Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  At that point they told me of Dr. Levine’s recommendation to exhume the body and wanted to know what I thought about it. I told them it was a terrific idea, and the more public hoopla leading up to it, the better. Weber should go on television beforehand and announce that if the body is still in good shape and the new examination turns up the evidence they expect, they will be close to solving the murder. In a sense, what they would be conveying to the killer is that they were "resurrecting" Karla, bringing her back from the grave, to bear witness in her own murder.

  The digging up of the body will be a tremendous stressor to him. I want Weber to state publicly that if it takes another twenty years, he’s going to solve this case. Your offender is going to be concerned and inquisitive. He’ll be asking a lot of questions. He may even call the police directly! Make sure you videotape or photograph everyone who shows up at the cemetery; he may be there. He’s going to be in a lot of suspense about what shape the body is in. And when you finally announce how pleased you are with its condition, that’s going to send him farther over the edge. At the same time, he’ll become even more of a loner, isolating himself from whatever friends he has. This will be the time to start listening to people in bars and places like that to see if any of the regulars are displaying markedly changed behavior. He may recently have joined a church or taken up religion as a means to cope. And while you’re putting all this stress on him, there should be a comment in the paper from one of the cops—it could even be from me—that sounds almost empathic. We should say we know what he’s going through, that he did not intend to kill her and has been carrying this huge weight on his shoulders all these years.

  I went on to outline an interrogation strategy similar to what had worked in the Stoner case. The important thing was that once a suspect had been identified, he shouldn’t be arrested right away but left to stew for a week or so, then you’d want to get him to confess before arresting him. The more facts you have at your disposal, the more things you can say, like, "We know you carried her from here to here" or "We know about the water," the better shot you’ll have. An object that had a material role in the murder (such as the rock in the Stoner case) would be good to have in the room.

  After hearing my impressions, my five visitors seemed to take what I had said to heart. They asked how I could tell all that just by hearing routine details of the case and looking at photographs. I’m not sure of the answer to that, though Ann Burgess has noted that I’m a visual person and like to work first from what I can look at. She says, and it’s probably true, that I have a tendency in consultations to say "I see" rather than "I think." Part of it probably has to do with not being able to be on-scene most of the time, so I’ve got to re-create the environment within my head. Often, when police would call me back several years after I’d analyzed a case for them, I could recall it and what I’d said about the UNSUB if they would just describe the crime scene to me.

  The investigators from Illinois said that from what I told them, two of their many interviewees still looked like strong suspects—Paul Main and his friend John Prante. Both had been next door that day, and at least one of them, Prante, had been drinking beer. Their stories had never quite squared with each other, which could have been the result of their low intelligence and drinking, or could have meant that one or both of them were lying. Prante had done better than Main on the polygraph, but they both fit the profile well. In fact, in some ways Prante fit better. He had been more cooperative with the police, and after the heat had died down, he had left town as I predicted the killer would, only to return later on.

  I said that the campaign I had outlined could be used against both of them. In fact, since I thought whoever had done it felt periodic guilt and remorse, a bit of extra flair might involve having a woman portray Karla and call each of them in the middle of the night, sobbing and asking, "Why? Why? Why?" This should coincide with articles in the paper about what an all-American girl Karla had been and how tragic it was that she had been cut down in her prime. I’ve always gone for the theatrical touch.

  Once the campaign had been on for about a week or ten days, the police could see if either Main or Prante was reacting in the way I’d said the killer would. If one of them was, then the next step would be to use informants—friends, acquaintances, work associates—to try to draw comments or a confession out of him.

  The exhumation of the body on June 1, 1982, was handled just the way I’d hoped, with Lowell Levine on the scene, a lot of television and press coverage, and appropriately solemn and optimistic statements from Weber. I’ve found that in smaller towns it’s a lot easier to get the kind of cooperation you need from journalists than it is in big cities, where they’re much more apt to feel you’re trying to manipulate them or tell them what to print. I see it more as a cooperative effort between the press and law enforcement that shouldn’t compromise the integrity of either. I’ve never asked a newspaper or TV reporter to lie or produce a false or incomplete story. But on many occasions, I have given out the information I needed to have an UNSUB read and react to. When reporters are cooperative with me, I’m cooperative with them. And in certain cases, when they’ve been particularly cooperative, I’ve given them exclusives when the inside story could finally be told.

  Fortunately, Karla’s body was in amazingly well-preserved condition. The new autopsy was performed by Dr. Mary Case, an assistant medical examiner for the city of St. Louis. Unlike in the first postmortem, Dr. Case determined that the cause of death was drowning. She also found a skull fracture. Most important, they got the bite-mark evidence they needed.

  The organized publicity campaign continued in earnest. Tom O’Connor of the state police and Wayne Watson of the Financial Fraud and Forgery Unit interviewed Main at his house, ostensibly about public-aid payments he was receiving that he was possibly ineligible for. They led him into a discussion of Karla Brown’s murder. While he wouldn’t confess and denied any involvement in the crime, he had definitely been closely following the publicity and had some inside information. For example, Watson mentioned that Main had left out Acton Avenue on his list of previous addresses. He said he had been trying to forget because of bad memories of the cops hassling him about the neighbor girl who got killed there.

  Watson said, "She’s the one who was shot, strangled, and drowned in a fifty-gallon barrel."

  "No, no! Not shot, not shot!" Main replied emphatically.

  Just around the time of the exhumation, a man named Martin Higdon went to the Wood River police and said he’d gone to high school with Karla Brown and that all of the current publicity had led to discussions at work. He thought the police should know that a woman he worked with claimed that at a party not long after the murder, a man said he had been at Karla’s house on the day she was killed.

  O’Connor and Rick White interviewed the woman, whose name was Vicki White (no relation). She confirmed the story, saying she and her husband, Mark, had been at a party at Spencer and Roxanne Bond’s house, where she’d spoken to a man she’d known at Lewis and Clark Community College. The man said he had been at Karla’s house the day of the murder. He mentioned where she had been found and that she had been bitten on her shoulder. He was going to have to leave town because he thought he would be considered a prime suspect. At the time, she’d discounted this as idle talk.

  His name was John Prante.

  How could he have known about the bite marks so soon after the murder when the police didn’t know about them until two years later? O’Connor and White asked each other. They then interviewed the party’s host, Spencer Bond, who had the same recollection as Vicki and Mark White. Bond also mentioned that Main had given him details about how Karla was found. The question was whether Main had gotten the information from Prante, or vice versa. Though Prante had done better on the polygraph, Weber and the police didn’t think Main was bold enough to have carried out such a crime or smart enough to have set up Prante.

  Bond had recently seen Prante, driving his old red
Volkswagen Minibus. Though I’d gotten the color and make right, I’d missed out on the model. But this, in itself, was significant. About this time, we were starting to see a shift in vehicle of preference to vans. Bittaker and Norris used one. Steven Pennell used one. Unlike a car, in the back of a van you can do whatever you want and not be seen. You have, in effect, a mobile murder site.

  I was not surprised to hear that John Prante had grown a beard since the murder. Bond agreed to wear a wire while he spoke to Prante about the case. While Prante didn’t admit the killing, he revealed how closely he fit the profile. He had studied welding at Lewis and Clark. He had left town after the murder. He had been divorced and had trouble with women. He was extremely curious about the investigation.

  Thursday, June 3, Weber’s office secured a court order compelling Prante to submit to a dental impression the next day. Chief Don Greer told him they were trying to tie up loose ends, and if he didn’t match, they could eliminate him as a suspect.

  After leaving the dentist’s office, Prante called Weber, just as I figured he would. He wanted to know what was going on with the investigation. Weber had the presence of mind to get his assistant Keith Jensen on the line at the same time, just to make sure Weber couldn’t later be knocked out of the case as a potential witness. In talking with Weber, Prante contradicted his earlier story about when he’d been at Paul Main’s house. As I predicted, he appeared cooperative.

  The police got more information from a second wired exchange between Bond and Prante, then even more from a taped conversation between Bond and Main. Prante told Bond he was up to several packs of cigarettes a day. Main went so far as to suggest that perhaps Karla had set Prante off by rejecting his sexual advances. That led to another police interview with Main, in which he stated that he believed Prante was responsible for the murder, though he recanted after a private conversation with Prante.

  The following Tuesday, Weber, Rushing, and Greer flew to Long Island to see Dr. Levine. They gave him the new autopsy photographs and three sets of dental impressions—Main’s, those of another long-standing suspect, and Prante’s. Levine eliminated the first two right away. He couldn’t say with scientific certainty that only Prante’s teeth out of the whole world would match up, but they did—perfectly.

  Paul Main was arrested and charged with obstructing justice. Prante was charged with murder and burglary with intent to commit rape. He went to trial in June of 1983. In July, he was found guilty and sentenced to seventy-five years in prison.

  It had taken four years, but through the combined efforts of many dedicated people, a killer was finally brought to justice. I was particularly pleased and gratified to receive a copy of a letter Assistant State’s Attorney Keith Jensen sent to FBI director William Webster. In it he wrote, "The community finally feels safe, and the family feels justice has been done, none of which could have happened without John Douglas. While he is an extremely busy man, I feel his efforts should not go unnoticed. I extend my sincere thanks and wish that there were more John Douglases available with the competency, capacity, and ability to assist as he did."

  These were kind words indeed. Fortunately, though, the previous January I had been able to make my case to Jim McKenzie, the assistant director of the Academy, that we did need "more John Douglases." In turn, he’d managed to sell headquarters, even though it meant stealing bodies from other programs. That was how I got Bill Hagmaier, Jim Horn, Blaine McIlwaine, and Ron Walker in the first go-round, then Jim Wright and Jud Ray in the second. As time soon told, they all made sizable contributions.

  Despite everyone’s best efforts, some cases, like Karla Brown’s, take years to close. Others just as complex can be solved in a matter of days or weeks if everything breaks right.

  When a stenographer named Donna Lynn Vetter in one of the FBI’s southwestern field offices was raped and murdered in her ground-floor apartment one night, Roy Hazelwood and Jim Wright were given an unambiguous order from the Director’s Office: get down there immediately and solve the case. By that time, we had divided the country into regions. This one fell in Jim’s territory.

  The message had to be loud and clear: you don’t get away with killing FBI personnel, and we’ll do whatever we have to to make sure. At two the next afternoon, an FBI Hostage Rescue Team helicopter carried the two agents and their hastily packed bags from Quantico to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where they boarded a Bureau jet. Upon landing, they went immediately to the crime scene, which had been held intact for them by the local police.

  Vetter was a white, twenty-two-year-old woman who’d grown up on a farm, and even though she’d worked for the Bureau for more than two years, she’d moved to the city only eight months before. Naive to the dangers of urban life, she’d taken an apartment in an industrial, predominantly black and Hispanic area. The resident manager was cognizant of security considerations. She had installed a white porch-type lightbulb—instead of the regular yellow one—over the door of each apartment where a single female tenant lived, so that her staff and the security guards would pay special attention. The system was not made public. But for all its good intentions, the code would have been quickly transparent to even the most casual snooper.

  Police had been called shortly after 11 p.m. when one of the other residents noticed the apartment’s window screen had been ripped out and called the complex’s security guard. The victim’s nude body, beaten about the face and bearing multiple stab wounds, was covered with blood. The autopsy showed she had been raped.

  The assailant forced entry through the front window, knocking over a large potted plant on his way in. The telephone cord had been unplugged from the wall. Large, hideous bloodstains were on the dining-room carpet and kitchen floor, where the main attack seemed to have taken place. One stain where the body had lain looked eerily like a life-size angel, her wings spread as if in flight. The blood tracks indicated the victim was then dragged into the living room. From the defense wounds on the body, it seemed that she had gone for a kitchen knife, but he had grabbed it and turned it on her.

  Vetter’s bloodstained clothing was found by the emergency medical team at the edge of the kitchen floor near the cabinets. Her shorts and panties were rolled, indicating they’d been removed by the attacker while she was lying on the floor. When police arrived at the scene, the lights in the apartment were off. They speculated that the offender had probably turned them off to delay discovery after he left.

  From everything they learned from coworkers, family, and neighbors, the young woman was shy, honest, and devout. She had grown up in a strict and solid religious environment, and she took her religion seriously. She wasn’t in any way glamorous and seemed to have little, if any, social life, either with men or her coworkers, who described her as conscientious and hardworking but "different." This probably had a lot to do with her lack of sophistication and sheltered upbringing. No one suggested any kind of illicit behavior or hanging around with the "wrong kind." No drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or birth control pills were in her apartment. Her parents were absolutely convinced of her chastity and said they thought she would do anything to protect her virginity.

  After studying the scene, that was what Roy and Jim concluded had happened. While there was blood all over the place, one particular bloodstain aroused their special interest. It was right outside the bathroom door. Inside the bathroom, they noticed urine but no tissue in the bowl of the unflushed toilet.

  This gave them an immediate sense of what had taken place between the intruder and the victim. She must have been in the bathroom when she heard the break-in. She got up without taking the time to flush and went out to see what was going on. As soon as she passed through the bathroom door, he hit her hard in the face, essentially trying to neutralize her. Jim and Roy found the murder weapon, a kitchen knife, hidden under a seat cushion in the living room.

  The murder weapon itself told them something—that the UNSUB had not broken into the apartment with the intention of murder. And the fac
t that nothing of value was taken suggested he had come with intentions other than burglary. The evidence suggested he was there to rape. Had he been there to murder, rather than spend time with her, there would have been no reason to unplug the phone. The easy access of the apartment, the victim’s plainness, his blitzing her before he’d even said a word to her, all pointed to an angry, macho type with low intelligence and no social skills or confidence in his ability to control someone else through words. Unless he completely controlled this unthreatening victim right from the beginning, he knew he couldn’t succeed in his goal.

  What he hadn’t counted on was how fiercely this shy, quiet woman would resist. Everything in her background told the profilers that this was exactly what she would do to defend her honor. But the attacker wouldn’t have known. The more she fought him, the more he was in danger of losing control, and the more his rage grew. With the Karla Brown case, another rape that turned to murder, I felt the assailant’s rage was secondary to his need to "deal with" the mess he’d created. In this killing, it looked as if the rage and need to deal with the victim had equal importance. The anger in this case was sustained rather than momentary. The drag marks showed that after he attacked her in the kitchen, he dragged her into another room where he raped her, bleeding and dying.

  Roy and Jim began preparing their profile the very evening they arrived. They were looking for a man between twenty and twenty-seven years of age. Normally, in a sexually based or lust murder, if the victim was white, you would expect the offender to be white, too. But the agents firmly believed this had started out as a rape, and so the "rules" of rape applied. This was a predominantly black and Hispanic apartment complex and neighborhood, with a high incidence in the area of white women being raped by black men, so there was a very strong chance the killer was probably black.

  They didn’t think the UNSUB would be married, but he could have been living in a financially dependent or exploitive relationship with someone. Any woman who had a relationship with him would be younger, less experienced, or in some way easy to influence. He would not be involved with anyone he found challenging or in any way intimidating. While he would be of fairly low intelligence and have an unspectacular record in school (where he’d probably been a behavior problem), he would be streetwise and able to take care of himself in a fight. He would want to seem macho and tough to those around him, and he would wear the best clothing he could afford. Likewise, he would be athletic and try to stay in good condition.