Authors: Pat Brown
Years had gone by and the police were willing to buy into Manny the bounty hunter’s scenario. That’s where my involvement in the story begins.
CASES THAT INVOLVE
American military personnel, especially females, are particularly disturbing to us all. How wrong it seems that men and women who volunteer their lives to serve their country and defend our freedoms are then killed by their fellow citizens within their own country’s borders.
The violent criminal, of course, being a psychopath, couldn’t care less that his victim was doing him a favor, protecting the very system that allows him so much freedom and providing him a criminal justice system that treats defendants and the guilty better than do most countries in the world.
Sometimes, we see strife between couples within the military, boyfriend-girlfriend disputes. Military life can be a difficult adjustment, stressful at times, and relationships can be difficult to maintain. In the case of Sarah Andrews, there was no evidence of domestic disturbance between her and anyone else, so the detectives did not think she had a boyfriend who went nuts on her.
THIS WHOLE CASE
was peculiar from the start. Sarah was murdered in 1987, and I was brought into it nine years later; it was the first case I officially took as a profiler. I can still look at the profile I did on this case and be satisfied with it, which I’m thankful for, because sometimes you look back on your early cases and think, “Oh, my God, did I not know what I was doing?”
It’s a good thing they didn’t know how new I was to profiling back then. One always feels a bit of guilt in the beginning of such a career because someone has to be the first “victim” and you can only cross your fingers and hope your work doesn’t suck too badly. Of course, the same is true for other professions—there is always a first patient, a first client, a first group of students. Someone gets to be practiced on for anyone to actually become a professional.
I opened the Sexual Homicide Exchange in 1996 and was starting to hear from interested people, even while continuing my studies. I met a few questionable characters at a class called “How to Become a Bail Enforcement Agent,” and when I finished, I got a cool bail enforcement badge and a jacket with the words “Bail Enforcement Agent” across the back. Manny the bounty hunter–private detective was lecturing at this course. When he found out that I was a criminal profiler, he glommed on to me. He figured he could manipulate me and get me to do his bidding. Families, when crimes go unsolved—and the Andrews
case had been on file for an eternity by the time I came into it—will try anything. They become desperate, which is why most of them will try psychics at some point. They want answers for their deep misery; they want closure.
Unfortunately, their emotions are raw and they aren’t always thinking clearly, making them great marks for people who will try to make money from their pain and suffering. One of the reasons I always give my service pro bono is to eliminate the notion that I am using these people to make money. Most private detectives don’t apply this same standard. And while there are plenty of qualified, smart PIs who do good work, there are even more charging $50 to $100 an hour when the likelihood of solving a murder is slim to none. They accept retainers on cases for which the police don’t have any evidence to effect a prosecution and never will, but bleed the family dry nonetheless.
In a stranger homicide, where there is no clue who committed the crime, the PI could interview the entire city and still produce nothing. I’ve seen families lose as much as $40,000 hiring private investigators and rarely getting answers from them.
Manny convinced the Andrews family that he was working hard on investigating their daughter’s murder. He shared his suspicions about drugs being involved and how Sarah was likely taken and executed by a gang.
Even the police believed that was possible in the beginning, providing Manny a credible theory on which to base his investigative forays. There were a lot of drugs floating around the area; it was a major drug hub. Sarah had quite a few friends and relatives who were said to be involved in drugs, and some said Sarah herself could be caught up in something illegal. So the police immediately labeled the homicide a drug-related crime, stating, “We think that she was taken someplace and tortured, and then dumped in the parking lot. It had something to do with the drug trade.”
Manny took off running with this concept. There were lots of people involved in drugs around the area where Sarah was murdered, so he could theoretically do lots and lots of investigating and collect lots and lots of checks. Somewhere along the way, he decided—and I still don’t understand his decision-making here except to think
that it was simply arrogance—that having a profiler agree with him would add fuel to his farce and keep the checks coming. He thought I would replicate his own profile of the crime, a notion that had nothing to do with the evidence but included a large cast of characters for him to track down.
He gave me information about drugs and gangs in the area, thinking I would jump on board with him and inspire the family into thinking he was headed down the right trail. But Manny was a lousy profiler.
I told the family that the murder was a sexual homicide committed by a lone serial killer, not a revenge killing by drug dealers. Manny was not a happy man.
THERE HAD BEEN
multiple theories over the years in Sarah’s case. There was the drug dealer approach, and then there was the idea that it was a lesbian crime. I thought that was a most interesting one—not correct, but curious.
This theory suggested that it was a lesbian-on-lesbian killing because women don’t use their hands to strangle and men do. But this is not true. Men use their hands and other methods as well. Apparently, some folks have never heard of a male killing a woman by ligature strangulation, which I thought was amusing, because one of the most common ways that men kill women is exactly that way. The man sneaks up behind the woman and throws a phone cord, a belt, or the cord of a window blind around her neck. Ligature strangulation can be useful in preventing the woman from clawing at your hands, leaving scratch marks on you and getting your DNA under her nails. Women use ligature strangulation for this reason also and because it’s easier than strangling someone with your bare hands, especially more delicate female hands. But in Sarah’s case, it made no sense whatsoever. First, she wasn’t a lesbian. Second, the woman would have had to be one heck of a big, tough broad to do what the killer did to Sarah.
One of the things I always tell the police and families is that while everything is possible, not all things are
probable
. You can’t waste a
lot of investigative effort on an extremely unlikely scenario; you have to stay with what makes sense. If we do get some odd information that proves it might be of interest, yes, of course it should be taken into consideration because you shouldn’t eliminate anything, either. But truly, every possibility is not really worth looking at.
The Andrews case showed me where criminal profiling and crime reconstruction are useful and that police departments often jump over this part of dealing with a homicide. Sometimes it is a matter of lack of training or funds to hire profilers, but a good portion of the time the investigator just doesn’t have hours and hours to spend analyzing one crime when they have new ones showing up daily. He goes with his gut—hopefully, a good one based on years of experience—and, if all goes well, it pans out and the case moves in the right direction.
Police are used to run-of-the-mill homicides, which include most of the homicides many investigators see. One guy pisses off another guy in a bar and gets stabbed. A drug dealer rips off another drug dealer and gets shot. Big deal. They don’t feel sorry for the victim and they don’t have to do much analysis to figure out the crime.
But Sarah Andrews was different. When the police showed up to view the body lying desolately in the empty parking lot behind the nightclub on that cold March morning, their blood ran cold from more than the winter weather. It was a chilling case that likely still lurks in the recesses of the detectives’ memories.
Sarah was found lying on her back, a little bit to her left side—“posed,” according to the police. At a distance, she looked almost artistic, like a Botticelli painting, the way she was lying there, her arms out and her legs bent. Her skin looked like marble against the gray pavement, her hair framing her face, a few dark strands across her eyes. Clumps of white snow seemed to accent the landscape. One could almost see a model lounging for the artist as he put brush to canvas, creating his masterpiece. Unfortunately, instead of being viewed in a portrait gallery, Sarah became part of a crime file, the police photographer snapping his picture methodically.
She was naked except for a shoe on her left foot and the leggings hanging off of it. The double coat hanger was at her mouth and around her neck, and that’s what was used to strangle her. There were bite
marks on her breast and hand. She had been sodomized with an object. Her right nipple was missing. It was a gruesome crime.
Sarah’s Maryland driver’s license—which had expired—was lying under her body. I will never know for sure whether the murderer tossed it to the ground along with her to say, “Ha, ha, here’s who this is,” or whether he was sending a message to somebody that he killed Sarah, or maybe he was just being funny, saying, “Look, she’s expired just like her license.”
One of the things you never know with an offender is what’s going through his mind, exactly. Sadly, serial killers and sex offenders are sometimes quite amused by designing their artistic projects. Others couldn’t care less and will simply rape, kill, and drive off. So one of the interesting behaviors in this crime is that the killer left Sarah’s license with her. We will never know why, but we do know that he had access to her license and he left it at the scene.
When you’ve worked in the field a long enough time, there’s little you can see that would make you say, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” because in homicide investigations, you see so many awful things. It almost becomes a joke, like, “Well, she’s still in one piece. That’s fabulous!” Or “She’s been stabbed sixty times, but her head’s still attached. I think that’s a plus.” This is the way some investigators actually think and talk after being on the job for a while. It’s sad but true. At a mechanic shop where body parts are found scattered about, you might hear if you snuck onto such a scene:
“Do you need a hand over there?”
“I’m not sure we can piece this one together.”
“This guy really doesn’t have a head for business.”
Sometimes the puns just bubble up amid the horror. But, in Sarah’s case, there was likely more workmanlike quiet as the police handled the scene.
As a criminal profiler, I am not looking at the fresh crime scene but at photos, which dulls the incoming sensory stuff quite a bit, so I have a great deal of empathy for the detectives who stood there at the scene and saw this horrific sight firsthand. If a crime involves a drug dealer who was shot, that may not be the worst thing they’ve ever seen. In fact, they might say, “That’s messy, but he deserved it.”
Then they walk away and forget it. But if the same investigator sees a child who has been murdered, he might completely lose it, because that, to him, might truly be the worst thing he has ever seen.
Sarah was a beautiful young military recruit, brutally killed and tossed like garbage in a parking lot. It took a great toll on the detectives. They wanted to get the perpetrator, that son of a bitch. They asked questions, did the legwork. They pounded the pavement, just like in the movies, hearing stories, compiling leads. Drug dealing was mentioned and it was implied that maybe Private Sarah Andrews wasn’t the perfect soldier. Theories flew. Maybe Sarah was in the middle of something dirty; maybe a drug dealer retaliated against her for something she said or did—or didn’t do.
Big-city detectives rarely have the time to stop everything they’re working on and spend even a day or two exclusively considering the evidence of a single case, analyzing all the photos and reports. And most police departments don’t have a dedicated criminal profiler on staff to assist their analysis. The detective, under pressure to get all kinds of other cases closed, may have had no choice but to look at Sarah Andrews and quickly reach some conclusions.
Once he says, “It looks like a retaliation crime,” conflicting evidence can be overlooked, because it’s incidental to the accepted theory of the homicide at hand.
In this instance, the quick theory was that Sarah was abducted, taken someplace, and tortured—the crime somehow related to the local drug trade—and then brought back and tossed aside in the parking lot. A lot of people were looking askance at army personnel, the kinds of people with whom she was involved, her friends, and anybody she dealt with on a regular basis.
Although there were clearly sexual aspects to the crime, oddly enough, the idea that the crime was a sexual homicide was not given much thought. A serial killer was on the loose, but nobody was looking for him.
IN 1997, WHEN
I came in and studied this case, I found some interesting elements that were overlooked, much of which had to do with
physical evidence. For an unsolved homicide, this was a case with a tremendous amount of information that could be gleaned from the body and the crime scene. Some crimes have almost nothing useful to help you with an analysis. You have a dead girl in a field, she’s been horrifically raped and strangled, and that’s all you see. Dead girl, naked, nail marks on her neck, semen in her vagina. That’s it. You can’t imagine what happened, before, during, or after, except you know she was raped and strangled.
In Sarah’s case, the evidence created the threads of a mental video of the entire crime, that’s how good it was. I could tell what happened first, second, third, fourth, and fifth in this crime. Very unusual. You don’t get this too often. By analyzing the autopsy and crime scene photos, you could tell certain things occurred.