The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (74 page)

[a] case. When I tell them, they are shocked but fasci-tion.

nated. People are generally interested in horror.” At the Two cases often cited as profiling success stories same time, she says, “Some people imagine I must be clearly demonstrate the gap between publicity and real-butch to be in this line of work, but I can assure you I ity. In Sacramento, California, sheriff’s officers and FBI am very feminine. I’m really just a normal girl at heart.”

agents prepared a profile of an UNSUB blamed for six Pistorius has published two books on the problem of grisly murders during January 1978. At his arrest, serial murder in modern South Africa, entitled Catch defendant Richard Chase was found to match the pro-Me a Killer (2000) and Strangers on the Street (2002).

file in every respect; yet psychological analysis played no role whatsoever in his capture. Rather, Chase was spotted by a former high-school classmate wandering
PROFILING of Unidentified Killers

the streets in blood-soaked clothing and was turned in Psychological “profiling” of unknown subjects at to the police, who picked him up for questioning and large—UNSUBs, in law-enforcement parlance—is a rel-then discovered telling evidence inside his car. Six years atively new investigative tool, utilized for the first time later, Florida rape-slayer ROBERT LONG was the subject in the mid-1950s; it is also one of the most controver-of another FBI profile, which again proved remarkably sial to date. In FICTION AND FILM, profilers are often accurate once the suspect was in custody. Retired Gmen depicted as psychics, picking up on “flashes” from an hail their achievement as if they had caught Long them-unknown killer’s mind with every visit to a crime scene, selves, but in fact the killer sealed his own fate by tracking down their man (or woman) as inexorably as if releasing his penultimate victim alive, whereupon she they could read the subject’s name and address in a provided authorities with a description of Long and his crystal ball.

car.

Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the When profilers miss their target, meanwhile, the truth.

results are sometimes truly bizarre. In 1963, a panel of Profiling, at the bottom line, is nothing more or less psychiatrists—including the aforementioned Dr. Brus-than educated guesswork. At its best, the guesswork sel—was convened to stalk the “Boston Strangler” from may be very educated, drawing on experience from afar. The experts concluded that Boston was plagued by dozens (or hundreds) of previous cases, often assisted two killers, one who claimed elderly victims, and by computer analysis, refining the portrait of an another—thought to be homosexual—who strangled UNSUB to the smallest detail. On the flip side, though, younger women. Beyond that divergence, many similarit may be worse than useless, leading homicide detec-ities were postulated, including a suggestion that both tives down a false trail while the object of their man-men were teachers, living alone and killing on their hunt watches from the sidelines and enjoys the show. In scheduled holidays from school. Both UNSUBs were most cases, the reality of profiling falls somewhere in diagnosed as sexually inhibited, the products of trau-between the two extremes: experts are able to prepare a matic childhoods featuring weak, distant fathers and fair likeness of their subject without providing the cruel, seductive mothers. In fact, confessed strangler essential details—name, address, and so forth—that ALBERT DESALVO was a construction worker, living with would lead to an arrest.

his wife and two children, insatiably heterosexual.

Ironically, the first application of psychological pro-Examination of his background showed a brutal, domi-filing in a modern criminal case is also the only case to neering father and a mother who was weak and ineffec-date where a profiler contributed directly to a subject’s tual. He was in his thirties, as projected for the two arrest. In 1956, forensic psychiatrist James Brussel pre-nonexistent teachers, but there the resemblance ended.

pared an amazingly accurate profile of New York’s An even more dramatic failure came in early 1975,

“Mad Bomber,” deducing the subject’s impotence from when another “expert panel” was assembled in Los the phallic shape of his pipe bombs, generating a sketch Angeles to sketch a profile of the “Skid Row Slasher.”

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“PSICÓPATA, El”

On January 30, the L.A. media broadcast descriptions their respective nations. In the 1990s, Canadian crimi-of a “sexually impotent coward, venting his own feel-nologist Kim Rossmo created a software program for ings of worthlessness on hapless drifters and down-and-geographic profiling of killers at large, charting their outers.” The slasher was described as a friendless loner, crimes (and hopefully uncovering their lairs) via com-probably a homosexual and possibly deformed, “driven puter analysis of “spatial-temporal clusterings.” The by a frenzy to commit these murders as a substitute for program serves not only to track transient slayers, but normal heterosexual relations.” His violence was most also to uncover those whom Rossmo calls “stealth likely “spurred by an unresolved rage he feels toward predators”—the medical killers, “BLACK WIDOWS,” and his father, who could have been a brutal alcoholic.”

“BLUEBEARD KILLERS” whose crimes may be artfully dis-Sketches drawn to fit the profile showed a white male in guised as natural or accidental deaths. “The challenge,”

his late twenties or early thirties, six feet tall, 190

Rossmo says, “is to determine that something is hap-pounds, with shoulder-length stringy blond hair fram-pening, even when no crimes have been reported.” Offi-ing an angular face. At his arrest, two days later, serial cial resistance to the newfangled software was shattered slayer VAUGHN GREENWOOD was revealed as a black in Canada by the case of Robert Pickton, accused (but man with no apparent deformities, whose murders untried at press time) in the disappearances of more smacked of ritual occultism, complete with blood-than 30 Vancouver prostitutes. Rossmo told reporters, drinking and salt sprinkled around the corpses.

“The data, if properly analyzed in that case, told us It is worth noting that even participating experts dis-something. . . . And if people had faith in the [profiling]

agree on the value of criminal profiles. Dr. Norman system, then it’s like a fire alarm going off.” In April Barr, one of the Skid Row Slasher panelists in Califor-2000, authorities began testing Rossmo’s system in nia, belatedly admitted that “I don’t think my state-Texas, where Houston investigator Cecil Wingo

ments would make any more sense than those of the claimed “there are right now about 3,500 unsolved average housewife.” Across the continent, at Boston cases of serial killers.”

University, psychologist Russell Boxley declares: “I think the people who do profiles are bastardizing their discipline with a lot of mumbo-jumbo, without really

“PSICÓPATA, El”

knowing what they’re doing. You know, it’s a mystical In 1997, Costa Rican authorities announced that some thing, and people are very impressed. It’s also a media 31 victims may have been murdered over the course of thing.” Boxley concludes that forensic psychologists a decade by an elusive slayer aptly dubbed the Psy-tracking an UNSUB “can’t do any better than a college chopath. Previous estimates had been more modest, student could with the same materials in front of him.”

pegging the stalker’s body count at 19 (including several FBI “mindhunters,” meantime, stand by their record victims who have not been found), but frustrated man-and tactics, although some of their conclusions are hunters have added another dozen names to the list, all vague, at best. Following protracted interviews with young men and women who vanished without a trace convicted serial killers in the 1980s, members of the during 1996. Despite a recent plea for FBI assistance in Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit divided serial killers tracking the killer, police in this Central American into “ORGANIZED” and “DISORGANIZED” subgroups.

republic are no closer to their man today than when the

“Organized” killers are basically those who plan their string of grisly crimes began.

crimes well in advance and take pains to avoid capture El Psicópata does his hunting, for the most part, in a afterward, while “disorganized” slayers strike on a rural area lately dubbed the “Triangle of Death,”

whim, leaving crime scenes littered with clues. The cate-stretching from the southwestern quarter of Alajuela to gories are deliberately broad, and while the fictional Dr.

the eastern part of Cartago, a few miles east of the Hannibal Lecter was overly harsh in blaming the sys-nation’s capital, at San José. Taking a cue from Italy’s tem’s conception on “a real bottom feeder,” FBI spokes-

“MONSTER OF FLORENCE,” the killer preys on young men have acknowledged its deficiency by creating an lovers, creeping up on couples as they have sex and intermediate “mixed” category to accommodate trou-shooting them to death with a large-caliber weapon, blesome cases.

afterward mutilating the female’s breasts and genitals.

While retired FBI agents JOHN EDWARD DOUGLAS

Occasional diversions from the pattern involve young and ROBERT K. RESSLER are probably the best-known women murdered on their own, the crime scenes includ-profilers on Earth, other specialists also have trained ing evidence of postmortem sexual assault.

themselves to cope with the worldwide occurrence of Local authorities have drawn up several “profiles” of serial murder. Dr. MICKI PISTORIUS has established a rep-their unknown subject, all in vain. One theory blames utation in South Africa, while Britain’s Ian Stephen and the murders on a deranged ex-soldier or policeman, Japan’s Yuki Nishimura work against the rising tide in while another brands the killer as a child of wealthy
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“PSICÓPATA, El”

stock—perhaps a politician’s son or the offspring of a some investigators that El Psicópata follows and mighty landlord. Duration of the crime spree indicates a observes his chosen prey for several days before killing; killer in his thirties, possibly his forties, and police yet one fact shines above all others in the case: whoever believe he “could be” quite intelligent (presumably or whatever he turns out to be, at this writing, the Psy-because they haven’t caught him yet). It is believed by chopath is still at large.

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Q

QUICK, Thomas

two Norwegian girls. Further trials are unlikely, based Sweden’s most prolific serial killer to date was a sadistic on Quick’s prognosis of incurable mental illness, but necrophile who preferred children as victims, but that police are still pursuing allegations that he killed five did not stop him from killing adults—or wiping out other children in Finland, Norway, and Sweden

whole families—when the opportunity presented itself.

between 1980 and 1989.

Like GERARD SCHAEFER, Quick originally wanted to become a priest, but he drifted into random homicide instead, reportedly claiming his first victim at age 14.

QUINN, Jane

Arrested in 1996, he described a childhood fraught with Awakened by a gunshot in the predawn hours of

physical and sexual abuse, then confessed to 15 homi-November 2, 1911, John Miller scrambled out of bed cides, including six in Norway.

and rushed to the apartment of his landlord, whence Quick’s confession solved the mystery of three Dutch the sound had emanated. On arrival at the scene he tourists, murdered while vacationing in northern Swe-found John Quinn, the landlord, lying in his bed, blood den, and he was sentenced to life for those crimes. On streaming from a fatal bullet wound. According to the May 28, 1997, Quick was also convicted of killing an dead man’s wife, a prowler was responsible, though Israeli tourist, one Yinon Levy, in 1988. Four months Miller saw no evidence of theft or any struggle. Jane later, following Quick’s directions, police unearthed Quinn declined to testify at the resulting inquest, and a what “could be a human finger bone” from the cellar of Chicago coroner’s jury deliberated for one hour on an abandoned farmhouse near Falun, but the victim November 10 before ordering her arrest on murder was not identified, and no further charges were filed. In charges.

November 1997, Norwegian detectives found human By that time, police had learned a thing or two about bone fragments in a gravel pit near Drammen, where the lethal Mrs. Quinn. They knew about her marriage nine-year-old Therese Johannessen vanished in July to Canadian John MacDonald in October 1883 and his 1988. Quick had confessed to her slaying and described subsequent death from “alcohol poisoning” on Septem-the child’s wristwatch in meticulous detail. Conviction ber 28, 1901. A short month later, at Bass Lake, Michi-in that case, on June 2, 1998, brought Quick’s official gan, the grieving widow had married Warren

tally to five victims.

Thorpe—and he had later been shot to death in circum-Investigation into Quick’s crimes and confessions stances similar to those surrounding the Chicago case.

continues at this writing, while Quick remains confined Another death in bed, this time involving Jane’s own at Säters Sjukhus, Sweden’s maximum-security institu-mother, had occurred soon after in the house once occu-tion for the criminally insane. In October 1999, author-pied by Warren Thorpe.

ities charged Quick with the 1985 murder of victim Gry The evidence was overwhelming, and Jane Quinn

Storvik. May 2000 brought charges in the slaying of was speedily convicted at her trial on murder charges
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