Crime Seen (7 page)

The Academy classrooms were very modern, most in the tiered theatre style. There was also a gymnasium, workout room and indoor pool. The campus started to feel more like a small town when we were shown the library, chapel, bank, post office, dry cleaners and a thousand-seat theatre.

Across the street from the Academy was Hogan’s Alley, a mock town built with streets of false-front apartment buildings, stores, a motel, a bank and a real operating deli. Behind the false facades were administrative offices and classrooms. Hogan was the most crime-ridden city in America. Dozens of simulated unlawful activities took place on those streets every day. The FBI and DEA rookies were engaged in practical scenarios to learn investigation procedures and prepare themselves for the real-life world of crime. The “bad guys” were often actors from a local company under contract to the FBI. It was all in a day’s work for them to be arrested, searched, interviewed, robbed, assaulted, taken hostage or murdered. Ed warned if something went down while we were walking around on the streets we might be stopped by a rookie and asked to give a witness statement.

The most interesting thing for me in this movie set–like town was the vintage reproduction of the entrance to the Biograph Theater, the famous Chicago landmark. The marquee listed
Manhattan Melodrama
, starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy. In 1934, FBI agents were directed by Hoover to find John Dillinger, the notorious and vicious criminal who terrorized communities throughout the Midwest of the US in the Depression years. He was wanted on a host of charges including murder, bank robbery and other violent crimes. On the evening of July 24, 1934, FBI agents acted on a tip that their man was at the Biograph watching the famous Clark Gable movie. When he exited the theatre, he realized agents were waiting for him. As he reached for his pistol he was shot dead by the FBI. The event was often described as the beginning of the end of the era for gangsters having a type of hero status in the US.

We went back into the rear of the Academy complex via the gymnasium. Signs nailed to a tree outside the entrance read: AGONY, PAIN, LOVE IT, PRIDE. Ed explained that the messages were in relation to an Academy fitness regimen. A challenging obstacle course undertaken by most National Academy students was a voluntary final test of their fitness before they graduated. The 6.1-mile Yellow Brick Road, built by the Marines, consisted of running, crawling, jumping, scaling and other such maneuvers. Apparently yellow bricks were at one time placed as markers to show the way along the course. Those that successfully completed the course got to proudly display a painted yellow brick as the prize for their achievement. I had no interest in doing the course challenge while I was there because I’d heard there were snakes in the woods and I hate snakes. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

We next stopped by the PX, short form for the military’s Post Exchange, which was like a general store with no tax charged. This Academy PX was full of FBI paraphernalia including grey “FBI Academy” sweatshirts, which were a particularly hot gift item for family and friends back home, especially after being worn by fictional FBI rookie character Clarice Starling in the soon-to-be-released movie
The Silence of the Lambs
. She wore the sweatshirt as she ran through a foggy segment of the Yellow Brick Road in the opening scene of the movie.

Next door was the “The Boardroom,” which operated as a coffee shop and fast food restaurant by day and the only on-campus pub by night. Starting that night, I saw that the roughly one hundred Academy students that the room held, mostly men, young to middle-aged, all away from home and ready to let off steam, made for some raucous entertainment by closing time. But it also provided me a great opportunity to socialize with all levels of US federal agencies and cops from around the world. The colourful war stories that were told every night ensured that my learning experience continued long after class hours ended.

From there Ed brought us to where we would study and work for the next ten months. It was located next to our dorm building, but you didn’t get to it through a gerbil tube. You went through the Academy’s main-level gun vault and firearms cleaning area to get to the elevator. I could smell Hoppe’s No. 9 firearms cleaning solvent as we came down the hall.

Even though I cleaned my firearm with that same solvent many times over the years, whenever I got a whiff of Hoppe’s No. 9, it always reminded me of walking through the gun-cleaning room that day in Quantico and taking the elevator down to the lowest level in the FBI Academy.

SIXTY FEET BELOW GROUND

“Sometimes the difference between failure and success is a new thought.”

—Captain John Cronin, chief of NYPD Bureau of Missing Persons, 1956

A SLOW JERKY ELEVATOR RIDE DOWN
two storeys was enough time to hear about how the sub-basement of the Academy was at one time the US government’s national emergency relocation centre and, by some accounts, had served as Director Hoover’s personal Cold War nuclear bunker. The elevator was so old Hoover must have ridden it himself. (It spooked me that first day, and a few weeks later I got trapped in it for a short time. After that I joined most everyone else and took the stairs.)

The doors opened directly into a reception lobby displaying photographs of the FBI’s hierarchy of bosses, as well as five large framed shadow boxes with photographs and police shoulder flashes mounted inside depicting the graduating police fellowship classes that had come before us. Ed explained that in 1984, the year-long program was created to train police officers in crime-scene analysis and criminal profiling. The first year the NCAVC hosted just one police investigator from Baltimore but subsequent years included four to six experienced detectives from across the US. The most recent class included the shoulder flash of the Canadian Mountie Ron MacKay, the first international student who had just graduated a few months before my arrival.

Our shared office was one of about forty rooms in the middle of the underground space. Our work area was a converted conference room with a large table in the middle and desks around the outside. Ed apologized that space was at a premium and that we wouldn’t have much privacy but that ended up not being such a bad thing. When agents needed the conference room for a consultation with a visiting police agency, we usually got to stick around. We were allowed to stay and observe the think-tank sessions and eventually even participate. We were often joined in our training and consultation sessions by several other FBI agents undergoing the same training program as we were, adding to the dynamic nature of the atmosphere.

There was a lot of innovative work being done in this subterranean lair. Since the 1960s police officers attending the National Academy had been bringing their unsolved violent crime files to this specialized team of instructors who offered their fresh take on the crimes. The agents, from various academic and investigative backgrounds, worked together to analyze physical aspects of crime scenes in combination with the interactive behaviour between the offenders and their victims. Their brainstorming ultimately resulted in opinions regarding the major personality and behavioural traits of the person likely responsible for the crime. Such predictions commonly included age, sex, race, level of intelligence, criminal history, motive and possible pre- and post-offence behaviours. Initially the agents kept a low profile since Director Hoover seemed to have the same disdain for the use of soft sciences in the FBI as he did for female agents. Their services would not be formally recognized by the FBI until after Hoover’s death in 1972. The Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) was then officially open for business.
*
Initially called criminal personality profiling—and referred to as profiling in this book, for simplicity’s sake—the deductive reasoning process underwent a number of name changes and eventually became known as criminal investigative analysis.

Violent crime in the US had been steadily increasing since the 1960s and by the mid-1980s had reached alarming proportions. Homicide rates were at an all-time high and investigation solve rates were dropping. The FBI was tasked with helping their government bosses understand the issues and BSU members travelled to prisons across the country undertaking research projects to analyze the workings of the criminal mind. This was groundbreaking research because the questions being asked of violent offenders were from a criminal investigator’s perspective rather than an academic’s or clinician’s. Keeping in mind the propensity for less than accurate responses from criminals, the agents always meticulously examined the investigative files of their interviewees before meeting with them.

In one of the first research initiatives, interviewers had face-to-face conversations with sexually motivated killers, adhering to an extensive research protocol developed and analyzed together with doctors internationally recognized for their work in the area. After speaking with thirty-six repeat homicide offenders, the term “serial killer” was coined, that is, the same person committing three or more murders. Further research was conducted over the years in the areas of sexual assault, child sexual abuse and other violent crime issues.

At the same time, on the other side of the country, an LAPD homicide cop was experiencing significant frustration having to time and again go through old newspaper articles and call other area police departments to see if anyone else had similar murders in their jurisdictions. He pitched his idea of a searchable database of violent criminal behaviour and other case information to the United States Department of Justice. It resulted in the establishment of the Violent Crime Apprehension Program (ViCAP), a computerized repository of major violent crime cases submitted by those police agencies that wanted to participate. ViCAP was added to the BSU’s profiling, research and consultation programs and, in 1984, President Ronald Regan announced the formation of the NCAVC. Long-time member of the BSU and its first unit chief, Roger Depue was instrumental in getting the police fellowship program off the ground that same year. By the time I arrived in Quantico, Roger had retired, as had most of the other pioneer agents, but I became well acquainted with his and all his agents’ work and how they gained their legend statuses when I reviewed their closed-case files. (Roger went on to gather a group of elite retired FBI agent and police fellow profilers, known as the Academy Group, providing parallel international behavioural consulting services to private sector organizations to aid them with a variety of behaviour-based civil and criminal issues.)

What I was about to study, including the BSU’s academic research, closed cases and new cases coming in, were some of the most unusual and vicious crimes ever investigated. The graphic details could come in many forms: through written material and photographs, but also via audio and video as the new era of recorded evidence was also emerging. Some days there would be hours of it. I had to be prepared to steel myself for it and manage the stress, to stay detached from the emotion of the open cases being presented, sometimes two or three a day. I learned for my mind and heart to survive and not be haunted by the knowledge and wisdom my teachers imparted, I had to adopt strategies to psychologically disconnect. One was: refer to the “good guys”—the assaulted, the murdered, the survivors by their first names, because the innocent and vulnerable deserved my thoughtfulness. Whereas I would refer to the “bad guys” only by their last names—these perpetrators who were heartless, vicious and cruel and had never exercised restraint or civility in causing human suffering, so I chose to give them no emotional consideration. It was a small thing that somehow helped. But I mostly coped by focusing on my role as a student profiler and concentrating hard on learning from what I was reading, listening to and seeing, and resist getting drawn in to the sensationalism of it all. Keeping my equilibrium was helped a great deal by being anchored with the company of my fellow students and decompressing together at the end of each day. I also took advantage of the state-of-the-art gym that was just a short distance away from my dorm room. On weekends I’d often take my bicycle by car to the outskirts of Washington, and then ride the bike paths into the city and spend the day there. I was eating well, sleeping well, staying fit and became totally immersed in all that I was experiencing.

My FBI training course was definitely not for the faint of heart, including everything from forensics and criminal psychology, to serial rapists and killers, bombers, threat assessment and interrogation tactics. Occasionally I’d be sprung from the bunker, sent for a week-long course in forensic pathology in Bethesda, Maryland, and a forensic psychiatry course in Charlottesville, Virginia. During one memorable week, I travelled to New York City and did a ride-along with the NYPD Crime Scene Unit, which specialized in forensic identification. As luck would have it, actor Robert De Niro was with us that week, conducting research for an upcoming movie. He and I were both assigned to work the night shift with the Bronx Squad.

With 2,262 homicides in the city in 1990, there was not a lot of downtime between calls, but there was much to learn from these officers and the multitude of crime scenes they took us to over the course of the week. Mr. De Niro, always dressed nondescriptly and with a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, drove to the crime scenes himself in his old rusted-out car. If recognized by bystanders, he’d take off and then meet up with us at the next homicide or other violent crime in the queue. I left New York with a whole new appreciation of the work done by these NYPD specialists—and, as an added memento, a signed photograph from Mr. De Niro.

Back at the FBI Academy, I particularly enjoyed sitting in on consultations between BSU agents and visiting police officers from all over the world who were searching for new and innovative perspectives on their unsolved violent crime cases. These sessions typically started with a full case overview with all investigative and forensic information. It was not uncommon for the investigators to work in a pitch regarding their personal perspectives and theories about the crime, but you couldn’t allow it to impact your own thinking or objectivity. As time went on my observer status slowly changed and I gained the confidence to share my opinions with those around the table. However, on at least one occasion, I may have crossed the line to oversharing.