Criminal Minds (14 page)

There was nothing in Berdella’s background to indicate that he would become a sexual sadist and a serial killer. His father’s death when Berdella was sixteen was devastating, and he’d had homosexual feelings from a young age. Berdella’s explanation—that his first homicide was a mistake, an unanticipated side effect of drugs he had employed to keep his victim compliant—was unconvincing. In the end, he confessed to six murders. There were more people shown in his photographs, as many as twenty, and other men were missing who might have run across Berdella, but he refused to admit to any more victims than the six.

Like other psychopathic sex offenders, Berdella was drawn to manipulation, domination, and control. He wanted full-time, live-in sex slaves (to the point that he experimented with injecting Drano directly into the eyes and the voice boxes of his victims, believing that if they were blind and unable to speak, they would be easier to keep). He claimed to have been partly inspired by the film version of the John Fowles novel
The Collector
, in which the protagonist abducts a woman and keeps her prisoner in his home. That novel also figured prominently in the crimes of serial killers Christopher Wilder and Charles Ng.

Berdella died of a heart attack in prison in 1992, after serving just four years of his life sentence. His death was ruled natural and never investigated.

 

 

WESTLEY ALLAN DODD
was another offender who kept records of his crimes, in the form of Polaroid photos and a diary. By the time he murdered his first two boys—brothers Billy and Cole Neer, ten and eleven years old, respectively—in September 1989, he had been exposing himself to and molesting children for fourteen years. But his fantasies of murder had become too powerful to resist. He went to David Douglas Park in Vancouver, Washington, that day with the specific intention of finding a boy to kill.

Instead, he found two. He took them into the woods, molested them, and stabbed them. Billy was discovered, but too late; he died of his wounds. Cole was already dead.

In his diary that night, Dodd, then twenty-eight years old, wrote, “I think I got more of a high out of killing than molesting. . . . I must go find another child.”

Dodd, like many pedophiles, was a loner with poor self-esteem. The first children he molested, when he himself was only fourteen, were his own younger cousins. Many molesters prey on children who trust them, as in the case of six-year-old Katie Jacobs, in the episode “Seven Seconds” (305), who is regularly molested by her uncle. Dodd continued to put himself into situations where he would come into contact with children—as a camp counselor and a babysitter, for example.

Periodically arrested, he was always sentenced to light punishment and counseling, which he attended even though he knew he would continue to do the only thing he truly enjoyed.

On October 29, 1989, he took his next victim, four-year-old Lee Iseli, from a public park in Portland, Oregon. Dodd lured the boy with promises of fun and money, then took him home. For hours, he molested Iseli, shooting pictures and recording his experiences in his diary. “He suspects nothing now,” Dodd wrote that night. “Will probably wait until morning to kill him. That way his body will be fairly fresh for experiments after work. I’ll suffocate him in his sleep when I wake up for work (if I sleep).”

In the morning, he strangled Iseli, then hanged him in a closet and took more pictures. Later, Dodd dumped Iseli’s body into Vancouver Lake.

The next boy he grabbed turned out to be his last. At a movie theater, Dodd followed a six-year-old into the bathroom. The boy screamed, and Dodd grabbed him and raced to his car. Some of the theater staff saw him open a yellow Ford Pinto, but as he fumbled with his keys, the boy escaped and ran back inside. The boy’s mother’s boyfriend raced outside and found the Pinto, which had stalled in the street. The boyfriend detained Dodd until the police arrived.

Once Dodd was in custody, he readily confessed. He claimed he had to kill the Neer brothers once he had molested them, because they would have reported him. In the powerful episode “Profiler, Profiled” (212), Derek Morgan’s onetime mentor Carl Buford kills boys for a similar reason: to cover up the fact that he has been abusing children for years.

Sentenced to death, Dodd refused to appeal his case. “I must be executed before I have an opportunity to escape,” he said. “If I do escape, I promise you I will kill prison guards if I have to and rape and enjoy every minute of it.” Washington law required that the condemned be offered the choice of lethal injection or hanging, and Dodd requested to be hanged, “because that’s the way Lee Iseli died.”

The state obliged him, and on January 5, 1993, at the age of thirty-one, Dodd became the first person to be legally hanged in the United States since 1965. He admitted to having molested approximately 250 children. The Justice Department reports that the “average” child molester commits 380 acts of molestation in a lifetime. Dodd was well on his way to that mark.

 

 

IN THE CRIMINAL MINDS
episode “In Heat” (317), prison guard David Fitzgerald employs the same sort of discipline he uses at work on his son, Steven, trying to force the young man to deny his homosexuality. It doesn’t work, and Steven kills a number of gay men around Miami.

In real life, Daniel Conahan’s parents might not have tried physical abuse, but when their teenage son admitted to being gay, they weren’t happy about it. They sent Daniel to several psychiatrists to try to “cure” him. Daniel didn’t appreciate being told that his sexuality was a disease that could be cured.

His homicidal nature probably couldn’t be cured, either. Conahan, called the Hog Trail Killer, took gay men out into the woods near Punta Gorda, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, promising them money for posing for nude photographs. The path he took them down was a wild hog trail, rarely traveled by human beings. Once they were there, he posed the men in bondage situations, tied to a tree, then he strangled them, and in several cases he cut off their genitals. Some of the men were also raped.

Conahan was arrested after other men reported that he had approached them with similar offers, and one man said that Conahan had actually tied him to a tree and tried to strangle him with a rope but had run out of time and had to leave the job unfinished.

Prosecutors charged Conahan with only one homicide. In his 1999 trial, Conahan pleaded not guilty but was convicted and sentenced to death. He has appealed that sentence while continuing to maintain his innocence; however, his story has changed, to the point of claiming that the victim’s death was the result of sex play gone awry. The remains of other men have continued to turn up in the woods of the Gulf Coast, including eight near Fort Myers in 2007. The authorities are investigating Conahan in connection with those new bodies, but we may never know how many people he really killed.

 

 

Although the psychoses of sexually motivated serial killers are unique to each individual, the basic thrust behind all of these perpetrators is the same. Somewhere in life they develop a fantasy that conflates sex and death. As time goes on, instead of the fantasy being outgrown, it takes on more force and power, to the point that these damaged individuals are unwilling or unable to deny it. They act out the fantasy as closely as they can.

However, fantasy is perfect in a way that real life never is, so the act they commit is not quite right. Living out the fantasy quells the desire for a while, but even through the cooling-off period, it doesn’t leave their minds. The killers ponder it, wondering what they might have done differently to make the act more like the imagination. And so they try it again, but once again it isn’t quite true to how they’ve constructed it mentally.

At the same time, usually with the use of trophies they’ve kept from each murder—photographs, diaries, personal possessions, body parts—they relive the best parts of it in their heads, once again achieving sexual release. But reliving it only feeds the fantasy, so they keep at it, over and over, until they are captured or killed—or, in a very few cases, like Ed Kemper’s, until they murder the person at whom the rage aspect of their fantasy is truly directed, and they give themselves up.

Also key to these fantasies is that the killers are without empathy. They not only can’t understand how other people feel, they don’t care to find out. To them, other people are useful only as props for their fantasies, and their deaths aren’t tragedies but are necessary elements of those fantasies. The only serial killers who factor the feelings of others into their mental equations at all are the sexual sadists, whose pleasure comes from the suffering they inflict.

It’s crucial to profilers to be able to figure out as much about each killer’s fantasy life as they can, because that’s the key to determining what sort of person committed the murders. Profiling can never lead to a specific individual; it can only narrow the scope of a search. The solution to the fantasy riddle is in the killer’s individual signature.

For instance, Daniel Conahan’s signature was tying nude men to trees and strangling them. He achieved sexual gratification through these acts, and sometimes through the rape of the men and the removal of their genitals. These things aren’t necessary aspects of murder—he could just as easily have clubbed them over the head or shot them—but they were necessary to his fantasy.

Conahan was born in 1954; when his fellow Floridian Gerard Schaefer was tying women to trees in remote areas and murdering them, he was a young man, and it would not be at all surprising to learn that Conahan, still struggling with his sexual identity, paid close attention to the news reports of Schaefer’s crimes.

Schaefer’s victimology was different from Conahan’s, because his sexual preference was for women. But the way he treated the girls who made the news was almost too similar to Conahan’s method to be coincidental. Conahan’s fantasies took shape at an early age, and as is the case with most sexual predators, his fantasies determined the ultimate shape of his murders.

THERE ARE SERIAL KILLERS
who stay home and become closely associated with a specific location or region: Son of Sam, the Green River Killer, the Atlanta Child Murderer, and the Boston Strangler come to mind.

Then there are those who take their act on the road, like Henry Lee Lucas and Mike DeBardeleben. This chapter takes a closer look at the traveling road shows of serial-killer history, beginning with the poster boy for the breed—in fact, the person most Americans probably think of when they think of serial killers at all.

 

 

TED BUNDY’S
name is mentioned in ten episodes of
Criminal
Minds
. It first arises in the fourth episode of
Criminal Minds
, “Plain Sight” (104). It’s brought up again in “Unfinished Business” (115), “Charm and Harm” (120), “The Boogeyman (206), “The Last Word” (209), “The Big Game” (214), “Penelope” (309), “Limelight” (313), “Omnivore” (418), and “The Slave of Duty” (510). With more mentions on the series than any other criminal, Bundy is the guy you’re talking about when you’ re talking serial killers.