I had now completed all of my studies and had reached a point where I considered myself a criminal profiler, whether anybody else wanted to consider me one or not. I designed my first business card and off I went to test the response.

I decided to start with Walt’s former employers, and the response I received was incredible.

I went to a law office in D.C. where he worked as a clerk just before he moved into my house. When I got there, I said, “I’m a private investigator,” and I handed my P.I. license to the receptionist. “I would like to talk to somebody who Walt Williams would have worked under. I’m looking into some of his past work history.”

The receptionist went away and a fellow came running from the back room and actually leaped over the counter. No kidding, leaped.

“Walt Williams?” he cried. “Oh, my God, that guy?”

He hauled me back to his office, and he couldn’t stop ranting and raving. “That guy was trouble. He would come to work wearing a black fishnet shirt. I’m like, ‘Walt, it’s a law office. What are you doing in a black fishnet shirt?’ Or he’d be dressed like a comic book character. He was obsessed with comic books, Spider-Man and other juvenilia like that. He was a twenty-three-year-old guy enamored with this kid stuff.”

According to this attorney, Walt behaved inappropriately with women in the office. They were uniformly uncomfortable around him. And he was always coming up with excuses for not getting things done.

“Why did you hire him?” I asked.

“Have you ever tried to hire somebody for a job as a mail clerk? You get pond scum,” he said. “But Walt came in, he was dressed in a suit, and he had a great résumé-”

“Which was a pack of lies,” I said.

He looked embarrassed. “I know that now.”

He handed me Walt’s résumé-it was quite amusing to read, and I was also amazed that this man still had the paper in his files so many years later; Walt must really have gotten his goat. I said, “How come, when his next employer called you up to get a recommendation, they were told he was a great worker?”

He shrugged.

“I just wanted to get rid of him.”

As we all know, many people lie about their ex-employees these days. They don’t want to get sued for telling the truth, which is why recommendations have become rather useless. When I told my friend Kim, who hired and dated Walt, she was furious. She said, “Oh, that’s just great. They sicced him on us knowing darn well he was a terrible employee.”

Reading Walt’s résumé for the first time I learned some fascinating tidbits. He wrote that he did “secret work” for an air force colonel. Really? I actually located the “colonel.” He laughed when I called. “Walt worked as a mail clerk in my office in Virginia,” he said. “I’ve been in the military, but I’ve never been a colonel.” That was a gross exaggeration.

Walt worked for 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 of things 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 another tepid response, but I handed over the information anyway and went away again. I had compiled a substantial history on Walt, including all the places I knew he had worked, and a list of his old girlfriends. Whether he murdered Anne Kelley or not, I did not know, because that must be proved with evidence, but based on my investigation, there was no doubt in my mind that he should be a suspect or at least a person of interest. Information about him now came not just from one “bored housewife” but also from employers, family, and friends. Now there were even more reasons for the police to take a look at Walt Williams. I could only hope they would.

IN THE SPRING of 1996 I got the phone call that I had been waiting for for the last six years. Walt Williams finally became the number one suspect in the murder of Anne Kelley.

A new investigator had taken over the case, and he said, “Can you come in? I want to interview you about Walt Williams.”

I said, “Thank God.”

We talked the next day at police headquarters. I was back in the same building I had first walked into carrying my cardboard box of evidence all those years before. The investigator looked at me, motioned toward the evidence-my evidence-sitting on the table in between us, and shook his head. “I don’t know why they missed this the first time around. This is crazy. This is crazy.”