Dr. Wolsieffer’s visible injuries don’t appear serious to the police or the paramedics they’ve called to the scene—a contusion on the back of the head, pink marks on the back of the neck, small scratches on the left side of his ribs and chest. But they don’t want to take chances, so they have him taken to the emergency room. He doesn’t look too bad to the doctor there, either, but he admits him based on the dentist’s report of having been unconscious.
From the beginning, the police were suspicious of Wolsieffer’s story. It didn’t seem logical that an intruder would enter the home from a second-story window in daylight. Outside, they found an old ladder leading to the open window of the back bedroom the intruder allegedly used as his entrance. But the ladder was so rickety, it didn’t look as if it could support the weight of even an average-size person. It was leaning against the side of the house with the rungs facing the wrong direction. The ladder had made no indentations in the soft ground to indicate that any weight had been placed on it, nor were there any markings on the aluminum gutters it was resting against. And no dew or grass was on the rungs or roof near the window as there should have been had someone used it that morning.
There were also contradictory indicators inside the house. Nothing of value appeared to have been taken, not even any jewelry that would have been apparent in the bedroom. And if the intruder intended to kill, why would he leave an unconscious man with a gun nearby downstairs and go back upstairs to kill, but not sexually assault, his wife?
Two points were especially disturbing. If Glen had been choked to the point of passing out, why were there no marks on the front of his neck? And the most unfathomable part of all: neither Glen nor his brother, Neil, had gone upstairs to check on Betty and Danielle.
To further fuzz things up, Dr. Wolsieffer’s story evolved as time went on. His description of the intruder grew more explicit as he recalled more details. The man wore a dark sweatshirt, a stocking mask, and had a mustache, Wolsieffer said. He contradicted himself on several points. He told family members he’d been out late Friday night but talked to his wife before going to sleep. He had told police that he never awakened her. Initially, he had reported that about $1,300 had been taken from a desk drawer, but later took that back when police found a deposit slip for the money. When police tried to question him after they arrived on the emergency call, he seemed only barely conscious and practically incoherent, yet when told at the hospital of his wife’s death, he referenced having heard the police call for the coroner.
As long as the investigation continued, Glen Wolsieffer came up with newer and more elaborate scenarios to explain the attack. Eventually, the number of intruders grew to two. He had admitted having an affair with a former dental assistant but told police he had ended it a year ago. Yet later he conceded that he’d just seen—and had sex with—the woman a few days before the murder. And he’d neglected to tell police about another affair he was having at the same time with a married woman.
Betty Wolsieffer’s friends told police that as much as she loved her husband and had tried to make things work, she was tired of his behavior, particularly the late Friday nights, which had become a regularity. Days before she was killed, she had told a friend she was going to "take a stand" if Glen stayed out late again the coming Friday.
Following the initial interviews at his home and the hospital, Glen refused to talk to police on the advice of his lawyer. So they focused on his brother, Neil. His story of that morning seemed almost as strange as Glen’s. He refused a polygraph, saying he had heard they were often inaccurate and he feared a damaging result. After repeated requests by the police, Betty’s family, and pressure from the media to cooperate in the investigation, Neil scheduled an interview with police at the courthouse in October.
At about 10:15 a.m., fifteen minutes past the scheduled time for the interview, Neil was killed in a head-on collision between his small Honda and a Mack truck. He was actually traveling away from the courthouse when hit. The coroner’s inquest ruled his death a suicide, though it later appeared he may have overshot the turn and was nervously trying to get back. We may never know for sure.
More than a year after the murder, the Wilkes-Barre police had assembled a large amount of circumstantial evidence pointing to Glen Wolsieffer as his wife’s killer, but they had no hard evidence and so no proof with which to charge him. His fingerprints and hair were found at the crime scene, but it was his own bedroom, so that didn’t say much. Police theorized that any ligature or bloody clothes he may have worn could have been disposed of in a nearby river prior to Glen’s call to his brother. Their only hope for an arrest and conviction lay in bolstering their case with an expert opinion that the crime was committed by someone who knew the victim personally and had staged the crime scene.
In January of 1988, the Wilkes-Barre police asked me to provide an analysis of the crime. After reviewing the by-then voluminous material, I concluded rather quickly that the murder was indeed committed by someone who knew the victim well and staged the crime scene to cover that up. Since the police already had a suspect, I didn’t want to generate our normal profile, or point the finger directly at the husband, but I tried to give the police some ammunition to help them support an arrest.
A daylight, weekend break-in in that neighborhood, into a home with two cars parked in the driveway, was an extremely high risk crime against low-risk victims. A burglary scenario was highly improbable.
It was totally inconsistent with everything we’d seen during our years of research and case consultation throughout the world that an intruder would enter a second-story window and immediately head downstairs without checking rooms on the second floor.
There was no evidence that an intruder had brought any weapons with him, which made an intended homicide scenario highly improbable. Mrs. Wolsieffer was not sexually violated, which made an intended-rape-gone-bad scenario equally improbable. And there was no evidence of even an attempt to take anything, which was another reason that an intended-burglary scenario was improbable. This narrowed down the potential motives considerably.
The method of death—manual strangulation—is a personal-type crime. It is not a method a stranger is going to choose, particularly one who has planned enough and made the effort to break in.
The police continued methodically and meticulously building their case. Although they were convinced as to who the murderer was, their evidence was still circumstantial and had to hold up in court. In the meantime, Glen Wolsieffer moved to Falls Church, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., and set up a dental practice there. Late in 1989, an arrest warrant and affidavit of probable cause was prepared, referencing my report. On November 3, 1989, thirty-eight months after the murder, a team of state, county, and local police came down to Virginia and arrested Wolsieffer in his dental office.
He told one of the arresting officers, "It happened too fast. We got into it. Everything was a blur." Later, he claimed he was talking about the attack on him by the intruder(s), not the murder of his wife.
Though I’d already been qualified at that time as a crime-scene analysis expert in several states, the defense referred to me as a "voodoo man" for the way I came up with my interpretations, and the judge ultimately ruled that I couldn’t testify. Still, the prosecution was able to incorporate what I’d told them. Combined with the thorough police work, they were able to secure a conviction for murder in the third degree.
There were many red flags in the Wolsieffer case—the rickety and wrongly positioned ladder, the staging of a sex crime without any evidence of sexual assault, the inconsistency of the choking wounds, the seeming lack of concern evidenced by not checking on the wife and child, the fact that the child was never awakened by any noise. But the most prominent red flag of all was the utter illogic of the supposed intruder’s actions and behavior. Anyone breaking into a house to commit a crime, any crime, is going to first concern himself with the greatest threat—in this case the six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound armed man of the h
ouse—and only secondarily with the lesser threat, the unarmed woman.
An investigator always has to have his antennae up for these inconsistencies. Perhaps because we’ve seen so many of these cases, we’re always acutely aware of going beyond what people say to try to figure out what the behavior really shows.
In some ways we’re like actors preparing for a role. The actor sees the words written on the page of the script, but what he wants to act is the "subtext"—what the scene is really about.
One of the clearest examples of that is the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart and the severe wounding of her husband, Charles, in Boston. Before it was done, the case became a cause and threatened to tear the community apart.
One night as the couple was driving home through Roxbury from a natural-childbirth class, they were apparently attacked by a large black man while their car was stopped at a light. He shot Carol, thirty, and then went after twenty-nine-year-old Charles, who sustained serious abdominal injuries requiring sixteen hours of surgery. Though doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital worked feverishly to save Carol, she died within hours. Their baby boy, Christopher, was delivered at the same time by cesarean section but died within a few weeks. Charles was still recuperating in the hospital at the time of Carol’s large and publicized funeral.
The Boston police sprang into action, rounding up every black man they could find who matched Charles’s description of the attacker. Finally, he picked one out of a lineup.
But shortly thereafter, his story began to unravel. His brother Matthew doubted there had been a robbery at all when he was called upon to help Charles dispose of a bag containing the supposedly stolen items. The day after the district attorney announced he was charging Charles Stuart with the murder, Charles committed suicide by jumping off a bridge.
The black community was understandably outraged by the accusation he had made, just as they were six years later when Susan Smith falsely claimed a black man had kidnapped her two children. In the Smith case, however, the local sheriff in South Carolina went out of his way to diffuse the problem. Cooperating with the media and federal authorities (such as our own agent, Jim Wright), he got to the truth in a matter of days.
It didn’t work out so efficiently in the Stuart case, though I feel it could have had police clearly analyzed what Stuart had told them and weighed it against what appeared to have happened at the scene. Not everyone will go to such lengths to stage a crime—that is, to shoot yourself that seriously. But just as in the Wolsieffer case, if a supposed offender strikes out at the lesser threat first—in most cases the women—there has to be a reason. In any robbery situation, the robber will always attempt to neutralize the most formidable foe first. If the greater threat is not taken out first, there has to be another reason. With "Son of Sam" David Berkowitz, he shot the women first, and in most cases more seriously, because they were his target. The man was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The problem posed by staged crimes for any of us in the law enforcement field is that you can easily become emotionally involved with the victims and survivors. If someone is in obvious distress, we obviously want to believe him. If he’s a halfway decent actor, if the crime appears legitimate on the surface, there’s a tendency to look no further. Like doctors, we can empathize with the victims, but we’re doing no one any favors if we lose our objectivity.
What kind of person could have done such a thing?
As painful as the answer to that question might sometimes be, that’s what we’re here to find out.
Chapter 16
"God Wants You to Join Shari Faye"
Shari Faye Smith, a beautiful and vivacious high school senior, was abducted as she stopped at the mailbox in front of her family’s house near Columbia, South Carolina. She was coming home from a nearby shopping center where she’d met her steady boyfriend, Richard. It was 3:38 p.m. on a warm and sunny May 31, 1985, two days before Shari was scheduled to sing the national anthem at the Lexington High School graduation.
Only minutes later, her father, Robert, found her car at the head of the long driveway to the house. The door was open, the motor was running, and Shari’s purse was lying on the seat. Panic-stricken, he immediately called the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department.
Things like this just didn’t happen in Columbia, a proud and peaceful community that seemed to embody the very notion of "family values." How could this pretty, outgoing young blonde disappear from in front of her own home, and what kind of person could be involved in such a thing? Sheriff Jim Metts didn’t know. But he did sense he had a crisis on his hands. The first thing he did was to organize what became the largest manhunt in South Carolina history. Law enforcement officers from state agencies and neighboring counties came in to help, assisted by more than a thousand civilian volunteers. The second thing Metts did was to quietly rule out as a suspect Robert Smith, who had publicly begged for the return of his daughter. In any instance of a disappearance or possible crime against such a low-risk victim, spouse, parents, and close family members always have to be considered.
The anguished Smith family waited for some word, any word, even a ransom demand. Then they got a phone call. A man with a strangely distorted voice claimed he had Shari captive.
"So you’ll know this is not a hoax, Shari had on a black-and- yellow bathing suit beneath her shirt and shorts."
Shari’s mother, Hilda, pleaded with him, making sure he knew Shari was diabetic and needed regular nourishment, water, and medication. The caller made no ransom demands, saying only, "You’ll get a letter later today." The family and the law officers became even more alarmed.
Metts’s next move reflected his background and training. Both he and Undersheriff Lewis McCarty were graduates of the FBI’s National Academy and had an excellent relationship with the Bureau. Without hesitation, Metts called both Robert Ivey, SAC of the Columbia, South Carolina, Field Office, and my unit in Quantico. I was unavailable, but he got a quick and sympathetic response from Agents Jim Wright and Ron Walker. Analyzing the circumstances of the abduction, photos of the scene, and reports of the telephone call, the two agents agreed they were dealing with a sophisticated and extremely dangerous man, that Shari’s life was very much in jeopardy. They were afraid the young woman could already be dead and that the subject would soon feel the compulsion to commit another such crime. They surmised that what had probably happened was that the kidnapper had seen Shari and her boyfriend, Richard, kissing at the local shopping center and had followed her home afterward. Her bad luck was to stop at the mailbox. Had she not stopped or had there been cars driving by on the street, the crime would never have happened. The sheriff’s department set up recording equipment at the Smith home in hopes of further communication.
Then came a critical and extremely distressing piece of evidence. In all my years in law enforcement, with all of the horrible, almost unbelievable things I’ve seen, I have to say that this is about the most heart wrenching. It was a two-page, handwritten letter to the family from Shari. Written down the left side in capital letters was the phrase "GOD IS LOVE."
As excruciating as I still find reading this letter, it is such an extraordinary documentation of the character and courage of this young woman that I want to reprint it in full:
6/1/85 3:10 AM I LOVE ya’ll
Last Will & Testament
I Love you mommy, daddy, Robert, Dawn, & Richard and everyone else and all the other friends and relatives. I’ll be with my father now, so please, please don’t worry! Just remember my witty personality & great special times we all shared together. Please don’t ever let this ruin your lives just keep living one day at a time for Jesus. Some good will come out of this. My thoughts will always be with & in you! (casket closed) I love you all so damn much. Sorry dad, I had to cuss for once! Jesus forgive me. Richard sweetie—I really did & always will love you & treasure our special moments. I ask one thing though. Accept Jesus as your personal savior. My family has been the greatest influence of my l
ife. Sorry about the cruise money. Some day please go in my place.
I am sorry if I ever disappointed you in any way, I only wanted to make you proud of me because I have always been proud of my family. Mom, dad, Robert & Dawn there’s so much I want to say that I should have said before now. I love you!
I know y’all love me and will miss me very much, but if y’all stick together like we always did—y’all can do it!
Please do not become hard or upset. Everything works out for the
good for those that love the Lord.
All My Love Always—
I Love Y’all
w/All My Heart! Sharon (Shari) Smith
P.S. Nana—I love you so much. I kind of always felt like your favorite. You were mine!
I Love You Alot
Sheriff Metts sent the pages to the crime lab at SLED—the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division—for paper and fingerprint analysis. Reading a copy of the letter at Quantico, we were reasonably sure the kidnapping had turned into a murder. Yet the close-knit Smith family, whose religious faith was so movingly reflected in Shari’s writing, clung to hope. And on the afternoon of June 3, Hilda Smith got a brief call asking if the letter had arrived.
"Do you believe me now?"
"Well, I’m not really sure I believe you because I haven’t had any word from Shari and I need to know that Shari is well."
"You’ll know in two or three days," the caller said ominously.
But then he called back that evening, saying that Shari was alive and implying he would release her soon. Several of the caller’s statements, however, told us otherwise:
"I want to tell you one other thing. Shari is now a part of me. Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Our souls are now one."
Mindhunter Page 32
