Mindhunter (51 page)

For this subject we’re on shakier ground, because there simply haven’t been the studies to answer this question definitively. As some have speculated, it may be related directly to testosterone levels and otherwise hormonally and chemically based. The only thing we can say with an experiential authority is that women seem to internalize their stressors. Rather than lashing out at others, they tend to punish themselves through such things as alcoholism, drugs, prostitution, and suicide. Some may repeat the psychological or physical abuse within their own families, as the mother of Ed Kemper appears to have done. From a mental health viewpoint, this is very damaging. But the fact remains, women do not kill in the same way or in anywhere remotely near the numbers men do.

So what can be done about dangerousness? How can we intervene in cases of mental instability or character defect before it’s too late? Unfortunately, there’s no quick or simple answer. In many instances, law enforcement has become the front line of order and discipline, rather than the family. This is a dangerous situation for society to be in, because by the time we enter, it’s too late to do any good. The best we can do is to keep more bad from happening.

If you’re asking the schools to be the answer, you’re also asking a lot. If you take a kid from a bad background and expect the overburdened teachers to turn him around in seven hours a day, it might or might not happen. What about the other seventeen hours in a day?

People often ask us if, through our research and experience, we can now predict which children are likely to become dangerous in later life. Roy Hazelwood’s answer is, "Sure. But so can any good elementary school teacher." And if we can get them treatment early enough and intensively enough, it might make a difference. A significant role-model adult during the formative years can make a world of difference.

Bill Tafoya, the special agent who served as our "futurist" at Quantico, advocated a minimum of a ten-year commitment of money and resources on the magnitude of what we sent into the Persian Gulf. He calls for a wide-scale reinstatement of Project Head Start, one of the most effective long-term, anticrime programs in history. He doesn’t think more police are the answer, but he would bring in "an army of social workers" to provide assistance for battered women, homeless families with children, to find good foster homes. And he would back it all up with tax incentive programs.

I’m not sure this is the total answer, but it would certainly be an important start. Because the sad fact is, the shrinks can battle all they want, and my people and I can use psychology and behavioral science to help catch the criminals, but by the time we get to use our stuff, the severe damage has already been done.

Sometimes the Dragon Wins

When the body of a sixteen-year-old girl was found in the Green River outside Seattle in July of 1982, no one thought too much about it. The river, linking Mount Rainier with Puget Sound, was a popular illegal dump site, and the victim was a young prostitute. The significance of the find didn’t become apparent to police until later that summer—another woman was found dead in the river on August 12, with three more discovered three days later. The ages and races of the victims differed, but all were suffocated. Some were weighted down in an apparent effort to keep them hidden. All were undressed, and in two cases, small rocks were found inside the victim’s vagina.

Now, the serial nature of the crimes was unavoidable and brought back haunting reminders of Seattle’s last serial murders, the kidnapping and killing of at least eight women in the area in 1974 by a subject known only as "Ted." Those cases had remained unsolved for four years until a handsome, articulate young man named Theodore Robert Bundy was arrested for a brutal series of sorority-house murders in Florida. By that time, he had worked his way across the country, killing at least twenty-three young women and earning himself a permanent place in the chamber of horrors of our collective psyche.

Maj. Richard Kraske of the King County Criminal Investigations Division had been in charge of that investigation, and wanting to apply what he had learned, he now turned to the FBI for assistance in developing a psychological profile of the "Green River Killer." Although the investigators on the newly formed, multijurisdictional task force were divided over whether all the cases were really linked, there was one clear common factor: all the dead women were prostitutes who worked the Sea-Tac Strip, the Pacific Coast Highway near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. And now, more young women were missing.

In September, Allen Whitaker, the Seattle SAC, was at Quantico for an in-service and presented us with a detailed package on the five original cases. As I often did when I wanted to be able to concentrate away from constant staff and phone interruptions, I sequestered myself on the top floor of the library, where I could be alone, stare out the window (always a pleasant novelty for those of us who work underground), and get myself into the minds of the offender and the victims. I spent about a day looking through the materials—crime-scene reports and photos, autopsy protocols, victim descriptions. Despite the variances in age and race and MO, the similarities were strong enough to indicate all the murders were committed by the same subject.

I developed a detailed profile of a physically powerful, inadequate, underemployed white male, comfortable with the river, who felt no remorse for what he was doing. Quite the contrary, he was a man on a mission who’d had humiliating experiences with women and was now out to punish as many as he could of what he considered to be the lowest of them. But at the same time, I warned the police that because of the nature of the crimes and the victims, many people would fit this profile. Unlike an Ed Kemper, say, this was no mental giant. These were unsophisticated, high-risk crimes. The emphasis had to be on proactive techniques that would lure the UNSUB into some type of contact with the police. Whitaker took the profile back with him when he left Quantico.

Later that month the badly decomposed body of another young woman was found in an area of condemned houses near the airport. She was nude, with a pair of men’s black socks tied around her neck. The medical examiner estimated she’d been killed around the same time as the river victims. Perhaps the killer had changed his MO after hearing about surveillance of the river.

As detailed in
The Search for the Green River Killer,
a carefully researched account by Carlton Smith and Thomas Guillen, the strongest suspect was a forty-four-year-old taxi driver who matched the profile in virtually every way. He’d injected himself into the investigation early, calling police with tips on how to find the killer and advising them to look for other taxi drivers. He spent a lot of time with prostitutes and street people along the Strip, was nocturnal, drove around compulsively, drank and smoked as the profile suggested the UNSUB would, and professed concern for the prostitutes’ safety. He had five failed marriages, grew up near the river, lived with his widower father, drove an older, conservative car that wasn’t well maintained, and followed the press on the case closely.

Police scheduled him for an interview in September and called me for a strategy. I was traveling at a feverish pace then, hopping around the country on an almost weekly basis trying to keep up with my cases. When the police called, I happened to be out of town. They spoke to Roger Depue, the unit chief, who said I would be back in a few days and strongly suggested they wait to conduct the interview until they’d had a chance to talk to me. Thus far, the subject had been cooperative and wasn’t planning to leave the area.

But the police went ahead with the interview, which lasted an entire day and turned into a confrontation. From a perspective of twenty-twenty hindsight, perhaps it could have been done differently. Polygraph results were ambiguous, and even though the police put him under bumper-lock surveillance and continued gathering circumstantial evidence, they could never make a case against him.

Not personally having been involved in that part of the investigation, I can’t say whether or not this individual was a promising suspect. But this lack of coordination and focus greatly hampered the investigation in the early stages, when a subject is usually most catchable. He’s concerned, he doesn’t know what to expect, the "ass-pucker factor" is at its highest. As time goes by and the UNSUB realizes he’s getting away with it, he becomes more comfortable. He settles down, refines his MO.

At the beginning of this case, local police didn’t even have a computer. And as the investigation grew, at the rate they were processing leads, it would have taken fifty years to evaluate properly what they had. Were a Green River type of investigation launched today, I hope and trust the early organization would be more efficient and the strategy more defined. Still, the task would be formidable. These prostitutes lived a nomadic existence. Oftentimes, when a boyfriend or pimp would report one missing, she had disappeared on purpose or simply relocated to another area up or down the coast. Many of them used aliases, making identification of bodies and tracking of cases a nightmare. Medical and dental records were therefore hard to locate and authenticate. And relations and cooperation between police and the prostitute community are always tenuous at best.

In May 1983, a young prostitute was found fully clothed in a carefully staged scene: a fish was placed across her throat, another on her left breast, and a wine bottle between her legs. She had been strangled with a thin cord or rope. The police chalked her death up to the Green River Killer. But while I thought the last victim found on land had been related, this one struck me as more of a personal-cause homicide. This one wasn’t random. There was too much anger here. The killer knew this victim well.

Nearing the end of 1983, the body count had risen to twelve, with seven more reported missing. One of the dead women had been eight months pregnant. The task force asked me to come out and give them on-scene advice. As I’ve mentioned, I was trying to handle various stages of the Wayne Williams case in Atlanta, the .22-Caliber Killer in Buffalo, the Trailside Killer in San Francisco, the Robert Hansen case in Anchorage, an anti-Semitic serial arsonist in Hartford, and more than a hundred other active cases. The only way I could keep up with them all was to force myself to dream about them at night. I knew I was running myself ragged. I just didn’t know how ragged, how fast. And when the Green River Task Force said they needed me, I knew I had to squeeze that one in, too.

I was confident my profile would fit the killer, but I also knew it would fit a lot of people, and more than one of these could be involved by now. The longer this went on, the greater the chance for more killers to become involved, either as copycats or simply because of the territory and the victims. The Sea-Tac Strip was easy pickings for a killer. If you have a will to kill, that’s the kind of place you go. The prostitutes were readily available, and since many of them plied the entire West Coast corridor from Vancouver all the way down to San Diego, when a girl disappeared, often she would not be missed.

I thought proactive techniques were more important than ever. These could include convening town meetings on the murders at rural schools, then passing around sign-up sheets and taking note of license plates of those attending, using the media to put forth one investigator as "supercop" to lure the killer to contact him, stories personalizing the pregnant woman to try to encourage some remorse and revisits from the killer, surveillance of unpublicized dump sites, use of decoy police officers, and any number of other possibilities.

I brought Blaine McIlwain and Ron Walker, two of the newer profilers, on the December trip to Seattle, figuring this would be a good case to get them some on-site experience. It was a good thing I did, as if God or some cosmic order had planned it. They saved my life.

When they broke through the locked, bolted, and chained door to my hotel room and found me unconscious and convulsing on the floor, I was near death from the fever that was raging through my brain.

By the time I finally recovered and returned to work in May of 1984, the Green River Killer was still at large, as he is at this writing more than a decade later. I continued consulting with the task force, which grew into one of the largest organized manhunts in American history. The longer the investigation went on, as the number of bodies continued to grow, I became increasingly convinced that several killers were at work, all sharing some similar traits, but each acting on his own. Police in Spokane and Portland brought me clusters of murdered and missing prostitutes, but I found no clear connection to the murders around Seattle. San Diego police thought another cluster in their city might be related. All in all, the Green River Task Force was investigating more than fifty deaths. More than twelve hundred solid suspects had been reduced to about eighty. They ranged from boyfriends and pimps of the dead women to a john in Portland from whom a prostitute had escaped after threats of torture, to a Seattle-based trapper. At times, even members of the police force were considered possible suspects. But none of this was enough for closure. At this point, I’m convinced there were at least three killers, possibly more.

The last major proactive thrust came in December 1988, with a two-hour live television program broadcast nationally. Entitled
Manhunt . . . Live
and hosted by
Dallas
star Patrick Duffy, the show offered background on the search for the killer or killers and provided a bank of toll-free numbers for viewers to give tips and leads. I flew out to Seattle to appear on the show and to train police officers on how to screen calls and quickly ask pertinent questions.

In the week following the broadcast, the telephone company estimated that more than one hundred thousand people had tried to call, but fewer than ten thousand had gotten through. And after three weeks, there just weren’t the financial resources or the volunteers to continue manning the crime-stoppers hot lines. In the end, it was symbolic of so many other aspects of Green River—many dedicated people expending tremendous effort, but ultimately, too little, too late.