Journey into Darkness (3 page)

It was always a searing and gut-wrenching experience to go through this exercise, but that’s what I had to do if I were going to be able to see the crime through the offender’s eyes. I’d already put myself through it from the victim’s point of view, and that was almost unbearable. But it was also my job, a job I’d created for myself as the first fulltime criminal profiler at the Behavioral Science division of the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.

Normally when my group—the Investigative Support Unit—was called in, it was to provide a behavioral profile and investigative strategy to help police hunt down an UNSUB: an unknown subject. By this time, I’d already worked on more than 1,100 such cases since I came to Quantico. But this time the authorities already had a suspect in custody when they called. His name was Sedley Alley—a bearded, twenty-nine-year-old white male from Ashland, Kentucky, six feet four inches tall, 220 pounds, a laborer for an air conditioning company who lived on base as a dependent
to his wife, Lynne, who was enlisted in the Navy. They already had a confession from him; in fact, they’d gotten it the next morning. But his version of events was somewhat different from mine.

Agents of the Naval Investigative Service had picked him up from the car description of two male joggers and the base gate guard. Alley told them that he’d been depressed after his wife, Lynne, had gone out to her Tupperware party, that he’d finished off three six-packs of beer and a bottle of wine in the house, then gone out in his old and dying green Mercury station wagon to the mini-mart near the post commissary to buy some more beer.

He said he was becoming increasingly intoxicated as he drove aimlessly, until he had seen an attractive white female in a Marine T-shirt and running shorts cross the street as she was jogging. He said he got out of his car and started jogging with her, exchanging small talk, until after a few minutes he became winded from his drinking and smoking. He wanted to tell her his problems, but didn’t feel she would care about them since she didn’t know him, so he said goodbye and drove off.

In his drunken state, he reported, he was drifting and weaving back and forth across the road. He knew he shouldn’t be driving. Then he heard a thump and felt a jolt in his car. He realized he’d struck her.

He put her in his car, telling her he was going to take her to the hospital, but he said she kept resisting him, threatening to have him arrested for DWI. He drove off the base and headed for Edmund Orgill Park, where he stopped the car and hoped to calm her down and talk her out of turning him in.

But in the park she continued berating him, he claimed, telling him how much trouble he was in. He yelled at her to shut up and when she tried to open the door, he grabbed her by the shirt, opened his door, got out, and pulled her out with him. She was still yelling about how she was going to have him arrested, then tried to break away. So he jumped on top of her and straddled her on the ground, just to keep her from running off. Alley just wanted to talk to her.

She kept trying to get away; he described it as “wiggling.”
At that point, he “lost it for a second” and hit her across the face—first once, then once or twice more—with his open hand.

He was scared and knew he was in trouble if she turned him in. He says he got off her, trying to figure out what to do, and went back to the Mercury for the yellow-handled screwdriver he needed to hot-start the car and when he came back, he heard someone running hi the dark. Panicked, he wheeled around and flung up his arm, which happened to be holding the screwdriver. It turned out to be the girl he struck, and the screwdriver must have hit her and penetrated the side of the head, because she collapsed onto the ground.

At this point he didn’t know what to do. Should he just run away, maybe go back to Kentucky? He didn’t know. He decided he’d have to make the death look like something else, like she was attacked and raped. But, of course, he hadn’t had sex with her—her injury and death had all been a horrible accident—so how was he going to make it look like a sexual attack?

He removed her clothes from her body—that was a start—then dragged her by the ankles away from the car, over to the lake bank, and placed her under a tree. He was grasping at straws, desperate to think of something, when he stretched his hand out and came in contact with a tree limb, and without even consciously thinking about it, he broke it off. Then he rolled her over onto her stomach and pushed the stick into her, just once, he claimed, just enough to make it look like she’d been attacked by a sex maniac. He ran back to his car, hurriedly left the scene, and left the park at the opposite end from where he’d driven in.

Henry “Hank” Williams, assistant district attorney for Shelby County, Tennessee, was trying to sort the whole thing out. Williams was one of the best in the business—an imposing-looking former FBI agent in his early forties with strong, chiseled features, kindly, sensitive eyes, and prematurely white hair. He’d never seen such a gruesome case.

“As soon as I looked at the file, I thought this was definitely a death penalty case,” Williams commented. “I wasn’t going to plea-bargain this one.”

The problem as he saw it, though, would be to come up
with a motive for such a savage murder that a jury could understand. After all, who in his right mind could do such a horrible thing?

That was the angle the defense was playing. Aside from Alley’s account of the “accidental” death, they were raising the specter of insanity. It seemed that psychiatrists examining the subject at the instruction of the defense had proposed that Alley suffered from multiple personality disorder. He had neglected to inform the Naval Investigative Service agents who’d interviewed him that first day that apparently he had been split into three personalities on the night Suzanne Collins died: himself; Billie, a female personality; and Death, who had ridden a horse next to the car in which Sedley and Billie had been riding.

Williams contacted Special Agent Harold Hayes, the profile coordinator in the FBI’s Memphis office. He described to Williams the concept of lust murder and referred him to an article my colleague Roy Hazelwood and I had written five years earlier for the
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin
, entitled “The Lust Murderer.” Though “lust,” in such cases, is something of a misnomer, the article described what our research into serial killers had shown us about these loathsome, sexually based crimes of manipulation, domination, and control. The killing of Suzanne Collins seemed to be a classic lust murder—a premeditated act willfully committed by a sane individual with a character disorder such that, while he knew the difference between right and wrong, he wasn’t going to let that moral distinction get in his way.

Williams asked me onto the case to advise him on prosecutive strategy and figure out how to convince a jury of twelve good men and women who probably had little direct contact with raw evil in their lives that my version of events made more sense than the defendant’s.

The first thing I had to do was explain to the prosecution team some of what my people and I had learned during our years of fighting crime from a behavioral perspective … as well as the particular price we’d paid to learn it.

I had to take them along on my own journey into darkness.

In early December of 1983, at thirty-eight years of age, I collapsed in a hotel room in Seattle while working on the Green River murders case. The two agents I’d brought with me from Quantico had to break down the door to get to me. For five days I hovered in a coma between life and death in the intensive care unit of Swedish Hospital, suffering from viral encephalitis brought on by the acute stress of handling more than 150 cases at a time, all of which I knew were depending on me for answers.

I wasn’t expected to live, but miraculously I did, nurtured by first-rate medical care, the love of my family, and the support of my fellow agents. I returned home, almost a month later, in a wheelchair and couldn’t go back to work until May. All during that time, I was afraid the neurological damage the disease left me with would prevent me from shooting at FBI standards and therefore prematurely end my career as an agent. To this day, I still have some impairment on my left side.

Unfortunately, my situation isn’t unique in this business. Most of the other agents who’ve worked with me as profilers and criminal investigative analysts in the Investigative Support Unit have suffered some severe, work-related stress or illness which kept them off the job for some period of time. The range of problems runs the gamut-neurological disease like mine, chest pain and cardiac scares, ulcers and GI disorders, anxieties and depression. Law enforcement is a notoriously
high-stress environment to begin with. While I was home recuperating, I did a lot of thinking about what it is in our job that causes the particular kind of stress that’s at least different and may even be greater than that of some other FBI agents, detectives, and police line officers—people who face immediate physical danger far more often than we do.

Part of the answer, I think, lies in the service we offer. In an agency long famous for its “Just the facts, ma’am” orientation, we’re probably the only group routinely asked for an opinion. Even so, we essentially had to wait for J. Edgar Hoover to die before profiling could even be considered a legitimate crime-fighting tool. For years after the criminal personality program was set up at Quantico, most others within and outside the Bureau considered this witchcraft or black magic practiced by a small group of shamans sixty feet below ground where the light of day never penetrated.

The fact of the matter, though, is that life and death decisions can be made based on our advice, yet we don’t have the luxury of hard facts to back them up; we don’t have the comfort of black and white. If a police officer is wrong, it means the case might not be solved, but things are no worse off than they were before. When we are called in, it’s often as a last resort, and if we’re wrong, we can send the investigation off in a completely nonproductive direction. So we try to be very sure about what we say. But our stock-in-trade is human behavior, and human behavior, as the psychiatrists are so fond of telling us, is not an exact science.

One of the reasons police and law enforcement agencies throughout the United States and many parts of the world come to us is because we have experience that they don’t. Like the medical specialist who has seen many more cases of a rare disease than any primary-care physician, we have the advantage of a national and international perspective and can therefore pick up on variations and nuances that might escape a local investigator who has only his own jurisdiction as a reference point.

We work on the principle that behavior reflects personality and generally divide the profiling process into seven steps:

1. Evaluation of the criminal act itself.
   
2. Comprehensive evaluation of the specifics of the crime scene or scenes.
   
3. Comprehensive analysis of the victim or victims.
   
4. Evaluation of preliminary police reports.
   
5. Evaluation of the medical examiner’s autopsy protocol.
   
6. Development of a profile with critical offender characteristics.
   
7. Investigative suggestions predicated on construction of the profile.
   

As the final step indicates, offering a profile of an offender is often only the beginning of the service we offer. The next level is to consult with local investigators and suggest proactive strategies they might use to force the UNSUB’s hand—to get him to make a move. In cases of this nature we try to stand off at a distance and detach ourselves, but we still may be thrust right into the middle of the investigation. This may involve meeting with the family of a murdered child, coaching family members how to handle taunting phone calls from the killer describing how the child died, even trying to use a sibling as bait in an effort to lure the killer to a particular place.

This was what I suggested after the murder of seventeen-year-old Shari Faye Smith in Columbia, South Carolina, since the killer gave indications of being fixated on Shari’s beautiful sister, Dawn. Every moment until we had the killer in custody, I sweated out the advice I’d given the sheriff’s department and the family, knowing that if my judgment was flawed, the Smiths could be facing another unendurable tragedy.

Less than six weeks after the killer called Dawn with elaborate instructions on how to find Shari Faye Smith’s body in a field in neighboring Saluda County, Lance Corporal Suzanne Collins was murdered in a public park in Tennessee.

There are just so many of them out there for us.

And what we do see, as my colleague Jim Wright characterized them, are the worst of the worst. We live every day with the certain knowledge of people’s capacity for evil.

“It almost defies description what one person can do to another,” Jim notes. “What a person can do to an infant; to a child less than a year old; the evisceration of women, the dehumanization process that they go through. There’s no way you can be involved in the type of work we’re doing or be involved as a law enforcement officer or in the investigation of violent crime and not be personally affected. We very often receive telephone calls from surviving victims, or from the loved ones of victims. We even have some of the serial killers and serial rapists calling us. So we’re dealing with the personal side of these crimes, and we do personally get involved and take them to heart. All of us in the unit, I think, have our pet cases that we refuse to let go of.”

I know what some of Jim’s are. One of mine is Green River, which was never solved. Another is the murder of Suzanne Collins, which haunts me to this day.

While I was home recuperating from my illness, I also visited the military cemetery in Quantico and stared at the plot where I would have been buried had I died that first week. And I did a lot of thinking about what I would have to do if I were going to survive to retirement age. I’d considered myself as good at what I did as anyone, but I realized I’d become a one-dimensional person. Everything—my wife, my kids, my parents, friends, house, and neighborhood—had all come in second behind my job, a very distant second. It got to the point that every time my wife or one of my kids got hurt, or had a problem, I’d compare it to the victims in my horrific cases, and it didn’t seem like such a big deal. Or, I’d analyze their cuts and scrapes in terms of blood patterns I’d observed at crime scenes. I tried to work off my constant tension through a combination of drinking and a feverish exercise regimen. I could only relax when I was completely exhausted.