The Serial Killer Files (60 page)

Both Dennis Nilsen—the so-called British Jeffrey Dahmer—and the cannibalistic German lust-murderer Joachim Kroll (responsible for fourteen between 1959 and 1976) made the mistake of flushing human body parts down the toilet, a method of disposal that led to their arrest when the plumbing in their respective apartment buildings became clogged with flesh and viscera, bringing their atrocities to light.

Were it not for the unfortunate tendency of corpses to rot, the necrophiliac Nilsen would undoubtedly have saved the dead bodies of his victims forever, since he enjoyed keeping them around the house for companionship. The same was true of Jeffrey Dahmer, who did, in fact, preserve various parts of the young men he killed. Another notorious Wisconsin necrophile, the ghoul Ed Gein, was the ultimate example of a madman who—instead of getting rid of his cadavers as quickly as possible—took them home to play with.

A few serial killers have resorted to such bizarre methods of disposal that they have become infamous less for the murders they committed than for the way they got rid of the bodies. One of the most outlandish of these psychopaths was Joe Ball.

A sullen, beer-bellied reprobate rumored to have sprung from a family of respectable ranchers, Ball took to bootlegging in the 1920s, earning enough money to open his own drinking establishment once Prohibition was repealed. His tavern—a rowdy, roadside joint called the Sociable Inn, situated on US

Highway 181 south of San Antonio—became locally famous for an offbeat feature Ball installed out back: a large cement pond stocked with five, fully grown alligators whose frenzied feedings became a nightly attraction for Joe’s hard-bitten regulars, particularly when he tossed in a live cat or dog.

Besides the reptile shows, Ball’s place was known for its high turnover of waitresses, who seemed to come and go with surprising regularity. In 1937, rumors began to circulate that Joe was keeping his gators fat and happy with more than horsemeat and stray animals. One local laborer claimed that, while passing the property on horseback one moonlit night, he had seen Ball dumping what appeared to be human limbs into the pond. Relatives of several young women who had worked for Ball—and subsequently disappeared without a trace—began pressuring authorities to launch an investigation.

Checking into the case, Texas Rangers discovered that at least a dozen of his former waitresses, along with two of his ex-wives, had gone missing. When a pair of Rangers showed up at the Sociable Inn on the night of September 24, 1938, the proprietor—realizing that the jig was up—casually stepped to the cash register, rang up “No Sale,” then, when the register drawer sprang open, pulled out an automatic

pistol and shot himself in the head.

Disposal by fire: an 1842 engraving showing the incineration of a victim’s dismembered remains The horrific truth was confirmed when his janitor, Clifford Wheeler, confessed that he had been coerced into helping Ball dispose of dismembered women—some in the desert, others in the alligator pond.

Wheeler was sent to jail as an accomplice; the gators ended up in the San Antonio zoo.

A more recent case of a serial sex-murderer who reportedly relied on voracious creatures to dispose of his victims is that of Robert Pickton, alleged to be the most savage psycho-killer in Canadian history. In November 2002, authorities announced that the remains of eighteen missing women—drug-addicted prostitutes from the skid row section of Vancouver—had been uncovered on a pig farm owned by Pickton. He is suspected of as many as sixty-three murders.

“The sufferings of the women can only be imagined,” the New York Times reported shortly after Pickton’s arrest. “Not one body has been found intact, and a wood chipper and Mr. Pickton’s pigs are believed to have devoured much of the evidence, leaving behind mostly microscopic traces of DNA.”

Recommended Reading

Brian Lane, The Butchers: A Casebook of Macabre Crimes and Forensic Detection (1998) HOW IT ENDS

In popular culture, even the most fiendishly cunning serial killer can’t elude the forces of law and order forever. Heroic profilers create uncannily accurate psychological portraits of their quarry that lead straight to the killer’s lair. Crime scene investigators employ a dazzling array of high-tech tools to identify a perpetrator from the merest, microscopic traces of evidence. FBI field agents defeat their diabolical foes by solving elaborate puzzles that would tax the deductive genius of Sherlock Holmes.

Of course, the reason people turn to movies, TV shows, and best-selling thrillers is precisely because these works depict a world far tidier and more reassuring than the one we actually inhabit. In reality, stopping serial killers is a grueling and distinctly unglamorous business, owing more to sheer accident, dumb luck, criminal incompetence, and old-fashioned dogged detective work than to the kind of forensic razzle-dazzle that makes for an exciting movie or suspense novel. And then, of course, there is another sobering difference between make-believe and fact.

In real life, the bad guy sometimes gets away with murder.

In the world of pop entertainment, criminal profilers are generally portrayed as the modern-day descendants of Sherlock Holmes: investigative prodigies whose uncanny powers of observation, deduction, and intuition inevitably lead to the killer’s arrest. This glamorized view of profiling has been encouraged by some of its more celebrated practitioners. In a pioneering 1986 article on the subject,

“Criminal Profiling from Crime Scene Analysis,” John Douglas and Robert Ressler—two of the founding members of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit—liken the profiler to Agatha Christie’s famed fictional detective, Hercule Poirot. “The ability of Hercule Poirot to solve a crime by describing the perpetrator is a skill shared by the expert investigative profiler,” they proclaim. “Evidence speaks its own language of patterns and sequences that can reveal the offender’s behavioral characteristics. Like Poirot, the profiler can say, ‘I know who he must be.’ ”

Such boasts have created an inevitable backlash among other law enforcement types, who scoff at the notion that the profiler is some kind of forensic genius—part scientist, part psychic—who can deduce the identity of an “unsub” (police slang for “unknown subject”) by analyzing the evidence gathered from a crime scene. Some skeptics dismiss the usefulness of profiling altogether, claiming that, by itself, it has never led to the solution of a crime and that it has actively hampered some investigations.

Certainly, the record of profilers has been spotty. Between September 2001 and May 2003—to cite just one example—five women, all of them white, were raped and killed in and around Baton Rouge by a sex-slayer dubbed the “Louisiana Slasher.” Because statistics show that the majority of serial killers choose victims of their own race, profilers initially described the “unsub” as a white male, a description that in retrospect seemed totally wrong when the prime suspect—linked to the murders by DNA evidence

—turned out to be Derrick Todd Lee, a thirty-four-year-old African-American.

Even Douglas and Ressler have backtracked from some of their more extravagant claims. In the very same article in which they compare themselves to real-life Poirots, they subsequently modify the claim, offering a more modest assessment of what profiling can accomplish: “Profiling does not provide the specific identity of the offender. Rather, it indicates the kind of individual most likely to have committed a crime.”

In this more limited sense—as a tool for narrowing the field of suspects, for helping police focus on certain avenues of investigation—profiling has often proved useful. And occasionally it has produced startlingly accurate results.

Origins

Experts agree that the earliest documented instance of the practice we now know as profiling occurred during the Jack the Ripper case. Following the Ripper’s final and most appalling murder—the butchery of twenty-five-year-old Mary Jane Kelly on November 9, 1888—a postmortem was carried out by several physicians, including police surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond. Afterward, Bond assembled his findings into a report that (as crime writer Martin Fido puts it) took “the form of primitive deductive offender profile”—one that can be favorably compared to any “drawn up by the best and most experienced criminal profilers in the world today”:

The murderer must have been a man of physical strength and of great coolness and daring. There is no evidence that he had an accomplice. He must in my opinion be a man subject to periodic attacks of Homicidal and erotic mania. The character of the mutilations indicate that the man may be in a condition, sexually, that may be called satyriasis. It is of course possible that the Homicidal impulse may have developed from a revengeful or brooding condition of the mind, or that Religious Mania may have been the original disease, but I do not think either hypothesis is likely. The murderer in external appearance is quite likely to be a quiet inoffensive looking man probably middle-aged and neatly and respectably dressed. I think he must be in the habit of wearing a cloak or overcoat or he could hardly have escaped notice in the streets if the blood on his hands or clothes were visible.

Assuming the murderer to be such a person as I have just described he would probably be solitary or eccentric in his habits, also he is most likely to be a man without regular occupation, but with some small income or pension. He is possibly living among respectable people who have some knowledge of his character and habits and who may have grounds for suspicion that he is not quite right in his mind at times. Such persons would probably be unwilling to communicate suspicions to the Police for fear or trouble or notoriety; whereas if there were a prospect of reward it might overcome their scruples.

Fifty years later, Dr. J. Paul de River of Los Angeles created another early criminal profile. On Saturday June 26, 1937, three little girls from Inglewood—six-year-old Madeline Everett, her nine-year-old sister Melba Marie, and their neighbor, eight-year-old Jeanette Stephens—went off to play in a local park and never came home. Two days later, their bodies—raped, strangled, and horribly mutilated—were found in a nearby ravine.

The crimes—dubbed the “Babes of Inglewood Murders” by the press—sent shock waves through the city and set off a massive police manhunt. When the investigation hit a dead end, Captain James Doyle of the LAPD decided to consult Dr. de River, a psychiatrist he had previously worked with. After viewing the corpses of the children and the physical evidence at the crime scene, de River wrote up this report for the district attorney’s office:

Look for one man, probably in his twenties, a pedophile who might have been arrested before for annoying children. He is a sadist with a superabundance of curiosity. He is very meticulous and probably now remorseful, as most sadists are very apt to be masochistic after expressing sadism. The slayer may have a religious streak and even become prayerful. Moreover, he is a spectacular type and has done this thing, not on a sudden impulse, but as a deliberately planned affair. I am of the opinion that he had obtained the confidence of these little girls. I believe they knew the man and trusted him.

There is some question as to how much this protoprofile actually contributed to the arrest of the perpetrator, a school crossing guard named Albert Dyer who was eventually hanged for the atrocities.

De River got a few things wrong: Dyer was in his thirties, not his twenties, and had been previously arrested only for vagrancy, not child molestation. Still, de River’s speculations were remarkably astute.

In his confession, Dyer revealed that the crime was carefully planned, that he had used his position as a crossing guard to win the trust of the girls, and that he was overcome with remorse after killing them and had prayed over their dead bodies.

Another pioneering profiler was Harvard psychiatrist Walter Langer. In 1943, Dr. Langer was asked by the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) to construct a psychological portrait of Adolf Hitler. Langer’s report not only offered a number of intriguing speculations about the Führer’s sexuality and overall psychopathology but correctly predicted that he would become increasingly unstable as Germany suffered more and more defeats and would commit suicide rather than face capture.

It was a New York psychiatrist named James A. Brussel, however, who is universally regarded as the direct forerunner of the modern profiler.

Between 1940 and 1956 (with a temporary “truce” during the war years, declared as an act of personal

“patriotism”), an unknown madman planted several dozen pipe bombs around Manhattan: in public buildings, movie theaters, railway stations, and the facilities of the Con Edison utilities company. Most of these devices failed to detonate, though a few went off, severely injuring several people. The bombs were accompanied by anonymous notes, composed of cut-and-pasted letters from various publications, in which the writer—who identified himself only by the initials “F. P.”—ranted at and swore vengeance on Con Ed.

After years of fruitless search for the “Mad Bomber”—as the tabloids dubbed him—investigators decided to consult Dr. Brussel, Assistant Commissioner of Mental Hygiene for the State of New York.

After reviewing all the evidence, Brussel suggested that police focus their search on a paranoid, middle-aged, Roman Catholic bachelor of medium build and Eastern European descent who lived with a brother or sister in a Connecticut city, hated his father, and bore a grudge against Con Ed. He was also likely to be meticulous in his personal habits.

“When you find him,” the report famously concluded, “chances are he’ll be wearing a double-breasted suit. Buttoned.”

George “The Mad Bomber” Metesky—complete with buttoned double-breasted suit—under arrest (Corbis)

Not long afterward, thanks partly to Brussel’s profile, police tracked down the bomber, a disgruntled former Con Ed employee named George Metesky, who had suffered a minor on-the-job injury in 1931

and whose claim for permanent disability payment had been rejected. Just as Brussel had predicted, Metesky (whose cryptic signature, “F. P.” stood for “Fair Play”), was a fifty-four-year-old bachelor of Polish descent who lived with two older sisters in Waterbury, Connecticut. He was a regular churchgoer, had not gotten along with his father, and suffered from acute paranoia. Before being led away by police, he changed into a carefully pressed pin-striped, double-breasted suit, which he made sure to button before leaving the house.