The Evil That Men Do Part 20

No one could make any sense of the unnerving discovery, except Linda Tucker. It didn't tell her who had taken her daughter, but now she knew who was not responsible-Joe. Whatever her son-in-law might be capable of, it didn't include stealing his own wife's underwear. That was a certainty.

"Until then I hadn't really thought about it," she remembers. "But if Joe had done it he would not have taken that underwear. Uh-uh. At that moment, I knew for sure that a stranger had taken Nikia."

Several hours later that Sunday, Nikia Gilbreath's body was discovered in a garbage dump, approximately eight miles north of the Gilbreath residence. She was still dressed in her T-shirt, briefs, and panties, and was lying on her back. No care had been taken to conceal her body.

Her jewelry, a silver wedding ring and a gold heart-shaped pendant on a gold chain around her neck, was untouched.

There was no evidence of s.e.xual a.s.sault. However, Mrs. Gilbreath's back was extensively bruised. Three of her ribs were broken as well. There were ligature marks on her wrists and ankles. Yet, she bore no defensive wounds or broken fingernails. There had been no fight for her life, or to protect her daughter.

She died, according to the medical examiner, of asphyxiation from three wads of paper toweling that had been shoved down her throat, obstructing the airway at Nikia's pharynx.

Besides Joe Gilbreath, about whom some investigators harbored misguided suspicions for months, there were no likely suspects in the homicide, and for several months the local authorities made no progress toward solving the case.

Then in December, a Walker County sheriff's detective named Keith Smith had a fortuitous encounter with agents of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Smith traveled to the GBI office in the little town of Calhoun, in neighboring Gordon County, to have a polygraph test conducted in an unrelated matter.

He struck up a conversation with the GBI agents, who told him of an unusual abduction-rape case they were working on, which involved a Gordon County suspect. The more he heard about the offense, the surer Smith became of a connection to the Gilbreath killing.

The victim was a thirty-two year old Laura Grant,* a divorcee who lived with her nine-year-old daughter in a trailer park a short distance south of Walker County in Rome, Georgia.

At approximately 5:30 a.m. on Friday, December 8, Grant and her daughter were asleep in their separate bedrooms when an intruder slipped through her trailer's unlocked back door. She awakened to the sight of his stocking-covered face and saw his knife.

He placed a hand over her mouth, and told Grant that her child would not be hurt if she did not make a sound. He handcuffed Grant and walked her out the front door to his truck, parked a block away. On the way out, he glanced at the modest tabletop tree she'd decorated for Christmas, and remarked that she deserved something a bit grander.

When Grant's daughter awoke at 6:30 that morning to discover her mother missing, the little girl called the police.

Meantime, the intruder drove her mother to an empty house, where he demanded she m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e him, as well as f.e.l.l.a.t.e him. He in turn fondled Grant and performed c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s on her. Then he raped her.

In between the a.s.saults, he told Grant a preposterous lie, that he actually had been sent to kill her, but found her so likable and alluring that he'd protect her, and planned to argue before his unnamed coconspirators that her life be spared.

It was by now full light outside. The rapist put away the knife and took off his mask. Grant already knew he was big-six feet seven inches and 245 pounds. Now she could make out his features, including a beard, mustache, and bushy hair.

He drove Grant to a second unoccupied residence in Gordon County. There he handcuffed her to a chair, left for a short time, and returned carrying a number of women's teddies. He ordered her to model them for him.

She did as she was instructed.

The man watched as she posed for him in the lingerie, became highly aroused, and raped her several more times. Finally, he drove her back to Rome, leaving Grant near her trailer park about fourteen hours after first abducting her. On the way, he said he'd like to see her again, and asked his baffled victim if he might call her.

Two days later, he pulled into her driveway in his truck and placed a Christmas tree on her porch. Grant's father, who lived across the street, witnessed the unlikely scene and recorded the vehicle's license plate number. The police soon arrested its owner, a thirty-three-year-old well digger named James Ray Ward. Grant identified Ward in a lineup as her abductor.

Once Linda Tucker heard of Ward's arrest, she rushed to the Walker County sheriff's office with a photo Nikia had taken of Amber resting on the Gilbreath's missing nylon bedspread with its attached bedsheet. If the killer still had the spread, she told the officers, the photo would help them identify it when they searched Ward's house.

Al Millard's men thanked Mrs. Tucker, but made it plain they had no expectation of recovering such a d.a.m.ning piece of evidence so many months later.

They were mistaken.

There were several searches of the unfinished structure that Ward, known as Ray, shared with his wife, Jamie, and their two children. The investigators found the telephone cord missing from the Gilbreath residence, plus the unusual bedspread (which Ward had tried unsuccessfully to burn), and one other surprise item, the bottom part of a two-piece Bill Bla.s.s swimming suit Linda Tucker had purchased for her daughter. As luck would have it, Tucker still had the top to the suit.

Searchers also discovered a sc.r.a.p of paper on Ward's dresser. Written on it were driving instructions to the Gilbreaths', plus "Baby, 1 yr. old" and "Brown Hair" and "fine looking," no doubt a physical appraisal of Mrs. Gilbreath.

Ward's employer, Jefford's Well Drilling, revealed that he had helped drill a water well on the Gilbreath property in July of 1988. The work had taken two days. Nikia had been at home. Linda Tucker recalled her daughter remarking to her and other family members in July of 1989, one month before her murder, that one of the two Jefford's employees who'd drilled the well had returned to ask if it was operating correctly.

This evidence alone connected Ray Ward to the killing of Nikia Gilbreath approximately four months before he kidnapped and raped Laura Grant.

However, "We realized that this was not a standard abduction-rape-murder thing," says John C. Ba.s.s, an investigator with the four-county Northwest Georgia Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit. "It was much more. Ward was a danger to everybody."

His rap sheet began with two burglary counts in 1975, and then lengthened over the years with arrests for criminal trespa.s.s, receiving stolen property, more burglary charges, and one charge of stealing livestock.

Witnesses told detectives that Ward was an exhibitionist, who'd begun exposing his genitals in public at least ten years earlier, and continued to do so up to the time of his arrest. Several women in the community accused Ward of groping their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, of more serious s.e.xual a.s.saults, and of placing obscene and threatening calls to them. He was known to have stolen several purses.

His wife said she began discovering lingerie-not hers-around the house, as well as used condoms, in February of 1989. Mrs. Ward complained that her husband kept asking her to pose in the lingerie, in order for him to be s.e.xually aroused. She said she'd generally refused his requests.

The searches of Ward's residence turned up a batch of paper slips with local women's names, addresses, and numbers written on them, apparently in the women's own handwriting. It turned out they had completed the slips as entries at a crafts fair raffle. Ward had watched as fair organizers discarded the slips, then fished them out of the trash and took them home.

The investigators also seized sheaves of newspaper articles detailing developments in the Gilbreath case, as well as other s.e.xual crimes committed in the area, not necessarily by Ward himself.

The searches' strangest disclosure, however, was the approximately three thousand dollars' worth of women's underclothing of all sorts he had hidden in his house. There were bras, panties, slips, half-slips, swimsuits, teddies, and gowns, each individually wrapped in a clear plastic bag and labeled. Most of the undergarments had been stolen in various ways, but some had been purchased, too.

Also discovered were 2,300 or so hand-printed three-by-five notecards bearing women's names and coded physical evaluations, together with an index to the cards Ward kept in a fat spiral notebook.

There was no question that District Attorney Ralph Van Pelt, Jr., would seek the death penalty. But Van Pelt was mindful he had no eyewitnesses who could place Ward and Nikia Gilbreath together on the morning of her murder. Juries tend to favor testimony from eyewitnesses, generally not realizing how unreliable even the most convincing eyewitness can be.

Van Pelt's case, though strong, instead was built on circ.u.mstantial evidence. To ensure a capital prosecution would succeed, the district attorney wanted to paint for Ward's jury a complete portrait of the defendant's multiple deviance, an informed overview that would tie together the seemingly disparate facts of the killer's character.

"Early on I was worried that some of the stuff was just so weird that the jurors would sit there and say, 'This cannot be happening,' " Van Pelt, now a Georgia superior court judge, recalls. " 'There's got to be some other explanation for all this stuff in this guy's house and for his behavior.'

"I was concerned they'd possibly think Ward might be insane, or that someone had planted the evidence."

John Ba.s.s, who had attended the FBI National Academy in 1986, immediately thought of Roy Hazelwood, his instructor in Interpersonal Violence. If anyone could make sense of Ray Ward to a jury it was Hazelwood, Ba.s.s thought.

"I told Van Pelt that I believed in the stuff they do at Quantico," Ba.s.s says, "that Roy did good work, and besides, it was free. I said we ought to give it a try, and Van Pelt said, 'Fine. Let's do it.' "

John Ba.s.s contacted Hazelwood, who agreed to testify as a prosecution expert on the connections between paraphilias, such as fetishism and exhibitionism, and deviant a.s.saults.

Roy's experience as an expert trial witness on paraphilias dated back to a South Carolina case where deviance also figured in the defendant's criminal behavior. A fifteen-year-old girl had been found with her throat cut. She'd been raped v.a.g.i.n.ally, a.n.a.lly, and orally, as well as stabbed thirty-seven times and eviscerated. Her eighteen-year-old killer, John Kenneth Register, who was arrested and charged on the strength of DNA evidence, was a family friend, and had been a pallbearer at her funeral.

In a pretrial strategy discussion, Roy asked the prosecutor, Ralph Wilson, if Register had any prior arrests or a mental health history. Wilson said no.

"Nothing at all?" Roy wondered.

"Only a couple obscene phone calls when he was about fifteen," the prosecutor answered. The files were with the juvenile authorities, Wilson said, because of the defendant's age at the time of the offense, and its status as a "nuisance" crime.

Roy asked about the victims, and the content of the obscene calls.

They turned out to be a mother and daughter, each of whom had heard the teen's telephone scatology approximately a hundred times. With variations, his usual stream of invective went something like, "I'm gonna cut your G.o.d-d.a.m.n throat. I'm gonna stab you till my arm gets tired. I'm gonna slit you open like a pig. And I'm gonna f.u.c.k you every way I can, and when I'm through I'm gonna use my gearshift."

Hazelwood returned to the prosecutor's office and advised him to indict Register for the phone calls.

"That's ridiculous!" Wilson said. "I'm faced with trying to convict a man for the most heinous murder this county has seen in a century, and you want me to convict this same person for obscene phone calls?"

"Yes!" Roy answered, "because he was verbalizing his fantasy. That young man was masturbating to those fantasies, which he later acted out in the murder. You can show the jury what he did, and also show them what he said he was going to do years earlier."

Roy's logic was compelling. He was telling the district attorney a way to reach into Register's mind by reaching back into the young man's behavior.

Hazelwood also interviewed two women who'd reported to the police that the defendant once had exposed himself to them.

"I asked them what he said," Roy recalls, "and they answered, 'Do you want this or my gearshift?' "

At Roy's recommendation, Wilson did indict and convict John Register for telephone scatalogia.

Hazelwood testified in the penalty phase of the Register trial.

"The autopsy was read, so the jurors knew what sort of trauma was inflicted on the victim," Roy explains. "Then the mother and daughter testified about the phone calls, and the jury could see the similarities between the two cases."

John Kenneth Register received a life sentence.

At Ray Ward's July 1991 trial for murdering Nikia Gilbreath, prosecutor Ralph Van Pelt presented to the jury all the testimony and evidence about Ward's exhibitionism, lingerie collection, a.s.saults, and coded card file. The district attorney also put on the record that Ward had lost his job twice in the period around the time of Nikia Gilbreath's murder, and that Ward's wife had temporarily left him, too. The jury was fully aware Ray Ward was beset with money and legal and personal worries at the time of the murder.

Then the prosecution called Hazelwood to the stand. This would be the first time such testimony ever had been accepted in a Georgia criminal court.

"What is a s.e.xual disorder?" Van Pelt asked.

"There are two types," Roy answered.

He explained that about half the men who voluntarily seek clinical help for s.e.xual problems are diagnosed with a paraphilia. About half those men are married.

"A type of paraphilia that you might have heard about is transvestism, a man dressed in the clothes of a woman," he said.

"Another would be exhibitionism, or flashing, exposing one's genitals to a stranger. And fetishism, the s.e.xual attachment to objects such as jewelry or rubber or leather or lingerie-panties, teddies, that kind of thing."

"It's a kind of paraphilia?" Van Pelt asked.

"It's a kind of paraphilia," Roy answered, "the same thing as a deviation. Also, may I mention one other thing?"

"Certainly."

"When you find one paraphilia, it is commonly accepted that you will find other deviations in that same individual."

The second major type of s.e.xual disorder is s.e.xual dysfunction.

"You have basically three types of dysfunction," Roy explained. "Premature e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, r.e.t.a.r.ded or difficult e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, and impotence."

John Ba.s.s sat in the gallery appreciatively taking in Hazelwood's polished exposition.

"Everyone was impressed with him," says the investigator. "He came across as really knowing what he was talking about. It was important for us to get across that Ward wasn't just some isolated crazy person. We needed Roy to educate the jury that people like Ward had been well studied."

Van Pelt asked Hazelwood what effects external stresses might have on a man with paraphilias. Ray Ward, of course, was coping with several stresses, from a disintegrating marriage to the loss of his job to the acute anxiety that any offender feels at the thought of being discovered or, in Ward's case, revealed.

"We have found that a person with paraphilias is more likely to commit one of these types of activities when he's under a great deal of stress," Roy answered.

He added that paraphilias also are reinforced when an individual's regular s.e.x partner refuses to indulge his particular desires, just as Ray Ward's wife had refused to partic.i.p.ate in his fantasies. The paraphiliac withdraws further into his deviance. Whatever interest he may have in conventional s.e.xual encounters is engulfed by the paraphilia.

The prosecutor asked Hazelwood to explain erotica.

"Erotica is anything that s.e.xually arouses or s.e.xually stimulates a person," Roy said to the jury.

"Sometimes it's a very innocent thing, such as newspaper articles. It could be a pair of panties. It could be a movie. Different things are s.e.xually arousing to different people."

"What does the term 'trophy' mean?" Van Pelt asked.

"We've found that quite frequently the violent s.e.xual offender retains something which belongs to the victim," Roy replied.

"This can be something like lingerie. It can be a piece of jewelry. It can be a newspaper clipping about a case, concerning the investigation or the discovery of the body.

"Such items very simply represent a trophy to the offender, much as if you and I were on a baseball team and we won a trophy. They represent a victory, a conquest, something the individual can use to relive the crime and to refresh his memory of it.

"We find that he normally keeps his trophies within an area of his control. It could be his office, his garage, his work shed, or his home."

The prosecutor then produced the coded three-by-five cards and spiral notebook seized from Ray Ward's house.

Roy looked over the material and said he had carefully examined seventy-six of the cards. He told the jurors Ward had put together a highly organized cross-referenced rating system for erotic photos he clipped from men's magazines, as well as lingerie and swimsuit catalogs. The defendant favored publications featuring homemade erotica, usually nude photos submitted by men of their wives and girlfriends.

Hazelwood used this example from Ward's file: Melissa P.

10.

19.

Paducah Kent.

No Mark Dancer 1-89 F&L.

The card, he explained on the stand, described a Melissa P. from Paducah, Kentucky, who was nineteen years old, and rated a ten on Ward's zero-to-ten scale.

"No" meant she was unmarried, and "Dancer" was Melissa's occupation. "Mark" took the photo, which appeared in the "F&L" section-for Friends & Lovers-of the January 1989 issue of Genesis.

The spiral notebook contained a complementary cla.s.sification system. A representative page contained these entries: The notebook's code was the same as for the cards. The initials V. and R. represented the women's surnames, Hazelwood testified.