Mindhunter (12 page)

As time went on, other perspectives about the job began to evolve. The sniper training and SWAT team exercises had lost their appeal. With my background and interest in psychology—I had my master’s by this time—the challenging part of the work, it seemed to me, was trying to manage the situation before it got to the shooting stage. The SAC recommended me for a two-week hostage-negotiation course at the FBI Academy in Quantico, which had only been in operation for a couple of years.

There, under the tutelage of such legendary agents as Howard Teten and Pat Mullany, I got my first real exposure to what was already known then as behavioral science. And that changed my career.

Behavioral Science or BS?

I hadn’t been back to Quantico since new-agent training almost five years before, and in many ways the place had changed. For one thing, by spring of 1975, the FBI Academy had become a complete and self-contained facility, carved out of a chunk of the U.S. Marine base in the beautiful, gently rolling Virginia woodlands about an hour south of Washington.

But some things hadn’t changed. The tactical units still commanded all the prestige and status, and of these, the Firearms Unit was the star. It was headed by George Zeiss, the special agent who had been sent to bring James Earl Ray back from England to face American justice after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Zeiss was a huge, powerful bear of a man who broke handcuffs with his bare hands as a parlor trick. One time, some of the guys on the range took a pair and soldered the chain, then gave them to Zeiss to do his thing. He twisted so hard, he snapped his wrist and had to be in a cast for weeks.

Hostage negotiation was taught by the Behavioral Science Unit, a group of between seven and nine special agent instructors. Psychology and the "soft sciences" were never held in much esteem by Hoover and his cohorts, so until he died, this was something of a "back room" endeavor.

In fact, much of the FBI at that time, as well as the law enforcement world in general, considered psychology and behavioral science as they applied to criminology to be so much worthless bullshit. While clearly I never felt this way, I had to acknowledge that a lot of what was known and taught in this field had no real relevance to the business of understanding and catching criminals, a circumstance several of us would try to begin to rectify a couple of years later. When I took over as chief of the operational side of the Behavioral Science Unit, I changed the name to the Investigative Support Unit. And when people asked me why, I told them, quite frankly, I wanted to take the BS out of what we were doing.

The BSU, under Unit Chief Jack Pfaff at the time I took my hostage-negotiation training, was dominated by two strong and insightful personalities—Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany. Teten is about six foot four with penetrating eyes behind wire-rim glasses. Though an ex-Marine, he’s a contemplative type—always totally dignified; the model of an intellectual professor. He joined the Bureau in 1962 after serving with the San Leandro, California, Police Department, near San Francisco. In 1969, he began teaching a landmark course called Applied Criminology, which eventually (after Hoover’s death, I suspect) became known as Applied Criminal Psychology. By 1972, Teten had gone up to New York to consult with Dr. James Brussel, the psychiatrist who had cracked the Mad Bomber case, who agreed to personally teach Teten his profiling technique.

Armed with this knowledge, the big breakthrough of Teten’s approach was how much you could learn about criminal behavior and motives by focusing on the evidence of the crime scene. In some ways, everything we’ve done in behavioral science and criminal investigative analysis since then has been based on this.

Pat Mullany always reminded me of a leprechaun. At about five ten, he’s a roly-poly type with a quick wit and high energy level. He came to Quantico in 1972 from the New York Field Office with a degree in psychology. Near the end of his tenure at Quantico, he would distinguish himself by successfully managing very public hostage situations: in Washington, D.C., when the Hanafi Muslim sect took over the B’nai B’rith headquarters, and in Warrensville Heights, Ohio, when Cory Moore, a black Vietnam vet, grabbed a police captain and his secretary right in the station house. Together, Teten and Mullany represented the first wave of modern behavioral science and made a distinct and unforgettable pair.

The other instructors in the BSU also participated in the hostage-negotiation course. These included Dick Ault and Robert Ressler, who’d arrived at Quantico a short time before. If Teten and Mullany constituted the first wave, Ault and Ressler constituted the second, moving the discipline further along as something that could be of real value to police departments throughout the United States and the world. Though at that time we only knew each other as teacher and student, Bob Ressler and I would soon join forces on the serial-killer study that led ultimately to the modern version of what we do.

About fifty guys were in the hostage-negotiation class. In some ways it was more entertaining than informative, but an enjoyable two-week respite from field work. In class, we examined the three basic types of hostage takers: professional criminal, mentally ill, and fanatic. We studied some of the significant phenomena that had arisen out of hostage situations, such as the Stockholm syndrome. Two years before, in 1973, a botched bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, had turned into an agonizing hostage drama for customers and bank employees. Ultimately, the hostages came to identify with their captors and actually assisted them against the police.

We also watched the Sidney Lumet film
Dog Day Afternoon,
which had recently come out, starring Al Pacino as a man who robs a bank to get money for his male lover to undergo a sex-change operation. The film is based on an actual hostage incident in New York City. It was this case, and the protracted negotiations that ensued, that led the FBI to invite Capt. Frank Bolz and Det. Harvey Schlossberg of the NYPD to bring the Academy up to speed on hostage negotiation, an area in which the New York people were the acknowledged national leaders.

We studied the principles of negotiation. Some of the guidelines, such as trying to keep loss of life to a minimum, were obvious stuff. We did have the benefit of audiotapes of actual hostage situations, but it would be years later, when the next generation of instructors came in, before students would be involved in role-playing exercises—the closest you can get in the classroom to hands-on negotiating. It was also somewhat confusing, because a lot of the material had been recycled from the criminal psychology classes and didn’t really fit. For example, they would give us photos and dossiers of child molesters or lust killers and discuss how such a personality would react in a hostage situation. Then there was more firearms training, which was still the big thing at Quantico.

Much of what we eventually came to teach about hostage negotiation was learned not in the classroom from other agents but in the cold crucible of the field. As I mentioned, one of the cases that earned Pat Mullany his reputation was that of Cory Moore. Moore, who had been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, made a number of public demands after taking the Warrensville Heights, Ohio, police captain and his secretary hostage in the captain’s own office. Among them was that all white people leave the earth immediately.

Now, in negotiating strategy, you don’t want to give in to demands if you can possibly help it. Some demands, however, aren’t terribly feasible under any circumstances. This certainly qualified as one of those. The case got so much national attention that the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, offered to speak with Moore and help resolve the situation. While this was certainly well-intentioned on Mr. Carter’s part, and indicative of the willingness he subsequently demonstrated for attempting to settle seemingly intractable conflicts around the world, this is not good negotiating strategy and I would never want it to happen in a situation I was managing. Neither did Pat Mullany. The problem with offering up the top guy, in addition to encouraging other desperate little people to try the same thing, is that you lose your maneuvering room. You always want to negotiate through intermediaries, which allows you to stall for time and avoid making promises you don’t want to keep. Once you put the hostage taker in direct contact with someone he perceives as a decision maker, everyone is backed against the wall, and if you don’t give in to his demands, you risk having things head south in a hurry. The longer you keep them talking, the better.

By the time I was teaching hostage negotiation at Quantico in the early 1980s, we used a disturbing videotape that had been made in St. Louis a couple of years before. Ultimately, we stopped showing it because the St. Louis Police Department was so upset by it. In the tape, a young black man holds up a bar. The robbery’s a bust, he gets trapped inside, the police surround the place, and he’s got a bunch of hostages.

The police organize a team of black and white officers to talk to him. But as the tape shows, rather than trying to deal with him on an objective level, they start jive-talking him and trying to get down on his level. They’re all talking at once, constantly interrupting him, not listening to what he’s saying, not trying to figure out what he wants to get out of this situation.

The camera swings away just as the chief of police arrives on the scene—again, I’d never let this happen. Once the chief is there, he "officially" ignores the demands, whereupon the guy points the gun at his own head and blows his brains out for all to see.

Contrast that with Pat Mullany’s handling of the Cory Moore case. Obviously, Moore was crazy, and obviously, all the white people weren’t going to leave planet Earth. But by listening to the subject, Mullany was able to discern what Moore really wanted and what would satisfy him. Mullany offered Moore a press conference in which to air his views, and Moore released the hostages bloodlessly.

During the course at Quantico, my name got around the Behavioral Science Unit, and Pat Mullany, Dick Ault, and Bob Ressler recommended me to Jack Pfaff. Before I left, the unit chief called me down to his basement office for an interview. Pfaff was a personable, friendly guy. A swarthy chain-smoker, he looked a lot like Victor Mature. He told me the instructors had been impressed with me and told me to consider coming back to Quantico as a counselor for the FBI National Academy program. I was flattered by the offer and said I’d very much like to do that.

Back in Milwaukee, I was still on the reactive squad and the SWAT team, but was spending much of my time going around the state training business executives on how to deal with kidnapping and extortion threats and bank officers on how to deal with the single-bandit and gang armed robberies that were plaguing rural banks particularly.

It was amazing how naive some of these sophisticated businessmen were about personal security, allowing their schedules, even their vacation plans, to be published in local newspapers and company newsletters. In many cases, they were sitting ducks for would-be kidnappers and extortionists. I tried to teach them and their secretaries and subordinates how to evaluate calls and requests for information, and how to determine whether an extortion call that came in was genuine or not. For example, it wasn’t unusual for an executive to get a call that his wife or child had been kidnapped and that he was to take a certain amount of money to such and such a drop. In point of fact, that wife or child was perfectly safe and in no danger the entire time, but the would-be profiteer had known that the family member would be unreachable for whatever reason, and if the criminal had one or two legitimate-sounding facts, he could convince the panicked executive to accede to his demands.

By the same token, we were able to cut down on the success of bank robberies by getting officials to institute some simple procedures. One of the common robbery techniques was to wait outside early in the morning when the branch manager would arrive to open for the day. The subject would grab the guy, then as other unsuspecting employees would arrive for work, they would be taken, too. The next thing you know, you have a whole bank branch full of hostages and a major mess on your hands.

I got some of the branches to institute a basic code system. When the first person arrived in the morning and found that the coast was clear, he or she would do one thing—adjust a curtain, move a plant, turn on a particular light, whatever—to signal to everyone else that all was okay. If that signal was absent when the second person arrived, he or she would not go in, but would call the police immediately.

Likewise, we trained tellers, who are the real key to any bank’s security, what to look for and what to do in panic situations without becoming dead heroes. We explained the proper handling of exploding money packs, which were just then going into wide usage. And based on the interviews I’d done with a number of successful bank robbers, I instructed tellers to take the holdup note as it was presented to them, then "nervously" drop it on the floor on their side of the cage rather than hand it back to the robber, thereby preserving a valuable piece of evidence.

I knew from my interviews that robbers don’t like to hit banks cold, so it could be extremely valuable to make a note of individuals coming into the branch whom you’ve never seen before, particularly with a simple or routine request, such as the exchange of paper money for a roll of dimes. If the teller had been able to jot down a license number or noted any kind of ID, a subsequent robbery could often be solved quickly.

I’d begun hanging out with city homicide detectives and around the medical examiner’s office. Any forensic pathologist, as well as most good detectives, will tell you that the single most important piece of evidence in any murder investigation is the victim’s body, and I wanted to learn as much as I could. I’m sure part of the fascination also went back to my youthful days of wanting to be a veterinarian and to understand how the structures and functions of the body related to living. But though I enjoyed working both with the homicide squad and the ME’s staff, what really interested me was the psychological side: what makes a killer tick? What makes him commit a murder under the particular circumstances he does?