Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  When I look at Jerry Brudos’s criminal progression, I have to ask myself whether understanding and intervention at any of the earliest stages could have short-circuited the ultimate process.

  In Ed Kemper, I felt I saw a serial killer manufactured by an emotionally harrowing childhood. I found Jerry Brudos’s case somewhat more complex. Clearly, his particular paraphilia was with him from a very early age. He was a small child when he became fascinated by the pair of high heels he found in the junkyard. But part of his fascination could have been never having seen anything like them before. They were nothing like what his mother wore. Then, when she reacted so vociferously, they became forbidden fruit to him. Not too long after, he stole shoes belonging to his teacher. Yet when she found out, he was surprised by her reaction. Rather than reproving him, she was curious to know why he’d done this. So he was already getting mixed messages from adult women about what he was doing, and a presumably inborn urge was gradually being transformed into something sinister and far more deadly.

  What would have happened had the dangerousness of his progression been recognized, and some productive means been tried to deal with his feelings? By the time of the first kill, it’s way too late. But at any step along the way, could the process have been short-circuited? Through the study and my work since then, I’ve become very, very pessimistic about anything remotely akin to rehabilitation for most sexually motivated killers. If anything has a hope of working, it has to come at a much earlier stage, before they get to the point at which fantasy becomes reality.

  When my sister, Arlene, was a teenager, my mom used to say she could tell a lot about the boys Arlene was going out with by asking them how they felt about their mothers. If the boy professed love and respect for his mother, that would probably reflect his relationships with other women in his life. If he thought of his mother as a bitch or whore or ball-buster, chances were pretty darn good he’d end up treating other women the same way.

  From my experience, my mom’s observation was right on the money. Ed Kemper cut a trail of destruction through Santa Cruz, California, before he finally worked up the nerve to kill the one woman he truly hated. Monte Rissell, who raped and murdered five women as a teenager in Alexandria, Virginia, told us that if he had been allowed to go with his father instead of his mother when their seriously troubled marriage broke up, he thought he’d be a lawyer now rather than a lifer at the Richmond Penitentiary, where we interviewed him.

  With Monte Ralph Rissell, we were able to start piecing together more parts of the puzzle. At seven, Monte was the youngest of three children at the time of the divorce, and his mother uprooted them and moved to California, where she remarried and spent much of the time alone with her new husband, leaving the kids with little adult supervision. Monte started getting into trouble early—writing obscene graffiti at school, then drugs, then shooting a cousin with a BB gun after an argument. He claimed that his stepfather had given him the rifle and, after the impulsive shooting, smashed it apart and hit Monte repeatedly with the barrel.

  When Monte was twelve, this second marriage broke apart and the family moved back to Virginia. Monte told us he thought he and his sister were responsible. From then on, his crime career escalated: driving without a license, burglary, car theft, then rape.

  His transition to murder was very instructive. Still in high school, on probation and receiving psychiatric counseling as a provision of the probation, he receives a letter from his girlfriend. She’s a year ahead of him in school and now away at college. The letter told Monte that their relationship was over. He promptly gets in his car and drives up to the college, where he spots the girl with a new boyfriend.

  Rather than do anything overt or take his rage out on the person who caused it, he drives back home to Alexandria, fortifies himself with some beer and marijuana, and spends hours sitting in his car in the parking lot of his apartment complex ruminating.

  Around two or three in the morning, he’s still there when another car appears, driven by a single woman. On the spur of the moment, Rissell decides to get back what he’s just lost. He goes up to the woman’s car, pulls a handgun on her, and forces her to go with him to a secluded area near the complex.

  Rissell was calm, deliberate, and precise as he recounted his actions to Bob Ressler and me. I’d checked his IQ beforehand, and it was above 120. I can’t say I detected a lot of remorse or contrition—except for the rare offenders who turn themselves in or commit suicide, the remorse is primarily over getting caught and going to jail. But he didn’t try to minimize his crimes and I did feel he was giving us an accurate account. And the behavior he had just described, and was about to describe, contained several key insights.

  First of all, this incident takes place after a triggering event or incident—what we came to call a stressor. And we would see this pattern over and over again. Anything can be a triggering stressor; different things bother each of us. But the two most common ones, not surprisingly, are losing your job and losing your wife or girlfriend. (I use the feminine here because, as I’ve noted, virtually all of these killers are men, for reasons I’ll speculate about later.)

  As a result of studying people like Monte Rissell, we came to realize that these stressors are so much a part of the serial murder dynamic that when we see certain circumstances at a crime scene, we feel comfortable predicting exactly what the stressor was in the particular case. In Jud Ray’s Alaskan murder case, which I mentioned in chapter 4, the timing and details of the triple homicide of a woman and her two young daughters led Jud to predict the killer had lost his girlfriend and his job. Both of these traumas had taken place. In fact, the girlfriend had dumped the subject for his boss, who had then fired him to get him out of the picture.

  So on the night that he sees his girl with a college man, Monte Rissell commits his first murder. This is significant enough in itself. But exactly how and why it happens tells us even more.

  It turns out by happenstance that Rissell’s victim is a prostitute, which means two things: she’s not going to have the same fear of sex with a stranger that someone outside the profession would; and though scared, she’ll probably have a pretty good survival instinct. So when he’s got her all alone and it’s clear he intends to rape her at gunpoint, she tries to diffuse the situation by hiking up her skirt and asking her attacker how he likes it and what position he wants her in.

  "She asked which way I wanted it," he told us.

  But rather than making him gentler or more sensitive, this behavior on her part only enrages him. "It’s like this bitch is trying to control things." She apparently faked two or three orgasms to placate him, but this made things worse. If she could "enjoy" this rape, it reinforced his feeling that women are whores. She became depersonalized, and it was easy to think about killing her.

  Yet he did let another victim go when she told him she was caring for her father, who was suffering from cancer. Rissell’s brother had had cancer, so he identified with her. She had become personalized to him, just the opposite of this prostitute, or the young nurse Richard Speck had attacked as she lay bound and facedown on the couch.

  But this does point out why it is so difficult to give general advice on what to do in a rape situation. Depending on the personality of the rapist and his motivation for the crime, either going along or trying to talk your way out of being assaulted may be the best course of action. Or it may make things worse. Resisting or struggling with the so-called "power reassurance rapist" might stop him in his tracks. Resisting the "anger excitation rapist," unless the victim’s strong enough or quick enough to get away from him, could get a victim killed. Trying to make the act seem pleasurable because the rapist is sexually inadequate isn’t necessarily the best strategy. These are crimes of anger and hostility and the assertion of power. The sex is only incidental.

  After the rape of the woman abducted from the parking lot, as angry as he is, Rissell hasn’t yet decided what to do with his victim. But at this point she does what many of
us would perceive to be the logical thing: she tries to run away. This makes him feel even more that she’s controlling the situation, not him. As we quoted Rissell in an article on the study for the American Journal of Psychiatry: "She took off running down the ravine. That’s when I grabbed her. I had her in an armlock. She was bigger than me. I started choking her . . . she stumbled . . . we rolled down the hill and into the water. I banged her head against the side of a rock and held her head underwater."

  What we were learning was that the behavior of the victim is equally as important in analyzing the crime as the behavior of the subject. Was this a high- or low-risk victim? What did she say or do, and did that egg the subject on or pull him back? What was their encounter all about?

  Rissell’s victims of choice were merely close by—in and around his apartment complex. And once he had killed, that taboo was gone. He realized he could do it, enjoy it, and get away with it. If we’d been called into this case and were profiling an UNSUB, we would expect to see some experience in his background—some violent crime short of murder—which, in fact, there was. Quite frankly, what we probably would have gotten wrong, at least initially, was the age. At the time of this first kill, Rissell was barely nineteen. We would have expected a man in his mid- to late twenties.

  But Rissell’s case demonstrates that age is a relative concept in our work. In 1989, Gregg McCrary from my unit was called into a baffling series of prostitute murders in Rochester, New York. Working closely with Capt. Lynde Johnson and a first-rate police force, Gregg developed a detailed profile and suggested a strategy that ultimately led to the arrest and successful prosecution of Arthur Shawcross. When we reviewed the profile afterward, we found that Gregg had nailed him almost precisely—race, personality, type of job, home life, car, hobbies, familiarity with the area, relationship to the police; virtually everything except the age. Gregg had predicted a man in his late twenties to about thirty with some already established comfort level for murder. In fact, Shawcross was forty-five. It turned out he’d been in prison for fifteen years for the murder of two young children (like prostitutes and the elderly, children are vulnerable targets), which had essentially put him on hold. Within months of his parole, he picked up where he’d left off.

  Just as Arthur Shawcross was on parole at the time of his murders, so was Monte Rissell. And like Ed Kemper, he was able to convince a psychiatrist he was making excellent progress while he was actually killing human beings. This is kind of a sick version of the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a lightbulb—the answer being just one, but only if the lightbulb wants to change. Psychiatrists and mental health professionals are accustomed to using self-reporting on the part of the subject to track his progress, and this assumes the patient wants to get "well." It has turned out to be incredibly easy to fool many psychiatrists, and most of the good ones will say that the only fairly reliable predictor of violence is a past history of violence. One of the things I hope we’ve accomplished with the criminal-personality study and our work since then is to make the mental health community aware of the limitations of self-reporting where criminal behavior is concerned. By his very nature, a serial killer or rapist is manipulative, narcissistic, and totally egocentric. He will tell a parole officer or prison psychiatrist whatever he or she wants to hear, whatever it will take to get out of prison or stay on the streets.

  As Rissell described his subsequent kills to us, we saw a steady progression. He was annoyed by his second victim’s barraging him with questions: "She wanted to know why I wanted to do this; why I picked her; didn’t I have a girlfriend; what was my problem; what was I going to do."

  She was driving the car at gunpoint, and like the first, she tried to escape. At that point, he realized he had to kill her, stabbing her repeatedly in the chest.

  By the time of the third kill, it was all pretty easy. He’d learned from his previous experience and wouldn’t let this victim talk to him; he had to keep her depersonalized. "I was thinking . . . I’ve killed two. I might as well kill this one, too."

  At this point in the progression he released the woman caring for her father with cancer. But by the final two murders, his intention was well established. He drowned one and stabbed the other—between fifty and a hundred times by his own estimate.

  Like virtually all the others, Rissell showed us that the fantasy was in place long before the actual rapes or murders began. We asked him where he’d gotten his ideas. They came from a number of places as it turned out, but one of them, he said, was reading about David Berkowitz.

  David Berkowitz, known first as the ".44-Caliber Killer" and then as the "Son of Sam" after he began writing to newspapers during his reign of terror in New York City, was more of an assassin personality than a typical serial killer. Over almost exactly a year—from July 1976 to July 1977—six young men and women were killed and more were wounded, all parked in lovers’ lanes, all shot in their cars with a powerful handgun.

  Like a number of serial killers, Berkowitz was the product of an adopted family, which he didn’t know until about the time he was in the Army. He’d wanted to be sent to Vietnam, but ended up in Korea, where he had his first sexual encounter, with a prostitute, and contracted gonorrhea. When he got out of the service and went back to New York City, he began hunting for his biological mother, whom he found living with her daughter—his sister—in Long Beach, Long Island. Much to his surprise and dismay, they wanted nothing to do with him. He’d been shy, insecure, and angry, and now he blossomed into a potential killer. He’d learned how to shoot in the Army. He went to Texas and procured a Charter Arms Bulldog—a .44-caliber handgun—a large, powerful weapon that made him feel bigger and more powerful. He went out into the city dumps of New York and practiced with this weapon, hitting small targets until he was a good shot. And then this low-level postal employee by day went on the hunt by night.

  We interviewed Berkowitz in Attica State Prison, where he was serving twenty-five years to life for each of six killings after pleading guilty, though he later came to deny his crimes. He had been the victim of a near-fatal attack in prison in 1979, when his throat had been slashed from behind. The wound had required fifty-six stitches and the attacker was never identified. So we came to him unannounced, not wanting to place him in further jeopardy. With the warden’s cooperation, we had filled out most of our written questionnaire in advance, so we were well prepped.

  For this particular encounter, I brought along some visual aids. As I mentioned, my father had been a pressman in New York and head of the printers’ union in Long Island and had supplied me with tabloids proclaiming the Son of Sam’s exploits in large headlines.

  I hold up the New York Daily News, then pass it across the table to him as I say, "David, a hundred years from now no one is going to remember Bob Ressler or John Douglas, but they will remember the Son of Sam. In fact, right now there’s a case in Wichita, Kansas, a guy who’s killed about half a dozen women and calling himself the BTK Strangler. That’s ’bind, torture, kill.’ And you know, he’s writing letters and he’s talking about you in those letters. He talks about David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. He wants to be like you because you have this power. I wouldn’t even be surprised if he writes you a letter in jail here."

  Berkowitz is not what I would call a charismatic guy, and he was always searching for some bit of recognition or personal achievement. He had bright blues eyes that were always trying to pick out if someone was genuinely interested, or laughing at him. When he heard what I had to say, his eyes lit up.

  "Now you never had a chance to testify in court," I continue, "so all the public knows about you is that you’re one bad son of a bitch. But from doing these interviews, we know that there must be another side, a sensitive side, a side that was affected by your background. And we want you to have the opportunity to tell us about that."

  He’s pretty emotionally undemonstrative, but he speaks to us with little hesitation. He admits having started more than two thousand f
ires in the Brooklyn-Queens area, which he documented in meticulous diary notes. That’s one way he resembles an assassin personality—a loner who indulges in this obsessive journal writing. Another is that he doesn’t want to have any physical contact with the victim. He’s not a rapist or fetishist. He’s not looking for souvenirs. Whatever sexual charge he’s getting is from the act of shooting itself.

  The fires he set were mainly of the nuisance variety, such as in trash cans or abandoned buildings. Like a lot of arsonists, he would masturbate while watching the flames, then again when the fire department came to put them out. The fire-starting also fits in with the other two elements of the "homicidal triad": bed-wetting and cruelty to animals.

  I always thought of the prison interviews as like panning for gold. The vast majority of what you get is going to be worthless pebbles, but if you get one real nugget out of it, the effort has been well worth it. And that was certainly the case with David Berkowitz.

  What’s very, very interesting to us is that as he’s stalking these lovers’ lane areas, rather than go to the driver’s side of the car—most frequently the male side—which would represent the greater threat, he shifts around to the passenger side. This tells us that, as he’s firing into that vehicle in a typical police stance, his hatred, his anger, is directed at the woman. The multiple shots, like multiple stab wounds, indicate the degree of that anger. The male is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s probably never any eye contact between attacker and victim. Everything is done from a distance. He could possess his fantasy woman without ever having to personalize her.

  Equally interesting, another golden nugget that has become part of our general awareness of serial killers, is that Berkowitz told us he was on the hunt nightly. When he could not find a victim of opportunity, a victim who was going to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, he would go back to areas where he’d been successful in the past. He would go back to a crime-scene area (many of the others went back to body-disposal areas), and the grave sites, and symbolically roll in the dirt and relive that fantasy over and over again.