Published Friday, June 13, 1997, in The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Virginia
Luck can play role in arrest
By JIM HALL Staff Reporter
In 1985, a woman in a church day-care center in Omaha, Neb., noticed a slightly built man hanging around outside, watching the children.
The woman was suspicious of the man--he matched a description broadcast by police--and she wrote down his license number. It was the break that Omaha police needed to capture serial killer John Joseph Joubert IV.
Joubert's crime spree ended because of dogged police work, public participation and dumb luck.
Dozens of serial murder cases have been solved over the past 20 years for similar reasons, according to serial crime experts. If a serial killer is at work in the Silva and Lisk cases, he likely will be caught the same way.
"The only time these guys are vulnerable is when they are grabbing a victim or disposing of a corpse," said Glenn DiViney, a detective for the Fort Worth, Texas, Sheriff's Department and lecturer on serial killers.
"Most of the time when they are caught it is an accident," said DiViney in a phone interview yesterday.
Such was the case in 1978 when the Sacramento, Calif., police finally caught Richard Trenton Chase.
Someone had committed five grisly murders in Sacramento, so 65 officers canvassed the streets where the killer was believed to live.
"It was a tremendous manhunt," wrote Robert K. Ressler in his 1992 book on serial killers, "Whoever Fights Monsters." "People in apartments and homes and on the sidewalks were asked whether they had seen a youngish man who appeared quite disheveled and thin."
A woman in the area had known Chase in high school and was surprised when she met him on the street. He was disheveled and thin, with sunken eyes and blood on his sweat shirt.
She called police when she heard the description, and Chase was arrested.
In New York in 1976, police finally caught David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, when he parked his car too close to a fire hydrant on the night of his final murder. A neighbor remembered seeing an officer put a ticket on the car, and that led to Berkowitz's arrest.
"My experience has shown me that the public is very often a critical partner with the police in bringing dangerous men to justice," wrote John Douglas in his 1997 book on serial killers, "Journey into Darkness."
It is often a good idea for police to withhold certain specific facts in a case, Douglas wrote. "But my own bias is that you work with the media and let the public help you as much as possible."
Sometimes it is the behavior of the killers themselves, and not the public, that leads to their arrests.
In their 1988 study, "Sexual Homicide," then-FBI agents Ressler and Douglas interviewed dozens of serial killers in prison.
The two men, who are now retired and living in the Fredericksburg area, learned that serial killers often went hunting each day for victims, but would strike only when circumstances were ideal. On days when they couldn't find a proper victim, they might return to the scenes of earlier murders and revel in the experience.
For Berkowitz, "It was an erotic experience to see the remains of bloodstains on the ground or a police chalkmark," Ressler wrote.
Wayne Williams, the man convicted in the 1981 child murder cases in Atlanta, was finally caught when he returned to the Chattahoochee River, one of his dump sites.
Police had staked out a bridge over the river for weeks and were about to abandon their operation, when a police academy recruit saw a car drive across the bridge and stop briefly in the middle.
"I just heard a loud splash," the recruit reported on his walkie-talkie. He turned his flashlight to the river and saw ripples. The body was found downriver, and Williams was arrested soon after.
In 1989, police spotted Arthur Shawcross of Rochester, N.Y., when they were patrolling an area where the bodies of a number of prostitutes had been dumped. Shawcross was seated in his car. The body of his latest victim was resting a few feet away, under a bridge.
Sometimes the intended victims themselves are able to escape their captors and provide enough information for an arrest.
Gerard John Schaefer was arrested this way. Schaefer is believed to have killed up to 35 women in Florida in the 1970s. The spree ended after he picked up two female hitchhikers and tied them in the woods. Schaefer was a policeman and had to leave his victims long enough to report for roll call. When he did, they escaped.
One of Robert Hansen's handcuffed victims escaped from him in an Anchorage, Alaska, airport in 1983. Her testimony led to his conviction on four murder charges.
Sometimes determined police work breaks the case. In Arlington in the late 1980s, Detective Joe Horgas linked Timothy Spencer to a string of murders in Richmond and Arlington. Spencer was executed for the crimes in the Virginia electric chair in 1994.
"Despite state-of-the-art techniques and computers that aided in getting the conviction, the case against Timothy Spencer was truly made by old-fashioned, street-cop detective work," Douglas wrote.
The same could be said for officer Renee Lano, who walked the streets of New Castle County, Del., for two months in 1989. Lano posed as a prostitute to catch serial killer Steven Pennell.
She waited for a man in a van to engage her and noticed blue carpet in Pennell's vehicle. Similar fibers had been found on one of his victims.
"As soon as she noticed the blue carpeting, she began admiring the van, and as they talked, she began casually scraping up carpet fibers with her fingernails," wrote Douglas in his 1995 book, "Mindhunter."
It used to be relatively easy for police to catch murderers, Douglas has pointed out. Victims knew their assailants, and the crimes stemmed from familiar emotions, such as anger, greed and jealousy.
"But a new type of violent criminal has surfaced in recent years," he writes. It is the serial offender, "who often doesn't stop until he is caught or killed, who learns by experience and who tends to get better and better at what he does, constantly perfecting his scenario from one crime to the next."
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