Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

Shortly after 7:00 the next morning, a husband and wife who’d pulled in at the E-Z Go gas station in Rockford found the attendant lying face-up in a large pool of blood in that station’s storage room. They’d gone in to try to find someone when the station appeared to be unattended during business hours. The victim this time was Kenny Foust, a thirty-five-year-old white male who had been shot twice one bullet entering the left side of his face and passing into his brain, the other after he collapsed to the floor, from the right side of his neck to the left. The customers immediately called the rescue squad, which arrived while Foust was still alive, but he died shortly after arriving at Rockford Memorial Hospital without regaining consciousness. It appeared that about $150 was robbed from the station. There were no witnesses, but ballistics tests indicated that the gun that had killed Kenny Foust had also killed Willie Fredd and Albert Pearson—the first real link in any of these three incidents. Rockford police immediately formed a major case task force.

  Four days later, on the afternoon of February 2, someone came into a Radio Shack store in Beloit, Wisconsin, and shot and killed both the twenty-one-year-old manager, Richard Boeck, and a twenty-six-year-old male customer, Donald Rains. Another customer later found them lying next to each other on the floor near the rear of the store. Both had been shot multiple times in the head and chest even though detectives saw no sign of a struggle with the gunman. It seemed that some money had been taken from the store, but they couldn’t tell how much. Beloit is just over Wisconsin’s southern border, about twenty miles or so north of Rockford.

  There were three witness accounts of men seen in the area prior to the killings. One of those was of a black male similar in description to the one spotted in connection with the second shooting in Rockford. The witness accounts and similarity of circumstances suggested this last crime could be related to one or more of the previous three. That gave it an interstate character and meant the FBI could be called in. I got involved right after this when I got a frantic call from the FBI in Illinois.

  The problem was, the case didn’t add up. There were multiple weapons. The victims were both black and white, a wide variety of ages, and almost nothing of value had been taken in crimes that looked like nothing else but armed robberies. Who was he and why was he doing it?

  As I looked at the police reports, the crime scene photographs, and the autopsy protocols, this started looking less like a string of armed robberies gone bad and more like a certain type of serial murder. I still didn’t really understand what the motive was, but the style of killing was consistent and I would characterize it as an assassination style. None of the victims appeared to have put up any resistance and most were shot more times and more viciously than was necessary to achieve the purpose of neutralizing them for a robbery. That is to say, the killing went far beyond modus operandi.

  The killings were methodical and sequential, but didn’t make much sense. You could even think of them as spree murders rather than serial crimes. Nothing of significant value was taken. There was no sexual component to the murders. There was no evidence the UNSUB knew any of the victims, so an attempt at personal revenge didn’t seem likely. Quite the contrary, the victims didn’t seem to have anything in common with each other.

  When you’ve analyzed what should be the motive based on the crime scenario and that doesn’t make sense, and you go through all the other “logical” ones and you can’t make one of them fit reasonably, then you start looking into psychiatric territory. All crimes have a motive, all crimes make sense according to some logic, though that logic may be a strictly internal one with no relationship to any “objective” logic.

  This made me think our UNSUB was probably a paranoid individual, delusional but still functional. I thought the multiple weapons spoke to this, too. He only used one type of ammunition; he was familiar with the .38 slug and trusted it. But he had more than one gun. I was willing to bet there were more still. When you’re paranoid you can never have too many guns.

  To commit this series, he had to be able to get from point A to point B, which meant he had to be able to drive, which meant he probably had a driver’s license, which meant he was operating in the everyday world at some level and he had some job, even if it was a menial one. He would have interaction with people around him, but they would know he was “odd.”

  In any series of crimes that takes place over some distance, we concentrate on the first case, which for our purposes is usually the most significant. In multiple homicides the killer is usually of the same race as his victim. Assuming that the four cases were related, here we had a situation in which the first two victims were black and all the other subsequent ones were white. A killer begins where he feels the highest comfort level. For that reason, I believed the UNSUB was black, and therefore possibly matched the description of the two separate witnesses. For that same reason, I also felt he was likely to live within a relatively close distance of Fredd’s Groceries. He would have had some excuse to be in that area.

  From our data, paranoid personalities as well as paranoid schizophrenics typically surface in their mid-twenties. Assassin types also seem to surface around their mid-twenties, so I felt pretty secure pegging this guy in his mid- to late twenties.

  I expected this type of individual to feel more comfortable at night and in the darkness. The first crime—the one I presumed to be close to home—was committed in the afternoon. But the next two were done late at night or in the early morning hours. It took until the fourth crime for him to be bold enough to go out again in broad daylight. For the same reason, I thought he’d drive a dark-colored car and favor dark clothing. He’d also feel the need of a large “power dog” for protection, either a German shepherd or Doberman pinscher; he might even have two. If I were constructing the same profile today, I’d probably specify a pit bull, the current vogue. But back then, it would be either a shepherd or a Doberman. Along with the police-type dog, he might use a police radio scanner.

  He’d also have some sort of record. I wouldn’t expect necessarily any homicides, but there’d be some assaultive behavior, reacting against authority figures, possibly institutionalization. Killing every person in each of the holdups spoke of someone who “overcompensated” for everything.

  The police circulated the witness descriptions, which eventually led to a man staying in a motel two blocks from the grocery store. Cigarettes which had been sold at the store were found in his room. His name was Raymond Lee Stewart, but by the time police identified him, he had fled.

  FBI agents working on an Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution—Armed Robbery warrant arrested Raymond Lee Stewart in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 21. Stewart was a twenty-nine-year-old, five-foot-six-inch-tall black male. He had lived in Rockford before moving to North Carolina and had returned for the upcoming birth of his out-of-wedlock child. He had stayed at a motel two blocks from Fredd’s Groceries. Concerned that he might be harrassed, bothered, or attacked at the motel, he had registered under an assumed name.

  On February 4, two days after the Radio Shack murders in Beloit, he returned to North Carolina, his old, dark-colored car pulling a rented U-Haul trailer in which he carried most of his possessions. As soon as the agents approached his car and trailer, they saw Stewart’s two Dobermans tied up nearby. After obtaining a search warrant for his trailer and the house of the cousin with whom he was staying, the investigators found a .38 caliber RG 31 revolver, a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Model 60 Chief’s Special, ammunition, and a police radio scanner. He had a history of armed robberies of self-service gasoline stations.

  He was charged with four counts of murder in Illinois and two in Wisconsin, though as it turned out he ended up standing trial twice, once for the armed robbery and killing of Willie Fredd and Albert Pearson, and a second trial for the murder of Kevin Kaiser. During the trials, his manner was angry and full of contempt for the system and his victims. He was found guilty of felony murder and sentenced to death by the Circuit Court of Winnebago County, Il
linois. He later claimed the murders were spurred by racial hatred, but said he deserved clemency because of childhood abuse.

  On September 18, 1996, Stewart was executed by lethal injection at the state penitentiary at Springfield. In his final words he said, “May you all have peace because of this. May my victims’ families have peace.”

  Delineating signature as a separate and distinct element from modus operandi was an attempt to shed light on the critical question of motive. And motive and signature were indeed critical in linking a series of six murders of women in San Diego from January through September of 1990. Former Cuyahoga County, Ohio, prosecutor Tim McGinty, now a judge in Cleveland, who’d used me in the Ronnie Shelton serial rapist case a few years before, recommended me to the San Diego Police Department. When the case reached my unit, it was assigned to Larry Ankrom, who had geographic responsibility for that part of the country.

  When we first saw the case, there had been three murders, all at the Buena Vista Garden Apartments in the Clairemont area. The first victim was a twenty-year-old student at San Diego State University named Tiffany Schultz. A boyfriend who found her body was arrested as a suspect, but quickly released. Before long there were two more victims: Janene Weinhold and Holly Tarr.

  Because of the high-risk nature of attacking women in such a setting in the middle of the day, we would expect the UNSUB to know the complex well. Violent offenders usually begin where they feel most comfortable and at home. That’s why the first crime in the series is so important. We also expected him to have made approaches to other women in the past. These approaches—a warm-up for his later violent crimes—may have seemed innocent but were ultimately unsatisfying to him.

  Before the attack on Tiffany Schultz there would have been a real or perceived crisis in the offender’s life which would have triggered his acting out. He came to each of these locations with focused anger. It would be a reasonable conclusion that he held a woman, or women in general, accountable for his problems and this was how he dealt with his rage. He would have had a number of failed relationships with women, most of them marked by periodic violent or abusive behavior. He could have taken personal items such as jewelry from one or more of the victims, which he would then give to the woman he was in a relationship with, but not tell her where it came from.

  We believed the offender would be employed in some capacity but because of his temper and lack of interpersonal skills, it would not be a high-level job and his employment history would be spotty. He’d be an underachiever who has problems getting along with his peers, prefers to be alone, and has a history of run-ins with authority. He might easily live in a dependent relationship with someone from whom he receives financial support. A conflict with her might have triggered the series of murders.

  Like many offenders, this one would likely display changes of behavior after the first killings which would be noticeable to those around him. These could include heavier reliance on alcohol or drugs, change in sleeping or eating habits, weight loss, anxiety, more eagerness to associate with others. He would also closely follow the news of the investigation. We told the police that the public could be extremely instrumental in identifying the killer if these traits were publicized and it was made clear that there would be at least one person close enough to him to have a sense of what he’d done.

  Holly Tarr was killed in April. She was an aspiring actress from Okemos, Michigan, who had come during spring break to visit her brother, who lived at the Buena Vista Garden Apartments. After this murder, the UNSUB narrowly missed capture. Several witnesses reported seeing a man with a knife dash outside with a T-shirt covering his face. The only physical description they could provide was that he appeared to be a dark-skinned man of shorter than average height. In the process of making his escape, he knocked down a maintenance man who was responding to another tenant’s report of a “horrible scream.” The maintenance man found Holly Tarr in the bedroom under a bloodcovered towel.

  By this point the media had dubbed him the “Clairemont Killer.”

  We expected this could signal a cooling-off period in which he’d lie low for a while and recover his nerve. And we expected this to be the end of his activities at this particular apartment complex. He might even move to another city on the pretext of a job offer or visiting relatives or friends. But it was unlikely he’d stop altogether. Most of these guys have no burn-out point.

  He did surface again, almost two months later, at a different location, but still an apartment complex in the same general vicinity where he obviously felt most comfortable. Then there were no more similar killings until the middle of September, when two women, Pamela Clark and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Amber, were killed in a house in the nearby area of University City. Even though these last victims had been mother and daughter, Pamela Clark was youthful-looking and very attractive. All of the six women fit a general physical profile, and in photographs Amber Clark looked remarkably like the previous victim, Janene Weinhold.

  In the largest manhunt in the city’s history, San Diego police worked intensively for thirteen months to find the one subject they were convinced was responsible for all six grisly and sadistic deaths.

  The break came early in February of 1991, when Geralynd Venverloth returned home from a Family Fitness Center health club and was going into the shower when she heard her doorknob jiggling. Looking through the peephole, she saw a black man trying to open the door. She managed to slip the dead bolt and he fled. But then several mornings later, Venverloth saw the same man dropping off her associate, Charla Lewis, at work.

  His name was Cleophus Prince, Jr. Police arrested him after staking out the health club and booked him for burglary. They found several knives on the floor of Prince’s 1982 Chevy Cavalier. But they had to release him on his own recognizance for lack of evidence. They did, however, get blood and saliva samples, which were sent to Cellmark Diagnostics in Maryland for DNA analysis. Three weeks later, the results came back with a match for Janene Weinhold’s attacker.

  Police went to Charla Lewis’s apartment, where Prince had been living. It was next door to where the fourth victim, Elissa Keller, had lived. Prince had skipped town, and gone back home to Birmingham, Alabama. But at the apartment, detectives found a gold opal ring identical to the one Holly Tarr’s father had given her on her sixteenth birthday. The ring’s manufacturer told police that only sixty-three such rings were made, none distributed in California.

  On Sunday, March 3, 1991, police in Birmingham arrested the twenty-three-year-old black former Navy mechanic, who had lived in the Buena Vista Garden Apartments complex at the time of the first three murders. He had been arrested for theft and had been released on bail just before San Diego PD called. At Prince’s residence, detectives found another ring that looked like one described as belonging to Elissa Keller and shoes that matched prints found at several of the scenes. The San Diego Sheriff’s Department began investigating him in relation to the unsolved murder of Diane Dann in May of 1988. And Homewood, Alabama, police wanted to talk to him about the unsolved murder of twenty-three-year-old Toni Lim in March 1990. Both slayings bore some of the same characteristics as the stabbing deaths of the six women in the main series.

  The key to the case was the DNA match between semen found on the clothing of the second Buena Vista victim, twenty-one-year-old Janene Weinhold, and blood and saliva samples they got from Prince. But what about the other five murders?

  San Diego police asked us to reexamine the six cases to see if it was reasonable to conclude that one individual had committed all the murders. Several people, including prosecutors Dan Lamborn and Woody Clark and Sergeant Ed Petrick of the task force, came to meet with us in Quantico. If the prosecution could prove that the defendant had committed all six murders, rather than only that of Janene Weinhold, the number and nature of the crimes would qualify as “special circumstances” under California law, which would make it a capital case. They didn’t want this guy getting out again.

 
Looking at six cases now rather than just the original three, based on both MO and signature considerations, we concluded that all the murders were, in fact, related.

  All six victims were white females. Except for Pamela Clark, all were brunettes between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. As far as modus operandi, in each case the killer entered through an unlocked door or window, the crimes were all committed with a knife, and all occurred within the victims’ residences, four of which were apartments, and in five of the cases the assault period was late morning to early afternoon. In four instances, the knife was a weapon of opportunity taken from the victim’s kitchen. The first three victims were living in the same garden apartment complex in second-floor units, which indicated to us a level of comfort created by the attacker living close by and knowing the area well. There were no signs of forced entry, and in five of the six there was no ransacking, although jewelry was taken from the third, fourth, and fifth victims. This last fact would likely fall in the category of signature, assuming the initial purpose of the offender was not simple robbery.

  And we certainly didn’t believe that to be the case since nothing apparently was taken from victims one, two, and six and they were all killed by relatively shallow stab wounds, very similar in five out of the six, concentrated in the chest area and indicative of focused anger and rage. The rage, however, was highly and unusually controlled. There was no frenzy as we often see in such situations, and other than the knife wounds there was little physical trauma. All of the victims were discovered face-up on the floor, nude or partially nude, with no attempt made to conceal the bodies.

  Equally important as all of this, no other similar homicides occurred within the San Diego area anywhere near the time of this series and a review of our Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) database didn’t identify any murders matching this wound pattern anywhere else in the country.

  Of course, then we had to consider the differences within this supposed series. The last two victims, the Clarks, lived not in apartments but in a single-family house. Two of the six were sexually assaulted before being killed. Holly Tarrwas stabbed only once, while the most brutally assaulted one was stabbed fifty-two times. However, as we noted, the evidence at the crime scene suggested that the killer had been interrupted in the process. Most of the victims would be considered low-risk, but two could have fallen into the high-risk classification. Tiffany Schultz, the San Diego State English major who became the first victim, had taken a parttime job as a nude dancer in a San Diego nightclub shortly before her murder. The relative risk of a crime happening to a particular victim and the relative risk taken by each offender in the commission of a particular crime are useful indicators to us in determining both victimology and the personality of the UNSUB.