COPYRIGHT

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: 9780008338152

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008338138

Version: 2020-07-24

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.

After dinner, they dropped me off back at the hotel, where I opened the case files and began several hours of review. My role was to see what I could determine about McGowan’s state of mind—then and now. Did he know the nature and consequences of his crime? Did he know basic right from wrong? Did he care about what he had done? Did he have any remorse?

What would be his demeanor during the interview? Would he recall specific details about the crime? If released from prison, where did he intend to live and what did he intend to do? How would he earn a living?

My one cardinal rule of prison interviews is never to go into the encounter unprepared. I also made a practice of not going in with notes, because that could create an artificial distance or filter between the subject and me when the time came to really bore in and search for the deepest layer of his psyche.

I didn’t know what I was going to get out of this interview, but I figured it would be illuminating. Because as I said at the beginning, every time I talked to “the experts,” I learned something valuable. And one of the things to be determined was just what kind of expert Joseph McGowan would turn out to be.

I sifted through the case files, reexamining the evidence and organizing my thoughts for the next day’s interview.

As I did, a grim story unfolded.

About 2:45 on the afternoon of April 19, 1973, which her mother Rosemarie would always remember was Holy Thursday, Joan Angela D’Alessandro noticed a car pulling into the first driveway on the right, on St. Nicholas Avenue, which intersected with Florence Street, where she lived. Joan and her older sister, Marie, had managed to sell Girl Scout cookies to just about everyone in a four-block area in their quiet Hillsdale, New Jersey, neighborhood. At that time, kids of that age going out by themselves to sell the cookies was a normal activity. Since they went to a Catholic school, the D’Alessandro girls had the day off for the religious holiday and spent part of it delivering orders. The people who lived in the house on the corner were the last customers they had to deliver to and then the cookie orders would be complete. Typically, Joan wanted to get the job done.

She was seven years old, a four-foot-three-inch bundle of playful energy and charm—a pretty, proud, and enthusiastic Brownie. In fact, she was enthusiastic about everything: school, ballet, drawing, dogs, dolls, friends, and flowers. Her second-grade teacher called her a “social butterfly,” who naturally attracted people around her. Her favorite music was the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She was the youngest of three children, born close together. Frank, known as Frankie, was nine and Marie was eight. They were more serious, Rosemarie recalls. Joan was more happy-go-lucky.

“Joan was empathetic right from the beginning. She was always concerned with other people’s feelings and hurts. And she had a natural spunkiness about her.”

There is hardly a photograph of her at this age in which she isn’t smiling: Joan in her Brownie uniform with its orange tie and beanie, hands clasped in front of her and long auburn hair symmetrically draping her shoulders; Joan in her black leotard and white tights, hair in a ponytail, arms outstretched to one side, demonstrating a ballet move; Joan in her navy blue plaid jumper, white blouse and red bow tie, as if she’d just turned to camera, bangs brushing her forehead and hair cascading around her adorable face; Joan sitting on her heels in a light blue party dress, hair pinned up, meticulously adjusting the bouquet in the hand of her Miss America Barbie doll. All of them represent different Joan personas. The two commonalities among them are the angelic smile and the innocent magic in her blue eyes.

A friend of Frankie’s said, “She was so down-to-earth. I would have married her!”

Her Italian-speaking grandfather adored her and used to say, “E così libera!” She is so free! She had a hearty laugh and Rosemarie envisioned her acting in plays as she got older. She was going to be taking piano lessons after her eighth birthday.

This afternoon, she was outside playing by herself. Frankie had gone to play at his friend’s house in the neighborhood and Marie was at a softball game.

Suddenly she raced back inside and said to Rosemarie, “I saw the new car. I’m going to take the cookies over there.” She grabbed her Girl Scout carrying case lying in the foyer with the two boxes of cookies inside.

“Bye, Mommy. I’ll be right back,” she called out as she bounded out the front door. It hadn’t even closed since she’d come running inside. Rosemarie remembers her ponytail bobbing up and down, held in place by an elastic band with two little light blue plastic balls on the ends, as Joan skipped down the front steps to the driveway and out onto the street. It all went by in a blur.

About ten minutes later the next-door neighbor, as she told Rosemarie afterward, heard the insistent barking of her dog, Boozer. Joan loved walking and playing with Boozer, and Boozer loved her.

When Joan didn’t come back right away, Rosemarie didn’t think much about it. She had probably gone to her friend Tamara’s house on the corner of St. Nicholas Avenue and Vincent Street. It was that kind of neighborhood, where you could go in and out of the houses of people you knew. The social butterfly could always find someone to hang out with or something to do. About 4:45, when the music teacher came for Marie’s piano lesson, Rosemarie started to get worried. She didn’t want to convey it to the children, so she tried to hold herself together. After all, it was a safe neighborhood, with an FBI agent and a minister living nearby.

She started making phone calls. Joan wasn’t at any of the houses she called, and no one had seen her.

Her husband, Frank D’Alessandro, got home about ten minutes to six and Rosemarie told him Joan was missing. Frank was a computer systems analyst, methodical and taciturn by nature. Rosemarie could see instantly how worried and tense he was, but as usual, he held it all in. Rosemarie said, “We have to call the police.” Frank agreed and made the call. Then he went out with Frankie and Marie to drive around the neighborhood looking for Joan. They covered the entire area.

When they returned without having spotted her or found anyone who had seen her, Rosemarie decided to go out herself. Frank didn’t want to come. She remembered that as Joan ran out, she’d said something about collecting on the last of her cookie orders because she’d seen “the new car” on St. Nicholas Avenue. The car belonged to the McGowan house. Joseph McGowan taught chemistry at Tappan Zee High, just over the state line in Orangeburg, New York. The house was owned by his mother, Genevieve McGowan, and he lived there with her and Genevieve’s mother—his grandmother. The public schools had class that day, so this would have been about the right time for him to be coming home.

Reluctantly, so she wouldn’t be alone, Rosemarie took Frankie with her and together they walked up Florence Street and turned onto St. Nicholas Avenue. It was ten minutes to seven. The McGowan house, a redbrick-and-beige-siding bi-level with a driveway and two-car garage in the left front, was the first one on the right, occupying the corner lot.

They both climbed the five front steps and she rang the bell. She told Frankie to stay on the landing.

Mr. McGowan answered the door. He seemed as if he’d just come out of the shower. He was holding a thin cigar that Rosemarie didn’t notice at first. He was a twenty-seven-year-old bachelor. Rosemarie didn’t know him, but “my children said he was very nice.”

Rosemarie stepped into the foyer; she wanted to stand exactly where she knew Joan had recently stood. She was already starting to get an eerie feeling. She introduced herself. “Have you seen my daughter Joan?” she asked. “She came here to deliver cookies.”

“No, I never saw her,” he replied.

He spoke in a casual, matter-of-fact manner. And it was at that moment that Rosemarie D’Alessandro felt everything go cold.

“After standing in the foyer for a couple of minutes, I noticed a long fire truck parked in front of his house,” she said. “We had called the police, and when I saw that they were responding this way, it just all came to me at that moment and I knew my life would never be the same.”

She was almost immediately struck by McGowan’s reaction—or rather, his lack of reaction. “As I was standing there in the foyer with him, tears were welling in my eyes. And he looked at me like he absolutely didn’t have one ounce of feeling. And what he did at that moment when he saw my tears, he walked up the steps to the upper floor, and he stayed right there facing me, holding his slim cigar, and waited for me to leave.

“Walking back to my house I knew that he knew what had happened to Joan.”

After the police arrived and spoke to Rosemarie and Frank, a neighborhood search for Joan was organized. Boy Scouts volunteered. As did Joseph McGowan. Hundreds of people turned out and organized themselves into small teams, checking every house, backyard, trash and garbage cans, woods, and park in Hillsdale and the surrounding towns. The police brought in bloodhounds to aid in the search. Several people climbed on the fire truck Rosemarie had seen parked. One of them was Joan’s seven-year-old “boyfriend,” Rich. They rode out to the reservoir near Woodcliff Lake.

At about 9:20, a priest from St. John the Baptist Church arrived at the house with a state trooper and a German shepherd. Rosemarie led the K-9 team to the clothes hamper so the dog could sniff Joan’s panties, then they went out into the neighborhood. Rosemarie had the overwhelming sense that the dog understood what had happened and “felt” deeply for her and Joan. With an obvious sense of mission, he cased the area up to and around the McGowan’s house, and went to the front door and the garage door.

But nothing turned up anywhere.

Word of the missing girl and the impromptu search spread quickly. Newspaper and television reporters swarmed the neighborhood. As Rosemarie herself had observed, this kind of thing just didn’t happen in Hillsdale. She spoke frequently to the media, hoping that someone who might have seen something would come forward. Her main memory of the media session was the dirty footprints that had turned the light-brown carpet on the steps a charcoal gray.

The anxiety in the D’Alessandro house that night was almost unbearable. Frank often displayed anger when he was frustrated. The night before, he had an outburst over not having a box in which to wrap an Easter gift. “He could be calm and patient for long periods and then change in a moment,” Rosemarie recalled. “He had a good job, but he wasn’t communicative, and he was never really my soul mate.”

Hillsdale police chief Philip Varisco was on vacation in Florida when he was informed of Joan’s disappearance. Hillsdale was the kind of community, and Varisco was the kind of leader, that made it unthinkable that the chief not be present for a trauma like this. He rushed back home. Varisco, who passed away in 2012 at the age of eighty-nine, was a complete professional. He attended the FBI National Academy program in Quantico to make himself and his force as effective as possible.

The chief went to the D’Alessandros’ house the next day. Rosemarie was sitting on her front steps when he came up the walk. He told her he was taking personal charge of the investigation. While not promising the happy outcome he knew was unlikely, he calmly assured her that everything would be done the right way. He asked for a photograph he could release to the newspapers. Rosemarie went to a picture of Joan in her school uniform, hanging in the hallway, took it off the wall and out of its frame, and handed it to Varisco.

Frank told newspaper reporters that if whoever had taken Joan would bring her back safely, he would ask the authorities to waive prosecution. During a television interview, Rosemarie described Joan to reporter Vic Miles, how special she was and how much she was loved, pleading for her to be returned. Years later, one of Joan’s classmates told Rosemarie she remembered the broadcast as if it were yesterday because Joan’s mommy was asking on TV for her to come back. Only two months before, Rosemarie had suddenly had the terrible thought of what would happen if one of her children died, and how utterly, unimaginably heart-wrenching it would be.

The police questioned several possible suspects, including a man seen driving around the neighborhood about an hour before Joan disappeared and another wandering the area on foot. The first turned out to be looking at neighborhoods in which to move and the second was simply lost. There are almost always loose ends and red herrings in major cases. But the investigators focused quickly on Joseph McGowan. Though he had no criminal record, it had been his house to which Joan said she was going and Rosemarie had related her creepy encounter with him. Her father had seen him taking out the trash the day after Joan’s disappearance and, pointing to the house on the corner, said to Rosemarie, “Something’s not right over there.”

Police officers and detectives spoke to McGowan both Friday and Saturday, asking him to account for himself in the minutes and hours after Joan went to his house. He was calm and amiable but denied that he saw Joan on Thursday. Instead, he claimed he was at the nearby supermarket buying groceries at the time Rosemarie said her daughter went to his house. What about the car Joan saw pull into the driveway? Did anyone see it leave the garage? No, he walked. At which cash register did he check out? He didn’t remember. Could he show them the grocery receipt? He thought he threw it away. Might it still be in the trash? He thought the trash had already been picked up. What days did the trash collectors come? He wasn’t sure. What did he buy? Steaks and apples, among other things. Were the steaks still in the refrigerator? No, he and his mother had eaten them. What about the apples? He wasn’t sure.

Seasoned detectives develop a natural sense for knowing whether a suspect’s story and profession of innocence is true. Over lunch one day, Mark Olshaker asked retired LAPD detective Tom Lange when he came to his own conclusion that O. J. Simpson was the prime suspect in the murders of his ex-wife Nicole and her waiter friend Ronald Goldman in 1994. Lange replied that though O.J. was cordial and cooperative during the interview, he asked no questions regarding the details of Nicole’s death, whether or how much she had suffered, whether the police had any idea who had done it—all of the normal things any close survivor would instinctively want to know.

Joan’s friend Rich recalled a large crowd in front of the police station on Central Avenue as McGowan was inside being questioned. To his young eyes, it seemed as if the entire town had gathered there.

As the seeming holes and contradictions in McGowan’s statements grew increasingly glaring, the detectives asked him to submit to a polygraph examination at the station. He agreed.

McGowan failed the polygraph, and when detectives informed him, they confronted him with all his statements that didn’t add up. Finally, exhausted and without any more answers, he asked for a priest. He and the priest met privately, and McGowan confessed to him. He then confessed to the detectives, and told them that after he killed Joan, he drove her body across the New York state line and deposited it in Harriman State Park in Rockland County, about twenty miles away.

Chief Varisco took it upon himself to be the one to tell Rosemarie and Frank. It was a little after four P.M. A deeply sensitive man, he brought a Catholic priest with him, and together they sat with Rosemarie at the kitchen table. Rosemarie remembers removing the tablecloth from the white table to delay, if only for a few moments, what she knew was to come.

When the chief told her what McGowan had said, she cried, “I want to kill him!” She says she was feeling rational and in control as she said it, knowing at the time she didn’t mean it, but needing a way to release the anguish consuming her.

The priest admonished her not to speak that way.

“What do you expect, Father?” Varisco said.

2

“I SLEPT WELL”

Dr. Frederick T. Zugibe, the chief medical examiner for Rockland County, New York, said Joan’s case was one of the most emotionally difficult in his long and distinguished career.

Word had spread quickly from the Hillsdale Police Department to the Bergen County district attorney’s office, and from there to the Police Division of the Rockland County sheriff’s office. So early in the afternoon on Easter Sunday, Officer John Forbes drove to the location described to him in Harriman State Park, just off Gate Hill Road, near the southern end of the park.

There he found the naked and battered body of a young white female. She was faceup in a wedge-shaped crevice between two boulders, on a leafy slope under a rock ledge. Her head was twisted sharply to the left and she was facing down the slope. Forbes had four young children of his own and struggled not to break down.

He called in the crime scene team.

By the time Dr. Zugibe arrived, less than an hour later, the cordoned-off crime scene was already populated by a horde of police officers and crime scene technicians, detectives, FBI agents, reporters, press photographers, and the generally curious. He immediately ordered the officers to move all nonessential personnel away.

Richard Collier, the D’Alessandro neighbor who was an FBI special agent working out of the New York City field office, came in to identify the body.

Yes, it was Joan.

Though the crime scene was no longer pristine, her body had not been moved or touched. Dr. Zugibe immediately noted the lividity—the purpling of the flesh around her abdominal area. This told him she had not been killed at this spot. If she had been, the lividity would have been concentrated in her back due to gravity. Since that type of blood settling takes at least six hours, he also knew that she hadn’t just been dumped here. He took her body temperature and found that it matched the temperature of the air. That indicated she had been dead at least thirty-six hours, the time it takes for a body to cool completely. The finding was confirmed for him by the absence of rigor mortis, a postmortem stiffening of the muscles that begins several hours after death and subsides within twenty-four to thirty-six hours.

Taking all the observable physical evidence together, Dr. Zugibe estimated that Joan had been dead for about fifty hours. When he was able to do more sophisticated tests during the autopsy, he upped his estimate to a minimum of seventy hours, which meant that she had died within a couple of hours or less of when Rosemarie last saw her.

Sheriff’s officers conducted a thorough search of the surrounding area and found a gray plastic shopping bag printed with the Mobil logo. According to Zugibe, the bag was neatly packed rather than haphazardly stuffed and contained the clothing Joan had been wearing when she disappeared: a pair of red and white sneakers, a turquoise shirt, maroon pants, white socks, and white panties, stained red with her blood.

Before the body was removed, an officer called the Marian Shrine in Stony Point, New York, and asked that a priest come to the scene. When he arrived, illuminated by the police lights and in the presence of officers, detectives, FBI agents, and reporters, he administered last rites to Joan Angela D’Alessandro. Once the priest was finished, Zugibe officially pronounced death, a seemingly obvious observation but a necessary formality in any murder investigation.

Back at the medical examiner’s office in Pomona, New York, less than ten miles away, he began the autopsy. From my experience in dealing with many medical examiners over the years, I would say there is little that is more painful than having to examine a dead child, and absolutely nothing more agonizing than if the child has been murdered.

By the time he had completed the postmortem, Zugibe listed injuries that spoke to the utter depravity of the crime: fracture of the neck, manual strangulation, dislocated right shoulder, generalized deep bruising, lacerations under the chin and inside the upper lip, frontal fracture of the skull, fracture of both sinuses, swelling of the face, both eyes blackened and swollen shut, three teeth loosened, contusion and hemorrhaging of the brain, bruising of the lungs and liver, and rupture of the hymen.

Essentially, Joan was beaten, choked, sexually assaulted, and ultimately battered to death. But according to Dr. Zugibe, it was even worse than that. Had she died right after the beating and strangulation, her face and body would not have appeared swollen. Upon death, the homeostatic functions that cause swelling at an injured site shut down. And since swelling takes about half an hour to be completed, he concluded that Joan must have been alive for at least that long following the attack. Mercifully, she was almost certainly unconscious.

The medical examiner’s close examination of the neck revealed two areas of injury: the thyroid cartilage and the hyoid bone. His conclusion was that a half hour or so after the deadly attack, the offender, unsure that he had killed her, returned to finish the job with a second manual strangulation. This sounds completely believable to me. With someone like Joseph McGowan, an “inexperienced killer,” it would not be unusual for him to be unsure how effective he had been in dispatching his victim and wish to take no chances.

I had seen a similar sort of behavior in the Christmas 1996 murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in her home in Boulder, Colorado. The medical examiner’s report listed two potentially lethal injuries: blunt force trauma to the head and ligature strangulation. Since there was no bleeding at the crime scene, I concluded that the cause of death was the strangulation and that the severe blow to the head was an attempt to make sure she was dead.

This scientific evidence suggested something highly significant from a behavioral perspective. No parent without a history of extreme child abuse could possibly, and systematically, strangle that child to death over a period of several minutes. It just doesn’t happen. Taken together with all of the other forensic and behavioral evidence, this did not tell us who killed JonBenet. But it told us who did not kill her: either of her parents. Mark and I came up against a lot of pushback and public condemnation for this conclusion, including from my old FBI unit, but the pursuit of criminal justice is not a popularity contest, and you have to let the evidence speak for itself.

Which was precisely what I would do with Joseph McGowan.

Joseph McGowan was arraigned before Bergen County judge James F. Madden. He was held in lieu of the $50,000 bail set by the judge. On Tuesday, April 24, 1973, he was indicted for the murder of Joan D’Alessandro.

Two days later, in the late morning, Joan’s funeral was held at St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, whose school Joan attended. The children from her class were there, and after the service, they all lined up outside as her casket was carried out to say goodbye.

As an investigator of violent crime, you try to be as emotionally detached as possible, not only to maintain your objectivity and critical judgment, but also to preserve your sanity. In fact, having to put myself, as a behavioral profiler, into the head of every victim whose case I work has definitely taken its psychic toll on me throughout my career. Dr. Zugibe’s and Officer Forbes’s reactions to seeing Joan’s small body in the park were understandable. No matter how “professional” you try to be, you can’t not react to something like this.

What kind of a man or monster spontaneously does something like this to a seven-year-old girl? I asked myself as I read through the case file a quarter of a century later. That’s what I would seek to find out.

McGowan repeated his confession to Dr. Noel C. Galen, a forensic psychiatrist who had received his neurology and psychiatry training at Bellevue Hospital in New York and consulted for the New Jersey court system. The day after his indictment, McGowan detailed for Dr. Galen how he answered the door, and when Joan told him what she was there for, said she should come with him downstairs so he could get the money for her. She must have hesitated or resisted, because he admitted grabbing her and forcing her into his downstairs bedroom. Meanwhile, McGowan’s eighty-seven-year-old grandmother, hard of hearing, was watching television upstairs. His mother was at work.

I am not revealing any privileged information from McGowan’s case file or medical records. All of the evaluations and analyses I am citing were contained and published in the appellate decision Joseph McGowan, Defendant-Appellant, v. New Jersey State Parole Board, Respondent, decided by the Superior Court of New Jersey on February 15, 2002.

As he told Dr. Galen, once in the bedroom and “safely” away from the street, McGowan ordered Joan to take off her clothes. Though he said he “never completed the act,” he became sexually excited and ejaculated on his fingers only inches from Joan and then penetrated her digitally. He probably couldn’t wait and did this before she was completely undressed, as her panties were stained with blood. Since he acknowledged he had semen on his fingers, we can’t say for sure whether he “completed the act” or not, but the blood and injuries to her vaginal area indicated a brutal assault.

It was at this point, according to McGowan’s account, that the consequences of his impulsive action dawned on him. “All of a sudden,” he told Dr. Galen, “I realized what I had done. If I let her go, my whole life was gone. All I could think of was just to get rid of her.”

As an investigator, I have to say that from a criminological perspective, this part makes sense to me. In a high-stress situation like this, a “smart” offender will tend to have only one thing on his mind: getting away with his crime. This is apparently what happened with McGowan. Whether Joan lived as long after the first strangulation as Dr. Zugibe speculated is an open question, as is which of McGowan’s attempts to kill her was the successful one. But the general narrative of what happened is not in doubt. According to the transcript of the confession:

I grabbed her and started to strangle her and I dragged her off the bed, tossed her into the corner of my room on the tile floor, off the rugs. She was trying to, you know, scream, and was fighting back. But of course she really couldn’t, since I had my hands around her throat. Uh … she stopped struggling … just sort of lay there. I got dressed. I had been sweating so violently. I went out to the garage. I got some plastic bags to put her in. [Returning from the garage,] I saw that she was still moving, so I began strangling her again and I hit her head on the floor repeatedly. She began to bleed from the nose, mouth, face … I don’t know where. There was blood all over the floor. I then grabbed one of the plastic bags and put it over her head and twisted it tightly and held it there until she stopped.

As I read this in preparation for meeting him, I was thinking to myself: An hour or two earlier, this guy was standing in front of a classroom teaching chemistry to high school students. What led from that Point A to this Point B?

As the confession went on, McGowan described how he lifted Joan’s body and placed it in a plastic trash bag, then wrapped it in an old sofa cover, tied it with cord, carried it to the garage, and stowed it in the trunk of his car—the “new car” Joan had spotted from her front yard around the corner and down the block. He cleaned up her blood as best he could with some old T-shirts. Then he drove the twenty miles or so and dumped the body down the slope in Harriman State Park. He unwrapped it and left it under the rock ledge. He put the plastic bag and the couch cover in a roadside trash can.

When he returned to Hillsdale he joined the neighborhood search for Joan.

“I felt better when I went back to the house,” he told Dr. Galen. “I slept well.”

3

MIND OF THE KILLER

Frank Mikulski, who retired as Hillsdale chief of police in 2006 after forty-two years on the force, was a patrol sergeant when Joan was killed.

“It was the most horrible crime that ever occurred in the borough and it’s the one that still stands out in my mind,” he reflected to the Bergen Record. “This man was a monster, and when something like that happens to a child it’s embedded in the memory of the community and it never goes away. For people here, it’s like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 … You remember where you were and what you were doing.”

Just about everyone who knew either the D’Alessandros or Joseph McGowan remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.

Robert Carrillo, a math teacher who rode to work with McGowan and one other teacher, had thought of McGowan when Joan went missing. “When the news came over, the first thing I thought of was Joe. I thought, Gee, he lives there. I wonder if he knows her, not that he would have been involved.”

On Easter Sunday, Carrillo had gone to visit his mother in Queens with his wife and daughter. That evening they were returning home when they heard. “We were on the Cross Bronx Expressway and they made an announcement on the radio that they had caught the suspected killer of Joan D’Alessandro, and he was a high school science teacher from Rockland County and they gave his name. And I had to pull off the side of the road. I got physically ill.”

Jack Meschino taught chemistry with McGowan. He and his longtime partner Paul Coletti had socialized with him and other teachers on several occasions. “I remember when we heard,” Coletti recalled, “when we received the phone call, hanging up, and we just sat and looked at each other and said, ‘What!’ ”

“Yeah, it was just unreal,” Meschino agreed. “It was really a shock that he did something like this.” But then he added, “On the other hand, Joe was a strange fellow; he really was. And in retrospect, you think of things. Another thing that struck me was Joe’s humor. There was a big gap in it. Things that he laughed at and thought were funny, the general population wouldn’t laugh or go along with. Very bizarre.

“Joe always walked around with a set of keys—more keys than anyone would have need of. God only knows what they were for. One of the things Joe took it upon himself to do was to check classroom doors after the school day ended. And it was known that he actually turned in some of his colleagues for leaving their classroom doors unlocked. This was not in his line of duties. He had no administrative responsibilities. The only people he tried to ingratiate himself with were the administrators.”

“He was kind of seen as an administration toady,” said Carrillo. “Also, I remember when the in thing to do was to join the Playboy Club in New Jersey, and Joe was a gold card member. He made it a point to show everyone in the teachers’ room his gold card. These kinds of things were important to him, seeking out approval or recognition from others.”

We asked Carrillo if McGowan was popular with the students. “I think he was,” he responded. “He was the type of teacher who tried to be friendly with them. He strove to be liked by the kids.”

It didn’t always work out that way, though. Mark and I later learned from a number of his female students that they had felt uncomfortable around him. One woman, now in her early sixties, recalled in a chemistry lab asking Mr. McGowan what to do with a glass flask she no longer needed. McGowan grabbed it from her and threw it to the floor, where it shattered across the room. He offered no explanation for his action.

Other students had similar thoughts about McGowan. One shared her story on social media: “Back in the day, I believe senior year 1971, I had McGowan for chemistry. I was so creeped out by him that I went to the office and demanded to get out of his class.”

Tappan Zee High School was closed for spring break the week after Joan’s murder, but when classes resumed the following Monday, an atmosphere of stunned silence prevailed.

“Going back to school was very bizarre,” Carrillo said. “Everybody knew about it, but nobody really talked about it much. The students may have talked about it among themselves, but the staff was more in shock than anything else. The board of education dismissed [McGowan] at a very private meeting; there was no publicity about it.”

Carrillo and Eugene Baglieri, the other teacher in the car pool, talked about it, “and you think of things, looking back,” Carrillo said. “But it was such a terrible experience, even to be touching on it in a peripheral way, that people just avoided it.”

For Jack Meschino, it was even worse. “It was terrible coming back,” he remembered. “We team-taught, and all of a sudden, our students were my students. I’ll never forget the first few classes. It took me five or ten minutes even to get up the courage to address the students. We all sat there and looked at each other; didn’t know how to handle it. We were dumbstruck.”

There would be more psychological exams for Joseph McGowan in the next several weeks as he sat in the Bergen county jail in Hackensack. On May 10, 1973, a little more than two weeks after Dr. Galen’s interview, Dr. Emanuel Fisher, a psychologist, tested the suspect. He found McGowan to be “an exceedingly labile, tense and hysterical personality whose tendency is to act out mood and impulse in a very explosive manner. Rational controls are weak, despite the fact that he is an exceedingly brilliant individual.”

Dr. Fisher noted “a tremendous amount of underlying, unconscious hostility,” that he “repressed, avoided, sublimated and intellectualized.” And although he presented himself as “a very proper, conventional, conforming individual, [t]his exaggerated propriety, conventionality and conformity, constitute his defensive facade, for himself and for others, against the underlying depression and hostility of which he is unconscious.”

Less than a month later, on June 6, Dr. Galen submitted a psychiatric report based on his interviews with McGowan. He said McGowan had “given a well-documented history of sexual attraction to young girls. This, coupled with a clearly evident picture of a dominating and overprotective mother, would strongly hint at some profound problems in [relation] to his making a normal adjustment to an adult woman.”

Galen cited McGowan’s admission to him that for the previous year or so, he had found himself sexually aroused by young girls and specifically mentioned his twelve-year-old female cousin. He said he had masturbated to rape fantasies. From this, the psychiatrist concluded, “younger girls would pose no threat to his rather shaky concept of his manhood.”

A further neuropsychiatric report was submitted by Dr. Abraham Effron in October, confirming what McGowan had told Dr. Galen about “fantasies of sexual relations with little girls,” adding that he was sexually aroused as a nineteen-year-old camp counselor when a young girl sat on his lap.

Dr. Effron also interviewed McGowan’s mother, Genevieve, who had not been home at the time of the murder. She said that her husband, who had died of a heart attack while Joseph was in college, “was much closer to the boy [than she was] and would take him out often.” After Joe completed college, he moved back home with her and his grandmother.

Effron’s report stated:

He does not show what he necessarily feels. He conceals many facets of his complex true self and his true identification and related emotional difficulties. He tries to hide his inability to truly establish his masculinity. He experiences tension whenever he gets close to the opposite sex. This passivity generates anxiety, which in turn feeds on itself and results in a higher state of tension, which must expiate itself in a complete loss of self-control or sexual release.

He manages to control an underlying psychosis by intellectually holding in abeyance his primitive drives to an inordinate extent, but as in the past and tragically in the recent past, he may act out again.

There is an ongoing debate regarding whether violent predators are born or made—the so-called nature versus nurture question. I would argue that, while no one who does not have certain inborn tendencies toward impulsivity, anger, and/or sadistic perversions is going to evolve into a predator because of a bad upbringing, there is no doubt in my mind that those possessing such inborn tendencies can be pushed along the path to predation by negative influences as they grow up and mature.

In fact, Ed Kemper was one such individual.

Edmund Emil Kemper III was the first prison interview that Bob and I did after my idea to speak with the killers. The only problem was we didn’t really know what we were doing.

As FBI agents, we were pretty much trained on the job to interview witnesses and interrogate suspects. But neither of those skill sets really prepared us for the prison interviews. An investigative interview is a meeting with one or more persons who may have information relative to a crime or the perpetrator of that crime. We try to find out as much of the who, what, when, where, why, and how as possible. That person is not treated as a suspect.

An interrogation, on the other hand, involves questioning a potential suspect in a crime. That individual is entitled to be informed of his or her legal rights and in no case may the information violate rules of due process. This tends to be more of a show-and-tell on the part of the interrogator in which the suspect is advised of or shown definitive forensic evidence linking him to the crime. The questions fall into the form of not if, but why and how, to get the suspect to cooperate and confess.

Neither of these approaches was appropriate for our prison interviews. The interplay between the agent and the violent offender needed to be informal and not overtly structured. What we were looking for was not so much the facts of the case, which were already established, but the motivation, the pre- and post-offense behavior, the victim selection process, and then the big question of why, without being too assertive, directed, or leading—the opposite of what we’d try to do in a suspect interrogation.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, the prison encounter had to feel “natural”—just a couple of people talking freely and exchanging information.

Since we were in California, we decided to go after the local “clientele” first. A special agent out there who was one of Bob’s former students agreed to act as liaison for us with the state prison system. Ed Kemper was a six-foot-nine, 300-pound giant of a man who was serving multiple life sentences at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, midway between Sacramento and San Francisco. Kemper had become known as the Coed Killer for his string of murders in and around the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1972–1973.

Before the interview, we familiarized ourselves with all the details of his grisly record. This would become a standard part of our process, so we wouldn’t be misled or conned by men who made a specialty of the practice. What we wanted was not the facts so much as what guys like Kemper were thinking and feeling as they planned and executed their crimes. We wanted to know what motivated them, what techniques they used, and how they regarded each assault or murder afterward. We wanted to know how and where the fantasy began, what the most emotionally satisfying parts of the crime were, and whether torture and the suffering of the victim were important components for them. In other words: What were the distinctions between the “practical” aspects of successfully committing the crime and the “emotional” reasons for doing it.

Born in 1948, Kemper grew up in a dysfunctional family in Burbank, California, with two younger sisters and parents Ed and Clarnell, who fought constantly and eventually separated. Early on, Ed showed a predilection for dismembering the family cats and playing death ritual games with his sister Susan. Clarnell sent him off to live with his father, and when he ran away, she sent him to live with his paternal grandparents on a remote farm in the foothills of the California Sierras.

Told by his grandmother Maude one day to stay and help her with the household chores rather than accompany his grandfather Ed into the field, the hulking fourteen-year-old shot Maude with a .22-caliber rifle and then stabbed her repeatedly with a kitchen knife. When Grandpa Ed returned home, the boy shot him, too. This got him committed to Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane, until at age twenty-one and over the objection of state psychiatrists, he was placed in Clarnell’s custody.

Sitting calmly in the prison interview room, Kemper took us through his childhood and his mother’s fear he would molest his sisters, so she made him sleep in a windowless basement room, which terrified him and made him resentful of his mom and sisters. That was when he mutilated the cats. He described his succession of odd jobs once he got out of Atascadero, how Clarnell, a secretary at the newly opened University of California, Santa Cruz, was popular and caring with students, but gave him the message that he would never be in the league with the beautiful coeds who attended there. He described his habit of picking up beautiful female hitchhikers of the type he’d missed out on by being imprisoned throughout his formative years, and how this habit eventually evolved into abduction and murder. He told us how he would bring the bodies back to his mother’s house, have sex with them, then dismember them and dispose of the pieces. Though his victims certainly suffered horribly, he was not motivated by sadism as many serial killers are. What he told us he was doing—and this isn’t a phrase I’ve heard before or since—was “evicting them from their bodies” so he could possess them, at least temporarily, after death.

And then he related how, after two years of this, on Easter weekend he’d finally summoned the will and courage to go into his mother’s bedroom while she slept and bludgeon her to death with a claw hammer. He then decapitated her, raped her headless corpse, cut out her larynx, and fed it down the garbage disposal. But when he turned on the switch, the device jammed and threw the bloody voice box back out at him. He took this as a sign that his mother was never going to stop yelling at him.

He called a friend of his mother and invited her over to the house for dinner. When she arrived, he clubbed and strangled her and cut off her head. He left her body in his bed while he slept in his mother’s. On Easter Sunday morning, he took off and drove aimlessly until he reached the outskirts of Pueblo, Colorado. He stopped at a phone booth, called the Santa Cruz police department, took some pains to convince them that he was the Coed Killer, and waited to be picked up.

Kemper was lonely and narcissistic and wanted to talk to the point that at times I had to tell him to stop because we had specific questions to ask him. We used a handheld tape recorder and took notes. This was a mistake. We learned that because we had taped the interview the subject lost a measure of trust in us. These guys are mostly paranoid by nature, but in prison, there are good reasons for that. There was worry that we would share the recording with prison authorities or it would get out to the general population that a prisoner was talking to the feds. The notes were not a good idea, either, for much of the same reason. And the subject expected us to give him our full attention.

Still, despite these necessary adjustments, much of that first conversation gave us significant insights, Perhaps most important, it demonstrated from the start just how pertinent this question of nature versus nurture would be when it came to understanding what drove these men in their antisocial behavior. This issue would come to infuse just about every interview that I’ve ever done with a killer, and the same would likely be true with Joseph McGowan.

While McGowan did not suffer the same emotional trauma growing up as Ed Kemper had, his domineering and controlling mother clearly had a profound effect on his development. He was a highly intelligent twenty-seven-year-old teacher with a master’s degree in science, yet he was living in his mother’s basement and was still emotionally dependent on her. His inability to go against her and then being forced to live with her as a mature adult surely had an impact on his self-image and, as I would discover, the life of an innocent little girl.

In a bergen County courtroom, with a jury already impaneled, McGowan and his attorneys decided to forgo a trial and instead entered a guilty plea to first degree felony murder on June 19, 1974. From his perspective, I think that was probably a wise decision. Given the facts of the case and the certainty of his guilt, I can’t imagine a jury regarding him with any compassion or leniency when it came time for sentencing.

On November 4, New Jersey superior court judge Morris Malech sentenced him to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after fourteen years. McGowan had his lawyer try to appeal this sentence multiple times, but all of his attempts failed.

The following month, McGowan was examined by another psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Revitch, at the New Jersey Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenel. Dr. Revitch, trained in both psychiatry and neurology, was a clinical professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of Rutgers University and published some of the first papers on sexual assault and murder.

Once again, McGowan admitted to rape fantasies in college, caused by sexual frustration and anxiety. After listening to the account and examining his subject with and without sodium amytal (so-called truth serum) and finding little difference other than degree of affect, the psychiatrist stated that Joan’s homicide was “not a cold-blooded murder, but something committed in a state of extreme emotional disorganization and pressure. The killing was the consequence of an additional upset and failure due to premature ejaculation.” Dr. Revitch also recognized “a degree of dissociation with use of mechanism of denial.”

While I have seen some cases of rape turn into murder as a result of premature ejaculation or failure to achieve or maintain erection on the part of the attacker, it tends to be with two specific rapist typologies—the anger-retaliatory rapist and the exploitative rapist. These guys tend to focus on adult women as their victims, and if the premature ejaculation or similar embarrassment results in either a mocking response from the victim or a loss of face for the attacker, then the situation can turn dire. Given that the victim here was a child, I was pretty convinced that was not what we were seeing here. But it was Dr. Revitch’s conclusion that really had me wondering:

We believe these events only occur once in a lifetime of such individuals. A series of circumstances are necessary to provoke the incident. If the girl had not come to his home that day or, perhaps, if he had two dollars instead of only one dollar and a twenty-dollar bill, the event would not have taken place, at least at the present.

Clearly, the crime would not have taken place had Joan not showed up at the McGowan house and rung the doorbell. She was a tragic victim of opportunity. Beyond that, from what I knew from my own study of the criminal mind, I wasn’t sure how much I agreed with the various psychological reports.

Which evaluation was closer to the mark: Dr. Effron’s opinion that “he may act out again,” or Dr. Revitch’s conclusion that “these events only occur once in a lifetime of such individuals”?

I reserved judgment until I actually talked to McGowan myself.

4

HUMAN FALLOUT

If there is one word I’ve found that survivors of murder victims detest, it is closure. The media, the public, well-meaning friends, and even the judicial system itself often feel that this is what all grieving loved ones are seeking so they can “put this behind them and get on with their lives.”

But anyone who has “experienced” a murder knows there is no such thing as closure, nor in fact should there be. The mourning process will go through stages and eventually the pain will become less unbearably acute, but it will never go away, any more than the hole in one’s personal universe left by the loss of the victim and the erasure of a lifetime of promise will ever be filled in.

The Girl Scouts sent a sympathy card. Other than that, no one in any official capacity made the effort to contact the family.

The emptiness really started, Rosemarie says, “after the burial, when everyone left and went back to their own lives.” The most important thing for her at that point was to keep life as normal as possible for Frankie and Marie. “I made sure Marie stayed in Girl Scouts because she wanted to, even though it was painful for me even to think about Girl Scout cookies. We stayed in the same house, so the familiar things would still be there, like school and friends, and not having more changes to deal with. I tried not to be overprotective. I let them continue to go out and play, though I was always attentive to their whereabouts. They had to be children and I didn’t want to be paranoid.”

Nor would she shield them from the ongoing news about their little sister’s case. “I would tell them both what was going on so they would hear it from me. I knew they would be hearing things and I didn’t want them to hear in a scary way. We would sit on the bedroom floor and talk about anything they had on their minds. They looked forward to that and knew they weren’t being left out.” Rosemarie and Frank took them to the cemetery on various occasions to visit their “sister in heaven.”

Rosemarie came to accept the reality that her love and pain could not be separated. “I have felt a relationship with Joan in my heart all these years,” she says. “It’s a relationship I wouldn’t have chosen, but it’s still a relationship that inspires me to do what I do. And I found there is a peace that comes with that.”

It was not all Rosemarie had to contend with. Seven months after the murder, her beloved father died of cancer. He had adored his granddaughter and never stopped grieving for her.

Rosemarie went to the court hearing when McGowan pled guilty. She felt she had to be there for Joan. Genevieve McGowan was there, too. “When I walked into the courtroom, she gave me the coldest stare I have ever experienced in my life. It was the first time I had ever seen her.”

Rosemarie would not have minded if McGowan had stood trial so that the truth would have come out and nothing would have been held back, including the details of what had happened to Joan. But as often happens, other types of details began filtering back to her. One of the most appalling was when she heard through a friend that Genevieve had told an acquaintance from church that she hated Rosemarie, because if it hadn’t been for her, Joe wouldn’t have killed Joan and gone to prison.

And then there were the persistent challenges from her own body. The first inkling, when she stopped to think about it, had come years earlier, when she was a nineteen-year-old in New York. One day she was running for a bus. Suddenly her leg felt tense and then gave out on her. She didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t recur, and she didn’t think much about the incident.

A few years later, when she was pregnant with Marie, she was feeling exceptionally tired and knew it wasn’t the normal fatigue of pregnancy.

She tried to work out her own strategies and coping mechanisms for dealing with her unknown affliction. “I had to develop my own strength through focus and determination.”

When Joan was born, the tiredness became more pronounced and she was forced to hire help, which she kept until the baby was six weeks old. The ongoing symptoms were vague and fluctuating, and seemed to affect various regions of her body. “It got worse as the day went on and was worst in the late afternoon. I knew I had something.” The one common denominator was the extreme fatigue and the knowledge that she had a limited amount of energy on any given day, and if she used it up, there would be consequences going forward.

She went to doctors, but they couldn’t find anything. Or they told her it was a physical manifestation of postpartum depression. Or it was a virus and she would get over it. But she didn’t get over it, and “if I didn’t rest, I would pick up infections regularly.”

It wasn’t until a year after Joan’s death that Rosemarie finally got an accurate diagnosis. She checked into Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and submitted to an extensive battery of tests. A neurologist there concluded that she was suffering from myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease caused by the breakdown in normal communication between nerves and muscles. It is an autoimmune disorder that can be related to thymus gland abnormalities, with minimal or no relationship to one’s genetic background. There was and is no cure, and treatment centers on trying to alleviate symptoms that, in addition to the severe fatigue and weakness, can involve drooping eyelids, double vision, slurred speech, difficulty chewing and swallowing, and even trouble breathing.

“They told me every case of MG is different. If I pace myself and stay organized, it’s a little better,” she says, but adds, “I do take risks, and that is when I get the most joy out of life. In fact, I think it makes me appreciate moments of joy so much more because this condition makes the experiences so pointed.”

After a miscarriage, two of those joys occurred in 1980 and 1982, when Michael and John were born. Frankie and Marie were already in their teens, so for Rosemarie and Frank, it was like having a second generation of children.

But the joy would not last. Frank lost his job, and their marriage started to fail. “Even though he found another good job, he was lashing out at us more,” Rosemarie says. “And when John was eight, I witnessed inappropriate touching and other gestures.” Throughout all the trials, Rosemarie was sustained by her religious beliefs and devotion. “In my faith,” she commented, “God was always my psychiatrist. After what happened to Joan, I asked Him to help me choose a life without animosity, and instead, a life advocating for prevention, protection and justice.”

In the early 1990s, around the time Michael was eleven and John was nine, Frank moved downstairs. Rosemarie knew it was just the next step on a road that led in only one direction. “I was going to go for a divorce in 1993—on September 7, Joan’s birthday,” she related.

Then they received a telephone call that changed her life yet again. It came on July 26 of that year, from Deputy Chief of Detectives Ed Denning from the Bergen County prosecutor’s office. He said that Joseph McGowan was coming up for parole. This was a shock, because Rosemarie had not been informed that six years could be cut for good behavior and work credit. He had been turned down in 1987, the first time he’d been eligible, but his chances looked better this time since he’d served more than his minimum sentence.

It had been twenty years since the murder, and Rosemarie wanted to bring Joan back into the public consciousness. “It wasn’t about dwelling on the grief but being a squeaky wheel to fight to keep her killer in prison and trying to make sure he wouldn’t be up for parole every few years. I thought starting a movement of the people would help us all.”

The mother of a former Tappan Zee High cheerleader called Rosemarie to say her daughter felt she had been stalked by McGowan back in school and would be “petrified if he came out.”

Rosemarie knew she’d have to fight to keep him behind bars and began by working with local and county officials, district representatives and the community to organize a vigil on September 30, 1993, at Veterans Park in Hillsdale. More than a thousand supporters attended. “My divorce plans had to change according to the advice that I sought from an attorney,” she explains. “The focus had to be on the fight to keep McGowan in, and that couldn’t be complicated by the divorce.”

And she had two overwhelming reasons to keep him behind bars: to make the punishment at least in some sense commensurate with the enormity of the crime; and to make sure no other young child suffered at McGowan’s hands as Joan had. If there were to be any meaning to Joan’s death, any meaning to her disappearing on Holy Thursday and being found on Easter Sunday, Rosemarie understood, she would have to do something herself. “The message of hope was clear. It would be the movement for child protection and helping society inspired by Joan, Holy Thursday, and Good Friday.” It was as if God, who had ordained free will to mankind and therefore had to suffer the deaths of little children at the hands of those who would forsake His values, was giving her a message.

“I realized then that this is the work I’m supposed to do. And I saw it as getting closer to Joan’s spirit. That’s when the movement started. I didn’t get positive support from my family—instead quite the opposite when family members verbally assaulted me, actually threatened me with physical force, and sent harassing mail. In the late 1990s, Michael and John would become involved, but before that, I was pretty much on my own.”

She began speaking out. She began organizing. She spearheaded a nine-month campaign to make the public aware of the danger of child predators and the reasons that they should be kept in prison. The parole board listened and once again turned down McGowan’s request. Just as important, it reviewed his case and had him transferred to the maximum security facility in Trenton, where the warden felt he should have been to begin with. Additionally, the board imposed a future eligibility term (FET) of twenty years before his next hearing. With good behavior and work credits, this would be reduced to twelve years, making him once again eligible in 2005.

And Rosemarie did not just let matters stand once McGowan’s 1993 parole request was denied. She began a grassroots movement, organizing parents and other interested parties in rallying and petitioning for justice for child victims. She wrote; she called; she appeared on television and radio and sat for interviews. Wherever she went, she handed out little green bows, Joan’s favorite color.

It took three years of essentially full-time advocacy. Then, on April 3, 1997, Governor Christine Todd Whitman signed what became known as Joan’s Law. Wearing a green bow on her lapel in memory of Joan, Governor Whitman sat in bright sunshine outside the Bergen County jail. Rosemarie, Frank, and Michael and John stood around her, surrounded by police officers, detectives, sheriff’s deputies, and legislators, all of whom had supported the campaign to have the law enacted.

Joan’s Law amended the New Jersey criminal code to mandate that anyone convicted of the murder of a child under fourteen years of age during the commission of a sexual assault would be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

Rosemarie came to the podium and thanked the governor and the sponsors and supporters of the bill. “Maybe this can deter crime—we hope,” she stated. Then she held up a photograph of Joan and said, “It’s she who we have to be thankful for. Joan’s spirit is very much alive. She wants you to smile more. She wants you to be more positive.”

The following year, on October 30, 1998, President Bill Clinton would sign a federal version of Joan’s Law. Six years after that, on September 15, 2004, New York governor George Pataki traveled to Harriman State Park, the site where Joan’s body was found, to sign a Joan’s Law for his state. Rosemarie could not make the signing but listened on the phone from her bed. It was where she had made many of her calls to connect with people to get bills passed.

Ironically, one convict Joan’s Law would not affect was Joan’s killer, Joseph McGowan. He had been sentenced before the statute went into the code, and the law could not be made retroactive. So, according to the instructions of the court of appeals, the New Jersey parole board and Rosemarie D’Alessandro prepared for the next hearing.

This was particularly problematic because shortly after the 1993 decision was handed down, McGowan appealed the ruling that didn’t allow him a parole hearing until 2005. The appellate court requested additional information from the parole board, then let its ruling stand. Over the next few years McGowan appealed three times, and the D’Alessandros went to each one. Their victim impact statements were difficult to go through, but Rosemarie felt she had to make Joan’s ordeal, and their own, as real to the board as possible.

In May 1998, the court ruled that the board had set the parole bar too high. It stated that board members should not consider whether he had been rehabilitated or not, only whether there was substantial reason to believe he would commit another violent crime if released. In other words: Was he dangerous?

And that’s where I came in.

5

WHAT THE PSYCH PEOPLE SAID

Over the first fifteen years of McGowan’s incarceration, the case file showed, and the previously cited appeals court decision confirmed, there were at least eight psychological evaluations in addition to the initial ones conducted by Drs. Galen, Effron, and Revitch in 1974. During this fifteen-year period, McGowan appeared to be a near model prisoner, not getting into trouble and not stirring things up with other prisoners.

The first several evaluations were brief and relied mainly on self-reporting. This kind of examination of incarcerated felons is always problematic for me. When most of us see a doctor, either for a physical or mental issue, our aim is to be cured or helped, so it is definitely in our best interests to tell the truth.

This logic does not always hold up on the other side of the bars. For one thing, the felon is not seeing the psychiatrist or psychologist by choice; the visit is officially mandated. For another, as far as the felon is concerned, the encounter is not designed to help him “get better.” It is to evaluate his behavior, rehabilitation, and potential dangerousness. He therefore has a vested interest not in telling the truth, but in portraying himself in the most favorable light.

On one of his court-mandated visits to a state psychiatrist following his release from Atascadero, Ed Kemper had the head of his latest victim, a fifteen-year-old girl, in the trunk of his car. During that particular interview, the psychiatrist concluded he was no longer a threat to himself or others and recommended that his juvenile record be sealed. That’s why I don’t trust self-reporting.

But that is what the McGowan mental health files from his incarceration amounted to. Three individual reports, generated in January 1987, October 1988, and September 1991, stated that McGowan had admitted his guilt and appeared remorseful about the crime. All three had recommended parole. On the other hand, McGowan had never reached out or attempted to express remorse to Rosemarie or anyone else in Joan’s family.

On October 7, 1993, Dr. Kenneth McNiel, the principal clinical psychologist at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center, met with McGowan. He was there at the request of the New Jersey state parole board. Specifically, the board wanted to assess the prisoner’s “(1) likelihood of violent acting-out; (2) general personality profile; (3) presence/absence of several psychological problems; and (4) treatment program recommendations.”

Dr. McNiel’s findings painted a substantially different picture, not only from the three previous reports, but also from the original ones conducted by Drs. Galen, Effron, and Revitch. According to Dr. McNiel, McGowan denied “any history of sexual fantasies or behaviors toward children prior to or subsequent to his crime.”

McNiel’s report stated that while

Mr. McGowan also denied any dissociative symptoms, his discussion of the present offense was notable for brief moments in which he would blank and look away while discussing the crime, which suggested a dissociative process. [I]t was clearly difficult for him to concentrate on specific memories of his crime.

HE CONCLUDED:

Mr. McGowan has made little or no progress in fully appreciating the extent of sexual deviance and violence that is apparent in his crime. Unfortunately it appears that he continues to primarily manage such negative aspects of himself through denial and repression, similar to the time of his crime.

Like the three previous reports, McNiel found “no evidence to indicate Mr. McGowan is at imminent risk of violent behavior,” but hedged himself by adding, “in a non-structured community setting, his ability to manage anger, rejection and feelings of sexual inadequacy remains open to question.”

Taken together, these reports underscored for me the vagaries of our understanding of the human mind and motivation, or even their relationship to the physical brain. Sometimes we can look at a mental symptom and link it directly to a physical problem in the brain or nervous system, but most of the time we can’t. Or, to take it one step further, sometimes we will say that a particular cruel, antisocial, or criminal action was the result of a mental or emotional disease. In other instances, we’ll say that the perpetrator wasn’t suffering from a mental disease per se, but had a “character disorder,” and therefore is more responsible for what he did. But what is the difference between a mental disease and a character disorder? A psychiatrist reading the DSM can give us a definitional answer, but will it really tell us anything about the distinction?

My colleagues and I on the criminal analysis side of behavior science operate from the premise that anyone who commits a violent or predatory crime is mentally ill. This is almost ipso facto, in that “normal” people do not commit such crimes. But a mental disorder, in and of itself, does not mean the perpetrator is insane, which is a legal, rather than a medical, term that has to do with culpability.

There have been many attempts to define insanity over the years, but in one way or another, they all go back to the M’Naghten Rule, formulated by the British courts in the wake of one Daniel M’Naghten’s attempt to assassinate British prime minister Sir Robert Peel in 1843. Shooting at point-blank range outside Peel’s London house, M’Naghten instead killed the prime minister’s private secretary Edward Drummond. M’Naghten, who suffered from delusions of persecution, was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and ever since, through multiple interpretations and permutations, the basic legal test of insanity in British and American courts has been whether the defendant could distinguish between right and wrong or was acting under a delusion or compulsion so strong that it negated that distinction.

Perhaps the closest we had to a genuinely insane predator was the late Richard Trenton Chase, who was convinced he needed to drink the blood of women to stay alive. When he was placed in a mental institution for the criminally insane and could no longer obtain human blood, he’d catch rabbits, bleed them, and inject their blood into his arm. When he could catch small birds, he would bite off their heads and drink blood. This was not a sadist who enjoyed inflicting pain and death on creatures smaller and weaker than him. This was an out-and-out psychotic, as opposed to a run-of-the-mill criminal sociopath. He committed suicide in his cell at age thirty by overdosing on antidepressant drugs he had saved up.

Still, there haven’t been many killers like Richard Trenton Chase, and this ambiguity around insanity and mental illness highlights one of the early objectives of our project to interview killers. The conversations alone were not enough. We knew that to be truly useful, we would have to find a way to systematize our results: create distinctions that could be applied more broadly, so that there was a vocabulary that extended beyond each individual case. Back in 1980, Roy Hazelwood, our sex crimes and interpersonal violence expert, was collaborating with me on an article about lust murder for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. For the first time, instead of jargon borrowed from psychology, we employed a series of terms we thought would be more practical for crime investigators. We introduced concepts such as organized, disorganized, and mixed to describe behavioral presentations at crime scenes.

Roy put me in touch with Dr. Ann Burgess, with whom he had done previous research. Ann was a highly regarded author, professor of psychiatric mental health nursing at Boston College and the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, and associate director of nursing research for the Boston Department of Health and Hospitals. Along with Roy, she was one of the nation’s leading authorities on rape and its psychological impact. Interestingly, she had recently completed a research project at Boston College involving the accuracy of predicting heart attacks in men and thought there were interesting similarities in the “reverse engineering” required for her study and what we were aiming to do.

Ann was eventually able to secure a large grant from the National Institute of Justice that allowed us to conduct a rigorous study and publish our results. Bob Ressler administered the grant and served as the NIJ liaison, and with our input, we developed a fifty-seven-page document to be filled out for each offender interview, which we called the Assessment Protocol. There were categories for modus operandi, description of the crime scene, victimology, pre- and post-offense behavior, and how they were identified and apprehended, among many other elements. Since we had already established that neither recording the interviews nor taking notes was a good idea, as soon as we finished, we would fill out the interview document, using the subject’s own words, to the best of our memories.

When we finished our formalized study in 1983, we had thirty-six in-depth studies of offenders and 118 of their victims, primarily women. By this point we had enough experience and sophistication in the Behavioral Science Unit to offer profiling and case consultation on a formal basis. Bob Ressler and Roy Hazelwood continued with their teaching and research and consulted part time as their other duties allowed. I became the first full-time operational profiler and program manager of the Criminal Profiling Program, and eventually created a new unit. My first order of business was to “take the BS out of behavioral science and profiling.” I renamed our group the Investigative Support Unit, or ISU. It encompassed programs in profiling, arson and bombing, the Police Executive Fellowship Program, VICAP—the national Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which involved logging and comparing cases between jurisdictions—and coordination with other federal law enforcement agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Secret Service.

We understood and tried to make clear to potential law enforcement clients that there were certain types of crimes for which our form of criminal investigation was useful and some for which it was not. For example, a run-of-the-mill back-alley robbery or felony murder—a crime of opportunity in which quick profit was the only motive—did not lend itself to profiling or behavioral analysis. It is all too common a scenario, with a predictable profile that fits too many people to be useful. However, even in a case such as that, we might be able to suggest proactive techniques that could help flush out the offender.

On the other hand, the more psychopathology the offender demonstrates, as evidenced by the analysis of the crime, the more we can do in profiling and helping to identify the culprit. But we had to be able to undertake our analyses and consult with local investigators in a context that would use psychology but be effective in crime solving.

In 1988 Bob Ressler, Ann Burgess, and I published our findings and conclusions in book form, entitled Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives. The reception in both the academic and law enforcement communities was gratifying. But we were still working toward the goal of making our studies and research useful in a practical way to law enforcement professionals in the manner that mental health professionals use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its fifth edition (DSM-5).

We came to realize that truly to understand an unknown subject (UNSUB in our parlance), you had to understand why and how he was committing a particular type of crime. And by the same token, you could classify crimes by motivation rather than simply by result or outcome. This was the challenge I tackled in the doctoral dissertation I was working on: evaluating different ways to train law enforcement officers in how to classify homicides. In other words, I was trying to present this material in such a way that it would actually help solve cases by explaining the behavioral dynamics of the crime.

The ultimate result, growing out of my dissertation research and involving some of the best minds in the FBI and law enforcement, was the Crime Classification Manual, published in 1992, with Ann Burgess, her husband, Allen Burgess, and Bob Ressler. By the time of the Crime Classification Manual’s initial publication, we already had a significant number of profiling victories under our belts, including the Atlanta Child Murders; Arthur Shawcross’s murders of prostitutes in Rochester, New York; the Francine Elveson murder in New York City; the Trailside Killer in San Francisco; and the murders of Karla Brown in Illinois, Linda Dover in Georgia, Shari Faye Smith in South Carolina, and FBI employee Donna Lynn Vetter in Texas. In addition, we were also able to use profiling and behavioral science to help free wrongly convicted David Vasquez, an intellectually challenged individual who was in prison in Virginia. Though he had confessed to several murders under coercive circumstances, we were able to link the crimes to the actual killer, Timothy Spencer, who has since been tried and executed.

Looking back on it, an insanity defense like the M’Naghten Rule was one of the main reasons Ann and Allen Burgess, Bob Ressler, and I set out to create the Crime Classification Manual. From a criminal investigation standpoint, it didn’t really matter to us whether something was a disease, a disorder, or neither. We were interested in how behavior indicates criminal intent and perpetration, and how that behavior correlated to the thinking of the perpetrator right before, during, and after the commission of the crime. Whether that behavior was disordered to the extent that it would militate against guilt (given that legally, each crime is composed of two elements—the act and the criminal intent to act) was something for the jury and judge to decide.

But these reports on McGowan’s mental state made me even more uncomfortable about their role in determining his suitability for parole. If you had severe physical symptoms that definitely indicated something was very wrong and you were examined by four different doctors, each of whom came up with a different diagnosis, you would seriously question the efficacy of their diagnostic protocols. You would, unquestionably, demand a battery of tests to determine what was actually ailing you and wouldn’t be satisfied until blood work and endocrine and imaging studies confirmed a specific cause for your ailment.

In most cases, though, no such tests exist for confirming the correctness of a mental diagnosis. We know the symptom—in this case, the brutal rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl—but we cannot prove the cause. So what concerns me the most is how accurately we can predict future dangerousness. It would be like the doctor saying she couldn’t prove what caused a condition, but she was most interested in whether it would recur. In other words, we can only speculate, only offer an estimation or opinion. But I always start from the same premise, one that I taught throughout my years with the FBI: Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.

In 1998, five years after he first examined McGowan, and again at the request of the parole board, Dr. McNiel undertook another evaluation. Again, denying his earlier admission of rape fantasies and sexual attraction to young girls, McGowan chalked up the murder to a bad confluence of events. In McNiel’s words: “The victim happened to come to his home during a moment of abject despair in which he had been actively planning to kill himself for weeks but had been unable to follow through with his suicide plans.” When Joan showed up at his front door, “he became overwhelmed with unexplainable rage.”

As I read over these reports in preparation for my own encounter with Joseph McGowan, one thing struck me particularly about this latest report: a moment of abject despair in which he had been actively planning to kill himself for weeks.

I wasn’t sure whether or not he had been planning to kill himself, but from the moment I had been brought into this case and then started learning the details, my first questions had been, Why this victim, and why then?

Even if he was sexually drawn to little girls, and even if he was unsure of his own manhood, even if he was under the thumb of a domineering mother, what was going on in his mind at this particular time that led him to the high-risk crime of assaulting and killing a child from his own neighborhood, in his own house?

Dr. McNiel told the parole board that he considered his latest evaluation generally consistent with his earlier one, though in this later report he pointed to McGowan’s “potential for dissociation at times of anger, and also the likelihood of severe sexual pathology involving pedophilia and sexual violence, which he continues to deny.” He also said that McGowan had “paranoid tendencies and significant violence potential,” and that, given “Mr. McGowan’s continued inability to deal with the sexual aspects of his crime, it would appear that he has made very little progress in confronting the pedophilic impulses and sexual sadism that erupted in his crime. As such, he should be considered a poor risk for parole.”

Okay, I said to myself. So even though Dr. McNiel considers his two reports generally consistent, and though the subject had had no serious problems in prison, while once he said he saw “no evidence to indicate Mr. McGowan is at imminent risk of violent behavior,” he now sees “significant violence potential.”

So what was this guy McGowan actually all about? And if I could probe deeply enough, would he show it to me?

6

RED RAGE AND WHITE RAGE

From the outside, the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton looks just what you would imagine a maximum security institution to look like: thick brownish-gray walls topped with coiled razor wire. Glassed-in guard towers stand at the corners and in the middle of the wall expanses, with the slanted tops of functional and unadorned buildings visible behind them. Even the newer part of the prison is grim-looking and fortresslike, a solid red brick structure whose narrow window slits clearly delineate the boundary between freedom and incarceration.

That morning, I had been sworn in as a deputy by a prison official and given a photo name tag that indicated I was representing the New Jersey State Parole Board. I wore my traditional dark suit to suggest my authority.

Even for someone like me, going through the outer gate of a facility like this and passing through the series of barriers that ultimately took me to the warden’s office produces a sense of what Dante Alighieri must have been thinking when he posited the legend “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” over the gate of Hell.

Before I went in to speak to McGowan, I specified several parameters that I believed, based on previous experience, would be conducive to a successful interview.

I wanted the setting to be reasonably comfortable and nonthreatening. This is no easy task in a maximum security prison, where the entire environment is intimidating and designed to be so. But within that context, I wanted somewhere that the subject would be most likely to open up. I suggested a room with no more than a desk or table and two comfortable chairs. For illumination I preferred only a table lamp—no overhead lighting. This would help make the setting subdued and relaxed.

This is very important, because in a maximum security environment, the prisoner has little freedom and I want him to feel as free in his mental association as possible—in a sense, to give him some of his power back. Then you have to keep proving yourself, not only in your knowledge of the case file and the crimes, but in your nonverbal cues. When David Berkowitz was brought into the windowless interview room in New York’s Attica Correctional Facility—a room about eight by ten feet and painted a somber battleship gray—what struck me were his very blue eyes that kept darting between Bob Ressler and me as I was giving the introduction. He was trying to read our faces and gauge whether we were being sincere. I told him about the research we were conducting and that its purpose was to help law enforcement solve future cases, and possibly to help intervene with children who displayed violent tendencies.

In my research I had surmised his feelings of inadequacy. I took out a newspaper headlining his crimes and said, “David, in Wichita, Kansas, there is a killer who calls himself the BTK Strangler and he mentions you in his letters to the media and police. He wants to be powerful like you.”

Berkowitz leaned back in his chair, adjusted himself into a more comfortable position, and said, “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” I said, and the interview proceeded from there.

In the prison in Trenton, I told the warden I wanted no time restrictions for the interview, nor any interruptions for food or a prison head count. We arranged ahead of time that McGowan would be fed when we concluded, even if he had missed an official mealtime.

The interview room was approximately fourteen feet square. The door was made of steel, with a twelve-by-eighteen-inch wire-reinforced window, through which the guards could check on us. The walls were cinder block, painted bluish gray. There was a small table and two comfortable chairs. The only light came from the table lamp I had requested.

McGowan had no idea ahead of time where he was being taken or why. He was brought into the room by two guards. Board chairman Andrew Consovoy, who had accompanied me to the prison, introduced me as Dr. John Douglas. He said I was there representing the parole board. I use the honorific Dr. only when I want to create a clinical-seeming situation. I asked the guards to remove his handcuffs, which they did before leaving the two of us alone.

McGowan and I were both in our fifties, and each about six-foot-two. I had read descriptions of him having been big but soft during his teaching days. Now his body seemed firm and muscular, after years of working out in prison. And with his gray beard, he certainly didn’t look like a young high school science teacher any longer.

Everything about these interviews was orchestrated. I wanted to face the door and have him face the wall. There were two reasons for this. I didn’t want him distracted, and since I didn’t yet know him well, I wasn’t sure how he’d react, so I wanted a clear view of the window and the guard behind it. The type of offender I interview often determines my seating decisions. When I interview assassins, for instance, I usually have to have them facing the window or door because they tend to be paranoid and will be distracted if they can’t psychologically escape when stressed by the interview.

In this situation, I took a seat and positioned myself in such a way that I would be looking up at him slightly throughout the interview. I wanted to give him that one psychological edge of feeling superior to me. This was a trick I’d learned from talking to Charles Manson when Bob Ressler and I interviewed him in San Quentin. I was surprised, at five-feet-two, how short and slight he was.

As soon as Manson entered the small conference room in the main cellblock at San Quentin where Ressler and I interviewed him, he climbed up onto the back of a chair at the head of the table so he could lord over us from a superior position, just as he used to sit on top of a boulder to preach to his “family” of followers, lending him an air of natural and biblical authority. As the interview progressed, it became clear that this short, slight man who had been the illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old prostitute, who had been partly raised by a fanatically religious aunt and a sadistic, belittling uncle who sometimes dressed him as a girl and called him a sissy, who had been in and out of group homes and reform schools and who essentially raised himself on the street before going in and out of prison for robberies, forgeries, and pimping, had developed an uncanny charisma and ability to “sell” himself to social misfits just as lost and unwanted as he was. As someone who has stared into those penetrating eyes, I can assure you that Manson’s gift, his enticing aura, was real, as real as the delusional grandeur that accompanied it.

What we learned from our interview was that Manson was not a master criminal. He was a master manipulator, and he had developed that skill as a survival mechanism. He didn’t fantasize about torture or murder like so many of the offenders I’ve confronted. He fantasized about being rich and famous as a rock star and even managed to hang out with the Beach Boys for a while.

Like other repeat criminals we had interviewed, Manson had spent a lot of his formative years in institutional settings. He told us he had been assaulted not only by other inmates, but also by counselors and guards. This had the effect of teaching him that weaker or more impressionable people were there to be used.

By the time he was released from prison in 1967, he had spent more than half of his thirty-two years in some sort of institution or custody. He made his way north to San Francisco and discovered things had changed in society. He could use his wits to participate in the culture of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and get it all for free. His musical talent and melodic voice served him well in attracting followers. It was only a matter of time before he drifted down to the Los Angeles area and developed an “audience.”

In listening to him, we realized that the horrific murders carried out in Los Angeles by his followers occurred not because Manson exerted such hypnotic control—which he did—but when he started losing control and others, particularly his lieutenant Charles “Tex” Watson, started challenging him and leading the group on adventures on his own. Manson had been predicting societal “Helter Skelter,” which he picked up from the Beatles’ White Album, and when he realized his acolytes had taken him seriously and murdered beautiful, nine-months-pregnant movie star Sharon Tate and four of her guests, he had to reassert himself, leading to another break-in and murder two nights later that Manson instigated but did not take part in himself.

What we learned from the Manson interview was later applied to the bureau’s dealing with other cults with charismatic and manipulative leaders, such as Reverend Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple in Guyana, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and the Freemen militia movement in Montana. The outcome is not always as we would like it, but it is important to understand the personality of those we are dealing with so we can try to predict behavior.

I had also learned from experience with assassin types like Arthur Bremer and James Earl Ray not to stare for long since it made them too uncomfortable to open up. From Bremer we learned that the target was not nearly so important as the act. Bremer had pursued President Richard Nixon before concluding that he would be too difficult to get close to and then switched his sights to Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace, whom he shot and rendered paraplegic during a campaign stop at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland, on May 15, 1972. From Ray, we got very little. He was so bound up in his paranoid fantasies that he had recanted his guilty plea in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., insisting that he was an unwitting dupe of a complex conspiracy to kill the civil rights icon.

Let’s be honest: Any prison interview of this type begins as a mutual seduction. I am there to seduce the convict into believing that my sole purpose in being there is to help him get out. And he is there to seduce me into believing that he is worthy of getting out. It usually takes a fair amount of time to get beyond those opening positions as the pretense is gradually stripped away to reveal who we each are. My part in this case was to come across as if I was helping him think about and prepare for the big day when he would be paroled. This was not insincere on my part. I had to go into this session with a completely open mind, and with the goal to turn on the switch in his brain that would reveal his inner thoughts and fantasies.

The first two hours were devoted primarily to small talk. This amount of time is necessary to establish a natural conversational rhythm and to ensure that the subject forgets the setting and lowers his inhibitions. I told him some vague things about myself and my own background in law enforcement to build up a level of trust. I asked him about the prison environment, inquiring about what he did with his time. It was interesting to me that he pretty much kept to his own wing in the prison and seldom ventured out into the main yard, where he said he didn’t feel comfortable. This was analogous to his pre-prison life, in which he felt a greater comfort level in school, where he was in control, as opposed to in the greater community, where he was socially awkward and more vulnerable.

Years later, I got to see a copy of a letter he’d written to a woman with whom he corresponded regularly. He mentioned the fact that I did not take notes, that I had the details of his file memorized, and that I was good at putting him at ease. My purpose was to steer the conversation where I wanted it to go. He “complimented” me in his letter on listening to what he had to say, rather than merely going through a list of predetermined questions, as parole board representatives tended to do. He was right about that. I was here to learn from him by listening and getting him to reveal himself. That was my only agenda.

Gradually, I began bringing him around to the crime itself. I stayed away from sounding the least bit judgmental. It was not as if I was trying to give him the impression I was condoning his actions. I just wanted to be as factual and objective as I could, so we could re-create his thought processes at the time. He had given so many different responses to psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors over the years that I wanted to see if I could just get him to give me the story unadorned.

I did this by creating a This Is Your Life–style narrative. For those too young to remember this, it was a television program during my youth in the 1950s in which host Ralph Edwards would “lure” a prominent guest into the studio with the aid of the guest’s family or friends and go through his or her life for the audience, punctuated by reminiscences of people from his past. I got McGowan to tell me about himself as I guided him up to that Thursday afternoon in 1973.

I knew that he had a reputation in school for being kind of humorless and aloof, at least among the faculty. I also knew that he had been engaged to be married around this time, but that the engagement had fallen through. If the woman had rejected him, that could certainly be a precipitating stressor.

Though he said McGowan wasn’t very emotionally forthcoming, Bob Carrillo had the impression that “he had a lot of emotion built up inside.” He never mentioned the breakup of the engagement and Carrillo said he had never met the young lady.

“I met his girlfriend on one occasion,” said Jack Meschino. “My god, she was the sweetest, most beautiful thing. She was very tiny compared to him.” And perhaps a threat to his mother? Though Meschino knew at the time there had been a breakup, he never knew why, and McGowan never brought it up.

Some of his fellow teachers had planned a trip to the Caribbean over the Easter break, but McGowan had not been invited.

I asked Meschino what would have happened if Joe had asked to go along. He indicated that he probably would have been included.

Then why didn’t he? Meschino said that he couldn’t get himself organized and figure out how to make all of the arrangements. That was pretty consistent with a guy of his age who still lived with his mother and grandmother, and it certainly could have contributed to the ongoing frustration of the life he found himself living.

It was about two hours into the interview when I said, “I want to know in your own words what it was like twenty-five years ago. How did this all happen to get you here?” I purposely avoid loaded or descriptive words like kill, assault, or murder, nor did I refer to Joan as his “victim” or a child. “That girl—Joan—did you know her?”

“Well, I’d seen her in the neighborhood,” McGowan replied. His affect was flat, his tone matter-of-fact.

“Had she come to the door to sell you the Girl Scout cookies?”

He said he thought his mother had ordered them from her. A newspaper article quoting a former FBI agent said they found more than a hundred empty boxes of Girl Scout cookies in the house.

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

It was almost like a metamorphosis. McGowan’s whole demeanor transformed. Even his physical appearance seemed to change before my eyes. His eyes were unfocused as he looked beyond me and stared toward the vacant cinder-block wall. I could tell he was looking completely inward—back a quarter of a century. I could sense he was clicking back to the one story that had never left his mind.

The front door was open to the mild spring weather, and from the lower level of the bi-level home, McGowan said he saw her through the screen door standing on the landing. She said she was there to deliver two boxes of Girl Scout cookies and to collect two dollars. He wanted to get her downstairs to the level where he lived, away from his grandmother, who was either sleeping or watching television upstairs.

That was why he said he had only a twenty-dollar bill and a one-dollar bill and would have to go get the proper change—to get her downstairs with him. The story about being embarrassed over not having the exact amount was all crap to give something innocuous to the psychiatrists.

This is what I was hoping would happen during the interview. I’ve had similar experiences with other sex offenders: Once you’re able to flip their on switch, they don’t shut up. When Ressler and I interviewed Monte Rissell, he recounted driving back to the parking lot of his apartment complex in Alexandria, Virginia, seeing a woman about to get out of her car, and forcing her at gunpoint into a secluded area. After that, she tried to run away. He pursued her into a ravine, grabbed her, and vividly described banging her head against the side of a rock and holding her head under the flowing water of a stream, as if he were watching a movie.

My goal was to turn on the “DVD” in McGowan’s brain that had recorded the homicide. After a quarter of a century behind bars, McGowan recalled every specific detail of that Thursday afternoon. It was like having a friend talk about a terrific movie he’s seen. But in this case, McGowan was the scriptwriter, the producer, the director, and the lead actor. He got to exercise the three aspirations of nearly every predator: manipulation, domination, and control.

Without looking directly at me, he described luring Joan into the lower level and his bedroom, ordering her to remove her clothes, and sexually assaulting her.

I asked him if he had penetrated her. Just with his finger, he insisted.

Then how did semen get into her vagina? It was on his fingers after he ejaculated, he said.

In a focused and excited state with no indication of any remorse, he described how he picked her up by her ankles, swung her around, and slammed her head to the floor, fracturing her skull. The account he gave was not much different from what he had told detectives and psychiatrists previously. He never even attempted to fake empathy, as other offenders had when I’d interviewed them. What struck me was not the facts, but the obvious intentionality.

It was hot as hell outside, but the interview room was very cold. In fact, I was trying to keep myself from shivering as I sat there, even though I was wearing a wool suit. McGowan, on the other hand, had begun perspiring profusely, just as he had described feeling after the attack. He was looking away from me in a trancelike state, breathing heavily, and his prison shirt was drenched with sweat. I could see his chest muscles trembling.

I thought immediately of the quotation I had just read from Dr. Galen’s initial report, after McGowan had beaten and strangled Joan: “she stopped struggling … just sort of lay there. I got dressed. I had been sweating so violently.” In his head and in his physical being, he was right back in the act.

“It’s pretty hard to strangle someone, isn’t it?” I asked. “Even a very young person.”

“Yeah,” he readily agreed. “I didn’t realize it would take so much strength.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, I turned around and positioned myself behind her.” I took that to mean he came around to where her head lay on the floor.

“And how long did you choke her?”

“Until I thought she was dead.”

“Then what?”

“I went out to get some bags to stuff her in and put her clothes in, and when I got back, she was twitching.”

Now, this was not a blitz-style attack resulting from a momentary surge of uncontrollable rage. He did not suddenly come to his senses and say to himself, Oh, my god! What have I done? When he saw that she was still twitching, his only thought was to choke her again to make sure she was finally dead. It was almost as if he had murdered her again.

The one time I remember McGowan looking right at me during this entire description was when he said, “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.

“I can feel two different kinds of rage,” he went on. “Red rage bothers me, but I can turn my head, focus, and control it, like when someone cuts me off in traffic or I have a conflict at school. But white rage I can’t control.”

“And is that what you were feeling when Joan came to your house?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s right.” Our eyes were still locked.

So he killed Joan while seized with white rage. The fact that he even had a name for it told me he had experienced it before and most likely would again. But he didn’t kill her right there at the front door no matter what was raging within him. At that moment, a methodical plan had formed instantly in his mind as to how he was going to get her where he wanted in order to be able to do what he wanted to do.

I pointed this out and said to him, “You’re not a psychotic, even though you tried to show dissociation from the crime. What I see is pretty logical, rational behavior.” He didn’t argue with me.

As for the psychiatric assertion that “The killing was the consequence of an additional upset and failure due to premature ejaculation”: wrong again. The killing was the result of a combination of displaced rage, sexual excitement at his momentary power over another human being, and the very practical consideration of leaving no witness to what already was an unspeakable crime.

He had admitted as much in his interview with Dr. Galen when he said, “If I let her go, my whole life was gone. All I could think of was just to get rid of her.” I wondered if anyone before me had ever taken the time to correlate all of McGowan’s statements together.

But I didn’t minimize the killing as merely a practical consideration to avoid being identified and caught. This was not a question of simply going too far. The way McGowan described it, I could tell that the gratification and emotional fulfillment of the act went through to the brutal murder itself and his ability to destroy something or someone.

At one point I asked him, “If I could have captured one ‘video image’ of your face while you were doing this, what would it show me?”

Obligingly, his face contorted into what I would characterize as an intense, malevolently satisfied grimace.

Even the way he described the body disposal was logical and methodical, as opposed to panicked or hurried. He got some towels and cleaning materials to wipe up the blood, trying to get this potential forensic evidence out of there so that his mother wouldn’t see it and in case the police searched the premises. He wrapped the body in a carpet and drove some distance to a setting he was familiar with to dump it. Then he went back home and acted as if nothing had happened. Joining the neighborhood search for Joan was a conscious means of covering his tracks.

Most cons, knowing they potentially have something to gain from the interviewer’s good report, will try to BS to one extent or another. There was none of that with McGowan. I think that was because I was well prepared, and he was intelligent enough to understand that it wouldn’t work. His goal in agreeing to talk to me was to improve his chances of parole, and he knew that my catching him up in a lie was not going to cut it. And the whole point of my approach was to make the subject “comfortable” enough to let me know what he was actually thinking and feeling.

What did surprise me was that he didn’t even try to express any sorrow for what he had done or feeling for Joan’s family. He was certainly sorry that the whole thing had happened—I was not the first one to hear that sentiment—but there was no sense of emotional comprehension of what he had taken away from this little girl, all those who loved her and all those who had come into her brief life. The impression I received was that he was telling me that since he couldn’t bring this young girl back to life, he just had to move on, and everyone should understand that. The murder was simply a fact of life to him, as if he had had cancer or a heart attack, and now the doctors were determining if he was well enough to leave the hospital and resume normal life.

Every violent crime is a scene acted out between two or more participants. And when the offender and the victim are up close and personal—as opposed to, say, a bombing, a poisoning, arson, or a sniper attack—a trained crime analyst can gain a tremendous amount of information on what is actually going on in the mind of the criminal by observing his behavior, even if he says little or nothing. As I listened to each detail of the deadly encounter between Joseph McGowan and Joan D’Alessandro, I focused not only on the fact of the violence and sexual assault but on the way it was done.

The fixation was with the act itself, not the personality or specificity of the victim. I didn’t doubt McGowan had some pedophilic tendencies, as he’d suggested in some of his previous interviews. That would certainly go along with his lack of social sophistication and his deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. But he had no prior sexual offenses on his record, even minor ones, and there was nothing in the file about search warrants turning up any child pornography or fantasy writing about children. If he fantasized, I thought it would be about an adult woman. And the only real fantasy here was a fantasy of power.

What became clear to me as he talked was that this crime, primarily an act of rage that escalated quickly from “red” to “white,” was triggered by something, some precipitating event, though I wasn’t sure at this point what it was. My guess—based on his living situation, his inability to see his engagement through to marriage, and my extensive knowledge of other sexual predators—was that it had something to do with his mother. Still, it gnawed at me that I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what had set him off.

As I listened to McGowan, I realized that what had gotten him off was the act rather than the victim. All the people who had interviewed him before were barking up the wrong tree if they were trying to get him to talk about his pedophilia. There was nothing either obsessive or particularly pleasurable in his description of the rape of a seven-year-old girl. Not only that, this was a child he had seen frequently in the neighborhood. He had never previously attempted to single her out for special attention, to befriend her, seduce her, or groom her. The violence, the sexual degradation, the murder—these were all manifestations of raw rage. No fantasy scenario was being acted out, not even a sexually sadistic one. What was significant about this particular victim of opportunity was that she was small and vulnerable. If it had been someone who McGowan saw could put up a good fight, no crime would take place.

McGowan slowly returned from his reverie excursion into the past. While describing the particulars of the crime, he had been focused and trembling. Now he was calm, no longer sweating. He had relived a battle he had fought and won, unlike so many others in his life.

We talked about his fondness for guns, another obvious psychological compensation. I asked, “If you were angry and you went out with an AK-47 to a shopping mall, who would you kill?” I was curious not only about his response, but also to see if he would even accept the premise of the question. “Whom would you be gunning for? Schoolchildren, teachers, police officers?”

“Anyone,” he replied.

This was significant. Not only did he not deny the possibility that something like this could happen, but he essentially told me that his rage was generalized and indiscriminate.

We began to talk about his possible release from prison. At one point I asked, “Joe, where are you planning to go when you get out?” I was careful to say when, not if. I wanted to keep the conversation as positive as I could so he would be candid with me.

He told me he was going to New York to meet up with another ex-con who was an electrician. He had promised McGowan a job as his assistant. I told him that I was raised in New York and returned frequently, and that he would be shocked to see how expensive it had become to live there.

He glanced furtively over his shoulder at the door to make sure the guards couldn’t hear our conversation. “John,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper, “I have money.”

“What kind of money could you have, being in a place like this for the past twenty-five years?” I responded. “It can’t be from making license plates.”

In a low voice he said that when his grandmother and mother passed away, he received a fairly substantial chunk from their life insurance policies and the sale of the house. He said it was in a bank out of state. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

He whispered, “I don’t want the victim’s family to be able to get at the money.”

What I was thinking to myself was: This guy just won’t let up. He has absolutely no regard for the people he’s hurt and whose lives he has changed forever.

What I said was “You know, you’re a pretty smart guy, Joe, the way you’ve figured it all out. I think you’d do really well in New York!” This was both necessary to maintain my rapport with the subject and not a lie. I did think this was pretty smart and resourceful and that he would be able to figure out his way through a place as intense as New York. I just didn’t say how appalled I was at his scheme. Just as in negotiating a high-level business deal, you have to know when to speak up and when to shut up, as difficult as it may be.

We later found out that an investigator had looked into Genevieve McGowan’s will and the money trail on Rosemarie’s behalf. She had sold her Hillsdale home shortly after the murder and moved to Villas, New Jersey. When she sold that house, she moved in with her niece in Wisconsin for a while, and then went to live at a Franciscan care center. She died in April 1992. Her will set up various trusts, one of them benefiting a niece.

The will was probated in Wisconsin since Genevieve was living there. Jim discovered that all funds had been disbursed and there was nothing left for the D’Alessandros to touch. Apparently, Genevieve had anticipated claims on anything coming directly to Joe, so she had protected her assets from any claims arising out of a wrongful death suit by making disbursements throughout the years. She had instructed the niece to take care of Joe and give him whatever he needed, without actually having him legally control the money. This is what he must have meant when he told me the money was held and protected out of state.

The sentiments behind these arrangements reminded me of Genevieve’s comments to her church acquaintance that she hated Rosemarie and blamed her for all of her and Joe’s troubles. One of the hallmarks of narcissistic, borderline, and sociopathic personalities is the unwillingness to assume personal responsibility for anything. It is always someone else’s fault.

By the time the conversation wound down, five or six hours had passed. Neither one of us had eaten or left to go to the bathroom. But I did have a pretty good idea now of what made Joseph McGowan tick. He sensed this as well, although his perspective turned out to be somewhat different from mine. In the letter to his female pen pal, McGowan expressed optimism about parole because he thought that he had had a good interview with me and that I had understood him. I did understand him, and I went in with an open mind, not about what he had done—that was beyond debate—but whether he still might be dangerous. Where he was in error was interpreting my nonjudgmental attitude and demeanor as empathy or acceptance.

That is where almost all of these guys go wrong—they can process other people only through their own self-centered emotional filters. It’s always all about them, and they cannot comprehend that my true empathy for them is about equal to what they showed for their victims.

As we concluded the interview, I shook McGowan’s hand and thanked him for talking with me. I wished him good luck and tried to give no indication of my personal feelings about him or my recommendations to the parole board.

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