by Pat Brown
Vincent Poor, finished with his day’s work, came out of the train station and was robbed and stabbed to death on his way home to the condo.
Art didn’t want to tell the next renter that the previous two residents were murdered.
He sold the unit.
CHAPTER 8.DORIS:THE UNLIKELY VICTIM
The Crime: Murder
The Victim: Doris Hoover
Location: Midwestern United States
Original Theory: Husband either did it or hired someone to commit the crime
I arrived twenty-six years too late in the Midwest.
I had just finished an appearance on a daytime talk show, where I met two of the daughters of Doris Hoover. The hour-long show was on cold cases and their mother’s murder was featured. After the show, they stopped me in the hallway and asked if I could profile the killer. Normally, a case this cold is one that I would leave alone, but the facts were so interesting and the daughters so insistent, I told them I would give the detective a ring.
“Sure, we would welcome a profile of the case,” he said.
I drove to the Midwest. In my experience, more people call from this part of the country for help with unsolved homicides than any other part.
After getting such a poor reception on the Mary Beth Townsend case and running into similar resistance with other police departments, it was a relief to have the local law enforcement welcome me.
When I got there, the detective ushered me into his office, a rather sheepish look on his face.
“Uh, I have some bad news for you,” he told me.
I thought he was going to tell me that a superior wanted me to go home.
“The case files are gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yeah, there was a flood at the warehouse and the Hoover case files were destroyed.”
Okay. This was not good news. I would come to learn that it wasn’t entirely rare news. A case I later worked in North Carolina would have the entire trunk of a car, the actual trunk that was removed for testing, disappear. How do you lose something that much larger than a breadbox?
“How about computer files?” I ventured.
The detective looked morose. “Gone as well. Someone thought the case was closed and erased all information on it.” He half-grinned at me. “We have her name!”
I know he felt bad. Shit happens and police departments aren’t 100 percent perfect. Things get lost, items get destroyed, evidence gets mislabeled…shit happens.
So there I was.
Not only had a mother of seven been dead for two decades but all the related evidence was eliminated.
Still, I was in town. I had worked the Townsend case with no police files, so I might as well see if I could do anything with this one. It was worth a try.
DORIS HOOVER, FORTY-TWO, was shot at home around 3:30 a.m., in her own bedroom, on November 3, 1975, while four of her children were asleep down the hall and her husband was at work. Since that early morning, the only suspect had been her husband. I could see why he might end up in the crosshairs of an investigation, but my profile of the crime ended up pointing away from him.
Doris, who was deaf in one ear and wore a hearing aid everywhere except to sleep, was standing beside the bed in a teddy and panties-no slippers-when she was shot. The Harlequin romance novel she was reading was still spread open on her bed. There was no evidence of sexual assault. When she fell, she collapsed on a stereo, knocking over the speaker and a phone that was on the top of it.
Doris ’s daughter Laurie, seventeen, the oldest girl living at home, was sleeping in a bedroom with her younger sisters, Denise and Dana, and her little brother, Deacon. In the middle of the night she woke up suddenly, although she didn’t remember being startled awake by any noise, and saw someone pass by her open bedroom door, walking from her mother’s room to the bathroom. She was half asleep, and what he was doing there didn’t register right away. Then she saw him stop at her door and wipe off the doorknob. Wide awake now, she listened as he continued to the hall, down the stairs, and out of the house. Laurie heard the screen door at the front of the house open and close. She heard sounds by the side of the house, and then the screen door again. She heard the man come back up the stairs, enter her mother’s room, and then he went back down the stairs and out of the house again. Scared, she didn’t move from her bed. Minutes passed, only about seven or eight, and then she heard the police pounding on the front door. By the time she left her bed, the officers-who found the front door open when they arrived-were already inside the house and on the stairs.
The open door was a tip-off to Laurie that something was wrong; her mother compulsively locked all the doors at night.
The police told Laurie there had been a shooting at the house, but she said no, she had heard no such thing-then a horrible thought popped into her mind that her mother must have been kidnapped because her bed was empty when she went by the open door.
“He kidnapped her, he kidnapped her!” she cried out.
She showed the police to her mom’s room and then she saw her mother’s foot at the bottom of the bed.
The killer had put a small caliber gun in Doris ’s mouth and pulled the trigger, execution-style. There were burns on her tongue and the bullet locked her neck and her spine so she couldn’t move. Doris drowned in her own blood because she couldn’t move her head to the side.
Because a curtain was pulled to the side of an unlocked window, it appeared the killer might have accessed the house in this way. It is not known if the window was left unlocked or if the killer was in the home earlier and unlocked it for later entry. Because the reports and photos were not available to me, there were many missing facts that might have provided clues to exactly what happened. I would have to make do with what information I could gain by interviewing the family.
A diamond-and-sapphire necklace was initially reported as missing from the house following the murder, but that was in error. Doris ’s daughter Denise had it; her father had given it to her grandmother to give to her to hold for her wedding one day. Laurie had cash in plain view where the perpetrator could have taken it. He didn’t. Doris ’s purse was missing, but there was nothing of value in it. Therefore, this crime was unlikely to have a monetary motive.
Even though much information was unavailable, there was enough interesting information to profile this case to a reasonable extent and offer avenues of investigation that might still lead to the case being solved and an individual serving time for the crime.
Doris was what one would classify as a low-risk victim. She was married, a mother of seven children, a homemaker, and a volunteer with the ladies’ auxiliary of the fire department. She did not involve herself in any dangerous activities and did not abuse alcohol or drugs. At the time of the murder, she was at home in bed. One of her eldest daughters, Cathy, lived in an apartment across the street with her own family. Doris ’s husband, Mickey, forty-three, a paramedic and the local fire chief, was in the midst of a twenty-hour shift at a station less than a mile away from his residence. Although her husband was not at home, it would be obvious to anyone casing the place that Doris and her children were there, making her home not the best choice for burglary or stranger sexual assault. The motive for this homicide would likely have come in one of three categories:
1. Revenge. Someone Doris or her husband made angry, intentionally or unintentionally.
2. Convenience. A hit by someone who wanted her out of his way, most likely the husband.
3. A crime of passion. Someone who was emotionally connected to the victim.
The possibility of a hit by the husband was the motive that the police focused on the most, since no one knew of anyone Doris had made angry, and the killer apparently called the fire station, the location where Mickey Hoover worked. The call came in minutes after the crime was committed-from a public pay phone-so it was theorized that Mickey hired a hit man. The phone call let him know the deed was done, giving him an alibi at the time of the crime, and also all
owing him to get home and prevent the children from discovering her body. If that scenario was true, it worked out well and the investigators made note of this.
Mickey was not home much. A combination of factors contributed to his long work shifts. He was said to be a flirt but there was no actual proof of extramarital affairs. His children saw him as a harsh, authoritarian figure in their lives. And not long after Doris ’s death, he began openly dating the woman who would become his second wife. She was only two years older than his eldest daughter.
In spite of these red flags, there were a number of reasons to question Mickey’s involvement in his wife’s death. One was that it was not possible for Mickey to have been the killer. He had an alibi at the fire station and his own daughter says she caught enough of a glimpse of the killer to know it was not her father. There was also a lack of a clear motive. He did not receive financial gain from her death, and although he later married a younger woman, there was no evidence he was having an affair with the woman at the time of Doris ’s death. Even if removing his wife from his life would allow him to get himself a much younger woman, a dead wife would leave him with the responsibility of raising the children alone. Mickey worked a heavy schedule and Doris bore the major responsibilities of the home and children. But Mickey’s behaviors and gossip about him did raise some eyebrows and sometimes a desire to be rid of certain roadblocks to one’s desires can be fuel for homicide. I could not eliminate Mickey purely on motive; I would need to see if the crime itself supported a hired hit on his wife.
The call to the station at 3:43 a.m. was an extremely unusual behavior, one I don’t often see from murderers. While hit men have called their employers to let them know a job is finished, they usually don’t call for help to save the victim as well. Since 911 did not yet exist in that county, one would have to call the police or fire station to get help. This call, made just minutes after the shooting of Doris Hoover, was to the fire station and received by whoever answered the phone-not to Mickey, personally. The killer didn’t really even know if Doris was dead at that point, and if he just wanted to inform Mickey of the shooting, he certainly could have waited long enough to make sure the victim had expired. It actually seemed as if the shooter might either have been trying to get paramedics to Doris or he didn’t want the kids to find her body.
One more thing: why was there no screaming, no struggle, if this was a hit man or burglar? Doris was up and awake, the light on; she was reading a book. Suddenly, a strange man appears in the door of her bedroom and Doris just stands there and lets him come up to her and put a gun in her mouth? I doubt it. Someone had to get near her, with her consent, someone she never thought would do such a thing, even if he was waving a gun right in her face. It had to be someone she knew well.
A few minutes after the call came in, the police, Mickey, and the rescue squad arrived at his home. Mickey jumped from his moving squad car in a rush to gain entrance to the house. It is unlikely, if he knew his wife had been shot and killed in a hit, he would have hurried into the home. He would have hung back and allowed someone else to deal with her body while he worked up a suitable emotional response. Instead, it is likely he was actually rushing to his wife’s aid, hoping that she could be saved.
Denise later recalled her father sitting with the children that morning and saying of their dead mother, “Sometimes, things happen.” He didn’t break down and cry then, but Denise later found him leaning against a telephone pole, sobbing. Clearly the man had feelings for his wife.
* * * *
IN MY INTERVIEW with Mickey Hoover, he readily agreed to take a polygraph. He was excited about my involvement and said “it was about time” someone looked into the case again.
I found nothing concerning in his interview, and his actual behaviors at the time of the homicide as related to me by his daughters did not seem suspicious.
One way a profiler can narrow down the suspect list in a crime is to determine whether the person was a stranger or not and whether the person was a stranger to the residence or not. Whoever killed Doris that night seemed to know his way around the house. If Mickey had hired some professional hit man or even some guy he knew from a bar, that man wouldn’t have exhibited the behaviors witnessed at the scene. Whoever was there was comfortable in the house but, on the other hand, was quite uncomfortable with having committed a homicide. He was the direct opposite of a hit man. I believe it must have been an intimate, an insider, and a person with some strong emotional connection to the family and the scene.
Following the homicide, the killer washed his hands in the bathroom. This shows, first, that he wore no gloves and I wondered, What hit man would neglect that issue? Second, having just committed a homicide, it would seem wise to vacate the premises immediately and not waste time in washing up. That could have been accomplished anywhere. He stopped in the bathroom to wash his hands. Either the sign of an extraordinarily nonchalant killer or a total amateur who was horrified by the sight of blood on his hands; the blood of his victim as it flew back at the hand holding the gun.
Also, the killer looked in on the children. Why? What interest, if he wasn’t a rapist, would he have in checking out sleeping kids? And, since there were teenage girls in the house, a rapist would have been more than pleased to make such a find. But he peeked in and then left the house.
Doris Hoover was shot in the mouth with a small caliber handgun. Shooting women in the mouth is usually a sign of rage. The anger is directed at the woman’s mouth, where the voice is coming out and telling you what you don’t want to hear.
The strangest behavior of all in this crime, outside of the fact that the killer called for emergency medical help in a bizarre attempt to save Doris ’s life, was that he left the house but then came back.
This brought me to consider what behaviors occurred at the crime scene that could identify the motive and personality of the offender.
I believed the killer was comfortable in the Hoover home. He knew his way around it either because he had been in the home before or he lived in a nearby home of the same design.
The forced entry was likely staged, perhaps as an afterthought when the killer realized the murder would not look like a stranger homicide.
It was theorized that the perpetrator also took Doris ’s purse to add to the staging effect and mislead the investigation to focus on robbery as a motive. Clearly, since nothing else of value was taken, this crime was not a robbery. However, I do not believe that the motive for taking the purse was to steer the investigation off course. The killer left the house after shooting Doris and then returned and went back upstairs into her room and left the house a second time. It is unlikely that the killer would waste yet more valuable time staging a robbery, minutes spent that would increase the chance of apprehension.
The family does not remember the exact whereabouts of Doris ’s purse that night. Her daughters believe it was either in her bedroom or under a coat on the living room couch. If it were hidden under a coat on the couch, it is not likely the killer knew it was there and took it. More likely, it was in her bedroom. It was my belief that the purse may have contained some item of interest to the killer that was worth coming back for. It was also possible that the killer came back to check and see what condition Doris was in and took the purse upon leaving the room as a possible afterthought. At this same time, he may well have noticed that Doris was not dead but asphyxiating (because of bodily fluids running into her lungs). This may have prompted the call for medical assistance. It is also interesting to note that the killer, on the return to her room, did not take this opportunity to make sure she was dead.
The killer did not wear gloves. This indicated that he did not plan to commit murder. Perhaps he only wanted to talk with her or show her how angry he was. He may not have worried his fingerprints would be considered evidence of his involvement in the crime if he had previously spent enough time in the house.
But Laurie reported that the killer had wiped off the doorknob of the child
ren’s room after he opened the door-it was always closed-and looked in. However, there may be other explanations for the perpetrator to have applied a rag to the doorknob. Laurie heard the man go into the bathroom and then she saw him at her door wiping off the doorknob. The bathroom light was on and the hallway was illuminated. He was tall and thin and wore a winter hat, denim shirt with long sleeves, and dark pants, and his head was turned back toward Doris ’s bedroom. It was possible that, following the crime, he went from Doris ’s room straight to the children’s room to look in and see if the shot had awakened them. The fact that he went into the bathroom and washed his hands indicated he had blood on them, most likely caused by back spatter from the gunshot wound. He may have left bloody fingerprints on the door to the kids’ room that he then wiped clean. Considering that the man wore no gloves to begin with, I wondered why he wiped down that door alone if his only interest was eradicating fingerprints, and not bloody fingerprints, from the residence.
That the killer took time to wash his hands indicated he was not comfortable with blood on his hands. It would therefore be unlikely that this person was a hit man or a hardened criminal.
And the fact that the killer looked into the bedroom of the children and did not attempt to harm them showed he had concern for the children and no ill will toward them.
The lack of clear forced entry meant the killer was either admitted to the house, had a key to the house, or entered through an unlocked door or window, perhaps one he had left open before so he could get back in.
Laurie claimed to have heard him leave the house; she heard the screen door slam closed.
Then, terrified, she heard him come back into the house and go into Doris ’s room. She believed he took something from the room and went back downstairs, where she heard something fall-she later discovered it was a box of crayons. She never heard the sound of a car.
Laurie later heard the voice recording of the killer’s call to her father’s fire station that reported the shooting. She thought the low voice sounded like it belonged to a black man, although “it could have been somebody with a Southern twang accent.” It was not a voice Laurie recognized. Either the killer was someone Laurie did not know or he disguised his voice so he would not be recognized. A Southern accent is one of the easier speech patterns to mimic-even if to a Southerner the effort might be laughable.
