Bloodsworth

by Tim Junkin

  THE FIRST POLICE to arrive at Fontana Village were Officer Paul Merkle, Corporal Barry Barber, and Officer Kevin Keene of the Baltimore County Police Department. Elinor Helmick’s call had been received at 11:49 A.M., and they arrived at Fontana Village just twelve minutes later. After interviewing Elinor, they conducted their own search of the area. At Bethke’s Pond, Chris Shipley and Jackie Poling repeated the information they had given to Elinor Helmick, that Dawn had gone off with a tall, thin stranger with blond curly hair. The boys, curious now, and impressed by these uniformed policemen, followed the officers into the woods.

  When their initial sweep of the area proved unsuccessful, Officer Merkle became worried. He notified his district sergeant, William O’Connor, and told him the situation was bad, that he suspected foul play. District Lieutenant Paul Lowe then drove to the scene arriving at about 12:40 P.M., and commenced operations for a full-scale search. The department went all out. Four different K-9 units, uniformed officers, homicide detectives, youth services detectives, and nearly forty-five cadets from the sixty-sixth police academy class arrived and were dispatched to conduct a field search. A police helicopter scanned the scene from the air. Reporters from local media, hearing about the lost girl over police scanner airwaves, began showing up. An official police department spokesman, Jay Miller, arrived in Car No. 8 just before 2 P.M. Both the district captain and district major were on the scene by 2:30.

  At around 1:50 P.M., while assisting in the assembly and coordination of such manpower, Officer Merkle saw Thomas Hamilton coming toward him, ashen-faced, and holding out some clothes—a pair of blue shorts and a pair of white cotton underpants. Hamilton told Merkle that they belonged to his daughter. He choked back sobs as he tried to describe where and how he found them. Everyone around stopped what they were doing. They all knew what this meant. Merkle placed the items in an evidence bag and then huddled with other officers discussing how to proceed.

  Detective Mark Bacon, experienced in child molestation cases, had arrived at the command center about twenty minutes earlier and had been assisting in organizing the search. He questioned Hamilton, then took him along with several other Youth Services detectives to his police car and drove them to the wooded area near where Hamilton had retrieved his daughter’s clothes. There they encountered Richard Gray who led them to the tree limb where he’d found the shorts and underpants. Bacon thought it all seemed too awful, too bizarre. He radioed in their position so that the search could be coordinated to concentrate on the immediate area. Detectives Bacon and Joseph Leitzer then walked down a path about two hundred feet searching for Dawn. Within a few minutes Bacon saw her, lying facedown, about twenty-five feet to the right of the path and maybe eighty paces from the tree on which her clothes had been found.

  Bacon first checked for a pulse, but there was none. Dawn’s body was still warm to the touch, and had normal skin color. Bacon sat back on his knees, reeling from the sight. The blood over her face had not coagulated. A terry-cloth top covered her torso, and a purse was still slung across her shoulder. Her head was a bloody mess. Except for white socks and blue tennis shoes, she was naked below the waist. A stick protruded about six inches from her vagina. Blood had pooled there. A rock lay a few feet from her head. A Big Red gum wrapper was crumpled on the ground alongside her. A swarm of flies buzzed around the corpse. Bacon radioed for crime scene technicians and homicide detectives to assist. Crime lab detectives Carroll Sturgeon and James Roeder were there within minutes. Homicide Detective William Ramsey arrived shortly thereafter, followed by his partner, Detective Robert Capel.

  William Ramsey was a homicide vet. He could read a crime scene. Sturgeon and Roeder were experts too. They could pick it clean. They were all experienced professionals. Each thought they’d known the worst. Still, this little girl’s body, broken and destroyed, mutilated, covered with flies, was a hard thing to see.

  Together, they went about their job. They surveyed and processed the area. About twenty feet away from the body, waist-high weeds were bent down, indicating a possible path angling in a southerly direction back toward the dirt road. Photographs of the body and surrounding area were taken and sketches of the scene made. A footprint in a mound of dirt was observed and photographed. Detective Sturgeon tried to lift latent fingerprints from the victim’s body using magna brush powder, but was unsuccessful. Later, because Chris Shipley thought the stranger might have touched his tackle box, Sturgeon dusted it for prints, again without success. The Big Red gum wrapper, with possible blood on its underside, was removed to a plastic bag; dirt and blood samples from around the body were taken; a navy blue belt loop, a red fiber from near the body, and a strand of human hair found nearby were all carefully stored. A piece of concrete found near the victim’s head, with a possible spot of blood on it, was also bagged. Detective Ramsey assumed this was the murder weapon. He cautioned everyone on the scene that this one piece of information was to remain confidential. It was not to be revealed to the public or press. Ramsey noted a strange mark or bruise on Dawn’s neck, like the imprint of a shoe’s sole with a herringbone pattern. One was on her back as well. Close-up photographs recorded these markings. Dr. Paul Guerin arrived, and officially pronounced Dawn dead at 5:03 P.M. When the crime scene analysis was complete, her body was wrapped in a sheet and taken to the morgue. During the autopsy, as reported by the medical examiner in the autopsy report, semen was found in both her vaginal and anal cavities. She had died, the medical examiner determined, from both strangulation and traumatic brain injury.

  While the area around Dawn’s body was being picked over by investigators, Detective Capel radioed Detective Howard Hessie, who had been instructed to stay close to the two key eyewitnesses, the boys Shipley and Poling, and asked Hessie to escort them down to Youth Services where he would meet them. Capel figured that the people who had the best opportunity to view the probable killer were these two boys, Chris Shipley and Jackie Poling. Though Chris was only ten at the time, and Jackie just seven, Capel felt that they might be best able to provide the clues needed to find the murderer, and he wanted to interview them while their memories were fresh and untainted by suggestion. He remained at the crime scene for only about twenty minutes before he left to meet them.

  PART III

  A COMPOSITE, A PROFILE, A GAMBIT

  A little neglect may breed mischief: for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost.

  —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  SEVEN

  THERE ARE COPS AND then there are murder cops. Homicide investigators. The crème de la crème. The ones who’ve made it to the top.

  They have to work their way up. First they’re on patrol, walking a beat, cruising through neighborhoods, ticketing speeders, handling shoplifters, drunks, domestic fights. The good ones make detective: vice, fraud, robbery. Only the very best, the ones who prove their mettle, are promoted to homicide. Robbery, burglary, rape—they’re ugly enough. But murder beats all.

  Detectives Ramsey and Capel were not newcomers to death. They’d both pretty much seen the whole underbelly of Baltimore County. Bad and really bad. But this crime was in a category of its own. Dawn Hamilton was just a kid and the way she was abused and killed made them certain they had one sick and dangerous perpetrator on the loose out there.

  Ramsey and Capel had been given control of the case as the lead detectives, the ones put in charge. It was their job to run the investigation, supervise the others, make the important decisions, solve the crime. Their peers were watching. The world was watching. The community was afraid. The community needed an arrest.

  A nineteen-year veteran of the police department, with nine years of experience as a homicide detective, Robert Capel in 1984 was a tall, bearlike man, with salt-and-pepper hair and an inquisitive but courteous manner. He and Ramsey worked well as a team. It’s a cliché, the Mutt and Jeff routine, but Capel came across as easygoing and naturally friendly. Ramsey could employ a c
old, tough demeanor. People tended to trust and open up to Capel, if only to avoid Ramsey’s rough questions and icy stare. Capel was probably the best suited of the two to deal with children.

  Ten years earlier, Capel had attended a three-day seminar on the art of working with witnesses to create composite drawings of suspects, and since that time he had prepared around two hundred such sketches, most during his tour as a robbery squad detective. Since Chris Shipley was the older of the two boys and seemed to be more certain of what he’d seen, Capel decided to work with him first in an effort to arrive at a likeness of Dawn’s probable killer. He took Chris into a room alone and gently asked him some questions about his age, school, family life, even fishing, trying to put the boy at ease.

  Capel learned that Chris had been in the fifth grade at Park Elementary School, that he liked to watch cartoons in the summer such as He-Man and shows with motorcycles such as Knight Rider. Chris particularly enjoyed fishing and spent hours at the pond. He had his own pole and also used a hand string and had sometimes caught smallmouth bass in the pond as well as the bluegill that were always taking the worms he used as bait.

  When Capel felt Chris was comfortable, he asked him to remember carefully the man he’d seen at the pond and to provide the most accurate description he could. Chris reiterated that the person was a white male, six feet five inches tall, slim to medium build, dirty blond, very curly hair with a light brown mustache, tanned skin, and spoke with no accent. He said he was wearing an Ocean Pacific short-sleeved T-shirt with three stripes around the upper chest: orange, red, and purple. He wore light tan shorts, calf-length socks, and tennis shoes. Chris mentioned that he had an uncle who was six foot five and that the man by the pond was the same height as his uncle. When Capel opened the door and motioned for another detective who was six foot three to come inside, Chris said the man at the pond might have been a little bit shorter than the detective. Even upon hearing that the detective was six foot three, though, Chris insisted that the man he’d seen with Dawn was six foot five. This experiment, along with the other available evidence, convinced Capel that the assailant was closer to six feet tall than six foot five. Chris Shipley said nothing about seeing orange or reddish hair. He also said nothing about the man being muscular or about seeing sideburns.

  Capel then brought out a book of drawings of black and white facial parts to show Chris, explaining that by using the drawings, they would try to create a likeness of the man who went into the woods with Dawn. He told Chris, in order to further relax him, that the composite wouldn’t be used to identify anyone but only to eliminate potential suspects. Capel had been taught to create composites by using a series of facial parts previously drawn on clear foils by Walt Disney Studios. Each transparency contained representations of different facial characteristics: facial outlines, noses, eyes, hair, chins, lips, cheeks, and facial hair. The foils could be placed on top of one another to form a complete face.

  Capel began by showing different facial outlines to Chris. Was the face round, oval, angular, fat? There were a set number to choose from. Eventually, Chris selected the one he thought most closely resembled the facial outline of the man he had seen with Dawn. Capel then showed him various hairstyles. Chris picked a hairstyle but was never completely comfortable with it. He thought the man’s hair was more unruly and lighter than the drawing reflected. He chose a chin line that seemed right but again could not find a pair of eyes that he thought was accurate. He settled for a pair that seemed closest to what he remembered, but he told the detective that the man’s eyes were different, weird. Chris also pointed to a mustache but told Capel it was too thin and asked him if it could be thickened up. Capel said no. The thicker mustaches on the foils looked liked Fu Man Chu mustaches and weren’t right, and Capel didn’t want to bring in a freelancer. He hadn’t gotten good results from using freelance artists in the past and was skeptical of their value. Also, the office wanted to get the composite out to the public quickly, and there wasn’t time to bring in a police sketch artist. When the composite was completed, Chris was not altogether satisfied with it. In retrospect, why would he have been? He had been dissatisfied with the hair, the eyes, and the mustache. Capel asked him what could be done to make it more resemble the suspect, but Chris couldn’t say. Chris Shipley, ten years old, finally agreed that it was a decent resemblance of the man he’d seen.

  Then Capel brought in Jackie Poling. Jackie gave a slightly different description. He remembered the man at the pond as looking twenty to thirty years of age, about six feet tall, skinny, with light brown curly hair, and wearing tan shorts and a tan T-shirt. Again, no mention of reddish hair or sideburns. Capel considered making another composite with him and started the process, but Jackie seemed so unsure of the different features that Capel gave up. Instead, Capel showed the composite Chris had helped create to Jackie. When seven-year-old Jackie seemed satisfied with the likeness, Capel concluded it was reliable.

  Later, Detective Mark Bacon, who had first discovered Dawn’s body, would criticize this protocol. He had received the same training in working with witnesses to create composite sketches that Capel had; they’d attended the same program at the same time. “Showing a composite made by one witness to another is totally against all principles taught in identity school,” he said. “You never put two witnesses together at the same time. You do one composite with witness one, and you do another composite with witness two, and you hope that the two composites look alike.”

  That evening, Capel tried to develop another composite likeness, this time with an adult eyewitness, Fay McCoullough. McCoullough had lived on Fontana Lane for ten years and had worked for the Social Security Administration for sixteen years. She’d reported seeing a strange man standing by the woods that morning as she drove out of the complex on her way to work. She’d slowed down as she passed him and gotten a good look at the man. She remembered him as being five foot seven to five foot eight, slim, with curly blond hair, and wearing khaki shorts, a sleeveless pullover shirt, and tennis shoes. No mention of a strawberry tint to the hair. No mention of sideburns. Capel worked with her for two hours trying to arrive at a satisfactory composite. But neither was happy with the result. Fay kept shaking her head that the sketch just wasn’t right. The eyes were wrong, she insisted. Finally, Capel gave up. He threw the composite in her trash can, concluding that she just wasn’t a reliable witness. After he left her house, she retrieved it.

  After Capel finished with McCoullough, the detectives decided to run with the composite put together by Chris Shipley. It was too late to make the newspapers and television news shows the next day, so they arranged to have the composite drawing disseminated to all media outlets for broadcast on Friday.

  EIGHT

  THE MURDER OF Dawn Hamilton created front-page headlines in all the local papers, including the Sun, the Evening Sun, the News American, and the Times of Baltimore County. Television news channels covered the crime in detail, and for several days Dawn’s picture appeared everywhere. Thomas Hamilton, Toni Hamilton, Mercy Sponaugle, the Helmicks, and their neighbors in the apartment complex were all sought out by reporters. During one interview, Thomas Hamilton held in his hand a Ziggy cartoon Dawn had drawn for him. She had scribbled I love you for all the world in the corner. Hamilton leaned against the apartment wall heaving sobs. The words “pain . . . sorrow . . . hate . . .” came through. He covered his face with his free hand. He waved the cartoon at the sky. “If he wants to pick on a little child,” he cried, “let him pick on me . . .”

  The funeral was held July 28. Sympathy and support poured in from the community. Afterward Thomas Hamilton wrote that Dawn’s death was the most horrifying thing that a person could live through. He went into a deep depression, developed a drinking problem, and tried to find new friends. Hamilton found it difficult to be around anyone who knew what had happened.

  Dawn’s mother, Toni, spoke to reporters outside her flat in Baltimore City. Fighting back tears, she cursed her daughter’s kil
ler, saying he should be tortured and slowly killed. “She couldn’t even fight back,” she cried. “I just hope she didn’t feel any pain . . .”

  Parents in communities all around Fontana Village huddled with their children indoors in fear. The Baltimore County Police Department promised to spare no resource in tracking down the monstrous person responsible. Five two-man teams of homicide detectives and numerous teams of police officers from the Fullerton precinct were assigned to assist in investigating the murder, and the FBI would lend its expertise both in forensic testing and psychological profiling. Officers going door to door interviewed every resident of Fontana Village. Neighbors from adjacent communities; merchants from nearby Golden Ring Mall; employees from the local 7-Eleven, the Dunkin’ Donuts, and other eateries on Rossville Boulevard; representatives of Essex Community College; and the manager of the Trailways bus station all were questioned. Even before the composite sketch was broadcast on Friday, the leads were substantial in number. Once the picture of the killer was shown on television and in the newspapers, calls flooded in. A hotline was set up for tips, and Metro Crime Stoppers offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of the murderer. By Monday, July 30, the police department had received over two hundred telephone reports. Over the following week, the number would more than double.