10 Twisted Red Herrings Exploited by Killers
How they (sometimes) get away with murder
An under-appreciated challenge in homicide investigation is the red herring. This underappreciation is rather incredible, given that such red herrings can profoundly hinder the progress of investigators and allow offenders greater success in evading capture or conviction. Their effects range from simply covering a killer’s tracks (e.g. destroying evidence of foul play) to incriminating others or casting suspicion on a demographic to which the killer doesn’t belong.
Red herrings can, of course, be used by either one-off killers or by serial murderers. The more intelligent and organized the killer, the more plentiful, subtle and confusing these faked clues and false leads can be. They come in all different forms, as shown below, and are occasionally so effective that their lack of veracity is never discovered.
The Red Herrings
10. Misleading Autobiographical Statements
Some serial murderers like to communicate to police and the media. In the process, they freely mix candid confessions, lies and half-truths in seamless narratives. Dennis Rader, the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) killer included several blatant falsehoods in his letters. Some of these lies, like the autobiographical ones (e.g. frequenting prostitutes), obscured his identity, while others, like details of his murders, were probably intended to intensify his fantasy fulfilment in reliving his crimes, through embellishment; and, of course, through taunting police, his victims’ families and the community at large.
The Golden State Killer (AKA East Area Rapist / Original Night-Stalker) kept investigators guessing about his background for years. GSK made many statements implying false clues to his victims, including (but not limited to) his claimed vagrancy, mode of transport (sometimes claimed to be a van in which he also lived), supposed drug addiction and financial straits. He also engaged in one-sided conversations with non-existent accomplices (another tactic shared with Mister Cruel).
This list is only a small sample of the tall tales told by GSK during the EAR home invasions. Additionally, he would act desperate to find money and would fake having the shivers to convince victims that he was a drug addict. These little acts were intended to reinforce his supposedly off-hand statements and lead police after the wrong demographic of suspects.
The Lipstick Killer’s letter to Edward Kelly, 36th Mayor of Chicago, was likely intended for the same purpose, as it rather carelessly implied he was a meatpacker.
Killers use such statements primarily to evade investigation, but also in some cases because they enjoy toying with investigators. This enjoyment is a likely motivation in the cases of BTK and GSK, as both already taunted police in other ways during written and telephoned communications.
9. Ransom Letters
Kidnapping-for-ransom is a good temporary cover for a murderer to escape and conceal their crime. This is one is a favourite of serial killers, as it gives them time to evade capture. In some instances, the ransom demand is quite serious, despite having no intention to return the victim, and the money is collected. This was the case with Israel Keyes, who demanded that £30,000USD be put into the account of his victim, Samantha Koenig, which he proceeded to spend throughout the American Southwest, by which time he had already dismembered and dumped her corpse in Alaska.
Often, though, the ransom demand is solely intended to divert resources and attention away from finding the real offender. During the abduction of Nicola Lynas, Australia’s feared serial rapist, (almost certain) child murderer and master of red herrings, Mister Cruel, told Nicola’s sister to inform her parents that she would be returned upon receipt of $25,000AUD. No attempt was made to collect a ransom or even follow up on the demand. However, the police considered that the connection was a personal one and wasted hundreds of man hours following up in the Lynas’ family, friends and business dealings. By the time ransom was ruled out as a motive, the diversionary tactic had served its purpose.
Nicola Lynas was released by her captor after a fifty-hour ordeal. Despite the abduction, sexual assault and repeated rape, which the perpetrator filmed, no forensic evidence remained leading back to Mister Cruel.
8. Bomb Threats
Another disruptive tactic occasionally (but not often) used by killers is the bomb threat. The first and best-known of these is the infamous ‘Bomb Letter’ of November 9th, 1969, sent to the San Francisco Chronicle by the Zodiac killer (along with a piece of Zodiac victim Paul Stine’s shirt, proving the letter’s authenticity).
Why would Zodiac make a bomb threat, even going so far as to include the ‘recipe’ for the explosives and hand-drawn blueprints for the device? Despite falling outside of the MOs of most serial murderers, especially where intimacy is paramount, bombing is always considered a serious danger wherever and whenever threatened. It will always be investigated until it can be decisively dismissed. Several killers who weren’t bombers accordingly took advantage of this to instil a public climate of fear, seize media attention, mislead investigators or a combination of these reasons. The Zodiac killer repeatedly threatened mass carnage in his letters, in order to force their publication.
Kristen Gilbert, the VA nurse and so-called ‘Angel of Death’, who killed at least four veterans, called in an anonymous bomb threat. This was intended to disrupt the investigation into the suspicious mortality rates under her watch.
A more mysterious example of this kind of red herring followed shortly after the murder of Wilhelmina Kruger in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, in 1966. One of the most bizarre and under-reported features in this case is that a reporter at the local newspaper, The Illawara Mercury, received a threatening phone call from an unknown person, claiming that a bomb had been placed in the mall where Mrs Kruger worked as a cleaner and where she was killed in the early hours of the morning. Now, it must first be stressed that this isn’t confirmed as being related to the crime. It is, however, highly suspicious; and, for the killer at least, highly convenient.
Supposing it was the killer or an accomplice who made this call, it occurred after Mrs Kruger’s body had been found, while the police were investigating the scene. The clear motive, in that case, would be to delay and disrupt the evidence-gathering phase of the investigation at the crime scene itself. The bomb threat was quickly determined to be a hoax, but even so, important forensic evidence was lost before it could be bagged and other evidence was simply mishandled. Had the police abandoned the scene due to a bomb scare, the state of evidence collected could have been even worse.
7. Miscellaneous Messages
The second victim of Chicago’s Lipstick Killer, Frances Brown, was found dead in her apartment, having been both stabbed in the back and shot in the head. Police found a message scrawled in lipstick on a wall in her apartment.
The disturbing plea read:
For heaven’s
Sake catch me
Before I kill more
I cannot control myself
There are many unresolved questions surrounding this case. This was, in fact, the case that most fascinated profiler Robert Bressler as a boy. Bressler would go on to investigate, profile and interview some of the most notorious serial killers in the United States, as well as coining the term ‘serial killer’ itself. The circumstances of the so-called Lipstick Murders fascinated him, perhaps precisely because of the ongoing mystery of it. The lipstick message, which is where the Lipstick Killer got the name, is arguably the biggest question-mark in the whole case.
Oddly, a preponderance of today’s handwriting experts say that the handwriting and style of the lipstick message didn’t even match the ransom note at the later abduction of Suzanne Degnan, let alone the handwriting of William Heirens, who was convicted of the crime.
In any case, messages scrawled by offenders at or near crime scenes serve a variety of purposes. Sometimes they frustrate an investigation by confusing the offender profile and throwing up imaginary, unknown suspects, but other times they achieve the same end by incriminating those close to the victim.
The latter was the intention during the abduction of Karmein Chan. The offender, almost certainly Mister Cruel, in this case spraypainted a car at the Chan home with graffiti insinuating the Chans were involved in Chinese drug distribution, making empty threats of “PAYBACK” and “MORE TO COME” which, like the Lynas ransom, never came to pass. In hindsight, it was clearly the offender’s attempt at misdirection, intended to divert police attention during the precious first few hours of the investigation. It briefly focused the investigation on the Chans themselves and their connections to the community, but this yielded no promising leads for the obvious reason that the abduction wasn’t personal. Karmein’s remains were found a year later. Mister Cruel presumably remains at large and police have identified no credible suspects to the present day.
6. Faked Burglary
Unknown scores of murder scenes have been misinterpreted as ‘burglaries gone wrong’, burglars interrupted by home owners or over-zealous home invaders whose violence went too far in subduing the home’s occupants. This misinterpretation is especially true of the early killings in a series, where the killer is as-yet unsure of themselves in the realm of homicide, less indulgent with their fantasies of control.
The tendency of police to label crimes this way is yet another factor exploited by killers. The Original Night-Stalker crimes committed by the Golden State Killer were sometimes misread as home invasions which turned lethal due to a struggle between the victims and the assailant.
Burglary-gone-wrong also functions as a legal defence, where a killer can claim that the murder wasn’t premeditated, but instead the unintended reaction to the victim lashing out or otherwise not cooperating. In such cases, it can be effective — except, of course, in jurisdictions where homicide during the commission of a felony carries a higher penalty than plain murder in the first degree.
5. Disguises
Disguises are another means of deflecting investigation. They protect the killer’s real identity, which directing suspicion at anyone who might match the description.
In his letters, the Zodiac Killer claimed that the witness descriptions of him were accurate — but only accurately described him in disguise, how he appeared when he did his ‘thing’, as he put it. He was referring to his hair, glasses and similar details. Usually, though, Zodiac wore a black hooded mask over his whole head.
John Wayne Gacy, the so-called ‘Killer Clown’, didn’t just clown for kids’ parties. Apparently, he also wore his makeup and clown costume to commit some of his crimes. Nor is Gacy the only killer clown: at least one other has used this as an effective disguise. In 1990, Marlene Warren of Wellington, Florida opened her door to an apparent balloon-o-gram, brought to her doorstep by a clown. Wordlessly, the clown handed over gifts, then shot Warren in the face, before calmly climbing in a LeBaron convertible and driving away from the scene. The suspect arrested twenty-seven years later for Marlene Warren’s murder, Sheila Keen Warren, had in the meantime married Warren’s widower, Michael Warren, whom police have suspected of involvement in his wife’s murder from the get-go.
Other killers, notably the Golden State Killer, probably employed disguises too. Some of the witnesses described him with dark hair, especially dark hair on his legs and arms. However, other witnesses describe him with blond hair, even longer blond hair. A later victim described his legs as smooth and hairless, rather than hairy, which may have been another attempt to confuse police in their descriptions of the suspect. After the Visalia Ransacker spree, he also lost a considerable amount of weight, almost certainly to change his appearance. Given his taste for misdirection, it certainly makes sense that he’d use disguises.
4. Firesetting and Arson
Some killers are pyromaniacs and dedicated arsonists. Fire is used by these offenders virtually for its own sake. However, others set fires in a much more instrumental way to achieve ulterior motives. One of these motives is concealment of another crime. The fire itself can appear accidental or intended, so long as it impedes investigation. Supposing a fire can distract from a murder, destroying evidence or even making the murder look like an accident or careless result of wilful arson, it will serve the killer’s requirements for the purposes of this motive.
This was the intention of the arson at Burgate House, in the New Forest, England, on September 1st, 1986. This fire was part and parcel with the robbery and horrific murder of the Cleavers and their servant, Margaret Murphy, by George Stephenson and his accomplices the Daly brothers, John and George.
Stephenson had history, albeit briefly, with the Cleavers. He’d worked on the grounds of the home as a handyman, but was dismissed when his employers, the elderly Joseph and Hilda Cleavers (both 82), discovered that he’d been battering his wife when she ran to Burgate House one night for help.
During dinner that evening, the three masked men entered the dining room with pickaxes and Joseph Cleaver’s own firearms. The Cleavers’ son Thomas and his wife Wendy happened to be visiting that evening, so the gang took advantage of this to subdue and kill them as well, not to mention taking turns raping Wendy Cleaver. Afterward, she was strangled with a length of fabric fashioned into a garrotte. Finally, the rest of the family, along with Margaret Murphy, were burned alive.
The fire was intended to both kill the Cleavers and cover up the other crimes. For the latter purpose, firesetting failed miserably. Unfortunately for the criminals, the master bedroom where they had set the fire was part of a twentieth-century addition to the house. Concrete-shuttered walls confined the fire to the master bedroom and prevented its spread, leaving the ransacked house and ample evidence of burglary and foul play intact for the police investigation.
Had the fire spread as intended, the three culprits would likely never have been caught and, if they had been, almost certainly not convicted. Thankfully, it didn’t spread and they were all convicted, Stephenson and John Daly receiving several life sentences each; and George Daly receiving a sentence of twenty-two years.
3. Identity Theft
An extremely disturbing (and effective) feature of South Australia’s Snowtown murders was the additional crime of coerced identity theft. The victims were made to record insulting messages and give reasons for their absence (e.g. moving to Western Australia, never to return), but this was just the start of it. The killers were able to extract bank and Centrelink (i.e. Australian social security) details during the torture and humiliation sessions preceding the victims’ deaths and disposal in acid barrels, sessions during which victims were forced to address their killers by names like “God” and “Lord Sir”. The information thus extracted allowed the perpetrators to make bank withdrawals and claim victims’ welfare checks, in some cases, for up to several years after the murders.
Another case involving identity theft as a red herring, even more horrifying, also occurred in South Australia. In mid-July 2015, outside Wynarka, a town near Adelaide, a suitcase was found discarded alongside a highway by a motorist. The suitcase contained the tiny remains of Khandalyce Pearce, dumped like trash. This was more than six and a half years after she and her mother Karle Pearce-Stevenson disappeared and were killed in December 2008. Karlie’s body had been discovered almost five years before in Belanglo State Forest, New South Wales (notorious for the grisly serial murders of backpackers committed there by Ivan Milat). However, investigators weren’t able to identify her remains until Khandalyce was recovered as well and their genetic relationship was established.
Karlie had been killed by her ex-partner, Daniel James Holdom, who then took Khandalyce away and sexually abused her before murdering her. The mother and daughter had eventually been reported missing, but police didn’t seriously suspect foul play for years, because the family had received communications supposedly from Karlie that she was moving to the other end of the country. Additionally, her bank accounts and Centrelink had been active in the years between the disappearance and the discovery of their remains. Over the years since Karlie’s death, Holdom was able to collect about $90,000AUD from her accounts.
He was already a child molester and attempted murderer by this time, so it’s sadly unsurprising that there was a sexual motive in the abuse and murder of Khandalyce. Holdom kept a diary with a list of children he’d abused — next to Khandalyce’s name, he added the note “rape”.
Remarkably, police never seemed to consider this repeat offender, with a prior relationship to the mother, a person of interest in the suspicious disappearance of the pair until after the bodies had been recovered. Thankfully, he was arrested in October, three months after Khandalyce’s remains were recovered, then again in December. He pleaded guilty in July last year and was convicted in November. Nevertheless, the bold-faced identity fraud he’d maintained allowed him to evade investigation for seven years, all while siphoning money from the state and the victims’ family by fraudulent means.
Supposing South Australia police do their homework better in future cases, identity theft might become a less effective red herring. We can only hope.
2. MO and Signature
The killer’s modus operandi (MO) is the particular way in which they stalk, subdue (perhaps also torture) and kill their victims.
Serial killers, in particular, have a heightened need to misdirect investigators over the weeks, months or years of their ‘double life’. More crime scenes mean more chances of DNA transfers, mistakes or interruption. A longer record of similar offenses also allows investigators to become more familiar with the offender profile and more confident in its various details.
The most general way that serial murderers can send investigators down entire rabbit-holes of false leads is to change MO, the purely functional part of the murder. The problem with this is that, while their MO can change as required, their motive for killing never does and their ‘signature’, their crime scene call-sign as it were, changes much less than the functional aspects of killing. Investigators and profilers with a good grasp on the killer’s patterns can see right through this sort of ruse.
1. Staging the Scene
This is another problematic area, though, like MO, for the reason that certain kinds of ‘staging’ are compulsive and have more to do with the killer’s preferences and fantasies than with concealing the crime.
In the abduction of Suzanne Degnan, not only was a ransom note used as a red herring, there was also some degree of physical crime-scene staging. The ladder placed up to her window and left there, at the very least, raises more questions than it answers. It was probably not the means by which the killer either entered the home and almost certainly not the means by which the child was carried out of the house. Even so, the ladder, along with the ransom note, led police down a number of investigative dead-ends, including the possibility that there were two perpetrators, which further fed the assumption that it was an organized kidnapping for ransom.
This sort of red herring can be used as a geographical red herring as well, suggesting that the abductor fled in one direction while they actually fled in another, even the opposite one. In fact, that’s the most likely reason the ladder was used.
Other kinds of scene-staging include arson, as addressed above. Given the right experience and training, investigators can see through this kind of red herring. There are even entire investigative handbooks dedicated to the topic.
The Good News
The good news is that crime scene analysts and criminal profilers understand red herrings fairly well by this point. Even where red herrings are used, they can be detected; even where they fool the public or uniformed officers, experienced investigators can in many cases spot them almost immediately.
Still, the more awareness we have of this phenomenon — and the more awareness our police forces have of it, in particular — the better. Between newfound awareness and new approaches to DNA evidence, the era of decades-long careers in serial murder, like the Golden State Killer’s, might finally be coming to a close.
