by Colin Wilson
To try to relate serial murder to the overall violent crime figures is more complicated. The FBI’s uniform crime rate for 1988 breaks down types of homicide by percentage as follows: argument-motivated (i.e. non-criminally motivated) 34.3%; calculating all percentages on the sum total of 20,675 homicides, this represented some 7,300 murders and the biggest single category. Felony and felony-related homicide accounted for a further 20.2% (say 4,200 victims), and ‘miscellaneous’ (any identifiable motive not covered by the above classifications) 18.9%, or 3,800 victims. A total of 26.6% (approximately 5,200 murders, the second biggest category) were classed as ‘unknown’ motive.
The 1988 figures also showed that, on average nationwide, 70% (or 14,480) of all murders committed in the United States were solved by the law enforcement agencies. The 30% unsolved represented 6,200 homicides: and somewhere among that number must lie the bulk of all unidentified serial murders committed during the year. The problem facing the NCAVC is, in what proportion? Even the obvious-seeming clues may be misleading. According to the uniform crime rate returns, 12% of all homicide victims in 1988 (say 2,480) were murdered by strangers. By no means all ‘stranger’ murders, however, are committed by serial killers. For lack of evidence to the contrary, a percentage of felony-related and miscellaneous homicides will inevitably have been included among the sum total of 6,200 ‘unsolved’ cases. Likely examples would be the habitual offender – facing certain long-term imprisonment if apprehended – who kills when murder presents his only opportunity to escape unidentified. Similarly, ‘first-timers’ may kill unintentionally and flee in panic. In a country such as the United States, where one violent crime was committed every twenty seconds on average during 1988, such ‘stranger murders’ could conceivably add up to a formidable total over twelve months. As the nineteenth-century Scottish author Thomas Carlyle once observed, ‘You might do anything with figures’.
When we were commissioned to write this book, we were aware that some observers in the US – the country worst affected – believed that serial murder claimed thousands of lives there each year, possibly 5,000 or more. It so happens that we have both lived and worked in America, and Colin continues to visit the US regularly and the average sum total of 20,000 murders of all kinds each year – compared with today’s 700 or so in Britain – occasioned no surprise. What was intriguing, however, was the remarkable apparent disparity in the two serial murder rates. If these unofficial estimates were accurate, they represented a ratio not of thirty to one (as with the overall homicide total), but of thousands to one.
In Britain, where Jack the Ripper sent shivers down every spine more than one hundred years ago, the serial killer remains a rarity. One can count the number to emerge over the past three or four decades on the fingers of both hands: Christie (hanged in July 1953), Brady and Hindley (sentenced to life imprisonment in 1966), Sutcliffe (jailed for a minimum thirty years, 1981), Nilsen (sentenced to life imprisonment in 1983), Erskine (jailed for a record minimum of forty years, in January 1988), and Duffy (sentenced to a minimum thirty years imprisonment, one month later). One has to think long and hard to recall many others.
One instance apart,6 serial killers are a twentieth-century phenomenon in the United States. Among the more notorious in the first half of the century were Earle Nelson (p. 12), and Carl Panzram (pp. 16–18). Nelson, who murdered twenty-two women in seventeen months in the late 1920s, employed the simplest of modus operandi to maximum effect. He targeted landladies who put ‘Room to Let’ notices in their front-room windows (a common practice in the Depression years that followed World War One), waited until the two of them were alone and then raped, strangled and robbed them before moving on. As with Chris Wilder sixty years later, simply to cross from one state into the next virtually ensured temporary respite from pursuit. Carl Panzram was a tough, long-term offender who had been homosexually gang-raped as a young man. He exacted revenge from society by committing twenty murders, mostly homosexual in nature, starting in 1918. In 1930 Panzram, by then thirty-eight years of age, contrived his own execution by murdering a prison guard – a crime which he knew to mean an automatic sentence. In 1934 Albert Fish, a New York painter and decorator, was executed for the murder of a ten-year-old girl whose flesh he cooked and ate. Following his arrest, Fish confessed to four hundred child murders; and while that confession was discounted (p. 70), he was believed to be responsible for ‘dozens’ of murders. In general however, before World War Two serial murder in the United States was rare in comparison, say, with the gangster killings of the Prohibition era.
Ed Gein, a necrophiliac serial killer and devotee of the wartime Nazi concentration camp medical experimentalists, is thought to have inspired the Alfred Hitchcock thriller ‘Psycho’ by his macabre deeds in the late 1950s. On one occasion he plundered a Wisconsin graveyard by night for edible body parts, and flayed one corpse to fashion a waistcoat ‘souvenir’. Some time later, when police called at his house to question Gein about a missing elderly woman, they discovered the gutted torso of one of his earlier female victims hanging from the beams. Gein, who is believed to have committed nine murders in all, was detained in an institution for the criminally insane. As an old man in his late seventies, he was interviewed by FBI agents – who were conducting their mass survey of known sex murderers for the Criminal Analysis programme.
Serial murder in the United States began to surface in earnest during the 1960s, along with all other forms of violent crime. Albert DeSalvo set the pace early in the decade, with thirteen murders in eighteen months – a reign of terror that the city of Boston is unlikely ever to forget. As we have already shown, he was followed over the years by the likes of Schaefer, Corll, Mullin, Kemper and Bundy, a deadly quintet who between them murdered at least a hundred men and women. One of the most recent of these so-called ‘high-scoring’ serial killers was Richard Ramirez, alias ‘The Night Stalker’ – twenty-eight years of age, unmarried, a drifter and satanist from El Paso, Texas.
In the fifteen months between June 1984 and August 1985 the Night Stalker murdered thirteen people and sexually assaulted several others in the suburbs of Los Angeles, terrifying the local communities in the process. His modus operandi was to break into houses by night at random, taking whatever opportunity offered by way of sex, robbery and murder. Men were shot or stabbed to death as they slept. The women were beaten, raped and sexually abused, regardless of age: most were then murdered by strangulation, stabbing or shooting. Their children (of both sexes, some as young as six) were either sexually assaulted in their homes or abducted, to be raped or sodomised before being turned loose on the streets, miles away. All Ramirez’ attacks were marked by extreme cruelty; on one occasion he gouged a woman’s eyes out. He ‘signed’ some of his murders by sketching in lipstick a pentagram – a five-pointed star, often associated with satanism – at the scene of the crime, either on the victim’s body or the wall above.
Ramirez, who had been profiled by the FBI at Quantico, was positively identified from a smudged fingerprint found on a getaway car. In a bid to prevent any more murders, the local law enforcement agencies then issued his photograph to the media. Shortly afterwards, Ramirez was recognised by a grocer’s assistant; he ran into the street, but was chased by an angry mob after trying to steal a woman’s handbag, overpowered and arrested. In September 1989, after a trial lasting five months, Ramirez was found guilty of thirteen murders and thirty associated felonies (five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults and fourteen burglaries). When the jury later recommended that he should die in the gas chamber, Ramirez flaunted his satanic beliefs to the media crowding the courtroom. ‘Big deal, death comes with the territory,’ he jeered. ‘See you in Disneyland!’ He now awaits the outcome of an appeal.
Perhaps the most graphic illustration of the threat the serial killer poses to society lies in the fact that the Night Stalker’s victim count (thirteen murders in fifteen months) is positively ‘low-scoring’ compared with some. As we have shown (pp. 60–1), the
highest known individual tally of serial murders rests with the Ecuadoran peasant Pedro Lopez. After his arrest in 1980, he confessed to murdering ‘about’ three hundred and fifty young girls in two years. In the United States a half-century earlier, Earle Nelson killed more people more quickly (twenty-two in seventeen months) than did Ramirez; while Albert Fish probably murdered more than Nelson and Ramirez put together. Nor are such numbers exceptional. Since the sharp rise in all types of homicide began to manifest itself in America in the 1960s, serial killers such as John Wayne Gacy (thirty-three victims), Gerald Schaefer (twenty-eight), Dean Corll (twenty-seven) and Ted Bundy (at least twenty-three), etc., have all murdered more people than Ramirez, but over a longer period.
In our view this represented an important field for research in any realistic assessment of the serial killer problem. Broadly speaking, were the unofficial estimates of the numbers killed annually in the United States correct? If they were, why should one country – and that one the leader of the western world, a stable society enjoying an enviable prosperity – suffer such a plague of serial murder, yet the rest of us largely be spared? That the US suffers more homicides annually than any other western nation is a matter of record, and that this should apply pro rata to serial murder would seem only logical. However, while the anti-gun lobby blames the constitutional right to bear arms for much of America’s huge annual murder total, there appeared to be no rational explanation for the apparently phenomenal rise in the serial murder rate. Clearly, there was only one oracle to consult on this problem; and in September 1989 – courtesy of the FBI – Donald Seaman became the first author from Britain to be granted access to the National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico.
The NCAVC is not normally open to the public, and security is impressive. The Centre lies sixty feet underground, directly below the FBI Academy. The academy itself stands in a 600-acre enclave of woodland, encircled by thousands more acres of lowland Virginia countryside – which in turn comprise the great US Marine Corps base at Quantico. Guards in strategically-placed checkpoints monitor all traffic, in and out. The sound of small-arms fire echoes from ranges alongside the road threading through the outer perimeter. Within the FBI enclave, more gunfire sounds from indoor and outdoor ranges; all law enforcement officers selected to undergo an eleven-week training course at the academy are issued with a .38 Police Special. In the Hogan’s Alley complex – a ghost town, complete with a bank, shops, service station, cleaner’s, fast-food restaurant and cinema (forever showing the programme seen by Public Enemy Number One John Dillinger in Chicago in 1934, immediately before he walked out to his death in a trap sprung by the FBI) – students undergoing specialist training fight every kind of street battle they are likely to encounter in a lifetime of duty. At all times there are enough armed, disciplined men in place here to fight a small war.
Entry to the NCAVC is via the Academy front door, and a foyer of which any five-star hotel would be proud; the one difference being that the ‘counter clerk’ here wears police uniform, sergeant’s stripes, and a .38 on his hip instead of the customary clerical grey. Once signed in and tagged with a badge, visitors are escorted along a corridor and down by elevator to the BSIS wing, a futuristic high-tech beehive of a crime-fighting centre, the only one of its kind in the world. Its business is the analysis of violent crime, not the physical arrest of violent criminals. There are no cells here, no interrogation rooms, no ‘Most Wanted’ posters; only desks and computers. On arrival visitors are introduced to an NCAVC senior analyst who will act as guide and mentor throughout their stay in this windowless, air-conditioned, subterranean wing which seems a world away from the blue skies and sunshine, and ranks of flowering dogwood, spruce and pine bordering the FBI Academy grounds sixty feet overhead.
Our guide is supervisory special agent Gregg O. McCrary (the ‘O’ stands for Oliver). SSA McCrary is forty-four years old, married with two children, and was born in New York State. He has been an FBI agent for half his life. Before he joined the elite ‘A (for analyst) Team’ here at Quantico he was a Field Profiling Co-ordinator, and before that he served in FBI counter-intelligence. He stands some six feet in height, a spare, upright figure with a pale face, carefully trimmed moustache and brown hair flecked with grey. As with all personnel in the NCAVC he is smartly dressed, reflecting the evident high morale. Equally, this is the FBI at work; McCrary’s dark blue blazer reveals no hint of the Smith & Wesson 9mm semiautomatic below, fully loaded with twelve rounds in the magazine, plus one (for emergencies) already in the chamber.
No law enforcement officer in the United States carries a gun for show. The handgun is also criminal America’s favourite weapon, as the FBI uniform crime report lying on McCrary’s desk will testify. It says that during 1988,45% of all the 20,675 murder victims in the US – 9,300 people – were shot dead with revolvers or pistols, with a further 10% killed by shotguns or rifles. It therefore comes as no great surprise to discover that FBI agent and senior analyst McCrary is a man of many parts. He is also a crack shot and former firearms instructor. In addition, he holds a black belt in the martial art of shorinji kempo – a blend of the better known karate (punch, kick and block) and aikido/ju-jitsu (defensive) techniques. Instructors in this rare martial art travel worldwide from their headquarters in Todatsu, Japan, to ensure that its exacting standards become in no way debased. In McCrary’s case this entails two visits (and two gruelling workouts) each year, physical examinations which he describes, with feeling, as a ‘most humbling experience’. In his capacity as a martial artist, McCrary was formerly an FBI instructor in defence tactics – and in the field, a ‘Special Weapons and Tactics’ (SWAT) team leader. A SWAT team is deployed only in high-risk situations.
Visitors start with a brief tour of the Investigative Support wing. The jewel in the NCAVC’s technological crown is unquestionably VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Programme. This unique, multi-million-dollar computer system acts basically as a serial crime databank, with the master computer housed at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, forty miles away. Its task is to store, collate and analyse all unsolved, homicide-related crimes reported to the NCAVC by law enforcement agencies nationwide, and fed on-line from Quantico via a secure telecommunications network.
When a new case is submitted, the master computer in Washington simultaneously retrieves more than one hundred cases from the appropriate modus operandi category, and overnight checks them against all other cases in store for similarities and discrepancies. Once that search is completed, a printed, computerised report is telexed back to Quantico – listing the ‘top ten’ matching cases in pecking order. This remarkable crime-pattern analysis technique is known as ‘Template pattern matching’, or more usually ‘The Template’ by VICAP analysts working in the BSIS, or Investigative Support, wing. It was specifically designed and programmed for VICAP in the mid-1980s by the unsung heroes of the FBI’s backroom Technical Division.
As soon as the Template is received at BSIS in Quantico, the VICAP analyst (as distinct from the ‘senior analyst’, or profiler) determines which if any of the top ten matches are linked with the new case as one series crime. Suppose, say, there are four. After consultation, the VICAP analyst then informs the four law enforcement agencies involved, asks if they want a profile, and puts each in touch with the others so that the least possible time is lost in mounting a co-ordinated attempt to apprehend the offender.
The VICAP system, straightforward in concept yet fraught with problems in development, took twenty-seven years to evolve from a germ in one man’s mind to operational readiness by 1985. It was the brainchild of Commander Pierce Brooks, retired now but formerly of the Los Angeles Police Department and first manager of the VICAP programme. During the course of two ‘unusual’ murder investigations in 1958, Brooks – then a homicide detective – became convinced that both unknown killers had murdered before. In those days there was no central source which stored data on the modus operandi of transient multiple murderer
s. Instead Brooks had to search computerised newspaper files and books in the city library for the information he needed: a laborious task which gave rise to his dream of an automated, central, permanently-updated, violent crime databank to serve all America’s law enforcement agencies. Gradually his idea won support; and in the 1970s, the US Department of Justice funded a VICAP task force of senior homicide investigators and analysts from more than twenty states to evaluate the Brooks project. They were later joined by men from the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit, where the concept of an American NCAVC was then under examination. As a result, VICAP and the complementary Criminal Analysis Programme were merged into the single crime-fighting system in use today.
The first twelve months following the formal establishment of the NCAVC in June 1984 were employed as a test-bed period for all aspects of the nascent VICAP system: a formidable task. There were major technological problems to solve, first in designing and programming the unique computer system required, and additionally in dovetailing complementary internal procedures at Quantico. There was also one fundamental difficulty to overcome. VICAP’s role is to analyse, not investigate, serial violent crime. The two tasks call for quite different skills when co-operating to solve the same homicide. This meant tabling a comprehensive, dual-purpose crime report designed to cover every type of case – yet which would enable the analyst at Quantico to profile the specific type of offender responsible, by using behavioural patterns emanating from the investigative feedback.
To no-one’s great surprise, many setbacks were encountered. Most important, from the operational point of view, it soon became apparent that fewer crime reports were being returned than had been anticipated, and after six months the entire process was overhauled and simplified. The outcome was a VICAP Crime Analysis Report which has remained unchanged since 1986, a ten-section questionnaire listing: administrative detail (law enforcement agency, county, town, state etc); everything known about victim; ditto offender; description if any of vehicle used; modus operandi; condition of victim when found (including use of restraints – gag, handcuffs, bonds, etc., evidence of torture if any, indications of removal of ‘souvenir’ items, other than clothing); cause of death; forensic evidence; request for profiling (a tick in the required box is sufficient); and details of related cases, if any.