It was an era when Americans lived under the threat of nuclear conflict. Evening news reports warning of Soviet aggression and targeted warheads fueled a Cold War cynicism that became part of the undercurrent of daily life. The ominous markings of carefully situated fallout shelters and the presentation of coordinated training programs on survival techniques in the event of nuclear attack presented a constant reminder to adults and children alike that annihilation was only a mushroom cloud away. Americans had received training and preparation for a nuclear conflagration that seemed palpable but, at least, perhaps, politically avoidable. The citizens of New York, however, were demonstrably unprepared for the anxiety of an ongoing and daily war of munitions that existed in reality within the confines of their own retail markets, theaters, and transportation systems. “It is one thing to live under a cloud of fear . . . but it is another thing altogether when lightening strikes again and again,” wrote the New York Times, reflecting on “Terror in the Age of Eisenhower.” The siege of an unknown assailant bore upon the beleaguered city like a pungent curse.
It wasn’t long before the wave of panic would develop into a seething anger. Newspapers began to question the competence of the police department, and the public at large soon followed. With all the available evidence, such as intact bombs, writing samples, and known methods of operation, why, asked New Yorkers, was the department at such a loss for clues in the Bomber investigation? The political pressures on Commissioner Kennedy grew by the day, and he, in turn, began commuting those pressures to his department chiefs. The New York police seemed to shudder beneath the weight of a fermenting urgency.
Amid this agitated turmoil, police brass bonded together and attempted to fuse the expertise of the varying districts and bureaus within the department. In a concentrated effort to share information and develop innovative and imaginative methods to corner the Bomber, active communication became the cornerstone of the investigation. Implementing this posture of interaction, the chief of the department’s missing-persons bureau, a career officer named John J. Cronin, in an offhand conversation with Captain Howard Finney of the crime laboratory, relayed a bold and innovative idea.
The two had an ongoing course of dealing involving the technical analysis of evidence in missing-person cases, typically teenage runaways, and had developed a fairly open and friendly relationship through the years. Aware, of course, that the commissioner had been pressing Finney for quicker and more constructive results on the technical end of the Bomber investigation, Cronin happened to mention a psychiatrist friend with whom he had appeared at several police chief conventions, and whom he knew to have a broad and working interest in the behavior of criminal offenders. Cronin posited that perhaps this psychiatrist could be of use to the investigation. The highly educated and broadminded Finney listened intently to Cronin’s description of the man, and his imagination began to swirl. Could the field of psychiatry actually assist in a criminal case? If a physical description of the Bomber was unavailable, could a trained individual develop a psychological description—a profile of sorts? The pressures of the investigation had clearly worn upon the fatigued director, and he was eager to explore any possible methods, regardless of novelty, in the case. Perhaps, he surmised, this was just the innovative thinking that the investigation needed.
Finney was an accomplished technical presence on the New York City Police Department. His tough and understated demeanor betrayed no hint of the three college degrees that he held—including a master’s in forensic psychiatry. “He has been described as poker-faced,” wrote one newspaper. “[B]ut when he gets angry . . . he looks like he’s going to explode right out of his well-tailored business suit.” As commanding officer of the police laboratory, Finney gained a reputation as a “Book of Rules,” or one whose expertise kept him buried in the numinous confines of the crime lab offices. A short and stocky man with thinning gray hair, Finney was a well-respected scientist through every rank of the department and into the upper echelons of New York law enforcement. His 1956 contribution to the Manual for Prosecuting Attorneys, titled “Forensic Evidence and Scientific Police Methods,” would provide technical guidance on crime lab techniques to New York district attorneys for years to come. In later years, his hardnosed deportment and celebrated credentials would land him in the commissioner’s seat of the Buffalo Police Department, but in December 1956 Finney would find himself consumed by the beleaguered search for the Mad Bomber.
Dr. James Brussel eyed the ever growing stack of files and reports that cluttered his high-rise Manhattan office at the State Department of Mental Hygiene. Through 1956, the department had overseen an institutional population of approximately 120,000 patients, and it was witnessing an annual increase of nearly 3,000 per year. Though the arcane methodology of custodial care had given way to the more enlightened approach of prevention, it seemed that Brussel’s patient caseload and administrative functions had risen steadily through the years, taking its toll on his private practice and family life. He was really looking forward to a holiday vacation.
When his friend Captain Cronin called to initiate a meeting with the director of the New York City Crime Laboratory to discuss the Mad Bomber case, Brussel wavered. Not only had his already jam-packed schedule of lectures, appointments, and paperwork left him with little time for extraneous endeavors, he had failed to see what assistance he could provide to the case. “I had real people to deal with, not ghosts,” Brussel would later write.
Up to that point in time, psychiatry and crime fighting had joined only in theoretical studies and fictionalized detective novels. For years, Sherlock Holmes had successfully postulated logical and dispassionate deductions in apprehending his man, but in practice the two disciplines were, for the most part, separate endeavors having little to do with one another. Through the early 1950s, the pervasive attitude among law enforcement toward the untested realm of psychiatry was one of disdain and mistrust. Tracking criminals, they held, was the job of the police— and psychiatrists generally agreed.
“I don’t know what you expect me to do,” Brussel said to his friend. “If experts haven’t cracked this case in more than ten years of trying, what could I hope to contribute?”
“Maybe you’ll come up with something. Inspector Finney needs a break. The Commissioner is pressing him for results . . . Come on. Give it a whirl, doctor. Sometimes the difference between failure and success is a new thought.”
Brussel paused for a moment and then hesitatingly agreed to meet with Finney. Though he didn’t know it at the time, his decision would be remembered as a pioneering step on the road to a new discipline of law enforcement.
X
PROFILE OF A BOMBER
DR. JAMES BRUSSEL WOULD LATER ADMIT THAT HIS PROFESSIONAL CURI-osity had been aroused by the Mad Bomber. He had followed the intense media coverage of the case and, like all New Yorkers, wondered what kind of person would engage in such a fiendish and perilous pattern of conduct for so many years. Privately, Brussel had constructed several speculative notions about the nature of the perpetrator and the makeup of his character, but such thoughts were general and fleeting, without purpose or substance. His professional opinion had never been formally or officially requested in connection with an ongoing police investigation—indeed, no psychiatrist’s opinion had ever been so requested. When Brussel greeted Captain Finney and two associate detectives in the Manhattan office of the Department of Hygiene on that brisk December day in 1956, they were navigating uncharted ground.
Though the process of attributing probable physical, personality, and character traits to a criminal offender based upon an analysis of crime scene evidence and behaviors—what would later become known as criminal profiling—had never been specifically used in the United States by a police force to assist in the identification of a criminal suspect, the technique is deeply rooted in history, lore, and literature. Homer’s eighth century BC classic The Iliad spoke of the ugly and deformed features of a character as being indicative of cri
minal tendencies, and Plato, in Hippias Major, suggested a relationship between physical ugliness and psychological comportment. During the Inquisition, an early form of profiling was embodied in the Latin publication The Malleus Maleficarum, or The Witches’ Hammer, which was, in essence, a handbook for the identification and prosecution of witches. Published in 1486 and sanctioned by the Catholic Church, the document asserted divine authority to dispose of heretics and heathens, and set forth a series of general characteristics such as birthmarks, solitary lifestyle, and pet ownership as evidentiary badges of witchcraft and devil worship.
A more scientific, though still flawed, application of profiling began to emerge in the nineteenth century with the work of the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso. In a methodical attempt to classify and predict criminality, Lombroso announced in his 1876 book The Criminal Man that physical and anthropological characteristics found in certain groups of offenders suggested the existence of what he called “born criminals,” as opposed to those driven to crime by illness, insanity, or circumstances. Based upon a study of 383 Italian prisoners and postmortem analysis of various offenders’ bodies, Lombroso concluded that certain physical features of some criminals denoted a primitive or lower evolutionary order. “I seemed to see,” said Lombroso, “all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.”
Pursuant to his anthropological theory, Lombroso developed a series of eighteen physical and congenital characteristics, including asymmetry of the face, excessive dimensions of the jaw and cheekbones, deformities of the nose, swollen and protruding lips, excessive arm length, and so on, the presence of five or more of which, in his view, suggested the born criminal. Lombroso believed that the identification of these physical attributes could be used, like a “mark of Cain” to predict future criminality.
Since Lombroso’s day other criminologists have made similar attempts to classify and predict criminal behavior based upon such factors as race, intelligence, and anatomical attributes. Though most of these theories have been scorned and discredited through the years, the concept of behavior as a reflection of personality has endured as an axiom of modern psychology.
The practical application of the behavioral sciences to criminology found perhaps its greatest influence in the pages of fictional literature. In November 1887, an English doctor and writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, published the first of his Sherlock Holmes mysteries, A Study in Scarlet. In a series of four novels and fifty-six short stories and articles that made up the classic adventures, “Conan Doyle continually referenced observation, logic, and dispassion as invaluable to the detection of scientific facts, the reconstruction of crime, the profiling of criminals, and the establishment of legal truth,” wrote renowned forensic scientist Brent Turvey. Sherlock Holmes and the renowned Dr. John Watson would engross aspiring detectives for years to come, and inspire future forensic scientists and profilers with their legendary nonbiased inferential study of crime.
Perhaps influenced by the fiction of Conan Doyle, the first actual interpretation of crime scene evidence to infer details of an offender’s personality took place in Great Britain in 1888 in response to the Whitechapel murders—the fabled case of Jack the Ripper. Baffled by a series of gruesome and sadistic murders of women, London authorities enlisted the help of a police surgeon named Thomas Bond to examine the evidence and, based upon his medical expertise, draw conclusions as to the personality of the killer. By a careful examination of the stab wounds and an analysis of the extensive mutilation of the bodies, Bond extrapolated that all five murders had been committed by one individual who was physically strong, dispassionate, and brazen. His comprehensive profile continued:
. . . A man subject to periodical attacks of Homicidal and Erotic mania. The murderer in external appearance is quite likely to be a quiet inoffensive looking man, probably middle-aged and neatly and respectably dressed. He would be solitary and eccentric in his habits, also he is most likely to be a man without regular occupation, but with a small income or pension.
The Whitechapel murders were never solved, and thus the accuracy of Bond’s inferences remain unverified, but his detailed findings stand, to this day, as a historical example of a pragmatic criminal profile.
The technique and theories associated with the study of modern profiling underwent comprehensive development in the early to mid twentieth century through the work and teachings of dedicated teachers and criminologists such as Dr. Hans Gross, August Vollmer, Dr. Paul Kirk, and Dr. Walter Langer. In a famous American account of a psychological study conducted during World War II, the US Office of Strategic Services enlisted the assistance of Dr. Langer to develop an evaluation of Adolph Hitler for planning and tactical purposes. In a 135-page assessment later published under the name The Mind of Adolph Hitler, Langer noted a series of psychological characteristics such as an unresolved Oedipus complex, evidence of sadism, and an irrational fear of germs and disease. Of strategic significance was Langer’s prediction that Hitler would likely fight to the end and commit suicide rather than endure capture—a calculation that would prove entirely accurate. Though Langer’s assessment was confined to the study of a known subject rather than providing aid in the search for an unidentified offender, his work nonetheless represented a practical attempt to predict patterns of future behavior and would lay the foundation for further study in the field.
Yet, despite the steady historical development of the behavioral sciences in the context of criminology by academics and practitioners alike, there existed prior to 1956 no reported case of a professionally generated criminal profile being sought by an American law enforcement agency as a tool to identify and apprehend a criminal suspect.
Captain Finney sat expressionless across from the desk, waiting for Dr. Brussel to say something. It was a cold and variably cloudy winter afternoon in Manhattan, and the occasional yellow hues of sunlight filled the seventeenth floor office and then faded like a fleeting whisper. Finney and the two detectives had brought with them a large satchel stuffed with every accumulated document that made up the official police record on the case of the Mad Bomber. The bundled contents of the file had been spread across the desk, and the men waited patiently as Brussel painstakingly sifted through the hundreds of letters, reports, photographs, and memos that they hoped somehow might contain an unseen clue or the missing element, drawing authorities closer to an arrest.
Though he had never met Finney, Brussel immediately recognized him as a direct and intelligent man who demanded honest appraisals or none at all. “I knew I wasn’t going to fool him with psychoanalytic doubletalk,” wrote Brussel. The two plainclothes detectives, however, did not share the captain’s intellectual curiosity and carried in their skeptical eyes the contempt that had marked law enforcement’s traditional attitude toward the field of psychiatry. Brussel captured the moment in his memoir, Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist: “I’d seen that look before,” he recalled,
most often in the Army, on the faces of hard, old-line, field-grade officers who were sure this newfangled psychiatry business was all nonsense . . . The two detectives were obviously quite sure [Captain] Finney was wasting his time and theirs. They fidgeted, they sighed, they exchanged glances of alternating amusement and impatience. Catching criminals was police work. What could a psychiatrist know about it?
Despite the intimidating circumstances, Brussel seemed to immediately recognize the significance of the moment and the far-reaching implications of what he’d been asked to do. He felt a certain stress at the meeting, and would later articulate in his memoir a sense of insecurity about the overwhelming nature of the task:
I felt that my profession was being judged as well as myself. And curiously, I was one of my own accusers in this bizarre trial of wits. Did I really know enough about criminals to say anything sensible to [Captain] Finney? I’d seen hundreds o
f offenders in my career, but had I learned enough from them and about them? . . . Did I actually have any business at all sitting here and talking to these three highly trained, experienced policemen?
I stood up from my desk, went to my window, and looked down at City Hall, seventeen floors below . . . The streets were crowded with cars and trucks, the sidewalks with pedestrians. Millions of people live in New York and more millions travel in and out every day. Any one of those people I saw below could have been the Mad Bomber . . . So little was known about . . . [him] that virtually anyone in the city could be picked at random as a suspect. Anyone—and no one.
He seemed like a ghost, but he had to be made of flesh and blood. He had been born, he had a mother and father, he ate and slept and walked and talked. He lived somewhere. Somewhere people knew him, saw his face, heard his voice . . . He had a name. Probably thousands of people in and around New York had some fleeting contact with him at one time or another. He sat next to people on subways and busses. He strolled past them on sidewalks. He rubbed elbows with them in stores. Though he sometimes seemed to be made of night stuff, unsolid, bodiless, he patently did exist. This was one of the few things about him that were known for sure. It narrowed the search to perhaps ten million people in and around the New York metropolitan area.
The Mad Bomber of New York Page 10