But then I learned of the clincher-and this is where normally rational families go into such huge denial over their children’s emotional state and well-being.
Sabrina actually left an incredibly long, detailed, three-page suicide note. In it, she bid good-bye to everyone in her life, and she said how much she loved the people who cared for her. Then she went on to explain why she needed to leave them.
“I was a mistake,” she wrote, “and everyone knows it, or at least I do. I know I’m not wanted here or anywhere else I go to, so I’ll leave, and I’ll have nowhere else to go, so I’ll rot in hell if I have to. For everything I’ve ever done or said to anyone that’s caused them pain, I’m so sorry. I hope you don’t end up like me.”
She went on for three pages, describing how much pain she was in, how things people said to her hurt her deeply.
“Every insult and every comment I’ve ever received has left a deep hole inside my heart. I’m a person who takes everything seriously. I am the mistake you can’t fix. You can’t give me advice. No one seems to understand the emotional stress and pain that I have been going through. I wrote this letter to everyone, all my friends that I have. I didn’t and don’t want you to feel bad for me. Be happy you won’t have to deal with me any more. I’m an emotional person forever.”
This was the tremendously sad suicide note of a girl with incredible teenage angst.
She used the term “Jehovah” quite often, which led me to believe she might have had some association with Jehovah’s Witnesses. There is a beautiful land that Jehovah’s Witnesses believe people will go to when they die, kind of like Heaven, but this is the new world, and that’s a beautiful place to be. We inhabit a hopeless world because of so much drug use and drinking and sex and violence that it’s hard to remain good. Sabrina believed she had to stick close to Jehovah.
After her daughter was dead, Penny decided that her brother Rufus-who tried to tell her it was a suicide-actually wrote the long suicide note.
The poor uncle. Essentially, there was never any problem between the uncle and the niece, because I asked the family that question.
Everyone said the same thing: “No, they got along fine.”
I said, “Was there any suspicious activity?”
And again, the answer was no; he lived there with them and everything was fine. He was just the unfortunate schmuck who found her.
I studied the suicide note that she thought Rufus forged. She sent me another sample of Sabrina’s handwriting, insisting the suicide note was not in Sabrina’s handwriting. And yet when the police and I analyzed it, we both came to the same conclusion: it was exactly the same handwriting. She had a loopy, teen girl’s handwriting style, and she even drew a heart in the letter just like one that she had drawn on her hand. A teenage girl’s thought process is clearly evident in the language and narrative of the note.
At the time, my daughter was the same age as Sabrina, and I, as a profiler, couldn’t even come up with that good a replica of a teenage girl’s suicide note. It would be an astonishing ability for a grown man to write a believable suicide note in the voice and handwriting style of a teenage girl.
On top of that, if someone were to stage a crime, they would not write anything with the level of depth and emotion Sabrina expressed in that note. Generally speaking, most suicide notes that are written by those who kill themselves are fairly short, because it’s hard to write a long one when the foremost thought in your mind is I’ve had it. The world sucks. That would have been a note I might have believed the uncle forged. That might have made sense, because he could have sat down and worked hard to make sure that “the world sucks, I’m out of here, Sabrina” matched her handwriting pretty well. But to actually write a three-page good-bye note, that’s pretty darn difficult.
Uncle Rufus was completely tormented by what happened, and by discovering his niece. He ended up in a mental hospital. The family claimed the reason for that turn of events was because he felt such horrible guilt about killing her. I believe Rufus ended up in a mental hospital because his own sister, Penny, accused him of killing Sabrina. Can you imagine losing your niece and then having your sister say that you raped and murdered her?
Rufus became paranoid after Sabrina’s death, thinking that everybody was out to get him, and it was terribly sad. And this was all because of how difficult it is to believe that your child could commit suicide.
WHEN I PROFILE suicides, I always write back to the family in a gentle way with my conclusions: “I know how much you are suffering from this…” I explain to them how we can’t always know what our children are thinking, how so many of us wouldn’t know the difference between a child exhibiting normal teenage depression and a teen in serious emotional distress who suddenly kills himself the next day. Sometimes teenagers make rash decisions that we can’t see coming. I point out to families that it’s not unusual for them to not know, so they shouldn’t feel guilty that this came out of the blue and blindsided them, that they didn’t necessarily contribute in any way to it. Some people, especially teenagers, don’t necessarily communicate what they’re going through. Most of the teenagers who complain and cry and say they hate everyone and their lives never attempt suicide and get through those years. We can only do so much, try our best to help our children, relatives, and friends, but sometimes they just do what they want to do and it ends up tragically.
I always naïvely think that if I can logically explain the crime to the family, detailing exactly what happened so that they can understand it, and stress that they were not responsible, they will accept it and move on. But to this day I can say that, for all my attempts to communicate these points, I’ve had almost zero acceptance after I’m done. The family will inevitably come back and argue that I’m wrong; they will say that I don’t know how to profile, that I don’t understand what’s going on.
When people cannot accept suicide, they go to the next most likely conclusion: the person who found her is the person who killed her. I believe Rufus ended up in a mental institution because his whole family turned on him and assumed he was a murderer.
All the evidence in the world would not change the family’s opinion of their daughter’s death, their conclusion that her uncle killed her, or of that idiot, Pat Brown, who calls herself a profiler.
CHAPTER 13.BRIAN:WHO PULLED THE TRIGGER?
The Crime: Suicide
The Victim: Brian Lewis
Location: Western United States
Original Theory: Suicide
As a profiler, I find crime-scene role-playing a useful tool.
In the courtroom, it’s increasingly common to see a crime-scene reenactment during which the prosecution or defense attorneys will take the judge and jury through an alleged crime. Sometimes, they’ll do it with 3-D pictures; sometimes they’ll make a video.
If a gun was shot, they’ll want to show the trajectory, so they’ll tack strings from wall to wall showing the exact path the bullets took, demonstrating whether they could have hit the victim and at what angle they had to be shot.
Not every police department has the money for all this fancy stuff or they don’t see that it is necessary. But sometimes it really should be done, even if in a simpler, less expensive way, like through role-playing. This is something I often do in order to test out a theory as to how a crime went down. I set up scenarios that are similar to what occurred. I have to be fairly careful, because I don’t want to do something that is based on vague guesswork.
One time, the police theorized that a man had transported his wife in the trunk of a particular vehicle. My question was, would she fit in this car’s trunk? Trunks come in all different sizes. The month before, I drove a nice little sports car out in California. If the convertible top was up, the tiny trunk allowed me to fit in my briefcase and my handbag. When I put the convertible top down, I couldn’t even get my purse in there. I did manage to lay my suit jacket carefully inside, and when I clicked the ragtop into its open position, my suit got a nice pressing. Certainly, no body would squeeze into that trunk. Even if I put the roof back up, only the body of an infant would fit in that tiny space.