Van Zandt: When evil comes knocking

Clint Van Zandt • Profile • E-mail

The trunk of the car was locked.  But the otherwise unremarkable blood stain across part on the inside of the car's interior left rear window forewarned what I was about to find.  A little fingerprint powder failed to raise any latent prints, so I jammed a rusty tire tool under the trunk lock, pushing and prying as hard as I could.  Real life is never like you see in the movies -- everything takes longer and is harder to do.  The lock was slow to surrender the contents of the car trunk, what the British would call the car's "boot."  When the lock finally yielded, and the lid popped open, my eyes met his open, but otherwise sightless eyes.  His complexion was pale, far different than a recent picture of him that I held in my hand.  But the eyes of the man stuffed in the trunk were what caught my attention, his eyes and the hole in the middle of his forehead, the entry wound for a small caliber, semiautomatic bullet.  He was dead, long dead.  Score: evil one, good guys zero.

The call had come in to our local FBI office earlier that day.  It seems that the night before someone had knocked on the front door of the home of a local branch bank manager.  Allowed to enter the home to use the phone, the distressed motorist quickly turned into a gunman who confronted the banker and then held him and the banker's housemate hostage throughout the night, tying them to overhead pipes in the basement of the house as the hours from night to morning slowly passed.    

The next morning the lone gunman told the manager to drive to his bank, take as much money as he could from the vault, and drop it alongside a remote road north of town.  "If you call the police," the manager was told, "your boyfriend is dead."  The bank manager did as instructed, taking thousands of dollars in cash to make the ransom drop.  However, as the bank manager left the bank with the cash, a bank employee called police and the FBI.  When we finally found the banker he told us his harrowing tale, but when we retraced his steps, the bag of cash, was not surprisingly gone.  The kidnapper had already cleared the drop site.      

We found the housemate's car that same day in the parking lot of an apartment building near his home.  We set up a surveillance on the car, hoping that the kidnapper or his victim would soon return.  After waiting a short time, I took another look through the parking lot and glanced inside the car.  When I saw the blood smear on the window I knew this case was not going to have a happy ending.  Instead of a homecoming there was going to be a funeral.     

Pamela Vitale
Some would suggest that an even worse case would be a victim brutally beaten to death with a scrap piece of wooden crown molding by some drugged-up, whacked-out teenage Satanist who for reasons known only to himself chose to carve a kind of cross in his victim's back.  The meaning of the cross is unknown but may represent the conflict between good and evil, between man and monsters, between God and Satan. 

Sixteen-year-old murder suspect Scott Dyleski may have come knocking on the door of Pamela Vitale's residence, or just let himself in.   He was said to be involved in a credit card fraud and believed the marijuana growing paraphernalia that he ordered had been mistakenly delivered to Vitale's residence.  No matter his reason, he is believed to have entered Vitale's home and engaged in a violent fight with her.  She probably knew she was fighting for her life, but evil won again and 52-year-old Pamela Vitale died.

Authorities suspect that Dyleski, who lived just down the hill from Vitale's residence, viciously struck her at least 39 times with his wooden club-like weapon that he probably found at the construction site of Vitale's new, soon to be completed, nearby home.  He is then alleged to have used some type of edged weapon on her, including the cult-like cutting of a type of Lorraine cross into her bare back -- something like a modern day Charles Manson might do. 

Some say that Dyleski functioned on the dark side of teenage behavior, trying as hard as he could to take on a Goth-like appearance.  His "look" was a combination of the black trench coated appearance of fellow teenagers Klebold and Harris, the 1999 Columbine High School shooters, while worshiping, as suggested by others, Satan himself.  Dyleski's black eyeliner and drastic hairstyle provided a living picture of a troubled youth -- something beyond "a mere phase."  But was he "evil" in what he did that night?  Was his alleged murder of Vitale the action of a young sociopath or something beyond criminal that crossed the line delineating "normal" human behavior from the indescribable, something beyond human understanding?

Murderers kill for many reasons.  Anger, frustration, fear, fun, accident, intention, compulsion.  They might say they needed to do it, it had once happened to them, it wasn't their fault, the victim had it coming, or their mother, their father, the guy down the street, their priest, or the devil himself made them do it.  You name the murder and state the motive, but know that the real reason that the killer killed may never be known.  After all, if the murderer himself does not fully understand his behavior, how can we comprehend one man's inhumanity to another?  But did the person who murdered the man I found in that car trunk and the young man suspected in the murder of Pamela Vitale plan their crimes, something a prosecutor might call premeditated murder?  And if not, was murder simply an artifact of the crime itself, as many murderers have told us.  "I had to kill (him/her/them).  He/she/they could have identified me."  Was murder really needed to complete the crime and allow the criminal to attempt to evade identification?

MORE FROM PROFILER'S PERSPECTIVE

Honeymooner gone in a heartbeat

Honeymooner gone in a heartbeat Murder and mayhem in Richmond Van Zandt: The media, the NSA and the Patriot Act Van Zandt: 'Tookie' stirs up death penalty debate Van Zandt: Cause of death? Unknown Van Zandt: Who knows what evil lurks? Van Zandt: Why some say Natalee may still be alive Van Zandt: Comparing the L.A. and Paris riots Van Zandt: No easy answers in Pa. case Van Zandt: Pirate attack - This is not a drill   Add Profiler's Perspective headlines to your news reader: