Criminal Minds (37 page)

Saldana survived the attack, and her stalker, Arthur Jackson, was subdued by a water deliveryman who saw the assault from a second-floor apartment. Jackson was from Aberdeen, Scotland, and had undergone several stints at mental hospitals. In between those, he had moved to the United States, served in the army, and been deported back to Scotland for threatening President John F. Kennedy. He had a habit of latching onto strange women in obsessive ways, and after seeing Saldana in the movie
Defiance
, she became the object of his obsession.

In 1982, Jackson reentered the country illegally and, with the help of a private detective he hired, tracked Saldana down. His plan was to shoot her, but without proper identification he was unable to buy a gun. That fact probably saved Saldana’s life, and her survival has allowed her career to continue and flourish. Jackson served fourteen years in a U.S. prison, then was extradited to England, where in 2004 he died of heart failure in a mental hospital.

 

 

ROBERT JOHN BARDO
, who is mentioned along with Hinckley in “Somebody’s Watching” (118), was twelve years old when Jackson attacked Saldana. The son of an alcoholic air force non-commissioned officer and a Korean woman, Bardo, along with his six older siblings, grew up in classic military fashion, moving frequently until the family finally settled in Tucson, Arizona, when Bardo was thirteen.

He was a troubled boy who was abused by at least one of his siblings. After he threatened suicide, he was temporarily placed in a foster home and then institutionalized at fifteen years of age. He was diagnosed as severely emotionally handicapped, and his family was deemed pathological and dysfunctional. After a month his parents brought him home again, and soon he quit high school for good.

Bardo had been earning straight A’s, but as a dropout the only job he could get was as a janitor at a Jack in the Box restaurant. With nothing mooring his life, his attention was easily captivated by a fresh-faced young actress named Rebecca Schaeffer. Schaeffer had modeled and appeared on the soap opera
One Life to Live
, but her real break came as Pam Dawber’s younger sister on the TV sitcom
My Sister Sam
.

That’s where Bardo saw her, in 1986, and he was instantly obsessed. Although his attention drifted to other young performers, Schaeffer remained his primary interest. He sent fan mail, but that was intercepted by her agent and handlers, who didn’t let the creepiest letters get to her. Bardo headed to Los Angeles and, clutching a teddy bear and a letter, tried to get onto the Warner Bros. lot to find Schaeffer. The lot’s security fended him off. He tried again, this time with a concealed knife, and was reportedly escorted back to his hotel by the security chief.

After Schaeffer’s series ended in 1988, she made a movie called
Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills
, in which the seemingly innocent young actress shot a fairly adult love scene. Bardo saw it, and his juvenile obsession took on an angry tone. It was time to meet the object of his affection.

Bardo had Arthur Jackson’s example to follow. He hired a private detective, who was able to obtain Schaeffer’s address from the Department of Motor Vehicles for four dollars. Bardo, still underage, got an older brother to buy him a handgun and hollow-point bullets.

On the morning of July 19, 1989, Schaeffer, then twenty-one, had an appointment with Francis Ford Coppola to discuss a possible role in
The Godfather, Part III
. When the doorbell of her apartment rang, a stranger stood there, holding a paper bag. He drew a gun from the bag and shot Schaeffer once in the chest, then ran. Schaeffer died at the hospital thirty minutes later.

A friend of Bardo’s in Tennessee told the Los Angeles police that Bardo had been obsessed with Schaeffer. The day after the shooting, the police in Tucson responded to a report of a young man acting strangely at an intersection. When they picked him up, they sent his picture to Los Angeles, where people in Schaeffer’s neighborhood identified him as someone they’d seen around her apartment.

Found guilty of first-degree murder in October 1991, Bardo was sentenced to life without possibility of parole. In July 2007, Bardo was attacked at the Mule Creek State Prison and stabbed eleven times. Unlike Rebecca Schaeffer, he survived.

MOST OF THE CRIMES DEPICTED
on
Criminal Minds
are acts that violate societal taboos, those social prohibitions against activities that are particularly objectionable to our Western society: murder, rape, and kidnapping, for example. But as awful as these acts are, there are twists to them, violations of even more serious taboos, in our culture that have—in other cultures, other times and places—not only
not
been taboo but, within certain ritual contexts, have been considered sacred acts.

Humans have been known to drink human blood for a variety of reasons. Long before Bram Stoker wrote
Dracula
, making famous the eastern European legend of the vampire, ancient Gauls drank the blood of their vanquished enemies. So did the Moche of Peru. The
Mahabharata
, a Sanskrit epic poem of ancient India, includes scenes of warriors drinking their enemies’ blood, and the German epic the
Nibelungenlied
describes the same practice among the Burgundians. This widespread ancient practice stemmed from the belief that it would give the warriors strength in future battles. King Louis XI of France reportedly drank the blood of children in his dying days because he believed that it had healing properties. In more modern times, the practice has persisted in some areas.

Cannibalism, the eating of human flesh, was also practiced for various reasons (e.g., by warriors to gain strength). Nor is cannibalism taboo in all cultures, even today. Some Melanesian tribes still practice it, as do the Korowai of Papua New Guinea. Some scientists believe that cannibalism was normal human behavior at one time, accounting for genes that protect human brains from diseases that can be contracted by eating contaminated human flesh. In recent history, cannibalism has been resorted to as a means of self-preservation when starvation was the only other option, such as in the case of the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes Mountains in 1972.

In contemporary Western civilization, however, both practices are not only illegal but are seen as among the most heinous acts a person can commit. These two taboos crop up on
Criminal Minds
with some regularity.

 

 

IN THE EPISODE
“Blood Hungry” (111), the term
anthropophagy
—feeding on human flesh—is mentioned. Spencer Reid brings up the case of Richard Trenton Chase, the so-called Vampire Killer of Sacramento.

On January 27, 1978, at about 12:30 p.m., Chase tried to open the door to a house in north Sacramento. Finding it unlocked—which he believed was an invitation—he walked into the house. Four people were inside at the time: Evelyn Miroth, thirty-eight; her six-year-old son, Jason; her twenty-two-month-old nephew, David; and a neighbor, Daniel Meredith, fifty-one. Dan was watching the kids while Evelyn took a bath. He went to see who was at the door, and Chase shot him in the head with a .22 at point-blank range.

In “The Uncanny Valley,” Dr. Reid tries to talk with a woman suspected of turning real-life women into her own personal doll collection.

Chase turned over the body and took Meredith’s wallet and car keys, then continued into the house. First he came upon David, who was in his crib, and shot him in the head. Then he followed Jason, who was running into his mother’s bedroom, and killed him with two head shots.

Chase entered the bathroom, where he shot Evelyn, then hauled her body from the tub into her bedroom. There he cut the back of her neck and sodomized her, drinking the blood from the slashes in her neck at the same time. When he was finished, he stabbed her anus multiple times. He sliced her abdomen open with a cross cut; the blood that had pooled there flowed freely. Chase collected it in a bucket and drank it.

He went back for the baby, which he took into a bathroom. Cracking David’s skull, Chase ate some brain matter and drank more blood. When a six-year-old girl, a friend of Jason’s, knocked on the door, Chase panicked, grabbed David’s corpse, and fled the house, escaping in Meredith’s car. The little girl told a neighbor that she had seen a man leave, and the neighbor came and discovered the grisly scene. The police arrived shortly thereafter and found Chase’s fingerprints, handprints, and shoe prints in his victims’ blood.

At home, Chase continued his dismemberment of young David. He cut off the boy’s head and drank blood from the neck. Slicing the body open, he removed some internal organs and ate them. Others went into the blender to be made into smoothies. What was left Chase put into a box and deposited in a nearby church. A church janitor found the box on March 24, the remains partly mummified. Meredith’s car was located, abandoned, near where a dog had been found shot and disemboweled.

Richard Chase was born on May 23, 1950. As a young boy, he exhibited the triad of sociopathy: bed-wetting, fire-starting, and cruelty to animals. By the age of eight, he was over the bed-wetting. But other problems waited around the corner.

When Chase was twelve, his parents started fighting often. His mother, later identified as “highly aggressive” and “hostile,” accused her husband of infidelity, of poisoning her, and of using drugs. The hostility continued for a decade, when the couple finally divorced.

Chase took to using drugs and drinking heavily. He had a few girlfriends, but he couldn’t maintain an erection, and his relationships ended when intercourse proved unsuccessful. He had no close male friends. After he graduated from high school, he got a job that he held for a few months, but after this job he would never again keep a job longer than a few days. He couldn’t handle the workload or the social pressures of junior college. He was arrested once for drunk driving and again for carrying an unlicensed gun and resisting arrest. Unable to support himself, he drifted between his parents’ separate homes. His life was locked in a downward spiral.

His adolescent hypochondria worsened, and as he imagined diseases for himself, he also imagined possible cures. Chase caught or purchased rabbits, which he disemboweled, then ate their entrails whole or processed them in a blender. He grew convinced that his heart was shrinking and that he needed to resupply it with blood or it would disappear. He thought that his own blood was turning to powder. He believed that someone had stolen his pulmonary artery and that his head was changing shape. When he injected rabbit blood into his veins as a “cure,” he got a bad case of blood poisoning. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, he was committed to a mental institution. Even there he found prey, capturing birds on the grounds, biting their heads off, and drinking their blood. The hospital staff called him Dracula.

Medication seemed to help, and in 1976 he was released into the care of his parents. Soon, though, he was living in his own place again. He returned to old habits, catching animals, including dogs and cats, killing them, and drinking their blood. He also bought guns and started practicing with them.