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IN AT THE KILL
From Charles Manson to the Yorkshire Ripper, Son of Sam to the Monster of Florence, John Douglas tests his wits against the best criminal minds of his generation. By John A. Jenkins
(As published in GQ (Britain), February 1991)
Edmund Kemper is, by his own lights, a man of superior intellect and no small achievements. He boasts of once having been America’s youngest fully-fledged civic booster; a twenty-year-old Christian living what he calls a “Jesus-first” life.
But that distinction is just an ironic footnote in Kemper’s vitae. He is a legend for far more weighty reasons, and he implores his visitor to please, just please, get the story right.
“ I did not butcher people ,” Ed Kemper, now 41 years old, insists with the petty certitude of a grammarian arguing over nuance. “ Decapitation is not butchering. The papers and the magazines had me butchering my victims. But I only dismembered two bodies. They were all decapitated; all but my mother’s friend. Why? Why didn’t I just pop some teeth out, or crunch some bones up? I was starting to branch out in my thoughts about how to do things and get away with it. The psychological trip was, the person is the head. For some reason, someone looks entirely different with no head. I noticed that.”
In an interview room at Vacaville prison in California, John Douglas, an energetic man not particularly suited to the sedentary, just sits there for a change and listens. There is little choice. Kemper talks fast, like someone trying to finish a long story before he runs out of the door. But Kemper is going nowhere.
Kemper is a giant of a man, 6’9” and 302 pounds, and as the words spew out, his voice betrays macabre enthusiasm while an intermittent giggle gives away his self-consciousness. These are awful stories. Over a span of maybe
half-a-dozen years, Kemper killed ten people: his grandparents, his mother, her best friend, and six hitchhiking students. He chopped their heads and hands off, ate parts of them, and, in his nagging mother’s case, propped up her severed head on the kitchen table, ranted and raved at it, ripped out the larynx and ground it up in the waste disposal. “Mom didn’t give a fuck. She was using us for her own little comforts.” Nice guy.
Maybe it’s a stretch of the imagination to see Kemper as the pride of the Junior Chamber of Commerce chapter at the Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane, California. But then he was much younger and the shrinks thought there was still hope; at that time he’d only hacked up his grandparents.
As Douglas listens to this serial killer offhandedly describe the young women he stalked and murdered after his release from Atascadero, the word that comes to Douglas’s mind is nothing to be proud of, but at least he is being honest with himself. Douglas spells it out: “p-u-s-s-y”. A coward. The word refers to Edmund Kemper, not to those who are dead, although Douglas has called murdered girls by that cruel name, too, when he thought doing so would please a murderer enough to make him relive the thrill of the kill.
Which is what Douglas wants.
The dead cannot speak, but their killers can, and Douglas has probably talked to more of them than any other man alive.
Douglas is the top cop on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s serial murder beat. He’s chief of the elite Behavioural Science Investigative Support Unit, putting the most brutal murderers under a psychological microscope to understand why and how they kill.
Witty, tall, trim, well-barbered and one of the Bureau’s nattiest dressers, Douglas is Miami Vice with manners. Forty-five years old with a pretty wife, three kids and a house in the suburbs, Douglas might be able to work undercover posing as an IBM executive or an up-market real estate salesman. He looks very corporate , going off every day to his $77,000-a- year job with a pistol in his briefcase.
“ I’m on an honesty thing the last five or six years; except when people get into my car. I didn’t tell ‘em I was gonna kill ‘em. I couldn’t quite handle that … Are you interested in what I was taking the heads off with? It wasn’t a saw, not even a hack saw: a buck knife. ”
There were more than 23,000 murders in the United States in 1990. Surpassed by its European and Asian cousins in so many other ways, America has bested its rivals in the one game it would like to lose. Only the Philippines comes close.
Most people kill for profit or revenge, and most murderers know their victims. Those are the easier ones to solve. It’s when somebody kills for fun that things get tough. Lust murderers, the mind trackers call them. They don’t stop. You have to hunt them down.
With killings in America at an all-time high, Douglas’s street value is soaring, too. For a nation that likes it murder and gore on the screen, if not the street, Douglas is proof that life truly can imitate art. Yes, he really does drive a brand-new, bright red BMW. Yes, he really does get clues from dreams and he believes in psychic power.
The American true-crime television shows love him: Top Cop and Hard Copy featured Douglas in recent months. A well-known literary agent wants to auction his life story to the highest-bidding publisher. Even Hollywood has acknowledged him. He was technical adviser on the set of The Silence of the Lambs , Jonathan Demme’s film of Thomas Harris’s harrowing novel. The book’s FBI section chief, Jack Crawford, played on screen by Scott Glenn, holds the same post as Douglas. There are photographs in his office of Douglas proudly standing with the two stars of the movie, Jodie Foster and Glenn, and Demme who directed. Douglas had his own director’s chair on the set. The canvas back of the chair is framed on the wall, too.
Amid so much publicity and adulation, it is all too easy to forget the urgency of Douglas’s real mission. Each year, his group helps about 650 local police departments, as well as those in Australia, Canada, Britain and Italy, who have hit dead ends in their own murder investigations. The number of calls for help keeps zooming upward. Even Douglas concedes the FBI’s claim of an 80 per cent success rate is dubious – “You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit” is one of many aphorisms collectively known at the FBI as “Douglasisms”- but the feds, by mixing cop lingo with some tools of social
science, have made believers out of inherently mistrustful local police who would never invite a psychologist in on a case, and who not that long ago didn’t think much of inviting in the FBI, either.
“I’m like a male whore.” Douglas flashes an infectious, mischievous smile. “I can’t say ‘No’ to my customers.”
“I got my high on the complication of the thing; the meticulous way I ironed out potential problems before they even started .. Hatpins! Mace! The more weapons the girls had, the safer they felt, the more chances they’d take, the easier it was for me. Unless it’s a policewoman with a gun in her hand, aimed at me, I’ve got her exactly where I want her. The first two victims were convinced the FBI and the CIA and Interpol were going to come looking for ‘em two hours after they were missing. Both of ‘em had money. Ritzy families. Real important. ‘Boy, if I don’t call daddy, we’ll be missed.”- Kemper
The Behavioural Science Investigative Unit has its offices in an underground bunker at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. During the Cold War, it was to be a bomb shelter for the White House high command. Now, it’s just a bucolic outpost 50 miles from Washington, located on federal property next to a Marine Corps base. Tan-brick, low-slung buildings have sprouted on a verdant landscape. This is where new agents (fewer than one in ten applicants are accepted) get their training, and all around the academy you can hear the pop-pop-pop of the nearby pistol range. Agents must shoot to kill, but not in the back and never at a car. They’re taught that the best way to solve a case is with their brain; the next best, by defensive tactics: boxing, wrestling and judo. Deadly force is the last resort.
When Douglas came to the academy in 1977, after seven years of working the usual bank robberies and kidnappings in the Detroit and Milwaukee field office, it was as a traveling criminology instructor, visiting local police offices to teach two-week courses. He already had a graduate degree in educational psychology (he has a doctorate now), and that was enough to bring him in out of the cold. But Douglas couldn’t abide the bland diet of the academic. He wanted to learn what made criminals tick, particularly those whose well-planned killings made them the most difficult to apprehend. So Douglas and a partner, Robert Ressler, decided to start making visits, unauthorized and unannounced, to prisons near the cities they toured.
Through this deft flattery, Douglas knew he’d stroked Berkowitz into his mind trap. “His eyes lit up. That got his attention.” Berkowitz opened up and told Douglas about his unhappy boyhood: no girlfriends, still a virgin when he joined the army and shipped out to Korea. He paid $10 for sex with a Korean prostitute and immediately contracted venereal disease. “So, he’s not a happy guy.” Berkowitz described returning to the US and learning he was adopted, and how he then searched for and finally visited his natural mother – only to have her slam the door on him. Berkowitz became an arsonist; Douglas says Son of Sam’s personal diaries documented more than 2,000 fires he set in New York City. And then he graduated to major league kills.
“What he said was, after the rejection, the hostility, the anger, he decided to get a gun, a .44 Magnum, and go to the dumps in NY City and start practicing with the weapon.
“He held it in a police-like stance, which he learned in the military. Even the selection of the weapon tells you something about the guy. He could use a .22 or .38 but he takes one of the most powerful weapons he can find.
“Then, he goes to areas where he can find couples. He’s involved in voyeuristic activities, watching them. He’s primarily interested in the female, so he shoots and kills the female and then he goes after the male.
“What David Bekowitz taught us was, in between the kills, serial killers are always on the hunt, looking for victims of opportunity. If they can’t find a victim, they’ll go back to the areas where they’ve been successful in the past. Berkowitz would go back to the areas of his previous kills, and he’d stand there, fantasize and relive the kills. He just stands there, maybe masturbates, and then he’ll even go the gravesite.
“Berkowitz would do that; many of these guys do that.”
When Ted Bundy finally broke down and admitted his grisly string of at least 31 female student murders in Washington, Utah, Colorado and Florida, his confession was to another agent from the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit, Bill Hagmaier, working for Douglas.
“Bundy was trying to help us on the Green River murders out in Seattle.” Forty-one Washington State women died and eight others disappeared
between July 1982 and March 1984. “What he was saying, we already knew: if you want to get the guy, the crime scene becomes a part of the killer. He’ll gravitate back there. Most of these cases, they’ve preselected the areas. What Bundy would do, he’d go back and even have sex with ‘em after death. The bodies would start decomposing and Bundy would have sex with them!”
People get very regimented in ways to kill and ways to get away with it. Wouldn’t it blow somebody’s mind to invite somebody over to the house, bump him off, cut the sucker up into nice usable chunks, throw him in the Waring blender, grind his ass up, take him out on the lawn and fertilize your yard! No way anybody’d even suspect you! Puree of Pal.”
Over time, Douglas became the FBI’s serial interviewer, probing the criminal minds of other assassins and mass murderers. Arthur Bremer, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck, James Earl Ray, David Chapman (the murderer of John Lennon), and hundreds of lesser lights.
The more killers he talked to, the smarter and cockier Douglas got, to the point where he’d sit among the killers during prison visits and play a game, trying to guess their backgrounds and motivations based only on what they told him about the way they killed. They were Douglas’s personal Tarot, and by his own account the convicts got a special high as their interlocutor turned over the cards and told him their past.
“These guys would get so excited! They’d say, ‘You gave me a high; I’m getting off on it.’
“They’re talking about their crimes, and I’m not offended by it. They may even talk about cannibalism, and I’m not shuddering or anything. I’m laughing with them about what they did to the victims, and using street language like them. They think it’s pretty cool.”
It felt like Douglas was on a roll one day as he visited the Maryland state penitentiary in Baltimore.
“So I said to them: ‘You guys killed cops, you had drug kills; I really want a good rape murder. There’s gotta be some out here in the yard.’
Douglas asked where the victims were found. Charlie replied that all of them were in open view. Douglas then said to himself: he wants the victims to be found.
“Then I can start profiling him: he gets wrapped up in the crimes, he’s enjoying it. Particularly after he’s done five of ‘em. He’s manipulating the police.
“But then I said to Charlie: ‘Let me tell you about yourself. I don’t know anything about your personal life, but, number one, you love police. You’d love to be in a position of power. If you had another occupation, it’d be as a police officer.’
“He started laughing! His dad was a police lieutenant.” Douglas also accurately predicted Charlie was working in a menial job, far below his real abilities, and correctly foretold the events precipitating each of the murders: Charlie was angry at the so-called bitch in his life.
“’And let me tell you something, Charlie. I don’t know that much about your case, but you took something belonging to the victim.’ Charlie got red as a beet! All these other killers are looking at this real hard-nosed SOB, and they’re saying: ‘What is it? What did he take?’ I said: ‘I don’t know what you took, but you took something from that victim. A photograph, a piece of jewellery, a piece of clothing. What was it, and why did you do it?’
“Charlie says ‘I really never thought of it. I took jewellery from the other ones, and the jewellery I’d give to my wife.’ It’s like the cat who kills the mouse and drops it on your doorstep, only this is the SOB in his life, the wife. He goes out on a kill, brings back something belonging to the victim, and tells the wife: ‘This is something I found on the street.’ So, when she wears, it Charlie’s saying to himself: ‘Little does she know that when she’s having sex with me later on, little does that bitch know that jewellery came from one of my victims!’” Perverse revenge. Douglas continues: “On one of the victims, he said he went through her wallet and he saw a photograph. On this particular murder, he threw clothing over her face and put her face down. The others were uncovered, face up.
“That told me he didn’t feel good about this one. What he found was a photograph in her wallet of the victim, her husband and their pet dog at Christmas time. I questioned him: ‘What did you do with that photograph?
You want to the gravesite, didn’t you?’ And he actually confessed to returning! ‘I went to the gravesite.’ He placed the photograph underneath the dirt. It was like returning it to the victim.
“All the other guys sitting around there, it was like watching a boxing match! They thought I was a psychic! But it’s not that; it’s just reconstructing. How in the hell do you do that? You do that by looking at the killer’s handiwork. In order to know the offender, you must know the crime.”
The last two women I killed, I didn’t even give them any warning. I just slowed the car down to two or three miles an hour … I had the gun right next to her on the seat. I just reached up, pivoted my elbow and my wrist, right net to her head. I had the spot exactly picked out where I was going to blow her brains out. Dead centre of the brain. Right smack in the middle cause it’s gonna be quick. Double-header trip. Wham! Wipe out two people! The one in the back, she’s looking around, picking her nose, or whatever. This is what I’m surmising. Then I hear a real sharp gasp. She saw the gun. It also triggered the girl in the front. She was real friendly when she got in the car. I was sitting there trying to work up the nerve to blow her brains out, so I really didn’t want to converse a helluva lot. I get to like her or something, I’m not gonna want to do it.”
Douglas and his cohorts use their interviews to draw composite profiles of various types of killers. Among other things, they’ve categorized murderers as “organized”, denoting a well-planned, clueless crime, or “disorganized”, where the killing seemed to be spur-of-the-moment, and they claim to have drawn statistical inferences about the likeliest suspects for both styles of homicides. When a police department asks for the FBI’s help, a thick package of crime scene and autopsy photographs, police reports and other evidentiary and investigative materials is sent to the academy, where it is evaluated by a team of agents from the Behavioural Science Investigative Support Unit. The agents then respond back with a psychological profile of the unknown killer.
Sometimes they visit the crime scene, but the agents are much more likely to examine the materials and draft their profile in the stark, government-issue confines of their underground offices. “You get a clinician’s approach to it,” concedes James I. Luke, who was once the medical examiner in
clumsily covered by a few old picket fencing stakes that the killer found at the scene.
Judson M. Ray, one of Douglas’s agents, ponders this last fact. “The killer knew her,” Ray confidently declares in due course. “He covered her up because of remorse for what happened. But he didn’t know the boy.” That’s because there was no effort to cover him; he was found tied to a tree 150 feet away.
The killer used more rope than he needed to bind the young woman’s hands behind her back. Moreover, she and her boyfriend were both quite drunk, so the killer really didn’t need so much effort to subdue her. ‘He has a need for control. That’s his own internal need. It’s not necessary for successful completion of the crime.”
Multiple wounds to the girl, versus just one to the boy, means the girl was the object of the killer’s focused rage. “You don’t need to cut the body three times. She’s who the killer came after.”
The young man’s throat was cut left to right, by someone who came up from behind. That tells the agents the killer was right-handed and probably slit his throat without any warning. Ray, the agent everybody just calls Jud, shakes his head not in sadness, but in seeming disgust that the guy didn’t help his lady. “I’d like to think he stole that boy’s confidence by saying, ‘I’m just gonna rape her. Gonna tie you up. Don’t wanna hurt anybody. Soon as I finish, I’ll come back and untie you. It’ll be over with.’”
Peter Smerick, another agent in Douglas’s programme, picks up on that theme. “He tied the boy up, put a noose around his neck and then tied him to a tree. There’s no indication that he tried to do anything to get out of his bindings. So, the kid did as he was told, and the time came and his throat was cut, too.”
Judson Ray: “He probably came up behind him, said to him: ‘OK, buddy, I’m cutting you loose.’ I’ve seen dead men move more.”
But the agents also found the awkward way that the girl was covered to be a telling piece of psychological evidence. It was clearly an afterthought; not so carefully planned as the rest of the crime seemed to have been.
Ray, for one, thinks the killer only intended to rape his quarry. “Something happened during the next fifteen minutes that caused the deaths of these people. I don’t think the person went there primarily to kill these people.”
In not too much time, the agents have performed a credible analysis of the crime. Their profile even points to a probable suspect: one of the girl’s former boyfriends, who knew she went to the lovers’ lane because he’d been there with her, too. The local cops certainly acted like they, too, thought the ex-boyfriend was their man. They had already given him a lie detector test. He failed. But because hard evidence linking him to the killing is nonexistent, he is still free, and that points to the inherent limitations of the FBI’s psychological profiling programme.
Sure, Douglas and his men can give the cops insights into who their likeliest suspects might be, but they cannot produce a suspect based on the psychological profile they give alone, and they certainly cannot amass the proof necessary to arrest a suspect without the kind of investigative work that regular cops and crime laboratories do.
Even in the case of this double murder, the local police are really waiting for the results of the DNA test – the “genetic fingerprint”- on the semen found inside the dead girl. The important question is: was it the ex-boyfriend’s? That single forensic test will be far more definitive than any profile the FBI draws.
That is why psychological profiles will never replace crime-scene forensic (hair, blood, and fibre types) and good, old-fashioned police work: knocking on doors and interviewing anybody who might have glimpsed the killer. Even Douglas acknowledges that his profile cannot produce a suspect, and he says that those who expect otherwise have missed the point: the psychological profile is just another investigative tool, albeit one designed to get the cops to start thinking like their quarry. “It gives you ideas.”
In the movies, it is different. In The Silence of the Lambs , the FBI section chief is a genius. He masterminds a nationwide manhunt that snares a psycho killer in a matter of days.
But the funny thing is that Douglas professes not to care much for the way the character is drawn. He says he would rather be in the midst of the
Too bad for them. Douglas doesn’t have any second thoughts. He thinks just like the killers.
