Criminal Minds (9 page)

He was growing concerned, however. There was a bullet hole in his car and a lot of blood inside it. He bought a new handgun, a .44, and a sheriff ’s officer who saw the paperwork and remembered Kemper’s earlier conviction decided to visit him at his apartment. Kemper handed over the .44 but kept his .22. He didn’t know if the officer had looked inside his car, however, or what other dots he might have connected. It was time to bring his murderous streak to an end—but not before he killed his most significant victim.

On Good Friday, April 20, 1973, Kemper went to his mother’s house. When she got home from work, they talked, and their discussion became an argument. He let her go to bed, and at around 5:15 a.m. he carried a claw hammer into her room, as he had fantasized about doing many times. He hit her in the head with the hammer, then slashed her throat. Once she was dead he decapitated her, handcuffed her wrists, and put her in the closet. He argued with her head, threw darts at it, and removed the larynx, which he tried to shove down the garbage disposal. The disposal spat it back out. “Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me,” he later said. “I couldn’t get her to shut up!” Back in her room, he had sex with her corpse.

He knew that suspicion would fall on him; he had, after all, murdered his own grandparents. But he thought that if there were two victims, his guilt wouldn’t be as obvious. Later in the day, he called his mother’s friend Sandy Hallett and invited her to dinner. When she arrived, he clubbed, strangled, and decapitated her and left her body in his bed. He slept in his mother’s bed, with her corpse lying beside him.

Still unsettled, Kemper drove to Reno, Nevada, rented a different car, and kept going. In Colorado he was pulled over, but he was chagrined to learn it was for speeding, not as part of a nationwide manhunt. Finally he called the Santa Cruz police, directing them to look in his mother’s house. At first, knowing “Big Ed,” they thought he was joking. It took a second call before they believed him.

Back home, he confessed to all of his murders. His public defender tried an insanity defense, which Kemper abetted by claiming that he had sliced off flesh from some of his victims, cooked it with macaroni, and eaten it—a claim he later recanted, saying it had been intended only to bolster the insanity plea. It was hard to convince a jury that someone as smart and personable as Ed Kemper was insane, and he was found guilty on eight counts of first-degree murder. The judge asked what he thought was appropriate punishment, and Kemper suggested that he be tortured to death. Instead, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and he remains locked up today.

Ed Kemper’s motivations for his crimes were many. He couldn’t conceive of a healthy sexual relationship with a woman. He wanted to possess the pretty girls he saw all around him, who his mother said were so much better than he was that he didn’t stand a chance. Early in life, he had twisted up his brain’s sex-and-death wiring. But he also wanted revenge against his mother, and some believe that if he had simply killed her first, he might have spared others a great deal of suffering.

 

 

JAMES MITCHELL
“Mike” DeBardeleben has been mentioned only once on
Criminal Minds
, in the episode “Zoe’s Reprise” (415), as one of the subjects of a book by profiler David Rossi,
Deviance: The Secret Desires of Sadistic Serial Killers
. DeBardeleben is definitely an appropriate subject for that book.

Initially, his case was investigated by the Secret Service, because in addition to being a sexual sadist and a serial killer, he was a counterfeiter known as the Mall Passer. He traveled the country using fake bills to make small purchases at malls and get substantial change in real currency. In two years, he had hit thirty-eight states and passed about thirty thousand dollars in funny money. The Treasury Department wanted him badly. It finally got ahead of him, figuring out where he might go next and alerting merchants in the malls he might hit.

In Knoxville, Tennessee, on March 25, 1983, an alert store clerk reported DeBardeleben. The authorities moved in, and the Mall Passer found himself busted.

The suspect clammed up. His ID said one thing, and his car registration said something else altogether. It took the FBI’s fingerprint analysis to hang his real name on him: Mike DeBardeleben. Once the Secret Service had that information, they realized they’d arrested him once before, for passing fake hundred-dollar bills in 1976, a rap that earned him two years of federal time.

The car he’d been driving in Knoxville contained drugs, pornography, phony IDs, fake money, and the goods he’d bought with the latter. What they didn’t have was his printing equipment, what the Secret Service calls a counterfeiter’s “plant.” They needed to search his home in Alexandria, Virginia.

All they found, however, were dirty dishes and more small purchases made with bogus bills—no printing press, no plates. Three agents stayed behind when the others left, determined to find something. Greg Mertz picked up DeBardeleben’s phone book and flipped through the yellow pages.

There he found that a card had been slipped between two pages in the “Moving and Storage” section. He showed his colleagues, and they canvassed the nearby storage facilities. At one, the manager recognized DeBardeleben’s picture and opened up his unit.

Inside, they found much counterfeit money, a single printing plate, bubble lights for posing as law enforcement, drugs and drug paraphernalia, and much more. They also found things that hinted at another pastime they hadn’t known about: a bloody chain, women’s phone numbers and addresses, panties, a dildo, handcuffs, and lubricant. They also found hundreds of sexually explicit photographs—stills that showed what kind of man they’d captured. Audiotapes made it all real in an even more horrible way.

What DeBardeleben had recorded were torture sessions. His voice could be heard, along with the voices of women in intense agony, begging their captor to stop what he was doing or kill them and be done with it. The victims who survived his attacks reported a man who was obsessed with causing pain, who forced them to perform the most degrading acts imaginable, and who photographed it all and threatened to make the photos public if they told anyone.

With this information, the Secret Service began to track DeBardeleben’s movements during the last few years. None of what they found was pleasant.

DeBardeleben was a pure sexual sadist, the kind that is categorized as an anger-excitation rapist. He had murdered at least two women and possibly many more; however, by the time he was sentenced to 375 years in prison on rape, kidnapping, robbery, sodomy, and forgery charges, the prosecutors from other vicinities decided not to bother pursuing convictions on the murders. Not only had DeBardeleben recorded his crimes on audiotape and in photographs, he had also filled notebook after notebook with his own writings, a diary of perversity that stunned all who read it.

Anger-excitation rapists are the most dangerous kind of rapist, because the suffering of their victims is what stimulates them sexually. That is, it’s not the act of inflicting pain that they respond to; it’s the suffering of their victims from that pain. Edmund Kemper was not a sexual sadist, because his dismemberment of his victims was postmortem. A sexual sadist like DeBardeleben wouldn’t bother with that—once the victim is beyond pain, there’s no point to it. Former FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood, who has done in-depth studies of sexual sadism, calls sexual sadists “the great white shark of sexual crimes.”

DeBardeleben was born on March 20, 1940, in Little Rock, Arkansas. His father was rigid and controlling, and his mother was an alcoholic who punished him frequently and whom DeBardeleben started beating up when he reached his teens. His younger brother eventually committed suicide. His first arrest, on a weapons charge, was at age sixteen. He joined the army but was court-martialed and booted out. He was married five times, and he treated his wives as horribly as he treated his victims, bending them to his will, punishing them, and making them participate in his criminal activities.

DeBardeleben made tapes on which he played both roles, running through a script dictated by his own internal fantasies and acting out the role of the victim, begging for mercy and screaming in pain. He also sometimes dressed in women’s clothing when acting out these fantasies.

But it’s his writings that are most illuminating. “The wish to inflict pain on others is not the essence of sadism,” DeBardeleben wrote. “The central impulse is to have complete mastery over another person, to make him/her a helpless object of our will, to become the absolute ruler over her, to become her god, to do with her as one pleases, to humiliate her, to enslave her are means to this end. And the most radical aim is to make her suffer. Since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her. To force her to undergo suffering without her being able to defend herself. The pleasure in the complete domination of another person is the very essence of the sadistic drive.”

Fortunately, the Secret Service agents arrested DeBardeleben when they did, because if he had been able to continue his activities, these would only have gotten worse. Sexual sadists begin developing their fantasies at a young age and typically begin acting them out in early adulthood, but throughout the years they become more violent and bizarre. DeBardeleben had been at it for a while before his 1983 arrest, but he was only in his early forties, and he would not have stopped.

On one occasion he made a tape recording of some of his goals: to create false identities, to buy a house and land on which he could build a structure suited especially for his rapes and murders, and finally, “also of prime importance—top priority—would be an incinerator capable of incinerating at extremely high temperature—total incineration.” Had he achieved these goals, there’s no telling how many women would have disappeared, never to be seen again.

 

 

During their hunt for the unsub in “Zoe’s Reprise” (415), members of the BAU mention potential similarities between the victims and the victims of several other sexual predators in addition to DeBardeleben: Jeffrey Dahmer, Robert Berdella, David Berkowitz, Jack the Ripper, Altemio Sanchez, the Hillside Stranglers (cousins Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi), the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run (also known as the Cleveland Torso Murderer), and Dennis Rader (the BTK Killer).

The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run has never been identified. During the 1930s, he murdered between twelve and forty people in Cleveland, Ohio, dismembering, decapitating, and occasionally cutting his victims in half, as the infamous Black Dahlia Killer did in Los Angeles in 1947. Famed detective Eliot Ness failed to catch the Mad Butcher. One of the strongest suspects was Dr. Francis E. Sweeney, who voluntarily committed himself and remained hospitalized until his death in 1965. After Sweeney took himself off the streets, the bloody murders stopped.

 

 

NO U.S. SERIAL
killer and sexual predator has been convicted of killing as many women as Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, has. On
Criminal Minds
, he merits four mentions, in the episodes “Unfinished Business” (115), “The Perfect Storm” (203), “About Face” (306), and “Catching Out” (405).

In “About Face,” women see their faces printed on posters that say, “Have you seen me?” Shortly after the appearance of the posters, the women are murdered. The first victim is found sexually assaulted and with her face removed, weighted, and dumped in a creek.

Although Gary Ridgway didn’t remove his victims’ faces or taunt them with posters of themselves, he was an aggressive predator who dumped his victims’ bodies in water. Beginning in July 1982, women—most of them prostitutes and teenagers—disappeared from the streets of King County, Washington. Later that month, their bodies started to turn up.

The first was that of Wendy Coffield, sixteen, who was spotted by boys bicycling near the Green River. Coffield was Ridgway’s first confirmed victim, although he has claimed that there were at least five victims before her. Coffield was found naked except for shoes and socks. She had been strangled.