Law & Disorder

by Douglas, John

  At the time of the Vasquez-Spencer case, the agent overseeing Virginia was Steve Mardigian, who set to work gathering material and analyzing every aspect of each related crime. After months of work, he presented his findings to all of us in a case conference. We all agreed that these were all the work of a resourceful, experienced, angry and manipulative sexual sadist. David Vasquez did not and could not have committed the murder of Carolyn Hamm.

  Once we had completed our analysis, we joined with Joe Horgas and the Arlington PD in asking Commonwealth Attorney Helen Fahey, of Arlington County, to ask Governor Gerald Baliles to grant Vasquez a full pardon. A report signed by both Mardigian and me accompanied her petition. Less than three months later, David Vasquez was a free man, having spent four years in prison for a crime he confessed to, but didn’t commit.

  Had a defense attorney brought this case to us and asked for our assistance, we would have had to decline. There was no federal jurisdiction here, so the only way we could get involved was when local law enforcement asked us in. Also, stretched as thin as we were, we had only offered our services to police, sheriff and other investigating agencies, not those charged with crimes. Even if we had had the resources, I can’t imagine the FBI brass letting us work both sides of the street.

  In working this case, though, the reality of the confession became equally clear. Scared and isolated during his police interrogation, Vasquez perceived that his only “salvation” was to please and cooperate with his interrogators and give them what they wanted. Either intentionally or not, he had been given way too much information, which he then formed into a “dream” in which he had murdered Carolyn Hamm. Naively, he thought that once he had cooperated with the authorities, they would let him go.

  Was the conviction of David Vasquez a horrible miscarriage of justice? Of course, it was. But let me point out one critical factor. Yes, it was law enforcement officials who put Vasquez behind bars. But it was also law enforcement officials who got him out when the mistake was realized, not reporters or lawyers or even crusading civilians. And it is the open-mindedness, impartiality and integrity—or lack of same—of those connected with the criminal justice process that is at the heart of this book.

  Stated in its most basic terms, our criminal justice system is an attempt to do the impossible: to make the world as right as possible after someone has done something to upset that rightness. We define this as committing an act that’s against the law. And that system knows and understands its own limitations, both in terms of restoring the aggrieved to their previous state and determining the ultimate truth of what happened. Just remember: No one is ever found innocent. Not ever. The only distinction the system is capable of making is between “guilty” and “not guilty.” Has the evidence reached a level of reasonable human certainty? That’s what the system strives to determine in each instance. We know that’s the best we can do, so we must try to do it as well as we possibly can.

  Long after we’d finished with the Vasquez case, it continued to haunt me, as it should haunt anyone in law enforcement who takes his or her mission seriously. I had always regarded confessions as the gold standard: If you can get a confession, you’ve made your case! But David Vasquez called everything uncomfortably into question.

  Which brings us back to William Heirens.

  CHAPTER 2

  UPON FURTHER REVIEW

  When you start out as a special agent for the FBI and get your first field office assignment, you’re pretty naive about certain things, especially if, like me, you had no previous law enforcement experience. The first thing you realize is that not everyone is glad to see you, and I’m not just talking about the bad guys. Some police departments welcome the assistance the Bureau can provide, while others perceive us as the four-hundred-pound gorilla muscling onto their turf.

  When you’re new, you tend to assume that all PDs and sheriff ’s offices conduct complete and thorough investigations, just as you’ve been taught to do at the FBI Academy, and that all the evidence they give you is good and reliable. Well, that one isn’t always true, either.

  During my years in the Bureau, I was always handling so many active cases and, for much of that time, also heading up the Investigative Support Unit, that I seldom had the luxury to revisit past cases. Only after I retired did I have a chance to consider crimes I’d studied early in my career, cases like the Lipstick Killer of Chicago.

  Let’s review the case and see if we want to tell the story a different way this time. We’ll take a look at some facts and events of which I was unaware at the time of the prison interview, and we’ll bring to bear some of the experience, research and knowledge we acquired as my unit’s criminal investigative analysis program developed. And we’ll begin as if we were profiling an UNSUB for a police consultation.

  First, let’s make sure we understand the role of profiling in a criminal investigation.

  Point Number One: We don’t catch criminals. That’s what the police do. What we do is assist local law enforcement in focusing their investigation on a particular type of UNSUB. Depending on the type of evidence or clues available, we may be able to give pretty specific details of sex, race, age, area of residence, motive, profession, background, personal relationships and various other aspects of an individual’s personality. We will also suggest proactive techniques to draw a criminal into making a move to go in a particular direction. Once the suspect is apprehended, we can aid in interrogation and then prosecution strategy. In the trial, we can provide expert testimony of signature, modus operandi (MO), motive, linkage, crime classification and staging.

  This is all based on our research and specialized experience with what is now tens of thousands of cases, many more than any local investigator could ever possibly see. Essentially, we use the same techniques as our fictional forebear, Sherlock Holmes. It is all based on logical, deductive and inductive reasoning and our basic equation is this:

  WHY? + HOW? = WHO

  It sounds simple, but there are countless variables that go into the analysis; and to be truly useful, we have to be as specific as possible. We all recognize the cliché of the white male loner in his twenties. But even in instances where that description might be accurate, it doesn’t help much unless we can say something about where he lives, what’s been happening in his life, what types of changes family, friends and colleagues should be noticing in him, when and where he might strike again, whether and/or how he’ll react to the investigation, etc.

  One thing I always told new agents in my unit was that it is not enough to profile the UNSUB; you have to profile the victim, too. You have to know whether she or he had a high-risk lifestyle, whether she or he was likely to be passive or aggressive in the face of threats, whether she or he had any enemies or bad relationships in the past, and so on. But I’ve found that even that is not enough. You also have to profile the situation. And by that, I mean taking a look at what is going on in and around the investigation. What is the social environment like? How do people feel about the particular crime? What role do the media play? What is the police culture like? There are any number of important questions you can ask to try to get the lay of the land.

  Most people know of Chicago’s reputation in the Roaring Twenties, when Prohibition made large-scale criminal enterprise profitable. But in the years since then, it went through a number of rough patches. After a relatively tranquil period during World War II, city officials were concerned that the influx of returning servicemen and a decrease in jobs would boost violent crime rates again. The police were already under intense stress. So when Josephine Ross was murdered in June 1945, just as the war was winding down, and then Frances Brown in December, just four months after VJ Day, the pressure was on.

  In my business, you always take into account the role of the media, and Chicago had the most audacious and freewheeling press in the country. Once they had their Lipstick Killer to write about, they began whipping the public into a frenzy. And we can’t overlook the fact that throughout the f
irst half of the twentieth century and even later, Chicago had an ongoing problem with public corruption. This, in turn, led to two other results: The public was both cynical and skeptical about the authorities’ abilities to solve problems; and the authorities felt a need to produce solutions, whether they had the wherewithal or not.

  If I were advising the Chicago PD after studying the Ross and Brown cases, I would tell them to look for a white male in his late twenties to late thirties who already had a history of break-ins and violence against women. This man would be very control-oriented and have a lot of rage as evidenced by the “overkill” of repeated stabbings. Neither woman was aggressive, nor did either victim have a high-risk lifestyle. Their murders were crimes of opportunity in which the victim was unfortunately home when the offender broke in. He would be able to objectify his victims and feel no remorse for the crimes. The murders of victims Ross and Brown—like those by Timothy Spencer in Virginia—show a strong degree of criminal sophistication and a buildup in both learned technique and escalation of acting out rage against women. This is why I would profile an older UNSUB.

  I would find the lipstick-scrawled message at the Brown scene interesting, but I’d also be skeptical. It could be a taunt from a narcissist playing off the press coverage he would be sure to get from such a gruesome crime. But it could also be a complete red herring—something forged by an overly industrious member of the press corps who wanted to up the ante on sensationalism. When Mark Olshaker and I were examining the “Jack the Ripper” Whitechapel murders for our book The Cases That Haunt Us, we became convinced that the notorious “Dear Boss” letter, from which the Ripper nickname derives, was a fake, probably written by an enterprising Victorian newsman hoping to gin up interest in the case. Simply put, when subjected to psycholinguistic analysis, it did not conform to the profile we had constructed for the killer based on the totality of evidence, while the subsequent “From Hell” letter—a much more raw and disorganized message—did. I think there may have been a similar instance here with the “Catch Me” message.

  Going back to our situational profile for a moment, when Suzanne Degnan was murdered less than three weeks after Frances Brown, everything changed. There is nothing more horrible in the collective consciousness than the murder of a child, and the details of this particular murder were so monstrous that the public and media demanded a swift solution and certain justice. That another little girl might meet Suzanne’s fate was unthinkable. The police were now under intense pressure to come up with a suspect. In response, they launched the greatest manhunt in the city’s history, involving thousands of leads, nearly a thousand interviews, hundreds of polygraphs and countless handwriting sample comparisons.

  It took them only two days to come up with their first good suspect. Hector Verburgh was the sixty-five-year-old janitor of the building where Suzanne’s body was butchered in the laundry room. The ransom note had the kinds of dirt smudges consistent with an author whose hands were always grimy. A PD spokesman announced, “This is the man.”

  This was like their trophy to hold up.

  They held Verburgh for forty-eight hours, during which time they beat and abused him so severely that he required ten days of hospitalization. Only the intervention of the janitors’ union attorney demanding a writ of habeas corpus finally got him released. Habeas corpus—literally “that you have the body,” in Latin—goes back to the era of English common law and gives imprisoned petitioners the right to be brought to court to have their grievances or objections to detention or sentencing reviewed.

  Enumerating the horrifying interrogation techniques, Verburgh testified, “Any more and I would have confessed to anything.” It also turned out the janitor’s writing skills were not even sufficient to have penned the crude ransom note.

  The treatment of Mr. Verburgh speaks for itself. So deplorable were the police actions that he sued the Chicago Police Department for $15,000, a considerable sum in those days. The court apparently agreed and awarded him the money and another $5,000 for his wife, whom the police had tried to coerce into testifying against him.

  When called into a case by a local law enforcement agency, a profiler’s role is to help refocus or redirect an investigation. The apprehension of Hector Verburgh definitely would have called for a redirection, had I been called in on the case. First of all, he was too far along on the age continuum, particularly with no prior history. People don’t suddenly “blossom” into violent sexual killers. From our extensive experience, it just doesn’t happen that way. For someone of Verburgh’s age to commit this act, there would have had to be other acts of violence, especially against children or other defenseless people, in his past. Other than the happenstance of the location, there was nothing that tied him to the crime.

  A number of weak suspects followed. One was a marine combat veteran who lived in the neighborhood who happened to have the same first initial and last name as the laundry mark found on a handkerchief near the crime scene. He had a solid alibi and easily passed a polygraph. Then there was a local kid who’d been in reform school for armed robbery and told another kid he’d killed Suzanne. Again the local papers declared the case solved. After failing to convince a polygraph examiner (in other words, passing), he admitted he’d made up the story to get the other kid to try to get the ransom money.

  Meanwhile, more than a thousand miles away, police came up with a suspect who definitely would have interested me.

  Richard Russell Thomas, a sometimes drifter, forty-four years of age, was in the Maricopa County, Arizona, jail on charges of molesting his thirteen-year-old daughter. Charles B. Arnold, head of the forgery unit of the police department in nearby Phoenix, Thomas’s hometown, thought he saw distinct similarities between the ransom note and Thomas’s handwriting when he wrote with his nondominant left hand. At the time of the Degnan murder, he had been living in Chicago, working as a nurse at Woodlawn Hospital and was known to hang around an automobile dealership a few blocks from the Degnan home.

  When Thomas was questioned, he confessed to the crime. However, police were suspicious, since he didn’t seem to know all of the details and appeared to be angling to be extradited out of state so he could beat the molestation rap. Apparently, he felt the devil he didn’t know was preferable to the one he knew. Once he had a chance to think about it, though, Thomas recanted his confession pretty quickly.

  But aside from the questionable confession, the facts concerning Thomas were compelling:

  He was a burglar with a bold and risky MO.

  He had a previous conviction for extortion, having sent a ransom note threatening the kidnapping of a little girl.

  He had a history of domestic violence and sexual abuse.

  He worked as a nurse and several times had tried to pass himself off as a doctor, and he had stolen surgical implements and supplies.

  If you also add the fact that he was known to be in and around the Degnans’ neighborhood at the time of the murder, and that his left-hand writing was a possible match for the ransom note, this was the kind of guy I would have advised the Chicago PD to put on the front burner. To get to the level of violence and depravity that the Suzanne Degnan murder represented, an offender had to go through a series of evolutionary steps. It often starts with voyeurism and/or petty burglary, but then it keeps escalating. Clearly, Thomas had gone through them.

  Then there was the issue of the ransom note, which I would have taken seriously as a piece of evidence, but not as a demand for money. Anyone primarily interested in kidnapping would have “researched” a likely victim—and in the late 1940s, this was still a somewhat active criminal enterprise, much more than it is today—and chosen one whose family clearly had the means to pay. Twenty grand was a large amount of money back then, far more than an average year’s salary for a government worker like James Degnan.

  If kidnapping was the primary motive for a crime, the criminal would target a victim whose family had the obvious means to lay their hands quickly on the amount
of cash demanded. You see, the longer a kidnapping goes on, the more dangerous it becomes for both the victim and the offender. If you put this together with the fact that Suzanne’s body parts were discovered before twenty-four hours had passed, or any instructions on delivering the money had been sent, you realize that kidnapping was not the prime motivation for the crime. This was a psychopathic offender for whom the ransom note was a sideline or afterthought.

  I can’t say for sure from this remove that Richard Thomas was Suzanne’s killer. He died in prison in 1974, before I started the FBI prison interviews, so we might never know. But I can say with a fair degree of confidence that Suzanne’s killer was like Thomas, or shared similar characteristics.

  But it was at this point—June 26, 1946—that seventeen-year-old William Heirens was arrested for burglary of an apartment house and, when trapped by police from two sides, panicked and pulled out his gun and fired. This act, in retrospect, altered the course of his life because it indicated to police that he was capable of violence. And it was at this point that the police apparently lost interest in Richard Thomas. They were confident they had the Lipstick Killer in custody.

  Despite the fact that they may have asked federal agents to come into a case, police are often not very happy when you suggest they refocus an investigation away from a particular suspect they feel is good for the crime. Sometimes they’re downright pissed off. That’s probably what would have happened if I had been working the Degnan case.

  Looking at Heirens, I would have considered him too young to pull off a crime of this detail and sophistication, to make the leap from petty burglaries to violent rapes and murders, and much too meek and passive. This would be particularly true after we looked into his personal life and saw that there was no precipitating factor to make him change or escalate his pattern of lawless and antisocial behavior. In other words, nothing had changed in his life at this point to induce the emotional trauma or stimulus that might have propelled him to more aggressive and violent behavior.