Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  Ironically, the defense tried to have some of the photos suppressed because they could “inflame the jury.”

  Sedley Alley was represented by Robert Jones and Ed Thompson, two of the preeminent defense attorneys in Memphis, both of whom Williams greatly respects. Despite what he considered the clear-cut nature of the crime, he knew he wouldn’t have an easy time with them.

  Nor did they have an easy time with their client, as it turned out. I don’t mean he completely clammed up and refused to talk; he simply didn’t tell them anything relevant or assist in his defense. Going on a year after the murder, Williams and his assistant, Bobby Carter, were pushing for trial.

  The defense brought in a psychologist named Allen Battle to examine Alley. When Dr. Battle interviewed him, he got a similar response to what Alley had been giving his lawyers. To any substantive question he’d respond, “I don’t remember.”

  Now, there are only a couple of ways to interpret the behavior of a defendant in a capital murder case who gives investigators a detailed confession just hours after the crime and then, months later, tells a psychologist he doesn’t remember anything about the incident. My personal interpretation, barring compelling evidence to the contrary, would be that he’s either attempting to save his own skin or just telling the entire system to take a flying leap. A more charitable interpretation—and one that would play a whole lot better from a defense viewpoint—might be that the horrible event of the death of this young woman so traumatized him that he had developed total amnesia about it.

  How could this happen? Dr.Battle wondered. After all, on July 12, he told the detectives what he’d done and that he’d killed her. Well …how about if only one personality remembered? The others didn’t, because they had no part in it!

  That was the explanation Dr. Allen Battle came up with. He then hypnotized Alley and became more convinced.

  Candidly, there weren’t many other arrows in the quiver at this point. Alley can’t very well deny the crime—he’s already admitted he killed her and the medical examiner’s detailed report is pretty definitive about the way she died. If you’re the defense, you might as well try to place it in a context that at least gets rid of some of the horrible responsibility.

  Ten days before the scheduled trial date of March 17, 1986, Jones and Thompson officially raised the possibility of multiple personality disorder. They said they needed more time to study Alley’s supposed condition. The trial was postponed to evaluate for mental competency.

  Alley was sent to MTMHI—the Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute. For six months, six therapists of various sorts examined him without coming to any definitive conclusion. Physical tests revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Dr. Willis Marshall, a psychiatrist brought in by the defense, examined Alley under drug-induced hypnosis to help overcome the “amnesia.” With this type of attention, Alley was able to remember the night of July 11, 1985.

  Under hypnosis, Alley revealed that he had been split into three personalities that night. There was the regular Sedley, there was a female personality called Billie next to him in the car, and there was Death, dressed in a black hood and cape and riding a white horse next to the car as it drove along.

  While Dr. Battle stuck with multiple personality disorder, Dr.Broggan Brooks, for the prosecution, specifically ruled it out in his own opinion, saying Alley was a “borderline personality.” DSM-III—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, the standard psychiatric reference—characterized borderline personality disorder as “an instability in a variety of areas, including interpersonal behavior, mood, and self-image.” It went on to describe intense and unstable relationships, intense anger, and impulsive, unpredictable behavior characterized by wide mood shifts. (We are now up to DSM-IV.) Four other examiners said they weren’t sure and required more time to study Alley.

  With respect to hypnosis as a forensic examination tool, we’ve all seen or heard about the nightclub acts in which a hypnotist selects members of the audience and gets them to cluck like chickens, or convinces them they can’t raise their arms, or regresses them back to a past life in the court of Cleopatra. There is a tendency for us to think of hypnosis as a combination of infallible truth serum and a state of utter suggestibility, even though when you stop to think about it, those two concepts are mutually exclusive.

  The fact of the matter is that hypnosis doesn’t work on everyone—I’m not even sure it works on most people—and what it really is, is a technique for helping the subject focus and concentrate on a particular time, place, or idea. That’s why it’s sometimes helpful to police in getting specific details from witnesses, such as a physical description or a license plate number, though it certainly isn’t foolproof any more than a polygraph is foolproof. What this means in real terms is that in some cases the subject might be very suggestible on either a conscious or semiconscious level to what he thinks the hypnotist wants to hear, or, with the heightened state of concentration that the hypnosis provides, he might be even more effective in constructing his own desired account of events. I have seen remarkable control studies in which, under the guidance of the hypnotist, subjects relate extensive details of events which have already been established not to have taken place. I’m not saying hypnosis isn’t sometimes effective or useful; I’m only saying it’s far from definitive—something many doctors, lawyers, judges, and juries don’t understand.

  As to multiple personality disorder: from my experience, MPD is a diagnosis that generally emerges post-arrest. In point of fact, it is a very rare phenomenon, so any therapist who tells you he has extensive experience with it ought to be suspect right from the beginning. In the few documented cases in which it is seen, it is much more common in women than in men and almost always arises out of early childhood sexual abuse. And if you’re going to see evidence of MPD, you’re going to see it early.

  Another issue is that while MPD seems to be a psychological response to abuse or violence inflicted upon an individual—who then retreats into another personality to lessen the trauma or fantasize getting back at the abuser—there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that MPD has made an otherwise nonviolent person become violent. In other words, there is no literature I’m aware of, or that any of the experts I’ve consulted are aware of, suggesting that a violent personality ever takes over and does what it wants with the other personalities unaware or unable to control it.

  So, to state it plainly: If you’re going to make a case for multiple personality disorder—particularly as a defense for a crime of violence—you’re going to have to do a pretty good job of documenting the evidence going back to early childhood rather than a sudden appearance around the time of the crime. And if you’re going to use it as an insanity defense, you’re going to have to show—which I don’t think you can—that one personality was responsible for the crime and the others were powerless to stop “him.” In Sedley Alley’s case, for example, which of the personalities killed Suzanne Collins? Was it Death; if so, maybe he was just doing his job. Or was it Billie—maybe she was jealous of another woman. Or was it regular old Sedley, in which case we can forget about the other two and just try him on the merits. One thing’s for sure: some personality or other gave a detailed description of killing Suzanne to the authorities, and I’ve studied the transcript—there’s no mention of Billie or Death or indication of a feminine persona.

  Kenneth Bianchi, who, along with his cousin Angelo Buono, was charged with the rape and murder of ten young women in the notorious Hillside Strangler case in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, claimed to be a multiple personality and convinced several psychiatric experts, who ultimately identified ten separate personalities under hypnosis—eight men and two women. In what has become a classic of forensic psychology, Dr. Martin Orne of the University of Pennsylvania revealed Bianchi as a fake and even showed where all of the other identities had come from and the technique Bianchi had used to develop them and call them up. Bianchi withdrew his insanity plea and beg
an cooperating with prosecutors to escape the death penalty. Bianchi is currently serving five consecutive life sentences.

  But Drs. Battle and Marshall stuck to their guns. Marshall testified that as a child, Alley was mentally abused by his father, which is where the multiple personalities began. Battle thought that because of a childhood urinary tract problem which required surgical correction Alley developed a female personality to handle the pain. The Death personality, he concluded, was the result of an underlying psychosis.

  Meanwhile, the pretrial procedure dragged on.

  On June 8, 1986—the day that would have been Suzanne’s twentieth birthday—Trudy wrote:

  With the trial of this dreadful man, who is her confessed murderer, having been postponed twice and now, perhaps, once again, we are groping for patience, relief from our oozing wound and solace in knowing that Sue is in God’s hands and can no longer be hurt.

  The need we have to start the healing by putting this deed in the court so that justice can be meted out, is great and heavy. It is almost an inhuman act to have this final reach for justice postponed and prolonged for reasons of the inadequacy of our justice system. It appears that the criminals have every card in the game of death and the victim has nothing.

  Preparing to leave for the trial, Jack and Trudy had put their dog in the kennel and were literally on their way out of the house for the trip to Tennessee when the phone rang, telling them there had been another postponement. Had the call come one minute later, they would have taken on the expense and made the trip for nothing. Among the other tasks Williams took on himself was trying to convince the Collinses that as excruciating as the delays were to them, the judge was doing it right, giving the defense all the latitude they asked for to prove their case.

  Still, he admits, “The frustration level was incredible.”

  After four postponements, the murder trial of Sedley Alley finally got under way in early March of 1987, in Thirteenth Judicial District Criminal Court, Shelby County, Tennessee, with Judge W. Fred Axley presiding.

  In the days just prior to the beginning of the trial, Williams and Carter went to interview Dr. Battle. While he insisted that Alley looked like a multiple personality case to him, when the two men pressed him, he admitted that he couldn’t say which of the personalities was in control at the time of the murder.

  At the request of the prosecution, I flew down to Memphis. I stayed at the River Place Hotel, the same hotel where Jack and Trudy Collins were staying. Jack testified, telling the jury what kind of person Suzanne was.

  Williams had originally contacted me at Quantico through Harold Hayes of the Memphis Field Office because he was worried about establishing motive in what might seem to a jury (and was) so senseless a killing. His greatest fear, he said, was that Battle or Marshall would do well and, absent another reasonable motive for the killing, the jury would buy their version. As it turned out, though, they came up with a fine, intelligent jury that didn’t.

  I had two main purposes in being down there. First, Williams and Carter were hoping Alley would take the stand. If he did, they wanted advice from me on how best to nail him and get him to show his true personality, as I’d helped District Attorney Jack Mallard do during the Wayne Williams (no relation to Hank Williams) child murder trial in Atlanta. Throughout that trial, Williams had come across as a mild-mannered nonentity who couldn’t hurt a fly. We knew, however, that he had a huge ego and might insist on testifying. Once he did, I gave Mallard pointers on how he could intrude on Williams’s physical and emotional space and get him to lash out emotionally, showing the jury his true colors. The moment when he did was a turning point in the trial, leading to Williams’s conviction for murder.

  The second purpose was to help the prosecution explain the motive for murder by providing them with analysis from a behavioral perspective that they could explain to the jury. As soon as Williams had described the case to me over the phone, and then I got a chance to review the complete file, I knew that Sedley Alley’s version of events didn’t make sense. He had said the death was an accident, that he had no intent to injure her. That, in a word, was bullshit.

  First of all, this was a generally organized type of crime, similar in some ways to what I’d seen from Wayne Williams. The murder itself was mixed—with elements of both organization and disorganization—indicating to me that in spite of her strategic disadvantage, Suzanne must have put up a hell of a fight. This was a ballsy, resourceful abduction, practically right under the noses of authorities. To disable and neutralize someone in the condition Suzanne was in, even for someone as large and strong as Alley, he’d need the element of surprise so he could quickly blitz her. After that, he just as quickly got her into the car and figured out a way to get her off base, even though two Marine joggers were running after him as fast as they could. He got her past the security gate and took her directly to a place he knew he wouldn’t be interrupted. You just don’t start out your criminal career creating a crime this brutal. He had to have had prior experience. I was therefore not surprised when Williams told me his suspicions both that Alley had strangled his first wife and that he might be responsible for two other murders in California similar in style to the Collins killing, although he was never charged with these crimes.

  Second, the crime was clearly of the category Special Agent Roy Hazelwood and I had defined in an article entitled “The Lust Murderer” that we had written for the April 1980 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. Typically, these killings are heterosexual and intraracial in nature and are so defined because they involve mutilation or torture of genital areas. While the abduction itself was clearly a crime of opportunity, there was no way Alley’s breaking off the tree limb and thrusting it up between his victim’s legs while she was still alive (as the autopsy report showed) was anything other than the premeditated, sexualized rage of a sociopath intent on having his own way.

  As we said in the article: “The lust murder is premeditated in the obsessive fantasies of the perpetrator. Yet, the killer may act on the ’spur-of-the-moment’ when the opportunity presents itself. That is to say, the murderer has precisely planned the crime in his fantasies, but has not consciously decided to act out those fantasies until the moment of the crime. Consequently, the victim is typically unknown to the killer.”

  In the article, we divided lust murderers into two broad categories: organized nonsocial and disorganized asocial. Though we don’t use the nonsocial and asocial of these terms much any longer, the Collins murder case was the work of the first variety for many reasons, including the fact that the trauma was mainly induced before death rather than postmortem.

  There is some confusion with the term “lust murder,” since it doesn’t really involve lust in the way we normally think of it. Sedley Alley hadn’t been lusting after Suzanne Collins; as far as we know, he’d never seen her before. And the fact that there may be no actual sexual assault or penile penetration of the vagina doesn’t mean this is not a sexualized act. In the criminal mind, sex takes many forms. David Berkowitz, who shot his victims and never touched them, admitted that he would later go back to the murder scenes and masturbate, thinking about what he had done. Both in Berkowitz’s case and Alley’s, I knew what I was seeing here was a sexualized manifestation of power from an individual who, under normal circumstances, had none. The blood found on Alley’s shorts, signifying that he had rubbed up against her genital area after killing her, spoke to that.

  While certainly sadistic, Alley was not what we would characterize as a sexual sadist, per se. As opposed to someone like Paul Bernardo in Toronto, he was not sexually aroused from the infliction of pain. Though she was beaten severely with blunt force, Suzanne wasn’t burned or whipped so that her attacker could get off on hearing her scream. Though her nipple was bitten as an act of general hostility, her attacker didn’t use pliers or other instruments of torture on her as Lawrence Bittaker had done to his victims. Alley’s motivation lay elsewhere.

  There had bee
n a precipitating event in the killer’s life prior to the attack. And the brutality against a total stranger—the pummeling, the stripping, the unspeakable cruelty with the tree limb—all that represented displaced anger, projected hostility against someone else. Since all of these types have inadequate personalities, it also served as a substitute for his inability to approach women in a mature and confident manner. When NIS agents searched Alley’s house, one of the items they found in his tool box was a mail-order penis enlarger.

  As we wrote of the lust killer: “He would be described as a trouble-maker and a manipulator of people, concerned only for himself. He experiences difficulties with family, friends and ’authority figures’ through anti-social acts which may include homicide. It is the nonsocial’s aim to get even with society.”

  James Clayton Lawson, the killer (as opposed to the rapist) of the Odom and Lawson serial murder team, explained in an interview, “I wanted to cut her body so she would not look like a person and destroy her so she would not exist.” If he destroys the victim, he becomes, in effect, her sole possessor.

  Often in these types of crimes, the instrument used on the victim is found prominently displayed at the crime scene. In the Collins case, it couldn’t have been any more prominent.

  The assertion that Alley had inserted the stick to stage it as a sexual crime was patently ridiculous. Aside from witness statements about Suzanne’s scream, the nature of the damage to internal organs showed that the stick was inserted with considerable force three or four times. You don’t do that if you’re staging. You put it in and get the hell out.

  What I wanted to get across to the prosecution team was that they had an angry and frustrated man with a tremendous amount of rage at life in general and women in particular, who tried to blunt his anger with drugs and alcohol, and who, on that particular night, was not going to put up with any frustration. When this pretty young runner wasn’t immediately receptive to him—or if he only perceived that, as she may not actually have had the time and opportunity to reject him—he just lost it. He couldn’t handle his rage and lashed out at her.