Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  15

  Blood Suckers and Flesh Eaters

  MOST OF THE CRIMES DEPICTED on Criminal Minds are acts that violate societal taboos, those social prohibitions against activities that are particularly objectionable to our Western society: murder, rape, and kidnapping, for example. But as awful as these acts are, there are twists to them, violations of even more serious taboos, in our culture that have—in other cultures, other times and places—not only not been taboo but, within certain ritual contexts, have been considered sacred acts.

  Humans have been known to drink human blood for a variety of reasons. Long before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, making famous the eastern European legend of the vampire, ancient Gauls drank the blood of their vanquished enemies. So did the Moche of Peru. The Mahabharata, a Sanskrit epic poem of ancient India, includes scenes of warriors drinking their enemies’ blood, and the German epic the Nibelungenlied describes the same practice among the Burgundians. This widespread ancient practice stemmed from the belief that it would give the warriors strength in future battles. King Louis XI of France reportedly drank the blood of children in his dying days because he believed that it had healing properties. In more modern times, the practice has persisted in some areas.

  Cannibalism, the eating of human flesh, was also practiced for various reasons (e.g., by warriors to gain strength). Nor is cannibalism taboo in all cultures, even today. Some Melanesian tribes still practice it, as do the Korowai of Papua New Guinea. Some scientists believe that cannibalism was normal human behavior at one time, accounting for genes that protect human brains from diseases that can be contracted by eating contaminated human flesh. In recent history, cannibalism has been resorted to as a means of self-preservation when starvation was the only other option, such as in the case of the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes Mountains in 1972.

  In contemporary Western civilization, however, both practices are not only illegal but are seen as among the most heinous acts a person can commit. These two taboos crop up on Criminal Minds with some regularity.

  IN THE EPISODE “Blood Hungry” (111), the term anthropophagy—feeding on human flesh—is mentioned. Spencer Reid brings up the case of Richard Trenton Chase, the so-called Vampire Killer of Sacramento.

  On January 27, 1978, at about 12:30 p.m., Chase tried to open the door to a house in north Sacramento. Finding it unlocked—which he believed was an invitation—he walked into the house. Four people were inside at the time: Evelyn Miroth, thirty-eight; her six-year-old son, Jason; her twenty-two-month-old nephew, David; and a neighbor, Daniel Meredith, fifty-one. Dan was watching the kids while Evelyn took a bath. He went to see who was at the door, and Chase shot him in the head with a .22 at point-blank range.

  In “The Uncanny Valley,” Dr. Reid tries to talk with a woman suspected of turning real-life women into her own personal doll collection.

  Chase turned over the body and took Meredith’s wallet and car keys, then continued into the house. First he came upon David, who was in his crib, and shot him in the head. Then he followed Jason, who was running into his mother’s bedroom, and killed him with two head shots.

  Chase entered the bathroom, where he shot Evelyn, then hauled her body from the tub into her bedroom. There he cut the back of her neck and sodomized her, drinking the blood from the slashes in her neck at the same time. When he was finished, he stabbed her anus multiple times. He sliced her abdomen open with a cross cut; the blood that had pooled there flowed freely. Chase collected it in a bucket and drank it.

  He went back for the baby, which he took into a bathroom. Cracking David’s skull, Chase ate some brain matter and drank more blood. When a six-year-old girl, a friend of Jason’s, knocked on the door, Chase panicked, grabbed David’s corpse, and fled the house, escaping in Meredith’s car. The little girl told a neighbor that she had seen a man leave, and the neighbor came and discovered the grisly scene. The police arrived shortly thereafter and found Chase’s fingerprints, handprints, and shoe prints in his victims’ blood.

  At home, Chase continued his dismemberment of young David. He cut off the boy’s head and drank blood from the neck. Slicing the body open, he removed some internal organs and ate them. Others went into the blender to be made into smoothies. What was left Chase put into a box and deposited in a nearby church. A church janitor found the box on March 24, the remains partly mummified. Meredith’s car was located, abandoned, near where a dog had been found shot and disemboweled.

  Richard Chase was born on May 23, 1950. As a young boy, he exhibited the triad of sociopathy: bed-wetting, fire-starting, and cruelty to animals. By the age of eight, he was over the bed-wetting. But other problems waited around the corner.

  When Chase was twelve, his parents started fighting often. His mother, later identified as “highly aggressive” and “hostile,” accused her husband of infidelity, of poisoning her, and of using drugs. The hostility continued for a decade, when the couple finally divorced.

  Chase took to using drugs and drinking heavily. He had a few girlfriends, but he couldn’t maintain an erection, and his relationships ended when intercourse proved unsuccessful. He had no close male friends. After he graduated from high school, he got a job that he held for a few months, but after this job he would never again keep a job longer than a few days. He couldn’t handle the workload or the social pressures of junior college. He was arrested once for drunk driving and again for carrying an unlicensed gun and resisting arrest. Unable to support himself, he drifted between his parents’ separate homes. His life was locked in a downward spiral.

  His adolescent hypochondria worsened, and as he imagined diseases for himself, he also imagined possible cures. Chase caught or purchased rabbits, which he disemboweled, then ate their entrails whole or processed them in a blender. He grew convinced that his heart was shrinking and that he needed to resupply it with blood or it would disappear. He thought that his own blood was turning to powder. He believed that someone had stolen his pulmonary artery and that his head was changing shape. When he injected rabbit blood into his veins as a “cure,” he got a bad case of blood poisoning. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, he was committed to a mental institution. Even there he found prey, capturing birds on the grounds, biting their heads off, and drinking their blood. The hospital staff called him Dracula.

  Medication seemed to help, and in 1976 he was released into the care of his parents. Soon, though, he was living in his own place again. He returned to old habits, catching animals, including dogs and cats, killing them, and drinking their blood. He also bought guns and started practicing with them.

  His mother decided that he no longer needed medication and weaned him off it. From that point on, his course was predictable.

  Chase committed his first murder on December 29, 1977. He was practicing with his .22 pistol, shooting from his car. He hit the wall of one house and fired through the kitchen window of another. Then he saw Ambrose Griffin and his wife taking groceries from their car into their house. Chase fired twice and Ambrose fell dead. All of these incidents were in the same Sacramento neighborhood.

  On January 23, 1978, a woman saw Chase trying the door and windows of her house as she approached. She stood and watched him. He saw her, lit a cigarette, and eventually wandered off. Locked doors meant he wasn’t welcome, he later admitted.

  Down the street a short while later, someone else had left a door unlocked. The owners, approaching their home, saw someone exit the house and run away. He had stolen a few things, had urinated into a drawer of baby clothes, and had defecated on a child’s bed.

  Another hour passed, then Chase encountered an acquaintance from high school in a shopping center parking lot. She was shocked at his appearance. He was frighteningly thin and disheveled. His cheeks were sunken and his eyes were bulging. He had a yellowish crust around his mouth. His sweatshirt was bloody. Anxious, she got into her car and tried to leave. When Chase grabbed at her car door, she stepped on the gas and zoomed away. Hearing about the murders four days later
at the Miroth house, the young woman reported her encounter to the police and gave them Chase’s name.

  Meanwhile, after being left behind by his high school acquaintance, Chase kept wandering the neighborhood, checking doors. He found another opportunity at the home of David and Teresa Wallin. David was at work. His wife, three months pregnant, was taking out the garbage. Chase shot Teresa three times, killing her. Taking her into her bedroom, he had sex with her corpse while stabbing it repeatedly. He disemboweled her, then got a used yogurt container from the kitchen and filled it with blood, which he then drank. Before leaving the property, he picked up dog feces from the yard, went back inside, and shoved it into Teresa’s mouth.

  The Sacramento police called in the FBI, and profiler Robert Ressler flew out to work on the case. He suggested that the offender would be a white male between twenty-five and twenty-seven, extremely thin, and slovenly. He would have a history of mental illness and drug use. He would be a loner and unemployed, living on a disability payment or off his relatives. He was a disorganized offender, too mentally unstable to hold a job or function in society.

  Chase lived less than a mile from where Dan Meredith’s car had been abandoned. Now that the police had Chase’s name, detectives went to his apartment. When he didn’t come out, the cops split up, one heading for the manager’s apartment while the other walked away from the building. Taking advantage of the moment, Chase darted for his truck, carrying a box, but the police grabbed him. He wore his .22 in a shoulder holster, and Meredith’s wallet was in his back pocket. The box contained bloody rags.

  What the police found inside Chase’s apartment was far worse: three food blenders, coated with blood; body parts in the refrigerator, including a container of human brain tissue; a calendar with the dates of the Wallin and Miroth-Meredith murders marked on it, along with forty-four more dates marked throughout the rest of the year.

  A jury found Chase guilty of six counts of homicide on May 8, 1979, and he was sentenced to die in the gas chamber. Ressler, who believed that Chase was clearly insane and should have been institutionalized rather than imprisoned, interviewed him extensively while he was on death row. Chase insisted that his killings were done in self-defense. He was suffering from soap-dish poisoning (an imaginary ailment), he said, and had been victimized by Nazis and UFOs.

  In prison, Chase was given antidepressants to control his continuing hallucinations. He saved up his pills for several weeks, and on December 26, 1980, he took them all at once. A guard found Chase on his bunk, dead.

  VAMPIRISM bares its blood-soaked fangs in “The Performer” (507). In that episode, the condition known as Renfield syndrome, or clinical vampirism, is discussed. A real-life example of this phenomenon is John Brennan Crutchley, who was known as the Vampire Rapist (rapist only because none of his probable murders was ever proven).

  Crutchley was arrested because a helpful motorist stopped when he saw a teenage girl crawling on the side of a Florida road, naked and weak, in late November 1985. The motorist took her home and called the police and an ambulance. The girl had lost 40-45 percent of her blood.

  She had been hitchhiking, she told the police. A man had picked her up, then said he had to get something from his house. When they arrived there, he got into the back of the car and threw a rope around her throat.

  The girl came to on the man’s kitchen counter, her arms and legs bound. The man had a video camera and lights mounted. As the camera ran, he raped her. After he was done, he drew blood from her with needles and drank it, claiming that he was a vampire. He handcuffed her and put her in a bathtub, and kept coming back for more. Finally he left the house, and she was able to escape. The doctors who examined her believed that she would have died if the man had drawn any more blood.

  The house belonged to John Brennan Crutchley, a thirty-nine-year-old computer engineer who was married and had one child. His family was in Maryland for the Thanksgiving holiday. Crutchley was arrested and his home was searched, but the search was haphazard. The videotape in the camera had been partly erased, so the documentary evidence of the victim’s rape was gone. A stack of credit cards several inches thick appeared in a photograph, but the cards themselves were gone when the police returned to look for them. Identification cards belonging to two other women were in the house; Crutchley claimed that those women had given him their IDs. There were bodies in his past, and plenty of them, but no evidence tied him to the murders that seemed to follow him from state to state.

  Crutchley had participated in kinky sexual activities with what must have been several dozen women and couples, some with his wife’s participation. He was a sexual sadist. When he was a boy, his mother had dressed him in girls’ clothes until he was five or six. According to FBI profiler Robert Ressler, Crutchley had all the hallmarks of a serial killer. Ressler believes that Crutchley did indeed kill many women, but in the end Crutchley was convicted only of sexual battery, kidnapping, and aggravated battery against the teenage hitchhiker and sentenced to twenty-five years to life.

  He was released after eleven years for good behavior, but he was arrested again the next day for violating his parole after he tested positive for marijuana use. That was his third strike, and he went back to prison for life. Crutchley died in prison on April 2, 2002, after putting a plastic bag over his head. His death was ruled a case of autoerotic asphyxiation.

  AS INFAMOUS as Richard Trenton Chase is, he’s a nobody compared to the most notorious modern cannibal, Milwaukee’s Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer is one of those killers whose name pops up frequently on Criminal Minds, beginning with the very first episode, “Extreme Aggressor” (101), and again in “Plain Sight” (104), “The Boogeyman” (206), “Fear and Loathing” (216), “Jones” (218), “In Name and Blood” (302), and “Zoe’s Reprise” (415).

  In “Fear and Loathing,” the BAU agents believe they’re looking for a smooth-talking killer who easily wins the trust of his victims. Spencer Reid points out that Jeffrey Dahmer was so calm and self-assured that he convinced the police not to look at a bag full of body parts.

  Reid is correct. The incident he mentions was Dahmer’s first murder, and it was only one of many occasions on which the authorities could have stopped him before he racked up a total of seventeen known murders.

  Dahmer, then eighteen, had for years had fantasies of meeting an attractive male hitchhiker and having sex with him. He had grown up in Bath, Ohio, where, he said, people just didn’t talk about homosexuality. He called it the biggest taboo in town; others might insist that there were greater taboos and that Dahmer eventually broke most of them.

  His parents had divorced the year before. His father was living in a motel, and Dahmer lived with his mother and David, his younger brother. One night in June 1978, when his mother and his brother were out of town for a week, Dahmer took the car and drove around town. He spotted Steven Hicks, also eighteen, the hitchhiker of his dreams, or a close enough approximation. Dahmer picked up Hicks and took him to the empty house. They drank beer and smoked pot, but Dahmer realized that Hicks wasn’t gay and wasn’t going to fulfill the rest of Dahmer’s fantasy. Not wanting Hicks to leave, Dahmer hit Hicks in the head with a barbell. Then he placed the barbell across Hicks’s throat and strangled him to death.

  This was another thing that Dahmer had fantasized about. Like Bob Berdella, the Kansas City Butcher (see chapter 2), Dahmer longed for complete control over others. If he couldn’t control people in life, he would control them in death. After killing Hicks, Dahmer masturbated, then took the body to a crawl space under the house.

  The next day, he had to dispose of Hicks in a more permanent fashion. He bought a hunting knife and went back into the crawl space. Slicing open Hicks’s belly and seeing his internal organs got him aroused again. He cut Hicks’s body into pieces and triple-bagged each piece in garbage bags. Around 3 a.m., while he was driving to dump the pieces in a ravine ten miles from his house, the police stopped him for crossing the centerline.

  Dahmer pas
sed an inebriation test, but while the police were talking to him, one officer shined a flashlight into the backseat of Dahmer’s car and asked about the plastic bags. Dahmer said it was garbage that he hadn’t yet taken to the landfill. Despite the smell—or maybe because of it—the officers believed him and let him go. He decided to take the bags back home instead of dumping them. At home he broke the bones up into tiny pieces and burned the clothes.

  For Dahmer, the cooling-off period after that first homicide was nine years long. But when he started up again, he didn’t stop.

  Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father, Lionel Dahmer, was an analytical chemist. He noticed that Jeffrey had a fascination with the bones of dead animals at an early age. He didn’t think anything of it at the time, but later he would see it as a dark premonition.

  Otherwise, Jeff was a cheerful child, until an operation for a double hernia at the age of four. His natural happiness never seemed to return after that; instead, he seemed solemn, distant, and apathetic. Between the ages of ten and fifteen, even the way he carried himself changed; he became rigid and tense, with a blank face and a shy manner.

  Dahmer had also developed an unsettling habit of collecting dead animals and dissecting them. He stripped the skin off a large dog he found by the road and mounted its head on a stick, which he set out in the woods as a prank.

  His later high school years were filled with nightmarish fantasies and a growing alcohol problem. These reached their culmination in the murder of Steven Hicks, and they never went away again.

  After high school, Dahmer tried college, but after staying drunk for a semester at Ohio State University, he dropped out. Next, he went into the army, which discharged him after two years for habitual drunkenness.