Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  Whatever the explanation in the Jessop case, I’m afraid this might be one of those tragic instances in which truth and justice will always be elusive.

  Of all the things I’ve had to deal with in my career, violent crimes against children are unquestionably the worst. Once you’ve seen the murder scenes and the crime scene photos, it never leaves you. Seeing what I have seen, knowing what I know is out there, my first instinct when my children were younger was to handcuff each of them to my own or my wife, Pam’s, wrists and never let them out of our sight.

  The problem is how to strike a balance between being overbearingly protective and allowing your children room to mature and develop their independence. I was a nervous wreck the first time Erika took the car out alone or went on her first date. One of my closest friends in the unit, normally a very easygoing guy with a fine sense of humor, practically interrogates his daughter’s dates before he lets them out of the house. We’ve all just seen too much.

  The best we can hope for as parents, I suppose, is to remain alert, to remain cognizant, to teach our children well without making them fearful of every shadow. We have to set a standard of behavior and integrity while letting them know that they can always come and tell us anything. And I’ll be the first to admit, that’s not an easy balance to strike.

  CHAPTER 4

  Is Nothing Scared?

  Cassandra Lynn Hansen, known as Cassie, was a six-year-old girl from Eagan, Minnesota, a southern suburb of St. Paul. She was a year older than my daughter Erika, and seeing a picture of her with brownish blond hair cascading down below her shoulders made me think at once of an adorable little pixie. Her dimpled smile looked as if it would brighten the darkest day.

  On the evening of November 10, 1981, she was attending a family night service with her mother and younger sister in the basement of Jehovah Evangelical Lutheran Church in St. Paul. She told her mother she had to go to the bathroom, then went down the hall and up the stairway to find the ladies’ room. On the stairway she was seen by a woman church member. She was not seen alive again. When she didn’t return, her mother, Ellen, went to the ladies’ room, turned on the lights and looked around. It was empty. She went outside the church and repeatedly called her daughter’s name. Other people took up the search. When they still couldn’t find Cassie, they called the police.

  The next morning, her body, still clothed in the Baby blue dress she’d been wearing, was discovered tucked in the corner of a Dumpster behind an auto repair shop on Grand Avenue, about three miles from the church. Her black patent leather buckle shoes were found separately about two blocks away. The only other items not accounted for were the barrettes she’d had in her hair.

  The murder of this little girl was among the most heartrending cases I’ve ever encountered. It also demonstrated some of the best uses of proactive strategies and involvement of dedicated and courageous citizens I’ve ever known.

  The Twin Cities public immediately reacted to Cassie’s murder with horror, revulsion, and sorrow. If a sweet and joyful little child could be abducted from a church service, from a house of God, and have her life snuffed out, then was anything sacred?

  The medical examiner found no evidence that she’d been sexually assaulted, though small traces of semen and several pubic hairs were discovered on one thigh of her navy blue tights. The semen revealed blood type O, a good piece of information since Cassie’s blood type was B. The cause of death was ligature strangulation, probably with a two-anda-half-inch-wide belt, based on the bruises on her neck. Abrasions across her chest indicated that another belt had been used as a restraint around her upper body. And there was one more detail the police kept secret as a “control” and to disqualify any false confessions: the six-year-old had been scratched and beaten about the head and face.

  Cassie’s parents were separated and she had lived with her mother. Police quickly determined that neither parent was a suspect. Ellen told investigators that Cassie had been taught to scream if she felt threatened by a stranger, and she had clearly grasped the significance of this lesson. Not too long before, Cassie had seen her four-year-old sister, Vanessa, talking to someone she didn’t know and had pulled her forcefully back into the house.

  As is often the case, witness accounts were somewhat contradictory and confusing. The church member who had seen Cassie on the stairs also remembered seeing a white male somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age with “saltand-pepper” gray hair and dark-rimmed glasses on a rough face. A realtor who was on the street less than a block from the church after Cassie disappeared said he spotted a white male in his twenties carrying a motionless child who appeared to be a female, six or seven years old. Later, a similar description was taken near the alley leading to the Dumpster where Cassie’s body was found.

  The St. Paul Police Department pursued the case rigorously, employed the services of the FBI’s Minneapolis Field Office, and developed some promising leads. But through the Christmas holidays and into the new year, they hadn’t been able to make an arrest. Everybody wanted this one. Everybody wanted to find the killer of this little girl.

  Late in February of 1982, Special Agents Bill Hagmaier and Brent Frost in Minneapolis got in touch with me and asked me to profile the case. This was the first time I’d ever worked with Bill, and it turned out to be a fortuitous meeting. Within a year, he had been transferred to the Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico. When I was near death in Seattle in December of 1983, Bill organized a collection to bring my wife and father out to the hospital to be with me. He later joined my Investigative Support Unit and was a key member until I retired in the spring of 1995. He now heads the Serial Killer and Child Abduction Unit at Quantico.

  On March 3, after analyzing all the relevant case materials, I offered my profile in a lengthy conference call with Bill and Brent and the key St. Paul police people on the case: Captain Donald Trooien was chief of the homicide and sex crimes unit and had attended a sex crimes investigation seminar at Quantico in January where he heard a presentation from my Investigative Support Unit. Also on the line were Deputy Chief Robert LaBath, Lieutenant Larry McDonald, and Sergeants Roger Needham and Darrell Schmidt. As was our custom at Quantico, the one thing I did not want from the investigators was any information on suspects they might have developed. I wanted to remain objective, my profile based solely on what the evidence suggested to me.

  Given the nature of the crime itself—an abduction in a church—I felt we were dealing with a white male UNSUB with a long history of obsession with children, perhaps a lifelong pattern. This crime was almost certainly committed by someone of the same race as Cassie and was not a casual, opportunistic off-the-street grab, though the abduction itself was a crime of opportunity. This guy was frequenting places where he knew children would be present, where he could freely observe them and be near them, and where parents’ guard would be down. Age is always among the toughest points to nail down in a profile because emotional or experiential age doesn’t always match chronological years. But although experience had shown us that a predictable time for the manifestation of child obsession disorders was early to mid-twenties, I thought the offender would be in at least his early thirties. I warned, however, that this wasn’t necessarily something to go on. Four months before this, I had finished up work on the notorious “Trailside Killer” case, involving the murder of women hiking in densely wooded parks just north of San Francisco. The particulars indicated a white male around thirty or so. When David Carpenter, an industrial arts teacher in San Jose, was arrested for the crimes, he was fifty. But he had first been incarcerated for sex crimes in his mid-twenties, just about the time we would have predicted. At any rate, regardless of his age, I expected Cassandra Hansen’s killer to have a previous history of sex offenses involving children, though they’d be far less serious than murder. He was able to get her out of the church quickly and efficiently, which spoke to a certain level of sophistication and maturity. He may have even gotten some thrill out of the challenge
of getting her out of there. (I’ve interviewed a number of child molesters who said that they really got off on the challenge of spiriting a child out of a crowded shopping mall without anyone noticing or stopping them.)

  At the same time that the circumstances showed some criminal maturity and sophistication, the choice of a child victim definitely showed an inability to deal with peers in an age-appropriate manner. This type of individual would not have been able to have his way with an eighteen-year-old or someone closer to his own age. He could only do it with a helpless child. He happened to abduct and kill a little girl. I think Cassie represented his victim of choice, but he easily could have done the same to a little boy, if that were the available victim. In spite of this, he still could be married or be with a woman, but it would not be a mature or deep relationship and I wouldn’t be surprised to find the woman to be dependent or immature herself. Arthur Shawcross, who raped and murdered prostitutes in Rochester, New York, had served a previous fifteen-year jail term (much too short, in my opinion) for the assault and murder of both a young boy and a young girl. At the time of the prostitute murders, Shawcross was employed, married, and had a steady girlfriend.

  I told the investigators I thought the church location had a major bearing on the personality of the UNSUB. He might not even realize why he was at that church; it might not even be his denomination. He may have thought he was there for religious reasons, to communicate with God. He might consider himself highly moral and whatever he does is because God has told him directly to do it. We could possibly be dealing with a paranoid schizophrenic; at least I would expect him to have had hallucinations or delusions. And these religious delusions could be tied up with his fantasies about children. When you finally identify this guy, I said, expect to find elaborate diaries and scrapbooks, possibly even some poetry, related to his obsession with children and possibly even this particular child. You’ll also find one or more Bibles with many passages underlined and/or meticulous notes in the margins. He will be something of a loner, with a poor self-image, probably overweight. He could be big and strong since he’d had to get this presumably struggling child quietly out of the church, but he wouldn’t be a good-looking guy. If he were in his twenties or (more likely) thirties, he might have some kind of physical disfigurement or speech impediment that made him self-conscious. If he were in his forties or fifties, I’d expect him to be fat or with a prominent gut and probably losing his hair. He won’t have a large number of friends or any close friends, and so his diaries and scrapbooks will serve as one of his primary means of communication. Some of these guys will even record their thoughts on audio- or videotape, such as videotaping kids getting off a school bus and recording comments about individual children. If the UNSUB becomes worried that the investigation may be closing in on him, he’ll hide his material but he won’t destroy it unless he absolutely has to; it represents his lifelong avocation.

  This type of individual will be obsessed with the case and the murder investigation. In his scrapbook he’ll have every newspaper clipping he can find, particularly those with photographs. The picture of Cassie the police had shown me had also been published in the newspapers and I was confident the UNSUB had kept a clipping of it.

  He could easily have gone to the funeral. He might have made repeated visits to the grave site. He probably took souvenirs from the child—I had noted Cassie’s barrettes were missing—and some of these guys have been known to return missing items and to “talk to” their victims at the grave. Another possibility for the souvenirs was to give them to another child. In this way, he could “transfer” his obsession with the dead girl.

  The disposal site was symbolic. By tossing this little girl in the trash when he was finished with her, he was, in effect, saying that he had the right to do with her what he wanted, that he was justified in his actions. This would tie in with the religious delusions. His direct contact with God would help him rationalize the murder and deal with it. Either God wanted the UNSUB’s help in reclaiming this pure soul into heaven, or she needed to be punished or purged and he was God’s instrument in this. For this reason, he might be attending church more frequently than before. This would be one way to deal with his stress. Another would be through alcohol or drugs.

  When you have this symbolic a scene, you expect the killer to return to it, to the cemetery, or to some location significant to the victim and the crime. Stakeouts can often lead to positive results, which is why I suggested periodic “reminders” in the media as to where Cassie was buried.

  This struck me as a serial type offender, and with most of them, you generally see a precipitating Stressor in the hours, days, or weeks before the crime. The two most common, as I’ve said, have to do with jobs and relationshipslosing one or the other—but any type of hardship, particularly an economic one, can trigger the violent outburst. The only important qualification is that the stressor represents something with which the UNSUB can’t cope, that makes him feel he’s been unfairly dealt with, or that the world is out to get him. Then—since I believed this offender had some sort of past with child molestation or sex crimes when the opportunity presented itself, when he saw a child without anyone else around, where the risks of being seen or stopped were small, he instantly and instinctively sprang into action.

  I told the police officers that regardless of whether they had any good suspects or not, they should state publicly that the investigation was going well. I suggested to Deputy Chief LaBath that he go on television and declare that if it took him his entire career, he was going to make sure that this case was solved and the killer was brought to justice; that would keep up the emotional pressure on him.

  Because this UNSUB would be feeling the pressure. As I mentioned, alcohol could be one manifestation of this, but I felt it wouldn’t help enough. He might have confided his act to another person, and if he had, that person could easily be in danger as the heat rose. He would be getting more and more desperate as he tried to figure out whether the length of time that had passed since the crime meant he was home free, or whether the investigative case was closing in on him. That desperation could easily take the form of another criminal act.

  If and when the police did have a good suspect, I suggested making the pressure more overt. When John Wayne Gacy became the prime suspect in the disappearance of young boys around the Chicago area, Des Plaines police detectives undertook an overt, high-profile surveillance, dogging Gacy wherever he went. At first the rotund construction contractor took it as a joke, even inviting two of the detectives to dinner. Knowing the police would not want to pick him up on anything trivial, he toyed with them by openly defying traffic laws and smoking marijuana. The pressure continued to grow, though, and eventually Gacy cracked. He invited police right into his house, where they smelled rotting flesh. Ultimately, they picked him up on a drug charge, got a search warrant, and found the first of thirtythree bodies concealed in the structure of his home.

  I thought a similar tack could work here. If a suspect went to church, the police should go to church with him. If he went to a restaurant, they should go to the restaurant with him. Let him see you knocking on his neighbor’s door. I also suggested rattling him by having some female voice call him regularly, sob on the phone, and then hang up. You’ve got to be imaginative about not letting the subject off the emotional hook.

  This kind of offender would probably be nocturnal. If the police went by his residence at night, they would find lights on. He would also be nomadic, driving around after dark. He won’t flee the area because he knows that might alert investigators, and anyway, he feels at least partially justified in what he did. At that time, there was a technique known as psychological stress evaluation, or PSE, that was popular in certain law enforcement circles, particularly in the Midwest. Using specific observation parameters and an electronic device something like a polygraph, PSE was supposed to detect deception during interrogation. Personally, I didn’t set much store in it, particularly with subjects who had
rationalized their acts in their own minds. He wouldn’t give them any satisfaction if they confronted him with killing the little girl. The only line of questioning that might elicit some telling response, I thought, would be challenging him on having masturbated on her since we did have the semen deposit on her tights.

  Once I’d described the type of individual I objectively thought was responsible for Cassie Hansen’s abduction and murder, the police told me that during the course of the investigation they had conducted more than five hundred interviews and considered 108 possible suspects.

  One in particular stood out remarkably. “When you described what we should be looking for, you hit this guy on about ten major points,” Captain Trooien commented.

  The suspect in question was a fifty-year-old, six-foot-tall white male cab driver named Stuart W. Knowlton. He had been approached by the police after being seen driving in the area near the church the day Cassie disappeared but he refused to be questioned and refused to take a polygraph. He was of stocky build, had short gray hair and a receding hairline, and wore glasses. The police told me he was known to frequent area churches and had a history of child sexual abuse, including charges involving his own children. After our consultation, the police concentrated on him as their prime suspect, placing the others they’d been following on the back burner.

  Despite police suspicions, however, there wasn’t enough to charge him, so he was still free. But coincidentally, about three weeks before this telephone conference, Knowlton had been hit by a car while walking home and lost about half of one leg. It wasn’t going to be difficult to keep track of him for a while, because he was still in the Ramsey County Nursing Home rehabilitating.