Popular Crime

by Bill James

  On November 15, 1971, he was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon, an attack against a woman. Free on bail, he kidnapped and raped a woman on December 19, but released her, even though she knew enough about him to identify him. On December 22, 1971, an Anchorage woman was kidnapped, assaulted and murdered by an unknown assailant. When that murder hit the newspapers, the December 19 victim went to the police, and Hansen was arrested again.

  He was sentenced to five years in prison, and served three months before being released to a halfway house. Let us pause the story for a moment, and look at the pattern. Hansen by the end of 1971 had committed hundreds of crimes, most of them petty thefts, but including at least three very serious assaults against women in the closing months of 1971 (later investigation made it clear that there was at least one victim who never came forward). But in court:

  a) All of the stuff that had happened in the lower states in earlier years—the thefts and arson—apparently never surfaced. This was before computerized records. The earlier crimes were a long time ago and a long way away, and it was a different kind of crime.

  b) One victim never reported the crime.

  c) In one case—the murder—Hansen was suspected but couldn’t be tied to the crime.

  d) One victim, the December 19 rape victim, was attacked so aggressively by Hansen’s lawyer that she broke down in court and became unable to testify, causing that charge to be dropped.

  e) Hansen was sentenced on the lesser charge (assault with a deadly weapon), but, hey, he was a family man with a good job. He got five years.

  f) Five years became three months due to parole. He behaved well in prison.

  Magical math—there are dozens of crimes, but only five of them make it to the level of prosecution, the prosecutors do triage and cut that to the best three, one falls away and the other two are pleaded down into one. Happens all the time.

  Out of jail, Hansen appeared to be on good behavior for a time. He added to his family, got his own bakery, bought his own house, his own boat, his own airplane. He resumed his big-game hunting.

  In July, 1973, Hansen is believed to have murdered a teenaged girl. He was never associated with that crime until many years later.

  He was found in possession of stolen property in 1973, but the police who investigated that incident didn’t discover that he was a criminal or was on parole, and weren’t sure that they could prove their case. His parole ended a few months later because of his good behavior.

  He raped an Anchorage teenager in September, 1974, but she didn’t go to the police until many years later, when Hansen was in custody.

  In July, 1975, another murder.

  In October, 1975, he abducted a dancer from an Anchorage nightclub. He released the woman, who went to a rape crisis center, talked to the police, and positively identified Hansen from a photograph. Hansen admitted to being with the woman, but told the police she was a prostitute who had tried to extort additional money from him. The woman fled the state in terror of Hansen, leaving police unable to prosecute.

  Five more serious crimes—more likely ten—have completely disappeared from the court dockets.

  In November, 1976, Hansen was arrested for stealing a chain saw. A psychologist who tested him at that time wrote that his evaluation “indicates the disintegration of personality to a highly potential psychotic level or high schizophrenic scale, high manic scale, and high antisocial scale.” Hansen pled guilty to the theft. The judge, pointing out that this was Hansen’s third felony conviction and aware of some of the other allegations against him, sentenced him to five years in prison.

  But.

  Hansen appealed. He argued that a) the first felony conviction, the arson, was a long time ago, when he was a kid, and b) the circumstances of the second case were unclear, and c) the theft of the chain saw could have been charged as a misdemeanor, and d) he had been diagnosed as having a mental illness which could be controlled with medicine, which he promised he would take.

  He won the appeal. He argued, in essence, that each of these events was less than it appeared. The police and the judge who sentenced him knew that the truth was just the opposite: that there was much more here than met the eye. The Supreme Court of Alaska didn’t know that, and ordered the Superior Court to re-sentence him.

  The Superior Court judge, furious at the decision, stated that “for the record, I’m absolutely convinced that Mr. Hansen is going to commit additional crimes. I don’t think that’s even an open question.” Hansen was released on parole, and there were to be strict, court-ordered guidelines for his supervision—for example, periodic checks that he was taking his medicine.

  The guidelines were never issued. There was no follow-up supervision of any kind.

  He was released in late 1978. Between then and 1983 he would murder at least seventeen women, most of them prostitutes and/or dancers in seedy clubs. Hansen was a classic serial killer, a sexual predator who abducted young women and left their bodies in remote areas of the Alaskan wilderness. In some cases, he let the women run, and then hunted and killed them.

  The system had other chances to stop him. There were other assaults on women who escaped, but the attacks were not tied to Hansen.

  In January, 1981, he reported a fraudulent burglary as a part of an insurance scam. The insurance company suspected that the claim was fake, but it was cheaper to pay it ($13,000) than to prove it was false.

  Bodies were occasionally found in very remote areas, far from roads. In retrospect, the police investigating the murders might have realized earlier that the killer had to have access to an airplane, which might have focused the search. I’m not blaming the police; sometimes things that seem obvious later on are hard to see at the time.

  Hansen burglarized isolated hunting cabins. A victim of one of those burglaries, a layman with no police experience, was smart enough to track it to Hansen. Realizing that the thief had to have an airplane, the cabin owner walked in circles around his cabin until he found where the airplane had landed, photographed and measured the tire tracks, and then went to nine airfields, looking for the plane with the matching tires. It was Hansen’s.

  The police said that was insufficient evidence for a warrant, and refused to pursue the case.

  Most of the victims had no strong family ties, and their disappearances caused little notice. As time passed, however, enough bodies were found and enough families became involved in the searches that the police eventually realized that they were dealing with a serial murderer.

  On June 13, 1983, Hansen made an agreement with a prostitute to get her into his car. Once he had her, Hansen pulled a gun, took the woman to his home and raped her several times, then took her to his plane, where she was able to escape.

  Hansen hastily arranged an alibi with a friend who owed him a favor. When the police came Hansen denied the whole thing and provided the alibi. The victim was credible and provided specific detail about Hansen’s house and plane, but she was, after all, a prostitute. When she skipped town a week later, the police closed the case with no action.

  A junior policeman who had responded to the call, however, felt strongly that

  a) Hansen had committed the assault,

  b) Hansen had intended to murder the woman, and

  c) Hansen very possibly might be the serial murderer for whom a special force was searching.

  Defying orders, the young cop sent the case file to the task force which was searching for the serial killer. The task force quickly focused on Hansen, and within a month of receiving the file had assembled enough information to raid his house. He was arrested on October 27, 1983, and has been in custody ever since. In February, 1984, he confessed to several murders.

  Hansen has never talked freely about his crimes, answering questions only when he could negotiate something in exchange for the information. One of the things he has negotiated for is protection from publicity, and for this reason he is not as well known as many comparable criminals. There are at least two books
about him—Fair Game, by Bernard DuClos (St. Martin’s Press, 1993), and Butcher, Baker: A True Account of a Serial Murderer, by Walter Gilmour and Leland E. Hale (Penguin, 1991). DuClos is a native of Pocahontas, Iowa, who became interested in the case for that reason, and did a solid, workmanlike job of writing a book about it. (Hansen’s mother’s name was DuClose, but I don’t know whether that is a connection or a coincidence.)

  The judge who sentenced Hansen at the end of his rampage said that “I can’t think of a bigger indictment of society than what we have here. This gentleman has been known to us for several years. Yet, we’ve turned him loose several times knowing that he had the potential to kill.”

  In response to this, let me say that first, this is not an indictment of “society,” it is an indictment of the criminal justice system. And second, of course it is, but …

  In this respect, the Robert Hansen story is like that of Westley Allan Dodd, or Charles Hatcher, or Larry Eyler or many others—men who did everything but drive to the police station and write their names in their victim’s blood, but who nonetheless were turned loose on society repeatedly until the full picture of their depravity became evident.

  I have been writing this book for more than twenty years. The article above, about Robert Hansen, was written more than fifteen years ago. By nature I am an optimist. I tend to see the good in everything—but at the time that I was writing stories like this one, I was very negative and depressed about the American judicial system. “What kind of country are we living in,” I wondered, “where people like Robert Hansen can be turned loose repeatedly by a justice system that has every reason to know that they are responsible for dozens of violent crimes?”

  This was the time, also, in which the criminal population of America passed one million persons, and there was a hue and cry about that from the left. “Do you realize that there are more than one million Americans now living under the control of the justice system?” the left would thunder, to which my response was, “Do you mean to tell me that there are only one million people in prison in America? Jesus Christ; no wonder crime is out of control.” A million people in America … that’s nothing. That’s one person in 300.

  Think about any group of 300 people that you can relate to … the people in your high school graduating class, or the people who work for your company. It’s easy for me, because I grew up in a town with a listed population of 309. Answer honestly the question: how many criminals were in that group? How many people were there in that group of 300 who would steal from you, or beat you up, or who were so over-the-top reckless that they were a constant danger to those around them? It’s not one in 300; it’s more like two or three percent. In a country the size of America, the idea that only one million people would be in prison is absolutely terrifying.

  Robert Hansen was the end product of a criminal justice system that really didn’t want to convict people, a criminal justice system that had lost track of its responsibility to protect the public. But you know what? That was 30 years ago, when Hansen was running wild and nobody would step up to stop him. It was a long time ago. It isn’t that way anymore. The system has, to a large extent, healed itself.

  America ignored the people who were whining about one million Americans being locked up—and rightly so. We went to two million.

  In the mid-1970s I taught a junior college class at the Kansas State Prison in Lansing—the same prison where Hickock and Smith had been executed just a few years before. I had a guy in my class who had been sentenced to life in prison for murder, and had been there about two years. In the middle of the semester he made parole.

  What?

  It turned out that, at that time, “life in prison” generally meant four to six years. The maximum sentence for murder in Kansas was called life in prison, but it was actually fifteen years to life. After fifteen years, you were eligible for parole.

  You were more than eligible for parole; you were legally entitled to parole, unless you had “bad time.” There was “good time” and “bad time.” “Good time” meant that you had not been convicted of any violations of the rules of the prison, and good time was counted at two-to-one, which meant that you were eligible for parole, actually, after seven and a half years.

  What was “good time”? Well, all time was good time, really. At the time the policy was adopted, prison officials would take away a prisoner’s good time for violations of prison rules. The theory was that this would give prison authorities more control of the inmates, if they had the ability to let prisoners who behaved themselves out earlier. Some prisoner had sued arguing that his loss of “good time” was keeping him in prison when he should be out, however, and he hadn’t been convicted of doing anything wrong inside the prison; it was just the judgment of the staff that he had violated prison rules. The result of that lawsuit was a policy that a prisoner could not be denied his “good time” credits without a hearing. You had to have a trial, with the prisoner represented by a lawyer, to prove that the prisoner had been found in possession of a knife, or had assaulted another prisoner, or had thrown urine at a guard, or whatever it was; if you didn’t prove it in a hearing, you couldn’t violate the prisoner’s good time.

  So basically, all time was good time. There was one case I was aware of in which the prison authorities were fairly certain that a prisoner had killed another prisoner, but they couldn’t actually prove it, so they couldn’t violate his good time. So fifteen years to life, in practice, meant seven and a half years.

  But somebody was held in prison for seven years, seven months waiting for the next session of the parole board, so he sued. The result of that lawsuit was a policy that a prisoner had to be granted a parole hearing no later than the moment that he was theoretically eligible for parole, which meant 7½ years, if he was doing life. The parole board met every six months. That meant that, if your earliest parole date was anywhere in those six months, you got to go before the parole board—and, unless you had been convicted of a serious crime while you were in prison, you were legally entitled to parole.

  So 7½ years meant, really, a little less than 7½ years—but. To count to the 7½ years, you had to include the time the prisoner was in custody while on trial or awaiting trial. Very often, in a murder case, the criminal might have been held in custody for two or three years before the case came to trial. By the time he got to the state pen, he might be four to five years away from parole.

  But wait a minute; it gets worse. Sometimes people who were awaiting trial in a murder case couldn’t make bond—but most of the time they could. Very often, like Ken McElroy, a prisoner would be able to make bond even after he was convicted. If the accused could post bail, he could remain free while awaiting trial or awaiting sentencing or awaiting appeals, and it still counted as time in custody. Because he was free on bond, he was still theoretically under the supervision of the corrections system, therefore he was theoretically in jail, therefore his time had to be counted in calculating his parole eligibility date—and had to be counted double, since it was always good time. A murderer who knew that he was likely to be convicted, then, would delay his trial and stay free on bond as long as he could. If he could stretch his pre-trial and pre-sentencing time to four years, then by the time he was convicted, he was only three years away from parole.

  It was a fantastic system. It enabled prosecutors to go before the press and announce that they had obtained a life sentence for A. J. Killer, but it allowed A.J. to walk quietly out of prison five years later—sometimes less.

  But you know what? It’s not that way anymore. The system has, to a large extent, healed itself. Parole has either been eliminated or sharply curtailed in most jurisdictions. Where it exists, it is no longer an entitlement. More of the very worst criminals are sentenced now to life without the possibility of parole. The revolving door doesn’t revolve the way it used to. I’m not saying that there aren’t any Robert Hansens out there anymore, killing scores of people, but America is not the way it was.

>   XXVIII

  John Joubert was an Eagle Scout and a serial murderer, not necessarily in that order. He became an Eagle Scout in 1981. In August, 1982, at the age of 19, he killed an eleven-year-old boy in Portland. Joining the Air Force almost immediately thereafter, he was stationed in Omaha, Nebraska, where he murdered two more young boys—Danny Joe Eberle, a thirteen-year-old newsboy abducted off his route (September 18, 1983), and Chris Walden, a twelve-year-old abducted on his way to school (December 2, 1983).

  Even as a Boy Scout, Joubert had attacked a number of young people with knives, although none of those attacks ended in death. Other than the swiftness of his moral descent, the only thing noteworthy about Joubert is the way in which he was caught. A county sheriff, Pat Thomas, went on TV and said that Joubert was “a coward who could only kill children … If he were a real man, he would stop picking on children and start picking on someone his own size.” Joubert rose to the bait, and attempted to abduct an adult woman. She escaped, and got his license plate number. That brought the police to his door, where they found incriminating evidence. He confessed a few hours later.

  Trying to goad the killer into varying his pattern by taunting him through the media is, of course, a classic device of crime fiction; you’ve probably seen cops do this on television a dozen times—but in this case, it actually worked.

  The book about the Joubert case, from which most of these facts are taken, is A Need to Kill, by Mark Pettit (Ballantine Books, 1991). Pettit was a TV reporter who became interested in the case at the time of the second murder, that of the Eberle boy. Whoever Fights Monsters, Robert Ressler’s book about his work for the FBI, has a chapter on Joubert, and gives a somewhat different account of his capture, which gives the impression that Joubert may not have intended to abduct the adult woman, but merely to prevent her from reporting the fact that he was hanging around the front of a school. Pettit’s book is OK, short and to the point, although it is punctuated with regrettable sentences such as “The teenager gasped at the red-hot streamer of pain that lanced through his body” (p. 18).