Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  After the Benton killing, there were seven more confirmed or suspected murders in Texas, Florida, Kentucky, California, and Illinois. Resendiz claims to have also killed seven people in Mexico. Since he frequented the area of Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican police suspect that he might have had a hand in the more than four hundred unsolved murders of women in that city. In 1999, after the murders of Pastor Norman Sirnic and his wife, Karen, Resendiz was briefly apprehended by border agents, who, when their computers didn’t indicate that he was wanted for any crimes, took him to the border and released him back into Mexico.

  Resendiz was finally brought in when Texas Ranger Drew Carter convinced Resendiz’s sister, who was living in the United States, that he could promise Resendiz a fair shake in U.S. courts. She got word to her brother in Juárez, and he agreed to turn himself in. He walked across the international bridge between Juárez and El Paso on July 13, 1999, shaking Carter’s hand at the midpoint and surrendering.

  For the Claudia Benton assault and murder, Resendiz was sentenced to death, and he was executed on June 27, 2006. Some believe that far more murders can be attributed to him, but unless he was right in his claim to be immortal, a true angel, the world will never know.

  LONG-HAUL TRUCKER Bruce Mendenhall is mentioned in the episode “Catching Out” (405) as an example of a killer with an occupation that allows him to travel. Mendenhall’s case is still unfolding; at the time of this writing, he was on trial for murder. On January 14, 2010, he was found guilty of soliciting the murders of three witnesses against him in the murder trial and was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Sometimes called the I-40 Killer, Mendenhall is believed to be responsible for an undetermined number of murders—no fewer than six, possibly ten or more—that he committed while he was driving his rig across the nation’s highways.

  Mendenhall, fifty-six, was arrested on July 12, 2007, when an alert Nashville, Tennessee, cop noticed blood on the door of his truck. Inside the rig he found a bag of bloody clothes. The truck was an apparent match to one that had shown up on a surveillance video three weeks earlier from the night that Sara Nicole Hulbert’s body had been found at the same truck stop.

  Later investigation found the truck’s cab to be “awash in blood,” according to an Indiana prosecutor who added to Mendenhall’s legal problems by charging him with a murder in that state as well. The blood of at least ten different people was discovered in Mendenhall’s cab. Some of it has been definitively linked to victims he is suspected of killing. After his arrest, Mendenhall confessed to six murders, but not to Hulbert’s. The investigators suspect his involvement in many more, possibly going back as far as 1992. Tennessee is seeking the death penalty for him for the murders of three women in that state, including Hulbert.

  Because so many murdered women were showing up along I-40, the FBI launched the Highway Serial Killer Initiative in April 2009. The initiative played a part in the episode “Solitary Man” (517). Using a computer database and studying the details of these crimes, the bureau hopes to get a better handle on killers like Mendenhall who travel hundreds of miles a day, crossing state lines on a regular basis and confounding the typical laws of jurisdiction. The database currently contains more than five hundred victims and two hundred killers. So far, the FBI’s work has resulted in the arrests of ten suspects believed to be responsible for at least thirty homicides.

  LIKE MARK GREGORY in the episode “Charm and Harm” (120), Christopher Bernard Wilder was sought by the authorities, but because he was on the move, taking victims as he went, they couldn’t catch up to him.

  Wilder was born on March 13, 1945, in Sydney, Australia, to a U.S. naval officer and an Australian woman. His first brush with the law was in Australia in the early 1960s, when he pleaded guilty to taking part in a gang rape. He was put on probation and ordered to undergo therapy, which included electroshock therapy. He formed a connection between electric shock and sex that became part of his signature and remained so for the rest of his life. Fictional killer Jeremy Andrus, in the episode “Limelight” (313), has a similar fondness for electrical torture.

  After emigrating to the United States at twenty-three, Wilder made a fortune in Florida real estate. He also developed hobbies such as auto racing and photography. The latter he combined with his interest in rape, inviting women to be models for him and then sexually assaulting them.

  In February 1984, Wilder graduated to murder. His first two victims were pretty, young women who had participated in the Miss Florida contest and wanted to be models. Both knew Wilder, and he was reportedly seen in their company before their disappearances. Their common experience gave him the nickname the Beauty Queen Killer. When Wilder read in the newspaper that the police were closing in on a suspect—who sounded quite a bit like him—he decided it was time to hit the road. He had just turned thirty-nine, and his road trip would end badly.

  His next victim was another Floridian, and after he dumped her body he grabbed a victim whom he took across state lines into Georgia. In a motel room he raped her, tortured her with electric shock, and glued her eyes shut. After she locked herself in the bathroom, screaming and pounding on the walls, Wilder fled.

  Wilder then struck in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California, raping, torturing, and killing. In California he abducted sixteen-year-old Tina Marie Risico, and after raping her he kept her alive and used her to lure additional victims into his trap. With her coerced help, he abducted another sixteen-year-old, Dawnette Wilt, in Gary, Indiana. Wilder was able to rape and torture her en route because he had Risico driving for him. He kept Wilt with him as they traveled through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, where he finally killed her. Then Wilder, with Risico still with him, abducted another woman, shot her, and took her car. In Boston, Wilder took Risico to the airport and gave her money for a plane ticket home.

  Wilder tried to grab one more victim on April 13, but she got away. He then drove into New Hampshire, where a pair of state troopers recognized the man the entire country was looking for. Wilder went for his gun and a scuffle ensued, during which he was shot in the heart. “Suicide by cop” is a common end to killing sprees, and it was also the ultimate end of spree killer Mark Gregory in the Criminal Minds episode.

  When police searched Wilder’s car, they found his gun, duct tape, and other tools of abduction, along with the special rig he had created to electrically shock his victims and his prized copy of John Fowles’s novel The Collector, which was mentioned in chapter 3. Wilder’s therapists reported that the killer had “practically memorized” the book.

  After his death, Wilder was tentatively tied to two murders in Australia back in 1965 and to two in Florida that had taken place before his final spree.

  5

  Team Killers

  ANY CRIMINAL PROFILER can be wrong at any time—human nature Ais too mutable to always follow any strict guidelines, and that’s why profilers insist that their practice is an art, not a science. But the profilers of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, at least as depicted on Criminal Minds, are rarely wrong, and when they are, they usually figure out their error quickly.

  The series begins with a difficult case, in the episode titled “Extreme Aggressor” (101). While the team is trying to find the killer known as the Seattle Strangler, the facts of the case lead the profilers in what seem to be two separate directions. In reality, there are two unsubs, which accounts for the confusion in the initial analysis. Timothy Vogel and Richard Slessman met in prison, where Vogel was a guard and Slessman was an inmate. Vogel, powerful and dominant, protected the weaker Slessman, who came to believe that he owed Vogel his life.

  Team killers are too well known in real life. The crimes of Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, for instance, are brought up again in “A Real Rain” (117) and “Lo-Fi” (320) as examples of this terrible strategy.

  BITTAKER HAD BEEN SENT to the California Men ’s Colony at San Luis Obispo for assault with a deadly weapon, and Norris was there for rape. Many single
people despair of ever finding the “right” person; Bittaker and Norris knew that with their particular shared interests, they were a match made—well, not in heaven, but a match just the same.

  Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker was born in Pittsburgh on September 27, 1940, and adopted shortly thereafter by George Bittaker and his wife. The family moved often, and at age sixteen Lawrence dropped out of school in California and was arrested for auto theft, a hit-and-run accident, and evading arrest. He served a couple of years in the California Youth Authority, was paroled, and was almost immediately arrested again—this time in Louisiana, for violating the Interstate Motor Vehicle Theft Act.

  This was how Bittaker’s life progressed—incarcerated more often than not. As of this writing, he is sixty-nine years old and has spent forty-two years in jail. He was diagnosed by prison psychiatrists as “borderline psychotic,” “basically paranoid,” and having “poor control of impulse behavior.” Despite these diagnoses and the opinions of experts that he would never stop committing crimes, every institution that held him sooner or later let him out.

  Comparatively speaking, Roy Lewis Norris had had a stable childhood. Born on February 2, 1948, he lived with his parents in Greeley, Colorado, until he dropped out of school at seventeen and joined the navy. He served four months in Vietnam without seeing combat and was then stationed in San Diego, where he started attacking women. The navy discharged him because of his “psychological problems,” and the state put him in Atascadero State Mental Hospital and labeled him a mentally disordered sex offender. After five years Norris was released; he returned to his old habits and was sent away for rape once again—this time to San Luis Obispo, where his path would intersect Bittaker’s.

  In “Lo-Fi,” the BAU team must investigate whether a killing spree in New York City is the work of a single serial killer or a that of a team.

  Norris claimed that Bittaker saved his life twice. Thus, according to the “prisoner’s code,” he owed Bittaker, and would do anything the older man asked of him. They began to formulate a plan. They would have some “fun” when they got out: kidnapping, raping, and torturing at least one girl of each of the teen years, thirteen through nineteen. After seeing how long they could keep the girls alive and screaming, they would kill them, because they decided that Norris’s mistake had been letting his victims survive to testify against him. Bittaker had already killed once, in what started as a simple shoplifting incident. He put some meat down his pants and left a supermarket; when an employee confronted him, Bittaker stabbed the employee to death.

  Once again, mental health experts warned that Bittaker was a psychopath and a continuing danger to society. Once again, he was released from prison. In November 1978, he moved in with his mother in Los Angeles and waited for Norris to be released.

  When Norris got out in early 1979, the two retired to a hotel in downtown Los Angeles to refine their plan. Their first move was to acquire a 1977 GMC cargo van with no windows in back and a sliding door. Naming it “Murder Mack,” they outfitted it for rape and abduction and began cruising the Pacific Coast Highway. The investigators later found around five hundred photos the pair took of teenage girls they spoke to during their time on the streets. The two predators also drove Southern California’s more isolated reaches, looking for the right spot to have their “fun.” Finally, they found both things they were looking for: the place and the girl.

  The morning of June 24, 1979, they worked on the bed they were constructing in the back of Murder Mack; the bed would have a space underneath in which to hide a body. After they finished that task, they started cruising, drinking beer, smoking dope, and flirting with girls. Soon they spotted one they could both agree on. Cindy Schaeffer, sixteen, was walking home from a church youth group meeting. Bittaker and Norris offered her a ride. She declined. They swung into a driveway ahead of her and offered more forcefully. Norris grabbed her and heaved her into the van through the sliding door, and they raced away. With Bittaker at the wheel, Norris wrestled with their captive, covering her mouth with duct tape and binding her wrists and ankles.

  On a dirt road in the San Gabriel Mountains, the psychopaths took turns raping Schaeffer. When they finished, Norris tried to kill her. He failed, and Bittaker took a crack at it. Finally they teamed up and strangled her with a wire coat hanger, then wrapped her body in a plastic shower curtain and hurled it into a canyon.

  The adventure had been almost everything they’d hoped for, but it left them wanting more, so they tried again on July 8, abducting and repeatedly raping Andrea Hall, an eighteen-year-old hitchhiker. This time they took Polaroid pictures. Bittaker sent Norris to fetch more beer, and while his partner was gone, Bittaker murdered Hall, driving an ice pick into each ear and then strangling her when the stabbings failed to kill her. Once again, the body was tossed off a cliff.

  Their next assault involved two girls at once: Jackie Gilliam, fifteen, and thirteen-year-old Leah Lamp. Bittaker and Norris kept the girls alive for two days of torture and documented the ordeal with pictures and audiotapes. When they threw the girls over the side of the canyon wall, Bittaker’s ice pick was still jammed into Jackie’s head.

  A few weeks later, the pair maced Shirley Sanders and raped her in the Murder Mack, but she escaped. Although she reported the attack, she couldn’t identify her attackers.

  The killers were anxious, but no official scrutiny came their way. On Halloween night they grabbed Lynette Ledford, their second sixteen-year-old. Instead of taking her to the mountains, they raped and tortured her in the back of the van. While Norris drove, Bittaker went to work with vise-grip pliers, a tape recorder going the whole time. Eventually, Norris took a turn. They strangled Ledford with a coat hanger and dumped her in a random yard.

  This corpse—the first of Bittaker and Norris’s victims to be found—startled a metropolitan area that was still reeling from the Hillside Stranglers case. One of the two stranglers, Angelo Buono, had just been arrested on October 22.

  Ledford was the beginning of the end for the psychopathic killers. It’s not uncommon for organized killers to become less organized as their crimes continue, because their tenuous psychological state progressively degenerates. Had the men continued with their plan of picking up at least one girl of each teen year, taking all of their victims to remote locations and hiding the bodies, they might have been able to finish what they started. But they abandoned a routine that had been working for them because they were unable to delay their gratification.

  The Los Angeles Police Department’s job was made easier by the fact that Norris couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He had bragged about the murders to another prison buddy, who thought that Norris was blue-skying him until he heard about Ledford. This onetime friend told his lawyer, and the two of them alerted the cops. The police showed Shirley Sanders (the victim who had gotten away) photos of Norris and Bittaker, and she identified them as her rapists.

  While the authorities were constructing their case, Norris was seen selling marijuana. He was picked up for dealing, and Bittaker was arrested for the kidnap and rape of Sanders. In custody, Norris blamed Bittaker for everything and showed the police where the bodies were hidden. Bittaker’s ice pick was still stuck in Jackie Gilliam’s skull. Norris couldn’t find Andrea Hall or Cindy Schaeffer, and those bodies have never turned up.

  The audio recordings made clear that Norris was every bit as engaged in the crimes as Bittaker was, but the state needed Norris to testify. In return for his confession and his testimony against Bittaker, Norris was promised a life sentence with the possibility of parole. He received a sentence of forty-five years to life, with the possibility of parole after thirty years. He is eligible for release in 2010.

  Bittaker tried to blame everything on Norris. The jury didn’t buy it, and in March 1981 he was sentenced to death. He remains on death row in San Quentin, where he’s a celebrity in the world of serial-killer fandom. He signs his responses to his fan mail “Pliers” and gives interviews, and for a while he sold
artwork and souvenirs to the outside world. Noted FBI profiler John Douglas has referred to Bittaker as “among the vilest human beings I have ever come across.” One would be hard-pressed to disagree.

  LAWRENCE BITTAKER committed his first murder when he was stopped for shoplifting. For Leonard Lake and Charles Ng—who, along with Bittaker and Norris, are mentioned in the episode “Lo-Fi” (320)—the crime of shoplifting had somewhat different consequences.

  On June 2, 1985, a hardware store clerk in south San Francisco saw an Asian man hide a bench vise under his jacket and leave the store, so he called the police. When an officer responded, the clerk showed him that the vise was sitting in the open trunk of a Honda; the Asian man had put it there and then ran away. A burly man intervened, telling the cop that he had paid for the vise, so there was no problem. But the cop, looking in the trunk, saw a .22 revolver and a silencer, so he had more questions. The man had a picture ID that didn’t seem to match his appearance, and the Honda belonged to someone else altogether.

  The officer took the big bearded man in and found paperwork among his possessions that belonged to yet another man. The burly man told the interrogators that the Asian man’s name was Charles Chitat Ng, his name was Leonard Lake, and he was wanted by the FBI. Then he swallowed a cyanide capsule that he had hidden under his shirt collar and went into a coma from which he never awoke. Four days later he died.

  In the car, the authorities found property belonging to still more people who weren’t Ng or Lake. Some of it led to Lake’s ex-wife, Claralyn Balasz, who led them to Lake and Ng’s hideaway, a cabin in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Calaveras County. What they found could have been a set for a horror movie.