Samples was quite concerned with records and documentation. John Cochran, a forensic psychologist who worked regularly in the Oregon prison system, believed that Samples, as a clerk in the prison’s psychological section, had altered and retyped his own prison records so that they would show he had been rehabilitated. This allegation of tampering with the records was never proved, however, as some of the records disappeared entirely. Cochran was used to working with inmates, and thought Samples was a classic sexual sadist. Cochran repeatedly told the authorities and the press that such a condition was not really curable; in other words, that despite the outward signs, Samples was not rehabilitated, because he could not be. There was reason to believe, Cochran said, that if Samples was released, he would kill again; he recommended against the commutation, but his expertise was disregarded.
* * *
When it came time for me to go to Oregon to see the governor, my wife was in the hospital after a serious automobile accident; though she was injured, she still urged me to fly out and fulfill my obligation. The controversy over Duane Samples had already reached the press in a big way. The commutation battle had also become a political one, with the Oregon legislature beginning consideration of bills that would undercut the governor’s power to issue such commutations.
Statements in the pages of the Oregon newspapers and on television news programs articulated the arguments of both sides. One side said that Samples had been rehabilitated and that if our society believed at all in the rehabilitation of prisoners and in the possibility that mental disease can be treated and reversed, Samples should be given his chance at a new life outside prison walls. Many psychologists and psychiatrists—though not those who worked regularly in prisons—held this view, as did Vietnam vets and their political supporters and many liberals. It was an attractive view to hold, one that saw human beings as capable of change and growth, one that believed in the ability of psychiatry to treat mental disease, and in an optimistic prognosis for a man who seemed to have been rehabilitated.
The other side contended that Samples was a sexual sadist whose outbursts had been constrained only because he had been behind bars, that there was a distinct chance that if released he would repeat the murderous behavior that had already landed him in prison, and that therefore he should not be released. It was in a sense a pessimistic view, one implying that psychiatry can understand mental disease but that some conditions are beyond treatment, and that had reference to the fact that many, many inmates in prisons are recidivists who repeat their crimes after their release and have to be caught and incarcerated again.
To my mind, both arguments were a little windy. I prefer to reason from facts, and the facts I had found all indicated that Samples fit the pattern I had already observed in so many cases of serial murder, in which a man whose violent fantasies had been developing since childhood eventually realized those fantasies and murdered someone. Samples’s own writings, his drifting, drugs, and bad relationships with women in the years prior to the murder, the details of the murder itself, and his lying about his military record and the source of his problems all were indications of recognizably psychopathic behavior. The Oregon prison system already held several men who had similarly fit the pattern and committed multiple homicide, including Jerome Brudos and Richard Lawrence Marquette. Both had been prematurely released from confinement by the state after a history of bizarre fantasies and violent acts in their younger years, only to kill when allowed to return to free society. In nearby California, Ed Kemper had killed many more people after his own premature release from an institution where he had been placed for having murdered his grandparents when he was a teenager. None of their murderous fantasies had subsided, even after incarceration. They were stable while in custody, but that was not an indication that they would be capable of living on the outside without again resorting to murder.
Near the end of June 1981, and the night before we were to see the governor, the prosecution’s team sat down together. In addition to Van Dyke, McMillen, and myself, there was Dr. John Cochran of the Forensic Psychology Service of the Oregon State Hospital, Steven H. Jensen, unit director of the correctional treatment program at the hospital, and Dr. Peter DeCoursey, a Portland psychologist who had evaluated Samples in 1975, just after the murder. We discussed what we would do the next morning, and in the course of it I suggested to Van Dyke that since Samples was basing his commutation on post-Vietnam stress syndrome, that his claims could be verified or refuted through examination of his military records. Van Dyke had had these in his hands but hadn’t looked at such things as the DD 214, which showed no awards for valor in combat, and certainly no Bronze Star. Nor had the prosecutors thought to ask the Army, as I had, whether Hugh Hanna or Randy Ingrahm had really been killed in combat. Sarah McMillen asked me if I could find out whether Randy Ingrahm was alive, and I said she ought to do it officially, but said I’d make a try, as well, when I returned to Quantico.
Next morning, we went to the state capitol building to make our presentation. I was up first, and I found Governor Atiyeh visibly nervous. He asked me whether I was from the local FBI office, and when I said I had come from Quantico, he wanted to know what this issue had to do with the FBI, since it was not a federal case. I explained that I was an expert on violent criminal behavior, and had come at the request of the Marion County authorities, a request that had gone through proper channels at the FBI.
We had expected this sort of challenge. I had even discussed it with the legal counsel people at Quantico and at FBI headquarters before traveling to Oregon. We had all agreed that it would be wrong for me to comment specifically on Samples, and so I confined my remarks to Atiyeh and his aides to six similar cases that I knew very well, including those of Brudos, Marquette, and Kemper. I hit hard on such matters as Brudos and Marquette, stressing that these men had been prematurely released from prison after early murders, and that because of their lifelong violent fantasies that they could not control, they had killed again shortly after release. My presentation was scheduled for twenty minutes. After the first ten, Atiyeh left the room and did not return. We were told he had an important matter to address. I got the distinct impression that the governor had realized the information and advice he had previously received was insufficient for him to have agreed to the commutation. He seemed to prefer to be seen as somewhat distanced from this matter, not personally involved, that it was really a matter to be dealt with by his aides. Those aides listened politely but appeared to make no notes as I continued my presentation. Then the mental-health specialists made theirs, which described Duane Samples specifically as a danger to society and a man who would most likely remain so in the future.
I flew back home, believing the controversy was now behind me. We had given the governor the information he had previously not had, and now the matter was in his hands. But the shouting wouldn’t stop. Before Governor Atiyeh even rendered his decision, Marquette filed an appeal for commutation similar to that of Samples. Marquette’s was summarily turned down. Atiyeh’s decision on Samples was eagerly awaited but was not forthcoming. In the next month or so, under the prodding of Sarah McMillen, I managed to locate Randy Ingrahm, who was an insurance salesman in Illinois; he had been an enlisted man, not an officer in Vietnam, and had been wounded, but he said he didn’t remember Samples, though he had been with Samples’s artillery unit. I conveyed this information to McMillen, who publicized it widely. Then Samples struck back: The man who had died, he said, was named Ingraham, not Ingrahm (as he had previously insisted); the Army confirmed that a man with that name had died in Vietnam during 1966 or 1967 but had had nothing to do with Samples’s unit.
Samples’s other blow was to insist publicly that the prosecution team’s presentation was faulty, since it spoke of a sexual crime, and, he said, there had been no sexual attack during the murder. How could there be a sex crime without sexual contact? he argued. As the reader knows from the earlier cases and examples in this book, the lack of penetration of
the victim’s body is characteristic of certain types of disorganized murderers who are nonetheless fulfilling sexual fantasies in their killings—but this explanation requires a lengthy narrative to be effective, and in the arena of the public mind is not able to overwhelm the sort of phrase that Samples used, the sort that fits neatly into a television sound bite.
The controversy interested the CBS program “60 Minutes,” which did an “investigative” segment that was fairly shallow. Post-Vietnam stress syndrome was an idea whose time had come, and Duane Samples was an articulate man: Together, those elements proved irresistible to the news program. CBS presented a sympathetic view of Samples’s plight. By this time, Samples knew all the right things to say and what to display in his behavior. How could such a polite, contrite man be disbelieved? The United States was putting the Vietnam War behind it, and we had to be understanding about its last victims, our soldiers who had fought and come home to disdain. CBS seemed to feel that the clinching argument in the case was that the attempt to impugn Samples by reference to Randy Ingrahm’s nondeath had failed.
Those attempts were still not complete, however. While in Europe on an Army assignment, I managed to locate Hugh “Bud” Hanna. He had become a major, assigned to SHAPE headquarters in Belgium, and I talked with him there. He remembered Samples vividly, because Samples was supposed to have been his replacement in that forward observer position, and there had been a problem with Samples. The Stanford graduate had been counseling enlisted men against the war, and was considered less than stable. Rather than send Samples into combat right away, the brass had decided to return Hanna to that post and see whether Samples straightened out. While in that forward post, Hanna was shot, hit in the mouth, tongue, and palate. When it came time for him possibly to testify against Samples for his antiwar activities, Hanna could hardly speak, and the issue was mooted. I conveyed what I knew about Hanna’s physical health and other comments to Van Dyke’s office, which passed them on to the governor’s aides. The summer wore on, and the governor still wasn’t making public his decision.
Then Samples’s former commanding officer got into the act. Toward the end of August 1981, Col. Courtney Prisk told reporter Bob Smith that he had known Samples in Vietnam “as well as any commanding officer knows a lieutenant in his unit. Probably better, because we talked often.” In Smith’s article, printed in the Silverton Appeal-Tribune. Prisk went on to say, “Duane showed concern for the ‘enlightenment’ of the times.… He was a guy I thought needed frequent counseling to keep his spirits up. He was strange—not peculiar—but strange. He was disturbed by things that did not disturb others.” Prisk pointed out the fact that Ingrahm and Hanna were alive, not dead, and recounted that there had been one casualty in his unit from a claymore mine, but it had been three hundred yards from Samples, and he doubted that Duane had even seen the event, though it had been talked about in the unit. Prisk summed it up for the reporter: “I believe Samples has taken two or three things he saw or heard about and fabricated them into something.… [Duane Samples] was a good soldier and did a good job in Vietnam. There’s no question about that. That’s why that whole stress thing is just so much bull—.”
Maybe it was the commanding officer’s statement that finally swayed Atiyeh or his aides, maybe it was the convincing presentation that I and the other members of the district attorney’s team had made, or maybe it was the public outcry that expressed itself in pressure from the state legislature in the form of pending legislation to limit the commutation powers, and in alarm from many ordinary citizens expressed in the letters-to-the-editor columns of the newspapers—but in late 1981, Atiyeh reversed his commutation decision. Samples would serve out the remainder of his sentence, until the parole board—if ever—saw fit to release him from prison.
* * *
After the commutation decision, Samples came to believe that I was the culprit, the man who had unfairly confined him to jail, and he mounted a campaign against me that took several reams of paperwork and several years to resolve. The bogeyman could not be someone like John Cochran, who had known him well, or any of the other mental-health professionals who had treated him and who had been in the forefront of recommending that he be kept in prison for a good long time; no, the culprit had to be the hired mudslinger from Washington, the man who had wanted to interview him officially but whom Samples had turned down. Samples enlisted state legislators and even a United States senator in the process, writing letters to ask them to prod the bureaucracy for an investigation of my role in the whole affair. I had slandered him in front of the governor, Samples alleged; I had no business saying anything about his crimes or those of serial murderers; I wasn’t a Ph.D. in criminal psychology and therefore was not academically certified enough to know anything about anything. As is usual when the bureaucracy is prodded, an investigation is undertaken and everyone has to spend a lot of time and paper answering the inquiry. That’s what happened as a result of Duane Samples’s typing away in prison and trying to get me. Fortunately, both Van Dyke and I had proceeded precisely by the book and had a lengthy paper trail to cite and to show to anyone who was interested. Eventually I had to give a sworn deposition to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility. Their decision that I had done nothing wrong ended the official inquiry into the matter.
Duane Samples was released from prison in 1991. I certainly hope that he has been truly rehabilitated and will not repeat the sort of crime for which he had previously been convicted. Only his continued proper behavior will demonstrate that of course.
10
TIGHTENING THE NET
Back in the 1950s, a serial rapist and killer was slashing his way through the Los Angeles area, but only one investigator suspected that several seemingly unconnected murders of young women were attributable to that lone killer. The search for that killer led, a quarter century later, to the formation of governmental structures for tightening the net around all future serial criminals.
Harvey Murray Glatman was a killer ahead of his time. In the 1950s, he put advertisements in newspapers that promised women auditions for modeling jobs. His ads said that professional models were not wanted, but that good pay could be obtained by young women with no experience in modeling. Women answered his ads, and when they did, he offered more money than they were making in their current jobs for a few hours of discreet posing. He’d convince them to go to a secluded apartment, then ask them to take off more and more clothing as he photographed them. Glatman understood that it was most likely the women had not told friends or relatives where they were going, in case they might disapprove; therefore, the women who posed for him would not be missed for some time. Glatman seems to have told himself that because these women were willing to take off their clothes in front of a stranger, they were inviting rape, and so he raped them; then he killed them so they wouldn’t talk about the rapes. It’s a pattern that was later replicated by other killers—Jerome Brudos in Oregon, for instance.
I say that Glatman was a man ahead of his time because the idea of putting personal ads in the newspapers was new in the 1950s; today, it’s commonplace, with fringe newspapers and sometimes even mainstream magazines printing personal ads enabling two strangers to meet. You’ve seen or heard of such ads: young bachelor, handsome, seeks woman interested in sharing experiences, skiing, dancing. Most of the ads are legitimate; a few disguise a rapist or killer looking for victims. In Glatman’s case, the ads were a reflection of fifteen years of fantasy development, during which he had steadily escalated from infantile sexual experimentation to making passes at girls, to minor sexual assault, and then to rape and murder.
Los Angeles homicide detective Pierce Brooks was the man put in charge of the investigation of two seemingly unrelated murders of young women in the area. Brooks was already an unusual man, a naval officer and blimp pilot who had become a top investigator in Los Angeles. He was frustrated during his investigation because although he felt that one man might be responsible for both murders, and poss
ibly some others in the area, he had no systematic way of checking his hypothesis. So he personally combed the newspaper files in several counties surrounding his own, and local police files, to see whether other murders had been committed that matched the MO of the killer he believed he was chasing. To make a long story short, this spadework eventually led to the conviction of Glatman, who when confronted with the evidence confessed to the murders.
Glatman’s extensive confession, obtained by Brooks, is one of the earliest documents of a serial killer’s mind that we have, and it reflects many of the factors that I have outlined in other chapters of this book. Among the most interesting aspects of the confession were Glatman’s rationalizations and reports of his conversations with the women after they had been raped. As with many killers, Glatman became annoyed when a woman would try to control him—for instance, by saying that she would not tell her roommate about the rape if Glatman let her go—and that made him angry enough to kill her. Actually, the chances of his having let her get away after the rape were near zero, for he was in the clutches of a fantasy that had been forming in his mind for many years, a fantasy that included murder. Glatman was tried and convicted, and then executed in 1957; Brooks attended the execution.
If any of this sounds familiar to you, that is because both the killer and the detective in the case have become the subjects of fictional treatments. In a seminar for mystery writers a few years ago, I presented the case of Glatman, and Mary Higgins Clark asked me for more details, which I furnished her: She used the Glatman story as the basis for her recent best-selling novel Loves Music, Loves to Dance. Years earlier, the detective in Joseph Wambaugh’s celebrated book The Onion Field was Pierce Brooks, though that book deals with a case other than the Glatman matter.
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