here is my second installment on the Darlie Routier case. As you will recall, the first installment was a general overview of my idea about how the crime occurred. The second installment will address the topic of "Phantom Killers" or, as they are sometimes known, "the intruder." Let me just preface my remarks by saying that I think the Websleuths members have done a great job in concluding that there was no intruder or phantom in the Darlie Routier case. I should also add that for the people who have signed the petition on Darlie's behalf at the justicefordarlie website, I have a great deal of sympathy because I, like a lot of them, would believe that an intruder struck if this was the only case of the intruder I had ever seen or remembered. Unfortunately, the "intruder" has quite a history of showing up when he needs to, which is always in time to bail out the chief suspect.
I'm sure one has to wonder how I got to looking at the history of the "phantom" or the "intruder." To make a long story short, I majored in journalism in college and got in the habit of reading the paper every day. Then, I obtained a law degree. I had just started as an associate at a law firm in east central Illinois in 1989 when I read the story of Charles Stuart. Although people don't tend to remember the story today, he called police on his cell phone and told them that a black gunman had stopped Stuart and his wife as they left a hospital birthing class in Boston, and that the gunman had shot his wife in the head and Stuart in the abdomen. I was pretty disgusted; indeed, I wanted to go up to Boston and look for the gunman myself. Only later did I find out that Stuart had staged the whole crime, and had shot his wife in the head and himself in the abdomen in order to make the crime look like a robbery. Instead, Stuart had shot his wife in the head because he wanted the insurance money from a policy that was on her life. That crime occurred on October 23, 1989 and investigators got a tip that Stuart had staged the crime from somebody who assisted him. As police closed in, Stuart committed suicide in early January 2000 by jumping off a bridge. However, in the time between the crime and his suicide, Stuart fooled almost everybody.
The next crime involving the "phantom" or the "intruder" that I read about was Susan Smith. You may recall that on October 25, 1994, a little over five years after the Stuart killing, Susan Smith strapped her two children into her car and rolled them into a lake in South Carolina. She then reported that she had been carjacked by a black man wearing a knit cap. Once again, I would have liked to have been on the scene, looking for the car, because I thought Susan Smith was telling the truth. I did recall the Stuart case, but I thought that was just some sort of oddity. However, I soon learned that Susan Smith made up the whole story about the "phantom" because she wanted to be with another man, a wealthy man, who did not want the kids.
Thereafter, a third story came to my attention, once again involving the "intruder." I have not been able to find this story on the web, but I believe that I saw it on ABC's 20/20. The story was about a couple in Lake-of-the-Ozarks, Missouri, a resort area, who came home from an evening out. They found that there home had been broken into and called 911. The husband, while on the phone with 911, informs the dispatcher that he has just seen the intruder and, at that moment, the wife is shot in the head. Later, the evidence indicated that he was a bank vice-president whose bank was having serious trouble and he saw himself losing his job and in need of money. I believe he got life in prison and is probably serving time in a Missouri state correctional facility. I also believe that the killing happened during the early 1990s. During the program, the show also asked viewers what they thought of a man who I believe was in the Northeast, who brought his wife into a hospital with a gunshot wounded to the head and a tale of a black male who came up and shot his wife while they were at a campsite. It was about this time that I started seeing a pattern to these cases; people with tales of an intruder or phantom who harmed one person for no reason at all while leaving another person alive who could identified the assailant. The assailant is often described as a young, black male wearing a knit cap (in other words, the assailant could be any one of thousands of people because the description is so generic). I started being very skeptical because the crimes did not seem random to me and I started to think that the "intruder" had been made up by the person who would naturally be the chief suspect were it not for the "intruder."
At this point, you are starting to think, great, but what does this have to do with Darlie Routier? My answer is that I started to go back in history to consider these cases and that is where I saw a pattern start to develop. I did not want to go too far back, so I am not really including the Lizzie Borden case in 1892, but that probably could be called a "phantom killer" case, too. I started with Dr. Sam Sheppard and the killing of his wife Marilyn in July of 1954. Dr. Sam Sheppard claimed that he struggled twice with an intruder (and he had some lesser injuries to show for it) known as the "Bushy-Haired Stranger" but said the intruder got away. The funny thing, aside from the intruder always getting away, is that Dr. Sam Sheppard was chasing his secretary around the desk and would have had a motive to do away with his wife, who had been stabbed 35 times in the face.
The Valerie Percy family in September of 1966 had similar bad luck in catching the intruder. Her father was campaigning for U.S. Senator from Illinois. Her stepmother heard a commotion around 5:00 am and went to look; allegedly her stepmother saw a burglar ("economic motive") in Valerie's room. The burglar rushed out past the stepmother and fled. The stepmother then turned on the light and found 21-year-old Valerie in her bed soaked in blood from having been hit in the head two to four times with a hammer and having been stabbed 10 to 12 times (some sources say 14 times) in the body (indicating a "personal motive"). The crime has never been solved.
Also, other people who could not catch the "intruder" were Jeffrey MacDonald in February of 1970 (wife and two children bludgeoned many times, MacDonald lightly injured), Cullen Davis in August of 1976 (he was not at the mansion when his estranged wife confronted an intruder wearing a black ski mask and black clothing at their mansion who shot to death two other people and shot and seriously wounded the wife, Priscilla Davis, conveniently around the time Cullen Davis was going through a divorce with her that would have given Priscilla half of his considerable estate). David Hendricks was lucky to be on the road in Wisconsin making a sales call for his company when his wife and three children were brutally murdered in the couple's Bloomington, Illinois home in November of 1983; the four people were killed with a knife and an ax, and David Hendricks was lucky because not only was he not killed, but he was free to start the new life he wanted to start since his back brace company had recently become very successful. Frances Newton, who was executed in September of 2005, was not so lucky because the State of Texas did not believe that the intruder shot and killed her estranged husband and two young children in 1987; rather, the State of Texas concluded that she shot them for the insurance money on policies that had just been recently obtained on them, and that Frances was most likely the shooter since a gun traced to her was the gun used to do the shootings.
I could go on in this vain for several hours, but only a couple other "intruder cases" really bear mentioning at the moment. One, of course, is Scott Peterson, who had the luck of having his wife go missing via the phantom just as he was wooing some other woman. Julie Harper was unlucky in October of 1997 because the intruder entered her home in downstate Illinois, where murder is fairly rare, and stabbed her 10-year old son approximately 13 times for no reason at all; people tend to wonder whether the killing, which is still being prosecuted, had something to do with the knock down, drag out custody battle that Julie had with her ex-husband over the child. Julie allegedly confronted the killer, who inflicted considerably lighter wounds on her, before the intruder got away (don't they always?) Finally, two non-murder phantoms are worth mentioning: the Audrey Seiler abduction from the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2004, which was later revealed to be a hoax stemming from a relationship breakup and the Jennifer Wilbanks "runaway bride" from Georgia caper that was recently in the news, where the phantom abductors were described as a Hispanic male (the race card is used fairly commonly, but not always, in phantom cases) and a white woman.
The point of talking about all these "phantom" cases--and there are several more, I guarantee you--is that you can see a pattern in these cases and I think it will help us identify the reason that the "phantom" showed up in Darlie's case. The phantom only shows up under three circumstances that I can see and I have probably looked at 20 to 25 such cases. What that indicates to me is that such crimes are not random, as people tend to think, but the phantom is created to throw suspicion off of the chief suspect. The phantom shows up in the following circumstances: (1) the chief suspect is financially troubled (for example, Charles Stuart, mentioned above, who killed his wife for the insurance money; (2) the chief suspect is emotionally conflicted (in other words, the chief suspect kills to be with someone else, as in the case of Susan Smith); or the chief suspect is emotionally troubled, which is a broader category and would be someone like Julie Harper, who was apparently upset at seeing her ex-husband win a fierce custody battle over their only child.
Now, if Darlie fits into one of those three categories, I think you can stop looking for the phantom or intruder. The easiest category to reject is the emotionally-conflicted category since there is no argument in this case that she killed the two boys to be with someone else. Most people tend to pop her into the financially troubled category because they were having money problems, but to me, the killing is much more violent than the usual killings for money we have seen. That leaves the invention of the phantom being the result of the chief suspect being emotionally troubled, and I believe that Darlie pops quite easily into that category. As I have indicated, I think this killing is the result of the jealous rage that Darlie flew into when she found out that she would have to return to that miserable childhood and the two children were getting to stay at "Nintendo House" after Darin told her that he was walking out on her when she pressed him for money and found that he did not have any and could not get any more.