Chasing Evil: Shocking Crimes, Supernatural Forces, and an FBI Agent's Search for Hope and Justice

The silver herringbone watch with its distinctive green face and gemstone bezel operates as material and symbolic evidence of Smith’s guilt, its circulation among women in Smith’s orbit mapping his predatory patterns. Janice Hartman’s sister, Dee, helped select this timepiece as a birthday gift—“I knew she would love it” (101)—establishing its intimate connection to the first victim. When Smith later presents the same watch to teenage Kathleen McDonald, an ominous declaration accompanies the transfer: “Don’t worry about it...she’s dead” (99). Smith’s words further link Janice and Kathleen, figuratively corroborating his sinister intentions toward the latter.

The watch’s reappearance, decades later in Kathleen’s possession followed by its dramatic production during the 1999 hotel interrogation, demonstrates how objects retain their evidentiary power even as their owners vanish. When Hilland confronts Smith with it during their standoff—“You see a ghost?” (133)—the timepiece becomes a symbol of the woman he killed. Its green face, unusual and memorable, makes it instantly identifiable, functioning like a fingerprint linking crime scenes across state lines and decades. Its eventual return to Janice’s sister completes a circle: Her tears acknowledge both the closure that securing justice has provided and the fundamental loss that no material links to Janice can remedy.

A motif of technology reveals how the physical and spiritual realms must collaborate rather than compete in the pursuit of justice. Throughout Chasing Evil, Hilland deploys standard FBI apparatus—polygraph machines, ground-penetrating radar, surveillance cameras, and digital forensics—yet these tools repeatedly fail to yield breakthrough insights on their own. By highlighting these failures, the book suggests that modern investigative technology is sophisticated but insufficient—an idea central to the theme of The Power of Intuition and Evidence Working in Tandem.

When Hilland searches for Noah Thomas, he embodies this synthesis: “I had the phone in one hand, the flashlight in the other” (1), with John's psychic guidance streaming through the phone while the flashlight illuminates physical terrain. This image encapsulates the book's central argument: Neither spiritual intuition nor conventional investigation supersedes the other, instead they function symbiotically. The polygraph emerges as a particularly symbolic technology in this respect: Hilland understands that while “the body never lie[s]” (224), interpretation requires intuitive reading of subjects’ demeanor and behavioral cues beyond mere physiological data.

The photo Hilland describes as capturing Fran’s image presents a variation on the pattern. The image serves Hilland’s investigation indirectly, motivating him to continue the search for Fran’s remains. However, its primary evidentiary function has nothing to do with the Smith case: Rather, it serves to corroborate the memoir’s claims about psychic phenomena and their utility in police investigations. This inverts the pattern that the book has previously established, with technology building a case for a spiritual reality rather than spiritual intuition providing leads in the material world. It thus reiterates the book’s basic attempt to integrate empirical rigor with metaphysical perception.