Journey into Darkness (5 page)

At that point he shook his head, smiled, then turned to us and said, “You fucking guys are crazy. It must be a fine line, separates you from me.”

Feeling the way I do about victims and their families, this is always a bitter and extremely difficult persona for me to assume. But it’s necessary, and after I did it with Speck I was able to start penetrating the macho facade and achieve an understanding of how his mind worked and what made him escalate that night in 1966 from a simple burglary to rape and mass murder.

When I went to Attica to interview David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” who had killed six young men and women in cars in New York City during a year-long reign of terror beginning in July of 1976, he held to his well-publicized story that his neighbor’s three-thousand-year-old dog had made him commit the crimes. I knew enough about the specific details of the case and I’d seen enough of his methodology that I was sure the killings were not the result of such a complex delusional system. I felt this way not because I made it up, but because of what I’d already learned in interviews we’d previously conducted and analyzed.

So once Berkowitz started giving me the song and dance about the dog, I was able to say, “Hey, David, knock off the bullshit. The dog had nothing to do with it.”

He laughed and quickly admitted I was right. This cleared the way to the heart of his methodology, which was the aspect I most wanted to hear about and learn from. And we did learn. Berkowitz, who had started out his antisocial career as a fire-starter, told us that he was on the hunt nightly for victims of opportunity who met his criteria. When he couldn’t find them, which was most nights, he would gravitate back to the scenes of his previous crimes to masturbate
and relive the joy and satisfaction, the power of life and death over another human being, just as Bittaker and Norris had with their audiotapes and Lake and Ng did with their home movies.

Ed Kemper is a six-foot-nine giant of a man who probably has the highest IQ of any killer I’ve ever encountered. Fortunately for me and the rest of us, where I encountered him was in the secure visitors’ room of the California State Medical Facility at Vacaville, where Kemper was serving out multiple life terms. As a young teen he had spent some time in a mental hospital for killing both his grandparents on their farm in northern California. He had gone on as an adult to terrorize the area around the University of California at Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, where he decapitated and mutilated at least six coeds before getting himself focused and butchering his own mother, Clarnell, the real object of his resentment.

I found Kemper to be bright, sensitive, and intuitive. And unlike most killers, he understands enough about himself to know that he shouldn’t be let out. He gave us a number of important insights into how an intelligent killer’s mind works.

He explained to me, with insight rare for a violent criminal, that he dismembered the bodies after death not because of any sexual kick, but simply to delay identification and keep investigators off his trail as long as possible.

From other “experts” we got additional nuggets of information and insight which were to prove tremendously valuable in devising strategies to catch UNSUBs. For instance, the old cliché about killers returning to the scenes of their crimes turns out to be true in many instances, though not necessarily for the reasons we thought. True, a certain personality of killer under certain circumstances does feel remorse and returns to the crime scene or the victim’s grave site to beg forgiveness. If we think we’re dealing with that sort of UNSUB, it can help dictate our actions. Some killers return for different reasons—not because they feel bad about a crime but because they feel good about it. Knowing this can help us catch them, too. Some inject themselves directly into an investigation to keep on top of things, chatting up cops or coming forward as witnesses. When I worked
on the Atlanta Child Murders in 1981, I was convinced from what I saw that the UNSUB would actually approach the police with offers to help. When Wayne Williams was apprehended after he’d thrown the body of his latest victim into the Chattahoochee River (as we predicted he would), we learned that this police buff had offered his services to the investigators as a crime scene photographer.

And others we interviewed told us that they had taken a companion, generally a woman, on a trip to the general area of the crime, then made some excuse to leave her long enough to actually revisit the scene. One killer told us of taking his sometimes girlfriend on a camping trip, then leaving her briefly with the excuse that he had to relieve himself in the woods. That was when he would go back to the body dump site.

The prison interviews helped us see and understand the wide variety of motivation and behavior among serial killers and rapists. But we saw some striking common denominators as well. Most of them come from broken or dysfunctional homes. They’re generally products of some type of abuse, whether it’s physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, or a combination. We tend to see at a very early age the formation of what we refer to as the “homicidal triangle” or “homicidal triad.” This includes enuresis—or bedwetting—at an inappropriate age, starting fires, and cruelty to small animals or other children. Very often, we found, at least two of these three traits were present, if not all three. By the time we see his first serious crime, he’s generally somewhere in his early to mid-twenties. He has low selfesteem and blames the rest of the world for his situation. He already has a bad track record, whether he’s been caught at it or not. It may be breaking and entering, it may have been rape or rape attempts. You may see a dishonorable discharge from the military, since these types tend to have a real problem with any type of authority. Throughout their lives, they believe that they’ve been victims: they’ve been manipulated, they’ve been dominated, they’ve been controlled by others. But here, in this one situation, fueled by fantasy, this inadequate, ineffectual nobody can manipulate and dominate a victim of his own; he can be in control. He can orchestrate whatever he wants to do to the victim. He
can decide whether this victim should live or die, how the victim should die. It’s up to him; he’s finally calling the shots.

Understanding the common background is very important in understanding a serial killer’s motivation. After spending many hours with Charles Manson at San Quentin, we concluded that what motivated him in inspiring among his followers the butchery of Sharon Tate and her friends one night in Los Angeles in 1969 and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the next was not the apocalyptic blood lust of “Helter Skelter” as had been widely thought. Born the illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old prostitute who had grown up with a fanatically religious aunt and sadistic uncle until he began living on the streets at age ten and in and out of prisons thereafter, Manson craved fame, fortune, and recognition, just like the rest of us. What he really wanted to be was a rock star. Short of that, he could set himself up as a guru and would settle for a free ride through life with susceptible followers providing the food, shelter, and drugs. His “family” of social misfits and middle-class dropouts provided him with enough opportunity for manipulation, domination, and control. To keep them in line and interested, he preached apocalypse, an ultimate social and race war symbolized by the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter” in which he alone would emerge victorious.

Everything was okay with Charlie until August 9, 1969, when Manson follower and would-be usurping leader Charles “Tex” Watson broke into the Beverly Hills home of director Roman Pølanski and his eight months pregnant wife, movie star Sharon Tate. After the brutal slaughter of five people (Polanski was not home at the time), Manson realized he had to assume control, make it seem that he had actually intended these murders as the beginning of Helter Skelter, and direct his family into another killing, or else he would lose credibility and surrender his leadership to Watson. Then his free ride would be over. In Manson’s case, the violence began not when he began his manipulation, domination, and control, but when he began
losing
control.

All that we learned from Manson doesn’t mean he’s any less a monster than what we thought, it only means he turns out to be a somewhat different type of monster. Understanding the differences gives us insight into his type of crime
and, equally important, his type of charisma. What we learned from Manson we were later able to apply to an understanding of other cults, such as the one led by the Reverend Jim Jones, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians at Waco, the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, the Freemen in Montana, and the entire militia movement.

Through our interview and research efforts we came up with a number of observations which have had significant bearing on our ability to analyze crimes and predict behavior of criminals. Traditionally, investigators have given great weight to a perpetrator’s modus operandi, or MO. This is the way the perpetrator goes about committing a crime—whether he uses a knife or gun, or the method he uses to abduct a victim.

Theodore “Ted” Bundy, who was executed in 1989 in the electric chair of the Florida State Penitentiary at Starke with my colleague Bill Hagmaier not far away, was handsome, resourceful, and charming, well-liked by those around him and the model of a “good catch.” He was a perfect example of the reality that serial killers don’t often look like monsters. They blend in with the rest of us. He was one of the most notorious serial killers in American history, a man who abducted, raped, and murdered young women all along the way from Seattle to Tallahassee, having developed a ruse in which he would have his arm in a sling and removable cast, making him appear disabled. He would then ask the assistance of his intended victim in moving some heavy object. When her guard was down, he would whack her. Novelist Thomas Harris used this particular MO in creating the character of Buffalo Bill in
The Silence of the Lambs
.

Additional aspects of the character were taken from other serial killers with whom we acquainted Harris during a visit he made to Quantico before writing his previous novel,
Red Dragon
. Buffalo Bill kept his victims in a pit dug in his basement. In real life, this is what Gary Heidnick did with the women he captured in Philadelphia. Buffalo Bill’s penchant for using the skins of women to create a female “costume” for himself came from Ed Gein, the 1950s killer in the small Wisconsin farming community of Plainfield. Harris wasn’t the first to borrow the idea, though. Robert Bloch
had already used parts of it in his own memorable novel,
Psycho
, made into the film classic by Alfred Hitchcock.

What’s important to note here is that while using an arm cast and sling to abduct women is a modus operandi, killing and flaying women to use their skins is not. The term I coined to describe that was “signature,” because like a signature, it is a personal detail that is unique to the individual. The MO is what the offender does to effect the crime; the signature, in a sense, is
why
he does it: the thing that fulfills him emotionally. Sometimes there can be a fine line between MO and signature, depending on the reason why it was done. Of the three aspects of the Buffalo Bill composite, the cast is definitely MO, the skinning is signature, and the pit could be either, depending on the situation. If he keeps his captives in the pit as a means of holding and controlling them, then I would classify that as MO. If he gets some emotional satisfaction out of holding them down there, of seeing them degraded and pleading in fear, then that would fall under signature.

I have found that signature is a much more reliable guide to the behavior of serial offenders than MO. The reason for this is that signature is static, while MO is dynamic; that is, it evolves as the offender progresses in his criminal career and learns from his own experience. If he can come up with a better means of abducting a victim or transporting or disposing of a body, he’ll do it. What he won’t change is the emotional reason he’s committing the crime in the first place.

Clearly, in a routine crime such as bank robbery, MO is the only thing that matters. The police will want to know how he’s pulling off the job. The reason he’s doing it is obvious—he wants the money. But in a sexually based serial crime—and virtually all serial murders are sexually based in one sense or another—signature analysis may be critical, particularly in being able to link a series of crimes together.

Steven Pennell, the “I-40 Killer” in Delaware, lured prostitutes into his specially equipped van where he raped, tortured, and murdered them. His methods of getting the women into his van varied; that was his MO. What stayed consistent was the torture; that was his signature, and that is what I testified to at his trial. That was what gave him
emotional satisfaction. A defense attorney might claim that various cases are not related and do not represent the work of the same subject because the instruments used or the methods of torture might have been different. But this is insignificant. What is significant is the torture itself, and that remained consistent and static.

One final note here: you’ve probably noticed that whenever I mention serial killers, I always refer to them as “he.” This isn’t just a matter of form or syntactical convenience. For reasons we only partially understand, virtually all multiple killers are male. There’s been a lot of research and speculation into it. Part of it is probably as simple as the fact that people with higher levels of testosterone (i.e., men) tend to be more aggressive than people with lower levels (i.e., women). On a psychological level, our research seems to show that while men from abusive backgrounds often come out of the experience hostile and abusive to others, women from similar backgrounds tend to direct the rage and abusiveness inward and punish themselves rather than others. While a man might kill, hurt, or rape others as a way of dealing with his rage, a woman is more likely to channel it into something that would hurt primarily herself, such as drug or alcohol abuse, prostitution, or suicide attempts. I can’t think of a single case of a woman acting out a sexualized murder on her own.