We Are the Cops (19 page)

So what do we do? We can’t check him out of the jail every day, because somebody would eventually notice that. We really had to take him some place where nobody would see us, so we figured that the best place would be to just put him in our office. He agreed to do it, so we took him out of the jail, Friday the 13th June, I think. 2003. We had him in our office for a hundred and eighty-eight days.

So we had this building, we were on the lower floor of it and we had a room that was about ten-by-ten, I think. We fixed it so he couldn’t escape. Basically they taped up all the outlets and we put a mattress on the floor and gave him a sleeping bag. Then we put a table in the doorway - a round table. We stuffed it into the doorway so he could sit at the table and he could do anything that he wanted - writing or stuff - and outside the doorway there were always three people standing there. We didn’t allow guns in there so all three of those guys had tasers, in case he tried anything. He
was very mellow and I don’t think he would ever have tried to escape. We rigged up a shower in the bathroom and we would talk to him every day. We had a room set up with video and audio and we’d go in and interview him.

Then about once a week, we’d get up really early and go out in this caravan of cars and he would take us to the dump sites, where he left the victims, one after another. Most of them we already knew about but it was up to him to show us and prove to us that he knew where they were. As it turned out, it was one of the few things that he could do to establish that he actually had done these things. There were so many of them, that he couldn’t give you specifics as to what happened with any one particular woman and half of them he couldn’t recognise from the pictures that we had of them.

There were so many of them and he did them all the same way. As I say, he was dumb as a stump but he found a way to kill women – at least prostitutes – that was fool proof and that was part of his success. His trick was – and the girls were always in a hurry so it worked well – to say, ‘Well you know what? If I could go at you from behind, I’ll get it over with faster.’ And when he was done, he’d suddenly say, ‘What’s that?’ The girl would then lift her head up, look around and he’d throttle them – strangle them to death – usually with his arm. There were a couple of them that were obviously done with rope – with a ligature – but most of the time the ligature was put on later just to make sure that they stayed dead; he may have had some problems with some of them popping back up alive or something.

So, we interviewed him for a hundred and eighty-eight days and eventually he went to court and pleaded guilty to forty-eight murders and went to prison.

I think about a year or so ago – two years ago maybe – we found the remains of another victim that he had admitted killing and had actually taken us to the spot where we found one victim but we didn’t find the second one. We brought him back out from prison, charged him with the forty-ninth murder and that’s where we stand now – forty-nine. We didn’t charge him with any that we hadn’t found. He was charged with four murders of women that we don’t know who they are – or didn’t at the time. We recently identified one of them. So we still have three unidentified sets of remains, but he was charged with their murders.

There were several more that he acknowledges that he had killed and he showed us where he dumped them, but the site had been developed into parking lots and industrial areas; their remains will probably never be found. But he wasn’t charged with cases where we didn’t find anything. He took us to several spots; he dumped the girls in a lot of different types of places. There was the river but he couldn’t go back there after they found the bodies – it was too exposed – so he started taking them into the woods.

He was also into necrophilia, at least early on. He was going back, visiting the bodies again for three, four or five days. That’s why I think there was so much sample available to us with the DNA, because he was, you know, going back to them. He wasn’t using any condoms or anything. He said that later on, he didn’t want to do that anymore so he started dumping them further out,
on the I-90, fifteen to twenty miles out of town.

One of the areas he took us – it’s highway 410 – it’s kind of a route over the mountains. I’m not even sure if it’s open all year long. But it goes up quite a ways and he took us to a number of spots along this road, which is quite remote, logging area type stuff, probably some big cats, cougars, maybe bears, but certainly lots of big animals. He said he dumped a bunch there. He took us to lots of spots but we could never find anything. I think the animals took them. The reason I say that is because one of the places he took us was only about fifty or sixty yards from a place where the highway department would throw road kill. Sometimes these dead animals would get dragged off and probably the only thing that could do that would be a big cat or something.

I don’t know if the Green River case affected me. I guess we’ll find that out some day. I don’t feel affected, although it was obviously an emotional experience. It was traumatic I guess, to some extent, but I don’t feel affected by it. I guess it could drive you nuts talking to a nut-job like that for as long as we did but we all seemed to survive, mainly because it wasn’t like talking to Hannibal Lecter. It was more like talking to your ten-year-old kid and trying to get him to admit to breaking the window, only he had actually broken a hundred windows and was trying to remember which ones he broke and when, and whether he used a rock or a stick. That’s the kind of thing we were trying to deal with.

We were expecting a lot more detail than what we got from him. I mean, he told us a lot of stories but he could never tell you which victim it was he did ‘this’ to, or ‘that’ with. Sometimes it
was like pulling teeth.

I don’t look at it as if I did anything special and I don’t make a big deal over it. The guy was already a suspect. The lab is what did the work.

In the end, he got forty-nine life sentences, without parole.

The thing about homicides – and I hope I don’t sound insensitive when I say this – is it’s just criminals killing criminals, for the most part.

A
s I sat in a quiet office on the fourteenth floor of a tower block overlooking a grey, rainy, West Coast city, talking to a police detective, I quickly – perhaps too quickly – changed the subject from our initial ‘get-to-know-you’ conversation to the negatives of police work. The officer stood up, slowly walked to the office door, shut it carefully, closed the blinds, calmly sat back down and then began to shake. Police work had taken its toll on him, and even though he had never met me before, and even though we had been talking for just a few minutes, he opened up and told me how his job had affected him. His experiences were of divorce, depression and suicidal thoughts. It was important, he felt, that anyone wanting to become a cop knew that the risks were not just those you faced on the streets. There were also the risks you took with your home life and your mental wellbeing. ‘Being a police officer can damage your health,’ he told me.

Most of the time, I never knew what a cop was going to say to me when I spoke to them. But I always went in with a set of topics
I wanted to discuss and one of these was the negative side of police work. Perhaps naively, I didn’t initially take into account just how distressing the subject could be for some of the cops I was speaking to and I often came away from these interviews feeling exhausted and saddened, but also extraordinarily grateful that the officers had been so honest and willing to speak to me about something so private.

The officer I mentioned above was the first one to do so and I learnt not to be so blasé in my questioning when I brought the subject up with other officers in future. Voices would be lowered, the tone would soften and I vowed never to push the officers for anything more than they were willing to give. But then I didn’t have to, because – as I found – they were willing to give me everything, which I felt was brave, generous and extraordinary.

You can ask me what you want. It doesn’t matter. You ask me and I’ll tell you straight. I don’t powder stuff. I shoot from the hip. Some people don’t like it but that’s reality. That’s the way I handle it.

I had a point where I burnt out mentally and I needed to recover and get healthy again. The thing is, out on the street, your daily diet is people who hate you, people you’ve got to fight all the time or people you’ve got to chase all the time. You see nothing but bad. It affects you and I was affected by it; I went into periods of depression.

Part of becoming healthy again was getting out of the field.
That really helped, getting out of that environment and taking on new challenges. And I saw it in other people – I’d see the same thing that was on me, on other people.

I’d give them some advice. I’d say, ‘Hey, get out of here, get a new assignment. Don’t stay here too long.’

It affected my marriage and it affected my family. It was a tough time for me because I was heavily invested in my job. I was heavily invested in
me
. I was trying to get the job done – going out there with an ideal and a purpose. And you take a lot of things personally. If it’s a job failure or you did something wrong, you take it too hard. It’s sometimes hard to keep perspective. I had to relearn some things, get friendly with people again, do obligations again – go to their parties, go to their get-togethers, which I didn’t want to do before. The big thing was to wait for the next cop party or something. I needed to get healthy, which included seeing my old friends and doing some activities.

Being a police officer can damage your health. I think I knew it – I had a sense that this could wreck me. The depression scared me. I was so dark and so heavy. And here’s a scary thought: I understood why people killed themselves, because I could relate to it. If you’re in this dark, heavy depression you can see why people would want to kill themselves. And that was a warning light for me.

The other part of it was the medication angle – I didn’t want to have to take meds to get up and to live. I was afraid to go on medication. I didn’t want to do it or even have to do it. But I didn’t want to stay in this dark hole either. I needed to take care
of myself, get rest, get out and be active with people, be social. Do things outside of the job. And I was able to say that I recovered. But it wasn’t easy.

I would say that police suicides are not that common but I think what we see is lots of acting out in all kinds of other ways – drinking, or for some people, drugs. Some guys want to womanise, they want to do lots of things that really damage their personal lives, because they just don’t know how to cope.

Even though I spent a good few years in administration, I saw a lot of fast and furious action in a good chunk of my career where it put me in this depression, so I’m very careful now. I do not want to go there again. And my wife reminds me, she warns me about that.

I even have to be careful with the stories that I tell. When I was teaching at the academy I said, ‘Do you know what could happen to you? Let me tell you…’ And you go through your stories, reliving them because you want to deposit in the deputies and recruits, enough of your own experiences to keep them safe. So when I taught at the academy, I was as tense as when I was on the road.

We’ve got a poster hanging up in the precinct. It’s a hand with a pistol in it, kinda pointing out and says something about, ‘all too often officers end their careers by taking their own life’, or something like that. ‘If you need help, call…’, you know, that kind of thing; just trying to prevent suicides or whatever.

That’s not really anything that ever crossed my mind but for about a year – between June of last year and June of this year –I
went the full year without wearing my bullet-proof vest. I know for a fact that I went for a year without wearing my vest because I was depressed after my marriage broke down. Apparently my wife didn’t respect the sanctity of marriage and decided that she was going to have multiple affairs behind my back with multiple officers that I have to work with. She works for the police department too – she’s a civilian employee.

I found out about them as they were going on. I found out about the first one and that was three months into our marriage. The second was last year, with a guy who I considered a friend. And then four months later with another guy who works with the sheriff’s department.

I wasn’t trying to hurt myself by not wearing my vest but to be honest there were times when I really didn’t care what happened. There are a lot of officers who think that vests are a false sense of security. You know? People think that they’re bullet-proof just because they’re wearing a vest, which isn’t the case. But I think it made me a better officer because I was more vigilant. I paid more attention to what was going on around me because I didn’t have this vest on that can protect me from everything that could hurt me. I found the difference between concealment-and-cover as opposed to standing behind a trashcan thinking it’s going to stop bullets, you know? I’d put my body behind something that was heavier and thicker and could actually stop rounds if they came my way. Because I wasn’t wearing a vest, it actually made me more tactical, it made me think about things more. I didn’t put myself in positions where I could be hurt.

But there were a lot of people who knew that I didn’t wear a vest. Some would ask why, some didn’t care, some would just beg me to put it back on. And eventually I got to the point where I did – I put it back on.

I think part of me had a death wish at that point. When you are at the bottom, you don’t see that there is a way out. But there’s a difference between being suicidal and just letting things happen the way they do.

There were days when I came to work and I was happy to come to work. I love my job. It’s great to come out here. It’s great to interact with different people. And there were days when I came to work and I thought, ‘Maybe today is the day that some idiot is going to end it for me and I don’t have to worry anymore about going home to an empty house, to two children who I only see four days out of a month.’ But eventually you realise that that’s no way to live – it’s not living. One day something just clicked. So I come to work every day, I put my vest on and I enjoy my job.

I can deal with death because I’ve learnt to care less. And that’s honestly the way it is. I used to care a lot more about it when I was younger and newer. I’d think about it more, let it get to me. Now, when I leave work at night I try to leave everything at the office. I don’t even think about work when I get home. It’s unfortunate.

You try to disassociate yourself from it. That’s what you do. It’s sad but I think that’s where a lot of cops get into a lot of trouble and I had problems with alcohol and everything for a while because I got too stressed out. I quit drinking years ago but for
a long time, that was my outlet. I think a lot of cops fall back on alcohol but it causes personal problems, family problems.

Being a cop is a stressful, stressful job. You’ve got to see things that most people don’t ever want to see – things that they see on TV and don’t believe are real. But a lot of stuff you see on TV
is
real.

It’s an enormous struggle to be a law enforcement officer in Detroit – in the most violent city in America. For forty years Detroit has been consistently 1, 2 or 3 – but mostly 1 – in the overall violent crimes statistics of all major cities in the United States. For forty years!

Just take a look at the amount of mayhem you see as a law enforcement officer. Some guy comes out of school, he gets recruited and becomes a police officer and the next thing you know, he’s looking at shit you don’t see on combat fields. You know what I mean? I mean, people blown up.

Some of the things that happen to people in automobile accidents are bad enough. When you see somebody run over somebody else, drunk, and then drag their ass for half a mile and half the body has literally been sanded away, but they’re still alive, that’s tough enough to look at, right? But to see some guy who’s had the lower portion of his face blow off with a sawn-off shotgun and he’s still alive and he’s trying to tell you what happened… and he’s sitting there conscious, with the bottom part of his face missing, trying to tell you who shot him – it becomes almost like a fuckin’ Creature Feature! You know what I mean? And then
you’re expected to go home and go to sleep like a normal fucking person – ‘Oh yeah, I’ll just go sleep this off.’ Really?

I mean you have no idea how big the emotional closet has to be for some of these officers when they hide this stuff, just the shit that they see every day. Like last night, we got some twenty-three-year-old kid finds out that he’s got some girl pregnant – she’s six months pregnant – and now she wants to move in and now he sees his whole life crushed and crumbling down around him because he’s now got a twenty-year commitment. He’s in a life-long commitment with this broad when he just thought it was a one-night thing. Well let me tell you what happened: he pulled out a gun and blew his fucking brains out, right there. Blew his own fucking brains out right there. Like, ‘Fuck this, I’d rather see what’s on the other side, bitch, than spend the rest of my life with you!’ For real? Holy shit! You know what I mean?

We grew up watching John Wayne movies, you know what I’m saying? That’s the kind of shit that John Wayne would do. John Wayne and Jimmy Cagney, that kind of thing. Tom Cruise and them, they don’t do that kind of shit, man. Boy, this kid’s got the balls to do that? It just blew my mind. I was like, ‘Wow!’

I’d say a majority of cops I work with are divorced. I think the job has a lot to do with it – crappy hours, working weekends. Like I said, seeing a lot of crap that normal people shouldn’t have to see – that’s what we get stuck dealing with and cleaning up. Every time someone dies, every time they blow their head off, every time they commit suicide, the cops have gotta be there. It’s just
death and death and death and death. Eventually it eats you up.

It’s also people lying to you. It’s the lying, the death, everything. You’re not dealing with the average Joe Blow citizen for the most part, you know, someone with a good job and a good family and a nice life. For the most part you’re dealing with the dregs of society – the liars, the cheaters, the scumbags, the rapists, the murderers, the people that no one else wants to deal with. Those are the ones we deal with.

You’re here to do two things: do your job and live your life. I really believe in the service to the community, in that there’s a certain trust they put in us to be here, and we owe it to them, whilst we’re here, to give them that service and trust. But when you look at it from sort of a personal objective standpoint, this job is also here so that you can live your personal life. Your personal and private life is not there so you can just be a cop and only ever work and I think a lot of time that line really starts to get blurred and you see these guys that are just ‘cop, cop, cop’ all the time. They go home to their family and everything is police work and when they hang out, they hang out with their police friends. Their whole life becomes this police thing and I think a lot of them realise too late that maybe they should have concentrated on other things when they weren’t at work – because it destroys families.