The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (15 page)

He was dressed in pyjamas when the police called, since it was after midnight: none the less he addressed them with formal courtesy.
‘You think I’m the Mad Bomber, don’t you?’ he said, but did not admit to it: he volunteered the information that ‘FP’ stood for ‘Fair Play’, but little more.
When the police discovered his bomb factory (complete with bomb parts, lathe and metal tubing) in the garage behind the house, they allowed Metesky time to dress before leading him away.
As his two sisters watched and wept, the ‘Mad Bomber’ left with shoes a-gleam, his hair neatly brushed, sporting a collar and tie beneath his blue, double-breasted suit – buttoned, naturally: exactly as the Sherlock Holmes of the Couch had pictured him, days earlier.
¹

By combining identifiable behavioural characteristics with statistical probability, his own considerable professional skills – and no little intuition – James A.
Brussel blazed a trail that day for future crime investigation.
Yet superlatively accurate though his resultant psychological profile proved to be, the technique was not enough in itself to change traditional law enforcement procedures.
It left obvious, inherent problems still to overcome.
Chief among them was that too much responsibility rested on the professional judgement of the consultant.
Had Dr Brussel been mistaken the police search for the Mad Bomber might well have been further delayed, perhaps irrevocably misdirected.
Some sort of safety net was needed.
But where to look for it?
Simply to increase the number of professional consultants was clearly not the answer.

Even the most experienced of mental health consultants are liable to submit opposing views when jointly asked to profile some unknown, violent offender.
A classic example was provided during the ‘Boston Strangler’ investigation in the 1960s.
On that occasion Dr Brussel was invited to serve on the distinguished medical-psychiatric advisory committee which included six such professional consultants.
In the event there was a wide divergence of opinion among them, and the eventual committee report – which found there were
two
Boston Stranglers, one a homosexual – proved to be completely inaccurate (see Albert DeSalvo, pp.
206–18.)

That said, the concept of investigating violent crime by behavioural analysis was clearly a viable one, given the right formula; and the challenge was taken up in the early 1970s by FBI agents from the Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico (
see here
).
The essential difference in approach was that instead of attempting to identify an individual offender via a combination of mental health diagnosis and statistical probability, the FBI agents proposed to use their professional analysis of the crime scene (drawing on police reports, autopsy findings and photographic evidence, in addition to statistical probability), to profile the
type
of criminal responsible.
The type of violent offender they had in mind was every bit as difficult to apprehend as any Mad Bomber.
Their concern was the sex killers, some of whom were undoubtedly responsible for the ever-growing number of apparently motiveless murders being committed nationwide: ‘motiveless’ in the sense that there was no apparent connection between killer and victim.

The first investigation in which the new technique was successfully employed was in 1974.
Four FBI agents took part, three of them instructors from Quantico, the fourth a field agent from Montana.
Howard D.
Teten, an experienced former police officer from California and a gifted, natural profiler who joined the FBI in 1962, was the senior.
Within seven years he was appointed an instructor in applied criminology at the old National Police Academy in Washington, DC.
In 1972 he moved on to the newly-formed, replacement FBI National Academy at Quantico, where he introduced the practice of informal discussion of bizarre home town murders with each incoming student class.
Years earlier Teten had made a point of meeting James Brussel to exchange investigative ideas and techniques with the man who profiled the Mad Bomber with such uncanny accuracy: the classroom talks were simply an extension of the same, mutually-educative process.
He was joined at Quantico in 1972 by another far-sighted FBI instructor, Patrick J.
Mullany.
Mullany, too, was a staunch believer in the classroom exchanges.
‘The more we did, the more we realised the possibilities.’

Their opportunity to put theory into practice came soon enough.
In June 1973 a seven-year-old girl named Susan Jaeger from Farmington, Michigan, was abducted from a Rocky Mountains campsite in Montana.
Sometime in the early hours an intruder slit open her tent with his knife, and overpowered Susan before she could alert her parents, William and Marietta Jaeger, who slept close by.
Once the alarm was raised an intensive search failed to reveal any trace of the missing child, or any clue to the identity of her abductor.
When the FBI was later called in, the case was referred to Quantico through agent Pete Dunbar, then stationed in Bozeman, Montana.

Combining their own investigative experience with the police report, photographic evidence and Dunbar’s local knowledge, Teten, Mullany and a newly-joined instructor named Robert K.
Ressler (also destined to become a senior member of the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit) employed the new crime analysis technique to help track down the abductor.
They concluded he was a homicidal Peeping Tom who lived in the vicinity of the camp – this was a remote area – and spotted the Jaegers during the course of a periodical, summer’s night snoop round the campsite, with Susan Jaeger a victim of opportunity.
Statistics pointed to a young, male, white offender (they are almost invariably young men: white because Susan Jaeger was white, and such offences are usually intra-racial).
The absence of any clues to his identity, the fact that he carried a knife with him to and from the campsite and made off with his victim without any alarm being raised, indicated an
organised
violent criminal.
Sexually motivated murder frequently occurs at an early age, yet this was not the handiwork of some frenzied teenager.
This bore the stamp of an older person, perhaps in his twenties.
Statistical probability made him a loner, of average or possibly above average intelligence.
Gradually the three instructors fitted together each piece of the behavioural jigsaw puzzle.
The length of time the girl had been missing without word – and no sign of a ransom demand – persuaded them Susan Jaeger had been murdered.
They thought it likely her abductor was that comparatively rare type of sex killer who mutilates his victims after death – sometimes to remove body parts as ‘souvenirs’ (
see here
).

Early on in the investigation an informant contacted FBI agent Dunbar with the name of a possible suspect – David Meirhofer, a local, twenty-three-year-old, single man who had served in Vietnam, By chance Dunbar knew Meirhofer, who seemed a quiet, intelligent person.
More important, there was no known evidence to connect him with the abduction.
Then in January 1974, the charred body of an eighteen-year-old girl was found in nearby woodland.
She had known Meirhofer, but avoided his company; otherwise there was no known circumstance to connect him with the crime.
Inevitably, however, he became a possible suspect for the second time: but on this occasion David Meirhofer volunteered to undergo both a lie-detector test and interrogation after injection with the so-called ‘truth serum’ (sodium pentathol) to prove his innocence.
He passed both tests so convincingly that Dunbar felt compelled to believe him.

Not so the Quantico profilers.
Experience had taught them how some sex killers deliberately seek ways of inserting themselves into an investigation, if only to find out how much the authorities know.
As a precaution, they advised Susan Jaeger’s parents to keep a tape-recorder by their telephone.
On the first anniversary of their daughter’s disappearance, an anonymous male caller rang their home in Farmington and boasted to Mrs Jaeger that he was keeping Susan alive, and prisoner.
Instead of upbraiding him, Mrs Jaeger responded gently: and by turning the other cheek reduced her anonymous caller to tears.
Analysis of the tape identified the voice as Meirhofer’s.
However, such unsupported identification was then insufficient under Montana law to obtain a warrant to search Meirhofer’s apartment, where the profilers believed he kept the ‘souvenirs’ which would tie him to Susan’s murder, and possibly that of the eighteen-year-old.

The answer was supplied by FBI instructor Mullany.
He reasoned that if Mrs Jaeger could reduce David Meirhofer to tears by telephone, a face-to-face meeting might prove even more rewarding.
Such a step called for fortitude on the parents’ part, but William Jaeger escorted his wife to Montana where she met Meirhofer in his lawyer’s office.
He appeared totally controlled, and said nothing to incriminate himself.
The Jaegers returned home, thinking the plan had failed; but they were wrong.
Shortly afterwards they received another phone call – this time from Salt Lake City, Utah, some four hundred miles south of Bozeman – from a man calling himself ‘Mr Travis’.
He told Mrs Jaeger that
he
was the man who abducted her daughter – but she recognised the voice, and called his bluff.
‘Hello, David’, she said.

Backed now by Mrs Jaeger’s sworn affidavit, FBI agent Dunbar in Bozeman obtained his search warrant.
As the Quantico profilers had predicted, he unearthed the ‘souvenirs’ – body parts, taken from both victims – which proved Meirhofer’s guilt.
At that, the man who had passed both ‘truth tests’ so convincingly also confessed to two more unsolved murders (of local boys).
Although he was not brought to trial – David Meirhofer hanged himself in his cell – he became the first serial killer to be caught with the aid of the FBI’s new investigative technique.
It was a breakthrough which, within a decade, was to lead directly to the accurate,
systematic
profiling technique known as the ‘Criminal Investigative Analysis Programme’, or CIAP – which today forms the NCAVC’s main weapon in the fight against these elusive, predatory serial offenders.

Under the stewardship of Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany (both of whom have since left the FBI), new names began to emerge during the 1970s as expert Behavioural Science Unit profilers in their own right.
Among them were special agents Robert ‘Roy’ Hazelwood, now a leading authority on serial violent crime involving sexual assault; Robert Ressler, the then newly-joined instructor who had won his spurs in the pioneer Meirhofer case, and John E.
Douglas.
John Douglas, a strapping, stylishly-dressed man now in his mid-forties, was recruited into the FBI as a graduate from Wisconsin State University.
Like Howard Teten, Douglas showed a natural aptitude for profiling; and within six years, while still in his twenties, he was posted to the crack FBI Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico.

He and Robert Ressler spent long hours of off-duty time in the latter part of the 1970s interviewing convicted sex murderers, thereby amassing a stockpile of common behavioural characteristics to feed back into the ever-expanding criminal profiling programme.
In earlier years Teten, Mullany and the giants of the past had been forced to rely too much on personal investigative experience to supplement crime scene analysis, and so focus each new search for the type of offender responsible.
Now the newcomers took this hitherto untried ‘short cut’ (of prison interviews) to build on the infant organised/disorganised findings.
They sought subject material in whichever states they happened to be working at the time, and persuaded the interviewees to help solve such riddles as why some killers deliberately hide the bodies of their victims, while others just as deliberately leave them to be found by passers-by whose immediate reaction is to inform the police, and so raise the alarm.

The appalling injuries inflicted by some of the prisoners on their victims was already a matter of medical record.
What the FBI agents now sought to discover was what
caused
the offenders to dismember, or ‘depersonalise’ these victims (beat them until their faces were unrecognisable) – many of them total strangers until the moment of the attack?
Had the prisoners themselves been sexually abused as children or adolescents?
Were they incapable of normal sex?
Did pornography ‘turn them on’?
What did their bizarre acts of mutilation mean to the killer who ‘signed’ all his homicides in this way?
Why did some offenders torture live victims, and others mutilate them only after death?

All of it was interrogation with intent: the aim was to identify common behavioural characteristics peculiar to certain types of murderer.
But they were all ‘gut’ questions, which needed to be put with rare tact.
It was the first time that law enforcement officers had attempted to ‘read’ every facet of some particularly brutal murder through the eyes of the criminal responsible.
Furthermore – as so often occurs in instances of unconventional research – the interviews were ‘unofficial’.
Had there been any adverse reaction by way of legal complaint, say, or prison incident, the consequences for the pioneer researchers concerned could have been disastrous.
Patrick Mullany (who became manager of corporate security with the oil giant, Occidental Petroleum, after leaving the FBI) was quoted in a 1989 newspaper interview as saying that these unofficial interviews ‘had the potential to crack back and hurt them badly career-wise’.

Fortunately, none did.
The information gained from those early interviews was to prove invaluable, particularly in so-called ‘motiveless’ murder cases (i.e.
where there is no apparent connection between murderer and victim).
A convincing early demonstration of its importance in this field was afforded in 1979, during the manhunt in New York City for the killer of schoolteacher Francine Elveson.

Miss Elveson – a tiny four-feet-eleven-inches, twenty-six-year-old Plain Jane who suffered from a slight curvature of the spine – was found naked, badly beaten about the head and face and with her body mutilated, spreadeagled on the roof of the Pelham Parkway Houses apartment building in the Bronx where she lived with her parents.
So severe was the physical assault that her jaw and nose were both broken, and the teeth in her head pounded loose.
Her nylon stockings were loosely tied round her wrists and ankles, even though no restraint had been needed: she was unconscious, or already dead, when that was done.
Her pants had been tugged over her head, hiding her battered features from view.
There were toothmarks visible on her thighs and knees.