Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind

by Hazelwood, Roy

  The absence of overkill indicated that his anger was controlled.

  If he had served in the armed forces, he was unlikely to have completed his hitch because of a dislike for authority figures. He probably was, or had been, married, but was incapable of sexual fidelity.

  He had a high school education and possibly had some trade or technical training. The lack of planning and sophistication in his crimes suggested no more than average intelligence.

  At the time of the murders, he was socioeconomically in the lower- to lower-middle-class and resided in close proximity to Ms. Boone’s residence.

  He had a highly impulsive lifestyle.

  At the time of the Sims murder, he was experiencing stress—occupational, health-related, financial, relational, family, or legal.

  He would have had difficulties with the law since he was a teenager. His arrest record would reflect a variety of offenses and would probably include resisting arrest.

  The murders had no effect on him, eliciting neither remorse nor guilt.

  Prior to receiving my profile, the Wichita Falls authorities completed their investigation of a list of suspects in the three cases, clearing all of them. Then Barry Macha asked his investigator, John Little, to review the Sims, Gibbs, and Blau files again in light of my profile and the lack of a single credible suspect for all killings.

  Right away Little noticed something previously overlooked. The name Faryion Edward Wardrip popped up in all three investigations. The police learned that Wardrip once lived with his wife and child in the same four-unit apartment building where Ellen Blau had lived with Janie Ball and her husband. The apartments were located two blocks from Leza Boone’s house, site of the Sims murder. And Wardrip also had worked at Wichita General Hospital as an orderly at the same time that Toni Gibbs was employed as a nurse.

  Detective Little dug deeper.

  Faryion Wardrip was born in 1959 and grew up in Salem, Indiana. He was the fifth of nine children. His father was a machinist and his mother a telephone operator. According to his siblings, the family exhibited no dysfunction or deprivation.

  Faryion was a poor student. He dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade and worked at mostly unskilled jobs until 1978, when he joined the Army National Guard. Six years later, just before the killings began, he received a less than honorable discharge in connection with an arrest for smoking dope.

  In 1983, he married a Wichita Falls woman and fathered two children by her. He went to work as a janitor at Wichita General. In November 1983, he became an orderly at the hospital.

  He soon thereafter separated from his wife. In 1985, four days after Toni Gibbs’s body was found, he left his orderly’s job at Wichita General. In December 1985, Wardrip and his wife separated for good.

  Now a new victim enters the narrative.

  Terry Sims was killed in December of 1984. Toni Gibbs’s murder occurred one month later. Ellen Blau vanished in September of 1985. Then on May 6, 1986—one month after Danny Wayne Laughlin was unsuccessfully prosecuted for killing Toni Gibbs—twenty-one-year-old Tina Kimbrew of Wichita Falls was found dead in her apartment.

  Kimbrew had been hit on the head and smothered with a pillow. Four days later, Faryion Wardrip arrived by bus in the Texas coastal city of Galveston where, he later would tell police, he intended to see the ocean before killing himself. Instead, he called the Galveston police and announced he had killed “a good friend” up in Wichita Falls—Tina Kimbrew.

  Tina Kimbrew was a very pretty college student who supported herself by waiting tables. Wardrip claimed to have met her at the Stardust Club (Toni Gibbs’s favorite) and became close with her. He said he took Kimbrew out to dinner at least once.

  According to Wardrip, the murder occurred Tuesday morning, May 6, when he went to Kimbrew’s apartment to ask if he could stay with her a few days. She said no. An argument ensued, and he killed her.

  Police records show that as officers drove Wardrip back to Wichita Falls from Galveston, the prisoner mentioned that he knew Ellen Blau. No follow-up action was taken at that time. Apparently, no one thought to connect the Kimbrew case with any of the other three, unsolved, local homicides.

  Wardrip acted deeply remorseful for the Kimbrew killing and pled guilty in exchange for a thirty-five-year sentence. He served eleven years before being paroled in December 1997. That was about four months after I had submitted my profile in the Sims, Gibbs, and Blau cases. The terms of Wardrip’s parole included wearing an ankle bracelet to permit constant monitoring and a restriction on his movements to work, home, and church.

  Upon his release, Wardrip moved to the little Texas town of Olney, where he had family members living. He went to work at the Olney Door and Screen Company, remarried, and became very active in the local Church of Christ. He began teaching Sunday school and told acquaintances he was studying for the ministry.

  When the subject of his long imprisonment arose, Wardrip sometimes told people that the crime was a vehicular homicide. Other times he said the sentence had resulted from a tragic bar fight. “He’d climb a tree to lie before telling the truth on the ground,” says Carlton Stowers, the Texas author who has written a book on the Wardrip case.

  After developing this dossier, John Little proposed a search warrant for DNA. But prosecutor Macha declined, saying they still had too little probable cause to seek such a warrant. In order to get the necessary tissue sample, Little would have to secure his specimen the hard way. Under Texas’s abandoned-property statute, anything someone discards—such as garbage put out for collection—is no longer considered private property and can legally be taken.

  Detective Little drove to Olney and put Wardrip under surveillance, awaiting his chance. Because of Wardrip’s restricted movements, opportunities were few. After several days of frustration, Little decided to settle in at a laundry across Olney’s main street from the Door and Screen Company to await his chance.

  A week passed. Then one day the new Mrs. Wardrip drove up during her husband’s morning break. He got into the front seat with her and ate a snack of coffee and a package of peanut butter crackers. When break time was over, Wardrip exited the car, finished his coffee, and discarded the used paper cup in a blue trash barrel on his way back to work.

  Here was Little’s chance. The investigator, a snuff chewer, jammed a wad of tobacco in his mouth and then ran across the street. Pointing at the blue barrel, he asked Wardrip if he could fetch out his used coffee cup for a spit cup.

  “Help yourself,” said Wardrip, and John Little did. I admire innovative thinking, and Little’s actions that day certainly earned my respect.

  The DNA extracted from Faryion Wardrip’s saliva in the paper coffee cup matched that of the person who had killed Terry Sims and Toni Gibbs. After fifteen long years, the cases finally were solved.

  Authorities decided that the best way to bring Wardrip into custody was through his parole officer in Wichita Falls. He was asked to call Wardrip in Olney and request that Wardrip come to Wichita Falls for a meeting. Wardrip, who had been lobbying hard to have his ankle monitor removed, apparently thought the meeting would address that issue.

  He showed up at the appointed hour on Saturday, February 13, 1999, and discovered John Little waiting for him. Later that day Wardrip was taken to the DA’s office and arrested for the two murders.

  In custody, Wardrip at first said nothing. Then his wife visited him with the news that a local paper was reporting the DNA match to Sims and Gibbs. After hearing that, Wardrip summoned John Little to the jail.

  On the morning of February 16, 1999, Wardrip sat down in front of a tape recorder for fifty minutes with John Little and Paul Smith, an investigator for the Archer County district attorney. He had a lot to tell them.

  After reading Wardrip his Miranda rights and other preliminaries, Little asked the prisoner about Terry Sims.

  Wardrip began by explaining that he had been using intravenous drugs at the time of the Sims murder, and that he had been out walki
ng that night after a fight with his wife. “As I was walking,” he went on, “she [Sims] was at her door. I went up to the door and forced my way in. Well, [I] just ransacked her, just slung her all over the house in a violent rage. Stripped her down and murdered her.”

  Little asked Wardrip to explain his rage.

  “I thought my family hated me. I hated them. My wife kept coming in and out of my life. She’d come to me when times were good, and then when times got hard she’d leave… I thought everybody was out to get me. The drugs made me paranoid… I would just reach a boiling point. But the crazy thing about it was, I was so mad at my wife [but] I never done [sic] anything to her. But I was just so mad and so angered.”

  Wardrip said he could remember very little about the crime, including whether he had sexually assaulted Sims or where he’d gotten the knife. All he knew for certain, he said, was that he had killed her.

  Paul Smith asked about Toni Gibbs.

  “Yeah,” Wardrip replied. “Again I was out walking, been out walking all night. Somehow I was downtown… It was starting to get daylight and, uh, I was walking up toward the hospital and Toni knew me and she asked me if I wanted a ride and I said yeah.

  “We got in the car and she gave me a ride and, uh, I started basically in on her. I started seeing images of anger and hatred and it just clicked off and I told her to drive out the road there. I don’t remember which direction we were going. I just told her to drive.”

  Wardrip recalled it was cold that February dawn but claimed no recollection of the abandoned trolley where he killed Toni Gibbs. “When I’m in those rages, I just black out. I just don’t remember. I don’t remember that,” he said.

  “I just grabbed her and started trying to sling her around the car and she swerved off the side of the road… and she turned down a dirt road and I still had her by her jacket and I was just slinging her, just slinging her, and I was screaming as loud as I can at her and, uh, I told her to stop and she stopped. I did the same thing. I took off her clothes and I stabbed her.”

  “Did you have sex with Toni Gibbs?” Smith asked.

  “I don’t really remember. I remember screaming at her, screaming at her, screaming at her that I hate you. I don’t remember if I had sex. I just remember screaming and screaming and screaming how much I hate you, how much I hated everybody.”

  John Little reminded Wardrip he had said he knew Toni Gibbs. “How did Toni know you?” Little asked.

  “From the hospital,” Wardrip replied. “She never had anything to do with me. I just knew her from there. It could have been anybody. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time… I never set my sights on anybody. I would just get so mad and I would just get out and walk, be in such a rage. I would just scream at the sky, scream at the trees, scream at God.

  “Then I would just lay down for a while and sleep, and then I’d see it on the news and [realize] that something must have happened real bad. I tricked myself [into] thinking it wasn’t me… I just blocked it out of my mind, wouldn’t even want to think about it for a long, long, long time.”

  Little turned the conversation to Ellen Blau.

  “Same thing,” said Wardrip. “I’d just be out walking, just walking.” He said he saw Blau turn her car into a store parking lot and followed her. “I asked her what she was doing. She said she was looking for somebody, and I just grabbed her and pushed her back into her car.

  “We drove out to a road… and I just started grabbing her and screaming at her, I hate you… I had drug her out of the car and took her in a field and stripped her clothes off, but I don’t remember how she died. I don’t believe I raped her. I don’t recall. She probably broke her neck because I sure was slinging her. I was just so mad and angry….”

  Wardrip explained that he had seen his wife’s face as he was assaulting the women. “I hated her so much. It’s just like with Tina. I was screaming at her, and I had my arm across her throat. I was screaming at her bloody murder. I didn’t see Tina’s face; I saw hers. I was so consumed with hatred. I never hit them though. That’s what really threw me. I wonder why I didn’t, but I never struck. Just like my wife. I never hit her.”

  Wardrip wasn’t finished. “There is one more,” he told Little and Smith. “It ain’t here though.” He confessed to a fifth homicide, one for which he had not been a suspect, the March 25, 1985, murder in Fort Worth, Texas, of Debra Taylor, a wife and mother.

  Wardrip said that following Terry Sims’s murder he went to Fort Worth for a while looking for work. One night he met Taylor at a local honky-tonk.

  “[She was] coming on to me,” he insisted. “We went out to the parking lot around back and I made my advance toward her and she said no and she slapped my face, and when she did that I just snapped and I grabbed her and I slung her around and I done the same thing to her that she did to me. And I killed her.”

  “How did you kill her?” asked Little.

  “I think I strangled her. I had her on the ground, and I think I used my forearm.” Wardrip continued, “I put her in the car, took her up the interstate and found the first road and just, uh, threw her out.”

  One of the most remarkable aspects of this extraordinary story is the speed with which the UNSUB of a fifteen-year-old serial murder case was identified and brought to justice.

  In early January 1999, when John Little had begun his cold-case review, Barry Macha had nothing more to go on than a DNA match between the Sims and Gibbs cases and my belief that Ellen Blau was killed by the same person. By early February John Little had obtained his DNA sample from Wardrip.

  Within eleven days, Wardrip had confessed to four killings and had been charged with capital murder by a Wichita County Grand Jury in the Sims and Blau cases. On the first day of his trial for murdering Terry Sims, Wardrip entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to death by lethal injection. By the end of the year, he was on death row, with life sentences in the three other homicides.

  The wheels of justice may have been slow to grind in Faryion Wardrip’s case, but once they got started, the outcome was satisfying, swift, and sure.

  12

  Linkage Analysis

  My report to the Wichita Falls prosecutor was a hybrid analysis; it combined a profile with related elements of what I call linkage analysis. Besides the portrait I drew of the UNSUB, I also analyzed the three murders for behavioral clues to see if they were linked, i.e., was the same killer responsible for all three homicides?

  I always set high standards of behavioral proof for linkage analyses. I will not testify in court that two or more homicides are the work of a single killer unless I can document a unique combination of MO and ritual behaviors. The three Wichita Falls cases certainly had plenty of behavioral similarities, but without more complete forensic information in the Blau homicide, I wasn’t prepared to make a definitive judgment.

  At the time of the Wardrip matter, I had already worked on a large number of cases involving linkage analyses. In most instances there were at least three crimes to analyze, and generally they were grouped together, both geographically and chronologically. But not always. A midwestern state case offered an interesting challenge.

  Several years ago I was retained by an attorney to conduct a linkage analysis in a civil liability suit that had grown out of a strange and savage murder. This homicide had a bizarre feature I hadn’t seen before and haven’t since—two of the victim’s teeth had been taken from her mouth.

  The case began just before 6:00 A.M. on a cold and snowy winter Saturday. As a police officer pulled into his station, he discovered a sports car parked improbably on the facility’s front lawn. The driver’s-side door was open, and a woman was lying on her back on the ground, her feet resting inside the car.

  She was thirty-one-year-old Juliet Cruz,* and she had been shot with a handgun. She also had an extraordinary story to tell—after she was hospitalized—of how she had been shot, and why she was lying on the cold ground next to her car in front of a police station
that Saturday morning.

  The young woman explained that just a few minutes before the officer discovered her, she had been innocently driving along the highway on her way to visit her sick father. Cruz said that she had just turned onto the interstate when in the distance she saw a man exit the driver’s side of a dark blue subcompact that was parked at the side of the road. He was headed across the highway toward a late-model sedan that had its emergency flashers on.

  Then Juliet saw a woman jump out the passenger side of the blue car. She waved Juliet to a stop, got into the startled woman’s car, and blurted out a harrowing tale.

  Her name was Rose Morrison.* Two hours earlier, Morrison said, she had been driving along the same stretch of the interstate when the sedan suddenly had bumped her left front fender, running her off the road. The sedan’s driver, a black man, at first behaved as if he wanted to help her. But then he drew a gun and took her to another location where, she said, he raped her for two hours and “used the gun on her during the rape,” according to Juliet Cruz’s later statement.

  As Rose Morisson recounted her ordeal, Juliet cautiously steered her sports car back out onto the snow-covered highway—her top speed that morning was 40 mph—and headed north. When Juliet looked into her rearview mirror, she was stunned to see the sedan bearing down on her from behind.

  The driver pulled abreast of her car and began shooting at Cruz with a handgun. Juliet drove onto an exit ramp, looking for a policeman. By this time the man had swung his car around to the other side of her vehicle and was shooting again.

  One bullet hit Cruz, paralyzing her from the waist down. She saw the police station at the same moment and aimed her car straight for it, ending up on the front lawn.