The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (20 page)

Perhaps the most graphic illustration of the threat the serial killer poses to society lies in the fact that the Night Stalker’s victim count (thirteen murders in fifteen months) is positively ‘low-scoring’ compared with some.
As we have shown (pp.
60–1), the highest known individual tally of serial murders rests with the Ecuadoran peasant Pedro Lopez.
After his arrest in 1980, he confessed to murdering ‘about’ three hundred and fifty young girls in two years.
In the United States a half-century earlier, Earle Nelson killed more people more quickly (twenty-two in seventeen months) than did Ramirez; while Albert Fish probably murdered more than Nelson and Ramirez put together.
Nor are such numbers exceptional.
Since the sharp rise in all types of homicide began to manifest itself in America in the 1960s, serial killers such as John Wayne Gacy (thirty-three victims), Gerald Schaefer (twenty-eight), Dean Corll (twenty-seven) and Ted Bundy (at least twenty-three), etc., have all murdered more people than Ramirez, but over a longer period.

In our view this represented an important field for research in any realistic assessment of the serial killer problem.
Broadly speaking, were the unofficial estimates of the numbers killed annually in the United States correct?
If they were, why should one country – and that one the leader of the western world, a stable society enjoying an enviable prosperity – suffer such a plague of serial murder, yet the rest of us largely be spared?
That the US suffers more homicides annually than any other western nation is a matter of record, and that this should apply pro rata to serial murder would seem only logical.
However, while the anti-gun lobby blames the constitutional right to bear arms for much of America’s huge annual murder total, there appeared to be no rational explanation for the apparently phenomenal rise in the serial murder rate.
Clearly, there was only one oracle to consult on this problem; and in September 1989 – courtesy of the FBI – Donald Seaman became the first author from Britain to be granted access to the National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico.

The NCAVC is not normally open to the public, and security is impressive.
The Centre lies sixty feet underground, directly below the FBI Academy.
The academy itself stands in a 600-acre enclave of woodland, encircled by thousands more acres of lowland Virginia countryside – which in turn comprise the great US Marine Corps base at Quantico.
Guards in strategically-placed checkpoints monitor all traffic, in and out.
The sound of small-arms fire echoes from ranges alongside the road threading through the outer perimeter.
Within the FBI enclave, more gunfire sounds from indoor and outdoor ranges; all law enforcement officers selected to undergo an eleven-week training course at the academy are issued with a .38 Police Special.
In the Hogan’s Alley complex – a ghost town, complete with a bank, shops, service station, cleaner’s, fast-food restaurant and cinema (forever showing the programme seen by Public Enemy Number One John Dillinger in Chicago in 1934, immediately before he walked out to his death in a trap sprung by the FBI) – students undergoing specialist training fight every kind of street battle they are likely to encounter in a lifetime of duty.
At all times there are enough armed, disciplined men in place here to fight a small war.

Entry to the NCAVC is via the Academy front door, and a foyer of which any five-star hotel would be proud; the one difference being that the ‘counter clerk’ here wears police uniform, sergeant’s stripes, and a .38 on his hip instead of the customary clerical grey.
Once signed in and tagged with a badge, visitors are escorted along a corridor and down by elevator to the BSIS wing, a futuristic high-tech beehive of a crime-fighting centre, the only one of its kind in the world.
Its business is the analysis of violent crime, not the physical arrest of violent criminals.
There are no cells here, no interrogation rooms, no ‘Most Wanted’ posters; only desks and computers.
On arrival visitors are introduced to an NCAVC senior analyst who will act as guide and mentor throughout their stay in this windowless, air-conditioned, subterranean wing which seems a world away from the blue skies and sunshine, and ranks of flowering dogwood, spruce and pine bordering the FBI Academy grounds sixty feet overhead.

Our guide is supervisory special agent Gregg O.
McCrary (the ‘O’ stands for Oliver).
SSA McCrary is forty-four years old, married with two children, and was born in New York State.
He has been an FBI agent for half his life.
Before he joined the elite ‘A (for analyst) Team’ here at Quantico he was a Field Profiling Co-ordinator, and before that he served in FBI counter-intelligence.
He stands some six feet in height, a spare, upright figure with a pale face, carefully trimmed moustache and brown hair flecked with grey.
As with all personnel in the NCAVC he is smartly dressed, reflecting the evident high
morale.
Equally, this is the FBI at work; McCrary’s dark blue blazer reveals no hint of the Smith & Wesson 9mm semiautomatic below, fully loaded with twelve rounds in the magazine, plus one (for emergencies) already in the chamber.

No law enforcement officer in the United States carries a gun for show.
The handgun is also criminal America’s favourite weapon, as the FBI uniform crime report lying on McCrary’s desk will testify.
It says that during 1988,45% of all the 20,675 murder victims in the US – 9,300 people – were shot dead with revolvers or pistols, with a further 10% killed by shotguns or rifles.
It therefore comes as no great surprise to discover that FBI agent and senior analyst McCrary is a man of many parts.
He is also a crack shot and former firearms instructor.
In addition, he holds a black belt in the martial art of
shorinji kempo
– a blend of the better known
karate
(punch, kick and block) and
aikido/ju-jitsu
(defensive) techniques.
Instructors in this rare martial art travel worldwide from their headquarters in Todatsu, Japan, to ensure that its exacting standards become in no way debased.
In McCrary’s case this entails two visits (and two gruelling workouts) each year, physical examinations which he describes, with feeling, as a ‘most humbling experience’.
In his capacity as a martial artist, McCrary was formerly an FBI instructor in defence tactics – and in the field, a ‘Special Weapons and Tactics’ (SWAT) team leader.
A SWAT team is deployed only in high-risk situations.

Visitors start with a brief tour of the Investigative Support wing.
The jewel in the NCAVC’s technological crown is unquestionably VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Programme.
This unique, multi-million-dollar computer system acts basically as a serial crime databank, with the master computer housed at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, forty miles away.
Its task is to store, collate and analyse all unsolved, homicide-related crimes reported to the NCAVC by law enforcement agencies nationwide, and fed on-line from Quantico via a secure telecommunications network.

When a new case is submitted, the master computer in Washington simultaneously retrieves more than one hundred cases from the appropriate
modus operandi
category, and overnight checks them against all other cases in store for similarities and discrepancies.
Once that search is completed, a printed, computerised report is telexed back to Quantico – listing the ‘top ten’ matching cases in pecking order.
This remarkable crime-pattern analysis technique is known as ‘Template pattern matching’, or more usually ‘The Template’ by VICAP analysts working in the BSIS, or Investigative Support, wing.
It was specifically designed and programmed for VICAP in the mid-1980s by the unsung heroes of the FBI’s backroom Technical Division.

As soon as the Template is received at BSIS in Quantico, the VICAP analyst (as distinct from the ‘senior analyst’, or profiler) determines which if any of the top ten matches are linked with the new case as one series crime.
Suppose, say, there are four.
After consultation, the VICAP analyst then informs the four law enforcement agencies involved, asks if they want a profile, and puts each in touch with the others so that the least possible time is lost in mounting a co-ordinated attempt to apprehend the offender.

The VICAP system, straightforward in concept yet fraught with problems in development, took
twenty-seven years
to evolve from a germ in one man’s mind to operational readiness by 1985.
It was the brainchild of Commander Pierce Brooks, retired now but formerly of the Los Angeles Police Department and first manager of the VICAP programme.
During the course of two ‘unusual’ murder investigations in 1958, Brooks – then a homicide detective – became convinced that both unknown killers had murdered before.
In those days there was no central source which stored data on the
modus operandi
of transient multiple murderers.
Instead Brooks had to search computerised newspaper files and books in the city library for the information he needed: a laborious task which gave rise to his dream of an automated, central, permanently-updated, violent crime databank to serve all America’s law enforcement agencies.
Gradually his idea won support; and in the 1970s, the US Department of Justice funded a VICAP task force of senior homicide investigators and analysts from more than twenty states to evaluate the Brooks project.
They were later joined by men from the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit, where the concept of an American NCAVC was then under examination.
As a result, VICAP and the complementary Criminal Analysis Programme were merged into the single crime-fighting system in use today.

The first twelve months following the formal establishment of the NCAVC in June 1984 were employed as a test-bed period for all aspects of the nascent VICAP system: a formidable task.
There were major technological problems to solve, first in designing and programming the unique computer system required, and additionally in dovetailing complementary internal procedures at Quantico.
There was also one fundamental difficulty to overcome.
VICAP’s role is to analyse, not investigate, serial violent crime.
The two tasks call for quite different skills when co-operating to solve the same homicide.
This meant tabling a comprehensive, dual-purpose crime report designed to cover every type of case – yet which would enable the
analyst
at Quantico to profile the specific type of offender responsible, by using behavioural patterns emanating from the
investigative
feedback.

To no-one’s great surprise, many setbacks were encountered.
Most important, from the operational point of view, it soon became apparent that fewer crime reports were being returned than had been anticipated, and after six months the entire process was overhauled and simplified.
The outcome was a VICAP Crime Analysis Report which has remained unchanged since 1986, a ten-section questionnaire listing: administrative detail (law enforcement agency, county, town, state etc); everything known about victim; ditto offender; description if any of vehicle used;
modus operandi
; condition of victim when found (including use of restraints – gag, handcuffs, bonds, etc., evidence of torture if any, indications of removal of ‘souvenir’ items, other than clothing); cause of death; forensic evidence; request for profiling (a tick in the required box is sufficient); and details of related cases, if any.

The VICAP form lists the types of crime dealt with by the system, as follows:

1. Solved or unsolved homicides or attempts, especially those that involve an abduction; are apparently random, motiveless, or sexually oriented; or are known or suspected to be part of a series.
   
2. Missing person, where the circumstances indicate a strong possibility of foul play and the victim is still missing.
   
3. Unidentified dead bodies, where the manner of death is known or suspected to be homicide.
   

The report form also reminds investigators that ‘Cases where the offender has been arrested or identified should be submitted, so unsolved cases in the VICAP system can be
linked to known offenders’.
According to SSA McCrary, this reminder is of crucial importance.
‘The strength of VICAP – and inversely, its weakness – lies in getting these reports sent to us.
The difficulty lies in convincing local investigators, who feel they have enough paperwork to do and enough forms to fill in as it is, that it is to
their
benefit to fill in one more.
Because if these reports aren’t submitted, and no-one tells us about the crimes, we have no way of
knowing
these serial killers are out there.

‘Right now California is about to send us
several thousand
unsolved homicides, cases spread over the last ten years or so which as yet have not been entered in the VICAP system.
It’s going to mean an awful headache for someone when all this hits us, but the fact remains – the more cases we get, the better job we can do.
As a matter of fact attempts are being made to set up legislation, which would make it mandatory to put all unsolved homicides into the VICAP system.’

These crime analysis reports are entered into the master system via the BSIS computer, which stands in its own centre along the corridor.
Because it needs controlled atmosphere and humidity to function at maximum efficiency, casual entry to the centre is barred by cypher and key locks.
All the visitor sees through the protective screen is a red light, pulsing in the computer’s steel face like a great bloodshot eye as it ‘talks’ to Washington.
Crime reports apart, ‘Old Red-Eye’ is also used for the BSIS Artificial Intelligence System (‘AI’), and other in-house tasks such as the PROFILER system.
It also has an additional onward link with the National Crime Information Centre (NCIC) in Washington.
The NCIC is linked in its turn, by telecommunications network, with all 17,200 police departments and other law enforcement agencies scattered throughout the United States: and entry to this system enables the NCAVC to request ‘off-line’ checks (for instance, when attempting to monitor the movements of transient serial offenders).

VICAP analyst Kenneth A.
Hanfland works from an office close by the BSIS computer centre.
As he describes his job this big, cheerful man from Oregon sounds oddly reminiscent of, say, an art expert called in to check on the authenticity of a painting; years of comparing and contrasting Template ‘matches’ with crime reports have given him rare assurance in assessing the
modus operandi
of specific types of serial killer.
After a while the conversation turns to British serial killers: and VICAP analyst Hanfland and SSA McCrary both hear for the first time of Kenneth Erskine, alias The Stockwell Strangler.
They learn that Erskine committed seven murders in fifteen weeks in 1986, targeting old age pensioners exclusively, the majority of whom were sexually assaulted.
No further description of Erskine is given, other than to add that he was aged twenty-four and British.
Hanfland nods, and asks: ‘He’s coloured, right?’ McCrary agrees – and they
are
right (
see here
).