Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  The response was enormous. Newspaper sales went through the roof, and the other papers picked up the story. All of Chicago read a confession that Heirens had yet to deliver. Heirens claimed later that he tried to match the Tribune’s phony confession, because when he tried to give his own version of the “facts” of the killings, if he deviated too broadly from the Tribune’s tale, his lawyers would guide him back toward that reality. His attorneys worked out a deal with State’s Attorney William Tuohy for three life sentences, served concurrently; with good behavior, Heirens could be out in twenty years.

  On July 30, Heirens was to give his confession in public, before the state’s attorney. When the time came, he later explained, “after assembling all the officials, including attorneys and policemen, he [Tuohy] began a preamble about how long everyone had waited to get a confession from me, but, at last, the truth was going to be told. He kept emphasizing the word ‘truth’ and I asked him if he really wanted the truth. He assured me that he did. Now Tuohy made a big deal about hearing the truth now, when I was being forced to lie to save myself. It made me angry . . . so I told them the truth, and everyone got very upset.”

  Once again, Heirens denied the murders. Tuohy was furious, and the particulars of the deal changed. Instead of serving his life sentences concurrently, Heirens would have to serve them consecutively. Tuohy didn’t have much of a case—the flawed evidence and the illegal treatment of the prisoner would all be picked over in court. Avoiding a trial by gaining a confession was the only way to guarantee Heirens a long prison term.

  Under threat of the electric chair, Heirens agreed to the new terms and again made a full confession, pleading guilty to each count. His sentencing was scheduled for the next day. That night, he tried to hang himself in his cell, but a guard spotted him and saved his life.

  In prison, Heirens continues to insist that he didn’t murder anyone. He’s been a model prisoner—the first in Illinois history to get a four-year college degree while incarcerated. He taught himself TV repair, then created a shop and taught other prisoners. He’s been a counselor and has worked in the Catholic chaplain’s office. Experts agree that he’s completely rehabilitated, but despite his efforts over the years, he has never been freed. In prison since 1946, he has been incarcerated longer than any other prisoner in the United States.

  Did Heirens do it? He said yes a couple of times, and he said no for decades. The better question might be this: Would the same person who killed two women, left their bodies naked and their heads wrapped in clothing, and urinated and defecated at both scenes also take a young girl from her home with her whole family present and strangle and dismember her?

  The killer’s signature in the first two instances is unmistakable. In the third, there are some areas of possible overlap, but there are vast differences as well. The killer may have washed Suzanne Degnan’s body in the washtub, as the two older women were presumably washed in their bathtubs—but then again, he put Suzanne’s head in a sewer, which seems to negate attempts at cleanliness; perhaps the washtub was simply to catch the blood of dismemberment. At the second and third scenes, some sort of written communication was left behind, but is a ransom note the same as a cry for help? Maybe Heirens did kill the first two but not Degnan, and his cry for help was answered: he was caught before he killed again.

  FBI profilers John Douglas and Robert Ressler believe that Heirens is guilty. So do members of Degnan’s family. A careful consideration of the known facts seems to cast some doubt on that verdict, but according to the laws of the state of Illinois, William Heirens is the Lipstick Killer, and he will be known that way when he finally dies in prison.

  BILL HEIRENS is not the only youthful killer to be discussed by the members of TV’s fictional BAU. In the episodes “Plain Sight” (14) and “The Eyes Have It” (506), Herbert Mullin’s name comes up as an example of a serial killer who murders a variety of people.

  Herbert Mullin was born on April 18, 1947. Significantly—to Mullin, at any rate—April 18 was the anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and of Albert Einstein’s death.

  What might have been the next most significant date of Mullin’s short life was February 13, 1973. On that day, while Mullin was picking up firewood for his family up in the redwood-covered hills outside the beach town of Santa Cruz, California, he believed that he received a telepathic message from his father: “Don’t deliver a stick of wood until you kill somebody.”

  The day before, trap shooters had come across the body of Mullin’s second victim, hitchhiker Mary Guilfoyle. Another serial killer, Edmund Kemper, had been making a career out of killing hitchhikers near Santa Cruz around this time, too, and the city was being called the Murder Capital of the World. Kemper’s targets were so consistent that he was called the Coed Killer. Mullin’s victimology was considerably more random.

  Wanting to heed his father’s supposed telepathic advice, Mullin stopped outside the home of retired boxer Fred Perez and fired one shot with the rifle he had taken from four hippies he had killed in the woods three days earlier. Perez fell down and died. Mullin backed out of the driveway and slowly drove away.

  It was to be Mullin’s last murder. One of Perez’s neighbors heard the shot, saw the car, and phoned the police, who picked up Mullin before he got home. He didn’t resist arrest. When he got to the police station, he wouldn’t say a word, except to shout “Silence!” whenever he was asked a question.

  Herb Mullin had always been troubled. Raised in and around San Francisco and Santa Cruz, he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in his early twenties. He was in and out of mental hospitals five times, determined to be a danger to himself and others, but in California, under Governor Ronald Reagan, mental hospitals were being closed right and left. All but the most severely mentally ill were expected to take their meds, live in halfway houses, and attend group therapy sessions.

  It was easy for a smart kid to skip those things and to just lose himself in San Francisco’s counterculture or the redwoods around Santa Cruz. And Mullin was a smart kid, voted “most likely to succeed” by his high school class. A low point in his life came when his best friend, Dean Richardson, was killed in a car accident the summer after graduation. In despair, Mullin took to his room, built shrines to his pal, explored esoteric philosophies, and sought meaning in tragedy.

  Jim Gianera, a buddy of Richardson’s, ran into Mullin at the beach and offered him some marijuana. As they smoked, Gianera told him about the burgeoning antiwar movement. This was 1966, and the Vietnam War was escalating hot and heavy. Mullin’s drug experimentation went further, and he eventually tattooed “Legalize Acid” across his belly. According to former FBI profiler Robert Ressler, drugs didn’t cause Mullin’s psychosis, but in combination with his paranoid schizophrenia they hurried him past the breaking point.

  Mullin swung from one extreme to the other, trying on lifestyles like pairs of shoes. He was, at various times, a drug-addled hippie, a shaven-headed ultraconservative, a conscientious objector, a nonviolent boxer, a bisexual, a skid row resident, and a would-be marine who passed the psychiatric tests and was passed over only because he wouldn’t finish the have-you-ever-been-arrested paperwork. In September 1972, after punching holes in his San Francisco apartment, he moved back in with his parents in Felton.

  At exactly the worst time in his life for something like this to happen, someone predicted “the big one,” the major earthquake that every Californian wonders about at one time or another. Most people disregarded the “prophet,” but not Herb Mullin. He had, after all, been born on April 18. He knew it was coming. And he knew how to stop it.

  On Friday, October 13, Mullin went for a drive. He saw a man walking along the road, a transient nobody would miss. Mullin passed him and stopped, pretending to have engine trouble. When the man, Lawrence White, offered to help, Mullin cracked his skull with a bat and shoved him over the embankment.

  White, according to Mullin, looked like the biblical Jonah, without the whale. Th
e telepathic message that Mullin heard him broadcast was “Hey, man, pick me up and throw me over the boat. Kill me so that others will be saved.”

  Next came Mary Guilfoyle, whom Mullin picked up while she was hitching to a job interview. Mullin had read about Michelangelo dissecting corpses to learn about human anatomy, so he decided to do the same thing. He stabbed Guilfoyle in the car, then carried her off into the woods and cut her open. When she was found almost four months later, she was believed to be another of Ed Kemper’s coeds.

  Father Henri Tomei was inside St. Mary’s Catholic Church, over the hill in Los Gatos, on All Souls’ Day, November 2. Mullin found his way to the church, hoping, he said later, to find the strength to stop killing. He began confessing to Father Tomei, then decided on a different course of action and stabbed the priest in the heart.

  Mullin then tried to join the coast guard but was turned down. He planned to kill a friend, but there were too many people around and all he had was his hunting knife. He bought a gun, failing to inform the gun shop about his various mental hospital stays. On January 15, 1973, his effort to join the marines failed. He moved out of his parents’ home and got a cheap apartment near the beach. There he decided that the next to die had to be Jim Gianera, who had ruined his life by introducing him to drugs and leftist politics.

  January 25 found Mullin at a cabin near the kitschy tourist destination the Mystery Spot, where Gianera had lived. Kathy Francis, home with her two children while her husband was in San Francisco doing a drug deal, told Mullin that Gianera and his wife, Joan, had moved into town. Mullin went to the address Francis had given him, where Gianera let him in the front door. Almost immediately, Mullin shot Gianera. Wounded, Gianera made it upstairs to where Joan was taking a bath. Mullin followed him and shot them both in the head, then went to work on them with his knife.

  Mullin realized that he had to return to the cabin. Francis had told him where the Gianeras lived, so when they turned up dead he would be the obvious suspect. He drove back up the hill, shot Francis and her two boys, then stabbed them.

  He went back to his apartment and managed to maintain for a couple of weeks. But on February 10, he couldn’t hold his urges in any longer. Wandering in the woods, he ran across four teenage boys who were camping illegally. He told them to pack up and leave; they refused. The next day, he came back and shot all four of them and took their .22 rifle, which he used a couple of days later to gun down ex-prizefighter Perez.

  The police hadn’t linked the various crimes because there were no obvious connections. The bludgeoned homeless man outside Santa Cruz didn’t have any ties to the stabbed priest in Los Gatos. Mary Guilfoyle was found out of sequence, and Ed Kemper was the immediate suspect in any hitchhiker murder. The Gianera and Francis murders appeared to be drug-related. The four kids in the woods weren’t found until a week after Mullin’s arrest for shooting Perez. Mullin was the very picture of what is called a disorganized offender, except that he was capable of driving a car. Because his last ten murders were committed so close together, he blurs the distinction between spree killers (who kill one victim right after another) and serial killers (who have time gaps between their murders).

  Mullin is a perfect example of the mission-based killer, one who truly believes that his murders serve a greater good.

  The only connections among his victims were in Mullin’s fevered brain. He had to kill, he explained, because “a minor natural disaster will prevent a major natural disaster.” To prevent a major earthquake from striking California, a few people had to die. Because Mullin understood this, it became his mission to carry out those executions, and the victims themselves had telepathically given their blessing, inviting Mullin to murder them. Einstein understood—he had sacrificed himself on an earlier April 18 so that Herbert Mullin might live in order to save California from disaster. The fact that “the big one” hadn’t happened was proof of the success of his efforts.

  Mullin was found mentally ill, but sane enough—in the legal sense of sanity, able to distinguish right from wrong—to stand trial. He was charged with ten murders—White, Guilfoyle, and Tomei had not yet been connected to him—and found guilty of premeditated murder in the cases of Jim Gianera and Kathy Francis and her children, and second-degree murder in the more impulsive killings of the others. Sentenced to life in prison, he won’t be eligible for parole until 2025. He remains incarcerated at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California.

  WILLIAM HEIRENS and Herbert Mullin didn’t look like murderers. In “Natural Born Killer” (108), we’re introduced to Vincent Perotta, a killer who not only looks like one but who has made it a career as well as a hobby by becoming a Mob hit man. Perotta, the BAU team discovers, has killed more than a hundred people, and he sometimes resorts to extreme overkill. He started hunting at a young age and showed extreme aggression with no fear or remorse. At one point, a homeless man found small-time mobster Freddy Condor’s head in a Dumpster; the rest of Freddy turned up in other garbage bins close by. Perotta was captured after one of his murders drew too much attention to his Mob bosses.

  If the fictional Perotta were compared to real-life Mafia hit man Roy DeMeo, Perotta would be a piker.

  Exact figures are hard to come by, for obvious reasons, but DeMeo is suspected of between seventy-five and two hundred murders. A Neapolitan rather than a Sicilian, he grew up around mobsters in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, in the early 1940s, and he worked his way into their good graces. He was close to a Gambino family associate named Nino Gaggi, and with Gaggi’s sponsorship eventually became a made man (someone officially inducted into the Mafia). As a young man he was violent, aggressive, and strong.

  Working for the Gambino family, DeMeo put together his own crew, specializing in auto theft and drug trafficking (an activity of which Mob boss Carlo Gambino disapproved). At age thirty-two, DeMeo did his first hit, a simple execution: several bullets to the head, the body left in an alley.

  DeMeo realized that some bodies shouldn’t be found, so he developed a method to dispose of them that rivaled Henry Ford’s advances in the mass production of automobiles. DeMeo owned a bar called the Gemini Lounge; it had an adjoining apartment, and the bathtub sometimes came in handy. Because his crew performed their grisly tasks there (sometimes referring to the place as the Horror Hotel), their technique became known as the Gemini Method.

  When they had a victim whom they needed to disappear, he would be shot in the head. Immediately, another member of the crew would wrap a towel around the head to stanch the flow of blood. Someone else would stab the victim numerous times in the heart in order to make sure the victim was dead and stop his heart from pumping. He would be put in the bathtub, or hanged over it, so that the blood would drain into a controlled location and be easily washed away. The drained body was then beheaded, cut into pieces (DeMeo, once a butcher’s apprentice, knew about chopping meat), wrapped in garbage bags, and tossed.

  The first time DeMeo’s butchers tried this method, they made a couple of mistakes. One of the crew put the victim’s head through a compacting machine, an unnecessary bit of overkill. Once the victim was bagged, they tossed him into a Dumpster, believing that it would be emptied soon. When it wasn’t, a homeless man came along and opened the bags, then fled. The next passerby called the police. After that point, the Gemini crew delivered packages directly to the garbage dump or buried them beneath buildings under construction. The disassembly crew enjoyed its work and was good at it. Between 1977 and 1979 these men plied their trade almost nonstop.

  The FBI whittled away at the Gemini crew, and finally Gambino decided that DeMeo’s habits were drawing undue attention to family matters. DeMeo, like so many of the people he had met in the last decade, was executed. He was shot seven times, and his body was left in the trunk of a car that was abandoned at a boat club. DeMeo wouldn’t be allowed to disappear the way his victims had—he was used to send a final message.

  DeMeo associate Richard Kuklinski, also known as the Iceman, would also put Pero
tta to shame. Kuklinski was ten years old when his alcoholic father, Stanley, beat his older brother, Florian, to death. Young Richard and his mother lied about Florian’s cause of death in order to protect Stanley from the law. By age fourteen, Kuklinski had committed a murder of his own. Before his career came to an end, he claimed credit for at least 130; some sources put it closer to 200.

  Kuklinski’s favorite murder weapon was cyanide, because it was hard to detect postmortem. But he was flexible, so he also used guns, knives, chain saws, and even a crossbow on at least one occasion. In his nearly scientific quest for murderous perfection, he sometimes froze the bodies of his victims to disguise their times of death, thereby earning himself the nickname the Iceman.

  Kuklinski died in prison in 2006, reportedly of natural causes, but he was preparing to testify against Gambino family underboss Sammy Gravano. After the Iceman’s death, the charges against Gravano were dropped for lack of evidence.

  Although people like Roy DeMeo and Richard Kuklinski—and the fictional characters Vincent Perotta and Tony “Basola” Mecacci, the Mob enforcers from “Reckoner” (503)—are not typically counted among the ranks of serial killers, they share many traits with them. Most notably, they suffer from a sociopathic lack of empathy. They feel no remorse about their victims, no sense of loss about lives snuffed out before their time. DeMeo and Kuklinski killed more for business reasons than personal ones, but they couldn’t have racked up the body counts they did if they weren’t supremely damaged human beings. In Kuklinski’s case, especially, the cause of that damage is obvious. Both men were, as the title of the episode suggests, natural-born killers.

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