Those who died: Carolyn Hamm, Debbie Davis, Susan Hellams, Diane Cho, and Susan Tucker (Photo courtesy Richard Foster)
In the summer of 1987, Richmond police believed that a serial killer was loose in the city. The detection technology available then was not much better than in a 1940s noir film: dusting for prints and combing a crime scene for clothing fibers, body fluids or sole patterns of shoes. Five women died and at least 10 were raped before the violence and terror ended. Today, Richard Foster, a former colleague of mine here at Richmond magazine, and a Style Weekly writer before that, premieres “Southern Nightmare,” his 10-part weekly podcast about the man dubbed “The Southside Strangler.”
A new technique brought the murderer and rapist to justice a year after his 1987 spree. For the first time, something almost taken for granted today — forensic DNA evidence — was successfully used by U.S. law enforcement to apprehend and convict a killer.
In the 1980s, the test wasn't conducted the way we see on TV with the high-tech gizmos.
“Back in the days of the Southside Strangler, DNA determination took months and involved radioactive danger to the tester,” Foster says. “It also required large amounts of bodily fluid: blood or semen. Now, they can use sweat, a minuscule amount, and they can duplicate and replicate it in the lab, to essentially create larger chains of DNA for a more complete picture.”
Foster is using information from nearly 50 separate interviews that he started last October. As happens with these sorts of stories, one leads to another. This isn’t a pleasant topic, either. “A guy I spoke with last night was very upset that I’d called him,” Foster says. “ ’Why are you stirring all this up again?’ ”
For Foster, it’s a several-fold response. Not many people realize that criminology involving DNA started right here in the Old Dominion — in Richmond, even — and that the state had the first DNA registry, championed, not without controversy, by the 21-year director of the state Department of Forensic Science, Paul B. Ferrara.
In 1989, due in large part to Ferrara’s efforts, Virginia became the first state to create a DNA database of previously convicted sex offenders.
Foster was also working against the actuarial clock.
“Many of the people I’ve interviewed are in their late 60s and 70s, even their 80s. I wanted to make their recollections a part of the historical record about this landmark case; otherwise they’d be lost.”
He set out to find people who knew about the case, the friends and relatives of the slain or the investigators who worked to end the killings.
Foster also wanted to remember the lives of those from which it had been taken: Debbie Davis, an account executive for Style Weekly; Susan Hellams, a neurosurgeon at the Medical College of Virginia; Diane Cho, a Manchester High School freshman and 15 at her death; and Susan Tucker, found dead in her Arlington apartment. DNA evidence ultimately proved that the killer was responsible for another death in Arlington, in 1984, of Carolyn Hamm.
The horrific aspects of these 1987 deaths involved the women being attacked in their own homes, raped, and then slowly killed in a process of tightening and releasing ligatures made from a vacuum cleaner hose and belts from the victim’s clothing. The killer left no fingerprints, no witnesses, and, for a time, the Richmond police pursued an erroneous profile of the perpetrator. Detectives in Richmond and Arlington needed to collaborate to form a complete picture.
The daily journalism of the day, too, wasn’t as sensitive as it might’ve been, especially in the case of Diane Cho, the daughter of recent Korean immigrants. Her parents moved to Richmond in July 1987, only to endure the death four months later of their youngest child.
“The parents didn’t know much English,” Foster says. Reporters attempted to interview the father through the brother, who wasn’t fully conversant in his adopted language, either. “The writers got what they could, and moved on — and I understand deadline pressure. But the time, too, was different: [Diane] was described as an ‘Oriental,’ which you just wouldn’t do today.”
Foster sought to build trust, and for the Cho component of the story, he hired a court-certified native Korean speaker to speak with Diane’s mother at her daughter’s gravesite.
These kinds of podcasts — delving into cold and unsolved cases, or events from the relatively recent past — straddle the line between oral history and true-crime stories. For delving into the folds of the story, Foster relied on his journalistic sleuthing skills. Social media and the internet make it easier to search for people, far more than when Foster wrote his biography of a 1950s pinup icon, “The Real Bettie Page,” which entailed going to the Library of Congress to find old newspapers. “At a certain point, it’s about one person leading you to another,” he says.
The killer, Timothy Spencer, became the first murderer convicted on forensic DNA evidence and was the last person in Virginia executed by electrocution on April 27, 1994.
Download “Southern Nightmare” for free from the podcast website and on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music and most podcast outlets.
