Sirhan had studied political science in college, and told me he had wanted to be a diplomat, to work in our State Department and eventually become an ambassador. He admired the Kennedys—but he shot one of the clan. The psychotic desire to fuse oneself through assassination with a notable figure is common among men such as Sirhan, John Hinckley, Mark Chapman, and Arthur Bremer. Sirhan knew that ten years in prison was about the average that one spent for such a crime in the United States, and therefore he felt that now, in 1978, he should be released; he believed he had good potential for being rehabilitated unless he remained in jail too long.
At the end of the interview, he stood at the door, sucking in his stomach, flexing his muscles, giving me a profile of his magnificence. He had done quite a bit of weight lifting and was somewhat sculpted. He said, “Well, Mr. Ressler, what do you think of Sirhan now?”
I didn’t answer the question, and Sirhan was then taken away. Obviously, he felt that to know Sirhan was to love him: the schizoid aspects of his behavior had diminished in prison, but not the paranoia. Sirhan refused any further interviews with us for the program.
Frazier, Mullin, and Corona all fell quite completely into the “disorganized” category of killers, and were nearly so mentally strange that I hardly got anywhere with them at all. Corona was entirely uncommunicative, and Frazier was a prisoner of his delusions. Mullin was docile and polite but really had nothing to say.
I had better luck with Charles Manson, Tex Watson, and the others, who could most definitely be placed in the category of “organized” killers, though Manson and his associates had taken pains to make their murders appear as if some disorganized personality had committed them.
Before going to see any of these killers, I had, of course, done a great deal of research into them and their crimes, and as a result had obtained rather deep knowledge of each man; this stood me especially well in regard to Manson. He wanted to know, as he entered the interview area, what the FBI wanted with him and why he should talk to us. Once I had convinced him that I was interested in him as a human being, I got a very good response, for Manson is a great talker and his favorite subject is himself. I discovered him to have a complex, wonderfully manipulative personality, and learned a great deal about how he perceived himself in relation to the world and how he had manipulated those who killed for him. Far from insane, he had keen insight into his crimes and into the personalities and rationales of those who had been fatally attracted to his charismatic presence. The information gleaned from this preliminary interview with Manson was more than I’d hoped for, and certified to me that doing such interviews in depth would result in whole new insights into the behavior of such killers. There was nothing in the literature to compare with what I was getting from the killer himself. Formerly, I and everyone else looking into these matters had been on the outside of a killer’s mind, looking in; now I was gaining a unique perspective, from the inside of that mind, looking out.
I’ll tell the story of the interview with Manson and subsequent interviews with killers in detail in the next chapters, but for the present, I want to bring forward the narrative of how the interviewing of murderers was brought into the rather rigid structure of the FBI.
About halfway through the week of interviewing, and perhaps as a consequence of dealing with these strange, driven men, I began to become a bit paranoid myself, thinking that I had no sanction from the Bureau to be conducting these interviews and therefore needed a way to cut the Bureau in on them. I should have had prior permission to go and see such well-known inmates as Manson or Sirhan, but I didn’t. I figured I was just doing preliminary interviews, not even taking notes, and was just requesting permission from these men to come back later with a tape recorder—but, nonetheless, I should have had something on paper. I had violated a cardinal principle of the Bureau, and had done something without authorization. Actually, agents in the Bureau are divided into two camps by the way they go about their business. There are the majority who ask permission for everything they do because they don’t want to get in trouble with the hierarchy. To my way of thinking, such agents are basically insecure. The second group, a much smaller bunch, consists of those who never ask permission to do anything because they want to get things accomplished. I was firmly in the second camp and was getting prepared to pay the consequences for my brash actions. Following Admiral Hopper’s rule, I hoped that if and when I was called on the carpet, I’d devise a strategy for dealing with that eventuality.
When I got back to Quantico, however, I was so excited by the new information that I decided to make another run before putting things down on paper, at which point my “project” could very likely be deep-sixed forever. It was the spring of 1978. Not too far away from Quantico was the women’s reformatory at Alderson, West Virginia. Two of Manson’s “girls,” Squeaky Fromme and Sandra Good, were incarcerated there, as well as Sarah Jane Moore, who had tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford. I could interview them all in a day. Minderman was going through a divorce, and decided to return to his home in San Francisco as an FBI squad supervisor. I needed a backup to replace him, and I chose John Douglas, a young, flamboyant agent whom I had earlier championed into the BSU after he had completed a stint at Quantico as a visiting counselor.
I decided to tell my immediate superior, Larry Monroe, what I was going to do. Larry was upset. “You talked to who in California? You’re going to interview who in West Virginia?” I told him not to worry, that after I came back I’d put the whole thing on paper, and Larry made a typical middle-management response. He agreed to let us go to West Virginia on the condition that if, as a result, anything bad happened bureaucratically, he would be able to claim that he had known nothing about it and that it was all my fault. Since it certainly was my fault all the way, I had no problem with this condition.
We talked to all three women, and got some good information. Basically, Fromme and Good bolstered the ideas I had been forming about Manson and his influence, which had been based on my preliminary interviews with Manson and with Tex Watson.
When I got back to Quantico, my own actions could be called “serial”—I now hoped to perfect my crimes by doing still more interviews before I had to face the paper hangman. This strategy was cut short by an accidental leak, however. One of my friends, to whom I had bragged a bit about my exploits, happened to be gossiping about them to someone else in the lunchroom, and didn’t realize that Ken Joseph was within earshot. Ken was by now the director of the FBI Academy, and even though he was my mentor, he was the chief administrator, a fan of the late Director Hoover, and of his belief that the hierarchy had to be kept informed at all times of what was going on in the ranks; now he had to act as a high official was obliged by this heritage to do in the face of what was clearly unauthorized behavior by one former Michigan State pal Robert Ressler.
Larry Monroe and I were called onto the carpet in Ken’s office and asked why he had not been advised of this Ressler initiative. Fortunately for me, a month or two earlier Joseph had put out a memo that for the first time encouraged instructors to do research, and I told him that my project—a preliminary project, I stressed—had been in response to that memo. Now this wasn’t entirely true, and I think all three of us knew that, but we went on without acknowledging that fact. Ken bored in, pointing out that interviewing “significant” people such as Sirhan and Manson could incur liabilities for the Bureau. I replied that I had put my intentions in a memo and circulated that before I’d gone off to California. Ken said he’d never seen that memo, and I blithely suggested that I’d have to see whether a copy could be located in the files somewhere, so I could show it to him. Larry Monroe kept an appropriately straight face through all of this, and so did Ken Joseph, and you can be sure that no smile creased my visage, either. We were engaged in a bureaucratic tap dance well known to the people who toil in government offices. When we left Joseph’s carpet, I knew I must now write and backdate that memo, double quick. I wrote an appropriate memo suggest
ing that I was going to do some “pilot work” in preparation for a major program of interviewing serial killers. Going to the prisons of California was merely to test the waters, to learn whether these convicted killers would be willing to participate in the research.
I then crumpled up the memo, stepped on it a few times, Xeroxed that, then Xeroxed the copy, stuck it in the files, then retrieved it and took it up to Ken Joseph, saying that it must have previously been misfiled and had now luckily been located. That, of course, was not hard for Joseph to believe, since things get misfiled all the time. Moreover, since Joseph was basically in agreement on my idea to interview the inmates, he was willing to play the game properly.
Now that we had “justified” the pilot project, Ken wanted me to write up a complete memo that laid out the true dynamics and dimensions of the actual interviewing project, replete with ground rules for conducting the interviews, liaisons with outside professionals and academic institutions, and so on. I was pleased to do that, and drafts of the proposal went back and forth between me, Larry Monroe, and Ken Joseph until we had a first-class proposal that identified the long-term objectives, the targets to be interviewed, the ways in which both the Bureau and the inmates would be protected, and so on. There was a seven-step approval process before an interview would be conducted; for instance, we would have to certify that anyone whom we were about to interview was not currently going through an appeal. For another instance, we would confine our interviews to the subjects of crimes for which the inmate had previously been judged guilty. We said we wouldn’t spend any Bureau money on the interviews, for they would be done as adjuncts to the road schools we regularly conducted. This memo went out in late 1978 over Ken’s signature to John McDermott at Bureau headquarters in Washington, an official who was in the top ranks of men just under Director Clarence Kelley.
McDermott was known throughout the Bureau as “the Radish,” because he was beet red above the starched white collar, probably due to high blood pressure, which itself had to have been in reaction to the difficulty of serving under Hoover for so long. The Radish looked at what we had styled the Criminal Personality Research Project (which included the information that the “pilot” had been going on for the previous eighteen months)—and turned it down flat.
In the first place, he wrote, the whole idea was ridiculous. The FBI’s job was to catch criminals, get them to court, and incarcerate them. Our job was not to do something that a social worker could and should do; we weren’t sociologists and shouldn’t be; if criminals were to be sympathetically interviewed, that could be done by academics. There was no Bureau tradition of doing something so outrageous as interviewing killers, and, besides that, due to the adversarial relationship we had always enjoyed with the criminal fraternity, the Radish was dead certain that the criminals wouldn’t talk to us, anyway.
The Radish’s response was completely characteristic, and in keeping with the Bureau attitude of the 1940s, when he had come up under Hoover. The fact that I had managed to interview a dozen convicted killers, that they had talked freely to me, and that the Bureau had thereby gained some insight into criminal behavior was totally ignored. Tradition held no precedent for this sort of action, and if there was no precedent, the action could not possibly be any good. One of my objectives in the memo had been to involve outside authorities on criminal behavior and abnormal psychology, and the Radish didn’t like that, either, because it went against the old Bureau attitude that no outsider could ever teach us anything of value. That posture was absurd, as was the Radish’s whole response—but once he had said no to the memo, the project was dead. Grace Hopper’s rule had come home with a vengeance. I couldn’t do any more prisoner interviews.
So I simply waited until the Radish had retired and Clarence Kelley had been replaced by the forward-looking William Webster. By this point, Ken Joseph himself had also retired, but our new administrative head, James McKenzie, was enthusiastic about the project. McKenzie was the youngest man ever to reach the level of assistant director, and his rise toward the top was an indication of his abilities and his understanding of the bureaucracy. What McKenzie did was resubmit the memo to Webster, with very few changes. The new director had been given a mandate to take the FBI in a new direction, and he had talked about collaborating with outside experts and about breaking into previously uncharted areas. His initial response to the memo was to want to hear more, and he invited me, McKenzie, and Monroe to a “working lunch” in his office.
The lunch was held in a midsized conference room adjacent to the director’s office, one of those bland places beloved of people who plan the newer government buildings. A number of bureaucratic hangers-on from Quantico had attached themselves to the project from above, so we had a good-sized crowd, but this was my baby, so I made the presentation. The others ate their lunches and didn’t say much. I had a sandwich in front of me but couldn’t really eat it because I was very busy talking. Director Webster was a cool and collected man, skilled in not revealing his emotions, and during my pitch, I received no sign that he either liked or disliked the idea. He was so hard to read that I despaired of trying. At last, however, I made the point that this project had been previously rejected by the Radish, and that got his attention, because Webster had been brought in to move the Bureau in new directions.
Now the director went from passive to active, and—in an action that was somewhat amazing in the light of usual bureaucratic procedure—we got a go-ahead at the same lunch meeting in which we presented. He endorsed the project, but only if it was done correctly. He didn’t want it conducted on a haphazard basis; the phrase he used to deprecate the ordinary way of doing it was “shoe-box research.” He insisted that we collaborate with first-class universities and hospitals, and was pleased that the major collaborators I had chosen came from Boston University and Boston City Hospital, and that others included in the project were among the country’s recognized academic experts in psychiatry, psychology, and the study of criminal behavior. They were all people I had met at conferences and had been talking to for years. Shortly, the project was approved all up and down the hierarchical ladder of the FBI.
Later I was amused to learn that the session with Webster had truly been a working lunch, for I got a memo asking for seven dollars for the sandwich I had not eaten because I was too busy talking. But we had a “go,” and that was what was really important. In the ensuing months, too, we obtained funding for some of the research from the Department of Justice. Now we’d even be able to spend an entire week interviewing inmates and not have to piggyback that research onto a road school.
* * *
Before the Criminal Personality Research Project was funded, but when I knew that approval and funding were solidly in the works, I decided to go and see William Heirens, the killer in whom I had been so interested when I was nine years old. An associate and I were—as usual—at a road school, this one in St. Louis, when we drove to a southern Illinois correctional facility to see Heirens. Heirens had been in prison for more than thirty years, and was now a man in his late forties. I explained to him that I’d been intrigued by his crimes since childhood, and that in a sense we had grown up together in Chicago. He’d been seventeen when I was nine, and now the age difference of eight years seemed even less a barrier than it had then.
In the interim between the 1940s and the 1970s, I’d learned a lot about Heirens, about the sexual content of his murders, about the string of fetish burglaries that had preceded them, about the many unsolved attempted murders and slashings to which he had been tentatively connected, and about his ability to conceal his crimes from family and friends. His initial defense had been as extraordinary as his crimes: He claimed that the crimes had been done by another person, George Murman, who had lived with him. Heirens had even taken investigators to the sites of the three murders and had been able to retrace his actions during those murders, which gave the lie to his pinning them on George Murman. Only under close questioning had he admitted that Georg
e Murman lived inside his head.
Heirens was not really a multiple personality, but his problems had begun and become evident when he was quite young. They blossomed to visible proportions as a teenager: He had sexual fantasies and in the secrecy of his room pasted pictures of Nazi leaders into a scrapbook and stared at them while trying on women’s undergarments. After he was discovered to have an arsenal of pistols and rifles in addition to the secret photos, and admitted to several burglaries and fire-settings, he’d been sent to a Catholic boarding school as an alternative to incarceration. In a few years, he had completed his studies at the boarding school and his behavior was deemed appropriate to reentering society, especially since he had done so well academically that he was going to be allowed to skip most of his freshman year work at the University of Chicago and take some advanced studies. His murders began shortly after he was let out of the boarding school, and in retrospect could be seen as a continuation of the burglaries and other crimes he had committed earlier in his teenage years. In fact, in between the murders, Heirens committed many more burglaries.
Heirens had never actually gone to trial. In pretrial work, psychiatrists had advised his counsel that although Heirens might be able to claim that he was subject to becoming George Murman (Murder-man?) and not really responsible for his actions at certain times, no jury would understand or believe that, and if tried, he would undoubtedly be given a death sentence. The evidence against him, consisting of fingerprints, handwriting, and his confession, was overwhelming. The alternative to a trial was to plead guilty, and for the psychiatrists to recommend a prison sentence and treatment. Heirens took the bargain, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to life. After his conviction, his parents divorced, changed their names, and started accusing each other of having been responsible for their son’s crimes. As for Heirens, since his conviction, he had been a model prisoner, the first prisoner in the state to complete his bachelor’s degree while incarcerated, and had even gone on to postgraduate work.
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