Obsession (4 page)

I then went on to describe the Search and Destroy murders as the result of fantasies acted out by an inadequate type, a nobody, who, for the first time in his life, has placed himself in a position of importance and control, finally receiving the recognition he believes has been his due for many years. He’s so inadequate, however, that he can’t even come up with original crimes and has to pattern himself after other well-publicized criminals. He’s so jealous of other killers’ publicity that he seizes on the Son of Sam as a model, even though the Peterson murders took place before Son of Sam was even active. In other words, he looks to killers who began after him in a wretched attempt to define himself.

The UNSUB would be a white male in his twenties or early thirties. He could be married, but if he was, there would be ongoing problems of both a personality and sexual type.

This guy is alienated, lonely, and withdrawn. He’s probably never had a normal heterosexual experience with a woman. His victims appear to be people who, unlike him, are outgoing and loved by others, so he renders them worse off than himself—not only vulnerable but completely helpless, begging for their lives.

Based on the profiles we’d composed of similar offenders in our prison interviews, I expected the UNSUB to come from a broken family and to have been raised primarily by an overbearing mother who was inconsistent in her discipline. She may have been highly religious and placed a burden of guilt on her son from an early age. His father probably left home or died when the UNSUB was young, maybe around
Danny’s age or even younger. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he was raised by foster parents.

In school, he would have been an average student, but more interested in disrupting the class than in doing his work. His language certainly suggests interest in law enforcement, but it could also mean that he’s been in the military. This was underscored by his use of the phrase
search and destroy
, but I didn’t make too much of it. In 1974, Vietnam was so much in the public consciousness that virtually everyone was familiar with the term. In his case, it could represent just one more bit of fantasy.

Any arrest record he’d have racked up so far would involve breaking and entering or voyeurism. Unlike a lot of sexual predators, we wouldn’t expect to see any outright rapes in his past.

He chooses the neighborhoods for his crimes based on his comfort level, where he has a choice of several different targets and where there is always an easy escape route or place to hide, such as a park. His targets, as he himself suggests, are a combination of some planning and then opportunity—the available victim when he has the urge to kill.

The extended periods between the murders could have had several causes. He might have been in the service or out of the area for some other reason. He could have been institutionalized in a mental facility, or he could have been incarcerated on an unrelated charge, such as B&E.

We know from his own words that he is closely monitoring the media and craves the recognition they offer. What we would also expect for a police buff of this type is that he would somehow attempt to inject himself into the investigation, such as by frequenting police hangouts where he could ingratiate himself with the cops and/or overhear conversations. This will make him feel like “one of them,” which is what he wants to
be, and at the same time make him feel superior, which he needs to so as to assuage his own inadequacy, since he has been able to outwit law enforcement and create a high level of fear in the community. If he starts feeling sufficiently superior, he could offer more communication, either by phoning the police directly or by sending them or the press actual photos he’s taken at a crime scene. Because we could expect him to kill again and keep killing, perfecting his fantasy and gaining confidence each time he gets away with it.

A profile is an important tool, but it is only one of several. If the investigators believe in it, it can help them narrow down a suspect list or recognize a hot prospect when they see him. This is particularly true in situations in which we advise the police that they’ve probably already interviewed the UNSUB as part of their initial inquiries. But just as important, if not more so, is understanding the meaning of the profile enough to translate it into proactive techniques, and that had to be the next phase of our advice.

What we had to play on, I felt, was his overwhelming self-centeredness and arrogance. Somewhere along the line, he will brag to a friend or acquaintance or possibly even family member and let slip something about what he’s done. The police fascination could work to our advantage, too. If he’s not actually a member of some law enforcement agency, even if he’s just a security guard or part-time rent-a-cop at night, he might try to impersonate a police officer. From his interest in bondage, he probably reads the “true detective” magazines, since bondage and depiction of various forms of domination of women are staples of such publications. As a result, he’ll know from the ads how easy it is to send away for an authentic-looking police or detective badge, which he’ll carry on his person. In fact, he may even use this MO to gain admittance into his victims’ homes, since there is generally
no sign of forced entry. He probably flashes his badge whenever the opportunity presents itself, such as when paying for drinks at the local bar.

He’s concerned about being caught, but so taken up by the hoopla he’s created that his ego might keep him in the area even after the heat is turned up.

I had learned that a branch of the state university, which wasn’t far from the murder sites, had a criminal justice department. I thought there was a good chance Search and Destroyer had taken courses there or, if not, had at least examined books on law enforcement. On our advice, police started monitoring copying machines there by making particular marks on the document glass and supplying the machines with paper bearing special watermarks. One of these watermarks on a later communication showed that he had, in fact, been hanging around the university.

I thought it was important to put as much stress on him as we could. It might be a good idea to announce that a suspect had been seen outside the Peterson or Gallagher residence cutting phone wires. The more pressure we could keep him under, the more his post-offense behavior would become apparent to those around him. Family, friends, or coworkers should be alerted to look for increased alcohol consumption, change in appearance such as weight loss, growing or shaving off a beard, general nervousness, and a preoccupation with the case, perhaps bringing it up often in conversation for no apparent reason. Just as the killings were always on his mind, so would be the search for their perpetrator. He would be both exhilarated and scared at the same time. And our job was to force his hand by forcing his behavior.

And what if he is actually a cop?
I wondered to myself. This might be one of us. He could call me on another case he was working on and ask for my help and advice. I’ve often said so myself—they’re all
around us; they make us see right through them. But it’s particularly damning when an offender turns out to be one who’s sworn to uphold the law. It’s a perversion of nature—the same sort of perversion of nature as when children precede their parents in death, a phenomenon I have seen all too often in my career.

Based on how I thought he felt about his various victims, I thought one way to bring him out would be by publicly focusing on Danny Peterson, or possibly even Frances Farrell’s sons, who survived her. This could be accomplished by a newspaper or magazine story or a television feature that got the UNSUB to relate to these victims as real people. Whatever remorse, whatever misgivings, he had about his acts might then come to the surface. That’s why I often liked to announce dates of memorial services or locations of graves, knowing from our research that, for a variety of reasons, offenders do return to visit their victims.

We gave the police a series of additional tips on forcing Search and Destroyer’s hand—trying to bring him out into the open before he killed again. I don’t want to get into too many of the specifics because they remain strategic this many years later. One thing I warned them about, especially with all the Motivation X psychologizing going on in the local media: I didn’t want officials to let him be portrayed as a psychotic animal, thereby giving him an out. I thought he was more likely to kill again if he could convince himself that the acts really were beyond his control and he therefore had a psychological excuse for perpetrating them.

While we all held our collective breath, there were no more murders that matched the pattern of the Search and Destroyer. But police did receive a drawing in the mail. It was both icily clinical in style and disgustingly pornographic in content, portraying a
nude woman on a bed, gagged and tightly bound, having been penetrated by a large stake. It could have been a crime-scene drawing, except that so far as we could tell, it didn’t represent any actual crime. Rather, I thought, it was his fantasy conception of what he imagined his next scenario would be like. Police officers across the metropolitan area were given composite physical descriptions based on all the witness accounts and alerted as to what type of suspicious activity to be looking for, and what type of victims and MO to expect from the unknown subject.

I wish I could report that this story has a happy ending. It does not. In fact, it has no ending at all. As far as anyone could tell, after the murder of Lori Gallagher, the killer seemed to vanish. The case has never been closed, he could still be out there, and that is why I have changed the names and some of the details.

What happened? Why did he stop?

We may never know for sure. One possible explanation is that, like some other serial killers who suddenly seem to stop despite our best predictions and worst fears that they will continue, he might have been picked up for something else and sent to prison or a mental institution, never being connected with the horrible series of murders that terrified the region for so many years. He could have died in an automobile accident or been killed by a sometime accomplice or other enemy. Another possibility is that he injected himself too closely into the investigation—that he was interviewed, realized how close they were to reaching him, and got scared.

Most serial sexual predators keep going until they are stopped one way or another. But this case might have been somewhat special. This one was so visual, so laden with fantasy, so removed from any kind of real or meaningful human contact, that the fantasy
itself might have been enough to keep him going, once he’d gotten a taste of the real searching and destroying that had become such an obsession to him. He may have been able to content himself with the idea that he had held the power of life and death over others, and exercised that power, and he had “outwitted” the combined forces of law enforcement, proving himself superior to them. He had been the center of media attention in ways that he never could have merited except through these flagrant acts of public outrage. In his own small and twisted mind, he had become a somebody. He still had his photographs and God knew how many drawings like the one he had sent to the police. They might have been enough for him.

Was I wrong about Search and Destroyer and that’s why he was never brought to justice? I don’t think so, but he’s the only one who knows for sure. And I’m not even really certain that that’s true, because I think, as a result of our work and research, we have more insight into his obsession than he does.

Years after all of this, there was another series of crimes that looked as if it might have had similar MO and signature elements. The media began speculating as to whether the Search and Destroyer was back. But a letter came in to one of the local media outlets, saying, in effect, “It’s not me.” Assuming that the letter was authentic, he was, and may still be, out there.

I begin intentionally with this cautionary tale from my early days as a profiler.

We might as well admit right here that the good guys don’t always come out on top. Like medicine, what we practice isn’t an exact science, and because of the stakes involved, our losses can be devastating to us, knowing that the predator is still at large, waiting to spring again. Predators come in many forms and guises, and they’re all dangerous. Despite our
dedication, despite our own obsessions, we don’t always get them.

It’s a sad truth that we don’t win every battle, and we probably never will. And even for those in which we triumph, by definition we can never achieve more than a partial victory, because by the time we enlist, someone has already been victimized. It gives me some peace, however, to think that the obsession that came over me thinking about the killer of the Peterson family, of Frances Farrell and Lori Gallagher, and probably others as well … that that obsession stayed with me and my colleagues and helped us dedicate ourselves and fully focus on the thousands of other victims who became our clients and the thousands of other predators we helped pursue.

If the first lesson of this cautionary tale is humility on the part of those of us who go out to do battle, the second is knowledge, awareness, and some basic fore-thought and preparedness on all our parts—because the only total victory is when we can
prevent
these monsters from victimizing us, our family, and our friends in the first place. That isn’t an exact science either, but I know it can make a huge difference.

The war never ends and we’re all soldiers. But first, we have to understand the enemy and the fight we have to wage, individually and as a society. That’s what we need to be thinking about.

M
anipulation. Domination. Control
.

These are the watchwords of all sexual predators, be they stalkers, rapists, or killers. They also have to be my watchwords, and those of my colleagues, as we try to get inside their heads to hunt them down.

The key tool we use is profiling, or, as I began calling it when I became chief of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit (which previously had been called the Behavioral Science Unit; I told people I was getting rid of the BS) at Quantico, criminal investigative analysis. This includes not only coming up with profiles of UNSUBs, but also proactive techniques for catching them, evaluation of case linkages, and then interrogation and prosecutorial strategies once an offender has been identified. But the important thing to remember is that we’re not the only ones doing the profiling and analysis. The people we hunt are doing it, too; you can be sure of that.