Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  What we saw on the child could have been an ineffective attempt to begin cleaning up so much blood that he simply abandoned the effort when he realized how formidable a task it would be. Or it might have had some significance only to him that the rest of us will never know. The murder weapon was the one item he brought with him, a sharp-edged knife, believed to be one Anthoney often carried.

  Looking at the photographs, Jud knew the killer was completely out of control at the height of his savagery. Jud also knew that, given another Stressor of similar magnitude, he would find a new target and kill again. Killing a small child is about as cowardly an act as any of us could conceive, and he was obviously displacing his anger against everyone else by assaulting and mutilating her.

  “You can’t go kick the boss’s ass and you can’t go kick your ex-girlfriend’s butt, and you can’t get back at mom, but you really can expend all of this energy against a little child who can’t fight back,” Jud says. “Kirby wanted to shock the consciousness of whoever found the bodies, knowing Nancy’s sister would probably be the person who found them. He’d probably killed these people a hundred times in his mind, given the stresses that were generated in the home and at work. Even if he hadn’t murdered these particular people under this particular circumstance, it was just a matter of time before a guy like this would have killed. The fantasy of killing is always sort of lurking in the background.”

  Anchorage District Attorney Steve Branchflower assigned William H. Ingaldson to prosecute the case. Anthoney was represented by two public defenders—John Salemi and Greg Howard. As soon as he began preparing for trial, Branchflower wanted to know if anyone from the Investigative Support Unit had ever testified on the witness stand as an expert during a case-in-chief (as opposed to merely as a rebuttal witness). The answer was that we had not, since profiling and behavioral analysis were still considered new and experimental and many in law enforcement (not to mention within the FBI) didn’t know what to do with them.

  Jud came to me and asked whether there was any precedent for this.

  No, I told him, we’d never been allowed to give expert testimony before. We called the legal counsel at Quantico, who researched the issue and couldn’t find any precedent for us being able to testify on this field of crime analysis that we’d been developing since the early 1970s.

  Jud called Branchflower back and told him that while the FBI legal people had no opposition to any of us testifying, he cautioned the DA that we’d never done it.

  Branchflower responded, “Well, I think I can get you qualified with your background in police work and having worked homicides for a number of years. At least we want to try it.”

  Carefully examining the Alaska statutes, he was able to get Jud a preliminary qualification as an expert witness, so Jud flew up to Alaska for the beginning of Kirby Anthoney’s trial. Once Jud was actually there, the judge was very cautious about how much latitude he was going to give the FBI. He ruled that Jud couldn’t testify on profiling per se, but could testify to post-offense behavioral characteristics. This was the critical issue for the defense, who claimed that their client had not behaved in a manner indicative of a guilty person. Jud, of course, was prepared to claim just the opposite, having predicted what he’d do each step of the way.

  Jud’s testimony in the Anthoney case became the first time anyone from our unit had been able to testify as an expert on what we did, and in so doing, he helped establish a trial precedent and blazed the trail for the rest of us.

  Even before the first day in court, Jud began advising Ingaldson on strategy. “With regard to my direct testimony,” Jud says, “I advised him that we should deal strictly with what we believe the defense strategy would be, which was to bring in a lot of people to say that this guy behaved in a certain manner and what did it all mean.”

  So on direct examination, Ingaldson questioned Jud about his qualifications, how many cases he’d worked, what kinds of behavior he’d seen over and over again, that sort of thing. But on cross examination, the defense began straying away from the strict topic of post-offense behavior, allowing Jud to respond and take in a much broader scope than he would have been permitted on his own. Jud believes that the defense decided not to put on the witnesses it had been planning to have describe Anthoney’s behavior, perhaps realizing that armed with Jud’s explanations, the jury could easily place a very damaging interpretation on that behavior.

  As in many cases in which we consult, one of the main things we’re hoping for is that we can get the defendant to waive his Constitutional right against self-incrimination, take the stand himself, and at least show the jury what he’s really like. Every day, Anthoney seemed a little cockier and more upbeat, as if he were feeling on top of the world rather than sitting in a murder trial. At times he appeared to be running the defense, telling his two lawyers what to do. In fact, he even had himself declared co-counsel.

  This was just the attitude and behavior Jud was looking for. When the defendant is cocky and confident enough to think he can do himself more good than harm, then he’s going to insist on taking the stand.

  The prosecution was confident about the elements of its case because of the solid forensic work. They had Anthoney’s blood and semen, which matched up, plus the lice. But remember, this was a little before the first use of DNA evidence in a courtroom. That would come about a year later in another case in which Jud was involved, a strange story I’ll detail in the next chapter. So to have the best chance of cinching a guilty verdict for Anthoney, Ingaldson and Jud wanted to be able to catch the defendant in his own inconsistencies.

  When police searched Anthoney’s residence, they found Nancy’s camera. His explanation was that she’d given it to him. To us and the police, that story was bogus on its face since the camera still had a roll of film in it with the Newmans’ pictures from the previous Christmas. If they could just get him up on the stand, they thought they could blow his story out of the water. After reading through the transcripts of interviews with the police, Jud became convinced that while Anthoney might have admired the camera, he had no idea how to use it, which would indicate that Nancy hadn’t given it to him.

  “I just wanted to get that camera in his hands and let him demonstrate to the court that he didn’t know how to use it, because he’d talked so much in the interviews about his knowledge of the camera, how he loved to take pictures and Nancy knew this. APD did a great job of questioning this guy. They really got it down.”

  Jud had heard from a contact in the media that the black inmates in the jail where Anthoney was being held had threatened to beat him up. “This made no sense to me, but as I learned a bit more about it, what was happening was, he would come back from court each evening and they would shout out, ‘Baby killer!’ so he would shout ethnic slurs back at these guys.

  “So I’m thinking to myself, Hmm, this could be useful. This guy doesn’t like blacks and he reacts to blacks in terms of what they do. I thought, let’s try to get his ex-girlfriend into court, just in the audience. I think we can get him riled.”

  Debbie Heck had been put on the prosecution’s list of potential rebuttal witnesses if the defense had tried to mount the attack on post-offense behavioral characteristics, so she was there and available.

  Jud began sitting in the audience next to Debbie. “This was all very nonthreatening. We were just sitting next to each other. But my strategy was to get his attention, and once I got his attention, I began to lean over and whisper things about the trial to her, asking her what she thought of him. And each time I did something like this, I would get closer and closer. Then I’d put my hand on the back of the bench to make it look as if I were hugging her. And even though I wasn’t, I could see Anthoney getting terribly upset. He began whispering to his lead counsel, and I knew what he was saying. So the counsel got up and asked for a recess.”

  Anthoney and his lawyers went into an anteroom off the court. When they came back about ten minutes later, the lawyers approached the be
nch and one of them whispered to Ingaldson, “I can’t keep this guy off the stand.”

  Whether he wanted to make an impression with his former girlfriend or simply say, “I’m cleverer than you, black FBI agent,” or if he just wanted to do what this type of arrogant defendant generally wants to do—“I can save this”—we can’t be sure. But he knew the prosecution had put on a strong case, the defense hadn’t put on anything to speak of, and he may have figured he had nothing to lose.

  Members of the press appeared to be shocked that he was actually doing this.

  Jud then called me back in Quantico and asked me to help him come up with an attack strategy for Ingaldson. Just as I’d advised in the Wayne Williams trial in Atlanta, I suggested that the prosecutor start off slowly and methodically, boosting Anthoney’s confidence and letting him think he was winning. Then, little by little, he should move in closer and closer until he begins violating the defendant’s sense of his personal space, intrudes on him, then start homing in on his inconsistencies. The key was to take him by surprise.

  As I’ve mentioned, I always like to have a physical object or symbol associated with the murder that the defendant can be made to touch or handle or even stare straight atsomething that would have no particular significance to an innocent person, but which would elicit an unmistakable emotional reaction from the perpetrator. In the murder of Mary Frances Stoner, it was the rock Darrell Gene Devier had used to smash her head in. In the trial of Tien Poh Su, it was Deliana Heng’s bloodstained panties. And when Jud told me about the camera, I thought this was a perfect object with which to fix the jury’s mind on the fact that Anthoney had been lying about everything.

  That was just what Ingaldson did. He started off slowly, then moved in gradually for the kill. Abruptly, he stopped his questioning and began talking about the camera. He asked Anthoney how much he’d used the camera, using what he’d said during the police questioning. He described the camera to the jury, then he picked it up and brought it over to Anthoney on the stand.

  “How about explaining this to me?” he asked. “What’s an f-stop?”

  Jud recalls, “Anthoney looked at the camera, and looked at it some more, and then he said, ‘I don’t know anything about f-stop. I just take pictures.’

  “‘Well, what’s the quality of the pictures that you take? Good? Bad? What?’

  “‘They’ve been pretty good.’ “You could just see him begin to fold because it was pretty obvious to the jury this guy knew nothing about cameras. He would not have been given that camera because he didn’t know how to use it, so it was stolen at the time of the killings. He completely hung himself.”

  The trial lasted eight weeks. After closing arguments, the jury went out on a Friday. They recessed over the weekend, then resumed deliberating Monday morning. About four hours later they came back with a verdict of guilty on all counts.

  Anthoney was sentenced to 487 years in prison. So far, he has lost all his appeals. One of the contentions of the appeals has been the claimed inappropriateness of an FBI agent testifying about criminal behavior. None of the courts has been sympathetic to that contention, nor are they likely to be, as our testimony has become increasingly more widely accepted.

  Just before the end of the trial, Jud went on a camping trip with John Newman. They ventured far out into the back country to a pristine lake in the mountains, through areas and onto ground probably few other people had ever walked upon. The two men spent a weekend together.

  “We began talking a little bit around the edges of his family life, what it was and what his life had now become. And to watch this thousand-yard stare in his eyes, I could never forget him or what he went through. He had a need to know what happened. He tried to pry out of me all the gory details of what happened to his family in their last moments. I couldn’t relate it to him just the way it was; it would have been just too painful. But I certainly understood his need. Even with what’s happened to me, I cannot fully imagine what it’s like for a man to lose his wife and two daughters like that.”

  Just as I had experienced in the Suzanne Collins murder ease, a powerful feeling came over Jud. “It finally touched me that the ones who loved these people, who are left here on this earth, have to live with this thing daily. And it’s happened to me several times since then.”

  After the trial he tried to stay in touch with John Newman and Cheryl Chapman, offering whatever emotional support he could. This was typical of our unit, and just one of the factors that makes our work at the same time both so stressful and so personally rewarding.

  The conviction of Kirby Anthoney was a particularly satisfying moment for Jud, the former cop and homicide detective who was used to dealing in facts and hard evidence and was now called upon to speculate, give opinions, and put himself into the head of his opponent.

  “In the time that I’d been with the unit, I’d had some reservations about the ability to sit down with a bunch of photographs and things like that and come up with concepts about what was going on at the scene. But later on I would realize it was not one particular discipline—profiling—that enabled people in the unit to do these lands of things. Truly, it is a collection of all the disciplines and an understanding and a good depth of knowledge about forensic psychology, forensic pathology, cultural anthropology, social psychology, motivational psychology—all of the things that when they are properly aligned and understood with a sense of investigative technique behind you, you have all these things kind of synchronized. It is not the panacea in homicide investigation, but I don’t see how you can effectively work these kinds of cases without those kinds of understanding, all brought to bear upon an analytical process where you walk away saying, ’Hey, I’m reasonably sure that you got the wrong guy, and I’m more than reasonably sure that the guy you’re on now is where you want to expend your energy,’ as I did in this case.”

  It’s never easy to define what makes a good profiler and criminal investigative analyst. One of the crucial skills is to be able to re-create in your own mind the story of what happened between the two main players in the drama: the victim and the attacker. Jud had been a homicide detective, and a detective’s job is to collect as many little bits of information as he can and then work them into a logical, coherent narrative of the crime. That’s the reason I’ve always found good detectives to be among the best storytellers. But I don’t think either Jud or I can be sure how much of his extraordinary ability has to do with his extensive police experience, how much of it is just inherent talent and instinct, how much is native street smarts, or whether any of it is related to his having been a victim himself.

  By the time he worked the Kirby Anthoney case, it had been six years since his own attack. “Even so,” he says, “I still can’t isolate my particular event every time I look at a crime scene. Sometimes it’s harder than others. I guess it’s a little easier when there’s been cutting, but it’s especially tough when there’s been a shooting with wounds and lacerations similar to mine. I think I focus more deeply in those kinds of crime scenes.

  “But just having been a victim is another part of the thing that comes into play. Having been near death, I think it gives me a deeper insight into the victimology of a particular crime scene. I bring that kind of awareness, because I lived through mine. In a weird kind of way I can almost place myself in that crime scene and kind of project what this woman went through as I look at her. As I look at a photo, I’m almost reflecting back on those seconds and minutes that I struggled through …that she didn’t struggle through. And I use that as I go about thinking about what did happen and what didn’t happen, what could have happened, what are the possibilities here? And it all kind of relates to having, in some sense, walked in her shoes, but managed to walk out of the dark that night.”

  A few years ago, Jud left the Investigative Support Unit and is now chief of the International Training and Assistance Unit, also based in Quantico. In a literal sense, he’s moved up in the world. Now his second-floor office
has a window, something he never had when he was with us, since our warren of rooms was sixty feet belowground. But even though Jud is now in a more “main-line” FBI job, his faith in and enthusiasm for what he used to do is as great as ever.

  “The Bureau has to get involved with this thing bigger than they are. I am absolutely convinced that the answers are there. All the reams of paperwork on these unsolved cases around the world today and especially in this country—it is my sense that they can be solved because the commonalities of these crime scenes are there and it is a matter of the FBI beginning to lead once again to fine-tune the process where they carry this thing to the next level. I think we’ve only scratched the surface of profiling and crime scene analysis and all the other things we do,” Jud asserts. “I think that if we really did more good studies and got back into the prisons and brought in more manpower and really devoted time to what I think is the most pressing problem facing us—violent crime against our citizens—we could make tremendous progress. I think the Bureau has a great role to play here.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Have They Got the Wrong Man?

  Carolyn Hamm, a hardworking thirty-two-year-old attorney in the field of historic preservation, hadn’t shown up at her office in Washington, D.C., for two days, and this wasn’t like her. Normally, she’d call in if she were running five minutes behind schedule, and here she’d missed several appointments without canceling them or following up afterward. At first her secretary didn’t panic because she knew Carolyn had been running around for several days trying to get ready for a long and much-needed vacation to Peru. But when she still didn’t show up for work after three days, panic set in. She called Carolyn’s best friend and asked her to stop by her house and check. It was late January of 1984.