The Profiler (37 page)

THE AVERAGE PERSON
thinks that the scientific method is strictly performing chemical tests in a lab. We can, of course, scientifically prove DNA and fiber matches. But using the scientific method in criminal profiling is all about being methodical about the analysis, and coming up with a theory and then deliberately trying to strike it down. I spend a great deal of time and energy generating
potentially valid explanations for murder—or suicide—and then knocking those very theories out until I can’t come up with any other explanation but the last one standing.

That’s what I did with the shotgun in the Brian Lewis case.

Could Brian shoot himself from the driver’s seat? Could somebody do it from the backseat, either the left or right side, or the passenger seat? There were four inside positions. And could someone shoot him from the outside?

I went to each one of the positions with the gun, trying to prove that it could or could not be done, and as I eliminated each of the possibilities, I was left with only two.

One was that Brian shot the gun himself while sitting in the driver’s seat. The other possibility was that someone else shot Brian from the passenger side.

The flesh on the passenger seat was a piece of scientific evidence that ruled out anyone sitting in that seat.

This was the case that showed me that I had to be able to rule everything out. If I had just looked at the pictures, I might not have figured out the same things that I did with the shotgun in hand.

I
returned to the Midwest. This town was so small that when I asked for a good place to eat, I was told to go back to wherever I came from.

The sheriff’s office was in the nearest “big” town. The sheriff had the same look on his face as the detective in the Hoover murder.

“Don’t tell me,” I guessed. “Problems with the case files?”

The sheriff was disgusted. “The judge won’t release them.”

“What? But isn’t it an open case?”

“I know. It’s ridiculous, but he sealed them.”

Politics. Had to be politics.

Luckily, I had access to a few police reports and interviews and one autopsy out of two. But no photos, no evidence reports, no forensic reports.

At least I had a really nice sheriff. And a fascinating case.

*  *  *  *

ON JULY 5, 1986
, a lazy summer night in a tiny Midwestern town, Marshal Bob Dickinson was sitting in his easy chair when he got a late-night call from a panicked man, Hugh Marshall, Christine Landon’s boyfriend. “Get on down to Christine’s house! I was talking with her and she started screaming! Hurry!”

Stuffing his feet into his slippers and slapping on his gun belt, the marshal took only half a minute to make the three-block drive to Christine’s house. The phone rang again as soon as he left.

“Tell Bob we’re on the way!” the sheriff’s office advised Bob’s wife. But it was too late to stop Bob.

Ten minutes later, patrol cars screamed into the eight-block town to the front of the Landon residence. The house was dark. Dickinson’s car was parked haphazardly at the curb, the driver’s door hanging open. No one answered the door. Around back the police officers discovered the sliding door open. Entering the house, they saw Christine Landon on the kitchen floor, half-naked, tied hand and foot, a dozen stab wounds to her chest, and her throat slashed.

They called out to Bob; no answer. The house was eerily quiet. Moving up the stairs to the second floor, they found the marshal, folded over at the top of the stairs, shot to death with his own gun.

Horrified police officers and citizens tried to come to grips with the brutal double murder in their peaceful town. They vowed this killer would be brought to trial. Wanting to go the extra mile, the sheriff’s office reached out for expert assistance, something few police departments are willing to do.

What started as an exemplary effort by the local law enforcement to ensure justice for the victims of these vicious homicides soon careened out of control. Big egos, ambitious politicians, and a desire to win without regard for the truth aborted the rules of fair play and the law, tearing apart the town and the lives of all who became involved; all except the real killer of Landon and Dickinson.

The players in this story stopped at nothing to achieve their goals.

FBI agent John Douglas, the criminal profiler and a twenty-year
agency veteran who was then working at the National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy, profiled the crime as a sexual homicide and identified Curtis Cox, the babysitter, as the suspect. Though there was no physical evidence linking Cox to the crime, Curtis Cox was arrested. The prosecutor believed he could get a conviction using the FBI profiler’s testimony and psychological profile. A police psychic was brought in and he came up with details of the crime, and the man he said did it looked and acted just like Curtis Cox, an unpopular character in town. The families were comforted that there was no question as to who killed Bob and Christine, and the right guy was going to trial. Oddly, when I read over the police reports, some of them were word for word what the psychic had claimed. Either that psychic had visions of the police reports or someone had slipped him the files.

Without a shred of evidence, the sitting duck suspect, Curtis Cox, was arrested. The defense attorney raised hell, complaining to the judge that the case ought to be thrown out because there was zero physical evidence and the entire case was based on the egregious use of criminal profiling, presenting psychological and behavioral theories of the crime and then claiming Curtis Cox was a sexual psychopath and therefore must have done it. The judge dismissed the case and then—for reasons unknown to me—sealed the case files.

For fifteen years, the case remained untouched by law enforcement.

One day, the daughter of Bob Dickinson tried once again to honor her father by bringing his killer to justice. She contacted me and I went to the town to review what information existed at the sheriff’s office. I interviewed and investigated some of the key players, profiled the crime, and disagreed with John Douglas.

The murderer was not Curtis Cox.

It was not even a sexual homicide.

The defense attorney was right; Cox was railroaded.

DICKINSON’S DAUGHTER CALLED
me because her family wanted me to confirm that Curtis Cox was guilty, and that the FBI profiler was right. But there were doubts.

Cox was a bit creepy. He was a skinny, effeminate fellow, very soft-spoken, who had never married. He liked to make friends with women who had young children. He was a friend of both Christine Landon and her ex-husband, Craig, and they frequently allowed their two young daughters, ages eight and eleven, to visit him at his home. He also came to their home quite often to babysit the girls. Christine gave him a key to the house.

Cox had access to the home, he was comfortable there, and he was weird. But he had no record. So did he commit this crime and, if he liked children so much and was a suspected pedophile, why would he choose to attack a grown woman?

The police report includes this description of Cox’s actions while babysitting the girls:

The sheriff gave me what he still had in terms of police reports and the autopsy of Marshal Bob Dickinson. The sheriff tried his best to get the crime scene and autopsy photos released to me, but they remained sealed by the prosecutor’s office and thus unavailable for inspection. The evidence should have been accessible. The sheriff’s department couldn’t fight whoever was in the power seat.

I visited the actual house where the murders occurred. Strangely, Christine Landon’s estranged husband, Craig, had kept it and moved back in as soon as the police tape was down, eventually raising the couple’s two daughters in the house where Christine was murdered. He eventually remarried and continued living there with his new wife.

When Craig came over from the side of the yard to meet me, the lawnmower backfired and he pretended to stumble as if he were shot. Then he laughed.

He brought me into the house and proudly showed me pictures he took of the crime scene after the police let him back in. The blood was still there on the kitchen floor, as were all the fingerprint powder and bullet holes in the walls. His pictures helped me reassemble that scene. Why he gave them to me still mystifies me.

WITH THE INFORMATION
available, I came to the following conclusion: the likelihood of Curtis Cox committing the double homicide of Landon and Dickinson was extremely low.

There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, so the focus on Curtis Cox as the killer in this double homicide was based on erroneous conclusions: first, that the motive for the crime that resulted in the death of Christine Landon was sexual and, second, that Curtis Cox’s fantasies would lead him to the behaviors exhibited during the commission of the crimes of that evening.

My view is that the killer or killers had no intention to commit a sexual crime on the premises. The only crime that I believe was supposed to have occurred at the Landon residence was the abduction of Christine Landon. There was no way to prove motive of anything but abduction from what I saw at the crime scene. Even the court trial record from Curtis Cox’s almost-prosecution stated:

So there was no conclusive proof at the scene that this was a sexual homicide. There was semen found in the vagina of the victim but it turned out to be that of her boyfriend, with whom she had spent the evening. The FBI profiler claimed that the stab wounds to Christine’s breast area were sexual in nature, but if you want to be sure someone is dead, you stab them in the heart, and for women, the heart just happens to have a breast covering it. The only true possible support for this being a sexual crime would be the ropes tying Christine’s hands and feet. This could be a sign of bondage, but I couldn’t jump to this conclusion. I would have to see how all the evidence fit. I needed to do a thorough crime reconstruction and “see” what actually occurred that night at the Landon residence.

There were three possible suspects—Curtis Cox, Craig Landon (alone or with assistance), and an unknown suspect (alone or with assistance)—that I could theorize as responsible for the deaths of Landon and Dickinson. I examined each without benefit of access to proper crime scene information.

THERE WAS NO
solid evidence that I knew of that connected Curtis Cox to this crime.

The prosecution and police cited the following reasons as probable cause for the arrest and prosecution of Cox in the murders of Landon and Dickinson.

1. Access to the house. This was the strongest element in the prosecution’s case. I was told that Cox did have access to the house.
   

2. Cox acted in a strange manner. This was not evidence. This was simply interesting.
   

3. A witness identified Cox. This was questionable, as the witness did not have a clear view of the man seen and there was also reason to believe the identification was not particularly reliable.
   

4. Cox had an alleged history of sexual deviancy. This information was actually not proven. When I studied the police records I found that this information was elicited from Christine’s estranged husband, Craig. Right after the crime he was brought in for questioning and during the interview, he and his children told the police of disturbing behavior by Curtis Cox when he was around children.
   

5. If Craig Landon’s and his children’s stories about Cox have any validity to them, Cox would be even less likely to have chosen an adult female as the target of any attempted crime or sexual encounter. Cox would have an interest only in children as the objects of his sexual endeavors. True pedophiles do not change sexual preferences from children to adults.
   If
   the information that I received from those who knew Cox was accurate, he was too weak and lacking in confidence to approach an adult, especially a fully functioning (physically and emotionally) adult. If Cox were a pedophile and the stories about him were true, he would have used a totally different MO. He would have enticed children, then slowly introduced them to sexual activities with him, all in a nonviolent manner. Whoever attacked Christine Landon was aggressive and violent. It should also be noted that some of the stories of Cox’s behavior came from Christine’s children, who may have been coached by their father or someone else prior to their interviews with the investigators.
   

6. The “Power List.” There was a piece of paper found in Cox’s trash that had the names of some of the women in town, their husbands, and their children, and Christine Landon’s was among them. One of the women’s names had a sexual comment next to it, but what that comment was or meant, I had no idea. But no words were written next to Christine’s name, so there would be no way to say Cox was targeting her. The FBI profiler imagined what this paper might mean to Curtis Cox and
   decided it was a list of women over whom he would like to have power. The prosecutor and the FBI profiler claimed this was an indication of Cox’s ideation and plan for the abduction and sexual assault of Christine Landon. There was no proof that the list had any such meaning except in the creative minds of the profiler and prosecution.
   

7. Cox’s disappearance and faked suicide. Cox’s life had definitely taken a bad turn. The woman for whom he babysat was murdered, the police were hounding him and insinuating he had something to do with it, and he was growing tired of caring for his sick father. One day he drove his car to a lake and left a suicide note stating he couldn’t deal with anything anymore. His body, however, was not found in the lake but just down the road in a cheap motel—still moving about quite well.
   

8. The prosecution claimed this was evidence of a guilty conscience, but all this bizarre behavior proved was that Curtis Cox was a weak man who couldn’t handle pressure. Cox burned some materials at a campfire while he was “on the run,” before he was found at the motel. The district attorney claimed he burned evidence, although he couldn’t come up with what the evidence was. It was possible Cox had another reason to have put material, kindling, and wood together. Many people do that. It is called building a fire.