But Debbie-and Carl-appeared to be holding back.

Debbie seemed defensive when we talked about Carl. And, according to Denise, Debbie had been against my being brought in to profile the crime. Was her grief too great and did she not want to dredge up the past, or was there another reason?

Debbie made statements that she and Carl were not romantically involved, yet others believe differently. Carl and Debbie also said that Carl was not romantically involved with Doris, but that also was questionable. What exactly the emotional involvement was among the three of them remains to be discovered.

Mickey, however, fully cooperated in my interview and I found nothing concerning in his answers. He did have questions about Carl, it’s worth noting.

“My wife had befriended Carl as a teenager,” he said. “Carl, it seemed, had a troubled relationship with his parents, and I don’t know whether he was living with them at the time. He never came to the funeral or the funeral home. He said he was at his girlfriend’s and the police never went further. My daughter asked me if [Doris] was having an affair. I hate to think that. She had never had any affairs that I had known of.”

(Incidentally, Carl told me he did attend the funeral and subsequently went with Debbie to put flowers at Doris ’s grave.)

Mickey was willing to be polygraphed, further decreasing any suspicion about his involvement. I still believed it advisable to request the polygraph anyway. This would serve two purposes. One, since he was willing, why not take the opportunity to leave no stone unturned and be sure nothing was overlooked? Should I be dead wrong in my profile, this was a reasonable way to be sure the killer of Doris Hoover didn’t escape attention. Should Mickey have difficulty with the polygraph, then a door of investigation opens. If he passed it without problem and a police interview with him aroused no new suspicions, then Mickey could be dropped low on the suspect list, further narrowing the focus of the investigation to other suspects.

Carl gave me mixed messages about his relationship with Doris and the family. On one hand, he tried to sound nonchalant, like he was just a casual family friend without strong connections to the victim.

Then, during his conversations with me, he made statements suggesting a strong intimacy with the family and Doris in particular. He was eager to be helpful. He didn’t even seem upset that he had been considered a suspect. He said he hoped the police solved this crime and that I should call him anytime, yet he purported to have little information to offer of other possible suspects.

It was my feeling that the crime may have been one of passion, at least what most people call a crime of passion. Crimes of passion are really actions that an individual would not object to carrying out should he be provoked. What causes some folks to feel guilty about these crimes is when the crime goes further than expected. If Carl did it, he might not have planned to kill her; he might only have wanted to scare her, maybe appear desperate to her.

He should have been asked if he ever actually engaged in any sexual conduct with Doris. I believed that they may have had a physical relationship and that Carl was uncomfortable with it. I didn’t buy his assertions that the relationship was just a friendship. He said that Doris couldn’t have sex-how would he know and why should he know? He was confused as to why the police got pubic hair from him when “she couldn’t have sex.” Perhaps he tried with her-consensually or not-and she found it too painful (following a hysterectomy). Perhaps she told him that as a way to fend him off. Either way, it seemed to me he knew too much about this for a daughter’s male friend to know.

He also said Doris knew things about him he had never told anyone. Was he suggesting she was psychic? Regardless of the confused meaning of this, it infers yet more intimacy.

When I completed my profile, in addition to thinking that the police should reexamine Carl, I also concluded that the police should have talked with Debbie. According to her story about when she was at the house and who was there with her, her stories were inconsistent with those of her sisters.

After I handed in my profile to the police, I suggested that they use the Hoovers ’ appearance on the daytime TV show to see if Carl would talk more about the night of the murder. I suggested they give Carl a ring, tell him that tips had been coming in after the show aired (I had gotten some, but unfortunately they were all from psychics), and they now needed to talk with him.

The detective liked the idea.

The prosecutor didn’t.

And nothing was ever done.

CHAPTER 9.MISSY:A CHILD’S NIGHTMARE

The Crime: Sexual assault, homicide

The Victim: Missy Jones

Location: Southwestern United States

Original Theory: Her father did it

As you’re driving into this small town in the Southwest, there are signs on the side of the road that say warning: hitchhikers may be escaping prisoners.

The town has only two industries: a prison and a mental institution. You either work at one or the other. And then there was the sheriff’s department, which put you either in the prison or the mental institution. It’s a pretty scary place.

The sheriff’s department did an excellent job of investigating Missy Jones’s murder, and they had the forensics, photos, and notes to prove it. They wanted my take, and if I came to the same conclusion, they wanted me to encourage the family to finally cooperate with the investigation. They wanted me to convince the family that Missy’s own daddy killed her.

Missy’s mom was incensed.

“The sheriff is crazy!” she insisted. “What father would rape and murder his own daughter?”

But by the time I finished profiling the crime and researching the background of Missy’s dad, Orville, they had come around and their anger wasn’t targeted at the sheriff’s department anymore. As we sat in a circle on the front lawn of the trailer home, Missy’s uncle spoke on behalf of the family.

“Hell, yeah, we’ll cooperate,” he said. “We’re ready to put a bullet in the bastard’s head ourselves.”

MISSY DIED ON April 25, 1992. The Jones family brought me into this case about nine years later.

They were upset because the police had focused on Missy’s father as the prime suspect. The family could not believe that her own father would do something like that to her when there were better choices out there:

Tommy Hime, the twenty-eight-year-old man down the street who befriended twelve-year-old Missy and was close to another teenage girl who disappeared six weeks after she had a baby and was never found;

Ron Lewis, who was at the house Missy visited that night. He grew pot and later escaped from a chain gang.

But Orville? Why would the sheriff be looking at him but not be interested in Tommy or Ron?

Instead, the sheriff insisted the only suspect in Missy’s murder was Orville Jones, her biological father.

Orville, who was a self-employed carpenter, earned an associate’s degree in criminal justice while attending community college, so he considered himself quite the junior investigator. He was always giving information to the police as to who they should be looking at and how the man down the street, Tommy, was trying to be Missy’s boyfriend but he was a lot older than her. He also noted how, in the house she was visiting, the boy living there, Ron Lewis’s brother, tried to have his way with her once before. I found that amusing. And you, her father, let her go back there to play anyway?

Orville was full of stories; he had an answer for everything. Orville, in the long run, comes off as a classic psychopath who likes to run the whole show, and yet his demeanor following his daughter’s death shows a total lack of understanding of what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate. Or how people will view you. Psychopaths are so busy manipulating people and trying to control the game in their own mind, they don’t realize how they come off.