Journey into Darkness

by John Douglas

  In one January break-in, a woman called police to report that someone had entered her home through a window in the basement. Nothing was taken except forty dollars in cash and a couple of gold chains. But the burglar left some strange items behind: on her bed was a paper bag containing a carrot, three pornographic magazines, and several pieces of cord cut from Venetian blinds. The intruder also left a bucket on the floor at the end of the bed containing marijuana, drug paraphernalia, and a small vial of procaine, a prescription topical anesthetic sometimes used illegally as a sexual stimulant. Investigating officer Rich Alt learned from the burglary victim that a neighbor, too embarrassed to admit it to police, had told her some of the items left at her house were stolen from his home next door, broken into the same night. Their houses were only about two blocks from Carolyn Hamm’s.

  A week after Susan Tucker’s body was discovered, Joe Horgas happened upon what would turn out to be a critical break: a regional message from Richmond PD Homicide. Dated October 6, 1987—two months earlier—it described two murders that occurred around then in Richmond—in September and early October. The description of the attacks read startlingly similar to the Hamm and Tucker murders. Both victims were white women, thirty-five and thirty-two, and both were strangled by an intruder or intruders who broke into their homes through windows. In the phone call he immediately placed to Detective Glenn D. Williams in Richmond, Horgas learned of more similarities: both women were raped and tied up, and in both cases the ME found petroleum jelly around the genital area and anus.

  Since the teletype, there was a third rape-murder in Chesterfield County, which adjoined Richmond. Although this victim was younger, just fifteen, she was raped, strangled, and tied in her bedroom like the others. Richmond police weren’t sure it was the same perpetrator but they’d sent semen samples from all three to New York, where a lab was analyzing the DNA.

  Williams didn’t buy Horgas’s theory that the crimes in the different counties were related. Rapist-murderers don’t commute a hundred miles, and anyway, the guy they were looking for was white. Still, he invited Horgas to Richmond the next day for a task force meeting that would include his department and detectives from Chesterfield.

  In Richmond, detectives Glenn Williams and Ray Williams (unrelated but known within the department as “the Williams boys”) presented the facts of the two murders in their jurisdiction. As in Arlington, both were shocking in part because of their location: the South Side of Richmond was a quiet, affluent section of town. Most homes were built around the turn of the century, with the exception of some brick, upscale garden apartments from the 1940s. But in Richmond, the murders had received much more play in the media, causing a general state of hysteria, with hardware stores selling out of window locks and entire neighborhoods lit up all night as concerned residents tried to make it impossible for an intruder to slip in unnoticed.

  The first Richmond murder had been discovered September 19, 1987, when a man called police to report a strange incident. When he’d gotten home the previous night around 10:00, he noticed a white hatchback parked haphazardly in front of his house with the engine running. He called the police when he realized it was still there, engine still running, the next morning. Police ran the license plates and tracked the car’s owner, who lived just yards away in a garden apartment. The investigating officer had the landlady let him into the first-floor, one-bedroom apartment, where he discovered thirty-five-year-old Debbie Davis face-down, dead, across her bed. Like the victims in Arlington, her wrists were tied together: one at her hip, the other at the small of her back. The black shoestring used to tie them ran over her shoulder, so if she moved either it pulled the other tighter.

  Naked but for a pair of jean cutoff shorts, earrings, and a bracelet, she had been strangled with a blue knee sock, rigged with a metal vacuum cleaner pipe to form a tourniquet. The ligature was so tight that the medical examiner had to cut it off. The autopsy revealed hemorrhages inside the victim’s eyelids, indicating the killer not only strangled his victim, he tortured her: tightening and loosening the tourniquet intermittently for a period estimated between forty-five minutes and an hour. She had also been raped, both vaginally and anally, brutally enough to tear the wall of her vagina. But the only signs of bruising were small abrasions on her lower lip and nose. As in Arlington, there were no defense wounds to indicate she tried to fight her attacker.

  But for the scene in the bedroom, there were no signs of struggle in the apartment. The agile intruder gained access through a small kitchen window—only twelve inches wide—that he reached by standing on a rocking chair stolen from a nearby home. Directly under the window on the kitchen counter sat a dish-drying rack full of glasses, left undisturbed by his entry. Police surmised that the offender had tried to flee in Davis’s car, but was uncomfortable with the stick shift.

  Victimology yielded little, except to confirm that Debbie Davis was not a high-risk victim. A clerk in accounts receivable at the newspaper Style Weekly, with a part-time job at a bookstore in a nearby mall, she had the reputation of a homebody. She’d been divorced several years ago and hadn’t even dated in a while. All her neighbors, co-workers, and relatives said she was a friendly person who had no enemies and didn’t use drugs. She was so well-liked, in fact, that the newspaper offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to her killer’s arrest and conviction.

  Investigators turned up almost nothing at the crime scene: no fingerprints anywhere in the apartment or on the victim’s car. All they had were semen samples on her sheets and comforter, which probably meant the killer masturbated over his victim. They also found incidental hairs: several animal hairs; a facial hair from another Caucasian; and a dark, curly hair.

  On October 4, the two Williamses got word of another homicide in the South Side, just a half mile from Davis’s apartment. Around 1:30 A.M., a man arrived home and figured his wife, a neurosurgery resident at the Medical College of Virginia, was still at work since he had to unlock the dead bolt on the front door. He showered and got into bed in the dark but realized the bed wasn’t made. He turned on the lights to fix the sheets and saw blood on the comforter. When he ran to the closet to throw on clothes and look for his wife, he found her, dead, on the closet floor.

  Thirty-two-year-old Susan Hellams lay sideways, facing the ceiling, barely fitting in the two-by-five-foot closet, her head wedged between a wall and a suitcase. She was naked but for a skirt and slip pushed up around her waist. Her ankles were loosely tied with a purple belt, hands tied behind her with an extension cord, a blue tie wrapped on top of the cord. As in the other murders, the cord was wrapped several times around each wrist: one lay at her hip, the other folded behind her back. She’d been strangled with a red leather belt, made longer by the killer, who attached it to another belt. The autopsy revealed the same kind of petechial hemorrhages found on Davis, but these were more extensive, indicating she’d been tortured and strangled over a longer period of time. The killer was getting bolder, taking his time.

  Hellams had no defense wounds, but had abrasions on her lip and nose like Davis, perhaps from being pushed into a wall or other object. Examination of a mark on her right calf revealed a partial shoe print: the killer held her down while he pulled the noose tight. She had been violently raped, vaginally and anally, and a jar of Vaseline with samples of her pubic hair was found on an air-conditioning unit outside a window near the closet. It was through this window—fifteen feet up, on a balcony—that the intruder entered the house without using a ladder. From the balcony, police saw more rope neatly coiled in a planter. Although it would be a difficult climb for most people, the back of the house faced an overgrown alley; someone could slip over the back fence and onto the premises without being seen.

  And the killer was able to escape without notice, which took on greater meaning with the victim’s body temperature measured at ninety-eight degrees, indicating she probably died between midnight and 1:00 A.M. Perhaps she was found in the closet because the killer was
still inside when her husband got home.

  Investigators found no fingerprints but did get semen samples from the victim’s vagina, anus, and bedding. There were no stray hairs from the killer. Still awaiting DNA results, police had confirmation from their lab that the style of ligature in this case and Davis’s was virtually identical.

  Victimology gave no indication of what made Hellams a target, except that she was a somewhat stocky white woman with reddish/auburn hair, professionally employed, who lived alone much of the time; her husband was a law student at the University of Maryland who came home only on weekends.

  Although the Richmond detectives didn’t think it was related, Horgas asked about the rape in the area. That victim was another single white woman in her thirties who lived in a ground-floor apartment in the South Side. November 1, about 3:00 A.M., she awoke to find a black man standing over her with a long knife. The intruder appeared to be in his late twenties, around six feet tall, and wore a ski mask and gloves. A knapsack held rope used to tie her hands. For three hours he raped and sexually tortured her. Around 6:00 A.M., as he started tying her ankles, the victim’s sobs got the attention of her neighbors upstairs. He fled when he heard them coming down.

  Richmond police did not believe the rapist was the killer they were looking for. This victim was petite, five foot four, and under a hundred pounds, and she was attacked early Sunday morning, not Friday night. The rapist did not tie a noose around her neck, nor did he masturbate on her, and the ropes were not cut by the knife used to cut the rope in the murders. Finally, the task force stood by the original profile and were looking for a white man in his thirties, not a younger black man.

  This was the first serial murderer Richmond ever faced and police were trying to learn as they went, taking tips from anyone who’d ever dealt with this kind of animal. The Williamses led a task force which included four extra homicide detectives, an investigator from sex crimes, extra plainclothesmen, even officers from SNAP—the Selected Neighborhood Apprehension Program, formed specifically to fight drugrelated violence, primarily in minority housing areas.

  The public, in the meantime, formed huge neighborhood watch groups in areas where previously virtually no one was interested in the program. Town meetings were held with local politicians and police. Advice was given and heeded, as neighbors started trimming bushes around windows and doors, keeping lights on, calling one another when they got home. The situation became volatile as people took it upon themselves to protect their turf: in one instance, a resident watched two suspicious-looking men in a car that didn’t belong in his neighborhood for an hour before he crept up, put a .45 to the driver’s head, and ordered them out of the car. The men in the car turned out to be undercover cops who were lucky not to have been shot by the vigilant civilian.

  Jud Ray and Tom Salp from our unit drove down to Richmond and met with Richmond and Chesterfield County Police in a conference room at the commonwealth attorney’s office. Jud made the point that although statistics and research supported the subject being a white male in his late twenties, they shouldn’t rule out suspects on the basis of race. Given that the killer left no prints or other obvious clues at the scene, Jud profiled an intelligent offender with a prior record of crimes like burglary and sexual assault. And since his victims seemed unable to defend themselves, he must have great upper-body strength.

  Jud and Tom also figured the killer had a full-time job, which was why the murders occurred Friday nights. With the type of sexual assault committed, the subject was someone who experienced difficulty with “normal” sex, and likely had difficulty in relationships with women in general. Unlike a lot of violent sexual offenders, he would not be the type to brag about his crime, being much more of a loner.

  Quite frankly, the reason we all leaned toward a white offender was that, in addition to the fact that the victims were white, at that point in time we hadn’t seen that kind of unique signature aspect among black, Hispanic, or Asian offenders. There were certain acts we were only seeing among whites, such as sexual penetration with sticks or other objects. That was one of the reasons I’d been so confident we were dealing with a white offender in the Francine Elveson murder in New York, a case I worked on with NYPD in 1979, despite the fact that the medical examiner had found a black pubic hair on the body. She had been assaulted with her own umbrella, and I’d just never seen a black or Hispanic do that to a victim. For the same reason, if Sedley Alley had not been arrested so quickly for the murder of Suzanne Collins and police were looking for an UNSUB, I still would have advised them to concentrate their efforts on a white male, based on the way he assaulted her.

  It was not until later that we first began to start seeing more unique, weird, and involved signatures in sex crimes perpetrated by blacks and other minorities. George Russell, Jr., an intelligent and sophisticated black rapist-murderer in Seattle, placed his victims in elaborate and degrading poses. One had a rifle inserted into her vagina. This was in 1990. It was important to the prosecution’s case to be able to link the murders and prove they were committed by the same individual and I was able to testify on signature, which helped lead to Russell’s conviction.

  The reasons for this divergence between white and black offenders are still somewhat speculative, just as are the reasons women don’t become serial killers as men do. Jud’s own theory, based not only on his work in the unit but also on his background as a police officer and growing up in the rural South, is that it has more to do with acculturation than race, per se. “In the interviews we did with rape victims, we just didn’t find either things like oral sex or acts of depravity involving foreign objects from nonwhite offenders the way we did from whites. There is a noticeable difference in the psychopathology of black sexual offenders and white sexual offenders regarding the way they each treat the living or dead body.” Jud believes that while this will continue to be true among black offenders who remain rural, Southern, uneducated, and/or apart from mainstream American society, those black offenders who have become more acculturated into mainstream society will begin imitating the behavior and custom of their white offender counterparts. “Black predator-type offenders are getting more involved with the depravity we’ve previously seen in whites,” he says.

  For that reason, while interracial rapes and murders still are less common than intraracial ones, if we saw “white style” depravity or perversion from a black offender, it would more likely be inflicted on a white victim than a black. On the whole, though, this is one of the many areas Jud referred to in the previous chapter that could benefit from further in-depth and high-quality research.

  In late November 1987, the killer struck again. Detectives Ernie Hazzard and Bill Showalter of Chesterfield County outlined the details of the murder there for Horgas and the Richmond task force.

  Fifteen-year-old Diane Cho lived with her parents and younger brother in a ground-level, corner apartment in a complex just west of the border between Chesterfield and South Richmond. One Saturday night in late November, the Chos heard their daughter typing a paper around 11:30 P.M. When they got up to go to work at the family store early the next morning, Diane was still in bed. Around noon, they checked with their son, who said she was still asleep. Although they wondered why she was in bed so late, they knew their son did not want to face his sister’s wrath by being the one to wake her; they left her alone until they arrived home around 3:00. Mrs. Cho found her daughter, dead, in a horrible scene that seemed to police unmistakably like the Richmond murders.

  The room itself looked like nothing was amiss: homework papers in their proper place on the desk, no sign of struggle. But on the bed was Diane’s body, nude, her neck and wrists bound. White rope cut deeply into her throat and a heavier rope held her wrists together. The killer had silenced her with a strip of duct tape over her mouth. As with the other victims, there were no wounds or bruising anywhere on her body, except for a fair amount of blood around her pubic region. It was later determined that she was raped so brutall
y the killer tore a one-inch-diameter hole in her vaginal septum, in addition to tears in her hymen. Both caused bleeding and she was menstruating at the time of the attack. Her fingernails—polished the night before—were perfect, indicating she never had a chance to fight her killer.

  In keeping with his pattern, the killer raped her vaginally and anally, leaving some kind of lubricant on the back of her arms and legs. Petechial hemorrhages around her eyes, face, and even shoulders indicated the extent of her torture. There were semen samples in and around the victim, including pure samples on her body and the sheets, indicating he masturbated on her, too.

  There were more similarities to the other murders: the killer gained access via her bedroom window, four feet from the ground. Police learned Diane used to remove the screen so she could stick her head out to talk to a friend upstairs. The killer left no fingerprints or footprints behind and, as usual, the rape-murder took place on a weekend night.

  But the killer had branched out into the suburbs, indicating he followed his own press enough to know it would be safer—and more vexing to authorities—to hit new territory. And this time, he struck audaciously when the victim’s family members were asleep in the next room. Detectives figured he either broke in while she was asleep and immediately silenced her with the tape or watched from outside, letting himself in while she showered, taking control immediately when she returned to her room. Detective Showalter observed, “This guy had to be watching her for some time to know when the ideal time to strike was.”

  He also left a bizarre calling card of sorts: on the side of her left leg, above her knee, he’d drawn a figure eight in nail polish. The girl’s family had never seen her paint herself, and the polish didn’t match the shade on her nails.

  Although they figured they’d find nothing, police searched to rule out any other forces at play in the murder. Diane Cho was into the high school chorus and honor society, though, not drugs or pornography or anything else that would make her a high-risk victim. She was a different race than the other victims, and younger, but in some ways she fit their profile physically: her frame, at five foot three, 140 pounds, was much like theirs.