Mindhunter (17 page)

So I believe from the background information and the interviews we did with Manson that while he made his followers into what he needed, they, in turn, made him into what they needed and forced him to fulfill it.

Every couple of years, Manson comes up for parole and has been turned down every time. His crimes were too publicized and too brutal for the parole board to take a chance on him. I don’t want him let out, either. But if he were released at some point, knowing what I do about him, I wouldn’t expect him to be a serious violent threat like a lot of these guys are. I think he’d go off into the desert and live out there, or else try to cash in on his celebrity for money. But I wouldn’t expect him to kill. The biggest threat would be from the misguided losers who would gravitate to him and proclaim him their god and leader.

By the time Ressler and I had done ten or twelve prison interviews, it was clear to any reasonably intelligent observer that we were onto something. For the first time, we were able to correlate what was going on in an offender’s mind with the evidence he left at a crime scene.

In 1979, we’d received about fifty requests for profiles, which the instructors tried to handle between their teaching responsibilities. By the next year, the caseload had doubled and would double again the next. By then, I had pretty much been relieved of teaching and was the only one in the unit devoting full time to operational work. I would still give presentations to National Academy and agent classes as my schedule allowed, but unlike the others, for me teaching had now become a sideline. I did virtually all the homicide cases that came into the unit and whichever rape cases Roy Hazelwood was too busy to handle.

What had been an informal service without official sanction was developing into a small institution. I took on the newly created title of "criminal-personality profiling program manager" and started working with the field offices to coordinate the submission of cases by local police departments.

At one point, I was in the hospital for a week or so. My old football and boxing injuries had messed up my nose, which had made breathing progressively more difficult, and I was in getting my twisted septum straightened out. I remember lying there hardly able to see and having one of the other agents come in and drop twenty case files on my bed.

We were learning more and more with each new prison encounter, but there had to be a way to organize the informal research into a systematized, usable framework. And that step forward came through Roy Hazelwood, with whom I was collaborating on an article about lust murder for the
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin.
Roy had done some research with Dr. Ann Burgess, a professor of psychiatric mental-health nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and associate director of nursing research for the Boston Department of Health and Hospitals. Burgess was a prolific author and already widely known as one of the nation’s leading authorities on rape and its psychological consequences.

Roy brought her to the Behavioral Science Unit, introduced her to Bob and me, and described what we were doing. She was impressed and told us she thought we had an opportunity to do research of a kind that had never been done before in this field. She thought we could contribute toward understanding criminal behavior in the same way
DSM
—the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
—had toward the understanding and organization of types of mental illness.

We agreed to work together, with Ann pursuing and eventually obtaining a $400,000 grant from the government-sponsored National Institute of Justice. The goal was to exhaustively interview thirty-six to forty incarcerated felons and see what kinds of conclusions we could draw. With our input, Ann developed a fifty-seven-page instrument to be filled out for each interview. Bob would administer the grant and be the liaison with NIJ, and he and I, with help from agents in the field, would go back into the prisons and face the subjects. We would describe the methodology of each crime and crime scene, and study and document the pre- and postoffense behavior, Ann would crunch the numbers, and we’d write up our results. We expected the project to take about three or four years.

And in that time, criminal-investigative analysis came into the modern age.

The Heart of Darkness

The question logically arises, why would convicted felons cooperate with federal law enforcement agents? We wondered about that ourselves when we began the project. However, the overwhelming majority of those we’ve approached over the years do agree to talk to us, and they do so for a number of reasons.

Some of them are genuinely bothered by their crimes and feel that cooperating on a psychological study is a way to make some partial amends and also come to a better understanding of themselves. I think Ed Kemper fits into this category. Others, as I’ve indicated, are police and law enforcement buffs and just enjoy being near cops and FBI agents. Some think there might be some benefit in cooperating with the "authorities," though we’ve never promised anything in return. Some feel ignored and forgotten and just want the attention and the relief from boredom that a visit from us represents. And some simply welcome the opportunity to relive their murderous fantasies in graphic detail.

We wanted to hear whatever these men had to tell us, but we were primarily interested in several basic questions, which we outlined in an article explaining the goals of the study in the September 1980 issue of the
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin.

1. What leads a person to become a sexual offender and what are the early warning signals?

2. What serves to encourage or to inhibit the commission of his offense?

3. What types of response or coping strategies by an intended victim are successful with what type of sexual offender in avoiding victimization?

4. What are the implications for his dangerousness, prognosis, disposition, and mode of treatment?

For this program to be valuable, we understood, we would have to be fully prepared and be instantly able to filter what each man told us. Because if you’re reasonably intelligent, as many of these guys are, you’re going to find a weakness in the system that you can use to your advantage. By their very nature, most serial offenders are good manipulators. If it’ll help your case to be mentally unstable, you can be mentally unstable. If it’ll help your case to be remorseful and contrite, you can be remorseful and contrite. But whatever seemed to them to be the best course of action to follow, I found that the people who agreed to talk to us were all similar. They had nothing else to think about, so they spent a lot of time thinking about themselves and what they’d done and could give it back to me in minute detail. Our task was to know enough about them and their crimes in advance to make sure they were telling us the truth, because they’d also had enough time to construct alternate scenarios that made them much more sympathetic or guiltless than the record would indicate.

In many of the early interviews, after hearing our convict’s story, I’d want to turn to Bob Ressler or whoever was with me and say, "Could he have been railroaded? He had a sensible answer to everything. I wonder if they really got the right guy." So the first thing we’d do when we got back to Quantico was check the record and contact the local police jurisdiction for the case file to make sure there hadn’t been some horrible miscarriage of justice.

Growing up as a boy in Chicago, Bob Ressler had been terrified and intrigued by the murder of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, who had been snatched from her house and killed. Her body was discovered cut up in pieces in the sewers of Evanston. A young man named William Heirens was eventually caught and confessed to the killing and the murders of two other women in an apartment building as part of some burglaries that escalated out of control. In one of them, the murder of Frances Brown, he had scrawled on the wall with her lipstick:

For heAVens

SAke cAtch Me

BeFore I Kill More

I cannot control myselF

Heirens attributed the murders to a George Murman (probably short for "murder man"), who he claimed lived inside him. Bob has said that the Heirens case was probably one of his early motivations for pursuing a career in law enforcement.

Once the Criminal Personality Research Project was funded and under way, Bob and I went to interview Heirens at Statesville Prison in Joliet, Illinois. He had been incarcerated since his conviction in 1946 and had been a model prisoner for all that time, the first one in the state to complete his college degree. He then went on to graduate work.

By the time we interviewed him, Heirens was denying any connection to the crimes, saying he was railroaded. No matter what we asked him, he had an answer, insisted he had an alibi and wasn’t even close to any of the murder scenes. He was so convincing and I was so concerned there might have been a massive miscarriage of justice that when we got back to Quantico, I dug out all the case files. In addition to the confession and other compelling evidence, I found that his latent fingerprints had been lifted from the Degnan crime scene. Yet Heirens had spent so much time sitting in his cell and thinking and giving himself all the answers that if they polygraphed him at that point, he would probably have passed with no trouble.

Richard Speck, who was serving consecutive life sentences for the murder of eight student nurses in a South Chicago town house in 1966, made it clear he didn’t want to be lumped with the other killers we were studying. "I don’t want to be on that list with them," he told me. "They’re crazy, these people. I’m not a serial killer." He didn’t deny what he’d done, he just wanted us to know he wasn’t like them.

On one key level, Speck was correct. He wasn’t a serial killer, who kills repeatedly with some emotional cycling or cooling-off period between his crimes. He was what I characterized as a mass murderer, who kills more than twice as part of the same act. In Speck’s case, he went to the house with burglary as his motive, trying to get money to get out of town. When twenty-three-year-old Corazon Amurao answered the door, he forced his way in with a pistol and knife, saying he was only going to tie her and her five roommates up and rob them. He herded them all into a bedroom. Over the next hour, three more women came home from dates or studying at the library. Once he had them all in his power, Speck apparently changed his mind, engaging in a frenzy of rape, strangling, stabbing, and slashing. Only Amurao survived, huddling terrified in the corner. Speck had lost count.

After he left, she went out on the balcony and called down for help. She told police about the "Born to Raise Hell" tattoo on the attacker’s left forearm. When Richard Franklin Speck showed up in a local hospital a week later after a bungled suicide attempt, he was identified by the tattoo.

Because of the brazen brutality of his crime, Speck had been the subject of all kinds of speculation from the medical and psychological communities. Initially, it had been announced that Speck had a genetic imbalance, an additional male (Y) chromosome, which was thought to increase aggressive and antisocial behavior. These vogues come and go with some regularity. More than a hundred years ago, the behaviorists of the times used phrenology—the study of skull shape—to predict character and mental ability. More recently, it was thought that an electroencephalograph reading showing a repeating fourteen-and-six-spike pattern was evidence of severe personality disorder. The jury is still out on the XYY issue, but the indisputable fact is that many, many men have this genetic makeup and display no extraordinary aggressiveness or antisocial behavior. And to cap things off, when a detailed study was performed on Richard Speck, it was found that his genetic makeup was perfectly normal—he didn’t even have the extra Y.

Speck, who has since died in prison of a heart attack, didn’t want to talk to us. His was one of the unusual cases where we had contacted the warden, who’d agreed to allow us in, but he didn’t think it was a good idea to let Speck know in advance of our visit. When we arrived, we concurred. We could hear him screaming and cursing from a holding pen where he’d been taken so we could look at his cell. The other prisoners were going nuts in sympathy with him. The warden wanted to show us the kind of pornography Speck kept, but Speck was protesting furiously over this violation of his space. Prisoners hate anything resembling a shakedown. Their cells are the only semblance of privacy they’ve got left. As we walked down the three-tiered cellblock at Joliet, windows broken and birds flying up near the ceiling, the warden warned us to stay close to the center so that prisoners couldn’t reach us with urine or feces.

Realizing this wasn’t getting us anywhere, I whispered to the warden that we’d just keep walking down the corridor without stopping at Speck’s cell. With the subject-interview guidelines in effect today, we might not have been able to spring ourselves on him unannounced. In fact, the entire criminal-personality study would be much more difficult to put together now.

Unlike Kemper or Heirens, Speck wasn’t exactly a model prisoner. He had once built and hidden a crude miniature still in the back of a false drawer in the cellblock guard’s wooden desk. It produced hardly any alcohol, just enough to create a smell and make the guards go crazy when they couldn’t find it. Another time, he found an injured sparrow that had flown in through one of the broken windows and nursed it back to health. When it was healthy enough to stand, he tied a string around its leg and had it perch on his shoulder. At one point, a guard told him pets weren’t allowed.

"I can’t have it?" Speck challenged, then walked over to a spinning fan and threw the small bird in.

Horrified, the guard said, "I thought you liked that bird."

"I did," Speck replied. "But if I can’t have it, no one can."

Bob Ressler and I met him in an interview room at Joliet, accompanied by his prison counselor, something akin to a guidance counselor in high school. Like Manson, Speck chose the head of the table, sitting on a credenza so he could be above us. I started out by telling Speck what we wanted to do, but he wouldn’t talk to us, only ranting about the "motherfucking FBI" who wanted to look in his cell.