Linking cases to a common killer often can be less about tracing who’s doing the killing and more about who’s being killed and how. That’s victimology, the study of the victims. If you’re trying to figure whether certain clusters of killings are committed by the same person, there’s more to it than matching lab tests, physical evidence, and hoping someone confesses to multiple murders.
“It’s their lifestyle, their personal characteristics.”
When I interview Catherine DeVane, she tells me victimology encompasses a myriad of components of a crime victim’s life—and death.
“Do they spend time on the internet, social media? Do they read a lot? What do they read? Are they drug users? Do they trade prostitution for transportation or for drugs? What day of the week were they killed? What time of day? Did they have the same hair color? What was the age range in that cluster? Were their bodies disposed of in water, in a ditch, in the forest? Clothes on or clothes off—which clothes? Evidence of recent sex or not? Mutilation or strangulation?”
She says, “We want to look at the day of the week, the time of the day when they were disposed of, were they disposed of in water, were they all redheads, were they all a particular age range, so when you’re talking about that victimology—it’s about the victim. Let’s talk about where they go, what they do, what they look like, the people they surround themselves with.”
Catherine wants to know.
She explains that her work isn’t any different than the work of any of the other analysts in ViCAP, but she is the team lead for the initiative focused on specific kinds of cases within that system, the HSK cases. While all the analysts have their assigned regions and work with local, state, federal, and tribal agencies, Catherine’s specialty is the Highway Serial Killings Initiative. The HSK looks at specific murders in that ViCAP database that point to the highways.
Catherine grabs my attention with something I know little about, so I fire questions at her until she can’t or won’t answer any more. I start by asking her when the FBI realized it needed to do something about highway murders.
“We were aware of the initiative all the way back to 1993 when individuals started coming up along the highway.” After 9/11 happened, that project got set aside, and the FBI started focusing on terrorism. “That’s not to say that we forgot about those types of violations; it’s just that the focus was redirected. It regained interest with the analysts within ViCAP in 2003.” It really took off in 2004, she says, when they identified, with their state partners, a series of cases that came up along the I-40 corridor. “So we’re looking at these cases and asking, ‘What are we looking at?’ We have victims being recovered along our major interstate systems and the state highways.”
When the FBI analysts started taking a closer look at the cases, they recognized there were some common aspects that might mean certain murders were linked.
“We were able to identify the commonalities based on dump site of the body, the victimology, the characteristics surrounding what was going on with that victim—the types of weapons, the types of bindings, so that’s what we started looking at with this initiative. Are we looking at one offender? Are we looking at multiple offenders? What type of offenders are we looking at? Are these individuals who specifically travel the highways? Are they individuals who are from that particular area and it just seems that they went to the highway and decided to leave a body, or just decided as they were passing through that this was a great place to leave a body because it was in the dark of night?”
Catherine tells me there are now over 850 cases in the database that have been submitted by state and local agencies. That doesn’t mean all those cases are linked to the same individual. Some of them are solved; a lot of them are still unsolved. The key is getting police agencies to enter their homicides into the ViCAP system. That’s easier said than done. Catherine works hard to make agencies more aware of the magic the database can do if they give it a chance. That’s why she’s agreed to speak with me.
“We look for platforms,” she says, “where we can speak to a large audience. We hold conferences, which are the Highway Initiative conferences. We’ve partnered with the behavioral analysis conference. We offer four days of free training to our law enforcement agencies to get them familiar with the types of violations we’re looking at.”
Catherine and her team do whatever they can to not only find the cases that could be missing pieces of the larger puzzle, but also make it easier for agencies to share the pieces they have. The team might read about cases in a newspaper article or in NLETS messages. When that happens, they reach out to that police department and offer their assistance at no cost.
So what qualifies a case for entry into the HSK Initiative—is it mere proximity to a highway or a roadway?
“The kinds of cases we take into the initiative, we’re focusing on victims recovered along the major highways, whether it’s a truck stop, a rest stop, a culvert. It could be a stranded motorist, a hitchhiker, a prostitute who is working those areas, and if law enforcement has identified a long-haul truck driver for one of these cases—those are included into this. Because those are the types of individuals that cross our U.S. states at a given moment. They could be in Virginia this morning and then be down in Texas by the afternoon. So we are not looking for just the unsolved; we are also looking for your solved cases. Because if an agency has identified an individual who’s responsible for something that has some really unusual behavior, and law enforcement believes that this is not his only crime, that he may have other victims out there, we want those cases as well, because we’re able to look at the various components of that case and take a look, and compare those against other cases we have in the system. Now we develop timelines on those individuals that can help us put an individual in a certain location at a given time. That’s what we’re looking at.”
Catherine reminds me that infamous serial killer Ted Bundy traveled the highways—but he wasn’t involved in the long-haul trucking industry. A highway connection isn’t enough to get the HSK team engaged. The big rig is what makes the difference.
“And we didn’t set up this initiative to focus on truck drivers; it just so happens that the suspects and the offenders—and I say suspects and offenders, they’re a suspect until law enforcement has proven that they were responsible for that crime. So those individuals we see are tied to traveling the highway with a long-haul truck.”
I ask Catherine if she, like the OSBI’s Terri Turner, ever reaches out to the trucking community to help solve some of these crimes. Her answer is a resounding yes.
“One of our resources is the trucking industry. We have a point of contact that we can help send out some of our publicly released ViCAP alerts. It’s a bulletin that we put together seeking information on a missing individual or the circumstances under which that individual went missing, or it could be unidentified remains. So if it’s something we can publicly release, we’ve got a point of contact with someone who can send that out to all the truck stops nationwide that are out there.
“We also partner with some of the other organizations that are dealing with highways. I just had the opportunity to speak with the National Domestic Highway Enforcement Initiative. That was a wonderful platform to get that information out there to law enforcement that’s not aware that this is there. There’s a lot of challenges that go with this. The long-haul truck drivers are miles away before a body can be recovered. And at times, what’s left behind? A body. There’s no evidence, there’s no witness, because if they do it in the dark of night where there’s no traffic, it’s a challenge for law enforcement. So we have to tap into all of the individuals who are dealing with this type of crime and the resources that can provide us with what we need to put the pieces of the puzzle together.”
The differences and similarities among both the victims and the offenders are critical to connecting the dots across cases. I ask Catherine about those characteristics.
“The victims—some of the similarities we’re seeing is their high-risk lifestyle. We’re looking at a lot of prostitutes, but we’re also looking at those victims who were just random. We’ve got individuals who were identified based on their MO because they wanted to kill someone; they didn’t want to have sex with them—they just wanted to kill someone. So they went through the neighborhoods looking for unlocked doors or windows. The other type of offender we’re looking for wanted to control life and death. They wanted to sexually assault them, they wanted to mutilate the bodies, they wanted to do whatever they could because with that individual, they are controlling the outcome of whatever is going on, they feel power.
“Now, we, as the analysts, aren’t looking at why the individual did it; we partner with our profilers—they’re the ones that look at why this individual did it, we’re looking at where else did he do it? So we have a collaboration when we’re working on these types of cases, with the behavioral analysis profilers.”
I’m intrigued by what might prompt the inclusion of an FBI profiler in a particular case. Catherine explains it to me.
“When we decide to bring in a behavioral analysis profiler, it’s because we, as the analysts, feel like there’s something else going on here—we’ve got a series, we need to identify an individual, and we believe that’s a resource our law enforcement partner needs to have fresh eyes. So if we’ve got an investigation that’s gone cold on them, and we need a new set of eyes, a new perspective, what type of individual are we looking for that would have committed this series of crimes, then we involve them. If the investigating agency has made that plea right at the front, and said, you know we’d like a profiler on this—we’ve looked at it, we’ve had multiple eyes on this case, we don’t know what kind of individual we’re looking at, so we want some type of feedback from the behavioral analysis folks.
“To say, okay, here’s what we’re looking at as far as victimology, as far as where the body was dumped, there’s a lot of things that go into play when the profilers are looking at a case. The entire case file has to come to their office and then we all sit down and take a look at everything that was done, interviews that were done, and then we start talking about where we go from here. So bringing in our behavioral analysis profilers is something that can be done from the law enforcement side or from the analyst side.”
When I ask Catherine how she measures success and if the HSK solves cases, she doesn’t hesitate to answer.
“Yes, our ViCAP analysts have assisted with hundreds of cases in this HSK Initiative. As recent as a couple of years ago. So, in 2013, one of the successes that we had, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigations [WDCI] entered a sexual-assault series that was going on in 2013. Two years later, in 2015, they submitted three more cases—these cases were linked by DNA. Now, at that time, in 2015, our analyst was requested to give analytical support to the WDCI, to see if we could help them identify an individual who was responsible for this sexual-assault series. Or if we could find additional cases that may link back to this.
“Our analyst did a search of the ViCAP national crime database and ended up finding another sexual assault that we believed was linked to those, and provided that as a lead to Wyoming. That case happened to be out of Riverdale, Utah. So that’s where this initiative and the ViCAP national database are an important tool to use when we are working on these violations. Submit them into a system and let that system work for you—we’ve got lots of eyes on there. So we submitted that lead to law enforcement. And we said, this is why we believe that this case is related. We looked at the characteristics surrounding the crime out of Riverdale and offered it as a lead. Three months after we did, Riverdale was able to link that case to the Wyoming series by DNA. In 2019, Mark Burns was identified through genetic genealogy as the offender in that series.
“Our work did not stop at that point. What we then did was continue our analytical support by doing a full workup on Mark Burns. Looking at a timeline to develop on him from the day he’s born to the day that he’s incarcerated to the day he dies. We want to be able to put that individual in a certain spot, any day of the week, at a certain time, and say, ‘Here’s his MO, his modus operandi.’ This is what this individual liked to do, here’s the victimology we’re looking at on this series, and then provide additional leads. Those timelines have come into play when law enforcement goes and interviews these individuals and they’re trying to identify additional leads on their investigation.” In 2020, Mark Douglas Burns was convicted and sentenced to 243 years in prison.
Catherine implores law enforcement to enter their cases into ViCAP. “It’s a very important program that we have. We specialize here at Quantico in these heinous crimes—I mean, these are some of the worst of the worst. And we’ve got small agencies out there that have never seen what we see on a daily basis. We read these cases every single day throughout the day. So we’re very familiar—all of our analysts in ViCAP are very familiar with our truck drivers. And something in a case will clue them in to say, ‘Let me take a look at this individual over here and see, was he driving through that state during that time, could he have been responsible for this?’ So let’s take a look at his biographical summary that we put together, all of the agencies that have had contact with him, everything that we know that he likes to do to those victims, let’s take a look at all of this, and say, ‘Okay, this is a good potential lead, now let’s offer this out to law enforcement and have them take a look at it.’”
I can hear it in her voice. Catherine genuinely wants to help. She wants police agencies across the country to show her what they have so the HSK might help connect the dots that point to the killers. It might take years to understand who did what to whom, but it will take even longer if no one analyzes the big picture.