Obsession (13 page)

Jury selection began September 11,1989, and it was a media frenzy. At McGinty’s urging, all thirty victims showed up at the courthouse every day, even if they had to wait outside because they hadn’t testified yet. Ronnie Shelton’s family—his parents and sister, Maria—were also in attendance.

Initially, Milano tried to keep the victims from testifying, arguing that since Shelton admitted to the rapes, the only issue left was his sanity. Milano argued it would save both time and money if the jury heard only the experts on that point, but the judge decided to let the victims have their say.

The judge did, however, inform jurors that if they found Shelton not guilty by reason of insanity, he would not just go free; he’d be sent to a penal institution where his sanity could be reviewed every six months and that he could possibly remain there for the rest of his life. It concerned the prosecution that jurors who would otherwise be afraid to vote him insane might see this as a good way to admit they weren’t sure, but still have the relief of knowing he’d be put away.

I met with McGinty on September 18, the night before he planned to call me to the stand to close his case. I could tell that even though he appreciated the report I’d sent him, he was still concerned about how effective I would be on the stand. Especially after days of dramatic, moving testimony from the women who were Shelton’s victims, I’m sure he didn’t want to close with someone whose credibility could be shaken in any way. Over dinner, we went back and forth until I could tell he was loosening up, feeling better about putting me on. I’m glad he didn’t focus on the fact that even though I believed in what I was saying, what I did was still new enough that if something happened and I bombed, it would have repercussions beyond even the thirty women and their families counting on him. But even with that pressure, I felt confident because, to me, the links between cases were so strong that I knew I could get the jury to understand. McGinty needed me to establish and point out the links because even though Milano didn’t contest Shelton’s guilt, he could have come back later and asked for a dismissal of any charges McGinty hadn’t been able to prove. In a sense, for the jury, I had to place Shelton at those rapes where he’d left no prints or other physical evidence.

I wanted my testimony to be an educational experience for the jury, to get them to understand how and why these various crimes were linked and why it was overwhelmingly evident that one individual had committed all of them. The most important thing I had to get across was the signature aspect, how it was related to, and how it differed from, the better understood modus operandi.

MO is what an offender has to do to accomplish a crime. It’s learned behavior and gets modified and perfected as the criminal gets better and better at what he does. For example, a bank robber’s accomplice
might realize after one or two jobs that he ought to leave the getaway car’s motor running during the robbery. This would be an aspect of modus operandi. The signature, on the other hand, is something the offender has to do to fulfill himself emotionally. It’s not needed to successfully accomplish the crime, but it is the reason he undertakes the particular crime in the first place.

To get this point across, I cited an example I’d used many times before in my teaching at the Academy, and it, too, involves bank robbery. I worked on two cases, with two different offenders working in two different states, yet both did a similar thing during the robbery. In a case in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the robber made everyone in the bank undress—take off everything—and stay that way until he had left with the money. In another case in Texas, the bank robber also made his victims undress, with one variation: he posed them in degrading sexual positions and then took photographs of them.

Now, what is the difference between these two similar actions? I asked rhetorically. The difference is that to a trained analyst, the first case is an example of MO, while the second is an example of signature.

In the Michigan case, the robber had everyone strip to make them uncomfortable and embarrassed so they would not look up at him and be able to make a positive ID later on. Also, once he escaped, they would be preoccupied with getting redressed before calling the police or reacting in any other way. There would be a lot of confusion before they could get sufficiently organized to pursue him. So this MO greatly helped the offender accomplish his goal of robbing money from that bank.

In the Texas case, having everyone strip so he could take pictures of them had nothing to do with accomplishing the robbery; in fact, quite the opposite, it
slowed him down and made him easier to pursue. But it was something he felt a need to do for his own emotional satisfaction and completeness. This is a signature—something that is special (possibly even unique) to that particular offender.

Another example of signature would be the serial bomber I profiled who spray-painted the insides of his devices black. This had nothing to do with how effective the bomb would be; it was just something he did for his own reasons.

In the case of a sexual predator, we can speak about signature and MO in a wider context than merely the crime itself. For some types, the courtship—wine, soft music, intimate lighting, and candles—might be an MO to lure the victim into his control. For other types, a quick blitz-style attack from behind might accomplish the same purpose. Once each predator has the victim in his control, whether it’s through a fancy dinner or a knock on the head, then he is free to exercise his obsession, to introduce his own signature.

And a signature could be almost anything—a burglar who urinates on the floor at the crime scene to show his arrogance and contempt, a sexual sadist who tortures his victim in a particular way, another vicious predator who videotapes his rape-murders so he can relive them again and again—all of these are signatures I’ve seen in numerous variations throughout my career.

Shelton used the same types of degrading language with most of his victims. He raped them in the same degrading manner. “The underlying theme in this case is not sex,” I testified. “The underlying theme is anger, is this power. And the method of his sexual assault—masturbating on the victim, performing vaginal sex, withdrawing, ejaculating on the victim’s stomach, or masturbating over the victim, masturbating between
the victim’s breasts—it tells you this is total domination of the victim.”

I went on to explain that “these elements of this particular crime are very, very unique—in fact, so unique that there’s no hesitation of saying that you have one person operating in Cleveland, Ohio, who’s perpetrating these particular crimes in this cluster of cases here. You have one person.”

In addition to explaining the signature link, I also testified that Ronnie Shelton was what we call a “power assertive” rapist, which is one of the rarer types. Only one in ten rapists fits his style. We’ll get into the different types more in the next chapter, but suffice it to say at this point that compared to, say, the so-called gentleman rapist, who is often apologetic about raping his victim, Shelton represents an uncommon group. His motivation was anger, power, the quest to manipulate, dominate, control, and degrade these women. I would have been shocked to see two rapists fitting this description, with this particular signature, operating in the same area at the same time.

I explained that Shelton was like a predator in the animal kingdom: he didn’t need to rape every night, but he was always out on the hunt, looking for victims of opportunity. In fact, although it wasn’t part of my testimony, Shelton had been arrested several times for voyeurism, which would be consistent with his hunting, getting ready for his next assault.

I clarified that it was not surprising to hear that Shelton had been in consensual sexual relationships during the period when he was raping his victims, because that’s actually common with this type of offender. Often, there’s a problem in that relationship that’s the precipitating Stressor to his crimes and is the underlying motivator. He can’t confront the woman with whom he’s really having problems—the wife or girlfriend or whatever—so he takes all that anger out
on a victim of opportunity. As I also said in my written report to McGinty, I testified that the way he raped these women, all showed his need to dominate them. I closed by saying that in the more than five thousand cases I’d worked on, the majority of which had been rapes or rape-murders, I found the power-assertive elements of his crimes unique to the point that I was certain he was responsible for all the rapes presented.

Had I ever heard the term “compulsive rape syndrome?” McGinty asked me on the stand.

“No, sir,” I replied.

Now I have to confess that what happened next is one of my favorite memories from providing expert-witness testimony. I was still on the stand when Jerry Milano got up to cross-examine me. But instead of beginning his questioning, he asked permission to approach the bench for a sidebar. I couldn’t hear what he, Judge McMonagle, and Tim McGinty were saying, but I did notice the judge shaking his head and McGinty smiling broadly. Milano moved to have my testimony stricken from the record, but Judge Mc Monagle ruled that it could stand. He then called for a brief recess.

As the court was clearing and I was stepping down from the witness stand, McGinty came over to me and related that, during the sidebar, Milano had muttered something to the effect of, “What the fuck am I gonna ask this guy? This guy’s worked more cases than One-A-Day vitamins!” A little later, while I was waiting in the corridor outside for the trial to resume, I could hear Milano on the phone to his office, expressing essentially the same sentiment.

When court resumed, I took my place on the stand. Judge McMonagle looked to Milano and said, “Your witness.”

“I have no questions for this witness. Your Honor,” he replied.

As part of his testimony, Dr. Tanay played a tape of an interview with Shelton, which included the tearful defendant talking about his miserable family life, among other things. Under cross, in hours of back-and-forth argument between the prosecutor and the witness, McGinty stressed that Tanay’s opinion had been formed after just one hour of examination, and that it was possible that Shelton had lied to him. In redirect, Tanay argued that such lying would be consistent with his diagnosis, however.

The strongest argument on the defense side came when Dr. Tanay focused on the head injury that had left Shelton unconscious for three days. The doctor argued that since the rapes began after that, Shelton’s rape impulses may have broken loose as a result of that injury.

Though it didn’t come out until after the trial, in a journalistic tour de force, James Neff identified an unsolved rape with similar characteristics that had taken place five years before the injury. Sure enough, when Neff got detectives to investigate, the UNSUB’s prints matched Shelton’s.

After all was said and done, the jury went off to deliberate, coming back with a verdict in four days that must have been an agonizing wait for the victims. Before the verdict was announced, they all clapped for McGinty as he entered the courtroom to hear it read: guilty of 49 rapes and 200 criminal counts in total.

Judge McMonagle then made history with his sentence. He imposed the maximum sentence for each crime committed against each victim, ranging from ten to twenty-five years, to be served consecutively in actual time, meaning no possibility of parole until he’d served the full sentence, the longest sentence in the history of Ohio—3,198 years. The night of the sentence,
the victims held a victory party, where they burned Ronnie Shelton in effigy.

What I found most fascinating about Ronnie Shelton was the issue of victim choice. I knew from the victim statements that his primary goal was to dominate and degrade these women. I knew from my interviews with serial offenders and my research into their backgrounds that the victims often represented some woman he actually hated but felt powerless to act out against. Think of someone like Ed Kemper, who vented his rage on young college students before he was finally able to get rid of his mother.

Ronnie Shelton’s preferential victim was simply female. As I looked across the courtroom at those thirty women, I was shocked that the only observable characteristic they had in common was race: they had different color hair, body types, styles of dress. They were a variety of ages, with occupations ranging from student to mother, Avon lady, office worker, and waitress, to name but a few. The woman could have been eighteen or eighty, I observed, as long as she lived in a place with a window or door he could penetrate. And despite their different styles, the same was true for Joseph Stephenson Thompson, half a world away.

Shelton and Thompson share other characteristics, too, that we in law enforcement need to take to heart. To begin with, in both cases, authorities basically knew whom they were looking for all along, they just didn’t have his name. Both bore a striking resemblance to profile elements developed by the FBI and local investigators. Each committed his crimes in a geographic comfort zone, especially the early offenses. Shelton most often operated near his parents’ home, a girlfriend’s house, his job, or someplace in between. Thompson stayed close to his current and former residences, or someplace on his way to work. As profiled, Shelton did not have a regular job and had trouble
keeping one, feeling he was too good to be working for someone else in a subservient capacity. Similarly, as had been predicted, Thompson worked in a local factory. Both men had troubled or volatile relationships with the women in their lives and were the dominant party in on-again, off-again relationships with women who were typically younger and/or dependent in some way. Shelton had an extremely conflicted relationship with his mother—described by him as domineering and inappropriate in her behavior toward him—and with his sister, whom he seemed to want to control.

Although they fit profiles in other ways as well, the most striking element in both cases is also the most disturbing one from a law enforcement perspective. It had been noted that the UNSUB in each case likely had a previous criminal record dating back to juvenile offenses. Not only did this turn out to be true, but with each there were numerous missed opportunities—times during the investigation when the authorities almost had their man but didn’t realize it. I’m saying this not to criticize the fine men and women who work long hours at a sometimes tedious, often dangerous job. Rather, I think we need to look hard at these cases and educate ourselves so we can pull something useful from these experiences and give the hardworking officers and detectives the kind of help and support they need and deserve.