Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  Exactly three seconds later, the car is riddled with bullets. In the crossfire, Detective Beasley is hit in the Achilles tendon. The boy scrambles on his hands and knees in front of the car, which rolls forward on him because Hoxie’s been hit by flying glass and has lost control. Fortunately, the boy’s not badly hurt.

  True to FBI form, the local TV news that night shows the special agent in charge, Herbert Hoxie, on a gurney being moved out of the emergency room with blood trickling from his ear, and while they’re wheeling him away, he’s giving his statement to the press: "All of a sudden I heard gunfire, bullets were flying everywhere. I guess I was hit, but I think I’m okay . . ." FBI, God, motherhood, apple pie, et cetera, et cetera.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. Fistfights nearly break out and the police almost beat up Del Campo for taking their shot. The SWAT team isn’t any too pleased either because he’s made them look bad. They go to ASAC Ed Best to complain, but he stands up for Del Campo and says that Joe salvaged the situation that they let develop.

  Cohen had between thirty and forty entrance and exit wounds but was still alive when they took him away in the ambulance. Fortunately for all concerned, he was DOA at the hospital.

  Special Agent Carr, miraculously, survived. Cohen’s bullet passed through the trench coat Carr was wearing, into his shoulder, ricocheted off his trachea, and lodged in his lung. Carr kept that trench coat with the bullet hole in it and wore it proudly from that day on.

  Del Campo and I were a terrific team for a while, except when we’d get on these laughing jags we couldn’t get off of. We were at a gay bar once, trying to develop some informants on a homosexual murder fugitive. It’s dark and it takes our eyes some time to adjust. Suddenly, we become aware of all these eyes on us, and we start arguing about which one of us they want. Then we see this sign above the bar, "A Hard Man Is Good to Find," and we just lose it, cracking up like two goofballs.

  It never took much. We broke up once talking to an old guy in a wheelchair at a nursing home, and again, interviewing a dapper business owner in his mid-forties whose toupee had slipped halfway down his forehead. It didn’t matter. If there was any humor anywhere in a situation, Joe and I would find it. As insensitive as it may sound, this was probably a useful talent to have. When you spend your time looking at murder scenes and dump sites, especially those involving children, when you’ve talked to hundreds, then thousands, of victims and their families, when you’ve seen the absolutely incredible things some human beings are capable of doing to other human beings, you’d better be able to laugh at silly things. Otherwise, you’re going to go crazy.

  Unlike a lot of guys who went into law enforcement, I’d never been a gun nut, but ever since the Air Force I’d always been a good shot. I thought it might be interesting to be on the SWAT team for a while. Every field office had one. It was a part-time job; the five team members were called out as needed. I made the team and was assigned as the sniper—the one who stays farthest back and goes for the long shot. All the others on the team had heavy military backgrounds—Green Berets, Rangers—and here I had taught swimming to pilots’ wives and kids. The team leader, David Kohl, eventually became a deputy assistant director at Quantico, and he was the one who asked me to head up the Investigative Support Unit.

  In one case, somewhat more straightforward than the Jacob Cohen extravaganza, a guy robbed a bank, then led police on a high-speed chase, ending up barricaded in a warehouse. That was when we were called in. Inside this warehouse, he takes off all his clothes, then puts them back on again. He seems like a real nut case. Then he asks to have his wife brought to the scene, which they do.

  In later years, when we’d done more research into this type of personality, we’d understand that you don’t do that—you don’t agree to this type of demand because the person they ask to see is usually the one whom they perceive as having precipitated the problem in the first place. Therefore, you’re putting that individual in great danger and setting them up for a murder-suicide.

  Fortunately, in this instance, they don’t bring her inside the warehouse, but have her talk to him on the phone. And sure enough, as soon as he hangs up, he blows his brains out with a shotgun.

  We’d all been waiting in position for several hours, and suddenly it was over. But you can’t always diffuse stress that quickly, which often leads to warped humor. "Jeez, why’d he have to do that?" one of the guys remarked. "Douglas is a crackerjack shot. He could have done that for him."

  I was in Milwaukee for a little more than five years. Eventually, Pam and I moved from the apartment on Juneau Avenue to a town house on Brown Deer Road, away from the office, near the northern city limit. I spent most of my time on bank robberies and built up a string of commendations clearing cases. I found I was most successful when I could come up with a "signature" linking several crimes together, a factor that later became the cornerstone of our serial-murder analysis.

  My only notable screwup during this time was after Jerry Hogan replaced Herb Hoxie as SAC. Not many perks went along with the job, but one was a Bureau automobile, and Hogan was proud of his new, emerald green Ford Ltd. I needed a car for an investigation one day and none was available. Hogan was out at a meeting, so I asked the ASAC, Arthur Fulton, if I could use the SAC’s. Reluctantly, he agreed.

  The next thing I know, Jerry’s called me into his office and he’s yelling at me for using his car, getting it dirty, and—worst of all—bringing it back with a flat. I hadn’t even noticed that. Now Jerry and I got along well, so the whole time he’s yelling, I can’t keep from laughing. Apparently, this was a mistake.

  Later that day, my squad supervisor, Ray Byrne, says to me, "You know, John, Jerry Hogan really likes you, but he has to teach you a lesson. He’s assigning you to the Indian reservation."

  These were the days of the Wounded Knee incident and the groundswell of consciousness over Native American rights. We were hated on the reservations, as much as in the ghettos of Detroit. The Indians had been treated terribly by the government. When I first arrived at the Menominee Reservation up on Green Bay, I couldn’t believe the poverty and filth and squalor these people had to live in. So much of their culture had been stripped away from them, they often seemed almost numb to me. Largely as a result of the deplorable conditions and the history of government hostility and indifference, on many of the reservations you saw high incidences of alcoholism, child and spouse abuse, assault, and murder. But because of the utter mistrust of the government, it was nearly impossible for an FBI agent to get any type of cooperation or assistance from witnesses.

  The local Bureau of Indian Affairs representatives were of no help. Even family members of victims wouldn’t get involved, for fear of being seen as collaborating with the enemy. Sometimes, by the time you would find out about a murder and get to the scene, the body would have been there for several days already, infested with insect larvae.

  I spent more than a month on the reservation, during which time I investigated at least six murders. I felt so bad for these people, I was depressed all the time, and I had the luxury of leaving and going home at night. I had just never seen people who, as a group, had so much to overcome. While it was dicey, my time on the Menominee Reservation was the first concentrated dose of murder-scene investigation I’d had, which turned out to be grim but excellent experience.

  Without question, the best thing that happened during my time in Milwaukee was the birth of our first child, Erika, in November of 1975. We were to have Thanksgiving dinner at a local country club with some friends, Sam and Esther Ruskin, when Pam went into labor. Erika was born the next day.

  I was working long hours on bank robbery cases and finishing up my graduate degree, and the new baby meant even less sleep. But needless to say, Pam bore the brunt of this. I felt much more family-oriented responsibility as a result of fatherhood, and I loved watching Erika grow. Fortunately for all of us, I think, I had not yet begun working child abduction and murder. If I had been, if I’d really
stopped and thought about what was out there, I don’t know that I could have adjusted to fatherhood as comfortably. By the time our next child, Lauren, was born in 1980, I was well into it.

  Becoming a father, I think, also motivated me to try to make more out of myself. I knew that what I was doing wasn’t what I wanted to be doing my entire career. Jerry Hogan advised me to put in ten years in the field before I thought about applying for anything else; that way, I’d have the experience for an ASAC and eventually a SAC posting, then maybe eventually make it to headquarters. But with one child and, I hoped, more to come, the life of a field agent, moving from office to office, didn’t seem terribly appealing.

  As time went on, other perspectives about the job began to evolve. The sniper training and SWAT team exercises had lost their appeal. With my background and interest in psychology—I had my master’s by this time—the challenging part of the work, it seemed to me, was trying to manage the situation before it got to the shooting stage. The SAC recommended me for a two-week hostage-negotiation course at the FBI Academy in Quantico, which had only been in operation for a couple of years.

  There, under the tutelage of such legendary agents as Howard Teten and Pat Mullany, I got my first real exposure to what was already known then as behavioral science. And that changed my career.

  Chapter 5

  Behavioral Science or BS?

  I hadn’t been back to Quantico since new-agent training almost five years before, and in many ways the place had changed. For one thing, by spring of 1975, the FBI Academy had become a complete and self-contained facility, carved out of a chunk of the U.S. Marine base in the beautiful, gently rolling Virginia woodlands about an hour south of Washington.

  But some things hadn’t changed. The tactical units still commanded all the prestige and status, and of these, the Firearms Unit was the star. It was headed by George Zeiss, the special agent who had been sent to bring James Earl Ray back from England to face American justice after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Zeiss was a huge, powerful bear of a man who broke handcuffs with his bare hands as a parlor trick. One time, some of the guys on the range took a pair and soldered the chain, then gave them to Zeiss to do his thing. He twisted so hard, he snapped his wrist and had to be in a cast for weeks.

  Hostage negotiation was taught by the Behavioral Science Unit, a group of between seven and nine special agent instructors. Psychology and the "soft sciences" were never held in much esteem by Hoover and his cohorts, so until he died, this was something of a "back room" endeavor.

  In fact, much of the FBI at that time, as well as the law enforcement world in general, considered psychology and behavioral science as they applied to criminology to be so much worthless bullshit. While clearly I never felt this way, I had to acknowledge that a lot of what was known and taught in this field had no real relevance to the business of understanding and catching criminals, a circumstance several of us would try to begin to rectify a couple of years later. When I took over as chief of the operational side of the Behavioral Science Unit, I changed the name to the Investigative Support Unit. And when people asked me why, I told them, quite frankly, I wanted to take the BS out of what we were doing.

  The BSU, under Unit Chief Jack Pfaff at the time I took my hostage-negotiation training, was dominated by two strong and insightful personalities—Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany. Teten is about six foot four with penetrating eyes behind wire-rim glasses. Though an ex-Marine, he’s a contemplative type—always totally dignified; the model of an intellectual professor. He joined the Bureau in 1962 after serving with the San Leandro, California, Police Department, near San Francisco. In 1969, he began teaching a landmark course called Applied Criminology, which eventually (after Hoover’s death, I suspect) became known as Applied Criminal Psychology. By 1972, Teten had gone up to New York to consult with Dr. James Brussel, the psychiatrist who had cracked the Mad Bomber case, who agreed to personally teach Teten his profiling technique.

  Armed with this knowledge, the big breakthrough of Teten’s approach was how much you could learn about criminal behavior and motives by focusing on the evidence of the crime scene. In some ways, everything we’ve done in behavioral science and criminal investigative analysis since then has been based on this.

  Pat Mullany always reminded me of a leprechaun. At about five ten, he’s a roly-poly type with a quick wit and high energy level. He came to Quantico in 1972 from the New York Field Office with a degree in psychology. Near the end of his tenure at Quantico, he would distinguish himself by successfully managing very public hostage situations: in Washington, D.C., when the Hanafi Muslim sect took over the B’nai B’rith headquarters, and in Warrensville Heights, Ohio, when Cory Moore, a black Vietnam vet, grabbed a police captain and his secretary right in the station house. Together, Teten and Mullany represented the first wave of modern behavioral science and made a distinct and unforgettable pair.

  The other instructors in the BSU also participated in the hostage-negotiation course. These included Dick Ault and Robert Ressler, who’d arrived at Quantico a short time before. If Teten and Mullany constituted the first wave, Ault and Ressler constituted the second, moving the discipline further along as something that could be of real value to police departments throughout the United States and the world. Though at that time we only knew each other as teacher and student, Bob Ressler and I would soon join forces on the serial-killer study that led ultimately to the modern version of what we do.

  About fifty guys were in the hostage-negotiation class. In some ways it was more entertaining than informative, but an enjoyable two-week respite from field work. In class, we examined the three basic types of hostage takers: professional criminal, mentally ill, and fanatic. We studied some of the significant phenomena that had arisen out of hostage situations, such as the Stockholm syndrome. Two years before, in 1973, a botched bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, had turned into an agonizing hostage drama for customers and bank employees. Ultimately, the hostages came to identify with their captors and actually assisted them against the police.

  We also watched the Sidney Lumet film Dog Day Afternoon, which had recently come out, starring Al Pacino as a man who robs a bank to get money for his male lover to undergo a sex-change operation. The film is based on an actual hostage incident in New York City. It was this case, and the protracted negotiations that ensued, that led the FBI to invite Capt. Frank Bolz and Det. Harvey Schlossberg of the NYPD to bring the Academy up to speed on hostage negotiation, an area in which the New York people were the acknowledged national leaders.

  We studied the principles of negotiation. Some of the guidelines, such as trying to keep loss of life to a minimum, were obvious stuff. We did have the benefit of audiotapes of actual hostage situations, but it would be years later, when the next generation of instructors came in, before students would be involved in role-playing exercises—the closest you can get in the classroom to hands-on negotiating. It was also somewhat confusing, because a lot of the material had been recycled from the criminal psychology classes and didn’t really fit. For example, they would give us photos and dossiers of child molesters or lust killers and discuss how such a personality would react in a hostage situation. Then there was more firearms training, which was still the big thing at Quantico.

  Much of what we eventually came to teach about hostage negotiation was learned not in the classroom from other agents but in the cold crucible of the field. As I mentioned, one of the cases that earned Pat Mullany his reputation was that of Cory Moore. Moore, who had been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, made a number of public demands after taking the Warrensville Heights, Ohio, police captain and his secretary hostage in the captain’s own office. Among them was that all white people leave the earth immediately.

  Now, in negotiating strategy, you don’t want to give in to demands if you can possibly help it. Some demands, however, aren’t terribly feasible under any circumstances. This certainly qualified as one of those. The case g
ot so much national attention that the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, offered to speak with Moore and help resolve the situation. While this was certainly well-intentioned on Mr. Carter’s part, and indicative of the willingness he subsequently demonstrated for attempting to settle seemingly intractable conflicts around the world, this is not good negotiating strategy and I would never want it to happen in a situation I was managing. Neither did Pat Mullany. The problem with offering up the top guy, in addition to encouraging other desperate little people to try the same thing, is that you lose your maneuvering room. You always want to negotiate through intermediaries, which allows you to stall for time and avoid making promises you don’t want to keep. Once you put the hostage taker in direct contact with someone he perceives as a decision maker, everyone is backed against the wall, and if you don’t give in to his demands, you risk having things head south in a hurry. The longer you keep them talking, the better.

  By the time I was teaching hostage negotiation at Quantico in the early 1980s, we used a disturbing videotape that had been made in St. Louis a couple of years before. Ultimately, we stopped showing it because the St. Louis Police Department was so upset by it. In the tape, a young black man holds up a bar. The robbery’s a bust, he gets trapped inside, the police surround the place, and he’s got a bunch of hostages.

  The police organize a team of black and white officers to talk to him. But as the tape shows, rather than trying to deal with him on an objective level, they start jive-talking him and trying to get down on his level. They’re all talking at once, constantly interrupting him, not listening to what he’s saying, not trying to figure out what he wants to get out of this situation.

  The camera swings away just as the chief of police arrives on the scene—again, I’d never let this happen. Once the chief is there, he "officially" ignores the demands, whereupon the guy points the gun at his own head and blows his brains out for all to see.