Mindhunter (29 page)

Atlanta PD checked all known pedophiles and sexual "priors," eventually getting down to a list of about fifteen hundred possible suspects. Police officers and FBI agents visited schools, interviewing children to see if any of them had been approached by adult males and hadn’t told their parents or the police. And they rode buses, passing out flyers with the missing children’s photos, asking if anybody had seen them, particularly in the company of men. They had undercover officers hanging out at gay bars trying to overhear conversations and pick up leads.

Not everyone agreed with us. And not everyone was happy to have us down there. At one of the crime scenes in an abandoned apartment house, one black cop came up to me and said, "You’re Doug las, aren’t you?"

"Yeah, that’s right."

"I saw your profile. It’s a piece of shit." I wasn’t sure whether he was actually evaluating my work or pointing up the newspapers’ frequent claim that there were no black serial killers. This wasn’t exactly true. We had had cases of black serial killers of both prostitutes and members of their own families, but not much in the way of stranger murders, and none with the modus operandi we were seeing here.

"Look, I don’t have to be here," I said. "I didn’t ask to come." At any rate, the frustration level was high. Everyone involved wanted the case solved, but everyone wanted to crack it himself. As was often true, Roy and I knew we were down there to take some of the flak and be blamed if everything hit the fan.

Aside from the Klan conspiracy scenario, all kinds of theories were floating around, some more bizarre than others. Various children were found missing various articles of clothing, but none identical. Was this killer outfitting his own mannequin at home the way Ed Gein had tried collecting sections of women’s skin? On the later kills, was the UNSUB evolving by leaving bodies more out in the open? Or was it possible the original UNSUB had committed suicide and a copycat had taken over for him?

To me, the first real break came when I was back in Quantico. A call had come in to the police department in Conyers, a small town about twenty miles from Atlanta. They thought they might finally have a lead. I listened to the tape in Larry Monroe’s office, along with Dr. Park Dietz. Before becoming Behavioral Science Unit chief, Monroe had been one of the outstanding instructors at Quantico. Like Ann Burgess, Park Dietz had been brought to the unit by Roy Hazelwood. He was at Harvard at the time and just starting to get a reputation in law enforcement circles. Now based in California, Park is probably the foremost forensic psychiatrist in the country and a frequent consultant to our unit.

The caller on the tape professed to be the Atlanta child killer and mentioned the name of the most recent known victim. He was obviously white, sounded like a typical redneck, and promised he was "going to kill more of these nigger kids." He also named a particular spot along Sigmon Road in Rockdale County where police could find another body.

I remember the excitement in the room, which I’m afraid I squelched. "This is not the killer," I declared, "but you have to catch him because he’ll keep calling and be a pain in the ass and a distracting force as long as he’s out there."

Despite the police excitement, I felt confident I was right about this jerk. I’d had a similar situation shortly before this when Bob Ressler and I had been over in England to teach a course at Bramshill, the British police academy (and their equivalent to Quantico) about an hour outside London. England was in the midst of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. The killer, who apparently patterned himself after the Whitechapel murderer of late Victorian times, was bludgeoning and stabbing women up north, mostly prostitutes. There had been eight deaths so far. Three more women had managed to escape, but could provide no description. The age-range estimates ran from early teens to late fifties. Like Atlanta, all of England was gripped in terror. It was the largest manhunt in British history. The police would ultimately conduct nearly a quarter million individual interviews throughout the country.

Police departments and newspapers had received letters from "Jack the Ripper," confessing to the crimes. Then a two-minute tape cassette arrived in the mail to Chief Inspector George Oldfield, taunting the police and promising to strike again. As in the Atlanta case, this seemed to be the big breakthrough. The tape was copied and played throughout the country—on television and radio, on toll-free telephone lines, over the PA at soccer matches—to see if anyone could recognize the voice.

We had been told that John Domaille was at Bramshill while we were there. He’s a big-shot cop and the lead investigator on the Ripper cases. He’s told that these two profiling guys from the FBI are here and maybe we should get together. So after class, Bob and I are sitting alone in the academy pub when this guy comes in, is recognized by someone at the bar, and goes over and starts talking to him. We can read his nonverbals and know he’s making fun of the blokes from the U.S. I say to Ressler, "I bet that’s him."

Sure enough, we’re pointed out to him, he and the other guys come over to our table, and he introduces himself. I say, "I noticed you didn’t bring any files with you."

He starts making excuses about how complicated a case this is and it would be difficult to bring us up to speed in a short amount of time and such like that.

"Fine," I reply. "We’ve got plenty of cases of our own. I’d just as soon sit here and drink."

This take-it-or-leave-it approach gets the Brits interested. One of them asks what we would need to profile a case. I tell him to start by just describing the scenes. He tells me that the UNSUB seems to get the women in a vulnerable position and then blitzes them with a knife or hammer. He mutilates them after death. The voice on the tape was pretty articulate and sophisticated for a prostitute killer. So I say, "Based on the crime scenes you’ve described and this audiotape I heard back in the States, that’s not the Ripper. You’re wasting your time with that."

I explained that the killer he was looking for would not communicate with the police. He’d be an almost invisible loner in his late twenties or early thirties with a pathological hatred of women, a school dropout, and possibly a truck driver since he seemed to get around quite a bit. His killing of prostitutes was his attempt to punish women in general.

Despite the fortune of time and resources they’d spent on getting this tape out, Domaille said, "You know, I was worried about that," and later changed the course of his investigation. When thirty-five-year-old truck driver Peter Sutcliffe was arrested on a fluke on January 2, 1981—in the midst of the Atlanta horrors—and was proved to be the Ripper, he bore little resemblance to the one who had made and sent the tape. The impostor turned out to be a retired policeman who had a grudge to settle with Inspector Oldfield.

After listening to the Georgia tape, I spoke to the Conyers and Atlanta police and, off the top of my head, came up with a scenario I thought would take out this impostor. Like the Ripper’s, this guy’s tone was taunting and superior. "From the tone of his voice and what he’s saying, he thinks you’re all dumb shits," I said, "so let’s use this."

I advised them to play as dumb as he thought they were. Go to Sigmon Road but search the
opposite
side of the street; miss him completely. He’ll be watching and maybe you’ll get lucky and grab him right there. If not, he’ll at least call and tell you what idiots you are, that you’re looking in the wrong place. Park Dietz loves this, assimilating this off-the-cuff field stuff into his academic knowledge.

The police make a very public show of looking for this body, screw up the directions, and sure enough, the guy calls back to tell them how stupid they are. They’re ready with the trap and trace and get this older redneck right in his house. Just to make sure he’s not on the level, they search the right area of Sigmon Road, but of course there’s no body.

The Conyers incident wasn’t the only red herring in this case. Large investigations often have a fair number of them, and Atlanta was no exception. Close to the road, in the woods near where the earliest skeletonized remains were found, detectives discovered a girlie magazine with semen on some of the pages. The FBI lab was able to lift latent fingerprints and from that get an ID. It’s a white male who drives a van and he’s an exterminator. The psychological symbolism, of course, is perfect. For this type of sociopath, it’s only one small step from exterminating bugs to exterminating black children. We already know that many serial killers return to crime scenes and dump sites. The police speculate that he pulls along the side of the road in his car, looks out over his conquest, and masturbates as he recalls the thrill of the hunt and kill.

This development works its way up to the director of the FBI, to the attorney general, all the way to the White House. All of them are anxiously waiting to make the announcement that we’ve got the Atlanta child killer. A press release is being prepared. But a couple of things bother me. For one thing, he’s white. For another, he’s happily married. I figure there must be another reason why this guy was there.

They bring him in for questioning. He denies everything. They show him the magazine with semen stuck to the pages. They tell him they’ve got his prints on it. Okay, he admits, I was driving along and I threw it out of the car. This doesn’t make any sense, either. He’s driving along, one hand on the wheel, the other hand on himself, and he manages to throw this thing out of a car so that it lands in the woods? He’d have to have an arm like Johnny Unitas.

Realizing this is a serious jam he’s in, he admits that his wife is pregnant, due any day, and he hasn’t had sex in months. Rather than even think of cheating on this woman he loves, who’s about to bear his child, he went down to the 7-Eleven, bought this magazine, then thought he’d go out into these isolated woods on his lunch hour and gain some relief.

My heart went out to this guy. Nothing is sacred! He figures he’ll go off where he won’t bother anybody, mind his own business, and now even the president of the United States knows he was jacking off in the woods!

When they caught the impostor in Conyers, I thought that would be that; at least we’d been able to get this racist ass out of the way so the police could concentrate on their investigation. But I hadn’t factored one thing in properly, and that was the active role of the press. Since then, I’ve made sure never to commit that oversight again.

One thing I had realized was that, at a certain point, the vast media attention the child murders were getting became a satisfaction to the killer in its own right. What I hadn’t counted on was that he would be
reacting specifically
to media reports.

What happened was the press was so hungry for any possible break in the case that they heavily covered the police search along Sigmon Road, which came up empty. But soon afterward, another body
is
found in open view along Sigmon Road in Rockdale County: that of fifteen-year-old Terry Pue.

To me, this is an incredibly significant development and the beginning of the strategy for how to catch the killer. What it means is, he’s closely following the press and reacting to what they’re reporting. He knows the police aren’t going to find a body on Sigmon Road because he didn’t put one there. But now he’s showing how superior he is, how he can manipulate the press and the police. He’s showing his arrogance and contempt. He
can
dump a body along Sigmon Road if he wants to! He’s broken his pattern and driven twenty or thirty miles just to play this game. We know he’s watching, so let’s see if we can use that to manipulate his behavior.

Had I known this or considered the possibility beforehand, I would have thought about staking out the general area along Sigmon Road. But it was too late for that now. We had to look forward and see what we could do.

I had several ideas. Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. were coming to Atlanta to give a benefit concert at the Omni to raise money for families of the victims. The event was receiving tremendous coverage, and I was absolutely certain the killer would be there. The challenge was, how to pick him out of twenty-odd thousand people?

Roy Hazelwood and I had profiled a police buff. That could be the key. "Let’s give him a free ticket," I suggested.

As usual, the police and Atlanta Field Office agents looked at me as if I were crazy. So I explained. We’ll advertise that because so many people are expected, additional security guards will be needed. We’ll offer minimum wage, require that each applicant must have his own vehicle (since we knew our guy had one), and those with some kind of background or experience with law enforcement will be given preference. We have the screening interviews at the Omni, using hidden closed-circuit television. We’ll eliminate the groups we don’t care about—women, older people, etc.—and concentrate mainly on young black men. Each one will fill out an application, on which we’ll have them list experience such as ambulance driving, whether they’ve ever applied for a police or security job before, all the things that will help us qualify our suspect. We can probably get down to a group of maybe ten or twelve individuals that we can then cross-check against the other evidence.

This idea went right up the line to the assistant attorney general. The problem is, anytime you have a large organization working on anything that isn’t right out of the book, "analysis paralysis" can set in. By the time my strategy was finally approved, it was the day before the concert and the feeble attempt to recruit "security guards" at that point was too little, too late.

I had another scheme. I wanted to have wooden crosses made up, about a foot high. Some would be given to families, others would be placed at crime scenes as memorials. One large one could be erected at a church in collective memory of the children. Once this was publicized, I knew the killer would visit some of the sites, particularly the remote ones. He might even try to take one of the crosses. If we had key sites surveilled, I thought we’d have a good chance of nabbing him.

But it took the Bureau weeks to okay the plan. Then there was a turf war over who got to make the crosses—should it be the FBI exhibit section in Washington, the carpentry shop at Quantico, or should the Atlanta Field Office contract it out? The crosses did eventually get made, but by the time they were usable, events in the case had overtaken us.