DAHMER: Yeah.
RESSLER: And then you did what with the bags?
DAHMER: Put them back, under the crawl space. Took the head, washed it off, put it on the bathroom floor, masturbated and all that, then put the head back down with the rest of the bags. Next morning—we had a large buried drainage pipe, about ten feet long—put the bags in there, smash the front of it down, and leave it there for about two and a half years.52
Dahmer attended Ohio State University in the fall of 1978, planning to major in business. He spent most of his time drinking, failed all his courses (except for riflery) and dropped out at the end of the first semester. In January 1979, Dahmer enlisted in the US Army and began training as a military policeman. He washed out and instead was trained as a combat medic and then deployed to Germany. In 2010, two former soldiers stated that they had been raped by Dahmer while serving with him there.53 (Dahmer claimed that he had no sexual encounters while in the military nor committed any rapes or other offenses in that period.) Although graded as “average,” his performance in the Army deteriorated due to excessive drinking, and Dahmer was eventually found unsuitable for military service and given an honorable discharge in March 1981.
Dahmer settled in Miami, working in a sandwich shop for about six months before returning home to Ohio in September 1981. While his father, who had moved back into the house, was away at work, he opened up the drainage pipe, took the bones, smashed them into small pieces and scattered them in the underbrush.
It would be another six years before Dahmer would begin his series of sixteen additional murders in 1987.
Ted Bundy, All-American Boy Killing All-American Girls
Of the 605 serial killers who appeared in the 1970s, Ted Bundy was special. So special and well-known today that I hardly need to describe his crimes. Say “serial killer” and “Ted Bundy” is the first name that comes to mind. It would be Bundy who would define for us the new postmodern serial killer. As the New York Times Magazine commented in “All-American Boy” in 1978:
The stereotype of mass killers with minds bedeviled by tumors or hallucinations is all too familiar to the American public. They were the drifters, the malcontents, the failures and the resenters. Ted Bundy, for all appearances, in no way resembled any of them. He had all the personal resources that are prized in America, that guarantee success and respect. He loved children, read poetry, showed courage by chasing down and capturing a purse snatcher on the streets of Seattle, rescued a child from drowning, loved the outdoors, respected his parents, was a college honor student, worked with desperate people at a crisis center and, in the words of one admirer, “Ted could be with any woman he wanted he was so magnetic!”54
Bundy was like so many of us can imagine ourselves being: an attractive college student with typical middle-class ambitions who drove a cute Volkswagen Bug. His outward persona was what many males identified with and what many females saw as qualities in a mate they desired. In other words, unlike serial killers of the past, he was not one of “them” but one of “us.” He was our first postmodern serial killer.
His now well-known story first slowly trickled out of Utah and Colorado from 1975 to 1977, when he was linked to seventeen homicides of young women across multiple states, and then grew into a torrent everywhere after his two escapes and three subsequent murders in Florida. Eventually, Bundy would confess to at least thirty murders, with many more attributed to him but not conclusively proven.
Unlike the decade’s murders of less-dead gays, transient “boomer hobos,” troubled juvenile “throwaways,” elderly welfare widows or street sex workers, many of Bundy’s victims were the cream of America’s crop: white, middle-class college girls. Now people became concerned. Now they started paying attention.
After Bundy was first arrested in 1975, the age-old problem of police “linkage blindness” took on a new urgency. Bundy not only crossed county lines in his killings, but state lines as well, murdering in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Colorado and eventually in Florida. In several states, the police actually recognized a pattern in the killings in their respective jurisdictions but did not link the patterns to one another across state lines. Only now with Bundy under arrest did the several state agencies come together to compare notes. Everybody agreed that there should be a better centralized system, some kind of networked database like the one that LAPD detective Pierce Brooks had been proposing in California back in the late 1950s in the wake of the Glatman murders.
When Bundy escaped twice in Colorado in 1977, he was lionized as an outlaw, honored with T-shirts reading “Ted Bundy is a one-night stand” and restaurant menu items named for him. He became the first of the counterculture “good serial killers,” the predecessor of the fictional sophisticated and cultured Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter, as played by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, who became the real star of the movie, not Jodie Foster as FBI agent Starling. As Steven Egger writes:
For many, the serial killer is a symbol of courage, individuality, and unique cleverness. Many will quickly transform the killer into a figure who allows them to fantasize rebellion or the lashing out at society’s ills. For some, the serial killer may become a symbol of swift and effective justice, cleansing society of its crime-ridden vermin. The serial killer’s skills in eluding police for long periods of time transcends the very reason that he is being hunted. The killer’s elusiveness overshadows his trail of grief and horror.55
Indeed, after his escape, Bundy committed three more horrific murders in Florida, the last the murder of twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach, whom he abducted from her school.
Bundy’s trial in Florida was televised live, and the scope of his secret life began to be understood; the concept of a particular type of multiple murderer who kills serially began to take form in popular lore. Ann Rule’s classic 1980 account of Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, pioneered a whole new resurgence of true-crime literature with serial murder as its focus. It introduced the general public to the concept of serial murder, even though the term “serial killer” appeared nowhere in the text of her book. It still had not been coined.
Inevitably, as I wrote in 2004, “All roads in the empire of serial killers lead to Ted Bundy”; in 2019, Netflix premiered both Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes and a Bundy biopic titled Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, starring High School Musical’s Zac Efron. We are back to where we started, with the first of our postmodern serial killers being introduced to a whole new generation of consumers (and perhaps serial killers too), many of whom had not even been born when Bundy was put to death back in 1989.
Six hundred serial killers were going to seep into all corners of the United States, from Louisiana to New York, from California into the Pacific Northwest and everywhere in between. In Florida in 1970, thirty-year-old Samuel Little killed the first of his at least fifty victims (and perhaps ninety-three, as he currently claims). Over a period of forty years, he was arrested in eight states for crimes that included driving under the influence, fraud, shoplifting, solicitation, armed robbery, aggravated assault and rape. He was twice charged with murder in 1982. In one charge, a grand jury refused to indict him, while in the other charge, he was acquitted at trial. It wasn’t until 2012 that Little was finally convicted of murder, and in 2019 he would make his widely reported confession; the FBI confirmed the veracity of his claims to at least fifty murders. If true, this makes Samuel Little the most prolific confirmed serial killer in American history, exceeding the forty-nine victims that Gary Ridgway, “the Green River Killer,” was convicted for.
Journalists who were infants in the 1990s scratched their heads, asking how could Samuel Little commit all these murders over some thirty-five years without anybody noticing? Hopefully this book helps to answer that naive question.
After Bundy, the crimes of Corona, Corll and the Son of Sam began to take on a different perspective, and when people backtracked, they l
earned that there had been more serial killings recently than anybody had realized: there was an “epidemic” of serial murders among us. In the public and media’s perception, local police agencies had failed to recognize the threat swelling over America’s cities and towns, its highways and byways.
The question was what to do about it and who was going to do it. The time had come for the “Mindhunters” to take the stage.
CHAPTER 6
Mindhunters: The Serial Killer Epidemic 1980–1990
People kill the way in which they live.
Patrick Mullany, FBI profiler
In the 1980s, we finally settled on a term for what has been described in these previous pages: “serial killers.” According to the Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database, there would be 768 serial killers that decade, an increase of 21 percent since the 1970s.
America’s first serial killer of record, that is the first one to be labeled in the news media as a “serial killer” and “serial murderer,” was Wayne Williams, “the Atlanta Child Murderer,” described as such before his apprehension by reporter Myron A. Farber in the New York Times on May 3, 1981.1 In the next ten years, the term “serial killer” would appear at least 80,038 times in US newspapers.
The irony is that twenty-three-year-old Wayne Williams, while suspected in twenty-three child murders from 1979 to 1981, was controversially convicted of only two murders, of adult male victims, and was technically not considered a serial killer until the San Antonio Serial Murder Symposium in 2005 updated the definition to “two or more murders.” In addition, Williams continues to claim innocence. Recent DNA tests on trace evidence from the case do not exclude him from the small percentile of potential perpetrator DNA, but the tests do not definitively identify him as the only possible source of the DNA. Similarly, another set of DNA tests, on dog hairs found on some victims, did not exclude Williams’s German shepherd, but again, did not establish definitive genetic links to the dog.
The Atlanta Child Murders are a gateway case in the history of serial murder in several ways. First, it was the case that introduced the public to the term “serial killer,” along with the involvement of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and its profilers (the so-called Mindhunters).
Second, because the victims were African American children, there were rumors that a white Ku Klux Klansman was perpetrating “hate crime” killings. The FBI’s conclusion that the unknown killer was probably black eased racial tensions to a certain degree and made the intervention of a federal agency more palatable.
Third, again because the child victims were all African American, the case highlighted the issue of race and poverty in murder investigations, of how “less-dead” (i.e., poor black) victims typically did not receive the kind of investigative effort they deserve.
Unfortunately, the case had another powerful effect: it advanced the idea that serial killers were an “epidemic” threatening America’s children. There suddenly seemed to be one answer to the cases of thousands of missing children in the United States. This child-killing serial killer epidemic became a key to the FBI’s claim on government financing as a national clearinghouse for serial murder that would be made in testimony before several much-publicized congressional committees.
* * *
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There are two versions of the history of FBI profilers: the familiar canonical history as portrayed in the Netflix series Mindhunter and the books and reminiscences of former FBI profilers like Robert Ressler, John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood that inspired it; and the “anti-establishment serial killer as a social construct” version as argued by critics like Philip Jenkins and David Schmid, which I describe extensively in two of my previous books, Serial Killers and Sons of Cain.
As Oscar Wilde is reputed to have said, “History is what people think should have happened.” So, here is a historian’s familiar canonical version.
Come the Mindhunters
The FBI profilers of what used to be called the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) are legendary, reputed to have an almost supernatural ability to look at a murder scene and determine from its characteristics everything about the perpetrator, down to the likely color and condition of the car they drove. The FBI did not invent criminal profiling, nor do they claim to have. A police-employed physician, Dr. Thomas Bond, attempted a psychological profile of Jack the Ripper in 1888; the OSS intelligence service commissioned psychiatrist Walter C. Langer to profile Adolf Hitler; LAPD forensic psychiatrist Dr. J. Paul de River in the 1940s was the first to be permanently hired by a police department in the United States to profile unknown perpetrators; and New York psychiatrist James Brussel famously profiled serial bomber George Metesky with extraordinary accuracy in the 1950s (and the Boston Strangler in the 1960s with a lot less).
Profilers were independent virtuosos hearing their own music in their head; there was no system, no craft, no teaching it—you either had the intuitive gift or you did not.
The BSU was founded in 1972, not as a response to serial killers, but to a surge of hostage-taking incidents culminating in the massacre at the Munich Olympics. Its objective was to psychologically profile hostage-takers to assist a negotiator in persuading them to lay down their weapons as an alternative to the use of force, which had led to the deaths of hostages in Munich.
The BSU was housed at the newly opened FBI Academy on the US Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Virginia, where FBI recruits were trained and state and municipal police and other agency personnel took advanced courses. Instructors at the academy were drawn from the ranks of serving FBI special agents; like civilian university professors, they were expected to balance a load of classroom teaching with research work, while also consulting on active FBI investigations.
The attraction of Quantico was that the FBI instructors had a relatively free hand in pursuing their research and developing curriculums. This was not typical of the highly disciplined and neurotically regimented white-shirt-and-dark-suit FBI of the J. Edgar Hoover years, 1924 to 1972.
Special Agents Patrick Mullany and Howard D. Teten were the founding fathers of the priestly class of FBI criminal mindhunters and confession collectors. Mullany was the theologian-inquisitor; Teten was its scholar-demonologist.
Pat Mullany declared, “It might sound very simple, but it’s true, that people kill the way in which they live. It sounds so simple, people kill the way in which they live.” Mullany believed in an intuitive approach to profiling: “If you have a dull sense of intuition you could get hit between the eyes and not realize what’s going on, you’re going to be useless as a profiler. I think it had a lot to do with the sensitivity . . . a person has in reading people.”2
Mullany was from New York City and studied for the priesthood in a Catholic teaching order, the Congregation of Christian Brothers. He earned a BA in American history from the Catholic University in Washington, DC, and an MA in counseling and psychology from Manhattan College while teaching as a Christian Brother in New York. But in 1965, he left the order, and after an unhappy stint selling insurance at Metropolitan Life (where serial killer Richard Cottingham was also employed at the time in the computer department), he joined the FBI in 1966. After working in the FBI field offices in Jacksonville, Florida, and in Los Angeles, Mullany was sent to New York on a variety of specialized assignments in the FBI Training Division. That eventually brought him to the FBI Academy and the BSU, where Teten was already teaching and researching, in 1972.
Howard Teten was from Crofton, Nebraska, and joined the US Marines on the day he graduated high school in 1950. He served in an aerial photography unit in Korea during the war and then at the El Toro base in California until his discharge in 1954. Teten went to work part-time for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and then later for the San Leandro Police Department while studying criminology and criminalistics at UC Berkeley. Because of his background as a Marine photographer and the courses he was taking at Berkeley, Teten was ass
igned to the CSI unit, where he was able to compare what he was seeing at crime scenes with what he was learning in some of the abnormal and criminal psychology courses he was taking at Berkeley.
Teten joined the FBI in 1962 and during his service earned an MA in social psychology. By 1972, he was teaching a ten-hour course at the FBI Academy in applied criminal psychology, which introduced both FBI trainees and visiting police officers to basic psychological techniques for questioning suspects, facing a hostage-taker and other situations. The course was soon expanded to forty hours, and Teten partnered with the recently arrived Patrick Mullany to teach it.
Police officers attending the course would sometimes bring up their ongoing unsolved cases, with Teten and Mullany offering their observations on the possible psychology and character of the perpetrators. The course began to lean toward profiling unknown subjects, even though officially the FBI did not sanction the concept of profiling.
At some point, Teten went up to New York and met with retired psychiatrist James Brussel to gain insight into his profiling techniques. Teten found Brussel’s approach helpful but rejected his “old school” Freudian interpretations as to what motivated the perpetrators. Teten believed that people were motivated more by their personality and daily life than by deep-seated subconscious impulses.
Teten was more heavily influenced by August Vollmer, the former marshal and later chief of police in Berkeley, California. Vollmer was one of the first American police chiefs to require his police officers to have university degrees and in 1916 persuaded Berkeley University to introduce a criminal justice program, which he headed. Teten said he learned from reading Vollmer that “the kind of crime a person commits is based on what kind of a person he is. Some kinds of people commit this crime. Other kinds commit their crime, you know.”
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