I wanted the story to be about police and citizen accountability and how cases like that of Anne Kelley were being swept under the rug, the police refusing to allow the public to know what really had happened and the public apparently not caring to know. A newspaper reporter came to my house and interviewed me. But when the story came out, almost nothing was mentioned about the police and prosecutorial problems in the Kelley case and how there needed to be more accountability. The headline read “Local Homemaker Starts Victims’ Rights Organization,” and it was a sappy human interest story about a nice lady who wanted to help families who had loved ones with unsolved cases and wasn’t I dedicated and caring?
The story made it sound like a very personal campaign, but that wasn’t what I was trying to say. I didn’t want the story or CCC to be about Pat Brown. I wanted it to be about political issues and criminal justice. But the newspaper didn’t see it that way and subsequently, neither did the community where I lived. The reporter wanted to tell a nice story about a local homemaker, but it undermined the serious work I was attempting.
I gave up on CCC and decided to try another approach.
By that time, I had met many victims of crimes, and I started applying my growing knowledge to their cases. That provided a tremendous release. If I couldn’t get Walt put away, maybe I could make a difference in the long run. I could help identify other likely killers, or maybe I could change the system so that this didn’t continually happen.
WHILE I WAS trying to figure out how to make an impact in cold case closure, I ran a short seminar aimed at teaching women that self-defense doesn’t work for us.
There had been a rape in the area, and a number of frightened women rushed to get training at the University of Maryland. I attended one of the classes and was appalled by what I saw. There were guys dressed up in big, fat, red insulated suits. The men in these suits were supposed to come at the women and go “Arrrrr!” and the women were supposed to defend themselves. The instructors taught women how to punch and kick and break out of basic holds.
I had practiced martial arts-tae kwon do-and I was pretty good at it. I watched these women throw punches, and I thought, “Oh, my God, they’re going to break their wrists!” They always had their wrists cocked downward in a horrible girly position.
“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” I said to the teacher and class. “You are out on a bike path, and a guy the size of Mike Tyson pops up from behind the bushes. You go, ‘Yeahhhh!’ and attack him with a little punch you learned in your self-defense class, with your little crooked hand?”
It sounded truly ridiculous just saying it out loud.
First of all, you will break your wrist. Then he will kill you. You’ll be dead and the police will wonder how you broke your wrist along the way. Maybe you’ll try a kick. Kicks are hard to execute well. Say you want to do a snap-front kick and nail your attacker in the groin. They teach this kind of kick in self-defense classes and you will practice it a few times. To do the kick correctly, you have to get in the proper position, raise your front knee, get your hip behind the kick for power, and then apply your foot to the target with a fast strike. If your attacker is kind enough to stand in front of you until you get your kick in action, you will still probably miss his vital points and softly scuff his thigh. Then he will crush you.
It gets even more amusing if you are in heels.
I went home that night and I said to Tony, “Grab my right arm as hard as you can.” He grabbed it and I was immediately kneeling on the floor in agony. I couldn’t move my hand. I couldn’t get out of that grip if I tried. And he was just doing what I asked. He hadn’t snuck up on me from out of the shadows.
Classes like those give women a false sense of confidence. They feel it’s safe to walk down a dark street or alley or into a deserted parking garage because they think they actually can beat people up after three hours of “training.” They can’t. So I started my own program and taught courses on how you couldn’t survive one of these things.
“You’re walking along and suddenly you’re hit on the top of the head. What are you going to do for self-defense?”
One of the women inevitably said, “Well, I’m kind of unconscious.”
“That is a problem, isn’t it?”
My first objective of the class was to knock down self-defense misconceptions. There is no sense signing up for a fight with a heavyweight when you are only a lightweight. I also advised women that if they really wanted to learn how to fight off an attacker they would have to study martial arts or boxing for years. They still will lose against most attackers, the ones who jump out and nail you before you can react, or the ones who are simply too big for you to do anything about. But it is possible that one truly good punch or kick might give you a chance to run like hell.
Once I got through to the women that fighting off an attacker was not likely to have a good ending, I taught them how to think smart and keep from becoming a victim in the first place.
A local television station did a news segment on my program. It was one of my first television appearances and I quickly discovered the power of TV. People paid attention to what I had to say because they saw me on television.
It also framed the real challenge before me: I was a forty-plus housewife with a liberal arts degree trying to tackle crime investigation and justice issues, a totally unorthodox, self-trained crime analyst who hadn’t worked her way up in the field coming out of college. Who was going to listen to Pat Brown, homemaker, sign language interpreter, female, self-made profiler? How could I possibly accomplish the changes that I wanted to make in a male-dominated profession if I persisted in being the lady the media presented as simply a volunteer do-gooder? Women still struggle for respect outside the traditional roles for females and I was stepping into that daunting, mostly male arena. The wall seemed impossibly high to climb.
I realized that since I was over forty, I wasn’t going to get in on the ground floor and work my way up through the FBI. And I wasn’t going to get in on the ground floor with some other law enforcement organization either. So I made my own way. I didn’t have the luxury of time. And I already knew what I wanted to do: profile.
How could I get to the point where somebody would start listening to me and I could start affecting how profiling is used and how serial homicide investigations are conducted? What could I do to communicate with law enforcement and be taken as a serious professional and not as a bored housewife?
I consciously decided that I could achieve my goals if the media liked me and viewed me as a credible resource; then I could use the media to promote the advantages and art of criminal profiling. I set out to become a recognized name in the profiling field, not just locally but across the United States.
I also promised myself that when I was on television, I would always tell the truth. I would speak my mind, even when doing so was risky and might put me at odds with certain individuals or groups. Occasionally, I have been criticized, but it hasn’t stifled my beliefs or my voice.
I was still rather insecure, however, and received no outside support. I started with no idea of how to do these things. Not a clue. Could I actually work with police departments in far-flung areas of the country? Could I actually appear on television and speak my mind convincingly?
These were not activities in my comfort zone. I was familiar with my home. I was comfortable with curling up on the sofa with one of my babies. I was at ease doing sign language and interpreting for strangers in their time of need. I needed to convince myself anything was possible, and that I could do the impossible.
I also discovered that I had to become a businesswoman. But I had never run anything in my life. I didn’t run any clubs in school; I never even joined any. I wasn’t the cheerleader type. This was like shooting myself into space and having no idea how powerful the rocket strapped to my back would be, where I would land, or how I would ever get back to earth. But I learned what I needed to know to get where I wanted to go.