Mindhunter (21 page)

So he breaks in, maybe she protests, maybe she starts yelling at him, maybe she’s just terrified. Whatever her reaction, that both inflames and empowers him. He wants to show himself and the world what a man he is. He attempts sex with her, but he can’t penetrate. So he beats the hell out of her, at a certain point deciding he’d better go all the way because she can identify him. He isn’t wearing a mask; this has been an impulse crime, not a planned one. But she’s so traumatized that even though she lives, she can’t give the police any description.

After the attack, he’s still got no place to go, and she certainly isn’t threatening him, he knows she won’t get any visitors at night, so he stays and eats and drinks, because by this point he’s hungry.

I pause in my narrative and tell them there’s someone who meets this description out there. If they can find him, they’ve got their offender.

One detective looks at another. One of them starts to smile. "Are you a psychic, Douglas?"

"No," I say, "but my job would be a lot easier if I were."

"Because we had a psychic, Beverly Newton, in here a couple of weeks ago, and she said just about the same things."

What’s more, my description did fit someone who lived nearby, whom they’d briefly considered. After our meeting, they interviewed him again. There wasn’t enough evidence to hold him, and they couldn’t get a confession. Shortly after that, he left the area.

The chief and detectives wanted to know how, if I wasn’t a psychic, I could come up with such a specific scenario. Part of the answer is that, by that time, I had seen enough cases of violent crime against all types of people, had correlated enough details with each one, and had interviewed enough violent offenders that I had a pattern in my mind of what sort of crime is committed by what sort of person. But, of course, if it were that straightforward, we could teach profiling from a manual or offer the police a computer program that could come up with a list of suspect characteristics for any set of inputs. And the fact of the matter is that while we use computers a lot in our work and they are capable of some impressive things, some other more complex things they simply can’t do and may never be able to do. Profiling is like writing. You can give a computer all the rules of grammar and syntax and style, but it still can’t write the book.

What I try to do with a case is to take in all the evidence I have to work with—the case reports, the crime-scene photos and descriptions, the victim statements or autopsy protocols—and then put myself mentally and emotionally in the head of the offender. I try to think as he does. Exactly how this happens, I’m not sure, any more than the novelists such as Tom Harris who’ve consulted me over the years can say exactly how their characters come to life. If there is a psychic component to this, I won’t run away from it, though I regard it more in the realm of creative thinking.

Psychics can, on occasion, be helpful to a criminal investigation. I’ve seen it work. Some of them have the ability to focus subconsciously on particular subtle details at a scene and draw logical conclusions from them, just as I try to do and train my people to do. But I always advise investigators that a psychic should be a last resort as an investigative tool, and if you’re going to use one, don’t expose him or her to officers or detectives who know the details of the case. Because good psychics are proficient at picking up small, nonverbal clues, and the psychic could amaze you and establish credibility by giving back to you facts of the case you already know without necessarily having any particular insight into what you don’t know but want to find out. In the Atlanta child murders, hundreds of psychics showed up in the city and offered their services to the police. They came up with all sorts of descriptions of killers and methods. As it turned out, none was even close.

Around the same time that I met with the local police, departments from around the San Francisco Bay area called me in on a series of murders in heavily wooded areas along hiking paths they had linked together and attributed to an UNSUB the press had dubbed the "Trailside Killer."

It had started in August of 1979 when Edda Kane, an athletic, forty-four-year-old bank executive, disappeared while on a solitary hike up the east peak of Mount Tamalpais, a beautiful mountain overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay, which was known by the nickname the "Sleeping Lady." When Kane wasn’t home by dark, her worried husband called the police. Her body was found by a search-team dog the next afternoon, naked except for one sock, facedown, in a kneeling position as if begging for her life. The medical examiner determined cause of death to be a single bullet to the back of the head. There was no evidence of sexual assault. The killer took three credit cards and $10 in cash, but left her wedding ring and other jewelry.

The following March, the body of twenty-three-year-old Barbara Schwartz was found in Mount Tamalpais Park. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest, also apparently while kneeling. In October, twenty-six-year-old Anne Alderson didn’t return from her jog around the fringes of the park. Her body was found the next afternoon with a bullet wound in the right side of her head. Unlike previous victims, Alderson was fully clothed, faceup, propped against a rock with only her right gold earring missing. The live-in caretaker on Mount Tamalpais, John Henry, said he had seen her sitting alone in the park’s amphitheater on what was to be the last morning of her life, watching the sun come up. Two other witnesses had seen her less than half a mile from where Edda Kane’s body had been found.

A promising suspect was Mark McDermand, whose invalid mother and schizophrenic brother had been found shot to death in their cabin on Mount Tamalpais. After eleven days as a fugitive, McDermand surrendered to Marin County detective Capt. Robert Gaddini. Detectives were able to link him to the murders of his own family, but while he was heavily armed, none of his guns matched the .44- or .38-caliber weapons used in the Trailside cases. And then the killings resumed.

In November, Shauna May, twenty-five, failed to meet up with two hiking companions in Point Reyes Park, a few miles north of San Francisco. Two days later, searchers found her body in a shallow grave near the decomposing corpse of another hiker, twenty-two-year-old Diana O’Connell, a New Yorker who had disappeared in the park a month before. Both women had been shot in the head. The same day, two other bodies were discovered in the park, identified as belonging to nineteen-year-old Richard Stowers and his eighteen-year-old fiancée, Cynthia Moreland, both of whom had been missing since mid-October. Investigators determined they had been killed the same long Columbus Day weekend as Anne Alderson.

The early murders had already sent terror through hikers in the area and prompted signs advising people, especially women, not to go into the woods alone. But with the discovery of four bodies in a single day, all hell broke loose. Marin County sheriff G. Albert Howenstein Jr. had collected several eyewitness accounts of people having seen the victims with strange men just before their deaths, but on certain key points, such as age and facial features, the descriptions conflicted with each other. This, by the way, isn’t unusual even in a single murder, much less a multiple over several months. An unusual pair of bifocals was found at the Barbara Schwartz scene, which apparently belonged to the killer. Howenstein released information on the glasses and the prescription, sending out flyers to all the optometrists in the area. The frames were of apparent prison issue, so Captain Gaddini contacted the California State Department of Justice to try to identify all recently released offenders with a history of sex crimes against women. Various jurisdictions and agencies, including the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office, were now actively working the case.

There was speculation in the press that the Trailside Killer might, in fact, be Los Angeles’ Zodiac Killer, who remained an UNSUB but who had been inactive since 1969. Perhaps Zodiac had been in prison for some other crime all this time and had been released by unknowing corrections officials. But unlike Zodiac, the Trailside Killer felt no need to taunt police or communicate with them.

Sheriff Howenstein brought in a psychologist from Napa, Dr. R. William Mathis, to analyze the case. Noting the ritualistic aspects of the cases, Dr. Mathis said he would expect the offender to keep souvenirs, and anyone identified as a suspect should be followed for a week before being arrested in the hope that he might lead police to the murder weapon or other evidence. As far as his appearance and behavioral characteristics, Mathis described a handsome man with a winning personality.

Working on Mathis’s advice, Howenstein and Gaddini set various types of proactive traps, including having male park rangers pose as female hikers, but nothing was working. The public pressure on law enforcement was intense. The sheriff announced to the public that the killer lays in wait for his victims and puts them through psychological trauma before killing them, probably making them plead for their lives.

When the Bureau’s San Rafael Resident Agency asked for assistance from Quantico, they’d originally contacted Roy Hazelwood, who was our chief expert on rape and violence against women. Roy is a sensitive, caring guy, and the case affected him deeply. I remember him describing it to me as we walked back to our office suite from the classroom building, where he had just finished teaching a National Academy class. I almost got the sense Roy felt personally responsible, as if the combined efforts of the FBI and about ten cooperating local agencies weren’t enough; that
he
should be cracking the case and bringing the offender to justice.

Unlike me, Roy had full-time teaching responsibilities. I had given up most of my classroom work by this point and was the Behavioral Science Unit’s only full-time profiler actively working cases. So Roy asked me to go out to San Francisco and give the police there some on-the-scene input.

As we’ve noted earlier, there is often resentment when the FBI comes into a case. Some of this is left over from the Hoover days, when it was often felt that the Bureau would just move in and take over the investigation of high-profile crimes. My unit can’t come in unless we’re asked by whichever agency has primary jurisdiction, be it a local police department or even the FBI itself. But in Trailside, the Marin County Sheriff’s Department had brought in the Bureau early, and with the kind of play the cases were getting in the media, I frankly felt they welcomed someone like me to come in and take the heat off them, at least for a while.

At the sheriff’s department offices, I reviewed all the case materials and crime-scene photos. I was particularly interested in Marin detective sergeant Rich Keaton’s observations that the murders all seemed to have taken place at secluded, heavily wooded sites with a thick canopy of foliage blocking out most of the sky. None of these areas was accessible by car, only by foot, involving at least a mile’s hike. The scene of Anne Alderson’s murder was reasonably close to a service road that represented a shortcut from the park amphitheater. This all strongly suggested to me that the killer was a local, intimately familiar with the area.

I gave my presentation in a large training room at the Marin County Sheriff’s Department. Seats were banked in a semicircle, like a medical lecture hall. Of the fifty or sixty people in the room, about ten were FBI agents, the rest police officers and detectives. As I looked out over the heads of the audience, I noticed more than a few gray hairs—experienced veterans had been brought back from retirement to help catch this guy.

The first thing I did was challenge the profile that had already been given. I didn’t think we were dealing with a good-looking, charming, sophisticated type. The multiple stabbings and blitz-style attacks from the rear told me we were dealing with an asocial type (though not necessarily antisocial) who’d be withdrawn, unsure of himself, and unable to engage his victims in conversation, develop a good line, or con or coax or trick them into doing what he wanted. The hikers were all physically fit. The blitz attack was a clear indication to me that the only way he could control his intended victim was to devastate her before she could respond.

These were not the crimes of someone who knew his victims. The sites were secluded and protected from view, which meant the killer essentially had as much time as he wanted to act out his fantasy with each victim. Yet he still felt the need for a blitz attack. There was no rape, just handling of the bodies after death; masturbation, probably, but no intercourse. The victims were a range of ages and physical types, unlike those of a glib, sophisticated killer such as Ted Bundy, most of whose victims conformed to a single image: pretty, college-age women with long, dark hair, parted in the middle. The Trailside Killer was nonpreferential, like a spider waiting for a bug to fly into his web. I told the assembled group of officers I expected this guy to have a bad background. I agreed with Captain Gaddini that he had spent time in jail. Priors might include rapes or, more likely, rape attempts, but no murders before this series. There would have been some precipitating stressor before it began. I certainly expected him to be white since all the victims were, and I thought he’d have some blue-collar mechanical or industrial job. Because of the efficiency of the murders and his success in evading the police thus far, I pegged his age at low to mid- thirties. I also thought he’d be pretty bright. If they ever tested his IQ, it would be well above normal. And if they looked into his background, they’d find a history of bed-wetting, fire-starting, and cruelty to animals, or at least two of the three.

"Another thing," I added after a pregnant pause, "the killer will have a speech impediment."

It wasn’t hard to read the expressions or body language in the room. They were finally expressing what they’d probably been thinking all along:
this guy’s full of shit!

"What makes you say that?" one cop asked sarcastically. "The wounds look like a ’stutter stab’ to you?" He grinned at his own "discovery" of a new method of killing.