Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind (17 page)

At ten, a friend dropped by for coffee. She suggested that Mary prop open a window to air out the place. The friend departed for home about eleven, and Mary headed for the shower.

Ten minutes into the shower, the curtain was pulled open and there stood the rapist, threatening her with a long, bread knife from her kitchen. She thought that he was in his midthirties. She described him as tanned and weathered, with rough hands and hair the length of an outgrown crew cut.

He had come in through the window she had propped open for ventilation. He was using a pair of her pants to try to conceal the lower part of his face.

Mary grabbed the curtain rod and tried to jab him with it. He tore the rod from her hands, threw it to the bathroom floor, and then forced her into her roommate’s bedroom, where he told her to lie on the floor. She screamed and tried to resist.

“Shut up!” he said, covering her mouth with his hand.

He struck her head against the floor, punched her, then picked up a nearby flashlight and beat Mary in the face and abdomen with it before choking her to the point of breath-lessness.

“Either be fucked or killed,” he repeatedly said.

Mary kicked him and made a dash for the door. He grabbed her again, forced her to the floor, inserted his fingers into her vagina, then raped her. He also inserted his fingers into her anus.

She told him, “My roommate and her boyfriend are going to be home any minute.”

He said he would kill them both and then hit her again in the stomach and abdomen with the flashlight and pushed her up onto the bed. She kicked him in the groin, and he hit her several times in the stomach. Then he raped her vaginally once again.

“It won’t take long,” he said.

This time he quickly withdrew. “I’m not going to come,” he said. “I’m going to leave.”

The rapist arose, dressed, and left the room, then returned. “Roll over, I want to fuck you in the ass,” he demanded.

But when Mary didn’t respond, he said, “Well, I better be going before your roommate gets back.” Then he grabbed both her breasts, saying, “Ya got nice titties,” and walked out of the room. He smashed her telephone and cut the lines on his way to the front door.

There was no doubt that a single perpetrator had committed the rapes; all the DNA specimens matched.

From an investigative point of view, the fact that he was growing progressively more violent made it all the more urgent that he be stopped. In the Margaret Jones case, he choked her and hit her with his fists. But he didn’t rape her when she asked him not to. One year and five victims later, he severely beat Mary Gilbert with his fists and a weapon and raped her twice.

I began my profile by noting that age is always the most difficult of all offender characteristics to determine. The victims varied widely in their estimates. I surmised that chronologically he was between twenty-six and thirty-three, but sexually and emotionally, he was immature. His initial actions were to look at and touch his victims. In his later assaults, when he encountered resistance, he immediately resorted to threats and violence.

I advised that the perpetrator’s wife or girlfriend would report similar behavior, a tendency to look at and play with her, and a habit of pouting or getting angry and leaving the room if he didn’t get his way.

His behavior also suggested that he had low self-esteem and was intimidated by his victims. That may sound like an odd thing to say about a rapist, but recall that he told Frankie Burget that he had tried to talk to her and how he knew that raping her was the only way he could ever have her.

He told Mary Gilbert as he raped her, “This won’t take long,” as though he was trying to assure her that he would be leaving quickly. I felt this lack of self-esteem would be perceived by others as a lack of confidence and that he would exhibit a lack of pride in his appearance. He would be poorly groomed, just as the victims themselves reported.

I believed that he drove a pickup or sedan, that it would be in poor condition and improperly maintained, would have high mileage, and would be at least five years old. His lack of personal pride would extend even to the care of his vehicle.

I also doubted that he had taken part in any team sports. It was far more likely that he had engaged in solo pastimes.

Sexual offenders are usually experiencing stress at the time of their attacks, and I said such would be the case with this offender. The stress might be relational, medical, financial, sexual, or caused by substance abuse. The rapist had discovered that the assaults momentarily relieved the stress and restored to him, at least for a while, his personal sense of power and control.

I felt that this would explain the reason why he was so determined to find a victim on the night of April 22-23, 1995. Having been unsuccessful at Lory Taylor’s and Beth Freedman’s apartments before midnight, his stress increased and he remained at the complex until 1:30, searching for a victim. When he spotted Frankie Burget, she became his target. We see the same persistence with this offender several months later. Scared off early in the evening by Marti Joseph’s male roommate, he acted out three hours later against Mary Gilbert.

What he failed to understand was that the temporary relief he experienced after each rape was illusory. In reality the crimes had a cumulative effect of actually increasing his stress and therefore his emotional burden.

I advised the police that the unidentified offender more than likely had an arrest record involving crimes against property, such as burglary or breaking and entering; alcohol-related crimes, such as disorderliness or DWI; or “nuisance” sexual offenses, particularly window peeping, but also quite possibly obscene telephone calls.

His preoccupation with anal assault suggested the possibility that he had served time in jail or prison. But the anal rape also signified something else. Taken together with his profanity and physical violence, it reflected deep anger toward women.

His crimes reflected neither planning nor patience. None of his victims (all of whom were college students) believed that he was a student. Additionally, he used vulgar street language for the female anatomy, even when complimenting the women. All of this told me that me probably had no more than a high school education, if that.

Nothing about his crimes suggested a high intellect or even street-smart craftiness. He relied entirely on physical and verbal violence to control the victims. Nor did he seem to learn from previous crimes. For example, he never figured out a reliable way to hide his face. It would have been simple to bring a mask with him. He did seem to have some concern about fingerprints, but nevertheless left DNA evidence at each rape.

The victims were selected impulsively. He apparently acted without knowing anything about their habits, living arrangements, or personalities.

Everything about his crimes, from the victims to the weapons he used, stemmed from opportunity not forethought.

I felt that impulsiveness would be reflected in his consenting relationships, both in the beginning and ending of them. He would be the type of person who makes purchases without considering their long-term implications, including whether he could afford them. His credit rating would be poor. He would frequently change jobs as well as addresses.

His low tolerance for frustration was amply shown in his behavior in the Lory Taylor case. After unsuccessfully trying to capture her, he returned later and ransacked her bedroom, obviously in anger. After also failing to enter Beth Freedman’s apartment, he took out his rage by using excessive, and unnecessary, violence against Frankie Burget. Similarly, following the interrupted assault on Marti Joseph, Mary Gilbert was violently assaulted.

I suggested that he had defective relations in his everyday life, that he was probably divorced, and that he collected pornography, especially material with bondage themes, as well as magazines and other materials emphasizing breasts and buttocks.

His anger toward women was increasing, and I believed that the violence would continue escalating. If he had a consenting sexual partner, she would note that he was becoming more demanding, more sexually selfish, and more abusive, both physically and verbally.

He worked with his hands, probably outdoors. I doubted that he was employed at any job requiring more than vocational training and experience.

He seemed to be comfortable moving around the university campus. Of course, the college environment provided him with an attractive victim pool, but I thought he might have previously lived in the vicinity or perhaps worked there or maybe even regularly visited someone who lived there.

Finally, it was my belief that his own residence would be modest and poorly maintained, much like his vehicle. It might be an apartment, small rental house, or even a trailer.

A few months later the police notified me that the rapist had been captured in an adjoining state, where he had moved shortly after the attack against Ms. Gilbert. Predictably, he had continued committing sexual assaults. The routine work of establishing where the rapist had previously lived led investigators to the university town and its string of rapes. The DNA evidence solved the cases I’d been retained to analyze.

My inferential portrait of the rapist was accurate except for one detail: he lived in a nice house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. When an officer told me this, I was amazed. The policeman let me stew for a moment and then said, “Oh, by the way, his father bought the place for him.”

Although it was DNA that finally tripped up this offender, Mark Burget was extremely satisfied with my profile and the diligent work of the police department. In an evening that I will never forget, he treated the investigators and myself to a wonderful steak dinner.

At the conclusion of the evening, as we toasted all around, he said, “You know, guys, my daughter is still my hero.”

Profiling was developed to address here-and-now investigative issues. Yet the process has intriguing historical potential as well. As long as we can reliably identify an offender’s behavior and gather sufficient information about the victim, we can profile any criminal, no matter when or where the crimes were committed.

In 1988, John Douglas was challenged to solve a notorious historical mystery. A television production company asked if he could profile Jack the Ripper for a two-hour live special marking the one hundredth anniversary of the Ripper’s murders. The FBI approved the project, and John asked me to assist him.

Murder investigations in the late-nineteenth century weren’t nearly as professional as they are today or as well documented. Procedure was especially deficient when the homicides were committed in slums like London’s Whitechapel district and when the victims were streetwalkers, as was true in the Ripper cases.

John and I questioned whether enough hard facts were available a hundred years later for us to create a profile. We were happily surprised when the production company provided us with two volumes, each about three inches thick, of detailed information on the five murders.

The binders contained autopsy and police reports, a great deal of background information on each of the victims, and maps detailing the area in which the murders occurred. They also held photographs of the victims after death.

Jack the Ripper killed five prostitutes from August 31, 1888, to November 9, 1888. Such a crime series is commonplace today, barely worth mention in the news. Yet despite his brief and unexceptional career as an aberrant offender, Jack the Ripper is perhaps the best-known serial killer in history.

What makes him so special?

For one thing, the newspapers gave him a memorable nickname, which made him sound more interesting, which in turn sold more papers, which generated more coverage. We sometimes see the echoes of such media attention in today’s cases.

Another important factor was the sexual mutilation committed on his victims. Jack’s postmortem slashing fueled the public’s fascination with him and his crimes. The Ripper also was never positively identified, and as a result wild accusations and public speculation could continue indefinitely—just as they have in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination, which many people still think remains unsolved.

In the JFK case, government conspiracy has been a favorite explanation for what occurred. In Jack the Ripper’s murders, conspiracy theorists predictably have singled out royalty for suspicion. Some have assigned guilt to a royal prince; others to the queen’s physician. Even a cover-up was alleged.

We wanted to develop a profile based solely on facts. In the evidence binders we’d find the behavioral details we needed. We carefully pored over the two volumes, taking the murders step-by-step.

Jack the Ripper’s first victim was Mary Ann Polly Nichols, forty-two, an alcoholic derelict last seen alive at 3:00
A.M.
Nichols was found dead on a narrow Whitechapel street called Bucks Row.

Her jaw was bruised and her throat had been cut from left to right. Two postmortem knife incisions had been made on her stomach in the shape of a reverse L, and she was disemboweled. Mary Nichols was missing two teeth, and her ring finger was abraded. Obviously, she was either stunned or rendered unconscious by the blow to her jaw. Her throat was then cut and mutilation ensued.

In profiling terms the Ripper was a disorganized lust murderer. He appears to have brought his own weapon with him, but the rest of his crime was highly impetuous. He apparently attacked and left his victim in an open area and made no effort to conceal his crime. The records show no documented evidence of penis penetration, so we can conclude that he did not rape his victim. Jack’s instrument of psychosexual gratification was his knife.

Victim number two was “Dark Annie” Chapman, a forty-seven-year-old prostitute, also a drunk and a derelict. She was murdered in the early morning hours of September 8, 1888, and was found in the backyard of a building on Hanbury Street in Whitechapel, approximately six blocks from the scene of the Nichols murder.

Chapman was discovered on her back, clothed, with her head propped against the wall of the building. Like Mary Nichols, she was missing two teeth. Her killer had struck her in the right cheek, which was swollen, and cut her throat from left to right. Jack performed a long, linear incision on Chapman’s front and rear torso, and she, too, had been disemboweled.

Her uterus, vagina, bladder, and intestines were found draped over her right shoulder. Her abdominal wall was missing, as were her ovaries. The area of her sternum was swollen. Her left hand lay across her breast. She also had an abraded ring finger.

The close similarities between these first two crimes quickly established in our minds a strong probability that the same killer was responsible for both. We discounted the fact that the victims were missing two teeth; this seemed more likely the consequence of chronic poor health, not Jack’s fist or a club. The best explanation for the abraded fingers was that someone had torn rings from them. Whether Jack the Ripper took them, we couldn’t say, but in my opinion the thief probably was a passerby. If Jack was taking souvenirs in this way, it seems that he would have continued to do so in the subsequent three killings. But he didn’t.

After all, Whitechapel was hardly a quality neighborhood. Robbing the dead probably wasn’t all that unusual.

Jack the Ripper’s third victim was Elizabeth Stride, forty-five, also a prostitute and drunk. Stride was murdered in the early morning hours of September 30, 1888, in a courtyard off Benner Street, about six blocks from the first murder and slightly farther from where he killed Chapman.

The Ripper was interrupted by a horse and carriage that entered the courtyard, and he fled without being able to act out his grotesque mutilation fantasies on Stride. She was found fully clothed and lying on her back. Her shoulder and clavicle were bruised, and like the other victims, her throat had been cut from left to right.

John and I surmised that the postmortem mutilation was a physical manifestation of Jack’s tremendous hatred and fear of women, common among lust killers. With the act of mutilation he achieved psychosexual relief and gratification.

With his third victim he was denied that sexual experience. The Ripper was unfulfilled. He could be expected, if possible, to immediately resume hunting for a victim to complete his objective. And that is what happened.

A short while later, that same morning in Mitre Square, about thirteen blocks away from the Hanbury Street address where Annie Chapman had been killed, he encountered victim number four, forty-three-year-old Katherine Eddowes.

Eddowes was discovered lying on her back with her clothing pulled up. Her throat had been cut from left to right. Her nose and one of her ears had been cut off. A diagonal incision was made across her abdomen, and a linear incision had been made down her back. Her left kidney was missing, and her intestines were drawn out. A portion of intestine lay beside her to the left. She also was stabbed in the liver. There were cuts to her scalp, and her face had been mutilated.

Jack the Ripper needed to finish the interrupted sexual experience he had begun with the murder of Elizabeth Stride. As is so frequently the case with aberrant murderers, Eddowes was a victim of opportunity, whose ill fortune it was to be alone and vulnerable when Jack found her.

Now we have four victims, all of a similar demographic type, and all killed within a rather small geographic area. What about the fact that they were all prostitutes?

It seems that whenever someone starts murdering prostitutes, some “expert” will tell the press, “The person who is perpetrating these heinous crimes is a man who has a great deal of anger and hostility toward females. He selects prostitutes because they symbolize the evil he perceives in some significant female in his life.”

Such comments are of little use to investigators.

In my opinion, there are two reasons why serial killers select prostitutes as victims: They are available, and they are vulnerable. When I lecture about victim selection and why prostitutes so commonly are chosen, I ask my audiences to consider five key questions about street prostitutes:

1. With whom will a street prostitute go? Anyone.
   
2. Why will a street prostitute go with anyone? Money.
   
3. Where will a street prostitute go with anyone? Anywhere.
   
4. When will a street prostitute go with anyone? Anytime.
   
5. Who cares when street prostitutes are murdered? Hardly anyone.
   

For these reasons, prostitutes are an all-too-easy target group for violent offenders.

Jack committed his fifth and final murder on November 2, 1888, in Millers Court, within two blocks of the Chapman homicide. His victim, Mary Kelly, was also a prostitute, alcoholic, and derelict. But twenty-five-year-old Kelly was by far the youngest of Jack’s murder victims.

The other departure in this murder was that the unfortunate woman entertained the Ripper in her one-room flat. For the first time Jack had a location where he could act out his aberrant fantasies at length and with little fear of being disturbed.

He brutalized Kelly’s face and, as was his habit, cut his victim’s throat from left to right. Then he cut off her ears and breasts and might even have attempted to skin her face and lower legs. He placed Kelly’s heart and kidneys on a bedside table. Her liver lay by her right thigh. Her intestines were draped over a mirror.

After preparing the profile, John Douglas and I flew to Los Angeles. There we met the three additional participants on the program: William Eckerd (since deceased), a forensic pathologist whom John and I both knew; Anne Mallalieu, an English judge or “queen’s counsel” and William Waddell, a British criminologist and then curator of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, which houses relics of some of the darkest crimes in English history. The English actor Peter Ustinov would emcee the show.

A surprise awaited us the first day on the set. Besides producing the profile, we were to consider five suspects that the production company’s investigative research had identified. They were:

1. DR. ROSLYN DONSTON, a journalist and selfproclaimed satanist who had studied medicine and lived in Whitechapel.
   
2. MONTAGUE JOHN DRUITT, an emotionally troubled schoolteacher and failed lawyer who committed suicide seven weeks after the final murder. His father and uncle were prominent surgeons.
   
3. SIR WILLIAM GULL, Queen Victoria’s personal physician and the central figure in what has come to be known as “the royal conspiracy,” an alleged plot to eliminate prostitutes who were blackmailing members of the royal family.
   
4. PRINCE ALBERT VICTOR, the queen’s twenty-eight-year-old grandson and an avid hunter.
   
5. AARON KOSMINSKI, a psychotic Polish immigrant and Whitechapel-area resident, known for his intense hatred toward women.
   

Previous investigators of the case paid a lot of attention to the “Dear Boss” letters, published in a London newspaper, in which Jack the Ripper allegedly claimed credit for the killings. Yet Bill Waddell of Scotland Yard reported on the program that the Home Office’s forensic laboratory had scientifically examined the “Dear Boss” letters and declared them a hoax.

John Douglas added a behavioral analysis to the letters. He explained that while some serial killers do communicate with the police or the press in an effort to demonstrate their superiority, lust murderers of Jack’s type do not. After perusing the packet, we surmised that someone of superior intelligence was attempting to assume Jack’s voice. I added that Jack probably didn’t want to attract attention of any sort and was more likely to have withdrawn into himself for a period after each homicide.

During the program all five panelists were asked which of the suspects we would eliminate immediately from consideration and why. Bill Eckerd said he would disregard Sir William Gull because the doctor had been ill during the time of the murders. He added that the mutilations did not appear to have been the work of a trained physician.

Bill Waddell eliminated Druitt. He did so based on information he said had only recently come to his attention and which he did not disclose.

Judge Mallalieu struck Prince Albert from the list on the strength of his strong alibis for three of them. She explained that during the Nichols and Chapman murders, the prince was grouse hunting in Scotland. At the time of Mary Kelly’s killing, he was hunting pheasant in Norfolk.

I ruled out Dr. Gull as well but on behavioral grounds. First, he was fifty-two years old. In our experience, much younger men commit this type of crime. Second, Dr. Gull was too cultivated to have killed in the way Jack did. He would not have relished the blood and gore being splashed on him. A ligature was a much likelier weapon for him. Finally, Dr. Gull had suffered a stroke two years earlier in 1886 and was in poor physical condition. I didn’t think he was physically strong enough to kill as Jack did.

John Douglas eliminated Dr. Donston, who had followed the Ripper investigation very closely and injected himself into the process with his opinions, behavior we often see in particular types of sexual killers. But as John explained, Dr. Donston was much too old to have committed the Ripper murders. Additionally, as an avid student of witchcraft, he could be expected to leave some sign of his satanic beliefs at the murder sites.

Both John and I believed Donston would have taken the women to some preselected location he preferred, rather than killing them opportunistically in the street or, in Mary Kelly’s case, her flat. John also reiterated Dr. Eckerd’s point that Jack the Ripper had no evident surgical skills.

After all the panel members explained which suspect they felt should be eliminated, I offered a brief introduction to profiling, explaining what materials and information are necessary. Then John began presenting the profile.

He explained that Jack was like a predatory animal who would be out nightly looking for weak and susceptible victims for his grotesque sexual fantasies. Douglas told the TV audience that with such a killer, you do not expect to see a definite time pattern because he kills as opportunity presents itself. He added that such killers return to the scenes of their successful crimes.