Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  While most cases of Munchausen syndrome by proxy don’t make headline news, perhaps because of the vulnerable nature of the victims and the intimate relationship they have with their victimizers, a notable exception is the case of Julie J. Gregory. Gregory wrote a book called Sickened that details her victimization at the hands of her mother, who fed her books of matches, pills that caused blinding headaches, and more. Gregory spent what seemed like much of her childhood in doctors’ offices and hospitals, and underwent a needless heart catheterization. If not for the resistance of one doctor, Gregory’s mother would have succeeded in forcing Gregory to undergo open-heart surgery.

  In the episode “Risky Business” (513), Will Summers is an emergency medical technician (EMT) who poisoned his wife gradually, sending her to the hospital many times before her eventual death. Now he’s persuaded his own son, and other teenagers, to play a dangerous “choking game.” As an EMT, he knows he’ll be sent out on calls and can revive the participants. He has done so many times with his son, but in other cases it has been too late for the victims.

  11

  Killers with a Cause

  THE KILLER IN THE EPISODE “Doubt” (301) is a campus security guard. With murdered girls turning up on campus, it’s easy for him to attract more victims, since he’s someone they turn to for protection. Although the BAU team has a profile, Derek Morgan reminds them that Richard Jewell fit the profile of the bomber at the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, but he was innocent, and the accusation ruined his life. When a defense attorney in the episode “Tabula Rasa” (319) also points out that the BAU’s profile led to Richard Jewell, Aaron Hotchner counters that when you look at the real Olympic bomber, Eric Rudolph, the profile was dead-on.

  RICHARD JEWELL was a college security guard. While working as a guard at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Jewell found a backpack containing three pipe bombs. He alerted the authorities and helped them to clear the area. The bombs exploded, killing one person and wounding more than a hundred. Another victim, a Turkish television cameraman, died of a heart attack while running to cover the blast.

  Without Jewell’s discovery and a warning phone call from the real bomber, the number of dead and injured could have been considerably higher. At first Jewell was called a hero, but as the days passed, he went from hero to suspect. It was theorized that he had planted the bombs he “found,” and the whole plot stemmed from his desperate need to be seen as heroic. He was crucified in the media and was sued, and his entire life was put under a public magnifying glass. Virtually everyone he had ever known was interrogated, and he found himself under surveillance.

  In October 1996, he was officially cleared by the investigating U.S. attorney, and in August 1997, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno formally apologized. On April 13, 2005, an Army veteran named Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty to planting the bombs. Jewell died on August 29, 2007, at the age of forty-four, suffering from heart disease, kidney disease, and other ailments.

  The real bomber, Rudolph, wasn’t finished.

  Two bombs exploded at an abortion clinic in Sandy Springs, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb, on the morning of January 16, 1997. The first, placed on the building’s rear porch, damaged an empty examination room. The second explosion, about ninety minutes later, was near the parking lot, and seven people were injured in the blast. Bombers often plant two devices, the first intended to cause some damage and the second to kill or injure emergency responders on the scene.

  On February 21, a bomb exploded at the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian nightclub in Atlanta, and injured five people. The police found a second explosive device and defused it.

  Investigators were looking into similarities among the three bombings when a letter showed up at some Atlanta news media outlets from a group calling itself the Army of God. The letter included details about the bombings that caused the investigators to believe that the writers were involved. It also railed against “sodomites” and abortion clinics and concluded with the phrase “Death to the New World Order.”

  The next bomb, at a clinic that provided abortion services in Birmingham, Alabama, exploded on January 29, 1998. An off-duty police officer working as a clinic guard was killed, and a clinic nurse was badly injured.

  This time a witness saw a man get into a pickup truck and drive away. The truck, it turned out, belonged to Eric Rudolph.

  Eric Robert Rudolph was born in Florida on September 19, 1966, but after his father died in 1981, his mother moved the family to rural North Carolina. They lived in a cabin in the mountains, with a wood-burning stove, a generator in case of power failures, and a distiller so they wouldn’t have to drink fluoridated water. Rudolph’s mother held a variety of fringe beliefs that were passed on to her children: she was paranoid about Social Security numbers, didn’t trust the government, partly homeschooled her kids, and taught her children the racist beliefs of the Christian Identity movement, which claims that Anglo-Saxons are the “true” Israelites of the Bible and that Jews are the offspring of Satan.

  When Rudolph was in a public school, he turned in a paper on the Holocaust in which he “proved” that it never happened. He grew up hating gays, blacks, and Jews and admired Nazi general Erwin Rommel. He was also a devoted user, and eventually cultivator and seller, of marijuana, reportedly earning sixty thousand dollars a year from it.

  Two days after the Birmingham bombing, Rudolph essentially vanished. The authorities believed that he shouldered a backpack and headed into the hills around his North Carolina home. They swarmed into the area, launching one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history. While on the run, Rudolph became a folk hero to many in the fringe movements of the extreme right. In absentia, federal grand juries handed down twenty-three counts against Rudolph in the bombing incidents.

  A rookie police officer spotted a suspicious looking man in an alley behind a grocery store in Murphy, North Carolina, on May 31, 2003. Suspecting that a burglary was in progress, the officer drew his gun and ordered the man to come out and lie down on the ground. The man complied, and the manhunt came to an end. Rudolph had been captured at last.

  In “Amplification,” when a new strain of weaponized anthrax is released into the public, Dr. Reid and the team work with members of the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Homeland Security to catch the unsub.

  Survivalist and military training had kept Rudolph alive through cold winters in the North Carolina mountains. His defense team seemed anxious to keep him a free man, but in April 2005, he agreed to a plea deal. As part of the deal, he directed the authorities to a stash of more than 250 pounds of dynamite he had buried in the mountains, and he admitted guilt in all of the crimes with which he was charged. In exchange, he would receive four consecutive life sentences instead of the death penalty. The way he put it, he “decided to deprive the government of its goal of sentencing me to death.” He claimed it was a “purely tactical choice” on his part and did not indicate any guilt.

  Rudolph wrote further that he believes that abortion is murder and that force is therefore justified in trying to stop it. He considers homosexuality “aberrant sexual behavior,” permissible in the privacy of one’s home but not in public, and any attempt to present it as something legitimate and normal should be met with force. He saw the Olympic games as an example of “global socialism,” and he hoped to shut them down.

  In other words, in his statement Rudolph doesn’t admit to doing anything wrong (although he has apologized for the Olympic bombing and claims to have felt remorse at the time); he merely details and excuses his actions on the basis of his extremist political beliefs.

  The Army of God organization continues to support Rudolph, hosting a Web site where his writings can be found and soliciting funds for him to use in prison. He’s spending the rest of his days in a supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, where the only continuing damage he can do to society is as a propagandist and an inspiration to those who share his views.

  A DIFFERENT Olympic attack is refer
enced in “The Tribe” (116), in which the killers are members of a cult who strike in a pack. BAU profiler Elle Greenaway mentions the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which members of Black September, a faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, broke into the housing for the Israeli Olympic team, killed an athlete and a coach, and took nine more hostage. The terrorists demanded the release of 234 Palestinians from Israeli prisons. They also wanted two German terrorist leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, released and given safe passage out of West Germany.

  Israel refused to negotiate with the terrorists, but West Germany, hoping to avoid a bloodbath at the games it was hosting, tried to stall the Palestinians. The terrorists kept pushing back the deadline for when they would start killing, knowing that the longer the drama played out, the more people watching on TV around the world would be exposed to their cause.

  The Palestinians demanded a flight to Cairo, so the West German authorities developed a plan to take out the terrorists at the airport. While the terrorists and their hostages helicoptered in from the Olympic Village, the police got into place. Five police sharpshooters would try to hit the terrorists on the tarmac, but in case that failed, there were to be more police positioned on the airplane, disguised as crew. At the last minute, the backup plan was called off, so everything was up to the sharpshooters.

  However, the sharpshooters—none of whom had sniper training—were expecting five terrorists, and there were eight. The shooters got into position, and two terrorists crossed the tarmac to check the plane. Unexpectedly finding it empty, they hurried back to the helicopters.

  As the other six terrorists came out of the helicopters, the Germans opened fire. Three Palestinians went down right away. Finally, after more than an hour, armored personnel carriers moved on the helicopters, and as they did, the terrorists killed their hostages. Five terrorists were killed in the firefight, along with one West German police officer. The remaining Palestinians were captured, but they were released later when more terrorists hijacked an airliner and demanded their release.

  The West German rescue plan had been flawed from the start, and the resulting tragedy almost brought the games to an end. The decision was made to continue the games, and after a memorial service on September 6, 1972, the games went on as scheduled.

  ANOTHER REFERENCE in “The Tribe” (116), as well as in “The Crossing” (318), in which Stockholm syndrome is discussed, is to Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Patricia Campbell Hearst came from a wealthy family; she was the granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.

  Hearst was attending the University of California at Berkeley when, on February 4, 1974, members of the SLA kidnapped her from the apartment she shared with her fiancé. The SLA demanded the release of two convicted killers, members of the group, from prison. Officials refused. The kidnappers changed their demand, and the Hearst family met the new one, providing two million dollars in food aid to the poor. Then the group wanted more.

  Meanwhile, Patty had been tied up and kept in a closet. In addition to experiencing food, sleep, and sensory deprivation, she was repeatedly raped and ranted at. All she knew was what her tormentors told her, and she had to do whatever they said in order to stay alive. The next time she appeared in public, she was calling herself Tania and helping the SLA to rob a bank. Two bystanders were shot, though not by her.

  On May 16, SLA member Bill Harris was detained for shoplifting at a Los Angeles sporting goods store. In this incident, “Tania” unloaded a whole clip from an M-1 carbine, then got another rifle and continued shooting. She and her friends got away, but the next day the police surrounded the SLA hideaway, and after a massive shootout the place went up in flames. Six SLA members were killed, but Hearst, Bill Harris, and Bill’s wife, Emily, were holed up in a motel near Disneyland, watching the whole thing on TV.

  After more bank robberies and some bombings, Hearst was arrested in San Francisco on September 18, 1975. Convicted of bank robbery and use of a firearm during the commission of a felony, she was sentenced to seven years in prison.

  The theory at the time was that Hearst’s transformation into Tania was the result of Stockholm syndrome, the phenomenon in which captives come to identify with their captors. Hearst later said that that’s not what happened, that she was coerced into committing the crimes. An FBI agent who interviewed her after her arrest, however, said that she was a classic case of Stockholm syndrome.

  In 1979, after Hearst had served two years of her sentence, President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence.

  EVERY AMERICAN who is alive today knows about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the Islamist group that attacked the United States on the morning of September 11, 2001. One Criminal Minds episode, “Lessons Learned” (210), deals explicitly with al-Qaeda when Jason Gideon, Spencer Reid, and Emily Prentiss travel to the U.S. detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to interrogate a prisoner who has knowledge of a terrorist plot in Virginia.

  Al-Qaeda has its roots in the opposition to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. The mujahedeen (Muslim freedom fighters)—both native Afghanis and Arabs who came to join the struggle—fought the Soviets, and they were financed by the CIA, which was working with the Pakistani intelligence service, and Saudi Arabia. One of the Arabs who came to join the Afghanis was a Saudi Arabian named Osama bin Laden, who built roads (with the resources of his family’s construction company), collected financial contributions from wealthy Saudis and other gulf-state Arabs, and organized the Arab volunteers who flooded in to join the fight.

  Bin Laden was born into a very wealthy family in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in the year 1377 in the Islamic calendar, which corresponds to July 1957 to July 1958 (his exact birth date is unknown, despite various rumors on the Internet). His father, Mohamed, was a poor man in Yemen who started a construction company and rose to become the main building contractor for the Saudi royal family. Mohamed had fifty-four children (twenty-five sons and twenty-nine daughters) by twenty-two wives. Osama was somewhere between the seventeenth and twenty-first son. He was the only son of the marriage of his father and his mother, a Syrian-born woman whom Mohamed divorced soon after the birth of their son—and for whom he then arranged a marriage to another man. Osama continued to live with his mother, who had four children with her next husband.

  In 1968, the year after his father’s death in a small-plane crash, bin Laden was enrolled in an exclusive school in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. At his school, instead of wearing traditional Arab dress, the students wore uniforms similar to those of British schoolboys (white shirts, ties, and blazers in the winter months). Having lost his father (and despite having a stepfather), bin Laden might have been susceptible to the Syrian-born (like his mother) physical-education teacher, who offered an informal Islamic study group after school.

  The teacher used soccer to entice the boys to join, then he told them that before playing each time they would read a verse from the Koran. Gradually he increased the study of the Koran and eliminated the playing of soccer. The teacher was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a religious and political movement formed in opposition to British rule in Egypt. After the British abandoned the region, the group remained active, opposing the rule of President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and secular rule in any Muslim country. Despite being suppressed by Nasser, the Muslim Brotherhood flourished underground and continued advocating for rule by sharia, or Islamic law.

  It was in this study group that bin Laden was exposed to the concept of violent jihad, or holy war against non-Muslims, and other forms of extreme political and religious activism. Bin Laden became committed to the group and its fervent cause of politically transforming the entire Muslim world.

  In Afghanistan, bin Laden finally got to put some of his ideas into action. The Soviet invasion was exactly the sort of colonial-style takeover by “infidels” that he opposed. His role was as an organizer and a financier, and he worked with Saudi officials (and, indirectly, the CIA) to r
aise funds for the cause. When the Soviets withdrew early in 1989, this was evidence to bin Laden that Islamic fundamentalists could defeat a major superpower. Ultimately, he believed, the Soviets’ defeat in Afghanistan helped to break up the Soviet Union. Bin Laden would soon transfer this belief and this goal to the United States.

  Bin Laden’s network coalesced into the organization called al-Qaeda, which means “the Base” in Arabic. After the Soviets withdrew, he returned to Saudi Arabia to work for his family’s construction company, but he was already more radicalized than most of the family, and he made no secret of his views. In 1990, when the Saudi government permitted U.S. troops to be stationed there after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, bin Laden was outraged by the idea of a non-Muslim presence in his homeland, which he viewed as a desecration. He offered his mujahedeen to fight the Iraqis, but his offer was rebuffed by the Saudi king, and the U.S. military arrived in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was expelled from his country the next year as a result of his antigovernment activities and diatribes. He took his fortune and moved to Sudan, where he owned a farm on which he raised horses and trained jihadis. A couple of years later Saudi Arabia revoked his citizenship.

  In 1993, al-Qaeda’s first violent action inside the United States took place: the bombing of New York’s World Trade Center. Six people died and hundreds more were wounded by a truck bomb that exploded in an underground garage. Six people were arrested, tried, and convicted on terrorism charges.

  Bin Laden didn’t restrict his ire to U.S. soil, however. In October 1993, his jihadis teamed with Somalis to kill eighteen U.S. soldiers in Somalia. An al-Qaeda truck bombing in Riyadh in 1995 claimed five American lives and killed two Indians.