Trailed, p.20
Trailed, page 20
“It was a heartbreaking decision for her,” Bill recalled. “She’d only ever wanted to dedicate her life to military service.” After leaving the navy, Cathy sank into a real depression. Meeting Becky was part of what eventually brought her out of it. While at the Naval Academy, Cathy had been a Russian scholar. She began applying to doctoral programs in international relations. “She figured if she couldn’t serve in the military, she could still serve the country in the foreign service,” said Bill. Cathy and Becky began dating the spring of 1986. “Cathy talked about her all the time,” Bill told me. “It was a solid, happy relationship. She was planning on bringing Becky to see us at Thanksgiving. Everyone in the family was thrilled.”
Bill struggled to remain composed as he continued his story. “We were all looking forward to finally meeting Becky. We never got the chance.” He brushed away a tear. “And my father went to his grave never knowing who killed his daughter.”
Bill’s grief turned to real anger. “The FBI has botched my sister’s case at every turn,” he said, his Irish complexion turning red. “They destroyed her rape kit. They’ve misled us. They’ve lied to us.” Take the wad of hair found in Cathy’s hand, Bill explained. “When you talk to the FBI, sometimes it exists and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s never been tested. When I ask why, I get all kinds of answers.” Once, he said, an agent told him they hadn’t bothered sending the sample to the lab because it was animal hair. “In the process of being strangled, my sister what? Pets a dog? Or maybe her attacker was actually a raccoon?” Bill demanded. He said that other times he’d been told the hair—which is described as brown in some reports—belonged to his strawberry-blond sister.
Becky Dowski and Cathy Thomas were the first of four couples killed on and around the Colonial Parkway between 1986 and 1989. Known colloquially as “the Colonial Parkway murders,” the crimes are sometimes attributed to a single killer, though none have been solved. The surviving families have joined forces in trying to raise awareness about the cases and to push for more attention and resources from law enforcement. Bill Thomas often serves as their spokesperson. “We’ve demanded answers. We’ve called bullshit. We’ve involved the media every way we know how. Nothing seems to push along the FBI,” he told me.
We spent the rest of the day and then evening breaking down our two cases and trying to look for any evidence that they might share a killer. One commonality among the Colonial Parkway murders is that the victims’ vehicles were often found with the driver’s-side window down and with the driver’s wallet out and open. That has led multiple people to speculate that someone in law enforcement—or posing as law enforcement—was the killer.
“It would certainly explain how they managed to subdue Cathy and Becky, who was also a strong college athlete,” said Bill. He speculated that the two women had pulled off into a secluded picnic area that night. Perhaps a person posing as a ranger had apprehended them, maybe even handcuffed them. Based on forensic evidence, it appears that they were killed at the picnic area and that their assailant then stuffed the women’s bodies into Cathy’s car and drove them to the lookout, where their attacker attempted to light the car on fire and then pushed it down an embankment. Four of the law enforcement rangers who worked on that case in 1986 had transferred to Shenandoah National Park by 1996 and were assigned to Lollie and Julie’s case as well, including Tim Alley, Clyde Yee, and their supervisor, Ken Johnson. At least two of the four were considered suspects by the FBI. (Agents went so far as to get a warrant to search Johnson’s vehicles; he also willingly gave hair and fingerprint samples. The FBI found no evidence he was involved and later ruled him out as a suspect.)
Long after the sun had set, Bill Thomas and I were still at it. Eventually, we both had to accept that neither of us knew enough about the cases to conclude much of anything. Even though he is Cathy’s surviving relative and the family’s spokesperson, Bill has been denied access to almost all the FBI’s information on the case. Because Darrell Rice’s case had made it to a federal court, I actually had more information about Julie and Lollie’s murder than Bill could obtain on Cathy’s. What he did have wasn’t enough to explain what had really happened at that campsite or who was responsible. I asked Bill about the experience and emotional impact of not knowing so many details about his sister’s death.
“It was especially hard on our family at first because we had no way to focus our anger and loss,” he told me. “For a while, I tried to put it behind me, but that didn’t work either. In a lot of ways, closing Cathy and Becky’s case has become my life.”
Bill said that a big reason he left Los Angeles and moved back east was so that he could be closer to the investigation. Since then, he has been tireless in his attempts to shine a spotlight on the unsolved crime, appearing on multiple TV shows, in magazine and newspaper stories, and at CrimeCon, the high-profile convention for armchair sleuths and true crime fans. It’s emotionally draining, he admitted, but he also feels like it’s worth it. I asked him what finally closing the case would mean for him. He said he has met other surviving family members who want a kind of biblical vengeance for the people who killed their loved ones. He empathizes with that sentiment, but it has never been his motivation. Instead, he said, his motivation has always been a quest for answers.
“I don’t believe that the sun will come out and always shine and everything in my life will be rosy,” Bill said. “But I think there will be real satisfaction and peace in at least understanding why this happened to my sister.” He paused and swallowed hard. “All we’ve ever wanted to know is why she had to die.”
He looked at me over the frames of his glasses. “What about you? What’s brought you down this path?”
I thought about that question for a long time before I spoke. The truth was that I was still parsing out that answer for myself. In the beginning, I had just wanted to preserve the memory of two extraordinary women and outdoor leaders. I also continued to believe that the case could be solved if it could just get the right attention. But my motivations had also become more complicated in recent months. As far as I could tell, the federal government had made Darrell Rice a stooge for its campaign to seem tough on hate crimes. That didn’t make him guilty or innocent, of course, but I’d become increasingly skeptical of the theory that he had done it. And the deeper I dug, the more incredulous I was becoming over how authorities had handled this case—and the more I was starting to recognize that their missteps and omissions seemed part of a larger systemic problem in our justice system. Add to all this the fact that our country, despite concerted efforts from strong and vocal people, continues to suffer from an even larger collective problem of overlooking, excusing, or otherwise dehumanizing violence against women and marginalized people. I wasn’t quite sure how to articulate a lot of that yet, so I stuck with what I knew to be true. I guess I’m just tired of being scared, I told Bill.
16
A few weeks after my visit to Connecticut, Bill Thomas called me. “How about a road trip?” he asked in his morning drive-time radio voice. I asked what destination he had in mind. “Albany, New York,” he said. “We can carpool.” I told him I thought I was going to need a little more information first. “Check your email,” he boomed. There, already in my inbox, was a registration form for the annual meeting of the American Investigative Society of Cold Cases, a consortium of law enforcement officers, behavioral scientists, and forensics experts, to be held on the campus of St. Rose College later that month. “Albany?” I complained. “There’s no easy way to get there. And I’m on deadline for a story.” Bill wasn’t taking no for an answer. “You can write during the off time. Book a room at the conference hotel. We can hang out over meals and compare notes.” It had already become clear that Bill and I were the archetypal odd couple. He’s a big talker. I’m an introvert who loves my quiet time and who becomes increasingly rude when I don’t get it. “All right,” I conceded. “But I’m driving my own car.” He laughed. “Suit yourself. I’ll see you there.”
On the morning of the first conference session, I found Bill sitting alone in the second row of a gilded ballroom at St. Rose. He was dressed in a tweed jacket and wearing clunky hipster glasses in a wash of very loud colors. Even if we hadn’t already met, it would have been easy to pick him out in a sea of law enforcement officers who mostly wore khaki pants, the requisite polo shirt, and sidearms.
The American Investigative Society of Cold Cases is the brainchild of Ken Mains, a veritable celebrity in the true crime world. A former marine intelligence operative turned cop, Mains made a name for himself first working as an undercover FBI narcotics agent and then as the progenitor of one of Pennsylvania’s first cold case squads. In 2013, while investigating an unsolved double murder, Mains became, in his words, “stuck.” “It is a detective’s worst nightmare,” he writes in his memoir, Unsolved No More: A Cold Case Detective’s Fight for Justice. “It is a horrible feeling. You feel lost, desolate, failed and alone. I felt I had nowhere to turn for help because no single person or group entity had invested the time and passion I had into the case.” Mains is also a sports fan. He decided that what he needed to break open his stuck case was the criminology version of a dream team. And so he contacted the world’s best detectives, forensic psychologists, crime scene investigators, DNA experts, and more. By 2013, they had become the board of Mains’s organization, the AISCC. Together, he and his board have advised on over one hundred cold cases, including high-profile murders like those perpetrated by California’s Zodiac Killer. Along the way, Mains has been an unflinching critic of homicide investigation in the country and one of the first to call attention to the ways in which an inability to account for bias has led both to wrongful convictions and unsolved crimes. It’s become his life’s work, which he’s tackled with a series of television shows and books. I’d watched several of the former before the conference. Depending on the situation, Mains can look like a Hell’s Angel or a geeky A/V enthusiast. That morning, as he kicked off the conference, he appeared somewhere in between. A blue sport coat hid Mains’s impressive collection of tattoos; he’d trimmed his beard and slicked his hair back into a tiny ponytail.
In addition to law enforcement, the audience that day comprised a number of surviving family members like Bill Thomas. Even in the second row, with my back to most of the audience, I learned very quickly that the bereaved are easy to pick out by the raw emotion in their voices and the gut-wrenching specificity of their questions (Yes, but what if he stabbed her sixty-five times in the chest? Or But what if she had already taken out three restraining orders and he was still showing up for the kids). Regardless of what brought them there, each of the audience members sat spellbound as a parade of international experts worked their way through digital presentations and grim statistics. The only reprieve was the pervasive graveyard humor: the last slide of a presentation made by a forensic psychologist, for instance, read thank you for not vomiting.
But for all the attempts at levity, the news delivered by these keynote speakers was sobering. Currently, at least 250,000 active murder investigations in the United States don’t just remain unsolved; they have also gone cold, which is to say that they are no longer being investigated. Every presenter at this conference believed that figure is actually much higher—and that it doesn’t even begin to account for the number of cases in which an innocent person has been found guilty. The national trend for all violent crime investigations is just as concerning. Despite huge advances in technology and investigation techniques, the murder clearance rate is still dropping: In the 1950s, the overwhelming majority—nearly 70 percent—of murder cases led to an arrest and conviction. Today, murder clearance rates are as low as 30 percent in some areas. According to studies completed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the NPS has the lowest clearance rate among law enforcement agencies nationally.
One big problem, Mains told me during a break, is the lack of resources for law enforcement. “Again and again, cold case leads don’t come in while new cases build up,” he said. “Eventually, a detective has to tend to those other cases, so the cold ones go into a drawer and then a vault.” Once those cases move off a detective’s desk, said Mains, it’s really hard to get any attention for them. As a result, the overwhelming majority of cold cases will never result in a conviction. But there are also advantages to a cooling-off period, and time can work to an investigator’s benefit. “Loyalties and allegiances change over time,” Mains said. “We think differently as we age. Cold case detectives can use that to their advantage.” Sometimes what a case needs more than anything is a changing of the guard—a handoff from one investigator to the next.
“Skepticism is also a powerful weapon,” added Mains. “Far too often, investigators who have worked a case for a while will become entrenched in their own theories. As a result, they’ll literally funnel every new piece of evidence through their account of the crime. And if a piece of evidence seems to call that theory into question, they’ll downplay or even disregard it.” It’s a phenomenon known as confirmation bias—as humans, we are predisposed to favor any information or opinion that affirms our preconceptions. In the world of homicide investigation, confirmation bias can cause investigators to explain away evidence or refuse to have it tested, so certain are they that it will not help solve the crime. In the Cary Stayner case in Yosemite, for instance, the FBI investigators focused almost exclusively on the theory that Carole Lund, her daughter, and the friend were killed by a loved one, because statistically that is usually the case. When that didn’t pan out, they focused only on those employees of the lodge who had criminal records. Because Cary Stayner did not, he was cleared. In the meantime, Stayner went on to kill his fourth victim.
Scholars have only recently begun to understand just how widespread confirmation bias has been in thwarting justice, particularly for the victims of violent crimes. A recent study found that 80 percent of all wrongful convictions occurred because of demonstrable confirmation bias on the part of both investigators and prosecutors. This bias included everything from misjudging witness reliability to preventing laboratory testing of evidence—what researchers say is nothing short of a complete breakdown of logic and inquiry. And, said Mains, confirmation bias can be especially pernicious because it often occurs at such a subconscious level that the experts don’t even realize it’s happening. New eyes—even amateur eyes—are an important corrective for that kind of bias, said Mains.
I asked him what he would recommend someone like me do. “Start at the beginning and investigate the case all over again. Assume they got it wrong the first time,” he said, finishing his coffee. “Doubt leads to inquiry. And inquiry leads to the truth.”
Over the course of the conference, Bill Thomas and I cornered every expert we could find. Most of the people we spoke with were familiar with the cases. That included Laura Richards, a criminal behavioral analyst who consults regularly for the FBI and England’s Scotland Yard. She and Bill Thomas first met when he appeared on Real Crime Profile, the popular true crime podcast she hosted with former FBI profiler Jim Clemente (he and Thomas have since collaborated on a TV series about the Colonial Parkway murders). Richards told me she thinks there are definitely enough similarities between these two cases for them to be at least considered together. In the case of the first Colonial Parkway and the Shenandoah murders, she said, it’s not just the victim selection and modus operandi (MO) of the crime but also the number of things that were done to the victims. “In both cases, we have them being bound, being gagged, having their throats cut. These three acts together, the sheer togetherness of them, stands out to me as a linkage,” she said.
Richards also said she was as interested in what investigators didn’t find as what they did. “It’s not just about the commission; it’s also about the omission,” she explained. “In both cases, you’d expect it to be sexually motivated. It’s almost always about power and control and sexual motivation when women are killed. But neither sets of women, as far as we know, were sexually assaulted. They weren’t robbed; it doesn’t look like a drug deal gone wrong. That narrows it down in terms of the reason they were targeted.” The same, she says, is true between the cases of Lollie and Julie, on the one hand, and Alicia Showalter Reynolds and Anne McDaniel, on the other. All four victims have notable similarities, another hallmark of a serial killer. Take, she said, by way of example, serial killers like Ted Bundy. They often have a particular type of victim they target (in Bundy’s case, mostly white women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, almost all brunettes with dark eyes, many of them college students).
Richards cautioned me not to make too much of the differences in these cases either. Intentional murderers—particularly serial killers—begin their criminal careers with a fantasy period, she explained. “Serial killers tend to rehearse different parts of a killing fantasy, rather than try it all at once,” said Richards. Bundy, for instance, began with low-level crimes like disabling women’s vehicles before advancing to attempted abduction and, eventually, murder. It wouldn’t be at all a surprise, said Richards, to see a murderer progress from killing one woman to two, or to shift from strangling to another form of killing. And, she added, most serial killers change their MO over time. “Perpetrators learn over time and develop countermeasures,” said Richards. “If one victim screams, next time you’re going to bring a knife or a gun to keep them quiet.” Dennis Rader, the serial killer who gave himself the nickname BTK (bind-torture-kill), for example, began his homicide career trying to suffocate people with plastic bags. After that, he tried strangling them but said later that doing so took too much time and effort. And so he then transitioned to shooting his victims, which meant he could spend a lot less time in their house.
