Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (43 page)

The pair hung out at a coffee shop where Muhammad began to pay inordinate attention to a guitar player and her son. Claiming to be a record producer, he invited her to come with him to New York. She recalls, however, having a “bad feeling” about him; Muhammad seemed overly interested in her son and his half-black ethnicity.

In December, Malvo’s mother arrived in Bellingham seeking her son. The police inquiry into his whereabouts resulted in Malvo’s being detained briefly for immigration violations. Pending a hearing, he was released and continued to live with Muhammad while his mother vanished—probably on the run from immigration authorities.

In February 2002, Muhammad was arrested for shoplifting food worth $27 from a grocery store. That same month, twenty-one-year-old Keenya Cook, who lived with her aunt Isa Nichols, the woman who had helped police recover the children Muhammad abducted, opened her front door and was killed by a shot to her face. Police have not solved the murder, but the possible implications are obvious.

In April, Muhammad visited a former army buddy, showed him two rifles and a silencer, and apparently ranted about how much damage those weapons, if silenced, could do. Muhammad was coming apart, and somehow the process involved the loss of his children and his attempts to substitute them with surrogates.

In June 2002, Muhammad took Malvo to his childhood hometown in Louisiana, where he visited his cousins. They recall that Muhammad was uncharacteristically haggard, dirty, and sullen, while Malvo appeared fearful and withdrawn. Muhammad showed his cousin his rifle and ammunition and claimed to be on some kind of secret mission for Special Forces. He contacted his first wife in Louisiana and then turned north toward the Washington, D.C., area, where his second wife had recently moved with their three sons.

The movements of Muhammad and Malvo between June and September 2002 are very obscure. We know that on September 10, Muhammad purchased the blue Caprice automobile that would be modified as a mobile sniper’s nest. Muhammad and the vehicle were seen in the vicinity of his second wife’s residence in Maryland. On September 21, two women were ambushed and shot outside a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama. One of the victims died. Although the details are still unclear, police have some kind of forensic evidence that links the crime to Muhammad and Malvo.

From October 1 to October 22, the world was transfixed by a series of sniper shootings in the Washington, D.C.–Maryland area. All took place near the extensive freeway system and paralyzed daily life in the region. Outdoor school activities were suspended, and every shooting broke into television programming as soon as it occurred. Some kind of communication demanding a $10 million ransom to cease killing was received from the snipers, and a tarot card was reported to have been left at one of the scenes. Ten victims in all were killed until apparently the snipers, in a phone call, linked themselves to the Montgomery, Alabama, shooting, from which their identity via fingerprints was surfaced. Within hours of the release of a description of the wanted men, they were apprehended asleep in their vehicle.

Muhammad and Malvo faced judge and jury in separate trials in the autumn of 2003. It appears that Muhammad might have acted as the “spotter” while the younger Malvo actually committed eight of the ten shootings—the prosecution never presented any evidence clearly indicating that Muhammad was the trigger man in any of the murders. Muhammad, nevertheless, was found guilty in November, with the jury recommending the death sentence. The teenage Malvo’s defense, in the meantime, is that he was “brainwashed” by the older Muhammad.

The motive behind the shooting spree remains unclear. According to Malvo’s defense attorney, the shootings were part of a secret plan by Muhammad to murder his ex-wife, Mildred, and regain custody of his children. The plan, unknown to Malvo, was to shoot Mildred and make it seem to be only one of the many sniper murders. The prosecution contends that the shootings were intended to extort a $10 million ransom with which Muhammad intended to establish a utopian commune in Canada for youngsters from around the world.

During his questioning by police, Malvo was asked, “Were you the trigger man in all of them?”

“Basically, yeah.”

“Basically means, in most but not all?”

“In all of them.”

When asked what the objective of the murders was, Malvo replied, “It’s a plan. You stick to it. You don’t deviate. You don’t change it.”

At his trial in November, his sixth-grade teacher testified that Malvo was “very dependable, hardworking. Whenever he was given a task, he’d do it to the end.”

His aunt, with whom he lived once, also testified, “He was very obedient. When I set down rules, he would obey them.”

Malvo was convicted in December and the jury recommended the youth be given a life sentence.

Whatever the motives, Muhammad and Malvo fit the newly emerging profile of the spree serial killer. Unlike the typical spree killer, they did not unleash their destruction oblivious to their own safety or escape. Instead they killed selectively and evaded the danger of arrest. Muhammad and Malvo were highly organized, carefully selecting sites that offered them quick access to the highway system for escape and customizing their vehicle as a sniper’s nest. But unlike traditional serial killers, they did not return to a normal life between their kills. They moved in a state of killing frenzy from murder to murder.

It will probably be found that Muhammad was the leading actor in these crimes and their timing reflected events in his life. Like Cunanan, Muhammad attempted to sustain a traditional life and career but somehow for some reason he failed. He was unable to cope with the failure and “snapped” into a raging homicidal campaign that took the lives of anywhere from ten to twelve innocent victims. In both cases, the homicidal snap followed a series of lesser breaks from the norms of society. Cunanan was dealing drugs; Muhammad was insubordinate in the military, abducted his children, and threatened his ex-wife. From a family man with a job in the military to a father with a bed in a homeless shelter whose children had been taken away, Muhammad was unable to cope with the failures of his life without blaming somebody or taking some kind of spectacularly lethal revenge. Cunanan’s decline mirrored a similar pattern.

What probably made Cunanan and Muhammad serial spree killers as opposed to mass killers is the absence of serious mental illness and the intact remnants of their intelligence, ego, and capability. Both Cunanan and Muhammad were relatively competent, proud, goal-oriented individuals, and they carried that competence with them into their killing sprees.

None of these criteria and categories are necessarily immutable. Every few years a serial killer appears on the scene whose sick fantasies and imagination defy the previously defined parameters and criteria. One only needs to remember that when Renwick Williams was prosecuted in 1790 as London “Monster” for slashing women’s clothing, his crime was described as “a scene that is so new in the annals of humanity, a scene so inexplicable, so unnatural, that one might have regarded it, out of respect for human nature, as impossible.” The annals of humanity, unfortunately, have come a long way since then, and probably still have a distance to go: Nothing is impossible!

FIVE
THE QUESTION OF MADNESS:
Inside Their Heads

The biggest mistake in trying to figure out why these people are this way is that we try to analyze them through our own standard of behavior.
They don’t think the way you or I think. We’re not sure why—but the point is they don’t.
—
JIM WRIGHT
, FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit
When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
—
MARK TWAIN

Few would disagree that Herbert Mullin, who thought he was saving California from the great earthquake by killing people, and Ed Gein, who was making chairs out of human skin, were entirely insane when they committed their acts. The question becomes more difficult with somebody like law student Ted Bundy, who killed twenty women while at the same time working as a suicide prevention counselor, or John Wayne Gacy, who escorted the first lady and then went home to sleep over thirty-three trussed-up corpses under his house. On one hand their crimes seem “insane,” yet on the other hand, Bundy and Gacy knew exactly what they were doing. How insane were they?

The Insanity Plea

Part of the problem is that there is no precise definition of insanity—doctors define insanity differently from courts of law. The insanity plea has existed in English jurisprudence since the reign of Henry III (1216–1272), when the king could commute a death sentence of an insane criminal if it was demonstrated that irrational behavior was not unusual for the person in the past. In such cases, the prisoner would often end up being confined in a monastery. In the next century the plea was moved into the regular appeals process, no longer requiring the king’s authority. In 1581 legal authorities were arguing what a test of insanity should consist of in law, settling upon “knowledge of good and evil” as the test.
¹³⁴

In 1843, English jurisprudence developed the concept of insanity as a defense against charges of murder. A mentally ill man named Daniel M’Naghten came to believe that he was personally being threatened by Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel and mistakenly shot and killed Peel’s private secretary. He was acquitted on the grounds of insanity in what is known to this day as the
M’Naghten rule.
It is used in many Western countries today, including the United States, to define insanity in the courts. It states that to establish a successful defense on the ground of insanity:

It must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.
¹³⁵

In other words, to claim insanity, a defendant needs to prove that he could not distinguish between right and wrong, or that he was not aware of what he was doing,
because of
mental illness.

In 1887, U.S. judges expanded the test for an insanity plea. They felt that while the M’Naghten rule excused those who could not tell right from wrong, it did not excuse those who knew they were doing wrong but could not resist the impulse to do so because of mental incapacity. Ruling in
State of Alabama v. Parsons,
the judges stated:

If, by reason of duress of such mental disease, he had so far lost the
power to choose
between the right and wrong, and to avoid doing the act in question, as that his free agency was at the time destroyed.
¹³⁶

In 1954, American courts further broadened the ground for a plea of insanity in
Durham v. United States:
“An accused is not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect.”
¹³⁷
This broad decision was codified by the acceptance of American courts in 1962 of a test proposed by the American Law Institute:

A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality [wrongfulness] of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law. The terms “mental disease or defect” do not include an abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or otherwise anti social conduct.
¹³⁸

Between 1955 and 1984, every trial where this defense was used required the conflicting testimony of psychiatrists who frequently disagreed on an exact definition of “mental incapacity” and its effect on an “irresistible impulse” of a defendant. Defense lawyers for serial killers who were lucid, cleverly concealed their crimes, and functioned in their daily lives argued that they were not guilty by reason of insanity—that they could not resist the impulse to kill, even though they knew it was wrong, because they were sick.

This broad definition of legal insanity came crashing down between Dan White’s so-called “Twinkie Defense”
*
in the murder of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978 and John Hinckley’s acquittal by reason of insanity for his attempt to gun down President Ronald Reagan. In October 1984 Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act, which returned the insanity pleas in federal courts closer to the original M’Naghten definition and set a model for state courts as well:

At the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant, as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts. Mental disease or defect does not otherwise constitute a defense.

The inability to resist an impulse to kill, for whatever reason, is no longer a viable defense for a serial killer. Most serial killers do not fit the legal definition of insanity, especially the organized ones. They search for and stalk their victims, they arrive with weapons and restraints prepared, they take their time killing, and they destroy the evidence afterward, demonstrating a full knowledge of the consequences of their crime. They elude detection and therefore are obviously aware of the wrongfulness of their act.