The Cases That Haunt Us (33 page)

I have no doubt that the caller was working from a script. This was a highly organized offender. He knew the call would be traced, and he had only a brief time to establish credibility and say his piece before getting off. If the police were able to develop a suspect shortly after this shooting, I would have advised them to include notes with directions or drafts of a full script on a scrap of paper in their search warrant, just as we often do in extortion or kidnapping cases.

It took seven minutes for Pacific Telephone to trace the call to a pay phone in front of a service station right near both the Vallejo Sheriff ’s Office and the home Darlene shared with her husband and daughter. A witness who’d been walking by the phone booth at the time had seen a man inside described as stocky, matching Mike Mageau’s first description of the shooter. About an hour later, around 1:30 A.M.^,^“crank” calls were received at Darlene’s home, at Dean Ferrin’s brother’s house, and Dean’s parents’ house. In each instance, the caller said nothing, and the person answering just heard the sound of someone breathing.

The phone calls, and the location of the phone booth from which the killer reported his work, made it seem that the
UNSUB
knew at least one of his recent victims. For one thing, the calls were made before news of the shootings, much less the identities of the victims, had been made public. I know from experience that many offenders derive great satisfaction from calling in a report of their crime while looking into the home of their victim, waiting to see the effects of their work. But Darlene and Dean had only lived in the home by the sheriff ’s office for a few months before her murder; their old address was the one in the phone book. If this offender chose that pay phone so he could gloat over the experience, he’d need to know not only her name, but be familiar enough with her life to know that she’d recently moved.

Was it the mysterious man in the white car Darlene feared? Of course, it’s also possible the
UNSUB
didn’t know whom he’d shot and simply picked the pay phone by the Sheriff ’s Office to taunt authorities.

It makes sense that in looking for a suspect with a connection to these victims the emphasis would be on Darlene. In addition to the victimology, the crime scene itself tells us she was the focus of the offender’s rage. She overwhelmingly bore the brunt of the attack, with many more—and more serious—gunshot wounds than her companion. In an attack of this nature, it would make more sense for the male, who normally represents the greater physical threat to the offender, to be the more seriously injured. Also, since the killer took his shots from Mageau’s side of the car, one would expect Darlene to be more likely to survive the attack.

But assuming the
UNSUB
did not know his victim or victims, the focus of the attack on the female is still telling. We saw this in the Son of Sam crimes in New York when David Berkowitz intentionally went to the woman’s side of the car with his .44 magnum. The male companions were only secondary considerations.

According to Mageau, the killer doubled back to fire more shots at both of his victims before he left. Given that Mageau was already wounded and vulnerable, we might have expected the shooter to make sure to finish him off this time, but instead he expended two of the four additional bullets at Ferrin, who he could see was already mortally wounded. The male victim was not only left alive, but was able to describe the
UNSUB
.

Less than a month after Darlene’s murder, the self-proclaimed killer made contact once again, but this time to the press instead of the police, and this time by mail. The
San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner
, and
Vallejo Times-Herald
all received nearly identical letters from an author claiming to be the serial killer. The letter to the
Chronicle
began:

Dear Editor

This is the murderer of the

2 teenagers last Christmass

at Lake Herman & the girl

on the 4th of July near

the golf course in Vallejo

To prove I killed them I

shall state some facts which

only I & the police know …

The letters went on to provide details for each of the two cases, including ammunition used and the position of the victims’ bodies. Enclosed with each communication was a section of a long, complicated coded message—made up of neatly printed symbols—each newspaper had received one-third. According to the letters, when solved, the cryptogram would reveal the identity of the killer.

I don’t imagine most in the law enforcement community actually believed the murderer was giving us his name. But I’ve always said that when a subject starts communicating with us, that’s a good sign. Compare this with a case like
UNABOM
, where we also had few solid leads. You’d much rather get your behavioral clues from a letter than a murder scene.

When he makes contact, this is when you start to feel you can catch the guy. His arrogance and feelings of power lead him to reveal more of himself, giving us the means to help someone in the public recognize him (as in the case of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski), and enlightening us as to his motives so we can design effective proactive techniques to flush him out. When you have a series of cases where traditional motives such as greed, anger, or revenge don’t apply, the information you get from his communiqués is invaluable in elucidating his motives.

In this instance, the killer didn’t stop in taking credit for his crimes and taunting police with his coded puzzle. It wasn’t enough for police to know he was the real deal. He wanted every reader of all the local newspapers to know of and fear him.

I want you to print this cipher

on the front page of your

paper …

If you do not print this cipher

by the afternoon of Fry. 1st of

Aug 69, I will go on a kill ram-

Page Fry. night. I will cruse

around all weekend killing lone

people in the night then move

on to kill again, untill I end

up with a dozen people over

the weekend.

The papers, in cooperation with the police, published part of the letters without reproducing the entire text. As with other aspects of their investigations, authorities wanted some things held back so that there would still be details only the
UNSUB
would know. For him, knowledge of these would provide a means for him to establish credibility in later communications. And for law enforcement, ideally, it would set the stage for future identification and prosecution.

Ironically, while the cryptogram would not prove to contain the author’s identity explicitly stated, it did provide valuable clues in ways likely unintended by the
UNSUB
. For one thing, when an
UNSUB
goes to the trouble of putting something like that together, you know you’re not dealing with your average jerk murderer. Not only is this guy meticulous and obviously proud of proving his intellectual superiority to the police (to compensate for his general feelings of inadequacy), but he also enjoys these incredibly detail-oriented tasks. Think of how much time it would take just to painstakingly write out each of those cryptogram characters, all the while trying to mask your natural handwriting. One misguided stroke and you’d have to start over. It’s almost the patience of a bomb-maker.

Then there are the symbols themselves. The average reader of a local newspaper would not be familiar with most of the characters in the cryptogram’s text, which included meteorological and astrological symbols, Morse and navy semaphore code, and various Greek symbols. We’re dealing with someone with exposure to, if not extensive training in, some highly specialized areas. Even if he was not well-versed in these areas, he’d need reference books with the symbols to copy. Although we’d expect this
UNSUB
to be a loner, family members or associates would know that along with that trait, he’d have this type of educational or work background.

Like the bomb-maker, this subject would view his letters and this code—like the murders—as his art. We would expect him to have a work area set aside where he would do his meticulous printing and keep his reference materials: books on codes, code-breaking, symbols, as well as media coverage of his crimes and communications. It’s not as easy to notice as a locked garage or basement room that sometimes emits smoke or strange noises, but it’s a sacred, organized work space about which this subject would be compulsively protective.

Let’s try to relate these character traits specifically to one of the crimes. Whether you assume that Darlene Ferrin knew her killer or not, her murder was not the act of an enraged boyfriend-wanna-be, or someone looking to cover his ass on an earlier crime. This
UNSUB
was on an intellectual campaign of terror, and his target was much greater than any single individual.

It seems fitting, then, that although the police enlisted assistance from experts including those at Naval Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the
CIA
, and the
FBI
, in the end it was a couple of newspaper-reading, concerned citizens who finally deciphered the killer’s writings. The newspapers printed their sections of the code in different editions on different days, but by Sunday, August 3, all three parts were available to the public.

Donald Gene Harden, a forty-one-year-old high school history and economics teacher, and his wife, Bettye June, spent the next couple of days working to crack the code. All of the consulted experts agreed with their solution:

I
LIKE
KILLING
PEOPLE

BECAUSE
IT IS SO
MUCH

FUN
IT IS
MORE
FUN
THAN

KILLING
WILD
GAME
IN

THE
FORREST
BECAUSE

MAN
IS
THE
MOST
DANGEROUE

ANAMAL
OF
ALL
TO
KILL

SOMETHING
GIVES
ME
THE

MOST
THRILLING
EXPERENCE

IT IS
EVEN
BETTER
THAN
GETTING

YOUR
ROCKS
OFF
WITH
A
GIRL

THE
BEST
PART
OF IT IS
THAE

WHEN
I
DIE
I
WILL
BE
REBORN

IN
PARADICE
AND
THEI
HAVE

KILLED
WILL
BECOME
MY
SLAVES

I
WILL
NOT
GIVE
YOU
MY
NAME

BECAUSE
YOU
WILL
TRY
TO
SLOI

DOWN
OR
ATOP
MY
COLLECTIOG
OF

SLAVES
FOR
AFTERLIFE

EBEORIETEMETHHPITI

The solution only provided more proof of the author’s cunning. For example, in their analysis of such messages, code breakers try to apply some basic rules. The letter
e
is typically the most commonly used. To cover his tracks, this cryptogram’s designer used a total of seven symbols to stand for the letter
e.
As you can see from reading it, there were numerous misspellings, but it is not obvious which were true mistakes on the part of the author and which were planted.

In analyzing the message, much has been made of the reference to the author’s rebirth in “paradice” and his use of his victims as slaves. I would argue that this is less telling as an indicator of our UNSUB’s religious beliefs and more revealing in the context of other parts of the message, such as his reference to man as “the most dangeroue anamal of all,” which sounds a lot like the title of the famous Richard Connell short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” The story, which has been made into a movie several times, is about a wealthy madman who lives on his own island and lures passing sailors to dangerous reefs close to his shores with phony navigational lights. He rescues them from their shipwrecks, only to release and hunt them like wild animals in his compound.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the serial killer is a literary genius or even particularly well-read, since the 1924 story has been required reading in many high schools, or the killer could have seen a movie rendition. But it does seem highly coincidental that he would use that turn of phrase, given the awkwardness of other parts of his message. I would suggest this shows a fair degree of education. I would also suggest that the author was being truthful when he said that killing was “even better than getting your rocks off with a girl,” since I don’t think he had much experience with that. As discussed earlier, men with successful, fulfilling relationships with women don’t generally gun them down.