The downtown Chicago summer night was filled with the wind-spun perfume of nearby roses and freshly mown lawns. My children were in bed, the youngest sleeping soundly with dreams of magic and Harry Potter, and the oldest sleeping the hard sleep that comes after playing three periods of ice hockey. Across the street, a young couple walked hand in hand, and their laughter echoed as they passed out of view. My neighbors pulled up in their car and I waved to them. Dressed to the nines, they’d just celebrated their wedding anniversary, and they waved back as they moved inside their house. As their door closed and the neighborhood fell completely silent, I began to think about my own life and the fact that my children and my neighbors knew only in the most general terms what I do in my professional life. Our friends recognize that I am a psychiatrist who deals with very difficult cases, and perhaps it’s better that they don’t know any more than that. My two boys don’t know why I sometimes leave for weeks on end, not yet. What I do is so very far removed from this thriving, affable neighborhood—the satisfaction we get from planting oak saplings with the community association, the occasional elegance of charity galas or the opera—that most everyone would be shocked to hear about it.
After a few minutes, I went inside our four-story brick house, a nearly perfect place that was my husband’s grandfather’s home and office where he practiced medicine for decades. In the back of the first floor is a former examination room that now serves as my work space when I’m at home. Its walls are coated with tin, still there from years gone by. It’s the history here, the cheerful medical attention given to the neighborhood for over eighty years by the good doctors, that inspires me. I pulled from a beige-colored folder some pictures of a child, a girl not only murdered brutally but also battered nearly beyond recognition. Sometimes I don’t think I can take the sight of one more photograph of an innocent whose life has been so senselessly taken.
In preparation for a keynote address to a coroners group, I jotted down some notes onto a legal pad about the number and location of each wound on her lifeless body. Nearby were wire mesh baskets, with reams of other notes, replete with the pictures of other girls and boys, all murdered. This is not uncommon work for me. It is what I do, and I believe it is what I was meant to do.
Admittedly, it is not the work that most would choose, but I am what people now call a profiler, three short syllables that have given my professional research life a determined focus and purpose. For the past thirty years, longer than I care to remember, I have been privy to the most devious inner workings of serial murderers, and I have been compelled to traverse both the country and the world in a kind of solitary, endless journey to discover who they are, where they are hiding, and why they kill. Sometimes I think I know too much about them, certainly more than just about anyone in the world. But even as my knowledge of multiple murderers increases each day, my great fear is that I will never know enough.
I am not a profiler in the way you’ve seen on television. A few years ago, Ally Walker starred as the smartly dressed Samantha Waters in the CBS television series The Profiler. Waters said she worked via “thinking in images,” picturing killers through colorfully edited montages in her mind in a kind of extrasensory perception that helped her track down serial murderers. While she could never exactly control her visions, they always seemed to arrive at precisely the dramatic moment that moved the story forward into that most crucial element of prime-time television—the commercial. As for me, I am not clairvoyant in any way. Unlike Sam Waters, I do not see detailed, cinematic flashes of what happened in the past or what will happen in the future. And although some people have called me “The Real-Life Clarice” because of the books and movies The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter are the stuff of fiction. In Thomas Harris’s novels, Hannibal develops an emotional bond with Clarice that belies a twisted, sick love, but love nonetheless. In reality, the caveat in working with serial killers is that they are completely, utterly inhuman.
As a forensic psychiatrist with a health law degree, my job is grounded in careful science and in reasoned theory. After speaking at length to more than eighty of them, I have found that serial murderers do not relate to others on any level that you would expect one person to relate to another. They can play roles beautifully, create complex, earnest, performances to which no Hollywood Oscar winner could hold a candle. They can mimic anything. They can appear to be complete and whole human beings, and in some cases are seen to be pillars of society. But they’re missing a very essential core of human relatedness. For them, killing is nothing, nothing at all. Serial murderers have no emotional connection to their victims. That’s probably the most chilling part of it. Not only do they not care, but they also have no ability to care.
With serial killers, I never quite know whom I’m dealing with. They are so friendly and so kind and very solicitous at the beginning of our work together. I’ve been swept up into their world, and that world, however briefly, can feel right. I’ve often thought, Is this person the right person? Is all the work I’ve done—painstaking research, scientific collection of data, complex theorizing—simply wrong? Maybe I missed something. They’re charming, almost unbelievably so, charismatic like a Cary Grant or a George Clooney (although they rarely are as handsome). They treat me as if I am their kindred spirit.
However, when I sit with them for four to six hours at a time, solid, without interruption, everything changes. My interviews are crafted to seem like talks, easy conversations. I’ve learned that a serial murderer can’t maintain his solicitous role for any period of time past two to three hours. At this point I can begin to strip away the superficial layer of affability to reveal a dark, barren core.
He begins to fidget, sigh, tsk, clear his throat, roll his eyes, look around. Small beads of sweat form on his forehead. Finally, he begins to become annoyed, begins to break down. What he’d rather I do is sit there patiently and become a repository for his endless thoughts and ramblings. Yet through a combination of indulgence, tolerance, listening, and constant indirect questioning, I will always get him to say more than he wants to say. It can take months for a breakthrough, and when it comes, there’s nothing more electrifying, nothing more satisfying.
A good portion of the satisfaction I get comes from piecing together the facts that help me understand a case and then make it more cohesive. Each fact or datum becomes a part of a monumental puzzle, and I try to connect the information to other crimes that have been done. Along the way, I learn more and more about the serial killer—life story, personality, the attitude he has toward his victims—bit by bit. It is painstaking and difficult, particularly because it involves precious, innocent human life that has been snuffed out senselessly and horrifically.
From the more than a hundred files I sifted through in preparation for my speech, I could see the victims’ struggle and pain in the photographs. The signatures of serial murderers emerged on the bodies of their poor victims—bites, cuttings, or knots they used to make their marks, as though they were marking their handiwork with some kind of misplaced pride.
Later today, I will drive down to Merillville, Indiana, a sleepy town of about 27,000 people. It’s the very picture of American suburbia with its IHOP, Lowe’s, and Costco. Inside the Radisson Hotel I will give the keynote speech to the annual meeting of the Indiana Coroners Association. As the coroners sip coffee and eat morning Danishes, I’ll deliver my address, explaining my theories about why serial killers are compelled to kill. What signs of a serial killer should coroners hunt for at a crime scene? What triggers their actions? What makes them tick? Why do they continually hunger for murder? The popular perception is that they have been physically and/or sexually abused by their parents when they were innocent children. That is the stuff of fiction—a complete misconception. In the pages that follow, I’ll explain my theories, some of which are controversial. But they are grounded in decades of research and science. In addition to my own ideas, I’ll take the reader on a journey though these killers’ brains, with transcripts from our psychiatric sessions and in their own words from their own letters.
Into my briefcase’s front pocket, I placed a particular file, one bearing three names that may be familiar to you, John Wayne Gacy. Gacy, a paunchy fellow who often dressed as a clown with a huge, red-painted mouth when he entertained the sick and infirm at local Chicago hospitals, raped, tortured, and then buried many of his victims under the floorboards in his house. The case would soon become a staple of the press, which depicted Gacy as the very incarnation of evil, the devil himself. It was 1980 when I first encountered this murderer of thirty-three young males.
It was close to Christmas when my husband and I returned to Chicago from our honeymoon, and we were excited about settling into our new apartment. Ours wasn’t the most luxurious apartment in the world, but at the time it seemed the perfect nest for two doctors deeply in love. I had picked up the mail and sat down at the kitchen table to go through the bills, magazines, and Christmas cards that had accumulated. There were small packages, medical journals, and too much junk mail. But one envelope bore unfamiliar handwriting. Inside was a card with primitive handmade art, drawn with a pen and colored in with crayon, of Christmas trees and a snowman. Inside the card, the inscription read, “Peace on earth. Good will to men…and boys—John Wayne Gacy.” It was obscene, bold, as though Gacy were celebrating his brutal murders of so many young men. There was no way that Gacy, who I was to interview shortly, should have had access to our unlisted address. But he had found it and sent the card directly from jail. Gacy’s “greeting” made me realize once again the danger inherent in my work, not only to me but also potentially to my family. I had been threatened and taunted before, so I tried to put Gacy and his murders aside, but my husband took the incident hard. For some time, he couldn’t stop worrying about it…and me.
I finished crafting my lecture for the coroners and put the speech, photos, and notes into the worn leather briefcase. I turned briefly to pat my green jade turtle for good luck, switched off the light, and quietly closed the door. As I walked upstairs to bed in the semidarkness, there were some things I felt I knew for certain. Serial killing can be explained and understood. There are intricate but knowable patterns that every serial killer maintains. And because of what we’re learning regarding the patterns of DNA and genetics, the very phenomenon of serial killing may be preventable in the future. In this book, which is the story of a good portion of my career, I hope to begin to explain how.