Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind (20 page)

“We got in the car and she gave me a ride and, uh, I started basically in on her. I started seeing images of anger and hatred and it just clicked off and I told her to drive out the road there. I don’t remember which direction we were going. I just told her to drive.”

Wardrip recalled it was cold that February dawn but claimed no recollection of the abandoned trolley where he killed Toni Gibbs. “When I’m in those rages, I just black out. I just don’t remember. I don’t remember that,” he said.

“I just grabbed her and started trying to sling her around the car and she swerved off the side of the road… and she turned down a dirt road and I still had her by her jacket and I was just slinging her, just slinging her, and I was screaming as loud as I can at her and, uh, I told her to stop and she stopped. I did the same thing. I took off her clothes and I stabbed her.”

“Did you have sex with Toni Gibbs?” Smith asked.

“I don’t really remember. I remember screaming at her, screaming at her, screaming at her that I hate you. I don’t remember if I had sex. I just remember screaming and screaming and screaming how much I hate you, how much I hated everybody.”

John Little reminded Wardrip he had said he knew Toni Gibbs. “How did Toni know you?” Little asked.

“From the hospital,” Wardrip replied. “She never had anything to do with me. I just knew her from there. It could have been anybody. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time… I never set my sights on anybody. I would just get so mad and I would just get out and walk, be in such a rage. I would just scream at the sky, scream at the trees, scream at God.

“Then I would just lay down for a while and sleep, and then I’d see it on the news and [realize] that something must have happened real bad. I tricked myself [into] thinking it wasn’t me… I just blocked it out of my mind, wouldn’t even want to think about it for a long, long, long time.”

Little turned the conversation to Ellen Blau.

“Same thing,” said Wardrip. “I’d just be out walking, just walking.” He said he saw Blau turn her car into a store parking lot and followed her. “I asked her what she was doing. She said she was looking for somebody, and I just grabbed her and pushed her back into her car.

“We drove out to a road… and I just started grabbing her and screaming at her, I hate you… I had drug her out of the car and took her in a field and stripped her clothes off, but I don’t remember how she died. I don’t believe I raped her. I don’t recall. She probably broke her neck because I sure was slinging her. I was just so mad and angry….”

Wardrip explained that he had seen his wife’s face as he was assaulting the women. “I hated her so much. It’s just like with Tina. I was screaming at her, and I had my arm across her throat. I was screaming at her bloody murder. I didn’t see Tina’s face; I saw hers. I was so consumed with hatred. I never hit them though. That’s what really threw me. I wonder why I didn’t, but I never struck. Just like my wife. I never hit her.”

Wardrip wasn’t finished. “There is one more,” he told Little and Smith. “It ain’t here though.” He confessed to a fifth homicide, one for which he had not been a suspect, the March 25, 1985, murder in Fort Worth, Texas, of Debra Taylor, a wife and mother.

Wardrip said that following Terry Sims’s murder he went to Fort Worth for a while looking for work. One night he met Taylor at a local honky-tonk.

“[She was] coming on to me,” he insisted. “We went out to the parking lot around back and I made my advance toward her and she said no and she slapped my face, and when she did that I just snapped and I grabbed her and I slung her around and I done the same thing to her that she did to me. And I killed her.”

“How did you kill her?” asked Little.

“I think I strangled her. I had her on the ground, and I think I used my forearm.” Wardrip continued, “I put her in the car, took her up the interstate and found the first road and just, uh, threw her out.”

One of the most remarkable aspects of this extraordinary story is the speed with which the UNSUB of a fifteen-year-old serial murder case was identified and brought to justice.

In early January 1999, when John Little had begun his cold-case review, Barry Macha had nothing more to go on than a DNA match between the Sims and Gibbs cases and my belief that Ellen Blau was killed by the same person. By early February John Little had obtained his DNA sample from Wardrip.

Within eleven days, Wardrip had confessed to four killings and had been charged with capital murder by a Wichita County Grand Jury in the Sims and Blau cases. On the first day of his trial for murdering Terry Sims, Wardrip entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to death by lethal injection. By the end of the year, he was on death row, with life sentences in the three other homicides.

The wheels of justice may have been slow to grind in Faryion Wardrip’s case, but once they got started, the outcome was satisfying, swift, and sure.

My report to the Wichita Falls prosecutor was a hybrid analysis; it combined a profile with related elements of what I call linkage analysis. Besides the portrait I drew of the UNSUB, I also analyzed the three murders for behavioral clues to see if they were linked, i.e., was the same killer responsible for all three homicides?

I always set high standards of behavioral proof for linkage analyses. I will not testify in court that two or more homicides are the work of a single killer unless I can document a unique combination of MO and ritual behaviors. The three Wichita Falls cases certainly had plenty of behavioral similarities, but without more complete forensic information in the Blau homicide, I wasn’t prepared to make a definitive judgment.

At the time of the Wardrip matter, I had already worked on a large number of cases involving linkage analyses. In most instances there were at least three crimes to analyze, and generally they were grouped together, both geographically and chronologically. But not always. A midwestern state case offered an interesting challenge.

Several years ago I was retained by an attorney to conduct a linkage analysis in a civil liability suit that had grown out of a strange and savage murder. This homicide had a bizarre feature I hadn’t seen before and haven’t since—two of the victim’s teeth had been taken from her mouth.

The case began just before 6:00
A.M.
on a cold and snowy winter Saturday. As a police officer pulled into his station, he discovered a sports car parked improbably on the facility’s front lawn. The driver’s-side door was open, and a woman was lying on her back on the ground, her feet resting inside the car.

She was thirty-one-year-old Juliet Cruz,
^*
and she had been shot with a handgun. She also had an extraordinary story to tell—after she was hospitalized—of how she had been shot, and why she was lying on the cold ground next to her car in front of a police station that Saturday morning.

The young woman explained that just a few minutes before the officer discovered her, she had been innocently driving along the highway on her way to visit her sick father. Cruz said that she had just turned onto the interstate when in the distance she saw a man exit the driver’s side of a dark blue subcompact that was parked at the side of the road. He was headed across the highway toward a late-model sedan that had its emergency flashers on.

Then Juliet saw a woman jump out the passenger side of the blue car. She waved Juliet to a stop, got into the startled woman’s car, and blurted out a harrowing tale.

Her name was Rose Morrison.
^*
Two hours earlier, Morrison said, she had been driving along the same stretch of the interstate when the sedan suddenly had bumped her left front fender, running her off the road. The sedan’s driver, a black man, at first behaved as if he wanted to help her. But then he drew a gun and took her to another location where, she said, he raped her for two hours and “used the gun on her during the rape,” according to Juliet Cruz’s later statement.

As Rose Morisson recounted her ordeal, Juliet cautiously steered her sports car back out onto the snow-covered highway—her top speed that morning was 40 mph—and headed north. When Juliet looked into her rearview mirror, she was stunned to see the sedan bearing down on her from behind.

The driver pulled abreast of her car and began shooting at Cruz with a handgun. Juliet drove onto an exit ramp, looking for a policeman. By this time the man had swung his car around to the other side of her vehicle and was shooting again.

One bullet hit Cruz, paralyzing her from the waist down. She saw the police station at the same moment and aimed her car straight for it, ending up on the front lawn.

The sedan was right behind. The man skidded to a stop in the middle of the street, ran over to Cruz’s car, opened the passenger door, and dragged Rose Morrison out onto the snow. “This time you die, bitch!” he snarled.

Then he poked his head in the car once more, grabbed Rose’s purse, and warned Cruz that if she said anything, he would kill her. He dragged Rose Morrison back to his car and vanished. The police officer arrived on the scene a few minutes later.

It was an incredible story, backed up by Juliet’s paralyzing wound and the multiple bullet holes the police found in her car. Her descriptions of both her attacker and his sedan led to the arrest of twenty-nine-year-old Roland Smith,
^*
a black man whom she later picked out of a police lineup.

Rose Morrison’s fate wasn’t known for seventeen days. A witness, John Jones,
^*
came forth with the news that he had found a woman’s body hidden under a low bridge approximately twenty miles from the police station. Her blouse and one of her boots also were recovered. There was a large pool of blood nearby, and a bullet lay underneath the body.

Jones reported that, while driving by, he had noticed a woman’s white slip. When he stopped for a closer look, he saw a woman’s leather coat on the ground by the roadway. Near it was a package of condoms. Police would later find another condom package at the same site as well as two empty cigarette packs.

Rose Morrison’s battered, nude body was secreted under the bridge a little farther on. She had been horribly beaten all over her body with blunt force. Her nose was fractured in several places, as were several other facial bones and her skull. The left side of her face had taken the brunt of the assault. It was deformed from his blows.

The blunt-force injuries caused Morrison’s death, but her killer had also shot her in the left forehead and shoulder. A piece of shrapnel pierced her right hip.

No drugs or alcohol were found in her system. Her body bore no defensive wounds or ligature marks. No semen was recovered. A lubricant had been applied to her vagina and anus. It appeared that Morrison had been anally raped after she died.

Strangest and most gruesome of all, two of her upper incisors, the left mid and left laterial, had been taken from their sockets, which the medical examiner described as open and bloody. The teeth were never recovered.

My participation in the case evolved around the pivotal issue of whether Smith had committed a similar crime four years earlier. I was asked to render my professional opinion as to whether the two crimes in fact were linked. I started by examining the facts of the earlier case.

On a Friday night in November, twenty-one-year-old Maria Rodriguez
^*
left a local nightclub about 11:45. A couple returning home from a movie that night reported seeing her at an intersection not long thereafter. They said that a white car, occupied by a single male, and a blue car were right behind her. The male in the white car appeared extremely angry.

A short while later, residents in a nearby, middle-class subdivision heard the sounds of a collision, followed by approximately ten minutes of excited yelling in the street. Two or three male voices were heard. Car doors were repeatedly opened and slammed shut.

Maria Rodriguez’s vehicle was later recovered in the vicinity. It was locked. Her flashers were on. The left front had minor scratches, and the left turn signal lens was broken out.

The next day, on a mountain highway an hour’s drive northwest from where her car was found, Maria’s battered, naked body was discovered at the bottom of an embankment at a roadside rest area. Evidence at the scene suggested that a vehicle had been backed to the edge of the embankment, and that two people had gotten out and thrown her over the edge. Footprints indicated that a third individual had walked from the car over to the highway, probably to keep watch.

Her bloody sweatpants and torn underwear were found along the roadside three miles away. Her car keys were recovered seven miles from the body disposal site. Police did not recover the necklace that Maria Rodriguez wore that night, or her watch, driver’s license, or credit cards.

The victim’s cause of death was listed as “central nervous system contusions and acute blood loss.” She had been beaten to death and her throat cut three times. Her entire body was covered in injuries from blunt-force trauma. Her nose was fractured, and a single huge contusion covered the left side of her face.

No semen was detected, nor was there any indication of direct injury to Maria’s sexual organs. No defensive wounds or ligature marks were noted in the autopsy. The medical examiner did describe extensive bruising of her pubic area and breasts. The most remarkable injury, however, was to her mouth.

Maria Rodriguez’s upper right mid incisors and left middle incisor—three teeth in all—had been taken.

In linkage analysis I must examine the differences between crimes as carefully as the similarities. In the Rose Morrison and Maria Rodriguez cases, these differences began with the fact that one victim was an Anglo and the other Hispanic. Also, a gun was used in the Morrison murder, while Maria’s killer used a knife.

Morrison hadn’t been robbed; Rodriguez had. Only a single offender had attacked Rose; it was believed that several males were involved in Maria’s abduction.

The presence of the lubricant and evidence of postmortem and tearing support the conclusion that Rose Morrison was sexually violated after death. There was no medical evidence that Maria Rodriguez was raped.

However, these dissimilarities did not rule out the possibility that one man had been involved in both women’s deaths. I believed some of them stemmed from the killer’s moving up the learning curve, as successful offenders generally do. It is not unusual for a serial offender to commit his first crime, or crimes, with accomplices then graduate to committing them on his own. Kenneth Bianchi—known together with his cousin, Angelo Buono, as the Hillside Strangler—is a notable example of this pattern of progression.

A serial offender has several reasons for preferring to act alone. Maria Rodriguez’s killer probably realized he was safer without fellow offenders who could become witnesses against him. He would also recognize the danger of being seen and identified in the suburban neighborhood where Maria was abducted. The interstate was a safer place to operate. Likewise, a gun is a more useful weapon than a knife.

He also did a better job of hiding the second victim’s body. Rodriguez was discovered within twenty-four hours; Morrison’s remains weren’t found for seventeen days. Finally, by stealing Rodriguez’s personal possessions, he had heightened his risk of being connected to her murder. Nothing belonging to Rose Morrison was known to have been stolen except her two teeth.

Investigators should always bear in mind that there will be differences between two crimes, even if the same person committed them. The variables responsible for these inconsistencies include the circumstances, victim behavior, the amount of time the offender has, and his mood.

Next I focused on the similarities. Both victims were females in their early twenties, and both had been out alone in their cars in the early hours of a Saturday. Both were abducted after incidents in which the left front portions of their vehicles received minor damage. There were no witnesses to either collision.

Both victims’ cars were left where they had been abducted. Both women eventually were transported elsewhere in their assailants’ vehicles.

Both cases featured multiple crime scenes, and both victims’ possessions were found scattered in different locations. Both were found nude, near a rural roadside, and in both instances care had been taken to conceal the body. No victim clothing was found near the disposal site.

Both murders appeared to be anger motivated. The victims had been severely beaten over their entire bodies, sustaining injuries far in excess to those necessary to cause death. Both murders were examples of overkill.

Recall that none of Faryion Wardrip’s Texas homicides, bloody though they were, met the overkill criterion. These two homicides, however, passed the threshold of excessiveness.

Both women suffered blunt trauma, primarily to the left sides of their faces, and both had been kept by their captors at least two hours.

No seminal fluid was found in connection with either homicide.

There were no defensive wounds nor ligature marks on either body.

Both victims had their noses fractured.

And the killer had extracted and kept upper incisors from both of them.

Although four years separated the two crimes, I had little trouble concluding that the same killer had committed both. The extracted teeth were compelling evidence, of course. But since this aspect was totally new in my experience, I advised my client to secure a second expert’s opinion.

My recommendation was Dr. Lowell Levine, the eminent forensic odontologist and director of the New York State Police’s Medicolegal Investigations Unit. Dr. Levine said that he, too, believed the teeth in both cases were intentionally removed. Dr. Levine also could not recall a similar case of deliberately excised upper teeth.

Roland Smith was sentenced to prison in the Rose Morrison case, thanks to Juliet Cruz’s bravery and quick wits.

Linkage analysis can be a useful tool for isolating the probability that one person was, or was not, involved in multiple offenses. In cases where no reliable witnesses, or physical evidence, are available, it can be a critical factor in establishing guilt or innocence. Sometimes, as in the Wardrip case, it has the same sort of value that a good profile has. It helps the police focus their investigation, to perhaps discard unpromising ideas and pursue potentially valuable ones that they hadn’t previously considered.

In this case my analysis did provide survivors with a sense of justice completed. It seemed certain that Smith had indeed murdered both women, and just as certainly he’s serving time for committing the crimes.