IN 1997, WHEN I came in and studied this case, I found some interesting elements that were overlooked, much of which had to do with physical evidence. For an unsolved homicide, this was a case with a tremendous amount of information that could be gleaned from the body and the crime scene. Some crimes have almost nothing useful to help you with an analysis. You have a dead girl in a field, she’s been horrifically raped and strangled, and that’s all you see. Dead girl, naked, nail marks on her neck, semen in her vagina. That’s it. You can’t imagine what happened, before, during, or after, except you know she was raped and strangled.
In Sarah’s case, the evidence created the threads of a mental video of the entire crime, that’s how good it was. I could tell what happened first, second, third, fourth, and fifth in this crime. Very unusual. You don’t get this too often. By analyzing the autopsy and crime scene photos, you could tell certain things occurred.
For example, Manny the bounty hunter’s original theory conveniently matched the police theory that Sarah was taken someplace and tortured. However, it’s not usually the MO of a drug gang to strip a girl because they are angry with her, nor do they leave their victims naked and strangled as a message to anyone. More significant, what ruled out Sarah being carted off to some room to be tortured was that her leggings were left hanging off her one remaining shoe. Otherwise she was completely naked; her right foot was completely clear, but that legging was still hanging off the shoe on her left one.
Everybody knows certain things about specific behaviors because they’re male or female or because of the culture or times in which they grew up. As a female, I could tell you exactly why that girl had leggings hanging off her left leg. That’s because women who have sex in the backs of cars end up with leggings hanging off one leg. If a man takes a girl home, he has the luxury of time and space. He can lay the girl on his bed, grab both shoes, and pull them off. He can then grab the leggings and, pulling them directly toward himself, peel them off both her legs, and, voilà, he has a nice naked girl to enjoy the rest of the night with.
But a car scenario presents a few problems. It is cramped and usually the sex act is a bit rushed. The man would remove the shoe closest to him, the left shoe if the lady is in the passenger seat of a small to mid-size vehicle and either shoe if the woman is in a larger van with a large space between the front seats or if he has gotten her into the back. He would pull the leggings down until he can free up one foot. He doesn’t need to bother with getting the shoe and leggings off the other foot. He has the access he needs to continue with either vaginal or anal intercourse.
This is my hypothesis. She was sitting in the front passenger seat of the offender’s vehicle when the attack began. Her killer then pulled her into the back of a vehicle to fully assault her, and this is when he pulled off her bottom clothing just as much as was necessary for him to do what he wanted to. The fact that Sarah was still wearing her left shoe with her leggings attached proved that Sarah never left that vehicle. She never went to any other location. She wasn’t thrown into a shed and attacked. She was attacked in the vehicle where the guy did the minimal possible to accomplish what he wanted. The entire crime went down in a vehicle.
That immediately eliminated this crime as a kidnapping for drug retaliation purposes.
NOW WE HAVE a girl in a vehicle. Let’s rewind that evidence “videotape” of the scene. Sarah somehow got into that vehicle. Did she get in consensually? Was she forced?
There was an interesting piece of evidence on her body that I believe showed she got into the car without being forced, that she had been sitting peacefully in the passenger seat when the crime began.
Sarah appeared to have known and felt comfortable to some extent with the offender. Having consumed some amount of alcohol and eaten relatively little over the course of the evening, she may have been less wary than usual. She may have been willing to take slightly higher risks or she may have accepted a ride home from someone she felt relatively safe with as an alternative to the possibly riskier situation of walking home alone or accepting a ride with a stranger. I believe that Sarah knew the offender well enough to feel safe, but the offender was not a personal friend or family member.
It seemed to me that it started out with the two of them getting into a van. It would have been a van because she was assaulted in the back of a vehicle with a large, flat cargo area, and I will prove that shortly. But she started out sitting in the front seat-the passenger seat-with the fellow on the left side. There was an attempt at some type of sexual act in the front seat of the van; we don’t know how far she wanted to or did go. She had been drinking. She might have thought he was going to take her home. She might have thought they were just going to talk for a bit. They might have gone out to smoke some herb. Who knows what they were doing when they started out in the vehicle, but at some point he attempted to kiss her. And whether she kissed him back consensually I don’t know, but at some point she said no.
It is also possible that she simply said no from the beginning and he kept pushing himself on her. With a good amount of alcohol consumed, Sarah might have been slow to resist, maybe even allowing the man to remove her upper clothing. Inebriated women may allow men to go a lot further sexually than they would if they were sober. Sarah may have realized too late, perhaps when he started biting her, that she wanted out of the vehicle. She might have tried to fight him; she had quite strong arms, but she was not that big a woman and she had been drinking. Her killer clearly got control of her.
Sarah didn’t like where this was going, and this is when it became violent. At this point, the offender may have attempted to kiss her, then bit forcefully on Sarah’s lips. Tearing off the clothes is common with this type of offender and he may at this point have ripped off her clothing without her consent. The offender became more aggressive and violent, biting at the nipple of Sarah’s left breast.
He did, in fact, sink his teeth into her left breast because there are bite marks around the nipple. Sarah attempted to protect herself by putting her right hand over her left breast, and so he bit her right hand as well. That is in the evidence. Her left hand wasn’t bitten, which makes sense because it is more natural to try to cover one’s breast with the opposite hand. Furthermore, her left arm was probably trapped along the seat next to her body. The right hand, according to the physical evidence, bore a bit of grime ground into her palm, proof that she was pushing against the floor. She was fighting. She was trying to get this guy off her, and then she tried to protect her left breast. This was the evidence that proved she was sitting in the front seat, that she hadn’t been abducted at gunpoint, dragged off, and attacked.
The offender then most likely grabbed Sarah by the throat with his left hand, choking her and at the same time punching her abdominal area a number of times. She may have passed out at this point.
Sarah was then dragged into the back of the vehicle, onto the floor, and there he pulled off her leggings. He then grabbed two uncoiled coat hangers and twisted them into ligatures about her neck and mouth. He may have slapped her on the buttocks with a belt to wake her up, or the injury to that area may have occurred during the ensuing anal assault.
It would appear Sarah attempted to get off the floor, pushing sideways with her right leg. She may have abraded her left arm and received numerous abrasions and damage to the left side of her face as she struggled and possibly struck the bottom of one of the front seats or other objects inside the vehicle.