by John Douglas
In the Tarr case, the offender attempted to clean up the scene and the victim was found covered with a sheet. This could have represented a change either in signature or MO, but it could also have been related to the way he felt about this particular victim. Most likely, it had to do with him being interrupted in the process.
Now this all might seem to be a statistical approach to crime scene analysis and it might seem that a computer could do the same thing Larry Ankrom did—crunch the numbers and make an evaluation. But a computer would be unable to give weight to each similarity and difference. There simply is no way of coming up with a numerical value for each piece of information. It can be properly evaluated only by running it through the brain of an experienced profiler like Larry. And putting all of this together, we concluded that all six murders were committed by the same individual and that his motive was the controlled sexualized rage so evident from the knife wounds.
Dan Lamborn, the prosecutor, asked me to testify at the trial. I was already starting to think about retirement and knew that the people who were staying on after me needed to get experience and develop their own independent reputations. Larry had done the key work on the analysis and made a very impressive, credible, and authoritative witness. I suggested that I take the stand to introduce and give background on the discipline of profiling and that Larry should testify on the analysis itself. That was fine with Lamborn and his partner, Rick Clabby.
The defense, represented by public defenders Loren Mandel and Barton Sheela, wasn’t thrilled with the idea of our testifying at all, arguing in pretrial motions that, not being psychiatrists or psychologists, we weren’t qualified to comment on psychological issues, and that what we had to say about the crimes and their linkage would be prejudicial to the defendant. In other words, if the jury believed us and thought that Prince had committed even one of the murders, they’d have to conclude that he did the other five as well. Lamborn and Clabby countered by pointing out that our testimony could actually put the greater burden on the prosecution, because if the jury believed us that the same individual was responsible for all six murders, then if they didn’t feel Prince had done any one of them, they’d have to let him off for all six.
Ultimately, in what had become a growing trend in courts across the country, Judge Charles Hayes ruled that we did have an expertise sufficiently beyond the common sense of the average person that it could be of guidance to the jury. In a complicated logic which tried to balance the concerns of both sides, however, he ruled that we couldn’t actually use the term “signature” in our testimony, as the defense felt that implied psychological motivation. Larry and I both felt somewhat hamstrung by this restriction, but we made the best of it.
The jury deliberated more than nine days before coming back with a verdict on July 13, 1993. They found Cleophus Prince guilty of all six murders and twenty-one burglaries. Since they deemed that there were special circumstances present, including murder during the course of a rape and the commission of multiple murders, the crimes were eligible for the death penalty. The next month, the same jury deliberated one day, returning a recommendation that he be sentenced to execution in the gas chamber at San Quentin or by lethal injection. Judge Hayes affirmed the sentence on November 6. As of this writing, he remains on San Quentin’s death row.
In 1986, I was a coauthor of an article for the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, entitled “Sexual Homicide: A Motivational Model.” By way of introducing the topic, we wrote:
“When law enforcement officials cannot readily determine a motive for murder, they examine its behavioral aspects. In developing techniques for profiling murderers, FBI agents have found that they need to understand the thought patterns of murderers in order to make sense of crime scene evidence and victim information. Characteristics of evidence and victims can reveal much about the murderer’s intensity of planning, preparation, and follow-through. From these observations, the agents begin to uncover the murderer’s motivation, recognizing how dependent motivation is to the killer’s dominant thinking patterns. In many instances, a hidden, sexual motive emerges, a motive that has its origins in fantasy.”
Tragically, this motive of uncontrolled anger and the need for sexual domination doesn’t always occur against strangers. In the mid-1980s, I was called in on a case up in Toronto in which a Malaysian college student named Deliana Heng had been found in the bathroom of her own apartment, lying face-down with her head next to the toilet bowl and her legs bound at the ankles with a belt. She’d been beaten about the face and head and strangled with the strap of a camera bag. She was nude from the waist down and blood was smeared across her abdomen and left leg. She’d also been sexually assaulted, and a pendant in the shape of a cross that she wore around her neck was missing. There was no forced entry and from all the victimology and evidence at the crime scene, I concluded that the murderer was someone whom she knew and trusted.
Toronto police concurred. In working their way through the people with whom Heng had contact, they had identified a friend of hers named Tien Poh Su as their prime suspect, a bodybuilder who worked out at a nearby gym. The problem was getting proof that would convince a prosecutor and then a jury.
What the police really wanted was a blood sample, but they didn’t want to tip off this guy that he was under suspicion. And without sufficient corroborating evidence, if he refused to give the blood, they couldn’t compel a test.
Canadian law is very strict on certain issues such as trial publicity, but police have latitude on searches and information gathering up there that we don’t have in the States. For example, we can’t bug a jail cell or set up a cop in disguise as a cellmate. And given what they were allowed to do, Toronto officers came up with a creative proactive strategy.
They identified a police officer who was a veteran weight lifter and had him begin frequenting the gym where the suspect worked out. He’d make a point of being there at the same time as Su and working out on machines close by.
Their eyes kind of lock in on each other. Before too long, the two men are exchanging friendly greetings, then comparing techniques and training habits. It’s clear that the suspect admires the somewhat older man’s physique and definition and the fact that he can outlift him on every exercise. Su starts asking him what he did to get those kinds of muscles.
He says he has a special diet, individually tailored to his system and keyed to the way he metabolizes various nutrients.
Su wants to try the diet, too, but the cop tells him that for it to work, he went to a special doctor who analyzed his blood to see which nutrients he was lacking. Su says he’d like to go to that same doctor, but the cop tells him this is a new technique, not yet regulated, so it’s somewhat unkosher.
“Tell you what, though,” the cop offers. “If you remind me, I’ll get a blood sample kit from him and I’ll take your blood and give it to him. Then I’ll tell you what he says you should be eating and what supplements you should be taking.”
The suspect likes this idea, and keeps reminding him about the blood sample. So before too long, the cop shows up at the gym with a sample kit, sticks Su’s finger, and takes some blood. It matches up with blood found at the crime scene, they now can get a search warrant, they find other incriminating evidence and charge the man with murder.
Among the things they find is a book published in the United States entitled The Rapist Files, which purports to be a collection of actual rapists talking about their crimes. In one of the cases, a subject describes bringing a victim into the bathroom, where he beats and rapes her. Then he gets her in front of the bathroom mirror, puts a ligature around her neck, and tightens it to the point where she passes out. He loosens it until she revives, then repeats the procedure, making the cord a little bit tighter each time until the victim literally watches herself being killed. This was the fantasy the killer was harboring long before the act itself.
Su was married and police learned that recently he had given his wife a cross-shaped pendant ide
ntical to the one missing from the neck of the murder victim.
The Crown attorney asked me to come to Toronto for the trial and consult on prosecutorial strategy. They thought that the defendant might testify, and that if he did, he would prove highly credible to a jury. After all, he knew this woman and sexually sadistic rage and control was a tough motive to get across. When he did decide to testify, we knew there had to be some way of shaking him up.
One of the critical pieces of evidence in the Crown’s case was the victim’s bloodstained panties. I suggested that the prosecutor take them over to the witness stand and force him to handle them. In several successful suspect interrogations, I’d found that if you can get the guy to focus on some object involved with the crime—something belonging to the victim, the murder weapon itself, almost anything that has meaning to the killer—you can throw him off. In the murder of twelve-year-old Mary Frances Stoner in Adairsville, Georgia, in 1979, we got a confession out of prime suspect Darrell Gene Devier by placing the bloody rock which had been the murder weapon at a forty-five-degree angle to his line of vision. This led to a first-degree murder conviction and Devier’s eventual execution, sixteen years after the murder.
The strategy worked here, too. As soon as he was handed the panties, Su became visibly upset. The longer he was forced to hold the evidence, the more shook up he became. From that point on in his testimony, his veneer of sensitivity and innocence was shot and the jury got a sense of what he was really like.
During a break in the case, I happened to run into the defense attorney in the corridor. He commented to me that it was really a shame how his client was coming across on the stand.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
He said it was a shame the jury was seeing him in such an unfortunate light, almost as if he were lamenting the fact that his client had dressed inappropriately that morning and was therefore giving a bad impression of himself.
“Are you kidding?” I responded. “This is a classic case. You’ve got an inadequate guy, who goes in and rapes this girl in front of the mirror, showing all this fantasy and anger and hostility. And to keep the fantasy going, he takes the cross and gives it to his wife so he can imagine doing to her what he did to the woman he killed. You’re defending a classic killer,” I said.
Just as in the prison interviews, if you know your subject and his crimes well, you can often cut quickly to the truth.
Had Su not been caught and convicted, there is no doubt in my mind he would have become Canada’s next serial killer.
CHAPTER 3
Candy from Strangers
One spring day when my daughter Lauren was about eight, I took her to a local fair set up in a park not far from where we lived. There were ice cream, hot dogs, and cotton candy, exhibits, all kinds of arts and crafts for sale, and rides for the kids. The mood was festive and everyone seemed to be having a good time.
Maybe it goes back to my days as a lifeguard, but I never quite relax in a crowd. I’m always looking out for the “bobbing head": someone in trouble or something that doesn’t seem quite right. And as I’m looking around, I see this one individual about five foot seven or five foot eight, with a potbelly and glasses. He has a camera around his neck and he’s watching the children on the pony ride. I’m about fifteen feet away and I can tell by the way he’s looking at these children that he doesn’t have a child there. He’s looking at the kids on the ponies with an expression that borders on lust; that’s the only word to describe it.
I figure this is a good opportunity to teach Lauren a useful lesson. I say to her, “Lauren, you see that guy over there?”
“What guy?”
“That guy right over there. You see him? Look how he’s looking at those kids. You see that? This is the kind of thing I’ve been telling you about.”
She whispers, “Dad, be quiet!”
I say, “No. Turn around and look at him. Look at what he’s doing. You see the way he’s looking at that little girl getting off the pony over there?”
“Yeah, Dad, I see him. Now be quiet! You’re embarrassing me. He may hear us.”
“No, let’s watch him, Lauren. He’s following these kids. You see the way he’s following them?”
So we tail him out of the park as he pursues these little girls, occasionally snapping pictures of them. And Lauren starts to get it, to understand that this man is not just a benign presence at this fair and around these children. What I explain to her, what I warn her about, is that this is not the type of individual who will plan ahead and boldly snatch a child off the street. He wouldn’t come up to our driveway and grab her off her bike. But if she were out selling Girl Scout cookies, say, or I let her go trick-or-treating alone and she went up and knocked on his door and he saw there was no adult around, the timing and the setting would be just right. By allowing this scenario to take place, I’d have, in effect, given away my daughter.
Around two years later my little object lesson paid off. Lauren was by herself on one of our town’s main streets when she saw this same guy, following her down the block, taking her picture. Now to a ten-year-old, he looks harmless, maybe even inviting, like a poor, lonesome soul. But because of our experience two years before at the fair, because of the somewhat uncomfortable exercise I put her through, she recognized what he was up to and was equipped to deal with the situation.
She ducked into the Ben Franklin store, surveyed the situation, then approached and started talking to a female customer, doing a tremendous acting job to make this guy think the woman was her mother. Seeing that, he quickly took off.
This kind of thing happens all too commonly. We’d all pick it up if we were attuned to it. About five years before, my wife, Pam, and I were down in Hampton, Virginia, with our older daughter, Erika, when she was about ten. We were around the harbor, a very pleasant place with all kinds of shops and attractions, and were watching a little girls’ dancing class putting on a recital for the public. As I watched, I spotted a guy in the crowd of about 150 spectators. He looked to be in his early forties and had a camera around his neck.
I nudge Pam, who says back to me, “Yeah, yeah, I saw him, too. I know what you’re going to say.” She was used to this in me because of the kind of work I did. But I can see it clearly in his eyes. He’s looking at these young kids as if they’re the Rockettes.
Now again, this type of individual isn’t going to grab a child in front of a crowdful of witnesses. He probably hasn’t even acknowledged to himself that he might act upon his fantasies.
But he’s got his camera, and let’s say he spots a child who seems to fit his particular profile, coming off the platform after this recital. What would be some of the elements of that profile? Probably a sex preference (in this case, girls), and a general physical appearance, but the behavioral cues she’s giving off to a sensitive observer—and our guy is exquisitely sensitive to this—are going to be even more important. He’s going to be looking for a child who isn’t loud or assertive, who seems shy, without a strong self-image. He’s looking for someone naive for her age, introspective, who’ll be susceptible to compliments and dreams of recognition. And, of course, he’ll be looking for someone without a hovering parent or protector close by.
So maybe he’ll approach this child and tell her how good she was on stage, tell her he represents some magazine or dance studio and that he wants to take pictures of her outside where the light is better. And if he’s able to lure her away from the crowd, if she willingly goes with him, then one thing’s going to follow another, and we might never see that little girl again.
This is what happened to Alison Parrott.
At the end of July 1986, I was up in Toronto speaking before a meeting of the Canadian and American National District Attorneys and Crown Attorneys Association, about five hundred prosecutors from both countries. I had a strong relationship with the Toronto Metro Police. I’d worked with them two years before on the Christine Jessop case—which we will be discussing shortly—and
in the deaths of babies at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. So while I was there, they asked me to consult on the case of a young girl who had disappeared after leaving her house on a Friday morning and whose body had been found in a local park.
Alison Parrott was eleven years of age, a local track star who was preparing to compete in a meet in New Jersey. This was a big event and the local papers had covered it, accompanied by pictures of her in her school track uniform.
What the police knew was this: Alison’s mother, Lesley, said she had been called at home by a man claiming to be a photographer who said he wanted to take publicity photos of her at Varsity Stadium for a sports magazine. She agreed, and at the arranged time, she took the subway alone from her suburban home, got off as planned at the St. George station, and proceeded to the stadium. They knew this because a bank surveillance camera—set to take a photograph every fifteen seconds—happened to record two images of her from the waist down through the front window as she walked past on the street to the stadium. Her mother identified her in these photos from the clothing and shoes.
