Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

by Peter Vronsky

  A crime scene can also be mixed when there are multiple offenders of different personality types or when the offender is immature or undergoing psychological transformation midway in his killing career.

  In Step Four of the FBI system, the criminal profile, the profiler offers a report describing the personality and possible physical and social characteristics of the unknown offender, listing objects that might be in the possession of the suspect, and sometimes proposing strategies for identifying, apprehending, and questioning him. The report can vary in length from a mere few paragraphs to pages, depending on how much information the profiler had to analyze.

  Step Five, the investigation, depends on whether the report is accepted by the local police department and introduced into the investigative strategy. Using the profile data, police can narrow the list of likely suspects or adopt strategies likely to lead to an arrest. If additional crimes occur or more evidence or information is discovered, the profile can be updated and expanded during this stage.

  Finally, Step Six is apprehension. The success or failure of a profile is compared to the identity of the actual offender in custody. The results are added to the variable database and the interpretive algorithms used by profilers are tuned, with the objective of further enhancing profiling accuracy in the future.

  Criminal Signatures, MO, and Staging and Posing

  French criminologist Edmund Locard, in the early twentieth century, determined what is today called Locard’s Principle of Exchange: “Anyone who enters the crime scene both takes something of the scene with them and leaves something of themselves behind.” Locard was, of course, referring to physical evidence—fingerprints, hair, fibers, blood, soil, and so forth—but his rule also applies to methodological and psychological imprints left by the offender at the crime scene.

  A criminal may leave one or both traces of the following behavioral processes: MO (modus operandi, or method of operation) and signature, the personal imprint of the offender. While every crime has an MO, not all crimes will have a signature, or at least, one immediately visible. Recognizing and differentiating signature from MO is one of the profiler’s essential tasks.

  The MO is what the offender needs to do to commit his crime—break a window, cruise the highways looking for hitchhikers, pose as a fashion photographer. It is a learned and changing behavior—the repeat offender constantly alters and refines his MO to suit circumstances and to reflect things he learns. He may learn, instead of breaking a window, to seek out an unlocked door first; instead of using rope to tie a victim, the offender may discover that it is easier to use handcuffs. At its core, the MO is dynamic and changing, because it reflects outside circumstances that affect the offender’s behavior.

  The signature, on the other hand, comes from within the offender and reflects a deep-rooted fantasy that he has of his crime—it is something that the perpetrator does for himself, regardless of the necessities of the crime. Police instructor Max Theil, when teaching investigators to recognize signature, says, “You should ask yourself what the offender did at that crime scene that he did not have to do.”

  The signature is always static because it emerges out of a long history of deep-rooted fantasies that the offender has evolved long before he committed his first crime. He brings those fantasies with him to the crime scene. The essential core of the signature is always the same, but its expression can be evolving and changing, and extraneous circumstances can affect the character or even presence of the signature (for example, if the offender is interrupted during the commission of the crime and escapes before being able to carry out an act his fantasy might require).

  Canadian serial killer Paul Bernardo’s MO, for example, changed during his career. His first victim was the teenage sister of his fiancée, Karla Homolka; he drugged her into unconsciousness with Homolka’s help on Christmas Eve and then raped her while Homolka videotaped. The girl died when an acute reaction to the drug combined with alcohol caused her to vomit and she choked to death while unconscious. His second murder was a crime of opportunity—he unexpectedly encountered his teenage victim, offered her a cigarette back at his car, and then overpowered her. His third victim was carefully stalked with an accomplice, Homolka, who helped him lure a fifteen-year-old girl to the car, where she was overcome by force. These were three different MOs that reflect three different sets of circumstances. Bernardo’s signature, however, remained the same: wholesome teenage girls as victims, all videotaped during their rapes, the same kind of content to his verbal interaction with the victims (called scripting)—“I’m the king.” “Call me master.” “Tell me you love me.” Those are signatures emerging out of things that Bernardo needed to do for himself, rather than for the purpose of the crime.

  The dismemberment of one of the victims, for example, was something that Bernardo felt was necessary to conceal his crime—it was part of his MO. It has a dynamic learning curve: Bernardo’s next victim was not dismembered, because Bernardo learned that it was a disgusting task and concluded that it was not necessary. On the other hand, the dismemberment by California serial killer Edmund Kemper of his victims was solely for his own fantasy fulfillment—it had nothing to do with the necessity of hiding the bodies; it was all signature. Thus the same action, in this case dismemberment of a corpse by one offender, could be MO, while by another offender it could be signature. A vital stage of profiling involves telling the two apart.

  Changes in MO are usually dynamically unpredictable and erratic; the offender may use a handgun with one victim but a knife with another. Changes are directed toward refining the ease with which the crime is committed. Changes in the signature are usually constant—they are directed toward elaborating, refining, or escalating the same core fantasy theme. Had he been able to continue killing, Bernardo probably would have kept his victims alive for longer periods of time before killing them, and would have introduced more evolved scenarios into his videotaped rape sessions. The direction an offender takes in his signature, therefore, is more predictable, and a successful profile in that area can significantly aid the police in apprehending the killer.

  The profiler may also encounter deliberate alterations of the crime scene or of the victim’s body position. If these alterations are for the purpose of confusing or misleading the investigators, they are part of the MO and are called staging; if on the other hand, the alterations are for the fantasy needs of the offender, they are called posing.

  A victim is sometimes posed to send some kind of message to the world—a victim’s body might be flung beside a No Dumping sign, or as in the case of Henry Lee Lucas, near the gates of a prison. Danny Rolling, the Gainesville Ripper left the head of one of his victims on a fireplace mantel, facing the door. Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, left his victims posed in positions exposing their genitals toward the door. The intention in both cases was to shock whoever discovered the bodies. William Lester Suff, convicted of killing thirteen women between 1988 and 1991, mostly street prostitutes in Riverside, California, left some of the bodies next to Dumpsters with their arms turned outward to expose needle track marks, clearly a message on the worth of the victims. Identifying and distinguishing staging and posing is part of the profiler’s task.

  FBI Profiling in Action

  Later in this chapter we will see that there is a significant amount of criticism of the lack of scientific method behind the FBI’s profiling. But when it works, it works well. Some of the successful profiles have resulted in spectacular arrests.

  The earliest cases of profiling by FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit agents were in the late 1970s. Robert Ressler was among the first agents to take the theories of profiling developed at the BSU out of the woods at Quantico and into the field of actual crime investigation.

  Richard Chase—“The Vampire Killer”

  On Monday, January 23, 1978, a local police department in a small town just north of Sacramento, California, called the FBI, asking for assistance with a homicide clearly outside the range of thei
r usual experience. David Wallin had returned home at about six in the evening and found his pregnant twenty-two-year-old wife, Terry, dead in the bedroom.

  Terry Wallin had apparently been attacked in the living room of the house as she was about to take out the garbage through the front door. There were signs of struggle all the way from the door to the bedroom. Two .22-caliber shell casings were found by the door. The murder had occurred some time before 1:30 that afternoon.

  Terry had been shot four times through the head. The victim’s sweater, bra, and pants were pulled away from her torso, exposing her midriff. There were numerous knife wounds, but the principal wound was a cut extending from her chest to her navel. A portion of her intestines protruded through the wound while several other body organs had been taken out of the body cavity and cut. Several external body parts were missing. The killer had stabbed the victim in the left breast several times, and apparently moved and twisted the knife around. Animal feces were found stuffed in the victim’s mouth. A yogurt container had been used to collect the victim’s blood, and by the traces on the container, the killer had used it to drink the blood. Nothing appeared to have been stolen from the house.

  Two days later, a disemboweled dog was found in the same neighborhood, shot dead by the same weapon used in the Wallin murder.

  FBI agent Robert Ressler’s original profiling notes were as follows:

  White male, aged 25–27 years; thin, undernourished appearance. Residence will be extremely slovenly and unkempt and evidence of the crime will be found at the residence. History of mental illness, and will have been involved in the use of drugs. Will be a loner who does not associate with females, and will probably spend a great deal of time in his own home, where he lives alone. Unemployed. Possibly receives some form of disability money. If residing with anyone, it would be with his parents; however, this is unlikely. No prior military record; high school or college dropout. Probably suffering from one or more forms of paranoid psychosis.211

  The killer was obviously a “psycho” in the full clinical sense of the word—a paranoid psychotic or paranoid schizophrenic, somebody who was not in control of himself and suffering from delusions. (George Metesky, the Mad Bomber, was diagnosed as a paranoiac—a mental disorder distinctly different from a paranoid.)*

  Ressler explained the reasons behind his profile as follows. The offender was white, because the victim was white and lived in a white residential area; statistically, most sexual attacks, he believed, are intraracial—white on white, black on black. Moreover, a black person would attract attention in a predominantly white neighborhood.

  The disorganized mutilation of the victim indicated paranoid schizophrenia, a disease that often begins to slowly manifest itself around age fifteen and takes about ten years to become a full-blown psychosis. Thus the offender was probably around age twenty-five. The chances of his being older and not having committed similar acts previously would be slim.

  Using Kretschmer’s body studies of mental patients, which psychiatrist Brussel used in his profiles, Ressler projected that the killer was thin. That would make sense, as an introverted schizophrenic would be so focused on his obsessions that he would skip meals—and would also ignore his personal appearance, not caring about neatness or cleanliness. Since nobody would want to live with an individual like that, Ressler surmised that the offender lived alone. His severe mental problems precluded him from finishing school, military service, or employment—he was probably surviving on a disability check. The fact that he was unemployed was further suggested by the time of the murder—midday on a weekday. Ressler felt that the murderer probably lived somewhere near the crime scene and walked away—his mind was too disordered to drive. If the killer owned a vehicle, it would be in a state of disorder—dirty, poorly maintained, filled with trash inside. As no other crimes with similar mutilation were on record, Ressler felt that the murderer had committed his first homicide—but that there would be more to come and that the killing would escalate in intensity.

  The police traced Terry Wallin’s movements that Monday morning and determined that she had cashed a check at a shopping mall within walking distance to her house. Police speculated that she might have been followed from the mall.

  Four days later, on a Thursday, the killer struck again less than a mile away from the Wallin murder scene. Neighbors discovered three bodies at about 12:30 in the afternoon—Evelyn Miroth, age thirty-six; her six-year-old son; and Daniel Meredith, a family friend, age fifty-two. Miroth’s twenty-two-month-old nephew, whom she was babysitting, was missing as well.

  The males were all shot dead, but Evelyn Miroth was even more severely mutilated than Terry Wallin. There were two crossing cuts across her abdomen, through which her intestines protruded. Her body was covered in stab wounds, some particularly aimed at her face and anal area. Rectal swabs of her anus indicated the presence of copious amounts of seminal fluid. The baby’s pillow was stained in blood and a shell casing was found in the playpen. The bath was filled with bloodied water as well as brain and fecal matter. It appeared that the killer had washed the infant’s body afterward. A ring of blood on the floor left by a bucket-type container suggested that blood had been collected at this scene as well. Nothing had been stolen except for Daniel Meredith’s wallet. The killer had escaped in Meredith’s car, but it was found abandoned a short distance away with the keys still in the ignition.

  In Ressler’s mind, the crime scene reinforced his first profile—Ressler stressed that the killer was severely mentally ill and was totally disorganized in his actions. Ressler felt that he had probably parked the stolen car near his house and walked home, where he lived alone. He might have been drinking blood from other sources before he began to murder, so Ressler suggested that the police begin an intense survey of the area of the two homicides, asking witnesses if they had seen an unkempt, gaunt individual with bloodstains on his clothing.

  On Saturday morning, during the survey, a woman told the police that she had encountered such a person in the shopping mall near the scene of the first murder, about two hours before Terry Wallin’s death. He was a former classmate from high school and she was shocked by how gaunt and unkempt he had become. His mouth was caked in a yellow crust and there were bloodstains on his shirt. He had recognized her and asked her about her boyfriend, who had died in a motorcycle accident. When she got into her car, he attempted to get in with her on the passenger side, but the door was locked and she drove away, disturbed by how sick her former schoolmate had become. He was so sick that at first she didn’t recognize him and had to ask his name: Richard Chase.

  The police immediately checked on Chase’s address—it was less than a block away from where Meredith’s car had been abandoned. When the police approached the twenty-eight-year-old Chase, he began to run and was quickly apprehended. He was carrying the .22-caliber handgun, which matched the one used in the murders, and in his back pocket was Daniel Meredith’s wallet. He was also carrying a box filled with blood-soaked rags.

  As Ressler had projected, Chase’s truck was a mess, filled with old newspapers, empty beer cans, milk cartons, and rags. In a locked box, the police found a twelve-inch butcher knife and a pair of rubber boots caked in blood. Chase’s apartment, where he lived alone, was in complete disorder, covered in dirty clothing, some of which was stained with blood. There were food blenders with blood in them, and dishes in the refrigerator with human body parts. The partially consumed body of the missing infant was not found until months later, not far from where Chase lived. Police also found numerous cat and dog collars, matching descriptions of pets reported missing in the area.

  Ressler’s profile had been almost correct—his only mistake was stating that Terry Wallin was the first victim; she was in fact the second. A few weeks earlier, some distance away from the other murders, Ambrose Griffin had been shot through the chest as he was taking groceries from his car. The .22-caliber bullet matched Chase’s weapon. Chase had fired from his truck and immediately
driven away before any witnesses appeared on the scene.

  The profile that the FBI constructed of Chase was instrumental in his capture. Armed with a specific description of a killer that nobody had seen, the police were able to narrow down the search for a suspect and capture him within five days of Terry Wallin’s murder.

  Richard Chase’s story is somewhat sad—he was born a happy and sweet child in 1950 in a middle-income home. When he was twelve, however, Chase’s mother began to exhibit mental problems, accusing her husband of infidelity, poisoning her, and using drugs. In high school, Chase was an average student with a few girlfriends but no really close friends. His girlfriends remember that he attempted intercourse with them but could not sustain an erection.

  At about the second year in school, his personality suddenly transformed, and he became “rebellious, defiant, and unkempt.” He would have been about fifteen then, when symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia often begin to first surface. (On the other hand, “defiant and unkempt” describes an entire generation during the 1960s—the hippies.) He began to hang around with “acidheads”—kids who took a lot of LSD—and in 1965 he was arrested for possession of marijuana. Again, Ressler was correct in his profile that the killer would have a drug record. But Ressler soberly reminds us, “Many in the public saw evidence for attributing Chase’s murders to the influence of drugs. I disagree. Although drugs may have contributed to Chase’s slide into serious mental illness, they were not a real factor in the murders; we have found that drugs, while present in many cases, are seldom the precipitating factor in serial murders; the true causes lie much deeper and are more complex.”