Journey into Darkness (16 page)

Then in February, Knowlton asked a nine-year-old girl to take her pants off for him. The girl was so frightened and traumatized that she developed recurring nightmares.

At the time, Knowlton was living temporarily in an efficiency
apartment a couple of blocks from the women’s shelter where his wife and children were staying.

In speaking to Rettman, Knowlton had no hesitancy talking about his sexual involvement with children. Though she’d never done anything like it before, Rettman instinctively decided not to give ham her real name, introducing herself as Janice Reever. She said she was obligated to report any suspected instances of child abuse to the proper authorities and told him, “I think you need help.”

The child protection authorities told her there had been other reports about Knowlton but that they’d never been able to get sufficient proof for prosecution.

When Rettman heard on the news that Cassandra Hansen’s body had been found, she immediately thought of the man she had dealt with in March. He said he’d been going to various churches and the efficiency he’d been renting was only ten blocks from Jehovah Evangelical Lutheran Church. A few days later she called Stuart Knowlton to follow up on his housing situation. She found him distraught and unwilling to talk. A couple of days after that, though, he called her back. With the same candor he had demonstrated at their first encounter, he told her the police had just searched his apartment when she’d called and he was so upset he couldn’t talk. He told her he was going through hell, was very lonely, and needed someone to talk to and to visit him.

Knowing that the police were trying to put together information on Knowlton, but that they were having difficulty doing it, Rettman, like Noga, decided to get involved.

“No child should be hurt,” she later told Linda Kohl of the
St. Paul Dispatch
. “Every adult is responsible for the children’s welfare. If I could assist the police in bringing that person to justice, or assist in making sure that person never touches a child again—then it was right, it was important. We are responsible for our children, whether it’s yours or somebody else’s.”

I firmly believe that if Janice Rettman’s attitude was more widely held and acted upon, we’d all be living in a lot safer, more humane society.

Being a fellow municipal official, Rettman went directly to Police Chief William McCutcheon and offered to help. As he had with Dorothy Noga, Knowlton began pouring out
his soul on the telephone to Janice Rettman. He talked about the child molestation charges that had led to his eviction, he talked about his marital problems and inability to hold a steady job, and he told about his religious conversion the previous year while listening to Johnny Cash. Rettman took notes during each conversation, then typed them up and delivered them to the police. Much of the information the police had on Knowlton, much of the way they knew he conformed so closely to my profile, came from Rettman’s compiled dossier.

The near-fatal attack on Dorothy Noga upped the ante considerably. Though fearful, Rettman kept at it, now making copies of her notes for safekeeping if anything similar happened to her.

What made Rettman take the physical and emotional risks to become involved? What made her so different, say, from the thirty-eight neighbors who listened without lifting a finger as Winston Mosely stabbed Kitty Genovese to death outside her apartment house in fashionable Kew Gardens, Queens, on the morning of March 13,1964? We could come up with some glib, superficial answers: She had a degree in social work. She had spent six and a half years as a VISTA volunteer. She was naturally adventuresome, having left her Texas home at eighteen in quest of an education. But none of this really speaks to the core values that made her part of the solution rather than part of the problem. The fact is that she got involved because she felt it was the right thing to do, just as Dorothy Noga had.

I have spent my career studying the complex motivations of criminals, but basically, all the prior influences on an individual resolve down to one key element: the
choice
to commit the crime. Likewise, doing the right thing resolves down to a simple factor: the choice to get involved. We’re all responsible for our actions.

Knowlton never admitted the Hansen murder to her, but he seemed obsessed with it in their conversations in ways that chilled Janice Rettman to her core. He said he had had a “vision” about the case and had a “sixth sense” that the murder of Cassie Hansen and the attack on Dorothy Noga were related. He discussed all sorts of details, including the method of disposal of the body.

And in one of these conversations, he made his crucial slipup.

He mentioned that Cassie Hansen had been beaten before she died, the fact police had kept confidential as a control.

It was shortly after this revelation that Knowlton suffered his automobile accident, losing the lower part of his leg. Rettman visited him in the hospital, and later at the Ramsey County Nursing Home. For some of these visits, she brought a tape recorder, hidden in her handbag. For later ones, she was wired with a police body mike. Going impressively proactive, she wore a pair of black patent leather shoes on several occasions because they were similar to the ones Cassie was wearing when she was taken. I wish I’d thought of this, but it was purely Rettman’s idea.

When the police told me about her activities, I told them that this was absolutely the right way to proceed with such an elusive and “uncooperative” suspect, and suggested some other types of approaches that might be fruitful. For example, Rettman might give him a nice journal in which he could record his thoughts and feelings.

Though he claimed to have nothing to do with the murder and murder attempt, he told Rettman he might have a “perfect double” somewhere in the city. This was a key piece of information, signifying another mechanism for trying to cope with the crime. This would be in my mind three years later as I sat in the office of Sheriff Jim Metts in Lexington County, South Carolina, interrogating a dark-haired, pudgy, bearded electrician’s assistant named Larry Gene Bell. A solid combination of good profiling, good proactive technique, first-rate police work and forensic analysis, and wonderful and courageous families had led to the arrest of Bell for the heartbreaking murders of seventeen-year-old Shari Faye Smith and nine-year-old Debra Helmick. I knew the chances of a confession were slim to none. South Carolina was a capital punishment state and there aren’t many sales tools available to convince a subject to buy a one-way ticket to the chair. The only real possibility is to offer him some face-saving justification or explanation for the crime.

So I spoke to him about how everyone has a good side and a bad side. The only thing the judge and jury in court were going to know about him was that he was a cold-blooded
killer. I was giving him the opportunity to tell me about the other side.

“Larry, as you’re sitting here now,” I said, “did you do this thing?”

With tears glistening in his eyes, he replied, “All I know is that the Larry Gene Bell sitting here couldn’t have done this, but the bad Larry Gene Bell could have.”

I knew that was as close as we’d ever get to a confession. But the state’s case, directed by County Solicitor Don Meyers, was convincing. After a nearly month-long trial, the jury took less than an hour to find Bell guilty of kidnapping and first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death by electrocution. More than eleven years after the killing, Bell was finally executed early on the morning of Friday, October 4, 1996.

In May 1982, after the police had keyed on Stuart Knowlton as their primary suspect and instituted the types of proactive techniques we’d discussed, Dorothy Noga showed up at St. Paul police headquarters and told detectives she was beginning to get back some memory of the day of her attack. She said that Knowlton came to the sauna where she was working and angrily accused her of betraying him. He told her he had stopped in Jehovah Evangelical Lutheran Church to use the men’s room and saw the little blond girl going by herself to the ladies’ room.

He waited for her to come out, Noga reported from his account, asked her to play a game with him in the hallway, then took Cassie out to where his taxicab was parked. He made advances to her, made the child touch his penis, then rubbed it between her thighs. This gave him feelings of euphoria, Noga said, but the little girl kept crying so he put his hand over her mouth and the next thing he knew she wasn’t breathing. At least, that’s the way he reportedly told her it had happened.

After this confession, according to Noga, he brought out a knife, chased her around the room, then began slashing at her throat. Then she lost consciousness.

On May 26, St. Paul police believed they finally had sufficient cause for a search warrant, which they applied for and received. Up until then, they had kept the details of the
investigation of this highly publicized case as quiet and out of the media as they could.

Knowlton’s account did square with the finding of semen on the thighs of Cassie’s tights and Al Robillard of the FBI Laboratory confirmed that the pubic hair found on her body and head hair found on her turtleneck sweater were consistent with Knowlton’s. Under microscopic examination, both reflected an unusual disease condition known as “ringed” or “banded” hair which makes Various parts of the individual hair strand appear light or dark. His blood type also corresponded with that of the semen stains on Cassie’s clothing.

Stuart Knowlton was charged with the kidnapping and first-degree murder of Cassandra Hansen. He was placed in a state mental facility, examined and found competent to stand trial. At his own request, his case was heard by a judge rather than a jury. Ramsey District Judge James M. Lynch presided at the trial. Thomas Poch led the prosecution. Philip Vilaume and Jack Nordby defended Knowlton, and offered to plea-bargain to second-degree murder, but without an admission of guilt.

“That was totally unacceptable,” Poch recalled.

Dana McCarthy, a mother who took her son to the same family night service from which Cassie disappeared, testified that she saw a man going up a flight of stairs just after the little girl had. In court, she identified that man as Stuart Knowlton.

When it was Janice Rettman’s turn to testify and she was asked, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” she gave the bailiff a thumbs-up signal and responded, “You bet.” Her notes and the level of her organization were very impressive.

The opposite was true for Knowlton. He said he was driving his taxi during the time Cassie had been abducted. As a cab driver, he was supposed to have trip logs which at least could have given some weight to his alibi claim. But he said his logs were in a briefcase that he believed had been stolen by a customer and he couldn’t remember where he’d been that night.

Donald Whalen, Jr., Knowlton’s taxi dispatcher, testified that he tried to radio the driver several times that evening but couldn’t raise him. Patricia Jones, general manager of a
competing cab company, stated that Knowlton tried to buy blank trip sheets from her on the day Cassie’s body was found, even though Whalen told the court there were plenty available for the asking at his own company.

It also came out in court that Knowlton had spent time in a mental hospital in Traverse City, Michigan, after molesting a seven-year-old girl.

The trial lasted thirteen days and involved forty-eight witnesses and more than a hundred exhibits. Knowlton did not choose to testify. At the trial’s conclusion, Judge Lynch found Knowlton guilty of first-degree murder and second-degree criminal sexual conduct and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Under Minnesota law, that made him eligible for parole in 2001.

Knowlton listened impassively, then in a ten-minute rambling statement, asserted his innocence. “As God is my witness, I swear to you this day, I did not abduct Cassandra Lynn Hansen from the church she was attending,” he told the judge. Interesting to note, he did not deny killing her, all of which could have amounted to a complex psychological defense mechanism on his part.

Without admitting anything he also reasserted the religiosity that I thought would be a part of his personality when he said, “I had no reason to take anyone’s life for God had not given me that right. I have had no reason to have any vengeance against Cassandra Lynn Hansen or Dorothy Noga.”

Defense attorney Vilaume, who seemed more devastated by the verdict than his client and made a public statement professing his belief in Knowlton’s innocence, still said he believed Judge Lynch was fair and conducted a good and impartial trial.

Cassie’s mother, Ellen, who also testified at the trial, came away from her ordeal dedicated to educating others about dangers to children and urging tougher enforcement of laws aimed at protecting them. Noting that Knowlton had been beaten and abused by his father, she called in media interviews for putting abusing parents in prison so that their victims didn’t become abusers themselves. Only if the vicious circle of incest is broken, she said, will child molestation decrease, and one of the most important things was that
children who’ve been abused be made to feel comfortable opening up to parents or other relatives, teachers, or family friends.

Ellen Hansen and her husband, William, had done a good job of preparing their children, Cassie and Vanessa, to deal with threats to their safety. They were taught not to speak with or go with strangers who approached them and that if they were afraid, to scream loudly and run. The Hansens therefore have no idea how their daughter was lured or forced away.

Knowlton was first incarcerated in the mental health unit of Oak Park Heights State Prison, but then transferred to St. Cloud Reformatory because correctional officials feared for his life. Even other convicts won’t tolerate child killers in their midst.

I don’t want to give the impression here that girls are the only victims of child molesters, or even that crimes against boys are confined to youngsters. While not in the same danger as females, males the age of Alison Parrott or Kristen French can become targets.