There is a theory that Missy actually arrived home and her father assaulted and killed her in her bedroom. I find this to be an unlikely scenario for two reasons. The likelihood of Missy arriving home with no one noticing, a brutal attack going unheard, and the removal of a body without being noted or heard in a small trailer with two boys asleep in the living room, which Orville would have to enter or exit, is unlikely. Also, Orville commented to Rhonda that if she went into the woods bad things could happen to her. I believe Orville was reliving the actual experience of the rape and murder of his daughter.
Orville had been drinking earlier that night, so it was possible he wasn’t careful, as he said. I believe he was indeed describing what he did to her, because I do not believe it was an intentional homicide. I believe he was sexually assaulting her and shut her up to control her, because Orville was quite a mean fellow-as he told the media the killer might be. It was an accident but it was still murder, because he killed her during the commission of a crime. When he realized she was no longer breathing, he knew he was in big trouble. I do believe, after studying his history, that he would have liked to have kept Missy around. She probably would have been a nice, useful sex partner for him for the next six years. That plan ended when she fought back.
I HOPED POLICE could use my profile to prosecute Orville, but sadly that did not happen. A profiler can go so far in a case and suddenly get the door slammed in her face. You’re so close to making a real difference, boom, and you can’t do any more, so you have to walk away.
The family will ask, “What now?”
I often find it is difficult to get justice for the family.
Once a case goes south, what do you do about it? Go talk with a reporter from the town newspaper? You might and you could get a story or two written about it. But what do you do then? All you can do is start fighting. You go to the town council and rail at the police, the prosecutor, the town itself. Usually nothing ever really amounts to anything. The family fights on and usually fights alone, and most of the time, they don’t win.
Sometimes, the family will come back to me and say, “Have you heard anything?” but eventually they give up contacting me because they realize I can’t do anything more. My job is profiling. I did my job, and I left. I’m not part of a law enforcement organization and I am not a victim’s advocacy organization that does long-term support. My job is profiling, and that’s what I do. I prefer to have the cooperation of the police department and the prosecutor so we can do the best job together. If I don’t have that, I can do only so much.
I do my job, and whether a case gets prosecuted or not, that’s not my call.
Does a profiler solve cases? No. A profiler profiles. That’s it. The police department officially is charged with solving cases; the prosecutor chooses which cases to prosecute.
AND THERE THE case of Missy Jones sits. Nothing more has been done.
Orville was never charged with his daughter’s rape and murder. If the system puts Orville back out there, he will likely go after someone else’s twelve-year-old daughter.
CHAPTER 10.JIMMY:WITH FRIENDS LIKE THIS
The Crime: Homicide
The Victim: Jimmy Conway
Location: Home of his friend, Southwestern United States
Original Theory: Shot in self-defense
People often wonder whether profilers go to the actual crime scene or if they don’t always bother and, in truth, I always go if I can. I can learn a lot by being there, standing on the spot where the victim and perpetrator once stood, absorbing the environment.
For example, you might think that some guy could toss a fellow off a particular bridge because the pictures you are looking at make that seem plausible. This happened to me on a case in Minneapolis. One of the theories was that the victim, who had been drinking at a local bar on Halloween night and been thrown out for being too inebriated, was walking over that bridge when he ran into another young man his age who tried to rob him. When he resisted, the guy pushed him over the railing. Well, that could make sense, except when I actually stood on the Hennepin Bridge at the point where it crossed the Mississippi River, I wondered how this shorter, smaller, less muscled attacker could have accomplished this. The railing was so high that the robber would have had to pick him up off the ground and heave him over it. If I hadn’t gone to the scene, I might have erroneously believed that action was possible. When you go to the location, you can see the neighborhood. You can see possible escape routes. You can analyze why someone would go that way and not this way.
Of course, sometimes crime scenes change, developers plow through them with a bulldozer, and then it’s gone, it doesn’t look anything like it did before, and then I do have to rely on the pictures.
But I learn a lot in person. I can interview people, and I can do a lot more because I can get the feel for everything. It’s not always economically reasonable to do so, in which case I have to rely on the photos and reports and hope that they will be good enough to do the case justice.
Working pro bono, as I always do (unless I am working for a defense attorney-and they don’t like me that much so it is a rare event), the family is not paying for my expenses or anything else.
In this case, the Conway family said, “We think that Jimmy was murdered. We don’t think it was self-defense, we think his friend shot him in cold blood.” They wanted me to look over the case and sent me the files, which they had because the case was closed. (If the case remains open, the family usually gets nothing.) I had access to all the photos of the crime scene and all the details in the police reports, so I could review the case quite thoroughly, even from a distance.
THE CONWAY FAMILY provided me with a solid amount of information, although the photos from the scene were lousy.
But one of the lousiest held the key.
It was one of those off-the-cuff pictures that people take. The police arrived, took a quick picture of the dead man at the scene, and it turned out to be the most valuable piece of evidence in the case file. It was a Polaroid photo that contained a blood spatter evidence pattern that convinced me that Jimmy’s “friend,” Earl White, was lying.
THIS VALUABLE OPPORTUNITY early in my career taught me the importance of photography.
When a murder is fresh, the police sometimes make snap decisions at the scene as to what they think the case is about.
In another Minnesota case, in 1998, a young man was found hanging in his bedroom. Gregg Meissner’s death was ruled a suicide at the scene and the police took no fingerprints off objects in the room. They didn’t even seal off the scene because, as they told Gregg’s mother, “This isn’t television.” The detective on the case actually allowed Gregg’s distraught friends to enter the crime scene.
The family didn’t think it was suicide, I didn’t think it was suicide, but the tests were never run. The family fought like tigers to prove Gregg was murdered, and finally, a man named Shawn Padden, one of the friends allowed into the crime scene, was convicted of killing him. However, the lack of certain evidence allowed only a manslaughter charge and not Murder One. Gregg’s family was convinced the crime was premeditated, but because the evidence wasn’t protected, the state could only prove manslaughter, and Padden might get out to kill again.
I often find this is also true for alibis, that if you make an assumption somebody is not involved and you don’t ask for an alibi, you can’t go back four years later and say, “Oh, by the way, where were you on May third?” If you’re innocent, you can’t protect yourself, because there is no way in heck you or anyone else can remember where you were on May 3. An innocent person can’t provide himself a decent alibi. A guilty person, well, he’s got an excuse not to provide himself a decent alibi, because he will say, “How the heck would I know where I was four years ago on that day?” or “How do you expect anybody to remember where I was?”