CONTENTS
About the Authors
Also by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
Title Page
Dedication
Authors’ Note
Epigraph
Prologue: In the Mind of a Killer
1. Journey into Darkness
2. The Motive Behind the Murder
3. Candy from Strangers
4. Is Nothing Sacred?
5. For the Children
6. Fighting Back
7. Sue Blue
8. Death of a Marine
9. The Passion of Jack and Trudy Collins
10. The Blood of the Lambs
11. Have They Got the Wrong Man?
12. Murder on South Bundy Drive
13. Crime and Punishment
Index
Copyright
Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime unit
Unabomber: On the trail of America’s Most-Wanted Serial Killer
The Anatomy of Motive: The FBI’s Legendary
Mindhunter Explores the Key to Understanding and
Catching Violent Criminals
The Cases That Haunt Us
Obsession
Broken Wings: A Novel
BY JOHN DOUGLAS
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives
(with Robert K. Kessler and Ann W. Burgess)
BY MARK OLSHAKER
Non-fiction
The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid
Experience
Fiction
Einstein’s Brain
Unnatural Causes
Blood Race
The Edge
The world’s top pioneer and expert on criminal profiling, author of the international bestseller, Mindhunter, delves further into the criminal mind in a range of chilling new cases – involving rape, arson, child molestation and murder – as well as profiling suspects from OJ Simpson to the Unabomber, and investigating the assassination of John Lennon and the tragedy at Waco, Texas.
The inspiration for Special Agent Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs and a continually sought-after consultant on headline-making cases, Douglas reveals the fascinating circumstances of each crime in detail as he explores the larger issues, from crime prevention and rehabilitation to what violence is doing to society.
John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, critically acclaimed novelist and producer of the Emmy-nominated The Mind of a Serial Killer, both live in the Washington D.C. area.
Follow the FBI’s Premier Investigative Profiler as he penetrates the minds and motives of the most terrifying serial killers
Our special thanks and deepest gratitude go out to all the people who have helped make this work a reality. The first team, as it has been since our first book together, consists of our editor, Lisa Drew, and our agent, Jay Acton, the two people who both shared the vision, encouraged us to see it through, and supported us every step of the way. Likewise, Carolyn Olshaker, our project coordinator, business manager, general counsel, editorial consultant, cheerleader, and to Mark, so much more. Ann Hennigan, our research director, has become an essential part of the operation and has contributed enormously. And we know that with Marysue Rucci handling things at Scribner for us with her amazing combination of efficiency and sunny disposition, everything is going to go smoothly and remain under control. Without these five . . .
We want to express our profound appreciation to Trudy, Jack, and Stephen Collins, Susan Hand Martin and Jeff Freeman for sharing Suzanne with us. We hope, in telling her story, that we have lived up to their faith in us. We are also indebted to Jim Harrington in Michigan and Tennessee District Attorney Henry “Hank” Williams for sharing their recollections and insights with us, and to our intern, David Altschuler, and to Peter Banks and all of the people at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for their kindness, as well as giving us the benefit of their research, experience, and good work. We’re all a lot better because of them.
Finally, as always, we want to thank all of John’s colleagues at Quantico, particularly Roy Hazelwood, Steve Mardigian, Gregg McCrary, Jud Ray, and Jim Wright. They will always be valued pioneers, explorers, and esteemed fellow travelers on the journey into darkness and back out again.
—JOHN DOUGLAS AND MARK OLSHAKER,
October 1996
IN EARLY DECEMBER of 1983, at thirty-eight years of age, I collapsed in a hotel room in Seattle while working on the Green River murders case. The two agents I’d brought with me from Quantico had to break down the door to get to me. For five days I hovered in a coma between life and death in the intensive care unit of Swedish Hospital, suffering from viral encephalitis brought on by the acute stress of handling more than 150 cases at a time, all of which I knew were depending on me for answers.
I wasn’t expected to live, but miraculously I did, nurtured by first-rate medical care, the love of my family, and the support of my fellow agents. I returned home, almost a month later, in a wheelchair and couldn’t go back to work until May. All during that time, I was afraid the neurological damage the disease left me with would prevent me from shooting at FBI standards and therefore prematurely end my career as an agent. To this day, I still have some impairment on my left side.
Unfortunately, my situation isn’t unique in this business. Most of the other agents who’ve worked with me as profilers and criminal investigative analysts in the Investigative Support Unit have suffered some severe, work-related stress or illness which kept them off the job for some period of time. The range of problems runs the gamut—neurological disease like mine, chest pain and cardiac scares, ulcers and GI disorders, anxieties and depression. Law enforcement is a notoriously high-stress environment to begin with. While I was home recuperating, I did a lot of thinking about what it is in our job that causes the particular kind of stress that’s at least different and may even be greater than that of some other FBI agents, detectives, and police line officers—people who face immediate physical danger far more often than we do.
Part of the answer, I think, lies in the service we offer. In an agency long famous for its “Just the facts, ma’am” orientation, we’re probably the only group routinely asked for an opinion. Even so, we essentially had to wait for J. Edgar Hoover to die before profiling could even be considered a legitimate crime-fighting tool. For years after the criminal personality program was set up at Quantico, most others within and outside the Bureau considered this witchcraft or black magic practiced by a small group of shamans sixty feet below ground where the light of day never penetrated.
The fact of the matter, though, is that life and death decisions can be made based on our advice, yet we don’t have the luxury of hard facts to back them up; we don’t have the comfort of black and white. If a police officer is wrong, it means the case might not be solved, but things are no worse off than they were before. When we are called in, it’s often as a last resort, and if we’re wrong, we can send the investigation off in a completely nonproductive direction. So we try to be very sure about what we say. But our stock-in-trade is human behavior, and human behavior, as the psychiatrists are so fond of telling us, is not an exact science.
One of the reasons police and law enforcement agencies throughout the United States and many parts of the world come to us is because we have experience that they don’t. Like the medical specialist who has seen many more cases of a rare disease than any primary-care physician, we have the advantage of a national and international perspective and can therefore pick up on variations and nuances that might escape a local investigator who has only his own jurisdiction as a reference point.
We work on the principle that behavior reflects personality and generally divide the profiling process into seven steps:
As the final step indicates, offering a profile of an offender is often only the beginning of the service we offer. The next level is to consult with local investigators and suggest proactive strategies they might use to force the UNSUB’s hand—to get him to make a move. In cases of this nature we try to stand off at a distance and detach ourselves, but we still may be thrust right into the middle of the investigation. This may involve meeting with the family of a murdered child, coaching family members how to handle taunting phone calls from the killer describing how the child died, even trying to use a sibling as bait in an effort to lure the killer to a particular place.
This was what I suggested after the murder of seventeen-year-old Shari Faye Smith in Columbia, South Carolina, since the killer gave indications of being fixated on Shari’s beautiful sister, Dawn. Every moment until we had the killer in custody, I sweated out the advice I’d given the sheriff’s department and the family, knowing that if my judgment was flawed, the Smiths could be facing another unendurable tragedy.
Less than six weeks after the killer called Dawn with elaborate instructions on how to find Shari Faye Smith’s body in a field in neighboring Saluda County, Lance Corporal Suzanne Collins was murdered in a public park in Tennessee.
There are just so many of them out there for us.
And what we do see, as my colleague Jim Wright characterized them, are the worst of the worst. We live every day with the certain knowledge of people’s capacity for evil.
“It almost defies description what one person can do to another,” Jim notes. “What a person can do to an infant; to a child less than a year old; the evisceration of women, the dehumanization process that they go through. There’s no way you can be involved in the type of work we’re doing or be involved as a law enforcement officer or in the investigation of violent crime and not be personally affected. We very often receive telephone calls from surviving victims, or from the loved ones of victims. We even have some of the serial killers and serial rapists calling us. So we’re dealing with the personal side of these crimes, and we do personally get involved and take them to heart. All of us in the unit, I think, have our pet cases that we refuse to let go of.”
I know what some of Jim’s are. One of mine is Green River, which was never solved. Another is the murder of Suzanne Collins, which haunts me to this day.
While I was home recuperating from my illness, I also visited the military cemetery in Quantico and stared at the plot where I would have been buried had I died that first week. And I did a lot of thinking about what I would have to do if I were going to survive to retirement age. I’d considered myself as good at what I did as anyone, but I realized I’d become a one-dimensional person. Everything—my wife, my kids, my parents, friends, house, and neighborhood—had all come in second behind my job, a very distant second. It got to the point that every time my wife or one of my kids got hurt, or had a problem, I’d compare it to the victims in my horrific cases, and it didn’t seem like such a big deal. Or, I’d analyze their cuts and scrapes in terms of blood patterns I’d observed at crime scenes. I tried to work off my constant tension through a combination of drinking and a feverish exercise regimen. I could only relax when I was completely exhausted.
I decided while walking through that military cemetery that I had to find a way to ground myself, to set a greater store in the love and support I got from Pam and my daughters, Erika and Lauren (our son, Jed, would come along several years later), to begin relying on religious faith, to try to take some time off, to explore the other aspects of life. I knew this was the only way I was going to make it. And when I moved from managing the profiling program and became unit chief in 1990, I tried to provide ways that everyone working for me could maintain his or her mental health and emotional equilibrium. I’d seen firsthand what can happen, how sapping our work can be.
To do what we do, it’s very important to get into the mind of not only the killer or UNSUB, but into the mind of the victim at the time the crime occurred. That’s the only way you’re going to be able to understand the dynamics of the crime—what was going on between the victim and the offender. For example, you may learn that the victim was a very passive person, and if so, why did she receive so many blows to the face? Why was this victim tortured the way she was even though we know from analyzing her that she would have given in, done anything her attacker said? Knowing how the victim would have reacted tells us something important about the offender. In this case, he must be into hurting his victims. The rape isn’t enough for him, it’s punishing them that’s important to him, that represents what we refer to as the “signature” aspect of the crime. We can begin to fill in much of the rest of his personality and predict his recognizable post-offense behavior from this one insight.
It’s important for us to know this about each case and each victim, but it’s also among the most devastating emotional exercises imaginable.
Police officers and detectives deal with the effects of violence, which is disturbing enough, but if you’re in this business long enough, you do grow somewhat used to it. In fact, many of us in law enforcement are concerned that violence is so much around us that it’s taken for granted even by the public.
But the kind of criminals we deal with don’t kill as a means to an end, such as an armed robber would; they kill or rape or torture because they enjoy it, because it gives them satisfaction and a feeling of domination and control so lacking from every other aspect of their shabby, inadequate, and cowardly lives. So much do many of them enjoy what they do that they want nothing more than to experience it again at every opportunity. In California, Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris made audiotapes so they could relive the sexual torture and murder of teenaged girls in the back of their specially equipped van, nicknamed Murder Mac. Also in California, Leonard Lake and his partner, Charles Ng, produced videos of young women they’d captured being stripped and psychologically brutalized in captivity—offering voice-over commentary along the way.
I’d like to tell you these are isolated practices, or just limited to the exotic perversions of California. But I’ve seen too much of this, and my people have seen too much of this, to be able to tell you that. And hearing or seeing violence as it happens in “real time” is about as unbearable as anything we deal with.
Over the years, as it became my responsibility to evaluate and hire new people for my unit, I developed a profile of what I wanted in a profiler.
At first, I went for strong academic credentials, figuring an understanding of psychology and organized criminology was most important. But I came to realize degrees and academic knowledge weren’t nearly as important as experience and certain subjective qualities. We have the facilities to fill in any educational gaps through fine programs at the University of Virginia and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
What I started looking for was “right-brained,” creative-type thinkers. There are many positions within the FBI and law enforcement in general where engineering or accounting types do the best, but in profiling and investigative analysis, that kind of thinker would probably have some difficulty.
Contrary to the impression given in such stories as The Silence of the Lambs, we don’t pluck candidates for the Investigative Support Unit right out of the Academy. Since our first book, Mindhunter, was published, I’ve had many letters from young men and women who say they want to go into behavioral science in the FBI and join the profiling team at Quantico. It doesn’t work quite that way. First you get accepted by the Bureau, then you prove yourself in the field as a first-rate, creative investigator, then we recruit you for Quantico. And then you’re ready for two years of intensive, specialized training before you become a full-fledged member of the unit.
A good profiler must first and foremost show imagination and creativity in investigation. He or she must be willing to take risks while still maintaining the respect and confidence of fellow agents and law enforcement officers. Our preferred candidates will show leadership, won’t wait for a consensus before offering an opinion, will be persuasive in a group setting but tactful in helping to put a flawed investigation back on track. For these reasons, they must be able to work both alone and in groups.
Once we choose a person, he or she will work with experienced members of the unit almost the way a young associate in a law firm works with a senior partner. If they’re at all lacking in street experience, we send them to the New York Police Department to ride along with their best homicide detectives. If they need more death investigation, we have nationally recognized consultants such as Dr. James Luke, the esteemed former medical examiner of Washington, D.C. And before they get to Quantico, many, if not most, of our people will have been profile coordinators in the field offices, where they develop a strong rapport with state and local departments and sheriff’s offices.
The key attribute necessary to be a good profiler is judgment—a judgment based not primarily on the analysis of facts and figures, but on instinct. It’s difficult to define, but like Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, we know it when we see it.
In San Diego in 1993, Larry Ankrom and I testified in the trial of Cleophus Prince, accused of murdering six young women over a nine-month period. We’ll get into more of the details of that case in the next chapter. During the preliminary hearing to rule on the admissibility of our testimony on linkage based on “unique” aspects of each crime, one of the defense attorneys asked me if there was an objective numerical scale I used for measuring uniqueness. In other words, could I assign a number value to everything we did. The answer, of course, is no. Many, many factors come together in our evaluations, and ultimately, it comes down to the individual analyst’s judgment rather than any objective scale or test.
Likewise, after the tragedy at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, there was much soul-searching, breast-beating, and attempt at self-critique within the federal law enforcement agencies about what could and should have been done differently. After one such meeting at the Justice Department in Washington, Attorney General Janet Reno asked me to have my unit compile a list of scenarios for standoff situations and assign each one a percentage success rating.
Ms. Reno is an extremely bright and sensitive individual and I lauded her desire to prepare herself in advance for the next unknown crisis rather than having to respond from a purely reactive mode. But while it might be considered insubordination, I told her how reluctant I was to do anything of the sort.
“If I tell you that a certain tactic worked eighty-five percent of the time in a particular type of hostage situation and any other response has only been effective twenty-five or thirty percent of the time,” I explained, “then there’s going to be tremendous pressure on you to go for the highest percentage. But I or another analyst may see something in that situation which indicates to us that the lower percentage option is the one to go with. We can’t justify it in statistical terms, but our judgment tells us it has the best chance of working. If you’re going to go with the numbers, you might as well let a machine make the decision.”
That, actually, is an issue which comes up with some regularity in our business—can’t a machine do what we do? It would seem that after you have enough cases and enough experience, an expert programmer ought to be able to come up with a computer model that could, say, duplicate my thought processes as a profiler. It’s not as if they haven’t tried, but so far, at least, machines can’t do what we can do, any more than a computer could write this book even if we gave it all the words in the dictionary, their relative usage in speech, all the rules of grammar and parameters of style and models of all the best stories. There are just too many independent judgments to be made, too many gut feelings based on training and experience, too many subtleties of the human character. We certainly can and do use computer databases to quantify material and retrieve it efficiently. But like a doctor making a diagnosis, objective tests only go so far. Since machines can’t do it, we have to find human beings who can, who try to balance objectivity and intuition.
And while we can offer the techniques and hone the skills, we can’t supply the talent. As with a gifted professional athlete, it’s either there or it isn’t. Like acting, or writing, or playing a musical instrument, or hitting a baseball, you can teach someone the concept, you can give pointers, you can help them develop the skill. But unless you’re born with what my friend the novelist Charles McCarry calls a “major league eye,” you’re not going to hit the ball consistently in the big leagues; you’re not going to be pro material.
But if you are pro material in our field, and if you are at all a decent, normal person—as I hope we all are—you can’t see the things we see, you can’t become involved with the families and survivors the way we do, you can’t encounter repeat, multiple rapists and killers who hurt other people for the sport of it, without taking on a sense of mission and developing a deep and enduring kinship with the victims of violent crime and their families. So you might as well know going in that this is where I’m coming from and that is the perspective from which this book is written. I would like to believe in redemption and I hope rehabilitation is possible in some cases. But from my twenty-five years of experience as an FBI special agent and nearly that long as a behavioral profiler and crime analyst, seeing the evidence, the statistics, and the data, I cannot place more faith in what I would like to be true than what I know is reality. What I mean by this is that I am much less interested in giving a convicted sexually motivated killer a second chance than in giving an innocent potential victim a first chance.
Please don’t get me wrong. We don’t need a fascist, totalitarian police state to accomplish this, we don’t have to threaten the Constitution or civil liberties; from my experience I’m as aware as anyone of the real and potential abuses of police power. What I do believe we need is to enforce the laws we already have on the books and bring some simple common sense, based more on reality than sentiment, to the issues of sentencing, punishment, and parole. What I think we need more than anything else in our society today is a sense of personal responsibility for what we do. From what I see and hear and read, no one is responsible anymore; there’s always some factor in a person’s life or background to excuse him. There is a price to the passage through life, and regardless of what’s happened to each of us in the past, part of that price is responsibility for our actions in the present.
Having briefly laid out these views, let me also repeat at the outset what almost anyone in law enforcement will tell you: that if you expect us to solve your social problems, you’re going to be very disappointed. By the time the problem reaches our desk, it’s already too late; the damage has been done. I’ve often said in speeches that many more serial killers are made than born. With adequate awareness and intervention, a lot of these guys can be helped, or at least neutralized, before it’s too late. I’ve spent much of my career dealing with the results if they’re not.
How do we know this? What makes us think we understand why a killer acts the way he does and that we can therefore predict his behavior even though we don’t know who he is?
The reason we think we know what’s going on in the mind of the killer or rapist or arsonist or bomber is because we were the first ones to get the word directly from the real experts—the offenders themselves. The work my colleagues and I did, and the work that’s still being done in Quantico after me, is based initially on a study Special Agent Robert Ressler and I undertook beginning in the late 1970s in which we went into the prisons and conducted extensive and detailed interviews with a cross section of serial murderers and rapists and violent criminals. The study continued intensively for several years and in a sense is still ongoing. (With the collaboration of Professor Ann Burgess at the University of Pennsylvania, the results were compiled and eventually published under the title Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives.)
To deal with these people effectively, to get what you need out of them, first you have to prepare extensively—study the entire file and know everything you can about the case—and then you have to come down and deal with them on their own level. If you don’t know exactly what they’ve done and how they’ve done it, how they got to their victims and the methods they used to hurt and kill them, then they’re going to be able to bullshit you for their own self-serving purposes. Remember, most serial offenders are expert manipulators of other people. And if you’re not willing to come down to their level and see things through their eyes, they’re not going to open up and confide. And both of these factors add to the strain.
I wasn’t getting anything out of Richard Speck, mass murderer of eight student nurses in a South Chicago town house, when I interviewed him in prison in Joliet, Illinois, until I abandoned my official Bureau detachment and berated him for taking “eight good pieces of ass away from the rest of us.”
At that point he shook his head, smiled, then turned to us and said, “You fucking guys are crazy. It must be a fine line, separates you from me.”
Feeling the way I do about victims and their families, this is always a bitter and extremely difficult persona for me to assume. But it’s necessary, and after I did it with Speck I was able to start penetrating the macho facade and achieve an understanding of how his mind worked and what made him escalate that night in 1966 from a simple burglary to rape and mass murder.
When I went to Attica to interview David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” who had killed six young men and women in cars in New York City during a year-long reign of terror beginning in July of 1976, he held to his well-publicized story that his neighbor’s three-thousand-year-old dog had made him commit the crimes. I knew enough about the specific details of the case and I’d seen enough of his methodology that I was sure the killings were not the result of such a complex delusional system. I felt this way not because I made it up, but because of what I’d already learned in interviews we’d previously conducted and analyzed.
So once Berkowitz started giving me the song and dance about the dog, I was able to say, “Hey, David, knock off the bullshit. The dog had nothing to do with it.”
He laughed and quickly admitted I was right. This cleared the way to the heart of his methodology, which was the aspect I most wanted to hear about and learn from. And we did learn. Berkowitz, who had started out his antisocial career as a fire-starter, told us that he was on the hunt nightly for victims of opportunity who met his criteria. When he couldn’t find them, which was most nights, he would gravitate back to the scenes of his previous crimes to masturbate and relive the joy and satisfaction, the power of life and death over another human being, just as Bittaker and Norris had with their audiotapes and Lake and Ng did with their home movies.
Ed Kemper is a six-foot-nine giant of a man who probably has the highest IQ of any killer I’ve ever encountered. Fortunately for me and the rest of us, where I encountered him was in the secure visitors’ room of the California State Medical Facility at Vacaville, where Kemper was serving out multiple life terms. As a young teen he had spent some time in a mental hospital for killing both his grandparents on their farm in northern California. He had gone on as an adult to terrorize the area around the University of California at Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, where he decapitated and mutilated at least six coeds before getting himself focused and butchering his own mother, Clarnell, the real object of his resentment.
I found Kemper to be bright, sensitive, and intuitive. And unlike most killers, he understands enough about himself to know that he shouldn’t be let out. He gave us a number of important insights into how an intelligent killer’s mind works.
He explained to me, with insight rare for a violent criminal, that he dismembered the bodies after death not because of any sexual kick, but simply to delay identification and keep investigators off his trail as long as possible.
From other “experts” we got additional nuggets of information and insight which were to prove tremendously valuable in devising strategies to catch UNSUBs. For instance, the old cliché about killers returning to the scenes of their crimes turns out to be true in many instances, though not necessarily for the reasons we thought. True, a certain personality of killer under certain circumstances does feel remorse and returns to the crime scene or the victim’s grave site to beg forgiveness. If we think we’re dealing with that sort of UNSUB, it can help dictate our actions. Some killers return for different reasons—not because they feel bad about a crime but because they feel good about it. Knowing this can help us catch them, too. Some inject themselves directly into an investigation to keep on top of things, chatting up cops or coming forward as witnesses. When I worked on the Atlanta Child Murders in 1981, I was convinced from what I saw that the UNSUB would actually approach the police with offers to help. When Wayne Williams was apprehended after he’d thrown the body of his latest victim into the Chattahoochee River (as we predicted he would), we learned that this police buff had offered his services to the investigators as a crime scene photographer.
And others we interviewed told us that they had taken a companion, generally a woman, on a trip to the general area of the crime, then made some excuse to leave her long enough to actually revisit the scene. One killer told us of taking his sometimes girlfriend on a camping trip, then leaving her briefly with the excuse that he had to relieve himself in the woods. That was when he would go back to the body dump site.
The prison interviews helped us see and understand the wide variety of motivation and behavior among serial killers and rapists. But we saw some striking common denominators as well. Most of them come from broken or dysfunctional homes. They’re generally products of some type of abuse, whether it’s physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, or a combination. We tend to see at a very early age the formation of what we refer to as the “homicidal triangle” or “homicidal triad.” This includes enuresis—or bed-wetting—at an inappropriate age, starting fires, and cruelty to small animals or other children. Very often, we found, at least two of these three traits were present, if not all three. By the time we see his first serious crime, he’s generally somewhere in his early to mid-twenties. He has low self-esteem and blames the rest of the world for his situation. He already has a bad track record, whether he’s been caught at it or not. It may be breaking and entering, it may have been rape or rape attempts. You may see a dishonorable discharge from the military, since these types tend to have a real problem with any type of authority. Throughout their lives, they believe that they’ve been victims: they’ve been manipulated, they’ve been dominated, they’ve been controlled by others. But here, in this one situation, fueled by fantasy, this inadequate, ineffectual nobody can manipulate and dominate a victim of his own; he can be in control. He can orchestrate whatever he wants to do to the victim. He can decide whether this victim should live or die, how the victim should die. It’s up to him; he’s finally calling the shots.
Understanding the common background is very important in understanding a serial killer’s motivation. After spending many hours with Charles Manson at San Quentin, we concluded that what motivated him in inspiring among his followers the butchery of Sharon Tate and her friends one night in Los Angeles in 1969 and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the next was not the apocalyptic blood lust of “Helter Skelter” as had been widely thought. Born the illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old prostitute who had grown up with a fanatically religious aunt and sadistic uncle until he began living on the streets at age ten and in and out of prisons thereafter, Manson craved fame, fortune, and recognition, just like the rest of us. What he really wanted to be was a rock star. Short of that, he could set himself up as a guru and would settle for a free ride through life with susceptible followers providing the food, shelter, and drugs. His “family” of social misfits and middle-class dropouts provided him with enough opportunity for manipulation, domination, and control. To keep them in line and interested, he preached apocalypse, an ultimate social and race war symbolized by the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter” in which he alone would emerge victorious.
Everything was okay with Charlie until August 9, 1969, when Manson follower and would-be usurping leader Charles “Tex” Watson broke into the Beverly Hills home of director Roman Polanski and his eight months pregnant wife, movie star Sharon Tate. After the brutal slaughter of five people (Polanski was not home at the time), Manson realized he had to assume control, make it seem that he had actually intended these murders as the beginning of Helter Skelter, and direct his family into another killing, or else he would lose credibility and surrender his leadership to Watson. Then his free ride would be over. In Manson’s case, the violence began not when he began his manipulation, domination, and control, but when he began losing control.
All that we learned from Manson doesn’t mean he’s any less a monster than what we thought, it only means he turns out to be a somewhat different type of monster. Understanding the differences gives us insight into his type of crime and, equally important, his type of charisma. What we learned from Manson we were later able to apply to an understanding of other cults, such as the one led by the Reverend Jim Jones, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians at Waco, the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, the Freemen in Montana, and the entire militia movement.
Through our interview and research efforts we came up with a number of observations which have had significant bearing on our ability to analyze crimes and predict behavior of criminals. Traditionally, investigators have given great weight to a perpetrator’s modus operandi, or MO. This is the way the perpetrator goes about committing a crime—whether he uses a knife or gun, or the method he uses to abduct a victim.
Theodore “Ted” Bundy, who was executed in 1989 in the electric chair of the Florida State Penitentiary at Starke with my colleague Bill Hagmaier not far away, was handsome, resourceful, and charming, well-liked by those around him and the model of a “good catch.” He was a perfect example of the reality that serial killers don’t often look like monsters. They blend in with the rest of us. He was one of the most notorious serial killers in American history, a man who abducted, raped, and murdered young women all along the way from Seattle to Tallahassee, having developed a ruse in which he would have his arm in a sling and removable cast, making him appear disabled. He would then ask the assistance of his intended victim in moving some heavy object. When her guard was down, he would whack her. Novelist Thomas Harris used this particular MO in creating the character of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.
Additional aspects of the character were taken from other serial killers with whom we acquainted Harris during a visit he made to Quantico before writing his previous novel, Red Dragon. Buffalo Bill kept his victims in a pit dug in his basement. In real life, this is what Gary Heidnick did with the women he captured in Philadelphia. Buffalo Bill’s penchant for using the skins of women to create a female “costume” for himself came from Ed Gein, the 1950s killer in the small Wisconsin farming community of Plainfield. Harris wasn’t the first to borrow the idea, though. Robert Bloch had already used parts of it in his own memorable novel, Psycho, made into the film classic by Alfred Hitchcock.
What’s important to note here is that while using an arm cast and sling to abduct women is a modus operandi, killing and flaying women to use their skins is not. The term I coined to describe that was “signature,” because like a signature, it is a personal detail that is unique to the individual. The MO is what the offender does to effect the crime; the signature, in a sense, is why he does it: the thing that fulfills him emotionally. Sometimes there can be a fine line between MO and signature, depending on the reason why it was done. Of the three aspects of the Buffalo Bill composite, the cast is definitely MO, the skinning is signature, and the pit could be either, depending on the situation. If he keeps his captives in the pit as a means of holding and controlling them, then I would classify that as MO. If he gets some emotional satisfaction out of holding them down there, of seeing them degraded and pleading in fear, then that would fall under signature.
I have found that signature is a much more reliable guide to the behavior of serial offenders than MO. The reason for this is that signature is static, while MO is dynamic; that is, it evolves as the offender progresses in his criminal career and learns from his own experience. If he can come up with a better means of abducting a victim or transporting or disposing of a body, he’ll do it. What he won’t change is the emotional reason he’s committing the crime in the first place.
Clearly, in a routine crime such as bank robbery, MO is the only thing that matters. The police will want to know how he’s pulling off the job. The reason he’s doing it is obvious—he wants the money. But in a sexually based serial crime—and virtually all serial murders are sexually based in one sense or another—signature analysis may be critical, particularly in being able to link a series of crimes together.
Steven Pennell, the “I–40 Killer” in Delaware, lured prostitutes into his specially equipped van where he raped, tortured, and murdered them. His methods of getting the women into his van varied; that was his MO. What stayed consistent was the torture; that was his signature, and that is what I testified to at his trial. That was what gave him emotional satisfaction. A defense attorney might claim that various cases are not related and do not represent the work of the same subject because the instruments used or the methods of torture might have been different. But this is insignificant. What is significant is the torture itself, and that remained consistent and static.
One final note here: you’ve probably noticed that whenever I mention serial killers, I always refer to them as “he.” This isn’t just a matter of form or syntactical convenience. For reasons we only partially understand, virtually all multiple killers are male. There’s been a lot of research and speculation into it. Part of it is probably as simple as the fact that people with higher levels of testosterone (i.e., men) tend to be more aggressive than people with lower levels (i.e., women). On a psychological level, our research seems to show that while men from abusive backgrounds often come out of the experience hostile and abusive to others, women from similar backgrounds tend to direct the rage and abusiveness inward and punish themselves rather than others. While a man might kill, hurt, or rape others as a way of dealing with his rage, a woman is more likely to channel it into something that would hurt primarily herself, such as drug or alcohol abuse, prostitution, or suicide attempts. I can’t think of a single case of a woman acting out a sexualized murder on her own.
The one exception to this generality, the one place we do occasionally see women involved in multiple murders, is in a hospital or nursing home situation. A woman is unlikely to kill repeatedly with a gun or knife. It does happen with something “clean” like drugs. These often fall into the category of either “mercy homicide,” in which the killer believes he or she is relieving great suffering, or the “hero homicide,” in which the death is the unintentional result of causing the victim distress so he can be revived by the offender, who is then declared a hero. And, of course, we’ve all been horrified by the cases of mothers, such as the highly publicized Susan Smith case in South Carolina, killing their own children. There is generally a particular set of motivations for this most unnatural of all crimes, which we’ll get into later on. But for the most part, the profile of the serial killer or repeat violent offender begins with “male.” Without that designation, my colleagues and I would all be happily out of a job.
Until that happens—which, if the last several thousand years of human history are any indication, won’t be anytime in the foreseeable future—some of us are going to have to continue making that journey into darkness: into the dark mind of the killer and the dark fate of his victim.
That’s the story I want to tell here.
I’VE OFTEN SAID that what we do in analyzing a murder, that what any good homicide detective does, is very similar to what a good actor does in preparing for a role. We both come to a scene—in the actor’s case a scene in a play or movie script, in ours, a murder scene—we look at what’s there on the surface—written dialogue between the characters or evidence of a violent crime—and we try to figure out what that tells us. In other words, what really happened between the principal characters in this scene? Actors call this “subtext,” and what they’ll tell you they need to know for themselves before they can act a scene is: What does the character want? Why does he say this particular thing or take this particular action?
What is the motive?
Motive is one of the thorniest issues in criminal investigative analysis. It is also among the most critical. Until you can figure out why a particular violent crime was committed, it is going to be very difficult trying to come to meaningful conclusions regarding the behavior and personality of the UNSUB. Even if you do catch him, it can still be very problematic prosecuting him successfully. That was the problem Hank Williams faced going into the Sedley Alley trial, and that was why he called me in. In the case of bank robbery, the motive—like its related element, the signature—is obvious: the offender wants the money and he doesn’t want to work for it legitimately. But let’s say you’re investigating a breaking and entering in which the resident of the apartment was raped and killed. Was the primary motive burglary, sexual assault, or murder? Either way, the victim is still dead, but it makes a big difference to us in figuring out what kind of person the killer is.
During the fall of 1982, we got a call from a police department in the Midwest investigating the rape-murder of a twenty-five-year-old woman. The crime occurred in the living room of the apartment she and her husband had lived in for about six months. When the husband returned home, he found the place had been completely ransacked, leading police to wonder whether the primary motive had actually been burglary and the rape and murder a secondary crime of opportunity.
The crime scene photos were very complete and well-done. The victim was found face-up on the living room floor, with her dress up around her waist and panties pulled down to her knees. Despite the disarray in the room, there was no evidence of struggle and no defense wounds on the body. The murder weapon was a hammer belonging to the victim and her husband. It was found in the kitchen sink, where it appeared the UNSUB had placed it to wash off the blood. The husband reported that some of his wife’s jewelry had been taken.
In interesting contrast to the appearance of the crime scene, the ME’s report found no apparent evidence of sexual assault and no traces of semen on the victim or her clothing. However, tox screens did show that she had been drinking shortly before the attack. This was where I said, “Bingo!” The crime was staged to look like what an inexperienced person thinks a rape-murder is supposed to look like.
I told the surprised detective I was pretty sure he’d already interviewed the killer, and that the motive wasn’t burglary It wasn’t even sexual aggression.
This is what I visualized having happened:
The victim and the offender had been drinking together in her apartment. They got into an argument, probably a rehash and continuation of one they’d had many times in the past. The tension reached a threshold that the offender could no longer stand. He grabbed the closest weapon of opportunity, which happened to be the hammer in the kitchen, returned and angrily struck the victim several times on her head and face until she collapsed. Realizing he would be the obvious suspect, the offender rushed to the kitchen sink to wash blood from his hands and bloody fingerprints from the handle of the hammer. He then went back to the dead victim and rolled her over into a face-up position, lifted her dress and pulled down her underpants to stage a sexually motivated assault. He then ransacked the drawers to make it appear that the intruder had come in searching for money or valuables.
At this point in my narrative the detective said, “You just told me the husband did it.”
I coached him on how to reinterview the husband. During the polygraph, I said, the key thing would be to stress that the police knew he got blood on his hands and tried—unsuccessfully—to wash the bloody evidence away.
Within a few days the husband was polygraphed, failed the test, and then admitted his guilt to the polygraph examiner.
Sometimes you’re faced with a case in which the motive should be apparent, but something doesn’t quite add up. That’s what happened early in the afternoon of January 27, 1981, in Rockford, Illinois.
About 1:00 P.M. someone walked in to Fredd’s Groceries and shot and killed the fifty-four-year-old owner, Willie Fredd, and an employee, Fredd’s twenty-year-old nephew, Albert Pearson. There were no witnesses.
Fredd was found face-down on the floor behind the counter. Detectives determined that he must have been sitting behind the counter when he was shot twice with .38 caliber slugs—one in his neck, the other in his spleen. The younger victim was found halfway out the swinging doors to the outside. He’d been shot three times in the chest by the same weapon, evidently while backing away from his assailant. Strangely, there was no evidence of anything of value being taken from the store. Fredd and Pearson, it should be noted, were black.
Around 8:45 the following morning, a man coming in for gas at a Clark Oil Company Super 100 service station in Rockford came upon the body of the attendant in the station’s supply storage room. The victim was an eighteen-year-old white male identified as Kevin Kaiser. He was propped against the wall where he’d fallen after being shot five times with a .38 caliber weapon, though ballistics tests later showed it was not the same weapon that had killed the two men at the grocery store the previous day. Four of the bullets had passed through his chest. The fifth entered the right side of his face and exited the left side of his neck, clearly shot at close range. The lack of bleeding at either the entry or exit wound meant the heart had already stopped; the young victim was dead before this last shot was fired.
As far as victimology, people who knew Kevin had nothing but good things to say about him, describing him as hardworking and “a real nice kid.” And like the incident the day before, nothing of value appeared to have been taken. There was a description of a possible suspect in the area, however: a black male in his late twenties, medium height with short hair and a mustache.