Authors: Stephen G. Michaud,Roy Hazelwood
Tags: #True Crime, #Murder, #Serial Killers
He learned from the files that Werner’s mother was a drunk who bore him at age eighteen. Ferrari never met his father. Between the ages of eight and seventeen, he lived in the juvenile facility near the cornfield where Daniel Suter’s body was dumped. Records show that while in the youth home Ferrari would not play with other children, refused to obey adults, stole, and was a chronic liar.
Back in his mother’s custody, he committed a series of burglaries, and was sent to a reformatory, from which he escaped. In 1965, at age nineteen, Ferrari attempted to derail a passenger train by placing several large stones on the railroad tracks. A psychiatrist who interviewed him in jail at the time diagnosed Ferrari as a pedophile, likely to commit sex crimes against children once he was released.
The psychiatrist was correct. Five years later, Ferrari killed a small boy and was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He served nine years of the term, and was released in August, 1979, approximately nine months before Ruth Steinmann’s asphyxiation murder.
Ferrari’s various ex-girlfriends described him as a humorless, friendless loner who eschewed physical sex with them, but enjoyed watching the women undress, and very much enjoyed resting his head on their unclothed chests or stomachs.
Hazelwood next spent four more days in deep analysis of the case material.
Besides the paramount question—which, if any, of the six unsolved murders did Roy believe Ferrari committed?—two other puzzles hung over the investigation. Why had the killer so readily conceded guilt in four of the cases, but no others? And why did he apparently prey on both boys and girls?
The police believed the answer to the first mystery was that Ferrari did not want to be known as Europe’s worst-ever child killer. The most victims attributed to a single killer in Europe at the time was six. Ferrari directly told his questioners that he was not as bad as other child killers, and even held out a hope he could be cured.
Hazelwood came at this question from another perspective. He suggested that a sense of hopelessness led Ferrari to confess some of the cases. At the time of his arrest, Hazelwood pointed out, Ferrari knew he’d been positively identified, and was in serious legal jeopardy because of his previous conviction for killing a child. His personal prospects were grim, and he was aging.
“Forced sexual assault and murder is basically a young man’s crime,” says Hazelwood. “While nonviolent child molesters (those who rely on obtaining the voluntary compliance of their victims) may continue to operate well beyond Ferrari’s age, the use of force requires a high degree of physical and emotional stamina.”
Werner Ferrari may have had the stable and comparatively attractive life of an inmate in mind.
“Ferrari,” Roy wrote in his report to commander Borer, “may rationally have decided that all of his problems could be resolved by confessing to a sufficient number of crimes [to] guarantee his being taken care of for life.”
On the issue of victim selection, Hazelwood turned to Ken Lanning’s research.
Lanning has found that pedophiles of Ferrari’s type who
prey on prepubescent children frequently have no gender preference. Those who prey on older children often focus on boys or girls, but not both.
The offender of Ferrari’s type also often
Werner Ferrari met at least seven of the listed criteria, but because so much was known about Ferrari and his crimes, Hazelwood believed an even closer categorization was possible. Ferrari, he thought, was a member of Lanning’s subtype “introverted preferential child molester,” and cited four reasons for his thinking.
First, Roy wrote, the introverted molester has a preference for children, but lacks the special skills to seduce them. He
therefore may resort to violence, as Ferrari apparently did on occasion.
Second, the introverted offender usually molests strangers, or victims too young to identify him.
Third, his sexual interest in children is rooted in deep-seated insecurity, as well as curiosity.
Fourth, he often cannot express anger and hostility in normal social intercourse, so he acts out against nonthreatening children.
Ferrari either lived near where the six officially unsolved cases occurred, or knew the areas from past experience. All victims whose remains were recovered were found in woods or fields. All victims were between the ages of seven and ten, and all were slightly built. Again, all but one, Imhof, was alone at the time of abduction, which occurred in all but one case (Rebecca Bieri’s) in the late afternoon or evening.
Ferrari also made some sort of important life change, from relocating his residence to breaking up with a girlfriend, within two months of each child murder.
Hazelwood declined to speculate whether Ferrari killed any of the three children whose bodies were never found: Peter Roth, Sarah Oberson, and Edith Trittenbass. He lacked sufficient evidence to make the necessary linkage analysis comparisons.
Ruth Steinmann, he thinks, “very probably” was killed by Werner, an inference drawn from the extraordinary number of similarities between her death and those of the children Ferrari confessed he had murdered.
These range from MO similarities—such as abduction sites, the fact that all victims except Fabienne Imhof were alone when he accosted them, and the use of the woods as disposal sites—to shared factors that plainly spoke to Ferrari’s psychosexual needs.
The children were all slightly built and prepubescent (save for Steinmann, who had slight breast development), and showed no defensive wounds or antemortem bondage.
Plus there was no semen recovered from any of the bodies or clothing, nor was there any evidence of penile penetration.
To the contrary, Ferrari told police that when he was angered he placed sticks in his victims’ orifices. The evidence that Ruth Steinmann was violated in that way suggests perhaps that he’d been upset by her, too, possibly because she was not completely immature sexually. Steinmann also suffered the only known bite mark, on her breast.
As for Rebecca Bieri and Loredana Mancini, both discovered as skeletons, Roy would not render a definitive opinion, except to say the cases’ similarities to those of Ferrari’s known victims were “interesting.”
In June 1995, Werner Ferrari was sentenced to life in prison by a criminal court in Baden.
Roy’s testimony as an expert in linkage analysis is especially effective in sexual crime cases where eyewitnesses are absent, such as the Ray Ward prosecution, or if the witnesses are less than absolutely certain, as was the case of Kenneth Bogard, the Pacific Beach Rapist.
Molly Iverson* was his first known victim.
She lived alone in a first-floor apartment in Pacific Beach, an oceanside family tourist destination with a large singles population, about five miles north of downtown San Diego.
At about 11:15 on Thursday night, August 13, 1992, Iverson was awakened from her sleep by a noise. Then she saw him, an intruder dressed only in red Converse high tops and a ski mask.
He had entered her bedroom via the open patio door. In the dark, he appeared to be a white male in his late twenties. He held a hunting knife in one hand. The other covered his penis.
When Iverson jumped up and began to scream, he pushed her down on the bed and told her to be quiet. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, pulling her hair back.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He said his name was Johnny, and reassured her, “I’m not going to go inside you,” as he instructed Iverson to remove her camisole and shorts.
“Johnny” then told the thirty-one-year-old divorcée to roll over on her stomach. He sat on her legs, stroking her back, and talked to her.
“You have a nice ass,” he said, placing his hands between her legs.
Iverson resisted, pushing herself up, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” she said.
“Okay, okay, okay,” he answered, and began to masturbate. In a few moments, Iverson felt his ejaculate on her back.
He tried to clean himself.
“Don’t wipe that shit on my blanket!” she snapped.
“Okay,” he answered, and rose to leave.
“Remember to lock that door, okay?” he said on his way out.
Iverson, incensed at the assault, reported it to the police, and then began the slow process of reclaiming her life. But barely had she begun to put the incident behind her when her world again was shattered by an intruder.
The next month, at 12:30 a.m. on Friday the eighteenth, Iverson was standing in her living room when a man she believed was “Johnny” walked through her unlocked door. This time he was wearing shorts along with the red high tops and ski mask. He had a knife, too, and a bottle of massaging oil.
“I came to treat you,” he said, tiptoeing toward her as he gestured with the bottle.
Iverson, surprised and furious, yelled obscenities at him until he retreated out the patio door and disappeared.
The following May, at 10:50 p.m. on the tenth, Dana Holly,* twenty-six, also of Pacific Beach, was awakened in her bedroom, much as Molly Iverson had been. Only this time Holly noticed he was wearing a ski mask and nothing else.
She screamed. He jumped onto the bed and put his knife to her throat.
“I wouldn’t,” he said.
Holly went silent.
She removed her clothes as he instructed her. She asked if he had a condom.
The intruder said he did not. Did she?
No.
He said he had not had sex in six months and had been tested and was “clean.”
Holly asked to go to the bathroom. He accompanied her, holding a handful of her hair. When she could not urinate, he turned on the faucet for her. Still no help.
Back in her bed, he kissed her neck and chest, working his way down to her vagina, where he performed extended cunnilingus. He said he hoped she could reach orgasm, and only stopped when she faked one.
He then tried to kiss her. When she resisted, he briefly inserted two fingers into her vagina before ordering Holly onto her stomach.
She, too, was complimented on her “nice ass.”
He perched behind her as he had with Iverson, and applied some Vaseline to her back before masturbating onto it. When he finished, she directed him to a box of tissues, with which he wiped off her back.
Before leaving, he asked her to get dressed again, and covered Holly with her blanket.
“He was very calm, almost trying to be nice,” she later testified.
“Good night, Darla,” he said as he left, getting her name wrong. He also warned her to keep her front door locked.
Six days later, at 2:50 a.m. on a Sunday morning, Pacific Beach resident Tammy Watkins,* twenty-three, was surprised by a man in a black mask who jumped out at her from a closet as Watkins walked into her bedroom.
She screamed.
“Stop screaming or I’ll hurt you,” he said, holding a knife to her throat. Watkins didn’t answer, and began to cry.
“I’m not going to hurt you if you do as I say,” he continued, and directed her to her bed.
“Okay, now sit here like a good little girl. Don’t move. I’m going to the door,” he told her in a voice Watkins described in court as “sort of soft and husky . . . gentle and nice.”
He didn’t touch Tammy. He just left, and did not return.
Approximately eighteen hours later, just after 9:00 that Sunday night, twenty-year-old Marsha Wilson* was alone in the Pacific Beach house she rented with four other young women. She heard a knock at the door. When Wilson answered it, an arm suddenly went around her neck. She felt a knife under her chin. He pushed her to her knees and told her not to scream or she would get hurt.
As before, he guided Wilson to a bed and told her to take her clothes off. He lay down beside her, still wearing his ski mask.
Later in court, Wilson was asked if the intruder said anything.
“Like, ‘relax,’ you know,” she said. “Just basically trying to calm me down in a really nice kind of a sort of comforting tone.”
When she asked him his age he said he was twenty-four.
He fondled her and performed cunnilingus. Then as he masturbated to erection, she asked him not to sodomize her, and if he had a condom.
He answered that he did not want to hurt her, and yes, he did have a condom, which he put on before subjecting her to a very brief vaginal rape.
Afterward, he told Wilson he’d never raped anyone before and that he didn’t enjoy it and wasn’t going to do it again. He added that she need not worry about him returning to harm her, either. He wouldn’t be coming back.
He did wait two months before striking again, this time
choosing a different venue, the San Diego State University district, about five miles inland from Pacific Beach.
Victim number five was nineteen-year-old Tina Mitchell,* who awoke at 2:45 a.m. on Friday, July 16, 1993, to find the rapist’s hand over her mouth. He had come through the front door and into her bedroom, ignoring a second bedroom, where her roommate slept with her boyfriend. Neither awoke during the incident.
The ski-masked intruder told Mitchell that if she did not scream she would not be hurt, and to nod if she understood him.
She nodded, and he removed his hand.