Meanwhile, on that mid-December morning nearly five months later, when father and son were making their way back home for the holidays, Bryan drove with a focused silence. The new day was startlingly bright, puffy white clouds were high in the big Midwestern sky, and Michael, he’d later share with a friend, had grown convinced that all his fears about a snowstorm had been unnecessary. He still was reflecting, though, on the horror of a SWAT team shoot-out in an off-campus neighborhood not far from where his son lived. Yet when he attempted to engage Bryan to see what he made of it all, for all his questions he had not gotten an answer worth a penny. But he had long ago grown accustomed to his son’s moods. One moment the boy would be rageful, the next unapproachable, as if locked in some inner world. Soon the small car was filled with a companionable silence.
Bryan spoke up at last. There was a Thai restaurant he had found on the Web, he announced. Outside Indianapolis. They could stop there for lunch.
Sounded like a plan, Michael agreed. At first, Bryan’s strict commitment to a vegan diet had left him mystified, but after all the years spent grappling with his son’s many difficulties, Michael’s temperament had grown more open to anything that kept him centered. And, he had to admit, maybe it was working. Gone were the truly awful days when he had to worry about whether Bryan would be found lying in a Stroudsburg alleyway with a needle in his arm. All the bewildering talk about visual snow was history, too. Heading off the interstate to hunt down a Thai restaurant rather than pulling into the next roadside McDonald’s was a small inconvenience when measured against the miracle of his son’s transformation.
They had turned down the heat in the car because, despite the chill outside, the high morning sun reflecting off the windshield glass was keeping things warm. Michael absently watched the passing trucks. It was an easy drive; the highway was flat and the traffic steady; they were making good time.
And as they started crossing through Hancock County, Indiana, Bryan spoke up. Only now there was a hesitancy, and Michael knew that was a warning. The one thing about Bryan, he’d tell people, was, “That boy knows his own mind. No beating ’round the bush. He’d let you know what he was thinking.”
“I got a problem,” Bryan finally announced.
All at once, Michael braced himself.
His apprehension eased as Bryan revealed that he was having some trouble at school. Yet for his son, it was as if a fuse had been set off. A taut-faced Bryan, Michael would tell people, ranted that a few spoiled brats in his classes were really to blame for the entire misunderstanding. They had complained that he was too demanding, too tough a grader. And, incredibly, the department’s professors were siding with the malcontents. The university had no commitment to “intellectual honesty,” Bryan charged, and it was at this point, Michael later confessed, that he started to have a difficult time following where things were going. Intellectual honesty? What the hell did that mean? More college mumbo-jumbo, he swiftly decided.
Truth be told, Michael would come to concede, from the start he had wondered why his son had thought it necessary to enroll in a school all the way on the other side of the country to study, of all things, criminology. What was that all about? Did Bryan need a PhD to become a cop? Was that where all this would be leading?
When Michael had first shared his misgivings last spring after his son had received the email announcing his acceptance into the WSU doctoral program in criminal justice, Bryan had gotten huffy. He was setting off on a career that was a lot more important than scribbling traffic summonses, he had barked. He’d be accomplishing the sort of things that the police could never dream of doing. He’d be studying, he said loftily, “the criminal mind.” He’d be “a scientist exploring why criminals do what they do.”
The indignant response told Michael it would be wiser if he kept his peace; he didn’t want to start something. Still, Michael felt that you didn’t need to be a scientist to solve what made the criminal mind tick. He had crossed paths with his fair share of hoods growing up by the Brooklyn waterfront. He had uncles who had gotten pinched for gambling. He had a brother, one of a set of twins, who had been charged with grand larceny and receiving stolen goods, but had gotten off with probation and fines. Hell, his own father had stolen a car. He had seen enough to convince himself that, without ever once cracking a book, he had a pretty good understanding of the criminal mind. And it all came down to this: people broke the law because it was the easiest way to get something they wanted.
And, he’d say, you want an explanation for why psychos do what they do? Why people kill? To Michael’s mind, that was pretty simple, too: it was just the way they were. You can’t change those sorts, or expect to understand them. That’s what he had told Maryann, friends would share, when she had gone to all the trouble of getting a poem Melissa, his daughter, had written into the Pocono Record after the horror of another school shooting, this one in Uvalde, Texas. “Small hands and feet / buried six feet deep,” Melissa had rhymed. And his wife had added an earnest postscript: “We must consider the children before the gun.” But Michael just shrugged off their heartfelt sentiments. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. He worked all day in a school; how could he not feel aggrieved, he’d say, over the deaths of innocent school kids? But he also was of a mind that was resigned to all the madness. Nothing, he had made clear to his wife, would be rectified one iota by poems. Or, for that matter, professors trying to use big words to make sense of things. Or degrees in criminology.
Still, if this was all there was to Bryan’s problem, he was relieved. Because the one thing he knew was that his boy was damn smart. “Has his mother’s brains, thank God,” Michael would tell people. So as Bryan continued to lay out in increasingly bewildering detail the vendetta the WSU criminal justice department had launched against him, Michael relaxed. Rather than probe too deeply, he listened with a doting, if somewhat perplexed, complacency. He was convinced that Bryan just needed to vent. This was school stuff—every job has its fair share of politics, right? he would tell himself, friends noted—and he felt assured his smart son would be able to work things out.
THE FIRST TIME BRYAN WALKED through a murder scene was in the old stone house on the leafy corner of Taylor Drive, in Center Valley, Pennsylvania. Bloodstained bodies were sprawled about the musty, low-ceilinged living room. Only the corpses were mannequins, the blood was red paint, the living room was in the DeSales University “crime scene house,” and he was an undergraduate taking 365 Psychological Sleuthing.
Bryan was hooked. That was when he made up his mind to switch his focus from psychology and head on to graduate school to study criminology.
As a former addict, he had lived with the awareness that he was one bust away from winding up a criminal; he had, after all, been picked up for making off with his sister’s iPhone. And he had known too many from his druggy high school crowd whose lives had become wrapped up in the justice system. But he had turned things around, and now he saw a way of making his reinvention complete. It was a dangerous world, but he’d be a secret hero in the making, one of the good guys who studied crime and criminals. And by digging deep into the criminal world, by studying the theories explaining illegal and deviant behavior, he’d be working with academics who were devising ways to keep crime in check. He’d be an owl, one of the deep thinkers who was determined to make the world a safe place. His mind set, he enrolled for DeSales’s online master’s degree program in criminal justice.
And that was where he discovered Dr. Katherine Ramsland.
“Serial killers fascinate us. We want to know what makes them tick . . .” she had written. Inside the Minds of Serial Killers: Why They Kill was the book, and she seemed to have the answers.
Professor Ramsland, after all, was someone who had done it all. She had a PhD in philosophy (her thesis was on Kierkegaard), had written a small library of books (sixty-eight at last count), had appeared on more than two hundred crime documentaries and television shows, and, most impressively to Bryan, she had actually gotten up close and very personal with a few of the most deviant minds on the planet. When she said serial killers saw the world differently, she was not spouting off like another academic who’d extrapolated her understanding from some dusty texts, but rather as an investigator who had dived straight down into the belly of the beast. When, for example, she wrote about the strange doings inside the mind of Dennis Rader, a convicted serial killer who had murdered at least ten people and who, in a self-aggrandizing flourish, had branded himself with the initials BTK (for “bind, torture, and kill”), Ramsland had firsthand knowledge. For five years, BTK had been communicating with the professor from prison, by phone and in lengthy letters that he’d written in a dauntingly complex code.
But with brains and perspicacity, Ramsland had cracked the code, a psychopath’s language where, for unnerving example, “Virals” were victims and “Wheels of Time” referred to what he called “Spin the Bottle,” a mind game where women were tied to a torture wheel with their legs spread. She had “gone into the cookie jar,” as Rader called his sadistic fantasy world, and when she had emerged, she came out with the “hope others will dig out things that I missed.”
Ramsland was a forensic psychologist, a practitioner who applied psychological research and clinical experience to get inside criminal minds. And this was an invaluable skill. Working at the juncture of the legal system and psychology, the forensic psychologist not only could provide a learned assessment of what was going on in a defendant’s head, but they might also be able to apply psychology to solve a crime. And Bryan wanted to forge a career at this intellectual crossroad, too. He hoped, as the professor had urged, “to dig out things” she had “missed.”
For his master’s thesis at DeSales, Bryan set out to emulate Dr. Ramsland by reaching out directly to prisoners. “I am inviting you to participate,” he wrote in a survey that he posted on Reddit hoping it would grab the attention of bored convicts, “in a research project that seeks to understand how emotions and psychological traits influence decision making when committing a crime. In particular, this study seeks to understand the story behind your most recent arrest, with an emphasis on your thoughts and your feelings throughout your experience.”
And the questions he posed were just the sort of probings that promised rich grist for a forensic psychologist’s mill:
Why did you choose that victim or target over others?
Did you prepare for the crime before leaving home?
How did you approach the victim or target?
After arriving, what steps did you take prior to locating the victim or target?
After committing the crime, what were you thinking and feeling?
How did you leave the scene?
How was your life right before the crime?
Michelle Bolger, the associate professor who was Bryan’s thesis advisor, was very impressed. Bryan was zeroing in on precisely the sort of questions a forensic psychologist would want to explore. “He was one of my best students, ever. Brilliant,” she judged. And so when Bryan asked her for a letter of recommendation for the doctoral program at WSU, she was happy to comply. “In my ten years of teaching,” she’d remark, “I’ve only recommended two students to a PhD program, and he was one of them.”
Yet, the time would come when Professor Bolger’s thoughts about Bryan would grow troubled, and she would have difficulty sleeping. And now when she reviewed his probing thesis questions in her mind, there was suddenly the possibility that everything she had called brilliance held a more awful promise.
“Fantasy,” Dr. Ramsland had written, “also builds to an appetite to experience the real thing.”