Criminal Minds (20 page)

Rosemary engaged in prostitution in their home and occasionally brought in other women to work with her; some of those coworkers also became victims. Among Fred and Rosemary’s eight children, at least one was fathered by Rosemary’s clients rather than her husband; at the same time, Fred fathered children with other women. Fred hanged himself rather than face trial, and Rosemary received a life sentence for each of their ten proven victims.

We don’t know the specifics of all the crimes committed by the fictional Dawes couple in “Riding the Lightning” (114), but we can safely say that there have been sexually motivated serial-killer couples, and Fred and Rosemary West set the bar high for the rest.

 

 

ANOTHER
murderous couple on
Criminal Minds
was Amber and Tony Canardo, in the episode “The Perfect Storm” (203). In a switch on the usual pattern, Amber calls the shots—and one of the murders investigated was committed by Amber and another man before Tony even entered the scene. This couple is reminiscent of a real-life couple, Alvin and Judith Neelley, who roamed the southeastern United States from 1979 to 1982.

Judith Ann Adams met Alvin Neelley when she was fifteen and he was twenty-seven. He was married, but he soon ended that in order to be with Adams. She fit easily into his low-rent criminal lifestyle, and they traveled about the southern states robbing gas stations and convenience stores and cashing stolen checks. In 1980, they were arrested. Neelley went to prison, and Adams was sent to the Youth Development Center in Rome, Georgia, where she made never-substantiated claims that the staff sexually abused her. Adams was pregnant by then and gave birth to twins while in custody.

By 1982, both were out and ready for more action. After a couple of strikes against the homes of people who Adams swore were responsible for her abuse, on September 25 they kidnapped thirteen-year-old Lisa Millican from a Rome mall and held her at various motel rooms in the area. For three days, they kept Millican handcuffed to a bed and raped her in front of the infant twins. Then Adams took the girl to a remote Alabama locale and injected her six times with drain cleaner, which was meant to kill her without leaving any trace. Adams was wrong on both counts—the drain cleaner didn’t kill Lisa, but it did leave traces. Finally, Adams shot her and shoved the body over a cliff.

On September 30, Adams was cruising for a victim and finally came across John Hancock and his developmentally disabled fiancée, Janice Chatman. Adams invited them to a party with her; they agreed and got into her car to go for a ride. Eventually they met up with Neelley. Adams took Hancock into the woods and shot him in the back; she thought that she had killed him, but he survived. Adams and Neelley turned their attention to Chatman; they raped her repeatedly in a motel room, then shot her and dumped the body.

Adams and Neelley were arrested in Tennessee. Although Adams tried to blame all of their crimes on Neelley, it quickly became apparent to all—including the jury and the judge—that Adams was the instigator. She craved power over others, and Neelley said that if he hadn’t gone along with her whims, he would have been one of her victims. Various accounts say that Neelley blamed her for between eight and fifteen sexually motivated murders, but no bodies except those of Millican and Chatman were ever positively connected to the couple.

In an Alabama trial (during which Adams gave birth to another child), eighteen-year-old Adams was sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of Lisa Millican. In order to avoid a trial in Georgia, she pleaded guilty to the kidnap, rape, and murder of Janice Chatman. Neelley was convicted of those crimes as well and died in custody while serving a life sentence.

During his last days in office as Alabama’s governor, Fob James—in what was to become a controversial decision—commuted Adams’s sentence to life in prison, where she remains today. She is one of the longest-serving female prisoners in the country.

IT ISN’T JUST COUPLES
—or cousins, as in the case of the Hillside Stranglers—who kill together. Sometimes it’s an entire family affair, as represented in a couple of
Criminal Minds
episodes.

In “Bloodline” (413), a mother and a father and their son prey on families; they’re trying to find a young girl who’ll be a suitable wife for the son, who’s about to turn ten. The family is an offshoot of a Romany tribe, and at the episode’s end we learn that there are other families who are also involved in these activities. And in “Haunted” (502), viewers are introduced to Bill Jarvis, who used to abduct and kill young boys while forcing his own young son to participate in their imprisonment.

Although these situations are fictional, they are unfortunately not that far removed from the reality of some family situations.

 

 

LIKE MANY KILLERS
, Joseph Kallinger was adopted at an early age. Born Joseph Lee Brenner III on December 11, 1936, he was adopted at the age of eighteen months by Anna and Stephen Kallinger. The adoption was more a means of getting another pair of hands for their shoe repair business than a display of love or concern. The Kallingers should never have been parents, and that was one family tradition that Joseph passed along.

His adoptive parents’ idea of child rearing involved regular beatings and other forms of torture, including locking their son in a closet, making him consume excrement, forcing him to kneel on rocks, and burning him. At the age of six he was hospitalized for a hernia operation necessitated by the beatings; his parents told him that the procedure was meant to ensure that his “bird” (the household’s euphemism for
penis
) would stay small and not work. By the age of eleven, Kallinger’s idea of sexuality was so distorted that he became aroused by cutting and stabbing pictures of naked men and women.

When he was fifteen, he redirected his sexual interests toward schoolmate Hilda Bergman, over the objections of his parents. The same year, he received what he called a message from God, which directed him to heal and save people through their feet. Stephen Kallinger had taught Joseph the shoemaking business, and Joseph believed that there were people everywhere whose poorly constructed shoes had damaged their brains. Kallinger’s idea of “saving” people was, to no surprise, on the twisted side.

He and Hilda married at age seventeen. They had two children together before she left him, claiming physical abuse, for another man when Kallinger was twenty. Hospitalized for a possible brain lesion, Kallinger was diagnosed with a psychopathological nervous disorder. After he got out, he married again. Soon he set fire to his home, an act that would become almost habitual.

With his second wife, he had four children, whom he began to abuse just as he had been abused. In 1972, he branded his oldest daughter with a hot iron after she tried to run away from home. Three of his children went to the police and accused Kallinger of abuse. Kallinger was found guilty and sentenced to four years’ probation with mandatory psychiatric treatment. His son Joey, evaluated as “seriously disturbed,” spent time in a reformatory—a chip off the old block.

In “Bloodline,” Agent Prentiss talks with a girl who was abducted, but then released, by a strange family.

By the middle of 1974, when Kallinger was living next door to his mother in Philadelphia, he was regularly hallucinating. Those messages from God were still coming in, and he told his thirteen-year-old son Michael that they instructed him to murder young boys and sever their genitals. Michael’s response, reportedly, was an enthusiastic “Glad to do it, Dad!”

Eleven days later, a Puerto Rican youth was murdered, and according to some reports, his genitals had been cut off. Kallinger had finally graduated to murder and had made his son his assistant.

Kallinger’s next victim would be his son Joey. Two weeks after Kallinger took out a huge life insurance policy on his sons, Joey “ran away from home.” His body was found under the rubble of a collapsed building, so crushed that the cause of death could not be determined. The insurance company, suspecting foul play, never paid out the claim.

On November 22, 1974, Kallinger and Michael broke into a home in Lindenwold, New Jersey. The house was empty, so they tried another house and forced their way in. Joan Carty was home. Kallinger tied her to a bed and raped her.

Father and son went out again on December 3, crashing a bridge game in Pennsylvania. They found four women there, and after stripping them and posing them suggestively, stole twenty thousand dollars in jewelry and cash. Flushed with that success, the Kallingers invaded a home in a Baltimore suburb, where they forced a woman to fellate Kallinger at gunpoint.

The beginning of the end for the Kallinger pair came on January 8, 1975. Posing as an insurance salesman, Kallinger, once again accompanied by Michael, forced his way into a home in Leonia, New Jersey. Armed with a pistol and a knife, he and Michael tied up the three residents. During the next several hours, as more people came home they were each seized and bound. Some were forced to strip and were tied up with electrical cords cut from lamps and appliances. Duct tape was put over their eyes and their mouths.

Maria Fasching was the eighth person to arrive. Upon learning what the situation was, she began to reproach Kallinger for his behavior. Kallinger slit her throat, and she drowned in her own blood. Another of the house’s residents, with legs bound, managed to get outside and cry for help. Some neighbors saw her and called the police. When the cops arrived, the intruders were gone.

Kallinger decided to use a city bus as their getaway vehicle. On the way to the bus stop, they discarded their weapons, and Kallinger dumped his bloody shirt. These items were quickly found.

The police put these clues together with the reports of similar home invasions in the region and saw a pattern. They had a physical description of their unsubs now, including the fact that the man and the boy shared a strange odor. Tracking down a laundry mark in the shirt that Kallinger had discarded gave them the next piece they needed. They learned that the shirt belonged to a Joseph Kallinger, who did indeed smell strange, thanks to chemicals used in his shoe repair business. The Philadelphia police remembered looking into Joey’s death, and they didn’t trust Kallinger.

They arrested Joseph and Michael Kallinger on January 17, 1975. Joseph, in his defense, told about his messages from God and his mission to save people whose badly made shoes had destroyed their lives. If he could create special plates for their shoes, he said, it would align their souls in the right way to prepare them for God’s coming—which was scheduled for 1978, he claimed.

In spite of an attempt at an insanity defense, Kallinger was found competent to stand trial. He had, after all, run a business and a crowded home and taken care of his aged mother. His crimes had been planned and carried out. The jury found him guilty in less than an hour. The judge saw no reason for mercy, telling him that “to corrupt your own son is vile and depraved.” A second trial was held in New Jersey, for the Maria Fasching murder and other crimes committed in that state, and Kallinger was again found guilty.