Trailed, p.21
Trailed, page 21
“Would a serial killer transition from, say, slitting throats to strangling their victims,” I asked Richards. “Absolutely,” she said. “There’s so much less potential DNA evidence left that way.” There are also plenty of cases of killers who just shook up their techniques along the way, she added. Take David Carpenter, the so-called Trailside Killer. Between 1979 and 1981, he murdered at least seven different women, all of whom were hiking on trails in state and national parks outside San Francisco. The first two women were found naked and kneeling, with a single shot to the backs of their heads. The third was tied up with wire. Two were raped; three were not. Later, Carpenter said he just got bored killing people the same way. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, managed to kill more than forty women in a twenty-year period—making him the deadliest of all known American serial killers. The length of that spree was due to Ridgway’s efforts to throw off authorities by altering his crimes. He even went so far as to pour battery acid on his arm to hide a scratch left by a victim and to collect other people’s cigarette butts and leave them at the scene of his crimes. He’d clip the nails of his victims to remove any trace of his cells and leave their jewelry in public restrooms, hoping other women would begin wearing the pieces as their own. On multiple occasions, Ridgway became a suspect in some of these homicides. Each time, he always passed the requisite polygraph test. That, say forensic psychologists familiar with his case, is because Gary Ridgway was obsessively concerned with his own self-preservation above all else—his need to kill so defined him that he was able to structure his entire life, including his mental processes, in a way that would allow him to continue to do so undetected.
Regarding Julie and Lollie’s case, Laura Richards felt confident that the murderer had become proficient over time. “Whoever killed them took countermeasures to confuse investigators and managed to leave so little evidence that the crimes remain unsolved all these years later,” she said. “I can’t say for certain that their deaths are linked to the others in that area, but it certainly does seem that whoever killed them had plenty of hate.” I asked her if that made theirs a hate crime. She said she was reluctant to put labels on the case without knowing all the facts. “But I will say I don’t think this is the first time the person has done something terrible to women,” she conceded. “You don’t just wake up and do this. I think there was probably a whole sequence of things beforehand. This person has deep-seated anger and resentment toward women.” And that, she said, makes their killer all too similar to many others out there. “Women and girls being killed, women and girls going missing—it’s a major problem we still aren’t addressing,” she said. “In our culture, the lives of women and girls seem to be not worth so much—particularly to law enforcement.”
17
After the cold case conference, any attempt I’d made to create healthy boundaries between me and the investigation into Julie and Lollie’s murder crumbled. As a reporter, I’ve always gone down plenty of rabbit holes, but now I found myself in new subterranean territory and unable to think about anything else. I began turning down other writing assignments. I’d regularly stay up well past midnight, tracking down possible witnesses and suspects or trying to confirm minutia like the uniforms worn by Skyland busboys in 1996 (black pants, black button-down shirt, and a black apron, in case you’re curious). Then, the next day, I’d monopolize dinnertime conversations or group trail runs, breathlessly recounting each hunting expedition and how little it had yielded—with little awareness about whether or not my audience even cared to hear each detail. When I discovered that the duct tape used to bind Julie and Lollie was a highly specialized and hard-to-find size (1.5 inches instead of the standard 1.88-inch width you’ll usually find in a hardware store), I spent weeks trying to track down who would have that size and why. I enlarged the images of the crime scene Tim Alley had sent me, staring for hours at the tangle of gear outside the tent, looking for clues. When I found a UV image taken of Julie’s sleeping pad that appeared to show the outline of a pair of human calves in leather ankle restraints, I scrolled through dozens of pornography sites specializing in fetishes and binding. I became distracted thinking about the women who appeared in the bondage films I watched and wondered what had led them to consent to acts that looked undeniably painful—and sometimes downright degrading. At one point, I even went so far as to hire a psychic medium to see if she could communicate with Julie and Lollie directly (she couldn’t, but she did tell me that I had the energy of a wild pony and that my guardian angels thought I should probably take a break and get some rest).
That June, Ray and I celebrated my birthday with a camping trip on a remote island in Maine’s Casco Bay. We’d paddled all day to get there and arrived on the tiny patch of granite exhausted and content. We set up our tent and toasted with a shot of tequila on the shore before making dinner. After sunset, I built a fire out of driftwood and stared out into the surrounding darkness. We were so far from everything. Ray went to bed, and I stayed up watching the fire burn down. Then I spread around the charred remains of wood so that they’d be swept away by the high tide and then crawled into the tent. Musty, rust stained, and barely still waterproof, that tent had been my constant outdoor accommodation since I first purchased it in 1998. However, as I zipped up the blue-and-yellow fly that night, I didn’t feel the familiar comfort of settling into a nylon cocoon. Instead, I felt panicked and deeply claustrophobic, as images of Lollie lying dead in a strikingly similar tent ricocheted through my head. It didn’t matter that I was sleeping beside Ray, a big, muscular guy who knows how to keep his cool in a crisis. It didn’t matter that a tiny island in the Gulf of Maine is quite possibly the safest place in the country to spend a summer night. I was terrified, haunted by the images of Lollie’s body in her blue-and-yellow tent. I thought about how the other victims must have felt, jolted awake and, in some cases, trapped inside their own tents, not knowing who or what awaited them outside. And then I began to hyperventilate. I tried every technique I knew to slow my breathing, but nothing worked. I was too ashamed to wake up Ray and admit how scared I was. Most of all, I think I was worried that, even awake, he wouldn’t be able to stop someone intent on killing us. And that was a revelation I wasn’t prepared to embrace. Instead, I spent the night sitting upright, nervously cataloging every tiny noise, certain someone was about to arrive by boat and murder us both.
The next morning, in the light of day, my panic attack seemed kind of ridiculous. But even knowing that, and that none of what I was feeling was all that rational, I packed up the tent, vowing never to sleep in it again.
Back home, in the safety of our bed, my nightmares were slowly giving way to frustration. I’d lie awake not so much worried that someone was inside our house as agitated that I couldn’t make the case against Darrell Rice fit together. Tim Alley didn’t believe Rice killed Julie and Lollie because they were gay. He believed Rice became enraged when they denied his advances and wanted to punish them. As Laura Richards made clear, there are a disturbing number of crimes today that fit that exact description. It’s what theorist Kate Manne describes in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny as an extreme example of the policing and enforcing of women’s subordination by punishing those who flout “patriarchal law and order.” Misogyny, she contends, works by creating threatening consequences for women who violate or challenge those perceived patriarchal norms. Today, there is still a subset of white men who view the wilderness as exclusively their domain and actively employ misogynistic or racist techniques in a misguided attempt to maintain that. Each year, message boards and Facebook pages dedicated to the nation’s most well-known long and scenic trails offer indelible reminders of this: female backpackers spreading the word about which male thru-hikers have been harassing them, accounts of attempted sexual assault, epithets written in logbooks or shouted from shelters.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to argue that whoever killed Lollie and Julie wasn’t even rebuffed by them sexually, that he just thought they’d grossly overstepped by having a great time backcountry camping. Maybe he wanted to punish them for invading his domain. Maybe he wanted to make sure other women would stay away. But even knowing that Darrell Rice had assaulted Yvonne Malbasha, I was having a hard time believing that any version of those ideas would have motivated him to kill. Rice had willingly told investigators, prosecutors, and even his own defense attorneys that he assaulted Malbasha because he wanted to wreck her day. He freely admitted that his attack did more than that. But the gulf between that assault and a premeditated double murder still seemed too wide to cross. Rice expressed regret about the 1997 incident. His former girlfriends said he was kind and, if anything, not all that interested in sex. That didn’t sound like a person who would kill two women and stage a vibrator at the scene. Was I just succumbing to my own version of confirmation bias? Was it because I just didn’t understand how criminal minds really work? All I knew was what my sources told me. Maybe then, it was time for me to follow Ken Mains’s suggestion: I needed new eyes, more eyes, on the facts of the case.
The next morning, I sent a lengthy email to Ann Burgess. Born in 1936, Burgess took her doctorate in psychiatric nursing and co-founded one of the country’s first hospital-based crisis counseling programs for trauma survivors. Her early research specialty was working with rape survivors. In the early 1970s, the FBI was just launching its Behavioral Science Unit, which sought to understand the minds and motivations of rapists and killers. Of the ten agents assigned to this new unit, special agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler soon took the lead in compiling interviews with serial predators to understand their motivations, planning, and execution of crimes. When a particularly complex rape case came before the unit, they asked Burgess to consult. She arrived there somewhat horrified to realize that the Behavioral Science Unit had no codified methods to homogenize and analyze their data. Over time, she provided the academic mechanisms and research methodologies to systematize and interpret their information.
At age eighty-three, Burgess was still teaching full-time at Boston College in the summer of 2019. She’d recently been made something of a pop-culture icon when the TV show Mindhunter created lightly fictionalized versions of her, along with Douglas and Ressler, as their main characters. I worried that the huge success of the show would have made her inaccessible, but she responded to my email the same day with an invitation to visit her at the college. A week later, she met me in the faculty parking lot, dressed to the nines in a well-coordinated Brooks Brothers blouse and scarf and driving an ancient, rusting Jeep Cherokee. Her mannerisms were precise to the point of seeming curt, and as she unlocked her office in the School of Nursing, she explained that she had allotted me forty-five minutes to discuss the case. As we ran down the time, I was certain she’d dismiss me. Instead, she invited me to help prepare platters of lunch meat for the Iraqi war veterans she would be meeting with later that afternoon—part of a new project she had undertaken to assess exercise and competition as a means of overcoming PTSD and other effects of war. Standing at a small counter space in a stuffy conference room, we rolled slices of ham and turkey as we discussed the nuances of the Shenandoah crime.
“It certainly sounds like a complex crime,” she agreed. “I wonder what my forensic psychology students would have to say.”
I returned to the campus on a Tuesday evening that fall to find out. I have been a career attendee of college classes for almost thirty years. I’ve never seen anything approaching the enthusiasm I witnessed in that lecture hall. Students began arriving forty minutes early, jostling to get the best seats. Ten minutes before class was set to start, the place was already standing room only. Attendees had brought personal pizzas and subs in takeout wrappers, cafeteria trays with their half-eaten dining-hall dinners. They brought along their friends and roommates who weren’t even enrolled in the course but had become fans of the TV show.
Burgess knows how to sustain the attention of undergraduates. She’d structured the course based on episodes of Mindhunter. She began the three-hour lecture with a clip from the show and then provided the real psychological background on the killer depicted in that episode. As she lectured on the specific elements of each crime, brutal images of murder victims flashed across the auditorium’s large screen. Most of the students continued blithely eating their dinners, setting down forks or sandwiches just long enough to take the occasional note. That evening, Ann was focusing on why predators commit violent sex-related crimes. She stressed that all criminals have a motive and that in the moment of their crimes that motive truly feels to them like justification for all manner of violence. She explained the opportunist, who often put little planning and forethought into the crime (and thus often leaves plenty of evidence), and the power-assertive criminal, who prowls like a predator, constantly looking for excuses to use force. She explained the power-reassurance offender, who is motivated by feelings of inadequacy and a robust fantasy world, and the sexual sadist, who just really gets off on thinking through different ways to torture people.
“Crime is never senseless from the criminal’s point of view,” Burgess reminded her students.
To demonstrate, she played the video of an interview between John Douglas and Robert Ressler, and Jon Simonis, the so-called ski mask rapist, who assaulted more than eighty women from 1978 to 1980. In the interview, Simonis told the agents he was motivated less by sexual gratification and far more by the adrenaline high he felt. “Crime was my drug. I got so much more adrenaline from that than racing cars or climbing mountains,” he told the agents. “My intention was to inflict fear. I enjoy watching their suffering.”
For me, there was something so dissonant about watching Simonis and some of the serial killers Ann showcased that session. They were all attractive and clean-cut. They were highly articulate and nuanced as they explained their crimes, as if committing them was the most rational decision in the world. Simonis seemed delighted to provide Douglas and Ressler with his autobiography. In the taped interview, he explained his criminal progression as if he were listing off bullet points on a résumé: He began peeping at fifteen. By age twenty, he was exposing himself to women and making obscene phone calls. At twenty-three, he committed his first rape. As his crimes escalated, Simonis became more and more efficient. He fine-tuned his rape kit, always keeping handcuffs, rope, and a knife at ready access. Why did it take you so long to get caught? asked Douglas. “I learned from my mistakes,” Simonis calmly replied. “It was a game of cat and mouse with the police, and I knew I had to create good patterns to win.” He explained that he deliberately spread out his crimes across different states. He became adept at getting rid of evidence. He was so proficient, in fact, that three other men were arrested and convicted for some of his crimes. Watching Simonis, I realized that someone like me could spend hours or days or even years with someone like him and never sense that he was a violent offender.
“He’s a super criminal,” Burgess told her students with what almost sounded like a hint of admiration. “He’s really, really good.”
Burgess had devised a worksheet for her students not unlike the rubric she created early on for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. On it, she asked students to assess the motivations of various criminals she had discussed, along with other details, like whether their crimes were organized or disorganized. In advance of my visit, we’d made a special document outlining possible scenarios that would explain who killed Lollie and Julie.
For the last hour of the class, I raced through a tick-tock account of the crime as we knew it and what Tim Alley had told me about the subsequent investigation. I offered the students what Burgess and I had decided were probably the four most likely suspect scenarios, based on what we knew of the investigation, namely that: (1) Darrell Rice had, in fact, killed the two women; (2) it had been a ranger or park employee; (3) a local poacher or homesteader was responsible; and (4) a yet unnamed serial killer murdered the women. Burgess instructed the students not to leave the auditorium until they’d completed the entire questionnaire.
Afterward, as we wandered the parking garage looking in vain for her Cherokee, she seemed almost giddy about the prospect of collating their responses. “As soon as I have all the data, I’ll send them your way,” Burgess promised.
A week later, a fat Priority Mail envelope arrived containing almost two hundred completed questionnaires, along with a note on a monogrammed card: “Very interesting. —Ann.”
Of the scenarios presented, most students selected the park ranger or employee, followed by the unnamed serial killer. A local homesteader came in a distant third and Rice, an even more distant fourth. Again and again, the students reasoned that Rice didn’t seem to have the capacity to commit what they felt was a highly organized crime. Reading their responses, I wondered if I had somehow unduly slanted my telling of the story. Had I focused too long on the similarities between the Colonial Parkway and Shenandoah murders? Had I overplayed Tim Alley’s assessment of Rice? I hoped not. I still had no theory of my own about the case. But I was becoming increasingly dismissive about any theory that included Rice. I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer: I needed to talk to his team.
Tim Alley’s assessment of Rice’s attorney still weighed heavily on my mind. On my drive home from Boston, I texted Bill Thomas. “Thoughts on Deirdre Enright?” He responded right away. “She’s always heard me out and seemed willing to help.” Enright served as the director of the University of Virginia School of Law’s Innocence Project, so I called a good friend, a fellow journalist who covers death penalty cases and asked if he felt comfortable querying his contacts at the national Innocence Project about her reputation. The next day, he forwarded the response to me: “She’s one of the good guys,” it read.
