Authors: Pat Brown
Marshal Bob Dickinson clearly knew his killer, as he willingly walked upstairs, his gun still holstered and the perpetrator behind him. Therefore, it is likely that Christine knew him as well. These were not stranger homicides. This was also a premeditated crime. If we eliminate Curtis Cox as a suspect because he lacked motive and capability, we must look for someone else known to the victims who had motive and capability.
The police investigated Craig Landon as he was upset about their divorce and losing custody of the children and stood to financially gain from Christine Landon’s death. My theory that the murder was to have taken place away from the home supports my supposition that it could have been the ex-husband. Craig would not have wanted the house messed up, because he wanted to move himself and the children immediately back into their home. Several people told me that they noticed that his behavior changed dramatically following the crime. He suddenly became
real
friendly to the neighbors—neighbors he didn’t have the time of day for before.
Craig also had a history of threatening his estranged wife. The marshal had been called to the residence a number of times to investigate domestic violence complaints when neighbors heard arguments sounding like they were growing out of control. That doesn’t prove he killed his ex-wife, but it does mean the police should have looked at him.
Christine would have screamed immediately upon seeing Craig in her hallway, brandishing a knife, and one witness claimed Hugh Marshall told her that after hearing Christine scream, he thought he heard her say, “No, Craig, no!”
Soon after the murders, Hugh Marshall said that he thought Craig was guilty of the double homicide. He was afraid Craig would come after him with a gun. And speaking of guns, Craig would certainly know if there was a shotgun or rifle under the bed.
My own interview with Craig made me wonder about the man.
He seemed to be taking pride in and enjoying showing me the pictures he took of the crime scene and the blood found there.
Craig was the first suspect in this case because, as we have all seen in many, many cases, a woman is usually killed by someone she is romantically involved with—a husband, a boyfriend, an ex-husband, an ex-boyfriend. After the police discovered the bodies and secured the scene, they drove straight to his temporary apartment, which, coincidentally, was not too far down that railroad track, and Craig Landon was a runner. When they got there, they found the engine of his car still hot. They brought him in and found gunshot residue on his hands. He claimed it was just residue from the fireworks he had been shooting off for his children the day after the Fourth of July.
He must have been convincing, or his lawyer and friend must have been since he gave Craig an alibi and said they were together that night. Still, doubts lingered, and in his four-year battle to exonerate his client, Curtis Cox’s lawyer in court claimed that Craig was the killer.
THE LAST POSSIBILITY
was that neither Curtis Cox nor Craig Landon was involved in the crime.
However, there was little evidence to point to any other party having motive to abduct and kill Christine Landon, or to any other party having access to her house. The only exception to this would have been a hired hit by Craig Landon. Another Craig, Craig Bright, was acquainted with Christine and later convicted of the sexual homicide of
a coworker in a state down south. He was someone who should have at least been eliminated as a suspect. Supposedly, Christine had known him for a short period of time due to her work, but Craig Landon reportedly did not have a relationship with this other Craig or even know him.
This case should have been reopened and reinvestigated with open minds and new investigative avenues. I finished my profile and told the sheriff that they should reopen the investigation and take a hard look at Craig Landon just as Cox’s lawyer asserted. The physical evidence pointed to him, the behavioral evidence pointed to him, and the motive pointed to him. But the case files are still locked up and the killer, whoever he is, remains free. I can only hope one day justice will prevail.
N
ot every murder in the United States is caused by a serial killer, but there are a lot of them. It used to be that we worried about our sons dying in war or our daughters in childbirth. Now we worry about our children being murdered at college or in the comfort of their own homes.
And the average American feels powerless to do anything about it.
Criminal profiling is a great tool to use in solving murder cases and taking dangerous predators off our streets. The more we understand about how men (and some women) become psychopaths and criminals, their motives for doing bad things, and how they go about committing their crimes, the better off we will all be in recognizing them in our lives. Then we can change our society to prevent our kids from turning into psychopaths, reduce crime, keep from becoming victims, and solve crimes quickly so the perpetrators get put away where they can’t hurt anyone anymore.
The night that I first came to suspect that Walt Williams murdered Anne Kelley, I thought,
I’ll gather all the evidence, deliver it to the police, and by morning, they will come and arrest him, and he will go away to jail
. That was what I expected would happen. I never dreamed it would take more than that.
When the police showed no interest in the information I brought them, at first I merely couldn’t believe it. And because the killer,
whether it is Walt Williams or someone else, has never been caught, I had a second thought, one that terrorized me for years:
Oh, my God, the murderer is still out there
.
I first started researching serial homicide and sexual crimes, serial killers and psychopaths, not to become a criminal profiler or to start a national organization, but to play devil’s advocate, because I didn’t want to suspect someone of a heinous crime for no reason. I was surprised to find that some police investigations were shallow at best, and certainly I was amazed that quite a few police officers didn’t understand the behavior of psychopaths or serial killers. I thought,
How is this possible?
I hit an iceberg, a massive problem in our society: that Anne Kelley could go running one night in my sleepy, safe hometown, past the baseball field where my sons played every day, be brutally murdered, and a week later nobody mentioned her name ever again—how could this be? The newspapers went silent on the subject, the people in town pretended she never existed, her case was never solved, while the killer hopped, skipped, and walked away. And this was repeated over and over in the surrounding communities—in fact, all across America.
In time I was haunted not just by Anne Kelley but by Deborah Joshi, Lisa Young, Vicki Davis, Sarah Andrews, Mary Beth Townsend, Doris Hoover, and hundreds more women nobody knew or cared anything about. My neighbors slept well at night thinking that our system of dealing with serial homicide was smart and effective, that we always caught the bad guys.
The system, however, is broken.
Look across the United States, in your own backyard, and you can start multiplying how many serial killers are running free. For forty years, the Green River Killer in Washington State was able to kill women whenever he felt like it. The man called the Grim Reaper, who slaughtered a multitude of women in Los Angeles, is still out there. Dennis Rader roamed free as a bird for thirty-one years, killing women whenever he felt like it. Finally, he was caught and charged as the BTK strangler for the murders of women in Wichita, Kansas, but there is still a long list of unsolved sexual homicides in police
files. If Rader didn’t kill them (and he likely did not), Wichita still has one or more serial killers at large.
FOR SOME REASON
, I am one of the few people in the United States looking at the big picture and only because I tripped over it. This wasn’t the kind of trouble I ever looked for in my life before Anne Kelley.
I believe that I ended up with this information and perspective in order to do something about it. I don’t know why Walt Williams came to live in my house and shortly thereafter a woman I never met was murdered near my home. I don’t know why I’m the type of person who would actually put two and two together and gather up evidence and take it to the police. Maybe if I hadn’t been there, no one would have gone to the police. Most people would have just shrugged their shoulders and erased the crime from their minds.
So why me? Well, why not me, as they say! Maybe I have an inquisitive mind. Maybe I’ve always been a curious person about certain things. Maybe I’m a logical, deductive person, and I can add things up. But whatever the reason, I was there, it happened in my neighborhood, and I had this suspect in my house.
It was brought to me, whether by destiny or fate, but I felt I could make a difference, and that’s what I set out to do, and I’ve sought to do that ever since.
Twenty years later, I’m just getting to the point where I feel I will be able to influence the changing of the American criminal justice system. That’s my goal, and there are still plenty of places I have to go. For starters, I developed the first criminal profiling program in the country outside of the FBI, one intended to provide training for law enforcement officers and future profilers in the United States and in other countries struggling with the same issues.
I want the police to learn how to do this themselves. I want them to have more time and more funds to do it. Sometimes, they just don’t have enough hours to focus on each homicide they’re presented. They work so many cases, run down so many leads, and spend a good deal
of their days in court. They write stacks of paperwork. We should actually consider ourselves fortunate when our police detectives have the luxury to put their full effort into an investigation. Sometimes we are lucky if they do any investigating at all. And when they actually solve a crime and get all their ducks in a row, it’s quite an accomplishment under horrible work conditions.
The FBI has a dedicated domestic crime computer it calls ViCAP. It is supposed to assist homicide detectives and investigators and fill in gaps in their knowledge base. But it doesn’t catch serial killers. It’s a poor system because the inputs are questionable and it is too unwieldy. Some police investigators rush through the form and the information is less than accurate. Other detectives just toss the damn form because it’s so long they can’t be bothered. The end result is a confusing mess. Some of the information is so vague that it serves little purpose. “The woman was strangled and found outside.” Oh, grand! Do you know how many women are strangled and found outside across the United States? Is that going to identify a serial killer? Is that a common linkage between that serial killer’s crimes? I don’t think so.
There are only so many ways to kill a woman. You strangle, you stab, you beat her to death, maybe you shoot her, but that’s it. So when you input that, you’ve got a whole lot of strangled dead women in the bushes. That’s not going to help. The way it is being done with ViCAP isn’t winning any popularity contests with local law enforcement.
What they don’t have is a suspect bank. I’ve been lobbying for a system in which a detective doing an investigation could input the name of a suspect or a witness connected to a crime, or toss in the name of a friend, workmate, or relative of the victim, then,
bam
, they could see if that name came up in connection with another crime. It is amazing how often a suspect will be interviewed at different times and by different police departments but nobody knows about that until after the killer is convicted of a homicide.
Suppose Walt Williams moved to San Diego and his female neighbor went missing and soon turned up dead. The police knock on all the doors of the residents on the street and Walt is living in one of the
houses. The police have a little chat with him and when they get back to the station, they input all the names of the folks on the street, including Walt’s. His name gets flagged!
“Whoa, wait a minute here! This Walt Williams was a suspect in the homicide of an Anne Kelley two decades ago in Maryland!” Wouldn’t that be useful to know?
But what actually happens is that a potential suspect moves from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and while he could be interviewed in five separate crimes, not one investigator will have a clue that he was interviewed in the other incidents unless there is a conviction.
That’s the state of affairs of serial homicide in the United States. And that’s why, even though I was already over forty years old when I took up profiling, I still believed I could make a difference. I thought the status quo was just not acceptable.
But how does a former housewife change an entrenched criminal and political system, much of which is rather militaristic, almost all male, and well guarded? There are fragile egos and jurisdictional challenges at play. Sometimes it’s as simple as balancing well-meaning but divergent views of the same evidence or suspect.
There are plenty of dedicated, wonderful police officers who are overworked and undertrained. There are thousands of men and women who do their best, day in and day out, with limited resources. These deficiencies contribute to the high level of unsolved homicides. Some do amazing work, solve difficult crimes, and are role models for others in law enforcement. But unfortunately, as in every organization, there is always a percentage of people who are simply not that good. There are incompetent professionals in every walk of life. Not every police officer is top-notch, so there will be cases that go under just because the detective working them isn’t the brightest bulb, and that’s unfortunate.
I HAVE NO
issue with where I came from. I don’t feel I need to apologize for being a homemaker in my life. I loved being a homemaker, and I think homemaking is a wonderful contribution, one of the finest contributions, to a community and to the family. I’m entirely
supportive of homemaking. I think it’s fabulous. I don’t regret a day that I was a homemaker or a day of homeschooling my kids. I loved being home with my children. I’m not one of those people who wishes I hadn’t done it. I loved it and I am thankful I was fortunate enough to have had the choice to stay home.