Organized offenders are angry at their girlfriends, at themselves, at their families, and at society in general. They feel that they’ve been mistreated during their entire lives and that everything is stacked against them. If they’re so smart and clever, why haven’t they made a million dollars or—as Charlie Manson wanted—had a career as a rock star? They all believe that society has conspired to keep them down. Manson felt that had he not been in jail during his early life, his songs would have been very popular. Manson’s rhetoric led his followers to believe they were stimulating class warfare by their murders. Ed Kemper believed he was taking victims from the rich and the middle class, and in so doing striking a blow for the working stiffs. John Gacy thought he was ridding the world of no-account punks and “little queers.” In their murders, these men strike back not only at the individual victims but at society as a whole.
* * *
Two men included in our study of the backgrounds and offenses of serial murderers provide classic instances of the patterns of organized and disorganized offenders. In our road shows, when I used to display the slides and give the lecture about the organized offender Gerard John Schaefer, someone in my audience would accuse me of having taken the characteristics of that sort of offender right from the details of Schaefer’s case. That’s not so, but it is true that the patterns associated with the organized killer are starkly apparent in his instance.
In the early 1970s, the Florida police were in the process of putting together a task force to investigate a handful of cases in which women were reported missing. Then they got a break. Two distraught and alarmed young women stumbled out of the swampy woods, found a passing motorist who took them into town, and made their way to a police station, where they told a harrowing tale of abduction.
They had been hitchhiking and were picked up by a normal-looking, neatly clothed man in a car that resembled a police vehicle. He told them he’d drive them to their destination. Instead, he took them into the woods and tied them up at gunpoint. After roping these two, however, the man looked at his watch and said, “Uh-oh, I gotta go; I’ll be back,” and he jumped in his car and drove away. The women managed to wriggle their way out of their bonds and get to the road. They took the police back to the spot where they had been tied up, and showed them how they had been immobilized. One strange sidelight to this part of the story: The police asked them to re-create what had happened, to demonstrate the immobilization in detail, and the women, who still must have been terrified by their recent and narrow escape, donned the ropes willingly, and the police photographed them in position. They had their hands tied high, with the rope thrown over a tree from which, they said, the man had intended to hang them.
Searching and excavating the area nearby, the police found partially decomposed body parts and some pieces of women’s clothing. On one pair or jeans, there was quite a distinctive hand-stitched pattern; that pattern matched the description of a pair of jeans that a girl had been reported as wearing when she was reported missing. Discovering this evidence, the police began to take the stories of the escaped women even more seriously. The two women were able to describe in excellent detail the car in which they had been abducted and the physical attributes of their abductor. For instance, they said that the car had a bumper hitch, which they remembered because their abductor had tied one end of the rope to it and thrown the other over the tree; he had said he was going to use the car to haul them up to a height from which he could hang them. The car also had a fraternity sticker in the window, they said.
Before going further with the story, let me point out the attributes of the organized offender that are present so far in the narrative. The abductor personalized the victims by talking with them, used his own vehicle, and conned the women into his car by means of his verbal skills. He brought his own threatening weapon to the scene and took it away with him, and he had a rope (in my judgment, a sure sign under the circumstances that he was planning to complete sexual acts with the women prior to torture and murder). After the murder, he was going to hide and dispose of the bodies. He displayed mobility and adaptive behavior during the crime when he left the women tied up and went to pay attention to some other aspect of his life, telling them that he would return and finish them off later.
Gerard Schaefer became a suspect. He was a police officer in a neighboring jurisdiction, and a close check of his background now revealed that he had left another police organization. According to my conversations with officers connected to the case, in his earlier job, Schaefer had been cited for stopping cars driven by women committing traffic infractions, then running the women’s license plate numbers through a computer check to obtain more particulars about them, and getting their phone numbers so he could later call them for dates. (As an aside, let me say that some police use their badges and authority as a way to obtain information and, shall we say, introductions to women—but very few use their authority to take women into the woods for rape, torture, and murder.) The authorities deduced that when Schaefer had left the women tied up in the wooded area, he had gone to answer a police roll call, and had planned to return to the site, in uniform and driving his official vehicle, to finish them off. Schaefer’s own car matched the description given by the two abducted women, and a search of his home turned up evidence that helped to convict him of the murder of the missing girl who had once worn those distinctive jeans, as well as the murder of another woman. Schaefer was also convicted of abducting the two hitchhikers who had managed to escape before being murdered.
Schaefer denied the crimes entirely, but his denials were contradicted by the living witnesses as well as by the evidence, and he was eventually convicted and is still in prison in Florida. How many women he may have killed is still in question; the estimate went as high as thirty-five. Since he denied the crimes and would not help the police in their searches, we don’t know whether some missing bodies that were found could be attributed to him, nor do we know whether any of the women whom he might have killed are still lying somewhere, their bodies unidentified.
From my point of view as a researcher into the minds of murderers, Schaefer’s home was a gold mine, not only because it contained evidence of his crimes but also because it gave us testimony to the sort of offender he was. Women’s garments were found in the home, and jewelry, as well—in my terminology, these were clearly trophies that he had used to relive his crimes. Questioned about these items, Schaefer said that as a patrolman he had picked up the clothing along the highway, and from time to time would give it to Goodwill; he had simply not had a moment in which to donate this batch. He had even given one of the necklaces to a girlfriend. In his home were stacks and stacks of soft-core pornography and detective magazines. Leafing through them, the authorities discovered that he seemed most interested in stories about women being hanged, strangled, and otherwise choked.
That the hanging and associated torture were major elements of his fantasy was shown by stories that he’d written himself, and by drawings that he made over the surfaces of pinups. All of them had the same theme. For instance, there was a relatively normal pinup photograph of a young woman leaning against a tree, with her hands behind her back. Schaefer had drawn lines over this to show bullet holes in her, ropes around her arms, and that she had defecated in her panties—the latter, an action commensurate with the loosening of muscles that usually accompanies death by hanging. On another photograph of three posed and nude women who face a single man, he had written a balloon commentary: “These women will please me. If not, they will be taken to the plaza square and entertain the villagers as they dance on the end of my rope.” In other collages, he made cutouts to enhance the photo of a young woman who had been depicted as lying down, so that she looked as if she, too, had been hanged. Still other photographs in his home depicted women who were actually being hanged.
Schaefer’s home and life, then, displayed many articles that reflected the attributes of the organized offender. He had a relationship with a woman, had s
teady employment, kept trophies of his crimes, used pornographic materials, and in his crimes clearly sought to realize his fantasies. His choice of victims seems to have been of young hitchhiking women who might not be missed for some time after they disappeared, since they were likely to be transients in the area.
During his trial, Schaefer flirted with the press, and was gregarious and outgoing; his standard line to reporters was that this was all a mistake, and that he would be exonerated. In one newspaper photograph taken at the time of the judicial proceedings, four law-enforcement officers are guarding the prisoner as they are moving him from one location to another; Schaefer is the only one among the five men who is smiling, well groomed, at ease in his surroundings—the organized offender, attempting to control the situation even when apprehended and on trial for his life. Schaefer is currently serving two concurrent life sentences for murder.
* * *
Herbert Mullin had been all right, most people who knew him during his childhood in Santa Cruz agreed, until he graduated from high school in the late 1960s. Though relatively short and small, five seven and 120 pounds, he had been a first-string guard on the varsity football team. In addition, he was a good student, popular with both sexes, always polite to everyone, and voted “most likely to succeed.” By his senior year, however, the appearance of having it all together was masking quite another reality: Herb Mullin was on the skids. The reason was a paranoid schizophrenic disorder, beginning to take hold in him, and accelerated (not caused!) by experimentation with marijuana and LSD.
Once out of high school, he went through a series of personality transformations of the sort that are characteristic of paranoid schizophrenics. Let me say at once that schizophrenia is completely misunderstood by the lay public. Schizophrenia is the most prevalent of all the psychoses, and paranoid schizophrenics are the most common of the schizophrenics. Most paranoid schizophrenics are not violent, however; in fact, the vast majority are harmless. The percentage of harmless people among schizophrenics may well be lower than it is among the normal population. No matter, though, for the crimes that are committed by paranoid schizophrenics are so gross that when brought to light, they bring censure down on all of the mentally ill. Herbert William Mullin was one of those who give mental illness a bad name.
During the late 1960s in northern California, a great many young high school graduates were “trying to find themselves,” and some of Mullin’s transformations didn’t seem all that far from the norm for young men Herb’s age. He went to college but couldn’t hack it. For a while, he wore beads and long hair, and when that did not gain him the sexual experiences he sought, he cut his hair, put on a suit and tie, and appeared as a businessman. From time to time, as each experiment failed, he would enter a mental hospital for a spell, only to be released because he seemed relatively harmless to himself and others. Deciding he should be married, he would ask girls on the street or at a party whether they would marry him. When he was turned down by women, he decided this must mean that he was a homosexual, and so he went into the gay districts of San Francisco and asked men on the street whether they would like to live with him. The gays didn’t want him, either. He stood up in a Catholic church and shouted that this was not proper Christianity; then he studied to be a priest but gave that up. Similarly, he showed up one day at a gymnasium and studied to be a boxer; he fought with such ferocity in his first bout that his handlers told him he had a good career ahead of him, but he soon walked away from the ring as well.
A year after registering as a conscientious objector, Herb applied to join the armed services; his father was in the military, but all the services rejected him except the Marines, who allowed him to go through basic training and then realized his mental instability, refused to put him on active duty, and cashiered him out. He lived with a mentally ill older woman for a time, during which he took up Eastern religions and mysticism. He went to Hawaii to pursue these but didn’t get very far; he returned to the mainland and told a friend that he had also been in a mental institution in Hawaii.
By this time, in his mid-twenties, Mullin was completely socially unfit. He had tried everything and everyone but fit in nowhere and with no one. Though he worked sporadically, he couldn’t hold a job for more than a few weeks at a time, and his parents continued to support him. By this time, too, he had a full-blown case of paranoid schizophrenia.
Schizophrenics characteristically take information from various sources and synthesize it in their minds, weaving it together in such a way that it makes a delusion and distorts the actual meaning of the information. Mullin had seen or read information about the possibility of future earthquakes in California, and he had a delusion about preventing these. He came to believe that California had been kept from having a calamitous earthquake in the previous half-dozen years because the war in Vietnam had produced a sufficient number of American casualties; that is, nature demanded blood sacrifices in order to keep from destroying the natural world. In October of 1972, however, the Vietnam War was rapidly winding down, insofar as American involvement was concerned, and Mullin’s mind discerned a potential catastrophe looming. California would suffer a cataclysmic earthquake that would drop it into the ocean, he concluded, unless the amount of human sacrifices to nature was raised. It was for this reason, Mullin later said, that his father began to order him, by telepathy, to take some lives.
Very often, we find that the disorganized offender has led a life decidedly free of antisocial behavior prior to his crimes. Such offenders are not criminally oriented, not hostile or particularly violent prior to the time that they erupt into murder. Mullin followed that pattern. He had been unable to fit properly into the social fabric, had not been accepted either professionally or sexually by anyone. He had been stopped several times for possession of pot, but he had not raped, robbed, stolen, gotten into fights, or exceeded speed limits prior to the moment he was able legally to buy a gun and began killing people.
Although the tale of murders I am about to recount has a certain amount of coherence, I want to point out that at the time of Mullin’s murders, the police suffered from what is known as linkage blindness—they were unable to relate one of these killings to another because of two factors. First, the murders did not seem to be connected by use of a similar weapon or a similar MO. The victims differed from one another in age, sex, and other characteristics, and so did the circumstances of their deaths. The second reason was that Ed Kemper was also operating in the same approximate area at the same time.
Herbert Mullin’s first victim was a male hitchhiker of fifty-five, apparently a vagrant. Mullin must have noticed the man walking down the highway, and driven past him. Then he parked his car on the shoulder and began to look under the hood as the man approached. The man asked whether he could help in return for a ride, and Mullin let him get under the hood to peer at the engine. Then Mullin reached inside the car for a baseball bat and smashed the man’s head in. Mullin dragged him into the woods not far from the highway and left him. The body was found the next day.
Two weeks after the first murder, Mullin’s father directed him to kill his second victim as a sacrifice, and also to test the hypothesis that the environment was rapidly being polluted and that an earthquake might be nigh. Accordingly, he picked up a female hitchhiker on a highway and then plunged a knife into her chest as he was driving. In the woods, he undressed her, spread-eagled her legs, and cut her abdominally, in order to investigate his hypothesis of pollution. He took her organs out and examined them, hanging them on nearby branches so he could see them better. She was not found until several months had gone by, and by then, only her skeleton remained. Therefore, the first and second murders were not considered linked by the police.
Mullin was a disorganized offender, and I have said that disorganized offenders don’t drive cars, but Mullin did. That just goes to prove that every single attribute on our list does not apply to every single killer. In a sense, that’s why profiling remains an art and not a science,
and why we resist our students’ wishes that we profilers provide them with a checklist that would make easy their own assessments of crime scenes. Although Mullin differs slightly from the classic disorganized killer in being able to drive a car, he shares many of the other characteristics of the disorganized offender: the chance victim, the chance weapon, the mutilation of the body, and no real attempt to hide the body or prevent identification. The reason that the second victim was not found until months later was pure luck, not something that happened as a result of planning or guile by the murderer.
On a Thursday afternoon, four days after cutting up the young hitchhiker in the woods, Mullin appeared to have doubts about the appropriateness of what he believed to be his father’s instructions, so he went to see a Catholic priest in a confessional booth at a church fifteen miles from Santa Cruz. As Mullin later related the incident, he told the priest about the sacrifice program and that his father had told him to start on it and to take certain victims. The priest asked him, “Herbert, do you read the Bible?”
“Yes.”
“The commandments, where it says to honor thy father and mother?”
“Yes,” Mullin responded.
“Then you know how important it is to do as your father says.”
“Yes.”
Whoever Fights Monsters Page 17