Squeaky Fromme had come from a normal family, well-educated participants in the space program. Sandra Good had a master’s degree. Both were intelligent, but had yielded up their lives to Manson. Squeaky was convicted of having pulled a .45 pistol on President Gerald Ford and squeezing the trigger; the gun did not go off because a Secret Service agent had put his hand between the hammer and the firing pin (and had been injured in the process). Sandra had been convicted of attempting to extort through the mails; she had written letters to directors of large corporations, telling them that unless they ceased polluting the earth, Manson Family members (who were all over the place, in hiding) would start killing the directors and their families. In prison, the “girls”—who were now women in their thirties—kept the faith. One day, they believed, Charlie would emerge from prison and restart the movement that would be the only hope for earth’s future, and they would join him in the endeavor. They told me that even if I had brought with me presidential commutations for them both, they would not leave prison until Manson also had been released. I didn’t get much more from them than that, and verification of the willingness of inadequate personalities to submit their lives and destinies to a psychotic man who led them very far astray. Sandra Good was released from prison in late 1991 and moved to a town twenty-five miles from Manson’s prison.
* * *
Richard Speck was not really a serial killer, but what I call a “mass murderer.” One terrible night in Chicago during the late 1960s, he had entered a house with the intent of robbing it, and found student nurses there. Others returned during the course of the evening. He tied them up—some of the American nurses told the others to go along with this, because they were convinced if they did so he wouldn’t harm them, though the Filipino nurses objected. One by one, he took them into another room, assaulted them, and then killed eight of them, mainly so they could not identify him. A ninth student had rolled under the bed, and lived through the experience of having Speck assault and kill one of her friends directly above her. Speck must have lost count, because after the eighth murder, he left the house. The ninth nurse came out and provided the police with a good description, including that of a tattoo on Speck that read, “Born to Raise Hell.” That description had been sent to hospital emergency rooms on the odd chance that this violent man might injure himself. Sending such descriptions around is a usual police technique, which in this instance paid off. A few days later, when Speck showed up in a hospital with a wound in his elbow, the tattoo was recognized and Speck was arrested. (One of my questions to Speck was going to be about that apparently self-inflicted wound in his inner elbow.) The surviving nurse positively identified Speck, as did some fingerprints left at the scene of the murders, and he was convicted and sent to prison for life.
I wanted to interview Speck because he was a well-known murderer, but he wasn’t very intelligent and seemed to have no insight into his crimes. According to the prison counselors, he was a bully whose assaultive and violent behavior was well known, in the prison system and out. Prior to going to Chicago, he had been a fugitive from Texas, where he was wanted for the attempted murder of his father-in-law. In the months just before the murders, Speck’s idea of having a good night on the town was to get drunk, take some pills, then go to a bar and pick on another patron until he got into a fight. If he beat up his opponent badly, that was a successful evening; if not, he’d look for a hooker and beat her badly before falling asleep. In prison, a guard told me, Speck had captured a sparrow and made a pet of it, tied a string around its leg and wore it on his shoulder. One of the guards told him to get rid of it, as pets were not allowed in prisons. Speck did not. After several go-around’s, the guard told Speck that if he didn’t get rid of the sparrow, he would be put into solitary. At that, Speck walked over to a rotating fan and threw the bird in. It was demolished. The surprised guard said, “What did you do that for? I thought you liked the sparrow.” “I did,” Speck was reported as saying, “but if it ain’t mine, it ain’t nobody’s.”
Speck didn’t want to talk to us, and was surly and posturing when he was brought in to see us. One of the prison guards began talking to him, though, and eventually told Speck that he had been a single man in Chicago at the time of Speck’s murders and was a bit annoyed that Speck had taken eight eligible young women away from the prowling bachelors of the city. Speck started to chuckle, and then loosened up a bit.
I was uneasy, because I always make it a point in my interviews not to get into the gutter with the murderer, and—just as important—never to make light of the victims. To me, there’s no excuse for deprecating those who have suffered, simply to get on the good side of a murderer. Nonetheless, we tried to use the opening that the guard had made to talk to Speck.
As I quickly discovered, he didn’t have much to say, and little insight into his own condition. Speck displayed a callousness for human life, admitting that he had killed his victims so they couldn’t testify against him. Frustrated by his low intelligence and bad attitude, I tried to get something out of the interview, and inquired as to how he had ended up in the hospital, where his tattoo had been recognized. Though several doctors believed that the cut to the artery in his elbow had been the result of a botched suicide attempt made in the flophouse where he lived after the murders, Speck denied this, saying that he’d been in a fight in a bar and had been cut by a broken whiskey bottle. Ten years after the crime, he was still trying to be the macho man.
* * *
On the other end of the scale from Richard Speck was Ted Bundy, who became the most celebrated killer of his time, perhaps because he was so photogenic and so articulate that many people concluded he could not have committed the crimes for which he’d been convicted. A handsome, intelligent young man who seemed to some people to have considerable sex appeal, Bundy was painted by the media as a smooth guy, respected, clean, a former law student, a Mr. Nice Guy, almost a benign killer, a good lover who would kill his victims quickly.
Far from being the Rudolph Valentino of the serial killer world, Ted Bundy was a brutal, sadistic, perverted man. His last victim was a twelve-year-old girl whom he suffocated by shoving her face in the mud during his sexual assault. By his verbal skills, Bundy would habitually lure girls and young women into a position of vulnerability, then bludgeon them with a short crowbar that he had concealed in a cast on his arm, or hidden under the seat of his car. He would then commit gross sexual acts with the unconscious or semiconscious women, his favorite practice being anal assaults. After that, he’d kill them by strangulation, then transport the bodies, often several hundred miles. Before leaving them, he would mutilate and dismember them, and sometimes commit necrophilic acts. After several days, he often returned to the body of a recent victim and sexually attacked the severed body parts—for instance, ejaculating into the mouth of a disembodied head. This guy was an animal, and it amazed me that the media seemed unable to understand that. Following Bundy’s execution, at a seminar run by the FBI at Quantico, the police officers from all over the country who had been trying to question him estimated that he had murdered between thirty-five and sixty young women in a dozen states.
Bundy had begun his career in Seattle, and after eleven homicides had brought the authorities very close to him, he moved southeast, leaving a trail of bodies behind him, until he reached the ski resorts of Colorado, where he settled for a while. He was apprehended in Colorado but escaped, was recaptured, and escaped a second time, after which he again proceeded southeast, committing more homicides on his way to Florida.
I had briefly and tangentially been involved in his case when he became a fugitive from Colorado. I worked with chief profiler Howard Teten on an assessment that became part of a Wanted poster. We alerted people to the killer’s MO: He would go to locations where young people congregated—beaches, ski resorts, discos, colleges—and look for young, attractive, outdoors-type women who parted their long hair in the middle.
After Bundy’s conviction and the exhaustion of m
ost of the appeals, I wanted to interview Bundy for our research project, because he was articulate and intelligent, and I hoped he would add to our base of knowledge. On my first visit to his prison in Starke, Florida, I wasted several days trying to see him, was delayed because of certain pending appeals, and eventually had to leave the interviewing task to associates because I was due to teach at a road school. A few years later, we at the BSU were surprised to receive a letter from Bundy, asking to see our records and crime-scene photographs on the thirty-six incarcerated killers included in the research project I had initiated; Bundy said that he wanted to assist us by becoming a consultant to the BSU. This prompted my second visit to his Florida prison.
Bundy stuck out his hand even before I’d put mine forward. I started to introduce myself, and he said, “Oh, Mr. Ressler, I know who you are; I’ve been reading your stuff for years.” He had many of the BSU’s published reports in his cell, and he wondered why I hadn’t come to see him earlier. I reminded him that I had done so but had been unable to wait out the appeal. Bundy regretted his earlier unavailability and said he was eager to talk, because “I like to talk to somebody I can relate to, who understands what I’m saying.” It was a clear attempt on his part to control me, and I was glad to understand that as we sat down to chat.
Bundy continued to try to flatter me by saying that the various college professors, newsmen, and local police officers who had interviewed him had all been amateurs, but now he was talking with a professional. He had written his letter in an attempt to obtain our research and use it for his appeals, to stave off his death sentence. Believe it or not, one of my superiors in the FBI wanted to give that research to this convicted killer; I refused to do so. I told Bundy that the only crimes we were interested in talking about were his own. Bundy wouldn’t look me in the eye. He said he’d win on appeal, anyway, and would never be executed.
After further fencing, he agreed to discuss some of the murders on a hypothetical basis. One of the cases, the one that had gotten him charged in Colorado, involved the abduction of a woman from a hotel bar when she was with her boyfriend. I asked him how this could have been accomplished. Using the third person, Bundy told me that “it could have happened this way.” The killer might have had the woman under surveillance, and perhaps approached her in the hall, posing as a security guard or an official in the hotel—someone with a bit of authority in this place—and, by a ruse or a trick, lured her to a specific room where he could disable her quickly.
It was most likely that Bundy was telling me precisely how he had committed this particular crime, but he wouldn’t say so directly. After three or four hours of this sort of dancing around the issues, I realized that Bundy would never talk, that he would attempt to con people (as he had done so successfully) until executed, and I went home.
Just three or four days prior to his execution, some months later, Bundy said that he would tell all, and a dozen officers from around the country came to interview him, each one allotted a few hours. The first to speak with him was Robert Keppel from Seattle, who had meticulously tracked Bundy’s first eleven murders. Bundy spent the hours allotted to Keppel verbally sparring around the first murder, and never got to the other murders. He informed the officer that this task was going to take longer than he had thought it would, and that if the policemen got together and petitioned so that Bundy would be allowed another six to eight months of life, they’d be able to get to the bottom of many things. This didn’t wash. He’d had ten years in jail in which to reveal the details, and it was clear that he would never do so. Bundy was executed several days later.
When all of those police officers came from Florida to Quantico for our seminar, I learned a disturbing fact. Bundy had managed one last con job. He had previously convinced someone else in the Bureau to obtain from me an autographed copy of my textbook on serial murder, and had it in his cell at the time he went to the electric chair. He even quoted from it in his last videotaped interview with Dr. James Dobson.
* * *
David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer, sat with me and my associates three times in mid-1979. In the space of a single year in New York, Berkowitz had killed a half-dozen people, mostly in cars parked in lover’s lanes, and seriously injured a half-dozen more. He had left notes for the police at the scenes of his crimes, and communicated with newspaper columnists during a reign of terror that had many New Yorkers staying home at nights. At the time of our interviews, Berkowitz was in Attica prison, isolated from the rest of the population.
Berkowitz was as he had appeared in court at the time of his trial, pudgy, pasty, extremely shy, reserved, polite, low-key. He accepted my handshake readily—always a good predictor of how well the interview will go, I had discovered; then he sat down and spoke only when spoken to. I took handwritten notes, as he indicated he did not want a tape recorder running.
Since Berkowitz’s crimes were committed in New York City, there had been even more than the usual media interest in the crimes and in him; that had provided a lot of material to read through as I prepared to meet Berkowitz. As I soon noted, it was also the basis for a complex interreaction between Berkowitz and the New York newspapers. Among other matters, I learned that Berkowitz had a scrapbook in which he had pasted the newspaper stories about his crimes; many criminals compile these memento books prior to their arrest, but Berkowitz had been allowed to keep his scrapbook in his cell, and, he told me, he used it to keep his fantasies alive.
What I really wanted to talk to Berkowitz about was the sexual content of his crimes. At first, he didn’t want to discuss it, saying that he had had a normal sex life, with girlfriends, and that the murders were just shootings. So I asked him about his early life. He had been adopted when very young and had had problems with the adopted family. He had always wanted to locate his birth mother, especially after his adoptive mother died when he was fourteen. On graduating from high school, he wanted to go into the Army and to Vietnam; he envisioned himself becoming a hero, receiving medals, being recognized as an important individual and thereby fashioning an identity for himself. Instead, the Army sent him to Korea, where he had an undistinguished year of service. He went to a prostitute to gain sexual experience, and was deeply disappointed when he contracted a case of venereal disease. Later, he would tell interviewers that this was his sole consummated sexual experience with a woman.
Returning home, Berkowitz managed to locate his birth mother. He met with her and with his half sister, who was living with the birth mother, but this, too, was a disappointing experience. He wanted the birth mother to take him in and make him part of the family, and things didn’t work out that way.
Before committing his murders, Berkowitz had set at least 1,488 fires in New York. That’s an amazing number, and we know it only because he kept a diary of them; he had also pulled several hundred false alarms. He had a desire to be a fireman but never took the qualifying test; he did participate in some fireman-type rescues in the course of his duties as a security guard for a private trucking firm in Queens.
At the point in our interview where he came to describe the murders, Berkowitz started to say, as he had to psychiatrists who had examined him for the court, that his neighbor Sam Carr’s dog, possessed by a three-thousand-year-old demon, had barked orders at him, instructing him to kill.
I told Berkowitz that I thought this explanation was nonsense and that I didn’t accept it. Stunned, Berkowitz continued to advance the demon-dog story. I reiterated that if this was the extent of his being honest with us—to attribute the motive of his crimes to a talking dog—the interview was over. I shut my notebook and started to leave the room.
Berkowitz stopped me, protesting that the psychiatrists had accepted his story as the reason for his crimes, and if it was good enough for them, it should be good enough for the FBI.
“That’s not the story we’re looking for, David,” I said. “We want the factual basis for these crimes, and if we’re not going to talk about that, then we’ll lea
ve.”
Berkowitz sighed, settled down, and began to talk about the real stuff. The Son of Sam business, and the assertion about the talking dog, he indicated, had been his way of signaling the authorities that he was insane. In other words, it was a construct made for the purpose of attempting to avoid proper prosecution for his crimes. He had been sane enough to know what he was doing. By the time I interviewed him, Berkowitz also had done enough talking with psychiatrists and other counselors in prison to be somewhat comfortable conversing about the true basis for his crimes. He admitted that his real reason for shooting women was out of resentment toward his own mother, and because of his inability to establish good relationships with women.
His first attempt at murder had been a stabbing. He had sliced a knife through a woman on the street, then had run away. He’d looked through the newspapers after the crime but saw no notice of it, and so he concluded that she had lived. He then decided to improve his MO. The knife, he reasoned, had been a mistake; it had resulted in too much blood on him and on his clothes, and he didn’t like that. So, with the precise intention of finding a weapon with which to kill, he had traveled to Texas and bought a Charter Arms .44 pistol and some bullets. He was afraid to buy the bullets in New York, thinking that somehow if he did so and the bullet shells were found, the authorities would be able to trace them to his New York residence. After committing several of the murders, Berkowitz even went back to Texas in order to purchase additional bullets.
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