Obsession (7 page)

The predominant view in Atlanta was that some sort of Ku Klux Klan—type conspiracy was responsible for the deaths of the children, that this was an attempt at genocide against the black race. As compelling as
this argument was on its face—after all, the victims were all black, and at that time, serial killers were almost exclusively white—when Roy and I really got into it, neither one of us could buy it.

First of all, the areas in which the children disappeared were overwhelmingly black. A white individual or group really would have stood out and could not have avoided notice. Yet there were no witness accounts involving white subjects. More to the point, a white supremacist group would not have operated anonymously, as this killer was doing. If a hate group such as the Klan commits a violent offense such as a lynching or other racial murder, it is supposed to be a highly symbolic act, intended to make a public statement and create an atmosphere of fear and hysteria among its intended targets. At the very least, we would expect some communication from such a group to come in to the local media taking credit for the act, just as you see after most terrorist bombings and the like, and just as we saw from the Search and Destroyer. As I said, you have to determine the nature of the obsession to determine the personality of the offender. And absent this kind of communication, Roy and I had to conclude that whoever was killing these young children, mostly boys, was doing so for other reasons.

So once we compiled our profile, we felt we were looking for a black male in his twenties who was sexually attracted to these young victims and would use some kind of ruse or come-on involving money to get them to go with him. The next question was, how would he tell us what his reasons were?

The break came on something of a fluke, a red herring, if you will. But there’s a lesson in that, too, which is that no detail of a case can either be excluded out-right or taken at face value. Everything must be evaluated in the larger context of the investigation.

A case generating as much media attention as the Atlanta Child Murders is bound to get more than its share of false leads and information. This, of course, is one of the reasons it’s necessary to withhold certain details of the crimes and crime scenes. At one point, police in the small town of Conyers, Georgia, about twenty miles from Atlanta, got a call from a man, obviously white and a real redneck type, purporting to be the killer and promising to “kill more of these nigger kids.” He specified a particular location along Sigmon Road where he said police would find the next body.

As soon as I heard the tape of this call, I was sure this was an impostor, a lowlife satisfying his own racial hatred by anonymously claiming credit for a series of crimes he did not commit. But knowing how the press was following the case, I thought it would be an excellent opportunity to test a theory.

I suggested that the police make the call public and make a great display out of looking for the body, but on the
opposite
side of the street from where he told them to look. I figured the impostor would be watching, and if police got lucky, they might be able to grab him right there. If not, he should at least call again and tell the police what idiots they are, at which point they’ll have a trap and trace ready to nab this guy. And that was exactly what happened. They got him right in his own house. And I thought that would be that.

But the press had covered the Sigmon Road episode heavily, and shortly thereafter, another body
did
show up there, that of fifteen-year-old Terry Pue. Only this body showed up where the police were looking, not the side of the street the impostor had specified, which signified that our real guy was closely following the press and now wanted to show that he was superior to everyone—that he could manipulate, dominate, and
control the police and press just as he had his young victims. That was the message he was giving us: he and the police were communicating with each other through the media.

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place one murder later, when twelve-year-old Patrick Baltazar’s body was found along Buford Highway, strangled as Terry Pue’s had been. As part of the official response, someone in the medical examiner’s office announced that hair and fibers found on Patrick’s body matched those found on five of the previous victims.

Then I knew: the next body is going to turn up in the Chattahoochee River, because he knows the hair and fiber evidence will be washed away by the water and he can once again prove how superior he is to all of us law enforcement jerks. And that, essentially, is what happened. Three more bodies showed up in the river. It took a while to get organized with all of the federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies involved, but Atlanta police staked out several bridges across the Chattahoochee. Nothing happened for some time, but around two-thirty in the morning on the last scheduled day of the surveillance operation, a police officer staking out the Jackson Parkway Bridge heard a splash in the water after seeing a car drive across the bridge and stop in the middle. The car turned and came back across the bridge, at which time another officer stopped it.

The driver of the car was Wayne Bertram Williams, a black male in his twenties who fit the profile perfectly. When he was arrested, hair and fiber evidence found at his house matched those of twelve of the young victims—the same twelve we had linked behaviorally to a single killer. Wayne Williams is currently serving a life sentence for murder of two of the victims.

When the UNSUB doesn’t communicate with us either
directly or indirectly, we have to speculate, based on our research and past experience. But unless or until we find him, we can’t be sure.

The case that almost killed me was the Green River Murders, whose tally has now probably topped sixty. I left that investigation early, not because I wanted to, but because I had no choice. As readers of
Mindhunter
will recall, I collapsed in my Seattle hotel room in December of 1983 while working on the case. I was a thirty-eight-year-old victim of viral encephalitis, brought on by the tremendous stress of not only that investigation, but the 150-odd other active cases that obsessed me at the same time. I would have died in that hotel room if the two special agents I had brought along, Blaine McIlwain and Ron Walker, hadn’t gotten worried when they didn’t see me and broken down the door to find me. I lingered in a coma for five days, not expected to recover.

But before that, when the bodies of six young women had ended up in or near the Green River, I had done a profile of the killer. Most, if not all, of the early victims had been transients or prostitutes who gravitated to the Seattle-Tacoma corridor. A multi-agency and jurisdictional task force had been formed, and the special agent in charge (or SAC as we say in the Bureau) of the Seattle Field Office came to Quantico with a package of materials on the case. As I had done with many other cases, I went up to the top floor of the library to analyze and think about the cases.

From the evidence presented to me, the UNSUB I visualized in this case was a white male in his twenties. He’d be unemployed or underemployed in some sort of blue-collar job. It was clear that he was an out-doorsman, a hunter, fisherman, or hiker who was familiar with the Green River area and knew where he was unlikely to be found. He could have thrown them off a bridge, but he took the time to carry them down
to the water, to locations where it would be more difficult to find them.

Among the many details in the profile and the many factors I used in compiling it, one of the most important was the way he’d disposed of the bodies. That is, they were merely dumped, with no particular staging, no ritualistic binding or bags over the head, and no effort at respect, such as covering the body in a dignified way, as we do see with some serial offenders. What this told me was that the UNSUB had no remorse for what he was doing. In fact, I thought he was trying to humiliate the victims as he must have felt humiliated by other women in the past. He saw himself, I felt, as an avenging angel of sorts, whose duty and privilege it was to punish women for their misdeeds.

Both the Green River Killer and the Atlanta Child Murderer disposed of bodies by putting them in the river, where the water would wash away the evidence. Why, then, do I say that the Green River Killer was out to punish his victims (not specifically by inflicting pain for its own sake as a sexual sadist would, but because he felt they deserved punishment for their sins), while the killer in Atlanta had a homosexual attraction to his? There are a number of reasons, which get to the subtlety of profiling and why the process has never been effectively reproduced by computer. First, while the UNSUB may very well have been following the media coverage, there was no evidence he was playing to it or playing off of it. He sought no recognition, but at the same time, the number of cases and the level of violence of the crimes continued to escalate.

Then there is the actual selection of victims—the victimology. In Atlanta, where the victims were young black boys, we concluded that the UNSUB was a black male, which implied a certain type of relationship that we could build on. In Green River, the victims were mainly prostitutes.

Prostitutes are favorite victims of many serial killers for several reasons. First and most basic, the very nature of their work and clientele makes them extremely approachable and vulnerable. They make their living by being picked up. Second, many men, with severe self-image problems of their own, consider them “bad” or defiled or even evil, which they take as an excuse to abuse them. In several instances at Green River, the nude bodies of the victims were found with small rocks stuffed into their vaginas. I have never seen this type of thing done for sexual thrills or for any reason other than to degrade the victim.

So in his own way, I felt, the Green River Killer had told us about his obsession. But in this case, merely understanding it wasn’t enough.

For one thing, this profile was general enough that it could reasonably fit a lot of men who might come into contact with the investigators. Except for the indication of familiarity with the region, these were not terribly sophisticated crimes with a unique or specialized signature. The most important use for the profile in a case like this was to structure the proactive techniques that might bring the UNSUB out into the open.

In fact, as the case dragged on and the body count rose. I became increasingly convinced that we were dealing with more than one offender. There were enough variations in location, condition of bodies, small details of the dump site, or the modus operandi, that I grouped the killings around two, then three killers. All would fit the same general profile, and all would be delivering the same sort of message.

Like the series related in the previous chapter, the Green River killings remain unsolved. For that reason, as well as the nearly deadly role the case played in my own life, it has continued to obsess me and probably always will. Someone or more likely several predators are still out there hunting.

And so are we.

I
magine you’re an eleven-year-old girl, drifting off to sleep. Your little sister has climbed into your bed and is already asleep as you begin to slumber. You fall into the deep, secure sleep that only comes at this age: you’re old enough not to worry about monsters in the closet anymore, but still young enough to be comfortably surrounded by your favorite stuffed animals. If they’re not back yet, your parents should be home soon from their party. Your grandmother has fallen asleep on the couch in the living room watching TV.

Suddenly, you’re awakened by something or someone touching you. You think it’s your mother, coming to kiss you goodnight, but it’s not. It’s a strange man, who growls at you to take off your panties. You’re still half-asleep, confused.
Who is he? Why is he here?
So he rips your panties off, warning that if you don’t start doing what he says right away, he’ll punch you hard in the face.

He raises up your nightie. He’s kissing you and touching you in places and ways that hurt, but you can’t get him off you, and when you beg him to stop, he tells you to shut up or he’ll take you outside and hurt you more, or maybe kill your grandmother. All
the while, your little sister remains innocently and obliviously asleep.
Please God she stays that way, or maybe he’ll hurt her, too.
When he’s done, he gives you a towel to clean yourself up. He says if you tell anyone, he’ll come back for you and he’ll do even worse things to you.

You believe him; you know he’s serious. And you are never the same again.

This sounds like something you’d expect to hear about happening in a city or suburb somewhere in the United States. In fact, it’s based on an actual rape that took place in New Zealand. More shocking even than the details of this particular crime is the fact that it was just one of a series of similar assaults on young girls and women that took place over more than a decade. The offender was popularly known as the South Auckland Rapist, named for the area he terrorized from the early 1980s to 1995.

This serial rapist originally came to my attention in the fall of 1994, after two special agents in the Investigative Support Unit, Steve Mardigian and Tom Salp, came back from a conference in Australia where they did a presentation on criminal profiling. Just about whenever we’re on the road for teaching or a conference, or a consultation with a local police department or task force, investigators in the area are likely to get in touch with us and ask to meet with us about their difficult, unsolved and/or active cases. Whenever we can, we try to help out.

Steve and Tom were scheduled to pass through Auckland as they traveled to Adelaide for the conference. The head of the serial rape investigation known as Operation Park—named after Manurewa district’s Mountfort Park, centrally located to the rapes—was Detective Inspector John Manning. When he learned the agents would be in the area, he met with them
and brought scads of material on all the cases they believed might be linked, as well as the investigation to date.