The Crime: Murder
The Victim: Doris Hoover
Location: Midwestern United States
Original Theory: Husband either did it or hired someone to commit the crime
I arrived twenty-six years too late in the Midwest.
I had just finished an appearance on a daytime talk show, where I met two of the daughters of Doris Hoover. The hour-long show was on cold cases and their mother’s murder was featured. After the show, they stopped me in the hallway and asked if I could profile the killer. Normally, a case this cold is one that I would leave alone, but the facts were so interesting and the daughters so insistent, I told them I would give the detective a ring.
“Sure, we would welcome a profile of the case,” he said.
I drove to the Midwest. In my experience, more people call from this part of the country for help with unsolved homicides than any other part.
After getting such a poor reception on the Mary Beth Townsend case and running into similar resistance with other police departments, it was a relief to have the local law enforcement welcome me.
When I got there, the detective ushered me into his office, a rather sheepish look on his face.
“Uh, I have some bad news for you,” he told me.
I thought he was going to tell me that a superior wanted me to go home.
“The case files are gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yeah, there was a flood at the warehouse and the Hoover case files were destroyed.”
Okay. This was not good news. I would come to learn that it wasn’t entirely rare news. A case I later worked in North Carolina would have the entire trunk of a car, the actual trunk that was removed for testing, disappear. How do you lose something that much larger than a breadbox?
“How about computer files?” I ventured.
The detective looked morose. “Gone as well. Someone thought the case was closed and erased all information on it.” He half-grinned at me. “We have her name!”
I know he felt bad. Shit happens and police departments aren’t 100 percent perfect. Things get lost, items get destroyed, evidence gets mislabeled…shit happens.
So there I was.
Not only had a mother of seven been dead for two decades but all the related evidence was eliminated.
Still, I was in town. I had worked the Townsend case with no police files, so I might as well see if I could do anything with this one. It was worth a try.
DORIS HOOVER, FORTY-TWO, was shot at home around 3:30 a.m., in her own bedroom, on November 3, 1975, while four of her children were asleep down the hall and her husband was at work. Since that early morning, the only suspect had been her husband. I could see why he might end up in the crosshairs of an investigation, but my profile of the crime ended up pointing away from him.
Doris, who was deaf in one ear and wore a hearing aid everywhere except to sleep, was standing beside the bed in a teddy and panties-no slippers-when she was shot. The Harlequin romance novel she was reading was still spread open on her bed. There was no evidence of sexual assault. When she fell, she collapsed on a stereo, knocking over the speaker and a phone that was on the top of it.
Doris ’s daughter Laurie, seventeen, the oldest girl living at home, was sleeping in a bedroom with her younger sisters, Denise and Dana, and her little brother, Deacon. In the middle of the night she woke up suddenly, although she didn’t remember being startled awake by any noise, and saw someone pass by her open bedroom door, walking from her mother’s room to the bathroom. She was half asleep, and what he was doing there didn’t register right away. Then she saw him stop at her door and wipe off the doorknob. Wide awake now, she listened as he continued to the hall, down the stairs, and out of the house. Laurie heard the screen door at the front of the house open and close. She heard sounds by the side of the house, and then the screen door again. She heard the man come back up the stairs, enter her mother’s room, and then he went back down the stairs and out of the house again. Scared, she didn’t move from her bed. Minutes passed, only about seven or eight, and then she heard the police pounding on the front door. By the time she left her bed, the officers-who found the front door open when they arrived-were already inside the house and on the stairs.
The open door was a tip-off to Laurie that something was wrong; her mother compulsively locked all the doors at night.
The police told Laurie there had been a shooting at the house, but she said no, she had heard no such thing-then a horrible thought popped into her mind that her mother must have been kidnapped because her bed was empty when she went by the open door.
“He kidnapped her, he kidnapped her!” she cried out.
She showed the police to her mom’s room and then she saw her mother’s foot at the bottom of the bed.
The killer had put a small caliber gun in Doris ’s mouth and pulled the trigger, execution-style. There were burns on her tongue and the bullet locked her neck and her spine so she couldn’t move. Doris drowned in her own blood because she couldn’t move her head to the side.
Because a curtain was pulled to the side of an unlocked window, it appeared the killer might have accessed the house in this way. It is not known if the window was left unlocked or if the killer was in the home earlier and unlocked it for later entry. Because the reports and photos were not available to me, there were many missing facts that might have provided clues to exactly what happened. I would have to make do with what information I could gain by interviewing the family.
A diamond-and-sapphire necklace was initially reported as missing from the house following the murder, but that was in error. Doris ’s daughter Denise had it; her father had given it to her grandmother to give to her to hold for her wedding one day. Laurie had cash in plain view where the perpetrator could have taken it. He didn’t. Doris ’s purse was missing, but there was nothing of value in it. Therefore, this crime was unlikely to have a monetary motive.
Even though much information was unavailable, there was enough interesting information to profile this case to a reasonable extent and offer avenues of investigation that might still lead to the case being solved and an individual serving time for the crime.
Doris was what one would classify as a low-risk victim. She was married, a mother of seven children, a homemaker, and a volunteer with the ladies’ auxiliary of the fire department. She did not involve herself in any dangerous activities and did not abuse alcohol or drugs. At the time of the murder, she was at home in bed. One of her eldest daughters, Cathy, lived in an apartment across the street with her own family. Doris ’s husband, Mickey, forty-three, a paramedic and the local fire chief, was in the midst of a twenty-hour shift at a station less than a mile away from his residence. Although her husband was not at home, it would be obvious to anyone casing the place that Doris and her children were there, making her home not the best choice for burglary or stranger sexual assault. The motive for this homicide would likely have come in one of three categories:
1. Revenge. Someone Doris or her husband made angry, intentionally or unintentionally.
2. Convenience. A hit by someone who wanted her out of his way, most likely the husband.
3. A crime of passion. Someone who was emotionally connected to the victim.
The possibility of a hit by the husband was the motive that the police focused on the most, since no one knew of anyone Doris had made angry, and the killer apparently called the fire station, the location where Mickey Hoover worked. The call came in minutes after the crime was committed-from a public pay phone-so it was theorized that Mickey hired a hit man. The phone call let him know the deed was done, giving him an alibi at the time of the crime, and also allowing him to get home and prevent the children from discovering her body. If that scenario was true, it worked out well and the investigators made note of this.
Mickey was not home much. A combination of factors contributed to his long work shifts. He was said to be a flirt but there was no actual proof of extramarital affairs. His children saw him as a harsh, authoritarian figure in their lives. And not long after Doris ’s death, he began openly dating the woman who would become his second wife. She was only two years older than his eldest daughter.
In spite of these red flags, there were a number of reasons to question Mickey’s involvement in his wife’s death. One was that it was not possible for Mickey to have been the killer. He had an alibi at the fire station and his own daughter says she caught enough of a glimpse of the killer to know it was not her father. There was also a lack of a clear motive. He did not receive financial gain from her death, and although he later married a younger woman, there was no evidence he was having an affair with the woman at the time of Doris ’s death. Even if removing his wife from his life would allow him to get himself a much younger woman, a dead wife would leave him with the responsibility of raising the children alone. Mickey worked a heavy schedule and Doris bore the major responsibilities of the home and children. But Mickey’s behaviors and gossip about him did raise some eyebrows and sometimes a desire to be rid of certain roadblocks to one’s desires can be fuel for homicide. I could not eliminate Mickey purely on motive; I would need to see if the crime itself supported a hired hit on his wife.
The call to the station at 3:43 a.m. was an extremely unusual behavior, one I don’t often see from murderers. While hit men have called their employers to let them know a job is finished, they usually don’t call for help to save the victim as well. Since 911 did not yet exist in that county, one would have to call the police or fire station to get help. This call, made just minutes after the shooting of Doris Hoover, was to the fire station and received by whoever answered the phone-not to Mickey, personally. The killer didn’t really even know if Doris was dead at that point, and if he just wanted to inform Mickey of the shooting, he certainly could have waited long enough to make sure the victim had expired. It actually seemed as if the shooter might either have been trying to get paramedics to Doris or he didn’t want the kids to find her body.
One more thing: why was there no screaming, no struggle, if this was a hit man or burglar? Doris was up and awake, the light on; she was reading a book. Suddenly, a strange man appears in the door of her bedroom and Doris just stands there and lets him come up to her and put a gun in her mouth? I doubt it. Someone had to get near her, with her consent, someone she never thought would do such a thing, even if he was waving a gun right in her face. It had to be someone she knew well.
A few minutes after the call came in, the police, Mickey, and the rescue squad arrived at his home. Mickey jumped from his moving squad car in a rush to gain entrance to the house. It is unlikely, if he knew his wife had been shot and killed in a hit, he would have hurried into the home. He would have hung back and allowed someone else to deal with her body while he worked up a suitable emotional response. Instead, it is likely he was actually rushing to his wife’s aid, hoping that she could be saved.
Denise later recalled her father sitting with the children that morning and saying of their dead mother, “Sometimes, things happen.” He didn’t break down and cry then, but Denise later found him leaning against a telephone pole, sobbing. Clearly the man had feelings for his wife.
IN MY INTERVIEW with Mickey Hoover, he readily agreed to take a polygraph. He was excited about my involvement and said “it was about time” someone looked into the case again.
I found nothing concerning in his interview, and his actual behaviors at the time of the homicide as related to me by his daughters did not seem suspicious.
One way a profiler can narrow down the suspect list in a crime is to determine whether the person was a stranger or not and whether the person was a stranger to the residence or not. Whoever killed Doris that night seemed to know his way around the house. If Mickey had hired some professional hit man or even some guy he knew from a bar, that man wouldn’t have exhibited the behaviors witnessed at the scene. Whoever was there was comfortable in the house but, on the other hand, was quite uncomfortable with having committed a homicide. He was the direct opposite of a hit man. I believe it must have been an intimate, an insider, and a person with some strong emotional connection to the family and the scene.
Following the homicide, the killer washed his hands in the bathroom. This shows, first, that he wore no gloves and I wondered, What hit man would neglect that issue? Second, having just committed a homicide, it would seem wise to vacate the premises immediately and not waste time in washing up. That could have been accomplished anywhere. He stopped in the bathroom to wash his hands. Either the sign of an extraordinarily nonchalant killer or a total amateur who was horrified by the sight of blood on his hands; the blood of his victim as it flew back at the hand holding the gun.
Also, the killer looked in on the children. Why? What interest, if he wasn’t a rapist, would he have in checking out sleeping kids? And, since there were teenage girls in the house, a rapist would have been more than pleased to make such a find. But he peeked in and then left the house.
Doris Hoover was shot in the mouth with a small caliber handgun. Shooting women in the mouth is usually a sign of rage. The anger is directed at the woman’s mouth, where the voice is coming out and telling you what you don’t want to hear.
The strangest behavior of all in this crime, outside of the fact that the killer called for emergency medical help in a bizarre attempt to save Doris ’s life, was that he left the house but then came back.
This brought me to consider what behaviors occurred at the crime scene that could identify the motive and personality of the offender.
I believed the killer was comfortable in the Hoover home. He knew his way around it either because he had been in the home before or he lived in a nearby home of the same design.
The forced entry was likely staged, perhaps as an afterthought when the killer realized the murder would not look like a stranger homicide.
It was theorized that the perpetrator also took Doris ’s purse to add to the staging effect and mislead the investigation to focus on robbery as a motive. Clearly, since nothing else of value was taken, this crime was not a robbery. However, I do not believe that the motive for taking the purse was to steer the investigation off course. The killer left the house after shooting Doris and then returned and went back upstairs into her room and left the house a second time. It is unlikely that the killer would waste yet more valuable time staging a robbery, minutes spent that would increase the chance of apprehension.
The family does not remember the exact whereabouts of Doris ’s purse that night. Her daughters believe it was either in her bedroom or under a coat on the living room couch. If it were hidden under a coat on the couch, it is not likely the killer knew it was there and took it. More likely, it was in her bedroom. It was my belief that the purse may have contained some item of interest to the killer that was worth coming back for. It was also possible that the killer came back to check and see what condition Doris was in and took the purse upon leaving the room as a possible afterthought. At this same time, he may well have noticed that Doris was not dead but asphyxiating (because of bodily fluids running into her lungs). This may have prompted the call for medical assistance. It is also interesting to note that the killer, on the return to her room, did not take this opportunity to make sure she was dead.
The killer did not wear gloves. This indicated that he did not plan to commit murder. Perhaps he only wanted to talk with her or show her how angry he was. He may not have worried his fingerprints would be considered evidence of his involvement in the crime if he had previously spent enough time in the house.
But Laurie reported that the killer had wiped off the doorknob of the children’s room after he opened the door-it was always closed-and looked in. However, there may be other explanations for the perpetrator to have applied a rag to the doorknob. Laurie heard the man go into the bathroom and then she saw him at her door wiping off the doorknob. The bathroom light was on and the hallway was illuminated. He was tall and thin and wore a winter hat, denim shirt with long sleeves, and dark pants, and his head was turned back toward Doris ’s bedroom. It was possible that, following the crime, he went from Doris ’s room straight to the children’s room to look in and see if the shot had awakened them. The fact that he went into the bathroom and washed his hands indicated he had blood on them, most likely caused by back spatter from the gunshot wound. He may have left bloody fingerprints on the door to the kids’ room that he then wiped clean. Considering that the man wore no gloves to begin with, I wondered why he wiped down that door alone if his only interest was eradicating fingerprints, and not bloody fingerprints, from the residence.
That the killer took time to wash his hands indicated he was not comfortable with blood on his hands. It would therefore be unlikely that this person was a hit man or a hardened criminal.
And the fact that the killer looked into the bedroom of the children and did not attempt to harm them showed he had concern for the children and no ill will toward them.
The lack of clear forced entry meant the killer was either admitted to the house, had a key to the house, or entered through an unlocked door or window, perhaps one he had left open before so he could get back in.
Laurie claimed to have heard him leave the house; she heard the screen door slam closed.
Then, terrified, she heard him come back into the house and go into Doris ’s room. She believed he took something from the room and went back downstairs, where she heard something fall-she later discovered it was a box of crayons. She never heard the sound of a car.
Laurie later heard the voice recording of the killer’s call to her father’s fire station that reported the shooting. She thought the low voice sounded like it belonged to a black man, although “it could have been somebody with a Southern twang accent.” It was not a voice Laurie recognized. Either the killer was someone Laurie did not know or he disguised his voice so he would not be recognized. A Southern accent is one of the easier speech patterns to mimic-even if to a Southerner the effort might be laughable.
A person who wanted Doris dead, or didn’t care if she died, and didn’t care if the kids found her body, would not have made the call. The killer also knew the Hoovers ’ exact address, indicating he was familiar with the location-so familiar that he would have had to live nearby or be a regular visitor to the point of knowing the address. In theory, the killer could have walked outside to get the address or looked at mail lying about to get it, but again, it was unlikely he would do this for any reason except to attempt to save Doris ’s life.
THERE ARE A number of versions of the events of the evening at the Hoovers ’ home prior to the homicide.
The most interesting discrepancy, reported by the other sisters, involved an older sister, Debbie, who was married and did not live in the residence, and Debbie’s friend Carl Barlow, who sometimes visited Doris without Debbie, and the issue of Debbie bringing a dog over to show Doris.
Her sisters say that in the early days of the investigation Debbie said she had been at the house with Carl, showing off her new dog. But when I spoke to her she said that Carl had visited separately before she had arrived that night. Debbie’s sisters also say that Debbie told them that both she and Carl had witnessed Doris arguing with Mickey over the phone. Carl, likewise, seemed to not remember exactly who was where and when. Carl told me that he couldn’t remember if he and Debbie were there together or not that evening.
Also, there was the issue of the argument ensuing on the phone that evening between Mickey and Doris Hoover. Mickey did not remember such an argument that evening.
According to her sisters, Debbie was defensive at the time when questioned about Carl and seemed to be holding back.
Carl, on the other hand, was almost too helpful in his interviews and responses to my e-mails. Although he said he wasn’t extraordinarily close to Doris and the family, he then detailed very intimate moments with them. He seemed eager to help solve the crime and appeared to be fishing for information about the status and progress of the case.
Carl also made odd statements in his interview that led me to believe there was more that he was not telling me.
CARL HAD A thing for Doris and used to take walks with her. They discussed stuff that seemed a little odd for a mother to be discussing with a boy who was close with her daughter and in his early twenties. They were a little bit too intimate.
Doris had seven children, and she had been seriously overweight until shortly before her death, when she enrolled in Weight Watchers and was steadily, purposefully, losing weight.
I think Carl was looking for a mother figure and might have confused her with his sexual needs-he became attracted to her in a none too wholesome way.
Here is what Denise Hoover told me about Carl in an interview:
“Carl Barlow was weird,” she said. “Very quiet-he was my older sister’s age, in his twenties. He was at the house a lot. My mom walked every day and there were times he walked with her. After Mom died we never saw him again. He called her Mom, but all of our friends did.
“A friend thought he had feelings for Mom but it was one-sided,” she continued. “He was there that night. My sister Debbie was there with him, but she says he was already there when she got there. It was around eleven p.m. I don’t know where he lived relative to the house. I think he had a car.”
Laurie told me that when she described the person she saw wiping the girls’ bedroom doorknob that night, Debbie told her that she had first thought of Carl.
When I began my investigation in 2001, I received an e-mail from Carl Barlow that said that he was a good friend to Doris and all of the children. He told me in the e-mail that he had gone by the house the evening that Doris was killed, but had to leave. He found out the next morning about the murder. The police asked him to come down to the station, where he said he “spent about three hours being questioned, having finger prints, palm prints, and pubic samples taken.” But he said that he never heard anything else from the police about that night.
Carl went on to describe the setup of the family room in detail-he said that he understood the person came in through the window in the family room. He said, “There was a couch in front of the window and the window was about 5 to 6 feet up from ground level. The windows were wood frame and not easily opened, they also had storm windows; I don’t remember them ever being open.”
He ended the e-mail by offering to help my investigation in any way he could.
He gave up some interesting information without even being asked; in particular he commented that Mrs. Hoover was unable to have sex. That was kind of an odd thing for a young friend of the family to be discussing with his friend’s mother.
He’s one nobody suspected. He was so unlikely no one had thought of him. It just couldn’t be him. But my review of the evidence raised questions about his possible role.
Now if only I could provide enough evidence to support my hypothesis.
CARL’S INTERVIEWS WITH me sent up many red flags.
“I have my own theory,” Carl told me. “This is way out in left field. I really wondered about Mickey, her husband. Me and him… he was intimidating to me… I had peculiar feelings about him… She couldn’t have sex; maybe it hurt too much.
“It also could be something she just said to me. Like we were a lot like mother and son but a lot more than that. But there was never anything physical between us…
“I didn’t care a whole lot for Debbie’s husband at the time,” Carl added. “Something about him I didn’t care for. He was in the military…
“The windows were always closed and locked. Wood frame windows with a swing lock on the top. And no ladder…would be impossible without a ladder.
“[There was a] double window in the family room and the couch was against the wall under the window. No footprints that I know of. I think one of the younger girls said he left and came back. I don’t know if the girls know if it was the same person… Maybe someone else came to the house and left. That was always something Doris [did] that meant they were in bed. If she was in bed I don’t think the door was open and if someone knocked, she probably wouldn’t hear it. In my younger days, if I was driving by and the lights were off, I wouldn’t stop.
“I couldn’t tell you a whole lot about Mickey.
“At the time I didn’t have a gun, not even an air gun.
“I only know that Doris had a gun. I just took her word that she had one. I know she told me she had one under her pillow or mattress. She always had it there in case she needed it.
“I think back then there was a three-day wait to pick up a pistol.
“I don’t remember the police questioning anyone. I just think it was people there that evening.
“They didn’t ask me to voice the words on the tape.
“For an injury, you would call the firehouse, not the police. I don’t know which one they called. As a matter of fact I did hear that they called Mickey’s station.
“[There were] four different pay phones-one at the corner, one up the street at the shopping center, within a mile or mile and a half or two. Or maybe eight phones. At that time most of them were inside stores. 7-Eleven was probably open all night… No, it was [the] other store-open at least until eleven.
“They asked me where I was at and I said, ‘At Marilyn’s house.’ They just asked what time I got there and what time I left-I arrived at eight p.m. and I left at eight a.m. I don’t know if they checked with Marilyn-[or] even talked with Marilyn.
“I sure hope you get some answers.”
Carl was a friend of the family and spent time alone with Doris, talking about life and taking walks. Without a doubt, he had established a personal relationship with her.
He was extremely familiar with the layout of the house and the address, as he visited quite often. He also knew Doris ’s children and was friendly with some of them.
One of the daughters told me that Carl owned a gun similar to the one used in the crime; however, during my interview with him he said he didn’t own any gun at the time of the murder. He even added, “I didn’t even own an air gun at the time.”
I learned that Carl was unhappy with his relationship with his own mother and commented that Doris filled in as a kinder, older woman who would listen to his problems. A number of Hoover family members believed he might have been infatuated with Doris.
Carl commented that Doris knew things about him that no one, including himself, had told her. This bizarre statement was made more than once.
“I told Doris I would be back later but I never made it back,” he told me.
I wondered why he would be returning at a later time that night and why, if he told her he would come back, he didn’t.
“To me he wasn’t odd,” Debbie told me. “Denise thought [he was]. He was a quiet person. He was very friendly. He would do anything for anybody. He liked me a lot. We dated a couple times in high school. He was good to my kids and husband.
“He was kind of my best friend,” Debbie continued. “I could talk to him about the problems with my dad. Maybe he had a crush on my mom. I know he didn’t think my dad treated her right… Monte, my husband, got a dog from the police department, and [my mother] at one time had raised shepherds. Mom wanted to see him [the night she was killed], so I went over, took the dog. Monte took care of the kids. I was there till midnight or later. I left because she got a phone call from my dad and argued.”
Debbie said she didn’t see Carl that night at the house. Carl couldn’t remember if she was there before or after him. Her sisters Laurie and Denise, however, said that they were there together, and that it was quite late. If they were there together, it would have had to be after eleven. Carl said he was there from seven to seven thirty p.m. and was going to come back later. Did he return after eleven p.m. with or after Debbie? He said he was there at around seven p.m. and told Doris that he would return later but didn’t. But what if he did return? Carl’s alibi was that he was a mile away at the home of his girlfriend, Marilyn, by eight p.m. This conflicted with others’ recollections of him being at the Hoover house late that night.
There seemed to have been a family confrontation that night. But who was involved is unclear. Some reported that Doris had fought with her husband over the phone. Others told of an argument between Doris and Debbie over Debbie leaving her husband (and possibly for Carl). Carl seemed to be involved in some way or another.
Carl brought up the issue of taking his watch over to Doris to have it fixed. This was a watch she gave him, supposedly for graduation. He said, “It never showed up again.” It was highly unlikely that a thief would have chosen to steal Carl’s broken watch. It was more likely he was concerned that the watch was in her purse, evidence perhaps that he had returned that night.
Finally, Carl’s parents lived nearby and this would be the direction the perpetrator would have been heading after leaving the Hoovers ’ house, shown by the crayon marks on the sidewalk the perpetrator left after he stepped on them at the crime scene. There was also a convenience store with a pay phone at the end of the Hoovers ’ street along that same route, the phone the killer used to call the fire station.
LAURIE HOOVER SAID she never completely shook off the nagging fear that her father could have had something to do with her mother’s murder, that maybe he had hired a hit man. It was a feeling that stuck with her over the years.
The police investigation stalled and the survivors waited for years and years for some hope that the case would be reevaluated and a suspect would finally be identified and brought in. A recording of the emergency call disappeared shortly after the murder. And although they hypnotized and polygraphed Laurie, they never interviewed Doris’s eldest daughter, Cathy, who lived across the street, or Debbie, who had been at the house that evening, or Doris ’s two best friends. Nor did they talk to Mickey Hoover’s coworkers. They did question Carl.
“It was screwed up,” Mickey told me in an interview. “One detective had a daughter who was very ill. He didn’t have the time to put into it. Finally, they changed lead detectives. Naturally, I would like to know what happened.
“The police told one of my daughters it was a hit. I didn’t hear it from the police. They never questioned me on the hit theory. They questioned my buddies; they never asked me to take a polygraph.”
By the time of my investigation, the police no longer had any evidence from the case. They gave the Hoover children a number of reasons for this: it “got lost in the chain of command,” “became contaminated,” or was “lost in a warehouse fire.” It didn’t help me that the house where the murder occurred subsequently burned down.
But Debbie-and Carl-appeared to be holding back.
Debbie seemed defensive when we talked about Carl. And, according to Denise, Debbie had been against my being brought in to profile the crime. Was her grief too great and did she not want to dredge up the past, or was there another reason?
Debbie made statements that she and Carl were not romantically involved, yet others believe differently. Carl and Debbie also said that Carl was not romantically involved with Doris, but that also was questionable. What exactly the emotional involvement was among the three of them remains to be discovered.
Mickey, however, fully cooperated in my interview and I found nothing concerning in his answers. He did have questions about Carl, it’s worth noting.
“My wife had befriended Carl as a teenager,” he said. “Carl, it seemed, had a troubled relationship with his parents, and I don’t know whether he was living with them at the time. He never came to the funeral or the funeral home. He said he was at his girlfriend’s and the police never went further. My daughter asked me if [Doris] was having an affair. I hate to think that. She had never had any affairs that I had known of.”
(Incidentally, Carl told me he did attend the funeral and subsequently went with Debbie to put flowers at Doris ’s grave.)
Mickey was willing to be polygraphed, further decreasing any suspicion about his involvement. I still believed it advisable to request the polygraph anyway. This would serve two purposes. One, since he was willing, why not take the opportunity to leave no stone unturned and be sure nothing was overlooked? Should I be dead wrong in my profile, this was a reasonable way to be sure the killer of Doris Hoover didn’t escape attention. Should Mickey have difficulty with the polygraph, then a door of investigation opens. If he passed it without problem and a police interview with him aroused no new suspicions, then Mickey could be dropped low on the suspect list, further narrowing the focus of the investigation to other suspects.
Carl gave me mixed messages about his relationship with Doris and the family. On one hand, he tried to sound nonchalant, like he was just a casual family friend without strong connections to the victim.
Then, during his conversations with me, he made statements suggesting a strong intimacy with the family and Doris in particular. He was eager to be helpful. He didn’t even seem upset that he had been considered a suspect. He said he hoped the police solved this crime and that I should call him anytime, yet he purported to have little information to offer of other possible suspects.
It was my feeling that the crime may have been one of passion, at least what most people call a crime of passion. Crimes of passion are really actions that an individual would not object to carrying out should he be provoked. What causes some folks to feel guilty about these crimes is when the crime goes further than expected. If Carl did it, he might not have planned to kill her; he might only have wanted to scare her, maybe appear desperate to her.
He should have been asked if he ever actually engaged in any sexual conduct with Doris. I believed that they may have had a physical relationship and that Carl was uncomfortable with it. I didn’t buy his assertions that the relationship was just a friendship. He said that Doris couldn’t have sex-how would he know and why should he know? He was confused as to why the police got pubic hair from him when “she couldn’t have sex.” Perhaps he tried with her-consensually or not-and she found it too painful (following a hysterectomy). Perhaps she told him that as a way to fend him off. Either way, it seemed to me he knew too much about this for a daughter’s male friend to know.
He also said Doris knew things about him he had never told anyone. Was he suggesting she was psychic? Regardless of the confused meaning of this, it infers yet more intimacy.
When I completed my profile, in addition to thinking that the police should reexamine Carl, I also concluded that the police should have talked with Debbie. According to her story about when she was at the house and who was there with her, her stories were inconsistent with those of her sisters.
After I handed in my profile to the police, I suggested that they use the Hoovers ’ appearance on the daytime TV show to see if Carl would talk more about the night of the murder. I suggested they give Carl a ring, tell him that tips had been coming in after the show aired (I had gotten some, but unfortunately they were all from psychics), and they now needed to talk with him.
The detective liked the idea.
The prosecutor didn’t.
And nothing was ever done.