Chapter 18 Chapter 15 Hurt the Beloved

Greg McClary was rummaging through case files in his windowless office in Quantico one day when he got a call from a police department in his area about a harrowing case that seems familiar to you. . A young single mother leaves her rented garden apartment with her two-year-old son to go shopping.As she was about to get into the car, she felt a sudden cramping in her stomach, turned quickly, and walked quickly across the parking lot to the bathroom next to the apartment building's back door.This is a very safe residential area, people are friendly and familiar with each other, and she has solemnly told her son to stay in the building and play obediently, waiting for her to come out.

I'm sure you can guess what happened next.About forty-five minutes later, she emerged from the bathroom to find that the child was not in the hall.At this time she was not panicked, she guessed that the child might have gone outside to play, even though it was a very cold day.She walked out of the building, looking around. But she noticed something was wrong: One of her son's knitted mittens was lying on the parking lot floor, and he was nowhere to be seen.Only then did she feel alarmed. She rushed back to her apartment and immediately called 911.Shocked, she told the emergency center operator that her son had been kidnapped.Police were quickly on scene and scoured the area for clues.By this time the young woman was in a state of hysteria.

The media learned of the situation.So she went into the radio studio and begged through the microphone for her son's captors to bring him back.Although the police were sympathetic to her, they still administered a polygraph test to her quietly, as is customary.She passed the polygraph.Knowing that every second counts in a child abduction case, the police turned to Greg. Greg listened to the briefing and the recording of the 911 call.He felt something was wrong.Then the case took a new development.The distressed woman received a small package with no return address, no note or letter inside, just a matching mitten she found in the parking lot: the woman had a nervous breakdown.

But at this time, Greg has understood the truth of the matter.He told the police that the little boy was dead and the murderer was his mother. How did you know?The police questioned him repeatedly.It is not uncommon for young children to be taken by sexual perverts.How do you know things are different this time? So Greg explained.First, the facts of the case itself are problematic.Nobody worries more about a child being taken by a sexual pervert than a mother.Is it logical for her to leave the baby unattended outside the bathroom for so long?If she had to stay in the bathroom for a long time, why didn't she bring the baby in, or make some impromptu arrangements?It might be what she says it is, but it can't help making you suspicious.

According to a recording of the 911 call, she explicitly stated that someone had "kidnapped" her child.Greg's experience has taught him that parents never want to accept such terrible assumptions in their hearts.In a state of hysterical grief, you might hear her say that the child is missing, that the child is lost, that she cannot find the child, or something of the like.The word "kidnapping" was used at this stage to show that she had already thought about all this before the accident happened. By crying and begging in the media certainly doesn't in itself make someone guilty.The image of Susan Smith in South Carolina begging for the safe return of her two sons still haunts us so often and deeply.Generally, we find that parents do this entirely from the heart.But the problem is that this kind of public appearance can also be a trick played by a few people with ulterior motives.

Most telling, however, in Greg's view, was the return of the mittens. Children are abducted for basically three reasons: they are abducted by kidnappers to extort money; they are abducted by child molesters for sexual gratification; have a child of their own.If it is the first reason, the kidnapper must contact the child's family, either by phone or by letter, to make their demands.The remaining two types do not want any contact with the child's family at all.None of the above three people would send back just one item of a child to tell the family that the child has been kidnapped.His family already knew.If it had to be proven to his family that it was a kidnapping, then there would be a redemption condition; otherwise it would be pointless.

Greg determined that the mother had merely staged a fake kidnapping based on the pattern of an imagined kidnapping.Unfortunately, she has absolutely no idea of ​​the actual motives for such crimes, and she botched the show. Clearly, she did it for a reason and convinced herself that there was nothing wrong with it.That's why she passed the polygraph.But Greg wasn't happy with that Australian 4 lie.He invited a senior polygraph expert from the Bureau of Investigation to retest her, and this time let her know in advance that she had been suspected.This time the results were completely different.After some targeted interrogation, she finally admitted that she killed the child and led the police to find the body.

Her motives are commonplace, and exactly what Greg has guessed from the start.She was a young single mother who had missed out on all the joys of twentysomethings due to the drag of her children.She meets a sweetheart, and the man wants to further their relationship and start a new family of his own.But he made it clear that there was no room for the child in their shared life. What's important about such cases is that Greg would have come to the same conclusion even if the police found the body after the child went missing and no one reported it.The child was buried in the woods, wearing a ski suit, wrapped in a blanket and tightly wrapped in a thick plastic bag.A kidnapper or a child molester wouldn't have gone to so much trouble to make him feel warm and "comfortable," or thought about keeping the body from getting exposed to the wind and rain.Whereas many murder scenes reveal the palpable and persistent anger of the perpetrator, abandoned corpses often reveal contempt and hostility, this burial shows the perpetrator's love and guilt.

Humans have a long history of hurting those they love or should love.In fact, Alan Burgess said in his first television interview as head of the Behavioral Sciences Division: "The violence we see is intergenerational, going all the way back to biblical times when Cain killed Abel. ’” Luckily, the reporters didn’t seem to catch what he meant when he explained the world’s first murder weapon. There was a major case in Britain in the 19th century involving domestic violence. In 1860, Inspector Jonathan Whitcher of Scotland Yard arrives in the Somerset town of Frome to investigate the murder of a baby named Francis Kent of a prominent family.The local police believed that the child was killed by a gypsy, but after investigation, Whitcher was convinced that the real murderer was Francis' 16-year-old sister Constance.Because of the family's social standing in the area and the notion that a teenage girl could not possibly kill her own brother, Whitcher's evidence was dismissed in court, he was not guilty of the charges against Constance, and she was acquitted. crime.

Whitcher was strongly criticized by public opinion and was forced to resign from Scotland Yard.Over the ensuing years, he conducted his own investigation to prove himself correct that the young girl was indeed the murderer.In the end, because he was penniless and in poor health, he reluctantly gave up his search for the truth.A year later, Constance Kent confessed to his crimes.She was tried again and was sentenced to life in prison.Three years later, Wilkie Collins would write his groundbreaking detective story, The Moonstone, based on the Kent case. It is not uncommon to murder a loved one or a family member. The key to solving it is to grasp the element of layout.Someone so close to a victim will try to draw suspicion away from him or herself.One of the first such cases I worked on was the murder of Linda Haney Dover in Cartersville, Georgia, on Christmas Day 1980.

Although Linda and her husband Larry have separated, they still maintain a relatively friendly relationship. Linda, 27, who is 5-foot-2 and weighs 120 pounds, regularly cleaned the house they used to share.In fact, on Friday, December 26th, she went to do just that.Meanwhile, Larry takes their young son to the park. When the father and son returned from an afternoon outing, Linda was no longer there.Larry had expected to see the house clean and orderly, but he hadn't expected the mess in the bedroom.The sheets and pillows were ripped under the bed, the dresser drawers were ajar, clothes were strewn all over the place, and there was a red stain like blood on the carpet.Larry immediately called the police.The police arrived quickly and searched the house inside and out. They found Linda's body in a crawl space at the bottom of the house that had been entered by outsiders.She was wrapped in a quilt taken from the bedroom, with only her head exposed.When they opened the coverlet, they saw her shirt and bra lifted over her breasts, her jeans down to her knees, and her panties pulled down to her pussy.There were blunt force trauma to the head and face, as well as multiple stab wounds, which police believe occurred after the bra was pushed up.There was a cupboard in the kitchen with a drawer open, and they believed the murder weapon was a knife that was taken from there, but they couldn't find (and never found) that knife.According to the crime scene, she was initially attacked in the bedroom before the body was moved outside the house and filled the crawl space at the bottom of the house.Drops of blood on her thigh indicated that the murderer had moved the body. There is nothing in Linda Dover's background to suggest she would be a particularly high-risk victim.Although she and Larry separated, she did not develop relationships with other men.The only unusual stressor was the time of year for the holidays and what caused her marriage to break up. Based on crime scene photographs and pertinent information sent to me by the Cartersville Police Department, I told them the perpetrator could have been one of two types.It's quite possible that he was a young, inexperienced, somehow handicapped loner who lived in the neighborhood and basically just happened to commit the crime on a whim.After I finished, the police mentioned that they had been having a lot of trouble with a villain in the area and that many residents were afraid of him. But this case has so many structural elements that I am more inclined to think that the perpetrator belongs to the second type: someone who knows the victim very well and therefore wants to divert attention.The only reason the murderer felt compelled to hide the body somewhere in the house was what we would classify as a vendetta homicide.Trauma to the face and neck also appear to have a highly individual character. I told them I thought the perpetrator was smart, but with only a high school education, working a physically demanding job.He may have a history of attacking others and is not very tolerant of setbacks.He was probably a morose man who couldn't stand failure, and was probably feeling depressed for one reason or another at the time of the crime, most likely because of financial constraints. The layout of this case has its own internal logic and reasons.Whoever killed Linda was reluctant to expose the body because another family member—especially her son—could see it.This is why he took the time to wrap the body in a blanket and move it into the crawl space.He wanted the case to look like a sex crime—thus pulling her bra up and exposing her genitals—even though there was no evidence of rape or molestation.He thought he had to, but he didn't feel comfortable having the police see her bare genitals and breasts, so he covered them up with a quilt. I pointed out that the killer would be very cooperative at first and caring about solving the case, but as soon as you question his alibi he becomes arrogant and hostile.His post-murder behavior may have included heavy drinking or drug use and a possible conversion to religion.He might change his appearance, he might even change jobs and move out of the area.I told the police to be on the lookout for someone who made a U-turn in behavior and personality. "He is a different person now than he was before the incident," I said. What I didn't know was that Larry Bruce Dover had been accused of murdering his wife when the Cartersville police asked for my profile, they just wanted to make sure they were right.This practice really annoys me for several reasons.One, I was overwhelmed by the urgent cases that I was dealing with at the time.But more importantly, if it goes wrong, it will make the Bureau awkward.To the good fortune of all parties involved, my profile turned out to be entirely true to the facts of the case.As I explained to the Director and the special agent in charge in Atlanta, if my profile was less than accurate, a sophisticated lawyer could bring me in court as a witness for the defense and force me to testify that my "expert share" "Profiling proves in some respects that the accused is not the murderer.Since then, I've learned to always ask the police first if they have a suspect, even though I don't want to know in advance who he is. Either way, justice was served in this case. On September 3, 1981, Larry Bruce Dover was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Linda Haney Dover. The 1986 murder of Elizabeth Jayne Wolcifer, known as Betty, brought a twist on the theme of home layout. Saturday, August 30, just after 7:00 am.Police in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, received a call to 75 Birch Street, the home of a popular local dentist.When officers Dale Minnick and Anthony George arrived about five minutes later, they saw 33-year-old Dr. Edward Glenn Wolcifer lying on the floor.Someone attempted to strangle him and hit him hard on the head.His brother Neil was there with him.Neil explained that he lived across the street and had come over after a call from his brother.Glenn was knocked out and said he only remembered Neil's phone number.After Neil arrived, he immediately called the police. Glenn's wife Betty, 32, and daughter Daniel, 5, were upstairs, according to two people.Whenever Neil tried to go up to check on them, Glenn either passed out or started moaning again, so the two hadn't been upstairs yet.Glenn told Neal he was concerned the intruders were still in the house. Officers Minnick and George searched the house.They didn't find the intruder, but they found Betty dead in the bedroom.She was lying on her side on the floor beside the bed, with her head toward the foot of the bed.Judging from the bruises on her neck, the drying saliva at the corners of her mouth, and her bruised face, she looked as if she had been strangled by hand.There was blood on the sheets, but the blood appeared to have been wiped off her face.She was only wearing pajamas, the hem was pulled up to the waist. Daniel, who was in the next bedroom, was still sound asleep and unharmed.When she woke up, she told police she heard nothing — no breaking and entering, fighting or commotion of any kind. After Minnick and George came down from upstairs, instead of describing the scene upstairs, they asked Dr. Wolsiver what happened.At dawn, he said, he was woken up by what sounded like someone breaking into the door.He took out the pistol from the bedside table and went downstairs to check it without waking Betty up. When he approached the bedroom door, he saw a big man at the top of the stairs.The man didn't seem to notice him.So he followed him down the stairs, but then he was lost and he started looking around the ground floor. Suddenly, someone attacked him from behind, with a rope or something around his neck, but he dropped the gun and got his hands in just in time before the rope tightened.Glenn then kicked back hard, hitting the man in the groin and causing him to let go.However, before Gray could turn around, he was hit hard on the back of the head, and passed out as soon as his eyes went dark.When he woke up, he called his brother. Dr. Wolsiver's injuries did not appear to be serious to police and the paramedics who were called to the scene - a contusion on the back of his head, several red spots on the back of his neck and several small lesions on the left side of his rib cage. Scuffs, that's all.But they didn't want to take any chances, so they sent him to the emergency room.The doctor there also felt that his condition was not very serious, but since the dentist claimed that he had been in a coma, he was admitted to the hospital. From the start, police were skeptical of Wolcifer's account.It doesn't seem plausible that an intruder would enter the home through a second-story window at dawn.Outside the house, they found an old ladder leading to an open bedroom window, which the intruders allegedly used to gain entry.But the ladder was so wobbly that it seemed too heavy for a man of medium size.It was leaning against the wall with the rungs facing the wrong way.The ground was soft, but the ladder didn't make a dent in it, which meant the ladder hadn't carried any weight.Nor did it leave any marks on the aluminum gutters the ladder rested on.There was no dew or grass on the rungs of the ladder, as there would have been had anyone used the ladder that morning. The situation inside the house also showed that his account was fraudulent.There seemed to be no shortage of valuables, even the jewelry placed in the bedroom in the open.If the intruders were there to murder, why would they leave an unconscious man downstairs with a gun and go back upstairs to kill instead of rape his wife? Two situations are particularly puzzling.If Glenn was strangled to the point where he was almost unconscious, why didn't he have any scars on the front of his neck?Most puzzling of all: Neither Glenn nor his brother Neil had gone upstairs to check on Betty and Daniel. Adding to the confusion, Dr. Wolsiver's claims have continued to change over time.As more and more details were recalled, his description of the intruder became more and more detailed.The man was wearing a black sweatshirt, mask socks and a moustache, Wolsifer said.There are several details in his account that are inconsistent.He told his family that he stayed out late Friday night but spoke to his wife before falling asleep.But he told police that he never woke up his wife.At first, he said about $1,300 had been stolen from a desk drawer, but changed his story when police found a $1,300 deposit slip.When the police arrived at the scene after receiving the call and asked him about the situation, he seemed to have just regained a little consciousness and his speech was slurred.But when he was told of his wife's death in the hospital, he mentioned hearing the police call for the coroner. As the investigation continues, Glenn Wolcifer continues to come up with newer and more detailed scenarios to explain the attack.Eventually, the number of intruders increased to two.He admitted to having an affair with his former assistant dentist, but told police it ended a year ago.He later admitted that he had just met the woman and had sex with the woman just a few days before the murder.He also said he forgot to tell police that he was also having an affair with a married woman. Friends of Betty Wolcifer told police that while she loved her husband and tried to change the situation, she was tired of his misbehavior, especially his habit of coming home late every Friday.Just days before she was killed, she had told a friend that if Glenn was still out late next Friday, she would "make a statement." After initial interviews at home and in the hospital, Glenn, on the advice of his lawyer, declined to speak to police about anything else.So they focused on solving the case on his brother Neil.His account of what happened early that morning is almost as bizarre as Glenn's.He refused to take a polygraph test, claiming he had heard that they were often inaccurate and worried that a bad result would affect his reputation.Under repeated requests from the police and Betty's family, and under pressure from the media calling for him to cooperate with the investigation, Neil agreed with the police to be interviewed in court in October. At around 10:15 that morning, 15 minutes after the scheduled interview time, the Honda car that Neil was driving collided head-on with a Mack truck, and Neil was killed on the spot.Neil was actually driving away from the courthouse when the crash occurred, and the coroner ruled his death a suicide, though it later appeared he may have swerved too sharply and nervously tried to turn back.We will never know the truth. More than a year after the incident, the Wilkes-Barre police have collected a large amount of circumstantial evidence confirming that Glenn Wolcifer was the murderer of his wife, but they cannot charge him because of the lack of conclusive evidence.His fingerprints and hair were found at the crime scene, but it was his own bedroom, so it didn't tell much.Police speculate that he may have used rope or worn a bloody coat and thrown it into a nearby river before calling his brother.The only way they could arrest and convict him was to have an expert authoritative opinion backing their view that the murder was committed by someone close to the victim who set up the crime scene. In January 1988, the Wilkes-Barre Police asked me to provide a case report.After poring over the voluminous sources, I immediately concluded that the murders were committed by people who knew the victims well, and that the perpetrators had staged crime scenes to cover up the truth.Since the police already had a suspect, I didn't want to provide a profile as usual, or directly identify the husband as the murderer, but I tried my best to provide the police with some convincing materials as a reason for arresting him. Breaking into a private home on that lot (with two cars parked in the driveway) in broad daylight on the weekend was a high-stakes crime targeting low-risk victims.The so-called theft is very implausible. An intruder entering through a second-floor window and immediately descending without checking the second-floor room is at odds with what we've learned from years of research and consulting cases around the world. There was no evidence that the intruder had a murder weapon with him, making claims of premeditated murder implausible.Mrs Wolsiver was not sexually assaulted, which makes the claim that the premeditated rape failed to lead to the murder equally unconvincing.There was no evidence that the killer had even attempted to take anything, which made the theory of premeditated theft difficult to establish.In this way, the possible motives for committing crimes are greatly reduced. The method of killing—the choking—was an intimate crime.Strangers would not choose this tactic, least of all someone who had planned his way in and gone through a lot of trouble. The police continued to flesh out the grounds for their charges methodically and meticulously.Although they are sure who the murderer is, the evidence in their hands is still indirect, and there must be evidence that stands up in court.During this time, Glenn Wolsiver relocated to Falls Church, Virginia, adjacent to Washington, D.C., where he opened a dental practice. At the end of 1989, the police prepared an arrest warrant and a statement of evidence based on my analysis report. On November 3, 1989, 38 months after the murders, a detachment of state, county and local police traveled south to Virginia to arrest him at Wolsiver's clinic. "It happened so fast. We got into it right away. It was all a dream," he told one of the officers who went to arrest him. He later claimed he was referring to the intruders (their) assault on him, not that he murdered his wife. Although several states had approved me to testify as a crime scene analysis expert, the defense in this case objected to my interpretation of the case, calling me a "voodoo wizard," and the judge ultimately ruled that I could not testify.However, the prosecution has mastered the analytical thinking I told them.After police efforts, Wolcifer was convicted of third-degree murder. There are many obvious suspects in the Wolcifer case: the rickety and upside-down ladder, the sex crime scene set up without any evidence of sexual harassment, the misnamed choke mark on the neck, the obvious behavior of not checking on his wife and daughter. There was a lack of concern for them, and the children were never woken by any sound.The most obvious doubt is that the actions of the so-called intruders are completely illogical.Anyone who commits a home break-in, no matter what the crime, will deal with the person who poses the greatest threat -- in this case the 6-foot-2, 200-pound man with the gun -- first, and the lesser threat second. person, the unarmed hostess in this case. Criminal investigators must be constantly alert to these inconsistencies.Perhaps because we have seen so many such cases, we have always been able to analyze people's statements with a high level of sobriety, and find out the truth of things by studying their behavior. In some ways, we are like actors ready to step into character.What the actor sees are the lines written in the script, but what he wants to perform is the "subtext", that is, what the scene really wants to express. The most obvious example is a case in Boston in 1989.Carol Stewart was murdered and her husband Charles was seriously injured.Before the case is closed, it has become a sensational event, and the whole community is about to be torn apart. One night, the couple were driving home via Roxbury from a natural childbirth class, and while they were stopping for a green light, Charles said they were attacked by a large black man.He shot Carroll, 30, before shooting Charles, 29.Charles suffered serious abdominal injuries and underwent 16 hours of surgery.Carroll died hours later, despite the efforts of doctors at the Brigham and Women's Hospital.Their baby boy Christopher was removed by Caesarean section, but died within a few weeks.Charles remains in hospital amid a lavish and high-profile funeral for Carroll. Boston police swooped in, arresting any black man who fit the description of the attacker Charles had described.In the end, he singled out one person in a row of suspects. But it didn't take long before his statement began to show flaws.When his younger brother Matthew gets a call from him asking for his help with a package of allegedly stolen items, Matthew suspects there was no robbery at all.The day after the district attorney announced that he would be charging Charles Stewart with murder, Charles committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. The black public was understandably outraged by Charles' false allegations, as it was six years later when Susan Smith's lie that a black man had kidnapped her two children was debunked.In Smith's case, however, the local county sheriff in South Carolina went against the norm and spread the case widely.With the cooperation of the media and federal agencies such as our special agent Jim Wright, he got to the bottom of it in a matter of days. The Stewart case has not been solved as efficiently, but I feel it could have been done if the police had analyzed Stewart's account carefully and compared it with what was shown at the scene.Not everyone goes to the trouble of arranging a crime, say, shooting themselves and being so seriously injured.But if, as in the Wolcifer case, the killer first attacked someone who was less of a threat to him—nine times out of ten, a woman—then there must be a reason.In any heist, the heist always tries to overpower the most difficult opponent first.If you don't get rid of the bigger threat first, there must be another reason.Take "Son of Sam" David Berkowitz, for example, he shot women first, and in most cases he shot women more viciously, because they were his targets.Men were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The problem with organized crime for all of us in law enforcement is that you can easily develop empathy for victims and survivors.If a man is manifestly unlucky, we obviously want to believe him.As long as his acting is passable, and as long as the crime is superficially logical, we tend not to pursue it in depth.We, like doctors, have empathy for victims, but we do no one any good if we lose our objectivity. Who can do such a thing? While the answer to this question may be painful at times, it is exactly what we must find out.