Just as medicines and technologies change, so does the intricate science that helps us to track down serial murderers. Over the course of the next decades, that science will only become better and more refined. To understand what I mean more fully, we have to backtrack somewhat.
I remember that I stood in my beige raincoat on the precipice of a deep ravine in the ever-present Seattle-area mist, cold and wondering how and when the Green River Killer would be found. Carefully, I walked around the crime scene, as I do with many of these cases, to try and collect any missing pieces of information, and I peered over and into the rocky abyss. This was one of the locations where he disposed of the body after he killed. Could another body be near here?
I looked around for other clues the police might have missed in the tall grass, but I saw nothing.
I did have my ideas regarding who the killer might be. My theory held that the suspect was a white male who was married, and he was in his thirties. He would be found working at a blue-collar job as a truck driver or a factory worker, or some position that gave him the opportunity to take time off pretty much whenever he desired to take a break. The suspect would not be someone from very far outside the area. In other words, the person knew Seattle and wasn’t a drifter. Additionally, he would be someone who wouldn’t stick out in a crowd: he wouldn’t look like a killer. He would look like a normal guy, the same kind of normal-looking guy that I have described throughout this book. That normalcy would provide him a cover, like a cloak of powerful invisibility.
The Green River itself twists along a sixty-five-mile course that begins just to the southeast of Howard Hansom Dam inland and pours into Elliott Bay just to the south of Seattle. To local fishermen, the river is known for its rainbow trout, steelhead, and salmon. To the police and the FBI, it became known as a dumping ground for corpses.
On July 15, 1982, in Kent, Washington, two boys stopped their bicycles on the Peck Bridge to horse around, talk about fishing, and look out over the water. As they chatted, they glanced down into the Green River. There they saw the bloated body of sixteen-year-old Wendy Lee Coffield, floating naked with a pair of her own jeans tied around her neck. Police immediately deduced that she had been strangled. A few weeks later and just to the south of the Peck Bridge, an employee of a meatpacking plant discovered something lying on a sandbar. Thinking it to be a dead animal, the worker slowly moved closer to examine the find, only to realize the unmoving hulk was the nude body of twenty-three-year-old Lynne Bonner. She hadn’t drowned: there was no water in her lungs. An autopsy revealed that Bonner had been choked to death. Other similarities between the two murders included these facts: both Bonner and Coffield were young prostitutes who had tattoos.
The killer wasn’t finished. On August 15, 1982, a man enjoying a Sunday respite leisurely rode on an inflatable raft down the Green River’s slow current. He discovered not one but two more bodies in the river. Once police arrived on the scene, they found yet another body in the tall wispy grass on the riverbank, a body that was likely placed there only a day before. Two of the five victims also had a rock inserted into their vaginas. I wondered whether this was done to weigh them down. Was there a sexual meaning that no one, not even the killer himself, could comprehend? Whatever the case, there was little doubt in the minds of authorities that a serial murderer was the perpetrator of the crimes.
The FBI’s top people from Virginia jetted to Seattle to try to help. One felt the killer was very close to the police, not necessarily a cop, but someone who had an interest in the doings of law enforcement. The same person then said the killer was a fisherman or a hunter. Another felt the killer was a sexual psychopath. There were agents who speculated that there was more than one killer. Another thought the murderer was a military man trained in intricate special operations. A psychic even got into the act with her predictions.
The Green River Task Force was created to track down the murderer ASAP. With a team that included not only members of the FBI and local detectives but also the specious from-the-cell “insight” of serial killer Ted Bundy, the task force sounded auspicious on the face of it. But they were bogged down by infighting and rampant ego. Similar chaos had reigned over Seattle’s Ted Bundy investigation a few years before. Ironically, though the Green River Task Force was created to avoid the same mistakes, one could argue that the quality of information retrieved by the Green River group was inferior to that gathered for the Bundy investigation.
I thought I could help the task force and I gave one of the leaders of the group (who had also worked on the Wayne Williams case) a call to offer my help. The conversation was very short, the answer was as abrupt and brusque as it was startling: “Not interested.”
One of the problems I’ve often seen with law enforcement is that they become too territorial. They don’t want anyone messing around or flying in to add new ideas or theories. And they don’t want anyone else getting credit for the capture except themselves. Additionally, they don’t understand how sitting and talking something through might be helpful. They generally see a forensic psychiatrist as someone who’s involved only in the trial aspect of the case, someone who’s extremely biased as part of the defense or prosecution teams. They couldn’t imagine that I could be objective. Plus, I was seen as a civilian and not as part of their closed circle. Did this narrow attitude affect the investigation of the Green River Killer? It certainly didn’t help. I went to Seattle to dig around anyway.
After I began profiling serial murderers, the FBI created its Behavioral Science Unit (and some members of the unit went to Seattle to join the task force). But their goal was to assist law enforcement people in apprehending perpetrators. Behavioral scientists don’t do the medical work that I do to discover what makes a serial killer commit murder after murder. They’ll look at the external characteristics of the person, and sometimes they get into a false way of “psychoanalyzing” the serial murderer. They come up with ideas like: he hates his mother and that’s why he murdered. But the ideas have no basis in scientific research. They believe in simplicities like “wet the bed, start a fire, and kill an animal, and you’ll become a serial murderer.*” It’s just too easy an assumption to make.
Opinions about the Green River Killer’s profile varied widely within the task force, and there were more and more of them as time went by. At the same time, more and more dead bodies were found in 1982 and 1983 in locations beyond the Green River—closer to Seattle itself. Leads increased exponentially, but the task force had only one primitive computer—and the information on it was lost when there was a power outage. Over time, the FBI and the police proved they could not track down the killer and the task force was scrapped. With renewed hope, another task force was created in 1984 with over forty people assigned to it. By then, skeletons and remains were found as distant as forty miles away from Seattle. Later, authorities began to believe the killer had murdered people as far away as Vancouver and Oregon. While the task force had amassed thousands of pieces of evidence, only one percent of it had been properly analyzed. The need to find the killer reached a fever pitch as months turned into years. But the baffled authorities had no definitive answers. Some even thought Michael Lee Lockhart from Florida might have been the Green River Killer.
Amid much media hoopla, King County Police Captain Frank Adamson predicted that the Green River Killer would be brought to justice in 1986. But the year came and went. With little success to show for the years it had been in existence, the Green River Task Force closed up shop in 1990. It wasn’t until 2001 that police apprehended a suspect, after forty-nine murders had been committed. The beady-eyed, mustached man was a Caucasian in his early fifties, Gary Leon Ridgway of Auburn, Washington, a town a little over twenty miles south of Seattle as the crow flies. The tagline the Auburn chamber of commerce came up with for the sleepy town of forty-five thousand is “More Than You Imagined.” Indeed it was—especially with a serial murderer living there.
Ridgway was a quiet man, a journeyman painter who toiled at the same company for thirty-two years and loved rooting around at flea markets. He also occasionally bragged to friends about his exploits with local prostitutes. In fact, members of the task force had picked up Ridgway for soliciting a prostitute as far back as the early 1980s, but they were never able to pin the murders on him. Though he was considered a suspect in the murder of seventeen-year-old Maria Malvar in 1983, there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him. In 1986, Ridgway even passed a lie detector test.
Over the course of twenty years, however, science has evolved in breathtaking fashion. Perhaps the most important discoveries in the last few years have come in the field of DNA and the mapping of the human genome. Advanced DNA testing was what helped crack the case of the Green River Killer in a way no law enforcement officer could. A sample of saliva that had been retrieved from Ridgway by court order in 1987 came up for DNA analysis in 2001 by using a method called PCR, polymerase chain reaction. The groundbreaking test was invented by University of California chemist Kary Mullis in the 1980s. In 1993, Mullis won the Nobel Prize for his work, and since then, the test has been refined and perfected enough so that forensic experts now trust it more implicitly than any other current investigative tool.
What PCR testing can accomplish is nothing short of amazing. Using a machine with a price tag of more than $50,000 and often about the size of a small cube refrigerator, chemicals are used to separate the DNA’s double helix into two distinct pieces. These delicate strands are placed into a solution of enzymes including the polymerase and the nucleotides adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine (molecules containing nitrogen that are the building blocks of DNA). The two strands of DNA, the polymerases, then act like a kind of superadvanced copy machine. Under the right conditions, the chemical recreates the DNA and makes a copy of it so there are a pair of double helixes. Within a few hours, the PCR chain reaction can produce billions of copies of the original DNA. The repetition was necessary because many copies were needed to create a kind of map of Ridgway’s genes. Once the map was in hand, comparisons could be made.
The DNA within Ridgway’s saliva sample was compared to the DNA found on the dead bodies. Hearts skipped when researchers were able to match up sequences of nucleotides that were unique to Ridgway and only to Ridgway. The possibility of a mistake was minuscule, since the error rate for the test is one in three trillion. It wasn’t that authorities didn’t find DNA on the dead victims along the way. They did. But the amount of DNA wasn’t enough to have been used in the fairly unrefined tests that were available at the time.
So the authorities finally nabbed their suspect. Three heroic scientists worked a total of 640 hours obtaining the right DNA samples to test and then used PCR to resounding success. When the news was announced, one Seattle journalist told me, “There was a lot of excitement—it seemed like a movie script, really. Here were these seemingly ancient murders, and suddenly the legendary killer was unmasked and the whole country knew about it. It was hard to believe, but little revelations kept pouring out, and it became more and more real.” In early November 2003, an unemotional Ridgway pled guilty, one by one, to forty-eight murders in exchange for a life sentence. Reading from a statement before the judge and some of the families of the deceased in a small courtroom, Ridgway said, “I’m sorry for killing all those young ladies. I have tried to remember as much as I could to help the detectives find and recover the ladies. I’m sorry for the scare I put into the community. I want to thank the police, the prosecuting attorneys, my lawyers, and all others that had the patience to work with me and to help me remember all the tragic things that I did and to be able to talk about them.
“I know the horrible things my acts were. I have tried for a long time to get these things out of my mind.
“I have tried for a long time to keep from killing any ladies. I’m sorry that I put my wife, my son, my brothers, and my family through this hell. I hope that they can find a way to forgive me.” That admission made him the worst serial killer in United States history, and families were up in arms. Most relatives of the murdered still wanted death for Ridgway (one stated, “I’ll kill him myself”), but the state of Washington has only performed a handful of executions since it initiated the death penalty. You might ask, Well, if serial killers are addicted to killing, why did Ridgway’s murders seem to stop in the 1980s? The fact is, they didn’t stop. Ridgway probably killed many more. If you look closer at the interviews he gave to authorities, Ridgway actually admitted to killing sixty women. But authorities could pin only forty-eight on him. Shortly after his plea of guilty, Snohomish County police announced that they were looking at twenty additional unsolved murders to gauge whether Ridgway may have been involved—especially because Ridgway admitted he didn’t stop killing in the 1980s. Police forces from San Diego to Canada are now looking at Ridgway as a possible connection to their unsolved murders of women.
We have made much progress in understanding the mind of the serial murderer. In 1975 when I began my research, serial killers were considered no different from mass murderers. But in my work on such cases as the worst massacre in Australia, where thirty-five people were killed (and eighteen injured) with a semiautomatic rifle in Port Arthur, I’ve found that the difference is quite distinct. Port Arthur was a historical site in Tasmania, the location of a former penal colony. On the afternoon of Sunday, April 28, 1996, Martin Bryant lunched at the Broken Arrow Café on the grounds of the tourist attraction. After sitting down and eating, he removed an AR15 semiautomatic shotgun from a blue gym bag and began shooting people. Twenty people died and fifteen were wounded in the restaurant and fifteen more were shot and died outside of the café and in locations nearby.
The mass murderer is a human who has a personality structure, whereas a serial murderer really does not. As he readies to kill, the mass murderer regresses from that personality to a very paranoid state. Becoming suspicious, angry, and revengeful, he develops clear motives for his murders. As he begins to shoot from a campus tower, from inside the halls of a high school, or in a seaside cottage to kill many people at once, he feels he’s getting back at somebody. Unlike serial murderers, who are seen by neighbors to be nice and helpful, a mass murderer is often said to be unusual, different, or odd. And the mass murderer often dies in a battle with police or kills himself to avoid police (although Martin Bryant stayed alive and currently is serving a life sentence in Risdon prison). Serial murderers never commit suicide before being apprehended, and they rarely kill themselves in prison. The mass murderer has blamed society for his woes.
As I’ve written, my belief, my theory, is that society and parenting and even accidents that injure the brain have little to do with creating a serial killer. John Wayne Gacy’s father continually called him “dumb and stupid.” Bobby Joe Long hated his mother. Ed Gein was obsessed with his mother. Gilles de Rais had a thug of a grandfather who never set the boy on the straight and narrow. But we humans are an adaptable species, tougher and more resilient than we think we are. The majority of people do not break down in the way serial killers break down. People may be hurt or emotionally wounded by parents or society, but they move on, some to become CEOs of large corporations, some simply to have a family that is far more stable than the upbringings they endured.
I am firmly convinced that there is something in the genes that leads a person to become a serial killer. In other words, he is a serial killer before he is born. He is a serial killer as he grows during those nine months of nurturing in the womb, not yet influenced by the words or deeds of parents, teachers, and caregivers. He is a serial killer when he is a fetus, even as soon as sperm meets egg to create the genes of a new person. Those genes will create a disordered brain, a “diseased” brain that is predisposed to serial murder.
It’s almost too facile to say the brain is the most complex of human organs, but it’s true. Franz Joseph Gall, the German-born scientist who worked in the early 1800s, was considered the Newton of intellectual physics and the creator of phrenology. He stated that “each of our feelings, our instincts, our intellectual and moral principles has, in the brain, its own specific organ which can be seen on the surface in the form of either a prominence or a Fossa, according to whether it is highly developed or not, and the skull, faithfully reproducing the outlines and sinuousity of the brain, also reproduces the configuration of these various organs.” While the writing itself is a bit obtuse, the eccentric Gall was on the right track in assigning specific activities to specific parts of the brain. He did mistakenly believe those with a big brain were more “powerful” than those with a smaller organ, and that bumps on the head indicated what was going on inside the brain. Today in my office, I keep a ceramic head that phrenologists used to use. It reminds me not to go too far off in speculation without having a good basis in fact.
With the discovery of the brain’s Papez circuit in 1937, science really began to show the connection between emotion and bodily response. Simply put, the Papez circuit is the brain route senses take, the result of which colors your emotions.
One of the first things a medical student learns in neuroanatomy courses is that this Papez circuit affects part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which is a kind of a minibrain in itself. The hypothalamus releases chemicals and hormones to the pituitary gland, which then releases them to the blood, where the chemicals have their effect on the human body. In addition, the multitasking hypothalamus helps to manage body temperature and the cardiovascular system. Many serial murderers will complain or talk about being hypertensive or having multiple autonomic symptoms, from sweating to rapid heartbeat to vomiting to passing gas at the time of or just prior to the act of killing. But not all people who have brain disease are violent, nor are all persons who are violent suffering from brain disease. While there’s not space enough to detail the intricacies of the neurological functions of the brain, I believe it’s important to understand that one of the primary keys to understanding the serial murderer lies within the hypothalmus and in the limbic system. To put it very simply, these parts of the brain regulate emotions and moods.
Created by Professor Zang-Hee Cho in the 1970s, the process of PET (positron-emission tomography) scans the brain to detect changes in blood oxygenation and blood flow. After the patient is injected with a radioisotope, the PET machine watches for the emissions of particles called positrons from the decaying radioisotope in the brain. When the positrons meet with electrons, photons are emitted, and the computer is then able to create an image for study by researchers and doctors. These pictures can tell quite a story.
In studies using PET, researchers induced emotions in patients by asking what people thought about movies they had just seen. When the brain patterns were studied, it was seen that happiness, sadness, and disgust are associated with increased activity in the hypothalamus and various areas of the brain that we can specify and target. I’d detail each of the areas I mean, but truly explaining places in the brain like the occipitotemporoparietal cortex would take a course of study in school, not just a book.
Again, without becoming too technical, there are various chemicals in the body that instigate emotions and lead to actions. For instance, I’ve said throughout the book that one of the clues to understanding a serial killer is that he has no social or psychological attachment. Killers such as Fred West or Michael Lee Lockhart are like infants emotionally. Two substances, oxytocin and vasopression, have been seen as being involved in attachment. Receptors have been located in the limbic system and in the brainstem. Could a serial murderer have an imbalance of these substances or a lack of receptor attachment in the brain? These are just two of many substances that can lead a human being to human action. Will we, sometime in the future, find one particular chemical that is the serial killer chemical? I certainly hope so.
In the mind of the average person, decision making occurs at several levels of the central nervous system. At the highest level, the individual uses past experience and future predictions to choose a course of action. At the lowest level, conscious decision making does not occur until after the actions are performed. The latter is the state of mind of the serial murderer. He is completely unaware of the process leading up to murder.
In addition to the Papez circuit, there are various other “switches” within the brain that create a cascade of events that lead a serial killer to kill. In the mind of a serial killer, something goes wrong in the switching process of these circuits. A multitude of factors, not the least of which are these circuits, keep the neurochemicals in the brain usually at levels that lead a person to function normally. To keep the brain on an even keel, the circuits strike a very fine balance, but what tips that balance? What makes that limbic system, the center of affect, emotion, and action, go berserk? I am convinced that it’s in the genes. In addition, there have not been any murders from serial killers until they have become adolescents. I believe that the changes in adolescents that make them become serial killers are in the neurochemical and neuroendocrine changes that go along with puberty.
What we did initially in looking at the DNA and the genetics of these people was very primitive. In the 1970s, I remember taking the blood of Richard Macek and passing it on to a geneticist to analyze. On reflection, how unrefined that process was. You could almost compare what we did in looking at early gene patterns with phrenology, because we were saying, “Wow, look at the shape of this gene, does this say anything?” We did not know how incredibly complex the internal structure of each gene is. We were trying to do some pioneering work, but look how far we’ve come since the 1970s. In thirty years, we’ve made mammoth strides.
There are now ways to monitor the brain’s function that psychiatrists used to believe could be observed only through analytic exploration like talking therapy. Being able to single out a chemical like oxytocin in the hypothalamus is only the very beginning. It doesn’t define anything or answer anything, but it gives me a clue. Finding that clue is a little bit like finding a clue when I’m on the trail of a serial murderer—it’s exhilarating and exciting. But much more work is needed. Scientists know a good deal about brain metabolism and function, but then, where can these clues lead when it comes to serial murderers? What in the brain and in the genes makes them addicted to killing?
Overseas in the Netherlands, geneticist Hans Brunner from the University Hospital in Nijmegen has made a fascinating discovery. One day, a young woman approached Brunner and said she was concerned about bearing children. During her conversation with Brunner, she confessed to a history of brutal behavior in her family, like attempted murder. After testing, Brunner found that the woman’s family carried an unusual gene mutation, a preponderance of the substance monoamine oxidase A. This enzyme stopped transmissions in the brain that are essential in maintaining tranquility and contentment, and the presence of the enzyme led the brain to refuse to break down serotonin. An excessive amount of serotonin may well cause a person to lash out with destructive behavior. Hans Brunner’s discovery is just another small, important piece of the puzzle in the picture of the causes of violence.
I’ve attempted to run various tests with the permission of the serial murderer and of the government. Consistently, I’d like to run the whole gamut of genetic, biochemical, neurological, and neurochemical testing—including some cerebrospinal fluid–sampling studies. Cerebrospinal fluid guards the brain and spinal cord, and it takes chemicals on their rides through the central nervous system. Testing is a relatively easy process in which a local anesthetic is rubbed onto the area between the third and fourth vertebrae on the lower back and the doctor takes a needle to remove samples of the fluid. The pain involved is minor, but there may be a headache after the procedure is completed.
The testing would also include the implantation of deep brain electrodes, the output of which I would follow over periods of time. This does require surgery, which includes placing electrodes in the brain that are joined to a battery via a wire placed underneath the skin. In most cases, the battery is turned off at night. The risk of any possible bleeding in the brain is low—between one and two percent. Data suggest that the implantation of electrodes has no long-term side effects, and the electrodes can be removed at a later date.
In other words, this is long-term testing that would be conducted with the prisoner within the prison system. Some might say, well, you’ve said the serial murderer acts different within the structure of prison than he does in the less structured environment in which he commits his murders. But even if he were in a structured prison situation, such tests would give me a good baseline as to how an individual reacts to certain situations, from work in the kitchen to prisoners that don’t particularly like him to dealings with visitors like family. If I see an external change, has there been an internal change to go along with it? Long-term testing is the way to find out.
Testing doesn’t mean the prisoner would be constantly tethered to anything. But I would want to monitor electrical patterns and neurochemical patterns in the brain. Doctors already do this on patients who aren’t incarcerated. Again, I’m not suggesting cutting into his skull to operate on his brain in an effort to change the way his brain functions. I just want to gather important information that the brain is telling me, information that occurs naturally in the course of the prisoner’s everyday life.
I would be remiss if I didn’t explain that there are legal obstacles to overcome with all of this. They’re not obstacles that stem from the serial murderers themselves. Usually the murderers are all for testing, as they often express how exploration will help them to understand themselves and their murderous deeds, deeds they sometimes cannot remember. Over the years, I’ve approached lawyers, judges, and legislators to gauge their opinions over coffee or at fancy fund-raisers. I’ve even suggested that a law be passed to allow testing of serial killers. Sometimes I’ve received blank stares. Sometimes I’ve been laughed at. Sometimes I’ve dealt with angry responses. Sometimes they’ve cited a litany of case law.
The courts themselves have been very clear on the subject. Judges in many states have ruled that the prisoners don’t have the free will to participate in the studies I propose simply because they are prisoners, thus incapable of exercising free will. Therefore, the state thinks for them in these matters, and the state says no to testing. The American Civil Liberties Union would likely pitch a huge fit even if the states agreed to testing, saying that the individual’s freedom to agree or disagree would be impinged upon.
Yet when I look at a movie like Minority Report, I wonder what the future might hold. In the film based on a short fiction by Philip K. Dick, Tom Cruise is a kind of detective in the year 2054 who is able to use technology and psychic beings called “Pre-Cogs” to capture killers before they kill.
I sometimes wonder whether our knowledge of DNA may someday prevent serial killings, but not in the dramatic way the characters in Minority Report prevented killings. Any person can already submit a DNA sample by simply brushing some skin from the cheek or by giving blood samples to companies like Kimball Genetics. They can diagnose predisposition to illness in the average person for a fee, everything from inherited mental retardation to periodontal disease. A Florida company called Applied Digital Solutions offers the VeriChip, a tiny device about the size of a grain of rice. Implanted under the skin, it is full of information that becomes known and can be disseminated when scanned into a computer. The company is also working on a device to track children and wandering Alzheimer’s patients via satellites and the Global Positioning System.
What if we were able to know, from something that was flagged deep within in the genes, that a person was predisposed to serial murder? Could we track him with an implanted device currently used by companies such as Applied Digital Solutions? Under what circumstances would it be ethical to do so? Would the legal system or the United States government ever permit even an experiment involving such a system? It’s important to create a discussion of these questions now because the day will come, sooner rather than later, when doctors using DNA analysis will have the ability to reveal whether or not we will have a serial murderer in our midst—even before the murderer is born.
When that day comes, I’ll know my work is done.
*An agent from the FBI told CNN about the serial murderer conundrum plaguing Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2003. The generalities the agent used in his profile after months of investigation were almost of no use. He was “too smart to be caught,” “able to lift 175 pounds,” “wore size ten or eleven shoes,” was “impulsive,” “determined,” “nonthreatening,” and “white.” So much for the vaunted depth of behavioral science.