The Cases That Haunt Us (57 page)

I speak all over the country on criminology and related subjects. When I address and meet with victims’ groups, people always come up to me and describe absolutely heinous crimes that I’ve never heard of. And if I haven’t, who else has outside the immediate circle of those affected? With such serial killers as John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Joel Rifkin, the dead had piled up before authorities even knew there was a problem. There are not only more violent crimes than there used to be, but increasingly they’re committed by “strangers”—someone who doesn’t know and has no personal grudge against the victim … the victim of opportunity. And that kind of homicide gives us big problems.

The point is, we’ve got to use what we’ve got, better and more efficiently than we’re doing now.

In 1985, I attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony at Quantico for the FBI’s new VICAP: the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Attorney General William French Smith and Bureau director William Webster attended.
VICAP
is a computer database listing in-depth particulars of predatory crimes. It was intended that when one of the more than seventeen thousand law enforcement agencies in this country had a violent predatory case—a potential serial murder or rape, for example—the case would be entered into the computer by filling out a carefully constructed questionnaire, and then
VICAP
would be able to provide them with the experience of anyone else in the country who had similar evidence or clues. It was a tremendous idea, coming originally from former
LAPD
homicide detective Pierce Brooks.

But while the profiling program quickly got on its feet and established itself,
VICAP
faltered and stumbled. By the time I retired from the Bureau in 1995, only a few thousand cases had been entered. The local agencies just didn’t want to go through the trouble, particularly if not everyone else was doing it. Meanwhile, the Canadians have studied our system, instituted their own, and run with it. The difference? Participation by Canadian forces is mandated. Anyone who doesn’t use it risks losing government funding. It does no good to have a sophisticated national resource like this unless everyone participates.

As anyone who’s read Mark’s and my recent novel,
Broken Wings
, knows, for a long time I’ve been advocating the creation of a “flying squad.” This would be a team of specialists in all areas of criminal investigation—detectives, profilers, medical examiners, crime scene technicians, ballistics, hair, fiber, and blood-spatter experts, forensic anthropologists and entomologists, whatever is needed—who could quickly get to a major crime scene anywhere in the United States in their own well-equipped plane and work the case while it is still fresh and uncorrupted. They wouldn’t all have to be Bureau people, either. I would make it like the military’s Delta Force, taking the best people from whichever agency or service could provide them.

I also advocate the establishment of an independent national laboratory for processing evidence, separate from the
FBI
and other federal agencies, whose scientists would be the best and whose reports would be reliable and unassailable. One of the issues we’ve seen in some of our haunting cases is that we really don’t know whose facts or whose evidence to believe. For example, was rail sixteen a legitimate piece of the Lindbergh kidnapping ladder or was it planted by overeager police officers? Was Elizabeth Short cut in two while she was still alive or after death? This lab could go a long way toward restoring the credibility of evidence in criminal investigations and prosecutions.

In the meantime, states can do some things on their own. A lot of times, a local police department’s or prosecutor’s office’s chief problem is that it can’t or won’t communicate, either with the victims of a crime, the public in general, or other departments. I think this could be greatly ameliorated if each state would set up a major-crimes task force. Some have already done so, and the results have been impressive.

Such a group would hold regular meetings with representatives of individual police and sheriff ’s departments and state investigative and lab facilities. They’d hear formal presentations on various aspects of forensic science and discuss both hot and cold cases. The critical consideration is that each official, detective, or investigator anywhere in the state would know what resources were available and how they could be used. This would avoid a Ramsey-type situation in that a local department without necessary resources or experience would have both the means and, just as important, the self-assurance to quickly call on the best help available.

While the
FBI
hasn’t enjoyed the success I would have liked to see on
VICAP
, a major, nearly incalculable contribution has been made with the National Academy program. Chiefs, division heads, and senior officers and detectives of local and regional agencies are brought to Quantico for intensive training, orientation, and familiarity with the latest trends and techniques of law enforcement. Not only does the National Academy give its graduate fellows a deeper understanding and wider perspective, it also creates an informal network of people around the country and the world who know each other and can call on each other when the need arises.

Some of my greatest successes have come about because the local officials who called in my unit had become familiar with us through participation in the National Academy. The 1985 investigation of the Shari Faye Smith and Debra May Helmick murders in South Carolina I alluded to in the previous chapter were examples of what can happen when profiling and related services are married to superior local police work to catch a serial killer before he can go any further in his devastation. And I’ve often said that one of the key reasons for this was because the two outstanding officers in charge, Sheriff Jim Metts and Undersheriff Lew McCarty, were both National Academy graduates. Metts understood that by calling us in, he was not displaying weakness or uncertainty, but strength and commitment to putting together the best team he could to protect his community. And for that reason he, McCarty, Rochester police captain Lynde Johnson, and so many others like them will always be heroes and role models in my book.

There are other lessons and commonalities in these cases that I hope come through.

Borden, Bembenek, and Ramsey demonstrate that you don’t just wake up one morning and decide to become a murderer. There is always some predictive behavior. If there isn’t or you can’t find it, then you’ve really got to wonder about your suspect. And the Boston Strangler case shows that a criminal can’t suddenly and for no reason change his personality.

The Ripper, Zodiac, Dahlia, and Ramsey cases all teach us that there is no such thing as a motiveless crime. It just means you don’t fully understand it.

Lindbergh, Borden, and Ramsey—particularly Ramsey—can warn us of the danger of jumping to a conclusion without knowing or understanding critical facts, because of preconceived notions. If we do, we play right into the hands of the tabloid and sensationalistic media and are no better than they are. In the Ramsey case, even the mainstream media came under their influence to the detriment of all … except the person who got away with murder. If there is a feeding frenzy to be the first, truth is the likely casualty, as we saw in the unfair accusations against security guard Richard Jewell in the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing case, a perfect example of the perversion of profiling by people who didn’t really understand what it was all about.

Conventional wisdom is often based on mythology, and each time and place is going to have its own set of standards.

Lizzie Borden couldn’t have killed her parents because that’s not the way well-off, well-brought-up ladies behave.

It must have been someone like Bruno Hauptmann who killed Lucky Lindy’sbaby because a true American wouldn’t have done that.

Bambi Bembenek must have killed Christine Schultz because she was anaggressive, conniving second wife.

The Ramseys must be responsible for their daughter’s death or else they wouldhave cooperated with the police.

These are not statements of truth or fact. They are myths of conventional wisdom.

And finally, I think of these cases like statues on a war memorial: a few specific images that represent all of the thousands upon thousands of soldiers who cannot be named but who gave and suffered just as much.

Two weeks after JonBenet Ramsey’s murder, a nine-year-old child, known only as Girl X to protect her identity and privacy, was beaten, raped, poisoned, and left for dead in a corridor of Chicago’s notorious Cabrini Green public housing project. She was found by a janitor with her own T-shirt tied around her neck and gang symbols scrawled on her body. She wasn’t a child beauty queen and she didn’t come from a prominent or wealthy family. But she suffered unspeakably, and she and her family deserved not only our sympathy, but our attention and outrage, just as every victim does.

The same year that JonBenet died, 804 children aged twelve and under were murdered in the United States, according to the FBI’s 1996 Uniform Crime Report. Yet there is only one name among them that we know. I don’t want to take anything from the enormity of what happened to JonBenet, I only want the same emotions extended to all the others.

Like those fallen soldiers, there are thousands upon thousands of cases that you will never hear about that will never be given sufficient attention or resources to be solved. And those cases haunt me just as much.