Criminal Minds (16 page)

After the Benton killing, there were seven more confirmed or suspected murders in Texas, Florida, Kentucky, California, and Illinois. Resendiz claims to have also killed seven people in Mexico. Since he frequented the area of Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican police suspect that he might have had a hand in the more than four hundred unsolved murders of women in that city. In 1999, after the murders of Pastor Norman Sirnic and his wife, Karen, Resendiz was briefly apprehended by border agents, who, when their computers didn’t indicate that he was wanted for any crimes, took him to the border and released him back into Mexico.

Resendiz was finally brought in when Texas Ranger Drew Carter convinced Resendiz’s sister, who was living in the United States, that he could promise Resendiz a fair shake in U.S. courts. She got word to her brother in Juárez, and he agreed to turn himself in. He walked across the international bridge between Juárez and El Paso on July 13, 1999, shaking Carter’s hand at the midpoint and surrendering.

For the Claudia Benton assault and murder, Resendiz was sentenced to death, and he was executed on June 27, 2006. Some believe that far more murders can be attributed to him, but unless he was right in his claim to be immortal, a true angel, the world will never know.

 

 

LONG-HAUL TRUCKER
Bruce Mendenhall is mentioned in the episode “Catching Out” (405) as an example of a killer with an occupation that allows him to travel. Mendenhall’s case is still unfolding; at the time of this writing, he was on trial for murder. On January 14, 2010, he was found guilty of soliciting the murders of three witnesses against him in the murder trial and was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Sometimes called the I-40 Killer, Mendenhall is believed to be responsible for an undetermined number of murders—no fewer than six, possibly ten or more—that he committed while he was driving his rig across the nation’s highways.

Mendenhall, fifty-six, was arrested on July 12, 2007, when an alert Nashville, Tennessee, cop noticed blood on the door of his truck. Inside the rig he found a bag of bloody clothes. The truck was an apparent match to one that had shown up on a surveillance video three weeks earlier from the night that Sara Nicole Hulbert’s body had been found at the same truck stop.

Later investigation found the truck’s cab to be “awash in blood,” according to an Indiana prosecutor who added to Mendenhall’s legal problems by charging him with a murder in that state as well. The blood of at least ten different people was discovered in Mendenhall’s cab. Some of it has been definitively linked to victims he is suspected of killing. After his arrest, Mendenhall confessed to six murders, but not to Hulbert’s. The investigators suspect his involvement in many more, possibly going back as far as 1992. Tennessee is seeking the death penalty for him for the murders of three women in that state, including Hulbert.

Because so many murdered women were showing up along I-40, the FBI launched the Highway Serial Killer Initiative in April 2009. The initiative played a part in the episode “Solitary Man” (517). Using a computer database and studying the details of these crimes, the bureau hopes to get a better handle on killers like Mendenhall who travel hundreds of miles a day, crossing state lines on a regular basis and confounding the typical laws of jurisdiction. The database currently contains more than five hundred victims and two hundred killers. So far, the FBI’s work has resulted in the arrests of ten suspects believed to be responsible for at least thirty homicides.

 

 

LIKE MARK GREGORY
in the episode “Charm and Harm” (120), Christopher Bernard Wilder was sought by the authorities, but because he was on the move, taking victims as he went, they couldn’t catch up to him.

Wilder was born on March 13, 1945, in Sydney, Australia, to a U.S. naval officer and an Australian woman. His first brush with the law was in Australia in the early 1960s, when he pleaded guilty to taking part in a gang rape. He was put on probation and ordered to undergo therapy, which included electroshock therapy. He formed a connection between electric shock and sex that became part of his signature and remained so for the rest of his life. Fictional killer Jeremy Andrus, in the episode “Limelight” (313), has a similar fondness for electrical torture.

After emigrating to the United States at twenty-three, Wilder made a fortune in Florida real estate. He also developed hobbies such as auto racing and photography. The latter he combined with his interest in rape, inviting women to be models for him and then sexually assaulting them.

In February 1984, Wilder graduated to murder. His first two victims were pretty, young women who had participated in the Miss Florida contest and wanted to be models. Both knew Wilder, and he was reportedly seen in their company before their disappearances. Their common experience gave him the nickname the Beauty Queen Killer. When Wilder read in the newspaper that the police were closing in on a suspect—who sounded quite a bit like him—he decided it was time to hit the road. He had just turned thirty-nine, and his road trip would end badly.

His next victim was another Floridian, and after he dumped her body he grabbed a victim whom he took across state lines into Georgia. In a motel room he raped her, tortured her with electric shock, and glued her eyes shut. After she locked herself in the bathroom, screaming and pounding on the walls, Wilder fled.

Wilder then struck in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California, raping, torturing, and killing. In California he abducted sixteen-year-old Tina Marie Risico, and after raping her he kept her alive and used her to lure additional victims into his trap. With her coerced help, he abducted another sixteen-year-old, Dawnette Wilt, in Gary, Indiana. Wilder was able to rape and torture her en route because he had Risico driving for him. He kept Wilt with him as they traveled through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, where he finally killed her. Then Wilder, with Risico still with him, abducted another woman, shot her, and took her car. In Boston, Wilder took Risico to the airport and gave her money for a plane ticket home.

Wilder tried to grab one more victim on April 13, but she got away. He then drove into New Hampshire, where a pair of state troopers recognized the man the entire country was looking for. Wilder went for his gun and a scuffle ensued, during which he was shot in the heart. “Suicide by cop” is a common end to killing sprees, and it was also the ultimate end of spree killer Mark Gregory in the
Criminal Minds
episode.

When police searched Wilder’s car, they found his gun, duct tape, and other tools of abduction, along with the special rig he had created to electrically shock his victims and his prized copy of John Fowles’s novel
The Collector
, which was mentioned in chapter 3. Wilder’s therapists reported that the killer had “practically memorized” the book.

After his death, Wilder was tentatively tied to two murders in Australia back in 1965 and to two in Florida that had taken place before his final spree.

ANY CRIMINAL PROFILER
can be wrong at any time—human nature Ais too mutable to always follow any strict guidelines, and that’s why profilers insist that their practice is an art, not a science. But the profilers of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, at least as depicted on
Criminal Minds
, are rarely wrong, and when they are, they usually figure out their error quickly.

The series begins with a difficult case, in the episode titled “Extreme Aggressor” (101). While the team is trying to find the killer known as the Seattle Strangler, the facts of the case lead the profilers in what seem to be two separate directions. In reality, there are two unsubs, which accounts for the confusion in the initial analysis. Timothy Vogel and Richard Slessman met in prison, where Vogel was a guard and Slessman was an inmate. Vogel, powerful and dominant, protected the weaker Slessman, who came to believe that he owed Vogel his life.

Team killers are too well known in real life. The crimes of Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, for instance, are brought up again in “A Real Rain” (117) and “Lo-Fi” (320) as examples of this terrible strategy.

 

 

BITTAKER HAD BEEN SENT
to the California Men ’s Colony at San Luis Obispo for assault with a deadly weapon, and Norris was there for rape. Many single people despair of ever finding the “right” person; Bittaker and Norris knew that with their particular shared interests, they were a match made—well, not in heaven, but a match just the same.

Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker was born in Pittsburgh on September 27, 1940, and adopted shortly thereafter by George Bittaker and his wife. The family moved often, and at age sixteen Lawrence dropped out of school in California and was arrested for auto theft, a hit-and-run accident, and evading arrest. He served a couple of years in the California Youth Authority, was paroled, and was almost immediately arrested again—this time in Louisiana, for violating the Interstate Motor Vehicle Theft Act.

This was how Bittaker’s life progressed—incarcerated more often than not. As of this writing, he is sixty-nine years old and has spent forty-two years in jail. He was diagnosed by prison psychiatrists as “borderline psychotic,” “basically paranoid,” and having “poor control of impulse behavior.” Despite these diagnoses and the opinions of experts that he would never stop committing crimes, every institution that held him sooner or later let him out.

Comparatively speaking, Roy Lewis Norris had had a stable childhood. Born on February 2, 1948, he lived with his parents in Greeley, Colorado, until he dropped out of school at seventeen and joined the navy. He served four months in Vietnam without seeing combat and was then stationed in San Diego, where he started attacking women. The navy discharged him because of his “psychological problems,” and the state put him in Atascadero State Mental Hospital and labeled him a mentally disordered sex offender. After five years Norris was released; he returned to his old habits and was sent away for rape once again—this time to San Luis Obispo, where his path would intersect Bittaker’s.

In “Lo-Fi,” the BAU team must investigate whether a killing spree in New York City is the work of a single serial killer or a that of a team.