Serial Killer Investigations (31 page)

In his study of DeBardeleben,
Lethal Shadow,
Stephen Michaud remarks that investigators concluded that he was ‘the most dangerous felon ever at large in America’. Michaud also comments: ‘For Mike DeBardeleben, possession meant a live victim, suffering under his control.’ ‘There is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her,’ DeBardeleben wrote in his private journal. ‘To force her to undergo suffering without her being able to defend herself. The pleasure in the constant domination over another person is the very essence of the sadistic drive.’

The problems with chronicling DeBardeleben’s criminal career were, as Michaud soon discovered, enormous. Even with the help of Roy Hazelwood, who had collected all the evidence that figured in DeBardeleben’s trials (no less than six), and which finally sent him to prison for 365 years, there was no possibility of constructing a timeline of DeBardeleben’s criminal activities. He had covered his trail far too well. Ted Bundy—about whom Michaud also wrote a book—continued to deny his guilt until his death sentence produced a state of desperation in which he was willing to bargain for time with confessions dribbled out piecemeal. DeBardeleben was never under this pressure, and so had no motivation to tell the whole truth. Michaud, like the police investigators, had to work backwards, telling the story in reverse order.

For practical purposes, this began with DeBardeleben’s release from prison in May 1978, where he had spent two years for passing counterfeit bills.

In the early hours of Sunday, 4 September 1978, DeBardeleben passed a 19-year-old nurse (whom Michaud calls ‘Lucy Alexander’) who had quarrelled with her boyfriend and was walking towards her home. He politely asked if he could help. She climbed into his luxury car. Minutes later he produced a police badge and told her she was under arrest for hitchhiking. He snapped handcuffs on her wrists, and gagged and blindfolded her with adhesive tape. Two hours later they stopped at a house and he took her indoors. On a mattress on the floor he undressed her leaving the blindfold in place, and then raped her for an hour without reaching a climax. He then sodomised her, ordering her to call him ‘Daddy’. After a sleep, he drank root beer, smoked a cigarette, and forced her to fellate him. As she did this he abused her verbally—obviously an integral part of the pleasure of the rape.

In lulls between further rapes, he told her about his former wife; ‘all she did was spend money’. During the next 18 hours she was raped four times vaginally and anally. Finally, he allowed her to dress, drove her to an isolated area, and released her.

On the afternoon of 4 February 1979, Debardeleben went into the trailer sales office of a real estate company, and told the estate agent, 31-year-old Elizabeth Mason (again a pseudonym) that he was a federal employee about to be transferred to Arlington, Virginia, and was looking for a home for himself and his wife. He asked her to take him to see some houses in the $100,000 range. Finally, in an empty house, he pointed a .389 automatic at her. Recalling an article she had read by the TV hostess Carol Burnett, she decided to scream and yell and flail at him.

He tried to shoot her, but the gun jammed. He then began hitting her with the gun. Eventually, declaring that he only wanted her purse and that he would then leave, he got her to agree to being tied up. This proved to be a mistake; when she was tied, he throttled her, banging her head on the floor and shouting, ‘Pass out, bitch.’ Finally she did.

When she woke up, her slacks had been removed, and the man had taken her car. She was in such a state of trauma that it was two days before a detective could question her. Her head required 31 stitches. It was not until she was in the hospital that she realised that her sanitary pad was still intact and that she had not been raped.

Towards midnight on IJune 1979, a 20-year-old woman (Michaud calls her ‘Laurie Jensen’) was on her way home from the convenience store she managed when a sedan car pulled up and the driver said, ‘Police,’ and ordered her into the car. Then he told her she was suspected of being an accomplice in a burglary.

Soon he abandoned the pretence, and handcuffed, blindfolded, and gagged her. There followed a two-hour drive, which ended when he made her walk into a house. There he undressed her and ordered her to perform oral sex. She noticed the small size of his penis. After achieving an erection with difficulty he sodomised her, ordering her to call him ‘Daddy’ as he did so.

That afternoon he made her pose for photographs, tape-recorded her as she was forced to tell him how much she enjoyed what he was doing to her, and then locked her in a closet. He told her that he was resentful about a previous wife and wanted ‘to get back at all women’. After keeping her for 24 hours, with more sodomy and oral sex, he drove her to within a few blocks of her home.

Frustrated investigators consulted the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, and it was John Douglas who profiled the rapist. What he said was to prove remarkably accurate when DeBardeleben was finally arrested. Douglas said that men who did this kind of thing were raised by an overbearing, domineering mother, and had a passive father. He had probably been arrested in his teens, had been in the military, but would have such problems adjusting to discipline that he would probably have been discharged. He would also be sexually inadequate.

DeBardeleben’s next attempt at abduction showed how his hatred of women could explode if he was resisted. On 1 November 1980, a 25-year-old named Diane Overton was pulled over at 4 a.m. by a man who claimed to be a policeman. He ordered her out of the car, and when she opened the door, snapped handcuffs on her wrists. When he put his hand over her mouth she bit him hard. She then began screaming and honking her horn. But in spite of being in the middle of a residential district, no one responded. He dragged her into his car, but she stalled it by kicking it out of gear. Then she managed to open the door and fell out. The open door hit a cement wall and jammed. He managed to get it free and drove at her; she twisted out of the way. But he turned at a closed gas station and drove at her again. She succeeded in escaping by hiding under a concrete stairway, and her attacker drove off. She was lucky to escape; in his fury, DeBardeleben would undoubtedly have tortured as well as killed her.

Ten days after this kidnap, he went into a clothing store in southern New Jersey and abducted the clerk, an Italian-American Michaud calls ‘Maria Santini’. In the car, she was ordered to crouch with her head on the seat. In his home he undressed her and tied her up with rope, explaining that he was ‘into bondage’. He then told her he was a transvestite, and proved it by going into the next room and returning wearing a miniskirt and high heels. After taking photographs of her in various postures that he arranged, he moved her into the bedroom and took more bondage photographs, explaining that his method was known as a ‘Chinese hog-tie’. Then, after lying beside her, kissing her breasts, and fondling her vagina, he allowed her to dress, even giving her the sweaty turtleneck he had been wearing to replace a blouse he had cut off her. After that he drove her to some woods and left her.

These were just a few of the crimes DeBardeleben committed between May 1978 and his arrest as the Mall Passer.

After DeBardeleben’s capture, the investigators—still unaware that he was more than a skilful counterfeiter—began looking into his background. Born in 1940, his first arrest at the age of 16 was for carrying a concealed weapon. He had subsequently been arrested on charges of sodomy, murder and attempted kidnapping. But he had been in prison only twice, once for a parole violation and once for counterfeiting. A large part of the material seized in his storage facility consisted of handwritten pages in which he spoke about himself and his plans at length—one document described his longterm ambition as being to buy himself a house in a remote spot, where he was not overlooked by neighbours, and turn it into a place where he could bring captive women and make them obey his every whim.

Incredibly, it looked as if the authorities might be willing to forget all his criminal activities except passing dud bills. The reason, simply, was that following up his criminal career looked as it was likely to be a long and costly exercise. The Secret Service’s responsibilities began and ended with the counterfeiting case. Agent Jane Vezeris, in overall charge of the investigation, was outraged by the idea, and went to see her boss, Acting Assistant Director Joe Carlon. She took with her a tape in which DeBardeleben could be heard making various sadistic demands, while his victim screams in anguish.

By chance, the director of the Secret Service, John R. Simpson, dropped in during the meeting, and heard the tape. When it was over, Simpson told Carlon: ‘Give them whatever they want,’ and left.

The first step Agents Foos and Mertz took was to dispatch a Teletype about DeBardeleben’s arrest to all field offices. Soon they had a break. Agent Harold Bibb, of Shreveport, Louisiana, thought he recognised the photograph of DeBardeleben, and after staring at it for a quarter of an hour, recalled that it resembled an artist’s impression of a man who was wanted for the murder of a real estate agent, Jean McPhaul, in

1982. The man had asked her to show him properties in Bossier City; he called himself ‘Dr Zack’. On 27 April the attractive 40-year-old had left her office in the morning, and when she failed to return, colleagues went looking for her. They found her in an attic, suspended by the throat from a rafter, drenched in blood from two knife wounds.

The killing seemed motiveless—she had been neither raped nor robbed.

Moreover, the investigators heard of another murder of a realtor dating back to 1971 in Barrington, Rhode Island; she was 52-year-old Edna (‘Terry’) Macdonald, and had set out for an evening appointment with a customer who called himself Peter Morgan, and failed to return. She was found in a basement, a cord around her neck and tied to an overhead pipe. She had been strangled, and again, rape and robbery were ruled out as motives. The description of Peter Morgan sounded like DeBardeleben.

Enquiries about DeBardeleben went on pouring in from all over the country—Mertz and Foos were astonished at the sheer volume of unsolved murders—and one of these indicated another level of DeBardeleben’s criminal activities: a kidnapping for ransom. On 13 April

1983, David Starr, manager of the Columbia Savings Bank in Greece, near Rochester, New York, had taken his sick housemate, Joe Rapini, to the hospital. On arriving home, they were held at gunpoint by a ski-masked intruder, who proposed to take Rapini hostage in his own car while Starr went to his bank and collected $70,000. When the money was paid, Rapini would be left in the trunk of the car. Starr was able to collected only $37,900, which he left near a burnt-out house. Twice Starr saw a woman driving a small white car, and it appeared later that she was the accomplice who collected the ransom. But when Rapini was found in the trunk of his car later that day, he had been shot through the heart, as well as beaten about the head and face.

DeBardeleben’s writings had indicated an interest in banks. And a teller at the Columbia Savings Bank recognised a photograph of him as a man who had been hanging around there.

The next task was to try to identify photographs of 40 women among DeBardeleben’s seized possessions, whose positions and expressions suggested that they had been victims of the same kind of sexual violence as rape victims Lucy Alexander, Elizabeth Mason, and Laurie Jenkins. The identity of most of them would remain unknown, as did the question of how many of them survived their ordeals. One or two were identified by one of DeBardeleben’s former wives as women who had worked for a nude modelling photographic studio he had run in 1972. Others were obviously in a state of terror, a few looked drugged, and others dead. The only thing that was absolutely clear was that DeBardeleben had spent much of his life raping, torturing, and terrifying women.

The reason for this hatred of women emerged when investigators spoke to his previous wives. The root of the trouble was his mother Mary Lou (whom he called Moe). Theirs was the classic Freudian love-hate relationship. When she had met DeBardeleben’s father (also called Mike) in the early 1930s, he was a serious-minded young engineer; she was a pretty, bubbly legal secretary who loved to party. Her own mother had died giving birth to her, and she had been adopted (twice) but never felt loved. So she had little love to give her children. When stressed she tended to drink, and so soon lost her hourglass figure. She was undoubtedly responsible for turning her son into a sociopath, and the investigators came to believe that he had murdered realtor Terry Macdonald because she resembled his mother. He grew up narcissistic, cruel and demanding—an archetypal Right Man.

His father also seems to have had some Right Man tendencies, in that he was strict and bad-tempered, and ‘made everyone miserable’ according to his daughter Beal. ‘His wife and children were made to feel inadequate,’ and Mike was frequently punished, on one occasion by having his head held under water. Parents like these can be almost guaranteed to turn a strong-willed son into a sociopath.

By the time he was 16 his mother had become a drunk, and his ‘physical assaults on her were routine’. His first police mug shot—on a careless driving charge—shows him wearing a leather jacket, dark glasses and a bored sneer. Soon after that he was expelled from high school.

He was in the Air Force for a brief period, but was court-marshalled for disorderly behaviour, and a psychiatrist described him as ‘a verbose young man of superior intelligence who gave an extensive history of repetitive acts of an egocentric and antisocial nature’. He was soon discharged. He went back to high school and was soon expelled again. An attempt to rob a service station led to him firing at the attendant and then fleeing empty-handed. He was sentenced to five years probation. By this time his first marriage—to a girl called Linda—was also over. He soon married again—a pretty schoolgirl —but this also broke up. By now, his parents were terrified of him. And his younger brother, Ralph, whose upbringing had been equally loveless and equally traumatic, committed suicide. After he threatened his mother with a hatchet, is parents had him committed to a mental hospital, where he spent six weeks.