Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  Maria Fasching was the eighth person to arrive. Upon learning what the situation was, she began to reproach Kallinger for his behavior. Kallinger slit her throat, and she drowned in her own blood. Another of the house’s residents, with legs bound, managed to get outside and cry for help. Some neighbors saw her and called the police. When the cops arrived, the intruders were gone.

  Kallinger decided to use a city bus as their getaway vehicle. On the way to the bus stop, they discarded their weapons, and Kallinger dumped his bloody shirt. These items were quickly found.

  The police put these clues together with the reports of similar home invasions in the region and saw a pattern. They had a physical description of their unsubs now, including the fact that the man and the boy shared a strange odor. Tracking down a laundry mark in the shirt that Kallinger had discarded gave them the next piece they needed. They learned that the shirt belonged to a Joseph Kallinger, who did indeed smell strange, thanks to chemicals used in his shoe repair business. The Philadelphia police remembered looking into Joey’s death, and they didn’t trust Kallinger.

  They arrested Joseph and Michael Kallinger on January 17, 1975. Joseph, in his defense, told about his messages from God and his mission to save people whose badly made shoes had destroyed their lives. If he could create special plates for their shoes, he said, it would align their souls in the right way to prepare them for God’s coming—which was scheduled for 1978, he claimed.

  In spite of an attempt at an insanity defense, Kallinger was found competent to stand trial. He had, after all, run a business and a crowded home and taken care of his aged mother. His crimes had been planned and carried out. The jury found him guilty in less than an hour. The judge saw no reason for mercy, telling him that “to corrupt your own son is vile and depraved.” A second trial was held in New Jersey, for the Maria Fasching murder and other crimes committed in that state, and Kallinger was again found guilty.

  Michael was sent to a reformatory, having been deemed to be under his father’s control at the time of the crimes, and was eventually released into the custody of foster parents. He changed his name and moved away from the area. Joseph Kallinger’s behavior grew erratic, even for him. He stabbed and tried to strangle another inmate, went on a hunger strike, and said that he wanted to slaughter every person on Earth and become God. These activities resulted in his transfer from prison to the Fairview Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He remained there until March 26, 1996, when he died of a seizure.

  Compared to Joseph Kallinger, even the fictional Bill Jarvis comes across as relatively well balanced.

  THE UNSUB IN THE EPISODE“Jones” (218) is a woman—a rarity in the world of Criminal Minds and in the ranks of multiple murderers in general (though not unheard of, as I’ll detail in the next chapter). While the types of female killers are being discussed in the show, one of the people mentioned is Sante Kimes, who, it’s said, was cold and calculating and preyed on men for money.

  Kimes, born Sante Louise Singhrs on July 24, 1934, spent most of her life on the far side of the law. After the family moved from Oklahoma to Los Angeles, her father abandoned his wife and children, and Sante’s mother turned to the streets, making her living as a prostitute. Sante started out small, with shoplifting, petty theft, and forgery. After high school, she married and divorced twice, bearing a son whom she left to be raised by his father.

  After adding prostitution and auto theft to her repertoire, she fell in with Kenneth Kimes, a con man who had already put together a sizable ten-million-dollar bankroll. They had a son, Kenny, and the family worked its way across the country, amassing more wealth. Sante was beautiful, sometimes mistaken for Elizabeth Taylor, and one of her more audacious cons with her husband involved slipping uninvited into a White House reception during the Nixon administration, to create the illusion of contacts in high places.

  Sante did her first serious prison stint for slavery. She had imported young women from Mexico with promises of jobs, then kept them locked in her houses to serve as cleaning ladies. Some got out and risked deportation to go to the police. Kenneth cut a deal and got a three-year suspended sentence and a fine, but Sante got five years and served three. When she got out, she was determined never to go to prison again, and she had decided that the way to do it was to never leave witnesses.

  In 1990, she might have put that philosophy into practice. A family lawyer burned down one of the Kimeses’ homes for the insurance money and then blabbed about it. When he agreed to talk to federal investigators, Kenneth and Sante took him on a vacation to Costa Rica, from which he never returned.

  When Sante’s son, Kenny, was old enough to go to college, Sante stopped sleeping with her husband and started sleeping with Kenny, living off-campus with him in Santa Barbara. Kenneth died and Sante had him cremated, but she didn’t report his death so that she could keep spending his fortune. He had never updated his will to include her—and there is some question about the legality of their marriage, since there is a suspicion that Sante had simply forged the license.

  She lured one of Kenneth’s real estate cronies into her scams, but when he objected to having his name forged on a $280,000 mortgage document and threatened to go to the authorities, he disappeared. His body turned up in a Dumpster near the Los Angeles airport. Sante and Kenny took off in a limo, scamming their way across the country.

  In Florida they learned of a wealthy New York socialite named Irene Silverman, who ran a sort of Manhattan bed-and-breakfast for the rich and fabulous. Kenny showed up at her door, dropped the name of a friend of Silverman’s, and flashed a big wad of cash. He was in. A few days later, Sante arrived, posing as his assistant. On July 4, 1998, with the household staff off for the holiday, Kenny strangled Silverman and crammed her body into a suitcase. He and Sante dumped it at a New Jersey construction site, then called a friend in Las Vegas who had done odd jobs for them and invited him to come and run Silverman’s Manhattan operation for them.

  But their friend had already been turned by the feds, and he reported the call. When he arrived to meet with Sante and Kenny, g-men moved in and arrested the pair. After a showy trial, Sante was convicted of 58 separate crimes and sentenced to 120 years in prison. Kenny, convicted of 60 crimes, got 125 years. Another murder trial followed, at which Kenny confessed and implicated his mother. Each wound up with an additional life sentence tacked on to their existing sentences. Sante is serving out her life term in New York, and Kenny is serving his in California. Keeping a continent between a murderous mother and son seems like a good idea.

  SOMETIMES BROTHERS MURDER, together or—more rarely—separately. Ronald and Reginald Kray, mentioned in “Lo-Fi” (320), were twins, born ten minutes apart on October 24, 1933. They grew up to be the undisputed crime bosses of London’s East End during the 1950s and 1960s. As celebrity nightclub owners they fraternized with Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, George Raft, and other actors. They committed at least two murders themselves, of gangland figures George Cornell and Jack “the Hat” McVitie, and were most likely responsible for several other murders that had been committed on their instructions. Ronnie died in prison on March 17, 1995, whereas Reggie was released on compassionate grounds in August 2000, shortly before his death from cancer.

  Henry Grace, also known as Professor Rothschild in the episode “Masterpiece” (408), seeks revenge on the BAU because it caught his brother, William, a serial killer. In real life, motives aren’t always so noble.

  Consider Larry and Danny Ranes. Their father was a gas station attendant—an alcoholic who beat his four children and his wife, humiliated his boys, and finally abandoned the family when Larry, the youngest boy, was nine. Both boys were in trouble early and often, fighting with each other and eventually taking their rage out on others.

  On June 4, 1964, Larry Ranes, nineteen, admitted to an acquaintance that he had killed people. He planned to confess to a priest and then kill himself. The acquaintance alerted the police, and when they arrived, Larry readily ad
mitted to murdering a man who had given him a ride on a lonely country road. Larry had robbed him and locked him in his own trunk, and when the man started banging on the hood, trying to alert people to his presence, Larry had pulled over and shot him in the head.

  Once Larry had started confessing he kept going, admitting to killing a couple of gas station attendants in Michigan and Kentucky and another man who had given him a ride in Death Valley, California. In prison, Larry, who said he hated his name and everything it represented, changed his name to Monk Steppenwolf.

  Danny Ranes wouldn’t begin to kill until after Larry had already confessed to murder and been sentenced to life in prison. Danny’s first homicide was in March 1972, when he was twenty-eight. He grabbed, bound, and raped a woman outside a shopping center, leaving her seventeen-month-old son wandering around by himself. Danny, who worked at a gas station himself at that time, enlisted a young partner named Brent Koster in more abductions, rapes, and murders. Eventually Koster turned on Danny, implicating him and testifying against him. Danny received five life sentences for his crimes, but the Supreme Court later set three aside on appeal. He continues to insist upon his innocence, despite Koster’s testimony and his multiple convictions.

  In “Children of the Dark” (304), profiler Spencer Reid points out that it’s not unusual for unsubs to be related, and he uses as an example that “the Carr brothers perpetrated the Wichita Massacre.”

  The Wichita Massacre occurred on the snowy night of December 14, 2000. Five friends in their twenties (three men and two women) were in their beds, when two armed men—the Carr brothers, Reginald, twenty-two, and Jonathan, twenty—invaded the house sometime after eleven o’clock, killing the victims’ dog. The brothers made their victims undress, forced the women to perform oral and manual sex on each other, made the men have sex (or try to) with the women, and raped the women themselves. They took them one at a time to an ATM machine and made them withdraw cash for the brothers.

  Finally, they squeezed the men into the trunk of a car, put the women in the backseat, and drove them to an empty, snow-blanketed soccer field. There the victims were made to kneel while the Carr brothers shot them. One woman, whose identity has never been made public because of the nature of the crimes perpetrated against her, survived when her hair clip deflected the bullet that would have killed her. Naked, she ran through snow and subfreezing weather for more than a mile before finding help.

  The next day, as word of the horrific massacre spread throughout the city, some neighbors reported seeing a truck that looked like one stolen from one of the victims parked outside an apartment building, and a new TV set was being carried from the truck into the Carrs’ apartment. The police surrounded the building, and Reginald surrendered. Jonathan was caught running from a girlfriend’s house after her mother turned him in.

  The Carr brothers’ crime spree had actually begun on December 8, when they committed an armed robbery against one victim and shot another, mortally wounding her, when she tried to escape in her car.

  Although the brothers tried to finger each other in court, they were both convicted of multiple counts of kidnapping, rape, theft, and murder.

  Their upbringing came into focus during the penalty part of the trial. The boys had been raised by a distant, emotionally aloof mother who sometimes beat them with electrical cords. Their father was violent as well, and he sexually abused their sister. After he abandoned the family, their mother had boyfriends who sexually abused both boys. The brothers were in frequent trouble in school, when they bothered attending.

  Despite these factors, both men were sentenced to death. When the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the state’s death-penalty statute was unconstitutional, executions were halted in that state, and as a result both Carrs remain in prison.

  ANOTHER TYPE of family-oriented crime sometimes comes into play on Criminal Minds. “Family annihilators” are people who murder whole families at once—a crime made all the more horrible when it’s committed by a member of that family. Recurring villain George Foyet is described as a family annihilator. In the episode “Children of the Dark” (304), the same one that mentions the Carr brothers, reference is made to family annihilator John List.

  On November 9, 1971, forty-six-year-old John Emil List waited until his children left for school and then put out a note for the milkman, canceling delivery. While his wife, Helen, ate her toast in the kitchen of their nineteen-room mansion in Westfield, New Jersey, List shot her in the jaw. Leaving her dead on the floor, he went up to his mother’s third-floor apartment, burst in, and shot her just above the left eye. Her knees broke when she fell. List shoved her onto a carpet runner and pulled her into a storage closet.

  Back downstairs, he dragged his wife forty feet into the ballroom. There he opened up Boy Scout sleeping bags on the floor, two side by side and a third perpendicular to them. He dumped Helen on the third one and tried to clean up the blood.

  His plan was to wait for the kids to come home from school, but his daughter, Patricia, sixteen, phoned from school and said she was sick. List picked her up, then hurried to enter the house ahead of her. When Patty entered, he shot her in the back of the head. He dragged her by her feet into the ballroom and deposited her on part of the other two sleeping bags.

  With time to spare, he left the house, did some banking, and mailed a batch of letters. Later in the day, he picked up his son Frederick, thirteen, from an after-school job. When they got home, List shot Fred before he had even taken his coat off. Fred was put in the ballroom with his mother and his sister.

  John Jr., fifteen, came home from soccer practice earlier than expected and caught List unprepared. They struggled, but List managed to kill the boy, shooting him ten times. List put him on the sleeping bags, straightened everybody out, draped towels over their faces, and then knelt and prayed over his family. John List was a very devout man.

  All that done, he sat down and wrote out a detailed confession, addressed to his church’s pastor, and put it in an envelope with other documents. He had already informed the children’s schools that they would be gone for a while, on a family trip to North Carolina. He ate dinner and slept in the billiards room. In the morning, he switched on all the lights in the house, turned on music that would play throughout the house on an intercom and cranked it up, and left.

  Patty had told her drama coach that she was worried about her father and that if the coach heard anything about a family vacation, it would mean that her father had killed her. That night, her coach drove past the house, but seeing it all lit up, he decided that everything must be okay.

  Nobody entered the house for nearly a month. On December 7, a neighbor noticed that the lights were burning out and that the place seemed abandoned. The neighbor called the police, and List, whose body was not present, was immediately the prime suspect, but he was nowhere to be found.

  List had adopted the name Robert Clark and moved to Colorado, where he had remarried and started a new life. When his second marriage started to fray and his new life seemed to be disintegrating in much the way that his old one had, he turned to a neighbor for comfort. That neighbor was an avid reader of the tabloids, and in 1987 she saw a story about those long-ago murders in New Jersey, complete with a photo and a description of the missing man. She knew it had to be the man she knew as Clark, but she didn’t report him. When America’s Most Wanted ran a segment on the crime in 1989, she was again reminded of Clark, who had moved to Virginia with his second wife. The neighbor called the show, and soon some FBI agents had List in custody.

  His life had fallen apart, List claimed in his letter to his pastor. His wife refused to attend church with him anymore, his professional life was collapsing, he was deeply in debt, and his daughter didn’t respect him. He couldn’t think of any other way out. At his trial he claimed that by killing his mother, his wife, and his three children, he was sending them to heaven, but he couldn’t kill himself because that would doom him to hell. On November 5 of that year—just fo
ur days before the murders—he had even sat them all down and asked them how they would want their remains handled in the event that they died.

  It wasn’t much of a defense, and the jury found him guilty on all counts and sentenced him to five consecutive life terms. List died of complications from pneumonia on March 21, 2008.

  THE EPISODE “Children of the Dark” (304) also makes reference to another family annihilator: Mark Barton. Barton was different from John List in two ways: he didn’t confine his killing to his immediate family, and he murdered his family over a much greater span of time.

  Barton, born in Germany to an air force family on April 2, 1955, was raised in South Carolina. He attended Clemson University and the University of South Carolina, earning a degree in chemistry in spite of an ongoing drug habit that he resorted to crime to feed. In Atlanta, Georgia, after graduation, he seemed to be settling down. He married Debra Spivey, and they had two children, Matthew and Mychelle.

  But his life wasn’t as stable as it seemed. The family moved to Arkansas for Barton’s job. He became paranoid and distrustful of his wife, and he lost his job when his performance slacked. He sabotaged company data on his way out the door and served a brief stint in jail as a result.

  Back in Georgia, Barton found a new job and a new girlfriend, Leigh Ann Vandiver, about whom his wife knew. In 1993, while on a family camping trip to Alabama, Debra Spivey and her mother, Eloise, were bludgeoned to death. Barton was a suspect, but since there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute him, he was never charged.