Manhunters Page 20

  Once the answer to these two connected factors was found, the rest of the puzzle would slot into place.

  Armed with the profile, the investigating police re-examined their list of suspects. One man in particular seemed to fit the description like a glove. His name was Carmine Calabro. He was thirty-two years old, an unmarried, out-of-work actor, and an only child with a history of mental illness. He had no girlfriends. He did not live in the apartment building where Francine was found murdered, but his father—whom he often visited—lived there and was a near neighbor of the Elvesons.

  The problem was that it seemed impossible for Carmine Calabro to be the killer. The police had interviewed his father (as they had every other resident in the complex) before calling on the FBI for help. The father told them that his son—who lived elsewhere, and alone—was an in-patient undergoing treatment at a local psychiatric hospital, which appeared to rule him out as a possible suspect. Now enquiries were rechecked, and the police discovered that—because security was lax—patients at the hospital concerned were able to absent themselves almost at will. When they learned that Carmine Calabro was absent without permission on the evening before Francine Elveson was murdered, he was arrested—thirteen months after the body had been found.

  Calabro proved to be a high-school dropout, who shared a collection of pornography—mostly S&M—with his father. He pleaded not guilty to the murder at his trial; however, the evidence given by three forensic (dental) experts—whose independent tests showed that impressions from Calabro’s teeth matched the bite marks on the dead teacher’s thigh—proved conclusive, and he was imprisoned for twenty-five years to life.

  It had been a virtuoso performance by Special Agent John Douglas, whose startling accuracy of profiling matched that of James Brussel in the case of the Mad Bomber twenty-two years earlier. Aptly, one of the warmest tributes came from the head of the police task force assigned to the Elveson murder investigation, Lieutenant Joseph D’Amico. “They had [Carmine Calabro] so right,” he said, “that I asked the FBI why they hadn’t given us his phone number too.”

  Douglas applied the same technique to a case involving the kidnapping and murder of Betty Shade in Logan, Pennsylvania, in June 1979. Her mutilated body was found on a garbage dump, and there was evidence that she had been raped after death. The injuries to her face convinced Douglas again that the killer knew the victim well, and had killed her in a fury of resentment; but the mutilations had been performed after she had died, suggesting that the killer was too frightened to inflict them while she was alive. This indicated a young and nervous killer. Yet, Betty had been driven from her babysitting job to the dump in a car, requiring a degree of organization. The necrophilic sex also suggested a killer who was taking his time. To Douglas, all this pointed unmistakably to two killers, and again, his “profile” pointed the police in the right direction. The young woman lived with her boyfriend, and it seemed unlikely that he would rape her after death, which is why he had originally been eliminated from the inquiry. But the boyfriend had an elder brother who owned a car. Both men were eventually convicted of the murder. The younger man had killed and mutilated her; the brother had raped her dead body.

  Agent Howard Teten, who taught one of the original FBI courses in applied criminology at the Academy, also seemed to have a natural talent for “profiling” random killers, which he had been applying since the early 1970s. On one occasion, a California policeman had contacted him about a case in which a frenzied killer had stabbed a young woman to death. The frenzy suggested to Teten that the murderer was an inexperienced youth, and that this was probably his first crime, committed in a violently emotional state. And, as in the later case of the Bronx schoolteacher, Teten thought the evidence pointed to someone who lived close to the scene of the crime. He advised the policeman to look for a teenager with acne, a loner who would probably be feeling tremendous guilt and would be ready to confess. If they ran across such a person, the best approach would be just to look at him and say, “You know why I’m here.” In fact, the teenager who answered the door said, “You got me” even before the policeman had time to speak.

  The FBI’s new insight into the mind of the killer and rapist began to pay dividends almost immediately. In 1979, a woman reported being raped in an East Coast city; the police realized that the modus operandi of the rapist was identical to that of seven other cases in the past two years. They approached the FBI unit with details of all the cases. The deliberation of the rapes seemed to indicate that the attacker was not a teenager or a man in his early twenties, but a man in his late twenties or early thirties. Other details indicated that he was divorced or separated from his wife, that he was a laborer whose education had not progressed beyond high school, that he had a poor self-image, and that he was probably a Peeping Tom. In all probability, the police had probably already interviewed him, since they had been questioning men wandering the streets in the early hours of the morning. This “profile” led the police to shortlist forty suspects living in the neighborhood, and then gradually, using the profile, to narrow this list down to one. This man was arrested and found guilty of the rapes.

  It soon became clear that psychological profiling could also help in the interrogation of suspects. The agency began a program of instructing local policemen in interrogation techniques. Their value was soon demonstrated in a murder case of 1980.

  On February 17, the body of a woman was found in a dump area behind Daytona Beach Airport in Florida; she had been stabbed repeatedly, and the body was in an advanced state of decomposition, which indicated that she had been dead for a matter of weeks. She was fully dressed and her panties and bra were apparently undisturbed; she had been partially covered with branches and laid out neatly and ritualistically on her back, with her arms at her sides. The FBI team would immediately have said that this indicated a killer in his late twenties or early thirties.

  From missing person reports, Detective Sergeant Paul Crowe identified her as Mary Carol Maher, a twenty-year-old swimming star who had vanished at the end of January, more than two weeks previously. She had been in the habit of hitching lifts.

  Towards the end of March, a local prostitute complained of being attacked by a customer who had picked her up in a red car. She had been high on drugs, so could not recollect the details of what caused the disagreement. Whatever it was, the man had pulled a knife and attacked her—one cut on her thigh required twenty-seven stitches. She described her assailant as a heavily built man with glasses and a moustache, and the car as a red Gremlin with dark windows. She thought that he had been a previous customer, and that he might live in or near the Derbyshire Apartments.

  Near these apartments an investigating officer found a red Gremlin with dark windows; a check with the Department of Motor Vehicles revealed that it was registered to a man named Gerald Stano. And the manager of the Derbyshire Apartments said that he used to have a tenant named Gerald Stano, who drove a red Gremlin with dark windows. A check revealed that Stano had a long record of arrests for attacking prostitutes, although no convictions; he apparently made a habit of picking up hitchhiking hookers.

  A photograph of Stano was procured, and shown to the prostitute, who identified him as her attacker.

  It was at this point that Detective Crowe heard about the case and reflected that Mary Carol Maher had also been in the habit of hitching lifts—she had been an athletic young woman who was usually able to take care of herself. Crowe’s observations at the crime scene told him that Mary’s killer had been a compulsively neat man; he was now curious to see Stano.

  The suspect was located at an address in nearby Ormond Beach, and brought in to police headquarters for questioning. Crowe stood and watched as a colleague, whom he had primed with certain questions, interrogated Stano. But his first encounter with Stano answered the question about compulsive neatness; Stano looked at him and told him that his moustache needed a little trimming on the right side.

  What Crowe wanted to study was Stano�
��s body language, which was as revealing as a lie detector. And Stano was an easy subject to read. When telling the truth, he would pull his chair up to the desk or lean forward, rearranging the objects on the desktop while talking. When lying, he would push back his chair and cross his legs, placing his left ankle on his right knee.

  It was not difficult to get Stano to admit to the attack on the prostitute—he knew that she could identify him. Then Crowe took over, and explained that he was interested in the disappearance of Mary Carol Maher. He showed Stano the young woman’s photograph, and Stano immediately admitted to having given her a lift. “She was with another girl,” he said, pushing back his chair and placing his left ankle on his right knee. After more conversation—this time about the fact that Stano was an orphan—Crowe again asked what had happened with Mary Carol Maher. Pushing his chair back and crossing his legs, Stano declared that he had driven her to a nightclub called Fannie Farkel’s—Crowe knew that this was one of Mary’s favorite haunts, a place frequented by the young set—but that she had not wanted to go in. Crowe knew that the truth was probably the opposite; Stano had not wanted to mix with a younger crowd (he was twenty-eight). He asked Stano if he had tried to “get inside her pants.” Stano pulled the chair up to the desk and growled, “Yeah.”

  “But she didn’t want to?”

  “No!”

  Crowe recalled being told by Mary’s mother that her daughter had, on one occasion, “beaten the hell” out of two men who had tried to “get fresh.”

  “She could hit pretty hard, couldn’t she?”

  “You’re goddam right she could,” said Stano angrily.

  “So you hit her?”

  Stano pushed back his chair and crossed his legs. “No, I let her out. I haven’t seen the bitch since.”

  Crowe now had the advantage. As he pressed Stano about the young woman’s resistance, it visibly revived the anger he had felt at the time. And when Crowe asked: “You got pretty mad, didn’t you?” Stano snorted: “You’re damn right I did. I got so goddam mad I stabbed her just as hard as I could.” Then he immediately pushed back his chair, crossed his legs, and withdrew his statement. But when Crowe pressed him to tell how he stabbed her, he pulled his chair forward again and described stabbing her backhanded in the chest, then, as she tried to scramble out of the door, slashing her thigh and stabbing her twice in the back—Crowe had already noted these injuries when he first examined the body. After this admission, Stano drove with Crowe to the dump behind the airport, and pointed out where he had hidden the body.

  It was after Stano had signed a confession to killing Mary Carol Maher that one of Crowe’s fellow detectives showed him a photograph of a missing black prostitute, Toni Van Haddocks, and asked: “See if he knows anything about her.” When Crowe placed the photograph in front of Stano, Stano immediately sat back in his chair and placed his left ankle on his right knee. He denied knowing the woman. Two weeks later, on April 15, 1980, a resident of Holly Hill, near Daytona Beach, found a skull in his back garden. Local policemen discovered the scene of the murder in a nearby wooded area—bones scattered around by animals. When Crowe went to visit the scene, he immediately noted that four low branches had been torn off pine trees surrounding the clearing, and recognized Stano’s method.

  Back at headquarters, he again showed Stano the photograph, asking: “How often do you pick up black girls?” Stano pushed back his chair. “I hate them bastards.” “But you picked her up.” Stano stared at the photograph, his legs still crossed. “That’s the only one I ever picked up.” It was at this point that Crowe realized that he was talking to a multiple killer.

  Stano persisted in denying that he had killed Toni Van Haddocks. Crowe stood up to leave the room. “I know you did because you left your signature there.” Stano stared with amazement, and then called Crowe back: “Hey, wait. Did I really leave my name there?” Realizing that he had virtually admitted to killing her, he went on to confess to the crime. But these two murders, he insisted, were the only ones he had ever committed.

  Crowe did not believe him. Now he knew that Stano was a ritualistic killer, and that ritualistic killers often kill many times. There had been no other recent disappearances in Daytona Beach, so Crowe studied the missing persons files and records of past murders. He found many. In January 1976, the body of Nancy Heard, a hotel maid, had been discovered in Tomoka State Park, near Ormond Beach, where Stano lived. Reports said the death scene looked “arranged.” She had been last seen alive hitchhiking. Ramona Neal, an eighteen-year-old from Georgia, had been found in the same park in May 1976, her body concealed by branches. In Bradford County, a hundred miles away, an unknown young woman was found concealed by tree branches, while in Titusville, to the south, another young woman had been found under branches—a young woman who had last been seen hitchhiking on Atlantic Avenue in Daytona Beach. When Stano had moved to Florida in 1973—from New Jersey—he had lived in Stuart. A check with the Stuart police revealed that there had been several unsolved murders of young women there during the period of Stano’s residence.

  Stano’s adoptive parents told Crowe that they had fostered Gerald even after a New York child psychiatrist had labeled him “unadoptable.” He had been taken away from his natural mother as a result of “horrible neglect.” In all probability, Stano had never received even that minimum of affection in the first days of his life to form any kind of human bond. He had never shown any affection, and he had been compulsively dishonest from the beginning, stealing, cheating, and lying. He preferred associating with younger children—a sign of low self-esteem—and preferred women who were deformed or crippled—he had once impregnated a retarded young woman. He had married a compulsive overeater, but the marriage quickly broke down.

  Crowe traced Stano’s wife, who was living with her parents in a house of spectacular untidiness—Crowe admitted that it reminded him of the home of the TV character Archie Bunker, who spends most of his time in his undershirt. There Stano’s ex-wife answered questions as she rested her huge breasts on the kitchen table. Stano’s sexual demands had been normal, as was only to be expected “with his itty-bitty penis.” But he had a peculiar habit of going out late at night, and returning, exhausted, in the early hours of the morning.

  What had now emerged about Stano convinced Crowe of the need for further psychological profiling, and he called in an Ormond Beach psychologist, Dr. Ann MacMillan, who had impressed police with her profile of mass killer Carl Gregory. The result of tests on Stano revealed a psychological profile almost identical with those of Charles Manson and David Berkowitz; she believed that it meant that his crimes were predictable, and that he belonged to a group that might be labeled “born killers.”

  Over many months, Crowe’s interrogation of Stano continued. At some point, Stano realized that Crowe was reading his physical signals, and changed them. But his compulsive nature made it inevitable that he developed new ones, and Crowe soon learned to read these, too.

  Eventually, Stano confessed to killing thirty-four women; then, typically, he declared that this had been a stratagem to make him appear insane. His memory of his crimes was remarkably detailed—for example, he was able to describe a prostitute whom he had picked up in Daytona Beach as wearing a brown leather jacket, brown shoes, and a shirt with an inscription: “Do it in the dirt.” When he led them to the woman’s skeleton—covered with branches—the police found that it was wearing precisely these clothes. With plea-bargaining, Stano finally agreed to admit to six murders. On September 2, 1981, he was sentenced to three consecutive terms of twenty-five years—seventy-five years in all—and was taken to the Florida state prison. But a later trial resulted in a death sentence.

  One of the most widely publicized cases of these early years of profiling began in Anchorage, Alaska, with the disappearance of a number of “exotic” dancers. In Anchorage, the temperature is so low that it is impractical for prostitutes to walk the streets. The majority of them solve the problem by working in topless ba
rs and making appointments with clients for after hours. Few people notice when such a girl vanishes, although bar owners were often puzzled when their dancers failed to show up to collect their pay.

  The lonely, frigid countryside outside Anchorage, Alaska, proved to be the perfect setting for Robert Hansen’s deadly games. If a prostitute did not satisfy him, he would take her to a remote spot, release her, and then hunt her down as if she were a game animal. (Shawn Clark/Shutterstock)

  When, in 1980, building workers on Eklutna Road discovered a shallow grave, which had been partly excavated by bears, containing the half-eaten body of a woman, it seemed likely that she was one of the missing women. Because the advanced state of decay made it impossible to identify the body, she became known in the records as “Eklutna Annie.”

  Two years later, on September 12, 1982, hunters found another shallow grave on the bank of the Knik River, not far from Anchorage; this time it was possible to identify the body in it as twenty-three-year-old Sherry Morrow, a dancer who had vanished the previous November. She had been shot three times, and shell casings near the grave indicated that the weapon had been a high-velocity hunting rifle that fires slugs—a .223 Ruger Mini-14. Here, once again, the investigation reached a dead end. It was impossible to interview every owner of such a rifle. An odd feature of the case was that the clothes found in the grave bore no bullet holes, indicating that the woman had been naked when she was killed.

  A year later, on September 2, 1983, another grave was found on the bank of the Knik River; the woman in it had also been shot with a .223 Ruger Mini-14. The victim was identified as Paula Goulding, an out-of-work secretary who had found herself a job as an exotic dancer in a topless bar. She had started work on April 17, 1983, and had failed to return eight days later, leaving her paycheck uncollected. The bar owner commented that he had been reluctant to hire her because she had obviously been a “nice girl,” who had only resorted to dancing because she was desperate for money. Again, there were no clues to who might have killed her.