FORTY-THREE
I drove home and sat down in my living room to read the files I'd purloined. Purloin. Isn't that a great word? Kind of softens things a little. As opposed to
steal
, for instance. But I wasn't going to apologize for what I'd done. When a little girl is locked up in a box somewhere, and the highest law enforcement officer in the jurisdiction plain out says, “Let her die”âhey, the hell with that, I'm going to do what it takes.
I sat down and cracked open the folder that said
ANALYSIS OF METHOD
on the tab. Inside were sheets of white ruled paper torn from legal pads, each one filled with Lt. Gooch's neat, penciled handwriting. Each page was dated in the top left corner. The ones on top were relatively new, but the ones on the bottom were old, brittle, yellowing with age. I decided to start with the oldest material and work my way forward.
The oldest page was dated September 10, 1990. Three years after Gooch hadâpresumablyâmurdered his daughter. At the top of the page, written in bold and underlined twice, was this header:
HOW TO BE A SERIAL MURDERER AND GET AWAY WITH IT
I started to read. Given Gooch's ungrammatical speech and cracker drawl, I was surprised by the formality of the writing. There was also a coolness, a clinical detachment that gave me the creeps. Here's what the first page said:
For the sake of argument, posit a subject. This subject wants to kill children. Because he enjoys doing so, and enjoys his liberty, he wishes to remain forever undetected. In his shoes, who wouldn't?
Let us also posit that our subject is no fool. Let us further posit that he is not crazy in the conventional sense of the term. Not disorganized, not delusional, not impulsive, not self-destructive.
Finally, let us posit that he is not of a self-revealing nature, that he is capable of hiding his natural capabilities and predilections behind a facade. The facade might be built on a mask of incompetence, geniality, religiosity, gregariousness, or any of a number of other characteristics that serve to deflect others' abilities to see him as he really is. He is, in effect, an actor.
Given these premises, it is logical to assume that our subject will attempt to disguise his crimes.
The question at hand is, given the nature of his first crime or crimes (ones which in all likelihood were not carefully planned), what method would be most productive for camouflaging his crimes.
The following methods would naturally be used by such a subject:
1.
Kill each victim using a different method. The simplest way of identifying the victims of serial killing is to isolate and draw together crimes committed using the same MO. Without a common MO, the crimes will not draw attention to themselves as part of a pattern.
2.
Draw the victims from different geographical areas.
3.
Draw the victims from different law-enforcement jurisdictions.
4.
Draw the victims from poor socio-economic backgrounds and disorganized family groups. Such victims are likely to receive less intensive victim advocacy, and therefore law enforcement is less likely to pursue the cases with vigor.
5.
Create plausible suspects. An additional advantage to #4 is that by harvesting victims from disorganized, disfunctional families, plausible suspects will spring immediately to hand in the form of family members with criminal backgrounds, DFACS histories, manifestly violent tendencies, etc.
6.
Leave false clues. A highly organized, intelligent, and careful subject might go so far as to gather materials of potential forensic value in order to shift the blame to plausible suspects. Hair, fiber, blood, semen, etc., might all be obtained and placed on the victim, at the crime scene, pointing the blame toward suspects as per #5 above.
7.
Disguise. When making initial contacts with victims, searching for victims, or actually snatching them, the subject may employ disguise, misleading accents, etc. to alter not just his appearance, but his apparent socio-economic background, his employment, possibly even his race.
Underneath the pencilled notes, written in the same hand, but looser, more emphatically, in red pen was one more sentence: “Is it possible to pull this off? Or am I dreaming?”
I don't know what bugged me more, that this plan had been coolly executed for over a decade, or that Gooch had fooled me so profoundly.
Let us posit that he is not of a self-revealing nature, that he is capable of hiding his natural abilities and predilections.
Could Gooch have more accurately described himself?
I went through the following pages. For the next few years most of the notes were taken from forensic and psychological textbooks dealing with the motivations and methods of serial killers. What was he trying to do here? Was this some kind of twisted attempt at self-analysis? Or was he, in effect, trying to size up the competition, trying to anticipate the roadblocks that law enforcement might set up in front of him so as to better evade them?
The thing that spooked me the most was the almost total lack of any moral tone to the writing. It was as though conscience was an alien thing to Gooch. I found myself shivering.
There were also scattered analyses of individual crimes. Some of them were murders that were among the seventeen on my list, but some weren't.
Then I came to one, a four-year-old boy who apparently died of exposure in a state park near Commerce, Georgia. There was the usual cool analysis of the available forensic evidence including the autopsy and the family.
But then, at the bottom of the page, was a line that gave me pause:
Did the Subject do this or not?
What the hell did that mean? Gooch
was
the “subject,” so obviously he knew whether or not he had killed the child. Was Gooch trying to look at the crime from the perspective of a hypothetical law-enforcement officer who'd cottoned on to the pattern? Or what? Was this some kind of suggestion that Gooch was suffering from multiple personality disorder, that one half of his mind was a serial murderer and the other half was . . . well, something different? It just didn't quite add up.
By the time I reached 1994, I was starting to feel an uncomfortable tickle in the back of my mind. Unless this was some kind of bizarre ruse, it was becoming increasingly clear from the tone of the writing that Gooch was puzzled by these crimes, that he was not planning something, but working backward from the evidence toward a solution. He was, in short, doing detective work.
I wanted to believe that Gooch was the killer, that all that remained to be done on this case was to find Jenny Dial before she starved to death. But the more I read, the less it seemed to add up that way.
I read for another half hour. And the more I read, the more I felt the itch, the more I felt like I wasn't reading the plans or confessions of a killer, but the investigation of a man obsessed with catching a killer, a man so obsessed, maybe, that he couldn't let emotion into the equation, that he had to keep the reins tight or he might just fall apart completely.
Or maybe not.
The whole thing just flat-out didn't make sense.
Then, in the middle of a page entitled “Why Doesn't the Blood Evidence Add Up?” I read a line that said: “See new folder (DNA).” On this page Gooch appeared to be addressing the thorniest issue we'd faced in trying to make a case that all of these murders were related and were not just the random collection of puzzlingly similarâyet ultimately unrelatedâchild slayings that they appeared on the surface to be.
I flipped through the next six or eight entries. Each one kept referring to the DNA folder. The very folder I had been forced to leave at the scene of the Gooch's death. The more I read, the more it seemed like Gooch's conclusions about the murders were based on his analysis of DNA evidence.
The final page had just one line. It said, “Hunger!” The word was underlined twice.
In for a penny, in for a pound, right? I went out to my car, checked in the back, found that the pry bar I used to open the drawer of Gooch's desk was still there.
I slammed the trunk, hopped in, and started driving.
I'd gotten halfway through Decatur when I noticed that the same set of headlights had been following me all the way from my apartment over off Memorial Boulevard. I figured I was being paranoid, but then I thought,
Well, let's just see
.
I turned right on Clairmont. The headlights followed me. I turned left on Scott Boulevard. The headlights followed me. So far, no big deal. It was a natural route from Decatur in toward the city. I turned left on a little road that hooked off Scott to Ponce de Leon, stopped at the light. The only reason a car would go this way was if they were turning around and heading back to Decatur. The headlights eased past me, continued on down Ponce toward Atlanta. I couldn't make out the model as it flashed in the rearview, and I didn't want to turn around.
The light changed and I turned left on Ponce. In my rearview I saw a carâwas it the same car or not?âcreeping along down Ponce. Just as it was about to disappear from my view, I saw the car hang a U and come after me. Son of a bitch. A white Crown Victoria. A cop car.
I drove slowly up the road until I reached a gas station, turned in, and started filling up the tank. The white Crown Vic sped by the station and around the corner. But not quickly enough that I didn't make out the even features of the man inside. It was Captain Goodwin, Chief Diggs's assistant. Wearing sunglasses at 9:00 at night.
I jumped back in the car and tore out of the parking lot, heading back up Ponce toward the city. Yet again.
This time the headlights didn't follow. This time he knew he couldn't follow me without my seeing him. I'd shaken my tail.
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The parking lot of Lt. Gooch's apartment was deserted. No cruisers, no uniformed officers. I ran quickly up the stairs, looking around. No residents hanging out. There was yellow tape across the door, along with a notice signed by the DA threatening all kinds of nastiness to crime-scene interlopers. I popped the thin edge of the pry bar into the doorjamb just above the lock, leaned hard. The doorjamb made a crunching noise. I pressed on the door with my shoulder, and it swung open. A smell of spoiled meat surrounded me as I walked inside and closed the door behind me.
I pulled out my trusty Maglight, put on my surgical gloves, went into the back bedroom, and yanked open the bottom drawer of the gray filing cabinet.
It was empty. Thinking I'd forgotten which drawer Gooch's DNA file had been in, I pulled open the next drawer. Also empty.
I cursed softly. Then I checked every filing cabinet drawer in the room, but they were all empty. Not a file, not a folder, not a piece of paper left in the room. I checked quickly around the apartment just in case someone had piled them in a box. But my survey of the sparsely furnished rooms didn't take long: there were no files left in the room.
I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and called the evidence lockup. Because of the occasional need for evidence at odd hours, it was staffed 24-7.
“Ehdense, Off Jessssss, speen.” They generally put the A-team in places like Evidence.
“Officer, how you doing?” I gave the officer a little nudge with my tone of voice, letting him know I was important, not to be trifled with. “Detective Deakes here. From the task force on this Gooch thing.”
“Ummmng.”
“I take that to mean, âYes, ma'am?'”
“Yethmam.”
“Good. Now listen up. Lt. Garner logged in that evidence this afternoon, correct, and I need to lay my hands on certain items. You with me, young man?”
“Uhhhh.”
“Certain documents were brought in. I need you to pull up on the computer a list of those documents.”
“Now?”
“What! You think I called you in the middle of the night so I could find this out in some other decade? Yes, officer, right now!”
“Oh. What, uh, what the evidence numbers is?”
“I don't know the answer to that.”
“Then how I'm 'pose to find it?”
“Young man! Are you taking a tone with me?” Dragging out Chief Diggs's line from earlier in the day.
“No, ma'am, ah, naw, butâ”
“Don't
but
me! Pull up a list of every item y'all logged in on Gooch, and read them off to me.”
“Uh, like the
whole
list?”
“Yes, the whole list.”
There was a big sigh, then some desultory clicking on the keys. Finally the young officer began reading off the list of items in a halting voice. He was not a strong testimony to the successfulness of our public schools. Or, for that matter, to the rigorousness of our department's recruiting standards. It took about ten minutes for this idiot to stumble his way through the list. And when he was done, there was nothing that sounded even vaguely like folders or documents or papers.