The Crimes: Two homicides and one attempted homicide
The Victims: Lisa Young and Deborah Joshi (homicides); Vicki Davis (attempted homicide)
Location: Maryland and Delaware
Original Theory: Bad friend, bad husband, bad luck
Sometimes crimes don’t go as the criminal planned-which makes it harder for the profiler to figure them out.
Anyone working in the profiling profession, as a consultant or as a homicide detective profiling his own cases, soon becomes aware of the incredible intersection of victims, suspects, crimes, and coincidences.
In the second case of my career, I profiled the horrific 1995 near-murder of Vicki Davis, age thirty. Vicki, in spite of being beaten, sexually assaulted, stabbed dozens of times, and having her throat cut, survived the brutal assault and wanted justice.
Harold Painter, the top suspect in the crime, was a mechanic. He was also investigated in the murder of seventeen-year-old Lisa Young, who was murdered six months before Vicki was attacked. Painter lived about four miles from where Young’s body was found. Lisa was abducted, stabbed, beaten, and her throat was cut. Her body was found lying on the side of a small, winding road. Not only had Painter admitted to being at the shopping center where Lisa was waiting for a ride home at around the same time, but he once lived with his wife and her best friend on the road where Lisa’s body was dumped.
It was the first time I ever heard a case first-person, with the victim describing the attempted homicide-Vicki didn’t die, but as hard as that guy tried to kill her, she should’ve been dead.
I’ll never forget when she said, “He grabbed me by the hair, pulled my head back, and he took the knife and drove it into the right side of my neck, and there was this horrible crunching sound. And then he said, ‘Oh shit, I broke my knife,’ and he dropped my head and left the room to look for another one in my kitchen.”
If Vicki had died and the killer had taken the knives away with him, I might have thought there were two killers involved because most attackers don’t carry a set of knives with them.
The attacker came back from Vicki’s kitchen with a new knife and continued cutting her throat until he thought she was dead. Then he pushed her off the bed, tossed a blanket over her, and left.
Vicki, barely breathing, managed to stand up, her chin touching her chest because her throat was cut so badly, and she somehow staggered, still tied up, to the next room and tried to call 911. That’s when her thirteen-year-old son came out from hiding, found his mom dying on the floor, and ran to the neighbor to get help.
And she lived to tell her story.
AFTER SENDING MY profile off to the detective on the Sarah Andrews case, I got the call from Vicki Davis.
She wanted me to find out more about Painter.
Vicki was a single mother living in a trailer park. She was furious and frustrated because Painter, the man she identified as her attacker, had been arrested, kept in jail for almost a year, and just before the trial date, the case was dropped. The DNA on a cigarette at the scene not only didn’t match Vicki or anyone else connected with her home, but didn’t match Painter either. No other evidence was left by the attacker; there were no fibers, not enough semen for DNA tests, no blood-nothing. At least that was the claim made by the state prosecutor’s office, and Painter was released.
Vicki was at home asleep on the morning of September 19, 1995, when she says a thin white man, about five four to five six, with shoulder-length dirty brown hair, a beard, and a mustache, knocked on the door of her trailer at 1:52 a.m. and said, “My car broke down, can I come in and use the phone?”
She said no, because she was home alone with her young son.
He said his name was Jack Wilson and she offered to call someone for him. He gave her a local number and she called it, but the man who answered did not know anyone by the name of Jack Wilson. She told Jack what happened and he left.
But the man’s appearance at her door in the middle of the night unnerved her enough that she called the police. And she was right to do so-even if the police never did show up-because fifty minutes later there was a loud bang at her front door and she got out of bed to find Jack Wilson in her kitchen. The lights were on and Vicki got a good look at the man as he grabbed her and held her at knifepoint in the living room.
“You made me have to break into my car, bitch. I locked my keys in it and you wouldn’t let me call anyone for help,” he hissed at her.
The attacker blamed her, justifying why he was going to teach her a lesson. Then he pushed Vicki past her son’s room, toward her bedroom. She grabbed the doorframe to stop him from taking her to the back and raping her.
“Stop fighting me, bitch,” he growled, grabbing at her hands. She pushed him against the wall and actually pinned him to it but she couldn’t hold him there for long. As he pushed her away, she made a desperate lunge for the knife and they grappled over the weapon. He won. He had had enough of Vicki refusing to give in.
“If you don’t stop fighting me, we will kill him,” he told her, breathing hard. Vicki thought the “we” her attacker was referring to might mean someone else was outside the house.
“Just let me tie you up and I won’t hurt your son.” His eyes were cold like a snake’s and he held her against the wall with one hand, his other hand waving the knife at her face.
Vicki was terrified and exhausted. She knew she couldn’t fight him much longer. To save my son, she thought, I have to cooperate.
She let him tie her up-with a Nintendo game cord-and she immediately knew it was the biggest mistake she had ever made, as he cut her undershirt and panties off with the kitchen knife and gagged her with them. He began kissing her, sucking her breasts, and rubbing her legs. He didn’t technically rape her, but he did roll her onto her stomach, putting something under her belly to elevate her buttocks. He then masturbated and ejaculated on her buttocks and back.
How stupid is this? she thought. The guy comes all the way up here to rape a woman but doesn’t bother-or can’t? Instead, he masturbated, and when he finished, he took out a knife and started cutting Vicki’s throat.
He cut her throat on one side, then the other.
Oh, my God, Vicki thought, he’s going to kill me.
The attack continued.
When he tried something different, stabbing her in the neck, his thrust literally snapped the blade.
“Look!” he said conversationally, as if he and his victim were sharing an evening meal. “I broke my knife!”
He went to the kitchen, rifled around for another one, came back, then stabbed her over and over until her throat was cut on both sides and he had stabbed her repeatedly in the back and neck.
She should have been dead.
But she wasn’t.
“Aren’t you dead yet, bitch?” he said a number of times, and eventually he thought she was dead because she stopped twitching. He pushed her off the bed.
Vicki later remembered that her head hit the nightstand by the bed when she went down. She didn’t think it much mattered that she hit her head, because if this wasn’t death, it wouldn’t be long.
The perpetrator threw a blanket over her and walked out, taking with him a few items of little value.
Vicki lay there until she was certain he was gone. Then this remarkable woman, bleeding to death, throat cut, stabbed many times, managed to get up despite the fact that her feet and hands were tied, and she staggered to a telephone. She knocked the receiver off the hook trying to call 911.
Just then, her son-who was pretending to be asleep during the attack-came out and found her. Seeing that her son was safe, Vicki muttered with her last conscious breath, “Go get help!” and passed out. Her terrified boy ran next door, banged and screamed until the residents came to the door and called 911. Emergency medical technicians came and Vicki miraculously survived.
It’s just mind-boggling. The damage that was done was seemingly beyond repair. It still amazes me, and Vicki, that she survived one of the most horrific attacks imaginable.
It seemed like one victim was going to see justice. She lived to be able to identify her attacker.
One month after the crime, Painter was arrested. On October 1, 1995, a neighbor called to report a suspicious person in Vicki’s yard. He was sitting in a red pickup truck near Vicki’s home. The arresting officer noted that not only did the driver match the description of the suspect but the composite drawing the police sketch artist did was actually taped to the windshield of his truck! Painter told the officer that he had been visiting his daughter, who lived in the same trailer park, and had just left Vicki’s trailer, where he had said a prayer for her. He was photographed, interviewed, and released.
The next day, Vicki picked Painter out of a lineup of six photos and said the man in the picture was the man who broke into her home, sexually assaulted her, and stabbed her.
He was arrested again four days later when Vicki’s son independently identified Painter from the six photographs he was shown.
“He seems to have some kind of thing going on in his brain that he thinks he is God,” Vicki later said of Painter. “He told the police that he felt strange vibes that told him to go to my house and burn a candle and pray for me right after the attack. When the police finally arrested him, they told me that during the entire ride to the courthouse, he was chanting.”
Painter said he was in the area at the time of the attack on Vicki, visiting a former wife and stepdaughter who lived in the same mobile home park.
That should have been the end of the investigation.
But in reality, the victim survived and the case died in the hands of the criminal justice system. Vicki knew something was wrong early in the investigation when the police seemed determined to keep the crime out of the headlines.
“They did such a good job of keeping quiet that it really pissed me off,” she wrote to me in an e-mail. “I didn’t realize what they were doing until it was too late. The detective actually pretended to cry because he knew I was a caring person [and] he led me out through the back of the courthouse to be sure that I didn’t talk to reporters. He also told me not to talk to any of the TV stations that were calling me. Stupid!! I was so caught up in making sure that everything was done right and that I would not mess up anything that I believed all the crap they fed me along with it. I wish I could have done things a whole lot different. I would have walked out of the court and screamed at the top of my lungs to all the reporters that the system is shit.
“I had seen on TV that the victim is allowed to help with her own case. When I asked the detectives about that, they said, ‘No way.’ I’m sure that they are so busy that they are either overlooking and missing a lot of good info, or they just don’t want me to know the real story about how much they have misplaced. I gave them everything, I made sure that I was writing notes while I was in ICU, giving them all the details. They were very accurate. How could they not be able to use it?”
The Delaware grand jury decided that the state had enough evidence against Painter and handed down an indictment charging him with first-degree attempted murder, burglary, kidnapping, first-degree unlawful sexual contact, and possession of a deadly weapon during the commission of a felony.
Painter pleaded not guilty.
The case was continued several times as prosecutors waited for the FBI to complete its DNA tests on evidence. Meanwhile, Painter underwent a psychiatric exam in which he said he did not know where he was or what he was doing on September 18 or 19, 1995. A doctor diagnosed Painter with “undifferentiated schizophrenia” but declared him competent to stand trial.
“I find no reason to believe that he would not have been responsible at the time of the crimes,” she wrote.
Two days before the attempted murder trial was scheduled to finally begin in Delaware, Vicki Davis was notified that Painter would be released and would not be going to trial for attempting to kill her.
“I called in and I demanded that the detectives explain how he could have done this to me and not left any hair or fibers,” Vicki wrote to me. “I was so confused… I wish I had thought to say at the time, ‘Did you guys just screw up?’ But I was protecting the detective that had told me confidentially that the evidence was lost.”
PAINTER ALSO BECAME a suspect in the 1995 murder of Lisa Young.
Lisa was a seventeen-year-old living in a state near the nation’s capital. A junior in high school, she left her after-school job at closing time and sat outside on a brick flower box with two bags of clothes she had purchased earlier and a soft drink, waiting for friends to pick her up. Then she just vanished. There were reports that she possibly got into a maroon or burgundy car, leaving her belongings on the sidewalk.
The next day at 5:30 a.m., a passing motorist found her fully clothed body about a mile down the road. She had been strangled, her head scored with knife wounds, and her throat cut. Her jewelry was stolen.
Painter became a suspect in the homicide investigation because he had a car that was similar to the one that allegedly took Lisa away, and he was in the area at the time. He was in jail awaiting trial in a nearby state, and this homicide looked awfully similar to the assault six months earlier of Lisa Young (though that case was ultimately dropped). The detective working the Young case decided to pay Painter a visit in jail.
The detective interviewed Painter and found that just prior to his arrest, Painter had disposed of his late model, burgundy car-had it crushed, actually-because, he said, “It had a bad smell in it.”
There was white dog hair from a boxer found on Lisa’s body. According to neighbors, Painter got rid of his dogs right before a detective showed up to question him.
It seemed like another easy case to close. “This is the guy,” the detective said.
Lisa’s mother, Jessie Young, called me in January 2000. She wanted my help investigating her daughter’s 1995 murder, but asked that we keep it quiet for four months, until after the fifth anniversary of the crime passed. She said she had not seen the autopsy report-nor did she care to-and she didn’t want me to see it, either. She wanted to keep the details of her daughter’s death private.
PAINTER, EVEN IF he wasn’t responsible for the attacks on Vicki and Lisa, certainly seems to have anger-retaliatory issues with women.
My take on him is that he views women as the cause of his problems and may have sought to regain his lost power through assaults on females. Painter certainly exhibited anger and violence five years earlier when he assaulted a girlfriend who told him she was leaving him. He was arrested but got only one hundred days of community service working in a food bank.
So the attacks on Young and Davis could have been perpetrated by him, too. They reflect similar, though escalating, anger and violence. Both the Lisa Young murder and the assault on Vicki Davis showed premeditation, some level of skill controlling the victim, and a violent rage against women. Although I could say there were elements of sadism present, the purpose of the assaults appeared to stem more from anger.
The offender in the Young and Davis crimes brought a knife with him but used materials present at the scene for the binding of the women. He planned part of the crimes but not all of them. However, it should be noted that the offender exuded a good amount of confidence and may have felt no need to bring items he knew would be readily available and less traceable.
Both crimes showed evidence of overkill. Much more violence was done to the women than was necessary to kill them. Vicki by all rights should have been dead, and the assault on her showed an uneven temper. The offender was calm when he was in control and became enraged when he lost control.
An experienced offender committed the crime against Vicki. The man who killed Lisa also showed some level of experience, but not quite as much as in Vicki’s assault. Were these two different offenders or did the same man commit both crimes, Lisa’s and then Vicki’s, showing more capability in the later crime once he acquired more experience? The calm manner in which he assaulted Davis without being terribly hurried showed practice. He took care to not leave evidence and he even commented to Davis that he had “seen it all before.” He put effort into restraining her and controlling the crime scene. Therefore, I thought it was of the utmost importance to look for unsolved rapes and homicides that occurred prior to 1995.
My investigation revealed that Painter was a homebody, and it seems more than coincidental that both the Young and Davis crimes were committed within a couple miles of his residence or the residence of someone he was visiting. I also looked at other crimes that occurred near his previous addresses and places of employment.
I concluded that earlier murders in these areas that did not include binding and knife wounds should not be ruled out as possibly being connected to Painter. Often, earlier crimes of the perpetrator are less complicated and take less time. The perpetrator’s choice of weapons can change due to acquired preferences or availability.
While we may think that the place where a body has been dumped is significant, in fact, most offenders dump a body where it is convenient rather than for some emotional reason. Some pick places where they feel the evidence will be eliminated. For example, a stream could be chosen because it will wash away DNA and fibers or simply because it was available. Perhaps the offender prefers dumping the body in a stream, but there are none nearby, so he instead chooses a field. Most of the time, the dumping of the body is done in the most expedient way. If, however, closer locations are ignored, then there may be a specific reason for a particular dumping location. Sometimes the offender remembers a place nearby where he had a picnic and thinks, “Hey, that place had some nice woods!”
My profile of the perpetrator is someone who liked to be in control. He seemed to savor the moment. It was my feeling that any crime committed by this individual would take a reasonable amount of time. He would not be the sort of anger-retaliatory killer who was in and out of the scene in a matter of minutes. He had some aspect of a power rapist in that he spent time talking to his victim. A power rapist likes to ask his victims about their sexual experiences or how well he is performing. Sometimes he will verbally threaten the victim-he enjoys humiliating her and watching her squirm. He would have liked to see the fear in the face of the woman and he would enjoy the act of killing. However, he would not exhibit the length of time used by a sexual sadist who meticulously planned the killing and torturing of a female for an extended length of time. He would not need to bring the woman to a fixed location nor would he need to bring much more than a knife along for the job-if anything at all.
I believed the perpetrator picked victims he could easily control. He would be unlikely to choose victims from a level of society above him; women who were highly educated or wealthy, for example, would make him feel inferior. He would operate where he felt comfortable. Although neither Young nor Davis was involved in prostitution, I would not discount the possibility that the perpetrator might choose victims who were. Even if he was not the type to use such services, availability is often the reason certain victims are chosen.
Certainly the case against Painter should have gone forward. The grand jury indicted him, and it is a travesty of the criminal justice system that the case was dismissed. Last I heard he was driving a tow truck; isn’t that great news for any woman who calls for help?
I DON’T KNOW if Painter was the attacker, but there was quite a bit of circumstantial evidence linking him to both Lisa’s murder and Vicki’s attack.
That wasn’t the half of it.
When Painter was being interviewed by a detective about Lisa’s murder, he suddenly blurted out, “Oh, by the way, tell Tracie Andrews I’m sorry about Sarah.”
When I heard that, my jaw dropped.
The Sarah Andrews case? What the hell?
Sarah Andrews’s parents lived in the same state as Painter, but Sarah Andrews had died 2,000 miles away and ten years earlier. How would Harold Painter know anything about Sarah Andrews? Why did he say, “I’m sorry about Sarah”?
It turned out that he knew Tracie Andrews, Sarah’s mother, and he knew her very well. She was the longtime best friend of Painter’s ex-wife, and the two of them had stayed in Tracie Andrews’s house when she lived on the very road where Lisa Young’s body was dumped. It was an incredible coincidence-if it was one. But despite all the circumstantial evidence-the car, the boxer dogs, and the bizarre-as-all-get-out connection to Sarah Andrews-Painter was never arrested for the Lisa Young murder and was never brought back in for the attempted homicide of Vicki Davis. The police were still convinced that he attacked Vicki, even though the DNA on the cigarette found at the scene in the living room didn’t match him or Vicki. I agreed with them; something seemed bogus about the DNA testing because everything else pointed toward Painter, and when I called and left a message for the FBI lab technician she called back and angrily told me how great a job she had done. I thought that the fact I got a call back was strange enough in itself (because I had no official capacity in the case and I wasn’t a journalist), but the technician was working overtime to say she hadn’t erred. Eventually, I caught up to the original detective on the Young case in the summer of 2000 and had a nice conversation with him while he worked his part-time job guarding a liquor store.
“He killed Lisa Young and attacked [Vicki Davis]. I never doubted that.”
But, unfortunately, no court ever proved he was guilty in either case.
And did Painter also go out west and kill Sarah Andrews?
I took the information and sent it to the present detective on Sarah’s case, including pictures of Painter’s smiling face and his dental work. If it wasn’t the bouncer or the cross-dresser, the two top suspects that I came up with in that crime, could it be Harold Painter?
Sarah was sexually assaulted with an object, and it is curious that the Davis attack, with which Painter was initially charged, showed anger and rage, though not penetration by him. Perhaps in both cases the perpetrator did not commit rape because he could not perform the act to his satisfaction with his own penis.
Davis says that Painter was her attacker and that he demanded that she move her bottom around while he masturbated on her, then stabbed her over and over. So it wasn’t really a surprise when Painter’s ex-wife told me that he called himself a “needle-nosed bug fucker” because his member wasn’t much to speak of, and he didn’t think it was very useful, she said. He had a complex about it. If he was the attacker, it could follow that he would use a substitute-he didn’t think his penis would be effective in that situation.
Three women, none raped in the “normal” way. But they were all sexual assaults that brought a thrill to the one who did them.
The perpetrator of the crime against Sarah Andrews could match my profile of Painter alone, but one of the things I’ve learned as a profiler is that there are a lot of Harold Painters out there. The bouncer at the bar may have been another, and the cross-dresser could be one, too. Did one of them do it?
On television news we often hear of reporters doing a sex offender search of a crime-ridden area and finding an incredible number of convicted offenders within one mile of some missing child. The viewer thinks, “They found what, seventy? Is every one of my neighbors a sex offender?” And the answer is…maybe. They intersect, and they crisscross, so you have to be careful when you arrest and convict these guys that you don’t mistakenly haul in someone who didn’t do it just because he may have a similar MO to the person who did.
There are only so many ways a person can commit a crime, even when the supposed signatures have been identified. And sex offenders aren’t always particularly creative. They may do the exact same things as the next guy. Once in a while, we’ll find one who’s really inspired, but mostly we see repetitive acts. Sometimes they get their ideas from books or movies or from the newspapers (which can spawn copycats). But a good portion of the time they do something that just comes naturally to them, like spitting on the victim, leaving her in a sexually provocative position, or throwing a blanket over her body. These simple behaviors are common to many offenders, making it look like the same guy-but it’s not.
The fact is, that seemingly guilty offender could have committed the crime, but then again, maybe one of nine other guys in the area could have committed the same crime. So unless we have actual evidence proving it was one individual, you don’t want to say, “Boy, that sure looks like Painter, it must be him.” Well, it may not be Harold Painter. It may be the bouncer or the cross-dresser. It could be someone else altogether. That’s the police’s job. If they analyze the crime well, then their job is to gather enough evidence to support probable cause to bring the suspect in and continue uncovering further evidence that will put him away.
WHILE I HAVE my theory, ViCAP-the computer methodology that the FBI uses to input all the information about a crime and try to match up potential suspects-matched up the Sarah Andrews homicide to Jeffrey Newsome.
I don’t object to using ViCAP in that way, but I would prefer to see a suspect bank so that someone who had been connected with a crime, such as Harold Painter, might be flagged and noted. We could put a list of all the people that Sarah knew into ViCAP and boom, Painter would have shown up as a homicide suspect. We need more linked databanks.
We also need more cooperation between police departments. We need more experts to be brought in to work on the aspects of a case for which the detective is not trained or for which he lacks the time.
If, back in 1987, they had a profiler or trained crime analysts come in, and spent time reconstructing this case on that mountain of physical evidence, they might’ve gone down a different road a long time ago. That’s one of the reasons I believe so strongly in training law enforcement officers in crime reconstruction and profiling and giving them, as individuals, fewer cases to work on.
HAROLD PAINTER WENT on with his life. The only thing on his record was that he assaulted his girlfriend. Other than that, there was nothing against him except that many people thought he was creepy.
Eight years later, I received an e-mail from someone who said, “You need to talk to Allison, Tommy Stern’s ex-wife, about the Lisa Young case.”
Stern knew Lisa Young at the time she was murdered. They went to the same high school and were friends, or at least acquaintances.
Stern apparently had a thing for Lisa, according to his ex-wife. Well, ex-wives. Allison sent me on to the other ex and she told me the exact same story! There is nothing like a spurned woman when it comes to getting information on a suspect. Both exes said Stern had a tattoo that said “In memory of Lisa Young” and a framed photo of Lisa next to his bed, the kind with a cute little one-stem-rose vase attached to it, which, when you are married, is not proper bedside decoration.
The ex-wives claimed Stern was dangerous and violent, had been in and out of mental hospitals, and that when they had sex, he strangled them and sang, “We are killing Lisa, we are killing Lisa.”
I asked both ex-wives this question: “When Tommy was in high school and living with his family, did they have any family pets?”
I had no clue what these family pets could be, but there was that white dog hair on Lisa’s clothing. One ex-wife said, “When he was in high school, his family had some white boxers.”
I said, “Oh, Lord.”
A new suspect had entered the Lisa Young mix. Tommy Stern was the better suspect, because when I profiled this case, I was always irked by the fact that when Lisa left work that night, she was standing on the curb waiting for a friend. She got into a car, quite willingly, it seemed. Her drink didn’t fall on the ground; it was just left on the sidewalk. It didn’t appear that she was abducted; it looked like she got in the car without being forced. Maybe she sat down just to chat for a second and off he went with her.
Lisa didn’t know Painter. I didn’t think any girl would get in a car willingly with that man. But she did know Tommy Stern, who was close to her age, so she might have had no problem jumping in his car while she waited for her ride to show up.
On top of this, just to add more to the mix, I later heard that a man was arrested for impersonating a police officer. He had handcuffs in his car. He lived on the same road where Lisa was found. Many a serial killer has carried handcuffs in his vehicle and pretended he was a cop. A suspect like this had to be considered.
Another crime occurred just a few months after Lisa was killed. If you drove out of the shopping center from which Lisa was abducted, passed the street where she was eventually found, and continued straight down the road two more miles, you would run into a house where another woman was murdered, the home of yet another unsolved homicide, that of Deborah Joshi.
DEBORAH JOSHI WAS stabbed seventeen times in the living room of her home. She was not raped, but her husband found her dying on their living room floor. A few pieces of jewelry and a big plastic container of quarters were stolen. Her vehicle was also missing.
I was not impressed with the way the police profiled this crime. The husband, Davis Joshi, was their chief suspect for a long time.
According to the police, Deborah came home from work in the afternoon and changed into more comfortable clothes. Her husband was not yet home and they didn’t have any children.
A next-door neighbor, Ray Hammond, told the local newspaper that her SUV flew out of the driveway that day. They had two dogs, and the dogs never barked, according to Hammond. He was working in his garage on a project and he responded to the sound of a car by looking through the windows of the garage door. He saw what looked like a black man-at least a “dark” man, he said-behind the wheel.
Deborah was black, and when I went to her house, I expected that her husband might be as well. However, Joshi is an Indian name, and Davis, it turned out, was of Asian descent; he was a Trinidad Indian. It’s possible that he might be mistaken for a black man if he was seen driving by very quickly. The SUV was found a mile away in a neighborhood strip mall. The plastic container that held the quarters was found in an apartment complex parking lot across from the mall but the quarters were gone. Nothing else was ever discovered.
The logistics didn’t support Deborah’s husband as a suspect. He would have had to leave his vehicle at the strip mall, walk home, kill his wife, then take her vehicle back to the strip mall, get in his own car, and drive back to the scene.
She was dying when the ambulance arrived. If he did it, he would have wanted to make sure she couldn’t speak and would have made sure she was dead.
There was no evidence ever found in his vehicle. Also, there was no blood evidence connected to him, which one would expect if a woman was stabbed seventeen times. Davis would have committed the perfect crime in the short amount of time between Deborah’s arriving home from work and when he got to the house just shortly after dark. The police looked at him right away, as they do when a married woman ends up murdered. Usually hours or days separate the time of a murder and the husband’s “discovery” of the body, leaving plenty of time to get rid of evidence, wash up, vacuum the car, and so on. Yet in the Joshi murder, the police found not a shred of evidence linking Davis to Deborah’s death in spite of how quickly the police were on the scene of the crime.
I went to the strip mall parking lot where Deborah’s car was dumped, and I couldn’t believe the coincidence: Harold Painter lived but two blocks west of that strip mall. And Walt Williams lived two blocks to the east.
Davis thought his dying wife muttered something about either a guy in black or a guy who was black, but she was dying, and it wasn’t clear whether he was leaning on Hammond ’s description of the suspect or he really heard her say that.
I asked the police if they interviewed Hammond, and they said no, they didn’t spend any time with him. I knocked on his door and said I was there to ask questions about the crime.
“Come on in,” he said.
He had a glass of scotch in his hand, and he was smoking a Marlboro cigarette-the kind found on the ground outside a window at the crime scene and a brand that was not smoked by the Joshis. An interesting coincidence, but of course it is a popular brand.
Hammond welcomed me into his house, chitchatting about this and that, quite friendly. But he quickly turned the conversation to a sexual note, and I became uncomfortable. “So, what’s a gorgeous woman like you doing in the detective business? I’m a lucky guy to have a sexy lady like you show up on my doorstep.” He leered at me. Why is this guy making sexual innuendos toward me?
I noticed, when I came through the front door, he went behind me, let the dog out, and shut the door, making sure it was locked. That seemed innocent enough. But then he walked to another door and locked that one, too.
My skin began to crawl. What was he doing?
Hammond talked about the crime and walked me to the garage, where he said he would show me where he was when the murder happened. He reminded me that he hadn’t heard the dogs bark when Deborah was being assaulted.
I was getting nervous about Hammond.
Did the dogs not bark because it was the husband who committed the crime? Or did the dogs not bark because the perpetrator was someone else they knew? Or maybe the dogs did bark and Ham mond simply didn’t hear them. Or could he be lying about it?
“I saw the car fly out of the driveway,” he said, “and I saw this black man…well, dark, like it could have been Davis…”
My mind was racing as Hammond put down the garage door to set the scene. As he did, he said something wholly inappropriate and even more anxiety inducing.
“Don’t worry,” Hammond said. “I’m not going to do anything to you.”
Excuse me?
Why would he assume that I was thinking he was going to do something to me? Why would this cross his mind? Why was he saying this?
A sense of dread crept up on me as the door came down. I noticed that the windows were completely smeared, like they hadn’t been washed in years. I found it hard to believe that that man could have seen anybody inside a vehicle from this garage.
I could feel panic just about to overtake me. I suddenly realized that I was alone with a stranger, and one who was making me feel increasingly uncomfortable. I wanted to get out of there fast. I pulled the phone out of my pocket, pretended I had dialed my office really quickly, and as he turned to face me, I said, “Oh, yeah, I’m over here at Mr. Hammond’s house, next door to the Joshis… Yeah…I should be through with the interview in about ten minutes, so I’ll be back at the office by five thirty.”
He suddenly looked at me coldly, and he said, “You can go now.” He marched me straight to the front door and out of his house.
Hammond ’s behavior and the incongruity of his story made me suspicious.
Was he involved in the case? Or was he just a really weird neighbor?
I wonder to this day what would have happened if I hadn’t managed to fake that phone conversation.
I STILL HAD a multitude of questions about Deborah’s murder.
Why would anybody take that big plastic jar of quarters?
Did they need the money or was it more of a diversionary tactic?
Did somebody go into the Joshi residence to steal something or was it a rape gone wrong? Did Deborah fight back and a rapist ended up stabbing her before he had any fun, decided to steal a few things, and used her SUV to get home? Could the killer be Painter or Williams?
Was someone burglarizing the house when Deborah came home unexpectedly early from work? Was she killed in a panic? Was the SUV just driven to the strip mall to make it look like the killer lived farther away? Was Deborah killed because she could identify the man in her house? Could it be the neighbor, Hammond?
Or was it really Davis staging a crime to cover up offing his wife?
The only suspect was the husband, and no one has been charged.