Popular Crime

by Bill James

  But it’s useful here. Not only are serial murderers in fiction vastly more organized than serial murderers in real life, but there is almost no overlap between the groups. One can almost say accurately that every serial murderer in fiction is more organized than any serial murderer in real life.

  I remember a 1970s made-for-TV movie about a serial killer; somebody is strangling women, and the police are trying to figure out who. They look for what the women have in common, and eventually they find it: they all had the same doctor when they were born, 20 years ago. They go after the doctor, only it turns out it isn’t the doctor, it’s the doctor’s wife. She gave birth to a baby girl who was born dead about that time, strangled on the umbilical cord, and she is psychotically re-enacting this tragedy with her murders.

  It’s too rational, too organized. Real serial murderers don’t have a clearly identifiable reason for their crimes. In The Silence of the Lambs Thomas Harris creates a serial murderer, Hannibal Lecter, who is 50 times more organized, more in control of his actions, than any real-life serial murderer. But even Harris’ backup serial murderer, Buffalo Bill Gumb, kills women for an easily identifiable reason: he wants their skin. Sexually confused, he is trying to make a “woman suit” for himself by trapping large girls, starving them so their skin is loose, then killing them and using their skin to make a suit in which he can be a woman. It’s too logical, too organized. Real serial murderers aren’t that organized. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is closer to real life.

  When people speculate about unsolved serial killings or unsolved murders, they tend to give the murderers the characteristics of fictional serial murderers, rather than the characteristics of real ones. If you look at the people accused by various authors of being Jack the Ripper, they’re mostly well-off, successful people, prominent in the community, and very often they’re committing the murders for some reason. If you look at the books accusing Tom, Dick and Harry of killing the Black Dahlia, same thing; it’s usually prominent people being accused, and often they are attributed some “motive” for the murder. It’s not the way it happens in real life.

  Speculation about unsolved grisly crimes always includes “evidence” that the killer may have been a doctor; Jack the Ripper may have been a doctor, and whoever killed the Black Dahlia was a doctor, and the Butcher of Kingsbury Run was a doctor. They’re all doctors.

  In real life, there have been many doctors who killed their patients—but they’re all pharmacists, not surgeons. They poison their patients; they don’t run around stabbing hookers and dissecting them in secret laboratories.

  Between April and early September, 1988, someone abducted and murdered eleven women in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Most or all of the women were prostitutes, and all were drug addicts.

  The book about the case is Killing Season, by Carlton Smith, who also wrote a book about the Green River Killer. The book is quite good in parts, in other parts prone to long-winded, repetitive speculation that does nothing to move the story.

  Smith’s thesis is that “there was an ample amount of physical evidence; the pool of potential victims was relatively small, and quite close-knit.” Why weren’t the cases ever solved, then? “The answer, as I hope this book demonstrates, was not so much an absence of evidence, but rather the result of an inability of police and political officials to set aside their own personal agendas and instead focus methodically on the facts.”

  Except that he’s dead wrong. Smith has it in for District Attorney Ron Pina, whom he sees as a publicity-hungry non-cop who is out of his league commanding this investigation. He hammers Pina relentlessly, essentially laying the failure to solve the crimes at his feet, or microphone.

  But while I agree that Pina’s performance in command of a serial murder investigation was not good, a more balanced reading of the facts is that

  1) Nothing in Pina’s experience prepared him to lead the hunt for a serial murderer,

  2) This was generally true in that era. Most people who found themselves leading a search for a serial murderer, before the late 1990s, had no meaningful preparation for the task,

  3) Serial murder cases are by their nature very difficult to solve,

  4) This guy was good,

  5) The cops weren’t all that good, and

  6) The murderer just beat them.

  Let us take, for example, Smith’s claim that “the pool of potential victims was relatively small, and quite close-knit.” Yes, but. The last victim was abducted on September 4, 1988. Only two of the women’s bodies had even been discovered by November 7, 1988. Most of the victims were never reported missing to the police. It is overwhelmingly likely, therefore, that the murderer had left the state two months before anyone realized (or could reasonably have realized) that a serial murderer was at work. So what is the value in having a relatively small, close-knit pool of potential victims? The implication is that because the pool of potential victims was small and close-knit, it should have been possible to protect them. But how? You can’t act to protect someone from a serial murderer at large unless you have some reason to believe that a serial murderer is at large, which no one did. How do you protect somebody in November who has been dead since July?

  Smith criticizes the investigators because, after one of the victims disappeared, they failed to make a timely investigation of her apartment. She lived in a drug-infested housing project. After she disappeared somebody else moved in, began stealing her welfare checks and using all of her stuff. Eventually, the victim’s sister and daughters broke in, cleaned out the apartment, and just threw away everything that didn’t belong to the victim.

  According to Smith, “without knowing who the clothing and other articles actually belonged to, the possibility exists that some items found in Nancy Paiva’s apartment might have belonged to other victims of the Highway Killer.” This, apparently, is a substantial portion of what Smith refers to when he says that “there was an ample amount of physical evidence,” and he also says that this act was preventable, and that it “may have made solving the Highway Murders far more difficult.”

  But I’m not aware that there has ever been a serial murder case in the history of the world which was solved by searching the domicile of one of the victims. It’s been tried hundreds of times. When there is a serial murderer around, the police always search the lodgings of the victims, as indeed they should. It’s never solved the case yet, and there’s no reason to believe that it would have done so here.

  Pina’s investigation followed the classic pattern of unsuccessful serial murder investigations of that era. Building from the lives of the victims, he tried to develop evidence leading toward the killer. In doing so, he tried to focus on a “super suspect,” channeling the investigation prematurely toward a few people that he regarded as hot prospects. These practices work fine in solving ordinary crimes; they don’t work at all in pursuing a serial murderer.

  But even had he done everything right, all of the crimes were months old before the investigation began. No one witnessed any abductions. The precise time frames of the abductions and murders could not be established. It was a hard case.

  When he was sixteen years old, Richard Grissom got a C on his report card. He was afraid to go home with that grade, he said. Instead, he broke into the nearby home of a 72-year-old woman and murdered her, stabbing her repeatedly with a rusty railroad spike. He walked home then, dripping blood through the snow, and confessed when confronted by police.

  He served three years in detention, after which he passed the threshold of adulthood, and became, in the legal fiction popular at the time, a different person, no longer responsible for the sins of his youth. He attended college for a couple of years, majoring in burglary, and bounced in and out of prison. Once, at a parole hearing, he pointed out that while on parole he had broken into the homes of at least four women while they were home, but hadn’t killed the women. He brought this up himself, to show that he was making progress.

  Eventually, however, he couldn’t
stand the pressure, and drifted back into mayhem. Grissom had a thing about keys. He acquired a key-duplicating machine, and structured his work to get keys. He set up a paint-contracting business that serviced apartment complexes. Through this and other scams, he acquired master keys that would open hundreds of apartments.

  On the evening of June 6/7, 1989, Grissom is believed to have entered the Wichita, Kansas, apartment of Terri Maness, who was found brutally murdered the next day. On June 12/13, 1989, he entered the Kansas City apartment of Michelle Katf, and attempted to forcibly abduct Ms. Katf. She fought him off, but on the following weekend, June 18/19, Grissom abducted and murdered another woman from the same neighborhood, Joan Butler. These were beautiful young women, all of them. Clean, hardworking young women.

  Grissom took Joan Butler’s car. Her family, with no idea what had happened to her, organized a search, one element of which was distributing fliers describing her car. A student at Kansas University spotted the car in Lawrence, Kansas, and called police. A policeman stopped Grissom entering the car, and attempted to walk him back to his apartment to check out his ID. The cop had no idea that it was a murder case; all he knew was that the man seemed to be driving somebody else’s car. Grissom, once a member of a college track team, broke and ran, escaping from the officer.

  Grissom’s fingerprints were all over Butler’s car; he was identified from the prints. Calling a friend, Grissom got a ride back to Kansas City, picked up his own car, and grabbed his kill kit and his key rings. That evening (June 25/26) he abducted two young women, Theresa Brown and Christine Rusch, and forced them to drain their bank accounts. Like Joan Butler, their bodies were never found, but Grissom was eventually convicted of their murders.

  Grissom, half black and half Asian, was a handsome man, intelligent, articulate, always composed. He was able to gain the trust of those around him, a trust which he abused without conscience. Like almost all serial murderers, Grissom was a thief of immense magnitude.

  The book about the case is Suddenly Gone, by Dan Mitrione (Addicus Books, Omaha, Nebraska, 1995). I’d give the book about a D+. The author blurb identifies Mitrione as “a former federal investigator” (OK, Dan, but what did you really do?), and the book has that feel about it, that it was written by a cop. Mitrione developed good connections to the investigation, but the cops are the only people in the book that he seems to care about. His writing is dull, and he has nothing to say other than this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. His research is good, and his intentions are honorable. This book is in no way an exploitation of the crime. But Mitrione has no ability to bring anyone to life, and doesn’t seem to have any real interest in the people. Near the end of the book, we learn for the first time, as an aside, that one of the victims was engaged.

  Like many serial murderers, Grissom never confessed, although he had always confessed readily to the other crimes with which he was charged, including the juvenile murder. Grissom told a jailhouse informant that he had committed several other murders—a couple of prostitutes in Florida, a hitchhiker here and there—but there is no basis on which to evaluate these statements. On the basis of what we do know, Grissom was sentenced to four life terms plus 361 years.

  In October, 1989, it came to light that Ray Copeland, an elderly Missouri farmer, had been murdering his hired help.

  Ray Copeland was a mean, nasty young man who had aged into a mean, nasty 75-year-old. He looked like anybody’s old farmer grandpa. He was a grouchy old bastard who would steal from his neighbors, cheat you in a business deal, or pay for his groceries with a bad check. When he was younger he’d beat the hell out of you for good measure.

  Part of what you have to understand about Ray Copeland is that there is one guy like this in every small town between Pittsburgh and Sacramento, or anyway there’s one in every small town that I ever lived in. They’re not usually murderers, of course. Copeland was the kind of guy who had been in and out of jail all of his life, but who still figured he was outsmarting the police because they only got him for about a tenth of the stuff he had actually done. He had always stolen and then sold livestock, even when he was a kid. As he matured his schemes to profit by other people’s pigs and cows got more convoluted, without getting more sophisticated. In the early 1970s he began using drifters as intermediaries. Rather than establishing a hollow bank account and buying cattle with bad checks himself, he would have his hired help do it for him, then persuade them to skedaddle out of town before the check came around.

  At least, we hope that those drifters just hung the paper and ran; nobody really knows. There’s no evidence that Copeland was killing people back then, although anything’s possible. Anyway, that landed him back in jail pretty quick. In the mid-1980s Ray Copeland had returned to his farm, fighting bankruptcy after a tour of confinement. With some assistance from his wife, Faye, he developed a scheme to stay afloat. He would visit the missions and homeless shelters near him, and bring home a drifter to employ as a farm worker. He would help the drifter to establish a bank account in the area. Then he and the drifter would visit the sale barns and buy cattle at auction, paying for the cattle with worthless checks from the new accounts. Copeland would murder the drifter and sell the cattle.

  This is about as stupid a crime pattern as you could come up with if you set out to get yourself executed. If you’re going to kill a bunch of people and try to profit by their deaths, probably the last thing you want is for the county sheriff to come knocking on your door every couple of months, asking if you know what’s happened to so-and-so. This was an inevitable consequence of what Copeland was doing. He was killing people who had been seen with him at sale barns buying livestock, at the bank, and at the grocery store, people who had been living in his house—and who left unpaid debts behind them. This had to bring the police to his door.

  In October, 1989, a drifter named Jack McCormick, lured into the Copelands’ clutches, sensed that something was up, and bolted. As soon as he had made it safely out of state (in a stolen car), he called Crime Stoppers and reported that he had seen human remains on Copeland’s farm. He was making that up; he was basically right, but he was making up the part about seeing human remains in order to get people to pay attention to him. The sheriff got a warrant to go out to the Copeland farm and poke around. It took a couple of weeks of searching, but five bodies were eventually found. Ray and Faye Copeland were both arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by the state of Missouri. At least three other men hired by Copeland in 1988 and 1989 had also disappeared without a trace.

  Faye Copeland was eventually pardoned. The evidence against her was not all that strong, and at some point it occurred to Missouri officials that it would be unseemly to execute an 85-year-old woman for crimes committed by her husband. Ray Copeland died on death row.

  The book about the case, The Copeland Killings, was written by Tom Miller, a local reporter. The book is OK, straightforward and inoffensive.

  Between January, 1988, and his arrest on January 9, 1992, William Lester Suff murdered at least thirteen prostitutes, perhaps a few more than that, in and around Riverside County, California.

  Suff was a pasty-faced, flaccid, dull, long-winded, ineffectual blowhard, in the general class of murderers which would include Robert Hansen and Gerald Stano. He had no particular talent at anything, including murder. He made every mistake a serial murderer can make, and frequently. He abducted prostitutes within miles of his home, and dumped them within blocks of his home. When he moved, in March, 1990, the dumpsites followed him across the county. He left his victims in the open, where they would be found within hours. Many or most of the victims were found within 72 hours of their disappearance, leaving the bodies and dump locations teeming with physical evidence, and allowing friends and associates of the deceased to be interviewed while they still remembered details. He was seen making contact with at least three of the victims, including once by a woman who was so suspicious of him that she had jotted down a partial license
plate as he drove away. He allowed at least one potential victim to escape, probably two, providing police with additional opportunities to develop information about him. One time he picked up a prostitute and took her to a McDonald’s. She was leery of him, and made a scene at the McDonald’s, so that they were seen together by a large number of people. Suff then dropped off that woman—but crossed the street, picked up and murdered her working partner.

  He responded to public goading by police. He took personal items from the victims, and gave them to women he knew. In addition to all of this, the man was a convicted murderer, on parole from a Texas conviction for beating to death his own baby daughter.

  Suff was able to end the lives of (about) eighteen young women due largely to the fact that the police who were investigating his crimes had no confidence in their ability to catch him—and, having no confidence that they could catch him, failed to take obvious steps to bring about his arrest.

  The RSO [Riverside Sheriff’s Office] didn’t believe the killer could be caught. Evidently, the Sheriff’s Office believed the Riverside prostitute killer was another Green River killer: a shrewd criminal who would continue uncaught until he eventually disappeared of his own accord.

  The investigation was composed of and directed by officers who had never before been a part of a serial murder investigation. Again, this was quite common until the late 1990s.

  Suff’s modus operandi was simple and almost unvaried: he picked up prostitutes who worked along a seedy strip in the city of Riverside. When Riverside City police had developed enough information about the assailant to perhaps recognize him when they saw him, they set up an intensive surveillance of the contact area. When Suff came through and tried to pick up a victim, they caught him. If they had done the same things a year earlier, they would have caught him a year earlier.