by Gary Noesner
“Jim,” I said, “if that’s the news media, I’d like you to hang up on them and come back and talk some more with me. But if it’s the police, the negotiator down where you are, just let me know and I’ll hang up.”
Jim took the call, then came back on the line with me. “It’s the cops,” he said.
“Good. Listen, they want to help you, not hurt you. They’re good guys. You just talk it through with them, and they’re going to get you out of there safe and sound, okay?”
“Yeah. Sure,” he said.
Whether that was a sincere response or sarcasm I couldn’t tell. Still, I was somewhat optimistic he could be talked out.
For the next thirty hours the local police negotiators stayed on the phone with Jim, employing the techniques set forth in our manual, listening to and acknowledging his problems and frustrations. They eventually convinced him that he shouldn’t harm himself, and he surrendered. This case was emblematic of something I would see often in the years to come: a guy feels hopeless and acts out in a cry for help. While his depression may lead him to suicide, this attention-seeking behavior indicates that at least part of him wants to live. This creates an opening for the negotiator, who, by the act of listening to him and acknowledging his difficulties, can make him realize that there is hope after all.
There are of course cases when the subjects are a great deal more desperate than Jim and have no intention of turning back. Maybe they’ve already committed a murder or some other serious criminal offense. In situations like this, all the signs point to disaster. But even at times like this it often proves possible to avoid further loss of life. In one instance in Houma, Louisiana, a uniformed police officer named Chad Roy Louviere, driving a marked cruiser, stopped a woman for a purported traffic violation, raped her, and then handed her his business card. Clearly, this was not a man working with any objective other than to act out and to sever his ties with humanity. Information we received later indicated that he was an obsessively controlling husband and that his wife had recoiled from his demands. She insisted on a separation, which had sent him over the edge.
At 11:00 a.m., immediately after the rape, Louviere went directly to the small-town bank where his wife worked. When he entered the building, his wife was there along with five other employees and two customers. Waving his gun and shouting orders, he forced the two customers to leave, then lined up his victims and went down the line. “I know you,” he said to the first. Then he went on to the next person in line and then the next, saying, “I know you,” until he reached a sobbing teller named Pamela Duplantis. “I don’t know you,” he said, and shot her in the head, killing her instantly.
After this, it seemed more likely than ever that neither of the Louvieres would leave the bank alive. This looked to be a classic homicide followed by a suicide.
By this time, the building was surrounded by squad cars from local, county, and state authorities. As the Houma police began the painful process of trying to negotiate with one of their own, the chief called on an untrained officer to be their primary negotiator because he was a friend of Chad Roy Louviere’s. But what inexperienced crisis managers don’t realize is that if it was that easy for troubled individuals to open up to friends, many of these situations would never happen in the first place. It is often easier for a well-trained stranger to develop the necessary relationship with an emotionally troubled subject.
A store across the street became the de facto command center, and from there, this officer called the bank repeatedly to plead with Louviere to give up and come out. “No way,” Louviere responded again and again.
Other friends of Louviere’s from the force were brought to the phone across the street, but every one of them focused on the same practical objective—getting the man to surrender. After several hours of his friends saying “Just come on out, Chad,” Louviere became so frustrated that he simply refused to answer the phone. Fortunately, he let his hostages answer when the police continued to call.
Louviere was known to be a man of few words, but amid his taciturn refusals, his friends never picked up on the one clear message he was trying to send. Several times, as he refused to surrender, he muttered, “I just want to talk to somebody.”
Shortly after Louviere broke off communication, the Houma police chief and local sheriff called me and asked for my advice. Right away I leveled with them: this situation did not hold out a great deal of promise. The initial rape and the subsequent murder of a random teller at the bank appeared to be the work of a man determined to push himself until there was no way of turning back. Our only hope was to get inside his head and begin to probe what had triggered his rage so that we could disarm it. But because the situation had reached a crisis point, with the hostages’ lives as well as the gunman’s a trigger pull away from being obliterated, we had to be extremely cautious.
As he briefed me, at one point the chief almost offhandedly mentioned Louvier’s desire to just talk. I seized on this as a glimmer of hope. Then the chief also mentioned that Gloria Newport, an experienced FBI agent assigned to the New Orleans field office, had just arrived at the scene. I knew Gloria to be a skilled negotiator—I had trained her myself at our course at Quantico. “Make Agent Newport your primary negotiator,” I told the chief. “I think he’ll open up more with a woman.”
The chief was taken aback, to say the least, by my suggestion.
“This man just raped one woman and murdered another,” he said. “What makes you think he wants to talk with a woman? Looks to me like he hates women. I think the last person he’d want to talk to is a woman.”
“Sometimes a man has an easier time talking with a woman about his emotional life,” I said. “I think we need someone who can appear nonthreatening and nonjudgmental, someone who can project a sense of understanding. I think a soothing female voice is what we need to get Louviere back from the edge.”
“We’ll think about it,” the chief told me. But he went back to the strategy of calling in more of Louviere’s friends from the police force. Finally, when it became clear they were making no progress in the negotiations, the chief relented and put Gloria on the phone.
At first, she was able to speak only with the hostages. Louviere’s wife reiterated her husband’s need to talk.
“Do you think he’d talk to me?” Gloria said.
“Let me see,” she said. And a moment later Louviere picked up the phone.
“Chad,” Gloria said, “I’ve heard that you want to talk to somebody. I’m here to listen.” Her voice was soft, soothing, and nonconfrontational.
In the pause that followed, Gloria heard a loud exhalation. She told me later that it was like a dam bursting, after which Louviere began to talk about his issues. He was an extreme case of a controlling husband who couldn’t accept the fact that his wife had a mind of her own. Gloria was the perfect listener, and her ability to deliver basic empathetic responses with absolute sincerity almost immediately calmed him down: “I’m worried about you. Tell me what happened. Tell me all about it.” She validated his emotions, often just by naming them. “You sound so angry and frustrated,” she said to him. “What do you think your wife would do if you just told her how you feel?” She gave him an attentive ear and, most important, hope.
Once Gloria had established a relationship with Chad, she began to lay a foundation that would help her convince him to end the standoff with no further loss of life, suggesting to him that there might be opportunities to fix his relationship with his wife. Chad was a police officer and he knew full well the implications of what he had done. Still, the idea of reconciling with his wife was compelling. And when he was finally given an opportunity to express his hurt, anger, and frustration, this helped to relieve the pressure cooker of his emotions that was about to burst. His rage dissipated significantly. Gloria was finally able to convince him that the best course of action was for him to come out peacefully and not hurt anyone else. She gently encouraged and coaxed him to do the right thing. She had gained
influence with him, and because of this, and this alone, he soon surrendered without incident. As of this writing he is still awaiting execution.
A small-town police chief might face one situation like this in his career. Working on a national, even global scale, my colleagues and I saw these situations every week, and we’d learned that part of effective resolution is pulling back from the end objective and focusing on how to establish a relationship with this guy, right now, at this moment. I felt Gloria had the right communication skills to make her effective with Chad. Part of Louviere hated his wife, but some other part of him still loved her as well. He simply didn’t have the capacity to express that love except as a wish to dominate and control.
And it takes nothing away from Gloria’s ability to say that she might also have entered the game at an opportune moment. Often, the first negotiator to work with someone gets nothing but incoherent rage. But then, after the subject has vented and calmed down with the passage of time, he can become more willing to engage in a more substantive dialogue. Sometimes it’s the change in personnel that triggers the shift. I just knew they were getting nowhere with the approach being taken prior to Gloria’s involvement.
In the Louviere case, we averted a larger tragedy because police gave the perpetrator time to cool off. This was not the case on July 11, 1993, in Antioch, California, when a man named Joel Souza drove into a parking lot with his five-year-old daughter in his lap, holding a gun to her head. His eight-year-old son was sitting in the backseat.
Souza pulled up beside his estranged wife’s car.
“Get in the car,” he told Jennifer Souza. “Do it or I’ll blow her head off.”
She got into Joel’s car and they drove to the house they had once shared. There, Joel held her at gunpoint for an hour while he raged at her and peppered her with personal questions. Whom had she been out with? Why hadn’t she returned his telephone calls? Like Chad Louviere, he was a controlling ex-husband who seemed to consider family members to be his personal property.
After Souza’s frightening diatribe was over, he let Jennifer go but kept the children. He warned her: “Tell anybody about this, and I’ll shoot the kids.”
Terrified but not intimidated, she ran to a neighbor’s house and called the police. During the phone call she told them that her husband owned at least five different guns.
According to court testimony, Officer Michael Schneider was one of the first members of the Antioch Police Department to arrive on the scene. When he asked to speak to Joel and to see the children, Souza retreated with them to an upstairs bedroom and locked the door. Schneider, a trained hostage negotiator, took up a position at the head of the stairs.
“Joel, come on out now. I know you don’t want to hurt your kids.”
“It’s none of your business,” Souza yelled back. “Get out of my house or somebody’s going to get hurt.”
Outside, the SWAT team arrived and established a perimeter downstairs. Their presence made it even more imperative that Schneider keep Souza calm.
“Don’t worry about those guys,” Schneider said. “We’re going to stay cool and everything’s going to be fine. They are definitely not going to force their way in unless you do something really stupid. But you’re not going to do anything stupid, are you, Joel? Because you love your kids, right? It’s going to be easy does it.”
Schneider, who had been trained in one of our regional programs, had thirteen years of negotiation experience. Unfortunately, some members of the Antioch police were less sophisticated in their thinking about how to deal with subjects who chose to barricade themselves against the cops. Taking the old-school approach, they immediately began to eliminate creature comforts. They disconnected the phone, electricity, and water, then, with the house already warm on a hot day, turned up the heating system full blast.
As the temperature in the bedroom began to rise, Souza became enraged and began to yell obscenities at Schneider. When he threatened to start shooting, the police turned the heat back down. The only quid pro quo was a promise Schneider extracted from Joel that something would be worked out.
Schneider worked to establish and then maintain a dialogue with the subject, relying on the standard approaches of building empathy through active listening. He also tried to get Souza to try to think about what he wanted to happen. How could this situation be resolved so that nobody got hurt?
After a while, Joel said that he wanted to exchange notes with his wife. Schneider agreed to deliver one note to Jennifer for every gun lowered by a rope out of the bedroom window. Over the next five hours, four rifles came out this way. Progress was being made, albeit slowly.
It was at the five-hour mark in the standoff that an off-duty police captain arrived to take over command of the incident. Here was a clear case of hierarchical authority taking precedence over knowledge and experience—a classic law enforcement mistake when negotiation expertise is not given its due. To make matters worse, this captain immediately suggested setting a time limit. This, of course, violated a basic premise of negotiation, which is that time can be a tool that allows anger to dissipate and better options to enter into the mind of the subject. We never put a deadline on ourselves. Time limits force a decision, yes, but it may be the wrong decision. The whole point of skilled negotiation is to provide the time and encouragement for subjects to make the right decision. The difference of a few hours can be, literally, a matter of life or death.
Schneider strongly resisted this imposition, and he continued to work on building rapport with Joel. At times it seemed as if the suspect was close to surrendering. He and Schneider began to discuss the process in detail. “When you come out, Joel, I want you to take your shirt off, okay? That way the SWAT guys will know you’re unarmed. Will you do that for me?” This was all good stuff.
There was no response.
“I can stand in front of you when you come out,” Schneider said. “Would that be good? That way you know that nobody’s going to take a shot at you.”
Again, no response from Joel, but no resistance, either.
Schneider called out to Joel’s son. “Is your dad okay, Danny? Is he listening?”
“Yes, sir. He’s listening,” the boy said.
Schneider promised not to handcuff Joel in front of the children, and also to give them some time together. “You know, you haven’t really hurt anybody. You haven’t even fired any rounds. This whole thing can be worked out, Joel. It’s really not so bad.”
Unfortunately, Joel needed more time to make up his mind. He had not yet gotten over the hurdle of his ambivalence.
About four hours after taking command, the captain ran out of patience. “I’m tired of this shit,” he said. Then he told Schneider, “Give him ten minutes—then we’re coming in.”
Once again Schneider argued that this was totally inappropriate, but this time the “suggestion” was an order.
Reluctantly, Schneider gave in. “Joel, you really have to come out now. It’s time to do the right thing. You’ve got ten minutes.”
Nine minutes later, three shots rang out. The SWAT team charged into the bedroom to find Joel and the two children dead. As a tragic indicator of how the pendulum can swing either way, Joel Souza was shirtless, just the way Schneider had told him to be when he was ready to surrender.
Jennifer Souza would later file a successful lawsuit claiming that the police had been responsible for the “negligent wrongful death” of her children. In his testimony at the trial, the captain said that he’d intended the ten-minute warning as a “bluff,” not as an ultimatum. He said that he’d expected the warning to prompt Souza to surrender or to at least participate more fully in the negotiation process. But experience teaches us never to bluff with an armed man forced into a desperate situation.
The tragic error in handling Joel Souza was grounded in the captain’s inexperience. He failed to appreciate how very different someone else’s mental processes can be. Because the captain believed there was no way on earth that h
e would ever shoot his own children, he assumed the same was true for Joel Souza.
Oddly enough, though, the captain and Joel Souza may have had more in common that the captain imagined. The psychological makeup of traditional law enforcement officers tends to include a fair amount of classic controlling behavior, though they may not be self-aware enough to realize it on any conscious level. That typical law enforcement profile can also include a fair amount of arrogance.
In the years ahead, the FBI would confront an increasingly diverse array of citizens barricading themselves against the police. In addition to tortured, solitary individuals such as Joel Souza or Chad Louviere, there would be large groups of disaffected people linked together by political or religious conviction. In these cases, the dangers inherent in emotional instability would be compounded by weapons caches and the potential for quasi-military action by tightly bound groups hostile to the government.
In the face of these challenges, the FBI was becoming increasingly sophisticated in its negotiation strategies as well as in its tactical operations. But a large problem remained: how could these two aspects of the FBI’s role be brought together effectively? Starting in 1991, the FBI would face a series of cases that would expose a fundamental divide between proponents of force and proponents of negotiation. Over this period, I would face the greatest challenge of my career, defending our role to skeptical colleagues increasingly convinced that they didn’t need us.
It all began with two seemingly separate events: a prison riot in Talladega, Alabama, and an incident involving a right-wing separatist who lived with his family on a ridge in Idaho.
CHAPTER SIX
FROM SUCCESS TO HUBRIS
A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.
—JOHN C. MAXWELL
When prisoners take hostages, there is great potential for things to spiral out of control. For one thing, prisons, while designed to keep people in, can also be effective in keeping them out. And your average prisoner has a fair amount of pent-up anger and rage over real and perceived mistreatment. Add to this the euphoria of suddenly having power when you’ve had none, and things can get out of hand quickly.