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ISBN 978-1-62914-193-0
eISBN 978-1-62914-293-7
Printed in the United States of America
To Robert K. Ressler
Introduction: A Plague of Murder
Chapter 1: The Science of Profiling
Chapter 2: Fighting Monsters
Chapter 3: The Founding Fathers
Chapter 4: Fantasy Finds a Victim
Chapter 5: The Behavioral Science Unit
Chapter 6: Developing an Instinct
Chapter 7: The Worst Mass Murderer Yet
Chapter 8: The Egoists
Chapter 9: The Hillside Stranglers
Chapter 10: The Turning Point
Chapter 11: The Case That Awakened America
Chapter 12: The Most Evil?
Chapter 13: Slaves
Chapter 14: The 1990s
Chapter 15: Sex Crimes—the Beginning
Chapter 16: Profiling Comes to Britain
Chapter 17: Murder in Lonely Places
Epilogue: An End in Sight?
A Plague of Murder
In 1977, FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler first used the term “serial killer” after a visit to Bramshill Police Academy, near London, where someone referred to a “serial burglar.” The inspired coinage was soon in general use to describe killers such as necrophile Ed Kemper (10 victims), schizophrenic Herb Mullin (14), and homosexual mass murderers Dean Corll (27) and John Wayne Gacy (32). Then in 1980, in Colombia, Pedro Lopez, the “Monster of the Andes,” confessed to murdering 310 prepubescent girls; three years later, a derelict named Henry Lee Lucas claimed to have killed 350 victims. Clearly, these sprees were on a scale beyond anything known in the history of crime—even the French “Bluebeard,” Gilles de Rais, executed in 1440, was believed to have killed no more than 50 children. In more recent years, the American “Pee Wee” Gaskins killed an estimated 110, “Red Ripper” Andrei Chikatilo 56, his fellow Russian Anatoly Onoprienko 52, and the British doctor Harold Shipman between 215 and 260. There was an obvious need for Ressler’s new term to describe this horrific phenomenon.
Understanding it is rather more difficult. But I can claim at least one qualification. In the late 1950s, I had decided it was about time someone compiled an encyclopedia covering all the most notorious murder cases. The subject of crime had always interested me, and I was engaged in writing my first novel, Ritual in the Dark, about a mass murderer based on Jack the Ripper. I had collected a considerable library of secondhand books on true crime with titles like Scales of Justice or Murderers Sane and Mad. But if I wanted to look up a specific fact about a murderer, such as the date he was hanged, I had to recollect which volume in my crime library contained a chapter about him. I decided to remedy this deficiency by writing an alphabetical encyclopedia of murder, which was published in 1961. Since then many writers have followed suit with encyclopedias of female killers, sex killers, serial killers, even one devoted entirely to Jack the Ripper.
It was while compiling the Encyclopedia of Murder that I first noticed a variety of murder that I was unable to fit into the old classifications: apparently “motiveless” murders. In 1952, for example, a nineteen-year-old clerk named Herbert Mills sat next to a forty-eight-year-old housewife in a Nottingham cinema and decided that she would make a suitable victim for an attempt at the “perfect murder”; he met her by arrangement the next day, took her for a walk, and strangled her under a tree. It was only because he felt the compulsion to boast about his “perfect” crime that he was caught and hanged.
In July 1958, Norman Foose stopped his jeep in the town of Cuba, New Mexico, raised his hunting rifle, and shot dead two Mexican children; pursued and arrested, he said he was trying to do something about the population explosion.
In February 1959, a pretty blonde named Penny Bjorkland accepted a lift from a married man in California and, without provocation, killed him with a dozen shots. After her arrest she explained that she wanted to see if she could kill “and not worry about it afterwards.” Psychiatrists found her sane.
An 1888 Punch cartoon satirizes the police’s inability to find the Whitechapel murderer. The nineteenth century saw the advent of the “sex crime.”
In April 1959, a man named Norman Smith took a pistol and shot a woman (who was watching television) through an open window. He did not know Hazel Woodard; the impulse had simply come over him as he watched a TV show called The Sniper.
The Encyclopedia of Murder appeared in 1961, with a section on “motiveless murder”; by 1970 it was clear that this was, in fact, a steadily developing trend. In many cases, oddly enough, it seemed to be linked to a slightly higher-than-average IQ in the murderers. Herbert Mills wrote poetry and read some of it above the body of his victim. The “Moors Murderer” Ian Brady justified himself by quoting de Sade, and in a later correspondence with him I had ample opportunity to observe that he was highly intelligent. Melvin Rees, a mild, quiet-spoken jazz pianist, committed a series of sex murders, including the slaying of an entire family, and told a friend: “You can’t say it’s wrong to kill—only individual standards make it right or wrong.” Charles Manson evolved an elaborate racist ideology to justify the crimes of his “Family.” San Francisco’s “Zodiac” killer wrote his letters in cipher and signed them with signs of the zodiac. John Frazier, a dropout who slaughtered the family of an eye surgeon, Victor Ohta, left a letter signed with suits from the tarot pack. In November 1966, Robert Smith, an eighteen-year-old student, walked into a beauty parlor in Mesa, Arizona, ordered five women and two children to lie on the floor, and then shot them all in the back of the head. Smith was in no way a “problem youngster”; his relations with his parents were good and he was described as an excellent student. He told the police: “I wanted to get known, to get myself a name.”
But certain basic facts seem fairly clear. One of the prime motivations of the serial killer is resentment—not just directed at society, but at life itself. Ian Brady shook his fist at the sky after killing one of his child victims and shouted, “Take that, you bastard.” The multiple killer and rapist Gerald Gallego told a prison psychiatrist: “All I want is to kill God.” The 1930s killer Carl Panzram explained that he was trying to make society “pay” for the miseries and indignities he had suffered at its hands.
Studying the history of murder, I was struck by an interesting insight: that its nature changes from century to century. In the eighteenth century, most crime had a material motive and was connected with robbery. In the second part of the nineteenth century a new category of crime began to emerge: “sex crime.” In 1867, a clerk named Frederick Baker killed an eight-year-old girl, Fanny Adams, and hacked her to pieces. He pl
eaded his innocence, but his diary gave him away: “Killed a young girl today. It was fine and hot.” Yet the notion of murder committed solely for sex was so strange that when the unknown killer dubbed “Jack the Ripper” began killing prostitutes in London in 1888, contemporaries did not recognize the murders as sex crimes; there was a widely held theory that the Ripper was a religious crank who wanted to clean up the licentious streets of London.
And in the 1950s another new category of crime emerged: the “self-esteem murder.” Herbert Mills wanted to feel he was more than an ordinary bank clerk: that he was a man who had committed the perfect murder. Robert Smith killed because he “wanted to become known.”
A major factor in such crimes is the desire to feel potent—not just sexually but also psychologically. FBI agent Roy Hazelwood remarked that a “sex crime isn’t about sex, it’s about power.” He described a habitual rapist who would stalk his victims for days or weeks before making his way into her bedroom. He would then stand by her bed and count to ten in increments of a half. When Hazelwood asked why, he explained: “Rape is the least enjoyable part of the entire crime.” “In that case,” said Hazelwood, “why didn’t you turn around and leave?” “Pardon the pun, but after all I’d gone through to get there, it would have been a crime not to have raped her.” In other words, the real pleasure lay in the long chase and the effort it involved.
But there is still another factor that is perhaps more important than either of these: violence seems to be oddly addictive. Serial killers tend to get “hooked” on it as they might get hooked on crack cocaine. On October 16, 1977, Los Angeles pimps Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi picked up Yolanda Washington, a prostitute, with the intention of killing her. Their motive was revenge on the madam for whom she worked, against whom they had a grudge. Before strangling her they decided that they might as well rape her. But the violence of the act proved addictive; Washington’s became the first of a dozen murders that earned them the label “the Hillside Stranglers.”
Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins was a serial burglar who had spent years in prison for two attacks on women, and who decided that in future, he would kill any woman he raped to make sure that she could never testify against him. But the first time he killed a hitchhiker who rejected his advances he found the pleasure of the act so overwhelming that it was the first of dozens of sex murders.
When Ted Bundy first decided to commit rape, he waited for a woman who was approaching along the street, with a length of two-by-four in his hand. But she stopped before she reached him and went into a house. He was so horrified at the compulsion that had gripped him, he swore that this would be the last time. But Bundy was a Peeping Tom; the obsession was stronger than he was. He later broke into a student’s bedroom after watching her undress, knocked her unconscious with a piece torn from the bed frame, and then sexually assaulted her with it. From then on, he would confess later, he was periodically taken over by a violent alter ego he called the “hunchback,” under whose control he committed some forty murders.
The “Gainesville Ripper,” Danny Rolling, was another Peeping Tom who broke into a house and committed his first rape after he was served with divorce papers. After the attack, he was tormented by remorse, and the next day went back to the house with the intention of begging his victim’s forgiveness. When two powerfully built men came out of her front door he changed his mind and hurried away. But the next time he was in a state of rage and resentment after being dismissed from his job, he broke into the house of a young woman he had been spying on as she undressed, murdered two of her male relatives, and then raped and murdered her. Rolling also became convinced that he was possessed, not by some sinister alter ego, but by a demonic entity that ordered him to kill. In a letter to me, he claimed not only that this demon had helped him to kill and rape, but had also attacked him in his prison cell and sat on his chest.
Nietzsche once said that happiness is the sense that obstacles are being overcome and that power is increasing. This seems to be the basic element that serial killers share with most human beings. Conversely, it is the absence of this sense of power that characterizes the sort of person who becomes a serial killer. British homosexual murderer Dennis Nilsen, who strangled and dismembered a dozen victims in north London, told the crime writer Brian Masters that the character of Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs was an absurdity because he represented a fantasy of potency; he himself, said Nilsen, had never felt potent in his life.
This, then, enables us to understand one of the basic motives behind serial murder, and to see what Roy Hazelwood meant when he said, “sex crime isn’t about sex, it’s about power.”
The thought is frightening because it is difficult to see an end to it. If crime has changed so much in a few decades, what will it be like in a century or in two centuries? This is the kind of reflection provoked by any volume on crime written more than a hundred years ago. There is a vast Victorian compilation called Chronicles of Crime, or The New Newgate Calendar, by Camden Pelham, published in 1886 and covering the period from the beginning of the century. Of its five hundred or so cases (mostly murder, but with an admixture of forgery, burglary, piracy, and treason), only seven are rapes. Four of the seven rapists were executed, one imprisoned, and two transported to Australia. Obviously, the Victorians took rape very seriously indeed. What would they have thought of the rape statistics in any modern city? They would have felt that our society has turned into a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah, and foretold its imminent extinction by an outraged deity. As to serial murder, the thought would have struck them as too frightening to believe—just as even a fairly hardened crime writer such as myself prefers not to dwell on some of the cruelties inflicted by serial killers.
Even so, I would argue that the situation is not quite as bad as it looks. As baffling and complex as serial murder first appears, it has many features that are easy to recognize and classify. And problems that can be classified and understood can also be solved. That is fortunate for the police who hunt the perpetrators, for most cases of serial murder would otherwise be virtually unsolvable, since there is no obvious link between killer and victim—the killer might be any one among millions.
These classifiable features have led to the development of the science of psychological profiling, which can often provide that first vital lead. The core of this book is the story of psychological profiling, and of the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation’s BSU, the Behavioral Science Unit, at Quantico, Virginia.
1
The Science of Profiling
In 2002, the U.S. Crime Index showed that a violent crime occurred every twenty-two seconds, an aggravated assault every thirty-five seconds, a rape every five minutes, and a murder every thirty-five minutes. At least the murder rate showed a slight improvement from 1988 when a murder occurred every twenty-eight minutes.
These hair-raising statistics produce an unsettling sense that violence is spinning out of control. But although it is true that the U.S. murder rate has trebled in the post–World War II period, the mid-1990s saw it peak at around 23,000 a year, and it has been falling steadily to a thirty-five-year low.
There are several reasons for this steady decline. One is undoubtedly the zero tolerance policies introduced by Bill Clinton, which drastically reduced the number of gang-related murders. Another was the implementation of practical, commonsense anticrime measures—for example, in 1992 close to forty taxi drivers were murdered in New York. When bulletproof partitions and digital surveillance cameras were introduced inside the vehicles, these murders ceased.
But a major reason for the declining crime rate has certainly been the increased efficiency of crime-detection techniques. The most important of these was undoubtedly genetic, or DNA, fingerprinting, discovered by British scientist Alec Jeffreys in 1986. Genetic fingerprinting was perhaps the most important innovation in crime detection since digital fingerprinting in the 1880s, yet it took more than a decade before it could be implemented efficiently. A maj
or problem was the speed at which such tests could be carried out; eventually it was increased from weeks to hours. Another major problem occurred if there was not enough DNA material for testing, or if it was old or degraded. But the discovery of methods of extracting usable DNA from old samples, and then multiplying the quantity by the method known as STR, or short tandem repeats, streamlined the process and dramatically increased the solution rate for sex crimes. It also led to a review of thousands of unsolved, or “cold cases,” from earlier years.
But where catching serial killers is concerned, the most important advance is undoubtedly “criminal profiling.” For all practical purposes, this began in 1950 with the series of explosions in New York City attributed to the “Mad Bomber.”
On April 24, 1950, an explosion wrecked a phone booth outside the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. During the next sixteen years, the bomber planted twenty-eight more explosive devices in sites around the city that included Grand Central Station, Radio City Music Hall, the Capitol Theater, Rockefeller Center, the Port Authority bus terminal, and the Consolidated Edison plant on Nineteenth Street. By chance, no one was seriously hurt in any of these incidents. Then, on December 2, 1956, a bomb exploded in the Brooklyn Paramount Movie Theater, injuring seven people, one seriously.
In reality, the first Mad Bomber crime had not occurred in 1950, but instead nearly ten years earlier, on November 16, 1940, when a homemade metal pipe bomb had failed to explode on a windowsill in the Consolidated Edison plant on West Sixty-fourth Street. A note wrapped around it said: “CON EDISON CROOKS—THIS IS FOR YOU.” Three months later, a second pipe bomb was found a few blocks away. When the war broke out, the Bomber wrote a letter to Manhattan police headquarters pledging to cease his attacks for the duration. It was after the Brooklyn bomb that the editor of a New York newspaper, the Journal American, decided to publish an open letter to the bomber. Appearing the day after Christmas 1956, it begged him to give himself up, offering to allow editorial space for a full airing of his grievances. Two days later, a bomb was found in the Paramount Theater, in an opening slashed in a seat; a police bomb squad deactivated it. Like the others, it was a homemade device consisting of a length of piping with nuts at both ends. But on that same Friday afternoon, the Journal American received a reply to its letter: