Obsession (2 page)
Authors: John Douglas,Mark Olshaker
Finally, we’d like to take this opportunity to pay special tribute to John’s father, Jack Douglas, who passed away on the morning of May 14, 1997, as we were writing this book. We had no greater or more enthusiastic supporter and we will miss him very much, which is why this book is dedicated to him.
—John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
5 W
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APPENED IN
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10 I
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The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.
—John Milton,
Paradise Lost
“Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling.
I
happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants—nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I’m evil? Am I evil, Officer Starling?”
—Thomas Harris,
The Silence of the Lambs
MOTIVATION X
T
hey were all dead. All four of them. The entire family.
It was 1979. I sat at my desk at Quantico concentrating on the color crime-scene photos. Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Peterson were in the bedroom of their one-story wood home in this medium-sized Mid-Atlantic city—he on the bed, his wife, Sarah, nude on the floor, her head sprawled to one side. Both had been bound with black electrical tape and white Venetian-blind cords, which, from the ligature marks encircling their necks, appeared to be the means of death. Thankfully, their eyes were closed, but there was no peace evident on their bloodied and swollen faces. Eleven-year-old Melissa was in the basement, bound upright by white cords and tied by her neck to a drainpipe. She was gagged with a towel, naked below the waist except for her socks, panties bunched around her ankles. I stared at the close-up of her head, her long, dark hair sprawled in matted tufts across her face. She looked as though she had been a pretty girl, but it’s always hard to tell from crime-scene photos. Violence robs a person of so much; violent death robs her of everything. Daniel, nicknamed Danny, was only nine. He
was lying on the floor of his own bedroom next to his bed, fully clothed, bound with cord with a plastic bag over his head. Whatever other wounds were evidenced on each body, both kids also died from ligature strangulation. The butchery had occurred between about eight and ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning in February of 1974—more than five years ago. Now there were two, possibly three, more killings, and an unknown subject—UNSUB—still apparently active. That’s why the local police had called us in.
The names and some of the details in this case have been changed for reasons that will become apparent. The facts, however, speak for themselves.
I studied the other pictures in the Peterson file and the detectives’ reports. Despite the mayhem at the scene, this was not a haphazard or opportunistic crime. There was no sign of forced entry, but one photo showed that the telephone line had been cut before the intruder entered the house, and a search by detectives indicated that the binding cord had been brought to the scene. Whoever had done this had it all planned out.
I was unclear what, if anything, was missing from the house, but the family car had been stolen. Police found it abandoned in a food-store parking lot.
In 1979, our profiling program was just getting established. I’d only been at Quantico for two years, first as a National Academy counselor, then as an instructor, after serving stints as a field agent in Detroit and then Milwaukee. FBI director William Webster had recently given the Behavioral Science Unit official approval to offer psychological profiling consultation as an adjunct to our educational and research responsibilities. A few years later, I would be the first to move over from training to full-time profiling, but at this point, my main job was still teaching, specifically the Applied Criminal Psychology course given to new
agents and police fellows from around the United States and the world. Bob Ressler, Roy Hazelwood, and a few of the other instructors were also starting to consult as their teaching schedules allowed.
Even though we were new and still relatively unknown, we’d already developed a procedure: Send us your crime-scene photos and officer-on-the-scene accounts, witness statements, autopsy photos, protocols and medical-examiner reports, maps of crime scenes and/or body dump sites, anything else that might be relevant to the case. Tell us anything you know about the victims, their habits, their lifestyles. But don’t give us your suspect list, if you have one, or tell us who you think might have done it; we don’t want to be influenced by your opinion.
Kenneth Peterson was forty-one at the time of death. His wife, Sarah, had been thirty-four, the same age I was now as I sat here reading this. Kenneth had retired from the Army, where he’d been stationed in Germany. He came with his family back to the United States, settled in this pleasant Eastern-seaboard city, and worked as a pilot and mechanic at a small airfield just south of the metropolitan area. Roughly a month before, the Petersons had moved into the house in which they died.
I glanced through the cold, clinical facts of the four autopsy reports. Just as the crime-scene photos suggested, all four of them had died of asphyxia due to compression of the larynx by ligature, causing pulmonary edema and congestion of the viscera. There were other wounds on Sarah, and the Gross Description noted that Melissa was also wearing a white bra, which had been cut in the front. Yet there was no evidence of sexual assault on either female.
Though there were no bullet wounds on any of the bodies, I figured he had to have had a gun. Otherwise, he couldn’t have controlled that many people at the
same time, particularly when one was a former military man. But clearly, he never intended to use the gun except as a last resort to save his own life. He definitely went in intending to kill—no chance this was a burglary or robbery gone bad—but he wasn’t interested in killing quickly and “cleanly” with a bullet.
The police had come up with a number of well-publicized suspects, but none of them was strong. Then in October, a local newspaper editor received a phone call directing him to look in a particular book in the main branch of the public library. Inside was a letter purporting to be from the killer. It claimed that the suspects the police had examined “know nothing at all” To authenticate his claim of responsibility, under the heading “PETERSON CASE,” he typed out specific descriptions of each victim, including position, type of binding, clothing, and means of death. He also threw in additional random “Comments” under each victim, such as the fact that Kenneth had thrown up and that Sarah had not made the bed. He even complained that the car he stole was dirty inside and practically out of gas.
I read the grayish photocopy, each sheet protected by a plastic sleeve.
What are you going to tell me about yourself from this?
I wondered.
The text that followed the descriptions was only semicoherent, going on for several paragraphs about how hard it was to control himself and that, since the murders, he didn’t have any effective way of dealing with the urge to kill, since he couldn’t approach anyone else about his problem.
“When this monster enters my brain I never know. But, it is here to stay. How does one cure himself? If you ask for help after you have killed four people they will laugh or hit the panic button and call the cops.”
In a way, it reminded me of the crime-scene plea of William Heirens, the seventeen-year-old college-student
serial killer in 1940s Chicago who had used the lipstick of one of his victims to scrawl on her wall, “For heAVens Sake cAtch Me BeFore I Kill More. I cannot control myselF.” He had been caught and attributed his kills to a George Murman (probably short for “Murder Man”), who he eventually acknowledged lived inside him. He was tried and sentenced to life in prison, where Bob Ressler and I had recently interviewed him as part of our Criminal Personality Research Project. The difference, though, was that whereas there might have been something heartfelt in Heirens’s lipsticked plea, this guy was playing with his audience.
He described his modus operandi (MO): “… following them, checking up on them, waiting in the dark, waiting, waiting.” Like Heirens, he attempted to split off responsibility, saying, “Maybe you can stop him. I can’t. He has already chosen his next victim or victims and I don’t know who they are yet,” then finished the note with, “Good luck with your hunting,” before signing off, “YOURS, TRULY GUILTILY.”
He added a PS: “Since sex criminals do not change their M.O. or by nature cannot do so, I will not change mine. The code words for me will be … Search and Destroy.”
That was the key, I realized. Not only is he taking credit for the murders, he’s putting his own stamp on them, giving himself a persona. Whatever else this guy has accomplished in life, and my guess was it wasn’t much, this is the thing he was most proud of. This is the thing he spends most of his time thinking and fantasizing about. He sees himself as an artist and this is his “art,” his life’s work. The second part of the letter is just an explanation, a facile excuse, for why he’s going to keep doing it. This is what makes him feel most alive. For this moment, he can get away from his inadequate, ineffectual existence and exercise
the ultimate power over other people. No matter what they are or have been, he’s more powerful than they are. This is the thing he wants to be known for.
That was it for a while, as far as anyone could tell. No more crimes, no more communications.
But even without the documentary evidence I had in front of me, it was clear this UNSUB wasn’t finished. I took a closer look at the first page of the letter. The detail was incredible; I’d never seen anything quite like it. He even noted where Melissa’s glasses were left lying. How’d he do this? Was he compulsive enough to go through the entire house taking meticulous notes? He sure as hell wasn’t doing it from memory eight months later.
Of course not! He was looking at crime-scene photographs, just as I was. Only he’d made his own. He’d brought a camera to the scene or, more likely, taken one from the Petersons. Unless you know to look for it, that’s not the kind of thing that would be missed. And unless he was a photography buff himself with his own darkroom setup, it had to be a Polaroid. He couldn’t take a chance on sending film out with those images on it.
And why had he made the photos? Not to be able to recount the scene to the police and media, though he certainly got a charge out of that. He made the pictures, I realized, so he could relive the moment over and over. Some guys take jewelry or underwear. This guy takes crime-scene photos. Of course he was going to keep killing. He was enjoying it too much not to. And he’d start again as soon as his memories didn’t do the job for him any longer.
The next murder in the suspected series occurred a little more than three years later, in May of 1977. A white male forced his way into Frances Farrell’s house at gunpoint. He locked her three children—two boys and a girl—in a bathroom, then tied up and strangled
their mother, twenty-seven-year-old Frances. A ringing telephone apparently scared away the intruder before he could complete his agenda. The children managed to free themselves and call the police. If it was the same guy, he’d neglected to cut the phone line this time, or maybe it wasn’t accessible. Police got a few more details to add to the composite descriptions of witnesses who thought they’d seen someone around the Peterson house. One of Frances’s sons had been stopped on the street that morning by the man he thought was the killer, asking for directions in the neighborhood.
The crime-scene photos of Frances Farrell were pretty horrific, possibly even more so than those of the Petersons. Like Sarah Peterson, she was nude, bound with black electrical tape and white Venetian-blind cord. Her arms were tied behind her back with the tape and cord and a pair of her own stockings. As with Danny Peterson, Frances had been found with a plastic bag tied over her head. When it was removed at the crime scene, her face was almost completely blackish red from cyanosis and hemorrhaging, and bloody vomit was dried around her nose and mouth. Yet the autopsy report noted no defense wounds on the hands nor evidence of sexual assault.
Then on November 6 of the same year, twenty-three-year-old Lori Gallagher returned home and was surprised by an intruder who had come in through the bedroom window. This time, he had cut the phone line. She was facedown on her bed, clad in a pink, long-sleeved sweater with her panties pulled down, her own panty hose binding her wrists behind her. There were additional pairs of panty hose of various colors that had been fashioned into a gag around her neck and across her mouth, which, along with her nose, had been bleeding. Her entire body had a reddish cast from petechial hemorrhage. Again, no defense wounds
and no apparent vaginal or anal assault. And again, the cause of death was ligature strangulation.
