New Respect for the New Centurions : For Paul Mones, Writing About Death and DNA Shattered Long-Held Prejudices About the Police

Dead, mangled and strangled women stared at Paul Mones for three years while he tried to capture their horror in mere words.

He plastered their crime-scene Polaroids around his Santa Monica office and listened to Verdi operas as dark inspiration for his new true-crime book, “Stalking Justice” (Pocket Books). Most of the victims were ornately tied up with rope, string or mini-blind chords. One was badly decomposed. Another stared at Mones, her eyes bulging with the terror that marked her last moments as a living being. They were the strangulation victims of a serial killer who stalked the streets of Virginia during the 1980s.

What makes this story special to readers is that it is a juicy, true-crime page-turner (lock your windows), and in this day of O.J. mania, it recounts the first murder case in America in which DNA testing was used successfully to get a conviction. What makes it special, even unique, to Mones is that, even as death enveloped his office, he became a changed man.

The attorney-cum-author is best known as a tireless children’s-rights advocate who has had little love for the criminal justice system. It’s hard to believe in a system that prosecutes abused children who kill their parents (he defended more than 200 such children) more often than it prosecutes parents who kill innocent children, he used to say.

In his first nonfiction book, “When a Child Kills” (Pocket Books, 1991), Mones decried “the mindless, insensitive, and morally bankrupt reaction of the legal system to the children’s plight.”

But after spending so much time under the gaze of these hapless strangulation victims, recounting how their killer was captured, tried and executed, this self-professed ‘60s liberal can only say one thing: “I was wrong.”

“Writing this book really opened my eyes about my own legal work,” said Mones, a 43-year-old who looks a little like Frank Zappa in a businessman’s haircut. “I never saw the other side.”

“What I saw and heard,” he wrote in “Stalking Justice,” “expanded my understanding and cracked my long-held prejudices about cops.”

To see the other side, it took a year of living in Arlington, Va. He boarded with police Detective Joe Horgas, spent time at the FBI behavioral sciences unit (a few weeks after Jodie Foster was there to study for her part in “Silence of the Lambs”), visited prosecutors and shadowed DNA wizards at Lifecodes Inc. in White Plains, N.Y. (Rival Cellmark Diagnostics worked for the defense in this case.) Mones even traced the killer’s every step, video camera in hand. “He was obsessive,” said wife Niki, a business writer.

At one point, a police investigator asked Mones, “You really want to know what it’s like to be a cop?” he recalled. The officer then played him a cassette tape of a teen-age girl being tortured by two men. “I lasted a minute and a half,” Mones said, “then I shut it off.”

“Those cops,” he said, “have to shut off their emotion.”

Mones came upon the murder story in 1989, in a phone introduction to Horgas in which, Mones said, “we hit it off.” The author purchased Horgas’ version of the tale for an undisclosed amount.

A masked rapist had been haunting Arlington during 1983, tying up his victims. In 1984, a woman was tied up in similar fashion and strangled. Horgas--an old-school detective from Pennsylvania who looks like he’s paid his dues at local doughnut establishments--believed that whoever killed in 1984 was the same masked rapist. But a separate team of detectives in Arlington found a local man, David Vasquez, who was fingered by witnesses and who confessed to the killing.

Vasquez was tried and jailed, but it happened again in 1987: A woman was tied up and strangled.

“She was nude and lying face down across the lower half of the bed,” Mones wrote. “Her face was almost completely blackened, her eyes swollen shut, and her head hung slightly over the bed’s edge. A thick, dark red mucus oozed from her mouth and nose, soaking the coverlet and pooling on the gray carpet.

“A brilliantly shiny, white nylon rope . . . was tautly wrapped around her neck.”

Then three more strangulation victims appeared in and around Richmond, 100 miles to the south. All Horgas could think about was the masked rapist, still on the loose. The only thing linking the masked rapist to the strangulation killings was Horgas’ unparalleled memory (he pulled the suspect’s name seemingly out of thin air from an old list of local troublemakers) and a new technique called DNA fingerprinting.

After checking records, Horgas found that his suspect, Timothy Spencer, was either on parole or holed up in a low-security half-way house at the times of all the murders. He lived close to the scene of all the murders. Then there was the clincher: DNA from sperm found at several crime scenes matched that of Spencer’s blood.

Spencer--eventually convicted of four murders and strongly suspected in the other--and one rape--was pronounced dead at 11:13 p.m., April 27, 1994, the victim of Virginia’s electric chair and Horgas’ relentless investigation. Vasquez--whose confession was attributed to his low mental abilities--was pardoned.

In his tireless efforts to get everyone from his own superiors to the Richmond police to believe that Spencer was their man, Horgas emerged as the story’s hero. “I know I did a good job,” he said recently, “but all the publicity is a little embarrassing.”

While the case changed Mones’ view of the justice system, it also fortified his view that DNA fingerprinting is to the next millennium what fingerprinting has been to the 20th Century. Here is a case where a serial murderer was captured and an innocent man was released. “This story to me was the embodiment of justice,” Mones said.

He is disappointed that California is one of the few states that does not legally put DNA in the same league as fingerprints when it comes to placing suspects at the scene of a crime. He also believes that the O.J. Simpson defense team has taken advantage of the state’s lack of faith when it comes to DNA.

“Some people say this is a nefarious tool of the state to deprive people of their freedom,” said Mones as he sat barefoot and laid-back in his West Los Angeles home. “I think DNA fingerprinting is a terrific tool to eliminate the innocent and provide a critical piece of evidence for convicting criminals.”

And the conviction of criminals is something Mones feels strongly about these days.

“He can’t have a cut-and-dried position on the death penalty anymore,” said Niki Mones, also 43, about her husband. (Paul Mones said he’s still against capital punishment, but now better sees the other side of the argument.)

He plans to stay liberal, defend kids and speak out against child abuse. And the new book has also whetted Mones’ appetite for writing fiction.

“I want to take what I learned and write a fictional novel,” he said. “I don’t want to be categorized.”