The Profiler (22 page)

The guy put the phone down for a while. When he returned, he was chortling.

“You’re not going to believe this one,” he said, his voice full of excitement.

“What?”

“That guy you asked me about, I have to testify against him in court.”

“What for?”

“He is accused of abducting, raping, and strangling a little girl who he put in a closet.”

I said, “That sounds familiar….”

Bingo!

If you were looking for MO, we had a winner here. And while MO doesn’t always remain the same, hey, when it’s that close, a profiler can’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

WHILE THIS WAS
going on, I reached out to an agent I knew in the FBI to see if he could get answers for the family. I also thought he might consider getting involved in the investigation. But he talked with the detective in charge, and even though he came away feeling she was sincerely following through on Mary Beth’s murder, he learned no more than the family did.

In November 1999, I wrote the following in my case notes:

WE COULD PLACE
a stranger in Mary Beth Townsend’s apartment just three weeks before she was discovered strangled and left in a closet. And he was on trial for strangling a girl and putting her in a closet.

“This is a guy we should look at,” I said.

I asked my new friend at Trashman some more questions about the man. “Who is this guy, what can you tell me?”

“His name’s Scotty May. He’s African American, and I believe he lives in southeast Washington.”

That also fit snugly into my profile.

“Do you possibly know whether he can drive a stick-shift car?”

“I actually do know that, because our vehicles are all stick-shift vehicles, and because he could not drive one, he always had to ride on the passenger side and somebody else had to drive.”

I CONFIRMED WITH
local law enforcement that Scotty May was indeed on his way to court, so I went back to the police department and gave the detective all the information I had gathered. She didn’t seem to me to be interested in the least.

I was stunned.

“How can you not be interested in a guy that was in her apartment three weeks before she was murdered, who committed the same exact crime someplace else?” I said. “What part don’t you get?”

The detective didn’t know me, and maybe she didn’t think profilers know what they’re doing, or she didn’t believe in the science of criminal profiling, but how could she deny that this guy committed the exact same crime someplace else? How could she think Scotty had nothing to do with it? That was crazy.

THE DAY OF
Scotty May’s trial arrived and he was charged with attempted murder, rape, and abduction with intent to defile. Art and I learned firsthand about Scotty and what kind of character this career felon was.

A high school graduate, May was five ten, weighed 185 to 195 pounds and had brown eyes. He lived in the area where Mary Beth’s car was abandoned, and worked for temporary employment services, as I suspected, one in Virginia near Mary Beth’s home and another in Washington, D.C. One of the last jobs he had before he went to jail was cleaning buildings that were under construction.

One of the services he worked for employed a thirteen-year-old girl with a false ID whom I’ll call Shania. She was a runaway from another county in Virginia, living in a motel with an older boyfriend who was dealing drugs. Clearly, her life wasn’t going terribly well. Then she met Scotty through the temp service, and things got worse.

Scotty was living with his girlfriend, Crystal Jones, and their two children in southeast Washington. One day, Shania’s boyfriend was arrested and jailed for dealing drugs and she no longer had a place to stay, since he was paying for the motel room. Good Samaritan that he was, May let her stay at his house.

The girl arrived thinking she’d be safe with May, Crystal, and their kids. May said he got a call for them to go clean a building early the next morning. Shania got up, put on her clothes, and off they went in his car.

When they arrived, there was nobody else there and it was still dark outside.

“Why don’t we go in the building and smoke some dope?” May said.

Shania said, “No, I don’t want to.”

“Oh, come on, come on,” he said, pressuring her to come along.

She wasn’t interested, but felt she had no choice but to go in with him. Once they were inside, Scotty started down a new path.

“Your boyfriend’s in jail. You need a new boyfriend, don’t you?”

He started putting the moves on her, and she said, “No, I don’t need a new boyfriend, because he’s getting out of jail. I don’t need to be with you. I’m not interested.”

But he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said.

“Well, you’re going to,” May said.

That’s when he raped her.

She was terrified that he was going to hurt her, so she did not fight back. May was a big guy, and she was a little girl.

He cleverly used a condom so he wouldn’t leave any evidence, and after he finished raping her, he told her to put her clothes back on, and she did. She looked sad, and she was.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“I’m tired, I just want to go to sleep,” she said.

She was emotionally shutting down from the horrible assault.

He said, “You want to go to sleep? No problem,” and May put his arm around her neck in a sleeper hold, tightened his arm, and he strangled her.

When she was unconscious and wasn’t moving anymore, he picked up her body and put it in a closet in the empty building, closed the door, and walked away.

It turned out there was never any temporary work at the building that day; that was just a ruse he used to get her there, and after he got what he wanted, he went on his way.

The mistake Scotty May made—besides the crimes of raping and strangling an underage girl—was that he didn’t check to see how dead she was, because she was still alive. She woke up, and she got out of the closet, ran down through the building, and went to the office and told them to call the police because she had been raped and strangled.

The police came, took her in, and asked her to write down exactly what had happened to her. She wrote, “Scotty May took me to this building, and he raped me, and he strangled me.” She wrote it all down, and the police went looking for May.

A year after Mary Beth Townsend’s murder, Scotty May was drinking tea in his living room when he saw a police car pull up. He thought they were coming to talk to him about a fraud he committed at work, but they were actually there to ask him about the thirteen-year-old girl that they believed he raped and strangled earlier that day.

“Oh, did you hear about the fraud?” he asked.

Until then, no, they didn’t know he had been ripping off the company where he worked.

“No, no,” the officers said. “We’re not here about a fraud. We’re looking into the case of this thirteen-year-old girl that’s gone missing. Shania.”

“What about her?”

“Do you know her?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I know her. I don’t know where she is. This morning she wanted to go back to the motel on Route 1 where her boyfriend was, so I dropped her off and haven’t seen her since.”

“Well, Scotty, she said that you raped her,” and with that the detective pushed the girl’s report in front of him. “See what she’s written about you?”

“That’s impossible. She couldn’t have written that,” he said.

“Why not?” the officer asked.

“She’s
dead
.”

Swift move, May. Gotta love stupid criminals. May wasn’t as slick as he thought. They arrested him, obviously, because he screwed that one up, making the criminally stupid mistake of saying she was dead before he was supposed to know she was dead.

THE SCOTTY MAY
story could have ended there. But he decided he was bright enough that he should be his own lawyer.

To be honest, he presented himself quite well in court. On the day Scotty’s trial began, Art looked around to see if he could spot him.

“Where is he?” Art asked the bailiff.

May was dressed so well that Art thought he was looking at a lawyer.

“No,” the bailiff said, “that is Scotty May.”

Some people can present themselves quite well in court when they dress up, so May was in a nice suit, and he thought this was enough to ensure a successful trial. He was well spoken, talkative, gentle, and respectful in his approach to the jurors. Mind you, he had spent most of his adult life in prison for committing one crime after another. He’d hardly been on the outside, but he saw himself as a pretty fine jailhouse lawyer.

Shania started crying as soon as she saw May in court. He got her on the stand, looked her in the eye, and he said to her, “You know I didn’t rape you, don’t you?”

She stared right back at him and said, “Yes you did, Scotty, yes you did.”

All he could say to that was “Oh,” which the jury didn’t consider much of a defense. Maybe he thought he could intimidate Shania, but it didn’t work.

He was found guilty of kidnapping, guilty of rape, and guilty of attempted murder.

Even though he looked good, he wasn’t a very good lawyer. But May continued representing himself in the penalty phase. He expected to convince the jury that he was a decent guy in spite of the fact that
he kidnapped, raped, and attempted to murder a thirteen-year-old girl.

What no one expected was that Scotty May was a changed man.

“I found the Lord. Yes, I found Jesus,” May proclaimed. “I’ve been reading my Bible, I’m a Christian now, and I just want to tell you that I think you ought to give me a chance, because I’m not really that bad a guy.

“As a matter of fact, I did Shania a favor, because when I met Shania, she was a runaway. She was living with a man who was dealing drugs. She was on the streets. She wasn’t in school, and after I did this to her, she returned home to her family, and she’s back in school. I should get a break because I helped her out!”

That’s a sign of a true psychopath, making lemonade out of lemons: “I did kidnap, rape, and strangle that girl, tried to kill her, but I did her a favor. So I think we should call it even.”

Scotty May’s closing argument won him a sentence of life plus thirty. He received twenty years for abduction with intent to defile, to be served concurrently; the remaining life plus ten years are to be served consecutively. May can still apply for geriatric parole when he reaches the age of sixty, which will be in the year 2028.

The court declined to hear oral arguments on the motion to set aside the jury verdict on rape. But Judge Stanley P. Klein did tell May: “Your whole defense is that you weren’t there. But it was clear to this Court, based on the questions you asked the witness [Shania] on cross-examination, that you WERE there. In this Court’s opinion, the jury did not make a mistake.”

ART SPOKE TO
a detective and told him he attended Scotty May’s trial.

The detective said, “We were supposed to have somebody there, but I don’t know if we did.” It was the first official acknowledgment that the police were even considering Scotty May a person of interest. “We are certainly focused on him,” the detective said, halfheartedly.

Later still, Art received the following phone message from the detective in charge of the case:

“Hello, Art. This is Detective B. from the police department. I had told you that I would get back with you sometime in October, and I wanted to chat with you briefly about the case. I have no new exciting news for you, except that the prosecutor and I are working toward an indictment. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a time frame as yet. But I would like to talk to you. Please call me later today, or I will try you again. Thank you.”

The phone call gave Art false hope that they were doing something, but nothing ever came of the indictment.

IT WAS ABOUT
a year after the Mary Beth Townsend murder that Scotty May attacked the thirteen-year-old girl.

When I found out the name of the Trashman employee was Scotty May, I paid a visit to his girlfriend, Crystal Jones, to discover a little bit more of what she knew around the time of the crime. The day Mary Beth died was, not coincidentally, Crystal Jones’s birthday. I believe May needed money to buy his girlfriend a present.

The day after the murder, May went to Philadelphia. Mary Beth’s murderer stole her rings, and he would have had to hawk them someplace; they were worth some money. If you hawk things in Washington, D.C., you have to show a driver’s license—same for Virginia—so your name will be recorded as the person selling the item. But in Philadelphia, the rules are different and it’s a popular place to fence stolen goods. I figured the murderer might go there, because he wouldn’t be asked for an ID. I never did find a pawn shop that could identify May, but according to police reports he sure acted peculiar while he was there. He arrived at his estranged wife’s home, beat her, threatened to kill her, pulled out a gun, and, after fleeing, was chased by police to the rooftop of a nearby building. The criminal justice system didn’t put him back in prison, so he moved on to raping and trying to kill Shania.

THERE WAS AN
incredible amount of evidence linking Scotty May to the murder of Mary Beth Townsend, so Art and I returned
once more to the police department. They still refused to look at any of the new information I brought.

Police departments are as susceptible as any business to the egos of the people who are involved and all the inherent politics. They fall prey to all kinds of issues that can be radically different from one police department to the next and from one investigator to the next.

You throw the dice when you talk about employees of any business, and, unfortunately, Mary Beth Townsend’s murder drew a pair of uncooperative detectives. Getting a good detective on your case is much the same as getting lucky with a skilled surgeon.