Criminal Minds (11 page)

The Rochester cops were furious. If they had known about the convicted murderer and sex offender in their midst, they would have had a starting point for their investigation much earlier.

Shawcross confessed to the prostitute murders, but he tried to blame them all on events outside his control, and his lawyers used an insanity defense. Shawcross’s stories were all over the map. He claimed to have been a super-soldier of some kind in Vietnam and to have suffered post-traumatic stress disorder as a result, but a little checking showed that he had never witnessed, much less taken part in, the wartime atrocities he had described. He said that he had been a bed-wetter and a pyromaniac, the son of an abusive mother, yet other family members denied those claims. It was a fact that he had dropped out of school at nineteen, when he had finally made it to ninth grade, but that only proved that he was not very bright.

In the trial preparation, a test showed that Shawcross had an extra Y chromosome, a condition once called the
criminal karyotype
and believed to cause antisocial, aggressive behavior and low intelligence. Later research disproved this, but some people still cling to it as an excuse for criminal acts (as did fictional murderer Henry Grace, in the
Criminal Minds
episode “Masterpiece” [408]).

Finally, Shawcross was convicted on ten counts of murder (although his body count might be as high as sixteen) and sentenced to ten consecutive twenty-five-years-to-life sentences. He would have been eligible for parole after serving a mere 250 years, but he died of a pulmonary embolism on November 10, 2008.

 

 

ROBERT HANSEN
was yet another prostitute killer, albeit one with a more colorful MO. Reminiscent of the deranged brothers in the episode “Open Season” (221), Hansen hunted for sport.

Hansen’s early life was marked by terrible acne, a stutter, and domineering parents who forced the naturally left-handed boy to use his right hand, a stress that he claims made his stutter even worse. He had few friends in high school and no girlfriends. He became an occasional shoplifter; this turned into a habit that would persist into his later years.

After finishing high school, Hansen joined the army, then went to work as a drill instructor at a police academy in Iowa. He had been married for a short time when his rage got the best of him and he burned down a school bus garage, supposedly in revenge for all the slights his town had visited upon him. His wife, humiliated, divorced him. Hansen served twenty months of a three-year sentence. A few months after being paroled, he married again.

The Hansens decided to make a new start in life, and in 1967 they moved to Anchorage, Alaska. The final frontier seemed like a good match for a guy who had never fit in anywhere. Hansen became well known as a hunter, setting records with his rifle and his bow. His trophy room filled up with animal heads. After committing insurance fraud and acquiring an easy thirteen thousand dollars, he opened a bakery in town.

But Hansen had another pastime that he didn’t tell his wife about. Anchorage’s Fourth Avenue was a hotbed of strip clubs and bars in which prostitutes plied their trade, and Hansen often visited them. Quick, impersonal sex didn’t turn out to be enough to satisfy his lust, however. At some point, probably around 1971, he turned violent and murdered one of the hookers. He discovered that he liked it.

He committed more murders and began dumping the corpses of the women in a wilderness area. Then another idea came to him—a way to combine his dual passions. He would offer a prostitute a couple of hundred dollars for oral sex—which he claimed he would never ask of his respectable wife—and once the act was under way, he would handcuff the woman, take her someplace and brutally rape her, then fly her into the wilderness. There he would let the woman, usually unclothed, run off. After giving her a head start, he would hunt her down and kill her, leaving the body lost in the wild. Hookers and topless dancers made good prey, since their absences often went unreported.

Hansen was arrested in 1977 for stealing a chain saw, and he was diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder. Although he was ordered to take lithium, the order wasn’t enforced, and he stopped taking his meds. The authorities didn’t know there was a serial killer working their turf. Hansen wasn’t suspected of anything more serious than property theft.

He was finally accused of rape on June 13, 1982. Hansen had pulled his usual routine: hiring a prostitute, cuffing her, and pulling a gun. He took her to his home, where he raped her, bit her breasts, and forced a hammer into her vagina. After immobilizing her, he rested from his travails. When he awoke, he informed her that he was going to fly her into the backcountry for more “fun.” If she cooperated, he would bring her back to Anchorage.

The woman was no fool; she realized that because the man had kidnapped her and raped her in his own home, making no effort to conceal his identity, he would never let her live. So while Hansen was loading the plane, the woman saw a chance to escape and ran, still in handcuffs, toward a passing truck. Hansen chased her, but when the truck driver saw her and stopped for her, Hansen turned away.

The police were called, and the woman described the man who had taken her. The cops recognized the description as sounding like local businessman Robert Hansen. They showed her his home and his airplane, and she confirmed both.

When the detectives paid Hansen a visit, he denied everything. “You can’t rape a prostitute, can you?” he asked. He said that his wife and two kids were in Europe for the summer, but he’d had dinner with two business associates. His alibi checked out, and the investigation stalled.

During the next year, more bodies of strippers and hookers turned up in the wilderness. Whenever the cause of death could be determined, it was found that the victim had been shot. A single .223 shell casing was found at one of the scenes.

Remembering the complaint against Hansen, the detectives decided to take another look at him. They brought FBI profiler John Douglas up from the lower forty-eight and asked him to profile their suspect. He did so, based on the information that was available, and it was a close match to Hansen, right down to the stutter. He also told them that since the man was both a hunter and a serial killer, he probably kept trophies—not animal heads mounted on a wall, but clothing, jewelry, and the like, which he might give away or stash in the house.

With Douglas’s profile in hand, the cops got the district attorney to authorize a grand jury investigation. Then they went back to the men who had buttressed Hansen’s alibi and warned them that if they lied they would be looking at serious jeopardy. Both men changed their stories, and Hansen’s alibi fell apart.

Hansen was arrested. The authorities took the profile to a judge and were granted a search warrant for Hansen’s property; this was the first time a criminal profile had ever been used to support a search-warrant request. In Hansen’s house, they found jewelry and identification belonging to some of the victims, as well as a .223 caliber Ruger Mini-14 hunting rifle that was a ballistics match to the shell casing.

Hansen pleaded guilty to the four homicides the police could definitively connect him to, and as part of his plea deal, he showed them seventeen grave sites in the Knik River Valley. Twelve of the sites were ones that the authorities hadn’t known about, and human remains were discovered in most of them. Ultimately, the police connected Hansen to twenty-one murders, and they believed that there could be more.

Robert Hansen is serving a 461-year prison sentence at the Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, Alaska. His big-game hunting days are far behind him, and his name has been expunged from the record books.

 

 

YET ANOTHER PROSTITUTE
murderer who earns a mention on
Criminal Minds
is Joel Rifkin, who is brought up in the episode “Charm and Harm” (120) as an example of a criminal who was also an amateur photographer. Rifkin was busted because of a minor violation—driving a pickup truck with no license plate—in East Meadow, Long Island, on June 28, 1993. Instead of pulling over, he tried to flee, so the patrol officers called for reinforcements and gave chase. His truck missed a turn and smashed into a lamppost, and the driver finally surrendered.

The cops noticed a foul odor coming from beneath a tarp in the truck’s bed. Underneath, they found the decomposing, plastic-wrapped body of Tiffany Bresciani, twenty-two years old. Rifkin, thirty-four, explained her presence by saying that she was a prostitute. He had sex with her and then killed her. “Do you think I need a lawyer?” he asked. As it turned out, he did.

Later that day, the authorities searched the house that Rifkin shared with his mother. They found women’s clothing and jewelry, purses and wallets, and several photographs of women. He also had books on the as-yet-unsolved Green River Killer and articles about prostitute-murderer Shawcross. In the garage the police found rope and a tarp, plus a chain saw with bits of human flesh stuck in the teeth and a wheelbarrow that contained human blood.

Once Rifkin was in custody, it didn’t take long for his tale to emerge. Bresciani, he revealed, was actually his seventeenth murder victim, making him New York’s most prolific serial killer. Bludgeoning and strangling his victims, he was then creative in hiding their bodies. His first victim, in 1989, he dismembered, putting her head in a paint can and the rest of her in garbage bags that he spread throughout New Jersey and New York. The next victim he chopped up and put into cans that he filled with fresh concrete, then tossed into the East River.

Dismemberment proved to be too much effort, so after that Rifkin left the bodies whole and simply stashed them inside containers of some sort—oil drums were a favorite. He patronized prostitutes nearly every night, spending almost all of the money he earned on them, but his murders were relatively selective. Rifkin, who was white, victimized white, Asian, Latina, and African American women of various ages.

At the trial, the prosecutor described Rifkin as a sexual sadist who got his satisfaction from causing his victims pain. The jury agreed, and he’s now ensconced at the Clinton Correctional Facility, better known as Dannemora, in New York. With a 203-year sentence, he’ll be eligible for parole in 2197.

Rifkin, like many other sexual predators, had an abiding interest in photography, and the photographs that were found in his bedroom helped to convict him of his crimes. In the
Criminal Minds
episode “Reckoner” (503), profiler Emily Prentiss says, “Serial killers, especially sexual sadists, often document their kills.” Mike DeBardeleben was also brought down partly by his photos of his many rape victims.

 

 

The man often thought of as the first of the modern signature killers (murderers whose crimes share some distinctive telltale commonality that can often be used to link them), Harvey Murray Glatman, also had a photography hobby. Known as the Lonely Hearts Killer, Glatman not only used photographs to fuel fantasies that mixed sex, bondage, and violence—which he often found in the pages of detective magazines—he also used photography itself as a way to lure his victims.

After moving to Los Angeles in 1957, Glatman joined a “lonely hearts club” of single people. From that and from the classified ads he ran in the newspapers, he found a ready pool of women who were willing to model for him in suggestive poses. These women didn’t get their pictures in the magazines, as Glatman promised, but as Glatman’s fantasies became ever more violent, they became the victims of his rapes. Having raped the women, he thought he was left with no choice but to murder them so they couldn’t identify him.

Glatman’s photo-bug habits tripped him up in the end. He photographed each victim at every stage of her torture and eventual death, and when those pictures were discovered, he broke down. His detailed confession proved to be a kind of entry-level manual for understanding the mind of a sexually sadistic serial killer. He was convicted of three murders and executed on September 18, 1959. A fourth victim, believed to be Glatman’s earliest murder, was never identified, and her case remains officially unsolved.