Civil liberties questions raised as white men in pickups are pulled over

01/03/2003

By GLYNN WILSON / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

BATON ROUGE, La. – As they intensify their search for a suspected serial killer, Louisiana authorities are taking DNA samples from hundreds of white men, some of them called in to a tip line and some stopped while driving white pickups.

That may be violating civil liberties, some legal experts say.

"This is a DNA dragnet," said Joe Cook, executive director of the Louisiana American Civil Liberties Union. "They shouldn't be targeting people unless they have credible, reliable information that this person has committed the crime or has specific knowledge about the crime."

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"Yes we are" targeting drivers meeting that profile, acknowledged Louisiana State Police spokesman Johnnie Brown. "If their vehicle draws the suspicion of the individual officer, that would create probable cause."

"Every law enforcement agency in this area is doing that," said Washington Parish Chief Criminal Deputy Dan Foil. "Any good police officer who sees those reports is going to be alert for that. It's human nature."

Washington Parish is about 80 miles from Baton Rouge on the Mississippi border.

If the driver fits an FBI profile of the killer or raises an officer's suspicion in any way, he could be added to the list of "persons of interest" being asked to submit DNA samples, officials said. Many of the names of those asked to give samples come from a tip line set up by investigators; others come from information obtained during the traffic stops.

According to the profile, the killer is probably a white male between 25 and 35 who works a blue collar job that requires a uniform. If a driver falls in that age range, and if his shoe size is a 10 or 11, which matches tracks found at several of the scenes where bodies were discovered, he is asked to submit to a mouth swab for DNA. The samples can be taken at home or at one of the crime labs in the area.

"We stopped over 200 [vehicles] Christmas Eve night," said Mike Cazes, chief deputy for the West Baton Rouge Parish sheriff's office. "Anything white that was driving that night we stopped."

That was the night Mari Ann Fowler was abducted from a suburban strip mall in Port Allen, just across the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge. Authorities are not officially adding her case to the homicide task force investigation yet, because no body has been found and they don't want to create more panic in the community.

"We don't want to make that leap yet. We hope there is a chance," Chief Cazes said. "The women here are in a panic now."

The case already includes one of the same pieces of evidence linking the others: The sighting of a white GM pickup speeding from the abduction scene where a sandwich Ms. Fowler had just purchased, her shoes and a couple of broken artificial fingernails were found on the ground by her car.

Surveillance video tapes from the small parking lot are being analyzed by the FBI and could bring a critical break in the case, officials say.

Ms. Fowler is the wife of former Louisiana elections commissioner Jerry Fowler, who is serving five years in a federal prison in Beaumont for taking kickbacks from voting machine contractors. His lawyer tried to get a furlough for him due to his wife's disappearance but failed.

Authorities say DNA evidence found at the murder scenes links the deaths of four women – three in Baton Rouge and one in Lafayette – in the last 15 months. FBI officials came up with a detailed profile from evidence at the scenes of the murders.

Officials say new evidence, obtained from another 400 tips in the last week and DNA swabs of 800 men in the area, is narrowing the possibilities. Critics say this expensive process of elimination method is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Each DNA test costs about $900, they say, meaning that Louisiana taxpayers have already committed almost three-quarters of a million dollars to the search.

Others question whether the search is violating constitutional rights.

"The whole problem with profiling a network is that innocent people get pulled into the net," attorney Mary Howell said. "It's sort of like the dolphins that get caught with the tuna."

Mr. Cook of the ACLU also questioned whether it was helping law enforcement close in on the killer.

"If the objective is to find a needle in a haystack, then they just made the haystack bigger by using these anonymous tips to profile," he said.

Many of those asked to submit DNA samples drive white pickups, said Col. Mary Ann Godawa of the Baton Rouge police department.

"I would say in a lot of cases [the white pickup] is significant," she said. "But it is not the only thing being looked at."

She said there are about 27,000 white General Motors pickup trucks registered in Louisiana.

Officers in the Lafayette case are asking another 100 men to voluntarily submit DNA samples and are asking residents to report anyone who appears nervous at the news.

The latest confirmed victim was Trineisha Dene Colomb, 23, described as a quiet young soldier who last spoke to her family on the afternoon of Nov. 21. Relatives reported her missing the next day when her empty black Mazda MX-3 turned up on a rural, dead-end road about 25 minutes outside of Lafayette in Grand Coteau. A rabbit hunter found her body near Scott on Nov. 24. She died of blunt force trauma.

Pam Kinamore, 44, an antiques dealer and decorator, was abducted from her home July 12. She was found with her throat cut on July 16, in a secluded area between Baton Rouge and Lafayette under the Whiskey Bay bridge off I-10.

Charlotte Murray Pace, 22, an LSU graduate student, was stabbed to death in her Baton Rouge town house May 31, not far from where Gina Wilson Green, 41, a nurse, was strangled in her home Sept. 24, 2001.

Glynn Wilson is a free-lance writer based in New Orleans.