How The “No Look Rule” and Other Suspicious Behavior Helped Mo. Cops Nab Suspected Killers On The Run
Another Police1 Exclusive Report
In an exclusive interview with Police1, Deputy Tony Hojsik, of the St. Charles County, Mo. Sheriff’s Department, talks about how he stopped two suspects last week and, after he used criminal patrol techniques and read several subtle cues, they later confessed to him that they killed their mother and grandparents. Hojsik’s is a textbook example of how to turn a minor traffic stop into a major bust. A textbook example of how you can sometimes turn a minor traffic stop into a major bust played out in Missouri last week when a road-smart deputy sheriff pulled over a car for speeding just 6 miles over the limit and ended up with a gruesome admission of multiple murders.
Deputy Tony Hojsik, 33, of the St. Charles County, Mo. Sheriff’s Department was able to accomplish this impressive career highlight because he understood from his 12 years of law enforcement experience and a variety of training courses on criminal patrol techniques how to read subtle cues in a suspect’s behavior that piece-by-piece add up to reasonable suspicion of felonious guilt.
Here’s how the incident unfolded, as reconstructed by Police1 from exclusive insider information:
On the morning of Feb. 8, Hojsik was running radar near a weigh station on Interstate-70 just west of St. Louis. Hojsik is part of a “directed patrol” unit that trolls the interstate in search of criminal offenders. Just before 10 a.m. he clocked a 2005 Chevy Malibu with Texas plates headed westbound at 76 in a 70-mph zone. But what caught his attention more than the slightly excessive speed was the “No-Look Rule.”
I first heard of this concept from two Ohio state troopers, Bob Stevens and Dick Unger, when I was researching my book “Tactics For Criminal Patrol: Vehicle Stops, Drug Discovery & Officer Survival.” Since then, it has become widely incorporated in training on drug interdiction and patrol procedures, and officers practicing it have been responsible for innumerable successful arrests.
The “rule” is that -- unlike typical motorists, who don’t think they’ve done anything wrong -- subjects who have committed crimes or otherwise have something to hide most often will blatantly refuse to establish eye contact -- or even look in the direction of -- any police officer or police vehicle they encounter. Instead they stare resolutely straight ahead like statues or turn away in the opposite direction from where you are. “The more determined an occupant is not to look, the more determined you should be to look further,” I wrote. “A No-Look almost always leads to something.”
Often a driver who has guilty knowledge or contraband to conceal will pull off the roadway or turn at the next opportunity -- which is exactly what the car Hojsik caught did. After conspicuously ignoring the deputy, the driver swung abruptly from the inside lane to the outer lane of the interstate without signaling, tucked in between two semi-trailers, then turned in at the scales station, an illogical move for a non-trucking motorist. Hojsik hit his overheads and followed.
The Chevy was a rental car (rental vehicles are common conveyances for drug haulers) out of Indianapolis. The driver was a 29-year-old male. In the passenger seat was a girl who appeared to be a teenager.
The secret of looking beyond a moving violation and, if warranted, successfully developing evidence of something more serious is to come across as just an affable, unaware traffic cop who’s carrying on a casual, chatty conversation while processing the ticket. In reality -- and unrecognized by the subject -- you’re conducting a purposeful interrogation with your eyes and ears wide open.
“Often within 30 seconds or a minute” you can start to get a sense of whether “this is just a normal citizen going too fast” or someone different, sheriff’s Lt. Craig McGuire told Police1.
Hojsik noted right away that the driver seemed far more nervous than the usual traffic violator -- fidgeting with his hands, smoking furiously, persisting in his No-Look demeanor. The girl sat rigidly in her seat, silent and also not looking at Hojsik.
The driver seemed to have trouble finding credentials. He first handed Hojsik a state-issued Indiana ID card, then a driver’s license from Florida. “I thought that was a little strange,” Hojsik says.
The deputy quickly got the occupants separated, directing the driver to the rear of the Chevy, out of the familiar comfort of his vehicle. “I wanted him back in my world where I could watch his hands,” Hojsik explains.
Playing the good ol’ boy, Hojsik interspersed his official dialog with a few basic questions. He kept his tone friendly, seemingly unfocused, nonthreatening: “Where you coming from today? Where you headed? Who’s the passenger? You traveling on business, or just pleasure?”
Telling the driver to stay put for a moment, he then approached on the Chevy’s passenger side and, out of the driver’s earshot, repeated the same “casual” inquiries to the girl. He noted that her hands were trembling as they talked. She continued to avoid eye contact.
The two travelers were consistent in stating that they were headed to Las Vegas for a vacation and that the girl was the driver’s 18-year-old sister. Hojsik thought Vegas a strange vacation destination for a brother and sister; boyfriend-girlfriend would be more expected.
Also there were discrepancies. The brother said they’d been planning the trip for a long time; the girl made it seem more spur-of-the-moment. She had no ID, so Hojsik couldn’t immediately verify who she was. She said she intended to get identification when she got to Vegas.
“How?” Hojsik asked her. She muttered something about obtaining ID “under my brother’s Social Security,” which made no sense to Hojsik.
Red flags were fluttering.
Because I-70 is a popular narcotics- and methamphetamine-trafficking corridor, drugs seemed most likely to be the pair’s dirty secret. Hojsik asked if they had drugs in the car and when they denied it, he asked if the driver would be willing for him to search the vehicle. Still acting nervous, the man readily agreed and popped the trunk.
Both the trunk and the backseat were jammed full of duffel bags, luggage and other containers, not easily processed. But Hojsik has learned to be patient and not to be pressured. He called another member of the directed patrol unit, Deputy Jeff Ochs, as backup and dug in.
Very quickly the “simple” speeding stop started taking an unexpected twist.
In the trunk, Hojsik found a satchel containing rings, necklaces, bracelets -- “a lot of jewelry.” Hojsik thought perhaps they’d burglarized someone. Next he came across a purse with a bundle of bills, later found to total more than $1,000, plus “a lot of quarters.” Were they maybe stealing out of vending machines? Wrapped inside a blanket, he found two pillows, stained with what appeared to be splotches of blood. “I tucked that away in my head, too,” Hojsik told Police1.
Rummaging through the trunk, he also discovered a soda bottle containing cigarette butts. This, he decided, could be an attempt to remove DNA from a crime scene.
Inside a personal organizer that he found while searching the backseat, Hojsik discovered credit cards, and driver’s licenses in the same names for two elderly residents of Indianapolis, a 91-year-old man and a 75-year-old woman. The two travelers said they belonged to their grandparents.
“Why do you have all this stuff?” Hojsik asked the driver. The man said grandma and grandpa had died and in a note on their kitchen table they’d “left everything” to him and had left their house unlocked so he could get it.
“This made no sense,” Hojsik says. “They both died at the same time? They knew they were going to die so they wrote the note and left the house open?”
The girl, questioned separately, said the grandparents were still alive. The driver insisted they were dead and that he just hadn’t told his sister about it yet.
By now, Hojsik’s suspicions were rock solid.
While the two siblings were detained at the stop location, Hojsik had the sheriff’s dispatcher telephone Indianapolis police and advise that a well-being check should be made at the grandparents’ home.
The first officer assigned reportedly checked the doors, saw no obvious evidence that anything was amiss and left. According to Hojsik, “a more proactive” Indianapolis officer, Mike Horn, saw information about the check request on his computer screen and decided to swing by the location himself. He established from neighbors that the old couple hadn’t been seen around lately, although one of their cars was in the driveway.
Horn called the sheriff’s dispatcher in Missouri and asked to be patched through to Hojsik’s cell phone.
According to Lt. McGuire, Hojsik told Horn, “There’s something stinky here,” and urged him to keep probing.
Through a flurry of cell phone conversations, an ominous picture began to take shape. Actually, it was several weeks since the grandparents had been seen, although other people had been noticed going in and out of their house. One neighbor recalled hearing what sounded like a jackhammer coming from inside their residence more than a month ago.
During one of their cell calls, about 90 minutes after Hojsik’s traffic stop began, Horn inquired as to what kind of cars the old couple owned. Hojsik asked the granddaughter, who by then was sitting in back of an unmarked patrol car, and she described them. Horn confirmed that such vehicles were on the property.
“Talking out loud to myself, I said, ‘Oh, they’re there,’” Hojsik recalls. Overhearing him, Hojsik believes the girl must have thought that he was referring to the missing couple.
She blurted out, “He killed them and they’re buried in the basement!” Hojsik recalled.
“Who killed them?” Hojsik asked.
“My brother. He killed my mom, too, but I don’t know what he did with her body.”
No emotion accompanied the girl’s spontaneous outburst. “She was basically nonchalant,” Hojsik said. “I was stunned.”
When Indianapolis police made entry to the grandparents’ home, splatters of concrete were found on the basement steps and one section of the basement’s concrete floor appeared freshly poured, Lt. McGuire says.
The two detainees were promptly transported to the sheriff’s department, where the girl gave a detailed confession. Later, her brother admitted his involvement as well, McGuire says.
The brother, Kenneth Allen, a divorced father of two, was released in November from a federal correctional facility in Kentucky after serving time for counterfeiting. His sheet also includes convictions for battery and for criminal confinement of his then-wife, plus theft-related felony convictions in Florida and Arizona. At the time of the traffic stop, there was an outstanding theft warrant was against him from California.
According to a probable cause affidavit filed in Indianapolis, this is how the murders went down:
Kenneth decided to enact a long-brewing plot to kill his grandparents, Leander and Betty Bradley, to get their money, including $200,000 in bank accounts.
Kenneth recruited his sister Kari to join in the murderous plot on Dec. 30, and also tried to engage their 53-year-old mother, Sharon Allen, at her suburban Indianapolis apartment. When she refused, he stabbed her to death. Kari, a high school senior, allegedly served as a lookout.
Kenneth lured his grandmother to the apartment on Jan. 3, by telling her that Sharon was sick, the affidavit says. He then smothered his grandmother with a plastic bag, Kari again keeping watch.
Later that day, Kenneth and Kari went to their grandparents’ home and Kenneth bludgeoned his grandfather to death with a hammer, the affidavit says.
Next he used a saw to cut up the bodies of his mother and grandmother in his mother’s apartment, then took the remains to the grandparents’ home. There, he and his sister used a jackhammer rented from Home Depot to break up concrete in the basement so that a six-foot-square hole could be dug.
The bodies - the two women dismembered and the grandfather intact -- were dumped in. The makeshift tomb was filled and sealed with concrete from a rented cement mixer.
At about 5:30 p.m. on the day of Hojsik’s critical traffic stop, forensic teams began extracting body parts from the death pit. Eventually they would exhume 12 bags full of evidence.
Kenneth and Kari Allen were charged with three counts each of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, along with two counts of robbery. The county prosecutor in Indianapolis says they could face the death penalty. He described the meticulous excavation of the bodies as “the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen.”
At the St. Charles County Jail, the Allen kids seemed unfazed by the killings. “He bragged and thought it was funny,” Hojsik remembers. “They joked about it,” and Kari horsed around, lifting up her shirt to reveal a T-shirt with the legend: I’M A LESBIAN. Hojsik concluded: “It was no big deal to them.”
He, on the other hand, has had trouble sleeping since that day. “I’ve been thinking about it all a lot,” he says.
Sheriff Tim Swope, a former narcotics sergeant, established the directed patrol unit about 18 months ago, soon after he was elected sheriff. In addition to Hojsik and Ochs, Deputies John Johnson and Chad Thorpe and four K-9s are assigned to it full time.
Besides solving robberies, burglaries, one kidnapping and assorted other crimes, they’ve conservatively seized nearly $10 million worth of illegal drugs and currency, including a kilo of heroin concealed in the soles of one suspect’s shoes.
Indeed, the same week Hojsik intercepted the accused murderers, “the unit took $60,000 off the highway,” Swope says.
When Deputy Hojsik speaks - reluctantly -- about his pivotal role in cracking the murder case, “he is far too modest,” the sheriff says. “He acts like it was luck ... but it wasn’t.”
