What if you knew a killer

And now it turns out in the early s back in New Hampshire, he was using Bob Evans. At this point, investigators had connected three mysteries back to the same person.

So in , more than 30 years after Denise Beaudin went missing, New Hampshire authorities opened a missing persons case for the first. And unbeknownst to Gruenheid, Headley and other California authorities at the time, investigators in New Hampshire had been baffled for decades by a complete different, yet strange, cold case: Two barrels each containing two bodies had been found 15 years apart in Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown, New Hampshire.

A second, similar rusted blue barrel was discovered about yards away in Police said it contained the remains of two female children, one believed to be 2 to 4 years old and the other between 1 to 3 years old. She became the key for investigators to tie him to the barrel victims. It turned out that the middle child was not related to the other three victims found in the barrels. However, DNA testing had determined that the adult victim was the mother of the other two children.

Rae-Venter said she was called upon again, this time to help identify the mystery killer. Rae-Venter said it was the first time that genetic genealogy had been used to help law enforcement solve a criminal case.

Rasmussen had died in a California prison of natural causes in , but now that authorities knew his real identity, Headley said they could retrace his whereabouts, piece together a timeline of his life and try to find more victims. As she listened to the officers describing what her father had been accused of over the years, Kloepfer said she realized a horrible truth about him.

Kloepfer said her father served in the U. The family also moved around when she and her three siblings were young, she said. By then, the family was living in Arizona. Soon after, he was in New Hampshire. So by , authorities had a much clearer picture of this bicoastal serial killer, but the identities of the four barrel victims in New Hampshire still remained a mystery.

While Rae-Venter was working with law enforcement, other amateur sleuths following the Bear Brook murders case had been trying to dig up new information on their own as well. I got mad at him and didn't want to talk to him for a day or two. When he came back, I told him he had to straighten up and fly right. He said he would and he kinda tried," Harris said. But one day, Harris was driving home and passed by a pawn shop. When he looked in the window, he saw one of the lawnmowers on display was his.

Mullins had stolen and sold it, too. Mullins claimed he knew nothing about one of the killings, but when presented with evidence, he came clean. Some of what he told the police was proved false, particularly when he claimed he killed the women in self defense.

He claimed each of the women consented to sex, something police don't believe. He also claimed many of his victims drank and did drugs with him, even when their toxicology reports came back negative.

He repeatedly tried to blame his actions on his drug habit, saying he attacked Maples "because I was on them drugs real hard. Even his apology, told to police in one of his interviews, rings hollow: "I apologize for treating that woman that way, taking advantage of her. I don't want anyone taking advantage of my mother, my sisters, my daughter.

I apologize for everything I've done. I don't mean no harm. I just ain't lined up right. I need some serious help. From his confessions to police regarding Cole, who Mullins killed on May 28, , in Downtown Memphis:.

We had some dope, cocaine. We went up there and smoked dope, got our drink on, smoked some cigarettes. Mullins said he and Cole then had sex, and he left to use the bathroom. When he came back, Mullins said he saw Cole having sex with another man.

That enraged him. I hit her two times. It was a concrete block. I said, 'I tell you what, I'm gonna bust your expletive head. His brother and sister still refuse to accept that Mullins murdered three people and beat a year-old woman so badly she never left a nursing home.

In an interview at his Berclair home, Harris said he didn't think his brother did it, or, if he did, someone made him do it. I know my brother better than anybody in my family," Harris said. I said they got the wrong somebody. I say he didn't do that by himself. His sister, Janice Mullins, recalled her shock at seeing her brother's face on the morning news the day he was caught for Jackson's murder.

Yet until a reporter told her, she didn't know there were three other victims. When told that Maples was 78 when attacked she was actually 79 , Janice Mullins kept repeating, "78," and shaking her head. She later repeated she didn't believe a man with three sisters could do what her brother did to these women. I find it hard to believe, what I know of my brother," she said. Like I say, he got three sisters. But in one of his interviews, Mullins told authorities he had a "history of becoming physically aggressive with others when angry.

When Mullins confessed to his crimes, the almost delight he took in answering police questions disturbed those working on the case. That's kinda spooky," Detective Joe Stark said. He's asking Sergeant Brown, 'Mike, you got anything you want to ask me? I'll be glad to answer it. In Mullins' confession to attacking Maples, he told police he'd never seen her before, despite living two floors above her for as long as a year.

I pushed her down in the bushes. And I put my feet in her face, stomping my feet in her face. In the face. About two times. No sir, she didn't say nothing.

She couldn't say nothing 'cause she was in a state of shock. I think he had the type of personality where he was very friendly to anyone he met," said Gerald Skahan, now a judge but then the public defender specializing in murder cases who was appointed to represent Mullins.

I don't know if it was ever determined what did that. Mullins lived in West Memphis with his father for a while, and was four years younger than Cole. There's no evidence he knew her, but it's not an impossible they encountered each other there.

Mullins lived two floors above Maples and it is likely he would have seen her coming and going from the Isabella Towers on one of her miles-long walks. There's no proof Mullins and Ector met, but they were both homeless addicts living around Downtown Memphis, so it's possible their paths intersected at some point.

Mullins was well aware of Jackson, however. His family members say Mullins talked about her often, pointing her out when they passed her in a car.

But according to Ron Bezon, who manages the St. Mary's soup kitchen, Mullins and Jackson got into a spat a couple of days before she was killed. Mullins — as he often did — tried to jump line at the soup kitchen, but this time he tried to do it to Jackson.

She was having none of it. Probably two or three days before the murder happened. They had an altercation, which I didn't think anything of. It was just somebody being belligerent," Bezon said.

It had to be his way, doing whatever he wanted to do. They're narcissistic and seem disconnected from people. In a sense you have to feel for somebody like that, because you know there's trauma that happened to them," Brown said.

Memphis authorities charged Mullins with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of aggravated rape. Veteran Shelby County prosecutor Jennifer Nichols became involved with the case. I've never said to a defense attorney before, 'You need to come up to my office and listen to this. You've got to hear this guy before you get too far into things,' " Nichols said. His willingness to say, 'I picked up a brick and hit her in the head' was unusual.

Mullins was interviewed by numerous mental-health professionals to determine his competency to stand trial. While all agreed he was mentally ill and mildly retarded, some of the psychologists believed he was exaggerating the extent of his disability to curry favor. Ultimately, he was ruled competent to stand trial. Under normal circumstances, someone with a body count like Mullins would have been a candidate for the death penalty.

However, federal law prohibits that punishment for anyone with an IQ under 70, and Mullins' highest recorded score was So Nichols and Skahan worked out a deal and on Dec. He was sentenced to three life sentences without parole for the murders and three year sentences, also without parole, for the rapes. Skahan: "Michael was one of the easiest people I ever represented. He was very friendly, polite, obsessively clean.

If you met Michael, you would think he was simple. You would probably think he was mildly retarded. You would think that he was harmless.

Skahan, later: "He's just a fascinating person. He is so different. He's the kind of guy that psychologists could write a book about or make a movie about. Why does he do this? Is it instinct? Does he really enjoy killing? Mullins repeatedly tried to claim Jackson had hit him in the head with a stick, and he had then gone and found a brick with which to beat her.

Except detectives discovered he got the brick before he interacted with her, which proved to them he planned to attack her. Mullins even claimed to one of his psychologists that he threw the brick at her from a distance of five feet. It went a little further and I picked up a brick and I hit her with it. Although Maples had been attacked in April , she didn't die until November Family members said Jessie never really recovered from the attack, but the Knoxville medical examiner's office did not rule her death a homicide.

For my medical examiner not to make that connection, you can bank on it. On May 1, , Mullins pleaded guilty to the attempted first-degree murder and aggravated rape of Maples.

He was sentenced to 50 more years in prison. He is housed in a cell with another inmate. He is enrolled in Adult Basic Education, and his security level is classified as "minimum restricted," Tennessee Department of Corrections representative Alison Randgaard said.

That means he can move around the prison on a regular basis, but is locked down in his cell from 9 p. Mullins never responded to a letter seeking a telephone conversation. A message asking Mullins to call was left with Harris, who talks to his brother regularly, but to no avail.

One question remains for almost everyone involved in the Mullins case: How many more victims are out there? Not are there more victims, but how many have yet to be connected to him? No one in law enforcement — not even his attorney — believes Mullins committed just these four assaults. Merritt said he went back through MPD's murder books — bound volumes with a description of every killing — through the early s and didn't find anything definitive. But there was no DNA, some of the victims pretty much decomposed.

And if you didn't have some leverage against him, he wasn't gonna confess to them. Memphis police homicide detective Joe Stark sent an alert to departments around the state, asking if anyone had similar assaults in their records. No one responded. Harris said his brother often disappeared for months at a time, then suddenly popped up in some random town.

No one knew where he was, or what he was doing. You could lose contact with him for six months to a year," Harris said. It wasn't just Knoxville. He'd go from any city he wanted to at any given day or time.

Please turn your device to landscape orientation. Memphis Memphis, Tennessee For more than 13 years, a serial killer targeted women living in the margins in Memphis and one in Knoxville, yet for much of that time, no one knew he even existed.

Cole's case had gone cold. Nine years later and miles away, the killer had found his second known victim. Doctors didn't believe she could survive. But she slowly recovered, to a degree. The tests came back on the knife: nothing. One evening I was doing Bible study homework. I dreaded doing it. Whoever designed it did not design it for someone who's dyslexic - small print, close together, very tight - it's torture for me to read. So I was reading and then I remember looking to the right and there was Angie.

I thought, "Am I dreaming? Am I asleep? What is it? There was no talking, it was just her and her great smile. I don't know if I believe in ghosts, but I have a lot of faith and I believe that there are messages, and at that moment I thought, "It's time.

I said, "Can I talk to the Cold Case division? He never returned any of my phone calls - this guy knew me well enough for me to invite him to my wedding, but he never called me back, ever.

Over a period of time I called probably times and he blew me off - I'm a little bitter about that. But probably the most heartbreaking part of making all those calls was that they said that not one other person in 20 years had called. Think about that - not one person. How can someone die such a violent death and no-one call and want to know why and want to know who?

That still makes me cry. I think they thought that I'd eventually go away - most normal people would drop it and move on with their life, but I didn't.

I thought there was something that just didn't feel right, and I just didn't take no for an answer. So I kept calling. I did the research and printed out reports about all the rapes that had happened during that period, the locations, and who was arrested to try to figure out what had happened.

We lived in a gated, guarded community and one day I was complaining to the head of security there about being blown off constantly by the police and he said, "You know, you'd make a great private investigator. I didn't even hesitate. It was and I was in my early 40s and that night I told my husband that I was going to become a private investigator. To become a private investigator in Tennessee you have to be sponsored by a company - I was lucky because our security guys were going to sponsor me and train me - they were fantastic.

At night after dinner my oldest son would read all the Tennessee laws that I had to know to me and I'd have to say them back to him. I acted like I was about to attend Harvard or Yale, but by the time I got to the private investigator exam I knew it.

I learned about cyber bullying, copyright laws on the internet and cheating spouses. Once I had passed the exam, I stopped going to cocktail parties because we were investigating my neighbours or some of them had hired me, and when you know people's personal lives it's very uncomfortable to be in social situations where they want to talk about stuff that you can't talk about.

But I loved it. Now that I had my private investigator licence I thought that the police would sit down and work with me. Rossmo has used geographic profiling to track terrorists—he studied where they lived, where they stored weapons, and the locations of the phone booths they used to make calls—and to identify places where epidemics began. He also worked with zoologists, to examine the hunting patterns of white sharks.

We know quite a lot about the journey to a crime. By noting where killings took place or the bodies were discovered, you can actually create probability distributions. Using computers to find killers has historical precedent. Eric Witzig, a retired homicide detective and a former F.

Witzig told me how, in the fifties, Brooks worked on the case of Harvey Glatman, who became known as the Lonely Hearts Killer. Glatman was a radio-and-TV repairman and an amateur photographer who would invite young women to model for him, saying that the photographs were for detective magazines. He would tie his victim up for the shoot, and then never remove the bonds.

Brooks started to research the way that some killers seemed to commit the same crime repeatedly. He began putting all his murder records onto three-by-five cards, and after becoming interested in computers in the late nineteen-fifties he asked the L. He was told that it was too expensive. In , he presented the idea of a homicide-tracking computer database to Congress, after which the F. Brooks wanted to record every element of a homicide and, as a result, there were more than a hundred and fifty questions.

M AP has its own limitations. Since the algorithm relies on place as a search term, it is blind to killers who are nomadic over any range greater than adjacent counties.

There is also a species of false positive that Hargrove calls the Flint effect: some cities, such as Flint, Michigan, are so delinquent in solving murders that they look as if they were beset by serial killers. Deborah Smith, who lives in New Orleans, is a hobby MAP searcher and a forum moderator on Websleuths, an online watering hole for amateur detectives. Twelve of the women had convictions for prostitution, and their bodies were found in two distinct geographic clusters.

Hargrove is pleased about the investigation but he also worries that something may go awry. In , a killing led to an arrest more than ninety-two per cent of the time. In , the number was slightly less than sixty per cent, which was the lowest rate since records started being kept.

Los Angeles had the best rate of solution, seventy-three per cent, and Detroit the worst, fourteen per cent. It is focussing on the largest finding of the algorithm, a collection of a hundred unsolved murders of women in the Atlanta area over forty years.

Most of the victims were African-American, and all were strangled. From the Atlanta police, Arntfield got names for forty-four of the women, and has been learning more about them. Studying the backgrounds of murder victims in the hope of discovering how they met their killers is a discipline called victimology. Arntfield and his colleagues separated the victims into two groups: a small group of older women, who were killed in their homes, and a larger group of young women, many of whom may have been prostitutes.

From newspaper accounts, Arntfield has found two men who have committed crimes with strikingly similar attributes, both of whom are already in prison. Hargrove told me he hopes that eventually detectives will begin to use the algorithm to connect cases themselves, and that MAP will help solve a murder.