Criminal Minds (35 page)

Again he was gone. FBI profiler John Douglas thought that he either had been arrested or had died. Perhaps the BTK Killer’s photographs, drawings, and memories were now sufficient to complete his fantasy. In January 2004, the
Wichita Eagle
ran stories about the murders that had begun thirty years before, and a Wichita lawyer wrote a book about the case.

Possibly afraid that others would tell his story and get it wrong, the BTK Killer began communicating again. The BAU provided a strategy to keep him reaching out by issuing press releases, and it worked. He sent multiple letters, some containing souvenirs and copies of photographs he had taken—items that only the real killer could have had. Some of the packages contained dolls that were bound in ways that suggested the deaths of Nancy Fox and Josephine Otero. The BTK Killer asked whether the police would be able to trace a computer floppy disk back to him if he sent one. The police responded in a classified ad that they wouldn’t.

On February 16, 2005, a floppy disk arrived at a TV station. The police checked it out and found traces of software from the Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita and the name Dennis. The church’s current president was Dennis Rader. The investigators obtained a DNA specimen from Rader’s daughter, Kerri, and matched it to the DNA found in the semen left at many of the BTK Killer’s scenes. Dennis Rader was their man. He was arrested on February 26, thirty-one years after his first murders.

During the decades in which Dennis Rader was killing, his life appeared, from the outside, to be fairly normal. Born on March 9, 1945, he was twenty-nine when he began to murder. At his arrest he was fifty-nine and still hoping to kill again. Rader was employed by ADT Security Systems from November 1974 until July 1998. He held several positions there, including installation manager—a job that took him into many private homes and taught him how to get around security systems.

Rader also worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, and he was the compliance director for Park City, Kansas. He married Paula Dietz in 1971 and had two children. Paula was shocked when her husband was arrested; she had no inkling that she might be married to a serial killer who had ten murders to his credit. Neither did the members of his church, who had voted for him as president. Rader had been a Cub Scout leader, and by the time of his arrest, his son had become an Eagle Scout.

On August 18, 2005, Rader was sentenced to ten life sentences, eligible for parole after 175 years.

Rader is brought up in the episodes “Charm and Harm” (120), “Tabula Rasa” (319), “Zoe’s Reprise” (415), and “Omnivore” (418).

 

 

THE FIRST TIME
that home invasions come into play on
Criminal
Minds
is in the episode “Plain Sight” (104), in which the Tommy Killer enters women’s homes in San Diego, murders them, and glues their eyes open. The name
Tommy Killer
comes from the line from the Who’s rock opera
Tommy
, “See me, feel me.”

San Diego dealt with its own rash of home-invasion murders in 1990, when the Clairemont Killer murdered six women in their own homes.

The first victim was Tiffany Schultz, a twenty-one-year-old student and part-time exotic dancer who had been sunbathing on the balcony of her second-floor apartment in San Diego’s Clairemont neighborhood on January 12, 1990. Later that day, her roommate found her. Schultz was wearing just the bikini bottoms and had been stabbed forty-seven times, mostly around her left breast.

Janene Weinhold was next. She lived in a complex across the street from Schultz’s, and the two complexes shared a garage. Weinhold was discovered in her second-floor apartment, naked except for a bra, and stabbed multiple times, centering on her right breast. She had been sexually assaulted, and semen was collected from her body.

On April 3, eighteen-year-old Holly Tarr, visiting from Michigan with her friend Tammy, became the third victim. Holly and Tammy were staying with Holly’s brother in the same complex that Weinhold had lived in. They were at the pool, and when Holly went back to the apartment before Tammy, she was attacked. Tammy returned to the apartment a few minutes later, but the door was locked. Hearing a scream, she cried for help. A maintenance man opened the door, and as he did, an African American man fled with a knife in his hand. Tammy found her friend wearing panties and a bra, with a deep stab wound in her heart.

The man she had seen looked like someone Tammy and Holly had noticed in the complex’s weight room earlier. A check of the weight room’s sign-in log revealed the name Cleophus Prince Jr. The police interrogated Prince, but he denied everything and refused to be fingerprinted. They didn’t have enough evidence to hold him.

The standard rule of criminal profiling is that killers tend to murder within their own race. But Prince was black and all of his victims white. In other ways, however, he fit the profile. The FBI believed that he lived close by and that he was killing within his comfort zone. It turned out that Prince did live in the complex.

After the Tarr murder, Prince moved away from the complex but not out of San Diego. On May 20, thirty-eight-year-old Elissa Keller was found choked, beaten, and with nine stab wounds in her chest. Prince’s next attack was on two women, Pamela Clarkson, forty-two, and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Amber. Each had eleven stab wounds in her chest. All three of these victims lived in the area to which Prince had recently moved.

The police tracked him down again and found several knives in his car. They took a blood sample and fingerprints, then released him, and he rushed to his mother’s home in Alabama.

The DNA analysis came back identifying Prince as the killer and rapist. Meanwhile, he was arrested in Alabama, then released on bond while San Diego cops were waiting for DNA results. When the San Diego police asked the Birmingham police to pick him up, the latter called him, and he turned himself in. He was arrested and extradited to California.

The authorities had him cold on the Weinhold case, but they wanted to convict him of all six murders. FBI profiler John Douglas and Special Agent Larry Ankrom of the San Diego field office worked together to provide a profile that would definitively link the crimes. They looked at the similarities among the victims, their residences, their proximity to Prince’s residences, and the MO of each murder. Of special note was the killer’s focus on stabbing the women in the breast, a psychosexual disorder called piquerism, in which a knife, a pin, or another sharp object acts as a penis substitute and the stabbing stands for sexual penetration. Prince didn’t glue his victims’ eyes open, but like the Tommy Killer he had a unique signature, and the FBI was able to use it against him.

Over the defense attorney’s objections, the profile was introduced in court, and Prince was convicted on all six counts, as well as for twenty burglaries. He was sentenced to death, but as of this writing he is still on death row at San Quentin.

 

 

IN SANTA CRUZ
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with Ed Kemper and Herb Mullin killing coeds and others, mass murder seemed second only to surfing as a favorite leisure-time activity. In “The Last Word” (209), Spencer Reid points out how rare it is to have two serial killers operating in the same city at the same time. In real life, Santa Cruz not only had two serial killers, it also had home invader and mass murderer John Linley Frazier, who helped to put a community that was already on edge even more so.

Frazier, who lived in a tiny shack in the hills outside town, murdered eye surgeon Victor Ohta and his family and his secretary, Dorothy Cadwallader. Frazier had, somewhat halfheartedly, embraced the hippie lifestyle, and he considered the well-to-do Ohta excessively materialistic. At the Ohta home, he shot Victor three times with a .38, then shot Ohta’s wife, Virginia, Ohta’s sons, Derrick and Taggart, and Cadwallader.

Frazier put the bodies in the swimming pool, set the mansion on fire, and left a note under the windshield of Ohta’s Rolls Royce, warning of World War III, “against anything or anyone who dose not support natural life on this planet, materialisum must die, or man-kind will.”

Some of Frazier’s hippie acquaintances recognized his off-the-wall theories and tipped off the police. His fingerprints were found on the Rolls Royce and on a beer can left at the scene. After Frazier was arrested, he claimed that voices from God had told him to seek vengeance against people who raped the environment. He appeared in court with half his head shaved clean, including an eyebrow.

Despite evidence that Frazier had a long history of paranoid schizophrenia, he was convicted of the murders and sentenced to death on December 30, 1971. He was resentenced to life imprisonment when California abolished the death penalty in 1972. He might have been paroled some day, but on August 13, 2009, Frazier hanged himself in his jail cell.

His story, with its environmentally motivated murders and arson, is similar to the episode “Ashes and Dust” (219), in which the unsub burns families inside their own homes under the guise of avenging the environmental damage caused by leaking underground storage tanks.

MOST MURDER VICTIMS know their killers. During an investigation, the detectives dig into the victims’ lives to find out why they in particular were attacked, since there’s almost always some link between a victim and a perpetrator. In a very few cases, people like JonBenét Ramsey become famous in death when the crimes against them become part of the national landscape.

But every now and then, crimes are committed against people who are already famous. Celebrities, the rich, the powerful—these people can also be victimized, and in some cases, as with Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, who they are makes them targets.

 

 

MARK DAVID CHAPMAN
, mentioned in the episode “The Last Word” (209), became inextricably linked with former Beatle John Lennon on December 8, 1980. Chapman, twenty-five at the time, was born in Fort Worth, Texas. His father was a physically abusive air force staff sergeant, and his mother was a nurse. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Georgia. Chapman tried to escape the fear he felt at home by imagining a race of “Little People” over whom he had godlike power. He was often depressed, which he dealt with by retreating into his fantasy world or listening to the Beatles. During his first two years of high school, he experimented with marijuana, LSD, and heroin.

At age sixteen he became a born-again Christian and met girlfriend Jessica Blankenship, also a born-again Christian. He was angered by John Lennon’s 1966 comment that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Chapman gave up drugs, but soon he fell under the influence of something else: J. D. Salinger’s novel
The Catcher in the Rye
. An engaging story of young Holden Caulfield’s alienation,
The Catcher in the Rye
, like
The Collector
by John Fowles, seems to be a favorite novel of murderers.