Any army guy knows that the investigators would be all over him in a heartbeat, getting his blood, demanding dental records or impressions of his teeth. He would be at the top of the list.
If the killer was a member of the military, my guess is that Sarah would have been driven back into the mountains that were nearby, her body thrown down a ravine by the side of the road. She would have been discovered weeks later. But because the killer didn’t care, or even wanted her body found right away, I doubt her killer had anything to do with the army base.
I believe it was someone who was an arrogant sex offender who didn’t think anybody would even consider him. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons he left her where he did was because it amused him. When the police showed up in the morning, he could make an appearance and say, “You found what? A dead girl in the parking lot?”
I think he watched and enjoyed the police spectacle. Or it could be possible he simply dumped her and left town, a smile on his face as the miles added up between him and the body. He could see the police action at the scene in his mind and be nowhere around for them to even interview.
IT IS MOST likely that the offender was employed in a blue-collar profession that did not require high levels of training. He was probably a high school graduate with no college education or a short period of education at a local community college. He would have considered Sarah pretty much his equal, someone who should think of him the same way. In fact, it is possible that Sarah looked down on him a speck, that she thought her army career put her on a bit higher level. She may not have been interested in any romantic liaison with him, at least not when she was stone sober.
He was in possession of a work van that had some objects strewn about the floor. He may have used the van for his work or it may have been primarily for transportation. The presence of coat hangers in the vehicle and possible other tools, such as a wire cutter or pliers, may indicate employment in auto mechanics or welding. He also may have used those tools for personal reasons. The wire coat hangers may have been used to help people who locked their keys in their cars or they may have been used to break into vehicles for the purpose of theft.
The perpetrator may have been employed as a waiter, bartender, or bouncer in one of the clubs the victim frequented. He may have been employed at one of the locations in the same strip mall as the nightclub as a clerk or a security guard. He may have done service work for a local business that used panel trucks for service and delivery. Serial killers tend to kill near their homes or employment, as they spend much of the day trolling for future victims, fantasizing about their conquests-in-waiting, until one lucky day-well, lucky for him, not her-he gets his opportunity.
It is likely that the offender was not in a permanent relationship with a female, due to his lack of security with his masculinity. However, it has been my experience that even men who fail in relationships in general can eventually find a woman willing to enter into a relationship with a weirdo. In this case, it was at least likely that Sarah didn’t think the guy was in a serious relationship. He was probably single and a little bit older than Sarah, just enough to make him feel he was more experienced than she was, that he could control her. He was probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. The race of the offender was most likely that of the victim. It is, however, not true that this kind of offender kills only within his own race.
The likelihood that the offender was Caucasian has a basis in demography and cultural issues. The makeup of the community was predominantly Caucasian. The victim was Caucasian and socialized with predominantly Caucasian people. These facts make the chances of the offender being white statistically pretty high. But this doesn’t mean Sarah didn’t have some male friends who were black or wasn’t attracted to black men or maybe just went off to smoke a joint-as she had been known to do-with a black male at the club. Statistically, probably white. But, possibly, black.
The perpetrator was probably well muscled, as it appeared he picked up the body of the victim from the floor of the van, swung her by an arm and a leg away from the vehicle, and dropped her to the ground. I know she wasn’t pushed from the van or dragged out of it because there was snow next to her that wasn’t touched by tire marks or footprints. The van had to have been a few feet from where her body was tossed in an area where the snow had melted. The killer also was able to twist coat hangers, either by hand or with a tool such as pliers, indicating a reasonable amount of hand strength. This would lead one to speculate the offender may have been involved in a blue-collar activity such as auto mechanics or construction. He may also have been involved in weightlifting or other sports promoting general body strength.
SOMETHING ELSE I noted about the Sarah Andrews case: there were so many creepy dudes around her.
It was one of those cases in which sex offenders and weird guys were coming out of every hole and from under every rock. One of those fellows suggested by the FBI’s ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) crime linkage data base was a guy by the name of Jeffrey Todd Newsome.
This convicted murderer supposedly served in the army at the same base at some point in his career. He was not known to have been in the area at the time of this murder. On the other hand, it was not proven that he was not in the area at the time. He was African American; he was not a soldier when Sarah was there, but he might have known the area, been visiting it, and taken off after the crime. However, we have no evidence Sarah ever knew this man, nor did anyone at the nightclub know of him.
At the time that I profiled this case, Newsome was jailed in Alabama for the sexual homicide of a young Alabama woman. He also committed a similar crime in Germany and he was a suspect in a number of other sexual homicides in the state of Alabama.
Newsome fit this profile in a number of ways. He would also appear to be a power-assertive-style rapist, although one could view him as an anger-retaliatory serial killer, the type who kills to get revenge on society and those he considers to have wronged him, usually women. Actually, these two types tend to overlap and much of the time it is the profiler who decides what issues the killer had and what his motive would likely have been. While I sometimes label a killer the power type, the anger type, or the sadistic type, I tend to categorize serial killers in two groups: quick and slow. The slow types are the sadists, the perverts who like to lock a woman up in a dungeon under their house and torture her for days. The quick type just wants to prove that he is powerful, that he can rape and kill and get away with it. Sarah’s killer was the quick type. So was Newsome. However, it would appear that Newsome had a very specific MO that consisted of taking the body as far away as possible so that it could not be found. He was adamant about that habit when he spoke with law enforcement. He had previously always used a car, not a van. He tended to blab a lot about his murders. He had been married more than once. The relationships apparently did not last.
There is no evidence linking Newsome to the area on the date Sarah was killed nor is there evidence that he owned a van at that time. A coat hanger was hanging from a tree near one of the bodies of his victims. But again, there is no evidence that Sarah Andrews ever had any contact with Newsome. Newsome was definitely a serial killer; he also strangled a girl in North Carolina with a coat hanger. In considering him, we look at what people call “signature.”
Everybody who has ever read a murder mystery or watched a movie of this genre knows the term MO, which stands for modus operandi, or method of operation. It means, simply, what you have to do to do the crime. Abducting a girl, that’s an MO. The fact that he raped her is an MO. If he tied her up in order to rape her because she was struggling, that would be an MO.