Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [74]
“The bodies of Christine and Harold Wallace were in bad shape. But we are trying to determine at this point whether he removed their hearts after he killed them or before.”
“Why is that significant?” asked one officer.
The image of Christine and Harold’s gutted bodies flashed on the screen behind Jeffrey. “Because it tells us exactly how sick a fuck we’re dealing with.”
A ripple of uncomfortable laughter moved through the room.
“Because,” Jeffrey continued, more seriously, “the more we know about what he does, the closer we are to why he does it. The more we understand about his motivations, the more we understand him, and the better profile we have.
“So this is what we know about him: His MO is to overpower his victims, either incapacitate or kill them, take them alive or dead to another location, and then to dump their bodies in a third location. The killer’s signature behavior is that he removes their hearts. For those of you that missed last week’s episode of Profiler, a ‘signature behavior’ or ‘aspect’ is something that an offender does above and beyond what he needs to do to commit the offense. It’s something he does to satisfy his emotional needs. Removing the heart is one part of it. I believe that what he does with the heart is another part of it. We’re in the dark as to what the underlying motivation is at this point.
“But we know enough to draw a decent profile. We know that he is an ‘inadequate’ type by the way he blitz-attacked Maria Lopez; he used as much force as he had to subdue her. He forced his way into her apartment and put chloroform to her face. When that didn’t work, he killed her there. We know he is highly organized, in that it was necessary for him to burglarize the supply warehouse and set up an operating room somewhere, stalk his victims, perform his sick ‘surgery,’ and dump the bodies—all without getting caught. He is likely to be white and in his mid- to late thirties, on the older side of the traditional serial-killer profile, because it takes maturity, organization, and skill to do what he is doing. We are probably looking for a person with some medical background but probably not an actual doctor or surgeon. More like a buff, someone that would have liked to have been a doctor but failed in some way. He holds down a job somewhere. He probably lives alone or he has a place separate from his home where he’s doing his crime.
“The other notable element is that this killer seems to have an agenda other than the pleasure of the kill. He wants something else. He has a plan—either real or imagined. Ms. Strong seems to be a part of that agenda.” A picture of the items the killer had left on Lydia’s doorstep appeared on the screen.
“The message he left for her indicates he wants some kind of ‘vengeance.’ Whether he wanted revenge on his victims, whether he wants it from Ms. Strong, we can’t be sure.”
A collage of photos of the victims’ faces loomed on the screen behind him. “So far, the victims are all different physically, crossing age, gender, and racial lines. But they all attended the same church with varying degrees of regularity. They were all leading somewhat lonely lives with checkered pasts. Christine and Harold had extensive records of drug abuse and domestic violence. Shawna was a chronic runaway and a discipline problem. Maria allegedly accepted money for sex. We can see by the way he disposes of the bodies that he is remorseless. These people are less than trash to him. He did not have intimate connections to them in life.”
The image of Maria Lopez’s trashed apartment was next on the screen. “We were hopeful that Maria Lopez’s apartment would contain some physical evidence. But the only hair we found we matched to Maria Lopez and Michael Urquia, who has been eliminated as a suspect. Same deal with the fingerprints. We found some fibers at the scene, but it takes a while to sort