Erased E-Book

Marilee Strong

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 636

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Based on five years of investigative reporting and research intoforensic psychology and criminology, Erased presents anoriginal profile of a widespread and previously unrecognized typeof murder: not a "hot-blooded," spur-of-the-momentcrime of passion, as domestic homicide is commonly viewed, but acold-blooded, carefully planned and methodically executed form of"erasure." These crimes are often committed by men withno criminal record or history of violence whatsoever, men leadingfunctional and often successful lives until the moment they killthe women, and sometimes children, they claimed to love. Asurprising number go on to kill a second or even third wife orgirlfriend, often in exactly the same way. In more than fifty chilling case studies, Marilee Strongexamines the strange and complex psychology that drives thesekillers--from the murder a century ago that inspired the novelAn American Tragedy to Scott Peterson, Mark Hacking, JeffreyMacDonald, Ira Einhorn, Charles Stuart, Robert Durst, MichaelWhite, Barton Corbin, and many others. Erased also looks athow these men manipulate the legal system and exploit loopholes inmissing persons procedures and death investigation, exposing howeasy it can be to get away with murder.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Epigraph

Introduction

PART ONE - Eraser Killing

CHAPTER ONE - Out of the Shadows

CHAPTER TWO - The Dark Triad

CHAPTER THREE - The Real American Tragedy

PART TWO - Getting Away with Murder

CHAPTER FOUR - The Lady-Killer

CHAPTER FIVE - Disappearing Acts

CHAPTER SIX - Hiding in Plain Sight

CHAPTER SEVEN - Pregnant and Vulnerable

PART THREE - A Psychological Autopsy of a Classic Eraser Killing

CHAPTER EIGHT - A Watery Grave

CHAPTER NINE - Keeping Secrets

CHAPTER TEN - Too Good to Be True

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Seeds of a Plan

CHAPTER TWELVE - A Collision Course

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Sex, Lies, and Audiotape

Conclusion

Bibliographical Sources

About the Authors

Index

Copyright © 2008 by Marilee Strong. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strong, Marilee.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7879-9639-0 (cloth)

1. Uxoricide—United States—Case studies. 2. Pregnant women—Crimes against—United States—Case studies. 3. Murderers—United States—Psychology. I. Powelson, Mark. II. Title.

HV6542.S77 2008

364.152’3—dc22

2007041054

To all the women still missing, may they yet be found,and to the living victims who seek justice in their name

Acknowledgments

I could not have written this book without the love, support, advice, and assistance of Mark Powelson, who constantly challenged me to go deeper than I thought I could go. His help in shaping the central idea of this book was invaluable, as were his magnificent research abilities and editing skills. He is a true partner in every sense of the word.

My friend and agent, Amy Rennert, set me on the path that led to this book. Her unwavering belief and support carried me through the darkest days of a long and arduous journey, and I owe her more than I can ever say. In the increasingly commercial world of book publishing, her commitment to ideas and her willingness to go the distance for her writers are both remarkable and rare.

My editor, Alan Rinzler, embraced the concept I envisioned for this book from our very first conversation and pushed me to take it even further. Every writer should be so lucky to have the opportunity to work with such a gifted and enthusiastic editor.

I am indebted to countless people who generously shared their time and insights with me during the reporting of this book, including Jim Anderson, Ron Arias, Anne Bird, Martin Blinder, Lisa Borok, Howard Breuer, Jacquelyn Campbell, Paula Canny, Michael Cardoza, Jason Dearen, Candice DeLong, Thomas DiBiase, Stacy Finz, Victoria Frye, Ann Goetting, Stan Goldman, Gloria Gomez, Gary Greene, Jim Hammer, Jodi Hernandez, Miriam Hernandez, Daniel Horowitz, Dean Johnson, Mark Klaas, Dennis Mahon, James Murphy, Alan Peacock, Delroy Paulhus, Dan Saunders, Garin Sinclair, Stan and Denise Smart, Chuck Smith, Kevin Smith, Vince Sturla, Robert Talbot, Diana Walsh, Janelle Wang, Neil Websdale, Chris Weicher, and Irwin Zalkin.

I am also grateful to the following people for the access and assistance they provided to me during the legal proceedings in the Scott Peterson case: Peter Shaplen, Judy Lucier, Carol Hurst, Jenne Carnevale, Mike Orange, Doug Ridenour, Kelly Huston, Tom Letras, and, most especially, the Honorable Alfred A. Delucchi, an extraordinary human being and a judge of incomparable intelligence, patience, fairness, and compassion.

I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee.

—William Shakespeare, Othello

Introduction

A Crime Without a Name

The long road that led to this book began for me with the disappearance of Laci Peterson. From the first bewildering reports that a young pregnant woman had vanished from her home on Christmas Eve 2002 in a town in California’s Central Valley, I sensed that something greater and even more disturbing was at play than an already overwhelming individual tragedy, although at the time I could not identify exactly what that was. The initial reports seemed to point to a stranger abduction, but the facts as they began to unfold did not cleanly fit the pattern that such a crime normally leaves behind.

Trained as a journalist in the South Bronx in the 1980s, I was well acquainted with violent crime in all its terrible manifestations. More recently I had become painfully familiar with the often-unending horror of stranger abduction while covering a string of child kidnappings in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although it’s no guarantee of a positive outcome—none of the missing little girls I wrote about has ever been found—I saw how aggressive reporting was essential to keep police and the public focused on these cases to provide any hope of a resolution to the mystery of their disappearances.

I also learned how much the ability to solve this kind of crime depends on rapid police response and the complete cooperation of those closest to the victim—especially whoever was the last to see the missing person. For the detectives on such cases, the clock begins ticking from the moment the person vanishes, as the chances of recovering the victim alive fall dramatically after the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours. I could see firsthand how, as more and more time passed, feelings of helplessness, self-blame, and intractable grief take an immeasurable toll on the family of the missing, just as frustration and irresolution eat away at the detectives searching in vain for their loved ones.

When the trail grows cold—when the hundreds or thousands of tips, leads, sightings, interviews, and alibi checks all come up dry—the case remains officially open. But, in a sense, a curtain is drawn around an ongoing tragedy.

In this type of crime, where a beloved family member has disappeared and no hint of evidence remains, someone has been able to commit what is, in effect, personal terrorism against everyone who knew and loved the missing person, and has literally gotten away with murder. By leaving no trace and no trail, no usable evidence or clues, the murderer faces fewer personal consequences than the average citizen might face from a minor traffic violation. There is no arrest, no hearing, no trial, no justice, and no answers. There is no body to recover, no funeral, no burial, no headstone.

Whereas most of the public is cognizant only of the few weeks or months when the search for a missing person is at its zenith, those who have been close to these crimes have seen the unresolved grief, the wrenching apart of families, the pained expressions on the faces of investigators. These cases are never formally closed, but they fall into a horrible state of limbo where hope is squeezed beyond human endurance.

When I first heard about the disappearance of Laci Peterson and the allegations that someone had abducted a pregnant woman as she walked her large and protective dog in a heavily utilized city park, my instincts as a reporter told me that something was off. Within a week of her disappearance, I began reporting on the story, making the first of many trips to her hometown of Modesto, walking where she was said to have walked that day, visiting the places and people that were pivotal to understanding this crime. I would go on to follow the case through to its resolution, attending every day of the nearly yearlong trial of her husband, Scott, for the double murder of his wife and unborn son. I was driven, like so many millions of other people, by compassion for this vital young expectant mother but also by a growing sense that a larger story was still unrecognized.

As is now well known, the kidnapping scenario advanced by Scott Peterson was simply an elaborate ruse—a complete fabrication in a profoundly Machiavellian plot. The ugly truth that emerged at trial was that Laci had been murdered by her own husband, a seemingly normal, well-functioning man—a young man with a college education and an apparently good upbringing, who held a job and managed the responsibilities of adult life, and who had no criminal background whatsoever. The murder occurred without warning, without any prior history of abuse in the marriage.

Furthermore, this “normal” young man took the extraordinary risks involved in “staging” a phony crime, to use the technical term that forensic investigators use when a crime or crime scene is made to seem like something other than what it was, and disposing of his dead wife’s body in broad daylight ninety miles away in the middle of San Francisco Bay. He was then able to maintain utter calm and put on an at least quasi-believable demeanor as he told lie after lie to conceal the truth from his wife’s concerned family as well as his own, dozens of friends, a girlfriend who had no idea she was a married man’s mistress, an array of very shrewd police investigators, and, much to Scott’s surprise, an ever-increasing media contingent.

What puzzled so many people who attempted to analyze the Peterson story was that Scott did not fit the well-known profile of a wife-killer. Usually domestic homicides are preceded by years of physical abuse, incidents known to family and friends and often documented by police. I had some familiarity in this area as well, having worked the crisis hotline at a shelter for battered women and at a legal clinic assisting women in obtaining restraining orders against their abusers. I had heard enough stories from victims who had faced every imaginable kind of abuse to see that the marriage of Scott and Laci Peterson did not fit this particular pattern, even if in the end Scott was capable of the consummate act of domestic violence. Something else was going on here, but what?

After a number of other incidences of mysteriously disappearing women broke into the headlines, I began to see a connection. At first the similarities between these new stories and the Peterson case just seemed like strange coincidences. Nineteen months after Laci’s disappearance, Lori Hacking—another young pregnant woman in what had appeared to be a loving relationship—went missing in Utah. Lori’s husband, who everyone believed to be an honest, hard-working, religious man, seemed almost to have taken notes from Scott Peterson’s playbook in an effort to pull off a perfect murder. Hacking had set the scene so that it appeared his wife had gone jogging in a quiet park on the mouth of a canyon, thus putting her well outside the home and into an area where, conceivably, something bad but unknown could easily have happened to her.

Although Mark Hacking stuck to his very simple and straightforward story, police quickly uncovered a series of lies not directly linked to Lori’s disappearance, but which cast grave doubt on the young man’s honesty. Mark Hacking had been leading a double life—not the kind of stylish and seductive double life one sees so often in fictional portrayals of spies or sophisticated con artists, but a strangely sad double life in which he spent all his time and effort pretending that he was a nose-to-the-grindstone premed student when he was nothing of the sort.

Learning the details of the Hacking case sent me back to my files and detailed notes covering some seemingly minor facts about Scott Peterson. In addition to the obvious lies Scott had told to cover up his murder, and the whopper he had told his girlfriend and others in claiming not to be married, there was an eerie parallel here. I knew through a series of sources how Scott would “innocently” but frequently introduce lies about himself whenever he had the chance to inflate his own image. Rather than being a married fertilizer salesman who worked for a subsidiary of a European corporation, he portrayed himself as an international business owner and globetrotting playboy. When he was away from anyone who actually knew him, his wealth, accomplishments, and prowess all increased dramatically.

This tendency toward extravagantly embroidered mendacity seemed to reflect two distinct but interrelated psychological characteristics. Peterson and Hacking appeared to be compulsive liars—although they both had the ability to modulate their lies in situations where they knew they might get caught. But even more interesting was the complex pattern of their lying, especially to their wives—lies told, maintained, and elaborated over long periods of time—in order to cover the fact that they were leading secret lives.

Scott Peterson’s other, more glamorous life was that of a randy bachelor; he was able to take advantage of a surprising number of nights “away on business” to pursue his compulsive need to romance other women. Mark Hacking’s secret life was far less exciting. His studious façade masked a kind of aimless slacking, like that of a boy who didn’t want to grow up.

Then one day when I was researching the legal issue at the very center of the Peterson case—whether murder can be proved by purely circumstantial evidence—I stumbled unexpectedly on details of another case that led me to believe that some of the key psychological factors being exhibited by these unusual killers were more than a coincidence and might, in fact, provide essential clues to the real motivation and makeup of these men.

That third case involved an urbane lothario named L. Ewing Scott, who killed his wife more than fifty years ago. Although no trace of Evelyn Scott was ever found, her husband was found guilty of killing her—the first time in U.S. history that someone was convicted of murder without a corpse or without any physical proof of death whatsoever. The case established clear legal precedent—not only that murder can be proven without a body but also that circumstantial evidence can be given just as much weight as eyewitness testimony or other forms of evidence.

However, for reasons that will be explored in this book, bodiless murder convictions remain relatively rare. The odds of getting away with murder by erasing the victim are astonishingly good a full half-century after the L. Ewing Scott decision.

As I looked into more and more of these “missing wife” cases, it became clear to me that “getting away with murder” was an essential force, but not the only force, driving these killers. One might assume that every killer, every criminal of any sort, wants to get away with his crime. But most domestic homicides are not planned, not carefully calculated and covered up. In fact, most intimate partner killers make no attempt to hide their identity.

Then a case broke into the news that seemed like a variation on this type of hidden domestic homicide, involving an even more audacious ruse than a faked missing person scenario. Dr. Barton Corbin, a successful dentist who lived in a suburb of Atlanta, was indicted in December 2004 for the death of his one-time girlfriend fourteen years earlier, and two weeks later he was indicted for the murder of his current wife.

Both women had been found dead under nearly identical circumstances: looking as though they had committed suicide, a gun by their side, their bodies both in very similar postures. Although friends of the first dead woman were highly suspicious of the coroner’s finding of suicide, Corbin had not been charged with anything and had simply gone on to build a flourishing dental practice and find a new woman to love him . . . until he was through with her, too. Although Corbin used a different strategy to rid himself of a partner for whom he no longer had any use, he seemed a close cousin to the Scott Peterson type of killer. Corbin’s crimes were just as carefully planned and premeditated as Peterson’s, but instead of disappearing his victims and leaving what happened to them an open-ended mystery, he created a staged crime scene to account for each woman’s death in a way that seemed to clear him of any involvement—in fact, made the victims appear not to have been murdered at all. And he did such a convincing job of it that he only tipped his hand when he had the temerity to try it a second time.

Both Peterson and Corbin were confident, intelligent, educated men who appeared to be unblinking in the face of enormous pressure from the police, the media, and the families of their loved ones. In both cases there was almost no physical evidence linking the killer to the crime. In fact, both men had gone to an unusual amount of effort to eliminate any sign that their victims had struggled for their lives, to time their crimes such that there would not be eyewitnesses, and to erase forensic evidence that might betray their actions. And both men concocted scenarios that, if believed, would leave them in the clear. Whereas Scott Peterson made his wife’s pregnant body disappear, Barton Corbin left his wife’s dead body in plain view but made his own actions and involvement “disappear.”

Yet unlike Scott Peterson, Corbin gave no media interviews, refused to speak even to police, and, to use cop terminology, “lawyered up” within hours of his wife’s death, even though he was maintaining that it was just a tragic suicide. I suspected at the time that Corbin—who committed his second murder in the waning days of the Peterson trial—was learning from the Peterson case and was trying to avoid the mistakes that Scott had made by not saying anything that could possibly be used against him.

In her book on the Corbin case, Too Late to Say Goodbye, crime writer Ann Rule confirmed the fact that Corbin had followed the Peterson trial avidly. His sister-in-law remembered Barton remarking one day that Peterson got caught “because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”

Around this same time, a thirty-seven-year-old Alabama man named Thomas Lane broke into the home where his estranged wife was staying and drowned her while she was taking a bath, holding her down under the water with his foot until she stopped breathing. He then took some money and jewelry to make it appear that his wife had been killed when surprised by a burglar.

Lane murdered his wife of eight years, Teresa, a “mail-order bride” from the Philippines, not because she was attempting to leave him. It was Thomas who wanted out of the marriage, telling friends and neighbors even before he killed Teresa that he was planning to replace her with a younger model he had already “bought and paid for.” He even showed them pictures of his new bride-to-be, a woman he met on the Internet, bragging that she was just thirteen or fourteen years old.

Like Scott Peterson and so many of the other killers I was beginning to research, Lane seemed to have no emotional attachment to his wife whatsoever. In his mind, she was nothing more than a commodity he had purchased, and he had the right to an upgrade whenever he saw fit. Tragically, he believed that once she was of no further use to him, she had no right to go on living.

At trial his father revealed how Lane was directly inspired by Peterson, whom he saw as offering a solution to his own marital woes.

“If I could do what Peterson did and get away with it, I’d kill her,” Thomas Lane told his father three weeks before the murder.

It was chilling to see that the killers themselves were making the connection between these crimes, regardless of the specific modus operandi employed. Whether they chose to disappear the victim or the crime itself by staging the death as a suicide or some other event, it was clear that these were simply two sides of the same coin. The meticulous planning and supreme self-control exhibited both before and after the crimes I was investigating and beginning to link together seemed to be a significant aspect of these men’s characters, far beyond the murderous aspect of their personalities. The expertise at lying and manipulation that is needed to successfully lead a double life is indicative of a high degree of Machiavellian thinking and behavior. Whereas political scientists and others sometimes use the term Machiavellian, psychologists have developed a formal category and accompanying tests and measures for people whose psychological makeup ranks high in such traits.

Other malignant personality characteristics seemed to be involved as well, from cold-blooded psychopathic tendencies to extreme degrees of narcissism. But there was something else curious about these men’s characters. Erasing their victims appeared to be not just a means to an end but an end in itself. Once they made the decision to kill, they began purging all traces of the victim’s existence in their lives. Many began getting rid of the woman’s possessions within days of her disappearance, pulling up stakes, changing their lifestyles dramatically. Some immediately replaced their missing wives or girlfriends with other women—sometimes with look-alikes for the disappeared. And, most shockingly, some later attempted to get away with murder again, erasing another wife or girlfriend, sometimes, as in Corbin’s case, in exactly the same manner as their first crime.

Many put an extraordinary amount of thought into their crimes, researching methods of killing and means of body disposal, and boning up on investigatory and forensic techniques. They also seemed to look to and learn from each other as models, noting what worked for other killers and what pitfalls to avoid.

For example, I believe that Scott Peterson based his plan on a number of highly publicized prior disappearances, most notably of several coeds during his college years in San Luis Obispo. One of these young women, Kristin Smart, remains missing more than a decade later. Even though police believe they know who killed her, no one has ever been charged.

The Smart case is an almost textbook example of how easy it can be to get away with murder. I believe Scott learned from this case how oversights and inaction in the crucial first days of a disappearance may prevent a killer from ever being charged, much less convicted. I think he relied on assumptions about police investigation that he drew from this case in conceiving his own murder plan—for example, choosing to carry out the crime and report his wife missing on Christmas Eve. He assumed, wrongly, that no experienced detectives would even begin looking into his wife’s disappearance for several days, enough time for the trail to grow stale and for him to thoroughly cover his tracks. He believed that if a body was never found and the suspect refused to confess, he would never be charged—something the police publicly declared in the Smart case.

The concept of serial murder has only been recognized as a distinct category of crime for a few decades, even though serial killers have been making headlines at least as far back as “Jack the Ripper.” For nearly a century, the notorious slayer who terrorized Victorian London was viewed as a criminal freak of nature, even though other serial killings during the same historical period were soon reported from Sweden to San Francisco. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, forensic psychologists in the FBI’s now famous Behavioral Science Unit began assembling common characteristics from interviews and case files of killers who now bear this moniker.

Although experts may disagree on what precisely is and is not a serial homicide, naming and defining the crime opened the door to serious research, which has led to hundreds of studies of these type of killers by psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, and other scientists.

Identifying a new crime category is a bit like discovering a new or previously misunderstood disease: everything changes when the phenomenon has a name. New syndromes in the medical field, first noticed as a seemingly unrelated collection of problems and symptoms, are often initially treated with shame and derision—from alcoholism to posttraumatic stress disorder, anorexia and bulimia to chronic fatigue syndrome. Giving them a name is the first step toward serious scientific study and public awareness.

• This book sets forth a profile of what I call eraser killing: a form of intimate partner (or domestic) homicide that is committed almost exclusively by men, done in a carefully planned manner, often through bloodless means known as a “soft kill” (such as smothering, suffocating, or strangling) so as to leave behind as little evidence as possible or with the crime scene thoroughly cleaned up. To further cover his tracks, the eraser killer disposes of his victim’s body by some means meant to ensure that it will never be found, or erases anything that links him to her death by “staging” the murder as something completely different—an accident, a suicide, or a crime committed by a total stranger, such as mugging, carjacking, or other random crime of opportunity.

• On the basis of five years of investigation into hundreds of killings that I believe fit this profile, I will explain what is truly going on behind the stories of missing women that have dominated the news since the disappearance of Laci Peterson six years ago, identifying the hidden pattern among cases that the media has simply presented as mystery after unrelated (and often unresolved) mystery.

• Using new research on the psychology of dark criminal impulses in otherwise high-functioning men, I will also offer a psychological profile of the factors I believe explain and drive this curious breed of killer—men who live behind a mask of normality, who seem incapable of violence to most of those who know them, who lead productive and often quite accomplished lives right up until the minute they kill the ones they supposedly love.

• This book will examine more than fifty eraser killings, some just recently in the headlines, some dating back a century, challenging some of the well-honed myths about domestic violence and domestic homicide. For eraser killers are not like ordinary killers, nor are they even like more typical wife- or girlfriend-killers. These men do not commit their crimes in the “heat of passion” or in a moment of out-of-control rage. Their crimes are not hot-blooded but cold-blooded, arrived at after much thought and carried out with meticulous care. Because these men premeditate and plan their killings with inordinate stealth and cunning, because they are fearless and expert at manipulating and deceiving those around them, because they hold nearly everything that is true about them in complete secrecy, the women in their lives often have no idea they are in mortal danger until it is too late.

• The motive behind these killings is something else that has been widely misunderstood and misrepresented both in the media and in the courtroom. Fundamentally, eraser killers do not kill for the reasons normally ascribed to murderers, such as greed, sex, or jealousy. They eliminate the women, and sometimes children, in their lives because their victims no longer serve any “purpose” in the emotionally desolate world of the eraser killer, or are seen as impediments to the kind of life they covet and fantasize for themselves. In the mind of this type of murderer, it is better, easier, and more satisfying for him to kill than simply to get a divorce.

• Eraser killers often go to extraordinary lengths not just to manipulate a crime scene or make a woman disappear but also to manipulate the police, the courts, and justice itself as part of their high-stakes game. This manipulation, I believe, is something that is also key to the nature of the eraser killer and becomes almost an end in itself—an enjoyable battle of wits in which he is sure he will always come out on top.

• In a kind of Catch-22 that is built into the American criminal justice system and its reliance on antiquated and faulty assumptions about this type of intimate homicide, police and prosecutors are very often sandbagged before they can even launch a homicide case. This book will provide several illuminating stories that expose the unintentional loopholes that both encourage eraser killers to believe that they can get away with murder and very often make it possible for them to do just that.

For example, eraser killers have used constitutional protections against search and seizure to seal off the scene of their crimes, usually in the victim’s own home, and prevent police from entering by staging the crime to appear to have happened elsewhere. Investigators are forced to wait sometimes for weeks, sometimes years before the actual murder scene can be searched and forensically examined, thus giving a killer as much time as he needs to completely erase all the evidence.

Murder is much harder to prove when the killer takes pains to leave no physical evidence behind. Someone clever enough to make sure his victim’s body remains hidden stands a good chance of never being charged with murder, much less convicted. Eyewitness testimony—the only truly noncircumstantial evidence—is notoriously unreliable. (Groups like the Innocence Project are regularly getting rape convictions overturned after DNA tests prove that the victim identified an innocent man.) Yet most jurors buy into the popular stereotype that circumstantial evidence is not proof, a sometimes insurmountable burden even when the body is not hidden.

“They couldn’t put the gun in his hand,” jury foreman Thomas Nicholson declared after acquitting In Cold Blood star Robert Blake of killing his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley—in spite of the fact that Blake openly hated his wife and that two men testified that he had attempted to hire them to “whack” her. (Bakley was ultimately shot to death as she waited for Blake in his car outside a restaurant where the two had just dined together, Blake claiming that at the time the shooting occurred, he had gone back inside to retrieve a gun he had inadvertently left behind.)

Prosecutors are often loath to take on no-body cases, knowing that if a defendant is acquitted, there will be no second chance to convict him even if the victim’s remains are later found right in the defendant’s backyard. Jurors erroneously but almost uniformly view circumstantial evidence as a weak form of proof, internalizing an attitude, often expressed in the popular media, that a case is “merely circumstantial.” Nearly every one of the sixteen hundred potential jurors who were queried to serve on the Peterson case initially expressed qualms about circumstantial evidence, believing it was not “real” evidence—or, as one put it, “My understanding is circumstantial evidence is what you can’t prove.”

Peterson juror John Guinasso said he would not have voted to convict if the bodies had not washed up where they did—on the shore of San Francisco Bay ninety miles from the Peterson home in Modesto, California, and within about a mile of the exact spot where Scott told police he had spontaneously decided to go fishing the day his wife disappeared.

In exploring these and other issues, I draw sometimes heavily on my investigation and analysis of the Scott Peterson case, which I believe to be a quintessential eraser killing, and which can shed more light on the phenomenon than perhaps any other single case. Although many feel that they already know this case quite well, I believe that this book breaks new ground by

• Exploring the real motive behind Peterson’s murder of his pregnant wife, something even the jurors who convicted him did not seem to fully understand

• Explaining how the death of his unborn son, Conner, was not simply an unfortunate by-product of his decision to kill his wife but represented a pivotal aspect of his motivation

• Offering the first comprehensive psychological portrait of Scott Peterson and explaining how different and competing aspects of his personality made him believe he could commit the perfect murder but also caused him to make fatal errors that got him convicted

• Revealing many new and disturbing facts about the case, including an alternative plan Peterson may have been considering for disposing of his wife and child that would have prevented their bodies from ever being found and all but ensured that he would never have been charged with their murders

I do not believe Scott Peterson killed his wife in order to be with another woman or to collect on the substantial inheritance his wife had coming. That he was having an affair and that he was living beyond his means, spending recklessly on such luxuries as an expensive golf club membership in the weeks before his first child was to be born, are important clues into his psyche. But they do not, in and of themselves, constitute motive. They are ultimately what film director Alfred Hitchcock called MacGuffins, red herrings that obscure rather than reveal the darker machinations of the plot.

Clearly there is something very disturbed in the psychological makeup of a man who could coldly plan a murder, but was unable or unwilling to face a divorce; who could strangle or smother his pregnant wife to death but could not displease her by maintaining that he did not want children; who could turn on his fourteen-carat charm to woo a new lover, but was unable to use that charm and power of persuasion to succeed in his job as a salesman; who believed himself fully capable of outfoxing the police, never doubting his ability to fearlessly win every nerve-wracking encounter, but whose fragile ego was threatened by the rapidly approaching responsibilities of fatherhood.

The Peterson case is rife with these seeming contradictions, which no one has yet been able to explain. I believe that they are not actually contradictions, but instead are part and parcel of the peculiar psychology of eraser killers. The strange and unstable mixture of pathologies that drives these killers explains not only their criminal success but also the mistakes and contradictions that sometimes get them caught.

When I began covering the Peterson case, the facts were so horrific that I wanted to believe that it was an anomaly. Unfortunately for the score of “missing” women who have since made headlines—and many more whose stories did not make national news but were no less tragic—the Peterson case turned out not to be singular at all. Whereas part of the media—led by the more innovative and less tradition-bound producers in cable television—covered these stories intensively, many editors, news anchors, and print columnists simply scoffed at such coverage. Some even extended their derision beyond media outlets they dislike to an unseemly attack on the victims themselves.

My own belief is that the recent flood of such seemingly inexplicable stories makes many people uncomfortable. Perhaps the betrayal at the heart of these crimes is too unsettling, too challenging to the illusion of safety we cling to in the sanctuary of our own home.

Those who dismiss news coverage (and books) focusing on this kind of crime have never sat down with the shell-shocked family members of women who have never been given even the dignity and validation of a trial. The most tragic eraser killings are those in which there is no arrest, no arraignment, no trial, no justice, no body recovered, no funeral, no burial, no headstone—no answers or resolution of any kind.

I have written this book so that all of us may start to understand a type of crime that has been right in front of us but obscured from view, just as its perpetrators have intended. My hope is to cast light on the shadows where the killers have hidden their faces from us. It is an attempt, however inadequate, to give voice as best I can to these women whose deaths have left them voiceless, for erased women are truly silent victims. They cannot call out for justice. They cannot point a finger at their killer, whose true face they may have recognized only at the moment of their death.

PART ONE

Eraser Killing

The History and Psychology of a New Criminal Profile

CHAPTER ONE

Out of the Shadows

A new type of killer is wreaking havoc across America and around the world. He has made countless headlines in recent years, but until now his core identity has been hidden. He is not driven by rage or lust. His conscience is not set loose by drugs or alcohol—the deadly fuels that can turn some men into momentary killers. Unlike most other murderers, he very often has no criminal record and sometimes no history of violence whatsoever. He is an intelligent, careful, methodical killer.

He is also someone who has always been a fabricator of reality. He is not your harmless garden-variety fibber but a compulsive, pathological liar whose lies are meant to get a reaction out of others: to inspire their admiration, to evoke their sympathy, to get him exactly what he wants. He makes up stories big and small, often lying about things for no readily apparent reason. But he is especially practiced at deceiving others about who he really is.

He fabricates evidence to exaggerate his accomplishments, wealth, success, social standing. Sometimes he proudly displays phony business cards or diplomas, awards from military service he never earned, and other “proof” he needs to create the impression that he craves. He knows how to use words, lies, and actions to manipulate others. Manipulation—either subtle or overt—is a core feature of how he interacts with others.

He leads what appears to be a normal and productive life and is often considered to be an exemplary citizen. But quietly, beneath the surface, unbeknownst to almost anyone, he has used all his well-honed abilities to lie, manipulate, and fabricate reality in order to commit the crown jewel of crimes, the perfect murder.

His goal is to erase his victim—be it his wife, ex-wife, girlfriend, or lover—to expunge her from the record of his life. If she is pregnant with a child he does not want—and an unwanted pregnancy is an alarmingly common motive for eraser killings—he is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating what he views as dead weight dragging him down. In his mind, he is not really murdering a human being; he is simply rearranging the world to better suit his needs, to remove a major annoyance or let him make a fresh start of things.

He harbors a cluster of psychological traits very unusual in the general public. He does not experience the almost universal psychological reaction called fear. It is not that he is uncommonly brave or that he has “conquered” fear. He does experience an abstract, emotionally colorless sensation when put under great stress—especially if he feels caught in a situation he is not confident he can talk his way out of, when he is no longer in control of everyone around him. Most of the time, any sense of truly being afraid is more like a thought than a feeling. His heart does not beat faster, and he shows few if any signs of the emotion of fear. He knows about fear a bit like a colorblind person is aware of color: it is visible, but only as another shade of gray.

Eraser killers employ cunning, stealth, and often meticulous planning to overcome their trusting prey, frequently employing the agonizingly slow and terror-inducing method of suffocation or strangulation in order to minimize the type of messy crime scene evidence that could get them caught.

These killers represent a previously unrecognized subset of intimate partner murderers, different in distinct ways from other domestic killers:

• Their killings are not committed in the violent rage or sudden loss of control that characterizes more classic domestic homicides. On the contrary, they kill with total calm, total control. If they leave behind any crime scene at all, it will be what criminal profilers refer to as “organized”—just the kind of crime scene investigators do not expect to see when a domestic homicide is involved, for that is supposed to be the most “hot-blooded,” disorganized, and messy of crimes.

• The eraser killer is a master of deceit and an expert manipulator. His killing is carried out in total secrecy (unlike many domestic homicides, which often are committed even though there are witnesses present) and then very highly “staged,” to use the investigators’ term for a crime scene that is arranged like a stage set to create an illusion intended to confuse the police and send them down a wrong trail.

• Most domestic homicides involve jealousy, money, another woman, or explosive and vengeful rage felt by the killer because the woman is planning to leave him. Although there are sometimes subsidiary motives involving monetary gain or other women, the eraser killer is not “driven” by these things. His real motivations stem from the unique psychology of men with a particular set of dangerous traits that psychologists have recently named “the Dark Triad” of personality.

• He is killing because the woman in question has become inconvenient. In his eyes, she no longer meets his needs, or she stands in the way of something he wants. She is not allowed to leave him or take away anything he holds dear, be it a home or children or the lifestyle he has come to enjoy. He will only let her go on his deadly, unilateral terms.

• He plans his killing well in advance, once again distinguishing him from the standard wife-killer. Far fewer than half of all wife-killings are actually planned in advance of the final encounter, according to available research.

• The eraser killer will exhibit neither mourning nor real signs of emotional loss, and will almost always exhibit strangely inappropriate behavior and speech after the mysterious death of his wife or girlfriend. (Sometimes he even starts speaking about her in the past tense before he has killed her.) Although he may actively participate in the search for a missing loved one, he will be using his full array of skills to direct any inquiries or police investigation toward fictitious threats and other suspects and away from himself.

• He may have hidden his contempt for the object of his enmity, especially if doing so gives him tactical advantage when the moment of attack arrives. But once he makes up his mind to erase his victim, his determination is all-consuming. When the act begins—once he puts his hands around her throat or strikes her with a heavy object as she sleeps—there is no twinge of conscience or compassion.

• He is generally intelligent, though he also greatly overestimates his talents. He believes he is smarter and better than the rest of us, certainly smarter than the police and more deserving in all ways than his victim. He often has considerable familiarity with the law and with how the police work. He may have read up on these matters diligently to help him with his plan. Or he may have used his unusual ability for absorbing things around him, observing with the cold eye of a lizard in the desert how other predators kill and get away with it, because getting away with murder is his goal.

• To achieve that goal, he may follow one of two distinct strategies. Either he can erase the victim’s body by destroying it entirely or secreting it where it won’t be found, or he can rearrange the crime or stage a wholly false scenario to erase all connection between himself and any criminal act. Either way, he appears to remain free and clear of any involvement in a dastardly act.

Although men have been carrying out this kind of crime for centuries, it is only now that the extraordinary glare of television lights and an almost “shock-and-awe” level of news coverage are beginning to drive him out of the safety of the darkness. But without an actual name for this crime and for this killer, it is still hard for us to make sense of these crimes, to find the hidden clues, and solve what too often and quite tragically remain unsolved mysteries. As criminal profilers have discovered, truth and resolution can be found only by ferreting out the unseen links and connections between these seemingly disparate cases.

I believe these killers are best described as eraser killers, because that term describes simply and succinctly both their motive and their methods. Their victims are not “missing women” or “vanished wives.” They are women who have been erased, just as repressive political regimes have used the method of “forced disappearances” to dispose of their enemies and strike terror into all those who oppose them. The impact of so many women being “erased” or “disappeared” from our very midst, from communities or homes we have assumed in some fundamental sense to be “safe,” is overwhelming and undermines so many fundamentals on which our sense of trust and security is based. These eraser killers exploit the fundamental safeguards of our legal system—principles enshrined in our constitution to protect honest citizens from unreasonable searches of their property and from being forced or coerced into making a false confession—as if those honored protections were simply escape hatches built to provide safe haven for someone capable of pulling off an expert murder.

By following a series of threads, beginning with Laci Peterson and then going back and forth in time to hundreds of other instances of mysteriously disappeared women, I discovered that most of the cases fit a distinct pattern or profile of a startlingly prevalent type of murder, yet one that had never been identified because we have tended to look at each case in a vacuum.

Most were not missing persons cases in any strict sense of the word, but elaborately planned and premeditated domestic homicides disguised to appear to be mysterious vanishings. Invariably, the person responsible for the woman’s disappearance was her current or former husband or boyfriend. Although some recent killers even cited Scott Peterson as their inspiration, he was hardly the first to come up with such an idea. Looking back in time, I traced the same pattern back a century to the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser’s literary classic, An American Tragedy.

Although the essential facts of these cases bear a striking similarity, the outcomes vary widely. Many “disappeared” women are never found, and no one is ever held to account for what happened to them. A few victims—the “lucky” ones, in a manner of speaking—are eventually discovered, often by pure chance or an act of nature. Their families get a chance to bury their loved ones, or what is left of them, and sometimes their killers are brought to justice. A small number of presumed killers are tried and convicted in the absence of a body; others are acquitted with or without a body because there is not enough evidence to convince a judge or jury beyond a reasonable doubt that a murder occurred, much less that the woman’s intimate partner was the one responsible.

The victims of these killers are women of all races and social classes, from all parts of the country (and around the world as well). Whereas some have been the subject of intensive media coverage, others are all but unknown beyond their closest loved ones.

All the women listed here are dead or presumed to be dead. All were murdered or are believed by authorities to have been murdered by a husband or boyfriend, falling victim precisely because of their physical and emotional vulnerability to their killer. All “went missing” under mysterious circumstances, but none of these women was ever truly lost. They didn’t wander off, run away from home, suffer amnesia and forget where they belonged. They were deliberately “disappeared” by someone who had good reason to try to make sure they would never be found, someone who wanted to erase them from the face of the earth.

• Hattie “Fern” Bergeler, fifty-seven, was found floating in the bay near her Florida home in August 2002 with a bedsheet wrapped around her head and cinderblocks tied to her neck and ankles. Her multimillionaire husband, Robert Moringiello, a retired aerospace engineer, claimed the two had lost sight of each other while driving in separate cars to visit his children. But he had still not reported her missing by the time her remains were identified—a month after he claimed to have lost her in traffic. Despite a wealth of physical evidence—the sheet, rope, and cinderblocks and the gun used to kill Fern, also fished from the water behind their Fort Myers Beach home, were all tied to her husband, and cleaned-up blood was found in the house—it took two trials to convict him of second-degree murder. A man of Moringiello’s intelligence and character would never have made so many stupid mistakes, his attorney had argued.

• Isabel Rodriguez, thirty-nine, vanished in November 2001 two weeks after seeking a protective order against her estranged husband, Jesus, who she said threatened to kill her if she was awarded any money from him in their divorce. In the days before her disappearance, her husband ordered ten truckloads of dirt and gravel delivered to his five-acre farm on the outskirts of the Florida Everglades. On the day she went missing, a witness saw a fire burning for hours on the property. Jesus had told all his farmhands not to come to work that day, explaining to one that he was planning a Santeria “cleansing” ritual on the property. Police believe he killed his wife that day, burned her corpse on the farm, and scattered the ashes under the dirt and gravel. He claims she returned to her native Honduras, abandoning their two children, but there is no record of her leaving the United States or entering Honduras. Not long after his wife disappeared, he began seeing another woman, who looks uncannily like his missing wife and whose name even happens to be Isabel. At the time this book was written, prosecutors were preparing for a third trial after two previous efforts ended in mistrial.

• Kristine Kupka, twenty-eight, was just two months away from graduating with a degree in philosophy from Baruch College in New York City when she vanished without a trace in 1998. She was also five months pregnant by one of her professors, Darshanand “Rudy” Persaud, who did not confess to her that he was married until after she became pregnant. He was so adamant that she get rid of the baby that she began to fear he might hurt her. Kupka left her apartment with Persaud on the day she disappeared. Although he admits seeing her that day, he denies harming her or having any knowledge of her whereabouts, and no charges have ever been brought against him or anyone else.

• Lisa Tu of Potomac, Maryland, a forty-two-year-old Chinese immigrant caring for two teenagers and her elderly mother, disappeared in 1988. Tu’s common-law husband, Gregory, a Washington, D.C., restaurant manager heavily in debt from business failures and gambling losses, said she never returned from a trip to San Francisco to visit a sick friend. But police believe he killed her as she slept on their couch, then attempted to assume a new identity, traveling to Las Vegas, forging checks under her name, stealing from her son’s college fund, and enjoying the services of prostitutes. A first-degree murder conviction was overturned when an appeals court ruled that evidence seized from his Las Vegas hotel room was improperly admitted. In the retrial, he was found guilty of second-degree murder.

• Pegye Bechler, a physical therapist and mother of three, disappeared in 1997 while boating off the Southern California coast with her husband to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary and her thirty-eighth birthday. Eric Bechler claimed she was piloting a rented speedboat and towing him on a boogie board when she was washed overboard by a rogue wave. Although Pegye was an expert swimmer who completed in triathlons, Bechler claimed she never surfaced, and no sign of her has ever been found. After sobbing for the cameras about his devastating loss, Bechler took up with another woman just three months after his wife’s disappearance, an actress and lingerie model; she agreed to wear a wire for police. Having been recorded describing how he bashed his wife over the head with a barbell, then attached the weights to her body and dumped her at sea, he was convicted of first-degree murder.

• Lisa Thomas’s rocky marriage turned strangely amicable in the summer of 1996 when she and her husband of eight years finally agreed to divorce. Then the thirty-six-year-old mother of two vanished on the same weekend she planned to begin looking for her own place to live. Her husband, Bryce, seemed remarkably nonchalant about the fact that his wife was missing, and refused to allow police into their Bakersfield, California, apartment. Lisa’s frantic twin sister, Theresa Seabolt, broke in and found the underside of the couple’s mattress, which had been flipped, soaked in blood. Only then did Lisa’s husband move into action, setting up a tip line and pleading for the public’s help in finding his wife. Although Lisa’s body was never found, a jury convicted her husband of second-degree murder. But the verdict was almost immediately thrown into question when one of the jurors accused fellow panelists of not following the judge’s instructions. Facing the possibility of a new trial, Bryce Thomas attempted to hire a hit man (who was actually an undercover sheriff’s investigator) from his jail cell to eliminate his wife’s twin, the woman he believed responsible for putting him behind bars. Dictating a scenario identical to the one he carried out against his wife—presumably in the hope that it would appear that the same person killed both sisters—he asked the purported hit man to kill his sister-in-law in her sleep, then make her body disappear, leaving just a little trail of blood “because that’s similar to what happened to the one I’m accused of murdering.” Ultimately, the trial judge allowed the conviction for killing his wife to stand, and handed down a sentence of fifteen years to life. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to another twelve years for trying to arrange the murder of Theresa Seabolt.

• Jami Sherer, twenty-six, mother of a two-year-old son, disappeared in Redmond, Washington, in 1990 the day after telling her husband, Steven, that she wanted a divorce and was moving back in with her parents. At her husband’s insistence, she had gone to meet him one last time, but never returned. Within hours of that meeting, days before her car was discovered abandoned with her packed suitcase still inside, Sherer began telling family members that his wife was “missing.” Ten years later, still maintaining that his missing wife was alive somewhere as a jury found him guilty of murder, he lashed out at his wife’s family: “When Jami does turn up, you can all rot in hell!”

• Peggy Dianovsky, twenty-eight at the time of her disappearance, vanished from her suburban Chicago home in 1982, leaving no trace of her existence. Her husband, Robert, admitted striking her during an argument with enough force to splatter blood on a stairway in the couple’s home. But he insisted that she packed a bag and left that night, never to be seen again—without taking her car or her three children. Twenty-two years later, he was acquitted of her murder in a bench trial, despite testimony from two of her now grown sons, who said they witnessed their father hit their mother and hold a knife to her throat in the hours leading up to her disappearance. A family friend also testified that several months before Peggy went missing, Robert Dianovsky asked him to help dispose of his wife’s body and outlined a plan to make her killing look like suicide. The friend declined to participate in Dianovsky’s schemes, telling him that he would never get away with it—an incorrect assumption, as it would turn out.

The sheer callousness of eraser crimes is breathtaking, not just the murders themselves but the actions taken after the fact to cover them up. As if taking the life of women they were supposed to love is not cruel enough, these killers afford their victims no solace or dignity even after death.

• Stephen Grant, who reported his wife missing on Valentine’s Day 2007, is accused of strangling thirty-four-year-old Tara several days before, hacking her body into pieces at the tool-and-die shop where he worked, then burying the pieces in a Michigan park. He was caught three weeks later when he ghoulishly retrieved the largest piece of his wife’s remains, her torso, and brought it back to his home for safekeeping after learning that investigators were searching in the area where he hid the body. Although he confessed at the time of his arrest, he has since entered a not-guilty plea and is awaiting trial.

• Thomas Capano, one of Delaware’s most prominent attorneys, a former prosecutor, mayoral chief-of-staff, and an chief legal counsel to the state’s governor, shot his girlfriend, Anne Marie Fahey, to death in 1996, then dumped her body sixty miles out to sea inside a giant Igloo cooler. When the ice chest failed to sink because of its natural buoyancy, he pulled her out, wrapped chains and boat anchors around her, and sank her to the bottom of the Atlantic. Although no body was ever found, Capano’s younger brother, who drove him out to sea that day in his boat, eventually admitted to police that he had seen the corpse sink below the ocean surface. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 1999 and sentenced to death, but the sentence was later reduced to life in prison.

• Robert Bierenbaum, a brilliant Manhattan surgeon and licensed pilot, is believed to have dropped the corpse of his wife, Gail, from a rented plane into the Atlantic Ocean in 1985. He was convicted of second-degree murder, but not until fifteen years after the crime.

• Ira Einhorn, a counterculture icon and widely revered peace and environmental activist, shattered the skull of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, in 1977, then locked her—still alive—inside a steamer trunk in their apartment. When police finally gained access to the apartment a year and a half later and discovered her body, Einhorn insisted he had been set up by the CIA or possibly the KGB, that Holly’s body was planted in a grand frame-up to silence him because of his radical views and research into “sensitive” areas. Ira was so well regarded in certain circles as the embodiment of peace that many influential acolytes bought that far-fetched story, lobbying for his release on bail and even posting his bond. Just before trial, he fled to Europe, where he managed to elude justice for a quarter century, living for much of that time happily and openly as a country gentleman in the south of France. After a long extradition battle, he was finally returned to the United States, where he was convicted in 2001 and sentenced to death.