The other factor I was pretty sure of was that there would have been a precipitating stressor or series of events that would make the subject want to strike back at someone. In many cases, the stressor is the loss of a job, but because of the sexualized nature of the crime, despite the lack of body-to-body penetration, I figured it had to be the loss of a relationship or some perceived slight or misbehavior on the part of his wife or girlfriend.
Lynne confirmed that she had been out at a Tupperware party that night. “When I got home he was gone, and the car was gone, and the phone rang and it was the base police and they said, ‘Where’s your husband?’
“And I said, ‘You must know or you wouldn’t be calling.’ And they said he was down here and there’s been a possible abduction. ‘Can you come down here?’
“And I said, ‘As you know, I have no car.’
“Well, they came and got me and took me down there and I knew something had happened just by looking at him. He was breathing fast and hard, and I remember his socks were inside out or something was inside out, and grass clippings were on him.
“I knew something had happened.”
The base police, on the other hand, did not. Sedley had managed to convince them that what the witnesses had observed was a lovers’ quarrel, that it was Lynne next to him in the car, and that it had all been an easily resolved misunderstanding. She got in the car with him and they returned home to their apartment on base. Lynne was twenty—a year older than Suzanne Collins.
“I remember he had some kind of compressor in the backseat, and I said, ‘What is that?’
“And he said, ‘I stole it from a captain’s house.’
“I went off. I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ Then I said, ‘We’ll talk about this tomorrow.’ I didn’t want any part of whatever it was.”
Lynne had signed up for base housing for herself and Sedley; though she acknowledged that even at the time, she was ambivalent about whether she wanted Sedley to join her there. When the apartment came through and they were together again, he got a job at a convenience store in Millington. But her husband was fired after substantial losses of inventory became apparent to the owner. A few days before, he’d gotten part-time work with an air-conditioning installation and service company, and now he was risking everything in using that position to steal.
“I went to bed. I woke up earlier than usual. He had never come to bed, and he was pacing the floor and drinking coffee.”
The story she told of meeting and getting together with Sedley Alley was typical of many predator relationships.
They met in her home state of Michigan when she was a fifteen-year-old high-school girl. She came from what she characterized as a “dysfunctional family.” She was about five feet three inches tall, and was living with a female former staff member of the group home where she’d resided for a while. Recently her boyfriend had gone off the deep end and had committed “suicide by cop,” shot down from a rooftop in Detroit.
Alley was nearly ten years older, more than a foot taller and weighed at least twice as much. He had come up from Kentucky to Ypsilanti, Michigan, following the tragic and pathetic death of his first wife, Debra. The late twenty-year-old had a drinking problem, he told Lynne, and one night she choked in the bathtub on her own vomit. The medical examiner’s report classified it as an accidental drowning and choking on the French fry that was found lodged in her throat.
“He could be funny and superficially charming,” Lynne reported. “But the bizarre thing is that I would go somewhere and I’d run into him. He was always there. I was in a Laundromat washing clothes and there he was. I didn’t realize until afterward that he was stalking me.”
All of this fits into the predator pattern. And leaving town right after the death of someone whom the police can associate you with is also a very predictable form of postoffense behavior.
The overwhelming number of predators I have dealt with and studied have two emotional pictures of themselves that are constantly at war with each other. The first is a sense of power and grandiosity, that they are special and not bound by the rules of conventional society. The second is a sense of powerlessness and inadequacy that often has its roots even further back than they can remember. The only way they can overcome this second sensation is by exercising the first. In my FBI unit, I used to teach that the three techniques they commonly use are manipulation, domination and control.
Remember, predators are profilers, too. So it is understandable that guys like this—and as we’ve noted, they are almost all guys—gravitate to women upon whom they can most easily practice these techniques. Women who are small, poor, lost, have low self-esteem, or are emotionally vulnerable because of some recent tragedy or uprooting in their lives, are all candidates. Lynne had just the profile that an inadequate, angry predator like Alley would look for. She fit the bill on many counts.
“I started hanging out with him and stopped going to school.”
Once he had his hooks in her, he took her back to Ashland, Kentucky, in his own comfort zone, but not in hers. This is a typical move of predators—they try to isolate their wives or girlfriends, remove them from whatever support systems they have, make them emotionally and physically dependent. Manipulation. Domination. Control.
He used various techniques to break down her defenses, to desensitize her to his aberrations. “I remember one time him telling me that when he lived in Michigan, he entered a male-on-male oral sex contest in a bar, and he won. Even at the young age I was, that was pretty repulsive.”
Frequently, she said, he would have sex with her after she had passed out from drinking. He would do things to her that she would never have agreed to of her own free will. This perfectly demonstrates the predator’s need to dominate and humiliate, but at the same time his inadequacy, knowing that truly to have his own way his partner/victim somehow had to be disabled.
“I didn’t like having sex with him on a good day,” she commented. “I came to hate it. He was repulsive and nauseating, and I had to drink before I could face it. But even that didn’t work.”
The more resistant Lynne became, the more resentful Sedley grew.
“I got a little tougher, and I pushed him and he pushed me back. We got to where we didn’t have sex at all.” Which must have represented a huge threat and insult to Alley’s sense of his own power and potency. When predators can’t effectively control their victims, their entire sense of self-esteem is challenged.
Sometimes Lynne would need to get away from him, but she had few options for refuge. She went to stay with his brother several times. Once or twice, she went to her mother and the elderly man she was caring for.
We were convinced that a crime as horrific as the one perpetrated on Suzanne Collins did not come out of nowhere. There had to have been significant violence in his past.
“Lynne, were you ever afraid for your own safety?” Mark asked.
“Oh, yeah,” she replied. “One night we went to the drive-in, and it was he and I and a friend.
“We’re all drinking and I was sitting in the middle and had a blanket over me. His friend was kind of feeling my leg, feeling me up, and then I black out.
“The next thing I know, I come to. I’m in my bed and he’s straddling me with all his weight, and he’s pressing down on my throat, and I’m trying to push him off me and I realize I can’t. I’m saying to myself, ‘God, forgive me for my sins. Here I come.’ ”
“Did you think he was trying to kill you?” I asked. “Did you actually think you were dying?”
“I knew I was dying. I knew I was going to die. I let go. And then he stopped. He finally stopped.
“The next day, I had to cover every mirror in the house because I’d get hysterical when I looked in the mirror. My face was swollen like a basketball. One eye was swollen shut. The other was a slit. My face was purple. The whites in my eyes were busted, and I couldn’t even eat anything.”
The eye injury she referred to is called petechial hemorrhaging,
and it is something we look for in cases of suspected strangulation murders. With the force he was capable of exerting, she was lucky he didn’t kill her. But the aftermath was also typical of abusers.
“The next day, there was all this remorse—‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I’ll leave.’ And I said, ‘You’re not going anywhere. You’re going to look at my face!’ ”
She did call a spousal-abuse center. “But they said I couldn’t bring my dog, and the dog was my baby.” Again, this is not an unusual situation. Abused women or children will cling to anyone or anything they have for love or comfort.
When prosecutor Hank Williams received the Suzanne Collins murder case and looked into Sedley Alley’s background, he was convinced, he told us, that this was not the defendant’s first murder. He was upset that the death of Alley’s first wife, Debra, in Kentucky had been ruled accidental. Williams felt that if it had been properly investigated and prosecuted, the Collins murder never would have happened. So we were extremely interested in whether Sedley Alley had ever talked to Lynne about Debra, beyond his initial play for sympathy as a grieving widower when they first met in Michigan.
“As time went on, he actually confessed to me that he killed her. He told me how he did it.”
I had figured that if he had killed Debra he might have told Lynne, and not because he trusted her or felt a need to get it off his chest. Telling her would serve the dual purpose of letting him relive and reaffirm his own power and sense of not having to live within normal rules, and also as a veiled warning of what could happen to her if she didn’t toe the line. After all, he’d already choked her nearly to death.
“The way he told the story, he kind of had you convinced, almost, that she had it coming. At least, I was so sick that that’s the way I interpreted it, coming from him.” To live with someone like this, you pretty much have to buy in emotionally to his perverted view of reality.
“He said he peeled her clothes off the same way you would as if you were peeling your (own) clothes off, where your underwear is kind of inside your pants inside out. And he said what he did was he choked her and then held her underwater. And he got her in the bathtub and made the water hotter than he normally would, so it would screw up the time of death. He used to tell me that her mom thought he did it.”
Despite the series of hard knocks her life had been, Lynne was always looking for ways to improve herself. She got her GED, but could only get a job in a doughnut shop. Not satisfied, she took a navy entrance exam and scored well. She was sent through basic training in Orlando, specialist schooling in San Diego and was then assigned to the Memphis Naval Air Station in Millington. As soon as she got there, she went to the housing office to try to secure a place she and Sedley could live in together.
“I had fun in the navy,” she reported.
With all that she had been through with Alley, I wondered what made her go to the effort to make it possible for Sedley to live with her on base.
“He had my dog,” she explained. “I wanted my dog.”
But she soon began to question her own efforts to bring him to Millington, just as she had wondered about it before he came. “As soon as he got there, I had intuition speaking to me: ‘Ooh, what have I done?’ But I didn’t listen.
“He knew our marriage was over pretty much as soon as he got there. I’d come home from work and he’d be drunk. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I used to pray to God to please let him meet somebody and leave. Maybe that’s where some of my guilt comes from.”
Several of Lynne’s friends and associates had uneasy feelings about Sedley. Her close friend Tammy came over to the apartment one day after Sedley had arrived. “She told me something about him scared her. Something about him just creeped her out.”
We always say that if an individual makes you viscerally uncomfortable, there is probably a legitimate reason and you should pay attention to that feeling.
While Sedley was working part-time at the convenience store in Millington, she coped by doing more and more things without him. “I worked a second job in the theater on base. He pressured me to quit.”
As Sedley warred within himself with his conflicting senses of entitlement and inadequacy, Lynne, like most similar victims, had her own conflicts between wanting to assert herself and have the relationship end and also blaming herself for their shared situation. When the base police brought her and Sedley in for questioning following the discovery of Suzanne Collins’s body, she was at first defiant.
“They had me in one room and him in the other, and I didn’t know anything. So I said, ‘I want a lawyer.’
“And then they pulled out the picture of her with the branch sticking out. And that’s when I broke down. I told them everything I knew, which wasn’t much.”
They had been to Edmund Orgill Park together, she and Sedley. Now to see photographs of this battered and mutilated dead body lying on the same grass where they’d let their Great Dane puppy run free was too much for her.
Even after Sedley was charged and put in jail awaiting trial, Lynne continued to be emotionally confused. “He had manipulated me so much, I even had letters where I would apologize to him and say, ‘I’m so sorry this happened,’ as though I drove him to do it. And he would say, ‘It’s not all your fault.’ ”
What an extraordinary—but sadly predictable—reaction! Imagine the absolute, unmitigated gall of magnanimously condescending to share the responsibility for this unspeakable crime with his innocent and repeatedly victimized wife. Just from this statement, it should be obvious why, in more than twenty years, he never accepted guilt or responsibility for the murder. Rather, he kept making excuses that it was an accident, then shifting blame to other personalities, then finally denying he was involved altogether. He couldn’t deny it to his wife, who knew he had done it, but he was willing to let her take the emotional rap. Anyone but himself. In my mind, he met the purest definition of a coward.
As the trial got under way, she saw the manipulation continue. “The lawyers told Sedley to wear light blue,” she recalls, “because it was an ‘innocent’ color.”
Several times in court, she wanted to go over to Jack and Trudy Collins to tell them how sorry she felt. “I wanted to hug them.” But she didn’t feel it was her place to intrude on their grief.
She visited Sedley in prison a number of times, before, during and after the trial. At first, she would give him small amounts of money for prison commissary. Even here, she continued to show kindness, even though none had been shown to her. After a while, she would only go see him with his sister coming along, because she was afraid of being locked in the visiting room alone with him. The two women had a plan in case he “tried anything.”
Lynne’s life spiraled downward. “No one would talk to me, because they didn’t know what to say.” She couldn’t deal with the fact that she had been living with a monster.
“I started doing drugs real heavy. Before I would go see him, I’d do cocaine or go get drunk. I remember when he was in the mental hospital for the criminally insane in Nashville (for pretrial evaluation), I was so wasted. I was AWOL. I just decompensated.”
The navy career she had enjoyed so much was now unbearable. “I wanted out of the navy and they wouldn’t let me out. I kept going AWOL. I became a drug user and had a bad car wreck. I hit a car stopped at a light, when I was high. I had the chance to run, but I said, ‘No, I want this to be over with,’ so I just waited for the police to show up.”
Ultimately she was court-martialed, but Lynne doesn’t blame the navy. “They really tried. I can look back and say they really tried. They were very kind.”
She went to Louisville and stayed with Sedley’s sister. She got a job doing data entry. Then she enrolled in college, kept at it for over a year and maintained a 4.0 average.
She saw Sedley for the last time about a year after the trial. “The last time I went, I remember just looking at his hands and thinking, ‘Those hands did that to her.’ ”
It was
only when she was sufficiently removed from his toxic presence that she could begin to think clearly enough to separate her life from his emotionally.
At some time around 2004, when Alley changed his defense strategy from not guilty by reason of insanity to denying he had committed the murder altogether, Lynne recalled she was visited by two female public defenders who asked her to help them with the appeals case. “They were really nice, so I invited them in and they stayed a couple of hours.”
But she said she couldn’t help them because she knew that he did it; he had been the one who murdered Suzanne Collins.
They implied they could accept that, but she could be helpful, anyway, if she’d be willing to testify or sign an affidavit to the effect that during the original questioning, she had requested an attorney and had been denied. They explained that short of proving actual innocence, they might be able to get his death sentence lifted or postponed by showing irregularities in the criminal procedure.
Politely but firmly, she told them there was nothing she could do for them or her former husband.
Life hadn’t been easy for Lynne. She married twice more after Sedley Alley. She had two sets of children with two husbands. But all through her experiences with drugs and alcohol, she never gave up hope or stopped thinking about trying to better herself. She enrolled in college again, with the goal of going into nursing or some field of medical technology. Though in a twelve-step recovery program, she said she continues to struggle with addiction. You can’t help but admire the courage and fortitude of someone who has been through so much and still perseveres. She told us that she is more than willing to try to help other victims in any way she can.
Throughout all of the years since that horrible night in Millington in July 1985, one thought continued to haunt her.
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