Serial Killer Investigations (2 page)

Even so, I would argue that the situation is not quite as bad as it looks. As baffling and complex as serial murder first appears, it has many features that are easy to recognise and classify. And problems that can be classified and understood can also be solved. That is fortunate for the police who hunt the perpetrators, for most cases of serial murder would otherwise be virtually unsolvable, since there is no obvious link between killer and victim—the killer might be any one among millions.

These classifiable features have led to the development of the science of psychological profiling, which can often provide that first vital lead. The core of this book is the story of psychological profiling, and of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s BSU, the Behavioral Science Unit, at Quantico, Virginia.

Chapter One

In 2002, the US Crime Index showed that a violent crime occurred every 22 seconds, an aggravated assault every 35 seconds, a rape every five minutes, and a murder every 35 minutes. At least the murder rate showed a slight improvement from 1988 when a murder occurred every 28 minutes.

These hair-raising statistics produce an unsettling sense that violence is spinning out of control. But although it is true that the US murder rate has trebled in the post-World War Two period, the mid-1990s saw it peak at around 23,000 a year, and it has been falling steadily to a 35-year low.

There are several reasons for this. One is undoubtedly the zero tolerance policies introduced by Bill Clinton, which drastically reduced the number of gang-related murders. Another was the implementation of practical anticrime measures—for example, in 1992 close to forty taxi drivers were murdered in New York. When bulletproof partitions and digital surveillance cameras were introduced inside the vehicles, these murders ceased.

But a major reason for the declining crime rate has certainly been the increased efficiency of crime-detection techniques. The most important of these was undoubtedly genetic, or DNA, fingerprinting, discovered by British scientist Alec Jeffreys in 1986. Genetic fingerprinting was perhaps the most important innovation in crime detection since digital fingerprinting in the 1880s, yet it took more than a decade before it could be implemented efficiently. A major problem was the speed at which such tests could be carried out; eventually it was increased from weeks to hours. The second major problem was likely to occur if there was not enough DNA material for testing, or if it was old or degraded. But the discovery of methods of extracting usable DNA from old samples, and then multiplying the quantity by the method known as STR, or short tandem repeats, streamlined the process and dramatically increased the solution rate for sex crimes. It also led to a review of thousands of unsolved, or ‘cold cases’, from earlier years.

But where catching serial killers is concerned, the most important advance is undoubtedly ‘criminal profiling’. For all practical purposes, this began in 1950 with the series of explosions in New York City attributed to the ‘Mad Bomber’.

On 24 April 1950, an explosion wrecked a phone booth outside the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. During the next 16 years, the bomber planted 28 more devices in sites around the city that included Grand Central Station, Radio City Music Hall, the Capitol Theatre, Rockefeller Center, the Port Authority bus terminal, and the Consolidated Edison plant on 19th Street. By chance, no one was seriously hurt in any of these incidents. Then, on 2 December 1956, a bomb exploded in the Brooklyn Paramount Movie Theater, injuring seven people, one seriously.

In reality, the first Mad Bomber crime had not occurred in 1950, but instead nearly ten years earlier, on 16 November 1940, when a homemade metal pipe bomb had failed to explode on a windowsill in the Consolidated Edison plant on West 64th Street. A note wrapped around it said: ‘CON EDISON CROOKS—THIS IS FOR YOU.’ Three months later, a second pipe bomb was found a few blocks away. When the war broke out, the bomber wrote a letter to Manhattan police headquarters pledging to cease his attacks for the duration.

It was after the Brooklyn bomb that the editor of a New York newspaper, the
Journal American,
decided to publish an open letter to the bomber. Appearing the day after Christmas 1956, it begged him to give himself up, offering to allow editorial space for a full airing of his grievances. Two days later, a bomb was found in the Paramount Theater, in an opening slashed in a seat; a police bomb squad deactivated it. Like the others, it was a homemade device consisting of a length of piping with nuts at both ends. But on that same Friday afternoon, the
Journal American
received a reply to its letter:

I read your paper of December 26—placing myself in custody would be stupid—do not insult my intelligence—bring the Con Edison to justice—start working on Lehmann—Poletti—Andrews...

It was signed ‘F. P’

The men named were the former governor of New York State, a former lieutenant governor, and a former industrial commissioner. The bomber went on to promise a ‘truce’ until mid-January, and to list 14 bombs he had planted in 1956, many of which had not so far been discovered. The police later found eight pipe bombs: five were dummies, but three were still live and unexploded—the crude chemical detonating mechanism had failed to work.

Police Commissioner Stephen P Kennedy asked the newspaper not to print the letter, in case it caused public panic; instead, the editor inserted an advertisement in the personals column:

We received your letter. We appreciate truce. What were you deprived of? We want to hear your views and help you. We will keep our word. Contact us the same way as previously.

But other newspapers spotted the item, and the secret was out. The
Journal American
decided to print most of the bomber’s letter, together with yet another appeal. The result was another letter from the bomber, promising a truce until 1 March and offering an important piece of information:

I was injured on a job at Consolidated Edison Plant—as a result I am adjudged totally and permanently disabled. I did not receive any aid of any kind from company—that I did not pay for myself—while fighting for my life—section 28 came up.

Section 28 of the New York State Compensation Law limits the start of any legal action to two years after an injury. The letter-writer went on to accuse Con Edison of blocking all of his attempts to gain compensation, and to criticise Lehmann, Poletti, and Andrews for ignoring his letters. Like the previous letter, this was signed ‘F.P’

Here, then, were clues that could lead to the bomber’s identity. Yet, Con Edison is a giant energy company, supplying New York City with its electric, gas, and steam, and has numerous power plants. If the bomber had been injured before 1940—the date of the first bomb—the chances were high that his records had long ago been destroyed or lost. The same problem applied to Lehmann, Poletti, and Andrews; they probably received a hundred letters a day during their terms of office, and most of them would have ended in the wastepaper basket. No politician files all of his crank letters.

The police decided on a curious expedient—to consult a psychiatrist for his opinion on the bomber. This was the decision of Inspector Howard F. Finney of the crime laboratory. The man he chose was Dr James A. Brussel, who had been working for many years with the criminally insane. Finney handed Brussel the file on the bomber, together with the letters. Brussel studied the letters, and his first conclusion was that the bomber was an immigrant; the letters contained no Americanisms. Further, stilted Victorian phrases such as ‘they will pay for their dastardly deeds’ suggested a member of the older generation. The bomber, said Brussel, was obviously a paranoiac, a man far gone in persecution mania, one who has allowed himself to become locked into an inner world of hostility and resentment; everyone is plotting against him and he trusts no one. But because he is so close to the verge of insanity, he is careful, meticulous, highly controlled—the bomber’s block-capital letters were beautifully neat. Brussel’s experience of paranoia suggested that it most often develops in the mid-thirties. Since the first bomb was planted in 1940, this suggested that the bomber must now be in his mid-fifties.

Brussel was a Freudian—as were most psychiatrists of that period—and he observed that the only letters that stood out from the others were the ‘W’s, formed from two rounded ‘U’s, which resembled breasts. From this Brussel deduced that the bomber was still a man with strong sex drives, and that he had probably had trouble with his mother. He also noted that the cinema bombs had been planted inside W-shaped slashes, and that these again had some sexual connotation. Brussel’s final picture of the bomber was of a man in his fifties, Slavic in origin, neat and precise in his habits, and who lived in some better part of New York with an elderly mother or female relative. He was—or had been—a good Catholic. He was of strong build. And finally, he was the type who wore double-breasted suits.

Some of these deductions were arrived at by study of the letters—the meticulousness, obsessive self-control—and others by a process of elimination: the bomber was not American, but the phrasing was not German, Italian, or Spanish, so the likeliest alternative was a Slav. The majority of Slavs are Catholic, and the letters sometimes revealed a religious obsession...

Meanwhile, the
Journal American
had printed a third appeal, this one promising that if the bomber gave further details of his grievances, the newspaper would do its best to reopen his case. This brought a typewritten reply that contained the requested details:

I was injured on 5 September 1931. There were over twelve thousand danger signs in the plant, yet not even First Aid was available or rendered to me. I had to lay on cold concrete... Mr Reda and Mr Hooper wrote telling me that the $180 I got in sick benefits (that I was paying for) was ample for my illness.

Again, the signature was ‘F. P’

Now that investigators had a date, Con Edison clerical employees were put to work searching the corporation’s voluminous personnel files. There was still no guarantee that a file dating back to 1931 would exist, but a worker named Alice Kelly eventually located it. The file concerned George Metesky, born in 1904, who had been working as a generator wiper in 1931 at the Hell Gate power station of the United Electric & Power Company, later absorbed by Con Edison. On 5 September 1931, Metesky had been caught in a boiler blowback and inhaled poisonous gases. These caused haemorrhages, which most likely brought on his subsequent pneumonia and tuberculosis—although there was no definitive proof. His doctors sent him to Arizona to recuperate, but he’d been forced to return to Waterbury, Connecticut—where he lived—because of lack of funds. He had received only $180 in sick benefits, and the file contained letters from the men called Reda and Hooper that he had mentioned.

The police lost no time in getting to Waterbury, taking with them a search warrant. The man who opened the door of the ramshackle four-storey house in an industrial area wore gold-framed glasses, and peered mildly at the policemen from a round, gentle face. He identified himself as George Metesky, and allowed the officers to come in. He lived in the 14-room house with two elderly half-sisters, May and Anna Milausky, daughters of his mother’s previous marriage. On that matter, Brussel’s ‘guess’ had been remarkably accurate.

A search of the house revealed nothing, but in the garage police found a workshop with a lathe, and a length of the same kind of pipe used to construct the bombs. Rechecking the house, they found in a bedroom a typewriter that would later be identified through forensic examination as the one used to write the letters. An hour later, at the police station, Metesky confessed that he was, indeed, the Mad Bomber, and that the initials ‘F.P’ stood for ‘fair play’. A photograph of him taken immediately after his arrest showed that, as Brussel had predicted, he wore a doublebreasted suit.

Rsychiatrists at Bellevue found Metesky to be insane and incapable of standing trial; he was committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Beacon, New York, where he spent the remainder of his life.

The next major investigation involving ‘psychological profiling’ was rather less successful, and brought a certain amount of discredit to the new science.

Between June 1962 and January 1964, 13 women were strangled and raped in the Boston area; the press referred to the unknown assailant of 11 of them as the ‘Boston Strangler’. But on 4 January 1964, the killings suddenly stopped. The Strangler’s last presumed victim was 19-year-old Mary Sullivan; he bit her all over her body, masturbated on her face, and left her with a broom handle rammed inside her vagina.

A rash of rapes continued in the Boston area, but this rapist seemed to be a polite and gentle sort of person; he always apologised before he left, and if the woman seemed too distressed, even omitted the rape.

The descriptions of this ‘gentle rapist’, known as the ‘Green Man’ because he wore green pants, reminded the police of an offender who had been jailed for two years in 1960. He had been dubbed the ‘Measuring Man’ because he talked his way into apartments by posing as an executive from a modelling agency, and persuaded young women to allow him to take their measurements. Occasionally he ventured a few indecent caresses. A few of the women allowed him to make love to them as a bribe—although the promised modelling jobs, of course, never materialised.

The Measuring Man was arrested, and proved to be a husky young ex-soldier named Albert DeSalvo; he was sentenced for ‘lewd and lascivious behaviour’, as well as for attempted breaking and entry.

DeSalvo was identified by the Green Man’s rape victims after his arrest in November 1964, and in February 1965 was sent to the Bridgewater State Hospital for observation; there he was diagnosed schizophrenic and deemed incompetent to stand trial. Soon after his permanent committal to Bridgewater, DeSalvo confessed to a fellow inmate, George Nassar, that he was the Boston Strangler, and Nassar informed his lawyer, who happened to be the controversial F. Lee Bailey, well-known for his involvement in the Dr Sam Sheppard murder case. In taped interviews with Bailey, DeSalvo confessed in detail to the 13 murders in Boston. The police were at first inclined to be sceptical, but soon became convinced by DeSalvo’s detailed knowledge of the crimes. As a result, DeSalvo was sentenced to life imprisonment; he had served only six years when he was found stabbed to death in his cell by a fellow prisoner who was never identified.