by Pat Brown
It gets even more amusing if you are in heels.
I went home that night and I said to Tony, “Grab my right arm as hard as you can.” He grabbed it and I was immediately kneeling on the floor in agony. I couldn’t move my hand. I couldn’t get out of that grip if I tried. And he was just doing what I asked. He hadn’t snuck up on me from out of the shadows.
Classes like those give women a false sense of confidence. They feel it’s safe to walk down a dark street or alley or into a deserted parking garage because they think they actually can beat people up after three hours of “training.” They can’t. So I started my own program and taught courses on how you couldn’t survive one of these things.
“You’re walking along and suddenly you’re hit on the top of the head. What are you going to do for self-defense?”
One of the women inevitably said, “Well, I’m kind of unconscious.”
“That is a problem, isn’t it?”
My first objective of the class was to knock down self-defense misconceptions. There is no sense signing up for a fight with a heavyweight when you are only a lightweight. I also advised women that if they really wanted to learn how to fight off an attacker they would have to study martial arts or boxing for years. They still will lose against most attackers, the ones who jump out and nail you before you can react, or the ones who are simply too big for you to do anything about. But it is possible that one truly good punch or kick might give you a chance to run like hell.
Once I got through to the women that fighting off an attacker was not likely to have a good ending, I taught them how to think smart and keep from becoming a victim in the first place.
A local television station did a news segment on my program. It was one of my first television appearances and I quickly discovered the power of TV. People paid attention to what I had to say because they saw me on television.
It also framed the real challenge before me: I was a forty-plus housewife with a liberal arts degree trying to tackle crime investigation and justice issues, a totally unorthodox, self-trained crime analyst who hadn’t worked her way up in the field coming out of college. Who was going to listen to Pat Brown, homemaker, sign language interpreter, female, self-made profiler? How could I possibly accomplish the changes that I wanted to make in a male-dominated profession if I persisted in being the lady the media presented as simply a volunteer do-gooder? Women still struggle for respect outside the traditional roles for females and I was stepping into that daunting, mostly male arena. The wall seemed impossibly high to climb.
I realized that since I was over forty, I wasn’t going to get in on the ground floor and work my way up through the FBI. And I wasn’t going to get in on the ground floor with some other law enforcement organization either. So I made my own way. I didn’t have the luxury of time. And I already knew what I wanted to do: profile.
How could I get to the point where somebody would start listening to me and I could start affecting how profiling is used and how serial homicide investigations are conducted? What could I do to communicate with law enforcement and be taken as a serious professional and not as a bored housewife?
I consciously decided that I could achieve my goals if the media liked me and viewed me as a credible resource; then I could use the media to promote the advantages and art of criminal profiling. I set out to become a recognized name in the profiling field, not just locally but across the United States.
I also promised myself that when I was on television, I would always tell the truth. I would speak my mind, even when doing so was risky and might put me at odds with certain individuals or groups. Occasionally, I have been criticized, but it hasn’t stifled my beliefs or my voice.
I was still rather insecure, however, and received no outside support. I started with no idea of how to do these things. Not a clue. Could I actually work with police departments in far-flung areas of the country? Could I actually appear on television and speak my mind convincingly?
These were not activities in my comfort zone. I was familiar with my home. I was comfortable with curling up on the sofa with one of my babies. I was at ease doing sign language and interpreting for strangers in their time of need. I needed to convince myself anything was possible, and that I could do the impossible.
I also discovered that I had to become a businesswoman. But I had never run anything in my life. I didn’t run any clubs in school; I never even joined any. I wasn’t the cheerleader type. This was like shooting myself into space and having no idea how powerful the rocket strapped to my back would be, where I would land, or how I would ever get back to earth. But I learned what I needed to know to get where I wanted to go.
I am still a pretty terrible businesswoman, though, when it comes to victims and casework; I speak to victims for hours sometimes. I give them information and advice and don’t charge them. I would make a lousy lawyer. I also still do pro bono work and pay for all the expenses out of my own pocket. I learn a lot and I provide a good service, but I have been told that no one works for free, so why am I doing that? I don’t know. I guess it’s because I think the work needs to be done.
LIFE AFTER MURDER becomes a life possessed. Victims of violent crime can’t think of anything else. They want to learn who killed their loved one. That’s all they want to do. They don’t want to go to the movies, they don’t want to go to a birthday party, and they don’t want to read a stupid book. They just want to know who killed their daughter.
Unfortunately, their other children suffer. “Why don’t you care about me, Mommy?” And it isn’t that she doesn’t, but Mom just can’t think about anything else. Senseless murder weighs on one’s mind.
I’ve developed a methodology for those victims. I say to them, “In order to fight another day, you have to be mentally and physically healthy, or you are going to fail in your job to find your daughter’s killer. Get a box, a figurative box, put a bow around it, and imagine your daughter is in there. Your memories of her, the whole murder and everything else, are safe in that box. When you get up in the morning, take that box down from the shelf, and talk to your daughter. Say, ‘I’m going to be working on your case this afternoon at three.’ Then put the box back on the shelf, and do what you have to do. When you’re feeling unhealthy, take the box down, and say, ‘Honey, I’m going to go to the movies and laugh for a while. I need a little pressure off me so I can go find your killer.’”
I learned to do this myself. Finally.
THERE WAS A six-year gap from the day I turned in my information on Williams until the day he was finally considered a suspect. During that time I developed my skills to do criminal profiling. I trained myself, which has always been a major issue for a lot of people who say, “How dare you?” and “What makes you qualified?”
I hung up a shingle and called myself a profiler, and I’ve received a tremendous amount of flak for doing so. In the beginning it wasn’t even the purpose of my studies, but now that I had learned so much, profiling became my focus. I started a new organization, the Sexual Homicide Exchange (SHE), and this one would leave behind the political fight to push accountability and instead offer profiling services and police training and work to transform serial homicide investigations. This organization worked.
FOR A WOMAN who needed to become well known so she could make solid changes in cold cases throughout the nation, there was nothing like the one-two knockout punch of the Internet and cable television.
When the D.C. sniper case exploded in October 2002, it was the first of its kind, a killer or killers driving around the Washington, D.C., area, shooting people at random. Someone was shot at a bus stop, another at a gas station, a third while walking down the street. People throughout our area were afraid to go out in public to do everyday tasks such as pumping gasoline into their cars and trucks. The TV news media went into a frenzy seeking out experts for comments and opinions.
We got our first computer when my son, David, wanted to use one for schoolwork. It’s hard to remember when the
Internet was so new, but David told me I ought to get an e-mail address and I actually asked him why. It seems laughable now. I wouldn’t be here today without the Internet. When I incorporated SHE as a nonprofit in 1996, I hired a Web designer and put together my first business Web site. When the D.C. sniper started shooting up the area, producers from cable television tossed “criminal profiler” into the search engine and they found me. I got my big break in television. During this random assault on Washington, I turned up on television for as many as eighteen hours a day. It was a crazy time, and I could be seen on every imaginable local broadcast and national cable news network, talking about who the sniper or snipers might be and what motivated their horrific rampage.
On one show, I appeared with a female ex-FBI profiler who said the sniper would be white. Why? “Because there are no black serial killers!” My mouth dropped open, aghast. I certainly couldn’t agree with that view; the perpetrator could be of any race. He—or they—was shooting from a distance. How would I know if they were white, black, Hispanic, male, or even female?
I appeared on a tremendous number of television news and talk programs in a short span of time and, by the time the D.C. snipers—there were two, both African American—were caught, my presence and expertise were established. I received a call from Montel Williams and soon appeared on his show. Then the phone started ringing off the hook. Desperate families contacted me as word got out that I worked pro bono; suddenly I was profiling for families and police departments.
My caseload increased more dramatically and rapidly than it ever would have if I hadn’t gone on television and if I charged a lot of money and nobody knew who I was.
In the old days, the only way to be a profiler was to be in the FBI. Police departments didn’t hire profilers. They didn’t have any money for that. Local law enforcement brought FBI profilers in to work on only the most extraordinary, perplexing cases. But, because of my presence on television and the Internet, I was approached by law enforcement from across the United States as well as families who saw me on television and hoped I could revitalize a cold case stuffed in a drawer in the file room of a local police department.
Television instantly awarded me more clout with detectives because they could hear for themselves what I had to say about cases and how I analyzed them.
My husband was wrong. I was becoming exactly the professional I swore that I would be—although, I have to admit, for all the declaring I did that I would succeed, I can’t quite believe things worked out as well as they have.
PART 2
PROFILING CASES
CHAPTER 5
SARAH
MURDER BEHIND THE BAR
The Crime: Torture, rape, homicide
The Victim: Sarah Andrews, an army private stationed at a military base in the Western United States
Location: Nightclub parking lot
Original Theory: A drug deal gone bad, involving a local gang
Overlooking crucial evidence often throws an investigation off course, and my first case as a criminal profiler proved how true this could be. It was 1996, the year the Sexual Homicide Exchange became a reality.
The 1987 unsolved homicide of army private Sarah Andrews, found brutally murdered behind a bar, was brought to me courtesy of Manny, a bounty hunter–private investigator I met during a class in bail enforcement. Manny insisted the murder was drug-related, and had spent many, many investigative hours funded by the family. He wanted a criminal profiler to support his theory and credibility.
This was the first time since investigating the Anne Kelley murder that I talked to the family of a homicide victim. I heard in detail what the mother and father of a murder victim go through as Sarah Andrews’s parents recounted the years of agony they’d suffered from the time they heard that their daughter was brutally murdered.
Sarah’s crime scene was ugly—horrifying—because she was not only raped and left in a parking lot nearly naked, but two coat hangers had been wound around her neck and mouth like the halter of a horse—that’s how she was killed. The coat hangers cut back into her mouth and pulled on both sides of her face, and the other part was around her throat. The murderer twisted it together, strangling Sarah to death. She was brutalized, internally as well as externally. The ending of this girl’s life was torture.
For parents to think of their child being abused like this, being killed in such a horrific manner, was heart wrenching. And then they had to endure years of agony hoping the murderer would be caught, listening to theory after theory, willing to jump at any little bit of hope, begging the police department for news only to keep hearing those famous words, “We’re working on it,” when, quite frankly, they may not have been working on it at all.
Listening to the grueling details that made up the last nine years of the Andrewses’ lives humbled me. Like that moment of realization at the victims’ meeting, I knew that I didn’t have it so bad. I may have my frustrations and struggles but I spent every day with all three of my children, happy and healthy. I didn’t exhaust my nights being tormented by nightmares of my daughter being murdered only to wake up and realize it wasn’t a dream.
Years had gone by and the police were willing to buy into Manny the bounty hunter’s scenario. That’s where my involvement in the story begins.
CASES THAT INVOLVE American military personnel, especially females, are particularly disturbing to us all. How wrong it seems that men and women who volunteer their lives to serve their country and defend our freedoms are then killed by their fellow citizens within their own country’s borders.
The violent criminal, of course, being a psychopath, couldn’t care less that his victim was doing him a favor, protecting the very system that allows him so much freedom and providing him a criminal justice system that treats defendants and the guilty better than do most countries in the world.
Sometimes, we see strife between couples within the military, boyfriend-girlfriend disputes. Military life can be a difficult adjustment, stressful at times, and relationships can be difficult to maintain. In the case of Sarah Andrews, there was no evidence of domestic disturbance between her and anyone else, so the detectives did not think she had a boyfriend who went nuts on her.
THIS WHOLE CASE was peculiar from the start. Sarah was murdered in 1987, and I was brought into it nine years later; it was the first case I officially took as a profiler. I can still look at the profile I did on this case and be satisfied with it, which I’m thankful for, because sometimes you look back on your early cases and think, “Oh, my God, did I not know what I was doing?”
It’s a good thing they didn’t know how new I was to profiling back then. One always feels a bit of guilt in the beginning of such a career because someone has to be the first “victim” and you can only cross your fingers and hope your work doesn’t suck too badly. Of course, the same is true for other professions—there is always a first patient, a first client, a first group of students. Someone gets to be practiced on for anyone to actually become a professional.
I opened the Sexual Homicide Exchange in 1996 and was starting to hear from interested people, even while continuing my studies. I met a few questionable characters at a class called “How to Become a Bail Enforcement Agent,” and when I finished, I got a cool bail enforcement badge and a jacket with the words “Bail Enforcement Agent” across the back. Manny the bounty hunter–private detective was lecturing at this course. When he found out that I was a criminal profiler, he glommed on to me. He figured he could manipulate me and get me to do his bidding. Families, when crimes go unsolved—and the Andrews case had been on file for an eternity by the time I came into it—will try anything. They become desperate, which is why most of them will try psychics at some point. They want answers for their deep misery; they want closure.
Unfortunately, their emotions are raw and they aren’t always thinking clearly, making them great marks for people who will try to make money from their pain and suffering. One of the reasons I always give my servi
ce pro bono is to eliminate the notion that I am using these people to make money. Most private detectives don’t apply this same standard. And while there are plenty of qualified, smart PIs who do good work, there are even more charging $50 to $100 an hour when the likelihood of solving a murder is slim to none. They accept retainers on cases for which the police don’t have any evidence to effect a prosecution and never will, but bleed the family dry nonetheless.
In a stranger homicide, where there is no clue who committed the crime, the PI could interview the entire city and still produce nothing. I’ve seen families lose as much as $40,000 hiring private investigators and rarely getting answers from them.
Manny convinced the Andrews family that he was working hard on investigating their daughter’s murder. He shared his suspicions about drugs being involved and how Sarah was likely taken and executed by a gang.
Even the police believed that was possible in the beginning, providing Manny a credible theory on which to base his investigative forays. There were a lot of drugs floating around the area; it was a major drug hub. Sarah had quite a few friends and relatives who were said to be involved in drugs, and some said Sarah herself could be caught up in something illegal. So the police immediately labeled the homicide a drug-related crime, stating, “We think that she was taken someplace and tortured, and then dumped in the parking lot. It had something to do with the drug trade.”
Manny took off running with this concept. There were lots of people involved in drugs around the area where Sarah was murdered, so he could theoretically do lots and lots of investigating and collect lots and lots of checks. Somewhere along the way, he decided—and I still don’t understand his decision-making here except to think that it was simply arrogance—that having a profiler agree with him would add fuel to his farce and keep the checks coming. He thought I would replicate his own profile of the crime, a notion that had nothing to do with the evidence but included a large cast of characters for him to track down.
