Mindhunter (5 page)

Hempstead did have a good football team, for which I was a 188-pound defensive line man. Again, I realized the psychological aspect of the game was what could give us an edge. I figured I could take on the bigger guys if I grunted and groaned and generally acted like a nut. It didn’t take long before I got the rest of the linemen to behave the same way. Later, when I regularly worked on murder trials in which insani ty was used as a defense, I already knew from my own experience that the mere fact that someone acts like a maniac does not necessarily mean he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.

In 1962, we were playing Wantagh High for the Thorpe Award, the trophy for the best high school football team on Long Island. They outweighed us by about forty pounds a man, and we knew chances were good we were going to get the crap knocked out of us before a full house. So before the game, we worked out a set of warm-up drills whose sole objective was to psych out and intimidate our opponents. We formed up in two lines with the first man in one line tackling—practically decking—the first man in the other line. This was accompanied by all the appropriate grunts and groans and shrieks of pain. We could see from the faces of the Wantagh players that we were having the intended effect. They must have been figuring, "If these jokers are stupid enough to do that to each other, God knows what they’ll do to us."

In fact, the entire episode was carefully choreographed. We prac ticed wres tling throws so we could appear to hit the ground hard, but without getting hurt. And when we got into the actual game, we kept up the general level of craziness to make it appear we’d only been let out of the asylum for this one afternoon and were going straight back as soon as the game was over. The contest was close all the way, but when the dust finally settled, we had won, 14-13, and captured the Thorpe Award for 1962.

My first brush with "law enforcement," in fact, my first "real" experience with profiling, came at age eighteen, when I got a job as a bouncer in a bar and club in Hempstead called the Gaslight East. I was so good at it that later I was given the same position at the Surf Club in Long Beach. At both places, my two main responsibilities were to keep out those below legal drinking age—in other words, anyone younger than me—and to short-circuit or break up the inevitable fights that crop up in places where alcohol is consumed.

Standing at the door, I would request an ID from anyone whose age was questionable, then ask the person for his or her date of birth to see if it matched up. This is pretty standard procedure and it’s what everyone expects, so they’re all prepared for it. Seldom will a kid who’s gone to the trouble of coming up with a fake ID be so careless as to fail to memorize the birth date on it. Looking straight into their eyes as I ques tioned them was an effective technique with some people, particularly girls, who generally have a more developed social conscience at that age. But those who want to get in can still get past most scrutiny if they just concentrate on their acting for a few moments.

What I was actually doing while I quizzed each group of kids as they got to the front of the line was discreetly scrutinizing the people about three or four rows back—watching them as they prepared to be questioned, observing their body language, noticing if they looked at all nervous or tentative.

Breaking up fights was more of a challenge, and for that I fell back on my athletic experience. If they see a look in your eyes that tells them you’re not quite predictable and you act just a little overtly screwy, then sometimes even the big guys will think twice about tangling with you. If they think you’re just off enough not to be worried about your own safety, then you become a far more dangerous opponent. Almost twenty years later, for example, when we were conducting the prison interviews for the major serial-killer study, we learned that the typical assassin personality is far more danger ous in certain crucial ways than the typical serial-killer personality. Because unlike the serial killer, who will only choose a victim he thinks he can handle and then will go to elaborate lengths to avoid capture, the assassin is obsessively concerned with his "mis sion" and is generally willing to die to achieve it.

The other consideration in making people have a particular opinion of you—such as that you’re irrational and crazy enough to do something unpredictable—is that you have to maintain that persona all the time on the job, not just when you think people are looking at you. When I interviewed Gary Trapnell, a notorious armed robber and airplane hijacker, at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, he claimed that he could fool any prison psychiatrist into believing he had any mental illness I cared to specify. The key to pulling it off, he informed me, was to behave that way all the time, even alone in your cell, so that when they interviewed you, you wouldn’t have to "think" your way through it, which was what gave you away. So, long before I had the benefit of this type of "expert" advice, I seemed to have some instinct for thinking like a criminal.

When I couldn’t manage to scare people out of a fight at the bar, I tried to use my amateur profiling techniques to do the next best thing and head it off before it got serious. I found that with a little experience, by closely observing behavior and body lan guage, I was able to correlate this with the sort of action that ended up breaking out into fights so I could anticipate if an individual was about to start something. In that case, or when in doubt, I always pounced first, using the element of surprise and attempting to get the potential offender out of the build ing and back out into the street before he knew exactly what was happening to him. I always say that most sexual killers and serial rapists become skilled in domination, manipulation, and control—the same skills I was trying to master in a different context. But at least I was learning.

When I graduated from high school, I still wanted to be a vet, but my grades weren’t nearly good enough for Cornell. The best I could do to get a similar type of program was Montana State. So in September of 1963, the Brooklyn and Long Island boy headed out to the heart of Big Sky country.

The culture shock upon arriving in Bozeman couldn’t have been greater.

"Greetings from Montana," I wrote in one of my early letters home, "where men are men and sheep are nervous." Just as Montana seemed to embody all the stereotypes and clichés of western and frontier life to me, that is how I came across to the people I met there as an easterner. I joined the local chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon, which was composed almost exclusively of local boys, so I stood out like a sore thumb. I took to wearing a black hat, black cloth ing, and black boots and sported long sideburns like a character out of
West Side Story,
which was very much how New Yorkers like me were perceived in those days.

So I made the most of it. At all the social gatherings, the locals would be wearing western garb and dancing the two-step, while I had spent the last several years religiously watching Chubby Checker on TV and knew every conceiv able variation of the twist. Because my sister, Arlene, was four years older than I was, she’d long before enlisted me as her practice dance partner, so I quickly became the dance instructor for the entire college community. I felt like a missionary going into some remote area that had never before heard English spoken.

I had never had much of a reputation as a scholar, but now my grades hit an all-time low as I concentrated on everything but. I’d already worked as a bouncer in a bar in New York, but here in Montana, the drinking age was twenty-one, which was a real comedown to me. Unfortunately, I didn’t let that stop me.

My first run-in with the law happened when one of my fraternity brothers and I had taken out these two swell girls who had met in a home for unwed mothers. They were mature for their age. We stopped at a bar and I went in to buy a six-pack.

The bartender says, "Show me your ID." So I show him this phony Selective Service card, carefully done. From my bouncer experience, I’d learned some of the pitfalls and mistakes of false identifi ca tion.

The guy looks at the card and says, "Brooklyn, huh? You guys back East are big bastards, aren’t you?" I kind of laugh self-consciously, but everyone in the bar has turned around, so I know there are witnesses now. I get back out to the parking lot and we drive away drinking this beer, and unbeknownst to me, one of the girls put the beer cans on the trunk of the car.

All of a sudden, I hear a police siren. A cop stops us. "Get out of the car."

So we get out of the car. He starts searching us, and even at the time I know this is an illegal search, but I’m certainly not going to mouth off to him. As he gets down, he’s exposing his gun and billy club to me, and I get this crazy flash that in a split second, I could take the club, crunch him on the head, grab the gun, and take off. Fortu nately for my future, I didn’t. But knowing he’s getting to me, I take my ID out of my wallet and stuff it down into my under shorts.

He takes all four of us back to the station, separates us, and I’m really sweating because I know what they’re doing and I’m afraid the other guy is going to cop out on me.

One of the officers says to me, "Now, son, you tell us. If that guy back at the bar didn’t ask for your ID, we’ll go back there. We’ve had trouble with him before."

I respond, "Back where I come from, we don’t rat on people. We don’t do that kind of stuff." I’m playing George Raft, but I’m really thinking to myself,
Of course he asked for my ID, and I gave him a phony one!
All the while, it’s slipped so low in my shorts, it’s pinching my vitals. I don’t know if they’re going to strip-search us or what. I mean, this is the frontier out here as far as I’m concerned, and God knows what they do. So I quickly size up the situation and feign illness. I tell them I’m sick and have to use the rest room.

They let me go in unaccompanied, but I’ve seen too many movies, so when I get in there and look in the mirror, I’m afraid they’re looking at me from the other side. I go way to the side of the room, stick my hands down my pants, and pull out the ID, then I go over to the sink and make out as if I’m throwing up in case they’re watching. I go over to the stalls and flush the Selective Service card down the john, then come back with a lot more confidence. I ended up with a $40 fine and probation.

My second encounter with the Bozeman police came my sophomore year, and it was worse.

I go to a rodeo along with two other guys from back East and one guy from Montana. We’re leaving at the end, driving a ’62 Studebaker, and we have beer in the car, so here we go again. It’s snowing like crazy. The kid at the wheel is from Boston, I’m in the front passenger seat, and the local is between us. Anyway, the guy driving goes through a stop sign, and—wouldn’t you know it?—there’s a cop right there. That seems to be the hallmark of my Montana life. Whatever they say about cops not being around when you need them—not true in Bozeman in 1965.

So this idiot fraternity brother of mine—I can’t believe it—he doesn’t stop! He takes off with this cop in the back in hot pursuit.

Every time we make a turn and get out of the cop’s view for a second, I’m throwing beer cans out of the car. We keep driving and reach this residential neighborhood, hitting speed bumps:
boom, boom, boom.
We come to a roadblock; the cop must have radioed ahead. We drive right around the roadblock, up across someone’s lawn. All the time, I’m yelling, "Stop the goddamned car! Get me out of here!" But this idiot keeps going. The car’s spinning, it’s still snowing like crazy, then right behind us we hear the sirens.

We reach an intersection. He slams on the brakes, the car goes into a 360-spin, the door flies open, and I’m thrown out of the car. I’m hanging by the door and my ass is dragging in the snow on the ground, and all of a sudden someone yells, "Run!"

So we run. All in different directions. I end up in an alley, where I find an empty pickup truck and get in. I’d ditched my black hat while I was running, and I’m wearing a reversible black and gold jacket, so I take it off and turn the gold side outward for some disguise. But I’m sweating and fogging up the windows. I’m thinking,
Oh, shit, they’re going to be able to see me.
And I’m afraid the owners are going to come back any minute, and out here, they probably have guns. So I wipe off a small area on the glass so I can see out, and there’s all kinds of activity around the car we’ve abandoned: cop cars, tracking dogs, you name it. And now they’re coming up the alley, their flashlights are shining on the pickup, and I’m about ready to shit my pants. But I can’t believe that they drive right by and leave me there!

I steal back to school and everyone’s already heard about this thing, and I find out that the other two eastern guys and I got away, but they caught the one from Montana and he spilled his guts. He names names and they come after each of us. When they get to me, I cop a plea that I wasn’t in control of the car, that I was scared and pleading with the guy to stop. Meanwhile, the driver from Boston gets thrown in a jail cell with springs and no mattress, bread and water and the whole bit, while my incredible luck holds out and I just get slapped with another $40 fine for posses sion of alcohol, and proba tion.

But they notify the school, they notify our parents, who are all royally pissed off, and things aren’t going any better academically. I have a straight-D average, I’ve failed a speech class because I never went to class—which is my all-time low since I’d always felt that being able to talk was about my best asset—and I’m not figuring out any way to pull myself out of this morass. By the end of the second year, it’s clear that my adventure in the western wilder ness is at an end.

If it appears that all of my memories from this period are of mishaps and personal screwups, that’s the way it seemed to me at the time. I came home from college, living under the eyes of my disappointed parents. My mother was especially upset, knowing now I’d never become a veterinarian. As usual when I didn’t know what to do with myself, I fell back on my athletics and took a job lifeguarding for the summer of 1965. When the summer ended and I wasn’t going back to school, I found a job running the health club at the Holiday Inn in Patchogue.