Authors: Pat Brown
The Delaware grand jury decided that the state had enough evidence against Painter and handed down an indictment charging him with first-degree attempted murder, burglary, kidnapping, first-degree unlawful sexual contact, and possession of a deadly weapon during the commission of a felony.
Painter pleaded not guilty.
The case was continued several times as prosecutors waited for the FBI to complete its DNA tests on evidence. Meanwhile, Painter underwent a psychiatric exam in which he said he did not know where he was or what he was doing on September 18 or 19, 1995. A doctor diagnosed Painter with “undifferentiated schizophrenia” but declared him competent to stand trial.
“I find no reason to believe that he would not have been responsible at the time of the crimes,” she wrote.
Two days before the attempted murder trial was scheduled to finally begin in Delaware, Vicki Davis was notified that Painter would be released and would not be going to trial for attempting to kill her.
“I called in and I demanded that the detectives explain how he could have done this to me and not left any hair or fibers,” Vicki wrote to me. “I was so confused…. I wish I had thought to say at the time, ‘Did you guys just screw up?’ But I was protecting the detective that had told me confidentially that the evidence was lost.”
PAINTER ALSO BECAME
a suspect in the 1995 murder of Lisa Young.
Lisa was a seventeen-year-old living in a state near the nation’s capital. A junior in high school, she left her after-school job at closing time and sat outside on a brick flower box with two bags of clothes she had purchased earlier and a soft drink, waiting for friends to pick her up. Then she just vanished. There were reports that she possibly got into a maroon or burgundy car, leaving her belongings on the sidewalk.
The next day at 5:30 a.m., a passing motorist found her fully clothed body about a mile down the road. She had been strangled, her head scored with knife wounds, and her throat cut. Her jewelry was stolen.
Painter became a suspect in the homicide investigation because he had a car that was similar to the one that allegedly took Lisa away, and he was in the area at the time. He was in jail awaiting trial in a nearby state, and this homicide looked awfully similar to the
assault six months earlier of Lisa Young (though that case was ultimately dropped). The detective working the Young case decided to pay Painter a visit in jail.
The detective interviewed Painter and found that just prior to his arrest, Painter had disposed of his late model, burgundy car—had it crushed, actually—because, he said, “It had a bad smell in it.”
There was white dog hair from a boxer found on Lisa’s body. According to neighbors, Painter got rid of his dogs right before a detective showed up to question him.
It seemed like another easy case to close. “This is the guy,” the detective said.
Lisa’s mother, Jessie Young, called me in January 2000. She wanted my help investigating her daughter’s 1995 murder, but asked that we keep it quiet for four months, until after the fifth anniversary of the crime passed. She said she had not seen the autopsy report—nor did she care to—and she didn’t want me to see it, either. She wanted to keep the details of her daughter’s death private.
PAINTER, EVEN IF
he wasn’t responsible for the attacks on Vicki and Lisa, certainly seems to have anger-retaliatory issues with women.
My take on him is that he views women as the cause of his problems and may have sought to regain his lost power through assaults on females. Painter certainly exhibited anger and violence five years earlier when he assaulted a girlfriend who told him she was leaving him. He was arrested but got only one hundred days of community service working in a food bank.
So the attacks on Young and Davis could have been perpetrated by him, too. They reflect similar, though escalating, anger and violence. Both the Lisa Young murder and the assault on Vicki Davis showed premeditation, some level of skill controlling the victim, and a violent rage against women. Although I could say there were elements of sadism present, the purpose of the assaults appeared to stem more from anger.
The offender in the Young and Davis crimes brought a knife with him but used materials present at the scene for the binding of the women. He planned part of the crimes but not all of them. However, it should be noted that the offender exuded a good amount of confidence and may have felt no need to bring items he knew would be readily available and less traceable.
Both crimes showed evidence of overkill. Much more violence was done to the women than was necessary to kill them. Vicki by all rights should have been dead, and the assault on her showed an uneven temper. The offender was calm when he was in control and became enraged when he lost control.
An experienced offender committed the crime against Vicki. The man who killed Lisa also showed some level of experience, but not quite as much as in Vicki’s assault. Were these two different offenders or did the same man commit both crimes, Lisa’s and then Vicki’s, showing more capability in the later crime once he acquired more experience? The calm manner in which he assaulted Davis without being terribly hurried showed practice. He took care to not leave evidence and he even commented to Davis that he had “seen it all before.” He put effort into restraining her and controlling the crime scene. Therefore, I thought it was of the utmost importance to look for unsolved rapes and homicides that occurred prior to 1995.
My investigation revealed that Painter was a homebody, and it seems more than coincidental that both the Young and Davis crimes were committed within a couple miles of his residence or the residence of someone he was visiting. I also looked at other crimes that occurred near his previous addresses and places of employment.
I concluded that earlier murders in these areas that did not include binding and knife wounds should not be ruled out as possibly being connected to Painter. Often, earlier crimes of the perpetrator are less complicated and take less time. The perpetrator’s choice of weapons can change due to acquired preferences or availability.
While we may think that the place where a body has been dumped is significant, in fact, most offenders dump a body where it is convenient rather than for some emotional reason. Some pick places where
they feel the evidence will be eliminated. For example, a stream could be chosen because it will wash away DNA and fibers or simply because it was available. Perhaps the offender prefers dumping the body in a stream, but there are none nearby, so he instead chooses a field. Most of the time, the dumping of the body is done in the most expedient way.
If
, however, closer locations are ignored, then there may be a specific reason for a particular dumping location. Sometimes the offender remembers a place nearby where he had a picnic and thinks, “Hey, that place had some nice woods!”
My profile of the perpetrator is someone who liked to be in control. He seemed to savor the moment. It was my feeling that any crime committed by this individual would take a reasonable amount of time. He would not be the sort of anger-retaliatory killer who was in and out of the scene in a matter of minutes. He had some aspect of a power rapist in that he spent time talking to his victim. A power rapist likes to ask his victims about their sexual experiences or how well he is performing. Sometimes he will verbally threaten the victim—he enjoys humiliating her and watching her squirm. He would have liked to see the fear in the face of the woman and he would enjoy the act of killing. However, he would not exhibit the length of time used by a sexual sadist who meticulously planned the killing and torturing of a female for an extended length of time. He would not need to bring the woman to a fixed location nor would he need to bring much more than a knife along for the job—if anything at all.
I believed the perpetrator picked victims he could easily control. He would be unlikely to choose victims from a level of society above him; women who were highly educated or wealthy, for example, would make him feel inferior. He would operate where he felt comfortable. Although neither Young nor Davis was involved in prostitution, I would not discount the possibility that the perpetrator might choose victims who were. Even if he was not the type to use such services, availability is often the reason certain victims are chosen.
Certainly the case against Painter should have gone forward. The grand jury indicted him, and it is a travesty of the criminal justice
system that the case was dismissed. Last I heard he was driving a tow truck; isn’t that great news for any woman who calls for help?
I DON’T KNOW
if Painter was the attacker, but there was quite a bit of circumstantial evidence linking him to both Lisa’s murder and Vicki’s attack.
That wasn’t the half of it.
When Painter was being interviewed by a detective about Lisa’s murder, he suddenly blurted out, “Oh, by the way, tell Tracie Andrews I’m sorry about Sarah.”
When I heard that, my jaw dropped.
The Sarah Andrews case? What the hell?
Sarah Andrews’s parents lived in the same state as Painter, but Sarah Andrews had died 2,000 miles away and ten years earlier. How would Harold Painter know anything about Sarah Andrews? Why did he say, “I’m sorry about Sarah”?
It turned out that he
knew
Tracie Andrews, Sarah’s mother, and he knew her very well. She was the longtime best friend of Painter’s ex-wife, and the two of them had stayed in Tracie Andrews’s house when she lived on the very road where Lisa Young’s body was dumped. It was an incredible coincidence—if it was one. But despite all the circumstantial evidence—the car, the boxer dogs, and the bizarre-as-all-get-out connection to Sarah Andrews—Painter was never arrested for the Lisa Young murder and was never brought back in for the attempted homicide of Vicki Davis. The police were still convinced that he attacked Vicki, even though the DNA on the cigarette found at the scene in the living room didn’t match him or Vicki. I agreed with them; something seemed bogus about the DNA testing because everything else pointed toward Painter, and when I called and left a message for the FBI lab technician she called back and angrily told me how great a job she had done. I thought that the fact I got a call back was strange enough in itself (because I had no official capacity in the case and I wasn’t a journalist), but the technician was working overtime to say she hadn’t erred. Eventually, I
caught up to the original detective on the Young case in the summer of 2000 and had a nice conversation with him while he worked his part-time job guarding a liquor store.
“He killed Lisa Young and attacked [Vicki Davis]. I never doubted that.”
But, unfortunately, no court ever proved he was guilty in either case.
And did Painter also go out west and kill Sarah Andrews?
I took the information and sent it to the present detective on Sarah’s case, including pictures of Painter’s smiling face and his dental work. If it wasn’t the bouncer or the cross-dresser, the two top suspects that I came up with in that crime, could it be Harold Painter?
Sarah was sexually assaulted with an object, and it is curious that the Davis attack, with which Painter was initially charged, showed anger and rage, though not penetration by him. Perhaps in both cases the perpetrator did not commit rape because he could not perform the act to his satisfaction with his own penis.
Davis says that Painter was her attacker and that he demanded that she move her bottom around while he masturbated on her, then stabbed her over and over. So it wasn’t really a surprise when Painter’s ex-wife told me that he called himself a “needle-nosed bug fucker” because his member wasn’t much to speak of, and he didn’t think it was very useful, she said. He had a complex about it. If he was the attacker, it could follow that he would use a substitute—he didn’t think his penis would be effective in that situation.
Three women, none raped in the “normal” way. But they were all sexual assaults that brought a thrill to the one who did them.
The perpetrator of the crime against Sarah Andrews could match my profile of Painter alone, but one of the things I’ve learned as a profiler is that there are a lot of Harold Painters out there. The bouncer at the bar may have been another, and the cross-dresser could be one, too. Did one of them do it?
On television news we often hear of reporters doing a sex offender search of a crime-ridden area and finding an incredible number of convicted offenders within one mile of some missing child. The viewer thinks, “They found what, seventy? Is every one of my
neighbors a sex offender?” And the answer is…maybe. They intersect, and they crisscross, so you have to be careful when you arrest and convict these guys that you don’t mistakenly haul in someone who didn’t do it just because he may have a similar MO to the person who did.
There are only so many ways a person can commit a crime, even when the supposed signatures have been identified. And sex offenders aren’t always particularly creative. They may do the exact same things as the next guy. Once in a while, we’ll find one who’s really inspired, but mostly we see repetitive acts. Sometimes they get their ideas from books or movies or from the newspapers (which can spawn copycats). But a good portion of the time they do something that just comes naturally to them, like spitting on the victim, leaving her in a sexually provocative position, or throwing a blanket over her body. These simple behaviors are common to many offenders, making it look like the same guy—but it’s not.
The fact is, that seemingly guilty offender could have committed the crime, but then again, maybe one of nine other guys in the area could have committed the same crime. So unless we have actual evidence proving it was one individual, you don’t want to say, “Boy, that sure looks like Painter, it must be him.” Well, it may not be Harold Painter. It may be the bouncer or the cross-dresser. It could be someone else altogether. That’s the police’s job. If they analyze the crime well, then their job is to gather enough evidence to support probable cause to bring the suspect in and continue uncovering further evidence that will put him away.