Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

by Peter Vronsky

  As paranoia develops slowly and usually erupts in full force when the subject is near thirty-five years old, Brussel concluded that the Mad Bomber, after sixteen years of activity, must be now be middle-aged.

  From the Mad Bomber’s neatly printed and orderly letters, Brussel deduced that he was a very neat and “proper” man. He was probably an excellent employee, always on time and always performing the best work. From the workmanship on the bombs, Brussel concluded that he was trained as an electrician or pipe fitter. He was probably always neatly dressed and clean-shaven, and was not involved in any disciplinary infractions at work. If he had been dismissed from work, Brussel concluded, it would be for medical reasons and not for work performance or disciplinary problems.

  The language of his letters showed a fairly well-educated man but either foreign born or somebody who lived among foreign-born people—there was a certain European stiffness to his writing and a lack of American slang and colloquialisms. It was as if the letters were written first in a foreign language and then translated into English. Brussel felt that because of his choice of both a knife (to slash the movie seats) and a bomb, the Mad Bomber was probably a Slav, and by his regularity, probably a Roman Catholic—very likely Polish. His letters were posted from either New York or Westchester County. He was too smart, Brussel felt, to post letters from where he lived—he likely posted them on his way to New York from somewhere else nearby. Plotting a line from New York through Westchester County, Brussels arrived at Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he knew there was a large Polish community.

  Looking at the hand-printed letters, Brussel saw that every letter was perfectly formed, as expected of a paranoiac who would make every effort to avoid any appearance of a flaw, except for one letter—the W—which was formed like a double U; to Brussel it symbolized a pair of female breasts. Brussel was troubled by this sloppy anomaly in the Mad Bomber’s otherwise neatly printed alphabet. Brussel was also struck by the Mad Bomber’s use of a knife to slash the movie theater seats, also a crude and sloppy action uncharacteristic of his ordered and neat personality. Brussel attributed sexual motives to the two factors and suggested that the Mad Bomber’s mother was probably dead and he lived either alone or with an older female relative; he was a loner, had no friends, and was single—but not a homosexual.

  Finally, Brussel proposed that the Mad Bomber would be dressed conservatively and would avoid newer-style clothing. He told the police that when they arrested the Mad Bomber, he would probably be wearing a double-breasted suit and it would be buttoned.200

  Armed with this information, the police again began to review the Con Edison company files for ex-employees who were skilled, were living in Connecticut with Polish-sounding names, might be in middle age, and were dismissed for medical reasons.

  That’s how the name of George Metesky cropped up, a generator wiper who was involved in an accident at an electrical plant in 1931. Metesky filed for disability payments but doctors could find nothing wrong with him. He stopped coming to work and was dropped from the payroll. He filed for worker’s compensation in 1934, claiming that the accident gave him tuberculosis. After being turned down, he spent three years writing bitter letters to Con Edison. In 1937 he stopped writing, and in 1940 the first bomb exploded.

  Metesky’s work record indicated that before the accident, he was an excellent employee—meticulous and punctual. He was a Roman Catholic and lived in Waterbury, Connecticut, in a house with his two older sisters. He was unmarried and both his parents were dead. He was known in the neighborhood as Mr. Think, because sometimes when he was greeted he would not respond, appearing to be in deep thought. Otherwise, he was considered an inoffensive loner. When the police questioned him, he quickly confessed that he was the Mad Bomber. When arrested, he was wearing a blue double-breasted suit—buttoned. Metesky was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility.

  Following the Metesky case, police began to use the services of psychiatrists more often to assist them in their investigations. The problem, however, was that each psychiatrist based his profiles on his own knowledge and experience, and when the police pooled together several psychiatrists to assist them on the Boston Strangler case, they all came up with radically different profiles. There was no systematic approach to profiling other than that of each individual psychiatrist.

  PIERCE BROOKS AND LINKING CASES

  Former LAPD homicide detective Pierce Brooks is considered the modern pioneer of VICAP crime data collection and case linking. In 1957, Brooks, a former naval officer and blimp pilot, became convinced that two separate homicides in the Los Angeles area might have been committed by the same individual. Surmising that if one killer had murdered two victims, he might have killed three or more as well, Brooks spent weeks thumbing through old crime files and newspaper reports at the public library. Brooks realized that he needed a computerized database of unsolved homicide descriptions, a fairly astute idea in a time when most people were unfamiliar with computers and what they can do.

  Brooks proposed that every police department in California have a computer terminal linked with a central mainframe that stored data on every unsolved homicide. Every department would have access to data on homicides in other jurisdictions. Aside from the fact that most of Brooks’s superiors didn’t know what a computer was, back in 1957 computers were huge elephants costing millions of dollars. Nobody took his proposal seriously. Brooks put the idea aside and went on with his career to become the head of the Los Angeles homicide unit, and later a chief of police in Oregon and Colorado during the 1960s and 1970s.

  By the late 1970s, Robert Ressler, an FBI instructor in hostage negotiation at the BSU in Quantico, was beginning to feel restless. Realizing that taking a systematized approach and understanding of the psychology of hostage takers was vital to police responses, Ressler came to believe that the same applied to what was then called “stranger killings”—murders where the victim and perpetrator did not know each other. These very difficult-to-solve murders were on a dramatic rise in the 1970s. On his own time, Ressler and an associate from the BSU, agent John Douglas, began to interview convicted killers, asking them why they thought they had killed. When the FBI hierarchy heard about Ressler and Douglas’s visits to various prisons, they quickly put a stop to them, informing the agents that “social work” was not the FBI’s objective. Fortunately, it was not long before the old-style FBI leadership retired, and Ressler began to lobby for a research program into the minds of multiple killers.

  Ressler and Douglas managed to reactivate the interview program and systemize the data that emerged from the encounters. Two important textbooks emerged out of those interviews, authored by Ressler and Douglas along with Ann Burgess, a professor of psychiatric nursing. These books are now considered the bibles of crime analysis: Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives and the Crime Classification Manual. At the same time, Douglas and Ressler began to train other FBI agents in the techniques of profiling an unknown subject—an “Unsub” in BSU terminology.

  For Ressler and Douglas, however, the problem remained as to how to collect, analyze, and distribute the data on various unsolved homicides throughout the United States. While exploring the possibility of a U.S. Justice Department research grant, Ressler learned that Pierce Brooks had retired from active police work and had just received a small grant of $35,000 to revive and update his original 1957 proposal of an unsolved homicide computer data network. Brooks was now based at Sam Houston University in Texas, and Ressler went down to see him. The following year, Brooks and the FBI joined forces and got a $1 million research grant to design a data collection, analysis, and distribution system that became known as VICAP. While FBI profilers began working in the field around 1979, VICAP and profiling research and analysis was formalized in the NCAVC only in 1984. It had taken twenty-seven years for Brooks to see his idea transformed into reality.

  COINING AND DEFINING THE TERM SERIAL KILLER

  While the thing itself has been around a lot longer, the expre
ssions serial killer and serial murder came into popular use only in the mid-1980s. Prior to that, the terms mass murderer, lust murderer, chain murders, stranger killing, and recreational or thrill killing were used. Recently the term sequential predation has been gaining currency in academic literature. Nobody has precisely defined what the term serial killer means. The definitions of serial killers and serial murder vary from expert to expert and include the following:

  Someone who murders at least three persons in more than a thirty-day period.201

  At least two fantasy-driven compulsive murders committed at different times and at different locations where there is no relationship between the perpetrator and victim and no material gain, with victims having characteristics in common.202

  Two or more separate murders when an individual, acting alone or with another, commits multiple homicides over a period of time, with time breaks between each murder event.203

  Premeditated murder of three or more victims committed over time, in separate incidents, in a civilian context, with the murder activity being chosen by the offender.204

  Someone who over time commits at least ten homicides. The homicides are violent and brutal, but they are also ritualistic—they take on their own meaning for the serial murderer.205

  Someone who murders two or more victims, with an emotional cooling-off period between the homicides.206

  The term serial killer might have been coined by Robert Ressler, who says that he felt the term stranger killings was inappropriate because not all victims of serial killers were strangers. Ressler says he was lecturing in England in 1974 at Bramshill, the British police academy, where he heard the description of some crimes as being in series—a series of rapes, arsons, burglaries, or murders. Ressler says that the description reminded him of the movie industry term for short episodic films shown on Saturday afternoons during the 1930s and 1940s: serial adventures. Each week, juvenile matinee audiences were lured back to movie theaters, week after week, by an inconclusive ending in each episode—a so-called “cliffhanger.” Ressler recalled that no episode had a satisfactory conclusion, and every time one ended, it increased rather than decreased the tension in the audience. Likewise, Ressler felt, serial killers increase their tension and desire after every murder to commit a more perfect murder—one that is closer to their fantasy. Rather than being satisfied when they murder, serial killers are instead agitated toward repeating their killing in an often-unending cycle. That, Ressler maintains, was a very appropriate description of the multiple homicides that he was dealing with and is the history behind the term serial killer.207 (Some dispute Ressler, claiming that others used the term earlier. Michael Newton says author John Brophy used the term in 1966 in his book The Meaning of Murder.208 Ann Rule credits Pierce Brooks with coining the term serial killer.209 But in the text of Rule’s 1980 seminal book on Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, which introduced the current concept of a serial killer, the term itself never appears. Bundy is still described as a “mass murderer.” It does seem, however, that Ressler at least introduced it into popular usage in the law enforcement community, even if others might have used the term previously.)

  The FBI System of Profiling: Crime Scene Analysis

  Today a local police department in the United States or Canada can fill out a VICAP form and submit it to the NCAVC for analysis of a series of unsolved murders, people missing under suspicious circumstances, or unidentified bodies. The VICAP data is then entered into the Profiler computer system. It is an artificially intelligent system, meaning that the computer program has been taught to reason like a human being. Of course, all artificial intelligence systems are limited by the number of rules by which the computer reasons. These rules, which were identified through years of interviews with serial killers and studies of homicide case data, are expressed as lines of instructions using “if-then” operators—for example, “if the victim is tied with duct tape, then the offender might be an organized personality; if the offender is an organized personality, then souvenirs of the murder might have been taken.” These lines of reasoning refer to each other and can be assembled in millions of different combinations by the computer, as would a trained human mind when reasoning out a problem. In 1990, Profiler was operating under 270 rules; however, every time the NCAVC research arm learns something new about the behavior of serial offenders, the information is programmed into Profiler in the form of a new line.

  Profiler is not a substitute for human analysts—it is a tool. Its output is always analyzed and reviewed by a human profiler. Profiler is used to statistically pinpoint human conclusions. Sometimes Profiler and the human analyst disagree, and the data are reviewed—perhaps a mistaken piece of data was entered into the computer, or perhaps the human analyst forgot something in his or her assessment. Human error in the analysis can be identified, because unlike humans, a computer never forgets.

  The FBI system of criminal profiling, called criminal investigative analysis (CIA), is essentially a six-step process. Step One, profiling inputs, involves gathering as much of the following data as possible: a complete investigative report, crime scene photographs, information on the neighborhood or area, the medical examiner’s report, a map of the victim’s movements before death, and background on the victim.

  In Step Two, constructing decision process models, the basic nature of the homicide is established: whether the killing was a serial or single murder; whether the homicide was the primary objective of the offender or the result of another crime; whether the victim was a high-risk victim (prostitute or hitchhiker, for example) or low-risk, such as a middle-class married female. Other factors in building the model include whether the victim was killed at the scene or elsewhere and the nature of the location where the homicide might have taken place.

  Step Three, the crime assessment, is the stage at which the FBI profiler decides whether the crime scene has the characteristics of an organized or disorganized offender, or a mix of both. This organized/disorganized dichotomy is both controversial in current debates on the effectiveness of criminal profiling (discussed later) and unique to the FBI system of profiling. It is primarily based on the already mentioned study of thirty-six sexual murderers conducted in the early 1980s. Factors such as whether the victim’s body was positioned, whether sexual acts were performed before or after death, insertion of foreign objects into the body, vampirism, mutilation, keeping of the corpse, age of the victim, and use of weapons or restraints all statistically characterize either an organized or disorganized killer. This categorization of offenders is the heart of the FBI approach.

  According to this system, organized offenders have a tendency to:

  plan their crimes carefully, giving thought to escape routes and body disposal

  carefully select and stalk their victims

  prefer strangers as victims

  engage in controlled conversation with the victim

  capture their victims, kill them, and dispose of their bodies at separate locations

  use restraints, often bringing them to the crime scene

  come prepared with weapons

  commit sexual offenses with a living victim

  attempt to extensively control the victim through manipulation or threats, and desire a show of fear from their victim

  use a vehicle

  commit their crimes far away from their residence

  study police investigative techniques

  become more proficient in the commission of their crime with time

  As individuals, organized killers are likely to be of above-average intelligence, attractive, married or living with a spouse, employed, educated, skilled, orderly, cunning, and controlled. They have some degree of social grace and often talk and seduce their victim into being captured. They are more likely to appear physically attractive to their victim, and their victims are often younger. They are difficult to apprehend because they go to inordinate lengths to cover their tracks and are often forensically aware. Their family backgroun
d is more stable, their father was more likely to have been gainfully employed, and they are of higher birth order, often the eldest of siblings. When they commit their crimes they are likely to be angry or depressed and under the influence of alcohol, and their offense is often triggered by some kind of personal stress such as divorce, loss of a job, or financial crisis. They are likely to follow the media reports of the crime and are prone to change jobs or leave town after the crime.

  Disorganized offenders, on the other hand, are more likely to:

  commit their crime spontaneously without planning

  engage in minimal conversation with the victim

  use a weapon found at the scene or leave one there

  position the body

  perform sexual acts with the corpse

  leave the body at the scene or keep the corpse with them

  try to depersonalize the body through extensive mutilation

  not use a vehicle

  The disorganized offender is likely to be of lower birth order, come from a unstable family, and have been treated with hostility by his family. Parents often have a record of sexual disorders; the offender himself is sexually inhibited and sexually ignorant and may have sexual aversions. They are more likely to be compulsive masturbators. They often live alone and are frightened or confused during the commission of their crime. They commit the crime closer to their workplace or home than organized offenders and they are likely to kill victims they know and who are older than them. They often “blitz” their victims—use massive sudden force—to overcome and capture them. They are unlikely to stalk their victims for any length of time or to talk or seduce their victims into capture. Disorganized offenders are very likely to be heterosexual, be uneducated, and leave forensic evidence behind. They are unlikely to transport their victims from where they first encountered them to another location. Stress is not a major factor in triggering their crime, but significant behavioral changes may be evident in their daily conduct.210