The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI’s Original Mindhunter

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © 2019 by Mindhunters, Inc.

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Identified as the authors of this work in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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Source ISBN: 9780008338107

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008338138

Version: 2019-04-12

To the memory of Joan Angela D’Alessandro and in honor of Rosemarie D’Alessandro and all of the others who, through their inspiration, courage, and determination, strive for justice and safety for all children, this book is dedicated with love and admiration

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

AUTHORS’ NOTE

IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE BIG HOUSE

INTRODUCTION: LEARNING FROM THE EXPERTS

I THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB

1 LITTLE GIRL LOST

2 “I SLEPT WELL”

3 MIND OF THE KILLER

4 HUMAN FALLOUT

5 WHAT THE PSYCH PEOPLE SAID

6 RED RAGE AND WHITE RAGE

7 THE BOTTOM LINE

8 “SUBSTANTIAL LIKELIHOOD”

9 JOAN’S LEGACY

II “KILLING FOR ME WAS JUST LIKE SECOND NATURE”

10 ALL IN THE FAMILY

11 THE ABANDONED VOLKSWAGEN

12 INSIDE THE WALLS

13 “THE CONVENIENCE OF THE SITUATION”

14 “THERE WERE VICTIMS IN BETWEEN”

15 POWER, CONTROL, EXCITEMENT

III ANGEL OF DEATH

16 PLAYING GOD

17 WORKING NIGHTS

18 THE MAKING OF A KILLER

19 “I HAVEN’T CHANGED A BIT”

20 FALLEN ANGEL

IV “NO ONE MADE ME DO ANYTHING”

21 THE SUPERBIKE MURDERS

22 WHAT HAPPENED TO KALA AND CHARLIE?

23 WHAT MADE TODD TICK?

24 “GOOD OR BAD, I STILL WANT TO KNOW”

25 ORGANIZED VERSUS DISORGANIZED

26 NATURE AND NURTURE

EPILOGUE: A KILLER’S CHOICE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY JOHN E. DOUGLAS AND MARK OLSHAKER

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

AUTHORS’ NOTE

The opinions expressed in this book belong to the authors alone and do not reflect those of the FBI or any other organization.

IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE BIG HOUSE

Here, it is not so much Who done it?, but Why?

And in the end, if we have discovered the Why? and add in How?, we will also come to understand the Who? Because Why? + How? = Who.

The aim is not to be a friend. The aim is not to be a foe. The aim is to get to the truth.

It is a verbal and mental chess match without any game pieces; a sparring session without body contact; an endurance contest in which each side will seek out and exploit the other’s weaknesses and insecurities.

We sit across a small table from each other in a dimly lit room whose cinder-block walls are painted a pale bluish gray. The only window is in the locked steel door, and it is small and reinforced with wire mesh. A uniformed guard peers through from the other side, making sure everything remains in order.

In a maximum security prison, nothing is considered more important.

We have been at this for two hours already and finally the moment is ripe. “I want to know in your own words what it was like twenty-five years ago,” I say. “How did this all happen to get you here? That girl—Joan—did you know her?”

“Well, I’d seen her in the neighborhood,” he replies. His affect is calm and his tone is even.

“Let’s go back to the moment she came to the door. Tell me what happened, step by step, from that point on.”

It is almost like hypnosis. The room is silent, and I watch him transform in front of me. Even his physical appearance seems to change before my eyes. His eyes are unfocused and he looks beyond me to stare at the vacant wall. He is moving back to another time and another place; to the one story of himself that has never left his mind.

The room is very cold, and even though I wear a suit, I struggle to keep myself from shivering. But as he recounts the story I have asked for, he has begun to perspire. His breathing grows heavier and more audible. Soon his shirt is drenched with sweat, and underneath, the muscles of his chest tremble.

He relates the entire story in this manner, not looking at me; almost talking to himself. He is in the zone, in that time and that place, thinking now what he was thinking then.

For a moment, he turns back to face me. He looks me square in the eyes as he says, “John, when I heard the knock and looked up through the screen door and saw who was there, I knew I was going to kill her.”

INTRODUCTION

LEARNING FROM THE EXPERTS

This is a book about the way violent predators think—the bedrock of my twenty-five years as an FBI special agent, behavioral profiler, and criminal investigative analyst, as well as the work I have done since my retirement from the bureau.

But it’s really a book about conversations I had. After all, conversations are where it all began for me, conversations in which I learned how to use what a predatory criminal was thinking to help local law enforcement officials to catch him and bring him to justice. For me, that was the beginning of behavioral profiling.

I started interviewing incarcerated violent offenders out of what I considered personal and institutional necessity, but in many ways, it began with a desire to understand the underlying motivations behind criminals. Like most new FBI special agents, I was assigned as a street agent. My first posting was in Detroit. Right from the beginning, I was interested in why people committed their crimes—not only that they committed crimes at all, but why they committed the particular crimes they did.

Detroit was a tough city, and while I was there they were racking up as many as five bank robberies a day. Robbing a bank backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is a federal crime, so the bureau had jurisdiction, and many new agents were assigned to investigate these cases in addition to their other duties. As soon as we would apprehend a suspect and read him his Miranda rights, often in the back of a bureau car or police cruiser, I would pepper him with questions. Why rob a bank where the security is tight, and everything is recorded on tape, rather than a store that does a large cash business? Why this particular bank branch? Why this particular day and time? Was the robbery planned or spontaneous? Did you surveil the bank first and/or make a practice run inside? I began mentally cataloging the responses and developing informal “profiles” (though we didn’t use that term yet) of bank robber types. I started seeing the differences between planned and unplanned crimes and organized and disorganized ones.

We got to the point where we could begin predicting which bank locations were most likely to be hit and when. In areas with a lot of building going on, for instance, we learned that Friday late morning was a likely time to hit the bank, because it would have a lot of cash on hand to handle the construction workers’ paychecks. We used this kind of intelligence to harden certain targets and be waiting at others if we thought we had a reasonable chance of catching robbers in the act.

During my second bureau posting in Milwaukee, I was sent to the new, modern FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, for a two-week in-service course in hostage negotiation. It was taught by Special Agents Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany, the original champions of behavioral science in the bureau. Their main course was called Applied Criminology. It was an attempt to bring the academic discipline of abnormal psychology into crime analysis and the training of new agents. Mullany saw hostage negotiation as the first practical use of the applied psychology program. This was a new wave in the battle against a new era of crime that involved airplane skyjackings and bank robberies with hostages, such as the 1972 Brooklyn bank heist that inspired the Al Pacino film Dog Day Afternoon. It was easy to see how having some idea of what was going on in the hostage-taker’s head would be of great benefit to the negotiator and ultimately save lives. I was one of about fifty special agents in this class, taught for the first time and a daring experiment in FBI training. Legendary director J. Edgar Hoover had died just three years before, and his lengthened shadow still hung over the bureau.

Even in his declining years, Hoover maintained an iron grip on the agency he had essentially created. His hard-nosed, hard-ass approach to investigation echoed the old Dragnet TV show line: Just the facts, ma’am. Everything had to be measurable and quantifiable—how many arrests, how many convictions, how many cases closed. He never would have embraced anything as impressionistic, inductive, and “touchy-feely” as behavioral science. In fact, he would have considered it a contradiction in terms.

While attending the hostage negotiation course at the FBI Academy, my name got around the Behavioral Science Unit, and before I left to go back to Milwaukee, I was offered positions in both the Education and Behavioral Science Units as my next posting. Even though our unit was called Behavioral Science, the primary responsibility of its nine agents was teaching. Courses included Applied Criminal Psychology, Hostage Negotiation, Practical Police Problems, Police Stress Management, and Sex Crimes, which was later changed by my great colleague Roy Hazelwood to Interpersonal Violence.

Though the academy’s “three-legged stool” model of teaching, research, and consultation was beginning to take shape, any case consultation that star agents like Teten provided was strictly informal and not part of any organized program. The focus of these forty hours of classroom instruction was supposed to be on the issue of most concern to criminal investigators: Motive. Why do offenders do the things they do, in what ways do they do them, and how can understanding this help catch them? The problem with this approach was that most of the content still came from the academic sphere, which became evident whenever senior law enforcement personnel going through the National Academy program had more firsthand case experience than the instructors.

No one was more vulnerable in this area than the youngest instructor on the team: me. Here I was standing in front of a classroom full of seasoned detectives and officers, most of them a lot older than me. And I was supposed to teach them what was going on in the criminal mind, something they’d actually be able to use to help clear cases. Most of my firsthand experience had come from working with experienced cops and homicide detectives in Detroit and Milwaukee, so it seemed presumptuous of me to be telling men like that their own business.

There was a dawning realization among many of us that what was applicable to the psychiatric and mental health community had only limited relevance to law enforcement.

Still, I started getting the same types of requests Teten got. In class or during breaks, or even in the evenings, officers and detectives would come up and ask for pointers or advice on their active cases. If I was teaching a case similar in some way to one they were working on, they would figure I could help them solve it. They saw me as the authoritative voice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But was I? There had to be a more practical way to amass useful data and case studies that would give me the confidence to feel I really knew what I was talking about.

As the guy closest to me in age, Robert Ressler was tapped to help me break into the academy culture and feel comfortable with teaching. About eight years older than I was, Bob was a new instructor who built on what Teten and Mullany had done, aiming to bring the discipline of behavioral analysis closer to something that could be of value to police departments and criminal investigators. The most efficient way to give a new instructor some concentrated experience was through what we called road schools. Instructors from Quantico would spend a week teaching a selective piece, sort of a highlights version, of the National Academy curriculum to a police department or law enforcement agency that had requested it, then move on to another for a second week before returning home with the memories of interchangeable hotel rooms and a suitcase full of dirty laundry. So Bob and I hit the road together.

One morning early in 1978, Bob and I were driving out of Sacramento, California, the site of our latest road school. I commented that most of the criminals we were teaching about were still around, we could easily find out where they were, and they weren’t going anywhere. Why not see if we could meet and talk with some of them, find out what a crime was like through their eyes, get them to recall and tell us why they did what they did and what was going on in their minds when they did it. I figured it didn’t hurt to try, and some of them might be bored enough with their prison routines that they’d welcome a chance to talk about themselves.

Very little research was available relative to interviewing prison inmates, and what there was pertained specifically to convictions, probation and parole, and rehabilitation. However, the record seemed to indicate that violent and narcissistic inmates, on the whole, were incorrigible—meaning they were not able to be controlled, improved, or reformed. By talking to them, we hoped to learn if this was indeed the case.

Bob was initially skeptical, but willing to go along with this crazy idea. He’d served in the army, and between the army and the bureau, he’d had enough experience with bureaucracies that his mantra was “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” We would show up unannounced. In those days FBI credentials could get us into prisons without prior permission. If we had said in advance that we were coming, there was a danger word would leak out into the yard. And if an inmate was known to be planning to speak with a couple of feds, the rest of the prison population might think he was a snitch.

As we embarked on this project, we had some preconceived ideas of what we would encounter during these interviews. Among them:

 All would claim they were innocent.

 They would blame their convictions on poor legal representation.

 They would not willingly talk to law enforcement personnel.

 Sex offenders would come across as sex-obsessed.

 If there had been capital punishment in the state in which the murder was committed, they would not have killed their victims.

 They would project the blame onto the victims.

 They all came from dysfunctional family backgrounds.

 They knew the difference between right and wrong and the nature of the consequences of their actions.

 They were not mentally ill or insane.

 Serial murderers and rapists would tend to be highly intelligent.

 All pedophiles are child molesters.

 All child molesters are pedophiles.

 Serial killers are made, rather than born that way.

As we’ll see in the following pages, some of these assumptions proved correct, while others were way off the mark.

Surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of the men we sought out did agree to talk to us. They had various reasons. Some felt cooperating with the FBI would look good on their records, and we did nothing to dissuade that assumption. Others might simply have been intimidated. Many inmates, particularly the more violent types, don’t get many visitors, so it was a way to relieve the boredom, talk to someone from the outside, and spend a couple of hours outside their cells. There were some who were just so cocksure of their ability to con every­one that they looked at the interview as a potential game.

In the end, what started with a simple idea while driving out of Sacramento—conversations with killers—became a project that would change the careers and lives of both Bob and me and the special agents who eventually joined the team, and add a new dimension to the FBI’s crime-fighting arsenal. Before we were done with our initial phase of interviews, we had studied and talked to, among others: shoe fetishist and strangler Jerome Brudos in Oregon, who liked to dress his dead victims in high heels from his extensive wardrobe of women’s clothing; Monte Rissell, who raped and murdered five women as a teenager in Alexandria, Virginia; and David Berkowitz, the .44 Caliber Killer and Son of Sam, who terrorized New York City in 1976 and 1977.

Over the years, my profilers at Quantico and I would interview many other violent and serial predators, including Ted Bundy, the prolific killer of young women, and Gary Heidnik, who imprisoned, tortured, and killed women in the basement pit of his house in Philadelphia. Both of these guys provided character traits for novelist Thomas Harris in The Silence of the Lambs, as did Ed Gein, the Wisconsin recluse who killed women so he could use their skins, whom I interviewed at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison. He was also famously the model for Norman Bates in Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho, the basis for the classic Alfred Hitchcock film. Unfortunately, Gein’s age and mental illness resulted in such rambling, disordered thought patterns that the interview wasn’t productive. He did, however, still enjoy working in leather crafts, making wallets and belts.

What eventually emerged was a set of rigorous interview methods that allowed us to start correlating the crime to what was actually in the criminal’s mind at the time. For the first time, we had a way of linking and understanding what was going on in an offender’s mind with evidence he left at the crime scene and what he said to the victim if she or he was alive, or what was done to the body, both ante- and postmortem. As we have often stated, it helped us begin to answer the age-old question “What type of person could do such a thing?”

By the time we had completed our initial round of interviews, we knew what type of person could do such a thing, and three words seemed to characterize the motivations of every one of our offenders: Manipulation. Domination. Control.

The conversations were the starting point for everything that came after. All the knowledge we gathered, the conclusions we drew, the Sexual Homicide book that came out of our research and the Crime Classification Manual that we created, the killers we helped catch and prosecute—all of it began by sitting across from killers and asking them about their lives with an aim to understanding what drove them to take another life, or in some cases, many lives. It was all possible because of the attention we paid to this previously untapped group of instructors: the criminals themselves.

We are going to take an in-depth look at four killers I confronted across the table after I had left the bureau, using the same techniques we had developed during our extensive study. The killers themselves are all different, each with his own techniques, motivations, and psychic makeup. They range from a single victim to close to a hundred, and I have learned from all of them. The contrasts between them are intriguing and compelling. But so are the similarities. They are all predators, and all grew up without forming trusting bonds with other human beings during their formative years. And they are all prime exhibits in one of the central debates of behavioral science: nature versus nurture, whether killers are born or made.

In my FBI unit, we operated under the equation Why? + How? = Who. When we interview convicted offenders, we can reverse-engineer that process. We know the Who and we know the What. By combining those, we discover the all-important How? and Why?

1

LITTLE GIRL LOST

It was just after the July Fourth holiday in 1998 when I took the Amtrak train up north to call on a new potential “instructor.” His name was Joseph McGowan, and he had been a high school chemistry teacher with a master’s degree. But rather than any formal academic title, he was now officially known as Inmate No. 55722 at his longtime place of residence, the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton.

The reason for his incarceration: the sexual assault, strangulation, and blunt force murder of a seven-year-old girl who had come to his house to deliver two boxes of Girl Scout cookies twenty-five years earlier.

As the train wound its way north, I prepared. Preparation when talking to a killer is always important, but no more so than now—after all, this conversation would have consequences far beyond the informational or academic. I’d been called in by the New Jersey parole board to help determine whether McGowan, who’d already been denied parole twice, should be released back into society.

At the time, the chairman of the New Jersey State Parole Board was an attorney named Andrew Consovoy. He had joined the parole board in 1989, and as McGowan’s case was coming up for a third time, he had just been appointed chairman. Consovoy had read our book Mindhunter after hearing me one night on the radio and recommended it to the parole board’s executive director Robert Egles.

“One of the things I realized from reading it and your other books was that you had to have all of the information going in,” Consovoy related years later. “You had to find out who these people were. They didn’t start to exist the day they came to jail.”

Based on this perspective, he formulated a special investigations unit operating under the parole board. It consisted of two former police officers and a researcher, and its function was to look deeply into the questionable parole cases and give board members as much information as possible about the applicant on which to formulate a decision. They asked me to consult on the McGowan case.

Consovoy and Egles picked me up at the train station and took me to my hotel in Lambertville, a picturesque town on the Delaware River. There Egles handed over copies of everything in the case file.

The three of us went out to dinner that evening and talked generally about the work I did, but we stayed away from the specifics of the case. All they had told me was that the subject had killed a seven-year-old female child and they wanted to know whether he remained dangerous.