Mindhunter (28 page)

In my own case, it might be something similar to what I would have used on Trapnell; that is, a particular date might be the emotional trigger.

My sister Arlene had a beautiful blonde daughter named Kim. She was born on my birthday, June 18, and I always felt a special bond with her. When she was sixteen, Kim died in her sleep. We were never able to find out the exact cause. To compound the pain and joy of her memory, it happens that my eldest daughter, Erika—now college age—looks very much like Kim. I’m sure that Arlene never sees Erika without seeing Kim in her mind, picturing what Kim would have grown up to become. My mother feels the same way.

If I were to target
me,
for instance, I’d plan the approach right before my birthday. I’m emotionally up, looking forward to the celebration with my family. But I’m also thinking about my niece, Kim—the birthday we shared, how much she resembles Erika—and I’m going to be feeling vulnerable. If I happen to see photographs of the two girls on the wall, I’m likely to come even more unglued.

It doesn’t matter that I know what the overall strategy is in approaching me. It doesn’t matter that I’m the one who came up with it. If the triggering stressor is a legitimate, valid concern, it will have a good chance of working. This one could be mine. Yours would be something else and we’d have to try to figure out in advance what it would be. But there would be something.

Because everybody has a rock.

Atlanta

In the winter of 1981, Atlanta was a city under siege.

It had begun quietly a year and a half earlier, almost unnoticed. Before it was over—if in fact it will ever be over—it had become one of the largest and perhaps one of the most publicized manhunts in American history, politicizing a town and polarizing a nation, every step of the investigation steeped in bitter controversy.

On July 28, 1979, police responded to a complaint of a foul odor in the woods off Niskey Lake Road and discovered the body of thirteen-year-old Alfred Evans. He’d been missing for three days. While examining the site, police discovered another body about fifty feet away—this one partially decomposed—belonging to fourteen-year-old Edward Smith, who had disappeared four days before Alfred. Both boys were black. The medical examiner determined that Alfred Evans had probably been strangled, while Edward Smith had definitely been shot with a .22-caliber weapon.

On November 8, the body of nine-year-old Yusef Bell was discovered in an abandoned school. He had been missing since late October and had also been strangled. Eight days later, fourteen-year-old Milton Harvey’s body was found near Redwine Road and Desert Drive in the East Point section of Atlanta. He had been reported missing in early September, and as with Alfred Evans, no definite cause of death could be determined. Both of these children were also black. But there wasn’t enough similar evidence to attach any particular significance. Unfortunately, in a city the size of Atlanta, children disappear all the time. Some of them are found dead.

On the morning of March 5, 1980, a twelve-year-old girl named Angel Lanier set out for school but never arrived. Five days later her body was found, bound and gagged with an electrical cord, on the side of a road. She was fully clothed, including her underwear, but another pair of panties had been stuffed in her mouth. Cause of death was determined to be ligature strangulation. The medical examiner found no evidence of sexual assault.

Eleven-year-old Jeffrey Mathis disappeared on March 12. At this point, the Atlanta Police Department still hadn’t made anything out of six black children either missing or turning up dead. There were as many differences as similarities among the cases, and they hadn’t seriously considered the possibility that some or all of them might be related.

But other people had. On April 15, Yusef Bell’s mother, Camille, aligned with other parents of missing and slain black children and announced the formation of the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders. They pleaded for official help and recognition of what they saw going on around them. This wasn’t supposed to be happening in Atlanta, the cosmopolitan capital of the New South. This was a city on the move, the town supposedly "too busy to hate," which boasted a black mayor in Maynard Jackson and a black public safety commissioner in Lee Brown.

The horrors didn’t stop. On May 19, fourteen-year-old Eric Middlebrook was found murdered about a quarter mile from his home. Death was caused by blunt-force trauma to the head. On June 9, twelve-year-old Christopher Richardson disappeared. And on June 22, the second young girl, eight-year-old LaTonya Wilson, was abducted from her bedroom in the early hours of a Sunday morning. Two days later, ten-year-old Aaron Wyche’s body was found beneath a bridge in DeKalb County. He died of asphyxia and a broken neck. Anthony "Tony" Carter, nine, was found behind a warehouse on Wells Street on July 6, facedown in the grass, dead of multiple stab wounds. From the absence of blood at the scene, it was clear his body had been moved from another location.

The pattern could no longer be ignored. Public Safety Commissioner Brown set up the Missing and Murdered Task Force, which would ultimately include more than fifty members. Yet on it went. Earl Terrell, ten, was reported missing on July 31 off Redwine Road, near where Milton Harvey’s body had been found. And when twelve-year-old Clifford Jones was found dead by ligature strangulation in an alley off Hollywood Road, the police finally accepted a connection and stated that the investigation would now be conducted under the assumption that the murders of black children were related.

Up until this point, the FBI had no jurisdiction to enter a case that for all its hideous enormity remained a series of local crimes. A break came with Earl Terrell’s disappearance. His family had received several telephone calls demanding a ransom for the safe return of their son. The caller indicated that Earl had been taken to Alabama. The presumed crossing of state lines brought the federal kidnapping statute into effect and allowed the FBI to investigate. But it soon became clear that the ransom calls had been a hoax. Hopes faded for Earl’s life and the FBI had to back out.

Another boy, eleven-year-old Darron Glass, was reported missing on September 16. Mayor Maynard Jackson asked the White House for help—specifically, to have the FBI conduct a major investigation into the Atlanta child murders and disappearances. With jurisdiction still very much an issue, Att. Gen. Griffin Bell ordered the FBI to begin an investigation of whether the children who had not been found were being held in violation of the federal kidnapping statute; in other words, was there an interstate character to the crimes? As an added responsibility, the Atlanta Field Office was charged with determining if the cases were, in fact, linked. In effect but not in so many words, the Bureau was given the message: solve the cases and find the killer, as quickly as possible.

The media, of course, had seized on the frenzy. The growing gallery of young black faces published regularly in the newspapers became a proclamation of collective municipal guilt. Was this a conspiracy to commit genocide on the black population, targeting its most vulnerable members? Was this the Klan or Nazi Party or some other hate group set to make its stand a decade and a half after the major civil rights legislation? Was this simply one crazed individual with a personal mission to kill young children? This last possibility seemed the least likely. These kids were falling victim at an incredibly rapid rate. And while to date, the overwhelming majority of se rial killers had been white, almost never did they hunt outside their own race. Serial murder is a personal crime, not a political one.

But this did give the FBI another possible legitimacy in the case. If the interstate kidnapping angle didn’t pan out, we were still charged with determining if this fit the 44 Classification: violation of federal civil rights.

By the time Roy Hazelwood and I went down to Atlanta, there were sixteen cases with no end in sight. By then the Bureau’s involvement had an official case name: ATKID, also designated Major Case 30, though there was little public fanfare when the FBI came in. The Atlanta police didn’t want anyone stealing their show, and the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office didn’t want to create expectations they might not be able to be meet.

Roy Hazelwood was the logical choice to join me in Atlanta. Of all the Behavioral Science Unit instructors, Roy was doing the most profiling, teaching the National Academy course on interpersonal violence and taking on many of the rape cases that came to the unit. Our primary goals were to determine for ourselves if the cases were linked, and if so, was there a conspiracy?

We reviewed the voluminous case files—crime-scene photos, descriptions of what each child was wearing when found, statements from witnesses in the area, autopsy protocols. We interviewed family members of the children to see if there was a common victimology. The police drove us around the neighborhoods where the children had disappeared and took us to each of the body dump sites.

Without talking over our impressions with each other, Roy and I both took psychometric tests, administered by a forensic psychologist, which we filled out as if each of us were the killer. The test involved motivation, background, and family life—the types of things we’d put into a profile. The doctor who administered the test was amazed that our results were nearly identical.

And what we had to say wasn’t aimed at winning any popularity contests.

First, we didn’t think these were Klan-type hate crimes. Second, we were almost positive the offender was black. And third, while many of the deaths and disappearances were related, not all of them were.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation had received several tips about Ku Klux Klan involvement, but we discounted them. If you study hate crimes going all the way back to the early days of the nation, you find that they tend to be highly public, highly symbolic acts. A lynching is intended to make a public statement and create a public display. Such a crime or other racial murder is an act of terrorism, and for it to have an effect, it must be highly visible. Ku Klux Klansmen don’t wear white sheets to fade into the woodwork. If a hate group had targeted black children throughout the Atlanta area, it wouldn’t have been content to let months go by before the police and the public figured out something was going on. We would have expected bodies strung up on Main Street, USA, and the message would have been none too subtle. We didn’t see any of that type of behavior in these cases.

The body dump sites were in predominantly or exclusively black areas of the city. A white individual, much less a white group, could not have prowled these neighborhoods without being noticed. The police had canvassed extensively and had no reports of whites near any of the children or dump sites. These areas had street activity around the clock, so even under the cover of night, a white man could not have been around there completely unnoticed. This also fit in with our experience that sexual killers tend to target their own race. Even though there was no clear evidence of sexual molestation, these crimes definitely fit a sexual pattern.

There was a strong link among many of the victims. They were young and outgoing and streetwise, but inexperienced and rather naive about the world beyond their neighborhood. We felt this was the type of child who would be susceptible to a come-on or ruse or con from the right individual. That individual would have to have a car, since the children were taken away from the abduction sites. And we felt he would have to have some aura of adult authority. Many of these kids lived in conditions of obvious poverty. In some of the houses we found no electricity or running water.

Because of that and the children’s relative lack of sophistication, I didn’t think it would take much of a lure. To test this, we had Atlanta undercover officers go into these areas, often posing as workmen, and offer a child five dollars to come with him to do some job. They tried it with black officers and with white officers and it didn’t seem to matter. These kids were so desperate for survival, they’d do just about anything for five dollars. It wasn’t going to take someone all that sharp to get to them. The one other thing the experiment showed was that white men were noticed in these neighborhoods.

But as I said, while we did find a strong linkage, it didn’t seem to apply to all the cases. After carefully evaluating the victims and the circumstances, I didn’t think the two girls had been killed by the primary offender, or even by the same person as each other. The manner of LaTonya Wilson’s abduction from her bedroom was too specialized. Of the boys, I thought most of the "soft kills"—the strangulations—were related, not necessarily all the unknown causes of death. And other aspects of the evidence led us to believe we weren’t dealing with a single killer. Strong evidence in a couple of the cases suggested the killer had been a member of the victim’s family, but when FBI director William Webster announced this publicly, he was slam-dunked by the press. Aside from the obvious political problems with such a statement, any case separated from the Missing and Murdered list made that family ineligible to receive any of the funds that were starting to be contributed by groups and individuals around the country.

Even though we felt more than one person was responsible, we felt we were dealing with one particular individual who was on a tear, and he would keep killing until he was found. Roy and I profiled a black male, single, between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine. He would be a police buff, drive a police-type vehicle, and somewhere along the way he would insinuate himself into the investigation. He would have a police-type dog, either a German shepherd or a Doberman. He would not have a girlfriend, he would be sexually attracted to the young boys, but we weren’t seeing any signs of rape or other overt sexual abuse. This, I thought, spoke to his sexual inadequacy. He would have some kind of ruse or con with these kids. I was betting on something having to do with music or performing. He would have a good line, but he couldn’t produce. At some point early in each relationship, the kid would reject him, or he would at least perceive it that way, and he would feel compelled to kill.