Mindhunter (52 page)

For years, Gregg McCrary had a cartoon tacked to the bulletin board in his office. It shows a fire-breathing dragon standing fiercely over a prostrate knight. The caption reads simply, "Sometimes the dragon wins."

This is a reality none of us can ever escape. We don’t catch them all, and since the ones we do catch have already killed or raped or tortured or bombed or burned or maimed, none of them is ever caught soon enough. It’s true today, just as it was more than a hundred years ago when Jack the Ripper became the first serial killer to haunt the public imagination.

Ironically, though the
Manhunt
broadcast didn’t solve the Green River murders, that same year I appeared on another national television show in which I did determine through profiling the possible identity of that most infamous serial killer of all. It was timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel murders, which meant my profile was only a century too late to do any good.

The brutal prostitute murders took place in the gaslit streets and alleys of Victorian London’s rough and teeming East End between August 31 and November 9, 1888. Over that time, the viciousness of the killings and the postmortem mutilation escalated. In the early morning of September 30, he killed two women within an hour or two, an unheard of event at the time. The police received several taunting letters, which were published in the newspapers, and the horrors became a huge media event. The Ripper was never caught, despite the fervent efforts of Scotland Yard, and his identity has remained a subject of intense speculation ever since. Like the "true" identity of William Shakespeare, the choice of suspects often reveals more about the people doing the speculating than it does about the mystery itself.

Among the favorite and most fascinating possibilities over the years has been Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, eldest grandson of Queen Victoria and, after his father, Edward, the Prince of Wales (who became Edward VII upon Victoria’s death in 1901), the next in line to the throne. The Duke of Clarence is supposed to have died in the great influenza epidemic of 1892, but many Ripper theorists have him actually dying of syphilis or possibly poisoning at the hands of a royal physician to remove the taint of scandal from the monarchy. It’s certainly an intriguing possibility.

Other strong candidates have included Montague John Druit, a teacher in a boy’s school who matched eyewitness descriptions; Dr. William Gull, chief royal physician; Aaron Kosminski, a poor Polish immigrant who’d been in and out of mental asylums in the area; and Dr. Roslyn D’Onstan, a journalist known to dabble in black magic.

Much has been made of the fact that the Ripper murders stopped abruptly, leading to speculation that he might have taken his own life, that the Duke of Clarence was sent on a royal trip, that one of the other suspects might have died. Looking back from our current knowledge, it seems to me just as likely that he was picked up for some other lesser offense as many are, and this was what stopped the killing. Another issue was the "ripping" itself. One of the reasons for the focus on someone with medical training was the degree of disembowelment of the later victims.

The aim of
The Secret Identity of Jack the Ripper,
broadcast nationally in October 1988, was to present all available evidence in the case and then have experts from various disciplines present their analyses about who Jack really was, solving this century-old riddle "once and for all." Roy Hazelwood and I were invited to be on the program, and the FBI thought this would be a good opportunity to showcase the kind of work we do without compromising any ongoing investigations or trials. The live, two-hour presentation was hosted by British actor, writer, and director Peter Ustinov, who really got into the mystery as the drama unfolded.

Now any exercise of this kind has the same rules and strictures as a current investigation—that is, our product can only be as good as the evidence and data we have to work with. A hundred years ago, forensic investigation was primitive by modern standards. But I thought that, based on what I knew about the Ripper murders, if such a case were presented to us today, it would be very solvable, so I thought we ought to take a flyer on it. When you do the kind of work we do, there is actually some sport and relaxation when the only thing on the line if you screw up is making a fool of yourself on national television rather than having another innocent victim dead.

Before the program aired, I developed a profile as I would for a modern case, with the same-style heading:

UNSUB; AKA JACK THE RIPPER
SERIES OF HOMICIDES
LONDON, ENGLAND
1888
NCAVC—HOMICIDE (CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE ANALYSIS)

The last line, NCAVC, refers to the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, the overall program established at Quantico in 1985 to include the Behavioral Science and Investigative Support Units, VICAP—the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program computer database—and other rapid-response teams and units.

As in a real consultation, once I had come up with the profile, we were given the possible suspects. As appealing as the Duke of Clarence was from a dramatic standpoint, after analyzing all the evidence available, Roy and I independently came up with Aaron Kosminski as our likeliest candidate.

As in the Yorkshire Ripper case ninety years later, we were convinced the taunting letters to the police were written by an impostor, someone other than the "real" Jack. The type of individual who committed these crimes would not have the personality to set up a public challenge to the police. The mutilation suggested a mentally disturbed, sexually inadequate person with a lot of generalized rage against women. The blitz style of attack in each case also told us he was personally and socially inadequate. This was not someone who could hold his own verbally. The physical circumstances of the crimes told us that this was someone who could blend in with his surroundings and not cause suspicion or fear on the part of the prostitutes. He would be a quiet loner, not a macho butcher, who would prowl the streets nightly and return to the scenes of his crimes. Undoubtedly, the police would have interviewed him in their investigation. Of all the possibilities we were presented, Kosminski fit the profile far better than any of the others. As for the supposed medical knowledge needed for the postmortem mutilation and dissection, this was really nothing but elementary butchery. And we have long since learned that serial killers need nothing but will to commit whatever atrocities they want on a body. Ed Gein, Ed Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Marquette—to name but a few—were in no way held back by their lack of medical training.

Having presented this analysis, I now have to backpedal on my original declaration with the qualification that from this vantage point a hundred years later, I can’t be sure that Aaron Kosminski was the Ripper. He was simply one of the ones given to us. But what I can state with a high degree of confidence is that Jack the Ripper was someone
like
Kosminski. Were this criminal investigative analysis taking place today, our input would help police and Scotland Yard narrow their focus and come up with the UNSUB’s identity. That’s why I say that by modern standards, this case would be very solvable.

In some cases our methods point to a type of suspect, but we can’t get enough evidence for an arrest and indictment. Such a case was the "BTK Strangler" in Wichita, Kansas, in the mid-1970s.

It began on January 15, 1974, with the murder of the Otero family. Thirty-eight-year-old Joseph Otero and his wife, Julie, were tied and strangled with venetian-blind cords. Their nine-year-old son, Joseph II, was found tied in his own bedroom, a plastic bag over his head. Eleven-year-old Josephine was hanging by her neck from a pipe in the basement ceiling, clad only in a sweatshirt and socks. All the evidence suggested that this was not an impulsive act. The telephone lines had been cut and the cord had been brought to the scene.

Ten months later, a local newspaper editor got an anonymous call directing him to a book in the public library. Inside was a note from the UNSUB, claiming credit for the Otero killings, promising more and explaining that "the code words for me will be: Bind them, Torture them, Kill them."

Several more killings of young women followed in the ensuing three years, after which a letter to a local television station revealed much about the psyche of this UNSUB, who had carefully given himself his own nickname: "How many do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?"

In one of his published communications, he compared his work to that of Jack the Ripper, the Son of Sam, and the Hillside Strangler—all obscure losers who had become media celebrities through their crimes. He attributed his deeds to a "demon" and "factor X," leading to extensive psychological speculation in the newspapers about his personality.

But he also included graphic drawings of naked women in various poses of binding, rape, and torture. These hideous drawings were not published, but they gave me a good picture of the type of person we were looking for. From that, it was only a matter of narrowing down the suspects.

Like those of his hero Jack the Ripper, BTK’s murders stopped abruptly. In this case, though, I believe the police had interviewed him, he knew they were closing in on him, and he was intelligent and sophisticated enough to stop before sufficient evidence could be gathered. I hope we’ve at least neutralized him, but sometimes the dragon wins.

Sometimes the dragon wins in our own lives as well. When a murderer kills one person, he takes a lot of victims along with that individual. I’m not the only one in my unit to lose work over stress-related problems; far from it. And the instances of family problems and marital strife are too numerous not to be worried about.

In 1993, my marriage with Pam broke up after twenty-two years. We would probably give differing perspectives on what happened between us, but certain things are undeniable. I was away much too often when our daughters, Erika and Lauren, were growing up. When I was in town, I was still so consumed by what I was doing that Pam often felt like a single parent. She had to run the house, pay the bills, get the kids to school, meet with the teachers, make sure the homework got done, all the while keeping up with her own teaching career. By the time our son, Jed, was born in January of 1987, we had other profilers working with me and I wasn’t spending as much time on the road. But I have to admit, I have three bright, loving, charming, wonderful children, and I don’t think I really got to know them well until shortly before I retired from the Bureau. I spent so much time over the years learning about the victimology of dead children that I shortchanged and didn’t learn enough about my own brilliantly alive ones.

Many times Pam would come to me with some typical minor problem involving one of the kids, say a cut or scrape from falling off a bike. With all the stress and pressure I felt, we both remember how often I would lash out, describing the mutilated bodies of kids the same age that I had seen, and didn’t she realize that a fall off a bike was normal and nothing to get charged up about?

You try never to fully desensitize yourself from the horrible stuff, but you find yourself building up immunity against anything that’s less than horrible. One time I was eating dinner with the kids while Pam was opening a package in the kitchen. The knife slipped and she cut herself badly. She screamed and we all came rushing in. But as soon as I saw that the injury wasn’t threatening to life or limb, I remember how interesting I found the blood-spatter pattern to be and began mentally correlating it to spatter patterns I’d seen at murder scenes. I was joking around, trying to diffuse the tension. I started pointing out to her and the children how we saw a different pattern every time she moved her hand, and that was one of the ways we could tell what happened between an attacker and a victim. But I don’t think the rest of them took it as casually as I did.

You try to develop defense mechanisms to deal with what you see on the job, but you can easily end up coming off as a cool, aloof son of a bitch. If your family’s intact and your marriage is solid, you can put up with a lot of what you face at work. But if there are any weaknesses at home, various stressors can magnify everything, just as they do for the people we hunt.

Pam and I ended up with different friends. I couldn’t talk about what I did in her circle, so I needed my own kind around me. And when we socialized outside Bureau or law enforcement circles, I often found myself bored by the mundane concerns discussed. As cold as it sounds, when you spend your days getting inside the heads of killers, where the neighbor puts his trash can or what color he paints his fence just isn’t all that stimulating.

I am glad to say, though, after a period in which we both went through the emotional wringer, that Pam and I are now good friends. The kids live with me (Erika is off at college), but Pam and I are together much of the time, and we both now take an equal role as parents. I’m grateful Lauren and Jed are still young enough for me to enjoy some of their growing-up years.

From a lonely position in the early 1980s in which I was the entire full-time FBI profiling staff—assisted as their time permitted by Roy Hazelwood, Bill Hagmaier, and a few others—the unit grew to more than ten. That’s still not enough to handle the volume of cases we’re presented, but it’s probably just about as large as we could be and still maintain the personal contact with each other and the local departments that has become the hallmark of our own modus operandi. Many of the police chiefs and detectives who call on the unit first met us in National Academy classes. Sheriff Jim Metts contacted me to help find Shari Smith’s and Debra Helmick’s murderer, and Capt. Lynde Johnston called on Gregg McCrary to help determine who was slaughtering prostitutes in Rochester because they were both National Academy graduates.

By the mid-1980s, Behavioral Science had been divided up into the Behavioral Science Instruction and Research Unit, and the group I worked for as criminal-personality profiling program manager, the Behavioral Science Investigative Support Unit. The other two key divisions besides mine in Investigative Support were VICAP, which Jim Wright had taken over from Bob Ressler, and Engineering Services. Roger Depue was chief of Instruction and Research and Alan "Smokey" Burgess was chief of Investigative Support. (He is not related to Ann Burgess, but her husband,
Allen
Burgess, was our coauthor on the
Crime Classification Manual.
Got it?)