The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  By the time detectives reached Wilder’s house at Boynton Beach the bird had flown. Enquiries revealed that he had drawn 50,000 dollars from the bank, and bought an air ticket to Sydney. This proved to be a false trail; Wilder had resold the ticket to add to his cash in hand. His two expensive cars were still in his garage, but the two-tone Chrysler he used to abduct the nineteen-year-student from Tallahassee (one of a fleet of company cars owned by Wilder) was missing. An alert was put out, while frogmen searched the canal flowing past his house for bodies: no trace of Miss Gonzales or Elizabeth Kenyon was found.

  Then on 23 March 1984 the body of Terry Diane Walden, a twenty-three-year-old university nursing student who disappeared two days earlier from a shopping centre in Beaumont, Texas, was found floating in a canal on the outskirts of the town. She had been beaten, bound hand and foot, and stabbed to death, gagged with adhesive tape similar to that used to silence Theresa Ferguson (murdered on 18 March) and the unnamed student subsequently kidnapped in Tallahassee. Medical evidence showed that Terry Walden, who was clothed, had been raped. Her orange-coloured Mercury Cougar was missing: Wilder’s two-tone company Chrysler was found abandoned in the shopping centre car park. The chase was on again.

  On 25 March English-born Suzanne Logan, aged twenty-one and a bride of only nine months, drove her husband to work in Oklahoma City. After calling at a local shopping centre – where she was seen talking to a well-dressed, bearded man – she failed to arrive home. Three days later and three hundred miles away her body was found on the banks of a reservoir near Junction City, Kansas. She too had been beaten, raped and stabbed to death. Silver-coloured plaster still adhered to her mouth, and she was bound hand and foot with nylon cord.

  Charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping and rape were filed against Wilder in Kansas, with bail (should he be apprehended) set at two million dollars. FBI assistant director Oliver Revell told a press conference in Washington, DC, that Wilder’s murders represented ‘a classic case of sexual, series murders that take place so many miles apart the local authorities cannot readily connect them’. Wilder became one of the FBI’s ‘Ten Most Wanted’ fugitives, and all police forces were asked to keep a lookout for Terry Walden’s distinctive Mercury Cougar.

  The trail led next to Colorado where Sheryl Bonaventure, a blue-eyed blonde of eighteen who wanted to be a model, vanished from a shopping centre in Grand Junction. She was never seen again. With Wilder heading westward, a trap was set for him in southern California where two Grand Prix meetings were due to take place, at Long Beach and Riverside. However, on 1 April seventeen-year-old Michelle Korfman from Boulder City, Colorado – who modelled clothes for a local department store, and had entered a nationwide, magazine-sponsored ‘Miss Teen’ beauty competition in Las Vegas, Nevada – was reported missing. Wilder, who arrived in Las Vegas the night before the competition, coolly took a front-row seat and invited entrants seeking a career in modelling to contact him later at Caesar’s Palace Hotel. Miss Korfman, whose car was found parked there, has not been seen since.

  Wilder missed the trap set for him by only a few miles. Instead of driving to Long Beach for the Grand Prix, he went instead to Torrance (another suburb, to the west of Los Angeles) on 4 April and abducted a sixteen-year-old girl who ‘wanted to become a model’. After telephoning a boyfriend to announce that a professional photographer was to pay her one hundred dollars for a photo session, she too disappeared. For a time the trail went cold. Then on 10 April a second sixteen-year-old was reported missing, this time from a shopping centre in Merriville, Indiana.

  Two days later – and more than one thousand miles still further east – the second missing girl was seen bleeding profusely as she staggered along a road near Barrington, in upper New York state. A passing motorist (who thought she was an accident victim) drove her to the nearest hospital, where she was found to have multiple knife wounds. After an emergency operation she told the police that a girl of her own age had approached her in Merriville on 10 April, and asked if she would take part in a photographic session. She explained that the photographer required two models for the assignment, and would pay them twenty-five dollars apiece. The Merriville teenager agreed – only to be dragged into a waiting, orange-coloured Mercury Cougar by a man armed with a gun. He gagged the girl with adhesive tape, and sexually assaulted her on the back seat as the other sixteen-year-old drove. The three of them spent that night in a motel at Akron, Ohio, where the girl driver warned the Merriville teenager not to resist Wilder or ‘they would both be killed’.

  They spent a second night in a motel at Syracuse, New York State, where the Merriville captive was again sexually abused and tortured. Next morning, 12 April, Wilder’s picture was shown on television – and as soon as he had shaved off his beard, the trio left Syracuse in a hurry. ‘We’ve got to change cars,’ said Wilder. Shortly afterwards he stopped in a wooded area, and promised to release the Merriville girl unharmed if she said nothing to the police to incriminate him. Although she gave her word, Wilder stabbed her repeatedly and left her for dead.

  Early that afternoon a lorry driver saw what he thought was a tailor’s dummy in a gravel pit near Victor, N.Y. It was in fact the body of a woman named Beth Dodge: she had been shot dead, after leaving work to drive home for lunch in the nearby town of Phelps. At first no-one realised Wilder might be the murderer: Beth Dodge was older than the type of victim he usually targeted, and had not been sexually assaulted. However, all doubts evaporated when the Mercury Cougar was found abandoned twenty miles away – while Beth Dodge’s car, a Pontiac Firebird, was missing. This in turn posed a new mystery. The Merriville teenager was alive and safe in hospital: but where was the sixteen-year-old from Torrance, and was she still alive?

  In fact Wilder had driven the Torrance girl to the international airport at Boston, Massachusetts, in the Pontiac. On arrival he paid for her airline ticket back to Los Angeles – and handed her five hundred dollars in cash. ‘I’ve got a feeling the end is close,’ he told her, prophetically. ‘You just go home and forget what’s happened.’ Unpredictably violent to the end, however, he then drove into Boston and all but succeeded in abducting another young woman, whose car had broken down. It took only seconds for Wilder to force her into the hijacked Pontiac at gunpoint – but he had no opportunity in a Boston street to bind and gag victim number twelve. She escaped by jumping out at the first set of traffic lights, and was later able to identify Wilder from police photographs.

  Next day – Friday the 13th (of April 1984) – two New Hampshire state troopers on patrol at Colebrook, eight miles from the Canadian border, spotted the Pontiac at a filling station. Wilder had time only to grab his .357 Magnum revolver from the glove compartment before Trooper Leo Jellison – 6(prime) 2(doubleprimd) in height and weighing some 250 pounds, or seventeen stone – landed on top of him. Two shots sounded in quick succession. The first bullet passed clean through Wilder’s body to enter the trooper’s chest, but missed the vital organs. The second shot killed Wilder instantly. In that short, desperate struggle it was not clear if Wilder had tried to kill Trooper Jellison – or himself. Either way, the 5,000-mile chase was over.

  The mystery of the ‘missing’ Torrance teenager was solved the same day when she arrived back in California, and was interviewed by police. She said she did not know why Wilder spared her: she had been raped and tortured like his other victims, and he had threatened to kill her several times. She admitted leading the Merriville sixteen-year-old to the car where Wilder lay in wait, but said she was too terrified of him to disobey his orders.

  Although the marathon chase was eventually brought to a successful conclusion, it emphasised the enormity of the task facing individual law enforcement agencies when attempting to track down and apprehend transient violent criminals in a land as vast as the United States. The mounting toll of victims Wilder left behind him served only to underline – yet again – the imperative need in America for a national resource centre, staffed and equipped to monitor, ad
vise – and where need be, assist – at every turn in such a fast-developing situation. Fortunately, such plans were already well advanced. Within two months of Wilder’s death the essential, first administrative step toward fulfilling that requirement was taken by President Reagan, with the formal establishment of the NCAVC at Quantico on 21 June 1984.

  By then serial murder had been a cause of growing concern in the US for at least three decades. In 1950, Dr Paul de River wrote about the ‘lust killers’, now recognised as a most dangerous sub-species of serial killer (pp. 64–9). In the early 1960s the thirteen serial murders committed by Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, reduced the state capital of Massachusetts to near panic. The 1970s were positively a vintage decade in America for notorious serial killers. Among them were Gerald Schaefer, the Florida deputy policeman suspected of twenty-eight murders, Californian schizophrenic Herb Mullin (ten murders), Ed Kemper (ten murders), Texan homosexual Dean Corll (twenty-seven murders), John Gacy, another homosexual, from Chicago (thirty-three murders), ‘Hillside Strangler’ Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono (nine murders), and Ted Bundy (twenty-three admitted murders, but thought to be ‘good for thirty-four’). Small wonder that President Reagan reflected the nation’s concern in 1984, by giving the newly-created NCAVC as its primary mission ‘the identification and tracking of repeat killers’.

  An important factor which added to the widespread fear aroused by ‘working’ serial killers in the United States in those early years was that no-one knew how many were at large at any given time, or the sum total of lives they claimed each year. On the other hand their crimes were such that they were quite properly reported by the media in full, so that at times the American public must have felt some new plague had come among them. Again, serial killers were not recognised as a distinct species of murderer until agents of the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit first learned to identify and profile them from crime scene analysis. Hitherto such bizarre cases were often recorded as ‘sex murders’, ‘unknown motive’ homicides, or simply as ‘unsolved’. The reason why many remained unsolved was not lack of effort by the local law enforcement agency involved, but rather the lack of a tested technique to investigate these seemingly motiveless, clue-less murders in a prescribed, systematic manner.

  That situation changed once the NCAVC became operational and CIAP (the Criminal Investigative Analysis Programme) was introduced. In a joint survey published in the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin in December 1986, headed ‘Criminal Profiling: A Viable Investigative Tool against Violent Crime’, the authors – special agents John Douglas and Alan Burgess – made the specific point that: ‘Sexual homicides . . . yield much information about the mind and motivation of the killer. A new dimension is provided to the investigator via the profiling technique, particularly in cases where the underlying motive for the crime may be suddenly hidden from even the more experienced detective.’

  President Reagan called the offenders ‘repeat killers’. Credit for coining the term ‘serial killer’ is given to FBI special agent Robert Ressler, one of the three Quantico instructors who took part in the test-case Meirhofer investigtion in 1974 (pp. 86–9). In an article in the New York Times magazine of 26 October 1986, journalist and author Stephen G. Michaud wrote: ‘Mr Ressler started using the term [serial killer] because such an offender’s behaviour is so distinctly episodic, like the movie house serials he enjoyed as a boy.’ In June 1983, one year before the establishment of the NCAVC, a Senate Judiciary committee debated the impact of serial murder on American society, under a heading that said it all: ‘Patterns of murders committed by one person in large numbers with no apparent rhyme, reason or motivation.’ The four principal subjects listed for debate were ‘Missing and murdered children’, ‘Sexual exploitation of children’, ‘Unidentified bodies’ and ‘Serial killers’. Thus the term passed officially into the American idiom.

  When responsibility for leading the campaign to reduce violent crime in the United States was delegated to the Behavioural Science Unit of the FBI in June 1984, the NCAVC had four main programmes to administer. They were research and development (Quantico’s traditional ‘think tank’ role), training, profiling and consultation, and VICAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Programme). While these four still form the bedrock of the Centre’s programming, their administration is divided between two wings of the Behavioural Science Unit, viz. Instruction and Research (BSIR), and Investigative Support (BSIS). Though the two wings have separate functions, in the long term they are wholly complementary.

  BSIR looks to the future. In addition to furthering research and training incoming agents for their new, specialist duties, this wing is responsible for programming law enforcement in the United States in the twenty-first century. BSIS, or the ‘operational wing’, deals with today’s problems. It uses the most modern technology to help reduce the unacceptable levels of violent crime – particularly in the field of serial murder, rape and arson, but also including a variety of other offences ranging from kidnapping, extortion, certain aspects of terrorism (hostage survival, etc.), and tampering with consumer goods – a growth industry in many countries in recent years – to public corruption. Research in all areas is unceasing at the NCAVC. ‘PROFILER’, the first automated profiling system to be employed in criminal analysis, is already operational. Although there are still some areas in which it cannot match the human analyst – notably the hunch, that intuitive judgement which comes to the human investigator only after years of experience – this computerised system delivers such accurate analyses that Quantico’s ten senior analysts use it constantly as a consultant, and apprentice analysts in training. A second expert system is in the pipeline, designed to apprehend the serial rapist and based on information gleaned from mass interviews with convicted offenders.

  FBI unit chief John Henry Campbell commands the Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico, and with it the NCAVC. The two wings of the Centre each have their own unit chief, subordinate to John Campbell. BSIS, the ‘operational wing’, is led by supervisory special agent (SSA) Alan E. Burgess. Alan Burgess – a quiet, confident executive known as ‘Smokey’ to FBI colleagues – is also Administrator of the NCAVC.4 SSA John Douglas, widely acknowledged as the most experienced of modern profilers, is manager of the operational wing’s ‘cutting edge’ – the CIAP, or the Criminal Investigative Analysis Programme. Together, the two men make a powerful crime-fighting team. The programme itself is operated by ten senior analysts, the only ten of their kind in the world.

  Under the stewardship of Alan Burgess and John Douglas, these ten men form the aces in the pack at Quantico. They wage their unique, solitary war against serial offenders either from a desk sixty feet underground (the NCAVC is housed in a former nuclear bunker, originally intended for intelligence personnel in the event of an atomic war), or from a plane or car seat; they travel extensively, both in and beyond the United States. They are officially known as ‘criminal investigative analysts’, rather than ‘profilers’. Profiling is what they do, but not as before: psychiatrist Dr James Brussel gave the New York city police a genuine ‘psychological profile’ of Mad Bomber George Metesky in 1957 (pp. 81–6). The FBI analysts at Quantico are not psychiatrists. They are trained investigative agents who draw on police reports, their own murder scene analysis based on photographic, medical and forensic evidence, VICAP data and the automated PROFILER system – plus their years of experience – to compile a systematic analysis of both the type of offender responsible, and the crime itself.

  Although the responsibility for listing each component of an analysis rests with the special agent concerned, all at BSIS work on the principle that investigative experience shared is knowledge gained: ‘The more minds at work, the better.’ Tremendous importance is therefore placed on the daily ‘group profiling conferences’, where every known detail pertaining to each incoming case goes into the melting-pot of expert, round-table discussion. Other specialist advice, in the fields of pathology, forensic science, sociology, lega
l problems, etc., is also always available at Quantico. Should further local knowledge be sought, the ten Quantico analysts – each of whom has responsibility for a given area nationwide – are backed by a force of one hundred and ten specially trained FBI agents (known as Field Profile Co-ordinators), stationed throughout the United States. Although the co-ordinators have several duties, special attention is always given to serial murder investigations.

  To gauge the extent of the possible workload facing the operational wing at Quantico, one need only examine the violent crime statistics in the US for 1988 – the most recent available when this book went to press. The sum total of all types of homicide for the year – 20,675 – was some 3,000 down on the peak 1980 figure. However, murder represented a mere one per cent of violent crime overall. Nationwide, there was an average rate of one violent crime every twenty seconds, including one ‘aggravated assault’5 every thirty-five seconds, one robbery a minute, one forcible rape every six minutes, and one murder every twenty-five minutes.

  In itself, that total of 20,675 murders was an increase of 3% over the preceding year. Worst hit were the big cities (average 4% up). The bigger the population of the city, the greater the rise in the murder rate; those with more than a quarter of a million inhabitants registered increases ranging from 1% to 8%. In New York – the biggest city in the country, the ‘Big Apple’ – there were 6,530 murders in the 1960s decade: that total more than doubled to 15,569 during the 1970s: the sum total for the 1980s is expected to show a further increase of between 2,000 and 3,000. Much of this rise in the big city murder-rate is undoubtedly drug-related. Dr Thomas Reppetto of the New York Citizens Crime Commission put the blame squarely on gang wars arising from the drugs traffic. ‘In 1988,’ he said, ‘40% of the killings were drug-related, as opposed to 20–25% in the early 1980s. A lot of this was the result of wars on the street between different gangs.’