The Terror in Gainesville

in the modern history of serial murders, the evil that struck the university of florida campus was almost beyond imagining

The real fear--the one that transforms the ordinary and imbues everyday objects with palpable mortal threat--kicked in late Tuesday night while a bunch of cops and reporters stood outside apartment 113 of the Williamsburg complex, where the bodies of two University of Florida freshmen had been found two days earlier. Both girls had been butchered, mutilated with harrowing calculation, washed clean of their blood and left posed in an eerie Grand Guignol tableau sometime in the humid August night. A night not unlike this one. Now, as the cops made small talk, a Miami reporter pointed and said, "Look up there." Against the Venetian blinds in the upstairs apartment, two shadows moved in an odd angular pantomime. All eyes locked on the window until the reporter, with a nervous laugh, tried to make a joke of it. "Sinister, isn't it?"

Gainesville, Florida, had reason to be nervous. That morning, the fourth and fifth victims had been found in another off-campus apartment. Both were college students, both were murdered by multiple blade wounds, both were left in a pose to chill the onlooker. In normal times, Gainesville is home to one of the nation's most laid-back campuses, a sunny Eden where students stroll from class to class in tank tops and shorts and casually share coed apartments. Saturday Gator games and Daytona Beach, just two hours away, are the prime outdoor activities. The city itself invariably makes those lists of the most livable places in the United States, imbued as it is with youthful optimism and blissful self-absorption. But in the abrupt span of 72 hours at summer's end, this sprawl of lightly undulating greenery dashed by sylvan lakes and inviting residential parks had become the hunting ground of a demented killer, its 135,000 souls uprooted from all tethers to the good life and tossed into a twister of horror and fear. By Labor Day weekend, the streets were deserted, the students had fled. The only sign of life was the police cars sweeping the tree-lined blocks.

The university briefly threatened to close. Its president, John Lombardi, a man brought in to revamp a school beset with sports and money troubles and now sandbagged by a chain of student murders, likened the grisly events to "a natural disaster." Only Saddam Hussein and possible Armageddon in the Persian Gulf kept the Gainesville serial killings from the covers of Time and Newsweek. Though for those familiar with the killings, the brutal horror in Florida was every bit as chilling as the worst excesses halfway around the world. The details, as they emerged, sickened all who heard them.

Sonja Larson and Christina Powell had begun moving into their Williamsburg apartment the week of August 20. Another roommate was expected to join them soon. Later, friends would use adjectives such as exuberant, bright and excited to describe the girls. The two spoke with their parents for the last time on Thursday, August 23. The last sound heard from their apartment was on Friday, the 24th--a new occupant in an adjacent apartment heard George Michael's Faith and "a kind of pounding or hammering or something." Then, only silence until Sunday afternoon around three o'clock, when Powell's parents, concerned that no one answered the phone, called police, who accompanied them to the girl's apartment.

The Williamsburg's maintenance man fingered his keys as he led the parents and a Gainesville cop up the short flight of stairs to their daughter's apartment. The door was locked. He unlocked it and stepped inside with the officer. In a glance that seemed to swell beyond the proportions of the stifling room, now hung with an odor not unlike soured milk, they wheeled about and blocked the couple from entering, then jerked the door shut on the fetid outrage within.

Lieutenant Sadie Darnell, a 12-year veteran of the Gainesville Police Department and its public-information officer, a dark brunette with wide-set eyes given to reading Faulkner and Joseph (continued on page 130)Terror in Gainesville(continued from page 72) Campbell, recalls that Sunday afternoon when the nightmare sprang from the stifling apartment. "It was right at dusk. I didn't really have an idea of what had happened yet. I went inside the crime scene, which I usually do to get an idea of what I'm working with and to be able to answer questions...."

She gathers her hands in her lap before continuing. "I went in and came back out. I was in there for ten or fifteen minutes." She sits silent for some moments as Mozart plays softly from her radio. "I've been on homicide scenes. I've seen shotgunnings, several times. I've seen extremely violent scenes. I've seen murdered children, even a three-year-old...." Mozart plays and Lieutenant Darnell listens. "I was ill. A lot had to do with the odor. There was some decomposition and the apartment was warm, musty. And there was the 3-D of it...not just a picture kind of thing. A lot of sensory things were occurring at once. It was an unusual death situation. Evil."

That was Sunday. That same night, Christa Hoyt was an hour late for her midnight shift at the Alachua County sheriff's-office dispatch desk. Hoyt was an extremely responsible 18-year-old, well-liked, given to quick smiles and an upbeat manner. Her friends called her Glowworm. She was to begin classes on a scholarship at Gainesville's Santa Fe Community College that week. Saturday afternoon, she played racquetball with friends and returned to her modest apartment in a slightly downscale duplex park at the end of 24th Avenue, a seldom-traveled street. When Hoyt didn't show up for her shift, a deputy was sent to her apartment. It was just after one o'clock when the deputy's cramped voice called for backup.

Lieutenant Spencer Mann is a former reporter. He has been with the Alachua County sheriff's office for eight years. He spent six hours in the apartment on 24th Avenue. "There was something about the crime scene where Christa was found that was different from any other homicide scene I've ever been a part of, and I can't tell you tangibly why. There was an aura there and that feeling started before I ever looked in. I was prepared to a degree, but...."

The killer who took apart Sonja Larson and Christina Powell on Friday night forced his way into Christa Hoyt's apartment late Saturday night. He menaced her with a heavy blade, stripped her and bound her with tape. In some sequence, he stabbed her many times, slit her from pubic bone to breastbone, cut off her nipples and cut off her head, which was then placed on a shelf some distance from the ruin he had created. He then went about cleaning the body, washing the numerous wounds with a germicide or a caustic solution. This both removed any possible trace of his own fluids and heightened the grotesque effect when the scene was discovered--the extreme violence coupled with the startling lack of blood. To avoid other traces of blood, the killer may have used a "collector," possibly a rubber sheet or a shower curtain. Before leaving, he used several mirrors to heighten the horror. One, located behind the severed head, was tilted to catch the shocked expression of a person entering the apartment. Another was canted to reflect the grisly scene to anyone who might pass by Hoyt's front window.

Like Powell and Larson, Hoyt was posed in such a way that--though all three victims were naked or nearly so--the sexual element was slightly askew, not overt but implied with a curious ambivalence. There was no indication that the killer had had any kind of sex with his victims. And, like the scenes in apartment 113--one upstairs, one downstairs--the tableau on 24th Avenue included seemingly banal objects, everyday items placed within the obscured context of these homicidal set pieces.

Investigators will not reveal the precise details of the poses or other specifics, in order not to jeopardize prosecution when and if a killer is caught. Regarding the poses, Lieutenant Darnell was asked how she would rate their intricacy on a scale of one to ten, one representing simple standing or sitting. She replied, "Four." Captain R. B. Ward, asked if the killer, who had taken pieces of his victims' flesh, might have left remains from one crime scene at another, said he could not comment.

"I knew about Williamsburg," says Lieutenant Mann, "but all I knew was there were similarities. I didn't know how bad it was." He swivels in his chair and lightly runs his fingers along the edge of his desk. "It wasn't like I stood there and gazed at it for an hour." He stops talking and swiveling and slowly rocks, looking at his fingers. "That image. Incredible is the word that comes to mind. And when I say incredible, I mean far different from and exceeding anything I've ever been exposed to in my life. And I've been exposed to a lot of violent deaths. It's just incredible that a person or persons--people--might do something like this.

The man responsible for bringing the person or persons to justice is Ward, a 48-year-old detective who has no small reputation in Florida law enforcement. In 24 years, primarily as an investigator with the Gainesville Police Department, Captain Ward has solved more than his share of homicide cases. And homicide can get quite strange in these parts of north Florida. In addition to Ted Bundy's deadly visitation less than 30 miles north of Gainesville, the neighborhood has witnessed several other twisted killings in the past decade. There was the murder-mutilation of a college professor whose body was found two months later in an abandoned refrigerator; there was the ritualistic slaying of Howard Appledorf, a high-profile "junk-food diet" promoter and University of Florida professor, who was bound, gagged, blindfolded, burned with cigarettes and slowly suffocated by a bag of ice placed over his head. His body was found propped up on his living-room couch with an empty plate and glass placed at his feet. Ward solved the latter crime, as well as a nasty double homicide at the local Steak 'n' Shake, in relatively short order, but the discoveries in Williamsburg almost immediately threatened to eclipse the previous horrors he had witnessed, if not in number, certainly in style. "I was out of town and came straight to the scene about seven-thirty, quarter to eight." Ward speaks in that distinctively clipped drawl endemic to this part of Florida. He says he's averaging three hours' sleep a night, and he looks it. He says his wife has a chair propped up under the doorknob and is sleeping with his service revolver. "On Sunday, I knew I had a very unusual situation and was very concerned that there was no reason for it to stop. But we didn't know it would hit us as fast as it did."

On Tuesday morning, at 8:35, Ward's worst suspicions were confirmed when another maintenance man opened another apartment door located midway between the first two homicide scenes, in Gatorwood, and found two more bodies. Both victims were 23 years old. Both had died of multiple stab wounds. As in the two other homicides, entry had been (continued on page 137)Terror in Gainesville(continued from page 130) forced. There was one big difference in the two-bedroom Gatorwood apartment. One of the victims was Tracey Paules. The other was Manuel Taboda, an athletic 200-pound ex-bouncer.

The possibility of more than one killer had worked its hydra head into the picture almost immediately. The logistics of double homicides, in which an intimate weapon--a blade--was used, were daunting. The lone killer would have had to gag and restrain one victim while immobilizing the other. In the case of Taboda, the problem became even more daunting--though the knife attack had apparently begun while Taboda was still in bed, most likely asleep. Whatever the number of killers, with the discovery of victims four and five, it became vividly clear that this quintet of murder and mutilation in three acts required an expenditure of thought far beyond common homicides and even the most heinous serial murders. These were not spontaneous acts of raging lust. Despite the almost unimaginably gruesome mayhem, these were not crimes of violence against people as such; the dead, rather, were truly accident victims. There were no indications that the victims were linked, except by their manner of death and the fact that they were all young white college students in Gainesville.

Out of those facts that are known, a mind begins to emerge, though its shape is somewhat faint and shifting. On those August--and, most likely, successive--nights of Friday the 24th, Saturday the 25th and Sunday the 26th, something that should be called evil moved through the rooms of Sonja and Christina, Christa, and Tracey and Manny. It moved with a purpose not yet fully understood, but it moved with force. It moved with sharpened steel and tape and latex and soap. With these, it made terror and pain and death. On those oak-shrouded nights in Gainesville, a kind of macabre history was being written upon flesh. Even Ted Bundy, notable for the sheer number and duration of his crimes, as well as for his mild-mannered disguise, could not match these depraved acts of violence. The Gainesville killings were beyond imagining, like encounters with a terrible alien life form. Yet the true horror and fear came from knowing that another human hand had done these things with an almost serene sense of accomplishment and a brazen showmanship. From this sequence of fiendish carnage came the aura Lieutenant Mann detected as he approached Hoyt's front door, an aura that spread like a contagion when the communications satellites triggered their signals from Gainesville. The inexplicable eeriness sheathing these crimes was italicized just a few days after the bodies of Paules and Taboda were discovered, when Captain Ward said softly, "The primary purpose is not the deaths."

Mann shared this chilling sense of unease. He, too, understood that these acts, seemingly without motive, went far beyond mere psychosis or sociopathy or corrupted sexual drive. "It was organized violence," said Mann. "This whole thing was packaged in such a way as to make some sort of statement. The statement doesn't have to be verbal or written. And when I'm talking about packaging, I'm talking about the view of the entire crime scene. Putting the product into a context people might try to perceive. The person doesn't necessarily want you to say Why? as much as he wants you to be shocked by the way he committed the crime."

The notion of performance art springs to mind, the sense that a certain kind of aesthetic was at work, or being fashioned, those hot, humid August nights. "There was a consistency in the posturing," muses Lieutenant Darnell. "There was the removal of blood. The objects placed within the scene were strange, because they were banal. The mutilations and dismemberments were not...." Darnell stands by the door to her office, her head cocked. "There were gender-specific mutilations, and if you had a check list and Sexual was one of the items on the list, you would mark it. But there was other dismemberment. It was strange, very quiet and very different. And it meant something."

Compounding this disturbing ingredient, the killer--or killers--left the crime scenes shockingly devoid of forensic links, despite the extraordinary amount of violence at each. At one point, Ward said, "We are very concerned that the individual concealed himself very well in the acts and we are running on very thin threads and shoestrings."

Dr. Michael West, a crime-scene analyst, forensic odontologist and deputy medical examiner for Forrest County, Mississippi, combed the three apartments with a Hamamatsu intensified ultraviolet viewer--a light intensifier that magnifies details 70,000 times beyond the capacity of the naked eye. "This is the most difficult crime scene I've ever seen," said the expert before packing up his gear. "All the areas the killer touched or manipulated were free of prints. Nothing. I've also never seen so many incidents of violence at a crime scene without leaving any evidence."

The situation was stupefying, and within a half hour of the discovery of Hoyt's body, a task force began to take shape. Along with Captain Andy Hamilton of the Alachua County sheriff's office, in whose jurisdiction the last three victims fell, they called the local FBI agent as well as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's J. O. Jackson, who had worked on the Bundy case a decade earlier. They were joined by the state's attorney for the eighth circuit in Gainesville, Lennard Register III, and the university police. The multi-agency force would soon swell to 178 members, including two FBI psychological profilers from Quantico, Virginia, and 40 Florida Highway Patrol officers to beef up patrols on Gainsville's fear-ridden streets--making the force larger than either the Hillside Strangler or Green River task forces. Governor Bob Martinez requested financial assistance from Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and received nearly $1,000,000 within two weeks. The cost of the operation would easily exceed that amount in less than a month.

Not that the presence of so many lawmen reassured the citizens of Gainesville--or kept them from taking up arms. Floridians--especially folks in the predominantly rural north of the state--have particularly liberal views on guns. They like them and they have them. They are a way of life and death. But the weapons purchases in and around Gainesville became so bullish during the first week in September that U.P.S. was delivering crates to gun stores that had sold out their stocks of preferred calibers. Students attended their first days of classes carrying guns. The N.R.A. organized emergency handgun seminars. Residents greeted pizza-delivery men and patrol officers with pistols and shotguns in hand. In the first two weeks of September, 142 concealed-weapon permits were issued in Alachua County, 25 percent of the total permitted in all of 1989. One official said that figure accounted for only one percent of all the handguns that were out there. Gainesville suddenly had the highest ratio of cops on the streets to citizens of any city in the United States and the highest percentage of personal weaponry. The city was armed to the teeth--with knives, baseball bats, numchucks, dogs and crossbows.

The media, too, went armed to do battle. No fewer than 30 video cameras and a posse of 150 reporters turned Darnell and Mann's twice-daily press briefings into carnivals. Given the compelling nature of the crimes, no one questioned the media's ravenous appetite--though Mann, among others, had reason to question their tactics. He had left work at 2:30 one morning for his 20-mile drive home for a quick shower and shave, only to find himself tailed by a white Lincoln. The car followed his every turn, off the interstate, onto smaller roads, until he finally called for backup units. "We pinned the car in. I'm out with my pistol, yelling, 'Everybody out with their hands up!'" says Mann. "We've got them down on the pavement and we've all got our guns on them. Turns out it was a Miami TV crew in a rented Lincoln. They said, 'We thought you were going somewhere important.'"

To be sure, TV coverage was a challenge. Just how many spins can be put on the grim handling of body bags or the picture of cops sweating their shifts in front of an apartment complex? Which is why the bottom fishers were so ecstatic when a teenaged manic depressive ran from his grandmother's house in Indialantic, 200 miles southeast of Gainesville, sobbing and yelling, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." TV had its picture.

•

Edward Lewis Humphrey was 18 when the Brevard County authorities charged him with aggravated battery on his grandmother, 79-year-old Elna Hlavaty. He turned 19 the Friday before a jury found him guilty of the lesser charge of simple battery in the second week of October. For more than a month, Humphrey's sad history of psychological trouble was plastered across TV screens and front pages throughout the nation and Europe. A UF freshman given to surfing, skate-boarding, wearing camouflage gear, carrying knives and behaving erratically, Humphrey was on a high dosage of Lithium prescribed to combat his psychological instability. He had once thrown himself from his brother's car as it was going 70 miles per hour, leaving him with metal pins and screws in his legs and a sad ruin of a face that only months before could have been described as cherubic. Humphrey was a damaged teen in need of serious therapy--what he got, instead, was a month-long hell ride in the national press.

Many people actually believed the Gainesville killer had been caught when they watched the heavy-lidded boy on their TVs, shuffling in shackles with a demented smirk on his scarred face. Students began walking alone at night, leaving their windows open to the cool night breeze. But one close look at Humphrey and his pathetic record showed a kid incapable of making a sandwich without attracting a crowd.

Yet Humphrey was nevertheless flogged as "a prime suspect"--by both media and cops. To obtain search warrants for Eddie's Gainesville apartment, his old Cadillac and his grandmother's house, the police developed a 75-page list of items based on what they had found at the crime scenes and what the FBI profilers speculated the serial killer might have in his possession. The list included human flesh, video and audio tapes, a black hood and gloves, photographs of the victims and knives with blades more than four inches long. The sensational list got big play in the press and prompted wide speculation. The fact that this list was based not only on specifics of the Gainesville killings but also on items a serial killer matching the FBI profile might have in his possession was obscured by the fact that Humphrey looked guilty as hell--of something. Humphrey, meanwhile, was held on $1,000,000 bond while everyone awaited test results from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab in Jacksonville.

Release of the list itself became something of a scandal. When the document hit the streets, state's attorney Register phoned the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Tallahassee and requested an investigation of the task force for leaks. As soon as the two inspectors arrived from the capital, a blanket was thrown over the investigation. Darnell and Mann returned to their regular duties and only the most cursory information emanated from the task force. Interviews suddenly ceased, no one returned phone calls. Curiously, just as paranoia zipped the mouths of investigators, Register, who had pushed the Mute button with his investigation, now began handing out interviews right and left. Four in one week. It appeared that the prosecutor was taking over the investigation of the murders. Apropos of nothing, Register informed the press that Ward had cancer, was about to undergo a biopsy and would soon be leaving his post as commander on the task force. He did this nearly a week before Ward himself released the news through official channels. Register, who had contemplated another high-profile prosecution, of 2 Live Crew, had plenty to say about the murders and his role, including the news that he had had to enter personal counseling after viewing one of the crime scenes. During October, the Gainesville investigation seemed to be turning into The Len Register Show.

As weeks turned into months and winter approached, the task force ground ahead more slowly and began to lose momentum. Although the forensics lab pressed on with its high-tech sleuthing, solid evidence leading to an arrest remained elusive. Numerous searches through the woods in and around Gainesville delivered little more than wasp stings and blisters. Hair and blood samples from Humphrey came back from the FBI's Jacksonville lab, "apparently negative," according to Darnell. The task force retreated to possible leads it had either dismissed or put on hold earlier in its investigation. Links to homicides in San Diego, Shreveport and South Carolina were once again considered, and detectives flew off in hope of finding clues or connections.

Early in the investigation, Ward had said, "Although we didn't realize it at first, this person is leaving us messages or signals. He is saying, 'You're not stopping me. Catch me if you think you can.' He enjoys the control he is exercising and the confrontation with authority."

If so, the killer must have delighted in the spectacle of so much manpower and so much money expended with so few results. Months had now passed since the maintenance man opened the door to apartment 113 in the Williamsburg complex, and by homecoming weekend, late in October, that grim spectacle seemed little more than a memory. The University of Florida campus was more concerned about its football team than serial murder. Although two professors had received a substantial Federal grant to study the psychological effects on the community in the aftermath of the killings, the campus had largely returned to normal. The usual neo-hippie crowd gathered at Kesl's Coney Island for plates of tempeh and rice and beans. Down the street, the Hippodrome Theater was opening its second play of the season, Evita. The season opener, Steel Magnolias, had been knocked off schedule by a more riveting performance in three acts, one that kept theatergoers behind locked doors. But now they were back, people were actually walking the streets after sundown, enjoying the balmy night air as they headed from bar to dance club. Most of the young people still moved in packs, but occasionally, there could be seen a lone young lady briskly stepping from campus along 13th Street. Such a sight brought chills to passing officers in the still-watchful patrols.

The white ribbons that had appeared the day after the campus memorial service for the five slain students in early September were now gray and in tatters. The ads for Mace, burglar and personal alarms and high-security locks no longer choked the pages of the Alligator, the campus newspaper. But if one listened closely to the breakfast talk in the morning or through the late-evening clatter of wineglasses at Emiliano's, inevitably, the dark subject would surface, bringing with it unanswered questions and a cool breath of fear.

In the last interview Ward gave as commander of the task force, before the cancer and chemotherapy pulled him away, he spoke with unusual intensity about how he saw his investigation.

"Most people, the public, will never really understand how difficult this case is. Most people still identify with TV shows, things they see in the movies. That's not what it's about at all. A criminal investigation is something like...alive. You let it live, let it move."

Ward raised his hands, extending his fingers. "With an investigation that is strictly bang-bang-bang, you lose too much. You don't stay fluid enough in thought and motion to move. Your commanders must realize that, that the investigation"--he dropped his hands, then raised them again, shaping the air before him--"moves. It flows. It hunts for its information. You allow it to breathe and to move as you're living through it. It...becomes an entity. And they, the investigative team, become a part of something living--almost sculptural--but breathing."

While Ward's investigation may yet be breathing and moving, flowing and hunting, so is another entity. The dark mind dancing with bright blades and strange pictures, hungering to show itself. Time and place of performance remain unknown to all but the evil itself, somewhere out there, watching.

"'There was an aura there that started before I ever looked in. I was prepared to a degree, but....'"