Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  The walls were covered with bullet holes and blood. Inside a locked bunker was a torture chamber that included a workshop full of power tools, many of them coated with dried blood; a hidden bedroom; and a second, even more hidden room that the police termed a “hostage cell.” In addition, they found a huge array of weapons, books on chemicals and explosives, and photographs of nude and seminude young girls (taken at the juvenile hall where Balasz worked). In the main part of the cabin they found Lake’s diary, which detailed a series of abductions, rapes, tortures, and murders as well as Lake and Ng’s goal of building a series of similar remote camps that they would outfit with weapons and female sex slaves. The latter they planned to use to repopulate the world after a nuclear holocaust.

  Outside, the police found a powerful incinerator and a long trench that had been treated with lye. In the trench and around the property, the police found personal effects and enough belongings to suggest that at least twenty-five people had been brought to the cabin, tortured, and killed. There were videotapes that showed some of the victims being abused.

  Ng, an ex-marine like Lake, was the son of a wealthy Hong Kong businessman. He had plenty of money and now had a head start of several days. Ng had been drummed out of the marine corps for theft, but Lake had been allowed to finish a tour in Vietnam despite being hospitalized for “exhibiting incipient psychotic reactions” and having had another tour cut short for medical reasons. It’s uncertain exactly how Ng and Lake met, but they wound up living on the remote mountain ranch with Balasz and then using that ranch to try to amass their army of sex slaves. Like Christopher Wilder and Bob Berdella, Lake was partially inspired by John Fowles’s novel The Collector. He called his plan Operation Miranda, after the imprisoned woman in the novel.

  On July 6, shoplifting entered their story again. Ng was picked up in Calgary, in Alberta, Canada, after stuffing groceries into his backpack. A scuffle ensued in which he drew a pistol and shot one of the security guards, then he was overpowered and taken into custody. He was tried and sentenced to four and a half years for shoplifting and assault. The battle to extradite him to the United States, which Canada doesn’t typically do because it doesn’t agree with the U.S. practice of using the death penalty, took six years. Canada finally complied, and on February 11, 1999, Ng was convicted of eleven murders. He was sentenced to death but remains on death row in San Quentin.

  It’s often said that in killing teams, there’s usually one partner who is dominant and one who’s submissive. In this case, burly Leonard Lake was definitely the dominant one, the one who had the idea of maintaining a bunker full of sex slaves. Ng went along willingly, and he participated fully in the brutal and vicious acts the pair committed. He’s every bit as guilty as Lake was, but apparently he was less willing to end his life with a cyanide pill. Instead, he has already been responsible for the most expensive legal proceedings in California’s history, and he has not stopped his appeals.

  BITTAKER AND NORRIS launched into their murders so closely on the heels of the Hillside Stranglers that it made terrified Los Angeles residents wonder if the police had locked up the right people. In fact, they had—Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi had killed at least ten women entirely on their own and didn’t need help from Bittaker and Norris to do it. Their crimes earned them their joint nickname and references in two episodes of Criminal Minds, “Children of the Dark” (304) and “Zoe’s Reprise” (415).

  Kenneth Alessio Bianchi was born on May 22, 1951, in Rochester, New York. His mother was an alcoholic prostitute who gave him up for adoption immediately after his birth. As if his destiny were already set, when he was a very young boy his adoptive mother recognized that he was lazy, irresponsible, and a constant liar. He was a bedwetter until late in childhood. After high school he married young, but his marriage didn’t last. After a series of menial jobs, he was hired as a security guard, a profession that gave him plenty of opportunity to engage in a hobby of petty theft. He was bright but never lived up to his potential in any area of life.

  In 1977 Bianchi drifted to Los Angeles, where his older cousin, Angelo Buono Jr., lived. Bianchi was no prize, but Buono was even worse. Also born in Rochester, on October 5, 1934, by age fourteen he was bragging to friends about his rapes. He hated women, but he married several in order to have sex with them and get them pregnant. In each marriage he fathered more children, seemingly all for the purposes of abusing them physically and sexually. His idol was rapist Caryl Chessman, and he later adopted one of Chessman’s favorite techniques: posing as a police officer. Even before Buono started killing, he was very familiar with the inside of a jail cell.

  Bianchi and Buono were awful individuals, but when they got together they were even worse.

  When Bianchi arrived in Los Angeles, Buono seemed like quite the successful ladies’ man. Somehow, in spite of his personality, Buono was surrounded by a bevy of underage girls. The cousins came up with the idea of using the threat of physical violence to coerce girls to work for them as prostitutes. It worked for a while with two girls, until one found somebody bigger than Buono and the other ran away.

  Bianchi and Buono tried abducting more girls, and they bought a “trick list” from a prostitute that turned out to be phony. When they found out it was a fake, they raped and strangled the hooker who had sold it to them. This was their first murder, but it was far from their last. The victim’s naked body showed up near Forest Lawn Cemetery on October 17, 1977. Two more prostitutes, one of them only fifteen, met their ends at the cousins’ hands in the next few weeks.

  The next five victims were found during Thanksgiving week, and the cousins had shifted their focus; they were no longer killing prostitutes, or people whom they had previously known. The first two victims, also raped and strangled, were twelve- and fourteen-year-old girls who were last seen getting off their school bus and who had no connection to the cousins’ lifestyle. The third proved to be a woman who had been missing since early November. The fourth and the fifth showed signs of torture. Another teenage prostitute’s body turned up after that, and then a final victim was found in the trunk of her own car after it had been rolled off a cliff.

  In 1978, Bianchi moved to Bellingham, Washington, to be with his girlfriend and their infant son. While he was there, working as a security guard, he tried his hand at solo murder. He strangled two women and was arrested almost immediately. The police there put two and two together, and, knowing that Bianchi had lived in Los Angeles, they contacted the Hillside Stranglers task force.

  The various agencies that were involved amassed the evidence, and after Bianchi’s attempt at an insanity defense failed, he took a plea deal: confess and testify against Buono, and he would get life with a possibility of parole, served in California instead of Washington. He reneged on the testimony, contradicting himself, and is currently serving his life sentence in Washington. Buono was sentenced to life in California, but he died of a heart attack on September 21, 2002.

  JUST AS DES PLAINES, Illinois, is terrorized by a sniper in “L.D.S.K.” (106), which is FBI parlance for “long-distance serial killer,” so was the Greater Washington, D.C., area in the autumn of 2002.

  The Beltway Snipers actually used a different MO in their first documented attacks. On September 5, 2002, Paul LaRuffa closed his restaurant in Clinton, Maryland, and carried his laptop computer and a bank deposit to his car. While he sat behind the wheel, someone shot him six times but failed to kill him. Someone he described as “a kid” ran up to the car and snatched the laptop and the deposit bags. The bags and the laptop case were discovered six weeks later. Clothing found nearby held the DNA of Lee Boyd Malvo, a seventeen-year-old. Had the items been found right away, the Beltway Snipers might never have become national news, and eleven other people might have lived.

  Ten days later, also in Clinton, Muhammad Rashid, the proprietor of Three Roads Liquor, was attacked while locking up his store. Someone later identified as Malvo shot him in the stomach. Rashid survived.

 
On September 21, twelve hours away, in Montgomery, Alabama, Claudine Parker and Kellie Adams were closing the Zelda Road ABC Liquor Store when they were both shot. Parker died from her wounds, but Adams survived, badly injured. The Beltway Snipers had killed their first victim. A police car arrived while two men, later identified as Malvo and his companion, John Allen Muhammad, forty-one, were rummaging through the women’s purses. The police chased Muhammad and Malvo, but they escaped.

  On September 23, Hong Im Ballenger, who managed a store called Beauty Depot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was shot in the head while walking to her car after closing the store. Malvo was observed grabbing Ballenger’s purse. She died from her gunshot wound.

  So far, these had seemingly been random robbery-murders, widely scattered and with no reason to link them beyond the common MO. On October 2, that all changed, and the nation became aware of the Beltway Snipers at last.

  On that autumn evening, at 5:20 p.m., a shot smashed the window of a Michaels Craft Store in Aspen Hill, Maryland. No one was hurt in that shooting, but at 6:30 p.m., James Martin, a government program analyst, was shot and killed in the parking lot of a supermarket in nearby Wheaton.

  The next morning, four people in the area were shot and killed, each outside: at a gas station, mowing a lawn, sitting on a bench. After that bloody morning, the snipers rested, but they went out again after dark, killing one more victim. Each of the day’s murders was accomplished with a single shot from some distance away.

  The next day, the shooters struck outside another Michaels Craft Store, this one at the Spotsylvania Mall outside Fredericksburg, Virginia. The snipers shot Caroline Seawell in the parking lot; she survived. The authorities had already connected the Maryland sniper attacks and determined that the bullet fragments were all from high-intensity .223 caliber bullets. The same was true of the Virginia attack.

  After lying low for a couple of days, Muhammad and Malvo attacked again on October 7, shooting thirteen-year-old Iran Brown as he arrived at his middle school. Brown survived and was able to testify at Muhammad’s trial.

  This time, the snipers left a message near the scene—the tarot card Death with “Call me God” written on the front and “For you mr. Police. Code: ‘Call me God’. Do not release to the press” on the back.

  The law enforcement response was massive. Coming just one year after 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the shootings were considered to be the possible work of a terrorist cell. More than four hundred agents from the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; and the Secret Service; as well as police officers from every jurisdiction where the shootings took place all worked under the command of the Montgomery County Police Department and its chief, Charles Moose, who later wrote a book about the weeks of terror.

  By October 22, the Beltway Snipers had shot five more people, including FBI analyst Linda Franklin, who was killed in Falls Church, Virginia. Only one of the five victims survived.

  In the woods near one shooting site, the authorities found evidence galore: a shell casing, a candy wrapper with DNA from Muhammad and Malvo on it, and a plastic bag that contained a long handwritten note demanding a payoff of ten million dollars to stop the killing.

  Phone calls had started coming in from someone who knew the words written on the tarot card. One of those calls, which the FBI referred to as an “investigative tease,” led to the break that the authorities needed. This call referred to the shootings in Montgomery, Alabama. The FBI learned that a fingerprint was found on an arms catalog that had been dropped at the scene. That fingerprint had not yet been analyzed, but the bureau matched it to Malvo, who had been arrested previously in the state of Washington. That arrest report also contained a reference to John Muhammad.

  Investigators swarmed the Muhammad home in Tacoma, Washington, and found a tree stump that had been used for target practice. The .223 caliber bullets embedded in the stump were all too familiar.

  The FBI discovered that Muhammad owned a Chevrolet Caprice, a former police car with almost 150,000 miles on it. The car’s description and license plate number were broadcast, and the car was spotted in a rest stop off I-70 near Myersville, Maryland. Law enforcement officials flooded the area and apprehended Muhammad and Malvo, asleep in the car.

  Inside the vehicle, they found a Bushmaster .223 caliber semiautomatic rifle, a bipod, and other items connecting the men to the slayings. The car had been modified so that someone could enter the trunk from the rear seat, and a hole had been cut near the license plate so that the rifle’s barrel could poke through without being seen. The Caprice had become a mobile sniper station, just like the vehicle in “L.D.S.K.”

  The reign of terror had come to an end, but big questions remained. Who were these people, and why had they done it? Muhammad and Malvo had questionable pasts. Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran, trained in the military as a mechanic, a truck driver, and a metalworker. He had earned the Expert Rifleman’s Badge, the highest level of marksmanship for basic soldiers. During his military career, he had joined the Nation of Islam. He had been born John Allen Williams in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but had changed his name in April 2001 to John Allen Muhammad.

  His second wife, Mildred Williams, had been granted a restraining order against him after he abducted their three children and threatened her with bodily harm. She claimed that he could make anything into a weapon and that she feared for her life. Ultimately, she believed the murders were all about her—that Muhammad intended to kill her and make it appear that she was another random victim of the spree. She had moved to the Beltway area to be far away from Tacoma, where Muhammad lived, but she believed that he knew where she had gone.

  Muhammad met Malvo in Antigua, where he dated the boy’s mother. Although there was never any legal or blood relationship between the two men, Malvo became close to Muhammad and referred to the older man as his father. He and his mother were Jamaican citizens, in the United States illegally.

  The real motive for the attacks has never been definitively stated. Malvo, when not citing Islamic jihad or the movie The Matrix, said it was all part of a campaign to terrorize the nation while recruiting an army of boys and young men who would accompany them to Canada for training and then be sent back into the United States to carry out the same type of random attacks.

  Initially, Malvo took credit for all the murders, then admitted that he had done so only because it was harder to sentence a teenager to death. In fact, he was not sentenced to death; he received several consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. After the sentencing, Malvo revealed that the pair had committed four earlier shootings that killed two people between March and August 2002.

  John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection on November 10, 2009.

  APRIL 19 AND 20 are dates with a considerable amount of bloodshed attached to them. Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889. On April 19, 1993, the siege at the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, ended in a cataclysmic fire, and at least seventy-four lives were lost. On that date two years later, 168 people died in Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. And on April 20, 1999—in celebration of the 110th anniversary of Hitler ’s birth, but probably with those other occasions in mind—Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, brought firearms and explosives into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where both were students, and opened fire on their classmates, the staff, and the police.

  For an hour, beginning at 11:10 a.m., Harris and Klebold terrorized the school, firing semiautomatic weapons and shotguns and throwing pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails. They brought larger bombs to school as well; their original plan was to detonate two large bombs that would blow up the cafeteria and the library and then to shoot students as they fled the building. When those bombs didn’t detonate, Harris and Klebold instead entered the school building and did their killing up close.

  Before finally killing themselves shortly after noon, they had murdered twelve st
udents and one teacher and injured twenty-one other students. Three more students were hurt trying to escape the slaughter.

  Harris and Klebold were deeply disturbed young men, both of whom had been in trouble with the law. They planned their attack for a year before they carried it out, posting bits and pieces of their plan online and keeping detailed journals of their preparations. They were part of a clique that was known as the Trenchcoat Mafia because of the members’ habit of wearing black trench coats to school. Although they were often bullied and tormented by the school’s jocks, and speculation has pointed to that (as well as to the influence of video games and heavy metal music) as a factor, the exact cause of or motive for the tragic assault will never be fully understood, since both students committed suicide at the scene.

  Aaron Hotchner mentions the Columbine Killers in the episode “The Perfect Storm” (203) while discussing murder teams.

  6

  Killing Couples

  SARAH JEAN DAWES, in the episode “Riding the Lightning” (114), is on death row, scheduled to be executed for murdering at least twelve teenage girls with her husband, Jacob. The argument is made that there are no genuine serial-killer couples, and she is eventually shown to be innocent of the crimes to which she admitted.

  It’s true that serial-killer couples are rare, especially in the United States. But they’re not unheard of, the man almost always “in charge” and the woman abused and isolated. The most famous North American example, and the pair most like Sarah Jean and Jacob, is probably the Canadian rape-and-murder team of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.

  PAUL KENNETH BERNARDO was born on August 27, 1964, in Toronto, Ontario, into a severely dysfunctional family. His mother, Marilyn, was married at the time, but Bernardo’s father was not her husband. The husband, Kenneth Bernardo, was abusive toward his wife and was later charged with child molestation and with sexually abusing the daughter whom he and Marilyn had had together. Marilyn became depressed, withdrawn, and morbidly obese.