Mindhunter (40 page)

But now Gregg knows. He tells the police the little boy is dead and that his mother killed him.

How do you know? the police press him. Children get snatched away by perverts all the time. How do you know this isn’t one of those cases?

So Gregg explains. First, there was the scenario itself. No one is more fearful of a child getting snatched away by a pervert than a mother. Is it logical that she would leave her son unattended for that long a period? If she had to be in the bathroom for an extended time, wouldn’t she have taken him in with her or made some other makeshift arrangement? It’s possible that it happened the way she said, but then you start compounding the factors.

On the 911 tape, she distinctly says that someone "kidnapped" her child. It’s been Gregg’s experience that parents will do almost anything to psychologically deny such a horrible situation. In the heat of hysterical emotion, you might expect to hear her say he was missing, he ran off, she doesn’t know where he is, or something like that. For her to use the word
kidnap
at this stage suggests she is already thinking ahead in the scenario that will play out.

The tearful plea before the news media is certainly not incriminating in itself, though we are now all haunted by the image of Susan Smith in South Carolina pleading for the safe return of her two young sons. Generally, parents we see doing this are completely on the level. But the problem is that this kind of public display tends to legitimize the few who aren’t.

What capped it for Gregg, though, was the return of the mitten. Basically, children are abducted for one of three reasons: they’re taken by kidnappers for profit; they’re taken by child molesters for sexual gratification; and they’re taken by pathetic, lonely, unstable people who desperately want a child of their own. The kidnapper will have to communicate with the family, either by phone or written message, to set out his demand. The other two types want nothing at all to do with the family. None of the three merely send back an artifact to let the family know the child was taken. The family already knows that. If there is to be some proof of the legitimacy of the crime, it will accompany a demand; otherwise, it’s meaningless.

What Gregg decided the mother had done was to stage a kidnapping according to her perception of what a real one would be like. Unfortunately for her, she had no idea of the actual dynamics of this type of crime, and so she blew it.

Quite clearly, she had reasons for what she had done and could therefore convince herself that she had done nothing wrong. That was why she passed the polygraph. But Gregg wasn’t satisfied with that. He brought in an experienced FBI polygraph expert and had her retested, this time with the knowledge that she was a suspect. And this time the results were completely different. After some directed questioning, she admitted having murdered her child and led police to the body.

Her motive was the common one, the one Gregg had suspected all along. She was a young single mother, missing out on all the fun of her late teens and early twenties because she was saddled with this child. She had met a man who wanted to intensify their involvement and start a new family of their own. But he had made it clear that there was no room in their life together for this kid.

What is significant about this type of case is, had the police come upon the body without having had the child reported missing, Gregg would still have come to the same conclusion. The child was found buried in the woods in his snowsuit, wrapped in a blanket, then completely covered with a thick plastic bag. A kidnapper or child molester would not have taken this much care to make him warm and "comfortable," or to try to shelter the body from the elements. While many murder scenes show obvious and prolonged rage, and dump sites often show contempt and hostility, the hallmarks of this burial were love and guilt.

The human race has a long history of hurting the ones we love or should love. In fact, during Alan Burgess’s first television interview after becoming Behavioral Science Unit chief, he stated, "We’ve had violence for generations and generations, going all the way back to Bible days when
Cain shot Abel
." Fortunately, the reporters didn’t seem to catch his reinterpretation of the world’s first murder weapon.

One of the major cases of nineteenth-century England involved allegations of intrafamily violence. In 1860, Scotland Yard inspector Jonathan Whicher went to the town of Frome in Somerset on the murder of a baby named Francis Kent, from a prominent family in the area. The local police were convinced the child had been killed by Gypsies, but after investigating, Whicher became convinced that the actual culprit was Francis’s sixteen-year-old sister, Constance. Because of the family’s stature and the very idea that a teenage girl could possibly kill her baby brother, Whicher’s evidence was overruled in court and Constance was acquitted of the charges he had brought against her.

A huge public reaction against Whicher forced him to resign from Scotland Yard. For years, he worked on his own to prove he’d been right and that this young woman was a murderess. Eventually, bankruptcy and poor health made him abandon his quest for the truth—a year before Constance Kent confessed to the crime. She was tried again and sentenced to life in prison. Three years later, Wilkie Collins based his groundbreaking detective novel,
The Moonstone,
on the Kent case.

The key to many murders of and by loved ones or family members is staging. Anyone that close to the victim has to do something to draw suspicion away from himself or herself. One of the earliest examples I worked on was the murder of Linda Haney Dover in Cartersville, Georgia, the day after Christmas in 1980.

Though she and her husband, Larry, were separated, they remained on reasonably cordial terms. The five-foot-two, 120-pound, twenty-seven-year-old Linda regularly came over to the house they used to share to clean for him. In fact, that’s what she was doing that Friday, December 26. Larry, meanwhile, took their young son out for a day in the park.

When the two of them return from their outing in the afternoon, Linda’s no longer there. But instead of finding a clean, straight house, Larry sees the bedroom is a mess. Sheets and pillows are pulled off the bed, dresser drawers are half-open, clothing is strewn around, and red stains that look like blood are on the carpet. Larry instantly calls the police, who rush over and search the house, inside and out.

They find Linda’s body wrapped in the comforter from the bedroom, with only her head exposed, in the outside crawl space under the house. As they unwrap the blanket, they see that her shirt and bra have been pushed up above her breasts, her jeans are around her knees, and her panties have been pulled down to just below her pubic area. There is blunt-force trauma to the head and face and multiple stab wounds, which appear to the officers to have been made after the bra was pushed up. They believe the weapon to be a knife from an open kitchen drawer, but they can’t find it (and never do). The crime scene indicates that she had been assaulted initially in a bedroom, then her body was moved outside and into the crawl space. Blood drops on her thighs show that the killer had handled and positioned her.

Nothing in her background made Linda Dover a particularly high-risk victim. Though she was separated from Larry, she wasn’t involved in any other relationships. The only unusual stress factors would be the holiday time of year and whatever led up to the disintegration of her marriage.

Based on the crime-scene photos and the information the Cartersville police sent me, I told them the UNSUB would be one of two types. Quite possibly, he would be a young and inexperienced, inadequate loner who lived nearby and essentially stumbled into this crime of opportunity. Police mentioned after I said this that they’d been having problems with a neighborhood thug, whom many of the residents were afraid of.

But the crime had too many staging elements, which made me lean toward the second type: someone who knew the victim well and therefore wanted to divert attention from himself. The only reason a killer would have felt the need to hide the body on the premises was what we classify as a "personal cause homicide." The trauma to the face and neck seemed highly personal, too.

I told them I felt this UNSUB was intelligent but only educated through high school and had a job requiring physical strength. He would have a history of assaultive behavior and a low frustration level. He would be moody, unable to accept defeat, and was probably depressed for one reason or another at the time of the murder, most likely from money problems.

The staging had its own internal logic and rationale. Whoever had brutalized Linda did not want to leave her body out in the open where another family member—particularly her son—might find it. That’s why he took the time to wrap her in the blanket and move her to the crawl space. He wanted to make this look like a sex crime—hence the raising of the bra and exposure of the genital area—though there was no evidence of rape or sexual assault. He thought he had to do this, but still felt uncomfortable with police seeing her bare genitals and breasts, so he covered them with the blanket.

I said the offender would be overly cooperative and concerned at first, but would turn arrogant and hostile when challenged on his alibi. His postoffense behavior might include increased drinking or drug use, or perhaps a turn toward religion. He would have changed his appearance, maybe even changed jobs and moved out of the area. I told the police to look for a total reversal in behavior and personality.

"The way he is today is nothing like the way he was prior to the homicide," I said.

What I didn’t know was that, at the time the Cartersville police requested the profile from me, they had already charged Larry Bruce Dover with his wife’s murder and wanted to make sure they were on the right track. This really ticked me off for several reasons. For one, I had more active cases than I could handle. But more importantly, this put the Bureau in what could potentially be an uncomfortable position. Fortunately for all concerned, the profile turned out to be a perfect match. As I explained to the Director and the Atlanta SAC, if it hadn’t been so accurate, a skillful attorney might have been able to subpoena me as a defense witness and force me to say that my "expert" profile pointed away from the defendant in certain areas. From that point on, I learned always to ask police if they had a suspect, even though I didn’t want to know in advance who it was.

But at least justice was served in this case. On September 3, 1981, Larry Bruce Dover was convicted of the murder of Linda Haney Dover and sentenced to life behind bars.

A variation on the theme of domestic staging came with the murder of Elizabeth Jayne Wolsieffer, known as Betty, in 1986.

Just after seven on the morning of Saturday, August 30, police in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, were called to 75 Birch Street, the home of a popular dentist and his family. Upon arriving about five minutes later, Officers Dale Minnick and Anthony George encountered thirty-three-year-old Dr. Edward Glen Wolsieffer, who was lying on the floor, the victim of an attempted strangulation and a blow to the head. His brother, Neil, was there with him. Neil explained that he lived across the street, had been called by his brother, and had rushed over. Glen had been stunned and disoriented and said Neil’s was the only phone number he could remember. As soon as Neil got here, he had been the one who called the police.

The men said that Glen’s thirty-two-year-old wife, Betty, and their five-year-old daughter, Danielle, were upstairs. Every time Neil started to go up to check on them, Glen had felt faint or begun moaning again, so neither of them had been upstairs yet. Glen told Neil he was afraid an intruder was still in the house.

Officers Minnick and George search the house. They don’t find an intruder, but they come upon Betty dead in the master bedroom. She’s on her side, lying on the floor next to the bed with her head toward the foot of the bed. From the bruises on her neck, the drying foam around her mouth, and the bluish coloring of her bruised face, it appears she’s been manually strangled. The bedsheets are stained with blood, but her face seems to have been cleaned off. She’s clad only in her nightgown, which has been pushed up to her waist.

Danielle is asleep and unharmed in the next bedroom. When she wakes up, she tells the police she didn’t hear anything—no sounds of breaking in or fighting or any commotion.

Without describing the scene upstairs, Minnick and George come back down and ask Dr. Wolsieffer what happened. He says he was awakened just as it was getting light by a noise that sounded like someone breaking into the house. He got his handgun from the night table and went to investigate without waking Betty.

As he neared the bedroom door, he saw a large man at the top of the stairs. The man didn’t seem to spot him, and he followed him downstairs, but then lost him and started looking around the first floor for him.

Suddenly, he was attacked from behind with some kind of cord or ligature, but he was able to drop his gun and slip his hand in before it could tighten around his throat. Glen then kicked back, hitting the man in the groin and causing him to loosen his grip. Before Glen could turn around, though, he was struck in the head from behind and blacked out. When he awoke sometime later, he called his brother.

Dr. Wolsieffer’s visible injuries don’t appear serious to the police or the paramedics they’ve called to the scene—a contusion on the back of the head, pink marks on the back of the neck, small scratches on the left side of his ribs and chest. But they don’t want to take chances, so they have him taken to the emergency room. He doesn’t look too bad to the doctor there, either, but he admits him based on the dentist’s report of having been unconscious.

From the beginning, the police were suspicious of Wolsieffer’s story. It didn’t seem logical that an intruder would enter the home from a second-story window in daylight. Outside, they found an old ladder leading to the open window of the back bedroom the intruder allegedly used as his entrance. But the ladder was so rickety, it didn’t look as if it could support the weight of even an average-size person. It was leaning against the side of the house with the rungs facing the wrong direction. The ladder had made no indentations in the soft ground to indicate that any weight had been placed on it, nor were there any markings on the aluminum gutters it was resting against. And no dew or grass was on the rungs or roof near the window as there should have been had someone used it that morning.