He looked into it and found that three weeks before his mother died, there was a service called Trashman at the building.
“My mother had this old computer,” he recalled, “and when she saw the Trashman truck outside, she naturally thought it was a trash service. She ran downstairs and said to the guy with the truck, ‘I have this old computer I want to get rid of. Can you take it?’ And he said, ‘Oh, no, we’re not a trash service. We fix commercial mailboxes and the locks on the mailboxes. That’s our job.’ She said, ‘Oh, darn.’ But then he said, ‘I’ve been looking for a computer to fix up.’ So she brought him up to the condo, and they went into her bedroom, where she unhooked the computer and gave it to him. Then she kindly gave the man her name and phone number and said, ‘If you ever have a problem with the computer, give me a ring.’”
Mary Beth was a librarian, used to helping and trusting people. The man thanked her and left with the computer.
Art tracked down the company’s address and phone number and only recalled his mother describing the man to whom she gave her computer as “a young black guy.”
I, of course, called Trashman. I said, “I am going to be honest with you…”
Honesty’s an interesting policy. Sometimes, the police have asked me, “How did you get that information? Even we can’t get that information without a court order.”
And I inevitably answer, “I was nice.”
I told the person who answered the phone, “Look, this is going to sound really strange. I’m a criminal profiler working on this case, and I have a suspicion that this woman, Mary Beth Townsend, may have been murdered by somebody who worked at a temporary service. Three weeks before the murder, a guy from your service came into her apartment and she gave a computer to him. Do you know a black guy in his twenties or thirties who worked for you at her condominium on August 21, 1998?”
The guy put the phone down for a while. When he returned, he was chortling.
“You’re not going to believe this one,” he said, his voice full of excitement.
“What?”
“That guy you asked me about, I have to testify against him in court.”
“What for?”
“He is accused of abducting, raping, and strangling a little girl who he put in a closet.”
I said, “That sounds familiar…”
Bingo!
If you were looking for MO, we had a winner here. And while MO doesn’t always remain the same, hey, when it’s that close, a profiler can’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
WHILE THIS WAS going on, I reached out to an agent I knew in the FBI to see if he could get answers for the family. I also thought he might consider getting involved in the investigation. But he talked with the detective in charge, and even though he came away feeling she was sincerely following through on Mary Beth’s murder, he learned no more than the family did.
In November 1999, I wrote the following in my case notes:
The Mary Beth Townsend case made some progress. The police actually permitted a meeting with Art’s lawyer and ADMITTED they were now looking at the possibility that an intruder committed the crime. This admission pretty much clears her fiancé and admits that they screwed up. HURRAH! Art is very happy.
WE COULD PLACE a stranger in Mary Beth Townsend’s apartment just three weeks before she was discovered strangled and left in a closet. And he was on trial for strangling a girl and putting her in a closet.
“This is a guy we should look at,” I said.
I asked my new friend at Trashman some more questions about the man. “Who is this guy, what can you tell me?”
“His name’s Scotty May. He’s African American, and I believe he lives in southeast Washington.”
That also fit snugly into my profile.
“Do you possibly know whether he can drive a stick-shift car?”
“I actually do know that, because our vehicles are all stick-shift vehicles, and because he could not drive one, he always had to ride on the passenger side and somebody else had to drive.”
I CONFIRMED WITH local law enforcement that Scotty May was indeed on his way to court, so I went back to the police department and gave the detective all the information I had gathered. She didn’t seem to me to be interested in the least.
I was stunned.
“How can you not be interested in a guy that was in her apartment three weeks before she was murdered, who committed the same exact crime someplace else?” I said. “What part don’t you get?”
The detective didn’t know me, and maybe she didn’t think profilers know what they’re doing, or she didn’t believe in the science of criminal profiling, but how could she deny that this guy committed the exact same crime someplace else? How could she think Scotty had nothing to do with it? That was crazy.
THE DAY OF Scotty May’s trial arrived and he was charged with attempted murder, rape, and abduction with intent to defile. Art and I learned firsthand about Scotty and what kind of character this career felon was.
A high school graduate, May was five ten, weighed 185 to 195 pounds and had brown eyes. He lived in the area where Mary Beth’s car was abandoned, and worked for temporary employment services, as I suspected, one in Virginia near Mary Beth’s home and another in Washington, D.C. One of the last jobs he had before he went to jail was cleaning buildings that were under construction.
One of the services he worked for employed a thirteen-year-old girl with a false ID whom I’ll call Shania. She was a runaway from another county in Virginia, living in a motel with an older boyfriend who was dealing drugs. Clearly, her life wasn’t going terribly well. Then she met Scotty through the temp service, and things got worse.
Scotty was living with his girlfriend, Crystal Jones, and their two children in southeast Washington. One day, Shania’s boyfriend was arrested and jailed for dealing drugs and she no longer had a place to stay, since he was paying for the motel room. Good Samaritan that he was, May let her stay at his house.
The girl arrived thinking she’d be safe with May, Crystal, and their kids. May said he got a call for them to go clean a building early the next morning. Shania got up, put on her clothes, and off they went in his car.
When they arrived, there was nobody else there and it was still dark outside.
“Why don’t we go in the building and smoke some dope?” May said.
Shania said, “No, I don’t want to.”
“Oh, come on, come on,” he said, pressuring her to come along.
She wasn’t interested, but felt she had no choice but to go in with him. Once they were inside, Scotty started down a new path.
“Your boyfriend’s in jail. You need a new boyfriend, don’t you?”
He started putting the moves on her, and she said, “No, I don’t need a new boyfriend, because he’s getting out of jail. I don’t need to be with you. I’m not interested.”
But he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said.
“Well, you’re going to,” May said.
That’s when he raped her.
She was terrified that he was going to hurt her, so she did not fight back. May was a big guy, and she was a little girl.
He cleverly used a condom so he wouldn’t leave any evidence, and after he finished raping her, he told her to put her clothes back on, and she did. She looked sad, and she was.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
“I’m tired, I just want to go to sleep,” she said.
She was emotionally shutting down from the horrible assault.
He said, “You want to go to sleep? No problem,” and May put his arm around her neck in a sleeper hold, tightened his arm, and he strangled her.
When she was unconscious and wasn’t moving anymore, he picked up her body and put it in a closet in the empty building, closed the door, and walked away.
It turned out there was never any temporary work at the building that day; that was just a ruse he used to get her there, and after he got what he wanted, he went on his way.