Free The Profiler by Pat Brown Page B

a department store, as a security guard, so I went there.
    “Oh,
that
guy?” his supervisor said. “Geez, he was so creepy. He was the only person who worked for me to whom I wouldn’t give my pager number. I didn’t want to be contacted by him. Walt told me once that he was going to snipe me on the way into work, ‘joking’ about gunning me down. Once he said that he had gloves that had stun guns in them so he could knock people out. Another day, Walt told me that he got a girl pregnant, and I said, ‘Is she going to get an abortion?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do it myself.’ That totally freaked me out.”
    I drove two hours south to meet with his father. I honestly didn’t expect him to speak with me. I rang the doorbell and when he answered, I explained who I was.
    “I’m a criminal profiler, and I’m trying to learn a little bit more about your son, because he’s either committed a serious crime, or he’s gotten himself into trouble by making himself look like he committed the crime.”
    Walt’s father looked at me and rolled his eyes.
    “Come on in,” he said.
    We spent the next two hours talking and he told me all kinds ofthings about Walt from way back when he was a child. “He’s
always
been a problem,” he said. “I had a difficult time with him. I’ve had problems with him constantly lying, and one time he stole a bunch of quarters from me, I think it was a jar.”
    He told me Walt couldn’t keep a job, had no ambition, and all he wanted to do was play Dungeons & Dragons with his loser friends. He was a disappointment as a son.
    His dad said that Walt served in the air force, but that he was discharged because the military said he was schizoid. He used the word “schizoid.” Walt later told me himself that he was let go because they also said he had a personality disorder. I thought that was interesting, because I believed he had a personality disorder and not a mental illness. How long did it take the air force to discover and make this evaluation? Four months.
    When our interview ended, Walt’s father said, “If you need any more help, you let me know.” He could have slammed the door in my face, but he didn’t. In fact, he gave me new insight into his son.
    My confidence was building with regard to my ability to run a background interview, and my suspicions about Walt were growing. Next I tracked down his sister.
    She also invited me into her home and I sat down with her for two hours. At one point her husband and kids joined the conversation, and everybody had something to say about Walt.
    She cried and said, “I’ve never understood what was wrong with him. All my life, I’ve had problems with him.”
    Her husband said, “He creeps me out completely.”
    And the kids added, “Uncle Walt creeps us out, too.”
    They described incident after incident in which Walt struggled with the people around him and displayed peculiar behaviors.
    Everyone I asked for an interview agreed. The family did not seem shocked or shaken that I was investigating him in connection with a sexual homicide. How many families would not object to a stranger sitting in their living room and questioning them as to whether their son, brother, brother-in-law, or uncle might be a murderer? Walt’s family members weren’t upset at all. Not one of them.
    *  *  *  *
    I TOOK THE information gained from my interviews and turned it over to the police department that had jurisdiction over the crime. In the beginning there had been a dispute over who should work the case; the park police, because Anne Kelley was murdered in the park, or the county police, because the park was within county jurisdiction. It would have been better for the county police to handle the case, because they had a lot of experience with murder investigations and the park police had very little. I never knew why the park police won out, but it was clearly their case. I had to go back to them with my new information and I got