by Colin Wilson
That said, the NCAVC is some clearing house. Standards of entry into the FBI are uniformly high, and only agents of exceptional calibre are recruited into the specialist Behavioural Science Unit. Most of its supervisory special agents (or SSAs) hold at least a Master’s degree. The NCAVC uses the latest advancements in computer engineering to combat serial violent crime nationwide, including VICAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Programme) and PROFILER (another world first: a robot, rule-based expert system programmed to profile serial murderers), both of which are discussed in detail in the next chapter. Research on new projects is continuous – the Behavioural Science Unit has long been known as law enforcement’s ‘Think Tank’ in the United States – and no great vision is required to anticipate the further advances which will be made in the coming decade. Here, surely, is the blueprint crime-fighting centre for every advanced nation in the twenty-first century.
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1 The Only Living Witness, New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1983.
Three
The Profilers
OVER THE YEARS, the name of one man more than any other – James A. Brussel, M.D. – has become synonymous with the art of psychological profiling. In the mid-1950s this spare, pipe-smoking American psychiatrist, with the forte voice and fund of knowledge concerning errant mankind, profiled the then unknown ‘Mad Bomber’ of New York with quite superlative accuracy – right down to the way he would wear the jacket of his double-breasted suit: buttoned. This was after just one meeting with the investigating city police, who had had the Mad Bomber on their ‘wanted’ list for sixteen years. James Brussel was that good. Small wonder the press dubbed him ‘The Sherlock Holmes of the Couch’.
For many years no-one knew why the Mad Bomber had declared his one-man war on Consolidated Edison, the firm which supplies New York with electric light. The campaign began on 16 November 1940 when a home-made metal pipe bomb was found on a windowsill at the Consolidated Edison plant on West 64th Street. It failed to explode, but a note wrapped round it left no-one in doubt as to the bomb-maker’s intention. ‘CON EDISON CROOKS – THIS IS FOR YOU’, it said. There were no tell-tale fingerprints. In those days, no-one made telephone calls claiming responsibility. Moreover, there was a real war being fought in Europe, where cities were being razed by bombs; so, perhaps understandably, the discovery of one, dud, home-made, explosive device in Manhattan failed to make a line in the papers. The same lack of publicity attended a second unexploded pipe bomb, found in the street a few blocks from Consolidated Edison headquarters on the corner of Irving Place and 14th Street a year later. Within another three months, America herself was at war.
Somewhat magnanimously the unknown bomb-maker wrote to New York city police headquarters, pledging a truce for the duration. As with all his letters it was hand-printed in neat, capital letters, and signed with the initials ‘FP’. He used hyphens instead of commas and full stops, and old-fashioned phrases (‘dastardly deeds’ was his favourite). ‘I WILL MAKE NO MORE BOMBS FOR THE DURATION OF THE WAR – MY PATRIOTIC FEELINGS HAVE MADE ME DECIDE THIS – LATER I WILL BRING THE CON EDISON TO JUSTICE – THEY WILL PAY FOR THEIR DASTARDLY DEEDS – FP’[.]
The ‘Mad Bomber’, as he was later dubbed by the press, kept his word. World War Two was long over before the first bomb exploded, on 24 April 1950. It wrecked the phone booth in which it was planted, outside the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue; by chance, there were no casualties. Over the next six years he planted bombs in subway lockers, phone booths or holes cut in cinema seats from Broadway to Brooklyn – fifty-four altogether by his count by March 1956. A number of people were injured: again by chance, only a handful seriously. Part of a letter sent by ‘FP’ that month to the New York Herald Tribune warned ‘THESE BOMBINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL CON EDISON IS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE – MY LIFE IS DEDICATED TO THIS TASK’[.]
On 2 December 1956 he struck again. His most powerful device to date exploded in the Paramount cinema in Brooklyn injuring seven of the audience, three seriously. On Boxing Day the Journal-American published an open letter calling on the Mad Bomber to give himself up, while offering him space to air his grievances. He rejected the appeal by return of post: ‘PLACING MYSELF IN CUSTODY WOULD BE STUPID – DO NOT INSULT MY INTELLIGENCE’, but clearly welcomed the publicity, by declaring another bombing truce until mid-January 1957. He also listed the fourteen devices he had planted in 1956, several of which had not been discovered. A police search uncovered eight. Five were dummies. The rest were armed, but for technical reasons had failed to explode.
Still the police did not know where to look, or for whom. Then by responding to a second open letter in the Journal-American on 10 January 1957, the Mad Bomber inadvertently revealed the first clues to his identity. ‘I WAS INJURED ON A JOB AT CONSOLIDATED EDISON PLANT – AS A RESULT I AM ADJUDGED TOTALLY AND PERMANENTLY DISABLED – I DID NOT RECEIVE ANY AID OF ANY KIND FROM COMPANY – THAT I DID NOT PAY MYSELF – WHILE FIGHTING FOR MY LIFE – SECTION 28 CAME UP’[.] Section 28 of the New York State Compensation Law requires legal claims to be submitted within two years of injury. An immediate search of Consolidated Edison files failed to unearth the complaint which could identify the Mad Bomber. A third appeal by the newspaper, asking for further details of his injuries, failed to elicit a quick response. As the search went on, the police asked Dr Brussel to help them by profiling the unknown wanted man.
While the police had not consulted him before in a criminal investigation, James Brussel was no stranger to the world of the criminally insane. Although in private practice, he was also assistant commissioner of the New York State’s mental health department. He had formerly been assistant director of a mental hospital. During World War Two he had served in the US army as a senior neuropsychiatrist, and was recalled in the Korean war as head of the Neuropsychiatric Centre at El Paso, Texas. He knew of the Mad Bomber, of course, from the newspapers. He now listened to the police version, studied photographs of the unexploded bombs and read through a host of letters inked in neat, capital letters. In his loud voice he then delivered the psychological profile which has since become legend.
The Mad Bomber’s sex? Dr Brussel assumed him to be a man: most bombers are. That was to prove correct, as did his professional diagnosis that the offender’s marathon resentment of Con-Edison, for offences real or imagined – plus his total disregard for the lives of others when settling old scores – to be the conduct of a man suffering from acute persecution mania: a paranoiac. Correction. A middle-aged paranoiac. Why? Because paranoia usually reaches a dangerous stage in patients in their mid-thirties, and this bombing campaign dated back to 1940. Elementary, my dear Watson.
To James Brussel, the bundle of letters on his desk, each one meticulously printed in neat, inked capitals to justify the mayhem it portended, denoted a neat, formally polite, yet hugely dangerous, mad author. To his psychiatrist’s eye the flowing shape of the ‘w’s, with their pointed tips, represented token female breasts. Experience had taught him the Oedipus-complex was not uncommon among paranoiacs. He had learned from the police how the Mad Bomber cut holes in cinema seats to plant his bombs. Was this, he wondered, the explanation for the bombing campaign – a sexual problem, sparked off by real or imagined resentment of male authority in the shape of Consolidated Edison management?
Dr Brussel was wrong there. Events showed it to be a straight grudge vendetta with no sexual overtones. In most other respects his profiling was inspired. He was certain of one thing; the Mad Bomber was not homosexual. Brussel saw him as a brooding, solitary person of average height and ‘athletic’ build (this last a statistical characteristic of most paranoiacs) who either lived alone or was looked after by some older, unmarried female relative – an aunt perhaps, or a sister. (The police found he lived with two doting, older unmarried sisters.) The stilted phraseology suggested either an immigrant American or – given his age – one born of immigrant parents who learned the new English language from Victorian-era books. Brussel decided he was a fir
st-generation American of Slav descent (Slav because he chose bombs as his weapon), which in turn suggested he might also be a Roman Catholic. Remarkably, the police found Dr Brussel right on all counts. The Mad Bomber was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1903 of Polish immigrant stock. Furthermore, he attended mass every Sunday up to the time of his arrest.
In his protest letters, the Mad Bomber constantly complained of a ‘serious’ illness resulting from injuries caused by an accident at work – date unknown, but clearly pre-1940. Wearing his hat as a qualified medical practitioner, James Brussel narrowed the list of probable illnesses to three – cancer, tuberculosis and heart disease. He thought, wrongly, it had to be heart disease. Why? Cancer would almost certainly have killed him by 1957, and tuberculosis could be successfully treated. A feasible deduction – yet on this one day when he seemed almost clairvoyant, Dr Brussel overlooked the one behavioural characteristic he knew better than most: that all paranoiacs think they know far more than mere doctors, and so rarely consult them voluntarily. Subsequent, obligatory medical examination showed the Mad Bomber to be suffering from TB.
But that is to carp. In almost every other respect his proved to be a near-perfect profile of the unknown, dangerous criminal who had terrified New York for more than a decade. All the police lacked was a name – and that was soon forthcoming. A Consolidated Edison secretary traced the missing file, and handed it to them. The cover was labelled ‘Metesky, George’. Inside was his 1930 address in Waterbury, Connecticut. (He had since moved to a different street, but was quickly located.) There was also a letter from Mr Metesky, complaining about the company’s ‘dastardly deeds’, while his personnel slip showed him to be a Roman Catholic. For good measure the Journal-American’s third open letter had reaped dividends too. A hand-printed letter, signed ‘FP’, listed the date of his accident at work as 5 September 1931. It matched the date in the firm’s file – the last shred of evidence needed to identify Metesky as the Mad Bomber.
He was dressed in pyjamas when the police called, since it was after midnight: none the less he addressed them with formal courtesy. ‘You think I’m the Mad Bomber, don’t you?’ he said, but did not admit to it: he volunteered the information that ‘FP’ stood for ‘Fair Play’, but little more. When the police discovered his bomb factory (complete with bomb parts, lathe and metal tubing) in the garage behind the house, they allowed Metesky time to dress before leading him away. As his two sisters watched and wept, the ‘Mad Bomber’ left with shoes a-gleam, his hair neatly brushed, sporting a collar and tie beneath his blue, double-breasted suit – buttoned, naturally: exactly as the Sherlock Holmes of the Couch had pictured him, days earlier.1
By combining identifiable behavioural characteristics with statistical probability, his own considerable professional skills – and no little intuition – James A. Brussel blazed a trail that day for future crime investigation. Yet superlatively accurate though his resultant psychological profile proved to be, the technique was not enough in itself to change traditional law enforcement procedures. It left obvious, inherent problems still to overcome. Chief among them was that too much responsibility rested on the professional judgement of the consultant. Had Dr Brussel been mistaken the police search for the Mad Bomber might well have been further delayed, perhaps irrevocably misdirected. Some sort of safety net was needed. But where to look for it? Simply to increase the number of professional consultants was clearly not the answer.
Even the most experienced of mental health consultants are liable to submit opposing views when jointly asked to profile some unknown, violent offender. A classic example was provided during the ‘Boston Strangler’ investigation in the 1960s. On that occasion Dr Brussel was invited to serve on the distinguished medical-psychiatric advisory committee which included six such professional consultants. In the event there was a wide divergence of opinion among them, and the eventual committee report – which found there were two Boston Stranglers, one a homosexual – proved to be completely inaccurate (see Albert DeSalvo, pp. 206–18.)
That said, the concept of investigating violent crime by behavioural analysis was clearly a viable one, given the right formula; and the challenge was taken up in the early 1970s by FBI agents from the Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico (see here). The essential difference in approach was that instead of attempting to identify an individual offender via a combination of mental health diagnosis and statistical probability, the FBI agents proposed to use their professional analysis of the crime scene (drawing on police reports, autopsy findings and photographic evidence, in addition to statistical probability), to profile the type of criminal responsible. The type of violent offender they had in mind was every bit as difficult to apprehend as any Mad Bomber. Their concern was the sex killers, some of whom were undoubtedly responsible for the ever-growing number of apparently motiveless murders being committed nationwide: ‘motiveless’ in the sense that there was no apparent connection between killer and victim.
The first investigation in which the new technique was successfully employed was in 1974. Four FBI agents took part, three of them instructors from Quantico, the fourth a field agent from Montana. Howard D. Teten, an experienced former police officer from California and a gifted, natural profiler who joined the FBI in 1962, was the senior. Within seven years he was appointed an instructor in applied criminology at the old National Police Academy in Washington, DC. In 1972 he moved on to the newly-formed, replacement FBI National Academy at Quantico, where he introduced the practice of informal discussion of bizarre home town murders with each incoming student class. Years earlier Teten had made a point of meeting James Brussel to exchange investigative ideas and techniques with the man who profiled the Mad Bomber with such uncanny accuracy: the classroom talks were simply an extension of the same, mutually-educative process. He was joined at Quantico in 1972 by another far-sighted FBI instructor, Patrick J. Mullany. Mullany, too, was a staunch believer in the classroom exchanges. ‘The more we did, the more we realised the possibilities.’
Their opportunity to put theory into practice came soon enough. In June 1973 a seven-year-old girl named Susan Jaeger from Farmington, Michigan, was abducted from a Rocky Mountains campsite in Montana. Sometime in the early hours an intruder slit open her tent with his knife, and overpowered Susan before she could alert her parents, William and Marietta Jaeger, who slept close by. Once the alarm was raised an intensive search failed to reveal any trace of the missing child, or any clue to the identity of her abductor. When the FBI was later called in, the case was referred to Quantico through agent Pete Dunbar, then stationed in Bozeman, Montana.
Combining their own investigative experience with the police report, photographic evidence and Dunbar’s local knowledge, Teten, Mullany and a newly-joined instructor named Robert K. Ressler (also destined to become a senior member of the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit) employed the new crime analysis technique to help track down the abductor. They concluded he was a homicidal Peeping Tom who lived in the vicinity of the camp – this was a remote area – and spotted the Jaegers during the course of a periodical, summer’s night snoop round the campsite, with Susan Jaeger a victim of opportunity. Statistics pointed to a young, male, white offender (they are almost invariably young men: white because Susan Jaeger was white, and such offences are usually intra-racial). The absence of any clues to his identity, the fact that he carried a knife with him to and from the campsite and made off with his victim without any alarm being raised, indicated an organised violent criminal. Sexually motivated murder frequently occurs at an early age, yet this was not the handiwork of some frenzied teenager. This bore the stamp of an older person, perhaps in his twenties. Statistical probability made him a loner, of average or possibly above average intelligence. Gradually the three instructors fitted together each piece of the behavioural jigsaw puzzle. The length of time the girl had been missing without word – and no sign of a ransom demand – persuaded them Susan Jaeger had been murdered. They thought it likely her abductor w
as that comparatively rare type of sex killer who mutilates his victims after death – sometimes to remove body parts as ‘souvenirs’ (see here).
Early on in the investigation an informant contacted FBI agent Dunbar with the name of a possible suspect – David Meirhofer, a local, twenty-three-year-old, single man who had served in Vietnam, By chance Dunbar knew Meirhofer, who seemed a quiet, intelligent person. More important, there was no known evidence to connect him with the abduction. Then in January 1974, the charred body of an eighteen-year-old girl was found in nearby woodland. She had known Meirhofer, but avoided his company; otherwise there was no known circumstance to connect him with the crime. Inevitably, however, he became a possible suspect for the second time: but on this occasion David Meirhofer volunteered to undergo both a lie-detector test and interrogation after injection with the so-called ‘truth serum’ (sodium pentathol) to prove his innocence. He passed both tests so convincingly that Dunbar felt compelled to believe him.
Not so the Quantico profilers. Experience had taught them how some sex killers deliberately seek ways of inserting themselves into an investigation, if only to find out how much the authorities know. As a precaution, they advised Susan Jaeger’s parents to keep a tape-recorder by their telephone. On the first anniversary of their daughter’s disappearance, an anonymous male caller rang their home in Farmington and boasted to Mrs Jaeger that he was keeping Susan alive, and prisoner. Instead of upbraiding him, Mrs Jaeger responded gently: and by turning the other cheek reduced her anonymous caller to tears. Analysis of the tape identified the voice as Meirhofer’s. However, such unsupported identification was then insufficient under Montana law to obtain a warrant to search Meirhofer’s apartment, where the profilers believed he kept the ‘souvenirs’ which would tie him to Susan’s murder, and possibly that of the eighteen-year-old.