Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  Margaret O’Shea understood just the kind of press we needed and had the paper send a photographer to the service. Since there was no gravestone yet, we’d had a white wooden lectern constructed with Shari’s picture laminated to the front. In turn, the family members stood at the grave and offered prayers for Shari and Debra. Then Dawn held up Shari’s little koala and attached it by the arms to the stem of a rose from one of the bouquets that had been sent to the cemetery. Altogether, it was an extremely emotional and moving experience. While the Smiths spoke and a group of photographers took pictures for the local press, Metts’s men quietly took down license numbers of all cars passing by. The one thing that bothered me was that the grave site was so close to the road. I thought such an unsecluded spot might intimidate the perpetrator from coming up close and also allow him to see what he wanted from the road. But we could do nothing about that.

  Pictures appeared in the paper the next day. Shari’s killer didn’t come for the koala bear that night as we’d hoped. I think the proximity to the road did scare him. But he did call again. Shortly after midnight, Dawn answered the phone for another collect call "from Shari Faye Smith." After establishing that it was, in fact, Dawn on the line, and making sure that "you know this isn’t a hoax, correct?" he made his most chilling pronouncement thus far:

  "Okay, you know, God wants you to join Shari Faye. It’s just a matter of time. This month, next month, this year, next year. You can’t be protected all the time." Then he asked her if she had heard about Debra May Helmick.

  "Uh, no."

  "The ten-year-old? H-E-L-M-I-C-K?"

  "Uh, Richland County?"

  "Yeah."

  "Uh-huh."

  "Okay, listen carefully. Go One north . . . well, One west, turn left at Peach Festival Road or Bill’s Grill, go three and a half miles through Gilbert, turn right, last dirt road before you come to stop sign at Two Notch Road, go through chain and No Trespassing sign, go fifty yards, and to the left, go ten yards. Debra May is waiting. God forgive us all."

  He was getting bolder and cockier, no longer using the voice-altering device. Despite the overt threat against her life, Dawn did her best to hold him on the line as long as possible, brilliantly keeping her wits about her and demanding the pictures of her sister he’d promised were coming but which had never arrived.

  "Apparently the FBI must have them," he said defensively, acknowledging his understanding of our role in the case.

  "No, sir," Dawn shot back, "because when they have something, we get it, too, you know. Are you going to send them?"

  "Oh, yes," he replied noncommittally.

  "I think you’re jerking me around because you said they were coming and they’re not here."

  We were getting closer, but the responsibility of having placed Dawn in more danger was weighing heavily on me. While Ron and I helped the local authorities, the technicians at the SLED laboratories in Columbia were subjecting their only piece of hard evidence—Shari’s last will and testament—to every imaginable test. It had been written on lined paper from a legal pad, which gave one analyst an idea.

  Using a device called an Esta machine, which can detect almost microscopically slight impressions made on the paper from sheets that had been higher up in the pad, he detected a partial grocery list and what seemed to be a string of numbers. Eventually, he was able to make out nine numerals of a ten-number sequence: 205-837-13_8.

  The area code for Alabama is 205, and 837 is a Huntsville exchange. Working with Southern Bell’s Security Division, SLED went through all ten possible phone numbers in Huntsville, then cross-checked to see if any of them related back to the Columbia-Lexington County region. One of them had received multiple calls from a residence just fifteen miles from the Smith home, several weeks before Shari was kidnapped. This was the biggest lead yet. According to municipal records, the house belonged to a middle-aged couple, Ellis and Sharon Sheppard.

  Armed with this information, McCarty took several deputies and raced to the Sheppard home. Its occupants were cordial and friendly, but other than that the fifty-odd-year-old Ellis was an electrician, nothing about him fit our profile. The Sheppards had been happily married for many years and had none of the background we had predicted in the killer. They acknowledged making the calls to Huntsville, where their son was stationed in the Army, but said they had been out of town when both horrible murders had been committed. After such a promising forensic lead, it was a disappointing outcome.

  But McCarty had spent considerable time working with us and had faith that the profile was accurate. He described it to the Sheppards, then asked them if they knew anyone who might fit it.

  They looked at each other in a moment of instant recognition. That would be Larry Gene Bell, they agreed.

  Under McCarty’s careful questioning, they proceeded to tell the undersheriff all about Bell. He was in his early thirties—divorced with a son who lived with his ex-wife, shy and heavyset, he worked for Ellis doing electrical wiring at various houses and other odd jobs. Meticulous and organized, he had house-sat for them the six weeks they’d been away, after which he’d gone back to live with his parents, with whom he’d been staying. Sharon Sheppard recalled writing their son’s phone number on a writing pad for Gene, as they called him, in case anything came up with the house while Gene was there. And now that they thought about it, when he’d picked them up at the airport, all he’d wanted to talk about was the kidnapping and murder of the Smith girl. They had been surprised by his appearance when they saw him: he had lost weight, was unshaven, and seemed highly agitated.

  McCarty asked Mr. Sheppard if he had a gun. He kept a loaded .38 pistol at home for protection, Ellis replied. McCarty asked to see it, and Ellis obligingly took him to where he kept the weapon. But it wasn’t there. The two men looked all over the house and finally found it—under the mattress of the bed Gene had slept on. It had been fired and was currently jammed. Also under the mattress was a copy of Hustler magazine, showing a beautiful blonde in bondage in a crucified position. And when McCarty played a portion of one of the telephone calls to Dawn, Ellis was sure it was Larry Gene Bell’s voice he was listening to: "No doubt about it."

  At about two a.m., Ron Walker knocked on my door and got me out of bed. He’d just gotten a call from McCarty, who told us about Larry Gene Bell and asked us to come to the office right away. We all matched up the evidence and the profile. It was uncanny how accurately he fit. This looked like a bull’s-eye. Sheriff’s photos showed a car registered to Bell on the road near the grave site, but the driver had not gotten out.

  Metts planned to have Bell arrested as he left for work in the morning and wanted advice from me on how to conduct the interrogation. Behind the office was a trailer the department had obtained in a drug raid that they used as an auxiliary office. At my suggestion, they quickly turned it into a "task force" headquarters for the case. They put case photographs and maps of the crime scenes on the walls and stacked the desks high with folders and case materials. I told them to man the trailer with busy-looking cops to give the impression of a tremendous amount of evidence amassed against the killer.

  Getting a confession would be difficult, we warned them. South Carolina was a capital punishment state, and at the very least, the guy would expect a long prison term doing hard time as a child molester and killer—not exactly the optimum circumstances for someone who values his life and bodily integrity. The best hope, I felt, would be some face-saving scenario—either trying to put some of the blame on the victims themselves, as offensive as that would be to the interrogators, or getting him to explain himself away with an insanity defense. Accused people with no other way out often jump at this, even though, statistically, juries rarely go for it.

  Sheriff’s deputies arrested Larry Gene Bell early in the morning as he left his parents’ home for work. Jim Metts carefully watched his face as he was brought into the "task force" trailer. "It was like a whitewash came over his face," the sheriff reported. "It put him in t
he proper psychological perspective." He was Mirandized and waived his rights, agreeing to talk to the investigators.

  The officers went at him most of the day while Ron and I waited in Metts’s office, receiving bulletins on the progress and coaching them on what to do next. Meanwhile, deputies armed with a search warrant were examining Bell’s home. As we could have predicted, his shoes were lined up perfectly under his bed, his desk was meticulously arranged, even the tools in the trunk of his three-year-old, well-maintained car were arranged just so. On his desk they found directions to his parents’ house written out in precisely the same manner as the directions he’d given to the Smith and Helmick body dump sites. They found more bondage and S&M pornography as we’d expected. Technicians found hairs on his bed that would match up with Shari’s, and the commemorative stamp used to mail her last will and testament matched a sheet in his desk drawer. And when his photograph was subsequently shown on the TV news, the witness to Debra Helmick’s abduction recognized him immediately.

  His background quickly emerged. As we’d predicted, he had been involved in various sexual incidents since childhood, which had finally gotten out of hand when he was twenty-six and tried to force a nineteen-year-old married woman into his car at knifepoint. To avoid going to prison, he had agreed to psychiatric counseling, but quit after two sessions. Five months later he tried to force a college girl into his car at gunpoint. He received a five-year prison term and was paroled after twenty-one months. While on probation, he made more than eighty obscene phone calls to a ten-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty and only got more probation.

  But back at the trailer, Bell wasn’t talking. He denied any involvement with the crimes, admitting only that he had been interested in them. Even after they played the tapes for him, he was unresponsive. After about six hours, he said he wanted to talk to Sheriff Metts personally. Metts came in and again advised him of his rights, but he wouldn’t confess to anything.

  So, late in the afternoon, Ron and I are still in the sheriff’s office when Metts and District Attorney Don Meyers (called the county solicitor in South Carolina) come in with Bell. He’s fat and soft and reminds me of the Pillsbury Doughboy. Ron and I are both surprised, and Meyers says to Bell in his Carolina accent, "Do you know who these boys are? These boys are from the F-B-I. You know, they did a profile and it fits you right down to a tee! Now these boys want to talk to you for a little bit." They put him on this white sofa against the wall, then they both go out, leaving us alone with Bell.

  I’m sitting on the edge of the coffee table directly in front of Bell. Ron is standing behind me. I’m still wearing what I’d left the motel in long before daybreak, which is a white shirt and practically matching white trousers. I call it my Harry Belafonte outfit, but in this context, in the white room with the white sofa, I look kind of clinical; almost otherworldly.

  I start giving Bell some of the background on our serial-killer study and make it clear to him that from our research, I understand perfectly the motivation of the individual responsible for these homicides. I tell him he may have been denying the crimes all day because he’s trying to repress thoughts he doesn’t feel good about.

  I say, "Going into the penitentiaries and interviewing all these subjects, one of the things we’ve found is that the truth almost never gets out about the background of the person. And generally when a crime like this happens, it’s like a nightmare to the person who commits it. They’re going through so many precipitating stressors in their life—financial problems, marital problems, or problems with a girlfriend." And as I’m saying this, he’s nodding as if he’s got all these problems.

  Then I say, "The problem for us, Larry, is that when you go to court, your attorney probably isn’t going to want you to take the stand, and you’ll never have the opportunity to explain yourself. All they’ll know about you is the bad side of you, nothing good about you, just that you’re a cold-blooded killer. And as I say, we’ve found that very often when people do this kind of thing, it is like a nightmare, and when they wake up the next morning, they can’t believe they’ve actually committed this crime."

  All the time I’m talking, Bell is still nodding his head in agreement.

  I don’t ask him outright at that point if he did the murders, because I know if I phrase it that way, I’ll get a denial. So I lean in close and say to him, "When did you first start feeling bad about the crime, Larry?"

  And he says, "When I saw a photograph and read a newspaper article about the family praying in the cemetery."

  Then I say, "Larry, as you’re sitting here now, did you do this thing? Could you have done it?" In this type of setting, we try to stay away from accusatory or inflammatory words like kill,crime, and murder.

  He looks up at me with tears in his eyes and says, "All I know is that the Larry Gene Bell sitting here couldn’t have done this, but the bad Larry Gene Bell could have."

  I knew that that was as close as we would come to a confession. But Don Meyers wanted us to try one more thing, and I agreed with him. He thought if Bell were confronted face-to-face by Shari’s mother and sister, we might get an instantaneous reaction from him.

  Hilda and Dawn agree to this, and I prepare them for what I want them to say and how I want them to act. So then we’re in Metts’s office. He’s sitting behind his huge desk, Ron Walker and I are on either side of the room, forming a triangle. They bring in Bell and sit him in the middle, facing the door. Then they bring in Hilda and Dawn and tell Bell to say something. He keeps his head down, as if he can’t bring himself to look at them.

  But as I’ve instructed her, Dawn looks him straight in the eye and says, "It’s you! I know it’s you. I recognize your voice."

  He doesn’t deny it, but neither does he admit it. He starts giving them back all the stuff I’d given him to get him to talk. He says the Larry Gene Bell sitting here couldn’t have done it and all the other bullshit. I’m still hoping he’ll seize on the possibility of an insanity defense and spill his guts out to them.

  This goes on awhile. Mrs. Smith keeps asking him questions, trying to bring him out. Inside, I’m sure everyone is sick to their stomachs having to listen to this.

  Then suddenly, I have this flash. I wonder if Dawn or Hilda is armed. Were they checked out to see if they had a gun, because I don’t remember anyone doing this. So the whole time now, I’m sitting on the edge of my seat, practically bouncing on the balls of my feet, ready to grab a gun and disarm either of them if one starts reaching into a purse. I know what I’d want to do in a situation like this if it were my child, and a lot of other parents feel the same way. This is the perfect opportunity to kill this guy, and no jury in the world would convict them.

  Fortunately, Dawn and Hilda had not tried to smuggle in a weapon. They had more restraint and faith in the system than I might have had, but Ron checked afterward, and they hadn’t been searched.

  Larry Gene Bell stood trial for the murder of Shari Faye Smith late the following January. Because of the huge amount of publicity, the venue was changed to Berkeley County, near Charleston. Don Meyers asked me to testify as an expert witness about the profile and how it was developed, and about my interrogation of the defendant.

  Bell didn’t take the stand and never again admitted any blame. What he’d said to me in Sheriff Metts’s office was the closest he ever came. He spent most of the trial taking copious, compulsive notes on the same kind of legal pad that Shari Smith’s last will and testament had been written on. Yet the state’s case was pretty convincing. After almost a month of testimony, the jury needed only forty-seven minutes to return the verdict of guilty of kidnapping and first-degree murder. Four days later, upon the further deliberation and recommendation of the jury, he was sentenced to death by electrocution. He was tried separately for the kidnapping and murder of Debra May Helmick. That jury didn’t need much longer to come up with the same verdict and punishment.

  From my perspective, the Larry Gene Bell case was an example of law enforcement a
t its best. There was tremendous cooperation between many county, state, and federal agencies; sensitive and energetic local leadership; two heroic families; and a perfect symbiosis between profiling and crime analysis and traditional police and forensic techniques. Working together, all of these factors stopped an increasingly dangerous serial killer early in his potential career. I’d like it to be a model for future investigations.

  Dawn Smith went on to do impressive things with her life. The year after the trial, she won the title of Miss South Carolina and was a runner-up in the Miss America pageant. She married and pursued her musical ambitions and became a country and gospel singer. I see her on television from time to time.

  As of this writing, Larry Gene Bell remains on death row at the South Carolina Central Correctional Facility where he keeps his cell remarkably neat and orderly. Police believe he is responsible for a number of other murders of girls and young women in both North and South Carolina. As far as I’m concerned, based on my research and experience, there is no possibility of rehabilitating this type of individual. If he is ever let out, he will kill again. And for those who argue that such a long stay on death row constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, I might agree with them up to a point. Delaying imposition of the ultimate penalty is cruel and unusual—to the Smith and Helmick families, the many who knew and loved these two girls, and all the rest of us who want to see justice done.

  Chapter 17

  Anyone Can Be a Victim

  On June 1, 1989, a fisherman in his boat spotted three "floaters" in Florida’s Tampa Bay. He contacted the Coast Guard and the St. Petersburg police, who removed the badly decomposed bodies from the water. They were all female, hog-tied with a combination of yellow plastic rope and regular white rope. All three were weighted down with fifty-pound cinder blocks tied around the neck. These blocks were of a two-hole variety rather than the more common three-hole type. Silver duct tape covered the mouths and, from residue, appeared to have covered the eyes when they were dropped in the water, and all three were wearing T-shirts and bathing-suit tops. The suit bottoms were missing, suggesting some sexual nature to the crime, though the state of the bodies in the water didn’t allow for any forensic determination of sexual assault.