The Murder Room (36 page)

“Consistency,” Walter said, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Walter was instructing Stoud in a course on murder, with particular attention to the most depraved serial killers and other sex murderers. Stoud was a plainclothes detective with the elite Criminal Investigation Assessment Unit (CIAU) of the Pennsylvania State Police, which boasted more criminal profilers than any police agency in the world, including the FBI and NYPD. He roamed 2,500 square rural miles in the northeast corner of the state investigating serial killings and other “behavioral” crimes. The state trooper was near the top of his profession; but the only way for an ambitious young detective to further his education in the criminal mind was to apprentice to a master.

“Richard is one of the few who have ideas about killers that really work for the detective in the field,” said Stoud.

For years he had longed to find a protégé to pass on his knowledge. He was conscious that he was running out of time.

“I’m one who believes when you’re dead, you’re dead. If I am to live on, it will be through my ideas. I believe we have an obligation to pass our knowledge on to the next generation.”

Walter, now in his fifties, had recently retired from the Michigan Department of Corrections, and sold his house in Lansing. With no family but two sisters on the West Coast, he moved east to Montrose, Pennsylvania (pop. 1,596), a small Victorian town forty-six miles north of Scranton coal country at the lonely “Top of the Endless Mountains.”

The remote location had numerous advantages. He was relieved to be on the East Coast, “where my acerbic wit is better appreciated.” It was only 170 miles, a two-hour drive, south to Philadelphia; he would no longer have to get on a plane for the monthly meetings of the Vidocq Society. The Biddle House was “quite grand,” with room for his grand piano and antiques to at last stretch their arms and legs. After a lifetime immersed in cities and murder, he planned to enjoy the leisurely life of a country gentleman. He would go skeet shooting and antiquing, sip wine with long views of the mountains, host “little soirees” for the local cognoscenti and friends from the city.

Steven and Susan Stoud, their children and dogs, lived in a farm-house over the hills, seven miles east of town. The Stouds fussed over him like a lost uncle, fixing his car and computer and sewing his curtains, for Richard Walter was one of those towering intellects who could not “tie his own shoes.” Thus the course in murder could continue over lunch, dinner, and drinks, in the parlor ringed by cigarette smoke, opera music, debate, and ribald laughter.

Walter hung out his shingle as the proprietor of the Omega Crime Assessment Group, offering the rarest expertise in “Munchausen syndrome, sadism, and serial murder.” He would restrict his investigative efforts to “select fascinating cases.” But it was not lifestyle or friendship that originally brought him to the remote hills. It was the scent of an old murder, a tale of lust and betrayal he called “quite worthy of the Greeks,” that drew him six hundred miles east, like an aging bloodhound.

 

On June 2, 1976, prominent Montrose physician Dr. Stephen Scher and his close friend lawyer Martin Dillon, were skeet shooting on the Dillon family preserve, “Gunsmoke,” when Dillon died from a sixteen-gauge, pump-action shotgun blast. Dr. Scher tearfully explained to the police that his friend accidentally tripped on untied shoelaces and fell while chasing a porcupine, discharging the gun. The doctor could do nothing to save him; Dillon, shot through the heart, died instantly. Dillon was thirty-six years old and left behind his wife, Patricia, a nurse, and two young children. That the mortal shot came from Dr. Scher’s rifle, and the bullet was a hunting round, not the less powerful round used on clay pigeons, raised eyebrows, as did rumors that Dr. Scher had been having a torrid affair with his friend’s wife. But Dr. Scher tearfully denied the rumors and deeply mourned his friend while offering stout moral support to the widow and children. All involved had suffered a tragedy; the coroner ruled the shooting an accident.

Yet two years later, when Dr. Scher married Patricia Dillon and the couple happily moved to New Mexico and later North Carolina, where they raised Martin Dillon’s children and adopted their own, Dillon’s father, Larry, redoubled his claim that his son had been murdered. It took twenty years before the state attorney general’s office charged Dr. Scher with murder, based partly on new facts unearthed by Corporal Stoud. The attorney general hired Walter to testify for the prosecution as an expert on murderer personality types.

“It wasn’t much of a mystery,” Walter said, lighting another menthol Kool. “Beneath his impressive sheen of physician’s respectability, prestige, caring, and what have you, the good doctor was a fucking psychopath. He took what he wanted when he wanted it, and he wanted Patricia Dillon.”

The small Susquehanna County courthouse was crowded with national TV journalists covering the rural county seat’s “Crime of the Century.” Celebrity pathologists Dr. Cyril Wecht and Dr. Michael Baden, a witness in the O. J. Simpson trial, testified for the defense. Walter, frustrated as legal maneuvering prevented him from being called to the stand for the prosecution, then utterly bored with the proceedings, left the courthouse and strolled the same charming but small Victorian main street for two days until he walked into a carpet shop and demanded, “Where can you get a drink in this goddamn town before noon?” Grinning, the rug merchant produced a bottle of bourbon and two glasses from beneath the counter, and the fast friends drank until, as Walter later put it, “I said to myself, ‘Self, this isn’t such a bad town after all.’ ” That afternoon, Walter strolled by the magnificent Biddle House with a “For Sale” sign in the front yard. He decided the asking price of under $200,000 was a “grand bargain” for a retirement abode, and made an offer.

After a four-day trial, on October 22, 1997, Dr. Scher was convicted of the first-degree murder of Martin Dillon. Stoud’s investigation had helped destroy the doctor’s alibi. Scher claimed he was a hundred yards away from Dillon when the shotgun went off, but FBI lab work revealed he stood six to nine feet away—close enough that Scher’s boots were splattered with Dillon’s blood, and a tiny piece of the victim’s flesh was found on Scher’s pant leg. Dillon’s body was exhumed to measure his arms, and it was proven they were too short to have held Scher’s shotgun in a position to create the gaping wound. Confronted with the new evidence, Scher admitted on the stand that he had concocted the “porcupine story.” Yes, he admitted, he’d been having an affair with Patricia Dillon. Now he claimed he and Dillon were struggling with the shotgun during a “conversation that led to an argument” about Patricia when the gun accidentally went off. However, Dillon was wearing earplugs when his body was found, and couldn’t have heard Scher talking to him.

As Dr. Scher was taken to a state prison outside Pittsburgh to serve a life sentence, Richard Walter moved into the grand home at 78 Church Street. Across from the old stone Episcopalian church, Walter would lead Stoud to the lowest region of hell.

 

Walter’s previous attempts to find a worthy protégé had failed miserably. He’d agreed to train three different young men, including a forensic psychologist who interviewed killers all day long and a homicide detective with twenty-five murder investigations under his belt. He’d warned them, “Someday you’ll have to interview a sixty-five-year-old man who enjoys destroying children by cutting them into little pieces. You can listen to me tell it to you now, but to be with him alone, to confront this reality, can be something else again if you are not highly structured and sound in your knowledge and belief system, if you are not of the right age or understanding to deal with it. Ideas can be very dangerous if you’re not ready for them.”

All three protégés dropped out. They couldn’t take it. The veteran homicide detective said, “I have a wife and a child. I want a sense of normality, a sense of innocence about life. You’re destroying that for me. I just can’t do it.” Walter was deeply disappointed. Reluctantly, he resigned himself to the fact that, unlike FBI agent Robert Ressler and other profiler friends, he would never have a protégé; his lifework would die with him.

“What I do is too eccentric for a healthy, normal person,” he told himself.

He discouraged the young people who approached him at parties or forensic conferences, as
CSI
became an international TV hit, looking for advice on how to become a “profiler.” “Young man,” he’d say, “while I understand your enthusiasm, you seem quite too normal. You look like a fine fellow who’d like to marry, have children, have a happy life, not devote yourself to something that can destroy your marriage and, ultimately, your soul. This is not for the faint of heart. There are few of us who are cut out for it.”

Few cops wanted to explore the netherworld of the criminal mind, or could do so with the scientific training of a psychologist. On the other hand, few psychologists had or wished to have experience at crime scenes. Since Freud, leading psychologists had focused on everyday behavior and its disorders with a single-minded determination not to make old-fashioned moral judgments. Murder, evil, they left to the burly, often uneducated police officer or constable.

Walter was astonished, while lecturing to prominent European psychologists on the personality subtypes of murderers, that “none of them had any idea what I was talking about. They could look at John Wayne Gacy and see schizophrenia, but they had no training in sadism. There is no psychology of evil.” Walter was a man without a country.

Then, in 1995, he was listening to Ann Rule, the bestselling true-crime author, lecture on psychopaths at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences convention in Seattle. Walter was a distinguished fellow and frequent lecturer at the conference with FBI agent Bob Ressler and others. Now he scowled in disgust. There was absolutely nothing a popular writer like Rule could teach him about psychopaths, even if she had been friends with Ted Bundy, the basis of her book
The Killer Beside Me
.

“Are you believing this bullshit?” Walter asked the large man sitting next to him.

“I’m good friends with Ann Rule,” the big man barked, eyeing the wan, bespectacled figure beside him. “Who the hell are you?”

Thus began one of the most important friendships in the modern history of criminology.

The big man was Robert Keppel, renowned chief criminal investigator for the Washington state attorney general’s office, nationally known for his decades-long pursuit of Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer. A criminology Ph.D. and ex-Seattle cop, the formidable Keppel was known for a brilliant analytical mind, relentless bulldog attitude, and pioneering use of computers in criminal investigations.

Keppel quickly realized his remarkable bond with Walter. The Washington state detective and the Michigan psychologist had spent their careers like a right hand and a left hand that each didn’t know what the other was doing, until now. While Keppel had spent two decades as a homicide detective arresting killers and investigating fifty serial murder cases, more than any living cop, Walter had interviewed thousands of incarcerated killers, descending deeper into the criminal mind than any scholar. Both men were mavericks and outspoken critics of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, the acknowledged leader of the science of criminal profiling. On their own, they had developed almost precisely the same theories—revolutionary ideas that would transform modern murder investigation.

“There’s only one problem with what the FBI is doing,” said Keppel, who like Walter had been a friend or rival of the leading FBI agents for years. “It’s a lot of bunk.” Star special agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler had traveled the country in the 1980s interviewing an incarcerated murderers’ row of thirty-six famous serial killers and assassins to try to determine what made them tick. The list included Bundy, Charles Manson, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck, Edward Kemper, and last, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, and Lynette Frome, respectively assassins of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, and attempted assassin of President Gerald Ford. Douglas and Ressler’s resulting book,
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives,
coauthored with a psychologist, became the bible of the new criminal profiling, dividing sexual murderers into two broad personality categories based on the crime scene, organized or disorganized.

Unfortunately, Keppel said, “they made it up. There’s no data at all. It wasn’t created out of a data set or known empirical study, it’s just there. As a result, FBI agents swoop into town, sit with the local cops, and begin their Kentucky windage estimate of what the offender was like. ‘We know he’s young and thin and a clothes-horse so I think he’s attractive to women’—and so on. The agents are in a room talking, never at the murder scene, not a one of ’em. As my detective friend Frank Salerno says, you know they never smelled the blood.”

Walter agreed, but was slightly more diplomatic. He saw the FBI as flawed and hidebound by bureaucracy, but deserving of credit for originating the systematic psychological study of killers. “I may disagree with the FBI or whatever, but we’re all on the same Roman road, trying to understand murder, evil, for the betterment of mankind.”

Walter had studied the history of murder back to the Greeks, but the modern road of criminal profiling began in November 1888, when Scotland Yard surgeon Thomas Bond attempted the first psychological profile of a killer after performing the autopsy of Mary Kelly, the fifth victim of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper, he wrote, would be physically strong, quiet, and harmless in appearance, possibly middle-aged, and neatly attired, probably wearing a cloak to hide the bloody effects of his attacks.

Both Walter and Keppel were aware of how little progress had been made in a century of trying to peer into the minds of killers. There were few highlights. In a 1943 profile of Adolf Hitler commissioned by American intelligence, New York psychiatrist Walter Langer correctly predicted that if the Third Reich collapsed the Führer would likely commit suicide. In 1957, the psychiatrist James Brussel, “The Sherlock Holmes of the Couch,” successfully profiled the Mad Bomber who had terrorized New York City in the 1940s and ’50s, injuring fifteen people with thirty-three bombs planted everywhere from phone booths to libraries, including Penn Station, the New York Public Library, and Radio City Music Hall. The Mad Bomber eluded cops for sixteen years until Brussel, after studying the bomber’s many crimes and letters, successfully predicted down to the last detail that the killer would be a middle-aged, Catholic, Slavic ex–Commonwealth Edison employee living in Connecticut, who furthermore would be, as George P. Metesky was when arrested at his sisters’ house, wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned. In the 1970s, Brussel helped the FBI create its Behavioral Sciences Unit, which developed the first “profiles” of suspects.