Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  Now, the serial nature of the crimes was unavoidable and brought back haunting reminders of Seattle’s last serial murders, the kidnapping and killing of at least eight women in the area in 1974 by a subject known only as "Ted." Those cases had remained unsolved for four years until a handsome, articulate young man named Theodore Robert Bundy was arrested for a brutal series of sorority-house murders in Florida. By that time, he had worked his way across the country, killing at least twenty-three young women and earning himself a permanent place in the chamber of horrors of our collective psyche.

  Maj. Richard Kraske of the King County Criminal Investigations Division had been in charge of that investigation, and wanting to apply what he had learned, he now turned to the FBI for assistance in developing a psychological profile of the "Green River Killer." Although the investigators on the newly formed, multijurisdictional task force were divided over whether all the cases were really linked, there was one clear common factor: all the dead women were prostitutes who worked the Sea-Tac Strip, the Pacific Coast Highway near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. And now, more young women were missing.

  In September, Allen Whitaker, the Seattle SAC, was at Quantico for an in-service and presented us with a detailed package on the five original cases. As I often did when I wanted to be able to concentrate away from constant staff and phone interruptions, I sequestered myself on the top floor of the library, where I could be alone, stare out the window (always a pleasant novelty for those of us who work underground), and get myself into the minds of the offender and the victims. I spent about a day looking through the materials—crime-scene reports and photos, autopsy protocols, victim descriptions. Despite the variances in age and race and MO, the similarities were strong enough to indicate all the murders were committed by the same subject.

  I developed a detailed profile of a physically powerful, inadequate, underemployed white male, comfortable with the river, who felt no remorse for what he was doing. Quite the contrary, he was a man on a mission who’d had humiliating experiences with women and was now out to punish as many as he could of what he considered to be the lowest of them. But at the same time, I warned the police that because of the nature of the crimes and the victims, many people would fit this profile. Unlike an Ed Kemper, say, this was no mental giant. These were unsophisticated, high-risk crimes. The emphasis had to be on proactive techniques that would lure the UNSUB into some type of contact with the police. Whitaker took the profile back with him when he left Quantico.

  Later that month the badly decomposed body of another young woman was found in an area of condemned houses near the airport. She was nude, with a pair of men’s black socks tied around her neck. The medical examiner estimated she’d been killed around the same time as the river victims. Perhaps the killer had changed his MO after hearing about surveillance of the river.

  As detailed in The Search for the Green River Killer, a carefully researched account by Carlton Smith and Thomas Guillen, the strongest suspect was a forty-four-year-old taxi driver who matched the profile in virtually every way. He’d injected himself into the investigation early, calling police with tips on how to find the killer and advising them to look for other taxi drivers. He spent a lot of time with prostitutes and street people along the Strip, was nocturnal, drove around compulsively, drank and smoked as the profile suggested the UNSUB would, and professed concern for the prostitutes’ safety. He had five failed marriages, grew up near the river, lived with his widower father, drove an older, conservative car that wasn’t well maintained, and followed the press on the case closely.

  Police scheduled him for an interview in September and called me for a strategy. I was traveling at a feverish pace then, hopping around the country on an almost weekly basis trying to keep up with my cases. When the police called, I happened to be out of town. They spoke to Roger Depue, the unit chief, who said I would be back in a few days and strongly suggested they wait to conduct the interview until they’d had a chance to talk to me. Thus far, the subject had been cooperative and wasn’t planning to leave the area.

  But the police went ahead with the interview, which lasted an entire day and turned into a confrontation. From a perspective of twenty-twenty hindsight, perhaps it could have been done differently. Polygraph results were ambiguous, and even though the police put him under bumper-lock surveillance and continued gathering circumstantial evidence, they could never make a case against him.

  Not personally having been involved in that part of the investigation, I can’t say whether or not this individual was a promising suspect. But this lack of coordination and focus greatly hampered the investigation in the early stages, when a subject is usually most catchable. He’s concerned, he doesn’t know what to expect, the "ass-pucker factor" is at its highest. As time goes by and the UNSUB realizes he’s getting away with it, he becomes more comfortable. He settles down, refines his MO.

  At the beginning of this case, local police didn’t even have a computer. And as the investigation grew, at the rate they were processing leads, it would have taken fifty years to evaluate properly what they had. Were a Green River type of investigation launched today, I hope and trust the early organization would be more efficient and the strategy more defined. Still, the task would be formidable. These prostitutes lived a nomadic existence. Oftentimes, when a boyfriend or pimp would report one missing, she had disappeared on purpose or simply relocated to another area up or down the coast. Many of them used aliases, making identification of bodies and tracking of cases a nightmare. Medical and dental records were therefore hard to locate and authenticate. And relations and cooperation between police and the prostitute community are always tenuous at best.

  In May 1983, a young prostitute was found fully clothed in a carefully staged scene: a fish was placed across her throat, another on her left breast, and a wine bottle between her legs. She had been strangled with a thin cord or rope. The police chalked her death up to the Green River Killer. But while I thought the last victim found on land had been related, this one struck me as more of a personal-cause homicide. This one wasn’t random. There was too much anger here. The killer knew this victim well.

  Nearing the end of 1983, the body count had risen to twelve, with seven more reported missing. One of the dead women had been eight months pregnant. The task force asked me to come out and give them on-scene advice. As I’ve mentioned, I was trying to handle various stages of the Wayne Williams case in Atlanta, the .22-Caliber Killer in Buffalo, the Trailside Killer in San Francisco, the Robert Hansen case in Anchorage, an anti-Semitic serial arsonist in Hartford, and more than a hundred other active cases. The only way I could keep up with them all was to force myself to dream about them at night. I knew I was running myself ragged. I just didn’t know how ragged, how fast. And when the Green River Task Force said they needed me, I knew I had to squeeze that one in, too.

  I was confident my profile would fit the killer, but I also knew it would fit a lot of people, and more than one of these could be involved by now. The longer this went on, the greater the chance for more killers to become involved, either as copycats or simply because of the territory and the victims. The Sea-Tac Strip was easy pickings for a killer. If you have a will to kill, that’s the kind of place you go. The prostitutes were readily available, and since many of them plied the entire West Coast corridor from Vancouver all the way down to San Diego, when a girl disappeared, often she would not be missed.

  I thought proactive techniques were more important than ever. These could include convening town meetings on the murders at rural schools, then passing around sign-up sheets and taking note of license plates of those attending, using the media to put forth one investigator as "supercop" to lure the killer to contact him, stories personalizing the pregnant woman to try to encourage some remorse and revisits from the killer, surveillance of unpublicized dump sites, use of decoy police officers, and any number of other possibilities.

  I brought Blaine McIlwain and Ron Walker, two of the
newer profilers, on the December trip to Seattle, figuring this would be a good case to get them some on-site experience. It was a good thing I did, as if God or some cosmic order had planned it. They saved my life.

  When they broke through the locked, bolted, and chained door to my hotel room and found me unconscious and convulsing on the floor, I was near death from the fever that was raging through my brain.

  By the time I finally recovered and returned to work in May of 1984, the Green River Killer was still at large, as he is at this writing more than a decade later. I continued consulting with the task force, which grew into one of the largest organized manhunts in American history. The longer the investigation went on, as the number of bodies continued to grow, I became increasingly convinced that several killers were at work, all sharing some similar traits, but each acting on his own. Police in Spokane and Portland brought me clusters of murdered and missing prostitutes, but I found no clear connection to the murders around Seattle. San Diego police thought another cluster in their city might be related. All in all, the Green River Task Force was investigating more than fifty deaths. More than twelve hundred solid suspects had been reduced to about eighty. They ranged from boyfriends and pimps of the dead women to a john in Portland from whom a prostitute had escaped after threats of torture, to a Seattle-based trapper. At times, even members of the police force were considered possible suspects. But none of this was enough for closure. At this point, I’m convinced there were at least three killers, possibly more.

  The last major proactive thrust came in December 1988, with a two-hour live television program broadcast nationally. Entitled Manhunt . . . Live and hosted by Dallas star Patrick Duffy, the show offered background on the search for the killer or killers and provided a bank of toll-free numbers for viewers to give tips and leads. I flew out to Seattle to appear on the show and to train police officers on how to screen calls and quickly ask pertinent questions.

  In the week following the broadcast, the telephone company estimated that more than one hundred thousand people had tried to call, but fewer than ten thousand had gotten through. And after three weeks, there just weren’t the financial resources or the volunteers to continue manning the crime-stoppers hot lines. In the end, it was symbolic of so many other aspects of Green River—many dedicated people expending tremendous effort, but ultimately, too little, too late.

  For years, Gregg McCrary had a cartoon tacked to the bulletin board in his office. It shows a fire-breathing dragon standing fiercely over a prostrate knight. The caption reads simply, "Sometimes the dragon wins."

  This is a reality none of us can ever escape. We don’t catch them all, and since the ones we do catch have already killed or raped or tortured or bombed or burned or maimed, none of them is ever caught soon enough. It’s true today, just as it was more than a hundred years ago when Jack the Ripper became the first serial killer to haunt the public imagination.

  Ironically, though the Manhunt broadcast didn’t solve the Green River murders, that same year I appeared on another national television show in which I did determine through profiling the possible identity of that most infamous serial killer of all. It was timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel murders, which meant my profile was only a century too late to do any good.

  The brutal prostitute murders took place in the gaslit streets and alleys of Victorian London’s rough and teeming East End between August 31 and November 9, 1888. Over that time, the viciousness of the killings and the postmortem mutilation escalated. In the early morning of September 30, he killed two women within an hour or two, an unheard of event at the time. The police received several taunting letters, which were published in the newspapers, and the horrors became a huge media event. The Ripper was never caught, despite the fervent efforts of Scotland Yard, and his identity has remained a subject of intense speculation ever since. Like the "true" identity of William Shakespeare, the choice of suspects often reveals more about the people doing the speculating than it does about the mystery itself.

  Among the favorite and most fascinating possibilities over the years has been Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, eldest grandson of Queen Victoria and, after his father, Edward, the Prince of Wales (who became Edward VII upon Victoria’s death in 1901), the next in line to the throne. The Duke of Clarence is supposed to have died in the great influenza epidemic of 1892, but many Ripper theorists have him actually dying of syphilis or possibly poisoning at the hands of a royal physician to remove the taint of scandal from the monarchy. It’s certainly an intriguing possibility.

  Other strong candidates have included Montague John Druit, a teacher in a boy’s school who matched eyewitness descriptions; Dr. William Gull, chief royal physician; Aaron Kosminski, a poor Polish immigrant who’d been in and out of mental asylums in the area; and Dr. Roslyn D’Onstan, a journalist known to dabble in black magic.

  Much has been made of the fact that the Ripper murders stopped abruptly, leading to speculation that he might have taken his own life, that the Duke of Clarence was sent on a royal trip, that one of the other suspects might have died. Looking back from our current knowledge, it seems to me just as likely that he was picked up for some other lesser offense as many are, and this was what stopped the killing. Another issue was the "ripping" itself. One of the reasons for the focus on someone with medical training was the degree of disembowelment of the later victims.

  The aim of The Secret Identity of Jack the Ripper, broadcast nationally in October 1988, was to present all available evidence in the case and then have experts from various disciplines present their analyses about who Jack really was, solving this century-old riddle "once and for all." Roy Hazelwood and I were invited to be on the program, and the FBI thought this would be a good opportunity to showcase the kind of work we do without compromising any ongoing investigations or trials. The live, two-hour presentation was hosted by British actor, writer, and director Peter Ustinov, who really got into the mystery as the drama unfolded.

  Now any exercise of this kind has the same rules and strictures as a current investigation—that is, our product can only be as good as the evidence and data we have to work with. A hundred years ago, forensic investigation was primitive by modern standards. But I thought that, based on what I knew about the Ripper murders, if such a case were presented to us today, it would be very solvable, so I thought we ought to take a flyer on it. When you do the kind of work we do, there is actually some sport and relaxation when the only thing on the line if you screw up is making a fool of yourself on national television rather than having another innocent victim dead.

  Before the program aired, I developed a profile as I would for a modern case, with the same-style heading:

  UNSUB; AKA JACK THE RIPPER

  SERIES OF HOMICIDES

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  1888

  NCAVC—HOMICIDE (CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE ANALYSIS)

  The last line, NCAVC, refers to the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, the overall program established at Quantico in 1985 to include the Behavioral Science and Investigative Support Units, VICAP—the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program computer database—and other rapid-response teams and units.

  As in a real consultation, once I had come up with the profile, we were given the possible suspects. As appealing as the Duke of Clarence was from a dramatic standpoint, after analyzing all the evidence available, Roy and I independently came up with Aaron Kosminski as our likeliest candidate.

  As in the Yorkshire Ripper case ninety years later, we were convinced the taunting letters to the police were written by an impostor, someone other than the "real" Jack. The type of individual who committed these crimes would not have the personality to set up a public challenge to the police. The mutilation suggested a mentally disturbed, sexually inadequate person with a lot of generalized rage against women. The blitz style of attack in each case also told us he was personally and socially inadequate. This was not someo
ne who could hold his own verbally. The physical circumstances of the crimes told us that this was someone who could blend in with his surroundings and not cause suspicion or fear on the part of the prostitutes. He would be a quiet loner, not a macho butcher, who would prowl the streets nightly and return to the scenes of his crimes. Undoubtedly, the police would have interviewed him in their investigation. Of all the possibilities we were presented, Kosminski fit the profile far better than any of the others. As for the supposed medical knowledge needed for the postmortem mutilation and dissection, this was really nothing but elementary butchery. And we have long since learned that serial killers need nothing but will to commit whatever atrocities they want on a body. Ed Gein, Ed Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Marquette—to name but a few—were in no way held back by their lack of medical training.

  Having presented this analysis, I now have to backpedal on my original declaration with the qualification that from this vantage point a hundred years later, I can’t be sure that Aaron Kosminski was the Ripper. He was simply one of the ones given to us. But what I can state with a high degree of confidence is that Jack the Ripper was someone like Kosminski. Were this criminal investigative analysis taking place today, our input would help police and Scotland Yard narrow their focus and come up with the UNSUB’s identity. That’s why I say that by modern standards, this case would be very solvable.

  In some cases our methods point to a type of suspect, but we can’t get enough evidence for an arrest and indictment. Such a case was the "BTK Strangler" in Wichita, Kansas, in the mid-1970s.

  It began on January 15, 1974, with the murder of the Otero family. Thirty-eight-year-old Joseph Otero and his wife, Julie, were tied and strangled with venetian-blind cords. Their nine-year-old son, Joseph II, was found tied in his own bedroom, a plastic bag over his head. Eleven-year-old Josephine was hanging by her neck from a pipe in the basement ceiling, clad only in a sweatshirt and socks. All the evidence suggested that this was not an impulsive act. The telephone lines had been cut and the cord had been brought to the scene.