Ned looked at the photo, turned, and walked away.
If you’re interested in reading the complete story of Ned’s life and crimes, my publisher has re-issued my book about him, “I’ll Be Watching You.”
Epilogue
JANE GOODWIN’S MURDER, LIKE MOST OF THE unsolved cases I profile on “Dark Minds,” is solvable. With the way in which DNA works today, we could hear down the road that Ned had nothing to do with Jane’s murder and it was a random act of violence. That conclusion would not surprise me. My point with profiling Ned for this crime is that I cannot exclude Ned from Jane’s murder. Until I can exclude him, based on what we know about Ned and his crimes and close contact to this case, we have to include him.
A major part of what I do in the series is about people coming forward with information they might have in these crimes. My job is not to solve cases. I am not a cop. For me, this is about gathering information. It doesn’t matter how insignificant or significant you think the information you might have is. Let the cops sort it out. Murder victims matter. They had lives before the devil’s claws hooked into them. Their lives were not disposable. They should NEVER be forgotten. Help the authorities solve this case. Give Jane’s family some peace and allow Jane’s memory what it deserves.
Justice.
If you want more information about “Dark Minds” (or you have any tips for this case), please go to the Investigation Discovery website or visit the “Dark Minds” Facebook page
THE EASTBOUND STRANGLER
by M. William Phelps
Introduction
THIS E-BOOK SHORT IS A BEHIND-THE-SCENES look at the investigation and production process involved in filming my Investigation Discovery series, “Dark Minds.” My hope in writing these shorts is to give the viewer of the series a deeper understanding of what I do, how I go about choosing cases, and why my involvement in these unsolved murders is, of course, for the purposes of entertaining an audience on television. But more importantly, it’s my hope to shed new light on cold cases—some of which have gone unsolved for nearly 40 years—and, with any luck, unearth new information. With the public’s help, serial murder cases are solvable. That is the model we work under on “Dark Minds.”
Each case I chose for this series was done with the help of my production company, Beyond Productions, and what is the best group of people in television at Investigation Discovery. Each focuses on a series of murders that I believed needed the careful and renewed attention of a hungry investigator willing to bang on doors, ask tough questions, reach out to the people who didn’t want to talk to police, and uncover information that could further the investigation along.
Our hope is to reignite a stagnant investigation, not to walk into town and point fingers. I didn’t want to play in the same box as other journalists had before me, and even some investigators, as a particular case evolved. What purpose would questioning the work of others serve? My aim was to rattle the cage of the case with the hope that, along with the assistance of the public and my expertise and experience, a little bird flew out and led police in the right direction.
In some of these cases, I worked very closely with police; in others, I walked a fine line between talking to the family members of victims, interviewing witnesses (and even suspects), and being led astray by knuckleheads. I did so knowing all the while that I would hand over anything of significance I found to law enforcement. My goal—always—is to help law enforcement, never to get in the way, or mock and make enemies of those people. Any cop I have ever interviewed can attest to my integrity and personal belief that murder cases are about the victims, their families, and the justice both deserve. My intention is to help families and victims of crime heal by providing answers—and, as a bonus, hopefully help to put scumbag killers in prison, where they belong.
The idea of involving an actual serial killer in this hunt was something I had wanted to do for a long time. The information and insight only a (convicted and imprisoned) serial killer can add is so important when hunting these creeps, simply because non-sociopaths like you or me do not think the same way as a serial killer (sociopath/psychopath). I don’t feel people in general give that idea enough credence. A sociopath views the world differently. In order to understand that dark mind, and hopefully gain some insight into it (obtaining information that can help solve cases—yes, like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs). So who better to ask than someone who has walked in those same evil footsteps?
“13,” his code name on “Dark Minds,” is a unique individual in this regard, and it took John Kelly, the expert profiler I return to in every episode, ten years of conversations to understand how this killer could help—not through a television show, mind you, but in Kelly’s work (the TV show came later). I don’t want to get too far into this thread of “Dark Minds” here in my e-books, because I believe Kelly does the best job during the series of explaining 13’s role. And, obviously, 13 speaks for himself quite emphatically and chillingly.
All that said, please enjoy this brief exclusive look at the series from my perspective as I go out and hunt these wackos. But understand that what you are about to read is my opinion. It is not the opinion of Investigation Discovery, Beyond Productions, John Kelly, or anyone else involved in “Dark Minds.” The e-book shorts accompanying the series are my own creation, the content based solely on my own findings and those interviews I conducted for the show and behind the scenes as I got to know my sources. I took extensive notes every day while on the road. I collected thousands of pages of documents. My intention is not to claim superiority over anyone, to speak for anyone, or to undermine other opinions on the same cases. I am merely writing about my personal experiences, feelings and recollections as I recall them.
Any mistakes, errors, misquotes, etc., are on me. I accept responsibility. I simply want viewers of “Dark Minds” to be able to enjoy a deeper experience within the context of my work on the series. I hope these e-book shorts can accomplish that.
Chapter 1
THEY WERE WALKING ALONG A SERVICE ROAD between the Atlantic City Expressway and Black Horse Pike, in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey. The dirt road was deserted, garbage strewn all over the place. Weeds ran waist-high and thick. The oddly fragrant juxtaposition of seawater, car exhaust and filth permeated the air. On one side of the dirt road they could see the back walls of the sleazy weekly/monthly/hourly motels; on the other, they could see a small drainage ditch, about fifteen feet across, a few feet deep, feeding into Lakes Bay maybe a half-mile upstream. Cars whizzed by on the expressway, while the train tracks between the thruway and the small chasm of slowly running water provided an avenue for the incoming locomotives transporting gamblers, well-wishers and runaways into Emerald City.
The last thing the girls expected to see while going about their day was a dead woman. Her bare feet stuck out of the brush, her head pointed toward the water, and her clothed body fit to the contour of the sloping bank. Her eyes, cast to the east, were wide open and cloudy, like fish in supermarket snow.
“Me and my friend were taking a walk on the path by the railroad tracks,” one of the girls said to the 911 operator. “There’s a dead woman down there.”
It was November 20, 2006.
That call led local authorities to the bodies of four dead women. Apparently, the work of the Eastbound Strangler, as he would soon be known, had been exposed—and the hunt was on.
From the best law enforcement could tell, one of the dead women had been strangled. Another died of asphyxia. But two additional bodies were in such a state of decomposition that figuring out their causes of death with any precision would be mere guesswork. Each female had been left along that slight bank formed along the drainage ditch just outside Atlantic City with her head facing toward the city. Each was fully clothed, except for shoes and socks. Three of the victims were said to be prostitutes, and all were reportedly drug users. An early news report concluded that they were found approximately sixty feet from one another and that
their deaths had been spread out one week apart.
I didn’t believe that report when I heard it, and confirmed my suspicions after being on the ground, talking to police sources and seeing an aerial photograph of the bodies and how they were spread out.
First, the girls were not equally spaced apart, as if a killer was sending a cryptic message by placing them exactly sixty feet from one another. Second, who could say that the two women whose bodies were so badly decomposed had been murdered? There was, after all, no evidence (other than an assumption) that they had been killed in similar fashion to the others.
What interested me initially was that a law enforcement task force had spent upwards of 200,000 man-hours investigating this case (an investigation that is still open) between 2006 and 2011 and no arrests had been made. With that kind of attention put on a case and still no viable perpetrator sitting behind bars, my first thought was that I was dealing with a potential structured serial killer with above-average intelligence—but, maybe, not as smart as he (or them) had seemed to be at first glance. On balance, at least in a lot of the cases I have studied, there is some luck involved for these guys. And killers, like machinists and accountants, get better at what they do the more they do it.
“We find what works best,” one infamous serial killer told me, “and we stick to it.”
It had been at least twenty years since I had taken a trip on a train. After shooting an episode (“The Valley Killer”) of “Dark Minds” in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, I opted for the train from my office in Connecticut to Atlantic City, knowing that I had a tremendous amount of travel in planes and automobiles ahead of me for the duration of the series shoot (eight episodes). I felt it would give me time to think. Here I was, out of my office, doing what I did best: hunting murderers. The ride would allow me the opportunity to get into the mindset of this perpetrator and begin—as I had been trained to by my serial killer profiling mentor, John Kelly—to think like him.
“There’s a good chance,” Kelly told me before I left, “you’ll come face to face with the guy you’re hunting down there. I believe you are going to be sitting and interviewing him. You better be ready for that.”
Kelly had worked this case back in the day. It was the profile his company had written that tagged this killer as the Eastbound Strangler because of the Atlantic City Expressway along the ditch where the women had been found, along with the sensationalized theory that the girls’ heads were facing east for a reason only the killer knew. It seems to me that most high-profile serial killer investigations, once the media sinks its claws into the case, take on a construction of their own. There needs to be, for some reason, a diabolical killer with deep-seated ulterior motives rooted in his psyche at play. It’s that ticking-clock syndrome that Hollywood has injected into the mix over the years.
I believe that some people are just fucking evil and like to watch people suffer. And they don’t need any reason for that other than their own sick, psychological needs being met within the madness they create. It can be that simple.
Kelly had contacts. He knew Atlantic City. He grew up and lived in New Jersey most of his life. Kelly had been in the business of catching serial killers for twenty years and had worked with the New Jersey State Police and FBI on several high-profile cases, including the Green River Killer, the Unabomber, and John Wayne Gacy, to name only a few.
Thinking things through as I traveled from Connecticut to Atlantic City, the one item that stood out to me most—beyond, that is, realizing how looking at the underbelly of most major cities from the viewpoint of a train is akin to staring into the bottom of a Dumpster—was how proficient this killer had been. He was able to presumably kill four women, transport their bodies to a rather busy area of Egg Harbor Township along the Black Horse Pike, just on the outskirts of Atlantic City, and place each girl methodically in a precise position.
All without being seen.
He knows this town, the terrain, the ebb and flow of the area, I thought. Where cops hang out. And where they don’t hang out.
Kelly met me at the train depot in Atlantic City and drove us to one of the major casino hotels. It was cool that day. Sunny. As soon as I got into Kelly’s car and we made our way toward the city, I could sense some childhood memories bubbling. As a youngster, I vacationed here with family. That was the in the late seventies and early eighties. Atlantic City’s heyday. There was money and bright lights and happy people gorging themselves at the buffets, blowing college-fund money and mortgage payments on the slots, and going to those silly cabaret shows in the ballrooms of the casinos. The beaches were clean and vendors were friendly and helpful. The taffy was sticky and salty. The riffraff was hidden away somewhere; you knew they were there, but you never saw them. Tourists came in by the thousands, and the casinos had money to burn.
It was that smell—musty and reminiscent of week-old garbage—that brought it all back for me as soon as we approached the Boardwalk. The stench had never left this place, I realized as I got out of the car.
Maybe, I considered, the city hadn’t changed.
Wishful thinking. Truth was: the Indian casinos of Connecticut and Pennsylvania had drained the life out of this place. It was a dead zone. The city’s upkeep had suffered. Nothing had been updated or repainted. The strip—Pacific Avenue—had a dirty and unkempt feel to it, like an abandoned building overtaken by weeds. The hotels were empty. The band names in lights (Chicago, Tony Orlando & Dawn, etc.) told the story of how maybe these entertainers who should have been put out to pasture long ago were still milking fizzling careers. Residents looked tired, sick, and pretty much waiting for a demolition ball to tell them the city was closing, and to get the hell out while they can. I thought how Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop and Frank Sinatra once called this place home while they played to sold-out audiences at the Resorts Casino for weeks on end. Now, I looked around and saw such A-listers as Don Rickles (a man I could have sworn was dead), and the big draw of the week, Seth Meyers.
Atlantic City, I realized, had changed. This was not the city of my youth. The life had been sucked out of this place. The sun shone, but it felt dark and gloomy all the time, as if a depression had consumed the entire town and its people. I could see how these murders had not surprised residents, because it seemed like the kind of place in which a serial murderer could thrive. When you do what I do long enough, and you come into a town, you can almost sense the evil looming in the infrastructure. And here, where gambling, drugs and prostitution were all that was keeping the city from imploding, that darkness—so heavy and obvious—was what I had come to embrace and settle into.
Chapter 2
JOHN KELLY SPORTS A SWATH OF SILVER-WHITE hair that works for him. He looks the part. Kelly, an addiction specialist/therapist by trade, has a congenial demeanor that makes you want to open up and talk about yourself. Kelly has been a friend and mentor for years. He’s one of the best people I know, and I love the guy. He thinks differently than me, especially where it pertains to profiling serial murderers and crime scenes. It’s one reason we make such a great team. Kelly’s cause is to educate the world about child abuse and how it greatly influences children to grow into violent, self-loathing adults—and sometimes even serial killers. How can one argue with a guy whose lot in life has become spreading the word that child abuse is the worst disease there is—and the fact that nobody is really doing much to put an end to it.
“Not every abused child grows up to be a serial killer,” Kelly likes to say. “But every serial killer we study tells us he’s been sexually abused.”
It was nice to see Kelly in Atlantic City under these circumstances. We were here to help catch a monster. Kelly’s role—along with a friend of his, a big guy with a big gun—was to watch my back for a few days and make a few introductions.
Most of my memories, probably because of the place I was in emotionally while in search of a serial killer, involved my oldest brother Mark, his better half Diana, my mother and f
ather, and our summer vacations in Atlantic City. The adults would drink, gamble and fight; I would find a game room and somebody to buy me some booze so I could have my own little party under the Boardwalk. It was interesting to me, as I took in the city for the first time in nearly thirty years, how my life had come full circle. Here I was in Atlantic City, investigating a presumed serial murder case in which several of the victims were so-called prostitutes. My brother’s common-law wife, Diana, had been not only like these women, but she was also murdered (in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1996) by what we at first believed was a serial killer (her case remains unsolved).
I call Diana my sister-in-law because it’s characteristic of her role in our lives. She and my brother, although they were together some twenty years, never officially married. That’s because they could never stay sober long enough to see it through. Diana was a fixture in our lives. She and my brother, who died some years after her, left three kids—my niece and two nephews. Their lives were a tragedy.
During her best days, Diana was a beautiful woman with striking blonde hair (nearly down to her waistline, Crystal Gayle-like), a round, baby face, blemish-free skin, and a cheerful, entertaining demeanor. She was the life of any party. She loved Stevie Nicks and, in many ways, resembled the popular singer in looks and life. I had to ask myself as I worked my way through what we had to do in Atlantic City that week: Was I here for Diana? For my family? Maybe to rectify childhood memories? Was I trying to right something that had gone wrong in my own life? Sure enough, we had been at war—Diana, my brother and I—when she was murdered. If I were being honest, I would say I despised her at the time she was killed. I had taken her and my brother to probate court and won their kids in a custody fight. But that’s a story for another time.
MADNESS, SEX, SERIAL KILLER: A Disturbing Collection of True Crime Cases by Two Masters of the Genre Page 6
