by Colin Wilson
Investigators checking the police files made a discovery that looked like a possible lead. On the previous June 13, a scared and frantic seventeen-year-old prostitute had rushed into the motel where she was staying, a handcuff dangling from her wrist, and told her pimp that a client had tried to kill her. A medical examination at police headquarters revealed that she had been tortured. She told of being picked up by a red-haired, pockmarked little man with a bad stutter, who had offered her $200 for oral sex. She had accompanied him back to his home in the well-to-do Muldoon area, and down to the basement. There he had told her to take off her clothes, then snapped a handcuff on her, and shackled her to a support pillar. The tortures that followed during the next hour or so included biting her nipples and thrusting the handle of a hammer into her vagina. Finally, he allowed her to dress. He told her that he owned a private plane, and was going to take her to a cabin in the wilderness. The young woman guessed that he intended to kill her—she knew what he looked like and where he lived. So as the car stopped beside a plane, and the man began removing things from the trunk, she made a run for it, and succeeded in flagging down a passing truck.
Her description of the “John” convinced the police that it was a respectable citizen: Robert Hansen, a married man and the owner of a flourishing bakery business, who had been in Anchorage for seventeen years. Driven out to the Muldoon district, the young woman identified the house where she had been tortured; it was Hansen’s. She also identified the Piper Super Cub airplane that belonged to him. The police learned that Hansen was at present alone in the house—his family was on a trip to Europe.
When Hansen was told about the charge, he exploded indignantly. He had spent the whole evening dining with two business acquaintances, and they would verify his alibi. In fact, the two men did this. The prostitute, Hansen said, was simply trying to “shake him down.” Since it was her word against that of three of Anchorage’s most respectable businessmen, it looked as if the case would have to be dropped.
After the discovery of Paula Goulding’s body three months later, however, the investigating team led by Sergeant Glenn Flothe decided that the case was worth pursuing. If Hansen had tortured a prostitute, then decided to take her out to the wilderness, he could well be the killer they were seeking.
The investigators contacted the Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico. What they wanted was not a profile of the killer—they already had their suspect—but to know whether Robert Hansen was a feasible suspect.
Flothe spoke to Roy Hazelwood, who told them not to tell him anything about their suspect, but to begin by giving him the details of the crimes, and the story of the prostitute who had been tortured. When they had finished, Hazelwood gave them a word picture of the kind of person they could be looking for—some local businessman who loved hunting, who was psychologically insecure, and possibly had a stutter.
The Alaska CID was impressed. Hazelwood’s account was full of hits, including the stutter. And at that point they told Hazelwood about Robert Hansen—that he was a well-known big-game hunter who had achieved celebrity by bagging a Dall sheep with a crossbow in the Kuskokwim Mountains. Douglas’s answer was that Hansen was indeed a feasible suspect. A big-game hunter might well decide to hunt women. And he was a trophy collector; it would be likely that he had kept items belonging to his victims. If the police could obtain a search warrant, they might well find their evidence.
What was also clear was that if Hansen knew he was a suspect, he would destroy the evidence; it was therefore necessary to work quickly and secretly. The first step was to try to break his alibi. No doubt his friends had been willing to provide a false alibi because it would cost them nothing. If they were convinced that perjury could cost them two years in prison, they might feel differently. The police approached the public prosecutor and asked him to authorize a grand jury to investigate the charges of torture against the prostitute. The businessmen were then approached, and told that they would be called to repeat their stories on oath. It worked; both men admitted that they had provided Hansen with an alibi merely to help him out of a difficult situation. They agreed to testify to that effect.
Next, the police arrested Hansen on a charge of rape and kidnapping. A search warrant authorized the police to enter his home. There they found the Ruger Mini-14 rifle, which a ballistics expert identified as the one that had fired the shells found near the graves. Under the floor in the attic the searchers found more rifles, and items of cheap jewelry and adornment, including a Timex watch. Most important of all, they found an aviation map with twenty asterisks marking various spots. Two of these marked the places where the two bodies had so far been found. Another indicated the place where the unidentified corpse of a woman had been found on the south side of the Kenai Peninsula in August 1980, a crime that had not been linked with the Anchorage killings.
The investigators discovered that her name was Joanna Messina, and that she had last been seen alive with a redheaded, pockmarked man who stuttered.
At first Hansen denied all knowledge of the killings, but faced with the evidence against him, he finally decided to confess. The twenty asterisks, he admitted, marked graves of prostitutes. But he had not killed all the women he had taken out to the wilderness. What he wanted was oral sex. If the woman satisfied him, he took her back home. If not, he pointed a gun at her, ordered her to strip naked, and then run. He gave the woman a start, and then would stalk her as if hunting a game animal. Sometimes the woman would think she had escaped, and Hansen would allow her to think so—until he once again flushed her out and made her run. Finally, when she was too exhausted to run another step, he killed her and buried the body. Killing, he said, was an anticlimax, “the excitement was in the stalking.”
In court on February 28, 1984, the prosecutor told the judge (a jury was unnecessary since Hansen had pleaded guilty): “Before you sits a monster, an extreme aberration of a human being. A man who has walked among us for seventeen years, selling us doughbuts [sic], Danish buns, coffee, all with a pleasant smile on his face. That smile concealed crimes that would numb the mind.” Judge Ralph Moody then imposed sentences totaling 461 years.
For the investigating detectives, the most interesting part of Hansen’s confession was the explanation of why and how he had become a serial killer. Born in a small rural community—Pocahontas, Iowa—he had been an ugly and unpopular child. His schoolfellows found his combination of a stutter and running acne sores repellent. “Because I looked and talked like a freak, every time I looked at a girl she would turn away.” He had married, but his wife had left him—he felt that it was because he was ugly. He married again, moved to Alaska, and started a successful bakery business—his father’s trade. But marriage could not satisfy his raging sexual obsession, his desire to have a docile slave performing oral sex. Since Anchorage had so many topless bars and strip joints, it was a temptation to satisfy his voyeurism in them; then, sexually excited, he needed to pick up a prostitute. What he craved was fellatio, and many of them were unwilling. Hansen would drive out into the woods, and then announce what he wanted; if they refused, he produced a gun.
Because he was by nature frugal, he preferred not to pay them. In fact, it emerged in his confession that he was a lifelong thief, and that this was a result of his miserliness. “I hate to spend money . . . I damn near ejaculate in my pants if I could walk into a store and take something. . . . I stole more stuff in this damn town than Carter got little green pills.” Yet his next sentence reveals that it was more than simply miserliness that made him steal. “Giving stuff away, you know, walk out in the parking lot and walk to somebody’s car, and throw it in the damn car. But I was taking it . . . I was smarter than people in the damn store. It would give me—uh—the same satisfaction—I don’t know if you want to call it that—but I got a lot of the same feeling as I did with a prostitute.” The link between stealing and oral sex was “the forbidden.” This seems to explain why many serial killers—Ted Bundy is an example—begin as habitual t
hieves.
The murders had started, Hansen said, with Joanna Messina, a woman he had met in the town of Seward. She was living in a tent in the woods with her dog, waiting for a job in a cannery. Hansen had struck up a conversation with her and taken her out to dinner. Afterwards, they went back to her tent, near a gravel pit, where Hansen hoped she would be prepared to let him stay the night. When they were in bed, she told him she needed money. His natural cheapness affronted, he called her a whore and shot her with a .22 pistol; he then shot her dog, destroyed the camp, and dumped her body into the gravel pit.
According to Hansen, he was violently sick after the murder. Not long afterwards, he picked up a prostitute and asked her if she would fellate him. She agreed, and they drove out along the Eklutna Road. Then, according to Hansen, she became nervous and ran away; when he gave chase, she drew a knife. He took it from her and stabbed her to death. That was how the unidentified corpse known as Eklutna Annie came to lie in a shallow grave, to be dug up by a hungry bear.
With this victim Hansen did not feel nauseated. In fact, he said, when he looked back on the murder, he experienced an odd pleasure. He then began to fantasize about how enjoyable it would be to hunt down a woman as if she were an animal. Like so many other serial killers, Hansen had discovered that murder is addictive.
Over the next three years he drove about sixty prostitutes out into the wilderness and demanded oral sex. If the woman complied satisfactorily, he drove her back to Anchorage. If not, he forced her to strip at gunpoint, then to flee into the woods. When the hunt was over and the woman lay dead, he buried the body, and made a mark on a map—he even tried to guide officers back to some of the murder sites, but had usually forgotten exactly where they were. Once, when they were hovering over Grouse Lake in a helicopter, he pointed down. “There’s a blonde down there. And over there there’s a redhead with the biggest tits you ever saw.”
John Douglas, who traveled to Anchorage to help the police, makes a penetrating remark about Hansen. “[Prostitutes] were people he could regard as lower and more worthless than himself.” This was Hansen’s problem—a deep sense of worthlessness that could only be transformed into self-esteem by exercising his power over someone he regarded as lower than himself. And, as Douglas says, hunting a naked female through the snow would have been the “ultimate control.”
This lack of self-esteem is a recurrent characteristic of serial killers, and explains cases that otherwise seem baffling. It can be seen clearly in another case that was ongoing at the time Hansen was killing: “the .22-Caliber Killer,” or “Buffalo Bill”—a nickname that would be borrowed a few years later by the crime novelist Thomas Harris for the killer in his Silence of the Lambs.
On September 22, 1980, two black youths stopped at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, where one of them intended to cash his paycheck. When he returned to the car, his companion, fourteen-year-old Glenn Dunn, was slumped in his seat, shot in the head. A nurse who had entered the supermarket a few minutes earlier had noticed a slim white man in a hooded sweatshirt sitting outside, as if waiting for a lift; he was carrying a brown paper bag. Glenn Dunn proved to have been killed by a .22-caliber bullet.
It was the first of four shootings that occurred over thirty-six hours. The following day, Harold Green, thirty-two, an engineer, was shot in the temple as he ate in his car outside a fast-food restaurant in nearby Cheektowaga. That night, Emmanuel Thomas, thirty, was killed in the same neighborhood as he was crossing the road with a friend. The following day the .22-Caliber Killer moved farther afield, to Niagara Falls, and shot Joseph McCoy, forty-three, in front of a church.
Because all of the victims were black, there was anger in the black community, and much criticism of the police.
Two weeks later, on October 8, the killings took an even more bizarre twist. An abandoned taxicab was found on a construction site in the Buffalo suburb of Amherst. A police patrolman found an empty wallet under the driver’s seat, and the license of Parker Edwards, seventy-one. In the trunk they found Edwards, his skull smashed in. The killer had also cut out his heart.
The next day another black taxi driver, Ernest Jones, forty, was found on the bank of the Niagara River, his heart cut out of his chest. His cab, also covered in blood, was found two miles away.
The following day, October 10, a strange incident occurred in the Buffalo General Hospital. Just as visiting hours were nearly over, a white man in a baseball cap enquired for the room of Collin Cole, thirty-seven, an inmate of the local jail who was recovering from a drug overdose. A nurse on her rounds saw the visitor strangling the struggling Cole with a ligature; the attacker fled, but Cole reported that he had snarled, “I hate niggers.”
The Behavioral Science Unit was consulted, and John Douglas traveled to Buffalo. His feeling was that the .22-Caliber Killer was a man who felt he had a mission to kill blacks. Douglas surmised that he was the kind of person who might join a right-wing hate group. Just possibly, such a person, with his “group” mentality, might join the military, but would probably soon be discharged because of failure to adjust. Such a person, Douglas said, was often a loner until about the age of twenty-eight, when he was likely to explode. Such men were obsessed by weapons and often had a large gun collection. Nevertheless, the crimes showed him to be rational and organized.
The heart-remover killer was disorganized and pathological, someone whose hatred had probably been building up over several years. And unless he had undergone a sudden deterioration after the shootings, he was not the same person.
For two months, there were no more killings in the Buffalo area.
On December 22, four black men and one Hispanic were stabbed in Manhattan over a thirteen-hour period by a killer who was dubbed the “Midtown Slasher.” The first victim, John Adams, twenty-five, was knifed by a white assailant at 11:30 a.m.; he recovered. At 1:30 p.m., Ivan Frazier, thirty-two, was attacked by the other passenger in a subway carriage, but deflected the blow with his arm. The attacker fled. At 3:30, messenger Luis Rodriguez was attacked by a man who demanded his wallet; when he fought back, the man stabbed him twice; he later died. Around 6:50, the victim was Antoine Davis, thirty, stabbed in front of a midtown bank; he also died. So did Richard Renner, twenty, stabbed about 10:30 on Forty-ninth Street. Around midnight, the killer stabbed another subway passenger, Carl Ramsey, who succeeded in dragging himself up to street level before he died.
The .22-Caliber Killer had changed his MO. On December 29, Wendell Barnes, twenty-six, was stabbed in Rochester, and died; the next day in Buffalo, Albert Menefee recovered from the knife wound that nicked his heart. On January 1, there were two separate attacks, but both victims, Larry Little and Calvin Crippen, survived.
The case went cold again for several months, until the Buffalo police received a call from the army’s Criminal Investigative Division in Fort Benning, Georgia. A twenty-five-year-old army private, Joseph Christopher, whose home was in Buffalo, was in the hospital under guard. On January 13, he had tried to slash a black GI, and been placed under restraint. He had then attempted to castrate himself. And he had told the medical officer attending him, Captain Dorothy Anderson, that he had killed black men in Buffalo and New York.
Police went to his mother’s home, and in his bedroom found the sawed-off rifle used in the original shootings, and clothes that matched those reportedly worn by the killer. Christopher was found to be mentally competent, and was sentenced to sixty years. The psychiatrist who examined him was amazed how closely Christopher fit Douglas’s profile, even to the collection of weapons—which Christopher had inherited from his father.
Christopher had joined the army on November 13, but was on leave from December 19 until January 4, when he had launched his second murder spree. In an interview with Buffalo journalists after his conviction, Christopher estimated that his murder spree had cost at least thirteen lives.
Asked about the heart-removal murders of the two black taxi drivers, Christopher neither confirmed nor denied them.
Douglas remains convinced that these two murders are not part of the sequence, because their MO is so completely unlike that of the earlier shootings. Yet it could be argued that the use of a knife connects them to the Midtown Slasher crimes, and that the mutilations of the taxi drivers reveals the same “signature”—hatred of blacks—as all the other crimes.
11
The Cases That Awakened America
The Atlanta child murders lasted from July 1979 until June 1981, reached a figure of twenty-one (or twenty-nine, depending on which estimate you prefer to believe), and ceased with the arrest of the chief suspect, Wayne Williams. Roy Hazelwood and John Douglas were both called to Atlanta to work on the murders, and it was a suggestion by Douglas that led to Williams being detained for the first time.
The case began, almost unobtrusively, on July 28, 1979, when a woman searching for empty bottles to recycle for cash noticed a disgusting smell near some roadside undergrowth in a slum neighborhood of southwestern Atlanta, Georgia. When she spotted a leg sticking out of the tangle, she reported her find to the police, who uncovered the body of fourteen-year-old Edward Smith. He had been shot in the head with a .22-caliber gun. The last time he had been seen was a week earlier, when he left a skating rink after meeting his girlfriend there.
The buzzing of flies led the police to another body, fifty feet away in the woods—another black youth, Alfred Evans, thirteen, who had disappeared four days earlier. Partial decomposition made it hard to determine the cause of his death, but it could have been strangulation.