Popular Crime
In the case of Ted Bundy, Seattle-area police produced and circulated a sketch of “Ted” which is an excellent likeness of Bundy. Several people called police hot lines to report there was this man, Bundy, who was named Ted and who looked very much like the sketch—yet nothing came of that, either. Bundy had no record of sexual assault. The police there had set up a system to attract loose information, but had not constructed mechanisms to manage the flood of information that this generated. Bundy moved on.
In the case of the Boston Strangler, the sketch circulated by police looks very little like Albert DeSalvo, and did nothing to convict him if he was guilty, and nothing to clear him if he was innocent.
In the case of the Son of Sam, New York police mixed up two or more suspects, and compiled a composite drawing which combines features of both men. The man eventually convicted of the crimes, David Berkowitz, was apparently one of the men whom the witnesses had described, but bears little if any resemblance to the drawing (though several books blithely state that he does). It played no role in his capture or conviction.
In the case of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, Sutcliffe looked so much like the drawing that his co-workers jokingly called him The Ripper (nyuk nyuk). Nonetheless, Sutcliffe was interviewed by police at least five separate times before they began to focus on him as a suspect (he had bumped up against the investigation in a variety of different ways, although some of these were before the drawing was circulated). Even after he became the chief suspect, that investigation jumped the tracks when police mistakenly believed that an audio tape mailed to the investigators was genuine. The drawing played no real role in identifying or convicting Sutcliffe.
In the case of Thomas Luther, a suspected serial murderer who operated in Vermont, Colorado and West Virginia from the late seventies until the mid-nineties, one woman who survived an attack worked with a police artist to produce a drawing which is unmistakably Luther. The drawing was published in the Denver newspapers, but had no impact on the investigation (although it was helpful in convicting Luther when the case finally came to trial).
In the case of Richard Ramirez (the Night Stalker), police made an excellent sketch of Ramirez from witness recollections, and several sources mistakenly credit the drawing with his capture. In fact, however, Ramirez was identified through fingerprints he had left in a stolen car. The drawing, once more, actually played no role in identifying Ramirez.
I can think of only a few cases in which an artist’s sketch played a critical role in bringing a serial killer to justice. A composite drawing based on hypnotizing a twelve-year-old girl was helpful in identifying Jon Dunkle, 1980s serial killer. We’ll get to it.
I don’t question that artists’ drawings are helpful to police in other investigations. My point here is only that, based on my reading, they don’t seem to do very much in investigations of this type.
It is a general thesis of this book that the law is too important to be abandoned to the lawyers. You may remember the Yale murder (1843), in which the young man who was charged with the crime posted bond and then went back to Pennsylvania, at which point Connecticut prosecutors closed the case.
In the view of the lawyers involved in the case, this was an appropriate resolution. That’s the way things were done. A bond is posted to ensure that the defendant appears at trial. If the defendant doesn’t appear for trial, he forfeits the bond, and the books are closed. It has to be done that way, the lawyers argued. Otherwise, what is the point of posting bond?
The press had a different take. As the press saw it, the failure to prosecute the murderer because the murderer was wealthy enough to forfeit the bond was an outrage. The lawyers thought that the reaction of the press was ignorant. These people just didn’t understand the process. The press brought to it a different perspective—and the press was right, and the press won. The practice of abandoning warrants when a defendant posted bond and fled the jurisdiction was gradually curtailed.
This, I believe, is one of the best justifications for the business of popularizing crime: that it exposes the narrow logic of the legal profession to a broader concept of justice. The legal profession always argues—and you can see this every day of the week on truTV—that this is the way things are done because this is the way things have to be done because this is what the law requires. Lawyers will believe this no matter how unreasonable it is. Their profession trains them to understand why the law is the way it is. Lawyers are trained in the logic of the law, and sometimes, once in a while, they lose sight of the bigger picture.
In the years just before John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan, there developed a cadre of whore psychologists who made a living convincing jurors that defendants were insane. Almost everybody has some psychological disorder, if you choose to look at it that way, and a person who commits a terrible crime … well, he always has a disorder. Many psychologists were willing to so testify. By trial and more trial, defense attorneys found a group of these people who were articulate enough and affable enough that juries tended to like them and believe them. These traveling psychologists would testify to the insanity of anyone who had the money to buy their testimony.
In one sense it was appropriate—people who commit crimes are almost universally suffering from psychological defects—but in a broader sense, it was an outrage. Lawyers couldn’t or wouldn’t see that it was an outrage. This was the way the law was; this was the way the system worked. But once the public caught on to it, the jig was up. After Hinckley was acquitted you could be as crazy as a bedbug in orange socks, and you weren’t walkin’.
But actually, in the way I just stated that, I undersold my case. Hinckley shooting the President, after all, is not really a popular crime story. That’s hard news. But it wasn’t actually Hinckley’s acquittal which brought about this change; it merely happened at that time, and commentators fell into the habit of attributing it to that. The public’s tolerance for irregular psychological defenses was wearing thin years before Hinckley—and it was tabloid crime stories that were the grindstone. The critical case in this process was not Hinckley, it was Dan White.
On November 27, 1978, Dan White, a struggling San Francisco politician, assassinated the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, and a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk. Several highly respected whore psychologists testified that White had had a psychic break—a brief vacation from a long career of mediocre sanity. One psychiatrist pointed out that White, who had normally been a fitness fanatic, had been pigging out on Twinkies and Coca-Cola in the days before the murders, and the bad diet could have contributed to his loss of judgment. Although this was a minuscule part of the testimony of one witness, the popular press portrayed this as “the Twinkie defense.” White was found guilty, but not of murder; the jury ruled that he had diminished capacity at the time of the crime, and sentenced him to less than eight years in prison.
The public hated that. Also of significance was a similar defense used successfully in the trial of Richard Herrin, convicted of Not Murdering Bonnie Garland, in what was also called The Yale Murder. As in the case of Dunkin’ Danny White, Herrin was a high-functioning individual (due to graduate from Yale in a few months) who took a half-hour break from sanity to kill somebody, in his case his girlfriend. She was breaking up with him. As in the Twinkie case, he was found guilty but with diminished capacity reducing the charge to manslaughter, and drew a sentence of 8 to 25 years. In The Killing of Bonnie Garland (Simon & Schuster, 1982), a respected psychiatrist (Dr. Willard Gaylin) picked apart the testimony of the psychologists who testified in the trial (from both sides), and pointed out in a scholarly, deliberate way that the things that these psychologists said during the trial didn’t bear any resemblance to the things that psychologists say during the normal conduct of their profession. A prosecution psychiatrist, for example, had insisted that there was “absolutely no” indication of psychosis in Richard Herrin. This would be a fairly remarkable thing for a psychiatrist to say about someb
ody who hadn’t beaten his girlfriend to death with a hammer. Psychologists in the case had offered diagnoses of Herrin that were patently absurd, and had done so in terminology unrecognizable within the profession. “The criminal law as it now stands,” wrote Dr. Gaylin, “is using false and, perhaps worse for legal purposes, indefinable psychological concepts.”
Dan White was released from prison in 1984, and committed suicide in 1985. Richard Herrin was released from prison in 1995, and has lived in almost total anonymity since then. But the cases of White and Herrin, among many others, convinced the public—not the lawyers; the public—that the time had come to pull the plug on the concept of temporary lunacy. White’s example made the emotional case for this, and appealed to the masses. Dr. Gaylin made the rational case, and appealed to opinion makers. The pincer movement snapped shut quickly after the acquittal of John Hinckley.
Dr. Gaylin wrote (p. 255, The Killing of Bonnie Garland) that “the insanity defense is increasingly used and increasingly effective.” Within months of the publication of his book, the insanity defense almost entirely stopped working. There was a sea change in the public’s attitude.
As Dr. Gaylin pointed out, until the mid-1970s a person who was found not guilty by reason of insanity would probably spend more time in “prison” than a person who was convicted of the same crime, the only real difference being that the prison was designated as a psychiatric hospital. But in the 1970s, federal courts issued a series of rulings making it difficult to keep a person involuntarily confined in a psychiatric hospital. A New York City policeman named Robert Torsney, apparently sane moments before, shot and killed a citizen for no reason whatsoever, in the presence of many witnesses, and kept walking forward as if nothing had happened. He appeared not to process what he had done. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and was locked up for treatment. The psychiatrist in charge of treating him, however, insisted that he appeared to be perfectly sane, and that there was no treatment for him. A court then ordered that Torsney be released, since a person who was not receiving psychiatric treatment could not be confined by the state for psychiatric treatment.
There was a brief period of time—roughly 1977 to 1982—in which persons were frequently acquitted by juries because they were insane, then released months or weeks later by psychiatric hospitals because they were not insane. The Hinckley case ended that period—but it had to end, and it would have ended anyway, even if Hinckley had stayed in Hawaii.
Two progressive reforms collided with great force, and one of them had to shatter. More and more people who committed serious crimes were being ruled insane. This was progress, because these people were in fact insane, and it was appropriate for the law to recognize this. But at the same time, persons involuntarily confined in psychiatric hospitals were acquiring the right to challenge their confinement and walk away. This also was progress, I suppose. But simply putting those two sentences together, more and more people who committed serious crimes were being given the right to challenge their confinement and walk away. This was not progress.
In this collision, the public more or less vetoed the insanity defense. This was not progress. This cycle of reform will come again. Once more, somewhere in the future, people who commit crimes in states of diminished responsibility will begin to be sent somewhere other than to prison. That will be a good thing. But this cannot mean that they are sent to some place from which they can quickly and un-safely be returned to society. That is the true lesson of the pre-Hinckley era.
In the past generation—in my lifetime and in yours—liberal ideas about the treatment of prisoners have by and large collapsed, and prisons have fallen back into barbaric conditions. I am trying to talk honestly here about how this happened, and how progress can be restored. These liberal ideas did not fail because conservatives opposed them or because conservatives stopped them. They failed because they proved unworkable, and this led to very negative outcomes for society. In order to restore progress, we have to understand why the progressive penal reforms of the 1940s and 1950s ultimately failed.
What happened essentially, in my view, is that progressives got to driving too fast. The Supreme Court had a lead foot. They wanted society to make progress. They were impatient. New sets of reforms were ordered before the old ones were understood. New sets of reforms were implemented on the heels of old. Too little thought was given as to how this set of reforms would mesh with that set of reforms.
I wish to point out that I am not bashing the Court here to advocate a conservative position. While I am, no doubt, a very bad liberal, I am at the moment bashing the Court in the advocacy of a liberal position: that criminals are human, that they should be treated with humanity, given every reasonable opportunity to return to the mainstream of American life. In 1930, in 1940, even in 1960, this was what educated and sophisticated Americans generally believed. It no longer is. Our prisons are horrible places, much worse than they were fifty years ago, and by and large the American people are fine with that. Prison reformers in America lack the power or the cachet of lawn trimmers.
I’d like to see America start back toward having prisons that try to help people figure out how to live a decent life. We have to understand what went wrong. The operating beliefs of any nation are held together with something like the consistency of taffy. What you believe, your neighbor tends also to believe, but not exactly; there is a spectrum of belief. If you pull on one end of it the other end moves, and, if necessary, it stretches—unless you pull on it too hard, in which case one end pulls away, the center weakens into nothing, and pulling on one end of the taffy no longer moves the other end at all.
In my view, what happened to America’s belief in a certain set of liberal values—including decent treatment for criminals—is that the Warren and Burger courts pulled so recklessly on the end of the taffy that it broke loose from the main part, and no longer bore any relevance to the society. Humane ideas became irrelevant to the prison system.
XXVI
On October 12, 1978, punk rock star Sid Vicious, a member of the group the Sex Pistols, stabbed to death his 20-year-old girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. Vicious himself died of a drug overdose a few months later, awaiting trial for the murder. Spungen’s mother, Deborah Spungen, wrote an account of her daughter’s painful life, And I Don’t Want to Live This Life, which is excellent—very moving, very honest.
Nancy Spungen was a “blue baby”—google “cyanosis”—and was never really normal. Her severe emotional and psychological problems, beginning in infancy, placed a destructive pressure on the Spungen family. Although Deborah Spungen is angry at Vicious for murdering her daughter, she realizes that Nancy was dead to her long before she was dead in fact. Nancy Spungen had never hoped and never expected to live to the age of 25. There was a nameless agony within her which had resisted the best efforts of trained psychologists. She saw death as the only release from that agony, and had pursued her own death not only in the hours before Vicious killed her, but from an early age, and with increasing abandon. Her time with Sid Vicious fulfilled the destiny that she had chosen for herself, and provided for her the closest approach to happiness that she was ever to know.
It is now believed by some people that Spungen was killed not by Vicious but by a comedian or a drug dealer who visited their room about the time of the fatal incident. It’s hard to see that it matters. Nancy, Sid, and most of those in their milieu were racing toward death. And I Don’t Want to Live This Life (Villard, 1983) is highly recommended, but is not a traditional “crime book,” and was published before the alternative theories about Nancy’s murder began to surface.
James Dallas Egbert III was sixteen years old and a sophomore at Michigan State when he disappeared one afternoon.
When Dallas Egbert was twelve years old, the computer system at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base broke down. Dallas was called in to fix it. That was 1975, before home computers; there weren’t computer stores on every corner, and very few people had any understanding of
programming. It wasn’t only computers which came naturally to him, but all forms of math and most other sciences, in particular chemistry.
Dallas Egbert was a genius, and Dallas Egbert was profoundly unhappy. His mother was always pushing him, pressuring him to do more, do better, work harder. He graduated from high school in 1977, and entered Michigan State on a gifted-student program. He was only 14, but Michigan State assured his parents that they knew how to take care of exceptional children. They assigned him a dorm room, gave him a class schedule, and forgot he existed. Within months Egbert was playing Dungeons & Dragons for days at a time, taking drugs, and involved with the university’s gay rights organization.
And he had no friends. At sixteen, when life revolves around peer groups, Egbert’s peers were the other gay sixteen-year-old geniuses at Michigan State: none. He was living among older kids who had nothing in common with him, and who didn’t particularly like him. He was regarded as an irritating little twerp. He was sixteen but looked twelve. The guys he played Dungeons & Dragons with told him to get lost; he was too intense, too weird, too into the game. He got involved in numerous campus activities and groups, each of which devised a new kind of rejection for him. His personal relationships, we must suppose, were of the most difficult kind, since even those partners who had come out of the closet could hardly be seen spending time with a juvenile.