I felt sure he was not from Mary Beth’s town because he drove to Washington, D.C., and destroyed the clutch en route. I didn’t think it was a joy ride. He had a place to go because he was not going to drive a car like Mary Beth’s all around town when he couldn’t even drive it properly.
ONE OF THE reasons I call myself an investigative criminal profiler is because I learned that you can’t always sit in your office and solve a crime by just looking at photos and reading case files. Sometimes you have to visit the crime scene and ask yourself, What kinds of buildings are here? What kind of land is it? What are the people like around here?
I went to the Townsend condominium and looked around. I went to the site where Mary Beth’s car was abandoned. Who would dump a car there? And, if they lived nearby, where did they live?
It was a poor area of town with a high incidence of drug-related crime, and it happens to be almost 100 percent African American. But I didn’t want to assume that the offender was African American; maybe there was more of a racial mix than I suspected.
I wanted to make sure of that, so I started knocking on doors, and I said, “I’m looking for a fellow who dropped a car near here, what do you think?”
I asked around in the community, because those in it would know a lot more about it than I’ll ever know, and every single one of them said, “Oh, no, if he dropped his car and walked from there, the guy’s African American. Definitely black, because we don’t have Hispanic guys around here, we don’t have white guys around here. If you come in here and you are trying to do some business and you are Hispanic or white, you will find nothing but trouble. You’re going to stand out. You will run into gang issues.”
It was not a safe area for the people who live there, let alone those who did not.
As I talked to people in the community, I told them, “I really need your help. I’ve got a suspect in a murder who might live around here.” Everybody jumped on board, trying to be detectives themselves. They started talking with me and giving me all kinds of information; a few even offered cookies and lemonade. Poor people don’t want a killer in their community any more than middle-class or rich people do, so everybody tried to help and was pleasant.
Because of what they told me, I was convinced Mary Beth Townsend’s attacker was a black man.
I believed he lived with someone or had a relative in that part of town, close to where the car was found. He worked for a day labor service of some kind, and he was in Mary Beth’s community for some work- or court-related reason. He had some previous knowledge and experience with the building where Mary Beth and Sam lived, because why else would he pick it? Criminals do things that make sense to them, even if we don’t fully understand their choices.
I asked Art Townsend, “Were there any temporary services working on or around the property, anybody lurking around, in the days before your mother’s homicide?”
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.