Serial Killer Investigations (26 page)

Back at headquarters, he again showed Stano the photograph, asking: ‘How often do you pick up black girls?’ Stano pushed back his chair. ‘I hate them bastards.’ ‘But you picked her up.’ Stano stared at the photograph, his legs still crossed. ‘That’s the only one I ever picked up.’ It was at this point that Crowe realised that he was talking to a multiple killer.

Stano persisted in denying that he had killed Toni Van Haddocks. Crowe stood up to leave the room. ‘I know you did because you left your signature there.’ Stano stared with amazement, and then called Crowe back: ‘Hey, wait. Did I really leave my name there?’ Realising that he had virtually admitted to killing her, he went on to confess to the crime. But these two murders, he insisted, were the only ones he had ever committed.

Crowe did not believe him. Now he knew that Stano was a ritualistic killer, and that ritualistic killers often kill many times. There had been no more recent disappearances in Daytona Beach, so Crowe studied the missing persons files and records of past murders. He found many. In January 1976, the body of Nancy Heard, a hotel maid, had been discovered in Tomoka State Park, near Ormond Beach, where Stano lived. Reports said the death scene looked ‘arranged’. She had last been seen alive hitchhiking. Ramona Neal, an 18-year-old from Georgia, had been found in the same park in May 1976, her body concealed by branches. In Bradford County, a hundred miles away, an unknown young woman was found concealed by tree branches, while in Titusville, to the south, another young woman had been found under branches—a young woman who had last been seen hitchhiking on Atlantic Avenue in Daytona Beach.

When Stano had moved to Florida in 1973—from New Jersey—he had lived in Stuart. A check with the Stuart police revealed that there had been several unsolved murders of young women there during the period of Stano’s residence.

Stano’s adoptive parents told Crowe that they had fostered Gerald even after a New York child psychiatrist had labelled him ‘unadoptable’. He had been taken away from his natural mother as a result of ‘horrible neglect’. In all probability, Stano had never received even that minimum of affection in the first days of his life to form any kind of human bond. He had never shown any affection, and he had been compulsively dishonest from the beginning, stealing, cheating, and lying. He preferred associating with younger children—a sign of low self-esteem—and preferred women who were deformed or crippled—he had once impregnated a retarded young woman. He had married a compulsive overeater, but the marriage quickly broke down.

Crowe traced Stano’s wife, who was living with her parents in a house of spectacular untidiness—Crowe admitted that it reminded him of the home of the TV character Archie Bunker, who spends most of his time in his undershirt. There Stano’s ex-wife answered questions as she rested her huge breasts on the kitchen table. Stano’s sexual demands had been normal, as was only to be expected ‘with his itty-bitty penis’. But he had a peculiar habit of going out late at night, and returning, exhausted, in the early hours of the morning.

What had now emerged about Stano convinced Crowe of the need for further psychological profiling, and he called in an Ormond Beach psychologist, Dr Ann MacMillan, who had impressed police with her profile of mass killer Carl Gregory. The result of tests on Stano revealed a psychological profile almost identical with those of Charles Manson and David Berkowitz; she believed that it meant that his crimes were predictable, and that he belonged to a group that might be labelled ‘born killer’.

Over many months, Crowe’s interrogation of Stano continued. At some point, Stano realised that Crowe was reading his physical signals, and changed them. But his compulsive nature made it inevitable that he developed new ones, and Crowe soon learned to read these, too. Eventually, Stano confessed to killing 34 women; then, typically, he declared that this had been a stratagem to make him appear insane. His memory of his crimes was remarkably detailed—for example, he was able to describe a prostitute whom he had picked up in Daytona Beach as wearing a brown leather jacket, brown shoes, and a shirt with an inscription: ‘Do it in the dirt.’ When he led them to the woman’s skeleton—covered with branches—the police found that it was wearing precisely these clothes. With plea-bargaining, Stano finally agreed to admit to six murders. On 2 September 1981, he was sentenced to three consecutive terms of 25 years—75 years in all—and was taken to the Florida state prison. But a later trial resulted in a death sentence.

One of the most widely publicised cases of these early years of profiling began in Anchorage, Alaska, with the disappearance of a number of ‘exotic’ dancers. In Anchorage, the temperature is so low that it is impractical for prostitutes to walk the streets. The majority of them solve the problem by working in topless bars, and making appointments with clients for after hours. Few people notice when such a girl vanishes, although bar owners were often puzzled when their dancers failed to show up to collect their pay.

When, in 1980, building workers on Eklutna Road discovered a shallow grave, which had been partly excavated by bears, containing the halfeaten body of a woman, it seemed likely that she might be one of the missing women. Since the advanced state of decay made it impossible to identify the body, she became known in the records as ‘Eklutna Annie’.

Two years later, on 12 September 1982, hunters found another shallow grave on the bank of the Knik River, not far from Anchorage; this time it was possible to identify the body in it as 23-year-old Sherry Morrow, a dancer who had vanished the previous November. She had been shot three times, and shell casings near the grave indicated that the weapon had been a high-velocity hunting rifle that fires slugs—a .223 Ruger Mini-14. Here, once again, the investigation reached a dead end since it was impossible to interview every owner of such a rifle.

An odd feature of the case was that the clothes found in the grave had no bullet holes, indicating that the woman had been naked when she was killed.

A year later, on 2 September 1983, another grave was found on the bank of the Knik River; the woman in it had also been shot with a Ruger Mini-14. The victim was identified as Paula Goulding, an out-of-work secretary who had found herself a job as an exotic dancer in a topless bar. She had started work on 17 April 1983, and had failed to return eight days later, leaving her pay cheque uncollected. The bar owner commented that he had been reluctant to hire her because she had obviously been a ‘nice girl’, who was only doing this because she was desperate for money. Again, there were no clues to who might have killed her.

Investigators checking the police files made a discovery that looked like a possible lead. On the previous 13 June a frantic 17-year-old prostitute had rushed into the motel where she was staying, a handcuff dangling from her wrist, and told her pimp that a client had tried to kill her. A medical examination at police headquarters revealed that she had been tortured. She told of being picked up by a red-haired, pockmarked little man with a bad stutter, who had offered her $200 for oral sex. She had accompanied him back to his home in the well-to-do Muldoon area, and down to the basement. There he had told her to take off her clothes, then snapped a handcuff on her, and shackled her to a support pillar. The tortures that followed during the next hour or so included biting her nipples and thrusting the handle of a hammer into her vagina. Finally, he allowed her to dress. He told her that he owned a private plane, and was going to take her to a cabin in the wilderness. The young woman guessed that he intended to kill her—she knew what he looked like and where he lived. So as the car stopped beside a plane, and the man began removing things from the trunk, she made a run for it, and succeeded in flagging down a passing truck.

Her description of the ‘John’ convinced the police that it was a respectable citizen called Robert Hansen, a married man and the owner of a flourishing bakery business, who had been in Anchorage for 17 years. Driven out to the Muldoon district, the young woman identified the house where she had been tortured; it was Hansen’s. She also identified the Piper Super Cub airplane that belonged to him. The police learned that Hansen was at present alone in the house—his family was on a trip to Europe.

When Hansen was told about the charge, he exploded indignantly. He had spent the whole evening dining with two business acquaintances, and they would verify his alibi. In fact, the two men did this. The prostitute, Hansen said, was simply trying to ‘shake him down’. Since it was her word against that of three of Anchorage’s most respectable businessmen, it looked as if the case would have to be dropped.

After the discovery of Paula Goulding’s body three months later, however, the investigating team led by Sergeant Glenn Flothe decided that the case was worth pursuing. If Hansen had tortured a prostitute, then decided to take her out to the wilderness, he could well be the killer they were seeking.

The investigators contacted the Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico. What they wanted was not a profile of the killer—they already had their suspect—but to know whether Robert Hansen was a feasible suspect.

Flothe spoke to Roy Hazelwood, who told them not too tell him anything about their suspect, but to begin by giving him the details of the crimes, and the story of the prostitute who had been tortured. When they had finished, Hazelwood gave them a word picture of the kind of person they could be looking for—some local businessman who loved hunting, who was psychologically insecure, and possibly had a stutter.

The Alaska CID was impressed. Hazelwood’s account was full of hits, including the stutter. And at that point they told Hazelwood about Robert Hansen—that he was a well-known big-game hunter, who had achieved celebrity by bagging a Dall sheep with a crossbow in the Kuskokwim Mountains. Hazelwood’s answer was that Hansen was indeed a feasible suspect. A big-game hunter might well decide to hunt women. And he was a trophy collector; it would be likely that he had kept items belonging to his victims. If the police could obtain a search warrant, they might well find their evidence.

What was also clear was that if Hansen knew he was a suspect, he would destroy the evidence; it was therefore necessary to work quickly and secretly. The first step was to try to break his alibi. No doubt his friends had been willing to provide a false alibi because it would cost them nothing. If they could be convinced that it might cost them two years in prison for perjury, they might feel differently. The police approached the public prosecutor and asked him to authorise a grand jury to investigate the charges of torture against the prostitute. The businessmen were then approached, and told that they would be called to repeat their alibi on oath. It worked; both admitted that they had provided Hansen with an alibi merely to help him out of a difficult situation. They agreed to testify to that effect.

Next, the police arrested Hansen on a charge of rape and kidnapping. A search warrant authorised the police to enter his home. There they found the Ruger Mini-14 rifle, which a ballistics expert identified as the one that had fired the shells found near the graves. Under the floor in the attic the searchers found more rifles, and items of cheap jewellery and adornment, including a Timex watch. Most important of all, they found an aviation map with 20 asterisks marking various spots. Two of these marked the places where the two bodies had so far been found. Another indicated the place where the unidentified corpse of a woman had been found on the south side of the Kenai Peninsula in August 1980, a crime that had not been linked with the Anchorage killings.

The investigators discovered that her name was Joanna Messina, and that she had last been seen alive with a red-headed, pockmarked man who stuttered.

At first Hansen denied all knowledge of the killings, but faced with the evidence against him, he finally decided to confess. The 20 asterisks, he admitted, marked graves of prostitutes. But he had not killed all the women he had taken out to the wilderness. What he wanted was oral sex. If the woman satisfied him, he took her back home. If not, he pointed a gun at her, ordered her to strip naked, and then run. He gave the woman a start, and then would stalk her as if hunting a game animal. Sometimes the woman would think she had escaped, and Hansen would allow her to think so—until he once again flushed her out and made her run. Finally, when she was too exhausted to run another step, he killed her and buried the body. Killing, he said, was an anticlimax, ‘the excitement was in the stalking’.

In court on 28 February 1984, the prosecutor told the judge (a jury was unnecessary since Hansen had pleaded guilty): ‘Before you sits a monster, an extreme aberration of a human being. A man who has walked among us for seventeen years, selling us doughbuts [sic], Danish buns, coffee, all with a pleasant smile on his face. That smile concealed crimes that would numb the mind.’ Judge Ralph Moody then imposed sentences totalling 461 years.

For the investigating detectives, the most interesting part of Hansen’s confession was the explanation of why and how he had become a serial killer. Born in a small rural community—Pocahontas, Iowa—he had been an ugly and unpopular child. His schoolfellows found his combination of a stutter and running acne sores repellent. ‘Because I looked and talked like a freak, every time I looked at a girl she would turn away.’ He had married, but his wife had left him—he felt that it was because he was ugly. He married again, moved to Alaska, and started a successful bakery business—his father’s trade. But marriage could not satisfy his raging sexual obsession, his desire to have a docile slave performing oral sex. Since Anchorage had so many topless bars and strip joints, it was a temptation to satisfy his voyeurism in them; then, sexually excited, he needed to pick up a prostitute. What he craved was oral sex, and many of them were unwilling. Hansen would drive out into the woods, and then announce what he wanted; if they refused, he produced a gun.

Since he was by nature frugal, he preferred not to pay them. In fact, it emerged in his confession that he was a lifelong thief, and that this was a result of his miserliness. ‘I hate to spend money... I damn near ejaculate in my pants if I could walk into a store and take something... I stole more stuff in this damn town than Carter got little green pills.’ Yet his next sentence reveals that it was more than simply miserliness that made him steal. ‘Giving stuff away, you know, walk out in the parking lot and walk to somebody’s car, and throw it in the damn car. But I was taking it... I was smarter than people in the damn store. It would give me—uh—the same satisfaction—I don’t know if you want to call it that—but I got a lot of the same feeling as I did with a prostitute.’ The link between stealing and oral sex was ‘the forbidden’. This seems to explain why many serial killers—Ted Bundy is an example—begin as habitual thieves.