By NC WANTED Staff

Posted: Nov. 12, 2009
Updated: Nov. 16, 2009

Between January 1996 and February 1997, an unknown man was raping and murdering women on the streets of Raleigh.

His pattern was befriending the victim, followed by sexual assault and strangulation, then leaving the lifeless bodies out in the open or  “displayed."  Many victims were found nude with only shoes and socks.

When investigators arrived at the first murder scene, Patricia Ashe’s body was out in the open behind a building. They didn’t know at first this was the work of a serial killer.

But as bodies of poor black women continued to turn up inside Raleigh’s belt line, authorities began to develop a profile for a nameless, faceless man who was probably living on the streets to avoid detection.

"We had a serial killer and rapist in the City of Raleigh, and I don't think we'd ever seen that before," said Sgt. Judy Sholar, a lead investigator on the case.

To know their perpetrator, they had to know their victims.

“Most had a drug addiction problem. They were out on the streets,” said Rick Poplin, the other lead investigator on the case.

Some victims survived and provided key details.

“They didn’t expect he was a dangerous or evil person. He was able to exhibit one type of behavior, and then another type of behavior shortly after that,” said Sholar.

As many investigators do in serial cases, Poplin and Sholar began formulating an idea of the kind of person who would commit these crimes.

They studied the relationship between the offender and the victims and the victims themselves.

They took their profile to the FBI in Quantico, Va., where the case was given a fresh set of eyes, and where analysts agreed that investigators were on the right track.

Experts say an appropriate time for behavioral analysis, once called profiling, is after all leads have been exhausted and the case is stalled.

The FBI has a unique division that offers resources to local law enforcement agencies.

“It could be the study of an offender, a victimology, or a media strategy,” FBI special agent Paul Minella told NC WANTED. Minella is one of two field coordinators in North Carolina for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit or “BAU.”

"We are there to provide a fresh set of eyes," Minella said.

BAU was recently called in to provide assistance in the Edgecombe County death investigations, where the bodies of six women were found in close proximity.

The murders appear to be related, but Antwan Pittman is charged in only one of the cases.

“I subscribe to the FBI approach,” explained Jon Perry, a 41-year law enforcement veteran trained by the FBI in behavioral analysis. He worked on the high-profile BTK serial killer case in Kansas.

“What the bureau did was they identified 36 serial killers, interviewed them and came up with typologies,” Perry said.

Two of the pioneers in this field are Gregg McCrary and John Douglas, the FBI agent immortalized by the 1991 film “The Silence of the Lambs” and author of the book “Mindhunter.” 

McCrary and Douglas developed the technique in the 1970s, giving birth to a new FBI unit devoted to the psychology and science of analyzing violent crime.

“Psychopaths commit crime because, why not? They have no compunction against hurting others or killing others,” McCrary said. “They’ve done a lot of brain scans and their brains actually fire differently than the brains of non-psychopaths.”

In the mid-1990s, Sholar and Poplin’s instincts were correct when they assigned undercover officers to keep surveillance of certain areas in downtown Raleigh. In February 1997, an officer was in the right place at the right time to spot a woman running from an unidentified male.

The officer arrested the man, and was soon identified as the serial killer, John Williams, Jr. He was a homeless drifter from Georgia, who could interact with others without drawing attention.

“Often times, the killer is the person in the community you don’t see,” Perry said. "You don't see an Igor as a serial killer. He's no smarter than a bucket of hair. It's this guy, the smarter one, able to move in the community and not be seen."

John Williams, Jr. was convicted in 2 murders and 5 rapes and is currently on death row in North Carolina.