by Pat Brown
BRIAN HAD BEEN hanging around with a couple of no-good characters. They were involved in Dungeons & Dragons stuff and other role-playing fantasy games. That, in and of itself, didn’t mean anything, but they were into negative, evil, dark things, and Brian had talked about moving on from the group because they weren’t healthy for him to be around.
One of those guys said something strange later on when a private investigator hired by the family talked to him. He knew what Brian was wearing the night he died; he even purported to know what music was playing in the car when Brian died.
The family was convinced these friends took Brian into the mountains and killed him. But this would have required two cars, because obviously they left the scene, which was a remote location. I wondered why, if they wanted to kill somebody, they would drive two vehicles to a site so far into the hills. It would be easier just to drive his car down the block, shove him out, and blow him away. Furthermore, it was clear Brian drove himself up there. He was in the driver’s seat of his own car. His body wasn’t placed in the vehicle later, even though the family had this idea that somebody had changed his clothes, put someone else’s shoes on him, and put strange tobacco in his pocket-things that made no sense in the crime. No one would do that, but families, when they see some oddity about a crime, something that they don’t equate with their child, will deny what’s right before their eyes. The Lewis family said, “That wasn’t the chewing tobacco that he used,” “He would never leave his pocketknife at home,” and “Those aren’t his shoes.”
They thought they knew everything about their child, but nobody who stages a crime would change the victim’s shoes or put their own shoes on him. There was no reason to give Brian a different brand of chewing tobacco; it would be smarter to have him have his regular brand. If someone were staging a suicide, he would want everything to look as normal as possible. The family’s arguments were attempts at stirring the pot, not impressive for proving a homicide had occurred.
In theory, one could say that someone put a gun to his head and made him drive up there, but that beer bottle between his legs was interesting. The family was convinced somebody put that bottle there.
“What guy is going to think of that?” I said. “Especially after Brian’s head has already been blown off, and there’s a lot of blood all over the place? Would someone really crawl across the seat to put a bottle between his legs?”
Probably not. Chances were that Brian was drinking beer from that bottle. Did somebody abduct him at gunpoint, force him to drive into the mountains, and then give him a beer? We may see it happen in a Western, where a condemned man is given a final smoke, but it didn’t seem terribly likely for somebody who was about to be murdered in cold blood.
Nobody had a real, credible motive for killing Brian Lewis, not even for a rage-induced homicide, where somebody got mad and did something stupid. That would have happened in Brian’s home, where he kept the gun. Or if they went out for any reason, maybe he’d be shot somewhere nearby and the killer would have thrown his body into a ditch or left him in the car where he shot him. But to go up to the mountains to shoot him seems premeditated. And yet, if it was premeditated, why did Brian drive up there and have a beer?
None of the nonsuicide theories made sense.
There were two interesting pieces of evidence, one of which convinced me that Brian probably wasn’t killed by somebody else. The other one, however, made me wonder if somebody was there with Brian.
There was some flesh from the shotgun blast found on the passenger’s seat. There were three pieces where a person would be sitting, so I had to think, if somebody was sitting there and they shot him, how did these three pieces of flesh end up on that seat? That evidence couldn’t be there if something blocked it. Therefore, nothing blocked it. There was nobody shooting Brian from the front seat because then the flesh couldn’t have landed there.
Also missing was a transfer pattern-smears-in the car. When something like this happens, we’ll see smears from a person’s hand or some other part of the body that might have had blood on it. As they moved around in the car, opening and closing car doors, we would see evidence. Except for one location on the side of the driver’s seat by the door, I didn’t see any of that, either. Even that blood pattern was a bit questionable as it was not clear from the photo if spatter just landed in such a position or it was transferred from someone’s hands. Sometimes photos just aren’t totally clear, and they aren’t three-dimensional, so some determinations simply can’t be made.
It still seemed like Brian was alone in the car.
The passenger door was locked, too. If you blew somebody’s brains out, it would take a lot of thought to lock the passenger door behind you. We would have a very clever killer if that were true.
The odd piece of evidence that messed up everybody’s confidence in suicide was a little piece of flesh discovered in the driver’s doorjamb. How did that happen? In the photos of the car taken when Brian was found, the doors were closed. But if the doors were closed when Brian shot himself, how did the flesh get in the doorjamb? Somebody had to have disturbed the scene! There had to be somebody else involved! Brian couldn’t have killed himself and then opened the door! Either the door was open when he got shot and the flesh went there and then the door slammed shut, or somebody innocently opened the door, not yet seeing that the front of Brian’s face was blown off because his head was hanging down. When they pushed his head back toward the seat, they were startled and horrified-“Oh my God!”-and during that moment some flesh flew backward and went into the doorjamb. They slammed the door and ran.
Oh, but then we have the wrench thrown into even that theory. That one photo was taken after the boy was removed from the car. Here again we have the problem of not taking photographs properly or not taking enough photographs. A photo should have been taken of that doorjamb and then another a few feet back from the doorjamb and another a few more feet back from the doorjamb. If I see the flesh in all the pictures and Brian’s body in the one that is far enough away to capture his image as well, then I know the flesh was in the door when the police got to the scene. But all I have is a picture of a doorjamb with flesh on it and I don’t know if the medical technicians bumped Brian’s body against the doorjamb when they removed him from the car. If that happened, then that flesh isn’t part of the crime scene.
So Brian was likely alone at the crime scene. If somebody else actually was there, he or she still didn’t kill Brian.
There were subsequent indications that Brian was more emotionally upset with his life than his family knew or could admit. There were also indications of depression and possible suicidal ideation.
Brian could and did commit suicide, but the family still demanded an official investigation. The police were right about the manner of death, but they still should have taken better photographs, done basic evidence analysis, and interviewed Brian’s friends. Because they didn’t, the family won’t stop hounding them; I bet now, looking back, they realize that it would have been a little extra work to double-check the manner of death but it would have saved them a whole lot of grief.
THE AVERAGE PERSON thinks that the scientific method is strictly performing chemical tests in a lab. We can, of course, scientifically prove DNA and fiber matches. But using the scientific method in criminal profiling is all about being methodical about the analysis, and coming up with a theory and then deliberately trying to strike it down. I spend a great deal of time and energy generating potentially valid explanations for murder-or suicide-and then knocking those very theories out until I can’t come up with any other explanation but the last one standing.
That’s what I did with the shotgun in the Brian Lewis case.
Could Brian shoot himself from the driver’s seat? Could somebody do it from the backseat, either the left or right side, or the passenger seat? There were four inside positions. And could someone shoot him from the outside?
I went to each one of the positions with the gun, tryin
g to prove that it could or could not be done, and as I eliminated each of the possibilities, I was left with only two.
One was that Brian shot the gun himself while sitting in the driver’s seat. The other possibility was that someone else shot Brian from the passenger side.
The flesh on the passenger seat was a piece of scientific evidence that ruled out anyone sitting in that seat.
This was the case that showed me that I had to be able to rule everything out. If I had just looked at the pictures, I might not have figured out the same things that I did with the shotgun in hand.
CHAPTER 14.BOB AND CHRISTINE:DOUBLE MURDER
The Crimes: Double homicide
The Victims: Christine Landon and Bob Dickinson
Location: Midwest
Original Theory: Pedophile committed aggravated murder
I returned to the Midwest. This town was so small that when I asked for a good place to eat, I was told to go back to wherever I came from.
The sheriff’s office was in the nearest “big” town. The sheriff had the same look on his face as the detective in the Hoover murder.
“Don’t tell me,” I guessed. “Problems with the case files?”
The sheriff was disgusted. “The judge won’t release them.”
“What? But isn’t it an open case?”
“I know. It’s ridiculous, but he sealed them.”
Politics. Had to be politics.
Luckily, I had access to a few police reports and interviews and one autopsy out of two. But no photos, no evidence reports, no forensic reports.
At least I had a really nice sheriff. And a fascinating case.
* * * *
ON JULY 5, 1986, a lazy summer night in a tiny Midwestern town, Marshal Bob Dickinson was sitting in his easy chair when he got a late-night call from a panicked man, Hugh Marshall, Christine Landon’s boyfriend. “Get on down to Christine’s house! I was talking with her and she started screaming! Hurry!”
Stuffing his feet into his slippers and slapping on his gun belt, the marshal took only half a minute to make the three-block drive to Christine’s house. The phone rang again as soon as he left.
“Tell Bob we’re on the way!” the sheriff’s office advised Bob’s wife. But it was too late to stop Bob.
Ten minutes later, patrol cars screamed into the eight-block town to the front of the Landon residence. The house was dark. Dickinson ’s car was parked haphazardly at the curb, the driver’s door hanging open. No one answered the door. Around back the police officers discovered the sliding door open. Entering the house, they saw Christine Landon on the kitchen floor, half-naked, tied hand and foot, a dozen stab wounds to her chest, and her throat slashed.
They called out to Bob; no answer. The house was eerily quiet. Moving up the stairs to the second floor, they found the marshal, folded over at the top of the stairs, shot to death with his own gun.
Horrified police officers and citizens tried to come to grips with the brutal double murder in their peaceful town. They vowed this killer would be brought to trial. Wanting to go the extra mile, the sheriff’s office reached out for expert assistance, something few police departments are willing to do.
What started as an exemplary effort by the local law enforcement to ensure justice for the victims of these vicious homicides soon careened out of control. Big egos, ambitious politicians, and a desire to win without regard for the truth aborted the rules of fair play and the law, tearing apart the town and the lives of all who became involved; all except the real killer of Landon and Dickinson.
The players in this story stopped at nothing to achieve their goals.
FBI agent John Douglas, the criminal profiler and a twenty-year agency veteran who was then working at the National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy, profiled the crime as a sexual homicide and identified Curtis Cox, the babysitter, as the suspect. Though there was no physical evidence linking Cox to the crime, Curtis Cox was arrested. The prosecutor believed he could get a conviction using the FBI profiler’s testimony and psychological profile. A police psychic was brought in and he came up with details of the crime, and the man he said did it looked and acted just like Curtis Cox, an unpopular character in town. The families were comforted that there was no question as to who killed Bob and Christine, and the right guy was going to trial. Oddly, when I read over the police reports, some of them were word for word what the psychic had claimed. Either that psychic had visions of the police reports or someone had slipped him the files.
Without a shred of evidence, the sitting duck suspect, Curtis Cox, was arrested. The defense attorney raised hell, complaining to the judge that the case ought to be thrown out because there was zero physical evidence and the entire case was based on the egregious use of criminal profiling, presenting psychological and behavioral theories of the crime and then claiming Curtis Cox was a sexual psychopath and therefore must have done it. The judge dismissed the case and then-for reasons unknown to me-sealed the case files.
For fifteen years, the case remained untouched by law enforcement.
One day, the daughter of Bob Dickinson tried once again to honor her father by bringing his killer to justice. She contacted me and I went to the town to review what information existed at the sheriff’s office. I interviewed and investigated some of the key players, profiled the crime, and disagreed with John Douglas.
The murderer was not Curtis Cox.
It was not even a sexual homicide.
The defense attorney was right; Cox was railroaded.
DICKINSON ’S DAUGHTER CALLED me because her family wanted me to confirm that Curtis Cox was guilty, and that the FBI profiler was right. But there were doubts.
Cox was a bit creepy. He was a skinny, effeminate fellow, very soft-spoken, who had never married. He liked to make friends with women who had young children. He was a friend of both Christine Landon and her ex-husband, Craig, and they frequently allowed their two young daughters, ages eight and eleven, to visit him at his home. He also came to their home quite often to babysit the girls. Christine gave him a key to the house.
Cox had access to the home, he was comfortable there, and he was weird. But he had no record. So did he commit this crime and, if he liked children so much and was a suspected pedophile, why would he choose to attack a grown woman?
The police report includes this description of Cox’s actions while babysitting the girls:
When visiting Cox the girls would play among themselves or with Cox, occasionally shop at the drugstore across the street from Cox’s home, and once traveled with Cox to a K-Mart in another town. Cox and the girls played several different games, including the “rug game,” in which Cox would wrap the children up in a rug, tie a rope on one end and drag them around the floor. In a variation on hide-and-seek, a person was tied and had to get loose in order to find the other players. Cox would untie the girls if they were unable to do so themselves.
Some of Cox’s other activities with the girls were of an overtly sexual nature. On at least one occasion he showed X-rated videotapes, and explained to the girls what was happening in the films. At times while watching the videos, Cox’s hands would be down his pants. On other occasions, Cox would walk through his house in a bikini swimsuit or bikini underwear, and would sometimes have his hands down his pants. Cox also showed [them] Playboy magazines, and allowed the girls to make audiotapes of themselves uttering sexual language. There has been no testimony that Cox ever touched the girls in a manner which constituted sexual contact.
The sheriff gave me what he still had in terms of police reports and the autopsy of Marshal Bob Dickinson. The sheriff tried his best to get the crime scene and autopsy photos released to me, but they remained sealed by the prosecutor’s office and thus unavailable for inspection. The evidence should have been accessible. The sheriff’s department couldn’t fight whoever was in the power seat.
I visited the actual house where the murders occurred. Strangely, Christine Landon’s estranged h
usband, Craig, had kept it and moved back in as soon as the police tape was down, eventually raising the couple’s two daughters in the house where Christine was murdered. He eventually remarried and continued living there with his new wife.
When Craig came over from the side of the yard to meet me, the lawnmower backfired and he pretended to stumble as if he were shot. Then he laughed.
He brought me into the house and proudly showed me pictures he took of the crime scene after the police let him back in. The blood was still there on the kitchen floor, as were all the fingerprint powder and bullet holes in the walls. His pictures helped me reassemble that scene. Why he gave them to me still mystifies me.
WITH THE INFORMATION available, I came to the following conclusion: the likelihood of Curtis Cox committing the double homicide of Landon and Dickinson was extremely low.
There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, so the focus on Curtis Cox as the killer in this double homicide was based on erroneous conclusions: first, that the motive for the crime that resulted in the death of Christine Landon was sexual and, second, that Curtis Cox’s fantasies would lead him to the behaviors exhibited during the commission of the crimes of that evening.
My view is that the killer or killers had no intention to commit a sexual crime on the premises. The only crime that I believe was supposed to have occurred at the Landon residence was the abduction of Christine Landon. There was no way to prove motive of anything but abduction from what I saw at the crime scene. Even the court trial record from Curtis Cox’s almost-prosecution stated:
The murder scene contained no direct evidence which indicated that the killings were sexually motivated. Landon’s body was found clad only in a shirt, but there is no dispute that the attacker surprised Landon after she had quickly emerged from the shower to answer the telephone. Landon’s body was not sexually mutilated.
