by Colin Wilson
Ressler was told to expand it and explain its long-term objectives. He did this, adding that he would not need to spend money on the project, since it could be done in the course of his road schools.
The memo was then sent out to John McDermott, the Bureau’s second-in-command in Washington. McDermott lost no time in turning it down flat. The Bureau’s job, he said, was to catch criminals, not to behave like social workers.
There was nothing for it but to forget the idea until McDermott retired. Fortunately, that was later the same year. The forward-looking William Webster replaced him. Ken Joseph also retired, and his replacement, James McKenzie, was enthusiastic about the idea. At a working lunch presided over by Webster, Ressler presented his idea, adding that the previous director had turned it down. Whether or not this influenced Webster, the project was approved. As a result, the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) was set up with a grant of $128,000 from the National Institute of Justice, with Howard Teten as an adviser.
The Behavioral Science Unit provides a preliminary idea of the sort of person the police should be looking for. It was obviously of central importance that this idea should be accurate, otherwise it would send the police looking in the wrong direction. Interviewing murderers gives the profilers the necessary background to begin to formulate a picture of the man they are looking for. The wider the range of their knowledge of such criminals, the more profilers can trust intuition.
Sometimes the details of a case seem to offer no possible clue to the culprit. At the time Ressler was brooding on the idea of psychological profiling, there occurred in Yorkshire, England, a series of violent attacks on women that recalled the Jack the Ripper murders that took place in London’s East End in 1888. The Yorkshire murders, mostly of prostitutes, began in the summer of 1985, when the man who became known as the Yorkshire Ripper attacked two women with a hammer, and then slashed them with a knife. Both victims recovered. The third victim, Wilma McCann, was knocked unconscious with a hammer, dragged into a sports field, and had injuries inflicted on her stomach, chest, and genital area with a knife. The fourth victim was battered beyond recognition with a hammer, and then stabbed fifty times in the chest. Two more prostitute murders followed, but the eighth victim, sixteen-year-old Jayne MacDonald, was a pretty schoolgirl, made it look as if the notion that the killer was driven by a hatred of prostitutes was inaccurate after all.
When Robert Ressler came to England in 1978, he was accompanied by a young and flamboyant agent named John Douglas, who had come to Quantico as a visiting counselor and then joined the Behavioral Science Unit on Ressler’s recommendation. Douglas would accompany Ressler during his second interview with Ed Kemper.
Ressler and Douglas were at the Bramshill Police Academy, where Ressler had coined the phrase “serial killer,” and they were drinking at a nearby bar when one of the leading investigators in the three-year-old Ripper case, John Domaille, walked over to speak to them, with several other detectives. They sketched out for the benefit of the FBI agents the background of the case, and the scenes of the crimes. The man in charge of the case, Chief Inspector George Oldfield, had received a cassette containing a message that purported to be from the killer. Ressler and Douglas had heard the tape in the United States, and Douglas now commented: “Based on the crime scenes you’ve described and the audiotape, that’s not the Ripper. You’re wasting your time with that.”
Douglas then sketched out his own notion of the killer. He would be an almost invisible loner in his late twenties or early thirties, with a pathological hatred of women, a school dropout, and possibly a truck driver, since he seemed to get around quite a bit. The murders were his attempt to punish prostitutes in general.
In fact, the Ripper was caught by accident in January 1981, after thirteen murders and four serious attacks. Two policemen doing a routine check on a parked Rover interrupted prostitute Olivia Reivers, and her client, who gave his name as Peter Williams. Recognizing Reivers as a convicted prostitute with a suspended sentence, the policemen checked the number plate of the car and found it to be false—in fact it came from a scrapyard for used cars. When they ordered Reivers into their car, the man asked if he might relieve himself, and went behind an oil storage tank before being taken to the police station. There he gave his correct name, Peter Sutcliffe, aged thirty-five, but continued to insist that he had done nothing wrong. But when one of the policemen, acting on a sudden hunch, returned to the storage tank, he found a hammer and a knife that Sutcliffe had dropped among the leaves. After forty-eight hours in custody, Sutcliffe confessed to being the Ripper. The massive hunt for him had taken six years.
Psychologically speaking, Peter Sutcliffe proved to be as strange and complex as Ed Kemper. This working-class young man was the last person in the world anyone would have expected to become the sadistic disemboweler of women. As a child he had been so gentle and timid that he seemed destined for a life of self-effacement. His father, who was mad about cricket and football and was regarded as something of a ladies’ man, treated him with a kind of irritable contempt, which reflected his feeling that his eldest son would always remain a sissy.
John Sutcliffe’s large family was terrified of him. He was the kind of man who would walk into the room when everyone was watching television, and change the channel on to a sports program. Then he would sit in front of it, so close that no one could see past him. One of his daughters admitted that she daydreamed of murdering him.
Peter, born in June 1946, was undersized and shy, a scrawny, miserable little boy who spent hours staring blankly into space. He learned to walk quite literally by clinging to his mother’s skirts. And he continued to cling to them for years after.
At school he was so withdrawn and passive that after his arrest, most of his teachers could not even recall his face. His headmaster remembered him because Peter had once played truant for two weeks because he was being bullied. When his father found out, he made such a scene at the school that from then on, the headmaster took great care that Peter would never be bullied again.
The Sutcliffe home in Bingley, Yorkshire, was no background for an introspective child. With a dominant, self-assertive tyrant for a father, Peter inevitably took his mother’s side. But his younger brothers were more like their father. One of them once floored the local boxing champion by punching him in the testicles. The house was always jammed with people, and John Sutcliffe enjoyed “feeling up” any girl who strayed too close. The atmosphere was heavy with sex, and even Peter’s mother, a quiet doormat of a woman, had an affair with a local police sergeant. When her husband found out, he retaliated by moving in with a deaf woman who lived a few doors down the street.
Peter was twenty-three when the unthinkable happened, and he discovered that his mother, the woman he regarded as his ideal, his vision of what a woman ought to be, loving, hard-working, self-sacrificing, always warm and sympathetic, had been having an extramarital affair. His father later confessed to a female reporter that he thought this had “turned Peter’s mind.”
John Sutcliffe had learned about the affair when his wife mistook his voice on the phone for that of her lover. (They had never before spoken on the phone, and he was not wearing his teeth.) He arranged to meet her in a hotel room, arrived three hours early, and persuaded a member of staff to let him into the room. He had taken his children with him to witness her shame.
When Kathleen Sutcliffe came into the room, carrying a bag with her nightclothes, she was confronted by her family, including Peter and his fiancée, Sonia. Her husband began to shout at her, calling her a prostitute. He then made her open her night bag, take out the expensive negligee she had packed for her tryst, and hold it up. John later told the reporter: “I remember Peter were just standing there—he were shook rigid. He had a look on his face like an animal, it were. I think it may have turned his mind.”
There was another factor: Kathleen’s lover was a policeman. This made it even worse. Coppers were not held in high esteem in their house. John had been
arrested for breaking and entering. The second brother was always in and out of jail, and some of Peter’s best mates were burglars. The infidelity of Peter’s mother with one of the “enemy” must have convinced him that even the nicest women were whores at heart.
By this time, Peter himself was no longer the pathologically shy boy. Ashamed of being so weak, he had flung himself into bodybuilding until by his late teens he had the physique of a wrestler. As soon as he could afford it, he had bought his first car, and used to drive at eighty miles an hour through the narrow Bingley streets. For as much as he disliked his father, he also admired him, and wanted to be more like him.
Where women were concerned he could never match his father or his brothers. He liked to drive around the red-light district of Bradford and stare at the women, but he never dared to accost one, even though he boasted to his mates about his nonexistent sexual experience. With his obsessive, semi-incestuous feelings about his mother, Peter Sutcliffe was undoubtedly a psychological mess.
Then he finally found himself a girlfriend. She was a Czech émigrée named Sonia Szurma, who was even shyer than he was, and so plain that even his father did not try to put his hand up her skirt.
And it was the timid Sonia, oddly enough, who started the train of events that turned him into a killer. For when she began having an affair with an Italian who owned a sports car, Sutcliffe was thrown into a frenzy of jealousy. It was like his mother all over again; this young woman who seemed so shy and withdrawn was just like the rest of them. Peter finally took the plunge and went to a prostitute. But even this turned out to be a fiasco. He was unable to raise an erection, and the girl swindled him out of five pounds. Worse still, when he saw her later in a pub, and asked for his change, she jeered at him and told the whole story at the top of her voice, so he became a laughingstock. For the introspective boy who had been fighting all his life to feel like a man, the humiliation bit deep, and turned poisonous.
One day, eating fish and chips in a friend’s minivan, he thought he saw the prostitute, and followed her. He was carrying in his pocket a brick inside a sock that was precisely for this kind of opportunity. He hit her on the back of the head and then ran back to the van. But she succeeded in taking its number, and police questioned him. He managed to convince them that it had been an ordinary quarrel, and they let him go.
But that act of hitting a prostitute had taken possession of his imagination. He realized that it had given gave him some deep and strange satisfaction that was intensely sexual. He became a kind of dual personality. While the Peter known to his friends and Sonia remained genial and courteous, another Peter enjoyed stopping his car by prostitutes and asking what they charged. When they told him, he would shout, “Is that all you’re worth?” and drive off.
In 1975, a prostitute turned him down and released once more the wellspring of rage; he followed her and hit her with a hammer, then raised her clothes and took out a knife. Someone called out, and he ran away. But the feverish excitement that swept through him again made him realize that what he really wanted was to assert his masculinity by killing a prostitute. A month later he again crept up behind a woman and hit her with a hammer; again he was disturbed and was forced to flee. But now it was only a matter of time before he committed murder.
It happened two months later, when he picked up a drunken hooker who was thumbing a lift. He took her to a playing field, where he once again proved to be impotent. He then made up for it by hitting her with a hammer and stabbing her repeatedly in the breasts and stomach.
What he had failed to realize, as he daydreamed of revenge on “whores,” is that he was handing himself over to a demon who would give him no peace. He would have to carry on murdering and disemboweling woman after woman, even when he knew perfectly well that they were not prostitutes, because only this could make him feel fully alive. Roy Hazelwood was right: “Sex crime isn’t about sex, it’s about power.” A murderer such as Sutcliffe is the living illustration of what he meant.
The hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was the biggest police operation ever mounted in the United Kingdom. It cost $10 million, and involved 200,000 interviews—including four with Sutcliffe and 30,000 searches of homes. But it taught the British police the same lesson that the FBI had learned through Manson, Kemper, and the rest: there had to be some more logical way of trapping serial killers. The Yorkshire police reached the conclusion Pierce Brooks had reached in 1948: the answer lay in computerization. In the United Kingdom, this happened in the early 1980s, and would later help to trap serial killers such as Duffy and Mulcahy, the “Railway Rapists.”
In the United States, it also began to happen in the early 1980s, when Pierce Brooks persuaded the Department of Justice to host a conference at Sam Houston State University, and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was approved. It was decided to run it from Quantico, and in May 1985 Brooks was appointed its first director, and joined the team there.
By that time, Ressler had already inaugurated a new project that he called the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), which sprang from that plan to interview killers—Ressler’s original “Criminal Personality Research Project” of 1978. The idea, as Ressler put it, was to “bring together the fragmented efforts from around the country so they could be consolidated into one national resource center available to the entire law enforcement community.”
But at the time Ressler and Douglas were advising the British police about the Yorkshire Ripper, all this lay some years in the future. And on the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, another series of random and apparently motiveless killings was underlining the need for some method of psychological profiling.
It had started in the stiflingly hot early hours of July 29, 1976, as two young women sat talking in the front seats of an Oldsmobile on Buhre Avenue in the Bronx; they were eighteen-year-old Donna Lauria, a medical technician, and nineteen-year-old Jody Valenti, a student nurse. Donna’s parents, on their way back from a night out, passed them at about 1 a.m., and said good night. A few moments after they reached their apartment, they heard the sound of shots and screams. A man had walked up to the car, pulled a gun out of a brown paper bag, and fired five shots. Donna was killed immediately; Jody was wounded in the thigh.
Total lack of motive for the shooting convinced police that they were dealing with a man who killed for pleasure, without knowing his victims.
On October 23, 1976, three months after the Bronx murder, twenty-year-old Carl Denaro shared a few beers with friends at a Queens bar. At 2:30 a.m., he left with Rosemary Keenan and parked his car near her house. Suddenly a man appeared and fired five shots into the car; one of them struck Carl in the head. Rosemary raced the car back to the bar and his friends, who rushed him to the hospital. Surgeons replaced a part of his skull with a metal plate.
Just a month later, on November 26, two young women were talking on the stoop in front of a house in the Floral Park section of Queens; it was half an hour past midnight when a man walked toward them, started to ask if they could direct him, then, before he finished the sentence, pulled out a gun and began shooting. Donna DeMasi, sixteen, and Joanne Lomino, eighteen, were both wounded. A bullet lodged in Joanne’s spine, paralyzing her.
On January 30, 1977, a young couple were kissing goodnight in a car in the Ridgewood section of Queens; there was a deafening explosion, the windscreen shattered, and Christine Freund, twenty-six, slumped into the arms of her boyfriend, John Diel. She died a few hours later in hospital.
On March 8, 1977, Virginia Voskerichian, an Armenian student, was on her way home, and only a few hundred yards from her mother’s house in Forest Hills, Queens, when a gunman walked up to her, and shot her in the face at a few yards’ range; the bullet went into her mouth, shattering her front teeth. She died immediately. Christine Freund had been shot only three hundred yards away.
By now police recognized that the bullets that had killed three and wounded four had all come from the same gun, an uncommon .44
Charter Arms Bulldog revolver. And this indicated a homicidal psychopath who would probably go on until he was caught. The problem was that the police had no clues to his identity, no idea of where to begin searching. Unless he was caught during an attempted murder, the chances of arresting him seemed minimal. New York City mayor Abraham Beame called a press conference in which he announced: “We have a savage killer on the loose.” He was able to say that the man was white, about five feet ten inches tall, well groomed, with hair combed straight back.” The press dubbed the unknown shooter “the .44-Caliber Killer.”
Despite the media frenzy and the intensive police manhunt, on the morning of April 17, 1977, there were two more deaths. Alexander Esau and Valentina Suriani were sitting in a parked car in the Bronx when the killer shot both of them. Valentina died instantly; Esau died later in the hospital, three bullets in his head. Only a few blocks away was the spot where Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti had been shot.
In the street near the victims, a policeman found an envelope. It contained a letter addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli, and it was from the killer. The hand-written missive was littered with misspellings: “I am deeply hurt by your calling me a weman-hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam. I am a little brat . . .” It claimed that his father, Sam, was a brute who beat his family when he got drunk, and who ordered him to go out and kill. “I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game—tasty meat. The wemen of Queens are prettyist of all . . .” It was reminiscent of the letters that Jack the Ripper and so many other “thrill killers” have written to the police, revealing an urge to “be somebody,” to make an impact on society. A further rambling, incoherent note, signed “Son of Sam,” was sent to New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin.
The next attack, on June 26, 1977, was like so many of the others: a young couple sitting in their car in the early hours of Sunday morning, saying good night after a date. They were Salvatore Lupo and Judy Placido, and the car was in front of a house on 211th Street, Bayside, Queens. Four shots shattered the windshield. The assailant ran away. Fortunately, his aim had been bad; both these victims were only wounded, and recovered.