STALKING JUSTICE: The Dramatic True Story of the Detective Who First Used DNA Testing To Catch a Serial Killer by Paul Mones

PUBLISHER: Pocket Books, 7/1995
GENRE: True Crime
SETTING: Virginia, USA, 1980s-90s
MY GRADE: B

SYNOPSIS: Paul Mones, author of the acclaimed When a Child Kills, presents the first in-depth account of the pursuit and capture of "The Southside Strangler," based on extensive interviews and a graphically detailed examination of the evidence. STALKING JUSTICE focuses on the heroic efforts of the lone investigator who, by using his gut instincts and twenty-first-century technology, ended the vicious rampage of an elusive killer.

Detective Joe Horgas suspected that Susan Tucker's murder was connected to a similar case nearly four years earlier-a murder to which another man had already confessed. Horgas's theories were dismissed by superiors and colleagues alike; undaunted, he developed his own leads, and ultimately targeted a suspect. But he had nothing except semen stains from the crime scene to tie his suspect to the murder-nothing but a genetic code that, once deciphered, would break open the case. In a historic breakthrough for the U.S. criminal justice, DNA testing would be used to catch a killer.

MY THOUGHTS: This was a decently written account of the crimes of the monster known as Timothy Wilson Spencer. More time was spent on the rape-murders than the rapes from 1983, if I'm remembering correctly. Thankfully not much time was spent on courtroom proceedings as that always bores me to tears. Lots of information on DNA was included, which was brand new at the time, having first been used a year before in England on the Colin Pitchfork case. That case was profiled on season 1 of Medical Detectives (Forensic Files.) Timothy has gone down in U.S. history as being the first person to have been convicted based on DNA evidence and he's the first person to have been executed based on a DNA conviction.

I wish the author had tried to interview Timothy. Now that I think about it that would have been as waste of time since he denies having any part of the crimes though he left his DNA (semen) all over crime scenes. I don't know why photos of the victims and Timothy weren't included. His family wasn't interviewed by the author either after the execution, which was 15 months before this book was published. I'd have loved to know their thoughts about all that went down. We weren't told of how law enforcement thought Timothy may have targeted his victims or if it was just random.

As for the killer himself, he was troubled from the start, at least from age 9 when he set something on fire at school. He seems to have just been a bad seed. There was no mention of him being abused as a child and I'm curious if he was maybe abused by someone as a child, before the fire incident at school, and his parents never knew about it.

I know of this case from the first season of Medical Detectives, which later became Forensic Files, "Season 1, episode 6, "Southside Strangler", from 1996. A British documentary called "Born To Kill?" profiled this case on an episode called "Timothy Spencer: The Southside Strangler" in 2014. This documentary is very good, better than Forensic Files in some ways.