Criminal Minds (43 page)

The patrol officers heard too many stories from too many hookers about a scary white man, so they started trying to run the man down. Rodriguez had identified the friend whose house she had run to as Axton Schindler, a truck driver. When they ran his address, however, it came up as belonging to someone named Fred Albright. But Albright was dead. Even so, he owned other property, very close to where the first two bodies had been dumped. Schindler’s real address was nearby, in one of Albright’s other houses.

An officer at the police department had heard the name Albright before, in an anonymous tip from someone who had known Pratt. The late Fred Albright’s adopted son, a man named Charles Albright, the tipster had said, had a thing for eyes. Running Charles Albright’s name, they discovered a man with multiple arrests on his record, for theft, burglary, forgery, and sexual intercourse with a child—a girl who had been fourteen when he was fifty-one. They showed Albright’s photo to White and Rodriguez, and they both identified him as the man who had attacked them.

Born on August 10, 1933, Charles Albright had been given up by his birth mother and adopted when he was three weeks old. His adoptive mother doted on him, but she was strange and unstable. Sometimes she would make him wear dresses and play with dolls, and she would tie him to his bed when he wouldn’t nap.

When he was eleven she enrolled him in a mail-order taxidermy course. He was fascinated by the taxidermy eyes he saw in stores, but those, his penny-pinching mother insisted, were too expensive. He proved to be a good student and a skilled taxidermist, even as a boy, but animals with buttons sewn in place of eyes never looked quite right.

Albright overcame his unusual upbringing to become a cultured, educated man, fluent in several languages; a skilled artist and a science teacher; a husband and a father. He was also a frequenter of prostitutes, a thief, a liar, and, eventually, a murderer.

He never admitted to the crimes, and the investigators were able to gather only enough physical evidence to tie him to one, the murder of Shirley Williams. For her murder, Albright was sentenced to life in prison.

 

 

THREE CRIMINALS
, mentioned by name on
Criminal Minds
one time each, have a great deal in common. In the episode “North Mammon” (207), an unsub abducts three high school girls and imprisons them in a concrete cellar, telling them that if they can select one girl to die, the other two will be set free. Spencer Reid refers to the sophisticated complex that John Jamelske built under his suburban home, where he kept careful track of the lives of the victims he imprisoned there for years. (Indeed he did have such a lair, although “sophisticated” might be a stretch.) In “Cradle to Grave” (505), the unsub has a more specific goal for the women he imprisons in his house: he wants to get them pregnant. That episode brings up the crimes of Gary Heidnik and Josef Fritzl.

John Jamelske was a handyman who had become a millionaire real estate investor from the Syracuse, New York, suburb of DeWitt. During the 1980s, when he was in his fifties, Jamelske went through what some called a midlife crisis. He lost weight, grew a ponytail, and started wearing designer jeans. His wife suspected that he was having an affair but didn’t pursue the matter.

What she didn’t know was that from 1988 until his capture in 2003, Jamelske kept women and girls captive in his underground dungeon. He raped them on an almost daily basis and required them to keep detailed records of when they had sex, when they brushed their teeth, and when they bathed.

His first victim was a fourteen-year-old Native American girl, whom he kept until she was seventeen. He warned her that her family would be killed if she told what had happened to her. When she returned home, she told no one what she had been through, and she let her family think she had simply run away.

In 1995, Jamelske took a fourteen-year-old Latina and kept her for thirteen months, then let her go with the same kind of threat. She told her family but was afraid to tell the police.

In August 1997, he snatched a fifty-two-year-old Vietnamese woman. She stayed in the dungeon until May 1998. When she was finally freed, she went to the cops, but she was unable to identify her captor or take authorities to the place she’d been held. The investigation stalled.

Jamelske’s wife, Dorothy, died in August 1999, after a battle with colon cancer. Jamelske waited until May 2001 to select his dungeon’s next occupant, a young white woman whom he kept for only two months. She also reported her abduction and described the inside of the dungeon, but she, like the previous victims, was unable to pinpoint its location. He took them out of the house blindfolded, or in the dead of night, and dropped them off in far-flung parts of the city.

In October 2002 he abducted a sixteen-year-old black girl. During the time they spent together, Jamelske grew to trust her. He let her have access to parts of his house, although he secured those sections so she couldn’t get out. He took her out bowling and to karaoke bars. He seemed to think that they had a regular, romantic relationship.

The morning of April 8, 2003, he took the girl along on an errand. She asked to be allowed to telephone a church about the times for services, but instead she called her sister and told her what had been going on. The sister alerted the police, and Jamelske was arrested. At the time, he remembered thinking, “I did something wrong, but I figured it’s like unlawful imprisonment, maybe [ I’ll get] thirty hours of community service or something of that nature.”

Given his capacity for denial of such epic proportions, his sentence of eighteen years to life probably came as a surprise to him. At the time of this writing, he is serving hard time at Dannemora, where it’s unlikely that he’ll ever be set free.

 

 

By contrast, Josef Fritzl of Amstetten, Austria, didn’t abduct perfect strangers to keep in his secret dungeon. Instead, in an even more perverse crime, his captive was his daughter Elisabeth. He kept her in his dungeon for twenty-four years and repeatedly raped her, which resulted in the births of seven children, whom he also kept in the dungeon.

Fritzl was a native son of Amstetten, born there on April 9, 1935. In 1956, he married, and he and his wife had seven children, including Elisabeth, who was born in 1966. Fritzl’s childhood was ravaged by war and by family abuse. He claimed that during World War II bombing raids, his mother would take the rest of the family to a shelter but would leave him alone at home.

In 1967, the year after Elisabeth’s birth, Fritzl was convicted of rape. He was, he told officials, “born to rape.” He began raping Elisabeth when she was eleven. On August 29, 1984, when she was eighteen, he took her into the dungeon he had built in the cellar and locked her away. He forced her to write occasional letters saying that she was alive and well but asking her family not to search for her. These letters seemed to convince Elisabeth’s mother, who remained unaware of her daughter’s proximity.

The dungeon was a remarkable construction. A person had to pass through eight doors, one of which had an electronic lock for which only Fritzl knew the password, to reach the outside world. Inside were four windowless rooms, including a full bathroom, a kitchenette, and two sleeping areas with beds.

One of Elisabeth’s babies, a boy with a twin brother, grew ill shortly after birth. Despite his daughter’s pleadings, Fritzl refused to take the infant to get medical care. When the boy died, Fritzl cremated him in the furnace.

Fritzl took three of his daughter’s children upstairs into the house, claiming that Elisabeth had dropped them off to be raised by their grandparents. Fritzl’s wife, who was forbidden to set foot in the basement, apparently never knew that her daughter was so close or that her grandchildren’s father was her husband.

The end of Elisabeth’s captivity came on April 19, 2008, when her daughter Kerstin, nineteen, became very ill. This time Fritzl was willing to take the sick young woman to the hospital, but the doctors needed the medical history of her mother. Fritzl took Elisabeth in, and the whole sick secret unraveled. Kerstin and her brothers Stefan, eighteen, and Felix, five, had never before seen daylight.

At his trial, Fritzl pleaded guilty to murder, rape, enslavement, and more and was sentenced to life in prison. Given that he was seventy-three at the time, chances are that his imprisonment will not be as long as his daughter’s was.

 

 

Gary Heidnik was born on November 22, 1943. His early childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, was marked by the divorce of his parents. Heidnik and his brother, Terry, after living briefly with their alcoholic mother and her new husband, moved in with their father, who had also remarried. The boys hated their “wicked” stepmother, and their father took her side in their frequent spats. An unpleasant living situation was made worse by Heidnik’s bed-wetting; his father punished Heidnik severely on these occasions, hanging his soiled sheets in the boy’s bedroom window for the neighbors to see. According to Heidnik, his father sometimes dangled him out the window as well, holding him by the ankles and shaking him.

When Heidnik fell from a tree, his skull was smashed, and his misshapen cranium is believed to have caused some behavioral aberration, as well as earning the boy the nickname “footballhead” from his schoolmates. Heidnik was intelligent and driven, but he suffered psychological disorders that kept him from achieving his full potential. He was discharged from the army after a year, earning a full disability pension and a diagnosis of “schizoid personality disorder.”

Heidnik’s mother’s suicide in 1970 prompted his first suicide attempt, one of many unsuccessful attempts resulting in frequent hospitalizations. A religious “epiphany” resulted in his becoming ordained by the United Church of the Ministers of God, and as Bishop Heidnik he founded the “Church of Heidnik.” With a fifteen-hundred-dollar investment in a Merrill Lynch account, the church amassed a fortune of half a million dollars.

Brushes with the law became commonplace for Heidnik, who was charged with aggravated assault after attacking a tenant of one of his properties, then with a multitude of charges for his kidnapping and rape of his mentally handicapped “girlfriend.” The aggravated assault charges were dropped, and in the other case he served most of his sentence at a hospital rather than in prison. In April 1983 he was released into the community once again.

Soon, Heidnik married a mail-order bride from the Philippines. That marriage was short-lived and marked by violence. His wife had a son, the existence of whom she kept from Heidnik until she sued him for paternal support. Other “girlfriends,” mostly mentally disabled women with whom he struck up relationships, also had children whom they then kept away from their father. The idea that he had yet another child to whom he had no access sent Heidnik into a spiraling rage, which ultimately resulted in the crimes for which he was arrested a final time: the kidnap, torture, and rape of six women whom he kept in the basement of his Philadelphia home, and the murder of two of them.

Heidnik’s first victim was a twenty-five-year-old African American prostitute named Josefina Rivera. On November 26, 1986, she was picked up by a white man driving a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. He took her back to his house; it didn’t look like much to her, inside or out, but she spotted a Rolls Royce in the garage. She and the john had sex, and as she started to get dressed, he attacked her, choking her and locking handcuffs around her wrists. Half naked, she was led into the cold basement room that was to be her new home.

Heidnik glued clamps around her ankles, then connected them to a length of chain and secured that to a pipe. Rivera wasn’t going anywhere. She watched him work on a pit in the basement floor, digging it wider and deeper, explaining as he did that he meant to have ten slaves and would need a much more substantial pit. He had four children by different mothers, but none of them lived with him. He wanted company, but without the niceties of an actual relationship. He wanted sex slaves to do his bidding. He wanted to get them all pregnant and create a large, mixed-race family.

If Rivera “misbehaved,” she was put into the pit, which was covered by a weighted board, so she tried not to upset her captor.

The next captive, Sandra Lindsay, was another African American woman. She was mentally disabled and had known Heidnik long enough to have become pregnant with his child and have it aborted. For Heidnik, it was payback time. He fed the women irregularly, kept them half-naked, and raped them whenever he wanted.

That December, he brought nineteen-year-old Lisa Thomas home and drugged her wine, and when she woke up, she was in the basement with the other women. A week later Heidnik grabbed Deborah Dudley, twenty-three. Dudley fought and challenged him at every opportunity, so she got more beatings and pit time than the others. Now Heidnik began to indulge himself in other ways, such as by forcing the four women to have sex with one another while he watched. Instead of continuing to feed them scraps from his own meals, he brought them dog food.