by Pat Brown
The family wanted to know: Why were no other suspects being considered? Was this really a death from a domestic dispute or was it a burglary-related homicide that was never investigated as such? If Mary Beth Townsend’s fiancé was really involved with her death, why did the department stall on an arrest? Were they struggling to make conflicting facts fit the story? Were they wasting time focusing on the fiancé rather than pursuing other leads?
The police also successfully resisted the local newspaper in its investigation. The newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that resulted in the release of some basic information but not the autopsy report its reporters (and Art) sought.
On the other hand, I did have information that was available through Mary Beth’s son. I was also able to interview Sam Bilodeau, her fiancé, and hear his story, and determine whether I thought it was a fabrication or whether he was telling the truth.
I decided I would profile this case and help in one manner or another. Perhaps I could develop a lead that would help the police department. Perhaps I could come up with an answer that would help the family cope. Not a perfect world, not a perfect case, but if I could do anything to help, I would.
I went forward on Art’s invitation because I was concerned that there might be a predator on the loose if Sam was not involved.
THE FIRST THING I did was hear the circumstances of the case from Art. He told me what had happened, and then he added some other interesting details.
After several months, the police finally released Mary Beth’s car. Art attempted to drive it away but couldn’t because the clutch was destroyed. He had it towed to a mechanic, who yelled at him for tearing it up so badly.
This discovery actually helped convince Art that Sam was in the clear. Art thought that if Sam had really killed his mother and was trying to dump the car on the other side of town just to make it look like the offender drove it there, he would have had to purposely destroy the clutch. Sam not only knew how to drive a car with a manual transmission, but he owned one, too. It would take clever thinking for a man who just accidentally killed his girlfriend to think, “I’ll leave the car in the ghetto and make it look like I didn’t know how to drive it. If I destroy the clutch, it won’t look like me.”
Art brought this detail to the investigating detective’s attention and she was, admittedly, surprised. He passed along the mechanic’s contact information to the police for confirmation but they never called. They were only interested in evidence that implicated Sam, not excluded him.
It’s clever but unlikely that an offender in the midst of such desperation would be smart enough to cook that up. More likely, the person who actually took the vehicle did not know how to drive a stick-shift car, and that’s why the clutch was destroyed. (The car was dusted for prints but the police never told Sam or Art what they found.)
That began the process of conclusively leading me away from believing Sam Bilodeau was the perpetrator.
I interviewed Sam and the people who could verify his whereabouts on the day of Mary Beth’s murder. He had a pretty airtight alibi for the entire day, so if Mary Beth was missing by noon, Sam Bilodeau was not involved. He could be involved only if she was alive when he returned home from work, but the fact is she did not show up for her planned lunch, so therefore she was likely dead by noon.
I WONDERED WHY Sam had confessed.
I can learn a lot during an interview. Sam was an amiable fellow-gullible, actually. The police could have led him into saying anything if they pushed hard enough. He was a teddy bear, and he was a person under great duress, an emotional wreck who found his fiancée, the woman he planned to marry, dead. The brain does not think straight under such circumstances.
Sam had slept only a couple of hours before he woke and found Mary Beth’s body. I can’t believe when he got to the hotel he jumped into bed and got a blissful eight hours of sleep. By the time he was interviewed for the second time on Saturday evening, he had been up for almost forty-eight hours. Seriously exhausted and emotionally devastated, an easygoing, guileless personality is a sitting duck for manipulation by clever, seasoned detectives. He just might make a confession that he didn’t really mean. He was so confused that he didn’t know what he was saying anymore. He had no family present, no attorney to guide him. He wasn’t a fast-talking con man, so he answered their questions as honestly as he could and he eventually gave the police what they wanted. Like many a person who has confessed after lengthy interrogation, he just wanted the questions to stop, he wanted to not talk about the horrible incident anymore, he just wanted to lie down. He simply reached a point where he was too tired to care anymore.
I was not convinced that Sam had the personality to kill. He had no violent background and no motive-there was no life insurance from which he or even Mary Beth’s son could have gained, for example. There was not any great equity in the condo that she owned alone, and her death left Art responsible for an $86,000 mortgage. Mary Beth’s son said that Sam and his mother got along fabulously. There was nothing there, no reason for him to kill his fiancée.
I could not envision such a docile man becoming so angry that he smacked his fiancée. I found it even harder to believe he would have strangled her. Then, for him to be so unbelievably clever and calm that he could place her body in the closet, remove items to stage a burglary, drive the car to a black area of town to throw the blame on someone else, destroy the clutch so it would look like the car had been driven by someone unable to use a stick…no, no, not this man.
Sam Bilodeau did not have a motive or the personality or the opportunity to commit this crime.
IN MY INVESTIGATION, I put Sam aside and looked at the crime itself.
The first thing that struck me was that the Townsend condominium was out of the way. It wasn’t a location a criminal would pick purely by accident. It wasn’t an isolated house that would catch one’s eye, it wasn’t an easily accessible end unit, it wasn’t even a condo on the first floor. The killer wouldn’t be someone who just happened upon Mary Beth’s condo and thought, Oh, I think I’ll just slide over to that door and try the handle. What we know happened at the crime scene was that there was a burglary; someone came into her apartment and took things that belonged to Mary Beth. He took her jewelry, he took rolled quarters that were set aside for future laundry use, and he took her vehicle.
The police said she was not raped, but neither Art nor I saw the autopsy report, so there was no way to know if that was true or not. When Sam found her in the closet, Mary Beth was not entirely dressed. It appeared she might have come back from the swimming pool or just come out of the shower, and was interrupted while she was getting dressed. Sometimes rape or sexual assault cannot be identified by an autopsy. If there is no physical damage, if the man used a condom and therefore didn’t leave any semen, we just don’t know if there was a sexual assault or not. He might even have had some weird sexual idea that had nothing to do with actual penetration. As the profiler, it was hard to tell whether this was a sexual assault and a burglary or just a burglary gone wrong.
Often, I find that these offenders overlap their crimes, and they don’t just pick one crime to commit. They are opportunists, and if they find another temptation at the scene, they can’t resist.
There was no sign of breaking and entering. Did Mary Beth open the door to somebody, or did somebody find his way in?
I was told that Mary Beth tended to leave her condo door open, or if not open, then unlocked. It was possible she went swimming and left the door open and somebody came in. Or the door was unlocked while she was taking a shower and a burglar slipped in without her realizing. Or perhaps he knocked and Mary Beth answered the door and let the person in-perhaps she knew the person. But it is not likely she would have answered the door half-dressed.
As she sometimes left the front door unlocked, it is likely someone entered the apartment believing no one was at home and surprised Mary Beth (and she surprised him). The perpetrator could have hit Mary
Beth and, when she fell to the floor, strangled her to prevent identification. Upon killing her, the perpetrator grabbed what was in sight and took off. The perpetrator of this kind of crime is a relatively disorganized criminal. The planning of the crime would have been minimal and the attack a necessity for self-preservation (prevention of identification). On the other hand, maybe the guy knew she was there and planned to rape and kill her, and then stole her stuff. This would have been a little more carefully planned, but it would still be a fairly opportunistic crime, so the killer wouldn’t have had to be a brilliant criminal.
Also, when he exited the condo, the perpetrator locked the bottom push-button lock from the inside, but didn’t set the dead bolt.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the location of the condo. You wouldn’t pick Mary Beth’s second-floor unit if you were just walking down the street. You wouldn’t think, There’s no car in front of that condo, I’ll commit a crime there. Mary Beth’s condo unit was not easily accessible to a nonresident, so a burglar or rapist would most likely pick some other unit before choosing hers.
Somebody had prior knowledge of this location. He picked it for a reason.
One of the questions I asked the son was whether he knew of anybody working on the property that day. My quick profile of the offender: a guy who was lurking around during the middle of the day, stealing money, and not doing too well at anything. Likely, he was not keeping a steady job. He arrived on foot and had to steal a vehicle to make a quick getaway. The fact that he took Mary Beth’s car from in front of the building and drove it to the other side of town said to me that he was going home. He probably lived in southeast Washington, D.C., the area where the car was abandoned.
Perhaps, prior to the murder, he was in the area working with some kind of temp service. Perhaps he was going to court there because he had problems with the law. Perhaps he was doing construction work nearby.
I felt sure he was not from Mary Beth’s town because he drove to Washington, D.C., and destroyed the clutch en route. I didn’t think it was a joy ride. He had a place to go because he was not going to drive a car like Mary Beth’s all around town when he couldn’t even drive it properly.
ONE OF THE reasons I call myself an investigative criminal profiler is because I learned that you can’t always sit in your office and solve a crime by just looking at photos and reading case files. Sometimes you have to visit the crime scene and ask yourself, What kinds of buildings are here? What kind of land is it? What are the people like around here?
I went to the Townsend condominium and looked around. I went to the site where Mary Beth’s car was abandoned. Who would dump a car there? And, if they lived nearby, where did they live?
It was a poor area of town with a high incidence of drug-related crime, and it happens to be almost 100 percent African American. But I didn’t want to assume that the offender was African American; maybe there was more of a racial mix than I suspected.
I wanted to make sure of that, so I started knocking on doors, and I said, “I’m looking for a fellow who dropped a car near here, what do you think?”
I asked around in the community, because those in it would know a lot more about it than I’ll ever know, and every single one of them said, “Oh, no, if he dropped his car and walked from there, the guy’s African American. Definitely black, because we don’t have Hispanic guys around here, we don’t have white guys around here. If you come in here and you are trying to do some business and you are Hispanic or white, you will find nothing but trouble. You’re going to stand out. You will run into gang issues.”
It was not a safe area for the people who live there, let alone those who did not.
As I talked to people in the community, I told them, “I really need your help. I’ve got a suspect in a murder who might live around here.” Everybody jumped on board, trying to be detectives themselves. They started talking with me and giving me all kinds of information; a few even offered cookies and lemonade. Poor people don’t want a killer in their community any more than middle-class or rich people do, so everybody tried to help and was pleasant.
Because of what they told me, I was convinced Mary Beth Townsend’s attacker was a black man.
I believed he lived with someone or had a relative in that part of town, close to where the car was found. He worked for a day labor service of some kind, and he was in Mary Beth’s community for some work- or court-related reason. He had some previous knowledge and experience with the building where Mary Beth and Sam lived, because why else would he pick it? Criminals do things that make sense to them, even if we don’t fully understand their choices.
I asked Art Townsend, “Were there any temporary services working on or around the property, anybody lurking around, in the days before your mother’s homicide?”
He looked into it and found that three weeks before his mother died, there was a service called Trashman at the building.
“My mother had this old computer,” he recalled, “and when she saw the Trashman truck outside, she naturally thought it was a trash service. She ran downstairs and said to the guy with the truck, ‘I have this old computer I want to get rid of. Can you take it?’ And he said, ‘Oh, no, we’re not a trash service. We fix commercial mailboxes and the locks on the mailboxes. That’s our job.’ She said, ‘Oh, darn.’ But then he said, ‘I’ve been looking for a computer to fix up.’ So she brought him up to the condo, and they went into her bedroom, where she unhooked the computer and gave it to him. Then she kindly gave the man her name and phone number and said, ‘If you ever have a problem with the computer, give me a ring.’”
Mary Beth was a librarian, used to helping and trusting people. The man thanked her and left with the computer.
Art tracked down the company’s address and phone number and only recalled his mother describing the man to whom she gave her computer as “a young black guy.”
I, of course, called Trashman. I said, “I am going to be honest with you…”
Honesty’s an interesting policy. Sometimes, the police have asked me, “How did you get that information? Even we can’t get that information without a court order.”
And I inevitably answer, “I was nice.”
I told the person who answered the phone, “Look, this is going to sound really strange. I’m a criminal profiler working on this case, and I have a suspicion that this woman, Mary Beth Townsend, may have been murdered by somebody who worked at a temporary service. Three weeks before the murder, a guy from your service came into her apartment and she gave a computer to him. Do you know a black guy in his twenties or thirties who worked for you at her condominium on August 21, 1998?”
The guy put the phone down for a while. When he returned, he was chortling.
“You’re not going to believe this one,” he said, his voice full of excitement.
“What?”
“That guy you asked me about, I have to testify against him in court.”
“What for?”
“He is accused of abducting, raping, and strangling a little girl who he put in a closet.”
I said, “That sounds familiar…”
Bingo!
If you were looking for MO, we had a winner here. And while MO doesn’t always remain the same, hey, when it’s that close, a profiler can’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
WHILE THIS WAS going on, I reached out to an agent I knew in the FBI to see if he could get answers for the family. I also thought he might consider getting involved in the investigation. But he talked with the detective in charge, and even though he came away feeling she was sincerely following through on Mary Beth’s murder, he learned no more than the family did.
In November 1999, I wrote the following in my case notes:
The Mary Beth Townsend case made some progress. The police actually permitted a meeting with Art’s lawyer and ADMITTED they were now looking at the possibility that an intruder committed the crime. This admission pretty much clears her fiancé and admits that they screwed
up. HURRAH! Art is very happy.
WE COULD PLACE a stranger in Mary Beth Townsend’s apartment just three weeks before she was discovered strangled and left in a closet. And he was on trial for strangling a girl and putting her in a closet.
“This is a guy we should look at,” I said.
I asked my new friend at Trashman some more questions about the man. “Who is this guy, what can you tell me?”
“His name’s Scotty May. He’s African American, and I believe he lives in southeast Washington.”
That also fit snugly into my profile.
“Do you possibly know whether he can drive a stick-shift car?”
“I actually do know that, because our vehicles are all stick-shift vehicles, and because he could not drive one, he always had to ride on the passenger side and somebody else had to drive.”
I CONFIRMED WITH local law enforcement that Scotty May was indeed on his way to court, so I went back to the police department and gave the detective all the information I had gathered. She didn’t seem to me to be interested in the least.
I was stunned.
“How can you not be interested in a guy that was in her apartment three weeks before she was murdered, who committed the same exact crime someplace else?” I said. “What part don’t you get?”
The detective didn’t know me, and maybe she didn’t think profilers know what they’re doing, or she didn’t believe in the science of criminal profiling, but how could she deny that this guy committed the exact same crime someplace else? How could she think Scotty had nothing to do with it? That was crazy.
THE DAY OF Scotty May’s trial arrived and he was charged with attempted murder, rape, and abduction with intent to defile. Art and I learned firsthand about Scotty and what kind of character this career felon was.
A high school graduate, May was five ten, weighed 185 to 195 pounds and had brown eyes. He lived in the area where Mary Beth’s car was abandoned, and worked for temporary employment services, as I suspected, one in Virginia near Mary Beth’s home and another in Washington, D.C. One of the last jobs he had before he went to jail was cleaning buildings that were under construction.
