My mind flashed to two similar cases. Almost precisely a year earlier, in Des Moines, a young newsboy had vanished under eerily parallel circumstances—on a Sunday morning, while delivering his papers. Newsboy Johnny Gosch had never been found. The FBI had been slow to get into the Gosch case, and Mrs. and Mrs. Gosch had both told me personally that they were very bitter about that. Of course the abduction of their son had been done within a state’s borders, and the FBI technically had no jurisdiction, but they quite legitimately felt that the nation’s premier law-enforcement entity ought to have done more. Similarly and earlier in time, when young Adam Walsh had disappeared, the Florida police had asked the FBI to get involved in the case and the Bureau had declined, saying it was a local matter and unless there was some indication of interstate travel, we had no jurisdiction. Later, when Adam’s head was found floating in a canal, and there was a suspect who had an out-of-state car, the FBI took an interest. John Walsh, Adam’s father, rejected the Bureau’s help at that time. He later told me his reasoning: The Bureau hadn’t wanted to assist when the case was just a missing child, but agreed to participate only when the boy’s head was found and the child’s life was clearly beyond saving. The Walshes could do without that kind of help, he said. (John Walsh later went on to national prominence as the host of the syndicated television program “America’s Most Wanted.”) I had agreed with both the Gosches and John Walsh that the Bureau should have been involved in the searches for their sons and ought to be more aggressively and earlier involved in such cases of missing children in the future.
The problem had always been that lack of jurisdiction. When I went through the FBI academy as a student, we had learned about the various federal laws that we were to enforce. One of them, for instance, was the Migratory Bird Act, which we called the Blue Heron law. It was a federal crime to kill certain migratory birds; another federal crime was not removing the door from a refrigerator when it had been put on the street for pickup by the garbage department. (Both these laws, by the way, had been introduced after problems had been discerned: The bird law was passed to protect a species that was fast disappearing because it was one of the favorite sources for plumes on ladies’ hats in the early part of the twentieth century, and the refrigerator-door law had been passed after a startling number of children had climbed into abandoned refrigerators and died because they were unable to reopen the doors.)
None of the federal laws involved serial murder, and the definition of kidnapping was such that the FBI could enter the case only if there was a ransom note or demand. The Walsh and Gosch tragedies, together with the urgings of child advocates throughout the country, had helped alter the climate of opinion in Washington and in state capitals toward missing and abducted children. In an ominbus crime bill introduced into Congress in the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration pressed to have murders, kidnappings, and other serious crimes become a part of the FBI’s jurisdiction. This bill had recently become law when Danny Joe Eberle was abducted, and so there was a determination up and down the Bureau to assist in the case in whatever way possible.
As soon as Danny Joe had been reported missing, the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Omaha FBI office had sent his deputy, Johnny Evans, to the nearby small town of Bellevue to see what he could do, and then sought permission for Evans to stay on it until it was solved. Evans was an upstanding guy, the very model of a good FBI agent—clean-cut, handsome, civic-minded, just the sort of man to help convey the wish of the FBI to throw the organization into a difficult case. Johnny Evans became extremely involved, determined to see the case through, and he worked closely with local, state, and military authorities in a coordinated effort that was unique at the time.
It was when the boy’s body was found, two and a half days after the abduction, that I was asked to get into the case. This was one of the first times I would actually be able to go on-scene in the midst of a murder case; it was a chance to see things firsthand, and to have more give and take with local authorities than the telephone and teletype usually allowed. Out of the classroom, onto the front lines.
I certainly wanted to be involved, and my superiors wanted me to, because we both thought we might be able to render some real help; at higher levels in the FBI, I think that the decision to have the Bureau participate fully in the Eberle matter was political, to make sure that the Bureau had a presence in this first important missing-child case to arise after the new law had been passed. It was a good thing, too, because there was a crying need for the sort of services that the Bureau could render in the areas of added manpower, the VICAP system that we were still developing, our growing expertise at profiling, and our traditionally superb laboratory work.
It was snowing in Omaha, and I had no coat, having been prepared only for the balmy Michigan State weather. I shivered as I was picked up at the airport by Sarpy County Sheriff Pat Thomas, and driven to Bellevue police headquarters. The task force was already established and at work; dozens of people were collecting and trying to analyze information. Johnny Evans was glad to see me. Although a veteran agent, he had worked mostly on such things as organized crime, bank robberies, and interstate commerce problems, and had no experience with a murder, especially one as stomach-turning as the killing of this young newsboy.
Bellevue is an outlying suburb of a typically Midwestern city, a place of modest incomes, quiet and orderly, the sort of place you think of when describing the good quality of life that the United States symbolizes in this world. Before dawn on a Sunday morning, Danny Joe Eberle had awakened, dressed—all except his shoes, for he liked to travel barefoot, despite his parents’ reminders—and taken his bicycle down to a local convenience store where he picked up papers to fold and deliver on a regular route. Danny was thirteen, a blondish, bright-eyed boy, five-two and weighing one hundred pounds, the son of a post office employee. His slightly older brother also had a paper route.
At seven that morning, Danny’s newspaper route supervisor began getting calls from neighborhood patrons saying that their papers hadn’t been delivered. He went to check, found nothing, and then roused Mr. Eberle, who also searched the area and did not find Danny. The first three papers had been delivered, but Danny’s bike lay propped next to a fence near what should have been the fourth delivery site. The remaining newspapers were still in the bag, and there was no sign of a struggle. Danny had just vanished. The police were contacted, and they called the FBI’s Omaha office. There was some suspicion that Danny might have accompanied his aunt and uncle on a trip out of state, where his uncle was going to look for employment; that notion was quickly disproved. A massive building-to-building search of the area was begun, and on Wednesday afternoon Danny’s dead body was found in some high grass alongside a gravel road, four miles from the site where his bike had been found, and only a few miles from the Iowa state line.
I went out to see the place where the body had been found. There are lots of things you can tell from crime-scene photos, but being on-site has a distinct advantage. You are able to be completely oriented, to see relationships between details that you might otherwise never figure out. For instance, it was easy to see that the site was near to a gravel road and a dead end. What might not have been obvious from crime-scene photos (unless they had been taken of the quarter mile or so around the site of finding the body), however, was the existence of a crossroads nearby, with one of the roads leading to a river. Why hadn’t the killer (or killers) put the body into the river, where it might have floated away or been more concealed? The site was the sort of area where people had outdoor parties, jettisoned beer cans, and such; there were tall weeds growing alongside the road, but the site was actually visible from the road if one happened to be looking carefully. Someone dumping the body there would have had to worry about a passing car’s headlights silhouetting him, if it had been still dark, or otherwise courting discovery.
The public had been told that Danny Joe Eberle had been killed with a knife. The details were far more horrible, for
the newsboy had been mutilated as well as killed. The body had lain as if he had fallen or been dumped in the weeds, facedown, hands and feet tied behind his back with rope. His hands, feet, and mouth had also been taped with surgical tape, and he was stripped to his undershorts. There were multiple stab wounds in the chest and the back. The neck had been slashed. It appeared as if a slice had been taken off the shoulder, and on the left calf there were postmortem wounds that seemed to be in a crisscross or ticktacktoe pattern. There was some facial battery, and pebble indentations all over the body.
The medical examiner’s report suggested the body had been moved perhaps more than once after death—because of a pebble found in the victim’s mouth, under the tape—and also suggested that Danny might have been kept alive for as much as a day after capture, and killed close to the time that the body was found. There had been no sexual assault on the body in any way, nor had the underpants been removed.
Being on the scene and talking to the various officers and witnesses and the like was quite important to my understanding of the case. Danny Joe’s older brother reported having been followed by a young white man in a tan car on his own route a few times. There were other witnesses who couldn’t provide many details but did believe they had seen a man in a car seemingly trailing other teenaged boys from time to time.
I took all of this information into account and wrote up a preliminary profile. In the profile, I said that Danny Joe Eberle’s killer was a youthful white male, in his late teens or early twenties. As the reader now knows, most serial killers are white males, and this was a white neighborhood; any black, Hispanic, or even Asian man entering the area would most probably have been noticed. I thought the killer was young because of the tentative nature of the killing and because the body had been dumped not far off a road, indicating that this was the first time the killer had killed. Of course he couldn’t be too young, because he (or his friends) had to have a driver’s license, but the killer did not display the savvy of a man in his thirties. I thought it possible that the killer was someone who knew Danny on a casual basis, at least well enough so that he might have been able to approach the newsboy and induce him to voluntarily enter a vehicle, a car or possibly a van. I wasn’t sure whether there was one killer or several. The violent male might have been accompanied by one or two other young white males, I reasoned; perhaps one lured the boy into the back of a van, where the other controlled him while the first drove away. Based on what I knew of the victim, I thought there was a possibility there had been an attempted sexual assault on Eberle that he had resisted, and that he had been killed while resisting—although there were no “defensive” wounds on the body. The way the body had been abandoned on the remote roadside suggested to me that the killer might have panicked after the killing and had hurriedly gotten rid of the body rather than dispose of it in a more orderly manner. “The dumping of the body just off a lightly traveled road suggests that the killer may not have possessed sufficient strength to carry the body further into a wooded area,” I wrote. I believed the unknown suspect was somewhat aware of the location and had probably traversed the area many times previously. The ligatures and lack of abrasions under the ropes, together with the pathologist’s report, had convinced me that the victim might have remained unbound for a while and could even have been treated well for a time before being killed.
Returning to the precise identity of the killer, I stated that he was from the local area—not a stranger or a transient who happened to be passing through—and that he was single and not educated beyond the high school level. He might be unemployed, or employed in a rather menial or unskilled capacity. The crime showed a certain level of intelligence, but not enough intelligence for every aspect of the killing to have been preplanned, and that was why I thought the killer hadn’t gone beyond high school. Yet the binding and rope tying suggested that this was a person who worked well with his hands. After considering the nature of the wounds, the tape, the rope bindings, the most important fact was that there had been no actual sexual penetration. This almost always means a youngish man who has had no true sexual experience with a consenting peer, either male or female. Since that is unusual in our society, it also connotes psychological problems while growing up. Here was a killer who stripped the boy down to his underpants but did nothing more. I wrote of the killer’s probable psychological orientation: “The main perpetrator would definitely have had a chronic sexual problem, indicating deviance and bizarre sexual experiences, throughout his life.” Having reviewed many cases in which the killers did not penetrate their victims, but did mutilate them, I knew that behavior of the level of a mutilation murder does not happen without a lot of deviant fantasies paving the way—fantasies that would have had to surface in one way or another in earlier years. My profile continued: “He would likely be an avid reader of pornography, and may have been involved in experiments of a bizarre nature throughout his adolescence. This experimentation could involve animals and possibly forced sexual acts on younger children, both male and female.” As the reader now knows from Chapter 4, this sort of earlier behavior is often associated with those who grow up to murder. There is one apparent contradiction here: I knew that the victim had not been penetrated, but I thought it possible that the killer might have earlier been involved in forced sexual acts with younger children. It was possible that he had been reluctant to penetrate because of the presence of other people in the car or van. The profile went on: “Indications are that the killer would have been involved in recent stressful events in his life which might include breaking up with a girlfriend, losing a job, being dropped from school or trouble with his immediate family.” As the reader also knows, such precrime stresses are usually involved in first murders—and I thought this to be a first murder. “Further,” I wrote, “the individual may have been absent from his employment, if employed, for several days before and after the disappearance of Eberle.” This last characteristic I suggested because of my interviews with murderers; many, such as Berkowitz, told me that the time right around the murder was quite important to them, so important that they had absented themselves from their usual routine before and after it.
I knew that the killer had been out at six in the morning, which indicated that he had no one to whom he was responsible, and therefore was most likely not living with a wife or with overly concerned parents. Sometimes when there is a case that occurs at this early-morning hour, it’s the result of a killer who has been up all night, drinking, to raise his courage to the point where he can do the crime. If he had kept the child alive for some time, he must have had a place in which to do so. I was not certain why the victim had been found in only his underwear, because there could have been reasons other than sexual for keeping him that way—to prevent him from running away, for instance. I had the distinct impression from the gravity and incompleteness of the wounds that the killer had murdered the boy somewhat spontaneously and then after death had cut the victim on the back of the neck, thinking perhaps that he would decapitate him and dismember the body and scatter the parts—but then pulling back because this was hard to do, and just leaving the body somewhere that seemed remote. This indicated to me that he had never before dismembered a body—but suggested that he might have killed before.
There was one aspect of the body that I thought might be important, but I wasn’t yet certain about it: On the leg and shoulder, there were some wounds that seemed inexplicable. Why would a killer cut away a portion of the shoulder, or the flesh on the inside of a leg? In the back of my mind, I thought it possible that these slices had been done in an attempt to obliterate bite marks on those parts of the body, but I couldn’t yet prove my contention. Biting in a sexual frenzy was consistent with a killing that had a sexual basis, as I believed this one did.
Because of the killer’s lack of control (as demonstrated by the crime scene), I thought it probable that he might inject himself into the investigation, trying to appear helpful but actually seeking information by hangin
g around the fringes of the dump area, the mortuary or grave site, or the neighborhood in which the crime was committed. Considering such a possibility likely, I suggested that any artist’s conceptions of the killer that were produced on the basis of witnesses’ recollections should not be made public but should be kept within the law-enforcement community, in case the killer showed his face anywhere near the investigation. For some time, we had people watching the funeral, the grave site, the place where the body had been found, and the location where Eberle had been abducted, but with no luck.
In addition to the profile, I did what we might call a preliminary VICAP analysis. Using the computer in my head rather than the one at Quantico, I compared this case to others and concluded that it was not that similar to the Gosch case. Eberle’s body had been found; Gosch’s was still missing. Gosch’s abductor, it seemed to me, had taken far more care than the killer of Danny Joe Eberle. The media continued to play up the fact that both victims had been newsboys, abducted on Sunday mornings; I, knowing more details and having more experience in comparing crimes, did not think the same abductor had been at work in both cases.
The rope used in the binding of Eberle was sent to our laboratories for analysis, but it did not match any known samples. That in itself was an important clue, for the uniqueness of the rope might help in pinning the crime on someone who had other pieces of similar rope. In addition to providing laboratory work, the FBI wanted to put every asset in our arsenal at the disposal of the investigation, and so our hypnosis team from San Antonio was called in to assist. The older Eberle boy and other witnesses agreed to be hypnotized in order to recall what they had seen. Very little extra evidence was gleaned from them, but every bit added to our understanding of the probable killer. Despite my strong belief—seconded by Johnny Evans—that the person who had abducted and killed Eberle would strike again, there was nothing more that I could do on the scene, and so I returned to Quantico. The task force was doing all that could be done. The Eberle family was bearing up reasonably well, aided by their faith and the close support of their neighbors and fellow parishioners. I had a teenaged son of my own at home, and felt the family’s loss keenly.
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