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

I looked carefully at all the koalas, imagining Shari holding them, petting them, arranging them on her shelves. And then I imagined the UNSUB having one as a souvenir of Shari. I bet he’d like that, another way of possessing her.

This was the one I wanted. What if this could be the bait and Dawn the fisherman? Let’s be honest, Douglas, I thought to myself, you’re the fisherman and Dawn’s the bait.

God knew I’d been surprised many times in the past by the actions of violent offenders, and not in a good way. Did I have the right to potentially put someone else in jeopardy? If anything happened to Dawn, the family would never recover.

And though you try not to think in those terms, I couldn’t help considering what it would mean to me and the still fairly new profiling program if any harm were to come to Dawn, even psychological harm.

“It was beyond unnerving,” Dawn later told us. “I felt I was bait at that point—bait to the man who had murdered my sister. But I remember almost not feeling like I was allowed to actually feel what a normal person would have felt in those circumstances, because I felt like it was my job, my responsibility, my assignment, to place the koala, do this, do that, be this way. Do what you have to do in order to get this to come to an end, to catch this man, for this nightmare to end.”

This guy had a “sick” mind, but he knew exactly what he was doing, and he wanted to continue.

To do that, I said to try to appear very kind, compassionate, and calm. Let him be in charge and appear compassionate and understanding, even if he makes you want to retch.

I was both moved and impressed by her self-control, not letting her inner turmoil or the knowledge of what this faceless man would have liked to do to her distract her from her mission. She was speaking to the UNSUB, but she was speaking for her sister, for Debra May, and for the entire community that was still under threat from this man’s violent desires.

“I felt terrified all along. That’s why we had around-the-clock police protection, because the fear was that he would come after me as well. And so to hear those words come out of his mouth, I remember thinking, Well, what are these people going to do to protect me for the rest of my life if this man is never caught? And he was so good at not getting caught. He would stay on the phone until just before the call would be traced. And every time he’d be gone by the time someone would arrive at the destination. We couldn’t even grieve Shari’s death properly because this man was still taunting our family and then threatening me. It was just a horrifying, terrible feeling. Words could never describe the fear that I felt.”

I knew how quickly things can happen when you don’t have a completely controlled environment.

Dr. Ted Allan Rathbun, a forensic anthropologist at the University of South Carolina, performed a craniofacial superimposition in which the skull of the deceased is superimposed by means of a video camera and monitor over a photograph of the individual the body is believed to belong to, to confirm identity.

The right-hand column of the paper was devoted to commonsense tips on how parents could protect their children.

His fixation on Dawn after abducting Shari pointed to a very specific preference. The abduction and murder of Debra May told us that when the urge struck him, he would settle for any female victim, as long as she was weaker than him and unable to put up effective resistance.

when Lewis McCarty picked us up from our motel and brought us out to his cabin on Lake Murray.

it was relaxing for once just being able to take in the scenery rather than continually analyzing my surroundings for clues or proactive strategy ideas.

In the short amount of time we’d been in South Carolina, Lewis had become not only a professional colleague, but a genuine friend.

“The watchword to this whole thing is helplessness,” psychiatrist Dr. David C. Jacobs told Joyce W. Milkie in an interview for the Times & Democrat of Orangeburg, South Carolina.

“It is a terrifying situation,” Jacobs acknowledged, allowing that the “type of terror presented when you think of your own children taken from their yard is something people are just not used to here.

Without suggesting what they should write—journalists understandably don’t take well to that kind of advice—I confided our own goals to them:

You never know where your breaks are going to come.

My only concern was that the grave was so close to the road that if the UNSUB showed up, he could either stay in his car or watch from a distance.

Perhaps the most moving coverage of the event came from Teresa K. Weaver, a staff writer for the Columbia Record, published in the next day’s edition under the headline COPING WITH THE PAIN.

Yesterday would have been Shari Smith’s 18th birthday.

She’d told me beforehand that she felt manipulative acting out this scenario, which was preplanned rather than a spontaneous gesture, and as I watched her, I had to concede to myself that I was manipulating her, just as the UNSUB had been doing. Though the motivation was different, I knew it was still distressing to her.

Despite the fact that it was staged, the ceremony was almost unbearably moving, and I found myself choking up several times as I observed each family member’s quiet and dignified grief, all the more difficult, I was sure, because it was on public display.

Bob made an observation that I knew to be all too true from my many encounters with families that had lost loved ones to murder: “You know, the injury heals but the scar doesn’t ever go away.”

I could see the toll it had taken on every member of the family. They seemed shell-shocked, as if they didn’t want to have to face anyone.

Dawn, who had had the major role, was particularly affected. She later told us, “I was really angry that I was having to do this koala thing and do all these other things to try to coax this man into reaching out to my family, because we thought that was the only way he would be caught. And so, while it was so upsetting on the inside, you wouldn’t have seen it on the outside because that was my job. But then, of course, once those little assignments were done, we fell apart. My family fell apart when nobody was watching. I would go upstairs into my bedroom and just sob. But we had amazing friends and family, and people there to support us, to help us so we didn’t go through it alone.”

Once someone in your family has been the victim of a violent crime, and murder, of course, is the very worst, a world of pain is opened up. Often the only way to get through it is to go through it.

Among the mourners were the Smiths, who had never met the Helmicks, but had been praying for them and felt their loss acutely.