Whoever Fights Monsters

by Robert K. Ressler

  “I think it’s so important,” the priest said (in Mullin’s recollection of the encounter), “that I want to volunteer to be your next sacrifice.”

  Mullin kicked and hit and stabbed the priest a half-dozen times, then left him bleeding to death in the confessional booth and rushed away.

  A parishioner saw the struggle and the assailant and ran for help. Mullin escaped and the priest died, but the parishioner gave a description of the killer to the police; unfortunately, it described the killer as tall as well as thin, and so was not much help in the investigation.

  Brooding, Mullin tried to figure out what had gone wrong in his life, and his thoughts came to center on the time in high school when a teammate first gave him marijuana to smoke. As he became more and more mentally ill, Mullin had actually stopped using drugs, and now had taken to blaming them for his problems. In early January 1973, he went to a remote area of cabins without telephones on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, where he thought the teammate might still reside. He went to the door of a house occupied by a woman who lived there with her common-law husband and children. The husband was involved in selling illegal drugs but was not home. The woman answered the door and told Mullin that the man he wanted to see lived down the road. In his memory, she also insisted to him that she and the children would like to volunteer as human sacrifices, as the priest had. He killed them all with a pistol. Then he knocked on the door of the football teammate’s home.

  The former teammate invited Mullin in, and a confrontation began. This man, too, was now a drug dealer, and drug paraphernalia lay about the house. The teammate was unable to answer questions about why he had ruined Mullin’s life with an early toke of pot, so Mullin shot him. Dying, the man crawled upstairs and into the bathroom, where his wife was in the shower; he shouted for her to lock the door, but Mullin broke it down and fatally shot her, too. When police found five people dead in two neighboring homes and learned that the men had been involved in the drug trade, they thought the murders were drug-related—a deal gone wrong, revenge being wrought. They did not suspect these killings to be connected in any way to the death of the priest or of the two hitchhikers.

  A month later, Mullin was in a redwood forest area and walked in on four male teenagers in a tent. He asked them their business and they said they were camping. He claimed to be a forest ranger and said that they were polluting the forest and ought to leave; moreover, the campsite was not in an area that was legal for camping. The four young men shooed Mullin away; the presence of their .22 rifle in the tent may have helped them do so. He said he’d come back the next day to see whether they had gone. The teenagers remained in the tent. Next day, Mullin came back and killed them all with the .22. They were not found until the following week.

  By that time, Mullin had killed again, and had been apprehended. His father’s supposed instructions to kill came to Herb while he was driving his station wagon with a load of firewood in it. He noticed an Hispanic man weeding his garden across the street. He made a U-turn, came back down the street, stopped, took out the rifle, put it across the hood of the car, and shot the man. He committed this murder in full sight of the dead man’s neighbor, who managed to write down the license plate number of the station wagon as Mullin calmly drove away from the scene of the crime. Within minutes of the description being put out on the police radio, a patrolman spotted Mullin driving down a road, ordered him to pull over, and arrested him; when apprehended, he was docile and did not attempt to grab or use the recently fired rifle on the seat next to him. Also in the station wagon was the .22 pistol that had been used several weeks earlier to kill the people in the cabins.

  Mullin’s disorganized characteristics were apparent by his demeanor in court—he had to be restrained by chains, and he submitted rambling written discourses to the judge that had nothing to do with the matters at hand—and in the way he had behaved during those four months in which he executed thirteen people. The logic that connected these murders existed only in his tormented brain. However, the jury judged him to have been legally sane at the time of the murders, and convicted him on all counts.

  When I attempted to interview Mullin in prison, I found him docile, polite, and handsome, but uncommunicative. Every few minutes, as I tried to question him, he would ask, “Sir, can I go back to my room now?” He stated that he had committed his crimes only in an attempt to save the environment. Mullin displayed all the signs of serious mental illness. That he was in a penitentiary with career criminals was ridiculous at best, and unwise; he should have been in a mental institution.

  Organized and disorganized: two types of killers. Which are the more prevalent and dangerous? That’s hard to answer, but perhaps we can approach an answer by means of our research and some educated guesses about modern society. Our research into murderers is acknowledged to be the most broad-based yet completed. In it, we judged two-thirds of the murderers to be in the organized category, as opposed to one-third in the disorganized; perhaps those ratios carry through in the overall population of killers, only some of whom are behind bars, as our interviewees were.

  My guess is that there has always been a certain unchanging fraction of disorganized killers in society, from the earliest days until the present—men who are quite deranged and who now and again go on killing sprees that stop only when they are caught or killed. We can’t do much about the disorganized murderers; there’ll probably always be one or two among us. It is my sincere belief, however, that the number and percentage of organized killers are growing. As our society grows more mobile, and as the availability of weapons of mass destruction increases, the ability of the antisocial personality to realize his rapacious and murderous fantasies grows apace.

  7

  WHAT PLUS WHY EQUALS WHO

  When I arrived at the Behavioral Sciences Unit in 1974, I became an apprentice in profiling to the Mutt and Jeff team of Howard Teten and Pat Mullany. Mullany, a former Christian brother, had been at the task since 1972, and Teten, a former San Leandro, California, evidence-unit specialist, had been working on profiling since 1969. Teten, in turn, had received guidance from a psychiatrist in New York, Dr. James A. Brussel, who had astounded the country in 1956 with a prediction about the personality of a “mad bomber” who had left thirty-two explosive packages in New York City over a period of eight years. Brussel studied crime scenes, messages from the bomber, and other information, and had told the police they would find an Eastern European immigrant in his forties who lived with his mother in a Connecticut city. The psychiatrist said the man was very neat; he deduced from the way the bomber rounded off the points of his W’s that he adored his mother—the rounded W’s looked like bosoms—and hated his father. Brussel even predicted that the bomber, when arrested, would be wearing a double-breasted suit, neatly buttoned. When taken into custody, George Metesky was indeed wearing a buttoned double-breasted suit, and fit the profile in many other regards, except for the fact that he resided with two unmarried sisters rather than with his mother.

  Profiling had somewhat fallen into disrepute during the 1960s, when a committee of psychiatrists and psychologists guessed very incorrectly about the identity of the Boston Strangler, but the need for profiling kept growing because violent crimes against strangers—the most difficult of all crimes to solve—kept increasing in number. In the 1960s, in the majority of murder cases, the killer had some relationship with his or her victim. By the 1980s, some 25 percent of murders were “stranger murders,” in which the killer did not really know the victim. The reasons for the steady rise in the statistics, sociologists believed, could be found in the sort of society we had become: mobile, in many ways impersonal, flooded with images of violence and of heightened sexuality.

  Profiling was even less of a science then; it was an art that had to be painstakingly learned over a period of years by means of an apprenticeship. Even in the FBI, it was not a regular bureaucratically designated activity but, rather, one that was pursued by a handful of people when local police
would see fit to refer a case to us that seemed beyond their own capabilities, or when an officer was smart enough to know when he or she needed help. I was fortunate to begin in profiling as Teten and Mullany tackled a difficult case.

  Pete Dunbar, an agent in the Bozeman, Montana, office, brought to our attention an unsolved kidnapping in that state. The previous June, while the Jaeger family of Farmington, Michigan, had been on a camping trip, someone had put a knife through the fabric of a tent and snatched away their seven-year-old daughter, Susan. Teten and Mullany had put together a preliminary profile of the likely suspect in the kidnapping. They thought it was a young white male who lived in the area, a loner who had come across the family during a night walk. The profilers concluded that Susan was probably dead, though when no body was found, the family continued to hold out hope.

  Dunbar had a logical suspect, a twenty-three-year-old Vietnam veteran named David Meierhofer. An informant had provided the name, and it happened that Dunbar was acquainted with Meierhofer, whom he characterized as “well-groomed, courteous, exceptionally intelligent … polite.” Meierhofer was a good match with the Teten-Mullany profile, but there was no evidence to tie him to the abduction, and he was not charged with the crime. The Jaegers went back to Michigan to resume their lives and Dunbar went on to other work.

  In January of 1974, however, an eighteen-year-old woman who had rejected Meierhofer as a suitor was also missing from the Bozeman area, and Meierhofer was again a logical suspect. He volunteered to take a lie-detector test and to be given truth serum. He passed both those tests in regard to both crimes, and his attorney pressed for Meierhofer to be unconditionally released and for the authorities to keep away from him.

  However, more information was obtained from the second crime, and this enabled the profilers—myself included, now, as a neophyte—to refine the profile. It pointed to the sort of person Meierhofer was, and the fact that this suspect had been able to get past the truth serum and polygraph tests did not sway us. The public thinks these tests are a good way to discern the truth, and that is so for most normal people. Psychopaths, however, are known for their ability to separate the personality who commits the crimes from their more in-control selves. Thus, when a psychopath takes these tests, the in-control self manages to avoid all knowledge of the crimes, and very often the result is that the suspect passes the tests. Meierhofer was in control at some times, and at others, horrendously out of control. We convinced Dunbar that Meierhofer had to be the killer, and that even though he had passed the tests, Dunbar should not let the matter go. Teten and Mullany thought that the killer might well be the sort of man who telephones the relatives of his victims in order to relive the crime and its excitement. Accordingly, Dunbar asked the Jaegers to keep a tape recorder next to their telephone.

  On the first anniversary of the seven-year-old’s abduction, Mrs. Jaeger answered a call at her Michigan home from a man who claimed he was keeping Susan alive. “He was very smug and taunting,” Mrs. Jaeger later told a reporter. The unknown man said that he had spirited Susan away to a country in Europe and was giving her a better life than the Jaegers could have afforded to give her. “My reaction was not what he was expecting,” Mrs. Jaeger recalled. “I felt truly able to forgive him. I had a great deal of compassion and concern, and that really took him aback. He let his guard down and finally just broke down and wept.”

  The caller did not admit that Susan was dead, and hung up before the call could be traced. An FBI voice analyst went over the tape and concluded that the taunting voice had been David Meierhofer’s. However, the analyst’s evidence was not then considered sufficient in a Montana court to obtain a search warrant of a suspect’s premises, so the authorities had no way of getting at Meierhofer. Dunbar spent some time tracing the call; it seemed to have come from an open area, possibly from someone tapping into phone line on poles above a neighboring ranch. Dunbar traced Meierhofer’s service record and learned that Meierhofer had learned to tap into field telephone wires in Vietnam. However, this, too, was not hard evidence.

  Mullany listened to the tape of the Jaeger-Meierhofer conversation and initiated a bold move. “I felt that Meierhofer could be woman-dominated,” he later recalled; “I suggested that Mrs. Jaeger go to Montana and confront him.” She did so at his lawyer’s office in Montana, but Meierhofer was calm and collected, very much in control of his emotions. Shortly after Mrs. Jaeger returned to Michigan, though, she received a collect telephone call from a “Mr. Travis” in Salt Lake City. Travis wanted to explain that he, not someone else, had taken Susan. Before the caller could go on, Mrs. Jaeger interrupted him and said, “Well, hello, David.”

  Now Dunbar had enough evidence, in the form of an affidavit from Mrs. Jaeger, to obtain a search warrant of Meierhofer’s premises, and in them found remains of both female victims. Meierhofer was confronted with these remains and other evidence, and confessed not only to those two murders but also to the previously unsolved killing of at least one local Montana boy. After the confession, Meierhofer was put into a cell alone, and, the next day, he hung himself.

  There was no doubt in our minds that the profile put together at Quantico had helped solve the case. If there had been no profile, Dunbar would have had no reason to be quite so interested in a suspect named by an informant. Later, after the second murder and after Meierhofer had passed the polygraph and truth-serum tests, the Quantico profile assisted Dunbar in sticking with the case and firming up his inner conviction that Meierhofer was the culprit. Finally, Mullany’s guess that Meierhofer could be swayed by Mrs. Jaeger because of his confused psychological responses to women was the blow that finally cracked open the killer’s defenses.

  This early case demonstrated to me both the power and the possibilities in profiling. Profiling had helped identify the most likely suspect and had given the agent in the field reason to keep after him, even when many factors argued against continuing to do so. Moreover, the Meierhofer case showed that the more experience we had, and the more information about violent criminals we amassed and comprehended, the better we would become at profiling.

  * * *

  No two crimes or criminals are exactly alike. The profiler looks for patterns in the crimes and tries to come up with the characteristics of the likely offender. It’s fact-based and uses analytical and logical thinking processes. We learn all we can from what has happened, use our experience to fathom the probable reasons why it happened, and from these factors draw a portrait of the perpetrator of the crime; in a nutshell: What plus why equals who.

  The real task is to whittle down the universe of potential suspects, to eliminate the least likely ones and allow the on-site investigators to focus on realistic targets. Thus, if we are able to say with a high degree of probable accuracy that the suspect in a crime is a male, we’ve eliminated about 50 percent of the population who are not males. The category “adult males” is a smaller fraction of the population; “single white males,” an even smaller number. By making such choices, we very quickly narrow the search. Every added category makes the band of possible suspects slimmer—for instance, we might suggest that the likely criminal is unemployed, or one who has previously received treatment for mental disease, or that it is a person who lives within walking distance of the crime scene.

  I taught class after class at Quantico and did road shows about profiling, and I found that no matter how intensively we tried to instill the principles in our students, they wanted more direction. Didn’t we have a workbook from which they could learn what questions to ask, to figure out what characteristics of a crime scene were the most important? Police officers, and even our in-service agents, wanted a checklist, so they could profile, as it were, by the numbers—put in this and that detail of evidence from the crime scene, push a button or apply a formula, and have a perfect profile pop out. In the future, we hope to have a computer program that can perform in that way, but we’ve been working on it for a half-dozen years and haven’t perfected it yet. Profiling is sti
ll best done by people with a lot of experience, particularly by those who have studied psychology. And there’s a lot of work involved, work in the sense of applying one’s brain to what is usually a complex puzzle.

  At the heart of the puzzle is the crime scene, which generally contains the best evidence that is available to us. We try to analyze it exhaustively, in an attempt both to understand the crime and, by reflection, the nature of the person who committed it. A good example is that rooftop in the Bronx where a special-education teacher was murdered. Virtually everything at the site came from the victim—the handbag used to strangle her, the comb placed in her pubic hair, even the felt pen with which the killer wrote obscenities on her body. That proved to be important in assessing what sort of a killer this might be; we thought it was a person who hadn’t planned the crime, that it might have been somewhat spontaneous. In other instances, an abductor might bring with him what we have come to call a rape kit, with tape, ropes, and possibly a gun, all of which could be used to control a victim.

  As I reported briefly in an earlier chapter, the absence of such a rape kit was a factor in another classic murder case in which I became involved as a profiler. The thoughtful reader would surmise that a city the size and sophistication of New York would catch on quite early to the idea of psychological profiling as an investigative aid, but that sort of acceptance had to wait awhile, until we had helped to unravel this particularly perplexing murder of the young special-education teacher.

  On an October afternoon, the nude body of this young woman was found on the roof of the Bronx public-housing project in which she lived. Francine Elverson had been a small woman, under five feet tall and weighing less than a hundred pounds. She lived with her mother and father in an apartment in that building, and had not been seen since early morning, when she had left for her job teaching handicapped children at a nearby day-care center.