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AT HOME The home invader is among the most violent of criminals. The crime scenes are devastating.
HOME
INTRUDERS Burglars want
only your property and will wait until the homeowner leaves. Intruders
are terrorists without a political agenda—they want to confront
you, control you, injure you. Home intrusions result
in the highest rate of Note: Louis Mizell, security and data consultant reviewed all home-intrusion cases nationwide in 1991. He found there had been 480,000 home intrusions with 144,000 occupants seriously injured, raped, or killed.
No one knows
why armed intruders are so brutal, so sadistic. Criminal psychologists
venture opinions, but all we really have are educated guesses. But
case after
Three
ways to protect your family: Home intrusion is one of the few scenarios where mental preparedness alone is insufficient if you have children. Mind-setting must be supported by role play, a family drill. The best chance you have to escape and survive is to have a plan that every member of your family (over four years old) understands and has practiced. It's hard enough for one person to escape violence. It's practically impossible for a family to escape when they have no mutually understood objective. You can't make decisions in the split seconds you have available because no one even knows what you should be trying to do. You have no resources to fall back on and worse, no reference point. However, if the worst strikes, families that have mind-setted together to escape and practice, have a chance. I have not included photos with this case. Inspector Falzone's description of the violence just doesn't need pictures. Frank
Faizones Story Frank Carlson tried to reason with the intruder. He kept pleading, "Please, please, we'll give you anything you want. Just don't hurt us." The suspect then cut the electrical cords off various lamps in the living-room and front-room area, then used the cords to tie Frank to one of the dining-room chairs. The Carlsons still did not resist or try to escape in any way. Threatened and controlled by the knife, they were paralyzed with fear. The intruder demanded money again. Annette was sent upstairs to get the money. The suspect guarded Frank with the knife. Sadly, this case is typical of how easily intruders control people, even send them to other parts of the home to get money, rope, whatever, while one family member is guarded. Annette returned with a jar containing about six dollars in coins. The suspect was livid. "You don't call this money! This is ridiculous! I want money!" Swearing angrily, he demanded, "Do you have a hammer?" She answered yes. Another typical and sad part of this case and many similar to it—few citizens understand the viciousness of criminals. Newspaper and TV news stories seldom detail all the crimes committed. Any experienced cop would have known there's only one reason he wanted a hammer. She went into the kitchen and returned with a hammer. He again demanded money. She said, "This is all the money we have right now. We can write you a check." Suddenly the suspect began beating Frank in the head with the hammer. Tied to the chair, he could not protect himself. The escalation of violence against isolated or bound innocent victims is always sudden. It was a carpenter's hammer with a wooden handle. He actually broke the head of the hammer off the handle, he hit Frank's skull with such force. As is often the case, the intruder went into a killing frenzy. He then picked up a potted plant and smashed it into Frank's head. I'm talking about a potted plant with a circumference of about eighteen inches, big and heavy. Then the suspect grabbed a three-inch-thick cutting board and began smashing Frank's head again. He swung so hard a corner of the board broke off. As is so often in cases involving armed intruders, Annette was forced to witness her husband's murder. Annette was screaming but she felt that nothing was coming out anymore. Probably didn't matter, the suspect had turned the stereo way up. Annette was horrified, but even worse, she was paralyzed. The suspect then grabbed the thick glass jar filled with coins and smashed it over Frank's head. By that time Frank was dead. During the trial, the coroner of San Francisco testified that he had never seen a human skull so destroyed. The suspect then forced Annette upstairs. His words were, "When I'm high on coke, I can fuck for hours." Annette pleaded, "Please don't kill me." Then the raping began. Oral, anal, everything, without stopping. He did everything. He raped her for three hours. Annette pleaded, "Please, just let me live." He laughed and looked straight at her and said, I can't let you live, you know who I am. I have to kill you." Three hours of rape—finally he was through with that second phase of crimes. Then he began another killing frenzy. He picked up a small rocking chair, Annette's childhood chair, and began beating her with it, fracturing her jaw, dislocating her shoulder, and ripping open her head. The rocking chair was crushed into many pieces. He then picked up a towel from the bathroom and wrapped it around a paperweight rock from her dresser. With tremendous force, he swung that makeshift weapon at her head over and over. Every time he hit her, flesh ripped from her head. Annette rolled onto the floor, bleeding profusely. "Please just let me die, don't hit me again, please don't hit me again. Just let me die," she begged. Every time she pleaded, he laughed. He then sliced her wrists with his knife, left her, and went downstairs. I know I'm being graphic. I'm relating this case as it happened—without any sugarcoating. If reading this helps some families prepare against our worst criminals, and there are no worse than armed intruders, maybe some good will finally come out of this case. Because the Carlsons had been remodeling their home, they had paint thinner and kerosene around. The killer doused Frank's body, then he went upstairs and doused Annette with the flammable liquid before dropping matches upstairs and downstairs. Then he fled. Annette, bloodied and broken, miraculously crawled out the same window the suspect used to enter the house. From the rooftop, she screamed for help. Neighbors heard and saved her. Big-city homicide investigators are seasoned, but we were stunned at what we saw. The house was almost destroyed upstairs but the fire had extinguished itself downstairs. When I got to the hospital, the doctors had shaved Annette's hair off. Her head was like a large orange with big chunks of skin missing. The doctor looked upset and angry when he said to me, "I'm going to let you into the operating room because we don't expect her to live. So, while we're operating, we're going to let you try and talk to her. I hope you can catch the bastard." They scrubbed me up, dressed me in surgical greens, and let me in with the surgical team to talk to Annette. The whole time this brave woman believed she was dying and knew her husband was dead and still did her best to talk to me. I was a police officer and homicide detective for twenty-eight years. In all these years, I've never been more proud to be a cop and part of a team trying to bring a monster to justice. Annette gave a near perfect description of the suspect. For five weeks I visited her at the hospital trying to find out what we might have missed, what we could do that we weren't doing. Her father was a design engineer and an artist. He wanted to help. I said, "The jewelry that was taken, if you could draw what those pieces look like, I'll put out a wanted bulletin and see if we can't come up with a break in this case." Many of the stolen items were antiques, mostly family heirlooms. He drew some perfect pictures. A month or two later when we figured the pieces would be hitting the pawn shops and jewelry stores, I went to friends at the Chronicle and Channel 7. 1 asked them to please put out a public plea for anybody that might have seen these pieces of jewelry. They jumped on it—in less than twenty-four hours I got a phone call from a jewelry designer who had just come across a ring that matched our description. I ran down to the store, got the ring, and headed to the hospital. I remember this day like yesterday. There are good days and bad days being a career cop—this was one of the good ones. Annette took one look at the ring and started crying. It had been her grandmother's. The nurses were crying, and I have to be honest with you, I got a big lump in my throat, too. That ring broke the case. We backtracked that ring two times and finally came up with the suspect. What
the Carisons Did Wrong For
the Record
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Home
intruders are the worst of criminals. Period. Their crimes include
rape, severe beatings, sometimes torture and murder. It's bad, whether
you're a citizen or a cop, because your home now has all the characteristics
of crime scene #2. Isolation, time, control by the attackers—all
come together in a place your family considers familiar and safe.
As Carlson family (next story) found, their
fears for their family, froze them up. The attackers used the victims'
emotional bonds to terrorize them and control their actions. 
serious
injuries and murders of all crimes: 35 percent of victims are seriously
injured or killed, a far higher percentage than with armed robberies,
which result in a 10 percent murder rate (percentages of serious
injuries during armed robberies not available). Franklin Zimring,
a professor at the University of California, found in his research
of murders during home intrusions that residents are six times more
likely to be killed during an armed intrusion than a street mugging
and robbery. 
As
with reports on other violent crimes, home-intruder cases tend to
all sound alike. I remember this one case that upset every cop on
the department. A family was terrorized by four hoodlums for three
hours in their beach cottage. The father was beaten and tied up;
both mother and daughter were raped, sodomized, and foreign objects
(rat-tail comb, champagne bottle) used repeatedly on them, with
son and father forced to watch. Finally, after three hours of savagery,
they robbed them. They left behind a ransacked home, a savagely
beaten and violated mother and daughter, a shattered family. 
case,
all crime investigators learn criminal behavior patterns, not why
but what happens. When a woman is abducted by a gang, a cop knows
it is destined to be long and horrible. When home intruders break
in, if the family is at home and trapped inside, a cop knows again…long
and horrible. If you're ever faced with an intruder, he will be
a career criminal—I've never known of an "intrusion" when that
wasn't true. Property loss will be nothing compared to the crimes
against people, especially women and children. With isolation and
control, the crimes escalate from robbery to terrorism and sadism
almost every time. 
The
two ways home intruders get in: