by John Douglas
The pretty ninth-grader at Burlington High School was going to the Smith Funeral Home for the wake of Chris Evans, a school friend who had died in an automobile accident with three other teens. Leslie promised her mother, Debbie, a teacher in nearby Halton, that she’d be home by her 11:00 P.M. curfew.
The curfews were indicative of some of the problems and conflicts that had come up between mother and daughter. Leslie had always been a bright, spunky, independent girl, but as she had approached her fifteenth birthday, the traditional teenage emotionalism and rebelliousness seemed to well up within her. She took to staying out well beyond her parents’ curfews, sometimes all night. She was once caught shoplifting. The problem may have been compounded by the fact that her father, Robert, known as Dan, often had to be away from home on his job as a government oceanographer.
That night after the wake, Leslie and several friends convened in a clearing in the woods popular with local teens to have a few beers and console each other on their loss. By the time Leslie walked back to her house, accompanied by a male friend who wanted to see her home safely, it was almost 2:00 A.M. and the house was dark. She told him her parents would just yell at her when they saw her, so he might as well leave before she went in. He said good night and that he’d be back for her in the morning to take her to the funeral.
But when Leslie tried all the doors, she found them locked. Her mother had decided to teach her a lesson this time by locking her out of the house. She would have to ring the doorbell and wake up her mom. She wouldn’t be able to postpone the confrontation and resulting discipline.
Instead, Leslie walked over to Upper Middle Road and called her friend Amanda Carpino to see if she could stay there overnight. But Amanda was afraid to ask her mother, Jacqueline, knowing the trouble Leslie had been in with her own mom before and Mrs. Mahaffy’s complaints to Mrs. Carpino. Coincidentally, Amanda’s younger sister was sleeping over at another girlfriend’s house but called home to say she was sick. Around 2:30, Jacqueline Carpino got dressed and went out to get her. Knowing of the phone call to Amanda, she drove down Upper Middle Road to see if she could spot Leslie and take her home.
By this time, however, Leslie had apparently gone home, resigned to facing the music with her own mother.
But she never went inside, and when Debbie Mahaffy woke up that morning, Leslie wasn’t there. She’d done this kind of thing before, crashing at friends’ houses, so Debbie wasn’t overly concerned until Leslie didn’t turn up at Chris Evans’s funeral. That was totally out of keeping. Leslie would have made sure to be there. At 4:30 and panic-stricken, Debbie Mahaffy called the Halton police and reported her daughter missing. In the next several days, Leslie’s family and friends put up more than five hundred missing person posters throughout Burlington and the Halton area, hoping for any lead or word on her.
On June 29, 1991, two weeks to the day after she was reported missing, Leslie’s dismembered body was discovered encased in several blocks of concrete in the shallow waters of nearby Lake Gibson. Autopsy reports indicated a brutal sexual attack.
Every parent I’ve ever encountered whose child has become the victim of a violent crime goes through a harrowing and punishing personal inquisition, agonizing over whether he or she could have done anything to prevent what happened. Debbie Mahaffy was no exception. As soon as Leslie disappeared she was plagued by thoughts that if she hadn’t locked her out that night, her daughter would still be with her.
Before Leslie’s parents even had the opportunity to bury their daughter, another local girl, Nina DeVilliers, was discovered murdered. There was no clear-cut connection but two violent deaths of young girls in the same area seemed like more than coincidence. The previous November, Terri Anderson, another fifteen-year-old who was a good student and cheerleader at Lakeport High School, next to Holy Cross, had disappeared around 2:00 A.M. from her home on Linwell Road after returning from a party where she reportedly took LSD for the first time.
These, then, were the fears as days dragged on into weeks and Kristen French had still not been heard from. Police put out an all-points bulletin for the cream-colored Camaro. Before the investigation had taken its course, billboards throughout Ottawa would picture the type of car police were looking for together with a toll-free number to call and as each cream-colored Camaro or similar-looking car was noticed, an officer would question the driver and place a sticker on the windshield to register it.
But on the morning of Thursday, April 30, 1992, two weeks to the day since Kristen disappeared, a forty-nineyear-old scrap metal dealer named Roger Boyer was horrified to come upon a naked body amidst the underbrush by the side of a road while foraging for abandoned farm equipment to salvage. The corpse was folded into the fetal position, as if asleep. The black hair was cut short like a boy’s, but from what he could see of the shape of the body and the small size of the hands and feet, Boyer thought it was probably a woman or girl.
As it happened, the site was only separated by a narrow greenbelt from Halton Hills Memorial Gardens in Burlington, the cemetery where Leslie Mahaffy was buried.
Police responded immediately to Boyer’s call and cordoned off the area. It wasn’t long, however, until the media got wind of the discovery. Speculation as to its significance was rampant and pointed. It was left to Halton Detective Leonard Shaw to confirm everyone’s worst fears. As the result of a childhood accident, Kristen was missing the tip of the little finger of her left hand. As soon as Shaw lifted the corpse’s left hand, he saw an identical disfigurement.
The medical examiner’s report compounded the horror. The cause of death was ligature asphyxiation. Like Leslie Mahaffy, she had been beaten and sexually attacked. And the well-preserved state of the body suggested that Kristen had been alive until a few days ago, maybe even less than twenty-four hours ago, held captive for at least a week and a half by whoever did this to her.
More than four thousand mourners showed up for Kristen’s funeral on May 4 at St. Alfred’s Church in St. Catharines. So great was the outpouring of public sympathy that the massive church was filled to overflowing. More than a thousand people had to listen to the service from outside. She was buried in the family plot in Pleasantview Cemetery alongside her grandparents. It soon became clear that virtually everyone associated with Kristen’s case, from the detectives to the crime scene technicians to the medical examiners, was affected by it in ways these seasoned professionals had seldom been before.
Fear gripped the entire Golden Horseshoe area. The discovery of Kristen French’s body led directly to the formation of Operation Green Ribbon, which became one of the largest manhunts in the history of Canadian law enforcement. Named for the campaign of hope launched by her classmates, the multiagency task force was under the direction of veteran Niagara Police Inspector Vince Bevan. The cases became known throughout Canada simply as “the Schoolgirl Murders.”
On May 21, Terri Anderson’s body was discovered floating in Port Dalhousie harbor on Lake Ontario. Evidence was inconclusive as to cause of death. Police eventually ruled her death accidental, relating to her drug ingestion.
Speculation linking the Anderson, Mahaffy, DeVilliers, and French deaths was rife in the media, even though the police tried to underplay it. Inspector Bevan was a dedicated and serious-minded investigator with little time or patience for the press. This was indicative of the larger problem with publicity and the public that the task force was facing. The Halton force had a long history of going public with information in the hope that someone might come forward with useful tips. The Niagara department, on the other hand, seldom willingly released anything, which tended to encourage the media to launch their own independent investigations of important cases.
My experience has shown me that the public is very often a critical partner with the police in bringing dangerous men to justice. So while it is often a good idea to withhold certain specific facts and pieces of information, my own bias is that you work with the media and let the public help you as much as possi
ble.
In addition to following up leads and following forensic clues, the Green Ribbon task force contacted the FBI, specifically Special Agent Chuck Wagner of the Buffalo, New York, Field Office. Buffalo is right over the border from the southern end of the Golden Horseshoe and the field office had always had a good, mutually beneficial relationship with local Canadian police agencies as well as the national RCMP—the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Chuck, the profile coordinator for the field office, in turn called Gregg McCrary at the Investigative Support Unit in Quantico.
We’d organized the unit so that each agent would have primary responsibility for a particular geographic territory. Gregg, a former high school teacher and black belt in the Asian martial art of Shorinji Kempo, had been a field agent in New York before we brought him to Quantico.
As soon as he took a look at the cases, Gregg was struck by the location where Kristen French’s body had been dumped, very near the grave of Leslie Mahaffy. Leslie had been taken from Burlington and dumped near St. Catharines. Kristen was abducted in St. Catharines and left near Burlington. He didn’t think that was coincidental. Either the crimes truly were related or the UNSUB wanted the police to believe they were. In any event, Kristen’s killer clearly was reacting to the Mahaffy murder.
To Gregg, both murders had all the earmarks of stranger homicide. There was nothing to suggest that the killer or killers knew either girl personally, though both were probably surveilled and stalked beforehand. These were high-risk crimes for the perpetrator. Kristen was grabbed in broad daylight from a church parking lot in view of witnesses. Leslie was taken at her own house from under her parents’ bedroom window.
When we see this type of crime, the first thing we think of is a somewhat younger, unsophisticated, perhaps disorganized offender with a highly developed sexual fantasy that he is increasingly desperate to act out. For this reason, when we see a high-risk crime, we expect the victim to be kept alive for a relatively longer period of time, which the medical examiner told us had been the case with Kristen French.
But eyewitness accounts had spoken of two offenders, which changed the profile considerations. If two people were involved in a high-risk, daylight abduction, the evaluation changes and we’d boost the sophistication level significantly. The fantasy aspect remains just as important, but now it appears to be planned, organized, and carried out by older, more criminally experienced individuals. The stalking and surveillance of girls at both high schools spoke to this as well. This type of crime perpetrated by a sole offender would likely be his first. Two people committing the same crime speaks to a more evolved and developed MO.
The body disposal methods in the two main murders under consideration were very different, suggesting the possibility of two separate killers. All things considered, though, Gregg thought this unlikely. More likely, the killer was getting bolder and/or smarter. He’d obviously gone to a lot of trouble and effort to dismember the body, mix and mold the concrete, put the blocks in a car, and drive it to Lake Gibson. In spite of all that work, the body had been found and identified relatively quickly. So next time, why bother? Another possible explanation for the change in this part of the MO was that the killer was growing more confident, flaunting his work to the police, letting them know that he was the same one who had killed Leslie Mahaffy and was therefore “burying” his latest prey nearby. Whichever was the explanation, or if both were correct, what was clear was that he was escalating, that he had begun to act out his fantasies and had convinced or coerced another person into working with him.
The cutting off of Kristen’s long hair and the evidence of sexual assaults on her body indicated a man with a hatred or contempt for women, an emotional need to degrade them in order to feel powerful or even adequate. This man would likely have difficulty with normal sexual function and if he had an ongoing relationship with a wife or girlfriend, he’d have the need to sexually dominate or degrade her in a similar fashion.
A couple of years before, Gregg had profiled an UNSUB in a series of murders of prostitutes and homeless women in Rochester, New York. From the facts he knew, Gregg had predicted the man would have some sort of sexual dysfunction, possibly on the order of erectile insufficiency. A further escalation of behavior in later crimes led Gregg to suggest secretly surveilling a newly discovered body dump site to which he felt the killer would return. This strategy ultimately led to the capture of Arthur Shawcross, who was convicted of multiple counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to 250 years to life. Interviews with other prostitutes Shawcross had visited revealed that he was unable to maintain erection or achieve orgasm unless they played dead.
Gregg predicted that if there were two offenders working as partners as seemed to be the case, then one would be the dominant leader and the other would always be a subservient follower. Double offenders in rape and sexual murder aren’t common, but we have seen and studied them, going back to Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono, who together terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s as the “Hillside Strangler,” and even before that, James Russell Odom and James Clayton Lawson, Jr., who met at Atascadero State Mental Hospital in California where they were both doing time for rape.
Clay Lawson would while away the time describing to Russell Odom the tortures he’d like to inflict on captured women when he got out. He himself wasn’t interested in intercourse. But Odom was, and, upon his release in 1974, sought out Lawson in South Carolina. Within a few nights they had kidnapped, raped, killed, and horribly mutilated a young woman working in a 7-Eleven they stopped in. The victim’s body was left in plain view and the killers were arrested within days. The terrified, submissive Odom admitted raping the girl but denied having any part in the murder. He was found guilty of rape, unlawful weapon possession, and accessory before and after the fact of murder. The dominant Lawson, who chewed chalk in the courtroom during his own separate trial, adamantly denied taking part in the rape, saying, “I only wanted to destroy her.” He was convicted of murder in the first degree and electrocuted by the state of South Carolina in 1976.
If it is possible to conceive of a more depraved partnership, it would be Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris. Like Odom and Lawson, they met behind bars, in this case the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, where they discovered their mutual affinity for dominating, hurting, and sexually abusing young women. When they were both paroled in 1979, they got together in Los Angeles and made plans to undertake a project to kidnap, rape, torture, and kill one teenaged girl of each age, thirteen through nineteen. They had successfully carried out their plan against five girls in a brutal and horrifying manner, when the sixth managed to escape after being raped and went to the police. Norris was the submissive one in this team and he was the one who caved in to police interrogation, confessing and fingering his dominant partner to escape the gas chamber. He also led police to the various bodies. One skeleton still had Bittaker’s ice pick protruding from its ear opening. The unrepentant Bittaker, among the vilest human beings I have ever come across, became something of a celebrity on California’s death row. When asked for his autograph by admiring fellow prisoners, he would sign it “Pliers Bittaker” after one of his favorite instruments of torture.
This is not to say an offender of this type is incapable of deep and genuine emotion. Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole and I had the opportunity to interview Bittaker at San Quentin. We thought it significant that during the several hours we were with him, Bittaker never once made eye contact with Mary Ellen. He would not look at her. Yet when we brought up the crimes he cried. Big, tough Lawrence Bittaker shed tears of sorrow. But he was crying not for the lost lives of his victims, but for the fact that his life was ruined by having been caught.
Gregg McCrary saw the dominant one of Kristen French’s killers in much the same way. He would be between the ages of twenty-five to early thirties, which squared with witness descriptions. He would be first and foremost a human predator, a born manipulator who would get by in life by exp
loiting people and systems. Like Lawrence Bittaker or Clay Lawson and unlike Alison Parrott’s killer, he would feel no guilt or remorse for the suffering of the victim, her family, or the community. Each successful kill would only fuel his appetite for inflicting more pain and shedding more blood.
This dominance would carry over into his personal life. Many sexual sadists are married or in ongoing relationships with women. If this were the case with the UNSUB, he would probably beat and sexually abuse his own mate. Small, ordinary things like questioning his comings or goings would be enough to trigger his wrath.
There would be prior sexual offenses in his background, beginning either with flashing or being a Peeping Tom, eventually escalating into sexual assaults for which he may or may not have been arrested. But someone, either his wife or girlfriend or partner in crime, would know about this history. Gregg felt he would probably work at some sort of manual skill, possibly with power tools or in a metal shop, and would have his own shop at home. And finally, there would have been some Stressor which triggered his initial homicidal rage. Perhaps his wife finally threw him out of the house. Perhaps he lost a job or suffered some serious professional setback. Perhaps both.
As police looked for the cream-colored Camaro and followed up every tip, the investigation dragged on without much progress. Not wanting to let the case grow cold and stale, the Green Ribbon task force decided to go public, which we at Quantico had been advocating for some time.
On the evening of Tuesday, July 21, 1992, television station CHCH-TV in Hamilton, Ontario, broadcast an extraordinary program, which was simultaneously picked up by other stations throughout Canada for a national airing. Entitled “The Abduction of Kristen French,” the program featured Green Ribbon chief Vince Bevan and Sergeant Kate Cavanagh, the Ontario Provincial Police Department profiler, as well as Chuck Wagner and Gregg McCrary on a feed from Quantico.
