by Pat Brown
* * * *
I LEARNED A tremendous amount working on the Andrews case—both about crime reenactment and the sensitivities of long-grieving families.
I told the Andrewses what I thought about the crime and that they were wasting their money having Manny chase useless leads all over the United States. Manny, in turn, telephoned me in a rage, furious that I killed his cash cow.
A month later, Manny dropped out of sight, and I was working on my second case.
CHAPTER 6
VICKI
A KNOCK IN THE NIGHT
The Crimes: Two homicides and one attempted homicide
The Victims: Lisa Young and Deborah Joshi (homicides); Vicki Davis (attempted homicide)
Location: Maryland and Delaware
Original Theory: Bad friend, bad husband, bad luck
Sometimes crimes don’t go as the criminal planned—which makes it harder for the profiler to figure them out.
Anyone working in the profiling profession, as a consultant or as a homicide detective profiling his own cases, soon becomes aware of the incredible intersection of victims, suspects, crimes, and coincidences.
In the second case of my career, I profiled the horrific 1995 near-murder of Vicki Davis, age thirty. Vicki, in spite of being beaten, sexually assaulted, stabbed dozens of times, and having her throat cut, survived the brutal assault and wanted justice.
Harold Painter, the top suspect in the crime, was a mechanic. He was also investigated in the murder of seventeen-year-old Lisa Young, who was murdered six months before Vicki was attacked. Painter lived about four miles from where Young’s body was found. Lisa was abducted, stabbed, beaten, and her throat was cut. Her body was found lying on the side of a small, winding road. Not only had Painter admitted to being at the shopping center where Lisa was waiting for a ride home at around the same time, but he once lived with his wife and her best friend on the road where Lisa’s body was dumped.
It was the first time I ever heard a case first-person, with the victim describing the attempted homicide—Vicki didn’t die, but as hard as that guy tried to kill her, she should’ve been dead.
I’ll never forget when she said, “He grabbed me by the hair, pulled my head back, and he took the knife and drove it into the right side of my neck, and there was this horrible crunching sound. And then he said, ‘Oh shit, I broke my knife,’ and he dropped my head and left the room to look for another one in my kitchen.”
If Vicki had died and the killer had taken the knives away with him, I might have thought there were two killers involved because most attackers don’t carry a set of knives with them.
The attacker came back from Vicki’s kitchen with a new knife and continued cutting her throat until he thought she was dead. Then he pushed her off the bed, tossed a blanket over her, and left.
Vicki, barely breathing, managed to stand up, her chin touching her chest because her throat was cut so badly, and she somehow staggered, still tied up, to the next room and tried to call 911. That’s when her thirteen-year-old son came out from hiding, found his mom dying on the floor, and ran to the neighbor to get help.
And she lived to tell her story.
AFTER SENDING MY profile off to the detective on the Sarah Andrews case, I got the call from Vicki Davis.
She wanted me to find out more about Painter.
Vicki was a single mother living in a trailer park. She was furious and frustrated because Painter, the man she identified as her attacker, had been arrested, kept in jail for almost a year, and just before the trial date, the case was dropped. The DNA on a cigarette at the scene not only didn’t match Vicki or anyone else connected with her home, but didn’t match Painter either. No other evidence was left by the attacker; there were no fibers, not enough semen for DNA tests, no blood—nothing. At least that was the claim made by the state prosecutor’s office, and Painter was released.
Vicki was at home asleep on the morning of September 19, 1995, when she says a thin white man, about five four to five six, with shoulder-length dirty brown hair, a beard, and a mustache, knocked on the door of her trailer at 1:52 a.m. and said, “My car broke down, can I come in and use the phone?”
She said no, because she was home alone with her young son.
He said his name was Jack Wilson and she offered to call someone for him. He gave her a local number and she called it, but the man who answered did not know anyone by the name of Jack Wilson. She told Jack what happened and he left.
But the man’s appearance at her door in the middle of the night unnerved her enough that she called the police. And she was right to do so—even if the police never did show up—because fifty minutes later there was a loud bang at her front door and she got out of bed to find Jack Wilson in her kitchen. The lights were on and Vicki got a good look at the man as he grabbed her and held her at knifepoint in the living room.
“You made me have to break into my car, bitch. I locked my keys in it and you wouldn’t let me call anyone for help,” he hissed at her.
The attacker blamed her, justifying why he was going to teach her a lesson. Then he pushed Vicki past her son’s room, toward her bedroom. She grabbed the doorframe to stop him from taking her to the back and raping her.
“Stop fighting me, bitch,” he growled, grabbing at her hands. She pushed him against the wall and actually pinned him to it but she couldn’t hold him there for long. As he pushed her away, she made a desperate lunge for the knife and they grappled over the weapon. He won. He had had enough of Vicki refusing to give in.
“If you don’t stop fighting me, we will kill him,” he told her, breathing hard. Vicki thought the “we” her attacker was referring to might mean someone else was outside the house.
“Just let me tie you up and I won’t hurt your son.” His eyes were cold like a snake’s and he held her against the wall with one hand, his other hand waving the knife at her face.
Vicki was terrified and exhausted. She knew she couldn’t fight him much longer. To save my son, she thought, I have to cooperate.
She let him tie her up—with a Nintendo game cord—and she immediately knew it was the biggest mistake she had ever made, as he cut her undershirt and panties off with the kitchen knife and gagged her with them. He began kissing her, sucking her breasts, and rubbing her legs. He didn’t technically rape her, but he did roll her onto her stomach, putting something under her belly to elevate her buttocks. He then masturbated and ejaculated on her buttocks and back.
How stupid is this? she thought. The guy comes all the way up here to rape a woman but doesn’t bother—or can’t? Instead, he masturbated, and when he finished, he took out a knife and started cutting Vicki’s throat.
He cut her throat on one side, then the other.
Oh, my God, Vicki thought, he’s going to kill me.
The attack continued.
When he tried something different, stabbing her in the neck, his thrust literally snapped the blade.
“Look!” he said conversationally, as if he and his victim were sharing an evening meal. “I broke my knife!”
He went to the kitchen, rifled around for another one, came back, then stabbed her over and over until her throat was cut on both sides and he had stabbed her repeatedly in the back and neck.
She should have been dead.
But she wasn’t.
“Aren’t you dead yet, bitch?” he said a number of times, and eventually he thought she was dead because she stopped twitching. He pushed her off the bed.
Vicki later remembered that her head hit the nightstand by the bed when she went down. She didn’t think it much mattered that she hit her head, because if this wasn’t death, it wouldn’t be long.
The perpetrator threw a blanket over her and walked out, taking with him a few items of little value.
Vicki lay there until she was certain he was gone. Then this remarkable woman, bleeding to death, throat cut, stabbed many times, managed to get up despite the fact that her feet and hands were tied, and she s
taggered to a telephone. She knocked the receiver off the hook trying to call 911.
Just then, her son—who was pretending to be asleep during the attack—came out and found her. Seeing that her son was safe, Vicki muttered with her last conscious breath, “Go get help!” and passed out. Her terrified boy ran next door, banged and screamed until the residents came to the door and called 911. Emergency medical technicians came and Vicki miraculously survived.
It’s just mind-boggling. The damage that was done was seemingly beyond repair. It still amazes me, and Vicki, that she survived one of the most horrific attacks imaginable.
It seemed like one victim was going to see justice. She lived to be able to identify her attacker.
One month after the crime, Painter was arrested. On October 1, 1995, a neighbor called to report a suspicious person in Vicki’s yard. He was sitting in a red pickup truck near Vicki’s home. The arresting officer noted that not only did the driver match the description of the suspect but the composite drawing the police sketch artist did was actually taped to the windshield of his truck! Painter told the officer that he had been visiting his daughter, who lived in the same trailer park, and had just left Vicki’s trailer, where he had said a prayer for her. He was photographed, interviewed, and released.
The next day, Vicki picked Painter out of a lineup of six photos and said the man in the picture was the man who broke into her home, sexually assaulted her, and stabbed her.
He was arrested again four days later when Vicki’s son independently identified Painter from the six photographs he was shown.
“He seems to have some kind of thing going on in his brain that he thinks he is God,” Vicki later said of Painter. “He told the police that he felt strange vibes that told him to go to my house and burn a candle and pray for me right after the attack. When the police finally arrested him, they told me that during the entire ride to the courthouse, he was chanting.”
Painter said he was in the area at the time of the attack on Vicki, visiting a former wife and stepdaughter who lived in the same mobile home park.
That should have been the end of the investigation.
But in reality, the victim survived and the case died in the hands of the criminal justice system. Vicki knew something was wrong early in the investigation when the police seemed determined to keep the crime out of the headlines.
“They did such a good job of keeping quiet that it really pissed me off,” she wrote to me in an e-mail. “I didn’t realize what they were doing until it was too late. The detective actually pretended to cry because he knew I was a caring person [and] he led me out through the back of the courthouse to be sure that I didn’t talk to reporters. He also told me not to talk to any of the TV stations that were calling me. Stupid!! I was so caught up in making sure that everything was done right and that I would not mess up anything that I believed all the crap they fed me along with it. I wish I could have done things a whole lot different. I would have walked out of the court and screamed at the top of my lungs to all the reporters that the system is shit.
“I had seen on TV that the victim is allowed to help with her own case. When I asked the detectives about that, they said, ‘No way.’ I’m sure that they are so busy that they are either overlooking and missing a lot of good info, or they just don’t want me to know the real story about how much they have misplaced. I gave them everything, I made sure that I was writing notes while I was in ICU, giving them all the details. They were very accurate. How could they not be able to use it?”
The Delaware grand jury decided that the state had enough evidence against Painter and handed down an indictment charging him with first-degree attempted murder, burglary, kidnapping, first-degree unlawful sexual contact, and possession of a deadly weapon during the commission of a felony.
Painter pleaded not guilty.
The case was continued several times as prosecutors waited for the FBI to complete its DNA tests on evidence. Meanwhile, Painter underwent a psychiatric exam in which he said he did not know where he was or what he was doing on September 18 or 19, 1995. A doctor diagnosed Painter with “undifferentiated schizophrenia” but declared him competent to stand trial.
“I find no reason to believe that he would not have been responsible at the time of the crimes,” she wrote.
Two days before the attempted murder trial was scheduled to finally begin in Delaware, Vicki Davis was notified that Painter would be released and would not be going to trial for attempting to kill her.
“I called in and I demanded that the detectives explain how he could have done this to me and not left any hair or fibers,” Vicki wrote to me. “I was so confused…. I wish I had thought to say at the time, ‘Did you guys just screw up?’ But I was protecting the detective that had told me confidentially that the evidence was lost.”
PAINTER ALSO BECAME a suspect in the 1995 murder of Lisa Young.
Lisa was a seventeen-year-old living in a state near the nation’s capital. A junior in high school, she left her after-school job at closing time and sat outside on a brick flower box with two bags of clothes she had purchased earlier and a soft drink, waiting for friends to pick her up. Then she just vanished. There were reports that she possibly got into a maroon or burgundy car, leaving her belongings on the sidewalk.
The next day at 5:30 a.m., a passing motorist found her fully clothed body about a mile down the road. She had been strangled, her head scored with knife wounds, and her throat cut. Her jewelry was stolen.
Painter became a suspect in the homicide investigation because he had a car that was similar to the one that allegedly took Lisa away, and he was in the area at the time. He was in jail awaiting trial in a nearby state, and this homicide looked awfully similar to the assault six months earlier of Lisa Young (though that case was ultimately dropped). The detective working the Young case decided to pay Painter a visit in jail.
The detective interviewed Painter and found that just prior to his arrest, Painter had disposed of his late model, burgundy car—had it crushed, actually—because, he said, “It had a bad smell in it.”
There was white dog hair from a boxer found on Lisa’s body. According to neighbors, Painter got rid of his dogs right before a detective showed up to question him.
It seemed like another easy case to close. “This is the guy,” the detective said.
Lisa’s mother, Jessie Young, called me in January 2000. She wanted my help investigating her daughter’s 1995 murder, but asked that we keep it quiet for four months, until after the fifth anniversary of the crime passed. She said she had not seen the autopsy report—nor did she care to—and she didn’t want me to see it, either. She wanted to keep the details of her daughter’s death private.
PAINTER, EVEN IF he wasn’t responsible for the attacks on Vicki and Lisa, certainly seems to have anger-retaliatory issues with women.
My take on him is that he views women as the cause of his problems and may have sought to regain his lost power through assaults on females. Painter certainly exhibited anger and violence five years earlier when he assaulted a girlfriend who told him she was leaving him. He was arrested but got only one hundred days of community service working in a food bank.
So the attacks on Young and Davis could have been perpetrated by him, too. They reflect similar, though escalating, anger and violence. Both the Lisa Young murder and the assault on Vicki Davis showed premeditation, some level of skill controlling the victim, and a violent rage against women. Although I could say there were elements of sadism present, the purpose of the assaults appeared to stem more from anger.
The offender in the Young and Davis crimes brought a knife with him but used materials present at the scene for the binding of the women. He planned part of the crimes but not all of them. However, it should be noted that the offender exuded a good amount of confidence and may have felt no need to bring items he knew would be readily available and less traceable.
Both crimes showed evidence of overkill. Much more viole
nce was done to the women than was necessary to kill them. Vicki by all rights should have been dead, and the assault on her showed an uneven temper. The offender was calm when he was in control and became enraged when he lost control.
An experienced offender committed the crime against Vicki. The man who killed Lisa also showed some level of experience, but not quite as much as in Vicki’s assault. Were these two different offenders or did the same man commit both crimes, Lisa’s and then Vicki’s, showing more capability in the later crime once he acquired more experience? The calm manner in which he assaulted Davis without being terribly hurried showed practice. He took care to not leave evidence and he even commented to Davis that he had “seen it all before.” He put effort into restraining her and controlling the crime scene. Therefore, I thought it was of the utmost importance to look for unsolved rapes and homicides that occurred prior to 1995.
My investigation revealed that Painter was a homebody, and it seems more than coincidental that both the Young and Davis crimes were committed within a couple miles of his residence or the residence of someone he was visiting. I also looked at other crimes that occurred near his previous addresses and places of employment.
I concluded that earlier murders in these areas that did not include binding and knife wounds should not be ruled out as possibly being connected to Painter. Often, earlier crimes of the perpetrator are less complicated and take less time. The perpetrator’s choice of weapons can change due to acquired preferences or availability.
While we may think that the place where a body has been dumped is significant, in fact, most offenders dump a body where it is convenient rather than for some emotional reason. Some pick places where they feel the evidence will be eliminated. For example, a stream could be chosen because it will wash away DNA and fibers or simply because it was available. Perhaps the offender prefers dumping the body in a stream, but there are none nearby, so he instead chooses a field. Most of the time, the dumping of the body is done in the most expedient way. If, however, closer locations are ignored, then there may be a specific reason for a particular dumping location. Sometimes the offender remembers a place nearby where he had a picnic and thinks, “Hey, that place had some nice woods!”
