Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind (19 page)

A broken beer bottle near the body matched shards of a Michelob bottle in her car. Investigators believed the broken bottle had been her abductor’s sharp-pointed weapon. Six .22-caliber bullet casings and one .22 round also were recovered nearby.

Because of extended exposure, Ellen’s body yielded little in the way of forensic evidence. Animals had carried one of her arms almost two hundred feet away.

It did not appear that she had been bound. She had no head fractures or broken teeth. There was no evidence to suggest she was strangled and no evident wounds to the intact skin that remained. It was impossible to tell if she had been sexually assaulted.

Her official cause of death was “undetermined homicidal violence.”

In my August 1997 report to Barry Macha, I concluded that because so little could be determined about the cause of Ellen Blau’s death, I couldn’t say conclusively that she had been killed by the same person who had killed Terry Sims and Toni Gibbs. Nor was there much about her personally, besides the women’s ages and race, that really connected Ms. Blau to the other two victims.

But the killings did show some striking similarities. All three murders occurred in the morning hours. All three involved a sharp instrument (knives and the beer bottle). Despite their bloodiness and violence, none of the three homicides could be classified as “overkills” according to BSU criteria, in which the threshhold is twenty or more stab wounds.

None of the three women suffered head or facial fractures. All three apparently struggled with their attacker. There were no known thefts. All three victims were found naked, and their killer left their clothing behind. The victims’ shoes were left tied in all three cases. At least one pant leg of each victim’s clothing was turned inside out. Each of the women was alone when attacked, and in each case, the victim was left where she was killed.

Combining these similarities with the fact that all three homicides occurred within a very small geographic area and within nine months of one another, I wrote that “a strong possibility exists that the same person may be responsible for the three murders.” I suggested therefore that the profile I had prepared could apply to all three investigations.

I wrote in my profile that the offender was a white male, twenty-four to thirty years of age at the time of the crimes. He almost certainly was less emotionally mature than his age and apt to react angrily at rejection, real or perceived. “He was a very selfish person,” I went on, “who exhibited a lack of concern for the welfare or safety of others…. The killer would have projected a macho image to friends and associates.”

It was obvious from the crimes that blood didn’t bother him nor did killing in a very personal way with a knife (or broken bottle). That suggested to me that the killer’s job involved working with his hands in a skilled or semiskilled position, and his job required physical exertion.

The absence of overkill indicated that his anger was controlled.

If he had served in the armed forces, he was unlikely to have completed his hitch because of a dislike for authority figures. He probably was, or had been, married, but was incapable of sexual fidelity.

He had a high school education and possibly had some trade or technical training. The lack of planning and sophistication in his crimes suggested no more than average intelligence.

At the time of the murders, he was socioeconomically in the lower- to lower-middle-class and resided in close proximity to Ms. Boone’s residence.

He had a highly impulsive lifestyle.

At the time of the Sims murder, he was experiencing stress—occupational, health-related, financial, relational, family, or legal.

He would have had difficulties with the law since he was a teenager. His arrest record would reflect a variety of offenses and would probably include resisting arrest.

The murders had no effect on him, eliciting neither remorse nor guilt.

Prior to receiving my profile, the Wichita Falls authorities completed their investigation of a list of suspects in the three cases, clearing all of them. Then Barry Macha asked his investigator, John Little, to review the Sims, Gibbs, and Blau files again in light of my profile and the lack of a single credible suspect for all killings.

Right away Little noticed something previously overlooked. The name Faryion Edward Wardrip popped up in all three investigations. The police learned that Wardrip once lived with his wife and child in the same four-unit apartment building where Ellen Blau had lived with Janie Ball and her husband. The apartments were located two blocks from Leza Boone’s house, site of the Sims murder. And Wardrip also had worked at Wichita General Hospital as an orderly at the same time that Toni Gibbs was employed as a nurse.

Detective Little dug deeper.

Faryion Wardrip was born in 1959 and grew up in Salem, Indiana. He was the fifth of nine children. His father was a machinist and his mother a telephone operator. According to his siblings, the family exhibited no dysfunction or deprivation.

Faryion was a poor student. He dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade and worked at mostly unskilled jobs until 1978, when he joined the Army National Guard. Six years later, just before the killings began, he received a less than honorable discharge in connection with an arrest for smoking dope.

In 1983, he married a Wichita Falls woman and fathered two children by her. He went to work as a janitor at Wichita General. In November 1983, he became an orderly at the hospital.

He soon thereafter separated from his wife. In 1985, four days after Toni Gibbs’s body was found, he left his orderly’s job at Wichita General. In December 1985, Wardrip and his wife separated for good.

Now a new victim enters the narrative.

Terry Sims was killed in December of 1984. Toni Gibbs’s murder occurred one month later. Ellen Blau vanished in September of 1985. Then on May 6, 1986—one month after Danny Wayne Laughlin was unsuccessfully prosecuted for killing Toni Gibbs—twenty-one-year-old Tina Kimbrew of Wichita Falls was found dead in her apartment.

Kimbrew had been hit on the head and smothered with a pillow. Four days later, Faryion Wardrip arrived by bus in the Texas coastal city of Galveston where, he later would tell police, he intended to see the ocean before killing himself. Instead, he called the Galveston police and announced he had killed “a good friend” up in Wichita Falls—Tina Kimbrew.

Tina Kimbrew was a very pretty college student who supported herself by waiting tables. Wardrip claimed to have met her at the Stardust Club (Toni Gibbs’s favorite) and became close with her. He said he took Kimbrew out to dinner at least once.

According to Wardrip, the murder occurred Tuesday morning, May 6, when he went to Kimbrew’s apartment to ask if he could stay with her a few days. She said no. An argument ensued, and he killed her.

Police records show that as officers drove Wardrip back to Wichita Falls from Galveston, the prisoner mentioned that he knew Ellen Blau. No follow-up action was taken at that time. Apparently, no one thought to connect the Kimbrew case with any of the other three, unsolved, local homicides.

Wardrip acted deeply remorseful for the Kimbrew killing and pled guilty in exchange for a thirty-five-year sentence. He served eleven years before being paroled in December 1997. That was about four months after I had submitted my profile in the Sims, Gibbs, and Blau cases. The terms of Wardrip’s parole included wearing an ankle bracelet to permit constant monitoring and a restriction on his movements to work, home, and church.

Upon his release, Wardrip moved to the little Texas town of Olney, where he had family members living. He went to work at the Olney Door and Screen Company, remarried, and became very active in the local Church of Christ. He began teaching Sunday school and told acquaintances he was studying for the ministry.

When the subject of his long imprisonment arose, Wardrip sometimes told people that the crime was a vehicular homicide. Other times he said the sentence had resulted from a tragic bar fight. “He’d climb a tree to lie before telling the truth on the ground,” says Carlton Stowers, the Texas author who has written a book on the Wardrip case.

After developing this dossier, John Little proposed a search warrant for DNA. But prosecutor Macha declined, saying they still had too little probable cause to seek such a warrant. In order to get the necessary tissue sample, Little would have to secure his specimen the hard way. Under Texas’s abandoned-property statute, anything someone discards—such as garbage put out for collection—is no longer considered private property and can legally be taken.

Detective Little drove to Olney and put Wardrip under surveillance, awaiting his chance. Because of Wardrip’s restricted movements, opportunities were few. After several days of frustration, Little decided to settle in at a laundry across Olney’s main street from the Door and Screen Company to await his chance.

A week passed. Then one day the new Mrs. Wardrip drove up during her husband’s morning break. He got into the front seat with her and ate a snack of coffee and a package of peanut butter crackers. When break time was over, Wardrip exited the car, finished his coffee, and discarded the used paper cup in a blue trash barrel on his way back to work.

Here was Little’s chance. The investigator, a snuff chewer, jammed a wad of tobacco in his mouth and then ran across the street. Pointing at the blue barrel, he asked Wardrip if he could fetch out his used coffee cup for a spit cup.

“Help yourself,” said Wardrip, and John Little did. I admire innovative thinking, and Little’s actions that day certainly earned my respect.

The DNA extracted from Faryion Wardrip’s saliva in the paper coffee cup matched that of the person who had killed Terry Sims and Toni Gibbs. After fifteen long years, the cases finally were solved.

Authorities decided that the best way to bring Wardrip into custody was through his parole officer in Wichita Falls. He was asked to call Wardrip in Olney and request that Wardrip come to Wichita Falls for a meeting. Wardrip, who had been lobbying hard to have his ankle monitor removed, apparently thought the meeting would address that issue.

He showed up at the appointed hour on Saturday, February 13, 1999, and discovered John Little waiting for him. Later that day Wardrip was taken to the DA’s office and arrested for the two murders.

In custody, Wardrip at first said nothing. Then his wife visited him with the news that a local paper was reporting the DNA match to Sims and Gibbs. After hearing that, Wardrip summoned John Little to the jail.

On the morning of February 16, 1999, Wardrip sat down in front of a tape recorder for fifty minutes with John Little and Paul Smith, an investigator for the Archer County district attorney. He had a lot to tell them.

After reading Wardrip his Miranda rights and other preliminaries, Little asked the prisoner about Terry Sims.

Wardrip began by explaining that he had been using intravenous drugs at the time of the Sims murder, and that he had been out walking that night after a fight with his wife. “As I was walking,” he went on, “she [Sims] was at her door. I went up to the door and forced my way in. Well, [I] just ransacked her, just slung her all over the house in a violent rage. Stripped her down and murdered her.”

Little asked Wardrip to explain his rage.

“I thought my family hated me. I hated them. My wife kept coming in and out of my life. She’d come to me when times were good, and then when times got hard she’d leave… I thought everybody was out to get me. The drugs made me paranoid… I would just reach a boiling point. But the crazy thing about it was, I was so mad at my wife [but] I never done [sic] anything to her. But I was just so mad and so angered.”

Wardrip said he could remember very little about the crime, including whether he had sexually assaulted Sims or where he’d gotten the knife. All he knew for certain, he said, was that he had killed her.

Paul Smith asked about Toni Gibbs.

“Yeah,” Wardrip replied. “Again I was out walking, been out walking all night. Somehow I was downtown… It was starting to get daylight and, uh, I was walking up toward the hospital and Toni knew me and she asked me if I wanted a ride and I said yeah.