Читать книгу Bone Crusher - Linda Rosencrance - Страница 12

March 21, 2001, started out as an ordinary day for Ken Givens, but it ended up being anything but.

It was about two in the afternoon. Givens, who lived in Norwood, was fixing the steps of the First Presbyterian Church of Pottstown, when he noticed a guy taking his dirt bike out of his truck. A short time later, he heard the biker calling out to a friend.

The dirt biker had almost ridden over the body of a woman in a vacant lot near a dry creek bed. He assumed she was sleeping and wanted his friend to help wake her up. But even though they continued to yell at her, she didn’t respond. Wondering what was going on, Givens went over and looked at the woman. She was a black female. She was wearing a sweatshirt and pink sweatpants, which had been pulled down. Givens checked for a pulse. There was none.

Investigators soon identified the woman as forty-year-old Wanda Jackson, of Peoria. She had been strangled and left in the field off Illinois Route 8 in Pottstown. A deputy had seen Wanda about eleven-thirty walking near Main Street on Farmington Road. He was responding to a call from someone who reported that a woman was walking in the street. The deputy told her to get off the street. There was little else he could do, because she wasn’t engaged in any illegal activity and she wasn’t drunk.

Witnesses told detectives with the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO) that they saw her get into a four-door cream or off-white car at just about that time. The man driving the car was in his late thirties or early forties. His sandy blond hair was tied in a long ponytail. The last time anyone saw the car, which was thought to be a 1990s Buick LeSabre or an Oldsmobile Delta 88, it was headed south on Western Avenue, at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

Wanda’s body was found approximately two miles north of where another woman’s body had been found the previous October. The partially mummified body of thirty-one-year-old Kimberly Avery had been found in a field about two months after she had been murdered. Investigators were unable to figure out how she had died because her body had been so decomposed. Investigators said they didn’t have any reason to think the murders of the two women were related.

During their investigation police learned that Wanda had used crack cocaine and had been arrested for prostitution and shoplifting. She lived off and on with either her parents or her oldest daughter. But sometimes the streets were home. Family members told the local newspaper that she had used crack for years, and she had been in and out of rehab. Wanda had nine children—the youngest was nine, the oldest twenty—two grandchildren, and eighteen brothers and sisters.

Like other women caught up in the vicious cycle of drugs and prostitution, Wanda Jackson wasn’t a bad person. She was a good person who had made some bad choices and had done some bad things, but she hadn’t deserved to die for her mistakes.

In August, investigators, who were trying to solve Wanda’s murder, got some particularly gruesome news. A human skull had been discovered by a man fishing in Kickapoo Creek, near Edwards. The man found the skull in about three feet of water in the creek on August 17. Sometimes, though, the creek could be eight feet deep, and it was possible that the skull had drifted downstream before it was found.

Thinking it might be some kind of artifact, the fisherman took the skull home, but a friend convinced him to turn his find over to the Peoria city police. After the discovery investigators from the Peoria Police Department, the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office, and the Peoria County Coroner’s Office (PCCO) went to the creek to search for more bones. They did find some, including what looked like a leg bone.

Although officials knew that the bones were human, they didn’t know much else. They didn’t know how long the bones had been in the creek or if they had belonged to a man or a woman. And they certainly had no idea how the person had died. They just had no way of knowing what they were dealing with, and they also had no way of knowing how much worse things were going to get.

Police set about trying to match the victim’s teeth with any missing persons on file in both the city and county police departments. They also asked an anthropologist to inspect the bones, to try and get some answers. About ten days later, the anthropologist determined that the skull belonged to a woman over eighteen. Investigators then set about matching the teeth to the dental X-ray records of seven or eight women who had been reported missing in the area.

Several of the women had already been linked to two other area serial killers. Valerie Sloan, of Peoria, who was twenty, and Stacey Morrison, twenty-five, of Pekin, had been missing since the fall of 1993. Police said they were probably victims of serial killer Joseph Miller. And Peoria native Arlie Ray Davis, who had been convicted of murdering one woman, most likely had something to do with the murder of a Peoria woman and the disappearances of four other Peoria women, who had been reported missing in the mid-1990s. However, he was never charged in those cases.

In July 1994, Miller was found guilty of murdering three Peoria prostitutes, whose bodies were found along roads in western rural Peoria County in the fall of 1993. In 1995, he also pleaded guilty to having murdered eighty-eight-year-old Bernice Fagotte around the same time he murdered the prostitutes. Investigators matched blood in Miller’s apartment and Bernice’s car to the three slain women. The link was established by analyzing the DNA in the blood. The Miller case was the first time in the history of Peoria County that DNA had been used by prosecutors to obtain a conviction.

Before he killed the four women in Peoria, Miller had served fifteen years in prison for the 1976 and 1977 murders of two Chicago prostitutes. He had been out of prison for only five months before killing the Peoria prostitutes. Miller was sentenced to death for killing the prostitutes. However, he pleaded guilty to killing Fagotte and received a sentence of life in prison without parole. In 2003, just days before he left office, the governor, George Ryan, commuted the death sentences of Miller and 167 inmates on death row in Illinois.

In May 1996, Arlie Ray Davis was convicted of raping and strangling Laurie Gwinn, of Kewanee, and was sentenced to die by lethal injection. But police were convinced he was a monstrous serial killer.

Laurie’s nude and decomposed body had been discovered in the Hennepin Canal, near Annawan, about fifty-two miles northeast of Peoria. Before she was murdered, Laurie met Davis and his cousin at a bar in Kewanee. After a night of drinking, Davis told Laurie she was too drunk to drive and offered to give her a lift home. But Davis drove Laurie and his cousin to another relative’s home, where he had set up a tent in the yard. When Laurie said she wanted to leave, Davis choked her, dragged her into the tent, coughing and gasping, raped her, then finished her off. The next morning Davis and his cousin, who was also charged in the case, tossed Laurie’s body into the Hennepin Canal. Davis’s cousin, who testified against him in court, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Even though Davis was only convicted of murdering Laurie Gwinn, police figured him for the murder of Ginny Miles, of Peoria. Ginny’s nude body was discovered in a shallow grave next to a creek in Menard County in 1994. After Davis died in prison of a heart attack in 2002, authorities said publicly that DNA recovered from Ginny’s body matched Davis’s DNA, indicating that he had had sex with her before her body was buried. But because there was no other evidence to tie Davis to her murder, prosecutors had been unable to bring him to trial.

In addition to Ginny’s murder, Peoria investigators believed Davis was linked to the disappearances of Stephanie Gibson, Loretta Tinkham, Sheryl Murwin, and Cheryl Murray.

About quarter past five in the evening on Sunday, July 27, 2003, a farmer found a partially clothed woman’s body in his cornfield along Augustin Road, about four miles northeast of Tremont, Illinois.

The farmer, who owned the land, was checking the field with his children when he found the body of a black female, four rows into the cornfield. She was lying on her back, with her head facing to the west and her feet to the east. She was nude, except for a pair of red panties and a pair of shorts, which had been pulled down around her ankles. The farmer immediately called police, and Detective Sergeant Jeff Lower, of the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office, responded to the call.

Lower figured that as her body was being dragged into the field, her pants probably caught on a cornstalk, which caused them to come down. The woman’s body was taken to the morgue by the coroner’s office, where her fingerprints were taken. A forensic technician then ran the prints through a database and matched them to thirty-six-year-old Sabrina Payne. They were also able to identify her by the repair plate she had in her right ankle.

During the investigation detectives determined that her boyfriend, Brian Montgomery, had been the last person to see her alive. That was on the Friday before her body was found. No one had seen her after four o’clock on Friday afternoon. Sabrina and Brian had met three years earlier when they both had lived in Chicago. Before she was killed, they had been planning to get married.

Police also learned that Sabrina had a drug habit. In June 2002, she was convicted of unlawful possession of a controlled substance and sentenced to thirty months of probation, fourteen days in jail, and treatment for drug and alcohol abuse.

On the Thursday before her body was found, she was at home with her boyfriend and two other people smoking a whole lot of crack. The other two people supplied most of the drugs. At one point they gave Sabrina some money to go out and score more crack. When the pair left Sabrina’s the next morning, her boyfriend was still with her, but he left at about four o’clock that afternoon. Sabrina’s neighbor saw her leave her house a little after that.

Police questioned Brian for hours the next day about Sabrina’s disappearance. He said the last time he saw her was about one on Friday afternoon. She left the house, saying she would be gone for a few minutes. The next morning, when she hadn’t come home, Brian figured she had gone to Chicago to visit her three teenage children, who still lived there. But he really got worried when she wasn’t back by Sunday.

On August 28, 2003, Tazewell County coroner Robert Dubois held an inquest into Sabrina’s death.

In Illinois, the coroner’s verdict has no civil or criminal trial significance. The verdict and inquest proceedings are held to determine the facts of death. However, if a person is implicated as the murderer, the outcome of the coroner’s inquest could have an effect on an arrest. But that rarely happened because the state’s attorney (SA) usually called a grand jury to indict a suspect.

At the inquest Lower told the jury about how Sabrina’s body was found, and Dubois told them about the results of Sabrina’s autopsy. He said that the doctor who examined her body didn’t find any evidence that she had been murdered. He categorized her death as undetermined, although he thought it could be drug related because she had cocaine, as well as alcohol, in her blood.

However, he couldn’t, with absolute certainty, rule out that someone might have killed her without leaving any evidence. That’s why he said she probably died from an overdose of cocaine. He just couldn’t be sure what killed her, since there was no sign of trauma, disease, or any other congenital anomalies.

Lower also testified that he had no evidence to conclude that Sabrina had been murdered. He said it appeared she had died from a cocaine overdose, and someone dumped her body in the cornfield.

After deliberations the jury decided that the manner of Sabrina Payne’s death was “undetermined.”

It was about half past seven in the morning on Thursday, February 5, 2004. Neal Barry had just left his house to drive his wife to work, when he noticed something unusual in a ditch—a woman’s body. She was lying on top of the snow, not far from his house on North Valley View Road in Edwards. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but no shoes. She had been dumped facedown on the side of the two-lane road, off Kickapoo-Edwards Road. Her feet were sticking out into the road. Barry drove by the body, backed up, then drove home to call police.

During their investigation police determined that the body of the black female could have been there since the previous evening. They canvassed the neighborhood, but no one reported seeing anything unusual. The woman’s body was dumped about four miles from where Wanda Jackson had been found three years earlier.

By the next day, police had identified the woman through her fingerprints. Her name was Barbara Williams. She grew up in the Harrison Homes housing development in Peoria, and still lived in the area. Even though police knew who the woman was, they still had no idea how she had died or how she had ended up in the snow. But even so, they were treating her death like a homicide.

Although she hung out with the wrong crowd, and got into drugs, she wasn’t really a criminal. She had been arrested in 1999 for battery, but prosecutors never pursued the case.

After Barbara’s body was found, members of her family talked to the Peoria Journal Star about her. Barbara came from a large family—eleven brothers and sisters. But she also had ten step-brothers and stepsisters. Her sister Shelley told the paper that no one had heard from her for a couple days before her death. Although she lived in the area, she was always moving around. Sometimes Barbara stayed with her mom, which was where her nine-year-old daughter lived. Barbara didn’t have a job at the time she died, but she had worked as a housekeeper.

Shelley had recently quit a job in Kansas City, Missouri, to care for their mother after she had triple bypass surgery. She described her sister as someone who was always smiling and always making people laugh.

An autopsy on Barbara’s body was inconclusive, and until they had something concrete to go on, investigators with the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office weren’t about to speculate on how she died. Dr. Violette Hnilica, the forensic pathologist who did the autopsy, found several injuries on Barbara’s body that she had received before she died.

Barbara, thirty-six, had a contusion on the right side of her face, a contusion and abrasion on her left shoulder, and an abrasion on her left wrist. The doctor also found some injuries that Barbara had received postmortem, including a dislocated left wrist, abrasions on her left arm, and lacerations and contusions on her left hand. She also had scrapes, most likely drag marks, on her left arm, both heels, as well as drag marks on her clothing.

In her medical opinion, Hnilica said Barbara died of a cocaine overdose, because Barbara had toxic levels of the drug, as well as a small amount of alcohol, in her system. The doctor couldn’t find any evidence that Barbara had been smothered or strangled.

If police thought that was the last body that was going to turn up, they were dead wrong.

On Saturday, February 21, just a little more than two weeks after Barbara’s body had been found, Michael Hodges was driving an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) along a rural road near Hanna City in Peoria County when he made another grisly discovery—a woman’s body partially covered with snow, lying in the tall prairie grass.

The discovery slammed the door shut on Michelle Brown’s hope that she would ever see her twenty-nine-year-old sister, Frederickia, again. Since she reported her sister missing to the Peoria police on Christmas Eve, she held on to the hope that her sister would turn up safe. Now there was no more hope.

Police said Frederickia had been found about thirty feet from the roadway. They identified her through her fingerprints. She was thought to be wearing a red coat, a long-sleeved shirt, and blue jeans the last time anyone saw her. Detectives with the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office wouldn’t say what she was wearing when her body was found.

Lieutenant Mark Greskoviak, a sheriff’s detective, said she wasn’t walking in the area when she died, but it appeared she had been there for quite some time. Police said Frederickia, a known prostitute, was last seen in the North Valley neighborhood, where she often stayed. Someone saw her get into a yellow car or a red truck driven by a white male around three-thirty in the morning on December 17 or December 18. But Michelle said her sister might have been seen again a couple days before Michelle had reported Frederickia missing.

Frederickia, who shared an apartment with her boyfriend, was also addicted to drugs. She had three children, who were in foster care. Over the years Frederickia had been arrested for prostitution, aggravated battery, robbery, mob action, and commercial burglary.

When her body was found, Greskoviak said it was too early to determine if Frederickia’s death was connected to the deaths of Barbara Williams or Wanda Jackson. But a few days later, police said she didn’t die of a drug overdose, but they refused to disclose exactly how she had died. Peoria County sheriff Mike McCoy said police were keeping that information from the public in order to determine who was responsible for her death. Ultimately a Peoria County coroner’s jury determined that Frederickia’s death was a homicide. She had been strangled; then her body was dumped in the snow.

On August 22, one of Laura Lollar’s friends told police he was concerned because he hadn’t seen her for about three weeks. Typically, he heard from her at least every three or four days. Laura’s ex-husband was also worried that she wasn’t around. He usually saw her at least once a week, and their three oldest children saw her regularly as well. He looked for her in all the usual places, but he hadn’t been able to find her. And no one he talked to seemed to have any idea where she was. Her ex-husband filed a missing persons report on the thirty-three-year-old woman on August 26.

On August 28, Shirley Ann Trapp-Carpenter’s boyfriend filed a missing persons report on her with the Peoria Police Department. The man told police he hadn’t seen the forty-five-year-old woman for a couple days, and he was worried because it wasn’t like her not to contact him.

Shirley’s family said the last time they saw her was August 25. They were concerned because she had diabetes and needed medication to control her condition. They had contacted her pharmacy to determine whether she had picked up her medication. She had not.

Twenty-nine-year-old Tamara “Tammy” Walls had been missing for about three weeks. On September 22, 2004, her sister finally reported her missing to the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office. Tammy never went that long without checking in with her family, and they were worried.

After the discovery of Linda Neal’s body on September 25, Tazewell County sheriff Robert Huston said there were enough similarities between her death and the deaths of the four other women found since 2001 that police were investigating any possible links.

Police described Neal, who had a history of prostitution-related arrests, as having an “alternative lifestyle,” much like the previous four women whose deaths they were investigating. All five cases were similar enough that the Peoria Police Department and the sheriff’s departments in Peoria and Tazewell Counties decided to form a task force to solve the crimes. But investigators admitted that finding the person or persons responsible for the women’s deaths could prove difficult because of the type of lives the victims led, moving around and living with different people.

After Linda Neal’s death, the task force began working hard to come up with any connections among the deaths of the five black women. However, the words “serial killer” hadn’t been spoken—yet. Maybe that was because serial murder was relatively rare, according to the FBI—although Peoria seemed to have more than its share. In fact, less than 1 percent of all murders in any year are attributed to serial killers. And those serial killers don’t always fit into the mold that society seems to have cast for them. So trying to zero in on a serial murderer wouldn’t be easy.

Interestingly, the majority of serial killers aren’t reclusive, social misfits who live alone. They’re not monsters, and they really don’t appear strange. Because they often have families and jobs, they’re able to hide in plain sight in their communities.

Take Robert Lee Yates, for example. During the 1990s, Yates killed seventeen prostitutes in the Spokane, Washington, area. He was married, had five children, lived in a middle-class neighborhood, and was a decorated U.S. Army National Guard helicopter pilot. During the time period of the murders, Yates routinely sought out the services of prostitutes. Yates buried one of his victims in his yard, beneath his bedroom window. He was eventually arrested and pleaded guilty to thirteen of the murders.

Contrary to popular belief, all serial killers aren’t white; rather, they span all racial groups. Charles Ng, a native of Hong Kong, killed numerous victims in Northern California. Derrick Todd Lee, an African-American, killed at least six women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, a native of Mexico, murdered twenty-four people in Kentucky, Texas, and Illinois, before he turned himself in.

And just because the women killed in Peoria and Tazewell Counties were all prostitutes, it didn’t mean their murders were sexual in nature. Serial murderers killed for any number of reasons, including anger, excitement, money, and even because they thought they were ridding society of people whom they considered to be less than desirable.

In the past the definition of “serial killer” was someone who killed three or more victims in separate events, with a cooling-off period in between. But a more recent definition developed by the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) of the FBI described serial murder as the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.

A mass murderer, on the other hand, is someone who kills several people at one time. Richard Speck, for example, was a mass murderer. In 1966, Speck killed eight student nurses in one night in South Chicago.

And a spree killer is someone who murders his victims in a short period of time. Andrew Cunanan is an example of a spree killer. In 1997, Cunanan shot and killed five men, including renowned clothing designer Gianni Versace, in a cross-country murder spree before he turned the gun on himself. Unlike serial murders, there wasn’t a cooling-off period in between Cunanan’s kills.

If a serial killer was on the loose in Peoria and Tazewell Counties, forming a task force was exactly the right thing to do, because it was important for all the law enforcement agencies to work together. They reviewed all the incoming information, collated the information, and assigned leads to various members of the task force. Throughout the investigation the task force received over a thousand leads, and assigned a priority—low, moderate, or high—to each one.

They got a number of leads related to the death of Linda Neal. One caller told police that Linda had been arguing with her roommate the week before Linda’s body was found. The caller said the roommate’s cousin told Linda, “I’m going to kill you.”

Linda Neal wasn’t the last black woman to turn up missing or dead in Peoria and Tazewell Counties.

Shaconda Thomas’s grandmother went to the Peoria Police Department on October 7, 2004, and reported the thirty-two-year-old woman missing. She hadn’t seen her granddaughter, who lived with her, since the last week of August.

About eight o’clock in the morning on Friday, October 15, the body of forty-one-year-old Brenda Erving was discovered in a ditch in Elmwood Township. An employee of the New Horizons Dairy in Elmwood who found her shook her toe to see if she was still alive. When she didn’t respond, he went back to his truck and called the police.

Brenda was found lying faceup in the mud. She was nude, except for a pair of white socks. In the mud near her body, there were fresh tire marks that went north in a bean field for about half a mile, then turned back onto Taggert Road. But the only footprints in the mud were those of the deliveryman.

Brenda’s mother hadn’t seen her daughter since Wednesday, when a male friend had picked her up. Although Brenda had been convicted of unlawful possession of a controlled substance, she had never been convicted of prostitution. Brenda Erving had three young daughters.

Dr. Violette Hnilica performed an autopsy on Brenda on Saturday and determined that she had been asphyxiated, but she had also suffered blunt-force trauma to her head. Medical tests showed that she had toxic levels of cocaine in her system.

Although the task force was doing everything it could to find out what had happened to the missing and murdered women, area residents didn’t think police were doing enough to investigate the murders of Brenda Erving, Linda Neal, Frederickia Brown, Barbara Williams, Sabrina Payne, and Wanda Jackson, plus the disappearances of Shirley Trapp-Carpenter, Shaconda Thomas, Tamara Walls, and Laura Lollar.

To air their grievances, nearly five hundred residents held a town hall meeting at City of Worship Refuge Center with members of the task force on Monday, October 25. Photos of the dead and missing women adorned two posterlike maps of Peoria and Tazewell Counties at the front of the congregation hall. The pictures of the dead women were placed on the spots on the map where their bodies had been found.

At the meeting Gary Poynter, the interim chief of the Peoria Police Department, told the residents that authorities had added more people to the task force. In total, there were ten detectives just working on the investigation.

Peoria County sheriff Mike McCoy said although the task force didn’t have any solid suspects, the investigators were gathering information. But, still, the people in attendance wanted to know why police waited until five African-American women had been murdered to form a task force.

Police hadn’t formed a task force earlier because the deaths of the women weren’t all the same. Although there were similarities, there were also a number of differences.

Residents also wanted to know why the task force was made up of only white officers from the Peoria Police Department, the Illinois State Police (ISP), and deputies from the Peoria County and Tazewell County Sheriff’s Offices. They believed an African-American officer might be able to get more information from members of the African-American community.

For police, though, race wasn’t an issue in the investigation, and investigators were treating the deaths like they treated any other deaths, without regard to the race or lifestyles of the victims.

Although the task force was working with an FBI profiler, an FBI agent wasn’t part of the task force because a federal crime hadn’t been committed.

About four hundred people attended another community meeting held at the City of Worship Refuge Center a couple weeks later. Residents talked about the possibility that a serial killer was stalking women who were drug abusers and worked as prostitutes to feed their habits. They worried that their daughters, sisters, and mothers weren’t safe on the streets of Peoria. And they were still concerned that police, who had added three African-American investigators to the task force, weren’t doing enough to find out what had happened to the dead and missing women.