Journey into Darkness (42 page)

In another decision, she stated that the ruling by a lower court judge that a convicted child molester must display a sign in his front yard for a certain period of time should be overturned because it “undermined his character and self-esteem.”

We could argue this point and I might even agree that such a public proclamation might tend to undermine an individual’s self-esteem. But it should also be noted that this sentence was imposed by the judge as a substitute for jail time. And since there is so much talk these days about alternative punishments, this might be a preferable one if the subject in question wasn’t highly dangerous. But again, if nothing else, that decision of Judge White’s was cited as showing a bias toward a convicted felon and away from the victim.

On Thursday, August 1, 1996, the voters of Tennessee voted No on Penny White by a margin of 55 to 45 percent. It was the first time in Tennessee history that a Supreme Court judge had been recalled. “We got the message to the people and the people were aroused,” said Jack Collins.

He saw White’s recall as a warning to judges not to sit too high up in their ivory towers. “Once those folks get life tenure, they sit back, they become academic and theoretical about life. They don’t whiff the sulfur, they don’t taste the blood. They have no idea of the grief and the sorrow involved. And they say, well, that’s their role: to be above the battle. Damn it, no! You’ve got to understand the battle. You may not be in it, but you’ve got to understand it, to take the time to feel it palpably.”

Jack and Trudy believe they face years yet before Sedley
Alley’s sentence will actually be carried out, and they only hope they live long enough to see it happen. If it does, they both want to be there, watching as their daughter’s killer pays the final price for his savage cruelty. They are haunted by the fact that they could not be with Suzanne when she died, and although this would not make up for it, it would constitute the final steps of walking the entire journey with her.

On June 8,1996—which would have been Suzanne’s thirtieth birthday—Jack and Trudy decided to go out to dinner to celebrate. “She was so joyous and upbeat, we wanted to be happy for her,” Jack explains. “It was a wonderful evening. Now, on the anniversary of the day she was killed I doubt very much if we’d be going out to dinner, or the date she was buried. But on the date of her birthday, we said, yes, let’s be happy for her. I think we’ll do this every year.”

They still miss her every day, in ways both large and small. Jack wears on his watchband the tiny gold heart Suzanne had on a chain around her neck when she died. Stephen still carries a high school photograph of her in his wallet. Susan Hand, who went on to become an air traffic controller at El Toro and is now Susan Martin, married to Army Captain Eric Martin and the mother of two children, still gets mistyeyed whenever she hears the song “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” by the group Simple Minds. It was one of her and Suzanne’s favorites. Among many other things, Trudy misses not being able to go shopping with her, not having her there to say, “Mom, those earrings don’t go with this.”

Recently, Jack wrote a short story entitled “Elegy for a Marine,” a very lightly fictionalized account of Suzanne’s death from her own perspective. He wrote it as a catharsis, he says, as another way of trying to come to grips with the tragedy, another way to share her pain and spiritually to be with her in the hour of her death as he couldn’t be physically. It is a moving tribute to Suzanne’s life and courage, one of the most affecting pieces of its kind I have ever read, and a poignant, deeply revealing insight into a parent’s anguish.

On the legal frontier, he and Trudy will continue seeking justice for their daughter and others like her, whatever it takes. But they have also established a living memorial: the
Suzanne Marie Collins Perpetual Scholarship, part of the American Foreign Service Association Scholarship Program. The Collins scholarship is awarded to children of foreign service personnel—active, retired, or deceased—to pursue their college educations, and is based solely on need.

Contributions in Suzanne’s memory can be made to:

AFSA Scholarship Fund/American Foreign Service Association
2101 E Street, N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20037

Telephone: (202) 338-4045 Fax: (202) 338-6820

(Please specify that your contribution is for the Suzanne Marie Collins Perpetual Scholarship.)

Sometime between the late night of Friday the thirteenth in March of 1987 and mid-morning of Saturday, March 14, thirty-year-old Nancy Newman and her two daughters, eightyear-old Melissa and three-year-old Angie, were sexually assaulted and murdered in their own apartment on Eide Street in Anchorage, Alaska, in one of the cruelest and most brutal crimes the investigators had ever seen. Her sister and brother-in-law, Cheryl and Paul Chapman, were the ones who discovered the horror after Nancy failed to show up for work. In addition to the deadly assaults, there was some evidence of burglary. So appalling was the attack and so concerned were authorities that a viciously depraved or serial killer was on the loose. Anchorage police and the Alaska state troopers immediately formed a joint task force.

In any case that could potentially be seen as a domestic homicide, the spouse is always considered among the earliest suspects. But John Newman, a heavy-equipment operator on the oil pipeline who had come up to Alaska with his family from their native state of Idaho, had been injured on the job three months before and had been down in San Francisco since January 3 for treatment and rehabilitation. And aside from the logistical impossibility of his involvement, it quickly became clear to investigators that he and his wife and children had a model loving relationship without a hint of any problems.

Even had John not been ruled out for these clear and
concrete reasons, as soon as we heard a description of the murders and saw the crime scene photos, we knew he had nothing to do with the attack. Sad to say, some parents do abuse, and some parents do kill, their children. They rape them, they beat them, they burn them, they starve them, they smother them. Sometimes they even stab them. But they don’t do what was done to the Newman children. We see personal cause domestic homicides in which a man kills his wife, ex-wife, or ex-girlfriend where there is a tremendous amount of overkill in evidence—multiple stab wounds concentrated around the head and neck. And we see cases in which a man will kill his entire family. But whether it’s done with a knife or a gun or any other means, it’s much “cleaner” than this. Whatever a man might do to his wife, no matter how hideous the punishment he tries to inflict as he kills her, there is no motive we’ve ever seen in which a father brutally rapes, sodomizes, and slashes up his two little girls, then leaves their bodies out in plain view for whoever finds them. It just does not happen.

Both the Anchorage PD and Alaska state troopers are first-rate organizations, confident enough in their own mission and capabilities that they are secure asking for assistance from anyone who can help them. As routine practice, APD has an assistant district attorney attached to each homicide team to oversee the investigation right from the start. So the newly formed task force immediately contacted Special Agent Don McMullen, the profile coordinator in the FBI’s Anchorage Field Office, who gave them a summary of the kind of individual likely to have perpetrated such a gruesome crime. McMullen is a first-rate agent and was one of the top profilers in the field. We had worked together about three and a half years earlier when he was the case coordinator in the murders committed by Robert Hansen—the Anchorage baker who had abducted prostitutes, flew them out of town in his private plane, and then hunted them down for sport in the woods far from civilization. After giving police his own initial evaluation of the Newman murders, McMullen contacted Jud Ray in Quantico.

Jud had been with the Investigative Support Unit for about two and a half years and brought a unique background and qualifications to his job as a profiler. An Army
veteran of Vietnam, he had started his law enforcement career as a police officer in Georgia, quickly working his way up to becoming a homicide detective before joining the FBI. He and I first got to know each other back in 1978 when he was a shift commander with the Columbus, Georgia, Police Department, working the “Forces of Evil” multiple murder case at Fort Benning. We then worked together briefly in early 1981 when he was a special agent in the Atlanta Field Office and I came down from Quantico on ATKID—the Atlanta Child Murders. But as it turned out, we didn’t work together too long on that one. As I related in
Mindhunter
, on February 21, 1981, two shooters hired by Jud’s wife very nearly killed him in his own apartment. He spent three weeks in the hospital under twenty-four-hour armed guard recovering from his physical wounds. The emotional recovery took a lot longer.

Despite obvious differences between us, such as the fact that I am tall, blue-eyed, and white, and Jud is short, wiry, and black, Jud became probably the closest I ever had to a brother. He was serving as profile coordinator in New York when some slots opened up in the unit and I immediately grabbed him and Jim Wright, who was in the Washington Field Office and had worked the John Hinckley case.

Jud asked McMullen for the crime scene photos and whatever other case materials had been developed thus far. Certain pictures were faxed immediately and a full set arrived at Quantico on Tuesday morning. McMullen told Jud that based on the profiling input the field office had already provided, the police thought they had a good suspect. At this stage, of course, Jud didn’t want to hear anything about potential suspects, needing what he refers to as “the freedom of neutrality.”

As he sat alone at his desk reviewing the case materials, the first question Jud was asking himself was: Which victim suffered the most damage at the hands of the perpetrator?

The photographs bore gruesome testimony to the fact that all three had suffered horribly. Nancy Newman and both of the girls had been found nude except for nightgowns pulled up high on their chests, and all had been assaulted both vaginally and anally before being stabbed repeatedly. But it didn’t take him long to conclude that the most violent assault,
the worst mutilation, the greatest sustained rage had been directed against the younger girl, Angie. The threeyear-old’s throat had been slashed so deeply that her head had almost been cut off. In the hideous autopsy close-up, the gaping ends of the trachea and esophagus are plainly visible, and both the jugular vein and left carotid artery had been completely severed. Angie was covered with blood and there were defense wounds on the fingers of her right hand.

What kind of monster could do this to a three-year-old?

From the crime scene photos, it was clear that the crime had been highly disorganized. From the blood transfer around the scene—the tracking by serological experts of which victim’s blood ended up where—police had determined that the UNSUB attacked Mrs. Newman first, then Melissa, then Angie. There was also evidence of some ritual behavior that has no obvious symbolic significance, but which is commonly seen with very disorganized offenders. In this case, the UNSUB had wiped a clean path up the front of Angie’s bloody body, from her vaginal area past the top of her abdomen.

Though Nancy was a waitress in a nightclub-bar, nothing in her victimology suggested anything high-risk. Everyone the police interviewed at the establishment said she was loved by all her co-workers and friendly without ever being flirty or encouraging to men. From all evidence, she was completely faithful to her husband, never socialized with customers, and had no involvement with drugs. In short, there was no reason why she or her daughters should be targeted in their own home for such a barbaric crime.

There was one potentially important piece of forensic evidence. After the murders, the killer had washed the blood off himself in the kitchen sink. And on the cloth washrag he’d used (terry cloth is useless at picking up fingerprints), police crime technicians had found lice. Since there was no evidence of lice anywhere else in the apartment, they must have been brought in by the killer. Exclusive of the lice clue, the other thing Jud found significant about the washing itself was that the UNSUB must have felt the need to get the blood off him before he went outside. Why would he spend more time at the scene risking discovery and leaving more evidence, rather than going back to his own place to clean
himself up? Well, for one thing, he might not have his own place. These types are often drifters. And if he were familiar with the premises, as Jud surmised he was, it might be a natural reaction for him to do it there. But most importantly, if he took the time and risk to clean up this bloody mess before leaving the murder scene, it probably meant one or both of two things: that he lived with someone else and therefore had to look “normal” when he returned home; and he was afraid of being seen as he left, which meant it was already light out, indicating the murders had taken place on Saturday morning rather than late Friday night.

The case already had a bizarre psychic dimension to it. On the Thursday before the murders, a female mental patient had called Anchorage police, describing a ritual murder which would soon take place in which the killer would drink the blood of his very young female victims and make a sacrificial offering of their bodies. Needless to say, this prophecy freaked out everyone concerned, especially when the news hit the media. The APD had to go back and interview this woman and work through the various aspects of her story, but neither Jud nor the task force could see any real connection. It seemed to be just one of those macabre coincidences that often turn up from nowhere in a homicide case and threaten to throw everyone off track, at least for a while.

After consulting with the Bureau’s Anchorage Field Office, the police had set up a blanket canvass and interview regimen designed to surface the type of individual who fit the profile of a classically disorganized violent offender with some previous history of sexual assault. He would be a white man in his early to mid-twenties, disheveled in appearance and nocturnal in habits, high-school-educated at most, no military service, unemployed or underemployed in some menial job, plus other criteria. And the canvass did yield a good suspect—a young man who had recently moved into the neighborhood a couple of doors down from the Newmans. He had no alibi for the time of the murders and the police were encouraged that they had their man.