The Evil That Men Do Part 19

After wondering aloud what made BSU agents any better at making psychological evaluations than, say, teachers or insurance agents, Indiana Democrat Frank McCloskey asked if it was unusual for someone working around explosives to believe he or she might die in an explosion.

"No sir," Hazelwood agreed. "But it is unusual for them to say 'I want to die in the line of duty,' not 'I may die,' not 'I'm in danger of dying,' but 'I want to die in the line of duty' to two different people. That is unusual, yes sir."

The final subcommittee report excoriated Hazelwood and Ault's a.n.a.lysis for "doubtful professionalism" and declared "the false air of certainty generated by the FBI a.n.a.lysis was probably the single major factor inducing the Navy to single out Clayton Hartwig as the likely guilty party."

Curiously, Roy remembers one hectoring questioner raised the reverse possibility, that Hazelwood and Ault had gone into the tank for the navy. At that Anthony Daniels rose to ask for a clarification. Was the congressman accusing the agents of lying? Daniels asked. No, came the quick reply.

As Roy told the committee, a BSU profile or a.n.a.lysis "can be used or discarded or discounted" by the requesting agency, in this case, the navy. That Petty Officer Clay Hartwig deliberately blew up Turret Two "is simply our opinion," he added.

The House committee also asked the American Psychological a.s.sociation to form a committee to review the evidence as well as Hazelwood's and Ault's findings. Of the fourteen panel members, several were dubious of the FBI a.n.a.lysis, although only three a.s.serted that Clay Hartwig was probably guiltless in the matter.

The other members were generally supportive. Dr. Roger L. Greene of the psychology department at Texas Tech University in Lubbock said he detected "a number of potential problems with the logical links between the evidence and the conclusions drawn in the FBI equivocal death a.n.a.lysis."

This was a not unreasonable academic criticism of purely practical exercise in speculation.

Dr. Elliott M. Silverstein, a forensic psychologist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, wrote, "Presuming all the evidence is true, the psychological profile drafted by the FBI is very plausible."

Dr. Alan L. Berman of the Was.h.i.+ngton Psychological Center was less equivocal. "It is most reasonable," wrote Berman, "to conclude that Hartwig sacrificed his own life in a planned suicide-ma.s.s homicide to accomplish a variety of ends."

Hazelwood and Ault's next engagement was with the Senate Armed Services Committee, where the reception was only marginally more civil.

William Cohen, then a Republican senator from Maine and later to be Bill Clinton's secretary of defense, was patently skeptical of both agents.

"Let me ask you," said Cohen, "is it abnormal for members of the navy to have subscriptions to Soldier of Fortune magazine?"

"I recall very few of my fellow marines who subscribed to Soldier of Fortune magazine," d.i.c.k Ault replied.

"Very few of your fellow marines were driven to violence? Don't they teach you a lot of violence at marine boot camp?"

"They teach us to hate the enemy."

Cohen pressed on. "You indicated that [Hartwig] only had three close women friends . . ."

Ault completed the senator's sentence: ". . . with whom he never had any s.e.xual contact, as far as anyone could tell. He proposed to one woman on their second date. She turned him down."

"Well," asked Cohen, "what's so unusual about that?"

"She was a dancer in a strip joint," interjected Hazelwood.

Cohen was undeterred.

"Another factor I think that you drew some significance from was that he said he could hide his hurt inside and never reveal it."

"That's what he said, yes sir," Roy answered.

"Is that unusual?"

"When you combine that with the fact that people never reported seeing him angry, never seeing him violent, that to us is a danger sign.

"We've seen it on too many occasions where they've just stored it up and then went out and murdered fourteen people at a college, or blew up a s.h.i.+p Yes, sir."

Cohen, like McCloskey, also fixed on Hartwig's expressed desire to die on duty.

"Is that unusual?" he asked.

"I was in the army for eleven years, and never once did I or any of my friends make the statement, 'I'd like to die in the line of duty,' " Hazelwood replied. "No sir. I didn't want to die in the line of duty."

The closest any of the questioners came to sympathy for the FBI men was John Warner, Republican of Virginia.

"Thank you, gentlemen," said Warner at the close of the session, and then he appended a small marvel of understatement: "Tough job that you've had to perform."

The FBI stood by its own.

After the hearings, Hazelwood and Ault both received personal telephone calls of support and congratulations for a good job well done from Director William Sessions and a.s.sociate Director John Otto.

Roy stands by the a.n.a.lysis.

"I'm as convinced today as I was then that we were correct," he says.

"As I told one of the senators, it would take new forensic evidence to convince me otherwise."

Several subsequent rea.n.a.lyses of the technical data, plus a wide array of other experiments, were undertaken by both the navy's Naval Sea System Command (NAVSEA) and the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.

None of the tests could scientifically establish whether the explosion in Turret Two was an act of suicide or an accident. However, there was unexplained foreign matter recovered from the gun's barrel. This material was consistent with a chemical detonator being used to ignite the powder. But it didn't prove it.

Despite the lack of hard new evidence, on October 18, 1991, Admiral Frank B. Kelso, chief of naval operations, announced at a Was.h.i.+ngton news conference that the navy had changed its mind.

After spending $25 million in an unsuccessful search for conclusive evidence, Kelso announced, "There is no certain answer to what caused the tragedy. Accordingly, the opinion that the explosion resulted from a wrongful intentional act is disapproved."

Asked about Admiral Milligan's previous announcements on several public occasions that the blast was deliberately set, Kelso explained, "I had a different set of evidence than he had, and we changed the rules."

The navy's final conclusion, said Kelso, would be "exact cause cannot be determined."

The admiral also issued an apology. "I extend my sincere regrets to the family of Hartwig," he said. "We're sorry Clayton Hartwig was accused of this."

Admiral Kelso's choice of October 1991 for reversing course would later strike both Hazelwood and Ault as ironically apt. Within days of Kelso's p.r.o.nouncements, NAVSEA issued its own final report, rea.s.serting that the navy had been right all along.

"The review of the original investigation," read the report's executive summary, "has not produced any information, data, or a.n.a.lysis that supports any material change to the conclusions of the original technical report."

The summary continued: "In the absence of a plausible accidental cause and having found material consistent with a chemical device, the NAVSEA team concludes that an intentional act must be considered as a cause of the incident."

A month earlier there had been what would prove to be another watershed event in Admiral Kelso's career.

September 1991 was the month of the infamous Tailhook convention in Las Vegas, where drunken navy fighter pilots allegedly groped, molested, hara.s.sed, and verbally abused scores of women.

Kelso had attended the convention.

According to a Was.h.i.+ngton Post article by reporter John Lancaster, in September of 1993, then navy secretary John H. Dalton reportedly tried to fire Kelso on the grounds that as senior officer at the convention, Kelso was responsible for the pilots' behavior.

Lancaster reported Dalton was overruled by Defense Secretary Les Aspin. In his former life as a Republican member of the House Investigations Subcommittee, Les Aspin had joined in the hostile grilling of both Hazelwood and Ault.

Aspin subsequently succ.u.mbed to a heart attack.

Admiral Kelso took an early retirement from the navy in February of 1994.

* Clay Hartwig's story is dotted with curious coincidences. He would have known that the battles.h.i.+p Arizona was sunk at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The surprise attack by the j.a.panese began at 7:55 a.m.

The coup de grace against the Arizona was a high-alt.i.tude bomb that crashed into the s.h.i.+p adjacent to Turret Two and exploded belowdecks, detonating the main battery magazines.

April 19 is a special date as well. Timothy McVeigh would choose April 19, 1995, to blow up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. McVeigh is widely believed to have selected April 19 because it was the second anniversary of the federal a.s.sault on the Branch Davidian compound at Mount Carmel, near Waco, Texas, in which David Koresh and eighty of his followers perished. It is also an important historical date on right-wing militia calendars, a fact that Hartwig might well have been aware of through Soldier of Fortune and his other reading. It is the anniversary of the 1775 Battle of Lexington and Concord, where colonial Minutemen-on whom many present-day militias profess to pattern themselves-first skirmished with the British redcoats, marking the start of the American Revolution.

16.

The Fetis.h.i.+st Nikia Gilbreath was by all accounts a contented country housewife, an attractive brown-eyed brunette who lived happily with her husband, Billy Joe, known as Joe, and their infant daughter, Amber, on a sixty-eight-acre farm in the mountains of extreme northwest Georgia, about an hour's drive south of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Life in the mountains was measured and quiet. Neither Nikia nor Joe had any sense of foreboding or knew of any reason to worry that August 17, 1989, was going to be anything but another routine day in the young family's well-ordered existence.

The name James Ray Ward meant nothing to the Gilbreaths.

They arose early as usual that Thursday, careful not to awaken Amber. Nikia, who was five months pregnant with the Gilbreaths' second child, a boy, fixed her husband his lunch and then retired once again in her oversize T-s.h.i.+rt, panties, and maternity briefs.

She needed her rest even more than usual. That night, Nikia and her mother, Linda Tucker of Dalton, Georgia, were to drive to Florida for a short vacation with Amber. Nikia was trying to spend as much time as possible with Amber before the new baby's scheduled arrival in January. She particularly wanted her daughter to get her first sight of the ocean that August.

Joe Gilbreath was out the back door by 6:00 and behind the wheel of his pickup, headed north over country roads to his job as a welder at Salem Carpet Mills in Ringgold, twenty-five miles away.

Joe did not speak with Nikia by telephone that day, which was not out of the ordinary. Nor was Joe at first surprised when he returned home at about 4:45 to find the family Oldsmobile missing from the front driveway. He a.s.sumed Nikia had gone to the store.

When Gilbreath walked inside the open back door, the telephone was ringing. It was Nikia's younger brother, Jon Tucker, who said he had been trying to reach Nikia by telephone all afternoon, with no luck.

As they spoke, Joe saw Amber in the living room, still in her pajamas from the night before, clearly hungry, wearing a very wet diaper. Suddenly, a dark perplexity began to close in on Joe Gilbreath. He apprised his brother-in-law of his discovery, and rang off. Then Joe changed and fed his daughter, put her in her three-wheel stroller, and headed out for the roadway to search for Nikia, not really knowing what else to do.

Jon Tucker, meanwhile, called his mother, who was in Chattanooga, with the disturbing news.

"Good Lord, Jon, get help," Linda Tucker told her son. "Something's wrong."

Nikia's mother jumped in her car and "flew" down the highway, as she recalls. "I could not for the life of me imagine what had happened," she says.

Fixed in Mrs. Tucker's mind was a single immutable fact: Under no circ.u.mstance would her daughter ever willingly leave Amber alone in the house, or anywhere else, for a moment.

Arriving at the farmhouse, Tucker saw a sheriff's deputy sitting outside in his car. His presence was rea.s.suring. Walker County sheriff Al Millard, a former FBI agent, was a Tucker family friend.

Mrs. Tucker remembers asking the deputy if he had any news of her missing daughter.

"Ma'am," he answered, "there'll be twenty-four hours before there's any search."

"We're not waiting twenty-four hours," Tucker corrected him.

"Now ma'am, don't get excited," advised the deputy.

"Honey," Tucker told him evenly, "you ain't seen me excited."

The Gilbreath house was filling with worried family and friends. One cousin reported he'd driven by at 7:30 that morning on his way to work and noticed that Joe and Nikia's gray '89 Cutla.s.s wasn't parked in the driveway as usual.

Al Mallard then arrived, and went into earnest conversation with Joe Gilbreath. Joe's mother-in-law quickly surmised why. Linda Tucker knew that when a husband or wife vanishes and there is a suspicion of foul play, the first person police suspect almost always is the remaining spouse, and for good reason. Often, he or she is the guilty party.

"All eyes went to Joe," she says. "He really took a lot. I know a lot of people a.s.sumed he'd done it."

She searched for Nikia for as long as the light held, then drove the seventeen miles home to Dalton. Linda Tucker slept poorly for a few hours before arising to resume her search for Nikia.

She still did not know what to make of the situation. Nikia had no history of emotional instability. To the contrary, she was levelheaded and strong-willed. If someone had tried to abduct Nikia, Tucker knew her athletic daughter most definitely would fight, and fiercely, to protect herself and her family.

She had married Joe in early 1987, and bore Amber that same year. It was a wonderful time for the Tucker family until days after Christmas, 1987, when Gary Tucker, Linda's husband of twenty-five years, was killed in a hunting accident.

Within a year, Linda Tucker had become a mother-in-law, a grandmother, and a widow.

Gary Tucker, a construction contractor, had come up with the name Nikia for their firstborn child. Nikia, in turn, planned to name the boy she was carrying Garrett, in honor of her dead father.

It was midmorning on Friday, the eighteenth, as Linda Tucker again neared her daughter's house. A number of dirt lanes fed onto the main country road she was traveling. She paid no attention to them until she was within about a half mile of the farmhouse.

Then one particular dirt track caught Tucker's attention. There was nothing special to distinguish it from any of the other lanes, except that some invisible power Linda Tucker cannot explain forcefully drew her to it.

She backed up and turned down the track until she reached a large rock. From there, Mrs. Tucker continued on foot, still sensing she was being drawn along, when suddenly she saw the Gilbreath family Cutla.s.s in front of her. The car was abandoned. One of its doors (she cannot remember which) was half open.

Tucker hurried away to report her discovery, and returned to the scene with Joe and the sheriff.

They saw that the driver's seat had been pushed back, doubtless in order to accommodate someone much larger than the five-foot five-inch Nikia. The keys were in the ignition, which was turned forward to the "Accessory" position. The Oldsmobile's battery was nearly dead. A second set of tire tracks led toward the main road through the weeds and gra.s.s past the abandoned car.

There was no sign of a struggle in the car or around it.

Everyone's attention then fell on the closed trunk. Mrs. Tucker, Joe, and the rest of family waited impatiently, fearfully, for the authorities to open it, praying that it would not disclose the dead Nikia.

It didn't, and everyone relaxed briefly. But the family's sense of foreboding was not dispelled. Nikia was still missing. She obviously had been brought by someone to this secluded place. How had this happened? And where had he taken her?

A check around the Gilbreath residence, which stood on a low hill about one hundred feet from the main roadway, revealed no signs of forced entry, no footprints in the dirt around the windows (even though it recently had rained), and no direct evidence of a struggle inside the house.

The back door was unlocked, as was customary; Joe had left it unlatched when he went to work. However, the front storm door, normally ajar because of the difficulty in closing it over a newly installed porch carpet, had been pulled shut. The screen door inside it, normally latched, was unlatched.

In the living room, the blue telephone cord had been ripped from its jack in the wall near the sofa, and was gone. Missing as well was a patterned nylon bedspread from the Gilbreaths' unmade bed.

The spread would be unmistakable to anyone who saw it, Joe and Linda told sheriff's investigators. Because the nylon bothered Joe's skin, his mother had hand-st.i.tched a white sheet to the underside of it, creating a distinctive and unique article of bedding.

Two days ensued with no further developments in the case. Then on Sunday, as Joe and his mother-in-law were searching through the Gilbreaths' bedroom, looking for anything that might a.s.sist the investigators, they jointly discovered that the dresser drawer where Nikia stored her underwear was completely empty. Whoever had abducted Mrs. Gilbreath had taken every last pair of her panties as well.