The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (17 page)

The true hero of the case wasn't Brussel; it was a woman named Alice Kelly, who had been assigned to go through Con Edison's personnel files. In January, 1957, she ran across an employee complaint from the early nineteen-thirties: a generator wiper at the Hell Gate plant had been knocked down by a back-draft of hot gases. The worker said that he was injured. The company said that he wasn't. And in the flood of angry letters from the ex-employee Kelly spotted a threat—to “take justice in my
own hands”—that had appeared in one of the Mad Bomber's letters. The name on the file was George Metesky.

Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous. The Hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It's a party trick.

 

“H
ERE'S WHERE
I'
M AT
with this guy,” Douglas said, kicking off the profiling session with which “Inside the Mind of BTK” begins. It was 1984. The killer was still at large. Douglas, Hazelwood, and Walker and the two detectives from Wichita were all seated around the oak table. Douglas took off his suit jacket and draped it over his chair. “Back when he started in 1974, he was in his mid-to-late twenties,” Douglas began. “It's now ten years later, so that would put him in his mid-to-late thirties.”

It was Walker's turn: BTK had never engaged in any sexual penetration. That suggested to him someone with an “inadequate, immature sexual history.” He would have a “lone-wolf type of personality. But he's not alone because he's shunned by others—it's because he chooses to be alone…. He can function in social settings, but only on the surface. He may have women friends he can talk to, but he'd feel very inadequate with a peer-group female.” Hazelwood was next. BTK would be “heavily into masturbation.” He went on, “Women who have had sex with this guy would describe him as aloof, uninvolved, the type who is more interested in her servicing him than the other way around.”

Douglas followed his lead. “The women he's been with are either many years younger, very naive, or much older and depend on him as their meal ticket,” he ventured. What's more, the profilers determined, BTK would drive a “decent” automobile, but it would be “nondescript.”

At this point, the insights began piling on. Douglas said he'd
been thinking that BTK was married. But now maybe he was thinking he was divorced. He speculated that BTK was lower middle class, probably living in a rental. Walker felt BTK was in a “lower-paying white collar job, as opposed to blue collar.” Hazelwood saw him as “middle class” and “articulate.” The consensus was that his I.Q. was somewhere between 105 and 145. Douglas wondered whether he was connected with the military. Hazelwood called him a “now” person, who needed “instant gratification.”

Walker said that those who knew him “might say they remember him, but didn't really know much about him.” Douglas then had a flash—“It was a sense, almost a knowing”—and said, “I wouldn't be surprised if, in the job he's in today, that he's wearing some sort of uniform…. This guy isn't mental. But he is crazy like a fox.”

They had been at it for almost six hours. The best minds in the F.B.I. had given the Wichita detectives a blueprint for their investigation. Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His I.Q. will be above 105. He will like to masturbate, and will be aloof and selfish in bed. He will drive a decent car. He will be a “now” person. He won't be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won't be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental. If you're keeping score, that's a Jacques Statement, two Barnum Statements, four Rainbow Ruses, a Good Chance Guess, two predictions that aren't really predictions because they could never be verified—and nothing even close to the salient fact that BTK was a pillar of his community, the president of his church and the married father of two.

“This thing is solvable,” Douglas told the detectives, as he stood up and put on his jacket. “Feel free to pick up the phone and call us if we can be of any further assistance.” You can imagine him
taking the time for an encouraging smile and a slap on the back. “You're gonna nail this guy.”

 

M
ALCOLM
G
LADWELL
is a staff writer for
The New Yorker.
He is the author of
The Tipping Point
and
Blink.

Coda

Not long after I published this piece in
The New Yorker
, I was interviewed by National Public Radio. When I arrived at the NPR studio, I was told that I would not be the only guest on the show. John Douglas had been invited as well, to defend himself. You can imagine my apprehension. Writers are writers because we prefer to handle confrontations through the typewriter. I had a moment of anxiety. Much of my critique of FBI profiling was based on the work of the University of Liverpool group, led by Laurence Alison. Surely Douglas would have come up with some devastating critique of Alison's work?

I shouldn't have worried. The interview began, and I began to realize that Douglas knew nothing about the academic critiques of the Behavioral Science Unit. In fact, Douglas didn't really have a defense of the bureau's techniques at all, except to insist, over and over again, that they worked. Think about it. America's premier law enforcement agency develops a complex methodology for solving heinous crimes. The methodology is debunked by a group of leading academics—and the bureau is apparently oblivious. All I could think, on my way home, was that these are the people who are supposed to protect us from terrorists.

FROM
The New Yorker

T
HOUGH
L
IEUTENANT
V
ERNELL
C
RITTENDON
had been reading Michael Morales's mail and listening to his telephone calls for four months, he hadn't formed much of an opinion of him by the evening of Morales's scheduled execution. Crittendon, who had for sixteen years served as San Quentin State Prison's spokesman—though his role at the prison was actually far more complicated—felt confident only of what he had set out to learn: that Morales had no wish to escape, assault his guards, or kill himself. After twenty-two quiet years on death row, the inmate with the startled brown eyes bore little apparent relation to the twenty-one-year-old thug, high on PCP, who had taken a car ride with a seventeen-year-old named Terri Winchell, bludgeoned her head twenty-three times with a claw hammer, raped her, stabbed her four times in the chest, and then took eleven dollars from her purse to buy beer and cigarettes.

At 10
P.M.
on February 20, 2006, two hours before Morales was to receive a lethal injection, Crittendon, who has been the prison's public face for all thirteen executions since capital punishment
resumed in California, in 1992, made an unexpected appearance at the deathwatch cell. As Crittendon remembers it, the condemned man sat slumped on his mattress, awaiting what must come: the moment when he'd be told to put on fresh denims and a Chux incontinence pad, then marched into the death chamber and strapped to the gurneylike green chair. The spokesman, wearing a Livestrong bracelet and the black suit that he changed into for executions, gazed down at him without expression.

Ordinarily, Crittendon, an athletic man of fifty-three, is a model of affability. When he lopes through the prison, he teasingly greets passing guards and inmates—“Look out, now!” and “He ain't playin'!”—then, when they stop him to register what are sometimes esoteric grievances, he responds with vigorous nods and says “Sheez!” and “Oh, my!” and usually promises a fix, proud of his ability to bend the most rigid of bureaucracies. As a frequent guest on talk shows like “Larry King Live,” Crittendon holds forth with relish on such topics as the crimes of death-row residents whose company the wife-killer Scott Peterson, recently arrived at San Quentin, might enjoy.

During an execution, though, his demeanor turns profoundly neutral. “Vernell has the hardest role,” the veteran guard John Gladson says. “He has to keep the victims' families from being pissed off by not appearing too sympathetic to the condemned, but he also has to go back the next day and deal with the inmates on death row, who've all had their TVs tuned to Channel 5”—San Francisco's CBS affiliate—“watching him like they're reviewing a play.”

As Morales knew, his attorneys had convinced a U.S. District Court judge, Jeremy Fogel, that two of the three poisons he would receive could cause excruciating pain if the first one to enter his bloodstream, the barbiturate sodium thiopental, didn't put him under. San Quentin's execution logs indicate that, during six of the prison's eleven lethal injections, the condemned may have been partly conscious; similar findings have led eight states
to suspend use of the chemical mixture—sometimes called Texas Tea—employed in most of the death-penalty states, including California. To meet Judge Fogel's concerns, the prison had brought in two anesthesiologists to monitor the procedure. But that night, when the anesthesiologists realized that if Morales regained consciousness they were expected to sedate him again, they told the warden that it would be medically unethical to do so.

Crittendon had just informed Terri Winchell's family, who were in seclusion two hundred yards away, that the warden had postponed the execution for a few hours. He tried to radiate what he called “a veil of confidence: ‘Everything is moving forward, justice will be served.'” Then, projecting an attitude he terms “professional but sympathetic,” he says he told Morales of the delay, without explaining further. Morales dropped his face into his hands and said, “Oh, this is going to kill her family. They were prepared for it.”

“I was speechless,” Crittendon recalls. “I was just
moved
, for once. I'd never heard a statement of caring about the victim's survivors from a death-row inmate.” After a slight pause, he told Morales, “I will make sure I keep you informed as this develops.”

At least, that's how Crittendon related the event in conversations with me. But the execution team's log shows that Crittendon never made a 10
P.M.
visit, and that Morales didn't learn of the delay until just after midnight. Crittendon acknowledged that his timetable must be off, but could provide no evidence to support his memory of the vivid exchange.

When Crittendon went to brief the press on the delay, he shifted his demeanor to appear “professional but indifferent to the eventual outcome.” Believing that the press would try to blame the Judge or the anesthesiologists for the setback, he blandly announced that the warden was going over “some additional training with some of the newer members that have just been added to our team.” Later, he returned to explain that “the warden has reached that level of comfort with all of the members on the ex
ecution team,” and they were just awaiting a ruling from the district court on a motion for a stay. Still later, he read a statement of withdrawal from the anesthesiologists, adding—rather at variance with the facts—that “this is a new problem.” Crittendon eventually announced that the prison would carry out the execution the following evening, using only sodium thiopental.

A single-drug injection had never been attempted, but Crittendon made the improvisation appear fitting and seemly, just as he had done with “citizens that were involved with civil disobedience” who had been arrested outside the East Gate; inmates “restricted to their assigned sleeping areas”—that is, locked down; and the condemned man expecting to partake of “the lethal cocktail.” (In the early nineties, when California used hydrocyanic gas, Crittendon spoke of a “team approach” that would “eventually end in a lethal environment.”) He excels at dispensing just enough information to satisfy reporters, and his sonorous locutions and forbearing gravity discourage further inquiry. Earlier, he had declared that Morales “was interacting with our staff in a very positive way,” and that the condemned man was suggesting that “this is not necessarily a sad affair.”

“To hear it from Vernell,” Kevin Fagan, a San Francisco
Chronicle
reporter who has covered seven executions, says, “everyone goes to his maker the same way: ‘calm, happily fed, and at peace with his fate.'”

 

C
RITTENDON, WHO RETIRED IN
D
ECEMBER,
always sought to navigate a clean line through the acrimonious confusion surrounding the death penalty. The public broadly endorses the penalty—by about sixty-five per cent in most polls—but many capital cases are beset by doubt, mitigating circumstances, or evidence of the condemned's remorse or redemption. California has a particularly thorough appellate process, and the result, on death row at San Quentin, is agonizing stasis: six hundred and twenty-nine
men, the nation's largest assembly of the condemned, now sit for an average of more than twenty-two years before their sentence is carried out.

Vernell Crittendon would seem to have been the ideal proxy for a citizenry that wished to see justice done but did not want to look too closely at its slow, and then suddenly swift, final workings. Yet Crittendon's studied professionalism about executions that occur (or, mysteriously, don't) behind stone walls late at night was greatly complicated by his role—largely unknown to the media or to inmates—in actually carrying them out. Though Crittendon was a mere lieutenant, he essentially ran the show—“the conductor of the orchestra” for executions, as one of the wardens he served under put it. Another warden says, “He trained everyone, he did everything, he choreographed it all.” Crittendon would often answer reporters' procedural inquiries by saying, “I'll have to check with the warden”—although he knew exactly what was going on because he had arranged it so, and was, in effect, serving as the spokesman for himself. “As long as you keep enough fire and smoke going,” he told me, “they don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Crittendon wrote much of the prison's lethal-injection manual, known as Procedure 770. At the weekly “special event” meetings in the warden's office, he set the schedule for practice sessions by the execution team, for the inmate's psychological evaluations, even for the tracing of the inmate's veins to establish where the two I.V.s should go. The execution team itself was not in his purview, but he helped coördinate the prison's Tactical and Investigative Services units, and selected and supervised a thirty-five-person Internal Security team who worked the night of an execution, evaluating them afterward for post-traumatic stress (a fairly common problem). Together with the prison's litigation coördinator, he dealt with the state attorney general's office about the progress of last-minute appeals. And he solicitously escorted the victims' families to and from the prison—even as the officers he'd sta
tioned outside the chamber were prepared to remove them if they caused a disturbance.

Crittendon would visit the condemned man at least once a week in the final months, studying him, under cover of bringing his mail and inquiring about his needs. As the prisoner was transferred from death row to a secluded cell under twenty-four-hour observation and, finally, to the deathwatch cell, he was weaned from the custody of officers he knew well to those he got to know briefly, to those, on the final evening, he didn't know and never would. Crittendon took pains to insure that the emotional atmosphere around the condemned was gradually muffled as well, as if an institutional rheostat were being dimmed. “I tell everyone to keep your voice low, don't laugh, and avoid all confrontation,” he said, adding that the soothing tone was “directed to the deserved outcome of getting the inmate to walk into the chamber without a struggle, hop up on the chair, lie still, and take the ultimate punishment.” Yet, he observed, “If they tell you pretty blondes in short miniskirts are going to put you to death, you're still going to feel stress when you hear those keys jingling. When I'd take the condemned to the death-watch cell that evening, I'd see it hit them. All of a sudden, they'd walk with little steps, like when you tell a child, ‘Go to your room.'”

 

C
RITTENDON LEARNED THE
fate of Michael Morales the next day at 5:30
P.M.,
two hours before the rescheduled execution was to occur, when the warden told him that the prison would not be able, by the midnight deadline, to find a court-approved medical practitioner willing to inject Morales with an overdose of barbiturates. (Since that day, there has been a statewide stay of executions; in May, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or C.D.C.R., announced that it would build a new lethal-injection chamber at San Quentin, and that it would overhaul staff training and tweak the chemical mixture to address
Judge Fogel's concerns.) After Crittendon told his staff, he went to the visiting room, where Morales was meeting with three of his lawyers. Crittendon approached their Plexiglas booth, turned to face Morales, and said, “I have been instructed to inform you that the warden is standing down from the execution.”

The lawyers stood in confusion. “What does that mean?” one lawyer asked, three times.

“He knows what that means,” Crittendon finally replied, indicating Morales with his chin. Then he turned away.

David Senior, one of the lawyers, recalls that Crittendon faced him rather than Morales, and says, “Vernell delivered the information in such a way—hands behind him, nose to a crack in the Plexiglas—that you could read zero personal feelings in it.”

When I told Crittendon that Senior had been struck by his detachment at the moment of reprieve, he said, sharply, “The moment I showed emotion, his attorneys would use it for their agenda, and my staff, who were also watching, would interpret that and they would allow their emotions to be seen, and then we are an embarrassment to the State of California.”

Every conversation between a guard and an inmate is circumscribed by tactical concerns. (You never give an inmate bad news when he's not secured in his cell, or on a weekend, when fewer staff are on duty, and you never confide anything intimate; to be guilty of “overfamiliarity”—of a sympathy or engagement that prevents you from enforcing the rules—is an unforgivable lapse.) Still, Crittendon couldn't help revisiting that exchange. Had Morales understood from the angling of the spokesman's body that he was trying to speak only to him, to convey a kind of solidarity? Did he grasp the constraints the spokesman was under? “I was not able to have the kind of interaction with a human being I'd like,” Crittendon said. “I'd have wanted to sit down next to him, with no barrier between us.”

The morning after an execution, Crittendon was always at his desk by nine—right back at it, when some on the execution
team would take a permitted five-day leave. Crittendon was such a “tower of strength,” as a former warden, Jeanne Wood-ford, puts it, that his colleagues were convinced that he both approved of capital punishment and shrugged off its impact. Yet immediately after an execution he would always linger until everyone had left and then sit in his truck in the deserted parking lot, thinking.

On the morning after the reprieve of Michael Morales, the prisoner was held in a stainless-steel shower stall on death row while guards returned his belongings to his regular cell. He was visited by Eric Messick, Crittendon's deputy, who knew that he would have to answer questions about Morales's state of mind. Messick, who is as direct and artless as Crittendon is strategic, asked Morales how he was doing.