Part 21 (2/2)

Roy inferred from the evidence that as Ward moved his bound and struggling victim from her car to his vehicle, he tried to m.u.f.fle her screams with wads of paper towel he grabbed from her trunk and shoved down her throat. He did not realize he was asphyxiating her.

Ward must have believed Gilbreath was alive as he drove away with her; otherwise he surely would have fled immediately, leaving her dead body at the scene.

He probably did not learn what he had done until he arrived at his preappointed site for a.s.saulting her, likely an empty or abandoned structure not too far away. The discovery would have panicked Ward.

At that moment, his motive would s.h.i.+ft from s.e.xual gratification to self-preservation. Roy believed the frightened killer continued driving in the direction he was headed, north, until he reached the dump, eight miles away, where Nikia Gilbreath's body was found three days later.

The dump site, Roy also believed, was selected on the spur of the moment, and was chosen only because Ward needed to quickly dispose of Mrs. Gilbreath's body lest he be discovered with it.

From the position in which she was later found, it appeared that he hastily placed her body into the dump, risking being seen and identified as he did so. The only precaution Ward took was to remove and carry home the bedspread and blue telephone cord ligatures. In his haste, he somehow grabbed the loose swimming suit bottom, too.

Either that, or as his attorney suggested, Ray Ward really could not resist a fetish object.

During his murder trial nearly two years later, a security search of Ward's cell revealed he'd secreted away a range of contraband doc.u.ments and photocopies. Among the materials Ward somehow managed to procure under heavy guard was a nude autopsy photograph of Nikia Gilbreath.

17.

Linkage a.n.a.lysis An aberrant offender's behavior is as unique as his fingerprints, as his DNA-as a snowflake.

The challenge for the investigator is to exploit that singularity, to find the behavioral equivalent of the latent fingerprint or the electroph.o.r.etic ”bar codes” of a DNA a.n.a.lysis that can establish an offender's ident.i.ty beyond any reasonable quibble. You need to isolate the snowflake.

With serial offenders, one means of doing so is linkage a.n.a.lysis, a compare-and-contrast behavioral a.s.say developed by Hazelwood and others at BSU.

This procedure looks at MO and ritual as Hazelwood did in the Gilbreath case.

”You can say that cases are linked when the number of MO characteristics and ritualistic characteristics reach a point that you have never seen in combination before,” Roy explains.

”For example, an attorney may ask me in court, 'How many victims have you seen who were twenty-one years old?'

” 'Well, a lot of people.'

” 'How many of them have been white females?'

” 'A lot of them.'

” 'How many have been bitten on the breast?'

” 'Quite a few.'

” 'I see, and how many of them were struck in the face four times?'

” 'A lot of them were.'

” 'Now, Mr. Hazelwood, how many cases have you seen in which the victims were all twenty-one-year-old white females who'd been bitten on the breast and struck in the face four times?'

”I'd have to say I'd never seen that exact combination before. Then if I saw that exact combination in another case, I could say the two cases were linked.”

The offender's MO is behavior meant to ensure his success, facilitate his escape, and protect his ident.i.ty. Ritual is behavior that heightens his psychos.e.xual gratification. Sometimes, the two are not easy to tell apart.

For example, Roy has never seen an offender's method of entering a structure be anything but MO. However, the way he approaches a victim on the street, or in her bed, can be either MO or ritual.

One of the earliest and most complex cases for which Roy Hazelwood provided the police a linkage a.n.a.lysis was that of a Swiss serial killer.

While in Europe together on a business vacation with their wives in the late 1980s, Hazelwood and Roger Depue accepted an invitation to visit Aarau, a small town about ten miles west of Zurich.

Their host in Aarau was a local police commander named Leon Borer, who took the opportunity to inquire if his guests would be curious to look over some unsolved cases in his files.

If the American agents liked, while they were consulting the criminal records, Commander Borer's officers were happy to drive Frau Hazelwood and Frau Depue on escorted motor tours of the breathtaking Swiss countryside.

Everyone immediately agreed to the idea.

Among the unsolved cases that Roy and Roger Depue reviewed for Borer in Aarau that summer was a series of child murders, mostly strangulations, which had begun in 1980. After poring over the files, Hazelwood and Depue visited various of the crime scenes, spoke to a number of the children's parents, and sketched a brief profile of the homicidal pedophile for Borer.

No progress was made toward cracking the case until August 1989, when Roy learned that a suspect named Werner Ferrari had been arrested in connection with the recent murder of a little girl in Hagendorf, close to Aarau. Ferrari, forty-two, confessed both to his homicide and to the killings of three boys, dating back to 1983.

Like Harvey Glatman three decades earlier, Werner Ferrari seemed to appear out of nowhere. Also like Glatman, Ferrari was more than just a lucky, or determined, deviant criminal. He seemed to have the same innate grasp of the successful MO: Be careful, move around, don't be seen, and don't leave any physical evidence.

Ferrari had staggered the intervals between his crimes, known and suspected, from between three weeks and twenty-two months. He also cannily avoided committing them one after another in a geographic cl.u.s.ter, so as to alarm the local populace and thus place greater pressure on the police to stop him. He finally was caught and charged with murder in August 1989 after an uncharacteristic, perhaps subconsciously intentional, lapse: Werner Ferrari left a live witness who identified him to the police.

Besides the four murders to which he confessed, investigators suspected Ferrari in six other child abductions and homicides, for which he denied any culpability.

Three of these victims (two girls, one boy) were never found, and there were no witnesses or hard physical evidence to link Ferrari to any of the three open cases where bodies were recovered. With his confessions, there was no question that Ferrari would be locked up for life. But lacking hard evidence one way or the other in their open cases, the Swiss police were loath to close them simply on their suspicion that Werner Ferrari was responsible.

That is when Commander Borer thought again of the FBI.

On the chance the Swiss authorities had missed or overlooked behavioral evidence of value either to themselves or to the courts, Borer asked Roy to return to Aarau to conduct a linkage a.n.a.lysis.

Hazelwood flew to Switzerland on a Friday in early May, and was driven straight to Aarau, where Borer showed his FBI guest to his a.s.signed room at the local police dormitory.

Ordinarily, Roy's routine when traveling on business is fixed and unvarying. He checks into upmarket chain hotels with big, quiet accommodations and hunkers down, leaving his room only as required. For sustenance, he relies nearly exclusively on room-service steaks (well done), American cheese sandwiches (white bread, maybe a little b.u.t.ter), and the odd bowl of Campbell's tomato soup, none other.

”Do you know what's important about American cheese sandwiches on white bread?” he asks. ”Wherever you go, they are exactly the same. I like that.”

Together with the spaghetti ajo e ojo he first tried at the suggestion of the Mafia hood in Binghamton, plus fast-food cheeseburgers and French fries, these dishes more or less const.i.tute Hazelwood's preferred diet in its entirety.

”It's embarra.s.sing to order dinner with him,” says Dr. Dietz.

In Aarau, Hazelwood took a deep breath as he inspected his spartan quarters, a small dorm room for one with no telephone and no television.

”Well, at least there won't be any distractions,” Roy thought and went looking for a McDonald's.

For the next four days, investigator after investigator sat down with Hazelwood to brief him, through interpreters, on each of the ten cases.

The first victim, twelve-year-old Ruth Steinmann, lived in Wurenlos, a northeast suburb of Zurich. The slightly built brown-haired child was last seen climbing aboard her bicycle at school late in the afternoon on Friday, May 16, 1980. When Ruth did not come home, her parents went in search of her in a woods near where they lived. As they called for their daughter, both father and mother observed a jacketed young male walking toward them from the woods. When he saw the Steinmanns, he turned away, jumped on a moped, and sped off.

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