Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (60 page)

We couldn’t wait to hear what gems of wisdom would come from the BSU’s agents, most of whom were only self-proclaimed experts in murder investigations and had never investigated one lead in an actual murder case. The FBI were the kings of follow-up but couldn’t solve a crime in progress. Most homicide detectives knew this . . . The profile of the probable killer provided by the BSU mirrored the wishes of the community, that is, the killer was white.
²¹⁵

Moreover, the FBI surveillance of river bridges did not start until April 24,
after
four bodies had already been found in Atlanta-area rivers between March 30 and April 20.
²¹⁶
Perhaps bureaucratic intransigence can explain why the bridge surveillance was not initiated immediately after Douglas “clicked” but only after four bodies in a row had been pulled out from the rivers. One wonders, though, why neither Hazelwood nor Douglas mention in their autobiographies the earlier BSU profile suggesting that the killer was a white individual. Or did Robert Keppel get the story all wrong? Go figure it out.

 Larry Bell—Profiling the Organized Offender

In 1985, FBI profilers confronted a highly organized serial killer. On May 31, in rural South Carolina, seventeen-year-old Shari Faye Smith was kidnapped on her way home from school. She was driving, but at the gates of her home, she stopped to check the roadside mailbox. He car was found at the end of the driveway, keys in the ignition, motor still running and her purse on the seat. During the next four days, the family received numerous telephone calls from the kidnapper, who said to them, “Shari is now a part of me. Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Our souls are now one . . . Shari is protected and . . . she is a part of me now and God looks after all of us.”

A handwritten letter from Shari arrived several days after her kidnapping—it was her “last will and testament” and proclaimed her love for her family. It was dated June 1, 1985, 3:10
A
.
M
. Reading the letter, the FBI was convinced that Shari was now dead.

The family kept receiving phone calls from the killer, but the calls were always placed from pay phones and never lasted long enough for the police to arrive in time at the location. The phones were dusted for prints, but the caller never left any behind. The voice was disguised as well, using an improvised electronic device.

Speaking to Shari’s sister Dawn on June 4, the killer told her how he had kidnapped and murdered Shari. He said that the whole thing had “gotten out of hand.” He was reading from some kind of written script, and at one point he made an error: “Okay, 4:58
A
.
M
.—no, I’m sorry. Hold on a minute . . . 3:10
A
.
M
., Saturday, the first of June, she handwrote what you received . . . 4:58
A
.
M
. Saturday, the first of June, we became one soul.”

Giving Dawn precise directions, to within six feet of where Shari’s body was located, the killer told her, “We’re waiting. God chose us.” He then hung up.

Arriving at the described location, eighteen miles away from Shari’s home, the police found her body. The body was dressed and decomposition had occurred to the point where police could no longer determine how Shari had been killed or whether she had been sexually assaulted. Sticky residue from duct tape was found in Shari’s hair and around her face, but the tape itself had been removed.

FBI profiler John Douglas, who assembled the profile, believed it was highly likely that Shari was the killer’s first murder victim. He noted, however, that the removal of the duct tape was indicative of organized planning and that generally first-time murderers do not start out this organized. This meant that the killer was probably older and more intelligent than average. When he telephoned the family he read quickly from a script and got off the phone as soon as possible. His meticulous directions to the body indicated that he must have revisited the corpse numerous times after the murder for some kind of sexual gratification and ceased only when a “relationship” was no longer possible because of advanced decomposition. Douglas believed that the killer had had a brief failed marriage from the degree of cruelty in the mind games he played with the victim’s family. He probably had a criminal record for obscene phone calls or attacks on children, but would not attack prostitutes because he was intimidated by them. He was most likely living alone or with his parents and would be in his early thirties. Because he chose a body dump site to which he could return, he was probably a local man familiar with the geography of the region. Again from his detailed instructions and highly scripted phone contact, it appeared that he was meticulous, rigid, and orderly. His car would probably be well maintained, clean, and no more than three years old. The fact that he had committed the abduction in the middle of the afternoon in a rural residential district suggested a degree of controlled sophistication. The killer was using some kind of improvised variable-speed device to disguise his voice, which probably meant he was skilled in electronics or in electric trades and aware of the risk of forensic voice identification.

Two weeks exactly after Shari was kidnapped, the offender struck again, this time kidnapping nine-year-old Debra May Helmick from the front yard of her home. Her father was in the house, ten yards away. The kidnapping took place some thirty miles away from Shari’s home. Witnesses saw the man pull up in a car, speak to the girl, and then suddenly force her inside the vehicle and drive away. They attempted to follow the car but it lost them. John Douglas had little doubt that it was the same offender. Douglas ventured that he would now be displaying even more compulsive behavior. People around him might notice weight loss; he might be drinking more and not shaving regularly, and he would be eagerly talking about the murder, following television reports, and cutting newspaper clippings about the crime. He would be greatly enjoying his celebrity and sense of power over his victims and the community.

The police and the FBI felt that because he was closely following the case and was phoning Shari’s family, he might be flushed out into the open. The FBI had a local newspaper publish a story of how the Smiths were having a memorial service at Shari’s grave, and published pictures of Dawn putting a stuffed teddy bear at her sister’s graveside. FBI agents photographed the license plates of any cars that passed by the memorial service and staked out the grave for days in the hope that the killer would attempt to take the teddy bear as a souvenir. He was too smart to take the stuffed toy bait, but obsessed enough to drive by the memorial service: When he was arrested, his license number was among the cars that the FBI had noted passing the location.

The killer continued to call Dawn, telling her where the body of the nine-year-old girl could be found: “Debra May is waiting. God forgive us all,” said the killer. He warned Dawn that at some point he was going to come for her.

The FBI crime laboratory, in the meantime, had been analyzing the two-page letter that Shari had written before her murder. An Esta machine is an instrument that can identify microscopic impressions in paper made earlier by somebody writing on sheets of paper higher up in the pad. The device uncovered the traces of the first nine digits of a ten-digit telephone number—a number in Alabama. This narrowed the number down to ten possible numbers. It was a remarkable piece of luck that the number and its area code were written down, and that it was an out-of-state number, meaning that long-distance charge records would be available. The police began to look through the billing records of the ten numbers to see if any had received calls from the area around where Shari was kidnapped and murdered. One of the numbers belonged to a soldier stationed in Alabama who had received calls from a house located just fifteen miles away from where Shari had lived.

When the police arrived at the house, they found an elderly couple living there. The husband was an electrician by trade. The soldier in Alabama was their son and they frequently talked on the phone. The profile and the record of the elderly man, other than his being an electrician, made him an unlikely suspect. Moreover, when the murders had occurred, the couple had been visiting their son in Alabama. They had no idea how their son’s number could have ended up on the same pad from which came the sheet of paper that Shari had written her death letter on.

The disappointed police officers were almost ready to leave when they tried one more thing. They described to the couple the profile the FBI had drawn up of the hypothetical offender—did the couple know anybody who might fit the description?

Both the man and the woman responded immediately; that was the description of Larry Gene Bell, an assistant electrician who often worked for the man. He was in his early thirties, heavyset, and divorced from his wife. He was a very neat and meticulous worker. When they were away in Alabama, Larry house-sat for them—as a matter of fact, the man remembered, he wrote down his son’s number in Alabama on Larry’s pad just in case he needed to get in touch with them. When they came back from Alabama, Bell picked them up at the airport. They were surprised by his physical appearance—he was unshaved, had lost some weight, and seemed highly agitated. All he wanted to talk about was the kidnapping of the Smith girl.

A search of Bell’s apartment uncovered all manner of evidence linking him to the two girls. Witnesses who had seen the little girl kidnapped identified Bell as the culprit. Bell had numerous sexual offenses on his record, from several attempted kidnappings to making obscene phone calls. In 1986, he was sentenced to death.

Once again, the profile was essential not so much for the police to identify the offender as for potential witnesses to point out a possible suspect. As elaborate and evolved as the profiling process is, in the overall picture it is only one component in many different investigative procedures applied to tracking a serial killer. These basic police procedures could be as complex as laboratory analysis or as routine as surveying a shopping center, but without them, the psychological profile has nowhere to go.

The most valuable aspect of profiling is not that it identifies who the killer is, but helps in weeding out who it is not. Frequently police already have information on a killer’s identity but it is buried deep within masses of files, leads, and tips among other suspects. Profiling often helps police decide whom to look at first.

Issues and Problems with the FBI System

Many scientists challenge not only the reliability of the FBI’s two categorizations (three if you include “mixed”) but also whether those offender categories actually display the characteristics attributed to them. There simply have been not enough data or scientific tests to confirm the FBI’s system, which was first based on interviews with only thirty-six sexual murderers, not all of whom were serial killers.

For example, the FBI asserts that organized offenders were “likely to change jobs or leave town” after committing a murder. A University of Detroit Mercy study of the data the FBI used revealed some problems with that assumption. As the FBI says, no disorganized killer in their study left town or changed jobs, but out of ninety-seven homicides by organized killers, only eleven killers left town and eight changed jobs—and presumably the eight job changers are included in the eleven who left town. This means that a profiler who suggests that an unknown killer who appears organized has changed jobs or left town would be wrong 89 percent of the time.
²¹⁷

Since their introduction some two decades ago, the FBI’s profiling techniques have not been empirically substantiated by scientific testing methodology. One measure of scientific integrity is the ability of a hypothesis to survive attempts to
disprove
it—attempts to
falsify
it. This is a kind of reverse-engineering approach to scientific proof known as
hypothetico deductivism.
In his criticism of the scientific foundations of the FBI’s system of profiling, criminologist Damon A. Muller gives the example of water’s boiling temperature. By inductive reasoning, we assume that it is
scientifically proven
that water boils at 212°F because if we repeat this experiment thousands of times, water will always boil at that temperature.
²¹⁸
But we would be wrong. If you take water to a mountaintop at a higher altitude, it boils at a lower temperature. The boiling point of water depends on more complex issues than merely temperature. If instead of attempting to prove that water always boils at 212°F, we attempted to first
disprove
it, we would quickly emerge with a truer scientific assessment of the reliability of the hypothesis. Repeating the experiment thousands of times with the same result is not necessarily conclusive scientific proof. The ability of a hypothesis to survive disproval is a more reliable measure. For something to be scientific, it must present theories that are empirically testable—not just simply repeatable by experiment.