The Profiler (19 page)

WHILE I HAVE
my theory, ViCAP—the computer methodology that the FBI uses to input all the information about a crime and try to match up potential suspects—matched up the Sarah Andrews homicide to Jeffrey Newsome.

I don’t object to using ViCAP in that way, but I would prefer to see a suspect bank so that someone who had been connected with a crime, such as Harold Painter, might be flagged and noted. We could put a list of all the people that Sarah knew into ViCAP and
boom, Painter would have shown up as a homicide suspect. We need more linked databanks.

We also need more cooperation between police departments. We need more experts to be brought in to work on the aspects of a case for which the detective is not trained or for which he lacks the time.

If, back in 1987, they had a profiler or trained crime analysts come in, and spent time reconstructing this case on that mountain of physical evidence, they might’ve gone down a different road a long time ago. That’s one of the reasons I believe so strongly in training law enforcement officers in crime reconstruction and profiling and giving them, as individuals, fewer cases to work on.

HAROLD PAINTER WENT
on with his life. The only thing on his record was that he assaulted his girlfriend. Other than that, there was nothing against him except that many people thought he was creepy.

Eight years later, I received an e-mail from someone who said, “You need to talk to Allison, Tommy Stern’s ex-wife, about the Lisa Young case.”

Stern knew Lisa Young at the time she was murdered. They went to the same high school and were friends, or at least acquaintances.

Stern apparently had a thing for Lisa, according to his ex-wife. Well, ex-wives. Allison sent me on to the other ex and she told me the exact same story! There is nothing like a spurned woman when it comes to getting information on a suspect. Both exes said Stern had a tattoo that said “In memory of Lisa Young” and a framed photo of Lisa next to his bed, the kind with a cute little one-stem-rose vase attached to it, which, when you are married, is not proper bedside decoration.

The ex-wives claimed Stern was dangerous and violent, had been in and out of mental hospitals, and that when they had sex, he strangled them and sang, “We are killing Lisa, we are killing Lisa.”

I asked both ex-wives this question: “When Tommy was in high school and living with his family, did they have any family pets?”

I had no clue what these family pets could be, but there was that white dog hair on Lisa’s clothing. One ex-wife said, “When he was in high school, his family had some white boxers.”

I said, “Oh, Lord.”

A new suspect had entered the Lisa Young mix. Tommy Stern was the better suspect, because when I profiled this case, I was always irked by the fact that when Lisa left work that night, she was standing on the curb waiting for a friend. She got into a car, quite willingly, it seemed. Her drink didn’t fall on the ground; it was just left on the sidewalk. It didn’t appear that she was abducted; it looked like she got in the car without being forced. Maybe she sat down just to chat for a second and off he went with her.

Lisa didn’t know Painter. I didn’t think any girl would get in a car willingly with that man. But she did know Tommy Stern, who was close to her age, so she might have had no problem jumping in his car while she waited for her ride to show up.

On top of this, just to add more to the mix, I later heard that a man was arrested for impersonating a police officer. He had handcuffs in his car. He lived on the same road where Lisa was found. Many a serial killer has carried handcuffs in his vehicle and pretended he was a cop. A suspect like this
had
to be considered.

Another crime occurred just a few months after Lisa was killed. If you drove out of the shopping center from which Lisa was abducted, passed the street where she was eventually found, and continued straight down the road two more miles, you would run into a house where another woman was murdered, the home of yet another unsolved homicide, that of Deborah Joshi.

DEBORAH JOSHI WAS
stabbed seventeen times in the living room of her home. She was not raped, but her husband found her dying on their living room floor. A few pieces of jewelry and a big plastic container of quarters were stolen. Her vehicle was also missing.

I was not impressed with the way the police profiled this crime. The husband, Davis Joshi, was their chief suspect for a long time.

According to the police, Deborah came home from work in the afternoon and changed into more comfortable clothes. Her husband was not yet home and they didn’t have any children.

A next-door neighbor, Ray Hammond, told the local newspaper that her SUV flew out of the driveway that day. They had two dogs, and the dogs never barked, according to Hammond. He was working in his garage on a project and he responded to the sound of a car by looking through the windows of the garage door. He saw what looked like a black man—at least a “dark” man, he said—behind the wheel.

Deborah was black, and when I went to her house, I expected that her husband might be as well. However, Joshi is an Indian name, and Davis, it turned out, was of Asian descent; he was a Trinidad Indian. It’s possible that he might be mistaken for a black man if he was seen driving by very quickly. The SUV was found a mile away in a neighborhood strip mall. The plastic container that held the quarters was found in an apartment complex parking lot across from the mall but the quarters were gone. Nothing else was ever discovered.

The logistics didn’t support Deborah’s husband as a suspect. He would have had to leave his vehicle at the strip mall, walk home, kill his wife, then take her vehicle back to the strip mall, get in his own car, and drive back to the scene.

She was dying when the ambulance arrived. If he did it, he would have wanted to make sure she couldn’t speak and would have made sure she was dead.

There was no evidence ever found in his vehicle. Also, there was no blood evidence connected to him, which one would expect if a woman was stabbed seventeen times. Davis would have committed the perfect crime in the short amount of time between Deborah’s arriving home from work and when he got to the house just shortly after dark. The police looked at him right away, as they do when a married woman ends up murdered. Usually hours or days separate the time of a murder and the husband’s “discovery” of the body, leaving plenty of time to get rid of evidence, wash up, vacuum the car, and so on. Yet in the Joshi murder, the police found not a shred of evidence linking Davis to Deborah’s death in spite of how quickly the police were on the scene of the crime.

I went to the strip mall parking lot where Deborah’s car was dumped, and I couldn’t believe the coincidence: Harold Painter lived but two blocks west of that strip mall. And Walt Williams lived two blocks to the
east
.

Davis thought his dying wife muttered something about either a guy in black or a guy who was black, but she was dying, and it wasn’t clear whether he was leaning on Hammond’s description of the suspect or he really heard her say that.

I asked the police if they interviewed Hammond, and they said no, they didn’t spend any time with him. I knocked on his door and said I was there to ask questions about the crime.

“Come on in,” he said.

He had a glass of scotch in his hand, and he was smoking a Marlboro cigarette—the kind found on the ground outside a window at the crime scene and a brand that was not smoked by the Joshis. An interesting coincidence, but of course it is a popular brand.

Hammond welcomed me into his house, chitchatting about this and that, quite friendly. But he quickly turned the conversation to a sexual note, and I became uncomfortable. “So, what’s a gorgeous woman like you doing in the detective business? I’m a lucky guy to have a sexy lady like you show up on my doorstep.” He leered at me.
Why is this guy making sexual innuendos toward me?

I noticed, when I came through the front door, he went behind me, let the dog out, and shut the door, making sure it was locked. That seemed innocent enough. But then he walked to another door and locked that one, too.

My skin began to crawl.
What was he doing?

Hammond talked about the crime and walked me to the garage, where he said he would show me where he was when the murder happened. He reminded me that he hadn’t heard the dogs bark when Deborah was being assaulted.

I was getting nervous about Hammond.

Did the dogs not bark because it was the husband who committed the crime? Or did the dogs not bark because the perpetrator was
someone else they knew? Or maybe the dogs did bark and Ham
mond simply didn’t hear them. Or could he be lying about it?

“I saw the car fly out of the driveway,” he said, “and I saw this black man…well, dark, like it could have been Davis….”

My mind was racing as Hammond put down the garage door to set the scene. As he did, he said something wholly inappropriate and even more anxiety inducing.

“Don’t worry,” Hammond said. “I’m not going to do anything to you.”

Excuse me?

Why would he assume that I was thinking he was going to do something to me? Why would this cross his mind? Why was he saying this?

A sense of dread crept up on me as the door came down. I noticed that the windows were completely smeared, like they hadn’t been washed in years. I found it hard to believe that that man could have seen anybody inside a vehicle from this garage.

I could feel panic just about to overtake me. I suddenly realized that I was alone with a stranger, and one who was making me feel increasingly uncomfortable. I wanted to get out of there fast. I pulled the phone out of my pocket, pretended I had dialed my office really quickly, and as he turned to face me, I said, “Oh, yeah, I’m over here at Mr. Hammond’s house, next door to the Joshis…. Yeah…I should be through with the interview in about ten minutes, so I’ll be back at the office by five thirty.”

He suddenly looked at me coldly, and he said, “You can go now.” He marched me straight to the front door and out of his house.

Hammond’s behavior and the incongruity of his story made me suspicious.

Was he involved in the case? Or was he just a really weird neighbor?

I wonder to this day what would have happened if I hadn’t managed to fake that phone conversation.

I STILL HAD
a multitude of questions about Deborah’s murder.

Why would anybody take that big plastic jar of quarters?

Did they need the money or was it more of a diversionary tactic?

Did somebody go into the Joshi residence to steal something or
was it a rape gone wrong? Did Deborah fight back and a rapist ended up stabbing her before he had any fun, decided to steal a few things, and used her SUV to get home? Could the killer be Painter or Williams?

Was someone burglarizing the house when Deborah came home unexpectedly early from work? Was she killed in a panic? Was the SUV just driven to the strip mall to make it look like the killer lived farther away? Was Deborah killed because she could identify the man in her house? Could it be the neighbor, Hammond?

Or was it really Davis staging a crime to cover up offing his wife?

The only suspect was the husband, and no one has been charged.

W
hen Mary Beth Townsend, a fifty-two-year-old librarian, was found dead in the closet of her condominium, the detectives had the case solved within hours. A couple days later, after grueling hours of interrogation, her fiancé confessed to accidentally killing her during an argument.

Unfortunately for the police, his forced confession didn’t match the evidence when the autopsy came back.

MARY BETH OWNED
a condo in Virginia that she shared with her fiancé, Sam Bilodeau. They had been together for eight years, and after seven years of living together, they were finally, happily, preparing to marry. They were also building a house together on weekends and planning a honeymoon trip to Paris.

Mary Beth and Sam got along well in their eight years together.
Her son, Art, who lived and worked in the area, knew Sam well, liked him, and had no issues with him.

On Friday, August 21, 1998, Sam left at 6:45 a.m. to arrive by 7:00 for his job at the Home Depot, where he worked on the loading dock. Mary Beth stayed behind. She took the day off from the library, where she had worked for fifteen years, planning to go down to the pool for a swim, something she did every day. Later in the day, Sam called Mary Beth but she wasn’t home. He thought she must be at the pool or running errands.

When Sam finished his work shift around 6 p.m., he drove home expecting they’d do what they always did on Fridays—drive over to the property where their house was under construction and then spend the weekend doing whatever needed doing. Oddly, Mary Beth’s car was not parked in the driveway out front. As he unlocked the front door of their condo, Sam noticed that only the bottom lock was locked; the top, a dead bolt, was not. He walked into the condo and noticed that Mary Beth’s purse and tote bag were not there, but that made sense because she was out with the car.

I guess she’ll be coming back soon, because we have plans for tonight
, he thought.

He also noticed that the condo had been freshly vacuumed, which was a little odd because that was a task usually done over the weekend.

But she didn’t come back, didn’t call, and Sam soon grew wary.
Where is she? What’s going on?

He called friends, including Mary Beth’s son, Art, around 9 p.m., but no one knew where Mary Beth was, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. He called several hospitals in town, thinking maybe there had been an accident, and asked each if she was there. She wasn’t. He called a friend who was battling cancer, but Mary Beth hadn’t been over to visit her.