Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind

by Hazelwood, Roy

  He resided in Whitechapel and knew the district well.

  His mental hospital records suggest strongly that he was a paranoid schizophrenic.

  According to two investigating officers, Inspectors Anderson and Swanson, Kosminski was positively placed with Elizabeth Stride shortly before her murder.

  Inspector Swanson reported that as soon as Kosminski was placed under surveillance and then hospitalized, the killings stopped.

  I also felt that Kosminski was the strongest suspect. I cited the fact that of the five, he was least likely to care if he was sprayed with human blood. Additionally, his hatred of women was well documented.

  Bill Waddell said that from a criminal investigator’s point of view, Kosminski also was the primary suspect among the five.

  John agreed with the rest of us and said of Kosminski, “If he didn’t do it, then someone just like him, in Whitechapel, committed these crimes.”

  Although we’ll probably never know Jack’s identity for a certainty, our study of the cases was more than a busman’s holiday for John Douglas and me. By showing the applicability of profiling, even in a century-old case, we were strengthening a valuable tool for today’s and tomorrow’s investigators to use in apprehending killers.

  11

  A Serial Killer

  Profiling, as the BSU originally conceived it, is the investigative technique of last resort, meant to be used after all else has failed. Only when all the traditional investigative avenues have been fully explored should police turn to a profiler for assistance.

  A profile rarely solves the case by itself. In fact, I can think of only a few times when that happened. But a profile can kick start a stalled investigation, generating new ideas—as Szent-Györgyi put it, “thinking what nobody else has thought.”

  A case in point occurred in July 1997. I was asked by authorities in Wichita Falls, Texas, to analyze a series of homicide cases and provide a profile of their unidentified offender. Barry L. Macha, the Wichita County district attorney, said he didn’t expect me to solve his case; he only wanted to see if I could connect a few dots. It turned out that I could, and the new insights led to fresh thinking, a lot of old-fashioned investigative legwork, a DNA breakthrough, and then an arrest, a confession, a death sentence, and a tangle of other surprises, too. The case vividly demonstrates how profiling can complement and amplify a wide range of other investigative disciplines.

  Macha asked me to review three murders committed in Wichita Falls between December 1984 and September 1985. The first two killings already had been linked by DNA analysis. The prosecutor wanted to know if I thought the same person had committed all three homicides, and if so, what sort of person was this UNSUB?

  The victim in the first case was twenty-year-old Terry Lee Sims, a nursing student and EKG technician at Wichita Falls’s Bethania Hospital, who was brutally stabbed to death in the early morning hours of Friday, December 21, 1984.

  Terry Sims lived with her great-grandmother, but often stayed overnight with her friend Leza Boone. Boone was also employed at Bethania Hospital. Both women worked the night shift on December 20. When Leza learned that she had been scheduled for a double shift, they decided that Terry would spend the night at Leza’s house.

  Leza gave Terry her only house key, as she had in the past, and last saw her friend alive as she drove away from the two-bedroom residence to her second shift at the hospital. Terry was standing out on the small porch as Leza left.

  The next morning at 7:30, Terry did not respond to Leza’s knocks on the front door. Leza walked around to the side of the house and discovered the kitchen light was on. This was unusual because Terry always had remembered to turn it off in the past. Leza also found the sliding glass door was securely locked.

  Leza fetched a duplicate key from her landlord and let herself in. She immediately saw an overturned stereo speaker in the living room and blood splatters in the first bedroom. Fearful of going farther, she summoned her landlord, who went inside to find Terry Sims naked except for her socks, curled up in a fetal position on the bathroom floor. She was dead.

  There was no sign of forced entry, and Leza Boone reported no recent trouble with hang-up calls or prowlers. She said that when spending the night, Terry’s usual routine was to change out of her hospital uniform the moment she came in from the night shift. Then she would turn on the stereo, get something to eat in the kitchen, and settle down in the living room to watch TV, listen to music, or study.

  In front of the stereo speaker was Terry’s uniform, a smock and a pullover shirt. Several items were found on the coffee table, including a blood-soaked yellow Kleenex. A pair of women’s underpants, spotted with blood, were rolled up beneath the table. Also lying on the floor near the coffee table were the victim’s glasses.

  Police discovered a blood spot in the doorway leading to the first bedroom and more blood on the bedsheets and pillowcase, as well as on a pillow on the floor. A rag, resting on the corner of the bed, was soaked in blood.

  Terry’s purse and tan wallet were on the bed, and inside the handbag were two Swiss Army knives. The yellow extension cord used to connect the water bed heater to an electrical wall socket was cut and a length removed. Two buttons also were found on the bedroom floor.

  The dead woman was lying on her left side in the bathroom, her hands tightly bound behind her with the yellow extension cord. Lab tests revealed semen in her mouth and vagina. There were bruises around her face consistent with being punched, bludgeoned, or possibly thrown against the floor or wall. Her attacker had stabbed Terry a dozen times in the chest and back. She had tried to fight back, according to the medical examiner, who found defensive wounds on both Terry’s hands, as well as her upper left arm. Blood spatters were found on the front of the vanity, the sink, one wall, and the bathtub. There also was a large amount of blood on the rim of the tub. No murder weapon was recovered.

  Terry Sims had lived in Wichita Falls her entire life. My interviews with people who knew her produced the portrait of a shy, quiet, somewhat insecure young woman who was naturally drawn to a helping profession such as nursing. She had a boyfriend who was out of the country at the time of her killing, and she was not known to be seeing anyone else.

  Terry used to warn other nursing students to be careful going to and from their cars. She had taken classes in tae kwan do, and the martial arts school she attended even had used her picture in a newspaper advertisement.

  She also collected sharp weapons, including bayonets, boot knives, knuckles knives, throwing knives, and pocket knives. It was an unusual hobby, to be sure, but her friends and family insisted there was no pathology attached to Terry’s interest in knives. She just liked to collect them. One of her younger sisters planned to give her a knife for Christmas that year.

  Besides her two Swiss Army knives, Terry was known to keep another knife in her purse, one disguised as a writing pen. It was missing the morning after her murder.

  Terry Sims was neither combative nor unusually preoccupied with her own physical safety. Some people described her as naive and dependable. Her cousin Billy said that, in his view, Terry wasn’t killed because of who she was but because of where she was. He couldn’t imagine Terry provoking someone to murder. He believed she was killed because she could identify the man who attacked her.

  Victim number two was Toni Gibbs, an attractive twenty-four-year-old nurse last seen around 7:30 on Saturday morning, January 19, 1985, as she left work at Wichita General Hospital. The next day Toni was reported missing.

  On Tuesday morning, January 22, her white 1984 Camaro was discovered on a street approximately two blocks from Leza Boone’s house, where Terry Sims had been murdered a month earlier. The car was legally parked and locked.

  Toni’s purse was found where she usually left it, under the passenger-side floor mat. Both bucket seats in the Camaro were positioned all the way to the rear. A small blood spot was detected on both the inside and outside of the driver’s-side door. Also found were whi
te scuff marks, presumably from shoe polish, on the emergency brake and center of the steering wheel. It appeared as though a person had been dragged or pulled across the front seat of the car.

  On Friday, February 15, a utility worker discovered Toni Gibbs’s naked body in a rural field approximately a mile south of the Wichita Falls city limits. The victim was lying on her back with her arms above her head. She had been stabbed numerous times and was wearing some moderately expensive jewelry that her killer had either overlooked or ignored.

  Like Terry Sims, Toni Gibbs had sustained terrible injuries. The areas around her chest and left leg had multiple contusions and deep scratches, some of them inflicted postmortem. A knife blade at least six inches long had been used to stab her several times in the upper abdomen, left front shoulder, and left armpit, and three more times in the back. Seminal fluid was found in her mouth, vagina, and anus. As with Terry Sims, Ms. Gibbs had also suffered defense wounds to both hands. There was no evidence that she had been bound.

  A hundred feet from her body was a derelict trolley car. Gibbs’s blood-stained shoes, still tied, were found under the trolley floor, along with her blood-stained panty hose, bikini underpants, white uniform pants (one leg turned inside out), white uniform top, and her black leather jacket. The bloody uniform top, full of knife slits, was still buttoned up the back. Gibbs’s bloody bra, still clasped, was also found inside the trolley.

  There were blood stains on the trolley’s inner walls and large blood drops on its floor. A rubber mat was soaked in blood.

  Clearly, most of this horrific assault had taken place inside the trolley. But there were no drag marks anywhere on Toni Gibbs’s body. The pathologist surmised that she walked or crawled from the trolley to where she was found in the field, nearly four weeks later.

  I learned that Toni Gibbs was an extremely intelligent, independent, outgoing young woman from a good family. She had been divorced for less than a year, lived alone in an apartment complex, and enjoyed going out to country and western bars with girlfriends.

  Everyone agreed that Toni would not have picked up a hitchhiker or anyone she didn’t know. She was in good physical shape, and she would have fought an attacker if she had any hope of prevailing.

  More questioning elicited the information that she had been receiving obscene telephone calls over several weeks prior to her death. I learned from her brothers, Waldo and Jeff, that the caller told Toni exactly what she was wearing and where she had been on each day that he called. They reported that their sister was sincerely frightened about the incidents. As it turned out, these calls apparently had nothing to do with the crime. An investigator must remember that there are often circumstances in a crime that have no association with it.

  The Gibbs investigation developed a viable suspect. Danny Wayne Laughlin was a strange young man who worked at the Stardust Club, one of the country and western clubs Toni frequented. His job as “bar back” was menial. Laughlin was sort of a gofer for the bartenders, responsible for keeping them supplied with liquor, wine, and beer, hauling ice, and running errands.

  During routine police questioning of the Stardust Club’s employees, Laughlin volunteered that he knew the victim. Then he showed up at police headquarters to say that on February 10 he had taken his dog out into the field where Toni Gibbs’s body was found five days later.

  That was a lie. On February 10 Danny Wayne Laughlin was in downtown Wichita Falls committing a burglary. The story he made up for the police was meant to be his alibi. In August he was tried and convicted of perjury and burglary and sentenced to two to seven years in prison.

  Meanwhile, an informant whom Laughlin met in jail claimed Laughlin had confessed the Gibbs killing to him. According to the informant, Laughlin described sharing drugs with Toni and then making sexual advances that she rebuffed. The source said Laughlin had told him that he became angry and killed Gibbs. A second witness also came forward to say she had seen Laughlin in the field with his dog, which, according to the witness, resembled a wolf.

  Laughlin was indicted for the Gibbs murder in October 1985 and tried the following spring. When the jury was hung 11-1 in favor of acquittal, the prosecution declined to try him again. He was paroled the following year and died in a car crash near Cripple Creek, Colorado, in September 1993. Three years later, and a year before I entered the case as a consultant, DNA tests cleared Laughlin of Toni Gibbs’s murder. They also showed that she and Terry Sims had been raped by the same man.

  Now the story becomes even more complicated.

  The third case that Barry Macha offered for analysis was that of Ellen Blau, twenty-one, who was last seen alive in the early morning hours of Thursday, September 19, 1985.

  Ellen Blau was an intensely idealistic young woman, a strong-willed free spirit who was uncomfortable with her family’s considerable wealth. Her parents told me Ellen left home in the Northeast at age seventeen to live with a young air force enlistee stationed at Wichita Falls. They brought her back home, but two days after completing high school, Ellen returned to Wichita Falls to be with her boyfriend.

  She supported herself as a waitress or cook, refusing all offers of help from her parents, except for a 1980 Volkswagen Rabbit convertible they gave her a few months before her murder.

  Her friends said Ellen was impulsive. Janie Ball, with whom Ellen was living at the time of her murder, reported her friend once drove to California with a truck driver, not bothering to inform Janie until she arrived on the West Coast. On the other hand, Ellen was not naive or easily frightened, according to her parents. They told me that she would probably resist an attacker unless he was armed.

  The night of her disappearance, Ellen drank a few beers with friends at a Pizza Hut, then left unescorted in her Rabbit. She last was seen headed in the direction of downtown Wichita Falls. When she didn’t show up the next morning at the Suds & Subs café where she worked as a cook, her boss telephoned both the police and Janie Ball.

  Meantime, a bread truck driver who knew Ellen discovered her Rabbit parked behind a country store. Sensing something was wrong, the truck driver also called the police.

  The VW was unlocked. The keys were in the ignition and at the “on” position. Both windows were rolled up. The victim’s purse, containing $223 in cash, lay on the passenger-side floorboard near the hump. Her mother told me that Ellen would not voluntarily have left either the keys or her purse in the vehicle.

  There was a small amount of blood on the driver’s seat.

  Three weeks later county employees found Blau’s nude (except for one sock), mummified, and partially skeletonized body lying face down on a slope under a mesquite tree near a dirt road. Her tennis shoes, blue jeans, yellow-and-white shirt, bra, and other sock were recovered near a stock pond not far from the body. Her jeans were turned inside out.

  Her yellow necklace, yellow bracelet, and yellow earrings were undisturbed, although two rings she was thought to have been wearing were gone. Her Lady’s Rolex was found nine feet from her body.

  A broken beer bottle near the body matched shards of a Michelob bottle in her car. Investigators believed the broken bottle had been her abductor’s sharp-pointed weapon. Six .22-caliber bullet casings and one .22 round also were recovered nearby.

  Because of extended exposure, Ellen’s body yielded little in the way of forensic evidence. Animals had carried one of her arms almost two hundred feet away.

  It did not appear that she had been bound. She had no head fractures or broken teeth. There was no evidence to suggest she was strangled and no evident wounds to the intact skin that remained. It was impossible to tell if she had been sexually assaulted.

  Her official cause of death was “undetermined homicidal violence.”

  In my August 1997 report to Barry Macha, I concluded that because so little could be determined about the cause of Ellen Blau’s death, I couldn’t say conclusively that she had been killed by the same person who had killed Terry Sims and Toni Gibbs. Nor was there much about her pe
rsonally, besides the women’s ages and race, that really connected Ms. Blau to the other two victims.

  But the killings did show some striking similarities. All three murders occurred in the morning hours. All three involved a sharp instrument (knives and the beer bottle). Despite their bloodiness and violence, none of the three homicides could be classified as “overkills” according to BSU criteria, in which the threshhold is twenty or more stab wounds.

  None of the three women suffered head or facial fractures. All three apparently struggled with their attacker. There were no known thefts. All three victims were found naked, and their killer left their clothing behind. The victims’ shoes were left tied in all three cases. At least one pant leg of each victim’s clothing was turned inside out. Each of the women was alone when attacked, and in each case, the victim was left where she was killed.

  Combining these similarities with the fact that all three homicides occurred within a very small geographic area and within nine months of one another, I wrote that “a strong possibility exists that the same person may be responsible for the three murders.” I suggested therefore that the profile I had prepared could apply to all three investigations.

  I wrote in my profile that the offender was a white male, twenty-four to thirty years of age at the time of the crimes. He almost certainly was less emotionally mature than his age and apt to react angrily at rejection, real or perceived. “He was a very selfish person,” I went on, “who exhibited a lack of concern for the welfare or safety of others…. The killer would have projected a macho image to friends and associates.”

  It was obvious from the crimes that blood didn’t bother him nor did killing in a very personal way with a knife (or broken bottle). That suggested to me that the killer’s job involved working with his hands in a skilled or semiskilled position, and his job required physical exertion.