Serial Killer Investigations (4 page)

Glatman then confessed to the murder of 24-year-old divorcee Shirley Ann Bridgeford, a mother of two children, whom he contacted through the Patty Sullivan Lonely Hearts Club; he registered as George Williams, a plumber by profession. He made a date with her over the telephone to go square dancing on 8 March 1958, but when he picked her up at her mother’s home in Sun Valley, he told her he would rather take her for a drive in the moonlight. After stopping for dinner he continued his drive until they were nearly a hundred miles south of Los Angeles before pulling the car over. He tried to fondle her; when she protested he produced a gun and ordered her into the back seat; there he raped her. Then, in the Anza Borrego desert, he tied her up, snapped photographs, and strangled her with a rope. He kept her red panties as a keepsake.

At the end of his two-hour confession, he led the detectives to the bones of Shirley Ann Bridgeford and Ruth Mercado.

In court in San Diego in November 1958, Glatman pleaded guilty to all three murders, rejecting his lawyer’s advice to plead guilty but insane on the grounds that he would rather die than spend the rest of his life behind bars. Superior Court Judge John A. Hewicker duly obliged, and on 18 September 1959, Glatman was put to death in the gas chamber at San Quentin. Pierce Brooks attended his execution.

Psychologically speaking, Glatman was the archetypal serial killer, a fantasist whose crimes were the outcome of sexual frustration. Scrawny and unattractive, he felt from the beginning that he would never be able to possess the kind of woman he dreamed about unless he took her by force. Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1928, he was a mama’s boy who did not get on with other children. Girls at school found the scrawny boy with the sticking-out ears unappealing; he therefore made his bid for attention by snatching their purses, running away, and then flinging them back at them. His mother is quoted as saying: ‘It was just his approach.’

When he was 12 he discovered the pleasures of masochism, learning that tightening a noose around his throat induced sexual satisfaction. His mother, noticing the marks around his neck, took him to see the family doctor, who reassured her that the boy would outgrow the behaviour. But by the age of 17 his sexual frustrations had found no other outlet, so he tried force, pointing a toy gun at a teenaged girl and ordering her to undress. She screamed and he fled, only to be picked up by the police. He broke his bail, and absconded to New York, where he satisfied his aggressive urges against woman by robbing them at gunpoint; he became known as the ‘Phantom Bandit’. He was caught and sentenced to five years in Sing Sing Correctional Facility, and was released in 1951. He then returned to Colorado, where he became a television repairman, and in 1957 moved to Los Angeles, where his mother set him up in the TV repair business. And he soon took on the identity of Johnny Glenn, magazine photographer, and on 1 August 1957, called at the flat of Judy Dull.

Pierce Brooks never forgot the effort it had cost him to check whether there had been any similar abductions in the Los Angeles area, and he now began to try to convince his superiors of the importance of logging crimes, solved and unsolved, on a computer system where similarities could be observed. In due course, he became chief of homicide detectives in Los Angeles, then went on to become chief of police in Springfield and Eugene, Oregon, and in Lakewood, Colorado. His dream of computerising crime reports eventually became the system known as VICAP the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. And the newly formed FBI Academy at Quantico looked like the ideal place to set it up. There Howard Teten and Patrick J. Mullany were teaching the concept of psychological profiling of criminals to their students.

In June 1973 came their first opportunity to put it into practice when seven-year-old Susan Jaeger from Farmington, Michigan, was abducted from a Rocky Mountains campsite in Montana. Sometime in the early hours an intruder slit open her tent with his knife and overpowered her before she could alert her parents, William and Marietta Jaeger, who slept close by. Once the alarm was raised an intensive search failed to reveal any trace of the missing child, or any clue to the identity of her abductor. When the FBI was later called in, the case was referred to Quantico through Agent Pete Dunbar, then stationed in Bozeman, Montana.

Combining their own investigative experience with the police report, photographic evidence, and Dunbar’s local knowledge, Teten, Mullany, and a recently arrived instructor named Robert K. Ressler, employed the new crime analysis to try and track down the abductor. They concluded that he was a homicidal peeping Tom who lived in the vicinity of the camp—this was a remote area—and spotted the Jaegers during the course of a periodical summer’s night snoop around the campsite. Statistics pointed to a young, male, white offender (they are almost invariably young men: white because Susan Jaeger was white, and such offences are usually intraracial).

The absence of any clues to his identity, the fact that he carried a knife with him to and from the campsite, and made off with his victim without any alarm being raised indicated an organised violent criminal. Sexually motivated murder frequently occurs at an early age, yet this was not the handiwork of some frenzied teenager. This bore the stamp of an older person, perhaps in his twenties. Statistical probability made him a loner, of average or possibly above average intelligence.

Gradually the three instructors fitted together each piece of the behavioural jigsaw puzzle. The length of time the girl had been missing without word—and no sign of a ransom demand—persuaded them that Susan Jaeger had been murdered. They thought it likely that her abductor was that comparatively rare type of sex killer who mutilates his victims after death—sometimes to remove body parts as ‘souvenirs’.

Early on in the investigation an informant contacted Agent Dunbar with the name of a possible suspect—David Meirhofer, a local 23-year-old single man who had served in Vietnam. By chance, Dunbar knew Meirhofer, who to him seemed quiet and intelligent. More important, there was no known evidence to connect him with the abduction.

In January 1974, the charred body of an 18-year-old girl was found in nearby woodland. She had rejected Meirhofer’s advances and avoided his company; otherwise he had no known connection with the crime. Yet, inevitably he again became a suspect, and even volunteered for both a lie detector test and interrogation under the ‘truth serum’ sodium pentothal. He passed both tests so convincingly that Dunbar concluded that he must be innocent.

The Quantico profilers felt differently. They had noted that psychopaths can have dual personalities, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hydes so to speak, so that as Jekyll takes the test, he genuinely feels innocent. Experience had also taught the profilers that many sex killers deliberately seek ways of inserting themselves into an investigation, partly to find out how much the authorities know, but also out of a desire to play some active part in the drama. This is why they advised Susan Jaeger’s parents to keep a tape recorder by their telephone. And on the first anniversary of their daughter’s disappearance, an anonymous male caller rang their home in Farmington and boasted to Marietta Jaeger that he was keeping Susan alive, and that she was in Europe. Instead of upbraiding him, Marietta responded gently, and by turning the other cheek reduced her anonymous caller to tears.

Analysis of the tape identified the voice as Meirhofer’s. But that was not enough evidence under Montana law to obtain a warrant to search Meirhofer’s apartment. Mullany reasoned, however, that if Marietta Jaeger could reduce David Meirhofer to tears by telephone, a face-to-face meeting might prove even more rewarding. Marietta had the courage to agree, and her husband escorted her to Montana where she met Meirhofer in his lawyer’s office. He appeared in complete control, and said nothing to incriminate himself. The Jaegers returned home, thinking the plan had failed; but they were wrong. Shortly afterwards they received another phone call—this time from Salt Lake City, Utah, some four hundred miles south of Bozeman—from a man calling himself ‘Mr Travis’. He told Marietta that he was the man who abducted her daughter—but she recognised the voice, and called his bluff. ‘Well, hello, David.’

Backed now by Marietta Jaeger’s sworn affidavit, Agent Dunbar in Bozeman obtained his search warrant. As the Quantico profilers had predicted, he unearthed various ‘souvenirs’—body parts, taken from both victims—that proved Meirhofer’s guilt. At that, the man who had passed both ‘truth tests’ so convincingly also confessed to two more unsolved murders (of local boys). Although he was not brought to trial—David Meirhofer hanged himself in his cell—he became the first serial killer to be caught with the aid of the FBI’s new investigative technique.

It was a breakthrough that, within a decade, was to lead directly to the accurate, systematic profiling technique known as the ‘Criminal Investigative Analysis Program’, or CIAP.

Both the Glatman and Meirhofer cases offered the psychological profilers some important clues to certain types of sex criminal. In childhood they are loners who feel alienated from their peer group. Robert Ressler writes in
Whoever Fights Monsters:
‘As the psychologically damaged boys get closer to adolescence, they find that they are unable to develop the social skills that are precursors to sexual skills and that are the coin of positive emotional relationships... By the time a normal youngster is dancing, going to parties, participating in kissing games, the loner is turning in on himself and developing fantasies that are deviant. The fantasies are substitutes for more positive human encounters, and as the adolescent becomes more dependent on them, he loses touch with acceptable social values.’ And he adds: ‘Most were incapable of holding jobs or living up to their intellectual potential.’

The psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the phrase ‘deprivation needs’ to refer to the basic needs that must be fulfilled before someone can reach his or her normal potential. A child who has been half-starved will lack certain vitamins that are essential to growth. And a child who is emotionally starved is likely to lack certain psychological vitamins, which may form an obstacle to satisfactory relationships. Ressler comments that although the result may not be murder or rape, ‘it will be some other sort of demonstration of dysfunction’. In such people, the Doctor Jekyll aspect, shocked by what Mr Hyde is doing, may become suicidal—hence Glatman’s plea to be executed and Meirhofer’s self-destruction.

Observations such as these would become the basis of Ressler’s insight into the minds of serial killers.

Chapter Three

By the time he was a nine-year-old boy, Ressler knew that monsters were not confined to fairy stories; there was a real one roaming the streets of his hometown, Chicago, Illinois.

On 5 June 1945, 43-year-old widow Josephine Ross had been stabbed to death when she had awakened to find a burglar in her apartment. Six months later, on 10 December 1945, a 30-old ex-Wave named Frances Brown was discovered kneeling unclothed by the side of her bath, a knife driven through her throat with such force that it had come out the other side. On the wall above her bed someone had written in lipstick: ‘For heavens sake catch me before I kill more—I cannot help myself.’ There was no sign of rape.

Four weeks later, on the morning of 7 January 1946, James E. Degnan went into the bedroom of his seven-year-old daughter, Suzanne, and saw that she was not in her bed, and that the window was wide open. He called the police, and it was a policeman who found the note on the child’s chair; it said she had been kidnapped and demanded $20,000 for her return. Later that afternoon, Suzanne’s head was discovered beneath a nearby manhole cover. In another sewer police found the child’s left leg. The right leg was found in another sewer, and the torso in a third. The arms were discovered—also in a sewer—some weeks later. The case shocked the nation, but the police seemed unable to develop any definite leads.

Six months later, on 26 June 1946, a young man walked into an apartment building in Chicago, and entered the apartment of Mr and Mrs Pera through the open door. Mrs Pera was in the kitchen preparing dinner. A neighbour who had seen the young man enter called to Mrs Pera to ask if she knew a man had walked into her apartment. The young man immediately left, but the neighbour called him to stop. Instead, he ran down the stairs, pointing a gun at the neighbour before running out of the building. Minutes later, he knocked on the door of a nearby apartment and asked the woman who answered for a glass of water, explaining that he felt ill. She sensed something wrong and rang the police. In fact, an off-duty cop had already seen the fleeing youth, and ran after him. When cornered, the young man fired three shots at him; all missed. As the on-duty police answered the call, the burglar and the cop grappled on the floor. Then one of the other policemen hit him on the head—three times—with a flowerpot, and knocked him unconscious.

Their prisoner turned out to be 17-year-old William George Heirens, who had spent some time in a correctional institution for burglary. When his fingerprints were taken, they were found to match one found on the Degnan ransom note, and another found in the apartment of Frances Brown. In the prison hospital, Heirens was given the ‘truth drug’ sodium pentothal, and asked: ‘Did you kill Suzanne Degnan?’ Heirens answered: ‘George cut her up.’ At first he insisted that George was a real person, a youth five years his senior whom he met at school. Later, he claimed that George was his own invisible alter ego. ‘He was just a realization of mine, but he seemed real to me.’ Heirens also admitted to a third murder, that of Josephine Ross. In addition to this, he had attacked a woman named Evelyn Peterson with an iron bar when she started to wake up during a burglary, and then tied her up with lamp cord; he had also fired shots through windows at two women who had been sitting in their rooms with the curtains undrawn.

The story of William Heirens, as it emerged in his confessions, and in interviews with his parents, was almost predictably typical of a serial sex killer. Born on 15 November 1928, he had been a forceps delivery. He was an underweight baby, and cried and vomited a great deal. At the age of seven months he fell down 12 cement steps into the basement and landed on his head; after that he had nightmares about falling. He was three years old when a brother was born, and he was sent away to the home of his grandmother. He was frequently ill as a child, and broke his arm at the age of nine. The family background was far from happy; his mother had two nervous breakdowns accompanied by paralysis, and his father’s business failed several times.