Shootout with the Twin Killers

Shootout With The Twin Killers

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  Gary W. Hancock

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  Copyright Gary Hancock 2017

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  The images on this work has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.

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  This free ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it

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  Spoiler Alert:

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  Best to read these three stories first:

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  Inside the Mind: The Chase for the Twin Killer

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  Murder by the Light of the Moon: The Midnight Massacres

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  The Return of the Twin Killer

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  I sat with my back against the large boulder and gazed into the sunset. Such a beautiful sight, the sun dropping down into the badlands of North Dakota. A few weeks ago, who would have thought I would be here in this desolate stretch of real estate. It is called the badlands for a good reason. The Lakota tribe called this place "mako sica" or "land bad." The very hot temperatures, no water, and sparse vegetation made it a name that no one could dispute. But despite of all that bleakness, it was still lovely in the sunset. I hope that my wife can get back before it gets too dark.

  I had been sitting in my favorite eat shop in downtown Washington D.C. with my little girl Sara Grace. She was the spitting image of her mother and even at the early age of five, was showing that stubbornness and drive that was the signature of Maggie. Today was no different from most of the others and we were waiting on her mother to show up. Since she had been promoted to Behavioral Analysis Unit 5 Supervisory Special Agent, the work load had been staggering. But the tradition of eating at "Bud and Pop's" was stuffed in between her traveling from the office to the meetings with the politicians in Washington almost every day. I always joked that she was the "poster girl" for the FBI just before she would tossed me across the bedroom.

  A black SUV pulled up in front of the eatery and I saw her waving for us to get in the car. It was probably the only police vehicle with a child seat in the second row. This was one of the conditions that she had insisted on when she took the promotion. Sara Grace was used to being positioned with a view of all the radio equipment and thought nothing of it. If she doesn't become a cop it won't be for lack of exposure. I sat shotgun and waited for what had my wife so wound up.

  She turned to me and said, "This has not been released to the public, but a twin killing is thought to have happened. One was in Sacramento and the other was in Lemmon South Dakota. The two victims are actual twins, Jack and Joules Barber. It might not be T.K. since he has not been know to kill actual twins, just people who look alike. I am going to cover the South Dakota crime scene and if you get on the phone and call my mother and beg her to sit our little angel, you can come along. You know just as much about this killer as is known and you just might spot the breakthrough like you did the last time. That request came straight from the top of the Bureau.

  Six o'clock that night we deplaned in Bismarck and headed south. That was my first time in the state and I was looking at the map to see what there was to do around here. The Teddy Roosevelt National Park was due west and I mentioned it to Maggie. She just said, "Wrong direction, we are heading south." I thought "Oh well, maybe when we start home." I would find out just how prophetic that statement would become.

  The two hour drive was just about the dullest I had ever been on. It was night, but if it had been day, there would still have not been anything to look at. It seemed like four hours before we arrived at the town of Lemmon. It had a little over a thousand people and there was a petrified wood park in the middle of town, I kid you not. This was going to be easy to keep your mind on the crime, cause there is nothing to distract you.

  The victim had been working at the local AM radio station and they found him when the manager started getting calls about the station being on the air but no music was playing. It was just the sound of silence. When the manager got to the station, he found Joules Barber dead on the floor with a crossbow bolt in his chest. I felt a shiver runs up my spine and I looked over a Maggie and saw the color of her blue eyes take on a green tint. This is the look she gets when she hits that level of intenseness that only T.K. can bring out in her. She is going to be hard to get along with the rest of the trip.

  The Perkins County Sheriffs Department and a SD Highway Patrolman stationed in Lemmon was all the law enforcement for this small town and surrounding county. The coroner had determined he had been killed last evening between seven and nine.. The crossbow bolt had a special terror for us as it was what T.K. had used to kill the twin of Maggie. She took a picture of the arrow and sent it back to the Bureau and requested a quick comparison with the one from the Baltimore crime scene almost six years ago. It only took them ten minutes to send back a side-by-side of the two missiles. They were identical from the feathers to the steel tips. I didn't need a microscope analysis to make up my mind, this was the work of our guy.

  The Agents that had gone to Sacramento to look at the scene of the other killing had just posted their initial report. We went back to our motel room to study it. The first thing that jumped out was the time. Jack Barber had been killed at almost the same time as Joules. He had been shot while he was walking his dog. He had a security fence that went around his entire property and was inside this area when he was shot. The shooter was on a hilltop about a football field and a half away. This was about five hundred feet. A good shot but not the four thousand foot shot made by T.K. in Crescent City California. How could he have killed two of them in two different states?

  We spent another two days asking questions of every person in the town and found out very little. Jack Barber had bought the station and Joules moved into the town about three years ago. Before then Joules was living on the streets of Sacramento. The people of Lemmon thought it was just so that the talk about Jack letting his brother live such dire circumstances would stop. The twins might not have be close, but they were twins and something like love had existed between them.
I thought, "They were now closer in death than they had been in life."

  Back in Washington, We picked up our child at her grammys and she was happy to see us. She may be a spoiled brat, but she is our spoiled brat. The color in Maggie's eyes returned to normal for the first time since we had saw the body. Nothing like a baby to bring out the best. We both took off the next two days and treated ourselves to a family vacation at home. The local splash pad and a pizza made Sara Grace's day. The simple things often are the best. I was right in the middle of another of my famous person's biography. This time I was writing about Danny Thomas and once again I was being assaulted on Twitter. It seems a writer can't write about anyone any more without their children pitching a fit.

  My number one job is to take care of our little girl and I have developed a method. I write when she is napping and carry a voice recorder around with me to make notes to myself the rest of the time. This has proven to be a very good way for me. Maggie on the other hand has to go to the office and fret about Sara Grace all day long till she returns home. I have the better job.

  Of course once Maggie got back to the Headquarters, she was put in overall charge of the murders of Jack and Joules. She immediately questioned the agents that had been in California and went over their notes and memories. It is the little things that catch killers. Sometimes it is a parking ticket like David Berkowitz, aka Son of Sam. But most of the time it is just hard police work that solves the puzzle that is a serial killer. This was a puzzle that had gone on for years. Maggie had told me that the killing of real twins was a change in the pattern and might be the break they were looking for. She put all the pictures of the crime scenes on the long table and arranged them to form a mosaic of each place. There was a overhead shot of Jack's compound from a helicopter. The house and surrounding yard must have been twenty acres. He was shot while walking his dog around this area. Plenty of room for the animal to get all the exercise and keep him happy. Then it hit her, where was the dog? A call to the Sacramento County Sheriff office and a dozen deputies were on the way back to the house of Jack Baker. It took them over an hour to locate the body of the German Shepherd. He had crawled into the brush to die. He had been shot. Later the coroner confirmed that the same gun that killed his owner had killed the pet.

  Maggie called me and asked that I join her at work. Once again grandma took over, she just loves to baby-sit. We didn't use her enough she always told me. I arrived just in time for the Sheriff's phone call. When he had heard about the dog, he remember a case that involved the dead man and this particular animal. It was a burglar getting caught in Jack's house by this dog. Maggie's eyes turned green again. She said," This cannot be a coincident". Who and where was the burglar now, was the next logical questions. Sally Pride and just paroled were the answers.

  "T.K. has a helper, this Sally Pride." was what Maggie exclaimed. That is how he can kill in two places at once. She was only half right. The full answer was going to require us to dig deeply into the life of Sally and uncover all of her secrets. Once again I was in the air heading to the Dakotas.

  The first place to go to was the Dakota Women's Correctional and Rehabilitation Center. The warden told us that Sally had quietly spent her time in jail, but never got along with any of the other inmates. She had eight different women share her room over the five year prison term and it was always the other woman that requested to be moved. Sally made no requests from the time she entered till she left. She had only had two different people visit her. There was a writer that tried to get her to tell her story, but she just strung him along to get gifts brought in. He finally gave up. Her sister came in every time she could. He told us that there was video of them in the common room just before she was released.

  Back at the motel, Maggie took the flash drive the warden has given us and plugged it into the laptop. We sat back on the bed and watched the most amazing thing of the whole case. The two women were identical. True one was a blond and the other a brunette, but the rest of their faces matched from the eyebrows down to their chins. My wife and I looked at each other and said at the same time, "I know now how they pulled it off. It's not T.K. its the girls."

  Mary Pride, sister of Sally, was our other killer. Now all we had to do was prove it. This was going to be a super secret investigation if we were going to find where they were hiding. The last time Sally broke out of prison, she had not been caught for months. To me this meant she had a hiding place not far from the pen and that is where she would be now.

  We were called back to Washington to give a face to face update to a committee made up of The Senators and Representatives of California and both of the Dakotas. I told you that her main job was to placate the people in D.C. I on the other hand was put to work at the bureau.

  The FBI had a helicopter that had been fitted with the sprayers that crop dusters use and it could fly around the countryside without looking like a police chopper. They also had access to the satellite feed from one of the birds that was stationed over the center of the country. It could provide photo cover from Texas to Canada. The BAU squad room had blowups of the roads from the Women's pen to interstate 95 from Bismarck to the Montana State Line. She had disappeared somewhere in this area. I spent the next week with a magnifying glass as I slowly went up Hwy 22 to the Interstate. I didn't find anything useful. The guys working Hwy 21 and Hwy 8 thought they spotted places of interest and the helio was sent, but each time it yielded zero.

  The break came one morning with a different satellite that actually belong to another agency. They would not tell us which one, but it had CIA written all over it. This one had passed over Nebraska and one of it side mounted cameras was tracking down Interstate 95 just as the sun was overhead of the intersection of Hwy 22 and a tiny reflection of light was noticed just north of the Interstate. The enlargement of the reflection shown a yellow car heading up a dirt drive into a clump of trees. Maggie pulled a memory out of the blue. T.K. had used a yellow car in the Crecent City murder. I told her that was such a thin clue I could see thru it. But as we found out, my wife is way better than me with this police work. Once again the whirlybird was sent out and the pilot took it up as high as he could and passed over the target. The trees were so dense that he couldn't see anything and he didn't want to go lower and alert whoever was there.

  As soon as we had an address, the agency put its awesome power into use. The owner of the land was soon found out to be a shell corporation within another shell corporation. There were no utilities billed to this address and no way to track the owner. It would take time to untangled the shells and we were not going to wait. Once again I was in the air heading to the Dakotas. If I was paying my own way, I would have enough frequent flyer miles to take a vacation to Hawaii.

  The agents on the scene had gotten a entry warrant and broke into the house. Maggie was on the phone the entire time we were in the air. They gave her a room by room description of the hideout and reported that no one was at home. The garage had tracks for a car and a motorcycle, but both were missing. She told them to take all but one of their vehicles back to town and hope that Sally or Mary would show up. We were thirty minutes away from Bismarck and when we landed, a SUV was on hand to whisk us to the waiting trap.