Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  Prostitutes had been found strangled with their skulls fractured along Interstates 40 and 13. The bodies had clearly been sexually abused and tortured. Steve’s profile was very accurate. He said the offender would be a white male in his late twenties to early thirties, employed in one of the construction trades. He would drive a van with high mileage, cruise excessively looking for victims, exhibit a macho image, have an ongoing relationship with a wife or girlfriend, but enjoy dominating women. He would bring his weapons of choice with him and destroy evidence afterward. He would be familiar with the area and choose his disposal sites accordingly. He would be emotionally flat during the crimes and would kill again and again until caught.

  Steven B. Pennell was a thirty-one-year-old white male who worked as an electrician, drove a van with high mileage, cruised excessively looking for victims, exhibited a macho image, was married but enjoyed dominating women, had a carefully prepared "rape kit" in his van, attempted to destroy evidence when he knew the police were onto him, was familiar with the area, and chose his disposal sites accordingly. He was emotionally flat during the crimes and killed repeatedly until caught.

  He was located when Mardigian suggested using a decoy female cop posing as a hooker. For two months Officer Renee C. Lano walked the highways, always looking for a man in a van to pull up who matched the profile’s description. They were particularly interested in the van’s carpeting. Blue fibers consistent with automobile carpeting had been found on one of the victims. If a van did stop, Lano was under strict orders not to get in—even though she was wired, that could have been a death sentence—but to find out as much as she could. When a guy matching the traits finally did stop, she engaged him in conversation and haggled extensively about the price for her services through the opened passenger door. As soon as she noticed the blue carpeting, she began admiring the van, and as they talked, she began casually scraping up carpet fibers with her fingernails. The FBI laboratory would confirm that they matched the previous samples.

  At Pennell’s trial, I was called in to testify about the signature aspects of the case. The defense was trying to show that it was unlikely these crimes were all committed by the same individual because so many details of the modus operandi varied. I made it clear that regardless of the MO, the common denominator in each of the murders was physical, sexual, and emotional torture. In some cases the murderer had used pliers to squeeze his victims’ breasts and cut their nipples. He had bound others at the wrists and ankles, cut them on the legs, whipped or beaten their buttocks, or hit them with a hammer. So, though the methods of torture varied—the MO, if you will—the signature was the pleasure he received out of inflicting pain and hearing his victims’ anguished screams. This wasn’t necessary to accomplish the murder. It was necessary for him to get what he wanted to out of the crime.

  Even if Steven Pennell were still alive and reading this, he would not be able to change his behavior in future crimes. He might be able to devise different or more ingenious methods of torturing women. But he would not be able to refrain from the torture itself.

  Fortunately for all of us, as I mentioned, the State of Delaware had the good judgment and decency to execute Pennell by lethal injection on March 14, 1992.

  One of our landmark cases in the use of signature analysis was the 1991 trial of George Russell Jr., charged with the bludgeoning and strangulation murder of three white women in Seattle—Mary Anne Pohlreich, Andrea Levine, and Carol Marie Beethe—the year before. Steve Etter from my unit did the profiling, then I went out to testify. In these cases, the prosecution knew it could not get a conviction based on a single murder. Police had the most compelling evidence in the Pohlreich killing and felt it would shore up the other two cases. So the key was tying all three together.

  Russell wasn’t the type you’d think of for these heinous crimes. Though having a long record as a petty thief, he was a handsome black man in his thirties, well spoken and charming, with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Even the local Mercer Island police who’d run him in on many charges in the past couldn’t believe he would commit murder.

  By 1990, it was still unusual to see sexually based homicide between races, but as society loosened up and became more tolerant, we were beginning to see race as less of an issue. This would be particularly true for a cooler, more sophisticated type like Russell. He regularly dated both black and white women and had friends in both races.

  The strategic focal point came when Public Defender Miriam Schwartz made a pretrial motion before King County Superior Court judge Patricia Aitken to have the cases severed from each other and tried separately, based on the premise that the three murders were not committed by the same offender. The prosecutors, Rebecca Roe and Jeff Baird, asked me to explain how the crimes were all linked.

  I mentioned the blitz-style MO attack in each one. Since the three killings happened over a seven-week period, I would not expect the offender to change his MO unless something had gone wrong in one case and he felt a need to improve upon it. But more compelling was the signature aspect.

  All three women had been left naked and posed provocatively and degradingly. The sexual content of the posed scene escalated from one to the next. The first was posed with hands clasped and legs crossed at the ankles and left near a sewer grate and trash Dumpster. The second was posed on a bed with a pillow over her head, her legs bent out to each side, a rifle inserted into her vagina, and red high heels on her feet. The final one was posed spread-eagled on her bed with a dildo in her mouth and the second Joy of Sex book placed under her left arm.

  The blitz attacks were necessary to kill these women. The degrading posing was not.

  I explained the difference between posing and staging. Staging, I said, appears in crimes where the offender is trying to throw off the investigation by making the police believe that something happened other than what did, such as when a rapist tries to make his intrusion look like a routine burglary. That would be an aspect of MO. Posing, on the other hand, would be signature.

  "We don’t get that many cases of posing," I testified at the hearing, "treating the victim like a prop to leave a specific message. . . . These are crimes of anger, crimes of power. It’s the thrill of the hunt, it is the thrill of the kill, and it is the thrill afterwards of how that subject leaves that victim and how he’s basically beating the system."

  I felt confident in saying, "The probability is extremely high that it was a single suspect." Bob Keppel, the chief criminal investigator with the state attorney general’s office and a veteran of the Green River Task Force, testified along with me, saying that of more than a thousand murder cases he’d examined, only about ten had included posing, and none had all of the elements of these three.

  At this point, we weren’t saying that Russell was the offender; all we were saying was that whoever did one did all three.

  The defense planned to bring in an expert to refute what I had to say, to testify that I was wrong on signature and that these three crimes were not committed by the same individual. Ironically, that person was my longtime FBI colleague and serial-killer study partner, Robert Ressler, retired from the Bureau but still consulting in the field.

  I thought this was a pretty tight and compelling case for anyone as experienced in profiling and crime-scene analysis as both Bob and I were, and so I was extremely surprised that he would be willing to come out on the other side and testify for severance of the cases. To put it bluntly, I felt he was out-and-out wrong. But as we’ve all admitted many times, what we do is far from an exact science, so he was certainly entitled to his opinion. Bob and I have since come out on opposite sides of a number of issues, perhaps most noticeably as to whether Jeffrey Dahmer was insane. Bob sided with the defense that he was. I agreed with Park Dietz, who testified for the prosecution, that he was not.

  I was therefore even more surprised when Bob said he had other commitments and never showed up for the Russell pretrial hearing, and instead sent another retired agent, Russ
Vorpagel. Russ is a bright guy. He was a chess champion who could play against ten opponents at once. But profiling wasn’t his main specialty, and I thought the facts were against him. He endured a pretty hard time from Rebecca Roe when she cross-examined him after he disputed my opinion. At the end of the hearing, Judge Aitken ruled that based on the signature evidence Keppel and I had presented regarding the likelihood of a single offender in all three cases, they could be tried together.

  I testified on signature again during the trial itself, refuting the multiple-killer theory the defense had put forth. In the Carol Beethe murder, defense attorney Schwartz suggested that her boyfriend had both the opportunity and the motive. We always study spouses or lovers in sexual homicides, and it was my firm opinion that this was a sexually motivated "stranger" homicide.

  In the end, a jury of six men and six women deliberated four days and found George Waterfield Russell Jr., guilty of one count of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole and sent to the state’s maximum-security penitentiary at Walla Walla.

  This was my first time back in Seattle since my collapse and coma there. It was good to be back and have a hand in solving a case after the intense frustrations of Green River. I went back to Swedish Hospital and was pleased to see they still had the plaque I’d given them in thanks. I went back to the Hilton Hotel to see if I could remember anything, but I couldn’t. I suspect that that was just too much trauma for my mind to consciously process. And anyway, after all the time I’d put in on the road for so many years, hotel rooms all blend together.

  We have now developed signature analysis to the point that we testify routinely in serial-murder trials, not only I but other profilers who’ve taken up my interest as well, most notably Larry Ankrom and Greg Cooper.

  In 1993, Greg Cooper played a major role in obtaining twin first-degree murder convictions against Gregory Mosely, who had raped, beaten, and stabbed two women in two separate jurisdictions in North Carolina. Like the related crimes in the Russell trial, it would have been difficult for either jurisdiction to successfully convict on its own. Both had to have testimony linking the cases, and after studying the crime-scene photos and case files, Greg felt he could give it.

  The key to signature analysis in the Mosely cases, Greg decided, was overkill. Both victims were lonely, single, mildly handicapped women in their early twenties who had attended the same country-western nightclub, where they had been abducted a couple of months apart. Both had been severely beaten. You might say beaten to death, except for the fact that they were also strangled manually and by ligature; one had been stabbed twelve times, and there was evidence of vaginal and anal penetration. There was forensic evidence in one case, including DNA from semen linking the crime to Mosely. Both rape-torture murders had been committed in secluded areas and the bodies dumped at isolated, remote sites.

  Greg testified at the first trial that the signature behavioral evidence indicated an inadequate personality who was a sexual sadist. His inadequacy was clear from his choice of victims. His sadism was even clearer from what he did to them. Unlike many of the inadequate, disorganized types, this one didn’t kill them before mutilating their bodies. He wanted to be in total physical and emotional control. He wanted to be the author of their pain and enjoy the response his cruelty provoked.

  Through his testimony in the first case, Greg helped enable the prosecution to introduce the second murder. Mosely was convicted and sentenced to death. In the second trial nine months later, Greg was able to do the same thing, achieving another conviction and death sentence.

  The first time he testified, Greg and Mosely locked eyes as Greg described Mosely’s personality to the packed courtroom. Greg could tell by the grim expression on Mosely’s face that he was thinking, "How the hell could you know that?" The pressure was intense. If Greg had been unsuccessful, the case would have been thrown out and the second case could have been weakened beyond salvage.

  When Mosely first saw Greg at his second trial, he muttered to his police escorts, "That’s the son of a bitch who’s gonna try to get me again!"

  Traditionally, to get a successful prosecution and conviction in a murder case, you’ve needed conclusive forensic evidence, eyewitness accounts or a confession, or good, strong circumstantial evidence. Now, from our work in behavioral profiling from crime scenes and signature analysis, there is another arrow in the police’s and prosecution’s quiver. In and of itself, it’s not usually enough to convict. But taken together with one or more of the other elements, it can often link various crimes together and be just what is needed to put a case over the top.

  Serial killers play a most dangerous game. The more we understand the way they play, the more we can stack the odds against them.

  Chapter 14

  Who Killed the All-American Girl?

  Who killed the all-American girl?

  That was the haunting question that had hung over the small town of Wood River, Illinois, for four years. Among many others, it obsessed Inspector Alva Busch of the state police, and it obsessed Don Weber, the state’s attorney for Madison County.

  The evening of Tuesday, June 20, 1978, Karla Brown and her fiancé, Mark Fair, threw a party with plenty of beer and music for the friends who had helped them move into their new home at 979 Acton Avenue in Wood River. It was a single-story, white, wooden-sided house on a tree-lined street, with slender round columns flanking the front door, and they had spent the last two weeks getting this typical starter home into move-in shape. It represented an exciting new beginning for the twenty-three-year-old Karla and twenty-seven-year-old Mark. They’d been going together for five years when Mark had finally made it clear he’d gotten over his male hesitancy and was ready to make the real commitment. With Karla finishing up her degree at a local college and Mark working as an apprentice electrician, their future was bright.

  Despite the years of putting off the big question, Mark Fair knew how fortunate he was to have Karla as his intended wife. Karla Lou Brown was the embodiment of the all-American girl. Less than five foot tall, she had wavy blond hair, a knockout figure, and a beauty queen’s smile. She had been the ideal of the boys and the envy of the other girls at Roxana High School, where everyone remembered her as a pert, peppy cheerleader. Her closest friends knew a sensitive, introspective dimension went along with the charming, flirty public side. They knew she was devoted to Mark, who was strong, athletically built, and more than a foot taller than she. Together, Karla and Mark made a terrific couple.

  After the party Tuesday night they went back to their apartment in East Alton to pack up the remaining boxes. They hoped to be ready to actually move in and sleep in the new place the next night.

  Wednesday morning, after Mark left for his job with Camp Electric and Heating Company, Karla went over to Acton Avenue, where she would organize and straighten until Mark got off work about four-thirty. They were excited about spending the night there.

  When Mark finished work, he went over to the house of his friend Tom Fiegenbaum, who lived on the same block as Mark’s parents and had agreed to help him move a large and unusual A-frame doghouse from the parents’ backyard.

  They got to Acton Avenue about five-thirty, and as Tom backed his truck down the driveway, Mark went to get Karla. He couldn’t find her, which meant she’d probably run out to get something she needed for the house, but he noticed the back door was unlocked. This bothered him. She was going to have to be careful about that sort of thing.

  Mark brought Tom in to show him the house. After showing him the main floor, Mark led him into the kitchen and down the stairs to the basement. When he reached the bottom stair, he didn’t like what he saw. Several small tables were overturned. Things seemed to be in a mess, despite the fact that he and Karla had organized everything the night before. Something was spilled on the sofa and the floor.

  "What’s happening here?" Mark asked rhetorically. As he turn
ed to go back upstairs to try to find Karla, he saw through the door to the laundry room.

  There was Karla, on her knees and bent forward, wearing a sweater but naked from the waist down, her hands tied behind her back with electrical cord, her head stuffed into a ten-gallon, drum-like barrel filled with water. The barrel was one of the ones he and Karla had used for moving clothes. And the sweater, which had been packed in one of the barrels, was one she wore only in winter.

  "Oh my God! Karla!" Mark screamed as he and Tom raced over. Mark pulled her head from the barrel and laid her back on the floor. Her face was puffy and blue, with a deep cut across her forehead and another on her jawline. Her eyes were open, but it was obvious she was dead.

  Mark collapsed in grief. He asked Tom to find something to cover her with, and after Tom came back with a red blanket, they called the police.

  When Officer David George of the Wood River Police Department arrived a few minutes later, Mark and Tom were outside the front door waiting for him. They led the officer down to the basement and showed him the scene. Throughout the encounter, Mark was barely able to contain himself. "Oh, God, Karla," he kept repeating.

  This kind of horror wasn’t supposed to happen in Wood River, a quiet community about fifteen minutes from St. Louis. Before long, all the top cops were there to see what was going on, including thirty-nine-year-old chief of police, Ralph Skinner.

  Karla showed signs of severe blunt-force trauma to the head, possibly from the upset TV tray stand in the room. Two socks were tied around her neck, and the autopsy would conclude that she had died by strangulation and was already dead by the time her head was submerged in the drum of water.