THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 20, 1995 TAG: 9508180586
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
STALKING JUSTICE
The Dramatic True Story of the Detective Who First Used DNA Testing to Catch a Serial Killer
PAUL MONES
Pocket Books. 314 pp. $23.
I ALWAYS FEEL a bit guilty when I ravenously read a true-crime book as I ravenously read Paul Mones' intelligent and thrilling Stalking Justice: The Dramatic True Story of the Detective Who First Used DNA Testing to Catch a Serial Killer, about the South Side Strangler who terrorized Richmond in 1987. After all, a victim's (and a family's) horrifying agony had to precede its writing.
But I have come to believe that such an exercise, although exploitative, actually honors a victim's life: It represents a triumph of justice and reason over perversion and criminality, righteousness over immorality. When done well, a true-crime book restores control to ``us'' over ``them,'' and exposes the behind-the-scenes truth: Who was a hero or a hindrance; what evidence was gathered, lost, tampered with, suppressed; which witnesses provided what clues; and most important, how the case was solved.
The ground-breaking use of DNA evidence in implicating and then convicting the South Side Strangler makes Stalking Justice even more important. Mones (When a Child Kills), a Los Angeles attorney who specializes in child abuse and family homicide, has become a national expert on DNA ``fingerprinting,'' first used in 1978. He explains the technique here and swears by it. (O.J. Simpson would not have a prayer if Mones were on his jury.)
Police detection powers all true-crime narratives: There could be no more larger-than-life ination until he gets his killer. His heady adrenalin rush is near-palpable. Though Mones uses images from Horgas' deer-hunting experience to parallel his ``hunt'' of the South Side Strangler, I envision the detective more as a family man and a basic good cop - smart and highly competitive, outraged by the Strangler's defilement of his victims and frustrated by his fellow officers' blindness.
Horgas sees all of the pieces long before police in either Arlington or Richmond know there's even a puzzle.
The elusive serial killer who became known as the South Side Strangler - for the affluent Richmond neighborhood where he found his victims - raped, sexually tortured and murdered three white women, one of them only 15 years old, in the autumn of '87. He entered each one's home through a window, in trademark style, quickly overpowered her and then spent hours tormenting her through an elaborate rope-binding set-up (his ``modus operandi''), before strangling her. He wore gloves, carefully wiped clean all surfaces that he may have touched and unwittingly left only one signature: his semen.
Nearly four years before the Richmond serial murders, two 30ish white women who lived alone and within four blocks of each other in Arlington, were raped and murdered in a similar fashion. Horgas formulated a theory then that the murders may have been the handiwork of a black masked rapist who had violated numerous women since June 1983, and had become more brazen with each attack, but he was advised by his superiors to drop it. Soon, a confused, Hispanic man of borderline intelligence ``confessed'' - police interrogations of David Vasquez are suspicious at best. Vasquez was convicted of one of the murders.
Irascible, relentless bulldog that he is, however, Horgas refuses to let it go. He recognizes a pattern between the Arlington and Richmond murders and, after hours of painstaking - and fascinating - research (much of it involving the criminal ``environment``), compiles a profile of an escalating rapist/killer - a black man who started in Arlington as a burglar. Having been told by the FBI's elite Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico that their serial killer is a smart, controlling white man - the vast majority of such killers are - the Richmond police ridicule and ignore Horgas. But the FBI experts listen and lend crucial assistance.
Mones sketches Richmond as ``a backwater town with provincial police'' and praises the Arlington cops as ``the most educated police force in Virginia.'' The Richmond Police Department's uneasy cooperation, its rigid territoriality and its officers' macho posturing are but several of the obstacles Horgas must overcome. Even his colleagues, some of whom worked on the tainted Vasquez investigation, resist his efforts, which border on monomaniacal. But without the DNA coding, a relatively new technology that Horgas had the insight to try, the renegade detective seems destined to have lost. Even so, a ``miracle'' is needed to identify the killer.
Mones' vivid characterization of Horgas is the strength of Stalking Justice; conversely, its weakness is the inadequate psychological profile of the killer, who never confessed and was convicted primarily on the basis of a DNA match between his blood and crime-scene semen samples. (Virginia's first such prosecution.) Although Horgas talked to many witnesses who helped him to make his case, including eight victims of the masked rapist, the trial evidence was solely physical: DNA coding, glass slivers and fibers.
Stalking Justice is a textbook example of true-crime writing and true-crime detection. It educates as it vindicates, and never loses sight of the victims who gave it life.
- MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is a lawyer and book editor of The Virginian-Pilot and
The Ledger-Star. by CNB