Good Field Practice — Processing a Crime Scene
199
Sidebar 6
The Freeway Killer — Butt
for a Videotape
During the late 1970s, a string of homicides occurred that attracted very little attention until the last
few victims were recovered. This was due in part to the location of the victims; they were spread across
Southern California over several counties. The victims all were found nude and showed evidence of
sexual assault. Many were abandoned
near freeway off-ramps, leading the press to dub the perpetrator
“The Freeway Killer.” By the time the Freeway Killer was arrested, he was a suspect in almost 20
homicides of young men. William George Bonin was ultimately charged and convicted of nine
homicides in two counties. He was executed in California by lethal injection in 1996.
Bonin had previously been convicted of assaulting a young male, and even though genetic marker
typing was then only in its infancy, Bonin knew that it had played a crucial role in this initial conviction.
He vowed not to be caught by science again, and so part of his MO (
modus operandi
) was to perpetrate
these
crimes with accomplices, little more than teenage punks of low IQ whom Bonin could easily
manipulate and control. If he raped one of his murder victims, he would make sure that one of his
accompanying pals would also have intercourse with the victim. In his mind, this would ensure that
the police would not have his genetic marker profile as evidence of his presence.
People are occasionally (although rarely!) more eloquent than evidence, however, and this was
Bonin’s undoing. For some reason, now consigned to oblivion
with his police file, one of these
accomplices attracted the attention of the multijurisdictional task force that had finally been formed.
As they staked out the house of Vernon Butts, they were able to engage him in conversation, and
succeeded in obtaining his agreement to do a consent search of his rented house. Several criminalists
were brought in to search primarily for blood.
Because the house contained lots of “stuff,” the search moved slowly and methodically from
room to room, and consisted principally of looking at clothing for traces of blood (one of the victim’s
had been stabbed in the ear with an icepick). As late evening turned to early morning, the rooms of
the house were sprayed with luminol. In the
bathroom, right next to the bathtub on the floor tile, an
outline of a hand developed as the luminol was applied. Up to now, Butts had been cooperative but
noncommittal, consistently denying his involvement in anything illegal. After a discussion with the
detectives, he was brought into the bathroom and the luminol reapplied. The outline once again
appeared, glowing up at him out the dark. The criminalists explained to him that this chemical reacted
with blood, and he was viewing the result of a bloody hand in contact with the floor. According to
detectives, when he left the bathroom, he went to the couch, sat down, and
confessed completely to
his role in the murder, as well as Bonin’s direction of it.
As Butts began his confession, the detectives asked if he would allow them to videotape the
event. He agreed, and the cameras were summoned. Recall that this incident took place in 1980, and
camcorders were not even a Sony dream yet. It took several hours for the video section of one of the
jurisdictions to respond and set up its equipment. But this decision to document the scene via
videotape paid big rewards.
As the accomplice started to talk about his involvement on tape, and to narrate the details of
the crime, it was clear that he was enjoying the stardom. Sensing this, the
detectives asked if he would
walk through the inside and outside of the house, pointing to various locations and discussing how
they were involved in the homicide. To this the (now) suspect agreed, and he gave a thorough and
energetic performance for the camera. At one point, when the detectives asked him about chloral
hydrate (one victim had been poisoned with the substance), he replied that he had thrown the plastic
bottle containing the drug into some bushes around the house. He walked outside, camera following,
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