Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  She answers that she’ll find someone who will and asks to use the phone, saying she’ll pay him back for the long-distance calls. The preacher tells the agents she called back to an old neighbor in Atlanta who’d been in the Army in Vietnam the same time as Jud and knew his way around a gun. She tells him, "We’ve got to get this thing done!"

  And to top it all off, the preacher claims, "Mrs. Ray stiffed me for the phone calls."

  The agents get in the car and drive back to Atlanta, where they confront the former neighbor. Under grilling, he admits Mrs. Ray asked him about a contract killing, but he swears he had no idea it was Jud she was trying to get.

  Anyway, he says he told her he didn’t know anybody who did that sort of thing and put her in touch with his brother-in-law, who might. The brother-in-law, in turn, introduces her to another guy, who agrees to take on the job and hires two other men to be the shooters.

  Mrs. Ray, the former neighbor’s brother-in-law, the man who took the contract, and the two shooters are all indicted. The former neighbor is named an unindicted coconspirator. The five charged are found guilty of attempted murder, conspiracy, and burglary. They each get a ten-year sentence, the most the judge can give them.

  I would see Jud from time to time in relation to ATKID. Before long, he began seeking me out. Since I wasn’t one of his colleagues in the office but knew what the stress of the job was all about and could understand what he’d been through and continued to go through, I guess he felt he could talk to me. In addition to all the other feelings that go with such a thing, he told me he found the public airing of his domestic situation very painful and embarrassing.

  With all Jud suffered, the Bureau wanted to do whatever was best for him and thought that transferring him to another field office far from Atlanta would help him recover. But after talking with Jud and sharing his feelings, I didn’t think so. I thought he should stay where he was for a while.

  I went in and spoke to John Glover, the SAC in Atlanta. I said, "If you transfer him, you’re eliminating the support system he has right here in this office. He needs to stay here. Let him spend a year getting his children settled again and close to the aunt who helped raise him." I suggested that if he was going to go anywhere, it should be to the Columbus Resident Agency, since he’d been a cop there and still knew most of the force.

  They did keep him in the Atlanta-Columbus area, where he began to get his life back in order. Then he moved to the New York Field Office, where his main job was foreign counterintelligence. He also became one of the office’s profile coordinators—the liaison between the local police and my unit at Quantico.

  When slots became available in the unit, we brought Jud on, along with Roseanne Russo, also from New York, and Jim Wright, from the Washington Field Office, who had spent more than a year working the John Hinckley case and trial. Roseanne eventually left the unit for the Washington Field Office and foreign counterintelligence. Jud and Jim both became distinguished and internationally known members of the team and close friends of mine. When I became unit chief, Jim Wright took over from me as manager of the profiling program.

  Jud claimed to have been shocked that we picked him. But he’d been an outstanding coordinator in New York, and because of his strong law enforcement background, he worked out right from the beginning. He was a quick learner and extremely analytical. As a police officer, he’d seen these cases from the "trenches" and brought that perspective to them.

  When it would come up in a teaching situation, Jud wouldn’t be afraid to mention the attempt on his life and its repercussions. He even had a tape recording of his emergency telephone call, which he would sometimes play for a class. But he couldn’t stand to be in the room. He would step outside until it was over.

  I told him, "Jud, this is a tremendous thing." I explained that so many of the elements at the scene—the footprints, the blood on the television—would have been misleading or nonsensical. Now we were beginning to understand how seemingly irrational elements can have a rational explanation. "If you work this case up," I told him, "it could be an extremely valuable teaching tool."

  He did that, and it became one of the most interesting and informative cases we taught. And it became a catharsis for him: "I found it quite a personal revelation. In the process of preparing to teach, I’d go down an alleyway I’d never ventured into before. Every time you talk about it to people you can trust, you explore another alley. Contract spouse killings and attempts happen more frequently in this country than we’d like to believe. And the family is often so embarrassed that no one will talk about it." Watching Jud teach this case has been among my most moving experiences as an Academy instructor. And I know I’m not alone. Eventually, he got to the point where he would stay and listen when the emergency tape was played.

  By the time Jud became part of my unit, I had already done a fair amount of research on postoffense behavior. It had become clear to me that no matter how hard he tries, much of what the offender does after the crime is beyond his conscious control. As a result of his own case, Jud became very interested in the issue of preoffense behavior. For a while, we had understood the importance of precipitating stressors as distinct events leading to the commission of a crime. But Jud expanded the unit’s horizons considerably and demonstrated how important it is to focus on the behavior and interpersonal actions before a crime takes place. A radical or even subtle but significant change in a partner’s behavior can mean that he or she has already begun to plan for a change in the status quo. If the husband or wife becomes unexpectedly calm or much more friendly and accepting than before, it can mean he or she has already come to regard that change as inevitable or imminent.

  Contract spouse killings are difficult to investigate. The survivor has laid the emotional groundwork well. The only way to crack these cases is to get someone to talk, and you have to understand the dynamics of the situation and what really happened to be authoritative in this. As much as the rearrangement of a crime scene can lead the police in the wrong direction, a spouse’s preoffense behavior is a form of staging.

  More than anything else, Jud’s case is an object lesson for us on how you can misinterpret behavior at a crime scene. If Jud had died, we would have come to some wrong conclusions.

  One of the first things a rookie cop is taught is not to contaminate a crime scene. But by his own barely conscious actions, veteran cop and special agent that he was, Jud inadvertently contaminated his own crime scene. We would have interpreted all of the footprints and evidence of his movement to have been a burglary that went bad—that the intruders had walked him around the room, forcing him to tell them where particular items were hidden. The blood on the TV screen would have suggested that Jud had been lying in bed watching television when he’d been surprised and immediately shot.

  The most important consideration, as Jud told me, was that "if I had died, I’m absolutely convinced she would have gotten away with it. It was well planned and her actions had prepped everyone in the neighborhood. She would have been completely believable as the grieving spouse."

  As I said, Jud and I became close friends; he’s probably the closest thing to a brother I have ever had. I used to joke that he would make sure to play the tape for me right around performance-rating time, to assure the full measure of my sympathy. Fortunately, though, that was never necessary. Jud Ray’s record speaks for itself. He is now chief of the International Training Unit, where his skill and experience will benefit a new generation of agents and policemen and policewomen. But wherever he goes, he will always be one of our own and one of the best—one of the few law officers around to survive an attempt on his life through character and sheer force of will, and then to bring the culprits to justice himself.

  Chapter 13

  The Most Dangerous Game

  In 1924, the author Richard Connell wrote a short story entitled "The Most Dangerous Game." It was about a big-game hunter named General Zaroff who had tired of pursuing animals and had begun hunting a mu
ch more challenging and intelligent prey: human beings. It’s still a popular story. My daughter Lauren read it recently in school.

  As far as we know, until about 1980, Connell’s tale remained in the realm of fiction. But its status changed with a mild-mannered baker in Anchorage, Alaska, named Robert Hansen.

  We didn’t profile Hansen or devise a strategy to identify and catch him according to our usual procedure. In September 1983, by the time my unit was called in, Alaska state troopers had already identified Hansen as a murder suspect. But they weren’t sure of the extent of his crimes, or whether such an unlikely individual, a respectable family man and pillar of the community, was capable of the terrible things of which he was being accused.

  What had happened was this:

  The previous June 13, a young woman had run frantically to an Anchorage police officer. She had a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist and told an extraordinary story. She was a seventeen-year-old prostitute who’d been approached on the street by a short, pockmarked man with red hair who had offered her $200 for oral sex in his car. She said that while she was performing, he slipped a handcuff on her wrist and pulled out a gun, then drove her to his house in the fashionable Muldoon area of the city. No one else was home. He told her that if she cooperated and did what he asked, he would not hurt her. But then he forced her to strip naked, raped her, and inflicted severe pain by biting her nipples and thrusting a hammer into her vagina. While he still had her handcuffed to a pole in his basement and immobilized, he slept for several hours. When he awoke, he told her that he liked her so much that he was going to fly her in his private airplane out to his cabin in the woods, where they’d have sex again and then he’d fly her back to Anchorage, where he would free her.

  But she knew the chances of that were pretty remote. He had raped and assaulted her and hadn’t done anything to hide his identity. If he got her into that cabin, she would be in real trouble. At the airport, while her kidnapper was loading supplies into the plane, she managed to escape. She ran as fast as she could looking for help. That was when she found the policeman.

  From the description she gave, her kidnapper appeared to be Robert Hansen. He was in his mid-forties, had grown up in Iowa, and had been in the Anchorage area for seventeen years, where he ran a successful bakery and was considered a prominent member of the community. He was married, with a daughter and a son. The police drove her to Hansen’s house in Muldoon, which she said was where she’d been tortured. They took her to the airport and she identified the Piper Super Cub that belonged to Robert Hansen.

  The police then went to Hansen and confronted him with the young woman’s charges. He responded with outrage, saying he had never met her, and asserted that because of his prominence, she was obviously trying to shake him down for money. The very idea was ridiculous. "You can’t rape a prostitute, can you?" he said to police.

  And he had an alibi for the night in question. His wife and two children were in Europe for the summer, and he was home having dinner with two business associates. He gave their names and they corroborated his story. Police had no evidence on him—just the young woman’s word—so he wasn’t arrested or charged.

  But though they lacked proof, both the Anchorage police and Alaska state troopers office smelled smoke and knew a fire was out there somewhere. Back in 1980, construction workers had been excavating on Eklutna Road when they came upon the partial remains of a woman. Her body had been partly eaten by bears and bore the signs of having been stabbed to death and buried in a shallow grave. Known only as "Eklutna Annie," she had never been identified and her killer had never been caught.

  Later in the year, the body of Joanne Messina was discovered in a gravel pit near Seward. Then, in September 1982, hunters near the Knik River found the body of twenty-three-year-old Sherry Morrow in a shallow grave. She was a topless dancer who’d been missing since the previous November. She’d been shot three times. Shell casings found at the scene identified the bullets as coming from a .223 Ruger Mini-14, a high-powered hunting rifle. Unfortunately, it was a common weapon in Alaska, so it would have been difficult to track down and interview every hunter who owned one. But one peculiar aspect to the case was that no bullet holes were in her clothing, indicating she must have been naked when shot.

  Almost exactly a year later another body was discovered in a shallow grave along the bank of the Knik. This time it was Paula Golding, an out-of-work secretary who had rather desperately taken a job in a topless bar to make ends meet. She had also been shot with a Ruger Mini-14. She’d gone missing in April, and since then the seventeen-year-old prostitute had been abducted and escaped. Now, with Golding to add to the list of unsolved crimes, the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the Alaska state troopers office decided they’d better follow up on Mr. Hansen.

  Even though the police had a suspect before I heard about him, I wanted to make sure my judgment wouldn’t be clouded by the investigative work already done. So before I let them give me the specifics on their man during our first phone conference, I said, "First tell me about the crimes and let me tell you about the guy."

  They described the unsolved murders and the details of the young woman’s story. I described a scenario and an individual they said sounded very much like their suspect, down to the stuttering. Then they told me about Hansen, his job and family, his position in the community, his reputation as an outstanding game hunter. Did this sound like the kind of guy who could be capable of these crimes?

  He sure did, I told them. The problem was, while they had a lot of secondhand information, they just didn’t have physical evidence to charge him. The only way to get him off the street, which they were extremely anxious to do, was to get a confession. They asked me to come on-scene and help them develop their case.

  In a sense, this was the opposite of what we normally do in that we were working from a known subject, trying to determine whether his background, personality, and behavior fit a set of crimes.

  I brought along Jim Horn, who had recently joined my unit from the Boulder, Colorado, Resident Agency. We’d gone through new-agents training together back in the old days, and when I finally got authorization for four agents to work with me, I’d asked Jim to come back to Quantico. Along with Jim Reese, Jim Horn is now one of the two top stress-management experts in the Bureau, a critical function in our line of work. But in 1983, this was one of his first cases on the behavioral side.

  Getting to Anchorage was one of the more exciting and least pleasurable business trips I’ve had. It ended up with a red-eye, white-knuckle flight over water. When we arrived, the police picked us up and took us to our hotel. On the way, we passed some of the bars where the victims had worked. It was too cold most of the time for hookers to work outside, so they made their business connections in the bars, which were open practically twenty-four hours a day. They closed for maybe an hour to clean up and sweep out the drunks. At the time, largely as a result of the huge transient population that came in for the construction of the oil pipeline, Alaska had among the highest rates in the country of suicide, alcoholism, and venereal disease. It had very much become the modern version of our Wild West frontier.

  I found the entire atmosphere very strange. There appeared to be an ongoing conflict between the native people and those who had come from "the lower forty-eight." You had all these macho men walking around with big tattoos and looking as if they’d come straight out of a Marlboro ad. With the great distances people had to travel, it seemed as though almost everyone had an airplane, so Hansen wasn’t unusual in that respect.

  What was significant to us about this case was that it was the first time profiling was used to support a search warrant. We began analyzing everything we knew about the crimes and about Robert Hansen.

  As far as victimology was concerned, the known victims had been prostitutes or topless dancers. They were part of a great crop of available victims who traveled up and down the West Coast. Because they were so transient, and because prostitutes are n
ot in the habit of reporting their whereabouts to the police, it was difficult to know if anything had happened to any one of them until a body turned up. This was exactly the same problem the police and FBI faced with the Green River Killer down in Washington State. So the choice of victims was highly significant. The murderer was targeting only women who would not be missed.

  We didn’t know everything about Hansen’s background, but what we did know fit into a pattern. He was short and slight, heavily pockmarked, and spoke with a severe stutter. I surmised that he had had severe skin problems as a teenager and, between that and the speech impediment, was probably teased or shunned by his peers, particularly girls. So his self-esteem would have been low. That might also have been why he moved to Alaska—the idea of a new start in a new frontier. And, psychologically speaking, abusing prostitutes is a pretty standard way of getting back at women in general.

  I also made much of the fact that Hansen was known as a proficient hunter. He had made a local reputation for himself by taking down a wild Dall sheep with a crossbow while hunting in the Kuskokwim Mountains. I don’t mean to imply that most hunters are inadequate types, but in my experience, if you have an inadequate type to begin with, one of the ways he might try to compensate is by hunting or playing around with guns or knives. The severe stutter reminded me of David Carpenter, San Francisco’s "Trailside Killer." As in Carpenter’s case, I was betting that Hansen’s speech problem disappeared when he felt most dominant and in control.

  Putting this all together, even though this was a scenario we’d never seen before, I was beginning to get an image of what I thought was going on. Prostitutes and "exotic dancers" had been found dead in remote wooded areas of gunshot wounds suggestive of those made with a hunting rifle. In at least one case, the shots had been fired at an undressed body. The seventeen-year-old who said she had escaped claimed Robert Hansen wanted to fly her to his cabin in the woods. Hansen had packed his wife and children off to Europe for the summer and was home alone.