As Starrs (and I, his co-author) wrote, “In the present state of our factual knowledge about the death of Dr. Olson, I would venture to say that the sub-galeal hematoma is singular evidence of the possibility that Dr. Olson was struck a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting through the window of Room 1018A.”
Given how easily these CIA agents risked people’s lives and sanity for the sake of “national security,” and given their expressed callousness over “collateral damage,” my own opinion is that they were afraid that Olson was having second thoughts about something he knew and that he might reveal government secrets. He said something he regretted during the Deep Creek retreat. He was scared. When he tried to resign, they convinced him to stay. They took him to an allergist, not a psychiatrist, and they placed him at great risk for someone in a supposedly unstable frame of mind. Lashbrook’s behavior alone makes the whole thing suspect. In 1975, the CIA admitted to a conspiracy of silence and lies. I suspect that there are more truths about this case that remain hidden.
I attended the second funeral for Frank Olson. I could see the effects of the years of stress on the Olson sons (his daughter had died in a plane crash). For further reading, I recommend H. P. Albarelli’s A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments. At 912 pages, it’s quite long, but it’s a stunner.
Threats and Explosions
FOR SIXTEEN YEARS, Manhattan was held hostage to an anonymous man who planted bombs and made dire threats. They were becoming increasingly more dangerous. Between 1940 and 1956, more than three-dozen explosions had occurred in various public places. None had been lethal, but bombs going off in places like Grand Central Station and Radio City Music Hall frightened people. Eventually, police believed, someone would be seriously hurt or killed. The alleged perpetrator had sent angry letters to several newspapers, politicians, and even to a utility company, Consolidated Edison.
The chief of New York’s Missing Person’s Bureau knew a psychiatrist, Dr. James Brussel, who was also a skilled graphologist. He sent a team of officers over to Brussel’s office in Greenwich Village to see if he could “psychoanalyze” them for some leads. Who was the kind of person who might do this? He agreed to look at them and render his findings. There were no guarantees, however, that anything he developed could nail the offender. Still, the police had nothing else to use.
He read the letters for content, looked at the handwriting, and examined a series of photos of the “Mad Bomber’s” bombs sites. He developed some ideas about the man’s ethnicity, living arrangements, mental illness, personality, and skill with a bomb. He even believed that, upon arrest, this man would be wearing an outdated double-breasted suit, buttoned. All of this was hashed out with a blend of Brussel’s clinical experience with paranoid types and probability analysis on the type of person who used bombs as threats. He called his method “my own private blend of science, intuition, and hope.” He said that this man had a grudge against Con Ed, since the first letter had gone to the company.
Because bombs were his weapon of choice, he thought the Bomber was a European immigrant, which also revealed his likely religion: Roman Catholic. His progressively more paranoid messages placed his age between 40 and 50 and suggested he had a rigid temperament and was likely a fastidious man who kept to himself. He would not be married, but there would be a woman in his life, seeing to his needs—a mother, an aunt, or a sister. Since the letters were often mailed in Westchester County, he probably lived in an ethnic community not far from the city. He would also be miserly, so he wouldn’t spring for a more fashionable suit. In addition, although the Mad Bomber had been meticulous in his missives about forming each letter of the alphabet with straight lines, the ‘w’ was always rounded. This signaled sexual issues and a deep love for his mother.
The detectives took it all with a grain of salt. They’d never consulted with a mental health expert before on investigative work, and most of what Brussel offered didn’t help. However, such an approach was not unprecedented. In Los Angeles during the 1930s and 40s, the chief of police had used a psychiatrist, J. Paul de River, for quite a few duties, including developing a profile of a crime scene that had involved three murdered girls. But there was little communication between these departments, so the NYPD knew nothing about de River.
Brussel suggested publishing the his profile in the newspaper, because he believed that it would trigger a response. It did. The respondent—presumably the Bomber—pointed out Brussel’s errors. In addition, a clerk at Con Ed started looking through employee files dating back to the first letter and, by matching unique phrases between the Bomber’s letters and those of an angry employee who wanted Con Ed to pay disability, she identified George Metesky, now 54 and living in Connecticut When the police came to arrest him, he was in his robe and pajamas. He did live with two unmarried older sisters who took care of his needs, and was of ethnicity and religion that Brussel had identified. His typewriter was matched to unique aspects of the letters, and Metesky had a workshop stocked with bomb-making materials. The police told him to get dressed and he returned (according to Brussel’s memoir) buttoning up an outdated double-breasted suit.
Years later, Brussel published his memoir, Casebook of a Forensic Psychiatrist. He included the Metesky case. What he did not reveal was that he’d initially given police several erroneous notions, such as the offender having a facial scar, being of Germanic extraction, and living in White Plains, New York.
“A psychiatrist’s dominant characteristic,” Brussel writes, “is his curiosity. He wonders about people.” Whenever reporters asked him about his approach, he’d say that he began with science but then intuition and imagination took over. Then he’d check his hunches against research data. He also relied on mental immersion. “When you think about an unknown criminal long enough, when you’ve assembled all the known facts about him and poked at them and stirred them about in your mind, you begin to see the man.”
The memoir impressed Special Agent Howard Teten from the FBI. With rising murder rates during the 1950s and 1960s, the F.B.I. had received expanded jurisdiction, especially for serial crimes. At the nascent FBI Academy, he was teaching ideas from psychology and sociology. With his course, “Applied Criminology,” Teten had developed a method of behavioral analysis that he’d tested successfully against solved cases. Brussel’s ideas potentially offered another layer, so they met to discuss what each might offer the other.
“We looked closely at what each of us did in terms of data used to compile a personality profile,” Teten told me in an interview. “He included things like ethnic background that I didn’t think should be included, and he didn’t consider the more mundane problems associated with a crime scene. This was particularly serious to my way of thinking.”
Brussel never quite rose to this level of success again, while Teten went on to found the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU, now called the BAU) that would have international impact, spawning movies, novels, true crime books, and new investigative techniques. In fact, the FBI coined the phrase “serial killer” in response to a series of New York-based murders in 1976-77 attributed to the “.44 caliber killer,” who randomly shot couples in parked cars.
Attacking thirteen people in just over a year, this offender killed six. He also wrote letters to the newspapers, calling himself the “Son of Sam” and created an aura of terror throughout the city. It seemed that he could strike anywhere and quickly melt away. Two women were shot as they sat on their porches. Special Agent Robert Ressler, from the BSU used “serial killer” based on the British term, “series killer.”
Thanks to a parking ticket, David Berkowitz, 24, was arrested. He claimed that a neighbor’s dog—“Sam”—had commanded him to kill. When he tried to sell his story, New York blocked him with the Son of Sam law that prohibited offenders from making money on their crimes. Later he admitted the dog-and-devil story were a hoax. Berkowitz still enters headlines from time to time wit
h a new angle on his story.
“Charlie Chopoff”
DURING THE EARLY 1970S, Manhattan-based police departments were faced with investigating a spate of crimes unlike any they’d seen before. On a rainy March 9, 1972, Douglas Owens, 8, disappeared from his Harlem home. Hours later, he was found two blocks away on a rooftop on East 121st Street. The autopsy indicated that he’d been viciously stabbed 38 times, with most of the wounds to his neck and chest, and his penis had been sliced open. There were no leads.
Six weeks passed before another young black boy suffered a grievous attack, which he survived. On April 30, the ten-year-old was found in the hallway of a West Side apartment building. He’d been stabbed and sodomized, and his penis had been sliced off and carried away. The boy recalled a slender man with darkish skin and a mole on his left cheek. He’d called himself Michael and offered the boy two quarters. The victim’s penis was later found in a park.
Both boys had been slashed with the same kind of knife and were attacked on rainy days. It looked like the first victim had been sexually assaulted as well.
Late in the afternoon on October 23, Mary Hubbard reported her nine-year-old son, Wendell, missing. She’d last seen him playing outside their building at 5th and 124th.
Around 9:45 P.M., three boys playing on the roof of that building found Wendell. He lay motionless. The autopsy revealed that he’d been stabbed 17 times and sodomized, and his penis had been sliced off and carried away.
On March 7, the body of a Puerto Rican boy, Luis Ortiz, turned up in East Harlem, in the basement stairwell on West 106th Street. This time, the police had witnesses, whose details helped to improve the composite drawing they’d developed during an earlier investigation.
The suspect was Hispanic, between 30 and 40, slender, and average height. More distinctive, he had acne scars on his face, black marks on his chin, and a mole on his left cheek.
Detectives from the Fifth District Homicide Assault Squad canvassed the neighborhoods and learned that a person who looked like this was known as ‘Tony’ and ‘Michael,’ and had served time in a penal institution. Yet the police were unable to link anyone to the crimes.
In 1973, after a police press conference, an angry crowd of several hundred came to the police station to demand more protection. “We want the killer!” they yelled.
The police invited some of the most vociferous into the station to discuss the situation and air their concerns. Their children were frightened, and had even dubbed this unknown offender, Charlie Chopoff.
On March 23, a female resident from the Bronx called the police to tell them that she knew who the child’s killer was. She named area resident Erno Soto as the culprit, hinting that Soto had been in a psychiatric institution recently and was known to be strange, even violent. Officers questioned Soto’s cousin, and even his wife, but they claimed they had not seen him since November.
Dr. Harvey Schlossberg offered a profile: the killer was psychotic, scared of women, and disturbed by his latent homosexuality. He was a controlled type of person, the “quiet, lovable, nice-guy-in-the-neighborhood type,” who could generally hide his anger or anxiety. Something could trigger a sudden rage. Such men were horrified by sexual feelings toward someone of the same sex, so they would symbolically castrate themselves when they mutilated the victim.
During the August heat of a Friday afternoon that year, a woman walking her dog on the sixth floor of a tenement house at 325 East Houston Street, discovered the body of a black boy, posed in a suggestive position. His sneakers had been removed and set nearby. Identified as Steven Cropper, 7, the victim had been with his parents just an hour before he was found.
New York’s Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Michael Baden performed an autopsy and determined that Steven had died from lacerations of the main artery in the left elbow. Soon after he’s died, his killer had carved a deep ‘X’ on his chest. However, since his genitals remained intact and there was no evidence of a sexual assault, there was speculation that this was not the work of Charlie Chop-off.
THE POLICE RELEASED A statement to reporters that they believed it was unlikely that this murder was linked to those in Harlem and the Upper West Side. Nevertheless, they decided to cover all bases by circulating a “photomontage likeness” of the person seen near the murder sites in the previous three incidents. They posted it in strategic places, including on the second story landing of the NENA Comprehensive Health Service Center on East 3rd Street.
The drawing resembled a man that people had seen on the Lower East Side. He’d been talking to young boys. On August 21, an employee at NENA called the police to report a man in the office at that moment who resembled the sketch.
A squad car from the Seventh Precinct pulled up and the officers arrested him. Word spread that the killer had been apprehended. Although he was soon cleared as a suspect, a crowd had gather demanding blood. Detectives went out with bullhorns to tell them that they should go home. To get this man out safely, they dressed him as a police officer. He was “spirited away” in the car, racing toward Brooklyn. The people were furious. After this, the police were more careful to keep arrests of pedophiles secret.
In 1974, police attention turned once again to Erno Soto. On May 24, he accosted a nine-year-old Hispanic boy and was arrested. He was transported to the prison psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital. His appearance fit the description of the killer, and it turned out that Soto had relatives in all the relevant neighborhoods. Witnesses identified Soto as the man they’d seen near some of the scenes. Soto confessed to killing Steve Cropper and detectives believed they’d closed this case.
In 1969, Soto had entered the Dunlop-Manhattan Psychiatric Center, spending about a year there. He’d returned in 1972 and 1973 for extended stays, due to uncontrolled bouts of violence. He’d spent a total of eleven years in jail for charges ranging from burglary to possession of narcotics. Soto admitted that God had told him to turn little boys into girls.
However, solving this case would not be this easy. The surviving victim, who had seen his attacker, could not identify Soto as the same man. Officials at the psychiatric hospital also indicated that Soto had been confined at the time of Cropper’s murder. When pressed, they admitted that he sometimes had left the building without permission. Since he’d confessed, he was going to trial.
At the trial, psychiatrist John Baer Train described Soto as a “walking time bomb” and insisted that he was “in need of constant surveillance.” Another psychiatrist called him “dangerous” and diagnosed him as suffering from schizophrenia. The judge found Soto not guilty by reason of insanity.
Whether Soto confessed from within a deluded state of mind or was aware of what he had done despite his illness, in the end his mental instability did become an issue. The murders could not be officially solved. In July 1976, a brief story ran in the Times indicating that Soto had been cleared in the three sex-mutilation murders, although he continued to be a suspect in the killing of Steven Cropper.
Cons and Cons
LIKE MOST OTHER PEOPLE, I was introduced to Suffolk County’s Amityville homicides through that supposedly true ghost story, The Amityville Horror, which was likely cooked up during the late 1970s to make money. Ten movies have been made about it, with another coming out soon. I followed that part of the story, too, and wrote about it in Blood and Ghosts. But I’ve also included the actual events in Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers, in part because the killer presents a fascinating case. So, let’s look at the details.
Just after 6:30 PM on November 14, 1974, the police arrived at a two-story mansion on 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island, called “High Hopes.” A 911 call had indicated there had been a shooting and “everyone was dead.” They discovered six members of the Ronald DeFeo family slaughtered in their beds. Only Ronald DeFeo, Jr. remained alive, sobbing uncontrollably.
The victims were all dead in their beds and Shaggy, the dog, was chained up outside. Ronald DeFeo, Sr., and his wife lay on their stomachs
, with blood sprays showing evidence of being shot. Ronald, 43, had taken shots to his spine, kidney and neck, while Louise, 42, had sustained fatal wounds from the side. In another room, two young boys, John and Mark, were both shot as they slept. A bullet had severed John’s spine. A third bedroom showed Allison, who’d apparently looked up as the bullet hit her in the face and she’d died instantly. A staircase led to an attic bedroom, where Dawn, the younger sister, had the whole side of her face blown off. It seemed as if the shootings had not roused anybody, as each person had died in bed. They’d been dead for over twenty-four hours.
Ronald Junior, known as Butch, told police what he knew. He’d called home several times the day before but had received no answer. He’d gone to see his girlfriend around noon. He’d encountered a friend, Bobby Kelske and arrived to his girlfriend’s around 1:30. He told her he’d seen cars at his house, but had not been able to reach anyone. He took her shopping before they went to see Kelske. Butch spent the rest of the afternoon with friends, shooting up heroin. He met Kelske at a bar and said he was going home to find out what was up with his family. It wasn’t long before he’d found them dead and had run back to the bar to get help.
Kelske and several other men returned to the house with him and saw the massacre for himself. Another man called it in. Within ten minutes, the first officer had arrived.
During questioning, Butch mentioned a name, Louis Falini. That was someone police should check. He was a hit man for the Mafia, and he had a grudge against his father. Detectives realized that if this was true, then Butch was a target, since it was clear that the killer had intended for the entire family to die.
When Butch, 24, gave his statement at police headquarters, he said that he’d been home on the night of the murders, watching TV until 2:00 AM. A couple of hours later, he’d heard the toilet flush. He hadn’t heard anything else. No gunshots, no barking dog. He’d headed out to work, staying there until he went to see his girlfriend. He fully cooperated by answering all questions and even admitted to an act of insurance fraud that his father had asked him to carry out.
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