The Profiler: My Life Hunting Serial Killers & Psychopaths

PART 2.PROFILING CASES
CHAPTER 5.SARAH:MURDER BEHIND THE BAR

The Crime: Torture, rape, homicide

The Victim: Sarah Andrews, an army private stationed at a military base in the Western United States

Location: Nightclub parking lot

Original Theory: A drug deal gone bad, involving a local gang

Overlooking crucial evidence often throws an investigation off course, and my first case as a criminal profiler proved how true this could be. It was 1996, the year the Sexual Homicide Exchange became a reality.

The 1987 unsolved homicide of army private Sarah Andrews, found brutally murdered behind a bar, was brought to me courtesy of Manny, a bounty hunter-private investigator I met during a class in bail enforcement. Manny insisted the murder was drug-related, and had spent many, many investigative hours funded by the family. He wanted a criminal profiler to support his theory and credibility.

This was the first time since investigating the Anne Kelley murder that I talked to the family of a homicide victim. I heard in detail what the mother and father of a murder victim go through as Sarah Andrews’s parents recounted the years of agony they’d suffered from the time they heard that their daughter was brutally murdered.

Sarah’s crime scene was ugly-horrifying-because she was not only raped and left in a parking lot nearly naked, but two coat hangers had been wound around her neck and mouth like the halter of a horse-that’s how she was killed. The coat hangers cut back into her mouth and pulled on both sides of her face, and the other part was around her throat. The murderer twisted it together, strangling Sarah to death. She was brutalized, internally as well as externally. The ending of this girl’s life was torture.

For parents to think of their child being abused like this, being killed in such a horrific manner, was heart wrenching. And then they had to endure years of agony hoping the murderer would be caught, listening to theory after theory, willing to jump at any little bit of hope, begging the police department for news only to keep hearing those famous words, “We’re working on it,” when, quite frankly, they may not have been working on it at all.

Listening to the grueling details that made up the last nine years of the Andrewses’ lives humbled me. Like that moment of realization at the victims’ meeting, I knew that I didn’t have it so bad. I may have my frustrations and struggles but I spent every day with all three of my children, happy and healthy. I didn’t exhaust my nights being tormented by nightmares of my daughter being murdered only to wake up and realize it wasn’t a dream.

Years had gone by and the police were willing to buy into Manny the bounty hunter’s scenario. That’s where my involvement in the story begins.

CASES THAT INVOLVE American military personnel, especially females, are particularly disturbing to us all. How wrong it seems that men and women who volunteer their lives to serve their country and defend our freedoms are then killed by their fellow citizens within their own country’s borders.

The violent criminal, of course, being a psychopath, couldn’t care less that his victim was doing him a favor, protecting the very system that allows him so much freedom and providing him a criminal justice system that treats defendants and the guilty better than do most countries in the world.

Sometimes, we see strife between couples within the military, boyfriend-girlfriend disputes. Military life can be a difficult adjustment, stressful at times, and relationships can be difficult to maintain. In the case of Sarah Andrews, there was no evidence of domestic disturbance between her and anyone else, so the detectives did not think she had a boyfriend who went nuts on her.

THIS WHOLE CASE was peculiar from the start. Sarah was murdered in 1987, and I was brought into it nine years later; it was the first case I officially took as a profiler. I can still look at the profile I did on this case and be satisfied with it, which I’m thankful for, because sometimes you look back on your early cases and think, “Oh, my God, did I not know what I was doing?”

It’s a good thing they didn’t know how new I was to profiling back then. One always feels a bit of guilt in the beginning of such a career because someone has to be the first “victim” and you can only cross your fingers and hope your work doesn’t suck too badly. Of course, the same is true for other professions-there is always a first patient, a first client, a first group of students. Someone gets to be practiced on for anyone to actually become a professional.

I opened the Sexual Homicide Exchange in 1996 and was starting to hear from interested people, even while continuing my studies. I met a few questionable characters at a class called “How to Become a Bail Enforcement Agent,” and when I finished, I got a cool bail enforcement badge and a jacket with the words “Bail Enforcement Agent” across the back. Manny the bounty hunter-private detective was lecturing at this course. When he found out that I was a criminal profiler, he glommed on to me. He figured he could manipulate me and get me to do his bidding. Families, when crimes go unsolved-and the Andrews case had been on file for an eternity by the time I came into it-will try anything. They become desperate, which is why most of them will try psychics at some point. They want answers for their deep misery; they want closure.

Unfortunately, their emotions are raw and they aren’t always thinking clearly, making them great marks for people who will try to make money from their pain and suffering. One of the reasons I always give my service pro bono is to eliminate the notion that I am using these people to make money. Most private detectives don’t apply this same standard. And while there are plenty of qualified, smart PIs who do good work, there are even more charging $50 to $100 an hour when the likelihood of solving a murder is slim to none. They accept retainers on cases for which the police don’t have any evidence to effect a prosecution and never will, but bleed the family dry nonetheless.

In a stranger homicide, where there is no clue who committed the crime, the PI could interview the entire city and still produce nothing. I’ve seen families lose as much as $40,000 hiring private investigators and rarely getting answers from them.

Manny convinced the Andrews family that he was working hard on investigating their daughter’s murder. He shared his suspicions about drugs being involved and how Sarah was likely taken and executed by a gang.

Even the police believed that was possible in the beginning, providing Manny a credible theory on which to base his investigative forays. There were a lot of drugs floating around the area; it was a major drug hub. Sarah had quite a few friends and relatives who were said to be involved in drugs, and some said Sarah herself could be caught up in something illegal. So the police immediately labeled the homicide a drug-related crime, stating, “We think that she was taken someplace and tortured, and then dumped in the parking lot. It had something to do with the drug trade.”

Manny took off running with this concept. There were lots of people involved in drugs around the area where Sarah was murdered, so he could theoretically do lots and lots of investigating and collect lots and lots of checks. Somewhere along the way, he decided-and I still don’t understand his decision-making here except to think that it was simply arrogance-that having a profiler agree with him would add fuel to his farce and keep the checks coming. He thought I would replicate his own profile of the crime, a notion that had nothing to do with the evidence but included a large cast of characters for him to track down.

He gave me information about drugs and gangs in the area, thinking I would jump on board with him and inspire the family into thinking he was headed down the right trail. But Manny was a lousy profiler.

I told the family that the murder was a sexual homicide committed by a lone serial killer, not a revenge killing by drug dealers. Manny was not a happy man.

THERE HAD BEEN multiple theories over the years in Sarah’s case. There was the drug dealer approach, and then there was the idea that it was a lesbian crime. I thought that was a most interesting one-not correct, but curious.

This theory suggested that it was a lesbian-on-lesbian killing because women don’t use their hands to strangle and men do. But this is not true. Men use their hands and other methods as well. Apparently, some folks have never heard of a male killing a woman by ligature strangulation, which I thought was amusing, because one of the most common ways that men kill women is exactly that way. The man sneaks up behind the woman and throws a phone cord, a belt, or the cord of a window blind around her neck. Ligature strangulation can be useful in preventing the woman from clawing at your hands, leaving scratch marks on you and getting your DNA under her nails. Women use ligature strangulation for this reason also and because it’s easier than strangling someone with your bare hands, especially more delicate female hands. But in Sarah’s case, it made no sense whatsoever. First, she wasn’t a lesbian. Second, the woman would have had to be one heck of a big, tough broad to do what the killer did to Sarah.

One of the things I always tell the police and families is that while everything is possible, not all things are probable. You can’t waste a lot of investigative effort on an extremely unlikely scenario; you have to stay with what makes sense. If we do get some odd information that proves it might be of interest, yes, of course it should be taken into consideration because you shouldn’t eliminate anything, either. But truly, every possibility is not really worth looking at.

The Andrews case showed me where criminal profiling and crime reconstruction are useful and that police departments often jump over this part of dealing with a homicide. Sometimes it is a matter of lack of training or funds to hire profilers, but a good portion of the time the investigator just doesn’t have hours and hours to spend analyzing one crime when they have new ones showing up daily. He goes with his gut-hopefully, a good one based on years of experience-and, if all goes well, it pans out and the case moves in the right direction.

Police are used to run-of-the-mill homicides, which include most of the homicides many investigators see. One guy pisses off another guy in a bar and gets stabbed. A drug dealer rips off another drug dealer and gets shot. Big deal. They don’t feel sorry for the victim and they don’t have to do much analysis to figure out the crime.

But Sarah Andrews was different. When the police showed up to view the body lying desolately in the empty parking lot behind the nightclub on that cold March morning, their blood ran cold from more than the winter weather. It was a chilling case that likely still lurks in the recesses of the detectives’ memories.

Sarah was found lying on her back, a little bit to her left side-“posed,” according to the police. At a distance, she looked almost artistic, like a Botticelli painting, the way she was lying there, her arms out and her legs bent. Her skin looked like marble against the gray pavement, her hair framing her face, a few dark strands across her eyes. Clumps of white snow seemed to accent the landscape. One could almost see a model lounging for the artist as he put brush to canvas, creating his masterpiece. Unfortunately, instead of being viewed in a portrait gallery, Sarah became part of a crime file, the police photographer snapping his picture methodically.

She was naked except for a shoe on her left foot and the leggings hanging off of it. The double coat hanger was at her mouth and around her neck, and that’s what was used to strangle her. There were bite marks on her breast and hand. She had been sodomized with an object. Her right nipple was missing. It was a gruesome crime.

Sarah’s Maryland driver’s license-which had expired-was lying under her body. I will never know for sure whether the murderer tossed it to the ground along with her to say, “Ha, ha, here’s who this is,” or whether he was sending a message to somebody that he killed Sarah, or maybe he was just being funny, saying, “Look, she’s expired just like her license.”

One of the things you never know with an offender is what’s going through his mind, exactly. Sadly, serial killers and sex offenders are sometimes quite amused by designing their artistic projects. Others couldn’t care less and will simply rape, kill, and drive off. So one of the interesting behaviors in this crime is that the killer left Sarah’s license with her. We will never know why, but we do know that he had access to her license and he left it at the scene.

When you’ve worked in the field a long enough time, there’s little you can see that would make you say, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” because in homicide investigations, you see so many awful things. It almost becomes a joke, like, “Well, she’s still in one piece. That’s fabulous!” Or “She’s been stabbed sixty times, but her head’s still attached. I think that’s a plus.” This is the way some investigators actually think and talk after being on the job for a while. It’s sad but true. At a mechanic shop where body parts are found scattered about, you might hear if you snuck onto such a scene:

“Do you need a hand over there?”

“I’m not sure we can piece this one together.”

“This guy really doesn’t have a head for business.”

Sometimes the puns just bubble up amid the horror. But, in Sarah’s case, there was likely more workmanlike quiet as the police handled the scene.

As a criminal profiler, I am not looking at the fresh crime scene but at photos, which dulls the incoming sensory stuff quite a bit, so I have a great deal of empathy for the detectives who stood there at the scene and saw this horrific sight firsthand. If a crime involves a drug dealer who was shot, that may not be the worst thing they’ve ever seen. In fact, they might say, “That’s messy, but he deserved it.” Then they walk away and forget it. But if the same investigator sees a child who has been murdered, he might completely lose it, because that, to him, might truly be the worst thing he has ever seen.

Sarah was a beautiful young military recruit, brutally killed and tossed like garbage in a parking lot. It took a great toll on the detectives. They wanted to get the perpetrator, that son of a bitch. They asked questions, did the legwork. They pounded the pavement, just like in the movies, hearing stories, compiling leads. Drug dealing was mentioned and it was implied that maybe Private Sarah Andrews wasn’t the perfect soldier. Theories flew. Maybe Sarah was in the middle of something dirty; maybe a drug dealer retaliated against her for something she said or did-or didn’t do.

Big-city detectives rarely have the time to stop everything they’re working on and spend even a day or two exclusively considering the evidence of a single case, analyzing all the photos and reports. And most police departments don’t have a dedicated criminal profiler on staff to assist their analysis. The detective, under pressure to get all kinds of other cases closed, may have had no choice but to look at Sarah Andrews and quickly reach some conclusions.

Once he says, “It looks like a retaliation crime,” conflicting evidence can be overlooked, because it’s incidental to the accepted theory of the homicide at hand.

In this instance, the quick theory was that Sarah was abducted, taken someplace, and tortured-the crime somehow related to the local drug trade-and then brought back and tossed aside in the parking lot. A lot of people were looking askance at army personnel, the kinds of people with whom she was involved, her friends, and anybody she dealt with on a regular basis.

Although there were clearly sexual aspects to the crime, oddly enough, the idea that the crime was a sexual homicide was not given much thought. A serial killer was on the loose, but nobody was looking for him.

IN 1997, WHEN I came in and studied this case, I found some interesting elements that were overlooked, much of which had to do with physical evidence. For an unsolved homicide, this was a case with a tremendous amount of information that could be gleaned from the body and the crime scene. Some crimes have almost nothing useful to help you with an analysis. You have a dead girl in a field, she’s been horrifically raped and strangled, and that’s all you see. Dead girl, naked, nail marks on her neck, semen in her vagina. That’s it. You can’t imagine what happened, before, during, or after, except you know she was raped and strangled.

In Sarah’s case, the evidence created the threads of a mental video of the entire crime, that’s how good it was. I could tell what happened first, second, third, fourth, and fifth in this crime. Very unusual. You don’t get this too often. By analyzing the autopsy and crime scene photos, you could tell certain things occurred.

For example, Manny the bounty hunter’s original theory conveniently matched the police theory that Sarah was taken someplace and tortured. However, it’s not usually the MO of a drug gang to strip a girl because they are angry with her, nor do they leave their victims naked and strangled as a message to anyone. More significant, what ruled out Sarah being carted off to some room to be tortured was that her leggings were left hanging off her one remaining shoe. Otherwise she was completely naked; her right foot was completely clear, but that legging was still hanging off the shoe on her left one.

Everybody knows certain things about specific behaviors because they’re male or female or because of the culture or times in which they grew up. As a female, I could tell you exactly why that girl had leggings hanging off her left leg. That’s because women who have sex in the backs of cars end up with leggings hanging off one leg. If a man takes a girl home, he has the luxury of time and space. He can lay the girl on his bed, grab both shoes, and pull them off. He can then grab the leggings and, pulling them directly toward himself, peel them off both her legs, and, voilà, he has a nice naked girl to enjoy the rest of the night with.

But a car scenario presents a few problems. It is cramped and usually the sex act is a bit rushed. The man would remove the shoe closest to him, the left shoe if the lady is in the passenger seat of a small to mid-size vehicle and either shoe if the woman is in a larger van with a large space between the front seats or if he has gotten her into the back. He would pull the leggings down until he can free up one foot. He doesn’t need to bother with getting the shoe and leggings off the other foot. He has the access he needs to continue with either vaginal or anal intercourse.

This is my hypothesis. She was sitting in the front passenger seat of the offender’s vehicle when the attack began. Her killer then pulled her into the back of a vehicle to fully assault her, and this is when he pulled off her bottom clothing just as much as was necessary for him to do what he wanted to. The fact that Sarah was still wearing her left shoe with her leggings attached proved that Sarah never left that vehicle. She never went to any other location. She wasn’t thrown into a shed and attacked. She was attacked in the vehicle where the guy did the minimal possible to accomplish what he wanted. The entire crime went down in a vehicle.

That immediately eliminated this crime as a kidnapping for drug retaliation purposes.

NOW WE HAVE a girl in a vehicle. Let’s rewind that evidence “videotape” of the scene. Sarah somehow got into that vehicle. Did she get in consensually? Was she forced?

There was an interesting piece of evidence on her body that I believe showed she got into the car without being forced, that she had been sitting peacefully in the passenger seat when the crime began.

Sarah appeared to have known and felt comfortable to some extent with the offender. Having consumed some amount of alcohol and eaten relatively little over the course of the evening, she may have been less wary than usual. She may have been willing to take slightly higher risks or she may have accepted a ride home from someone she felt relatively safe with as an alternative to the possibly riskier situation of walking home alone or accepting a ride with a stranger. I believe that Sarah knew the offender well enough to feel safe, but the offender was not a personal friend or family member.

It seemed to me that it started out with the two of them getting into a van. It would have been a van because she was assaulted in the back of a vehicle with a large, flat cargo area, and I will prove that shortly. But she started out sitting in the front seat-the passenger seat-with the fellow on the left side. There was an attempt at some type of sexual act in the front seat of the van; we don’t know how far she wanted to or did go. She had been drinking. She might have thought he was going to take her home. She might have thought they were just going to talk for a bit. They might have gone out to smoke some herb. Who knows what they were doing when they started out in the vehicle, but at some point he attempted to kiss her. And whether she kissed him back consensually I don’t know, but at some point she said no.

It is also possible that she simply said no from the beginning and he kept pushing himself on her. With a good amount of alcohol consumed, Sarah might have been slow to resist, maybe even allowing the man to remove her upper clothing. Inebriated women may allow men to go a lot further sexually than they would if they were sober. Sarah may have realized too late, perhaps when he started biting her, that she wanted out of the vehicle. She might have tried to fight him; she had quite strong arms, but she was not that big a woman and she had been drinking. Her killer clearly got control of her.

Sarah didn’t like where this was going, and this is when it became violent. At this point, the offender may have attempted to kiss her, then bit forcefully on Sarah’s lips. Tearing off the clothes is common with this type of offender and he may at this point have ripped off her clothing without her consent. The offender became more aggressive and violent, biting at the nipple of Sarah’s left breast.

He did, in fact, sink his teeth into her left breast because there are bite marks around the nipple. Sarah attempted to protect herself by putting her right hand over her left breast, and so he bit her right hand as well. That is in the evidence. Her left hand wasn’t bitten, which makes sense because it is more natural to try to cover one’s breast with the opposite hand. Furthermore, her left arm was probably trapped along the seat next to her body. The right hand, according to the physical evidence, bore a bit of grime ground into her palm, proof that she was pushing against the floor. She was fighting. She was trying to get this guy off her, and then she tried to protect her left breast. This was the evidence that proved she was sitting in the front seat, that she hadn’t been abducted at gunpoint, dragged off, and attacked.

The offender then most likely grabbed Sarah by the throat with his left hand, choking her and at the same time punching her abdominal area a number of times. She may have passed out at this point.

Sarah was then dragged into the back of the vehicle, onto the floor, and there he pulled off her leggings. He then grabbed two uncoiled coat hangers and twisted them into ligatures about her neck and mouth. He may have slapped her on the buttocks with a belt to wake her up, or the injury to that area may have occurred during the ensuing anal assault.

It would appear Sarah attempted to get off the floor, pushing sideways with her right leg. She may have abraded her left arm and received numerous abrasions and damage to the left side of her face as she struggled and possibly struck the bottom of one of the front seats or other objects inside the vehicle.

Her chipped tooth and the multiple bruises on her chin may have occurred as she resisted the ligatures and her head was slammed downward onto the vehicle floor and onto any object at that location. At this point, the ligatures would have strangled Sarah, whether intentionally or by accident.

(The autopsy report is not sufficiently detailed to determine the amount of pressure the offender used in the attack.)

At the end, he flipped her over, and for his coup de grâce, he bit or cut off her right nipple. At least Sarah didn’t feel the pain of this last act as she was already dead in the back of the vehicle.

SARAH WAS NOT dumped out of the van right after she was killed; she lay on the floor for a good long time. This is important evidence as it could help establish a time line and also suggest certain offender behaviors. One of the reasons I know Sarah remained in that van for a period of time after death was that there were two round circles on her butt. The copies of the photos I had of the autopsy were pretty awful and the lighting made it difficult to clearly analyze certain impressions and bloodstain patterns, but I still could make out two odd circles from something that had pressed against Sarah’s skin at some point before she was tossed out of the vehicle into the lot. I knew she couldn’t have gotten those circles on her butt after she was dumped because there were no objects of that shape under her body where she was found lying.

Each of the circles had almost the same look. They were round and each one left a double outline. But the peculiar aspect to these circles was that one part of the circle appeared a bit flattened. If you looked at the circle like a clock, the area from twelve to three flattened a bit, and the other circle had the one to three area flattened a bit.

“What the heck caused these?” I asked the investigators.

“We don’t know what those are,” they said.

Nobody ever tried to figure out what made the circles. They just said there were some weird circles on her. Crop circles in Iowa might be inexplicable, but not these. These just required more thought and research. This is the problem when people don’t do a crime reconstruction, because that piece of information might well be the missing link. Unfortunately, no one on the case may have time to think and think and think about what some odd piece of evidence might be.

There were guesses, though. Some thought they were caused by a can of chewing tobacco. Others suggested they were imprints of crushed soda cans. They had ideas, but nobody ever actually took the time to find out exactly what they were.

I took the exact measurements recorded in the autopsy, and I re-created those circles precisely. I concluded that I was looking at some kind of a lid, but I didn’t understand why it was flat on one side.

I started by going to the local Walmart store. I didn’t want to go broke buying every circular item in town, so the only way I could find out what caused the impressions was to walk into stores and press whatever I could find that was circular against my body. I’m sure I made quite a spectacle.

“What is that blonde doing in the hardware section, picking up item after item, pressing the tool onto her arm, saying, ‘No, that’s not it,’ throwing it back, and then repeating it with another one?”

I started running out of room on my arm, so I pressed items against my thigh. Then I went through the neighborhood drugstore, continuing with press tests. This was where I located a one-ounce can of Skoal snuff, which several people thought might be the matching product. When I pressed it against my body, it made two rings, measuring.5cm apart. But the circles on Sarah’s body were 1cm apart. The soda can concept didn’t even make sense. It had only one outside edge.

Eventually, I wandered into a hardware store, went to the paint and enamel section, and picked up a can of Minwax.

“That looks like the right top,” I said aloud, to no one in particular.

By that time, I was pretty aware of what kind of impressions various lids would make just by holding them. The Minwax can’s lid is embedded into the top of the can, making an airtight seal, so I couldn’t pull it off in the store. But boy, it sure looked right. I turned the can over and pressed it against myself, and I said, again out loud, “This has got to be it.”

I took out my tape measure and measured the lid area, and it had identical measurements to what I was seeking, the extra thin lines, and the little rim part with two double lines.

I bought the Minwax-to the relief of a befuddled clerk and several customers-and brought it home to my “lab.” In order to properly do the lid press test, I had to pry the lid off the can. As the top is forced up and off the can, one side flattens out a little. I took the lid and placed it next to the photos. It looked exactly like the circles in the pictures. I double-checked the measurements of the lid, and the measurements were exactly the same. The flattened edge of the lid top fit into the twelve-to-three spot of the clock face. I determined a couple of Minwax can lids were indeed what left the mysterious rings on Sarah Andrews’s bottom.

Could there be something else out in the universe that could make the same marks? Absolutely. But at a certain point, one of the things any detective or profiler has to ask is, “When do I stop looking?” The universe is a big place. I could look for every possible similar lid in all of creation, and I could spend thousands and thousands of hours doing it. But at some point, you have to stop. I stopped here because after looking through dozens and dozens of commercially available products, this one made sense to me, because we were talking about the victim being in the back of a van. What would be on the floor of a van? A lot of guys use various paint and enamel products in their work and hobbies. If they are in the painting business, if they have motorcycles, if they do carpentry, they might have a few cans of Minwax paint or enamel in their vehicle. They might have jimmied off the lid tops and tossed them onto the floor in the back of a van.

My theory was that Sarah lay on top of a couple of Minwax can lids or something very similar to them until she was dumped out of the vehicle.

SOLVING THAT MYSTERY led back to another: Why was she lying in the back of the vehicle?

There were a couple possibilities. One is that the guy killed her while he was on a break and then went back to work. If he was a bouncer at the nightclub, he might have been on a break (sometimes bouncers just vanish for a while), but then continued working until the club closed and the crowd dispersed. He could have been hanging out until four in the morning. (Officially, closing time at the nightclub was two a.m. No one was ever sure if it actually closed at that time, however.)

One of the possible suspects I suggested to the police worked at the nightclub. He was a bouncer, an ex-con with a history as a violent offender and a burglar, and he had been in and out of prison. A big guy, he fit the profile.

So it’s possible that Sarah went out to the van to smoke a joint with the bouncer and during that time, he took a fancy to her and wanted to have his way with her. She fought him off, which made him angry. He lost his composure, threw her in the back, and raped and strangled her. All of that takes a lot less time than people ever imagine, ten minutes, fifteen minutes max, because we are talking about someone who acted in a rage-and who was likely on the clock. He was what profilers call a power rapist. He wants what he wants and he wants it his way on his timetable. He gets angry when he doesn’t get it, and then he follows through in a forceful, violent way. That’s a power offender. He wants to prove his masculinity. “How dare you turn me down?” That kind of guy doesn’t take long to rape and murder somebody. If he could have controlled her, he might have done less damage to her, but Sarah was known to be a fighter, not someone who would give up without a struggle.

People who don’t know better imagine he must have been at this for a couple of hours. But no, he needed to be gone for only fifteen or twenty minutes, and then she’s dead in the back of his vehicle. He throws a blanket over her so nobody can see her if they peep in his van windows. He goes right back into the club, cleans up, finishes out the night, and by early morning, with the club closed and everyone gone home, he can go back to his van, now the only vehicle left in the lot.

At that point he could have picked her up by an arm and a leg, flipped her out of the van, and she would have dropped onto the ground. The police thought she looked posed. I didn’t think so. If a fairly strong fellow shoved the body to the edge of the car, he could pick her up, swing her body out from the van, and she would have landed just as Sarah did.

Then he would drive away and toss the rest of her clothes-and maybe some of his own-when he realized he still had incriminating evidence in his van.

The bouncer is just one possible suspect and the story above just one possible scenario. Sarah could have left with someone else who was at the club, she could have left and been on the way back to the club with someone. I couldn’t say exactly who the killer was but I could tell you he had some connection to the area around the nightclub, wasn’t a total stranger to Sarah, did some kind of work painting or fixing stuff, and was relatively strong. And we were looking at only one killer, not two or three, or a gang. Just one sick monster.

We were looking at somebody who likely did know Sarah, but not necessarily well. It could have been a casual acquaintance, but the behavior suggested an experienced sex offender. This had nothing to do with drugs.

If an investigator or profiler deduced this originally, the police could have run away from all those other silly theories and focused on sexual psychopaths who were in the vicinity of the nightclub that night.

WAS THE MURDERER someone from the same base as Sarah Andrews? Was it an army guy?

Sarah had bite marks on her breast and hand, and who, on the base, if they had killed Sarah, would want to display her body so it would be found within two hours?

Any army guy knows that the investigators would be all over him in a heartbeat, getting his blood, demanding dental records or impressions of his teeth. He would be at the top of the list.

If the killer was a member of the military, my guess is that Sarah would have been driven back into the mountains that were nearby, her body thrown down a ravine by the side of the road. She would have been discovered weeks later. But because the killer didn’t care, or even wanted her body found right away, I doubt her killer had anything to do with the army base.

I believe it was someone who was an arrogant sex offender who didn’t think anybody would even consider him. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons he left her where he did was because it amused him. When the police showed up in the morning, he could make an appearance and say, “You found what? A dead girl in the parking lot?”

I think he watched and enjoyed the police spectacle. Or it could be possible he simply dumped her and left town, a smile on his face as the miles added up between him and the body. He could see the police action at the scene in his mind and be nowhere around for them to even interview.

IT IS MOST likely that the offender was employed in a blue-collar profession that did not require high levels of training. He was probably a high school graduate with no college education or a short period of education at a local community college. He would have considered Sarah pretty much his equal, someone who should think of him the same way. In fact, it is possible that Sarah looked down on him a speck, that she thought her army career put her on a bit higher level. She may not have been interested in any romantic liaison with him, at least not when she was stone sober.

He was in possession of a work van that had some objects strewn about the floor. He may have used the van for his work or it may have been primarily for transportation. The presence of coat hangers in the vehicle and possible other tools, such as a wire cutter or pliers, may indicate employment in auto mechanics or welding. He also may have used those tools for personal reasons. The wire coat hangers may have been used to help people who locked their keys in their cars or they may have been used to break into vehicles for the purpose of theft.

The perpetrator may have been employed as a waiter, bartender, or bouncer in one of the clubs the victim frequented. He may have been employed at one of the locations in the same strip mall as the nightclub as a clerk or a security guard. He may have done service work for a local business that used panel trucks for service and delivery. Serial killers tend to kill near their homes or employment, as they spend much of the day trolling for future victims, fantasizing about their conquests-in-waiting, until one lucky day-well, lucky for him, not her-he gets his opportunity.

It is likely that the offender was not in a permanent relationship with a female, due to his lack of security with his masculinity. However, it has been my experience that even men who fail in relationships in general can eventually find a woman willing to enter into a relationship with a weirdo. In this case, it was at least likely that Sarah didn’t think the guy was in a serious relationship. He was probably single and a little bit older than Sarah, just enough to make him feel he was more experienced than she was, that he could control her. He was probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. The race of the offender was most likely that of the victim. It is, however, not true that this kind of offender kills only within his own race.

The likelihood that the offender was Caucasian has a basis in demography and cultural issues. The makeup of the community was predominantly Caucasian. The victim was Caucasian and socialized with predominantly Caucasian people. These facts make the chances of the offender being white statistically pretty high. But this doesn’t mean Sarah didn’t have some male friends who were black or wasn’t attracted to black men or maybe just went off to smoke a joint-as she had been known to do-with a black male at the club. Statistically, probably white. But, possibly, black.

The perpetrator was probably well muscled, as it appeared he picked up the body of the victim from the floor of the van, swung her by an arm and a leg away from the vehicle, and dropped her to the ground. I know she wasn’t pushed from the van or dragged out of it because there was snow next to her that wasn’t touched by tire marks or footprints. The van had to have been a few feet from where her body was tossed in an area where the snow had melted. The killer also was able to twist coat hangers, either by hand or with a tool such as pliers, indicating a reasonable amount of hand strength. This would lead one to speculate the offender may have been involved in a blue-collar activity such as auto mechanics or construction. He may also have been involved in weightlifting or other sports promoting general body strength.

SOMETHING ELSE I noted about the Sarah Andrews case: there were so many creepy dudes around her.

It was one of those cases in which sex offenders and weird guys were coming out of every hole and from under every rock. One of those fellows suggested by the FBI’s ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) crime linkage data base was a guy by the name of Jeffrey Todd Newsome.

This convicted murderer supposedly served in the army at the same base at some point in his career. He was not known to have been in the area at the time of this murder. On the other hand, it was not proven that he was not in the area at the time. He was African American; he was not a soldier when Sarah was there, but he might have known the area, been visiting it, and taken off after the crime. However, we have no evidence Sarah ever knew this man, nor did anyone at the nightclub know of him.

At the time that I profiled this case, Newsome was jailed in Alabama for the sexual homicide of a young Alabama woman. He also committed a similar crime in Germany and he was a suspect in a number of other sexual homicides in the state of Alabama.

Newsome fit this profile in a number of ways. He would also appear to be a power-assertive-style rapist, although one could view him as an anger-retaliatory serial killer, the type who kills to get revenge on society and those he considers to have wronged him, usually women. Actually, these two types tend to overlap and much of the time it is the profiler who decides what issues the killer had and what his motive would likely have been. While I sometimes label a killer the power type, the anger type, or the sadistic type, I tend to categorize serial killers in two groups: quick and slow. The slow types are the sadists, the perverts who like to lock a woman up in a dungeon under their house and torture her for days. The quick type just wants to prove that he is powerful, that he can rape and kill and get away with it. Sarah’s killer was the quick type. So was Newsome. However, it would appear that Newsome had a very specific MO that consisted of taking the body as far away as possible so that it could not be found. He was adamant about that habit when he spoke with law enforcement. He had previously always used a car, not a van. He tended to blab a lot about his murders. He had been married more than once. The relationships apparently did not last.

There is no evidence linking Newsome to the area on the date Sarah was killed nor is there evidence that he owned a van at that time. A coat hanger was hanging from a tree near one of the bodies of his victims. But again, there is no evidence that Sarah Andrews ever had any contact with Newsome. Newsome was definitely a serial killer; he also strangled a girl in North Carolina with a coat hanger. In considering him, we look at what people call “signature.”

Everybody who has ever read a murder mystery or watched a movie of this genre knows the term MO, which stands for modus operandi, or method of operation. It means, simply, what you have to do to do the crime. Abducting a girl, that’s an MO. The fact that he raped her is an MO. If he tied her up in order to rape her because she was struggling, that would be an MO.

But “signature” is something that the FBI profilers are very fond of and they’ve gotten a little carried away with declaring it. The signature is what the serial killer does that makes a murder his own piece of artwork. It’s an act that he had no reason to do except that he thought it was really cool, and driven by his own psychological needs, he just had to do it.

I think signature elements are not about something they had to do. It’s something they wanted to do, yes, something that amused them at the time of that particular crime.

In the attack on Sarah, I found a few possible signature elements:

The killer used the coat hanger contraption that resembled a horse bridle when he strangled her.

He threw her body into the parking lot.

He left her body faceup: But was that a signature, or was it just the way the body landed?

It would have been to his advantage to simply drive away and dump her in a ditch. So to me, the fact that he left her in that public location to be found immediately was indeed a signature element that he wanted the fun of her being found.

Leaving the ID with her was definitely a signature move.

The fact that he repeatedly bit her showed his style. He didn’t have to do that-you don’t have to rape anybody, either-but he obviously liked doing that, and the fact that he excised the right nipple also suggested to me that this was something that gave him an extra cheap thrill.

These signature elements showed us what kind of offender he was. It showed us how he got his thrills. But it didn’t necessarily mean that every other crime in which an ID was left with a body or there’s a bite mark meant that it was the same guy, and it didn’t mean this person would do the same things the next time around. Some guys are repetitive just because they get used to doing something and like doing it. But there are other guys who get bored with what they’re doing and don’t bother with that particular act next time. We have to be cautious saying that every time there is something unusual in the crime that it’s going to be a trademark that he’s going to sign every one of his crimes with. That would imply that any crime without that trademark isn’t him, and every crime with it is him. That’s nonsense. There will be crimes he’s committed where none of the elements are the same, and the crime is still his, and there are other crimes that look just like his and aren’t his.

Back to convicted rapist and strangler and murderer Jeffrey Todd Newsome.

In Alabama and North Carolina, he strangled girls with coat hangers, but there was something different about Jeffrey Newsome’s crimes. He always used a car; he never used a van. He transported the bodies to distant locations. He was proud of the fact that nobody would ever find them, and that’s what he told people. So it didn’t seem likely to me that he would kill Sarah Andrews and dump her where she was sure to be found the next day.

As a matter of fact, that reliable trait is what did Newsome in. He abducted his last victim in a car and drove her way out into the woods so he could rape and strangle her, which he did. But then his car got stuck in the mud and he found himself in a bit of a bind.

Newsome did what every guy would. He called a buddy.

“Hey, can you come down and help me? My car is stuck in the mud.”

Of course, he had a dead, strangled girl out there just yards from his car and when the authorities found the dead girl, they were able to pin it on Newsome. He erred when he went off-road with his sedan to dump the body.

WE KNOW THAT Sarah was involved with several guys, including Suspect #1, a married man, who supposedly made some passes at Sarah. This did not end their relationship, as they were close friends. They were both stationed with the army at the same place.

Suspect #1 was away at military training the night of the murder. He reportedly said to his wife, who was out of town, that he left training to fix a military vehicle, but then he denied that he left training when interviewed by the police. It is odd that his superiors would have no record of his leaving. He would have been driving a military vehicle, not a van. He did not own a van.

Suspect #1 supposedly had some scratches on the left side of his neck. This is the only piece of information that interested me when considering #1 as a suspect. I would have been interested in knowing more about those scratches.

SUSPECT # 2 WAS an extremely violent cross-dresser who was imprisoned in another state at the time I profiled Sarah Andrews’s murder. He was serving time for the abduction and aggravated assault of his wife and three children.

His brother was also on the same base as Sarah at the same time she was there, and it was possible that Suspect #2 visited or ran drugs there. He supposedly worked the bars in that area-yet another bouncer enters the picture. He may have been introduced to the victim or had access to a van through his work.

His possible connection to a construction company might be important as I believed the two ringlike indentations on Sarah’s body were consistent with the lids of Minwax sixteen-ounce cans of wax, polyurethane, or enamel.

Suspect #2 was a strong suspect due to his violent nature and his connection to the murder location. Although he was married, that relationship was bizarre. It was clear from his behavior that he felt entitled to do what he wanted with women. A number of people were frightened of him and hinted at a possible connection to the crime. That Suspect #2 was not in jail for life and had a violent reputation may have deterred people from ratting on him. It was possible he spoke of committing the crime, alluded to it, or people knew he was there at the time of the murder but were afraid to speak up for fear of retaliation.

The only two reasons he was questionable as a suspect were that the comfort level Sarah would have felt getting into a vehicle with this person wasn’t there, and the lack of purpose the dump site would serve for this particular suspect.

The police never quite proved Suspect #2 was in the area at the time of Sarah’s murder. One of the reasons that some people thought it might be him was because he worked with horses, and Sarah had two hangers wrapped around her head. But if you look at any kind of pornography or bondage, you find lots of women with bridles around their heads. That’s the way brutal men control women.

Sarah was bitten, bludgeoned, punched, strangled, and brutalized. This was not done by what you would call a sadistic serial killer. It wasn’t that at all. This wasn’t a guy who took her someplace and tied her up in his basement and tortured her for days on end. Remember, we’re talking about a guy who committed a crime probably in fifteen minutes flat. This was extreme rage, anger, and power that he threw at her all at once. She surely fought back while he was striking out at her.

While she certainly suffered a torturous experience, the perpetrator wasn’t someone who set out to torture her. The contraption he put around her head, neck, and mouth was probably more to control her in a moment of anger than anything else.

A danger of the investigator’s or profiler’s job is that sometimes we glamorize things beyond what they truly are. On the other hand, if the guy was a horse rider, maybe he did know bridles, and it occurred to him this was a nice way to bend up old coat hangers. We can’t eliminate that, but we have to be careful not to overstate it, either. So this cross-dressing weirdo was a decent suspect.

I GOT SOME more information about the ex-con bouncer-Suspect #3-who worked at the nightclub. And while the facts were a bit sketchy, what I learned put him near the top of my suspect list. His father owned a repair service. There was no information as to whether Suspect #3 owned a van or his father’s business used vans in the course of their work, but it was likely.

It was reported that Suspect #3 suggested to police that Sarah got into a van with two black males the week before her death. He also stated that she danced with a black male the evening of her murder. It was interesting that Suspect #3 found it necessary to implicate black males. Was it an attempt to focus the investigation away from Caucasians or to focus the investigation on soldiers, as most black men in the area were connected with the military at that time? Was it an inadequacy issue? Was it a method of inferring the victim was “loose” because she would hang with black men? Was it a way of saying she deserved to be killed? Or was he just being helpful?

Members of Sarah’s family told me that she had mentioned to them that she dated a bouncer from a nearby town, the location of another murder victim. I don’t know if this bouncer she reportedly dated was the same one who worked at the nightclub. As a bouncer at the nightclub, Suspect #3 would have excellent knowledge of the movements of the locals and the police in the early hours of the morning. He would have been well acquainted with the back lot of the nightclub. He would have lived in the vicinity and have had no reason to travel out of the area with the body of the victim. It would serve a purpose to leave the body behind the club where he could participate in the next day’s activities and have a legitimate reason to be there.

Bouncers at clubs get to know regular customers, are familiar faces to them, and are knowledgeable of their comings and goings and observant of their behavior. It was also possible a bouncer might keep coat hangers available to help customers who locked their keys in their cars. They also might be available to give a ride home to someone.

A bouncer can often leave his job and not be missed for a period of time. It is possible that the reason the police and army CID (Criminal Investigation Division) never identified him as a suspect was because they overfocused on the military connection and ignored possible civilian candidates.

I SAW AN overdose of theories and ideas concerning Sarah’s murder that served only to distract and confuse the investigative process. Many of these well-intentioned theories were a result of a lack of familiarity with sexual homicide. Even police investigators and FBI agents can lack understanding of this area of crime and psychopathology. Too many approaches and an unlimited number of suspects led to no progress at all.

One of the main purposes of bringing in a profiler on a case is to reduce the number of suspects and to prioritize investigative avenues. While anything is possible, everything is not probable. If we give equal weight to any and all theories, we accomplish next to nothing. If we wished to bring Sarah’s killer to justice, we needed to focus all our attention and resources on the top suspects.

LET’S REVIEW THE elements of this case that were important and what evidence was valuable in identifying the perpetrator:

There was only one perpetrator in the murder of Sarah Andrews.

From the forensic evidence presented, the attack was not economically motivated and not one of revenge. The offender appeared to be what is called a power-assertive rapist, one of the quick types. No one neat label can exactly explain the behaviors of these kinds of offenders, but the more dominant features fit the behaviors of the offender in this crime.

The power-assertive rapist has doubts about his masculinity and his sexual adequacy. He likes to exert his power in a situation where he can win and feel satisfied. He does not necessarily plan to kill his victim, but he wants what he wants and rising anger and frustration may cause him to escalate into more violent levels of control.

Because of the level of violence exhibited in this murder, some might feel this offender would be more appropriately labeled an anger-retaliatory rapist, one who kills to take out his anger against a particular person or class of persons. It is possible that the invitation to the vehicle was just a ruse to get Sarah into his hands. He would then surprise attack her and kill her. It is also possible that some elements of this type of offender are mixed in with power-assertive elements, and all we really can be sure of purely based on the evidence is that we have a quick, violent attack by a serial killer.

From the presentation of forensic evidence in this case, it would appear that the victim entered the offender’s vehicle willingly. There was no evidence of a weapon being employed in this attack. Control of the victim appeared to have been through the sheer physical advantage of the killer. Whether he planned all along to rape and kill Sarah or lost control when she refused him, we will never know. Even the killer might not really know that, as serial killers tend to twist the truth, even in their own minds, claiming, “The bitch made me do it,” when, in fact, he planned to do that “bitch” in all along.

All the elements of the murder indicated a violent sexual attack, including vaginal and anal rape, biting of sexual parts, and the removal of a sexual part.

It was not a drug hit, a revenge killing, or a robbery. Therefore, it did not matter who Sarah knew and associated with prior to the murder other than to indicate that she might have crossed the path of this killer and might have known him in some manner. The elements of this homicide indicated an experienced serial murderer, not a first-time accidental killing.

The evidence for this lies in the signature aspects of the crime rather than the MO. The fact that Sarah was lured, attacked, raped, and murdered by ligature does not prove an experienced killer. This MO merely shows that the perpetrator used those methods to assault and kill her. However, the fact that the perpetrator added a second coat hanger to the ligature configuration shows he had a more advanced knowledge of bondage methodology and, perhaps, prior experience with the use of ligatures.

The boldness of leaving the body in a public place ruled out the accidental killing by a well-known acquaintance or novice killer. Also, the fact that the victim was left faceup showed that the perpetrator had no guilt about this crime; in fact, he was damned proud of himself.

The ID left with the body was another bold move. The perpetrator had little fear that he would be identified as the killer. A rule of thumb among killers is to leave the body as far away as possible or as hidden as possible, allowing for the passage of time to obliterate evidence and the memories of any possible witnesses. Killers who leave a body where it will be easily found are extremely arrogant and confident that no one will connect them to the murder. If the perpetrator was well known to Sarah or served in the army with her, I doubt he would have left the body to be so quickly found.

If the perpetrator were in the military, it is also unlikely that he would have left a body with bite-mark evidence to be found; the marks would eventually have been matched up with army dental files.

The lack of any other major physical evidence such as body fluids or fingerprints is more support for the theory of a more experienced killer.

There is a relatively high chance that the killer was watching and possibly involving himself when the police were processing the crime scene. It is my belief that the perpetrator was a local resident, not in the military, and had connections to the crime scene area. He probably has lived in the area for quite a while and committed other murders or rapes and possibly other lesser crimes. He may or may not have a criminal record.

There was no evidence of two perpetrators involved in the crime. The particular kind of behaviors evidenced in this crime led me to believe this killer acted alone. The lesbian theory that was offered by some had absolutely no credibility.

The following is my analysis of the information derived from the murder evidence:

1. One individual committed the murder.

2. The murder was typical of a power-assertive rapist type.

3. No elements of the murder were extremely unusual in the MO.

4. The signature elements of the murder are as follows:

1. The use of an added coat hanger for the mouth.

2. The location of the body being placed in a very public location.

3. The leaving of the ID with the body.

4. The bite marks on the breast.

5. The excision of the right nipple.

5. The signature elements of the murder, while in combination point to a particular kind of personality, are not separately unusual in the history of sexual homicide.

6. The killer did not appear to have used a knife as a weapon in this homicide.

7. The vehicle used was most likely a panel van; the body of the victim was probably dumped from the right side of the van from the open sliding door of the vehicle.

8. There was no evidence of binding of the hands or feet.

9. The victim appeared to have been raped and murdered in the vehicle.

10. There was no evidence of torture.

11. There was evidence of extreme violence.

12. The entire event probably occurred in a relatively short time, between twenty and thirty minutes.

13. The perpetrator probably used some kind of pliers to twist the coat hangers. He may also have used an instrument to excise the nipple, perhaps a wire cutter.

14. The double-ringed circles on the buttocks of the victim provide evidence that following her death, the body was left in a supine position. It would appear that following her death by ligature, the perpetrator then rolled the victim onto her back and excised the right nipple. The buttocks rested on two lids that left the marks.

15. The two circles were the exact dimensions of the lids of sixteen-ounce Minwax cans of polyurethane, enamel, or wax. The warp in the measurements is likely due to the removal of the can lids by prying them up with an instrument of some kind. There may have been other possible sources of these circular marks, but we should be careful not to base any investigative avenues on sources that have not been proven to be of those exact dimensions described in the autopsy report.

16. The prioritizing of the suspect list should have been based on the following:

1. The suspect must have a power-assertive rapist personality.

2. The suspect must have access to a panel van or similar vehicle.

3. The suspect must be relatively strong.

4. The suspect must have no relationship or a minimal relationship with the victim.

5. The suspect must have some connection to activities using Minwax, pliers, and coat hangers.

6. The suspect must be very familiar with the area where the victim’s body was left.

7. The suspect, having no guilt about the murder of Sarah, most likely has psychopathic personality traits.

The suspects that I determined deserved top priority in this investigation were as follows:

1. Suspect #3.

2. Suspect #2.

3. An unknown guy-some man described in one report as having lived in the area and who cut off a woman’s clothing and bit her breasts: this behavior was consistent with a power-assertive rapist.

4. Any new suspect that came to light who matched the characteristics of the profile.

THE ANDREWS FAMILY was furious.

She was not killed on army grounds, but there was an army investigation. The Andrews family thought the army did a pitiful job and failed to do what it could to locate whoever killed Sarah. There was a sense on their part that the army abandoned Sarah, one of their own.

I received a lot of notes from her parents over the course of my investigation that showed their frustration. The case eventually ended up in the hands of the local police department, where one detective worked the case and then another. Neither one solved it.

The family also became very angry at me at one point.

Families of victims, when they get frustrated, tend to take it out on the professional people around them. I did a lot of work on this case and came up with a solid profile-and I did it for free. At one point, I uploaded information about the crime to the Sexual Homicide Exchange Web site. Mrs. Andrews had told me that it was okay for me to post certain details about the case-including that Sarah’s nipple was cut off-but Sarah’s father went absolutely berserk.

“How dare you put that detail about my daughter up on a Web site?” he screamed.

The Andrews family stopped talking to me at that point.

I did it because we were seeking more information, and there is a tendency in certain crimes to repeat behaviors. If somebody knew of a crime where an attacker similarly brutalized a woman’s breasts and nipples, it would be a valuable thing to discover. And I wasn’t the first one to put it out there; the police had talked about it before, the detail had appeared in some papers, and this was nine years after the crime occurred. It wasn’t something only they and the offender knew or at this point would hurt the case.

The parents were still extremely emotional, and they haven’t talked to me since.

I pulled the information about Sarah off the site after that and we lost an avenue of bringing in fresh tips.

I LEARNED A tremendous amount working on the Andrews case-both about crime reenactment and the sensitivities of long-grieving families.

I told the Andrewses what I thought about the crime and that they were wasting their money having Manny chase useless leads all over the United States. Manny, in turn, telephoned me in a rage, furious that I killed his cash cow.

A month later, Manny dropped out of sight, and I was working on my second case.