Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  Ten months later, a local newspaper editor got an anonymous call directing him to a book in the public library. Inside was a note from the UNSUB, claiming credit for the Otero killings, promising more and explaining that "the code words for me will be: Bind them, Torture them, Kill them."

  Several more killings of young women followed in the ensuing three years, after which a letter to a local television station revealed much about the psyche of this UNSUB, who had carefully given himself his own nickname: "How many do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?"

  In one of his published communications, he compared his work to that of Jack the Ripper, the Son of Sam, and the Hillside Strangler—all obscure losers who had become media celebrities through their crimes. He attributed his deeds to a "demon" and "factor X," leading to extensive psychological speculation in the newspapers about his personality.

  But he also included graphic drawings of naked women in various poses of binding, rape, and torture. These hideous drawings were not published, but they gave me a good picture of the type of person we were looking for. From that, it was only a matter of narrowing down the suspects.

  Like those of his hero Jack the Ripper, BTK’s murders stopped abruptly. In this case, though, I believe the police had interviewed him, he knew they were closing in on him, and he was intelligent and sophisticated enough to stop before sufficient evidence could be gathered. I hope we’ve at least neutralized him, but sometimes the dragon wins.

  Sometimes the dragon wins in our own lives as well. When a murderer kills one person, he takes a lot of victims along with that individual. I’m not the only one in my unit to lose work over stress-related problems; far from it. And the instances of family problems and marital strife are too numerous not to be worried about.

  In 1993, my marriage with Pam broke up after twenty-two years. We would probably give differing perspectives on what happened between us, but certain things are undeniable. I was away much too often when our daughters, Erika and Lauren, were growing up. When I was in town, I was still so consumed by what I was doing that Pam often felt like a single parent. She had to run the house, pay the bills, get the kids to school, meet with the teachers, make sure the homework got done, all the while keeping up with her own teaching career. By the time our son, Jed, was born in January of 1987, we had other profilers working with me and I wasn’t spending as much time on the road. But I have to admit, I have three bright, loving, charming, wonderful children, and I don’t think I really got to know them well until shortly before I retired from the Bureau. I spent so much time over the years learning about the victimology of dead children that I shortchanged and didn’t learn enough about my own brilliantly alive ones.

  Many times Pam would come to me with some typical minor problem involving one of the kids, say a cut or scrape from falling off a bike. With all the stress and pressure I felt, we both remember how often I would lash out, describing the mutilated bodies of kids the same age that I had seen, and didn’t she realize that a fall off a bike was normal and nothing to get charged up about?

  You try never to fully desensitize yourself from the horrible stuff, but you find yourself building up immunity against anything that’s less than horrible. One time I was eating dinner with the kids while Pam was opening a package in the kitchen. The knife slipped and she cut herself badly. She screamed and we all came rushing in. But as soon as I saw that the injury wasn’t threatening to life or limb, I remember how interesting I found the blood-spatter pattern to be and began mentally correlating it to spatter patterns I’d seen at murder scenes. I was joking around, trying to diffuse the tension. I started pointing out to her and the children how we saw a different pattern every time she moved her hand, and that was one of the ways we could tell what happened between an attacker and a victim. But I don’t think the rest of them took it as casually as I did.

  You try to develop defense mechanisms to deal with what you see on the job, but you can easily end up coming off as a cool, aloof son of a bitch. If your family’s intact and your marriage is solid, you can put up with a lot of what you face at work. But if there are any weaknesses at home, various stressors can magnify everything, just as they do for the people we hunt.

  Pam and I ended up with different friends. I couldn’t talk about what I did in her circle, so I needed my own kind around me. And when we socialized outside Bureau or law enforcement circles, I often found myself bored by the mundane concerns discussed. As cold as it sounds, when you spend your days getting inside the heads of killers, where the neighbor puts his trash can or what color he paints his fence just isn’t all that stimulating.

  I am glad to say, though, after a period in which we both went through the emotional wringer, that Pam and I are now good friends. The kids live with me (Erika is off at college), but Pam and I are together much of the time, and we both now take an equal role as parents. I’m grateful Lauren and Jed are still young enough for me to enjoy some of their growing-up years.

  From a lonely position in the early 1980s in which I was the entire full-time FBI profiling staff—assisted as their time permitted by Roy Hazelwood, Bill Hagmaier, and a few others—the unit grew to more than ten. That’s still not enough to handle the volume of cases we’re presented, but it’s probably just about as large as we could be and still maintain the personal contact with each other and the local departments that has become the hallmark of our own modus operandi. Many of the police chiefs and detectives who call on the unit first met us in National Academy classes. Sheriff Jim Metts contacted me to help find Shari Smith’s and Debra Helmick’s murderer, and Capt. Lynde Johnston called on Gregg McCrary to help determine who was slaughtering prostitutes in Rochester because they were both National Academy graduates.

  By the mid-1980s, Behavioral Science had been divided up into the Behavioral Science Instruction and Research Unit, and the group I worked for as criminal-personality profiling program manager, the Behavioral Science Investigative Support Unit. The other two key divisions besides mine in Investigative Support were VICAP, which Jim Wright had taken over from Bob Ressler, and Engineering Services. Roger Depue was chief of Instruction and Research and Alan "Smokey" Burgess was chief of Investigative Support. (He is not related to Ann Burgess, but her husband, Allen Burgess, was our coauthor on the Crime Classification Manual. Got it?)

  As taxing and challenging as my job was in many ways, I had managed to establish a prominent and satisfying career for myself. Fortunately, I’d been able to avoid the step virtually everyone else who wants to get ahead in the organization has to take—administration. That changed in the spring of 1990. We were having a unit meeting when Smokey Burgess announced he was retiring as unit chief. Later, the new deputy assistant director, Dave Kohl, who’d been my squad supervisor in Milwaukee and a fellow member of the SWAT team, called me into his office and asked me my intentions.

  I told him I was so burned out and fed up with everything that I was thinking of applying for a desk job uptown in violent crime and finishing out my career that way.

  "You don’t want to do that," Kohl told me. "You’ll lose yourself up there. You can make a much greater contribution as unit chief."

  "I don’t know if I want to be unit chief," I told him. I was already performing a lot of the unit-chief functions and acting as institutional memory because I’d been there so long. But at this stage of my career, I didn’t want to get bogged down in administration. Burgess was an excellent administrator, adept at running interference so that those of us who worked for him could do our jobs effectively.

  "I want you to be unit chief," Kohl announced. He’s a dynamic, hard-charging, aggressive type.

  I said I wanted to continue doing cases, trial strategy, court testimony, and public speaking. That’s what I thought I was good at. Kohl assured me I’d be able to and nominated me for the job.

  My first act as unit chief, as I’ve said many times, was to "get rid of the BS" by getting rid of "Behavioral Scienc
e" in our name and calling it, simply, the Investigative Support Unit. I wanted to give our local police clients and the rest of the FBI a clear message about where we were—and were not—coming from.

  With the help and unending support of Roberta Beadle, who was in charge of personnel, I got VICAP staffing from four up to sixteen. The rest of the unit grew, too, and soon we were up to a total complement of about forty people. To relieve some of the administrative burden created by our new size, I instituted a regional management program in which individual agents would be responsible for a specific region of the country.

  I thought these people all deserved to be GS-14s, but headquarters was only willing to give us four or five 14 slots. So I got them to agree that as each one got through a two-year specialized training program, they would each be "anointed" as experts and recognized as supervisory special agents entitled to that rating and pay. The program involved auditing all National Academy Behavioral Science Unit-taught courses, taking two Armed Forces Institute of Pathology courses, working on psychiatry and law at the University of Virginia (Park Dietz was there at the time), attending John Reed’s interrogation school, studying death investigation with the Baltimore Medical Examiner’s Office, riding with NYPD homicide units, and writing profiles under one of the regional managers.

  We also did much more international work than ever before. In the last year before he retired, for instance, Gregg McCrary worked major serial murders in both Canada and Austria.

  Functionally, the unit ran well. Administratively, I ran something of a loose ship, which is merely a function of my personality. When I would see someone burning out, I’d go around the rules and regulations, sign them out, or tell them to take some time off. Ultimately, they would be much more efficient than if I had them working by the rule book. When you’ve got top people and you can’t reward them monetarily, you have to help them out in other ways.

  I also always got along well with the support staff, and when I retired, they seemed the most sorry to see me go. This probably goes back to my time in the Air Force. So many of the leaders in the Bureau were military officers (and many, like my last SAC, Robin Montgomery, were decorated war heroes) that they approached things from an officer’s perspective. There’s nothing wrong with this, and large organizations would function less smoothly if most of the administrators were like me. But I was an enlisted man and so always identified emotionally with the support people. I was therefore a lot more likely to get the help I needed than some of the other chiefs.

  A lot of people think of the FBI the same way they used to think of IBM: a huge bureaucratic organization of bright and accomplished, though interchangeable, humorless men and women in white shirts and dark suits. But I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of a small group of truly unique individuals, each of whom is a standout in his or her own right. As time went by and behavioral science’s role in law enforcement grew, we all naturally developed our own special interests and fields of expertise.

  From the early days of our study, Bob Ressler pursued research while I devoted myself to the operational side. Roy Hazelwood is the expert on rape and lust murder. Ken Lanning is the leading authority on crimes against children. Jim Reese started off in profiling but found his great contribution to be made in the field of stress and stress management for police officers and federal agents. He has a Ph.D. in the field, has written extensively, and is sought after for his counseling ability throughout the law enforcement community. Once he came into the unit, Jim Wright not only took on the training of new profilers but also became the leading authority on stalking, one of the fastest growing of the serious interpersonal crimes. And each of us has developed many, many personal relationships with field offices, police departments, sheriff’s offices, and state agencies around the country so that when someone calls for help, he or she knows and trusts whom they’re talking to.

  It’s sometimes daunting for the new people coming into the unit, trying to blend in with all these "stars," especially after the film The Silence of the Lambs came out and such intense national interest was focused on what we do. But we try to assure them that the reason they were selected is because we feel they have what it takes to be full and equal members of the team. They all come from strong investigative backgrounds, and once they’re with us, we put them through a full two years of on-the-job training. Add to that their intelligence, intuition, diligence, integrity, and self-confidence, together with an equal capacity to listen to and evaluate other people’s points of view. From my perspective, one of the things that has made the FBI Academy the premier institution of its kind in the world is that it is made up of individuals, each pursuing his or her own interests and talents for a common purpose. And each of those individuals, in turn, encourages the same qualities in others. I hope and trust that the collegial and mutually supportive system we set up in the unit will survive as we first-generation people retire.

  At my retirement dinner at Quantico in June 1995, a lot of people had nice things to say about me, which I found both humbling and extremely moving. Frankly, I was prepared for a real roast and figured all my people would use this last official chance to dump everything on me they’d been saving up. I ran into Jud Ray in the men’s room afterward, and he was already expressing regret at having held off. Once they’d blown their opportunity, though, and it was my turn to speak, I felt no obligation to restrain myself and let loose with all the zingers I’d armed myself with in anticipation of what they’d say. I had no particular wisdom or serious advice to impart that night; I just hope I’ve managed to strike a chord by the example I’ve tried to set.

  Since my retirement, I’ve gone back to Quantico to teach and consult, and my colleagues know I’m always available to them. I continue to lecture and speak as I always have, giving the perspective of my twenty-five years of experience delving into the mind of murder. I’ve retired from the FBI, but I don’t think I’ll ever truly be able to stop what it is I’ve trained to do. Unfortunately, ours is very much a growth industry, and we’ll never run out of customers.

  People often ask me what can be done about our horrendous violent-crime statistics. While there are definitely practical things that can and should be done, I believe that the only chance of solving our crime problem is if enough people want to. More police and more courts and more prisons and better investigative techniques are fine, but the only way crime is going to go down is if all of us simply stop accepting and tolerating it in our families, our friends, and our associates. This is the lesson from other countries with far lower numbers than ours. Only this type of grassroots solution, in my opinion, will be effective. Crime is a moral problem. It can only be resolved on a moral level.

  In all my years of research and dealing with violent offenders, I’ve never yet come across one who came from what I would consider a good background and functional, supportive family unit. I believe that the vast majority of violent offenders are responsible for their conduct, made their choices, and should face the consequences of what they do. It’s ridiculous to say that someone doesn’t appreciate the seriousness of what he’s done because he’s only fourteen or fifteen. At eight, my son, Jed, has already known for years what’s right and what’s wrong.

  But twenty-five years of observation has also told me that criminals are more "made" than "born," which means that somewhere along the line, someone who provided a profound negative influence could have provided a profound positive one instead. So what I truly believe is that along with more money and police and prisons, what we most need more of is love. This is not being simplistic; it’s at the very heart of the issue.

  Not too long ago, I was invited to speak before the New York chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. The talk was well attended and the reception was warm and cordial. These men and women who made their living writing stories about murder and mayhem were acutely interested in hearing from someone who had worked thousands of actual cases. In fact, ever since Thomas Harris and The Silence of the Lambs, wri
ters and newspeople and filmmakers have been coming to us for the "real story."

  But what I quickly realized as I related the details of some of my more interesting and graphic cases was that many people in the audience were turning off and tuning out. They were getting seriously grossed out by hearing about the things that my people and I saw every day. I saw that they had no interest in hearing the details, at the same moment that it must have dawned on them that they didn’t want to write about it like it really was. Fair enough. We each have our own clienteles.

  The dragon doesn’t always win, and we’re doing whatever we can to see to it that he wins less and less. But the evil he represents, the thing I’ve confronted throughout my career, isn’t going to go away, and somebody has to tell the real story. That’s what I’ve tried to do here, just as I’ve lived it.

  Life on the farm. How I spent my summers in high school; posing with one of my early clients. (photo by Jack Douglas)

  The big game against Wantaugh High—the first time I really tried to apply “psychological profiling” against an opponent. I am easy to spot on the Hempstead bench—wearing the Hannibal Lecter-like face mask, having broken my nose in a previous game. photo by Jack Douglas)

  A portrait of the agent as a young man. My first trip back home after joining the new suits my father bought me. Note also the FBI regulation haircut. This was a rare moment of smiling on this trip. I spent most of the Christmas 1970 vacation memorizing the manual of Bureau communications for Assistant Director Joe Casper. (photo by Jack Douglas)