by Pat Brown
THE MIND OF A TEENAGE GIRL
The Crime: Teen suicide
The Victim: Sabrina Oliver
Location: Home
Original Theory: Suicide
One of a criminal profiler’s most difficult jobs is telling a family that their child really did commit suicide.
I received an e-mail from a mother whose daughter, Sabrina Oliver, was found by her uncle Rufus:
A friend gave me your e-mail address. I don’t know if you can help or maybe direct me to another source. My 14 yr old daughter was supposedly found hanging from her bedroom wall by her uncle. He was the last one to talk to her and the only one to see her hanging. Reasons for doubt:
No damage at all to her throat.
Egg size knot above her right brow with bruising.
Small hammer found next to body when I entered the room.
Error filled records, from EMT’s, hospital, medical examiner, 911 tape, and police report. (Funeral director wrote letter stating facts about knot on head, but did no good.) Example of errors with records in my possession: EMT received call at 4:05 a.m. (their record), 911 call made at 4:11 a.m. (police record), body found at 4:15 a.m. (police report).
Uncle that found her went off the deep end about two months ago and is now in a mental institution (no history of mental illness).
There is so much more, but I’m trying to make this brief. The sheriff’s department will not help. They say there is no evidence. WRONG! They just want to wash their hands of it.
My daughter was pretty, talented, smart, and had made future plans as well as weekend plans. Is there anything you can suggest that I do?
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Penny Oliver
PROFILERS GET CALLED in on suicides more than any other kind of death, including homicide.
These are especially difficult cases to deal with, because sometimes the family is right. A person who commits a homicide may stage the event as a suicide and do a pretty good job of it and actually fool people. Certainly, a few of those do slide by. But what I’ve found as a profiler is that the majority of them are exactly what the police said they were—suicides.
Why does a family doubt suicide even when the police are thoroughly convinced? There is usually an overwhelming amount of evidence proving suicide. But quantity and quality doesn’t matter to a family in shock; they just won’t believe a loved one opted out of life.
Families have a difficult time accepting suicide. They can’t believe that they didn’t know that a loved one wanted to commit suicide or that they couldn’t stop their loved one from committing suicide or, even worse, that they contributed to their loved one wanting to commit suicide.
In the aftermath of such tragedy, they feel a heavy weight of guilt that they did something wrong and pushed a family member over the edge. I wasn’t a good enough mother (or father or wife or husband)! I didn’t love her enough. I didn’t show her enough caring, and therefore she killed herself.
They prefer to think that the person was murdered.
For the people whose children commit suicide, guilt sits on their chests like an elephant’s foot, and they’d rather have almost any other answer than accept that their loved one killed herself.
SABRINA OLIVER WAS a fourteen-year-old girl who was found hanging in her bedroom. She had looped her raincoat belt around her neck and hanged herself on the curtain rod; and, considering how many children die playing choking games, it’s sadly not an unusual suicide route for a child to pick anymore. Hanging is a fairly well-known way of committing suicide and quite simple. It doesn’t require a special weapon, it doesn’t require drugs that might be hard to obtain, and it doesn’t involve having to do something terrifyingly scary like leaping off a bridge.
Most people haven’t given it a thought, but you don’t have to step off a chair to commit suicide; you can die by wrapping something around your neck and a stationary bar, then bending your knees and letting gravity do its job. The blood vessels will constrict, your brain won’t receive enough oxygen, and you will pass out and die. It’s not all that uncomfortable or terrible, you just get sleepy, pass out, and that’s it. It’s not a violent death. Sometimes elderly people use this method, because they are lying in a hospital bed and they want to commit suicide, but they can’t figure out what to do, so they’ll take the belt from their robe, tie it on a bar of the bed, and lean their head down over the side so it constricts long enough for them to pass out. It’s not unusual that a fourteen-year-old girl might pick this type of exit.
Although her mother later claimed she was a happy child and was fine the night she died, Sabrina clearly was having problems in her life. She had just been kicked off the basketball team and kids at school were being mean to her because she didn’t have fashionable enough clothes. Uncle Rufus found her hanging. He took her down and called 911. The family took turns on the telephone talking to the 911 operator trying to direct the ambulance to their home, which turned out to be a difficult location to find, and that delayed the paramedics.
The autopsy reported that Sabrina died of ligature strangulation. The medical examiner found no evidence of any kind of bruising to her head, nothing else that would have caused her death, and the police agreed.
But the Oliver family could not believe that Sabrina killed herself.
As Penny Oliver indicated in her e-mail to me, there was a hammer found in the room, and the family believed Uncle Rufus hit Sabrina over the head with it and then hanged her. A rape kit was done, but the actual testing never was performed because the police were certain Sabrina committed suicide. It is wise to at least be sure that the rape kit is completed, so if there comes a time when there is a question that the victim was sexually assaulted, the evidence will be available.
At the funeral home, Penny said she saw a bruise over Sabrina’s eye. The next day, she claimed, it was even bigger, which was impossible, because when you’re dead, you don’t bruise, and bruises that are already on the body don’t get bigger. But there was nothing ever noted in the autopsy report or by the hospital. No one else documented a big abrasion or swelling or anything else on Sabrina, so I was not sure what the family thought they saw. It’s possible they saw some discoloring caused by decomposition, which they mistook for something else.
Penny said, “We believe Rufus committed this crime.”
I said, “Why? Why would he do this?”
When Sabrina died, Penny’s husband, Steve—Sabrina’s stepfather—was also at home. He and Rufus were both there with Sabrina for some time before Penny arrived home from work that night.
The stepfather said he saw Sabrina shortly before she went to bed. For Penny’s belief to be true, Uncle Rufus would have had to rape Sabrina, hit her over the head with the hammer (which the investigators denied seeing in the room), and kill her before Penny got there. By that theory, maybe he raped Sabrina, she screamed, he panicked, and he hanged her.
Because I could see some logic in this, I agreed to take on the case. I wanted to see if there was a possibility that Rufus did these things.
The autopsy report proved nothing of the sort. No hammer hit Sabrina, according to the medical examiner; there was also no evidence of any kind of a trauma to her head.
But Rufus still could have hanged her.
Then I listened to Rufus’s call to 911.
“Please someone get over here, please, hurry, please, please, hurry, she’s not breathing, she’s not breathing, for God’s sake, please.”
Calls to 911 are fascinating. Something traumatic just happened, and these calls record a fresh response from the people involved. The first thing I noticed was that Rufus was hyperventilating so badly he could barely get the words out. He found his niece; he was an absolute wreck. I thought, That’s one fine acting job if you are acting here, buddy, because man, you sound totally, completely, out of your mind distraught. It didn’t sound to me like a cold-blooded psychopath who had raped and hanged his niece. That was one of the most te
lling things.
But then I learned of the clincher—and this is where normally rational families go into such huge denial over their children’s emotional state and well-being.
Sabrina actually left an incredibly long, detailed, three-page suicide note. In it, she bid good-bye to everyone in her life, and she said how much she loved the people who cared for her. Then she went on to explain why she needed to leave them.
“I was a mistake,” she wrote, “and everyone knows it, or at least I do. I know I’m not wanted here or anywhere else I go to, so I’ll leave, and I’ll have nowhere else to go, so I’ll rot in hell if I have to. For everything I’ve ever done or said to anyone that’s caused them pain, I’m so sorry. I hope you don’t end up like me.”
She went on for three pages, describing how much pain she was in, how things people said to her hurt her deeply.
“Every insult and every comment I’ve ever received has left a deep hole inside my heart. I’m a person who takes everything seriously. I am the mistake you can’t fix. You can’t give me advice. No one seems to understand the emotional stress and pain that I have been going through. I wrote this letter to everyone, all my friends that I have. I didn’t and don’t want you to feel bad for me. Be happy you won’t have to deal with me any more. I’m an emotional person forever.”
This was the tremendously sad suicide note of a girl with incredible teenage angst.
She used the term “Jehovah” quite often, which led me to believe she might have had some association with Jehovah’s Witnesses. There is a beautiful land that Jehovah’s Witnesses believe people will go to when they die, kind of like Heaven, but this is the new world, and that’s a beautiful place to be. We inhabit a hopeless world because of so much drug use and drinking and sex and violence that it’s hard to remain good. Sabrina believed she had to stick close to Jehovah.
After her daughter was dead, Penny decided that her brother Rufus—who tried to tell her it was a suicide—actually wrote the long suicide note.
The poor uncle. Essentially, there was never any problem between the uncle and the niece, because I asked the family that question.
Everyone said the same thing: “No, they got along fine.”
I said, “Was there any suspicious activity?”
And again, the answer was no; he lived there with them and everything was fine. He was just the unfortunate schmuck who found her.
I studied the suicide note that she thought Rufus forged. She sent me another sample of Sabrina’s handwriting, insisting the suicide note was not in Sabrina’s handwriting. And yet when the police and I analyzed it, we both came to the same conclusion: it was exactly the same handwriting. She had a loopy, teen girl’s handwriting style, and she even drew a heart in the letter just like one that she had drawn on her hand. A teenage girl’s thought process is clearly evident in the language and narrative of the note.
At the time, my daughter was the same age as Sabrina, and I, as a profiler, couldn’t even come up with that good a replica of a teenage girl’s suicide note. It would be an astonishing ability for a grown man to write a believable suicide note in the voice and handwriting style of a teenage girl.
On top of that, if someone were to stage a crime, they would not write anything with the level of depth and emotion Sabrina expressed in that note. Generally speaking, most suicide notes that are written by those who kill themselves are fairly short, because it’s hard to write a long one when the foremost thought in your mind is I’ve had it. The world sucks. That would have been a note I might have believed the uncle forged. That might have made sense, because he could have sat down and worked hard to make sure that “the world sucks, I’m out of here, Sabrina” matched her handwriting pretty well. But to actually write a three-page good-bye note, that’s pretty darn difficult.
Uncle Rufus was completely tormented by what happened, and by discovering his niece. He ended up in a mental hospital. The family claimed the reason for that turn of events was because he felt such horrible guilt about killing her. I believe Rufus ended up in a mental hospital because his own sister, Penny, accused him of killing Sabrina. Can you imagine losing your niece and then having your sister say that you raped and murdered her?
Rufus became paranoid after Sabrina’s death, thinking that everybody was out to get him, and it was terribly sad. And this was all because of how difficult it is to believe that your child could commit suicide.
WHEN I PROFILE suicides, I always write back to the family in a gentle way with my conclusions: “I know how much you are suffering from this…” I explain to them how we can’t always know what our children are thinking, how so many of us wouldn’t know the difference between a child exhibiting normal teenage depression and a teen in serious emotional distress who suddenly kills himself the next day. Sometimes teenagers make rash decisions that we can’t see coming. I point out to families that it’s not unusual for them to not know, so they shouldn’t feel guilty that this came out of the blue and blindsided them, that they didn’t necessarily contribute in any way to it. Some people, especially teenagers, don’t necessarily communicate what they’re going through. Most of the teenagers who complain and cry and say they hate everyone and their lives never attempt suicide and get through those years. We can only do so much, try our best to help our children, relatives, and friends, but sometimes they just do what they want to do and it ends up tragically.
I always naïvely think that if I can logically explain the crime to the family, detailing exactly what happened so that they can understand it, and stress that they were not responsible, they will accept it and move on. But to this day I can say that, for all my attempts to communicate these points, I’ve had almost zero acceptance after I’m done. The family will inevitably come back and argue that I’m wrong; they will say that I don’t know how to profile, that I don’t understand what’s going on.
When people cannot accept suicide, they go to the next most likely conclusion: the person who found her is the person who killed her. I believe Rufus ended up in a mental institution because his whole family turned on him and assumed he was a murderer.
All the evidence in the world would not change the family’s opinion of their daughter’s death, their conclusion that her uncle killed her, or of that idiot, Pat Brown, who calls herself a profiler.
CHAPTER 13
BRIAN
WHO PULLED THE TRIGGER?
The Crime: Suicide
The Victim: Brian Lewis
Location: Western United States
Original Theory: Suicide
As a profiler, I find crime-scene role-playing a useful tool.
In the courtroom, it’s increasingly common to see a crime-scene reenactment during which the prosecution or defense attorneys will take the judge and jury through an alleged crime. Sometimes, they’ll do it with 3-D pictures; sometimes they’ll make a video.
If a gun was shot, they’ll want to show the trajectory, so they’ll tack strings from wall to wall showing the exact path the bullets took, demonstrating whether they could have hit the victim and at what angle they had to be shot.
Not every police department has the money for all this fancy stuff or they don’t see that it is necessary. But sometimes it really should be done, even if in a simpler, less expensive way, like through role-playing. This is something I often do in order to test out a theory as to how a crime went down. I set up scenarios that are similar to what occurred. I have to be fairly careful, because I don’t want to do something that is based on vague guesswork.
One time, the police theorized that a man had transported his wife in the trunk of a particular vehicle. My question was, would she fit in this car’s trunk? Trunks come in all different sizes. The month before, I drove a nice little sports car out in California. If the convertible top was up, the tiny trunk allowed me to fit in my briefcase and my handbag. When I put the convertible top down, I couldn’t even get my purse in there. I did manage to lay my suit jacket carefully inside, and when I clic
ked the ragtop into its open position, my suit got a nice pressing. Certainly, no body would squeeze into that trunk. Even if I put the roof back up, only the body of an infant would fit in that tiny space.
The car the police suspected might have been used in the crime had a bigger trunk than that sports car. I found a vehicle of the same make, model, and year parked outside of a shop I was in with about eleven minutes left on the meter. I walked outside and waited for the driver to show up.
“Excuse me,” I said when a young couple arrived at the car, “would you mind terribly opening the trunk of your vehicle so I can look in it and see how big it is?”
They looked at me kind of funny, so I said, “I’m a criminal profiler, and I’m working on a case. I know it sounds a little odd, but I want to know if a body would fit in your trunk.”
They just laughed—wouldn’t you?—and said, “No problem.”
They opened it up, I checked out the size of the trunk, and then said, “Thank you very much.”
Since the victim I was dealing with was a bit on the overweight side, I had to make sure that this wasn’t a trunk for anorexics only. The lady would have fit in the trunk.
On occasion, if the police found a body in a certain position, I might wonder, “Could that body be in that position in the trunk?” In that situation, it’s not going to be good enough to look in the trunk. I’m going to say, “I’m about the same size as that woman. Guess who’s going in the trunk?”
Could an alleged perpetrator climb through a given window if, for example, the window seemed kind of small? I have to find somebody the same size and try to shove him through it. I can’t just guess.
The Virginia detective who nailed the cat burglar turned serial killer dealt with this issue in one of the murders he investigated. He said, “That was a pretty small window that guy had to use to get into the house. He had to be a certain weight to slither through that one.” A 210-pound man couldn’t get through it, but a 140-pound man might.
