Whoever Fights Monsters

by Robert K. Ressler

  In recent years, the hue and cry about profiling, and the misinterpretation of it as well as of what the Bureau legitimately does, has continued to increase. The media have come around to lionizing behavioral-science people as supersleuths who put all other police to shame and solve cases where others have failed.

  Regrettably, the FBI itself seems to have jumped on this bandwagon. It was most evident in the Bureau’s cooperation with the producers of the film The Silence of the Lambs. One of the last matters to pass across my desk before I retired was the script for that movie. I objected to several aspects of it. I felt that if the FBI was going to be involved in the filming, to the extent of allowing Quantico to be used as a set, we ought to exert more influence to make the film realistic. For instance, the heroine, played by Jodie Foster in the movie, was an agent-in-training; we would never have placed a trainee in such a position of responsibility or danger, as the script suggested. That detail could easily have been changed without damage to the fictional structure, as could dozens of other such details. They were not changed, however, and some of the scenes at Quantico even include Bureau personnel in extra or cameo roles. The powers that be evidently reasoned that the movie would be such good publicity for the Bureau that it made no difference whether or not the film was accurate.

  With the success and wide appeal of the book and movie The Silence of the Lambs, there came a frenzy to exploit both serial killers and their profilers. This was most apparent on television. Whereas earlier in the 1980s there had been some legitimate programs about serial killers, the legitimate programming now fell away to the broadcast equivalents of tabloid journalism. My main complaint with most of the recent material is that it is hastily pulled together. For instance, one program that is often helpful to law enforcement is “America’s Most Wanted.” However, even this program hastened to portray Joe Fisher, in prison in New York, as a man who had killed 150 people. That was Fisher’s claim, but while he did kill his wife and perhaps a few other people, he had not murdered hundreds, and a little research would have shown that truth. Fisher, like Henry Lee Lucas, was a drifter and an alcoholic who liked the idea of making huge claims and finding himself featured in newspapers and on television.

  The avalanche of publicity has brought with it some strange and upsetting reactions. Several serial killers are now receiving letters in prison from people they do not know, people who write that they want to be just like them and emulate their deeds. I have also been told by individuals at various times that they think it would be interesting to go to a cocktail party and chat with a Ted Bundy or another serial killer. These murderers are awful examples of humanity and should not be idolized or emulated.

  Some people still in the BSU have also taken to claiming that they were the models for the FBI characters in the book and movie The Silence of the Lambs, though Harris has stated (and I agree) that the characters are entirely his own and not based on any particular individuals. And the problem is seen not only with old BSU hands. New applicants to the BSU are taking Jodie Foster’s character as a role model; they, too, want to be supersleuths. If an aspirant to a police force identified too closely with “Dirty Harry” Callahan, we’d have an awful lot of trigger-happy, violent, and dangerous cops. We don’t need them, and we don’t need FBI supersleuths either. As a society, we seem to be flying too close to the flame, looking for stimulation—we are bored audiences more attuned to fantasy than to reality, in danger of falling completely into the abyss about which Nietzsche warned us.

  * * *

  Since retiring from the FBI, I have worked as an expert witness and a lecturer. Among my recent cases was that of Ricky Greene, a Texas murderer. He had killed a handful of people in seemingly random violence, and was awaiting sentencing. I testified that he could be considered even more dangerous than Ted Bundy, because while Bundy chose his victims by type, Greene demonstrated a willingness to kill almost anyone. I can’t tell what effect my testimony, separate from others, had on the outcome, but Greene was sentenced to death.

  In a more celebrated case in Rochester, New York, Arthur J. Shawcross was accused of eleven murders of area women, many of whom were prostitutes. Shawcross had previously served fourteen years in a penitentiary for the sexual assault and strangulation murder of an eight-year-old girl. He had also admitted to having killed a young boy, but that charge was dropped in exchange for his guilty plea to the girl’s murder. Nonetheless, after fourteen years he had been released and had gone right back to killing.

  In the new case, the serial murders of the prostitutes, Shawcross had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Part of his defense was to be based on the notion that he had been sexually, psychologically, and physically abused as a child. Another part was his contention that he suffered from a mental condition of “altered states” akin to multiple personality disorder, and a third strand to the defense was that Shawcross had a Vietnam-related mental illness, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

  While my long-term friend and colleague psychiatrist Dr. Park E. Dietz advised the prosecution on how to deal with Shawcross’s claims of child abuse and multiple personality disorder, I tackled the PTSD notion. By this time I had put in thirty-five years of active duty and reserve time in Army military police and CID matters, and my experience helped me to quickly debunk Shawcross’s PTSD defense. My research showed me that his claim of having witnessed wartime atrocities was patently outrageous and untrue, and my pretrial work in this area was so strong that it shattered the PTSD issue in the case, to the point where the defense did not even seek to make it part of their insanity plea at the trial. The other two areas were similarly countered by Dr. Dietz, and Shawcross was convicted of ten counts of murder in the second degree in one case—and ten consecutive life sentences—and in a second case he was convicted of one count of homicide and sentenced to twenty-five years to life. It is unlikely that he will leave prison alive.

  Along with the rest of the world, in the summer of 1991 I read the headlines about Jeffrey Dahmer’s arrest in connection with seventeen murders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the details about sexual assaults, mutilation, cannibalism, and necrophilia. In his acts of violence Dahmer seemed to have captured all the horror of serial and sexual killings during the last quarter-century, and rolled them together into one. In fact, he had been sporadically active as a killer during a great deal of that period, as his first homicide had been committed in 1978, when he was eighteen. Near his childhood home in Bath, Ohio, he had picked up a hitchhiker and killed him—rather spontaneously, it appears, without a plan. Nine years went by, and his bizarre and murderous fantasies built up until he began killing again, once in 1987, twice in 1988, once in 1989, four times in 1990, and eight times in 1991, the last several killings separated only by days, before he was caught.

  Looking at the case from outside, it was clear to me that Dahmer followed the predictable pattern of serial killers. They begin killing cautiously, frightened of their crimes. Then the pace picks up, and they progress to become effective and efficient killing machines. Eventually, they become cavalier and careless, convinced that they cannot be caught by any mortal. They believe they have ultimate power and authority over others.

  As the reader knows, over the years I had conducted hundreds of road shows for the FBI about criminal personality assessment and psychological profiling, a number of them in the Milwaukee area. After my retirement, I was invited to give a similar course in Milwaukee in January of 1991, under the sponsorship of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and did so in conjunction with Ken Lanning, who had become the Bureau’s top expert in crimes entailing the exploitation and sexual assault of children. During my road shows I had developed many contacts among the police officers and attorneys and mental-health professionals in the Milwaukee area. Thus, in a sense it was no surprise that in August 1991 I received a letter from a Milwaukee police detective who had attended my course in January, and who was now actively involved in the Dahmer investigation. “I can’t tell you e
nough how helpful the information you presented was in the recent events here in Milwaukee,” the detective wrote. “Knowing what to look for has been of great assistance to both me and to the other investigators involved [in the Dahmer case] as well.”

  Although I was pleased to receive this endorsement, it saddened me to learn of the actions of certain other officers in the Dahmer case, those who were fired for having allowed a fourteen-year-old Laotian boy to remain in Dahmer’s apartment even after they had interviewed Dahmer and observed the highly suspicious circumstances in his apartment. I wished that those officers had had the opportunity to attend the course I’d given, just as the detective had; I felt confident that if they had, the outcome of their initial interview with Dahmer would have been different. Dahmer killed the Laotian boy only minutes after the police had left him in Dahmer’s custody. Moreover, Dahmer killed four more males in the next two months before he was apprehended. It is highly likely that five lives could have been saved had those street officers been more alert to the patterns and motives of sexual killers. Had the Milwaukee police in general been more aware of these matters, they might have made Dahmer a suspect even earlier, when a number of young men were disappearing from gay bars in the city. Realistically, though, the Milwaukee police cannot be blamed for such errors in judgment; very few law-enforcement officers in the country have been trained to recognize the complex dynamics of violent offenders. The entire incident renews my belief that more training is needed for the police in this area.

  In the fall of 1991, I was contacted by both the prosecution and the defense in the Dahmer case about testifying as an expert witness. My friend Park Dietz was going to work for the prosecution, and, in a strange twist, I eventually determined to appear on the opposite side, for the defense.

  For a former FBI agent to appear on the defense side in any case is highly unusual, and might be misunderstood by most lay people, as well as by some of my former FBI and law-enforcement colleagues. However, since leaving the Bureau and becoming a paid consultant and expert witness, I have come to understand that a true expert has but one opinion, and it really doesn’t matter which side wants to call upon that opinion, because it is based on facts and experience, and cannot be altered to fit either the defense or the prosecution strategies. That’s the basis on which I agreed to work with Gerald P. Boyle, the Milwaukee attorney charged with handling the defense of Jeffrey Dahmer. I could never appear in support of Dahmer’s actions or behavior, and I do not condone the outrageous acts of killing seventeen people—but I understand those acts and Dahmer’s state of mind. My position is neither for nor against Dahmer, but is most definitely for using my expertise to bring all parties to the correct level of understanding where they can fairly adjudicate the matter at hand. What I’m for is a criminal justice system that can most appropriately handle such difficult things as the Dahmer case.

  On January 13, 1992, attorney Boyle announced that Jeffrey Dahmer was prepared to change his plea to each of the fifteen counts of murder for which he had been charged from not guilty by reason of insanity to guilty but insane. “The decision to plead guilty is Mr. Dahmer’s, not mine,” Boyle said to the press. “This case is about his mental condition. It is his intent to plead guilty.” The “guilty but insane” plea is possible under Wisconsin law, though it is not permitted in many other states. I agreed wholeheartedly with the decision to enter this plea. With Dahmer’s guilt not in question, he will face an abbreviated trial, a second phase of which will focus only on his mental condition. Regardless of the outcome of that phase, it is a virtual certainty that Dahmer will spend the rest of his life in a secure facility, either a mental institution or a state penitentiary—and that, to my mind, is the correct conclusion to the case. By arranging to have Dahmer plead guilty, Gerald Boyle has saved the Milwaukee courts many weeks and possibly months of tedious trial testimony, as well as millions of dollars, and has permitted an outcome to the case that will serve the public very well.

  In conjunction with Dahmer’s defense, I interviewed him for two days. In preparation for this, I delved into the case more deeply. The figure that came to my mind most immediately was the terrible specter of Richard Trenton Chase, the vampire killer whose crimes I detailed in Chapter One. Dahmer, too, consumed blood and human flesh, but he was not as disorganized as Chase had been. This was a man who cruised the gay bars of Milwaukee in his search for victims, and brought them back to his apartment, even though he knew that this course of action would make him vulnerable to police investigation. In this regard, he reminded me of John Gacy. Dahmer kept body parts, such as skeletons and skulls, knowing that these also could be used as evidence against him if they were found. I also learned information that was part of the court record but had not yet become widely known: that Dahmer drank blood, consumed body parts, and preferred sexual contact with the dead and dismembered bodies of his victim. In these last actions, he reminded me of Ted Bundy and of Ed Kemper.

  I was astonished to learn that when Dahmer’s last victim escaped his apartment in the midst of being attacked, Dahmer calmly waited for the police to arrive and made no effort to destroy or conceal the great amount of evidence that he kept in his rooms. And that evidence was massive, consisting of hundreds of photographs of the victims, both dead and alive, skulls and body parts in the refrigerator and in drums and boxes. Paraphernalia used to restrain and kill the victims was scattered throughout the apartment. I was heartsick to learn that in the months prior to his arrest, Dahmer let outsiders, including his landlord and the police, into his apartment when the paraphernalia were present and in full view in the living room and in adjacent rooms whose doors were open. All the signs of the killer were there, but no one had heeded them.

  While Dahmer exhibited many of the characteristics of the organized offender—he hunted victims, lured them to his apartment with promises of money and favors, and after death hid and concealed the evidence of his crimes—he also exhibited many dynamics associated with the disorganized offender: He had sex with his victims after death, consumed their flesh, mutilated their bodies, and kept body-part souvenirs. In our terminology, then, Dahmer was a “mixed” offender. In fact, he encompasses so many usually unrelated dynamics that we may have to make him the prime example of an entirely new category of serial killer.

  Is Dahmer sane or insane? After two days interviewing him, I felt only empathy for the tormented and twisted person who sat before me. Dahmer was as candid and as cooperative as any serial murderer whom I have ever confronted, and yet he could not comprehend how he could have committed all of the atrocious deeds that he knew he had done. In the controlled prison environment, he was able to realize the extent to which his compulsions and fantasies had taken over his rational mind, driving him on, murder after murder. He chain-smoked during the entire interview, and suggested that lung cancer might be the solution to his problems. There was no way to view this tormented man as having been sane at the time of his crimes. I was glad that no matter what way the court proceedings would go, he would spend the rest of his life in custody.

  I was equally glad that there is no death penalty in the state of Wisconsin, because it would serve no purpose for the state to kill him. The state of Florida spent seven or eight million dollars to execute Ted Bundy, money that might have been better used to build a forensic penal facility devoted to the research and study of people like Bundy, Kemper, Gacy, Berkowitz, and Dahmer, who have so horrendously violated society’s trust. Criminologists have long agreed that the death sentence has never deterred violent offenders. It serves only to satisfy the families of victims, and society’s general desire for revenge. If, as in the Dahmer case, we can assure the public that these monsters will not be allowed to complete a few years of incarceration and then slip back into our society—if we can agree to keep them in custody for the rest of their lives—then we will have made progress. Precisely where and how they are kept away from society should not be an issue.

  The existence of a Jeffrey Dahmer
spurs me to press on with my research. There are some murderers in prison cells around the country whom I haven’t yet talked to. I am still professionally involved with the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, in the investigation and analysis of those who molest, abduct, and murder children. I maintain faculty affiliation with Michigan State University’s School of Criminal Justice, and with Georgetown University’s Program on Psychiatry and the Law, and also lecture occasionally at several other universities. Though I will shortly retire from the U.S. Army Reserve and from the CID, I plan to go on training CID agents around the world, so long as the Army wants me to do so. It would be gratifying to believe that all of the work that I have done in regard to violent offenders has made a dent in the incidence of violent crime, but the headlines about terrible murders that crop up regularly in the nation’s newspapers, and the routine reports of violence on the nightly news broadcasts, tell me that the fight against monsters goes on and on—and that I must continue to be in the thick of it.

  INDEX

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  Abbott, Bud “Shakey”

  Abduction scenes

  Abuse during childhood, criminals and

  Adaptability and mobility

  Adolescence, murderers during

  “America’s Most Wanted”

  Anger, unexpressed

  Arsonists, fantasies of

  Atiyeh, Governor Vic