The Most Evil?
Sadism, the enjoyment of another person’s suffering, is a relatively rare perversion. As Roy Hazelwood told Stephen Michaud, however, “. . . those who harbor it are the most dangerous of all aberrant offenders. They are the great white sharks of deviant crime.”
He was referring to Mike DeBardeleben, whose criminal career spanned eighteen years. When he was arrested on May 25, 1983, it was not for murder or rape—although in both these fields he was a repeat offender—but passing counterfeit bills.
By 1980, one of the Secret Service’s serious headaches was a counterfeiter agents called the “Mall Passer,” who they had been trying to find for three years. The Mall Passer unloaded fake $20 bills in shopping malls all over the country by handing them over in exchange for small items, such as cigarettes and men’s socks, and taking the change. He obviously drove far and wide; in one year, he traveled to thirty-eight states and unloaded as much as $30,000 in fake bills. It was the task of the hunters, led by Secret Service agents Greg Mertz, Dennis Foos, and Mike Stephens, to try to discern some kind of pattern in his crimes and lay a trap. The number of fake bills passed in the Washington D.C. and northern Virginia area suggested that this might be where he lived.
Police artist drew up sketches of the Mall Passer based on the descriptions of store clerks who had seen him, and these were passed to every mall he had ever visited. In the late afternoon of Thursday, April 25, 1983, staff of the Eastridge Mall in Gastonia, North Carolina, was on the lookout for the Mall Passer, since a local FBI agent had worked out that this might well be his target that month.
When a customer offered a $20 bill in payment for a paperback book, the clerk thought he recognized the wanted man, and noted that the $20 bill did not seem genuine. At the first opportunity he called the security guard, only to discover that his cell phone was out of order. But the Mall Passer had now moved on to other stores, where he continued to pass counterfeit bills. Finally, the Mall Passer—a thin, dark-haired man with a tight, straight mouth—was followed to his car. Some sixth sense must have told the fugitive that he was being observed, for one clerk noticed that he was so nervous that he was shaking. The police arrived shortly after he had driven away.
A month later, on May 25, the Passer was recognized by a bookstore clerk in West Knoxville, Tennessee, who dialed the police. The man had realized he was being tailed, and broke into a run, with two agents after him, when he found himself confronted by two policemen who had been summoned by radio.
But the thin, tight-lipped man was uncooperative with the police, even though he knew that they had found more phony bills and stolen license plates in his car, as well as a large quantity of pornography.
His wallet identified him as Roger Collin Blanchard, but his car was registered to a James R. Jones of Alexandria, Virginia. Fingerprint identification, however, revealed him to be James Mitchell DeBardeleben II, known as “Mike,” and that in 1976 he had spent two years in jail for passing dud $100 bills.
In his apartment, investigators discovered a Yellow Pages directory with a tiny slip of paper slipped between the pages listing storage facilities. And a visit to the one nearest his home uncovered a storeroom full of the kind of items that indicated a car thief, and someone who posed as a policeman—a police badge, bubble lights, handcuffs, and a siren. And together with more pornography, they found dozens of photographs of women in various stages of undress, many looking terrified and battered. There could be little doubt that these latter were not posed by models—a bag containing bloodied panties, a chain, handcuffs, a dildo, and a lubricant suggested why the women looked so terrified. There were also tapes that made it clear that DeBardeleben enjoyed having women at his mercy—and forcing them to say that they were enjoying the rapes and tortures he was inflicting on them.
In his study of DeBardeleben, Lethal Shadow, Stephen Michaud remarks that investigators concluded that he was “the most dangerous felon ever at large in America.” Michaud also comments: “For Mike DeBardeleben, possession meant a live victim, suffering under his control.” “There is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her,” DeBardeleben wrote in his private journal. “To force her to undergo suffering without her being able to defend herself. The pleasure in the constant domination over another person is the very essence of the sadistic drive.”
The problems with chronicling DeBardeleben’s criminal career were, as Michaud soon discovered, enormous. Even with the help of Roy Hazelwood, who had collected all of the evidence that figured in DeBardeleben’s trials (no less than six), and which finally sent him to prison for 365 years, there was no possibility of constructing a timeline of DeBardeleben’s criminal activities. He had covered his trail far too well. Ted Bundy—about whom Michaud also wrote a book—continued to deny his guilt until his death sentence produced a state of desperation in which he was willing to bargain for time with confessions dribbled out piecemeal. DeBardeleben was never under this pressure, and so had no motivation to tell the whole truth. Michaud, like the police investigators, had to work backwards, telling the story in reverse order. For practical purposes, this began with DeBardeleben’s release from prison in May 1978, where he had spent two years for passing counterfeit bills.
In the early hours of Sunday, September 4, 1978, DeBardeleben passed a nineteen-year-old nurse (whom Michaud calls “Lucy Alexander”) who had quarreled with her boyfriend and was walking towards her home. He politely asked if he could help. She climbed into his luxury car. Minutes later he produced a police badge and told her she was under arrest for hitchhiking. He snapped handcuffs on her wrists, and gagged and blindfolded her with adhesive tape. Two hours later they stopped at a house and he took her indoors. On a mattress on the floor he undressed her, leaving the blindfold in place, and then raped her for an hour without reaching a climax. He then sodomized her, ordering her to call him “Daddy.” After a sleep, he drank root beer, smoked a cigarette, and forced her to fellate him. As she did this he abused her verbally—obviously an integral part of the pleasure of the rape.
In lulls between further rapes, he told her about his former wife; “all she did was spend money.” During the next eighteen hours she was raped four times vaginally and anally. Finally, he allowed her to dress, drove her to an isolated area, and released her.
On the afternoon of February 4, 1979, DeBardeleben went into the trailer sales office of a real estate company, and told the realtor, thirty-one-year-old Elizabeth Mason (again a pseudonym), that he was a federal employee about to be transferred to Arlington, Virginia, and was looking for a home for himself and his wife. He asked her to take him to see some houses in the $100,000 range. Finally, in an empty house, he pointed a .389 automatic at her. Recalling an article she had read by the TV hostess Carol Burnett, she decided to scream and yell and flail at him.
He tried to shoot her, but the gun jammed. He then began hitting her with the gun. Eventually, declaring that he only wanted her purse and that he would then leave, he got her to agree to being tied up. This proved to be a mistake; when she was tied, he throttled her, banging her head on the floor and shouting, “Pass out, bitch.” Finally she did.
When she woke up, her slacks had been removed, and the man had taken her car. She was in such a state of trauma that it was two days before a detective could question her. Her head required thirty-one stitches. It was not until she was in the hospital that she realized that her sanitary pad was still in place and that she had not been raped.
On June 1, 1979, a twenty-year-old woman (Michaud calls her “Laurie Jensen”) was on her way home toward midnight from the convenience store she managed when a sedan pulled up and the driver said, “Police,” and ordered her into the car. Then he told her she was suspected of being an accomplice in a burglary.
Soon he abandoned the pretense, and handcuffed, blindfolded, and gagged her. A two-hour drive followed, which ended when he made her walk into a house. There he undressed her and ordered her to perform oral sex. She noticed the small size of his penis. After achieving an erection with difficulty he sodomized her, ordering her to call him “Daddy” as he did so.
That afternoon he made her pose for photographs, tape-recorded her as she was forced to tell him how much she enjoyed what he was doing to her, and then locked her in a closet. He told her that he was resentful about a previous wife and wanted “to get back at all women.” After keeping her for twenty-four hours, with more sodomy and oral sex, he drove her to within a few blocks of her home.
Frustrated investigators consulted the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, and it was John Douglas who profiled the rapist. What he said was to prove remarkably accurate when DeBardeleben was finally arrested. Douglas said that a man who did this kind of thing was raised by an overbearing, domineering mother, and had a passive father. He had probably been arrested in his teens, had been in the military, but would have such problems adjusting to discipline that he would probably have been discharged. He would also be sexually inadequate.
DeBardeleben’s next attempt at abduction showed how his hatred of women could explode if he was resisted. On November 1, 1980, a twenty-five-year-old named Diane Overton was pulled over at 4 a.m. by a man who claimed to be a policeman. He ordered her out of the car, and when she opened the door, snapped handcuffs on her wrists. When he put his hand over her mouth she bit him hard. She then began screaming and honking her horn. But in spite of being in the middle of a residential district, no one responded. He dragged her into his car, but she stalled it by kicking it out of gear. Then she managed to open the door and fell out. The open door hit a cement wall and jammed. He managed to get it free and drove at her; she twisted out of the way, but he turned at a closed gas station and drove at her again. She succeeded in escaping by hiding under a concrete stairway, until her attacker finally drove off. She was lucky to escape; in his fury, DeBardeleben would undoubtedly have tortured as well as killed her.
Ten days after this attempted kidnapping, he went into a clothing store in southern New Jersey and abducted the clerk, an Italian-American Michaud calls “Maria Santini.” In the car, she was ordered to crouch with her head on the seat. In his home he undressed her and tied her up with rope, explaining that he was “into bondage.” He then told her he was a transvestite, and proved it by disappearing into the next room and returning wearing a miniskirt and high heels. After taking photographs of her in various poses that he arranged, he moved her into the bedroom and took more bondage photographs, explaining that his method was known as a “Chinese hog-tie.” Then, after lying beside her, kissing her breasts, and fondling her vagina, he allowed her to dress, even giving her the sweaty turtleneck he had been wearing to replace a blouse he had cut off her. After that he drove her to some woods and left her.
These were just a few of the crimes DeBardeleben committed between May 1978 and his arrest as the Mall Passer.
After DeBardeleben’s capture, investigators—still unaware that he was more than a skillful counterfeiter—began checking his background. Born in 1940, he was first arrested at age sixteen was for carrying a concealed weapon. He had subsequently been arrested on charges of sodomy, murder, and attempted kidnapping. But he had been in prison only twice, once for a parole violation and once for counterfeiting. A large part of the material seized in his storage facility consisted of handwritten pages in which he spoke about himself and his plans at length—one document described his long-term ambition to buy himself a house in a remote spot, where he was not overlooked by neighbors, and turn it into a place where he could bring captive women and make them obey his every whim.
Incredibly, it looked as if the authorities might be willing to forget all of his criminal activities except passing dud bills. The reason, simply, was that following up his criminal career looked as if it was likely to be a long and costly exercise. The Secret Service’s responsibilities began and ended with the counterfeiting case. Agent Jane Vezeris, in overall charge of the investigation, was outraged by the idea, and went to see her boss, Acting Assistant Director Joe Carlon. She took with her a tape in which DeBardeleben could be heard making various sadistic demands, while his victim screams in anguish.
By chance, the director of the Secret Service, John R. Simpson, dropped in during the meeting, and heard the tape. When it was over, Simpson told Carlon, “Give them whatever they want,” and left.
The first step agents Foos and Mertz took was to dispatch a Teletype about DeBardeleben’s arrest to all field offices. Soon they had a break. Agent Harold Bibb, of Shreveport, Louisiana, thought he recognized the photograph of DeBardeleben, and after staring at it for a quarter of an hour, recalled that it resembled an artist’s impression of a man who was wanted for the murder of a real estate agent, Jean McPhaul, in 1982. The man had asked her to show him properties in Bossier City; he called himself “Dr. Zack.” On April 27, the attractive forty-year-old had left her office in the morning, and when she failed to return, colleagues went looking for her. They found her in an attic, suspended by the throat from a rafter, drenched in blood from two knife wounds.
The killing seemed motiveless—she had been neither raped nor robbed.
Moreover, the investigators heard of another murder of a realtor dating back to 1971 in Barrington, Rhode Island; she was fifty-two-year-old Edna (“Terry”) Macdonald, and had set out for an evening appointment with a customer who called himself Peter Morgan, and failed to return. She was found in a basement, a cord around her neck and tied to an overhead pipe. She had been strangled, and again, rape and robbery were ruled out as motives. The description of Peter Morgan sounded like DeBardeleben.
Enquiries about DeBardeleben went on pouring in from all over the country—Mertz and Foos were astonished at the sheer volume of unsolved murders—and one of these indicated another level of DeBardeleben’s criminal activities: a kidnapping for ransom. On April 13, 1983, David Starr, manager of the Columbia Savings Bank in Greece, near Rochester, New York, had taken his sick housemate, Joe Rapini, to the hospital. On arriving home, they were held at gunpoint by a ski-masked intruder, who proposed to take Rapini hostage in his own car while Starr went to his bank and collected $70,000. When the money was paid, Rapini would be left in the trunk of the car. Starr was able to collected only $37,900, which he left near a burnt-out house. Twice Starr saw a woman driving a small white car, and it appeared later that she was the accomplice who collected the ransom. But when Rapini was found in the trunk of his car later that day, he had been shot through the heart, as well as beaten about the head and face.
DeBardeleben’s writings had indicated an interest in banks. And a teller at the Columbia Savings Bank recognized a photograph of him as a man who had been hanging around there.
The next task was to try to identify photographs of forty women among DeBardeleben’s seized possessions, whose positions and expressions suggested that they had been victims of the same kind of sexual violence as rape victims Lucy Alexander, Elizabeth Mason, and Laurie Jensen. The identity of most of them would remain unknown, as did the question of how many of them survived their ordeals. One or two were identified by one of DeBardeleben’s former wives as women who had worked for a nude modeling photographic studio he had run in 1972. Others were obviously in a state of terror, a few looked drugged, and others dead. The only thing that was absolutely clear was that DeBardeleben had spent much of his life raping, torturing, and terrifying women.
The reason for this hatred of women emerged when investigators spoke to his previous wives. The root of the trouble was his mother Mary Lou (whom he called Moe). Theirs was the classic Freudian love-hate relationship. When she had met DeBardeleben’s father (also called Mike) in the early 1930s, he was a serious-minded young engineer; she was a pretty, bubbly legal secretary who loved to party. Her own mother had died giving birth to her, and she had been adopted (twice) but never felt loved. So she had little love to give her children. When stressed she tended to drink, and so soon lost her hourglass figure. She was undoubtedly responsible for turning her son into a sociopath, and the investigators came to believe that he had murdered realtor Terry Macdonald because she resembled his mother. He grew up narcissistic, cruel, and demanding—an archetypal Right Man.
His father also seems to have had some Right Man tendencies, in that he was strict and bad-tempered, and “made everyone miserable” according to his daughter Beal. “His wife and children were made to feel inadequate,” and Mike was frequently punished, on one occasion by having his head held under water. Parents like these can be almost guaranteed to turn a strong-willed son into a sociopath.
By the time he was sixteen his mother had become a drunk, and his “physical assaults on her were routine.” His first police mug shot—on a careless driving charge—shows him wearing a leather jacket, dark glasses, and a bored sneer. Soon after that he was expelled from high school.
He was in the air force for a brief period, but was court-martialed for disorderly behavior, and a psychiatrist described him as “a verbose young man of superior intelligence who gave an extensive history of repetitive acts of an egocentric and antisocial nature.” He was soon discharged. He went back to high school and was soon expelled again. An attempt to rob a service station led to him firing at the attendant and then fleeing empty-handed. He was sentenced to five years’ probation. By this time his first marriage—to a girl called Linda—was also over. He soon married again—a pretty schoolgirl—–but this also broke up. By now, his parents were terrified of him. And his younger brother, Ralph, whose upbringing had been equally loveless and equally traumatic, committed suicide. After he threatened his mother with a hatchet, his parents had him committed to a mental hospital, where he spent six weeks.
He forced his third wife, a pretty beautician named Faye, to pose for pornographic photographs, including bondage. He also pressured her to become his partner in crime. Her job was to locate lonely elderly women. DeBardeleben would then call a target, claiming to be a “Federal Bank Examiner,” explain that her account was being tampered with, and that in order to help him catch the culprit, she had to withdraw money from her account; when she did this, the “Examiner” would arrive at her house with a briefcase and dark suit, and convince her that he had to take the money away, but that it would be returned shortly. Faye estimated that the husband-and-wife team did this about thirty times and took around $1,200 on each occasion—although on one occasion it was as high as $3,500.
His next moneymaking scheme involved the crimes of kidnapping and extortion, using the same basic scheme as in the extortion that had ended in the murder of the bank manager’s male partner. This brought $60,000. Soon after this incident, Faye learned she was pregnant, refused his demand that she have an abortion, and left him.
His fourth wife was another pretty schoolgirl named Caryn, and the marriage began auspiciously when he returned to college (he was now thirty) and took courses in philosophy, history, and government. But soon he was treating her as he treated Faye, and forcing her to become his accomplice in another extortion—a bank manager’s wife was held at pistol point and made to telephone her husband and tell him she would be killed unless he delivered $60,000 to a pickup point. In fact, he was able to raise only half this sum, which Caryn retrieved.
Under the stress of being married to DeBardeleben, acting as his accomplice in crimes, and taking part in strange sexual games that involved bondage and beatings, Caryn developed acute nervous problems, including multiple personality disorder (which usually develops as an attempt to escape an intolerable reality). And, eventually, Caryn did something that Right Men hate and fear more than anything else: she left him, and so became the object of an almost insane hatred. She, it seems, was the wife he was punishing vicariously when he kidnapped and raped women such as Laurie Jensen, Elizabeth Mason, and Maria Santini.
Eventually, investigators would discover at least one occasion when this hatred led to murder. On April 27, 1983, in Beaumont, Texas, Rhoda Piazza, a twenty-two-year-old topless dancer, was seen with a tall white male in a club called The Foxy Lady. Two days later, her naked body, raped, sodomized, and brutally beaten, was found beside a country road. Investigators connected DeBardeleben to this murder because among the many stolen license plates found in his storage unit was one from Beaumont, Texas, stolen just before the dancer disappeared; he had been passing counterfeit bills in a nearby town soon after. Marks on the body showed that she had been suspended in a harness and then lashed, beaten, and tortured with cigarette burns. The position of one burn suggested it had been made while she was being anally raped.
The two detectives who had traveled from Texas to Virginia to interview him only met with frustration. As soon as they identified themselves as being from Beaumont, Texas, DeBardeleben stood up and walked out of the interview room. The inference seems to be that he had no desire to discuss Beaumont, Texas.
Roy Hazelwood, who was asked to survey the sexual materials seized from the storage facility—photographs, audiotapes, sheaves of notes and diary entries—concluded that DeBardeleben was the most self-documented sadist since the Marquis de Sade.
He also noted that DeBardeleben was a totally narcissistic egomaniac, and that his decision to act as his own defender—a typical decision for a narcissist—led to his downfall as much as any other factor. (As we have seen, Ted Bundy would have escaped execution if he had left the conduct of his trial to his lawyers.)
DeBardeleben’s major mistake came when he was cross-examining nineteen-year-old Lori Cobert, who had been pulled over by a “police officer” on February 5, 1981. The “officer” had made her fellate him before he let her go. In the courthouse at Manassas, Virginia, DeBardeleben took her through the crime in detail, so that spectators felt he was relishing it.
“During the incident in this man’s car, it was dark all the time, wasn’t it?”
“I could see.”
“The interior lights were not on, were they?”
“No.”
“And there were no overhead interior lights, were there?”
“No.”
“The only lights they had there were these little small ones next to the door at the bottom of the door, right?”
“Correct.”
Prosecutor Miliette would point out to the jury that DeBardeleben’s question revealed a knowledge of the car that indicated that it was his own. The panel required just thirty-eight minutes to convict.
But it was not simply mistakes like this that led to the guilty verdict. Everything about his presentation underlined an overblown ego and conviction of his own cleverness. At his sixth and final trial, for the abduction and rape of Laurie Jensen, he was sentenced to 60 years, bringing the total to 375.
In 1987, too late to help in the prosecution of DeBardeleben, law enforcement agencies gained a new tool with the introduction of genetic fingerprinting, discovered by the British scientist Dr. Alec Jeffreys in 1984. This was founded on the recognition that every cell in our bodies is as individual as a fingerprint, so that a rapist can be identified from his semen, a fragment of skin under the victim’s nails, or even by a hair root. There are stretches in the DNA molecule (three feet long) where the genetic code differs dramatically for each individual (except identical twins), and which is therefore a “fingerprint.” It was used in the United Kingdom in November 1987, to identify the rapist of a forty-five-year-old disabled woman in Bristol. After that, it was used to establish the culprit in a case where two schoolgirls had been raped and murdered. All males in a whole country area near Leicester were asked for blood samples. In fact, the rapist, a bakery worker named Colin Pitchfork, was not caught by his blood sample, but by his attempt to avoid giving it; he persuaded a friend to take the test for him, and the friend was overheard boasting about it. Pitchfork was questioned and confessed.
In Virginia at that time there was a far more brutal and dangerous rapist and killer. He took as much pleasure in raping and slowly strangling his victims, using a lubricant, as the Hillside Stranglers. Pettechial hemorrhages—small blood spots—under the eyelids revealed that he had tortured his victims with a tourniquet for up to an hour, repeatedly throttling them and then allowing them to breathe again.
The first victim had been thirty-five-year-old Debbie Davis, who was asleep when the rapist broke into her apartment in Richmond, Virginia, on September 19, 1987. Two weeks later, on October 3, thirty-two-year-old neurologist Dr. Susan Hellams was attacked in her bedroom, subjected to lengthy rape and torture with a tourniquet, and then strangled with a belt; her husband, a law student, found her bound body in a wardrobe in the bedroom.
On November 22, the killer moved twenty miles away, to the home of a fifteen-year-old Korean student, Diane Cho, where she lived in Chesterfield County with her family. Her death had not even been noticed for most of a day because the killer had climbed through her bedroom window when she was asleep—she had removed the screen—and gagged her with duct tape before subjecting her to the lengthy rape and strangulation. The rapes, both vaginal and anal, had been exceptionally brutal, tearing her flesh. Since Diane had been working late at night on some assignment, her parents and brother assumed that she was sleeping late, and did not investigate until mid-afternoon.
Police went to the home of forty-four-year-old Susan Tucker after a call from her husband, who was away in his native Wales and was unable to get an answer to his phone calls; she was a government employee, and they had no children. She was found facedown in the bedroom, naked except for a sleeping bag that covered her lower body; the rope around her wrist was also looped around her neck, so that any struggles would cause her to strangle herself. Semen was found on her nightdress, and two black pubic hairs. The contents of her handbag had been scattered on the floor, yet there was no sign that anything had been taken.
Detective Joe Horgas was reminded of a similar murder in Arlington three years earlier—that of thirty-two-year-old attorney Carolyn Hamm, who had also been raped and strangled. Strangulation was obviously a part of the killer’s obsession; he had looped a rope around Carolyn Hamm’s neck, taken it over a ceiling pipe, and tied it to the bumper of a car in the garage.
A suspect named David Vasquez, thirty-seven, had been arrested. Neighbors had noticed him hanging around her house on the two days preceding the murder. A search of his apartment revealed girly magazines of the Playboy sort, one containing a picture of a woman bound and gagged. He was not a highly intelligent individual, and the evidence suggested that he was a Peeping Tom who liked to take photographs while he was doing it. The semen evidence did not link him to the crime, but police theorized that he was one of two intruders. Under interrogation he confessed, and was confined to prison.
A blood test on the semen on Susan Tucker’s nightdress revealed that the blood was type O, as in the Hamm case; but since that was the most common type, this was of little help.
It was at this point that Horgas heard about the three rape-murders in nearby Richmond, and wondered if there was a connection. The MOs were very similar. He had also just learned about Alec Jeffreys’s discovery in England, and instantly saw that genetic fingerprinting might be his solution. The only laboratory in the United States that was performing DNA testing was Lifecodes of New York. And it was to them that the five semen samples were sent.
In 1987, the tests took about ten weeks. Meanwhile, Horgas learned of a series of rapes that had preceded the murders in Richmond. These had started early in 1983, but had then stopped. The probable reason, Horgas suspected, was that the rapist had been sent to prison. The first of three 1983 rapes had taken place in the Richmond suburb of Green Valley. Horgas reasoned that this was probably close to the rapist’s home, since a first rape is often committed where the rapist feels comfortable and knows his escape route.
Thousands of names of criminals were run through the computer. Then Horgas came upon a case with which he had been involved in the early 1980s—a young black burglar named Timothy Spencer, who had started his career with arson. Horgas had been to the home of Spencer’s mother to investigate a burglary in which Spencer—born 1962—was a possible suspect. And although Spencer had not been charged, Horgas had entered his name into the system.
Now Horgas realized that he had a hit. Spencer had gone to jail in January 1984 for burglary, and had been released to a halfway house in Richmond two weeks before the murder of Debbie Davis. When Horgas checked the dates Spencer had signed out of the halfway house, each was the date of a murder. And when Susan Tucker was murdered in Arlington in December 1987, Spencer had been allowed back to his home in Washington on furlough for Thanksgiving.
When the DNA test results came back from Lifecodes, they showed that the same person had committed all of the five rapes.
Spencer was picked up for questioning in January 1988. When authorities requested a blood sample, he asked: “What has blood got to do with rape?” But no one had mentioned rape.
His blood sample had the same genetic code as that of the Susan Tucker rapist, and he was charged with her murder.
The defense took the line that DNA fingerprinting was new and untested, and therefore unreliable. The prosecution replied that in that case, they would have to submit the evidence from the other rape-murder cases to prove their point. Understandably, the defense team dropped their objection.
Timothy Spencer was found guilty in July 1988 and sentenced to death; he was executed in the electric chair on April 27, 1994.
In due course, the efficiency of DNA testing improved until results came back in a matter of days rather than weeks. It also became possible to make copies of the DNA molecule, so that in cases where only a small quantity was available, an indefinite amount could be created. In the case of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer (see chapter 14) this was to prove crucial.
It also became possible to open up “cold cases” that had long ago been abandoned, so that most police departments created Cold Case teams to look into murders that might be several decades old.
The Virginia police files provide a striking example.
On July 25, 1980, forty-seven-year-old Dorothy White was found stabbed and raped in her trailer; her throat had also been slashed. But a careful search by the physical evidence recovery team failed to find any clues to her murder. Although unmarried, she had been for years in a stable relationship with a used-car salesman, who was eliminated from the enquiry. Dozens of possible suspects were interviewed, but none detained. Over the years the case went cold.
In 1999, nineteen years after the murder, the victim’s sister-in-law, Doris White, telephoned the local police department to ask whether they might try DNA fingerprinting. She spoke to Detective Sergeant Edgar Browning, who had worked on the case. Browning went back to the file for the original “perk” kit (physical evidence recovery) and sent off the swabs taken from Dorothy White to the laboratory for testing.
Immense strides had been taken in DNA testing since Timothy Spencer had been convicted ten years earlier. In those days, a fairly large quantity of semen was required—enough to cover a nickel. Now a spot almost invisible to the eye was sufficient, for it was possible to churn out copies by a method know as STR, or short tandem repeats (also known as PCR, polymerase chain reaction).
Since 1989, Virginia had also started to build a DNA fingerprint database, which now contained samples from 100,000 offenders.
Almost immediately, Browning had a match—a man named William Morrisette. He had, in fact, been among the suspects originally interviewed, for he did odd jobs for Dorothy White’s boyfriend, and occasionally mowed her lawn.
Morrisette was in the database because in 1985, he had approached a woman called Virginia Brown, who had been sitting in her car waiting for her daughter to come out of school. Morrisette had tried to gag her, and forced his way into the car, with the obvious intention of abducting and raping her; she had thrown her keys out of the car window. The approach of another car motivated him to run away. Arrested a few days later, he had been sentenced to eight years for attempted abduction. But it was not until after his release, when he was re-arrested for parole violation, that Browning had asked for a blood sample to enter into the database.
Morrisette was found guilty of Dorothy White’s murder on the DNA evidence and sentenced to death.
In 1993, I became involved—retrospectively—in the case of a man who may be the worst serial killer of all time. If sadistic killers are the great white sharks of deviant murder, then Donald (“Pee Wee”) Gaskins probably qualifies as its Jaws. Yet until 1992, a year after his execution, his name remained completely unknown to the public at large. This changed with the publication of Final Truth: The Autobiography of a Serial Killer, whose descriptions of his crimes were so horrific that when I first tried to read it, I gave it up after a few dozen pages.
In the summer of 1993, I was working as a contributing editor on a part-work called Murder in Mind. (A part-work is a magazine published in single issues, which the reader can collect and bind together in a series of folders.) I suggested Gaskins as the subject of an issue, but this soon ran into problems. Most of the photographs of Gaskins were the copyright of the author of Final Truth, Wilton Earle Hall, a South Carolina writer who wrote under the pen name Wilton Earle. He not only owned the photographs, but he also felt that, since he had “discovered” and researched the case, copyright on its details belonged to him. He had successfully sued one writer who had used his work.
When the publisher of Murder in Mind spoke to Earle on the telephone, he learned that he was an admirer of my books, and so asked me to ring him and see if I could persuade him to allow us to go ahead. Later that day I spoke to him from the publisher’s office, and immediately established a warm relationship that has lasted to the present time.
What he had to tell me was this:
Pee Wee Gaskins had come to Earle’s attention when he was under sentence of death in the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, for murdering a fellow prisoner. He had been sentenced originally for killing a number of “business associates,” people involved with him in a racket involving respraying and selling stolen cars. Earle wrote to ask him if he would like to collaborate on his autobiography. Gaskins invited Earle to visit him in prison, and in unsupervised conversations revealed that he was a sadistic killer who had often cooked and eaten parts of his victims—sometimes while they were still alive. And since he was scheduled for execution, Gaskins had decided to tell the whole story, which involved around 110 murders.
But listening to this recital of torture and murder proved more than Wilton Earle had bargained for.
In Whoever Fights Monsters, Ressler writes:
Nearly everyone in our unit fell victim to its situational stress. One woman profiler bailed out after a few years because the work was giving her nightmares. She found herself unable to deal rationally with cases in which someone broke into a house and raped a woman; she, too, went on to other work for the FBI. Several of our people developed bleeding ulcers and three had anxiety attacks that were so severe that they were initially misperceived as heart attacks. Four of us, myself included, had periods of rapid and unexplained weight loss, some twenty to forty pounds in six-month periods. We went for batteries of tests, including the standard gastrointestinal series, and no purely physical reasons for the weight loss were discovered; it was all stress-related.
Something of the sort had happened to Earle. After listening to Gaskins’s horrific stories for months, he sank into a state of stress and anxiety that wrecked his marriage and led to a nervous breakdown. Even after Gaskins had been executed, the problems continued—at which point medical tests revealed that Earle was suffering from cancer. He regards this as one outcome of those days spent closeted with the man who told him: “My name is going to live as long as men talk about good and evil.”
A harmless-looking little man with a high voice, Gaskins enjoyed torturing his victims, mostly hitchhikers, to death.
Born in the backwoods of South Carolina in 1933, Gaskins had been sent to reform school for burglary as a teenager, and had been gang-raped by twenty youths; this was the first of many terms in prison, although he later compelled the respect of fellow inmates when he murdered a particularly dangerous fellow prisoner, one of the jail’s “power men.” After a prison sentence for raping an underage girl, he resolved in future to kill women he raped and to hide the bodies. The first time he did this he was so carried away by the sensation of power that he began doing it regularly.
It seems likely that his predisposition to sadism was inborn. When he was a five-year-old, he went to a carnival where he saw a cobra in a glass cage kill a rat with a single strike of its fangs, and he found that the sight gave him an erection.
I suspect (as does Earle) that if Gaskins had been subjected to a postmortem, he would have been found to be brain damaged. As noted in an earlier chapter, a significant number of violent killers have suffered brain lesions due to blows to the head or birth defects.
The human brain has the consistency of jelly, and a violent blow—particularly on the forehead—can cause it to surge forward against the skull, creating scars. Such people often experience a total personality change, becoming prone to explosions of violence. It seems plausible that this may explain what Gaskins called his “bothersomeness”—a feeling as if he had a ball of molten lead in his stomach, which created tension and severe pain.
In Final Truth, Gaskins says:
When I was younger, there was always one or another of a bunch of different step-daddies around. I called them all sir and never bothered to learn most of their names because I knew my Mama wasn’t married to them, and they wouldn’t likely be around for long. The one she finally did marry was one mean son-of-a-bitch. He used to backhand me and knock me clean across the room just for practice. But then everybody knocked me around: my uncles, my other step-daddies, and nearabout all the boys and girls I played with and went to school with. They beat up on me just because I was so damned little.
When Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins was arrested on November 14, 1975—charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor—it was for suspected involvement in the disappearance of Kim Ghelkins, a thirteen-year old girl last seen leaving her home in Charleston with an overnight bag.
Kim’s parents told the police of a married man named Donald Gaskins, whose stepdaughter was a friend of Kim’s.
Twelve years before this, Gaskins had been imprisoned for the statutory rape of a twelve-year-old girl named Patsy. A week later, he had escaped by jumping from an open window of a second-story waiting room in the Florence County courtroom. He was at liberty for six months before being recaptured and sentenced to four years in the South Carolina Central Correctional Institution. In November 1970, he was again questioned by the police, this time about the disappearance of his own fifteen-year-old niece, Janice Kirby, but denied all knowledge of her whereabouts.
A month later, he had again been under suspicion—this time, of a horrifying sex murder. Peggy Cuttino, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a prominent local politician, had disappeared in the small town of Sumter; her mutilated and tortured body was found in a ditch. Again, Gaskins was questioned and released.
It was when some of Kim Ghelkins’s clothes were found in a mobile home rented by Gaskins that a warrant was issued for his arrest. Yet even when taken into custody, police were unable to find enough evidence to charge him. Just as they were preparing to release him, his trusted friend and fellow convict Walter Neely experienced a sudden conversion as a born-again Christian, and decided to tell everything he knew about Gaskins. That same afternoon—December 4, 1975—he led the police to the graves of two young men who had been shot in the head and buried in the swamp. The following day he led them to four more corpses, two men and two women. On December 10, he was able to help them locate two more graves.
On May 24, 1976, Gaskins went on trial in the Florence County Courthouse, and was sentenced to die in the electric chair.
On death row, Gaskins began to think hard about how he could escape execution. One possibility was to confess to more murders, and engage in plea-bargaining. So he confessed to the murder of his niece, Janice, and her friend, Patty Ann Alsbrook. He claimed he had killed them as a result of an argument when he had caught them taking drugs. (In fact, as he later admitted to Wilton Earle, both had been sex crimes.) In exchange for his confession, Gaskins’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. With a known score of eleven murders, he prepared to face a lifetime behind bars.
In late 1980, there came a welcome diversion. He was asked if he would undertake to murder a fellow prisoner, Rudolph Tyner, a twenty-four-year-old black drug addict, who had killed an old couple in the course of holding up their grocery store. Now Tyner was on death row, hoping that the sentence would be commuted to life.
The son of his victims, Tony Cimo, was embittered at the thought of Tyner escaping the electric chair, and decided to take justice into his own hands. Through a friend of a friend, he approached Gaskins. Bored and frustrated in prison, Gaskins rose to the challenge of committing a murder under the nose of the wardens.
The first step was to get to know Tyner and gain his trust, which Gaskins did by slipping him reefers. The murder itself was brilliant in its ingenuity. Gaskins suggested he install a homemade telephone between their cells, running through a heating duct. Tyner’s phone contained plastic explosive, supplied by Tony Cimo. When, at a prearranged time, Tyner said, “Over to you,” Gaskins plugged his end of the wire into an electric socket, and the explosion rocked the whole cellblock. Tyner was blown to pieces.
At first the authorities believed that it had been an accident. Then rumors of murder began to spread. Soon, Tony Cimo was arrested, and confessed everything. He and Gaskins stood trial for the murder of Rudolph Tyner. Cimo received eight years. Gaskins was sentenced to the electric chair.
During his early days in prison, after his arrest for the murder of Kim Ghelkins, Gaskins had often been interviewed by reporters; now he was almost forgotten—a mere car thief and contract killer who had murdered a number of crooked business acquaintances. One or two criminologists had talked about writing about him, but it had all come to nothing. Gaskins disliked his loss of celebrity status as South Carolina’s worst mass murderer; he felt he deserved to be famous.
So in 1990, when Wilton Earle, who felt that his story might be worth telling, approached him, Gaskins cautiously agreed. He was running out of appeals, and his appointment with the electric chair could not be long delayed—a year at the most. As he came to trust him, Gaskins agreed to tell Earle what he called “the final truth.” But there was one stipulation: that nothing should be published until after Gaskins had been executed. Among other things, his rape of a small child would disgust his fellow prisoners.
Earle agreed. What he did not know when they made the agreement was that he was about to hear the most appalling and terrifying story of serial murder in the history of twentieth-century crime. What was revealed over many sessions with the tape recorder was that Gaskins was not simply a killer of crooked business associates; he was a compulsive and sadistic sex killer, whose list of victims amounted to three figures. The story of “the final truth” was so nauseating that Earle must have doubted many times whether it could be published.
Gaskins’s problem, as it emerged in the tapes, had always been an overdeveloped sex-impulse. His need for sex was so powerful and compulsive that, whenever it came on him, he experienced a heavy feeling that rolled from his stomach up to his brain, and down again. He compared it to the pain women suffer before menstruation. When this happened, he would drive up and down the coastal highway cruising for female hitchhikers.
But having served two terms for rape, he had vowed it should never happen again. His solution was simple: to kill his victims. And having raped and killed his first with a knife, he discovered, like so many serial killers before him, that torture and murder were an addiction. “I felt truly the best I ever remembered feeling in my whole life.”
With his next female hitchhiker, “I took my time and did some of the extra things I had thought up, so I enjoyed myself more, and after I finished, I felt the same good relief I felt the first time.”
These “extra things” soon came to include melting lead and pouring it on his victims’ flesh.
After a while, it made no difference whether the hitchhiker was male or female; it was the torture—and the sense of power—that gave the pleasure. In effect, he became a character out of one of the novels of the Marquis de Sade, working out new ways to satisfy his desire to torture and degrade.
Gaskins estimated that in the six years between September 1969 and his arrest in November 1975, he committed between eighty and ninety “coastal kills,” an average of fourteen a year. He distinguished these murders of hitchhikers picked up on the coast road from his “serious murders,” those committed for business or personal motives such as revenge.
Hours before his execution, Gaskins tried to commit suicide with a razor blade that he had swallowed the previous week, and then regurgitated. He was found in time, and given twenty stitches.
He had assumed that Earle would attend his execution, as his “official witness,” so that he could die looking at a friendly face. But Earle, who had been forced to conceal his feelings of revulsion during the tape-recorded confessions, had no intention of giving Gaskins this comfort. At their final meeting, he told Gaskins: “You are mistaken, Pee Wee, if you think I was ever your advocate. Not for a moment did I ever approve of you.” Gaskins tried to get at him from around the conference room table, but Earle was cautious enough to keep it between them (and proved to be correct—Gaskins had a concealed razor blade).
Soon after midnight on September 6, 1991, Donald Gaskins walked into the execution chamber without help, and sat in the electric chair. After his wrists and ankles had been strapped, a metal headpiece was placed on his skull, with a wet sponge inside it. Before the black hood was placed over his head he gave a thumbs-up salute to his lawyer. Three buttons were then pressed by three men—so that none of them would be sure who had been responsible for the execution.
His body was handed over to his daughter, and was later cremated.