It was the same old story. The VICAP profiles were usually dead-on accurate but they rarely led to the acquisition of a suspect. The profile given to Winston could match hundreds, maybe thousands of men in the Los Angeles area. So after all investigative leads were played out, there was nothing to do but wait. McCaleb made a note of the case on his calendar and went on to other cases.
In March of the following year-eight months from the last murder-McCaleb came across the note, reread the file and gave Winston a call. Nothing much had changed. There still were no leads or suspects. McCaleb urged the sheriff’s investigator to begin a surveillance of the two body disposal sites and the graves of the two victims. He explained that the killer was near the end of his cycle. His fantasies would be running dry. The urge to freshly recreate the sensation of power and control over another human would be growing and increasingly hard to control. The fact that the Unknown Subject had apparently dressed the bodies after each of the first two murders was a clear sign of the battle raging inside his mind. One part of him was ashamed of what he had done-he sought in a subconscious way to cover it up by replacing each victim’s clothes. This suggested that eight months into the cycle the killer would be engulfed in tremendous psychological turmoil. The urge to act out his fantasy again and the shame the act would bring were the two sides in a battle for control. One way to temporarily placate the urge to kill would be to revisit the sites of his previous crimes in an effort to bring new fuel to the fantasy. McCaleb’s hunch was that the killer would return to one of the disposal spots or visit the graves. It would bring him closer to his victims and help him stave off the need to kill again.
Winston was reluctant to instigate a multiple point surveillance operation on the basis of an FBI agent’s hunch. But McCaleb had already received approval for himself and two other agents for stake-out duty. He also played upon Winston’s professionalism, telling her that if she didn’t do it, she would always wonder if the stake-out would have been successful, especially if the Unknown Subject hit again. With that kind of threat to her conscience, Winston went to her lieutenant and counterparts on the LAPD case and a surveillance squad was assembled from all three agencies. While planning the surveillance, Winston learned that by coincidence both of the victims were buried in the same Glendale cemetery, about one hundred yards apart. Hearing that, McCaleb predicted that if the Unknown Subject was going to show, it would be in the cemetery.
He was right. On the fifth night of the surveillance, McCaleb, Winston and two other detectives hiding in a mausoleum with a view of both grave sites watched a man drive into the cemetery in a van, get out and climb over the locked gate. Carrying something under his arm, he walked to the grave of the first victim, stood motionless in front of it for ten minutes and then headed to the grave of the second victim. His actions showed a prior knowledge of the location of the graves. At the second grave, he unrolled what turned out to be a sleeping bag on top of the grave, sat down on it and leaned back against the headstone. The detectives did not disturb the man. They were recording his visit with a night-vision video camera. Before long he opened his pants and began masturbating.
Before he returned to the van, the man had already been identified through its license plates as Luther Hatch, a thirty-eight-year-old gardener from North Hollywood released four years earlier from a nine-year Folsom Prison term for a rape conviction.
The subject was no longer unknown. Hatch became a working suspect. When his years in prison were subtracted from his age, he fit the VICAP profile perfectly. He was watched around the clock for three weeks-including during two more visits to the Glendale cemetery-until finally one night the detectives moved in as he attempted to force a young woman leaving the Sherman Oaks Galleria into his van. In the van, the arresting officers found duct tape and clothesline cut into four-foot lengths. After receiving a search warrant, the investigators tore apart the interior of the van as well as Hatch’s apartment. They recovered hair, thread and dried fluid evidence that was later linked through DNA and other scientific analysis to the two murder victims. Quickly dubbed “The Cemetery Man” by the local media, Hatch took his place in the pantheon of multiple murderers who fascinate the public.
McCaleb’s expertise and hunches had helped Winston break the case. It was one of the successes they still talked about in Los Angeles and Quantico. On the night they arrested Hatch, the surveillance team went out to celebrate. During a lull in the din, Jaye Winston turned to McCaleb at the bar and said, “I owe you one. We all do.”
