Mindhunter (38 page)

He didn’t go to Karla’s house that afternoon with the plan of killing her. The killing was an afterthought. If he’d planned it, he would have brought his weapons and implements (his "rape kit") with him. Instead, we have manual strangulation and blunt-force trauma, demonstrating a spontaneous act of anger or desperation in reaction to her rejection of him. Manipulation, domination, and control are the watchwords of the rapist. He’d probably gone over to the house offering to help her move in. Karla was known as a friendly sort, and since she knew this guy in some way, she probably let him in. What he wanted from her was sex, some sort of a relationship. When she resisted or he realized he was in over his head, he—like Mary Frances Stoner’s killer in South Carolina—decided the only way to save himself was to kill her. And even at that point, he probably panicked and had second thoughts. There was water on the floor and on the sofa. After he strangled her, he might very well have splashed water on her face to try to revive her. When that didn’t work, he would have had to deal with her wet face, so he dragged her across the floor and pushed her head in the tub to make it look like some bizarre or kinky ritual; in other words, to draw attention away from what had actually happened. The head in the tub of water had a secondary significance as well. She had rejected him. Now he could degrade her. As in so many other cases, the more an offender does at a scene, even if it’s an attempt to throw the police off the scent, the more clues and behavioral evidence he gives you to work with.

This guy is in his mid- to late twenties, I said, and this is not the work of someone who has experience killing. His staging was poor and shows he’s never tried to do it before. However, he does have an explosive, assaultive personality, so he could have committed lesser crimes. If he’s ever been married, he’s recently been separated or divorced or is having marital discord. Like so many of these guys, this one is a real loser with a poor self-image. He may come across as confident, but deep down, he is extremely inadequate.

He is of average intelligence and IQ, went no further than high school, and his use of wire to bind her suggests shop training or one of the vocational trades. Once the investigation was launched, you would find him changing residences and/or jobs, and once the heat was off and he wouldn’t create any suspicion, he might very well leave town. He’d also be turning heavily to drugs or alcohol or cigarettes to relieve his tension. In fact, alcohol could have played some role in the crime itself. This was a bold move for this particular guy. He may have been drinking beforehand, which would have lowered his inhibition, though he wouldn’t be drunk, because then he wouldn’t have done so much on the scene postoffense.

He’d be having difficulty sleeping, he would have a problem with his sex life, and you’d find him becoming more and more nocturnal. If he had a regular job, he would have missed a lot of work as the investigation geared up. He would change his appearance, too. If he had a beard and long hair at the time of the killing, he would have shaved them. If he was clean-shaven, he would have grown a beard. You’re not looking for a preppie type, though. He’s naturally scruffy and unkempt, and any attempt to keep himself orderly will be an obvious manifestation of overcontrol. He will find this effort physically and mentally exhausting.

As to automobile, in this case I fell back on my old killer standby—a Volkswagen Beetle. It would be old and not terribly well maintained; red or orange.

This is someone who will be following the police investigation closely in the media, and he will be taking his leads from them. If the chief of police has publicly announced that there have been no new leads, that’s going to give him a mechanism to cope. He could easily have passed a polygraph; a lot of killers do. The next phase of the investigation has to have as its goal to begin to shake him up.

There can be a lot of stressors. Every year in June he could become more nervous. The same could happen around Karla’s birthday. He’s probably been out to visit Karla’s grave at Calvary Hill Cemetery. He may have sent flowers or asked her directly for forgiveness.

So the next thing you’ve got to do, I said, is to announce a new and promising lead, something that will appear to get the case back on the front burner. Continuously advertise and publicize this. Keep that "ass-pucker factor" as intense as possible. Mention that you’ve brought an FBI profiler into the case and that what he’s telling you fits in perfectly with the new evidence you’ve developed.

At that point they told me of Dr. Levine’s recommendation to exhume the body and wanted to know what I thought about it. I told them it was a terrific idea, and the more public hoopla leading up to it, the better. Weber should go on television beforehand and announce that if the body is still in good shape and the new examination turns up the evidence they expect, they will be close to solving the murder. In a sense, what they would be conveying to the killer is that they were "resurrecting" Karla, bringing her back from the grave, to bear witness in her own murder.

The digging up of the body will be a tremendous stressor to him. I want Weber to state publicly that if it takes another twenty years, he’s going to solve this case. Your offender is going to be concerned and inquisitive. He’ll be asking a lot of questions. He may even call the police directly! Make sure you videotape or photograph everyone who shows up at the cemetery; he may be there. He’s going to be in a lot of suspense about what shape the body is in. And when you finally announce how pleased you are with its condition, that’s going to send him farther over the edge. At the same time, he’ll become even more of a loner, isolating himself from whatever friends he has. This will be the time to start listening to people in bars and places like that to see if any of the regulars are displaying markedly changed behavior. He may recently have joined a church or taken up religion as a means to cope. And while you’re putting all this stress on him, there should be a comment in the paper from one of the cops—it could even be from me—that sounds almost empathic. We should say we know what he’s going through, that he did not intend to kill her and has been carrying this huge weight on his shoulders all these years.

I went on to outline an interrogation strategy similar to what had worked in the Stoner case. The important thing was that once a suspect had been identified, he shouldn’t be arrested right away but left to stew for a week or so, then you’d want to get him to confess before arresting him. The more facts you have at your disposal, the more things you can say, like, "We know you carried her from here to here" or "We know about the water," the better shot you’ll have. An object that had a material role in the murder (such as the rock in the Stoner case) would be good to have in the room.

After hearing my impressions, my five visitors seemed to take what I had said to heart. They asked how I could tell all that just by hearing routine details of the case and looking at photographs. I’m not sure of the answer to that, though Ann Burgess has noted that I’m a visual person and like to work first from what I can look at. She says, and it’s probably true, that I have a tendency in consultations to say "I see" rather than "I think." Part of it probably has to do with not being able to be on-scene most of the time, so I’ve got to re-create the environment within my head. Often, when police would call me back several years after I’d analyzed a case for them, I could recall it and what I’d said about the UNSUB if they would just describe the crime scene to me.

The investigators from Illinois said that from what I told them, two of their many interviewees still looked like strong suspects—Paul Main and his friend John Prante. Both had been next door that day, and at least one of them, Prante, had been drinking beer. Their stories had never quite squared with each other, which could have been the result of their low intelligence and drinking, or could have meant that one or both of them were lying. Prante had done better than Main on the polygraph, but they both fit the profile well. In fact, in some ways Prante fit better. He had been more cooperative with the police, and after the heat had died down, he had left town as I predicted the killer would, only to return later on.

I said that the campaign I had outlined could be used against both of them. In fact, since I thought whoever had done it felt periodic guilt and remorse, a bit of extra flair might involve having a woman portray Karla and call each of them in the middle of the night, sobbing and asking, "Why? Why? Why?" This should coincide with articles in the paper about what an all-American girl Karla had been and how tragic it was that she had been cut down in her prime. I’ve always gone for the theatrical touch.

Once the campaign had been on for about a week or ten days, the police could see if either Main or Prante was reacting in the way I’d said the killer would. If one of them was, then the next step would be to use informants—friends, acquaintances, work associates—to try to draw comments or a confession out of him.

The exhumation of the body on June 1, 1982, was handled just the way I’d hoped, with Lowell Levine on the scene, a lot of television and press coverage, and appropriately solemn and optimistic statements from Weber. I’ve found that in smaller towns it’s a lot easier to get the kind of cooperation you need from journalists than it is in big cities, where they’re much more apt to feel you’re trying to manipulate them or tell them what to print. I see it more as a cooperative effort between the press and law enforcement that shouldn’t compromise the integrity of either. I’ve never asked a newspaper or TV reporter to lie or produce a false or incomplete story. But on many occasions, I have given out the information I needed to have an UNSUB read and react to. When reporters are cooperative with me, I’m cooperative with them. And in certain cases, when they’ve been particularly cooperative, I’ve given them exclusives when the inside story could finally be told.

Fortunately, Karla’s body was in amazingly well-preserved condition. The new autopsy was performed by Dr. Mary Case, an assistant medical examiner for the city of St. Louis. Unlike in the first postmortem, Dr. Case determined that the cause of death was drowning. She also found a skull fracture. Most important, they got the bite-mark evidence they needed.

The organized publicity campaign continued in earnest. Tom O’Connor of the state police and Wayne Watson of the Financial Fraud and Forgery Unit interviewed Main at his house, ostensibly about public-aid payments he was receiving that he was possibly ineligible for. They led him into a discussion of Karla Brown’s murder. While he wouldn’t confess and denied any involvement in the crime, he had definitely been closely following the publicity and had some inside information. For example, Watson mentioned that Main had left out Acton Avenue on his list of previous addresses. He said he had been trying to forget because of bad memories of the cops hassling him about the neighbor girl who got killed there.

Watson said, "She’s the one who was shot, strangled, and drowned in a fifty-gallon barrel."

"No, no! Not shot, not shot!" Main replied emphatically.

Just around the time of the exhumation, a man named Martin Higdon went to the Wood River police and said he’d gone to high school with Karla Brown and that all of the current publicity had led to discussions at work. He thought the police should know that a woman he worked with claimed that at a party not long after the murder, a man said he had been at Karla’s house on the day she was killed.

O’Connor and Rick White interviewed the woman, whose name was Vicki White (no relation). She confirmed the story, saying she and her husband, Mark, had been at a party at Spencer and Roxanne Bond’s house, where she’d spoken to a man she’d known at Lewis and Clark Community College. The man said he had been at Karla’s house the day of the murder. He mentioned where she had been found and that she had been bitten on her shoulder. He was going to have to leave town because he thought he would be considered a prime suspect. At the time, she’d discounted this as idle talk.

His name was John Prante.

How could he have known about the bite marks so soon after the murder when the police didn’t know about them until two years later? O’Connor and White asked each other. They then interviewed the party’s host, Spencer Bond, who had the same recollection as Vicki and Mark White. Bond also mentioned that Main had given him details about how Karla was found. The question was whether Main had gotten the information from Prante, or vice versa. Though Prante had done better on the polygraph, Weber and the police didn’t think Main was bold enough to have carried out such a crime or smart enough to have set up Prante.

Bond had recently seen Prante, driving his old red Volkswagen Minibus. Though I’d gotten the color and make right, I’d missed out on the model. But this, in itself, was significant. About this time, we were starting to see a shift in vehicle of preference to vans. Bittaker and Norris used one. Steven Pennell used one. Unlike a car, in the back of a van you can do whatever you want and not be seen. You have, in effect, a mobile murder site.

I was not surprised to hear that John Prante had grown a beard since the murder. Bond agreed to wear a wire while he spoke to Prante about the case. While Prante didn’t admit the killing, he revealed how closely he fit the profile. He had studied welding at Lewis and Clark. He had left town after the murder. He had been divorced and had trouble with women. He was extremely curious about the investigation.

Thursday, June 3, Weber’s office secured a court order compelling Prante to submit to a dental impression the next day. Chief Don Greer told him they were trying to tie up loose ends, and if he didn’t match, they could eliminate him as a suspect.

After leaving the dentist’s office, Prante called Weber, just as I figured he would. He wanted to know what was going on with the investigation. Weber had the presence of mind to get his assistant Keith Jensen on the line at the same time, just to make sure Weber couldn’t later be knocked out of the case as a potential witness. In talking with Weber, Prante contradicted his earlier story about when he’d been at Paul Main’s house. As I predicted, he appeared cooperative.