The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (19 page)

When responsibility for leading the campaign to reduce violent crime in the United States was delegated to the Behavioural Science Unit of the FBI in June 1984, the NCAVC had four main programmes to administer.
They were research and development (Quantico’s traditional ‘think tank’ role), training, profiling and consultation, and VICAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Programme).
While these four still form the bedrock of the Centre’s programming, their administration is divided between two wings of the Behavioural Science Unit, viz.
Instruction and Research (BSIR), and Investigative Support (BSIS).
Though the two wings have separate functions, in the long term they are wholly complementary.

BSIR looks to the future.
In addition to furthering research and training incoming agents for their new, specialist duties, this wing is responsible for programming law enforcement in the United States in the twenty-first century.
BSIS, or the ‘operational wing’, deals with today’s problems.
It uses the most modern technology to help reduce the unacceptable levels of violent crime – particularly in the field of serial murder, rape and arson, but also including a variety of other offences ranging from kidnapping, extortion, certain aspects of terrorism (hostage survival, etc.), and tampering with consumer goods – a growth industry in many countries in recent years – to public corruption.
Research in all areas is unceasing at the NCAVC.
‘PROFILER’, the first automated profiling system to be employed in criminal analysis, is already operational.
Although there are still some areas in which it cannot match the human analyst – notably the hunch, that intuitive judgement which comes to the human investigator only after years of experience – this computerised system delivers such accurate analyses that Quantico’s ten senior analysts use it constantly as a consultant, and apprentice analysts in training.
A second expert system is in the pipeline, designed to apprehend the serial rapist and based on information gleaned from mass interviews with convicted offenders.

FBI unit chief John Henry Campbell commands the Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico, and with it the NCAVC.
The two wings of the Centre each have their own unit chief, subordinate to John Campbell.
BSIS, the ‘operational wing’, is led by supervisory special agent (SSA) Alan E.
Burgess.
Alan Burgess – a quiet, confident executive known as ‘Smokey’ to FBI colleagues – is also Administrator of the NCAVC.
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SSA John Douglas, widely acknowledged as the most experienced of modern profilers, is manager of the operational wing’s ‘cutting edge’ – the CIAP, or the Criminal Investigative Analysis Programme.
Together, the two men make a powerful crime-fighting team.
The programme itself is operated by ten senior analysts, the only ten of their kind in the world.

Under the stewardship of Alan Burgess and John Douglas, these ten men form the aces in the pack at Quantico.
They wage their unique, solitary war against serial offenders either from a desk sixty feet underground (the NCAVC is housed in a former nuclear bunker, originally intended for intelligence personnel in the event of an atomic war), or from a plane or car seat; they travel extensively, both in and beyond the United States.
They are officially known as ‘criminal investigative analysts’, rather than ‘profilers’.
Profiling is what they do, but not as before: psychiatrist Dr James Brussel gave the New York city police a genuine ‘psychological profile’ of Mad Bomber George Metesky in 1957 (pp.
81–6).
The FBI analysts at Quantico are not psychiatrists.
They are trained investigative agents who draw on police reports, their own murder scene analysis based on photographic, medical and forensic evidence, VICAP data and the automated PROFILER system – plus their years of experience – to compile a systematic analysis of both the type of offender responsible, and the crime itself.

Although the responsibility for listing each component of an analysis rests with the special agent concerned, all at BSIS work on the principle that investigative experience shared is knowledge gained: ‘The more minds at work, the better.’ Tremendous importance is therefore placed on the daily ‘group profiling conferences’, where every known detail pertaining to each incoming case goes into the melting-pot of expert, round-table discussion.
Other specialist advice, in the fields of pathology, forensic science, sociology, legal problems, etc., is also always available at Quantico.
Should further local knowledge be sought, the ten Quantico analysts – each of whom has responsibility for a given area nationwide – are backed by a force of one hundred and ten specially trained FBI agents (known as Field Profile Co-ordinators), stationed throughout the United States.
Although the co-ordinators have several duties, special attention is always given to serial murder investigations.

To gauge the extent of the possible workload facing the operational wing at Quantico, one need only examine the violent crime statistics in the US for 1988 – the most recent available when this book went to press.
The sum total of all types of homicide for the year – 20,675 – was some 3,000 down on the peak 1980 figure.
However, murder represented a mere one per cent of violent crime overall.
Nationwide, there was an average rate of one violent crime every twenty seconds, including one ‘aggravated assault’
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every thirty-five seconds, one robbery a minute, one forcible rape every six minutes, and one murder every twenty-five minutes.

In itself, that total of 20,675 murders was an increase of 3% over the preceding year.
Worst hit were the big cities (average 4% up).
The bigger the population of the city, the greater the rise in the murder rate; those with more than a quarter of a million inhabitants registered increases ranging from 1% to 8%.
In New York – the biggest city in the country, the ‘Big Apple’ – there were 6,530 murders in the 1960s decade: that total more than doubled to 15,569 during the 1970s: the sum total for the 1980s is expected to show a further increase of between 2,000 and 3,000.
Much of this rise in the big city murder-rate is undoubtedly drug-related.
Dr Thomas Reppetto of the New York Citizens Crime Commission put the blame squarely on gang wars arising from the drugs traffic.
‘In 1988,’ he said, ‘40% of the killings were drug-related, as opposed to 20–25% in the early 1980s.
A lot of this was the result of wars on the street between different gangs.’

To try to relate serial murder to the overall violent crime figures is more complicated.
The FBI’s uniform crime rate for 1988 breaks down types of homicide by percentage as follows: argument-motivated (i.e.
non-criminally motivated) 34.3%; calculating all percentages on the sum total of 20,675 homicides, this represented some 7,300 murders and the biggest single category.
Felony and felony-related homicide accounted for a further 20.2% (say 4,200 victims), and ‘miscellaneous’ (any identifiable motive not covered by the above classifications) 18.9%, or 3,800 victims.
A total of 26.6% (approximately 5,200 murders, the second biggest category) were classed as ‘unknown’ motive.

The 1988 figures also showed that, on average nationwide, 70% (or 14,480) of all murders committed in the United States were solved by the law enforcement agencies.
The 30% unsolved represented 6,200 homicides: and somewhere among that number must lie the bulk of all unidentified serial murders committed during the year.
The problem facing the NCAVC is, in what proportion?
Even the obvious-seeming clues may be misleading.
According to the uniform crime rate returns, 12% of all homicide victims in 1988 (say 2,480) were murdered by strangers.
By no means all ‘stranger’ murders, however, are committed by serial killers.
For lack of evidence to the contrary, a percentage of felony-related and miscellaneous homicides will inevitably have been included among the sum total of 6,200 ‘unsolved’ cases.
Likely examples would be the habitual offender – facing certain long-term imprisonment if apprehended – who kills when murder presents his only opportunity to escape unidentified.
Similarly, ‘first-timers’ may kill unintentionally and flee in panic.
In a country such as the United States, where one violent crime was committed every twenty seconds on average during 1988, such ‘stranger murders’ could conceivably add up to a formidable total over twelve months.
As the nineteenth-century Scottish author Thomas Carlyle once observed, ‘You might do anything with figures’.

When we were commissioned to write this book, we were aware that some observers in the US – the country worst affected – believed that serial murder claimed thousands of lives there each year, possibly 5,000 or more.
It so happens that we have both lived and worked in America, and Colin continues to visit the US regularly and the average sum total of 20,000 murders of all kinds each year – compared with today’s 700 or so in Britain – occasioned no surprise.
What was intriguing, however, was the remarkable apparent disparity in the two
serial
murder rates.
If these unofficial estimates were accurate, they represented a ratio not of thirty to one (as with the overall homicide total), but of thousands to one.

In Britain, where Jack the Ripper sent shivers down every spine more than one hundred years ago, the serial killer remains a rarity.
One can count the number to emerge over the past three or four decades on the fingers of both hands: Christie (hanged in July 1953), Brady and Hindley (sentenced to life imprisonment in 1966), Sutcliffe (jailed for a minimum thirty years, 1981), Nilsen (sentenced to life imprisonment in 1983), Erskine (jailed for a record minimum of forty years, in January 1988), and Duffy (sentenced to a minimum thirty years imprisonment, one month later).
One has to think long and hard to recall many others.

One instance apart,
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serial killers are a twentieth-century phenomenon in the United States.
Among the more notorious in the first half of the century were Earle Nelson (p.
12), and Carl Panzram (pp.
16–18).
Nelson, who murdered twenty-two women in seventeen months in the late 1920s, employed the simplest of
modus operandi
to maximum effect.
He targeted landladies who put ‘Room to Let’ notices in their front-room windows (a common practice in the Depression years that followed World War One), waited until the two of them were alone and then raped, strangled and robbed them before moving on.
As with Chris Wilder sixty years later, simply to cross from one state into the next virtually ensured temporary respite from pursuit.
Carl Panzram was a tough, long-term offender who had been homosexually gang-raped as a young man.
He exacted revenge from society by committing twenty murders, mostly homosexual in nature, starting in 1918.
In 1930 Panzram, by then thirty-eight years of age, contrived his own execution by murdering a prison guard – a crime which he knew to mean an automatic sentence.
In 1934 Albert Fish, a New York painter and decorator, was executed for the murder of a ten-year-old girl whose flesh he cooked and ate.
Following his arrest, Fish confessed to four hundred child murders; and while that confession was discounted (p.
70), he was believed to be responsible for ‘dozens’ of murders.
In general however, before World War Two serial murder in the United States was rare in comparison, say, with the gangster killings of the Prohibition era.

Ed Gein, a necrophiliac serial killer and devotee of the wartime Nazi concentration camp medical experimentalists, is thought to have inspired the Alfred Hitchcock thriller ‘Psycho’ by his macabre deeds in the late 1950s.
On one occasion he plundered a Wisconsin graveyard by night for edible body parts, and flayed one corpse to fashion a waistcoat ‘souvenir’.
Some time later, when police called at his house to question Gein about a missing elderly woman, they discovered the gutted torso of one of his earlier female victims hanging from the beams.
Gein, who is believed to have committed nine murders in all, was detained in an institution for the criminally insane.
As an old man in his late seventies, he was interviewed by FBI agents – who were conducting their mass survey of known sex murderers for the Criminal Analysis programme.

Serial murder in the United States began to surface in earnest during the 1960s, along with all other forms of violent crime.
Albert DeSalvo set the pace early in the decade, with thirteen murders in eighteen months – a reign of terror that the city of Boston is unlikely ever to forget.
As we have already shown, he was followed over the years by the likes of Schaefer, Corll, Mullin, Kemper and Bundy, a deadly quintet who between them murdered at least a hundred men and women.
One of the most recent of these so-called ‘high-scoring’ serial killers was Richard Ramirez, alias ‘The Night Stalker’ – twenty-eight years of age, unmarried, a drifter and satanist from El Paso, Texas.

In the fifteen months between June 1984 and August 1985 the Night Stalker murdered thirteen people and sexually assaulted several others in the suburbs of Los Angeles, terrifying the local communities in the process.
His
modus operandi
was to break into houses by night at random, taking whatever opportunity offered by way of sex, robbery and murder.
Men were shot or stabbed to death as they slept.
The women were beaten, raped and sexually abused, regardless of age: most were then murdered by strangulation, stabbing or shooting.
Their children (of both sexes, some as young as six) were either sexually assaulted in their homes or abducted, to be raped or sodomised before being turned loose on the streets, miles away.
All Ramirez’ attacks were marked by extreme cruelty; on one occasion he gouged a woman’s eyes out.
He ‘signed’ some of his murders by sketching in lipstick a pentagram – a five-pointed star, often associated with satanism – at the scene of the crime, either on the victim’s body or the wall above.

Ramirez, who had been profiled by the FBI at Quantico, was positively identified from a smudged fingerprint found on a getaway car.
In a bid to prevent any more murders, the local law enforcement agencies then issued his photograph to the media.
Shortly afterwards, Ramirez was recognised by a grocer’s assistant; he ran into the street, but was chased by an angry mob after trying to steal a woman’s handbag, overpowered and arrested.
In September 1989, after a trial lasting five months, Ramirez was found guilty of thirteen murders and thirty associated felonies (five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults and fourteen burglaries).
When the jury later recommended that he should die in the gas chamber, Ramirez flaunted his satanic beliefs to the media crowding the courtroom.
‘Big deal, death comes with the territory,’ he jeered.
‘See you in Disneyland!’ He now awaits the outcome of an appeal.