You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together
with Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a
researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social
media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Ever Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly
and I'm Bill Thomas. We're joined today by two of our favorite people,
Jim fitz Fitzgerald and Ray Carr, here to talk to us about profilingist serial
killer. Ray and fitz thank you for joining us today and great to be
back with you and Bill with the Mix News here. Bill, we know
your situation, of course, but I guess there is some good news in
this investigation. And Ray and I will do our best to fill in out
any blanks or any questions you have in your Oh. Thank you both,
and absolutely we think this is fantastic news. We are thrilled for three of
our families now. Robin Edwards's family David Noblink's family both received confirmation of who
was involved in their murder. It's a rape murder actually, and a case
we were less familiar with. Teresa Howell her family also received news, and
Kristin and I were talking about this Onmind Over Murder. I've said, I
don't think there's a place at the card store where you can go and say
congratulations on finding out who killed you loved one. But at the same time,
as you both know, when you're looking for answers in this case for
over thirty years getting those answers, there's some good in that. There really
is. So we're thrilled in that regard. We're excited about helping the FBI
and the Virginia State Police move this case forward. Thank you both. One
of the things that we wanted to have you both on today to talk about
is some of the hallmarks of what happens when you're trying to profile a serial
killer. For some of our listeners who may be a little less familiar with
profiling. We wanted to pose some questions to you, first overall about serial
killers, and then we have some questions from our listeners who wanted to ask
our experts some questions in particular. So I want to kick us off with
first of all, can you guys tell us about precursor crimes? Are there
types of precursor crimes that are common to all or most serial killers or do
they tend to differ from a fender to a fender. I'll start here.
It does differ from a fender to offender. However, there are some sort
of elemental or foundational crimes that many of them will commit. If they're sexual
sadists, they may have committed started off with maybe youngsters stealing underwear off of
clothes lines or out of doing a burglary and taking the material out of drawers
or wherever they may be kept. They could also be leaving shall we say,
DNA samples behind sometimes in terms of a precursor crime, so when they're
younger and they haven't quite escalated into actually forceful violent behavior. And of course
we can go into the whole arson thing and and animal cruelty and urineesis that
some of these suffer from early on. But in terms of the crimes themselves
that lead up to these, it's usually these property crimes. But have a
that's the mo We'll get into a building somehow, break a window, maybe
not that sophisticated than first, but the signature behind it is some sexual satisfaction.
They're not there to break into the safe or steal expensive jewelry necessarily,
these type of serial killers. They're there for some kind of need driven behavior,
sexual fulfillment. And as they get older, as they get more freedom,
perhaps a little more money, a little more ability of transportation, they
can expand their precursor crime zone. And if they get a little bit far
out of their own neighborhood, they may feel safe enough in attacking someone in
person, raping them, killing them, and that's where they really kick into
that violent sort of behavior, which if they are successful a few times,
they then become labeled a serial killer. You know, Jim's right, but
you look at antisocial behavior, you look at psychopaths. So it's really important
when you look at children, you look at those children that are antisocial.
And Jim's right too about arson. Many serial killers start out as arsenists and
then not to jump on. But Jim's talking about some of the other things,
for family life, twitturing as some animals, abuses as a child subsist,
abuse, voyeurism, especially when there's a sexual tendency to it. And
you find a lot of times that many of these individuals are intelligent as well.
To say, the dumb ones as reinos get caught early on and they
don't become serial killers. If they do have a modicum of intelligence about them,
savby and perhaps lucky too, they can then succeed in multiple killings and
getting away with it. Yeah, there's something that's come up in this suspect.
He died in twenty seventeen. His name is Alan Wade Wilmer Sr.
Unfortunately for their family, is also a junior who was eight years old at
the time of the Colonial Parkway murders. So we don't think he's involved,
but he now has to go through life with the exact same name of a
man that's now been identified as a serial killer. One of the things that
I noticed was some of the investigators in speaking about this gentleman, He's not
somebody with a lot of higher education. He was a waterman in Virginia.
He works on the water. He's an avid hunter, fisherman, outdoorsman,
actually quite skilled, a championship marksman. He's one archery contests. He's really
very at home in the woods and on the water, which is how he
makes us living crabbing, fishing, and oystering. Some of the investigators said
a few things about him that I actually thought were disparaging. They were saying,
he's a waterman, he's not very smart. And actually, the more
we learn about Wilmer, we actually believe that Wilmer may have been getting away
with raping and murdering people for as long as forty years. So I don't
really think he can say the man's not smart. He's actually gotten away with
murder and rape for forty years. Is that fair? And Jim will probably
attest to this. Some of the dumbest academic people I know are the smartest
criminals. So it's not as though where we say that they're intelligent doesn't necessarily
mean we're speaking academically. We're speaking intelligent in the ways of life and how
to get things done in an organized, systematic way. In order to cover
their tracks as they move forward. There's no barometer for intelligence that way.
We just say, like I had a guy that robbed banks for thirty years.
Think about a guy Robin Banks for thirty years. Who would ever think
someone would get away with Robin Banks for thirty years, but he did.
He was also very smart academically. He's more of the anomaly than he is
the usual individual. But this individual, and I know I read up a
little bit about him that he was an avid fisherman. He was a hunter.
He was very well versed in the areas where a lot of these crimes
were committed, which is a benefit to him. He's in his comfort zone,
as you might call it, where his area of familiarity. And you
know what, with these hunting and fishing skills, you could maybe classify him
as an apex predatory obviously legally hunting animals and various above water and below water.
He knew how to stalk his prey. And I remember from the early
there's days of being a plane closed police officer in watching guys getting ready to
commit crimes. I didn't catch a serial killer in the act. People rarely
do. But car thieves and purse snatchers, you see them very much take
their time. The good ones, the ones that usually get away with it.
And I used to watch them through binoculars at a mall and Bensalem Township,
and their eyes are darting all around. They're looking left and right.
They may go back to their car take off. They may if they're on
foot, they'll walk around their side of the mall. They're very careful and
very astute in knowing their environment. And to be a good hunter, and
I would assume a good fisherman, you have to have those skills. You
have to have patience. You have to be willing to sit by and sometimes
let a potential prey or an animal a deer go by, because you just
don't have a clean shot where there could be something else interfering with it.
The same with choosing a live human victim potential victim, and that sometimes they
may have to be let go. Sometimes they may come very close to getting
attacked and violated. Other times not. Yeah, and I've met I've done
then directly. I'm familiar with research done on Smith Island, Maryland, as
well as Opracoke Island, North Carolina. I met some fishermen. There's some
very bright people there I've met some PhDs that aren't that great sometimes so into
intelligence, and intellect is measured on different levels and different planes, as Ray
said, and getting by on the streets like this guy apparently knew how to
do for about forty years, can equate to a certain level of intelligence that
works just for him. If you're not going to cite the classics or math
formula, but he knows how to stalk a victim and eventually take care of
business at the right time, in the right place. One of the things
Kristin and I wanted to ask about is regarding Wilmer as a suspect the cases
that he's been linked to directly via DNA. He's in his early thirties at
the time those rape murders occur. Is there a common age at which offenders
start when do they escalate, as you said, into this level of behavior.
A lot of people look at these offenders. They don't wake up one
morning and go, hey, today is Wednesday, January twenty fourth. I
think today I'm going to become a serial killer. You don't go to the
school to learn how to become a serial killer, to be able to earmark
a certain date that someone says, we know based on research that it happens
around nineteen or twenty. There is no research and I'm aware of that tells
you that because every individual is unique in and of their own, so there
is an escalation in their behavior that you can see if you go back and
look at what they've done and how they progress through life. You should be
able to pick up on signs. And some people will say that's just boys
being boys, and other people say, hey, that's not right. Someone
should correct that, and they don't, or for whatever reason, he's allowed
or she's allowed to get away with this behavior, and then it just condones
that, Hey, I'm out smarting these people, I'm bettering these people,
and it bodes their confidence and allows them to move forward. I'll never forget
working in the UNIBOM case. He was a serial killer, and we once
we got inside his cabin and got all his private writings, his diary,
his or to biography, all these things he never expected anyone to read.
These are separate, of course, from the manifesto and other letters. Kazinsky
clearly delineated a date and a time while he was at the University of Michigan
working on his PhD. This would have been the mid nineteen sixties where he
decided he wanted to become a woman. He decided that this was before it
was trendy and everyone else was doing these things. And he went to see
the school psychologist or a psychiatrists and he basically walked in the room and said,
hey, I want to be a woman. And the person listened to
him and respectfully the way I'm reading Kazinsky's writings years later, and he said,
all right, we can talk about this, but first of all,
we had to go through a few years of therapy. Then there's some medications
we can put you on, and maybe at the five to seven year point,
if you really want to be a woman, we can consider some surgery.
This is the mid nineteen sixties and he's in his mid twenties, he's
well into adulthood. He got really upset at this doctor. He left that
room, he came outside, and of course he wrote this. He said,
you know what, hell it becoming a woman. Health's going through all
this nonsense. I'm going to start killing people. I'm going to start killing
people, just like this psychologist or psychiatrist, I forget which one. Now.
It took him about twenty years to in fact do his first bombing nineteen
seventy eight. But it's interesting we actually have written information from one serial killer,
and Kazinski is not representative of them all. But it's one time where
he put in writing. There's even a date attached to it. I forget
the date, but it's mid sixties, said yeah, forget this becoming a
woman. I'm going to kill someone people just like him. Ironically, he
never did target psychologists or psychiatrist, was more other types of people. We
know his representational targets. But there's a guy that identified some aspect of his
life and said I'm going to start killing. He delayed it by twenty years,
so he's an outlier in that regard. But I would concur much with
what Ray was saying in that there are elements of a person's life the whorre
Jupiter aligns with Mars and other things are going on the exact age. It's
tough to pinpoint that. Probably in the late teens early twenties is when the
ideation starts. But now when they carry through that ideation, be it homicidal,
be it rapist, be it both, that could have an extended period
to it. Where the man to gather more revenue and means of transportation.
And they may and the tools and the weaponry, the rape and the homicide
kits. But once they're ready to go, if they can get away with
it the first time, they'll try it a second time and move on from
there. One of the things that the FBI and Virginia State Police were asking
of the public at this press conference is to please provide any information that they
may be aware of with regard to Alan Wade Wilmer Senior, his hangouts,
his friends, his places of business, and so on and so forth.
I'm assuming some of that is because they're trying to get a timeline going on
this guy. How far back is a profiler or an investigator going to go
in trying to figure out how long this guy has been working? Are they
going to go all the way back to childhood? Or like, how does
that process work? Exactly? When you're trying to define a timeline for a
serial killer? How far do you go back? To me? I don't
think there's again, there's nothing set in stone to say, hey, let's
go back here. You go back as far as the information allows you to
go back. But the thing that's important when you're looking at the individual is
you look at the phases of a murder and you look at try and figure
out when the thought of identifying this individual, whether they were whether it was
a a victim of opportunity, or whether they were selected. It depends because
you're looking and we call it the anty cessim behavior, which is the conscious
fantasy or planning of the actual killing or what the purpose of it is.
And it's a fantasy act towards it as they're going through this fantasy of what
it's like, and a lot of times the fantasy never lives up to the
reality of what happens, and that's why there's a continued killing. But then
from the anty session behavior, do you have the selection or the murder act
itself where they selected the person, the method and manner in which you're going
to kill the person. And then once they do that, then there's disposal
of the body. Do they transport it or do they leave it there,
do they conceal it or do they openly display it. A lot of times
we don't know anything about that. Law enforcement knows nothing about that. Only
the offender knows those things. So going back into his behavior, We may
find out about some of those things, but the things that we do have
a access to is his post defense behavior. Once that fantasy becomes reality.
How does he react? Does he maintain that fantasy through continued killings? Does
he get involved in the investigation. Does he attend to wake or a funeral?
Does he visit the grave site, visit the murder site, or other
significant locations of where these things occurred. So I mean you go where the
information takes you. If it takes you back into childhood, my bioll means
you go there. Yeah. Essentially, what the investigators are doing their best
to build now is a psychological autopsy. There's not much they can do with
his body because he's buried and there wasn't much left when they found out.
But kudos to whoever took the DNA sample from him. I guess they had
to do that to get the to identify him, But he wasn't in any
database as far as I know, and that was invaluable that the person knew
enough to take that. So they're doing a psychological autopsy of this guy,
just as if they were going to take him to trial, because they want
to find out every single aspect of his life, and they will go back
to childhood as much as they can link him to classmates in grade school,
in high school, any woman he's dated, will be a wealth of information.
Buddies of his conceivably was before a lot of these crimes were before his
murders were before the Internet. But I'm sure in the last twenty years of
his life, once the Internet kicked in, I have a feeling if records
can be kept that long from someone who died in twenty seventeen, I'm sure
that'll be a treasure trove also of information about not only the crimes he committed,
looking under the different websites devoted to these cases, but also an active
fantasy life of reading about other homicides and reading about how to get away with
these types of homicides, and all kinds of most likely violent pornography. Anything
they can get on this guy, going as far back as they can from
a testimonial or evidentiary perspective, but certainly from a technological perspective too, with
the Internet at least in the last ten to twenty years of his life will
prove very valuable and perhaps linking him to the other crimes that we still want
to get solved. That's fantastic. A couple of other things we wanted to
ask you, Jents. Law enforcement investigators have filled us into some extent,
and they'd said that Alan Wade Wilmer, Senior Blitz attacked single women. They
think he may have attacked single men. He raped and killed same sex couples
and straight couples, hetero sexual couples. Do you regard him as a preferential
offender or an opportunistic offender? Or are there killers that blend these two different
types of killers and their activities and interests vary. I'd go in my opinion,
I think I'd go with the latter. There's a combination of both preferential
and opportunistic. And the reason why I say that is because every offender that
I've come in contact with throughout my career always has a preference or desire for
certain image of what they're looking for. But a lot of times that doesn't
plan out the way they'd like it to, so then it becomes something of
an opportunity for them. They look for something that's just there or happens to
be there. Again, it's difficult to speak to this individual's mindset without knowing
more about him, But I just if I had to speculate in this,
I would say there was a combination of both interesting. How about you,
Yeah, a combination, but I would say leaning towards opportunistic. Again.
He was a hunter who would like a twelve point buck as his trophy,
but if he only sees a six point he'll take that too, as long
as whether it's in season or not. He's probably one of these guys.
He didn't violate any of the hunting laws or fishing laws. I know Kazinski
was that way too. He always got his hunting license and kept his driver's
license going. But he's mailing bombs at people. I'll bet you'll find this
guy again. As part of his intelligence, the innate part, even if
not a formal degrees under his belt, he knew to keep all these eyes
dotted and tease crossed in terms of his everyday life. I would see him
more as opportunistic. He may have preferences and ideally they would if they fall
his way, he would go after them. But it's a special kind of
offender. And I know some questions that I looked at before, whether there's
more than one person Serial offenders very rarely work with a partner, I would
assume, unless evidence provides otherwise he worked on his own. And what is
the rarest of Lee's loan offenders is those who go after couples, including a
man and a woman, because you are really you're doubling your risk, if
not even in different percentages, because the man is typically stronger, and he
may have a more fight element to him than flight, and it's just you're
just increasing your odds exponentially. When you take on a couple, you have
to subdue him right away. And are you the type like Dennis Rader bt
K that he ties the man up and forces the man to watch him violate
the woman victim before of course he kills them both. So I don't know
exactly how that played out in these particular instances, and these two sets of
murders we know of one couple and the single person Terry Howell. That adds
a whole different dimension, And most likely a serial killer would not first venture
after two people. They would try it one first. But this guy may
have felt skilled enough after one or two successful killings, and it's very likely
we don't know all his murders at this point in time, because I know
the investigators are still looking into it. But I wouldn't surprise me at all
if he in fact has these other murders under his belt and not linked to
him yet, but these are his I won't say practice runs because he may
have completed the act. But then he said, you know what, this
is enough, I somehow want to get a guy in this. And this
is a whole there's a whole psychological element too, to a rapist, a
murderer who gets not just the quote unquote pleasure of raping a woman. It's
not about pleasure, it's not about sections about power and control, as we
know, But then forcing a man to sit through it and watch his loved
one being violated, that's a whole different set and a whole different dynamic involved
in the psychological makeup of this person. And there may be factors in his
life we learn from his childhood. Again, no excuses or defenses here,
but there may be something he went through as a kid, or even in
his teen years. Was he forced to watch something, or was he in
somehow put in a situation like that, And now he basically reacts the same
way when these situations present himself. So there's a lot more we have to
learn about this guy. But among serial killers, he's more on the rare
variety who wants to do these type of double murders where one person is tied
up and put in some position of weakness and then the other rape and the
action goes on. And it's a whole different breed of serial killer. And
this guy got away with it for the number of years that he did,
which he was probably lucky, but he had some street smarts and predatory smarts
too. Well. Just let me add one more thing to what Jim said,
because makes a great point. And the point is this individual's success in
being able to get away with these crimes I think was based a lot on
his ability to compartmentalize the behavior and kind of put that behavior in silos and
almost like a doctor checklmister iber. He was able to just show it,
turn it on, and turn it off. And he was very good at
that. And I think that's the psychological makeup. When Jim talks about that,
you'd love to be able to study someone like that and look at him.
We'll never get the opportunity to do that unless we do it through others
by talking to family members and people of that nature. But his ability to
compartmentalize that behavior and turn it on want to turn it off, I think
is what helped in his success over forty years. And let me just add
to that, that's what I've used the term earlier need driven behavior. There
are some offenders that just can't stop. They have to rape every three or
four days, maybe three or four weeks. They usually get caught earlier on.
But there are people that can control themselves, and it's while it's still
need driven behavior, their psychological makeup is not. They don't need this release,
this power burst every few days. They can control and confine their activities.
And the ones who can't control and confine their activities get caught early on,
even if they have a few quote unquote successes under their belt. But
this guy knew picked his victims carefully. And I tell you, for every
victim we have of this guy, I wouldn't even know the numbers, yet,
there were probably a dozen that he came close to confronting somehow with that
something's not right. I hear a police siren in the background. Now it's
a little too bright here where they're pulling over. Now that guy's a little
too big. I'm not going to mess with this couple. He took off
and found someone else that night, a week or a month later. Yeah,
there's a lot of different temporal and spatial factors that go into the selection
process with these guys, and you can almost project for every victim a serial
killer has, there may be dozens more that came really close but somehow didn't
make the cut and they're alive to speak of it. You're listening to mind
Over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors. We're
back here at Mindover Murder. That's coming out in this investigation now, as
you can imagine, people are coming out of the woodwork to us, and
of course we're urging people to please talk to the FBI and the Virginia State
Police, and we're supporting their efforts. But people are coming forward to us
and reporting things that they reported to the FBI, the Virginia State Police,
or the National Park Service back in the eighties, which is a number of
people have reported now that typically couples would be parking and this man driving this
very distinctive truck attacked them in sort of a blitz attack. He would show
up very suddenly, typically at the window of their car. These couples are
usually making out and not paying a lot of attention to what's going on.
A lot of these incidents occurred on the Colonial Parkway, which seems to be
part of his comfort zone. So he would come up, bang on the
window very aggressively. He's not dressed as a cop. He's typically dressed in
like a mechanics uniform. He's not driving a cop car, no blue lights,
nothing like that. He just uses his high beams to flash people,
and then it'll come up and aggressively demand driver's licenses, insisting they're trespassing or
they're doing something illegal. A number of these people had already been warned because
the other Colonial Parkway murders were way by this point, and local folks were
advised not to allow themselves to be pulled over on the Colonial Parkway. And
so some of these people are telling me stories in the last two weeks about
slipping a driver's license through a little one inch gap at the top of the
window. And one woman who was telling me the story the other day,
she's a retired architect. Her mail companion gave him the driver's licenses. He
really wanted them to roll the window down, and they refused. He didn't
produce a gun, although he has used guns in other situations. We know
he shot Robin Edwards and David Nobling to death with a small caliber handgun.
This guy goes back to his truck, which they could see, which matches
the truck described in the new materials that have come out about Wilmer, and
they quickly discussed this amongst themselves. Both of them agreed this guy's not a
cop. He flashed some sort of id not even a badge, and look
more like an idea or a security pass that you would use to go in
and out of somewhere. And they agree they've got to get the hell out
of there. What they wanted to do is get their driver's licenses and get
gone. The female half of the couple is saying she's able to really study
this guy, and she realizes he's very short, which matches Wilmer's description.
He's only five to five, he's very muscular, he's one hundred and sixty
five pounds, and she noticed he had extremely large hands, almost outsized for
the size of his body, which he was banging on the window and she
was on the other side of the car and she could see all this.
She noticed how callous they were. And this is a guy who works on
the water, so this would match his description pretty well. They were able
to get their driver's licenses back. They kind of gave him some pushback,
you're not a cop, We're not doing anything wrong, that kind of thing.
He eventually gave them their driver's licenses back. And just like you said,
Jim, it appears that there are a number of incidents like this on
the Colonial Parkway and people did manage to get away without being raped or murdered,
but it sounds like they might have had a close call. What's your
take on that. But for the grace of God, who knows what factors
kicked into the external environment, his internal environment, and he just decided now
wasn't the right time or the right place. Maybe he felt this couple in
this one case anyway, would give him too much of a fight and he
wasn't in the mood. There may be some other couples that are more amenable
and conciliatory, and sure, okay, officer, And if they just somehow
think he's a person of authorities, yeah, that's those would be very interesting
reading any interview they did back in the day. And I think Bill,
you said, you just talk to this woman in the last few weeks.
Yeah, and they had talked to the authorities back in the late eighties when
this happened. But obviously we're urging all these people to contact authorities again because
they need this information. Yeah, and hopefully they will come forward and perhaps
and it'll give us some pinpoints on a map where they can put this guy
in certain locations at certain times. It's obviously before cell phones, so there's
no towers that can be pinged off of in that regard, but even some
of these anecdotal instances can really help build a solid map of where this guy
was at certain times in certain places. And Yeah, if that's not Wilmer
what you just described from what that woman described back in the eighties, I'd
be really surprised. It sounds like his mo to a t. Can you
talk about the kind of stressors that might prompt an offender into committing a crime
and is there always a stressor that kicks off an event or a spree or
is it sometimes just I feel like waking up today and raising some hell I
think there's really three areas that you would consider here. Number one is the
pre offense behavior, and a lot of that is usually an incident in the
life of the offender prior to the offense, and that could be anything from
a relationship problem to a loss of a job, monetary problems, he has
a fight, he could even have a run in with law enforcement. The
other is the behavior that goes on during the crime that you can see it
actually in the crime scene. When you look at that, you sit there
and you say, wow, that could be anything from the way the body
is positioned as a sort of struggle. And then the last thing is the
post defense behavior. The post defense behavior are actions of the offender that are
usually pretty quickly after the incident happens, or it can be days weeks following
the crime, and the behavior is going to be noticed by others. But
the problem is nobody ever says anything. You really have to look when you're
trying to do an assessment of someone like that, is those are the three
areas that we would always look at when you look at some of the crime
when somebody behave if you're doing the crime, did they display an interest in
ownership? Did they protect some property of their own. Is there any signs
of staging that may have taken place at the crime. All these different things
come into this, and then you look at what did the offender do to
place himself in harm's way, So you look at his risk level. Like
Jim said earlier when we were talking about that before, Look, it's at
night, lack of guardianship, so there's not a whole lot of people that
are able to observe he's really a low risk offender. And the reason maybe
why, besides the grace of God, is they didn't comply by opening the
door or rolling the window all the way down. Had they done that,
it probably would have trained changed the whole scenario of what took place. That's
interesting. It just struck me here. I was a uniform police officer for
a number of years. During my eleven years in Ben Salem Township, Bugs
County, just suburban Philadelphia, and there were not only lovers lanes in our
area, but every once in a while, late at night, we'd see
a car park somewhere, sometimes where stolen cars were dropped off or they're being
stripped, and we'd walk up and sometimes the windows are fogged up. So
I was that person with a real badge and a real gun and with the
authority to walk up to a car and say, what's going on? Is
it a dead body, is it just a stolen car? Is it something
else? And some of the times it would be two kids or sometimes older
people in various acts of will say intimacy. I never got a kick out
of that. I just I did need to see the ID. I didn't
need to make sure someone belonged to that car or vice versa. And people
were at least over eighteen, they weren't drunk all these other factors. Sometimes
I just left them there if no one was actually complaining, and other times
I did make them leave because it was private property. Then I have authority
to be there. So I've been that person who has checked out lovers in
cars, and I had legal authority to do it, and I didn't even
know they were lovers when I walk up with the car with this guy,
he was there for that one reason. He could care less whose property it
was. He could care less if the car was stolen or not, or
the age of one of the things. I know in one of the killings,
the young girl was only fourteen and the guy was twenty Who knows what
they were doing. Could be some statutory issues. Back then the eighties,
people didn't care about stuff quite as much as that if things weren't actually being
physically forced. But this was some kind of a turn on to this guy,
and he didn't want to leave this one go by. I wouldn't be
surprised if somewhere down the line he was in a car with some woman and
some police came up to him, maybe some non police came up to him,
and whatever happened, he obviously survived, and he said, hey,
this isn't a bad modus operandi to try myself when the time comes years later.
It seems like that's exactly what happened, and it worked for him because
he was never caught in the act, or even caught after the fact alive.
That is, of course, So we're curious how helpful would geographic profiling
be in the case of an offender like Wilmer who moves around primarily using the
waterways. Is that something that would be more helpful or less helpful in terms
of tracking his movement. When you talk about geographic profiling, it's usually a
technique that uses locations that are connected to the series of the crime sites,
or where the person's first approached to determine maybe the offender lives in that area.
I think it's we can comfortably say that the individual that committed these offenses
had a great familiarity with the area in which he was doing it. When
you look at geographic profiling, it's more like a probability map of where he
may live, where he may want to do things. But you're looking at
locations of where they were approached, locations of the crime scenes, body disposal.
You look at all three of those, and sometimes that can help and
pinpointing some things. But that's just a piece of the information when you get
in a geographic profiling. There's many other things besides that. Yeah. I
know the person who first developed geographic profiling. His name's Kim rossmo. He
was a law enforcement officer. He actually wrote a dissertation on geographic profiling and
it's been used in many investigations. I think you need at least three points.
The more the better, And from my understanding of it, the waterways
would present no issue in terms of still from the triangular triangulation or beyond that
where someone may live, but Here's where it also gets tricky, and Ray
alluded to this, is that what it may point out is the person's area
of familiarity, not necessarily his resonance. And there's an old expression, and
I'll be a little polite for your audience, you don't poop where you eat.
I think I know what you're saying. This guy in San Francisco,
I think they do that now. But that's a whole other story. But
anyway, anyway, but he knows, this guy, especially because he's been
successful. I'm talking about Womber here. He knew not to violate exactly where
he lived. But he may have worked in a certain area, he may
have grown up in a certain area, he may have spent some time there
for whatever reason, and that became his conference zone. I know we have
the twenty two miles of the Colonial Parkway between Jamestown and Yorktown, so certainly
geographic profiling wouldn't have hurt in that case. I don't think the waterways would
make that much of a difference. It would still pinpoint a central location where
I think investigators could at least process that information and an attempt to somehow say
this person has some connection to this particular area doesn't necessarily mean their residents presently.
It could have been one in the distant past, but it's still a
viable tool, and I don't think Waterways would have any negative aspect to that.
They've described him in the recent materials that have come out, they've described
Alan Wade Wilmer Senior as trantient, sometimes even living aboard his work boat,
the Denny Wade. There are things that I think can be very helpful in
terms of looking for more information because he drove this very distinctive truck, and
he sailed a very distinctive boat with a large graphic on the side that said
Denny Wade, and then of course he himself is physically distinctive. So they're
looking for information like people that used to dock at the places he kept his
boat, where he would often stay aboard for weeks or months at a time,
and even though he had a family a couple of hours away, apparently
he would be down on the water for big chunks of time working as a
waterman, fishing, grabbing and oystering. They're trying to pin that down more
in terms of home ports and places where he would sell his catch, and
that sort of thing which it sounds like that could be beneficial. You're talking
about the spatial mobility of Cereal fenders, and we usually find in most of
the Cereal cases, usually when you have a series, and this is not
always the case, but there is a greater regularity than there is not that
Usually the first crime is an area like we call his comfort zone, where
he feels most comfortable, because the whole thing about committing this, his mo
is to make sure that he's successful in committing the crime. You know,
they may start out and they may do it where they live in the same
area, and they may do that, and they may kill in that same
area and even disposed the bodies in that same area or nearby, and as
they gained confidence in what they do, then they become geographically transit. Then
they'll start traveling continually. Ed Kemper was that way. His first killings were
very close to home, and then they went further and further away. Believe
it or not, the guy that robbed banks for thirty years. The first
bankye robbed, the first two banks he robbed, was a place right outside
of a military base where he was living. And then when he went on
to rob banks, he went further and further away so as to he was
caught, nobody would know at his hometown that it was him that committed something
like this. So yeah, they do. And sometimes they'll even dispose of
bodies. They may kill in an area and then take the body and dispose
of it far away to give them a period of time. It gives them
a chance to distance themselves from the crime itself. And they do that too,
because if that happens, that confuses law enforcement. How the hell did
this person get one hundred miles up the road or how did they get twelve
miles up the road? Were they traveling up here? So that always throws
a little bit of a wrench into it for law enforcement because they just don't
know. Because all we really know is law enforcement initially, is where we
find the body. We don't know where it began. We don't know where
it happened. We just know where it ended up. And Bill, if
I can go back to the original part of your question, as I mentioned
earlier, I've met some watermen over the years. They are a very close
knit group. They are a fraternity. They know each other really well.
They have their own language, their own jargon. As you can imagine,
they only work certain times of the year. But that's been interesting to look
at some of the dates of these murders. In what time of season was
it for crabbing, for oystering? Regulated? Ye, and this guy probably
these guys they really played by rules, you know, in that regard to
their profession. They may violate a bunch of others in terms of killing people,
but I wouldn't be surprised if he was very much in tune, because
he'd be then pissing off his fellow watermen by you know, fishing out of
season, woristering out of season, whatever it may be. And the watermen
also have a philosophy. And I think there's just a Supreme Court decision of
just a few days ago in which a lot of overregulation now that the country,
different agencies are putting on them and it's us against them. So I
have a feeling if they want to learn, if the investigators will learn more
about this guy, interview some of his fellow watermen, people that docked around
him, whatever marina he may have put himself up, and what kind of
activity is going on and off the boat he was living in. They could
be a very valuable source of information if it comes down to it, and
they're not going to protect this guy. This isn't like he's he caught too
many fish. They don't want to drop the dime. Want to know this
guy has crossed the rubicon to use another water reference here in terms of violating
the laws, and he's really They'll talk. If they can give anything to
do investigators, they will to give you an idea how obsessed I've gotten at
different times in the Colonial Parkway murders case. Some years ago, I actually
researched the phases of the moon of the four known Colonial Parkway murders double homicides,
and interestingly, I'm not saying it was exact, but it seemed that
the Colonial Parkway murders all seem to happen at the darkest phases of the moon,
when it was either fully dark or in a new moon phase where it's
just starting to the crescents just starting to grow. I mentioned this someone who
knows a lot more about being on the water than I do, and they
actually said, you know something, that low light situation on the water actually
is something that they think the investigators should be looking at. Very interesting absolutely.
We're gonna take a break here with Fits and Ray and we'll be back
with more listener questions from the profilers on our next episode of mind Over Murder.
Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Mind
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