Obsession (6 page)

Directly after he did kill her, he called her friend Sally Hallett over for a “surprise” dinner, whereupon he clubbed and strangled and decapitated her, placed her headless body in his bed, then went to sleep in his mother’s bed before setting out on a multistate car journey that ultimately ended when he contacted police from a Colorado phone booth and told them to come and get him. He’d gotten it out of his system and so was ready to call it quits. If I look into my
own psyche, perhaps that’s the reason for my rapport with Kemper—he stopped on his own.

Now, as much as I “understand” why Ed did what he did, this certainly does not imply that I condone or accept it as inevitable. More to the point, I do not believe, and find no evidence or suggestion, that he
had
to kill these women—that, because of his background, upbringing, and belief structure, he was
compelled
to kill them. Quite the contrary; he was organized and well-controlled. Not only did he not stage any of his crimes while a uniformed police officer was watching—a sure sign of compulsion that no serial killer in my experience or knowledge has ever displayed—he managed to drive safely through a manned guard post where cars were being examined while he had the body of one of his victims, posed as a sleeping girlfriend, in the seat beside him. He indicated to me how he took personal satisfaction in showing up at one of his parole-mandated psychiatric interviews with the severed head of fifteen-year-old Aiko Koo in the trunk of his car.

Would Ed Kemper have done the horrible things he did had he not had the bad background and family trauma? Maybe not. Does that excuse his crimes? Absolutely not, and I suspect that the bright and insightful Kemper, who expects to spend the rest of his life in confinement, would agree with that.

So let’s get this straight and state it plainly: It is my belief, based on several decades of experience, study, and analysis, that the overwhelming majority of repeat sexual predators do what they do because they want to, because it gives them a satisfaction they do not achieve in any other aspect of their lives, and because it makes them feel good, regardless of the consequences to others. In that respect, the crime represents the ultimate in selfishness; the predator doesn’t care what happens to his victim as long as he gets what he
wants. In fact, exercising this manipulation, domination, and control—and the infliction of pain and death are for him their ultimate expressions—are the critical factors in making him feel complete and fully alive. Ed Kemper
chose
to kill those women because, for whatever reason, it fulfilled something in himself.

Are serial killers and other sexual predators mentally ill?

You could say so; it’s largely a matter of definition. Certainly they’re abnormal. Certainly what they do is “sick.” Certainly they have a severe character disorder or defect. Certainly anyone who gets his pleasure from rape and torture and death has some fairly pronounced psychological problems. But “insanity” is a matter of definition, too. And what we rely on to test for insanity today, whether it’s the traditional knowledge of the difference between right and wrong as set forth by the British M’Naghten Rule of 1843, or the more modern American Law Institute Model Penal Code Test, we’re still talking about the ability to control impulses and appreciate the consequences of your actions. A lot of people don’t seem to grasp the concept that you can have mental or emotional problems—even severe ones—and still be able to distinguish right from wrong and conform your behavior accordingly. In other words,
you don’t have to commit violent crime
. If you commit violent crime, in virtually all cases, you do so by choice, just as any of us decide what to eat, to seek a job, to form relationships, whatever—all by choice.

A predator can be obsessed with killing, just as I can be obsessed with hunting him down. But he isn’t forced to kill any more than I am forced to pursue him.

Yes, there are people who commit violent crimes because they are literally crazy, even delusional, but there aren’t that many, and virtually none is a serial
killer or rapist. The true crazies are not difficult to catch.

By the same token, you’ll often see a claim of multiple personality disorder, or MPD, surface postarrest. William Heirens didn’t kill those women; George Murman, who resided inside him, did. No one wants to take responsibility for what he’s done: it’s another personality that’s taken over my good personality. But in every serial murder case I’ve consulted on in which MPD was offered as a defense, the claim was completely unfounded. First, the condition is extremely rare. Second, it begins in early childhood, generally as a defense mechanism against severe sexual or physical abuse, so there should be ample verification of the disorder’s manifestations in the subject long before the commission of crime. Third, the great majority of MPD sufferers are women. And fourth, there is no psychiatric literature I know of which suggests that multiple personality disorder compels, or even predisposes, one to violence. In other words, even if you could convince me that your client suffered from MPD, that would be an incidental finding, and not the explanation for why he killed or raped.

David Berkowitz, the self-proclaimed “Son of Sam” who terrorized New York City from the summer of 1976 until he was caught as the result of a routine license-plate check during the summer of 1977, claimed in publicized letters and statements that he killed six young men and women with his .44-caliber handgun as they sat in their cars because his neighbor’s three-thousand-year-old dog had commanded him to do so. Admittedly, many people commit violent crimes for reasons unfathomable to the rest of us, but that one got my bullshit detector going big time. Nothing else in Berkowitz’s behavior suggested he was taking his marching orders from a dog. He had served in the Army and held a job as a postal employee in New
York City. He made a trip to Texas during which he purchased a Charter Arms .44 Bulldog, a powerful weapon. He went out into the city dumps and practiced his shooting until he became reasonably proficient. And then he went out on the streets nightly, hunting for his victims of preference: young couples parked in cars on makeshift lovers’ lanes, each time approaching the woman’s side of the car first and firing at her.

A check of his background revealed that he had been put up for adoption as a baby but did not learn of this until he served in the military. As a child and young man he set more than two thousand fires in the Brooklyn-Queens area—some in trash cans, some in abandoned buildings—which he documented with obsessional diary entries, and would masturbate while watching the flames and the firefighters. Bringing all these people out because of something he had done was probably the only time he felt powerful and potent.

He had his first sexual encounter with a woman while serving as a soldier in Korea—with a prostitute who gave him gonorrhea. When he left the Army, he went back to New York and located his biological mother and sister in Long Beach, Long Island (as it happens, not far from where I grew up). When he finally contacted them, he was shocked and distressed to learn that they wanted nothing to do with him. It was then that his resentment and anger against women transformed into an obsession with men and women who weren’t lonely and inadequate as he was, and that was when he procured the weapon that made him feel powerful and virile.

I interviewed Berkowitz in Attica State Prison when a few of my colleagues and I were conducting what became the first organized behavioral study of violent and multiple offenders. Out of this study came the
book
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives
, which we co-authored with Professor Ann W. Burgess of the University of Pennsylvania. More important was an approach to criminal profiling and investigative analysis that, for the first time, was based on a correlation between evidence and indicators found in and around the crime and what would be going on inside the criminal’s mind at the time. Berkowitz had originally pleaded guilty and been sentenced to multiple twenty-five-years-to-life terms, but had since denied his guilt for a variety of reasons, his supposed insanity being one of them.

It will come as no surprise that it is in the nature of repeat criminals to lie as a matter of course, and the ones we interviewed, particularly the more “successful” of them, were notorious manipulators of everyone within their orbit. We had learned that if we were to get anything accurate and useful from the interviews and not merely provide a self-serving forum or entertaining diversion for a bored long-termer, we had to be totally prepared, and that meant knowing the case and the crimes at least as well as the offender himself did. This often meant slogging through hours of verbal sparring before the subject realized he couldn’t con us the way he may have done with psychiatrists, the press, or even his own attorneys. This was particularly true of insanity claims.

During a long and rambling interview, Berkowitz admitted to me that while roaming the streets on the hunt, if he couldn’t find a victim of opportunity that suited his preference, he would return to the site of one of his previous kills, masturbate, and relive the moment of triumph. It was the same as the Search and Destroyer’s jerking off over the crime-scene photos I was sure he had.

And as soon as I heard this from David, I knew that his dog story was crap. Like the UNSUB described in
the previous chapter and so many other sexual predators, he killed because it made him feel good. It let him possess women in death in a way he felt totally incapable of doing in life. His manipulation, domination, and control of his victims didn’t require any verbal interchange or conversation, it didn’t require bodily contact, it didn’t require the taking of souvenirs such as jewelry or underwear. But it was manipulation, domination, and control just as clearly as if the crimes had had those more common elements.

When we got around to the subject of motive, Berkowitz explained to me how he had been receiving telepathic orders to kill from a three-thousand-year-old demon residing in this black Labrador retriever named Harvey, which belonged to his neighbor Sam Carr. Together with the letters full of obscure symbolism, this immediately suggested paranoid schizophrenia to much of the psychiatric community.

“Hey, David, knock off the bullshit,” I said to him. “The dog had nothing to do with it.”

He laughed and owned up to the hoax. It was just one more example of manipulation, domination, and control. Like Ed Kemper, the guy wasn’t normal, but he knew and understood what he was doing and kept doing it.

And this is one of several reasons why, much as I’d like to believe differently, I find the hope of rehabilitation for most of these people dim to nonexistent. As we will see throughout this book, unlike burglars or bank robbers or even drug dealers, who do not necessarily
enjoy
what they do for a living—who merely want the money it brings them—sexual predators and child molesters do enjoy their crimes; in fact, many of them do not even consider them crimes. They don’t want to change.

Dr. Stanton E. Samenow, the Washington, D.C.—area clinical psychologist who has probably done as
much as anyone to explore, understand, and try to alter the thinking of habitual lawbreakers, challenges the very notion of rehabilitation. “Rehabilitation as it has been practiced cannot possibly be effective,” he writes in his penetrating book,
Inside the Criminal Mind
, “because it is based on a total misconception. To rehabilitate is to restore to a former constructive capacity or condition.
There is nothing to which to rehabilitate a criminal.
There is no earlier condition of being responsible to which to restore him.”

I’m afraid my own research and experience, as well as that of my colleagues, leads me to concur wholeheartedly with Dr. Samenow’s courageous observation.

In the Investigative Support Unit at Quantico, in our work with local police, we were always trying to understand the nature of the obsession of the unknown predator.

Sometimes he communicated to us directly, as in the Search and Destroyer case, telling us just why he was doing it and how he wanted to be perceived.

Sometimes he enlightened us indirectly, giving us the clues to figure it out, as happened in Atlanta.

And sometimes, we were never sure. Those were the toughest and most agonizing cases of all. One of them nearly killed me. More about that in a moment.

But first, by the winter of 1981, Atlanta, Georgia, was gripped by a terror that had been building for a year and a half, ever since a thirteen-year-old boy named Alfred Evans had gone missing and then turned up dead three days later, in a wooded area on the west side of the city. While searching the site, police discovered another body, partially decomposed, this one belonging to fourteen-year-old Edward Smith, who had disappeared four days before Alfred. Both boys were black. Alfred had been strangled, Edward shot. By the time I got involved, there were sixteen
cases, all black children, and as far as anyone could tell, the killer or killers were still active.

At that time, the FBI’s profiling program was still new. It had its home at the FBI Academy in Quantico because that’s where it had begun, informally at first under Behavioral Science instructors Howard Teten and Dick Ault, then gradually with more formality after the program of prison interviews with serial offenders began. I was still the only full-time profiler, and we were taken with varying degrees of seri-ousness, not only by the country’s law enforcement agencies but within the Bureau as well. There’s no question that something considered such touchy-feely voodoo could not have surfaced under the ironfisted reign of J. Edgar Hoover. We had no real operational side, so as the requests for assistance kept coming in and the caseload began to pile up, I was backed up by some of the instructors from the Behavioral Science Unit. As expert as any in the subject of rape and interpersonal violence—not just in the Bureau but the entire world of law enforcement—is Robert “Roy” Hazelwood. Now retired after a distinguished career, Roy is active nationally as a consultant.

He and I went down to Atlanta to try to figure out if the cases were actually related and what type of person or persons was responsible for the murders. To do this, we studied the victimology by going through each file and talking to as many family members and people who knew each victim as we could, visiting each neighborhood. Was there a common trait among the dead children? Then we had the Atlanta police take us to each of the body dump sites so we could start seeing things from the killer’s point of view.