The Murder Room (50 page)

This was what happened. Walter was certain of it. The hidden story told by the condition of the body and the crime scene was incontrovertible. Dozens of good men had gone to their graves, afraid to face it. That was OK. It was natural. This darkest of shadows was death itself and men could only live by turning away. “The truth is, the cops just didn’t want to know.”

He saw into the present. He saw the old killer living alone on the edge of a city, a decrepit shell of wantonness and stale pleasure. He saw the old man who had committed the most diabolical of crimes, an especially depraved and merciless child sex murder that would shake any decent person’s soul. No doubt he was considered a little aloof or odd by his neighbors, a “funny old man,” it was a shame he had no family on the holidays, one of those old bachelors who stank of alcohol and cigarettes and showered once a week, not pleasant but nothing to worry about—if they only knew! It was many years later now and the old man had nothing left but his memories. Walter could see him in his dim row house turning the yellowed and crumbling newspaper pages with appalling arrogance to read about himself once again, reliving the sweet memory of the killing when he was young, the zenith of his power and achievement, the high point of his life! What kind of society allowed such a monster his freedom for nearly fifty years, while the nameless and innocent child, he would be a father now, perhaps a grandfather, moldered unknown and unmourned? Walter was offended to the core of his sense of decency. The old killer had exulted over his dark triumph for too long. It was time to go get him.

The piano thundered. This new creation of his seemed to summon shades from every corner of the parlor. It was thrilling to make but it was good he would never hear it again. It was the song of the beast.

Lost in his music, Walter didn’t detect the soft, dissonant tympanic beat in the darkness of the great house, the click of the door against the jamb.

A thick-shouldered man stood in the gloom. He had shining black eyes and the glint of a gun at his hip. His smile was brilliant.

The mighty music stopped, and the echoes faded in the lower rooms. A big hand clapped Walter on the shoulder.

“Nice!” the thin man exclaimed with a hoarse laugh. “I could have had a heart attack! I assumed I’d be enjoying libations alone. The least you could do is call.”

“I did! You were too busy being Beethoven to answer the phone.”

“I think not,” Walter shot back.

Stoud. Walter walked into the parlor turning on lights, and tossed a Hallmark-style card to Stoud with a smirk. It was the invitation to the fifth anniversary of the reburial of the Boy in the Box, also known as America’s Unknown Child, in his prominent new grave at Ivy Hill Cemetery. Stoud hadn’t been able to go; Walter had brusquely declined the invitation.

Inside was a drawing of a baby being sung up to heaven and a poem, “Little Angels”; Stoud snorted. “Your cynicism is apt, check this out,” Walter said, reading: “From this day forth he becomes a symbol for every child in America who has paid the ultimate price for abuse.”

The thin man took a long drag on his cigarette. “Fleisher thinks my heart has finally turned to stone. OK, he may be right.” He smiled wickedly. “But first they bring him toys, fetishizing the joys of a childhood that was spent six feet underground. Now they’re quite happy to ignore what really happened to him.”

His eyes flared. “The child is not a symbol of anything. He was not a trendy victim of ‘child abuse.’ He was murdered, tortured and murdered. He was prey to the darkest, most complicated murdering personality type the human race has produced, and since we can’t bring a dead boy back to life, it’s not our job to imagine him playing second base. It’s our job to go get the S.O.B. who did it.”

Stoud grinned. There was nothing quite like Richard Walter reaching for the sword.

“AE,” the state trooper said. It was a statement, not a question. The boy had clearly been murdered by the fourth and most diabolical type of killer—the anger-excitation killer.

“Of course,” Walter said, as he spun the triple-digit combination of his silver attaché on the coffee table in front of him. Stoud watched the thin fingers carefully lift out an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper.

“The Helix,” Walter said, holding it up. “The map to the bottom, the black hole at the end of the continuum.”

Walter was loath to discuss the Helix, and was downright paranoid about showing it to anyone, even his protégé. When murder descended to the fourth personality subtype, AE, Walter’s schemata described a murderer who killed not for any tangible achievement—money or power or revenge—but simply for the unmatched excitement and pleasure of killing. The AE or sadistic killer murdered and tortured strangers, killed purely for secondary sexual enjoyment, and couldn’t stop. The complex pleasures of sadism drove him insatiably to kill and kill again until he was caught and incarcerated, was killed himself, or died of old age. It was the kind of killer responsible for the dark legends in all cultures of human beasts like Dracula and the werewolf—and in modern times men like Pedro Alonso Lopez, “The Monster of the Andes,” arrested in 1980 after killing more than three hundred women. Yet it was a monster rare enough in American civilization until the 1960s and ’70s, until it went by the names Bundy, Gacy, Boston Strangler, Night Stalker, Green River Killer, and dozens of others. Now the FBI said there were sadistic serial killers operating in every state.

The Helix was a hand-drawn illustration of a swirling spiral cone, marked all along its length by tiny neat handwritten legends in black ink.

“Richard,” Stoud teased. “Turn on that computer yet? Revolutionary papers in forensic journals are generally not handwritten.”

Walter scoffed at the idea he would publish it. “I do not even want to expose it to a hacker, or leave its impressions on a typewriter ink ribbon.”

Walter was right to be paranoid about the Helix and keep it locked away in the steel-ribbed attaché, Stoud thought. The thin man sounded grandiose when he described it as “the most dangerous knowledge in the world.” But he had a point. While it didn’t teach a man how to build a nuclear bomb, it showed him something more perilous—how to release the darkest evil in himself.

“I have to be careful,” Walter said. “The sadists are the first ones to attend my lectures, to order reprints of my papers. Like everyone, the sadist is eager to find out who he really is, how to achieve his dream. In the wrong hands, the Helix is a self-help guide for a serial killer or a mass murderer.” Once, when making his speech in Marquette, Michigan, “Sadistic Acting Out: A Theoretical Model,” at a forensic convention, Walter saw a suspected rapist in the audience.

Sadists take their work seriously, he said. Sexual sadists, like Ted Bundy, represent the class of criminals with the highest IQ, an average of 119. They are often very bright, charming, and utterly normal and trustworthy—until, being master manipulators, they get an unsuspecting victim alone, and the monster emerges. The learning curve is complicated and absorbs all the senses—touching, viewing, smelling, tasting, hearing. It’s difficult and time-consuming to figure out exactly what to do next. In Kansas, Walter spent a day consulting with the Wichita police helping them piece together a series of murders that police believed were caused by one man. That afternoon as he was about to lecture on sadism to the First World Meeting of Police Surgeons and Police Medical Officers, “a detective came up to me and said, ‘I just kicked the suspect out of your audience.’” The suspected serial killer had been prepared to take notes.

As one of the founders of modern criminal profiling, Walter was widely known for describing the four personality subtypes of killers with Keppel. He was the first to deeply analyze the psychology of bite-mark evidence left by murderer-rapists. He pioneered a system for analyzing pre-crime, crime, and post-crime behavior of murder suspects. But the Helix, containing his theory of sadism, was his greatest contribution to criminology. When FBI agent Robert Ressler heard him lecture on it in the mid-1980s, he immediately invited Walter to Quantico to lecture to the bureau’s Behavioral Sciences Unit profilers, and the two profilers began a lifelong friendship. Walter teased Ressler that “the bureau still doesn’t understand sadism. Bob, the FBI hasn’t had a new idea since 1978.”

Unlike the first three personality types of killers, for whom murder is the goal, murder is not the motivation for the anger-excitation killer; the process of killing itself is the pleasure and the goal—prolonged torture that sparks the killer’s fantasy life. While other murderers acted as deeply flawed or evil human beings, the sadist’s indoctrination and transformation was so thorough he or she seemed no longer human. Once a murderer reached the complex fury known as anger-excitation, it was as if a trapdoor opened beneath him, with eight steps down to the very bottom, the worst killers of humankind. Based on thousands of interviews with sadists and other murderers as well as the testimony of cops in the field, Walter’s Helix charted those eight steps with psychological and behavioral precision.

It was a time-honored path of self-discovery pointing toward annihilation blazed by the Marquis de Sade, the seventeenth-century father of sadism, and all who follow. The journey could also be seen as the precise opposite of the hero’s journey, the timeless climb to redemption, the soul’s climb to enlightenment or God; in ages past it was known as the downward journey, to the Father of Darkness. The medieval imagery was apt. It was the wasteland of the soul. Although visually the Helix resembled Francis Crick and James Watson’s DNA double helix representing the code to life, it functioned more like Dante’s fourteenth-century map of the underworld, leading through increasing human sins, betrayals, and monstrosities to the bottom, the Ninth Circle of Hell.

“Sadism is a crime of luxury,” Walter said. “Not everybody can afford it. It takes time, investment, it takes a covert life, it takes a whole series of learning requirements—it’s like a Ph.D. There’s a sequential learning pattern for them; you just don’t wake up one day and you’re a sexual sadist. It’s the growth curve of evil.”

But like other arts that were once the exclusive province of the aristocracy, sadism is now within the reach of the masses. Once a man needed wealth, power, position to have the luxury of time and access to victims. Now all he needed, Walter said, was “a minimum-wage job, a studio apartment, a cheap panel truck, cable TV to instruct him, and his full suite of constitutional freedoms.” Sexual sadists are rarer in repressive societies; they are a dark fruit of democracy.

In the Helix, Walter charts an inexorable eight-step pattern of increasing depravity that leads to the sadistic killer and beyond, to the very depths of human evil.

“If I locate a developing sadist on the Helix, I know where he’s been, and I know where he’s going.”

In the beginning, the developing sadist, lured by the temptation of his own obsessions, is drawn to a self-destructive fetish, such as “pornography, a lust for women’s shoes or teens’ underwear, or whatever. All sexual sadists have fetishes, usually three or four operating at one time. All fetishists don’t become sexual sadists.”

Once snared by his fetish, however, the potential sadist has entered the Helix. And once inside, there is no way out. Walter spoke of it as if it were a “House of Sadism.” “A man enters a room,” Walter said, “and the door closes behind him. Men make choices, and there are doors that close permanently. There is no going back.” He may never progress to step two, but that is the only direction available—downward, to the depths of the pathology.

The pathology is insatiable. When the fetish no longer satisfies, the next step is voyeurism. The voyeur can be highly specialized. “I had a case where the voyeur was a Peeping Tom specializing in Army lieutenants’ wives,” Walter said.

The following step, when the voyeur needs more, is frotteurism. “We’ve all been victims of frotteurs,” Richard Walter said. “These are the people who get sexual gratification from anonymously rubbing against you in a crowd.” As an adjunct professor at Michigan State University, Walter investigated two students, homosexual twins, who wore tight jeans every Saturday and waited for the 72,000 faithful to pour out of Spartan Stadium after football games, touching and feeling as they worked unseen against the crowd.

The sadist is now on a path to achieve intimacy and sexual gratification without vulnerability, making the wrong choice endlessly depicted in the oldest stories, taking without giving his heart. Unable to form authentic relationships, he becomes a “master at manipulating others to get what he wants. Sadists even go through marriages, but by and large unless the person has something they want, they just don’t count.” Many achieve normal sexual relations with wives, husbands, or lovers, but after a time that level of emotional vulnerability becomes intolerable. It’s “far more satisfying to target potential victims and imagine or later actualize out the relationship with them in the total control position.”

Fetishists, voyeurs, and frotteurs choose and control their victims from an emotional distance. But in subsequent steps the sadist crosses a dangerous divide. Fantasy or limited touching or striking is no longer enough; he desires the more intimate relationship, and approaches the victim with punishing control in mind: dominance, submission, bondage, and discipline.

“He can’t bond, he can’t achieve sexual satisfaction by being honest and legitimate, can’t emotionally invest in anybody else, is totally exploiting, so he finds secondary sexual gratification by dominating a victim utterly. It’s a systematic way to feed and empower himself through fantasies by creating a sense of dread and dependency in the victim. Their thrill comes from the feeling ‘I own you. You don’t eat unless I say so. You live and breathe at my request. Your life is not your own.’ It gives them a messianic sense of importance.”

When bondage no longer satisfies, the developing sadist inevitably becomes a devotee of picquerism. A picquer derives from the French, meaning to penetrate, cut. “Picquers derive sexual satisfaction from stabbing, cutting, slicing, rendering human flesh. It’s the people who cut leather coats in stores as a second skin, a practice skin. They’re freeway snipers firing rifle shots into the victim, like the Tower Killer, or lovers’-lane killers like the Son of Sam.”