Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (56 page)

NINE
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF CRIMINAL PROFILING:
How They Get It Right and When They Don’t

If you want to understand the artist, look at his work.
—
JOHN DOUGLAS
, former head of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Investigative Support Unit
In a macabre way, looking at the changing face of a serial killer is like looking at the changing face of America . . .
—
ROBERT D. KEPPEL
, criminal investigator

Profiling and the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit

In 1991, the Jodie Foster movie
The Silence of the Lambs,
based on the Thomas Harris bestseller, claimed that the FBI had a center nestled deep in a forested region near Washington D.C., where specially trained FBI agents ensconced in underground chambers did nothing but think about and analyze hundreds of unsolved murder files and gruesome crime scene photographs from every part of the United States. The movie proposed that they attempt to enter the minds of unidentified killers to produce a profile—a hypothetical description of a suspect based on his psychology. That is precisely what the FBI does in real life—at Quantico, Virginia, about thirty miles outside the capital.

Quantico is a fortified U.S. Marine Corps base where the FBI training academy is located. The Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU)
*
is based at the training facility and was originally established to train agents how to negotiate with and predict the behavior of hostage takers. It was in the BSU that the FBI’s system of analysis of serial killers and rapists was first developed in the late 1970s, primarily by FBI agents Robert K. Ressler, John Douglas, and Roy Hazelwood.

At Quantico, buried beneath the ground in a bomb shelter once built for postnuclear intelligence operations, the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) is housed. FBI agents specialized in profiling offenders, known as
criminal investigative analysts,
study crime data from suspected serial homicides, kidnappings, terrorist acts, and other serious and violent offenses.

In most serial homicides, FBI agents do not actively participate in the investigation, secure evidence, or pursue the suspect—that is the responsibility of the local police agency. Nor is the FBI called in if serial homicides occur in different jurisdictions—that is a myth. The FBI analysts act in an advisory capacity, only at the request of a local police department that submits a standard, thirteen-page Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) analysis report to the FBI. The data from the VICAP report is fed into a computer known as Profiler, and the output of the computer is then elaborated on by the analysts in the form of a profile before being sent back to the local police department. Although generically called profiling, the technical term is
criminal investigative analysis
(CIA).

FBI analysts sometimes travel to the scene of a crime or assign one of a team of specially trained local FBI agents, known as
field profile coordinators,
to work at the scene. The average FBI agent is fairly well educated—a university degree is required of recruits. The agents at NCAVC often hold postgraduate degrees in various social sciences—they are highly trained, highly experienced, and highly educated. They claim to be formidable “mind hunters” and “monster fighters.”

A Brief History of Profiling

The NCAVC is a relatively new program, formally established by order of President Reagan in June 1984. In the wake of the serial killer “epidemic” described earlier, it took twenty-seven years to develop and implement the NCAVC from the time that an LAPD homicide detective named Pierce Brooks first thought of it.

Aside from fictional investigative profilers such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or C. Auguste Dupin in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the use of psychological profiling of unidentified criminals is a relatively new technique. It was probably first used to profile one of history’s most notorious criminals, Adolf Hitler. During World War II, the OSS—the precursor of the CIA—commissioned psychiatrist W. C. Langer to construct a psychodynamic personality profile of Hitler with the purpose of anticipating decisions that Hitler might make under certain circumstances. Langer’s profile turned out to be relatively accurate, down to his prediction of Hitler’s suicide at the end of the war.
¹⁹⁸

PROFILING THE MAD BOMBER OF NEW YORK: 1956

Starting from 1940, for sixteen years, New York City was plagued by a series of bomb explosions in public places. Some thirty bombs had been planted, although not all had exploded. In 1956, the bombings began to escalate—the police were worried that it was only a matter of time before somebody would be killed. The individual was now leaving bombs inside movie theater seats, which he slashed open with a knife from underneath and stuffed the device inside.

From letters that the “Mad Bomber” left behind and sent to newspapers, it was obvious that he was a disgruntled former employee of Con Edison, New York’s electric power company—but there were records for thousands of such former employees and the police did not know where to begin their search. It was at this point that the New York City police turned for help to psychiatrist and New York State Assistant Commissioner for Mental Hygiene Dr. James A. Brussel.

After reviewing the police files, Brussel told the astonished police officers, “He’s symmetrically built. Perpendicular and girth development in good ratio. Neither fat nor skinny.” From the notes and the behavior, Brussels had concluded that the Mad Bomber was suffering from paranoia—an obvious deduction. From there, however, Brussels turned to his knowledge of Ernst Kretschmer’s study of some 10,000 patients in mental hospitals. Kretschmer found that 85 percent of the paranoiacs had what he described as an “athletic” body type. Thus Brussel concluded that if the Mad Bomber was a paranoiac, then indeed the chances were 17 in 20 that his build was symmetrical. (A recent study of serial killers, who are not all paranoiacs, concluded that 68 percent had height and weight in good proportion to one another.)
¹⁹⁹

As paranoia develops slowly and usually erupts in full force when the subject is near thirty-five years old, Brussel concluded that the Mad Bomber, after sixteen years of activity, must be now be middle-aged.

From the Mad Bomber’s neatly printed and orderly letters, Brussel deduced that he was a very neat and “proper” man. He was probably an excellent employee, always on time and always performing the best work. From the workmanship on the bombs, Brussel concluded that he was trained as an electrician or pipe fitter. He was probably always neatly dressed and clean-shaven, and was not involved in any disciplinary infractions at work. If he had been dismissed from work, Brussel concluded, it would be for medical reasons and not for work performance or disciplinary problems.

The language of his letters showed a fairly well-educated man but either foreign born or somebody who lived among foreign-born people—there was a certain European stiffness to his writing and a lack of American slang and colloquialisms. It was as if the letters were written first in a foreign language and then translated into English. Brussel felt that because of his choice of both a knife (to slash the movie seats) and a bomb, the Mad Bomber was probably a Slav, and by his regularity, probably a Roman Catholic—very likely Polish. His letters were posted from either New York or Westchester County. He was too smart, Brussel felt, to post letters from where he lived—he likely posted them on his way to New York from somewhere else nearby. Plotting a line from New York through Westchester County, Brussels arrived at Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he knew there was a large Polish community.

Looking at the hand-printed letters, Brussel saw that every letter was perfectly formed, as expected of a paranoiac who would make every effort to avoid any appearance of a flaw, except for one letter—the W—which was formed like a double U; to Brussel it symbolized a pair of female breasts. Brussel was troubled by this sloppy anomaly in the Mad Bomber’s otherwise neatly printed alphabet. Brussel was also struck by the Mad Bomber’s use of a knife to slash the movie theater seats, also a crude and sloppy action uncharacteristic of his ordered and neat personality. Brussel attributed sexual motives to the two factors and suggested that the Mad Bomber’s mother was probably dead and he lived either alone or with an older female relative; he was a loner, had no friends, and was single—but not a homosexual.

Finally, Brussel proposed that the Mad Bomber would be dressed conservatively and would avoid newer-style clothing. He told the police that when they arrested the Mad Bomber, he would probably be wearing a double-breasted suit and it would be buttoned.
²⁰⁰

Armed with this information, the police again began to review the Con Edison company files for ex-employees who were skilled, were living in Connecticut with Polish-sounding names, might be in middle age, and were dismissed for medical reasons.

That’s how the name of George Metesky cropped up, a generator wiper who was involved in an accident at an electrical plant in 1931. Metesky filed for disability payments but doctors could find nothing wrong with him. He stopped coming to work and was dropped from the payroll. He filed for worker’s compensation in 1934, claiming that the accident gave him tuberculosis. After being turned down, he spent three years writing bitter letters to Con Edison. In 1937 he stopped writing, and in 1940 the first bomb exploded.

Metesky’s work record indicated that before the accident, he was an excellent employee—meticulous and punctual. He was a Roman Catholic and lived in Waterbury, Connecticut, in a house with his two older sisters. He was unmarried and both his parents were dead. He was known in the neighborhood as Mr. Think, because sometimes when he was greeted he would not respond, appearing to be in deep thought. Otherwise, he was considered an inoffensive loner. When the police questioned him, he quickly confessed that he was the Mad Bomber. When arrested, he was wearing a blue double-breasted suit—buttoned. Metesky was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility.

Following the Metesky case, police began to use the services of psychiatrists more often to assist them in their investigations. The problem, however, was that each psychiatrist based his profiles on his own knowledge and experience, and when the police pooled together several psychiatrists to assist them on the Boston Strangler case, they all came up with radically different profiles. There was no systematic approach to profiling other than that of each individual psychiatrist.

PIERCE BROOKS AND LINKING CASES

Former LAPD homicide detective Pierce Brooks is considered the modern pioneer of VICAP crime data collection and case linking. In 1957, Brooks, a former naval officer and blimp pilot, became convinced that two separate homicides in the Los Angeles area might have been committed by the same individual. Surmising that if one killer had murdered two victims, he might have killed three or more as well, Brooks spent weeks thumbing through old crime files and newspaper reports at the public library. Brooks realized that he needed a computerized database of unsolved homicide descriptions, a fairly astute idea in a time when most people were unfamiliar with computers and what they can do.

Brooks proposed that every police department in California have a computer terminal linked with a central mainframe that stored data on every unsolved homicide. Every department would have access to data on homicides in other jurisdictions. Aside from the fact that most of Brooks’s superiors didn’t know what a computer was, back in 1957 computers were huge elephants costing millions of dollars. Nobody took his proposal seriously. Brooks put the idea aside and went on with his career to become the head of the Los Angeles homicide unit, and later a chief of police in Oregon and Colorado during the 1960s and 1970s.

By the late 1970s, Robert Ressler, an FBI instructor in hostage negotiation at the BSU in Quantico, was beginning to feel restless. Realizing that taking a systematized approach and understanding of the psychology of hostage takers was vital to police responses, Ressler came to believe that the same applied to what was then called “stranger killings”—murders where the victim and perpetrator did not know each other. These very difficult-to-solve murders were on a dramatic rise in the 1970s. On his own time, Ressler and an associate from the BSU, agent John Douglas, began to interview convicted killers, asking them why
they
thought they had killed. When the FBI hierarchy heard about Ressler and Douglas’s visits to various prisons, they quickly put a stop to them, informing the agents that “social work” was not the FBI’s objective. Fortunately, it was not long before the old-style FBI leadership retired, and Ressler began to lobby for a research program into the minds of multiple killers.

Ressler and Douglas managed to reactivate the interview program and systemize the data that emerged from the encounters. Two important textbooks emerged out of those interviews, authored by Ressler and Douglas along with Ann Burgess, a professor of psychiatric nursing. These books are now considered the bibles of crime analysis:
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives
and the
Crime Classification Manual.
At the same time, Douglas and Ressler began to train other FBI agents in the techniques of profiling an unknown subject—an “Unsub” in BSU terminology.

For Ressler and Douglas, however, the problem remained as to how to collect, analyze, and distribute the data on various unsolved homicides throughout the United States. While exploring the possibility of a U.S. Justice Department research grant, Ressler learned that Pierce Brooks had retired from active police work and had just received a small grant of $35,000 to revive and update his original 1957 proposal of an unsolved homicide computer data network. Brooks was now based at Sam Houston University in Texas, and Ressler went down to see him. The following year, Brooks and the FBI joined forces and got a $1 million research grant to design a data collection, analysis, and distribution system that became known as VICAP. While FBI profilers began working in the field around 1979, VICAP and profiling research and analysis was formalized in the NCAVC only in 1984. It had taken twenty-seven years for Brooks to see his idea transformed into reality.