Mindhunter (32 page)

This development represented everyone’s worst nightmare. A brutal killer stalking Columbus was horrible enough. An organized and murderous vigilante reaction to it could tear the community apart.

Other letters followed, upping the ante with a further demand for a $10,000 ransom, as the police searched frantically but without success for any of these seven white men. Gail Jackson was a prostitute, well known around the bars that serviced Fort Benning. And she was indeed missing.

Jud Ray was a shift commander in the Columbus Police Department. As an Army Vietnam veteran and a black police officer who had worked his way up through the ranks, he was acutely aware that the community would not heal until these twin threats of the Stocking Strangler and the Forces of Evil organization were neutralized. With no progress in the investigation despite all the time and effort that had gone into it, his cop instincts told him they had to be looking for the wrong people in the wrong way. He tried to keep up on law enforcement developments around the country and had heard about the profiling program in Quantico. He suggested that the department contact the Behavioral Science Unit and see what we made of the case.

On March 31, we were asked through the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to analyze the case. Despite what the original letter had stated, we were all pretty sure the connection to the Army and Fort Benning was not a casual one. Bob Ressler, who had been a military policeman before he joined the Bureau, took the lead.

Within three days we had returned our report. We felt there was no evidence this self-styled Forces of Evil was composed of seven white men. In fact, we didn’t believe it was composed of any white men. It would be a lone black male, trying to divert attention away from himself and the fact that he had already murdered Gail Jackson. From his military usage of dates (e.g., "1 June") and his reference to meters rather than feet or yards, it was clear he was in the military. The letters were almost illiterate, ruling out an officer, who would have had a better education. From his own experience, Bob felt he would likely be either an artilleryman or a military policeman, twenty-five to thirty years of age. He would already have killed two other women, probably also prostitutes—that’s what his reference to "the victims will double" was all about—and we thought there was some chance he might be the Stocking Strangler as well.

When our profile was circulated around Fort Benning and the bars and nightclubs the victim was known to frequent, the Army and Columbus police quickly came up with the name of William H. Hance, a black, twenty-six-year-old specialist four assigned to an artillery unit at the fort. He confessed to the murders of Gail Jackson, Irene Thirkield, and another woman, an Army private named Karen Hickman, at Fort Benning the previous fall. He admitted that he had made up the Forces of Evil to throw police off his track.

The actual Stocking Strangler was identified from a photograph by a witness at one of the scenes as Carlton Gary, a twenty-seven-year-old black man who was born and raised in Columbus. He was captured after a series of restaurant holdups, but escaped, and was not recaptured until May 1984. Both Hance and Gary were convicted and sentenced to die for their crimes.

After the community settled back to normal, Jud Ray took a leave of absence to run a program at the University of Georgia that recruited minorities and women into law enforcement careers. Once this project was over, he planned to go back to police work. But with his military and investigative background, not to mention the fact that he was black and at this time the Bureau desperately needed to establish itself as an equal-opportunity employer, he accepted an offer from the FBI. I first met him casually when he was at Quantico for new-agent training. He was then assigned to the Atlanta Field Office, where his experience and knowledge of the local area and people was considered a tremendous asset.

We next met late in 1981 when I was down in Atlanta for ATKID. Like everyone else in the field office, Jud was deeply involved in the investigation. Each agent was part of a team working five ATKID cases, and Jud was working an intense schedule.

He was also under tremendous pressure from another source. His marriage, shaky for some time, was breaking up. His wife had been drinking heavily, verbally abusing him, acting erratically. "I didn’t even know this woman anymore," he said. Finally, one Sunday evening, he’d given her an ultimatum: either she had to change her ways and get help or he was going to take their two daughters—ages eighteen months and eight years—and leave.

Much to his surprise, Jud did begin seeing positive signs. She became more attentive to him and the girls. "I saw an abrupt change in her personality. She quit boozing," he recalled. "She started doting over me. For the first time in thirteen years of marriage, she got up in the morning to make me breakfast. Suddenly, she’d become all the things I wanted her to be."

But then he added, "I should have known this was too good to be true. And that’s something I would lecture to police afterward. If your spouse suddenly shows you a radical change of behavior—negatively or positively—you ought to be suspicious right away."

What was happening was that Jud’s wife had already decided to have him killed and was buying time until she could make the arrangements. If she pulled it off successfully, she would be able to avoid the trauma and humiliation of an ugly divorce, keep the two kids herself, and collect on a quarter-million-dollar life insurance policy. Far better to be the grieving and well-off widow of a murdered law officer than a divorced woman alone in the world.

Unbeknownst to Jud, two men had been watching his moves and habits for several days. They waited outside his apartment building in the morning and followed him on I-20 into Atlanta every day. They were looking for the opportunity to get him defenseless, so the hit could be accomplished efficiently and a getaway made without witnesses.

But they quickly realized they had a problem. Jud had been a law officer long enough that the first rule a cop learns was instinctive to him: keep your gun hand free. No matter where the two would-be shooters tracked him, he always seemed to have his right hand ready to go for his gun.

They went back to Mrs. Ray and told her the problem. They wanted to take him out in the parking lot outside the apartment, but Jud would be able to get to at least one of them before they could finish him off. She had to do something about that free right hand.

Not letting a detail like this stand in her way, she got a travel coffee cup and suggested Jud take it to work with him every morning. "For thirteen years, she never made me or the girls breakfast, and now she was trying to get me to take that damn coffee cup with me."

But he resisted. After all these years, he just couldn’t get used to the idea of driving with his left hand on the wheel and his right hand occupied with a coffee cup. This was in the days before cup holders were commonplace in cars. Had they been, this story might have had a completely different outcome.

The gunmen came back to Mrs. Ray. "We can’t take him in the parking lot," one of them reported. "We’ve got to take him inside."

So the hit was scheduled for early February. Mrs. Ray had taken the two girls out for the evening and Jud was home alone. The shooters come to the building, down the hall, and up to the apartment door, where they ring the bell. The only problem is, they have the wrong apartment number. When a white man comes to the door, the two guys ask where the black man is who lives there. Innocently, he tells them they have the wrong apartment. Mr. Ray lives over there.

But now the shooters have been seen by this neighbor. If there’s a hit tonight, there’s no way he’s not going to remember two black men asking where Jud Ray lives when the police question him. So they leave.

Later, Mrs. Ray comes back home assuming the job’s been done. Hesitantly, she looks around, then crawls into the bedroom, mentally preparing for the 911 call she’s going to make, saying something terrible has happened to her husband.

She gets to the bedroom and sees Jud lying there on the bed. She’s still creeping around. He turns over and says, "What the hell are you doing?" whereupon she freaks out and runs to the bathroom.

But in the following days her good behavior continues and Jud thinks she’s really turned around. As naive as he thinks this was in retrospect, after many rocky years in a relationship, there is such an overwhelming desire to believe things truly have gotten better.

It’s two weeks later—February 21, 1981. Jud is now working the murder of Patrick Baltazar. It’s potentially a big break in the ATKID investigation because hair and fiber found on the twelve-year-old’s body appear to match specimens found on previous victims of the child killer.

That night, Jud’s wife makes him an Italian dinner. What he doesn’t know is that she’s heavily laced the spaghetti sauce with phenobarbital. As planned, she takes the two girls with her and goes to visit her aunt.

Later on, Jud’s home alone in the bedroom. He thinks he hears something coming from the front of the apartment. The light in the hallway changes, goes dim. Someone’s unscrewed the lightbulb in his older daughter’s bedroom. Then he hears muffled voices down the hall. What’s happened is that the first shooter’s lost his nerve. The two of them are discussing what to do now. He doesn’t know how they’ve gotten in, but it doesn’t matter at the moment. They’re here.

"Who is it?" Jud calls out.

Suddenly, a shot rips out, but it misses him. Jud dives for the floor, but a second bullet hits him in the left arm. It’s still dark. He’s trying to hide behind the king-size bed.

"Who is this?" he calls out. "What do you want?"

A third shot hits the bed, close to him. In his mind, he’s going through this intuitive survival drill, trying to figure out what kind of gun it is. If it’s a Smith & Wesson, they’ve got three shots left. If it’s a Colt, they’ve only got two.

"Hey, man!" he yells. "What’s wrong? Why’re you trying to kill me? Take what you want and get out. I haven’t seen you. Just don’t kill me."

There’s no reply. But now Jud can see him, silhouetted against the moonlight.

You’re going to die tonight, Jud acknowledges to himself. No way you’re going to get out of this. But you know what it’s like. You don’t want detectives walking in here tomorrow and saying, "This poor bastard, never put up a fight. He just let them come in and execute him." Jud resolves that when the detectives see the scene, they’re going to know he fucking fought this guy.

The first thing he’s got to do is get to his gun, which is on the floor on the other side of the bed. But a king-size bed represents a lot of real estate to cover when there’s someone trying to kill you.

Then he hears, "Don’t move, you motherfucker!"

In the darkness, he climbs back up and begins inching toward the edge of the bed and his gun.

He gets closer, agonizingly slowly, but he needs more leverage to make the final move effectively.

When he’s got all four fingers gripping the edge, he whirls off onto the floor, but lands with his right hand under his chest. And since he’s been shot in his left arm, he doesn’t have enough power in his left hand to reach for the gun.

Just then, the shooter jumps on the bed. He shoots Jud at point-blank range.

He feels as if he’s just been kicked by a mule. Something inside him seems to collapse on itself. He doesn’t know the technical details at the time, but the bullet has gone through his back, knocked out his right lung, penetrated the third intercostal space between his ribs, and ripped out the front of his chest into his right hand, which he’s still lying on.

The shooter jumps down off the bed, stands over him, feels his pulse. "There, you motherfucker!" he declares, and walks out.

Jud’s in shock. He’s lying on the floor hyperventilating. He doesn’t know where he is or what’s happening to him.

Then he realizes, he must be back in combat in Vietnam. He can smell the smoke, see the muzzle blasts. But he can’t breathe. He thinks, "Maybe I’m not really in Nam. Maybe I’m just dreaming I am. But if I’m dreaming, why is it so hard to breathe?"

He struggles to get up. He staggers over to the television and turns it on. Maybe that’ll tell him if he’s dreaming. Johnny Carson and the
Tonight
show come on. He reaches out and touches the screen, trying to tell if it’s real, leaving a streak of wet blood across the glass.

He needs to get some water. He makes his way to the bathroom, turns on the tap, and tries to cup the water in his hand. That’s when he sees the bullet embedded in his right hand and the blood streaming from his chest. Now he knows what’s happened to him. He goes back out into the bedroom, lies down at the foot of the bed, and waits to die.

But he’s been a cop too long. He can’t let himself go this quietly. When the detectives come the next day, they’ve got to see that he struggled. He gets up again, makes his way to the phone, and dials O. When the operator comes on, he gasps for air, tells her that he’s an FBI agent and that he’s been shot. Immediately, she puts him through to the DeKalb County Police Department.

A young female officer comes on the line. Jud tells her that he’s FBI and he’s been shot. But he can barely get the words out. He’s been drugged, he’s lost a lot of blood, his speech is slurred.

"What do you mean, you’re FBI?" she challenges. Jud hears her yell to her sergeant that there’s some drunk on the line claiming he’s with the FBI. What does the sergeant want her to do? The sergeant tells her she can hang up.

Then the operator breaks in, telling them he’s for real and that they’ve got to send emergency help immediately. She won’t let them off until they agree.

"That operator saved my life," Jud told me later.

He passed out when she broke in and didn’t regain consciousness until the emergency medical team was putting the oxygen mask over his face. "Don’t prepare him for shock," he hears the team leader say. "He’s not going to make it."

But they take him to DeKalb General Hospital, where there’s a thoracic surgeon on duty. And as he’s lying there on the gurney in the emergency room, as the doctors frantically try to save his life, he knows.