American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Teten’s approach fit well with Mullany’s “people kill the way in which they live”; the two quickly teamed up, earning the nickname “Frick and Frack” among their FBI colleagues.3

  The BSU in the early 1970s was divided into two factions—the “sociologists,” who believed that environment dictated the behavior of criminals, and the “psychologists,” like Teten and Mullany, who were convinced that personality trumped environment. As far as the FBI administrators were concerned, they couldn’t care less, as long as the trainees received their classroom instructions and nobody from the BSU embarrassed the agency. And so Teten and Mullany pursued their behavioral research while news of their profiling sessions at the FBI Academy began to spread throughout the law enforcement community.

  Teten and Mullany were very different than academic forensic psychologists or psychiatrists and criminologists, who were researching why criminals did what they did, often after their subject was identified; Teten and Mullany were interested in the who did it and how. They profiled the personality and psychology of the perpetrator in order to identify and apprehend him—not explain him. The why was of little interest unless it helped to identify the unsub and secure his complete confession.

  In the mid-1970s, a second generation of FBI agents, like Robert Ressler, Roy Hazelwood and Richard Ault, would arrive at the BSU and build on what Teten and Mullany started. All three had served in the military and had graduate degrees in psychology, or in Ressler’s case, police administration. They would be followed by a third generation, led by the brash youngster with a psych degree, John Douglas, and somebody from outside the FBI to whip them into academic shape: Ann Burgess, a Boston University forensic nurse. But that came much later.

  It was Teten, Mullany and Ressler who, back in 1974, would undertake the FBI’s first operational profiling of an active unidentified serial killer in an ongoing investigation.

  David Meirhofer, “Unsub Zero,” Three Forks, Montana, 1967–1974

  In 1973, Bill and Marietta Jaeger of Farmington, Michigan, spent months planning a family camping trip to Montana with their five children, three boys and two girls, thirteen-year-old Heidi and seven-year-old Susan. Their grandparents joined the trip as well. The adults would sleep in the trailer while the boys and girls slept in two separate tents set out next to it. The two tents had been set up in the Jaegers’ backyard for two weeks before the trip, and all the neighborhood children took turns sleeping in them, roasting marshmallows and pretending they were on a camping trip.

  On June 22, 1973, the family caravan arrived at a campground in the Missouri Headwaters State Park near Three Forks, Montana, in Gallatin County. The Jaegers had no way of knowing that the campground was the site of the unsolved mysterious murder of a twelve-year-old Boy Scout, Michael E. Raney, on May 7, 1968. Raney’s tentmate had woken in the morning and found a slash cut through the side of the tent and Raney unconscious, covered in blood. He had been stabbed once, the wound puncturing his lung. Raney was rushed to the hospital, where he died. When an autopsy was completed, to everyone’s surprise it was determined that Raney died of brain damage as a result of blunt-force trauma to his head, not the stab wound.

  On the Jaegers’ third night there, the adults went to sleep in the trailer while the kids turned in for the night in their two tents, just as they had before. Heidi awoke in the middle of the night, needing to go to the bathroom. She would later say that when she stepped out of the tent, she had a strange dread that something or somebody was watching them in the dark, but she just dismissed it as nighttime jitters. She rejoined her little sister in the tent and went to sleep. In the early morning, Heidi was awakened by a cold draft blowing into their tent. There was an arching hole slashed into the side of the tent next to where Susie had been sleeping, and Susie was gone.

  Absent any ransom note or evidence that the victim had been taken across state lines, this was not an FBI case, but the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office requested the local FBI office’s assistance. A number of suspects were questioned but no leads resulted. The FBI was no more successful than the sheriff’s office in finding Susan, and within a few weeks the case stalled.

  In the spring of 1974, about ten months after the abduction, the FBI agent assigned to the case, Pete Dunbar, came to the FBI Academy to take the applied criminal psychology course with Teten and Mullany. While there, he proffered the unsolved Susan Jaeger abduction case for the BSU to review, to see if perhaps he’d missed something in the investigation. Teten, Mullany and Ressler together reviewed the case files. There was no autopsy report, no extensive crime scene reports and no body. It was a difficult start for the FBI’s first attempt to profile an unsub.

  Mullany recalled in his self-published memoir, Matador of Murder:

  We felt that the suspect was a white male in his mid to late twenties, was unmarried and a loner, lived in the area, was well known in the area and regarded as odd, had military experience, was a repeat offender, had a dominant mother and no father or an absent father figure, was asocial, and had an impaired history of heterosexual relationships. We also felt that his work history would reflect a solitary position, not requiring interpersonal relationships. Perhaps most shocking to Dunbar was our certainty that if the suspect was apprehended and his house searched, body parts would very likely be found. We felt that the suspect had killed more than once.4

  The BSU had one more thing to say in their profile: they predicted that when the suspect was arrested, he would attempt suicide.

  Very early in the investigation, an anonymous informant had given the FBI the name of a suspect. By coincidence, Dunbar, who’d grown up in the area, was familiar with him—he had gone to school with his mother. The suspect was David Gail Meirhofer, a twenty-four-year-old handyman who lived alone. This is typical in serial killer investigations: when an arrest is made, it’s quite often of someone on a list of suspects already identified and even interviewed. Gary Ridgway, “the Green River Killer,” for example, had been interviewed at least four times as a suspect over a period of fifteen years before he was finally arrested and charged in 2001.

  David Meirhofer fit the profile perfectly. He was a white male, single, a loner, a self-employed handyman and carpenter, lived in the area, was raised by his mother, had past difficulty in school, was ejected from the Boy Scouts when he had tried to stab a boy, intelligent, a Vietnam veteran, seldom dated, was asocial, and was regarded as somewhat strange.

  Dunbar was at first skeptical of the profile furnished by the BSU. Despite a rocky juvenile history and a somewhat strange personality, Meirhofer was well-liked in the community; he was affable and helpful, and had a distinguished record in the Marines. Aside from the juvenile incidents, Meirhofer had no record of any trouble.

  After the anonymous tip, Dunbar questioned Meirhofer, who had even submitted to sodium pentothal “truth serum” interviews. But Meirhofer had a lot of supporters in town, including the physician who had administrated the “truth serum.” Meirhofer retained an attorney and claimed that he was being unfairly prosecuted. On the advice of the BSU, the FBI now polygraphed Meirhofer, who successfully passed the test when asked if he had any knowledge of Susan Jaeger’s abduction.

  One thing nagged Dunbar, however. Meirhofer had been acquainted with a recent murder victim, nineteen-year-old Sandra Mae Dykman Smallegan. She had disappeared in February 1974 after attending a local basketball game. Eventually, her car was found covered by a tarp and hay on the Lockhart ranch, an abandoned property. Inside the dilapidated house on the ranch, police discovered a bloodstained closet that had been once nailed shut. Some 1,200 charred bone fragments were recovered from the property, and Smallegan’s remains were identified through dental records and an undergarment found at the site. While police conducted their search, a man approached the fence line and asked if anything had been found. It was David Meirhofer. But there was no evidence to charge him with anything or even serve a search warrant on his p
roperty. (Thirty years later, in 2005, construction workers would find Smallegan’s wallet, identification and a small notebook bound in wire hidden inside a wall of a building on property that Meirhofer once owned.)5

  “I Always Wanted a Little Girl of My Own”

  Back at Quantico, the profilers now made a suggestion to Dunbar. Mullany recalls, “We felt the subject had a connection to the crime, much like an individual to a wedding anniversary. We felt there was a very high degree of probability that the subject would make an anniversary contact with Susan’s parents. We convinced them that we had nothing to lose and everything to gain by having a tape recorder placed on the Jaeger residence phone in Farmington, Michigan. We also recommended that the phone call, if made, be traced.”

  Just as they predicted, on June 25, 1974, the one-year anniversary of Susan’s abduction, her mother, Marietta, received a call from a man claiming that he had Susan. The FBI was standing by to record the call and trace it. Marietta kept the caller on the line for over an hour. When Marietta asked to talk to her daughter, the caller claimed he had “brainwashed” Susan’s memory of her parents.

  MJ: Have you been good to her?

  C: Yes I have.

  MJ: Why did you take her?

  C: Well, it is kinda a long story. I always wanted a little girl myself [crying]. . . . I always wanted a little girl of my own.

  MJ: Did you ever have a little girl of your own, your very own?

  C: No.

  MJ: Are you married?

  C: Not now.

  MJ: Has she been abused; have you hurt her?

  C: No, just that first night—I had to choke her some.

  MJ: When you took her out of the tent?

  C: Yeah.

  MJ: Did she wake up?

  C: Not right away. I grabbed her around the throat.

  MJ: How did you get away? No one could figure out how you possibly got away.6

  Marietta eventually broke the caller down to tears, and he begged her to hang up the phone because he could not bear to do so himself. She recalled:

  I was surprised at how calm I felt. Instead of feeling rage at him, I felt genuine compassion. . . . Without really knowing where the words came from, I asked him, “How are you? You must be very burdened by what you have done.” I honestly felt concern for him, and he could tell this from my voice. I heard him gasp and then cry. He replied, “I wish this terrible burden could be lifted,” and then the line went dead.7

  Despite having over an hour to carry it out, the phone trace failed. In the predigital age of phone line switching, a trace had to be followed down wired relays physically from substation to substation. It was no easy task. The call vanished into a jungle of relays somewhere in a Florida substation. The only clue the FBI had was the sound of a passing train during the conversation. They began to look at houses around Three Forks in the vicinity of railway tracks, but none could be linked to Meirhofer or any other potential suspect. Nor was the FBI able to get anybody who knew Meirhofer to conclusively identify his voice as the one they recorded on tape.

  A month later, a rancher in the area found an expensive long-distance call on his phone bill. When the phone company supplied him the name of the party called, it was the Jaegers in Michigan. The rancher immediately recognized the name from news reports and called the FBI. Dunbar and a sheriff’s deputy walked the phone line along the rancher’s property and, near a railway line, found vehicle tracks under a telephone pole. Meirhofer had not only done work on the rancher’s property but in the Marines had been trained as a telephone technician. He had climbed the pole and made the call from there to confuse any tap that he presumed might be made on a call to the Jaeger family in Michigan. The problem, however, was proving it.

  Again, on the advice of the BSU, the FBI and sheriff set up a meeting between Marietta Jaeger and Meirhofer in his attorney’s office. The BSU argued that a strong female presence might intimidate Meirhofer and suggested a female agent be sent to pose as Marietta. Instead, Marietta volunteered to undertake the mission herself. The BSU advised that the room be carefully staged with Meirhofer seated in a position lower than Marietta to have her tower over him. Marietta would later recall:

  [Meirhofer] showed no signs of recognition as he entered the room. I stood up and walked towards him to shake his hand. As I shook his hand, I thought how he was the last person to touch Susie. . . . We took our assigned seats, and I was no more than three feet from him. He was very polite. He told me how very sorry he was about what happened to my daughter. He told me that he would help me if he could but he didn’t kidnap Susie and didn’t know where she was. He said that he had been upset by news of the kidnapping and had taken part in the search party. . . . This went on for about an hour, and then his lawyer ended the interview, claiming that his client had nothing further to say.

  Before he left, I shook his hand again and looked firmly into his eyes, but he looked away from me. One of the hardest things I’ve done in my whole life was to let go of that hand. He was my only connection to Susie, and I was desperate to find her.8

  The next day, Marietta went over to a warehouse that Meirhofer owned and confronted him again. Meirhofer again assured her that he had no knowledge of Susan’s abduction but was more hostile. He accused Marietta of carrying concealed recording devices.

  “And Almost All Things Are by the Law Purged with Blood”

  Marietta returned home to Michigan, feeling disappointed that the confrontation failed. No sooner had she arrived than her phone rang. The FBI was again standing by to do a trace. The caller identified himself as “Mr. Travis” and told Marietta that since she was talking to the FBI, she would never see her daughter again. He berated her for accusing the wrong person of abducting her daughter and asked her if she wanted to speak to her daughter. Marietta heard a small girl’s voice say, “He’s a nice man, Mommy, I’m sitting on his lap right now.” The voice was obviously a recording. Marietta now called Meirhofer by his first name, David, and that enraged him. He said angrily, “You’ll never see your little girl again,” and hung up the phone.

  This call was successfully traced to a hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, four hundred miles away from Gallatin County, Montana. Sheriff’s deputies were waiting for Meirhofer when he came home. In his pocket, they found a receipt from the Salt Lake City hotel with the Jaegers’ phone number written on it. A search warrant was now executed on his property.

  Just as Teten, Mullany and Ressler had foreseen from their desks at Quantico, police in Montana found body parts stored in Meirhofer’s home. In the freezer was meat labeled “Deerburger—SMDS” (Sandra Mae Dykman Smallegan). It was later confirmed as human remains. (Chillingly, two weeks before his arrest, Meirhofer had attended a church picnic to which he contributed a mystery meat casserole.) Also found in the freezer was one of Smallegan’s severed hands. A sheriff’s deputy presented it to Meirhofer’s attorney, who had been avidly defending him for months and was at the house to ensure the police did not overstep their search warrant. The attorney ran out to vomit.9

  On September 29, 1974, in exchange for the prosecutor declining to seek the death penalty, David Meirhofer confessed to a sniper shooting of a thirteen-year-old boy, Bernard L. Poelman, on March 19, 1967; the stabbing of Boy Scout Michael E. Raney on May 7, 1968; and abducting, strangling, dismembering and burning the bodies of Susan Jaeger in 1973 and Sandra Smallegan in 1974. Two of the four murders were committed prior to Meirhofer going to Vietnam, so war trauma was not going to be on his defense agenda.

  Meirhofer’s confession was cursory, and he refused to acknowledge several other suspected murders and attacks in the region. There were a great many bloodstained blankets found on his property, but Meirhofer denied knowing anything about them.

  He described how he shot Bernard Poelman with a .22 rifle from across a river. He admitted to stabbing Michael Raney but denied bludgeonin
g him.

  PD: OK, then what happened with Michael Raney?

  DM: Well, I went to the park where the Boy Scouts were camped, and I was going to get somebody, and I opened this tent and saw this little boy, and I couldn’t force myself to take him, so I stabbed him in the back.

  PD: And then did you hit him with anything on the head or anything?

  DM: No, I did not.

  PD: This was just a stabbing; is that correct?

  DM: Yes.

  PD: You did not hit him with a club or your fist or anything?

  DM: I did not.

  [He described his abduction of Susan.]

  PD: Being very blunt, very truthful, cutting this to the bare essentials, did you on June 25 take Susie from a tent? Susie Jaeger, in the Headwaters State Park at Three Forks.

  DM: Yes.

  PD: Did you cause Susan to be hurt, and if so, how?

  DM: Yes, I had to choke her.

  PD: Was she killed when you choked her?

  DM: No.

  PD: When was she killed?

  DM: Uh, a little later.

  PD: All right, let’s start, David. I know this is difficult, but it’s the only way I know to do it. When you took her from the tent and choked her, where did you take her?

  DM: Uh, it was about one hundred yards north and then over to the highway and back down the highway fifty yards back across the highway up on top of the hill where the monument is, down the road on top of this hill about half a mile to my pickup, which was waiting alongside the river.

  PD: Did you put her in the pickup?

  DM: Yes.

  PD: And then where did you take her?

  DM: Went out to the ranch owned by Bill Bryant.