The Serial Killer Files (61 page)

The Mind Hunters

Though their contributions are regarded as landmarks in the history of profiling, Langer, de River, and Brussel were not criminologists but psychiatrists whose opinions were occasionally sought by frustrated law officials. It was not until the 1960s that efforts were made to place the profiling process on a more professional and scientific footing—to add it to the repertoire of forensic techniques used to track down serial killers.

The acknowledged father of this effort was Howard Teten, who began his career as an investigator with the San Leandro Police Department in California. During the 1960s, Teten started working with instructors at the School of Criminology at the University of California to develop a more systematic approach to profiling. After joining the FBI, he teamed up with fellow agent Pat Mullany—a specialist in abnormal psychology—to create the Bureau’s first profiling program.

Teten—who was often consulted by police officers from across the country—had a reputation for being able to come up with amazingly detailed suspect descriptions based on the scantiest data. In an article in the April 1983 issue of Psychology Today, writer Bruce Porter describes one memorable incident: On one occasion, a California policeman telephoned about a baffling case involving the multiple stabbing of a young woman. After hearing just a quick description of the murder, Teten told him he should be looking for a teenager who lived nearby. He would be a skinny kid with acne, a social isolate, who had killed the girl as an impulsive act, had never killed before, and felt tremendous guilt. “If you walk around the neighborhood knocking on doors, you’ll probably run into him,” Teten said. “And when you do, just stand there looking at him and say, ‘You know why I’m here.’ Two days later, the policeman called back to say that he had found the teenager as Teten had said he would. But before the officer could open his mouth, the boy blurted out: “You got me.”

Teten was succeeded at the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit by a younger generation of agents who refined and improved upon his groundbreaking techniques. The most prominent of these individuals were John Douglas, Robert Ressler, and Roy Hazelwood. Along with a half dozen others—Richard Ault, Roger Depue, Jim Reese, Swanson Carter, Robert Schaeffer, Ken Lanning—these agents constituted the now-celebrated team of “Mind Hunters” whose pioneering interviews with notorious serial murderers like David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, and Edmund Kemper would shed vital new light on the mental and behavioral patterns of psychopathic sex-killers.

Besides making key innovations in the still-evolving science of profiling (for example, by introducing the basic distinction between “organized” and “disorganized” offenders), Douglas and Ressler were also instrumental in bringing the once-obscure figure of the psychological profiler to the forefront of public awareness. Their work (especially as popularized by Thomas Harris in The Silence of the Lambs ) transformed the profiler into a modern-day media icon, the glamorous hero of countless fictional and cinematic thrillers.

In more recent years—while Douglas and Ressler, now retired from the Bureau, have become best-selling authors and media celebrities in their own right—sophisticated new techniques have been developed by other criminologists. These include the “Behavioral Evidence Analysis” method of Brent E. Turvey, a California-based private criminal profiler who has made extensive studies of sex offenders, and the “Investigative Psychology” approach of British criminologist David Canter, whose profile of England’s notorious “railway rapist” in the 1980s led directly to the perpetrator’s arrest.

How It Works

By now, the FBI’s criminal profiling program has been going on for more than thirty years. In its efforts to help local law enforcement agencies identify and track down psychopathic killers, the Bureau’s behavioral specialists are far better equipped than their predecessors. One of the most powerful tools at their disposal is the high-tech system known as the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, established in 1985. The brainchild of a former Los Angeles homicide detective named Pierce Brooks, VICAP is a computerized database that collects, collates, and analyzes information on solved and unsolved serial homicide cases across the nation.

For all the advances made in the field, however, criminal profiling still remains essentially what it has always been: a painstaking procedure of deducing certain facts about an elusive, unknown killer, based on statistical probabilities, years of investigative experience, psychological training, plus a healthy dose of intuition and educated guesswork.

However astonishing it may sometimes seem to a layman, there is nothing magical about the profiler’s art. For example, when James Brussel correctly predicted that the “Mad Bomber” would turn out to be a severely paranoid middle-aged Catholic of Eastern European background and medium build who lived with a sibling in Connecticut and would be dressed in a neatly buttoned, double-breasted suit when arrested, the psychologist was basing his conjecture on both fairly obvious assumptions and solid probabilities.

The ranting letters that accompanied the bombs were clearly the work of a paranoiac, and since the writer had been sending them out for so many years, it was a pretty safe bet that he had reached middle age by 1956. From the work of a German psychiatrist named Ernst Kretschmer—who correlated body types with different kinds of psychoses—Brussel concluded that the suspect would be neither fat nor skinny but of medium build. He deduced that the bomber was not native-born from the stiffly formal style of his writing and guessed that he was part of the large wave of Eastern Europeans who had emigrated to America in the 1930s. Slavs, Brussel believed, were particularly prone to using bombs as weapons, and—if the bomber were in fact Slavic—he would obviously be Catholic and very likely living in Connecticut, which had a large population of such immigrants. Anyone as crazy as the Mad Bomber, Brussel assumed, would not be married and would probably be living with relatives, as was often the case in immigrant families.

As for the bit about the buttoned, double-breasted suit—which struck so many people as nothing short of supernatural—that prediction was, in a sense, the most obvious of all. From the care he had taken in constructing his devices and cutting and pasting his communications, it was clear that the bomber was a finicky fellow, the kind who would likely be meticulous in other areas of his life, including the way he dressed. Double-breasted suits were a popular style in the 1950s, and—unlike the single-breasted variety

—the jackets couldn’t be worn unbuttoned without appearing extremely slovenly.

The same kind of reasoning employed by Brussel is still used by current-day profilers. When local police officers, stymied in their search for a serial killer, seek help from the FBI, they will send all available information of the case—from crime scene photos to autopsy reports to the victims’

background—to the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, part of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCVAC). There, agents will study the material and draw up a profile intended to help the police focus their search on a particular type of victim.

When twenty-two-year-old, three-month pregnant Terry Wallin was found hideously butchered in her Sacramento home in January 1978, for example, Robert Ressler drew up the following preliminary profile, based on information about the crime sent to him via teletype: White male, aged 25–27 years thin, undernourished appearance. Residence will be extremely slovenly and unkempt and evidence of the crime will be found at the residence. History of mental illness, and will have been involved in use of drugs. Will be a loner who does not associate with either males or females, and will probably spend a great deal of time in his own home, where he lives alone. Unemployed.

Probably receives some form of disability money. If residing with anyone, it would be with his parents; however this is unlikely. No prior military record; high school or college dropout. Probably suffering from one or more forms of paranoid psychosis.

In his 1992 book, Whoever Fights Monsters, Ressler explains the reasoning that lay behind this description. He assumed that the killer, like the victim, was white because serial homicide is usually intra racial—that is, a crime involving members of the same race. He also knew that savage lust-murders—of which the Wallin killing was a particularly appalling example—are virtually always committed by males in their twenties or thirties.

Ressler narrowed the suspect’s presumed age to between 25 and 27 because the murder was so unusually violent as to suggest that the perpetrator was in the grip of a full-blown psychosis. (Mrs.

Wallin had been partly eviscerated, animal feces had been stuffed in her mouth, and a yogurt cup found near the corpse clearly indicated that her attacker had used it to drink some of her blood.) “To become as crazy as the man who ripped up the body of Terry Wallin is not something that happens overnight,”

Ressler explains in his book. “It takes eight to ten years to develop the depth of psychosis that surfaces in such an area of apparently senseless killing. Paranoid schizophrenia is usually first manifested in the teenage years. Adding ten years to an inception-of-illness age of about fifteen would put the slayer in the midtwenties age group.”

The rest of Ressler’s profile had followed logically from the inference that the killer was suffering from a raging psychosis:

That was why I thought this killer was bound to be a thin and scrawny guy. Introverted schizophrenics don’t eat well, don’t think in terms of nourishment and skip meals. They similarly disregard their appearance, not caring at all about cleanliness or neatness. No one would want to live with such a person, so the killer would have to be single. This line of reasoning led me to postulate that his domicile would be a mess, and also to guess that he would not have been in the military, because he would have been too disordered for the military to have accepted him as a recruit in the first place. Similarly, he would not have been able to stay in college, though he might well have completed high school before he disintegrated. If he had a job at all, it would be a menial one, a janitor perhaps, or someone who picked up papers in a park; he’d be too introverted even to handle the task of a delivery man. Most likely he’d be a recluse living on a disability check.

Ressler’s profile was instrumental in helping the police track down the madman, Richard Trenton Chase, aka the “Vampire of Sacramento” (though not before the blood-crazed young man butchered several other victims). In his book, Ressler takes justifiable pride in his contributions, though he is careful not to overstate the role of profiling in the solution of such crimes: “Some people later said that the profile caught the killer. That, of course, is not true. It’s never true. Profiles don’t catch killers, cops on the beat do, often through dogged persistence and with the help of ordinary citizens, and certainly with the aid of a little bit of luck. My profile was an investigative tool, one that in this instance markedly narrowed the search for a dangerous killer.”

There have been times, of course, when profiles have been, not just wrong, but wildly off base. Roy Hazelwood was known among his colleagues for having produced one of the most inaccurate profiles on record. As Bruce Porter describes it:

He did it in a Georgia case in which a stranger showed up at a woman’s door one day and for no apparent reason punched her in the face and shot her little girl in the stomach. Hazelwood told local police to look for a man who came from a broken home, had dropped out of high school, held a low-skilled job, hung out in honky-tonk bars, and lived far from the crime scene.

When the culprit was finally caught, he turned out to have been raised by both his parents who had stayed married for 40 years. He had a college degree and had earned above-average grades. He held an executive job at a large bank, taught Sunday school and regularly attended church, never touched a drop of alcohol, and lived in a neighborhood close to the crime scene.

Even when profiles aren’t this wide of the mark, some law enforcement professionals remain deeply skeptical about their effectiveness. At the height of the Hillside Strangler murders, for example, a forensic psychiatrist offered this suspect profile:

The Strangler is white, in his late twenties or early thirties, separated or divorced—in any case not living with a woman. He is of average intelligence, unemployed or existing on odd jobs, not one to stay with a job too long. He has probably been in trouble with the law before. He is passive, cold, and manipulative

—all at once. He is the product of a broken family whose childhood was marked by cruelty and brutality, particularly at the hands of women.

The disdain of profiling felt by many cops was summed up by one investigator on the case—Bob Grogan of the LAPD—who, after hearing this description, dryly remarked: “Gee, all we got to do now is find a white male who hates his mother.”

Recommended Reading

D. Canter, Criminal Shadows: Inside the Mind of the Serial Killer (1994) John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, The Anatomy of Motive (1999) Ronald M. Holmes and Stephen T. Holmes, Profiling Violent Crimes (1996) H. Paul Jeffers, Who Killed Precious? (1992)

Robert Ressler and Tom Shachtman, Whoever Fights Monsters (1992) B. E. Turvey, Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioural Evidence Analysis (1999) CAPTURE

Mass murderers—“human time bombs,” as they’re often described—cause enormous damage when they go off without warning. But once the explosion is over, there’s not much for the police to do in terms of solving the crime. These killers don’t conceal their identities or commit their atrocities in secret. Their massacres are carried out in full public view, as though they were seeking to inflict the greatest possible trauma not just on their immediate targets but on society at large. They will stride brazenly into a populated place—a bustling office, a packed high school cafeteria, a busy fast-food restaurant—and open fire. Once they have finished slaughtering everyone within range, their own fate is a foregone conclusion. If they don’t commit suicide or contrive to be killed in a shoot-out, they will often surrender without a fight, allowing the state to dispense the inevitable punishment that, one way or another, puts an end to their intolerable existence.