Mindhunter (33 page)

With the clarity that comes from a close encounter with death, he’s saying to himself, "This isn’t a reprisal. I’ve put a lot of people in jail, but they couldn’t get that close. The only person who could get that close to me is someone that I trusted implicitly."

When he comes out of surgery and is taken to the intensive care unit, the Atlanta SAC, John Glover, is there. Glover has been bearing the weight of ATKID for months, and now this. Like the dead children and like Jud, Glover is also black, one of the highest-ranking blacks in the Bureau. He feels enormously for Jud.

"Find my wife," Jud whispers to him. "Make her tell you what happened."

Glover thinks Jud’s still delirious, but the doctor says no—he’s conscious and alert.

Jud spends twenty-one days in the hospital, his hospital room under armed guard since no one knows who these shooters are or whether they’re coming back to finish him off. Meanwhile, his case is going nowhere. His wife expresses shock and dismay over what happened and thanks God he wasn’t killed. If only she’d been there that night.

In the office, a team of agents are tracking down leads. Jud’s been a cop for a long time. He could have a lot of enemies. Once it’s clear he’s going to recover, the question is phrased in a lighter vein, in terms of the popular TV series
Dallas:
"Who shot J.R.?"

It’s a couple of months before he can get his routine back to normal. He finally tackles the stack of bills that have been piling up since the attack. He moans as he faces a Southern Bell telephone bill for more than $300. But as he starts going through it, he begins putting the case together in his mind.

The next day, he comes into the office and says he thinks this phone bill is the key. As the victim, he’s not supposed to be working his own case, but his colleagues listen.

Listed on the bill are a bunch of calls back to Columbus. From the phone company, they get the name and address that go with the number. Jud doesn’t even know this guy. So he and several other agents get in the car and drive the hundred miles down to Columbus. Their destination is the home of a preacher, who, Jud decides, is actually more of a snake oil salesman.

The FBI agents lean on him, but he denies having anything to do with the attempted murder. The agents aren’t going to let him off easily. This is one of our own, they tell him, and we’re going to get the person or persons who did this.

Then the story begins to emerge. This preacher is known around Columbus as a man who can "get things done." Mrs. Ray had approached him to do the job back in October, but he says he told her he wouldn’t do it.

She answers that she’ll find someone who will and asks to use the phone, saying she’ll pay him back for the long-distance calls. The preacher tells the agents she called back to an old neighbor in Atlanta who’d been in the Army in Vietnam the same time as Jud and knew his way around a gun. She tells him, "We’ve got to get this thing done!"

And to top it all off, the preacher claims, "Mrs. Ray stiffed me for the phone calls."

The agents get in the car and drive back to Atlanta, where they confront the former neighbor. Under grilling, he admits Mrs. Ray asked him about a contract killing, but he swears he had no idea it was Jud she was trying to get.

Anyway, he says he told her he didn’t know anybody who did that sort of thing and put her in touch with his brother-in-law, who might. The brother-in-law, in turn, introduces her to another guy, who agrees to take on the job and hires two other men to be the shooters.

Mrs. Ray, the former neighbor’s brother-in-law, the man who took the contract, and the two shooters are all indicted. The former neighbor is named an unindicted coconspirator. The five charged are found guilty of attempted murder, conspiracy, and burglary. They each get a ten-year sentence, the most the judge can give them.

I would see Jud from time to time in relation to ATKID. Before long, he began seeking me out. Since I wasn’t one of his colleagues in the office but knew what the stress of the job was all about and could understand what he’d been through and continued to go through, I guess he felt he could talk to me. In addition to all the other feelings that go with such a thing, he told me he found the public airing of his domestic situation very painful and embarrassing.

With all Jud suffered, the Bureau wanted to do whatever was best for him and thought that transferring him to another field office far from Atlanta would help him recover. But after talking with Jud and sharing his feelings, I didn’t think so. I thought he should stay where he was for a while.

I went in and spoke to John Glover, the SAC in Atlanta. I said, "If you transfer him, you’re eliminating the support system he has right here in this office. He needs to stay here. Let him spend a year getting his children settled again and close to the aunt who helped raise him." I suggested that if he was going to go anywhere, it should be to the Columbus Resident Agency, since he’d been a cop there and still knew most of the force.

They did keep him in the Atlanta-Columbus area, where he began to get his life back in order. Then he moved to the New York Field Office, where his main job was foreign counterintelligence. He also became one of the office’s profile coordinators—the liaison between the local police and my unit at Quantico.

When slots became available in the unit, we brought Jud on, along with Roseanne Russo, also from New York, and Jim Wright, from the Washington Field Office, who had spent more than a year working the John Hinckley case and trial. Roseanne eventually left the unit for the Washington Field Office and foreign counterintelligence. Jud and Jim both became distinguished and internationally known members of the team and close friends of mine. When I became unit chief, Jim Wright took over from me as manager of the profiling program.

Jud claimed to have been shocked that we picked him. But he’d been an outstanding coordinator in New York, and because of his strong law enforcement background, he worked out right from the beginning. He was a quick learner and extremely analytical. As a police officer, he’d seen these cases from the "trenches" and brought that perspective to them.

When it would come up in a teaching situation, Jud wouldn’t be afraid to mention the attempt on his life and its repercussions. He even had a tape recording of his emergency telephone call, which he would sometimes play for a class. But he couldn’t stand to be in the room. He would step outside until it was over.

I told him, "Jud, this is a tremendous thing." I explained that so many of the elements at the scene—the footprints, the blood on the television—would have been misleading or nonsensical. Now we were beginning to understand how seemingly irrational elements can have a rational explanation. "If you work this case up," I told him, "it could be an extremely valuable teaching tool."

He did that, and it became one of the most interesting and informative cases we taught. And it became a catharsis for him: "I found it quite a personal revelation. In the process of preparing to teach, I’d go down an alleyway I’d never ventured into before. Every time you talk about it to people you can trust, you explore another alley. Contract spouse killings and attempts happen more frequently in this country than we’d like to believe. And the family is often so embarrassed that no one will talk about it." Watching Jud teach this case has been among my most moving experiences as an Academy instructor. And I know I’m not alone. Eventually, he got to the point where he would stay and listen when the emergency tape was played.

By the time Jud became part of my unit, I had already done a fair amount of research on postoffense behavior. It had become clear to me that no matter how hard he tries, much of what the offender does after the crime is beyond his conscious control. As a result of his own case, Jud became very interested in the issue of
pre
offense behavior. For a while, we had understood the importance of precipitating stressors as distinct events leading to the commission of a crime. But Jud expanded the unit’s horizons considerably and demonstrated how important it is to focus on the behavior and interpersonal actions before a crime takes place. A radical or even subtle but significant change in a partner’s behavior can mean that he or she has already begun to plan for a change in the status quo. If the husband or wife becomes unexpectedly calm or much more friendly and accepting than before, it can mean he or she has already come to regard that change as inevitable or imminent.

Contract spouse killings are difficult to investigate. The survivor has laid the emotional groundwork well. The only way to crack these cases is to get someone to talk, and you have to understand the dynamics of the situation and what really happened to be authoritative in this. As much as the rearrangement of a crime scene can lead the police in the wrong direction, a spouse’s preoffense behavior is a form of staging.

More than anything else, Jud’s case is an object lesson for us on how you can misinterpret behavior at a crime scene. If Jud had died, we would have come to some wrong conclusions.

One of the first things a rookie cop is taught is not to contaminate a crime scene. But by his own barely conscious actions, veteran cop and special agent that he was, Jud inadvertently contaminated his own crime scene. We would have interpreted all of the footprints and evidence of his movement to have been a burglary that went bad—that the intruders had walked him around the room, forcing him to tell them where particular items were hidden. The blood on the TV screen would have suggested that Jud had been lying in bed watching television when he’d been surprised and immediately shot.

The most important consideration, as Jud told me, was that "if I had died, I’m absolutely convinced she would have gotten away with it. It was well planned and her actions had prepped everyone in the neighborhood. She would have been completely believable as the grieving spouse."

As I said, Jud and I became close friends; he’s probably the closest thing to a brother I have ever had. I used to joke that he would make sure to play the tape for me right around performance-rating time, to assure the full measure of my sympathy. Fortunately, though, that was never necessary. Jud Ray’s record speaks for itself. He is now chief of the International Training Unit, where his skill and experience will benefit a new generation of agents and policemen and policewomen. But wherever he goes, he will always be one of our own and one of the best—one of the few law officers around to survive an attempt on his life through character and sheer force of will, and then to bring the culprits to justice himself.

In 1924, the author Richard Connell wrote a short story entitled "The Most Dangerous Game." It was about a big-game hunter named General Zaroff who had tired of pursuing animals and had begun hunting a much more challenging and intelligent prey: human beings. It’s still a popular story. My daughter Lauren read it recently in school.

As far as we know, until about 1980, Connell’s tale remained in the realm of fiction. But its status changed with a mild-mannered baker in Anchorage, Alaska, named Robert Hansen.

We didn’t profile Hansen or devise a strategy to identify and catch him according to our usual procedure. In September 1983, by the time my unit was called in, Alaska state troopers had already identified Hansen as a murder suspect. But they weren’t sure of the extent of his crimes, or whether such an unlikely individual, a respectable family man and pillar of the community, was capable of the terrible things of which he was being accused.

What had happened was this:

The previous June 13, a young woman had run frantically to an Anchorage police officer. She had a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist and told an extraordinary story. She was a seventeen-year-old prostitute who’d been approached on the street by a short, pockmarked man with red hair who had offered her $200 for oral sex in his car. She said that while she was performing, he slipped a handcuff on her wrist and pulled out a gun, then drove her to his house in the fashionable Muldoon area of the city. No one else was home. He told her that if she cooperated and did what he asked, he would not hurt her. But then he forced her to strip naked, raped her, and inflicted severe pain by biting her nipples and thrusting a hammer into her vagina. While he still had her handcuffed to a pole in his basement and immobilized, he slept for several hours. When he awoke, he told her that he liked her so much that he was going to fly her in his private airplane out to his cabin in the woods, where they’d have sex again and then he’d fly her back to Anchorage, where he would free her.

But she knew the chances of that were pretty remote. He had raped and assaulted her and hadn’t done anything to hide his identity. If he got her into that cabin, she would be in real trouble. At the airport, while her kidnapper was loading supplies into the plane, she managed to escape. She ran as fast as she could looking for help. That was when she found the policeman.

From the description she gave, her kidnapper appeared to be Robert Hansen. He was in his mid-forties, had grown up in Iowa, and had been in the Anchorage area for seventeen years, where he ran a successful bakery and was considered a prominent member of the community. He was married, with a daughter and a son. The police drove her to Hansen’s house in Muldoon, which she said was where she’d been tortured. They took her to the airport and she identified the Piper Super Cub that belonged to Robert Hansen.

The police then went to Hansen and confronted him with the young woman’s charges. He responded with outrage, saying he had never met her, and asserted that because of his prominence, she was obviously trying to shake him down for money. The very idea was ridiculous. "You can’t rape a prostitute, can you?" he said to police.

And he had an alibi for the night in question. His wife and two children were in Europe for the summer, and he was home having dinner with two business associates. He gave their names and they corroborated his story. Police had no evidence on him—just the young woman’s word—so he wasn’t arrested or charged.