Mindhunter (25 page)

The next night after their first hunt, Odom and Lawson go to a drive-in movie theater. When the show is over, sometime after midnight, they drive back to the 7-Eleven. They go in and buy a few small items—a chocolate milk, a bag of peanuts, a pickle. This time, they’re the only ones in the store, so they abduct the young female store clerk with Odom’s .22-caliber handgun. Lawson has a .32 pistol in his pocket. When the police arrive later on, after being called by a customer who notices the store is unattended, they find that the cash register has not been touched, the woman’s pocketbook is behind the counter, and nothing of value has been taken.

The two men drive to a secluded spot. Odom orders her to undress completely, then rapes her in the backseat of the car. Meanwhile, Lawson is standing outside by the driver’s door, telling Odom to hurry up and give him his turn. After about five minutes, Odom ejaculates, buckles his pants, and gets out of the car so Lawson can take his place.

Odom walks away from the car, he says, to throw up. Lawson later claims that Odom told him, "We had to get rid of her," even though Lawson had elicited a promise from her that she wouldn’t tell if they let her go. At any rate, about five minutes later, Odom hears the woman scream from the car and yell, "Oh, my throat!" When he returns, Lawson has cut her throat and is mutilating her naked body with a knife he’d bought from the 7-Eleven the previous night.

The next day, as the two of them are in Odom’s VW, getting rid of the victim’s clothing that they had wrapped into two bundles, Lawson tells him he had tried to cannibalize the woman’s sexual organs after the attack, but it had made him sick.

The horribly mutilated body was discovered in plain view, and the killers were arrested within a few days of the murder. Russell Odom, scared for his life, readily admitted the rape but denied he had taken part in the murder.

In his statement to police, Clay Lawson made it clear he had had no intercourse with the victim: "I did not rape the girl. I only wanted to destroy her." This is a guy who chewed chalk in the courtroom during his trial.

They were tried separately. Odom received life plus forty years for rape, unlawful weapon possession, and accessory before and after the fact to murder. Lawson was convicted of first-degree murder and was electrocuted on May 18, 1976.

Like Bittaker and Norris, this case is characterized by a mixed presentation of behavior—and therefore behavioral evidence—because of the participation of two distinct personalities. The bodily mutilation is a sign of a disorganized personality type, while the finding of semen in the victim’s vagina strongly points to an organized personality. We taught the Odom and Lawson case at Quantico, and it was in the back of my mind when I got a call from Chief John Reeder of the Logan Township, Pennsylvania, Police Department. It was early in my career as a profiler. Reeder was a National Academy graduate, and through Special Agent Dale Frye of the FBI’s resident agency in Johnstown, he and Blair County district attorney Oliver E. Mattas Jr. asked for help in solving the rape, murder, and mutilation of a young woman named Betty Jane Shade.

The facts presented to me were these:

About a year earlier, on May 29, 1979, this twenty-two-year-old woman was walking home from her baby-sitting job at about 10:15 p.m. Four days later, a man who stated he was out on a nature walk stumbled upon her badly mutilated but well-preserved body in an illegal garbage dump site on top of Wopsonock Mountain, near Altoona. Her long blond hair had been cut off and was hanging on a nearby tree. County coroner Charles R. Burkey told the local newspaper it was the "most gruesome" death he had ever seen. He found that Betty Jane Shade had been sexually assaulted, her jaw fractured, her eyes blackened, the body with numerous stab wounds. The cause of death was a severe blow to the head, and postmortem mutilation included numerous stab wounds, the removal of both breasts, and an incision from the victim’s vagina to rectum.

Although the partially undigested contents of her stomach indicated she had been killed soon after she disappeared, her body was too well preserved to have been at the dump site for four days. There was no larvae infestation or trauma from animals that one would normally expect. The police had also been investigating complaints of illegal dumping at the mountainous site, so they would have found the body themselves had it been there earlier.

I reviewed all of the case materials Reeder sent me and came up with a profile, which I related during a lengthy telephone conference. During this conference, I tried to educate the police about the principles of profiling and the kinds of things we look for. I thought they should be looking for a white male, aged seventeen to twenty-five, though I noted that if he lived way the hell out in the sticks, he could be older because his social development would be slower. He would be thin or wiry, a loner, not exactly a whiz kid in high school, introverted, probably into pornography. The childhood background would be classic—a dysfunctional, broken family with an absent father and a domineering, overly protective mother. She might have given him the impression that all women are bad except for her. The UNSUB would therefore fear women and not be able to deal with them, which was why he had to render her unconscious or powerless so quickly.

He knew her very well. That was clear from the severe facial trauma. He had a tremendous amount of anger and sought to depersonalize her, through the face, breast, and genital mutilation. The removal of the hair said something else to me. While this could also be thought of as an attempt at depersonalization, I knew from victimology that Shade was a neat, meticulous individual and was proud of her well-groomed, well-cared-for hair. So the cutting off of the hair was an insult, a degrading gesture. And this also hinted at someone who knew her very well. Yet there was no sign of sadistic abuse or torture before death as there had been with Bittaker and Norris. This was not someone who derived his sexual satisfaction from inflicting pain.

I told the police not to look for the "used-car salesman type down the street with the outgoing personality." If this guy was employed at all, it would be menial; a janitorial or blue-collar job. Anyone who would leave the body at that sort of dump site had to have a menial job or something that involved dirt or grime. The time of the abduction, the missing breasts, the obvious moving of the body, and the revisiting the final dump site, all told me he’d be mainly nocturnal. I expected him to visit the cemetery, maybe go to the funeral, to twist things around in his mind until he was convinced he had had a "normal" relationship with Betty Jane. For that reason, I thought a polygraph would be virtually useless even after they had a suspect. The chances were strong he would live somewhere between her home and where she was seen leaving work at her baby-sitting job.

Though they didn’t have anything solid enough for an arrest, the police told me they had two suspects they considered strong. One was her live-in boyfriend and self-described fiancé, Charles F. Soult Jr., known as Butch. He would certainly have to be strongly considered. But the police were very high on the other one: the man who found the body and whose story didn’t quite add up. He was a machinist for the railroad, out on disability. He said he’d been out on a nature walk but had found the body at an obvious trash dump. An elderly man out walking his dog said he had seen this individual urinating at the scene. He was dressed inappropriately for a long hike, and though it had been raining, he was completely dry. He lived within four blocks of Betty Jane Shade’s house, and had tried unsuccessfully to pick her up on several occasions. He was nervous in his encounters with the police and said he had been afraid to report the body because he didn’t want to be blamed for the crime. This is a typical excuse by a subject who comes forward proactively to inject himself into the investigation and tries to deflect suspicion from himself. He was a beer drinker and heavy smoker, certainly strong enough to kill and dispose of the body himself. He had a history of antisocial behavior. On the night of the murder, he and his wife claimed to be home watching television by themselves, which provided them with no solid alibi. I told the police that someone like this would contact an attorney and be uncooperative from then on. That was exactly what had happened with him, they reported. He’d gotten a lawyer and refused a polygraph.

All of this sounded pretty promising. But what bothered me most was that he was married with two children and living with his wife. This wouldn’t have been his style. If a married guy had done the murder, he would have a lot of sadistic rage toward women. He would draw out the killing, abuse her more before death, but not mutilate her afterward. He was also thirty, which struck me as being on the high side.

Soult looked like a stronger choice to me. He fit virtually all of the profile elements. His parents had separated when he was young. His mother was a domineering woman, overly involved in her son’s life. At twenty-six, he was inept with women. He told police he had had just two sexual encounters in his life, both with an older woman who made fun of him because he couldn’t get it up. He said he and Betty Jane were very much in love and engaged to be married, though she dated and had sexual relationships with other men. I felt sure that if she were still alive, she’d tell a completely different story. At her funeral, he said he wanted to dig up the coffin and climb in there with her. And when interviewed by the police, he had cried incessantly over the loss of Betty Jane.

Butch Soult and his brother, Mike, worked as trash haulers, the police said.

"Jesus, this sounds pretty good," I replied.

They had access to the dump site, reason to know about it and go there, and a means of transporting the body.

But as much as I liked Butch as a suspect, two things bothered me. First, as I’d expected, he was kind of a little twerp who wasn’t much bigger than Shade. I didn’t think he was capable of moving the body or arranging it into the froglike position with the legs spread and bent at the knees in which it was found. Second, semen was found in the victim’s vagina, indicative of a traditional rape. I would not have been surprised to find semen on the body, in her underpants or other clothing, but not this. Like David Berkowitz, this guy would be a masturbator, but not a rapist. He had to get his sexual satisfaction indirectly. It didn’t add up.

This was a mixed organized-disorganized presentation, in many ways similar to the murder of Francine Elveson in New York, with the same early blitz attack, facial disfigurement, and genital mutilation. Whereas Elveson’s nipples had been cut off, Shade’s entire breasts had been removed.

But in the New York case, the larger Carmine Calabro had carried the tiny victim a couple of floors up and left her. And the ejaculation had all been masturbatory.

Keeping the lessons from Odom and Lawson in mind, I thought there was only one logical possibility. I believed it was likely Butch Soult had met Betty Jane on the street after she left her job, they got into an argument, he beat her up and probably rendered her unconscious, then transported her to a secluded location. I also believed he could have struck the blow that killed her, cut off her hair, mutilated her body, and kept the breasts as souvenirs. But between the time she was first attacked and the time she was killed, she had been raped, and I didn’t think a disorganized, sexually inadequate, mother-dominated young man such as Soult was capable of that. And I didn’t think he had moved the body by himself.

Butch’s brother, Mike, was the logical second suspect. He came from the same background and had the same job. He had spent some time in a mental institution, and had a record of violence, behavior problems, and poor anger control. The main difference was he was married, though their mother was so domineering in his life as well. The night Betty Jane Shade was abducted, Mike’s wife had been in the hospital having a baby. Her pregnancy was a major stressor, plus it had deprived him of a sexual release. It made perfect sense that after the attack, the panicked Butch had called his brother, who had raped the young woman while Butch looked on, then, after the murder, had helped him dispose of the body.

I told the police an indirect, nonthreatening approach would be best. Unfortunately, they had already interviewed Butch several times and polygraphed him. As I knew it would, the exam showed no deceit on his part, but inappropriate emotional reactions. I thought the best approach now would be to focus on Mike, hammering home that all he did was have sex with Shade and help dispose of her body, but that if he didn’t cooperate at this point, he would be in as much hot water as his brother.

This tactic paid off. Both brothers—and their sister, Cathy Wiesinger, who claimed to be Betty Jane’s best friend—were arrested. Cathy, according to Mike, had been in on the body disposal as well.

So what happened? I believe Butch had been trying to have sex with this sexually attractive, sexually experienced woman, but couldn’t. His resentment built up until it didn’t take much to set him off. After he attacked Shade, he panicked and called in his brother. But his anger built even further when Mike could have sex with her and he couldn’t. His anger continued, and four days later he mutilated the body, giving him "the final word."

One of the victim’s breasts was recovered. Mike told police that Butch kept the other one, which didn’t surprise me. Wherever he hid it, it was never found.

Charles "Butch" Soult was convicted of first-degree murder and Mike, following a plea arrangement, was sent to a mental institution. Chief Reeder commented publicly that we were directly instrumental in developing the investigation and obtaining statements from the perpetrators. We, in turn, were fortunate to have a local partner like him who had been trained in our methods and understood the collaborative process between police and Quantico.

Because of this cooperation, we were able to take out a killer and his accomplice before they had a chance to kill again. Chief Reeder and his men and women went back to the business of keeping the peace in Logan Township, Pennsylvania. And I went back to my 150-odd other active cases, hoping I’d learned something that would help me in at least one of them to walk in the shoes of both perpetrator and victim.