Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

by Peter Vronsky

  Chase managed to graduate from high school in 1969, but could not keep up with his studies in college or hold down a job. In 1972 he was arrested for drunk driving, and in 1973, after an incident at a party, he was charged with resisting police and carrying a concealed handgun without a license. He paid a $50 fine.

  In 1976, Chase was put in a nursing hospital after he was found injecting rabbit blood into his veins. Because his parents could not afford mental treatment for their son, state conservators were appointed for Richard Chase. At the hospital, Chase was reported to be a “frightening” patient and known among the staff as Dracula. He often went out into the hospital garden and captured birds in the bushes. Afterward he bit off their heads and drank their blood. Two nurse’s aides quit their jobs rather than continue working around Chase.

  Chase explained to staff at the hospital that his blood was turning to powder and he needed to drink blood to stave off death. When psychiatrists suggested that Chase’s problems could be controlled by drugs and that he should be released, the nursing staff at the hospital howled in protest. In 1977, Chase was released anyhow—into the custody of his mother, who had believed that her husband was trying to poison her. She rented Chase an apartment to live in.

  People who had encountered Chase, who was by then twenty-seven years old, remembered that he seemed to live entirely in the past—he talked of events in high school as if they had happened yesterday. He also talked a lot about UFOs and a “Nazi crime syndicate” from high school that was still pursuing him.

  In August 1977, Chase was driving near Lake Tahoe when police pulled his truck over in a routine stop. He was covered in blood and in his truck was a bucket of blood and several rifles. Police determined that the blood was bovine and let him go. In September, Chase had an argument with his mother and killed her cat. Twice in October, he bought dogs from the animal shelter for fifteen dollars each. In mid-November, he answered an ad in a local paper for puppies and managed to bargain for two puppies for the price of one. Police, meanwhile, were getting a barrage of missing pet reports in Chase’s neighborhood.

  On December 18, after filling out a form stating that he had never been a mental patient or a criminal, Chase purchased a .22-caliber handgun. He drove around for several days shooting at people’s houses until he killed Ambrose Griffin.

  On January 16, 1978, he set a garage on fire. On January 23, the day he killed Terry Wallin, he wandered through the neighborhood, entering any house where the door was unlocked. Several people called the police, but he was gone by the time they arrived. In one house that Chase entered, he defecated on a child’s bed and urinated in a clothes drawer. He rambled on this way, passing through the shopping mall where he encountered his former schoolmate and eventually arrived at Terry Wallin’s home.

  Mumbling about UFOs following him, Chase was sentenced to death, much to Ressler’s regret, who felt that Chase was truly insane and did not know the nature of the acts he was committing. The death sentence, however, reflected the community’s fear that convicts like Chase might be released after being declared “cured” by psychiatrists—a fear that was well founded considering how many serial killers had records of being confined and released (such as Ed Kemper and Henry Lee Lucas). In 1980, Chase accumulated a surplus of depressants and took them all. He was found dead in his cell.

  Psychotic serial killers like Chase can be both difficult and easy to capture—difficult because they strike like lightning with no rhyme or reason and are therefore highly unpredictable; easy because they make little effort to conceal their acts. They are, however, rare—only a small percentage of serial killers are truly suffering from psychosis.

  Criminal profiling is not intended to “solve” a case or produce a definitive identity of the perpetrator. Profiling is a contributory tool that can filter out less likely scenarios and suspects or focus the investigation on fewer possibilities. It can be used to “trigger” witness recollections by providing a starting point. In the Chase case, when police asked witnesses specifically if they had seen an unkempt, gaunt individual, Chase’s name surfaced. The witness might not have come forward with his identity had police been more general in their survey.

  Wayne Williams—The Atlanta Child Murders

  Probably the first high-profile case FBI analysts became involved in was the Atlanta child murders of the early 1980s. Between July 1979 and May 1981, at least twenty-eight black children and youths, mostly males, were found dumped in various locations around Atlanta. Because there was some discussion as to whether these crimes were committed by a white supremacist group, eventually the federal government and the FBI became involved in the investigation. FBI agents John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood from the BSU came down to Atlanta to assist in profiling the killer.

  They thought it was unlikely that a white supremacist group was committing the murders because the bodies were partially hidden, dumped in abandoned buildings or in the backs of vacant lots. A more public display of the bodies would have served white supremacists better. Because the crimes were committed in black neighborhoods, it was likely that the offender was black. A white killer would have stood out in the neighborhood and would have been noticed. Roy Hazelwood recalls driving through a neighborhood where some of the victims disappeared: “People walking on the sidewalk stopped. People mowing their lawns stopped. People stopped talking to each other and stared at us. It was like one of those E. F. Hutton ads on television . . . I knew there was no way a white serial killer could have moved through those neighborhoods without being noticed. I knew the guy had to be black.”212 Furthermore, statistically speaking, serial killers tend to kill victims within their own race.

  There were no reports of any of the victims being forcibly abducted. The profilers concluded that the serial killer was using some kind of con to lure his victims away. He was intelligent, probably from a middle-class or upper-class background, and had some kind of occupation or hobby that might have been attractive to the young victims. He was probably in his midtwenties—not too old to frighten away the victims nor too young to be credible in his con. There was little evidence of sexual contact with the victims, and therefore the profilers suggested that he was sexually inadequate and probably single. He would be a police buff, might drive a police-type vehicle and own a police-type dog like a German shepherd, and might have already interjected himself somewhere into the investigation. He would be probably following media reports of the progress of the investigation.

  Not long afterward, Atlanta police received an anonymous phone call from an individual claiming to be a racist killer and warning that he would kill more black kids. The caller hung up after giving police a roadside location to search for another body. Douglas had recently witnessed hoax messages while teaching in England during the Yorkshire Ripper investigation and remembered the impediment they had created to identifying that killer. He suggested that the police set up a telephone trace and then make a big show of searching the opposite side of the road from which the caller instructed them to search. Sure enough, the caller telephoned, telling the police how stupid they were in searching the wrong side of the road. His call was traced and he was quickly arrested. Again, we see that profiling is important not only in focusing on who the perpetrator might be, but also in filtering out who is not.

  Incredibly, the next victim was found on the road that police pretended to search to flush out the hoaxer. Apparently the killer was following press reports and knew that he had not dumped any body there. Now he was going to show his superiority to the police.

  John Douglas wrote that in February 1981, somebody in the medical examiner’s office released information that was widely carried by the media: that five victims had been linked to the same killer through hair and fiber evidence. “And something clicked with me. He’s going to start dumping bodies in the river,” Douglas wrote in his memoirs. “We’ve got to start surveilling the rivers, I said.”213

  Local police and FBI agents staked out bridges for weeks over ri
vers in the Atlanta area, and in what has been called “The splash heard ’round the world” they identified Wayne Williams after seeing his vehicle on a bridge at 3:00 A.M. in the vicinity of the sound of a large splash. No body had been located at that moment, but a suspect was now identified. Several days later, police pulled from the river two bodies downstream from the bridge. On the basis of fiber and hair evidence and witness statements that placed the victims in Williams’s company, he was charged with the two murders.

  Wayne Williams was a twenty-three-year-old black man who lived with his parents, both retired schoolteachers. He was an unrealized prodigy, establishing his own small low-powered radio station when he was fourteen. Although the station’s range did not extend beyond a few city blocks, he attracted a lot of press attention. He claimed to be a music producer and promoter and recruited young boys whom he promised stardom. Nothing came of his promises.

  Williams monitored radio and police frequencies and sold freelance photographs of accidents to local newspapers. At one of the scenes of the child murders, Wayne Williams offered his services as a crime scene photographer. In 1976 he was charged with impersonating a police officer when his vehicle was found equipped with red and blue police lights beneath the grill and on the dashboard. He owned a German shepherd.

  While he appeared genteel and harmless, FBI profilers coached the prosecution on how to get Williams to make angry outbursts in the courtroom during his cross-examination. Williams was never charged with the other child murders, but after his arrest they ceased. He was convicted of only two murders, neither of which exactly fit the pattern of the child murders. The victims were twenty-seven and twenty-one, and their cause of death was not clearly established. When state forensic evidence linking Williams to the two victims was discredited by the defense, the judge in a controversial decision allowed the introduction of fiber and hair evidence linking Williams to the other victims, even though he was not charged with their murders. Williams to this day proclaims his innocence.214

  Looking over Wayne Williams’s description, it appears that the FBI profile that Hazelwood and Douglas submitted is incredibly accurate—right down to the ownership of a vehicle fitted with police lights and the dog. But just to show how difficult it is to sort fact from fiction in true-crime history, there is a radically different account of the FBI’s participation in the Atlanta child murders investigation. Robert D. Keppel, a professional investigator in more than fifty serial homicide cases and a consultant to the Atlanta child murder task force, remembers things differently upon his arrival in Atlanta in March 1980:

  We couldn’t wait to hear what gems of wisdom would come from the BSU’s agents, most of whom were only self-proclaimed experts in murder investigations and had never investigated one lead in an actual murder case. The FBI were the kings of follow-up but couldn’t solve a crime in progress. Most homicide detectives knew this . . . The profile of the probable killer provided by the BSU mirrored the wishes of the community, that is, the killer was white.215

  Moreover, the FBI surveillance of river bridges did not start until April 24, after four bodies had already been found in Atlanta-area rivers between March 30 and April 20.216 Perhaps bureaucratic intransigence can explain why the bridge surveillance was not initiated immediately after Douglas “clicked” but only after four bodies in a row had been pulled out from the rivers. One wonders, though, why neither Hazelwood nor Douglas mention in their autobiographies the earlier BSU profile suggesting that the killer was a white individual. Or did Robert Keppel get the story all wrong? Go figure it out.

  Larry Bell—Profiling the Organized Offender

  In 1985, FBI profilers confronted a highly organized serial killer. On May 31, in rural South Carolina, seventeen-year-old Shari Faye Smith was kidnapped on her way home from school. She was driving, but at the gates of her home, she stopped to check the roadside mailbox. He car was found at the end of the driveway, keys in the ignition, motor still running and her purse on the seat. During the next four days, the family received numerous telephone calls from the kidnapper, who said to them, “Shari is now a part of me. Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Our souls are now one . . . Shari is protected and . . . she is a part of me now and God looks after all of us.”

  A handwritten letter from Shari arrived several days after her kidnapping—it was her “last will and testament” and proclaimed her love for her family. It was dated June 1, 1985, 3:10 A.M. Reading the letter, the FBI was convinced that Shari was now dead.

  The family kept receiving phone calls from the killer, but the calls were always placed from pay phones and never lasted long enough for the police to arrive in time at the location. The phones were dusted for prints, but the caller never left any behind. The voice was disguised as well, using an improvised electronic device.

  Speaking to Shari’s sister Dawn on June 4, the killer told her how he had kidnapped and murdered Shari. He said that the whole thing had “gotten out of hand.” He was reading from some kind of written script, and at one point he made an error: “Okay, 4:58 A.M.—no, I’m sorry. Hold on a minute . . . 3:10 A.M., Saturday, the first of June, she handwrote what you received . . . 4:58 A.M. Saturday, the first of June, we became one soul.”

  Giving Dawn precise directions, to within six feet of where Shari’s body was located, the killer told her, “We’re waiting. God chose us.” He then hung up.

  Arriving at the described location, eighteen miles away from Shari’s home, the police found her body. The body was dressed and decomposition had occurred to the point where police could no longer determine how Shari had been killed or whether she had been sexually assaulted. Sticky residue from duct tape was found in Shari’s hair and around her face, but the tape itself had been removed.

  FBI profiler John Douglas, who assembled the profile, believed it was highly likely that Shari was the killer’s first murder victim. He noted, however, that the removal of the duct tape was indicative of organized planning and that generally first-time murderers do not start out this organized. This meant that the killer was probably older and more intelligent than average. When he telephoned the family he read quickly from a script and got off the phone as soon as possible. His meticulous directions to the body indicated that he must have revisited the corpse numerous times after the murder for some kind of sexual gratification and ceased only when a “relationship” was no longer possible because of advanced decomposition. Douglas believed that the killer had had a brief failed marriage from the degree of cruelty in the mind games he played with the victim’s family. He probably had a criminal record for obscene phone calls or attacks on children, but would not attack prostitutes because he was intimidated by them. He was most likely living alone or with his parents and would be in his early thirties. Because he chose a body dump site to which he could return, he was probably a local man familiar with the geography of the region. Again from his detailed instructions and highly scripted phone contact, it appeared that he was meticulous, rigid, and orderly. His car would probably be well maintained, clean, and no more than three years old. The fact that he had committed the abduction in the middle of the afternoon in a rural residential district suggested a degree of controlled sophistication. The killer was using some kind of improvised variable-speed device to disguise his voice, which probably meant he was skilled in electronics or in electric trades and aware of the risk of forensic voice identification.

  Two weeks exactly after Shari was kidnapped, the offender struck again, this time kidnapping nine-year-old Debra May Helmick from the front yard of her home. Her father was in the house, ten yards away. The kidnapping took place some thirty miles away from Shari’s home. Witnesses saw the man pull up in a car, speak to the girl, and then suddenly force her inside the vehicle and drive away. They attempted to follow the car but it lost them. John Douglas had little doubt that it was the same offender. Douglas ventured that he would now be displaying even more compulsive behavior. People around him might notice weight loss; he
might be drinking more and not shaving regularly, and he would be eagerly talking about the murder, following television reports, and cutting newspaper clippings about the crime. He would be greatly enjoying his celebrity and sense of power over his victims and the community.

  The police and the FBI felt that because he was closely following the case and was phoning Shari’s family, he might be flushed out into the open. The FBI had a local newspaper publish a story of how the Smiths were having a memorial service at Shari’s grave, and published pictures of Dawn putting a stuffed teddy bear at her sister’s graveside. FBI agents photographed the license plates of any cars that passed by the memorial service and staked out the grave for days in the hope that the killer would attempt to take the teddy bear as a souvenir. He was too smart to take the stuffed toy bait, but obsessed enough to drive by the memorial service: When he was arrested, his license number was among the cars that the FBI had noted passing the location.

  The killer continued to call Dawn, telling her where the body of the nine-year-old girl could be found: “Debra May is waiting. God forgive us all,” said the killer. He warned Dawn that at some point he was going to come for her.

  The FBI crime laboratory, in the meantime, had been analyzing the two-page letter that Shari had written before her murder. An Esta machine is an instrument that can identify microscopic impressions in paper made earlier by somebody writing on sheets of paper higher up in the pad. The device uncovered the traces of the first nine digits of a ten-digit telephone number—a number in Alabama. This narrowed the number down to ten possible numbers. It was a remarkable piece of luck that the number and its area code were written down, and that it was an out-of-state number, meaning that long-distance charge records would be available. The police began to look through the billing records of the ten numbers to see if any had received calls from the area around where Shari was kidnapped and murdered. One of the numbers belonged to a soldier stationed in Alabama who had received calls from a house located just fifteen miles away from where Shari had lived.