by Colin Wilson
Ten days after this attempted kidnapping, he went into a clothing store in southern New Jersey and abducted the clerk, an Italian-American Michaud calls “Maria Santini.” In the car, she was ordered to crouch with her head on the seat. In his home he undressed her and tied her up with rope, explaining that he was “into bondage.” He then told her he was a transvestite, and proved it by disappearing into the next room and returning wearing a miniskirt and high heels. After taking photographs of her in various poses that he arranged, he moved her into the bedroom and took more bondage photographs, explaining that his method was known as a “Chinese hog-tie.” Then, after lying beside her, kissing her breasts, and fondling her vagina, he allowed her to dress, even giving her the sweaty turtleneck he had been wearing to replace a blouse he had cut off her. After that he drove her to some woods and left her.
These were just a few of the crimes DeBardeleben committed between May 1978 and his arrest as the Mall Passer.
After DeBardeleben’s capture, investigators—still unaware that he was more than a skillful counterfeiter—began checking his background. Born in 1940, he was first arrested at age sixteen was for carrying a concealed weapon. He had subsequently been arrested on charges of sodomy, murder, and attempted kidnapping. But he had been in prison only twice, once for a parole violation and once for counterfeiting. A large part of the material seized in his storage facility consisted of handwritten pages in which he spoke about himself and his plans at length—one document described his long-term ambition to buy himself a house in a remote spot, where he was not overlooked by neighbors, and turn it into a place where he could bring captive women and make them obey his every whim.
Incredibly, it looked as if the authorities might be willing to forget all of his criminal activities except passing dud bills. The reason, simply, was that following up his criminal career looked as if it was likely to be a long and costly exercise. The Secret Service’s responsibilities began and ended with the counterfeiting case. Agent Jane Vezeris, in overall charge of the investigation, was outraged by the idea, and went to see her boss, Acting Assistant Director Joe Carlon. She took with her a tape in which DeBardeleben could be heard making various sadistic demands, while his victim screams in anguish.
By chance, the director of the Secret Service, John R. Simpson, dropped in during the meeting, and heard the tape. When it was over, Simpson told Carlon, “Give them whatever they want,” and left.
The first step agents Foos and Mertz took was to dispatch a Teletype about DeBardeleben’s arrest to all field offices. Soon they had a break. Agent Harold Bibb, of Shreveport, Louisiana, thought he recognized the photograph of DeBardeleben, and after staring at it for a quarter of an hour, recalled that it resembled an artist’s impression of a man who was wanted for the murder of a real estate agent, Jean McPhaul, in 1982. The man had asked her to show him properties in Bossier City; he called himself “Dr. Zack.” On April 27, the attractive forty-year-old had left her office in the morning, and when she failed to return, colleagues went looking for her. They found her in an attic, suspended by the throat from a rafter, drenched in blood from two knife wounds.
The killing seemed motiveless—she had been neither raped nor robbed.
Moreover, the investigators heard of another murder of a realtor dating back to 1971 in Barrington, Rhode Island; she was fifty-two-year-old Edna (“Terry”) Macdonald, and had set out for an evening appointment with a customer who called himself Peter Morgan, and failed to return. She was found in a basement, a cord around her neck and tied to an overhead pipe. She had been strangled, and again, rape and robbery were ruled out as motives. The description of Peter Morgan sounded like DeBardeleben.
Enquiries about DeBardeleben went on pouring in from all over the country—Mertz and Foos were astonished at the sheer volume of unsolved murders—and one of these indicated another level of DeBardeleben’s criminal activities: a kidnapping for ransom. On April 13, 1983, David Starr, manager of the Columbia Savings Bank in Greece, near Rochester, New York, had taken his sick housemate, Joe Rapini, to the hospital. On arriving home, they were held at gunpoint by a ski-masked intruder, who proposed to take Rapini hostage in his own car while Starr went to his bank and collected $70,000. When the money was paid, Rapini would be left in the trunk of the car. Starr was able to collected only $37,900, which he left near a burnt-out house. Twice Starr saw a woman driving a small white car, and it appeared later that she was the accomplice who collected the ransom. But when Rapini was found in the trunk of his car later that day, he had been shot through the heart, as well as beaten about the head and face.
DeBardeleben’s writings had indicated an interest in banks. And a teller at the Columbia Savings Bank recognized a photograph of him as a man who had been hanging around there.
The next task was to try to identify photographs of forty women among DeBardeleben’s seized possessions, whose positions and expressions suggested that they had been victims of the same kind of sexual violence as rape victims Lucy Alexander, Elizabeth Mason, and Laurie Jensen. The identity of most of them would remain unknown, as did the question of how many of them survived their ordeals. One or two were identified by one of DeBardeleben’s former wives as women who had worked for a nude modeling photographic studio he had run in 1972. Others were obviously in a state of terror, a few looked drugged, and others dead. The only thing that was absolutely clear was that DeBardeleben had spent much of his life raping, torturing, and terrifying women.
The reason for this hatred of women emerged when investigators spoke to his previous wives. The root of the trouble was his mother Mary Lou (whom he called Moe). Theirs was the classic Freudian love-hate relationship. When she had met DeBardeleben’s father (also called Mike) in the early 1930s, he was a serious-minded young engineer; she was a pretty, bubbly legal secretary who loved to party. Her own mother had died giving birth to her, and she had been adopted (twice) but never felt loved. So she had little love to give her children. When stressed she tended to drink, and so soon lost her hourglass figure. She was undoubtedly responsible for turning her son into a sociopath, and the investigators came to believe that he had murdered realtor Terry Macdonald because she resembled his mother. He grew up narcissistic, cruel, and demanding—an archetypal Right Man.
His father also seems to have had some Right Man tendencies, in that he was strict and bad-tempered, and “made everyone miserable” according to his daughter Beal. “His wife and children were made to feel inadequate,” and Mike was frequently punished, on one occasion by having his head held under water. Parents like these can be almost guaranteed to turn a strong-willed son into a sociopath.
By the time he was sixteen his mother had become a drunk, and his “physical assaults on her were routine.” His first police mug shot—on a careless driving charge—shows him wearing a leather jacket, dark glasses, and a bored sneer. Soon after that he was expelled from high school.
He was in the air force for a brief period, but was court-martialed for disorderly behavior, and a psychiatrist described him as “a verbose young man of superior intelligence who gave an extensive history of repetitive acts of an egocentric and antisocial nature.” He was soon discharged. He went back to high school and was soon expelled again. An attempt to rob a service station led to him firing at the attendant and then fleeing empty-handed. He was sentenced to five years’ probation. By this time his first marriage—to a girl called Linda—was also over. He soon married again—a pretty schoolgirl—–but this also broke up. By now, his parents were terrified of him. And his younger brother, Ralph, whose upbringing had been equally loveless and equally traumatic, committed suicide. After he threatened his mother with a hatchet, his parents had him committed to a mental hospital, where he spent six weeks.
He forced his third wife, a pretty beautician named Faye, to pose for pornographic photographs, including bondage. He also pressured her to become his partner in crime. Her job was to locate lonely elderly women. DeBardeleben would then call a
target, claiming to be a “Federal Bank Examiner,” explain that her account was being tampered with, and that in order to help him catch the culprit, she had to withdraw money from her account; when she did this, the “Examiner” would arrive at her house with a briefcase and dark suit, and convince her that he had to take the money away, but that it would be returned shortly. Faye estimated that the husband-and-wife team did this about thirty times and took around $1,200 on each occasion—although on one occasion it was as high as $3,500.
His next moneymaking scheme involved the crimes of kidnapping and extortion, using the same basic scheme as in the extortion that had ended in the murder of the bank manager’s male partner. This brought $60,000. Soon after this incident, Faye learned she was pregnant, refused his demand that she have an abortion, and left him.
His fourth wife was another pretty schoolgirl named Caryn, and the marriage began auspiciously when he returned to college (he was now thirty) and took courses in philosophy, history, and government. But soon he was treating her as he treated Faye, and forcing her to become his accomplice in another extortion—a bank manager’s wife was held at pistol point and made to telephone her husband and tell him she would be killed unless he delivered $60,000 to a pickup point. In fact, he was able to raise only half this sum, which Caryn retrieved.
Under the stress of being married to DeBardeleben, acting as his accomplice in crimes, and taking part in strange sexual games that involved bondage and beatings, Caryn developed acute nervous problems, including multiple personality disorder (which usually develops as an attempt to escape an intolerable reality). And, eventually, Caryn did something that Right Men hate and fear more than anything else: she left him, and so became the object of an almost insane hatred. She, it seems, was the wife he was punishing vicariously when he kidnapped and raped women such as Laurie Jensen, Elizabeth Mason, and Maria Santini.
Eventually, investigators would discover at least one occasion when this hatred led to murder. On April 27, 1983, in Beaumont, Texas, Rhoda Piazza, a twenty-two-year-old topless dancer, was seen with a tall white male in a club called The Foxy Lady. Two days later, her naked body, raped, sodomized, and brutally beaten, was found beside a country road. Investigators connected DeBardeleben to this murder because among the many stolen license plates found in his storage unit was one from Beaumont, Texas, stolen just before the dancer disappeared; he had been passing counterfeit bills in a nearby town soon after. Marks on the body showed that she had been suspended in a harness and then lashed, beaten, and tortured with cigarette burns. The position of one burn suggested it had been made while she was being anally raped.
The two detectives who had traveled from Texas to Virginia to interview him only met with frustration. As soon as they identified themselves as being from Beaumont, Texas, DeBardeleben stood up and walked out of the interview room. The inference seems to be that he had no desire to discuss Beaumont, Texas.
Roy Hazelwood, who was asked to survey the sexual materials seized from the storage facility—photographs, audiotapes, sheaves of notes and diary entries—concluded that DeBardeleben was the most self-documented sadist since the Marquis de Sade.
He also noted that DeBardeleben was a totally narcissistic egomaniac, and that his decision to act as his own defender—a typical decision for a narcissist—led to his downfall as much as any other factor. (As we have seen, Ted Bundy would have escaped execution if he had left the conduct of his trial to his lawyers.)
DeBardeleben’s major mistake came when he was cross-examining nineteen-year-old Lori Cobert, who had been pulled over by a “police officer” on February 5, 1981. The “officer” had made her fellate him before he let her go. In the courthouse at Manassas, Virginia, DeBardeleben took her through the crime in detail, so that spectators felt he was relishing it.
“During the incident in this man’s car, it was dark all the time, wasn’t it?”
“I could see.”
“The interior lights were not on, were they?”
“No.”
“And there were no overhead interior lights, were there?”
“No.”
“The only lights they had there were these little small ones next to the door at the bottom of the door, right?”
“Correct.”
Prosecutor Miliette would point out to the jury that DeBardeleben’s question revealed a knowledge of the car that indicated that it was his own. The panel required just thirty-eight minutes to convict.
But it was not simply mistakes like this that led to the guilty verdict. Everything about his presentation underlined an overblown ego and conviction of his own cleverness. At his sixth and final trial, for the abduction and rape of Laurie Jensen, he was sentenced to 60 years, bringing the total to 375.
In 1987, too late to help in the prosecution of DeBardeleben, law enforcement agencies gained a new tool with the introduction of genetic fingerprinting, discovered by the British scientist Dr. Alec Jeffreys in 1984. This was founded on the recognition that every cell in our bodies is as individual as a fingerprint, so that a rapist can be identified from his semen, a fragment of skin under the victim’s nails, or even by a hair root. There are stretches in the DNA molecule (three feet long) where the genetic code differs dramatically for each individual (except identical twins), and which is therefore a “fingerprint.” It was used in the United Kingdom in November 1987, to identify the rapist of a forty-five-year-old disabled woman in Bristol. After that, it was used to establish the culprit in a case where two schoolgirls had been raped and murdered. All males in a whole country area near Leicester were asked for blood samples. In fact, the rapist, a bakery worker named Colin Pitchfork, was not caught by his blood sample, but by his attempt to avoid giving it; he persuaded a friend to take the test for him, and the friend was overheard boasting about it. Pitchfork was questioned and confessed.
In Virginia at that time there was a far more brutal and dangerous rapist and killer. He took as much pleasure in raping and slowly strangling his victims, using a lubricant, as the Hillside Stranglers. Pettechial hemorrhages—small blood spots—under the eyelids revealed that he had tortured his victims with a tourniquet for up to an hour, repeatedly throttling them and then allowing them to breathe again.
The first victim had been thirty-five-year-old Debbie Davis, who was asleep when the rapist broke into her apartment in Richmond, Virginia, on September 19, 1987. Two weeks later, on October 3, thirty-two-year-old neurologist Dr. Susan Hellams was attacked in her bedroom, subjected to lengthy rape and torture with a tourniquet, and then strangled with a belt; her husband, a law student, found her bound body in a wardrobe in the bedroom.
On November 22, the killer moved twenty miles away, to the home of a fifteen-year-old Korean student, Diane Cho, where she lived in Chesterfield County with her family. Her death had not even been noticed for most of a day because the killer had climbed through her bedroom window when she was asleep—she had removed the screen—and gagged her with duct tape before subjecting her to the lengthy rape and strangulation. The rapes, both vaginal and anal, had been exceptionally brutal, tearing her flesh. Since Diane had been working late at night on some assignment, her parents and brother assumed that she was sleeping late, and did not investigate until mid-afternoon.
Police went to the home of forty-four-year-old Susan Tucker after a call from her husband, who was away in his native Wales and was unable to get an answer to his phone calls; she was a government employee, and they had no children. She was found facedown in the bedroom, naked except for a sleeping bag that covered her lower body; the rope around her wrist was also looped around her neck, so that any struggles would cause her to strangle herself. Semen was found on her nightdress, and two black pubic hairs. The contents of her handbag had been scattered on the floor, yet there was no sign that anything had been taken.
Detective Joe Horgas was reminded of a similar murder in Arlington three years earlier—that of thirty-two-year-old attorney Carolyn Hamm, who had also been r
aped and strangled. Strangulation was obviously a part of the killer’s obsession; he had looped a rope around Carolyn Hamm’s neck, taken it over a ceiling pipe, and tied it to the bumper of a car in the garage.
A suspect named David Vasquez, thirty-seven, had been arrested. Neighbors had noticed him hanging around her house on the two days preceding the murder. A search of his apartment revealed girly magazines of the Playboy sort, one containing a picture of a woman bound and gagged. He was not a highly intelligent individual, and the evidence suggested that he was a Peeping Tom who liked to take photographs while he was doing it. The semen evidence did not link him to the crime, but police theorized that he was one of two intruders. Under interrogation he confessed, and was confined to prison.
A blood test on the semen on Susan Tucker’s nightdress revealed that the blood was type O, as in the Hamm case; but since that was the most common type, this was of little help.
It was at this point that Horgas heard about the three rape-murders in nearby Richmond, and wondered if there was a connection. The MOs were very similar. He had also just learned about Alec Jeffreys’s discovery in England, and instantly saw that genetic fingerprinting might be his solution. The only laboratory in the United States that was performing DNA testing was Lifecodes of New York. And it was to them that the five semen samples were sent.
In 1987, the tests took about ten weeks. Meanwhile, Horgas learned of a series of rapes that had preceded the murders in Richmond. These had started early in 1983, but had then stopped. The probable reason, Horgas suspected, was that the rapist had been sent to prison. The first of three 1983 rapes had taken place in the Richmond suburb of Green Valley. Horgas reasoned that this was probably close to the rapist’s home, since a first rape is often committed where the rapist feels comfortable and knows his escape route.
