Authors: Pat Brown
I TOOK ALL
the statements that Donnell Washington made about coming to Frank Bishop’s home in the morning when he came with his son to pick up his mother and moved them back to one a.m., when he came over to get the car.
Donnell said, “I got out of that car, and I banged on the door. I was banging hard as hell, because I’m like, what the fucking hell, she knows I’m here.”
Is that what happened at seven a.m., or is that what happened when he went to pick up the car at one a.m.?
Clearly, Donnell was mad and getting madder. He got crazy about how he would have to kick the door in. He ranted and raved about kicking the door in. Why, if it was seven a.m., didn’t he just kick the door in if he thought something was wrong? His mother might be hurt, dying, or dead on the other side. Why didn’t he kick the door in? Why did he just
talk
about kicking the door in?
The answer seemed to me to be that he wasn’t worried about what was going on inside, he was just mad that nobody opened the goddamn door. He was pissed off because he was being refused entry—and it probably was sometime after the hour that Frank didn’t like to open his door. It probably wasn’t the first time he had been refused entry.
SUPPOSEDLY, DONNELL CALLED
his mother when he wanted to come get the car and told her he was on the way. But if that was true, when he got there, why did he have to bang and bang on the door? At some point, Frank relented and let him in, maybe because he didn’t want him waking up the whole neighborhood.
“What took you so damned long to let me in?”
Donnell
might
have asked Frank.
“Why didn’t you answer the phone when I called earlier?”
Donnell was known to have problems controlling his anger and it was possible that Frank threatened to call the police if Donnell didn’t calm down, because Frank had done it before when Donnell’s temper flared up.
Donnell wanted his mother’s car keys. He wanted to be let in; he wanted what he wanted. My hypothesis is that Donnell went over to get the car, and they were too slow, so he became pissed off when Frank wouldn’t let him in, lectured him after he did, and threatened to call the police on him if he didn’t calm down. So Donnell killed them.
Here’s another thing Donnell said in his police interview: “I know she was fighting, man, I know she was trying to hold on. I know my momma, man.”
He might have known she fought her attacker because he
was
the attacker. Maybe he watched her struggle. Frank went down without a fight but his mother, he knew, lasted longer.
In the early rounds of Donnell’s police interrogations, when they asked him about his mother and Frank’s relationship, he had nothing bad to say. None of the relatives had anything bad to say about Frank, either. But the longer the interview went on, the fewer nice things Donnell said about Frank. At one point he called him a coward. Why would he say that? Somebody killed his mother. Frank was the only one there, and Renee was dead, so it was Frank’s fault. He didn’t feel a bit sorry for Frank. He said Frank was the cause of it. Maybe he was telling the truth there.
Oh, and there was another great statement: “Frank was just a cool guy. All this shit I’m telling you now is shit, is just coming to me. I’m making this shit up.”
Donnell said he spit on Frank on the way out of the crime scene. Yet he told the police that Frank was a nice guy who treated his mother well. Why then would he think that this nice guy got his mother killed, and why would he spit on him?
I think he despised Frank because he felt that if Frank hadn’t antagonized him, none of this would have happened, and his mother wouldn’t be dead. In other words, Frank pissed Donnell off, Donnell killed Frank, and then he killed his own mother, and it was Frank’s fault.
Donnell also said, “I’m not fixing to go to prison behind this shit.”
Say what?
If you didn’t have anything to do with it, why would you be fixing to go to prison “behind this shit”? How was that possible? Donnell may have told the police that he could handle his mother’s death, but of course if he killed her, he wouldn’t have been too happy that her death was putting him in a bad situation. He said, “I’m trying to deal with this shit, and it’s hard dealing with it when I know what the
fuck went on. I panicked. I just couldn’t stop. It’s what I did. I knew I was fucking up, I knew I was fucking up. When I grabbed her, I couldn’t control myself.”
These are statements about CPR he made, but that didn’t sound like a CPR statement. It sounded like murder.
And yet Donnell was never an official or unofficial police suspect.
I DON’T BELIEVE
the police ever analyzed the double homicide crime scene.
An investigator has to go in and reconstruct a crime. Find out what happened first, second, third, and fourth. Look for inconsistencies. Discern whether all the evidence matches and not make assumptions. The detective possesses some information, he thinks it’s true, and decides to move on. Some establish a theory and then ignore or don’t listen to the evidence that fails to support that theory.
The police decided that since enough people were ticked off at Donnell Washington, one of them certainly killed his mother. So when Donnell was talking, they didn’t listen. They just let a victim’s family member talk. They did the interview, and that was the end of it.
It seemed like everybody involved had some form of drug involvement and they were all squirrelly.
This was a wonderful opportunity to put Donnell away. The police did not like Donnell. They wanted Donnell off the streets. He was a problem in their community, no question about it. He was a menace.
I honestly think they decided that this was a hit on the mother because of Donnell’s drug involvement and they simply did not thoroughly analyze the evidence or what Donnell said.
It seemed to me that the evidence was almost overwhelming that Donnell was involved in this crime. I read the interviews and to me they read like a confession. But if a detective gets his mind set a certain way, he won’t notice that. He simply won’t hear it or see it.
Most of the time, the police do hard work trying to track down the people they think are involved and gather the appropriate evidence, but if we forget to stop and analyze the crime, we’ll be wasting
time, because it has nothing to do with what we are looking for. We can work hard—but for no reason.
This crime did not take me tremendously long to analyze. It was a fascinating case. There were a lot of details in it, but a week was the most I needed to profile it. I gathered all the physical evidence, went through all the interviews, and right away, these things jumped out at me, starting with Donnell’s police interviews.
The police did a great job interviewing him, because they got a huge amount of information from him that demonstrated to me that he was involved in this crime.
The downside of reaching such a conclusion was that by the time I got the case, law enforcement lost a year’s time and the knife was nowhere to be found. The police may have had a surrogate confession from Donnell but not a true one. Any blood evidence that might have linked Donnell to the killings, evidence at his place of residence for example, would be long gone. I suggested that they interview the cousin and see if they could get him to talk. When I left town, the case remained unsolved.
I NEVER TOLD
anybody I was coming to town to investigate the Bishop and Washington murders. That’s one of my rules. When I go in, I want to work with the police and leave.
In this case, the family must have said something to the press because I heard that a reporter contacted the police: “The family told me there was a profiler in town. Did she help you?”
They said, “No.”
By the time I came up with my profile, the police probably didn’t have enough evidence to go forward with anything, so they let it lie. There was no sense—in their view—to admit that maybe they should have analyzed this crime better a year earlier. That’s one of the reasons I feel so strongly about police training.
When my profile was done, I said, “You should be looking at this guy.”
I expected them to say something like,
“We still like the drug thing, but boy, you’ve made some points…. We never saw this
confession thing. We better get Donnell back in here. We better get that cousin back in here and find out if he can corroborate anything that Donnell says. We need to find out why he drove off so quickly and if Donnell gave him a knife to dispose of. We better find that knife.”
Had that happened, they might have solved this crime. Instead, the case remained open. They told me they were still looking for drug connections. They were still looking for somebody other than Donnell Washington.
Sometimes, when I hear a police department say that they’re not looking at my suspect, I think,
Did I really analyze this crime correctly?
But there was an astounding amount of information that pointed to Donnell, and he walked away.
Here are the key elements of the profile I wrote about this case:
The attack occurred at Frank Bishop’s residence.
While Renee Washington often stayed overnight at Frank’s home, she did not do so all the time.
Renee’s car was not at the residence between the time Donnell picked it up (sometime around midnight) until he brought the car back at seven a.m. Unless the killer was very familiar with Renee Washington’s habits and was watching the residence, the killer would not know if she was there that night.
No one was permitted into the house without calling first. After ten p.m., Frank Bishop did not open the door to strangers. And sometimes not even for relatives.
Renee Washington was not dressed at the time she was killed. Frank was fully dressed and had his slippers on. He was in the front room. Renee was in the bedroom.
Frank was killed first.
Frank received the more violent assault in spite of the fact he fought back less than Renee.
Even if Donnell Washington had angered certain people, it would have been highly unusual for those people to take this kind of action. Rather than kill Washington’s mother, it was more likely they simply would have killed Donnell. Donnell left
alive would continue to be a problem. Killing his mother would make him
more
of a problem. Furthermore, it was not within the cultural mores of Donnell’s community to go around killing people’s mothers.
If Frank Bishop
was
the target of the attack, what was the motive? Frank had been involved in drug activities and there were rumors that he may have turned or was about to turn state’s evidence. However, there was no proof that anything immediate was going to happen. Frank appeared to have been well liked by family and acquaintances. No one, at that point in time, seemed to have a grudge against Frank or have made any threats. It was unlikely that any of Frank’s business dealings were the cause of retaliation.
It was also unlikely that a hit man would use the methods of killing I saw at the scene. The tossing of the table and the sudden, violent attack on Frank would seem to be born of extreme anger, not a planned killing. The attack on Renee seemed to be more of necessity than anger. None of Renee’s blood is in the living room or on Frank, but Frank’s blood is mixed with Renee’s. It would seem an argument erupted between Frank and his killer and Renee was then eliminated because she was a witness. Only one person appeared to have been involved in the killing.
The time of death was also crucial in determining whether this crime was a stranger homicide, a hit, or a killing of a personal nature. While Frank Bishop was fully dressed, he was not in clothes one would expect for a man planning to attend a funeral that morning. Renee Washington was dressed for bed, in a nightshirt, panties, and a cap to cover her hair while she slept. Frank Bishop had nothing in his stomach. Renee had a yellow substance and a white meat substance and green pepper. Renee’s family has stated that Renee was not a big breakfast eater, but when she did eat, she would have cooked and eaten with Frank, not alone. There was no evidence of dishes or pans being used that morning. Renee most likely consumed an omelet late in the evening before coming to Frank’s place. The state of dress and the food remaining in Renee’s stomach put the time of the deaths relatively early in the morning. Add to this the statement
of a neighbor that she heard “fussin’” sometime between one and three in the morning, and it was not a homicide that occurred at seven a.m.
Since Frank would not have permitted anyone access to the house that he did not expect, we could safely determine that this was not a stranger homicide.
We know of only one person who was there late that evening/early morning: Donnell Washington.
My hypothesis is that Donnell was responsible for the deaths of Renee Washington and Frank Bishop. Because I saw no bloody footprints or blood spatter in the hallway, on the door frames, on the doors, or outside, it was possible that Donnell simply did not get that much blood on him during the murders. He may have grabbed a towel and wiped off enough to be able to leave without a trail of evidence. It
was
possible this
was
why no blood was found in Renee Washington’s car. It was also possible that he did not leave in her car but left with friends who brought him. He may have picked up his mother’s car later.
I’d love to hear that the detectives finally paid attention to my profile and actually brought Donnell in. This was a well-documented case and the police did a good job with the physical evidence. They had good photography. The autopsy report was great. Everything about the case was handled well, except for the fact that they did not do a crime reconstruction or profile the case. That was all left undone. The doing part was done well; it was the thinking part that was missing.
In my opinion, Donnell was a violent person who needed to be locked up for life.
Drug dealers didn’t kill Frank Bishop and Renee Washington.
Incensed gamblers didn’t kill Frank Bishop and Renee Washington.