I’ll never say that I know what a family who has lost a loved one through violence goes through. I don’t have a family member who was the victim of a horrible crime. No one wants to be that person. I don’t ever want the knock at the door that tells me my child has been murdered.
I have observed the agony families go through and how they never get over it. I have talked with many families of murder or suicide victims and have heard them express their despair over feeling separate from all others, and of being alone. Friends don’t want to hear about it after a while. They get sick of you. Oh, there you go again. They have normal lives. They don’t have killers in their past. They just want to talk about what happened at their son’s baseball game or how their daughter has a new costume for Halloween. They don’t want to think about evil monsters. They don’t understand what you’re talking about or why you’re so obsessed. You become a pariah, a strange being with knowledge that nobody else has and a situation of which nobody else wants to be a part.
Once upon a time, people who were grieving, people who were ill with a terminal disease, people who were struggling with alcohol or drug problems, also felt quite alone. They had to rely on their small circle of family and friends and whatever religious faith they might have. Sometimes they had no one with whom to talk. Now there are support groups for just about every problem, including wonderful groups to help victims of crime and families of murder victims.
I was in a weird, lonely spot of my own, because I was chasing a killer but nobody had killed my child. I went to some support groups for families of murder victims, hoping to find a form of kinship, but I was not really a person who fit the criteria. When I started to speak, I immediately felt my problem was trivial in comparison to what the others in the group were going through. We were all frustrated with the criminal justice system, but when I expressed my feelings about my struggle, I felt like some whiner complaining about heartburn to a group of heart transplant patients. I realized my faux pas, apologized, and never went back.
There are no support groups for people who think someone killed somebody. No support groups for people chasing serial killers or for those who want to become criminal profilers and change the system. I was a victim of sorts, but there was no support group listed in the newspaper that served someone with my “problem.”
I shared many of the same emotional difficulties that families of victims of unsolved murder suffer from: anger, frustration, rage, fear, and desperation. Thoughts about the crime take over one’s life and, worst of all, the thought that one must continually do something about it. One mother of a murder victim told me she hadn’t swum in her backyard pool since her daughter had been killed because the first time she jumped in, guilt overwhelmed her.
“My daughter will never get to swim again,” she told me. “How could I dare enjoy myself while her killer was still out there?”
I thoroughly understood where she was coming from. Police had done nothing to shake my belief that Walt Williams might have killed Anne Kelley. It was hard for me to do things like go to the movies or read the latest best seller-selfish, frivolous stuff; someone might die because I was wasting time in a theater eating popcorn.
I know this sounds a bit egotistical, like I thought I was the only one who could save the world, but what if I was the only one who really did know who killed Anne Kelley? What if it was Walt and he continued to be a free man? That knowledge dumped a load of responsibility on me and I couldn’t just walk away from it.
So there I was. I felt my time should be dedicated almost exclusively toward solving this mystery, developing evidence, doing something. It was stressful, and there was nobody who understood that.
Then there were the people who started telling me that I was nuts, which didn’t help. And the folks who didn’t say anything, but I could see they didn’t get it because they had that look that says, “We must tolerate those who are a bit out there.”
I would be plagued with doubt. I started questioning myself, thinking, “Gee, maybe I am wrong.” Then I would reread my notes and the evidence would get me back on track.
I became obsessed with working this case night and day, and that was a strain on daily life. I still taught my children, of course, and I still went to all the Boys and Girls Clubs games. I still went to the hospital and did sign language interpreting. The minute I walked into the treatment area I changed my expression completely and everybody would say, “What a Pollyanna! You’re always cheerful and always happy.” They had no idea what I was going through, none.
At a certain point, I was exhausted and realized that I didn’t know how to balance my life. Several people suggested I should get some therapy and counseling, which I eventually concluded was a good idea. It might help me get things in place. I went to a counselor and she immediately thought I was nuts. She suggested medication. I tried to explain the situation as carefully as I could, but the therapist was already pulling out the prescription pad. I didn’t get angry; I just left. I understood exactly what the therapist was thinking upon hearing my crazy-sounding story. I get a lot of those phone calls and e-mails myself, from a lot of people who are nuts, who are psychopaths and attention-seekers.
But once in a while, there is somebody who is telling the truth. I am familiar with the way people communicate and I can usually separate the attention-seekers from those I think are being honest. The ones who are telling the truth I do contact, and I talk with them and work with them. They can’t believe someone professional is willing to give them the time of day instead of telling them to “seek psychiatric help.”
I tried counseling three different times, and then I gave up. That first therapist wanted to put me on antipsychotic drugs of some sort. The second one wanted to hear the cool story and then put me on medication. And the third one told me that she was going to have to take calls during my appointment. “During my appointment?” I objected in disbelief, since I was paying for the damn thing.
The psychotherapist looked at me blankly, apparently failing to see the problem. “Well, some of these people could be suicidal.”
“And some of these people sitting in your office could be homicidal,” I muttered to myself, wishing I could have carried a weapon. Then I just shook my head, walked out, and laughed all the way home. At least the absurdity of it all was good medicine.
A few days later, I called a hotline myself, the one my health care provider offers for online advice, mostly to complain that the whole mental health system sucked along with the criminal justice system; I was in a bit of a foul mood. I told the nurse who answered, “I am so frustrated with the system because I see I can’t get anywhere with it!”
She actually listened to an abbreviated version of my story and didn’t tell me I was nuts. She said, “You’re fighting to do the right thing, what any good citizen should do. Don’t even bother with any mental health therapist. They will only give you drugs. I think your biggest problem is that you are overfocused on one case. You keep picking at that same gnarled knot and if you don’t see any progress with it you have no other easier knot to work with or distract your mind. Why don’t you develop more cases?”
People talk about the “Aha!” or lightbulb moment in their lives when a truth becomes self-apparent, that point when they go, “Of course! That’s what I should do!” And I probably owe the rest of my career in part to the advice of that hotline nurse. Wherever you are, I thank you.
DURING THE YEARS I waited for the police to act, I became a regular reader of my local newspaper, The Washington Post, and I learned that Anne Kelley’s death was not unusual at all.
My original view that this was an anomaly or some freaky circumstance proved to be the height of naïveté. There were dead women turning up all over the Washington, D.C., and Maryland metro area.
In Washington, D.C., alone there were 123 unsolved murders of black females between 1986 and 1996; add in women of other races and female victims killed over the borders of the city in the neighboring states and God knows how many women have been murdered in the area over recent years. If we add in sexual homicides of men and children, the number grows even larger.
Who killed Nia Owens, Dana Chisholm, and Ann Bourghesani? Who murdered Chandra Levy, Joyce Chang, and Christine Mirzayan? Could criminal profiling link any of these cases? Were these murders the work of a serial killer?
How many killers were really out there, living in our neighborhoods, blending in among us, and committing heinous crimes with little fear of being apprehended?
Why had all of these cases remained unsolved?
Dead women were turning up everywhere. It’s like when you’re pregnant and suddenly you notice how many other women are pregnant.
What freaked me out was that not only were there so many dead women, there were no arrests made on a good many of these cases, particularly on the homicides that were clearly serial murders. A woman doesn’t usually end up strangled and naked in the bushes because she had a bad boyfriend. And even if one woman had a boyfriend who raped and murdered her, it’s hard to believe each one of these dead women had a separate rapist for a boyfriend. I didn’t think so. All indicators pointed to serial killers.
I realized that the Anne Kelley case wasn’t an island unto itself. But it was the only knot I was picking on, trying to loosen up a lead, make a bit of progress, and it was driving me nuts. Why don’t you get some more knots? I asked myself.
That advice was brilliant. Without knowing it, it was precisely what I needed to hear. Many victims of crime find that if they can put their knowledge to use and help someone, maybe the unfortunate event that fate brought them wasn’t all for naught. That’s when I first got the inkling that while I may never solve the Kelley case, there are plenty of unsolved murders out there. Who committed those?
I printed out what pictures I could find of female victims of unsolved homicides in my county, and I rented a booth at an outdoor festival. I laminated all the pictures and hung them up in a big circle around the table. Under each, I wrote, “Unsolved.”
People would walk up and their mouths would fall open.
“These are all unsolved in Prince Georges County?”
“Yes,” I’d say.
“You mean nobody was ever caught?”
They’d recognize a picture of Lisa Young, because their daughter had known her at school or because they were in town when the crime occurred.
“Didn’t the police ever catch Lisa Young’s murderer?”
I’d just shake my head.
Then they would point to another photo.
“They never caught that killer either?”
“Oh, my God,” I heard over and over again. “I thought these murders were solved.”
The pictures I selected represented just fifteen unsolved cases, less than 10 percent of female victims of homicide in my area over the last two decades. I realized that I should have been trying to get ten guys off the street, not just one. And the problem wasn’t that one police department had made an error or that one political decision made by county executives was irresponsible or that one prosecutor was more concerned with his win record than public safety. There was an epidemic throughout our country of sexual homicides and we were obviously not getting these cases solved. Police departments might say, “We have an 80 percent closure rate,” but in reality they had a high rate of case closure when the suspect was connected in some way to the victim; the closure rate for stranger homicides was abysmally low.
I estimated that the actual closure rate for serial homicides was 5 percent or less. If you want to get away with a crime in this country, serial homicide is your best bet.
My efforts at more knots began with Citizens for Case Closure (CCC), an organization I started with the concept of bringing all victims’ organizations together to fight for increased case closure, with citizens having rights within their communities to hold police and prosecutors accountable for unsolved cases. But it didn’t work. I couldn’t drum up enough interest. It was a frustrating beginning in the field of criminal justice.
I realized my message wasn’t getting through after an article about me appeared in the local newspaper, in which I stated my belief that law enforcement hadn’t done its job in the Anne Kelley case.
I wanted the story to be about police and citizen accountability and how cases like that of Anne Kelley were being swept under the rug, the police refusing to allow the public to know what really had happened and the public apparently not caring to know. A newspaper reporter came to my house and interviewed me. But when the story came out, almost nothing was mentioned about the police and prosecutorial problems in the Kelley case and how there needed to be more accountability. The headline read “Local Homemaker Starts Victims’ Rights Organization,” and it was a sappy human interest story about a nice lady who wanted to help families who had loved ones with unsolved cases and wasn’t I dedicated and caring?
The story made it sound like a very personal campaign, but that wasn’t what I was trying to say. I didn’t want the story or CCC to be about Pat Brown. I wanted it to be about political issues and criminal justice. But the newspaper didn’t see it that way and subsequently, neither did the community where I lived. The reporter wanted to tell a nice story about a local homemaker, but it undermined the serious work I was attempting.
I gave up on CCC and decided to try another approach.
By that time, I had met many victims of crimes, and I started applying my growing knowledge to their cases. That provided a tremendous release. If I couldn’t get Walt put away, maybe I could make a difference in the long run. I could help identify other likely killers, or maybe I could change the system so that this didn’t continually happen.
WHILE I WAS trying to figure out how to make an impact in cold case closure, I ran a short seminar aimed at teaching women that self-defense doesn’t work for us.
There had been a rape in the area, and a number of frightened women rushed to get training at the University of Maryland. I attended one of the classes and was appalled by what I saw. There were guys dressed up in big, fat, red insulated suits. The men in these suits were supposed to come at the women and go “Arrrrr!” and the women were supposed to defend themselves. The instructors taught women how to punch and kick and break out of basic holds.
I had practiced martial arts-tae kwon do-and I was pretty good at it. I watched these women throw punches, and I thought, “Oh, my God, they’re going to break their wrists!” They always had their wrists cocked downward in a horrible girly position.
“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” I said to the teacher and class. “You are out on a bike path, and a guy the size of Mike Tyson pops up from behind the bushes. You go, ‘Yeahhhh!’ and attack him with a little punch you learned in your self-defense class, with your little crooked hand?”
It sounded truly ridiculous just saying it out loud.
First of all, you will break your wrist. Then he will kill you. You’ll be dead and the police will wonder how you broke your wrist along the way. Maybe you’ll try a kick. Kicks are hard to execute well. Say you want to do a snap-front kick and nail your attacker in the groin. They teach this kind of kick in self-defense classes and you will practice it a few times. To do the kick correctly, you have to get in the proper position, raise your front knee, get your hip behind the kick for power, and then apply your foot to the target with a fast strike. If your attacker is kind enough to stand in front of you until you get your kick in action, you will still probably miss his vital points and softly scuff his thigh. Then he will crush you.
It gets even more amusing if you are in heels.
I went home that night and I said to Tony, “Grab my right arm as hard as you can.” He grabbed it and I was immediately kneeling on the floor in agony. I couldn’t move my hand. I couldn’t get out of that grip if I tried. And he was just doing what I asked. He hadn’t snuck up on me from out of the shadows.
Classes like those give women a false sense of confidence. They feel it’s safe to walk down a dark street or alley or into a deserted parking garage because they think they actually can beat people up after three hours of “training.” They can’t. So I started my own program and taught courses on how you couldn’t survive one of these things.
“You’re walking along and suddenly you’re hit on the top of the head. What are you going to do for self-defense?”
One of the women inevitably said, “Well, I’m kind of unconscious.”
“That is a problem, isn’t it?”
My first objective of the class was to knock down self-defense misconceptions. There is no sense signing up for a fight with a heavyweight when you are only a lightweight. I also advised women that if they really wanted to learn how to fight off an attacker they would have to study martial arts or boxing for years. They still will lose against most attackers, the ones who jump out and nail you before you can react, or the ones who are simply too big for you to do anything about. But it is possible that one truly good punch or kick might give you a chance to run like hell.
Once I got through to the women that fighting off an attacker was not likely to have a good ending, I taught them how to think smart and keep from becoming a victim in the first place.
A local television station did a news segment on my program. It was one of my first television appearances and I quickly discovered the power of TV. People paid attention to what I had to say because they saw me on television.
It also framed the real challenge before me: I was a forty-plus housewife with a liberal arts degree trying to tackle crime investigation and justice issues, a totally unorthodox, self-trained crime analyst who hadn’t worked her way up in the field coming out of college. Who was going to listen to Pat Brown, homemaker, sign language interpreter, female, self-made profiler? How could I possibly accomplish the changes that I wanted to make in a male-dominated profession if I persisted in being the lady the media presented as simply a volunteer do-gooder? Women still struggle for respect outside the traditional roles for females and I was stepping into that daunting, mostly male arena. The wall seemed impossibly high to climb.
I realized that since I was over forty, I wasn’t going to get in on the ground floor and work my way up through the FBI. And I wasn’t going to get in on the ground floor with some other law enforcement organization either. So I made my own way. I didn’t have the luxury of time. And I already knew what I wanted to do: profile.
How could I get to the point where somebody would start listening to me and I could start affecting how profiling is used and how serial homicide investigations are conducted? What could I do to communicate with law enforcement and be taken as a serious professional and not as a bored housewife?
I consciously decided that I could achieve my goals if the media liked me and viewed me as a credible resource; then I could use the media to promote the advantages and art of criminal profiling. I set out to become a recognized name in the profiling field, not just locally but across the United States.
I also promised myself that when I was on television, I would always tell the truth. I would speak my mind, even when doing so was risky and might put me at odds with certain individuals or groups. Occasionally, I have been criticized, but it hasn’t stifled my beliefs or my voice.
I was still rather insecure, however, and received no outside support. I started with no idea of how to do these things. Not a clue. Could I actually work with police departments in far-flung areas of the country? Could I actually appear on television and speak my mind convincingly?
These were not activities in my comfort zone. I was familiar with my home. I was comfortable with curling up on the sofa with one of my babies. I was at ease doing sign language and interpreting for strangers in their time of need. I needed to convince myself anything was possible, and that I could do the impossible.
I also discovered that I had to become a businesswoman. But I had never run anything in my life. I didn’t run any clubs in school; I never even joined any. I wasn’t the cheerleader type. This was like shooting myself into space and having no idea how powerful the rocket strapped to my back would be, where I would land, or how I would ever get back to earth. But I learned what I needed to know to get where I wanted to go.
I am still a pretty terrible businesswoman, though, when it comes to victims and casework; I speak to victims for hours sometimes. I give them information and advice and don’t charge them. I would make a lousy lawyer. I also still do pro bono work and pay for all the expenses out of my own pocket. I learn a lot and I provide a good service, but I have been told that no one works for free, so why am I doing that? I don’t know. I guess it’s because I think the work needs to be done.
LIFE AFTER MURDER becomes a life possessed. Victims of violent crime can’t think of anything else. They want to learn who killed their loved one. That’s all they want to do. They don’t want to go to the movies, they don’t want to go to a birthday party, and they don’t want to read a stupid book. They just want to know who killed their daughter.
Unfortunately, their other children suffer. “Why don’t you care about me, Mommy?” And it isn’t that she doesn’t, but Mom just can’t think about anything else. Senseless murder weighs on one’s mind.
I’ve developed a methodology for those victims. I say to them, “In order to fight another day, you have to be mentally and physically healthy, or you are going to fail in your job to find your daughter’s killer. Get a box, a figurative box, put a bow around it, and imagine your daughter is in there. Your memories of her, the whole murder and everything else, are safe in that box. When you get up in the morning, take that box down from the shelf, and talk to your daughter. Say, ‘I’m going to be working on your case this afternoon at three.’ Then put the box back on the shelf, and do what you have to do. When you’re feeling unhealthy, take the box down, and say, ‘Honey, I’m going to go to the movies and laugh for a while. I need a little pressure off me so I can go find your killer.’”
I learned to do this myself. Finally.
THERE WAS A six-year gap from the day I turned in my information on Williams until the day he was finally considered a suspect. During that time I developed my skills to do criminal profiling. I trained myself, which has always been a major issue for a lot of people who say, “How dare you?” and “What makes you qualified?”
I hung up a shingle and called myself a profiler, and I’ve received a tremendous amount of flak for doing so. In the beginning it wasn’t even the purpose of my studies, but now that I had learned so much, profiling became my focus. I started a new organization, the Sexual Homicide Exchange (SHE), and this one would leave behind the political fight to push accountability and instead offer profiling services and police training and work to transform serial homicide investigations. This organization worked.
FOR A WOMAN who needed to become well known so she could make solid changes in cold cases throughout the nation, there was nothing like the one-two knockout punch of the Internet and cable television.
When the D.C. sniper case exploded in October 2002, it was the first of its kind, a killer or killers driving around the Washington, D.C., area, shooting people at random. Someone was shot at a bus stop, another at a gas station, a third while walking down the street. People throughout our area were afraid to go out in public to do everyday tasks such as pumping gasoline into their cars and trucks. The TV news media went into a frenzy seeking out experts for comments and opinions.
We got our first computer when my son, David, wanted to use one for schoolwork. It’s hard to remember when the Internet was so new, but David told me I ought to get an e-mail address and I actually asked him why. It seems laughable now. I wouldn’t be here today without the Internet. When I incorporated SHE as a nonprofit in 1996, I hired a Web designer and put together my first business Web site. When the D.C. sniper started shooting up the area, producers from cable television tossed “criminal profiler” into the search engine and they found me. I got my big break in television. During this random assault on Washington, I turned up on television for as many as eighteen hours a day. It was a crazy time, and I could be seen on every imaginable local broadcast and national cable news network, talking about who the sniper or snipers might be and what motivated their horrific rampage.
On one show, I appeared with a female ex-FBI profiler who said the sniper would be white. Why? “Because there are no black serial killers!” My mouth dropped open, aghast. I certainly couldn’t agree with that view; the perpetrator could be of any race. He-or they-was shooting from a distance. How would I know if they were white, black, Hispanic, male, or even female?
I appeared on a tremendous number of television news and talk programs in a short span of time and, by the time the D.C. snipers-there were two, both African American-were caught, my presence and expertise were established. I received a call from Montel Williams and soon appeared on his show. Then the phone started ringing off the hook. Desperate families contacted me as word got out that I worked pro bono; suddenly I was profiling for families and police departments.
My caseload increased more dramatically and rapidly than it ever would have if I hadn’t gone on television and if I charged a lot of money and nobody knew who I was.
In the old days, the only way to be a profiler was to be in the FBI. Police departments didn’t hire profilers. They didn’t have any money for that. Local law enforcement brought FBI profilers in to work on only the most extraordinary, perplexing cases. But, because of my presence on television and the Internet, I was approached by law enforcement from across the United States as well as families who saw me on television and hoped I could revitalize a cold case stuffed in a drawer in the file room of a local police department.
Television instantly awarded me more clout with detectives because they could hear for themselves what I had to say about cases and how I analyzed them.
My husband was wrong. I was becoming exactly the professional I swore that I would be-although, I have to admit, for all the declaring I did that I would succeed, I can’t quite believe things worked out as well as they have.