The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (30 page)

As the man drove through the desert, he asked Asbenson what she did for a living. She told him she wanted to be an actress. “He asked me if I was interested in pornos,” Asbenson later testified. “I said, ‘No, that's sick.'” She inquired as to what he did for a living and the man replied that he was a detective. She didn't believe him. She thought it was a little odd that he kept staring out at the desert. Then, halfway through the trip, she got “creeped out” when she told him to make a left turn. He seemed to be ignoring her, but he finally pulled over at the last moment and made the turn.

When the man dropped her off at her job, he asked for her telephone number and invited her to breakfast the next morning. Asbenson, who had a boyfriend, gave him a phony number, hoping to let him down easy. But when she left the building the next morning at 6, she saw the blue car idling down the block. “He just pulled over and rolled the window down and said, ‘Good morning,'” she recalled. “And he was nice. I didn't feel threatened at all.”

Asbenson accepted his offer for a ride back to Palm Springs. Almost immediately, the driver became angry about the phony telephone number, and Asbenson realized she was in trouble. “He was being persistent, but then all of a sudden, he just flipped out, and he had a knife, and he just held it up to my throat and started screaming at me, calling me a bitch and telling me to shut up.” The man pulled over on the side of the road, pushed Asbenson's head into the dashboard and grabbed a ball of twine from under his seat.

“He pulled my hands behind my back and just started wrapping them,” she said. “And it just felt like I was doomed…. I couldn't believe what was happening, and I couldn't even think, and I just said, ‘This is a joke. Oh, my God, all this over the phone number. Oh, my God.' And he just said, ‘Shut up.'”

Asbenson asked the man what he was doing, but he wouldn't answer. When she told him he wouldn't get away with anything, he placed a hat and sunglasses on her head, then locked her door and pushed her seat back so other motorists wouldn't be able to see her.

The sun was just coming up over the horizon, and from her vantage point, Asbenson would later recall, she could see nothing but an endless parade of telephone poles in the early-morning sky. She asked if he planned to rape her. “He wouldn't say anything,” she said. “He had a lot of rage. I kept looking at him. I provoked no emotion. No matter what I said, he couldn't feel a thing for me. He was just really pissed off.”

As he drove through the desert, one hand on the wheel and the other gripping a knife to her neck, the man forced her to perform oral sex on him. The road became bumpy, and Asbenson, who grew up in Palm Springs, knew he was taking her to a remote area. After what seemed like nearly an hour, he pulled over, cut off all her clothes and stuffed her panties in her mouth, using her bra as a gag. As he raped her, he began viciously cursing Asbenson.

“And then he just told me to tell him that I loved him,” she said. He removed the gag, and Asbenson did her best to sound sincere. It didn't work. The man punched her in the face. She tried again, imagining what it would be like to say those words and truly believe them. Her second effort didn't fare much better. He called her a “bitch,” and the next thing Asbenson knew, he was strangling her. The world turned white, and Asbenson passed out. When she awoke, the man was licking her neck, biting her. He pushed her out of the car and, holding a handgun to her head, forced her once again to perform oral sex. She thought about biting his penis, but she couldn't muster the courage. Instead, she asked him to shoot her.

The man then forced her into the trunk and began driving down the road, deeper into the desert. Gathering all her energy, Asbenson managed to pop the twine off her wrists. Terrified that she would be cut to pieces by her captor, she tried to strangle herself with the twine. When that failed, she began feeling around the darkness until her fingers gripped a latch. As she did so, the trunk popped open. Asbenson lifted the trunk a few inches and stuck her hand out, hoping to attract the attention of passing motorists. But her abductor immediately noticed the trunk was open and pulled over to the side of the road. He got out and slammed the trunk shut again.

“Keep it shut, bitch,” he yelled. Then he ran back to the driver's seat and revved the engine. But he hit the gas so hard, his wheels spun, stuck in a sandy rut. Asbenson opened the trunk and, naked
except for her sweat shirt, ran down the road. In the distance, she could see an approaching truck. She turned around and saw the man running after her, waving a machete. She kept running, eyes closed. When she opened them, the truck had screeched to a halt.

“Catch him!” she screamed. “He kidnapped me! I just got out of his trunk!”

Inside the truck were two Marines who listened in horror as she described her ordeal. “They were really mad,” she recalled. “They said they were going to kick his ass. They started driving as fast as they could, trying to catch him.” The blue car sped off into the distance. Asbenson was treated for her injuries and gave a statement to Riverside County Sheriff's detectives, but they were unable to locate the car or its driver.

 

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EARLY FIVE YEARS LATER
and more than 2,000 miles away, Officer Warren Fryer of the Hammond, Indiana, Police Department received an emergency call from a security guard at the American Inn, a run-down motel in the working-class suburb 30 minutes east of Chicago. According to the guard, two guests, a man and a woman, were arguing in the motel parking lot.

It was April 1, 1997. Fryer, who was on routine patrol that evening, drove to the motel. As he got out of his car, he immediately recognized the woman mentioned by the guard: Patricia Kelly, a local prostitute Fryer had arrested in the past. Apparently, she had just stolen a personal check from her client while they were having sex in their motel room, and the john was angry, chasing her around the parking lot, demanding she return it, which she couldn't do because she had flushed it down the toilet. Fryer also recognized the john. He was a Chicago security guard and former Marine named Andrew Urdiales.

Some five months earlier, on November 14, 1996, Fryer had arrested Urdiales outside a crack house on Becker Street in Ham
mond. Urdiales had been sitting in his silver-and-white Toyota pickup with a prostitute. While Fryer talked to the prostitute, his partner, Edwin Ortiz, was questioning Urdiales when he noticed a .38 caliber handgun sticking out from under his seat. They also found a gym bag in the spotless bed of the truck containing a few rolls of duct tape. Urdiales said he used the gun for his security work, but the cops arrested him for carrying a concealed weapon without a permit. They confiscated the gun, and Urdiales spent the night in jail.

At the American Inn, Urdiales was standing in the parking lot, seething. “That bitch took one of my checks,” he told Fryer, who then questioned Kelly separately. She told him that Urdiales, a regular client, would routinely drive her to nearby Wolf Lake and pay her $40 to have sex with him. But that was always during the day, and tonight, she'd refused to go with him because it was dark. Not only that, but she also knew a couple of prostitutes who'd been murdered at Wolf Lake late at night.

“This guy is kind of kinky,” Kelly told Fryer. “He wants to take me in the back of his pickup truck and go up by Wolf Lake, duct tape me, and fuck me in the ass.”

Fryer made no arrests that night, but he typed up a report on Kelly's statement, making sure to note Urdiales' previous firearm arrest—knowing full well that it would be forwarded to other local police departments. He figured a couple of Chicago homicide detectives might be interested in what Kelly had to say.

 

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NE OF THOSE DETECTIVES,
Don McGrath, still works nights for Chicago's Area Two Homicide Unit, which covers the southeast portion of the city. He's been with the force 31 years; so far this year, his unit has handled 135 murder investigations. But he still remembers well the night in April 1997 when he read Fryer's report because it seemed to have everything to do with three bodies that had been found in the previous year, two in Wolf
Lake and one in the Vermilion River 100 miles away near Pontiac, Illinois.

Although it was out of his jurisdiction, McGrath was familiar with the Vermilion case. On the evening of July 13, 1996, three young fishermen spotted a body floating in a remote area of the river near a footbridge. It was a nude woman who had been shot above her left eye and stabbed seven times in the chest. She had bruises all over, three broken teeth, duct-tape residue on her mouth and ankles, and strangulation marks on her neck. She also had a small, homemade tattoo on her ankle with the initials “C.C.” Police later identified her as 21-year-old Cassandra Corum, a prostitute from Hammond.

As McGrath saw it, Corum's murder seemed awfully similar to the murders his unit had been investigating at Wolf Lake, a recreational park bordered on the southeast side of Chicago by a chemical plant. The first body had been discovered on April 14, 1996, when a man was driving along the shore, looking for rocks to use as decoration in his garden. From his car, he spotted what looked like a mannequin floating in the water 20 feet from shore.

Police determined the victim was Laura Uylaki, a 25-year-old Hammond prostitute, who had been stabbed 25 times and shot three times in the head. She had been raped anally, and her body was covered in bruises.

A few months later, on August 2, a Chicago city employee was coming home after an early-morning fishing trip with his son, when he spotted what he thought was a mannequin floating in the water. It turned out to be Lynn Huber, a 22-year-old homeless prostitute from Chicago who had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest, back and neck, and then finished off with close-range gunshots to the face and head. The bullets matched those which had been retrieved from the bodies of Corum and Uylaki.

When he read Fryer's report about Urdiales, McGrath immediately called the Hammond police and learned that the handgun
that had been confiscated from Urdiales was scheduled to be destroyed in the next few weeks. “I asked would it be okay to pick up the gun and examine it,” he recalls. “We brought it to the crime lab, and it took them about a week to analyze it. They said we had the murder weapon.”

 

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N
A
PRIL
22, 1997, McGrath and his partner Raymond Krakausky drove to the house on the south side of Chicago where Urdiales lived with his parents. They sat in their car from early that afternoon until 9 a.m. the following day, when Urdiales walked out the front door dressed in a security-guard uniform. “We snagged him in the alley and told him we wanted to talk to him about the handgun charge,” McGrath says. “He said that the matter had already been adjudicated, but he agreed to come with us to the station. He was unremarkable. There was nothing about him that stood out, that would make you look twice, just an average-looking Joe.”

McGrath began his interrogation with a casual chat about
Star Trek
. Both he and Urdiales happened to be fans of the show, and McGrath was impressed that Urdiales could quote from the series.

McGrath and Krakausky already had a suspect in mind for the murders, a man who knew all three prostitutes, who had failed a polygraph and then tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists.

“He was an evil guy,” McGrath says of their suspect. “Evil incarnate, deep-set eyes, disheveled hair, a Charlie Manson expression, and in my 32 years, I never had the sense of evil like when I talked to this guy, but we couldn't find any physical evidence to connect him. We kind of believed Urdiales acquired his gun from this guy or loaned it to the guy, and he was the guy we were looking for.”

At the station, however, Urdiales insisted he had purchased the gun from a dealer, still had the receipts, kept the gun locked in a
box in his basement, and nobody else had the keys. McGrath and Krakausky exchanged glances and informed Urdiales that his gun had been used to murder three prostitutes. Urdiales unpinned his security-guard badge and untied his shoelaces. “I guess I'm not going to be going to work today,” he said, and then confessed to murdering Uylaki, Corum and Huber.

Urdiales described the murders in detail: how he lured them to Wolf Lake for sex but got angry each time. He shot Uylaki after she saw his gun under his seat and tried to grab it. He then removed her clothes, stabbed her and dumped her in the lake. Huber met the same fate after she acted “ditzy” in his car. He grabbed her by the hair, then shot her when she tried to leave and dumped her in the water.

Corum, according to McGrath's notes of the interview, said “something that pissed him off,” so Urdiales hit her in the face, took off her clothes and used duct tape to tie her feet together. He also taped her mouth shut, but he took off the tape to let her smoke a cigarette while he drove down Interstate 55 toward the Vermilion River. He pulled off the freeway near a farmhouse, driving through cornfields to the river.

Once there, he untied Corum, marched her out of the car, shot and stabbed her, then dropped her from a footbridge into the river. “Andrew Urdiales states that he didn't feel anything for Cassie after he shot her,” McGrath wrote. “That she was just a whore. And he was trained to kill in the Marine Corps.”

Urdiales didn't stop there. After confessing to the three Illinois murders, he told McGrath to call the cops in California.

“There are things they'd like to talk to me about, too,” he explained.

McGrath took furious notes as Urdiales recited a list of horrific murders in California. “It seemed he was glad to get it off his chest,” McGrath recalls. “During the recounting of the incidents, we'd crack a couple of jokes, and he'd laugh and go on to tell us about somebody else he killed. Pretty bizarre.”

In 1987, Urdiales said, he'd picked up a prostitute (later revealed to be Mary Ann Wells) in an industrial neighborhood of San Diego. He paid her $40 for sex, then shot her and took his money back. The next year, he returned to San Diego and murdered a woman police identified as Julie McGhee, a 20-year-old prostitute. In 1989, he murdered another prostitute, 19-year-old Tammie Erwin, in Palm Springs. He told McGrath he returned to Palm Springs on at least two other occasions. In 1995, he'd murdered a prostitute named Denise Maney there. And three years earlier, he'd kidnapped and raped a young woman who managed to escape his vehicle.