Chasing Evil, page 1
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For my kids, Justin and Olivia … I hope this makes you proud.
—JOHN EDWARD
To my children, Connor and Caitlyn. As you journey through life, do not be afraid. You are never alone. Have faith. Thank you for letting me be your dad. I love you both more than I can possibly express.
And to the 10 percent of FBI Agents who do 90 percent of the work.
—ROBERT HILLAND
This book is based on real events. All details are true to the best of the authors’ memories and contemporaneous notes. Some names and details have been changed to protect privacy.
In accordance with my obligations as a former FBI employee pursuant to my FBI employment agreement, this book has undergone a prepublication review for the purpose of identifying prohibited disclosures but has not been reviewed for editorial content or accuracy.
The FBI does not endorse or validate any information that I have described in this book. The opinions expressed in this book are mine and not those of the FBI or any other government agency.
—Robert Hilland
“Evil prospers when good men do nothing.”
—attributed to JOHN PHILPOT CURRAN
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
—DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
PROLOGUE
Little Noah
DUBLIN, VIRGINIA
March 25th, 2015
The phone rang. John. Thank God.
As soon as I picked up, his words were spilling out. He was on fire.
“Bob, you walked right over him!” said John, his sense of immediacy palpable.
“What?”
“Bob. STOP WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW. Turn around. Go back in the direction you came.”
I turned around and started walking back to the tires.
Five-year-old Noah had been missing for three days, and I was stumbling around in the dark, at midnight, trying to find the little boy. I was searching the area between the junkyard and the steep hill behind his parents’ trailer. Hundreds of volunteers had been searching tirelessly, day and night.
“STOP! He’s right there. You just walked over him!”
I started to backtrack. I had the phone in one hand, the flashlight in the other.
“Stop! You’re going the wrong way. You need to go back up the hill. They’re telling me you need to go back up.”
John was talking a hundred miles a minute.
“Go back up the hill and look for that Star Wars toy—the X-wing fighter plane. Bob, the boy is there. I’m telling you.”
I could hear the emotion in John’s voice, and that was unlike him. He was usually clinical and composed when we worked together.
Noah was different for him.
The pure, guileless spirit of that red-haired little boy made the worried, loving father in both of us take over. It was personal. We felt Noah’s innocence and yearning.
He touched our hearts.
Whatever horror befell him, his own father couldn’t protect him. It was now up to John and me …
1
TWO WORLDS
BOB HILLAND, Police Officer, FBI Agent
After seven years as an NJ police officer, I joined the FBI in 1997 as a special agent assigned to the New York office.
I remember the first time I looked into the eyes of evil: the day I first saw killer John Smith.
It was in the fall of 1991, and I was a 23-year-old patrolman in West Windsor Township, New Jersey.
New to the force, I would become painfully aware of the unsavory, dangerous characters that were part and parcel to the job.
I almost died once after a drugged-up jackass dragged me down the highway. I was on routine duty and spotted a stalled pickup in the middle lane of a three-lane roadway. I pulled over to investigate.
As I approached the truck on foot, I could see wild hair and a tattooed neck through the half-open window.
“Good afternoon, sir,” I said. “What seems to be the…”
The driver slowly turned to look at me, pupils dilated and fixed. He took a drag from a joint (laced with PCP, I’d learn later). A crazy-eyed Jesus on acid.
“Out of the car!” I ordered, pulling the door handle. It was locked.
At 6'8" and 250 pounds, I was an intimidating figure. Coworkers at the department nicknamed me “Big Bird” for my size—and later, for the number of collars I brought in.
But Crazy Eyes didn’t flinch. He took another drag and turned away.
I reached through the window for the lock—big mistake. He raised the window, trapped my arm, slipped the truck in gear, and sped off—yanking me with him.
My body slammed against the truck and bounced off the road like a rag doll as I fought from getting sucked under the tires.
“Pull over!” I yelled. “You’re going to kill me!”
Crazy Eyes swerved and slammed against a concrete barrier, releasing my arm and sending me flying. I landed in the middle of four lanes of speeding oncoming traffic.
I scrambled to safety and chased the guy in my car, finally pulling him over and dragging him out of the truck before wrestling him to the ground and cuffing him as backup arrived. At the hospital later, doctors were shocked I had no broken bones or ruptured organs.
After the incident, I realized that the driver was the same man I’d spoken to several days earlier about kicking his drug habit.
As a patrolman, I was dragged down a highway by a criminal high on PCP.
That guy was drugged up, but his crazy eyes were not the eyes of evil—that was reserved for murderer John Smith and his cold, soulless gaze.
At the end of my shift one day in the fall of 1991, I passed through the department’s dispatch area on my way to meet colleagues for a drink.
Through the lobby’s bulletproof glass, a figure caught my attention—a thin, pale man sitting with another officer. He was fortyish and had a meek disposition. He would have disappeared into the colorless background except for his reddish hair and those eyes. Killer eyes. A devil with an innocuous name … John Smith.
April 1992—police photo of John Smith seven months after he reported his second wife, Fran, missing (COURTESY OF THE FBI)
He looked up and our eyes locked.
His were like a shark’s the second before it rips you apart.
From that first moment, it was a battle of wills between Smith and me. We stared, each challenging the other to look away.
I couldn’t. I was seeing something difficult to comprehend—an evil spirit hiding in a human body, daring me to expose it.
We remained locked in our staring contest until the officer asked Smith a question and he looked away.
The date was October 4, 1991, and Smith had come to the department to report his second wife, Fran, missing. I would later learn that Fran was not his only wife to have disappeared. Seventeen years earlier in Ohio, he’d reported his first wife, Janice, missing.
Little did I know at the time that this scrawny man with the eyes of a killer shark would change my life forever.
Little did I know that I’d spend much of the next three decades searching for his missing wives, trying to find justice for them. And that they would haunt the rest of my days and come to me at night in my dreams.
Fran was outgoing and enjoyed posing for photos. (COURTESY OF THE FBI)
Janice Hartman’s high school yearbook photo.
She went missing in 1974,
a few days after her
divorce from Smith was final.
(COURTESY OF THE FBI)
* * *
My role as defender and protector began in childhood, out of necessity.
The eldest of five children, I grew up in a dysfunctional family plagued by trauma, apathy, and alcoholism. As a boy growing up in Brooklyn and later in New Jersey, I took care of and protected my younger siblings. I was the family guardian.
My father, Bob Sr., was Archie Bunker with a drinking problem—the world was black and white to him. My mother, Virginia, grew up with an alcoholic and absent father after losing her mother at an early age. Her upbringing was so tough that the city of New York put her in a shelter to protect her from her own father. Both my parents had unresolved traumas that affected every aspect of our family dynamic. I tirelessly tried to keep the family together while striving to win my parents affirmation.
As a teen I pumped iron and excelled in sports and academics. And I grew, towering over my family, my classmates, my teachers.
I never considered myself a fighter and never looked for trouble. Bu
You’d think my instincts would’ve led me to the police academy, but being a cop never occurred to me. When I joined the police force at age 22, it was by accident. (Although, I’ve learned since that there are no “accidents” or “coincidences” in life.)
I was a junior at Rutgers University studying history when a buddy asked me to go with him to take an entrance exam at the local police department. I aced the test, and if it’s true that biology is destiny, my physique sealed my fate. The department had a winning softball team with a couple of vacancies, and I knew how to swing a bat.
I’d only been on the force for a year, still a rookie, when that drugged-up maniac dragged me down the highway in ’91. I could take the beating; I was used to it. I wanted the tough assignments others didn’t. I wanted to go after the bad guys no one wanted to touch. I liked going into battle, fighting the good fight, then walking off the field when it was over—no accolades or awards required.
My work gave me the validation I needed, the approval I never got from my parents.
It gave me purpose.
* * *
Six years after I looked into John Smith’s predatory eyes, I began a new job: FBI special agent working on New York City’s Cold Case Squad. The squad reexamined unsolved homicide investigations that were stuck in limbo, some for decades.
Our downtown Manhattan office was blocks from the World Trade Center and across from the Supreme Court buildings where Law & Order actors ran amok playing cops and criminals. On coffee breaks, I’d sit on a bench behind 26 Federal Plaza and see them with their cameras and lights, their imaginary world next to our very real one.
It was 1997, the era of Walkmans, fax machines, and pagers. Slow-as-a-snail technology compared to today, but back then it was cutting edge. The streets of New York City bustled with an energy and pace I hadn’t known in Jersey, and I thrived on it.
Inside my new office, the pace was different.
My first day on the job, I found my officemate, Richie DeStano, asleep at his desk with glasses resting on the end of his nose and hands folded on top of his belly. His desk was strewn with coffee-stained files, empty cartons of chow mein from nearby Chinatown, and crumpled coffee cups. He was short and balding, my physical opposite. Someone nudged him awake. With a yawn, he got up and gave me a tour.
“Homicides can be some of the easiest cases to work,” he said. “Bad-Guy-One kills Bad-Guy-Two over money, drugs, power, or a woman. Change the names, dates, and locations, and it’s the same case over and over.”
He grabbed an armload of files from his desk and dumped them on mine.
“Your first cases. Some are old dogs that won’t ever be solved. For others, your murderers are already in prison for something else, or maybe even dead. Don’t kill yourself on them. We got hundreds more,” he said.
Then he pointed at me with a warning.
“And remember,” he added, “big cases, big problems … little cases, little problems. No cases … get the picture?”
I nodded, to be polite. But I was the kind of guy who went big and all the way; I didn’t do anything on a “little” scale.
I made my way through the mountain of files he’d slapped on my desk—faded yellow reports with crime photos dating back years, and sometimes decades.
Does anyone care about these victims anymore?
Someone had to.
* * *
A year later, in the summer of 1998, I was called to testify in some old cases from my police officer days. When court was over, I stopped by my old department to catch up with the guys, walking past that thick, bulletproof glass where I’d seen Smith years earlier. Everybody yelled:
“Hey, Big Bird!”
“Birdman!”
“The Bird!”
Detective Matt Dansman pulled me into his cubicle.
“How’s the FBI treating you, Bird? Are they making you run after Russian spies or something?”
Dansman’s desk was piled high like DeStano’s, with the addition of an unusual item—a cheesy fortune teller’s crystal ball. Dansman sometimes consulted with psychics on cases, and the guys teased him about it, giving him the novelty gift as a joke.
It was a sunny day, and as we talked, a beam of light from a window hit the crystal like a laser. It threw a rainbow of colors onto a bookshelf next to us, illuminating a binder with words in black magic marker:
BETTY “FRAN” SMITH—MISSING PERSON.
As we chatted, I got up and pulled it off the shelf, opening it.
The photo on the first page gave me a jolt.
There he was, that guy from six years earlier with the evil eyes.
Oh, no, not this monster. I turned the page to find photos of his missing wives—Janice Hartman and Fran Smith. Again, I felt a thunderbolt—but this one was different. These women in the photos were strangers to me, but I felt an immediate, emotional, all-encompassing need to help them. As if they were urging me to.
“What’s the status on this, Matt?” I asked, trying to be nonchalant.
“Dead in the water,” he said. “No bodies, no evidence, no crime we can prove. That guy got away with at least two murders that we know of.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the women; Fran’s smile was full of mischief, and Janice looked like someone’s sweet kid sister.
“There must be a way to breathe new life into it. Shake the trees a little?”
“Nope. We did everything. Between here, Ohio, and Connecticut, there’s nothing left.”
I looked into Fran’s lively eyes and remembered Smith in the police lobby, filling out the missing person report on her. Days before, she’d been alive and smiling, like in this photo. I remembered Smith’s eyes challenging me, daring me to catch him.
“Do you mind if I look into it?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? Be my guest!”
It was a reckless move, taking on a hopeless case that was out of my jurisdiction when I had dozens waiting for me on my desk in New York. But as I said, I liked tough assignments. I liked figuring out the impossible. At home, I had a dozen Rubik’s Cubes I twisted and turned until I solved their three-dimensional puzzles. I liked mysteries.
But this went deeper. I was a no-nonsense, follow-the-facts guy. I was brought up a churchgoer and did not subscribe to superstition, hocus-pocus, or the supernatural. Had I believed in such things, I might have said destiny or cosmic forces pulled me to this case. Whatever it was, I couldn’t explain it.
I made a silent vow: no matter how long it took, I was going to find Janice and Fran and put this monster behind bars. Forever.
* * *
“The answer is no, absolutely not,” my supervisor, Stan Nye, said the next day at the New York office. “You’re juggling dozens of cases here already without taking on Jersey’s work, too.”
“Stan, this guy Smith is bad news. Let me do some preliminary work and see what develops?”
Nye shook his head.
I got quiet. My voice took on a tone of urgency.
“This case means a lot to me. Would it be alright if I ran it past Buckbee?”
Dennis Buckbee was Nye’s boss, and no one wanted to deal with him—especially Nye. Buckbee had the temperament of a hurricane. He was born yelling at everyone.
“You’ve got some set of balls, Bob. Go ahead. If he’s good with it, so am I.”
An hour later I was in Buckbee’s office lining up photos of Smith, Janice, and Fran on his desk.
“New Jersey made an official request for our help,” I told him. It was almost the truth.
“So? Forward it to Newark. This doesn’t involve New York. We don’t even have venue.”
FBI offices were territorial and sensitive about poaching cases from other divisions. It was the kind of bureaucracy I hated. I was ready with an answer after skimming the details in the binder.
