Journey into Darkness (46 page)

On Friday, November 27, the couple spoke by phone, but then Susan missed a scheduled call on Monday the thirtieth and still failed to answer the phone late that night or anytime Tuesday. Susan was highly responsible, a meticulous creature of habit. When Reggie couldn’t reach her at work he grew frantic, calling a cousin of hers in Maryland who promised to check on her the next day. In the meantime, though, one of his calls home had gotten through: Officer Rick Schoembs, a crime scene agent, answered the phone and informed him of his wife’s death. Responsibly, Schoembs did not reveal that she’d been murdered since anyone with a relationship to the victim must be considered a suspect early in an investigation.

Initially, the only finds that seemed promising were several hairs taken from the victim’s body and sink. Too dark to belong to the redheaded victim or her husband, they appeared to be pubic hairs. Later that week, the neighbor who originally called police located a washcloth Reggie identified as Susan’s hanging in a tree near the house.

Schoembs and his partner, John Coale, noted that this was a sophisticated burglar. They checked everywhere it would be possible to lift prints but found every surface the killer might have touched had been wiped clean. He even wiped the washing machine of any shoe prints he may have left climbing in the window.

As in Hamm’s case, the subject took only whatever cash the victim had on hand. Collectible coins and credit cards, which could easily be traced, were left behind.

This time it was Detective Joe Horgas’s turn to head the murder investigation, and from the beginning it looked to him like Carolyn Hamm’s murderer was at work again, even though David Vasquez was still in jail. In addition to the binding, the strangulation, and the position of the body,
there were other similarities. The killer entered the home through a back, laundry room window so small it was hard to imagine such a strong killer getting through. Both crime scenes had been wiped clean of prints and in both homes there was some ransacking of belongings, including dumping the victim’s purse. Although Tucker’s body already showed signs of decomposition, investigators could tell that, like Hamm, this victim put up no struggle—there were no defense wounds. And her home was just four blocks away from Hamm’s, nearly visible from the bedroom window.

But this time, the killer had brought his own rope. When Reggie was shown a sample, also found in the laundry room near the point of entry, he didn’t recognize it. And the killer was cocky. He calmly ate half an orange at the elegant dining room table, using a long serrated knife to cut the fruit.

Even the victimology was similar. Like Carolyn Hamm, Susan Tucker was a low-risk victim. A white, forty-four-year-old professional—a technical writer and editor for the U.S. Forestry Service—she was known to be reliable at work and something of a loner, although she didn’t have any known enemies. She was devoted to her husband and a few close friends, and not likely to pick up or go with a stranger.

Horgas knew that any killer this smart wasn’t the type to be observed by neighbors or make other stupid mistakes. He advised Schoembs to take as much time with the crime scene as necessary, figuring the case would hinge on forensics. When it looked like the assailant might have washed his hands or showered on the premises, they went so far as to remove drains and pipes from the sinks and bathtub.

Dr. Frances Field, the medical examiner, later estimated the victim was killed between late Friday and early Sunday. The cause of death was listed as ligature strangulation. Prior to the autopsy, Schoembs used a PERK (Physical Evidence Recovery Kit), standard procedure in any physical assault case, to gather evidence such as semen and other bodily fluids from the victim.

Considering the similarities with the Hamm case, the investigation immediately focused on the never-named, smarter partner David Vasquez may have had in 1984. While investigators dug into the victim’s background and interviewed neighbors, Horgas visited Vasquez at Buckingham
Correction Center, one of Virginia’s three maximum-security prisons. Rich McCue, one of the defense lawyers who represented Vasquez in 1984, also came along.

Horgas brought Vasquez a cigar, since Chuck Shelton told him he liked them, and soon he began to open up, but not in the way Horgas had hoped. Vasquez cried, saying he’d been assaulted soon after his arrival, and said life in prison was hell. He’d had no visitors in the nearly four years he’d been there. But as desperate as he was to get out, he wasn’t able to provide any information that would help him.

Horgas left the prison concerned that they may have locked up the wrong man. Even worse, they had a new murder which might have been committed by the same killer. Horgas set out to reexamine the case that put Vasquez away.

True, Vasquez had confessed several tunes, but he’d also been interrogated in a method which was inappropriate and which we would have known to be ineffective for someone of his passivity and lack of sophistication. Transcripts and interviews showed they’d used the good cop/bad cop technique on him, raising voices, slamming the table, and surrounding him in a small interrogation room with no windows and full of cigarette smoke. Eventually, he just seems to have broken down. His entire confession seems based on information they’d already given him.

Psychiatric experts for the defense supported Horgas’s fears. They had argued that with Vasquez’s low mental function, he did not understand the implications of his talks with investigators and was easily confused and overwhelmed.

The evidence that earlier pointed to a second offender began to bother Horgas more now: Vasquez could not drive, so how did he get to Hamm’s house? And why didn’t the semen match? Were similar hair and some questionable eyewitness accounts enough to convict him?

With no new leads and nothing from David Vasquez on his “partner,” Horgas returned to his original theory that the killer was the same subject who broke into two other homes nearby and was responsible for the black masked rapist crimes throughout the county in the six months preceding the murder. He started a careful study of all those crimes.

In one January break-in, a woman called police to report that someone had entered her home through a window in the basement. Nothing was taken except forty dollars in cash and a couple of gold chains. But the burglar left some strange items behind: on her bed was a paper bag containing a carrot, three pornographic magazines, and several pieces of cord cut from Venetian blinds. The intruder also left a bucket on the floor at the end of the bed containing marijuana, drug paraphernalia, and a small vial of procaine, a prescription topical anesthetic sometimes used illegally as a sexual stimulant. Investigating officer Rich Alt learned from the burglary victim that a neighbor, too embarrassed to admit it to police, had told her some of the items left at her house were stolen from his home next door, broken into the same night. Their houses were only about two blocks from Carolyn Hamm’s.

A week after Susan Tucker’s body was discovered, Joe Horgas happened upon what would turn out to be a critical break: a regional message from Richmond PD Homicide. Dated October 6, 1987—two months earlier—it described two murders that occurred around then in Richmond—in September and early October. The description of the attacks read startlingly similar to the Hamm and Tucker murders. Both victims were white women, thirty-five and thirty-two, and both were strangled by an intruder or intruders who broke into their homes through windows. In the phone call he immediately placed to Detective Glenn D. Williams in Richmond, Horgas learned of more similarities: both women were raped and tied up, and in both cases the ME found petroleum jelly around the genital area and anus.

Since the teletype, there was a third rape-murder in Chesterfield County, which adjoined Richmond. Although this victim was younger, just fifteen, she was raped, strangled, and tied in her bedroom like the others. Richmond police weren’t sure it was the same perpetrator but they’d sent semen samples from all three to New York, where a lab was analyzing the DNA.

Williams didn’t buy Horgas’s theory that the crimes in the different counties were related. Rapist-murderers don’t commute a hundred miles, and anyway, the guy they were
looking for was white. Still, he invited Horgas to Richmond the next day for a task force meeting that would include his department and detectives from Chesterfield.

In Richmond, detectives Glenn Williams and Ray Williams (unrelated but known within the department as “the Williams boys”) presented the facts of the two murders in their jurisdiction. As in Arlington, both were shocking in part because of their location: the South Side of Richmond was a quiet, affluent section of town. Most homes were built around the turn of the century, with the exception of some brick, upscale garden apartments from the 1940s. But in Richmond, the murders had received much more play in the media, causing a general state of hysteria, with hardware stores selling out of window locks and entire neighborhoods lit up all night as concerned residents tried to make it impossible for an intruder to slip in unnoticed.

The first Richmond murder had been discovered September 19, 1987, when a man called police to report a strange incident. When he’d gotten home the previous night around 10:00, he noticed a white hatchback parked haphazardly in front of his house with the engine running. He called the police when he realized it was still there, engine still running, the next morning. Police ran the license plates and tracked the car’s owner, who lived just yards away in a garden apartment. The investigating officer had the landlady let him into the first-floor, one-bedroom apartment, where he discovered thirty-five-year-old Debbie Davis face-down, dead, across her bed. Like the victims in Arlington, her wrists were tied together: one at her hip, the other at the small of her back. The black shoestring used to tie them ran over her shoulder, so if she moved either it pulled the other tighter.

Naked but for a pair of jean cutoff shorts, earrings, and a bracelet, she had been strangled with a blue knee sock, rigged with a metal vacuum cleaner pipe to form a tourniquet. The ligature was so tight that the medical examiner had to cut it off. The autopsy revealed hemorrhages inside the victim’s eyelids, indicating the killer not only strangled his victim, he tortured her: tightening and loosening the tourniquet intermittently for a period estimated between forty-five minutes and an hour. She had also been raped, both vaginally and anally, brutally enough to tear the wall
of her vagina. But the only signs of bruising were small abrasions on her lower lip and nose. As in Arlington, there were no defense wounds to indicate she tried to fight her attacker.

But for the scene in the bedroom, there were no signs of struggle in the apartment. The agile intruder gained access through a small kitchen window—only twelve inches wide—that he reached by standing on a rocking chair stolen from a nearby home. Directly under the window on the kitchen counter sat a dish-drying rack full of glasses, left undisturbed by his entry. Police surmised that the offender had tried to flee in Davis’s car, but was uncomfortable with the stick shift.

Victimology yielded little, except to confirm that Debbie Davis was not a high-risk victim. A clerk in accounts receivable at the newspaper
Style Weekly
, with a part-time job at a bookstore in a nearby mall, she had the reputation of a homebody. She’d been divorced several years ago and hadn’t even dated in a while. All her neighbors, co-workers, and relatives said she was a friendly person who had no enemies and didn’t use drugs. She was so well-liked, in fact, that the newspaper offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to her killer’s arrest and conviction.

Investigators turned up almost nothing at the crime scene: no fingerprints anywhere in the apartment or on the victim’s car. All they had were semen samples on her sheets and comforter, which probably meant the killer masturbated over his victim. They also found incidental hairs: several animal hairs; a facial hair from another Caucasian; and a dark, curly hair.

On October 4, the two Williamses got word of another homicide in the South Side, just a half mile from Davis’s apartment. Around 1:30
A.M.
, a man arrived home and figured his wife, a neurosurgery resident at the Medical College of Virginia, was still at work since he had to unlock the dead bolt on the front door. He showered and got into bed in the dark but realized the bed wasn’t made. He turned on the lights to fix the sheets and saw blood on the comforter. When he ran to the closet to throw on clothes and look for his wife, he found her, dead, on the closet floor.

Thirty-two-year-old Susan Hellams lay sideways, facing
the ceiling, barely fitting in the two-by-five-foot closet, her head wedged between a wall and a suitcase. She was naked but for a skirt and slip pushed up around her waist. Her ankles were loosely tied with a purple belt, hands tied behind her with an extension cord, a blue tie wrapped on top of the cord. As in the other murders, the cord was wrapped several times around each wrist: one lay at her hip, the other folded behind her back. She’d been strangled with a red leather belt, made longer by the killer, who attached it to another belt. The autopsy revealed the same kind of petechial hemorrhages found on Davis, but these were more extensive, indicating she’d been tortured and strangled over a longer period of time. The killer was getting bolder, taking his time.

Hellams had no defense wounds, but had abrasions on her lip and nose like Davis, perhaps from being pushed into a wall or other object. Examination of a mark on her right calf revealed a partial shoe print: the killer held her down while he pulled the noose tight. She had been violently raped, vaginally and anally, and a jar of Vaseline with samples of her pubic hair was found on an air-conditioning unit outside a window near the closet. It was through this window—fifteen feet up, on a balcony—that the intruder entered the house without using a ladder. From the balcony, police saw more rope neatly coiled in a planter. Although it would be a difficult climb for most people, the back of the house faced an overgrown alley; someone could slip over the back fence and onto the premises without being seen.