Mindhunter (14 page)

But back in the "just the facts, ma’am" Hoover days, no one in any position of authority considered what became known as profiling to be a valid crime-solving tool. In fact, the very phrase
behavioral science
would have been considered an oxymoron and its proponents might as well have been advocating witchcraft or psychic visions. So anyone "dabbling" in it would have had to do so very informally with no records kept. When Teten and Mullany began offering personality profiles, it was all done verbally, nothing on paper. The first rule was always, "Don’t embarrass the Bureau," and you never wanted to document something that could blow up in your—or your SAC’s—face.

Through Teten’s initiative and based on what he had learned from Dr. Brussel in New York, some informal consulting was provided to individual police officials who requested it, but there was no organized program nor any thought that this was a function the Behavioral Science Unit should perform. What normally happened was that a graduate of the NA course would call Teten or Mullany to talk about a case he was having trouble with.

One of the early ones came from a police officer in California desperate to solve the case of a woman who’d been murdered by multiple stab wounds. Other than the viciousness of the killing, nothing in particular stood out, and there wasn’t much to go on forensically. When the officer described the few facts he had, Teten advised him to start looking in the victim’s own neighborhood—for a slightly built, unattractive loner in his late teens who had killed the woman impulsively and was now wrestling with tremendous guilt and fear of being found out. When you go to his house and he comes to the door, Teten suggested, just stand there, stare right at him, and say, "You know why I’m here." It shouldn’t be difficult to get a confession out of him.

Two days later, the officer called back and reported that they’d begun systematically knocking on doors in the neighborhood. When a kid fitting Teten’s "profile" answered at one house, before the cop could get out his rehearsed line, the young man blurted out, "Okay, you got me!"

While it probably seemed at the time that Teten was pulling rabbits out of a hat, there was a logic to the type of individual and situation he described. And over the years, we would make that logic more and more rigorous and make what he and Pat Mullany were dabbling with in their spare time an important weapon in the fight against violent crime.

As is often true with advances in a particular field, this one came about largely by serendipity. The serendipity in this case was that as a Behavioral Science Unit instructor, I really didn’t think I knew what I was doing and felt I needed a way to get more firsthand information.

By the time I got to Quantico, Mullany was just about to leave and Teten was the overall guru. So responsibility for breaking me in fell to the two guys closest to me in age and seniority—Dick Ault and Bob Ressler. Dick was about six years older than I was, and Bob, about eight. Both had done police work in the Army before joining the Bureau. Applied Criminal Psychology represented about forty hours of classroom instruction over the eleven weeks of the National Academy course. So the most efficient way of breaking in a new guy was with the "road schools," where instructors from Quantico taught the same types of courses in highly compressed form to local police departments and academies throughout the United States. These were popular and there was usually a waiting list of requests for our services, mainly from chiefs and senior people who’d been through the full NA course. Going out with a seasoned instructor and watching him perform for two weeks was a quick way of picking up what it was you were supposed to be doing. So I started traveling with Bob.

There was a standard drill to the road schools. You’d leave home on Sunday, teach at one department or academy from Monday morning to Friday noon, then move on to the next school and do it all again. After a while, you started to feel like Shane or the Lone Ranger—riding into town, doing your bit to help the locals, then silently riding out again when your work was done. Sometimes I wanted to leave a silver bullet for them to remember us by.

Right from the beginning, I felt uncomfortable about what amounted to teaching from "hearsay." Most of the instructors—myself prime among them—had no direct experience with the vast majority of the cases they taught. In that way, it was very much like a college course in criminology where, in most cases, the professor has never been out in the streets experiencing the kind of things he’s talking about. Much of the course had evolved into "war stories," told originally by whoever the officers on the cases had been, then embellished over time until they had little relationship to the actual events. By the time I came on the scene, it had gotten to the point where an instructor would make a pronouncement about a particular case only to be contradicted in class by a student who had actually worked the case! The worst part of it was, the instructor wouldn’t always back down but would often insist he was right, even in the face of someone who’d been there. This kind of technique and attitude can go a long way toward making your class lose faith in everything else you say, whether they have any personal knowledge or not.

My other problem was that I had just turned thirty-two years of age and looked even younger. I was supposed to be teaching experienced cops, many of them ten and fifteen years older. How was I going to sound authoritative or teach them anything? Most of the firsthand experience I had in murder investigation had been under the wings of seasoned homicide cops in Detroit and Milwaukee, and here I was going to be telling people like them how to do their jobs. So I figured I’d better know my shit before I faced these guys, and whatever I didn’t know, I’d better learn in a hurry.

I wasn’t stupid about it. Before I would start a session I would ask if anyone in the class had any direct experience with any of the cases or criminals I planned on discussing that day. For example, if I was going to be discussing Charles Manson, the first thing I’d ask was, "Anyone here from LAPD? Anyone here work this case?" And if there happened to be someone, I’d ask him to give us all the details of the case. That way, I’d make sure I didn’t contradict anything that an actual participant would know to be true.

But still, even though you might be a thirty-two-year-old kid fresh out of a field office, when you taught at Quantico or came to teach from Quantico, you were presumed to speak with the authority of the FBI Academy and all of its impressive resources. Cops would constantly come up to me during breaks, or, during road schools, call my hotel room in the evenings, asking for pointers on active cases. "Hey, John, I’ve got this case that’s kind of similar to what you were talking about today. What do you think about this?" There was no letup. And I needed some authority for what I was doing; not authority from the Bureau, but personal authority.

Now there comes a point on the road—at least there did for me—when you realize there are only so many songs you can listen to, so many margaritas you can drink, so much time you can hang around the room staring at the television. That point came for me in a hotel cocktail lounge in California early in 1978. Bob Ressler and I were doing a school in Sacramento. The next day, driving away, I commented that most of these guys we’re teaching about are still around, and most of them are going to be on ice for the rest of their lives. Let’s see if we can talk to them; ask them why they did it, find out what it was like through
their
eyes. All we can do is try. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out.

I’d long had a reputation as a blue flamer, and this didn’t do much to diminish it in Bob’s eyes. But he did agree to go along with my crazy idea. Bob’s motto has always been, "It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission," and that certainly seemed to apply here. We knew if we asked for sanction from headquarters, we wouldn’t get it. Not only that, anything we tried to do from then on would be scrutinized. In any bureaucracy, you have to watch blue flamers carefully.

California has always had more than its share of weird and spectacular crimes, so that seemed like a good place to start. John Conway was a special agent assigned to the FBI resident agency in San Rafael, just north of San Francisco. He’d had Bob for a class at Quantico, had excellent relations with the California state penal system, and agreed to act as liaison and make the arrangements for us. We knew we needed to have someone we trusted, and who trusted us, because if this little project blew up in everyone’s face, there would be plenty of blame to go around.

The first felon we decided to go for was Ed Kemper, who at the time was serving out his multiple life sentences at the California State Medical Facility at Vacaville, about midway between San Francisco and Sacramento. We had been teaching his case at the National Academy without ever having had any personal contact, so he seemed like a good one to start with. Whether he would agree to see us or talk with us was an open question.

The facts of the case were well documented. Edmund Emil Kemper III was born on December 18, 1948, in Burbank, California. He grew up with two younger sisters in a dysfunctional family in which his mother, Clarnell, and father, Ed junior, fought constantly and eventually separated. After Ed displayed a range of "weird" behavior, including the dismemberment of two family cats and playing death-ritual games with his older sister, Susan, his mother packed him off to her estranged husband. When he ran away and went back to his mother, he was sent to live with his paternal grandparents on a remote California farm at the foothills of the Sierras. There, he was miserably bored and lonely, cut off from his family and the little comfort that the familiar surroundings of his own school afforded him. And there, one afternoon in August of 1963, the tall, hulking fourteen-year-old shot his grandmother, Maude, with a .22-caliber rifle, then stabbed her body repeatedly with a kitchen knife. She had insisted he stay and help her with the household chores rather than accompany his grandfather, whom he liked better, into the fields. Knowing Grandpa Ed would not find what he had just done acceptable behavior, when the old man returned home, Ed shot him, too, and left the body lying in the yard. When questioned by the police afterward, he shrugged and said, "I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma."

The seeming motivelessness of the double murder got Ed a diagnosis of "personality trait disturbance, passive-aggressive type," and a commitment to the Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane. He was let out in 1969 at age twenty-one, over the objection of state psychiatrists, and placed in the custody of his mother, who had left her third husband and was now working as a secretary at the newly opened University of California at Santa Cruz. By now, Ed Kemper was six foot nine and weighed in at around three hundred pounds.

For two years he held odd jobs, cruised the streets and highways in his car, and made a practice of picking up young female hitchhikers. Santa Cruz and its environs seemed to be a magnet for beautiful California coeds, and Kemper had missed out on a lot in his teens. Though turned down for the Highway Patrol, he got a job with the State Highway Department.

On May 7, 1972, he picked up two roommates from Fresno State College, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. He drove them to a secluded area, stabbed both young women to death, then took their bodies home to his mother’s house where he took Polaroid photos, dissected them, and played with various organs. Then he packed up what was left in plastic bags, buried the bodies in the Santa Cruz mountains, and tossed the heads into the deep ravine beside the road.

On September 14, Kemper gave a ride to a fifteen-year-old high school girl, Aiko Koo, suffocated her, sexually assaulted her corpse, then brought it home for dissection. The next morning, when he had one of his periodic visits with state psychiatrists to monitor and evaluate his mental health, Koo’s head was lying in his car trunk. The interview went well, though, and the psychiatrists declared him no longer a threat to himself or others and recommended that his juvenile record be sealed. Kemper reveled in this brilliantly symbolic act. It demonstrated his contempt for the system and his superiority to it at the same time. He drove back to the mountains and buried the pieces of Koo’s body near Boulder Creek.

(At the time Kemper was active, Santa Cruz could boast the unenviable title of serial-murder capital of the world. Herbert Mullin, a bright, handsome, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, was killing both men and women, he claimed, at the urging of voices directing him to help save the environment. On a similar theme, a twenty-four-year-old recluse car mechanic who lived in the woods outside of town—John Linley Frazier—had burned down a house and killed a family of six as a warning to those who would destroy nature. "Materialism must die or mankind must stop," was the note left under the windshield wiper of the family’s Rolls-Royce. It seemed as if every week another outrage was taking place.)

On January 9 of 1973, Kemper picked up Santa Cruz student Cindy Schall, forced her into his trunk at gunpoint, then shot her. As had become his custom, he carried her body back to his mother’s house, had sex with it in his bed, dissected it in the bathtub, then bagged the remains and flung them over the cliff into the ocean at Carmel. His innovation this time was to bury Schall’s head face-up in the backyard, looking toward his mother’s bedroom window, since she’d always wanted people "to look up to her."

By now, Santa Cruz was gripped with terror of the "Coed Killer." Young women were warned not to accept rides from strangers, particularly from people outside the supposedly safe confines of the university community. But Kemper’s mother worked for the college, and so he had a university sticker on his car.

Less than a month later, Kemper picked up Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu, both of whom he shot, then piled in the trunk. They received the same treatment as his previous victims when he got them home. He dumped their mutilated bodies in Eden Canyon, near San Francisco, where they were found a week later.

His compulsion to kill was escalating at an alarming rate, even to him. He considered shooting everyone on the block, but finally decided against it. He had a better idea—what he realized he’d been wanting to do all along. On Easter weekend, as his mother slept in her bed, Kemper went into her room and attacked her repeatedly with a claw hammer until she died. He then decapitated her and raped her headless corpse. As his final inspirational touch, he cut out her larynx and fed it down the garbage disposal. "It seemed appropriate," he later told police, "as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years."