Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  Carolyn’s house was a trim white clapboard rambler with contrasting dark shutters on South Twenty-third Street in Arlington, Virginia. When her friend arrived, she noticed the front door was slightly open, allowing snow to drift inside. This was definitely not like Carolyn. Afraid, she found a young man down the street and asked him to go inside with her.

  They found Carolyn’s nude body in the basement, lying face-down across the doorway into the garage. Her wrists had been tied behind her with a long section of cord ripped from a Venetian blind and there was a noose around her neck fashioned from rope that had been used to bind a rolled-up carpet. The rope from the noose was pulled up over a ceiling pipe and down again, then tied to the bumper of Carolyn’s Fiat in the garage. They didn’t see any blood or bruises on her, but it was obvious she had been dead for some time.

  When Arlington police arrived, they were able to determine that the killer entered the house through a basement window where a ventilation hose to the clothes dryer had been removed. On top of the carpet roll where the noose ligature had come from was a six-inch knife, presumably used by the UNSUB to keep her under control. Nothing appeared to be missing from the house except some cash from Carolyn’s purse, which was found upstairs with its contents spilled on the floor. A police canvass of the neighborhood revealed nothing. No one, not even the neighborhood watch representative, had seen anything unusual.

  During the autopsy, the medical examiner found a lubricant resembling petroleum jelly around the victim’s mouth, vaginal and rectal areas, as well as semen in her vagina and on her thighs. There was also evidence of semen on her bathrobe, which was upstairs in the living room. There was a small abrasion on her left instep, indicating that she was dragged across the floor. The time of death was estimated to be after 10:00 on the night of January 22 or very early morning on January 23.

  Detectives Robert Carrig and Chuck Shelton began with victimology. Carolyn Hamm, like many well-educated, young professionals in the D.C. metropolitan area, spent much of her time at the prestigious downtown law firm where she worked; she was not well-known to her neighbors. Friends confirmed she was a loner—not the type to pick up men in bars. In fact, she’d had just a few romances. Police found one angry letter from an ex-boyfriend, but he was quickly ruled out as a suspect when his alibi was verified, putting him out of state at the time of the attack.

  The two detectives theorized the intruder broke in on the afternoon of January 22 and waited for his victim to return home. What was unclear was how much of the crime was planned: was it a rape/robbery gone bad or had he planned to kill all along? Murders in Arlington were rare, despite the fact that the county is just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., home to one of the nation’s highest murder rates. Arlington averaged just four or five a year, leaving the eight robbery/homicide detectives to work mostly robberies, taking turns with murder cases when they occurred.

  Actually, it wasn’t Carrig’s or Shelton’s turn to work a homicide case. The Hamm murder was to be Detective Joe Horgas’s, but he happened to be out of town at a family event when the body was discovered. Horgas had sixteen years with the ACPD and it had been two years since he last worked a homicide. When he got back to town about a week later, he couldn’t help but look into the case. And when he did, he noticed that two break-ins had been reported within days of the rape-murder, just blocks from Hamm’s house. In addition to location, the break-ins shared other characteristics with the Hamm case. In all three instances, the subject gained access through a small rear window.

  In one break-in, the subject accosted a single female resident, threatening her with a knife, sexually assaulting her, and demanding money. When she resisted, he slashed her and fled. She gave police a description of her attacker: a black male, about five feet ten inches tall, slight build, wearing a cap, gloves, and mask.

  In the second break-in, the intruder apparently grew tired of waiting. He left before his intended victim came back home. But he left some things for her: among other items, pornographic magazines were found on her bed, along with the cord from a Venetian blind. To Horgas, the three crimes were obviously related. He also saw a connection to a series of nearby rapes in the past few months.

  The description provided by the victim of the one breakin matched a subject known to police as the “black masked rapist.” At least nine victims in Arlington County had given the same description of a masked rapist since June of 1983. When Horgas realized the crimes weren’t being investigated in connection to the murder, he brought his theory to his supervisor, Sergeant Frank Hawkins, who reminded him Hamm wasn’t his case but encouraged him to pursue the break-in connection. Horgas issued a regional teletyped broadcast to departments in northern Virginia, D.C., and Maryland, describing the suspect and a vehicle seen in front of a victim’s house. Maybe someone out there would recognize their guy.

  In the meantime, Carrig and Shelton came down to Quantico and met with Roy Hazelwood and me to get a profile of the killer and tips on how to interview such a suspect if he was caught. We had crime scene photos and the autopsy report to work with, but virtually nothing in the way of forensic evidence. We were dealing with the case in isolation, not knowing about any potentially related crimes. There was a fair amount of criminal sophistication evident in the scene, indicating someone with experience behind him. And at that time, the rape-murders we were seeing were almost exclusively intraracial. In fact, this is still largely true today; this type of criminal tends to target his own race. Based on that, Roy described a subject who would likely be a white male in his thirties, and I agreed with this assessment. There were signs of both maturity and immaturity at the scene: dumping the purse and taking only cash was immature, while the careful attention to detail in the bindings, with no other bruises or wounds, were signs of a more mature killer. This could indicate two offenders or one killer with two sides to his personality.

  Carrig and Shelton tried to match up their notes from Quantico against leads. Meanwhile, Horgas checked the teletype daily, but no responses were forthcoming. Then, on February 6, 1984, Carrig and Shelton arrested thirty-seven-year-old David Vasquez and charged him with the murder of Carolyn Hamm, two weeks before.

  Vasquez had recently moved out of a friend’s house in Hamm’s neighborhood to live with his mother in Manassas, about an hour’s drive away. In the days before Hamm’s body was discovered, however, two neighbors reported seeing him around her house.

  When the detectives visited the house where Vasquez used to live, in his old room they found girlie magazines, mostly of the Playboy and Penthouse variety, though one magazine had a photo of a woman bound and gagged, with a rope ligature around her neck. Detectives also found pictures he’d taken of women—obviously from a distance and without their knowledge—through their windows and in various stages of undress. It’s not unusual to find this type of offender with a large pornography collection, either storebought or homemade, and while I don’t believe there is any reliable data showing that pornography causes men to go out and commit sex crimes, our research does show that certain types of sadomasochistic and bondage-oriented material can fuel the fantasies of those already leaning in that direction. So while there’s nothing abnormal about a man wanting to look at naked women in the magazines, the one bondage picture was disturbingly close to the actual crime and the “peeper pictures” showed a willingness to violate another person’s privacy on at least a basic level.

  Carrig and Shelton picked Vasquez up at a McDonald’s in Manassas, where he performed custodial functions, and brought him in for questioning. Over the course of several interrogation sessions, Vasquez confessed to the murder.

  He couldn’t be linked forensically to semen samples from Hamm’s body or bathrobe, but hair samples from the scene had characteristics consistent with Vasquez’s pubic hair. And Vasquez’s alibi—that he was bowling that night—couldn’t be verified. His mother then vouched for him, saying he was with her, but she had changed her story—she first told investigat
ors that she was at work and didn’t know where her son was—and could not provide any corroboration.

  As suggested by several of the details of his life, such as his job and the fact that in his late thirties he still lived with his mother, Vasquez was not blessed with a high IQ. Investigators therefore believed he must have had a partner in crime—he just didn’t seem smart or sophisticated enough to carry it off by himself. In mixed presentations at a crime scene, Roy Hazelwood and I had occasionally seen two offenders working together. Police figured Vasquez could have been the one who left the signs of immaturity. His only known prior run-in with the law was stealing coins from a laundromat as a teenager.

  Evidence pointing to the existence of a partner included the semen samples, two sets of shoe prints outside the house, and other aspects of David Vasquez’s life that would require him to have assistance, such as the fact that he didn’t drive: he was at his job in Manassas the day of the murder and made it back to work on time the next morning at 7:00. There were no buses available to meet that time frame and he had no other means of travel. He would have needed someone to drive him to Hamm’s and back. And David Vasquez was not particularly strong. His co-workers told police he had difficulty trying to unload thirty-pound boxes from trucks; Hamm outweighed Vasquez by at least that. He just wasn’t physically or mentally capable of acting alone. Investigators and his attorneys tried to get him to reveal the mastermind in the brutal crime but Vasquez wouldn’t name any names. His lawyers even had him interviewed under the influence of a chemical “truth serum,” but he still implicated himself so they didn’t use it in his defense.

  The evidence against him included three taped confessions and two independent eyewitnesses who placed him at the scene. In the end, David Vasquez agreed to an Alford plea to a charge of second-degree murder—not a guilty plea but acknowledging that the prosecution has sufficient evidence to try and convict the defendant of a more serious crime. With the plea, Vasquez’s attorneys avoided the possibility of the death penalty if he’d been tried and convicted. Instead, he received a sentence of thirty-five years in prison.

  Although many believed a partner was still out there, the Hamm case was officially closed.

  On December 1,1987, as the result of a 911 call, Arlington police received a dispatch to “check on the welfare” of a woman whose neighbor was worried that she wasn’t answering her door or phone and hadn’t been seen in days. Typically, police responding to this type of call find an elderly person who’s fallen in the bath or suffered a heart attack. But this time, patrolmen William Griffith and Dan Borelli found a much younger person who’d met a far grislier fate.

  The moment they arrived at the two-story, Georgian-style brick, attached two-family home—just thirteen minutes after the 911 call—they found reasons to be suspicious: the back door was unlocked and open as wide as the chair wedged under the knob allowed. Inside, they saw a purse lying on the floor, its contents spilled haphazardly, and instantly smelled the distinctive odor of decomposing flesh.

  Upstairs, in her bedroom, they found the body of Susan M. Tucker, lying face-down and naked across the bed, her head hanging over the edge. Her killer had wrapped a white rope tightly around her neck, then down her back to a point where her wrists were tied together, with extra rope wrapped around the binding. A sleeping bag was placed over the middle of her body. The bedroom was ransacked, with clothing, bank statements, and other personal effects scattered throughout.

  Although Susan Tucker was married, for the past few months she’d been living alone while her husband, Reggie, was in Wales. A Welsh native, he’d left three months earlier to secure a job and set up house. She was to join him there in a few weeks.

  On Friday, November 27, the couple spoke by phone, but then Susan missed a scheduled call on Monday the thirtieth and still failed to answer the phone late that night or anytime Tuesday. Susan was highly responsible, a meticulous creature of habit. When Reggie couldn’t reach her at work he grew frantic, calling a cousin of hers in Maryland who promised to check on her the next day. In the meantime, though, one of his calls home had gotten through: Officer Rick Schoembs, a crime scene agent, answered the phone and informed him of his wife’s death. Responsibly, Schoembs did not reveal that she’d been murdered since anyone with a relationship to the victim must be considered a suspect early in an investigation.

  Initially, the only finds that seemed promising were several hairs taken from the victim’s body and sink. Too dark to belong to the redheaded victim or her husband, they appeared to be pubic hairs. Later that week, the neighbor who originally called police located a washcloth Reggie identified as Susan’s hanging in a tree near the house.

  Schoembs and his partner, John Coale, noted that this was a sophisticated burglar. They checked everywhere it would be possible to lift prints but found every surface the killer might have touched had been wiped clean. He even wiped the washing machine of any shoe prints he may have left climbing in the window.

  As in Hamm’s case, the subject took only whatever cash the victim had on hand. Collectible coins and credit cards, which could easily be traced, were left behind.

  This time it was Detective Joe Horgas’s turn to head the murder investigation, and from the beginning it looked to him like Carolyn Hamm’s murderer was at work again, even though David Vasquez was still in jail. In addition to the binding, the strangulation, and the position of the body, there were other similarities. The killer entered the home through a back, laundry room window so small it was hard to imagine such a strong killer getting through. Both crime scenes had been wiped clean of prints and in both homes there was some ransacking of belongings, including dumping the victim’s purse. Although Tucker’s body already showed signs of decomposition, investigators could tell that, like Hamm, this victim put up no struggle—there were no defense wounds. And her home was just four blocks away from Hamm’s, nearly visible from the bedroom window.

  But this time, the killer had brought his own rope. When Reggie was shown a sample, also found in the laundry room near the point of entry, he didn’t recognize it. And the killer was cocky. He calmly ate half an orange at the elegant dining room table, using a long serrated knife to cut the fruit.

  Even the victimology was similar. Like Carolyn Hamm, Susan Tucker was a low-risk victim. A white, forty-four-year-old professional—a technical writer and editor for the U.S. Forestry Service—she was known to be reliable at work and something of a loner, although she didn’t have any known enemies. She was devoted to her husband and a few close friends, and not likely to pick up or go with a stranger.

  Horgas knew that any killer this smart wasn’t the type to be observed by neighbors or make other stupid mistakes. He advised Schoembs to take as much time with the crime scene as necessary, figuring the case would hinge on forensics. When it looked like the assailant might have washed his hands or showered on the premises, they went so far as to remove drains and pipes from the sinks and bathtub.

  Dr. Frances Field, the medical examiner, later estimated the victim was killed between late Friday and early Sunday. The cause of death was listed as ligature strangulation. Prior to the autopsy, Schoembs used a PERK (Physical Evidence Recovery Kit), standard procedure in any physical assault case, to gather evidence such as semen and other bodily fluids from the victim.

  Considering the similarities with the Hamm case, the investigation immediately focused on the never-named, smarter partner David Vasquez may have had in 1984. While investigators dug into the victim’s background and interviewed neighbors, Horgas visited Vasquez at Buckingham Correction Center, one of Virginia’s three maximum-security prisons. Rich McCue, one of the defense lawyers who represented Vasquez in 1984, also came along.

  Horgas brought Vasquez a cigar, since Chuck Shelton told him he liked them, and soon he began to open up, but not in the way Horgas had hoped. Vasquez cried, saying he’d been assaulted soon after his arrival, and said life in prison was hell. He’d had no visitors in the nearly four years
he’d been there. But as desperate as he was to get out, he wasn’t able to provide any information that would help him.

  Horgas left the prison concerned that they may have locked up the wrong man. Even worse, they had a new murder which might have been committed by the same killer. Horgas set out to reexamine the case that put Vasquez away.

  True, Vasquez had confessed several tunes, but he’d also been interrogated in a method which was inappropriate and which we would have known to be ineffective for someone of his passivity and lack of sophistication. Transcripts and interviews showed they’d used the good cop/bad cop technique on him, raising voices, slamming the table, and surrounding him in a small interrogation room with no windows and full of cigarette smoke. Eventually, he just seems to have broken down. His entire confession seems based on information they’d already given him.

  Psychiatric experts for the defense supported Horgas’s fears. They had argued that with Vasquez’s low mental function, he did not understand the implications of his talks with investigators and was easily confused and overwhelmed.

  The evidence that earlier pointed to a second offender began to bother Horgas more now: Vasquez could not drive, so how did he get to Hamm’s house? And why didn’t the semen match? Were similar hair and some questionable eyewitness accounts enough to convict him?

  With no new leads and nothing from David Vasquez on his “partner,” Horgas returned to his original theory that the killer was the same subject who broke into two other homes nearby and was responsible for the black masked rapist crimes throughout the county in the six months preceding the murder. He started a careful study of all those crimes.