As we all know by now, stalking targets are not limited to the famous. There are, of course, frequent cases of people being stalked by former spouses or lovers. The deadly stage is reached when the stalker finally thinks, "If I can’t have her (or him), no one else can either." But Jim Wright, our unit’s most experienced specialist on stalking and among the leading experts on the subject in law enforcement, points out that anyone who deals with the public, particularly women, may be vulnerable to stalkers. In other words, the object of a stalker’s desire need not be on television or the movie screen. She might be a waitress at the restaurant down the block or a teller at the local bank. Or she could even work in the same store or business.
That was what happened to Kris Welles, a young woman who worked for Conlans Furniture Company in Missoula, Montana. Kris was efficient and well respected and worked her way up in the company first to sales manager and then, in 1985, to overall manager.
At the same time Kris worked in the office, a man named Wayne Nance worked in the warehouse . He tended to keep to himself, but he seemed to like Kris, and she was always cordial and friendly to him. Still, Wayne’s personality blew hot and cold, and the temper she perceived just beneath the surface scared her. No one had any complaints with Wayne’s work habits, though. Day in and day out, he consistently worked the hardest of anyone in the warehouse.
What neither Kris nor her husband, Doug, a local gun dealer, knew was that Wayne Nance was obsessed with her. He watched her all the time and kept a cardboard box filled with souvenirs of her—snapshots, notes she had written at the office, anything that belonged to her.
The other thing neither the Welleses nor the Missoula police knew was that Wayne Nance was a killer. In 1974, he had sexually molested and stabbed a five-year-old girl. It was later discovered he had also bound, gagged, and shot several adult women, including the mother of his best friend. Alarmingly, all of this had taken place in counties neighboring where he now lived. Yet even in sparsely populated Montana, one police jurisdiction had no idea of the criminal activity recorded in another jurisdiction.
Kris Welles didn’t know any of this until the night Nance broke into her and Doug’s home outside of town. They had a female golden retriever, but the dog put up no resistance to him. Armed with a handgun, he shot Doug, tied him up in the basement, then forced Kris upstairs into the bedroom where he tied her to the bed so he could rape her. She obviously knew him well and he made no attempt to hide his identity.
Meanwhile, in the basement, Doug had managed to wriggle free from his bonds. Weak and on the verge of unconsciousness from pain and loss of blood, he staggered over to a table where a rifle loader from his store was set up. He managed to feed one round into the rifle, then mustering all his remaining strength, he pulled himself slowly and agonizingly up the basement stairs. As quietly as he could, he made his way up the stairs to the second floor, and in the hallway, his eyes blurring, he took aim for his one shot at Nance.
He had to get him before Nance saw him and went for his own gun. Nance was unhurt and had more shots available. Doug would be no match for him.
He squeezed the trigger. He hit Nance, knocking him backward. But then Nance got up again and started coming for him. The shot hadn’t been deadly enough. Nance kept coming for him toward the staircase. There was nowhere to go and Doug couldn’t leave Kris alone there, so he did the only thing he could. He charged forward at Nance, using his empty rifle as a club. He kept hammering at the powerful Nance until Kris could get herself free and help him.
To this day, the Welles case remains one of the few on record in which intended victims of a serial killer were actually able to fight back and kill their attacker in self-defense. Their story is a miraculous one, and we have had them out several times to speak to classes at Quantico. This unassuming couple have been able to give us rare insight from the perspective of victims who became heroes. Having been to hell and back that night, they are amazingly warm, sensitive, and "together" people.
At the end of one of their presentations at Quantico, a police officer in the class asked them, "If Wayne Nance had lived and there was no death penalty—that is, if he were still sharing the earth with you—would you both be as mentally sound as you are now?"
They turned and looked at each other and then silently agreed on their response. "Almost definitely not," said Doug Welles.
Chapter 18
Battle of the Shrinks
What kind of person could have done such a thing?
During our serial-killer study, Bob Ressler and I were in Joliet, Illinois, where we’d just interviewed Richard Speck. I was back in my hotel room that evening and was watching CBS news when I saw Dan Rather interviewing another killer, named Thomas Vanda, who also happened to be incarcerated at Joliet Penitentiary. Vanda was in for killing a woman through multiple stab wounds. He’d been in and out of mental institutions for much of his life, and every time he’d been "cured" and let out, he would commit another crime. Before the murder for which he was now doing time, he’d killed once before.
I called Ressler and said we had to talk to him while we were here. From the televised interview, I could tell he was the perfect inadequate type. He could as easily have been an arsonist as a killer. Or, if he had the tools and skills, he could have been a bomber.
We went back to the prison the next day and Vanda agreed to see us. He was curious as to what we were doing there, and he didn’t get many visitors. Before the interview, we went over his file.
Vanda was white, about five foot nine, and in his mid-twenties. He had a soft, inappropriate affect and smiled a lot. Even while smiling, he still had "the look"—eyes darting back and forth all the time, nervous twitches, hand-rubbing. You wouldn’t comfortably turn your back on this guy. The first thing he wanted to know was how I thought he looked on TV. When I told him he looked good, he laughed and loosened up. Among the things he told us was that he had joined a Bible study group in prison and thought it had helped him a lot. It may very well have. But I’ve seen a lot of inmates nearing parole-board appearances join religious groups to show they’re on the right path to be released.
You could argue about whether this guy belonged in a maximum security prison or a secure mental hospital, but after the interview, I went to see the staff psychiatrist who treated him. I asked him how Vanda was doing.
The psychiatrist, who was around fifty, gave me a positive response, saying Vanda was "responding very nicely to medication and therapy." The psychiatrist mentioned the Bible study group as one example and said Vanda could be ready for parole if this progress continued.
I asked him if he knew the specifics of what Vanda had done. "No, I don’t want to know," he replied. "I don’t have the time, with all the inmates I have to deal with here." And, he added, he didn’t want to unfairly influence his relationship with the patient.
"Well, Doctor, let me tell you what Thomas Vanda did," I insist. Before he can protest, I went on to relate how this asocial, loner-type personality joins a church group, and how, after a meeting when everyone else is gone, he propositions the young woman who hosted the meeting. She turns him down and Vanda doesn’t take the rejection real well. Guys like that generally don’t. He knocks her down, goes to her kitchen, comes back with a knife, and stabs her numerous times. Then, as she’s on the floor dying, he inserts his penis into an open wound in her abdomen and ejaculates.
I’ve got to say, I find this amazing. She’s like a rag doll at this point. Her body is warm, she’s bleeding, he’s got to be getting blood on himself. He can’t even depersonalize her. And yet he’s able to get an erection and get it off. So you’ll understand why I insist this is a crime of anger, not sex. What’s going through his mind is not sex—it’s anger and rage.
This, by the way, is why it doesn’t do any good to castrate repeat rapists—as satisfying and fulfilling as the idea may be to some of us. The problem is, it doesn’t stop them, either physically or emotionally. Rape is definitely a crime of anger. I
f you cut someone’s balls off, you’re going to have one angry man.
I finished my story about Vanda. "You’re disgusting, Douglas!" the psychiatrist declared. "Get out of my office!"
"I’m disgusting?" I countered. "You’re gonna be in a position to make a recommendation that Thomas Vanda is responding to therapy and could be freed, and you don’t know who in the hell you’re talking to when you’re dealing with these inmates. How are you supposed to understand them if you haven’t taken the time to look at the crime-scene photos or reports, to go over the autopsy protocols? Have you looked at the way the crime was committed? Do you know if it was planned? Do you understand the behavior leading up to it? Do you know how he left the crime scene? Do you know if he tried to get away with it? Did he try to establish an alibi? How in the hell do you know if he’s dangerous or not?"
He didn’t have an answer and I don’t think I made a convert that day, but this is something I feel strongly about. It’s the basis of what we do in my unit. The dilemma, as I’ve stated many times before, is that much of psychiatric therapy is based on self-reporting. A patient coming to a therapist under normal circumstances has a vested interest in revealing his true thoughts and feelings. A convict desirous of early release, on the other hand, has a vested interest in telling the therapist what he wants to hear. And to the extent that the therapist takes that report at face value without correlating it with other information about the subject, that can be a real failing of the system. Ed Kemper and Monte Rissell, to name but two, were in therapy while they were committing their crimes, and both managed to remain undetected. In fact, both showed "progress" to their therapists.
The problem as I see it is that you get young psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers who are idealistic, having been taught at their universities that they really can make a difference. Then they come up against these guys in prison, and they want to feel that they’ve changed them. Often, they don’t understand that in trying to assess these convicts, they’re actually assessing individuals who themselves are expert in assessing people! In a short time, the convict will know if the doctor has done his or her homework, and if not, he’ll be able to downplay the crime and its impact on victims. Few criminals will willingly give out the nitty-gritty details to someone who doesn’t already have them. That’s why complete preparation was so critical in our prison interviews.
As with Thomas Vanda’s doctor, people in the helping professions often don’t want to be prejudiced by knowing the gory details of what the criminal did. But as I always tell my classes, if you want to understand Picasso, you have to study his art. If you want to understand the criminal personality, you have to study his crime.
The difference is, the mental-health professionals start with the personality and infer behavior from that perspective. My people and I start with the behavior and infer the personality from that perspective.
There are, of course, varying perspectives on the issue of criminal responsibility. Dr. Stanton Samenow is a psychologist who collaborated with the late psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Yochelson on a pioneering study at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., about criminal behavior. After years of firsthand research that gradually stripped away most of his preconceived notions, Samenow concluded in his penetrating and insightful book, Inside the Criminal Mind, that "criminals think differently from responsible people." Criminal behavior, Samenow believes, is not so much a question of mental illness as character defect.
Dr. Park Dietz, who works with us frequently, has stated, "None of the serial killers that I’ve had the occasion to study or examine has been legally insane, but none has been normal, either. They’ve all been people who’ve got mental disorders. But despite their mental disorders, which have to do with their sexual interests and their character, they’ve been people who knew what they were doing, knew what they were doing was wrong, but chose to do it anyway."
It’s important to keep in mind here that insanity is a legal concept, not a medical or psychiatric term. It doesn’t mean someone is or is not "sick." It has to do with whether that person is or is not responsible for his or her actions.
Now, if you believe that someone like Thomas Vanda is insane, fine. I think a case can be made for that. But once we’ve carefully examined the data, I think we have to face that whatever the Thomas Vandas of the world have, it may not be curable. If we accepted that, they wouldn’t be let out so fast to keep doing what they do over and over again. Remember, this murder wasn’t his first.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the concept of criminal insanity, and this talk isn’t new. It goes back at least hundreds of years in Anglo-American jurisprudence, to William Lambard’s Eirenarcha, or "Of the Office of the Justices of Peace" of the 1500s.
The first organized statement of insanity as a defense against criminal charges is the M’Naghten Rule of 1843, named after Daniel M’Naghten (sometimes spelled McNaughten or McNaghten), who tried to kill British prime minister Sir Robert Peel and did manage to shoot Peel’s private secretary. Peel, by the way, was responsible for organizing London’s police force. To this day, London cops are still referred to as bobbies in his honor.
After M’Naghten was acquitted, public outrage was so great that the lord chief justice was called before the House of Lords to explain the logic. The basic elements state that a defendant is not guilty if his mental condition deprived him of the ability to know the wrongfulness of his actions or understand their nature and quality; in other words, did he know the difference between right and wrong?
The insanity doctrine evolved over the years into what was often referred to as the "irresistible impulse test," which stated that a defendant was not guilty if, because of mental illness, he was unable to control his actions or conform his conduct to the law.
It received a major overhaul in 1954 with Judge David Bazelon’s Court of Appeals ruling in Durham v. United States, which held that a defendant is not criminally responsible if his crime was the "product of mental disease or defect," and if he would not have committed the crime but for that disease or defect.
Durham, which gave such broad latitude and wasn’t primarily concerned with appreciating the difference between right and wrong, wasn’t terribly popular with law enforcement personnel and many judges and prosecutors. In 1972, in another Court of Appeals case, United States v. Brawner, it was abandoned in favor of the American Law Institute (or ALI) Model Penal Code Test, which hearkened back to M’Naghten and irresistible impulse in saying that the mental defect had to make the defendant lack substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or conform his conduct to the requirement of the law. In one form or another, the ALI Test has enjoyed increasing popularity among courts as time goes on.
But along with this discussion, which often degrades into a speculation on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, I think we have to deal with a more basic concept. And that is dangerousness.
One of the classic confrontations in the ongoing battle of the shrinks was the serial-murder trial of Arthur J. Shawcross in Rochester, New York, in 1990. Shawcross had been accused of the murders of a string of local prostitutes and street people whose bodies had turned up in the wooded areas in and around the Genesee River gorge. The murders had gone on for nearly a year. The later bodies had also been mutilated after death.
After doing a detailed—and, as it turned out, highly accurate—profile, Gregg McCrary studied the UNSUB’s developing behavior. When police discovered a body that had been mutilated, Gregg realized that the killer was going back to the dump sites to spend time with his prey. He then urged police to comb the woods to locate the body of one of the still-missing women. If they could do that, then secretly stake out the site, Gregg was sure they would eventually find the killer there.
As it happened, after several days of aerial surveillance, New York State Police did find a body in Salmon Creek along State Route 31. At the same time, Inspector John McCaffrey noticed a man in a car parked
on a low bridge spanning the water. State and city police were called in to follow him. The man they picked up was Arthur Shawcross.
Under interrogation from a team led by Dennis Blythe of the State Police and Leonard Boriello of the Rochester Police Department, Shawcross confessed to several of the crimes. The key issue at his intensely covered ten-count murder trial was whether or not he was insane at the time of the killings.
The defense brought in Dr. Dorothy Lewis, a well-known psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in New York, who had done important work on the effects of violence on children. Lewis had become convinced that most, if not all, violent criminal behavior resulted from a combination of childhood abuse or trauma and some kind of physical or organic condition, such as epilepsy, an injury, or some kind of lesion, cyst, or tumor. There is, of course, the case of Charles Whitman, the twenty-five-year-old engineering student who climbed to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966 and opened fire on passersby below. Before police could surround the tower and kill him ninety minutes later, sixteen men and women lay dead and another thirty wounded. Prior to the incident, Whitman had complained of periodic murderous rages. When doctors performed an autopsy, they found a tumor in the temporal lobe of his brain.
Did the tumor cause Whitman’s deadly behavior? We have no way of knowing. But Lewis wanted to show the jury that as a result of a small benign temporal-lobe cyst that showed up on Shawcross’s MRI, a form of epilepsy she characterized as "partial complex-seizure state," post-traumatic stress from Vietnam, and what he claimed was severe childhood physical and sexual abuse at the hands of his mother, Arthur Shawcross was not responsible for his episodes of extreme violence. In fact, she testified, he was in some kind of fugue state when he killed each woman; his memory of each episode would have been impaired or nonexistent.
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