Obsession (5 page)

Any sexual predator, before he’s been in the business for too long, has his own preferences and learns his own techniques. He knows how to locate and identify
—profile, if you will—the victim of preference, the victim of opportunity. He knows how to get inside that victim’s head and create the effect he’s looking for: the manipulation, the domination, the control of that individual, then the manipulation, domination, and control of the law enforcement personnel trying to neutralize him. So we’ve got to be able to go through the same process he does, only we’ve got to do it better. We’re probably already dominating him—that is, the crime or crimes he’s committed will be taking up most, if not all, of his conscious thought. He’ll be following the media, trying to monitor the police investigation, so we’ve already got his attention. We’ve got to figure out how to manipulate the way he responds, the actions he contemplates taking, with the idea of being able to predict, and ultimately control, his next move. He’s playing a game, and it’s the most important thing in the world to him. We’ve got to be able to play that game as seriously as he does.

When I talk about playing the game, I’m not just talking about me, my fellow FBI agents, and all the dedicated police officers, detectives, and prosecutors across the country and around the world. I’m talking about you, all of you, all of us, because we’re all potential prey for these guys, and we can all do something to avoid playing that role of victim, to fight back. Because it’s great to be able to catch them after they’ve perpetrated some outrage. It’s a whole lot better to be able to prevent them from doing it in the first place. But to have a shot at that, we have to understand.

This is a book about obsession: the obsession of the creatures who prey on the innocent and vulnerable, and the obsession they’ve engendered in people like me who’ve spent their careers trying to understand them and put them out of business. More specifically, it’s about interpersonal violent crime and what we can
do about it. And it’s also about the victims themselves, and their loved ones and survivors, as they pursue their own obsession for justice and closure and peace—as they struggle, quite literally, to get their lives back. And make no mistake, when violent predators go unchecked in our society, we all become victims.

As we did in both
Mindhunter
and
Journey into Darkness
, we’re going to relate some interesting stories and bring you into the heads of both the hunters and the hunted. But we want this book to be more than simply a collection of grim and fascinating case histories. While it is certainly that, we also want to show you how you can cut down the odds of victimization for yourself, your loved ones, your friends. And we also want to show that for all the bad people out there we need to neutralize, there are a lot of very good and very brave people, too, doing the work that needs to be done. We want to highlight those people and organizations whom we consider to be models for positive change, prevention, and healing. We are at war and they are our real comrades in arms.

I use the word
war
purposefully, and you might as well know right now where I’m coming from with all this. Violent, predatory crime is a scourge that has become intolerable. We either become victims of the criminal ourselves, or we become victims of fear for ourselves, our families, our children. Recently, there have been some national statistical declines in various types of violent crimes, and that’s certainly welcome. But I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’m not terribly optimistic that this represents an ongoing trend. It won’t take much—a decline in the economy, the next generation of crack babies coming of age without any realistic prospects or emotional support system—to make our society as violent as it’s ever been. A lot of experts think we
won’t even reach the peak until between 2005 and 2010, and I wonder if the same politicians who are taking bows for the current decrease will still be around to accept the blame for what some of us already see coming. In the meantime, there’s still plenty of violence and plenty of fear to go around.

If we’re going to attempt to come to grips with this issue, which consistently rivals the economy and personal financial anxieties on polls of Americans’ number one concern, it’s only going to be by declaring outright war on the problem.

While preparing to write this book, I happened to be watching on television the debate on the 1997 Juvenile Crime Bill. I’ve had to testify a number of times on Capitol Hill before various committees and sub-committees concerned with law enforcement, crime, and its effects, so I was interested in hearing how the debate would be framed and which arguments—I think I’ve heard them all by this point—would be brought to bear, and by whom.

Some of the debaters said we need to get tougher on crime, with more prisons and stiffer sentences. Others said that this was just political posturing—that we need to spend money on social programs, and get to “the root of the problem” by attacking the foundations of poverty and social inequality. Some said the answer lies in improved education or job prospects, and that is where we should be concentrating our resources. Still others argued that the answer was early intervention with potentially problem children—to get them out of their damaging home environments and into the therapy and exposure to the positive role models they needed.

As if any of these people has
the
answer.

I say the real answer should be obvious. If we’re serious about this, and not just spouting off easy, hackneyed political rhetoric, then what we need is a real
war on crime. And that means you throw everything you’ve got at the enemy.

None of these suggestions is, or should be, mutually exclusive. Of course we have to get to the root of the problems of poverty and inequality. Of course we have to identify potential problem children and individuals and attempt to intervene before it’s too late. Of course we have to give children the best educational opportunities we possibly can. Of course we have to offer better jobs and job training possibilities. And of course we need stiffer and more certain sentences so that the ones we haven’t been able to help aren’t free to continue their predatory ways. To hope that any one thing will work is like hoping that there will be a single cure for all cancer. It would be great if it happened, but none of the experts I know is counting on it. If you think by getting to the roots of poverty you’re going to eliminate the need for prisons, that’s just as naive as saying that any of us is going to feel appreciably safer or more secure if we give everyone who’s been convicted of a violent crime a fifty-year sentence his first time out. In the meantime, let’s see what we can do to feel more personally secure and in control.

When it comes time for sentencing, the defense attorney often asserts that despite what his client has just been convicted of doing, the defendant isn’t really a bad person; he’s got a good, kind, sensitive, caring, vulnerable side, too. That’s what they tried to show about Timothy McVeigh during the sentencing phase of the Oklahoma City bombing trial. They showed childhood photos and had friends tell touching and funny stories; jurors heard testimony about what a loyal soldier he was from Army buddies. They tried to explain that what happened was that Mr. McVeigh was so emotionally devastated over seeing women and
children burned to death in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, that he had to vent his fury at the federal government by blowing up one of its buildings and hundreds of occupants on the anniversary of the Waco disaster.

To all of this, I say, “Wrong!” or more pointedly, “Crap!” This good, kind, sensitive, caring, vulnerable fellow coldly planned and carried out an action that predictably stole 168 innocent lives. That’s what he was capable of. The other aspects of his life and personality become completely irrelevant. This is a theme we’ll be coming back to again and again, as I have throughout my career in law enforcement.

We are what we think.

We are what we do.

I will concede that virtually anyone who commits murder or some other horrible or violent act can be thought of as being “mentally ill.” Normal, mentally healthy people just don’t do those kinds of things. I do not believe it follows, however, that such men (and occasionally women) are therefore “insane” or unable to conform their actions to the laws of society or the dictates of common morality.

Just as I do not believe that there is any one simple fix for our crime problem, it is probably also simplistic and somewhat naive to suppose that there is one single, all-encompassing psychoneurological explanation for why people commit violent crimes, particularly when they commit those violent crimes repeatedly. One school of theorists bases its ideas on the belief that violent behavior is the result of a combination of organic injuries or abnormalities in the brain, together with an abusive childhood or family life. Another theory suggests that the organic brain problems seen in certain members of such an antisocial population may actually be the result of injuries caused by reckless or foolhardy behavior, that is, the behavior may have
caused the condition rather than the condition causing the behavior.

My own experience, beginning with the first organized study of serial killers and repeat violent offenders initiated back in the late 1970s when I was a young agent recently assigned to the FBI Academy in Quantico, makes me believe that virtually all of them come from abusive or otherwise severely dysfunctional backgrounds. But that doesn’t explain or excuse what they do.

After all I’ve seen, there’s no question in my mind that neglect or abuse of young children has the serious potential to produce some very psychologically messed-up people. I don’t think many mental health professionals would disagree with that assessment, and all of our hearts go out to these individuals.

What I have not seen established, through any combination of logic or data, is the connection that those psychologically messed-up people are therefore
compelled
to commit violent crime. They are portrayed to us as victims of bad treatment, turning our compassion against us. But once they aggress against others, they instantly forfeit whatever claims they had to victim status. Despite a bad background or any other supposedly mitigating or explanatory factors, they choose to commit violent, predatory crime.

While a bad background doesn’t make it any easier for a given antisocial individual to “go straight,” we see over and over again that siblings of sexual predators and other repeat offenders turn out respectable and law-abiding. As a reaction to their early environment, many even go into the type of social work, law enforcement, or political reform that may prevent others from suffering similar experiences.

Let me repeat that, because it is one of the key philosophical underpinnings of this book and, in fact, my entire approach to crime and punishment: With
the rare exception of the truly insane individual—and these types are generally caught pretty quickly as opposed to experienced and organized serial offenders—the predator, and particularly the sexual predator, commits violent acts because he
chooses
to do so. The operative word is always
choice
. That’s where I stand, and if you don’t agree with that, or aren’t open-minded enough to let me try to convince you in this book, you may as well stop reading right now.

Those who’ve read
Mindhunter
or
Journey into Darkness
will recall the name Edmund Emil Kemper III. Of all the serial killers from our original study, he’s probably the one who’s most interested and intrigued me with the combination of his intellect, sheer physical presence, the brutality of his crimes, and the apparently genuine insight into their cause and effect and his own twisted psyche. I interviewed him at the California State Medical Faculty at Vacaville. Kemper killed, mutilated, and in some cases beheaded a number of beautiful young women near the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz in the early 1970s. Prior to that, as a fourteen-year-old, he had shot his grandparents to death while visiting them on their farm and been committed to California’s Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane until he was twenty-one. The background of all of this is that Ed, who ended up an imposing, broad-chested man about six feet nine, had never gotten along with his mother, Clarnell, who had raised him after she and his father, Edmund Jr., had separated when Ed and his two sisters were young. Among other belittling cruelties, once the sensitive Ed reached puberty and began to grow dramatically tall, Clarnell banished him to a makeshift basement bedroom, fearing he might try to molest his sisters. It’s true that Ed already had displayed some alarmingly weird behavior, including dismembering two family cats and engaging in death-ritual games
with his sister Susan. It’s also true that Clarnell—who by the time of Ed’s murderous reign of terror had already left husband number three and was working as a secretary at U.C., Santa Cruz—showed considerably more interest in and empathy for students she met casually in her job than she did for her own son. And it’s further true, as I’ve admitted before, that of all the serial killers and violent offenders I’ve had occasion to study in my career, I probably “liked” Ed the best and empathized with him more than the others because of his superior intellect, insight, and willingness to confront the monsters within him.

Having said all that, there is no doubt in my mind that Edmund Kemper picked up and killed the six young women in and around Santa Cruz as an attempt—horribly misguided though it may have been—to get back at his mother. This is certainly authenticated by the fact that he buried the head of at least one of his victims in the yard outside Clarnell’s window because she’d always wanted people “to look up to her.” Ed eventually did get up the nerve to bludgeon her to death in her bed, cut off her head, and feed her larynx down the garbage disposal because he was tired of the way “she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.” Kemper told me that he had often crept into his mother’s bedroom as she slept and fantasized about stabbing her with a knife or beating her to death with a hammer.