3. No elements of the murder were extremely unusual in the MO.
4. The signature elements of the murder are as follows:
1. The use of an added coat hanger for the mouth.
2. The location of the body being placed in a very public location.
3. The leaving of the ID with the body.
4. The bite marks on the breast.
5. The excision of the right nipple.
5. The signature elements of the murder, while in combination point to a particular kind of personality, are not separately unusual in the history of sexual homicide.
6. The killer did not appear to have used a knife as a weapon in this homicide.
7. The vehicle used was most likely a panel van; the body of the victim was probably dumped from the right side of the van from the open sliding door of the vehicle.
8. There was no evidence of binding of the hands or feet.
9. The victim appeared to have been raped and murdered in the vehicle.
10. There was no evidence of torture.
11. There was evidence of extreme violence.
12. The entire event probably occurred in a relatively short time, between twenty and thirty minutes.
13. The perpetrator probably used some kind of pliers to twist the coat hangers. He may also have used an instrument to excise the nipple, perhaps a wire cutter.
14. The double-ringed circles on the buttocks of the victim provide evidence that following her death, the body was left in a supine position. It would appear that following her death by ligature, the perpetrator then rolled the victim onto her back and excised the right nipple. The buttocks rested on two lids that left the marks.
15. The two circles were the exact dimensions of the lids of sixteen-ounce Minwax cans of polyurethane, enamel, or wax. The warp in the measurements is likely due to the removal of the can lids by prying them up with an instrument of some kind. There may have been other possible sources of these circular marks, but we should be careful not to base any investigative avenues on sources that have not been proven to be of those exact dimensions described in the autopsy report.
16. The prioritizing of the suspect list should have been based on the following:
1. The suspect must have a power-assertive rapist personality.
2. The suspect must have access to a panel van or similar vehicle.
3. The suspect must be relatively strong.
4. The suspect must have no relationship or a minimal relationship with the victim.
5. The suspect must have some connection to activities using Minwax, pliers, and coat hangers.
6. The suspect must be very familiar with the area where the victim’s body was left.
7. The suspect, having no guilt about the murder of Sarah, most likely has psychopathic personality traits.
The suspects that I determined deserved top priority in this investigation were as follows:
1. Suspect #3.
2. Suspect #2.
3. An unknown guy-some man described in one report as having lived in the area and who cut off a woman’s clothing and bit her breasts: this behavior was consistent with a power-assertive rapist.
4. Any new suspect that came to light who matched the characteristics of the profile.
THE ANDREWS FAMILY was furious.
She was not killed on army grounds, but there was an army investigation. The Andrews family thought the army did a pitiful job and failed to do what it could to locate whoever killed Sarah. There was a sense on their part that the army abandoned Sarah, one of their own.
I received a lot of notes from her parents over the course of my investigation that showed their frustration. The case eventually ended up in the hands of the local police department, where one detective worked the case and then another. Neither one solved it.
The family also became very angry at me at one point.
Families of victims, when they get frustrated, tend to take it out on the professional people around them. I did a lot of work on this case and came up with a solid profile-and I did it for free. At one point, I uploaded information about the crime to the Sexual Homicide Exchange Web site. Mrs. Andrews had told me that it was okay for me to post certain details about the case-including that Sarah’s nipple was cut off-but Sarah’s father went absolutely berserk.
“How dare you put that detail about my daughter up on a Web site?” he screamed.
The Andrews family stopped talking to me at that point.
I did it because we were seeking more information, and there is a tendency in certain crimes to repeat behaviors. If somebody knew of a crime where an attacker similarly brutalized a woman’s breasts and nipples, it would be a valuable thing to discover. And I wasn’t the first one to put it out there; the police had talked about it before, the detail had appeared in some papers, and this was nine years after the crime occurred. It wasn’t something only they and the offender knew or at this point would hurt the case.
The parents were still extremely emotional, and they haven’t talked to me since.
I pulled the information about Sarah off the site after that and we lost an avenue of bringing in fresh tips.
I LEARNED A tremendous amount working on the Andrews case-both about crime reenactment and the sensitivities of long-grieving families.
I told the Andrewses what I thought about the crime and that they were wasting their money having Manny chase useless leads all over the United States. Manny, in turn, telephoned me in a rage, furious that I killed his cash cow.
A month later, Manny dropped out of sight, and I was working on my second case.
CHAPTER 6.VICKI:A KNOCK IN THE NIGHT
The Crimes: Two homicides and one attempted homicide
The Victims: Lisa Young and Deborah Joshi (homicides); Vicki Davis (attempted homicide)
Location: Maryland and Delaware
Original Theory: Bad friend, bad husband, bad luck
Sometimes crimes don’t go as the criminal planned-which makes it harder for the profiler to figure them out.
Anyone working in the profiling profession, as a consultant or as a homicide detective profiling his own cases, soon becomes aware of the incredible intersection of victims, suspects, crimes, and coincidences.
In the second case of my career, I profiled the horrific 1995 near-murder of Vicki Davis, age thirty. Vicki, in spite of being beaten, sexually assaulted, stabbed dozens of times, and having her throat cut, survived the brutal assault and wanted justice.
Harold Painter, the top suspect in the crime, was a mechanic. He was also investigated in the murder of seventeen-year-old Lisa Young, who was murdered six months before Vicki was attacked. Painter lived about four miles from where Young’s body was found. Lisa was abducted, stabbed, beaten, and her throat was cut. Her body was found lying on the side of a small, winding road. Not only had Painter admitted to being at the shopping center where Lisa was waiting for a ride home at around the same time, but he once lived with his wife and her best friend on the road where Lisa’s body was dumped.
It was the first time I ever heard a case first-person, with the victim describing the attempted homicide-Vicki didn’t die, but as hard as that guy tried to kill her, she should’ve been dead.
I’ll never forget when she said, “He grabbed me by the hair, pulled my head back, and he took the knife and drove it into the right side of my neck, and there was this horrible crunching sound. And then he said, ‘Oh shit, I broke my knife,’ and he dropped my head and left the room to look for another one in my kitchen.”
If Vicki had died and the killer had taken the knives away with him, I might have thought there were two killers involved because most attackers don’t carry a set of knives with them.
The attacker came back from Vicki’s kitchen with a new knife and continued cutting her throat until he thought she was dead. Then he pushed her off the bed, tossed a blanket over her, and left.