VIRGINIA TECH: MASS KILLINGS; HOW DO WE COVER IT UP?

As the dust settled and the horror of the Tech massacre began to sink in, there was widespread suspicion the school leadership was trying to figure out how to handle the negative publicity of a double homicide less than two weeks before the largest on-campus fundraiser in the school’s history—was that why there was no warning; was that why there was no lockdown? Surely the upcoming gala was known by these senior administrators who had most likely been involved in discussions during the planning for such an important event. This evidence is circumstantial, but is at least as good as the evidence that allowed police to target Karl Thornhill as the killer in a domestic dispute.

The school’s rush to concentrate on Karl Thornhill, to the exclusion of all other possible murderers, doomed students and faculty in Norris Hall—30 people killed and 17 wounded because of incompetence, poor crime scene investigation, and wishful thinking.

Some argue that it is unfair to criticize Flinchum, Steger, and others because hindsight is 20-20. But I believe it is fair to criticize them for lack of professionalism, poor leadership, and unsound judgments. Consider this, Chief Flinchum prior to April 16, 2007, was extolled by many as “one of the best” in his profession. If this is true, his poor decisions and lack of action when confronted with a murder scene are open to question and are valid areas of criticism.

Flinchum’s actions and inactions on that fateful morning are not only mystifying, but are certainly not commensurate with “one of the best” in his profession. Indeed, his actions on April 16, 2007 are something more akin to an amateurish response than the actions of a senior, professional police officer.

We need to skip forward for a moment until sometime around 6:00 p.m. on April 16, 2007. That is when school President Steger and Larry Hincker, Associate Vice President for University Relations, and possibly the school’s legal counsel, apparently mapped out a strategy for handling the press and fielding questions about the delay in issuing a campus-wide warning.

A press conference was scheduled for 7:40 p.m. that night so they needed a plan and they needed it quickly. The two apparently decided that Steger would read a prepared statement and then the floor would be turned over to Police Chief Flinchum. Flinchum had not been at the Policy Group meetings, the deliberative body that debated when and how to alert the campus, so he wasn’t privy to what the group had discussed that morning. Nevertheless, the chief would field the questions.

Prior to the press conference, at 7:05 p.m., an email detailing specific wording that President Steger would ultimately present at the press conference was prepared on the laptop of Virginia Tech’s head of University Relations, Larry Hincker. The email could then be forwarded to his computer for printing for release to the media.  At a trial five years later, Hincker—under oath—denied that he had written the email on his laptop and had no idea who had composed it, yet it was sent from that laptop to himself, and was read almost verbatim by Steger 30 minutes later on television in front of reporters.

The prepared statement read by Steger included an erroneous timeline of events, along with other untruths. The incorrect timeline identified 7:30 a.m. as when a “person of interest” was identified, and police were already searching for him. But, as we have already shown, “the person of interest,” Karl Thornhill was not identified until the questioning of Heather Haugh over an hour later—sometime between 8:15 and 8:30 a.m. The school needed a 7:30 a.m. time in order to give them some degree of cover for the delay in notifying the campus.

I have serious doubts about the statements made by Hincker relative to his being so clueless about the source and author of what was about to be released to the national media by the school president. It is odd that apparently a phantom got access to Hincker’s laptop at 7:05 p.m., typed a timeline that lied about key aspects of the crime, sent it to Hincker, and then left before the real Hincker returned to his keyboard. Following that, the document mysteriously was printed for the president of the school to hand out to the press corps, presenting false information as fact, and getting these inaccuracies into the public record—yet still its origin is unknown. Granted, there was a great deal of confusion and angst that day, but by anybody’s standards the strange comings and goings regarding Hincker’s laptop stretch the limits of credibility.

Even if you accept the phantom timeline writer, it is hard to explain why Chief Flinchum, who knew there was no person of interest until after 8:30 a.m., remained silent at the time of the press conference and for a very prolonged period of time thereafter. In fact, he did more than just remain silent; at one point he apparently contradicted himself and verified the lie.

In March of 2012, during the trial where Virginia Tech, as agent of the state, was found guilty of negligence, the Roanoke Times reported that retired Virginia State Police Superintendent Gerald Massengill, chairman of the Virginia Tech Review Panel appointed by Governor Kaine, testified under oath that Flinchum and Blacksburg Police Chief Kim Crannis had both verified the erroneous timeline in a private meeting with Massengill held in June of 2007. The meeting attendees were purposely limited because had their numbers exceeded a certain level, then, by law, the meeting would have to have been open to the public.

What is even more egregious is that in May of 2007, just one month earlier, Flinchum had presented the timeline of events to the Virginia Tech Review Panel in a PowerPoint presentation which was published almost verbatim in the official report released by then-Governor Tim Kaine in August of 2007, which actually showed the correct start time of the interview.  I say “almost verbatim” because even though Flinchum’s PowerPoint presentation of May, 2007 showed the critical interview of Heather Haugh actually began at 8:16 a.m., and led to the identification and search for a person of interest almost thirty minutes later, the false timeline entry surrounding that event remained in the official record.

True, over one year later Flinchum would finally lay out the correct timeline. However, that correction was only made after approval of a legal settlement offer was accepted by all but two of the families. Prior to the settlement, there was no mention of the false timeline, or other errors, by anyone from the school, former panel members, or the state.  His silence on this critical point, particularly early on, is troubling because the incorrect timeline made it into the first official version of the Governor’s Review Panel’s report. The motivation for not correcting the timeline may have been a recognition that the correct timeline could have undercut and negatively impacted the tremendous pressure being placed on the families to settle with the state of Virginia.

Another complete falsehood contained in Steger’s comments dealt with whether the campus had been notified and warned of the homicide at West Ambler Johnston Hall. According to the school president, the answer was—of course. At the press conference, and in the press release, Steger stated that the school had been notified of a “homicide.” That simply is not true. “A shooting incident,” the exact words found in the first email sent to the campus at 9:26 a.m., is not a double homicide; “police are on the scene and are investigating,” in no way indicates that the murderer is unidentified and is still at large.

It is impossible to disguise or gloss over these errors in information and evidence gathering. The “love triangle” was allowed to stand, and then for reasons no one has explained, the police built on that theory, calling the double homicide “targeted” killings, making the murders and murderer seem less a threat to the campus at large. Where did Flinchum and the Virginia Police come up with that? The term “targeted” was apparently an afterthought as police kept looking for excuses. “Targeted” is not used in the timeline of events in the Governor’s Review Panel report and only gains prominence in testimony given at the trial in connection with lawsuits the Peterson and Pryde families filed against Virginia Tech. A murderer is a murderer. There is absolutely no way to measure the threat posed until the killer is in custody. There is no reason to ever say that a murderer is not a threat. But the school and law enforcement argued that because this was “domestic” or “targeted” there was no urgency to warn.

Let’s take a closer look at the words “targeted killings.” According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “targeted killings” refers to the killing of individuals whom the U.S. government deems to be an enemy. The ACLU says this about “targeted killings:” “The CIA and the military are carrying out an ‘illegal killing’ program in which people far from any battlefield are determined to be enemies of the state and are killed without charge or trial. The executive branch has, in fact, claimed the unchecked authority to put the names of citizens and others on ‘kill lists’ on the basis of secret determination, based on secret evidence that a person meets a secret definintion of the enemy.”  Indeed, most authorities who have looked at “targeted killings” refer to it as an intentional killing, by a government or its agents of persons who are allegedly taking part in an armed conflict or terrorism, whether by bearing arms or otherwise, and who have allegedly lost the immunity from being targeted that they would otherwise have under the Third Geneva Convention.

I think what the Virginia Tech Police really meant when they used the term “targeted killings” was a completely different term and concept: “targeted violence.” “Targeted violence” is used by specialists who study violent crimes and is a completely different concept from “targeted killings.” “Targeted violence” has been used in discussing school safety, but from what I can determine, it does not apply to a love triangle on a campus, anywhere. Did Flinchum really mean “targeted violence?” The mixing of the terms “domestic incident,” “targeted violence,” and “targeted killings” gives credence to the fact that the label “targeted killings” was applied in a rush, without thought, and as part of an afterthought to provide an excuse for both the police’s and school’s inaction.

Another nagging question is why there was no campus lockdown.

One of the excuses repeated by school officials is that they did not call for a campus lockdown because they wanted to avoid a panic similar to the one that occurred in the late summer of 2006 when William Morva escaped from custody in Blacksburg and killed two people.

On August 20, 2006, Morva, while awaiting trial for armed robbery, was taken from the Blacksburg jail to the Montgomery Regional Hospital for treatment of a sprained ankle and wrist. After using the bathroom, Morva assaulted and knocked out deputy Russell Quesenberry with a metal toilet-paper holder. He then took the officer’s gun and killed Derrick McFarland, a hospital security guard.

The next morning, on August 21, 2006, Morva shot and killed Montgomery County sheriff’s deputy Eric Sutpin. In response, Virginia Tech canceled classes and closed the campus—a lockdown. In other words, the school locked down even though the victims were not students and there was no evidence the killer was on the campus. Later on the 21^st, Morva was captured hiding in a briar patch 150 yards from where he killed Sutpin.

When asked why Virginia Tech did not follow its own example of eight months earlier, President Steger and others in the school administration said they did not want a repeat of the panic that occurred at that time. The only problem with that is in talking to people who were there at the time and reading the newspaper accounts, there was no panic anywhere on the Tech campus. (To be continued)

           

           

PART II--VIRGINIA TECH: WISHFUL THINKING, INCOMPETENCE, BUNGLING

As far as I have been able to ascertain, it took a little over an hour after the shootings took place to identify Ryan Clark, the RA in West Ambler Johnston Hall. But the timeline in the Governor’s Review Panel Report does not pin down the precise time of the identification.

You may be saying that this delay is not too bad. And, in and of itself, you are probably right. But coupled with the rest of what was going on at the crime scene, it is another indication of the lack of coordination and communication among those who were at West Ambler Johnston Hall. It would seem that despite the presence of an experienced police chief, Wendell Flinchum, there was little or no organization or systematic approach to investigating the crime scene.

A good crime scene investigator considers all possibilities and rules nothing out. Who might have committed the murder, was it a random act of violence, was it a robbery or drug deal gone bad? Nothing should be excluded and while a suspect may be identified in the interview process, no one suspect or person of interest should be singled out to the exclusion of others—particularly in the absence of strong evidence. So how did it happen that Chief Flinchum focused the investigation on Karl Thornhill, Emily Hilscher’s boyfriend, as the only person of interest?

Let’s take a closer look at this “person of interest.” Who decided that the West Ambler Johnston crime scene was a “domestic incident?” When was that decision made? How was the conclusion reached that murderers in a domestic crime should not be considered a threat to others?  The only evidence that Flinchum had to support his belief that this was a domestic incident appears to be that one of the victims was male and the other female—and, that they were clad only in their pajamas and underwear respectively. It does not appear that the trousers flung on the bed of the next-door room, left unoccupied and with the door hanging open, were taken into account.

A far more likely explanation of the crime scene was that what Ryan Clark had heard concerned him so much that he didn’t take time to put his pants on before going to investigate. He was probably the only person, and certainly the last, to hear Emily’s cry for help. He did the heroic thing—he went to her aid. But, the police, because the two were not fully dressed, put the tawdriest explanation on what they found—the two must have been having sex; the shootings must have been part of a love triangle. It apparently was beyond the investigating officers’ thinking that what they found could be anything else but some spin on a sex crime. The exact opposite appears to be the truth—Ryan Clark died a hero’s death.

Let’s look more closely at the question of issuing a warning and instituting a lockdown. Only the Virginia Tech police and the school’s Policy Group know what took place in the deliberations and conversations following the double homicide at West Ambler Johnston Hall. Only they know if a lockdown was suggested; only they know if and how vigorously a campus-wide warning was recommended—and by whom. And they are not talking.

A key concept in crime scene analysis is the “person of interest;” the identification and apprehension of such a person is key to any investigation, and especially important in a violent crime. First, a reasonable suspicion of who may have committed the crime—based on facts—must be determined. Then, if that person is still at large, investigators must determine whether that person is planning to engage in further criminal activity. Only once investigators have the evidence to substantiate their suspicion, should they identify that individual as a “person of interest.”

These principles were violated at Virginia Tech. The Virginia Tech police identified Karl Thornhill, Emily Hilscher’s boyfriend, as a “person of interest” and concentrated on him to the exclusion of all else. The “evidence” pointing to the boyfriend was a photo of Thornhill holding a rifle, not a pistol, at a firing range.

In fact, a large number of college-age males in southwestern Virginia own guns and many go to firing ranges or engage in target practice. On this basis alone, any number of young men in West Ambler Johnston Hall could have been designated a “person of interest.” There was no evidence in the room or from witnesses that Karl Thornhill had been there that morning, and no hints that the couple had been unhappy.

Compounding the error was the fact that the police and school proceeded as if they had found their killer. By zeroing in on Karl Thornhill, Chief Flinchum and all the police investigators violated one of the very basic tenants of crime analysis: they believed what they wanted to believe, they assumed someone was guilty with the flimsiest of evidence and apparently excluded other possible culprits in their investigation.

Flinchum and others may try to argue that it was reasonable to focus on Karl Thornhill. Reasonable suspicion, however, is determined from the totality of the circumstances and information known to the investigating officers. There was no totality of evidence pointing toward Thornhill. Reasonable suspicion is subject to neither wishful thinking nor is it subject to formulaic analysis in the absence of evidence. Crime scene investigators should never zero in on one suspect to the exclusion of others. This basic mistake by Flinchum, and others, would become a mutating monster at Norris Hall in less than two hours.

In examining the missteps of the investigating officers in the early hours of April 16, 2007, you have to look at the questioning of Emily Hilscher’s roommate Heather Haugh. If the police suspected that the murders were the result of a domestic dispute such as a love triangle, what better person to ask that than Haugh? Yet, there is no evidence such a question was asked.

Had anyone thought to follow up on the possibility of a love triangle with any of the dorm residents, rather than assuming it was true based on the location and genders of the bodies, investigators could have quickly found out that Ryan Clark had no interest in Emily Hirscher beyond her being a student he was assigned to help and watch over in his role as a RA. Hilscher had none in him, other than as a neighbor, RA, and possibly the person who answered what may have been her last cry for help.

As far as I can tell, no one asked Heather Haugh about the relationship between her roommate and her RA. Haugh returned to the dorm room at 8:14 a.m., an hour after the shooting, 45 minutes after Spencer had arrived, and only 14 minutes after Chief Flinchum. Shortly after that point in time the police had to know that Emily Hirscher was the wounded student (although the timeline of the Review Panel Report does not specifically state the time of Hilscher’s identification). It is not until the questioning of Haugh begins that the police identify Hilscher’s boyfriend, Karl Thornhill, as the person of interest and that takes place sometime around 8:30 a.m. A lookout for Karl Thornhill was issued between 8:30 a.m. and 8:40 a.m. However, although he was a “person of interest” and a student at Radford University, apparently Virginia Tech police did not notify the Radford University police of that fact for some time. This delay in asking for help to find Thornhill, “a person of interest” in a double homicide, is puzzling.

Strangely, President Steger would claim at a press conference on the evening of April 16^th that Thornhill was a “person of interest” at 7:30 a.m. Only years later, and following a painful jury trial, did families find out for certain that such timing was impossible.

Still, it is clear that by 8:40 a.m. the university police had decided on a suspect and issued a be-on-the-look-out for him. It is also clear that the young man was not in custody, and the police did not know where he was. They had delayed in contacting Thornhill’s school, and so they could not confirm whether he was in class or at his dorm. What they did have was thirteen bloody footsteps leading away from a double murder scene, and someone with a gun, whether it was Thornhill or not, potentially loose on their campus.

Still no warning was issued. It was not until 9:26 am that the school issued a notification reading: “A shooting incident occurred at West Ambler Johnston Hall earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating.”

All references to a homicide and a possible active shooter were absent from the notice; there was no mention of the fact that the killer was armed, dangerous, and still at large.

The police said they locked-down one building on the morning of April 16, 2007, and that was West Ambler Johnston Hall. But even then, they got it wrong. Despite statements that the dormitory was “locked down” while the building was being searched, in fact it was not. Students still had access into and out of the building. Students such as Henry Lee and Rachael Hill were allowed to leave the building during that time period to go to their French class—where both would later be killed. The two arrived at class sometime between 9:15 a.m. and 9:30 a.m., just minutes before Cho. A particularly heart-wrenching aspect to this story is that Hill, while walking across campus, called her parents to tell them there had been a shooting in her dormitory, but she was OK.

Cho’s rampage began at 9:40 a.m.

The bottom line is that at the one place where the police instituted a lock- down, they didn’t get it right. If a true lock-down had been in place, Hill and Lee would be alive today. (To be continued)

PART I--VIRGINIA TECH: WISHFUL THINKING, INCOMPETENCE, BUNGLING

The immediate goal of the investigating officer when he or she arrives on the scene is to gain, as much as possible, a clear understanding of what has happened. Common sense mingles with keen observational skills. Theories about what happened are fine—that is part of the initial investigative process. But investigating officers should never zero in on a theory or theoretical suspect to the exclusion of all else, particularly when there is little evidence to go on.

If the crime is violent, one of the critical questions is, “Is there a blood trail leading away from the victim(s)?” If there is, that trail tells an investigator that the perpetrator is on the loose. The blood trail also dictates that the investigating officer(s) do everything possible to warn and alert that a murderer is at large. This is simply common sense meeting harsh reality. Indeed, notifying the campus community when a dangerous criminal is loose is part of most universities’ emergency plans, including Virginia Tech’s.

I have to reluctantly conclude that the failure of the Virginia Tech police and other law enforcement officials to follow this elementary first step in crime scene analysis doomed thirty people at Norris Hall. Indeed, in reviewing media accounts of the morning of April 16^th and the court room testimony concerning that same time frame, it is clear that law enforcement personnel involved in investigating the crime scene violated a basic principle in crime scene analysis, which is that investigating officers need to make decisions that will help prevent follow-on violence and crimes related to the one being investigated. But you, the readers, can judge for yourselves.

Let’s look at the events of the morning of April 16, 2007 and what the police found and did.

Somewhere between 7:05 a.m. and 7:12 a.m. a then unknown gunman shot a black male and a white female in room 4040 of West Ambler Johnston Hall on the Virginia Tech campus. A call was made to the campus police saying someone had heard a noise and that a female may have fallen out of bed.  The rescue squad was sent to the dormitory, arriving sometime between 7:21 a.m. and 7:24 a.m. 

When the Virginia Tech police arrived at room 4040 on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston Hall, there were two bodies on the floor—one dead and one severely wounded. A black male was lying up against the room door. He had been shot in the face and bled profusely before dying. The other was a young white female barely alive with a wound to the top and back of her head. She had been shot at a downward angle and the bullet had exited her jaw. The police found two spent 9 mm shell casing indicating the weapon was a semi-automatic pistol, but there was no pistol. The absence of the murder weapon eliminated the possibility of a murder suicide.

There were thirteen bloody footprints leading away from the murder scene, apparently made from a size 10 sneaker. The footprints headed down the hall and stopped at the door of a stairwell—one of 12 entry/exit points in the building. There was a bloody thumbprint on the stairwell door handle. The stairwell leads to the ground floor and to a door exiting the building. All indications were that the killer was on the loose, was possibly still on the campus, and that the killer was almost certainly armed and dangerous. At that moment (sometime around 7:30 a.m.), a warning was justified and called for.

No warning went out.

Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum was notified of the murder and wounding around 7:40 a.m. and immediately tried to reach the office of the school’s Executive Vice President. Court records indicate that at 7:51 a.m. he contacted the Blacksburg Police Department and requested “technical assistance.” A few minutes later, at 7:57 a.m., he got through to the Executive Vice President’s office and notified them of the shooting. At approximately 8:00 a.m. Chief Flinchum arrived on the scene.

At this point, the investigation of the crime was fully and squarely in the hands of Virginia Tech Chief of Police Wendell Flinchum. He was running the show and making all the decisions. Flinchum had an excellent reputation and was well thought of in the law enforcement community in southwestern Virginia. His background included ten weeks of training at the Basic Police Academy and in 2005, and he had been nominated for and was sent to the FBI for training that included 44 hours of homicide instruction. His nomination for this training at Quantico was, to use his own words, a special “honor.”

By this point it was nearly an hour since the shootings occurred and according to court documents, no one was looking for a shooter on campus. No one had issued a be-on-the-lookout for the killer, especially one with bloody clothes and shoes.

One of Flinchum’s first actions was to assign the homicide to a young detective with no prior homicide training and no homicide schooling of any kind. The detective however, did follow good police procedure and began to interview people on the fourth floor. She learned that a number of them had heard screams and loud bangs, but there were no eyewitnesses.

Chief Flinchum later testified on the witness stand that he never raised the subject of a campus lockdown with school president Charles Steger. In fact, he even went so far as to say that if he considered issuing a warning that morning, he doesn’t recall it. The chief also testified that he had the authority to issue a warning per published university procedure, but did not because the police did not have the technical means to do so and the evidence suggested the shooter posed no threat to the wider campus.

What evidence gave that suggestion? The two bodies—one dead and one dying? The gunshot wounds? Or perhaps it was the bloody footprints leading out of the building? In the first hour or two following the double homicide there was a dearth of evidence. About the only intelligent thing you could say was the killer was out there somewhere, might be on campus, and was armed and dangerous.

We know at this point that President Steger and Chief Flinchum were in contact though we have no way of knowing what was said. However, notes taken by Kim O’Rourke and Lisa Wilkes at the Policy Group meeting convened to discuss the shootings, state the police (read Flinchum) indicated there was no need to rush to warn or to lockdown the campus. (Two families whose daughters were killed at Tech, the Petersons and the Prydes, refused to settle with the state and sued Virginia Tech. I will discuss the discrepancies between Chief Flinchum’s statements on the stand later. Chief Flinchum claims that the idea of warning was not considered in his communications with the Policy Group, but President Steger testified at the Pryde and Peterson trial that Flinchum indicated there was no need to rush to warn the campus. No one has explained this inconsistency and no one has ever adequately explained why or how Flinchum felt there was no need to rush to warn or lockdown.)

While all of this was going on, the young man and the young woman in room 4040 were yet to be identified by the police. There were pictures of Emily Hilscher and Heather Haugh, with their names, on the door of dormitory room 4040. The wounded female student was almost certainly one of those young women. It is not unreasonable to think that the medics who worked on Emily would have been able to quickly recognize her features from the photo on the door. For that matter, the university had records of who lived in that dorm room and neighbors could also have provided names. Emily remained, for the moment, unnamed.

Ryan Clark, who was a Resident Advisor (RA) for the dorm, lived in room 4042, next to the crime scene. His name was on the door. The door to that room was open and pair of trousers had been thrown on the bed. The young man in 4040 was found in his undershorts. The police had still not made an official identification at the one-hour mark.

 

Unofficially, however, the cleaning staff had already identified the male victim. We know that because Ed Spencer, the Associate Vice President for Student Affairs, knew Clark and knew that he was gay. Soon after the shootings Spencer had been informed by a member of the cleaning staff that the “RA had been murdered” in West Ambler Johnston Hall. To quote from the Petition for Rehearing, Record No. 121717, “Ed Spencer, Associate Vice President for Student Affairs, arrived on the scene [Norris Hall] shortly before 8:00 a.m. He informed police that the RA ‘was active in the gay community,’ thus negating the sexual-liaison theory.”

Even if no one had told Spencer, it would have taken him a very short time to realize that the murdered male was Ryan Clark. Because Spencer knew Clark, he should have reported instantly who the murdered black male was. It seems logical that Spencer could have provided assistance in identifying the female victim as well, or at least with contact information for the two females listed as living in that room. As far as the records show, none of that happened.

It is odd that the cleaning staff identified Ryan Clark within 30 minutes of the shooting, but the police did not. The failure of the police to at least give a tentative identification of the victims is puzzling. It is also puzzling that police decided the double homicide was a domestic incident—a love triangle. As already noted, Ryan Clark was gay. Spencer knew that and even if he had not, one question by the investigating officers to any student on the fourth floor of West Ambler Johnston Hall would have put the domestic incident theory to rest. (To be continued)