Finding Amy (9 page)

Gorman's car.

Shit! They got the search warrant! I'm banging my steering wheel like a happy drummer. We got him. We got his fucking car! More happy drumming. My pager bleeps as the monster screeches to a halt. I pound the steering wheel with my fist, hard. We got you now, you bastard! I slide into my slot and pop out of the car in my excitement. My anger.

I see the “Stearnman,” the evidence technician, move around the car, slowly, mechanically flashing his pictures, the light bouncing into my bloodshot eyes. “Stearny” moves around the car like a spider eyeing its trapped prey.

“We got the freaking car. That's great. That's great!”

Stearny looks tired as he photographs. Just the beginning of a long, long day. There will be so much forensic work for him.
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Gorman's had it, I think. My pager beeps. The loudspeaker calls my name to report. Lieutenant Loughlin, call 8533. Lieutenant Loughlin, 8533. It's Penny Diaz, my assistant, and this sounds urgent.

I can't believe we got the car. Danny believed, but it was an incredible long shot. The monster slams shut and the garage is silent. I talk to Stearns as he works. This guy Gorman is done! I think of his arrogance, his almost laughable post-offense behavior. Right out of a criminal psychology textbook. Is he organized or disorganized? Impulsive or methodical?

I recall that organized are usually psychopathic, with disorganized usually being psychotic individuals. Organized offenders are more apt to plan, use vehicles, display power and control, commit sex acts on the victim, use restraint. Yeah, Gorman's smooth—we've been told that over and over—but you're not that smooth, are ya, Gorman? So yeah, Tommy and Dan and I will bat this around, but I think organized.

But where's the girl?

I go back to my behavioral science from my FBI studies at Quantico. To identify and incarcerate, use the three-prong approach:

—do not underestimate your adversary
—know how he thinks and feels about the world
—study his behavior

Study his behavior. Danny will do this over and over. Constantly reevaluating what he knows about Gorman as he interviews those who knew him. And Gorman's out there laying a nice foundation, isn't he?

Getting the warrant was both exciting and satisfying to the detectives working the case; however, they also knew that it could be weeks or even months before any results became available from the state crime lab. Meanwhile, Amy St. Laurent was still missing. While Stearns and MacDonald worked on the car, state and Portland police continued to gather information about Gorman.

A quality not always appreciated about police investigators is their extraordinary patience and persistence. Patience in the face of resistance and lies. Patience when faced with almost unremitting frustration and legal hurdles. A patient willingness to stick to the routines, to follow the stories through as many witnesses or interviews as it takes, listening carefully to the facts, then checking and rechecking those facts, proceeding legally and prudently however frustrated they feel or however exhausted they get.

Once the first week of the St. Laurent case had passed, the detectives' race-against-the-clock approach gave way to steady, unremitting endurance. There was no longer much likelihood that the missing woman might only be injured, or a hostage, and that speed was essential if there was a hope of rescue. Nor did it appear that Amy's body or the crime scene were going to be in some obvious or clearly visible place. Recognizing that the event had already occurred and there was nothing they could do to stop it, they settled in for the long haul, focusing on building a strong case, making sure they got the guy before he did it again.

Their knowledge of human nature would play an important role. A trained detective knows how to spot a liar. Liars don't simply lie with their words or with their faces. They lie with their mannerisms, the nature of their responses, displays of nervousness and anger, the contortions of their bodies—folded arms, jiggling feet, leaning toward or away from the interviewer, shrugs of their shoulders. They lie with obfuscation, excess detail, and belligerent denial. Sometimes with stone-cold expressions that fool even seasoned detectives.

When Detective Young and the other investigators began to reinterview key people, they were looking as much at behavior—at how the witnesses spoke and moved and behaved—as they were at what was said. Gorman began his second interview attempting to focus attention away from himself with his tale of a man in a yellow suit and a raincoat acting suspiciously in the Old Port that the police really ought to take a look at. He tried to be friendly and engaging. He expressed concern about leaving Amy alone in the Old Port so late at night. He had a detailed timeline of his evening, complete with the names of his alibi witnesses and how long it had taken him to drive from the Old Port to the Brighton Avenue apartment, but refused to take a polygraph, give a DNA sample, and allow a search of his car. The detectives located witnesses who confirmed that, following that Tuesday interview, he cleaned his car and researched polygraphs.

As if those weren't enough flags for experienced detectives, he also engaged in the kind of post-offense behavior
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typical of a guilty person. He cleaned the rubbish-filled car he had only a week before declared wasn't worth cleaning.
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He tried to deflect attention from himself and show concern for the victim by calling her family (after calling the police department for a contact number). He called Young with a supposed sighting of Amy St. Laurent. When his car was impounded, he made outraged calls, demanding to know when he was going to get it back. And when the car was returned with fabric samples removed where luminol had indicated presumptive bloodstains, he called Young and furiously demanded compensation for the damage.

Gorman also changed his appearance. He abandoned the spiky, streaked blond locks in favor of a shaved head. A good strategy, one of his friends noted, to prevent the police from getting hair samples. When friends commented on the change, he asserted that he routinely shaved his head every few years, although one witness noted that when she had offered to style his hair, he had told her no one touched his hair. He got more tattoos and body piercings, trying to distance himself from the Old Port pretty boy with his new, tough look. He grew a goatee.

According to criminal psychology textbooks, offenders engage in various post-offense behaviors for a variety of reasons. The obvious one is disguise—to make themselves as unlike the person witnesses might associate with the crime as possible. Offenders also change their physical appearance because they are disgusted with themselves for what they've done and don't want to associate the self that committed the crime with their new self. Still others change their appearance and behavior because, as a result of committing the crime, they've just crossed a big hurdle and are now a changed, and different, person.

Police began tailing Gorman and monitoring his behavior, hoping he might say or do something that would give them a break. On Halloween, a big scene in the Old Port with a party at the Mariners' Church and noisy crowds and costumes giving a Mardi Gras feel to the evening, Detective Mark Teceno, Sergeant Jeff Davis, and Officer Tommy O'Connor followed Gorman. The three, dressed in civilian clothes, took turns following Gorman, who was dressed as a pimp, as he made his way from bar to bar, sometimes sitting only a table away as he drank with his friends. They hoped the fact that it was Halloween might spook or lure Gorman into leading them to Amy.

Certain that at some point Gorman would be compelled to visit Amy's body, Danny Young would have put twentyfour-hour-a-day surveillance on Gorman if the department's budget would have allowed it. As it was, the police did as much surveillance as their energy and budget allowed, doing surveillance on Gorman's friends as well.

It was hard for everyone to watch their suspect going on with the normal routines of his life—drinking and clubbing, playing pool, and hanging out with his friends— knowing that Amy St. Laurent would never do any of those things again. Hard to watch him putting on his smooth, cool-guy act, trying to pick up girls, knowing that those girls were seriously at risk. Harder still to watch teenage girls and young women responding to his smooth and charming manner, knowing that his slick exterior hid a violent nature.

At the same time, the detectives were working with Gorman's friends and acquaintances, looking for breaks in their stories about Gorman's alibi. As they interviewed, they asked the same questions. What has he said about Amy St. Laurent? Whom did he hang around with? Who knew him better than you? Who's told you things they won't tell us? And always, whomever they spoke to, they asked about places young men might take girls, couples might go parking, places Gorman might have gone with Amy.

Detectives were also looking for Gorman to begin to talk. Typically, except for the coldest sociopaths, it is difficult for suspects to avoid talking to someone about their crimes, especially serious, guilt-inducing crimes. Such talking is even more likely when the perpetrators are young. The detectives hoped that eventually Gorman would crack under the weight of his conscience and steady police scrutiny and say something incriminating. Even more, they hoped that he'd get drunk, cocky, or careless and tell someone where he'd hidden Amy.

Detectives therefore kept pressure not only on Gorman but on his friends. One thing that's surprising to a layperson about a case like this is how readily friends will support a suspect's alibi and how slowly and unwillingly they divulge what they know about his character. The police are less surprised. They are used to people's reluctance to provide information. Sergeant Joyce summed it up in one cynical sentence: “Don't expect much; then you won't be disappointed.” Police also know it takes time for people to get over their belief in a friend and to accept the possibility that someone they know might be a murderer.

There is also, particularly among adolescent and young adult males, a kind of “pack mentality” at work. No one wants to be the one who breaks the bond and becomes the snitch. In addition, although everyone wants the police to come when there's trouble, most people are relatively unfamiliar with them—the police are those blue lights in your rearview mirror that ruin your day—and are reluctant to initiate contact. This kind of reluctance was especially true for some of the teenage girls and young adult women acquainted with Gorman, some of whom had valuable information. Months after Amy St. Laurent disappeared, police would still be finding new witnesses and collecting new information.

Gorman's friends began their talks with the police with the attitude that Gorman was a good guy, always up for barhopping or a game of pool. Gorman was the life of the party, the willing-to-try-anything crazy guy. For male friends, Gorman's success at picking up girls for sex meant that hanging around with him improved their own chances. Others probably valued Gorman because he provided access to desirable drugs.

Some were reluctant to talk because they were afraid of him. Even though he wasn't a big guy, he had a terrible temper, especially when he'd been drinking, and was always ready for a fight. Shyla Cameron, a waitress at the Iguana, described him as “a vicious little guy.” And he had boasted about having access to guns.

Detectives knew you couldn't always get a witness's story in one interview. It might take several sessions to get the whole story, or the true story, out. Sometimes this was because witnesses lied deliberately—because they didn't believe in cooperating with the police, were determined to protect a friend, or had something of their own to hide. Sometimes they unconsciously slanted the facts since the suspect was their friend. Sometimes witnesses didn't give the whole story because they weren't even aware of what they knew, or that what they knew might be important.

A chilling example of this kind of progression emerged from the interviews with Kush Sharma, Gorman's roommate. In his initial interview, Sharma insisted that Gorman, after leaving the Brighton Avenue apartment with Amy, was gone only about twenty minutes, then returned to the apartment and stayed in for the rest of the night, corroborating Gorman's story. In a later interview, Sharma told police that he
thought
that was what had happened, he didn't know, he couldn't be sure, and voluntarily took a polygraph to record his uncertainty.

Still later, Sharma said that when he and Amy were outside walking Jason Cook's dog, she asked, referring to Gorman and showing that she sensed something wasn't quite right, “Is he okay?” Amy, who had good intuition, was trying to put herself in a safer situation.
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A similar pattern appeared in the interviews with Jason Cook. Initially, Cook insisted Gorman had returned to the apartment after being gone only twenty minutes, offering as support his tale about being on the computer sending an e-mail to his aunt when Gorman returned. When the police were unable to verify the e-mail after checking the computer and contacting Cook's aunt, Cook backtracked a little, yet when roommate David Grazier commented to Cook that he hadn't seen Gorman at the apartment when he returned at 3:15 a.m., Cook insisted, “Well, he was there.”

It took several interviews to uncover a version of the story that had Gorman stopping at the Iguana bar (in his interviews, Gorman never mentioned stopping at the Iguana) to ask Cook if he could bring Amy back to the apartment for sex (perhaps Gorman was looking for a more private venue than the living room couch where he was sleeping) and Cook telling him he could not.

As they took Sharma and Cook through the many different iterations of their stories, the detectives had to wonder something else, as well. Were Cook and Sharma lying because they, too, had something to do with Amy St. Laurent's disappearance?

Gorman's plan to have sex with Amy was also confirmed by a waitress at the Iguana, Shyla Cameron, who reported in a follow-up interview that Gorman had asked her, concerning Amy St. Laurent, “Should I take her home and sleep with her?” Cameron had told him he should just leave her alone. It would take several interviews to learn Gorman had called a friend that night, trying to locate a cheap motel, and had confided in another friend that he thought of Amy as nothing more than a “quick blow job.”