Mindhunter (37 page)

Mark collapsed in grief. He asked Tom to find something to cover her with, and after Tom came back with a red blanket, they called the police.

When Officer David George of the Wood River Police Department arrived a few minutes later, Mark and Tom were outside the front door waiting for him. They led the officer down to the basement and showed him the scene. Throughout the encounter, Mark was barely able to contain himself. "Oh, God, Karla," he kept repeating.

This kind of horror wasn’t supposed to happen in Wood River, a quiet community about fifteen minutes from St. Louis. Before long, all the top cops were there to see what was going on, including thirty-nine-year-old chief of police, Ralph Skinner.

Karla showed signs of severe blunt-force trauma to the head, possibly from the upset TV tray stand in the room. Two socks were tied around her neck, and the autopsy would conclude that she had died by strangulation and was already dead by the time her head was submerged in the drum of water.

As much of a focus as this murder scene was, problems dogged the police right from the beginning. Illinois State Police inspector Alva Busch, an experienced crime-scene technician, couldn’t get the flash attachment for his camera to work. Bill Redfern, who had taken the call at the police station from Tom Fiegenbaum, fortunately brought a camera and took crime-scene photos but at the time happen to have only black-and-white film in his camera. Another problem was all the people who had been at the house helping the couple move. That was a lot of potential fresh latent fingerprints legitimately at the scene. Selecting out others would be difficult if not impossible.

Some elements appeared to be possible clues, but made no sense. Most notable of these was a glass coffee carafe stuck up in the rafters in the basement. Just before spotting it, police had noted the carafe missing from the machine in the kitchen. No one, including Mark, had any logical explanation for why it was where it was, and its role in the murder, if any, wasn’t clear. Alva Busch managed to lift a few latent prints from the glass surface, but they didn’t turn out to be complete enough to use.

In the days following the murder, police combed the neighborhood, talking to anyone who might possibly have seen anyone. The next-door neighbor, Paul Main, said that on the day of the murder, he was on his front porch much of the afternoon with his friend John Prante. Prante recalled being at Main’s house briefly that morning, just after applying for a job at a local oil refinery, but said he left early to apply for other jobs. The night before the murder, Main, Prante, and a third friend had watched Karla, Mark, and the gang helping them move. All three of them said they had hoped to be invited to the moving-in party since Main was a neighbor and the other friend had known Karla casually in high school. But they had never been asked to join in. The closest they got was when the friend called to Karla from across the driveway.

The neighbor across the street, an elderly woman named Edna Vancil, remembered seeing a red car with a white roof parked in front of 979 the day of the murder. Bob Lewis, one of the people at the party, said he had seen Karla on the driveway talking to a "rough-looking," long-haired guy next door who had pointed to Karla and called her by name. That would have been Paul Main’s friend.

"You’ve got a good memory. It’s been a long time," Lewis heard Karla reply. He said he then told Mark Fair about the encounter, suggesting that if those were the kinds of people they were living next to, he’d better be careful until he got to know them better. Mark didn’t seem concerned and said that Karla knew the long-haired guy from high school and that he was just visiting Paul Main.

Another woman was driving down the street, taking her grandson to the dentist. She and the child saw a man and a woman talking on the driveway, but even when she was questioned under hypnosis, her description wasn’t much.

The police talked to many of Karla’s girlfriends, trying to find out if anyone had a grudge against her, perhaps a spurned boyfriend. But all of them said Karla was well liked and had no enemies that they knew of.

One woman, Karla’s former roommate, did have an idea, though. Karla’s father had died when she was young, and her mother, Jo Ellen, had married Joe Sheppard Sr., from whom she was now divorced. The roommate reported that Karla had not gotten along with Sheppard, who had hit her and was always coming on to her friends. He had to be considered a suspect. He had come over the night of the murder and barraged the police with questions. As I’ve noted, it’s not unusual for a killer to approach the police or otherwise inject himself into the investigation. But there was no evidence linking Sheppard to the crime.

The other person who had to be examined closely was Mark Fair. Along with Tom Fiegenbaum, he had found the body, he had access to the house, he was the closest person to the victim. As I noted with regard to the George Russell case, the spouse or lover always has to be considered. But Mark was at work for the electrical contractor when the murder would have taken place; a number of people had seen him and talked to him. And there was no question in anyone’s mind—the police, Karla’s friends, her family—that his grief was genuine and profound.

As the investigation geared up, the police polygraphed many of the people they had interviewed, people who could have had contact with Karla shortly before her death. Mark, Tom, and Joe Sheppard passed without any ambiguity. No one really failed. The closest was Paul Main, a man of marginal intellect who had been at home next door that afternoon. Though he claimed John Prante had been with him on his porch and could vouch for him that he hadn’t left, Prante himself—who passed his polygraph exam—acknowledged that he had left in the morning to look for work and therefore couldn’t say where Main had been during that time. But even though Main’s polygraph was questionable and he remained a suspect, as with everyone else nothing tied him directly to the crime.

The trauma of Karla Brown’s murder affected Wood River deeply. It remained a wound that wouldn’t heal. Both the local and state police had interviewed everyone they could find, had followed up every possible lead. Yet frustratingly, they appeared no closer to a solution. Months went by. Then it was a year. Then two. It was particularly tough on Karla’s sister Donna Judson. With her husband, Terry, they seemed involved on almost a daily basis. Karla’s mother and her other sister, Connie Dykstra, were unable to face that kind of intense involvement and had less contact with the authorities working on the case.

It was also tough on Don Weber, the state’s attorney responsible for Madison County, which contained Wood River. He had been an assistant prosecutor at the time of the murder. A combination of tough prosecutor and deeply sensitive man, Weber desperately wanted to show the public that the kind of outrage perpetrated on Karla would not be tolerated in his district. He was practically obsessed with bringing her killer to justice. Following his election in November 1980 to the top post of state’s attorney, he promptly reactivated the case.

The other one who just couldn’t let the case rest, no matter how long it dragged on without progress, was the state crime-scene investigator, Alva Busch. There are always a couple of cases in a cop’s career that won’t let go. And it turned out to be through Busch that this one finally got a critical push forward.

In June of 1980, a full two years after Karla’s killing, Busch was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to testify in a murder trial in a case in which he’d processed a stolen car in Illinois. While waiting for the pretrial motions to be completed, he attended a presentation at the sheriff’s department given by Dr. Homer Campbell, an expert from the University of Arizona in the computer enhancement of photographs.

"Hey, Doc," Busch said to him at the end of the presentation, "have I got a case for you." Dr. Campbell agreed to examine the crime-scene and autopsy photos to see if he could help determine exactly the type of instrument or weapon that had been used on Karla. Busch copied and sent all the relevant pictures to Campbell.

That the photos were only black and white didn’t make the job any easier, but Campbell was able to do a careful analysis with his sophisticated equipment. Through computer enhancement, he could essentially turn the photos inside out and he was able to report several things. The deep gashes were made by a claw hammer, and the cuts on the chin and forehead had come from the wheels of the overturned TV tray table. But what he told Busch next turned the case completely around and sent it off in a new direction.

"What about the bite marks? Do you guys have any suspects in the bite marks on her neck?"

"What bite marks?" was all Busch could think to say into the phone.

Campbell told him that while the images he’d managed to raise weren’t the best, they definitely showed bite marks on Karla’s neck, clear enough that if a suspect was identified, they could get a good comparison. One in particular didn’t overlap any of the other wounds or marks on the skin.

Unlike anything else they had so far, bite marks were good, solid evidence, practically the same as fingerprints. A comparison of Ted Bundy’s teeth with bite marks found on the buttocks of a murder victim in the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University had helped convict the notorious serial killer. Campbell had been a prosecution witness at Bundy’s trial. (On the morning of January 24, 1989, after extensive interviews and conversations with Bill Hagmaier from our unit, Bundy was put to death in the Florida electric chair. No one will ever know for certain how many young lives he took.)

Once the Illinois police had Dr. Campbell’s bite-mark images, they began refocusing on some of their original possibilities, most notably the neighbor Paul Main. But after police obtained a bite sample from Main, Campbell couldn’t match it to the crime-scene and autopsy photographs. They made an attempt to locate Main’s friend John Prante to see if he would finger Main with this added information, but they couldn’t find him.

There were other attempts at a solution, including bringing in a well-known Illinois psychic, who, without knowing any of the details of the case, said, "I hear water dripping." To the police, this was a clear reference to the discovery of Karla’s body. But beyond the fact that the killer lived near railroad tracks (most people do in Madison County), the psychic didn’t offer much help.

Even with the knowledge of the bite marks, little progress was being made in the case. In July of 1981, Don Weber and four of his staff members attended a seminar in New York on forensic science in criminal investigations as part of setting up his new administration as state’s attorney. Knowing Weber would be there, Dr. Campbell suggested he bring the Brown case photos and show them to Dr. Lowell Levine, a forensic odontologist from New York University, who was speaking at the seminar. Levine studied the photos but, after agreeing with Campbell that certain of the wounds were definitely bite marks, said he could not make a definitive match. He suggested that they exhume Karla’s body, commenting that "a casket is cold storage for evidence." I didn’t know Levine personally, but I certainly did by reputation. He had done the analysis in the Francine Elveson case in New York. (He must have done a pretty damn good job, too, since when Bill Hagmaier and Roseanne Russo went to interview Carmine Calabro at the Clinton Correctional Facility, he’d had all his teeth removed to avoid incriminating himself in the appeal. Dr. Levine went on to head up the forensic science unit for New York State.)

In March of 1982, Weber and two state police investigators attended the annual training session for the St. Louis Metropolitan Major Case Squad. I was at the meeting, giving an overview of personality profiling and crime-scene analysis to the large gathering. While I don’t personally remember the encounter, Weber describes in his fascinating study of the case,
Silent Witness
(with Charles Bosworth Jr.), that he and his colleagues came up to me after my presentation and asked if what I had just described could be used in their case. I apparently told them to call me at my office when I got back to Quantico and that I’d be happy to help them however I could.

Upon his return, Weber learned that Rick White of the Wood River police had also been at the session and had independently concluded that this would be a good approach in the Brown investigation. White contacted me and we arranged for him to come to Quantico with the crime-scene photos and to let me analyze them on the spot and give my reactions. Weber was too involved in cases being prepared for trial to come himself, but he assigned Assistant State’s Attorney Keith Jensen in his place, along with White, Alva Busch, and Randy Rushing, one of the state police officials who’d been with him in St. Louis. The four of them drove over eight hundred miles to Quantico in an unmarked cruiser. The then-current Wood River police chief, Don Greer, was on vacation in Florida, but flew up to Washington to attend the meeting, too.

We met in the conference room. The four investigators had spent much of the drive organizing their thoughts and theories to present to me; they could not have known that I liked to come to my own conclusions before being influenced by anyone else’s ideas. We hit it off well, though. Unlike many situations in which we’ve been brought in for political reasons or to cover someone’s ass, these guys were here because they’d simply refused to give up. They really wanted to be here and were genuinely anxious for anything I could do to steer them in the right direction.

I hit it off particularly well with Alva Busch, who shared my difficulty with authority. Like me, he was known to piss off a lot of people with his outspokenness. In fact, Don Weber had had to threaten to call in all his political markers for Busch to be allowed to make the trip to Quantico.

I requested the crime-scene photos and spent several minutes poring over them. I asked a few questions to orient myself, then said, "Are you ready? You might want to record this."

The first thing I told them was my experience told me that when bodies ended up in water inside a house—a bath or shower or a container—the object was not to wash away clues or evidence, as we were seeing in Atlanta, but to "stage" the crime to look like something other than what it actually was. Then I said that they had already undoubtedly interviewed the killer. He was in the neighborhood or immediate vicinity. This kind of crime is almost always a neighborhood or household crime. People don’t travel long distances to commit them. If he got blood on him, which he most certainly did, he had to be able to go someplace close by to clean it off and get rid of his bloody clothing. Our guy was comfortable in the situation and knew he wouldn’t be disturbed, either because he knew Karla well or had been observing her enough to know her and Mark’s habits. Since you’ve talked to him, he has been cooperative with your investigation. That way, he feels he can keep control of the situation.