by P. D. Martin
“Files.” Darren nods toward the two piles. “What about you, find anything in Malcolm’s client list?”
“Not yet. I’m waiting on a few return calls.” She holds up her cell phone.
Darren takes about ten files from the top of his batch and tosses them onto the table in front of Stone. “In that case, have fun.”
She flips open the first one. “Cool.” She only reads for a few seconds before she reaches into her inside pocket and takes out some sheets of typed paper. “And this is the profile Agent Evans from VICAP e-mailed through.”
The Bureau has been tracking this woman for a while and one of the profilers from my unit had already drafted a profile for the VICAP consultants and the relevant cops, but it was before my time.
“I’m going to start with the case files, then the profile.” I hand it to Darren who starts reading it immediately. I prefer to establish my own picture of the killer first, then see what another profiler has come up with. It can be dangerous to start making psychological assumptions before you’ve got all the information, all the facts. If you start doing that, you can get sidetracked, forcing your mind down a certain path. Then you can become too attached to one theory, one image of the killer.
I look back at my first file, the first kill, Cameron Michaels. I always like to spend time on a killer’s first victim. I look at the photos of a naked man handcuffed to a bed. Soon, I’m buried in her world, the killer’s world.
By 5:00 p.m. we’ve completed an initial pass of the files, horrified that this woman has been at large for so long, taking so many lives.
“How has she gotten away with it all these years?” Stone asks incredulously.
Darren leans back in his chair. “Beats me. She’s certainly racked up the numbers.”
“And you definitely think this is the same woman?” Stone looks at me.
“The black rose detail wasn’t released to the press or families. She’s made changes, some unusual changes, but the manual strangulation with small hands, handcuffs, it’s a match.”
“But the heart shape isn’t,” Stone says.
Darren plays devil’s advocate too. “And we’ve still got a woman carrying all two-hundred and fifteen pounds of Malcolm to the campus dump site.”
“The love heart is new. Unusual,” I concede. “And as for dumping the body, like Stone said, it wasn’t far from the road to the dump site. Difficult, yes. Impossible, no.”
We move on.
“My stack had some of the older ones.” Darren pats the top file. “We’ve got DNA in three of the cases from the nineties, but no sample to match it against.”
“The DNA evidence will be good for a conviction when we track her down,” I say.
“Now that’s confidence.” Stone points at me.
I smile. “Hope is probably a better word. I’m stubborn. I like to get my man…or woman.”
“Don’t we all.” Darren stands up to stretch. “But some perps get away.”
I hide my reaction by moving my clenched fists under the table. There’s one that got away that I don’t like to think about, the man who kidnapped and murdered my brother when I was eight. The guy was never caught. “But maybe one of these days something new will surface, something to catch them out,” I manage to say.
Darren thinks I’m talking about this case, the VICAP files, but I’m thinking more about my brother’s killer, and my never-ending hope that something new will surface in his case. Then I’d be on the first plane home.
Every year since I became a cop and got access to his case file I go over it. But nothing new ever strikes me. Maybe I can use my psychic abilities to crack the case. Until now, it’s never occurred to me to try.
“Let’s get these babies in order,” Darren says, bringing me back to the case at hand.
All in all we’ve got twenty murders that VICAP attributes to the one killer, this femme fatale. Malcolm makes twenty-one.
Once we rearrange the files into chronological order, the killer’s base usually becomes obvious. But in this case, the pattern seems to be random. We’ve got murders in California, Texas, Nevada and Colorado, but the locations chop and change between the four states with no obvious pattern. “She moves around a bit,” I say.
Stone leans forward. “Maybe she moves for work.” She flicks through the spines of the files with a short fingernail. “Twenty-one murders over the past fifteen years. I wonder if she’s planning on retiring any time soon.”
“She’s been around for a while, but hardly retirement age,” I say.
Stone’s hand rests on the top file. “How old do you think we’re talking here?”
I take a breath and do the math in my head. “Let’s say she started in her late teens or early twenties, like most serial killers do—that would place her in her mid-thirties.”
“She sure doesn’t have a problem attracting good-looking young men.”
Stone’s right. It’s one thing the victims all have in common. They tend to be attractive, well-built and in their late teens or early twenties.
Darren shrugs. “Men are suckers for sex.”
Stone crosses her arms. “Men. Your dicks sure do get you into trouble.” She takes a file off the pile and flicks through it randomly. “So, where to next?”
Darren takes the file from her. “You’re going home, Stone.”
She glances at her watch. “It’s only six.”
Darren glares at her.
“I do my best work after six.”
“What time were you here till last night?”
“Late,” Stone admits.
“So, vamoose.” Darren waves the file in a shooing motion.
Stone stands up, somewhat reluctantly. “All right already. I’m going.” She loiters in the same spot. “What about you guys? You should call it a night, too.”
Darren smiles. “Goodnight, Stone.”
She stays still for a few seconds before heading off.
Darren puts the file back on the table. “She’s a good kid.”
“She’s hardly a kid, Darren. What is she, twenty-six?”
“Something like that.” Darren walks over to the project room’s whiteboard and flips it around so he’s got a fresh board. He starts scribbling notes, talking as he writes.
“So, 1992 to now.” He puts an arrow on the end of 1992 to indicate continuing action. “Twenty-one…so she’s averaging, like one and a quarter every year.” He writes Victim type on the whiteboard. He looks at me, but starts the process off himself. “In their late teens and early twenties. Across races.”
“Yes, I noticed that. Our girl’s politically correct.”
Darren closes his eyes, trying to recall the case details. “Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic.”
“And don’t forget the Swede who was out here on holiday.”
“How could I forget that poor bastard? Not much of a vacation.”
“No.” According to the file, he’d come out for a one-month trip in July 1998 and was found dead two days before he was due to fly back to Stockholm. Sometimes this job really makes me believe in fate.
Darren adds the different ethnic backgrounds to the list. “All the victims were last sighted in bars, but in most cases no one can remember seeing them with a specific woman.” Darren writes Bars on the board.
“Now that’s the strange part. Surely she must have picked them up in those bars. Spent time with them before they moved on to a private location.”
“You’d think so. For the ones when the vic was sighted with a woman on the night of his death, the descriptions of that woman vary significantly.”
I flip through the files, scanning some of the descriptions. “People can change their appearance. If she wears wigs, for example.”
“But the height varies too.”
“Heels,” I say. “The height only varies by a few inches. That could easily be the difference between flats and high heels. Then on top of that, factor in different people’s estimates. A person’s actually fi
ve-eight, but I guess five-seven and you guess five-nine.”
“True.” Darren writes Disguises on the board with a dash and Wigs next to it. Next he writes up Heels. “So her normal MO is basically that she picks them up, takes them to a motel, handcuffs them, has sex with them and strangles them during the act.”
I nod.
Darren writes MO on the very right-hand side of the board, and catches up with our conversation, scribbling down the details.
I look at the whiteboard. “The real question is, why was he dumped at a college instead of found in some motel room? That discrepancy concerns me.”
“It is a major departure from her MO.” Darren taps the marker against the whiteboard.
I stand up and stretch. “Actually, it’s stranger than that. The motel room and the way she leaves them, still naked and handcuffed, that’s more than MO, that’s signature stuff. Not to mention the rose. She has to see them like that, lifeless, handcuffed to the bed. To her it represents ultimate power over them and their sexuality. Perhaps male sexuality in general.” I pause. “Our guy doesn’t fit. He was in the open, and naked, but why not in a motel room?”
We’re both silent, unable to come up with an explanation.
“And don’t forget the love heart,” Darren says. “Another anomaly.”
Again, a depressing silence.
Darren glances at the wall clock. “Maybe we should call it a day, too.”
It’s not exactly late, but I am wrecked. “I don’t feel like we’ve got very far.”
Darren sits down again and leans back, hands behind his head. “What about the profile, then? You want to talk about that?”
“Sure.” I search for the folded pages on the table among the chaos and eventually find them. I read through the pages but find my mind wandering—a sign of my tiredness.
Sex:
Female
Age:
Chronological: 30-35
Emotional age: 25-30
Race:
Difficult to determine. Shows preference for African-American victims so perhaps African-American?
Type of offender:
Organized—well-planned murders, MO and signature remain consistent over time and crime scenes. Highly intelligent.
Low risk—murder seems to occur under pretence or during a one-night stand.
Occupation/employment:
Killer is hunting across all socioeconomic groups, making it difficult to pin down her own status, but the fact that she easily attracts white-collar guys indicates she’s probably white collar herself.
Travels with her work.
Sales a strong possibility.
Marital status:
Single but very sexually active.
If she travels with her job it’s possible she’s married and the men she has sex with are affairs, one-night stands on the road.
Dependants:
No—under-developed sense of responsibility make it unlikely she’s a mother.
Childhood:
Probably the youngest child—acting on sex and power drives rather than having a developed sense of responsibility. Indicates an older sibling looked out for her. But that older sibling was absent in later life—rift or maybe even death.
Very smart, so probably good at school. Sexually active from an early age and saw sex as power. This is her motivation—power over men. May have been sexually abused and wants to turn that around—her victims also represent her childhood at-tacker.
Victims also give her attention—something she craves. This may be due to emotional abuse growing up or a sense of a sibling being the favored child, particularly in her father’s eyes.
Personality:
Charming, extroverted, flirtatious.
Disabilities:
None.
Interaction with victims:
Victims are victims of opportunity. No stalking prior to night of murder, but some stalking on the night of at-tack.
MO indicates she chooses vulnerable victims at bars—those who are on the lookout for sex and/or who are intoxicated.
Remorse:
No—victims left out in the open, still handcuffed on the motel-room bed.
She doesn’t respect the men she chooses and possibly has no respect for any man.
She wants others to see the men in their final stages of degradation.
They paid for their sexual desires with their lives.
Home life:
Lives alone if single, or possibly with partner.
Lives in small house.
Car:
Sports car? Enjoys a “racy” life and this could be part of her image.
She also doesn’t need a more practical vehicle for transporting bodies, because she leaves them in the motel room.
Intelligence:
High IQ.
Education level:
Not clear. She may be able to pick up educated men through her looks and the promise of sex rather than them seeing her as an equal. Victims cross all education levels—from not finishing high school to college-educated.
Outward appearance:
Well-presented and groomed.
Overtly sexual in her clothes and appearance.
Criminal background:
Long history of murder.
No adult criminal record but probably a juvenile record.
Modus operandi (MO):
Watches the victim at a bar.
Uses disguises while she’s targeting a victim.
Picks up the victim either inside the bar or outside—less witnesses.
Takes the victim back to a motel room with promise of sex.
Checks in under a false name.
Signature:
Handcuffs.
Strangulation during sex.
Leaving body in the open, handcuffed and still naked.
Black rose draped across bed.
Post-offensive behavior:
Posing elements of the signature—rose.
Leaves the motel as soon as he’s been killed. She likes to see the victims in their shame, but doesn’t need to stay in the room with them.
Media tactics:
Don’t think this killer will follow the media. She’s not overtly egotistical and doesn’t need to relive the kill through the media’s reports. Will only show minimal interest in coverage of her crimes.
“Well, what do you think?” Darren’s now standing and twisting from side to side.
“Sore back?” I ask.
“A little.”
I know how he feels. My shoulders and lower back are both tender—not surprising given the amount of time I’ve spent on airplanes in the past few days.
“The profile’s good. But we may need to make amendments for Malcolm and why she’s changed her MO and signature.” I start a yawn andstand uptostretch. Afterabout aminute I force myself back into the seat. “Let’s go through this now.” There are a few areas I’d like to revise, the first is race. I lean over and point to it on the profile. “The original profiler suggested maybe African-American, but I’m not so sure given the cross-section of her victims.” In general, male serial killers hunt within their own race: if the victims are all black women, you’re looking for a black man; if the victims are Caucasian, the perp usually is, too. But we don’t have many stats on female killers. The victims fall across different races but there are more African-American men than any others. But does that mean she’s black? Lots of white women are attracted to African-American men.
Darren’s with me. “It is unusual. I guess not all the serial-killer rules apply, given she’s a woman?” He turns the last part into an open-ended question.
“We’re not in totally uncharted territory, but we don’t have detailed road maps either.”
The analogy seems to make sense to Darren. “So we can’t assume she’s black.”
“Definitely not.” I pause. “And some of the standard victim rules don’t apply either. These guys—” I point to the files“—are all high risk.”
&n
bsp; Darren raises an eyebrow. “But—”
I put my hand up. “I know, high-risk victims are traditionally women who are easier to target. Prostitutes, or younger girls who just aren’t streetwise. But the fact that the guys she targets want sex and are under the influence…that makes them high-risk when a predator like our girl is around.”
Darren slowly nods. “Okay, I can see where you’re going with this. We’ve got to think backward because she’s a woman.”
“Right. The factors that make a woman a high-risk victim are different than what makes a man a high-risk victim.” I let out a small breath. “But the crimes themselves are low-risk. She’s got her motel setup, she uses disguises, in most bars she’d have lots of men to choose from, and once she gets them back to the motel room, she handcuffs them. Her risk of exposure is low, as long as her disguises are good.”
“Which they appear to be, given our different descriptions.”
I move back to the profile and the next area is type of offender. Based on the way a crime is committed, we usually classify perps as either disorganized or organized offenders. In our case the crimes are well planned, the murders are controlled to an extent, restraints are used and the killer’s obviously smart. All add up to an organized offender. I don’t go through this with Darren—he’s worked a few serials and he’s seen profiles before. He knows the drill.
I put my finger on the next part of the profile—employment. “This part’s a little blurry.”
Darren reads it through. “She’s hunting across different socioeconomic groups.” He pauses. “A builder, a barman, a sales exec, a doctor, a computer geek, an escort…”
He rattles off only six of the twenty-one victims in terms of occupation, but it demonstrates the issue. Like the race, it’s difficult to cross-match her against her victim type. Male serial killers tend to target specific types of women.
