The uncle told Orville that I helped the family understand it was an accident, that the family was comfortable with that and wasn’t angry at Orville, that if he would plead guilty to that, he could get a manslaughter conviction and get a few years in prison and get out.
It was a pretty good setup. The sheriff liked it, too. I was playing the role of the dumb blond profiler doing the worst case of profiling you ever saw.
I thought Orville would buy this. I thought he would find it terribly amusing and make him think he was manipulating me. Plus, he would believe his family were chumps, too, and he would hardly serve any time if he confessed to accidentally killing Missy.
I wrote Orville a nice letter when I started working the case to get information from him, and he wrote me back all kinds of fanciful theories. Then, after the family meeting, Missy’s uncle wrote his letter and I wrote one to match. Finally, when the prosecution stopped the planned visit the sheriff and I were to make to Orville, I wrote him one last-ditch-attempt letter, hoping to spook him. Here are excerpts from it.
OCTOBER 18, 2001
Dear Mr. Jones,
Think carefully about what you are reading, Mr. Jones.
Missy may be dead but her body and her clothes can still speak volumes. Mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) can link a suspect with a crime by a minute speck of saliva or hair fiber. This new methodology far exceeds the old testing and is being used across the country in getting convictions in cold cases. Expect the investigator on your case to be court ordering your DNA for comparison very shortly…
The family will have to hear all the horrible details and who knows what information will be made public to support the prosecution and what other witnesses will come forward to tell what they know. The person convicted of this crime will have to spend his remaining life among inmates labeled as a child rapist and killer.
The family wishes to believe that this was a crime of carelessness or drunken anger. This profiler believes this may well be true and would support this conclusion in cooperation with a plea bargain for manslaughter with the DA. Once the testing is complete and immunity is given, this case will then have to be prosecuted as a crime committed by a man who has no guilt over what happened. By refusing to plea this down to an unfortunate accident, this person admits to his family, this profiler, and the court that the crime was intentional.
Time is short, Mr. Jones. Use it wisely.
SINCERELY,
PAT BROWN
DIRECTOR/INVESTIGATIVE CRIMINAL PROFILER
Orville was in jail for another crime, so the sheriff and I could have gone down there to talk to him. In this last letter, I let Orville know that Missy’s body would be exhumed. I told Orville they were looking for more sexual evidence and some other things that would put him in a death penalty situation. But if he confessed, we wouldn’t have the body exhumed.
I added in scientific methodologies, hoping to make him fear that more might be found, so pleading out might be a better deal. Then we would have a confession that he committed the crime.
That’s what we were aiming for, but unfortunately the prosecution shut us down. One of the things I’ve learned over years of profiling and working with police departments is that often there are things that can and will be done, and everybody is on the same page until we get to some level of politics that throws a wrench in our plans. I never got an explanation in this case as to why the prosecution wouldn’t cooperate and I probably will never know. If it is frustrating to me, imagine how hard it is on the family to see an investigation suddenly come to a jarring halt with no reason given.
Prosecutors come and prosecutors go, and many are political appointees. If the sheriff and prosecutor aren’t buddy-buddy, we might not get any kind of cooperation from the prosecutor. The prosecutor may be looking at his win record. He might say, “This is too tough a case, I don’t even want to deal with it.”
Sometimes, they won’t tell you directly what the politics are, because they can’t admit to it, or they will get in trouble if they do. I can’t tell you how many cases are ruined by politics. The Anne Kelley case was one. People usually think that it’s underhanded, like the suspect in the case is really the police chief’s brother. That’s not usually what it is. It’s more likely something completely unrelated to the actual crime. It’s either a time factor, the possibility that they might lose the case, or it could be the specter of negative publicity for the town. Prosecutors may refuse to take a case because they don’t want to bring out the community’s dirty laundry, especially if that laundry is sitting in some bigwig’s basket. If it’s a tourist destination, they will especially resist tackling a prosecution that will scare tourists away from visiting their once quiet hamlet.
People think that when a person is murdered there is a requirement by our legal system that the person who committed the crime be prosecuted. There is no such mandate in our country. The state is only required to prosecute crimes it feels like prosecuting, that are in the “interest of the state.” That’s it. The victim has no rights, the family has no rights, and citizens’ only rights are voting the people they favor into office. It is the state’s determination whether it chooses to proceed with a case or not. They don’t even have to investigate a case. They don’t have to prosecute a case.
If the prosecution becomes too expensive or unwieldy or it could possibly lose, it simply may not move ahead. Not even if the state knows who did it and there’s a solid pile of evidence, it just won’t do it. Prosecutors have so many cases on their plates that they decide which ones they’ll take and with which cases they won’t bother. If there are easy cases and hard cases, they’ll take the easy cases.
The police tend to be frustrated with this, too, and that’s why sometimes they develop a negative attitude. They will work hard on a case for two years, thinking they have ample evidence, and the prosecutor won’t take it to trial. And if that happens to them enough times, they get cynical, and they say, “Why bother next time? Am I really going to sit here and kill myself investigating this stupid case when nobody will ever take it to court?”
These days, if the police don’t have a bucket of DNA and a videotape of the crime going down, they may lose confidence their investigation is worth doing. If they get handed a difficult crime that requires confessions or huge amounts of legwork, or if they have five other cases pending, they’ll just dump the most complicated one and go with the other four.
WE OFTEN FIND that predators will wait until a child reaches prepubescence before abuse begins. They don’t like having sex with a six-year-old, but once she reaches nine or ten, she’s cute, having started to grow breasts and appearing more teenagerlike. That can be attractive to a sexual predator.
A lot of men who are considered child predators are not pedophiles. A pedophile is somebody who has an obsession with having sex with children, with childlike children, little children. A pedophile is not necessarily a sexual predator, because some pedophiles don’t do anything about it, they just think about it a lot.
A child sexual predator is someone who assaults children for sex or uses sex as a method of power and control over children. Sometimes a sexual predator would prefer to rape women but he is too chicken to go up against an adult so he picks on the most vulnerable of the population: kids.