Vincent Poor, finished with his day’s work, came out of the train station and was robbed and stabbed to death on his way home to the condo.

Art didn’t want to tell the next renter that the previous two residents were murdered.

He sold the unit.

CHAPTER 8.DORIS:THE UNLIKELY VICTIM

The Crime: Murder

The Victim: Doris Hoover

Location: Midwestern United States

Original Theory: Husband either did it or hired someone to commit the crime

I arrived twenty-six years too late in the Midwest.

I had just finished an appearance on a daytime talk show, where I met two of the daughters of Doris Hoover. The hour-long show was on cold cases and their mother’s murder was featured. After the show, they stopped me in the hallway and asked if I could profile the killer. Normally, a case this cold is one that I would leave alone, but the facts were so interesting and the daughters so insistent, I told them I would give the detective a ring.

“Sure, we would welcome a profile of the case,” he said.

I drove to the Midwest. In my experience, more people call from this part of the country for help with unsolved homicides than any other part.

After getting such a poor reception on the Mary Beth Townsend case and running into similar resistance with other police departments, it was a relief to have the local law enforcement welcome me.

When I got there, the detective ushered me into his office, a rather sheepish look on his face.

“Uh, I have some bad news for you,” he told me.

I thought he was going to tell me that a superior wanted me to go home.

“The case files are gone.”

“Gone?”

“Yeah, there was a flood at the warehouse and the Hoover case files were destroyed.”

Okay. This was not good news. I would come to learn that it wasn’t entirely rare news. A case I later worked in North Carolina would have the entire trunk of a car, the actual trunk that was removed for testing, disappear. How do you lose something that much larger than a breadbox?

“How about computer files?” I ventured.

The detective looked morose. “Gone as well. Someone thought the case was closed and erased all information on it.” He half-grinned at me. “We have her name!”

I know he felt bad. Shit happens and police departments aren’t 100 percent perfect. Things get lost, items get destroyed, evidence gets mislabeled…shit happens.

So there I was.

Not only had a mother of seven been dead for two decades but all the related evidence was eliminated.

Still, I was in town. I had worked the Townsend case with no police files, so I might as well see if I could do anything with this one. It was worth a try.

DORIS HOOVER, FORTY-TWO, was shot at home around 3:30 a.m., in her own bedroom, on November 3, 1975, while four of her children were asleep down the hall and her husband was at work. Since that early morning, the only suspect had been her husband. I could see why he might end up in the crosshairs of an investigation, but my profile of the crime ended up pointing away from him.

Doris, who was deaf in one ear and wore a hearing aid everywhere except to sleep, was standing beside the bed in a teddy and panties-no slippers-when she was shot. The Harlequin romance novel she was reading was still spread open on her bed. There was no evidence of sexual assault. When she fell, she collapsed on a stereo, knocking over the speaker and a phone that was on the top of it.

Doris ’s daughter Laurie, seventeen, the oldest girl living at home, was sleeping in a bedroom with her younger sisters, Denise and Dana, and her little brother, Deacon. In the middle of the night she woke up suddenly, although she didn’t remember being startled awake by any noise, and saw someone pass by her open bedroom door, walking from her mother’s room to the bathroom. She was half asleep, and what he was doing there didn’t register right away. Then she saw him stop at her door and wipe off the doorknob. Wide awake now, she listened as he continued to the hall, down the stairs, and out of the house. Laurie heard the screen door at the front of the house open and close. She heard sounds by the side of the house, and then the screen door again. She heard the man come back up the stairs, enter her mother’s room, and then he went back down the stairs and out of the house again. Scared, she didn’t move from her bed. Minutes passed, only about seven or eight, and then she heard the police pounding on the front door. By the time she left her bed, the officers-who found the front door open when they arrived-were already inside the house and on the stairs.

The open door was a tip-off to Laurie that something was wrong; her mother compulsively locked all the doors at night.

The police told Laurie there had been a shooting at the house, but she said no, she had heard no such thing-then a horrible thought popped into her mind that her mother must have been kidnapped because her bed was empty when she went by the open door.

“He kidnapped her, he kidnapped her!” she cried out.

She showed the police to her mom’s room and then she saw her mother’s foot at the bottom of the bed.

The killer had put a small caliber gun in Doris ’s mouth and pulled the trigger, execution-style. There were burns on her tongue and the bullet locked her neck and her spine so she couldn’t move. Doris drowned in her own blood because she couldn’t move her head to the side.

Because a curtain was pulled to the side of an unlocked window, it appeared the killer might have accessed the house in this way. It is not known if the window was left unlocked or if the killer was in the home earlier and unlocked it for later entry. Because the reports and photos were not available to me, there were many missing facts that might have provided clues to exactly what happened. I would have to make do with what information I could gain by interviewing the family.

A diamond-and-sapphire necklace was initially reported as missing from the house following the murder, but that was in error. Doris ’s daughter Denise had it; her father had given it to her grandmother to give to her to hold for her wedding one day. Laurie had cash in plain view where the perpetrator could have taken it. He didn’t. Doris ’s purse was missing, but there was nothing of value in it. Therefore, this crime was unlikely to have a monetary motive.

Even though much information was unavailable, there was enough interesting information to profile this case to a reasonable extent and offer avenues of investigation that might still lead to the case being solved and an individual serving time for the crime.

Doris was what one would classify as a low-risk victim. She was married, a mother of seven children, a homemaker, and a volunteer with the ladies’ auxiliary of the fire department. She did not involve herself in any dangerous activities and did not abuse alcohol or drugs. At the time of the murder, she was at home in bed. One of her eldest daughters, Cathy, lived in an apartment across the street with her own family. Doris ’s husband, Mickey, forty-three, a paramedic and the local fire chief, was in the midst of a twenty-hour shift at a station less than a mile away from his residence. Although her husband was not at home, it would be obvious to anyone casing the place that Doris and her children were there, making her home not the best choice for burglary or stranger sexual assault. The motive for this homicide would likely have come in one of three categories:

1. Revenge. Someone Doris or her husband made angry, intentionally or unintentionally.

2. Convenience. A hit by someone who wanted her out of his way, most likely the husband.

3. A crime of passion. Someone who was emotionally connected to the victim.

The possibility of a hit by the husband was the motive that the police focused on the most, since no one knew of anyone Doris had made angry, and the killer apparently called the fire station, the location where Mickey Hoover worked. The call came in minutes after the crime was committed-from a public pay phone-so it was theorized that Mickey hired a hit man. The phone call let him know the deed was done, giving him an alibi at the time of the crime, and also allowing him to get home and prevent the children from discovering her body. If that scenario was true, it worked out well and the investigators made note of this.