There are only so many ways a person can commit a crime, even when the supposed signatures have been identified. And sex offenders aren’t always particularly creative. They may do the exact same things as the next guy. Once in a while, we’ll find one who’s really inspired, but mostly we see repetitive acts. Sometimes they get their ideas from books or movies or from the newspapers (which can spawn copycats). But a good portion of the time they do something that just comes naturally to them, like spitting on the victim, leaving her in a sexually provocative position, or throwing a blanket over her body. These simple behaviors are common to many offenders, making it look like the same guy-but it’s not.
The fact is, that seemingly guilty offender could have committed the crime, but then again, maybe one of nine other guys in the area could have committed the same crime. So unless we have actual evidence proving it was one individual, you don’t want to say, “Boy, that sure looks like Painter, it must be him.” Well, it may not be Harold Painter. It may be the bouncer or the cross-dresser. It could be someone else altogether. That’s the police’s job. If they analyze the crime well, then their job is to gather enough evidence to support probable cause to bring the suspect in and continue uncovering further evidence that will put him away.
WHILE I HAVE my theory, ViCAP-the computer methodology that the FBI uses to input all the information about a crime and try to match up potential suspects-matched up the Sarah Andrews homicide to Jeffrey Newsome.
I don’t object to using ViCAP in that way, but I would prefer to see a suspect bank so that someone who had been connected with a crime, such as Harold Painter, might be flagged and noted. We could put a list of all the people that Sarah knew into ViCAP and boom, Painter would have shown up as a homicide suspect. We need more linked databanks.
We also need more cooperation between police departments. We need more experts to be brought in to work on the aspects of a case for which the detective is not trained or for which he lacks the time.
If, back in 1987, they had a profiler or trained crime analysts come in, and spent time reconstructing this case on that mountain of physical evidence, they might’ve gone down a different road a long time ago. That’s one of the reasons I believe so strongly in training law enforcement officers in crime reconstruction and profiling and giving them, as individuals, fewer cases to work on.
HAROLD PAINTER WENT on with his life. The only thing on his record was that he assaulted his girlfriend. Other than that, there was nothing against him except that many people thought he was creepy.
Eight years later, I received an e-mail from someone who said, “You need to talk to Allison, Tommy Stern’s ex-wife, about the Lisa Young case.”
Stern knew Lisa Young at the time she was murdered. They went to the same high school and were friends, or at least acquaintances.
Stern apparently had a thing for Lisa, according to his ex-wife. Well, ex-wives. Allison sent me on to the other ex and she told me the exact same story! There is nothing like a spurned woman when it comes to getting information on a suspect. Both exes said Stern had a tattoo that said “In memory of Lisa Young” and a framed photo of Lisa next to his bed, the kind with a cute little one-stem-rose vase attached to it, which, when you are married, is not proper bedside decoration.
The ex-wives claimed Stern was dangerous and violent, had been in and out of mental hospitals, and that when they had sex, he strangled them and sang, “We are killing Lisa, we are killing Lisa.”
I asked both ex-wives this question: “When Tommy was in high school and living with his family, did they have any family pets?”
I had no clue what these family pets could be, but there was that white dog hair on Lisa’s clothing. One ex-wife said, “When he was in high school, his family had some white boxers.”
I said, “Oh, Lord.”
A new suspect had entered the Lisa Young mix. Tommy Stern was the better suspect, because when I profiled this case, I was always irked by the fact that when Lisa left work that night, she was standing on the curb waiting for a friend. She got into a car, quite willingly, it seemed. Her drink didn’t fall on the ground; it was just left on the sidewalk. It didn’t appear that she was abducted; it looked like she got in the car without being forced. Maybe she sat down just to chat for a second and off he went with her.
Lisa didn’t know Painter. I didn’t think any girl would get in a car willingly with that man. But she did know Tommy Stern, who was close to her age, so she might have had no problem jumping in his car while she waited for her ride to show up.
On top of this, just to add more to the mix, I later heard that a man was arrested for impersonating a police officer. He had handcuffs in his car. He lived on the same road where Lisa was found. Many a serial killer has carried handcuffs in his vehicle and pretended he was a cop. A suspect like this had to be considered.
Another crime occurred just a few months after Lisa was killed. If you drove out of the shopping center from which Lisa was abducted, passed the street where she was eventually found, and continued straight down the road two more miles, you would run into a house where another woman was murdered, the home of yet another unsolved homicide, that of Deborah Joshi.
DEBORAH JOSHI WAS stabbed seventeen times in the living room of her home. She was not raped, but her husband found her dying on their living room floor. A few pieces of jewelry and a big plastic container of quarters were stolen. Her vehicle was also missing.
I was not impressed with the way the police profiled this crime. The husband, Davis Joshi, was their chief suspect for a long time.
According to the police, Deborah came home from work in the afternoon and changed into more comfortable clothes. Her husband was not yet home and they didn’t have any children.
A next-door neighbor, Ray Hammond, told the local newspaper that her SUV flew out of the driveway that day. They had two dogs, and the dogs never barked, according to Hammond. He was working in his garage on a project and he responded to the sound of a car by looking through the windows of the garage door. He saw what looked like a black man-at least a “dark” man, he said-behind the wheel.
Deborah was black, and when I went to her house, I expected that her husband might be as well. However, Joshi is an Indian name, and Davis, it turned out, was of Asian descent; he was a Trinidad Indian. It’s possible that he might be mistaken for a black man if he was seen driving by very quickly. The SUV was found a mile away in a neighborhood strip mall. The plastic container that held the quarters was found in an apartment complex parking lot across from the mall but the quarters were gone. Nothing else was ever discovered.
The logistics didn’t support Deborah’s husband as a suspect. He would have had to leave his vehicle at the strip mall, walk home, kill his wife, then take her vehicle back to the strip mall, get in his own car, and drive back to the scene.
She was dying when the ambulance arrived. If he did it, he would have wanted to make sure she couldn’t speak and would have made sure she was dead.
There was no evidence ever found in his vehicle. Also, there was no blood evidence connected to him, which one would expect if a woman was stabbed seventeen times. Davis would have committed the perfect crime in the short amount of time between Deborah’s arriving home from work and when he got to the house just shortly after dark. The police looked at him right away, as they do when a married woman ends up murdered. Usually hours or days separate the time of a murder and the husband’s “discovery” of the body, leaving plenty of time to get rid of evidence, wash up, vacuum the car, and so on. Yet in the Joshi murder, the police found not a shred of evidence linking Davis to Deborah’s death in spite of how quickly the police were on the scene of the crime.