Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (59 page)

Ressler’s profile had been almost correct—his only mistake was stating that Terry Wallin was the first victim; she was in fact the second. A few weeks earlier, some distance away from the other murders, Ambrose Griffin had been shot through the chest as he was taking groceries from his car. The .22-caliber bullet matched Chase’s weapon. Chase had fired from his truck and immediately driven away before any witnesses appeared on the scene.

The profile that the FBI constructed of Chase was instrumental in his capture. Armed with a specific description of a killer that nobody had seen, the police were able to narrow down the search for a suspect and capture him within five days of Terry Wallin’s murder.

Richard Chase’s story is somewhat sad—he was born a happy and sweet child in 1950 in a middle-income home. When he was twelve, however, Chase’s mother began to exhibit mental problems, accusing her husband of infidelity, poisoning her, and using drugs. In high school, Chase was an average student with a few girlfriends but no really close friends. His girlfriends remember that he attempted intercourse with them but could not sustain an erection.

At about the second year in school, his personality suddenly transformed, and he became “rebellious, defiant, and unkempt.” He would have been about fifteen then, when symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia often begin to first surface. (On the other hand, “defiant and unkempt” describes an entire generation during the 1960s—the hippies.) He began to hang around with “acidheads”—kids who took a lot of LSD—and in 1965 he was arrested for possession of marijuana. Again, Ressler was correct in his profile that the killer would have a drug record. But Ressler soberly reminds us, “Many in the public saw evidence for attributing Chase’s murders to the influence of drugs. I disagree. Although drugs may have contributed to Chase’s slide into serious mental illness, they were not a real factor in the murders; we have found that drugs, while present in many cases, are seldom the precipitating factor in serial murders; the true causes lie much deeper and are more complex.”

Chase managed to graduate from high school in 1969, but could not keep up with his studies in college or hold down a job. In 1972 he was arrested for drunk driving, and in 1973, after an incident at a party, he was charged with resisting police and carrying a concealed handgun without a license. He paid a $50 fine.

In 1976, Chase was put in a nursing hospital after he was found injecting rabbit blood into his veins. Because his parents could not afford mental treatment for their son, state conservators were appointed for Richard Chase. At the hospital, Chase was reported to be a “frightening” patient and known among the staff as Dracula. He often went out into the hospital garden and captured birds in the bushes. Afterward he bit off their heads and drank their blood. Two nurse’s aides quit their jobs rather than continue working around Chase.

Chase explained to staff at the hospital that his blood was turning to powder and he needed to drink blood to stave off death. When psychiatrists suggested that Chase’s problems could be controlled by drugs and that he should be released, the nursing staff at the hospital howled in protest. In 1977, Chase was released anyhow—into the custody of his mother, who had believed that her husband was trying to poison her. She rented Chase an apartment to live in.

People who had encountered Chase, who was by then twenty-seven years old, remembered that he seemed to live entirely in the past—he talked of events in high school as if they had happened yesterday. He also talked a lot about UFOs and a “Nazi crime syndicate” from high school that was still pursuing him.

In August 1977, Chase was driving near Lake Tahoe when police pulled his truck over in a routine stop. He was covered in blood and in his truck was a bucket of blood and several rifles. Police determined that the blood was bovine and let him go. In September, Chase had an argument with his mother and killed her cat. Twice in October, he bought dogs from the animal shelter for fifteen dollars each. In mid-November, he answered an ad in a local paper for puppies and managed to bargain for two puppies for the price of one. Police, meanwhile, were getting a barrage of missing pet reports in Chase’s neighborhood.

On December 18, after filling out a form stating that he had never been a mental patient or a criminal, Chase purchased a .22-caliber handgun. He drove around for several days shooting at people’s houses until he killed Ambrose Griffin.

On January 16, 1978, he set a garage on fire. On January 23, the day he killed Terry Wallin, he wandered through the neighborhood, entering any house where the door was unlocked. Several people called the police, but he was gone by the time they arrived. In one house that Chase entered, he defecated on a child’s bed and urinated in a clothes drawer. He rambled on this way, passing through the shopping mall where he encountered his former schoolmate and eventually arrived at Terry Wallin’s home.

Mumbling about UFOs following him, Chase was sentenced to death, much to Ressler’s regret, who felt that Chase was truly insane and did not know the nature of the acts he was committing. The death sentence, however, reflected the community’s fear that convicts like Chase might be released after being declared “cured” by psychiatrists—a fear that was well founded considering how many serial killers had records of being confined and released (such as Ed Kemper and Henry Lee Lucas). In 1980, Chase accumulated a surplus of depressants and took them all. He was found dead in his cell.

Psychotic serial killers like Chase can be both difficult and easy to capture—difficult because they strike like lightning with no rhyme or reason and are therefore highly unpredictable; easy because they make little effort to conceal their acts. They are, however, rare—only a small percentage of serial killers are truly suffering from psychosis.

Criminal profiling is not intended to “solve” a case or produce a definitive identity of the perpetrator. Profiling is a contributory tool that can filter out less likely scenarios and suspects or focus the investigation on fewer possibilities. It can be used to “trigger” witness recollections by providing a starting point. In the Chase case, when police asked witnesses specifically if they had seen an unkempt, gaunt individual, Chase’s name surfaced. The witness might not have come forward with his identity had police been more general in their survey.

 Wayne Williams—The Atlanta Child Murders

Probably the first high-profile case FBI analysts became involved in was the Atlanta child murders of the early 1980s. Between July 1979 and May 1981, at least twenty-eight black children and youths, mostly males, were found dumped in various locations around Atlanta. Because there was some discussion as to whether these crimes were committed by a white supremacist group, eventually the federal government and the FBI became involved in the investigation. FBI agents John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood from the BSU came down to Atlanta to assist in profiling the killer.

They thought it was unlikely that a white supremacist group was committing the murders because the bodies were partially hidden, dumped in abandoned buildings or in the backs of vacant lots. A more public display of the bodies would have served white supremacists better. Because the crimes were committed in black neighborhoods, it was likely that the offender was black. A white killer would have stood out in the neighborhood and would have been noticed. Roy Hazelwood recalls driving through a neighborhood where some of the victims disappeared: “People walking on the sidewalk stopped. People mowing their lawns stopped. People stopped talking to each other and stared at us. It was like one of those E. F. Hutton ads on television . . . I knew there was no way a white serial killer could have moved through those neighborhoods without being noticed. I knew the guy had to be black.”
²¹²
Furthermore, statistically speaking, serial killers tend to kill victims within their own race.

There were no reports of any of the victims being forcibly abducted. The profilers concluded that the serial killer was using some kind of con to lure his victims away. He was intelligent, probably from a middle-class or upper-class background, and had some kind of occupation or hobby that might have been attractive to the young victims. He was probably in his midtwenties—not too old to frighten away the victims nor too young to be credible in his con. There was little evidence of sexual contact with the victims, and therefore the profilers suggested that he was sexually inadequate and probably single. He would be a police buff, might drive a police-type vehicle and own a police-type dog like a German shepherd, and might have already interjected himself somewhere into the investigation. He would be probably following media reports of the progress of the investigation.

Not long afterward, Atlanta police received an anonymous phone call from an individual claiming to be a racist killer and warning that he would kill more black kids. The caller hung up after giving police a roadside location to search for another body. Douglas had recently witnessed hoax messages while teaching in England during the Yorkshire Ripper investigation and remembered the impediment they had created to identifying that killer. He suggested that the police set up a telephone trace and then make a big show of searching the opposite side of the road from which the caller instructed them to search. Sure enough, the caller telephoned, telling the police how stupid they were in searching the wrong side of the road. His call was traced and he was quickly arrested. Again, we see that profiling is important not only in focusing on who the perpetrator might be, but also in filtering out who is not.

Incredibly, the next victim was found on the road that police pretended to search to flush out the hoaxer. Apparently the killer was following press reports and knew that he had not dumped any body there. Now he was going to show his superiority to the police.

John Douglas wrote that in February 1981, somebody in the medical examiner’s office released information that was widely carried by the media: that five victims had been linked to the same killer through hair and fiber evidence. “And something clicked with me.
He’s going to start dumping bodies in the river,”
Douglas wrote in his memoirs. “We’ve got to start surveilling the rivers, I said.”
²¹³

Local police and FBI agents staked out bridges for weeks over rivers in the Atlanta area, and in what has been called “The splash heard ’round the world” they identified Wayne Williams after seeing his vehicle on a bridge at 3:00
A
.
M
. in the vicinity of the sound of a large splash. No body had been located at that moment, but a suspect was now identified. Several days later, police pulled from the river two bodies downstream from the bridge. On the basis of fiber and hair evidence and witness statements that placed the victims in Williams’s company, he was charged with the two murders.

Wayne Williams was a twenty-three-year-old black man who lived with his parents, both retired schoolteachers. He was an unrealized prodigy, establishing his own small low-powered radio station when he was fourteen. Although the station’s range did not extend beyond a few city blocks, he attracted a lot of press attention. He claimed to be a music producer and promoter and recruited young boys whom he promised stardom. Nothing came of his promises.

Williams monitored radio and police frequencies and sold freelance photographs of accidents to local newspapers. At one of the scenes of the child murders, Wayne Williams offered his services as a crime scene photographer. In 1976 he was charged with impersonating a police officer when his vehicle was found equipped with red and blue police lights beneath the grill and on the dashboard. He owned a German shepherd.

While he appeared genteel and harmless, FBI profilers coached the prosecution on how to get Williams to make angry outbursts in the courtroom during his cross-examination. Williams was never charged with the other child murders, but after his arrest they ceased. He was convicted of only two murders, neither of which exactly fit the pattern of the child murders. The victims were twenty-seven and twenty-one, and their cause of death was not clearly established. When state forensic evidence linking Williams to the two victims was discredited by the defense, the judge in a controversial decision allowed the introduction of fiber and hair evidence linking Williams to the other victims, even though he was not charged with their murders. Williams to this day proclaims his innocence.
²¹⁴

Looking over Wayne Williams’s description, it appears that the FBI profile that Hazelwood and Douglas submitted is incredibly accurate—right down to the ownership of a vehicle fitted with police lights and the dog. But just to show how difficult it is to sort fact from fiction in true-crime history, there is a radically different account of the FBI’s participation in the Atlanta child murders investigation. Robert D. Keppel, a professional investigator in more than fifty serial homicide cases and a consultant to the Atlanta child murder task force, remembers things differently upon his arrival in Atlanta in March 1980: