Criminal Minds (38 page)

His mother decided that he no longer needed medication and weaned him off it. From that point on, his course was predictable.

Chase committed his first murder on December 29, 1977. He was practicing with his .22 pistol, shooting from his car. He hit the wall of one house and fired through the kitchen window of another. Then he saw Ambrose Griffin and his wife taking groceries from their car into their house. Chase fired twice and Ambrose fell dead. All of these incidents were in the same Sacramento neighborhood.

On January 23, 1978, a woman saw Chase trying the door and windows of her house as she approached. She stood and watched him. He saw her, lit a cigarette, and eventually wandered off. Locked doors meant he wasn’t welcome, he later admitted.

Down the street a short while later, someone else had left a door unlocked. The owners, approaching their home, saw someone exit the house and run away. He had stolen a few things, had urinated into a drawer of baby clothes, and had defecated on a child’s bed.

Another hour passed, then Chase encountered an acquaintance from high school in a shopping center parking lot. She was shocked at his appearance. He was frighteningly thin and disheveled. His cheeks were sunken and his eyes were bulging. He had a yellowish crust around his mouth. His sweatshirt was bloody. Anxious, she got into her car and tried to leave. When Chase grabbed at her car door, she stepped on the gas and zoomed away. Hearing about the murders four days later at the Miroth house, the young woman reported her encounter to the police and gave them Chase’s name.

Meanwhile, after being left behind by his high school acquaintance, Chase kept wandering the neighborhood, checking doors. He found another opportunity at the home of David and Teresa Wallin. David was at work. His wife, three months pregnant, was taking out the garbage. Chase shot Teresa three times, killing her. Taking her into her bedroom, he had sex with her corpse while stabbing it repeatedly. He disemboweled her, then got a used yogurt container from the kitchen and filled it with blood, which he then drank. Before leaving the property, he picked up dog feces from the yard, went back inside, and shoved it into Teresa’s mouth.

The Sacramento police called in the FBI, and profiler Robert Ressler flew out to work on the case. He suggested that the offender would be a white male between twenty-five and twenty-seven, extremely thin, and slovenly. He would have a history of mental illness and drug use. He would be a loner and unemployed, living on a disability payment or off his relatives. He was a disorganized offender, too mentally unstable to hold a job or function in society.

Chase lived less than a mile from where Dan Meredith’s car had been abandoned. Now that the police had Chase’s name, detectives went to his apartment. When he didn’t come out, the cops split up, one heading for the manager’s apartment while the other walked away from the building. Taking advantage of the moment, Chase darted for his truck, carrying a box, but the police grabbed him. He wore his .22 in a shoulder holster, and Meredith’s wallet was in his back pocket. The box contained bloody rags.

What the police found inside Chase’s apartment was far worse: three food blenders, coated with blood; body parts in the refrigerator, including a container of human brain tissue; a calendar with the dates of the Wallin and Miroth-Meredith murders marked on it, along with forty-four more dates marked throughout the rest of the year.

A jury found Chase guilty of six counts of homicide on May 8, 1979, and he was sentenced to die in the gas chamber. Ressler, who believed that Chase was clearly insane and should have been institutionalized rather than imprisoned, interviewed him extensively while he was on death row. Chase insisted that his killings were done in self-defense. He was suffering from soap-dish poisoning (an imaginary ailment), he said, and had been victimized by Nazis and UFOs.

In prison, Chase was given antidepressants to control his continuing hallucinations. He saved up his pills for several weeks, and on December 26, 1980, he took them all at once. A guard found Chase on his bunk, dead.

 

 

VAMPIRISM
bares its blood-soaked fangs in “The Performer” (507). In that episode, the condition known as Renfield syndrome, or clinical vampirism, is discussed. A real-life example of this phenomenon is John Brennan Crutchley, who was known as the Vampire Rapist (
rapist
only because none of his probable murders was ever proven).

Crutchley was arrested because a helpful motorist stopped when he saw a teenage girl crawling on the side of a Florida road, naked and weak, in late November 1985. The motorist took her home and called the police and an ambulance. The girl had lost 40-45 percent of her blood.

She had been hitchhiking, she told the police. A man had picked her up, then said he had to get something from his house. When they arrived there, he got into the back of the car and threw a rope around her throat.

The girl came to on the man’s kitchen counter, her arms and legs bound. The man had a video camera and lights mounted. As the camera ran, he raped her. After he was done, he drew blood from her with needles and drank it, claiming that he was a vampire. He handcuffed her and put her in a bathtub, and kept coming back for more. Finally he left the house, and she was able to escape. The doctors who examined her believed that she would have died if the man had drawn any more blood.

The house belonged to John Brennan Crutchley, a thirty-nine-year-old computer engineer who was married and had one child. His family was in Maryland for the Thanksgiving holiday. Crutchley was arrested and his home was searched, but the search was haphazard. The videotape in the camera had been partly erased, so the documentary evidence of the victim’s rape was gone. A stack of credit cards several inches thick appeared in a photograph, but the cards themselves were gone when the police returned to look for them. Identification cards belonging to two other women were in the house; Crutchley claimed that those women had given him their IDs. There were bodies in his past, and plenty of them, but no evidence tied him to the murders that seemed to follow him from state to state.

Crutchley had participated in kinky sexual activities with what must have been several dozen women and couples, some with his wife’s participation. He was a sexual sadist. When he was a boy, his mother had dressed him in girls’ clothes until he was five or six. According to FBI profiler Robert Ressler, Crutchley had all the hallmarks of a serial killer. Ressler believes that Crutchley did indeed kill many women, but in the end Crutchley was convicted only of sexual battery, kidnapping, and aggravated battery against the teenage hitchhiker and sentenced to twenty-five years to life.

He was released after eleven years for good behavior, but he was arrested again the next day for violating his parole after he tested positive for marijuana use. That was his third strike, and he went back to prison for life. Crutchley died in prison on April 2, 2002, after putting a plastic bag over his head. His death was ruled a case of autoerotic asphyxiation.

 

 

AS INFAMOUS
as Richard Trenton Chase is, he’s a nobody compared to the most notorious modern cannibal, Milwaukee’s Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer is one of those killers whose name pops up frequently on
Criminal Minds
, beginning with the very first episode, “Extreme Aggressor” (101), and again in “Plain Sight” (104), “The Boogeyman” (206), “Fear and Loathing” (216), “Jones” (218), “In Name and Blood” (302), and “Zoe’s Reprise” (415).

In “Fear and Loathing,” the BAU agents believe they’re looking for a smooth-talking killer who easily wins the trust of his victims. Spencer Reid points out that Jeffrey Dahmer was so calm and self-assured that he convinced the police not to look at a bag full of body parts.

Reid is correct. The incident he mentions was Dahmer’s first murder, and it was only one of many occasions on which the authorities could have stopped him before he racked up a total of seventeen known murders.

Dahmer, then eighteen, had for years had fantasies of meeting an attractive male hitchhiker and having sex with him. He had grown up in Bath, Ohio, where, he said, people just didn’t talk about homosexuality. He called it the biggest taboo in town; others might insist that there were greater taboos and that Dahmer eventually broke most of them.

His parents had divorced the year before. His father was living in a motel, and Dahmer lived with his mother and David, his younger brother. One night in June 1978, when his mother and his brother were out of town for a week, Dahmer took the car and drove around town. He spotted Steven Hicks, also eighteen, the hitchhiker of his dreams, or a close enough approximation. Dahmer picked up Hicks and took him to the empty house. They drank beer and smoked pot, but Dahmer realized that Hicks wasn’t gay and wasn’t going to fulfill the rest of Dahmer’s fantasy. Not wanting Hicks to leave, Dahmer hit Hicks in the head with a barbell. Then he placed the barbell across Hicks’s throat and strangled him to death.

This was another thing that Dahmer had fantasized about. Like Bob Berdella, the Kansas City Butcher (see chapter 2), Dahmer longed for complete control over others. If he couldn’t control people in life, he would control them in death. After killing Hicks, Dahmer masturbated, then took the body to a crawl space under the house.

The next day, he had to dispose of Hicks in a more permanent fashion. He bought a hunting knife and went back into the crawl space. Slicing open Hicks’s belly and seeing his internal organs got him aroused again. He cut Hicks’s body into pieces and triple-bagged each piece in garbage bags. Around 3 a.m., while he was driving to dump the pieces in a ravine ten miles from his house, the police stopped him for crossing the centerline.

Dahmer passed an inebriation test, but while the police were talking to him, one officer shined a flashlight into the backseat of Dahmer’s car and asked about the plastic bags. Dahmer said it was garbage that he hadn’t yet taken to the landfill. Despite the smell—or maybe because of it—the officers believed him and let him go. He decided to take the bags back home instead of dumping them. At home he broke the bones up into tiny pieces and burned the clothes.

For Dahmer, the cooling-off period after that first homicide was nine years long. But when he started up again, he didn’t stop.

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father, Lionel Dahmer, was an analytical chemist. He noticed that Jeffrey had a fascination with the bones of dead animals at an early age. He didn’t think anything of it at the time, but later he would see it as a dark premonition.

Otherwise, Jeff was a cheerful child, until an operation for a double hernia at the age of four. His natural happiness never seemed to return after that; instead, he seemed solemn, distant, and apathetic. Between the ages of ten and fifteen, even the way he carried himself changed; he became rigid and tense, with a blank face and a shy manner.

Dahmer had also developed an unsettling habit of collecting dead animals and dissecting them. He stripped the skin off a large dog he found by the road and mounted its head on a stick, which he set out in the woods as a prank.

His later high school years were filled with nightmarish fantasies and a growing alcohol problem. These reached their culmination in the murder of Steven Hicks, and they never went away again.

After high school, Dahmer tried college, but after staying drunk for a semester at Ohio State University, he dropped out. Next, he went into the army, which discharged him after two years for habitual drunkenness.

Back home in 1982, after being arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct, Dahmer moved in with his paternal grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin. He tried to straighten out his life, tried to push away the sexual fantasies and the booze. He attended church with his grandmother and thought that he was doing a good job of regaining control of himself.

Eventually, though, the compulsion to have sex with men began to rule him again. He started going out to gay bars, bookstores, and bathhouses. He bought a male mannequin, which he kept under his bed, hoping that by playing with it and controlling it he would satisfy the urge to do the same with real men. It didn’t work. There were more arrests, for indecent exposure. In 1986, after the second arrest, he served ten months in jail. He was soon arrested again, for fondling a thirteen-year-old boy.