It was a simple enough matter for Leisha to call on neighbor Tim Smith, a young, submissive evangelical Christian, to help with the murder. Smith had flooded her with a series of fawning love letters that included, “If only Scott wasn’t around, we could be together.” Duct tape from a roll in Smith’s apartment was used to patch the blood-soaked carpet that had been cut away and replaced in the killing room.
“This is a classic setup for a PA killer,” he said. “Just classic. A female PA relies on sexual performance and seduction, but if her power base is threatened, she will resort to violence. She’ll typically enlist trickery to disable a stronger male and/or acquire a sympathetic and weak accomplice. Leisha did both. And the PA killer classically needs to brag or flaunt the killing to claim credit, and inserts him- or herself into the investigation to exert control and power and prolong the fantasy of the murder.”
Calling attention to herself was Leisha’s big mistake, Walter said.
“How do we find out about the crime? We find out when Leisha calls Jim Dunn. She’s laying the framework, not only shaping the investigation-she knows ultimately Jim’s going to look for Scott-but she’s also exhibiting her own insatiable greed for power. She’s already done in the son; now she wants to do in the father, too. Then she tried to be coquettish with the detectives, casting herself as the wronged woman, calling them all the time with new information, pretending to be afraid of Tim Smith. She moved in with Smith so she could continue to set up her dupe to take the fall. This need for stimulation is quite insatiable for a psychopath, the ego gratification to prove they’re smarter than anyone, the gotcha.”
In the Avalanche-Journal story on Walter’s arrival in town, Leisha was quoted as saying Smith was a “suspect” in Scott’s disappearance, and had been “fiercely jealous of her relationship with Scott.”
Smith was absent from work the day of the murder, Walter said, and Hamilton can’t account for her activities that day, although her memory is extraordinary for the days around it.
The murder itself was a monstrous affair, Walter said. Scott was incapacitated with poisons, imprisoned and restrained and tortured for two days before his death, Walter believed. “This kind of killer typically uses a gun to restrain or intimidate, but close-up weapons, the kind that caused all this splattering and gives the killer emotional satisfaction, to pummel, cut, utterly destroy the victim until the killer’s fear of vulnerability is sated, and power restored. There would have been a lot of ‘You think you’re leaving me now, bitch, try this.’ What the absence and presence of evidence at the crime scene tells us is Scott intolerably challenged somebody’s power base, and paid with his life.”
After the murder, Walter said, Leisha and Tim had sex together that night in the apartment. “A little thank-you from Leisha,” Walter said. “But only after they had removed the body and cleaned up.” He smiled wickedly. “Even they have standards.”
Detective English shook his head sadly, acknowledging the depth of evil, and sat back with an audible sigh. He was persuaded by Walter’s profile of Leisha Hamilton as a psychopath-he saw why Jim Dunn had termed Walter’s insights “miraculous.” But the young detective didn’t buy the wide conspiracy, and the others weren’t nearly as impressed. All the cops knew Hamilton was withholding information; all of them considered Smith a suspect. “They were Texas polite,” Walter said. “But the whole thing was too ethereal for them.” None of it would matter, anyway, the cops said, to the DA, Travis Ware. As Sergeant McGuire told Dunn, “I have seen Ware cut people right off at the knees when he feels they don’t have a strong case. Believe me, you don’t want to talk to Travis Ware.”
Walter wasn’t listening. He was ready to see the DA. “Let’s do it,” he said. “I don’t like to fuck around.” Reluctantly, the cops led him to the office of the top lawman in Lubbock County, Texas.
The district attorney’s office was large and redolent of masculine power. Travis Ware, six feet tall, dark-haired, and impeccably attired, rose from his high-backed leather chair behind a huge polished wooden desk. In a remarkable display of dominance, he hitched one expensive black leather shoe up on the desk, towering over them with the flamboyance, Walter thought, of a matador. Leisha’s not the only PA in the room, the profiler thought, amused. Let’s see who gets gored.
Walter, Detective English, Sergeant McGuire, Lieutenant Dean Summerlin, and Captain Frank Wiley, head of Crimes Against Persons, sat in five small chairs positioned around the district attorney’s huge wooden desk like pawns around a king. In a glance Walter evaluated Ware-fortyish, reasonably good-looking, expensive gold watch peeking from under the cuff. Ah, narcissism, he thought-a weakness.
For twenty minutes, the DA talked about himself. As if to match Walter’s experience with Scotland Yard, Walter thought, he discussed his education abroad in England and the many brilliant murder prosecutions that “attested to his greatness.” Appealing to the DA’s sense of vanity, the profiler offered, “Yes, there are indeed many connections to England in this room,” and casually mentioned a “quite brilliant friend,” Dr. Richard Shepherd of London, who had helped him with the case.
Ware said brusquely, from his elevated pose: “Well, you’ve asked for this meeting. What do you want?”
Walter snapped back, “We want charges filed against Leisha Hamilton and Tim Smith in the murder of Scott Dunn.”
The DA scoffed. His voice filled with condescension, as if addressing schoolchildren, he said, “You don’t have a murder charge. All you have is a missing person. You don’t even have a body. Without a body you don’t have a murder. Come back to me when you have a body.”
The profiler removed his horn-rims and glared. “If you want a goddamned body, I’ll give you one. It’s right here, in Dr. Shepherd’s report.” His face flushed with color, Walter stood and dropped on the desk a slim blue-bound report titled “Forensic Pathology and Analysis of the Crime Scene in the Murder of Roger Scott Dunn.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s right here,” Walter said. “Dr. Shepherd’s report proves conclusively that Scott Dunn died in that room, and was murdered.”
Walter had asked Detective English to have a forensic pathologist examine the crime scene to determine if enough blood had been spilled to indisputably have caused the death of a six-foot-two, 170-pound man. Dr. Sparks Veasey, the Lubbock County pathologist, had refused the job, saying there wasn’t enough information to reach a conclusion. At Walter’s direction English had mailed a large package with copies of the entire case file, photographs, and bloody carpet samples to Walter’s friend Dr. Richard Shepherd, forensic pathologist at Guy’s Hospital, London, England, internationally known consultant to Scotland Yard. “Dick’s brilliance is unsurpassed,” Walter said. “And he owes me a favor.”
After studying the sprayed blood on the south and east walls, ceiling and doorknob of the bedroom, Dr. Shepherd wrote that the “by far most likely cause” of the blood spatter was “repeated blunt trauma.” Furthermore, “The distribution of the spraying of blood is entirely consistent with the victim lying on the floor while the blows that resulted in this spraying were struck.” Although the amount of blood lost was impossible to calculate, the blood spatter indicated Scott Dunn was forcefully and repeatedly bludgeoned about the head and such blows to the brain were “the prime cause of death in such cases.”