by John Douglas
On November 25, serological results confirmed that the semen from the Cho, Davis, and Hellams crime scenes all matched and the two lead detectives from Chesterfield began reporting directly to the Richmond bureau. At that point, the only common link investigators had been able to establish between the three victims—beyond the general physical profile—was Cloverleaf Mall, where receipts showed Cho and Hellams shopped and Davis worked parttime. The task force theorized the subject picked his victims there, following them home to rape and kill. Police could stake out the mall, but how would they recognize him?
In Arlington, Joe Horgas was more convinced than ever that the Hamm and Tucker murders were linked to those in Richmond, and the rapes in Arlington and Richmond were committed by that same perpetrator: the black masked rapist. He formed a task force to investigate Tucker’s murder. With his partner, Mike Hill, Horgas was joined by Detective Dick Spaltung from burglary and another detective, Ed Chapman, from the sex crimes unit. Within the context of searching for David Vasquez’s partner or another perpetrator who might have been involved in both Hamm’s and Tucker’s murders—say, the black masked rapist—Horgas had them pull all the burglary and rape files for the area from 1983.
Horgas hand-carried evidence from the Tucker crime scene to the Northern Virginia Bureau of Forensic Science in Fairfax County. By December 22, he had preliminary word back from his contact there, Deanne Dabbs (who conveniently had a good friend in Richmond’s crime lab), that the semen samples from Tucker contained the same blood characteristics as samples from the Davis and Hellams crime scenes. This would help them nail the offender, since only thirteen percent of the population matched these characteristics. Of course, first they had to have a suspect.
He next began reinterviewing victims of the black masked rapist from 1983. Of the nine, eight agreed to talk to him. As difficult as it was to relive their experiences, once they learned the same man could still be out there, now murdering victims, they felt compelled to cooperate.
The first victim was assaulted in June 1983, in a supermarket parking lot. Around 1:00 A.M., the petite, dark-haired victim, in her twenties, was approached by a thin black man with a knife. About five foot eight, also in his twenties, he’d pulled a T-shirt in which he’d cut eyeholes over his head, and his hands were covered. He forced the victim to drive him around, then had her stop and get out by a wooded area. Threatening her with the knife the whole time, he forced her to perform oral sex and raped her repeatedly. She escaped when he left her in the woods to go back to the car. This victim did not think her assailant ejaculated and was left with the impression that “he’s capable of anything. And I mean anything.”
The rapist attacked the next three victims in their homes, breaking in as they slept. He matched the same physical description as in the first case, and in each attack he wore gloves and a makeshift mask. The same type of knife was described in each. The pattern of behavior was that he’d start off demanding money, usually making the victim get her purse, then rape her both orally and vaginally. In all three crimes he threatened the women repeatedly with the knife, issuing warnings like “I’m gonna put my dick in you and you’d better come” and “You’ll have an orgasm or I’ll kill you.” To Horgas, it sounded almost as if the subject was working from a script.
In the last of those three attacks, the rapist added two new elements: he duct-taped the victim’s mouth and attempted to tie her up. She escaped the apartment as he tried to cut cord from her Venetian blinds.
He added still more elements to his next attack. After surprising his eighteen-year-old victim as she got out of her car, he forced her back in the car and had her drive to a secluded location where he duct-taped her eyes and raped her repeatedly: orally, vaginally, and anally. Finally, he tied her wrists behind her back with rope and forced her into the trunk of her car. Miraculously, she was able to escape by kicking the trunk open when she smelled smoke. The rapist had set her car on fire and left her for dead.
In another attack, the UNSUB tied the victim’s ankles with stockings and used cord from her Venetian blinds to tie her wrists behind her back. The sexual assault was similar to that of the other victims. Looking at the files, it was as if this guy needed to strike every six weeks or so; and he was growing increasingly violent.
Horgas believed the rapist was definitely homicidal by January 1984, and the last rape certainly supported that belief. On January 25, just hours after Carolyn Hamm’s friend discovered her body, the rapist broke into the home of the last reported victim. The thirty-two-year-old woman went downstairs to investigate when she heard the door on the side of her house open. There, she found a man matching the same physical description as in the other attacks, from his age and height to his homemade mask and his knife. In a scenario that sounds much like what happened to Hamm, the intruder forced her to bring him her purse. After emptying the contents on the floor he took her cash, then forced her back downstairs where the sexual assault took place. Part of the ritual that night involved an artificial phallus which he brought with him and ordered her to use. When she refused, he beat her about the face, cut her leg, sexually assaulted her again, and forced her outside, where he told her they were going for a ride. She fought back, screaming loudly, figuring if she went with him he’d kill her. Finally he fled.
Investigators learned the sexual device was stolen from the house next door, much as the pornographic magazines and drug paraphernalia had been stolen from one house and left on a bed in the next during the break-in in Carolyn Hamm’s neighborhood.
Horgas presented his findings to the task force, which was not overly enthusiastic. It seemed far-fetched that a burglar would escalate to rape and murder. And those on the sex crimes unit thought they knew who the black masked rapist was: they arrested a guy in the summer of 1987 who had a similar MO; they just couldn’t prove he had been in action before 1986. By Christmas, Horgas’s task force was disbanded.
In the meantime, however, his partner, Mike Hill, came up with two more break-ins that seemed to match the pattern. On January 12, 1984, an attempt had been thwarted when an eighteen-year-old woman woke up her father to have him check on noises she heard outside the house. He found two basement windows damaged and a mailbox placed under a bedroom window, presumably to facilitate entry. Two days later, a twenty-two-year-old woman reported that a black man (of the same description as the man in the rapes, with mask, gloves, and knife) broke into her basement and demanded money or “We’ll kill the little girl upstairs.” The intruder fled when a roommate made noise coming down the stairs. Both occurred within two blocks of Carolyn Hamm’s house.
On December 28, 1987, Horgas boarded a plane bound for New York. He’d gotten approval to have Arlington case samples analyzed at Lifecodes, the lab the detectives in Richmond had turned to for DNA testing. With so many cases seemingly linked, Horgas needed proof. And they had to work fast: just that morning another report came in, this one from nearby Fairfax County, about a seventeen-year-old attacked in her bedroom December 17 by a black man matching the description Horgas knew by heart. Fortunately for that victim her sister walked in the room just as the attacker finished tying her wrists and he fled.
Horgas also knew DNA results would only be useful after he brought in a suspect. So with all the information and behavioral clues he’d amassed, he called the Investigative Support Unit again and said to Special Agent Stephen Mardigian, the profiler whose geographic territory included Virginia, “I’d like to talk to you guys. Can you come over here and sit down with us? I think we’ve got a homicide up here related to those cases down in Richmond.” On December 29, Mardigian and Jud Ray slogged up through the snow to meet with him at Arlington PD headquarters.
In the conference room, Steve and Jud listened as Horgas led them through a major presentation of the evidence. He was organized and methodical. After he presented the Tucker case, he said, “Okay, now do you feel the facts of it could relate to the Richmond cases?”
Steve and Jud were caugh
t in something of a bind. Our unit’s effectiveness is based on a high, mutual-trust relationship with each of the police departments and local law enforcement agencies with which we work. We had already conducted an independent case consultation with Richmond, and if the two investigations did end up going off in dissimilar directions, we didn’t want to be caught in the middle of a conflict with two important “clients.”
But as soon as Horgas completed his review, Steve said, “It was pretty evident to us that these cases were related. From a profiling standpoint, the methodology, the MO were very, very consistent. We said it was our opinion they were probably dealing with the same offender.”
Horgas was highly organized. “Now I’d like you to take a look at a homicide that occurred back in 1984,” he said. “This is the murder of Carolyn Hamm.”
Again, the similarities between the Tucker and Hamm cases were dramatic. “What else was going on in the area at this time?” Steve asked.
Horgas then outlined for the agents the series of burglaries and sexual assaults that had occurred in Arlington in 1983. All the victims were white women, most in their twenties and thirties, attacked by a masked black man with a knife and wearing gloves. In several cases, victims were tied up and Venetian blind cords were used as binding. Elements of the sexual assault were similar, and the UNSUB had grown more dangerous with each rape, up to the point of Hamm’s murder.
“When you looked at this serial rapist active in the Arlington area at that time and the serial burglar active at the same time, you immediately saw a geographic overlay that also corresponded to the murders under investigation. Jud and I quickly discussed it with each other and said to Joe, ’These are related. There are significant enough commonalities in methodology, escalation, progression.’ It all worked out well.”
Jud focused on the rapes and the fact that they provided live victims to interview. Therefore, if they were committed by the same UNSUB as the murders, they would have not only the physical evidence from which to draw conclusions, but a tremendous amount of verbal behavior as well. Then he pointed to the painstaking attention to detail in the bindings in each of the Richmond murders and the killing of Susan Tucker. The killer did much more with the ropes than he had to, either to strangle his victim or merely to control her, as seen in the binding from the noose down to the wrists and wrapping extra rope or other binding around the wrists. This wasn’t more MO. This was part of the murderer’s signature. Looking at the crime scene photos, Jud explained that this UNSUB had a deep need to exert complete control over the situation.
He also declared that the subject was a sexual sadist; he enjoyed torturing his victims, choking them and releasing them, seeing their fear and pain, hearing them beg for mercy.
Steve noted other signature elements: the victims’ bodies were all concealed in some way—Tucker with a sleeping bag, Hellams in a closet, Cho with her sheet, and Davis with her shorts. He noted the semen left on the bodies, that all were killed in their bedrooms, and the fact that the killer overwhelmed his victims immediately, leaving them no time to struggle.
This killer was clearly an organized offender who planned his crimes very carefully. He stalked victims, waiting for an opportunity to strike, monitoring their movements, probably for several days. He chose victims who lived alone or would be alone when he attacked. He was sophisticated: he knew if he committed the crimes inside their homes he would decrease the risk that he’d be detected or his crimes witnessed.
Both agents were sure the offender would have a history of crime that went beyond breaking and entering. He may not have been arrested for them, but he practiced with earlier rapes. There was no way he started out with these elaborate murders.
It wasn’t just the physical description or disguise elements that convinced Jud and Steve that the rapes and both the Hamm and Tucker murders were committed by the same offender. There was also the psycholinguistics: an aspect of profiling we use extensively in ransom kidnapping cases, hostage situations, extortions, and bombings—in other words, any ongoing situation in which written or verbal communication is our primary behavioral clue. Though we have used it on many occasions with gratifying results, such as in trying to determine a hostage holder’s true intentions to know whether, and how much, force should be brought to bear, perhaps the most prominent recent use of psycholinguistic analysis has been in the Unabom case. As we detailed in our book Unabomber: On the Trail of America’s MostWanted Serial Killer, it was the word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, and idea-by-idea comparison of the Unabomber’s published manifesto with other personal letters and writings that led to the identification of Theodore Kaczynski in his remote Montana cabin as the primary suspect in these deadly bombings which had terrorized the United States for more than a decade.
Here, in the cases Joe Horgas had assembled, the rapist’s choice of words and his sentence structure were not only consistent from crime to crime, but consistent with the overall personality type we felt would commit this type of crime. This rapist needed his victims to exhibit signs they were sexually satisfied by him to build up his masculinity. His primary motivation was control, exhibited in his insulting language, his use of the knife, and ultimately the binding, torture, and murder of his victims.
Both agents stressed that this type of offender will continue to grow more and more violent with each crime, as he learns and perfects his techniques. Jud showed how the first rape, involving abduction from a parking lot, was high-risk. He learned from that and modified his MO, almost exclusively attacking inside victims’ homes from that point on. And his control over his victims also grew over time. Initially, he only used the knife to keep control, but later he began duct-taping victims’ eyes and mouths, and tying them up. By the later rapes, he felt confident breaking into houses next door, boldly using props from one in the other. In the later murders, he brought his own rope, demonstrating an even higher degree of planning.
The rapes were practice for the murder: he perfected his method of entry into the homes; he left no fingerprints; and he grew comfortable spending time in the victims’ residences, leading them upstairs and downstairs, and raping them in several locations.
In Steve’s and Jud’s opinion, the killing started when he felt control being taken away. They cited the last rape in Arlington as an example. The rapist quickly escalated his level of violence when the victim refused to use the sexual device as ordered and tried telling him to leave. He perceived her as trying to run the show, to take back control from him, and that enraged him. The later murders were virtually all professional women, achiever personality types, used to being in control of their lives. Since the killer had already overpowered them physically (there were no signs of struggle in any case), perhaps they tried talking to him, verbally resisting. That alone could have been enough to set him off.
After all the presentations, when our guys had essentially confirmed Horgas’s suspicions, the detective paused, then said, “Let me explain something. Hamm is actually a closed case, because an individual has been arrested, tried, and convicted.” He gave the agents the background on David Vasquez, and told them the theory of the accomplice who was never caught or identified.
“Do you think there’s more than one person involved?” he asked.
Steve told him a more thorough review would be necessary than simply looking at all the materials around a conference table, but from what they’d seen so far, he told Horgas that not only didn’t they believe someone like Vasquez was capable of Hamm’s murder the way it had been described, they didn’t buy that he could be part of a two-man team, stressing that this type of crime is committed by lone offenders and that with two offenders there would have been more evidence of divergent behaviors exhibited at the crime scene. From all of the unit’s collective experience, it just did not seem that a guy on Vasquez’s level would have the intellectual capability or criminal sophistication to commit the crime.
Then they talked about the race issue and the fact that our original profil
e had predicted a white offender. The agents noted that we hadn’t been told about any possible link to the black masked rapist, which pointed up that our product can only be as complete as the input we’re given. And, up to that point, with the virtual exception of Wayne Williams in Atlanta, all serial killers had been white. And even Williams had attacked within his own race. But again, Jud and Steve stressed that although statistically rare, it was not impossible that the offender Horgas was looking for was black. Indeed, they agreed that the black rapist and the murderer were likely one and the same, so that was the direction the investigation should take.
So where to begin?
If all of this was part of a pattern, the agents explained, then that pattern should be helpful in identifying the UNSUB. Go back and identify the first rape, they told him; that was the environment in which he felt the most comfortable; that was where he either lived or worked.
“Now, unlike Hamm’s, all the rapes are open cases,” Steve continued. “No one was ever apprehended. We know from our research that this type of sexual offender doesn’t quit on his own. He’s either been forced out of the area for one reason or another, or else he’s been arrested on another charge.”
“Generally speaking, a guy will kill right there where he’s been killing until he’s flushed out or something else happens,” said Jud.
“If he’d been arrested in a rape or related sex crime, he would have surfaced for consideration in all of these—and he didn’t,” Steve concluded.
Likewise, if he left the area and began working somewhere else, some other law enforcement agency would have picked up on his pattern and responded to Horgas’s published inquiry. And that didn’t happen, either. But if the activity ceases, as it suddenly seemed to here, then the chances were good that he’d been incarcerated on some unrelated charge. The only other strong possibility was that he had died, and they could effectively rule that one out since the same offender was apparently now back at work again.
