Chapter 15 Chapter Twelve One of Us

Judd Ray is a living legend at Quantico.He almost lost his life. In February 1982, when he was involved in the investigation of the Asian child case as an agent of the Atlanta field station, his wife tried to hire someone to kill him. We heard about each other in early 1978 when we investigated the "evil forces" case, but we never met at that time.A serial killer known as the "Stock Strangler" broke into the homes of six elderly women in Columbus, Georgia, assaulted them and strangled them with their own nylon stockings.All victims were white, and forensic evidence found by the coroner on some of the bodies indicated that the strangler was black.

Next, the city's police chief received a threatening letter on paper and envelopes reserved for the U.S. Army.The letter writer claimed to be part of a seven-member "evil force" group.The letter mentions that they believe the "stocking strangler" to be a Negro and threatens to kill him if he is not caught by "June 1" or, as the writer wrote, "1 June" A black woman retaliates.They claimed to have kidnapped a woman named Gail Jackson.Had the "stocking stranglers" not been caught by "1 Sept.", "the number of victims would have doubled." The letter suggested that the military letterhead envelopes were stolen and that the group had originated in Chicago.

This development created nightmare fears for everyone.A brutal killer stalking Columbus is scary enough.Blood for blood by a "vigilante" group would divide the city. Just when the police searched for the seven whites but found nothing, they received another letter, and the other party further raised the conditions, demanding a ransom of 10,000 US dollars.Gail Jackson was a whore, well known in the bars around Fort Benning.She did disappear. Judd Ray is the captain of the Columbus Police Department.As a veteran of the Vietnam War and a black police officer who has worked step by step from the ordinary police, he knows that Columbus will not be peaceful until the double threats from the "Stock Slayer" and "Evil Force" groups are not eliminated.Despite the considerable time and effort invested by the police, the investigation has gone nowhere.His police instincts told him they must have found the wrong person in the wrong way.He had been tracking law enforcement across the country and had heard of Quantico's profiling project.He suggested that the police department should get in touch with the Behavioral Science Section to see how we handle the case.

On March 31, they requested our assistance through the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to analyze the case.Regardless of what the writer stated in the first letter, we are all fairly certain that the case has something to do with the Army and Fort Benning.Bob Ressler, a military policeman before joining the FBI, led the analysis of the case. We delivered the report within three days.We believe there is no evidence that this self-proclaimed "Evil Force" consisted of seven white men.In fact, we don't believe it was made up of any white men.Its members were just a lone black man trying to distract the police and cover up the fact that he had already killed Gail Jackson.He was clearly in the military, judging from his use of military conventions for dates such as "1 June" and the use of "meters" instead of "feet" or "yards."The letters were full of errors, which ruled out the possibility that he was an officer, as officers are supposed to be well educated.Based on his own experience, Bob judged that this person was probably either an artilleryman or a military policeman, and he was probably between 25 and 30 years old.He may have already killed two women, possibly also prostitutes, which is what he meant when he said "the number of victims would be doubled."We also think that it is possible that he is the same person as the "Longstocking Strangler".

After our profile was circulated at Fort Benning and the bars and nightclubs the victims frequented, the Army and Columbus police quickly identified a black private named William Hans, 26, who was in a fort. Military service in the Artillery Corps.He confessed to killing Gail Jackson, Eileen Sekild and, last fall, another woman, an Army private named Karen Hickman, at Fort Benning.He admitted that his purpose of fabricating the organization "Evil Force" was to divert the attention of the police. A witness at the scene identified the real "stocking strangler" from a photo. He was 27-year-old Carlton Gary, a black man born and raised in Columbus.He was captured after robbing several restaurants in succession, but was able to escape and was not re-arrested until May 1984.Both Hans and Gary were found guilty and sentenced to death.

When things returned to normal in Columbus, Judd Ray took time off to go to the University of Georgia on a mission to recruit minorities and women into law enforcement.He intends to return to work at the police station as soon as his recruitment is over.However, because of his background in the military and the police, coupled with his being black, and the Bureau's urgent need to project an image of equal opportunity for whites and blacks, the FBI offered him a job, He accepted.I didn't pay much attention to him when I first met him, during his training as a new agent at Quantico.He was later assigned to the Atlanta Field Station.There, his extensive experience and deep knowledge of the place and its people are seen as a great asset.

We met again at the end of 1981, when I traveled south to Atlanta for the Asian child case.Judd, like everyone at the field station, threw himself into the investigation.Each agent was part of a task force investigating five of the murders, and Judd had his hands full. He is also under tremendous pressure from another direction.His marriage, which had been in crisis for some time, was now collapsing.His wife has been drinking too much, making foul language about him, and behaving erratically. "I don't even know this woman anymore," he said.Finally, on a Sunday night, he gave her an ultimatum: Either she quit the habit and went to a psychiatrist, or he left her with his two daughters, 18 months and 8 years old.

To Judd's complete surprise, he did begin to see signs of improvement.She became more concerned about him and her daughter. “I saw a change in her personality. She stopped drinking,” he recalled afterwards. “She started treating me well. For the first time in our 13 years of marriage, she got up early to make me breakfast. All of a sudden. , she has completely become what I expected." But he added: "I should have known that nothing like this was going to happen. I will tell other cops that in the future. If your spouse's behavior towards you suddenly changes fundamentally, whether positive or negative, You should all be alert immediately."

It turned out that Judd's wife had already decided to kill him, but she was just buying time so that she could make arrangements.If her plan worked out, she could avoid the shock and humiliation of a forced divorce, keep her two children with her, and receive $250,000 in life insurance.Better to be the sad but wealthy widow of a murdered police officer than a lonely divorced woman. Little did Judd know that two men had been following him for days.They waited outside his family's apartment building every morning and followed him down Interstate 20 into Atlanta.They'd been looking for an opportunity to kill him cleanly when he was off guard, and then get away with no witnesses.

However, they soon realized a problem.Judd had been a police officer for many years, and the first rule of policemanship had become an instinct for him, which was to keep the hand with the gun empty.No matter where the two assassins followed him, his right hand always seemed ready to reach for the gun. They went back to Mrs. Ray and raised the issue with her.They were going to take him out in the parking lot outside the apartment building, but Judd would probably take at least one of them down before he could.She had to do something about his empty right hand. In order not to let such a detail get in the way of her plans, she procured a travel coffee mug and suggested that Judd take it to work each morning. "She hasn't cooked me and my daughter a breakfast in 13 years and now she's reminded me to bring the damn coffee mug."

He refused.Over the years, he just couldn't get used to driving with his left hand on the steering wheel and his right hand holding a coffee cup.Those were the days before cupholders were ubiquitous in cars.Had it become popular at the time, this story could have had a very different ending. The Gunners are back for Mrs. Ray. "We couldn't do it in the parking lot," one of them said, "we had to deal with him in your house." So, they decided to start in early February.Mrs. Ray and her two daughters were out that night, leaving Judd alone.The assassins came to the apartment building, walked through the foyer, went upstairs to the door of a house, and rang the doorbell.But they got the house number wrong.A white guy opened the door, and these two guys asked him where the black guy who lived here went.He simply told them that they mistook the door and that Mr. Lei lived across the street. But in doing so, Judd's neighbors had seen them.Had he done it that night, by the time the police questioned him, he would have remembered that two black men had approached Judd Ray.So they had to leave. Later, Mrs. Ray came home thinking that the matter was settled.She looked around hesitantly, then slipped into the bedroom, ready to call 911 and say her husband had been assassinated. She went into the bedroom and saw Judd lying on the bed.Still she tiptoed about the room.He turned over and asked, "What are you doing?" She screamed in fright and ran into the bathroom. But in the days that followed, she still performed so well that Judd thought she had really reformed.Though in hindsight he found it naive to think so, after all the years of their marital ups and downs, he longed to believe that things had really changed for the better. It was two weeks later, on February 21, 1981, that the unexpected happened.Judd was working on the death of Patrick Baltazar.This is likely to be a major breakthrough in the investigation of the Asian child case, because the hair and fibers recovered from the 12-year-old boy's body appear to be consistent with samples taken from previous child victims. That night, Judd's wife cooked him an Italian-style dinner.He didn't know that she had put a lot of sleeping pills in the spaghetti.According to the plan, she took her two daughters to visit her aunt after dinner. Judd was alone in the bedroom.He thought he heard a sound at the door of the suite.The hall lights dimmed.Someone had turned off the light bulb in the eldest daughter's bedroom.Then he heard someone whispering in the hall.In fact, it was a gunman who lost his courage, and the two were discussing what to do.He didn't know how they got in, but that didn't matter at the time.They are already in. "Who?" Judd asked aloud. Suddenly there was a gunshot, but the bullet missed him.Judd threw himself on the floor, and the second bullet hit his left arm.The room was dark.He wanted to hide behind the big bed. "Who?" he asked aloud again. "What do you want?" The third bullet hit the bed, very close to him.Things from his survival training flashed through his mind, and he tried to deduce the type of gun.If it had been a Smith & Wesson, they had three rounds left.If it was a Colt, they only had two rounds left. "Hey, man!" he yelled, "what's the matter? Why are you trying to kill me? Get what you want and go. I didn't see you. Just don't kill me." No one answered.But then Judd could see a figure against the moonlight. You're not going to live tonight, Judd thought to himself.You don't want to escape at all.But you know where you are.You don't want the detectives walking in tomorrow and saying, "Poor guy, he didn't shoot back at all. He just let them in and executed him." Judd made up his mind to let the detectives see the scene At that time, I knew that he had fought tenaciously. The first thing he had to do was get his gun, which was on the floor on the other side of the bed.When someone is trying to kill you, being separated by a big bed also means a lot of distance. Then he heard someone yell, "Stay still, you bastard!" In the dark, he got up and started to move a little bit towards the bed and his gun. He was getting closer, moving very slowly, and he needed more strength to effectively make the final push. When he had four fingers gripping the edge of the bed, he leapt and threw himself on the floor, but landed with his right hand under his chest.Because his left arm had been shot, he didn't have enough strength in his left hand to reach for the gun. That's when the gunman jumped onto the bed and shot Judd at close range. He felt as if he had been kicked by a mule.Something in him seemed to shrink suddenly.He didn't know at the time that the bullet had shot in his back, shattered his right lung, penetrated the third intercostal space, exited the front chest, and hit his right hand, still under his body. The gunman jumped out of bed and leaned over to feel his pulse. "You bastard, fight me again!" He said and walked away. Judd's mind went blank.He lay on the floor breathing heavily.He didn't know where he was or what had happened. Then he realized that he must have been back in Vietnam.He could smell the smoke of the battlefield and see the flames from the muzzles of the guns.He couldn't breathe.He thought, "Maybe I'm not really in Vietnam. Maybe I'm just dreaming. But if I'm dreaming, why is it so hard to breathe?" He struggled to get up, stumbled to the TV, and turned on the switch.Maybe the TV could tell him if he was dreaming.Johnny Carson and "Tonight" on screen.He reached out to touch the screen, wondering if it was real, and left a trail of blood on it. He needs some water.He walked to the bathroom with difficulty, turned on the tap, and tried to drink some water with his hands.At this moment, he saw the bullet embedded in his right hand and the blood gurgling from his chest.Now he understood what had happened.He went back to the bedroom and lay down at the foot of the bed, waiting for death to come. But he's been a policeman for so long.He couldn't let himself pass away quietly like this.Make sure the detectives come the next day and see that he fought.He stood up again, walked to the phone, and dialed 0.After hearing the operator's voice, he told her, gasping for breath, that he was an FBI agent who had been shot.She immediately put him through to the DeKalb County Police Department. A young female police officer answered the phone.Judd told her he was from the FBI and was shot.He struggled to finish his speech.He ate food laced with sleeping pills, lost too much blood, and slurred his speech. "What did you say? You're from the FBI?" she asked skeptically.Judd heard her tell her squad leader aloud that a drunk had called, claiming to be from the FBI.She asked the squad leader what she should do about it.The team leader said to just hang up the phone. That's when the operator stepped in and told them he was telling the truth and they had to send emergency help right away.She didn't stop until they agreed. “That operator saved my life,” Judd told me later. By the time she interrupted, he had passed out.He was not revived until emergency medical teams put him on an oxygen mask. "Don't use shock therapy," he heard the medical chief say, "he can't take it." They took him to DeKalb General Hospital where a thoracic surgeon was on duty.He was sane as doctors struggled to save his life as he lay on a gurney in the emergency room. He brushed past the Grim Reaper, but his mind cleared up a lot. He said to himself: "This is not a revenge incident. I did send a lot of people to prison, but they can't get close to me. Only people I absolutely trust To be so close to me." As he was wheeled from the operating room and into intensive care, Special Agent John Glover, in charge of the Atlanta Field Station, arrived.Glover has been under intense pressure from the Asian child case for months, and now it's happening again.Like the murdered children and Judd, Glover was black, one of the highest-ranking black men in the bureau.He was very sympathetic to Judd. "Go to my wife," Judd whispered to him, "and let her tell you what's going on." Glover thought Judd was still delirious, but the doctor said no, he was conscious and alert. Judd spent 21 days in the hospital, his room under armed protection, because no one knew who the shooter was or if they would return to take him out.During this time, his case was clueless.His wife expressed shock and dismay at the tragedy, saying thank God he wasn't killed, and wishing she had been home that night. At the field station, a team of agents is looking for clues.Judd has been in the police force for a long time and may have made a lot of enemies.Seeing that he was almost recovered, they posed the question in a more light-hearted and playful tone, using a famous line from the popular TV series "Dallas": "Who shot J.R.?" It was months before he got his daily life back to normal.He had to pay the bills that had piled up since the attack.When he saw a telephone bill of more than three hundred dollars from BellSouth, he couldn't help crying.But as he looked at the case by case, he began to make sense of the case in his mind. He said at work the next day that he believed the phone bill was the key to solving the case.As a victim, he should not have pursued his own case, but his colleagues heeded him. The bill listed a series of phone calls to Columbus.They got the name and address of the owner of the phone from the phone company.Judd didn't know the man at all.So he and several other agents drove more than a hundred miles to Columbus.They came to the house of a priest whom Judd thought looked like a charlatan. Hence the line in the TV film: "Who shot J.F.K.?" Judd Ray's initials are J.F.K. R． , his colleague borrowed the lines from the TV film and jokingly asked: "Who shot J.R.?" Bureau agents pressured him, but he denied any involvement in the attempted murder.The agents would not let him go easily.They told him the murder was one of us, and whoever did it, we'd catch him. Then, the ins and outs of things began to become clear.Everyone around Columbus knew the pastor as someone who had a way of "getting things done."Mrs. Ray had approached him to do the job in October of the previous year, but he said he told her then that he didn't want to do it. She replied that she would find someone who would do it, but asked to use his phone, saying she would pay him for the long-distance call.The pastor told agents that she called an older neighbor in Atlanta.This person had fought in Vietnam at the same time as Judd, both in the Army and familiar with the use of firearms.She said to him, "We've got to get this over with!" Finally, the pastor also claimed: "Mrs. Ray still won't pay my phone bill." The agents got into the car and drove back to Atlanta to confront the old neighbor.Under cross-examination, he admitted that Mrs. Wray had told him about hiring assassins, but he swore he had no idea it was Judd she was trying to kill. Anyway, he said he told her at the time that he didn't know anyone who did that kind of thing, so he asked her to get in touch with his brother-in-law, maybe he knew someone.The brother-in-law then introduced her to another guy.He agreed to take the job and hired two other men to be the shooters. Mrs. Ray, the former neighbor's brother-in-law, the man who picked up the job, and the two shooters have all been charged.The former neighbor was found a co-conspirator immune to prosecution.The five individuals were charged and found guilty of attempted murder, conspiracy and unincorporation.They were each sentenced to 10 years in prison, the longest a judge could give them. Because of the Asian child case, I saw Judd often.Later, he came to me.Although I am not his field colleague, but I know the pressure of doing this job, and I can understand the inner pain he has experienced and is still suffering, so I guess he wants to tell me what is on his mind.He told me that, apart from all the hardships this incident had caused him, he was especially distressed and embarrassed by the public discussion of his family situation. Considering Judd's suffering, the Bureau wanted to make the most favorable arrangement for him, considering transferring him to a field station far away from Atlanta to heal the trauma of his heart.However, after speaking with Judd and learning about his thinking, I take a different view.I think he should stay where he is for a while. I went to Special Agent in Charge Atlanta Field Station John Glover and shared my opinion with him.I said, "If you move him, you're going to take him out of the support he's got at this field station. He needs to be here. Give him a year to get the kids settled. And here they can be taken care of." Their aunt's care." I suggested that if he was transferred anywhere, he should be placed in the permanent office in Columbus, since he had been a policeman there and still knew most of the law enforcement officers there. They really kept him in the Atlanta-Columbus area, and he started to get his life back on track.Later, he was transferred to the New York field station, mainly responsible for foreign counterintelligence operations.He also became a profiling coordinator for the field station, the liaison between the local police and our section. When there were openings in our section, we transferred Judd, along with Roseanne Russo from New York Field Station and Jim Wright from Washington Field Station.Wright spent more than a year handling the investigation and trial of the John Hinckley case.Rosanne eventually left our department and was transferred to the Washington Field Station in charge of foreign counterespionage operations.Both Judd and Jim became outstanding members of the internationally renowned Corey and my dear friends.When I became section chief, Jim Wright succeeded me as profiling director. Judd claims he was taken aback when we drafted him.But he had always been an excellent coordinator in the New York field station, and because of his extensive law enforcement experience, his job was right from the start.He is a quick learner and extremely analytical.As a police officer, he once "visited the front line" to participate in the investigation of the case, and brought correct insights to Corey. In teaching situations, Judd wasn't afraid to bring up the attempted murder against him and its fallout.He even keeps a tape of his emergency calls, which he sometimes plays in class.But he couldn't stay in the classroom and listen to it.He would wait outside until the recording was over before coming in. I said to him, "Judd, there's a lot going on in this case." I explained that there were so many elements at the scene, like footprints, blood on the TV screen, etc., that could have been misleading or seemingly irrelevant. Have a clue.But now we are beginning to understand that seemingly irrational factors may have plausible explanations. "If you work on this case," I told him, "it will make a very valuable teaching case." He did as I told him to, and the case became one of the most vivid and instructive we ever taught.For him, it was a spiritual purification process. "I found it very personally inspiring. In preparing my lectures for this case, I was going down an alley I hadn't trod before. Whenever you talk about it with someone you can trust, you're exploring Another alley. Hired spouse murder or attempted murder is more common in this country than we like to believe. Families are often so embarrassed that no one wants to talk about it.” Listen to Jia De's teaching this case is one of the most moving events that I have experienced during my tenure as an instructor at the National Academy.I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.Eventually, when the tape was played, he could stay in the classroom and listen to it. By the time Judd became a member of our department, I had done extensive research on post-crime behavior.I began to understand that no matter how hard a perpetrator tried, many of his post-committal actions were often beyond his conscious control.Since this was a case of personal experience, Judd became interested in the subject of pre-commitment behavior.We once believed that sudden stressful stimulation was an important factor leading to crimes.But Judd greatly broadens our horizons, illustrating with his own example how important it is to focus on pre-crime behavior and relationships.A fundamental change in a partner's behavior, even a small but significant change, may mean that he or she has begun planning to change the status quo.If a husband or wife becomes unexpectedly calm, or uncharacteristically kind and tolerant, it may mean that he or she has begun to think that change is inevitable or imminent. Hired to murder a spouse is hard to investigate.The living party has already set up a psychological defense line.The only way to solve a crime is to pry someone's mouth open, and you have to figure out the motive and the reason for the crime, so that the other party will buy you.Just as rearranging a crime scene can lead the police astray, a spouse's pre-crime behavior is a form of rearranging. Most importantly, Judd's case provides a good example of how crime scenes can be misinterpreted.Had Judd been killed, we might have drawn some wrong conclusions. One of the first things police were taught was the indestructibility of crime scenes.But veteran cop and special agent Judd's almost unconscious actions have invisibly destroyed the original crime scene.We might interpret all the footprints on the ground and evidence of his activities as a case of a burglar that didn't go well, in which intruders held him around the house and forced him to tell where certain items were hidden.Blood on the TV screen suggested that Judd had been lying in bed watching TV when he was suddenly attacked and shot. There is a situation that requires serious consideration.As Judd puts it: "If I were to die, I'd be absolutely sure she'd get away with it all. The whole thing was well planned, and she'd already won over her neighbors. Nobody would be widowing her." Doubtful about the mourning." As I said, Judd and I became close friends.He was almost like brother to me.I used to joke with him that he would make sure to play that tape back to me while I was evaluating the performance of the clerks, and that would guarantee my absolute sympathy.However, this was never necessary.Judd Ray's resume says it all.He is now the head of the International Training Section.In this unit, his skills and experience will benefit a new generation of agents and police officers.But, no matter where he goes, he will always be one of us, and one of the best.He is one of the few surviving law enforcement officers who survived the massacre through sheer courage and willpower and then personally brought the perpetrators to justice.

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