Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  Sheriff Howenstein brought in a psychologist from Napa, Dr. R. William Mathis, to analyze the case. Noting the ritualistic aspects of the cases, Dr. Mathis said he would expect the offender to keep souvenirs, and anyone identified as a suspect should be followed for a week before being arrested in the hope that he might lead police to the murder weapon or other evidence. As far as his appearance and behavioral characteristics, Mathis described a handsome man with a winning personality.

  Working on Mathis’s advice, Howenstein and Gaddini set various types of proactive traps, including having male park rangers pose as female hikers, but nothing was working. The public pressure on law enforcement was intense. The sheriff announced to the public that the killer lays in wait for his victims and puts them through psychological trauma before killing them, probably making them plead for their lives.

  When the Bureau’s San Rafael Resident Agency asked for assistance from Quantico, they’d originally contacted Roy Hazelwood, who was our chief expert on rape and violence against women. Roy is a sensitive, caring guy, and the case affected him deeply. I remember him describing it to me as we walked back to our office suite from the classroom building, where he had just finished teaching a National Academy class. I almost got the sense Roy felt personally responsible, as if the combined efforts of the FBI and about ten cooperating local agencies weren’t enough; that he should be cracking the case and bringing the offender to justice.

  Unlike me, Roy had full-time teaching responsibilities. I had given up most of my classroom work by this point and was the Behavioral Science Unit’s only full-time profiler actively working cases. So Roy asked me to go out to San Francisco and give the police there some on-the-scene input.

  As we’ve noted earlier, there is often resentment when the FBI comes into a case. Some of this is left over from the Hoover days, when it was often felt that the Bureau would just move in and take over the investigation of high-profile crimes. My unit can’t come in unless we’re asked by whichever agency has primary jurisdiction, be it a local police department or even the FBI itself. But in Trailside, the Marin County Sheriff’s Department had brought in the Bureau early, and with the kind of play the cases were getting in the media, I frankly felt they welcomed someone like me to come in and take the heat off them, at least for a while.

  At the sheriff’s department offices, I reviewed all the case materials and crime-scene photos. I was particularly interested in Marin detective sergeant Rich Keaton’s observations that the murders all seemed to have taken place at secluded, heavily wooded sites with a thick canopy of foliage blocking out most of the sky. None of these areas was accessible by car, only by foot, involving at least a mile’s hike. The scene of Anne Alderson’s murder was reasonably close to a service road that represented a shortcut from the park amphitheater. This all strongly suggested to me that the killer was a local, intimately familiar with the area.

  I gave my presentation in a large training room at the Marin County Sheriff’s Department. Seats were banked in a semicircle, like a medical lecture hall. Of the fifty or sixty people in the room, about ten were FBI agents, the rest police officers and detectives. As I looked out over the heads of the audience, I noticed more than a few gray hairs—experienced veterans had been brought back from retirement to help catch this guy.

  The first thing I did was challenge the profile that had already been given. I didn’t think we were dealing with a good-looking, charming, sophisticated type. The multiple stabbings and blitz-style attacks from the rear told me we were dealing with an asocial type (though not necessarily antisocial) who’d be withdrawn, unsure of himself, and unable to engage his victims in conversation, develop a good line, or con or coax or trick them into doing what he wanted. The hikers were all physically fit. The blitz attack was a clear indication to me that the only way he could control his intended victim was to devastate her before she could respond.

  These were not the crimes of someone who knew his victims. The sites were secluded and protected from view, which meant the killer essentially had as much time as he wanted to act out his fantasy with each victim. Yet he still felt the need for a blitz attack. There was no rape, just handling of the bodies after death; masturbation, probably, but no intercourse. The victims were a range of ages and physical types, unlike those of a glib, sophisticated killer such as Ted Bundy, most of whose victims conformed to a single image: pretty, college-age women with long, dark hair, parted in the middle. The Trailside Killer was nonpreferential, like a spider waiting for a bug to fly into his web. I told the assembled group of officers I expected this guy to have a bad background. I agreed with Captain Gaddini that he had spent time in jail. Priors might include rapes or, more likely, rape attempts, but no murders before this series. There would have been some precipitating stressor before it began. I certainly expected him to be white since all the victims were, and I thought he’d have some blue-collar mechanical or industrial job. Because of the efficiency of the murders and his success in evading the police thus far, I pegged his age at low to mid- thirties. I also thought he’d be pretty bright. If they ever tested his IQ, it would be well above normal. And if they looked into his background, they’d find a history of bed-wetting, fire-starting, and cruelty to animals, or at least two of the three.

  "Another thing," I added after a pregnant pause, "the killer will have a speech impediment."

  It wasn’t hard to read the expressions or body language in the room. They were finally expressing what they’d probably been thinking all along: this guy’s full of shit!

  "What makes you say that?" one cop asked sarcastically. "The wounds look like a ’stutter stab’ to you?" He grinned at his own "discovery" of a new method of killing.

  No, I explained, it was a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning, considering just about every other factor in the cases; all of the factors I’d already been through. The secluded locations where he wasn’t likely to come in contact with anyone else, the fact that none of the victims had been approached in a crowd or tricked into going along with him, the fact that he felt he had to rely on a blitz attack even in the middle of nowhere—all of this told me we were dealing with someone with some condition he felt awkward or ashamed about. Overpowering an unsuspecting victim and being able to dominate and control her was his way of overcoming this handicap.

  It could be some other type of ailment or disability, I allowed. Psychologically or behaviorally speaking, it could be a very homely individual, someone with bad acne scarring, polio, a missing limb, anything like that. But with the kind of attack we’d seen, we had to rule out a missing limb or any serious crippling condition. And with all the various witness accounts and all of the people in the parks around the time of the murders, we would have expected to hear about someone with an obvious disfigurement. A speech impediment, on the other hand, was something that the UNSUB could easily feel ashamed of or uncomfortable with to the extent that it might limit normal social relationships, yet wouldn’t "stand out" in a crowd. No one would know about it until he opened his mouth.

  Giving this kind of guidance to a roomful of seasoned cops with a lot at stake and the press and public breathing down their necks is definitely a high ass-pucker situation, the kind I like to create for the people I’m interrogating but would just as soon avoid myself. You can’t completely do that, though. You’re always haunted by the thought so clearly stated by one of the detectives in the room that afternoon:

  "What if you’re wrong, Douglas?"

  "I may be wrong about some things," I conceded as truthfully as I could. "I may miss the age. I may miss the occupation or the IQ. But I’m certainly not going to miss the race or the sex, and I’m not going to miss that he’s blue collar. And in this particular case, I’m not going to miss that he has some kind of defect that really bothers him. Maybe it’s not a speech impediment, but I think it is."

  When I was finished, I couldn’t tell how much of an impact I’d had or whether any of this had sunk in. But one cop
did come up to me afterward and say, "I don’t know whether you’re right or wrong, John, but at least you gave the investigation some direction." That’s always good to hear, though you tend to hold your breath until you see what that investigation ultimately turns up. I went back to Quantico and the combined Bay Area sheriff and police departments went about their work.

  On March 29, the killer struck again, this time shooting a young couple in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park near Santa Cruz. When he told Ellen Marie Hansen, a twenty-year-old sophomore at the University of California-Davis, that he was going to rape her, she protested, whereupon he opened fire with a .38 pistol, killing her outright and severely wounding Steven Haertle, whom he left for dead. But Haertle was able to provide a partial description of a man with crooked, yellow teeth. Police built on this with other witnesses and were able to tie such a man to a red, late-model foreign car, possibly a Fiat, though again, this description varied considerably from previous ones. Haertle thought the subject was in his fifties or sixties and balding. Ballistics linked these shootings to previous Trailside murders.

  On May 1, pretty, blond, twenty-year-old Heather Roxanne Scaggs disappeared. She was a student at a printing trade school in San Jose, and her boyfriend, mother, and roommate all recalled she said she was going out with an industrial arts teacher at the school, David Carpenter, who had arranged for her to buy a car from a friend of his. Carpenter was fifty years of age, which was unusual for a crime of this type.

  From that point on, things began falling into place and the net began closing. Carpenter drove a red Fiat with a dented tailpipe. This last detail was a piece of "hold-back" information the police hadn’t let out previously.

  David Carpenter should have been identified and caught before he actually was. The fact is, he was incredibly lucky and had also involved multiple police jurisdictions, which complicated the manhunt. He had an incarceration record for sex crimes. Ironically, the reason he didn’t show up as a sex offender on state parole records was that he had been released by California to serve out a federal sentence, and though on the streets, he was still technically in federal custody. So he slipped through the cracks. Another irony was that Carpenter and his second victim, Barbara Schwartz, at whose murder scene his glasses had been found, shared the same optometrist! Unfortunately, he had not seen the flyer the sheriff’s department circulated.

  Other witnesses came forward, including an older woman who had recognized the composite drawing on television and said he had been the purser on a ship she and her children had taken to Japan twenty years before. The man had given her "the creeps" with the inappropriate attention he continually paid her young daughter.

  And Peter Berest, the manager of the Glen Park Continental Savings and Loan branch in Daly City, recalled his pretty, sensitive, and trusting part-time teller, high school student Anna Kelly Menjivar, who had disappeared from her home late the previous December. Though she had not previously been linked to the Trailside slayings, her body had also been found in Mount Tamalpais Park. Berest remembered how kind and sweet Anna had been to the regular customer with a severe stutter whom Berest later learned had been arrested in 1960 for attacking a young woman at the Presidio, the Army installation at the north tip of San Francisco.

  San Jose police and the FBI put Carpenter under surveillance and eventually arrested him. He turned out to be the product of a domineering and physically abusive mother, and at least an emotionally abusive father, a child of well above average intelligence who was picked on because of his severe stuttering. His childhood was also marked by chronic bed-wetting and cruelty to animals. In adult life, his anger and frustration turned into fits of unpredictable, violent rage and a seemingly unquenchable sex drive.

  The first crime for which he was caught and served time, the attack on a woman with a knife and hammer in the Presidio, came following the birth of a child into an already strained marriage. During the brutal assault and shortly before, the victim reported, his terrible stutter was gone.

  Because of all the requests that had been coming in from National Academy graduates, FBI director William Webster had given the Behavioral Science instructors official approval to offer psychological profiling consultation back in 1978. By the early 1980s the service had become extremely popular. I was working cases full-time, and instructors such as Bob Ressler and Roy Hazelwood were consulting as their teaching duties allowed. But despite the fact that we felt good about what we were doing and the results we thought we were achieving, no one at the top really knew for sure if this was an effective use of Bureau resources and manpower. So in 1981, the FBI’s Institutional Research and Development Unit—then headed by Howard Teten, who had moved over from Behavioral Science—undertook the first in-depth cost-benefit study of what was then called simply the Psychological Profiling Program. Teten, whose informal consultations had begun the program almost by accident, was interested to see if it was really having any effect and if headquarters should continue it.

  A questionnaire was developed and sent to our clients—officials and detectives at any law enforcement agency that had used our profiling services. These included city, county, and state police departments, sheriff’s departments, FBI field offices, highway patrols, and state investigative agencies. While most of the requests had had to do with murder investigations, the R&D Unit also compiled data on our consultation in rapes, kidnappings, extortion, threats, child molestation, hostage situations, and accidental-death and suicide determination.

  Profiling was still a hazy and hard-to-evaluate notion to many people within the Bureau. A lot considered it witchcraft or black magic, and some of the rest thought of it as window dressing. So we knew that unless the study showed strong and verifiable successes, all of the nonteaching facets of the Behavioral Science Unit could go by the board.

  We were therefore both gratified and relieved when the analysis came back in December 1981. Investigators from all over the country came through enthusiastically for us, urging that the program be continued. The final paragraph of the report’s covering letter sums it up:

  The evaluation reveals that the program is actually more successful than any of us really realized. The Behavioral Science Unit is to be commended for their outstanding job.

  The detectives generally agreed that the area in which we were the most helpful was in narrowing down lists of suspects and directing the investigation into a tighter focus. An example was the brutal and appallingly senseless killing of Francine Elveson in the Bronx in October 1979, not far from some of David Berkowitz’s haunts. In fact there was concern on the part of NYPD that a Son of Sam devotee might be using his hero for inspiration. We teach the case at Quantico because it’s a good model of just how we came up with a profile and how the police used it to push forward a baffling and long-unsolved murder.

  Francine Elveson was a twenty-six-year-old teacher of handicapped children at a local day-care center. Weighing ninety pounds and standing less than five foot tall, she brought a rare empathy and sensitivity to her students, being mildly handicapped herself with kyphoscoliosis, or curvature of the spine. Shy and not very socially oriented, she lived with her parents in the Pelham Parkway House apartments.

  She had left for work as usual at six-thirty in the morning. About eight-twenty, a fifteen-year-old boy who also lived in the building found her wallet in the stairwell between the third and fourth floors. He had no time to do anything with it and still be on time for school, so he kept it until he came home for lunch, then gave it to his father. The father went to the Elveson apartment a little before three that afternoon and gave the wallet to Francine’s mother, who then called the day-care center to let Francine know her wallet had been found. Mrs. Elveson was told her daughter had not shown up for work that day. Instantly alarmed, she and her other daughter and a neighbor began a search of the building.

  On the roof landing at the top of the stairwell, they came upon a sight of overwhelming horror. Francine’s nude body had been severely beaten by
blunt-force trauma, so severely that the medical examiner later found that her jaw, nose, and cheeks had been fractured and her teeth loosened. She had been spread-eagled and tied with her own belt and nylon stockings around her wrists and ankles, though the medical examiner determined she was already dead when that was done. Her nipples had been cut off after death and placed on her chest. Her underpants had been pulled over her head to cover her face, and bite marks were on her thighs and knees. The several lacerations on the body, all of them shallow, suggested a small penknife. Her umbrella and pen had been forced into her vagina, and her comb was placed in her pubic hair. Her earrings had been placed on the ground symmetrically on either side of her head. The cause of death was determined to be ligature strangulation with the strap of the victim’s own pocketbook. On her thigh the killer had scrawled, "You can’t stop me," and on her stomach he had written, "Fuck you," both with the pen that had been inserted into her vagina. The other significant feature of the scene was that the killer had defecated near the body and covered the excrement with some of Francine’s clothing.

  One of the things Mrs. Elveson told the police was that a gold pendant in the form of the Hebrew letter chai, for good luck, was missing from around Francine’s neck. When the mother described the shape of the pendant, detectives realized her body had been ceremonially positioned to replicate it.

  Traces of semen were found on her body, but DNA typing was unknown to forensic science back in 1979. There were no defense wounds on the hands or blood traces or skin fragments under fingernails, which suggested there had been no struggle. The only tangible piece of forensic evidence was a single negroid hair found on the body during the autopsy.

  Upon examining the scene and establishing the known facts, homicide detectives determined that the initial attack took place as Francine walked down the stairs. After she was battered unconscious, she was carried up to the roof landing. The autopsy indicated that she hadn’t been raped.