Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  At sixteen, Bernardo was devastated to learn the real circumstances of his birth. His relations with his parents, which had been tenuous at best, grew worse. When he went away to college, he began beating and humiliating the women he dated, purposely seeking out women who appeared to be the submissive type.

  In May 1987, his career as the Scarborough Rapist began; he was named for the Toronto suburb in which he lived and operated. By the time he met Karla Homolka in October, he had raped twice and attempted a third rape.

  Homolka, by contrast, seemed well adjusted. She was beautiful, blond, popular, and smart. An animal lover who worked at a veterinary clinic, she was seventeen when she met Bernardo at a pet convention in Toronto. Within two hours, they were in a hotel room having sex. Homolka was submissive, allowed herself to be bound during sex, and gave Bernardo everything he wanted in that area.

  It wasn’t long before she knew that he was the Scarborough Rapist, and she not only condoned his activity but encouraged it. On at least one occasion she recorded Bernardo’s assault with a video camera. Eventually a composite drawing of the rapist was released, and so many people noted Bernardo’s resemblance to it that the police picked him up and questioned him. He convinced them of his innocence, and they let him go. By then, a darker phase of his life was about to begin.

  One thing had always bothered Bernardo about his new girlfriend: the fact that she wasn’t a virgin when they met. But her fifteen-year-old sister, Tammy, was, so Bernardo wanted Tammy as a replacement virgin. As usual, Homolka not only agreed but assisted. She stole animal anesthetic from the veterinary lab where she worked, and at dinner at the Homolka family’s home, a few days before Christmas in 1990, she spiked her sister’s drinks with a powerful sedative. After the rest of the family had gone to bed, Homolka held a rag soaked with anesthetic over Tammy’s face, and while Bernardo raped Tammy, her older sister videotaped the whole thing.

  In “Riding the Lightning,” after interviewing a married couple sitting on death row for serial murder, the team races against time to prove the wife’s innocence.

  Tammy had eaten a big meal, however, so she vomited and then choked to death. Bernardo and Homolka quickly dressed her, hid their drugs and video gear, and called an ambulance.

  With Tammy dead, Bernardo still felt cheated. Determined to make it up to him, Homolka settled on a wedding gift for her husband-to-be: a teenager, a friend of Homolka’s, who looked quite a bit like Tammy. When the time came, Homolka knocked the girl out with the animal sedatives, then sexually assaulted her for Bernardo’s viewing enjoyment. She took over the camera and recorded Bernardo deflowering the girl and anally raping her. In the morning, the girl awoke, sore but unaware of what had been done to her.

  They let that victim live, but having killed once, they were quite willing to do so again. One night Bernardo came upon fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahaffey, who was locked out of her parents’ house after missing her curfew. Bernardo blindfolded her and took her home, where he and Homolka both sexually molested her, then killed her. To dispose of the evidence—except what they had recorded on videotape—they cut her into pieces, encased them in cement, and threw it all into Lake Gibson.

  The pieces of Mahaffey were found two weeks later, on June 29, 1991, the day Bernardo and Homolka wed.

  On April 16, 1992, Homolka approached fifteen-year-old Kristen French in a church parking lot and persuaded her to come over to her car, which Bernardo then forced her into at knifepoint. They kept her for three days, sexually assaulting, beating, and torturing her, and capturing the whole ordeal on video before they finally killed her.

  Other women are believed to have been raped and/or murdered by Bernardo and Homolka, but those allegations have never been proven. The pair’s run came to an end when Bernardo brutally beat Homolka and her parents called the cops.

  Seeing the writing on the wall, Homolka blamed everything on Bernardo. She made a deal that would give her two twelve-year sentences, served concurrently, with parole eligibility after three years for good behavior. All she had to do was tell the truth about the crimes. After her trial and sentencing, the videotapes surfaced. When they were shown at Bernardo’s trial, the prosecutors realized that they had made a terrible mistake with Homolka’s plea bargain—she was not the innocent victim she had pretended to be.

  Bernardo was convicted of kidnapping, rape, and murder on September 1, 1995, and remains in prison, whereas Homolka was released from prison on July 4, 2005. She remarried, changed her name to Leanne Teale, and has a son.

  YEARS BEFORE Bernardo and Homolka, the Sunset Strip Murders rocked a Los Angeles that was still staggering from the Hillside Stranglers and Bittaker and Norris.

  On June 12, 1980, the bodies of two teenage girls showed up near the Ventura Freeway. Both had been shot, and there was evidence of necrophilia. The bodies were identified as Cynthia Chandler, sixteen, and her stepsister, Gina Chandler, fifteen; both were frequent runaways who’d seen their share of trouble. Two more bodies, both of prostitutes, were discovered on June 23. One woman’s head was missing. Both hookers had been shot, and those bullets were a ballistics match to the Chandler girls’.

  The head was found four days later, ensconced in a wooden box in an alley. The cut marks on the neck matched those on the decapitated corpse from the June 23 murders.

  By the time a fifth victim appeared, on June 30, the media had attached the name the Sunset Strip Murders to the killings. This victim was also a young woman, shot three times, and her stomach was slit open.

  In an unexpected twist, the sixth and final victim in this series was a man, who was discovered rotting inside his sealed van on August 9. His head had been cut off and he’d been stabbed and slashed multiple times, in addition to being shot. Shell casings found in the van matched those of the previous murders.

  Two days later, Carol Bundy (no relation to Ted) broke down and told her coworkers that she had killed some people. Someone called the police, and Bundy was picked up. She turned over evidence, including panties belonging to some of the victims, and a photo album showing her boyfriend, Douglas Clark, sexually abusing an eleven-year-old girl. Bundy said that she had killed the man, a country bar singer named Jack Murray, but that Clark had killed the women and had helped her to decapitate Murray.

  Bundy described an existence not unlike Karla Homolka’s. Clark didn’t just want a girlfriend, he wanted a sex slave, and Bundy willingly played that role. When Clark was bored with her, he would bring prostitutes home. One day he came home covered in blood. He told her about having murdered the Chandler girls, whom he had picked up, molested, and then killed. After they were dead, he had sex with the bodies and then dumped them.

  His tale excited Bundy, and she let him know it. That night, when the TV news reported that a man was dead in the trunk of a car, Clark took credit for that killing as well.

  When Clark went hunting again, Bundy joined him. They picked up a hooker, and Clark shot her in the head while she was performing oral sex on him. Bundy’s excitement at watching this could hardly be contained. After dumping the body and dropping Bundy off, Clark found another hooker. This one bit him—an involuntary reaction when he shot her—and in his anger he cut off her head. Seeing yet another hooker nearby, he shot and dumped her, then took the severed head home to Bundy to use as a sex toy.

  Clark went out without Bundy on August 1, taking with him instead the eleven-year-old girl with whom he had been photographed. He picked up a hooker and had sex with her while the girl watched, then dropped the girl off at her home and shot the hooker. After raping the corpse, he dumped her, too.

  Bundy turned to country singer Jack Murray, an occasional lover, for comfort, and revealed some of her recent activities. When Murray threatened to tell the cops, she silenced him.

  At least, that was Bundy’s version of things. In Clark’s version, the same basic acts took place, but he hadn’t done any of the killing. Bundy, he said, imagined herself to be Ted Bundy’s wife, and she had enticed
Murray into her delusion. Bundy and Murray had done all of the murders and then blamed Clark.

  Finally, the bodies of the other hookers Clark had shot were located, and in one of them, ballistics comparisons proved that the bullet came from the same gun that had been used in some of the other murders. This and other evidence were enough to earn Clark six death sentences, and he’s still on San Quentin’s death row. Bundy died of heart failure in prison in 2003.

  HOWEVER PERVERSE these North American couples were, they had a pair of British counterparts whose depravity makes them look like amateurs by comparison. From 1967 to 1987, Fred and Rosemary West of Gloucester, England, raped, tortured, and murdered at least ten women and girls (although Fred later put the figure at closer to thirty). In addition to casual acquaintances, their victims included Fred’s first wife and his three daughters from that marriage. The wife and two of the daughters were murdered (one of the daughters was cut into pieces and buried in the yard). The third daughter was repeatedly raped by Fred and his friends and was later impregnated by Fred.

  Rosemary engaged in prostitution in their home and occasionally brought in other women to work with her; some of those coworkers also became victims. Among Fred and Rosemary’s eight children, at least one was fathered by Rosemary’s clients rather than her husband; at the same time, Fred fathered children with other women. Fred hanged himself rather than face trial, and Rosemary received a life sentence for each of their ten proven victims.

  We don’t know the specifics of all the crimes committed by the fictional Dawes couple in “Riding the Lightning” (114), but we can safely say that there have been sexually motivated serial-killer couples, and Fred and Rosemary West set the bar high for the rest.

  ANOTHER murderous couple on Criminal Minds was Amber and Tony Canardo, in the episode “The Perfect Storm” (203). In a switch on the usual pattern, Amber calls the shots—and one of the murders investigated was committed by Amber and another man before Tony even entered the scene. This couple is reminiscent of a real-life couple, Alvin and Judith Neelley, who roamed the southeastern United States from 1979 to 1982.

  Judith Ann Adams met Alvin Neelley when she was fifteen and he was twenty-seven. He was married, but he soon ended that in order to be with Adams. She fit easily into his low-rent criminal lifestyle, and they traveled about the southern states robbing gas stations and convenience stores and cashing stolen checks. In 1980, they were arrested. Neelley went to prison, and Adams was sent to the Youth Development Center in Rome, Georgia, where she made never-substantiated claims that the staff sexually abused her. Adams was pregnant by then and gave birth to twins while in custody.

  By 1982, both were out and ready for more action. After a couple of strikes against the homes of people who Adams swore were responsible for her abuse, on September 25 they kidnapped thirteen-year-old Lisa Millican from a Rome mall and held her at various motel rooms in the area. For three days, they kept Millican handcuffed to a bed and raped her in front of the infant twins. Then Adams took the girl to a remote Alabama locale and injected her six times with drain cleaner, which was meant to kill her without leaving any trace. Adams was wrong on both counts—the drain cleaner didn’t kill Lisa, but it did leave traces. Finally, Adams shot her and shoved the body over a cliff.

  On September 30, Adams was cruising for a victim and finally came across John Hancock and his developmentally disabled fiancée, Janice Chatman. Adams invited them to a party with her; they agreed and got into her car to go for a ride. Eventually they met up with Neelley. Adams took Hancock into the woods and shot him in the back; she thought that she had killed him, but he survived. Adams and Neelley turned their attention to Chatman; they raped her repeatedly in a motel room, then shot her and dumped the body.

  Adams and Neelley were arrested in Tennessee. Although Adams tried to blame all of their crimes on Neelley, it quickly became apparent to all—including the jury and the judge—that Adams was the instigator. She craved power over others, and Neelley said that if he hadn’t gone along with her whims, he would have been one of her victims. Various accounts say that Neelley blamed her for between eight and fifteen sexually motivated murders, but no bodies except those of Millican and Chatman were ever positively connected to the couple.

  In an Alabama trial (during which Adams gave birth to another child), eighteen-year-old Adams was sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of Lisa Millican. In order to avoid a trial in Georgia, she pleaded guilty to the kidnap, rape, and murder of Janice Chatman. Neelley was convicted of those crimes as well and died in custody while serving a life sentence.

  During his last days in office as Alabama’s governor, Fob James—in what was to become a controversial decision—commuted Adams’s sentence to life in prison, where she remains today. She is one of the longest-serving female prisoners in the country.

  7

  The Family That Preys Together

  IT ISN’T JUST COUPLES—or cousins, as in the case of the Hillside Stranglers—who kill together. Sometimes it’s an entire family affair, as represented in a couple of Criminal Minds episodes.

  In “Bloodline” (413), a mother and a father and their son prey on families; they’re trying to find a young girl who’ll be a suitable wife for the son, who’s about to turn ten. The family is an offshoot of a Romany tribe, and at the episode’s end we learn that there are other families who are also involved in these activities. And in “Haunted” (502), viewers are introduced to Bill Jarvis, who used to abduct and kill young boys while forcing his own young son to participate in their imprisonment.

  Although these situations are fictional, they are unfortunately not that far removed from the reality of some family situations.

  LIKE MANY KILLERS, Joseph Kallinger was adopted at an early age. Born Joseph Lee Brenner III on December 11, 1936, he was adopted at the age of eighteen months by Anna and Stephen Kallinger. The adoption was more a means of getting another pair of hands for their shoe repair business than a display of love or concern. The Kallingers should never have been parents, and that was one family tradition that Joseph passed along.

  His adoptive parents’ idea of child rearing involved regular beatings and other forms of torture, including locking their son in a closet, making him consume excrement, forcing him to kneel on rocks, and burning him. At the age of six he was hospitalized for a hernia operation necessitated by the beatings; his parents told him that the procedure was meant to ensure that his “bird” (the household’s euphemism for penis) would stay small and not work. By the age of eleven, Kallinger’s idea of sexuality was so distorted that he became aroused by cutting and stabbing pictures of naked men and women.

  When he was fifteen, he redirected his sexual interests toward schoolmate Hilda Bergman, over the objections of his parents. The same year, he received what he called a message from God, which directed him to heal and save people through their feet. Stephen Kallinger had taught Joseph the shoemaking business, and Joseph believed that there were people everywhere whose poorly constructed shoes had damaged their brains. Kallinger’s idea of “saving” people was, to no surprise, on the twisted side.

  He and Hilda married at age seventeen. They had two children together before she left him, claiming physical abuse, for another man when Kallinger was twenty. Hospitalized for a possible brain lesion, Kallinger was diagnosed with a psychopathological nervous disorder. After he got out, he married again. Soon he set fire to his home, an act that would become almost habitual.

  With his second wife, he had four children, whom he began to abuse just as he had been abused. In 1972, he branded his oldest daughter with a hot iron after she tried to run away from home. Three of his children went to the police and accused Kallinger of abuse. Kallinger was found guilty and sentenced to four years’ probation with mandatory psychiatric treatment. His son Joey, evaluated as “seriously disturbed,” spent time in a reformatory—a chip off the old block.

  In “Bloodline,” Agent Prentiss talks with a girl who was abduc
ted, but then released, by a strange family.

  By the middle of 1974, when Kallinger was living next door to his mother in Philadelphia, he was regularly hallucinating. Those messages from God were still coming in, and he told his thirteen-year-old son Michael that they instructed him to murder young boys and sever their genitals. Michael’s response, reportedly, was an enthusiastic “Glad to do it, Dad!”

  Eleven days later, a Puerto Rican youth was murdered, and according to some reports, his genitals had been cut off. Kallinger had finally graduated to murder and had made his son his assistant.

  Kallinger’s next victim would be his son Joey. Two weeks after Kallinger took out a huge life insurance policy on his sons, Joey “ran away from home.” His body was found under the rubble of a collapsed building, so crushed that the cause of death could not be determined. The insurance company, suspecting foul play, never paid out the claim.

  On November 22, 1974, Kallinger and Michael broke into a home in Lindenwold, New Jersey. The house was empty, so they tried another house and forced their way in. Joan Carty was home. Kallinger tied her to a bed and raped her.

  Father and son went out again on December 3, crashing a bridge game in Pennsylvania. They found four women there, and after stripping them and posing them suggestively, stole twenty thousand dollars in jewelry and cash. Flushed with that success, the Kallingers invaded a home in a Baltimore suburb, where they forced a woman to fellate Kallinger at gunpoint.

  The beginning of the end for the Kallinger pair came on January 8, 1975. Posing as an insurance salesman, Kallinger, once again accompanied by Michael, forced his way into a home in Leonia, New Jersey. Armed with a pistol and a knife, he and Michael tied up the three residents. During the next several hours, as more people came home they were each seized and bound. Some were forced to strip and were tied up with electrical cords cut from lamps and appliances. Duct tape was put over their eyes and their mouths.