The Profiler (23 page)

And to my knowledge, to this day, they still refuse to look at new information. However, in the next county over, the detectives and district attorney who prosecuted Scotty May all say, “
We
know Scotty May killed Mary Beth Townsend.” If they had had the case, charges against Scotty May would have gone forward.

I UNDERSTAND WHY
the investigators immediately suspected Sam Bilodeau.

In the beginning of the investigation, they wouldn’t have known what time of day Mary Beth Townsend was killed. They did not know if it had been six, eight, or even ten hours before she was discovered, and they hadn’t known about the lunch date she missed, so they did not have their time frame down yet. They didn’t have the full autopsy saying that she had been strangled. The police had a dead woman in a closet, apparently with a blow to the head, and there was no sign of breaking and entering.

Her fiancé said, “I came home, she wasn’t there, I didn’t know what happened to her, and I fell asleep. When I got up, I found her in the closet.”

Uh-huh, really?

I do not put down the police department for its original views. I would have that same thought. Nothing wrong with that. When you’re talking about a crime that just occurred, you have to go with the most likely theory. Women are most often killed by boyfriends or
husbands, not by strangers, serial killers, or burglars. Domestic homicide tops the list of likely places to start. The police detective will obviously go there first. He’s got the guy in the chair. He’s going to take his chance to talk to him. However, he shouldn’t put words into his mouth. And he certainly shouldn’t pursue the domestic angle just because the truth is less convenient.

The police had a reason to suspect Sam. Maybe he moved Mary Beth’s car to the other side of town and took the train back; the couple’s condominium was close enough to transportation for that to be plausible. I have another case where that’s exactly what happened. A white man committed a murder, moved the car to a poor black neighborhood, and tried to make it look like the perpetrator was a black man. Why? Because the white killer lived four doors down from the neighbor he murdered and he wanted the police to look elsewhere. It’s not necessarily racist; it’s just smart for a criminal to point law enforcement to an area where nobody looks like him and the location is poor enough or has a high enough crime rate to make it feasible that a criminal lived there.

For an innocent man, Sam did all the right things. He came home. He made phone calls to find his fiancée. That seems like normal behavior, but a lot of people ask, “With his fiancée missing, if he was really worried about her, why did he just go to sleep? How could he do that?”

This is a gender issue. If it was a woman and her boyfriend was missing, that woman would not sleep. That woman would have been pacing the floor all night long, cussing and saying, “He better be dead, because if he’s not dead, then he’s going to be dead when he gets home.” She would be standing there at six a.m., still fuming, when that man walked in. And if he was fine,
she’d
kill him. That’s the way a woman thinks. A guy will go, “I don’t know where she is…
Zzzzzzzz
.” And he’ll fall right to sleep. It’s amazing. Men will snooze under even the most stressful circumstances.

Sam’s going to sleep did not surprise me. He was annoyed, he was aggravated, but he didn’t know what else to do, so he did what a guy does, he slept. When he did wake up, somewhat rested and thinking clearly, he finally noticed that the closet door was closed.

To the police, who didn’t know Sam Bilodeau at that point, it sounded like a strange story. And then, of course,
he
found the car, which made things worse for him, but because he was driving home from Mary Beth’s father’s and the highway ran close to Scotty May’s house, that just happened to be where the car was dumped.

But ultimately, there was too much evidence to the contrary to continue being suspicious of Sam.

At a certain point, the police should have said, “The evidence shows that it’s not Sam Bilodeau.” He lost his fiancée. He pays taxes. He deserved to be treated like a man grieving a horrible loss, not a common felon.

The detectives never talked to Sam again after his “confession.” He waited around a year for the police, and nobody ever came back to him. He didn’t know what to do. That indicated to me that they weren’t thinking it was him, but they didn’t know where to turn next.

This is a huge problem that I hope to help more police departments solve in the future. Cases are solved by everybody working together. The medical examiner helps us understand how the person died. The crime photographer gets good photos that we can examine for clues. A ballistics expert on a case can tell us about the caliber of bullets when appropriate. There might be forensic evidence. The community might give us tips on who it thinks could have committed the crime—if we ask for the help and then listen to the answers. When all these people get together, the profiler is just a part of a larger team. Even in this case, I had the help of the family and the community to unravel the case. The police need to stop looking at it as “our” case and start looking at it as the victim’s case. That’s a big problem.

Criminal profiling is still a relatively new concept, and since there’s been so much mythology about criminal profiling and some foolishness promoted about criminal profiling, profilers are sometimes considered gods—and sometimes they’re considered frauds.

IS IT WORTH
profiling a homicide if law enforcement doesn’t care? If it isn’t prosecuted, is it worth it?

Absolutely yes.

In Mary Beth Townsend’s murder, her son, Art, got the answer he prayed was true: the fiancé of his mother wasn’t somebody he had to hate the rest of his life.

The fiancé, Sam Bilodeau, got some relief that somebody believed he didn’t kill his fiancée, that there was an answer out there.

More recently, I received a letter from Sam Bilodeau’s sister, thanking me profusely for helping with the case, because it was such a horrible thing for her brother to live through with this cloud hanging over his head. When I spoke out in the media as to why Scotty May should be the top suspect in Mary Beth’s death and explained how he—and not Sam Bilodeau—was most likely to have committed the crime, I provided some peace of mind to her family. It took her years to deal with it and write a letter thanking me, but it was a beautiful thing to receive, ten years after I worked on the case. We know that Scotty May is not going anyplace. He’s in jail for life. I know the Townsend family would like him prosecuted for what he did to Mary Beth, but at least I could clear Sam Bilodeau’s name to some extent so he could go on in his life and I could give Art some closure, too. That is indeed worth it, even if I can’t say the case was prosecuted or the police ever formally exonerated Sam.

It is said that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place, but there are folks who can tell you that this is an old wives’ tale. Art Townsend can tell you that crime also can strike twice in the same place. Following his mother’s death, Art put the condo up for rent. A nice young man who did government work, Vincent Poor, moved in. The very next year after Mary Beth was murdered, in 1999, the police department had another crime go unsolved.

Vincent Poor, finished with his day’s work, came out of the train station and was robbed and stabbed to death on his way home to the condo.

Art didn’t want to tell the next renter that the previous two residents were murdered.

He sold the unit.

I
arrived twenty-six years too late in the Midwest.

I had just finished an appearance on a daytime talk show, where I met two of the daughters of Doris Hoover. The hour-long show was on cold cases and their mother’s murder was featured. After the show, they stopped me in the hallway and asked if I could profile the killer. Normally, a case this cold is one that I would leave alone, but the facts were so interesting and the daughters so insistent, I told them I would give the detective a ring.

“Sure, we would welcome a profile of the case,” he said.

I drove to the Midwest. In my experience, more people call from this part of the country for help with unsolved homicides than any other part.

After getting such a poor reception on the Mary Beth Townsend case and running into similar resistance with other police departments, it was a relief to have the local law enforcement welcome me.

When I got there, the detective ushered me into his office, a rather sheepish look on his face.

“Uh, I have some bad news for you,” he told me.

I thought he was going to tell me that a superior wanted me to go home.

“The case files are gone.”

“Gone?”

“Yeah, there was a flood at the warehouse and the Hoover case files were destroyed.”

Okay. This was not good news. I would come to learn that it wasn’t entirely rare news. A case I later worked in North Carolina would have the entire trunk of a car, the actual trunk that was removed for testing, disappear. How do you lose something that much larger than a breadbox?

“How about computer files?” I ventured.

The detective looked morose. “Gone as well. Someone thought the case was closed and erased all information on it.” He half-grinned at me. “We have her name!”

I know he felt bad. Shit happens and police departments aren’t 100 percent perfect. Things get lost, items get destroyed, evidence gets mislabeled…shit happens.

So there I was.

Not only had a mother of seven been dead for two decades but all the related evidence was eliminated.

Still, I was in town. I had worked the Townsend case with no police files, so I might as well see if I could do anything with this one. It was worth a try.

DORIS HOOVER, FORTY-TWO
, was shot at home around 3:30 a.m., in her own bedroom, on November 3, 1975, while four of her children were asleep down the hall and her husband was at work. Since that early morning, the only suspect had been her husband. I could see why he might end up in the crosshairs of an investigation, but my profile of the crime ended up pointing away from him.

Doris, who was deaf in one ear and wore a hearing aid everywhere except to sleep, was standing beside the bed in a teddy and panties—no slippers—when she was shot. The Harlequin romance novel she was reading was still spread open on her bed. There was no evidence of sexual assault. When she fell, she collapsed on a stereo, knocking over the speaker and a phone that was on the top of it.

Doris’s daughter Laurie, seventeen, the oldest girl living at home, was sleeping in a bedroom with her younger sisters, Denise and Dana, and her little brother, Deacon. In the middle of the night she woke up suddenly, although she didn’t remember being startled awake by any noise, and saw someone pass by her open bedroom door, walking from her mother’s room to the bathroom. She was half asleep, and what he was doing there didn’t register right away. Then she saw him stop at her door and wipe off the doorknob. Wide awake now, she listened as he continued to the hall, down the stairs, and out of the house. Laurie heard the screen door at the front of the house open and close. She heard sounds by the side of the house, and then the screen door again. She heard the man come back up the stairs, enter her mother’s room, and then he went back down the stairs and out of the house again. Scared, she didn’t move from her bed. Minutes passed, only about seven or eight, and then she heard the police pounding on the front door. By the time she left her bed, the officers—who found the front door open when they arrived—were already inside the house and on the stairs.

The open door was a tip-off to Laurie that something was wrong; her mother compulsively locked all the doors at night.

The police told Laurie there had been a shooting at the house, but she said no, she had heard no such thing—then a horrible thought popped into her mind that her mother must have been kidnapped because her bed was empty when she went by the open door.

“He kidnapped her, he kidnapped her!” she cried out.

She showed the police to her mom’s room and then she saw her mother’s foot at the bottom of the bed.

The killer had put a small caliber gun in Doris’s mouth and pulled the trigger, execution-style. There were burns on her tongue and the bullet locked her neck and her spine so she couldn’t move. Doris
drowned in her own blood because she couldn’t move her head to the side.

Because a curtain was pulled to the side of an unlocked window, it appeared the killer might have accessed the house in this way. It is not known if the window was left unlocked or if the killer was in the home earlier and unlocked it for later entry. Because the reports and photos were not available to me, there were many missing facts that might have provided clues to exactly what happened. I would have to make do with what information I could gain by interviewing the family.

A diamond-and-sapphire necklace was initially reported as missing from the house following the murder, but that was in error. Doris’s daughter Denise had it; her father had given it to her grandmother to give to her to hold for her wedding one day. Laurie had cash in plain view where the perpetrator could have taken it. He didn’t. Doris’s purse was missing, but there was nothing of value in it. Therefore, this crime was unlikely to have a monetary motive.

Even though much information was unavailable, there was enough interesting information to profile this case to a reasonable extent and offer avenues of investigation that might still lead to the case being solved and an individual serving time for the crime.

Doris was what one would classify as a low-risk victim. She was married, a mother of seven children, a homemaker, and a volunteer with the ladies’ auxiliary of the fire department. She did not involve herself in any dangerous activities and did not abuse alcohol or drugs. At the time of the murder, she was at home in bed. One of her eldest daughters, Cathy, lived in an apartment across the street with her own family. Doris’s husband, Mickey, forty-three, a paramedic and the local fire chief, was in the midst of a twenty-hour shift at a station less than a mile away from his residence. Although her husband was not at home, it would be obvious to anyone casing the place that Doris and her children were there, making her home not the best choice for burglary or stranger sexual assault. The motive for this homicide would likely have come in one of three categories: