Three weeks after coming home from the psychiatric facility, Rissell was charged with an attempted armed robbery that was actually an intended rape. This charge would take a year to work through the courts, and during that time, the judge assigned him to report regularly to a psychiatrist. Unfortunately, this psychiatrist’s practice did not normally include violent juvenile offenders.
Rissell saw the psychiatrist on a regular basis and—according to the psychiatrist’s reports—made good progress. The progress was an illusion: During this year in which he was receiving treatment, Rissell for the first time murdered one of his rape victims. The crime took place in the vicinity of the apartment complex where he lived. When the year-old attempted robbery case came to trial, Rissell was convicted and sentenced to probation and continued psychiatric counseling. No one at the time of the robbery conviction had traced the murder to him, or even suspected his involvement.
During his probationary period, while still seeing the psychiatrist, Rissell committed four more rape-murders near the apartment complex. There seemed no true pattern to the crimes. The rape victims differed: Some were young, others were in their thirties; some were white, others black; some were single, some married. The police continued to look for an outsider, and Rissell’s arrest for these crimes came not as a result of a logical trail leading to his door but, rather, from a chance search of his car. He confessed to the murders, was convicted, and given five life sentences. It was only after spending two years in prison that he told the authorities about the earlier rapes that he had committed while living in the psychiatric facility.
I interviewed Rissell in prison and found him to be quite articulate and forthcoming about his crimes, able to give considerable detail about his motivations and state of mind and to trace these to roots in his childhood. He agreed to become part of our Criminal Personality Research Project, and provided very good data for us. For instance, he recounted that he had let one rape victim go. He had not killed her, because she told him that she had to support a member of her family who had cancer. A member of Rissell’s family also had cancer, so he let his victim live. In our terms, he had become personally involved with the victim to such a large degree that he could no longer depersonalize her and kill her.
This sort of information on Rissell is what I was recounting to a forensic psychiatric group in Chicago, in the early 1980s. With Rissell’s mug shots on the screen, I was lecturing to an audience of eighty or so mental-health professionals about the case. I was facing the door, and through it I saw a scene that seemed as if it were out of an animated cartoon: A man walked by the door, peered in, and kept going; then, his head came back into the frame, as it were, to look again, and the rest of the body followed. The man came into the lecture hall and took a seat down front near the lectern. He proceeded to watch and listen with rapt attention as I went on with my presentation. During it, I mentioned that Rissell had been seeing a psychiatrist during the time that he was raping and murdering, and that the psychiatrist had not realized that Rissell was lying through his teeth in order to get the doctor to award him a diagnosis of good progress. This, I suggested, was testimony to the manipulative genius of organized murderers. In my view, the problem stemmed from the historic reliance of traditional psychiatry on self-report; that is, that the patient will truthfully tell the doctor everything that has happened and will willingly participate in the healing process. Forensic psychiatry has learned not to rely solely on self-reports, to use outside reports, court records, and the like, and to continually question the accuracy of what a patient-offender discloses about his life and actions.
During my presentation, the man who had come in and sat down was sweating profusely, beginning to look ashen. At the end of my lecture, the lights went on and people started to file out of the room. The sweating, white-faced, obviously troubled man came up and said he had to talk to me.
“I’m a psychiatrist,” he said.
“You look like you need a psychiatrist,” I retorted.
“I’m Dr. Richard Ratner,” he said. “I’m the guy who was gulled by Monte Rissell. I’ve agonized over this case for many years. Can we talk?”
To condense a long story, we did talk and we became friends. I reiterated my contention that he had been fooled by Rissell in much the same way as Rissell’s rape and murder victims had, and that he should not blame himself too greatly for that. I went on to urge that in his future forensic work it was imperative that he not rely completely on the self-reports of his patients-offenders.
In recent years, Dr. Ratner has become an active convert to this idea. Still disturbed by the notion that if he had been more astute in the Rissell case, the lives of several people might have been spared, Dr. Ratner lectures to groups and uses himself as an example of a man who was duped by a master manipulator. He has invited me to make grand rounds in psychiatry presentations at various hospitals in the Washington, D.C., area, I’ve brought him in to Quantico as a guest lecturer, and he has become an adviser to the Criminal Personality Research Project. Of such bonds, one hopes, progress is made in the understanding of the criminal mind.
I had been presenting to psychiatrists for some years when a second important incident occurred. It was at a similar gathering, and I was speaking about what I had come to label “regressive necrophilia.” I had on the screen a crime scene slide of a woman from whose vagina one could see a tree branch protruding. I explained that the term regressive necrophilia had been used to describe the insertion of foreign objects into the vagina or anus, something we had observed in cases involving seriously disorganized offenders. We interpreted it as an act that displayed tremendous hostility toward women and, at the same time, the offender’s ignorance of consensual sexuality. It is an act that is often misinterpreted by crime-scene analysts as a mutilation, when it is actually a sexual substitution.
One man in the audience, a non-forensic psychiatrist with silver hair, objected vociferously to the slide and to my presentation of the whole subject. He accused me of trying to shock the audience, and insisted that this had to be a most unusual case and that there had never been another like it. He interrupted the lecture to the point that I had to address him directly before I could continue.
I asked the man how many crime scenes he had ever evaluated.
“None,” he said. “I’m a psychiatrist, not a police officer.”
I stood my ground, saying that we had seen similar behavior in dozens of cases. He continued to say that this was absurd.
Another member of the audience asked the protester to sit down and listen, and said that if he did, perhaps everyone might learn something. The protester could not be appeased, however, and stomped out. Later, other members of the audience suggested to me that he had been on overload, that he was too set in his ways to assimilate new information. They had found the presentation instructive, they said, and, in general, I’ve had the same positive reaction from the dozens of professional groups to whom I’ve spoken in the last fifteen or so years.
In the fall of 1991, my attempts to bridge to the psychiatric community were acknowledged when the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law honored me at their annual conference in Orlando, Florida, with its annual Amicus award, given to the person who as an outsider to the field of psychiatry has done the most to advance its knowledge. No other FBI agent has ever been considered for this award.
* * *
From the beginning of my years at Quantico, I was determined that our work would be a two-way street, not one-way, as had been the norm in the old FBI. Toward that end, I was constantly on the lookout to bring people who could help us to the FBI. Dr. Murray Miron, an expert in psycholinguistics, had been brought in as a Bureau consultant by Pat Mullany. My mentors, Mullany and Teten, had also been instrumental in developing people within the Bureau who could assist hypnosis experts, whom we sometimes employed to help witnesses recall in more vivid detail what they had seen in relation to a crime. I reached out to various forensic psychiatrists such
as Drs. Park Dietz, James Cavanaugh, Richard Ratner, Robert Simon, and others, and, for my Criminal Personality Research Project, to Dr. Ann Burgess and to such advisers as Dr. Marvin Wolfgang of the University of Pennsylvania, who had done pioneering studies of violent offenders.
A good deal of my time was spent in lecturing to in-service agents and to the police who came to Quantico for courses, and for these courses I always sought outside guest lecturers. Burgess, Dietz, and the others just mentioned, came and spoke, as did Capt. Frank Bolz, who had practically invented hostage negotiation for the New York City police department. I had noticed that no matter how lively our own presentations were, it was these guest lecturers who became the main topic of students’ reports back to their superiors.
I went far beyond law enforcement and forensic sciences to find interesting guests. A friend had told me that the patient in The Three Faces of Eve case, Chris Sizemore, had recovered from the multiple-personality disorder that had been the basis for a celebrated book, and for a movie starring Joanne Woodward, and had become a dynamite lecturer. I met Chris and determined to have her come to Quantico. The Bureau’s general, though unwritten, rule was that you checked such things as unusual lecture guests with your superior. That superior invariably would not object but would inform the agent that he would be acting on his own, and that if anything went wrong, it would be the agent, not the superior, who would face the wrath of the Bureau. I got that standard line from my boss, and more in addition. Wasn’t this woman a mental patient? I told him she was fully recovered and not dangerous. He told me it was my rear end on the line, not his; with a deadpan face, I told him that the greatest difficulty with Chris was that since she had three personalities, we’d have to triple our regular honorarium in order to obtain her. He didn’t get the joke.
Chris was a big hit, explaining what it was like to have a mental disorder and to recover from it. There had been several headline courtroom cases in which the defense had tried to invoke a defense that involved multiple personalities. Chris spoke convincingly to the effect that if one of a patient’s multiple personalities is capable of murder, all are, and that if one is not, neither are the others. In summary, she said that having multiple personalities did not exculpate a murder suspect.
All of the guests contributed in some special way to our growing expertise. Other unusual visiting lecturers included a sculptor, Frank Bender—who specializes in constructing models that show what a suspect might look like after not having been seen in ten or twenty years—and a psychic, Noreen Renier. This woman had been well recommended to me, and had previously worked on some cases with local law-enforcement entities, helping to locate dead bodies and providing similar clues. My superior told me that I was to tell our students that we were just presenting Ranier as an interesting lecturer, not recommending her to local police departments or in any way suggesting that we believed in what she was doing.
She came to Quantico early in 1981, and in her lecture she told us that she was not in control of her powers, that they were sometimes on target and sometimes not. In front of a group of policeman that day, Ranier predicted that an attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan would take place before the end of the month. She said that the President would be hit in the left chest, that he would not die but would recover, gain a great deal of sympathy from the public, and go on to greater things.
After Reagan was shot, I asked the psychic down for a second appearance at Quantico, and this time she predicted that the President would die in an assassination attempt in November, at the hands of men in foreign uniforms wielding machine guns. This time, I told the Secret Service about her predictions; they were upset that I hadn’t brought them the first prediction, which I had initially thought was just a wild guess. She was both right and wrong about the November assassination: It was President Sadat of Egypt who died in October, not November, at the hands of men in foreign uniforms with machine guns.
In another instance, she helped to locate a plane containing the body of a relative of an FBI agent. The psychic also predicted something in my own life. Several days before I was scheduled to leave on a six-week trip to Germany, she told me that I would be coming back shortly, because of something having to do with a dark-haired woman. Three days after I landed in Germany, I was called back to the States because my wife, who had dark hair, had been in a terrible automobile accident.
By this time, however, information that Renier had lectured at Quantico had gotten out to the media, where it was distorted into a story that announced flatly that the psychic was an FBI consultant. A second story twisted the facts still further, saying that this psychic had been hired by the FBI to predict such things as assassination attempts. The Quantico authorities were incensed at this, and forbade me to invite Renier to lecture again.
A year or two later, we were confronted with a murder case that had happened right on the Quantico base, to the wife of a DEA agent—a case that had us stumped for a long time. While we were still perplexed by it, my superior (a novice to the BSU unit) came to me and asked whether I could invite the psychic down to lecture once more, so he could consult with her and see whether she could help on this murder case. I objected, reminding him that I had been told by higher brass that we were not to use her anymore. He insisted that I bring her down anyway, and agreed to take the heat if her presence became known. After her lecture, he whisked her out of the classroom and allowed her to see and touch the evidence associated with the case, but her input had no bearing on the case, which remains unsolved to this day.
Even though the sort of publicity that Noreen Renier had involved us in was not of the best sort, the BSU continued to be the focus of outside interest. Early in the 1980s, that interest changed from documenting what we did to using it as the basis for fiction.
Writers of articles—and even more so, of fiction—often expand in their work the idea of what the FBI can accomplish through profiling. They make profiling seem like a magic wand that, when available to police, instantly solves the crime. As readers of this book will know by now, magic has nothing to do with it. Profiling is merely the application of sound behavioral science principles, and years of experience, gained in part by evaluating crime scenes and evidence, and also by interviewing incarcerated criminals, with the goal of pointing the police toward the most likely category of suspects. Profiling never catches a killer. Local police do that.
No matter how many times we stressed that point, fiction writers seem to want to have profilers in their own work do more. One day in the early 1980s the public-affairs office of the FBI asked me to take an author around the BSU. His name was Tom Harris, and he had already written one best-selling novel, Black Sunday, which had been made into a motion picture. Harris explained to me that he was writing another novel, and that a serial killer would be featured in it. He wanted to know how the FBI would get involved, how a profile was done, how we would assist the local police. He and I spent several hours together, and during it I showed him slides on various cases, among them those on Kemper and Chase. Harris was like a sponge, saying little but absorbing everything. We also discussed my already-lengthy series of prison interviews, and I told him that lately we had been bringing various psychiatrists and other mental-health experts into the Bureau for consultation.
Later, Tom Harris fused the idea of prison interviews with reaching out to psychiatrists and used that in his novel Red Dragon, where the FBI agent turns for help to the now-celebrated character of Hannibal Lecter, the psychiatrist and incarcerated serial killer who helps solve the mystery. The character and plot are entirely Harris’s, of course, but I am proud to have provided some facts on which his fertile imagination could work.
After Red Dragon was published, I asked Harris why he had made his hero a civilian working with the Bureau, and not an agent. He told me that he had wanted the man to have mental problems as a result of his first run-in with Lecter, mental problems that would have disqualified him from being an agent. I thought this w
as comical, given the weight losses, the pseudo heart attacks, and other problems that many of us in the BSU had experienced.
On a second visit, while he was working on another novel, I spent more hours with Harris and showed him other specific cases, including that of Ed Gein, who became part model for the villain in The Silence of the Lambs. I also introduced Harris to the lone female agent who was working with the BSU at the time.
As fiction, both the Harris novels are superb, though they are not truly realistic in their portrayals either of the serial killers or of the heroes and heroines inside the FBI. For instance, in the serial killer of the first book, Francis Dolarhyde, Harris combines attributes of several different sorts of killers, personality dynamics that would be highly unlikely to coexist in one person in the real world. Moreover, FBI agents don’t personally go after such killers; we assess crime scenes, make personality profiles, and pass our suggestions on to local law-enforcement agencies, who do the hard field work and ultimately make the arrests.
In the years since Harris came through the BSU, I’ve served as a source for other major authors writing novels and nonfiction books. Among the most prominent are Mary Higgins Clark, whose novel Loves Music, Loves to Dance was based in part on a presentation I made of the Harvey Glatman case (and on some subsequent consultation that I provided to her after I retired from the Bureau), and Ann Rule. Ann Rule became a colleague of mine on the VICAP task force, and she was later invited to lecture at Quantico on Ted Bundy, about whom she had written a book. I consulted her on the case of Jerome Brudos, and she later went to Oregon, did a lot of spadework, and wrote a book about him, called Lustkiller.
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