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Criminal profiler opens her files

In “The Profiler,” Pat Brown opens her case files to take readers behind the scenes of bizarre sex crimes, domestic murders, and mysterious deaths, going face-to-face with killers, rapists, and brutalized victims. It's a rare, up-close, first-person look at the real world of police and profilers as they investigate crimes.
/ Source: TODAY books

In “The Profiler,” Pat Brown opens her case files to take readers behind the scenes of bizarre sex crimes, domestic murders, and mysterious deaths, going face-to-face with killers, rapists, and brutalized victims. It's a rare, up-close, first-person look at the real world of police and profilers as they investigate crimes. Here's an excerpt:
Chapter 1
No one had ever been murdered in my town.

The community’s first house—my house—was built in the 1700s on rolling Maryland farmland. Many interesting things happened here over the centuries, but the town had never experienced a violent homicide.

Anne Kelley, a brilliant government intern from the Midwest, would have the unfortunate honor of being the first.

I was out of town until Sunday. When I returned that morning, I was at home for only a few minutes when the horrific news reached me. The phone rang and it was my best friend, Terry, who lived just a couple blocks away.

“Did you hear?” she asked, incredulously, dismay in her voice.

“Hear what?” When I had taken the turn onto Sixtieth Street, nothing seemed out of place. There were no fire trucks or ambulances on the street. The town appeared serene. The only activity was a slight breeze, which hardly affected the oppressiveness of the heat on that early sultry summer day, the third of June.

“A young woman was found murdered in the stream by the softball field.”

“WHAT?”

“Oh, it’s just awful. One of the men playing softball in the league game this morning chased a ball across the path into the water and found a woman’s naked body floating right at the edge.”

I felt sick. My first thought was that it might be someone I knew, an area resident, a friend, or the mother of one of the local children.

I took a deep breath. “Do they know who she is?”

“No, not yet. I heard she was young, maybe in her late teens or twenties. They found her clothes and a Walkman; it seems she was jogging. The police figure she was killed yesterday, probably at dusk, because no one saw her there during the daylight. She doesn’t seem to be a town resident.”

It was a tiny relief to hope she was not someone I knew.

I hung up the phone with a nagging, uneasy feeling that I was somehow more connected to this situation than I should be. For a minute, I placated myself with the idea that it was just the shock of hearing about such a tragedy that made me feel this way. Or maybe it was the fact that this gruesome murder happened right at the ball field where I spent so many happy hours cheering on my son and his baseball team. But it wasn’t that kind of feeling; it was something more eerie. Something was not quite right in the house; a malignant spirit was residing with us now, and it wasn’t the ghost previous residents claimed they had seen on the third-floor landing. I made lunch for my kids and tried to distract myself. The children ate their sandwiches and went out to play. As I put the dishes in the sink, our latest boarder, Walt Williams, came down the stairs from his room into the kitchen. The feeling of anxiety increased.

Walt. It has something to do with Walt.

Years later, I would dig out the picture of Walt Williams that I had once shown to the police and stare at it. It was the photo I took on a church trip to Six Flags in the suburbs of Maryland just outside of Washington, D.C. The snapshot was dated May 13, 1990. Walt, a twenty-four-year-old African American, was dressed in blue-checked shorts and a white, short-sleeved Tshirt. He was holding the hand of an adoring, giggly prepubescent girl who looked to have a crush on him. He was grinning smugly, looking away from the girl, his chin up in the air. He seemed either arrogant or goofy, depending on how you read the picture, with his boyish face and slight pudginess.

My children were in the picture, too, which made me cringe a bit; my eight-year-old daughter, Jennifer, with her frizzed-out, flyaway hair, courtesy of the gene blend of her blond mother and Jamaican father, and my son, David, age six, who looks rather Hispanic, causing Latinos to state matter-of-factly, “Oh, your husband is from Mexico!”

Walt, our new renter of one week, made the trip to the amusement park rather reluctantly. Although he expressed initial enthusiasm when asked to help chaperone the church teens, that morning when my husband, Tony, and I were ready to depart, he made himself scarce. He had not come down for breakfast nor had I seen him in the hallway.

“Walt?” I called up to his room above the kitchen. “Are you coming?”

“Oh.” I heard a muffled voice through the door. “I was sleeping.”

I was not one to let people who had made a commitment off that easily.

“Well, hurry up. We leave in ten minutes. We’re waiting on you.”

My husband rolled his eyes. He hadn’t been enthusiastic about Walt’s moving in, but it was that or take on a second job to pay the bills. He never liked the idea of anyone living in the house who wasn’t family, but he tolerated our cash-paying international students. Tony was more uncomfortable with the idea of Walt living with us because he thought a working man of his age shouldn’t have to rent a room. He also thought Walt was way too old to be obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and comic books.

“Well, he is kind of immature,” I offered during our discussion of the new boarder, the present beau of my girlfriend Kim. A few weeks earlier, Walt had applied for a mail room job at her company, and she was the person in human resources who reviewed his application and hired him. Now she was dating him and she asked if we would rent him a room. Walt was looking for a new place to live; he wanted to attend our church and be closer to Kim’s home. Kim was a soft touch, the kind of woman who always tried to help people improve their lives. She told us he didn’t do drugs, didn’t drink alcohol, and didn’t smoke. He was honorably discharged from the air force and had a good work record. We really needed the income from the rental room, as I was a stay-at-home mom, so I agreed to go ahead and interview him. He came across as a pleasant enough fellow, and because my husband and I were in the process of adopting Jeremy, a six-year-old boy from the Delaware foster care system, we also had to have Walt fingerprinted at the local police station. He consented without any hesitation, so we decided to let him move in.

“He’s weird,” Tony said a few days later. “He doesn’t talk with a guy the way guys talk with each other. Actually, I think he avoids me.” I had to agree with Tony that Walt wasn’t a “guy’s guy,” the kind who gets along in groups of males, drinking beer, talking sports, and going golfing or fishing together. He was more of the gamer type. Walt was different from the majority of men his age, but this was one reason I was willing to give him a chance. Rather than being into partying, bars, and one-night stands, Walt had come across as more of a religious sort with strong morals—kind of a Boy Scout. The other reason I may have convinced myself not to be too hard on him was that since fingerprinting became a requirement for any new tenants, our Chinese graduate student applicants found the required trip to the police station too strange and they vanished. We needed money, the room was empty, and beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, I figured many people were a little “different,” but that didn’t make them bad. My friend Kim liked him, and she was levelheaded.

The day at Six Flags was lots of fun for the teens, but when I looked around, we seemed to be one chaperone down. Walt had vanished.

“Have you seen Walt?” I asked Tony.

“Nope.”

We decided to do a quick tour of the park, but we never came across him. None of the other chaperones from the church had seen him either.

Twenty minutes before our planned departure time from the park, Walt suddenly popped up near the exit. Speechless, Tony and I could only stare at the apparition in front of us.

Walt now stood before us dressed in long black pants, a black see-through net shirt, and a black headband. From his left ear dangled a silver skull earring. His hands were encased in fingerless black gloves. He looked completely inappropriate for a teen church outing, creepy even, and the fact that he had disappeared and exchanged one outfit for another was unnerving.

I lacked the courage at that time to question Walt extensively to get to the bottom of his strange behavior. Instead, I only asked, “Where were you all this time?” He just smiled, swung his backpack up over his shoulder, and ignored the question as two giggling church girls ran up to him, grabbing his arms.

Tony and I gave each other a “What is up with this guy?” look. Then we shook our heads, gathered the kids, and headed to the van. Driving out of the parking lot, I pulled down the sun visor on the passenger side to “check my hair” and glanced at Walt’s reflection in the mirror. He sat with his arms crossed, immobile, between Jennifer and David in the backseat, ignoring their discussion of the rides. He had disconnected from the rest of us in the vehicle, his eyes shaded by the dark sunglasses. There was definitely something not quite right about this guy.

Unfortunately, he was now living in my house and he had rights. The law does not permit homeowners to protect their families by evicting renters just because they feel they are a bit peculiar. I couldn’t evict someone without cause and Walt had not broken any house rules. I told myself that I was focusing too much on his quirks instead of his attributes. Walt was friendly, often quite chatty, and he wasn’t a complainer. We actually had some things in common; we both had studied karate, we both wrote fiction, and we both liked going to the movies. We enjoyed a number of pleasant conversations and Walt was never rude toward anyone in the family. He had not acted inappropriately with the children and they were never alone with him anyway, so this was not an issue. I figured I would just keep an eye on him, and if he sent up any real red flags, we would ask him to move on, giving him the proper notice the law required.

I didn’t make a special project of analyzing Walt’s behaviors and thinking patterns; I didn’t have to.

Over the two weeks after the church outing, more and more negative aspects of his personality came to light. I would later learn these characteristics were often representative of psychopathic traits. If Walt had kept to himself, I might never have interacted enough with him to have formed any opinion of his character, but because he was a gregarious sort, he liked to talk and did so almost every time he saw me. Worrisome mannerisms and behaviors kept appearing.

Walt liked telling stories about incredible things that had happened to him.

“I actually left the military early,” he told me one day as he was getting himself a bowl of Cheerios.

“Really? Why? What happened?”

“Well, I was in Grenada for the operation the United States conducted down there.” He poured milk on the cereal.

Grenada? I could hardly remember the conflict.

“It was wrong, us invading them. So I asked to leave the air force and they let me go.” He made it sound like such cooperation by the military was a regular occurrence. Walt gazed past me as if he wasn’t expecting a response.

“They just let you go?” I asked. “I didn’t think they let anyone go just because they decided military life wasn’t a joy ride.”

Walt acted as though I hadn’t commented and he changed the subject.

“They just hired some new girl to work in our mail room. She’s pretty cute.”

The next day he stepped into the kitchen while I was preparing dinner and offered a new explanation for his separation from the air force.

“Actually, I left the military because I had to shoot a bunch of the Grenadians and it really depressed me. I don’t like violence.” I raised an eyebrow, but he abruptly turned and left before I could ask questions again. I found his stated dislike of violence rather ironic considering he was obsessed with Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and watched The Running Man again and again during the short time he lived in my house. He liked to pretend to be Arnold as well.

“I’ll be back!” he would announce, striking a pose, hands on his hips and head turned sideways.

A week later, he had a new ending to the story.

“I got shot in the leg and that’s why the air force released me,” he told me. He seemed to be searching for an explanation that I would actually believe.

“Oh, I see,” I said, and I didn’t push for further information. My acceptance of this version seemed to end his need to talk to me about his short military career.

Though Walt professed a desire to avoid violence, he appeared to have problems with violence finding him. One night, he told me that he was attacked on the way home by a knife-wielding stranger who stabbed him in the thigh. He claimed he had been jumped while walking down the bike path that ran the two miles between Kim’s house and mine—he carpooled with her from work to her place and then covered the remainder of the route home on foot. Walt told me he had already sewn up the cut himself. I glanced down at his upper leg but he was wearing jeans that covered the “damaged” area. I saw no rip in the cloth and wondered about the veracity of this story, which didn’t quite ring true.

“Why did he attack you?” I asked, skeptical.

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” Then he went back to his room.

A few days later, Walt claimed he had been assaulted again, this time by a homeless man at a bus shelter. He said he was forced to punch the man. By the end of the week, another tale: he subdued a man who wanted to fight him in a bar. I commented rather dryly that my husband had never experienced all this criminal behavior; that Walt, at five eleven and 220 pounds, should have been less of a target for assault than Tony, who had the smaller build of a West Indian soccer player.

There were other odd stories. On my only visit to Walt’s room since he moved in, I noticed a framed photograph of a lovely young girl displayed on his nightstand. She wore a black graduation gown and a gold chain with a cross hung around her neck. Clearly, the photo was a high school yearbook picture.

“Who’s the pretty girl?” I asked.

Walt sighed.

“She was my high school love, Tiffany. We were going to get married, but on prom night, while I was waiting for her to show up at the dance, she got into a traffic accident. Her car was hit by a truck and she got decapitated.”

He looked at me sadly; then he added, “That’s why I haven’t had sex since.”

After quickly picturing the headless girl in my mind, my next thought was that this man had not had sex since he was seventeen years old. I counted the years, seven of them. And he had been a military man, albeit for a short period of time. I found the likelihood of this self-imposed celibacy hard to swallow, especially since I had come to realize he was not particularly religious (in spite of his recent church attendance) and he talked often about how women were always coming on to him, calling them “sluts,” “bitches,” and “whores.” He even commented that a number of women he had gone out with weren’t interested in sex with him because they were closet lesbians.

He had other peculiarities. The all-black clothing Walt had changed into while at the amusement park had become his regular uniform. When he came home from work, he would morph into his “costume” and disappear out of the house for hours, returning home long after dark. He relished stalking about at night pretending he was a ninja.

“I’m the Avenger!” he informed me, clearly envisioning himself as an invincible gladiator, some superhero straight out of the comic books he loved. I soon discovered he knew nothing of karate outside of making “HA!” noises and striking a stance with bent knees, a fist, and a knife hand. He was like a child who never grew up.

It was during the third week of his stay in my home that Kim told me she was considering breaking off her romantic relationship with Walt.

“He’s beginning to really creep me out,” she confided. “He makes people at work uncomfortable with his bizarre behavior and his ridiculous stories, which none of us think are true. He avoids doing work and makes excuses for not getting tasks accomplished. He usually blames someone else for his poor work performance. Some of the women think he’s stalking them.” She reached into her pocketbook, pulled out a ring with some kind of jewel in it, and shoved it at me. “He told me he bought this to celebrate our one-month anniversary and that it cost him over a thousand dollars! Supposedly he has to make payments on the ring for the next six months!” She grimaced. “I was mortified that he had spent so much money on a present for me when we had been dating only a few weeks. I tried to refuse to accept it, but Walt acted all insulted and insisted I take it. As soon as he left, I began thinking that maybe he was lying about the cost of the ring, that it was really a piece of costume jewelry.”

I looked at the ring, but I was no expert. Save my engagement and wedding rings, I never wore any jewelry in those days.

Kim continued. “I took the ring to a store to get it appraised. The jeweler told me it was definitely not real and probably worth about fifty dollars.” She shook her head. “I have to get away from him. I am going to tell him I don’t want to continue dating when I see him on Saturday.”

As she left the house, she turned and apologized to me. “Sorry I pushed you into renting to him.”

I told her not to worry. Everything would work out just fine.

Little did I know how my life would change.

That night, after tucking in the children, I lay in bed with Tony, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. I felt pretty much like Kim and her coworkers.

“Tony,” I said, “we need to give Walt notice on the first of July. I don’t think I want this guy in our house any longer than he needs to be here.”

Tony surprised me by arguing against getting rid of him. “Why? What has he done? We’ll lose the rent money if we evict him and we probably won’t be able to find someone else to take the room.” Even though Tony was not exactly fond of Walt, the pain of losing the income was now apparently worse than putting up with his strange behavior.

I struggled to explain. “I think there’s something wrong with him. I don’t think it’s wise to have him around.”

Tony grunted. “I think you’re exaggerating things.” He turned over and went to sleep.

Maybe he was right. I wasn’t a psychologist. I wasn’t trained to diagnose mental disorders. Walt hadn’t done anything or said anything that was threatening or scary. I probably had overstated his eccentricities. I would attempt to see the positive side of him and not judge him so harshly.

The next few days went by without incident and I was feeling better. Okay, nothing to worry about after all.

On Thursday night, Walt came downstairs and handed me a sheaf of papers, stapled together at the corner.

“My new short story,” he said proudly. “I’m going to try to get it published. Maybe you can tell me where to send it.” I was a published author, if just once, having been paid one hundred dollars for my submission to Humor magazine, a short-lived publication.

I looked down at the single-spaced typewritten material. At the top of the first page was the title, “My Silent Enemy,” and underneath it, “by Walt Williams.”

Walt retreated to his room and I sat down on the couch and started reading. His composition quickly made my skin crawl. The story was about a man with two personalities. One was an avenger stalking “filth and vermin” in the local park—“his slayground.” The second was a frightened man walking through the dark in the same park, hearing footsteps coming behind him. When he turns quickly to see who is following him, he sees no one. Then he wrote, “Death wore my face. Death used my name. I was my silent enemy.”

All my thoughts about something being wrong with Walt rushed back to me with a vengeance as I read his work. I never did discuss it with him. I kept the story and one copy of it eventually ended up in police evidence. I didn’t realize then that this tale was to be a harbinger of the events to come just a few days later.

Walt had now been living in my house for nearly three weeks. On Saturday, the day Kim planned to have her talk with him, I took the kids to Virginia to spend the day and night with a friend of mine who had children of the same age. When I got back the next day, I planned to call Kim to see how her talk with Walt went.

Then, on Sunday morning, I got the phone call about the homicide.

The news of the murder still ringing in my head, I stared at Walt standing in front of me.

“Hey! Hey!” He grinned. “I’m going off hiking with the church.”

I looked at his clothing. He wasn’t wearing his usual daytime outfit of shorts and a summer shirt. Instead, he was in blue jeans and a long-sleeved dress shirt, which seemed overdressed for the hot June day. Maybe he was protecting himself from thorns and branches, I reasoned.

I looked him in the eye. “Say, did you hear about the murder on the bike path that happened last night?”

“Yeah, I heard about it.”

“Isn’t that dreadful? The poor girl!”

Walt made no comment.

“Were you on the path yesterday?” I tried to make it sound like I was kidding him a bit.

Walt looked away, crossed his arms, and then looked back at me with a cold stare. “Yeah, but I cut across the stream behind the bowling alley on Kenilworth Avenue and got my feet wet.”

Then he turned abruptly and left the room.

I tried to process what I had just heard. Did he admit he was on the path yesterday? Did he actually claim he left the path and waded through the water to cut over to a road that would take him out of his way and make his walk longer? Did he really say he was in the same stream where the body was found? Did he really seem to have no reaction to the grisly murder, show no compassion for the victim, or even be spooked about the fact that she was murdered on a path he walked daily? Wasn’t he worried he could become a suspect or could have been another victim? Yet he didn’t seem to be fazed by the event or his proximity to it.

It was a long day of stewing and gnawing doubts. Could it be?

Nah, come on, it couldn’t be. Okay, he is weird, very weird, and he has issues. This doesn’t make him a killer. Of course, there was that story about the “slayground.” Could he have been hunting “filth and vermin,” “sluts and bitches,” acting out his Avenger character? No, you are overreaching. Stop it.

In the evening, Walt returned to the house and went up to his room. An hour later, Kim called.

“Can you go check on Walt for me?” she asked.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

She gave me a quick rundown of her talk with him during his visit to her home on Saturday afternoon. “I told him I wasn’t ready for a committed relationship and would prefer to be friends. I tried to give him back the ring and he got very upset. He huffed out of the house.”

I held my breath and then asked what time he had left.

“Early evening, about seven p.m.”

I felt a moment of relief that he hadn’t left later, closer to nightfall. Good, if he walked directly back to the house he would have already been home before the murder went down. Then the unfortunate thought came to me that maybe he didn’t come directly back. Maybe he stopped at a store, or hung around near Kim’s house awhile, thinking about going back and trying to talk her into giving him another chance.

“Anyway,” Kim went on, “I thought I should call him to be nice and make sure he was all right, but when I was talking to him just now, he sounded really disturbed. I asked him if he was all right and he didn’t answer. I thought he might be suicidal because he told me he tried to commit suicide before. I asked if he was going to do anything bad and he said, ‘You don’t know what I’ve already done.’?”

I felt the room reel just a little. The early feelings of unease returned with the force of a hammer. Oh, please, do not let this be true.

“Can you check on him?”

I made myself sound calm. “Sure.”

I knocked on the door and called to Walt. “Hey, everything all right up there? Kim is a little worried about you.”

He answered in a chipper voice. “Sure, I’m fine.”

I went back to Kim. “He’s fine.” I felt I sounded a bit sarcastic, as my attitude toward Walt was definitely going downhill.

Kim breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, good. I would hate to think I pushed him over the edge. Okay, thanks, I’ll catch you later.”

I couldn’t tell her my thoughts. I didn’t want to burden her right then. And I didn’t want to sound nuts. I didn’t know what the heck I was really thinking, or what I should do. What if Walt really was a psychopath, a rapist, a serial killer? I wanted to believe I was wrong, and I told myself I was.

I put the children to bed and went to lie down myself. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about the innocent girl lying in the water, naked and still. I felt ill and I felt guilty. I should do something. What if she were my child? How would I react if I thought a citizen was hanging on to information about who might have killed her? For God’s sake, I would scream, “Go to the police!” I thought about my safety and my children’s safety. I wondered what would happen if he knew I suspected him. Would he come after us, kill us all? I wondered what others would do. Would they decide they didn’t really know anything and convince themselves not to contact the police?

“Tony!”

I slugged my husband in the left arm. “Wake up!”

He rolled over.

“What is it?”

“I think Walt may have killed that girl.”

Tony groaned. “Oh, come on. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“No, I mean it. You don’t like him, you said yourself he’s weird. Well, you were right. He is,” I insisted. “Kim broke up with him on Saturday and he took the path home from her house.”

“So?”

“Tony? Don’t you think it just might be him?”

“Lots of people are on that path. I run on that path. Yeah, Walt is a little bizarre and I don’t like him, but I can’t believe the guy is a murderer.” He rolled back over, away from me. “Go to sleep,” he muttered.

Great. Thanks. Easy for you to do.

Somebody killed that girl. Maybe I was out in left field with my suspicions about Walt, but on the other hand, if I was right, wouldn’t it be better to be safe than sorry? I would rather be a little embarrassed that the killer turned out to be someone else than feel guilty that I let a murderer walk away without even bringing him to the attention of law enforcement. If he was the perpetrator and he killed again, how would I live with myself?

I spent the rest of the night trying to decide how to handle the situation. Do I just go to the police and tell them Walt is some kind of mental case? Do I try to learn more before I do that? Do I search for evidence? This wasn’t a Hollywood movie and no scriptwriter was handing me a sheet with directions for the next scene. I had to go with my gut, and I decided that while Walt was at work, I would review all I knew. Maybe I could get more information on the psychology and behavior of serial killers and see if he even fit the description. Then I could search his room for proof of my theory, for true physical evidence, and see if any existed. If by the end of the day I felt fairly convinced I was right, I would go to the police.

The next morning, Monday, Walt rose at his usual time and left the house. He walked past his car with the expired tags and vanished around the corner. I wondered if he was going back to walk along the path where the murder had taken place and show up unannounced at Kim’s. Yes, this sounded like something he would do, and Kim would probably go ahead and let him ride to work with her.

As the day dragged on, I watched the news and learned the name of the murdered woman: Anne Kelley. She was an intern chosen for her smarts, a graduate at the top of her class who came east for a job opportunity many others wished they had gotten. She was extremely bright, enthusiastic, and friendly, and naturally, everyone loved her. She was twenty-two years old, petite, and the short, wispy hair framing her face gave her a look of childish innocence. I almost wish I hadn’t seen her picture because now she became a real person to me. Each time I shut my eyes, her face would appear before me. When she was attacked, I wondered, how many seconds did it take her to realize that everything she dreamed of was never going to come true? That this was already the end?

And who ended it for her? Who could do such a thing to this sweet girl? I thought about Walt’s recent behavior and went over and over it in my head. Was he a killer?

By afternoon, I needed solid answers. I piled the kids into the car and went off to the library. Those were the days when most people did not have access to the Internet and I was one of them. I had to do my research the old-fashioned way—by going through card files and finding books on the subjects I wanted to know more about: rapists and serial killers.

During the next two hours, my children enjoyed their books of imaginative stories and humorous animal misadventures while I read about women being hacked into pieces and other sorts of terrible and unimaginable crimes. I learned that almost all men who commit sexual violence against others are psychopaths, people with no empathy for others and no remorse for the heinous crimes they commit. And while not all psychopaths are serial killers, all serial killers are psychopaths. In my readings, I came across Robert Hare’s psychopathy checklist, a quick way to evaluate someone’s likelihood of possessing this destructive personality disorder. It came with a warning not to analyze anyone yourself, that such an evaluation should be done only by a professional. I felt Hare was tossing out that piece of advice much the way every exercise book tells you to see a doctor before beginning their regimen, so I ignored it.

I started making checkmarks on the list based on the little I knew about Walt from his three weeks in my life:

  • Glibness/superficial charm—Yep, he was cheerful, gregarious, and lacked depth.
  • Grandiose sense of self-worth—He bragged about many things that were unlikely to be true, or that I knew were not true.
  • Pathological lying—No doubt about that.
  • Cunning/manipulative—Kim told me that she and her coworkers found him manipulative in the workplace and clever about getting around certain tasks.
  • Lack of remorse or guilt—He always seemed to think he was right, everyone else was wrong, and he never seemed to feel bad about anything he did or didn’t do.
  • Shallow affect—I could see no depth of feeling other
    than occasional flashes of anger when he didn’t get his way. He didn’t seem to care about much, including Kim; he seemed to
    be play-acting most of the time.
  • Callous/lack of empathy—He seemed indifferent to
    the horrible murder of the jogger.
  • Failure to accept responsibility for own actions—He never apologized or took responsibility for things he screwed up; he blamed others for pretty much everything that went awry in his life.
  • Promiscuous sexual behavior—Well, he hadn’t had sex in seven years, if one believed him, so I couldn’t put a mark there yet.
  • Walt fit almost the whole list and I hardly knew him. But, I argued with myself, maybe he was just a psychopath and not a killer; he just might be one of the annoying but nonviolent sort—a user, a con artist, an embezzler, or a thief.

I looked at actual descriptions of serial killers. I read that they tended to be psychopathic, male, underachieving (Walt was a twenty-four-year-old male who worked in a mail room and rented a room in my house), troubled in relationships with women (Kim didn’t last long before she ran away), and to have a bent toward violent ideation. Frequently, there is a precipitating event that makes them feel like losers, causing them to want to commit an act of violence to regain a feeling of power and control. Walt was dumped just before the time of the murder.?.?.?.??

I closed the books I was reading. I gathered up the children, helped them check out what they wanted to read, and drove home. I told them to go play, opened the door to Walt’s room, and started up the stairs. I carried along a pair of kitchen gloves. I needed to find out if there was any real evidence in his room that would support what I was now fairly certain to be true. I needed something more than theory to take to the police. If I just told them about Walt’s behavior and my conclusions, I didn’t think they would believe me. I needed proof.

Walt was a bit of a slob, and he didn’t have very many possessions. I put on the gloves and worked my way around the room. I didn’t find much of interest. Then I came to the trash bag by the top of the stairs. There were pizza boxes on top and I memorized how the two of them were stacked so I could put them back the same way when I was finished with my search.

By this time, I was starting to get nervous. It was late in the day and Walt could walk in at any moment. I ran down the stairs and looked down the driveway. He wasn’t out there. I hurried back up and started in on the trash bag. I moved the pizza boxes carefully to the floor. Underneath them was a pile of magazines, at least two dozen of them. As I pulled them out, I saw that every single one was pornographic. I laid them in a stack.

Then I looked back in the trash bag and I saw a shirt. I lifted it out. It was damp and the back of it had been shredded, as if caught on briar bushes, the kind found at the edge of the stream where the girl’s body was found. I held my breath and reached back into the bag. Next, I pulled out a pair of jeans, wet, but in good condition. Why would someone throw his jeans away? Why were they wet? They weren’t dirty, but rather they seemed to have been washed, but not dried. Even if Walt really did wade across a stream on some whim not connected with the murder, why would he toss perfectly good jeans?

Next I found tennis shoes, again wet, but in perfect condition. I thought again of his story about getting wet in the stream. How many people threw away their tennis shoes because they got caught in the rain one day or stepped in a puddle? Then I came upon three very curious items. The first looked very much like a knife, or a letter opener filed down to a very sharp point. I wasn’t familiar with weapons, but knew right away that it would be dangerous if used on a person. Next I found a package of condoms—two were still sealed up, but the third one was used and placed back in the wrapper. I found this peculiar. I knew that Kim wasn’t having sex with Walt. And he had claimed that he hadn’t had sex since he lost his beloved prom girl. Beyond that, if he did have sex with someone, who puts the used condom back in the package rather than simply tossing it? And why throw two brand-new condoms away?

Then I found what I considered the most mysterious piece of possible evidence: a clump of mud wrapped in plastic. A clump of mud? Wrapped in plastic? I tried to think of what innocent situation would call for someone to wrap mud in plastic. I had no good answer, but I felt fairly certain that the mud was from the stream bank.

I was now closing in on the bottom of the trash bag. I saw a piece of pink paper and picked it up. It was a receipt for a ring. The price was forty dollars. I laughed. Forty dollars—the lying dog. Then the reality of the situation returned. I ran down the stairs again and looked out the front door. No Walt, but time was slipping by. I hurried into the laundry room and found an empty box. I brought it up the stairs and put all the “evidence” into it: the pants, the shirt, the shoes, the knife, the condom pack, and the mud wrapped in plastic. Oh, and a few of the magazines and the ring receipt. Then I ran back downstairs and grabbed some newspapers to stuff the trash bag; since I had taken so many of the items out, it looked rather deflated. When I had filled the bag out satisfactorily, I placed the pizza boxes back on top. I surveyed my artwork. By now, I had forgotten what I told myself to remember, and I could only hope the boxes were placed correctly.

I ran back down the stairs, tossed the gloves under the sink, and carried the box to the trunk of my car. I went back in and collected Walt’s story and the photo I had of him. Then I waited, counting the minutes until my husband got home. Finally, he drove up.

“I have to go to the police station. I found evidence, real evidence in his room!”

Tony looked at me skeptically.

“I’ll explain when I get back.” I wasn’t up to trying to convince him before dealing with the police. “Do me a favor and boot Walt. Tell him he’s late with the rent and be a jerk about it. Please, I just want him out of here and I don’t want him to think I suspect him of the murder.”

Tony gave me that look again.

“Please, just do it for me?” I didn’t feel like arguing. “I have to go.”

I had never been inside a police station before. I had no idea of what to expect and I felt terribly uncomfortable. By the time I asked to see the detective in charge, I babbled like an idiot with the box in my arms to the officer behind the glass window. He listened to me, stone-faced, and then pointed to a row of plastic chairs on the other side of the room, saying, “Take a seat and one of the detectives will talk to you.” Ten minutes or so passed and a tall, muscular police detective walked out and asked if I had something I wanted to tell him. He didn’t invite me back to an interview room. I had to ask him if we could go to his office, as I needed to speak with him about the recent murder in town. He motioned me into the hallway and I followed him to one of the rooms. He went around to his side of the desk, settled himself into his chair, and gestured for me to sit down on the other side. I took the seat, setting the box on the table.

“So,” he said, crossing his arms on the desk. “You have some information about the Kelley murder?”

“Yes, I have a new renter in my house and he’s been acting strange. I brought you some stuff I found in his trash that I think may be connected to the murder.”

He peered into the box and then settled back into his chair.

“What makes you think he’s guilty of anything?”

“Well, to start with, he calls women sluts, bitches, and whores. He thinks he’s a ninja and he wrote this story about killing people in the park.” I told him all about Walt’s creepy behavior and about the breakup with Kim on the day of the murder, how the murder happened on the path between our two houses.

Then I told him the most important point.

“Walt admitted to being on the path that evening.”

He didn’t seem impressed. I desperately kept talking, explaining what I found in his trash and adding more bits about his habits and history, but the detective seemed completely uninterested in Walt as a suspect. He barely scribbled any notes on the pad in front of him. The interview that I thought would be a slam-dunk was not materializing. The detective was leaning back in the chair with a smirk on his face.

Finally, he asked, “Was your girlfriend white?”

“No, she’s black. Why?”

He shrugged. “Well, the victim was white.”

I stared at him. Was he seriously telling me serial killers only choose victims who look like their girlfriends? Didn’t I just read in one of those library books that this was bunk?

“Maybe you’re misconstruing this fellow’s behavior because he is black.”

Now I was beginning to lose it. “I have a black husband. I have black in-laws. I have black friends. I don’t think I am a panicked racist white lady who thinks all black men are killers.”

He practically snickered. “Well, maybe you’re just imagining things.”

Now I was furious. I got up and grabbed my purse. “I am not a bored housewife with nothing better to do than spy on her neighbors and fabricate all sorts of naughty goings-on in the neighborhood. I am just a citizen who has enough brains to recognize when someone’s behaviors are bizarre and there is evidence in his room that is pretty concerning!”

I stormed out of the police station in a confused state of shock. I had assumed I was doing the right thing. I had thought they would be happy that a citizen had come across information that might help solve a crime. I thought they would be gratified to have evidence in hand so quickly after such a crime occurred rather than having nothing useful for months, or years, or ever. And even if the police weren’t immediately convinced that Walt was the killer, I would have thought the evidence strong enough to make him a suspect worth investigating, or at least eliminating.

What was I to do? I never envisioned driving back to the house with nothing accomplished, except maybe Walt finding out I had been in his room. I had no police to protect my family or me. I had no idea if I was totally right, or very wrong. Was I returning home to stay the night in the same house as a vicious killer, or was I just completely insane?

When I arrived home, I could hear Walt’s footsteps upstairs as he moved around his room. I felt clammy as I thought about the trash bag. I should take the children and go to a hotel for the night, but what was the point of being so drastic when the police detective didn’t seem to find any reason to suspect Walt? I felt numb, trapped in a surreal world. I left the kitchen, crossed the dining room, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and went to my children’s room. I peeped in and they were asleep, looking peaceful under their covers, surely believing that their world was safe and secure. I went into my bedroom, closed the door, and told my husband what happened at the police station.

Tony seemed annoyed with me.

“See? You were being ridiculous. The police know their job and they would be all over Walt if they saw any reason to suspect him. By the way, I told Walt he had to go and he said he would leave in the morning.” He abruptly turned away from me. “There goes June’s rent money,” he muttered somewhat resentfully. Then he immediately went off to sleep.

I, on the other hand, spent the night on my side of the bed with eyes wide open and a butcher knife clutched in my hands. Deep down inside, I still believed I was right.

The next day Walt put all his belongings in two Hefty bags and drove his illegal car down the driveway. He left the trash bag crowned with the pizza boxes untouched.

It would be five years before I started investigating him, and six years before the police would finally bring him in for an interview. Although my career as a profiler was beginning, I never imagined, as I watched the car disappear from sight, that this was where my life was heading.

Excerpted from "The Profiler" by Pat Brown. Copyright (c) 2010. Reprinted with permission from Voice, the publisher.