The Profiler (27 page)

ALL THESE BEHAVIORS
that Orville exhibited after the fact were peculiar, which is why the police said, “There’s something fishy about this guy.”

They already knew Orville pretty well. He lived in a small town, and Orville wasn’t terribly liked by the police there. He agreed to a polygraph, which was inconclusive. He said he contacted a psychic who told him Missy was in a dark place, probably the car trunk that he knew she was in. He spouted theories of Satanism.

Where was she for two weeks? Why couldn’t they find her?

Eventually, an anonymous 911 call came in—it was not recorded because of technical difficulties—telling the police that Missy could be found in one of three places. She was found in one of them, between the two houses, the Jones house and the Lewis house, underneath a honeysuckle bush. She wasn’t there before; the area had been carefully searched and searched again. Her hair was matted and stood out from her head. Her skin was black all over except for her legs, which were orangish above the knees. She was laid down in the bush with her body pitched downward and her feet up, wearing a
T-shirt decorated with kittens. Her tennis shoes, the shoelaces tied in a knot to keep the shoes together, had been tossed onto the bush and were hanging from a branch. Missy was not known to tie her shoes in that manner.

Her hands were loosely tied with one of her socks. The other sock was stuffed in her mouth and had hardened there. Missy’s black jeans and underwear were wadded up and lying under her. Her shirt was on her torso but it, too, was rolled up. No bra, but she didn’t wear one. It appeared to be a sexual assault but there was no visible evidence of it.

If she were there for two weeks, searchers would have found her, because they clearly searched between the two houses.

“A few days before Missy’s body was found,” according to Miranda Jones, “Rhonda Lewis’s oldest sister picked berries at that spot and said she saw nothing. My mom and I searched that area, too; we stood next to the honeysuckle bush where her body was later found and we saw nothing.

“Everyone is in agreement that Missy was not there at that time, that she was killed somewhere else and her body was brought back.” It wasn’t until later that they brought in cadaver dogs and came across her body. Where did her body come from?

If she got tired of waiting to be picked up and walked home and somebody raped her on the way—like Tommy from down the street—he probably would have just left her there and run.

If somebody abducted her and dragged her off to a vehicle, she wouldn’t be there at all. So why did the body end up back by the house? Why wasn’t it there to begin with?

Earlier, Orville reportedly told Rhonda that she shouldn’t walk between the houses because bad things happen to little girls who walk in that area.

There was a theory that Orville may have actually brought Missy home and done something to her in the house, but I found that kind of unlikely. My theory is that he did something to her in those woods and then didn’t know what to do about his dead daughter lying in the middle of the patch. He had to do something with her body—after
all, he might have left evidence on it—so he quickly carried her to his house and put her body in the trunk of the car; he would slip back inside and into bed and deal with “the problem” later. He hid the car keys to make sure no one else would borrow the vehicle and decide to put some groceries in the trunk.

Eventually, the car was moved. I think it was moved around quite a few times because he didn’t know what to do with it. One of the reasons her body may have ended up where it did, dumped back in the woods to be found two weeks later, was that he got tired of it all. We find this often happens with people who are involved with the killing of a family member. That’s one of the reasons we look back at the family when we see something like this. We look at the husband, the parents—whoever the victim had a close relationship with, because these people have to live day in and day out with the search, and at some point they get frustrated by it. They tire of the questioning and the wife or the husband or whoever constantly looking for the missing person and spending their entire lives doing this. They want to move on.
That kid’s dead, I want to forget about it. I want to start doing stuff. I don’t want to sit here and dwell on this
.

The killer will bring the body back and dump it in a location where it will be found and they can get that part over with.
There’s
the body. We found her. Now can we move on?
Of course, they don’t think ahead to the next part, which is that the authorities will actually investigate the homicide. The perpetrator doesn’t think that far ahead.

Orville didn’t seem terribly surprised when he got the news that Missy’s body was found right near the house in the woods. He said, “Huh.” That someone might have brought her body back and dumped it in the bushes would not be a big surprise to Orville if he was the one who put it there. It is most likely that he kept Missy in the trunk until he had an opportunity to move her to another location for hiding. There was speculation that he hid the body in his mother’s barn. But, at some point, my theory continues, he wanted her to be found, and so he put her back in the trunk and brought her back to the woods by the house. He carried her body to the bush and dumped it.
Then he went back to the car, looked in the trunk, and realized the shoes were still there. He grabbed them, tossed them into the bushes, and took off. The body was found, and by that time the police were looking at him.

One of the interesting things is that his wife told me that he kept spraying his car trunk with insecticide. He was apparently having a little bit of a fly problem. That’s why his wife noticed an odd smell and an insecticide odor as well.

The family, in spite of Orville’s squirrelly behavior, did not think he had anything to do with the crime. They just thought he was a quirky fellow.

I see this happen with many families. People around Missy, her teachers and her Girl Scout leader, thought she might have been sexually abused. They believed something was not right in her life long before she was murdered. Missy’s behavior had changed in recent months, she seemed sad and distant. Yet they had trouble believing that someone they knew was responsible for this horrific act.

I WENT BACK
and looked at Orville’s history and there was no shortage of interesting details. He told his first wife that he had had a sexual relationship with his sister, and his sister was killed running in front of a car—away from him, perhaps.

We don’t know whether it’s true that he had sex with his sister, but he said that he did, which is an interesting admission.

I also learned that another family member had reported that she had been molested by him. When we get to Missy, it’s not terribly surprising to learn police suspected he had sexually assaulted her as well.

The information was adding up and Orville was scoring all the points. The time line made no sense for anybody but Orville to have committed the crime. Everything pointed to him: his peculiar behaviors, his lack of interest in looking for his daughter, and the claim that she was already dead, so why bother looking? This guy was awfully confident that he knew what happened to Missy.

The family was blind to these behaviors; they wouldn’t and couldn’t believe it.

I MET WITH
the police, studied all of their materials, and examined the crime scene. I believed that the police were absolutely correct, that Orville must have been involved in the sexual assault and murder of his daughter.

But I came to a slightly different theory about where it happened and how it went down.

The police did not have enough evidence at that point in time to go to court. They wanted the family’s cooperation, but they weren’t getting any because the police focused suspicion on Orville.

When I made my independent analysis, which pointed to Orville’s involvement, I told the police that I would sit down with the family and ask for their cooperation. We had a fascinating meeting outside the house. We all sat in chairs with a beer and relaxed. Miranda was there, as was Missy’s uncle, and it was quite a group. Orville was not living there at the time; he had already fled the family coop and was in prison serving time for an unrelated charge that occurred when his new girlfriend called the police on him. They had been arguing over a new man in her life and Orville said he was going to hurt the other boyfriend. When the police arrived on the scene, he shot at them, they shot back, and he went to prison.

I explained Orville’s entire history. I explained how his sexual experience with his sister demonstrated sexual deviancy before they ever met him. He was not an honest man and he was a major manipulator. I went through every detail of his background. I explained how they got wrapped up in this, why it was confusing, and how they might have difficulty recognizing the truth in all of this.

When I finished, they looked at me with sad, glazed-over expressions and I realized that this was one family that could handle the truth, even as ugly a truth as this one. Families often fight back against
the truth, and they say, “No way,” no matter what I tell them. This family did not do that. Instead they said, “What do you need us to do? How can we help?”

I put in place a plan to try to draw a confession out of Orville, and I started by communicating with him. There were letters coming from him, so full of garbage it was just amusing. The family worked with me, so Missy’s uncle, Miranda’s brother, sent a letter saying, “Orville, we have this great private investigator working with us who believes Missy’s death was an accident.”

I wanted Orville to think I was on the family’s side in supporting him and that the family did not want this going to court. They believed it was an accident because the criminal profiler told them that. This was my ruse: I believed that Orville was drunk when he picked up Missy and, on the way back, they got into an argument, and he accidentally killed her, and he didn’t know what to do. I thought the police were wrong that it was murder and that the worst charge he faced would be manslaughter.

The uncle told Orville that I helped the family understand it was an accident, that the family was comfortable with that and wasn’t angry at Orville, that if he would plead guilty to that, he could get a manslaughter conviction and get a few years in prison and get out.

It was a pretty good setup. The sheriff liked it, too. I was playing the role of the dumb blond profiler doing the worst case of profiling you ever saw.

I thought Orville would buy this. I thought he would find it terribly amusing and make him think he was manipulating me. Plus, he would believe his family were chumps, too, and he would hardly serve any time if he confessed to accidentally killing Missy.

I wrote Orville a nice letter when I started working the case to get information from him, and he wrote me back all kinds of fanciful theories. Then, after the family meeting, Missy’s uncle wrote his letter and I wrote one to match. Finally, when the prosecution stopped the planned visit the sheriff and I were to make to Orville, I wrote him one last-ditch-attempt letter, hoping to spook him. Here are excerpts from it.

Orville was in jail for another crime, so the sheriff and I could have gone down there to talk to him. In this last letter, I let Orville know that Missy’s body would be exhumed. I told Orville they were looking for more sexual evidence and some other things that would put him in a death penalty situation. But if he confessed, we wouldn’t have the body exhumed.

I added in scientific methodologies, hoping to make him fear that more might be found, so pleading out might be a better deal. Then we would have a confession that he committed the crime.

That’s what we were aiming for, but unfortunately the prosecution shut us down. One of the things I’ve learned over years of profiling and working with police departments is that often there are things that can and will be done, and everybody is on the same page until we get to some level of politics that throws a wrench in our plans. I never got an explanation in this case as to why the prosecution wouldn’t cooperate and I probably will never know. If it is frustrating to me, imagine how hard it is on the family to see an investigation suddenly come to a jarring halt with no reason given.

Prosecutors come and prosecutors go, and many are political appointees. If the sheriff and prosecutor aren’t buddy-buddy, we might not get any kind of cooperation from the prosecutor. The prosecutor may be looking at his win record. He might say, “This is too tough a case, I don’t even want to deal with it.”