'In addition — and this is important — this blanket also contains all the information collected on all known sex offenders identified during the Clifford Olson case. It has been updated to yesterday. When supplied with specific search criteria — such as the description of a person or car or registered weapon — the program generates a list of the numbers of all documents that refer to the person or vehicle or weapon that matches the description.'
'How detailed will it go?' one of the cops asked.
'The search criteria can be as specific as a person's name, date of birth, age, height, weight, sex, race, hair and eye color, or the place where the person was last checked by police. It can contain as little information as say, just hair color.' Chan took a moment to sip from a cup of coffee rapidly cooling on a desk top to his right.
'Finally, I am in the process of preparing an up-to-date skin list. I have culled all known possible sex offenders from our files and as soon as we get a psychological profile of the Headhunter from our psychiatric services I will computer-enhance it into a formal sweep sheet. This list will have the necessary key word to retrieve information on any offender listed in the margin.
'And that's about it, unless there are any questions. Remember, Computer Command is set up to reflect the present state of the art. Use it!'
There were no questions so MacDougall took over. 'All right,' he said. 'You all know what happened last night and you all know what that means. You heard the Superintendent yesterday morning. So let's roll.'
Then as MacDougall was turning away to have a quiet chat with Inspector Chan, someone in the audience made a
No one laughed. Most cops don't watch cop shows on TV.
10:35 a.m.
The RCMP Report Centre in Ottawa has 24,000 sets of fingerprints on file for British Columbia alone.
Sergeant James Rodale had spent the morning putting the finishing touches to DeClercq's flying patrol concept. For that reason he had come up to Computer Command in order to arrange the independent information pool which — excised of all theory, conjecture, and conclusion — would be available to these patrols. That was how he was near the communications center as the teletype reply from Ottawa came in on Avacomovitch's fingerprint request concerning the lifts that he had obtained off the jack-o'-lantern. Out of habit Rodale glanced at the piece of paper emerging from the machine as he walked by. Then he stopped dead in his tracks.
The fingerprints on the pumpkin, Report Centre said, were a match with those on the record of one Fritz Sapperstein.
Sapperstein had a record for B and E in 1974 and an address in the Municipality of Richmond.
Richmond was Rodale's home turf.
The Sergeant tore the sheet off, leaving a copy for Avacomovitch, then checked his Smith and Wesson.38 and left Computer Command to go and find 'Mad Dog' Rabidowski.
He found him.
10:45 a.m.
The good citizens of Vancouver and its many suburbs spent the overcast morning watching for more rain and waiting impatiently for the first edition of the
In addition to the facts of the case there were the usual color stories. One of these was a barometer reading from women interviewed on the street. These were some of the comments:
'Well I don't plan to leave my house without a knife in my purse. The police say that's breaking the law, carrying a concealed weapon. Well I don't care. The Headhunter's not going to get me without one hell of a fight.'
'A nun! My God! Is any woman safe? This guy's a raving maniac. If City Council had any guts at all they'd slap a ten p.m. curfew on every male in this city.'
'Why are people so shocked? I don't see this as so special. This Headhunter and his attacks are no more than an extreme version of the fears that most women suffer every day of their lives. I'm on a bus, eh, and I have to fend off a drunken businessman who sits too close and tries to put his arm around me. But — and every woman in the world will recognize this — I have to do it nicely so I don't cause a scene Then once I'm off the bus a strange guy stands in my path and asks in a tough voice: 'All alone? Don't you know there's a killer around? Where do you live? I'll take you home.' And then it takes an eternity to get rid of him — nicely. Now I ask you, do we go around putting our arms around men minding their own business, insisting on accompanying them to their homes and getting nasty if they refuse? Not on your life — sorry, that was a poor choice of words!'
'I say take every sex offender — maybe every male while you're at it — and cut his fucking nuts off. Amen, sister.'
12:02 p.m.
Matthew Paul Pitt had a pathological hatred of his mother. She had committed suicide when he was four. Pitt's father had then placed both his sons in a foster home. Sometime later he had returned to retrieve one of the boys, leaving Pitt behind. And ever since that day Pitt had loathed his mother, for-the way he saw it — if she had not killed herself the family would not have fractured.
As a child Matthew Paul Pitt had been misdiagnosed as 'retarded but without psychosis.' The result was that of the twenty-eight years the Australian had lived, twenty-four had been spent in mental institutions. In actual fact Matthew Paul Pitt had an IQ of 128. That is in the above-average to superior range.
The actual psychological problem afflicting the man was dyslexia — a learning disorder in which the affected person sees everything backwards resulting in an inability to read or write or count. The original misdiagnosis of a disorientated and angry child had never been corrected, and therefore, trapped for twenty-four years of his life in mental institutions for the retarded, surrounded daily by persons with whom he could not communicate, Matthew Paul Pitt like an ingrown toenail had slowly turned in on himself. Ultimately, as a result of this misdiagnosis and his subsequent institutionalization, Pitt had developed a real psychiatric disorder. Pitt was now a classic borderline personality???and it had been almost two years since Matthew Paul Pitt had escaped from a Queensland mental hospital.
By noon that Monday Monica Macdonald and Rusty Lewis knew a great deal about this man. They also had at least a rudimentary knowledge about a borderline state. The knowledge they had looked promising. Promising indeed.
Early yesterday afternoon, following DeClercq's briefing and their coffee together, the two constables had driven the 150 miles south on Highway 99 connecting at the border with
Interstate 5 to take them into Seattle, Washington. In Seattle they had found the FBI building and had talked to Monica's friend. The FBI agent remembered her very well (a little
'Thanks, Daryl,' Macdonald said with a grin every bit as wide as his.
The two RCMP officers had spent that afternoon and a good portion of Halloween night rummaging through the FBI files on known and suspected US sex offenders. There was a great deal of information. Both Bundy and part of the alleged Hillside Strangler team — not to mention the recent Green River Killer — were alleged to have murdered repeatedly in the State of Washington. Thus a detailed and thorough profile of sex crimes had recently been compiled by the FBI. By midnight, with the aid of a computer technician, the two Canadians had composed an American skin list of sixty-seven possible cross-border sex suspects who might just fit the Head-hunter's MO.
The man who sat at the top of this list was the Australian Matthew Paul Pitt.
Pitt was wanted by the FBI for questioning in a number of interstate rape/murders over the previous year and a half. In each of the killings the throat of the victim had been cut, and in two of them the head severed completely from the body. There had been one murder outside Los Angeles, California; one seven miles from Tucson, Arizona; two on the Stockton Plateau in Texas; one at a road junction near Wichita, Kansas; three twelve
