Authors: Stephen G. Michaud,Roy Hazelwood
Tags: #True Crime, #Murder, #Serial Killers
Ken Lanning, a BSU agent who is an authority on the sexual victimization of children, recalls his own confusion and dismay at the FBI’s state of knowledge in the early 1970s.
“I remember an in-service [class] at Quantico,” he says, “when we were told we actually were going to be shown some real pornography. In order to see it, however, we had to
leave the classroom and go to another room, where it was displayed for us on a table. We had to put our hands behind our backs and walk around the table, just sort of looking at it. That was a bizarre experience.”
In the same period, Lanning began teaching the subject at field schools. He remembers being taken aside by his predecessor in the job.
“ ‘Ken,’ he told me, ‘you’re about to embark on probably the greatest topic the Bureau can teach. You can’t go wrong. It’ll be great. Let me just give you three bits of advice.
“ ‘One, lots of dirty jokes. You have to have a dirty joke to go with every sexual perversion that you talk about.
“ ‘Two, get lots of pornography. Dirty pictures. Magazines. Movies. Pass ’em out. The cops love ’em.
“ ‘And three, never allow any women in the class.’ ”
Lanning asked why.
“Because if you have women,” the other agent answered, “you can’t do the first two things.”
When John Douglas first arrived at the BSU in 1977, the situation had hardly improved. Douglas remembers an incident in a class taught by one of Roy’s predecessors, an instructor infamous for his indifference to fact.
“This guy shows a slide and tells the class that it is one of the few instances of a female African American autoerotic fatality,” he recalls.
“Well, after the instructor goes through the whole nine yards, describing the case, a hand goes up in the classroom. It was the investigator who’d actually worked the case.
“He says, ‘Well, you got half the story right. She
is
a woman. But she’s not black.’
“ ‘What do you mean, she’s not black? She has black features, black hair.’
“ ‘No,’ the cop says, ‘she’s in an advanced stage of decomposition. She’s white and she’s decomposing there.’
“Now that was embarrassing.”
When Hazelwood arrived in 1978, he knew at a glance to
drop the term “sex” from the course title. The class was renamed “Interpersonal Violence.”
He cleaned up the classroom, as well. Instead of pornography and dirty jokes, he taught the nuts and bolts of sexual crime investigation, fundamentals such as interview techniques and the collection and preservation of evidence.
Later, Hazelwood and Ken Lanning would coauthor “The Maligned Investigator of Criminal Sexuality,” a wide-ranging survey of law enforcement agencies’ attitudes toward sexual crimes. Although the piece was respectfully worded, the agents took police organizations to task for their tendency to trivialize sexual crimes, sometimes stigmatizing sexual-crime investigators as “wienie waggers,” sometimes compounding the victims’ trauma by lack of empathy, sometimes forgetting how emotionally devastating these crimes can be.
They argued in the article that sexual-crimes investigators should be chosen from volunteers, not assigned to the work as punishment or discipline, as commonly has been the case. They also advised screening out those officers who are drawn to sexual crimes for the wrong reasons.
“Some investigators,” Hazelwood and Lanning wrote, “are voyeuristic. . . . They get a vicarious thrill out of interviewing victims or viewing the pornography often associated with sexual crimes. They may demand sexual acts from prostitutes, ask a rape victim to describe her assault an unreasonable number of times, or make copies of seized materials for their private use.”
The agents were equally adamant on the issue of confidentiality.
“The investigator is absolutely dependent upon the victim for information pertaining to the crime and the criminal; he must not betray the victim’s trust.”
The BSU’s “porno show for cops,” as Roger Depue remembers it, soon became a legitimate and respected course at Quantico. From a ten-hour, noncredit elective class for
National Academy students when Roy took over, by 1979 Interpersonal Violence had been expanded to a thirty-hour course for which the University of Virginia awarded two credits. The following year, the class was upgraded again to forty-four hours and three credits.
Hazelwood also sought out Howard Teten, the original guru of criminal personality profiling at Quantico, to learn the craft.
Teten, a veteran of the San Leandro, California, Police Department evidence unit, had joined the FBI in 1962. Later, Teten taught applied criminology to Bureau recruits in the Training Division’s old post office building facility, where Roy had taken his classroom instruction.
When the Bureau opened its new Academy at Quantico in 1972, Teten came south to teach applied criminology in the newly established Behavioral Science Unit. Unlike the rote drudgery Roy had slogged through just the year before, the Academy offered new agents dramatically upgraded classroom instruction. Not only were the Quantico facilities the best in the world, but the quality of instruction improved dramatically, too. Teaching slots no longer went to the first available agent, but to the best-qualified agent.
The BSU’s first chief was Agent Jack Kirsch, a former reporter for the
Erie
(Pennsylvania)
Dispatch Herald
who’d joined the FBI in 1950.
Kirsch candidly recalls that despite his determination to impart useful, practical information at the BSU, the new unit was not an immediate success with the police enrollees.
“A lot of our students were not outwardly hostile, but they weren’t the most receptive group,” he says.
Roger Depue, who arrived as a BSU faculty member in 1974, also encountered considerable skepticism among the students.
“The level of instruction was pretty basic, a lot of theory and war stories,” says Depue. “Plus there was a natural animosity.
Law enforcement officers back in those days did not trust the behavioral sciences.
“I remember they’d sit in the back of the room, arms folded, chair leaning against the wall with a ‘What the hell is this guy gonna tell me?’ expression. Often, their comments would begin with ‘Bullshit.’ ”
One exception to the BSU’s generally cool reception by its police-officer pupils was the Criminology Section, originally led by Howard Teten and agent Patrick J. Mullany, a former Christian Brother.
Teten was both a veteran investigator and an eager student of the detective’s craft. He, as much as anyone, bent the BSU twig away from formal instruction toward profiling and active case consultation.
He sought out Dr. James Brussel, who’d helped capture George Metesky, New York City’s so-called Mad Bomber of the 1940s and 1950s, and spent hours with the psychiatrist, reviewing cases and sharing lore. Teten also consulted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s oeuvre, in search of whatever helpful insights the great Sherlock Holmes might offer.
Teten and Pat Mullany, who held an undergraduate degree in psychology, conducted informal case colloquiums at Quantico, meeting after class with students who brought with them strange unsolved cases in the hopes that either the FBI instructors, or perhaps their fellow students, might see something familiar or suggest an investigative strategy.
The consultations were strictly unofficial, and advisedly so. Although J. Edgar Hoover was gone, his shadow remained. The Bureau that Hoover built still operated by the book.
In the course of these discussions, Howard Teten added to his considerable fund of information and theory an enormous amount of new empirical evidence, a mass of specialized knowledge he graciously shared with Hazelwood.
As Roy delved more deeply into this strange new world of aberrant crime, the more intensely interested he became.
“Even though I hadn’t given Harvey Glatman or what I’d learned at the AFIP any serious thought for years, I remember how quickly I felt at home at the BSU,” says Hazelwood. “The old fascinations were still there.”
The BSU remained a little-known arm of the FBI until 1980, when Roy was invited by the Atlanta Police Department to consult in that city’s infamous Child Murders investigation, one of the most massive, controversial, and socially divisive serial murder cases in the history of the American South.
The case began on July 28, 1979, along a scruffy section of Niskey Lake Road in southeast Atlanta, when a woman out searching for redeemable soda cans and bottles discovered fourteen-year-old Edward “Teddy” Smith’s leg poking out from a roadside tangle of vines.
Shortly thereafter, another African American youth, thirteen-year-old Alfred Evans, was discovered dead about fifty feet away.
Smith, who had been shot with a .22, and Evans, who most likely was strangled, were old schoolmates, although they no longer lived near one another. Atlanta homicide detective Mickey Lloyd, now a major in the department, found witnesses who put the teens together at a party several nights before their murders. But that was the end of the connections and useful leads. In time, the two unsolved cases moved to the back burner.
On November 8, a thirty-nine-year-old man in search of someplace to relieve himself entered an abandoned Atlanta elementary school and discovered stuffed into a hole in the building’s concrete floor the decomposed body of another black child, eight-year-old Yusef Bell, who’d vanished on his way to the grocery store seventeen days earlier.
Bell’s manner of death also appeared to have been strangulation. However, there was no immediate reason to link his death to those of Alfred Evans and Teddy Smith four months earlier.
The fourth victim, Milton Harvey, fourteen, was discovered dead a week later. Harvey had been missing since early September.
By the following spring, Atlanta’s black community, and the police, noticed the pattern. Although poor children who live in big-city neighborhoods always suffer a higher incidence of violent deaths than their wealthier suburban counterparts, too many of Atlanta’s youngsters were vanishing, only to be found dead, usually strangled, several days later.
A list of dead and missing children was begun. By June of 1980, there were ten names on it, eight boys and two girls.
Strange rumors circulated.
According to one, the local U.S. Centers for Disease Control was behind the killings. Scientists there supposedly needed the penises of recently deceased young blacks to obtain a chemical necessary for making the virus- and cancer-fighting protein interferon.
Much wider credibility was accorded rumors that the Klan or some other white supremacist group was behind the deaths.
By then, a parents’ Committee to Stop Children’s Murders had been formed. Lee Brown, the Atlanta public safety commissioner, announced a Missing and Murdered Task Force.
Although not yet a national story, the Atlanta Child Murders were generating fear and anger and dangerous stresses.
It was also in June of 1980 that Morris Redding, then deputy chief of the Atlanta Police Department and head of APD’s Criminal Investigation Division, had an inspiration. Redding was generally acquainted with the BSU and the broad concepts behind criminal personality profiling. He also had heard much about Roy Hazelwood from officers who’d taken Roy’s BSU class in Interpersonal Violence.
“So I said, ‘Let’s see if we can get Hazelwood down here,’ ” Redding recollects.
Roy arrived from Quantico a few days later.
The important assignment began inauspiciously when his wallet was stolen at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport. Hazelwood had to borrow two hundred dollars from John Glover, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta office.
Once he’d reviewed the cases, Roy had little trouble recognizing what Atlanta faced. “I was absolutely convinced a serial killer was at work,” he says. A couple of the murders clearly looked like copycat killings to him. Others looked like a family member, or acquaintance, was the most likely killer. Roy deeply doubted that the serial killer had murdered either of the two young girls on the list.
But in the midst of the confusion and fear, the Child Killer certainly was out there, murdering for the sheer thrill of it, growing more confident and more skilled with each homicide. He was a classic lone wolf, and he wasn’t going to be easily stopped.
Roy also was certain from the start that the killer was black.
“I drove with three black Atlanta police detectives to the neighborhoods where the victims lived, as well as where they disappeared and where their bodies were found,” he explains.
“We were in an unmarked car, but I remember turning down one street and seeing everything just stop. People walking on the sidewalk stopped. People mowing their lawns stopped. People stopped talking to each other and stared at us. It was like one of those old E. F. Hutton ads on television.
“I asked, ‘What the hell’s going on?’
“These detectives said that it was me, that everyone wondered about the white guy in the car. I knew then that there was no way a white serial killer could have moved through those neighborhoods without being noticed. I knew the guy had to be black.”
As the body count rose—two more young black males were added to the list in July—Roy felt both the pressure to make a positive contribution to the investigation, and the urgency of catching the Atlanta Child Killer before the city’s strained social fabric began to tear.
“I called the BSU and I said, ‘This thing’s going to blow, and I’m going to need some help.’ ”
There didn’t seem to be much interest at the other end of the line.
“So I called back about a week later and said, ‘I’m telling you, this thing is going to blow.’ That’s when they sent down John Douglas.”
Months had passed since Roy’s first review of the case, and six more potential victims of the Child Killer had been identified. There was no consensus among the various law enforcement agencies involved as to just what sort of person, or persons, might be committing the killings.
Hazelwood and Douglas, in consultation with their colleagues back at Quantico, went to work on a profile.