Obsession (27 page)

Just as our studies show that predatory offenders have a particular triggering experience that moves their obsession beyond the realm of perverse fantasy and into reality, it’s also true that many of the good people on the other side can point to a specific trigger that turned their vague ideas into concrete reality. For Sandy Witt, it was coming in contact with the mother of a college freshman by the name of Meredith Mergler.

“It’s so hard to look back because my whole understanding is so different now than what it was then,” Sandy says. “But I tell you, I can sit here and close my eyes and remember certain victims or discussions I had with certain people and feelings that I had of being handicapped because there was nothing else I had to offer them. And one of those I remember is this lady, Mary Alice Mergler. Mary Alice’s daughter, Meredith, was murdered down at Virginia Tech, where she was a student. She was missing for sixteen months before they found her body in the bottom of a well about twenty miles from campus. She was murdered by a guy named John David Lafon, who’s now been convicted.

“Mary Alice used to call down to the detectives every Tuesday, and then she would call me. And she wouldbe on the phone with me for hours and hours.
But what was going on then was that I would get off the phone with her, and a second later the next person would call and it would be another homicide case. And it would be very much the same conversation that I had just had. And I was getting into a rut, of having these days where I was coming in and I was on the phone with people—maybe three clients a day. They were talking to me because they needed so much. I was starting to realize that I didn’t have a proper understanding of the enormity of what’s been left behind. All of those crime victims had really specific, special reactions and needs. And you have to understand each one of them before you can really get in there with people and help.”

In the late fall of 1990, the crisis hit for Sandy and Carroll. And that crisis began them on the journey that ultimately led to one of the model victims’ programs in the country.

“I was supposed to be working the homicides and Carroll was supposed to be working rapes and child sex cases,” Sandy explains. “And suddenly we got hit with a whole slew of homicide cases in a row. Like five of them in about three weeks. That was when Destiny’s case hit.”

Destiny’s case.

Even today, there is a peculiar haunting cadence to the words around the Victim-Witness Unit offices—as if they have the power, which they do, to conjure up both the unbelievable depths of horror of which some human beings are capable … and the soaring heroic heights to which some other human beings may ascend in the everyday conduct of their lives.

“That’s the one case that started me on the path,” says Carroll.

On September 17, 1990, she and Sandy had been with the unit about three months when they got word of the most horrific crime they had ever heard of.
Destiny Ann Souza, known as Dee, eight years old, dark-blond-haired, and cute as a button, was found by her thirty-one-year-old pregnant mother, Kathleen, known to everyone as Katie. Destiny had been beaten to death in the basement of the town house she and her mother shared in the Newington Forest section of Fairfax County.

Seven years later, Katie sits with her new husband, Steven Hanley, retired as a sergeant major after twenty-eight years in the Marine Corps, in the living room of another town house in adjoining Loudoun County, remembering those horrible events with a clarity and courage that is almost transfixing. The room itself is an arrangement of poignant images: a stained-glass panel of Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man,” a replica of Degas’s statuette of a little girl ballerina. Then there are the toys: Winnie the Pooh and Barney and a bike with training wheels. The animals belong to two-year-old Casey, the bike to six-year-old Tyler, born months after his sister’s death. Studio-quality portraits of Dee and Katie—a beautiful child and a beautiful mother—hang on the wall above the staircase.

Katie Souza was a single mother, divorced from Destiny’s father. She was an acquisition analyst for TRW, where she still works. Destiny, a responsible girl who had just started the third grade, who was as much concerned with taking care of her mother as in being cared for by her, would come home after school, let herself in, go to the bathroom, then immediately call Katie at work. On the afternoon of September 17, Katie received no such call. She then called the house, but got no answer. She let some time go by and called again, but still nothing.

“I went to my boss and said, ‘Something’s not right there. I have to go home.’”

“Hey, by all means, go,” he replied.

“So I get home and I think I unlocked the door, or it was unlocked—I’m not really sure. And I go up-stairs because I hear the TV is on. I see her book bag there, but the key’s not there attached to the book bag as it should be. I see that she had started her homework, she’d taken off her school clothes, hung them up on the outside of the closet door. Then I went into my bedroom, and I’m noticing that there’s a drawer open in my nightstand and a drawer open in my chest of drawers, with stuff hanging from it and down on the floor.”

Katie went back downstairs and called the school secretary, Cynda Roberts, to ask if Destiny had missed the school bus.

“I’m talking to Cynda, and all of a sudden I looked over my left shoulder and there was this light coming from the basement. I said, ‘Cynda, let me call you back.’ Then I went down the stairs, rounded the corner, and looked down. And she’s lying right there; I mean, I could barely get by her.”

The basement had been outfitted with a sofa, love seat, television, and two dressers, where Katie’s sister, Rebecca Hall, known as Becky, and her boyfriend, Rob Miller, had been staying until recently. Almost trancelike, Katie did not notice that paneling had been broken, lights had been smashed, and the blood on the floor and furniture. She was moving as if in slow motion.

Destiny was dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes. She was lying on her side, facing toward the dressers.

“I rolled her over, her hair was a mess, and I saw her left eye was black-and-blue and bulged out. And blood was coming out of her mouth. I started slapping her on either side of her cheeks, yelling, ‘Destiny, come on, come to!’”

But nothing happened. Katie ran upstairs and called
911. The emergency operator led her through CPR while help was dispatched.

“I went running back downstairs and opened up her mouth. There was a hole in her teeth like a perfect circle. I started doing CPR, but I didn’t know if I was doing it right; all I was hearing was gurgling. I lifted her shirt up to see if her chest rose as I blew in, and it was all blotchy brown under her skin, and I realized she had internal bleeding.”

The rescue squad arrived, barreled down the basement stairs, and brought Destiny up where they could work on her. They put in IV lines and a breathing apparatus. As they took her out on the front lawn, then to the helicopter that would medevac her to Fair-fax Hospital, Katie didn’t even realize she had Destiny’s blood on her mouth from her efforts to breathe life into her daughter.

“I just kept saying, ‘You know, I hope she comes to. When she does, we’ll find out who did this to her and I’ll take care of it.’”

But Destiny never did come to.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this …,” the doctor said bleakly.

“We go into this room; it’s like a viewing room—a small table and lamp and a bed up against the wall. A police officer standing guard. They had a sheet up to her neck and her hands were resting on top, wrapped in plastic bags. They wouldn’t allow me to get too close. I felt like I was in a funeral home already. Nobody would let me alone with her.”

In shock, Katie let herself be carried along on the tide of confusion and grief.

“Some friends from work decided that I had to come stay with them, that I should not be home alone. So they took over my life and had me stay at their place, helped me arrange the funeral. I had other people
from work coming over to help me pick out the dress and stuff.”

But before she could even leave the hospital, she received an even greater shock.

The detectives took her aside to ask questions. For reasons Katie did not at first comprehend, they all seemed to center around the significance of the basement as the murder site.

“Why would Destiny have been down in the basement?” one of the detectives asked.

“She wouldn’t have been,” Katie replied. “She hated the basement.”

Not only that, the basement door was kept locked and Destiny couldn’t have gotten in on her own because the handle didn’t work. But the investigators kept hearkening back to the significance of the basement.

“And I said, ‘Look, you know what it is? A couple of weeks ago my sister, Becky, and her boyfriend lived down there. That’s the only significance of the basement. What are you getting at here?’”

Later that night, the police called Katie at her friends’ house and told her they had arrested Becky’s boyfriend, Rob Miller, at a nearby McDonald’s restaurant where he had just begun working, on charges of murdering Destiny.

Katie couldn’t believe it. Becky had dominated that relationship. Katie thought Rob was so wimpy she couldn’t imagine him hurting anyone. She had even had to referee in disagreements that sprang up between Rob and Becky, since he didn’t seem capable of standing up to someone his own age.

But homicide detective William “Bill” Whildin knew that the suspect list for this particular crime wouldbe extremely limited. “Homicide investigations open quickly,” Whildin explains. “We try to keep it focused. In this case, it looked like it wasn’t a stranger;
it was someone she knew. So then you say, ‘Well, who was it?’ It wasn’t Katie. Was it Katie’s sister? It could have been, but we didn’t think so—too violent, too much of a physical aspect. So then you get to Rob.

“There are certain types of murders and there are certain ways people are killed, and they give you clues,” Whildin observes. “This type of homicide, it was an overkill from the very beginning. It was brutal. The girl was killed and just smashed in every part of her body. Now, either he went into some rage because of something she said to him, or there was something else more to it that put him in a rage.

“He was really disheveled that night. He looked almost a little confused, like he had a lot on his mind. Buthe wasn’t drunk and he didn’t appear to be on any narcotics or anything. You could see he was nervous. You could see he was hiding something. He started off by saying he didn’t know anything about it, but then once we pressured him, I think that he felt relieved he could just say it was an accident, and if we would buy that, then he wouldn’t be in as much trouble as he was convinced he was going to be in.”

Before long, Whildin and fellow detective Thomas J. Lyons would have a confession. Rob had returned to the house and apparently gotten into an argument with Destiny. He said she was “being smart” with him and“mouthing off.” He had picked up a wooden jewelry box and struck her with it. He was afraid she’d tell her mother and knew he had to somehow keep her quiet.

“After I hit her,” Miller told the detectives, “something had to be done.”

But hitting her hard enough with this box to do serious injury? There had to be more to the story. “And that’s what I was trying to determine,” says Whildin. “Why would he do it? So she mouthed off to him, maybe he would have slapped her for it and
maybe slapped her again. But it was more than that, and that’s what we were trying to get out.”

Sandy Witt began calling Katie Souza within days of Destiny’s funeral, to offer whatever services or comfort she could. She tried calling several times each day, but never got any response, perhaps because Katie was still with her friends. Then Carroll Ellis gave it a try and happened to get through to her.

Carroll introduced herself, then said, “I’m sorry, I’ve heard the disturbing news and I can’t tell you how sorry I am that your daughter has been murdered. I’m from the Victim-Witness Unit. We’re within the police department and our role is to provide supportive services to you. And I’d like to be able to come over and talk with you if I may.”

Katie agreed and Carroll made an appointment to visit her at her friends’ house in Vienna, which was across the county from Katie’s own home, but near police headquarters in Fairfax City.

“When I saw her, she looked like a young Candice Bergen,” Carroll remembers. “A beautiful blonde with deep green eyes, very athletic-looking. She was in the home alone and she was about four months pregnant by a man with whom she was no longer associated, I walked in and she opened her arms to me, and I believe that this was the moment of my actually walking into this business, with no return, because she made me feel her pain. It was so apparent; it was hanging in that room. You could see it … feel it … taste it … smell it. It was there. Death was there. She cried and cried. And once that was over, we sat down together. Her grief was so overwhelming, you couldn’t help being touched by the pain she was experiencing and the fact that there was no need for words. It was like, ‘Welcome to my world,’ and I had no choice other than to be a part of her world.”

Tears still come to Carroll’s eyes as she recalls that
first meeting with Katie. “All of my professional reserveor veneer—gone … gone … gone. Because my job was to be there to provide professional services, and what do you say, what do you do, how do you do it, in the face of someone whose only child has been beaten to death? This is a little girl. This is an eight-year-old child who was beaten to death. Where do you even begin to make sense of that or to put that together?”

Katie told Carroll that she wanted to see the crime-scene and autopsy photos of Destiny. She wanted to see the medical examiner’s report on what had actually happened to her. Carroll was determined to do for her anything she requested, but asked her if she was sure about this, that seeing that material could be even more upsetting.

“She said to me, ‘I want to see everything. This is my daughter. Nothing worse can happen to me. The worst thing that can ever happen to me has already happened.’