Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  It was my belief that, like General Zaroff in "The Most Dangerous Game," Robert Hansen had tired of elk and bear and Dall sheep and turned his attention to a more interesting prey. Zaroff explained that he used captured sailors who shipwrecked on the intentionally unmarked rocks in the channel leading to his island: "I hunt the scum of the earth—sailors from tramp ships—a thoroughbred horse or hound is worth more than a score of them."

  Hansen, I was surmising, regarded prostitutes in much the same way. They were people he could regard as lower and more worthless than himself. And he wouldn’t need the gift of gab to get one to come with him. He would pick her up, make her his prisoner, fly her out into the wilderness, strip her naked, let her loose, then hunt her down with a gun or knife.

  His MO wouldn’t have started this way. He would have started simply by killing the early ones, then using the plane to fly their bodies far away. These were crimes of anger. He would have gotten off on having his victims beg for their lives. Being a hunter, at a certain point it would have occurred to him that he could combine these various activities by flying them out into the wilderness alive, then hunting them down for sport and further sexual gratification. This would have been the ultimate control. And it would have become addictive. He would want to do it again and again.

  And this led me to the details of the search warrant. What they wanted from Jim and me was an affidavit they could take to court explaining what profiling was all about, what we would expect to find in the search, and our rationale for being able to say so.

  Unlike a common criminal or someone whose gun is an interchangeable tool, Hansen’s hunting rifle would be important to him. Therefore, I predicted the rifle would be somewhere in his house, though not in open view. It would be in a crawl space, behind paneling or a false wall, hidden in the attic; someplace like that.

  I also predicted our guy would be a "saver," though not entirely for the normal reasons. A lot of sexual killers take souvenirs from their victims and give them to the women in their lives as a sign of dominance and a way of being able to relive the experience. But Hansen couldn’t very well put a woman’s head on the wall the way he would a big-game animal’s, so I thought it likely he would take some other kind of trophy. Since there was no evidence of human mutilation on the bodies, I expected him to have taken jewelry, which he would have given to his wife or daughter, making up a story about where the piece came from. He didn’t appear to have kept the victims’ underwear or any other item we could account for, but he might have kept small photographs or something else from a wallet. And from my experience with this type of personality, I thought we might find a journal or list documenting his exploits.

  The next order of business was cracking his alibi. It was no big deal for his two business associates to say they were with him the night in question if nothing was at stake for them. If we could create some high stakes, however, that could change things. Anchorage police got the district attorney to authorize a grand jury to investigate the abduction and assault of the young prostitute who had identified Hansen. The businessmen were then approached by the police and asked to give their stories again. Only this time they were informed that if they were found to be lying to the grand jury, they’d each be facing hard time.

  As we’d anticipated, that was enough to break things open. Both men admitted they had not been with Hansen that night, that he’d asked them to help him out of what he characterized as an awkward situation.

  So Hansen was arrested on charges of kidnapping and rape. A search warrant of his home was immediately executed. There police found the Ruger Mini-14 rifle. Ballistics tests matched it to the shell casings found near the bodies. As we’d figured, Hansen had a well-outfitted trophy room where he watched television, full of animal heads, walrus tusks, horns and antlers, mounted birds, and skins on the floor. Under the floorboards in the attic they found more weapons, and various cheap items of jewelry belonging to the victims. One of these was a Timex watch. He had given other items to his wife and daughter. They also found a driver’s license and other ID cards from some of the dead women. They didn’t come across a journal, but they did find the equivalent: an aviation map marked with where he had left various bodies.

  All of this evidence, of course, was enough to make a case to nail him. But without the warrant, we wouldn’t have had it. And the only way we could get a warrant in this instance was to demonstrate to a judge’s satisfaction that there was sufficient behavioral evidence to justify a search. We have successfully aided in search-warrant affidavits leading to arrests many times since then, perhaps most notably in the Delaware case of Steven Pennell, the "I-40 Killer," who was executed in 1992 for torturing and killing women he picked up in his specially outfitted van.

  By the time Anchorage police and Alaska state troopers actually interrogated Robert Hansen in February 1984, I was home recovering from my collapse in Seattle. Roy Hazelwood, who was heroically covering for me while still handling all his own work, coached the police on interview techniques.

  As he had when police first confronted him with the abduction charge, Hansen denied everything. He pointed to his happy home life and his success in business. At first he claimed that the reason shells from his rifle had been found at various sites was that he had been there and practiced his shooting. Apparently, the presence of dead bodies at each of the locations was merely coincidental. But eventually, faced with a mountain of evidence and the prospect of an angry prosecutor seeking the death penalty if he didn’t come clean, he admitted to the murders.

  In trying to rationalize and justify himself, he claimed that he only wanted oral sex from the prostitutes he picked up—something he didn’t feel he should ask from his proper, respectable wife. If the hooker satisfied him, he said, that would be that. The ones who didn’t comply—who tried to control the situation—those were the ones he punished.

  In this way, Hansen’s behavior mirrored what we learned in our prison interview with Monte Rissell. Both Hansen and Rissell were inadequate types with bad backgrounds. The women who received the worst of Rissell’s wrath were the ones who tried to feign friendship or enjoyment to placate him. What they didn’t realize was that for this type of individual, the power and domination of the situation is everything.

  Hansen also asserted that thirty to forty prostitutes had gone with him willingly in his plane and that he had brought them back alive. I found this proposition hard to believe. The class of prostitutes Hansen picked up are in business to turn a quick trick and move on to the next customer. If they’ve been in the business for any time, they’re generally pretty good assessors of people. They’re not willingly going to take a plane ride into the country with some john they’ve just met. If they made a mistake with him, it would be in letting him convince them to come with him to his house. Once he got them inside, it was too late.

  Like his fictional counterpart, General Zaroff, Hansen stated that he hunted and killed only a certain class of people. He would never consider hurting a "decent" woman, but felt that prostitutes and topless or nude dancers were fair game. "I’m not saying I hate all women, I don’t . . . but I guess prostitutes are women I’m putting down as lower than myself. . . . It’s like it was a game, they had to pitch the ball before I could bat."

  Once he started his hunting, the killing became anticlimactic. "The excitement," Hansen told interrogators, "was in the stalking."

  He confirmed our suspicions about his background. He had grown up in Pocahontas, Iowa, where his father was a baker. Robert was a shoplifter as a child, and long after he reached adulthood and could afford to buy what he wanted, he still stole for the thrill of it. His trouble with girls started in high school, he said. He resented the fact that his stuttering and bad acne kept people away from him. "Because I looked and talked like a freak, every time I looked at a girl she would turn away." He had an uneventful stint in the Army, then married when he was twenty-two. There followed a string of arson and burglary convictions, separation and div
orce from his wife, and remarriage. He moved to Alaska upon his second wife’s graduation from college. There he could make a new start. But his troubles with the law continued for several more years, including repeated assault charges against women who apparently rejected his advances. Interestingly, like so many of the others, he drove a VW Beetle at the time.

  On February 27, 1984, Hansen pled guilty to four counts of murder, one of rape, one of kidnapping, and assorted theft and weapons charges. He was sentenced to 499 years in prison.

  One of the questions we’d had to answer in the Hansen case before police knew how to proceed was whether all of the noted prostitute and topless-dancer deaths in Anchorage had been or could have been committed by the same individual. This is often a critical issue in criminal investigative analysis. Just about the time the body of Robert Hansen’s first victim was discovered in Alaska, I’d been called by the Buffalo, New York, Police Department to evaluate a string of vicious, apparently racially hate-based murders.

  On September 22, 1980, a fourteen-year-old boy named Glenn Dunn was shot and killed in the parking lot of a supermarket. Witnesses described the gunman as a young white male. The next day Harold Green, thirty-two, was shot at a fast-food restaurant in suburban Cheektowaga. That same night, thirty-year-old Emmanuel Thomas was killed in front of his own house, in the same neighborhood as the previous day’s murder. And the next day another man, Joseph McCoy, was killed in Niagara Falls.

  As far as anyone could tell, only two factors linked these senseless murders. All the victims were black men. And all had been killed by .22-caliber bullets, prompting the press to bestow an instant title: the ".22-Caliber Killer."

  Racial tension ran high in Buffalo. Many in the black community felt helpless and accused the police of doing nothing to protect them. In some ways it seemed to mirror the horror taking place in Atlanta. And as so often happens in these situations, things didn’t immediately get better. They got worse.

  On October 8, a seventy-one-year-old black taxi driver named Parler Edwards was found in the trunk of his cab in suburban Amherst with his heart cut out. The next day, another black taxi driver, forty-year-old Ernest Jones, was found on the bank of the Niagara River with his heart torn out of his chest. His cab, covered with blood, was found a couple of miles away within the Buffalo city limits. The day after that, a Friday, a white man roughly matching the description of the .22-Caliber Killer entered the hospital room of thirty-seven-year-old Collin Cole, announced, "I hate niggers," and proceeded to strangle the patient. Only a nurse’s arrival caused the intruder to flee and saved Cole from death.

  The community was in an uproar. Public officials were concerned a wide-scale reaction from black activist groups might be imminent. At the request of Buffalo SAC Richard Bretzing, I came up that weekend. Bretzing is a very proper, solid guy, a real family man and a key member of the FBI’s so-called Mormon Mafia. I’ll never forget, he had a sign in his office saying something to the effect of, "If a man fails at home, he fails in his life."

  As I always try to do, I looked first at the victimology. As the police had suggested, there really weren’t any significant common denominators between the six victims except their race and, I felt, being unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Quite clearly, the .22-caliber shootings were all done by the same individual. These were mission-oriented, assassin-style killings. The only evident psychopathology in these crimes was a pathological hatred of blacks. Everything else about them was detached and removed.

  I could see this individual joining hate groups, or even groups with positive goals or values such as a church and convincing himself he was contributing to them. For this reason, I could see him joining the military, but he would have been discharged early in his career for psychological reasons or failure to adjust to military life. This would be a rational and organized individual, and his prejudiced delusional system would be orderly and "logical" within itself.

  The other two crimes, the horrifying attacks on the taxi drivers, also were racially based, but in these cases, I did not feel we were dealing with the same offender. These crimes were the work of a disorganized, pathologically disoriented person, possibly hallucinatory and in all probability a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. To me, the crime scenes reflected rage, overcontrol, and overkill. For the four shootings and two eviscerations to have been perpetrated by the same individual would have meant a severe personality disintegration between the murders of Joseph McCoy and that of Parler Edwards less than two weeks later. This didn’t square with the incident in the hospital—if that person was, in fact, the .22-Caliber Killer—plus my instinct and experience told me that the heart remover’s sick fantasies had been building for a long time, several years at least. Robbery wasn’t a motive in either set of killings, but while the first four represented a quick hit and get the hell out, the crime scenes of the last two clearly showed that the offender took a lot of time at the site. If these six crimes were related, it was more likely to me that the psycho who cut out the hearts might have been triggered by the racist who had already gone about assassinating blacks in the community.

  Then, on December 22, in midtown Manhattan, four blacks and one Hispanic were knifed to death over a thirteen-hour period by the "Midtown Slasher." Two other black victims narrowly escaped being killed. On December 29 and 30, the slasher apparently struck again upstate, stabbing and killing thirty-one-year-old Roger Adams in Buffalo and twenty-six-year-old Wendell Barnes in Rochester. In the next three days, three other black men in Buffalo survived similar attacks.

  Now I couldn’t assure police that the .22-Caliber Killer was also the Midtown Slasher or the man who had committed this last set of crimes. But what I could say with conviction was that it was the same type of individual. They all had the racist element, and all were committed in a blitz-assassination style.

  The .22-Caliber case broke in two steps over the next several months. In January, Army private Joseph Christopher, age twenty-five, was arrested at Fort Benning, Georgia (where three years before William Hance had tried to play the racist card in the "Forces of Evil" murders), charged with slashing a black fellow soldier. A search of his old house near Buffalo turned up a large store of .22-caliber ammunition and a sawed-off rifle. Christopher had just enlisted the previous November and was on leave from Fort Benning during the times of the Buffalo and Manhattan murders.

  While in the Confinement Center at Fort Benning, he told Capt. Aldrich Johnson, the officer in charge, that he did "that thing in Buffalo." He was charged with the Buffalo shootings and some of the stabbings. He was convicted, and after some back-and-forth wrangling about his mental competence, was sentenced to sixty years to life. Capt. Matthew Levine, the psychiatrist who examined Christopher at Martin Army Hospital, said he was amazed by how closely Christopher fit the .22-Caliber Killer profile. As the profile had predicted, the subject did not adjust well to military life.

  Christopher neither admitted nor denied the murders of the two taxi drivers. He wasn’t charged with them and they don’t fit into the pattern of the others, from either a modus operandi or signature perspective. Both of these are extremely important concepts in criminal investigative analysis, and I have spent many hours on the witness stands of courtrooms throughout the country trying to get judges and juries to understand the distinction between them.

  Modus operandi—MO—is learned behavior. It’s what the perpetrator does to commit the crime. It is dynamic—that is, it can change. Signature, a term I coined to distinguish it from MO, is what the perpetrator has to do to fulfill himself. It is static; it does not change.

  For example, you wouldn’t expect a juvenile to keep committing crimes the same way as he grows up unless he gets it perfect the first time. But if he gets away with one, he’ll learn from it and get better and better at it. That’s why we say that MO is dynamic. On the other hand, if this guy is committing crimes so that, say, he can dominate or inflict pain on or provoke begging and pleading from a
victim, that’s a signature. It’s something that expresses the killer’s personality. It’s something he needs to do.

  In many states, the only way prosecutors can link crimes is by MO, which I believe we’ve shown is an archaic method. In the Christopher case, a defense attorney could easily make the argument that the Buffalo .22-caliber shootings and the Manhattan midtown slashings showed a markedly different modus operandi. And he’d be right. But the signature is similar—a propensity to randomly assassinate black men fueled by racial hatred.

  The shootings and the eviscerations, on the other hand, show me a markedly different signature. The individual who cut out the hearts, while still possessing a related underlying motivation, has a ritualized, obsessive-compulsive signature. Each type needs something out of the crime, but each one needs something different.

  The differences between MO and signature can be subtle. Take the case of a bank robber in Texas who made all of his captives undress, posed them in sexual positions, and took photographs of them. That’s his signature. It was not necessary or helpful to the commission of a bank robbery. In fact, it kept him there longer and therefore placed him in greater jeopardy of being caught. Yet it was something he clearly felt a need to do.

  Then there was a bank robber in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I flew out to provide on-site consultation in the case. This guy also made everyone in the bank undress, but he didn’t take pictures. He did it so the witnesses would be so preoccupied and embarrassed that they wouldn’t be looking at him and so couldn’t make a positive ID later on. This was a means toward successfully robbing the bank. This was MO.

  Signature analysis played a significant role in the 1989 trial of Steven Pennell in Delaware, in whose case we’d prepared the affidavit leading to the search warrant. Steve Mardigian from my unit worked closely with the combined task force of New Castle County and Delaware state police, producing a profile that allowed police to narrow their focus and come up with a proactive strategy to nail the killer.