Her body was arranged in an odd, almost unnatural position that made no sense until investigators described it to her parents, who told them it resembled the letter chai of the Hebrew alphabet, the letter that had been on a chain she had worn around her neck; the chain was missing from the scene. This, however, was not an anti-Semitic crime but a brutal sexual murder. On either side of the victim’s head, the killer had placed the earrings she had worn; her nylons were tied loosely around her wrists and her underpants had been removed and pulled over her head to cover her face. The rest of Francine’s clothing lay nearby, and under it was the place where the killer had defecated. The young teacher had been beaten about the face, strangled with the strap of her purse, and severely mutilated after death. Her nipples had been cut off and placed on her chest, there was a lot of blood smeared about, bite marks on her inner thighs, an umbrella and a pen had been jammed into her vagina, and a comb was entwined in her pubic hair. The killer had written on her thigh and abdomen in ink: “Fuck you. You can’t stop me.”
Semen and a single black pubic hair, not the victim’s, had also been found on her body; that hair served to lead the police astray for some time. When New York Housing Authority homicide detective Thomas Foley got around to sending us the crime-scene photos and other investigative information, the police had twenty-two suspects, some of them quite promising. That wasn’t surprising, because New York is a very large city in population as well as in area, and there are a lot of strange, potentially violent people within that number. For instance, one obvious suspect was a man who lived in the building and who had previously been incarcerated for sex offenses. Another was a black man who had formerly been a janitor in the building and had never turned in his keys. A third was a fifteen-year-old boy who found Francine’s wallet on the stairs in the morning as he was on his way to school but did not give it to his father to return until later in the day.
I looked at the crime-scene photos and the other evidence and concluded that the black pubic hair was irrelevant. Another profiler disagreed with me but I argued that this was a crime of a mentally ill person; the level of violence to the body showed that. The absence of a rape kit showed a lack of complete premeditation and stalking; real stalkers bring with them the things they need to restrain the victim. This was clearly a spontaneous, blitz-style assault, committed during a chance encounter between killer and victim. Though the scene had been made to appear a bit as if a gang had done this, I thought not. Our profile told Foley that he ought to be looking for a white male aged twenty-five to thirty-five who knew the victim and lived and worked either in that very building or in one that was nearby. I thought it likely that the killer was mentally ill, and, as with Richard Chase, the disease had been bubbling within him for ten years before it had erupted into a mutilation murder. Most people who have full-blown mental illness do not range far from their homes to commit this sort of crime, and that was why I thought it probable that he lived nearby, either alone or with an indulgent single parent. The notes and arranging of the body suggested that this was not a well-schooled man, probably a school dropout who had gotten his ideas on what to say in his note and how to mutilate the body from an extensive collection of pornographic materials. Because I felt certain that he had a history of mental disease, I thought it likely that he had been released by some mental-care institution within the past year. I also suggested that there would be severe precrime stresses that might have provoked the murder. Given the level of police work that had already been put in, we all concluded that the cops had probably already interrogated the killer.
This profile enabled Foley and his men to refocus their investigation. They could put the former janitor on the shelf for a while, since we said the crime had been committed by a white man, and they could also more or less eliminate the man who had had prior sex-crime offenses, who was now happily married, employed, and considered as having put his past behind him. Another suspect who had been previously dismissed could now be brought to the fore, however. Earlier, the police had spoken to a man who lived on the fourth floor of the building (the same floor as the victim) and shared the apartment with his son, who had been in a mental institution. The mother had died when Carmine Calabro was nineteen years old, and that was eleven years earlier. When interviewed in October, the father said that Carmine had been in the institution at the time of the murder—and the police had not triple-checked this alibi. Now, it was scrutinized more closely.
Calabro was a high school dropout who had spent more than a year in a nearby mental hospital, then had gotten a job as a stagehand, from which he had recently been fired. He had first told police that he was an unemployed actor, but he later admitted to being an unemployed stagehand. The Calabros’ apartment was full of pornography. When the police looked into security at the mental hospital, they discovered that it was so lax, it would easily have been possible for Carmine to have slipped out of the institution, committed the murder, and returned without anyone having noticed he had been gone or being able to say that he had been absent. At the time of the murder, he had been wearing a cast on his arm, and it was surmised that he had used this cast to render the victim unconscious. By the time the police caught up to him, the cast had long since been thrown away; fortunately, it was not needed to prove that the former mental patient was the killer. One of the key clues came from the victim’s body: she had been bitten. Three forensic odontologists, including Dr. Lowell Levine, were able to match the bite marks to the prime suspect’s teeth—and the case was solved. Calabro was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years to life.
Further investigation revealed that this former stagehand had a long history of violence toward himself, including repeated suicide attempts, and was described by many people as being insecure with women. His inability to connect with a woman seems to have been the starting point of the crime.
It turned out that Elverson’s body had been transported to the medical examiner in a body bag that had previously been used for a black male and had not been properly cleaned before transport. The unexplained pubic hair had come from that earlier murder—not from Elverson’s body at all.
When the Elverson-Calabro case was all over, Lt. Joseph D’Amico, Foley’s boss and a former student of mine at Quantico, told a reporter, “They [the profilers] had him [the suspect] so right that I asked the FBI why they hadn’t given us his phone number, too.” While we liked that compliment, we liked even better the fact that this case helped open the eyes of New York’s police community to the idea of profiling as a way of narrowing the field of suspects in a difficult case.
In court, Calabro never admitted his crime. However, after an article including information about the BSU’s profile of the case had appeared in the magazine Psychology Today—an article that did not mention the name of the killer or of the victim—Calabro wrote us a letter. That he would write to us directly and make reference to the case summarized in the article was as much an admission of guilt as he ever made. The letter said that some points in our psychological profile “I personally believe [are] correct.”
* * *
I was on the interstate, traveling in a Bureau car to Richmond, Virginia, to give a lecture, when a call came over the FBI radio asking me to turn around and return to Quantico. When I protested that I was expected to show up and talk to a prestigious group, I was informed that I was needed because President Reagan had been assassinated. I turned around. On the way back, I tuned in to commercial radio stations, from which I learned the good news that the President had been shot but was alive and expected to recover, as were the other victims. Driving back, I alternated between listening intently to the reports and churning over in my mind some details of my earlier interviews with such assassins as Sirhan Sirhan and would-be assassins as Arthur Bremer, and Sara Jane Moore. My visit with Arthur Bremer had been almost a carbon copy of the one I’d had with Sirhan; the two were two peas in a behavioral pod, paranoid schizophrenics to the core. Bremer had been bizarre in appearance, s
omething like Howard Hughes in his reclusive state—wild hair, flowing beard; his eyes darting about. He carried with him two shopping bags that contained all of his earthly belongings. Yet Bremer had seemed somewhat in control of his actions at the time of his attempts on the life of Governor George Wallace. I thought also on this ride back to Quantico of David Berkowitz, who was not an assassin but who had many of the personality characteristics that I associate with assassins: He had stalked a particular type of victim much as Bremer had stalked Wallace.
At Quantico, I went to Assistant Director McKenzie’s office, where it was obvious that I had been expected, and I was put on the hot line to headquarters, where I spoke with Frank W. Waikart, the agent who had been put in charge of the case. Waikart told me that the authorities already had John Hinckley in custody and needed some assistance on what to look for when they searched his motel room. I asked for whatever details he could provide me about Hinckley.
The FBI had worked quickly. My colleagues already knew that Hinckley was a white male in his midtwenties. They learned he was single, a college student from Denver, and that his family appeared to be fairly wealthy. After his shooting spree, he had submitted rather easily to the Secret Service and other agents who immobilized him, and now appeared to be calm. The FBI had the key to his motel room, but the motel and room had also been discovered by the press, and the authorities were nearly having to beat off the press to prevent unauthorized people from entering and trashing the assassin’s quarters.
Although Hinckley was in custody, many, many things could go wrong in this stage of the investigation, when the shock and panic had not worn off. First of all, Washington, D.C., is a multijurisdictional area, and lots of different police authorities might want to push their way in and seize evidence. There was the extreme danger that if the evidence was not properly seized, it could be thrown out in court, and that might put the entire prosecution of Hinckley in jeopardy. What was essential was to get a search warrant that listed items for which the prosecution would specifically look. It must not seem as if the search was a random one.
What was required, then, was more than a profile; it was a journey into the mind of this assassin to see who he might be, and what evidence of that personality he might have left around him. I told Waikart that all the facts he had given me pointed toward the notion that Hinckley was a mentally disordered type of assassin, though not so disordered as to be actually beyond understanding what he had done or what was happening to him. I did not see him as a paid assassin or as part of a conspiracy but, rather, as a loner, an introvert. He would be the type, often recognized on college campuses, who had no successful relationships with women, didn’t fit into the dating scene, wasn’t a member of sports teams or even of clubs, the sort of person who wasn’t very good academically and who found his rewards in fantasy. And so I told Waikart to look in Hinckley’s motel room—and in his car and his Denver home—for evidence of such loneliness and fantasy.
The searchers should seize materials that were reflections of the fantasy: diaries, scrapbooks, reading material. I cautioned Waikart to seize all reading material, no matter how innocuous it might appear, because it would be a window into Hinckley’s personality. There might be, for instance, magazine articles or books where specific passages were underlined, and the underlining would tell us what Hinckley thought was significant. High up on my list of what to look for was a tape recorder and audiotapes, because this sort of lonely person often makes audiotapes and uses them as a sort of diary. Another important item would be credit cards and receipts, because we’d need to trace his steps back at least six months and possibly as long as a year. Assassins such as Bremer had stalked their targets, and I thought it likely that Hinckley had also done so. Hotel bills might contain records of phone calls; he might even have a telephone credit card that we could use to find additional records of his movements and interests.
My list of a dozen items was turned into a search warrant listing those items, and was used by the authorities to seize items from Hinckley’s motel room and other rooms used by him. Nearly every item I had suggested as important was found. For example, there were tapes of his conversations with Jodie Foster. There was a postcard with a picture of the Reagans that Hinckley had addressed to Foster, with this text:
Dear Jodie: Don’t they make a darling couple? Nancy is downright sexy. One day you and I will occupy the White House and the peasants will drool with envy. Until then, please do your best to remain a virgin. You are a virgin, aren’t you?
[signed] John Hinckley
He hadn’t sent the postcard, but he had written it. Another item seized was a letter to Foster that said he was going out to shoot Reagan and knew he might not return, but that he wanted her to know he had done this deed for her. (This letter, among other items, was evidence of a premeditated attack against Reagan and of the fact that he knew what he was doing was legally wrong.) There were diaries and comments in the margins of papers; one read, “Everything whirls / and still the young girls / laugh and mock my name.” There was an annotated copy of the script of Taxi Driver, the film about an assassin in which Jodie Foster had starred. All of this material fit quite well with my snap evaluation of John Hinckley as a loner who was unsuccessful with women and who lived in a fantasy world.
* * *
One thing we in law enforcement are never able to forget is that murder is a horrific crime that scars the family, friends, and associates of the victim. This bedrock belief was all the more reason for me to feel the necessity of doing what I could to help when a call came from Dr. James Cavanaugh in Chicago. Years earlier, I had enlisted Dr. Cavanaugh as an adviser to my Criminal Personality Research Project. He was medical director of the Isaac Ray Center of Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, which deals in forensic psychiatric issues. One of Cavanaugh’s medical students, a young woman named Lori Roscetti, had been found murdered at the side of some railroad tracks not far from the medical center. Roscetti had been a bright, gentle, straight-A student who had just finished a campaign to reinstate a campus escort service for women, which had been dropped as a result of a budget crunch. Her efforts had failed. Lori was liked by everyone at the center, and the staff and Cavanaugh were quite upset by her death.
The formal request for my presence was initiated by Tom Cronin, a Chicago police officer who had been a police fellow at the FBI Academy and a student of mine. Tom sent me a batch of materials. He facetiously noted that a reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer had already reached $45,000, of which half would be mine if we did a good profile. (In the middle of serious business, law-enforcement people often try to maintain a level head by making jokes; we are, of course, precluded from seeking or accepting monetary rewards.)
From the materials, I learned that the young student had been studying in a room with several others until about 1:30 A.M. on a Saturday in October. She and a male student had gone down to the garage to get her car, carrying books and bags, and she had then driven the male student up to another level of the garage, where he got out of the car and slammed the door. She must have assumed the door was locked, since that male student and others had told the police that Lori was always quite conscientious about such matters; the medical center was in a bad neighborhood at the edge of the University of Illinois Circle campus, and she was always cautious about traveling to and from the area.
At five-thirty that same morning, her body and her car were found next to a railroad trestle adjoining an impoverished black community and not more than half a mile from the hospital. The medical examiner’s report showed that she had been badly beaten about the face, that there were considerable trauma injuries to her midsection, and that she had been repeatedly sexually assaulted. It seemed that her car had actually been driven over her body. The doors and trunk of the car were open, and her empty wallet was found on the scene.
The police had no suspects but were interested in a young man who had been a platonic friend of the
victim’s. He had sought a closer relationship with her and had been spurned, but he had been unexpectedly in town on Friday night and on the morning of the murder. They were also looking into her relationships at the medical center—focusing, for instance, on a janitor who had access to the garage—as well as canvassing in the area where she lived. They were attempting to trace people who drove trucks near the railroad tracks and a nearby viaduct—in short, going out in all directions.
In terms of profiling, the case was easy, and after viewing aerial photos of the crime-scene area, the medical examiner’s report, and all the other documents, I gave an oral profile to Tom Cronin at his home.
My guess was based on what I thought was likely to have happened after Roscetti had left the garage. She had probably stopped at a light in this run-down district, and some people had come up to her, blocked the car, and one had pulled a door, which happened to be open, even though she had thought it was locked. These people then forced her to drive to the somewhat isolated location, where they had raped, killed, and robbed her.
To my mind, this had been an opportunistic crime; the attempt to rob had been the primary motivator, and the sexual assault was secondary. The murder had probably been committed to prevent the victim from identifying her attackers, and it reflected the psychopathic nature of the group of attackers. The presence of a good deal of seminal fluid made it likely that there had been more than one killer. It had all the hallmarks of a gang event. I told the police to look for a group of black youths, somewhere between three and six males, ranging in age from fifteen to twenty, who would previously have been in jail, and who lived close by the scene of the abduction and the railroad trestle where Roscetti had been killed. In white middle-class neighborhoods, kids tend to hang out in single-age groups—all fifteen-year-olds, for example, or all eighteen-year-olds—but in black neighborhoods, there is often a mixture of ages, with young ones accompanying older ones. This murder took place well before the rape of the jogger in Central Park by a bunch of kids who had gone “wilding”; if I had known the term wilding then, I would have used it to describe what I thought had happened in the murder of Lori Roscetti. The anal assault convinced me that at least some of the gang members had already been incarcerated, because such assaults are common in prisons.
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