Mindhunter (9 page)

Welch, who could be really fierce, starts out generally, using good interrogation techniques that put the subject on the spot. "Okay, McGonigel, what about those telephone calls?"

So Bob starts confessing to any call he can think of because he’s afraid Welch might have something more serious on him and maybe he can satisfy the SAC’s wrath by giving him the petty stuff.

Welch rises to his full imposing height, leans over his desk, and points his finger menacingly. "McGonigel, let me tell you something: you’ve got two strikes against you. First, you’re a former clerk. I hate fucking clerks! The second thing is, if I ever see you wearing a lavender-colored shirt, particularly during inspection, I’m gonna kick your ass up and down East Jefferson Street. And if I ever see you near a telephone, I’m gonna throw your ass down the elevator shaft. Now get out of my office!"

Bob comes home a beaten man, convinced he’s going to be fired. Jack Kunst and I really feel sorry for him. But what Fitzpatrick tells me the next day is that after McGonigel left, he and Welch sat there laughing their asses off.

Years later, when I headed up the Investigative Support Unit, I would get asked if—with all that we knew about criminal behavior and crime-scene analysis—any of us could commit the perfect murder. I always told them no, that even with all we knew, our postoffense behavior would still give us away. I think the incident between McGonigel and Welch proves that even a first-rate FBI agent isn’t immune to the pressures of the right inter rogator.

By the way, from the moment he left the SAC’s office that Saturday afternoon, Bob wore the whitest shirts in town . . . until Neil Welch was transferred to Philadelphia.

Much of Hoover’s leverage in getting his funding requests through Congress had to do with the statistics he could throw around. But for the director to be able to use these numbers, everyone in the field had to deliver.

Early in 1972, so the story goes, Welch promised the boss 150 gambling arrests. That, apparently, was the category needing a boost in numbers at the time. So we set up an elaborate sting with informants, wiretaps, and military-like planning, all to culmi nate on Super Bowl Sunday, the biggest illegal-gambling day of the year. The Dallas Cowboys, who’d lost a close contest to the Baltimore Colts the year before, were playing the Miami Dolphins in New Orleans.

Arrests of bookies have to be lightning-fast, precision procedures because they use flash paper (which burns instantly) or potato paper (which is water soluble). The operation promised to be something of a mess because there had been intermittent showers all day.

Our sting netted more than two hundred gamblers on that rainy afternoon. At one point, I had a subject handcuffed in the back of the car, bringing him back to the armory where we were booking them all. He was a charming guy, friendly. He was handsome, too; looked like Paul Newman. He said to me, "Sometime when this is all over, we ought to get together for some racquetball."

He was approachable enough, so I started asking him questions, just the way I’d been asking bank robbers. "Why do you do this stuff?"

"I love it," he replied. "You can arrest all of us today, John. It won’t make a bit of difference."

"But for a smart guy like you, making money legitimately should be easy."

He shook his head, like I still didn’t get it. It was raining harder now. He glanced to the side, directing my attention to the car’s window. "You see those two raindrops?" He pointed. "I’ll bet you the one on the left will get to the bottom of the glass before the one on the right does. We don’t need the Super Bowl. All we need is two little raindrops. You can’t stop us, John, no matter what you do. It’s what we are."

For me, this brief encounter was like a bolt out of the blue, like an instant cessation of ignorance. It may seem naive in retrospect, but suddenly, everything I’d been asking, all of my research with bank robbers and other criminals, came crystal clear.

It’s what we are.

There was something inherent, deep within the criminal’s mind and psyche, that compelled him to do things in a certain way. Later, when I started research into the minds and motivations of serial murderers, then, when I began analyzing crime scenes for behav ioral clues, I would look for the one element or set of elements that made the crime and the criminal stand out,
that represented what he was.

Eventually, I would come up with the term
signature
to describe this unique element and personal compulsion, which remained static. And I would use it as distinguishable from the traditional concept of modus operandi, which is fluid and can change. This became the core of what we do in the Investigative Support Unit.

As it turned out, all the hundreds of arrests we made that Super Bowl Sunday were thrown out of court on technical procedure. In everyone’s haste to get the operation up and running, an assistant to the attorney general, rather than the attorney general himself, had signed the search warrants. But the SAC Welch had fulfilled his promise and delivered his numbers to Hoover, at least long enough for them to have the desired impact on Capitol Hill. And I had come up with an insight that was to become critical in my law enforcement career, simply by betting on raindrops.

Between Two Worlds

It was a hijacking case involving the interstate theft of a truckload of J&B Scotch worth about $100,000. It was spring of 1971 and I had been on the job in Detroit going on six months. The warehouse foreman had tipped us off where they were going to make the exchange of money for the stolen booze.

We were working it as a joint FBI-Detroit police operation, but both organizations had met separately for planning. Only the higher-ups had talked to each other, and whatever they’d decided hadn’t filtered down to the street. So when the time came to make the arrest, no one was quite sure what anyone else was doing.

It’s nighttime, the outskirts of the city, by a set of railroad tracks. I’m driving one of the FBI cars with my squad supervisor, Bob Fitzpatrick, in the seat next to me. The informant was Fitzpatrick’s, and Bob McGonigel was the case agent.

Word comes over the radio, "Bust ’em! Bust ’em!" We all come screeching to a halt, surrounding this semi. The driver opens the door, bolts out, and starts running. Along with an agent in another car, I open the door and get out, pull out my gun, and start running after him.

It’s dark, we’re all dressed down—no suits or ties or anything—and I will never ever forget the whites of his eyes as I see a uniformed cop holding a shotgun aimed directly at me and he’s yelling, "Halt! Police! Drop the gun!" We’re less than eight feet from each other, and I realize, this guy’s about to shoot me. I freeze, at the same time coming to grips with the fact that if I make one wrong move, I’m history.

I’m about to drop my gun and put up my hands when I hear Bob Fitzpatrick’s voice frantically shouting, "He’s FBI! He’s an FBI agent!"

The cop lowers his shotgun, and instinctively I take off again after the driver, adrenaline pumping, trying to make up the distance I’ve lost. The other agent and I reach him together. We tackle him to the ground and cuff him, more roughly than necessary, I’m so keyed up. But that frozen couple of seconds when I thought I was going to be blown away was one of the most terrifying experiences I’ve ever had. Many times since then, as I’ve tried to put myself in the shoes and heads of rape and murder victims, as I’ve forced myself to imagine what they must have been thinking and going through at the moment of attack, I’ve recalled my own fear, and it’s helped me to really understand cases from the victim’s point of view.

At the same time that a lot of us younger guys were busting our humps trying to make as many arrests as we could, many of the burnt-out old-timers seemed to have the attitude that rocking the boat was senseless, that you got paid the same whether you put yourself out on the limb or not, and that initiative was something for salesmen. Since we were encouraged to spend most of our time out of the office, window-shopping, sitting in the park, and reading the
Wall Street Journal
became favorite pastimes for a certain segment of the agent force.

Being the blue-flamer that I was, I took it upon myself to write a memo suggesting a merit pay system to encourage the people who were being most productive. I gave my memo to our ASAC, pronounced "a-sack," or assistant special agent in charge, Tom Naly.

Tom calls me into his office, closes the door, picks up the memo from his desk, and smiles benevolently at me. "What are you worried about, John? You’ll get your GS-11," he says as he rips the memo in half.

"You’ll get your GS-12," he says as he tears it in half again. "You’ll get your GS-13." Another rip, and by now, he’s really laughing. "Don’t rock the boat, Douglas," is his final advice as he lets the pieces of the memo flutter into the trash can.

Fifteen years later, long after J. Edgar Hoover was dead and at least somewhat gone, the FBI did implement a merit pay system. Though, when they finally got around to it, they obviously managed it with no help from me.

One evening in May—actually, I remember it was the Friday after May 17, for reasons that will become clear in a moment—I was with Bob McGonigel and Jack Kunst in a bar where we used to hang out, across the street from the office, called Jim’s Garage. There’s a rock-and-roll band playing, we’ve all had a few too many beers, when suddenly this attractive young woman comes in with a girlfriend. She reminds me of a young Sophia Loren, dressed in the trendy outfit of the times—this short blue dress and go-go boots practically up to her groin.

I call out, "Hey, blue! Come on over here!" So, to my surprise, she and the friend do. Her name is Pam Modica and we start joking around, hitting it off. Turns out it was her twenty-first birthday and she and the friend are out celebrating her legal right to drink. She seems to be into my sense of humor. Later, I find out her first impression of me was good-looking but kind of nerdy with my short, government-issue haircut. We leave Jim’s and spend the rest of the night bar-hopping.

In the next couple of weeks, we got to know each other better. She lived within the city of Detroit and had gone to Pershing High, a practically all-black school where basketball great Elvin Hayes went. When I met her, she was attending Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti.

Things developed pretty quickly between us, although not without its social costs to Pam. This was 1971, the Vietnam War was still on, and distrust of the FBI was rampant on college campuses. Many of her friends didn’t want to associate with us, convinced I was an establishment plant who was reporting back on their activities to some higher authority. The entire notion that these kids were important enough to be spied on was ludicrous, except that the FBI was doing that sort of thing back then.

I remember going with Pam to a sociology class. I sat in the back of the room, listening to the lecturer, a young, radical assistant professor; very cool, very "with it." But I kept looking at the professor and her gaze kept coming back to me, and it was obvious she was really bothered by my being there. Anyone from the FBI was the enemy, even if he was the boyfriend of one of her students. Looking back on the incident, I realized how unsettling an effect you can sometimes have just by being yourself, and my unit and I used this to our advantage. In a vicious murder case up in Alaska, my colleague Jud Ray, who is black, got a racist defendant to come unglued on the witness stand by sitting next to and being friendly to the man’s girlfriend.

During Pam’s early college years at Eastern Michigan, a serial killer was working, though we didn’t yet use that terminology. He’d struck first in July of 1967, when a young woman named Mary Fleszar disappeared from the campus. Her decomposed body was found a month later. She had been stabbed to death and her hands and feet hacked off. A year later, the body of Joan Schell, a student at the University of Michigan in nearby Ann Arbor, was discovered. She’d been raped and stabbed almost fifty times. Then another body was found in Ypsilanti.

The killings, which became known as the "Michigan Murders," escalated, and women at both universities lived in terror. Each body that turned up bore evidence of horrible abuse. By the time a University of Michigan student named John Norman Collins was arrested in 1969—almost by chance by his uncle, state police corporal David Leik—six coeds and one thirteen-year-old girl had met grisly deaths.

Collins was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment about three months before I entered the Bureau. But I often wondered if the Bureau had known then what we do now, if the monster could have been trapped before he had been responsible for so much misery. Even after his capture, his specter continued to haunt both campuses, as Ted Bundy’s would haunt other colleges only a few years later. With the memory of the hideous crimes so much a part of Pam’s recent life, they became a part of mine as well. And I think it’s more than likely, at least on a subconscious level, that when I began studying, then hunting, serial killers, John Norman Collins and his beautiful, innocent victims were very much with me.

I was five years older than Pam, but since she was in college and I was out in the working world of law enforcement, it often seemed like a generation gap. In public, she was often quiet and seemingly passive around me and my friends, and I’m afraid we sometimes took advantage of this.

One time, Bob McGonigel and I met Pam for lunch at a hotel restaurant that overlooked the downtown area. We’re both in dark suits and wing tips, and Pam is in perky coed casual. Afterward, we’re taking the elevator back down to the lobby, and it seems like it’s stopping on every floor. Each time, it gets a little more packed.

About halfway down, Bob turns to Pam and says, "We really enjoyed ourselves today. Next time we’re in town, we’ll definitely give you a call."

Pam is looking down at the floor, trying not to react at all when I jump in, "And next time,
I’ll
bring the whipped cream and
you
bring the cherries." The other passengers are all looking at each other, squirming uncomfortably, until Pam bursts out laughing. Then they look at the three of us like we’re some kind of perverts.