Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  Because of its horrible nature, the case attracted a tremendous amount of public attention and media coverage. A police task force of twenty-six detectives was assembled, which questioned more than two thousand potential witnesses and suspects and checked on all known sex offenders in the New York City metropolitan area. But after a month, the investigation didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

  Figuring there was no harm in getting another opinion, New York Housing Authority detective Tom Foley and Lt. Joe D’Amico contacted us at Quantico. They came down, bringing files and reports, crime-scene photos, and autopsy protocols. Roy Hazelwood, Dick Ault, Tony Rider (who would go on to become chief of the Behavioral Science Unit), and I met with them in the executive dining room.

  After going over all the evidence and case materials and trying to place myself in the shoes of both the victim and the attacker, I came up with a profile. I suggested that the police seek an average-looking white male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, probably right around thirty, who would be disheveled in appearance, unemployed, and mainly nocturnal, live within a half mile of the building with his parents or older female relative, be single and have no relationships with women and no close friends, be a high school or college dropout with no military experience, have low self-esteem, and not own a car or hold a driver’s license, who was currently or had been in a mental institution taking prescription medication, had attempted suicide by strangulation or asphyxia, was not a drug or alcohol abuser, and who would have a large collection of bondage and S&M pornography. This would be his first murder, in fact his first serious crime, but unless he was caught, not his last.

  "You don’t have to go far for this killer," I told the investigators. "And you’ve already talked to the guy." They would already have interviewed him and members of his family, since they lived in the area. Police would find him cooperative, probably overly so. He might even seek them out, injecting himself into the investigation to make sure it didn’t get too close to him.

  To a lot of people unfamiliar with our techniques, this seemed like a lot of hocus-pocus. But if you go through it methodically, you can begin to see how we come up with our impressions and recommendations.

  The first thing we decided was that this was a crime of opportunity, a spontaneous event. Francine’s parents told us that she sometimes took the elevator and sometimes walked the stairs. There was no way to predict what her preference would be on any given morning. If the killer had been lying in wait for her in the stairwell, he might have missed her altogether and, in any event, would likely have run into other people before seeing Francine.

  Everything used in the attack and on the victim’s body belonged to the victim. The killer had brought nothing to the scene, other than perhaps the small pocketknife. He had no weapons or rape kit. He had not stalked her or gone to the scene with the intention of committing the crime.

  This, in turn, led us to the next conclusion. If the UNSUB had not gone to the building with the intention of committing this crime, he must have been there for some other reason. And for him to have been there before 7 a.m. and to have run into Francine on the stairwell, he must have either lived in the building, worked there, or knew his way around pretty well. This could have meant a mailman or telephone company or Con Ed worker, though I thought that unlikely since we had no witness reports, and someone in that situation would not have been able to take the time he clearly spent with her. After the initial attack on the stairs, he knew he could take her up to the roof landing without much fear of being interrupted. Also, since no one in the building saw anything or anyone unusual, he must have fit in. Francine did not scream or struggle, so she probably knew him, at least by sight, and no one noticed anyone strange or menacing going into or out of the building that morning.

  Because of the sexual nature of the attack, we felt confident we were dealing with a man in her general age range. We stated the range to be between twenty-five and thirty-five, probably right around the middle. I was willing to rule out the fifteen-year-old who found the wallet (as well as his forty-year-old father) based solely on this. Based on my experience, I could not imagine someone of that age treating the body this way. Even Monte Rissel, an extremely "precocious" serial rapist, had not behaved in this manner. This advanced a sexual fantasy would take years to develop. Also, the fifteen-year-old was black.

  Even though the examination of the body had turned up the negroid hair, I was convinced we were dealing with a white killer. Very rarely did we see this type of crime cross racial lines, and when we did, there was usually other evidence to substantiate it. There was none in this case, and I had seldom, if ever, seen this kind of mutilation from a black subject. A black former janitor in the building who had never returned his keys was considered a good suspect, but I didn’t think it would be him both because of this behavioral consideration and the fact that some of the tenants would have been sure to notice him.

  How did I account for that hair connecting the crime to a black UNSUB? the police wanted to know. I couldn’t, which made me somewhat uncomfortable, but I was still sure enough I was right to stand by it.

  This was a "high-risk" crime and a "low-risk" victim. She had no boyfriends, was neither a prostitute, a drug taker, a beautiful child in an open environment, nor was she in a bad neighborhood away from home. The building was about 50 percent black, 40 percent white, and 10 percent Hispanic. No other similar crimes had been reported here or anywhere else in the neighborhood. Any attacker could have chosen a much "safer" place to commit a sexual crime. This, combined with the lack of advance preparation, pointed to a disorganized offender.

  A combination of other factors, taken together, gave me an even clearer picture of the type of person who had killed Francine Elveson. There had been rather horrible sexual mutilation and masturbation over the body, but no intercourse. The penetration with the umbrella and pen were acts of sexual substitution. Quite clearly, the adult male we were looking for was an insecure, sexually immature, and inadequate individual. The masturbation suggested this was the acting out of some ritual he had been fantasizing about for some time. The masturbatory fantasy would have been fueled by rough bondage and sadomasochistic pornography, also a hallmark of a sexually inadequate male. Remember, he had tied her up after unconsciousness or death. The choice of a small, physically frail victim who still had to be blitz-attacked and neutralized quickly before he could perpetrate his violent fantasies on her only confirmed this in my mind. Had he carried out his sadistic acts on a living, conscious victim, it would have been a different story as to personality. But as it was, he would have a lot of difficulty maintaining relationships with women. If he dated at all, which I doubted, he would seek out much younger women whom he’d have a better shot at dominating or controlling.

  The fact that he had been hanging around the apartment building when other people like Francine were on their way to work told me he was not gainfully employed in a full-time job. If he had any job at all, it would be a part-time one, possibly at night, which didn’t pay him much.

  From that I concluded that he would not be able to live on his own. Unlike a lot of slicker types of killers, this guy would not be fully able to hide his weirdness from peers, which would mean he would not have many friends and wouldn’t live with a roommate. He would probably be nocturnal and wouldn’t care much about his appearance. Since he wouldn’t be living with friends and could not afford a place of his own, he would be living with his parents, or more likely, I felt, a single parent or older female relative such as a sister or an aunt. He would not be able to afford an automobile, which meant he either took public transportation to the building, walked, or lived there. I didn’t see him taking a bus to get there so early in the morning, which then suggested that he lived in the building or within, say, a half mile.

  Then there was the placement of the various ritual objects—the severed nipples, the earrings, the positioning of the body itself. This type of compulsiveness amidst this frenzy of
disorganized mayhem told me my prey had some deep psychological and psychiatric problems. I expected him to be on, or at least to have been on, some kind of prescription medication. That and the fact that the crime took place in early morning indicated that alcohol wasn’t a factor with this person. Whatever his instability or psychosis was, it was getting worse and would have been noticeable to those around him. Previous suicide attempts, particularly involving asphyxiation—the method of killing he had used on Francine—were a good possibility. I was betting he either was, or had been, in a mental institution. I ruled out any military experience because of this and thought he would be either a high school or college dropout with a history of unfulfilled ambitions. I was reasonably sure this was a first murder for this guy, but if he got away with it, it wouldn’t be his last. I didn’t expect him to strike again right away. This crime would be enough to hold him for weeks or months. But eventually, when the circumstances were favorable and the victim of opportunity again presented herself, he would strike again. His messages written on the body told me that much.

  His placing the victim in the degrading, ritualistic posture told me he didn’t have much remorse about the crime. Had her body been covered, I might have thought that placing her underpants over her face was a sign that he was somewhat sorry and wanted to leave her with some dignity, but that was negated by the exposure of the body. So the covered face was more in the line of depersonalizing and degrading her than any act of concern.

  Interestingly, he did use her clothing to cover up his own feces. Had he defecated at the scene and left it exposed, this could have been interpreted as part of his ritual fantasy or a further sign of contempt for this victim in particular or for women in general. But the fact that he covered it indicated either that he was there a long time and had no place else to go or couldn’t control his nerves or both. Based on previous experience, I thought his inability to refrain from defecating at the scene might also be the result of medication.

  After receiving the profile, the police went back over their extensive suspect and interview list. They tossed out one known former sex offender who was now married with children. The preliminary cut-down had twenty-two names on it, and of these, one stood out as fitting the profile closely.

  His name was Carmine Calabro. A thirty-year-old, white unemployed actor, he lived off and on with his widowed father in the Elvesons’ building, also on the fourth floor. He was unmarried and reportedly had trouble maintaining relationships with women. A high school dropout, he had no military experience. When police searched his room, they found an extensive collection of bondage and S&M pornography. He did have a history of suicide attempts by hanging and asphyxia—both before and after the Elveson murder.

  But he had an alibi. As I’d predicted, the police had interviewed his father, as they had every other tenant in the building. Mr. Calabro had told them that Carmine was an in-patient resident at a local mental hospital undergoing treatment for depression. This was why the police had ruled him out earlier.

  But armed with the profile description, they immediately went back to work on him and quickly determined how lax security was at that particular institution. They were then able to establish conclusively that Carmine had been absent without leave—he had simply walked out—the evening before Francine Elveson’s murder.

  Thirteen months after the murder, Carmine Calabro was arrested and police got a dental impression from him. Three forensic dentists then confirmed that his teeth matched the bite marks on Francine’s body. This was to be key evidence in the trial, at which Calabro pleaded not guilty, and which ended with a murder conviction and a sentence of twenty-five years to life.

  The negroid hair, by the way, turned out to be unrelated. The medical examiner’s office did a careful procedural investigation and discovered that the body bag used to transport Francine Elveson’s body to the morgue had previously been used for a black male victim and had not been properly cleaned out between uses. But this does go to show that forensic evidence on its own can be misleading, and if it doesn’t fit the investigator’s overall impression of the case, it should be looked at carefully before being accepted as proof.

  This case was very gratifying to us, made even more gratifying by the fact that we had made believers out of the people we worked with in New York, among the sharpest and most sophisticated law enforcement people in the business. For an April 1983 article about the profiling program in Psychology Today, Lieutenant D’Amico said, "They had him so right that I asked the FBI why they hadn’t given us his phone number, too."

  After that article appeared, Calabro wrote to us from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, even though his name and Elveson’s name never appeared in the article. In a rambling letter with poor grammar and spelling, he generally had complimentary things to say about the FBI and NYPD, reasserted his innocence, grouped himself together with David Berkowitz and George Metesky, the Mad Bomber, and wrote, "I am not contradicting your profile of the killer in this case, as a matter of fact, on two points, I sincerely believe you are correct."

  He went on to ask if we had been informed of the presence of hair evidence on the body, which he thought might exculpate (my word, not his) him. Then, curiously, he went on to ask when we came up with the profile and whether we had all the evidence. If we had all the evidence, then he intended to let the matter rest, though if we didn’t, he would write us again.

  I thought this letter might be an opening to allow us to include Calabro in our study. So in July 1983, Bill Hagmaier and Rosanne Russo, one of the first woman agents in the Behavioral Science Unit, went up to Clinton to interview Calabro. They described him as being nervous but polite and cooperative, just as he had been with the police. He focused quite heavily on his innocence and the upcoming appeal, stating that he had been unfairly convicted on the bite-mark evidence. As a result, he had had all of his teeth removed so that "they cannot accuse me again" and proudly displayed his empty mouth. Other than that, the interview was in many ways a rehash of his letter, though Hagmaier and Russo said he seemed quite interested in what they were doing and didn’t want them to leave. Even in prison, he remained a loner.

  There is no doubt in my mind that Carmine Calabro is deeply psychologically disturbed. Nothing about his case, his background, or our communication with him indicates anything approaching normalcy. At the same time, I still believe that like most disturbed individuals he understood the difference between right and wrong. Having these bizarre and deranged fantasies is not a crime. Making the willful choice to act upon them to the harm of others most certainly is.

  Chapter 9

  Walking in the Shoes

  By this time in the early 1980s I was handling upward of 150 cases a year and was on the road an equal number of days. I was starting to feel like Lucille Ball trying to get ahead of the conveyor belt in the famous I Love Lucy candy factory skit—the more stuff that came at me, the more frantically I had to scramble to keep from falling behind. Actually getting ahead of the game so I could take a moment to breathe was out of the question.

  As our work and results became known, requests for assistance were pouring in from all over the United States and many foreign countries. Like a triage officer in an emergency room, I had to start prioritizing cases. Rape-murders where there appeared to be a threat of further loss of life got my most immediate attention.

  With cold cases or those where the UNSUB didn’t seem to be active, I’d ask the police why they’d called us in. Sometimes the victim’s family would be pressuring them for a solution. That was certainly understandable and my heart always went out to them, but I couldn’t afford to spend precious time on an analysis that was just going to be shelved by the locals without any action.

  With active cases, it was interesting to note where they came from. In the early days of the program, anything from one of the most major departments—say, NYPD or LAPD—would arouse my suspicion as to why they’d come to our unit in Quantico at all. Sometim
es it was a jurisdictional feud with the FBI, such as who gets the surveillance films, who’ll do the interrogation, and who’ll prosecute a series of bank robberies. Or it could have been that the case was a political hot button and the locals just wanted someone else to catch the flak. All of these considerations went into my decision on how to respond to a request for assistance, because I knew all of them would help determine whether that particular case was going to get solved.

  Initially, I had provided written analyses. As the caseload increased exponentially, though, I didn’t have time for that any longer. I would take notes as I examined a file. Then, when I spoke to the local investigator—either in person or on the phone—I would go over my notes and recall the case. Normally, the cops would take copious notes of their own on what I was telling them. On those rare occasions when a cop was in the same room with me, if he would just listen without writing anything down, I would quickly lose patience, tell him it was his case, not mine, and if he wanted our help, he’d better get his ass in gear and work as hard as I was.

  I’d done enough of these that, like a doctor, I knew how long each "office visit" should take. By the time I’d reviewed the case, I knew whether or not I could help, so I wanted to focus on the crime-scene analysis and victimology right away. Why was this victim selected over all other potential victims? How was he or she murdered? From those two questions, you can begin to address the ultimate question: who?

  Like Sherlock Holmes, I had quickly come to realize that the more ordinary and routine the crime, the less behavioral evidence there was to work with. I couldn’t be much help on street holdups. They’re too common, the behavior is too mundane, and therefore the suspect pool is enormous. Likewise, a single gunshot or stab wound presents a more difficult scenario than multiple wounds, an outdoor case is more challenging than an indoor one, a single high-risk victim such as a prostitute doesn’t give us as much information as a series.