Serial Killer Investigations (25 page)

Crime scene photographs, together with the police report and autopsy findings, were duly forwarded to the Behavioral Science Unit for analysis.

Enter Special Agent John Douglas to profile the type of person responsible—from his desk at Quantico, some three hundred miles away. He knew from the police report that Francine Elveson, who was self-conscious about her size and physical deformity, had no boyfriends. That ruled out a lovers’ quarrel. Moreover, it was spontaneous choice that led her to leave for work that morning via the stairs, rather than use the elevator. Those two factors meant that it was a chance encounter between victim and murderer—yet an encounter with someone who promptly spent a long time on the roof mauling his victim in broad daylight. To John Douglas that meant he was no stranger to the building; he knew its routine well enough to feel confident that he would not be disturbed during the ritual mutilation murder that ensued.

Again, the fact that he was in the building at that hour suggested someone who might live, or perhaps work there. And Francine Elveson—this shy, almost reclusive young woman who shunned men because of her appearance—had neither screamed nor made any apparent attempt to ward off a man who suddenly lashed out as they passed on the stairs. It had to mean that either he was someone she knew, if only by sight, or who was wearing an identifiable uniform—postman, say, or janitor—whom she believed she had no reason to fear.

The offender left mixed crime scene characteristics, as many sex killers do. He used restraints (organised), yet left the body in full view (disorganised). He depersonalised his victim (disorganised), yet having mutilated her body took the knife with him (organised). On balance, however, John Douglas classified him as a ‘disorganised’ offender, acting out a fantasy ritual that had probably been inspired earlier by a bondage article and/or sketches in some pornographic magazine. The FBI agent profiled him as white (Francine Elveson was white), male, of roughly her age (say between 25 and 35), and of average appearance, in other words, who would not seem in any way out of character in the apartment building environment.

Statistics pointed to a school ‘dropout’ type, possibly now unemployed. Because of the time at which it happened, the crime seemed unlikely to be either drink—or drug-related. Francine Elveson’s killer was a man who found it difficult to behave naturally with women, and was almost certainly sexually inadequate. (The ritual mutilation provided the gratification he craved—a fact borne out by forensic evidence, which revealed traces of semen on the body.) He was the type of sex offender who would keep a pornography collection, while his sadistic behaviour pointed to one with mental problems.

He left the body in view because he wanted it to shock and offend. That decision was part and parcel of his implied challenge to the police, inked on the victim’s thigh—‘You can’t stop me.’ It was a challenge that John Douglas believed meant he was liable to kill again, should opportunity arise. His profile stressed the importance of the attacker’s prior knowledge of the apartment building where the victim lived—and her apparent lack of alarm as they met on the stairs.

Once the answer to these two connected factors was found, the rest of the puzzle would slot into place.

Armed with the profile, the investigating police re-examined their list of suspects. One man in particular seemed to fit the description like a glove. His name was Carmine Calabro. He was 32 years old, an unmarried, out-of-work actor, and an only child with a history of mental illness. He had no girlfriends. He did not live in the apartment building where Francine was found murdered, but his father—whom he often visited—lived there and was a near neighbour of the Elvesons.

The problem was that it seemed impossible for Carmine Calabro to be the killer. The police had interviewed Calabro’s father (as they had every other resident in the complex) before calling on the FBI for help. The father told them that his son—who lived elsewhere, and alone—was an in-patient undergoing psychiatric treatment at a local psychiatric hospital, which appeared to rule him out as a possible suspect. Now enquiries were rechecked, and the police discovered that—because security was lax—patients at the hospital concerned were able to absent themselves almost at will. When they learned that Carmine Calabro was absent without permission on the evening before Francine Elveson was murdered, he was arrested—13 months after the body had been found.

Calabro proved to be a high-school dropout, who shared a collection of pornography—mostly S&M—with his father. He pleaded not guilty to the murder at his trial; however, the evidence given by three forensic (dental) experts—whose independent tests showed that impressions from Calabro’s teeth matched the bite marks on the dead teacher’s thigh—proved conclusive, and he was imprisoned for 25 years to life.

It had been a virtuoso performance by Special Agent John Douglas, whose startling accuracy of profiling matched that of James Brussel in the case of the Mad Bomber 22 years earlier. Aptly, one of the warmest tributes came from the head of the police task force assigned to the Elveson murder investigation, Lieutenant Joseph D’Amico. ‘They had [Carmine Calabro] so right,’ he said, ‘that I asked the FBI why they hadn’t given us his phone number too.’

Douglas applied the same technique to a case involving the kidnapping and murder of Betty Shade in Logan, Pennsylvania, in June 1979. Her mutilated body was found on a garbage dump, and there was evidence that she had been raped after death. The injuries to her face convinced Douglas again that the killer knew the victim well, and had killed her in a fury of resentment; but the mutilations had been performed after she had died, suggesting that the killer was too frightened to inflict them while she was alive. This indicated a young and nervous killer. Yet, Betty had been driven from her babysitting job to the dump in a car, requiring a degree of organisation. The necrophilic sex also suggested a killer who was taking his time. To Douglas, all this pointed unmistakably to two killers, and again, his ‘profile’ pointed the police in the right direction. The young woman lived with her boyfriend, and it seemed unlikely that he would rape her after death, which is why he had originally been eliminated from the inquiry. But the boyfriend had an elder brother who owned a car. Both men were eventually convicted of the murder. The younger man had killed and mutilated her; the brother had raped her dead body.

Agent Howard Teten, who taught one of the original FBI courses in applied criminology at the Academy, also seemed to have a natural talent for ‘profiling’ random killers, which he had been applying since the early 1970s. On one occasion, a California policeman had contacted him about a case in which a young woman had been stabbed to death by a frenzied killer. The frenzy suggested to Teten that the murderer was an inexperienced youth, and that this was probably his first crime, committed in a violently emotional state. And, as in the later case of the Bronx schoolteacher, Teten thought the evidence pointed to someone who lived close to the scene of the crime. He advised the policeman to look for a teenager with acne, a loner, who would probably be feeling tremendous guilt and would be ready to confess. If they ran across such a person, the best approach would be just to look at him and say, ‘You know why I’m here.’ In fact, the teenager who answered the door said; ‘You got me,’ even before the policeman had time to speak.

The FBI’s new insight into the mind of the killer and rapist began to pay dividends almost immediately. In 1979, a woman reported being raped in an East Coast city; the police realised that the modus operandi of the rapist was identical to that of seven other cases in the past two years. They approached the FBI unit with details of all the cases. The deliberation of the rapes seemed to indicate that the attacker was not a teenager or a man in his early twenties, but a man in his late twenties or early thirties. Other details indicated that he was divorced or separated from his wife, that he was a labourer whose education had not progressed beyond high school, that he had a poor self-image, and that he was probably a peeping Tom. In all probability, the police had probably already interviewed him, since they had been questioning men wandering the streets in the early hours of the morning. This ‘profile’ led the police to shortlist forty suspects living in the neighbourhood, and then gradually, using the profile, to narrow this list down to one. This man was arrested and found guilty of the rapes.

It soon became clear that psychological profiling could also help in the interrogation of suspects. The agency began a program of instructing local policemen in interrogation techniques. Their value was soon demonstrated in a murder case of 1980.

On 17 February the body of a woman was found in a dump area behind Daytona Beach Airport in Florida; she had been stabbed repeatedly, and the body was in a state of decomposition, which indicated that she had been dead for a matter of weeks. She was fully dressed and her panties and bra were apparently undisturbed; she had been partially covered with branches and laid out neatly and ritualistically on her back, with her arms at her sides. The FBI team would immediately have said that this indicated a killer in his late twenties or early thirties.

From missing person reports, Detective Sergeant Paul Crowe identified her as Mary Carol Maher, a 20-year-old swimming star who had vanished at the end of January, more than two weeks previously. She had been in the habit of hitching lifts. Towards the end of March, a local prostitute complained of being attacked by a customer who had picked her up in a red car. She had been high on drugs, so could not recollect the details of what caused the disagreement. Whatever it was, the man had pulled a knife and attacked her—one cut on her thigh required 27 stitches. She described her assailant as a heavily built man with glasses and a moustache, and the car as a red Gremlin with dark windows. She thought that he had been a previous customer, and that he might live in or near the Derbyshire Apartments.

Near these apartments an investigating officer found a red Gremlin with dark windows; a check with the Department of Motor Vehicles revealed that it was registered to a man named Gerald Stano. And the manager of the Derbyshire Apartments said that he used to have a tenant named Gerald Stano, who drove a red Gremlin with dark windows. A check revealed that Stano had a long record of arrests for attacking prostitutes, although no convictions; he apparently made a habit of picking up prostitutes who were hitchhiking.

A photograph of Stano was procured, and shown to the prostitute, who identified the man as her attacker.

It was at this point that Detective Crowe heard about the case and reflected that Mary Carol Maher had also been in the habit of hitching lifts—she had been an athletic young woman who was usually able to take care of herself. Crowe’s observations at the crime scene told him that Mary’s killer had been a compulsively neat man; he was now curious to see Stano.

The suspect was located at an address in nearby Ormond Beach, and brought in for questioning. Crowe stood and watched as a colleague, whom he had primed with certain questions, interrogated Stano. But his first encounter with Stano answered the question about compulsive neatness; Stano looked at him and told him that his moustache needed a little trimming on the right side.

What Crowe wanted to study was Stano’s body language, which was as revealing as a lie detector. And he soon discovered that Stano was an easy subject to read. When telling the truth, he would pull his chair up to the desk or lean forward, rearranging the objects on the desktop while talking. When lying, he would push back his chair and cross his legs, placing his left ankle on his right knee.

It was not difficult to get Stano to admit to the attack on the prostitute—he knew that she could identify him. Then Crowe took over, and explained that he was interested in the disappearance of Mary Carol Maher. He showed Stano the young woman’s photograph, and Stano immediately admitted to having given her a lift. ‘She was with another girl,’ he said, pushing back his chair and placing his left ankle on his right knee. After more conversation—this time about the fact that Stano was an orphan—Crowe again asked what had happened with Mary Carol Maher. Pushing his chair back and crossing his legs, Stano declared that he had driven her to a nightclub called Fannie Farkel’s—Crowe knew this was one of Mary’s favourite haunts, a place frequented by the young set—but that she had not wanted to go in. Crowe knew that the truth was probably the opposite; Stano had not wanted to mix with a younger crowd (he was 28). He asked Stano if he had tried to ‘get inside her pants’. Stano pulled the chair up to the desk and growled, ‘Yeah.’ ‘But she didn’t want to?’ ‘No!’

Crowe recalled being told by Mary’s mother that her daughter had, on one occasion, ‘beaten the hell’ out of two men who had tried to ‘get fresh’. ‘She could hit pretty hard, couldn’t she?’ ‘You’re goddam right she could,’ said Stano angrily. ‘So you hit her?’ Stano pushed back his chair and crossed his legs. ‘No, I let her out. I haven’t seen the bitch since.’

Crowe knew he now had the advantage. As he pressed Stano about the young woman’s resistance, it visibly revived the anger he had felt at the time. And when Crowe asked: ‘You got pretty mad, didn’t you?’ Stano snorted: ‘You’re damn right I did. I got so goddam mad I stabbed her just as hard as I could.’ Then he immediately pushed back his chair, crossed his legs, and withdrew his statement. But when Crowe pressed him to tell how he stabbed her, he pulled his chair forward again and described stabbing her backhanded in the chest, then, as she tried to scramble out of the door, slashing her thigh and stabbing her twice in the back—Crowe had already noted these injuries when he first examined the body. After this admission, Stano drove with Crowe to the dump behind the airport, and showed where he had hidden the body.

It was after Stano had signed a confession to killing Mary Carol Maher that one of Crowe’s fellow detectives showed him a photograph of a missing black prostitute, Toni Van Haddocks, and asked: ‘See if he knows anything about her.’ When Crowe placed the photograph in front of Stano, Stano immediately sat back in his chair and placed his left ankle on his right knee. But he persisted in his denials of knowing the woman. Two weeks later, on 15 April 1980, a resident of Holly Hill, near Daytona Beach, found a skull in his back garden. Local policemen discovered the scene of the murder in a nearby wooded area—bones scattered around by animals. When Crowe went to visit the scene, he immediately noted that four low branches had been torn off pine trees surrounding the clearing, and recognised Stano’s method.