Mindhunter Read online

  Toward the end of the first week, Pam, my father, the agents, and the priest formed a circle around my bed, joined hands, and took my hands in theirs and prayed over me. Late that night, I came out of the coma.

  I remember being surprised to see Pam and my father and being confused about where I was. Initially, I couldn’t talk; the left half of my face drooped and I still had extensive paralysis on my left side. As my speech came back, it was slurred at first. After a while I found I could move my leg, then gradually, more movement returned. My throat was painfully sore from the life-support tube. I was switched from phenobarbital to Dilantin to control the seizures. And after all the tests and scans and spinal taps, they finally offered a clinical diagnosis: viral encephalitis brought on or complicated by stress and my generally weakened and vulnerable condition. I was lucky to be alive.

  But the recovery was painful and discouraging. I had to learn to walk again. I was having memory problems. To help me remember the name of my primary physician, Siegal, Pam brought in for me a figurine of a seagull made of shells and sitting on a cork base. The next time the doctor came to give me a mental status exam and asked if I remembered his name, I slurred, "Sure, Dr. Seagull."

  Despite the wonderful support I was getting, I was tremendously frustrated with the rehabilitation. I’d never been able to sit around or take things slow. FBI director William Webster called to encourage me. I told him I didn’t think I could shoot anymore.

  "Don’t worry about that, John," the director replied. "We want you for your mind." I didn’t tell him I was afraid there wasn’t much of that left, either.

  I finally left Swedish Hospital and came home two days before Christmas. Before leaving, I presented the emergency room and ICU staffs with plaques expressing my profound gratitude for all they had done to save my life.

  Roger Depue picked us up at Dulles Airport and drove us to our house in Fredericksburg, where an American flag and a huge "Welcome Home, John" sign were waiting. I had dropped from my normal 195 to 160 pounds. My kids, Erika and Lauren, were so upset by my appearance and the fact that I was in a wheelchair that for a long time afterward, they were afraid every time I went away on a trip.

  Christmas was pretty melancholy. I didn’t see many friends; only Ron Walker, Blaine McIlwain, Bill Hagmaier, and another agent from Quantico, Jim Horn. I was out of the wheelchair, but moving around was still difficult. I had trouble carrying on a conversation. I found I cried easily and couldn’t count on my memory. When Pam or my dad would drive me around Fredericksburg, I’d notice a particular building and not know if it was new. I felt like a stroke victim and wondered if I’d ever be able to work again.

  I was also bitter at the Bureau for what they’d put me through. The previous February, I’d spoken with an assistant director, Jim McKenzie. I told him I didn’t think I could keep up the pace and asked him if he could get me some people to help out.

  McKenzie was sympathetic but realistic. "You know this organization," he’d said to me. "You have to do something until you drop before anyone will recognize it."

  Not only did I feel I wasn’t getting support, I felt I wasn’t getting any appreciation, either. Quite the contrary, in fact. The previous year, after working my butt off in the Atlanta "Child Murders" case, I was officially censured by the Bureau for a story that appeared in a newspaper in Newport News, Virginia, just after Wayne Williams was apprehended. The reporter asked me what I thought of Williams as a suspect, and I replied that he looked "good," and that if he panned out, he’d probably be good for at least several of the cases.

  Even though the FBI had asked me to do the interview, they said I was speaking inappropriately about a pending case. They claimed I’d been warned before doing a People magazine interview a couple of months before. It was typical of government bureaucracy. I was hauled up before the Office of Professional Responsibility at headquarters in Washington, and after six months of bureaucratic tap dancing, I got a letter of censure. Later, I would get a letter of commendation for the case. But at the time, this was the recognition from the Bureau for helping crack what the press was then calling the "crime of the century."

  So much of what a law enforcement officer does is difficult to share with anyone, even a spouse. When you spend your days looking at dead and mutilated bodies, particularly when they’re children, it’s not the kind of thing you want to bring home with you. You can’t say over the dinner table, "I had a fascinating lust murder today. Let me tell you about it." That’s why you so often see cops drawn to nurses and vice versa—people who can relate in some way to each other’s work.

  And yet often when I was out in the park or the woods, say, with my own little girls, I’d see something and think to myself, That’s just like the such-and-such scene, where we found the eight-year-old. As fearful as I was for their safety, seeing the things I saw, I also found it difficult to get emotionally involved in the minor, but important, scrapes and hurts of childhood. When I would come home and Pam would tell me that one of the girls had fallen off her bike and needed stitches, I’d flash to the autopsy of some child her age and think of all the stitches it had taken the medical examiner to close her wounds for burial.

  Pam had her own circle of friends who were involved with local politics, which didn’t interest me at all. And with my travel schedule, she ended up with the lion’s share of responsibility for raising the children, paying the bills, and running the house. This was one of the many problems with the marriage at the time, and I know that at least our oldest, Erika, was aware of the tension.

  I couldn’t shake my resentment at the Bureau organization for letting this happen to me. About a month after I returned home, I was out burning leaves in the backyard. On an impulse, I went in, collected all the copies of profiles I had in the house, all the articles I’d written, carried them outside, and threw them all onto the fire. It felt like a catharsis, just getting rid of all of this stuff.

  Some weeks after that, when I could drive again, I went to Quantico National Cemetery to see where I would have been buried. Graves are positioned by date of death, and if I had died on December 1 or 2, I would have gotten a lousy site. I noticed it happened to be near that of a young girl who had been stabbed to death on her driveway not far from where I lived. I’d worked on her case and the murder was still unsolved. As I stood there ruminating, I recalled how many times I’d advised police to surveil grave sites when I thought the killer might visit, and how ironic it would be if they were watching here and picked me up as a suspect.

  Four months after my collapse in Seattle, I was still out on sick leave. I’d developed blood clots in my legs and lungs as a complication of the illness and so much time in bed, and I still felt as if I was struggling to get through every day. I still didn’t know if I’d physically be able to work again and didn’t know if I’d have the confidence even if I could. In the meantime, Roy Hazelwood, from the instructional side of the Behavioral Science Unit, was doubling up and had taken on the burden of handling my ongoing cases.

  I made my first visit back to Quantico in April of 1984 to address an in-service group of about fifty profilers from FBI field offices. I stepped into the classroom, wearing slippers because my feet were still swollen from blood clots, and got a standing ovation from these agents from all over the country. The reaction was spontaneous and genuine from the people who, better than anyone, understood what I did and what I was trying to institute within the Bureau. And for the first time in many months, I felt cherished and appreciated. I also felt as if I had come home.

  I went back to work full-time a month later.

  Chapter 1

  Inside the Mind of a Killer

  Put yourself in the position of the hunter.

  That’s what I have to do. Think of one of those nature films: a lion on the Serengeti plain in Africa. He sees this huge herd of antelope at a watering hole. But somehow—we can see it in his eyes—the lion locks on a single one out of those thousands of animals. He’s trained him
self to sense weakness, vulnerability, something different in one antelope out of the herd that makes it the most likely victim.

  It’s the same with certain people. If I’m one of them, then I’m on the hunt daily, looking for my victim, looking for my victim of opportunity. Let’s say I’m at a shopping mall where there are thousands of people. So I go into the video arcade, and as I look over the fifty or so children playing there, I’ve got to be a hunter, I’ve got to be a profiler, I’ve got to be able to profile that potential prey. I’ve got to figure out which of those fifty children is the vulnerable one, which one is the likely victim. I have to look at the way the child is dressed. I have to train myself to pick up the nonverbal clues the child is putting out. And I have to do this all in a split second, so I have to be very, very good at it. Then, once I decide, once I make my move, I’ve got to know how I am going to get this child out of the mall quietly and without creating any fuss or suspicion when his or her parents are probably two stores down. I can’t afford to make any mistakes.

  It’s the thrill of the hunt that gets these guys going. If you could get a galvanic skin response reading on one of them as he focuses in on his potential victim, I think you’d get the same reaction as from that lion in the wilderness. And it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about the ones who hunt children, who hunt young women or the elderly or prostitutes or any other definable group—or the ones who don’t seem to have any particular preferred victim. In some ways, they’re all the same.

  But it is the ways they are different, and the clues that they leave to their individual personalities, that have led us to a new weapon in the interpretation of certain types of violent crimes, and the hunting, apprehension, and prosecution of their perpetra tors. I’ve spent most of my professional career as an FBI special agent trying to develop that weapon, and that’s what this book is about. In the case of every horrible crime since the beginning of civilization, there is always that sear ing, fundamental question: what kind of person could have done such a thing? The type of profiling and crime-scene analysis we do at the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit attempts to answer that question.

  Behavior reflects personality.

  It isn’t always easy, and it’s never pleasant, putting yourself in these guys’ shoes—or inside their minds. But that’s what my people and I have to do. We have to try to feel what it was like for each one.

  Everything we see at a crime scene tells us something about the unknown subject—or UNSUB, in police jargon—who committed the crime. By studying as many crimes as we could, and through talking to the experts—the perpetrators themselves—we have learned to interpret those clues in much the same way a doctor evaluates various symptoms to diagnose a particular disease or condition. And just as a doctor can begin forming a diagnosis after recognizing several aspects of a disease presentation he or she has seen before, we can make various conclusions when we see patterns start to emerge.

  One time in the early 1980s when I was actively interviewing incarcerated killers for our in-depth study, I was sitting in a circle of violent offenders in the ancient, stone, gothic Maryland State Penitentia ry in Baltimore. Each man was an interesting case in his own right—a cop killer, a child killer, drug dealers, and enforcers—but I was most concerned with interviewing a rapist-murderer about his modus operan di, so I asked the other prisoners if they knew of one at the prison I might be able to talk to.

  "Yeah, there’s Charlie Davis," one of the inmates says, but the rest agree it’s unlikely he’ll talk to a fed. Someone goes to find him in the prison yard. To everyone’s surprise, Davis does come over and join the circle, probably as much out of curiosity or boredom as any other reason. One thing we had going for us in the study is that prison ers have a lot of time on their hands and not much to do with it.

  Normally, when we conduct prison interviews—and this has been true right from the beginning—we try to know as much as we can about the subject in advance. We go over the police files and crime-scene photos, autopsy protocols, trial transcripts; any thing that might shed light on motives or personality. It’s also the surest way to make certain the subject isn’t playing self-serving or self-amusing games with you and is giving it to you straight. But in this case, obviously, I hadn’t done any prepa ration, so I admit it and try to use it to my advan tage.

  Davis was a huge, hulking guy, about six foot five, in his early thirties, clean-shaven, and well groomed. I start out by saying, "You have me at a disadvantage, Charlie. I don’t know what you did."

  "I killed five people," he replies.

  I ask him to describe the crime scenes and what he did with his victims. Now, it turns out, Davis had been a part-time ambulance driver. So what he’d do was strangle the woman, place her body by the side of a highway in his driving territory, make an anonymous call, then respond to the call and pick up the body. No one knew, when he was putting the victim on the stretcher, that the killer was right there among them. This degree of control and orchestration was what really turned him on and gave him his biggest thrill. Anything like this that I could learn about technique would always prove extremely valu able.

  The strangling told me he was a spur-of-the-moment killer, that the primary thing on his mind had been rape.

  I say to him, "You’re a real police buff. You’d love to be a cop yourself, to be in a position of power instead of some menial job far below your abilities." He laughs, says his father had been a police lieutenant.

  I ask him to describe his MO: he would follow a good-looking young woman, see her pull into the parking lot of a restaurant, let’s say. Through his father’s police contacts, he’d be able to run a license-plate check on the car. Then, when he had the owner’s name, he’d call the restaurant and have her paged and told she’d left her lights on. When she came outside, he’d abduct her—push her into his car or hers, handcuff her, then drive off.

  He describes each of the five kills in order, almost as if he’s reminiscing. When he gets to the last one, he mentions that he covered her over in the front seat of the car, a detail he remembers for the first time.

  At that point in the conversation, I turn things further around. I say, "Charlie, let me tell you something about yourself: You had relationship problems with women. You were having financial problems when you did your first kill. You were in your late twenties and you knew your abilities were way above your job, so everything in your life was frustrating and out of control."

  He just sort of nods. So far, so good. I haven’t said anything terribly hard to predict or guess at.

  "You were drinking heavily," I continue. "You owed money. You were having fights with the woman you lived with. [He hadn’t told me he lived with anyone, but I felt pretty certain he did.] And on the nights when things were the worst, you’d go out on the hunt. You wouldn’t go after your old lady, so you had to dish it out to someone else."

  I can see Davis’s body language gradually changing, opening up. So, going with the scant information I have, I go on, "But this last victim was a much more gentle kill. She was different from the others. You let her get dressed again after you raped her. You covered up her head. You didn’t do that with the previous four. Unlike the others, you didn’t feel good about this one."

  When they start listening closely, you know you’re onto something. I learned this from the prison inter views and was able to use it over and over in interrogation situations. I see I have his complete attention here. "She told you something that made you feel bad about killing her, but you killed her anyway."

  Suddenly, he becomes red as a beet. He seems in a trancelike state, and I can see that in his mind, he’s back at the scene. Hesitantly, he tells me the woman had said her husband was having serious health problems and that she was worried about him; he was sick and maybe dying. This may have been a ruse on her part, it may not have been—I don’t have any way of knowing. But clearly, it had affected Davis.

  "But I hadn’t disguised myself. She knew who I was, so I
had to kill her."

  I pause a few moments, then say, "You took something from her, didn’t you?"

  He nods again, then admits he went into her wallet. He took out a photograph of her with her husband and child at Christ mas and kept it.

  I’d never met this guy before, but I’m starting to get a firm image of him, so I say, "You went to the grave site, Charlie, didn’t you?" He becomes flushed, which also confirms for me he followed the press on the case so he’d know where his victim was buried. "You went because you didn’t feel good about this particular murder. And you brought something with you to the cemetery and you put it right there on that grave."

  The other prisoners are completely silent, listening with rapt attention. They’ve never seen Davis like this. I repeat, "You brought something to that grave. What did you bring, Charlie? You brought that picture, didn’t you?" He just nods again and hangs his head.

  This wasn’t quite the witchcraft or pulling the rabbit out of the hat it might have seemed to the other prisoners. Obviously, I was guessing, but the guesses were based on a lot of background and research and experience my associates and I had logged by that time and continue to gather. For example, we’d learned that the old cliché about killers visiting the graves of their victims was often true, but not necessarily for the reasons we’d originally thought.

  Behavior reflects personality.

  One of the reasons our work is even necessary has to do with the changing nature of violent crime itself. We all know about the drug-related murders that plague most of our cities and the gun crimes that have become an everyday occurrence as well as a national disgrace. Yet it used to be that most crime, particularly most violent crime, happened between people who in some way knew each other.

  We’re not seeing that as much any longer. As recently as the 1960s, the solution rate to homicide in this country was well over 90 percent. We’re not seeing that any longer, either. Now, despite impressive advances in science and technology, despite the advent of the computer age, despite many more police officers with far better and more sophisticated training and resources, the murder rate has been going up and the solution rate has been going down. More and more crimes are being committed by and against "strangers," and in many cases we have no motive to work with, at least no obvious or "logical" motive.