The Profiler (15 page)

People who don’t know better imagine he must have been at this for a couple of hours. But no, he needed to be gone for only fifteen or twenty minutes, and then she’s dead in the back of his vehicle. He throws a blanket over her so nobody can see her if they peep in his van windows. He goes right back into the club, cleans up, finishes out the night, and by early morning, with the club closed and everyone gone home, he can go back to his van, now the only vehicle left in the lot.

At that point he could have picked her up by an arm and a leg, flipped her out of the van, and she would have dropped onto the ground. The police thought she looked posed. I didn’t think so. If a fairly strong fellow shoved the body to the edge of the car, he could pick her up, swing her body out from the van, and she would have landed just as Sarah did.

Then he would drive away and toss the rest of her clothes—and maybe some of his own—when he realized he still had incriminating evidence in his van.

The bouncer is just one possible suspect and the story above just one possible scenario. Sarah could have left with someone else who was at the club, she could have left and been on the way back to the club with someone. I couldn’t say exactly who the killer was but I could tell you he had some connection to the area around the nightclub,
wasn’t a total stranger to Sarah, did some kind of work painting or fixing stuff, and was relatively strong. And we were looking at only one killer, not two or three, or a gang. Just one sick monster.

We were looking at somebody who likely
did
know Sarah, but not necessarily well. It could have been a casual acquaintance, but the behavior suggested an experienced sex offender. This had nothing to do with drugs.

If an investigator or profiler deduced this originally, the police could have run away from all those other silly theories and focused on sexual psychopaths who were in the vicinity of the nightclub that night.

WAS THE MURDERER
someone from the same base as Sarah Andrews? Was it an army guy?

Sarah had bite marks on her breast and hand, and who, on the base, if they had killed Sarah, would want to display her body so it would be found within two hours?

Any army guy knows that the investigators would be all over him in a heartbeat, getting his blood, demanding dental records or impressions of his teeth. He would be at the top of the list.

If the killer was a member of the military, my guess is that Sarah would have been driven back into the mountains that were nearby, her body thrown down a ravine by the side of the road. She would have been discovered weeks later. But because the killer didn’t care, or even wanted her body found right away, I doubt her killer had anything to do with the army base.

I believe it was someone who was an arrogant sex offender who didn’t think anybody would even consider him. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons he left her where he did was because it amused him. When the police showed up in the morning, he could make an appearance and say, “You found what? A dead girl in the parking lot?”

I think he watched and enjoyed the police spectacle. Or it could be possible he simply dumped her and left town, a smile on his face
as the miles added up between him and the body. He could see the police action at the scene in his mind and be nowhere around for them to even interview.

IT IS MOST
likely that the offender was employed in a blue-collar profession that did not require high levels of training. He was probably a high school graduate with no college education or a short period of education at a local community college. He would have considered Sarah pretty much his equal, someone who should think of him the same way. In fact, it is possible that Sarah looked down on him a speck, that she thought her army career put her on a bit higher level. She may not have been interested in any romantic liaison with him, at least not when she was stone sober.

He was in possession of a work van that had some objects strewn about the floor. He may have used the van for his work or it may have been primarily for transportation. The presence of coat hangers in the vehicle and possible other tools, such as a wire cutter or pliers, may indicate employment in auto mechanics or welding. He also may have used those tools for personal reasons. The wire coat hangers may have been used to help people who locked their keys in their cars or they may have been used to break into vehicles for the purpose of theft.

The perpetrator may have been employed as a waiter, bartender, or bouncer in one of the clubs the victim frequented. He may have been employed at one of the locations in the same strip mall as the nightclub as a clerk or a security guard. He may have done service work for a local business that used panel trucks for service and delivery. Serial killers tend to kill near their homes or employment, as they spend much of the day trolling for future victims, fantasizing about their conquests-in-waiting, until one lucky day—well, lucky for him, not her—he gets his opportunity.

It is likely that the offender was not in a permanent relationship with a female, due to his lack of security with his masculinity. However, it has been my experience that even men who fail in relationships in general can eventually find a woman willing to enter into a
relationship with a weirdo. In this case, it was at least likely that Sarah didn’t think the guy was in a serious relationship. He was probably single and a little bit older than Sarah, just enough to make him feel he was more experienced than she was, that he could control her. He was probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. The race of the offender was most likely that of the victim. It is, however, not true that this kind of offender kills only within his own race.

The likelihood that the offender was Caucasian has a basis in demography and cultural issues. The makeup of the community was predominantly Caucasian. The victim was Caucasian and socialized with predominantly Caucasian people. These facts make the chances of the offender being white statistically pretty high. But this doesn’t mean Sarah didn’t have some male friends who were black or wasn’t attracted to black men or maybe just went off to smoke a joint—as she had been known to do—with a black male at the club. Statistically, probably white. But, possibly, black.

The perpetrator was probably well muscled, as it appeared he picked up the body of the victim from the floor of the van, swung her by an arm and a leg away from the vehicle, and dropped her to the ground. I know she wasn’t pushed from the van or dragged out of it because there was snow next to her that wasn’t touched by tire marks or footprints. The van had to have been a few feet from where her body was tossed in an area where the snow had melted. The killer also was able to twist coat hangers, either by hand or with a tool such as pliers, indicating a reasonable amount of hand strength. This would lead one to speculate the offender may have been involved in a blue-collar activity such as auto mechanics or construction. He may also have been involved in weightlifting or other sports promoting general body strength.

SOMETHING ELSE I
noted about the Sarah Andrews case: there were so
many
creepy dudes around her.

It was one of those cases in which sex offenders and weird guys were coming out of every hole and from under every rock. One of those
fellows suggested by the FBI’s ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) crime linkage data base was a guy by the name of Jeffrey Todd Newsome.

This convicted murderer supposedly served in the army at the same base at some point in his career. He was not known to have been in the area at the time of this murder. On the other hand, it was not proven that he was
not
in the area at the time. He was African American; he was not a soldier when Sarah was there, but he might have known the area, been visiting it, and taken off after the crime. However, we have no evidence Sarah ever knew this man, nor did anyone at the nightclub know of him.

At the time that I profiled this case, Newsome was jailed in Alabama for the sexual homicide of a young Alabama woman. He also committed a similar crime in Germany and he was a suspect in a number of other sexual homicides in the state of Alabama.

Newsome fit this profile in a number of ways. He would also appear to be a power-assertive-style rapist, although one could view him as an anger-retaliatory serial killer, the type who kills to get revenge on society and those he considers to have wronged him, usually women. Actually, these two types tend to overlap and much of the time it is the profiler who decides what issues the killer had and what his motive would likely have been. While I sometimes label a killer the power type, the anger type, or the sadistic type, I tend to categorize serial killers in two groups: quick and slow. The slow types are the sadists, the perverts who like to lock a woman up in a dungeon under their house and torture her for days. The quick type just wants to prove that he is powerful, that he can rape and kill and get away with it. Sarah’s killer was the quick type. So was Newsome. However, it would appear that Newsome had a very specific MO that consisted of taking the body as far away as possible so that it could not be found. He was adamant about that habit when he spoke with law enforcement. He had previously always used a car, not a van. He tended to blab a lot about his murders. He had been married more than once. The relationships apparently did not last.

There is no evidence linking Newsome to the area on the date Sarah was killed nor is there evidence that he owned a van at that
time. A coat hanger
was
hanging from a tree near one of the bodies of his victims. But again, there is no evidence that Sarah Andrews ever had any contact with Newsome. Newsome was definitely a serial killer; he also strangled a girl in North Carolina with a coat hanger. In considering him, we look at what people call “signature.”

Everybody who has ever read a murder mystery or watched a movie of this genre knows the term MO, which stands for modus operandi, or method of operation. It means, simply, what you have to do to do the crime. Abducting a girl, that’s an MO. The fact that he raped her is an MO. If he tied her up in order to rape her because she was struggling, that would be an MO.

But “signature” is something that the FBI profilers are very fond of and they’ve gotten a little carried away with declaring it. The signature is what the serial killer does that makes a murder his own piece of artwork. It’s an act that he had no reason to do except that he thought it was really cool, and driven by his own psychological needs, he just had to do it.

I think signature elements are not about something they
had
to do. It’s something they wanted to do, yes, something that amused them at the time of that particular crime.

In the attack on Sarah, I found a few possible signature elements:

• The killer used the coat hanger contraption that resembled a horse bridle when he strangled her.
  

• He threw her body into the parking lot.
  

• He left her body faceup: But was that a signature, or was it just the way the body landed?
  

It would have been to his advantage to simply drive away and dump her in a ditch. So to me, the fact that he left her in that public location to be found immediately was indeed a signature element that he wanted the fun of her being found.

• Leaving the ID with her was definitely a signature move.
  

• The fact that he repeatedly bit her showed his style. He didn’t have to do that—you don’t have to rape anybody, either—but
  he obviously liked doing that, and the fact that he excised the right nipple also suggested to me that this was something that gave him an extra cheap thrill.
  

These signature elements showed us what kind of offender he was. It showed us how he got his thrills. But it didn’t necessarily mean that every other crime in which an ID was left with a body or there’s a bite mark meant that it was the same guy, and it didn’t mean this person would do the same things the next time around. Some guys are repetitive just because they get used to doing something and like doing it. But there are other guys who get bored with what they’re doing and don’t bother with that particular act next time. We have to be cautious saying that every time there is something unusual in the crime that it’s going to be a trademark that he’s going to sign every one of his crimes with. That would imply that any crime without that trademark isn’t him, and every crime with it is him. That’s nonsense. There will be crimes he’s committed where none of the elements are the same, and the crime is still his, and there are other crimes that look just like his and aren’t his.

Back to convicted rapist and strangler and murderer Jeffrey Todd Newsome.

In Alabama and North Carolina, he strangled girls with coat hangers, but there was something different about Jeffrey Newsome’s crimes. He always used a car; he never used a van. He transported the bodies to distant locations. He was proud of the fact that nobody would ever find them, and that’s what he told people. So it didn’t seem likely to me that he would kill Sarah Andrews and dump her where she was sure to be found the next day.

As a matter of fact, that reliable trait is what did Newsome in. He abducted his last victim in a car and drove her way out into the woods so he could rape and strangle her, which he did. But then his car got stuck in the mud and he found himself in a bit of a bind.

Newsome did what every guy would. He called a buddy.

“Hey, can you come down and help me? My car is stuck in the mud.”

Of course, he had a dead, strangled girl out there just yards from his car and when the authorities found the dead girl, they were able to pin it on Newsome. He erred when he went off-road with his sedan to dump the body.

WE KNOW THAT
Sarah was involved with several guys, including Suspect #1, a married man, who supposedly made some passes at Sarah. This did not end their relationship, as they were close friends. They were both stationed with the army at the same place.

Suspect #1 was away at military training the night of the murder. He reportedly said to his wife, who was out of town, that he left training to fix a military vehicle, but then he denied that he left training when interviewed by the police. It is odd that his superiors would have no record of his leaving. He would have been driving a military vehicle, not a van. He did not own a van.