Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  Traditionally, most murders and violent crimes were relatively easy for law enforcement officials to comprehend. They resulted from critically exaggerated manifestations of feelings we all experience: anger, greed, jealousy, profit, revenge. Once this emotional problem was taken care of, the crime or crime spree would end. Someone would be dead, but that was that and the police generally knew who and what they were looking for.

  But a new type of violent criminal has surfaced in recent years—the serial offender, who often doesn’t stop until he is caught or killed, who learns by experience and who tends to get better and better at what he does, constantly perfecting his scenario from one crime to the next. I say "surfaced" because, to some degree, he was probably with us all along, going back long before 1880s London and Jack the Ripper, generally considered the first modern serial killer. And I say "he" because, for reasons we’ll get into a little later, virtually all real serial killers are male.

  Serial murder may, in fact, be a much older phenomenon than we realize. The stories and legends that have filtered down about witches and werewolves and vampires may have been a way of explaining outrages so hideous that no one in the small and close-knit towns of Europe and early America could comprehend the perversities we now take for granted. Monsters had to be supernatural creatures. They couldn’t be just like us.

  Serial killers and rapists also tend to be the most bewildering, personally disturbing, and most difficult to catch of all violent criminals. This is, in part, because they tend to be motivated by far more complex factors than the basic ones I’ve just enumerated. This, in turn, makes their patterns more confusing and distances them from such other normal feelings as compassion, guilt, or remorse.

  Sometimes, the only way to catch them is to learn how to think like they do.

  Lest anyone think I will be giving away any closely guarded investigative secrets that could provide a "how-to" to would-be offenders, let me reassure you on that point right now. What I will be relating is how we developed the behavioral approach to criminal-personality profiling, crime analysis, and prosecutorial strategy, but I couldn’t make this a how-to course even if I wanted to. For one thing, it takes as much as two years for us to train the already experienced, highly accomplished agents selected to come into my unit. For another, no matter how much the criminal thinks he knows, the more he does to try to evade detection or throw us off the track, the more behavioral clues he’s going to give us to work with.

  As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say many decades ago, "Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home." In other words, the more behavior we have, the more complete the profile and analysis we can give to the local police. The better the profile the local police have to work with, the more they can slice down the potential suspect population and concentrate on finding the real guy.

  Which brings me to the other disclaimer about our work. In the Investigative Support Unit, which is part of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico, we don’t catch criminals. Let me repeat that: we do not catch criminals. Local police catch criminals, and considering the incredible pressures they’re under, most of them do a pretty damn good job of it. What we try to do is assist local police in focusing their investigations, then suggest some proactive techniques that might help draw a criminal out. Once they catch him—and again, I emphasize they, not we—we will try to formulate a strategy to help the prosecutor bring out the defend ant’s true personality during the trial.

  We’re able to do this because of our research and our specialized experience. While a local midwestern police department faced with a serial-murder investigation might be seeing these horrors for the first time, my unit has probably handled hundreds, if not thousands, of similar crimes. I always tell my agents, "If you want to understand the artist, you have to look at the painting." We’ve looked at many "paintings" over the years and talked extensively to the most "accomplished" "artists."

  We began methodically developing the work of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, and what later came to be the Investigative Support Unit, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And though most of the books that dramatize and glorify what we do, such as Tom Harris’s memorable The Silence of the Lambs, are somewhat fanciful and prone to dramatic license, our antecedents actually do go back to crime fiction more than crime fact. C. August Dupin, the amateur detective hero of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 classic "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," may have been history’s first behav ioral profil er. This story may also represent the first use of a proactive technique by the profiler to flush out an unknown subject and vindicate an innocent man imprisoned for the kill ings.

  Like the men and women in my unit a hundred and fifty years later, Poe understood the value of profiling when forensic evidence alone isn’t enough to solve a particularly brutal and seemingly motiveless crime. "Deprived of ordinary resources," he wrote, "the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not infrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation."

  There’s also another small similarity worth mentioning. Monsieur Dupin preferred to work alone in his room with the windows closed and the curtains drawn tight against the sunlight and the intrusion of the outside world. My colleagues and I have had no such choice in the matter. Our offices at the FBI Academy in Quantico are several stories underground, in a windowless space originally designed to serve as the secure headquarters for federal law enforcement authorities in the event of national emergency. We sometimes call ourselves the National Cellar for the Analysis of Violent Crime. At sixty feet below ground, we say we’re ten times deeper than dead people.

  The English novelist Wilkie Collins took up the profiling mantle in such pioneering works as The Woman in White (based on an actual case) and The Moonstone. But it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal creation, Sherlock Holmes, who brought out this form of criminal investigative analysis for all the world to see in the shadowy gaslit world of Victorian London. The highest compliment any of us can be paid, it seems, is to be compared to this fictional character. I took it as a real honor some years back when, while I was working a murder case in Missouri, a headline in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat referred to me as the "FBI’s Modern Sherlock Holmes."

  It’s interesting to note that at the same time Holmes was working his intricate and baffling cases, the real-life Jack the Ripper was killing prostitutes in London’s East End. So completely have these two men on opposite sides of the law, and opposite sides of the boundary between reality and imagination, taken hold of the public consciousness that several "modern" Sherlock Holmes stories, written by Conan Doyle admirers, have thrown the detective into the unsolved Whitechapel murders.

  Back in 1988, I was asked to analyze the Ripper murders for a nationally broadcast television program. I’ll relate my conclusions about this most famous UNSUB in history later in this book.

  It wasn’t until more than a century after Poe’s "Rue Morgue" and a half century after Sherlock Holmes that behavioral profiling moved off the pages of literature and into real life. By the mid-1950s, New York City was being rocked by the explo sions of the "Mad Bomber," known to be respon sible for more than thirty bombings over a fifteen-year period. He hit such public landmarks as Grand Central and Pennsylvania Stations and Radio City Music Hall. As a child in Brooklyn at the time, I remember this case very well.

  At wit’s end, the police in 1957 called in a Greenwich Village psychiatrist named Dr. James A. Brussel, who studied photographs of the bomb scenes and carefully analyzed the bomber’s taunting letters to newspapers. He came to a number of detailed conclu sions from the overall behavioral patterns he perceived, includ ing the facts that the perpetrator was a paranoiac who hated his father, obsessively loved his mother, and lived in a city in Connecticut. At the end of his written profile, Brussel in structed
the police:

  Look for a heavy man. Middle-aged. Foreign born. Roman Catholic. Single. Lives with a brother or sister. When you find him, chances are he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit. Buttoned.

  From references in some of the letters, it seemed a good bet that the bomber was a disgruntled current or former employee of Consolidated Edison, the city’s power company. Matching up the profile to this target population, police came up with the name of George Metesky, who had worked for Con Ed in the 1940s before the bombings began. When they went up to Waterbury, Connecticut, one evening to arrest the heavy, single, middle-aged, foreign-born Roman Catholic, the only variation in the profile was that he lived not with one brother or sister but with two maiden sisters. After a police officer directed him to get dressed for the trip to the station, he emerged from his bedroom several minutes later wearing a double-breasted suit—buttoned.

  Illuminating how he reached his uncannily accurate conclusions, Dr. Brussel explained that a psychiatrist normally examines an individual and then tries to make some reasonable predictions about how that person might react to some specific situation. In constructing his profile, Brussel stated, he reversed the process, trying to predict an individual from the evidence of his deeds.

  Looking back on the Mad Bomber case from our perspective of nearly forty years, it actually seems a rather simple one to crack. But at the time, it was a real landmark in the development of what came to be called behavioral science in criminal investigation, and Dr. Brussel, who later worked with the Boston Police Department on the Boston Strangler case, was a true trailblazer in the field.

  Though it is often referred to as deduction, what the fictional Dupin and Holmes, and real-life Brussel and those of us who followed, were doing was actually more inductive—that is, observing particular elements of a crime and drawing larger conclusions from them. When I came to Quantico in 1977, instructors in the Behavioral Science Unit, such as the pioneering Howard Teten, were starting to apply Dr. Brussel’s ideas to cases brought to them in their National Academy classes by police professionals. But at the time, this was all anecdotal and had never been backed up by hard research. That was the state of things when I came into the story.

  I’ve talked about how important it is for us to be able to step into the shoes and mind of the unknown killer. Through our research and experience, we’ve found it is equally important—as painful and harrowing as it might be—to be able to put ourselves in the place of the victim. Only when we have a firm idea of how the particular victim would have reacted to the horrible things that were happen ing to her or him can we truly understand the behavior and reactions of the perpetrator.

  To know the offender, you have to look at the crime.

  In the early 1980s, a disturbing case came to me from the police depart ment of a small town in rural Georgia. A pretty fourteen-year-old girl, a majorette at the local junior high school, had been abducted from the school bus stop about a hundred yards from her house. Her partially clothed body was discovered some days later in a wooded lovers’-lane area about ten miles away. She had been sexually molested, and the cause of death was blunt-force trauma to the head. A large, blood-encrusted rock was lying nearby.

  Before I could deliver my analysis, I had to know as much about this young girl as I could. I found out that though very cute and pretty, she was a fourteen-year-old who looked fourteen, not twenty-one as some teens do. Everyone who knew her assured me she was not promiscuous or a flirt, was not in any way involved with drugs or alcohol, and that she was warm and friendly to anyone who approached her. Autopsy analysis indicated she had been a virgin when raped.

  This was all vital information to me, because it led me to understand how she would have reacted during and after the abduction and, therefore, how the offender would have reacted to her in the particular situation in which they found themselves. From this, I concluded that the murder had not been a planned outcome, but was a panicked reaction due to the surprise (based on the attacker’s warped and delusional fantasy system) that the young girl did not welcome him with open arms. This, in turn, led me closer to the personality of the killer, and my profile led the police to focus on a suspect in a rape case from the year before in a nearby larger town. Understanding the victim also helped me construct a strategy for the police to use in interro gating this challenging suspect, who, as I predicted he would, had already passed a lie-detector test. I will discuss this fascinating and heartbreaking case in detail later on. But for now, suffice it to say that the individual ended up confess ing both to the murder and the earlier rape. He was convicted and sentenced and, as of this writing, is on Georgia’s death row.

  When we teach the elements of criminal-personality profiling and crime-scene analysis to FBI agents or law enforcement professionals attending the National Academy, we try to get them to think of the entire story of the crime. My colleague Roy Hazelwood, who taught the basic profiling course for several years before retiring from the Bureau in 1993, used to divide the analysis into three distinct questions and phases—what, why, and who:

  What took place? This includes everything that might be behaviorally significant about the crime.

  Why did it happen the way it did? Why, for example, was there mutilation after death? Why was nothing of value taken? Why was there no forced entry? What are the reasons for every behaviorally significant factor in the crime?

  And this, then, leads to:

  Who would have committed this crime for these reasons?

  That is the task we set for ourselves.

  Chapter 2

  My Mother’s Name Was Holmes

  My mother’s maiden name was Holmes, and my parents almost chose that as my middle name instead of the more prosaic Edward.

  Other than that, as I look back, not much about my early years indicated any particular future as a mind hunter or criminal profiler.

  I was born in Brooklyn, New York, near the border with Queens. My father, Jack, was a printer with the Brooklyn Eagle. When I was eight, con cerned about the rising crime rate, he moved us to Hempstead, Long Island, where he became president of the Long Island Typographical Union. I have one sister, Arlene, four years older, and from early on she was the star of the family, both academi cally and athletically.

  I was no academic standout—generally a B-/C+ student—but I was polite and easygoing and always popular with the teachers at Ludlum Elementary despite my mediocre perfor mance. I was mostly interested in animals and at various times kept dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, and snakes—all of which my mother tolerated because I said I wanted to be a veterinarian. Since this endeavor showed promise of a legitimate career, she encouraged me down this path.

  The one pursuit in school for which I did show a flair was telling stories, and this might, in some way, have contributed to my becoming a crime investigator. Detectives and crime-scene analysts have to take a bunch of disparate and seemingly unrelated clues and make them into a coherent narrative, so storytelling ability is an important talent, particularly in homicide investigations, where the victim can’t relate his or her own story.

  At any rate, I often used my talent to get out of doing real work. I remember once in ninth grade, I was too lazy to read a novel for an oral book report before the class. So when my turn came (I still can’t believe I had the balls to do this), I made up the title of a phony book, made up a phony author, and began telling this story about a group of campers around a campfire at night.

  I’m making it up as I go along, and I’m thinking to myself, How long can I keep pulling this off? I’ve got this bear stealthily stalk ing up on the campers, just about to pounce, and at that point I lose it. I start cracking up and have no choice but to confess to the teacher that I’d made up the whole thing. It must have been the guilty conscience, proving I wasn’t a complete criminal personal ity. I’m up there, exposed as a fake, knowing I’m going to flunk, about to be embarrassed in front of all my peers, and I can already anticipate what my mother’s going
to say when she finds out.

  But to my surprise and amazement, the teacher and the other kids are totally into the story! And when I tell them I’ve been making it up, they all say, "Finish it. Tell us what happens next." So I did, and walked away with an A. I didn’t tell this to my own children for a long time because I didn’t want them to think that crime does pay, but I learned from it that if you can sell people your ideas and keep them interested, you can often get them to go along with you. This has helped me innumerable times as a law officer when I had to sell my own superiors or a local police department on the value of our services. But I have to admit that to a certain extent, it’s the same talent that con men and criminal predators use to get by.

  By the way, my fictitious campers did end up escaping with their lives, which was far from a foregone conclusion since my real love was animals. So, in preparation for becom ing a vet, I spent three summers on dairy farms in upstate New York in the Cornell Farm Cadet Program sponsored by the university’s veterinary school. This was a great opportunity for city kids to get out and live with nature, and in exchange for this privilege, I worked seventy to eighty hours a week at $15 per, while my school friends back home were sunning themselves at Jones Beach. If I never milk another cow, I won’t feel a huge void in my life.

  All of this physical labor did get me in good shape for sports, which was the other consuming passion of my life. At Hempstead High School, I pitched for the baseball team and played defensive tackle in football. And as I look back on it, this was probably the first real surfacing of my interest in personality profiling.