The Crime: Homicide, burglary
The Victim: Mary Beth Townsend, fifty-two, librarian
Location: Condominium, Virginia
Original Theory: Killed by her fiancé
When Mary Beth Townsend, a fifty-two-year-old librarian, was found dead in the closet of her condominium, the detectives had the case solved within hours. A couple days later, after grueling hours of interrogation, her fiancé confessed to accidentally killing her during an argument.
Unfortunately for the police, his forced confession didn’t match the evidence when the autopsy came back.
MARY BETH OWNED a condo in Virginia that she shared with her fiancé, Sam Bilodeau. They had been together for eight years, and after seven years of living together, they were finally, happily, preparing to marry. They were also building a house together on weekends and planning a honeymoon trip to Paris.
Mary Beth and Sam got along well in their eight years together. Her son, Art, who lived and worked in the area, knew Sam well, liked him, and had no issues with him.
On Friday, August 21, 1998, Sam left at 6:45 a.m. to arrive by 7:00 for his job at the Home Depot, where he worked on the loading dock. Mary Beth stayed behind. She took the day off from the library, where she had worked for fifteen years, planning to go down to the pool for a swim, something she did every day. Later in the day, Sam called Mary Beth but she wasn’t home. He thought she must be at the pool or running errands.
When Sam finished his work shift around 6 p.m., he drove home expecting they’d do what they always did on Fridays-drive over to the property where their house was under construction and then spend the weekend doing whatever needed doing. Oddly, Mary Beth’s car was not parked in the driveway out front. As he unlocked the front door of their condo, Sam noticed that only the bottom lock was locked; the top, a dead bolt, was not. He walked into the condo and noticed that Mary Beth’s purse and tote bag were not there, but that made sense because she was out with the car.
I guess she’ll be coming back soon, because we have plans for tonight, he thought.
He also noticed that the condo had been freshly vacuumed, which was a little odd because that was a task usually done over the weekend.
But she didn’t come back, didn’t call, and Sam soon grew wary. Where is she? What’s going on?
He called friends, including Mary Beth’s son, Art, around 9 p.m., but no one knew where Mary Beth was, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. He called several hospitals in town, thinking maybe there had been an accident, and asked each if she was there. She wasn’t. He called a friend who was battling cancer, but Mary Beth hadn’t been over to visit her.
This wasn’t like Mary Beth, and he grew anxious, a mixture of anger and dread. Why doesn’t she come home? Meanwhile, he washed some clothes to pass time between 9 and 10 p.m. in the building’s downstairs laundry room and chatted with neighbors.
When Sam returned to the condo, Mary Beth still wasn’t there. He lay down in bed and dozed off. When he woke up, it was 1:30 a.m. He looked over at the bedroom closet, and for the first time since coming home from work, noticed that the door was closed. Mary Beth almost always kept it open, except when she vacuumed.
Sam got up and looked in the closet. There was Mary Beth, scrunched up in a fetal position, facedown on the floor of the closet, dead.
She was wearing a blouse and slip; her hair was combed as if she had just come out of the shower, which was consistent with her routine after a swim. There was no blood. Sam touched her once on the cheek and she was cold. He left the room and called 911. The police came out and took him in for several hours of questioning. He told them what happened, that he found her in the closet, and they said they didn’t believe him. They asked him what really happened and he told them the same story again. They told him Mary Beth had been killed in the evening, after 6 p.m., after Sam arrived home. Nothing made sense to Sam-that his fiancée was dead and the police said he killed her. He told them again he didn’t. They said he did. Then they told him to go to a hotel for the time being and they would contact him.
The police told reporters that Mary Beth Townsend’s death was suspicious, but it took six months before it would officially be ruled a homicide. According to the local paper, they “insinuated” to reporters that Mary Beth was killed by someone she knew, so the public had no reason to fear that a serial killer was on the loose. The condominium unit was sealed for the next three weeks.
Meanwhile, Sam Bilodeau waited in limbo. On that Saturday, after he had been interrogated by the police and checked into a hotel, he called Art but couldn’t get hold of him. Unable to just sit alone and do nothing, Sam decided to visit Mary Beth’s father-his almost-father-in-law. When he was driving back, he saw Mary Beth’s car, a light blue hatchback, off the side of the highway in a distressed part of Washington, D.C. The police had been looking for the car, but he was the one who found it. That made the police even more suspicious of him.
Sam called the police, who arrived on the scene with a dog that sniffed Mary Beth’s car and then pulled its handler toward the woods. The police brought Sam in for more questioning and leaned on him, hard.
“We know what happened,” the detective said. “You came home from work. You had an argument with Mary Beth, you pushed her, she hit her head, and she died. You panicked and put her in the closet, and you drove her car down to an area of town where you thought criminals came from, dumped the car there, and took the train back.”
Sam shook his head and said, “No, that’s not what happened. I didn’t do this.”
“She died after six p.m, sometime after six p.m. Weren’t you home after six at night?”
“That’s when I came home. If it happened after that, yes, I was there the whole time. There could be nobody else, because I was there.”
This went on for hours.
The police said they had a new technique to bring up prints. They told him his prints were all over Mary Beth, that she was alive at six p.m., and that there was an indentation on the back of her neck that matched an indentation of his palm. They said they believed that Sam accidentally knocked her off balance and then she hit her head as she fell. Sam said he gave Mary Beth a massage that morning and that that could account for his fingerprints. (The police lied about Sam leaving fingerprints on Mary Beth’s body; such misrepresentation is accepted as standard practice and is legal in interrogation techniques. Still, Sam’s lawyer later told me there could be no prints and that in twenty-five years as an attorney he had never heard such a ridiculous police claim. The method for pulling fingerprints from bodies does exist now, but is not often successful, especially if the body isn’t found within a couple of hours.)
The police asked Sam for a blood sample and he gave it voluntarily. They also took his shoes; he left the station in socks. (The police still have his shoes.) A polygraph test was administered to Sam-with his assent. From the police officers’ expressions, he assumed he passed. But they went right back to telling him that he did it.
Sam eventually confessed to doing what the police said he did.
He said he didn’t know how it could have happened and that he had no memory of killing Mary Beth, but that he must have panicked, hid Mary Beth’s body, and tried to stage the crime to look like a burglary by driving the car to the other side of town.
Everything he said was based on what the police told him, not his own memories. He was a trusting person, he was confused, he was exhausted and grieving, and he thought the police wouldn’t lie. He finally gave in. He signed a confession-and then the police let Mary Beth’s alleged killer go, in his stocking feet.
On Sunday, the police brought Sam in for a couple more hours of questioning, but nothing new was brought up. By Monday morning, the medical examiner’s report came in stating that Mary Beth had been strangled and that the police now had a confession that didn’t match the evidence. They never called Sam-or his lawyer-again.
SAM BILODEAU MIGHT not have heard from the police again but he remained their number one suspect. In spite of the detectives’ dogged belief that Sam was guilty as hell, they had no evidence with which to charge him. Worse, the more they investigated the circumstances of the crime, the less the evidence supported their theory.
The police couldn’t charge Sam based on his “confession”-or anything else.
When Sam found himself in the interview room after Mary Beth’s murder, there was no time of death yet determined by the medical examiner. All the police knew was that when Mary Beth was found, she was cold and stiff; she had been dead for hours, but how many, they didn’t know. (They told Sam she was killed after six p.m., after he came home from work, but that was just to force him into confessing.) Sam could have killed her after he came home from work and waited a good long time to report her murder. So, Mary Beth being cold and in a good amount of rigor mortis didn’t rule Sam out. The autopsy is still sealed, so we don’t know what the medical examiner ruled as the time of death, but sometimes circumstantial evidence packs a wallop.
IT WAS LATER discovered that Mary Beth called a girlfriend at 9:15 a.m. on the day she died, and they planned to meet for a nice Italian lunch that day. She even sent an e-mail confirming, “See you at noon for lunch.”
The police didn’t know about this call or e-mail when they forced a confession from Sam.
Mary Beth never showed up for lunch, and it wasn’t her style to not keep her appointments.
Why did Mary Beth stand up her friend? Why did she miss a noon appointment if nothing happened to her until six p.m.?
And that was just the beginning.
MARY BETH TOWNSEND’S death was one of eight homicides in the county that year, according to the local paper. It remains the department’s only unsolved case of 1998.
The second problem for the police and their forced confession was that Sam had solid alibis and plenty of witnesses as to his whereabouts all day and night.
His time card authenticated that he was at the store where he worked, except from 12:45 p.m. to 1:45 p.m., when he left to buy lunch. But witnesses said he was gone for only five minutes and ate his lunch at the store, off the clock.
It was a thirty-minute round trip to the condo and back. He wasn’t gone long enough to make the drive and kill Mary Beth. Besides, if he left at 12:45 and drove home, Mary Beth would have already been off enjoying food and wine with her girlfriend at the restaurant.
Sam also produced a receipt that showed he was pumping gas at a service station at 5:12 p.m. So we know that he was at work all day, barring the few minutes to go out, grab lunch, and bring it back, that he left work at the normal time, got some gas, and drove home. Now, it was six p.m. Once he was home, Sam was seen in the building doing his laundry and talking to neighbors at the same time that the police theorized that he was on the other side of town, disposing of Mary Beth’s car.
Again, at the time of his forced confession, the police didn’t know that neighbors had seen Sam doing laundry between nine and ten p.m.
THE THIRD PROBLEM was that the medical examiner came back and said that Mary Beth had been strangled. That was not in the confession, essentially because the police never told Sam that he had strangled Mary Beth. They said he hit her, so that’s what he confessed to under extraordinary pressure.
The police had a false confession. People have a hard time understanding why anybody would confess falsely, but it’s more common than people realize. Art Townsend’s lawyer-he got one when the police started implicating him along with Sam-told me that the very detective who pressured Sam to confess claimed that 70 percent of the people he got to confess were innocent, something of which I wouldn’t have been so proud, but he bragged about it.
In fact, the police department was sued because the same detective also forced a false confession out of a man accused in a woman’s brutal rape and murder in 1984. He went to prison, and it wasn’t until three years later that another detective in the department began to suspect that he was innocent. He was released after another two years of investigation, DNA testing, and paperwork. The real murderer, a cat burglar, was finally convicted. DNA proved he did it; the man was also a serial killer. The falsely accused man spent five years in prison convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. He got $117,000 from the state for his pain and suffering.
When Mary Beth Townsend was murdered, that same detective finagled an equally false confession out of Sam Bilodeau.
At that point, the police told Sam, “Don’t leave town,” and he stayed. The case lay dormant for a long time. The police told the community, “There’s nothing to be worried about,” insinuating that Sam was responsible in spite of evidence that seemed to prove that he was not.
ART TOWNSEND, MARY Beth’s son, became frustrated because nothing was happening with the case and it was going nowhere.
In September 1999, Art contacted me.
“Can you help with this case? I don’t think Sam killed my mother, and I want somebody to find out the truth,” he said.
I was excited to get the call. I was going to talk with the case investigator and see the crime scene photos and everything else related to the case. I was going to help them out, and this was where I got my first comeuppance.
When I dealt with the Anne Kelley case, I knew that I was not considered a friend of the police department-I lived in the community, was directly impacted by Anne’s murder, and was a common housewife-but this was a totally different situation. This was not a personal case to me. This was not a case that I brought to them as a citizen. This was a case in which a family member asked me to see the police as a profiler, admittedly new in the field, so law enforcement might have an issue with that.
Now that I was working in a professional capacity, I thought that Art and I would sit down with the police detective and he would say, “We are kind of stuck. If you want to look at things, we’d like to hear your thoughts.” It didn’t go well. The detective in charge was not pleased that Art had the audacity to bring in an outsider to examine her case. The police were working the case and she didn’t appreciate any implication that they weren’t doing their job well in spite of the fact that they had made no progress on the case whatsoever. They did not want anything going public that would make the police department look bad.
She greeted me coldly and told me in no uncertain terms that I was not welcome.
“I refuse to discuss this case with you or the family,” she said. “If you go public you had better be careful with what you say because I have done a lot of work on this case.”
That caused a dilemma, because I obviously would have liked to see all the evidence in their possession. Should I profile a case if I can’t access the case information and the case photos?
Ideally, I want the police department’s cooperation and access to every shred of evidence I can possibly see, all of the reports, all of the photos. But the reality is that even a police investigator sometimes doesn’t have all of this when he works a case. There are many pieces of evidence that might be missing. Maybe the elements have destroyed it. Evidence may have also been negatively impacted by first responders at the scene, by the fire department hosing down a place that was on fire. Things may have gotten lost on the way to the lab. They may have been misplaced in an evidence locker. They may have degraded. A witness may have disappeared so we can’t get a statement. In a perfect world, I would have 100 percent of all possible information and evidence. But in the real world, I get what I get.
Does that mean if I don’t have everything, I shouldn’t try to be helpful?
The police department and the medical examiner’s office refused to officially tell the family the time of death and refused to allow the family the right to see the autopsy report, even after Mary Beth’s son, Art Townsend, went to court over the matter.
The family wanted to know: Why were no other suspects being considered? Was this really a death from a domestic dispute or was it a burglary-related homicide that was never investigated as such? If Mary Beth Townsend’s fiancé was really involved with her death, why did the department stall on an arrest? Were they struggling to make conflicting facts fit the story? Were they wasting time focusing on the fiancé rather than pursuing other leads?
The police also successfully resisted the local newspaper in its investigation. The newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that resulted in the release of some basic information but not the autopsy report its reporters (and Art) sought.
On the other hand, I did have information that was available through Mary Beth’s son. I was also able to interview Sam Bilodeau, her fiancé, and hear his story, and determine whether I thought it was a fabrication or whether he was telling the truth.
I decided I would profile this case and help in one manner or another. Perhaps I could develop a lead that would help the police department. Perhaps I could come up with an answer that would help the family cope. Not a perfect world, not a perfect case, but if I could do anything to help, I would.
I went forward on Art’s invitation because I was concerned that there might be a predator on the loose if Sam was not involved.
THE FIRST THING I did was hear the circumstances of the case from Art. He told me what had happened, and then he added some other interesting details.
After several months, the police finally released Mary Beth’s car. Art attempted to drive it away but couldn’t because the clutch was destroyed. He had it towed to a mechanic, who yelled at him for tearing it up so badly.
This discovery actually helped convince Art that Sam was in the clear. Art thought that if Sam had really killed his mother and was trying to dump the car on the other side of town just to make it look like the offender drove it there, he would have had to purposely destroy the clutch. Sam not only knew how to drive a car with a manual transmission, but he owned one, too. It would take clever thinking for a man who just accidentally killed his girlfriend to think, “I’ll leave the car in the ghetto and make it look like I didn’t know how to drive it. If I destroy the clutch, it won’t look like me.”
Art brought this detail to the investigating detective’s attention and she was, admittedly, surprised. He passed along the mechanic’s contact information to the police for confirmation but they never called. They were only interested in evidence that implicated Sam, not excluded him.
It’s clever but unlikely that an offender in the midst of such desperation would be smart enough to cook that up. More likely, the person who actually took the vehicle did not know how to drive a stick-shift car, and that’s why the clutch was destroyed. (The car was dusted for prints but the police never told Sam or Art what they found.)
That began the process of conclusively leading me away from believing Sam Bilodeau was the perpetrator.
I interviewed Sam and the people who could verify his whereabouts on the day of Mary Beth’s murder. He had a pretty airtight alibi for the entire day, so if Mary Beth was missing by noon, Sam Bilodeau was not involved. He could be involved only if she was alive when he returned home from work, but the fact is she did not show up for her planned lunch, so therefore she was likely dead by noon.
I WONDERED WHY Sam had confessed.
I can learn a lot during an interview. Sam was an amiable fellow-gullible, actually. The police could have led him into saying anything if they pushed hard enough. He was a teddy bear, and he was a person under great duress, an emotional wreck who found his fiancée, the woman he planned to marry, dead. The brain does not think straight under such circumstances.
Sam had slept only a couple of hours before he woke and found Mary Beth’s body. I can’t believe when he got to the hotel he jumped into bed and got a blissful eight hours of sleep. By the time he was interviewed for the second time on Saturday evening, he had been up for almost forty-eight hours. Seriously exhausted and emotionally devastated, an easygoing, guileless personality is a sitting duck for manipulation by clever, seasoned detectives. He just might make a confession that he didn’t really mean. He was so confused that he didn’t know what he was saying anymore. He had no family present, no attorney to guide him. He wasn’t a fast-talking con man, so he answered their questions as honestly as he could and he eventually gave the police what they wanted. Like many a person who has confessed after lengthy interrogation, he just wanted the questions to stop, he wanted to not talk about the horrible incident anymore, he just wanted to lie down. He simply reached a point where he was too tired to care anymore.
I was not convinced that Sam had the personality to kill. He had no violent background and no motive-there was no life insurance from which he or even Mary Beth’s son could have gained, for example. There was not any great equity in the condo that she owned alone, and her death left Art responsible for an $86,000 mortgage. Mary Beth’s son said that Sam and his mother got along fabulously. There was nothing there, no reason for him to kill his fiancée.
I could not envision such a docile man becoming so angry that he smacked his fiancée. I found it even harder to believe he would have strangled her. Then, for him to be so unbelievably clever and calm that he could place her body in the closet, remove items to stage a burglary, drive the car to a black area of town to throw the blame on someone else, destroy the clutch so it would look like the car had been driven by someone unable to use a stick…no, no, not this man.
Sam Bilodeau did not have a motive or the personality or the opportunity to commit this crime.
IN MY INVESTIGATION, I put Sam aside and looked at the crime itself.
The first thing that struck me was that the Townsend condominium was out of the way. It wasn’t a location a criminal would pick purely by accident. It wasn’t an isolated house that would catch one’s eye, it wasn’t an easily accessible end unit, it wasn’t even a condo on the first floor. The killer wouldn’t be someone who just happened upon Mary Beth’s condo and thought, Oh, I think I’ll just slide over to that door and try the handle. What we know happened at the crime scene was that there was a burglary; someone came into her apartment and took things that belonged to Mary Beth. He took her jewelry, he took rolled quarters that were set aside for future laundry use, and he took her vehicle.
The police said she was not raped, but neither Art nor I saw the autopsy report, so there was no way to know if that was true or not. When Sam found her in the closet, Mary Beth was not entirely dressed. It appeared she might have come back from the swimming pool or just come out of the shower, and was interrupted while she was getting dressed. Sometimes rape or sexual assault cannot be identified by an autopsy. If there is no physical damage, if the man used a condom and therefore didn’t leave any semen, we just don’t know if there was a sexual assault or not. He might even have had some weird sexual idea that had nothing to do with actual penetration. As the profiler, it was hard to tell whether this was a sexual assault and a burglary or just a burglary gone wrong.
Often, I find that these offenders overlap their crimes, and they don’t just pick one crime to commit. They are opportunists, and if they find another temptation at the scene, they can’t resist.
There was no sign of breaking and entering. Did Mary Beth open the door to somebody, or did somebody find his way in?
I was told that Mary Beth tended to leave her condo door open, or if not open, then unlocked. It was possible she went swimming and left the door open and somebody came in. Or the door was unlocked while she was taking a shower and a burglar slipped in without her realizing. Or perhaps he knocked and Mary Beth answered the door and let the person in-perhaps she knew the person. But it is not likely she would have answered the door half-dressed.
As she sometimes left the front door unlocked, it is likely someone entered the apartment believing no one was at home and surprised Mary Beth (and she surprised him). The perpetrator could have hit Mary Beth and, when she fell to the floor, strangled her to prevent identification. Upon killing her, the perpetrator grabbed what was in sight and took off. The perpetrator of this kind of crime is a relatively disorganized criminal. The planning of the crime would have been minimal and the attack a necessity for self-preservation (prevention of identification). On the other hand, maybe the guy knew she was there and planned to rape and kill her, and then stole her stuff. This would have been a little more carefully planned, but it would still be a fairly opportunistic crime, so the killer wouldn’t have had to be a brilliant criminal.
Also, when he exited the condo, the perpetrator locked the bottom push-button lock from the inside, but didn’t set the dead bolt.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the location of the condo. You wouldn’t pick Mary Beth’s second-floor unit if you were just walking down the street. You wouldn’t think, There’s no car in front of that condo, I’ll commit a crime there. Mary Beth’s condo unit was not easily accessible to a nonresident, so a burglar or rapist would most likely pick some other unit before choosing hers.
Somebody had prior knowledge of this location. He picked it for a reason.
One of the questions I asked the son was whether he knew of anybody working on the property that day. My quick profile of the offender: a guy who was lurking around during the middle of the day, stealing money, and not doing too well at anything. Likely, he was not keeping a steady job. He arrived on foot and had to steal a vehicle to make a quick getaway. The fact that he took Mary Beth’s car from in front of the building and drove it to the other side of town said to me that he was going home. He probably lived in southeast Washington, D.C., the area where the car was abandoned.
Perhaps, prior to the murder, he was in the area working with some kind of temp service. Perhaps he was going to court there because he had problems with the law. Perhaps he was doing construction work nearby.
I felt sure he was not from Mary Beth’s town because he drove to Washington, D.C., and destroyed the clutch en route. I didn’t think it was a joy ride. He had a place to go because he was not going to drive a car like Mary Beth’s all around town when he couldn’t even drive it properly.
ONE OF THE reasons I call myself an investigative criminal profiler is because I learned that you can’t always sit in your office and solve a crime by just looking at photos and reading case files. Sometimes you have to visit the crime scene and ask yourself, What kinds of buildings are here? What kind of land is it? What are the people like around here?
I went to the Townsend condominium and looked around. I went to the site where Mary Beth’s car was abandoned. Who would dump a car there? And, if they lived nearby, where did they live?
It was a poor area of town with a high incidence of drug-related crime, and it happens to be almost 100 percent African American. But I didn’t want to assume that the offender was African American; maybe there was more of a racial mix than I suspected.
I wanted to make sure of that, so I started knocking on doors, and I said, “I’m looking for a fellow who dropped a car near here, what do you think?”
I asked around in the community, because those in it would know a lot more about it than I’ll ever know, and every single one of them said, “Oh, no, if he dropped his car and walked from there, the guy’s African American. Definitely black, because we don’t have Hispanic guys around here, we don’t have white guys around here. If you come in here and you are trying to do some business and you are Hispanic or white, you will find nothing but trouble. You’re going to stand out. You will run into gang issues.”
It was not a safe area for the people who live there, let alone those who did not.
As I talked to people in the community, I told them, “I really need your help. I’ve got a suspect in a murder who might live around here.” Everybody jumped on board, trying to be detectives themselves. They started talking with me and giving me all kinds of information; a few even offered cookies and lemonade. Poor people don’t want a killer in their community any more than middle-class or rich people do, so everybody tried to help and was pleasant.
Because of what they told me, I was convinced Mary Beth Townsend’s attacker was a black man.
I believed he lived with someone or had a relative in that part of town, close to where the car was found. He worked for a day labor service of some kind, and he was in Mary Beth’s community for some work- or court-related reason. He had some previous knowledge and experience with the building where Mary Beth and Sam lived, because why else would he pick it? Criminals do things that make sense to them, even if we don’t fully understand their choices.
I asked Art Townsend, “Were there any temporary services working on or around the property, anybody lurking around, in the days before your mother’s homicide?”
He looked into it and found that three weeks before his mother died, there was a service called Trashman at the building.
“My mother had this old computer,” he recalled, “and when she saw the Trashman truck outside, she naturally thought it was a trash service. She ran downstairs and said to the guy with the truck, ‘I have this old computer I want to get rid of. Can you take it?’ And he said, ‘Oh, no, we’re not a trash service. We fix commercial mailboxes and the locks on the mailboxes. That’s our job.’ She said, ‘Oh, darn.’ But then he said, ‘I’ve been looking for a computer to fix up.’ So she brought him up to the condo, and they went into her bedroom, where she unhooked the computer and gave it to him. Then she kindly gave the man her name and phone number and said, ‘If you ever have a problem with the computer, give me a ring.’”
Mary Beth was a librarian, used to helping and trusting people. The man thanked her and left with the computer.
Art tracked down the company’s address and phone number and only recalled his mother describing the man to whom she gave her computer as “a young black guy.”
I, of course, called Trashman. I said, “I am going to be honest with you…”
Honesty’s an interesting policy. Sometimes, the police have asked me, “How did you get that information? Even we can’t get that information without a court order.”
And I inevitably answer, “I was nice.”
I told the person who answered the phone, “Look, this is going to sound really strange. I’m a criminal profiler working on this case, and I have a suspicion that this woman, Mary Beth Townsend, may have been murdered by somebody who worked at a temporary service. Three weeks before the murder, a guy from your service came into her apartment and she gave a computer to him. Do you know a black guy in his twenties or thirties who worked for you at her condominium on August 21, 1998?”
The guy put the phone down for a while. When he returned, he was chortling.
“You’re not going to believe this one,” he said, his voice full of excitement.
“What?”
“That guy you asked me about, I have to testify against him in court.”
“What for?”
“He is accused of abducting, raping, and strangling a little girl who he put in a closet.”
I said, “That sounds familiar…”
Bingo!
If you were looking for MO, we had a winner here. And while MO doesn’t always remain the same, hey, when it’s that close, a profiler can’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
WHILE THIS WAS going on, I reached out to an agent I knew in the FBI to see if he could get answers for the family. I also thought he might consider getting involved in the investigation. But he talked with the detective in charge, and even though he came away feeling she was sincerely following through on Mary Beth’s murder, he learned no more than the family did.
In November 1999, I wrote the following in my case notes:
The Mary Beth Townsend case made some progress. The police actually permitted a meeting with Art’s lawyer and ADMITTED they were now looking at the possibility that an intruder committed the crime. This admission pretty much clears her fiancé and admits that they screwed up. HURRAH! Art is very happy.
WE COULD PLACE a stranger in Mary Beth Townsend’s apartment just three weeks before she was discovered strangled and left in a closet. And he was on trial for strangling a girl and putting her in a closet.
“This is a guy we should look at,” I said.
I asked my new friend at Trashman some more questions about the man. “Who is this guy, what can you tell me?”
“His name’s Scotty May. He’s African American, and I believe he lives in southeast Washington.”
That also fit snugly into my profile.
“Do you possibly know whether he can drive a stick-shift car?”
“I actually do know that, because our vehicles are all stick-shift vehicles, and because he could not drive one, he always had to ride on the passenger side and somebody else had to drive.”
I CONFIRMED WITH local law enforcement that Scotty May was indeed on his way to court, so I went back to the police department and gave the detective all the information I had gathered. She didn’t seem to me to be interested in the least.
I was stunned.
“How can you not be interested in a guy that was in her apartment three weeks before she was murdered, who committed the same exact crime someplace else?” I said. “What part don’t you get?”
The detective didn’t know me, and maybe she didn’t think profilers know what they’re doing, or she didn’t believe in the science of criminal profiling, but how could she deny that this guy committed the exact same crime someplace else? How could she think Scotty had nothing to do with it? That was crazy.
THE DAY OF Scotty May’s trial arrived and he was charged with attempted murder, rape, and abduction with intent to defile. Art and I learned firsthand about Scotty and what kind of character this career felon was.
A high school graduate, May was five ten, weighed 185 to 195 pounds and had brown eyes. He lived in the area where Mary Beth’s car was abandoned, and worked for temporary employment services, as I suspected, one in Virginia near Mary Beth’s home and another in Washington, D.C. One of the last jobs he had before he went to jail was cleaning buildings that were under construction.
One of the services he worked for employed a thirteen-year-old girl with a false ID whom I’ll call Shania. She was a runaway from another county in Virginia, living in a motel with an older boyfriend who was dealing drugs. Clearly, her life wasn’t going terribly well. Then she met Scotty through the temp service, and things got worse.
Scotty was living with his girlfriend, Crystal Jones, and their two children in southeast Washington. One day, Shania’s boyfriend was arrested and jailed for dealing drugs and she no longer had a place to stay, since he was paying for the motel room. Good Samaritan that he was, May let her stay at his house.
The girl arrived thinking she’d be safe with May, Crystal, and their kids. May said he got a call for them to go clean a building early the next morning. Shania got up, put on her clothes, and off they went in his car.
When they arrived, there was nobody else there and it was still dark outside.
“Why don’t we go in the building and smoke some dope?” May said.
Shania said, “No, I don’t want to.”
“Oh, come on, come on,” he said, pressuring her to come along.
She wasn’t interested, but felt she had no choice but to go in with him. Once they were inside, Scotty started down a new path.
“Your boyfriend’s in jail. You need a new boyfriend, don’t you?”
He started putting the moves on her, and she said, “No, I don’t need a new boyfriend, because he’s getting out of jail. I don’t need to be with you. I’m not interested.”
But he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said.
“Well, you’re going to,” May said.
That’s when he raped her.
She was terrified that he was going to hurt her, so she did not fight back. May was a big guy, and she was a little girl.
He cleverly used a condom so he wouldn’t leave any evidence, and after he finished raping her, he told her to put her clothes back on, and she did. She looked sad, and she was.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
“I’m tired, I just want to go to sleep,” she said.
She was emotionally shutting down from the horrible assault.
He said, “You want to go to sleep? No problem,” and May put his arm around her neck in a sleeper hold, tightened his arm, and he strangled her.
When she was unconscious and wasn’t moving anymore, he picked up her body and put it in a closet in the empty building, closed the door, and walked away.
It turned out there was never any temporary work at the building that day; that was just a ruse he used to get her there, and after he got what he wanted, he went on his way.
The mistake Scotty May made-besides the crimes of raping and strangling an underage girl-was that he didn’t check to see how dead she was, because she was still alive. She woke up, and she got out of the closet, ran down through the building, and went to the office and told them to call the police because she had been raped and strangled.
The police came, took her in, and asked her to write down exactly what had happened to her. She wrote, “Scotty May took me to this building, and he raped me, and he strangled me.” She wrote it all down, and the police went looking for May.
A year after Mary Beth Townsend’s murder, Scotty May was drinking tea in his living room when he saw a police car pull up. He thought they were coming to talk to him about a fraud he committed at work, but they were actually there to ask him about the thirteen-year-old girl that they believed he raped and strangled earlier that day.
“Oh, did you hear about the fraud?” he asked.
Until then, no, they didn’t know he had been ripping off the company where he worked.
“No, no,” the officers said. “We’re not here about a fraud. We’re looking into the case of this thirteen-year-old girl that’s gone missing. Shania.”
“What about her?”
“Do you know her?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I know her. I don’t know where she is. This morning she wanted to go back to the motel on Route 1 where her boyfriend was, so I dropped her off and haven’t seen her since.”
“Well, Scotty, she said that you raped her,” and with that the detective pushed the girl’s report in front of him. “See what she’s written about you?”
“That’s impossible. She couldn’t have written that,” he said.
“Why not?” the officer asked.
“She’s dead.”
Swift move, May. Gotta love stupid criminals. May wasn’t as slick as he thought. They arrested him, obviously, because he screwed that one up, making the criminally stupid mistake of saying she was dead before he was supposed to know she was dead.
THE SCOTTY MAY story could have ended there. But he decided he was bright enough that he should be his own lawyer.
To be honest, he presented himself quite well in court. On the day Scotty’s trial began, Art looked around to see if he could spot him.
“Where is he?” Art asked the bailiff.
May was dressed so well that Art thought he was looking at a lawyer.
“No,” the bailiff said, “that is Scotty May.”
Some people can present themselves quite well in court when they dress up, so May was in a nice suit, and he thought this was enough to ensure a successful trial. He was well spoken, talkative, gentle, and respectful in his approach to the jurors. Mind you, he had spent most of his adult life in prison for committing one crime after another. He’d hardly been on the outside, but he saw himself as a pretty fine jailhouse lawyer.
Shania started crying as soon as she saw May in court. He got her on the stand, looked her in the eye, and he said to her, “You know I didn’t rape you, don’t you?”
She stared right back at him and said, “Yes you did, Scotty, yes you did.”
All he could say to that was “Oh,” which the jury didn’t consider much of a defense. Maybe he thought he could intimidate Shania, but it didn’t work.
He was found guilty of kidnapping, guilty of rape, and guilty of attempted murder.
Even though he looked good, he wasn’t a very good lawyer. But May continued representing himself in the penalty phase. He expected to convince the jury that he was a decent guy in spite of the fact that he kidnapped, raped, and attempted to murder a thirteen-year-old girl.
What no one expected was that Scotty May was a changed man.
“I found the Lord. Yes, I found Jesus,” May proclaimed. “I’ve been reading my Bible, I’m a Christian now, and I just want to tell you that I think you ought to give me a chance, because I’m not really that bad a guy.
“As a matter of fact, I did Shania a favor, because when I met Shania, she was a runaway. She was living with a man who was dealing drugs. She was on the streets. She wasn’t in school, and after I did this to her, she returned home to her family, and she’s back in school. I should get a break because I helped her out!”
That’s a sign of a true psychopath, making lemonade out of lemons: “I did kidnap, rape, and strangle that girl, tried to kill her, but I did her a favor. So I think we should call it even.”
Scotty May’s closing argument won him a sentence of life plus thirty. He received twenty years for abduction with intent to defile, to be served concurrently; the remaining life plus ten years are to be served consecutively. May can still apply for geriatric parole when he reaches the age of sixty, which will be in the year 2028.
The court declined to hear oral arguments on the motion to set aside the jury verdict on rape. But Judge Stanley P. Klein did tell May: “Your whole defense is that you weren’t there. But it was clear to this Court, based on the questions you asked the witness [Shania] on cross-examination, that you WERE there. In this Court’s opinion, the jury did not make a mistake.”
ART SPOKE TO a detective and told him he attended Scotty May’s trial.
The detective said, “We were supposed to have somebody there, but I don’t know if we did.” It was the first official acknowledgment that the police were even considering Scotty May a person of interest. “We are certainly focused on him,” the detective said, halfheartedly.
Later still, Art received the following phone message from the detective in charge of the case:
“Hello, Art. This is Detective B. from the police department. I had told you that I would get back with you sometime in October, and I wanted to chat with you briefly about the case. I have no new exciting news for you, except that the prosecutor and I are working toward an indictment. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a time frame as yet. But I would like to talk to you. Please call me later today, or I will try you again. Thank you.”
The phone call gave Art false hope that they were doing something, but nothing ever came of the indictment.
IT WAS ABOUT a year after the Mary Beth Townsend murder that Scotty May attacked the thirteen-year-old girl.
When I found out the name of the Trashman employee was Scotty May, I paid a visit to his girlfriend, Crystal Jones, to discover a little bit more of what she knew around the time of the crime. The day Mary Beth died was, not coincidentally, Crystal Jones’s birthday. I believe May needed money to buy his girlfriend a present.
The day after the murder, May went to Philadelphia. Mary Beth’s murderer stole her rings, and he would have had to hawk them someplace; they were worth some money. If you hawk things in Washington, D.C., you have to show a driver’s license-same for Virginia -so your name will be recorded as the person selling the item. But in Philadelphia, the rules are different and it’s a popular place to fence stolen goods. I figured the murderer might go there, because he wouldn’t be asked for an ID. I never did find a pawn shop that could identify May, but according to police reports he sure acted peculiar while he was there. He arrived at his estranged wife’s home, beat her, threatened to kill her, pulled out a gun, and, after fleeing, was chased by police to the rooftop of a nearby building. The criminal justice system didn’t put him back in prison, so he moved on to raping and trying to kill Shania.
THERE WAS AN incredible amount of evidence linking Scotty May to the murder of Mary Beth Townsend, so Art and I returned once more to the police department. They still refused to look at any of the new information I brought.
Police departments are as susceptible as any business to the egos of the people who are involved and all the inherent politics. They fall prey to all kinds of issues that can be radically different from one police department to the next and from one investigator to the next.
You throw the dice when you talk about employees of any business, and, unfortunately, Mary Beth Townsend’s murder drew a pair of uncooperative detectives. Getting a good detective on your case is much the same as getting lucky with a skilled surgeon.
And to my knowledge, to this day, they still refuse to look at new information. However, in the next county over, the detectives and district attorney who prosecuted Scotty May all say, “We know Scotty May killed Mary Beth Townsend.” If they had had the case, charges against Scotty May would have gone forward.
I UNDERSTAND WHY the investigators immediately suspected Sam Bilodeau.
In the beginning of the investigation, they wouldn’t have known what time of day Mary Beth Townsend was killed. They did not know if it had been six, eight, or even ten hours before she was discovered, and they hadn’t known about the lunch date she missed, so they did not have their time frame down yet. They didn’t have the full autopsy saying that she had been strangled. The police had a dead woman in a closet, apparently with a blow to the head, and there was no sign of breaking and entering.
Her fiancé said, “I came home, she wasn’t there, I didn’t know what happened to her, and I fell asleep. When I got up, I found her in the closet.”
Uh-huh, really?
I do not put down the police department for its original views. I would have that same thought. Nothing wrong with that. When you’re talking about a crime that just occurred, you have to go with the most likely theory. Women are most often killed by boyfriends or husbands, not by strangers, serial killers, or burglars. Domestic homicide tops the list of likely places to start. The police detective will obviously go there first. He’s got the guy in the chair. He’s going to take his chance to talk to him. However, he shouldn’t put words into his mouth. And he certainly shouldn’t pursue the domestic angle just because the truth is less convenient.
The police had a reason to suspect Sam. Maybe he moved Mary Beth’s car to the other side of town and took the train back; the couple’s condominium was close enough to transportation for that to be plausible. I have another case where that’s exactly what happened. A white man committed a murder, moved the car to a poor black neighborhood, and tried to make it look like the perpetrator was a black man. Why? Because the white killer lived four doors down from the neighbor he murdered and he wanted the police to look elsewhere. It’s not necessarily racist; it’s just smart for a criminal to point law enforcement to an area where nobody looks like him and the location is poor enough or has a high enough crime rate to make it feasible that a criminal lived there.
For an innocent man, Sam did all the right things. He came home. He made phone calls to find his fiancée. That seems like normal behavior, but a lot of people ask, “With his fiancée missing, if he was really worried about her, why did he just go to sleep? How could he do that?”
This is a gender issue. If it was a woman and her boyfriend was missing, that woman would not sleep. That woman would have been pacing the floor all night long, cussing and saying, “He better be dead, because if he’s not dead, then he’s going to be dead when he gets home.” She would be standing there at six a.m., still fuming, when that man walked in. And if he was fine, she’d kill him. That’s the way a woman thinks. A guy will go, “I don’t know where she is…Zzzzzzzz.” And he’ll fall right to sleep. It’s amazing. Men will snooze under even the most stressful circumstances.
Sam’s going to sleep did not surprise me. He was annoyed, he was aggravated, but he didn’t know what else to do, so he did what a guy does, he slept. When he did wake up, somewhat rested and thinking clearly, he finally noticed that the closet door was closed.
To the police, who didn’t know Sam Bilodeau at that point, it sounded like a strange story. And then, of course, he found the car, which made things worse for him, but because he was driving home from Mary Beth’s father’s and the highway ran close to Scotty May’s house, that just happened to be where the car was dumped.
But ultimately, there was too much evidence to the contrary to continue being suspicious of Sam.
At a certain point, the police should have said, “The evidence shows that it’s not Sam Bilodeau.” He lost his fiancée. He pays taxes. He deserved to be treated like a man grieving a horrible loss, not a common felon.
The detectives never talked to Sam again after his “confession.” He waited around a year for the police, and nobody ever came back to him. He didn’t know what to do. That indicated to me that they weren’t thinking it was him, but they didn’t know where to turn next.
This is a huge problem that I hope to help more police departments solve in the future. Cases are solved by everybody working together. The medical examiner helps us understand how the person died. The crime photographer gets good photos that we can examine for clues. A ballistics expert on a case can tell us about the caliber of bullets when appropriate. There might be forensic evidence. The community might give us tips on who it thinks could have committed the crime-if we ask for the help and then listen to the answers. When all these people get together, the profiler is just a part of a larger team. Even in this case, I had the help of the family and the community to unravel the case. The police need to stop looking at it as “our” case and start looking at it as the victim’s case. That’s a big problem.
Criminal profiling is still a relatively new concept, and since there’s been so much mythology about criminal profiling and some foolishness promoted about criminal profiling, profilers are sometimes considered gods-and sometimes they’re considered frauds.
IS IT WORTH profiling a homicide if law enforcement doesn’t care? If it isn’t prosecuted, is it worth it?
Absolutely yes.
In Mary Beth Townsend’s murder, her son, Art, got the answer he prayed was true: the fiancé of his mother wasn’t somebody he had to hate the rest of his life.
The fiancé, Sam Bilodeau, got some relief that somebody believed he didn’t kill his fiancée, that there was an answer out there.
More recently, I received a letter from Sam Bilodeau’s sister, thanking me profusely for helping with the case, because it was such a horrible thing for her brother to live through with this cloud hanging over his head. When I spoke out in the media as to why Scotty May should be the top suspect in Mary Beth’s death and explained how he-and not Sam Bilodeau-was most likely to have committed the crime, I provided some peace of mind to her family. It took her years to deal with it and write a letter thanking me, but it was a beautiful thing to receive, ten years after I worked on the case. We know that Scotty May is not going anyplace. He’s in jail for life. I know the Townsend family would like him prosecuted for what he did to Mary Beth, but at least I could clear Sam Bilodeau’s name to some extent so he could go on in his life and I could give Art some closure, too. That is indeed worth it, even if I can’t say the case was prosecuted or the police ever formally exonerated Sam.
It is said that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place, but there are folks who can tell you that this is an old wives’ tale. Art Townsend can tell you that crime also can strike twice in the same place. Following his mother’s death, Art put the condo up for rent. A nice young man who did government work, Vincent Poor, moved in. The very next year after Mary Beth was murdered, in 1999, the police department had another crime go unsolved.
Vincent Poor, finished with his day’s work, came out of the train station and was robbed and stabbed to death on his way home to the condo.
Art didn’t want to tell the next renter that the previous two residents were murdered.
He sold the unit.