by Colin Wilson
Observations such as these would become the basis of Ressler’s insight into the minds of serial killers.
3
The Founding Father
By the time he was a nine-year-old boy, Robert K. Ressler knew that monsters were not confined to fairy stories; there was a real one roaming the streets of his hometown, Chicago, Illinois.
On June 5, 1945, forty-three-year-old widow Josephine Ross had been stabbed to death when she had awakened to find a burglar in her apartment. Six months later, on December 10, 1945, a thirty-year-old ex-Wave named Frances Brown was discovered kneeling unclothed by the side of her bath, a knife driven through her throat with such force that it had come out the other side. On the wall above her bed someone had written in lipstick: “For heavens sake catch me before I kill more—I cannot help myself.” There was no sign of rape.
Four weeks later, on the morning of January 7, 1946, James E. Degnan went into the bedroom of his seven-year-old daughter, Suzanne, and saw that she was not in her bed and that the window was wide open. He called the police, and it was a policeman who found the note on the child’s chair; it said she had been kidnapped and demanded $20,000 for her return. Later that afternoon, Suzanne’s head was discovered beneath a nearby manhole cover. In another sewer, police found the child’s left leg. The right leg was found in another sewer, and the torso in a fourth. The arms were discovered—also in a sewer—some weeks later. The horrifically brutal case shocked the nation, but the police seemed unable to develop any definite leads.
Six months later, on June 26, 1946, a young man walked into an apartment building in Chicago, and entered the apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Pera through the open door. Mrs. Pera was in the kitchen preparing dinner. A neighbor who had seen the young man enter called to Mrs. Pera to ask if she knew a man had walked into her apartment. The young man immediately left, but the neighbor called out for him to stop. Instead, he dashed down the stairs, pointing a gun at the neighbor before running out of the building. Minutes later, he knocked on the door of a nearby apartment and asked the woman who answered for a glass of water, explaining that he felt ill. She sensed something wrong and rang the police. In fact, an off-duty cop had already seen the fleeing youth and ran after him. When cornered, the young man fired three shots at the cop; all missed. As the on-duty police answered the call, the burglar and the cop grappled on the floor. Then one of the other policemen hit the burglar on the head—three times—with a flowerpot, and knocked him unconscious.
Their prisoner turned out to be seventeen-year-old William George Heirens, who had spent sometime in a correctional institution for burglary. When his fingerprints were taken, they were found to match one found on the Degnan ransom note, and another found in the apartment of Frances Brown. In the prison hospital, Heirens was given the “truth drug” sodium pentothal, and asked: “Did you kill Suzanne Degnan?” Heirens answered: “George cut her up.” At first he insisted that George was a real person, a youth five years his senior whom he met at school. Later, he claimed that George was his own invisible alter ego. “He was just a realization of mine, but he seemed real to me.” Heirens also admitted to a third murder, that of Josephine Ross. In addition to this, he had attacked a woman named Evelyn Peterson with an iron bar when she started to wake up during a burglary, and then tied her up with lamp cord; he had also fired shots through windows at two women who had been sitting in their rooms with the curtains undrawn.
The story of William Heirens, as it emerged in his confessions, and in interviews with his parents, was almost predictably typical of a serial sex killer. Born on November 15, 1928, he had been a forceps delivery. An underweight baby, he had cried and vomited a great deal. At the age of seven months he fell down twelve cement steps into the basement and landed on his head; after that he had nightmares about falling. He was three years old when a brother was born, and he was sent away to the home of his grandmother. He was frequently ill as a child, and broke his arm at the age of nine. The family background was far from happy; his mother had two nervous breakdowns accompanied by paralysis, and his father’s business failed several times.
William Heirens stands in his cell on September 5, 1946, in the Cook County Jail in Chicago, after he was sentenced to serve three consecutive life terms for the murder of a little girl and two women. Heirens, although he claims to have been railroaded by the police, has been behind bars more than fifty years in the sensational Chicago murder case in which “Catch me before I kill more” was left scrawled in lipstick on a bathroom mirror. (Associated Press)
Heirens matured sexually very early—he had his first emission at the age of nine. Soon after this, he began stealing women’s panties from clotheslines and basement washrooms, and putting them on. (After his arrest, police found forty pairs of pink and blue rayon panties in a box in his grandmother’s attic.)
He came to think of sex as something “dirty” and forbidden. This was confirmed when, at the age of thirteen, he walked into the school washroom and found two boys playing sexually with a mentally retarded boy; he refused to join in. Being a good-looking boy, he was attractive to girls; on eight occasions he attempted some form of sex play, touching their breasts or pressing their legs, but this had the effect of upsetting him so much that he cried. There was a deep conflict between his sexual obsession and his rigid Roman Catholic upbringing. He found normal sexual stimulation repellent.
From the age of thirteen he had been burgling apartments, entering through the window, and experiencing sexual excitement—to the point of emission—as he did so. After this, he lost interest in underwear, and began to experience his sexual fulfillment by entering strange apartments through the window. He often urinated or defecated on the floor. He also began lighting small fires.
He was arrested for the first time at the age of fourteen, charged with eleven burglaries and suspected of fifty; in many of them he had stolen guns and women’s dresses. He was sentenced to probation and sent to a semi-correctional Catholic institution. After a year there he transferred to a Catholic academy, where he proved to be a brilliant student—so much so that he was allowed to skip the freshman year at the University of Chicago.
Back in Chicago, the sexual obsession remained as powerful as ever, and led to more burglaries. If he resisted the urge to burgle for long, he began to experience violent headaches. On one occasion, he put his clothes in the washroom and threw the key inside in order to make it impossible to go out; halfway through the night, the craving became too strong, and he crawled along the house gutter to retrieve his clothes.
Once inside an apartment, he reached such a state of intense excitement that any interruption would provoke an explosion of violence. This is why he knocked Evelyn Peterson unconscious with an iron bar when she stirred in her sleep. On another occasion he was preparing to enter what he thought was an empty apartment when a woman moved inside; he immediately fired his gun at her, but missed.
He raped none of the victims—the thought of actual sexual intercourse still scared him. Sexual fulfillment came from the “forbiddenness,” the excitement of knowing he was committing a crime. After the ejaculation, he felt miserable; he believed that he was a kind of Jekyll and Hyde. He even invented a name for his Mr. Hyde—“George.” Although he later admitted that the invention of an alter ego was partly an attempt to fool the psychiatrists, there can be no doubt that he felt that he was periodically “possessed” by a monster. This is why he scrawled the message in lipstick on the wall after killing Frances Brown. It may also explain why he eventually courted arrest by wandering into a crowded apartment building in the late afternoon and entering a flat in which a married woman was cooking dinner as she waited for her husband to return from work. Mr. Hyde was turning into Dr. Jekyll.
In July 1946, Heirens was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment in Joliet Penitentiary.
Ressler states that as a nine-year-old boy he used to fantasize about catching Suzanne Degnan’s killer—although he admits that the fantasy was a wa
y of coping with his fear. But the detective fantasies lasted all that year of Heirens’s arrest.
After a stint in the army, Ressler took a course in criminology and police administration at Michigan State University. But when he applied for a job with the Chicago police force, he was passed over; they were not interested in recruits with too much schooling because they “might make trouble.”
He reenlisted into the army, and was posted to Germany, where he was named provost marshal of a platoon of MPs in the small town of Asschaffenburg, and, in effect, became its chief of police. Back in the United States, four years later, he opted to remain a soldier when offered a job as CID commander of a plainclothes investigation unit at Fort Sheridan, near Chicago. He was in charge of a complex operation to penetrate a narcotics ring, when a number of his undercover agents came close to being exposed and murdered. (They were posing as troublemakers awaiting dishonorable discharge.) Finally, in exchange for signing on for two more years, the army paid for him to complete his master’s degree in police administration, and he applied to join the FBI. It was 1970, he was thirty-two, and his real career was about to commence.
An irritating but oddly significant incident almost prevented this from happening. Told to report to a certain classroom by 8 a.m. on a February day in 1970, he arrived in plenty of time only to find a notice saying the class had been shifted to another room several blocks away. On arriving there, he was bawled out by the instructor for being late. He replied that he had been ten minutes early at the other classroom. Irritated, the instructor sent him to see a high official, Joe Caspar, deputy assistant of the Training Division, known as the “Ghost” after the cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost. Caspar informed him that everyone had been sent a letter about the change of venue. Ressler replied that he hadn’t received it. He added that he had been in the army for several years and knew all about orders, both giving and receiving them. “I thought steam was going to come out of the Ghost’s ears as he threatened me with being kicked out of the FBI at that very minute.” Ressler said maybe that would be best for everyone, if the FBI didn’t know how to treat new agents. Caspar gave way and told him to hold up his right hand to be sworn in, adding sourly: “We’ll be watching you.”
This was typical of Hoover’s old FBI, with its “do it by the book” ethos, and this would not be the last time Ressler encountered it. But it was doubly significant in that Caspar’s downright refusal to admit that he was in the wrong is also typical of the behavioral pattern of a certain type of criminal to which the majority of serial killers belong. This behavioral pattern, which will recur many times in the course of this book, may well be worth further discussion here.
In the early 1960s, the Los Angeles science-fiction writer A. E. Van Vogt had a brilliant psychological insight that has considerable application to criminology: a concept that he called the “Right Man,” or the “Violent Man.” The Right Man is one who belongs to what zoologists call the “dominant 5 percent,” for 5 percent of all animals are more dominant than their fellows. This dominance is inborn. But if a person is too young to be aware of his dominance, or if circumstances have never allowed the expression of that dominance, he will feel oddly frustrated and resentful, without understanding why. Such people have “a chip on their shoulder,” and are inclined to be aggressive and self-assertive. His self-esteem depends upon feeling himself to be always in the right: he cannot bear to be thought in the wrong, and will go to any length to deny that he can ever make a mistake. Van Vogt also called him the Violent Man, because if you can prove that he is in the wrong, he would rather hit you in the face than acknowledge it.
Such a person’s work colleagues may not notice his dominance, for if he wants to be liked, it is important to appear easygoing and nonaggressive. But for his wife and family he can be intolerable, for the Right Man’s determination to be absolute master in his own home may be enforced by bullying.
Men like this, says Van Vogt, are at their worst in their intimate relations with women, since their sensitive egos make them wildly unreasonable if any disagreement arises. In one case he cites, the husband had divorced his wife and set her up in a suburban home, on condition that she remained unmarried and devoted herself to the welfare of their son. The husband was promiscuous—and always had been—but because his wife had confessed that she had not been a virgin when she met him, he treated her as a whore who had to be reformed at all costs. During their marriage he was violently jealous and often knocked her down. It was obviously essential to his self-esteem to feel himself her lord and master.
But perhaps the most curious thing about the violent male, Van Vogt observed, is that he is so basically dependent on the woman that if she leaves him, he experiences a total collapse of self-esteem that sometimes ends in suicide. For she is the foundation stone of a tower of fantasy. His self-esteem is built upon this notion of himself as a sultan brandishing a whip, with a submissive and adoring girl at his feet. If she leaves him, the whole fantasy world collapses, and he is faced with the prospect of an unlivable life. Van Vogt suggests that many dictators were Right Men—Hitler, Stalin, Mao—and that their urge to dominate was based upon this need to make the world conform to their fantasy of infallibility. Since submissive and adoring girls are hard to find, particularly for men like Glatman and Meirhofer, the serial killer is choosing this extreme method to ensure that the woman conforms to his fantasy.
A dominant person is, by definition, a person with a craving to be a “somebody.” And if lack of talent or social skills frustrates this urge, the result is anger, self-assertiveness, and mild paranoia. This may happen very early in the career of the Right Man, and become so much a character trait that subsequent success makes no difference—it has come too late as far as he is concerned. This is why a Hitler, a Stalin, a Saddam, remains a Right Man all his life.
Freud once said that a child would destroy the world if it had the power—which explains why Right Man criminals are so dangerous. They regard society itself as the enemy that is frustrating them, with the result that they commit their crimes entirely without conscience, with a grim feeling of justification. Society is “getting what it deserves” for treating them so badly. The American mass murderer Carl Panzram, executed in 1930, declared: “If I couldn’t injure those who had injured me, then I would injure someone else.” Panzram committed twenty pointless murders, engaged in a weird and totally illogical principle of “reciprocity.”
So it may be regarded as significant that Ressler’s career as an FBI agent was nearly aborted because of an encounter with a Right Man.
Following his FBI training, Ressler spent the early 1970s doing fieldwork in Chicago, New Orleans, and Cleveland, before being transferred to Quantico in 1974, in time to participate in the profiling and capture of David Meirhofer. And here Ressler was able to observe an element that is typical of a certain kind of killer: telephoning the kidnapped child’s parents on the anniversary of her disappearance. The serial killer wishes to see himself as a “mover,” one who can change events. There is a need for dramatization that leads him to scan newspapers for every item referring to his crime, and to revisit the crime scene. The German sadistic mass murderer of the 1920s, Peter Kürten (on whom Fritz Lang based his film M) regularly returned to the crime scene after the victim had been found, enjoying the horror of the spectators and often achieving a sexual climax. If investigators had known this at the time, he might well have been caught sooner.
Ressler soon observed this central role played by fantasy in the life of the serial killer (although in fact, it would be another decade before he coined the term). He would comment later: “They are obsessed with a fantasy, and they have what we must call non-fulfilled experiences that become part of the fantasy and push them on towards the next killing.”
A major step in the development of his new techniques was his involvement in teaching hostage negotiation. A large number of FBI recruits came out of the military after the end of the Vietnam War; many of them
were trained crack marksmen and became involved in SWAT teams (Special Weapons and Tactics). SWAT snipers were used to kill criminals, and heavy weapons often used in attempts to free hostages—which led to a great deal of needless slaughter. Rather than sending in SWAT teams, however, the New York City Police Department pioneered the use of bargaining by trained negotiators. This demanded an understanding of criminal psychology of the kind that obsessed Ressler. The new approach was slow to replace the old one, partly because many old-school cops disliked what they saw as compromise with criminal scum (an attitude that made the Dirty Harry movies of Clint Eastwood so popular). But this attitude had its practical disadvantages, not least of which were expensive lawsuits against the police for excessive use of force.
Ressler took note of the new approach and melded it into the idea that was taking shape in his mind, and that would become his own brand of criminal profiling.
What fascinated him was the psychology of the criminal. What drove Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz, and the Texas Tower Sniper, Charles Whitman (who had killed sixteen people from the University of Texas Tower)? But the books about these killers contained insufficient information for a full assessment of their motives. As to his colleagues at the FBI, he comments wryly on the “Bureau’s belief that if there was something worth knowing about criminals, the Bureau already knew it.”
By the late 1960s and mid-1970s, however, a whole series of bizarre mass murders made it clear that there was a great deal to be learned. The five killings at the house of film star Sharon Tate on August 9, 1969, followed by the slaying of supermarket owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, the next day, traumatized the American public. When it emerged that December that an ex-convict named Charles Manson had ordered his drug-dependent “Family” to commit the murders, there was universal bafflement about his motive, which the subsequent trial failed to disperse.