Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  She never returned home. Less than twenty-four hours later, her nude body was found face down in the mud on the bank of the Humber River by two boys walking through King’s Mill Park in Etobicoke. The body wasn’t covered, and there were already insect larvae in the nose and mouth and rectal area, which showed evidence of bleeding as a result of sexual assault. The cause of death appeared to have been strangulation.

  Toronto police took me to the dump site. From the scenario and the crime scene evidence, I profiled a white male in his thirties, a respectable-looking man, not at all threatening in his appearance. He could have a job that involves being around children, even something as indirect as a custodian or maintenance engineer in a school. He may have had some previous run-ins with the law, but more likely some ambiguous complaints against him involving children. I thought it very unlikely he would have previous murder or violent crime arrests. He would have some connection to photography, at least as an avid amateur. And he would be a local rather than an outsider, possibly a recreational hunter or fisherman.

  I felt this would be an older, more sophisticated individual because of several key elements in the story. Having read about Alison in the newspapers, he would begin fantasizing about her and devise a strategy to meet her. Since he wouldn’t know her home address, he’d systematically have to make “pretext calls” to all the Parrotts in the phone book, each time asking for Alison until he hit pay dirt. To make himself believable and get her to agree to meet him at all, much less at a location other than her own home or school, he’d have to have a convincing and disarming, carefully rehearsed conversational style. This much planning and sophistication pointed to a more mature, intelligent, organized offender. He’d used this technique before to get to other kids, though the consequences had never been anywhere near this tragic. But this meeting was not spontaneous or haphazard.

  Neither was what I believed happened afterward. As I saw it, Alison arrives at the stadium where she’s approached by a man who has a camera and looks legitimately like a photographer. But he can’t get into the stadium, and even if he could, that’s not a controlled situation; there’d be guards or watchmen there and he’d immediately be challenged.

  So he has to get her into a location where he feels comfortable. He probably tells her that because of the cloud conditions or the time of day or whatever, the light isn’t right so he wants to drive somewhere else, probably the park where her body was found, which is how he gets her into his vehicle.

  And what kind of vehicle was it? I believed it would be a commercial style van without windows in the back, and that that was where the assault took place. Everywhere between the stadium and the park has too much traffic during the day for him to have been able to find a secluded location. Therefore, he had to have been able to deal with her in broad daylight but without having to worry about the prying eyes of witnesses. Based on a lot of past experience with MOs in similar cases, this scenario suggested the van.

  Despite the apparent degree of planning and forethought, he didn’t necessarily intend to kill her. In fact, that was probably not even a part of his thinking. Many times, a van will be the vehicle of choice for a sexual sadist, someone like Steven B. Pennell, who raped, tortured, and murdered women he had picked up in his van along Interstate routes 40 and 13 in Delaware. After a trial in which I testified regarding the signature aspects of his crimes, Pennell was executed in 1992 by lethal injection, a far milder and more humane death than the one to which this monster subjected his innocent victims.

  And that was the point. Pennell was a monster, someone who derived his sexual pleasure and satisfaction from hurting, then exercising the power of life and death over his victims. His van was fitted out with a “rape kit,” restraints and pliers, knives, needles, whips, and other instruments of torture he knew he would need. A normal sexual “relationship” with these women, even if that were obtainable, wouldn’t have satisfied him. His aim was to hurt them, make them suffer, sexually react to their screams and their pain and, ultimately, their deaths.

  Alison’s killer did not conform to that profile. While the sexual assault was brutal enough, the kill itself was “gentle” and there were no signs on the body of torture or physical abuse for its own sake. Instead, it was my belief that this guy would have developed the fantasy of a real relationship between himself and the attractive, prepubescent young girl. This fantasy would have been solidified in his own mind by her willingness to get in the van, which he would have interpreted as a personal interest in him.

  But once he drives to the park, roughly five miles away, then his problems begin. Most of these guys have a very warped sense of how children will react to them. In this man’s fantasy, she reacts to his sexual advances the way a consenting adult woman would, rather than the reality, which is a terrified little girl who wants no part of him. She’s crying, in pain, wants to go home. Quickly, he’s lost control of the situation.

  He can’t let her go, because if he does, his life is ruined. He’s made no attempt to disguise himself. And his victim isn’t a three- or four-year-old child who might not be able to relate what had happened to her but an intelligent young lady, almost a teenager, who could easily identify him and his vehicle and who would have high credibility and believability no matter what he said. So now that he’s assaulted her, he has to dispose of her.

  Which he will do as easily for himself and painlessly for her as he can. He probably doesn’t have a weapon; that’s not the way he controls his victims. He strangles her in the back of the van, then has to get rid of the body.

  Now the placement of the body is as significant as any other single aspect of the crime and told me a tremendous amount about the UNSUB. As soon as the police took me to the park, I knew this had to be a local who was intimately familiar with the area. He had brought Alison somewhere he felt comfortable. He would have had to walk into the dark woods at night carrying this body. There is no way he would have done that unless he knew the area well, knew what to expect, and knew he would not be disturbed.

  Once in there, he could have done any number of things with the body. He could have thrown it in the river that runs right through the park, which most likely would have delayed significantly its discovery and neutralized most of the forensic evidence. He could have placed it deep in the woods where it might never have been found, or not found until it was completely skeletized.

  But what he does is place her gently near a trail where her body will be found quickly, before it has decomposed. He is not treating the dead body as a used-up piece of trash as some of these guys do. He wants her to be found. He wants her to be properly taken care of in death and to have a decent burial. To me, that’s an encouraging sign in terms of getting to him. He does not feel good about himself for what happened.

  No one who does something like this can feel good about himself. You can argue that a sexual sadist, even one who gets off torturing children, may take pride in his “work” and look back with satisfaction on his ability so completely to manipulate, to dominate, and to control his victims in carrying out his hideous intentions. But someone who fantasizes about a “normal” love relationship with a twelve-year-old, and who falls apart as soon as he realizes his fantasy is not going to be fulfilled in reality, has to feel extremely inadequate and ineffectual. This individual is not going to feel proud of what he’s done; he’s going to feel remorseful.

  This presents an opportunity to utilize proactive techniques that can be designed to play on his psyche. And that is the key to catching him.

  While I would not characterize Alison Parrott’s murderer as a serial killer, his criminal sophistication shows he is definitely capable of killing again if the situation presents itself, and the insights into behavior we’ve learned from our study of serial killers can be helpful. With this type of offender, the profile can be useful in narrowing a suspect list or in recognizing a new subject who comes up in the course of investigation. But for me and my people, the profile is most helpful in
coming up with proactive techniques, and that is where the emphasis should lie.

  The specific details of the profile can be deemphasized here. The only thing we really have to know, and we know it unquestionably from the details of this crime and the crime scene itself, is that the subject does not feel good about what he did. So I told the police we should try to get him to go to the grave site. Our research has shown that offenders tend to do this for two reasons, generally mutually exclusive: one is out of remorse and the other is to relive the thrill of the crime, to symbolically roll around in their own dirt. If this one went to the grave, it would be out of remorse, and there are any number of ways to play on this.

  I suggested articles in the newspaper giving details of Alison’s life and impressive accomplishments, humanizing and personalizing her to this man who would have done his best to depersonalize her after the fact. I suggested staging a well-publicized memorial service at the grave or body dump site. In the hope that someone could identify or describe him, I suggested getting the word out that he’d probably tried something like this with other children. I thought there was a good chance he’d used alcohol to lower his inhibitions before the crime, and that he might have taken up heavy drinking since the murder as a way to deal with his stress. People around him—friends, family, and co-workers—would have recognized a noticeable change in his appearance and behavior, which would be a tip-off.

  And, since I had a pretty strong feeling about the possibility that he used a van, I suggested planting the seed of doubt in his mind by having the police state publicly that a suspicious-looking van had been seen near the stadium or in the park and that anyone who had information about this vehicle should contact police. What this might have done was gotten the UNSUB to come forward to neutralize the van report. He might have identified himself as the owner of a van that could have been the one in question, but offered a legitimate or innocent reason as to why he was in the area.

  This would have delivered him right into police hands.

  Alison Parrott’s killer has never been found despite the fact that Toronto Metro Police offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. They felt very strongly about this one. It’s always been frustrating for me and my colleagues at Quantico in most cases not to be able to stay on scene and help follow up on our own suggestions. I don’t fault the Toronto Metro Police Department, which is as good an organization as any I’ve worked with. At the time of this crime, their murder clearance percentage was in the high nineties, and the previous year they cleared all but one of then cases. They’re a fine, dedicated group of men and women. They did check every photography shop in the area, using the profile to describe the man they were looking for. But some of my other suggestions were never instituted. Everyone has their own methods and procedures, and once the profiler leaves, his or her suggestions can easily end up on the back burner. I still believe this guy is catchable, though this many years later, of course, it would be a lot more difficult. In cases we believe to be nonstranger homicides, we can take a more conservative approach; the potential suspect population is limited. In homicides that appear to have been committed by strangers, though, a more radical, creative approach is often the answer.

  I’d recommend searching out the weaknesses in the offender. When you have an UNSUB, of course, this can be difficult to ascertain. But in this case, I do believe that his weakness is his remorse and you have to keep up the psychological pressure. For one thing, I’d target Alison’s birthdays or the anniversaries of her death to get the guy to come forward. Remind him of the significance of the day. You might think that forearmed with some of my strategy, the killer may be able to avoid the traps we’d set up for him. But I can tell you from long experience, the more he does to avoid them, the more behavior he’d show us and the more we’d have to work with. There is no such thing as a perfect crime or a perfect criminal.

  In my mind, there’s a double tragedy to Alison’s death. Not only was this young life so full of love and promise brutally snuffed out and her killer unpunished, but it was a death that could have been avoided. Had Alison’s parents or some other authority figure accompanied her to her meeting with the self-proclaimed photographer, I don’t believe anything would have happened. He probably would have taken his pictures, which he would have used not to sell to a magazine but to fantasize over on his own, and then would have been on his way. It’s upsetting to think about this degenerate masturbating over pictures of children and happily musing about how close he was able to get to them, but this young girl would be none the wiser and still alive. I believe he was frankly shocked when she showed up alone and therefore felt she was independent and grown-up and that he could go further than ever before.

  As parents, we may not always be able to prevent all of the horrible things that I’ve seen happen to kids. But we can prevent some of them if we just try to understand the nature of the threat and the range of personality types and motivations of the threateners. It’s critical that we try. I hate to say that we have to be less trusting of people, I hate to have to give my own kids that message, but we do have to accept the realities of our time. We don’t have to become crazy with fear that there’s a monster lurking behind every tree because there isn’t. The number of child abductions is statistically low and most of them are carried out by noncustodial parents. We don’t have to become crazy, but we do have to become cautious and observant.

  About forty miles away from the site where Alison Parrott’s body was found, a different personality type—a true monster—was responsible for the death of Kristen French and, as it turned out, at least two others.

  By all accounts, Kristen Dawn French, of St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls and the border with New York, was an exceptional young lady. Beautiful, with long, shiny black hair, she was adored by her family, friends, and teachers at Holy Cross Secondary School where she was an honors student. She’d been skating since she was a little girl and now, in addition to everything else, was an accomplished precision skater. Friends say she was always smiling, always able to help them over their own problems, a genuinely happy person in love with her first boyfriend.

  Shortly before 3:00 P.M., on a rainy Thursday, April 16, 1992, the day before Good Friday, less than a month before her sixteenth birthday, Kristie French disappeared on her way home from school. Doug and Donna French knew their daughter well enough to know she was always on time or else would call with a legitimate explanation why she wasn’t. They even briefly entertained the possibility that she might have been kept after school as punishment, but this would have been so out of character for Kristie that they dismissed it. When she wasn’t home by 5:30, Donna called the Niagara Regional Police and reported Kristie missing.

  At least there was something to go on. Five separate witnesses reported seeing something related to Kristen’s disappearance. A schoolmate noticed her walking from school in her uniform of green plaid skirt, tights, V-neck sweater with a white shirt, and oxblood-colored Bass loafers as he approached the corner of Linwell Road in his van around 2:50. Another reported seeing a cream-colored Chevy Camaro with rust on the back and primer paint on the side pull over in front of Grace Lutheran Church about two minutes later. Three minutes after that, two men in the car were speaking with Kristen. The car window was down and the driver appeared to be around twenty-four to thirty years of age, with brown hair. A third witness, on her way to pick up her daughter downtown, thought she saw a girl struggling with a passenger in the car, who was trying to shove her into the maroon-colored back seat, but figured it was probably a boy and girl fooling around or having a minor argument. The fourth and fifth witnesses were drivers who nearly collided with the speeding Camaro just after it pulled out of the church parking lot around 3:00. Others believed they had seen a similar car in the area around Holy Cross and next door to Lakeport High School in the days preceding the abduction. This led police to speculate that Kristen or other students might have been stalked and that the abductio
n was planned rather than spontaneous.

  As the investigation intensified, police psychologists used hypnosis to help potential witnesses evoke memories of that afternoon. More than one described having seen an elderly couple walking by the church as the abduction was in progress and pointing in shock at the car and Kristen. If these people did, in fact, exist, they never came forward.

  All of this information is important. However, too many times I’ve seen information considered that really has nothing to do with the case. If it is irrelevant or out-and-out wrong, it can derail an investigation. Therefore, I always recommend concentrating on the overall crime analysis rather than on any one possible clue.

  In the parking lot, crime scene technicians identified tire tracks and found a worn, folded map of Canada and a small lock of hair that appeared to be Kristen’s. On Good Friday, as Kristen’s close friend and fellow skater Michelle Tousignant drove with her mother along Unwell Road as part of a general community search, she noticed an oxblood right loafer like Kristen had worn. She picked it up and brought it to two Niagara detectives who were conducting a houseto-house canvass along the route Kristen ordinarily took home from school. Donna French identified the shoe, which had an arch support inside, as belonging to her daughter.

  A massive search and investigation were undertaken. The students at Holy Cross kept a hopeful but agonized vigil for their friend. They tied green ribbons around trees and poles as symbols of hope and remembrance. And Doug French appealed publicly for the safe return of his beloved daughter as his wife went through unremitting torment at the thought of what Kristie must be going through. Nearly every night she was tortured by dreams of Kristie crying out, but no matter what she did, she was never able to find her.

  There was another terrifying prospect associated with Kristen French’s disappearance and that was the possibility of a serial killer operating in this relatively peaceful and secure area of Canada. The previous June 14, at 7:00 P.M., Leslie Erin Mahaffy—like Kristen French, a month shy of her sixteenth birthday—left her home in Burlington, just across the western rim of Lake Ontario from St. Catharines. The area is known as the Golden Horseshoe.