The views and opinions expressing this podcast are solely those of the authors and participants and do not necessarily represent those of iHeart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. This series contains discussions of violence and sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised previously an algorithm. After graduating high school in in Lima, Ohio, Vaughan returned to Indiana, where he says he committed three murders in Hammond, killing a couple as part of a robbery and shooting a man after getting into a fight. You said that you shot him near the telephone call that was directly across right from there. How many times you think you shot at? By? After a stint in the Marines, some head trauma and a less than honorable discharge, Vaughn began dating a woman twenty nine years older than him. They moved to Texas and got married, but life kept drawing vond back to Gary and they moved back. Around the year two thousand, Von grew apart from his wife. He made a new girlfriend, Sharifa, but it was an abusive relationship. In two thousand four, he and Sharitha had a child together, but shortly after their child's birth. The child died. That n a dead moment for we allowed the child. We're going through the morning period. She was out, took the money to the nopeman. I was like, that's just too got me. What do you want to fuck up? Like if we're just gonna beat this ship over from my Heart radio and Tenderfoot TV, this is algorithm, I'm ben key break. After Von and Shretha's child died, Sharia escaped Vaughn and went into hiding. Von suspected Sharitha was staying with a friend of hers, a man named David Abraham, who Vaughan said was a drug dealer and a member of a rival gang, the Vice Lords. Dude, we woke through somebody. I'm too, According to a police report, near the beginning of April two thousand four, Vaughan showed up at Abram's house and asked if Shritha was there. Abram told him she wasn't, but Vaughan got angry. I know she's in there, he said, and kept demanding to see her, but eventually Von gave up and left. The Next day, Vaughan returned, this time with police officers. Vaughn told them that Abram had shot at his cousin Darryl. Abram talked to the police and explained the situation. When the police were satisfied with Abram's story, they left and Vaughan left as well. But Abram started hearing through the grape vine that Vaughn was hatching a plan to get back at him. Vaughn was telling people he had dynamite and he was going to blow up Abram's house. A few days later, Abram was driving through his neighborhood when he saw Van storming towards his house with a red can of gasoline. Abram called the police and pulled over beside Vaughan. Vaughan yelled at him that he'd blew up Abraham's home if he didn't get Sharita back, and said that Shreta owed him seven thousand dollars. Abraham tried to reason with Vaughan. He remembered saying, you're going to burn down my family, innocent people, over a woman. Vaughan responded, give me seven thousand dollars and you can have her. When the police showed up, they saw Vaughan was standing by Abram's car, yelling wildly and waving around a red gas canister. Police say that they tried to get Von to calm down, but things escalated. Instead, Vaughn poured gasoline on himself and got out of lighter, yelling to officers that he had dynamite and would blow himself up. The officers advised Abraham to get away from Vaughan, so Abraham drove back towards his home, but he could see Vaughan following in his rear view mirror. Abraham says he saw Sharita sitting on a porch a couple of doors down from his home, and he threw her a set of his keys and told her to lock herself inside. But before Sharitha had a chance to react, Vaughan was already approaching. He yelled, bitch, are you crazy, and then started running towards her. She sprinted to the back door of Abram's house. Von pursued her, gaining on her, but she managed to get inside and locked the door behind her. Vaughan began kicking at the door. Terrified, Shartha tried to find a place to hide and ended up crawling under a bed. She could hear the door bust open and then heard Von stepping inside Vaughan yelled that if she didn't come out of hiding, he'd burned the whole place down. He began pouring gasoline onto the floor. Sharitha was terrified and didn't know what to do, but as Vaughan kept pouring gas, fumes began filling apartment and soon became overpowering. Finally, Sharifa crawled out from under the bed. Immediately, Von put her in a headlock, and then he poured gasolene on top of her until the can was almost empty. The final bit of gasoline he poured onto his own head gabs just running off. Yeah, but the gas pipe and had the whole bud to feel with games. Police had now arrived at Abram's home, but Von told them to stay back. We'd light the building on fire. Police tried to talk him down and to clear others out of the area. Vaughn says he started clicking the lighter the girl fire, beat on fire and go to building up, always saying it's part but it didn't light. You said you got lucky fume with one hard. Officer Carrie Rice was working that day. He remembers it a bit differently. If he had tried to strike that cigarette line and it didn't strike the person, he wouldn't have got a second chance to try to strike it. He had a deadly weapon, a gas on the cigarette for the deadly weapons, deadly for it was authorized. You shouldn't and you don't want to, but sometimes you scenario had it went different in two thousand four, and maybe some people would still be alive today. I don't know, but it's just eerie sometimes because I don't think we still know I'm in the women he's actually killed. Rice says that he was nearby when Abram called. We don't have too many days where we have stuff like this. In fact, it probably my first time ever going to a hospital situation like this one was. It was a strange scene with Sharifa in a headlock. Vaughan had marched her out of Abram's apartment and was starting back towards his own place. He had a left hand around her neck, the gas can in his left hand and cigarette lighter in his right hand. The girl was, of course scared. She was screaming, please help me a lot. The officers tried to calm Vonda down. You trying to tell him you haven't heard anybody it's gonna be okay. You know, let's go ahead end this now and nobody hurts. You know, it's not that serious. But he really didn't want to be, for some reason separated from that female, and he wouldn't let any of us get too close to him. But like if you guys started getting close, he threatened to light him on fire. Or yes, he kept telling us to stay away every time you get the step twelve and be thrown the light both of him up. And how would you describe his general state of mind? Um, he was calm, but but he was yellout. I guess he was yellous so we could hear him. I really did believe that he was going to set both of them on fired, you know, just from this demeanor what he was saying. Sure, you kind of like running through in your head. What can you do if he does do that? The only thing we can do at that point is trying to at least grab the female fell up to the ground and try to put the fire up. As Vaughan March Wreatha back to his apartment, a growing procession of police, firefighters, and now a SWAT team followed. They crossed us twenty a three way highway that runs through Gary, and they went down an alleyway until they arrived at the back door of Vaughn's apartment because back was up against the door in the back of the apartment building. At that point, we had two or three of our swat team guys go through the front door apartment buildings. But after he backed up to the door and opened it, two of us watch teams actually grabbed him. He ran up, also grabbed the can. One of us grabbed the girl as snatched her out, and that's not we were able to prod him away from her. Vaughn was charged with felony breaking and entering and felony intimidation. He took a plea deal that knocked off the intimidation charge, and the judge used her discretion to bump the breaking and entry charge down to a misdemeanor. Vaughn was sentenced to a year in praison in in a year of probation. Obviously, Von was a deeply troubled person before this all happened. But in Von's own mind, or at least the story that he's told the police, this two thousand four incident, losing his child and his relationship with Sharifa and then going to prison. This was the incident that vond saw as the beginning of his downward spiral. And then it seemed like I never made it back from there. I was doing good thing, a quick crime like quick back. What are you now? Working at a house doing good? Just couldn't make it back. We're at least if it wasn't the beginning of his downward spiral, it may have been when he returned to killing, it all went back out of control again. I never made him back. Un Once you I don't know how to flame. If y'all y'all don't have the same or just once you start killing again, it becomes it's like any other day. It's like if I was I'm not an out the hallway, right, But if I were and I started to drink, you're off to the races, right. That's because you have the urge to hunt. In this part of the interview, Vaughan clearly implies they struggled with murder rages sometime before his arrest in two thousand four, and then he struggled with them again after his release in two thousand five. In two thousand and six, after Vaughan finished serving a year in jail and a year of probation. He borrowed some money from his stepsister, Regina, and moved back down to Texas. Vaughan got an apartment in the Rundberg area of North Austin, an area known for drugs and prostitution. That's that same area where Maria's son said that Vaughan would go for long walks at night. In Austin, Vaughn kept a low profile for about a year before he committed his next crime. In two thousand and six, after Vaughan had finished a year of prison and a year of probation for breaking and entering and threatening to kill Sharita, Vaughan moved back to Austin, and in December two thousand seven, he committed his next documented crime. This next section is going to get graphic. I'm not including it to be lurid, but because this is what von did, and maybe more importantly, this is what the justice system knew Vaughan was capable of. The following comes from police documents. On December two thousand seven, Vaughan booked a prostitute to come to his apartment. She says they met in the parking lot inside his building, and then went back to his place. It was dark, and she asked Vaughan if they could turn on a light. He did, and then asked her if she was a police officer. She told him she wasn't, and then he attacked her. He tripped her and knocked her down to the ground, gone on top of her, and began choking her. As she lost blood flow to her brain, she felt her body go limp and she urinated. She felt completely and utterly helpless. Vaughan yelled at her that he could kill her if he wanted. She thought that she was going to die. Vaughan then forced her to undress and to perform sex acts, beating her if she didn't comply. Eventually, he ejaculated inside her in a short while later, he allowed her to leave. The Next day, the woman went to the Austin Police to report the attack. A sexual assault nurse observed that she had broken blood vessels in her left eye and pinpoint bruises behind her ears. These are injuries that can occur if someone has been strangled, so they supported her story of a violent attack. The nurse performed a rape kit and collected DNA evidence. The woman told police what had happened and where Von lived. Police determined that Darren Vaughan was leasing the apartment at the address she had given them, but he wasn't at the apartment when they showed up. Eventually, they did locate him, and Vaughan told them that he was innocent. He claimed to have never met the victim and said that he had moved out of the apartment a month prior to the incident. Police asked him if he'd consent to a DNA test, and he agreed. Almost half a year passed before police received the DNA analysis His uncle year exactly what caused this delay. Like many places across the country, there was a rape kit backlog in Texas. It's worth noting, too, though, that there's currently a class action lawsuit against the Austin Police Department for allegedly mishandling thousands of sexual assault cases going back to the same time period. Whatever the reason, though, almost half a year passed between when the DNA was collected and when police received the analysis. The analysis showed a sample from the victims jacket matched Vaughn's DNA, but it still took another two months before police found and arrested Vaughan. Vaughn was charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault, a first degree felony that can lead to a sentence of up to years in prison, but the Travis County District Attorney's office labeled Vaughan a low risk offender and gave him a plea deal where if he played guilty to a second degree sexual assault charge, he'd only see a five year sentence. Years later, a spokesperson for the District Attorney's office told the local paper that they were completely unaware of Vaughan's violent incident with Sharifa because Vaughan had only been convicted of a misdemeanor breaking and entering charge. It wasn't even on their radar when I learned about the crimes Vaughan had been convicted of ving Gary and Austin for incidents where he had almost killed two women. I was shocked by the short sentences he'd received, but I also just didn't have a good sense for what's normal. How do we and how should we make decisions about how we sentence someone for a crime. To try to find out how big of a threat someone like Vaughan poses, I contacted professor Carl Hansen. If you look at the police stories, the police stories are almost always told from the perspective of catching the wrong door. My story starts, Okay, you caught him, Now what you know, what's the rest of the story. Hanson is a clinical psychologist who spent most of his career working for the Canadian government trying to figure out how their justice system should deal with sex offenders. He's now a professor at Carlton University in Ottawa. Most of my research has focused on sexual recidivism. So these are people with a history of sexual crime, and the question is, given that somebody has a history of sexual crime, what is the likelihood that they're going to do it again? And how can we tell individuals are higher or lower risk? Hansen says there's a number of factors that predict whether an offender is high risk or low risk, like young age, past crimes, negative attitudes towards authority, substance use, and a general preoccupation with sex. All of these risk factors can then be tallied up and put into an algorithm that then predicts a sex offender's risk of committing future offenses. Studies know that these algorithms do a better job at predicting recidivism than pearl boards, who are decisions made by professionals based on their intuition. The data is getting better. We can stort people into higher and lower risks. The lowest risk people have expected rates of sexual recidivism that are quite low. It's like less than two percent after five years. The highest risk groups have rates um, you know, thirty two after five years, which I think most people would consider objectively high. Now that being said, people are not fully predictable. We're not billiard balls. Even somebody in the highest risk group. There's no group that will say this person is guaranteed to reoffend. It's a question of how much risk we're willing to tolerate. I wondered whether Texas had all the information it needed when it deemed von low risk. Should the gasoline incident with Sharifa have been factor it in? This guy at one point had kidnapped in an ex girlfriend, So after she left the relationship, he showed up and was threatening her with a can of gasoline, and you know, police showed up, and it was this whole thing. But I'm curious how you know, like the history of a crime like that might influence how you think of someone's risk. A history of of violence is a well established rispector for sexual crime. If you knew this guy had a history of threatening his ex girlfriends, um, it's not good. Yeah, And and it's kind of like domestic violence or violence against women. Is that particularly important or so? One of the well established predictors of sexual violence against women is his negative attitude towards women. You're putting women in a class who they're not trusted. You know, think about in cells individuals who think that women are or you out to get them. They're tricky. You can't be trusted if you have that belief. And if you also have problems with what you know they college would call attachment, so that you get particularly upset or irrational around the breakup of relationships. Those are established risk factors for sexual violence. When Hansen mentioned attachment problems, I thought of Vaughan's relationship with his mother, how he'd been put into foster care at age six and felt that his mother had abandoned him. You know, there probably are factors from someone's childhood or early experiences, are really things that they have little control over. Is it fair to use those factors to make these decisions, um, when in some ways they could help public safety, but in other ways almost feel discriminatory against a person. Yeah, it coming back to the moral question about you know, how blame worthy people are. We're all a product of something, right, you know, there's we all have causes and conditions that made us who we are. And if we're you know, committing serious sexual violence, I can bet that the conditions weren't very good, right, So what do we do about that? UM? I think that we have to make some determination to blame worthin us. But I think we also have to have a wide view about how we can make the world a better place, and some of it has to do with, um, making people's upbringings better. One of the researchers who I really like, Richard Tromblay, He was very interested in, you know, going back in the prevention, and so he started with you know, severe forensic hospitals, and he got a bit younger, and got two teens, and he got two young children. And last time I talked to him, or so him speak, UM, he was looking at pregnant women and he was able to identify prior to birth children who were going to be involved in the criminals as the system and had to do with the parents, um lifestyle, their substance abuse. There, you know, values and behavior. We're all products of something. I'm not sure what to do with all this information about the factors that might make someone high or blue risk of reoffending. Before I ended my conversation with Hansen, he wanted to make it very clear that Vaughan isn't a typical offender. He's an exception to the rule. Sounds the fellow that you're focusing on a specificate and serious problems in multiple areas, but that's not typical when you're talking about sex crime and sex crimes against women. We tend to make policy based on the worst cases. If you have a wider range of what these cases actually look like, I think we'll motivate towards better public policy overall. And I want to be clear, I don't think any advant's risk factors excuse his behavior in any way. But I do think as a society we should work to reduce risk factors like neglect and abuse that can make someone more likely to commit these sorts of violent crimes. And I think we need to do a better job at making sure courts and parole boards have the information they need to make informed, evidence based decisions about someone's risk of re offense. But Vaughan didn't feel like he'd gotten off easy. As he told Detective Forward in and from that offense where you choked the girl there and wound up with all this happening, you were never given probation or parole conditions or anything like that. Is you came to Indiana, you were completely released. So the only thing you had to do was signed up on the offender RESHI, according to Von's twisted logic, because the woman was a prostitute, it wasn't ranged locked up. Yeah, I'll beat her. I rape you, well, I rape got standard. Y'all call it rape, but we don't call it rape. And streets like you pay her. So what is she p plaining about? After Vaughn was released from prison in Austin, he needed somewhere to stay Texas, right, offer me housing. I don't want your money. I don't need you to give me anything. I could go get what I wanted. It might not be the way y'all want me to go get anything, but I could go get it. I think it's the way most people in society wasn't right. But that's why we got what a trillion dollars and did because everybody, like guys that lived in projects that we know your publics. This we call him bitches. You get no respect, We'll slap you, knock you out because you're mate. We'd rather you rob like because kids need more health than a delt. Once you've been going with a dolt, you shouldn't need any dolt. Vun ended up going straight back to Gary and moving in with his stepbrother, Reginald Beard. Here's Reginald talking to the police shortly after Bond's arrest. You know he was gonna do when he got out and mucket, I'm sensitive, you know what I'm saying that it's my brother. No, I said, brother, you know you need space, crash man, you can come here, okay. And he when he got home, he explads to me like the details of when he went to jail for down there in Texas. Uh, he had to register at my house. I get him light up. You know, okay, what do you do when you first came most here doing? When he first name well, he really didn't go him right on that mostly watching a lot of TV, eating a lot of food. Yeah, how does behavior mens? Just's been out of jail. I mean, what do you I was having when you first came from Do you have me? He started getting pressed, He flip flops. Man. Uh. Some days he had come in the house and he had spent on couch. On a day he watched cartoonls, like fucking cartoonls out back day, Schoopy said, and then true green one more for a while. See you you know what I'm saying. And I'm alte him for a couple of fucking days, sure, he said, two three morning open, go for a walk? Yeah? Is that all the time? He walks a lot. He had disappeared for a couple of days. But it's not always at the exact time. I really can't keep tabs something like that. But before olish, you know, his walks out and you just take a walk. Okay, working house now and now as alltist and like, well you've walked up. Help not I'm talking about the city to like see you know what I'm saying. It's unclear exactly when Bond started killing after he returned to Indiana, but Bonds confirmed murders the ones where he took police to the bodies. News appeared to have started in January with the disappearance of Tierra Beatty. Contact police base, but they will say enough that she probably wanted to be bombed with nobody, but we knew that wasn't the case. But you knew the look out with it. So I said, well, let me start in death. Gave myself next time on algorithm. I'm not normally a drug dealer because I'm not kind of got you go hold ten dollars to you know what I'm saying, I want my ten dollars. Presiban talking like keeping people that were like, I don't you got the twinings, but I've seen you had to sing her the other day, dn't pretty much one dollars. It was one girl. She was one of the very very first person that I ever ran into him, but she happened to get away from him. She talked to the detective because of her line of work, they didn't have time for her to me, it's more because this is him. You know what I'm saying, This is he's told me the person I've always tooke. China was going around telling people that she's in a band of building on the west side of town. It was like a singing from a horror movie. This episode was written and produced by me then Keith. Break Algorithm is executive produced by Alex will Umes, Donald Albright and Matt Frederick. Production assistance and mixing by Eric Quintana. The music is by Makeup and Vanity Set and Blue Dot Sessions. Thanks to Christina Dana, Miranda Hawkins, Jamie Albright, Rema l Kali, Trevor Young, and Josh Thane for their help and notes. And if you're looking for another true crime show to listen to, you can now binge camp Hell. It's a podcast investigating the rise of this weird wilderness therapy school based out of Georgia, which operated for over thirty years and ended in this huge scandal. Is a really good show and all twelve episodes are out now, so you can binge them. Search for Camp Hell on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

The views and opinions expressing this podcast are solely those of the authors and participants and do not necessarily represent those of iHeart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. This series contains discussions of violence and sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised previously an algorithm. After graduating high school in in Lima, Ohio, Vaughan returned to Indiana, where he says he committed three murders in Hammond, killing a couple as part of a robbery and shooting a man after getting into a fight. You said that you shot him near the telephone call that was directly across right from there. How many times you think you shot at? By? After a stint in the Marines, some head trauma and a less than honorable discharge, Vaughn began dating a woman twenty nine years older than him. They moved to Texas and got married, but life kept drawing vond back to Gary and they moved back. Around the year two thousand, Von grew apart from his wife. He made a new girlfriend, Sharifa, but it was an abusive relationship. In two thousand four, he and Sharitha had a child together, but shortly after their child's birth. The child died. That n a dead moment for we allowed the child. We're going through the morning period. She was out, took the money to the nopeman. I was like, that's just too got me. What do you want to fuck up? Like if we're just gonna beat this ship over from my Heart radio and Tenderfoot TV, this is algorithm, I'm ben key break. After Von and Shretha's child died, Sharia escaped Vaughn and went into hiding. Von suspected Sharitha was staying with a friend of hers, a man named David Abraham, who Vaughan said was a drug dealer and a member of a rival gang, the Vice Lords. Dude, we woke through somebody. I'm too, According to a police report, near the beginning of April two thousand four, Vaughan showed up at Abram's house and asked if Shritha was there. Abram told him she wasn't, but Vaughan got angry. I know she's in there, he said, and kept demanding to see her, but eventually Von gave up and left. The Next day, Vaughan returned, this time with police officers. Vaughn told them that Abram had shot at his cousin Darryl. Abram talked to the police and explained the situation. When the police were satisfied with Abram's story, they left and Vaughan left as well. But Abram started hearing through the grape vine that Vaughn was hatching a plan to get back at him. Vaughn was telling people he had dynamite and he was going to blow up Abram's house. A few days later, Abram was driving through his neighborhood when he saw Van storming towards his house with a red can of gasoline. Abram called the police and pulled over beside Vaughan. Vaughan yelled at him that he'd blew up Abraham's home if he didn't get Sharita back, and said that Shreta owed him seven thousand dollars. Abraham tried to reason with Vaughan. He remembered saying, you're going to burn down my family, innocent people, over a woman. Vaughan responded, give me seven thousand dollars and you can have her. When the police showed up, they saw Vaughan was standing by Abram's car, yelling wildly and waving around a red gas canister. Police say that they tried to get Von to calm down, but things escalated. Instead, Vaughn poured gasoline on himself and got out of lighter, yelling to officers that he had dynamite and would blow himself up. The officers advised Abraham to get away from Vaughan, so Abraham drove back towards his home, but he could see Vaughan following in his rear view mirror. Abraham says he saw Sharita sitting on a porch a couple of doors down from his home, and he threw her a set of his keys and told her to lock herself inside. But before Sharitha had a chance to react, Vaughan was already approaching. He yelled, bitch, are you crazy, and then started running towards her. She sprinted to the back door of Abram's house. Von pursued her, gaining on her, but she managed to get inside and locked the door behind her. Vaughan began kicking at the door. Terrified, Shartha tried to find a place to hide and ended up crawling under a bed. She could hear the door bust open and then heard Von stepping inside Vaughan yelled that if she didn't come out of hiding, he'd burned the whole place down. He began pouring gasoline onto the floor. Sharitha was terrified and didn't know what to do, but as Vaughan kept pouring gas, fumes began filling apartment and soon became overpowering. Finally, Sharifa crawled out from under the bed. Immediately, Von put her in a headlock, and then he poured gasolene on top of her until the can was almost empty. The final bit of gasoline he poured onto his own head gabs just running off. Yeah, but the gas pipe and had the whole bud to feel with games. Police had now arrived at Abram's home, but Von told them to stay back. We'd light the building on fire. Police tried to talk him down and to clear others out of the area. Vaughn says he started clicking the lighter the girl fire, beat on fire and go to building up, always saying it's part but it didn't light. You said you got lucky fume with one hard. Officer Carrie Rice was working that day. He remembers it a bit differently. If he had tried to strike that cigarette line and it didn't strike the person, he wouldn't have got a second chance to try to strike it. He had a deadly weapon, a gas on the cigarette for the deadly weapons, deadly for it was authorized. You shouldn't and you don't want to, but sometimes you scenario had it went different in two thousand four, and maybe some people would still be alive today. I don't know, but it's just eerie sometimes because I don't think we still know I'm in the women he's actually killed. Rice says that he was nearby when Abram called. We don't have too many days where we have stuff like this. In fact, it probably my first time ever going to a hospital situation like this one was. It was a strange scene with Sharifa in a headlock. Vaughan had marched her out of Abram's apartment and was starting back towards his own place. He had a left hand around her neck, the gas can in his left hand and cigarette lighter in his right hand. The girl was, of course scared. She was screaming, please help me a lot. The officers tried to calm Vonda down. You trying to tell him you haven't heard anybody it's gonna be okay. You know, let's go ahead end this now and nobody hurts. You know, it's not that serious. But he really didn't want to be, for some reason separated from that female, and he wouldn't let any of us get too close to him. But like if you guys started getting close, he threatened to light him on fire. Or yes, he kept telling us to stay away every time you get the step twelve and be thrown the light both of him up. And how would you describe his general state of mind? Um, he was calm, but but he was yellout. I guess he was yellous so we could hear him. I really did believe that he was going to set both of them on fired, you know, just from this demeanor what he was saying. Sure, you kind of like running through in your head. What can you do if he does do that? The only thing we can do at that point is trying to at least grab the female fell up to the ground and try to put the fire up. As Vaughan March Wreatha back to his apartment, a growing procession of police, firefighters, and now a SWAT team followed. They crossed us twenty a three way highway that runs through Gary, and they went down an alleyway until they arrived at the back door of Vaughn's apartment because back was up against the door in the back of the apartment building. At that point, we had two or three of our swat team guys go through the front door apartment buildings. But after he backed up to the door and opened it, two of us watch teams actually grabbed him. He ran up, also grabbed the can. One of us grabbed the girl as snatched her out, and that's not we were able to prod him away from her. Vaughn was charged with felony breaking and entering and felony intimidation. He took a plea deal that knocked off the intimidation charge, and the judge used her discretion to bump the breaking and entry charge down to a misdemeanor. Vaughn was sentenced to a year in praison in in a year of probation. Obviously, Von was a deeply troubled person before this all happened. But in Von's own mind, or at least the story that he's told the police, this two thousand four incident, losing his child and his relationship with Sharifa and then going to prison. This was the incident that vond saw as the beginning of his downward spiral. And then it seemed like I never made it back from there. I was doing good thing, a quick crime like quick back. What are you now? Working at a house doing good? Just couldn't make it back. We're at least if it wasn't the beginning of his downward spiral, it may have been when he returned to killing, it all went back out of control again. I never made him back. Un Once you I don't know how to flame. If y'all y'all don't have the same or just once you start killing again, it becomes it's like any other day. It's like if I was I'm not an out the hallway, right, But if I were and I started to drink, you're off to the races, right. That's because you have the urge to hunt. In this part of the interview, Vaughan clearly implies they struggled with murder rages sometime before his arrest in two thousand four, and then he struggled with them again after his release in two thousand five. In two thousand and six, after Vaughan finished serving a year in jail and a year of probation. He borrowed some money from his stepsister, Regina, and moved back down to Texas. Vaughan got an apartment in the Rundberg area of North Austin, an area known for drugs and prostitution. That's that same area where Maria's son said that Vaughan would go for long walks at night. In Austin, Vaughn kept a low profile for about a year before he committed his next crime. In two thousand and six, after Vaughan had finished a year of prison and a year of probation for breaking and entering and threatening to kill Sharita, Vaughan moved back to Austin, and in December two thousand seven, he committed his next documented crime. This next section is going to get graphic. I'm not including it to be lurid, but because this is what von did, and maybe more importantly, this is what the justice system knew Vaughan was capable of. The following comes from police documents. On December two thousand seven, Vaughan booked a prostitute to come to his apartment. She says they met in the parking lot inside his building, and then went back to his place. It was dark, and she asked Vaughan if they could turn on a light. He did, and then asked her if she was a police officer. She told him she wasn't, and then he attacked her. He tripped her and knocked her down to the ground, gone on top of her, and began choking her. As she lost blood flow to her brain, she felt her body go limp and she urinated. She felt completely and utterly helpless. Vaughan yelled at her that he could kill her if he wanted. She thought that she was going to die. Vaughan then forced her to undress and to perform sex acts, beating her if she didn't comply. Eventually, he ejaculated inside her in a short while later, he allowed her to leave. The Next day, the woman went to the Austin Police to report the attack. A sexual assault nurse observed that she had broken blood vessels in her left eye and pinpoint bruises behind her ears. These are injuries that can occur if someone has been strangled, so they supported her story of a violent attack. The nurse performed a rape kit and collected DNA evidence. The woman told police what had happened and where Von lived. Police determined that Darren Vaughan was leasing the apartment at the address she had given them, but he wasn't at the apartment when they showed up. Eventually, they did locate him, and Vaughan told them that he was innocent. He claimed to have never met the victim and said that he had moved out of the apartment a month prior to the incident. Police asked him if he'd consent to a DNA test, and he agreed. Almost half a year passed before police received the DNA analysis His uncle year exactly what caused this delay. Like many places across the country, there was a rape kit backlog in Texas. It's worth noting, too, though, that there's currently a class action lawsuit against the Austin Police Department for allegedly mishandling thousands of sexual assault cases going back to the same time period. Whatever the reason, though, almost half a year passed between when the DNA was collected and when police received the analysis. The analysis showed a sample from the victims jacket matched Vaughn's DNA, but it still took another two months before police found and arrested Vaughan. Vaughn was charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault, a first degree felony that can lead to a sentence of up to years in prison, but the Travis County District Attorney's office labeled Vaughan a low risk offender and gave him a plea deal where if he played guilty to a second degree sexual assault charge, he'd only see a five year sentence. Years later, a spokesperson for the District Attorney's office told the local paper that they were completely unaware of Vaughan's violent incident with Sharifa because Vaughan had only been convicted of a misdemeanor breaking and entering charge. It wasn't even on their radar when I learned about the crimes Vaughan had been convicted of ving Gary and Austin for incidents where he had almost killed two women. I was shocked by the short sentences he'd received, but I also just didn't have a good sense for what's normal. How do we and how should we make decisions about how we sentence someone for a crime. To try to find out how big of a threat someone like Vaughan poses, I contacted professor Carl Hansen. If you look at the police stories, the police stories are almost always told from the perspective of catching the wrong door. My story starts, Okay, you caught him, Now what you know, what's the rest of the story. Hanson is a clinical psychologist who spent most of his career working for the Canadian government trying to figure out how their justice system should deal with sex offenders. He's now a professor at Carlton University in Ottawa. Most of my research has focused on sexual recidivism. So these are people with a history of sexual crime, and the question is, given that somebody has a history of sexual crime, what is the likelihood that they're going to do it again? And how can we tell individuals are higher or lower risk? Hansen says there's a number of factors that predict whether an offender is high risk or low risk, like young age, past crimes, negative attitudes towards authority, substance use, and a general preoccupation with sex. All of these risk factors can then be tallied up and put into an algorithm that then predicts a sex offender's risk of committing future offenses. Studies know that these algorithms do a better job at predicting recidivism than pearl boards, who are decisions made by professionals based on their intuition. The data is getting better. We can stort people into higher and lower risks. The lowest risk people have expected rates of sexual recidivism that are quite low. It's like less than two percent after five years. The highest risk groups have rates um, you know, thirty two after five years, which I think most people would consider objectively high. Now that being said, people are not fully predictable. We're not billiard balls. Even somebody in the highest risk group. There's no group that will say this person is guaranteed to reoffend. It's a question of how much risk we're willing to tolerate. I wondered whether Texas had all the information it needed when it deemed von low risk. Should the gasoline incident with Sharifa have been factor it in? This guy at one point had kidnapped in an ex girlfriend, So after she left the relationship, he showed up and was threatening her with a can of gasoline, and you know, police showed up, and it was this whole thing. But I'm curious how you know, like the history of a crime like that might influence how you think of someone's risk. A history of of violence is a well established rispector for sexual crime. If you knew this guy had a history of threatening his ex girlfriends, um, it's not good. Yeah, And and it's kind of like domestic violence or violence against women. Is that particularly important or so? One of the well established predictors of sexual violence against women is his negative attitude towards women. You're putting women in a class who they're not trusted. You know, think about in cells individuals who think that women are or you out to get them. They're tricky. You can't be trusted if you have that belief. And if you also have problems with what you know they college would call attachment, so that you get particularly upset or irrational around the breakup of relationships. Those are established risk factors for sexual violence. When Hansen mentioned attachment problems, I thought of Vaughan's relationship with his mother, how he'd been put into foster care at age six and felt that his mother had abandoned him. You know, there probably are factors from someone's childhood or early experiences, are really things that they have little control over. Is it fair to use those factors to make these decisions, um, when in some ways they could help public safety, but in other ways almost feel discriminatory against a person. Yeah, it coming back to the moral question about you know, how blame worthy people are. We're all a product of something, right, you know, there's we all have causes and conditions that made us who we are. And if we're you know, committing serious sexual violence, I can bet that the conditions weren't very good, right, So what do we do about that? UM? I think that we have to make some determination to blame worthin us. But I think we also have to have a wide view about how we can make the world a better place, and some of it has to do with, um, making people's upbringings better. One of the researchers who I really like, Richard Tromblay, He was very interested in, you know, going back in the prevention, and so he started with you know, severe forensic hospitals, and he got a bit younger, and got two teens, and he got two young children. And last time I talked to him, or so him speak, UM, he was looking at pregnant women and he was able to identify prior to birth children who were going to be involved in the criminals as the system and had to do with the parents, um lifestyle, their substance abuse. There, you know, values and behavior. We're all products of something. I'm not sure what to do with all this information about the factors that might make someone high or blue risk of reoffending. Before I ended my conversation with Hansen, he wanted to make it very clear that Vaughan isn't a typical offender. He's an exception to the rule. Sounds the fellow that you're focusing on a specificate and serious problems in multiple areas, but that's not typical when you're talking about sex crime and sex crimes against women. We tend to make policy based on the worst cases. If you have a wider range of what these cases actually look like, I think we'll motivate towards better public policy overall. And I want to be clear, I don't think any advant's risk factors excuse his behavior in any way. But I do think as a society we should work to reduce risk factors like neglect and abuse that can make someone more likely to commit these sorts of violent crimes. And I think we need to do a better job at making sure courts and parole boards have the information they need to make informed, evidence based decisions about someone's risk of re offense. But Vaughan didn't feel like he'd gotten off easy. As he told Detective Forward in and from that offense where you choked the girl there and wound up with all this happening, you were never given probation or parole conditions or anything like that. Is you came to Indiana, you were completely released. So the only thing you had to do was signed up on the offender RESHI, according to Von's twisted logic, because the woman was a prostitute, it wasn't ranged locked up. Yeah, I'll beat her. I rape you, well, I rape got standard. Y'all call it rape, but we don't call it rape. And streets like you pay her. So what is she p plaining about? After Vaughn was released from prison in Austin, he needed somewhere to stay Texas, right, offer me housing. I don't want your money. I don't need you to give me anything. I could go get what I wanted. It might not be the way y'all want me to go get anything, but I could go get it. I think it's the way most people in society wasn't right. But that's why we got what a trillion dollars and did because everybody, like guys that lived in projects that we know your publics. This we call him bitches. You get no respect, We'll slap you, knock you out because you're mate. We'd rather you rob like because kids need more health than a delt. Once you've been going with a dolt, you shouldn't need any dolt. Vun ended up going straight back to Gary and moving in with his stepbrother, Reginald Beard. Here's Reginald talking to the police shortly after Bond's arrest. You know he was gonna do when he got out and mucket, I'm sensitive, you know what I'm saying that it's my brother. No, I said, brother, you know you need space, crash man, you can come here, okay. And he when he got home, he explads to me like the details of when he went to jail for down there in Texas. Uh, he had to register at my house. I get him light up. You know, okay, what do you do when you first came most here doing? When he first name well, he really didn't go him right on that mostly watching a lot of TV, eating a lot of food. Yeah, how does behavior mens? Just's been out of jail. I mean, what do you I was having when you first came from Do you have me? He started getting pressed, He flip flops. Man. Uh. Some days he had come in the house and he had spent on couch. On a day he watched cartoonls, like fucking cartoonls out back day, Schoopy said, and then true green one more for a while. See you you know what I'm saying. And I'm alte him for a couple of fucking days, sure, he said, two three morning open, go for a walk? Yeah? Is that all the time? He walks a lot. He had disappeared for a couple of days. But it's not always at the exact time. I really can't keep tabs something like that. But before olish, you know, his walks out and you just take a walk. Okay, working house now and now as alltist and like, well you've walked up. Help not I'm talking about the city to like see you know what I'm saying. It's unclear exactly when Bond started killing after he returned to Indiana, but Bonds confirmed murders the ones where he took police to the bodies. News appeared to have started in January with the disappearance of Tierra Beatty. Contact police base, but they will say enough that she probably wanted to be bombed with nobody, but we knew that wasn't the case. But you knew the look out with it. So I said, well, let me start in death. Gave myself next time on algorithm. I'm not normally a drug dealer because I'm not kind of got you go hold ten dollars to you know what I'm saying, I want my ten dollars. Presiban talking like keeping people that were like, I don't you got the twinings, but I've seen you had to sing her the other day, dn't pretty much one dollars. It was one girl. She was one of the very very first person that I ever ran into him, but she happened to get away from him. She talked to the detective because of her line of work, they didn't have time for her to me, it's more because this is him. You know what I'm saying, This is he's told me the person I've always tooke. China was going around telling people that she's in a band of building on the west side of town. It was like a singing from a horror movie. This episode was written and produced by me then Keith. Break Algorithm is executive produced by Alex will Umes, Donald Albright and Matt Frederick. Production assistance and mixing by Eric Quintana. The music is by Makeup and Vanity Set and Blue Dot Sessions. Thanks to Christina Dana, Miranda Hawkins, Jamie Albright, Rema l Kali, Trevor Young, and Josh Thane for their help and notes. And if you're looking for another true crime show to listen to, you can now binge camp Hell. It's a podcast investigating the rise of this weird wilderness therapy school based out of Georgia, which operated for over thirty years and ended in this huge scandal. Is a really good show and all twelve episodes are out now, so you can binge them. Search for Camp Hell on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.