Journey into Darkness (50 page)

DNA testing took until early March to complete but the results were dramatic: Spencer’s blood matched semen samples from the Tucker, Davis, and Hellams crime scenes, as well as one of the early rapes in Arlington. His defense attorneys, Carl Womack and Thomas Kelley, had Cellmark Diagnostics Inc.—a prominent lab in Maryland which would later analyze the samples in the O.J. Simpson murder trial—independently do a blind check on the results of the DNA tests, hoping for a discrepancy. But the experts concurred with Lifecodes’s findings. The odds that Spencer’s DNA matched another black person’s in North America—and police held the wrong guy—was said to be 135 million to one.

In addition to the DNA testing, the local lab in Fairfax processed Spencer’s clothing, including a camouflage jacket he reportedly wore every day. Senior forensic scientist Joseph Beckerman matched trace particles of glass from the jacket to glass in one of the basement windows broken by the subject.

On July 16, 1988, Timothy Spencer was found guilty in the rape and capital murder of Susan Tucker. Although they were not considered in the trial, the murders in Richmond could be brought into the penalty phase, and Debbie Davis’s father testified on his dead daughter’s birthday.

Spencer’s mother testified on his behalf, as did the leader
of a community center and a former teacher. Both spoke of his troubled youth. Finally, Spencer briefly told the jury he did not murder anyone and “felt sorry for their families.” The jury deliberated three hours before unanimously recommending a sentence of death.

In October of 1988, Spencer was also found guilty in the murder of Debbie Davis. He was convicted in Susan Hellams’s murder in January of 1989, and in Diane Cho’s in June 1989. The Davis and Hellams cases used the DNA results, but there were no pure DNA samples from the Cho murder scene. Prosecutors in that trial argued the case as a “signature crime,” which by law allowed them to introduce evidence from the other murders.

On April 27, 1994, after the failure of several appeals, Timothy Wilson Spencer died in the Virginia electric chair, the first person in the world to receive the death sentence by virtue of DNA identification. Even at the end, he never confessed his guilt. Steve Mardigian drove down U.S. 95 to the state penitentiary in Jarratt, not far from the North Carolina border, to try to interview Spencer shortly before his execution. But Spencer refused to talk or admit anything.

Ironically, despite the state-of-the-art techniques and computers that aided in getting a conviction, the case against Timothy Spencer was truly made by old-fashioned, streetcop detective work. If Joe Horgas hadn’t remembered Spencer’s name it never would have come up in the exhaustive computer search because of the technicality that Spencer was not considered paroled or released by corrections officials. There would have been no blood to test.

David Vasquez, though, was still in prison, having confessed to the murder of Carolyn Hamm. The two original witnesses would not change their story, the lab samples had degraded too much over time to be definitive, and no one could corroborate Vasquez’s alibi.

After his meeting with Jud and Joe Horgas in Arlington, Steve Mardigian had begun the laborious task of analyzing all of the relevant case materials in the Tucker and Hamm murders in Arlington, the murders in Richmond and Chesterfield County, and each separate sexual assault and burglary. All significant data was entered into a computer
program to provide a detailed comparison of physical characteristics and verbal behavior.

“That’s when the real work started,” says Steve. “One of the things we were asking was, ’How do we determine whether the man in custody had anything to do with the Carolyn Hamm case?’”

Mardigian created a grid with such headings as Name of Victim, Jurisdiction, Date, Duration of Crime, Type of Location, Type of Weapon, Type of Binding, Method and Place of Injuries, Initial Contact with Victim, Had Offender Gained Entry Prior to Victim Coming Home?, Location of Assault—Inside, Outside, or in Vehicle, Was Victim Moved Throughout the Residence?, Dialogue and Verbal Behavior in Rapes, Type of Sexual Activity.

Steve then brought the data to me and we each analyzed it independently before coming together for our conclusions. It was clear to both of us that his and Jud’s original supposition was correct: there was no question that this was one person acting alone rather than two working together—either two partners such as Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris or a sadistic leader and a compliant follower such as Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. Vasquez’s supposed partner was a ghost.

These crimes—the burglaries, the rapes, and the murders—were all committed by someone with experience, criminal sophistication, and organizational skills. He had the ability to interact for long periods with his victims and took sexual pleasure in manipulating them, dominating them, controlling them, and torturing them. David Vasquez was not a sexual sadist, he didn’t have the organizational or interpersonal skills to interact with the victims the way this guy did, and we both felt there was absolutely no way he could have committed these crimes.

It was clear to us that during his interrogations he had been scared and confused, had been given too much information, and, in a pathetic effort to please and cooperate, he had told police of his “dream” in which he had murdered Carolyn Hamm. With all the input he had at that point, he very well could have dreamed it. But that didn’t make him a murderer.

Together with Joe Horgas and the Arlington Police Department,
we asked Arlington County Commonwealth Attorney Helen Fahey to request Governor Gerald Baliles to grant Vasquez a full pardon. Since he had confessed, that would be the quickest route to getting him out of prison.

On October 16, 1988, we sent Fahey our written report concluding that the murderer of Carolyn Hamm was the same man who had murdered the other victims. The report, in the form of a five-page letter signed by both Steve and me, went with Fahey’s petition to the governor.

The pardon process took longer than we expected, as both the governor’s office and the Board of Pardon and Parole individually reinvestigated the case and reviewed our analysis. But finally, David Vasquez was released January 4,1989. He returned to his mother’s house and contemplated legal action against Arlington authorities. Eventually, on the advice of several different lawyers, he decided not to sue, and instead received a $117,000 settlement. Frankly, I would have given him a lot more if it was up to me.

But as troubling as David Vasquez’s arrest and conviction are—and they are sufficiently troubling that I think they must become an object lesson to all of us in law enforcement—when the possibility arose to Joe Horgas and then to us that this man might have confessed to and been imprisoned for something he didn’t do, no attempt was made to sweep a mistake under the rug. Rather, great effort was made to get to the truth of the matter.

As Steve Mardigian put it, “Arlington PD, that same department that got Vasquez arrested, had the willingness to go back and review the case and take the shots they knew would be forthcoming. I think that is a tremendous testament to that department’s integrity and dedication.”

And as Paul Mones eloquently points out in
Stalking Justice
, “What is unique about the story of David Vasquez is that the people who put him behind bars were also the ones who set him free. No family member, crusading journalist, or civil libertarian banged the drum for David’s release. Police and prosecutors did. Ironically, it was Susan Tucker’s horrific demise that ultimately became David Vasquez’s salvation.”

The time and effort my unit spent on the behavioral analysis in this group of cases was the most we’d ever spent on any case up to that time, including the Atlanta Child Murders and Green River. And the bulk of that effort, actually, was devoted not to finding and arresting a guilty man, but to getting an innocent man freed.

Practically every decade, it seems, has its own “Trial of the Century.” In the 1890s it was Lizzie Borden. In the 1920s it was the Scopes “Monkey Trial” challenging the teaching of evolution. In the 1930s it was the Lindbergh kidnapping case. In the 1940s, the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. The 1950s, the Rosenberg atom bomb spy trial. The 1960s gave us the Chicago Seven. In the 1970s, the Manson Family. The fact that each of these, in its time and place, qualified to someone as the Trial of the Century (and I’m sure we can all think of alternates for each—Dreyfus, Sacco and Vanzetti, Eichmann, Bundy?) speaks to two things. The first is the media’s obsession with the moment, of course. The second, I think, has to do with our collective compulsion toward the examination of evil or wrongdoing, or, in the case of politically oriented trials such as Scopes, the Chicago Seven, and, some might say, Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs, other people’s very perception of truth.

The 1990s Trial of the Century (at least so far) undeniably has been the O.J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles. Perhaps no trial in history was as examined in excruciating detail from outside, or argued from as many points of trivia inside. The only things lost in all of this were truth and, to many people’s way of thinking, justice. With as much money and legal resources as were thrown around in this trial, truth became a commodity—to be bought and sold and manipulated in
the marketplace of public opinion—and logic became a means to service already-held beliefs.

Millions, if not billions, of words have already been written on the subject and virtually every pundit in the known universe has weighed in with his or her opinion. And iike a Rorschach test, that opinion often reveals more about the opinion holder than the case itself. And whatever you say about the criminal trial jury’s verdict, you can’t convince me the few hours they spent were sufficient time to examine seriously and conscientiously the many months of testimony and such a huge volume of complex evidence. Their own verbal and written commentaries after the fact demonstrated that most of them didn’t have a clue what this case was all about.

It’s not my intention to pass judgment on the trial itself or the performance of the lawyers or Judge Lance Ito. There’s been plenty of that already and if you care enough to have an opinion, I probably couldn’t change it anyway. Nor are we going to deal extensively with the physical evidence which, in itself, makes or breaks a case. We’re only going to deal with it in its behavioral context, and see how much we can learn about these murders strictly from that perspective.

What I do want to do here is something that, for all the time and money expended in this case, really wasn’t done. And that is to examine the double homicide that occurred at 875 South Bundy Drive on the evening of June 12, 1994, from a behavioral perspective and examine what the facts at, and surrounding, the crime scene tell us about the killer from a behavioral point of view. In other words, forgetting O.J. Simpson’s celebrity, forgetting the Trial of the Century aspect, forgetting the racial polarization it created, had the LAPD contacted my unit at Quantico for consultation on this particular murder investigation, what could we have told them about who did it? Because if you strip away all of the sensationalism and false issues, the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are not so different from many other cases we’ve examined over the years.

Let me remind you that we in my unit are not in the business of solving cases on our own or delivering the names and addresses of UNSUBs. All we can do at this stage of
an investigation is help point to the
type
of suspect on which the police should be concentrating. If they already have suspects, we can help them limit and qualify them with our input. And if they are still looking for the UNSUB, we can often help them focus that search.

To pull off this imaginary consultation, we may have to make certain assumptions and stipulations along the way, such as the case not reaching the level of publicity as fast as it actually did. That is to say, we have to assume that I’d have the opportunity to come up with my own objective conclusions before being bombarded by detail in the media. But there’s plenty of precedent for that kind of supposition. As a control exercise, those of us in my unit have often examined controversial cases of the past, including those of the Boston Strangler, and Dr. Sam Sheppard, the Cleveland osteopath accused of murdering his wife in 1954, who was found guilty and later not guilty of the crime, and who died before the controversy had quieted. In October of 1988, I took part in an internationally broadcast television special profiling the identity of Jack the Ripper and came up with some interesting and surprising results, as we described in
Mindhunter
. Recently, I was invited to analyze the Lizzie Borden case, one of the most ambiguous in American history.

When the South Bundy murders occurred in June of 1994, I was still chief of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit, which included some of the top profilers and criminal investigative analysts in the world—Larry Ankrom, Greg Cooper, Steve Etter, Bill Hagmaier, Roy Hazelwood, Steve Mardigian, Gregg McCrary, Jana Monroe, Jud Ray, Tom Salp, Pete Smerick, Clint Van Zandt, and Jim Wright. Let me emphasize that, in actuality, we did not consult on this case, nor were we asked.

But if we had been, this is how I think it would have gone. This would be a typical and representative case consultation and analysis.

We would have gotten a telephone call from someone in the LAPD who was designated point man on the case. He probably would have been a detective and he already would have talked to the profile coordinator in the FBI’s Los
Angeles Field Office. Let’s call him Detective Kenneth Scott so we don’t get involved with any of the real personalities in the case.

Unbeknownst to me or my unit at this point, Scott and his investigative team have collected a fair amount of blood and other forensic evidence. But he’s not going to tell me about this and I’m not going to want to know, unless it points to behavior. Ultimately, when I finish my analysis, then we’ll go over the forensics together and see if they match what I’ve said. If they do, then we’ve helped him narrow his investigation and focus with more confidence on a particular type of suspect. If not, then it could point to serious flaws in the case.