Mindhunter

by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker

  The first thing that struck me when they brought him in was how huge this guy was. I’d known that he was tall and had been considered a social outcast in school and in the neighborhood because of his size, but up close, he was enormous. He could easily have broken any of us in two. He had longish dark hair and a full mustache, and wore an open work shirt and white T-shirt that prominently displayed a massive gut.

  It was also apparent before long that Kemper was a bright guy. Prison records listed his IQ as 145, and at times during the many hours we spent with him, Bob and I worried he was a lot brighter than we were. He’d had a long time to sit and think about his life and crimes, and once he understood that we had carefully researched his files and would know if he was bullshitting us, he opened up and talked about himself for hours.

  His attitude was neither cocky and arrogant nor remorseful and contrite. Rather, he was cool and soft-spoken, analytical and somewhat removed. In fact, as the interview went on, it was often difficult to break in and ask a question. The only times he got weepy was in recalling his treatment at the hands of his mother.

  Having taught Applied Criminal Psychology without necessarily knowing that everything I was saying was true, I was interested in the age-old question of whether criminals are born or made. Though there is still no definitive answer and may never be, listening to Kemper raised some fascinating questions.

  There was no dispute that Ed’s parents had had a terrible marriage. He told us that, from early on, he had looked so much like his father that his mother had hated him. Then his size became an issue. By the time he was ten, he was already a giant for his age, and Clarnell worried that he would molest his sister, Susan. So she made him sleep in a windowless basement room near the furnace. Every night at bedtime, Clarnell would close the basement door on him, while she and Susan went to their rooms upstairs. This terrified him and made him totally resentful of the two women. It also coincided with his mother’s final breakup from Ed’s father. Because of his size, shy personality, and lack of a role model in the house to identify with, Ed had always been withdrawn and "different." Once he was shut up like a prisoner in the basement and made to feel dirty and dangerous without having done anything wrong, his hostile and murderous thoughts began to blossom. It was then that he killed and mutilated the two family cats, one with his pocketknife and the other with a machete. We would later realize that this childhood trait of cruelty to small animals was the keystone of what came to be known as the "homicidal triad," also including enuresis, or bed-wetting, beyond the normally appropriate age and fire-starting.

  What was also sad and ironic was that at Santa Cruz, Ed’s mother was popular with both administrators and students. She was considered a sensitive, caring person you could go to if you had a problem or just needed to talk something out. Yet at home, she treated her timid son as if he were some kind of monster.

  There’s no way you can ever date or marry any of these college coeds, was her apparent message. They’re all much better than you. Continually exposed to that attitude, Ed eventually decided to fulfill her expectations.

  In her own way, it must be said, she did try to take care of him. When he expressed an interest in joining the California Highway Patrol, she endeavored to have his juvenile record expunged so the "stigma" of having murdered his grandparents wouldn’t hold him back in adult life.

  This desire to work with the police was another interesting revelation, which was to come up over and over again in our serial killer studies. The three most common motives of serial rapists and murderers turn out to be domination, manipulation, and control. When you consider that most of these guys are angry, ineffectual losers who feel they’ve been given the shaft by life, and that most of them have experienced some sort of physical or emotional abuse, as Ed Kemper had, it isn’t surprising that one of their main fantasy occupations is police officer.

  A policeman represents power and public respect. When called upon to do so, he is authorized to hurt bad people for the common good. In our research, we discovered that, while few police officers go bad and commit violent crimes, frequently serial offenders had failed in their efforts to join police departments and had taken jobs in related fields, such as security guard or night watchman. One of the things we began saying in some of our profiles was that the UNSUB would drive a policelike vehicle, say a Ford Crown Victoria or Chevrolet Caprice. Sometimes, as in the case of the Atlanta child murders, the subject had purchased a used and stripped police car.

  Even more common is the "police buff." One of the things Ed Kemper told us was that he would frequent bars and restaurants known to be police hangouts and strike up conversations. This made him feel like an insider, gave him the vicarious thrill of a policeman’s power. But also, once the Coed Killer was on the rampage, he had a direct line into the progress of the investigation, allowing him to anticipate their next move. In fact, when Kemper called from Colorado at the end of his long, bloody mission, he had a difficult time convincing the Santa Cruz cops that this wasn’t all some drunken joke, that the Coed Killer was really their friend Ed. Now, because of what we’ve learned, we routinely consider the likelihood that a subject will attempt to insinuate himself into the investigation. Years later, working the Arthur Shawcross prostitute murders in Rochester, New York, my colleague Gregg McCrary correctly predicted that the killer would turn out to be someone that many of the police knew well, who hung around their hangouts, and who enthusiastically pumped them for information.

  I was extremely interested in Kemper’s methodology. That he was getting away with these crimes repeatedly in the same general geographical area meant that he was doing something "right"; that he was analyzing what he was doing and learning to perfect his technique. Keep in mind that for most of these guys, the hunting and killing is the most important thing in their lives, their main "job," so they’re thinking about it all the time. Ed Kemper got so good at what he did that when he was stopped one time for a broken taillight while he had two bodies in his trunk, the officer reported how polite he was and let him off with a warning. Rather than being terrified of discovery and arrest, this was part of the thrill to Kemper. He dispassionately told us that had the officer looked in his trunk, he was prepared to kill him. Another time, he talked his way past a university security guard with two women dying of gunshot wounds in the car. Both were wrapped in blankets up to their necks, one next to him in the front seat, the other in the back. Kemper calmly and somewhat embarrassedly explained that the girls were drunk and he was taking them home. The last part of the statement was true. And on one occasion, he picked up a woman hitchhiking with her young teenaged son, planning to kill them both. But as he drove away, he saw out of his rearview mirror that the woman’s companion had written down his license-plate number. So he rationally drove the mother and son to where they were going and dropped them off.

  As bright as he was, Kemper had actually administered psychological tests in prison, so he knew all the buzzwords and could give you an analysis of his behavior in analytical psychiatric detail. Everything about the crimes was part of the challenge, part of the game, even figuring out how to get the victims into the car without being suspicious. He told us that when he stopped his car for a pretty girl, he’d ask her where she was going, then glance at his watch as if trying to decide if he had enough time. Thinking that she was dealing with a busy man who had other more important priorities than stopping for hitchhikers would immediately put her at ease and erase any hesitations. Aside from giving us a look into a killer’s modus operandi, this type of information would start suggesting something important: the normal common-sense assumptions, verbal cues, body language, and so on that we use to size up other people and make instant judgments about them often don’t apply to sociopaths. With Ed Kemper, for instance, stopping for a pretty hitchhiker was his most important priority, and he had thought long, hard, and analytically about how best to accomplish his objective; much longer, harder, and more analytically than a young woman encounte
ring him casually would have done from her perspective.

  Manipulation. Domination. Control. These are the three watchwords of violent serial offenders. Everything they do and think about is directed toward assisting them in filling their otherwise inadequate lives.

  Probably the most crucial single factor in the development of a serial rapist or killer is the role of fantasy. And I mean this in its broadest sense. Ed Kemper’s fantasies developed early, and they all involved the relationship between sex and death. The game he made his sister play with him involved binding him to a chair as if he were in the gas chamber. His sexual fantasies involving others ended with the partner’s death and dismemberment. Because of his feelings of inadequacy, Kemper didn’t feel comfortable with normal boy-girl relationships. He didn’t think any girl would have him. So in his own mind, he compensated. He had to completely possess his imagined partner, and that meant ultimately possessing her life.

  "Alive, they were distant, not sharing with me," he explained in a confession introduced in court. "I was trying to establish a relationship. When they were being killed, there wasn’t anything going on in my mind except that they were going to be mine."

  With most sexually based killers, it is a several-step escalation from the fantasy to the reality, often fueled by pornography, morbid experimentation on animals, and cruelty to peers. This last trait can be seen by the subject as "getting back" at them for bad treatment. In Kemper’s case, he felt shunned and tormented by the other children because of his size and personality. And he told us that before he dismembered the two family cats, he had stolen one of his sister’s dolls and cut off its head and hands, practicing what he was planning for living beings.

  On another level, Kemper’s overriding fantasy was to rid himself of his domineering, abusive mother, and everything he did as a killer can be analyzed in that context. Please don’t get me wrong; this in no way excuses what he did. Everything in my background and experience tells me that people are responsible for what they do. But in my opinion, Ed Kemper is an example of someone not born a serial killer but manufactured as one. Would he have had the same murderous fantasies had he had a more stable and nurturing home life? Who knows? But would he have acted on them in the same fashion had he not had this incredible rage against the dominant female personality in his life? I don’t think so—because the entire progress of Kemper’s career as a killer can be seen as an attempt to get back at dear old Mom. When he finally worked himself up to that final act, the drama was played out.

  This was another characteristic we were to see over and over again. Seldom would the subject direct his anger at the focus of his resentment. Though Kemper told us he used to tiptoe into his mother’s room at night with a hammer and fantasize bringing it down through her skull, it took him at least six killings before he could actually get up the nerve to face what he really wanted to do. And we’ve seen many other variations on this displacement theme. For example, a common trait is to take some "trophy" item from the victim after the murder, such as a ring or necklace. The killer would then give that item to his wife or girlfriend, even if that woman was the "source" of his anger or hostility. Typically, he would say he had purchased the jewelry or else found it. Then, seeing her wear it, he both relives the excitement and stimulation of the kill and mentally reasserts domination and control, knowing he could have done to his own partner what he did to his unfortunate victim.

  Eventually, in our analysis, we would begin to break down the components of a crime into such elements as pre- and postoffense behavior. Kemper had mutilated each of his victims, which at first suggested to us a sexual sadist. But the mutilation was all postmortem, or after the victim’s death, rather than while she was alive, thus not inflicting punishment and causing suffering. After listening to Kemper for several hours, it became clear that the dismemberment was more fetishistic than sadistic and had more to do with the possession part of the fantasy.

  Equally significant, I thought, was his handling and disposal of the corpses. The early victims had been carefully buried far from his mother’s home. The later ones, including his mother and her friend, had virtually been left out in the open. That, combined with his extensive driving around town with bodies and body parts in the car, seemed to me to be taunting the community he felt had taunted and rejected him.

  We ended up doing several lengthy interviews with Kemper over the years, each one informative, each one harrowing in its detail. Here was a man who had coldly butchered intelligent young women in the prime of their lives. Yet I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit that I liked Ed. He was friendly, open, sensitive, and had a good sense of humor. As much as you can say such a thing in this setting, I enjoyed being around him. I don’t want him out walking the streets, and in his most lucid moments, neither does he. But my personal feelings about him then, which I still hold, do point up an important consideration for anyone dealing with repeat violent offenders. Many of these guys are quite charming, highly articulate, and glib.

  How could this man do such a terrible thing? There must be some mistake or some extenuating circumstances. That’s what you’re going to say to yourself if you talk to some of them; you cannot get the full sense of the enormity of their crimes. And that’s why psychiatrists and judges and parole officers are fooled so often, a subject we’ll get into in more detail later on.

  But for now: if you want to understand the artist, look at his work. That’s what I always tell my people. You can’t claim to understand or appreciate Picasso without studying his paintings. The successful serial killers plan their work as carefully as a painter plans a canvas. They consider what they do their "art," and they keep refining it as they go along. So part of my evaluation of someone like Ed Kemper comes from meeting him and interacting with him on a personal basis. The rest comes from studying and understanding his work.

  The prison visits became a regular practice whenever Bob Ressler or I were on a road school and could get the time and cooperation. Wherever I found myself, I’d find out what prison or penitentiary was nearby and who of interest was "in residence."

  Once we’d been doing this for a while, we refined our techniques. Generally, we were tied up four and a half days a week, so I tried to do some of the interviews on evenings and weekends. Evenings could be difficult because most prisons take a head count after dinner and no one is allowed into the cellblock after that. But after a while, you start to understand the prison regimens and adapt to them. I found that an FBI badge could get you into most penitentiaries and a meeting with the warden, so I began showing up unannounced, which often worked out best. The more of these interviews I did, the more confident I began to feel about what I was teaching and telling these veteran cops. I finally felt that my instruction was achieving some reality base, that it wasn’t just recycled war stories from those who had actually been there.

  It wasn’t necessarily that the interviewees were providing profound insight into their crimes and psyches. Very few had that, even someone as bright as Kemper. Much of what they told us parroted their trial testimony or self-serving statements they’d made many times before. Everything had to be interpreted through hard work and extensive review on our part. What the interviews were doing, though, was letting us see the way the offender’s mind worked, getting a feel for them, allowing us to start walking in their shoes.

  In the early weeks and months of our informal research program, we managed to interview more than half a dozen killers and would-be killers. These included George Wallace’s would-be assassin, Arthur Bremmer (Baltimore Penitentiary), Sarah Jane Moore and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, both of whom had tried to kill President Ford (Alderson, West Virginia), and Fromme’s guru, Charles Manson, at San Quentin, just up the bay from San Francisco and the rotting hulk of Alcatraz.

  Everybody in law enforcement was interested in Manson. It had been ten years since the grisly Tate and LaBianca murders in Los Angeles, and Manson remained the most famous and feared convict in the world. The case
was regularly taught at Quantico, and while the facts were clear, I didn’t feel we had any real insight into what made this guy tick. I had no idea what we could expect to get from him, but I thought that anyone who had so successfully manipulated others to do his will would be an important subject. Bob Ressler and I met with him in a small conference area off the main cellblock at San Quentin. It had wire-reinforced glass windows on three sides, the kind of room set aside for inmates and their lawyers.

  My first impression of Manson was just about diametrically opposite from what I had of Ed Kemper. He had wild, alert eyes and an unsettling, kinetic quality to the way he moved. He was much smaller and slighter than I’d imagined; no more than five two or five three. How did this weak-looking little guy exert such influence over his notorious "family"?

  One answer came right away when he climbed onto the back of a chair positioned at the head of the table so he could look down on us as he talked. In the extensive background preparation I’d done for the interview, I’d read that he used to sit on top of a large boulder in the desert sand when he’d addressed his disciples, enhancing his physical stature for his sermons on the mount. He made it clear to us from the outset that despite the celebrated trial and voluminous news coverage, he didn’t understand why he was in jail. After all, he hadn’t killed anyone. Rather, he considered himself a societal scapegoat—the innocent symbol of America’s dark side. The swastika he had carved into his forehead during the trial was faded but still visible. He was still in contact with his women followers in other prisons through cooperative third parties.

  In one sense at least, he was very much like Ed Kemper and so many of the other men we talked to in that he had had a terrible childhood and upbringing; if those two terms can be used at all to describe Manson’s background.