The Serial Killers Read online

  The caller identifies himself as a psychiatrist who has been asked to take part in a televised discussion of the triple murder ten days earlier of housewife Mrs Joan Heaton, aged thirty-nine, and her daughters Jennifer, ten, and Melissa, eight, at their home in Metropolitan Drive, Warwick, Rhode Island. All three were found dead from multiple stab wounds, and also suffered severe blows to the head and body, following a break-in. Preliminary medical tests showed no evidence of sexual assault. According to press reports, the police have found no trace of the offender or the murder weapon, despite house-to-house enquiries. Local residents fear that this triple murder is the work of an unknown serial killer – the same person responsible for the unsolved murder, two years earlier (in July 1987) and one street away, in which twenty-seven-year-old Rebecca Spencer, also the mother of two children, was found stabbed to death in her home after a break-in. Can the NCAVC help?

  Because of the similarities in the two events, SSA McCrary – who has not received the all-important VICAP crime report – checks out the call. First he rings the FBI’s Field Profiling Co-ordinator for the area. That brings welcome news: the co-ordinator has already spoken with the local police, who have requested a profile. Their VICAP report, together with the relevant documentary evidence, will shortly be on its way to the NCAVC. McCrary himself then calls the local Captain of Police to discuss various aspects of the case, and reports the facts in his turn at the BSIS group conference.

  Within six days of the initial phone call to McCrary, the police at Warwick, Rhode Island, had their suspect in custody – and a confession to all four murders. In order of events: on receipt of the police report, crime scene evidence, forensic details and VICAP report, analyst McCrary furnished a profile by return of a youthful, black offender who lived within walking distance of the Heaton family home. He said this was the type of offender who came from a domestic background of a weak or absent father-figure and dominant female influence, and would have a police record of ‘Peeping Tom’ prowling activity. He would also, said McCrary, be the kind of offender who takes and retains souvenirs of his crime. The detectives in Warwick, who from the outset believed the two ‘events’ to be the work of one murderer, now used the BSIS profile as a screening mechanism.

  As soon as they identified a suspect who matched the profile components, McCrary provided an interview strategy. Within hours Craig Price – a burly, coloured, fifteen-year-old high school student standing five feet ten inches tall and weighing two hundred and forty pounds (seventeen stone) – confessed both to the Heaton murders, and that of Rebecca Spencer in 1987. A search warrant was obtained and – as predicted in the profile – a knife, thought to be the murder weapon, and certain other items (believed to be ‘souvenirs’ but not publicly identified) were recovered.

  As well as demonstrating the efficiency both of FBI analysts and the NCAVC’s Criminal Investigative Analysis Programme, the Heaton-Spencer serial murder case looks set to make legal history in the United States. When Craig Price appeared before Judge Carmine R. DePetrillo in Kent County Family (‘Juvenile’) Court on 21 September 1989, he admitted killing Mrs Joan Heaton, her two daughters, and Rebecca Spencer. In an adult court he would have faced charges of first-degree murder. However, because Price was under sixteen at the time all four murders were committed (he was aged thirteen when he knifed Rebecca Spencer), he was charged with ‘delinquency, by reason of murder’. The four homicides and two related burglaries were entered as evidence of his ‘delinquency’.

  Under the existing laws of Rhode Island, no matter how many murders a child under sixteen may commit, he or she may be detained only until their twenty-first birthday – when they are automatically freed. Furthermore, in no circumstances may any child adjudged to be ‘delinquent’ be sent to an adult corrective institution. Accordingly, Judge DePetrillo ordered Price to be detained in state training school (for treatment and rehabilitation) until the age of twenty-one. Ironically, twenty-one is the age at which serial killers are reckoned to be entering their prime years as mulitple murderers; so the Price case aroused considerable public concern.

  Earlier attempts, in 1988 and 1989, to introduce legislation which would enable juveniles charged with a capital offence to be tried in adult court, regardless of their age, were defeated in the Rhode Island General Assembly. However, after the Price Family Court hearing, Representative Jeffrey J. Tietz – chairman of the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee – said that reform of the state juvenile justice laws would be one of his committee’s ‘highest priorities’ in the next session. Should such legislative reform be proposed, it will almost certainly mean calling FBI Behavioural Science Unit experts at the NCAVC to testify on their research into the behavioural characteristics of serial killers generally, including their development years and their response – if any – to attempted rehabilitation.

  There is increasing international interest in the achievements of the NCAVC during its first five years of operational life. By September 1989 there had already been enquiries about CIAP and its offspring computerised techniques from Australia, Canada, Britain, Norway, West Germany, Italy, the Caribbean, Singapore, Hong Kong, Costa Rica – and Communist China. (The Chinese request for information was put on ice following the Tiananmen Square massacre.) In August 1989 two Australian officers started a ten-months profiling course in the BSIS wing of the NCAVC, the first to be invited from any foreign country. While Donald Seaman was in Quantico an Italian police officer, attending another training course at the FBI Academy, brought with him the documentary evidence relating to the sixteen murders committed to date by ‘II Mostro’, the Monster of Florence (pp. 63–4). The police in Florence were later furnished with a profile.

  Under the aegis of the Home Office, British officials have also visited the NCAVC to evaluate the Criminal Investigative Analysis Programme and other related techniques. Significantly, Douglas Hurd (then Home Secretary) told the Police Superintendents’ Association at their Torquay conference in 1989 that the government was considering the establishment in Britain of a national, FBI-style criminal intelligence unit. He said that although the proposed unit would not be given operational powers like the FBI, ‘ . . . we should ask ourselves whether the increasing sophistication of major crime, whether the link between drug trafficking and other crime, make it necessary to bring all criminal intelligence together in a national unit’.

  Agents of the Investigative Support wing of the NCAVC have had their setbacks as well as successes in the past five years. By December 1989 the task force investigating the Green River serial murder case in Seattle, Washington, was thought to be on the point of disbandment after five years of continuous enquiry (aided by BSIS profiling and on-site FBI investigative support) at a minimum estimated cost of fifteen million dollars. The Green River case – in terms of victim count the worst known, unsolved, serial murder case in American crime history – involved the deaths or disappearance of some forty-nine women, mostly Seattle prostitutes, between 1982 and 1984. It took its name from the river area in King County, Washington, where the first five victims were found. All five had been strangled. Thereafter as each new victim was discovered, the cause of death was recorded simply as homicidal violence; most were just heaps of bones.

  Only one man was arrested and named as a ‘viable’ suspect during the entire investigation. He was William Jay Stevens II, aged thirty-nine. He was arrested in June 1989 following a tip-off prompted by the Manhunt TV screening of the case. Despite lengthy interrogation, however, no murder charges were filed against him. Finally, in November 1989, the Green River Task Force commander and King County police chief, Robert Evans, declared: ‘The guy is a prolific thief and a world-class liar, but after we looked at everything we took’ – a reference to a police search of Stevens’ quarters – ‘and interviewed everybody we could interview, I can’t tell you in good conscience I think he’s responsible for any murders in King County.’ Whoever murdered the forty-nine Green River victims was thought to have posed
as a police officer to lure them to their deaths. Stevens himself was subsequently transferred into custody in Arizona, to await trial on charges arising from the cache of twenty-nine handguns, video films and items of police equipment found during the search of his quarters. (See Chapter 9 for a full description and eventual conclusion to the Green River Killer case.)

  One senior FBI agent who took part in the Green River investigtion was the legendary profiler, SSA John Douglas. It almost killed him. The pressure of too many cases over too many years finally caught up with him in Seattle in 1983, and fellow agents found him in a state of collapse suffering from paralysis of the left side, a temperature of 105, and a pulse rate of 220. Doctors diagnosed viral encephalitis, and rated his chances of survival as slim. Douglas proved them wrong. After two months in hospital, and five more convalescing, he returned to duty. Today he is manager of the Criminal Investigative Analysis Programme in the ‘operational wing’ of the NCAVC – with his matchless skills as a profiler available at every session of the BSIS daily group conference (see footnote p. 111).

  SSA McCrary spoke about the stress that goes hand-in-hand with profiling. ‘After reviewing the case material in detail, we often visit the significant sites – by which I mean abduction and/or murder scenes, if known, or the body recovery sites – to familiarise ourselves with the areas in which the killer worked. The end result is the construction of our analysis, including a profile of the type of offender responsible . . . But when you first arrive at the scene of a series of ongoing murders, you enter a pressure-cooker environment. The stress is almost palpable, and it transfers to you all too easily. Even though we’re talking about mental effort, it leaves you physically drained: exhausted.’

  For McCrary, 1989 ended and 1990 began with a non-stop round of serial murder investigation. Some new cases took him overseas, to the Caribbean and Central America. The majority were in the United States, in his eastern ‘area of responsibility’. His busiest spell came in what was intended as a week off in up-state New York, between Christmas and New Year. On 22 December 1989 the Harris family of four – Mr Warren A. ‘Tony’ Harris, aged thirty-nine, his wife Dolores, forty-one, and their children, Shelby, fifteen and Marc, eleven – were found murdered in their home on Ellis Hollow Road, Ithaca, at the foot of Lake Cayuga. All had been shot in the back of the head with a small-calibre handgun, doused with petrol and set ablaze. Three of them were bound. A VICAP report, requesting a profile, was sent to the NCAVC – and McCrary was assigned to the investigation, aided by Lieutenant John Edward Grant of the New York state police ‘special services’ unit at divisional headquarters (who had previously undergone training with the Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico).

  On 30 December 1989 the Ithaca Journal headlined their arrival in a front-page lead story: ‘FBI agents called in. “A Team” assigned to Harris murder.’ Shortly afterwards – and unknown to the readers – the newly arrived ‘A Team’, led by SSA McCrary, profiled the type of offender responsible as black, male, aged between the late twenties and early thirties, with a criminal record of burglary and armed robbery. The profile also said he lived in the area, in rented property, possibly with a white woman.

  On 7 February 1990, after using the profile as their screening mechanism and carrying arrest and search warrants, New York state police entered a house in Ithaca. The man they hoped to question chose to open fire instead. No police were injured, but the suspect died in an exchange of shots. He was thirty-three years of age, black, and had a criminal record for burglary and armed robbery. A .22 handgun (later identified by ballistic experts as the weapon used to execute the Harris family) was recovered. Subsequent enquiries revealed that the gunman had a common-law relationship with a white woman, a few miles away.

  The age of the serial killer is always the most difficult component to gauge when furnishing a profile. In the BSIS wing they take the age of twenty-five as a starting-point, then add or subtract years on the basis of the ‘experience’ they adjudge to be reflected in the crime scene evidence. The aim is to reduce the profiled age to a span of seven years or less. The problem they face is that their decision has to be calculated from the offender’s mental and emotional age as distinct from his chronological age, which may prove to be very different. Because of this possible variant, each profile carries a caution that no suspect should be eliminated on the basis of age alone. (We see a clear example of the age ‘variant’ in the case of the British serial killer Kenneth Erskine, alias the Stockwell Strangler. Erskine was twenty-four at the time of his trial in 1988: police revealed later that he had a mental age of only eleven.) FBI analysts take twenty-five as a starting-point because statistics show that incipient serial killers usually – but by no means always – commit their first murder when aged between twenty-five and thirty.

  The McCrary-led ‘A Team’ gave on-site assistance during the holiday period in two other, unrelated serial murder investigations in up-state New York: one at Windsor, the other at Rochester. The Rochester case concerned the unsolved murders of eleven prostitutes – all ‘high risk’ victims because of the nature of their trade, a factor which makes profiling more than usually difficult. On this occasion the profile said that the unknown killer would return to the scene of the crime (pp. 70–1). He did. Following his arrest by the Rochester police, the astonished offender led his captors to the spot where two of his victims were buried.

  Such accurate profiling seems almost uncanny to most outsiders. In fact it is based squarely on the far-sighted, meticulous research which began in the classrooms of the FBI Academy at Quantico, at the persuasion of Howard Teten and his handful of fellow instructors in the early 1970s – and blossomed into the mass survey of thirty-six convicted, incarcerated, sex killers carried out by agents of the FBI, under the aegis of the Behavioural Science Unit, between 1979 and 1983. Among the more meaningful behavioural characteristics which they examined in offenders were their ‘rearing environment’, their history of physical, sexual and psychological abuse, the influence of violent, sexualised fantasy on their adult lives, their unnatural preference for ‘solo sex’ (masturbation), and their failure during the critical development years to fulfil their academic promise.

  Their rejection of family ties made them self-centred loners. They blamed their own failures on an unjust world, in which their hatred for society flourished naturally. Their response to the physical, psychological and/or sexual abuse they encountered in their formative years was to inflict it on others: first in their fantasy world, and then – as the fantasies grew increasingly violent – on dumb animals and finally, people. Their rejection of normal relationships led to masturbation as an outlet; an unnatural preference stimulated by pornography and ‘Peeping Tom’ activity and ending, inevitably, in sexual assault. The whole interwoven pattern of unreasoning hatred of society, violent fantasy and sexual immaturity fused eventually into an overwhelming desire to dominate others – by force.

  And murder, say the analysts, is the ultimate expression of this ‘will to power, or desire to control’ (see here).

  * * *

  1 George Metesky did not stand trial for the bombings. Instead he was declared unfit to plead, and was confined in an institution for the criminally insane for the rest of his life. Ironically, as assistant commissioner for New York State’s mental health department, Dr Brussel was one of his official visitors.

  2 Genetic fingerprinting (or coding) by analysis of semen, blood, skin tissue, etc. was not discovered until 1984.

  3 Thanksgiving is a variable date, falling on the fourth Thursday in November.

  4 Burgess retired from the FBI in 1990. He was succeeded as Unit Chief of the BSIS unit by SSA John E. Douglas.

  5 Attempted murder is classed as aggravated assault.

  6 See Howard Henty Holmes, p. 78.

  Four

  The Power Syndrome

  SERIAL MURDER IS not about sex; it is about power. Freud once commented that a child would destroy the world if it had the power. In
this sense, the mind of the serial killer is that of a child. Fantasy takes precedence over actuality. And the fantasy is about power.

  This fact was noted by agent Robert R.Hazelwood, of the FBI Behavioural Science Unit. ‘One individual we talked to had a very ritualistic method of operation. For example, he would select six victims in advance. On the evening he would decide to rape one of the victims he would put on his “going-in clothes”, as he referred to them: an oversize pair of tennis shoes to confuse the police, baggy nondescript coveralls, a ski mask and work gloves. He would then enter the residence and stand by the victim’s bed and count from one to ten in increments of one half. And then he would leap on the victim, rape her, and then immediately leave after tying her up. And when I asked him why he counted to ten, he stated that he was putting off the rape. And I said: “I don’t understand.” And he said: “Rape is the least enjoyable part of the entire crime.” I asked him: “In that case, why didn’t you just turn around and leave at that point?” And he stated to me: “Pardon the pun, Mr Hazelwood, but after all I’d gone through to get there, it would have been a crime not to have raped her.”

  ‘Now the actual time he spent with the victim was less than two minutes. He told us this was the least enjoyable part of the entire crime. Which substantiates the fact that sexual assault services non-sexual needs – it’s power needs, it’s anger needs, and the need for control.’

  This sounds an incredible statement. After all, we know that some rapists spend hours with the victim, raping her again and again. It can only be understood if we remember that ‘self-esteem’ crime is a fairly recent phenomenon. It springs out of the desire for ‘recognition’, a craving to ‘become known’ – or at least, to feel that you deserve to become known. When Hazelwood speaks of the need for control, he is not referring simply to control over the victim. This type of criminal has a sense of inadequacy, of inferiority, which produces a burning feeling of resentment. The crime relieves his anger and produces a sense of power, of being ‘worthwhile’, of being in control of himself. As strange as it sounds, such crimes are an attempt to leave behind his immaturity and to grow up. When rape is involved, sex is not the prime objective. The prime objective is to feel himself the master – of himself and other people, and to hope that some of this feeling will stay with him.