Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  Clearly, he spent quite a bit of time at the scene and appeared to be comfortable there, leading me to profile an offender who knew his victims and the area. It did not appear that he went there that night specifically to kill them, though. More likely, the homicides occurred spontaneously. The crime scene reflected elements of both disorganization and inventiveness; the offender was adaptable, using electrical cords from lamps and a vacuum cleaner to tie up his victims.

  A mixed scene of this nature led me to believe that alcohol was a factor that night and that the UNSUB probably had a history of alcoholism. With the level of aggression demonstrated against the older victim, I figured he was one of those Jekyll and Hyde drinkers. Normally a loner—not at all a ladies’ man—a louder, more aggressive side of his personality would come out after a few drinks, although he’d only be able to express this to people he felt he could dominate. He would have difficulties in any relationships with women.

  Since people don’t just jump into double homicide, this subject would have been in trouble with the law before. He might have done time for crimes like assault, robbery, or burglary. Offenders leaving this kind of crime scene are typically of average intelligence, but this guy probably had not finished high school. When he had a job, it would involve physical rather than intellectual work, such as a laborer, mechanic, or truck driver. He would not keep himself neat; he’d appear in need of a bath, shave, and haircut.

  Of all the behavioral clues left throughout the apartment, the most significant came from the crime scene in the bedroom with the young girl. When he attacked Dannelle, her grandmother was out of the picture and he could act out his fantasies, easily dominating and controlling her. In his assault he was consuming her, reinforcing his power over the situation. The fact that he covered her up with the bedclothes, however, said a lot about his feelings after the fact. He was trying to eliminate the assault, feeling disgust and distaste over his actions. With this apparent change of heart, he felt some remorse over her death, in contrast to the apparent justification he felt for his actions against her grandmother.

  Whenever you have any signs of remorse like that at the scene, there’s going to be spillover into the UNSUB’s postoffense behavior. He would be compelled to talk to someone, to find out what the police were doing regarding the investigation, he’d increase his alcohol consumption, alter his physical appearance in some way, maybe visit the girl’s grave.

  The only area of the UNSUB’s life that I had trouble with was his age. As I’ve mentioned, this aspect is often problematic. I’ve seen subjects like this range in age from the late teens to early fifties, so I advised police to focus on the post-offense behavior and the other elements of the profile instead of looking for an offender of a particular age. I also warned that after the publicity died down, the subject had probably skipped town. As I always do, I told the investigators to give me a call if they wanted to discuss things further or brainstorm on proactive and/or interrogation techniques.

  Dickinson police continued the investigation, interviewing nearly thirty suspects. Only one fingerprint was recovered at the crime scene and that turned out to belong to one of the investigators. Later, when DNA testing was available, police went to reexamine evidence and found it had been destroyed when a freezer in the lab malfunctioned. No witnesses were ever found to shed a clue about the events of that night.

  However, none of this stopped the tenacious police in Dickinson. At one point, they even consulted a psychic from out of state, sending personal effects of the victims and photos of possible suspects and known sex offenders in the area. She chose one man from among them as the killer. Investigators’ suspicions about this guy grew when the sheriff’s office in Missoula, Montana, contacted them after he allegedly exposed himself to neighborhood kids. His friends told the sheriff he’d been talking about these murders in Dickinson. Police interviewed this suspect extensively and asked him to take a polygraph, which he refused. They also took a dental impression from him to compare with bite marks on Dannelle’s right cheek, but the results were inconclusive.

  Jerry Theisman of the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, a graduate of the FBI National Academy, contacted us in December 1985 for an evaluation of this man as a viable suspect for the double murder. We explained to him that it would be highly unlikely for someone to deescalate the level of violence in this manner. After having essentially gotten away with a brutal rape and double murder, this UNSUB wasn’t going to risk getting caught exposing himself in his own neighborhood. Also, the Dickinson killer had taken money from the crime scene. This guy didn’t seem to be hard up for cash.

  Still undaunted, Dickinson PD told us there was another suspect who met nearly all the points in my original profile and who was given a polygraph early on in the investigation, which gave indication of significant deception. The problem was, he’d left town and no one knew where he went. His name was William Thomas Reager and he’d lived in the motel at the time of the double homicide. He not only knew the victims but used to baby-sit Dannelle and seemed to have a crush on her mother, Melody. The family noticed that when he visited he would invite the child to sit on his lap, always putting his hand somewhere on her leg, which made them uncomfortable. Just a few nights before her murder, Dannelle had asked her mother not to allow him to baby-sit. The night after the murders, Reager was arrested for drunk driving and was interviewed by police. Now, years later, Dickinson police were searching for Reager’s whereabouts.

  By 1991, Sergeant Chuck Rummel had taken over the case and contacted us again. I was out of town when he called, so Jud Ray got involved and stayed with the case until its conclusion. Rummel had tracked Reager to Batesville, Arkansas, aided by a National Crime Information Center computer search run by a nearby county. Dickinson officials contacted police in Batesville to let them know Reager was a suspect in a double murder. Interestingly enough, authorities there were working on the unsolved murder of an elderly woman in 1988. In June of that year, the body of seventy-seven-year-old Della T. Harding was found under a bridge in a dry riverbed. The previous day she had been bound, beaten, and strangled in her home after an apparent break-in. At the time of her murder, Reager lived about a mile from Harding.

  After tracking his suspect further, Rummel finally got to interview Reager in the sheriff’s office in Clinton, Arkansas. He consulted Jud Ray before making the trip. Armed with our prediction that the offender would feel remorseful about the rape-murder of Dannelle Lietz, and with results from the original polygraph which indicated he’d been lying, Rummel and Jerry Theisen kept at him until he finally confessed, providing details on the Dickinson murders that had not been previously released to the public or even known to police, such as the fact that he took more than cash from the crime scene that night.

  According to Reager, he’d gone to the office to talk to Mrs. Dinkel about her daughter Melody. He wanted to get to know Melody better, an idea her mother scoffed at. Instead of being discouraged, Reager grew enraged and “went berserk” by his own description, hitting her with a piece of wood from the table. Reager said Dannelle came in from the bedroom while he was tying up her grandmother. As I visualized it, he had to maintain his control of the situation and he did this with his attack on the girl. He admitted that in addition to the money, he took a picture of Dannelle and Melody and a decorative platter from the scene—items not previously reported missing. The killer kept a memento of his crime.

  Reager was a white male, thirty-nine years of age at the time of the crime, with a history of offenses that included grand larceny, passing bad checks, burglary, and petty larceny. Of average intelligence, he worked as a laborer, truck driver, dishwasher, and carnival worker. Photos showed he always looked sloppy. He changed his appearance after the murders: he stopped dying his hair and let it go completely gray. He had a history of drinking and a drunk driving arrest, and his difficulties with women included separation from his second wife—whom he wed while still married to his first wife. He was repo
rtedly getting ready to marry a third when he was arrested. The second wife confirmed that he had a “nonfeeling” personality, that they’d had marital difficulties and that he drank frequently. Finally, his version of the events of that night confirmed anger and hostility toward Ms. Dinkel, who didn’t take him seriously as a suitor for her daughter.

  Along with his arrest in March of 1991 for the North Dakota crimes, Reager was also charged with capital murder in the 1988 Harding case in Arkansas. Investigators in both states noted that he’d traveled throughout the country in the ten years between the Dickinson case and his arrest, and police in Dallas, Texas, announced they were looking into possible ties to the murders of several elderly women there.

  We have to be grateful for the Dickinson authorities’ dogged pursuit. Over the course of a decade, new people were assigned to the case and each one took up the mantle with dedication and professionalism. Oftentimes, once the initial momentum is lost, old cases appear so stale no one wants to work them and they just sit there. There’s no doubt in my mind that Reager would have continued to let his impulses lead him, killing until he was either locked up for another offense, died, or just plain grew too old to do it. But that would have taken a long, long time.

  In the Batesville case, Harding was another older, female, vulnerable victim known by Reager, who’d visited her residence before. Like the Dickinson victims, she’d received a blow to the head but died as a result of strangulation. The offender used electrical cords to strangle his victims and took money from both crime scenes. Reager confessed to that killing, as well as the other two, then later waffled over his involvement, although he also admitted his guilt to his fiancée. As fate would have it, laws of nature caught up with Reager before the laws of man could. After he was charged with the three murders—and after the lead prosecutor in Arkansas, Don McSpadden, announced he would seek the death penalty in the Harding case—Reager had a fatal heart attack. Although you like to be able to bring a guy like this to trial, especially after so many years, appeals in death sentence cases in Arkansas were running at least ten years at the time. For Frank Dinkel, husband of one murder victim and grandfather to another, closure came sooner. At news of Reager’s arrest, he was quoted by the Bismarck Tribune as saying, “I was hoping it would be solved before I died.”

  Little Dannelle Lietz was clearly a victim of opportunity—raped and murdered by a situational child molester simply because she was there. Preferential or pedophile child molesters, on the other hand, have a clear sexual and erotic focus on children. They are not driven by situational stress or emotional insecurity; they simply prefer sex with children. They have predictable behavior patterns that they exhibit time and time again. This ritual behavior is a signature, something they have to do as part of their sexual activity, even if it makes carrying out the crime riskier or more difficult, like abducting a specific type of victim using a well-rehearsed script, even if this victim is hard to get without being observed and even if the script will slow his getaway.

  They also tend to be of a higher socioeconomic background than the situational molesters. They are constantly driven to molest young people, unlike situational types who might molest a child once in their lifetime. While all preferential child molesters share the same general sexual orientation, they’re very specific and individual in their choice of victim, with both gender and age preferences (although more prefer boy victims to girls and the younger the preferred victim, the less preferential the sex of the child becomes—those who look for toddlers tend to be less discriminating as to gender).

  Ken Lanning outlines three types of preferential molester, based on the different but predictable behavior patterns they exhibit: seduction, introverted, and sadistic.

  When you read in the media about a local teacher charged with fondling or raping one of his students, or a coach accused of behaving inappropriately with the kids on his team, you’re dealing with a seduction-type molester. This subject actually courts his victims with gifts and/or attention, slowly winning their trust, lowering their inhibitions. He is very good at communicating with children and at choosing victims who will be most susceptible to his ploys. A child who receives little affection at home, for example, will be flattered and will appreciate his attention.

  This is where your natural instinct can help you protect your kids. If someone seems to be paying too much attention, seems a little too focused on children, and spends a disproportionate amount of time in their company instead of with adults, the warning lights should go on. I’m not saying that every supportive coach or lonely, elderly man on your block is a sexual deviant waiting to prey on your child—far from it. We don’t want to become so suspicious of people that we sap all the joy and satisfaction out of human relationships. But be sure to supervise your children’s relationships.

  You don’t have to tell your ten-year-old you think her softball coach might be a pervert, just watch over her, go to the games, and if you’re suspicious, don’t let her be in a situation where they’ll be alone together. Also, try to develop a nurturing relationship so she’ll be less easily swayed by attention from someone else. I didn’t have a lot of time for my family when I was with the Bureau, which I regret. But I hope my kids felt close to me and understood that if anybody ever did or said anything that made them at all uncomfortable they could come to me or Pam. These guys tend to pick lonely, poorly supervised kids. You don’t have to be Supermom or Superdad; just stay aware of who your kid’s friends are and pay attention to that little voice in your head.

  A lot of these seduction types can be involved with several victims at once—their own personal child sex ring. Victims may be children in his Scout troop, his classroom, or his neighborhood. He spends time with them, listens to them, and knows how to communicate with—and manipulate—them. Because he’s an adult, a lot of well-behaved kids will feel they should listen to him and he’ll use that authority and status to his advantage. If none of his young victims reports him early on, the tide won’t turn until he’s ready to end one of his relationships, when a child victim grows up and becomes too old or mature to appeal to him any longer. This is the point when most victims report the exploitation, unless the molester’s threats and possibly even physical abuse keep them in line—probably the same means he used to prevent them from leaving or reporting him before he’s ready to move on.

  Unlike the seduction type, other molesters with the same drive for sex with children simply don’t have the interpersonal and social skills to lure their victims. The introverted type is more like the cliché of the creepy stranger in the raincoat in that he’s more likely to hang around parks or playgrounds, watching kids. You’ll be able to spot him—he may look like he’s ready to flash his victims, and at times he’ll do that. His sexual activity will be limited to brief encounters and he usually targets strangers or much younger children. He may act out his fantasies by making obscene telephone calls to children, exposing himself, or having sex with child prostitutes. If he can’t find any other way to obtain victims, he may even marry a woman with young children or have his own with her; they will then be his convenient victims from infancy.

  The most horrifying and physically dangerous preferential child molester, though, is the sadistic type. Like sadistic rapists and killers of adults, they need to cause pain—physical and/or psychological—to be aroused and satisfied sexually. A sadistic type of molester will use either trickery or force to gain control of his victims and then torture them in some way for his sexual gratification. Although there seem to be fewer sadistic molesters, these are the most likely to abduct and murder their victims.

  What’s also frightening is that there have been cases where seduction-type offenders have turned sadistic. It’s not clear whether these guys have had sadistic drives all along which surfaced later, maybe triggered by some stressor, or if they developed over time, gaining confidence and experience from their earlier exploits.

  While we can’t say the same for situational child mol
esters, pedophiles exhibit very predictable behaviors, many of which a parent can recognize. As a teenager, the pedophile may have very little social contact with other teens: his sexual interest is already directed toward children. As an adult, he tends to move frequently and often unexpectedly, as suspicious parents or law enforcement in effect run him out of town. If he joins the military, he may be discharged with no reason given. In many cases, the subject will have a long history of prior arrests, including molestation or abuse charges, as well as trouble with child labor laws, passing bad checks, or impersonating an officer. If there are prior arrests for child molestation, he may have been involved with multiple victims—if he molests one child from a neighborhood group, he probably at least attempted to molest others.

  Once we can review all his crimes, you’ll see that a high level of planning (and risk) went into repeated attempts to lure children. Unlike the situational molester, a pedophile puts a lot of time and energy into developing the perfect approach, which he may practice in order to attain a skillful delivery. His lifestyle will reflect the fact that he prefers children to adult sexual partners. These days, with “returning to the nest” becoming more popular, a twenty-fiveyear-old single man living with his parents is not unusual. As he grows older, though, he may draw attention to himself if he never dates women. He may also live alone, in a house decorated in a way that will appeal to the age/sex of his preferred victim. Depending on that category, he might have toys or dolls or all manner of games and amusements that he wouldn’t have in any other context.