Criminal profiling is still a relatively new concept, and since there’s been so much mythology about criminal profiling and some foolishness promoted about criminal profiling, profilers are sometimes considered gods-and sometimes they’re considered frauds.
IS IT WORTH profiling a homicide if law enforcement doesn’t care? If it isn’t prosecuted, is it worth it?
Absolutely yes.
In Mary Beth Townsend’s murder, her son, Art, got the answer he prayed was true: the fiancé of his mother wasn’t somebody he had to hate the rest of his life.
The fiancé, Sam Bilodeau, got some relief that somebody believed he didn’t kill his fiancée, that there was an answer out there.
More recently, I received a letter from Sam Bilodeau’s sister, thanking me profusely for helping with the case, because it was such a horrible thing for her brother to live through with this cloud hanging over his head. When I spoke out in the media as to why Scotty May should be the top suspect in Mary Beth’s death and explained how he-and not Sam Bilodeau-was most likely to have committed the crime, I provided some peace of mind to her family. It took her years to deal with it and write a letter thanking me, but it was a beautiful thing to receive, ten years after I worked on the case. We know that Scotty May is not going anyplace. He’s in jail for life. I know the Townsend family would like him prosecuted for what he did to Mary Beth, but at least I could clear Sam Bilodeau’s name to some extent so he could go on in his life and I could give Art some closure, too. That is indeed worth it, even if I can’t say the case was prosecuted or the police ever formally exonerated Sam.
It is said that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place, but there are folks who can tell you that this is an old wives’ tale. Art Townsend can tell you that crime also can strike twice in the same place. Following his mother’s death, Art put the condo up for rent. A nice young man who did government work, Vincent Poor, moved in. The very next year after Mary Beth was murdered, in 1999, the police department had another crime go unsolved.
Vincent Poor, finished with his day’s work, came out of the train station and was robbed and stabbed to death on his way home to the condo.
Art didn’t want to tell the next renter that the previous two residents were murdered.
He sold the unit.
CHAPTER 8.DORIS:THE UNLIKELY VICTIM
The Crime: Murder
The Victim: Doris Hoover
Location: Midwestern United States
Original Theory: Husband either did it or hired someone to commit the crime
I arrived twenty-six years too late in the Midwest.
I had just finished an appearance on a daytime talk show, where I met two of the daughters of Doris Hoover. The hour-long show was on cold cases and their mother’s murder was featured. After the show, they stopped me in the hallway and asked if I could profile the killer. Normally, a case this cold is one that I would leave alone, but the facts were so interesting and the daughters so insistent, I told them I would give the detective a ring.
“Sure, we would welcome a profile of the case,” he said.
I drove to the Midwest. In my experience, more people call from this part of the country for help with unsolved homicides than any other part.
After getting such a poor reception on the Mary Beth Townsend case and running into similar resistance with other police departments, it was a relief to have the local law enforcement welcome me.
When I got there, the detective ushered me into his office, a rather sheepish look on his face.
“Uh, I have some bad news for you,” he told me.
I thought he was going to tell me that a superior wanted me to go home.
“The case files are gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yeah, there was a flood at the warehouse and the Hoover case files were destroyed.”
Okay. This was not good news. I would come to learn that it wasn’t entirely rare news. A case I later worked in North Carolina would have the entire trunk of a car, the actual trunk that was removed for testing, disappear. How do you lose something that much larger than a breadbox?
“How about computer files?” I ventured.
The detective looked morose. “Gone as well. Someone thought the case was closed and erased all information on it.” He half-grinned at me. “We have her name!”
I know he felt bad. Shit happens and police departments aren’t 100 percent perfect. Things get lost, items get destroyed, evidence gets mislabeled…shit happens.
So there I was.
Not only had a mother of seven been dead for two decades but all the related evidence was eliminated.
Still, I was in town. I had worked the Townsend case with no police files, so I might as well see if I could do anything with this one. It was worth a try.
DORIS HOOVER, FORTY-TWO, was shot at home around 3:30 a.m., in her own bedroom, on November 3, 1975, while four of her children were asleep down the hall and her husband was at work. Since that early morning, the only suspect had been her husband. I could see why he might end up in the crosshairs of an investigation, but my profile of the crime ended up pointing away from him.
Doris, who was deaf in one ear and wore a hearing aid everywhere except to sleep, was standing beside the bed in a teddy and panties-no slippers-when she was shot. The Harlequin romance novel she was reading was still spread open on her bed. There was no evidence of sexual assault. When she fell, she collapsed on a stereo, knocking over the speaker and a phone that was on the top of it.
Doris ’s daughter Laurie, seventeen, the oldest girl living at home, was sleeping in a bedroom with her younger sisters, Denise and Dana, and her little brother, Deacon. In the middle of the night she woke up suddenly, although she didn’t remember being startled awake by any noise, and saw someone pass by her open bedroom door, walking from her mother’s room to the bathroom. She was half asleep, and what he was doing there didn’t register right away. Then she saw him stop at her door and wipe off the doorknob. Wide awake now, she listened as he continued to the hall, down the stairs, and out of the house. Laurie heard the screen door at the front of the house open and close. She heard sounds by the side of the house, and then the screen door again. She heard the man come back up the stairs, enter her mother’s room, and then he went back down the stairs and out of the house again. Scared, she didn’t move from her bed. Minutes passed, only about seven or eight, and then she heard the police pounding on the front door. By the time she left her bed, the officers-who found the front door open when they arrived-were already inside the house and on the stairs.
The open door was a tip-off to Laurie that something was wrong; her mother compulsively locked all the doors at night.
The police told Laurie there had been a shooting at the house, but she said no, she had heard no such thing-then a horrible thought popped into her mind that her mother must have been kidnapped because her bed was empty when she went by the open door.
“He kidnapped her, he kidnapped her!” she cried out.
She showed the police to her mom’s room and then she saw her mother’s foot at the bottom of the bed.