by John Douglas
I decided while walking through that military cemetery that I had to find a way to ground myself, to set a greater store in the love and support I got from Pam and my daughters. Erika and Lauren (our son, Jed, would come along several years later), to begin relying on religious faith, to try to take some time off, to explore the other aspects of life. I knew this was the only way I was going to make it. And when I moved from managing the profiling program and became unit chief in 1990, I tried to provide ways that everyone working for me could maintain his or her mental health and emotional equilibrium. I’d seen firsthand what can happen, how sapping our work can be.
To do what we do, it’s very important to get into the mind of not only the killer or UNSUB, but into the mind of the victim at the time the crime occurred. That’s the only way you’re going to be able to understand the dynamics of the crime—what was going on between the victim and the offender. For example, you may learn that the victim was a very passive person, and if so, why did she receive so many blows to the face? Why was this victim tortured the way she was even though we know from analyzing her that she would have given in, done anything her attacker said? Knowing how the victim would have reacted tells us something important about the offender. In this case, he must be into hurting his victims. The rape isn’t enough for him, it’s punishing them that’s important to him, that represents what we refer to as the “signature” aspect of the crime. We can begin to fill in much of the rest of his personality and predict his recognizable post-offense behavior from this one insight.
It’s important for us to know this about each case and each victim, but it’s also among the most devastating emotional exercises imaginable.
Police officers and detectives deal with the effects of violence, which is disturbing enough, but if you’re in this business long enough, you do grow somewhat used to it. In fact, many of us in law enforcement are concerned that violence is so much around us that it’s taken for granted even by the public.
But the kind of criminals we deal with don’t kill as a means to an end, such as an armed robber would; they kill or rape or torture because they enjoy it, because it gives them satisfaction and a feeling of domination and control so lacking from every other aspect of their shabby, inadequate, and cowardly lives. So much do many of them enjoy what they do that they want nothing more than to experience it again at every opportunity. In California, Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris made audiotapes so they could relive the sexual torture and murder of teenaged girls in the back of their specially equipped van, nicknamed Murder Mac. Also in California, Leonard Lake and his partner, Charles Ng, produced videos of young women they’d captured being stripped and psychologically brutalized in captivity—offering voice-over commentary along the way.
I’d like to tell you these are isolated practices, or just limited to the exotic perversions of California. But I’ve seen too much of this, and my people have seen too much of this, to be able to tell you that. And hearing or seeing violence as it happens in “real time” is about as unbearable as anything we deal with.
Over the years, as it became my responsibility to evaluate and hire new people for my unit, I developed a profile of what I wanted in a profiler.
At first, I went for strong academic credentials, figuring an understanding of psychology and organized criminology was most important. But I came to realize degrees and academic knowledge weren’t nearly as important as experience and certain subjective qualities. We have the facilities to fill in any educational gaps through fine programs at the University of Virginia and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
What I started looking for was “right-brained,” creative-type thinkers. There are many positions within the FBI and law enforcement in general where engineering or accounting types do the best, but in profiling and investigative analysis, that kind of thinker would probably have some difficulty.
Contrary to the impression given in such stories as The Silence of the Lambs, we don’t pluck candidates for the Investigative Support Unit right out of the Academy. Since our first book, Mindhunter, was published, I’ve had many letters from young men and women who say they want to go into behavioral science in the FBI and join the profiling team at Quantico. It doesn’t work quite that way. First you get accepted by the Bureau, then you prove yourself in the field as a first-rate, creative investigator, then we recruit you for Quantico. And then you’re ready for two years of intensive, specialized training before you become a full-fledged member of the unit.
A good profiler must first and foremost show imagination and creativity in investigation. He or she must be willing to take risks while still maintaining the respect and confidence of fellow agents and law enforcement officers. Our preferred candidates will show leadership, won’t wait for a consensus before offering an opinion, will be persuasive in a group setting but tactful in helping to put a flawed investigation back on track. For these reasons, they must be able to work both alone and in groups.
Once we choose a person, he or she will work with experienced members of the unit almost the way a young associate in a law firm works with a senior partner. If they’re at all lacking in street experience, we send them to the New York Police Department to ride along with their best homicide detectives. If they need more death investigation, we have nationally recognized consultants such as Dr. James Luke, the esteemed former medical examiner of Washington, D.C. And before they get to Quantico, many, if not most, of our people will have been profile coordinators in the field offices, where they develop a strong rapport with state and local departments and sheriff’s offices.
The key attribute necessary to be a good profiler is judgment—a judgment based not primarily on the analysis of facts and figures, but on instinct. It’s difficult to define, but like Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, we know it when we see it.
In San Diego in 1993, Larry Ankrom and I testified in the trial of Cleophus Prince, accused of murdering six young women over a nine-month period. We’ll get into more of the details of that case in the next chapter. During the preliminary hearing to rule on the admissibility of our testimony on linkage based on “unique” aspects of each crime, one of the defense attorneys asked me if there was an objective numerical scale I used for measuring uniqueness. In other words, could I assign a number value to everything we did. The answer, of course, is no. Many, many factors come together in our evaluations, and ultimately, it comes down to the individual analyst’s judgment rather than any objective scale or test.
Likewise, after the tragedy at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, there was much soul-searching, breast-beating, and attempt at self-critique within the federal law enforcement agencies about what could and should have been done differently. After one such meeting at the Justice Department in Washington, Attorney General Janet Reno asked me to have my unit compile a list of scenarios for standoff situations and assign each one a percentage success rating.
Ms. Reno is an extremely bright and sensitive individual and I lauded her desire to prepare herself in advance for the next unknown crisis rather than having to respond from a purely reactive mode. But while it might be considered insubordination, I told her how reluctant I was to do anything of the sort.
“If I tell you that a certain tactic worked eighty-five percent of the time in a particular type of hostage situation and any other response has only been effective twenty-five or thirty percent of the time,” I explained, “then there’s going to be tremendous pressure on you to go for the highest percentage. But I or another analyst may see something in that situation which indicates to us that the lower percentage option is the one to go with. We can’t justify it in statistical terms, but our judgment tells us it has the best chance of working. If you’re going to go with the numbers, you might as well let a machine make the decision.”
That, actually, is an issue which comes up with some regularity in our business—can’t a machine do what we do? It would seem that after you have enough cases and enough ex
perience, an expert programmer ought to be able to come up with a computer model that could, say, duplicate my thought processes as a profiler. It’s not as if they haven’t tried, but so far, at least, machines can’t do what we can do, any more than a computer could write this book even if we gave it all the words in the dictionary, their relative usage in speech, all the rules of grammar and parameters of style and models of all the best stories. There are just too many independent judgments to be made, too many gut feelings based on training and experience, too many subtleties of the human character. We certainly can and do use computer databases to quantify material and retrieve it efficiently. But like a doctor making a diagnosis, objective tests only go so far. Since machines can’t do it, we have to find human beings who can, who try to balance objectivity and intuition.
And while we can offer the techniques and hone the skills, we can’t supply the talent. As with a gifted professional athlete, it’s either there or it isn’t. Like acting, or writing, or playing a musical instrument, or hitting a baseball, you can teach someone the concept, you can give pointers, you can help them develop the skill. But unless you’re born with what my friend the novelist Charles McCarry calls a “major league eye,” you’re not going to hit the ball consistently in the big leagues; you’re not going to be pro material.
But if you are pro material in our field, and if you are at all a decent, normal person—as I hope we all are—you can’t see the things we see, you can’t become involved with the families and survivors the way we do, you can’t encounter repeat, multiple rapists and killers who hurt other people for the sport of it, without taking on a sense of mission and developing a deep and enduring kinship with the victims of violent crime and their families. So you might as well know going in that this is where I’m coming from and that is the perspective from which this book is written. I would like to believe in redemption and I hope rehabilitation is possible in some cases. But from my twenty-five years of experience as an FBI special agent and nearly that long as a behavioral profiler and crime analyst, seeing the evidence, the statistics, and the data, I cannot place more faith in what I would like to be true than what I know is reality. What I mean by this is that I am much less interested in giving a convicted sexually motivated killer a second chance than in giving an innocent potential victim a first chance.
Please don’t get me wrong. We don’t need a fascist, totalitarian police state to accomplish this, we don’t have to threaten the Constitution or civil liberties; from my experience I’m as aware as anyone of the real and potential abuses of police power. What I do believe we need is to enforce the laws we already have on the books and bring some simple common sense, based more on reality than sentiment, to the issues of sentencing, punishment, and parole. What I think we need more than anything else in our society today is a sense of personal responsibility for what we do. From what I see and hear and read, no one is responsible anymore; there’s always some factor in a person’s life or background to excuse him. There is a price to the passage through life, and regardless of what’s happened to each of us in the past, part of that price is responsibility for our actions in the present.
Having briefly laid out these views, let me also repeat at the outset what almost anyone in law enforcement will tell you: that if you expect us to solve your social problems, you’re going to be very disappointed. By the time the problem reaches our desk, it’s already too late; the damage has been done. I’ve often said in speeches that many more serial killers are made than born. With adequate awareness and intervention, a lot of these guys can be helped, or at least neutralized, before it’s too late. I’ve spent much of my career dealing with the results if they’re not.
How do we know this? What makes us think we understand why a killer acts the way he does and that we can therefore predict his behavior even though we don’t know who he is?
The reason we think we know what’s going on in the mind of the killer or rapist or arsonist or bomber is because we were the first ones to get the word directly from the real experts—the offenders themselves. The work my colleagues and I did, and the work that’s still being done in Quantico after me, is based initially on a study Special Agent Robert Ressler and I undertook beginning in the late 1970s in which we went into the prisons and conducted extensive and detailed interviews with a cross section of serial murderers and rapists and violent criminals. The study continued intensively for several years and in a sense is still ongoing. (With the collaboration of Professor Ann Burgess at the University of Pennsylvania, the results were compiled and eventually published under the title Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives.)
To deal with these people effectively, to get what you need out of them, first you have to prepare extensively—study the entire file and know everything you can about the case—and then you have to come down and deal with them on their own level. If you don’t know exactly what they’ve done and how they’ve done it, how they got to their victims and the methods they used to hurt and kill them, then they’re going to be able to bullshit you for their own selfserving purposes. Remember, most serial offenders are expert manipulators of other people. And if you’re not willing to come down to their level and see things through their eyes, they’re not going to open up and confide. And both of these factors add to the strain.
I wasn’t getting anything out of Richard Speck, mass murderer of eight student nurses in a South Chicago town house, when I interviewed him in prison in Joliet, Illinois, until I abandoned my official Bureau detachment and berated him for taking “eight good pieces of ass away from the rest of us.”
At that point he shook his head, smiled, then turned to us and said, “You fucking guys are crazy. It must be a fine line, separates you from me.”
Feeling the way I do about victims and their families, this is always a bitter and extremely difficult persona for me to assume. But it’s necessary, and after I did it with Speck I was able to start penetrating the macho facade and achieve an understanding of how his mind worked and what made him escalate that night in 1966 from a simple burglary to rape and mass murder.
When I went to Attica to interview David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” who had killed six young men and women in cars in New York City during a year-long reign of terror beginning in July of 1976, he held to his well-publicized story that his neighbor’s three-thousand-year-old dog had made him commit the crimes. I knew enough about the specific details of the case and I’d seen enough of his methodology that I was sure the killings were not the result of such a complex delusional system. I felt this way not because I made it up, but because of what I’d already learned in interviews we’d previously conducted and analyzed.
So once Berkowitz started giving me the song and dance about the dog, I was able to say, “Hey, David, knock off the bullshit. The dog had nothing to do with it.”
He laughed and quickly admitted I was right. This cleared the way to the heart of his methodology, which was the aspect I most wanted to hear about and learn from. And we did learn. Berkowitz, who had started out his antisocial career as a fire-starter, told us that he was on the hunt nightly for victims of opportunity who met his criteria. When he couldn’t find them, which was most nights, he would gravitate back to the scenes of his previous crimes to masturbate and relive the joy and satisfaction, the power of life and death over another human being, just as Bittaker and Norris had with their audiotapes and Lake and Ng did with their home movies.
Ed Kemper is a six-foot-nine giant of a man who probably has the highest IQ of any killer I’ve ever encountered. Fortunately for me and the rest of us, where I encountered him was in the secure visitors’ room of the California State Medical Facility at Vacaville, where Kemper was serving out multiple life terms. As a young teen he had spent some time in a mental hospital for killing both his grandparents on their farm in northern California. He had gone on as an adult to terrorize the area around the University of California at Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, where he decapitated and mutilat
ed at least six coeds before getting himself focused and butchering his own mother, Clarnell, the real object of his resentment.
I found Kemper to be bright, sensitive, and intuitive. And unlike most killers, he understands enough about himself to know that he shouldn’t be let out. He gave us a number of important insights into how an intelligent killer’s mind works.
He explained to me, with insight rare for a violent criminal, that he dismembered the bodies after death not because of any sexual kick, but simply to delay identification and keep investigators off his trail as long as possible.
From other “experts” we got additional nuggets of information and insight which were to prove tremendously valuable in devising strategies to catch UNSUBs. For instance, the old cliché about killers returning to the scenes of their crimes turns out to be true in many instances, though not necessarily for the reasons we thought. True, a certain personality of killer under certain circumstances does feel remorse and returns to the crime scene or the victim’s grave site to beg forgiveness. If we think we’re dealing with that sort of UNSUB, it can help dictate our actions. Some killers return for different reasons—not because they feel bad about a crime but because they feel good about it. Knowing this can help us catch them, too. Some inject themselves directly into an investigation to keep on top of things, chatting up cops or coming forward as witnesses. When I worked on the Atlanta Child Murders in 1981, I was convinced from what I saw that the UNSUB would actually approach the police with offers to help. When Wayne Williams was apprehended after he’d thrown the body of his latest victim into the Chattahoochee River (as we predicted he would), we learned that this police buff had offered his services to the investigators as a crime scene photographer.
