The Turning Point
To law enforcement officials it must have seemed that serial murder arrived in the United States as suddenly and devastatingly as the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century—but was rather worse, for while the Black Death lasted for three years, from 1347 until 1350, there is still no sign of an end to this “plague of murder.”
That analogy, however, makes things sound worse than they are. The Black Death wiped out one-third of the population of Europe, and continued to return down the centuries, killing millions. The “plague of murder” has caused a fractional increase in the crime rate, but already the fight against it is proving more successful than anyone could have foreseen in the mid-1970s.
For many years, not even the Behavioral Science Unit was aware of its success. In 1978, William Webster, head of the FBI, had given his official approval to allowing instructors such as Ressler and Hazelwood to offer police forces a psychological profiling service. But the FBI is a bureaucracy, and even by 1980, no one was sure if was justifying its cost. A questionnaire was sent out to all the officials and detectives who had used the service to solicit their opinion. If the answer had been negative, the BSU might have faded away. In fact, the replies demonstrated that, although many officials in the Bureau were dubious about this new departure, police themselves were full of enthusiasm. A 1981 report concluded: “The evaluation reveals that the program is actually more successful than any of us really realized. The Behavioral Science Unit is to be commended for their outstanding job.”
An earlier chapter has described how in 1974, the unit was able to identify David Meirhofer as the kidnapper of Susan Jaeger, and how, when the police chief in Platte City, Kansas, telephoned the unit to describe the circumstances of the murder of Julie Wittmeyer, the profiler was able to describe the killer so accurately that the police chief cried: “Sure as shootin’, it’s him!”
One of Roy Hazelwood’s first profiles in 1978 demonstrated the same impressive accuracy. In Saint Joseph, Missouri, a babysitter left four-year-old Eric Christgen alone in a playground while she ran to the store. When she returned, the child was missing. His sexually abused body was later found at the foot of cliffs above the river. When the local police had run out of leads, they decided to approach Quantico.
Working with crime-scene photographs and police reports, Hazelwood’s own experience of criminal pedophiles led him to surmise that the killer was a white male of around fifty. This was based on witnesses to the abduction. And a middle-aged pedophile who sodomizes and strangles a child almost certainly has a police record. From the roughness of the steep hillside where the man had taken the boy, Hazelwood reasoned that the killer was powerfully built.
He judged that the man was a laborer, since he would be unlikely to have the ability or skill to hold down a more demanding job. He added that the man was a loner who had probably been drinking all day, and that this was a crime of sudden impulse.
As a final comment Hazelwood said that the criminal pedophile, like the sexual sadist, is the only sexual offender who experiences no remorse or guilt. They enjoy committing their crimes, and they fantasize about them later.
A few months after the murder, Michael Reynolds, an unemployed twenty-five-year-old cook, broke down under interrogation and confessed to killing the child. It looked as if Hazelwood had been wide of the mark. But, in 1983, a pedophile named Charles Hatcher was arrested for another crime, and confessed to the murder of Eric Christgen, and to sixteen other murders over the years. He had been fifty at the time he killed Eric. Hatcher was sentenced to life, and Reynolds was released. (False confessions, based on deep guilt feelings, are one of the problems most policemen have to contend with at some time.) Hatcher hanged himself in his cell a year later.
The prosecutor, Michael Insco, who had been in charge of the Reynolds case, later admitted to Hazelwood that he had not read the profile, since at the time the work of the Behavioral Science Unit was little known. He had come across it after Hatcher’s conviction and realized that it matched on twenty-one points. If its accuracy had been recognized in 1978, Hatcher would have been prevented from killing again.
In 1979, the year Reynolds was falsely convicted, the Behavioral Science Unit had one of its most striking early successes.
Francine Elveson, twenty-six, a tiny four-foot-eleven-inches Plain Jane who suffered from a slight curvature of the spine, was found naked, badly beaten about the head and face, and with her body mutilated, spread-eagled on the roof of the Pelham Parkway Houses apartment building in the Bronx where she lived with her parents. So severe was the physical assault that her jaw and nose were both broken, and the teeth in her head pounded loose. Her nylon stockings were loosely tied round her wrists and ankles, even though no restraint had been needed: she was unconscious, or already dead, when that was done. Her underwear had been pulled over her head, hiding her battered features from view. There were tooth marks visible on her thighs and knees.
Using a pen taken from her handbag, her killer had scrawled a challenge to the police on one thigh: “You can’t stop me,” and on her stomach, “Fuck you.” Both the pen and the dead teacher’s umbrella were found thrust into her vagina, and her comb (also taken from the handbag) wedged in her pubic hair. Her pierced earrings had been removed from the lobes, and placed on either side of her head. Both breasts were mutilated, each nipple cut off and placed back on the chest.
There were no deep knife wounds: this suggested that the killer had used a small weapon—a penknife, probably—and taken it with him. A pendant that the victim habitually wore, manufactured in the shape of a Jewish good luck sign (chai), was missing—presumably taken by her assailant. The dead woman’s limbs were positioned to simulate the shape of the pendant, as if to form a replica.
Francine Elveson was attacked within minutes of leaving her parents’ apartment shortly after 6:30 a.m. on October 12, 1979. Her body was found on the roof some eight hours later, after she failed to arrive at the school for disabled children where she taught. The police report showed that the attack took place as she made her way downstairs. She was battered unconscious and carried up to the roof for the macabre ritual that followed. Medical evidence revealed that she had not been raped. The cause of death was strangulation; she had in fact been twice strangled, manually first and then with the strap of her handbag. Lack of forensic evidence—fragments of skin tissue, fibers, and the like—under her fingernails indicated that she had made no attempt to fight off her assailant. Traces of semen were found on her body, but DNA fingerprinting would not be discovered for another five years, so there were no apparent clues to the identity of her murderer.
Because of its bizarre features the Elveson case attracted a great deal of publicity, but despite an intensive police investigation that included questioning some two thousand people, and checking on known sex offenders and patients undergoing treatment in mental hospitals, the search for Francine Elveson’s killer bogged down. Finally, in November 1979, local authorities called in the FBI—even though the police investigators thought it was probably a waste of time. One experienced murder squad detective was quoted as saying: “Frankly I didn’t see where the FBI could tell us anything, but I figured there was no harm in trying.”
Crime-scene photographs, together with the police report and autopsy findings, were duly forwarded to the Behavioral Science Unit for analysis.
Enter Special Agent John Douglas to profile the type of person responsible—from his desk at Quantico, some three hundred miles away. He knew from the police report that Francine Elveson, who was self-conscious about her size and physical deformity, had no boyfriends. That ruled out a lovers’ quarrel. Moreover, it was spontaneous choice that led her to leave for work that morning via the stairs, rather than use the elevator. Those two factors meant that it was a chance encounter between victim and murderer—yet an encounter with someone who promptly spent a long time on the roof mauling his victim in broad daylight. To John Douglas that meant he was no stranger to the building; he knew its routine well enough to feel confident that he would not be disturbed during the ritual mutilation murder that ensued.
Again, the fact that he was in the building at that hour suggested someone who might live, or perhaps work there. And Elveson—this shy, almost reclusive young woman who shunned men because of her appearance—had neither screamed nor made any apparent attempt to ward off a man who suddenly lashed out as they passed on the stairs. It had to mean that either he was someone she knew, if only by sight, or who was wearing an identifiable uniform—postman, say, or janitor—whom she believed she had no reason to fear.
The offender left mixed crime scene characteristics, as many sex killers do. He used restraints (organized), yet left the body in full view (disorganized). He depersonalized his victim (disorganized), yet having mutilated her body took the knife with him (organized). On balance, however, John Douglas classified him as a “disorganized” offender, acting out a fantasy ritual that had probably been inspired earlier by a bondage article and/or sketches in some pornographic magazine. The FBI agent profiled him as white (Francine Elveson was white), male, of roughly her age (say between twenty-five and thirty-five), and of average appearance, in other words, who would not seem in any way out of character in the apartment building environment.
Statistics pointed to a school “dropout” type, possibly now unemployed. Because of the time at which it happened, the crime seemed unlikely to be either drink- or drug-related. Francine Elveson’s killer was a man who found it difficult to behave naturally with women, and was almost certainly sexually inadequate. (The ritual mutilation provided the gratification he craved—a fact borne out by forensic evidence, which revealed traces of semen on the body.) He was the type of sex offender who would keep a pornography collection, while his sadistic behavior pointed to one with mental problems.
He left the body in view because he wanted it to shock and offend. That decision was part and parcel of his implied challenge to the police, inked on the victim’s thigh—“You can’t stop me.” It was a challenge that John Douglas believed meant he was liable to kill again, should opportunity arise. His profile stressed the importance of the attacker’s prior knowledge of the apartment building where the victim lived—and her apparent lack of alarm as they met on the stairs.
Once the answer to these two connected factors was found, the rest of the puzzle would slot into place.
Armed with the profile, the investigating police re-examined their list of suspects. One man in particular seemed to fit the description like a glove. His name was Carmine Calabro. He was thirty-two years old, an unmarried, out-of-work actor, and an only child with a history of mental illness. He had no girlfriends. He did not live in the apartment building where Francine was found murdered, but his father—whom he often visited—lived there and was a near neighbor of the Elvesons.
The problem was that it seemed impossible for Carmine Calabro to be the killer. The police had interviewed his father (as they had every other resident in the complex) before calling on the FBI for help. The father told them that his son—who lived elsewhere, and alone—was an in-patient undergoing treatment at a local psychiatric hospital, which appeared to rule him out as a possible suspect. Now enquiries were rechecked, and the police discovered that—because security was lax—patients at the hospital concerned were able to absent themselves almost at will. When they learned that Carmine Calabro was absent without permission on the evening before Francine Elveson was murdered, he was arrested—thirteen months after the body had been found.
Calabro proved to be a high-school dropout, who shared a collection of pornography—mostly S&M—with his father. He pleaded not guilty to the murder at his trial; however, the evidence given by three forensic (dental) experts—whose independent tests showed that impressions from Calabro’s teeth matched the bite marks on the dead teacher’s thigh—proved conclusive, and he was imprisoned for twenty-five years to life.
It had been a virtuoso performance by Special Agent John Douglas, whose startling accuracy of profiling matched that of James Brussel in the case of the Mad Bomber twenty-two years earlier. Aptly, one of the warmest tributes came from the head of the police task force assigned to the Elveson murder investigation, Lieutenant Joseph D’Amico. “They had [Carmine Calabro] so right,” he said, “that I asked the FBI why they hadn’t given us his phone number too.”
Douglas applied the same technique to a case involving the kidnapping and murder of Betty Shade in Logan, Pennsylvania, in June 1979. Her mutilated body was found on a garbage dump, and there was evidence that she had been raped after death. The injuries to her face convinced Douglas again that the killer knew the victim well, and had killed her in a fury of resentment; but the mutilations had been performed after she had died, suggesting that the killer was too frightened to inflict them while she was alive. This indicated a young and nervous killer. Yet, Betty had been driven from her babysitting job to the dump in a car, requiring a degree of organization. The necrophilic sex also suggested a killer who was taking his time. To Douglas, all this pointed unmistakably to two killers, and again, his “profile” pointed the police in the right direction. The young woman lived with her boyfriend, and it seemed unlikely that he would rape her after death, which is why he had originally been eliminated from the inquiry. But the boyfriend had an elder brother who owned a car. Both men were eventually convicted of the murder. The younger man had killed and mutilated her; the brother had raped her dead body.
Agent Howard Teten, who taught one of the original FBI courses in applied criminology at the Academy, also seemed to have a natural talent for “profiling” random killers, which he had been applying since the early 1970s. On one occasion, a California policeman had contacted him about a case in which a frenzied killer had stabbed a young woman to death. The frenzy suggested to Teten that the murderer was an inexperienced youth, and that this was probably his first crime, committed in a violently emotional state. And, as in the later case of the Bronx schoolteacher, Teten thought the evidence pointed to someone who lived close to the scene of the crime. He advised the policeman to look for a teenager with acne, a loner who would probably be feeling tremendous guilt and would be ready to confess. If they ran across such a person, the best approach would be just to look at him and say, “You know why I’m here.” In fact, the teenager who answered the door said, “You got me” even before the policeman had time to speak.
The FBI’s new insight into the mind of the killer and rapist began to pay dividends almost immediately. In 1979, a woman reported being raped in an East Coast city; the police realized that the modus operandi of the rapist was identical to that of seven other cases in the past two years. They approached the FBI unit with details of all the cases. The deliberation of the rapes seemed to indicate that the attacker was not a teenager or a man in his early twenties, but a man in his late twenties or early thirties. Other details indicated that he was divorced or separated from his wife, that he was a laborer whose education had not progressed beyond high school, that he had a poor self-image, and that he was probably a Peeping Tom. In all probability, the police had probably already interviewed him, since they had been questioning men wandering the streets in the early hours of the morning. This “profile” led the police to shortlist forty suspects living in the neighborhood, and then gradually, using the profile, to narrow this list down to one. This man was arrested and found guilty of the rapes.
It soon became clear that psychological profiling could also help in the interrogation of suspects. The agency began a program of instructing local policemen in interrogation techniques. Their value was soon demonstrated in a murder case of 1980.
On February 17, the body of a woman was found in a dump area behind Daytona Beach Airport in Florida; she had been stabbed repeatedly, and the body was in an advanced state of decomposition, which indicated that she had been dead for a matter of weeks. She was fully dressed and her panties and bra were apparently undisturbed; she had been partially covered with branches and laid out neatly and ritualistically on her back, with her arms at her sides. The FBI team would immediately have said that this indicated a killer in his late twenties or early thirties.
From missing person reports, Detective Sergeant Paul Crowe identified her as Mary Carol Maher, a twenty-year-old swimming star who had vanished at the end of January, more than two weeks previously. She had been in the habit of hitching lifts.
Towards the end of March, a local prostitute complained of being attacked by a customer who had picked her up in a red car. She had been high on drugs, so could not recollect the details of what caused the disagreement. Whatever it was, the man had pulled a knife and attacked her—one cut on her thigh required twenty-seven stitches. She described her assailant as a heavily built man with glasses and a moustache, and the car as a red Gremlin with dark windows. She thought that he had been a previous customer, and that he might live in or near the Derbyshire Apartments.
Near these apartments an investigating officer found a red Gremlin with dark windows; a check with the Department of Motor Vehicles revealed that it was registered to a man named Gerald Stano. And the manager of the Derbyshire Apartments said that he used to have a tenant named Gerald Stano, who drove a red Gremlin with dark windows. A check revealed that Stano had a long record of arrests for attacking prostitutes, although no convictions; he apparently made a habit of picking up hitchhiking hookers.
A photograph of Stano was procured, and shown to the prostitute, who identified him as her attacker.
It was at this point that Detective Crowe heard about the case and reflected that Mary Carol Maher had also been in the habit of hitching lifts—she had been an athletic young woman who was usually able to take care of herself. Crowe’s observations at the crime scene told him that Mary’s killer had been a compulsively neat man; he was now curious to see Stano.
The suspect was located at an address in nearby Ormond Beach, and brought in to police headquarters for questioning. Crowe stood and watched as a colleague, whom he had primed with certain questions, interrogated Stano. But his first encounter with Stano answered the question about compulsive neatness; Stano looked at him and told him that his moustache needed a little trimming on the right side.
What Crowe wanted to study was Stano’s body language, which was as revealing as a lie detector. And Stano was an easy subject to read. When telling the truth, he would pull his chair up to the desk or lean forward, rearranging the objects on the desktop while talking. When lying, he would push back his chair and cross his legs, placing his left ankle on his right knee.
It was not difficult to get Stano to admit to the attack on the prostitute—he knew that she could identify him. Then Crowe took over, and explained that he was interested in the disappearance of Mary Carol Maher. He showed Stano the young woman’s photograph, and Stano immediately admitted to having given her a lift. “She was with another girl,” he said, pushing back his chair and placing his left ankle on his right knee. After more conversation—this time about the fact that Stano was an orphan—Crowe again asked what had happened with Mary Carol Maher. Pushing his chair back and crossing his legs, Stano declared that he had driven her to a nightclub called Fannie Farkel’s—Crowe knew that this was one of Mary’s favorite haunts, a place frequented by the young set—but that she had not wanted to go in. Crowe knew that the truth was probably the opposite; Stano had not wanted to mix with a younger crowd (he was twenty-eight). He asked Stano if he had tried to “get inside her pants.” Stano pulled the chair up to the desk and growled, “Yeah.”
“But she didn’t want to?”
“No!”
Crowe recalled being told by Mary’s mother that her daughter had, on one occasion, “beaten the hell” out of two men who had tried to “get fresh.”
“She could hit pretty hard, couldn’t she?”
“You’re goddam right she could,” said Stano angrily.
“So you hit her?”
Stano pushed back his chair and crossed his legs. “No, I let her out. I haven’t seen the bitch since.”
Crowe now had the advantage. As he pressed Stano about the young woman’s resistance, it visibly revived the anger he had felt at the time. And when Crowe asked: “You got pretty mad, didn’t you?” Stano snorted: “You’re damn right I did. I got so goddam mad I stabbed her just as hard as I could.” Then he immediately pushed back his chair, crossed his legs, and withdrew his statement. But when Crowe pressed him to tell how he stabbed her, he pulled his chair forward again and described stabbing her backhanded in the chest, then, as she tried to scramble out of the door, slashing her thigh and stabbing her twice in the back—Crowe had already noted these injuries when he first examined the body. After this admission, Stano drove with Crowe to the dump behind the airport, and pointed out where he had hidden the body.
It was after Stano had signed a confession to killing Mary Carol Maher that one of Crowe’s fellow detectives showed him a photograph of a missing black prostitute, Toni Van Haddocks, and asked: “See if he knows anything about her.” When Crowe placed the photograph in front of Stano, Stano immediately sat back in his chair and placed his left ankle on his right knee. He denied knowing the woman. Two weeks later, on April 15, 1980, a resident of Holly Hill, near Daytona Beach, found a skull in his back garden. Local policemen discovered the scene of the murder in a nearby wooded area—bones scattered around by animals. When Crowe went to visit the scene, he immediately noted that four low branches had been torn off pine trees surrounding the clearing, and recognized Stano’s method.
Back at headquarters, he again showed Stano the photograph, asking: “How often do you pick up black girls?” Stano pushed back his chair. “I hate them bastards.” “But you picked her up.” Stano stared at the photograph, his legs still crossed. “That’s the only one I ever picked up.” It was at this point that Crowe realized that he was talking to a multiple killer.
Stano persisted in denying that he had killed Toni Van Haddocks. Crowe stood up to leave the room. “I know you did because you left your signature there.” Stano stared with amazement, and then called Crowe back: “Hey, wait. Did I really leave my name there?” Realizing that he had virtually admitted to killing her, he went on to confess to the crime. But these two murders, he insisted, were the only ones he had ever committed.
Crowe did not believe him. Now he knew that Stano was a ritualistic killer, and that ritualistic killers often kill many times. There had been no other recent disappearances in Daytona Beach, so Crowe studied the missing persons files and records of past murders. He found many. In January 1976, the body of Nancy Heard, a hotel maid, had been discovered in Tomoka State Park, near Ormond Beach, where Stano lived. Reports said the death scene looked “arranged.” She had been last seen alive hitchhiking. Ramona Neal, an eighteen-year-old from Georgia, had been found in the same park in May 1976, her body concealed by branches. In Bradford County, a hundred miles away, an unknown young woman was found concealed by tree branches, while in Titusville, to the south, another young woman had been found under branches—a young woman who had last been seen hitchhiking on Atlantic Avenue in Daytona Beach. When Stano had moved to Florida in 1973—from New Jersey—he had lived in Stuart. A check with the Stuart police revealed that there had been several unsolved murders of young women there during the period of Stano’s residence.
Stano’s adoptive parents told Crowe that they had fostered Gerald even after a New York child psychiatrist had labeled him “unadoptable.” He had been taken away from his natural mother as a result of “horrible neglect.” In all probability, Stano had never received even that minimum of affection in the first days of his life to form any kind of human bond. He had never shown any affection, and he had been compulsively dishonest from the beginning, stealing, cheating, and lying. He preferred associating with younger children—a sign of low self-esteem—and preferred women who were deformed or crippled—he had once impregnated a retarded young woman. He had married a compulsive overeater, but the marriage quickly broke down.
Crowe traced Stano’s wife, who was living with her parents in a house of spectacular untidiness—Crowe admitted that it reminded him of the home of the TV character Archie Bunker, who spends most of his time in his undershirt. There Stano’s ex-wife answered questions as she rested her huge breasts on the kitchen table. Stano’s sexual demands had been normal, as was only to be expected “with his itty-bitty penis.” But he had a peculiar habit of going out late at night, and returning, exhausted, in the early hours of the morning.
What had now emerged about Stano convinced Crowe of the need for further psychological profiling, and he called in an Ormond Beach psychologist, Dr. Ann MacMillan, who had impressed police with her profile of mass killer Carl Gregory. The result of tests on Stano revealed a psychological profile almost identical with those of Charles Manson and David Berkowitz; she believed that it meant that his crimes were predictable, and that he belonged to a group that might be labeled “born killers.”
Over many months, Crowe’s interrogation of Stano continued. At some point, Stano realized that Crowe was reading his physical signals, and changed them. But his compulsive nature made it inevitable that he developed new ones, and Crowe soon learned to read these, too.
Eventually, Stano confessed to killing thirty-four women; then, typically, he declared that this had been a stratagem to make him appear insane. His memory of his crimes was remarkably detailed—for example, he was able to describe a prostitute whom he had picked up in Daytona Beach as wearing a brown leather jacket, brown shoes, and a shirt with an inscription: “Do it in the dirt.” When he led them to the woman’s skeleton—covered with branches—the police found that it was wearing precisely these clothes. With plea-bargaining, Stano finally agreed to admit to six murders. On September 2, 1981, he was sentenced to three consecutive terms of twenty-five years—seventy-five years in all—and was taken to the Florida state prison. But a later trial resulted in a death sentence.
One of the most widely publicized cases of these early years of profiling began in Anchorage, Alaska, with the disappearance of a number of “exotic” dancers. In Anchorage, the temperature is so low that it is impractical for prostitutes to walk the streets. The majority of them solve the problem by working in topless bars and making appointments with clients for after hours. Few people notice when such a girl vanishes, although bar owners were often puzzled when their dancers failed to show up to collect their pay.
The lonely, frigid countryside outside Anchorage, Alaska, proved to be the perfect setting for Robert Hansen’s deadly games. If a prostitute did not satisfy him, he would take her to a remote spot, release her, and then hunt her down as if she were a game animal. (Shawn Clark/Shutterstock)
When, in 1980, building workers on Eklutna Road discovered a shallow grave, which had been partly excavated by bears, containing the half-eaten body of a woman, it seemed likely that she was one of the missing women. Because the advanced state of decay made it impossible to identify the body, she became known in the records as “Eklutna Annie.”
Two years later, on September 12, 1982, hunters found another shallow grave on the bank of the Knik River, not far from Anchorage; this time it was possible to identify the body in it as twenty-three-year-old Sherry Morrow, a dancer who had vanished the previous November. She had been shot three times, and shell casings near the grave indicated that the weapon had been a high-velocity hunting rifle that fires slugs—a .223 Ruger Mini-14. Here, once again, the investigation reached a dead end. It was impossible to interview every owner of such a rifle. An odd feature of the case was that the clothes found in the grave bore no bullet holes, indicating that the woman had been naked when she was killed.
A year later, on September 2, 1983, another grave was found on the bank of the Knik River; the woman in it had also been shot with a .223 Ruger Mini-14. The victim was identified as Paula Goulding, an out-of-work secretary who had found herself a job as an exotic dancer in a topless bar. She had started work on April 17, 1983, and had failed to return eight days later, leaving her paycheck uncollected. The bar owner commented that he had been reluctant to hire her because she had obviously been a “nice girl,” who had only resorted to dancing because she was desperate for money. Again, there were no clues to who might have killed her.
Investigators checking the police files made a discovery that looked like a possible lead. On the previous June 13, a scared and frantic seventeen-year-old prostitute had rushed into the motel where she was staying, a handcuff dangling from her wrist, and told her pimp that a client had tried to kill her. A medical examination at police headquarters revealed that she had been tortured. She told of being picked up by a red-haired, pockmarked little man with a bad stutter, who had offered her $200 for oral sex. She had accompanied him back to his home in the well-to-do Muldoon area, and down to the basement. There he had told her to take off her clothes, then snapped a handcuff on her, and shackled her to a support pillar. The tortures that followed during the next hour or so included biting her nipples and thrusting the handle of a hammer into her vagina. Finally, he allowed her to dress. He told her that he owned a private plane, and was going to take her to a cabin in the wilderness. The young woman guessed that he intended to kill her—she knew what he looked like and where he lived. So as the car stopped beside a plane, and the man began removing things from the trunk, she made a run for it, and succeeded in flagging down a passing truck.
Her description of the “John” convinced the police that it was a respectable citizen: Robert Hansen, a married man and the owner of a flourishing bakery business, who had been in Anchorage for seventeen years. Driven out to the Muldoon district, the young woman identified the house where she had been tortured; it was Hansen’s. She also identified the Piper Super Cub airplane that belonged to him. The police learned that Hansen was at present alone in the house—his family was on a trip to Europe.
When Hansen was told about the charge, he exploded indignantly. He had spent the whole evening dining with two business acquaintances, and they would verify his alibi. In fact, the two men did this. The prostitute, Hansen said, was simply trying to “shake him down.” Since it was her word against that of three of Anchorage’s most respectable businessmen, it looked as if the case would have to be dropped.
After the discovery of Paula Goulding’s body three months later, however, the investigating team led by Sergeant Glenn Flothe decided that the case was worth pursuing. If Hansen had tortured a prostitute, then decided to take her out to the wilderness, he could well be the killer they were seeking.
The investigators contacted the Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico. What they wanted was not a profile of the killer—they already had their suspect—but to know whether Robert Hansen was a feasible suspect.
Flothe spoke to Roy Hazelwood, who told them not to tell him anything about their suspect, but to begin by giving him the details of the crimes, and the story of the prostitute who had been tortured. When they had finished, Hazelwood gave them a word picture of the kind of person they could be looking for—some local businessman who loved hunting, who was psychologically insecure, and possibly had a stutter.
The Alaska CID was impressed. Hazelwood’s account was full of hits, including the stutter. And at that point they told Hazelwood about Robert Hansen—that he was a well-known big-game hunter who had achieved celebrity by bagging a Dall sheep with a crossbow in the Kuskokwim Mountains. Douglas’s answer was that Hansen was indeed a feasible suspect. A big-game hunter might well decide to hunt women. And he was a trophy collector; it would be likely that he had kept items belonging to his victims. If the police could obtain a search warrant, they might well find their evidence.
What was also clear was that if Hansen knew he was a suspect, he would destroy the evidence; it was therefore necessary to work quickly and secretly. The first step was to try to break his alibi. No doubt his friends had been willing to provide a false alibi because it would cost them nothing. If they were convinced that perjury could cost them two years in prison, they might feel differently. The police approached the public prosecutor and asked him to authorize a grand jury to investigate the charges of torture against the prostitute. The businessmen were then approached, and told that they would be called to repeat their stories on oath. It worked; both men admitted that they had provided Hansen with an alibi merely to help him out of a difficult situation. They agreed to testify to that effect.
Next, the police arrested Hansen on a charge of rape and kidnapping. A search warrant authorized the police to enter his home. There they found the Ruger Mini-14 rifle, which a ballistics expert identified as the one that had fired the shells found near the graves. Under the floor in the attic the searchers found more rifles, and items of cheap jewelry and adornment, including a Timex watch. Most important of all, they found an aviation map with twenty asterisks marking various spots. Two of these marked the places where the two bodies had so far been found. Another indicated the place where the unidentified corpse of a woman had been found on the south side of the Kenai Peninsula in August 1980, a crime that had not been linked with the Anchorage killings.
The investigators discovered that her name was Joanna Messina, and that she had last been seen alive with a redheaded, pockmarked man who stuttered.
At first Hansen denied all knowledge of the killings, but faced with the evidence against him, he finally decided to confess. The twenty asterisks, he admitted, marked graves of prostitutes. But he had not killed all the women he had taken out to the wilderness. What he wanted was oral sex. If the woman satisfied him, he took her back home. If not, he pointed a gun at her, ordered her to strip naked, and then run. He gave the woman a start, and then would stalk her as if hunting a game animal. Sometimes the woman would think she had escaped, and Hansen would allow her to think so—until he once again flushed her out and made her run. Finally, when she was too exhausted to run another step, he killed her and buried the body. Killing, he said, was an anticlimax, “the excitement was in the stalking.”
In court on February 28, 1984, the prosecutor told the judge (a jury was unnecessary since Hansen had pleaded guilty): “Before you sits a monster, an extreme aberration of a human being. A man who has walked among us for seventeen years, selling us doughbuts [sic], Danish buns, coffee, all with a pleasant smile on his face. That smile concealed crimes that would numb the mind.” Judge Ralph Moody then imposed sentences totaling 461 years.
For the investigating detectives, the most interesting part of Hansen’s confession was the explanation of why and how he had become a serial killer. Born in a small rural community—Pocahontas, Iowa—he had been an ugly and unpopular child. His schoolfellows found his combination of a stutter and running acne sores repellent. “Because I looked and talked like a freak, every time I looked at a girl she would turn away.” He had married, but his wife had left him—he felt that it was because he was ugly. He married again, moved to Alaska, and started a successful bakery business—his father’s trade. But marriage could not satisfy his raging sexual obsession, his desire to have a docile slave performing oral sex. Since Anchorage had so many topless bars and strip joints, it was a temptation to satisfy his voyeurism in them; then, sexually excited, he needed to pick up a prostitute. What he craved was fellatio, and many of them were unwilling. Hansen would drive out into the woods, and then announce what he wanted; if they refused, he produced a gun.
Because he was by nature frugal, he preferred not to pay them. In fact, it emerged in his confession that he was a lifelong thief, and that this was a result of his miserliness. “I hate to spend money . . . I damn near ejaculate in my pants if I could walk into a store and take something. . . . I stole more stuff in this damn town than Carter got little green pills.” Yet his next sentence reveals that it was more than simply miserliness that made him steal. “Giving stuff away, you know, walk out in the parking lot and walk to somebody’s car, and throw it in the damn car. But I was taking it . . . I was smarter than people in the damn store. It would give me—uh—the same satisfaction—I don’t know if you want to call it that—but I got a lot of the same feeling as I did with a prostitute.” The link between stealing and oral sex was “the forbidden.” This seems to explain why many serial killers—Ted Bundy is an example—begin as habitual thieves.
The murders had started, Hansen said, with Joanna Messina, a woman he had met in the town of Seward. She was living in a tent in the woods with her dog, waiting for a job in a cannery. Hansen had struck up a conversation with her and taken her out to dinner. Afterwards, they went back to her tent, near a gravel pit, where Hansen hoped she would be prepared to let him stay the night. When they were in bed, she told him she needed money. His natural cheapness affronted, he called her a whore and shot her with a .22 pistol; he then shot her dog, destroyed the camp, and dumped her body into the gravel pit.
According to Hansen, he was violently sick after the murder. Not long afterwards, he picked up a prostitute and asked her if she would fellate him. She agreed, and they drove out along the Eklutna Road. Then, according to Hansen, she became nervous and ran away; when he gave chase, she drew a knife. He took it from her and stabbed her to death. That was how the unidentified corpse known as Eklutna Annie came to lie in a shallow grave, to be dug up by a hungry bear.
With this victim Hansen did not feel nauseated. In fact, he said, when he looked back on the murder, he experienced an odd pleasure. He then began to fantasize about how enjoyable it would be to hunt down a woman as if she were an animal. Like so many other serial killers, Hansen had discovered that murder is addictive.
Over the next three years he drove about sixty prostitutes out into the wilderness and demanded oral sex. If the woman complied satisfactorily, he drove her back to Anchorage. If not, he forced her to strip at gunpoint, then to flee into the woods. When the hunt was over and the woman lay dead, he buried the body, and made a mark on a map—he even tried to guide officers back to some of the murder sites, but had usually forgotten exactly where they were. Once, when they were hovering over Grouse Lake in a helicopter, he pointed down. “There’s a blonde down there. And over there there’s a redhead with the biggest tits you ever saw.”
John Douglas, who traveled to Anchorage to help the police, makes a penetrating remark about Hansen. “[Prostitutes] were people he could regard as lower and more worthless than himself.” This was Hansen’s problem—a deep sense of worthlessness that could only be transformed into self-esteem by exercising his power over someone he regarded as lower than himself. And, as Douglas says, hunting a naked female through the snow would have been the “ultimate control.”
This lack of self-esteem is a recurrent characteristic of serial killers, and explains cases that otherwise seem baffling. It can be seen clearly in another case that was ongoing at the time Hansen was killing: “the .22-Caliber Killer,” or “Buffalo Bill”—a nickname that would be borrowed a few years later by the crime novelist Thomas Harris for the killer in his Silence of the Lambs.
On September 22, 1980, two black youths stopped at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, where one of them intended to cash his paycheck. When he returned to the car, his companion, fourteen-year-old Glenn Dunn, was slumped in his seat, shot in the head. A nurse who had entered the supermarket a few minutes earlier had noticed a slim white man in a hooded sweatshirt sitting outside, as if waiting for a lift; he was carrying a brown paper bag. Glenn Dunn proved to have been killed by a .22-caliber bullet.
It was the first of four shootings that occurred over thirty-six hours. The following day, Harold Green, thirty-two, an engineer, was shot in the temple as he ate in his car outside a fast-food restaurant in nearby Cheektowaga. That night, Emmanuel Thomas, thirty, was killed in the same neighborhood as he was crossing the road with a friend. The following day the .22-Caliber Killer moved farther afield, to Niagara Falls, and shot Joseph McCoy, forty-three, in front of a church.
Because all of the victims were black, there was anger in the black community, and much criticism of the police.
Two weeks later, on October 8, the killings took an even more bizarre twist. An abandoned taxicab was found on a construction site in the Buffalo suburb of Amherst. A police patrolman found an empty wallet under the driver’s seat, and the license of Parker Edwards, seventy-one. In the trunk they found Edwards, his skull smashed in. The killer had also cut out his heart.
The next day another black taxi driver, Ernest Jones, forty, was found on the bank of the Niagara River, his heart cut out of his chest. His cab, also covered in blood, was found two miles away.
The following day, October 10, a strange incident occurred in the Buffalo General Hospital. Just as visiting hours were nearly over, a white man in a baseball cap enquired for the room of Collin Cole, thirty-seven, an inmate of the local jail who was recovering from a drug overdose. A nurse on her rounds saw the visitor strangling the struggling Cole with a ligature; the attacker fled, but Cole reported that he had snarled, “I hate niggers.”
The Behavioral Science Unit was consulted, and John Douglas traveled to Buffalo. His feeling was that the .22-Caliber Killer was a man who felt he had a mission to kill blacks. Douglas surmised that he was the kind of person who might join a right-wing hate group. Just possibly, such a person, with his “group” mentality, might join the military, but would probably soon be discharged because of failure to adjust. Such a person, Douglas said, was often a loner until about the age of twenty-eight, when he was likely to explode. Such men were obsessed by weapons and often had a large gun collection. Nevertheless, the crimes showed him to be rational and organized.
The heart-remover killer was disorganized and pathological, someone whose hatred had probably been building up over several years. And unless he had undergone a sudden deterioration after the shootings, he was not the same person.
For two months, there were no more killings in the Buffalo area.
On December 22, four black men and one Hispanic were stabbed in Manhattan over a thirteen-hour period by a killer who was dubbed the “Midtown Slasher.” The first victim, John Adams, twenty-five, was knifed by a white assailant at 11:30 a.m.; he recovered. At 1:30 p.m., Ivan Frazier, thirty-two, was attacked by the other passenger in a subway carriage, but deflected the blow with his arm. The attacker fled. At 3:30, messenger Luis Rodriguez was attacked by a man who demanded his wallet; when he fought back, the man stabbed him twice; he later died. Around 6:50, the victim was Antoine Davis, thirty, stabbed in front of a midtown bank; he also died. So did Richard Renner, twenty, stabbed about 10:30 on Forty-ninth Street. Around midnight, the killer stabbed another subway passenger, Carl Ramsey, who succeeded in dragging himself up to street level before he died.
The .22-Caliber Killer had changed his MO. On December 29, Wendell Barnes, twenty-six, was stabbed in Rochester, and died; the next day in Buffalo, Albert Menefee recovered from the knife wound that nicked his heart. On January 1, there were two separate attacks, but both victims, Larry Little and Calvin Crippen, survived.
The case went cold again for several months, until the Buffalo police received a call from the army’s Criminal Investigative Division in Fort Benning, Georgia. A twenty-five-year-old army private, Joseph Christopher, whose home was in Buffalo, was in the hospital under guard. On January 13, he had tried to slash a black GI, and been placed under restraint. He had then attempted to castrate himself. And he had told the medical officer attending him, Captain Dorothy Anderson, that he had killed black men in Buffalo and New York.
Police went to his mother’s home, and in his bedroom found the sawed-off rifle used in the original shootings, and clothes that matched those reportedly worn by the killer. Christopher was found to be mentally competent, and was sentenced to sixty years. The psychiatrist who examined him was amazed how closely Christopher fit Douglas’s profile, even to the collection of weapons—which Christopher had inherited from his father.
Christopher had joined the army on November 13, but was on leave from December 19 until January 4, when he had launched his second murder spree. In an interview with Buffalo journalists after his conviction, Christopher estimated that his murder spree had cost at least thirteen lives.
Asked about the heart-removal murders of the two black taxi drivers, Christopher neither confirmed nor denied them. Douglas remains convinced that these two murders are not part of the sequence, because their MO is so completely unlike that of the earlier shootings. Yet it could be argued that the use of a knife connects them to the Midtown Slasher crimes, and that the mutilations of the taxi drivers reveals the same “signature”—hatred of blacks—as all the other crimes.
