On March 8, 1977, the day we met, Richard Macek had written a letter to me about that meeting. The paper bore a coat of arms in the lower right corner, featuring two armed lions facing each other with their tongues sticking out. Under the lions’ paws stood the motto In hoc signo vinces. It is a Latin phrase meaning “In this sign thou shalt conquer” and was adopted by Constantine after he had a vision of a cross in the heavens, a waking dream that occurred just prior to his victorious battle against Maxentius in A.D. 312. A popular and adaptable battle cry, In hoc signo vinces has been employed by everyone from the Catholic Church to neo-Nazi hate groups to advance their various causes. It was interesting that Macek used the coat of arms, since Macek was a man who had nothing and now had less. Whenever I spoke with him, it was clear Macek wanted to be more than he was. To pretend he had an important history full of adventure and blue-blood relations, he took to adding this coat of arms to his letters.
All prisoners write letters: it passes the time, and they have too much of that. The notes are always self-involved; they write about their days and nights—even when nothing much happens. Macek’s two-page handwritten letter included the announcement that he was “a little insecure and scared around women.” What a lie this was for a man who murdered women exclusively. What concerned me was not his revelation about being “scared around women.” That was a ruse. How would I get to him? How would I break through and coax him into lowering his guard? In my heart, I knew I was in for a royal struggle to find out if this man, who often bit and chewed on his victims with feral intensity, fit any kind of diagnostic category of psychiatric disorder, any classification of murderer known to us throughout history. The rest of Macek’s letter was uneventful and devoted to sucking up, as if he hoped that speaking to me would help his case. Yet I was glad he wrote, and hoped he would write more. The more I knew about him the better.
Because I tend to compartmentalize and focus acutely on the task at hand, I hadn’t given the Richard Macek case all that much thought in the two weeks that had slipped by since our first meeting. When I was a third-year resident at the University of Wisconsin Medical Center, my life was a constant whirl of seminars, patients, teaching medical students, and generally working through the sometimes hellish duty of being on call.
To a young transplant, the expansive Midwest was full of a culture about which I knew very little. Though I could have chosen a residency on the more familiar East Coast, recruiters convinced me that the program was eclectic and well-rounded and that they really wanted women at Wisconsin. There had been on-campus protests by the students demanding that women become an integral part of the medical school and residency programs.
By the 1970s Madison was a progressive-minded city of 150,000 considered to be the Haight-Ashbury of the Midwest. Not only was it still full of the introspective culture and the patchouli-laced lifestyle of hippiedom, but it also brimmed with anti–Vietnam War rhetoric and wild experimentation with drugs…and violence. While a resident at the University Hospital, I lived in the shadow of the 1970 bombing of the physics building. Sterling Hall was attacked by four anti–Vietnam War protesters who dragged six barrels of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil into a van, only to explode the vehicle and its dangerous contents, damaging twenty-six buildings. The explosion was earth-rattling enough to be heard twenty miles away.
Years later, the event still loomed large, and it seemed that a form of anarchy still reigned on campus and in town. Students who were depressed or who lost control after a night of drug-filled partying would walk off dormitory roofs. In the student union, I would often encounter one of my schizophrenic patients. If I made the mistake of ignoring him or not acknowledging his presence, his paranoia could lead to a confrontational scene that could grow inflamed and end in fury.
I sometimes escaped by going off and riding a light blue Schwinn ten-speed bicycle. North of Madison on a railroad bed long abandoned by any train was the thirty-two-mile Elroy-Sparta trail, which wound through rock tunnels and among pine trees and sugar maples, wood violets and speckled red granite. But when I returned, I often had to deal with hospital politics.
As one of four women granted residency that year, I was tolerated (though certainly not embraced) by the departmental and hospital administration that so actively had recruited me. After serving on various committees and working very diligently, I was elected president of the 280-person house medical staff. The hospital administration even sent a dozen long-stemmed roses in a pretty box to my office, which I cut and arranged in a vase. As I placed the flowers on my bookshelf, the first thing that crossed my mind was that they wouldn’t have sent roses to a male doctor, and I wondered if they had an inkling of what was going on with the embattled and disgruntled medical staff.
On the next day, I began with my executive staff a process whose ultimate goal was to unionize the residents, primarily because one of the brightest young doctors was fired without due process. We were working a hundred hours each week—which we accepted wholeheartedly. But we wanted training, security, and various quality-of-life issues to be adequately addressed as well. Since our move for organization was chronicled in the local papers, administration officials must have rued the day they called the florist. Finally, after a fair amount of news coverage, the administration backed down and agreed to due process. We felt we had achieved our goals, and we dropped the idea of forming a union.
Despite working as a resident with not a lot of money to spare, I had moved into a charming apartment. I felt a rush of independence, as though I’d moved up in the world. Meanwhile, I was wrestling with the challenge of the child-faced Richard Macek, and how precisely to strip away those layers of congeniality. It was my job to reach an unprotected inner core that would lead me to learn much more about the murders he may have committed.
I’d already had Dr. Brooks Brennin, a psychologist specializing in aggression, interview Macek. After poring over the results of a Rorschach inkblot test (which was very much in vogue at the time), it became obvious to Dr. Brennin and me that Macek responded on an exceedingly basic oral level, seeing monstrous teeth with jagged edges in one of the black forms. The oral stage is a phrase coined by Sigmund Freud, who believed a baby’s mouth is the center of his primary pleasure during his first few hundred days of living. Macek’s interpretation of the images conveyed resentful and aggressive attitudes, possibly because he felt he didn’t get what he needed as a child from those around him, especially his mother and father. It also indicated Macek’s possible antipathy toward his parents (perhaps over feeling unloved) and toward children who seemed to have what he felt he could not. It was very likely that Macek was overwhelmed by the developmental demands of babyhood and had severe conflict in the oral period. For example, infancy is a time when the child has no physical power to use weapons, other than the act of biting, to be destructive.
Richard explained he was never the center of attention, and he reported that he felt inadequate and inferior. His decreased tolerance for frustration and rejection could have played a major role in the acts of voyeurism for which he was arrested when he was a younger man. In addition, his Rorschach test responses indicated a fear of his masculine identity, and the denial of the need for his mother and father. But Rorschach tests are just one indication for a psychiatrist. For instance, if you go to a family doctor and get a blood test, and that test reveals an elevated white blood cell count, that’s not the end of the story. More tests need to be done. So it was for Macek, except my tests would take much more time to complete than any kind of test a family doctor might perform.
I picked up the phone and arranged for Dr. Roger McKinley, a reputable hypnotherapist, to put Macek into a trance. McKinley would help Macek remember events that he was unable to recall. At least Macek would perceive some of his memories more vividly through concentration and relaxation. Since it appeared that all of the murderer’s crimes were against women, I didn’t want to attempt the procedure myself and risk being perceived as a potential victim as we probed Macek’s mind. After all, there was the chance that, in a trance, Macek would see me as someone he wanted to kill when he began to relive a killing. McKinley had an impressive depth of knowledge and was the same expert with whom I conducted the seminar where I met FBI Agent Tomaselli. We didn’t socialize as friends, but we worked very well together. Because of all this careful planning, I was sure the procedure would go well.
The next few days passed quickly, and there I was, driving up to Central State in Waupun once again. As I turned into the parking lot of the depressing old prison hospital, I was eager to discover what grim memories lay buried inside Macek’s brain and what thought processes were embedded in his mind. Most people think that when a subject is hypnotized, the doctor probes the unconscious mind, which Freud thought was the mind’s repository of the weird and frightening memories with which a person just cannot deal. But you can never get into the unconscious; you can get to what’s called the preconscious, where bits of information that border the unconscious can be found. But patients do need to be prodded for recollection to make it out of the preconscious.
McKinley had hauled from the trunk of his Mercedes a heavy reel-to-reel tape recorder along with a case full of other equipment, including cords, a microphone stand, and a microphone—all to be painstakingly inspected by the always suspicious guards.
McKinley and I set up the machinery in the same dreary, cramped interview room in which I first met Macek. The prisoner was led in, still affable, still exchanging pleasantries. There is no real preparation for hypnosis, no drugs, no pep talk, no blood tests. Macek knew he was going to be hypnotized, and he appeared ready. The baby-faced killer had agreed in writing to be hypnotized, but when we started he was somewhat anxious, worrying that people were stopping to peer into the cramped room at him through a small window. Macek didn’t want to be stared at, and he didn’t want to be the subject of hospital gossip, which was percolating due to a growing media frenzy that sensationalized Macek and his crimes. In addition, the low voices of those outside the door, including one of the guards, got under his skin. We pressed on, though. As the hypnosis began, McKinley suggested that Macek imagine himself in a field of fragrant clover, where the annoying voices he heard became the meaningless noises of a pleasant world that bathed and engulfed him. But an aggravated Macek said that he wished to be in the field by himself, alone and away from any human sounds whatsoever. Though his body relaxed and his breathing slowed, his mind was somehow still tense. Finally he closed his eyes and went into what seemed to be an absorbing hypnotic state.
The first words he uttered were simple but forceful commands that cried out gently, almost as a whisper.
“Stop me. Stop me,” he said, his voice raised a bit in intensity, the two short syllables weighing heavily, mysteriously.
“What’s going to happen, Rich?” McKinley frowned. He seemed concerned.
“Stop it.”
“Will you tell me first what’s going to happen? Are you going to choke?”
“Stop me, now!”
We had given him a key word, the word release, to help him relax, to warn us to remove him temporarily from the trance. But he either refused to utter the word or had forgotten about it all together. I took his pulse and saw Macek was beginning to calm. McKinley reasoned with him, his voice becoming a combination of soft yet strong tones. His words were unmistakably direct.
“Rich, you want to find out who you are, don’t you?”
Macek nodded.
“Turn back the pages, you turn back the pages. What year are you in now?”
“Seventy-four.”
Macek began to recount the details of one of his murders, the killing for which he was incarcerated and for which he would eventually receive a sentence of two hundred years in prison, the brutal knifing of Paula J. Cupit, the maid at the Abbey resort. He said he was standing outside the Abbey, that he saw the Abbey’s driveway and cars parked there. After looking around, he strode inside the main door, wandering the halls. He poked his head into room after room, into door after open door, until he saw Paula. He said that merely gazing upon her was making him nervous, “uncomfortable,” and “odd.” He retreated from the room but returned shortly thereafter, feeling “hot,” perspiring. Macek remembered that his heart was “racing.” He lied to Paula, making up a story that he had lost his son, and the good-natured hotel employee offered help in finding him. He then avoided describing the murder completely. Dr. McKinley tried to jog his memory so that he would recall more vital details.
“What do you have in your pocket?” McKinley asked. Inquiring about minor objects or events tends to prod the memory more than questions about specific scenes or bold interrogations like “How did you kill her?”
“Comb. Key. Wallet. Ball.”
“Where is the knife?”
“Threw it away.”
“Why did you throw the knife away, Rich?”
“Blood.”
“Do you know how the knife got bloody?”
“No.”
“Do you want to find out?”
“Scared.”
Macek hesitated but went on to explain how he bought a double-edged knife at a hardware store in the quiet town of McHenry, Illinois, the kind of town with after-work mixers at the local bank and Miss McHenry beauty pageants at the high school. Macek went to have a drink, to order two scotches and water at an unnamed lounge with a Hawaiian motif. (Richard wasn’t an alcoholic, but an occasional social drinker; no serial murderers are addicted to drugs, drink, or even smoking.) After the drinks, Richard’s afternoon still wasn’t quite complete.
“I, I, I leave and get in the car. I’m driving to go home, but I didn’t. The car turned and went toward the hotel.”
He described the car as if it had a mind of its own, transmogrified and turned human, as if it controlled him. It is not uncommon for serial killers in general to believe that things have the characteristics of people, just as sometimes they believe people are things without feelings. Macek strolled back into the hotel, then hunted the rooms to find the maid. In the bathroom of one of the rooms, he found Paula still working, scouring the floor, perhaps her fifteenth of the day, and he confronted the poor woman, who was still on her knees. When she tried to leave, he blocked her way. When she tried again, he closed the door so there was little chance for exit and escape.
“I says, that’s all right, that’s all right. You don’t have to worry. It’s all right. Um-hmm. Then I touched her. On her chest.”
Neither of us knew precisely what was happening. I sat within a couple of feet of Macek, monitoring him. I noticed that his right hand began to move, slowly rising off the desk, and then the left hand began to rise too. His face turned crimson and his breathing rate increased somewhat. Otherwise he appeared perfectly normal. At that point, Macek took the heavy microphone from its stand and into his right hand. Grasping it tightly, he lifted it high above his head. It was one of those surreal, bizarre flashes where everything seems to slow. I should have thought to jump up and move away, but I was trapped in the moment. Macek himself made no sound, but the microphone came crashing down. His right hand arced near my face and then away, settling hard on the small finger of his left hand. The sound cracked and echoed through the room. But Macek was not hurt and still remained in the trance. Everyone, from the guards to McKinley, believed Macek didn’t need to be shackled, that he was an affable prisoner willing to cooperate with us. We felt that shackling would somehow impede Macek from recollection, and Macek really had advanced nicely under hypnosis, until this.
Dr. McKinley had never experienced such a reaction and he now looked concerned and puzzled. What happened with Macek plainly shouldn’t have happened, no way, no how. During hypnosis, this sort of behavior is supposed to be far more controlled and less spontaneous. Clearly, there was turmoil occurring inside Macek’s mind, and he could physically act it out.
We were taken aback, stunned even—but we had to maintain our composure. We continued almost by rote, our training taking over, until we took Macek out of the trance. Unfortunately, Macek hadn’t spoken at all about biting, raping, and ritually cutting Paula J. Cupit.
As we left the facility, we looked at what Macek had done with the microphone as a mere aberration. But again, the image of Macek slamming down the microphone wended its way into my senses as I walked to the car. I played the scene again in my head. Before Macek threw down the mike, I was unable to detect any clue that there was something wrong. I mean, I am a highly intuitive person who has encountered plenty of really aggressive people in my day-to-day work in psychiatry. Most of the time, I will get some signal that things are not going well. When that is the case, I will change tactics or pose a question in an unconventional way, modifying the tone of my voice, employing words that are more soothing and appealing to the individual. When I’m working with someone, as I was in this case, I’d quietly signal to him to bring Macek out of the trance. But Macek’s outburst came completely out of the blue. There was no warning, no change of inflection, no strange look on his face, absolutely nothing that would have indicated that this display of violence was about to ensue. Though I believed Macek’s emotions would not flare up again, I decided to have McKinley bring along a smaller cassette recorder next time, one with an almost weightless plastic microphone—just in case.
As I parted ways with the discomfited McKinley, I hoped that Macek would not again become so unrestrained under hypnosis. On the way back home, driving past cornfields and dairy farms, I convinced myself to believe it.
I looked into Macek’s criminal and family history dating back to 1967 and discovered he was not very close to his father, a gruff, successful, and self-made man whose ownership of a brewery lifted his family to an upper-middle-class existence. He was very strict, rarely permitting Richard to date and employing physical means of control and discipline with all family members. He hit. He slapped. He punched his sons and his wife until they lived in a good deal of fear.
Macek’s crimes began early, according to Illinois police reports. As a young boy in grammar school in the suburban town of Elmwood, Illinois, Macek was arrested for stealing the panties from a neighbor’s clothesline. Once he took them, he chewed on the crotches. Appearances notwithstanding, this was not a sexual act. Rather, it had more to do with the still babylike Macek enjoying the touch, feel, and smell of the softer cotton fabric the crotch was made of, avoiding the coarser cotton in the rest of the panty. This is something some serial killers like to do. John Wayne Gacy placed his mother’s panties in a paper bag and hid them under his porch, often taking them out and caressing them for comfort. You might ask, well, why not touch or chew a T-shirt? A T-shirt just isn’t as soft as panties.
In 1966, Macek’s father died of a myocardial infarction in a hospital while being treated for hypertension. Not many months later, Macek was arrested for voyeurism, Peeping Tom incidents in which he’d perch by night near a window with a small handheld telescope, watching the sleeping woman inside. Over time, Macek’s crimes became increasingly violent and included charges of beating up women. In 1974, the infant daughter of his girlfriend with whom he was staying was found dead on a heating pad, burnt to the extent that her poor body looked like a sausage that had burst through its casing. Macek was never convicted of this death, but I think he did it. By 1976, I believe that he had murdered eight women, although police had gotten him to confess only to the murder of the maid. In all of these cases, the murder or attack was sadistic, sexual, and violent, including incidents of stabbing, drowning, strangulation, mutilation, biting, and/or necrophilia.
On the following morning, we gathered again in Waupun, this time in a second-floor conference room, an immense, spacious room in which the five-foot-four, 192-pound Macek seemed inconspicuous, tiny. He sat, waiting alone at a long, polished oak table, again un-shackled. With a guard outside the door, I felt comfortable, focused, and ready.
I resolved to use this session to probe the killings of Nancy Lossman and her three-year-old daughter, Lisa, found dead in 1974 in their Crystal Lake, Illinois, apartment. Nancy’s body was discovered nude and battered. Macek had strangled her with the cord from a venetian blind. There were, gouged in her right breast, substantial bite marks, and there was evidence of necrophilia, according to the coroner’s report. He drowned the little girl, Lisa, in a toilet bowl and, bizarrely, placed towels in the bowl as well. But he left Nancy’s sleeping son alone. Macek never tried to kill a boy or a man. He preferred to kill women. Just as substance abusers have their drug of choice, Macek had his murder victims of choice.
As McKinley led Macek to recall these disturbing events, the criminal remained relaxed under hypnosis, and all seemed well. Within a few minutes, Macek began to remember more.
He stood there with lighter fluid in his hand, and he plotted to burn everything around him to cover his tracks. As Macek brought to mind the fire he started in the utility room in the Lossman apartment, he said he rummaged about to find a match to ignite the blaze. Inwardly, I found this strange, primarily because Macek was not a stupid man; surely he knew that a small can of lighter fluid would mainly cause a smoky fire that wouldn’t last and wouldn’t destroy the crime scene. But as I contemplated this, something changed.
“Ooooh!” Macek’s groan was piercing.
“AHHHHHHH!” He was clearly uncomfortable, tense and sweating.
“It hurts. The fire!” Macek exclaimed that he was in agonizing pain, that he was immersed in the flames, that he could feel them lash at his skin. As I looked at Macek, I felt he was beginning to exist inside the past, a past that we might not be able to control with hypnosis.
“AHHHHH!” he roared. Hands that had been hanging by his side tensed into fists, and then he cradled his right hand in his left. It was happening again! McKinley looked alarmed and loosened his tie.
Macek had burned his hand in the fire, a flare-up that he saw and felt as lucidly as the terrible moments when the murders of the mother and daughter had occurred. I took stock of the room around us. Certainly nothing there had changed. No one had entered, not a guard, not anyone, and the temperature was the same. Then my eyes focused on Macek’s hand. On his fingers, I saw red blisters, big as dimes, rise from the inferno he was experiencing in his head. I closely examined everything, looking all around to make sure there was no outside source—a hidden match, a pocket lighter, a cigarette—of heat. There was nothing. I was frightened at what seemed to be an almost supernatural event.
Something had to be done immediately. We interrupted the trance and said to Macek, “Let’s take a break.” I kept staring at the blisters that remained on his hand. At that moment, I chose to end any further hypnotic sessions. The whole process had disintegrated, and the risk of continuing was tremendous. Macek could lose control, and the cost could be a total erosion of his very tenuous state of mind. Or he could assault someone within the prison hospital, forcing authorities to put him in seclusion where he couldn’t be seen, and putting an end to my scientific research just as it had begun. Then and there, I had to admit that Macek may never have been adequately hypnotized. For a moment, I wondered whether part of his brain was conscious and controlling us just as we believed we were exploring the depths of his mind. There in the confines of Waupun State Hospital, I began to understand that I was walking on a razor’s edge as long as I worked with serial murderers. Because so many things could go wrong, I felt if I made one false move or slip, I could be shredded.
There was something going on that was completely out of the realm of what I had learned or had ever experienced. We were trekking into the unknown, and it was not safe to be there. I did take consolation in something Sigmund Freud wrote in 1905: “No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.” I believe that what happened with Macek had to do with the suspension of the boundary of time. If you think about it, when Macek was focused and reexperiencing his past murders, time ceased to exist. Back in that traumatic moment where his life played itself over in three dimensions, Macek was capable of reliving his horrors as if they were happening in real life. Again, he didn’t have a cigarette to burn himself. He didn’t have anything. He was back there in the past, as if nothing had ever changed, and his hand was, for all intents and purposes, burned. I’ve already mentioned that there is a part of the mind called the preconscious, the place in the brain that stores mental contents that are not conscious but could be, like memories that can be recovered. But they aren’t quite near enough for immediate mining. The preconscious can also include the hints of memories—traces, parts, pieces, rather than the whole memory itself.
As I mentioned, you can never get to the unconscious, according to theory. But is there something somewhere within the boundary to that wall that’s so permeable that it seeps through into the consciousness of the patient? What part of the mind allows a human to go back and forth from the conscious to the preconscious occasionally as freely as one goes from the dining room to the kitchen? I think it is a boundary so fluid that you can’t tell what is real time to the serial killer. So it was for Richard Otto Macek, and for many others too, who would talk about these bits of remembrances, but only after dozens of hours of probing.
For our own safety, we called two young guards to take Macek away. I recounted the eerie tale of what had just happened.
“What was really weird were the blisters that appeared on his hand. Take a look,” I said.
One guard looked dumbfounded, but he did not believe what he saw. Convincing these people who saw everything as black and white, rather than in shades of gray, was next to impossible. After some confusion, an angry look fell over his face.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re just a faker! This is all fake. Fake.”
The other guard said, “You did this to him yourself. You burned his hands. You want us to believe THIS? You’re full of crap.”
Some people have asked, well, if this really happened, where’s the photo of his hand? But getting a camera past security would have been impossible. And I think the tape of the session speaks for itself.
Though I’m sure this information filtered up to the superintendent, I never heard a word from him or other prison officials. I’m sure they didn’t want anyone on the outside to know we were talking to Macek, nor did they want this admittedly bizarre story to seep out into Waupun and beyond. I could almost hear them say, “Don’t make my prison anything out of the ordinary. Don’t you shake things up. But, hey, aren’t you cute for comin’ in with all of your investigations and all that science?”