Faces of Evil Page 23
“Unless you’ve been through something like this,” Heidi explains, “you can’t understand what it’s like,” and adds, “and I wouldn’t want you to, because the only way to understand it is to experience it.”
One well-meaning comment that Heidi found particularly prickly after her sister’s murder was that, after the trial, she and her family might find “closure.”
“There’s no such thing as closure,” she insists. “You don’t ever really accept a loved one’s murder. You just learn to cope with it and adjust to it. You live with it as best you can.”
T. said the same thing. “I don’t think it ever really leaves you. It’s always there.”
Following the conviction of Sarah Rinehart’s killer, the editor of the Newton Kansan, Doug Anstaett (now the executive director of the Kansas Press Association), wrote an editorial in which he said, “A Wichita Eagle story on Monday about the Sarah Rinehart murder concluded that, ‘although the homemaker’s brutal beating death still haunts the community, some of its drama likely has dissipated with time.’
“That’s what happens when a big city newspaper comes into a small town and tries to ‘analyze’ the effect of what is usually a big city crime.
“In Wichita, murders are forgotten every day. They’re often replaced by another murder, another victim.
“But not in Newton.
“We don’t forget. And we never will.”
And they never have.
Chapter Twelve:
A Look of Murderous Rage
No one really knows what was going through her mind during the hour that nine-year-old Annie Tyson spent with her mother’s body before finally running to her grandma’s nearby apartment for help. Some horrors are simply too unspeakable to probe into.
Newspaper accounts the next day detailed what officers found upon arriving at the scene some time after midnight. Cynthia Tyson, a thirty-one-year-old teacher’s aide and single mother, was lying naked on the living room floor with her feet tied together; she had been beaten, strangled, and her killer had attempted to set her on fire. There were also signs of sexual assault.
Detectives later learned that Annie had also been raped.
But newspaper articles are a compilation of facts. They don’t tell the whole story. That’s up to the detectives, who patiently piece together characters, setting, plot, and theme by paying close attention to what they have learned from the dead—and what their survivors have to say.
The Houston Police Department’s homicide division is separated into three shifts. The day shift comprises the largest part of the division, followed by a smaller evening shift. The late-night shift is made up of a skeleton crew who handles calls.
After midnight, day shift investigators who are on call are notified. This is how Sergeant J.W. “Billy” Belk and his partner, Investigator Tom McCorvey got yanked out of bed.
Both Belk and McCorvey were experienced homicide investigators; young, handsome, and physically fit. Once they saw the crime scene, it was obvious to them that this was not a “typical” case, like a barroom brawl or a domestic dispute gone bad. For one thing, Annie was a sweet, beautiful, intelligent African-American child who had a way of making people fall in love with her from the moment they met her.
“When you come on a crime scene,” Sgt. Belk explained later, “you learn to take on a professional stance so that you can investigate the scene in a way that’s not emotional. What’s different is when you’re dealing with a case that involves a child, whether it’s a child victim or a child witness. And in this case, we had a child who was both the victim and the witness.”
Although Sgt. Belk was the supervisor on the scene, he and McCorvey usually split responsibilities. McCorvey stayed at the scene with the crime scene unit, documenting and photographing evidence that would then be applied to the investigation. Belk handled interviewing witnesses and canvassing the neighborhood.
There are details in every crime scene that detectives are trained to notice, and in a setting like the one they stepped into that night, they may take in details that might not register right away with the casual observer—things one might take for granted that, to an experienced investigator, tell a story.
Like the salt and pepper shakers on the stove-top. They were matching, decorative shakers, arranged neatly, balanced with other trinkets, just so, on the spotless stove-top. The same stove-top where one electric coil glowed red like the eyes of Satan, still littered with burnt-out wisps of paper towels that had come from the empty dispenser that sat on the clean cabinet next to the stove.
Officers know, for instance, that in a house in which there is extensive drug use, there is chaos, disarray, clutter and filth; the people who live in such degradation just don’t care anymore. Clearly, that wasn’t the case here. Cynthia Tyson didn’t have a lot of money and she lived modestly, but she’d made a nice home for her little girl, with what luxuries she could afford arranged neatly in clean surroundings. In Cynthia’s bedroom, the curtains matched the comforter. Her apartment may have been modest, but it was homey. There were family snapshots of a lovely young woman hugging her happy child, both smiling for the camera.
The only chaos in that apartment had been made by the killer himself.
From questioning heartbroken family and neighbors, the detectives learned that Cynthia had called her sister at about 10 P.M. to say that all was well and that she was turning in for the night.
At some point after that, the killer apparently forced his way into the apartment when she’d answered a knock at the door. He fought with her in the living room—crashing over a glass candy dish and other items in the struggle, then choked her and, after yanking a phone cord out of the wall, bound her hand and foot, raped her, then attempted to set her on fire by burning up all the paper towels from the kitchen dispenser. He also burned holes in the skin of his victim’s arms, breasts and thighs with a cigarette.
Then he turned his attention to the terrified child.
One of the first things Sgt. Belk learned at the scene (and something he never mentioned to newspaper reporters), was that Annie had witnessed what happened to her mother. I know he tried not to think about that, at least not then. Not while there was so much work to be done.
Homicide detectives investigate every case to the fullest extent of the law, but there are some cases that grab them by the gut in ways that others don’t. The best way to explain it is to compare these horrific crimes to a bar fight in which two drunkards go at one another with knives and one ends up dead. It’s not that the person deserved to die—I don’t mean to imply that at all. But in a case like that, the victim made certain choices that put him in a situation that risked his life.
But in the Cynthia Tyson case, there was a cozy, loving family going about their lives—and suddenly, through no fault of their own, through no choice made by them—they were savagely attacked and their lives destroyed, leaving a child violated and motherless.
That’s a gut-grabber, and it’s one that the investigators will go above and beyond the call of duty to bring to justice.
As Sgt. Belk examined Cynthia Tyson’s burnt and bruised body, he told me later he knew right away that we were dealing with a juvenile or adolescent offender. When he squatted down to examine Annie’s mother, he noticed that the killer had tried to set fire to her fingernails and had set fire to some paper towels he’d placed on her abdomen.
“What young people don’t usually realize,” he told me later, “is that the human body is composed of something like 85 percent water—so it doesn’t erupt into flames like that. You have scorching instead. If an adult wanted to destroy evidence by setting a body on fire, what he’d do is pour gasoline or something like that on the body and the area surrounding it, and torch it.”
After looking over the crime scene, Sgt. Belk turned his attention to Annie. She was sitting in a squad car with a police officer. “I thought the child would be so terribly traumatized that she wouldn’t talk,” he said later.
Later, he said how amazed he had been by this child. “She turned out to be a big surprise—the exact opposite of what I had expected,” he said. “I’d thought she wouldn’t talk at all, or would cry and turn away. I found her to be articulate, intelligent, and precocious. She was willing to dig through her memory in order to provide details we needed.”
To his amazement, Annie even had the calm good sense to point out things the killer had touched in the apartment so that the crime scene unit could take fingerprints. “For instance, she mentioned that he had parted the blinds to look out. We got a good set of prints from those blinds.”
Sgt. Belk said later that little Annie “ranked in what I would consider the top 10 percent of most witnesses and I’m talking about adults.” Thanks to this child, Belk was hopeful that the case could be solved quickly.
At that time, the homicide division was located in a two-story, gray stone substation on Mykawa Road in southeast Houston. My old friend, Assistant Chief Charles McClelland—then a lieutenant in homicide—oversaw the case. Later, we talked about how his own little girl was the same age as Annie, and he described how he felt when he first met Annie Tyson.
“It just broke my spirit,” he said. “She was so sweet and innocent, such a well-behaved little girl.” McClelland kept a bag of teddy bears in his office to comfort traumatized children, and he gave one to Annie, “so she would have something to hold on to, and to help restore her faith that the whole world wasn’t bad.”
Like Sgt. Belk, Chief McClelland noticed how composed Annie was, “for someone—especially a child—who had been so hurt and experienced such trauma.” During the interview, Annie gave the investigators a detailed description of the suspect. They both marveled at her presence of mind. “She kept comparing him to a family friend,” said Belk. “She’d say, ‘He had this type or that type of feature, like my friend—but it wasn’t my friend who did it.’”
At that point, Chief McClelland explained later, “I knew we needed to get you in right away, and I didn’t hesitate to call, even though it was 3:30 in the morning.”
When the telephone jars me awake in the dark depths of night the way it did then, it’s not like it is for most people, whose hearts beat rapidly from fear that something must have happened to someone they love. I automatically assume it’s work, but I also know something else—it’s bad.
Over the course of a given year I work dozens of murders, sometimes as many as five in one week, mixed in with all my other cases from sex crimes or robbery, but the witnesses or victims all come to my office by appointment. When investigators call me in the middle of the night, I know right away that this is going to be something horrible, something heinous, something that will shock the readers of the morning papers.
As soon as I heard Lieutenant McClelland’s voice, I struggled awake and gave him my full attention. I’d felt close to McClelland ever since we’d worked the horrific Theodore Goynes case (when, thanks to valiant serial rape survivors and McClelland’s dedication, Goynes had been stopped after murdering one of his victims).
On this night, Lt. McClelland’s voice was so soft, so soothing, as he relayed to me the horrific details of what had happened to Annie. Of course, my motherly heart constricted. Like McClelland, I too had a nine-year-old little girl of my own, sleeping peacefully in the next bedroom, dreaming of unicorns and rainbows and all the things sweet young girls should have in their hearts.
Although I had a sore throat and was feeling ill I said, “Consider me en route.” This is a phrase I always use when awakened in the night, to ease the detective’s mind that I’m going to get there as quickly as I can.
He, like other detectives, asked, “What is your ETA?”
Chief McClelland says that he’ll never forget that night, how I said, “Now, I’m a woman. It takes me longer to get ready than a man, but I’m on my way.” He chuckles when he tells that story. I told him I’d be there in about half an hour.
Sid and I had been married at that point for fourteen years, and our older son, Brent, was thirteen. We’d long since worked out a routine, where I would sleep in after working late-night cases and Sid would get the kids up and off to school. To this day, Sid has a tender heart that makes him a wonderful daddy, but he can’t bear to hear the details of the kinds of cases that drag me out of bed in the night, so I don’t talk to him about them. Sometimes that can be lonely, but I think of my husband and children as my roots. They hold me firmly to the ground, like a tree, and give me the strength to withstand the storms of my job.
I slid out of the warm womb of my bed, leaving Sid snoring peacefully, and padded silently over to the closet in the dark, where I pulled out soft black knit jersey pants and a top that I kept for just this sort of case. It was comfortable and the embroidered shock of wheat on the front, in shades of gold and yellow thread, looked like a cheerful sunburst—less threatening, I reasoned, than a severe business suit, especially to a child.
Whenever I work with a child, I want to appear more like a mommy to them than a cop.
As I dressed, brushed my teeth and combed my hair, I thought about Annie Tyson. At this point, the little girl had been up all night and along with the emotional and physical trauma, she would most likely be falling asleep while I sketched. So I would have to work fast and I would have to wake her up and force her to live through it over and over again. I dreaded that part.
From the kitchen I snatched up a couple of apples, one for me to eat on the way and one for Annie, and took a little juice box from the refrigerator, the kind kids like. I knew instinctively that this little girl was going to need a lot of nurturing.
There are some in my profession who believe that the forensic sketch artist should be as detached as the police investigators, that we’re there to do a job and move on to the next case. They think our responsibilities are more technical than psychological. We render the face of the bad guy and the cops go get him.
I couldn’t disagree more. As sketch artists, we’re asking a crime victim to relive the worst thing that’s ever happened to him or her. They’re shattered and shaken and they think they can’t remember any of the details we’ll need to do a sketch. Some victims, like Betsy in “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” tremble and sob—or even break out in hives. Like the bus driver in “Blind Justice,” some shout at you. Some don’t even want to talk. Some get sick.
Although I keep a full array of paper, pastels and other artist’s instruments in my office, by far the most important tool I have at my disposal is my empathy. My own rape and near-murder years ago has sharpened my ability to stand in a victim’s shoes and understand how they must be feeling.
As I’ve mentioned before and will do again as long as there’s breath in my body—if I can touch a mutual, responsive chord somewhere deep inside a crime victim and in so doing, coax the person to remember the things he or she has tried so hard to stamp out of his or her memory, I’m not just increasing the trauma. No. What I’m doing is empowering the victim.
But it does take an emotional toll. Every time I sit with someone who’s been through hell, it’s like reliving my own ordeal all over again. It often leaves me drained and exhausted.
However, for every moment that I feel worn out by this process, there are thousands more when I feel not just energized but exhilarated. I’ve helped someone else find justice! It is absolutely the very best therapy I could have ever had to enable me to triumph over my own attack. It’s downright addictive.
But even though I’ve done it thousands of times, every time I sit down with a victim of violent crime, especially a very young child, I’m entering the unknown—creating substance from thin air. Will I be able to pull it off? Will my sketch look like the criminal? Will the officers be able to use my drawing successfully? I always get hammered
with self-doubts and I always have to motivate myself by remembering how many successful cases we’ve had before this.
As I drove through the mostly deserted streets of Houston in the humid early-morning hours that autumn night, I gave myself a pep talk, reminding myself of the criminals I’d helped to catch, so that I could approach the job with confidence, but even so I knew—as with other difficult cases—every time I sit down with a witness, it’s like the very first time.
The ride down Mykawa took me past row upon row of massive warehouse parks on the right, with several railroad tracks on the left, separated by a wide, water-filled ditch. This late at night, it was spooky and lonesome. Before the police substation had been built, I used to read in the paper about dead bodies being dumped on Mykawa road—a gruesome reminder that this world—the police world I inhabit by day—is far removed from the world I just left, where fifty-foot pecan trees form a cathedral ceiling over my street and people in their safe homes don’t usually think about things like little girls being raped and beaten after watching their mamas being tortured and murdered.
By then I’d grown used to that light/dark aspect of my life. In fact, whenever I was invited to a party, I always thought up some funny stories to tell about my work, so that when people made polite inquiries, I didn’t scare them.
I parked my car behind the substation next to one other lonely car, got out and walked to the building, balancing the juice and apples I’d brought. I punched in the keypad code so the door would click open and I could get in.