The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (14 page)

Each FBI interviewer possessed detailed knowledge of the offender’s serial murders and criminal record overall, from courtroom transcripts, police records, prison, probationary and psychiatric reports.
Every scrap of information on the victims’ background and lifestyle was also collated.
What the prison interviews afforded was a unique opportunity to match established facts with the offender’s eye-witness account of all that transpired before, during and after each murder he had committed.
The quest for common behavioural characteristics in both the organised and disorganised types of serial killer included questions about childhood and adolescence – the all-important ‘rearing environment’ which had shaped them, first into children who tortured pets or set fire to houses, and finally into adults who committed fantasy-inspired serial murder.
Only such men – some awaiting almost certain execution – could reveal the thinking behind their selection of the ‘stranger’ victims (or types of stranger victim) they targeted, often abducted, almost invariably physically and sexually assaulted, and sometimes tortured before murdering.
Only they possessed first-hand experience of the compulsive frenzy (or ‘voices’) which drove them to perform each ‘signed’ mutilation of their victims’ bodies; or could describe the various phases they passed through in the course of each bizarre murder, and describe the various stratagems they adopted to evade detection and arrest for so long.

By any investigative standards, here was priceless material for analysis.
The FBI does not disclose the names of the murderers who took part.
However, the information they volunteered was sufficient to form an encyclopaedic databank guide to future behavioural analysis; a guide which is continually being reviewed and extended as new material flows in.
(So successful was the original survey that prison interviews of convicted serial killers is now an ongoing process.) Even before it was fully completed – in 1983 – enough had been learned to ensure that no time was wasted when US Attorney General William French Smith called on all the agencies of the Justice Department for urgent recommendations on how best to contain and reduce the record 1980 violent crime figures.

In November 1982, following a meeting between members of the Criminal Personality Research Project advisory board (who had instituted the thirty-six killer survey) and other specialists, the bold concept of a single National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime, or NCAVC, was put forward.
That proposal was unanimously adopted seven months later by a conference of all the interested parties, held at the Sam Houston University’s Centre for Criminal Justice in Huntsville, Texas.
The delegates further agreed that the NCAVC should be founded at the FBI Academy in Quantico, and run by the agents of the elite Behavioural Science Unit.
President Reagan then formally announced its establishment on 21 June 1984 when he gave it the primary mission of ‘identifying and tracking repeat killers’.

The NCAVC was never envisaged as a replacement for traditional crime
investigation
by local law enforcement agencies: there is no substitute for prompt, on-the-spot investigation by trained police officers.
The need for a national centre arose because of the continuing rise in violent crime throughout the United States, a situation worsened by the ease with which transient serial offenders – killers, kidnappers, rapists and arsonists alike – could remain at large, simply by crossing the state lines in a country served by numerous independent jurisdictions.
The NCAVC sees its proper role as a clearing house-cum-resource centre in the combined national fight against all violent criminals.

That said, the NCAVC is some clearing house.
Standards of entry into the FBI are uniformly high, and only agents of exceptional calibre are recruited into the specialist Behavioural Science Unit.
Most of its supervisory special agents (or SSAs) hold at least a Master’s degree.
The NCAVC uses the latest advancements in computer engineering to combat serial violent crime nationwide, including VICAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Programme) and PROFILER (another world first: a robot, rule-based expert system programmed to profile serial murderers), both of which are discussed in detail in the next chapter.
Research on new projects is continuous – the Behavioural Science Unit has long been known as law enforcement’s ‘Think Tank’ in the United States – and no great vision is required to anticipate the further advances which will be made in the coming decade.
Here, surely, is the blueprint crime-fighting centre for every advanced nation in the twenty-first century.

¹
The Only Living Witness
, New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1983.

Three

The Profilers

OVER THE YEARS
, the
name of one man more than any other – James A.
Brussel, M.D.
– has become synonymous with the art of psychological profiling.
In the mid-1950s this spare, pipe-smoking American psychiatrist, with the
forte
voice and fund of knowledge concerning errant mankind, profiled the then unknown ‘Mad Bomber’ of New York with quite superlative accuracy – right down to the way he would wear the jacket of his double-breasted suit: buttoned.
This was after just one meeting with the investigating city police, who had had the Mad Bomber on their ‘wanted’ list for sixteen years.
James Brussel was that good.
Small wonder the press dubbed him ‘The Sherlock Holmes of the Couch’.

For many years no-one knew why the Mad Bomber had declared his one-man war on Consolidated Edison, the firm which supplies New York with electric light.
The campaign began on 16 November 1940 when a home-made metal pipe bomb was found on a windowsill at the Consolidated Edison plant on West 64th Street.
It failed to explode, but a note wrapped round it left no-one in doubt as to the bomb-maker’s intention.
‘CON EDISON CROOKS – THIS IS FOR YOU’, it said.
There were no tell-tale fingerprints.
In those days, no-one made telephone calls claiming responsibility.
Moreover, there was a real war being fought in Europe, where cities were being razed by bombs; so, perhaps understandably, the discovery of one, dud, home-made, explosive device in Manhattan failed to make a line in the papers.
The same lack of publicity attended a second unexploded pipe bomb, found in the street a few blocks from Consolidated Edison headquarters on the corner of Irving Place and 14th Street a year later.
Within another three months, America herself was at war.

Somewhat magnanimously the unknown bomb-maker wrote to New York city police headquarters, pledging a truce for the duration.
As with all his letters it was hand-printed in neat, capital letters, and signed with the initials ‘FP’.
He used hyphens instead of commas and full stops, and old-fashioned phrases (‘dastardly deeds’ was his favourite).
‘I WILL MAKE NO MORE BOMBS FOR THE DURATION OF THE WAR – MY PATRIOTIC FEELINGS HAVE MADE ME DECIDE THIS – LATER I WILL BRING THE CON EDISON TO JUSTICE – THEY WILL PAY FOR THEIR DASTARDLY DEEDS – FP’[.]

The ‘Mad Bomber’, as he was later dubbed by the press, kept his word.
World War Two was long over before the first bomb exploded, on 24 April 1950.
It wrecked the phone booth in which it was planted, outside the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue; by chance, there were no casualties.
Over the next six years he planted bombs in subway lockers, phone booths or holes cut in cinema seats from Broadway to Brooklyn – fifty-four altogether by his count by March 1956.
A number of people were injured: again by chance, only a handful seriously.
Part of a letter sent by ‘FP’ that month to the
New York Herald Tribune
warned ‘THESE BOMBINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL CON EDISON IS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE – MY LIFE IS DEDICATED TO THIS TASK’[.]

On 2 December 1956 he struck again.
His most powerful device to date exploded in the Paramount cinema in Brooklyn injuring seven of the audience, three seriously.
On Boxing Day the
Journal-American
published an open letter calling on the Mad Bomber to give himself up, while offering him space to air his grievances.
He rejected the appeal by return of post: ‘PLACING MYSELF IN CUSTODY WOULD BE STUPID – DO NOT INSULT MY INTELLIGENCE’, but clearly welcomed the publicity, by declaring another bombing truce until mid-January 1957.
He also listed the fourteen devices he had planted in 1956, several of which had not been discovered.
A police search uncovered eight.
Five were dummies.
The rest were armed, but for technical reasons had failed to explode.

Still the police did not know where to look, or for whom.
Then by responding to a second open letter in the
Journal-American
on 10 January 1957, the Mad Bomber inadvertently revealed the first clues to his identity.
‘I WAS INJURED ON A JOB AT CONSOLIDATED EDISON PLANT – AS A RESULT I AM ADJUDGED TOTALLY AND PERMANENTLY DISABLED – I DID NOT RECEIVE ANY AID OF ANY KIND FROM COMPANY – THAT I DID NOT PAY MYSELF – WHILE FIGHTING FOR MY LIFE – SECTION 28 CAME UP’[.] Section 28 of the New York State Compensation Law requires legal claims to be submitted within two years of injury.
An immediate search of Consolidated Edison files failed to unearth the complaint which could identify the Mad Bomber.
A third appeal by the newspaper, asking for further details of his injuries, failed to elicit a quick response.
As the search went on, the police asked Dr Brussel to help them by profiling the unknown wanted man.

While the police had not consulted him before in a criminal investigation, James Brussel was no stranger to the world of the criminally insane.
Although in private practice, he was also assistant commissioner of the New York State’s mental health department.
He had formerly been assistant director of a mental hospital.
During World War Two he had served in the US army as a senior neuropsychiatrist, and was recalled in the Korean war as head of the Neuropsychiatric Centre at El Paso, Texas.
He knew of the Mad Bomber, of course, from the newspapers.
He now listened to the police version, studied photographs of the unexploded bombs and read through a host of letters inked in neat, capital letters.
In his loud voice he then delivered the psychological profile which has since become legend.

The Mad Bomber’s sex?
Dr Brussel assumed him to be a man: most bombers are.
That was to prove correct, as did his professional diagnosis that the offender’s marathon resentment of Con-Edison, for offences real or imagined – plus his total disregard for the lives of others when settling old scores – to be the conduct of a man suffering from acute persecution mania: a paranoiac.
Correction.
A
middle-aged
paranoiac.
Why?
Because paranoia usually reaches a dangerous stage in patients in their mid-thirties, and this bombing campaign dated back to 1940.
Elementary, my dear Watson.

To James Brussel, the bundle of letters on his desk, each one meticulously printed in neat, inked capitals to justify the mayhem it portended, denoted a neat, formally polite, yet hugely dangerous, mad author.
To his psychiatrist’s eye the flowing shape of the ‘w’s, with their pointed tips, represented token female breasts.
Experience had taught him the Oedipus-complex was not uncommon among paranoiacs.
He had learned from the police how the Mad Bomber cut holes in cinema seats to plant his bombs.
Was this, he wondered, the explanation for the bombing campaign – a sexual problem, sparked off by real or imagined resentment of
male
authority in the shape of Consolidated Edison management?

Dr Brussel was wrong there.
Events showed it to be a straight grudge vendetta with no sexual overtones.
In most other respects his profiling was inspired.
He was certain of one thing; the Mad Bomber was not homosexual.
Brussel saw him as a brooding, solitary person of average height and ‘athletic’ build (this last a statistical characteristic of most paranoiacs) who either lived alone or was looked after by some older, unmarried female relative – an aunt perhaps, or a sister.
(The police found he lived with two doting, older unmarried sisters.) The stilted phraseology suggested either an immigrant American or – given his age – one born of immigrant parents who learned the new English language from Victorian-era books.
Brussel decided he was a first-generation American of Slav descent (Slav because he chose bombs as his weapon), which in turn suggested he might also be a Roman Catholic.
Remarkably, the police found Dr Brussel right on all counts.
The Mad Bomber was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1903 of Polish immigrant stock.
Furthermore, he attended mass every Sunday up to the time of his arrest.

In his protest letters, the Mad Bomber constantly complained of a ‘serious’ illness resulting from injuries caused by an accident at work – date unknown, but clearly pre-1940.
Wearing his hat as a qualified medical practitioner, James Brussel narrowed the list of probable illnesses to three – cancer, tuberculosis and heart disease.
He thought, wrongly, it had to be heart disease.
Why?
Cancer would almost certainly have killed him by 1957, and tuberculosis could be successfully treated.
A feasible deduction – yet on this one day when he seemed almost clairvoyant, Dr Brussel overlooked the one behavioural characteristic he knew better than most: that all paranoiacs think they know far more than mere doctors, and so rarely consult them voluntarily.
Subsequent, obligatory medical examination showed the Mad Bomber to be suffering from TB.

But that is to carp.
In almost every other respect his proved to be a near-perfect profile of the unknown, dangerous criminal who had terrified New York for more than a decade.
All the police lacked was a name – and that was soon forthcoming.
A Consolidated Edison secretary traced the missing file, and handed it to them.
The cover was labelled ‘Metesky, George’.
Inside was his 1930 address in Waterbury, Connecticut.
(He had since moved to a different street, but was quickly located.) There was also a letter from Mr Metesky, complaining about the company’s ‘dastardly deeds’, while his personnel slip showed him to be a Roman Catholic.
For good measure the
Journal-American
’s third open letter had reaped dividends too.
A hand-printed letter, signed ‘FP’, listed the date of his accident at work as 5 September 1931.
It matched the date in the firm’s file – the last shred of evidence needed to identify Metesky as the Mad Bomber.