Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  This is the same reason why other serial killers take photographs or make videotapes of their crimes. Once the victim is dead and the body has been disposed of, they want to be able to relive the thrill, continue acting out the fantasy, do it again and again. Berkowitz didn’t need the jewelry or the underwear or the body parts or any other souvenir. He told us that just going back was enough for him. He would then go back home, masturbate, and relive the fantasy.

  We would use this insight to great effect. People in law enforcement had always speculated that killers returned to the scenes of their crimes, but couldn’t prove it or explain exactly why they did. From subjects like Berkowitz, we were starting to discover that the speculation was true, though not always for the reasons we might have suspected. Remorse can certainly be one of them. But as Berkowitz showed us, there can be others. Once you understand why a particular type of criminal might revisit the scene, you can begin planning strategies to deal with him.

  The Son of Sam name came from a crudely written note addressed to police captain Joseph Borelli, who later went on to become NYPD chief of detectives. It was found near the car of victims Alexander Esau and Valentina Suriani in the Bronx. Like the others, both were killed from point-blank range. The note read:

  I am deeply hurt by your calling me a weman-hater. I am not. But i am a monster. I am the "son of Sam." I am a little brat.

  When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up to the back of the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to drink blood.

  "Go out and kill," commands father Sam.

  Behind our house some rest. Mostly young—raped and slaughtered—their blood drained—just bones now.

  Pap Sam keeps me locked in the attic too. I can’t get out but I look out the attic window and watch the world go by.

  I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wavelength then everybody else—programmed too kill.

  However, to stop me you must kill me. Attention all police: Shoot me first—shoot to kill or else keep out of my way or you will die!

  Papa Sam is old now. He needs some blood to preserve his youth. He has had too many heart attacks. "Ugh, me hoot, it hurts, sonny boy."

  I miss my pretty princess most of all. She’s resting in our ladies house. But i’ll see her soon.

  I am the "monster"—"Beelzebub"—the chubby behemouth.

  I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game—tasty meat. The wemon of Queens are prettyist of all. I must be the water they drink. I live for the hunt—my life. Blood for papa.

  Mr. Borelli, sir, I don’t want to kill any more. No sur, no more but I must, "honour thy father."

  I want to make love to the world. I love people. I don’t belong on earth. Return me to yahoos.

  To the people of Queens, I love you. And i want to wish all of you a happy Easter. May God bless you in this life and in the next. And for now I say goodbye and goodnight.

  POLICE: Let me haunt you with these words:

  I’ll be back!

  I’ll be back!

  To be interrpreted as—bang, bang, bang, bang—ugh!!

  Yours in murder

  Mr. Monster.

  This insignificant nobody had become a national celebrity. More than a hundred detectives joined what came to be known as Task Force Omega. The wild, raving communications continued, including letters to newspapers and journalists such as columnist Jimmy Breslin. The city was in terror. At the post office, he told us, he got a real thrill overhearing people talking about the Son of Sam and not knowing they were in the same room with him.

  The next attack took place in Bayside, Queens, but both the man and woman survived. Five days later, a couple in Brooklyn were not so lucky. Stacy Moskowitz was killed instantly. Robert Violante survived, but lost his sight from his wounds.

  The Son of Sam was finally caught because he parked his Ford Galaxy too close to a fire hydrant the night of the final murder. A witness in the area remembered seeing an officer writing up a ticket, and when it was traced, it led to David Berkowitz. When confronted by police, he said simply, "Well, you got me."

  After his arrest, Berkowitz explained that "Sam" referred to his neighbor, Sam Carr, whose black Labrador retriever, Harvey, was apparently a three-thousand-year-old demon who commanded David to kill. At one point, he actually shot the dog with a .22 pistol, but it survived. He was instantly labeled a paranoid schizophrenic by much of the psychiatric community, with all sorts of interpretations being given to his various letters. The "pretty princess" of his first letter was apparently one of his victims, Donna Lauria, whose soul Sam had promised him after her death.

  What was most significant to me about the letters, more than any of the content, is the way his handwriting changes. In the first letter, it is neat and orderly, then progressively degrades until it is almost illegible. The misspellings become more and more common. It is as if two different people had been writing the letters. I showed this to him. He hadn’t even realized it. If I were profiling him, as soon as I saw the degradation of the handwriting, I would know he was vulnerable, prime to slip up, to make some petty mistake, like parking in front of a fire hydrant, that would help police catch him. That vulnerable point would be the time to launch some sort of proactive strategy.

  The reason Berkowitz opened up to us, I believe, was because of the extensive homework we’d done on the case. Early on in the interview, we came to the topic of this three-thousand-year-old dog that made him do it. The psychiatric community had accepted the story as gospel and thought it explained his motivation. But I knew that that story hadn’t actually emerged until after his arrest. It was his way out. So when he started spouting about this dog, I said simply, "Hey, David, knock off the bullshit. The dog had nothing to do with it."

  He laughed and nodded and admitted I was right. We’d read several long psychological dissertations on the letters. One compared him to the character of Jerry in Edward Albee’s play The Zoo Story. Another tried to pick up his psychopathology by analyzing the writing word by word. But David was throwing them all a curve, which they swung at and missed.

  The simple fact is that David Berkowitz was angry about how he had been treated by his mother and other women in his life and felt inadequate around them. His fantasy of possessing them blossomed into a deadly reality. The important things to us were the details.

  With Bob Ressler’s skillful administration of the NIJ grant and Ann Burgess’s compilation of the interviews, by 1983 we had completed a detailed study of thirty-six individuals. We also collected data from 118 of their victims, primarily women.

  Out of the study came a system to better understand and classify violent offenders. For the first time, we could really begin to link what was going on in a perpetrator’s mind to the evidence he left at a crime scene. That, in turn, helped us to hunt them more efficiently and catch and prosecute them more effectively. It began to address some of the age-old questions about insanity and "what type of person could do such a thing?"

  In 1988, we expanded our conclusions into a book, entitled Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, published by Lexington Books. At this writing, it is in its seventh printing. But regardless of how much we learned, as we admitted in our conclusion, "this study raises far more questions than it answers."

  The journey into the mind of the violent offender remains an ongoing quest of discovery. Serial killers are, by definition, "successful" killers, who learn from their experience. We’ve just got to make sure we keep learning faster than they do.

  Chapter 8

  The Killer Will Have a Speech Impediment

  Sometime in 1980 I saw an article in my local paper about an elderly woman who was sexually assaulted and severely beaten by an unknown intruder and left for dead, along with her two dogs, which had been stabbed to death. It looked to the police as though the offender had spent a fair amount of time at the scene. The community was stunned and outraged.

  A couple of months
later, coming back from a road trip, I happened to ask Pam if there had been any news on that case. She told me there hadn’t been, and that there were no strong suspects. I commented that that was too bad, because from what I’d read and heard, it sounded like a solvable case. It wasn’t a federal jurisdiction, and we hadn’t been asked in, but just as a local resident, I decided to see if there was anything I could do.

  I went down to the police station, introduced myself, told the chief what I did, and asked if I could talk to the detectives working the case. He accepted my offer graciously.

  The lead detective’s name was Dean Martin. I can’t remember if I refrained from any Jerry Lewis jokes, but I probably didn’t. He showed me the case files, including the crime-scene photos. This woman had really been pummeled. And as I studied the materials, I started getting a clear mental picture of the offender and the dynamics of the crime.

  "Okay," I said to the detectives, who were politely, if somewhat skeptically, listening to me, "here’s what I think." It’s a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old high school kid. Whenever we see an old victim of a sexual assault, we look for a young offender, someone unsure of himself, without much or any experience. A victim any younger, stronger, or more challenging would be too intimidating to him. He’ll be disheveled-looking, he’ll have scruffy hair, generally poorly groomed. Now what happened on this particular night was his mother or father kicked him out of the house and he had no place to go. He’s not going to go too far in this situation. Instead, he’s going to look for the closest and easiest shelter he can find. He doesn’t have the kind of relationship with any girl or other guys that he can just crash at their house until the storm at home blows over. But as he’s out wandering, feeling miserable, powerless, and angry about it, he comes to this lady’s house. He knows she lives alone, he’s worked there in the past or done some odd jobs for her. He knows she isn’t much of a threat.

  So he breaks in, maybe she protests, maybe she starts yelling at him, maybe she’s just terrified. Whatever her reaction, that both inflames and empowers him. He wants to show himself and the world what a man he is. He attempts sex with her, but he can’t penetrate. So he beats the hell out of her, at a certain point deciding he’d better go all the way because she can identify him. He isn’t wearing a mask; this has been an impulse crime, not a planned one. But she’s so traumatized that even though she lives, she can’t give the police any description.

  After the attack, he’s still got no place to go, and she certainly isn’t threatening him, he knows she won’t get any visitors at night, so he stays and eats and drinks, because by this point he’s hungry.

  I pause in my narrative and tell them there’s someone who meets this description out there. If they can find him, they’ve got their offender.

  One detective looks at another. One of them starts to smile. "Are you a psychic, Douglas?"

  "No," I say, "but my job would be a lot easier if I were."

  "Because we had a psychic, Beverly Newton, in here a couple of weeks ago, and she said just about the same things."

  What’s more, my description did fit someone who lived nearby, whom they’d briefly considered. After our meeting, they interviewed him again. There wasn’t enough evidence to hold him, and they couldn’t get a confession. Shortly after that, he left the area.

  The chief and detectives wanted to know how, if I wasn’t a psychic, I could come up with such a specific scenario. Part of the answer is that, by that time, I had seen enough cases of violent crime against all types of people, had correlated enough details with each one, and had interviewed enough violent offenders that I had a pattern in my mind of what sort of crime is committed by what sort of person. But, of course, if it were that straightforward, we could teach profiling from a manual or offer the police a computer program that could come up with a list of suspect characteristics for any set of inputs. And the fact of the matter is that while we use computers a lot in our work and they are capable of some impressive things, some other more complex things they simply can’t do and may never be able to do. Profiling is like writing. You can give a computer all the rules of grammar and syntax and style, but it still can’t write the book.

  What I try to do with a case is to take in all the evidence I have to work with—the case reports, the crime-scene photos and descriptions, the victim statements or autopsy protocols—and then put myself mentally and emotionally in the head of the offender. I try to think as he does. Exactly how this happens, I’m not sure, any more than the novelists such as Tom Harris who’ve consulted me over the years can say exactly how their characters come to life. If there is a psychic component to this, I won’t run away from it, though I regard it more in the realm of creative thinking.

  Psychics can, on occasion, be helpful to a criminal investigation. I’ve seen it work. Some of them have the ability to focus subconsciously on particular subtle details at a scene and draw logical conclusions from them, just as I try to do and train my people to do. But I always advise investigators that a psychic should be a last resort as an investigative tool, and if you’re going to use one, don’t expose him or her to officers or detectives who know the details of the case. Because good psychics are proficient at picking up small, nonverbal clues, and the psychic could amaze you and establish credibility by giving back to you facts of the case you already know without necessarily having any particular insight into what you don’t know but want to find out. In the Atlanta child murders, hundreds of psychics showed up in the city and offered their services to the police. They came up with all sorts of descriptions of killers and methods. As it turned out, none was even close.

  Around the same time that I met with the local police, departments from around the San Francisco Bay area called me in on a series of murders in heavily wooded areas along hiking paths they had linked together and attributed to an UNSUB the press had dubbed the "Trailside Killer."

  It had started in August of 1979 when Edda Kane, an athletic, forty-four-year-old bank executive, disappeared while on a solitary hike up the east peak of Mount Tamalpais, a beautiful mountain overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay, which was known by the nickname the "Sleeping Lady." When Kane wasn’t home by dark, her worried husband called the police. Her body was found by a search-team dog the next afternoon, naked except for one sock, facedown, in a kneeling position as if begging for her life. The medical examiner determined cause of death to be a single bullet to the back of the head. There was no evidence of sexual assault. The killer took three credit cards and $10 in cash, but left her wedding ring and other jewelry.

  The following March, the body of twenty-three-year-old Barbara Schwartz was found in Mount Tamalpais Park. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest, also apparently while kneeling. In October, twenty-six-year-old Anne Alderson didn’t return from her jog around the fringes of the park. Her body was found the next afternoon with a bullet wound in the right side of her head. Unlike previous victims, Alderson was fully clothed, faceup, propped against a rock with only her right gold earring missing. The live-in caretaker on Mount Tamalpais, John Henry, said he had seen her sitting alone in the park’s amphitheater on what was to be the last morning of her life, watching the sun come up. Two other witnesses had seen her less than half a mile from where Edda Kane’s body had been found.

  A promising suspect was Mark McDermand, whose invalid mother and schizophrenic brother had been found shot to death in their cabin on Mount Tamalpais. After eleven days as a fugitive, McDermand surrendered to Marin County detective Capt. Robert Gaddini. Detectives were able to link him to the murders of his own family, but while he was heavily armed, none of his guns matched the .44- or .38-caliber weapons used in the Trailside cases. And then the killings resumed.

  In November, Shauna May, twenty-five, failed to meet up with two hiking companions in Point Reyes Park, a few miles north of San Francisco. Two days later, searchers found her body in a shallow grave near the decomposing corpse of another hiker, twenty-two-year
-old Diana O’Connell, a New Yorker who had disappeared in the park a month before. Both women had been shot in the head. The same day, two other bodies were discovered in the park, identified as belonging to nineteen-year-old Richard Stowers and his eighteen-year-old fiancée, Cynthia Moreland, both of whom had been missing since mid-October. Investigators determined they had been killed the same long Columbus Day weekend as Anne Alderson.

  The early murders had already sent terror through hikers in the area and prompted signs advising people, especially women, not to go into the woods alone. But with the discovery of four bodies in a single day, all hell broke loose. Marin County sheriff G. Albert Howenstein Jr. had collected several eyewitness accounts of people having seen the victims with strange men just before their deaths, but on certain key points, such as age and facial features, the descriptions conflicted with each other. This, by the way, isn’t unusual even in a single murder, much less a multiple over several months. An unusual pair of bifocals was found at the Barbara Schwartz scene, which apparently belonged to the killer. Howenstein released information on the glasses and the prescription, sending out flyers to all the optometrists in the area. The frames were of apparent prison issue, so Captain Gaddini contacted the California State Department of Justice to try to identify all recently released offenders with a history of sex crimes against women. Various jurisdictions and agencies, including the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office, were now actively working the case.

  There was speculation in the press that the Trailside Killer might, in fact, be Los Angeles’ Zodiac Killer, who remained an UNSUB but who had been inactive since 1969. Perhaps Zodiac had been in prison for some other crime all this time and had been released by unknowing corrections officials. But unlike Zodiac, the Trailside Killer felt no need to taunt police or communicate with them.