Mindhunter (39 page)

The police got more information from a second wired exchange between Bond and Prante, then even more from a taped conversation between Bond and Main. Prante told Bond he was up to several packs of cigarettes a day. Main went so far as to suggest that perhaps Karla had set Prante off by rejecting his sexual advances. That led to another police interview with Main, in which he stated that he believed Prante was responsible for the murder, though he recanted after a private conversation with Prante.

The following Tuesday, Weber, Rushing, and Greer flew to Long Island to see Dr. Levine. They gave him the new autopsy photographs and three sets of dental impressions—Main’s, those of another long-standing suspect, and Prante’s. Levine eliminated the first two right away. He couldn’t say with scientific certainty that only Prante’s teeth out of the whole world would match up, but they did—perfectly.

Paul Main was arrested and charged with obstructing justice. Prante was charged with murder and burglary with intent to commit rape. He went to trial in June of 1983. In July, he was found guilty and sentenced to seventy-five years in prison.

It had taken four years, but through the combined efforts of many dedicated people, a killer was finally brought to justice. I was particularly pleased and gratified to receive a copy of a letter Assistant State’s Attorney Keith Jensen sent to FBI director William Webster. In it he wrote, "The community finally feels safe, and the family feels justice has been done, none of which could have happened without John Douglas. While he is an extremely busy man, I feel his efforts should not go unnoticed. I extend my sincere thanks and wish that there were more John Douglases available with the competency, capacity, and ability to assist as he did."

These were kind words indeed. Fortunately, though, the previous January I had been able to make my case to Jim McKenzie, the assistant director of the Academy, that we did need "more John Douglases." In turn, he’d managed to sell headquarters, even though it meant stealing bodies from other programs. That was how I got Bill Hagmaier, Jim Horn, Blaine McIlwaine, and Ron Walker in the first go-round, then Jim Wright and Jud Ray in the second. As time soon told, they all made sizable contributions.

Despite everyone’s best efforts, some cases, like Karla Brown’s, take years to close. Others just as complex can be solved in a matter of days or weeks if everything breaks right.

When a stenographer named Donna Lynn Vetter in one of the FBI’s southwestern field offices was raped and murdered in her ground-floor apartment one night, Roy Hazelwood and Jim Wright were given an unambiguous order from the Director’s Office: get down there immediately and solve the case. By that time, we had divided the country into regions. This one fell in Jim’s territory.

The message had to be loud and clear: you don’t get away with killing FBI personnel, and we’ll do whatever we have to to make sure. At two the next afternoon, an FBI Hostage Rescue Team helicopter carried the two agents and their hastily packed bags from Quantico to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where they boarded a Bureau jet. Upon landing, they went immediately to the crime scene, which had been held intact for them by the local police.

Vetter was a white, twenty-two-year-old woman who’d grown up on a farm, and even though she’d worked for the Bureau for more than two years, she’d moved to the city only eight months before. Naive to the dangers of urban life, she’d taken an apartment in an industrial, predominantly black and Hispanic area. The resident manager was cognizant of security considerations. She had installed a white porch-type lightbulb—instead of the regular yellow one—over the door of each apartment where a single female tenant lived, so that her staff and the security guards would pay special attention. The system was not made public. But for all its good intentions, the code would have been quickly transparent to even the most casual snooper.

Police had been called shortly after 11 p.m. when one of the other residents noticed the apartment’s window screen had been ripped out and called the complex’s security guard. The victim’s nude body, beaten about the face and bearing multiple stab wounds, was covered with blood. The autopsy showed she had been raped.

The assailant forced entry through the front window, knocking over a large potted plant on his way in. The telephone cord had been unplugged from the wall. Large, hideous bloodstains were on the dining-room carpet and kitchen floor, where the main attack seemed to have taken place. One stain where the body had lain looked eerily like a life-size angel, her wings spread as if in flight. The blood tracks indicated the victim was then dragged into the living room. From the defense wounds on the body, it seemed that she had gone for a kitchen knife, but he had grabbed it and turned it on her.

Vetter’s bloodstained clothing was found by the emergency medical team at the edge of the kitchen floor near the cabinets. Her shorts and panties were rolled, indicating they’d been removed by the attacker while she was lying on the floor. When police arrived at the scene, the lights in the apartment were off. They speculated that the offender had probably turned them off to delay discovery after he left.

From everything they learned from coworkers, family, and neighbors, the young woman was shy, honest, and devout. She had grown up in a strict and solid religious environment, and she took her religion seriously. She wasn’t in any way glamorous and seemed to have little, if any, social life, either with men or her coworkers, who described her as conscientious and hardworking but "different." This probably had a lot to do with her lack of sophistication and sheltered upbringing. No one suggested any kind of illicit behavior or hanging around with the "wrong kind." No drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or birth control pills were in her apartment. Her parents were absolutely convinced of her chastity and said they thought she would do anything to protect her virginity.

After studying the scene, that was what Roy and Jim concluded had happened. While there was blood all over the place, one particular bloodstain aroused their special interest. It was right outside the bathroom door. Inside the bathroom, they noticed urine but no tissue in the bowl of the unflushed toilet.

This gave them an immediate sense of what had taken place between the intruder and the victim. She must have been in the bathroom when she heard the break-in. She got up without taking the time to flush and went out to see what was going on. As soon as she passed through the bathroom door, he hit her hard in the face, essentially trying to neutralize her. Jim and Roy found the murder weapon, a kitchen knife, hidden under a seat cushion in the living room.

The murder weapon itself told them something—that the UNSUB had not broken into the apartment with the intention of murder. And the fact that nothing of value was taken suggested he had come with intentions other than burglary. The evidence suggested he was there to rape. Had he been there to murder, rather than spend time with her, there would have been no reason to unplug the phone. The easy access of the apartment, the victim’s plainness, his blitzing her before he’d even said a word to her, all pointed to an angry, macho type with low intelligence and no social skills or confidence in his ability to control someone else through words. Unless he completely controlled this unthreatening victim right from the beginning, he knew he couldn’t succeed in his goal.

What he hadn’t counted on was how fiercely this shy, quiet woman would resist. Everything in her background told the profilers that this was exactly what she would do to defend her honor. But the attacker wouldn’t have known. The more she fought him, the more he was in danger of losing control, and the more his rage grew. With the Karla Brown case, another rape that turned to murder, I felt the assailant’s rage was secondary to his need to "deal with" the mess he’d created. In this killing, it looked as if the rage and need to deal with the victim had equal importance. The anger in this case was sustained rather than momentary. The drag marks showed that after he attacked her in the kitchen, he dragged her into another room where he raped her, bleeding and dying.

Roy and Jim began preparing their profile the very evening they arrived. They were looking for a man between twenty and twenty-seven years of age. Normally, in a sexually based or lust murder, if the victim was white, you would expect the offender to be white, too. But the agents firmly believed this had started out as a rape, and so the "rules" of rape applied. This was a predominantly black and Hispanic apartment complex and neighborhood, with a high incidence in the area of white women being raped by black men, so there was a very strong chance the killer was probably black.

They didn’t think the UNSUB would be married, but he could have been living in a financially dependent or exploitive relationship with someone. Any woman who had a relationship with him would be younger, less experienced, or in some way easy to influence. He would not be involved with anyone he found challenging or in any way intimidating. While he would be of fairly low intelligence and have an unspectacular record in school (where he’d probably been a behavior problem), he would be streetwise and able to take care of himself in a fight. He would want to seem macho and tough to those around him, and he would wear the best clothing he could afford. Likewise, he would be athletic and try to stay in good condition.

He would live within walking distance of the scene, in a lower-income rental unit. He’d have some menial job and would be in frequent conflict with coworkers or authority figures. Because of his explosive temper, he wouldn’t have been in the military, or if he had, he would have been discharged. The agents didn’t think he had killed before, but would have burglarized and assaulted. Roy Hazelwood, one of the leading experts on rape and crimes against women, believed strongly that he had a past history of rape or sexual assault.

They predicted his postoffense behavior, which in many ways mirrored that of Karla Brown’s killer, including absence from work, heavier drinking, weight loss, and a change in appearance. Most important, they felt that this type of individual would mention his crime or confide in a family member or close associate. And that could be the key to a proactive strategy for catching him.

Since they knew the UNSUB would be following the news, Roy and Jim decided to make their profile public, submitting for interviews with the local press. The only significant detail they withheld was the racial factor. In case they were wrong, they didn’t want to lead the investigation astray and misdirect potential leads.

But what they did make as public as possible was their belief that whomever the UNSUB had talked to about the murder was in grave danger him—or her—self, now that he or she knew this incriminating information. If you recognize yourself in this situation, they urged, please contact authorities before it’s too late. Within two and a half weeks, the offender’s armed-robbery partner called the police. The subject was apprehended, and based on a matchup of palm prints found at the murder scene, he was charged.

When we went over the profile afterward, we found that Jim and Roy had been right on the money. The offender was a twenty-two-year-old black male who lived four blocks from the crime scene. He was single, lived with, and was financially dependent on, his sister. At the time of the murder he was on probation for rape. He was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. His execution was carried out only recently.

I’ve often told my people that we should be like the Lone Ranger, riding into town, helping to bring about justice, then quietly riding out again.

Who were those masked men? They left this silver bullet behind.

Them? Oh, they were from Quantico.

In this particular case, Jim and Roy rode out of town quietly. They had been rushed down in a private Bureau jet. When their work was done, they flew home tourist class, crammed in with happy vacationers and screaming kids in the back of a commercial flight. But we knew what they’d done, and so did all the recipients of the "silver bullets" they had left behind.

Hurting the Ones We Love

Going over case files in his windowless office at Quantico one day, Gregg McCrary got a phone call from one of the police departments in his region. It was one of those anguishing cases you seem to hear about all too often.

A young single mother was leaving her garden apartment complex to go shopping with her two-year-old son. Just before she got into her car, she suddenly developed stomach cramps, so she turned around, hurried back across the parking lot, and went into a rest room just inside the apartment building’s back door. It was a safe, friendly neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else, and she gave her little boy strict instructions to stay inside the building and play quietly until she came out.

I’m sure you’ve already anticipated what happened next. It’s about forty-five minutes before she’s finished in the bathroom. She comes out and the child isn’t in the hall. Not yet alarmed, she goes outside and looks around, figuring he’s just wandered off a little, even though the weather is chilly and brisk.

But then she sees it: one of her little boy’s knit mittens, lying on the pavement of the parking lot and no sign of him anywhere. Now she panics.

She rushes back to her apartment and immediately dials 911. Frantically, she tells the emergency operator that her child’s been kidnapped. The police arrive quickly and comb the area looking for clues. By this time the young woman is hysterical.

The news media picks up the story. She goes before the microphones and pleads to whoever took her son to bring him back. As sympathetic as the police are, they want to cover their bases, so they quietly administer a polygraph, which she passes. They know that in any child abduction, time is of the essence, which is why they call Gregg.

He hears the scenario and listens to a recording of the 911 call. There’s something about it he doesn’t like. Then there’s a new development. The agonized woman receives a small parcel in the mail. It has no return address, no note or communication enclosed—just the matching mitten to the one she found in the parking lot. The woman goes to pieces.