Whoever Fights Monsters

by Robert K. Ressler

  His MO was to look for women alone in cars, or necking with men in parked cars. Then he’d walk up and shoot the women and sometimes the men with them. He told me that in the process of stalking and shooting women, he would become sexually excited, and that after the shootings, he would masturbate.

  Now we were getting toward the heart of the matter. Under my gentle probing, Berkowitz said something that hadn’t been widely known—that stalking for victims was a nightly occupation. It didn’t depend on phases of the moon, particular days of the week, or any other matter that had been advanced as a theory by those who tried to solve the case. He was out looking every night but would strike only when he felt the circumstances were ideal. This amount of premeditation alone cuts the ground from under any instant analysis of Berkowitz as an insane killer.

  Berkowitz told me that on the nights when he couldn’t find a proper victim or proper circumstances, he would drive back to the scenes of earlier murders he had committed and revel in the experience of being where he had formerly accomplished a shooting. It was an erotic experience for him to see the remains of bloodstains on the ground, a police chalkmark or two: Seated in his car, he would often contemplate these grisly mementos and masturbate. (No wonder that he kept his scrapbook in his cell.)

  In this single moment of revelation, almost casually given, Berkowitz told us something extremely important for law enforcement, and at the same time provided new understanding to a staple of detective stories. Yes, murderers did indeed return to the scene of their crimes, and we could try to catch future murderers on that basis. Equally as important, the world could now understand that this return to the scene of the crime arose not out of guilt, which had been the usual explanation accepted by psychiatrists and mental-health professionals, but because of the sexual nature of the murder. Returning to the murder site took on a connotation that Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, or even Sam Spade had never dared to suggest.

  For me, the revelation also had another reverberation. I had long argued that the aberrant behavior of killers is in some ways only an extension of normal behavior. Every parent of an adolescent girl has observed that teenage boys will repeatedly walk or ride their bikes or drive their cars by a girl’s house, or hang around as close to her as they are allowed, and engage in impetuous, spontaneous behavior. Hanging around the scene of the crime, then, is an instance of arrested, inadequate personality development, an extension of something normal into abnormal behavior.

  Berkowitz had felt a great urge to go to the funerals of his victims. Many killers do so. He didn’t, fearful that police would be watching the ceremonies (as, indeed, they were). Berkowitz had learned from television shows and detective magazines that such events were watched by police. He did take off from work on the days of funerals, and often hung around diners near police stations to try and overhear cops talking about his crimes. He heard nothing. Although he didn’t go to the funerals, he would go so far as to try and locate the graves of his victims, which he was also unable to do. Berkowitz was incredibly ineffectual at anything other than setting fires and murdering people.

  He liked the idea of becoming notorious, and that was why he communicated with the police and, later, directly with the newspapers. The power that he held over the city, and over the sale of newspapers, was stupendous, and very exciting for him. Having read about the idea of communicating with the police from a book on Jack the Ripper, he slipped a note into the seat of the car in which his first victim lay dying, a note in crude letters that read, “Bang-bang.… I’ll be back,” and was signed with the appellation “Mr. Monster.” At that point, Berkowitz was not the Son of Sam. That phrase was a minor part of a letter that he sent to the newspapers. Only after the press started calling him Son of Sam did he adopt the moniker as his own, and even fashioned a logo for it. Publicity spurred his creativity.

  In my view, such people as newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin baited Berkowitz and irresponsibly contributed to the continuation of his murders. Breslin wrote columns about the Son of Sam, and the killer sent him letters directly. After the initial murders, when the city was gripped by fear, Berkowitz came to be directed by the media. For instance, the papers would draw maps to indicate that the killer had struck in several of the boroughs of the city, and would wonder in print whether he was going to hit them all in turn. Berkowitz hadn’t really considered doing so, but after the map and articles appeared, he decided he’d try. The story was kept alive even when there was nothing new to report, because it sold newspapers. It was clear to everyone, even the most doltish of newspapermen, that Berkowitz wished to be famous (or infamous) and was murdering in order to impress and shock society and thereby gain attention and identity. Feeding that ego by consistently printing and televising stories about the murders was assuring that there would be more murders. Perhaps, since this was New York, there was no hope of controlling media attention to the case or keeping it at a low enough level not to hamper police or incite the killer, but it has always been clear to me that David Berkowitz kept on killing so he would continue to be the focus of columnists such as Jimmy Breslin.

  In his adolescent years, Berkowitz admitted to me, he had started developing these fantasies that involved sex but also violent acts, disruptive and homicidal themes mingling with normal erotic ones. Even earlier in his life, at six or seven, he remembered pouring ammonia into his adoptive mother’s fish tank to kill her fish, and spearing them with a pin. He also killed her pet bird with rat poison—he got a thrill out of watching the bird die slowly, and from his mother’s anguish at being unable to reverse the illness. He tortured small animals such as mice and moths. All of these were control fantasies, involving power over living things. Berkowitz also confided to me his fantasies about wishing to cause fiery air crashes. He had actually never interfered with an airplane, but arson was a logical extension of this fantasy. Most arsonists like the feeling that they are responsible for the excitement and violence of a fire. With the simple act of lighting matches, they control events in society that are not normally controlled; they orchestrate the fire, the screaming arrival and deployment of the fire trucks and fire fighters, the gathering crowds, the destruction of property and sometimes of people. Berkowitz loved to watch bodies being carried out of burning buildings. These fires were all a prelude to his moving into the arena in which he could exercise the ultimate in control, homicide. Here was a man who obtained his biggest thrills in life from sitting at home and watching the news on television as it reported his latest killing and the fear that he caused to grip the city.

  What about his courtroom antics? The suggestion that he had been demonically possessed? All nonsense, he told me, brought to the fore in hopes of mounting an insanity defense. He believed he had been caught just in time, he said, because his fantasy had been growing to the point where he envisioned going out in a blaze of glory. He imagined going to a disco where lots of couples were dancing, and just shooting up the place until the police came and there was a Hollywood-style gun battle in which he and many others would be killed.

  Berkowitz’s final fantasy was a remarkably vivid display of his envy of normal people involved in normal heterosexual relationships. He recognized that envy, and told me earnestly that if, before he got into the bizarre murders, he had been able to have a relationship with a good woman who would accept him, fulfill his fantasies, and marry him, he would not have begun the killings.

  It was a nice note on which to end the interview, but I didn’t believe Berkowitz then and don’t now. A good woman would not have solved his problems or prevented murders. The reality is that he had tremendous inadequacies, that his problems went far deeper than rejection by women, and stemmed from fantasies that began to surface at the age when most males are entering into their first important personal relationships with members of the opposite sex. It was these fantasies, and the behaviors that embodied them, that prevented his having a mature relationship with a woman. As with so many of the criminals that I interviewed, he h
ad grown up to murder.

  4

  CHILDHOODS OF VIOLENCE

  “Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?” These three great questions from Gauguin’s triptych were the real subject of the prison interviews of murderers I had started on my own in the late 1970s. I wanted to know what made these people tick, to understand better the mind of the murderer. Shortly, my curiosity became systematized and the interviews brought under the umbrella of the Bureau; they became the core of the Criminal Personality Research Project, partially funded by the Justice Department, and involving Dr. Ann Burgess of Boston University, and other academics, with myself as principal investigator. Using a research protocol of some fifty-seven pages, we interviewed thirty-six individual incarcerated murderers, concentrating on their histories, their motives and fantasies, their specific actions. Eventually, we were able to discern important patterns in their lives and learn something about their developing motivation to murder.

  In the opinion of a number of experts, our study was the largest, most rigorous, and most complete investigation of multiple murderers ever undertaken, one that included the greatest percentage of the living, incarcerated multiple murderers. In a 1986 article, forensic psychiatrists Drs. Katie Bush and James L. Cavanaugh, Jr., of Chicago’s Isaac Ray Center called the research “exemplary” because of its breadth, and said that “its conclusions warrant evaluation in great detail.”

  Before going into the details of who these murderers are and how they became murderers, let me state unequivocally that there is no such thing as the person who at age thirty-five suddenly changes from being perfectly normal and erupts into totally evil, disruptive, murderous behavior. The behaviors that are precursors to murder have been present and developing in that person’s life for a long, long time—since childhood.

  A common myth is that murderers come from broken, impoverished homes. Our sample showed that this wasn’t really true. Many of the murderers started life in a family that was not desperately poor, where family income was stable. More than half lived initially in a family that appeared to be intact, where the mother and father lived together with their son. These were, on the whole, intelligent children. Though seven of the thirty-six had IQ scores below 90, most were in the normal range, and eleven had scores in the superior range, above 120.

  Nonetheless, though the homes seemed to outward appearances to be normal, they were in fact dysfunctional. Half of our subjects had mental illness in their immediate family. Half had parents who had been involved in criminal activities. Nearly 70 percent had a familial history of alcohol or drug abuse. All the murderers—every single one—were subjected to serious emotional abuse during their childhoods. And all of them developed into what psychiatrists label as sexually dysfunctional adults, unable to sustain a mature, consensual relationship with another adult.

  From birth to age six or seven, studies have shown, the most important adult figure in a child’s life is the mother, and it is in this time period that the child learns what love is. Relationships between our subjects and their mothers were uniformly cool, distant, unloving, neglectful. There was very little touching, emotional warmth, or training in the ways in which normal human beings cherish one another and demonstrate their affection and interdependence. These children were deprived of something more important than money—love. They ended up paying for that deprivation during the remainder of their lives, and society suffered, too, because their crimes removed many people from the world and their assaultive behavior left alive equally as many victims who remain permanently scarred.

  The abuse that the children endured was both physical and mental. Society has understood somewhat that physical abuse is a precursor to violence, but the emotional component may be as important. One woman propped her infant son in a cardboard box in front of the television set, and left for work; later, she’d put him in a playpen, toss in some food, and let the TV set be the baby-sitter until she came home again. A second man reported to us that he had been confined to his room during his childhood evenings; when he wandered into the living room at such times, he was shooed away and told that evening was the time when his mother and father wanted to be alone together; he grew up believing he was an unwanted boarder in his own home.

  These children grew up in an environment in which their own actions were ignored, and in which there were no limits set on their behavior. It is part of the task of parenting to teach children what is right and wrong; these were the children who managed to grow up without being taught that poking something into a puppy’s eye is harmful and should not be done, or that destroying property is against the rules. The task of the first half-dozen years of life is socialization, of teaching children to understand that they live in a world that encompasses other people as well as themselves, and that proper interaction with other people is essential. The children who grow up to murder never truly comprehend the world in other than egocentric terms, because their teachers—principally their mothers—do not train them properly in this important matter.

  Richard Chase, the “vampire killer” discussed in the first chapter of this book, killed a half-dozen people before he was apprehended. According to psychiatric interviews conducted in conjuction with Chase’s sentencing, Chase’s mother was a schizophrenic, emotionally unable to concentrate on the task of socializing her son or to care for him in a loving way. The mothers of nine more subjects of the study also had major psychiatric problems. Even those mothers whose problems did not reach the level where they came to the attention of a mental-health professional could be considered dysfunctional in other ways; for instance, many were alcoholic. Neglect has many faces. Ted Bundy summed it up when he reminded an interviewer that he had not come from a “Leave It to Beaver” home. He had been brought up by a woman who he thought was his sister but was actually his mother, and although there was no neglect or abuse pinpointed in that relationship, there were strong indications that Bundy was physically and sexually abused by other members of his family.

  Sometimes the mother, even when nurturing, cannot balance out or offset the destructive behavior of the father. One murderer came from a family in which the father was in the Navy, was often away on assignments, and was present only occasionally; the children went into a panic when he did come home, because he would then beat up his wife and the children, and sexually abuse the son, who later became a murderer. Over 40 percent of the murderers reported being physically beaten and abused in their childhoods. More than 70 percent said they had witnessed or been part of sexually stressful events when young—a percentage many times greater than that usually found in the general population. “I slept with my mother as a young child,” said one; “I was abused by my father from age fourteen,” said another; “My stepmother tried to rape me,” reported a third; “I got picked up downtown one night by some guy when I was around seven or eight,” said a fourth man.

  The quality of a child’s attachments to others in the family is considered the most important factor in how he or she eventually relates to and values nonfamily members of society. Relationships with siblings and other family members, which might make up for a parent’s coolness in these situations, were similarly deficient in the murderers’ families. These children, nurtured on inadequate relationships in their earliest years, had no one to whom they could easily turn, were unable to form attachments to those closest to them, and grew up increasingly lonely and isolated.

  It is true that most children who come from dysfunctional early childhoods don’t go on to murder or to commit other violent antisocial acts. As far as we could see, the reason for this is that the majority are rescued by strong hands in the next phase of childhood, that of preadolescence—but our subjects were definitely not saved from drowning; they were pushed further under in this phase of their lives. From the ages of eight to twelve, all the negative tendencies present in their early childhoods were exacerbated and reinforced. In this period, a male child really needs a father, and it was in just this time peri
od that the fathers of half the subjects disappeared in one way or another. Some fathers died, some were incarcerated, most just left through divorce or abandonment; other fathers, while physically present, drifted away emotionally. John Gacy killed thirty-three young men and buried them beneath his home before he was caught. In Gacy’s youth, his father used to come home, go down into the basement, sit in a stuffed chair, and drink; when anyone approached, the father would chase them away; later, drunk, he’d come up for dinner and pick fights and beat his wife and children.

  John Joubert killed three boys before he was caught. John’s mother and father divorced when he was a preadolescent, and when John wanted to see his father, his natural mother refused to take him to the father’s residence or provide money for his trip. That’s abuse, too, in a manner psychologists call passive-aggressive. Now, divorce in the United States is a very common occurrence, and hundreds of thousands of children grow up in single-parent homes. Only a handful of them go on to commit murder. I’m not impugning single-parent homes; rather, I am recognizing the fact that the preponderance of murderers in our study came from dysfunctional settings, many of which were rendered dysfunctional by divorce.

  Monte Ralph Rissell raped a dozen women, and killed five of them, before he was nineteen. His parents had divorced when he was seven, after which his mother moved with her three children from Virginia to California. Monte was the youngest, and he cried all the way across the country in the car. When I interviewed him in prison, years later, Monte told me that if he had been allowed to go with his father instead of his mother at the time of the divorce, he would have been in law school now, not in a penitentiary for life. His conclusion is debatable, though the sentiment is real. In any event, he’d had quite a childhood.