Serial Killer Investigations (12 page)

In early 1978 he used it to help a colleague, homicide detective Russ Vorpagel, in Sacramento, California.

On 23 January, an intruder walked into the house of newly married Teresa Wallin, 22, in the Watt Avenue area of Sacramento, shot her three times, and then mutilated the body with a knife. There was no sign of rape, but there was evidence that the killer had drained some of her blood into a yoghurt cup and drank it.

In his profile of the killer, Ressler said:

White male, aged 25-27 years; thin, undernourished appearance. Residence will be extremely slovenly and unkempt and evidence of the crime will be found at the residence. History of mental illness, and will have been involved in use of drugs. Will be a loner who does not associate with either males or females, and will probably spend a great deal of time in his own home, where he lives alone. Unemployed. Possibly receives some form of disability money. If residing with anyone, it would be with his parents; however, this is unlikely. No prior military record; high school or college dropout. Probably suffering from one or more forms of paranoid psychosis.

Ressler explains:

I had plenty of reasons for making such a precise description of the probable offender. Though profiling was still in its infancy, we had reviewed enough cases of murder to know that sexual homicide—for that’s the category into which this crime fit, even if there was no evidence of a sex act committed at the scene—is usually perpetrated by males, and is usually an intraracial crime, white against white, or black against black. The greatest number of sexual killers are white males in their twenties and thirties; this simple fact allows us to eliminate whole segments of the population when first trying to determine what sort of person has perpetrated one of these heinous crimes. Since this was a white residential area, I felt even more certain that the slayer was a white male.

Now I made a guess along a great division line that we in the Behavioral Sciences Unit were beginning to formulate, the distinction between killers who displayed a certain logic in what they had done and those whose mental processes were, by ordinary standards, not apparently logical—‘organized’ versus ‘disorganized’ criminals. Looking at the crime-scene photographs and the police reports, it was apparent to me that this was not a crime committed by an ‘organized’ killer who stalked his victims, was methodical in how he went about his crimes, and took care to avoid leaving clues to his own identity. No, from the appearance of the crime scene, it was obvious to me that we were dealing with a ‘disorganized’ killer, a person who had a full-blown and serious mental illness. To become as crazy as the man who ripped up the body of Terry Wallin is not something that happens overnight. It takes eight to ten years to develop the depth of psychosis that would surface in this apparently senseless killing. Paranoid schizophrenia is usually first manifested in the teenage years. Adding ten years to an inception-of-illness age of about fifteen would put the slayer in the mid-twenties age group. I felt that he wouldn’t be much older, for two reasons. First, most sexual killers are under the age of thirty-five. Second, if he was older than late twenties, the illness would have been so overwhelming that it would already have resulted in a string of bizarre and unsolved homicides. Nothing as wild as this had been reported anywhere nearby, and the absence of other notable homicides was a clue that this was the first killing for this man, that the killer had probably never taken a human life before. The other details of the probable killer’s appearance followed logically from my guess that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and from my study of psychology.

For instance, I thought this person would be thin. I made this guess because I knew of the studies of Dr Ernest Kretchmer of Germany and Dr William Sheldon of Columbia University, both dealing with body types. Both men believed there was a high degree of correlation between body type and mental temperament. Kretchmer found that men with slight body builds (asthenics) tended toward introverted forms of schizophrenia; Sheldon’s categories were similar, and I thought that on his terms, the killer would be an ectomorph [i.e. thin, intellectual type]. These body-type theories are out of favour with today’s psychologists—they’re fifty years old and more—but I find, more often than not, that they prove to be correct, at least in terms of being helpful in suggesting the probable body type of a psychopathic serial killer.

So that’s why I thought this was bound to be a thin and scrawny guy. It was all logical. Introverted schizophrenics don’t eat well, don’t think in terms of nourishment, and skip meals. They similarly disregard their appearance, not caring at all about cleanliness or neatness. No one would want to live with such a person, so the killer would have to be single. This line of reasoning also allowed me to postulate that his domicile would be a mess, and also to guess that he would not have been in the military, because he would have been too disordered for the military to have accepted him as a recruit in the first place. Similarly, he would not have been able to stay in college, though he might well have completed high school before he disintegrated. This was an introverted individual with problems dating back to his pubescent years. If he had a job at all, it would be a menial one, a janitor perhaps, or someone who picked up papers in a park; he’d be too introverted even to handle the tasks of a deliveryman. Most likely he’d be a recluse living on a disability check.

I didn’t include some other opinions in the profile, but I did believe that if this slayer had a car, it, too, would be a wreck, with fast-food wrappers in the back, rust throughout, and an appearance similar to what I expected to be found in the home. I also thought it likely that the slayer lived in the area near the victim, because he would probably be too disordered to drive somewhere, commit such a stunning crime, and get himself back home. More likely, he had walked to and from the crime scene. My guess was that he had been let out of a psychiatric-care facility in the recent past, not much more than a year earlier, and had been building up to this level of violent behaviour.

Sherlock Holmes could not have explained his methods better. Using this profile, cops on the beat began questioning people in the area. Around that time, many of them had reported seeing a dirty, dishevelled man in an orange jacket, who sometimes knocked on doors and made incomprehensible demands.

Four days later, 38-year-old Evelyn Miroth, the mother of three sons, was found shot and mutilated on her bed, and a boyfriend, Danny Meredith, was found shot dead in the next room. One of her sons, six-year-old Jason, had also been shot. A 22-month-old baby, David Ferreira, whom the victim had been babysitting, was missing. Evelyn Miroth’s other two sons were away from home at the time. The postmortem showed that Evelyn had been sodomised.

Again, there was evidence that the killer had drunk some of his victim’s blood.

Finally, Ressler’s profile paid off. A woman named Nancy Holden thought she recognised it, and told the police about an encounter she had had with a man named Richard Chase on the day of the Wallin murder. Chase, who had been at school with her, had accosted her in a store and tried to persuade her to give him a lift. Worried by his wild appearance, she had made some excuse.

The police checked on Chase and discovered that he had a record of mental illness. When they called at his apartment to interview him, Chase tried to run away; he was finally handcuffed before he could draw a gun.

The body of David Ferreira was found—decapitated—in a box near a church.

On 2 January 1979, Richard Chase was tried on six counts of murder. It became clear from the evidence that one of his peculiarities was to dabble his fingers in the intestines of his victims—hence the nickname the ‘Dracula Killer’. Chase was sentenced to death, but on 26 December 1980, he committed suicide with an overdose of his antidepressants, which he had been saving up for weeks.

Ressler makes the vitally important observation that Chase’s mental problems can be traced back to his mother, who was ‘schizophrenic, emotionally unable to concentrate on the task of socializing her son or to care for him in a loving way’. And he goes on to note that no less than 19 of his serial killers had inadequate mothers. The psychologist Abraham Maslow used the term ‘schizophrenogenic’ about his own mother, explaining that it meant the kind of mother who made her kids crazy, and told me (when I was working on a book about him) that if it had not been for a maternal uncle who loved children, and who took care of Abe and his younger brother, he would not be sane, that his uncle ‘may have saved my life psychically’. If a person like Maslow, brought up in a protective family background, can come close to being ‘psychically wrecked’, it underlines how easy it is for the kind of offenders Ressler was dealing with.

Another serial killer to whom Ressler devotes several pages in
Whoever Fights Monsters
was Gerard Schaefer, perhaps one of sickest sex killers of the twentieth century. In his early lectures to police academies, Ressler would use Schaefer as a typical example of the organised serial killer. In fact, Schaefer fit the pattern so well that members of the audience often accused Ressler of taking the details of the organised serial killer directly from Schaefer.

Ressler was not involved in catching Schaefer; he was arrested before Ressler had developed the idea of criminal profiling. But the pages about him in
Whoever Fights Monsters
show the importance Ressler attaches to the case.

In 1973, there had been so many disappearances of young women in Brevard County, Florida, that the police were in the process of putting together a task force, when the man responsible fell into their hands. He was Gerard John Schaefer, a 29-year-old police officer.

On 22 July 1972, Schaefer stopped his police cruiser to confront two hitchhikers, Nancy Trotter, 17, and Pamela Sue Wells, 18, in the town of Stuart in Martin County. He issued them a warning about hitching rides, but also offered to give them a ride to the beach the next day. He drove them out to the then swampy and isolated Hutchinson Island on the pretext of showing them a Spanish fort. The young women must have felt that they could hardly be in safer hands.

Once out on the island, he suddenly started to verbally abuse them, accusing them of being runaways (which they were not). He then forced them from the car at gunpoint, and handcuffed them both. All this was plainly designed to reassure them that this was a legitimate arrest, to make them feel that this was a mistake that would soon be cleared up when they reached the police station. But when he went on to gag them with old rags from the trunk of his car, they must have realised that this was no arrest.

Schaefer then forced Pamela Sue to balance on the giant roots of a cypress tree, where he tied her. Next he made Nancy stand on the roots of another cypress, some distance away, with a noose around her neck. Trapped there, the young women were forced to listen to his taunts of selling them into white slavery. His aim was obviously to terrify them—if possible, until they lost control of their bowels, which seems to have been one of the things that sexually excited him. But then he was interrupted by a call on the police radio. He left the pair only to return to find them gone. Realising that Pamela Sue and Nancy could identify him, he went home and rang the sheriff—his boss—and told him that he had done ‘something foolish’. His intention, he explained, was to frighten the girls and make them realise that hitchhiking was dangerous. He described where he had left them, and in about a quarter of an hour, the sheriff found the petrified young women wandering in the woods—still handcuffed and gagged.

Schaefer was dismissed from the police force immediately, and charged with assault and imprisonment. He was released on $15,000 bail, and ordered to appear for trial in November 1972.

My own interest in Schaefer arose from the fact that he had been the first love of a friend of mine, a woman named Sandy Steward, who later became the crime writer Sondra London. After his arrest she kept in touch with him, published some of his writings under the title
Killer Fiction,
and persuaded me to write an introduction to them.

When Sondra met Gerard Schaefer in Florida at a high school dance in 1964, she was 17 and he was 18—handsome, gentle, and well-mannered. Her parents liked him so much that they invited him to go with them on their vacation, and her grandmother told her she was lucky to meet such a
nice
boy. Sandy and Gerry decided that they were in love, walked hand in hand, and made love among the tombstones in the old graveyard. They had been together for a year when he confessed to her that he experienced terrifying sadistic urges towards women, and daydreamed of hanging them dressed only in their underwear. Sometimes he sobbed as he told her about these compulsions. He even talked to the school counsellor about them, but she was unable to help him. Eventually, Sandy broke off their engagement because, she said, she had no desire to be his mother-confessor.

Schaefer also spied on a woman who sunbathed in her garden in a bikini. One night, when she came home late and slightly drunk, he broke into her house, and woke her up by pressing a knife to her throat and threatening her with instant death if she moved, and then made her lie on her face. He removed his trousers and masturbated on her, then urinated on her pillow. Before he left, he threatened to kill her if she told anyone.

The experience proved to be addictive. But it was not rape to which he became addicted, but the terror he could inspire in his victims. For this reason, Schaefer liked abducting two victims together, so one could watch as he killed the other. This is undoubtedly what he had in mind when he drove Nancy and Pamela Sue into the woods that day in 1972, a decision that cost him his job, but unfortunately not his liberty. For soon after being released on bond, he went back to killing.

On 27 September 1972, Schaefer introduced himself to Susan Place, 18, and her friend Georgia Jessup, 17. He went with them to Susan’s home and told her parents that they were going to the beach to ‘play some guitar’.