Mindhunter (18 page)

When I look at these guys, when I sit across a table from them in a prison conference room, the first thing I try to do is visualize what they must have looked like and sounded like when they were doing the crimes. I’ve prepared myself with all of the case files so I know what each has done and what he’s capable of, and what I have to do is project this onto the individual sitting across from me.

Any police-type interrogation is a seduction; each party is trying to seduce the other into giving him what he wants. And you have to size up the individual interviewee before you can figure out how to approach him. Outrage or moral judgment won’t accomplish anything. ("What, you sadistic beast! You ate an arm?") You have to decide what’s going to ring his bell. With some, like Kemper, you can be straightforward and matter-of-fact, so long as you make clear you know the facts and they can’t snow you. With the ones like Richard Speck, I learned to take a more offensive approach.

We’re sitting there in the conference room and Speck’s making a show of ignoring us, so I turn to the counselor. He was an open, gregarious man, experienced at diffusing hostility—some of the qualities we look for in hostage negotiators. I talk about Speck as if he weren’t even in the room.

"You know what he did, your guy? He killed eight pussies. And some of those pussies looked pretty good. He took eight good pieces of ass away from the rest of us. You think that’s fair?"

Bob is clearly uncomfortable with this. He doesn’t want to get down to the killer’s level, and he’s squeamish about mocking the dead. Of course, I agree, but in situations like this, I think you do what you have to.

The counselor answers me in kind and we go back and forth like that. We would have sounded like high school boys in the locker room if we weren’t actually talking about murder victims, which shifts the tone from immature to grotesque.

Speck listens for a while, shakes his head, chuckles, and says, "You fucking guys are crazy. It must be a fine line, separates you from me."

With that opening I turn to him. "How in the hell did you fuck eight women at the same time? What do you eat for breakfast?"

He looks at us as if we’re a couple of gullible rubes. "I didn’t fuck all of them. That story got all out of proportion. I just fucked one of them."

"The one on the couch?" I ask.

"Yeah."

As crude and disgusting as this all sounds, it’s starting to tell me something. First of all, as hostile and aggressive as he is, he doesn’t have much of a macho self-image. He knows he can’t control all the women at once. He’s an opportunist—he’ll rape one for the hell of it. And from the crime-scene photos, we know that the one he chose was facedown on the couch. She was already a depersonalized body to him. He didn’t have to have any human contact with her. We can also tell he’s not a sophisticated or organized thinker. It doesn’t take much for what would have been a relatively simple and successful robbery to degenerate into this mass murder. He admits that he killed the women not in a sexual frenzy, but so that they couldn’t identify him. As the young nurses come home, he’s putting one in a bedroom, one in a closet, as if he’s corralling horses. He has no idea how to handle the situation.

Interestingly, he also claims that the wound that sent him to the hospital and ultimately to capture did not represent a suicide attempt but rather was the result of a bar fight. Without necessarily understanding the significance of what he’s saying, he’s telling us he wants us to think of him as the "born to raise hell" macho man rather than a pathetic loser whose only way out is to kill himself.

Now, as I’m listening, I’m starting to turn all of this information around in my mind. Not only is it telling me something about Speck, it’s telling me something about this type of crime. In other words, when I see similar scenarios in the future, I’m going to have more insight into the type of individual responsible. And that, of course, was the main purpose of the program.

As we processed the study’s data, I tried to get away from the academic, psychological jargon and buzzwords and more into clear-cut concepts that would be of use to law enforcement personnel. To tell a local detective that he’s looking for a paranoid schizophrenic may be intellectually interesting, but it doesn’t tell him much that’s useful in catching his UNSUB. One of the key distinctions we came up with was whether an offender was
organized
or
disorganized
or showed a mixed pattern. People like Speck were beginning to give us the pattern of the disorganized offender.

Speck told me he had a troubled early life. The only time I could tell we’d touched a nerve was when I asked him about his family. By the time he was twenty, he had chalked up nearly forty arrests and had married a fifteen-year-old girl, with whom he fathered a child. He left her five years later, angry and bitter, and told us he just never got around to killing her. He did kill several other women, though, including a waitress in a sleazy bar who’d spurned his advances. He also robbed and attacked a sixty-five-year-old woman a couple of months before he murdered the nurses. All things being equal, the brutal rape of an older woman suggests to us a young man, possibly even a teenager, without much experience or confidence or sophistication. Speck was twenty-six when the rape occurred. As the age of the offender goes up in the equation, his sophistication and self-confidence go down accordingly. That was certainly my impression of Richard Speck. Though in his mid-twenties, his behavior level, even for a criminal, was late adolescent.

The warden wanted to show me one more thing before we left. In Joliet, as well as in other prisons, a psychological experiment was under way to see if soft pastel colors would decrease aggressiveness. A good deal of academic theory was behind this. They’d even put police weight-lifting champs in rooms painted pink or yellow and found they couldn’t lift as much as they had before.

So the warden takes us to a room at the end of the cell block and says, "The rose-colored paint is supposed to take the aggression out of a violent offender. And if you put them in a room like this, they’re supposed to get really calm and passive. Take a look inside this room, Douglas, and tell me what you see."

"I see there’s not much paint on the walls," I observe.

He replies, "Yeah, that’s right. See, the guys don’t like these colors. They’re peeling the paint off the wall, and they’re eating it."

Jerry Brudos was a shoe fetishist. If that were as far as it went, there would have been no problem. But due to a variety of circumstances, including his punitive, domineering mother and his own compulsions, it went a lot further—from mildly strange all the way to deadly.

Jerome Henry Brudos was born in South Dakota in 1939 and grew up in California. As a young boy five years old, he found a pair of shiny high heels at a local dump. When he brought them home and tried them on, his mother, furious, told him to get rid of them. But he kept them, hidden, until his mother found out, took them away, burned them, and punished him. By the time he was sixteen, now living in Oregon, he was regularly breaking into neighborhood homes and stealing women’s shoes and eventually underwear, which he would save and try on. The next year he was arrested for assaulting a girl he had lured into his car so he could get to see her naked. He was given several months of therapy at the state hospital in Salem, where he was not found to be dangerous. After high school, he did a brief stint in the Army before leaving on a psychological discharge. He was still breaking into houses, and stealing shoes and underwear—sometimes confronting the women he found there and choking them unconscious—when, out of a sense of obligation, he married the young woman with whom he had recently lost his virginity. He went to a vocational college and became an electronics technician.

Six years later, in 1968, now the father of two children and continuing his nighttime raids for souvenirs, Brudos answered the door to a nineteen-year-old named Linda Slawson, who had an appointment to sell encyclopedias and had come to the wrong house by mistake. Seizing this opportunity, he dragged her into the basement, and bludgeoned and strangled her. When she was dead, he undressed her and tried various of his collected outfits on the corpse. Before disposing of the body by sinking it in the Willamette River with a junked automobile transmission, he cut off the left foot, placed it in one of his prized high heels, and locked it in his freezer. He killed three more times over the next several months, cutting off breasts and making plastic molds of them. He was identified by various coeds he’d approached for dates using a similar story and was picked up when police staked out a supposed rendezvous site. He confessed and eventually pleaded guilty when it became clear an insanity defense wouldn’t work.

Bob Ressler and I interviewed him in his permanent home at the Oregon State Penitentiary at Salem. He was heavyset and round-faced, polite and cooperative. But when I asked him specifics about the crimes, he said he’d blacked out because of hypoglycemia and didn’t remember anything he might have done.

"You know, John, I get this attack of low blood sugar, and I could walk off the roof of a building and not know what I was doing."

Interestingly enough, when Brudos confessed to police, he remembered well enough to give them graphic details of the crimes and where the bodies and evidence could be found. He also inadvertently incriminated himself. He’d hung the body of one of his victims from a hook in his garage, clothed her in his favorite attire and shoes, then placed a mirror on the floor beneath her to see up her dress. While taking a picture, he’d unknowingly captured his own image in the photograph.

Despite his claims of hypoglycemic blackouts, Brudos showed many of the traits of an organized offender. This was tied in to the fantasy element he displayed from an early age. When he was a young teen living on the family farm, he fantasized about capturing girls in a tunnel where he would force them to do what he wanted. Once, he managed to trick a girl into the barn, then ordered her to undress so he could take her picture. We saw this type of behavior carry over into his adult offenses, yet as a young teenager, he was too naive and unsophisticated to think of anything other than photographing his naked victims. After the session in the barn, he locked the girl in the corncrib, then came back sometime later, wearing different clothes and with his hair combed differently, pretending to be Ed, Jerry’s twin brother. He released the terrified girl, explaining that Jerry was undergoing intense therapy and begging her not to tell anyone lest he get in trouble and suffer another "setback."

What we see clearly in Jerome Brudos, along with this textbook escalation of activities, is a continual refinement of the fantasy. This is a much more significant finding than anything he could have told us directly. Even though a Kemper and a Brudos are so different in goals and modus operandi, we see in both—and so many of the others—an obsession with and "improvement" of the details from one crime to the next and one level of activity to the next. Kemper’s victims of choice were beautiful coeds tied in his mind to his mother. The less sophisticated and intelligent Brudos was more content with victims of opportunity. But the obsession with detail was the same and took over both men’s lives.

As an adult, Brudos made his wife, Darcie, dress in his fetishistic attire and submit to his photographic ritual, even though she was a straight, unadventuresome woman who was uncomfortable with this and scared of her husband. He had elaborate fantasies of constructing a torture suite but had to settle for his garage. In that garage was the freezer he kept locked so he could store his favorite body parts. When Darcie cooked meat for dinner, she had to tell Jerry what it was she wanted, and then he would bring it to her. She often complained to friends that it would be so much easier to look in the freezer herself and select a particular cut. Yet despite the inconvenience, she didn’t think it odd enough to report. Or if she did, she was too afraid to do so.

Brudos was a near classic example of an offender who begins with innocuous oddities and escalates progressively—from found shoes to his sister’s clothing to the possessions of other women. First he just steals from clotheslines, then he stalks women who are wearing high heels and breaks into empty houses, then gets bolder and is willing to confront the occupants. At first, merely putting on the clothing is enough, but eventually he wants more of a kick. Socially, he begins to ask girls to let him take pictures of them. Then, when one of them refuses to undress for him, he threatens her with a knife. He doesn’t kill until a victim of opportunity happens to ring his doorbell. But once he’s killed her and realizes the satisfaction, he’s moved to do it again and again, each time stepping up his mutilation of the corpse.

I’m not meaning to suggest that every man attracted to stiletto heels or turned on by the thought of black lace bras and panties is destined for a life of crime. If that were true, most of us would be in prison. But as we see in Jerry Brudos, this kind of paraphilia can be degenerative, and it is also "situational." Let me give an example.

Some time ago, not far from where I lived, an elementary school principal reportedly had a thing for children’s feet. He would play a game with them to see how long he could tickle their feet or toes. If they held out for a certain time, he would give them money. It came to parental attention when some of the kids were spending money at the mall they couldn’t account for. When the principal was fired by the school district, many quarters of the community protested. He was a good-looking guy, he had a normal relationship with a steady girlfriend, and he was popular with children and parents alike. The teachers thought he was being railroaded. Even if he did have this thing for toes, it was essentially harmless. He’d never abused any of the children or tried to get them to undress. This is not the kind of person who’s going to go out and abduct a child to feed his perversion.

I agreed with that assessment. The community was in no danger from him in that regard. I had met him and he was friendly and personable. But let’s say during one of these games a little girl reacts badly, starts screaming or threatens to tell on him. In an instant of panic, he could end up killing the child simply because he doesn’t know what else to do to manage the situation. When the school superintendent contacted my unit for advice, I told him I thought he had taken the right action in firing the man.