Thereby hangs a long story, but, to shorten it, I’ll just say that during my twenty years in the Bureau, I maintained my reserve status in the Army. Since this was technically speaking against Bureau policy, I now and then had to do a bit of tap dancing to be permitted to keep my commission. Every other government agency not only allows but encourages its employees to be in the reserves—the CIA even has its own reserve unit that meets at Langley—but the FBI doesn’t like divided loyalties. Nonetheless, from time to time, the Army would request that the Bureau provide experienced teachers for hostage negotiations or other similar subjects, and the task would fall to me. On this particular trip, I asked my associate John Douglas to come along as my backup; John had participated in a tense hostage negotiation in Milwaukee that was successfully resolved, and had also followed me in teaching our hostage-negotiation course at Quantico.
On the way home from the school, we stopped by prior arrangement at Bramshill, the British police college about a hundred miles from London that is the leading training facility for law enforcement in the British Isles, the counterpart of Quantico. I hoped to establish some contacts there and stir up some interest in an exchange program. We met the commandant of the college and some other high-level officials, conducted a few guest lectures, and sat in on some classes.
The British expressed quite a bit of skepticism about what we American blokes said we could tell about a case just from looking at crime-scene photographs, and this became the meat of an after-hours session at the local lounge to which the lawmen regularly repaired at the end of the day. Douglas and I sat in that lounge drinking beer with John Domaille, a police officer attending the college just then, and a man who was investigating the most notorious multiple slaying case that had surfaced since Jack the Ripper. The unknown killer was called the Yorkshire Ripper, and he had murdered eight women in Yorkshire, most of them prostitutes, over the course of the previous four years. There were three survivors of his attacks, but all they had been able to agree upon was that the attacker had been a white man of adult age and average size. The police had no good suspects. For instance, they were suggesting to police stations that the killer would be a man born between the years of 1924 and 1959; that is, anywhere between twenty and fifty-five years of age.
Domaille described the crimes to us. Much in the manner that we would later come to associate with Ted Bundy, the killer bludgeoned women and then sexually assaulted them as they lay dying; after death, he mutilated their bodies with a knife.
In the past year, Domaille told us, Chief Inspector George Oldfield had received two letters in the mail from “Jack the Ripper,” and then a tape-recording, also sent through the mail. A third letter had been received by a major newspaper. These had become the focus of a renewed manhunt. Oldfield, near retirement age, was under considerable public pressure to find the killer before he struck again. This was the largest case ever in Oldfield’s jurisdiction; he had many people trying to second-guess him and criticizing the police for not being able to apprehend the killer. Oldfield had the tape electronically analyzed, the background noises amplified so they might be identified, and was going all out to share his information with the public. A lot of time and money was being spent on tracking the killer through use of this tape. You could telephone a number and listen as the tape was played for you, then offer your comments if you thought you recognized the voice or even the precise origin of the fairly thick backcountry “Geordie” accent. Hundreds of police officers were roaming the area of the murders with tape recorders, playing the tape for the citizenry and soliciting their comments, and the tape was also being broadcast on radio and television.
We said we wanted to see the crime-scene photographs, and offered to do a profile of the likely offender after we’d seen them, but such photographs weren’t available at Bramshill just then. However, someone had a copy of the tape-recording and proceeded to play it for us. The speaker was an adult male and spoke with a slow, measured voice. There was considerable background noise, and the tape lasted about two minutes.
I’m Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me. I have the greatest respect for you, George, but you are no nearer catching me now than four years ago when I started. I reckon your boys are letting you down, George; ya can’t be much good, can ya? The only time they came near touching me was a few months back, in Chapeltown when I was disturbed. Even then it was a uniformed copper, not a detective. I warned you in March that I’d strike again … but I couldn’t get there. I’m not quite sure when I’ll strike again but it will definitely be some [time] this year, maybe September, October, even sooner if I get the chance … there’s plenty of them knocking about. They never learn, do they, George.… I’ll keep on going for quite a while yet. I can’t see myself being nicked just yet. Even if you do get near, I’ll probably top myself first. Well, it’s been nice chatting to you, George.…
“Jack” also encouraged Oldfield to listen to the “catchy tune” on the tape, which turned out to be an extract from a record entitled Thank You for Being a Friend.
By the time we finished listening to the tape, more than a few people had gathered at our table. Under the needling stimulus of the Brits, I said to Domaille, “You realize, of course, that the man on the tape is not the killer, don’t you?”
He was thunderstruck. John Douglas concurred in my evaluation of the tape. It was a hoax designed deliberately to flummox the police, and perpetrated by someone other than the murderer. The two of us then lit into the subject. We told the assembled crew why it was quite clear that the tape was the product of a hoaxer: Because what the person on the tape said seemed totally inconsistent with the crimes as Domaille had described those killings to us. We thought that the killer was not the type of extroverted man who would be communicating with the police, that he was the quiet, introverted, woman-hating type. Didn’t they understand that his style of quickly rendering the victims unconscious and his postmortem mutilations showed that hatred of women?
The voices around the table took on tones of distinct challenge. If the tape’s sender was not the killer, then what sort of man did we think the killer was? We were being asked to do an instant profile, just the sort of thing we are most reluctant to do. We protested that we didn’t have crime-scene photos, but the officers gave us more details and would not be denied. Put up or shut up. Fortified by another round of beer, we winged it. The killer, we said, was undoubtedly in his late twenties or early thirties, probably a school dropout or a man who had not been through higher education. We postulated that he was able to enter the areas of the murders in a way that rendered him near invisible—he got there without people paying attention to him, because his business regularly took him to various areas; he would be a cabdriver or a truck driver or a mail carrier or possibly even a policeman. We thought that he was not a total loner, and would have a relationship with a woman, even though the absence of sexual penetration of the victims suggested that he had some serious mental problems that had taken years to develop.
By the time we were finished elucidating this rump profile and defending our conclusions, Domaille invited us to go to Yorkshire to look at the crime-scene photos. We were unable to do so because we had to get back to Quantico, so I invited him to bring the crime-scene materials to us in the United States as soon as he could.
He didn’t come and the materials didn’t arrive. I later learned that Chief Inspector Oldfield was adamantly opposed to showing us those materials, and totally disagreed with our rump profile. He could not stomach our explanation of the crimes and the fact that the audiotape demonstrated so easily that he had been misled, and that thousands of police man-hours had been wasted in a fruitless search for the wrong man.
Sometime—and more victims—later, Oldfield was replaced as chief of the investigation. The hunt for the killer had cost nearly $10 million; the police had questioned 200,000 people, made 30,000 searches of homes and 180,000 vehicle searches. It was not until 1981 that the case of the Yorkshire Ri
pper was solved: During a routine police check in a prostitution area, a man was stopped, and evidence later connected him to thirteen killings and seven other assaults. As we had predicted, Peter Sutcliffe was a thirty-five-year-old, married truck driver for an engineering firm and he regularly traveled around the country for the purposes of his job. After Sutcliffe’s apprehension and conviction, some further spadework finally revealed the identity of the man who had perpetrated the audiotape hoax: He was a retired police officer who hated Chief Inspector George Oldfield and had sent the tape to vex him.
* * *
In the small town of Genoa, Ohio, in late February of 1980, teenager Debra Sue Vine left her friend’s house at eight in the evening and headed for her own home, two blocks away. She never arrived. The next morning, her father, vice president of a local bank, reported her missing. A search of the area between her home and the friend’s home turned up one of Debra’s mittens. Later that morning, an aunt who was staying at the Vine home received a telephone call from someone she described as a white male in his late teens or early twenties with a Southern or New England accent. He said, “We have your daughter. We want eighty thousand dollars or you will never see her again.” The aunt asked to speak to Debra, and the caller hung up.
The aunt told police that because of the unique characteristics of the Genoa telephone system, she believed the call had been a local rather than a long-distance call. The following day, Debra’s father received another call at his residence, from a man he thought was speaking with a Mexican accent. The man claimed to have Debra and wanted fifty thousand dollars. Mr. Vine, too, asked to speak with his daughter, and the caller said that Vine would just have to trust him, and that instructions for delivery of the money would be given later. The phone call was recorded.
Because ransom demands had been made, the FBI was able to enter the case. Genoa is twenty miles from Toledo, and the Cleveland office of the FBI became involved. What seemed like a big break came the next day—three days after the abduction. Some of Debra’s clothing was recovered about two miles west of Genoa, at the side of a county road, and the remainder was found the following day on another county road in the same general area. Near her sweater was a crumpled-up handwritten map, on yellow legal paper. The map depicted the general area where the clothing was found, and markings on it seemed to indicate that a search ought to be made near a bridge over a river. The authorities went to the bridge and found tire tracks and two sets of footprints that indicated someone had dragged something to the bridge. A police dog, brought along to sniff, was quite excited by these findings, but a search of the river found nothing.
The police thought it certain they had found the dump site of the body, and they continued to search along the river. A tape recorder had been set up to monitor the Vine family’s phone, but no further messages from the abductor were received just then.
In my early days at the Bureau, I had been assigned to the Cleveland office, and still knew many of the agents there. As so often happened, I was in the area of the crime, conducting a road school, and the Cleveland office learned about this and contacted me.
From FBI agents Dick Wrenn and George Steinbach, I learned the details of the abduction (such as were then known), heard about the sequence of finding the clothing, looked at the map, listened to the tape-recording of the ransom-demand phone call, and came to an immediate conclusion. The clues had been deliberately staged and were misleading. The police had been directed to the supposed dump site by a detailed map, and they were meant to believe that the body had been thrown into the river.
When I encounter a deliberate staging, the immediate need is to look in precisely the opposite direction from the one the perpetrator wants me to face. Since the caller avowed that Debra was alive and that there would be more ransom demands, I told my colleagues from the Cleveland office, and the local Genoa authorities, that the staging indicated that Debra was almost certainly dead. Given the usual patterns of these sorts of crimes, it was likely she had been picked up by someone and then raped or sexually assaulted, and most likely had been killed during the assault. It was probably not a well-planned abduction, more of a spur-of-the-moment thing, and the death had been unexpected. After the killing, the killer had had some moments of panic, then had settled down to make a plan for keeping the authorities at bay. The abductor must have felt that any real investigation of the victim would lead to him as a likely suspect, and he had staged the dropping of the clothing and the map and the tire and drag marks by the river as attempts to steer the investigation in precisely the wrong direction. “He’s trying to lead you to a place where you’ll never find the girl,” I concluded.
The phone call also seemed deliberately phony, especially the Hispanic accent—“’Ey mon, I need de mawney ri’ now.” It seemed like the comic José Jimenez accent, not the real thing. The tape was sent on to Dr. Murray Miron of Syracuse University, the Bureau’s psycholinguistic consultant, for more precise analysis, but in light of all the other evidence, I was certain that it was just another aspect of the staging. I thought to myself: This is a community of two thousand people; the likelihood is that the abductor is so visible to the police that he knows the investigation will stumble across him unless he keeps it away from him by every means possible.
I sat down and worked up a profile of the likely offender. He would be an athletically built white male in his late twenties to early thirties. I thought he was athletically built because he had been large enough to abduct Debra from the street without interference, and also because I guessed that he was the sort of antisocial personality who compensated for his personality by muscle building, driving souped-up cars, and wearing cowboy boots. Reasoning along the same lines, I described him as a macho, aggressive sort of individual, one who would be very neat in his appearance and might well have the reputation of a ladies’ man. Believing that this was a spur-of-the-moment crime, I thought that the precrime stresses most likely had to do with the man’s trouble with a woman; this had been an affront to him, and in reaction, he had grabbed the first attractive, vulnerable young woman he came across. The ransom notes, drawings, and staging of the scene made it a virtual certainty that the perpetrator had been someone extremely familiar with police procedure. I postulated that the abductor had been a police officer, a private detective, or a security officer but that he was now unemployed and had been so for six to nine months. I thought it likely that he’d been in a number of scrapes in his life, one of which might have led to the termination of his most recent employment, and possibly to the end of his relationship with a woman, since I was equally certain that he would have been divorced at least once, and in trouble with a woman, either a former wife or a girlfriend. During this unemployed period, I guessed, he would also have had a scrape with the law that would have resulted in an arrest. For most people whose personalities tend to get them fired, troubles do not come singly, and they pyramid after such a basic prop as a job is removed. This man’s rage was great enough so that he would most likely have been unable to stay out of trouble once he had lost his job and his wife or girlfriend. I guessed that as an ex–law-enforcement man he would be driving something that resembled a police car, a late-model automobile, a sedan painted in dark colors, with a CB radio or a device to monitor police frequencies, and the antenna on the car positioned on the rear fender or in the center of the hood.
As the reader will have discerned from many of the other cases reported in this book, many killers like to take on the color of authority in order to control situations and victims. In some instances—and not as rarely as I would like, since I’ve spent my professional life in law enforcement and have great respect for the vast majority of officers who uphold the law—the same urge to use the color of authority for nefarious purposes is present in people who manage to get themselves on police forces. Sometimes it happens that an officer is kicked off one force for infractions that don’t quite add up to an indictable crime but are serious nonetheless. He tells the next for
ce to which he applies that he was severed, say, because of a personality conflict with a superior—certainly a common-enough occurrence—and manages to get hired again. In Chapter 6, I discussed Gerard Schaefer, whose employment history as a police officer fit that pattern.
In the Genoa case, my profile produced two prime suspects, one of whom was a thirty-one-year-old officer recently fired by the Genoa police department for cohabiting with an eighteen-year-old girl; and a second who had at one time been with a neighboring police department, had most recently been a railroad detective, and who had been fired from that last job nine months earlier. The first man had been hanging around the fringes of the investigation and making himself overly cooperative. That sort of behavior often masks guilt, because the offender tries to learn what the police know, so he can stay one step ahead of the authorities. Though I advised the Cleveland office against a polygraph on either of the likely suspects, because true psychopaths are frequently able to “beat the box,” the Cleveland office decided to give the first suspect a lie-detector test. Then they called me to tell me the suspect had passed. I asked whether his alibi had been verified, and the answer was, “What for? He passed the polygraph test.” I requested that they verify his alibi nonetheless, and that was done. This first former police officer was eliminated as a suspect.
The second man’s name was Jack Gall, and he seemed to fit the profile extraordinarily well. He was having difficulty with his former wife, with whom he jointly owned a several-cabin resort on a Michigan lake that they were trying to sell. While in Michigan, after his separation from the railroad detective force, Gall had been arrested for a burglary. He owned a late-model Monte Carlo, complete with CB radio, and so on. In fact, he fit the profile so precisely that it was decided to keep only a loose surveillance on him in hopes that he would tip his hand.
Several weeks went by before the victim’s father received another phone call at his residence from the man with the Mexican accent, telling him there would shortly be instructions on where to drop the ransom money. One of the Genoa officers on the case, listening later to the tape, said that he was now sure the caller was Jack Gall, because Gall had sometimes regaled fellow officers with his Mexican-accented stories. A fourth call came the next day, April 10, and was successfully traced to a pay phone on the outside wall of a Woolco store a few miles from Genoa. Surveillance was put on that pay phone in hopes that the kidnapper would use it again. That simple, obvious step led directly to the conclusion of the case.
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