His movie favorites likely would include features like Kiss the Girls, the story of a self-styled Casanova who lives his fantasy by abducting women for his underground harem. Another possibility would be the film version of John Fowles’s classic novel, The Collector. Fowles’s protagonist, chillingly portrayed in the movie by Terence Stamp, also acts on his fantasy, kidnapping and holding as captive the lovely Miranda. It was no coincidence that “Operation Miranda” was Leonard Lake’s code name for his abduction and captivity plan.
Even though the authorities had already identified Anderson as their subject, the insight that he was a sexual sadist showed them why the other materials were in the Bronco and at the rural site and why he had invested so much time in preparing for the crime. For example, when they later recovered Anderson’s murder trophies (jewelry belonging to his victims), they better understood why he had kept them.
Sexual sadists almost invariably are psychopaths, but Anderson’s mental anomalies also singled him out as a narcissist. Narcissism is a personality disorder marked by self-centeredness and a lack of empathy for others. Such individuals have grandiose fantasies.
The narcissist’s favorite subject is himself, and he frequently exaggerates his accomplishments to impress himself and others. That description certainly fits Robert Anderson. Fred Devaney, an agent with the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation who played a significant role in the case, later told me that Anderson compared himself to Albert Einstein in one postconviction interview.
He also revealed an immense amount of damning detail about himself to others who, in time, came forward with what they knew.
The first of these witnesses was Jamie Hammer, thirty-two, Anderson’s longtime acquaintance and former roommate. Investigators interviewed Hammer within ten days of Piper Streyle’s disappearance and immediately realized he was not an ideal witness. He had a police record, a history of substance abuse, and had sustained a head injury in an accident, which caused him to suffer partial memory loss.
Jamie Hammer did not inspire confidence, yet authorities knew that what he had to say, if corroborated, would have a powerful impact in the capital murder case that Mark Barnett and his associates hoped to bring against Anderson.
In a series of interviews, and in sworn testimony, Hammer described in detail how his friend, Rob Anderson, always had been obsessed with murdering women. He said the two of them had discussed the subject hundreds of times, beginning as far back as early high school. The focus of these conversations was how to gain control of a woman, kill her, and then get away with the crime.
For example, said Hammer, Anderson exhaustively considered the subject of body disposal. Once a victim was captured, the ultimate disposal site should be no more than an hour’s drive away, he said, and the grave should be predug. They decided that a plastic sheet, placed beneath the victim, was useful for preventing anyone from finding forensic evidence such as blood, semen, hairs, and fibers. Anderson felt that dismembering a victim before burial also was a good practice, although he didn’t say why.
They discussed how to build a restraining device, such as Anderson’s plywood platform, and the various ways of killing a person. Anderson strongly opposed using a gun. Gunshots were too loud, he said.
Hammer explained that Anderson made tire “poppers,” sharp little metal triangles, in the machine shop at Morrell. Anderson spray painted the devices to blend in with the road surface on which they were placed, making it extremely difficult for a driver to see them, particularly at night.
According to Hammer’s account to authorities, Anderson planned to drop an accomplice off along a roadway at night with a two-way radio and a supply of the poppers. Anderson would then drive on to scout for possible victims. When he saw one, he’d radio the accomplice with a description of the woman’s car. As she approached his position, the accomplice would place the tire poppers in the roadway. Anderson would follow the potential victim in his car, pick up the accomplice, and then trail their quarry until her tires went flat. Hammer told authorities that he and Anderson practiced with two-way radios to test their range of reception.
Late on Thursday night, November 10, 1994, Amy Anderson was driving just west of the little town of Tea with her friend, Stacy Hazen. She noticed a maroon Monte Carlo moving slowly in front of her.
The Chevy pulled over onto the shoulder to let Ms. Anderson pass, then caught up with her, passed her, and slowed again. She backed off the gas as well and kept driving slowly until the Monte Carlo finally pulled away into the distance ahead.
A short while later, she felt her car run over something in the roadway. Continuing on, she dropped Stacy Hazen at home and drove for seven more miles until one of her tires went flat. She carefully pulled over, flipped on her flashers, and walked back to the trunk to retrieve her spare tire and jack. Just as she did, the Monte Carlo drove past again. She watched its brake lights flash before it continued on.
As Amy Anderson opened her trunk and extracted the jack, the Chevy returned once more. This time the driver stopped and turned off his headlights. When he got out of his car, she noticed that the dome light remained unlit. Wordlessly, he approached the young woman and leaned into the trunk as if he was going to help her. Instead, he turned and grabbed her and began to drag her toward a ditch.
They fought briefly before Ms. Anderson broke free. She ran into the road as another vehicle approached. The driver of that car, teenager Christie Craig, and her passenger, Pamela Doud, saw Ms. Anderson running toward them from the ditch, waving her arms in obvious distress. They quickly opened a door for the frightened young woman as they saw two white men get into the Monte Carlo and drive off.
A check of Robert Anderson’s employment records showed that he did not go to work at Morrell’s that night. Amy Anderson later identified him as her attacker.
Judy Munkvold, who worked with Amy Anderson at a Dean Witter brokerage office, also identified a picture of Robert Anderson as a walk-in client she had seen there on several occasions.
As I have seen with many other sexual sadists, Anderson bragged compulsively, a narcissistic urge that in the end would prove his undoing. If this careful, intelligent, and patient killer could have kept his mouth shut, he might never have been brought to justice.
This was especially true of the Dumansky case.
Jamie Hammer testified that one day, while he was installing speakers in the trunk of the Monte Carlo that he had purchased from Anderson in 1995, “he [Anderson] said that’s where the girl from Morrell’s was. He said he stuffed her in the trunk.”
Hammer couldn’t remember Anderson’s exact words, but he knew his pal was referring to the killing of Larisa Dumansky. “What I can remember is she did anything he wanted her to do because she didn’t want to be hurt,” Hammer added. “He said he didn’t have enough time to do what he wanted to.”
Attractive young Larisa Dumansky and her husband, Bill, were relative newcomers to America. Native Ukrainian Pentecostals who had been driven from their homeland in 1991 by religious persecution, they settled in Sioux Falls, where both of them found work at Morrell’s meat-packing plant. Bill later got a job laying carpet, but Larissa stayed on, usually working the night shift, where she came to know Robert Anderson.
In the summer of 1994, Mrs. Dumansky had been bothered by an inexplicable series of flat tires. Every other day her Dodge Caravan seemed to suffer a puncture. August 26 was no different. Her husband later told me that Larisa was happy that day because the orthodontist had finally removed her braces. “You won’t believe how beautiful I am when you see me,” she said in their last phone conversation.
Larisa, who believed she was two months’ pregnant (her doctor hadn’t confirmed it), was already at work on the assembly line at Morrell’s when her husband got home. He went to bed as usual, expecting that when Larisa came back after work, she would get into bed and awaken him when his alarm went off the next morning.
But Larisa did not come home that night. The next da
y, her Caravan was found in its usual place at the Morrell’s parking lot. The vehicle was empty, the wheel was turned sharply to the right, and one front tire was flat.
Robert Anderson didn’t become a suspect in Mrs. Dumansky’s disappearance until the summer of 1996, when authorities interviewed Jamie Hammer in the immediate aftermath of Piper Streyle’s abduction. But even then prosecutors understood they needed a lot more than Jamie Hammer’s uncorroborated testimony to win a capital murder conviction. Just having a strong suspicion that Anderson had murdered both women was not enough to take before a jury. No body had yet been found in either case.
They didn’t have long to wait.
In late May 1997, following Anderson’s conviction for kidnapping Piper Streyle, another of his friends came forth with more startling revelations. Glenn Walker, who like Hammer had known Anderson for years, also recalled that his friend’s abduction-murder fantasies dated back to high school. “He said he’d really like to try suffocating a woman,” Walker recounted, “and then bring her back and then suffocate her and bring her back and just torment her.”
Walker had critically important and concrete information as well: the location of Larisa Dumansky’s remains—or what was left of them. He took police to a remote roadside location and pointed at a spot beneath a chokecherry tree, saying Anderson had admitted burying his victim there. Walker also recalled what Anderson had confided concerning the details of Larisa Dumansky’s final moments.
He said Anderson smirked when he told of putting a knife to her throat in Morrell’s parking lot, threatening to kill her instantly if she made a sound. He drove her out to the countryside, according to Walker, and raped her four or five times. She didn’t resist at all, but pleaded for her life, telling Anderson she was pregnant. She promised not to tell anyone about the assault if only he’d let her live. Instead, Walker told authorities, Anderson wrapped Dumansky’s mouth and nose in duct tape and watched her struggle as she suffocated. Then he buried her beneath the bush. A forensics team recovered scattered fragments of Larisa Dumansky’s skeleton at the site, as well as portions of her belt and shoes.
In July 1997, principally on the strength of Jamie Hammer and Glenn Walker’s testimony, along with the crucial recovery of Larisa Dumansky’s partial remains, Mark Barnett was confident that he had enough evidence to charge Anderson with both the Dumansky and the Streyle slayings. What the attorney general couldn’t know was that Anderson was about to stick his own head in the noose.
A month after his sentencing for the kidnapping of Mrs. Streyle, Anderson’s cellmate in the administrative segregation section at the South Dakota State Penitentiary secretly contacted authorities with word that Anderson had been talking to him. The man, a small-time drug dealer and thief named Jeremy Brunner, had shared a cell with Anderson for a week, and during that time Anderson apparently had gone into great detail about the murders. He even drew a map showing where he had hidden trophies of his victims, as well as his handcuffs (remember the keys?) and the 9-mm handgun he had carried with him the day he abducted Piper Streyle. What’s more, Anderson sought to recruit Brunner in a plot to kill Glenn Walker and to frame another man for the killings.
Brunner, twenty-two, used a fake rap sheet to trick Anderson into believing he had once beaten an attempted murder charge. This proved to be sufficient credentials for Anderson to take him into his confidence. “He asked me how I got away with my murder charge, and that’s how the ball started rolling,” Brunner later testified.
He said Anderson described himself as a serial murderer “because a serial killer saves something from each of his victims.” Brunner’s cell mate seemed to relish retelling the crimes. “It was every day, besides when we were sleeping,” said Brunner, “and we weren’t sleeping too much. It was just like he was reliving it.”
Anderson described targeting Larisa Dumansky for murder at least three months before carrying out his crime, Brunner said. He also implicated Glenn Walker in the crime. According to Brunner, Anderson said Walker had assisted in Mrs. Dumansky’s abduction but had declined to participate in her rape and murder. Instead, Walker went home, where Anderson later showed up with Larissa Dumansky’s body in his trunk. He demanded that Walker bury the victim for him, thereby implicating him even further in the crime.
Brunner said Anderson told him that Walker was also with him on the night he unsuccessfully attempted to abduct Amy Anderson.
Glenn Walker later pled guilty to three criminal counts. One, conspiracy to kidnap Larisa Dumansky; two, the attempted kidnapping of Amy Anderson; and three, being an accessory to commit first-degree murder and kidnapping.” He is serving a thirty-year sentence for the three counts.
Anderson bragged about the Streyle murder, too. He told his cell mate that he had been surprised to find Vance Streyle at home on the Friday morning before the successful abduction. On the second visit the following Monday, Anderson brought his 9 mm, intending to shoot Mr. Streyle, if necessary, he told Brunner.
He said he had also revisited Larisa Dumansky’s two-year-old grave under the chokecherry bush that weekend because he had come to distrust Glenn Walker’s willingness to remain silent. He intended to remove the physical evidence with which Walker might connect him to Dumansky but didn’t do a complete job of it. Anderson partially exhumed Dumansky’s skeleton, placing parts of it in a bag, and made sure to take away her skull and teeth, which he told Brunner he tossed from his car window as he drove.
In Canistota, once he had subdued Piper Streyle, Anderson remembered to retrieve the slip of paper with his name and address on it before leaving with her. He told Brunner he raped and manually strangled Mrs. Streyle to death in the Bronco, looking straight into her eyes as he did so. “It’s the rush right before you do it,” Brunner quoted Anderson, “and the rush of having a total stranger do what you want.”
Before taking her out to his preselected disposal site by the Big Sioux River near Baltic, Anderson remembered two other items at the trailer that could implicate him. One was his watch, which he’d left behind. The other was little Nathan’s new blue tent. During an initial scuffle with Piper Streyle, Anderson’s 9 mm had discharged a round that passed through the tent, a shag rug, and the floor under it. (The bullet was recovered from beneath the trailer after Brunner provided this information.)
Anderson put his dead victim on the floorboards, he said, and drove back through town to the trailer to fetch both the watch and the tent. He told Brunner he threw some of Piper Streyle’s belongings from the Bronco as he drove. He disposed of her nude body in the river, he said.
Given his criminal background and the fact that his testimony had won him a brief release from prison (Brunner was soon rearrested for possession of methamphetamines and trying to sell bogus LSD and was returned to custody), his sworn evidence as to what Robert Anderson allegedly told him might not have convinced a jury.
But he produced two maps, each in Anderson’s hand, and each bearing Anderson’s thumbprint.
One guided investigators to Glenn Walker’s house in Kansas City, Missouri. Brunner said he was supposed to arrange to kill Walker there. The second one revealed the location of his 9 mm and his handcuffs, tucked away above a doorway in Anderson’s mother’s basement. Also found in this hiding spot were his victim trophies, rings he had taken from Piper Streyle and the necklace that Larisa Dumansky was wearing the night of her murder.
Robert Leroy Anderson, through his behavior and his conversations with others, provided me with a treasure trove of information about himself. The details Hammer provided show that Anderson was well advanced along the Augustinian five-step continuum as early as fourteen years of age when he was already scripting his play. By the time he committed the Dumansky murder, he had been fantasizing about the crime in explicit detail for at least eight years!
The longer a sexual offender fantasizes prior to committing his crimes, the more specific his desired victim’s characteristics will be. Leonard Lake, for instance, said on his video that
he preferred his victims to be eighteen to twenty-two years of age, slim, petite, small breasted, with “shoulder length hair if I’m allowed.” Anderson also selected his known murder victims according to particular criteria. He told others that he was attracted to Mrs. Streyle because of her legs and to Larisa Dumansky because of her hips.
As mentioned, I didn’t believe that Amy Anderson was a random victim either. To suggest that such an organized offender just happened to select Ms. Anderson’s car would be too much of a coincidence. After all, he had been in her place of employment several times prior to the abduction attempt. Furthermore, I believe that had Ms. Anderson’s tire gone flat before she dropped off Stacy Hazen, Robert Anderson and his accomplice would have attempted to abduct both young women.
Fantasy’s role in planning the offense also explains why Anderson modified his car to make night surveillance simpler and easier. He had an acquaintance install a toggle switch to manipulate the front and rear lighting on his vehicle and removed his dome light bulb so that it would not come on when he opened the doors.
I learned this information about vehicular modification with a twinge of recognition. When I was in Binghamton, New York, working on organized crime investigations in the mid-1970s, I often did automobile surveillance at night. I had the Bureau mechanic install switches that darkened either headlight and either or both taillights. This device allowed me to observe a person for long periods at night without being “made.” My car became known as “the Batmobile” among my FBI colleagues. How eerie that Anderson had used a similar ploy, not to further justice, but to foil it.
3
Inside the Fantasy
Sexual crimes begin as fantasy, but fortunately only a small minority of fantasies lead to sexual crimes. According to mental health professionals, everyone harbors hidden desires, if only fleetingly. Yet for the vast majority, simply contemplating forbidden acts seems to suffice. Most of us never seriously consider bringing those reveries to reality.
Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind Page 4
