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Authors: Ken Englade

BOOK: Beyond Reason
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For several years the Haysoms led a placid, mainly uneventful life in Rhodesia, which was still a British colony, albeit a restless one. A wave of nationalism was sweeping Africa at that time, and Rhodesia’s blacks, who outnumbered whites by some twenty to one, were demanding independence. The British government seemed inclined to go along.
Determined to halt the stampede to black freedom, an obstinate farmer-turned-politician named Ian Smith convinced like-minded whites to revolt from England and beat the blacks to the punch. In 1965 the Smith-led party, the Rhodesian Front, declared its independence, an action that was widely reviled as a blatant attempt to continue suppressing blacks.
Although Derek was working for a government-owned industry, he had little sympathy with Smith’s views about white dominance. In direct opposition to government policy, Derek continued to follow his practice of promoting blacks in his mill, occasionally advancing them ahead of whites. It didn’t take long for this to come to the attention of Smith, who had since been named prime minister in the new government. Despite several warnings, Derek continued to follow his managerial instincts more than his government’s directives. As a result of this stubborn defiance he was placed under house arrest.
Clearly, Derek no longer had a future in Rhodesia. It
would be another decade and then some before the country’s black nationalists would militarily defeat Smith’s government and form a new government under Robert Mugabe. By the time blacks came into power and renamed the country Zimbabwe, Derek and Nancy would be solidly entrenched in eastern Canada, many thousands of miles away.
But in 1965, with a wife and six children to worry about, Derek’s main interest became escaping from Smith and his cohorts. He solved the problem very expeditiously: He simply left. One day he was in Rhodesia, the next he was in Switzerland. Very quickly he landed a job as a director with a major chocolate manufacturing firm and moved to Luxembourg, then sent for Nancy and the children.
Derek may never have looked at the Luxembourg job as a career. In any case, he was there only briefly. In less than four years, he took a job with a New York steel manufacturer. Before Nancy and the children could move, he changed jobs again. En route to Calgary on business for the U.S. manufacturer, Derek stopped in Halifax to see how things were going at a steel mill that had recently been purchased by the government. When he was offered a job as an executive at the mill, he leaped at it. Within weeks Nancy and the children joined him there. That was 1968.
Sixteen years down the road, Nancy, Derek, and Elizabeth were in Virginia. Veryan and Julian were in Nova Scotia, Richard in Calgary, Fiona in Vancouver, and Howard in Houston. Nancy and Derek had come to Boonsboro because it was a comfortable place to live, and it was close to Lynchburg. Nancy felt a compulsion to return to the place where she had spent her childhood. Also, they wanted to establish residence in Virginia so their daughter, Elizabeth, could attend the University of Virginia, one of the more highly regarded state universities in the country.
DESPITE THE DETAIL INVESTIGATORS WERE ACCUMULATING about the lives of Derek and Nancy Haysom, there was little to go on. For more than a week, Sergeant Brown and the other lab techs went through the house on hands and knees, using magnifying glasses, chemicals, powders, and the latest in electronic equipment, including a laser imported from Florida that was supposed to be able to detect fingerprints that wouldn’t show up with a normal dusting. In the end, they tagged and carried away some two hundred items ranging from the kitchen linoleum and sections of the wooden floor which contained bloody footprints to a wooden mousetrap and a bloodstained gray shoe. Although those items might prove extremely valuable later in proving a particular person was there (or, almost as important, in proving someone was
not
there), they did not give investigators any leads on where to begin looking.
The most promising items were bloody shoe and foot impressions and the bloody hand print that decorated the seat of a dining room chair.
One of the foot impressions was made by the left foot of a person wearing only a sock. It was nine and a half inches long, which meant it came from either a woman who normally wore a size 6 ½ or 7 ½ shoe or a man who wore size 5 or 6. The good news was that the impression was sufficiently clear to be useful later if they could find a suspect to match it with.
There also was a full-length shoe impression ten and a half to eleven inches long. Because it came from a shoe with a wavy sole and a
U-
or
L
-shaped heel plate, investigators deduced it was from a sports shoe.
Other items included:
—A soft drink can with fingerprints on it;
—Several cigarette butts;
—A knife that was found in a drawer in the dining room table, but had no blood on it;
—One hair that did not come from either Nancy or Derek. It was found in the bedroom. In the investigator’s report it was identified as “a caucasian head hair approximately one and a half inches in length from root to diagonally cut end.”
 
Blood spots were as common as water drops after a summer shower. All told, blood stains were found in fifty-two places. They included types A, B, O, and AB. The most plentiful were A and AB. Derek was a type A; Nancy, an AB. Two small type O bloodstains, together smaller than a dime, were found in the bedroom. Considerably more type O was found on and near the front door. A single type B stain was found on a washcloth from the kitchen, but investigators felt that did not necessarily mean that a fourth person had been in the house. Because of the amount of time the stains had been exposed to the elements, it is possible that a type AB spot had deteriorated to the point where it was typed as a B.
Evidence-gathering was basically a process of elimination. Evidence that could not be traced to either Nancy or Derek would have to be assumed to have been left there by the killer. It turned out that the footprints and the blood spots were in that latter category; the soft-drink can was not. Fingerprints showed it was left at the scene by one of the police officers.
Tests on saliva traces on the cigarette butts showed they came either from Derek or from someone with the same type blood.
There were bloodstains on the handle of a pair of fireplace tongs near Derek’s body, but they were type A, the same as Derek’s, indicating he may have tried to grab the tongs to use them as a weapon against his attacker.
The blood in the dramatic print on the chair seat was Derek’s type.
There was no seminal fluid on swabs taken from Nancy’s mouth, rectum, or vagina, indicating she was not sexually attacked. That helped because investigators could eliminate rape as a possible motive.
All told, however, the amount of evidence was disappointing.
 
THERE WERE OTHER DISAPPOINTMENTS AS WELL. THE laser system for detecting fingerprints did not work, at least not in this case. There was another system, too, which also proved useless.
It had been determined in other cases that chemicals in Superglue fumes would adhere to fingerprints and make them visible to the naked eye. Brown and other technicians worked for a day and a half sealing the house, caulking every window and door, plugging the fireplaces, every place where a crack might allow air in or out. Then they pumped in Superglue fumes and waited for the chemicals to go to work. After giving the fumes the required amount of time, plus a little extra for luck, they rushed in, hoping to find fingerprints they had not been able to detect previously. The procedure failed.
However, one system did work: a tried and usually successful method of doctoring a surface with a chemical that would make blood stains fluorescent. Even if the stains were no longer visible to the naked eye, they could be made visible under the right lighting conditions.
The first place Brown used the chemical, called luminol, was in the house. Painstakingly, he loaded his cameras with high-speed color film and put them on tripods along the killer’s likely path. Then he set the shutters for thirty-second time exposures. Lastly, he squatted and duck-walked across the floor, spraying the tan-colored luminol liquid from a plastic bottle. As the mist settled, it reacted with the chemical traces from the blood. The killer’s footprints began to glow with a spooky blue-green light. Quickly, Brown
tripped the shutters since the luminescence lasts only about fifteen seconds. The result was a series of photographs showing a wavy set of ghostly footprints traveling from the living room to the bedroom and into the bathroom. That confirmed what detectives had suspected: The killer had taken a shower to try to wash off the blood that must have coated him like a second skin.
It was a little more difficult to use the chemical outside because stray light could ruin the whole experiment. Brown waited for a dark night and then prepared to spray the chemical around the doorway, the yard, and the driveway. Looking up, he noticed that the house lights were still on; they would have to be extinguished for the test to work properly.
“Would you mind going in and turning off the lights?” Brown mentioned nonchalantly to one of the investigators standing nearby.
“Not me,” the man said. “I’m not going in that house alone in the dark.”
Surprised, Brown turned to another detective.
“Not me, either,” he said. “Why don’t you go?”
“I don’t want to go either,” Brown admitted.
“Let’s both go,” the second officer suggested. “I’ll carry the flashlight.”
“Okay,” Brown agreed.
Once the lights were out and the luminol had been sprayed, the killer’s path showed up just as clearly outside as it had inside, even though it had rained several times since the murders. Footprints led from the door to the driveway and across it to two large trees. They circled the trees several times, as though the person who left the prints had sought to hide behind the trunks.
“Maybe he came out and was getting in his car and something spooked him,” one of the investigators suggested.
“Could be,” agreed Brown.
Interestingly, there was a second set of prints. Instead of going off to the right, the second set led to the left out into the yard. They went out about eight feet and stopped, then
went back. Where they stopped there was an area several feet square that was covered by what Brown described as “swishing marks.” The killer walked out into the grass, vigorously rubbed his bloody feet back and forth as though he were using a doormat, then went back to the porch.
The size and shape of the prints indicated both sets were made by the same person. To investigators, this meant one thing: The killer had been in the house twice. They theorized he attacked the Haysoms, left, and then came back. They speculated the second trip was to make sure they were dead by slitting their throats.
 
THOSE WERE NOT THE ONLY SURPRISES THEY HAD, though. When the lab reports came back, they showed that both Derek and Nancy had an identical amount of alcohol in their blood: .22 percent. In most states, including Virginia, a level of .1 percent is sufficient to certify that the person is too drunk to drive. Generally speaking, a level of .3 is considered lethal, although people have different tolerance levels. A lot depends on a person’s weight, height, and physical condition. Still, anyone with as much booze in his or her system as Derek and Nancy had had would be very drunk indeed.
Another surprise came when an investigator was searching Nancy’s “studio,” the small room above the master bedroom she used as a retreat to work on her art. There was an easel in the room and several watercolors, including one of three nude women. That was hardly surprising, but what they found in a drawer in a small chest in the room was. Carefully tucked away were five snapshots of a nude young woman. The photos were all in profile so genital areas were not exposed. But the poses were somewhat strange. In one, the woman was kneeling by a bed studying an open illustrated volume of Shakespeare. Wondering who this could be, the investigator slipped the photos into his evidence bag.
Still another surprise was not even a surprise at first. There were so many wounds on Derek’s body that no one initially studied them carefully to see if they might form a
pattern or design. At a glance they all appeared to be random. But when they began looking at them more closely, however, they noticed a peculiar cut on Derek’s chin. It was two diagonal slices joined at one end to form a
V.
It meant nothing at the time, but it soon would figure prominently in a series of developments that would dump upon police like a cloudburst.
While the technicians were busy inside the house, investigators were working even more frantically outside. The big job was finding people who knew the Haysoms well enough to be helpful in establishing habits and routines, or in locating someone who may have seen something that could lead them to the killer. Neighbors had not been able to provide much useful information. Neither had the friends of the Haysoms who had been interviewed immediately after the bodies were discovered.
Within twenty-four hours after the first call the investigation settled into a pattern. A twelve-person team with representatives from Bedford and neighboring counties was responsible for directing the course of the investigation. They did the interviews and the legwork, tracking down leads and trying to find potential witnesses or anyone who could give them information that might help them find the killer. Their first command post was in the Boonsboro Ruritan Club, but it moved almost immediately from there to the Boonsboro Elementary School, which fortuitously was empty for the Easter holidays.
Task-force members hardly had time to get the door open for business when they got their first customer: a frizzyhaired woman in white blouse and tan walking shorts who pedaled up to the front door of the school on a new blue bicycle with big, black tires. “Hello,” she said, pushing her vehicle into the lobby and knocking down the kickstand. “My name is
Margaret Louise Simmons
. I think you want to talk to me.”
She did most of the talking, though—virtually nonstop for as long as anyone could stand to listen. She said she was the ex-fiancée of Julian Haysom, Derek’s younger son. They
had met, Margaret Louise said, the year before, when Julian, an engineer like his father, found himself between jobs and decided to come to Virginia from Nova Scotia to spend some time while he looked for work. Margaret Louise was a cousin of Nancy’s, but that didn’t preclude a relationship with Julian since he was Derek’s son, not Nancy’s. They had become engaged while Julian was still in Virginia, and the relationship continued for a time after he returned to Canada. But distance and changing circumstances apparently created too much strain. Soon after Julian returned to Nova Scotia, Margaret Louise underwent a strong resurgence of her Christian faith, and it seemed to overwhelm Julian. The summer before the murder, without telling Margaret Louise in advance, Julian married a Canadian.
From an investigator’s point of view, that was pretty strong grounds for resentment. Whether the resentment was strong enough to lead to murder was something they were going to have to find out. There was one other reason for the investigators’ interest in Margaret Louise. A few years before she had begun experiencing increasingly severe psychological problems, and her parents had committed her. After months of treatment she was proclaimed well enough to function in society and was released. She functioned, but no one was sure just how well.
One of those assigned to interview her was Sergeant Carroll Baker, a jolly gray-haired man whose outgoing manner seemed to contradict the fact that he was a high-ranking member of the LPD SWAT team. Soon after Margaret Louise cycled into his life, Baker found himself closeted with her in a classroom with orders to find out if she had information valuable to the investigation.
She told him what Julian looked like. She told him about Canada. She told him what she had for dinner the previous Sunday. She told him about a movie she had seen. She did
not
tell him anything that was remotely helpful in finding Derek’s and Nancy’s killer.
Baker coughed into his fist and rolled his eyes. Every time she wound down enough to let him get a word in, he would
ask a question directly relating to the Haysoms or their murders. She would go off on a tangent about something else. Finally, he quit trying to lead the conversation and let her roam wherever she wanted to go. As she rambled, Baker looked deep into her eyes. This is like looking into a cave, he thought. There’s no light there. Nobody’s home.

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