Mindhunter (11 page)

"I met John Douglas for the first time the other day, and he got me thinking long and hard about how I feel about my own religious beliefs."

God knows what I said to make him think so deeply, but sometimes He works in mysterious ways. The next time I told the tassel story to a priest, it was the one Pam had called in to pray over me in Seattle. And I got him believing it, too.

We had a brief honeymoon in the Poconos—heart-shaped bathtub, mirrors on the ceiling, all the classy stuff—then drove to Long Island where my parents had a party for us since few people in my family had been able to come to the wedding.

After we were married, Pam moved to Milwaukee. She had graduated and become a teacher. New teachers all had to do their time serving as substitutes in the roughest inner-city schools. One junior high was particularly bad. Teachers there routinely were shoved and kicked, and a number of rape attempts had been made against the younger female teachers. I’d finally gotten off the recruiting detail and was putting in long hours on the reactive squad, mostly handling bank robberies. In spite of the inherent danger of my work, I was more concerned about Pam’s situation. At least I had a gun to defend myself. One time, four students forced her into an empty classroom, pawing at her and assaulting her. She managed to scream and break away, but I was furious. I wanted to take some other agents down to the school and kick ass.

My best buddy at the time was an agent named Joe Del Campo, who worked with me on bank robbery cases. We would hang around this bagel place on Oakland Avenue, near the University of Wisconsin’s Milwaukee campus. A couple named David and Sarah Goldberg managed it, and before too long, Joe and I became friendly with them. In fact, they started treating us like sons.

Some mornings, we’d be in there bright and early, wearing our guns and helping the Goldbergs put bagels and bialys in the oven. We’d eat breakfast, go out and catch a fugitive, follow up on a couple of leads in other cases, then go back for lunch. Joe and I both worked out at the Jewish Community Center, and around Christmas and Hanukkah time, we bought the Goldbergs a membership. Eventually, other agents started hanging around what we simply called "Goldberg’s place," and we had a party there, attended by both the SAC and ASAC.

Joe Del Campo was a bright guy, multilingual, and excellent with firearms. His prowess played the central role in perhaps the strangest and most confusing situation I’ve ever been involved with.

One day during the winter, Joe and I are in the office interrogating a fugitive we’d brought in that morning when we get a call that Milwaukee police have a hostage situation. Joe’s been up all night on night duty, but we leave our own subject to cool his heels and head out to the scene.

When we get there, an old Tudor-style house, we learn that the suspect, Jacob Cohen, is a fugitive accused of killing a police officer in Chicago. He’s just shot an FBI agent, Richard Carr, who tried to approach him in his apartment complex, which had been surrounded by a newly trained FBI SWAT team. The crazy guy then ran through the SWAT team perimeter, taking two rounds in the buttocks. He grabs a young boy shoveling snow and runs into a house. Now he’s got three hostages—two children and an adult. Ultimately, he lets the adult and one of the kids go. He holds on to the young boy, whose age we estimate at about ten to twelve.

At this point, everyone is pissed off. It’s freezing cold. Cohen is mad as hell, not exactly helped by the fact he’s now got an ass full of lead. The FBI and Milwaukee police are angry at each other for letting the situation degenerate. The SWAT team is pissed off because this was their first big case and they missed him and let him slip through their perimeter. The FBI in general is now out for blood because he’s taken down one of their own. And Chicago police have already gotten out the word that they want to come get him, and that if anyone’s going to shoot the suspect, they should have that right.

SAC Herb Hoxie arrives on the scene and makes what I consider a couple of mistakes to compound the ones already made by everyone else. First, he uses a bullhorn, which makes him come across as dictatorial. A private telephone linkup is more sensitive, plus it gives you the flexibility of negotiating in private. Then he makes what I consider his second error: he offers himself as hostage in exchange for the boy.

So Hoxie gets behind the wheel of an FBI car. The police form a circle around the car as it backs into the driveway. Meanwhile, Del Campo tells me to give him a boost onto the roof of the house. Remember, it’s a Tudor with steep-sloping roofs that are slick with ice, and Joe’s been up all night. The only weapon he’s got is his two-and-a-half-inch-barrel .357 magnum.

Cohen comes out of the house with his arm wrapped around the boy’s head, holding him close to his body. Detective Beasley of the Milwaukee Police Department steps out from the circle of cops and says, "Jack, we’ve got what you want. Leave the boy alone!" Del Campo is still creeping up the pitch of the roof. The police see him up there and realize what he’s up to.

The subject and the hostage are getting closer to the car. There’s ice and snow everywhere. Then suddenly, the kid slips on the ice, causing Cohen to lose his grip on him. Del Campo comes up over the peak of the roof. Figuring that with the short barrel, the bullet may rise, he aims for the neck and gets off one shot.

It’s a direct hit, an amazing shot, right in the middle of the subject’s neck. Cohen goes down, but no one can tell whether he’s been hit or if it’s the boy.

Exactly three seconds later, the car is riddled with bullets. In the crossfire, Detective Beasley is hit in the Achilles tendon. The boy scrambles on his hands and knees in front of the car, which rolls forward on him because Hoxie’s been hit by flying glass and has lost control. Fortunately, the boy’s not badly hurt.

True to FBI form, the local TV news that night shows the special agent in charge, Herbert Hoxie, on a gurney being moved out of the emergency room with blood trickling from his ear, and while they’re wheeling him away, he’s giving his statement to the press: "All of a sudden I heard gunfire, bullets were flying everywhere. I guess I was hit, but I think I’m okay . . ." FBI, God, motherhood, apple pie, et cetera, et cetera.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Fistfights nearly break out and the police almost beat up Del Campo for taking their shot. The SWAT team isn’t any too pleased either because he’s made them look bad. They go to ASAC Ed Best to complain, but he stands up for Del Campo and says that Joe salvaged the situation that they let develop.

Cohen had between thirty and forty entrance and exit wounds but was still alive when they took him away in the ambulance. Fortunately for all concerned, he was DOA at the hospital.

Special Agent Carr, miraculously, survived. Cohen’s bullet passed through the trench coat Carr was wearing, into his shoulder, ricocheted off his trachea, and lodged in his lung. Carr kept that trench coat with the bullet hole in it and wore it proudly from that day on.

Del Campo and I were a terrific team for a while, except when we’d get on these laughing jags we couldn’t get off of. We were at a gay bar once, trying to develop some informants on a homosexual murder fugitive. It’s dark and it takes our eyes some time to adjust. Suddenly, we become aware of all these eyes on us, and we start arguing about which one of us they want. Then we see this sign above the bar, "A Hard Man Is Good to Find," and we just lose it, cracking up like two goofballs.

It never took much. We broke up once talking to an old guy in a wheelchair at a nursing home, and again, interviewing a dapper business owner in his mid-forties whose toupee had slipped halfway down his forehead. It didn’t matter. If there was any humor anywhere in a situation, Joe and I would find it. As insensitive as it may sound, this was probably a useful talent to have. When you spend your time looking at murder scenes and dump sites, especially those involving children, when you’ve talked to hundreds, then thousands, of victims and their families, when you’ve seen the absolutely incredible things some human beings are capable of doing to other human beings, you’d better be able to laugh at silly things. Otherwise, you’re going to go crazy.

Unlike a lot of guys who went into law enforcement, I’d never been a gun nut, but ever since the Air Force I’d always been a good shot. I thought it might be interesting to be on the SWAT team for a while. Every field office had one. It was a part-time job; the five team members were called out as needed. I made the team and was assigned as the sniper—the one who stays farthest back and goes for the long shot. All the others on the team had heavy military backgrounds—Green Berets, Rangers—and here I had taught swimming to pilots’ wives and kids. The team leader, David Kohl, eventually became a deputy assistant director at Quantico, and he was the one who asked me to head up the Investigative Support Unit.

In one case, somewhat more straightforward than the Jacob Cohen extravaganza, a guy robbed a bank, then led police on a high-speed chase, ending up barricaded in a warehouse. That was when we were called in. Inside this warehouse, he takes off all his clothes, then puts them back on again. He seems like a real nut case. Then he asks to have his wife brought to the scene, which they do.

In later years, when we’d done more research into this type of personality, we’d understand that you don’t do that—you don’t agree to this type of demand because the person they ask to see is usually the one whom they perceive as having precipitated the problem in the first place. Therefore, you’re putting that individual in great danger and setting them up for a murder-suicide.

Fortunately, in this instance, they don’t bring her inside the warehouse, but have her talk to him on the phone. And sure enough, as soon as he hangs up, he blows his brains out with a shotgun.

We’d all been waiting in position for several hours, and suddenly it was over. But you can’t always diffuse stress that quickly, which often leads to warped humor. "Jeez, why’d he have to do that?" one of the guys remarked. "Douglas is a crackerjack shot. He could have done that for him."

I was in Milwaukee for a little more than five years. Eventually, Pam and I moved from the apartment on Juneau Avenue to a town house on Brown Deer Road, away from the office, near the northern city limit. I spent most of my time on bank robberies and built up a string of commendations clearing cases. I found I was most successful when I could come up with a "signature" linking several crimes together, a factor that later became the cornerstone of our serial-murder analysis.

My only notable screwup during this time was after Jerry Hogan replaced Herb Hoxie as SAC. Not many perks went along with the job, but one was a Bureau automobile, and Hogan was proud of his new, emerald green Ford Ltd. I needed a car for an investigation one day and none was available. Hogan was out at a meeting, so I asked the ASAC, Arthur Fulton, if I could use the SAC’s. Reluctantly, he agreed.

The next thing I know, Jerry’s called me into his office and he’s yelling at me for using his car, getting it dirty, and—worst of all—bringing it back with a flat. I hadn’t even noticed that. Now Jerry and I got along well, so the whole time he’s yelling, I can’t keep from laughing. Apparently, this was a mistake.

Later that day, my squad supervisor, Ray Byrne, says to me, "You know, John, Jerry Hogan really likes you, but he has to teach you a lesson. He’s assigning you to the Indian reservation."

These were the days of the Wounded Knee incident and the groundswell of consciousness over Native American rights. We were hated on the reservations, as much as in the ghettos of Detroit. The Indians had been treated terribly by the government. When I first arrived at the Menominee Reservation up on Green Bay, I couldn’t believe the poverty and filth and squalor these people had to live in. So much of their culture had been stripped away from them, they often seemed almost numb to me. Largely as a result of the deplorable conditions and the history of government hostility and indifference, on many of the reservations you saw high incidences of alcoholism, child and spouse abuse, assault, and murder. But because of the utter mistrust of the government, it was nearly impossible for an FBI agent to get any type of cooperation or assistance from witnesses.

The local Bureau of Indian Affairs representatives were of no help. Even family members of victims wouldn’t get involved, for fear of being seen as collaborating with the enemy. Sometimes, by the time you would find out about a murder and get to the scene, the body would have been there for several days already, infested with insect larvae.

I spent more than a month on the reservation, during which time I investigated at least six murders. I felt so bad for these people, I was depressed all the time, and I had the luxury of leaving and going home at night. I had just never seen people who, as a group, had so much to overcome. While it was dicey, my time on the Menominee Reservation was the first concentrated dose of murder-scene investigation I’d had, which turned out to be grim but excellent experience.

Without question, the best thing that happened during my time in Milwaukee was the birth of our first child, Erika, in November of 1975. We were to have Thanksgiving dinner at a local country club with some friends, Sam and Esther Ruskin, when Pam went into labor. Erika was born the next day.

I was working long hours on bank robbery cases and finishing up my graduate degree, and the new baby meant even less sleep. But needless to say, Pam bore the brunt of this. I felt much more family-oriented responsibility as a result of fatherhood, and I loved watching Erika grow. Fortunately for all of us, I think, I had not yet begun working child abduction and murder. If I had been, if I’d really stopped and thought about what was out there, I don’t know that I could have adjusted to fatherhood as comfortably. By the time our next child, Lauren, was born in 1980, I was well into it.

Becoming a father, I think, also motivated me to try to make more out of myself. I knew that what I was doing wasn’t what I wanted to be doing my entire career. Jerry Hogan advised me to put in ten years in the field before I thought about applying for anything else; that way, I’d have the experience for an ASAC and eventually a SAC posting, then maybe eventually make it to headquarters. But with one child and, I hoped, more to come, the life of a field agent, moving from office to office, didn’t seem terribly appealing.