Southside Strangler

Shortly after Thanksgiving in 1987, an intruder broke into the Tucker residence in Arlington, Virginia.

It might have been just another statistic, but the crime committed that night launched a new era in police investigations.

This is how DNA evidence and psychological profiling helped catch a serial killer and set an innocent man free.

Everything about her was very gentle.

She was very soft-spoken.

Just had this amazing softness about her,

this human quality.

44-year-old Susan Tucker was a publications editor who worked for the United States Forestry Service.

She was spending the Thanksgiving holiday alone, since her husband, Reggie, was out of the country in Wales on a business trip.

Neither of us could put the phone down.

We kept saying, I love you.

And we said this over and over again.

I don't know how many times.

But without explanation, telephone calls went unanswered.

And neighbors noticed her bedroom window wide open in the cold November weather, so they called police.

As they approached the front door, they noticed it was ajar.

Inside, a woman's purse was lying on the foyer floor.

Susan Tucker's badly decomposed body was lying face down on the bed.

She had been dead for four or five days.

Her hands were tied behind her back, her feet were tied, the head hanging over the side of the bed almost.

She had been strangled and possibly raped.

It appeared that the killer more than likely was inside the home for quite some time.

I mean, it wasn't just a very, you know, quick in-and-out type of a situation.

Many of the drawers had been, you know, ransacked, had been gone through.

When Reggie Tucker heard the news, he was devastated.

My whole world

just fell away.

Detective Joe Horges of the Arlington Police Homicide Unit was quickly assigned to the case.

His task wouldn't be easy.

For one thing, the killer had been careful.

He had worn gloves and left no fingerprints.

This has been like clean.

It had been raining on the night of the murder, and he meticulously cleaned the area around his point of entry.

He's smart enough to know that

footprints, which is what we would have gotten from that, would maybe come back to haunt him, which kind of tells you maybe some past experience on burglaries.

Police collected the sheets, nightgown, and the large sleeping bag which covered Susan Tucker's body to look for possible blood and semen stains.

They found hairs on the bedding around Susan Tucker's body.

in the bathroom sink, and on a washcloth discovered outside on the clothesline.

And they gathered shards of broken glass from the basement window.

Everything was taken to the forensics lab for analysis, but perhaps the most important clue was also the most obvious, the rope and knots used to strangle Susan Tucker.

The police were convinced they had seen this killer's work before.

Three years earlier, A 34-year-old lawyer named Carolyn Hom had been raped and strangled in her home only four blocks away from Susan Tucker.

The killer entered the Hom residence the same way, through a basement window, and tied his victim using the same knots.

And it's not a common occurrence, not common at all, to see victims killed by using ligatures.

to strangle them, ropes tying up victims.

It's really quite rare.

But the Hom case was closed when this man, David Vasquez, confessed to her murder and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Could he have had an accomplice?

Horges spoke to him for several hours.

And from the way he was talking and everything and answering my questions, I didn't think he knew a damn thing about Carolyn Hom's murder.

While Detective Horges began his search for Susan Tucker's killer, 100 miles away in the capital city of Richmond, police there were investigating a series of murders shockingly similar.

The body of 35-year-old Debbie Davis was found inside her South Richmond apartment.

She'd been raped and strangled.

In less than a month, two young women had been raped and strangled in their homes just a few blocks from each other.

In each case, there was a forced entry with the murderer entering by cutting the screens.

and entering through an open window.

Each victim was strangled.

Both victims were white between the ages of 30 and 35 years.

Two weeks later, he struck again, this time, a 15-year-old girl raped and strangled in her bedroom while her family was sleeping.

All three had been bound, raped, and strangled with rope.

The knots were identical to the ones used in the Arlington cases.

Detective Horges suspected that the killer of Susan Tucker was the same man who murdered Carolyn Hom and the three women in Richmond.

If Horges was correct, a serial murderer was loose on a 100-mile killing spree.

Detective Horges believed the man who raped and strangled Susan Tucker had also murdered Carolyn Hahn three years earlier.

Horges also believed the same man was responsible for the three rapes and murders in Richmond, 100 miles away.

The Richmond police weren't so sure.

I mean they have three murders that were within a couple miles square radius,

I'm guessing, or maybe even less.

That, you know, and now we're trying to say that 100 miles away, we're trying to link something to theirs.

It's like, yeah, get out of here.

I mean, this is a local guy.

Horges was a man, he was the perfect man for this case because he was obsessed.

He knew something was wrong.

Author Paul Moniz wrote a best-selling book entitled Stalking Justice.

It profiles the rapes and murders of these five women and the history-making investigation which followed.

Joe Horges is motivated by

the

hunt.

He's not a guy who's obsessed by issues of right and wrong, except for his own internal moral compass, which tells him if there's an innocent man in prison, I don't care if we got the guilty guy, we've got to get the innocent man out.

And he was determined to get this guy.

But if Horgus was right, that all of these murders were connected, he needed proof.

For that, he turned to the forensics lab, where scientists were examining the stains found on Susan Tucker's nightgown and bedding.

I found four semen stains, and when I analyzed the sleeping bag, I found one very large semen stain.

I typed all of those stains.

The semen came from an individual with type O blood and a PGM-1 enzyme profile.

Although this matched 13% of the population, it also matched the semen found at the Carolyn Hahn murder scene.

Next, they turned their attention to the hair found at the Tucker crime scene.

And there are characteristics, microscopically, that can classify hair into one of three racial categories.

Which are Caucasian, Negroid, or mongoloid.

The hairs found at the Tucker crime scene appeared to be pubic and did not appear to be from the victim or her husband.

They were positively identified as Negroid in origin.

This was another possible link to the Carolyn Hom murder case.

Three years earlier at the time of Hom's murder, a black male wearing a mask had raped a number of women in the same neighborhood.

The masked rapist was never apprehended, and Horges always suspected that there was a connection to the Hom murder.

Actually, the same day that Carolyn Hom's body was found, another girl lady was in her house,

and

this black male with the mask and a knife burglarized her house, got her,

and actually

he...

did some sexual activity with her.

The Richmond police and later the Arlington Police both sought sought help from the FBI's behavioral science unit in Quantico, Virginia.

This unit has interviewed hundreds of serial killers to learn what similarities exist in their psychological makeup.

They were able to predict a number of important things about the killer.

We get in and look at the behavior that's that's

left behind the offender in the commission of his crime.

We believe that by looking at

that behavior, we can interpret the type of offender that may have committed the crime.

The fact that the strangler attacked his victims in their homes suggested that he had stalked them first and knew precisely when to strike.

The FBI concluded that the perpetrator was between the age of 18 and 30, the quiet type, a loner who held a menial job.

He probably had a troubled relationship with his mother and began his crime spree with arson.

Historically, many serial rapists and murderers begin with arson.

Serial killers are usually white, but could be any race.

He lived or worked close to where he committed his first crimes.

That's because criminals begin their crime sprees in an area where they feel most comfortable.

He took sadistic pleasure in strangling his victims.

He would periodically release the bindings so he could hear his victim plead for her life.

It appeared that the perpetrator had intended the victim to suffer considerably.

In one case, a shoe impression was found on the victim's back.

And it's not clear whether they were dead when he did this or alive, but he also masturbated on his victims.

And it was these semen samples which would prove to be extremely important pieces of evidence.

I can remember our prosecutor, Helen Fahey, a couple days after the murder asking me if this was going to be a DNA case.

And I'm kind of, I don't know.

I mean, we don't even know what we had got yet.

In 1987, when Susan Tucker was murdered, DNA evidence was still in its infancy.

The first time DNA evidence was used in a criminal case was only a year earlier in England, when DNA from a semen sample was used to convict a bakery worker with the rape and murder of two 15-year-old girls.

Horges decided to try this new DNA testing, sending the semen stains from Susan Tucker's nightgown to the Life Codes Laboratory in New York.

The final results from the DNA tests would take up to 10 weeks, but Detective Horges still didn't have a suspect.

Detective Horges suspected that the same individual who raped and murdered Susan Tucker and Carolyn Hahn three years earlier was the masked rapist who was committing crimes in the same area but was never caught.

So Horges drove out to an area of Arlington known as Green Valley, the area where the masked rapist committed his first assaults.

The FBI told Horges that rapists usually commit their first crime close to home.

If the first rape was the first rape for this guy, then he would have lived around there.

And that was very crucial to me because

I didn't know that.

And as he drove through Green Valley, Horges tried to recall the names or faces of likely suspects, young men he'd run across over the years who came from that area.

And it just so happens that Detective Horges started to focus on this one juvenile he had dealt with.

I remembered him.

He just couldn't place the name.

And all I could remember was Timmy.

I could see his face, but I couldn't remember his last name.

So we were running all these names to the computer seeing when they had been locked up and released.

And he said, Spencer, Timothy Spencer, that's the name.

And I saw where he was arrested on January the 29th, 1984, which was four days after Carolyn Homer body was found.

Spencer's history unfolded.

In trouble as a teenager, he had a string of burglary convictions.

And even more surprising, just as the FBI predicted, Spencer had first drawn police attention for arson for setting fire to his mother's car.

Spencer was on probation, living in this halfway house just a short distance from where the Richmond murders took place.

And according to house records, Spencer had been signed out during the Thanksgiving holiday, visiting his mother in Arlington, the week Susan Tucker was murdered.

The fact that he got out of prison two weeks before the first murders down in Richmond, the fact that he was available for every murder, the fact that he came to Arlington when he did for our murder.

And the FBI was correct about another important detail.

Spencer lived in the area where the first rape was committed.

And that happened over there.

And at the time, Timothy Spencer was living down here over this hill.

In his mother's house, barely a mile from the homes of Carolyn Hom and Susan Tucker.

On January 20th, 1988, police arrested Timothy Spencer.

Within hours, they had collected a blood sample, some of his hair, and confiscated his clothing for forensic analysis.

The clothing was scraped down for removing any debris and once that debris was collected it was taken to a microscope.

Several dozen particles of glass were removed from the debris that was removed from his clothing.

The glass fragments were of particular interest to the police.

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I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was queer.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

After police recovered glass particles from Spencer's clothing, they were examined forensically to see if they matched glass from any of the victims' homes.

One technique is called glass refraction analysis.

By shining light from different points on the spectrum through the particles, the characteristics of the glass can be plotted on a graph, in effect, measuring how the particles bend light.

If you stick the pen into the water, which is more dense than the air, it bends the light.

What we're doing with the glass particle basically is measuring how much the light is bent in a refract, and we call it refractive index.

They compared the glass fragments found on Spencer's clothing to the glass particles taken from the broken window at Susan Tucker's home.

We were able to say that that glass that was removed from Spencer's clothing either came from that particular pane or that particular source of glass or another source of glass that had the same optical characteristics.

When scientists completed the DNA analysis of the semen stain found at the Susan Tucker crime scene, they made a chilling discovery.

And I remember pulling out an x-ray film from the developer and holding it up from these two separate cases and being bombarded immediately that the patterns I'm seeing are the same.

I'm seeing the same profile on this case from one county versus this case from a second county, which says to me,

the same person is involved in both of those incidents.

It really gives you chills up and down your spine to see something like that.

Horgus was right all along.

The semen sample from the individual who raped and presumably murdered Susan Tucker matched the semen stains from the murders in Richmond.

There were seven hairs that were consistent with his.

There was a glass fragment that was consistent with his.

His family couldn't provide him with a complete alibi for the entire weekend.

And finally, Timothy Spencer's blood DNA was compared to the semen samples from the crime victims.

Once we got a sample from Mr.

Spencer to test, we generated a profile that was the same as the profile we got from the evidentiary samples.

We had a frequency of occurrence of greater than one in a million.

So that means that only one person in a million in the population would have that particular genetic profile.

And starting with the first result, the blood type,

it was a match, it was a match, it was a match, it was a match.

On July 11th, 1988, Timothy Spencer went on trial for his life.

It was the first time in the United States where DNA evidence would be used in a serial murder case.

It took the jury less than seven hours to find Timothy Spencer guilty of rape and capital murder.

He was sentenced to death.

I feel some kind of relief.

But I'll never have my wife back.

Death was pronounced by the attending physician at 1113 p.m.

There were no complications.

Mr.

Spencer did not make a last statement.

Thank you.

Without DNA, it would have been impossible to convict Timothy Spencer.

If he had committed those murders a year or two years earlier, He could not have been convicted.

In fact, if this had been 1984 or 1985,

we probably would not even have arrested him.

Some people ask the question, will DNA fingerprinting replace detective work?

I don't think so.

Susan Tucker left Detective Horges at the crime scene, and Timothy Spencer left part of himself at the crime scene.

But his name would never have come up if it wasn't for Detective Horges.