Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (3 page)

Introduction

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begin looking into his wife’s disappearance for several days, enough

time for the trail to grow stale and for him to thoroughly cover his

tracks. He believed that if a body was never found and the suspect

refused to confess, he would never be charged— something the police

publicly declared in the Smart case.

Q

The concept of serial murder has only been recognized as a distinct

category of crime for a few decades, even though serial killers have

been making headlines at least as far back as ‘‘Jack the Ripper.’’

For nearly a century, the notorious slayer who terrorized Victorian

London was viewed as a criminal freak of nature, even though other

serial killings during the same historical period were soon reported

from Sweden to San Francisco. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s,

forensic psychologists in the FBI’s now famous Behavioral Science

Unit began assembling common characteristics from interviews and

case files of killers who now bear this moniker.

Although experts may disagree on what precisely is and is not

a serial homicide, naming and defining the crime opened the door

to serious research, which has led to hundreds of studies of these

type of killers by psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, and other

scientists.

Identifying a new crime category is a bit like discovering a new

or previously misunderstood disease: everything changes when the

phenomenon has a name. New syndromes in the medical field,

first noticed as a seemingly unrelated collection of problems and

symptoms, are often initially treated with shame and derision—from

alcoholism to posttraumatic stress disorder, anorexia and bulimia

to chronic fatigue syndrome. Giving them a name is the first step

toward serious scientific study and public awareness.

Q

• This book sets forth a profile of what I call eraser killing: a form

of intimate partner (or domestic) homicide that is committed

almost exclusively by men, done in a carefully planned manner,

often through bloodless means known as a ‘‘soft kill’’ (such as

smothering, suffocating, or strangling) so as to leave behind as little

evidence as possible or with the crime scene thoroughly cleaned up.

To further cover his tracks, the eraser killer disposes of his victim’s

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body by some means meant to ensure that it will never be found, or

erases anything that links him to her death by ‘‘staging’’ the murder

as something completely different—an accident, a suicide, or a

crime committed by a total stranger, such as mugging, carjacking, or

other random crime of opportunity.

• On the basis of five years of investigation into hundreds of

killings that I believe fit this profile, I will explain what is truly going

on behind the stories of missing women that have dominated the

news since the disappearance of Laci Peterson six years ago,

identifying the hidden pattern among cases that the media has

simply presented as mystery after unrelated (and often unresolved)

mystery.

• Using new research on the psychology of dark criminal

impulses in otherwise high-functioning men, I will also offer a

psychological profile of the factors I believe explain and drive this

curious breed of killer—men who live behind a mask of normality,

who seem incapable of violence to most of those who know them,

who lead productive and often quite accomplished lives right up

until the minute they kill the ones they supposedly love.

• This book will examine more than fifty eraser killings, some just

recently in the headlines, some dating back a century, challenging

some of the well-honed myths about domestic violence and

domestic homicide. For eraser killers are not like ordinary killers,

nor are they even like more typical wife- or girlfriend-killers. These

men do not commit their crimes in the ‘‘heat of passion’’ or in a

moment of out-of-control rage. Their crimes are not hot-blooded

but cold-blooded, arrived at after much thought and carried out

with meticulous care. Because these men premeditate and plan their

killings with inordinate stealth and cunning, because they are

fearless and expert at manipulating and deceiving those around

them, because they hold nearly everything that is true about them in

complete secrecy, the women in their lives often have no idea they

are in mortal danger until it is too late.

• The motive behind these killings is something else that has been

widely misunderstood and misrepresented both in the media and in

the courtroom. Fundamentally, eraser killers do not kill for the

reasons normally ascribed to murderers, such as greed, sex, or

jealousy. They eliminate the women, and sometimes children, in

Introduction

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their lives because their victims no longer serve any ‘‘purpose’’ in the

emotionally desolate world of the eraser killer, or are seen as

impediments to the kind of life they covet and fantasize for

themselves. In the mind of this type of murderer, it is better, easier,

and more satisfying for him to kill than simply to get a divorce.

• Eraser killers often go to extraordinary lengths not just to

manipulate a crime scene or make a woman disappear but also

to manipulate the police, the courts, and justice itself as part of their

high-stakes game. This manipulation, I believe, is something that is

also key to the nature of the eraser killer and becomes almost an end

in itself—an enjoyable battle of wits in which he is sure he will

always come out on top.

• In a kind of Catch-22 that is built into the American criminal

justice system and its reliance on antiquated and faulty assumptions

about this type of intimate homicide, police and prosecutors are

very often sandbagged before they can even launch a homicide case.

This book will provide several illuminating stories that expose the

unintentional loopholes that both encourage eraser killers to believe

that they can get away with murder and very often make it possible

for them to do just that.

For example, eraser killers have used constitutional protections

against search and seizure to seal off the scene of their crimes, usually

in the victim’s own home, and prevent police from entering by staging

the crime to appear to have happened elsewhere. Investigators are

forced to wait sometimes for weeks, sometimes years before the

actual murder scene can be searched and forensically examined, thus

giving a killer as much time as he needs to completely erase all the

evidence.

Murder is much harder to prove when the killer takes pains to

leave no physical evidence behind. Someone clever enough to make

sure his victim’s body remains hidden stands a good chance of

never being charged with murder, much less convicted. Eyewitness

testimony—the only truly noncircumstantial evidence—is notori-ously unreliable. (Groups like the Innocence Project are regularly

getting rape convictions overturned after DNA tests prove that the

victim identified an innocent man.) Yet most jurors buy into the pop-ular stereotype that circumstantial evidence is not proof, a sometimes

insurmountable burden even when the body is not hidden.

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‘‘They couldn’t put the gun in his hand,’’ jury foreman Thomas

Nicholson declared after acquitting
In Cold Blood
star Robert Blake

of killing his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley—in spite of the fact that

Blake openly hated his wife and that two men testified that he had

attempted to hire them to ‘‘whack’’ her. (Bakley was ultimately shot

to death as she waited for Blake in his car outside a restaurant where

the two had just dined together, Blake claiming that at the time the

shooting occurred, he had gone back inside to retrieve a gun he had

inadvertently left behind.)

Prosecutors are often loath to take on no-body cases, knowing

that if a defendant is acquitted, there will be no second chance to

convict him even if the victim’s remains are later found right in

the defendant’s backyard. Jurors erroneously but almost uniformly

view circumstantial evidence as a weak form of proof, internalizing

an attitude, often expressed in the popular media, that a case is

‘‘merely circumstantial.’’ Nearly every one of the sixteen hundred

potential jurors who were queried to serve on the Peterson case

initially expressed qualms about circumstantial evidence, believing it

was not ‘‘real’’ evidence—or, as one put it, ‘‘My understanding is

circumstantial evidence is what you
can’t
prove.’’

Peterson juror John Guinasso said he would not have voted to

convict if the bodies had not washed up where they did— on the

shore of San Francisco Bay ninety miles from the Peterson home in

Modesto, California, and within about a mile of the exact spot where

Scott told police he had spontaneously decided to go fishing the day

his wife disappeared.

Q

In exploring these and other issues, I draw sometimes heavily

on my investigation and analysis of the Scott Peterson case, which

I believe to be a quintessential eraser killing, and which can shed

more light on the phenomenon than perhaps any other single case.

Although many feel that they already know this case quite well, I

believe that this book breaks new ground by

• Exploring the real motive behind Peterson’s murder of his

pregnant wife, something even the jurors who convicted him did

not seem to fully understand

Introduction

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• Explaining how the death of his unborn son, Conner, was not

simply an unfortunate by-product of his decision to kill his wife

but represented a pivotal aspect of his motivation

• Offering the first comprehensive psychological portrait of Scott

Peterson and explaining how different and competing aspects of

his personality made him believe he could commit the perfect

murder but also caused him to make fatal errors that got him

convicted

• Revealing many new and disturbing facts about the case,

including an alternative plan Peterson may have been

considering for disposing of his wife and child that would have

prevented their bodies from ever being found and all but

ensured that he would never have been charged with their

murders

I do not believe Scott Peterson killed his wife in order to be

with another woman or to collect on the substantial inheritance

his wife had coming. That he was having an affair and that he was

living beyond his means, spending recklessly on such luxuries as an

expensive golf club membership in the weeks before his first child

was to be born, are important clues into his psyche. But they do not,

in and of themselves, constitute motive. They are ultimately what

film director Alfred Hitchcock called MacGuffins, red herrings that

obscure rather than reveal the darker machinations of the plot.

Clearly there is something very disturbed in the psychological

makeup of a man who could coldly plan a murder, but was unable

or unwilling to face a divorce; who could strangle or smother his

pregnant wife to death but could not displease her by maintaining

that he did not want children; who could turn on his fourteen-carat

charm to woo a new lover, but was unable to use that charm and

power of persuasion to succeed in his job as a salesman; who believed

himself fully capable of outfoxing the police, never doubting his

ability to fearlessly win every nerve-wracking encounter, but whose

fragile ego was threatened by the rapidly approaching responsibilities

of fatherhood.

The Peterson case is rife with these seeming contradictions, which

no one has yet been able to explain. I believe that they are not

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actually contradictions, but instead are part and parcel of the peculiar

psychology of eraser killers. The strange and unstable mixture of

pathologies that drives these killers explains not only their criminal

success but also the mistakes and contradictions that sometimes get

them caught.

When I began covering the Peterson case, the facts were so horrific

that I wanted to believe that it was an anomaly. Unfortunately for

the score of ‘‘missing’’ women who have since made headlines—and

many more whose stories did not make national news but were no

less tragic— the Peterson case turned out not to be singular at all.

Whereas part of the media—led by the more innovative and less

tradition-bound producers in cable television—covered these stories

intensively, many editors, news anchors, and print columnists simply

scoffed at such coverage. Some even extended their derision beyond

media outlets they dislike to an unseemly attack on the victims

themselves.

My own belief is that the recent flood of such seemingly inexplica-ble stories makes many people uncomfortable. Perhaps the betrayal

at the heart of these crimes is too unsettling, too challenging to the

illusion of safety we cling to in the sanctuary of our own home.

Those who dismiss news coverage (and books) focusing on this

kind of crime have never sat down with the shell-shocked family

members of women who have never been given even the dignity

and validation of a trial. The most tragic eraser killings are those

in which there is no arrest, no arraignment, no trial, no justice, no

body recovered, no funeral, no burial, no headstone— no answers or

resolution of any kind.

I have written this book so that all of us may start to understand

a type of crime that has been right in front of us but obscured from

view, just as its perpetrators have intended. My hope is to cast light

on the shadows where the killers have hidden their faces from us. It

is an attempt, however inadequate, to give voice as best I can to these

women whose deaths have left them voiceless, for erased women

are truly silent victims. They cannot call out for justice. They cannot

point a finger at their killer, whose true face they may have recognized

only at the moment of their death.

P A R T

O N E

Eraser Killing

The History and Psychology of

a New Criminal Profile

C H A P T E R

O N E

Out of the Shadows

Q A newtype of killer iswreaking havoc across

America and around the world. He has made countless headlines in

recent years, but until now his core identity has been hidden. He is

not driven by rage or lust. His conscience is not set loose by drugs or

alcohol— the deadly fuels that can turn some men into momentary

killers. Unlike most other murderers, he very often has no criminal

record and sometimes no history of violence whatsoever. He is an

intelligent, careful, methodical killer.

He is also someone who has always been a fabricator of reality.

He is not your harmless garden-variety fibber but a compulsive,

pathological liar whose lies are meant to get a reaction out of others:

to inspire their admiration, to evoke their sympathy, to get him

exactly what he wants. He makes up stories big and small, often

lying about things for no readily apparent reason. But he is especially

practiced at deceiving others about who he really is.

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