Mindhunter (13 page)

During my weeks at Quantico, I’d been exposed to some of the more bizarre murder cases, and one of the most bizarre of all turned out to be practically in my backyard—actually about 140 miles away. But that was close enough.

Back in the 1950s, Edward Gein had been a recluse living in the farming community of Plainfield, Wisconsin—population 642. He had begun his criminal career quietly, as a grave robber. His particular interest was the corpse’s skin, which he removed, tanned, and draped across his own body, in addition to adorning a tailor’s dummy and various home furnishings. At one point he had considered a sex-change operation—still revolutionary in the midwest of the 1950s—and when that seemed impractical, decided on the next best thing, which was making himself a woman suit out of real women. Some speculate he was trying to become his dead, domineering mother. If this case is starting to sound familiar, aspects of it were used by both Robert Bloch in his novel
Psycho
(made into the Hitchcock film classic) and Thomas Harris in
The Silence of the Lambs.
Harris picked up the story while sitting in on our classes at Quantico.

Gein could probably have continued living in ghoulish obscurity had his fantasy needs not expanded into "creating" more corpses to harvest. When we began our serial-killer study, this escalation is something we came to recognize in virtually all cases. Gein was charged with the murder of two middle-aged women, though likely there were more. In January of 1958, he was found legally insane and then spent the rest of his life in the Central State Hospital at Waupun and the Mendota Mental Health Institute, where he was always a model prisoner. In 1984, Gein died peacefully at age seventy-seven in the Mendota geriatric ward.

Needless to say, as a local detective or a special agent in the field, you don’t get to see this sort of thing too often. When I got back to Milwaukee, I wanted to learn as much about the case as I could. But when I checked with the state attorney general’s office, I found that the records had been sealed because of the insanity angle.

Saying I was an FBI agent with an educational interest in the crimes, I got the office to open the files to me. I’ll never forget going with the clerk and taking the boxes off the endless shelves and actually having to break a wax seal to get in. But inside, I saw photographs that instantly became seared in my mind: headless, naked female bodies, hung upside down by ropes and pulleys, slit open in front all the way from sternum to vaginal area with all genitalia cut out. Other photos showed severed heads lying on the table, their blank, open eyes staring into nothingness. As horrible as these images were to contemplate, I began speculating as to what they said about the person who had created them, and how that knowledge could have aided in his capture. And in a real sense, I’ve been contemplating that ever since.

At the end of September 1976, I left Milwaukee for my temporary duty assignment, or TDY, as a counselor for the 107th National Academy session at Quantico. Pam had to stay on her own in Milwaukee, running the house and taking care of one-year-old Erika, while still teaching. This was the first of my many professional absences over the years, and I’m afraid too many of us in the Bureau, in the military, and in the foreign service give too little thought to the incredible burdens on the spouse left behind.

The FBI National Academy program is a tough, eleven-week course for senior and accomplished law enforcement officials from around the nation and the world. In many cases, Academy students are trained right alongside FBI agents. The way to tell the difference between trainees is by shirt color. FBI agents wear blue while NA students wear red. Another thing: NA students tend to be older and more experienced. To qualify, you have to be recommended by your local commanding officer and accepted by the Quantico staff. Not only does the National Academy provide expert training in the latest in law enforcement knowledge and techniques, it also serves as an extended and informal environment for the FBI to build personal relationships with local police officers, which has proved an invaluable resource over and over again. The head of the National Academy program was Jim Cotter, a real law enforcement institution whom the police loved.

As a counselor, I was responsible for one section of students—Section B—consisting of fifty men. Even though Director Patrick Gray’s, and then Clarence Kelley’s, policies were opening the Bureau from the narrow strictures of the Hoover years, no women were yet invited to the National Academy. In addition to the Americans, I had people from England, Canada, and Egypt. You live in the same dormitories and you’re expected to be everything from instructor to social director to therapist to den mother. It was a way for the Behavioral Science staff to see how you interacted with police, if you liked the atmosphere at Quantico, and how you handled stress.

And there was plenty of that. Away from their families and living in dorm rooms for the first time in their adult lives, unable to drink in their rooms, sharing the bathroom with people they’d never met before, pushed to physical challenges most of them hadn’t had to endure since new-recruit training, the students got an excellent education, but at a price. By about the sixth week, many of the cops were going nuts, bouncing off the white cinder-block walls.

And this, of course, took its toll on the counselors as well. Each one handled the assignment differently. As with everything else in my life, I decided that if we were all going to get through this in one piece, I’d better have a sense of humor. Some counselors took other approaches. One was so strict and intense, he’d be chewing his guys’ butts out during intramural games. By the third week, his section was so pissed off, they gave him a set of luggage—the symbolic message being, "Get the hell out of here."

Another counselor was a special agent I’ll call Fred. He’d never had a drinking problem until he came to Quantico, but he sure got one there.

The counselors were all supposed to watch for signs of students becoming depressed. In fact, Fred had taken to locking himself in his room, smoking and drinking himself into oblivion. When you’re dealing with street-hardened cops, it’s survival of the fittest. Any weakness and you’re dead meat. A really nice guy, Fred was so sensitive and understanding and gullible, he didn’t stand a chance with this crew.

There was a standing rule: no women on the floor. One night, one of the cops comes to Fred saying he "can’t take it anymore." That’s not something you want to hear as a counselor. His roommate has a different woman in bed every night and he can’t sleep. So Fred goes with the guy to the room and sees half a dozen other men standing outside the door, waiting their turn, holding money in their sweaty hands. Fred freaks, he barges in on the guy who’s on top of this long-haired blonde, grabs him, and pulls him off the woman, who turns out to be an inflatable doll.

One week later, another cop comes to Fred’s room in the middle of the night saying his depressed roommate, Harry, has just opened the window and jumped. First of all, the windows in the dorm building aren’t supposed to open. So Fred races down the hall, into the room, peers out the open window, and sees Harry covered with blood lying on the grass. Fred races down the stairs and out to the suicide scene, whereupon Harry jumps up and scares the shit out of him. It happens a bottle of ketchup had been appropriated from the cafeteria that very night! By graduation, Fred’s hair was falling out, he wasn’t shaving, his leg was numb, and he was walking with a limp. A neurologist could find nothing clinically wrong with him. A year later, back in his field office, he was out on a medical disability discharge. I felt sorry for the guy, but in one respect at least cops are a lot like criminals: you’ve got to prove how tough you are with each.

Despite my easygoing and humorous approach, I was not immune either, though fortunately, most of it was camp stuff. On one occasion, my group removed all the furniture from my room; on another, they short-sheeted my bed; and on several more, they stretched cellophane across my toilet seat. You have to be able to relieve stress somehow.

There came a point when they were driving me nuts, I was desperate to get away for a little while, and like the good cops they were, they sensed that moment precisely. They prop my green MGB up with cinder blocks, lifting it just enough off the ground so that the wheels missed by a small fraction of an inch. I get in, turn on the engine, I pop the clutch, put the car in gear, and futilely gun the engine, unable to figure out why I’m going nowhere fast. I get out, cursing at the damn British engineering; I open the hood, I kick the tires, I bend down and look under the car. And all of a sudden, the entire parking lot is lit up. They’re all in their cars shining their headlights at me. Since they claimed to like me, they actually put the car back on terra firma for me after they’d had their fun.

The foreign students were in for their share, too. A lot of these guys would come over with empty suitcases, go to the PX, and buy like crazy. I particularly remember one high-ranking Egyptian colonel. He’d asked a cop from Detroit what
fuck
meant. (Big mistake.) The cop had told him, somewhat accurately, that this was an all-purpose word that had many, many different usages depending on the situation, but it was almost always appropriate. One of its meanings is "beautiful" or "classy."

So he’s in the PX, goes over to the photography counter, points, and booms out, "I wish to buy that fucking camera."

The horrified young woman clerk says, "Excuse me?"

"I want to buy that fucking camera!"

Some of the other guys quickly get to him and explain that while the term does have many usages, it is not used around women and children.

Then there was the Japanese police officer who had dutifully asked one of the other cops the protocol for greeting instructors one holds in high regard. So every time I saw him in the hallway, he would smile, bow respectfully, and greet me with, "Fuck you, Mr. Douglas."

Rather than getting all complicated, I’d bow back, smile, and say, "Fuck you, too."

Generally, when the Japanese sent over someone to the National Academy, they would insist on sending two students. After a while it became clear that one would be the superior officer and the other a subordinate who would be responsible for shining the senior man’s shoes, making his bed, cleaning his room, and generally acting as his servant. One time, several of the other students went to Jim Cotter and complained that the top guy was regularly practicing his karate and martial arts by beating the hell out of his companion. Cotter took the top guy aside, explained that every student was equal at the Academy, and stated in no uncertain terms that this kind of behavior would not be tolerated. But it just goes to prove the kind of cultural barriers that have to be overcome.

I sat in on NA classes and got a sense of how they were taught. By the end of the session in December, both the Behavioral Science and Education Units offered me jobs. The Education Unit chief offered to pay for more graduate school, but I thought I’d be more interested in Behavioral Science.

I came back to Milwaukee a week before Christmas, so confident I’d be getting the posting to Quantico that Pam and I bought a five-acre lot in an area south of the FBI Academy in Quantico. In January 1977, the Bureau announced a manpower study, during which time personnel transfers would be frozen. So there went my new job; I was stuck with this lot in Virginia and had to borrow money from my dad for the down payment, and I still had no idea what my future in the Bureau was going to be.

But then, several weeks later, I’m out on a case with an agent named Henry McCaslin when I get a call from headquarters that I’m going to be transferred to Quantico in June and assigned to Behavioral Science.

At thirty-two years of age, I would be taking the place of Pat Mullany, who was going on to the inspection staff at headquarters. Those were big shoes to fill and I looked forward to the challenge. My only real concern was the people I’d be teaching. I knew how they could take apart counselors, even ones they liked. I could only imagine how tough they’d be on instructors who were trying to teach them their own business. I had the right dance down, but I wasn’t sure if I knew the song well enough. If I was going to be teaching them behavioral science, I’d better figure out some way to eliminate as much of the BS as I could. And if I was going to be able to say anything of value to a police chief fifteen or twenty years older than me, I knew I’d better have the goods to back it up.

And it was that fear that led me to the next stage of the journey.

Taking the Show on the Road

Nine special agents were assigned to Behavioral Science when I joined the unit in June of 1977, all primarily involved in teaching. The main course offered to both FBI personnel and National Academy students was Applied Criminal Psychology. Howard Teten had originated it back in 1972, focusing on the issue with which detectives and other crime solvers are most concerned: motive. The idea was to try to give students an understanding of why violent criminals think and act as they do. Yet as popular and useful as this course was, it was based mainly on research and teaching from the academic discipline of psychology. Some of the material came from Teten’s own experience, and later that of the other instructors. But at that time, the only ones who could speak from the authority of organized, methodical, broadly conducted studies were the academics. And there was a dawning realization among many of us that these studies, and this professional perspective, had only limited applicability to the field of law enforcement and crime detection.

Other courses offered at the Academy included: Contemporary Police Problems, which dealt with labor-management issues, police unions, community relations, and associated topics; Sociology and Psychology, which mirrored the typical introductory college curriculum; and Sex Crimes, which often, unfortunately, was more entertaining than useful or informative. Depending on who was teaching Sex Crimes, it was taken with greater or lesser seriousness. One of the instructors set the tone with a dirty-old-man doll dressed in a raincoat. When you pushed down on the head, the raincoat flashed open and the penis popped up. They would also show hundreds of photographs of people with various types of what are now called paraphilias but were then generally known simply as perversions: transvestism, various fetishes, exhibitionism, and so on. These would often elicit an inappropriate laugh from the room. When you’re dealing with voyeurism or showing a man dressed in women’s clothing, you might be able to squeeze a few chuckles out of a particular photo. When you get into the extremes of sadomasochism or pedophilia, if you’re still laughing, then there’s something wrong with you or the instructor or both. It took several long years and a lot of sensitization before Roy Hazelwood and Ken Lanning came in and put the study of such topics as rape and the sexual exploitation of children on a serious and professional level. Hazelwood is retired now but still an active consultant, and Lanning will retire soon. These two guys remain among the leading law enforcement experts in the world in their respective fields.