Mindhunter (50 page)

The most difficult question any of us in this business are asked has to do with whether a particular individual is, or will be, dangerous. For psychiatrists, it’s often posed in terms of "a threat to himself or others."

Around 1986, the FBI was contacted about a roll of film sent in from Colorado to a photo lab for developing. The pictures depicted a man in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in camouflage gear, posed on the tailgate of his 4X4 with his rifle and a Barbie doll that he had subjected to various tortures and mutilations. No law had been broken in doing this, and I said that the guy would not have a criminal record. But I also warned that at his age, this fantasy he was acting out with the doll would not be satisfying much longer. It would evolve. Just from the photographs, I didn’t know how important it would be in his life, but for him to have gone to the care and trouble he did, it must have had some important significance. I said that this guy should be watched and interviewed, because this was a case of dangerousness waiting to happen. I’m not sure if most psychiatrists would have had the same perspective.

As strange as this incident may sound, I can think of several "Barbie doll cases" brought to me over the years, all involving adult men. One subject out in the midwest would stick pins in every inch of the doll and leave it on the grounds of the local psychiatric hospital. Occasionally you get this kind of thing with satanic cults, voodoo, or people who think they’re into witchcraft, but there was none of that here. Nor did he attach a name to the doll, indicating an orientation to a particular person. This was a general sadistic tendency, characteristic of someone who has a real problem with women.

What else can we say about this individual? We can say that he has probably experimented with torturing small animals and may do it regularly. He will have difficulty dealing with people his own age, either men or women. When he was growing up, he would have been a bully or sadistic with younger, smaller children. And he either has or will soon reach the stage in which acting out his fantasies on a doll won’t be enough. You can argue about whether or not he’s "sick," but sick or not, I can tell you I’d have a real concern about his dangerousness.

So when is this dangerous behavior likely to occur? This guy is an inadequate loser. In his mind, everyone’s out to get him and no one recognizes his talents. If the stressors in his life become unbearable, that’s when he’ll go one step further with his fantasy. And with a doll mutilator, one step further doesn’t equal going after someone in his age group, it means going after someone younger, weaker, or lamer. He’s a coward. He’s not going to go after a peer.

That doesn’t mean he’s going to go for children necessarily. Barbie is portrayed as a mature, developed woman, not a prepubescent girl. No matter how warped this guy is, what he desires is contact with a mature woman. If he’s mutilating or abusing a baby doll, we’ve got another set of problems.

And yet the guy who’s sticking pins in the doll and leaving it at the hospital is going to be fairly dysfunctional, he won’t have a driver’s license, he’ll stand out in a crowd as being weird. The guy in camouflage is going to be much more dangerous. He’s got a job because he has money for his rifle, his truck, a camera. He can get around and function "normally" in society. The minute he snaps, someone’s in real trouble. Do I trust most psychiatrists or health-care professionals to make this distinction? No. They just don’t have the background or the orientation for it. They haven’t verified their findings.

One of the key features of our serial-killer study was the idea of verifying what people told us by studying tangible evidence. Otherwise, you’re relying on self-reporting, which is incomplete at best and scientifically meaningless at worst.

The evaluation of dangerousness has many uses and applications. On Friday, April 16, 1982, U.S. Secret Service agents met with me about a series of letters written by the same individual beginning in February 1979, threatening the life of the president (the first one targeted Jimmy Carter, all the others Ronald Reagan) and other political figures.

The first letter had been sent to the Secret Service in New York, from "Lonely and Depressed." It was two pages long, handwritten on notebook paper, and threatened to "shoot and kill President Carter or someone else who has power."

Between July 1981 and February 1982, eight more letters followed. Three were sent to the Secret Service in New York, one to the FBI in New York, one to the FBI in Washington, one to the
Philadelphia Daily News,
and two directly to the White House. They were handwritten by the same hand as "Lonely and Depressed," but these were all signed "C.A.T." They were mailed from New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. The letters expressed C.A.T.’s intent to kill President Reagan, who was variously referred to as "the evil of God" and "the Devil." Other politicians who supported President Reagan were also threatened. The writer also made references to John Hinckley, promising to carry out his failed mission.

There were more letters, with the mailing list expanded to Congressman Jack Kemp and Sen. Alfonse D’Amato. Of particular concern to the Secret Service was the inclusion of photographs of Senator D’Amato and Congressman Raymond McGrath of New York City. Taken at very close range, they demonstrated C.A.T.’s ability to get close enough to carry out his threats.

Finally, on June 14, 1982, the fourteenth letter was sent to the editor of the
New York Post.
It declared that everyone would know who he was after he did away with the president, whom he referred to as "the Devil." He claimed that no one listened to him and everyone laughed at him, none of which surprised me.

But within the text of this communication he also gave the newspaper "permission" to talk to him after he had completed his historic mission. This was the opening we were looking for. C.A.T. was willing, probably eager, to engage in a dialogue with a newspaper editor. We would supply one.

From the language and usage in the letters, as well as where they were sent and to whom, I was pretty sure this guy was from New York City. I profiled a single white male in his mid-twenties to early thirties, a native New Yorker living on the outskirts of the city, probably alone. He would be of average intelligence with a high school diploma and maybe some further courses in political science and literature and was probably the youngest or only son in his family. I suspect that in the past, he was heavily into drugs and/or alcohol, but now would be only an occasional user. He would see himself as a failure, having never fulfilled the dreams his parents or others had set for him, and had a lifelong list of incomplete tasks and goals. In his early to mid-twenties I expected him to have been psychologically taxed by an uncontrollable stress, perhaps related to military service, divorce, illness, or loss of a family member.

There was a lot of speculation about what "C.A.T." stood for or symbolized. I told the Secret Service not to spend too much time worrying about that, since it might not mean anything at all. There is often a tendency to read too much into every detail when, in fact, the UNSUB might just like the sound of it or the way it looked written out.

The issue for the Secret Service, as it always is, was whether or not this guy was actually dangerous since a lot of people who make threats and spout in letters would never follow through. But I told them that personalities like this one are always searching for something. They turn to political groups and cults, but don’t find it. Other people think they’re weird and don’t take them seriously, so the problem worsens as time goes by. They focus on a mission to give their lives some meaning. This is the first time he’s felt any control, and he likes the feeling, which will lead him to take frequent and greater chances. People who take chances are dangerous.

I thought he would be familiar with weapons and prefer close-range assault, even though that would mean he couldn’t get away. Because his mission might be suicidal, he’d be keeping a diary for posterity, so the world would know his story. Unlike a personality like the Tylenol poisoner, C.A.T. doesn’t want to be anonymous. When the fear of life becomes greater than the fear of death, he will perpetrate his act of violence. He will seem very calm just prior to his act. He will camouflage himself and blend into his surroundings. He will chat with police or Secret Service agents nearby, and he will seem ordinary and nonthreatening.

In certain ways, he was the same type as John Hinckley, whose case and trial were much in the news. He also seemed fixated on Hinckley, about whom we knew a fair amount. I thought he might want to hear the trial verdict or sentence and suggested to the Secret Service that at that time, they go to Ford’s Theatre in Washington, where Abraham Lincoln had been shot and where Hinckley visited before he shot President Reagan. I also told them to watch the nearby hotel where Hinckley had stayed. If anyone requested Hinckley’s room, that could very well be him.

The hotel did report a request for that specific room. Secret Service agents swooped in and raided an elderly couple who had spent their wedding night in that room and had been back many times since.

In August, the Secret Service got two more letters signed "C.A.T." addressed to the "Office of the President, Washington, D.C." These were both postmarked from Bakersfield, California. Since a lot of assassins travel around the country stalking their prey, there was real concern that the guy might be on the move. In these letters he said, "Being of sound mind & Sound Body [I] am takeing it upon myself to organize as many United States Citizens as I can, to bear arms, and exterminate from my country, the enemies from within."

In a long, paranoid rambling, he talked about the "torture & Hell" he had been through and acknowledged the possibility that he could be killed "in my attemps to bring to Justice the scumb at the top."

I went through these letters carefully and concluded we were dealing with a copycat. For one thing, these were written in script rather than the block capitals of the earlier letters. They referred to President Reagan as "Ron" rather than "the Devil" or "the Old Man." I thought it likely the writer was a woman, and as unpleasant as the sentiments and threats expressed were, I did not think this individual would be dangerous.

The real C.A.T. was a different story. I thought a "tactical stall" would be the best approach, engaging him in a dialogue until we could locate him. We cast a Secret Service agent as the newspaper editor and briefed him on how to seem and what to say. I emphasized that he should try to get C.A.T. to open up to him so that his "full story" could be told. Once the level of trust was built up, the "editor" should suggest that they meet, but make it late at night, someplace out of the way, because the editor was even more concerned than C.A.T. about keeping it secret.

We placed a carefully constructed classified ad in the
New York Post,
which C.A.T. answered. He began having regular conversations with our man. I thought he’d be calling from some large public facility such as Grand Central or Pennsylvania Station, or possibly one of the libraries or museums.

Around this time, the FBI got another evaluation from Dr. Murray Miron, the noted psycholinguistics expert at Syracuse University. Murray and I had collaborated on research and articles on threat assessment, and I thought he was one of the best in the business. After the telephone dialogue began, Murray wrote an analysis for the FBI stating he no longer considered C.A.T. dangerous, but instead, a publicity-seeking fraud who was getting off on manipulating all of these important people. Murray certainly thought he ought to be caught, but didn’t see him as the threat I did.

Gradually, we were able to keep him on the phone long enough to establish a trap and trace. On October 21, 1982, a combined Secret Service-FBI team picked him up in a phone booth in Penn Station while he was talking to the "editor." His name was Alphonse Amodio Jr., a twenty-seven-year-old, white, native New Yorker with a high school education.

FBI and Secret Service agents went to his cramped, roach-infested apartment in Floral Park. The family seemed quite dysfunctional, and when Mrs. Amodio was interviewed, her description of her son matched the profile. "He hates it [the world] and feels it hates him," she told the agents. She described his violent mood swings. He had been clipping newspaper stories for years and had filled two filing cabinets with folders labeled with the names of various politicians. As a child, he had had such a bad stutter that it had held him back from starting school. He had joined the Army but went AWOL after basic training. Other than several diary references to himself as an "alley cat," the agents could find no logic or explanation for the C.A.T. moniker.

Amodio was placed in the psychiatric lockup at Bellevue. Before his trial, U.S. District Court judge David Edelstein requested an evaluation from a psychiatric social worker, who found the defendant severely emotionally ill and therefore a serious danger to the president and other government officials.

Amodio did confess to being C.A.T. Agents questioning him could find no political component to his thinking. He just did it for the power and attention.

He is no longer institutionalized. Is this type of person still dangerous? I don’t think he would be an immediate threat, but if the stressors built up again and there was no way for him to cope, I would begin getting nervous again.

What do I look for? One of the key things is tone. If I see a series of letters to a politician, a movie star, an athlete, or any celebrity in which the tone becomes increasingly rigid and urgent ("You’re not answering my letters!"), I take them seriously. It becomes mentally and physically exhausting to maintain that obsessive-compulsive rigidity. In time, the individual will begin to break down. Again, you can call behavior a form of mental illness, but what I have to concern myself with is how
dangerous
it may be.

Though we have interviewed women such as attempted assassins and Manson family sympathizers Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore, our published prison study only involved men. While you find the occasional woman assassin type, you will note that every case of serial murder or lust killing I’ve mentioned involves a male offender. Our research has shown that virtually all serial killers come from dysfunctional backgrounds of sexual or physical abuse, drugs or alcoholism, or any of the related problems. Women come from these same backgrounds, and if anything, girls are even more subject to abuse and molestation than boys. So why do so few of them grow up to commit the same kinds of crimes as the men? A female serial killer suspect such as Aileen Wuornos, accused of killing men on interstates in Florida, is so rare as to be instantly noteworthy.