* * *
While we were still developing the prototype VICAP form, the police in Los Angeles were in the midst of a major case that they called the Night Stalker. They weren’t completely sure but thought that a single person was responsible for a series of killings in the Hispanic areas of that city. We sent out some people from the emerging VICAP unit to give them technical assistance, primarily to help determine which victims could be attributed to the single killer and which could not. Most of that was fairly obvious to experienced investigators such as Frank Salerno of the LAPD, who had earlier been the point man on the Hillside Strangler case and who was in charge of the Night Stalker operation, but we were testing our form and also trying to be helpful without inserting ourselves into the limelight of the investigation. The goal was to show the police that they could use the FBI as a resource without running the risk of being upstaged. Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, was caught with very little assistance from the FBI, but the case did help us to revise our form, which was initially too lengthy and tried to accomplish too much—as often happens when a project is put together by a committee. Later, we made the form shorter, though it is still quite detailed and takes about an hour for a policeman to fill out.
The mid-1980s, when we were gearing up to ask for funding for VICAP and the NCAVC, coincided with a period that Philip Jenkins of Pennsylvania State University has called “the serial killer panic of 1983 to 1985.” An article by Jenkins in the Criminal Justice Research Bulletin (1988) cited numerous stories in newspapers and magazines during that period, all making the point that there were lots more unsolved murders in the United States than there had ever been before, that a large number of these were serial murders, and that new criminal-justice-system elements were needed to attack the growing problem. Jenkins cited the Lucas case as evidence that such matters were blown out of proportion. As I’ve reported earlier in this chapter, the trend certainly did show more and more unsolved “stranger” murders in the 1970s and 1980s than in early decades, but Jenkins was basically correct in his thesis: There was somewhat of a media feeding frenzy, if not a panic, over this issue in the mid-1980s, and we at the FBI and other people involved in urging the formation of VICAP did add to the general impression that there was a big problem and that something needed to be done about it. We didn’t exactly go out seeking publicity, but when a reporter called, and we had a choice whether or not to cooperate on a story about violent crime, we gave the reporter good copy. In feeding the frenzy, we were using an old tactic in Washington, playing up the problem as a way of getting Congress and the higher-ups in the executive branch to pay attention to it.
The difficulty was that some people in the bureaucracy went too far in their quest for attention. Pierce Brooks and I had urged the formation of NCAVC and VICAP on good grounds, but in our minds, these were long-term projects that might not pay off right away, at least not insofar as capturing criminals at the first touch of a computer-terminal button. I recall saying to Pierce that if VICAP began officially in 1985, it would not be fully operational until 1995. My reasons for this prediction were simple to understand. Filling out VICAP forms and sending them in to Quantico would be a voluntary procedure on the part of local police departments; it would take time to make those departments recognize the advantage to be gained by filling out and sending in the forms, and it would also take time to build a sufficient data base and to perfect a system able to retrieve the information in a way that would be helpful in solving crimes.
President Ronald Reagan announced the formation of the NCAVC at the annual convention of the National Sheriffs Association in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 21, 1984. He said that its primary mission was the identification and tracking of repeat killers. Pilot funds were provided by the National Institutes of Justice. Pierce Brooks came on board, spent nine months with us, and, at the end of May 1985, sat down at a terminal at Quantico and watched as we entered data from the first real, incoming VICAP form into the computer. It had taken twenty-seven years, but his dream of a way to match data from one violent crime to another had finally taken operational form. Three days later, Pierce was on his way back to Oregon, and the program was turned over to me to manage.
I didn’t want it. VICAP is a number-cruncher’s dream, and I’m more interested in behavioral sciences and in active, ongoing investigations. The best man for the job was a Department of Justice supervisor, Robert O. Heck, who had shepherded the large grant through the bureaucratic mills, had done a tremendous amount of work on the project, and had expected to run the program after it was fully established. Higher-ups in the FBI had even promised that job to him. Once the FBI obtained the grant money, however, the management told Heck that they were going to administer it, not him. Heck was bitter, and so was I. Nonetheless, things kept rolling onward. In October of 1985, the entire cost of funding the NCAVC was absorbed into the regular annual budget of the FBI; its four basic programs were Research and Development (mostly consisting of my Criminal Personality Research Project), Training (of field agents and local police), Profiling, and VICAP.
Another monkey wrench was soon thrown into the works. The original plan for VICAP called for one manager and many junior analysts to do the actual work of taking the data from the incoming forms and entering it into the computer, and others who would actively cajole local police departments into using the forms for their unsolved homicides and other violent crimes. During the first year of appropriations, the money for those subordinate jobs was channeled by my superiors into the purchase of computer equipment. So we had some shiny new electronic playthings, and no one to do the drab, time-consuming work of entering information into the system. In subsequent appropriations, my superiors decided that rather than use the money earmarked for data enterers and junior analysts, they would instead hire high-level managers and senior crime analysts who had very little to analyze because very little data was being punched into the system. It had been naively predicted that all the unsolved cases would go into the computer in the first year. Since there were about five thousand unsolved murders a year, that would have meant that by 1989, after four years of operation, there ought to have been twenty thousand cases in the computer’s memory; by that time, only five thousand had been entered, and the program appeared to fail to live up to its potential. Only in the late 1980s, near to the time of my retirement from the Bureau, were we able to hire the appropriate midlevel technicians to get data put in, and simultaneously to convince enough local police departments to send us their completed forms so that VICAP would begin to have a chance to show what it could do.
There are still several major cities and states that won’t fully participate in the VICAP program, and their refusal to participate means the system has a somewhat lower chance of accomplishing the goals set for it. I believe that the federal government should mandate local departments to report their unsolved violent crimes to VICAP, as they are required to do for the Uniform Crime Reporting System. If this was done, and such VICAP reporting was standard procedure in all police departments, I am certain that we could reduce the 25 percent of all unsolved homicides to between 5 and 10 percent.
Here’s my reasoning. VICAP doesn’t all have to do with serial murderers, who would be traced because, for example, we are able to match the pattern of knife wounds on victim A in Massachusetts to those on victim B in New Hampshire, giving police more of a lead on the killer. A lot of other crimes would feed into it. For instance, say that you had a single homicide-by-gun in New Jersey. The bullet was found but not the killer; the information was entered into the VICAP computer though. Say that two years later, in a bar in Texas, a man was arrested for an attempted rape and a gun was seized from him. Running that gun’s ballistic particulars through the VICAP computer might turn up a match, and the man arrested in Texas could be tied to the unsolved single homicide in New Jersey.
We’re not at that point yet, but we will be. And we need to be. As I write this in the late summer of 1991, the need for a strong
VICAP is more apparent than ever. Just recently, after admitting to the killing of one ten-year-old girl, Donald Leroy Evans, in Gulfport, Louisiana, startled his captors and the nation by saying that he has killed more than sixty people in twenty states since 1977. Two of the murders have now been verified, so Evans may in fact be a serial killer of serious proportions. That is not certain, however, and the whole affair could turn into a chaotic mess of the sort that surrounded the Henry Lee Lucas confession in the early 1980s unless the crimes are examined in some detail. The best way to do that would be to enter the details of every crime to which Evans confesses into the VICAP computer, cross-check them against the FBI’s Missing Persons and Unidentified Dead programs, and analyze them against his travel patterns and other particulars so the truth of his serial-killer claims can be evaluated. Using all those systems is now possible, though they are not yet interlinked. Even though certain cities and states in this country have not wanted to work with VICAP, England, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, and other countries have shown great interest in the program. Since my retirement, I have conducted seminars in some of these countries about VICAP and criminal profiling. They are eager to join forces and submit data in the hope of more quickly apprehending violent criminals.
My original estimate that VICAP would be fully operational by 1995 seems in hindsight like a pretty good guess, after all, though I certainly took a lot of heat in the FBI for having said so in 1985.
11
TWO FOR THE SHOW
On June 20, 1988, I was the master of ceremonies for an unusual live, closed-circuit video show featuring two of the country’s most notorious and dangerous serial murderers. The occasion was an attempt to get the VICAP program more widely accepted; in the service of that objective, we were holding the first ever International Homicide Symposium at Quantico. In attendance were three hundred law-enforcement officials from the United States and abroad. Our focus was to try and standardize the procedures for investigating homicides from country to country; each country—indeed, in the United States, each separate jurisdiction—seems to go about the business of examining a crime scene, questioning witnesses, and hunting killers in a different way. As program manager of VICAP, I wanted to make people aware of our national program for the apprehension of violent criminals. Bringing them to Washington, D.C., was the first part of the Bureau’s plan. Giving our guests an experience they would probably never have elsewhere—something to talk about when they got home—was the second part, and that unique experience was going to be provided by live interviews of two notorious serial killers. Because of my extensive interviewing of both men, done over a period of nearly ten years each, I was able to persuade John Wayne Gacy and Edmund Kemper to “visit” with us from their prisons in Illinois and California. Both men trusted me, and, I believe, would not have consented to these unique interviews had I not been in charge of the proceedings and made the request personally. After I had made the preliminary arrangements, a Bureau paper shuffler tried to horn in on the glory and wanted to act as the master of ceremonies; I told him that if Gacy or Kemper heard his voice when he expected to hear mine, he might just refuse to go on with the show, and we’d all have egg on our faces. The paper shuffler decided that he’d have to settle for some brief introductory remarks and then sat down and behaved as a good audience member should, leaving the performance to me.
The idea of interviewing a convicted murderer by satellite had earlier been broached to me by staff members of the Geraldo Rivera television program, but I refused to get involved in asking anyone to appear on commercial television, believing that this was not a proper thing for a Bureau employee to do. The Rivera program had tried to convince the California prison system to let Charles Manson appear live but had been unable to do so; rather, the prison had allowed the program to come and do its own extensive taped interview with Manson; later, this had been broadcast in several parts, during which Dr. Jack Levin of Northeastern University and I were asked to critique what Manson had said.
Our closed-circuit program, by contrast, was “interactive.” The two men faced video cameras whose images were sent to Quantico via satellite and projected on very large screens. I first presented their cases in slide lectures to our audience, then acted as a funnel for the audience’s questions to them. We could see them, but they could only hear us. Each man answered questions for a period of ninety minutes, and it was quite a show, for Gacy and Kemper are both extremely intelligent and articulate, in addition to being dangerous serial murderers.
* * *
I had been driving to Chicago with my family in late 1978 for a Christmas vacation when I heard on the radio that bodies were being discovered on the grounds of a small house near Des Plaines, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago not far from O’Hare airfield and not far from where I had grown up. Several bodies had been discovered, and the radio report said that there might be many more to come.
For a man interested in multiple murder, this was too important an opportunity to pass by, vacation or not. Depositing my family at our relatives’ home, I said a few words of greeting and apology and then grabbed my camera and took off for the crime scene. There were dozens of people swarming around, many of them families looking for hints of vanished relatives. I asked the local FBI agent for help, and he introduced me to the man in charge of the burgeoning investigation, Joe Kozenczak, former Chief of the Des Plaines Police Department. By this time, the search and exhumation of the bodies had been taken over by the Cook County sheriff’s office, and I met those investigators, as well; by chance, Howard Vanick, a lieutenant in that office, had been in my class at Quantico, and so I quickly became acquainted with the case at the time it was breaking.
Here’s how it had begun. December 11, 1978 was Elizabeth Piest’s birthday, and she was waiting for her fifteen-year-old son, Robert Piest, to finish up work at a drugstore in Des Plaines so she could drive him home for the family party. Robert told his mother he had to go out to the parking lot to see a contractor about a summer construction job, one that would pay him nearly twice as much as he was currently making at the drugstore. Ten minutes later, when Bob didn’t come back for her, Mrs. Piest became alarmed, went home, and called the police. They told her that adolescent boys often don’t come home when they’re supposed to, and advised her to stay calm. By eleven-thirty that night, Mrs. Piest could wait no longer, and she insisted to the police that they start to search for her son.
About twenty thousand people a year are reported missing in the Chicago area, and probably nineteen-plus thousand of them are found within a few hours to a year. So police are often reluctant to search seriously for missing people before allowing more time to elapse than had occurred in this case. But Chief of Detectives Joe Kozenczak determined to institute a real search; he, too, had a fifteen-year-old son in the same school as Mrs. Piest, and knew the Piest boy as an all-American kid, a gymnast. This was not the sort of boy to vanish and not call home; it seemed certain that something had gone wrong. Interviewing people at the drugstore, Kozenczak learned that a local contractor, John Wayne Gacy, had been in the store on December 11, doing a remodeling estimate during which he had taken pictures of the place and written down measurements.
Kozenczak had already begun looking for previous conviction records on Gacy, but none turned up by the morning of the thirteenth, when Gacy walked in the door of the police station in response to a call to come in to discuss the matter. Gacy was thirty-six, a short, pudgy man with a double chin and a dark mustache. To outward appearances, he was an upstanding and civic-minded businessman, a contractor who also did interior design and maintenance work; he had been involved in local politics—had even led a Polish Constitution Day parade that featured Rosalynn Carter, and had had his photograph taken with the First Lady—and had dressed up as a clown in full makeup to entertain children at charitable events. He had lived in the same house since 1972 and was well known in the community.
To Kozenczak, Gacy denied knowing Robert Piest or having any
contact with him. Joe told Gacy that he had been seen in the parking lot with the boy, and Gacy changed his story slightly to cover the possibility that he might have been seen in contiguity with him at the parking lot but no further. Kozenczak told me later that he had had an intuitive feeling that Gacy was lying; the way Gacy made denials was too pat and not completely convincing. Kozenczak’s men obtained a search warrant and looked into Gacy’s house in a very cursory way; they found some young men’s clothing and a receipt for a roll of film then being developed at the pharmacy in Des Plaines where Piest worked, a receipt not in Gacy’s name. The investigation revealed that Piest had loaned his jacket to a girl who also worked in the store; she had turned in a roll of film for developing and had mistakenly left the receipt in the pocket of the jacket when she returned the jacket to Piest.
Kozenczak and his superiors felt they did not have enough information yet on which to arrest Gacy for anything—officially, Robert Piest was still “missing”—but they did have enough to put Gacy under complete and open surveillance and to question his friends, associates, and acquaintances. This was a tight surveillance. The men were on the street with him, and when he was in his car, the watchers sometimes came close to locking bumpers with him, trying to provoke him into some action. Gacy was calm at first. He told the tailers that their stupid superiors had put them up to this and that he didn’t hold them personally responsible. He’d tell them where his next destination was, in case they lost him in traffic, and at least once offered to buy them lunch at the diner toward which he was heading. In five days, under the surveillance, his behavior crumbled to the point that he stopped shaving and started drinking and using drugs and shouting at people. This did not stop him from stringing Christmas lights on the outside of his home, as had been his custom at earlier holiday seasons.
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