Chapter 7: Definition of evil
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
Once safely in the air, the team took a few minutes to study their files in silence.
"Hey, this is an ax-murderer case?"
Tony's question broke the silence and everyone looked at him who pointed to the reports in his hand. He started reading out loud one of the paragraphs who caught his attention.
"In subsequent interrogations done during the prosecution phase, Elizabeth Boyd, known as Lizzie Boyd by her acquaintances in little Franklin, Louisiana, admitted to have killed and desecrated the bodies of eight people who happened to stop by her bed and breakfast in a period of two years. She informed that she used different knives but her favorite was a meat ax which her father gave her when she was just fifteen."
He lifted surprised eyes, staring at Buchanan as she started her tale. "Her father was a dedicated hunter and the lack of male heirs made him to transfer his desire of teaching the manly arts to his daughter." She took a picture of a mid thirties woman, in a blue dress and corn blond hair and showed to the team. "At twelve, she was an expert marksman... woman and by fifteen she had already killed an alligator just with her knives."
"Ninja killer," muttered Tony, his eyes going back to the reports.
"Here says you were part of the task force who arrested her and you also gave your statement during her prosecution." says Ziva, studying the files in her hand.
"Yes, the profile up until then had been unable to nail her down as we didn't have all the necessary info for it. Her victimology was too widespread; she killed black, white, young old, quite democratic on her picking out. So we changed approach and instead of profiling the victims, we made a geographical profile."
Gibbs eyebrows went up, clearly indicating he had no idea what the agent was talking about. McGee, once he noticed that, explained, "They profiled the possible places where she would dump the cars and the victims' belongings. "
Joy nodded, thankful for McGee's explanation, "We set up stake outs and three days later she was arrested with the belongings of her latest victim in her hands."
"She acted like a spider. All she had to do was sit on her B&B and wait for the victims to come knocking on her door. If the circumstances were right and if her psychosis decided to rear its ugly head, she would drug her intended victims and simply move them to a more isolated cottage in the back of the property, where she had all the privacy she needed to do what she wanted to do."
"What do you mean by if the circumstances were right?" Gibbs asked, closing his file and looking at his profiler, who leaned back on her seat before explaining.
"She is what we call an omnivore. She will hunt and kill anyone or everyone in her path, just to satisfy her bloodlust. The only thing between life and death in her mind is a very faint feeling of control over the situation. In her trial, when questioned about her motives to kill these people she told the D.A. that he was asking the wrong question. What was important wasn't the reason why she killed. It was the reason why she chose not to kill the others. Her B&B was out of the highway but it was well known locally thanks to the quality of the hearty breakfast she offered every day in there."
"According to these files," McGee said reading from one of the reports, "there was an average of fifteen to twenty people who showed up every morning for Lizzie's breakfasts, yet she only had twelve victims."
"That we were aware of. We always suspected she had more victims, but we never had enough proof of it."
"Why did she do it then?"
"Power. She said that deciding who would die or who would live made her feel like God."
"Wacko." Tony shook his head as he looked looking at the crime scene photos. "I'm excited about this case. This is my first ever ax murderer."
"Tony, you are... excited about this case?" Ziva's voice showed skepticism, while she glanced briefly at Joy who was staring at Tony with inscrutable eyes.
"Yeah, it's an opportunity to learn about these..." he pointed to the folder in his hand "crazy people, learn what makes them thick."
Joy looked at him for a long time, her disappointment being quite clear on her face as she decided to talk, "This is not a walk in a park or training session, Tony. She's a psychopath who murdered twelve people and God knows how many others we weren't able to link to her. She picked her victims randomly from her usual stream of guests in her B&B, drugging them in their morning tea or coffee, before dragging their unresisting bodies in between the bed sheets she shoved into laundry carts. She admitted to keeping them drugged but aware when she used her hunting knives on them, slowly separating tendons from bone. She kept them alive until she decided to chop off their heads with a meat ax, finally ending their misery. She was nicknamed the 'Lizzie Borden' of Louisiana, due to the gravity of her crimes and also her weapon of choice for the murders. Despite her gruesome description of the murders, we were never able to find their bodies, as she disposed of them and later on gloated about our inability to find them."
"When our investigation pointed her out to us, she kidnapped one of the agents of the task force and …" Joy's voice faltered and Gibbs could see she was visibly trying to gather her wits to continue her exposition on the case, "she did the same thing to him, but instead of hiding his body with the others she dispatched his body parts to us. So please, don't get excited about the killer as she doesn't deserve your admiration or your pity." She stands up and leaves going to the back of the plane, leaving an open mouthed Tony staring at her back.
"What did I do?"
Gibbs glares at him before putting his folder on the side, standing up and following his wayward agent, who was filling a glass with water on the small bar on the back of the plane. He glanced at her hand and noticed the faint shaking she could not control.
"Are you going to reprimand me again?" She asked, almost belligerently, without lifting her eyes from the water glass.
"Nope," he stayed silent until she acceded and looked at him, her eyes showing all her hurt. "I just want to remind you of rule number ten."
"And what would that be?"
"Never get personally involved on a case."
She grimaced and looked down to her water glass again, "I'm not wired like that, Boss. In profiling... if... " She lifted her eyes, staring into his blue ones firmly. "If you quit caring about the people in the case, about the victims... there's the very real possibility that you become like the monsters you're hunting. As long as it hurts it means you're still human. If you can't feel their pain anymore... it's time to quit the job."
Gibbs studied her silently for a moment, watching her slowly calming down. He noticed her frowning lightly before looking chagrined at him.
"When we get there, if you want to take over dealing with the locals, I'm totally fine with it." She offered, smiling lightly, "It would free me up to focus on the profile and I'm quite sure that you would fit right in between that bunch of alpha males in there."
"Rule number thirty eight." Gibbs said grinning, leaning against the wall of the airplane. He notices her attempting to remember what the rule says.
"There's no such thing as coincidence?" she tries, just to have Gibbs shaking his head.
"No, that's rule thirty nine. Rule thirty eight is 'your case, your lead.'"
"Great," she muttered, her pouting making Gibbs snicker lightly.
"What should we expect when we arrive there?"
"Resistance from the local PD and belligerence from the local FBI. They took it very hard when SSA Molina was murdered, especially because Lizzie arranged for the body parts to be delivered after we had her in custody. It almost debunked the profile as it raised the possibility of her having an accomplice."
"But she didn't have one." Gibbs waited until Joy finished her water to respond his question.
"No, she simply used a local schedule-yourself-delivery service and just waited for the fireworks to start."
While they were talking, McGee silently walked towards the two agents and was standing behind Gibbs. He looked worriedly at Buchanan who nodded, trying to transmit him the message that all was well.
The three agents silently agree to return to their seats, going back to reviewing the reports. Tony cleared his throat calling everyone's attention to himself. Ziva poked him lightly on his ribs and he looked at her cross, before closing his folder and looking at Joy.
"I'm... I wasn't cheering on the killer. It was a bad choice of words."
"Yes, it was." Joy closed the folder and put it over her lap, looking at Tony very serious. "I'm aware of your coping mechanisms, Tony. That you use humor to hide your feelings but this is not a joke or a game. Working with you guys..." She briefly glances at Gibbs and Ziva, before glancing at McGee and continuing. "It made me realize how sick the unsubs were while I was working with BAU."
She looked at Gibbs, biting her lower lip. "I can get the eventual murder, the crimes of passion, hate and greed that we see in NCIS. In most of our cases the motives are petty, then in some we have the political motivation behind it, but it's really rare that we find someone really... evil."
Ziva shivered and rubbed her arms, as if a cold wind had blown inside of the airplane bringing a chill in the air.
"Evil is a very strong word to describe these crimes."
"But it's the only one that fits, Ziva." Joy sat back and looked at the Israeli, "When you were in Mossad, the killings you witnessed were motivated by hatred and division, something that you could not control as they had started thousand of years before you were even born and that still rules over the actions of your people and their people. Yet when you get a case like this," Joy gets a picture of a head of a young woman in a jar, floating in a yellow liquid and shows it to Ziva. "This is cruelty for cruelty's sake. There's no agenda. There are no excuses. Just the desire to inflict the maximum amount of pain onto another human being. And that's the definition of evil for me."