Whoever Fights Monsters

by Robert K. Ressler

  Brooks’s experiences in trying to pry information from other police jurisdictions in the vicinity of Los Angeles led him to propose a system for linking all the departments in California, so that future criminals could be tracked and trapped more easily. He envisioned doing this by computer, because teletypes, another option, were clumsy and not conducive to sharing information. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, computers were quite new, very large, and very expensive, and California said it couldn’t afford to buy computers and use them for such police purposes. So Brooks put the idea on a back burner and went on with his career, becoming chief of homicide detectives in Los Angeles and, later, chief of police in Springfield and Eugene, Oregon, and in Lakewood, Colorado.

  In the mid-1970s, when I first began seriously looking into the personal histories of serial killers, the Glatman case caught my attention, and I studied it from the public records. As the reader knows, I spent the late 1970s putting together the Criminal Personality Research Project, getting it approved by FBI headquarters, and obtaining a Justice Department grant to interview convicted murderers. In that project, and in the growth of the Behavioral Sciences Unit, we were beginning to institutionalize some of the personal initiatives that I had made. By this time Teten and Mullany had retired, and I was the FBI’s senior criminologist and criminal profiler; from what had been almost an ad hoc handful of men looking into murders, rapes, and abductions, we had become a formal group of people who profiled cases for local police and were reaching out to do research in the prisons. In addition, and despite some foot dragging inside the FBI, I had managed to start a program to train experienced field agents as profiling coordinators, bringing them to Quantico in 1979 for an intensive course in what was becoming a bit more of a science and accordingly less of an art, then sending them back to their field offices. There, fifty-five newly trained agents became the resident experts in profiling, aided in our research, and acted as coordinators when there was a case where our help was sought; they funneled information to us and took our analysis back to the local police departments.

  In 1981, Quantico director Jim McKenzie and I were sitting at a bar, drinking beers after work, and I was waxing philosophic.

  We had already established the greatest training facility for law enforcement in the country, perhaps in the world, and our fingerprint files and our evidence-analysis laboratory had long been considered the best available anywhere. I reminded Jim that the laws had recently changed, and that the FBI had new latitude to work in the areas of violent crime that had heretofore been solely the province of local police departments. And I suggested that we now ought to develop at Quantico, with our growing resources in behavioral sciences and our field coordinators, a National Center for Violent Crime Analysis. Under that umbrella, I’d put the CPRP, special training for police interns, programs to take the results of the research projects and apply them to such areas as assisting police in making out behaviorally oriented search warrants and conducting interviews, and other aspects of our in-service training for local police and for our own agents. Deadpan, McKenzie said that it ought to be the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime—and that by switching two words, the concept had become his idea. We both laughed, understanding the joke about the way in which bureaucracies worked and management superiors took credit for everything. McKenzie recognized that the National Center was my idea, and that it was a good one. In the years following, McKenzie fought hard to make the NCAVC a reality, and it certainly would not have become more than an idea without his tireless endeavors; organizational change does not take place in the federal government without a well-placed and indefatigable champion of the cause.

  The NCAVC eventually absorbed all of the behavioral sciences programs at Quantico with which I had been associated. The reader will recall that Quantico began in 1972 as a training facility for in-service agents and visiting police, as well as for new agents. Much of that training of experienced personnel was later subsumed under the NCAVC; in addition, the umbrella idea incorporated a lot of research and information-gathering programs that had never been done at Quantico before I started going out on my own to interview convicted murderers in prisons. From the original Criminal Personality Research Project, for instance, similar projects were developed that looked more closely at child abuse, at arson, at rape, at the minds of assassins, at spies and counterpies, and at other important subjects in criminal justice. The NCAVC became, in effect, the behavioral sciences research and training arm at Quantico. The Behavioral Sciences Unit had enlarged its universe considerably.

  While we were looking into the possibility of establishing the NCAVC, I learned that a man named Pierce Brooks had obtained a small grant from the Justice Department to study the feasibility of establishing a Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. After more than twenty years, he had revived his dream of the late 1950s, and had done so in a day when working with computers had become much more acceptable and a lot less expensive.

  In the interim between the era when Harvey Glatman was an active killer and the early 1980s, there had been a large and significant change in the landscape of violent crime in the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s, virtually all of the homicides in the United States were solved within a year of the time they had been committed. That was because most of the approximately ten thousand murders committed during any one year fell into the category of murders perpetrated by someone known to the victim—by a spouse, another relative, a neighbor, or a coworker. Statistically speaking, very few had been done by a stranger or were for other reasons “unsolvable.” By the 1970s, however, the earlier situation had changed drastically. Now, of the approximately twenty thousand murders committed annually in the United States, about five thousand a year were going unsolved—about 25 to 30 percent. It was this fraction of the murders that Pierce Brooks hoped to address with his VICAP system. In the intervening twenty years since he had initially formulated the idea, Pierce had broadened it considerably; he wanted the system to be countrywide, not just in California, and he wanted all police departments to be able to feed in data and to use the data that was stored in the system to evaluate their own unsolved crimes.

  Learning of the National Institute of Justice grant to Brooks, I got in touch with him and invited him to be on the board of advisers of our Criminal Personality Research Project, and to visit us at Quantico. When he saw what we were doing, he invited me and my immediate superior to join his own task force, which was operating from the good offices of Professor Doug Moore and the Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, one of the nation’s academic centers for the study of law enforcement.

  I never saw anyone milk a federal grant the way Pierce Brooks did. Any person knowledgeable about the ways of government would have asked Justice for a couple of million dollars to study the feasibility of a nationwide computer system; Brooks had asked for and received around $35,000, and he shepherded every penny of the public’s money. He had assembled a stellar board of experts in homicide and other relevant fields. To attend a conference in Texas, we were asked to book our air tickets months in advance and to take supersavers to keep the costs down. At Sam Houston State, we stayed in dormitories, and, when it came time for a meal, Brooks had buses to ferry us to fast-food restaurants. No lavish expenditures here. While I admired his husbanding of the public’s money, I felt that Brooks’s initial plan for VICAP would shortly become unworkable, however.

  His idea was to have the national headquarters for VICAP in a room or two at the Lakewood police department. There would be ten or fifteen terminals around the country, only in the largest localities, which meant that each terminal would have to service two or three states. To actually run the system, he’d have to apply for federal grants each year; that was when he planned to add several goose eggs to the amount he’d requested for the initial study.

  After he and I had gotten to know one another, I leveled with Pierce and advised him on my view of the realities of government and grants and the lik
e. The federal government being what it was, I said, even though he might obtain a large grant in 1982, there was the likelihood that if the administration changed in 1984, a new administration would not renew the grant and that the project would die due to lack of funds. However, if the program was part of an already-existing government agency, the refunding of it could become a part of the permanent appropriation for that agency, which would mean it was much less likely to be dropped at the time of an administrative change. Moreover, I argued, if we put the VICAP program under a federal agency, there would be offices and personnel already in place, telecommunications on site, possibly even a computer system with excess capacity already installed, and the new money could be better used. One could put such a program under the auspices of the Post Office or the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—but the most logical home for it was the FBI. Even though a lot of local police departments resented the FBI—remember the one-way street?—it was clear that the FBI was the correct setting for the VICAP program, especially in conjunction with the NCAVC, whose establishment we were concurrently exploring.

  Brooks had to agree with the logic of my argument, and we began to set the wheels in motion to bring the VICAP program under the aegis of the FBI, as part of the NCAVC; when the new and larger grant was obtained, Brooks would come to Quantico to manage the program during its first year. With those concepts in mind, Brooks and the FBI applied for a grant of millions of dollars to begin the VICAP and NCAVC programs.

  My reasons for being so interested in VICAP were rooted in the work I had been doing for the FBI during the previous decade. In too many cases, police who were confronted with “stranger” murders did not act on them in the most optimal way in the early stages. David Berkowitz had killed several people before the New York City police began to acknowledge that there was any connection among the victims or the crimes. If VICAP had been in full operation, the connection would have been made sooner, and the arrest might have taken place in time to prevent the later murders. Similarly, during Wayne Williams’s series of killings in Atlanta, for over a year the police denied that they had a serial killer’s work on their hands.

  VICAP was needed to help the police in those cases, and VICAP was needed to tie into the NCAVC and other existing government programs such as those dealing with missing persons for another very good reason—to release people such as the parents of Johnny Gosch from their agony. One can get over a death, even the death of a child, but the uncertainty of not knowing anything keeps wounds open and hurting. Ten years after the abduction of their son, the Gosches would like to know whether he’s dead or alive, whether his remains have ever been found, whether his killer has ever been caught and incarcerated, perhaps for a different crime. They need to put the matter to rest, and to do so, they need information. VICAP and the NCAVC could help to provide the information that would make them rest easier.

  * * *

  The establishment of VICAP and the NCAVC was no exception to the rule that making institutional change takes a while. Discussions on VICAP continued for a year. During one of our sessions in Texas, a member of the VICAP task force, a former reporter, burst into the room bearing the news that a man named Henry Lee Lucas had confessed to over one hundred killings in nearly every state in the union. Here, said the former reporter, was a perfect case on which to hang the need for VICAP.

  Those of us with more direct experience in homicide investigations looked more askance at the Lucas case, even though we did agree that its very existence might be helpful in convincing the public of the need for VICAP.

  Henry Lee Lucas was a one-eyed drifter in his late forties when he was convicted of killing an elderly woman in a small town in Texas in 1983. At the time of his sentencing, Lucas told the judge that although the authorities had nailed him on this charge, it was no big deal, because since getting out jail in 1975—he had been sent there for the murder of his mother—he’d killed hundreds of other people across the nation, some by himself and some in conjunction with another drifter, Ottis Toole, whom he met first in 1979. That admission, and his later detailed confessions, kept Lucas off death row and sent law-enforcement people throughout the country into a remarkable frenzy that lasted several years.

  The first people that Lucas roped in were the Texas Rangers. There were lots of inquiries coming to Texas from police and sheriff’s departments in many states, seeking to find out whether Lucas had had anything to do with some of the unsolved murder cases they still had on their books. The Rangers quietly let it be known that if you had such an unsolved case in your jurisdiction and would send the particulars to them, they’d begin an inquiry and advise you whether you ought to come to Texas and put your questions directly to Lucas.

  Let’s say your police department in southern Illinois had an unsolved homicide, a young woman raped and knifed to death behind a convenience store, and the signs seemed to point to the murderer having been a transient. You sent the case jacket to the Rangers and they took up the matter with the prisoner. Instead of asking indirect questions to learn whether Lucas had been in Illinois on the dates in question, or whether he’d ever killed anyone near a convenience store, the Rangers asked especially leading questions of Lucas, questions that gave him the race, sex, and age of the victim, and sometimes even showed him the crime-scene photographs—to jog his memory—and then asked him whether he had committed the murder. Lucas was shrewd enough to say no to more than half the cases, but he also said yes to a large percentage. And when he said yes, a representative from that police department would go to Texas to interview Lucas personally, and then, often as not, would arrange for Lucas to take a trip to the state in which the murder had occurred, to visit the crime scene, testify in a trial, and so on. Almost always, there was no other evidence and no witnesses on which to base a conviction for that crime. Incredibly, police from thirty-five states used this process to close the books on 210 unsolved murders.

  In the process, of course, Henry Lee Lucas got to leave his non-air-conditioned cell in Texas for large periods of time; on his excursions, he was conveyed to distant locations by airplane or car, stayed in motels, ate well in restaurants, and was generally treated as a celebrity. At one point early in the game, a sort of convention was held in which police officers from all over the country went to a central location to “discuss” the Lucas cases. I didn’t attend, but I was told that this was the pinnacle of chaos; observers likened the atmosphere to the pit of a commodities market, with everyone yelling and screaming and making hand gestures to try to claim certain cases as their own. My impression is that this fiasco was fueled not only by the need of police departments to close their difficult unsolved murder cases but also by the boredom of local policemen, many of whom convinced their superiors that it was important for them to go to Texas on a sort of paid holiday in order to join the queue waiting to get in to interview Lucas.

  One of my superiors wanted to get in on the action and go to Texas to interview Lucas—not really to obtain information but just to be able to say he’d been there and interviewed such a heinous criminal. Since I controlled the purse strings of the CPRP grant on which he wanted to travel, I was able to veto that idea. One agent from our Houston office did interview Lucas, and asked him whether he had committed the murders in Guyana. “Yep,” Lucas said. The agent asked him how he had gotten to Guyana. “Drove my car,” Lucas responded. Questioned further, Lucas said he wasn’t certain of the exact location of Guyana, but thought it was Louisiana or Texas. In short, he freely admitted that he had been responsible for the many hundreds of people who had died at the hands of Jim Jones in the Jonestown murder-suicides, several thousand miles away from the continental United States, when he obviously had had nothing to do with them. This was a clear indication that his confessions about the hundreds of other murders were just as false.

  Eventually, records of Lucas’s employment in the mushroom fields of Pennsylvania, sales of scrap metal in Florida, credit-card receipts, and other evidence were c
ompared and tallied, and the discrepancies in his stories were made manifest. Some of the most important work in this regard was conducted by Hugh Aynesworth and Jim Henderson of the Dallas Times Herald. Such diligent spadework established that, for instance, Lucas had physically been in Florida when a murder to which he later admitted was being committed in Texas.

  By the time I interviewed Lucas, years after the controversy had died down, the dust had settled and Lucas said that he had actually committed none of the murders to which he had previously confessed. Under closer questioning, he did admit that since 1975 he had “killed a few,” fewer than ten, perhaps five. He just wasn’t sure. He had told all those lies in order to have fun, and to show up what he termed the stupidity of the police.

  It took several years for the Lucas fiasco to be resolved. The task-force member had been right, though: If we had had VICAP up and running at the time Lucas made his first startling admission, it would have been easy to see what was truth and what was falsehood in his confession. First, we would have asked the police departments to fill out VICAP forms on their unsolved murders and enter them into the computer system. Then we would have analyzed them by date, location, and MO, and would quickly have been able to show that several of them had been committed on the same date in widely separated locations, thus eliminating the possibility that they were committed by the same man. By such processes of elimination, we would have narrowed the field very quickly and allowed investigators to concentrate on the real possibilities.