II
“Killing for Me Was Just Like Second Nature”
All in the Family
In real life, there are no violent criminals as brilliant or “glamorous” as Hannibal Lecter—anyone who says there are hasn’t met them. Ever since I first started talking to killers, I’ve been determined to see and show these guys (and very occasionally, women) for what they really are. Such was the case when I was approached about doing an interview with an inmate named Joseph Kondro—not by a parole board but as part of a documentary television program.
A television producer who had followed my career approached me on behalf of MSNBC. He had been intrigued with the prison interviews with killers that my bureau colleagues and I had done, and he realized that this foundation of the behavioral profiling program—the one-on-one confrontation with a killer—could be turned into gripping television. As disgusted as I was with the spate of so-called reality programs that focused on manufactured adventure, phony romance, instant stardom, and above all, the systematic humiliation of seemingly ordinary people, I had to agree. The many times when I’ve faced off against killers who would have been just as happy to murder me as talk to me have been among the most intense experiences of my life.
Because let’s be honest: The fascination with “true crime” is actually fascination with what writers and philosophers call the human condition. We all want to know and understand the basis of human behavior and motivation, why we do the things we do. And with crime, we are seeing the human condition writ large and at the extremes, both for the perpetrator and for the victim. In a very real sense, the television audience was after the same thing I was: a wider and deeper understanding of the criminal mind. And I do think there is a strong value in letting a large audience see what the face of evil really looks like. If we could find the right subjects to interview, what I wanted and what the television producers wanted would not be in conflict.
With the prison interview as the centerpiece of each program, the rest of the show would be supported with news clips, photos, and other documentary evidence of the crime and the killer, together with on-camera interviews with survivors, detectives, prosecutors, and others involved with the crime—similar to what an actual case investigation would be like. I agreed to do an episode, with the provision that I would have some level of control over the finished product. While I have no objection to playing off the ongoing fascination with the evil of violent crime as long as it leads to greater understanding and insight, I adamantly refuse to have anything to do with sensationalizing or glorifying the perpetrators.
The biggest problem with the television concept was a practical one: It’s a lot harder to access serial killers for interviews than it used to be. Even for interviews that are strictly law enforcement related, the days of simply showing up at a prison and presenting your credentials as Bob Ressler and I used to do are long gone. Not only does the inmate have to give informed consent, but there are so many rules relating to safety, criminal process, and correctional system bureaucracy that getting in to see violent offenders is extremely difficult.
Because I was no longer in the FBI, I couldn’t compel an inmate to talk to me, so we went through the whole procedure that began with writing to wardens and asking for their cooperation. This can be a big hurdle, because for obvious reasons, prisons are highly controlled and regimented. Everyone gets up at the same time, eats at the same time, and goes to bed at the same time, so conducting an extensive interview with one of the inmates disrupts the order of things.
I was looking for someone who fit the definition of a violent predator, but I was also trying to find an individual whose M.O. was different from anything I had encountered before, because I’m always trying for new insights that can expand our understanding of the criminal mind. And it was through this process of searching for someone willing to talk that I came across Joseph Kondro.
You never know for sure why certain incarcerated predatory offenders agree to talk to you. Some are bored. Some think you might be able to help get them out, like Joseph McGowan. There is always a flicker of hope, even for those sentenced to life without parole. Some think they can get better treatment or respect from the administration and staff by cooperating with federal agents or a former federal agent like me. Others relish the idea of reliving their crimes and feel it gives them status. And still others think of the interview as their self-analysis: They want an interpretation of the crimes they perpetrated. Some violent offenders already know the why of their behavior and embrace the challenge of whether I can discover their motive.
We knew that Kondro had turned down a number of interview requests in the past, which I suspected had something to do with unsolved crimes he didn’t want to talk about. In any event, he would be spending the rest of his life in prison, but that life-span could be reduced considerably if he were charged with and found guilty of another murder that carried the death penalty.
I think the reason he agreed to speak with me was that my background was explained to him and he was “sold” on the insight he could provide law enforcement into his type of predator, which would help identify and catch other similar predators. I’m not sure he cared that much to learn about himself or even to help put others like him behind bars. But any prisoner with a reputation as a child-killer is not a popular guy, with either the staff or the general population, so he might have been doing some image enhancement by sitting down for the interview.
I didn’t have access to the subject’s prison file as I did when I was conducting officially sanctioned interviews, but I was provided with voluminous case materials as well as all of the media reporting, which I spread out on my dining room table. By the time I flew to Washington State, I felt I was pretty well on top of things.
Joseph Robert Kondro was serving a fifty-five-year term at the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla. The former millworker, house painter, and laborer had avoided a death-penalty-eligible trial by copping a plea to the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl in 1996 and admitting to the unsolved murder of an eight-year-old girl in 1985.
What did these two victims have in common other than their preadolescent ages? Kondro was a close friend of both girls’ families. And in my mind, that made him a standout interview subject. Over the course of my career, I have gotten used to gory crime scenes. It’s far more horrifying to work my way into the psyches of those who produce them.
What kind of guy rapes and kills the children of people he knows well and who consider him a friend? What goes through his mind as he is planning and carrying out the crime? This is what I had to find out.
Kondro was also a prime suspect in the 1982 strangulation murder of eight-year-old Chila Silvernails in Kalama, Washington. Chila was last seen on her way to catch the school bus. Her strangled, naked body was discovered the next day in a creek bed. No arrests were made. Kondro had dated Chila’s mother.
I had read an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in which he claimed that since his incarceration he had returned to the belief of his Chippewa ancestors that requires people to atone for their misdeeds and try to correct them before they die; otherwise, their souls would be doomed to torment in the spirit world. I didn’t know how much of this to believe, though criminals sometimes do find spiritual awakening in prison. But I intended to ask him why he had agreed to the interview. In the meantime, I had to prepare myself with everything I could find out about Joseph Robert Kondro and his crimes. Despite the fact that this interview was for a television program rather than a criminological study, I would conduct it the same way, following a huge amount of research, case file review, and preparation. I was talking to a killer, and as such I had to be prepared for whatever he turned out to be.
JOSEPH KONDRO WAS BORN MAY 19, 1959, IN MARQUETTE, MICHIGAN, TO A NATIVE American mother from the Chippewa tribe who already had six children and didn’t feel she could care for another. She gave him up at birth and he was adopted by John and Eleanor Kondro, a white couple in Iron River, Michigan, where he grew up, before moving to Castle Rock, Washington. John was an aluminum worker for Reynolds Metals. Kondro later said his parents considered adopting him a mistake.
As a child, he had a difficult time adjusting, was fond of carrying a knife with him, and hung out with a group that tortured and killed small animals and pets they found in the neighborhood. Along with fire-starting and late-age bedwetting, this is one of the predictors of violent criminal activity that we see over and over again. Of the components of this “homicidal triad,” cruelty to animals is by far the most serious.
The Kondros had tried to raise their son with a strict, middle-class upbringing, but he kept getting into trouble. His father had to bail him out of jail several times and paid for two stints in drug rehabilitation facilities.
By the time he reached his early teens, Kondro was molesting girls at school and in the neighborhood. What would become significant the more I learned was that as he grew older, his victim of preference remained the same age. He was accused of molesting girls and young women several times over the years, but most of the charges were not prosecuted.
On the afternoon of May 15, 1985, just before Kondro’s twenty-sixth birthday, eight-year-old Rima Danette Traxler was on her way home from St. Helens Elementary School in Longview, Washington, a city of about 35,000 on the Columbia River in Cowlitz County. About two blocks from her house, Rima stopped to show a neighbor an art project she had made at school. The third grader was about four-feet-three and forty-five pounds—a beautiful blue-eyed girl with blond hair and a friendly disposition. She was wearing a pink shirt, a tan plaid skirt over white tights, dark brown clogs, and a belted knee-length coat. I stress the details of her appearance because this was the last time she was seen, alive or dead.
When her mother, Danelle Kinne, began to worry about her daughter’s not coming home, she walked to the school to retrace Rima’s route, but saw nothing. When she returned home, she called Joe Kondro, who was an old high school buddy of her husband, Rusty Traxler—Rima’s stepfather—and a good friend of the family. Many years later, Danelle recalled that earlier on the day her daughter disappeared, Joe and Rusty had been sitting on her front porch, drinking beer and laughing while Rima sweated through mowing the lawn. They were making fun of her for being so diligent about keeping the yard neat.
After Danelle’s call, Kondro came over and Danelle even used Kondro’s cell phone to call police. As soon as the announcement of her missing child was published, police and community members launched an intensive search, similar to the one that had been mounted for Joan D’Alessandro. But they couldn’t find any trace of her.
Around the time of the disappearance Kondro was seen in the vicinity, driving to a convenience store to buy beer and cigarettes. He was questioned by the police, but there was nothing to tie him to the missing child. The case remained open and unsolved.
Years passed and Kondro remained free.
Over a decade later, on November 21, 1996, also in Longview, Washington, twelve-year-old Kara Patricia Rudd and Yolanda Jean Patterson decided to skip out of their classes at Monticello Middle School. At the time, Kara and Yolanda were living in the same house together, along with Kara’s mom, Janet Lapray, and her live-in fiancé, Larry “Butch” Holden. Yolanda was Larry’s niece and he had guardianship of her and her brother, Nicholas. And until about a month before their house had another resident: Joseph Kondro.
Kondro was a close friend of Kara’s mom and often stayed with the family. By this time, the thirty-seven-year-old Kondro was the father of six children by three different women, and he didn’t regularly support any of them. Kondro had recently renewed his relationship—and periodic residence—with Larry and Janet because he was between girlfriends; indeed, he had become a regular enough fixture at the house that Kara called him “Uncle Joe.” But his most recent stay had come to an abrupt halt after Janet and Larry threw him out when his drinking and drug use became intolerable. Janet later said Joe used to come on to her while Larry was away.
On the morning in question, Larry had dropped both girls off at school at 7:15. Around 7:30, a gold 1982 Pontiac Firebird pulled up to the sidewalk abutting the school parking lot; the car belonged to Kondro. According to Yolanda, when the girls spotted the car, she went over and leaned in the window on the driver’s side while Kara got into the car on the passenger side. Shortly thereafter, Kondro rolled up his window, apparently so that he and Kara could have a private conversation. When Kara emerged, she told Yolanda she had asked Joe if he would take her out to pig farmer Pete’s place in nearby Willow Grove so she could play with the piglets. She asked Yolanda if she wanted to come along, but Yolanda said she was afraid of getting in trouble with Larry or Kara’s mom, so she declined and said she was going back to class. With that, Kondro’s Firebird pulled out of the school parking lot. The last time Yolanda saw Kara, she was walking east on Hemlock Street, presumably to meet up with Kondro. Yolanda then went into the school building.
Like Rima eleven years earlier, Kara never returned home. Before that even became an issue, though, the vigilant school principal had called Kara’s mother, Janet, to say that she was absent. When Kara did not return at the end of the day, Janet immediately thought of Kondro and even accused him of abducting her daughter—a conversation that was recorded by a malfunctioning answering machine in Lapray’s home. For some reason, it kept running even after she picked up the phone.
Police instituted a community-wide search and released Kara’s photograph to the Longview Daily News. Pete Vangrinsven, owner of the pig farm Kara wanted to visit, said he had not been home on November 21, but nothing looked disturbed to him and he invited detectives to look around. They found no sign of her. In the meantime, like Kara’s mom, law enforcement focused on Kondro.
Joe Kondro was questioned by police and admitted he had spotted Kara and Yolanda outside the school that morning and had pulled up to talk to them. He agreed that Kara had asked him to take her to the pig farm but said he had refused, told her to get out of the car, and warned them to go back to school. He said that both young teens were good girls, but that every teenager gets into mischief. According to Kondro’s account, he stopped at the Hemlock Store for a cup of coffee, and then drove out to Marthaller’s Log Yard to look for a job. The office was locked, and though he did see men working out in the yard, the ground was muddy, and he didn’t want to get out of his car, which nonetheless became stuck in the mud.
As part of their thorough examination of anyone connected with Kondro, Longview police department detectives interviewed Julie West, Joe’s ex-wife, with whom he had two children and with whom he was currently living. He felt free to come and go because she had previously kicked her current husband out of the house. Julie told them Kondro was subject to violent rages and had assaulted her on a number of occasions, including tearing her clothes off one time when she was pregnant with their child, and ripping a sink off the bathroom wall. She finally had to obtain a restraining order against him, which led him to seek a divorce. That didn’t end their relationship, though, and she got pregnant by him again one night when they had both been drinking heavily. Another time when he was at her house, he became belligerent and she threatened to call the cops. Kondro warned her that if she tried to, he would rip the phone out of the wall.
Julie said that at around 11:45 on the morning of Kara’s disappearance, Kondro came over to her house to take their son to school. When Kondro returned about 12:30, he asked her to take a ride with him to apply for a job at Industrial Paints. As they passed Marthaller’s Log Yard he commented that he had stopped there earlier to ask about employment but didn’t get out of the car because of the mud. West thought this was curious, since she didn’t notice any mud on the tires, fenders, or body of the Firebird.
Then there was the hairbrush. As she had climbed into the car, the passenger seat was all the way back, so she slid it forward. When she did, she noticed a hairbrush under the seat. She described it in detail: black with white bristles that were black at the tips. Some of the bristles were missing and others appeared chewed up. Later in the day, she spoke with Janet and asked if Kara had a hairbrush like that. Janet said that Kara always carried a hairbrush and that she thought it sounded like hers.
While Julie West was quite forthcoming, Kondro’s current girlfriend, Peggy Dilts, was not. Together Kondro and Peggy had a daughter, Courtney, and Peggy did not want to cooperate with the police and forbade them from speaking to Courtney alone.
Peggy’s lack of cooperation couldn’t prevent other parts of Kondro’s story from falling apart. Two clerks who worked at the Hemlock Store and knew Kondro said they had not seen him at the time he said he’d been in there. Similarly, an employee of Marthaller’s said he would have seen anyone who came in the single entrance to the log yard, and Joe Kondro’s gold Firebird had not been there.
Though Rima’s disappearance from 1985 didn’t immediately come to mind because it had happened so long ago, the idea that two pretty blond schoolgirls in the same town had disappeared under similar circumstances seemed like too much for coincidence. I suspect it had to be on some of the senior police officers’ minds.
Ray Hartley, the lead detective on the case, learned that Kondro had been accused of molesting a friend’s daughter two years before but had been acquitted and that he had been fired from a job in a lumber mill for doing drugs in the parking lot. Around the same time, he had trashed and wrecked the inside of the home of a woman he was dating and threw her pet cages out into the yard. And here’s the part I find incomprehensible and so troubling every time I hear something like this: After the incident, the woman continued seeing Kondro.
Another woman, Crystal Smith, who had dated Kondro the previous spring and had also given him free run of her house, told detectives that he got mean when he drank and even referred to himself as Diablo at such times. She recalled a barbecue in the summer when he had had too much to drink and started slapping around another girlfriend, Vickie Karjola. Smith had to get in between them to stop Kondro’s assault. Kondro was apparently so casual about his female relationships that when detectives questioned him and asked Crystal’s last name, Kondro replied, “I don’t know. We are just good friends.”
While the police were assembling an overall portrait of Kondro’s character as violent and dangerous, they continued to turn up more useful information about Kara’s previous interactions with him. When a detective sergeant questioned Yolanda, she told him that she and Kara had actually skipped school a few weeks earlier so that Joe Kondro could take them out to an abandoned house near Willow Grove where there were a lot of cats and kittens. Kara had wanted to take one of the kittens to give her mother as a birthday present. On that day, he had told the girls to walk away from the school—much as Kara had the day she went missing—so he could pick them up where no teachers could see them. When the detective asked if Yolanda had ever been in a car with Kondro before that, she said he had taken her, Kara, and his daughter Courtney swimming and camping along the Toutle River, up Interstate Highway 5. It had been cold, and they’d stayed only one night.
When the police were finally able to interview Courtney at the police station in the Hall of Justice, she admitted that her father could be “kinda mean,” and that he had slapped her on occasion and thrown her around for talking back to him. He had hit her sister April in the head with his open hand a couple of weeks before. She also said that until he moved in about two months before, she hadn’t really known him well, to the point that she called him Joe rather than Dad. Courtney said she overheard Kondro on the phone conversation he had with Kara’s mom, Janet, in which she said she was going to call the cops on him. “Last time I saw her she was in my car and I told her to get out,” Courtney reported her father as saying.
Like her daughter Courtney, Peggy Dilts finally had to speak to police at the station, and when she did, she revealed that Kondro had asked to borrow shovels from her garage. When police checked the garage, two shovels were, in fact, missing.
ONE OF THE THINGS THIS CASE SHOWS IS THAT NO MATTER WHAT SUSPICIONS POLICE or individual citizens may have—even if they have a pretty good narrative of the crime in mind—none of it means anything unless solid evidence can be developed. I often have readers and audience members at my lectures say whatever case I have been discussing didn’t seem like a very difficult one to solve. And in one sense they are correct. Not every case involves complex profiling and investigative analysis. And certainly, not every case is mystery novel material.
But Mark and I have run experiments from time to time where we start by telling our audience who the offender turned out to be and then go through the case from the beginning. When we finish, most of our listeners think the case was pretty straightforward and don’t see why the police had any trouble solving it.
Then we’ll take the same case with a different audience and not reveal who the UNSUB turned out to be. Given the identical case narrative, those groups almost never come up with even the type of person who committed the crime, even if we give them a suspect list.
This is how it was with identifying the main suspect in the Atlanta Child Murders case, Wayne B. Williams. While his profile and apprehension may seem obvious in hindsight, at the time they were anything but.
The Atlanta Child Murders of 1979–1981 put us on the map with law enforcement agencies around the country and overseas. More than twenty African American children and adolescents—mostly male—had gone missing and turned up dead. Many in the police department, the media, and the community at large were convinced the murders were being perpetrated by a Ku Klux Klan–like hate group, intent on intimidating the southern city against its progressive views.
This was one of the ways we were able to get involved with the case, since it was a possible violation of federal civil rights laws. Also, since there were missing children, Attorney General Griffin Bell ordered the FBI to try to determine whether they had been kidnapped. Following the notorious kidnapping of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh’s baby son in 1932, kidnapping was made a federal offense, allowing the FBI jurisdiction after twenty-four hours had passed. The Atlanta murders were given a bureau major case designation: ATKID.
But when Roy Hazelwood and I went down there at the request of the Atlanta police department and analyzed the cases, we became convinced of two things pretty quickly. First, these were not Klan-like murders; there was no symbolism, no behavior intended to intimidate or cause fear, and no signature or taking credit for the crimes. Moreover, when we visited the sites where the victims had been abducted and/or their bodies found, it became clear that any white person in these overwhelmingly black areas would have stood out and been witnessed by someone, since these areas tended to have activity around the clock. The individual or persons who abducted these young people caused no such sensation. We thought there was a good chance, therefore, that the murderer was African American, even though nearly all the serial killers we had studied thus far had been Caucasian.
In a workroom the police had dedicated to the murders, we went through every case file, read statements from witnesses in the areas where children disappeared and their bodies were found, studied crime scene photographs, and reviewed autopsy protocols. We interviewed family members to see if there was any common victimology.
Most of the victims were pretty streetwise but otherwise naive about the world outside their own neighborhoods and therefore susceptible to the right lure or come-on. Most were also living in pretty significant poverty, so it probably wouldn’t take much to get them to go with a stranger for a modest enticement. To test this out, we had undercover police officers—both black and white—offer neighborhood kids five dollars to come do some job. It worked almost every time, plus proved to us that white men were noticed in these neighborhoods.
In our investigation we did think that two of the victims—both girls—were not part of the overall pattern, since the abduction style and victimology were different. In investigating multiple murders, you have to be extremely careful not to succumb to either linkage blindness or connecting cases that may not be related.
Even though the entire raft of unnatural child deaths was being attributed to one individual or group, we thought a number of the cases bore no evidentiary relationship to the main group. Some could have been copycats, and others simply unrelated child murders that happened to occur around the same time. Records indicated that every year there were about ten to twelve child homicides in the city. Most were personal cause classifications, in which the offender was related to or knew the victim.
We began to construct our profile. Though the vast majority of our serial killer cohort had been white, we’d also learned that these predators tended to hunt for victims within their own race. We were therefore pretty convinced we were dealing with an African American male, since female killers were so rare, and we thought a man would be able to exert more authority over these kids. He would be in his mid-to-late twenties, and homosexually attracted to the young boys, though the lack of sexual assault showed him to feel inadequate or ashamed of his own sexuality. Since the crimes took place at various times, we didn’t expect him to have a steady job, or else he might be self-employed. We expected him to be of above-average intelligence, but an underachiever. And with the sense of authority he would have to exert over his victims, we thought he would be glib and maybe a law enforcement wannabe. If this were true, we would expect him to drive a large, police-type car and possibly have a large dog.
A break came when a tape recording, purportedly from the killer, arrived at the headquarters of the Conyers, Georgia, police department, about twenty miles from Atlanta. There was general excitement, but when I listened to the tape back at Quantico and heard a white man’s voice, I was pretty sure it was a fake. But the speaker mentioned the latest victim and said his body could be found along a certain stretch of Sigman Road in Rockdale County. From the tone and psycholinguistic analysis, I thought this guy felt superior to the police. So I advised them to play to his belief and look on the wrong side of Sigman Road. If he was there watching, maybe they could catch him.
The press covered this search heavily, and as I had suspected, no body turned up. Sure enough, the guy called back to tell the cops how stupid they were. The “stupid” cops were prepared with a phone trap and trace and got the guy, an older white redneck, right in his house, getting rid of that nuisance. Just to make sure, they also went back to make sure there was no body on the right side of Sigman Road.
Soon after, though, the body of a fifteen-year-old black boy was found on Sigman Road, which told us something critical: the UNSUB was reacting to the media and trying to show his own superiority. With that in mind, we suggested several proactive ideas to the police, including hiring amateur “security guards” for a large concert benefiting the victims’ families. But by the time my idea was approved by the assistant attorney general, it was too late.
When the next body was found, the medical examiner announced that hair and fiber matched that of five previous victims. Since we knew the UNSUB was following the media, I was convinced the next body would be dumped in a river, where such evidence would be washed away. It took a while to organize all the local law enforcement departments to a river surveillance. By then, a thirteen-year-old boy was found in the South River and then two more, a twenty-one-year-old and another thirteen-year-old, had been discovered in the Chattahoochee, the waterway that forms the northwest border between Atlanta and Cobb County. Unlike the previous fully clothed victims, these three had been stripped to their underwear, presumably to remove hair and fiber.
Over a month later, the local agencies were losing patience with the river surveillance when a police academy recruit named Bob Campbell, on his final shift on the Chattahoochee beneath the Jackson Parkway Bridge, saw a car drive across the bridge and stop briefly in the middle. Campbell heard a splash, directed his flashlight to the water’s surface, and saw ripples. The car turned around and drove off, where a stakeout car was waiting that Campbell directed to follow.
The driver was a twenty-three-year-old African American named Wayne Bertram Williams, who politely told the officer he was a music promoter who lived with his parents. When the body of a previously missing twenty-seven-year-old black male was found downstream, Williams was placed under intense, “bumper-lock” surveillance.
Williams fit our profile extremely closely, including the police-type vehicle and the large dog. He considered himself superior to the authorities and handled his initial interrogation glibly. When police obtained a search warrant, they found hair and fibers in his car that matched those from the murders we had concluded were linked together.
Williams was tried and convicted for some of the Atlanta child murders. But here we come to the second point of which we were convinced:
In one case in which a teenage girl had been abducted and strangled with an electrical cord, we were sure the offender was a man with documentable mental illness, who had almost certainly spent time institutionalized. The police came up with a suspect who fit our profile, even to wearing the same type of electrical cord to hold his pants up rather than a belt. There was no way, however, to connect this man conclusively to the murder, so it was never brought to trial.
As the Atlanta Child Murders case was wrapping up and Roy Hazelwood and I were getting ready to leave the city, we were talking to the task force psychiatrist and I explained to him how we came to our conclusion about the then-unknown offender.
“How do you know?” the psychiatrist asked.
“From the way he committed his crime,” Roy responded. “We try to think the way he thinks.” We had learned this from Gary Trapnell.
This seemed to intrigue the doctor. He asked, if he were to administer a psychological test to us, would we be able to score as if we had any mental disorder he specified? We said we thought that we could.
He had us each go into a separate room and we had a go at the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)—the most widely used standardized psychological test for adults. We both scored as antisocial personality disorder–psychopathy, coupled with paranoid ideation. The psychiatrist professed surprise. Roy and I were both pretty proud of ourselves. We had proved we could think like the worst of ’em.
The results of this case might all seem clear-cut and obvious in retrospect, but in real time, it was anything but. We could suspect Wayne Williams all we wanted, but until the police could get actual evidence on him, they couldn’t arrest him. Then the prosecution team still had to build the case against him. We may have helped to single out his profile, but that was of course just the start. Putting him behind bars required more than just psychology. And while suspecting someone might be okay for true crime TV pundits and online discussion groups, it doesn’t hold any weight in the real-life criminal justice process. And as I was to learn, Joseph Kondro had thought through this notion quite coherently.
Like Wayne Williams, Kondro continued to be cooperative with the police when he was asked to come down to the station house for questioning. The only times he would become angry were when the detectives would catch him up in a seeming inconsistency. At the conclusion of the session, acting on instructions from the district attorney’s office, Detective Jim Duscha, the lead detective in the case, warned Kondro not to have any contact with Julie West—not to go over to her house, not to speak to her in person or attempt to contact her by telephone. Kondro said he understood.
The next day Duscha received a call from Julie. She said that Kondro had called her that morning, asking what the police had said to her and what she had told them. He told her not to say anything more to the cops nor to tell them about this conversation, since he wasn’t supposed to be talking to her. She responded that she would tell the police everything she knew since she had nothing to lie about.
She told Duscha she was very afraid of Kondro because of his violent nature. “I don’t know what he will do when he finds out I talked to the police,” Duscha quotes her as saying in his written report.
The detective responded to the situation right away and went to the home of a judge to secure an arrest warrant. That afternoon, he and Detective Sergeant Steven Rehame, the case supervisor, drove to Crystal Smith’s house, where Kondro had last been seen. They knocked on the door and Kondro answered. They said they were there to arrest him for tampering with a witness. They handcuffed him and put him in the back seat of the patrol car, where they read him his Miranda rights.
In the interview room at the Hall of Justice, Kondro denied having spoken to Julie West or even knowing she was a witness. Finally, when he felt he had heard enough, Detective Duscha asked Kondro why he would not tell him the truth.
Kondro hung his head for a few seconds, then looked up and said, “I really need a lawyer.” The conversation stopped and the detectives took him to the county jail and booked him on $25,000 bail. It was soon doubled.