American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  PD: The Lockhart ranch, right? Did you then nail her in the closet—I mean put her in the closet and nail the door shut?

  DM: No.

  PD: Well, what happened then?

  DM: Well, I undressed her, and then, uh, well, uh, I proceeded to feel her body, and she got pretty wild, I guess, and I choked her. She died.

  PD: She what?

  DM: She died.

  PD: OK, and then did you conceal her body?

  DM: Yes.

  PD: Where?

  DM: Uh, I cut her up.

  PD: And where is the body located?

  DM: Well, not much left of it.

  PD: What’s left? Where, where did you put the pieces?

  DM: I put her head in that outhouse behind the ranch, and all the rest of it was burned.

  Police would recover Susan’s skull from the outhouse. Meirhofer said that he had dismembered and decapitated Susan’s body with his hunting knife before burning the pieces.

  PD: OK, now, David, did uh, did you or will you tell us what happened to Sandra Smallegan?

  DM: Yes.

  PD: And in your own words, just the same way you did with Susie, go ahead.

  DM: Well, I went up to her apartment about two o’clock in the morning of the tenth. . . . And, uh, I, she was sleeping, and I jumped on her and choked her and then tied her up and put a piece of tape around her mouth, and then I was gonna, while I was putting some of her clothes and stuff in the car, she evidently died. She couldn’t get any air through the tape.10

  Meirhofer then described how he drove Smallegan’s corpse to the ranch and dismembered it with his hunting knife and a saw and afterward burned and disposed of the remains. The confession was terse.

  At the end of the day, confession at least secured and signed off on, the sheriff locked Meirhofer in his cell for the night.

  That night, just as the BSU had warned, Meirhofer used a towel to hang himself in his cell, taking any secrets and explanations to his grave.

  A search of Meirhofer’s house found no explanation either, no diaries, souvenirs or pornography—only a verse underlined in his Bible—Hebrews 9:22: “And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood there is no remission.” According to Montana’s Great Falls Tribune, a local clergyman said the passage had sometimes been a motivating force for demented and deranged people to justify heinous acts with religious overtones.11

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  That was the way FBI profiling worked the first time they tried it, and that’s kind of how it still works today. Profiling works in tandem with a host of other investigative and forensic techniques combined with a policeman’s tenacity and skill to take advantage of intuition along with random dumb luck, such as an anonymous tip, a rancher challenging his phone bill or a mother’s steely nerve to bring her daughter’s killer to justice with genuine compassion. Profilers are rarely at the actual crime scene; they rarely rush, weapons drawn, to a profiled suspect’s location like in the movies or on TV, and while profiling is a valuable tool in narrowing down an already developed suspect list, there is no case on record of a serial killer being apprehended on a profile alone. Profiling is only one part of a complex mechanism that makes up a serial homicide investigation.

  Mindhunters: The Third Generation

  By the end of the 1970s, Teten and Mullany had risen higher in the ranks and moved on to other duties and assignments related to hostage-taking and the psychology of assassins and Americans spying for the Russians. Robert Ressler led profiling from its second into its third generation, recruiting FBI agent John Douglas and Boston University forensic nurse Ann Burgess into a new program of interviews with incarcerated serial killers, the subject of the recent Netflix series Mindhunter.

  Ressler had been born in Chicago and served in the Army as a military policeman. He earned degrees in justice administration but had been fascinated with criminal psychology since the Chicago case of serial killer William Heirens (whom Ressler would eventually visit for a disappointing interview). In 1970, after leaving the Army, Ressler joined the FBI and was assigned to the BSU in 1976, where he taught and worked in the field of hostage negotiation.

  Most historians agree that Ressler might not have first coined the term “serial killer” but that he at least introduced it into current usage. Ressler claims he was inspired by Saturday matinee movie “serial” cliff-hangers that left the audience wanting more and compelled them to return the next Saturday to see the next episode, very much in the way serial killers were left unsatisfied and wanting to kill again and again. In 1981, the term entered public usage.

  In his recollections of the early days of the BSU, Patrick Mullany has only one thing to say about Ressler: “Bob was feisty. . . .”12

  Ressler believed there were two kinds of FBI agents: those who ask permission for everything they do because they don’t want to get in trouble with the hierarchy and “those who never ask permission to do anything because they want to get things accomplished.” According to Ressler, he was influenced by seventy-one-year-old US Navy admiral Grace Hopper, who believed that once formal permission was put to paper and denied, a proposed project was dead and rarely could be revived in a command structure like the Navy. She would advise, “It’s better to ask forgiveness than ask permission.”

  Ressler was interested in criminal psychology, but he was not a psychologist—his background was in administration, getting things done. It bothered him that most of the material that the BSU was collecting on criminal psychology was secondhand observations by either police officers or forensic psychologists or psychiatrists. What did the perpetrators have to say for themselves, he wanted to know. The FBI was sending Ressler around the country on a series of road courses to be delivered in various jurisdictions. Without telling anyone, without getting permission, Ressler started visiting prominent incarcerated killers and interviewing them; asking them what they thought they were doing. In those days, a prison visit could often be arranged merely by showing his FBI credentials.

  Ressler began interviewing some of the prominent killers from the 1960s and 1970s, from the assassin of Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan, to the Son of Sam and Charles Manson. He carried on for about a year before he reported his visits to his supervisor at the BSU. Fortunately for Ressler, this was a moment when the FBI hierarchy was encouraging the BSU to undertake more research, and Ressler now got official backing to establish what would become the Criminal Personality Research Project.

  Ressler now brought into his project thirty-three-year-old John Douglas, who had joined the FBI in 1970 after serving in the Air Force. He earned several graduate degrees in psychology and counseling and adult education and arrived at the BSU in 1977, like almost everybody there, teaching hostage negotiation. His first assignment in the FBI had been with a SWAT team in Detroit. A number of agents who had accompanied Ressler on the interviews had problems dealing with the horror stories some serial killers were telling them, or at least hiding their reactions from the serial killers. Ressler liked Douglas’s affable and easygoing manner when interviewing serial killers. Douglas wore a nonjudgmental mask, was warmly encouraging and easily established a rapport with the psychopaths they were visiting, keeping them in a talkative frame of mind.

  In order to secure funding for his project from the Justice Department, Ressler brought in forensic nurse and researcher Ann Burgess to help shape the grant application and the program protocols in a disciplined academic format.

  The Criminal Personality Research Project ended up interviewing twenty-nine incarcerated sexual serial killers and seven solo sexual murderers, asking them about their childhoods, their fantasies and what they thought they were doing, as now fictionally portrayed on Mindhunter. These interviews, along with the work of Roy Hazelwood, who specialized in sexual crimes, and other behaviorists at the BSU, would lead to the
FBI’s controversial profiling system of organized/disorganized/mixed classifications of serial killers. After its use for nearly thirty years, in 2004, the FBI would conclude the system has “limited utility” in active serial killer investigations and it’s no longer used in day-to-day case analysis.)13

  In 1986, Ressler, Burgess and Douglas published their classic textbook based on their interviews, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, which is still considered an important text on the psychology of serial killers.

  In 1981, Ressler put forth an initiative for what would become the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), coordinating profiling and research in serial crime and housing the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), a national database of violent crime incidents and their case characteristics—something that Pierce Brooks had first proposed back in the late 1950s and had revived in the late 1970s. Partnering with the Justice Department and the FBI, Brooks’s proposal now secured major funding for his long-dreamt project, and eventually, he became the first director of ViCAP when it went operational in 1985.

  John Douglas, in the meantime, affable, handsome, well-spoken, young, educated with a psychology degree, became the public face of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, especially when they became involved in the Atlanta Child Murders. The press loved him. And when Douglas later advised the prosecution on how to best goad Wayne Williams during his trial, the press loved him even more. Eventually, Douglas went on to change the unit designation to the Investigative Support Unit. He said he wanted to take the “BS” out of profiling and align it more with investigations and not behavioral science. Today it is called the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU). Douglas retired in 1996 to work as a private consultant and author of bestselling books.

  There are many different forms of profiling developed outside of the FBI, and the effectiveness of FBI profiling, and that of ViCAP, is a matter of debate.

  But this, at least, is the “official” history of the FBI’s profiling system.

  Making the Serial Killer Epidemic

  At the exact same time as the term “serial killer” was entering our popular vocabulary, Congress was embracing the concept of a “serial killer epidemic.” Coincidentally, the same guy who we think coined the term “serial killer” might have also coined “serial killer epidemic,” when in the 1980s Ressler stated, “Serial killing—I think it’s at an epidemic proportion. The type of crime we’re seeing today did not really occur with any known frequency prior to the fifties. An individual taking ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five lives is a relatively new phenomenon in the crime picture of the U.S.”14

  There were three major committees on Capitol Hill from 1981 to 1983 that looked into the issues of increasing violence, linkage blindness, child abduction, child pornography and serial killers: the Attorney General’s Task Force on Violent Crime, the House Committee on Civil and Constitutional Rights and Senator Arlen Specter’s Juvenile Justice Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate.

  The start of these hearings in 1981 was punctuated by several dramatic cases of child abduction murder. In Atlanta, Wayne Williams was arrested in a series of thirty-one child murders; in New York, Etan Patz infamously vanished on his way to school (thirty-eight years later, in February 2017, the boy’s killer was convicted);15 and in Florida, six-year-old Adam Walsh vanished in a shopping mall. Adam’s severed head was found floating in a canal; his body was never recovered. Adam’s father, John Walsh, became a vocal advocate for victims and missing children, and the host of America’s Most Wanted.

  Testifying before the committees were an assortment of FBI officials, Pierce Brooks selling his database idea, which became ViCAP; John Walsh, now an advocate for abducted children; and true-crime author Ann Rule. The impression they left was that hundreds of migratory serial killers were roaming around the nation, abducting and murdering thousands of American children and young women every year.

  Ann Rule told the senators on the Judiciary Committee looking into “Patterns of Murders Committed by One Person in Large Numbers with No Apparent Rhyme, Reason or Motivation”:

  Several of the serial killers I have researched have put 200,000 miles a year on their cars. They move constantly. They may drive all night long. They are always looking for the random victim who may cross their path. . . . When we are talking about a clean slate and a fresh start in this context, it is chilling because every time these men move to a new territory, maybe two States away, they are starting over. The police there do not recognize the pattern.16

  Rule’s claim was nonsense, but nobody questioned it. First, in order to drive 200,000 miles in a year, one would have to drive 547 miles every day. Rule never identified in her testimony the “several serial killers” she claimed drove those enormous distances. Moreover, statistically, the majority of serial killers stuck to their own region, their city or home state. Ted Bundy was atypical as a migratory serial killer ranging over multiple states.

  When describing to the senators how Ted Bundy moved across state lines, Rule claimed, “I think ViCAP would have saved 14 to 15 young women’s lives at the very least if we had ViCAP in operation.”

  Statistics were marshaled before Congress in a deceptive way to highlight an “epidemic” number of murders and child abductions. For example, the number of unsolved murders in a given year was combined with “motive unknown,” “stranger” and “relationship unknown” murders to give the impression that nearly 25 percent of all murders in the US were perpetrated by anonymous serial killers. While some serial murders did fall into these categories, most did not.

  As for the claims that thousands of children were being abducted by serial killing strangers, a study of 1,498 child murders in California between 1981 and 1990 determined that relatives, predominately parents, were the most frequent killers of children under the age of ten (in 44.8 percent of cases). Strangers, serial killers or otherwise, were involved in only 14.6 percent of the child murders.17

  Further, the definition of “abduction” did not necessarily match the public’s imagination. For example, in the California penal code at the time, abduction was defined as when a victim is lured or forcibly moved farther than twenty feet or held longer than half an hour if no movement occurs. Naturally, that inflated abduction statistics.18

  As Joel Best put it in his analysis of the claims presented to Congress: “Three principles seem clear: Big numbers are better than small numbers; official numbers are better than unofficial numbers; and big, official numbers are best of all.”19

  Ressler himself admitted, “In feeding the frenzy we were using an old tactic in Washington, playing up the problem as a way of getting Congress and the higher-ups in the executive branch to pay attention to it.”20

  The frightening “big number” testimony did the trick. Millions in federal dollars now poured into ViCAP and NCAVC, and the FBI emerged as the only agency able to confront this “epidemic” of highly mobile serial killers crossing state lines.

  Carrying on the Kitty Genovese discourse and that of Vernon Geberth’s “Sweet Little Mary,” the New York Times now spun the story in that direction. An article headlined “Officials Cite a Rise in Killers Who Roam U.S. for Victims” quoted officials who claimed that the rise in serial killings was “linked somehow to the sweeping changes in attitudes regarding sexuality that have occurred in the past 20 years.”21 Once again, female sexual promiscuity was blamed, rather than the repressively sick celebration of women’s abduction, rape, mutilation and murder in mainstream men’s adventure and true-detective magazines since the 1940s (and earlier) that the serial killers had consumed since childhood, long before “women’s liberation” and the “sexual revolution.”

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  Despite all the heavy profiling work in Quantico since the 1970s and the newly introduced ViCAP database, the 1980s brought us even more serial killers than before, although vict
im counts rarely surpassed the twenty to thirty plus accrued in the 1970s by killers like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Juan Corona and Dean Corll. This suggests that serial killers were now being apprehended earlier in their “career,” before they could amass the huge victim counts of the previous decade.

  Psychological profiling—the FBI’s and others (for a description of the array of different profiling systems, see Serial Killers)—gave homicide investigators on the front lines a better grasp of the difference between a changing MO and a static “signature.” A change in MO or in the type of victim no longer automatically led to investigators dismissing the possibility of a serial killer. The average homicide investigator now had a more sophisticated understanding and awareness of serial perpetrators. Interjurisdictional communication and sharing of information improved throughout the 1980s as well.

  Henry Lee Lucas, “The Confession Killer”

  Henry Lee Lucas first hit the front pages in the early 1980s with spectacular claims of having murdered first 100, then 360, and then 3,000 people. Lucas was quickly labeled the “most prolific serial killer ever.” The problem was that investigators from various jurisdictions rushed to Lucas eager to close cold cases on their books, and it turned out Lucas was known to be in other states at the times of the murders he claimed to have perpetrated. In 1986, the Texas attorney general concluded:

  Except for Lucas’ original three confessions to the murders of his mother in Michigan in 1961 and Frieda Powell and Kate Rich in Texas in 1982, there is a notable lack of physical evidence linking Lucas to the crimes to which he confessed. Lucas did not lead authorities to any bodies of victims. Unfortunately, when Lucas was confessing to hundreds of murders, those with custody of Lucas did nothing to bring an end to his hoax. Even as evidence of the hoax mounted, they continued to insist that Lucas had murdered hundreds of persons. . . . We found information that would lead us to believe that some officials “clear cases” just to get them off the books.22