Sheriff Duane Low was quoted by the newspaper as calling the murders “The most bizarre, grotesque, and senseless killings I’ve seen in twenty-eight years,” murders that had “terribly disturbed” him. Evelyn Miroth had been a baby-sitter for the neighborhood, and many of the children and mothers knew her well; other children had gone to school with the six-year-old boy. No one could think of any reason for anyone to have killed them. A neighbor who had been friendly with the dead woman told a reporter that she felt like crying, “but I’m scared, too. That’s awfully close.” Residents of the neighborhood watched the local television news to get what details were available, and then came out of their homes to gather in clusters on the street and discuss the matter. It was a foggy night, and, with the waiting patrol cars and emergency vehicles and the knowledge of murder in the air, many found it to be an eerie scene. Though the reports said shots had been fired, no one could be found who had heard any shots.
People were frightened. Although police were trying to keep the information about the killings from causing hysteria, enough of it had leaked out so that doors were being double-locked, window shades pulled down; some people were even loading up their cars, station wagons, and small trucks and moving out.
Russ Vorpagel called me as soon as he heard the news. We were alarmed, of course, but as professionals we had to put aside our sense of horror and decipher the puzzle—right away. From a crime-scene analyst’s standpoint, the second group of killings provided important new information and verification of what we believed we already knew about the killer. At this second crime scene—again, these are details that were not immediately made public—the man and the boy had been shot but had not been molested. Meredith’s car keys and wallet had been taken from him. In contrast, Evelyn Miroth had been even more badly molested than the first female victim. She was found nude on the side of a bed, shot once through the head, and with two crossing cuts on her abdomen, through which loops of her innards partially protruded. Her internal organs had been cut, and there were multiple stab wounds all over her body, including cuts on the face and in the anal area. A rectal swab showed the presence of significant amounts of sperm. In the playpen where the visiting baby was normally kept, a blood-soaked pillow and an expended slug were found. In the bath, there was red-colored water, as well as brain and fecal matter. Blood appeared to have been drunk at this location, too. Also important was that the stolen station wagon had been found not far away, with its door ajar and the keys still in the ignition. The baby had not been found, but the police were fairly certain from the amount of blood in the playpen that he would not be alive.
Using this new information, and with a mounting sense of urgency and the certainty that if not caught this man would kill again—and soon—I refined the profile that I had put together just a few days earlier. The sexual connection of the crimes had become more overt. The number of victims at a single crime scene was growing. The violence was escalating. I was more convinced than ever that the slayer was a seriously mentally disturbed young man who had walked to the crime scene, and walked away from the spot where he had abandoned the car. I translated these convictions into a revised profile that indicated the probable offender was “single, living alone in a location within one-half to one mile from the abandoned station wagon.” To my mind, the slayer had been so disordered that he had no sense of hiding anything, and had probably parked the station wagon right near his own house. I also reinforced the notions as to his unkempt and disheveled appearance, and the slovenliness to be expected at his residence.
I also told Russ that I believed that before this man had murdered, he had probably committed fetish burglaries in the area, and that once he was caught, we’d be able to trace his crimes and difficulties back to his childhood. We characterize as fetish burglaries those breaking-and-entering cases in which the items stolen or misused are articles of women’s clothing, rather than jewelry or other items of marketable value; often, the burglar takes these for autoerotic purposes.
With this new profile in hand, more than sixty-five police personnel hit the streets, concentrating on everything within a half-mile radius of the abandoned station wagon. It was a tremendous manhunt. People in apartments and homes and on the sidewalks were asked whether they had seen a youngish man who appeared quite disheveled and thin. The area of the search was further narrowed when the police received a report that a dog had been shot and disemboweled at a country club close to where the abandoned car had been found.
The police found two people who thought they had seen the red station wagon being driven in the neighborhood, but even under hypnosis these witnesses were able to recall only that it had been driven by a white male. The most promising lead came from a woman in her late twenties who had met a young man whom she had known in high school in the shopping center near the site of the first murder, just an hour or two preceding the attack on Terry Wallin. She had been shocked at her old classmate’s appearance—disheveled, cadaverously thin, bloody sweatshirt, yellowed crust around his mouth, sunken eyes—and when he tried to pursue a conversation with her by pulling at the door handle of her car, she had driven away. When the police alerted the area to look for a man with blood on his shirt, she had contacted the authorities. She told the police that the man was Richard Trenton Chase, and that he had graduated from her high school in 1968.
By then, it was Saturday. The police learned that Richard Trenton Chase lived less than a block away from the abandoned station wagon, a mile north of the country club and a mile east of the shopping center. They staked out the area near his apartment and waited for him to come out. At this point, he was only one among a half-dozen likely suspects. He did not answer phone calls to the apartment, and toward late afternoon the watchers decided they would try a ruse to see whether they could lure him outside. They knew that the killer had a .22 revolver and was not afraid to take a human life, so they proceeded carefully. One went to the apartment of the manager of the project as if to use the telephone, while the other openly walked away from the front of Chase’s apartment. Moments later, Chase appeared at the door with a box under his arm and started to make a run for his truck.
As soon as he began to run, the officers knew they had their man, and they ran to grapple with him. As they rolled about, the .22 came out of his shoulder holster. In their grasp, he tried to hide what was in his back pocket: Daniel Meredith’s wallet. The box he carried was full of bloody rags. Chase’s truck was near the apartment, and it was a dozen years old, in poor condition, and littered with old newspapers, beer cans, milk cartons, and rags. A locked toolbox and a twelve-inch butcher’s knife were also in the truck, together with rubber boots with what appeared to be blood on them. In his apartment—as slovenly as could be—were some animal collars, three food blenders with blood in them, as well as newspaper articles about the first murder. Dirty clothing was strewn about the house, some with blood on it. Several dishes in the refrigerator had body parts in them, and a container held human brain tissue. In a kitchen drawer, there were several knives that turned out to have been taken from the Wallin residence. A calendar on the wall of the apartment had the inscription “Today” on the end-of-January dates of the Wallin and Miroth-Meredith murders; the same inscription was on forty-four more days spread out over the remainder of 1978. Would there have been forty-four more murders? Thankfully, we’ll never know.
The police were tremendously relieved that the murderer had been caught—for there could be no real doubt that this was the slayer, from the evidence he carried and the descriptions that he matched. Everyone was grateful to the FBI and very appreciative of the profile, and some people later said that the profile caught the killer. That, of course, was not true. It’s never true. Profiles don’t catch killers, cops on the beat do, often through dogged persistence and with the help of ordinary citizens, and certainly with the aid of a little bit of luck. My profile was an investigative tool, one that in this instance markedly narrowed the search for a dangerous killer. Di
d my work help catch Chase? You bet, and I’m proud of it. Did I catch him myself? No.
The fact that Chase so precisely fit the profile that I had drawn up in conjunction with Russ Vorpagel was gratifying to me on two counts. First and foremost, because it helped in the apprehension of a violent killer who would undoubtedly have continued his homicides if not caught immediately. Second, because when the murderer matched the profile, that gave us at the BSU more information on how to evaluate subsequent crime scenes and identify the characteristic signs that murderers leave behind; in short, it helped us to refine further the art (and I do mean the art, because it had not yet approached the status of being a science) of profiling.
* * *
In the days and months after Chase’s apprehension, I closely followed the information coming to light about this strange young man. Almost immediately after his arrest, he was connected to an unsolved murder that had taken place in December not far from the site of the two other events. It turned out that I had been wrong about Terry Wallin being the first victim; she was actually the second. A Mr. Ambrose Griffin and his wife had returned home from the supermarket on December 28, 1977, and were taking groceries into their house from their car. Chase had driven by in his truck and had fired two shots; one hit Griffin in the chest and killed him. Ballistic research on Chase’s .22 caliber gun, taken from him after the other two murders, showed that it had also discharged the bullet that killed Griffin.
Chase also fit the description of the unknown assailant responsible for some earlier fetish burglaries in the neighborhood, and was pinpointed as the probable abductor of many dogs and cats. Several dog collars and leashes found in his apartment matched up with those taken from missing dogs and puppies from the surrounding area. These dogs and cats were most likely killed for his strange purposes; he may even have drunk their blood, though we could never be certain of that.
Computer searches also came up with an incident in mid-1977 in the Lake Tahoe area, when an Indian agent on a reservation stopped and arrested a man whose clothes were soaked with blood and whose truck had guns in it, as well as a bucket of blood; it was Chase. He had gotten off that time because the blood was bovine. He had paid a fine and explained away the blood on his clothes by saying that he’d been hunting rabbits that had bled on his shirt.
As reporters and court officers interviewed people who had known Chase and unearthed records about him, the whole sorry history emerged. Born in 1950, Chase was the male child of a moderate-income family, thought of as a sweet and cooperative son. At age eight, he was a bed wetter, but this behavior soon ceased. His problems really seemed to have begun at age twelve or so, at the time when his parents began to fight at home. His mother accused his father of infidelity, of poisoning her, and of using drugs. The father, when interviewed, said that these accusations and other loud arguments had to have been overheard by Chase. A later evaluation by a group of psychologists and psychiatrists who interviewed the family labeled Mrs. Chase as the classic mother of a schizophrenic, “highly aggressive … hostile … provocative.” The arguments between father and mother continued for nearly ten years, after which the couple was divorced and the father remarried.
Chase was of just about normal intelligence—IQ around 95—and an ordinary student in high school in the mid-1960s. He had girlfriends, but his relationships with them were broken off when they got to the point that he attempted intercourse but was unable to sustain an erection. He had no close friends, no long-standing relationships with anyone but his family. Psychiatrists and psychologists who examined him later were of the opinion that Chase’s mental condition began to deteriorate in his second year of high school, when he became “rebellious and defiant, had no ambition and his room was always in a state of disarray. He was smoking marijuana and drinking heavily.” One of the girlfriends who had been close to him said that he started hanging out with the “acid-head” crowd. He was arrested in 1965 for possession of marijuana, and was sentenced to community cleanup work.
As these sort of details were published in the newspapers, reporters and many in the public saw evidence for attributing Chase’s murders to the influence of drugs. I disagreed. 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.
Despite his deterioration, Chase managed to graduate from high school and held a job for several months in 1969; it was the only job that he ever managed to keep for more than a day or two. He attended a junior college but could not keep up with the work or, friends remembered, with the social pressures of college life. In 1972, he was arrested in Utah for drunk driving. This seemed to have hit him hard, for after it, he later recalled, he had stopped drinking altogether. But he was on a downward curve. In 1973, he was picked up for carrying a gun without a license and resisting arrest. He had been at an apartment where a party of young people was in full swing, and had attempted to grab a girl’s breast; he’d been ejected from the party, and when he returned, the men jumped him and held him for the police; as they did so, a .22 pistol fell from his waistband. Charges were reduced to a misdemeanor, he paid a fifty-dollar fine, and walked away. He couldn’t hold a job, and went between his father’s and mother’s homes and was supported by them.
In 1976, after Chase tried to inject rabbit’s blood into his veins, he was sent to a nursing home. Conservators were appointed by the court to take charge of his affairs, thereby relieving his parents of that responsibility; taking care of Chase was getting beyond the capabilities of any individuals even then. Conservatorship is also a way of having the state pick up the tab for caring for a mentally disturbed person; paying the bills privately can otherwise bankrupt any but the very wealthiest families. On the grounds of the nursing home, according to some of the nurses later interviewed, Chase was a “frightening” patient. He bit the heads off birds he had captured in the bushes, and was several times found with blood on his face and shirt. In a diary, he described the killing of small animals and the taste of blood. Two nurse’s aides quit because of his presence at the institution. He became known among the staff as Dracula.
All of his bizarre actions had a reason, at least in Chase’s own mind. He believed he was being poisoned, that his own blood was turning to powder, and that he needed this other blood to replenish his own and to stave off death. A male nurse was directed by the staff physicians to put Chase into a room at night with one other patient, and he refused to do so, fearing that if something happened—a distinct possibility, according to the nurse—he would lose his license. Medication seemed to control Chase to the point of stability, and a psychiatrist wanted to release him for outpatient care to make room for more seriously ill patients. The male nurse later recalled, “When we learned [Chase] was going to be released, we all raised hell about it, but it didn’t do any good.” An outside physician, later asked for his opinion about what had happened to allow Chase to be released, thought it had probably come about “because his medication was controlling him.” (The families of the victims in the Chase murders later sued the psychiatrists who had allowed Chase out of the institution, asking for considerable damages.)
Chase was released in 1977, mostly in the care of his mother, who obtained an apartment for him—the one at which he was eventually captured. He spent some time with her, but most of the time he was alone at the apartment. Chase was an outpatient who subsisted on a disability check, and bragged to people who knew him about not having to work. Some of the bills at the apartment were paid by his father, who also tried to spend time with his son, taking him on trips for weekends, buying him presents. Old acquaintances who bumped into him during this period after his release said he seemed to dwell entirely in the past, to talk of events that had occurred when they were in high school as if they were current, and not to say anything about the intervening eight or ten years
. He did, however, speak of flying saucers, UFOs, and of a Nazi party crime syndicate that he thought had been operating in high school and was still after him. When his mother complained about the disarray at his apartment, he barred her from entering it. When his father went to rescue him after the incident near Lake Tahoe, Chase dismissed it as an accident and a misunderstanding by the local police agents of a hunting mishap.
That Lake Tahoe incident was in August of 1977. Chase’s actions from then until the first discovered murder provide such a clear picture of a deteriorating mind and an escalating series of criminal behaviors that we need to paint them in some detail. In September, after an argument with his mother, Chase killed her cat. Twice in October, he bought dogs from the ASPCA for about fifteen dollars each. On October 20, he stole two dollars’ worth of gasoline for his truck; when an officer questioned him about it, he was calm and denied the charge, and was allowed to drive away. In mid-November, he answered an ad in the local paper for Labrador pups, showed up at the owner’s home, and bargained successfully to take two home for the price of one. Later in November, he made a phone call to torment a family whose dog he had taken on the street, and who had placed an ad in the paper asking whether anyone had seen it. Police received reports of other animals missing in the neighborhood.
On December 7, Chase went to a gun shop and purchased the .22 revolver. He had to fill out a form that required him to answer whether or not he had ever been a patient in a mental institution, and he swore that he had not. There was a waiting period, and he would not be able to pick up the gun until December 18. During the intervening days, he did some work on reregistering his truck and other tasks that required a coherent mind. He kept articles from the newspapers about a Los Angeles strangler and circled advertisements for free dogs. His father took him to a store to pick out a Christmas present, and Chase accepted an orange parka, which he wore steadily from the moment he obtained it.
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