He was finally accused of rape on June 13, 1982. Hansen had pulled his usual routine: hiring a prostitute, cuffing her, and pulling a gun. He took her to his home, where he raped her, bit her breasts, and forced a hammer into her vagina. After immobilizing her, he rested from his travails. When he awoke, he informed her that he was going to fly her into the backcountry for more “fun.” If she cooperated, he would bring her back to Anchorage.
The woman was no fool; she realized that because the man had kidnapped her and raped her in his own home, making no effort to conceal his identity, he would never let her live. So while Hansen was loading the plane, the woman saw a chance to escape and ran, still in handcuffs, toward a passing truck. Hansen chased her, but when the truck driver saw her and stopped for her, Hansen turned away.
The police were called, and the woman described the man who had taken her. The cops recognized the description as sounding like local businessman Robert Hansen. They showed her his home and his airplane, and she confirmed both.
When the detectives paid Hansen a visit, he denied everything. “You can’t rape a prostitute, can you?” he asked. He said that his wife and two kids were in Europe for the summer, but he’d had dinner with two business associates. His alibi checked out, and the investigation stalled.
During the next year, more bodies of strippers and hookers turned up in the wilderness. Whenever the cause of death could be determined, it was found that the victim had been shot. A single .223 shell casing was found at one of the scenes.
Remembering the complaint against Hansen, the detectives decided to take another look at him. They brought FBI profiler John Douglas up from the lower forty-eight and asked him to profile their suspect. He did so, based on the information that was available, and it was a close match to Hansen, right down to the stutter. He also told them that since the man was both a hunter and a serial killer, he probably kept trophies—not animal heads mounted on a wall, but clothing, jewelry, and the like, which he might give away or stash in the house.
With Douglas’s profile in hand, the cops got the district attorney to authorize a grand jury investigation. Then they went back to the men who had buttressed Hansen’s alibi and warned them that if they lied they would be looking at serious jeopardy. Both men changed their stories, and Hansen’s alibi fell apart.
Hansen was arrested. The authorities took the profile to a judge and were granted a search warrant for Hansen’s property; this was the first time a criminal profile had ever been used to support a search-warrant request. In Hansen’s house, they found jewelry and identification belonging to some of the victims, as well as a .223 caliber Ruger Mini-14 hunting rifle that was a ballistics match to the shell casing.
Hansen pleaded guilty to the four homicides the police could definitively connect him to, and as part of his plea deal, he showed them seventeen grave sites in the Knik River Valley. Twelve of the sites were ones that the authorities hadn’t known about, and human remains were discovered in most of them. Ultimately, the police connected Hansen to twenty-one murders, and they believed that there could be more.
Robert Hansen is serving a 461-year prison sentence at the Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, Alaska. His big-game hunting days are far behind him, and his name has been expunged from the record books.
YET ANOTHER PROSTITUTE murderer who earns a mention on Criminal Minds is Joel Rifkin, who is brought up in the episode “Charm and Harm” (120) as an example of a criminal who was also an amateur photographer. Rifkin was busted because of a minor violation—driving a pickup truck with no license plate—in East Meadow, Long Island, on June 28, 1993. Instead of pulling over, he tried to flee, so the patrol officers called for reinforcements and gave chase. His truck missed a turn and smashed into a lamppost, and the driver finally surrendered.
The cops noticed a foul odor coming from beneath a tarp in the truck’s bed. Underneath, they found the decomposing, plastic-wrapped body of Tiffany Bresciani, twenty-two years old. Rifkin, thirty-four, explained her presence by saying that she was a prostitute. He had sex with her and then killed her. “Do you think I need a lawyer?” he asked. As it turned out, he did.
Later that day, the authorities searched the house that Rifkin shared with his mother. They found women’s clothing and jewelry, purses and wallets, and several photographs of women. He also had books on the as-yet-unsolved Green River Killer and articles about prostitute-murderer Shawcross. In the garage the police found rope and a tarp, plus a chain saw with bits of human flesh stuck in the teeth and a wheelbarrow that contained human blood.
Once Rifkin was in custody, it didn’t take long for his tale to emerge. Bresciani, he revealed, was actually his seventeenth murder victim, making him New York’s most prolific serial killer. Bludgeoning and strangling his victims, he was then creative in hiding their bodies. His first victim, in 1989, he dismembered, putting her head in a paint can and the rest of her in garbage bags that he spread throughout New Jersey and New York. The next victim he chopped up and put into cans that he filled with fresh concrete, then tossed into the East River.
Dismemberment proved to be too much effort, so after that Rifkin left the bodies whole and simply stashed them inside containers of some sort—oil drums were a favorite. He patronized prostitutes nearly every night, spending almost all of the money he earned on them, but his murders were relatively selective. Rifkin, who was white, victimized white, Asian, Latina, and African American women of various ages.
At the trial, the prosecutor described Rifkin as a sexual sadist who got his satisfaction from causing his victims pain. The jury agreed, and he’s now ensconced at the Clinton Correctional Facility, better known as Dannemora, in New York. With a 203-year sentence, he’ll be eligible for parole in 2197.
Rifkin, like many other sexual predators, had an abiding interest in photography, and the photographs that were found in his bedroom helped to convict him of his crimes. In the Criminal Minds episode “Reckoner” (503), profiler Emily Prentiss says, “Serial killers, especially sexual sadists, often document their kills.” Mike DeBardeleben was also brought down partly by his photos of his many rape victims.
The man often thought of as the first of the modern signature killers (murderers whose crimes share some distinctive telltale commonality that can often be used to link them), Harvey Murray Glatman, also had a photography hobby. Known as the Lonely Hearts Killer, Glatman not only used photographs to fuel fantasies that mixed sex, bondage, and violence—which he often found in the pages of detective magazines—he also used photography itself as a way to lure his victims.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1957, Glatman joined a “lonely hearts club” of single people. From that and from the classified ads he ran in the newspapers, he found a ready pool of women who were willing to model for him in suggestive poses. These women didn’t get their pictures in the magazines, as Glatman promised, but as Glatman’s fantasies became ever more violent, they became the victims of his rapes. Having raped the women, he thought he was left with no choice but to murder them so they couldn’t identify him.
Glatman’s photo-bug habits tripped him up in the end. He photographed each victim at every stage of her torture and eventual death, and when those pictures were discovered, he broke down. His detailed confession proved to be a kind of entry-level manual for understanding the mind of a sexually sadistic serial killer. He was convicted of three murders and executed on September 18, 1959. A fourth victim, believed to be Glatman’s earliest murder, was never identified, and her case remains officially unsolved.
IN THE EPISODE “Scared to Death” (303), real-life murderer Gary Taylor is used as an example of a serial killer whose MO changes as his need to control his situation changes. Taylor used weapons as diverse as a wrench, a rifle, and a machete, and he went from sniping at unsuspecting women to using ruses and posing as an FBI agent to earn their trust.
Taylor, born in 1936, was institutionalized as a young man after nonfatal attacks on several women in Royal Oak,
Michigan. His MO was to hang around bus stops waiting for likely victims, whom he clubbed over the head with a wrench. From there he took to shooting women who were out after dark, which led to his becoming known as the Royal Oak Sniper or the Phantom Sniper. He admitted to a “compulsion to hurt women,” but he was nonetheless granted outpatient status and instructed to take his prescribed medication.
Eventually, of course, he stopped doing that, and then his murders began. While living in Michigan, Taylor abducted two women from Ohio, murdered them, and buried them in his yard. He then moved to Seattle, and his wife reported the two bodies buried in the Michigan yard and claimed that a third was buried there, too, but a third body was never found.
In Seattle Taylor killed another woman and buried her near his home there. The Seattle authorities picked him up, but the authorities in Michigan had not yet entered his name in the national database. Unable to charge Taylor with the Seattle murder and not knowing that he was wanted in Michigan, the police released him, and he vanished again.
After more travel, Taylor surfaced in Texas, where he changed his MO once again: raping his victims but letting them live. On May 20, 1975, he was arrested for a sexual assault in Houston, and he confessed to four homicides. The authorities in California, Texas, and Michigan think he might have been involved in up to twenty murders. He was sentenced to life in prison.
AARON HOTCHNER, in the episode “100” (509), beats serial killer George Foyet to death with his bare hands after Foyet kills Hotchner’s wife, Haley. An investigation concludes that Hotchner was acting in self-defense and defending his four-year-old son, Jack, so no charges are brought against him. In an earlier episode, “Aftermath” (205), profiler Elle Greenaway shoots multiple rape suspect William Lee when the team can’t amass the evidence necessary to convict him. She claims self-defense, and with no witnesses to dispute her story, she isn’t charged, either, but she leaves the FBI.
Both acts could have been considered vigilantism, when the rules of law and order are bypassed in favor of a more immediate brand of justice. Greenaway actively went after Lee, and even though Hotchner was in the midst of the situation with the man who had kidnapped Haley and Jack (and had already murdered Haley), Hotchner could have arrested Foyet rather than killing him on the spot.
Joe Muller, in the episode “Retaliation” (511), is an ex-cop who helps ex-con Dale Schrader murder three people and evade the FBI. He’s pressured into doing this because Schrader has abducted Muller’s family and will murder them if Muller doesn’t cooperate. Muller is, in fact, an honest man who got caught in a bad situation.
But sometimes good cops just plain go bad, like Deputy Sheriff John Clark Battle, who shoots Penelope Garcia, the team’s technical analyst, in the episode “Lucky” (308) and is captured in “Penelope” (309).
Unfortunately, law enforcement officers who dishonor their badges aren’t confined to fiction. Lucille Place of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was concerned when her daughter Susan, who was seventeen, and Susan’s sixteen-year-old friend, Georgia Jessup, went to the beach with an obviously older man. He said his name was Jerry Shepherd, and he was twenty-six. Place watched as he loaded the girls into his Datsun, and she wrote down the license plate number—but missing one digit. The date was September 27, 1972. Place never saw her daughter or Georgia alive again.
Because Place had the license plate number wrong, when she reported it to the police it didn’t match up with anything. After six months, Lucille realized her mistake. When she added in the missing 2 from a county designation code, the match turned out to be a blue Datsun from Martin County. The car belonged to a jailed Martin County deputy sheriff named Gerard John Schaefer. Place went to the jail where Schaefer was being held in March 1973, bearing a picture of her daughter, but he denied ever having seen her.
Schaefer was in jail because he had picked up two hitchhiking teenage girls earlier that summer. He warned them that he was a deputy sheriff, which was true, and that hitching a ride was illegal in Martin County, which was false. To keep them safe, he told them, he would drive them home, and the next morning he would personally take them to the beach.
He showed up in the morning, but instead of heading to the beach, he took the kids to a remote part of swampy, bug-infested Hutchinson Island. When the girls protested, he said he wanted to show them an old Spanish fort. He stopped in a wooded area, drew a gun, and told the girls that he meant to sell them into sexual slavery. Then he handcuffed and gagged them, slipped nooses around their necks, and had them balance on the bulbous roots of a tree while the other ends of the ropes were tied to the tree’s branches. Should one of the girls slip off the root, she would be hanged.
That was as far as Schaefer got. He checked his watch and told the girls he had to run off for a little while, but he’d be back.
An investigation later showed that he had to go take care of police business. When he returned, in uniform and driving his official vehicle instead of his private car, the girls had escaped. He called his boss, Sheriff Richard Crowder, and confessed to trying to scare two teenagers out of hitchhiking, but perhaps he had let things go a little too far, he said.
Crowder fired Schaefer and then arrested him. The former deputy sheriff made bail and cut a deal, accepting a single charge of aggravated assault. He was sentenced to a year in jail, but with good behavior he could be out in six months.
Between Schaefer’s arrest and his trial, while he was out on bail, he met Susan and Georgia. Two other pairs of young women also disappeared during that period. Had Place not had the presence of mind to jot down Schaefer’s license plate number, Schaefer might have kept on making young women disappear.
Although Schaefer’s childhood was relatively affluent and trauma-free, something in his early days twisted his ideas about sexuality. From the age of twelve, he liked women’s panties and would masturbate while wearing them; soon he added the fillip of tying himself to a tree while wearing them, struggling to get free, and hurting himself, which he found incredibly arousing. At the age of fourteen he met his first real girlfriend and sexual partner, a girl who would have sex with him only during elaborate rape scenarios in which he would attack her and tear her clothes. When he tired of the rape games, she broke up with him.
He took to spending a lot of time in the Everglades by himself, hunting and exploring. He also started peeping in windows, especially those of a friend’s sister, Leigh Hainline, who was two years older than Schaefer and who had a habit of undressing by a window with the curtains open. She later disappeared after claiming that a childhood friend was getting her a job with the Central Intelligence Agency.
The bones of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup turned up on Hutchinson Island in April 1973. Susan had a bullet hole through her jaw, and evidence at the crime scene indicated that the two girls had been butchered while tied to a tree. With that information, and Place’s complaint identifying Schaefer’s blue Datsun, the police obtained a search warrant for Schaefer’s mother’s home, where he lived.
His room was a treasure trove. The investigators found the belongings of seven different young women there, including Susan Place and others who had vanished as far back as 1969. The police discovered purses, clothing, jewelry, an address book, a passport, and two teeth that belonged to a missing woman named Carmen Hallock. In addition to items that had belonged to the missing women, the police found eleven guns and thirteen knives, photographs of yet more women who could not be identified, photos of Schaefer himself dressed in women’s underwear, and page after page of Schaefer’s perverse writings and drawings, in which he described the torture and murder of “whores” in painstaking detail. Some of his “artwork” consisted of magazine photos of women in perfectly innocent poses, which he cut out and positioned in collages to look as though they were being hanged.
Schaefer had explanations for everything. His writings, he said, had been his psychiatrist’s idea; he had complained of disturbing fantasies and the doctor had recommended that he write everyth
ing down as a way of defusing them. Even though Schaefer probably would have written them down anyway, the doctor’s instruction made most of the writing inadmissible in court, because it fell under doctor-patient privilege.
Schaefer was tried only for the murders of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup, but over the years, he has been suspected of between twenty-eight and thirty-five murders. He once claimed the true number was closer to 110, in several countries. A particular activity he liked to engage in was taking two victims at once.
“Doing doubles is far more difficult than doing singles,” Schaefer wrote. “But on the other hand it also puts one in a position to have twice as much fun. There can be some lively discussions about which of the victims will get to be killed first. When you have a pair of teenaged bimbolinas bound hand and foot and ready for a session with the skinning knife, neither one of the little devils wants to be the one to go first. And they don’t mind telling you quickly why their best friend should be the one to die.”
Because Schaefer was never tried for other murders and is believed to have committed many to which he never confessed, no one knows for sure which of the girls and women who vanished in southern Florida during the late 1960s and early 1970s should be attributed to him. Some bodies have turned up, but others never have. The souvenirs found in Schaefer’s room are the only signs that remain of some of the victims.
He did confess, in letters and works of fiction, to certain murders, including that of eight-year-old Wendy Stevenson and nine-year-old Peggy Rahn, both of whom disappeared in 1966, and about whom he wrote, “I assure you these girls were not molested sexually. I found both of them very satisfactory, particularly with sautéed onions and peppers.” Since Schaefer was a notorious liar, the veracity of some of his confessions is suspect.
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