The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators (28 page)

Kelso had attended the convention.

According to a
Washington Post
article by reporter John Lancaster, in September of 1993, then navy secretary John
H. Dalton reportedly tried to fire Kelso on the grounds that as senior officer at the convention, Kelso was responsible for the pilots’ behavior.

Lancaster reported Dalton was overruled by Defense Secretary Les Aspin. In his former life as a Republican member of the House Investigations Subcommittee, Les Aspin had joined in the hostile grilling of both Hazelwood and Ault.

Aspin subsequently succumbed to a heart attack.

Admiral Kelso took an early retirement from the navy in February of 1994.

*
Clay Hartwig’s story is dotted with curious coincidences. He would have known that the battleship
Arizona
was sunk at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The surprise attack by the Japanese began at 7:55 a.m.

The coup de grace against the
Arizona
was a high-altitude bomb that crashed into the ship adjacent to Turret Two and exploded belowdecks, detonating the main battery magazines.

April 19 is a special date as well. Timothy McVeigh would choose April 19, 1995, to blow up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. McVeigh is widely believed to have selected April 19 because it was the second anniversary of the federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound at Mount Carmel, near Waco, Texas, in which David Koresh and eighty of his followers perished. It is also an important historical date on right-wing militia calendars, a fact that Hartwig might well have been aware of through
Soldier of Fortune
and his other reading. It is the anniversary of the 1775 Battle of Lexington and Concord, where colonial Minutemen—on whom many present-day militias profess to pattern themselves—first skirmished with the British redcoats, marking the start of the American Revolution.

Nikia Gilbreath was by all accounts a contented country housewife, an attractive brown-eyed brunette who lived happily with her husband, Billy Joe, known as Joe, and their infant daughter, Amber, on a sixty-eight-acre farm in the mountains of extreme northwest Georgia, about an hour’s drive south of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Life in the mountains was measured and quiet. Neither Nikia nor Joe had any sense of foreboding or knew of any reason to worry that August 17, 1989, was going to be anything but another routine day in the young family’s well-ordered existence.

The name James Ray Ward meant nothing to the Gilbreaths.

They arose early as usual that Thursday, careful not to awaken Amber. Nikia, who was five months pregnant with the Gilbreaths’ second child, a boy, fixed her husband his lunch and then retired once again in her oversize T-shirt, panties, and maternity briefs.

She needed her rest even more than usual. That night, Nikia and her mother, Linda Tucker of Dalton, Georgia, were to drive to Florida for a short vacation with Amber. Nikia
was trying to spend as much time as possible with Amber before the new baby’s scheduled arrival in January. She particularly wanted her daughter to get her first sight of the ocean that August.

Joe Gilbreath was out the back door by 6:00 and behind the wheel of his pickup, headed north over country roads to his job as a welder at Salem Carpet Mills in Ringgold, twenty-five miles away.

Joe did not speak with Nikia by telephone that day, which was not out of the ordinary. Nor was Joe at first surprised when he returned home at about 4:45 to find the family Oldsmobile missing from the front driveway. He assumed Nikia had gone to the store.

When Gilbreath walked inside the open back door, the telephone was ringing. It was Nikia’s younger brother, Jon Tucker, who said he had been trying to reach Nikia by telephone all afternoon, with no luck.

As they spoke, Joe saw Amber in the living room, still in her pajamas from the night before, clearly hungry, wearing a very wet diaper. Suddenly, a dark perplexity began to close in on Joe Gilbreath. He apprised his brother-in-law of his discovery, and rang off. Then Joe changed and fed his daughter, put her in her three-wheel stroller, and headed out for the roadway to search for Nikia, not really knowing what else to do.

Jon Tucker, meanwhile, called his mother, who was in Chattanooga, with the disturbing news.

“Good Lord, Jon, get help,” Linda Tucker told her son. “Something’s wrong.”

Nikia’s mother jumped in her car and “flew” down the highway, as she recalls. “I could not for the life of me imagine what had happened,” she says.

Fixed in Mrs. Tucker’s mind was a single immutable fact: Under no circumstance would her daughter ever willingly leave Amber alone in the house, or anywhere else, for a moment.

Arriving at the farmhouse, Tucker saw a sheriff’s deputy sitting outside in his car. His presence was reassuring. Walker County sheriff Al Millard, a former FBI agent, was a Tucker family friend.

Mrs. Tucker remembers asking the deputy if he had any news of her missing daughter.

“Ma’am,” he answered, “there’ll be twenty-four hours before there’s any search.”

“We’re not waiting twenty-four hours,” Tucker corrected him.

“Now ma’am, don’t get excited,” advised the deputy.

“Honey,” Tucker told him evenly, “you ain’t seen me excited.”

The Gilbreath house was filling with worried family and friends. One cousin reported he’d driven by at 7:30 that morning on his way to work and noticed that Joe and Nikia’s gray ’89 Cutlass wasn’t parked in the driveway as usual.

Al Mallard then arrived, and went into earnest conversation with Joe Gilbreath. Joe’s mother-in-law quickly surmised why. Linda Tucker knew that when a husband or wife vanishes and there is a suspicion of foul play, the first person police suspect almost always is the remaining spouse, and for good reason. Often, he or she is the guilty party.

“All eyes went to Joe,” she says. “He really took a lot. I know a lot of people assumed he’d done it.”

She searched for Nikia for as long as the light held, then drove the seventeen miles home to Dalton. Linda Tucker slept poorly for a few hours before arising to resume her search for Nikia.

She still did not know what to make of the situation. Nikia had no history of emotional instability. To the contrary, she was levelheaded and strong-willed. If someone had tried to abduct Nikia, Tucker knew her athletic daughter most definitely would fight, and fiercely, to protect herself and her family.

She had married Joe in early 1987, and bore Amber that
same year. It was a wonderful time for the Tucker family until days after Christmas, 1987, when Gary Tucker, Linda’s husband of twenty-five years, was killed in a hunting accident.

Within a year, Linda Tucker had become a mother-in-law, a grandmother, and a widow.

Gary Tucker, a construction contractor, had come up with the name Nikia for their firstborn child. Nikia, in turn, planned to name the boy she was carrying Garrett, in honor of her dead father.

It was midmorning on Friday, the eighteenth, as Linda Tucker again neared her daughter’s house. A number of dirt lanes fed onto the main country road she was traveling. She paid no attention to them until she was within about a half mile of the farmhouse.

Then one particular dirt track caught Tucker’s attention. There was nothing special to distinguish it from any of the other lanes, except that some invisible power Linda Tucker cannot explain forcefully drew her to it.

She backed up and turned down the track until she reached a large rock. From there, Mrs. Tucker continued on foot, still sensing she was being drawn along, when suddenly she saw the Gilbreath family Cutlass in front of her. The car was abandoned. One of its doors (she cannot remember which) was half open.

Tucker hurried away to report her discovery, and returned to the scene with Joe and the sheriff.

They saw that the driver’s seat had been pushed back, doubtless in order to accommodate someone much larger than the five-foot five-inch Nikia. The keys were in the ignition, which was turned forward to the “Accessory” position. The Oldsmobile’s battery was nearly dead. A second set of tire tracks led toward the main road through the weeds and grass past the abandoned car.

There was no sign of a struggle in the car or around it.

Everyone’s attention then fell on the closed trunk. Mrs. Tucker, Joe, and the rest of family waited impatiently, fearfully,
for the authorities to open it, praying that it would not disclose the dead Nikia.

It didn’t, and everyone relaxed briefly. But the family’s sense of foreboding was not dispelled. Nikia was still missing. She obviously had been brought by someone to this secluded place. How had this happened? And where had he taken her?

A check around the Gilbreath residence, which stood on a low hill about one hundred feet from the main roadway, revealed no signs of forced entry, no footprints in the dirt around the windows (even though it recently had rained), and no direct evidence of a struggle inside the house.

The back door was unlocked, as was customary; Joe had left it unlatched when he went to work. However, the front storm door, normally ajar because of the difficulty in closing it over a newly installed porch carpet, had been pulled shut. The screen door inside it, normally latched, was unlatched.

In the living room, the blue telephone cord had been ripped from its jack in the wall near the sofa, and was gone. Missing as well was a patterned nylon bedspread from the Gilbreaths’ unmade bed.

The spread would be unmistakable to anyone who saw it, Joe and Linda told sheriff’s investigators. Because the nylon bothered Joe’s skin, his mother had hand-stitched a white sheet to the underside of it, creating a distinctive and unique article of bedding.

Two days ensued with no further developments in the case. Then on Sunday, as Joe and his mother-in-law were searching through the Gilbreaths’ bedroom, looking for anything that might assist the investigators, they jointly discovered that the dresser drawer where Nikia stored her underwear was completely empty. Whoever had abducted Mrs. Gilbreath had taken every last pair of her panties as well.

No one could make any sense of the unnerving discovery, except Linda Tucker. It didn’t tell her who had taken her
daughter, but now she knew who was not responsible—Joe. Whatever her son-in-law might be capable of, it didn’t include stealing his own wife’s underwear. That was a certainty.

“Until then I hadn’t really thought about it,” she remembers. “But if Joe had done it he would not have taken that underwear. Uh-uh. At that moment, I knew for sure that a stranger had taken Nikia.”

Several hours later that Sunday, Nikia Gilbreath’s body was discovered in a garbage dump, approximately eight miles north of the Gilbreath residence. She was still dressed in her T-shirt, briefs, and panties, and was lying on her back. No care had been taken to conceal her body.

Her jewelry, a silver wedding ring and a gold heart-shaped pendant on a gold chain around her neck, was untouched.

There was no evidence of sexual assault. However, Mrs. Gilbreath’s back was extensively bruised. Three of her ribs were broken as well. There were ligature marks on her wrists and ankles. Yet, she bore no defensive wounds or broken fingernails. There had been no fight for her life, or to protect her daughter.

She died, according to the medical examiner, of asphyxiation from three wads of paper toweling that had been shoved down her throat, obstructing the airway at Nikia’s pharynx.

Besides Joe Gilbreath, about whom some investigators harbored misguided suspicions for months, there were no likely suspects in the homicide, and for several months the local authorities made no progress toward solving the case.

Then in December, a Walker County sheriff’s detective named Keith Smith had a fortuitous encounter with agents of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Smith traveled to the GBI office in the little town of Calhoun, in neighboring Gordon County, to have a polygraph test conducted in an unrelated matter.

He struck up a conversation with the GBI agents, who told him of an unusual abduction-rape case they were working on, which involved a Gordon County suspect. The more
he heard about the offense, the surer Smith became of a connection to the Gilbreath killing.

The victim was a thirty-two year old Laura Grant,* a divorcée who lived with her nine-year-old daughter in a trailer park a short distance south of Walker County in Rome, Georgia.

At approximately 5:30 a.m. on Friday, December 8, Grant and her daughter were asleep in their separate bedrooms when an intruder slipped through her trailer’s unlocked back door. She awakened to the sight of his stocking-covered face and saw his knife.

He placed a hand over her mouth, and told Grant that her child would not be hurt if she did not make a sound. He handcuffed Grant and walked her out the front door to his truck, parked a block away. On the way out, he glanced at the modest tabletop tree she’d decorated for Christmas, and remarked that she deserved something a bit grander.

When Grant’s daughter awoke at 6:30 that morning to discover her mother missing, the little girl called the police.

Meantime, the intruder drove her mother to an empty house, where he demanded she masturbate him, as well as fellate him. He in turn fondled Grant and performed cunnilingus on her. Then he raped her.

In between the assaults, he told Grant a preposterous lie, that he actually had been sent to kill her, but found her so likable and alluring that he’d protect her, and planned to argue before his unnamed coconspirators that her life be spared.

It was by now full light outside. The rapist put away the knife and took off his mask. Grant already knew he was big—six feet seven inches and 245 pounds. Now she could make out his features, including a beard, mustache, and bushy hair.

He drove Grant to a second unoccupied residence in Gordon County. There he handcuffed her to a chair, left for a short time, and returned carrying a number of women’s teddies. He ordered her to model them for him.

She did as she was instructed.