Part 29 (1/2)

Agencies nevertheless still submit such crimes for a.n.a.lysis.

A sheriff once contacted Hazelwood with a special request. ”I would appreciate some priority service on a case we have here,” said the lawman. ”I'd like to send you the photographs.”

A few days later, Roy received twenty-eight full-color eight-by-ten photos of the sheriff's battered car. Roy glanced through the photos, scene after scene of dents and smashed gla.s.s.

He reached for his phone and dialed up the sheriff.

”Sheriff,” he said, ”somebody's really p.i.s.sed at you.”

End of profile.

The Vetter murder scene, to Ray's relief, told a detailed story. It remains vivid in Roy's recollection for two reasons.

As he and Jim Wright stepped past the yellow police tape into the sealed-off apartment, the agents saw an enormous bloodstain where Donna Vetter had lain in her living-room rug. It was a detailed crimson impression of the dead woman; not just a vaguely suggestive blotch, but plain as a full-size photographic negative, done in her blood.

”It was like the Shroud of Turin,” Roy recalls. ”I've never ever seen anything like it.”

Moments later, Hazelwood was struck with a sudden presentiment.

”Jim, a black guy did this,” Roy said to Wright.

”You can't say that,” the other agent replied. ”You just got here.”

Roy had made what is known to mental health workers as a threshold diagnosis. He could not say why he thought the UNSUB was black. He didn't know, and that annoyed him. A strict empiricist, Hazelwood does not believe in intuition.

When he returned to Quantico he thought perhaps Judd Ray, a black agent who had been with the Atlanta police before joining the FBI, could shed some light on the matter.

He couldn't.

Hazelwood showed Ray the Vetter crime-scene photos.

”Give me the race,” he asked.

”Black,” Ray answered without hesitation.

”How do you know that?”

Judd Ray shrugged. ”You can just tell,” he said. Ray was no better able than Hazelwood to articulate his certainty.

Donna Lynn Vetter's killer did leave a rich array of behavioral evidence behind him. In fact, as the Vetter investigation unfolded, her murder emerged as a cla.s.sic instance of the applicability of behavioral a.n.a.lysis to criminal investigation. It also offered a broad range of features rarely seen all together in a single case, everything from clues that fell together under simple deductive reasoning to the development of an investigative strategy that dramatically narrowed and focused the hunt for Vetter's killer.

Today, when Hazelwood lectures on profiling to police and other professional audiences, he uses Donna Vetter's rape-murder as a case study and workshop problem for his students to a.n.a.lyze.

Readers who themselves are now familiar with some of profiling's rudiments are invited to draw their own step-by-step behavioral portrait of the UNSUB, as well.

Here are the facts.

Jerome and Virginia Vetter's daughter, Donna Lynn, twenty-four, was a 1982 high school honor graduate from New Braunfels, Texas, a small German American community and popular tourist destination a few miles northeast of San Antonio.

In February 1986, Donna moved to San Antonio, Texas's third-largest city, to be closer to her typist's job at the FBI office. Five nine and 165 pounds, Vetter was described by friends and family as a frugal, shy, naive, and deeply religious young woman with no s.e.xual history, and almost no social life at all.

Her two pa.s.sions were sewing and bubble gum.

She lived alone in a one-bedroom first-floor apartment fronting a heavily traveled walkway in an apartment complex located in a high-crime area of northeast San Antonio. The local population was 70 percent Hispanic, 20 percent black, and 10 percent white.

Vetter was anything but reckless in her views or habits. Yet perhaps because of her naivete, she was not as cautious about her personal safety as prudence dictated.

Steve Harris, a security guard at the complex, later said that Donna almost always came home from work alone in the evening, and often spent her nights sewing. Despite his frequent admonitions, she would open her windows and curtains, offering any pa.s.serby a clear view of her as she worked.

Donna told Harris she disliked air-conditioning.

One other piece of victimology that would figure in the profile was her father's advice that Donna would resist wildly if any man attempted to hurt her. He advised that Donna would ”fight to the death to defend her virginity.”

Steve Harris last saw Donna Vetter alive as he walked past her apartment at 9:20 the previous evening. Her curtains were open.

The security officer returned to Vetter's apartment at 11:20, responding to a report that a screen was missing from her front window.

It was. Donna's curtains were drawn, as well, and her front door was ajar.

Harris pushed the door open, and immediately saw the lifeless woman, supine on the living-room rug. Her clothing had been ripped from her body.

”Her eyes were swollen shut,” Harris later testified in court. ”There were bruise marks on her face. She seemed covered in blood.”

Besides the facial battering, Vetter was subjected to a furious knife a.s.sault. She had sustained defensive knife wounds to both hands, four superficial stab wounds in her chest, defense wounds to her left thigh, and two deep stab wounds to her chest.

She had been mortally wounded, her lungs filling with blood, when her attacker finally stopped stabbing her and violently raped the dying woman.

A schematic drawing of the crime scene is shown on the following page.

The killer climbed through the window by the chair shown at bottom, leaving telltale fingerprints as he did so. He also knocked over a potted plant, and then set it straight.

The telephone, shown at right, was unplugged from the wall.

Vetter's body was discovered as shown. Her a.s.sailant had dragged her by her knees onto the living-room rug-where she had been raped-from the kitchen, where the floor was slick with her blood. It was evident the shoeless UNSUB had slipped and lost his footing in the blood as he tried to move her. He left footprints in the kitchen.

A fresh head of lettuce lay on the kitchen shelf. On the floor, investigators found a jar of salad dressing. On the kitchen wall were Vetter's carefully organized weeklong menus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Lunch on Friday, had Donna Lynn Vetter lived to prepare it, was going to be a salad.

There was another small pool of her blood at the intersection of the apartment hallway and her living room.

A wad of chewing gum was found in the living room, as shown.

Her gla.s.ses were recovered from the floor near the dining-room table.

The bedroom was undisturbed, as was the storage area and the rest of the hallway. In the unflushed bathroom bowl, investigators discovered urine, but no tissue paper. The seat was down.

A butcher knife belonging to the victim was found beneath the cus.h.i.+on of the chair next to the front door.

Hazelwood and Wright's first step was to determine if this UNSUB was organized or disorganized. If the reader is a.n.a.lyzing, too, you may wish to cover the italicized text below as you consider which type of offender you believe attacked Donna Vetter, and why.