THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 19, 1995 TAG: 9511190426
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE MATHER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 407 lines
Chesapeake police Detective Michael Fischetti thought this might be the break he needed to catch the serial killer responsible for 10 deaths.
A jittery man, his voice nervous and breaking, called a tip line with promising information. He said he had been with a new homosexual partner who suddenly turned violent. The caller narrowly escaped.
Police have long known that the serial killer who has preyed on homosexuals, transients, drifters and hustlers in South Hampton Roads has made mistakes. The mistakes allowed escapes.
Now, finally, a survivor had come forward. He promised to point out the house where this all happened.
Fischetti and partner John K. Cooke agreed to meet him. With a little luck, thousands of investigative hours poured into the area's most persistent manhunt would soon cascade to a conclusion.
But the caller never showed.
The killer hasn't been caught.
The tip became one in a long list of dead ends and empty promises Fischetti and Cooke have pursued with passion for more than a year.
The serial killer they are hunting operated unnoticed in South Hampton Roads for at least five years, scattering naked bodies throughout Chesapeake, Suffolk and Isle of Wight County.
For the past three years, he has killed without consequence, stymieing a team of investigators charged with catching him.
He is a killer without a name. The detectives have resisted the urge to tag him with a clever moniker like ones so often attached to history's serial criminals: The Vampire Killer, The Green River Killer, The Boston Strangler, The Night Stalker.
``We decided not to, because that only glorifies him,'' Fischetti said. ``He's a killer. That's what he is.''
By January 1992, detectives were fairly certain a serial killer had emerged from the population. There were four victims then.
By the middle of 1993, area investigators had begun comparing cases. There were seven victims then.
By the end of 1994, the Serial Killer Task Force had been formed among several Hampton Roads police agencies. There were nine victims then.
By May of this year, the task force was in full swing, with heavy assistance from the FBI.
There are 10 victims now.
It is the job of Fischetti and Cooke, a Suffolk detective, - lead members of the Serial Killer Task Force - to ensure there will not be an 11th.
But, worn down by dead ends and frustrated by failure, the searchers are nearly idle.
There is nowhere left to look.
``We're not going to break this case by ourselves,'' Fischetti said. ``Someone out there has the information that will break this case.''
They have never found that someone.
Despite a hotline and a $5,000 reward, useful information has been scarce. The manhunt has taken the detectives on a fruitless journey.
From darkened drug corners in Portsmouth to the marbled lobby of a posh downtown Norfolk restaurant; from the den of a satanic sex cult in Moyock, N.C., to the living room of a Virginia Beach psychic; from the offices of the FBI's secretive serial-killer hunters in Quantico to a woman who thought her ex-boyfriend was behaving strangely - these have become routine treks for Detectives Fischetti and Cooke.
Seven FBI clerks have stocked a computer with thousands of names, addresses, descriptions and notes contained in the detectives' 14 binders. Each binder is 4 inches thick with a sparse summary on its spine such as: ``Homicide. 93-75737. Victim: Robert Neal. Detective Assigned: M.J. Fischetti. Date: 9/8/93. Location: Old State Road.''
Most nights, Fischetti and Cooke cruise the blighted areas of South Hampton Roads that have become hunting grounds for the killer. The last hours of all 10 victims have been traced to the Granby Street and Ocean View areas of Norfolk and the Truxtun area of Portsmouth.
The detectives spend their nightly shifts probing reluctant residents of those areas for any shard of information that could make the puzzle a little clearer.
Sometimes, the detectives' best sources are the men who spend idle hours hanging out on the corners hustling for money, guzzling malt liquor, or dealing crack. ``Street people,'' the detectives call them.
In Truxtun, the detectives hear that a person in a van has been offering money and rides to neighborhood men.
It's a familiar story, with minor variations.
Sometimes he's a white man. Sometimes he's black. Sometimes the van is dark. Sometimes it's sky-blue.
From Portsmouth Boulevard to Granby Street in Norfolk, the street people talk about a guy in a van. No one seems to know more - or no one will say more.
``What I want to know is, why isn't anyone talking?'' says Cooke to a man whose glassy eyes are tangled in a web of swollen red blood vessels.
``You know,'' the man replies, ``the code of the street.''
``Yeah, I know the code of the street,'' Cooke booms, cutting him off. ``But money talks, brother. $5,000 talks. Garland was one of your neighbors.''
Garland is Garland Taylor Jr., former Truxtun resident and Victim No. 9.
``I know, I know,'' a second man says. ``It bothers the hell out of me that people won't come up and say what they saw.''
On June 28, 1993, Fischetti was next on the homicide rotation.
Early that morning, a Monday, a Deep Creek man spotted a body near his home on rural Cook's Mill Road.
There, Fischetti found the nude corpse of Ray Bostick, 27.
``My first thought was that this one was related to the others,'' Fischetti said.
In the past six years, the bodies of Charles Smith, Stacey Reneau and John Ross Jr. had been found in rural parts of Chesapeake. Smith, the first victim, in 1987, wore jeans. He was the only one found clothed.
Detectives arrested a man and charged him with killing Smith, an 18-year-old Ocean View resident, but the suspect was acquitted in court. When the other bodies turned up under similar circumstances, police lumped Smith's death with them and reopened the case.
A fourth body, that of Joseph Ray, also was found in Chesapeake. But the case was being investigated by the state police and Fischetti didn't know much about it.
Word was, though, the circumstances were strikingly similar.
Bostick was lying on his back on the dirt road's right side, his left arm stretched above his head. His legs protruded into the weeds flanking the road's shoulder.
The man who found the body had left to run an errand and was returning home when he made the discovery. During the short time he was away, the body was discarded.
Police missed the killer by just 30 minutes.
There were no visible injuries on the nude body. An autopsy showed he had been strangled. Bostick, an unemployed truck driver, was last seen three days earlier in downtown Norfolk.
The body showed several days' decomposition; the killer kept the corpse a while before dumping it.
This day marked Fischetti's exclusive assignment to track a killer who police believed was responsible for maybe four deaths.
Fischetti, 38, has been a Chesapeake cop 15 years.
He had always wanted to be a cop, but the several-years-long waiting list for a law-enforcement job in his native New York made him look elsewhere. He had visited an uncle living in Virginia Beach, and Fischetti liked the area. He applied for police jobs here.
In 1980, with a criminal-justice degree from Suffolk County Community College in New York and a letter of acceptance from the Chesapeake Police Academy, Fischetti packed and moved.
He was married last year on Dec. 23, the day of a triple killing. His supervisors called him at home for help, forgetting he was due at the altar.
In the days that followed the discovery of Bostick's body, Fischetti and investigators from several jurisdictions gathered to see whether other area cases looked similar.
Suddenly, the tally jumped to seven.
The state police case was indeed similar, detectives thought. So was a death in Suffolk and another in Isle of Wight County.
Five of the seven men had been strangled, some by hand and some with a rope or cord. The other two probably had been strangled, but the bodies were too decomposed to tell. That pattern would continue.
No one would say the words ``serial killer'' with any conviction, but the evidence was mounting.
Fischetti and more than a dozen local and state investigators traveled to the storied home of the FBI's secretive serial-killer hunters in Quantico.
With them was state police Special Agent Larry McCann, an investigator who studies the minds and personalities of serial killers.
There, the investigators waded through the details of all seven cases.
Bostick, the most recent victim, spent much of his time in downtown Norfolk and didn't keep a schedule. If he was missing several days, few would think it odd.
He was gay, like a few of the other victims.
But mainly, the seven dead men were linked by where they hung out, the schedules they kept, and the lives they led.
Quite simply, McCann noted, they were easy targets. They wouldn't be immediately missed.
That - and not the ``M.O.'' - is ultimately what joined the seven slayings.
An ``M.O.,'' or modus operandi, is the way criminals do their deeds. Career and serial criminals tend to find a method that works and stick with it.
But a serial killer's M.O. sometimes changes. The killer becomes more efficient.
``We just don't look at the M.O.; we study the victims,'' McCann said. ``The people who like to kill again and again change their M.O. They learn. They get better. But their victims don't change.''
The seventh case is also the one that makes McCann an integral part of the task force. It is his job to map the mind of the killer, to develop a profile of him.
McCann, a 47-year-old father of two stationed in Richmond, first became interested in the complexities of the criminal mind when he was assigned to the governor's security detail. There, he investigated threats against the governor.
In 1988, he applied for a fellowship to study at the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit in Quantico, where he learned about serial criminals.
For reasons no one can explain, organized serial killers - like the one Fischetti is hunting - repeat the same general patterns. McCann studies the personalities and patterns of past killers and develops a psychological compilation of the killer he is hunting: what he will look like, act like and live like.
McCann is not unlike a police artist who sketches a picture of a suspect from witnesses' descriptions. McCann studies what a killer did and whom he did it to, and then develops a surprisingly detailed description of a person police have never seen.
Then, as they would with a police artist's sketch, investigators use McCann's description to narrow the field of suspects.
``I think we've got him nailed down,'' McCann said. ``I think we have a pretty good idea of who we are looking for.''
The hybrid of art and science used to be called psychological profiling, but now it's called criminal investigative analysis.
This killer, like all organized killers, carefully chooses his victims and lures them into vulnerability with good verbal skills, often using a ruse or con to gain trust. He kills without struggles.
``Somehow, these men are being subdued without a lot of violence,'' Cooke said. ``And some of these men were big men.''
The killer is carefully following the investigation through the newspaper and probably will read this story. He even may have offered to help the police. He is of average or above-average intelligence, but he believes himself smarter than the police hunting him.
He is probably in a heterosexual relationship, although McCann said such people are often ``trysexual. They will try sex with anything at any time.''
And like similar killers, this one has let some victims live.
``He's made some mistakes and the victims got away,'' McCann said. ``They're out there, but they're not talking to us. But they could save someone's life.
``A lot of people think they don't know anything, but they know tiny bits of the puzzle. We need those bits to make the puzzle fit together. Maybe they're embarrassed about the situation they were in, but they have to overcome that embarrassment,'' McCann said.
The killer owns a car and has a decent job. He keeps souvenirs from each killing. He is white and is probably in his 30s. He began killing while he was in his 20s, when he finally acted on fantasies developed in his teens.
Those fantasies are always sexual. Sex is what serial killing is about.
None of the victims of the Chesapeake killer was sexually assaulted, but that doesn't change the motive. For killers like this one, the acts of manipulating, controlling and killing are tantamount to intercourse.
Later, the killer will visualize his crimes and masturbate.
But even though the killer acts on his violent fantasies, he lives a fairly normal life.
``I will promise you this: When we catch him, he will not be green and he will not ooze slime,'' McCann said. ``He will look like you and me, and he will blend in perfectly to his surroundings. He's a chameleon.''
On Sept. 8, 1993, he struck again.
A woman who lives on Old State Road in the Bowers Hill section of Chesapeake was returning home shortly after 10 a.m. when she found the eighth victim - Robert A. Neal. Like the others, he had been strangled and dumped nude.
Police found another woman who had used the same street a half hour earlier and didn't see Neal's body crumpled on the roadside.
Again, police had missed the killer by 30 minutes.
And like the previous victim, Neal's body was decomposing. He, too, was kept several days after death.
The dump site for Neal was just blocks from where the first victim, Smith, was found on July 17, 1987.
Police didn't know exactly when the first few bodies were dumped, but the last two were plopped where they would be quickly found and reported.
The killer wasn't getting sloppy, Fischetti thought; he was getting bolder. He was taunting the police.
The taunts would become more brazen.
Neal was last employed by a roofing company, but work was spotty. Although his usual hangout was Truxtun, he frequently stayed at the Union Mission in downtown Norfolk.
So did John Ross Jr. and Reginald Joyner, victims Nos. 4 and 6.
The pattern began emerging more clearly.
Four of the eight victims sometimes stayed at the Union Mission. Six of the eight were last seen in downtown Norfolk hanging around the business district's late-night bars. Several victims also spent idle hours on the streets of Ocean View.
The lifestyles of the victims make it difficult to find who killed them, which, the investigators know, isn't an accident.
``You don't know what they were doing, who they were with, or what was going on when they died,'' McCann said. ``You don't know where the intersection occurred between their lives, and the life of the killer.''
On Feb. 28, 1994, Fischetti thought he might have slammed into that intersection.
On a cold winter afternoon two weeks earlier, a mosquito-control worker spreading toxins through a damp Chesapeake field found a decomposed body. It was 15-year-old South Norfolk resident Jennifer McCann - no relation to the state police special agent - who had been missing 74 days.
Police believed she was murdered.
On Nov. 29, Jennifer spent the night with friends and went with them on a stroll down Bainbridge Boulevard. Something happened, and the group separated.
Moyock, N.C., resident Raymond L. Onley Jr., 23, found her crying in front of a nightclub. He had graduated from Jennifer's school, Oscar Smith High School, and sometimes hung around with current students. The two were acquainted.
He was the last to see her alive. He told detectives Jennifer passed out from drinking and he panicked. He left her in a field where she died of exposure. Her death was later ruled accidental.
During the questioning, the conversation turned to the serial killings. Like some of the victims, Onley was gay.
Detectives showed Onley pictures of the victims. He rattled off the names or nicknames of three, and said he had recently met a fourth. He mentioned he knew that someone was dumping bodies in the area.
Detectives pressed him. Onley ended the interview. He said he was tired and wanted to go home.
Eight days earlier, North Carolina authorities looking for drugs had searched Onley's Moyock trailer. Some of the items police confiscated interested Chesapeake detectives who were still investigating Jennifer's death as a homicide.
North Carolina authorities found sex videos, sexual paraphernalia, hair clippings in a velvet bag, satanic books and manuals, and a chilling manuscript in which Onley claimed to be a devil or wizard born mistakenly into a modern world.
The L of Onley's middle name was for Lechter, but he told people it was Lucifer. He was the leader of a satanic cult whose members met at his trailer to use drugs, watch sex videos and, occasionally, drink blood from self-inflicted cuts.
Fischetti was intrigued.
The detective was convinced Onley knew more about the serial killings than he had divulged.
The pattern made sense, too. Historically, the craftiest of serial killers are tripped up in the simplest ways.
The Son of Sam killer, David Berkowitz, had parked illegally. Gerard Schaefer, a cop who turned to killing, left two victims alive because he suddenly realized he was late for work. Ted Bundy caught the attention of police only because he was driving erratically. Edmund Kemper, who killed his grandparents as a child and eight women as an adult, simply turned himself in.
Fischetti made an appointment with Onley for 9 a.m., Feb. 28, 1994.
That morning, shortly before Fischetti's arrival at Orchard Trailer Park, Onley stuck the muzzle of a shotgun to his chest and pulled the trigger.
``I couldn't understand why he would do that,'' Fischetti said. ``I was hoping to get more information, but that was snatched away. I was dejected.''
In the months that passed, Fischetti and the other investigators waffled about Onley's involvement in the killings.
Fischetti never considered him a suspect, but others weren't as certain.
For one, Fischetti noted, Onley would have been 16 at the time of the first killing. Serial killers almost never begin taking life until they are in their mid-20s. Second, detectives had a hard time believing a timid Onley could have controlled men much larger than him. Third, Onley didn't fit the profile, although that is never reason to completely eliminate a suspect.
Investigators thought the sex tapes might feature some of the victims. They didn't. Investigators thought the hair clippings might be from some of the victims. They weren't.
Fischetti was certain Onley was a mixed-up young man, but not a serial killer.
He believed the murders would continue.
They did.
On Sept. 17, 1994 - seven months after Onley's death - two boys riding bicycles in Suffolk noticed a strange odor coming from a ditch.
They found the ninth victim.
The nude corpse was that of Garland Taylor Jr., who had disappeared three days earlier from Truxtun. He was last seen talking to a person in a van.
Taylor had recently married, but he also led an unpredictable life. He would leave for days without notice, and return just as suddenly.
Workers at the Union Mission recognized his picture, although there were no records showing he stayed there.
Taylor's body was in advanced decomposition. Unlike with the last two bodies, Cooke didn't know when the killer dumped Taylor's body. He had been dead maybe three days.
Cooke didn't know if the killer meant to conceal Taylor's body, or if it had just been overlooked in the ditch. But with the next victim, there was no doubt.
On May 14, a Chesapeake police cruiser was parked in a cul-de-sac on Rotunda Avenue. It was 6:30 a.m. and the officer was finishing paperwork. He shifted the cruiser's transmission and drove away.
Then, just moments later, someone drove onto the same street and discarded the body of 31-year-old Samuel E. Aliff.
Fewer than 15 minutes had passed from the officer's departure to the discovery of the body by another motorist. This was the boldest of the taunts.
Fischetti thinks the killer probably watched the police car, and then deposited the victim when the officer left.
``It's frustrating to have the feeling someone is playing with you,'' Fischetti said. ``Especially when he is playing with other people's lives.''
Aliff was a Richmond resident who frequently traveled to Norfolk, and frequently stayed at the Union Mission.
As with Bostick and Neal, Aliff's body also was decomposing when it was dumped.
The morning after Aliff was found, the Chesapeake Police Department called a news conference.
Tony Torres, who was then the department's spokesman, stood at a podium and leaned toward a quiver of microphones.
``We are investigating the case as a serial killing,'' he said.
It was the first time any police agency publicly acknowledged a serial killer was loose in South Hampton Roads.
Police opened a phone hotline and a post-office box to gather tips, and offered a $5,000 reward to prompt the person with the right information to come forward.
The information never came.
It has been seven months since the 10th victim was found - seven months of dead ends and disappointments, seven months of fear and frustration.
When the leads dried up, the few detectives assigned to the Serial Killer Task Force gradually were put back on their regular beats.
Cooke was the last to go. He was recalled to Suffolk when the caseload there demanded another detective.
That left only Fischetti to chase the evaporating leads. And, finally, there were no more leads to chase.
Fischetti was put back on the regular rotation.
When the phone rings in the middle of the night, Fischetti bolts from sleep expecting news of Victim No. 11. It's an odd relief when the call is for an ordinary shooting or a stabbing.
``You just know it's coming,'' he said. ``I just wish I could bring it to an end.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
The Virginian-Pilot
A SERIAL KILLER'S VICTIMS
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
Photo
TAMARA VONINSKI/The Virginian-Pilot
Detective John K. Cooke from Suffolk, left, and detective Michael J.
Fischetti from Chesapeake have amassed piles of paperwork and
evidence in their tracking of the serial killer.
Graphic
YOU CAN HELP: Police are asking anyone with information to call the
Serial Killer Tip Hotline at 436-8900, or to write to the detectives
at P.O. Box 16291, Chesapeake, Va. 23328.
KEYWORDS: MURDER SERIAL KILLER CHESAPEAKE POLICE
DEPARTMENT by CNB