Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  The issue of supposedly ineffective counsel comes up a lot. At the same time that our age seems to be characterized by a lack of personal responsibility for anything, we are also quick to palm responsibility off or lay blame on others. Just as with the large number of medical suits clogging the courts, if you don’t get the result you want in a criminal trial, why not fault someone else?

  Hank Williams has what I think is a good solution to this particular problem. Before a trial begins, there should be a list of about fifty questions, almost like a preflight cockpit checklist. The defense attorney should answer each question, or check off each step, then the judge, as part of his own evaluation, should get the defendant on the stand and ask him if he’s satisfied. Then the judge certifies that the defense preparation has been adequate. At the end of the trial, perhaps even before the verdict, he should make another determination as to the adequacy of counsel. All of this would go into the trial record. It may not eliminate all the problems with bogus habeas claims of inadequate representation, but it would go a long way. And in cases where there really was incompetent counsel, the court would be made aware of it at the appropriate time—the beginning of the trial.

  Williams thinks it’s downright insulting to attack competent and dedicated attorneys after the fact just for the sake of legal maneuvering. “The problem,” he says, “is that the anti—death-penalty people feel anything they do is justified because their cause is justified. That’s a dangerous attitude in a free society.”

  There have been significant victories, though. A major piece of legislation providing for habeas corpus reform at the federal level was finally passed by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton on April 24, 1996. Public Law 104-132, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, was designed to put an end to the endless recycling of habeas corpus petitions. Before a successive petition in a given case can be heard by a Federal District Court, its substantive merits must be certified by a three-judge panel of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Given the other provisions of the new statute, that circumstance should prove very rare. And the imposition of time limits on both the filing of a petition and its adjudication by federal courts should go a long way toward eliminating undue delay.

  Credit for the passage of the bill must be shared by many people and groups. In my opinion and in the opinion of people like Hank Williams, though, the habeas corpus reform is due in large measure to Jack and Trudy Collins and others like them who, believing in the power of the individual citizen and inspired by devotion to their slain loved ones, decided to march into the nation’s corridors of power and demand justice.

  Says Jack, “Suzanne’s fingerprints are all over that law.”

  Of course, on a state level, every state must pass its own reforms and Sedley Alley’s collateral appeals have not even reached the federal level yet, since so much time has been spent on the process thus far in Tennessee. This type of ordeal is being repeated for other victims and their families throughout the country.

  For the last several years of this delay, Jack and Trudy have blamed Judge Penny White, who, since her order that Alley’s collateral appeal be reheard, had been appointed to the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1994 by then-Governor Ned McWherter. As in many states, once appointed to this court, judges do not run for reelection, but are voted on in a public approval referendum. They don’t run against an opponent in this referendum; it’s simply a yes-no vote. And the vote, generally by very low turnout, is almost always yes. Penny White’s appointment was to be judged by the voters on August 1, 1996.

  Jack and Trudy and their fellow crime victims felt that Judge White was simply out-and-out against the death penalty, despite the fact that it was the law of the land in Tennessee. They had written a letter to Governor McWherter in 1994 urging him not to appoint her to the Supreme Court vacancy. They also felt so strongly that so many of her other decisions were egregious, that she was demonstrably antivictim, that they made the 1,400 mile round trip to Tennessee to actively support a drive to have her recalled from the bench. In this effort, they worked closely with Rebecca Easley from Burns, Tennessee, a widely respected victims’ advocate whose sister had been brutally murdered by her husband in a contract killing in 1977. Her sister’s case is still being appealed almost twenty years after that terrible event.

  Giving interviews about the “judicial Ping-Pong” they were subjected to, talking to reporters, appearing at press conferences and on television, the Collinses and other victims’ advocates took part in a massive statewide drive to highlight what they felt were the problems with Penny White as a State Supreme Court jurist. They helped publicize an extensive position paper detailing the facts of many of her major case decisions. They were opposed by the “People to Retain Penny White” campaign, which raised more than ten times as much money as the anti-White group.

  Judge White’s critics cited a number of appellate decisions in which she took part that they said proved her bias against capital punishment and against victims. One involved the 1991 murder of Tennessee State Trooper Doug Tripp.

  On May 19,1991, John Henry Wallen had pulled up next to Tripp as he sat in his patrol car and unloaded twelve or thirteen shots into his head, neck, and shoulder in two separate barrages with a .22 caliber rifle. Tripp’s revolver never left its holster. The killer admitted he had “made up his mind” that he would shoot the trooper. There was testimony at the trial that Wallen admitted hating police officers in general and told his girlfriend that one day he would kill Tripp or Tripp would kill him. A jury found Wallen guilty of first-degree murder.

  When the case came up before the Court of Criminal Appeals in November of 1995, Judge White declared that there was insufficient evidence of premeditation on Wallen’s part and therefore the charge should have been reduced to second-degree murder. The other two judges on the panel disagreed.

  “It is impossible to tell from the context whether this decision was reached months earlier or seconds before the killing,” she wrote.

  This opinion outraged a lot of people, especially law enforcement officers who daily lay their lives on the line, particularly Doug Tripp’s brother, David, a detective with the Union County Sheriff’s Department. “If that can’t be tried for first-degree murder,” he said, “then I can’t imagine what could be.”

  And that wasn’t all.

  The same month that John Henry Wallen killed Trooper Doug Tripp, Richard Odom, a convicted murderer who had escaped from a Mississippi prison, raped and murdered seventy-eight-year-old Mina Ethel Johnson in a Memphis parking garage as she walked to her podiatrist’s office. As he was raping her, Johnson pleaded that she was a virgin and tried to diffuse his rage, saying, “Don’t do this, son.”

  “I’ll give you a son!” Odom testified he replied. The rape was so brutal it tore her vaginal wall, then he stabbed her repeatedly in her heart, lung, and liver until she died. There were also defense wounds on her hands. Odom testified that she remained conscious until she died. The jury convicted Odom and sentenced him to death.

  By the time this case reached the Tennessee Supreme Court, Penny White was a member of that panel. She and one other judge ruled that there was no evidence that the Johnson rape-murder was “especially heinous, atrocious and cruel in that it involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death,” one of the state’s “aggravating circumstances,” necessary for imposition of the death penalty. Odom was therefore entitled to a new sentencing hearing.

  The Supreme Court opinion, while allowing that, “while almost all murders are ‘heinous, atrocious and cruel’ to some degree, and we have no purpose to demean or minimize the ordeal this murder victim experienced,” stated that this standard “must be reserved for application only to those cases which, by comparison or contrast, can be articulately determined to be the very ‘worst of the worst.’” “Otherwise,” they piously pointed out, “every murder committed in the perpetration of rape could be classified as a deatheligible offe
nse.”

  Okay, folks. We can argue the merits of the death penalty all we want. But I’m here to tell you that I’ve been involved with thousands of rape and murder cases during my quarter century in law enforcement, and to paraphrase Detective David Tripp, if raping a seventy-eight-year-old virgin—making this violation the last experience of her life—ripping her vaginal wall and stabbing her over and over again isn’t “especially heinous, atrocious and cruel,” or that it isn’t “serious physical abuse,” then I can’t imagine what could be; and believe me, I’ve seen some pretty bad stuff.

  Ron McWilliams, the lead detective on the case, wept openly when describing its brutality at a news conference.

  White’s critics saw this ruling as manifest evidence that she simply wasn’t sensitive to victims of violent crimes and really didn’t get what they actually went through. The Collinses and their allies, including Rebecca Easley, David Tripp, and Mina Johnson’s sister, Louise Long, concluded that Judge White was simply against the death penalty and was using her position and power to circumvent the will of the jury.

  White’s supporters said she was just trying to insure fair trials for defendants and that it was unfair to judge her on only a few decisions, though her critics saw an overall pattern in her judgments. Whatever the overall record, though, I personally happen to believe that saying you shouldn’t evaluate a judge on one particular decision is like saying you shouldn’t evaluate a person on the commission of one particular crime. In both instances, they tell you a lot about where this individual is coming from.

  In another decision, she stated that the ruling by a lower court judge that a convicted child molester must display a sign in his front yard for a certain period of time should be overturned because it “undermined his character and self-esteem.”

  We could argue this point and I might even agree that such a public proclamation might tend to undermine an individual’s self-esteem. But it should also be noted that this sentence was imposed by the judge as a substitute for jail time. And since there is so much talk these days about alternative punishments, this might be a preferable one if the subject in question wasn’t highly dangerous. But again, if nothing else, that decision of Judge White’s was cited as showing a bias toward a convicted felon and away from the victim.

  On Thursday, August 1, 1996, the voters of Tennessee voted No on Penny White by a margin of 55 to 45 percent. It was the first time in Tennessee history that a Supreme Court judge had been recalled. “We got the message to the people and the people were aroused,” said Jack Collins.

  He saw White’s recall as a warning to judges not to sit too high up in their ivory towers. “Once those folks get life tenure, they sit back, they become academic and theoretical about life. They don’t whiff the sulfur, they don’t taste the blood. They have no idea of the grief and the sorrow involved. And they say, well, that’s their role: to be above the battle. Damn it, no! You’ve got to understand the battle. You may not be in it, but you’ve got to understand it, to take the time to feel it palpably.”

  Jack and Trudy believe they face years yet before Sedley Alley’s sentence will actually be carried out, and they only hope they live long enough to see it happen. If it does, they both want to be there, watching as their daughter’s killer pays the final price for his savage cruelty. They are haunted by the fact that they could not be with Suzanne when she died, and although this would not make up for it, it would constitute the final steps of walking the entire journey with her.

  On June 8,1996—which would have been Suzanne’s thirtieth birthday—Jack and Trudy decided to go out to dinner to celebrate. “She was so joyous and upbeat, we wanted to be happy for her,” Jack explains. “It was a wonderful evening. Now, on the anniversary of the day she was killed I doubt very much if we’d be going out to dinner, or the date she was buried. But on the date of her birthday, we said, yes, let’s be happy for her. I think we’ll do this every year.”

  They still miss her every day, in ways both large and small. Jack wears on his watchband the tiny gold heart Suzanne had on a chain around her neck when she died. Stephen still carries a high school photograph of her in his wallet. Susan Hand, who went on to become an air traffic controller at El Toro and is now Susan Martin, married to Army Captain Eric Martin and the mother of two children, still gets mistyeyed whenever she hears the song “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” by the group Simple Minds. It was one of her and Suzanne’s favorites. Among many other things, Trudy misses not being able to go shopping with her, not having her there to say, “Mom, those earrings don’t go with this.”

  Recently, Jack wrote a short story entitled “Elegy for a Marine,” a very lightly fictionalized account of Suzanne’s death from her own perspective. He wrote it as a catharsis, he says, as another way of trying to come to grips with the tragedy, another way to share her pain and spiritually to be with her in the hour of her death as he couldn’t be physically. It is a moving tribute to Suzanne’s life and courage, one of the most affecting pieces of its kind I have ever read, and a poignant, deeply revealing insight into a parent’s anguish.

  On the legal frontier, he and Trudy will continue seeking justice for their daughter and others like her, whatever it takes. But they have also established a living memorial: the Suzanne Marie Collins Perpetual Scholarship, part of the American Foreign Service Association Scholarship Program. The Collins scholarship is awarded to children of foreign service personnel—active, retired, or deceased—to pursue their college educations, and is based solely on need.

  Contributions in Suzanne’s memory can be made to:

  AFSA Scholarship Fund/American Foreign Service Association

  2101 E Street, N.W.

  Washington, D.C. 20037

  Telephone: (202) 338-4045 Fax: (202) 338-6820

  (Please specify that your contribution is for the Suzanne Marie Collins Perpetual Scholarship.)

  CHAPTER 10

  The Blood of the Lambs

  Sometime between the late night of Friday the thirteenth in March of 1987 and mid-morning of Saturday, March 14, thirty-year-old Nancy Newman and her two daughters, eightyear-old Melissa and three-year-old Angie, were sexually assaulted and murdered in their own apartment on Eide Street in Anchorage, Alaska, in one of the cruelest and most brutal crimes the investigators had ever seen. Her sister and brother-in-law, Cheryl and Paul Chapman, were the ones who discovered the horror after Nancy failed to show up for work. In addition to the deadly assaults, there was some evidence of burglary. So appalling was the attack and so concerned were authorities that a viciously depraved or serial killer was on the loose. Anchorage police and the Alaska state troopers immediately formed a joint task force.

  In any case that could potentially be seen as a domestic homicide, the spouse is always considered among the earliest suspects. But John Newman, a heavy-equipment operator on the oil pipeline who had come up to Alaska with his family from their native state of Idaho, had been injured on the job three months before and had been down in San Francisco since January 3 for treatment and rehabilitation. And aside from the logistical impossibility of his involvement, it quickly became clear to investigators that he and his wife and children had a model loving relationship without a hint of any problems.

  Even had John not been ruled out for these clear and concrete reasons, as soon as we heard a description of the murders and saw the crime scene photos, we knew he had nothing to do with the attack. Sad to say, some parents do abuse, and some parents do kill, their children. They rape them, they beat them, they burn them, they starve them, they smother them. Sometimes they even stab them. But they don’t do what was done to the Newman children. We see personal cause domestic homicides in which a man kills his wife, ex-wife, or ex-girlfriend where there is a tremendous amount of overkill in evidence—multiple stab wounds concentrated around the head and neck. And we see cases in which a man will kill his entire family. But whether it’s done with a knife or a gun or any other means, it’s much “cleaner” than t
his. Whatever a man might do to his wife, no matter how hideous the punishment he tries to inflict as he kills her, there is no motive we’ve ever seen in which a father brutally rapes, sodomizes, and slashes up his two little girls, then leaves their bodies out in plain view for whoever finds them. It just does not happen.

  Both the Anchorage PD and Alaska state troopers are first-rate organizations, confident enough in their own mission and capabilities that they are secure asking for assistance from anyone who can help them. As routine practice, APD has an assistant district attorney attached to each homicide team to oversee the investigation right from the start. So the newly formed task force immediately contacted Special Agent Don McMullen, the profile coordinator in the FBI’s Anchorage Field Office, who gave them a summary of the kind of individual likely to have perpetrated such a gruesome crime. McMullen is a first-rate agent and was one of the top profilers in the field. We had worked together about three and a half years earlier when he was the case coordinator in the murders committed by Robert Hansen—the Anchorage baker who had abducted prostitutes, flew them out of town in his private plane, and then hunted them down for sport in the woods far from civilization. After giving police his own initial evaluation of the Newman murders, McMullen contacted Jud Ray in Quantico.

  Jud had been with the Investigative Support Unit for about two and a half years and brought a unique background and qualifications to his job as a profiler. An Army veteran of Vietnam, he had started his law enforcement career as a police officer in Georgia, quickly working his way up to becoming a homicide detective before joining the FBI. He and I first got to know each other back in 1978 when he was a shift commander with the Columbus, Georgia, Police Department, working the “Forces of Evil” multiple murder case at Fort Benning. We then worked together briefly in early 1981 when he was a special agent in the Atlanta Field Office and I came down from Quantico on ATKID—the Atlanta Child Murders. But as it turned out, we didn’t work together too long on that one. As I related in Mindhunter, on February 21, 1981, two shooters hired by Jud’s wife very nearly killed him in his own apartment. He spent three weeks in the hospital under twenty-four-hour armed guard recovering from his physical wounds. The emotional recovery took a lot longer.