GUILTY TX - Billy Joe Harris for rapes of elderly women in 6 counties, 2011

[concerndgdaughter]

Check these out:

http://www.sanantonio.gov/sapd/SCAMS.asp?res=1280&ver=true#asphalt

and:

http://www.sanantonio.gov/sapd/SCAMS.asp?res=1280&ver=true#travelers

 

[IWannaKnow]

These are a couple of things I would like to point out to all the ladies out there, maybe you already know this, maybe not:
http://www.wmur.com/news/22958692/detail.html

Stalkers Take Advantage Of High-Tech Cell Phones
Devices Used By Some Stalkers To Track Victims
UPDATED: 11:54 pm EDT March 25, 2010

SOMERSWORTH, N.H. -- "Cell phones have become a pervasive tool in society, but experts warn the technology can also be used by stalkers to track their victims.

Local police said they are starting to see more cases in which high-tech devices are in the wrong hands......

.....What the woman didn't realize was what police said her estranged husband had done. They said he turned on the family mapping plan in their cell service, allowing her phone to be tracked by cell towers."

Very good video at link!!
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And:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_bumping

Lock bumping
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lock bumping is a lock picking technique for opening a pin tumbler lock using a specially-crafted bump key. One bump key will work for all locks of the same type.

A US patent first appears in 1928 by H.R. Simpson called a 'rapping' or bump-key. (page 19 "High Security Mechanical Locks - An Encyclopaedic Reference" published by Graham W. Pulford 2007). In the 1970s, locksmiths in Denmark shared a technique for knocking on a lock cylinder while applying slight pressure to the back of the lock plug. When the pins would jump inside of the cylinder, the plug would be able to slide out freely, thus enabling the locksmith to disassemble the lock quickly.[1] The use of a bump key was not introduced until some time later and was first recognized as a potential security problem around 2002–2003 by Klaus Noch who brought it to the attention of the German media.[2] After further examination of the procedure, a white paper was drafted in 2005 by Barry Wels & Rop Gonggrijp of The Open Organization Of Lockpickers (TOOOL) detailing the method and its applicability.[3] A patent exists for a lock device following the same principle as the bump key from 1926–1928.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour..._OWQAQ&usg=AFQjCNEDnXfODswrbNsdrMyt8eZ5W9YGKQ

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour..._OWQAQ&usg=AFQjCNFb3naFGzhY7uzuHLMFeVa9uBhr1Q
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According to a you-tube video, a bump key can be made from any key, it doesn't even need to be a blank, and any kid can fashion one at home with an old key and a rasp. There is a detailed video on the net about how to fashion your own bump key. From my understanding, the only way to prevent this are keyless locks and not the cheapo's from H.D. It is my silly girl opinion that he isn't accessing these homes every time through the windows. Surely these ladies would notice something wrong with their windows over and over, over a stretch of months. Missing panes of glass would be a heads up, IMO. Maybe I'm wrong, but if it were my granny or mom, I wouldn't want to take any chances...

As far as the cell phones go, I think a two way radio might be just the ticket, especially if there was a trusted neighbor or relative to leave the other hand set with......

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3251228

Emergency communication.
The Motorola Talkabout® EM1000R is the ideal emergency preparedness communication tool. With a range of up to 20 miles*, an emergency alert feature and flashlight, these radios are perfect for active outdoor excursions or life's every day adventures. Plus, the NOAA weather channel keeps you up to date with changing weather conditions.

Keeps you in contact and prepared for anything during emergency situations
Emergency alert feature ensures you are informed when danger is approaching
Alert button function allows you to notify others of impending danger via siren and spoken sounds
Built-in LED flashlight provides peace-of-mind during evening adventures or power outages
Weather alerts will provide you with warnings of incoming storms or dangerous conditions
Allows hands-free communication so you can keep on moving without stopping to answer a call

 

[Missizzy]

Travelers (based in Irish Emigrant history) have been pulling the driveway and roofing scam for decades. One interesting thing to note is that they are almost all "sharp looking" and white--just one tactic they use to make their victims feel safer. They are very often relatives and each state seems to have different specialties. Texas has always had the roofers and driveway guys.

Local contractors despise them and do everything they can to run them off. They are known for their flashy trucks and excessive signage. I cannot see any group of Travelers employing someone not affiliated with them nor employing a man of color.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Traveller

http://www.contractorfraud.net/scams.htm

This could be our guy but I somehow doubt it. First, these guys travel together and are usually quite close and know each other well. Second, this rapist is supposedly a man of color. Could be but it just doesn't strike me as the real deal. I think, sadly, that your grandmother was most likely a victim of these guys due to her age and niceness of house. But I don't think the rapist was one of the workers.

I wanted to drag a link over here from another thread. It's concerning cyber-stalking through cell phones (IWannaKnow first brought this up, I believe) and here's a new link about how stalkers are using the technology:

http://www.wmur.com/news/22958692/detail.html

I remember something about the victim in Moody getting a new cell phone a while back. I wonder if the rapist could work at the cell phone store or know someone who does?

Still no DNA match or not?

 

[justthinkin]

Her house was broken into in November we think and another time which we think was December.

Did these break-ins take place, day or night? Obviously if they occurred at night, then he was breaking in while she slept. Now that is truly creepy.

I'm just trying to establish if he may have broken in when she wasn't home during the day, maybe while she was at the grocery store, the doctor's, visiting a friend, maybe even while visiting her next door neighbor.

If ALL the break-ins to these ladies' houses are occurring at night as are the rapes, then that means he is also doing peeping tom type activities, and seeing them through their windows at night, but I question that. Most older people I know always have their windows covered well at night, curtains in addition to shades or blinds. So I'm trying to figure out how it is that he never makes a mistake and breaks into a home where there's more than one person living there, and how he knows in advance all his victims are widows living alone.

Then too, can he really be driving the distances to these towns to do peeping tom activities, then doing break-ins, and then leaving to come back some other night to rape? This is just weird, and that would call for a lot of driving.

The re-asphalting in San Antonio was attributed to the Travelers. Usually they're Irish and white, and sometimes even called just that, Irish Travelers. They've been around forever, and all over the US. I got scammed by them years ago on some "added roof protection" scam they were running. Didn't know it was phony until I heard about it on my evening news. Well, I see Missizzy has already mentioned this.

 

[concerndgdaughter]

The more I think about the "Traveller" angle it fits. I just talked to my grandmother and apparently the scammers who had re-paved her driveway had sent another guy back to see if she wanted her driveway re-paved again. My dad was at the house and answered the door when the guy came by. Shiny red truck, no plates. He was real pushy with my dad and my dad was really gruff right back. Then someone called from city hall on Friday and asked my grandmother again about the guys who had done the paving job a couple of months ago. The city hall lady said that another small town (sorry I don't know more details) had called her up and said that an elderly woman in their town had been approached at her door by a man to do paving work and he was really aggressive- almost trying to come into her home. She slammed the door on him and called the police.

I have been trying to figure out from the start why the FBI would be involved and maybe it is because they think it is a member of the Travellers. They are wanted in multiple states on massive tax evasion charges and are on a Most Wanted list. They intermarry and marry off daughters at young ages- wouldn't raping an elderly woman be imaginable if you had already raped a young girl?

Here is another article:

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20081024/NEWS/810240876?p=1&tc=pg

Dateline did a segment on them in 1996 and 2002.

What do you guys think?

 

[Missizzy]

Concernd--Can you find out if any of the Travelers have ever employed or traveled with a black or Latino man? That's where I'm hanging up. One unusual aspect of the Travelers is that they are all intermarried and unusually close--even though they can be violent with one another. There's lots of drama, that's for sure.

While the men are paving or roofing or scamming, the women are busy shoplifting and teaching the youngest children how to do it. Their infant, child, and teen mortality rates are almost unbelievable.

My point is that they are pushy, loud, unforgettable. People in small Texas towns denigrate them and talk about them for months after they've left--just as they did back in Ireland. I guess it's possible that they've linked up with a man of color and that he's a bit of a lone wolf. But that man would stand out like, well, "a black man in a band of Irish Travelers".

These guys are so slick that if they wanted jewelry or cash, they'd be in and out in a heartbeat and five counties away before you realized your jewelry was missing. They use their door to door tactics to not only drum up quick business but to scope out the house. That's why a person should not go to the door but should call LE if they are seen in a neighborhood. If they surprise you while outside, insist that they leave the property before reentering your house. You do NOT want them on your porch.

I wouldn't be surprised if one of them didn't steal something from your grandmother. But, it would actually be more common for one of the women (bringing lunch to her husband) to sneak into the house and lift the jewelry.

I just find it hard to believe that one hung around after the crew moved on and fooled with her mind and terrorized her. From everything I've ever read about them (and I'm extremely intrigued by them as I'm Irish and my husband is a contractor), I've never seen them linked to rape--outside of their own circle. JMO

If anyone can find info to dispute this, I'd love to read it.

 

[concerndgdaughter]

From http://www.gainesville.com/article/20081024/NEWS/810240876?p=3&tc=pg "The informant said they might show up at houses with a truck full of "leftover" materials and tell the homeowners that their shingles need attention, that their barn needs painting or that their driveway needs repair. Once a deal is made, Travellers often hire transients or undocumented workers to do the actual work."

 

[Missizzy]

Another fact pointing away from Travelers is that they almost always speak very very fast and have a strong accent and peculiar dialect (which is unique to them). They maintain this dialect even after living in the states for years. It's often used as a way to prevent others from understanding what they are saying.

You can search on youtube and find many clips of Travelers speaking. As I said they are hard to miss.

Now, it's entirely possible that another group is patterning themselves after the Travelers and employing men of color. That should be checked into. There's always scam artists in construction--just no one, but no one, outdoes the Travelers. If they didn't steal and scam, they'd be magicians. By the way, they are some of the most talented musicians.

 

[Missizzy]

Thank you concernd, I've never seen that before. It's my experience that the transients and the undocumented workers are often the ones who step in to help after the Travelers have already scammed and left.

Licensed contractors can be a haughty bunch (apologies to my sweet husband) and will often refuse to clean up the mess made by Travelers. They've often made a simple job far more difficult and the clean up is time-consuming and expensive. Besides, the person who is scammed already lost a lot of money and thus, doesn't have much more to spend on the job.

The "mess" will gladly be taken over by men desperate for work, though. That might be somewhere to look. After the original group left, was there anyone who stepped in to finish or clean up?

 

[concerndgdaughter]

Has anyone seen the TR in enough light to know for sure he is somewhat dark skinned? If it is dark enough, couldn't someone with a tan (maybe from working outside in the sun all the time) look hispanic or like a light-skinned black person? Is it possible that the guy doing the asphalt work came back to "camp" (they have been staying on a Motel 6 on IH-35 as referenced in an article in Jan 2010) boasting of how much money he made and got someone in their group stirred up enough to rob the place. The travellers are known to also come back and try to steal from the same house. Doesn't necessarily mean rape, but is it possible that one of the guys in the group is a deviant?

From http://www.rickross.com/reference/irish_travelers/irish_travelers10.html

"Joe Livingston, an investigator with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division who is an expert on Traveler scams, estimates that perhaps 10 to 15 percent of the Murphy Village Travelers are thieves, or "yonks," as the Travelers label the wayward among them.

However small the proportion, their impact is felt widely along the seasonal circuits they travel. Livingston calls it "nontraditional organized crime." And tracking the phenomenon is a nightmare, he says, because of the web of same-names and nicknames among the Travelers.

Like others who have tangled with the Travelers, Livingston is both intrigued and mystified by their lifestyle.

He can quote case after case of Traveler scams. The first he encountered was in 1984, up in Rhea County, Tenn. Some workmen completed a small construction job for an elderly man, who went inside the house to get money to pay them. They saw where he kept the cash, Livingston said, and returned later and stole it.

Some of the scams are inventive. Several Travelers were arrested a few years ago over a scam in which a Traveler wore a white lab coat and a stethoscope and went door to door in rural South Carolina, telling old folks he was there to examine them for an increase in their Social Security benefits. During the "exam," other Travelers searched the house for cash. "

 

[Ruflossn]

Missizzy; I'd really like to know what profilers say about this behavior.



Hi Missizzy ~
I am not a profiler but, I am taking classes on the subject. I have more than a passing interest in profiling. I have searched all my text books and the internet for info on offenders who specifically target the elderly population. I have had very little luck in learning more on this subject. For a variety of reasons, there is very little info. available. I will continue to try and come up with some answers. As soon as, I learn anything of importance, I will post it.

Flossie

 

[Missizzy]

If you go to youtube and search for Travelers (spelled both with one or two l's), you can get a sense of what these guys look like. They are rough people and often play mean spirited pranks on one another. I've not seen much about guns but they usually carry knives. They are wiry or burly. Their upper arms are massive.

For spending most of the time scamming, they must do some physical work or it's just genetic. I find them so intriguing as it's very much a brotherhood or fraternity. The women are in the background. Watch a few of the videos and you'll get a sense of the way they speak (mixed English with their dialect) and their body language.

Remember, not all Irish are light skinned and red-headed. I'm what's called Black Irish. My family comes from Northern Ireland and has always had black hair, dark brown eyes, and olive skin. My father and I could have been very very dark if we had tanned. Being that these men work outside, I could see them getting dark. You'll notice that they often have their shirts off. They are very proud of their physiques and ready for a fist fight at a moment's notice.

Concerning your question about the color of the TSR's skin, it's vague. I don't know that we have anything ever confirmed other than "darker skinned". Being Texas, we jump to the conclusion of black or Latino and forget that the man could be Middle Eastern or even Cambodian. Many different ethnicities have "darker skin". We could all be on the lookout for a black man when the real TSR is Asian or of Mediterranean descent. That's just one of the ways he could be hiding in plain site.

 

[Missizzy]

Here's an interesting link with a photo. I think this photo is an excellent representation of what I'm talking about:

http://images.google.com/imgres?img...G&rls=en&tbs=isch:1&ei=Mv2wS5z7KofSswOBu8X9Cw

Notice that there's a comment about their being a group in Fort Worth.

 

[justthinkin]

If you go to youtube and search for Travelers (spelled both with one or two l's), you can get a sense of what these guys look like. They are rough people and often play mean spirited pranks on one another. I've not seen much about guns but they usually carry knives. They are wiry or burly. Their upper arms are massive.

For spending most of the time scamming, they must do some physical work or it's just genetic. I find them so intriguing as it's very much a brotherhood or fraternity. The women are in the background. Watch a few of the videos and you'll get a sense of the way they speak (mixed English with their dialect) and their body language.

Remember, not all Irish are light skinned and red-headed. I'm what's called Black Irish. My family comes from Northern Ireland and has always had black hair, dark brown eyes, and olive skin. My father and me could have been very very dark if we had tanned. Being that these men work outside, I could see them getting dark. You'll notice that they often have their shirts off. They are very proud of their physiques and ready for a fist fight at a moment's notice.

Concerning your question about the color of the TSR's skin, it's vague. I don't know that we have anything ever confirmed other than "darker skinned". Being Texas, we jump to the conclusion of black or Latino and forget that the man could be Middle Eastern or even Cambodian. Many different ethnicities have "darker skin". We could all be on the lookout for a black man when the real TSR is Asian or of Mediterranean descent. That's just one of the ways he could be hiding in plain site.

Same here, Missizzy, only with a mix of Scottish and Irish. Like my dad I have dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin. When I tan, I get what I call a Mexican tan.

Concerned, I'm still waiting to hear if the break-ins at your grandmother's occurred during the daylight or at night or is she not even sure about the time of the robberies?

I totally don't think there'd be a black guy or a Hispanic working with the Travellers. They are a tight group, and would only be working with other members of their band of Travellers. And yes, some of the group might be fair-skinned, others olive complected.

 

[concerndgdaughter]

The attack happened in the evening Sunday night the 28th. I am not trying to profile about the travellers, the only reason I bring it up is that second to the attack on my grandmother is this asphalt scam. There are a lot of people in Moody and neighboring towns who are freaked out about it. They have been extremely aggressive (according to my dad and reports into city council in Moody from neighboring cities). A guy came to my grandmother's house last week and asked again if she needed her driveway re-paved. Luckily my dad was there to talk to the guy, but he didn't want to take no for an answer and my dad had to be really pushy back.

The asphalt people are the only people she hasn't known well locally that have been close to my grandmother's house in the last 6 months.

 

[Missizzy]

To play Devil's Advocate for a minute, we need to keep in mind that the driveway scammers could have nothing to do with Travelers. If that's the case, all bets are off and we'd need to hear more about this particular group or company. You mentioned an article from January, concernd, can you link to that, please.

 

[justthinkin]

The attack happened in the evening Sunday night the 28th. I am not trying to profile about the travellers, the only reason I bring it up is that second to the attack on my grandmother is this asphalt scam. There are a lot of people in Moody and neighboring towns who are freaked out about it. They have been extremely aggressive (according to my dad and reports into city council in Moody from neighboring cities). A guy came to my grandmother's house last week and asked again if she needed her driveway re-paved. Luckily my dad was there to talk to the guy, but he didn't want to take no for an answer and my dad had to be really pushy back.

The asphalt people are the only people she hasn't known well locally that have been close to my grandmother's house in the last 6 months.

Concernd, Bear with me, please. I'm not talking about the night she was raped. I want to know what time of day the robbery or robberies occurred, the break-ins that happened in the weeks before the rape.

 

[concerndgdaughter]

The robberies happened at night- she doesn't have exact dates because she thought she was imagining things so her memory of the time is fuzzy. But the way she tells the story is clear every time. I went to bed and had $X and the clock was there. The next day, I woke up and was going to pay for something and didn't have any cash- she got the money the day before. That very same day she says she had to be somewhere and went into the living room to see what time is was and noticed the clock missing when it had been there the day before. She told my brother and I the story at Christmas time and hadn't mentioned it a few weeks prior.

 

[concerndgdaughter]

The article from January

http://www.sanantonio.gov/sapd/SCAMS.asp?res=1280&ver=true#asphalt

http://www.sanantonio.gov/sapd/SCAMS.asp?res=1280&ver=true#travelers

 

[concerndgdaughter]

sorry- it wasn't an article, it was on the San Antonio police website- I will see if I can find mention of the January part- I know I read it somewhere