The poor uncle. Essentially, there was never any problem between the uncle and the niece, because I asked the family that question.
Everyone said the same thing: “No, they got along fine.”
I said, “Was there any suspicious activity?”
And again, the answer was no; he lived there with them and everything was fine. He was just the unfortunate schmuck who found her.
I studied the suicide note that she thought Rufus forged. She sent me another sample of Sabrina’s handwriting, insisting the suicide note was not in Sabrina’s handwriting. And yet when the police and I analyzed it, we both came to the same conclusion: it was exactly the same handwriting. She had a loopy, teen girl’s handwriting style, and she even drew a heart in the letter just like one that she had drawn on her hand. A teenage girl’s thought process is clearly evident in the language and narrative of the note.
At the time, my daughter was the same age as Sabrina, and I, as a profiler, couldn’t even come up with that good a replica of a teenage girl’s suicide note. It would be an astonishing ability for a grown man to write a believable suicide note in the voice and handwriting style of a teenage girl.
On top of that, if someone were to stage a crime, they would not write anything with the level of depth and emotion Sabrina expressed in that note. Generally speaking, most suicide notes that are written by those who kill themselves are fairly short, because it’s hard to write a long one when the foremost thought in your mind is I’ve had it. The world sucks. That would have been a note I might have believed the uncle forged. That might have made sense, because he could have sat down and worked hard to make sure that “the world sucks, I’m out of here, Sabrina” matched her handwriting pretty well. But to actually write a three-page good-bye note, that’s pretty darn difficult.
Uncle Rufus was completely tormented by what happened, and by discovering his niece. He ended up in a mental hospital. The family claimed the reason for that turn of events was because he felt such horrible guilt about killing her. I believe Rufus ended up in a mental hospital because his own sister, Penny, accused him of killing Sabrina. Can you imagine losing your niece and then having your sister say that you raped and murdered her?
Rufus became paranoid after Sabrina’s death, thinking that everybody was out to get him, and it was terribly sad. And this was all because of how difficult it is to believe that your child could commit suicide.
WHEN I PROFILE suicides, I always write back to the family in a gentle way with my conclusions: “I know how much you are suffering from this…” I explain to them how we can’t always know what our children are thinking, how so many of us wouldn’t know the difference between a child exhibiting normal teenage depression and a teen in serious emotional distress who suddenly kills himself the next day. Sometimes teenagers make rash decisions that we can’t see coming. I point out to families that it’s not unusual for them to not know, so they shouldn’t feel guilty that this came out of the blue and blindsided them, that they didn’t necessarily contribute in any way to it. Some people, especially teenagers, don’t necessarily communicate what they’re going through. Most of the teenagers who complain and cry and say they hate everyone and their lives never attempt suicide and get through those years. We can only do so much, try our best to help our children, relatives, and friends, but sometimes they just do what they want to do and it ends up tragically.
I always naïvely think that if I can logically explain the crime to the family, detailing exactly what happened so that they can understand it, and stress that they were not responsible, they will accept it and move on. But to this day I can say that, for all my attempts to communicate these points, I’ve had almost zero acceptance after I’m done. The family will inevitably come back and argue that I’m wrong; they will say that I don’t know how to profile, that I don’t understand what’s going on.
When people cannot accept suicide, they go to the next most likely conclusion: the person who found her is the person who killed her. I believe Rufus ended up in a mental institution because his whole family turned on him and assumed he was a murderer.
All the evidence in the world would not change the family’s opinion of their daughter’s death, their conclusion that her uncle killed her, or of that idiot, Pat Brown, who calls herself a profiler.
CHAPTER 13.BRIAN:WHO PULLED THE TRIGGER?
The Crime: Suicide
The Victim: Brian Lewis
Location: Western United States
Original Theory: Suicide
As a profiler, I find crime-scene role-playing a useful tool.
In the courtroom, it’s increasingly common to see a crime-scene reenactment during which the prosecution or defense attorneys will take the judge and jury through an alleged crime. Sometimes, they’ll do it with 3-D pictures; sometimes they’ll make a video.
If a gun was shot, they’ll want to show the trajectory, so they’ll tack strings from wall to wall showing the exact path the bullets took, demonstrating whether they could have hit the victim and at what angle they had to be shot.
Not every police department has the money for all this fancy stuff or they don’t see that it is necessary. But sometimes it really should be done, even if in a simpler, less expensive way, like through role-playing. This is something I often do in order to test out a theory as to how a crime went down. I set up scenarios that are similar to what occurred. I have to be fairly careful, because I don’t want to do something that is based on vague guesswork.
One time, the police theorized that a man had transported his wife in the trunk of a particular vehicle. My question was, would she fit in this car’s trunk? Trunks come in all different sizes. The month before, I drove a nice little sports car out in California. If the convertible top was up, the tiny trunk allowed me to fit in my briefcase and my handbag. When I put the convertible top down, I couldn’t even get my purse in there. I did manage to lay my suit jacket carefully inside, and when I clicked the ragtop into its open position, my suit got a nice pressing. Certainly, no body would squeeze into that trunk. Even if I put the roof back up, only the body of an infant would fit in that tiny space.
The car the police suspected might have been used in the crime had a bigger trunk than that sports car. I found a vehicle of the same make, model, and year parked outside of a shop I was in with about eleven minutes left on the meter. I walked outside and waited for the driver to show up.
“Excuse me,” I said when a young couple arrived at the car, “would you mind terribly opening the trunk of your vehicle so I can look in it and see how big it is?”
They looked at me kind of funny, so I said, “I’m a criminal profiler, and I’m working on a case. I know it sounds a little odd, but I want to know if a body would fit in your trunk.”
They just laughed-wouldn’t you?-and said, “No problem.”
They opened it up, I checked out the size of the trunk, and then said, “Thank you very much.”
Since the victim I was dealing with was a bit on the overweight side, I had to make sure that this wasn’t a trunk for anorexics only. The lady would have fit in the trunk.
On occasion, if the police found a body in a certain position, I might wonder, “Could that body be in that position in the trunk?” In that situation, it’s not going to be good enough to look in the trunk. I’m going to say, “I’m about the same size as that woman. Guess who’s going in the trunk?”
Could an alleged perpetrator climb through a given window if, for example, the window seemed kind of small? I have to find somebody the same size and try to shove him through it. I can’t just guess.
The Virginia detective who nailed the cat burglar turned serial killer dealt with this issue in one of the murders he investigated. He said, “That was a pretty small window that guy had to use to get into the house. He had to be a certain weight to slither through that one.” A 210-pound man couldn’t get through it, but a 140-pound man might.