Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind (24 page)

No forensic evidence suggested that the young man attempted to regain his balance, for example, by grasping the wall. He had no torn fingernails or bits of concrete under his nails.

Factors consistent with an accidental death included the lack of witnesses or forensic evidence that conclusively proved either suicide or homicide. There was that low railing, and Harrison was known to have been preoccupied with other matters, including Christmas and his exams. He might not have been paying as close attention as he usually would. Also, his fatal injuries were consistent with those normally suffered in such a fall, no matter what its cause.

We found an impressive number of reasons to doubt that Jamie Harrison’s death was a homicide.

As I noted above, the victim didn’t have many close friends, but no one seemed to dislike him enough to kill him. No theft was associated with the death. Harrison had no known involvement with criminals and did not gamble, use drugs, or have any reported sexual problems.

No signs of a struggle were found either in his room or at the top of the staircase. His body had no defensive wounds. All of the injuries he suffered were consistent with a fall. Harrison had not tried to break his fall or grasp anything to save his life.

No evidence pointed to the presence of anyone else in the stairwell at the same time, and no trace of any weapon was recovered. However, at the bottom of another, identical, stairwell, investigators found a large brick. It’s discovery prompted speculation that whoever was responsible for Harrison’s death had pretested the incident using the brick as a surrogate victim or to determine if its noise would attract attention.

Harrison surely would have screamed if someone had pushed him off the top of the stairs. What’s more, the staircase would have acted as an echo chamber, amplifying his cry. Yet no one heard a thing.

Anyone intent on pushing Jamie Harrison down that stairwell ran a high risk of being detected. It was exam time, and many students were up late. Escaping unnoticed would have been difficult.

Finally, Jamie Harrison survived his fall for a time. If his death had been a homicide, the killer surely would have checked to make sure his victim was dead if for no other reason than to preclude the possibility of being identified.

I told the coroner’s jury that only two factors were consistent with murder. One was the victim’s fear of heights, although you might argue that he could have been coerced into climbing to the top of the stairwell because he would never do it on his own. The second was the way he died—from a fall. Such a death is open to misinterpretation; it can look like an accident, suicide, or a homicide.

Factors inconsistent with suicide included Harrison’s future plans. We knew he was looking forward to Christmas and to the games tournament in the spring. He even had a game-playing appointment for the next morning. Also, the young man had paid for his next semester’s tuition with a postdated check.

As far as we knew, he had never attempted suicide in the past, nor did Jamie Harrison give away any prized possessions in the period just prior to his death. There was no suicide note, although investigators did find a deleted message on his computer. It was an enigmatic and unclear note that began “Try this twist” and was focused on death throughout.

None of the stress factors commonly associated with suicide were present. Harrison had no health problems as far as anyone knew; there had been no sudden disruptions in his intimate relationships; he showed no symptoms of internalized stress, such as disturbed sleep, or vomiting; and he had no urgent financial problems.

Jamie Harrison’s death was subject to a number of interpretations. But after looking at all of them carefully, my colleagues and I concluded that this young man had killed himself. Here is our reasoning:

1. Harrison was an introvert with poor social skills who spent a great deal of time alone.
   
2. Consequently, he had few close friends. Not one of his dorm mates whom we interviewed considered himself Jamie’s confidant. He had no one to turn to in time of emotional need.
   
3. He was having difficulty adapting to the university social environment. In his first year he couldn’t get along with his roommates and moved out to live alone. He also unsuccessfully ran for student office three times as a freshman. In his sophomore year, Jamie’s application to be a dormitory resident adviser was rejected. He did not date, and the only female in whom he showed interest, Elizabeth Davies, clearly preferred another.
   
4. The foundation of Harrison’s precarious self-image was his record of intelligence and scholastic accomplishments, and this part of his world was crumbling. His grades had steadily declined since he entered the University of Guelph. His first-semester grade average was 79.4. His second-semester average dropped to 65, and he lost his academic scholarship.
   In his sophomore year, he had scored just 53 on his first chemistry midterm, and 50 on his second. Classmates reported that his study habits were poor, and that he expressed concern over his teetering academic career. “That was one thing he could feel superior about,” said fellow student Pamela J. Livingston. “Now that was gone. He couldn’t get by just listening in class anymore.”
   
5. Harrison thought a great deal about death. A female acquaintance recalled that he read the tarot cards for her from time to time. “The things he would say for me were so positive,” she remembered. “But every time he did himself he seemed to turn up the death card or say he’d have to die here.” Another student recalled how Jamie Harrison always “flipped out” whenever the death card appeared.
   

Death was also the principal subject of the obscure note left on the victim’s computer.

“He liked to make twisted, sarcastic comments that no one could answer,” said Pamela Livingston. “I think that made him feel superior, too. He liked to be mysterious.”

For instance, Harrison sometimes used a standard poker deck as tarot cards. In it the jokers represented the fool in tarot. Harrison told his acquaintances that the fool could be thought of as a person standing on a cliff with his back to the edge, weighing the choice of stepping forward or backward.

Joker cards were found in his dorm bed. Unofficially, I believed Harrison was acting out the role of the fool. I also believed that “try this twist” was a parting attempt to play games with his friends, to toy with them.

Similarly, as Harrison explained to an acquaintance, the ace of hearts is equivalent to a particular tarot card, the cup card, that is suggestive of great hope and love, he said. A ripped ace of hearts was discovered in Jamie’s deck.

It’s impossible to quantify the sense of alienation Jamie Harrison felt or to measure how wounded he was by other students’ rejection. But it was clear from the interviews that he had had a difficult time at Guelph.

The female students especially dwelled on how his roommates had harassed Jamie until he finally moved into a room by himself.

Pamela Livingston believed Jamie’s penchant for the occasional odd comment contributed to his isolation, too. “People thought he was bizarre,” she said, “so he learned not to say anything.”

Yet at times Jamie Harrison seemed to crave even negative attention. When he grew a beard, acquaintances said he looked better without facial hair, but he kept the beard anyway. When he finally shaved it off and was told that he looked better, he promptly grew it back.

In all, the weight of the witnesses’ evidence clearly supported the conclusion that Jamie Harrison had taken his own life. That is the finding that I told the coroner’s jury, and they agreed.

For Kate Lines, Ron Mackay, and me, the hard work in preparing the equivocal death analysis brought an unexpected reward. Never before in a Canadian court had behavioral testimony been allowed as evidence. Out of the sad duty of explaining why I believed this troubled young man had taken his own life had come a form of formal legal sanction for an investigative technique I had pioneered years before at the BSU.

We appreciated the historical nature of the occasion and hoped that, as a precedent, it would allow other authorities and families to find the answers they sought in solving unexplained deaths.

At 2:10
A.M.
on a rainy Tuesday night, Langford Hall on the campus of Montana State University in Bozeman was quiet. It was May 15, 1990.

Then four thunderous shotgun blasts shattered the calm, followed by screams from Room 130 of the dormitory. Students hurried to the scene. One of the first to arrive was resident adviser, Larry Vaught, who discovered a student named James Clevenger standing in the hallway, clutching his lower abdomen, a dark trail of his blood leading back into the room.

Student Richard Mickelson ran into 130 and found Brian Boeder lying on the floor in the middle of the room, one arm outstretched. Boeder was wounded in his right arm, upper thigh, and buttocks. The shotgun used against Clevenger and Boeder lay on the floor nearby, partially covered by a pillow and a blue blanket. Mickelson also saw two expended shotgun shells on the floor.

Though mortally injured, Clevenger and Boeder were lucid as they waited for the ambulance. They told officers Michael B. Murphy and Rex Duncan of the MSU Campus Police that they had been quietly chatting in Boeder’s room when a knock came at the door.

“Come in,” said Boeder casually.

In strode a red-haired, freckle-faced, young man they both knew by sight but not by name. Saying nothing, he raised a sawed-off Marlin shotgun, pointed the weapon at the two friends, and squeezed off four rounds. Clevenger and Boeder lunged at the intruder, knocking the weapon out of his hands. He then fled out the door.

Moments later, resident adviser Tim Kluesner stepped out of his room, number 113, to encounter student Brett Byers, a red-haired sophomore who lived in 103.

Mark Baxter looked out his door as they met.

“You need to call the police, Tim,” said Byers, as he lightly jogged on down the corridor. “There’s been a murder.”

Kluesner would later remember that the young man seemed intense, excited, but not scared.

Back at the crime scene, both victims described their assailant to the officers. Their mention of his red hair made Officer Duncan think immediately of Brett Byers, whom he knew.

In recent months Byers had complained repeatedly to Duncan of vandalism to his pickup, which was his most cherished possession. Duncan was therefore familiar with the vehicle; he had noticed it in the parking lot earlier that night. Now he walked over to the window, looked out, and saw that the truck was missing.

After consulting with Tim Kluesner, Officer Duncan prepared an all-points bulletin for Brett Byers’s arrest.

Paramedics meantime had placed James Clevenger and Brian Boeder in an ambulance.

“Do you think we’re going to make it?” one of the young men was heard to ask.

“No,” his friend answered.

Brian Boeder died at 4:45
A.M.
; James Clevenger succumbed to his injuries a half hour later.

Their killer, meanwhile, was fleeing northwest toward his home in Great Falls. Brett Byers stopped along the way in the little community of Townsend, on U.S. 287, where he broke a store window in order to steal a Coke and candy bar. He was intercepted north of Townsend by Dep. Everard Creek of the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Office.

Deputy Creek would testify that Byers was traveling about fifty-five miles per hour when he pulled his police car in behind the pickup. The truck then slowed to forty-five, said Creek. When he turned on his flashing lights and sirens, Byers accelerated.

A highway roadblock was in place to the north in East Helena. Creek estimated that Brett Byers was driving in excess of eighty miles per hour when he saw the police vehicles with their flashing lights ahead. The subject immediately jerked his pickup off the highway, through a ditch and cyclone fence, and headed overland for the gas pumps at a Circle K convenience store and station. Byers seemed to smash his truck deliberately straight into one of the pumps. He then bounced into another vehicle, flipping over his pickup before it came to a rest.

There was never any question that Brett Byers murdered James Clevenger and Brian Boeder. In 1991, a jury found Byers guilty of the killings, and he was sentenced to 165 years in prison. He would be eligible for parole after 35 years. But a separate civil issue was raised in lawsuits filed against the university by the Clevenger and Boeder families. Were these killings foreseeable and could they have been prevented?

That was the question posed to me in a March 1994 letter from Last Chance Gulch in Helena, the street address for G. Curtis Drake, an attorney representing MSU in the litigation. Drake supplied me with all the necessary background material—everything from Langford Hall’s floor plan to psychiatric and psychological evaluations of Byers—and I began to analyze the information.

It was critical for me to learn as much as possible about the circumstances that helped shape Brett Byers’s outlook and behavior. One source was his older sister, Sloan, who testified at her brother’s trial. She told the court that Brett had emotional problems that had begun in his earliest childhood. He’d started lighting grass fires at age four or five, Sloan said. By the fourth grade her younger brother also was having nightmares of being chased and killed.

Sloan described her early relationship with Brett as closer than many of her friends seemed to be with their brothers. But they started pulling apart in junior high. About that time, her brother also started having trouble with their mother, an elementary schoolteacher. Brett complained that she was too demanding.

Sloan testified that in time Brett came to avoid their mother whenever possible. She didn’t think her brother was ever close to their father either. When he came home to Great Falls from Bozeman for Christmas, for example, Brett spent two nights at a friend’s house without even telling his parents he was in town.

In high school Brett started gambling and drinking. Both habits would spiral out of control once he got to MSU (where Sloan also studied). Something else changed, too—his personality. At MSU Sloan noticed that Brett began having severe and sudden mood swings. He had trouble controlling his temper and sometimes broke down in tears.

He got a little crazy behind the wheel, too. Brett had always been a risk taker, she said, but in college his driving became scary. Sloan was sometimes afraid to ride with Brett in his beloved pickup.

Sloan Byers was not alone in her apprehension. Several friends and acquaintances testified that her brother was a reckless driver. Several also mentioned the sawed-off shotgun he kept in the truck.

Brett seemed nearly as attached to his gun as he was to his truck, they said, and just as rash and foolhardy with it. In the autumn of 1989, for example, he had produced the weapon at an outdoor party to shoot kindling branches out of a tree. A number of fellow students were angered by the incident.

He was not a responsible young man.

Sloan Byers said her brother kept to himself at MSU. If Brett wasn’t at his job as a restaurant waiter, he was in his room. He seldom went to class or even to the cafeteria. He took showers at odd hours to avoid other dorm residents.

Witness Shane Tanberg told the court he had known Brett Byers since the first grade. The two boys were part of a tight group of five or six close friends. Tanberg, too, said that Brett changed in high school. His friends began to find him annoying and hyper. In Tanberg’s view, Byers wasn’t maturing along with the rest of the group, and as a result he alienated his friends.

Brett’s parents, said Tanberg, had always treated him as a child; Mr. Byers’s nickname for his son was “Bretty Boy.”

According to Tanberg, Byers feared his parents and came to hate them, especially his mother. If Brett ever was late getting home, Tanberg explained, he would panic. “My mom’s going to yell at me,” he would say. “She’s going to rip my head off.”

One time Brett put a small dent in the tailgate of his pickup. Rather than risk his mother’s wrath, he removed the tailgate, threw it into a river, and told his mother it had been stolen while he and Shane were at the movies.

Shane Tanberg also confirmed that Brett was prone to mood swings and depressions, which grew more pronounced in college, and that he was drinking a great deal.

A psychiatrist and a psychologist who interviewed Byers described him as impulsive, immature, and unstable. But neither believed the young man suffered from any mental disease or defect.

One stress factor in Byers’s life was an unfortunate gaffe he committed early in the 1989 autumn term. At a meeting of Langford residents, Byers joked that he chose Langford because he liked living with guys. The line was supposed to be funny, but it fell flat. Instead, some of his fellow residents wondered what Byers really meant. Others teased him.

At the trial Byers’s acquaintances testified that he was obsessed with the fear that others believed he was homosexual because of the remark. Shane Tanberg told the court that two weeks after the meeting, Byers confided that the previous evening he had loaded a firearm and held it to his head, intent on taking his own life. When Tanberg inquired why, Byers answered, “I can’t talk about it. You’ll make fun of me.”

Said Tanberg, “It devastated Brett that he screwed up a joke because he was just trying to make some people laugh. And now they all hated him”—or at least that’s how Byers saw it.

He told essentially the same story to another student as well.

Byers’s grades were another problem. In the fall quarter, he had failed algebra and a course in computer literacy and received a D in economics. In the winter quarter, the best grade he had managed was a C in a course called “Mysteries of the Sky.”

Then there was his gambling. Byers bet away four thousand dollars during the fall quarter. Broke, he was forced to turn to his parents for tuition and room and board money.

But the nexus of Brett Byers’s deepening emotional crisis was his pickup truck. So important was the vehicle to him that as he sat upside down in the gas station outside Helena, after very nearly killing himself and now awaiting arrest for murder, Byers’s first words to Deputy Creek were, “How’s my truck?”

I remember being particularly struck when I read that quote. He was concerned about his truck but not the two humans he had just murdered.

Because of his poor grades and a pile of traffic citations, Byers had been worried that his mother would take away the truck. Even if she didn’t, his reckless driving and consequent tickets put his insurance policy in jeopardy.

Above all, however, he complained about the maddening vandalism. Throughout 1989 and 1990, Byers’s truck was repeatedly damaged. Vandals scratched its paint, broke mirrors and lights, snapped off his windshield wipers and hood ornament, and repeatedly deflated his tires. Apparently a good deal of vehicle vandalism was occurring at this time around the MSU campus. It is unclear whether Brett Byers was being singled out, or if the repeated damage to his truck was entirely coincidental, a problem that he shared with other student drivers.

Whatever the case, the vandalism drove Byers to distraction. “It was like beating Brett up,” said Shane Tranberg. “Every time they vandalized his truck, it took a part of him.”

Byers swore on several occasions that he would kill the person or persons responsible. No one took him seriously. Leslie Busby, who didn’t know Byers well, described him as solitary and occasionally depressed. But Busby also never saw Byers get mad, start a fight, or do anything to suggest he was potentially violent. When Busby was told Byers was under arrest for the shotgun killings, he thought a mistake had been made.

Similarly, student Jeff Nygard, who had known Byers since the start of the year, was amazed. Nygard knew Byers as hot-tempered, hyperactive, hungry for friendship, and often obnoxious. But murder was out of the question. “He was capable of a lot of things,” said Nygard, “but not that.”

Byers tried to protect his truck by parking it in the most exposed, well-lit spaces he could find. He would watch it all night from the dorm. Some nights he slept in it. At one point he even offered a reward for information leading to the arrest of the vandals.

Sometime during this emotionally charged process, he also conceived the dangerous and wholly erroneous idea that Brian Boeder in Room 130 was his chief tormentor. Never mind that the two young men weren’t even acquainted, let alone enemies. This was pure paranoia.

Byers told very few people of his suspicion. But there was much about Brett Byers that was deeply hidden, contradictory psychological currents churning toward eruption.

Among Brett’s MSU acquaintances were Mark Weirich and Dan Evans, roommates in Hedges Hall. Both had met Byers at the start of the fall quarter, and both knew he was interested in firearms and weapons. Weirich had seen the sawed-off Marlin; Byers had brought the gun into Hedges under his trenchcoat.

Byers also showed Evans a bomb he had made to get even with the people responsible for damaging his truck. He said he was going to throw the device through their window. Evans testified that he eventually took the bomb from Byers and disposed of it.

This was sometime in the fall of 1989. Not long thereafter, Evans went out drinking with Byers and a couple of other students at a local bar called Molly Brown’s. While they were inside, his truck again was vandalized. A rear taillight was broken out, and a tire stem was jammed in, causing the tire to go flat.

A few days later Byers led a small vigilante squad to Boeder’s room, allegedly to beat him up. When Byers knocked and no one answered, he entered the room and stole a three-hundred-dollar stereo as an act of retribution.

Brian Goetz, one of the resident advisers at Langford Hall, was another of Brett Byers’s longtime friends. Goetz testified that he was surprised to learn from Byers of the stereo theft. Goetz didn’t think Byers was capable of an act of this nature.

He told the court Byers said that he felt guilty about taking the stereo but couldn’t give it back because he had sold it.

The night of the murders, Byers came home from work with a magnum of German wine, which he had with him at nine o’clock when he visited his friends, James Hesterberg and Jeff Nygard, in their room, 327. He offered the bottle around, but neither Hesterberg, Nygard, nor a fourth student in the room, Scott Strobel, was drinking that night. So Byers drank the wine by himself.