Obsession (46 page)

There is nothing any woman—or man—can do to deserve a beating at the hands of a spouse or lover. And neither does anyone deserve to be emotionally abused. It horrifies and completely confounds me when I hear of beating victims who seek help from family members or friends and instead get responses to the effect of “You must have made him awfully mad.” I know the people who say these things are ignorant, but I don’t accept that as an excuse and neither should any victim of violence. We cannot overstate that if you are being abused, you absolutely do not deserve that treatment and you do not have to live that way. If you can’t find help locally listed in the front of your phone book (look under “Emergency Assistance” or “Community Services” for domestic violence shelters or rape crisis assistance), call the National Victim Center. In communities that have victim-witness units like the one we’ve looked at in Fairfax County, Virginia, call them. They’ll be able to figure out what you should do or where you should go.

I also take issue with those who blame the abused
victim for ever getting involved with that type of man. This is terribly unfair, especially since many times the same people were also initially fooled by the offender during his charming phase. Also, victims often receive the worst treatment at the hands of their abusers precisely because they are unwilling to put up with threatening and/or violent behavior.

What the victim needs in all these cases is the support of those around her. Questioning her judgment only strengthens the offender’s position as it causes the victim to doubt herself. We don’t blame burglary victims for not staying home to guard their possessions all day against a potential intruder. So why should we second-guess stalking victims, or rape victims?

Being stalked in any form is an incredibly stressful experience, and even if you feel that you can handle it, you should consider joining a support group. I find it a further testament to the courage of crime survivors that in many cases, when a victim did not find the support and understanding she needed from her community, law enforcement, and the criminal justice system, instead of giving up, she and others in similar situations founded their own support groups. Theresa Saldana founded Victims for Victims. Another survivor, Jane McAllister, founded Citizens Against Stalking. Try surfing the internet, looking for resources and information on stalking. You’ll be amazed at what’s available.

I know, though, that we still have a long way to go. The National Victim Center’s “Helpful Guide for Stalking Victims,” full of practical steps you can take to try to insulate yourself from the offender, is a depressing document, as are the similar lists you can get from other victims’ groups. Reading these materials, you realize they all represent actions taken or planned by the victim—they’re all reactive.

Because stalkers are adept at skirting the edges of
lawful behavior, sometimes terrorizing a victim for years before doing anything they can be arrested for (even under the new laws), for the victim to improve her situation, she must change her behavior. He’s the one doing something wrong, yet she’s the one who’s punished for it. She’s the one who has to turn her home into a prison, with dead bolt locks, reinforced doors, extra outside lighting, minimal shrubbery, and maybe a guard dog for a pet. She’s the one who needs to change her locks and unlisted phone number if she even suspects a breach in security. She loses her privacy, never traveling alone if at all possible, airing her “dirty laundry” by providing a photo or description of her stalker and his vehicle to people she works with, her neighbors, family, and close friends. She gives up outdoor interests like jogging and spends time and energy picking different routes to and from work, the food store, even church.

And she is the one who spends money she may not have in a desperate effort to stay safe, even as she knows she’ll probably never realty feel safe again. Even if her stalker dies, he has stolen time from her and irrevocably altered the way she sees the world. She can get to the point where she functions “normally” again, but like other crime survivors, there is no tremendous relief or peace when the crime itself passes. Sometimes, victims buy guns and learn how to use them.

Now, I think any one of the above developments is sickening. It enrages me to think that a decent, moral, contributing member of society has to pay such a high emotional, physical, and financial price—on a moment-by-moment basis—so some degenerate loser can have his fantasies and build up his own feeble, worthless ego. I think of Trudy Collins, the mother of bright, beautiful Suzanne Marie Collins, murdered at nineteen, who asks if we as a society realize what we’re losing when we allow so many good people to be victimized.

David Beatty holds up his National Victim Center’s “Helpful Guide” and states outright, “Everything in here is somehow a limitation on your liberty as a citizen. Every right that you have, basically, you give up, because the system cannot effectively respond in guaranteeing your protection.”

To be fair, he notes, we can’t even guarantee the safety of the president of the United States, on whose security we spend millions of dollars a year. But when a threat has been issued and a person has displayed a pattern of potentially dangerous behavior, we ought to be able to do more than we’ve been doing to make sure the stalker is the one locked up and deprived of his civil liberties, not the victim.

These cases have to be wake-up calls to all of us. If we are going to hold people in the social services and criminal justice system responsible for not focusing on the dangerousness of guys like Ronnie Shelton and Joseph Thompson in the past, then we also have to accept responsibility and start picking out the dangerous among us at the first warnings. And I’m hoping increased awareness and education will help. I can sympathize with the frustration of a cop on the street who’s gone to the same house to investigate a domestic dispute a dozen times only to see the woman refuse to press charges, but I believe we have to look at why that happens instead of just getting angry at the victim. In many cases, when a victim of domestic violence/ simple obsession stalking returns to her abuser, it’s because she fears he’ll be able to find her no matter where she is. We haven’t been able to convince her we’ll be able to keep her safe.

I keep coming back to David Beatty’s penetrating observation that stalking is the only instance we know of where a future murderer identifies himself to police ahead of time.

That’s not just an opportunity, it’s a responsibility that cannot, and must not, be ignored.

T
here can be little doubt that if one person were to be given credit (or responsibility, in certain circles) for placing behavioral science as it is practiced at Quantico squarely on the map and in the public imagination, that individual would have to be Thomas Harris, author of the best-selling novels
Black Sunday, Red Dragon
, and
The Silence of the Lambs
, all of which, of course, were also made into feature films. So completely have they become part of the collective psyche that I recently heard myself referred to on a television talk show as “that
Silence of the Lambs
guy.” And even today, seldom does a week go by that I do not receive a letter from somewhere in the country asking how one goes about becoming a profiler and getting into the Investigative Support Unit, which I headed until I retired.

Harris definitely nailed the dark and constricting atmosphere of psychic tension under which we work—made all that much darker and more constricting by the fact that until recently, more than a year after I retired, the unit worked in a tight warren of offices sixty feet underground. He also captured a sense of the ultimately unexplainable evil that we try to identify
and hunt down, largely through such memorable literary villains as Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter; Francis Dolarhyde, the “Tooth Fairy,” and Jame Gumb, aka Buffalo Bill.

Fortunately for all of us, we have yet to come across in real life anyone quite as perversely brilliant and resourceful as the warped psychiatrist Dr. Lecter. As readers of our previous books undoubtedly know, I have come across a number of psychiatrists in my career whom I considered warped, but that had mainly to do with their professional unwillingness to look at the crime itself when evaluating the dangerousness and “rehabilitation” potential of the criminal. Thankfully, none of them in my experience ever went out and tried to duplicate the acts of the offenders in their charge. In fact, while we’ve certainly had doctors and dentists who’ve killed their wives or girlfriends (and were generally fairly easy to hunt down because they weren’t as criminally sophisticated as they thought they were), I know of no serial-killer psychiatrists or other doctors. There is nothing to stop one from becoming another type of sexual predator, but our research has shown that serial killers, though often bright, tend to be inadequate underachievers. Most doctors wouldn’t have to compensate in quite this way.

So while there seem to be no Hannibal Lecters in real life, there are, in a sense, some Buffalo Bills. Before writing
Red Dragon
, Thomas Harris came to see us in Quantico. He attended classes and spoke to a number of agents and listened carefully to what we had to tell him. The terrifying and repulsive character that emerged as Buffalo Bill—who lured women into his control by faking an injury with a cast on his arm, who kept them in a pit in his basement, and who then skinned them to create a female human “suit” for himself—is a composite of the traits, personalities, modi operandi, and signatures of three real sexual
predator killers whom we had studied. We familiarized Harris with two of them while he was with us at Quantico. The third emerged years after
Red Dragon
had been published, while Harris was writing
Lambs
. Since each of the three represents a somewhat different type of predator, each displays varying levels of sophistication from the other two, and each brings up different aspects of the ongoing argument over whether people who kill for pleasure are “evil” or “sick,” it is worth-while for us to take a look at the three individuals who collectively contributed to Harris’s character Buffalo Bill.

Edward Gein was born on August 8, 1906, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and lived his entire life in the state. His father, George, was a frequently abusive alcoholic who worked intermittently as a carpenter, a tanner, and a farmer. When Ed was still a child, the family moved to a farm near the rural community of Plainfield to try to make a go of working their own land. Quite clearly, the dominant parent was Ed’s mother, Augusta, who seemed to have pretty strong ideas about religion and morality and equally strong ideas about men in general and the kind of trouble they could get into. She fanatically impressed upon Ed and his brother, Henry, five years older than Ed, all of the sins they must avoid, and paramount on that list was any notion of sex outside of marriage, though Ed later recalled she seemed a little more lenient on the subject of masturbation. In any event, her message got across, and neither Ed nor Henry ever married, had sex, nor wandered far from home. As Ed later told a state psychiatrist, his mother had told him that “if a woman is good enough for intercourse, she is good enough for marriage.”

Ed left school after the eighth grade, but remained an avid reader. He never had a regular job, but in
addition to his work on the family farm, he would baby-sit in the Plainfield community and do odd jobs. Since he was quiet and fairly unworldly and unsophisticated, he was often taken advantage of and cheated out of his pay.

Within a span of five years, while in his thirties, Ed was left completely alone. In 1940, at age sixty-five, George died of heart disease. In 1944, Henry was burned to death in a marsh fire while trying to clear some land. And a year later, after her second stroke, Augusta passed away. Though she had been rigid and domineering, Ed was extremely attached to his mother and apparently felt lost without her. He boarded up his mother’s bedroom and sitting room to be preserved, museum-style, as they had been while she was alive. As it turned out, this was not the only thing Ed Gein preserved.

No one thought much about this quiet, unassuming man who lived alone in the white clapboard house in the midst of a no-longer-working farm until late in the afternoon of November 16, 1957. It was a crisp, clear Saturday, the first day of deer-hunting season, and many, if not most, of the adult and teenaged males in the community of 642 were taking advantage of that event. Frank Worden, whose family owned the local hardware store on Main Street, was no exception. So his mother, fifty-eight-year-old widow Bernice Worden, took over for him in the store, as she often did when Frank had somewhere else he had to be.

Frank returned from hunting around 5
P.M
. and found the store locked and dark. He was surprised, asked around, and someone at the filling station told him it had been that way most of the day. When he let himself in to investigate, he found the store empty, but there was a pool of blood on the floor and a bloody trail led to the back door. Outside, the store truck was missing. Frank immediately called Sheriff
Art Schley, proclaiming his fear that his mother had been murdered.

Schley and his deputy Arnie Fritz rushed over to investigate, calling people from the state crime lab in Madison and other deputies and law officers to join them. When they arrived, they asked Frank if he suspected anyone.

“Ed Gein,” he replied.

When they asked him why, he said that Ed Gein had been asking his mother to go roller-skating with him, and that he had been in the day before, asking about the price of antifreeze, and that while there, he had asked Frank if he was going hunting today. Frank responded that he was and that he’d be out all day. When the lawmen checked Bernice Worden’s sales slips for the day, one was for antifreeze. This thin trail was the only evidence against Edward Gein, but it turned out to be all they needed to identify the UNSUB.

Gein wasn’t home when the investigators came and knocked. But in a woodshed attached to the house, illuminated by their flashlights since there was no electricity, they came upon one of the grisliest and most notable scenes in the history of American law enforcement—one that was to rock this Middle American community of the 1950s to its core. There in the shed they found Mrs. Worden’s headless body, hanging up-side down with her ankles lashed to a wooden cross-piece, slit open from vagina to sternum, dressed like a newly bagged dear for skinning.