January 6, 2011
Westminster, Colorado
IN HER CUBICLE IN THE Westminster police station, Detective Edna Hendershot settled in with her Starbucks usual: a venti upside-down skinny caramel macchiato. At 9:07 a.m., an email arrived. It had been posted to a listserv read by detectives throughout the Denver area. The subject line was pleading: “Sex Aslt Similars?”
The email described a rape that had occurred the previous night in Golden. The attacker had bound his victim’s hands. He’d made her shower. He’d threatened to post pictures of her on the Internet. At the bottom of the note was a personal plea: “Can Det Hendershot please contact me in reference to this report?” It was from a Golden detective named Stacy Galbraith.
Hendershot did not know Galbraith. But she had an ominous feeling that she knew what the email was about. It had been five months since Sarah’s rape, and fifteen months since the attack on Doris. She called Burgess, her counterpart in Aurora, and gave him the news.
It looked like the worst had happened. The rapist had struck again.
Cops can be protective about their cases, fearing that information could be leaked that would jeopardize their investigations. But Hendershot right away recognized the potential in collaborating with Galbraith and Burgess. “Two heads, three heads, four heads sometimes are better than one, right?” she says. So did Galbraith. Her department was small—a little more than forty officers serving a town of about twenty thousand. It only made sense to join forces. “I have no qualms with asking for help,” Galbraith says. “Let’s do what we can do to catch him.”
We need reinforcement, Galbraith told Hendershot. Let’s bring in the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Let’s call the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “This is much bigger than little Golden. This is bigger than Jefferson County,” she said. Hendershot was more cautious. Her superiors wanted to proceed more slowly. Let’s all meet at my station house, she told Galbraith. Me, you, and Burgess. We’ll lay out the facts. “We aren’t sure of anything,” she said. “We have a lot of investigating to do.”
A few days later, the three detectives circled up around a table in a conference room at the Westminster Police Department. Each detective carried a file. And each file told a very similar story.
The victims’ descriptions of the attacker overlapped. The women estimated his height somewhere between five feet ten and six feet two. They put his weight at around 180 pounds. Amber had gotten the best look at him. He had hazel eyes. His hair was blondish.
The rapist seemed relaxed during the attacks, almost like he was on Xanax. He talked to the victims. He seemed smart, educated. He could be introspective. He knew intimate details about their lives—things that only a close friend or partner would know. Crazy as it was, all the women described him as being, at times, gentlemanly.
The rapist committed his crimes robotically. Each attack was the same, repeated with ruthless efficiency. He wore the black mask that hid everything but his eyes. He tied the women up, but only loosely. He raped the women for hours, in multiple sessions. Afterward, he forced each one to shower.
Hendershot and Burgess described how the rapist had posed Sarah and Doris for photos, and how he had taken scores of pictures as he raped them. Both women remembered the large black camera with its clicking noise.
Well, there’s a difference, Galbraith noted. The attacker had taken pictures of Amber, too. But he had used a pink digital camera.
Immediately, Hendershot flashed back to the conversation she had with Sarah over the second missing camera. A pink Sony. Stolen by the rapist. Who matched the description in Amber’s case. Even for Hendershot, it was hard to resist the conclusion: It was the same guy at work.
Together, the detectives bore down. How were the women connected? Did they have something in common that might lead police to the rapist? All shopped at branches of King Soopers, the grocery chain scattered across eastern Colorado and Wyoming. All had links to local colleges. Doris, the victim from Aurora, worked as a housemother at a fraternity. Sarah, the victim from Westminster, had lived in an apartment complex near a community college before relocating to her new home. And Amber was a graduate student.
That was where the similarities ended. Doris was sixty-five and lived in a house in a residential neighborhood. Sarah was fifty-nine and had only recently moved into her new apartment complex. Both were older white women. Both lived alone. But Amber was in her twenties and a woman of color. She had a roommate. And a boyfriend.
The differences—in the women’s ages, their races, their physical appearances—ran against a well-established pattern in rape. The study of victim attributes, what the police call “victimology,” holds that serial rapists tend to strike similar targets. They could be young or old, teachers or doctors, blondes or brunettes. But they usually had some common unifying trait.
In this instance, the victims were dissimilar enough that the detectives decided they could not rule out the chance that more than one rapist was out prowling. It was possible that the similarity of the attacks was coincidental. But it was easy to imagine more unsettling scenarios. Maybe the rapes were being committed by a group of men coordinating their assaults to throw off the cops. Maybe it was some kind of pornography ring. Maybe Denver’s suburbs were under siege by a pair of highly experienced, highly traveled rapists.
The detectives noted another troubling trend. Ten months had passed between the first attack in Aurora in October 2009 and the second attack in Westminster in August 2010. Five months later, in January 2011, Golden happened. In the first two incidents, the rapist had threatened the women with a gun, but he had not displayed a weapon. In Golden, he flashed a handgun. He pointed it directly at Amber. And he threatened to shoot her.
The attacks were getting closer together and becoming more violent. To the detectives, it was a sign that the rapist was growing more confident. It was also an indication that he was getting better at what he did. The cops called it “MO creeping,” using the abbreviation for “modus operandi.” As a criminal got comfortable with the usual routine, he often pushed new boundaries and took more chances.
Burgess left the meeting burdened by a single question.
“How do we stop him before he rapes someone else?”
GALBRAITH HAD A strong lead. A business across from Amber’s apartment had a video surveillance camera that pointed toward one entrance into the complex. The owner turned the footage over to detectives to analyze. The task fell to Matt Cole, Galbraith’s partner, another Golden detective who had responded to the scene of the rape.
Cole watched the grainy footage for an entire day. He would play and rewind, play and rewind. He saw a guy on a bike with a dark backpack. Was he staring into Amber’s apartment? Why did the silver Chevy Celebrity switch parking spaces?
He counted 261 vehicles coming and going the night of January 4 and the early morning of January 5. One vehicle ghosted across the screen ten times in the predawn hours: a white pickup truck, driving slowly through the snowy parking lot.
Cole marked each appearance down to the second.
12:37:44 a.m.
01:16:25 a.m.
02:30:03 a.m.
05:03:00 a.m.
05:05:26 a.m.
05:14:02 a.m.
05:16:30 a.m.
05:17:14 a.m.
05:19:19 a.m.
05:19:59 a.m.
Could the pickup belong to the rapist? Cole and Galbraith ran the tape again and again, looking for a way to identify the vehicle. They could read “Mazda” on the back. The mirror on the passenger’s side looked broken. And it seemed like an older model truck. But the license plate was unreadable. They sent the surveillance tape to an analyst who specialized in video enhancement. The analyst broke down the tape into 1,200 images composed of overlapping, individual frames—a technique called averaging. Nothing. The video was too blurry.
The tape also presented a problem of chronology. The last time the truck was seen on the tape, the time stamp showed that it was 5:20 in the morning. But the attack started two hours later, at about 7:30. By then, the truck was no longer appearing in the video. Maybe it was just some all-nighter student, scrambling out for coffee or snacks. Galbraith gave up. She put the truck out of her mind. It was a dead end, as far as she was concerned.
The Golden Police Department issued a press release with a rudimentary description of the incident. The assailant was a white male, six feet two, with hazel eyes. There were no further identifying details: “The suspect was wearing a mask so no composite sketch is available,” it read. Galbraith made sure the release prominently mentioned the same detail that had drawn Amber’s attention. “The suspect does have a distinctive mark or tattoo on the outer area of his lower leg or calf that is about the size and shape of a large chicken egg,” it read. Galbraith was taking a leap of faith. Amber’s recollection needed to be right.
A few days later, a student at a college near Denver called the police hotline. He sounded shaky on the voicemail. He said he felt obligated to contact the cops. One of his friends had a mark that sounded like the one on the report. The guy’s name was Frank Tucker.* He was a fellow student.
With help from the tipster, Galbraith called up Tucker’s Facebook page. One photo showed his leg. The image was dark. But maybe there was a birthmark? Galbraith called Amber to come to the station. When she arrived, she peered at a cropped photo that showed Tucker’s leg. She couldn’t be sure. It seemed like the mark on the rapist had been farther down his leg, she told Galbraith. But it was about the same size and shape as the one on Tucker’s leg.
Galbraith ran Tucker’s criminal history. Four years earlier, cops at the college had taken a report from a female student. She had gotten drunk at a party. She attached herself to Tucker. After boozy conversation, he ordered her to have sex with him. If she didn’t, Tucker threatened to tell everyone that she was a slut. The woman agreed reluctantly. But after they started, she changed her mind. Tucker ignored her. She reported the rape to campus police but had ultimately declined to press charges.
Galbraith was fortunate the woman had come forward. Many women are reluctant to report sexual assault. Only about one-fifth of women contact police after they’ve been raped, according to national surveys. The stigma of the crime remains a serious barrier to speaking out. Women are afraid that friends or family might discover what happened. Or they are afraid of not being taken seriously. Or they don’t consider the attack serious enough to merit the involvement of the law. Or they don’t want to help the cops imprison a man who may be a boyfriend, a husband, a father to their children.
For Galbraith, the woman’s report of rape was enough to make Tucker a suspect. She subpoenaed the phone company for his cell phone records. She banged out a request to place a GPS tracker on Tucker’s car. Her concern was clear. She needed to track Tucker’s car in order “to identify future victims,” she told the judge.
HENDERSHOT FIGURED SHE’D use Amber’s case to revisit an evidentiary trail that had so far disappointed.
Television dramas often treat DNA as the key that can unlock every mystery. Investigators find a speck of blood on a weapon or traces of spit on a cigarette butt. They send the sample to a lab. The lab compares the sample against the DNA of a suspect. Boom, there’s a hit, and the crime is solved in one hour, minus commercials.
The reality is different. The Federal Bureau of Investigation runs the most comprehensive cold-case database in the country, the Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS. The database contains the genetic profiles of more than fifteen million people, mostly convicted criminals. The profiles are extracted from DNA samples collected under controlled conditions at some point in the judicial process—for instance, when a suspect is booked into jail and gets the inside of his cheek swabbed. From there, an analyst separates the DNA sample into fragments, which produce a person’s profile—a pattern of stripes that appears almost like a bar code on an X-ray filmstrip. The FBI accepts the profile only if it contains genetic material from thirteen separate locations, or loci, of a person’s DNA.
The power of the database kicks in when a detective finds some kind of body fluid at a crime scene: blood, semen, saliva. Once the crime scene sample is processed, it can be compared to the millions of stored samples. The FBI will not do the comparison, however, unless the crime scene sample contains genetic material from the same thirteen locations, with some limited exceptions. If the DNA sample is degraded or limited in quantity so that the analysis results in complete information from only five or ten genetic locations, the FBI rejects the sample. By insisting on such “high stringency” matching criteria, the FBI estimates the chances of a false match at one in one billion.
Hendershot figured that the rapist must know something about the process. The police term was “DNA conscious.” He was trying to erase his presence down to the molecular level. And so far, he had succeeded.
Burgess had been the first to be disappointed. A few days after the rape in Aurora, Doris had walked through her house with a crime scene investigator named Randy Neri. In each room, Neri asked: “What did you see? Where’d you see him go? What did you see him touch?” When they reached her bedroom, Doris saw the television that sat on a wooden dresser, next to her bed. On top were three teddy bears, two white and one yellow. When Doris saw them, she stopped. The yellow bear, she told Neri. The rapist had knocked the yellow bear onto the floor, and then stooped to pick it up.
Neri swabbed the bear, packed the sample into an evidence bag, and shipped it to the state’s crime lab at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
The CBI was headquartered in a low brick building, surrounded by pine trees, across a busy intersection from a Hooters restaurant. Much like its federal counterpart, it specialized in using science and technology to solve the toughest crimes. With 250 employees, and offices across the state, the bureau served as a crime lab for local police and sheriffs. It analyzed fingerprints and DNA, conducted toxicology tests, and tracked gun sales. The bureau’s crime lab was best known for its Herculean labor in the case of JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen found murdered in her parents’ house in Boulder in 1996. In that case, the bureau’s analysts received 2,509 laboratory specimens and conducted 25,520 lab examinations over the course of 3,116 hours. The murder went unsolved. But Colorado cops still held the CBI as the last, best hope for answers in a complicated case.
On December 7, 2009, two months after Doris’s rape, CBI analyst Sarah Lewis called Burgess with mixed news. The rapist had been punctilious. But not perfect. Doris’s teddy bear had yielded the tiniest trace of him—perhaps no more than seven or eight skin cells, sloughed from his fingertips as he grabbed the bear with gloveless hands. The analysis of touch DNA, as such micro-genetic samples were known, was a revolutionary investigative development. It allowed police to examine minute amounts of genetic material that would have been impossible to analyze with traditional DNA tests. But the new tests had a drawback: The paucity of cells did not render enough information to meet the FBI’s standard of thirteen genetic markers.
Lewis had been forced to use a more limited type of DNA exam called a Y-STR analysis. The exam looked for patterns, called short tandem repeats, on the Y chromosome found in male DNA. The results would show nothing in the case of a female suspect. And even for men, they would only reveal a limited amount of information. They could identify a male suspect as coming from a particular family tree. But the results were not unique enough to be a genetic fingerprint. Lewis delivered the news to Burgess: The DNA found on the bear was “either inconclusive or provided no results,” she wrote. “This profile does not qualify for entry into the CODIS DNA database.”
In Westminster, Hendershot had been excited to learn that Sarah saw the rapist pick up her white kitchen timer. It was one of the few items police were certain he had touched. Sarah’s memory proved correct. CBI analyst Gentry Roth found a trace of genetic material on the timer. But as with the teddy bear in Doris’s home, he was able to salvage only enough cells for a Y-STR analysis. “The amount of DNA was not sufficient for a complete DNA profile,” Hendershot wrote.
In Golden, Galbraith had managed to capture a few of the rapist’s cells when she brushed Amber’s face with a swab in the front of her patrol car. But as with Doris’s teddy bear and Sarah’s kitchen timer, Amber’s face did not yield enough of the rapist’s genetic material to develop a complete profile. The CBI technicians could only conduct a Y-STR analysis. The magic of DNA had failed Hendershot, Galbraith, and Burgess. The FBI’s database could not be tapped for a possible hit.
But a CBI technician pitched an idea to Hendershot. The three samples might not be able to identify a single suspect, but they could still be useful. The CBI could compare the Y-STR profiles with one another. If they were different, detectives would know they were dealing with different suspects. If they matched, detectives would know that a single man—or at least a paternally related set of men—was stalking the suburbs.
They would know they were hunting relatives, instead of strangers.
Hendershot gave the go-ahead to start the work.
THOUGH THEY DID not know each other well, Hendershot’s and Galbraith’s lives were intertwined. They were members of a sorority within a fraternity. They were female cops.
As a young patrol officer, Galbraith had been inspired by a female detective. One morning, Golden’s chief called his officers together to let them know about a drug bust that was going to happen later that day at a local fast-food restaurant. An elite narcotics squad drawn from police departments across the Denver area, the West Metro Drug Task Force, was sweeping in to break up a ring. One of the task force officers in the room for the briefing caught Galbraith’s eye. She radiated a quiet intensity. Galbraith had been thinking about applying for a spot on the narcotics squad. At that moment, she knew she would. “She’s a chick,” Galbraith thought. “If she can do it, I can do it.” The detective was Edna Hendershot.
In the United States, female cops have been building on the success of other female cops for more than a hundred years. Once, women were confined to work in police departments as civilian helpers, usually in matters involving children and women. Alice Stebbins Wells helped change that. She became a police officer—or “officeress” as she was then known—when she joined the Los Angeles Police Department on September 12, 1910. Her shield read “Policewoman.” The bottom of her gold badge featured her number: 1. She joined the so-called “purity squad,” tasked with patrolling penny arcades, dance halls, skating rinks, and other dens of iniquity. Wells “fought for the idea that women, as regular members of municipal police departments, are particularly well-qualified to perform protective and preventative work among juveniles and female criminals,” reads her official bio on the International Association of Women Police, a group she founded. Two years after Wells was hired, two other women joined the LAPD.
Wells’s argument that women brought special qualities to police work wasn’t always enough to win over her male colleagues. But over time, studies have shown that female officers benefit police departments and the communities they serve. Women are less likely to use excessive force than their male counterparts, and are less likely to be involved in lawsuits alleging police abuse. Citizens tend to rank female officers as more empathetic and communicative than their male counterparts. And female officers are more likely to embrace the goals of community policing—a law enforcement philosophy that emphasizes cooperation and interaction with citizens.
Female officers have also been shown to respond more effectively to violence against women. For instance, a 1985 study found that female officers displayed more patience and understanding with domestic-violence victims. A 1998 study of a nationally representative sample of 147 police departments found that female officers were more likely to make arrests in domestic-violence cases than male officers. And a 2006 study of the sixty largest US metropolitan police departments showed that every 1 percent increase in female officers correlated with a 1 percent increase in the number of rapes reported in a jurisdiction.
None of these studies downplays the extraordinary work of the male cops who investigate and arrest thousands of rapists every year. Nor do they suggest that a female officer is automatically better than a male counterpart at responding to gender-based violence. While some female victims prefer to speak with a woman because of a shared gender connection, other victims have said they felt safer and calmer in the presence of a male officer. End Violence Against Women International, the police training organization, has suggested that the most important factor in talking with victims is the engagement of the investigators. “What is absolutely clear is that an officer’s competence and compassion are far more important than gender in determining their effectiveness at interviewing sexual assault victims,” the organization emphasizes.
Despite the benefits of gender diversity, female cops still have a tough time on the job. Some male cops—from patrolmen to police chiefs—remain hostile to hiring women, claiming that they are not strong enough or tough enough to be cops. In studies, between 63 to 68 percent of female officers report suffering some form of sexual harassment or discrimination in the workplace. The most common complaints from female officers involve hostility, a lack of promotion opportunities, and poor policies to deal with pregnancy and other family issues.
But even departments that have put a significant focus on boosting the number of women in their ranks have found it difficult. Many women have little interest in a profession that—at least in popular culture—is all about guns and violence. The result is that no police department in the United States is even close to gender parity. The criminal investigation branch of the Internal Revenue Service may have the highest percentage of female law enforcement agents in the country, with 32 percent. And in some big-city police departments, such as Philadelphia and Los Angeles, women make up about a quarter of sworn officers. But overall, about a hundred thousand female officers fill the ranks of police in the United States—about 11 percent of the total. Police work remains a mostly male field, macho, hierarchical, and militaristic. Officeresses are rare.
BROUGHT TOGETHER BY the hunt for the rapist, Galbraith and Hendershot bonded quickly. Both were outgoing. They cracked fast jokes and smiled fast smiles. Galbraith was younger and crackled with energy. Hendershot’s experience complemented Galbraith’s enthusiasm.
Both women were at ease working in the testosterone-soaked world of law enforcement. Men accounted for about 90 percent of the sworn officers in Golden and Westminster, but neither Galbraith nor Hendershot felt unwelcome or intimidated. Both had grown up with brothers. Both had few close female friends and tended to get along better with men. Both took pride in being tough. “I don’t tolerate drama. If it’s drama, I’m like, ugh. If it’s emotional, ugh,” Galbraith says.
Both also had the same experience breaking into police work. Get your foot in the door, prove yourself, and you were accepted into the brotherhood—just like any other cop. The woman thing didn’t matter so much. “It might be at the forefront when you first walk in the door,” Hendershot says. “But especially after you’ve established yourself for a little bit as a patrol officer, it just doesn’t come up. It just is.”
They reveled in the dark though redemptive humor found in every cop shop, emergency ward, and newsroom. They shared details of crime scenes and traffic accidents. They swore. They swapped stories of disgust: wearing face masks stuffed with dryer sheets to ward off the scent of a rotting corpse, watching a guy masturbate during an undercover drug deal.
“He answers the door, and all he’s wearing is a pair of black shorts, no shirt, and an ankle monitor,” Hendershot tells Galbraith.
“Cute,” Galbraith says.
“The epitome of sexy, let me tell you. Who can resist this?”
Sometimes, they made a point of trying to discomfit their younger male colleagues—a kind of verbal hazing usually involving women’s body functions or sex organs.
“It’s actually kind of amusing to see how much you can poke it sometimes, I’ve got to be honest,” Hendershot says to Galbraith.
“And then they’re walking to HR,” Galbraith says.
“Or running.”
Both women laugh.
Sometimes, their superiors worried about the male cops saying something offensive. Once, one of Galbraith’s superiors pulled her aside when he thought the conversation had crossed a line. He asked whether Galbraith was okay with the chatter. “I’m like, ‘God, yes. I started it.’ ”
They did, of course, have problems as female cops. Galbraith was always having to tie her hair up in a bun to avoid getting it covered in mud or blood. Hendershot could never find a place to conceal her handgun. Neither thought they looked particularly good in a bulletproof vest. “It’s not glamorous. I’m not wearing cute shoes. None of it is what society puts forward as to how a female is supposed to look, act, think,” Hendershot said.
The women were connected in another way, too. Cops often inhabit an incestuous world, where every officer knows every other, and marriages and friendships stay in the family. Hendershot’s second husband, Mike, and Galbraith’s second husband, David, had worked together at the Golden Police Department. David wound up working with Hendershot at the Westminster Police Department.
ON JANUARY 18, 2011, the detectives gathered again. The stakes were higher now, and the crowd in the room reflected it. The FBI, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the Jefferson County district attorney’s office—all sent agents to meet on the second floor of Golden’s fire house, off the city’s historic district.
One of the new faces was Jonny Grusing, a veteran FBI agent who worked out of the bureau’s Denver office. He was tall, thin, and fit, with a dry sense of humor—the consummate G-man. He had been based in Denver for fifteen years—an unusually long time for FBI agents, who rotate frequently through jobs in different cities. For much of his career, Grusing focused on bank robberies. Now, he was assigned to the Safe Streets task force, created after 9/11 to marry the skills of the FBI with the shoe-leather savvy of local cops. He had worked cases with most of the agencies at the table, and those in the room knew he was no bigfoot who would take over an investigation from local lawmen. “I don’t know of a department that we walk in or a jurisdiction where we walk in and they go, ‘Oh no, it’s the FBI,’ ” Grusing says.
Grusing was in charge of bringing a potentially powerful tool to the hunt for the rapist: an FBI database of thousands of crimes called the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCAP. The ViCAP database was designed to catch serial killers and rapists. It was based on the principle that repeat offenders—called serialists by the experts—had signature patterns of behavior nearly as distinctive as a fingerprint or a snippet of DNA. A serial rapist who used a favorite knife in one jurisdiction might use the same knife in another jurisdiction. When local investigators suspected that a serial criminal was at work, they would load as many of the crime’s details as possible into the ViCAP database. FBI analysts would then comb through the files of cold cases, hoping to find a match. At its best, the system would connect two agencies together, allowing them to share details as they hunted for the same criminal.
Dawn Tollakson, a crime analyst from Aurora, had already entered details from the three rapes in Colorado into the database. Back in Quantico, analysts had compared Tollakson’s reports to thousands of others in the ViCAP database. Now, Grusing held the results: the analysts had found a hit. The Colorado attacker appeared to share many characteristics with a rapist who had terrorized University of Kansas students for almost a decade. He had raped or attacked thirteen young women between 2000 and 2008.
The women had described the attacker as a white male, approximately twenty-six to thirty-five years of age. He was from five feet nine to six feet tall. He attacked in the early morning. He would straddle the women in bed. He used bindings to tie their hands. He dressed in dark clothes. He wore a black mask and gloves. He brandished a handgun.
During the attack, his commands were short and direct. He spoke calmly. He would assault the women orally, vaginally, and anally. He carried a bag with him that contained lubrication and a video camera that he used to film the rapes. Afterward, he would have them shower to remove any evidence from their bodies. He told them to wait twenty minutes before leaving the bathroom.
He attacked his first victim on October 1, 2000. She woke to find him standing in her room. She lunged to hit a panic button, but he pointed a gun at her head and told her to stop. Apparently spooked, he left without raping the woman. As he turned to go, he gave her a warning: “Do me a favor and lock your door next time.”
On July 14, 2004, he raped a woman who woke to find him staring at her from the foot of her bed. “I have a gun, don’t say anything or I will kill you,” he told her. He carried a black bag that contained K-Y Jelly. After he finished, he ordered her into the bathroom. He forced her to brush her teeth.
The last woman was assaulted while her roommate was away on Thanksgiving break. It was more violent than any of the previous rapes. The rapist punched the woman in the face. He shoved a sock in her mouth so she could not scream. He raped her several times. The woman could provide no description of the man. She had been too terrified to open her eyes.
After the final attack, in December 2008, the man had disappeared. Now Grusing raised the question: Had he resurfaced, ten months later, in Aurora, Colorado?
Grusing believed that he had.
“He had warmed up to this level of proficiency. Like someone playing basketball or baseball, you can tell when they’ve been around and they’ve handled the ball before,” Grusing says.
“We thought this was our guy.”
IN TURNING TO ViCAP, the detectives were betting on one of the FBI’s most forgotten programs.
Pierce Brooks was the father of ViCAP. A legendary cop, he had a square jaw, high forehead, and dead-serious eyes. During twenty years with the Los Angeles Police Department, he helped send ten men to death row. He served as technical adviser to Jack Webb, who played the fictional Sergeant Joe Friday character in Dragnet. And he became famous for tracking down a pair of cop killers, a hunt chronicled in Joseph Wambaugh’s 1973 nonfiction best seller, The Onion Field. “Brooks’s imagination was admired, but his thoroughness was legend,” Wambaugh wrote.
In the late 1950s, Brooks was investigating two murder cases. In each, a female model had been raped, slain, and then trussed in rope in a manner that suggested skill with binding. Brooks intuited that the killer might commit other murders. For the next year, he leafed through out-of-town newspapers at a local library. When he read a story about a man arrested while trying to use rope to kidnap a woman, Brooks put the cases together. The man, Harvey Glatman, was sentenced to death, and executed a year later.
The experience convinced Brooks that serial killers often had “signatures”—distinct ways of acting that could help identify them. An early adopter of data-driven policing, Brooks realized that a computer database could be populated with details of unsolved murder cases from across the country, then searched for behavioral matches.
After Brooks had spent years lobbying for such a system, Congress took interest. In July 1983, Brooks told a rapt Senate Judiciary Committee audience about serial killer Ted Bundy, who confessed to killing thirty women in seven states. The ViCAP system could have prevented many of those deaths, he said. “ViCAP, when implemented, would preclude the age-old, but still continuing problem of critically important information being missed, overlooked, or delayed when several police agencies, hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, are involved,” Brooks told the lawmakers. By the end of the hearing, Brooks had a letter from the committee that would result in $1 million for the program.
The agency used the money to purchase what was then called the “Cadillac of computers”—an AVAX 11/985 nicknamed the “Superstar.” It had 512 kilobytes of memory. The revolutionary computer system took up most of the room in a bomb shelter two floors beneath the cafeteria of the FBI’s national academy in Quantico, Virginia. Also housed in the basement was another novel program: the Behavioral Analysis Unit, the profilers who would one day be made famous by Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs. At the time, rank-and-file FBI agents saw the unproven unit and its ViCAP computer program as a kind of skunk works. They referred to the oddball collection of psychologists, cops, and administrators as “rejects of the FBI” or the “leper colony.” The basement was a dark, moldy warren of desks, bookcases, and file cabinets. “We were ten times deeper than dead people, down there,” one agent later recalled.
An FBI agent named Art Meister modified the ViCAP system to hunt serial rapists. To Meister, a former Connecticut state trooper with dark curly hair and glasses, the upgrade only made sense. Research had shown that rapists were far more likely than murderers to be serial offenders. Studies had found that between one-fourth to two-thirds of rapists committed multiple sexual assaults. Only about 1 percent of murderers were considered serial killers.
By the time of the Colorado rapes, ViCAP had amassed an enormous collection of violent and bizarre crimes—enough so that researchers once requested access to the database for an academic paper on cannibalism. (Meister turned them down.) But the program was eking along, a pale, unwanted child that had relocated from the FBI academy’s basement into a mini-mall off a two-lane highway in rural Virginia. It was chronically underfunded. The database itself was hard to use—a detective had to fill in ninety-five separate fields of information to input a case. It generated lots of noise: Cops disparaged it for creating a never-ending supply of bad tips. Most significantly, ViCAP had been surpassed by CODIS, the FBI’s DNA-matching system. ViCAP’s behavioral linkages could never equal the scientific certainty of a genetic match. And CODIS’s record of success was indisputable. It had linked up more than 346,000 crimes over the years. A 1990s review found that ViCAP could claim credit for linking thirty-three crimes in twelve years.
The result was that ViCAP was rarely used. Only about fourteen hundred police agencies out of roughly eighteen thousand in the United States entered information into the database. It contained far less than 1 percent of the rapes and murders committed each year. The database was a tragically unfulfilled promise. Only about half of rape cases involved DNA. For the other half, where a serial rapist might wear a certain mask, or speak in a peculiar way, or tie a particular binding knot, ViCAP was the best, and only, nationwide tool to help in the hunt. “The need is vital,” said Ritchie Martinez, the former president of the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts. “But ViCAP is not filling it.”
HENDERSHOT WAS NO computer expert. But she knew that data could help find a criminal as surely as a snippet of DNA. As Galbraith and Grusing chased the Kansas connection, she turned to a far more local resource: her department’s own crime analyst, Laura Carroll.
Like Ellis, the crime scene investigator, Carroll was one of Hendershot’s favorites at the Westminster Police Department. Carroll had stumbled into the profession. She began college wanting to be a teacher, but ended with a degree in criminology. Being in law enforcement just seemed—well, more interesting. “It’s catching the bad guys, being part of the process in order to do good,” she’d explain. She wasn’t keen on running around in the streets with a gun. That seemed dangerous. So her first jobs were clerical: in police records in nearby Arvada, then as a clerk at Westminster’s municipal courts. The work itself wasn’t exciting, but she liked feeling like a part of something bigger.
Then, she discovered her true talent. She got a job working in the traffic division of the Westminster Police Department, which required her to take courses in mapping and analytical software. She became a crime analyst, studying long rows of data and computerized maps. She alerted the cops to dangerous intersections, or streets where drivers were ignoring speed limits. She had become part of the crime-fighting team. She loved it.
It was a lonely job, though. Most smaller departments didn’t have a crime analyst. Even a large department might have only two or three. Carroll realized it was critical to network with analysts at other agencies, so she began going to monthly meetings of the Colorado Crime Analysis Association. It was a simple affair: a bunch of analysts, most of them women, gathering together in spare conference rooms at different agencies to review cases and data patterns. But the conversations were a revelation. Data combined with collaboration was a powerful tool, she thought. “As analysts, we really try to communicate and work together,” Carroll says. “Crime has no borders.” She eventually became president of the association.
Hendershot had first contacted Carroll to hunt down possible suspects in Sarah’s rape, based on Amber’s description of the egg-shaped mark on her rapist. Hendershot figured it might be a tattoo—and she knew that Carroll had access to every tattoo on every criminal who had passed through Westminster’s jail. After an arrest, cops would detail each suspect’s tattoos—their size, shape, color, position on the body—and enter the information into a database. Carroll found thirty-two guys inked with a collective 124 tattoos on their legs. Two had leg tats that weren’t exactly egg-shaped but were close enough for Carroll to pull more reports. One of the guys didn’t match the physical description. The other was in prison at the time of Sarah’s rape. “Where do we go from here?” Carroll wondered.
A week later, her answer arrived. At the crime analyst association’s regular monthly meeting, she laid out the details of the rapist’s attacks. Did it sound familiar to anybody? An analyst from nearby Lakewood remembered a burglary call. A man had broken into a woman’s house while she was sleeping. He had worn a black mask. The woman managed to escape and the man fled. Worth looking into, she thought.
When Carroll got the report the next morning, she knew she was on the right track. Lakewood detectives had actually classified the incident as an attempted burglary and an attempted sexual assault. Their investigation had not turned up much. But Lakewood’s crime scene investigator did find footprints and glove prints.
When Carroll showed Hendershot the report, the detective was intrigued. There had been a footprint in the snow outside Amber’s apartment in Golden. Hendershot sent a message to Ellis. Could she contact her counterpart at Lakewood and compare the prints?
That afternoon, Ellis was eating lunch at her desk in the crime lab when she got an email from the Lakewood criminalist, an old friend. As the images of the glove prints and shoe prints filled her screen, she jumped up from her seat. She couldn’t believe it. She ran toward Hendershot’s cubicle. “Where’s Ed? Where’s Ed?” she shouted. Told that she was at a meeting, Ellis shot Hendershot a text message. It was urgent.
“Call me. 911.”
* Pseudonym