Mindhunter (24 page)

With cold cases or those where the UNSUB didn’t seem to be active, I’d ask the police why they’d called us in. Sometimes the victim’s family would be pressuring them for a solution. That was certainly understandable and my heart always went out to them, but I couldn’t afford to spend precious time on an analysis that was just going to be shelved by the locals without any action.

With active cases, it was interesting to note where they came from. In the early days of the program, anything from one of the most major departments—say, NYPD or LAPD—would arouse my suspicion as to why they’d come to our unit in Quantico at all. Sometimes it was a jurisdictional feud with the FBI, such as who gets the surveillance films, who’ll do the interrogation, and who’ll prosecute a series of bank robberies. Or it could have been that the case was a political hot button and the locals just wanted someone else to catch the flak. All of these considerations went into my decision on how to respond to a request for assistance, because I knew all of them would help determine whether that particular case was going to get solved.

Initially, I had provided written analyses. As the caseload increased exponentially, though, I didn’t have time for that any longer. I would take notes as I examined a file. Then, when I spoke to the local investigator—either in person or on the phone—I would go over my notes and recall the case. Normally, the cops would take copious notes of their own on what I was telling them. On those rare occasions when a cop was in the same room with me, if he would just listen without writing anything down, I would quickly lose patience, tell him it was his case, not mine, and if he wanted our help, he’d better get his ass in gear and work as hard as I was.

I’d done enough of these that, like a doctor, I knew how long each "office visit" should take. By the time I’d reviewed the case, I knew whether or not I could help, so I wanted to focus on the crime-scene analysis and victimology right away. Why was this victim selected over all other potential victims? How was he or she murdered? From those two questions, you can begin to address the ultimate question: who?

Like Sherlock Holmes, I had quickly come to realize that the more ordinary and routine the crime, the less behavioral evidence there was to work with. I couldn’t be much help on street holdups. They’re too common, the behavior is too mundane, and therefore the suspect pool is enormous. Likewise, a single gunshot or stab wound presents a more difficult scenario than multiple wounds, an outdoor case is more challenging than an indoor one, a single high-risk victim such as a prostitute doesn’t give us as much information as a series.

The first thing I’d look at was the medical examiner’s report to learn the nature and type of wounds, the cause of death, whether there was any sexual assault, and if so, what kind. The quality of medical examiner work varied wildly throughout the thousands of police jurisdictions around the country. Some of them were real forensic pathologists and their work was first-rate. For example, when Dr. James Luke was medical examiner of Washington, D.C., we could always count on complete, detailed, and accurate protocols. Since his retirement from that job, Dr. Luke has been a valued consultant to my unit at Quantico. On the other hand, I saw situations in small towns down South where the coroner was the local funeral director. His idea of a postmortem exam would be to show up at the scene, kick the body, and say, "Yep, that boy’s sure dead."

After I’d gone through the body-related findings, I’d read the preliminary police report. When the first officer arrived, what did he see? From that point on, it’s possible the scene was altered, either by him or someone on the investigative team. It was important to me to be able to visualize the scene as closely as possible to how the offender left it. If it wasn’t the way it had been, I wanted to know that. For example, if there was a pillow on the victim’s face, who put it there? Was it there when the officer arrived? Did a family member who found the body do it for the sake of dignity? Or was there some other explanation? Finally, I’d look at the crime-scene photos and try to complete the picture in my mind.

Photographs weren’t always of the best quality, particularly back when most departments were still shooting in black and white. So I’d also ask for a schematic drawing of the crime scene with all directions and footprints noted. If detectives had something particular they wanted me to look at, I asked them to write it on the back of the photo, so I wouldn’t be influenced by someone else’s observation in my first pass-through. By the same token, if they had a particular suspect at the top of their list, I didn’t want to know, or I asked them to send it to me in a sealed envelope so I could be objective in my own analysis.

It was also important to try to figure out if anything had been taken from the victim or removed from the crime scene. Generally, it was clear if cash or valuables or prominent jewelry was taken, each of which would help point to the offender’s motive. Other items are not always so easy to track.

When an officer or detective would tell me that nothing was taken, I’d ask, "How do you know? Do you mean to tell me that if I took a bra or a single pair of panties from your wife’s or girlfriend’s drawer, you’d be able to tell? Because if so, you’re a sick puppy." Something as subtle as a barrette or lock of hair could be missing, and that would be difficult to trace. The mere fact that nothing
appeared
to be missing was never a definitive finding in my mind. And when we’d eventually catch an offender and search his premises, we’d often find surprise souvenirs.

It was clear from early on that a lot of folks, both inside the Bureau and out, really didn’t understand what we were all about. This was brought home to me during a two-week homicide school Bob Ressler and I were teaching in New York in 1981. There were about a hundred detectives, mainly from NYPD but also from jurisdictions all over the New York metropolitan area.

One morning, before the class on profiling began, I’m at the front of the room setting up the large, three-quarter-inch Sony VCR we used in those days. This obviously overworked, clearly burnt-out detective with pale, bloodshot eyes wanders by me and says, "You’re into this profiling stuff, huh?"

"Yeah, that’s right," I answer, turning to the boxy VCR. "In fact, this is the profiling machine right here."

He looks at me skeptically, the way seasoned detectives do when dealing with a suspect, but he stays with me.

"Give me your hand," I say. "I’ll show you how it works."

Tentatively, he gives me his hand. On a three-quarter-inch VCR, the tape cassette slot is pretty large. I take his hand, put it in the tape slot, and turn some dials. Meanwhile, Ressler’s somewhere else in the room, preparing his material. He overhears me and is ready to come over, thinking I’m about to get punched out.

But the guy just says, "So what’s my profile?"

I say, "Why don’t you wait for the class. You’ll see how it works."

Fortunately for me, the guy must have figured out during class what was going on as I explained the profiling process and used the VCR for its real purpose: to demonstrate! And he wasn’t waiting for me at the end. But the point of this story is that I’ve always wished it were that easy to come up with a usable profile. Not only can you not stick a hand (or any other body part) in a machine and come up with a profile, for years computer experts have been working with law enforcement officials to develop programs that would replicate the logical processes we go through. So far, they haven’t come up with much.

The fact of the matter is, profiling and crime-scene analysis is a lot more than simply inputting data and crunching it through. To be a good profiler, you have to be able to evaluate a wide range of evidence and data. But you also have to be able to walk in the shoes of both the offender and the victim.

You have to be able to re-create the crime scene in your head. you need to know as much as you can about the victim so that you can imagine how she might have reacted. You have to be able to put yourself in her place as the attacker threatens her with a gun or a knife, a rock, his fists, or whatever. You have to be able to feel her fear as he approaches her. You have to be able to feel her pain as he rapes her or beats her or cuts her. You have to try to imagine what she was going through when he tortured her for his sexual gratification. You have to understand what it’s like to scream in terror and agony, realizing that it won’t help, that it won’t get him to stop. You have to know what it was like. And that is a heavy burden to have to carry, especially when the victim is a child or elderly.

When the director and cast of
The Silence of the Lambs
came to Quantico to prepare for filming, I brought Scott Glenn, who played Jack Crawford—the special agent some say was based on me—into my office. Glenn was a pretty liberal guy who had strong feelings on rehabilitation, redemption, and the fundamental goodness of people. I showed him some of the gruesome crime-scene photos we worked with every day. I let him experience recordings made by killers while they were torturing their victims. I made him listen to one of two teenage girls in Los Angeles being tortured to death in the back of a van by two thrill-seeking killers who had recently been let out of prison.

Glenn wept as his listened to the tapes. He said to me, "I had no idea there were people out there who could do anything like this." An intelligent, compassionate father with two girls of his own, Glenn said that after seeing and hearing what he did in my office, he could no longer oppose the death penalty: "The experience in Quantico changed my mind about that for all time."

But just as difficult, I have to put myself in the position of the attacker, to think as he thinks, to plan along with him, to understand and feel his gratification in this one moment out of his life in which his pent-up fantasies come true and he is finally in control, completely able to manipulate and dominate another human being. I have to walk in that killer’s shoes, too.

The two men torturing and killing the teenage girls in the van were named Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris. They even had a nickname for their van: Murder Mac. They met while serving time at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. Bittaker was serving time for assault with a deadly weapon. Norris was a convicted rapist. When they discovered their mutual interest in dominating and hurting young women, they realized they were soul mates. And when they were both paroled in 1979, they got together in a Los Angeles motel and laid plans to kidnap, rape, torture, and kill one girl of appropriate age for each teen year, thirteen through nineteen. They had already successfully carried out their plans against five girls when one managed to escape from them after her rape and go to the police.

Norris, the less dominant of the two, eventually caved in to police examination, confessed, and in exchange for immunity from the death sentence, agreed to finger the even more sadistic and aggressive Bittaker. He led police to the various body sites. One, already skeletonized from the California sun, had an ice pick still protruding from the ear.

What is notable about this case, aside from the heartrending tragedy of these promising lives snuffed out and the utter depravity of torturing young girls, in Norris’s words, "for fun," is the different behavioral dynamic when two offenders are involved in the same crime. Generally, what we see is one more dominant and one more compliant partner, and often one more organized and one less organized. Serial killers are inadequate types to begin with, and the ones who need partners to carry out their work are the most inadequate of all.

As horrible as their crimes were (and Lawrence Bittaker is among the most loathsome and repugnant individuals I have ever come across), they are not, unfortunately, unique.

Like Bittaker and Norris, James Russell Odom and James Clayton Lawson Jr. met in prison. It was the mid-1970s and they were both doing time for rape at Atascadero State Mental Hospital in California. Looking back at their records, I would consider Russell Odom a psychopath and Clay Lawson more of a schizophrenic. While at Atascadero, Clay evocatively described to Russell his plans for what he would like to do when he was let out. This included capturing women, cutting off their breasts, removing their ovaries, and sticking knives into their vaginas. He said he was inspired by Charles Manson and his followers. Lawson made it clear that sexual intercourse was not part of his plan. He did not consider this part of "doing his thing."

Odom, on the other hand, considered intercourse very much his thing and, as soon as he was released, drove his 1974 powder-blue Volkswagen Beetle cross-country to Columbia, South Carolina, where Lawson was working as a pipe fitter and living with his parents after parole. (VW Beetles, as I’ve noted, seemed to be the car of choice for serial killers—as well as FBI agents without savings—at that time.) Odom thought that with their related but separate interests, they could make a good team and each do his own thing.

Within a few days of Odom’s arrival, the two of them go out looking for a victim in the 1974 Ford Comet belonging to Lawson’s father. They stop at a 7-Eleven on U.S. Highway 1 and spot a young woman they like working behind the counter. But too many people are around, so they leave and go to a porno movie.

I think it’s important to underscore here that when they realized they couldn’t stage a successful abduction without being resisted or at least witnessed, they left without having committed their intended crime. Both men were mentally ill, and in Lawson’s case, a pretty good argument could be made for criminal insanity.
Yet when circumstances did not favor the success of their crime, they refrained from committing it.
They were not under such a compulsion that they were
compelled
to act. So I will say it again for the record: in my opinion and based on my experience, the mere presence of a mental disorder does not let an offender off the hook. Unless he is completely delusional and does not comprehend his actions in the real world, he
chooses
whether or not to hurt someone else. And the truly bonkers ones are easy to catch. Serial killers are not.