Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind (3 page)

The conversation touched on topics as diverse as the suspect’s boyhood speech impediment, his professed interest in anal sex (which Anderson reported his wife did not share), and the unsolved disappearance of another local woman, Larisa Dumansky. Mrs. Dumansky was a twenty-nine-year-old Morrell employee who had vanished from the meat-packing company’s parking lot two years before. Anderson denied any knowledge of her disappearance.

Meanwhile, investigators found a pair of Anderson’s blue jeans in the laundry area of his trailer. They were stained inside with both blood and semen. Later tests on the stains would prove inconclusive as to their source. The search also turned up two handcuff keys and a container of black, water-soluble spray paint, such as that discovered in his Bronco.

When the police interviewed one of Anderson’s neighbors, Dan Johnson, he recalled seeing Anderson carefully clean the interior of his blue Bronco on the morning of the 29th. Mr. Johnson reported that Anderson then left for a while and returned around 2:00
P.M.
, when he again cleaned the vehicle’s interior.

Confronted with the handcuff keys, Anderson admitted they were his but said he didn’t own any handcuffs to go with them. He also denied Dan Johnson’s account of the cleaning of the Bronco.

Vance Streyle later picked out Robert Anderson in a lineup as the man who had come to his home on the morning of the 26th. His daughter, Shaina, also identified him as the “mean man” who had forcibly taken her mother away. At 1:30 on the morning of August 2, the Sioux Falls police arrested Robert Anderson at Morrell’s and charged him with kidnapping Piper Streyle.

They had identified their suspect quickly—a key to success in any criminal case—but the investigation still was a long way from completion. Piper Streyle was still missing.

Hundreds of officers and volunteers scoured the area around the Streyles’ trailer looking for further evidence. They found nothing. However, botanist Gary Larson from South Dakota State University was able to point the investigation in a more useful direction. Larson identified bits of vegetable matter taken from a toolbox in the back of the Bronco as honewort and black snake root, which are known to grow along certain wooded stretches of the Big Sioux River north of Sioux Falls, near the small town of Baltic. Police realized it was not a coincidence that on July 29, the day of Piper Streyle’s abduction, a motorist driving near Baltic had found the torn half of a black-and-white T-shirt that Mrs. Streyle had been wearing when she was last seen.

That’s where Anderson had taken her.

A search of the lightly inhabited area turned up the other half of her T-shirt beneath a small tree. Dangling from a branch directly above it were several lengths of duct tape, wadded up together and matted with human hair, that proved to be microscopically indistinguishable from Mrs. Streyle’s hair. Nearby were a large dildo and a partially used wax candle. One torn end of the duct tape matched a roll taken from Anderson’s Bronco. The vehicle also yielded hair specimens believed to have come from Piper Streyle. Stuck to the blade of a folding knife recovered from the Bronco were bits of cloth fiber that matched her cut shirt.

Anderson was charged with kidnapping Piper Streyle and went on trial the following spring. He was not charged with murder since there wasn’t yet sufficient evidence to prosecute him successfully for that crime. The prosecution team, led by South Dakota attorney general Mark Barnett, would show the jury that the defendant had bought the black paint that Monday morning and sprayed it on the Bronco to change the appearance of the vehicle.

The use of water-soluble paint was just one example of how thoroughly Anderson scripted his crime. Applying a coat of easily washed-off, water-based paint is not a spontaneous inspiration. It reflected substantial forethought and cunning.

A reconstruction of events derived from the evidence, witnesses, and informant information established that Anderson drove to the Streyles’ trailer on the 29th. He handcuffed Mrs. Streyle, retrieved the note with his name and phone number, carried her out to the Bronco, and then drove to the thinly settled area near Baltic. Securing her to the platform in his vehicle, he gagged Piper Streyle with duct tape. He cut her shirt open with his folding knife, sexually assaulted and killed her, and disposed of the body.

Anderson then returned to the Streyle residence and retrieved a watch he had dropped during the struggle as well as the expended shell casing from the round that Shaina reported he had fired. This second trip to the residence accounts for the Streyles’ neighbor seeing him walk from the trailer to the Bronco. Dan Johnson and other witnesses placed him back at home in the Bronco (now blue once more) by 2:00 that afternoon, which means that somewhere along the way he also stopped and washed off the black paint.

On May 8, 1997, Anderson’s jury found him guilty of kidnapping Piper Streyle. Two months later state circuit judge Boyd McMurchie sentenced him to life in prison.

No one was satisfied with this outcome. Anderson complained in court that he was an innocent victim of vindictive prosecution. “I hope you rot in hell,” he told Barnett just before his sentencing.

“I might,” Barnett later said, “but it won’t be because I convicted Robert Anderson.”

In fact, Barnett was no happier about the punishment Anderson had received than was the defendant, though for a different reason. The attorney general vowed in court that there would be another day of reckoning. “Sooner or later, he’ll face a homicide charge,” Barnett predicted.

My major conclusion about Robert Leroy Anderson was his clear sexual sadism.

This condition is not well understood. Frequently people mistake cruelty for sadism. Another misperception is that sadists are aroused by the
infliction
of pain. In fact, what excites the sadist is the
suffering
of the victim. It is true that sexual sadists use physical and/or psychological pain to produce suffering, but the suffering is the most important thing to them.

I based my opinion that Anderson was a sexual sadist on four factors: First was his obvious interest in sexual bondage, a hallmark of the sexual sadist. Anderson kept chains, eye bolts, handcuff keys, and furniture-moving straps in his truck, as well as duct tape and a plywood platform with restraint holes. These instruments of bondage were significant because sexual sadists are attracted to, and sexually excited by, the helplessness and vulnerability of a bound victim.

Second, the evidence clearly indicated physical torture. This included, of course, the platform, but Anderson also had wooden dowels and a dildo. He had confessed to an acquaintance his fantasy of forcefully inserting such objects into a woman. The fact that the partially used candle was found near the dildo and shirt suggested that it had also been used to torture Mrs. Streyle.

The T-shirt that had been cut up the middle in the front and back also provided important clues, as did the wadded duct tape with her hair matted in it. I believe that Mrs. Streyle was bound to the platform on her back and that Anderson then cut the front of the T-shirt. The wadded duct tape would have been used to gag her and muffle her screams as he tormented her. Then he turned her on her stomach, cut the shirt up the back, and continued to torture her.

Third, Anderson told the police and several witnesses that he enjoyed anal sex. Our research at the FBI shows that sexual sadists strongly prefer this form of sex. I believe that the discarded dildo and wooden dowels found in Anderson’s truck were used to act out this fantasy against Mrs. Streyle.

Finally, sexually sadistic offenders habitually plan their crimes in much greater detail than do other criminals. The evidence showed that Robert Leroy Anderson had an elaborate plan in mind when he called on the Streyles’ residence. Piper Streyle obviously was not a random victim of violence. She was chosen well in advance of the abduction, and the area to which Anderson took her was carefully preselected.

Anderson also gathered and/or constructed the materials he needed to act out his aberrant fantasies. He shaped the plywood platform so that it not only fit the contours of his Bronco cargo area but was easily hidden beneath carpeting. His toolbox was essentially a sadist’s kit, containing implements of torture. And he had gathered the bondage paraphernalia he needed.

Anderson’s ingenious stratagem for temporarily disguising his Bronco reflected meticulous planning. When I speak of this case, someone invariably suggests that Anderson must have gotten the idea from the movie
The Jackal
, in which Bruce Willis also spray paints his car then washes off the camouflage coat in a car wash.

However, Mrs. Streyle was abducted and killed the summer before
The Jackal
was released. This was a case of film imitating life, not the other way around.

Establishing that Robert Anderson is a sexual sadist permitted me to make several other inferences about him. Had he been an unidentified subject (UNSUB)—as is often the case in my consultations—these additional insights might have helped the authorities identify Piper Streyle’s killer. As it was, the findings helped flesh out the prosecution’s understanding of their suspect.

For example, I could tell the investigators with confidence that Mrs. Streyle’s killer probably preferred anal sex, bondage, and foreign-object penetration with his consenting partners.

His movie favorites likely would include features like
Kiss the Girls
, the story of a self-styled Casanova who lives his fantasy by abducting women for his underground harem. Another possibility would be the film version of John Fowles’s classic novel,
The Collector
. Fowles’s protagonist, chillingly portrayed in the movie by Terence Stamp, also acts on his fantasy, kidnapping and holding as captive the lovely Miranda. It was no coincidence that “Operation Miranda” was Leonard Lake’s code name for his abduction and captivity plan.

Even though the authorities had already identified Anderson as their subject, the insight that he was a sexual sadist showed them why the other materials were in the Bronco and at the rural site and why he had invested so much time in preparing for the crime. For example, when they later recovered Anderson’s murder trophies (jewelry belonging to his victims), they better understood why he had kept them.

Sexual sadists almost invariably are psychopaths, but Anderson’s mental anomalies also singled him out as a narcissist. Narcissism is a personality disorder marked by self-centeredness and a lack of empathy for others. Such individuals have grandiose fantasies.

The narcissist’s favorite subject is himself, and he frequently exaggerates his accomplishments to impress himself and others. That description certainly fits Robert Anderson. Fred Devaney, an agent with the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation who played a significant role in the case, later told me that Anderson compared himself to Albert Einstein in one postconviction interview.

He also revealed an immense amount of damning detail about himself to others who, in time, came forward with what they knew.

The first of these witnesses was Jamie Hammer, thirty-two, Anderson’s longtime acquaintance and former roommate. Investigators interviewed Hammer within ten days of Piper Streyle’s disappearance and immediately realized he was not an ideal witness. He had a police record, a history of substance abuse, and had sustained a head injury in an accident, which caused him to suffer partial memory loss.

Jamie Hammer did not inspire confidence, yet authorities knew that what he had to say, if corroborated, would have a powerful impact in the capital murder case that Mark Barnett and his associates hoped to bring against Anderson.

In a series of interviews, and in sworn testimony, Hammer described in detail how his friend, Rob Anderson, always had been obsessed with murdering women. He said the two of them had discussed the subject hundreds of times, beginning as far back as early high school. The focus of these conversations was how to gain control of a woman, kill her, and then get away with the crime.

For example, said Hammer, Anderson exhaustively considered the subject of body disposal. Once a victim was captured, the ultimate disposal site should be no more than an hour’s drive away, he said, and the grave should be predug. They decided that a plastic sheet, placed beneath the victim, was useful for preventing anyone from finding forensic evidence such as blood, semen, hairs, and fibers. Anderson felt that dismembering a victim before burial also was a good practice, although he didn’t say why.

They discussed how to build a restraining device, such as Anderson’s plywood platform, and the various ways of killing a person. Anderson strongly opposed using a gun. Gunshots were too loud, he said.

Hammer explained that Anderson made tire “poppers,” sharp little metal triangles, in the machine shop at Morrell. Anderson spray painted the devices to blend in with the road surface on which they were placed, making it extremely difficult for a driver to see them, particularly at night.

According to Hammer’s account to authorities, Anderson planned to drop an accomplice off along a roadway at night with a two-way radio and a supply of the poppers. Anderson would then drive on to scout for possible victims. When he saw one, he’d radio the accomplice with a description of the woman’s car. As she approached his position, the accomplice would place the tire poppers in the roadway. Anderson would follow the potential victim in his car, pick up the accomplice, and then trail their quarry until her tires went flat. Hammer told authorities that he and Anderson practiced with two-way radios to test their range of reception.