When a Killer Calls: A Haunting Story of Murder, Criminal Profiling, and Justice in a Small Town (Cases of the FBI's Original Mindhunter, #2)

by John E. Douglas

It had already been a busy day for Shari Smith. After rushing through breakfast and her parents’ mandatory short devotional and prayer session for her and her fifteen-year-old brother, Robert, she’d raced to school for practice for Lexington High’s Class of 1985 graduation at the University of South Carolina’s Carolina Coliseum on Sunday. She and Andy Aun had been selected to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” so they had to rehearse with Mrs. Bullock, the chorus teacher. Once she got out of school, the rest of the day would be an unending sprint from one activity to the next, much, but not all of it, in preparation for the senior class trip—a cruise to the Bahamas the following week.

Shari liked to practice her dancing on the paved basketball court in front of the garage when Robert wasn’t shooting hoops. Sometimes she would bring their mom and dad out to be her audience.

For the yearbook’s Senior Superlatives, Shari had been voted Wittiest. She’d also been voted Most Talented, but you weren’t allowed two superlatives, so she’d relinquished that one to another girl, who was thrilled with the honor.

Then Shari got into her own little blue Chevy Chevette hatchback and took off for home, with Richard following her until she turned down Highway 1, heading toward Red Bank.

The Smiths lived out in the country, in a house they built on twenty acres of land on Platt Springs Road, about ten miles outside of Lexington. The house was set back from the road on a rise, up from the 750-foot-long driveway, so there was plenty of privacy.

Somewhere around 3:25, Shari pulled into the Smith driveway and stopped the Chevette to check for mail at the pole-mounted wooden mailbox, as she always did when she came home. Since it was only a few steps from the car, she kept the motor running and didn’t bother slipping on her black plastic jelly shoes. It was Friday, May 31, 1985.

Shari loved hearing from Dawn, and Hilda was more than a little afraid that Shari was living vicariously through her big sister since her summer plans to sing and dance at Carowinds had been wrecked by the vocal cord problem.

Shari had a rare medical condition called diabetes insipidus, also known as water diabetes, that causes persistent thirst and the frequent need for urination, so there is a near-constant danger of life-threatening dehydration.

In the dirt, bare footprints led from the car to the mailbox, but—ominously—there were none leading back.

The house was on a twenty-acre plot of land in a rural community known as Red Bank, about ten miles outside the town of Lexington, up a 750-foot driveway from Platt Springs Road.

Often, I’d found that local law enforcement was not particularly thrilled to have us consulting on a case. Either they were wary of the Bureau’s reputation for moving in and then claiming all the credit because they wanted to control the investigation on their own, or they were worried our analysis wouldn’t conform with the theory both the police and the community had firmly in mind.

Metts contacted the FBI’s Columbia, South Carolina, field office and spoke to the special agent in charge, or SAC, Robert Ivey, requesting Bureau involvement.

This kind of thing, seeing a grief-stricken family further victimized by an opportunist without a conscience, which unfortunately is not uncommon, always enrages me.

All kidnappings are harrowing ordeals, but by the very nature of the crime, with a money-motivated abduction, there has to be interaction with the victim’s family, which makes the perpetrator highly vulnerable.

At this time, my title was Profiling and Consultation Program Manager, and I shared an office with my old teaching partner, Robert Ressler.

with me on the operational side as manager of the Profiling and Consultation Program, and Bob on the research side as the first manager of VICAP—the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program that created a database of criminals and their specific traits throughout the United States.

Bob and I were soon joined, always on an informal basis since they were officially tied up with teaching and research, by Roy Hazelwood, a brilliant agent whose special area of expertise was interpersonal violence and who had gone down to Atlanta with me four years before to work ATKID-Major Case 30: the Atlanta Child Murders, and the equally brilliant Kenneth Lanning, who focused on crimes against children.

Behavioral Science Unit chief Roger L. Depue was a great champion for us and regularly went to bat on our behalf with the Academy and Headquarters brass.

Of course, this put a tremendous amount of pressure on both him and us to deliver the goods and show positive results, and thankfully we’d had some notable victories, in particular with the Atlanta Child Murders in 1981.

I had been the Bureau’s first full-time profiler, and for several years I was the only one; the workload quickly became overwhelming. In January 1983, I had gone to Jim McKenzie, the assistant FBI director in charge of the Academy, told him of my exhaustion, and pleaded for more full-time help.

He’d managed to sell Headquarters on the idea by shifting around some manpower slots at Quantico. What this meant, in essence, was “stealing” bodies from other programs to get me my first four profilers: Ron Walker, Blaine McIlwaine, Jim Horn, and Bill Hagmaier.

In 1982, we were formalizing the profiling program and establishing a profile coordinator in each field office as a liaison to the Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico. Ron was tapped by the Training Division to be the WFO’s coordinator, even though he only had two years in the Bureau, because of his service record and master’s degree in psychology.

All the profilers had strong egos; that was a given in our occupation. To build on their confidence while protecting against its excesses, I liked having my team work together collegially and share ideas.

Bob Ressler, on the other hand, preferred to work alone, with a proprietary protectiveness about his cases and projects. I can’t say that was wrong or didn’t produce some good results. It was just not the way I did things.

Later, when we established the Investigative Support Unit as a separate operational entity within Behavioral Science and I became its chief, Jim took over from me as profiling program manager and second-in-command of the unit.

While we consulted on a wide variety of crimes—from extortion to kidnapping to sexual assault to serial murder—it quickly became a challenge to keep up with the hundreds of cases presented to us at any given time. Some could be handled with a simple phone call that suggested to local authorities the kind of person they should be looking for within a small field of suspects, and some were extremely involved and required extensive on-scene assessment and analysis, as Roy Hazelwood and I performed on the Atlanta Child Murders investigation, in cooperation with the area’s police departments and the FBI field office.

To put it in its simplest terms, the more common and ordinary a crime, the harder it is to solve using our methods.

While motive or motivation is an important and interesting aspect of a violent crime, and something the jury almost always wants to hear about, it is often not very helpful in solving that crime.

That is why we almost never accepted felony murder cases—defined as a murder that takes place in the commission of another felony, such as a bank robbery—or other “routine” crimes. The circumstances and behavior displayed were just not distinctive enough for us to add much to the standard police investigation.

All of these factors help us profile an UNSUB and anticipate his—and it was almost always a “he” when it came to UNSUBs we would profile—next move.

Clearly this was not the kind of guy who could charm or disarm a woman into trusting him with good looks and/or a gift of gab. This was someone who knew the only way he could get a woman to go with him was by force, no doubt combined with the element of surprise.

AFTER RON LEFT MY OFFICE, I FOUND I COULDN’T IMMEDIATELY REFOCUS ON ALL the other work piled up on my desk. As little as we knew about the Smith case at this point, my mind went back to another I had worked more than five years earlier that seemed a lot like this one.

In December 1979, Special Agent Robert Leary of the FBI resident agency (a smaller Bureau outpost than a field office) in Rome, Georgia, called with the details of a particularly troubling case. The previous week, a pretty and outgoing twelve-year-old girl named Mary Frances Stoner had disappeared after being dropped off by the school bus at the driveway to her home in Adairsville,

Physical evidence indicated she was assaulted in his vehicle, and once that happened, he would have seen that the reality of her horror, screams, and pain was nothing like his fantasy. At that point, if not before, he would have realized he had to kill her, or his life was ruined.

Most of the time, the best we can do is use our skills to try to prevent more victims. As I found myself involuntarily glancing at the photos of my own two young daughters, Erika and Lauren, on my credenza, I dared to hope this case would have a better outcome.

Back in 1985, when Lewis McCarty called us about the Smith case, Behavioral Science occupied a row of offices on the first floor of the Forensic Science Building on the FBI Academy campus, nestled in the woods on the U.S. Marine Base in Quantico, Virginia.

We also shared a conference room with the Forensic Science side of the house, and they weren’t always happy about it because we were taking up some of their space. We started asking them to sit in with us on some of our case consultation conferences, and many of them seemed to appreciate that.

We tried to hold these meetings at least once a week so everyone on the team could run his or her cases (Special Agents Rosanne Russo and Patricia Kirby had come to us from the New York and Baltimore field offices, respectively, the year before as our first female profilers) by the others for assumption-challenging questions and ideas.

The case materials and photocopied newspaper articles were spread out across the conference table.

Ron and Blaine also made another contribution that was to have a significant effect on the program, at least as far as I was concerned. They saved my life.

Not quite a year and a half before, in late November to early December 1983, I had taken them with me to Seattle to consult with the task force on the Green River Murders, then already shaping up to be one of the largest serial killer cases in American history.

By the time Ron, Blaine, and I went there in November 1983, at least eleven victims had been attributed to an UNSUB by then termed the “Green River Killer,” a task force had been formed, and the search had become the country’s largest serial murder investigation.

It was a particularly stressful time in my own life. Even with the new associates, I was overwhelmed by the workload and having trouble sleeping. Three weeks earlier, while giving a talk on criminal personality profiling to about 350 NYPD, Transit Police, and Nassau and Suffolk County, Long Island, police officers, the stress had gotten to me—I’d had a momentary but overpowering feeling of dread, even though I’d given the speech many times before.

The morning after our arrival in Seattle, I made a presentation to the Green River Task Force and suggested some proactive strategies that might get the killer to come forward as a “witness,” and how to interrogate him if that did happen.

November in Seattle is not the most inviting month to be outdoors, and the locals were still talking about the “Turkey Day Storm” the previous week. By the time we got back to the Hilton hotel that evening, I was wiped out, had a headache, and felt like I might be coming down with the flu.

Alarmed, they went back to the front desk and demanded a key from the manager. When they went back upstairs and unlocked the door, the security chain was on, and they heard faint moaning coming from inside. They broke the door open and found me on the floor, comatose and apparently near death from what turned out to be viral encephalitis.

While away from it all, I was despondent and questioned everything about my life and commitment to this kind of work. Ron was one of the few friends I saw during that time, probably figuring that he understood and could appreciate what I was going through.

Now I was thankful to have people like Ron, Blaine, and the others on the team both to share their insights and to help absorb and defuse some of the stress.

Much of it was based on the timeline the sheriff’s office and SLED—the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division—had put together.

We had to think beyond Shari herself. Bob Smith served as a volunteer chaplain at the Lexington County Jail. He also ministered in other prisons and young men’s correctional schools and institutions. So was there a possibility that the abduction was revenge for some perceived wrong by Bob against one of the inmates, or simply resentment that he represented the law that had put them behind bars?