Criminal Minds (21 page)

Michael was sent to a reformatory, having been deemed to be under his father’s control at the time of the crimes, and was eventually released into the custody of foster parents. He changed his name and moved away from the area. Joseph Kallinger’s behavior grew erratic, even for him. He stabbed and tried to strangle another inmate, went on a hunger strike, and said that he wanted to slaughter every person on Earth and become God. These activities resulted in his transfer from prison to the Fairview Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He remained there until March 26, 1996, when he died of a seizure.

Compared to Joseph Kallinger, even the fictional Bill Jarvis comes across as relatively well balanced.

 

 

THE UNSUB IN THE EPISODE
“Jones” (218) is a woman—a rarity in the world of
Criminal Minds
and in the ranks of multiple murderers in general (though not unheard of, as I’ll detail in the next chapter). While the types of female killers are being discussed in the show, one of the people mentioned is Sante Kimes, who, it’s said, was cold and calculating and preyed on men for money.

Kimes, born Sante Louise Singhrs on July 24, 1934, spent most of her life on the far side of the law. After the family moved from Oklahoma to Los Angeles, her father abandoned his wife and children, and Sante’s mother turned to the streets, making her living as a prostitute. Sante started out small, with shoplifting, petty theft, and forgery. After high school, she married and divorced twice, bearing a son whom she left to be raised by his father.

After adding prostitution and auto theft to her repertoire, she fell in with Kenneth Kimes, a con man who had already put together a sizable ten-million-dollar bankroll. They had a son, Kenny, and the family worked its way across the country, amassing more wealth. Sante was beautiful, sometimes mistaken for Elizabeth Taylor, and one of her more audacious cons with her husband involved slipping uninvited into a White House reception during the Nixon administration, to create the illusion of contacts in high places.

Sante did her first serious prison stint for slavery. She had imported young women from Mexico with promises of jobs, then kept them locked in her houses to serve as cleaning ladies. Some got out and risked deportation to go to the police. Kenneth cut a deal and got a three-year suspended sentence and a fine, but Sante got five years and served three. When she got out, she was determined never to go to prison again, and she had decided that the way to do it was to never leave witnesses.

In 1990, she might have put that philosophy into practice. A family lawyer burned down one of the Kimeses’ homes for the insurance money and then blabbed about it. When he agreed to talk to federal investigators, Kenneth and Sante took him on a vacation to Costa Rica, from which he never returned.

When Sante’s son, Kenny, was old enough to go to college, Sante stopped sleeping with her husband and started sleeping with Kenny, living off-campus with him in Santa Barbara. Kenneth died and Sante had him cremated, but she didn’t report his death so that she could keep spending his fortune. He had never updated his will to include her—and there is some question about the legality of their marriage, since there is a suspicion that Sante had simply forged the license.

She lured one of Kenneth’s real estate cronies into her scams, but when he objected to having his name forged on a $280,000 mortgage document and threatened to go to the authorities, he disappeared. His body turned up in a Dumpster near the Los Angeles airport. Sante and Kenny took off in a limo, scamming their way across the country.

In Florida they learned of a wealthy New York socialite named Irene Silverman, who ran a sort of Manhattan bed-and-breakfast for the rich and fabulous. Kenny showed up at her door, dropped the name of a friend of Silverman’s, and flashed a big wad of cash. He was in. A few days later, Sante arrived, posing as his assistant. On July 4, 1998, with the household staff off for the holiday, Kenny strangled Silverman and crammed her body into a suitcase. He and Sante dumped it at a New Jersey construction site, then called a friend in Las Vegas who had done odd jobs for them and invited him to come and run Silverman’s Manhattan operation for them.

But their friend had already been turned by the feds, and he reported the call. When he arrived to meet with Sante and Kenny, g-men moved in and arrested the pair. After a showy trial, Sante was convicted of 58 separate crimes and sentenced to 120 years in prison. Kenny, convicted of 60 crimes, got 125 years. Another murder trial followed, at which Kenny confessed and implicated his mother. Each wound up with an additional life sentence tacked on to their existing sentences. Sante is serving out her life term in New York, and Kenny is serving his in California. Keeping a continent between a murderous mother and son seems like a good idea.

 

 

SOMETIMES BROTHERS MURDER
, together or—more rarely—separately. Ronald and Reginald Kray, mentioned in “Lo-Fi” (320), were twins, born ten minutes apart on October 24, 1933. They grew up to be the undisputed crime bosses of London’s East End during the 1950s and 1960s. As celebrity nightclub owners they fraternized with Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, George Raft, and other actors. They committed at least two murders themselves, of gangland figures George Cornell and Jack “the Hat” McVitie, and were most likely responsible for several other murders that had been committed on their instructions. Ronnie died in prison on March 17, 1995, whereas Reggie was released on compassionate grounds in August 2000, shortly before his death from cancer.

 

 

Henry Grace, also known as Professor Rothschild in the episode “Masterpiece” (408), seeks revenge on the BAU because it caught his brother, William, a serial killer. In real life, motives aren’t always so noble.

Consider Larry and Danny Ranes. Their father was a gas station attendant—an alcoholic who beat his four children and his wife, humiliated his boys, and finally abandoned the family when Larry, the youngest boy, was nine. Both boys were in trouble early and often, fighting with each other and eventually taking their rage out on others.

On June 4, 1964, Larry Ranes, nineteen, admitted to an acquaintance that he had killed people. He planned to confess to a priest and then kill himself. The acquaintance alerted the police, and when they arrived, Larry readily admitted to murdering a man who had given him a ride on a lonely country road. Larry had robbed him and locked him in his own trunk, and when the man started banging on the hood, trying to alert people to his presence, Larry had pulled over and shot him in the head.

Once Larry had started confessing he kept going, admitting to killing a couple of gas station attendants in Michigan and Kentucky and another man who had given him a ride in Death Valley, California. In prison, Larry, who said he hated his name and everything it represented, changed his name to Monk Steppenwolf.

Danny Ranes wouldn’t begin to kill until after Larry had already confessed to murder and been sentenced to life in prison. Danny’s first homicide was in March 1972, when he was twenty-eight. He grabbed, bound, and raped a woman outside a shopping center, leaving her seventeen-month-old son wandering around by himself. Danny, who worked at a gas station himself at that time, enlisted a young partner named Brent Koster in more abductions, rapes, and murders. Eventually Koster turned on Danny, implicating him and testifying against him. Danny received five life sentences for his crimes, but the Supreme Court later set three aside on appeal. He continues to insist upon his innocence, despite Koster’s testimony and his multiple convictions.

 

 

In “Children of the Dark” (304), profiler Spencer Reid points out that it’s not unusual for unsubs to be related, and he uses as an example that “the Carr brothers perpetrated the Wichita Massacre.”

The Wichita Massacre occurred on the snowy night of December 14, 2000. Five friends in their twenties (three men and two women) were in their beds, when two armed men—the Carr brothers, Reginald, twenty-two, and Jonathan, twenty—invaded the house sometime after eleven o’clock, killing the victims’ dog. The brothers made their victims undress, forced the women to perform oral and manual sex on each other, made the men have sex (or try to) with the women, and raped the women themselves. They took them one at a time to an ATM machine and made them withdraw cash for the brothers.

Finally, they squeezed the men into the trunk of a car, put the women in the backseat, and drove them to an empty, snow-blanketed soccer field. There the victims were made to kneel while the Carr brothers shot them. One woman, whose identity has never been made public because of the nature of the crimes perpetrated against her, survived when her hair clip deflected the bullet that would have killed her. Naked, she ran through snow and subfreezing weather for more than a mile before finding help.

The next day, as word of the horrific massacre spread throughout the city, some neighbors reported seeing a truck that looked like one stolen from one of the victims parked outside an apartment building, and a new TV set was being carried from the truck into the Carrs’ apartment. The police surrounded the building, and Reginald surrendered. Jonathan was caught running from a girlfriend’s house after her mother turned him in.

The Carr brothers’ crime spree had actually begun on December 8, when they committed an armed robbery against one victim and shot another, mortally wounding her, when she tried to escape in her car.

Although the brothers tried to finger each other in court, they were both convicted of multiple counts of kidnapping, rape, theft, and murder.

Their upbringing came into focus during the penalty part of the trial. The boys had been raised by a distant, emotionally aloof mother who sometimes beat them with electrical cords. Their father was violent as well, and he sexually abused their sister. After he abandoned the family, their mother had boyfriends who sexually abused both boys. The brothers were in frequent trouble in school, when they bothered attending.

Despite these factors, both men were sentenced to death. When the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the state’s death-penalty statute was unconstitutional, executions were halted in that state, and as a result both Carrs remain in prison.

 

 

ANOTHER TYPE
of family-oriented crime sometimes comes into play on
Criminal Minds
. “Family annihilators” are people who murder whole families at once—a crime made all the more horrible when it’s committed by a member of that family. Recurring villain George Foyet is described as a family annihilator. In the episode “Children of the Dark” (304), the same one that mentions the Carr brothers, reference is made to family annihilator John List.

On November 9, 1971, forty-six-year-old John Emil List waited until his children left for school and then put out a note for the milkman, canceling delivery. While his wife, Helen, ate her toast in the kitchen of their nineteen-room mansion in Westfield, New Jersey, List shot her in the jaw. Leaving her dead on the floor, he went up to his mother’s third-floor apartment, burst in, and shot her just above the left eye. Her knees broke when she fell. List shoved her onto a carpet runner and pulled her into a storage closet.