Obsession (3 page)

Most noteworthy about this particular murder was the way police found out about it. The next morning, the killer called them and directed officers to the scene. The police traced the call to a public phone booth on a busy downtown corner. A couple of witnesses vaguely recalled seeing a tall blond man using the phone at about the right time.

Near the beginning of February 1978, the killer mailed a poem to the local newspaper, but it somehow found its way to the circulation department, where no one noticed it for several days. Evidently ticked off over this slight, not to mention the lack of publicity he so desperately craved, the UNSUB took a different tack, sending a letter to a television station that served a large part of the region. Not only did he reassert credit for the Peterson murders, he also claimed responsibility for Farrell and Gallagher.

The station immediately brought the letter to the police, who took it seriously.

The letter’s description of the Farrell and Gallagher murders was just as detailed as the original depictions of the Petersons had been. He said how lucky the Farrell children had been that the phone had rung, saving their lives. He had intended to kill them as he had Danny Peterson. Only this time, his letter gave an even greater insight into his methods and motivations. At the end of the paragraphs on both Farrell and Gallagher, he had written identical commentaries: “Chosen at random with little planning, Motivation X.”

And he promised another one, in a scenario similar to the one in which he had killed Melissa Peterson, a scenario he described in hideous and vulgar detail. She would be chosen at random with a little more planning
this time. And the driving force, again, would be “Motivation X.”

“How many do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?” he practically pleaded. “Do the cops think that all those deaths are not related? Yes, the M.O. is different in each, but look at the pattern that is developing.”

As if he hadn’t made himself clear enough already, he explained, “You don’t understand these things because you’re not under the influence of Motivation X. The same thing that made Son of Sam, Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler, the Hillside Strangler, Ted [Bundy] of the West Coast and many more infamous characters.”

He called his affliction “a terrible nightmare,” but admitted he didn’t “lose any sleep over it. After a thing like Gallagher I come home and go about life like anyone else. And I will be like that until the urge hits me again.”

Even as early in my profiling career as this was, I knew he wasn’t going home and going about life like anyone else. But I’d already learned how to read the deeper message, the “subtext,” as actors call it, and here he was saying something profoundly accurate, not only about himself but about virtually all serial predators. And that is, on an everyday basis, they do appear to go about their business and ordinary lives just like the rest of us. Even though they’re monsters, they don’t look or act like monsters, and that is why they become successful. We see them, but we look right through them. What makes them monsters is not how they look; it’s that they “don’t lose any sleep” over what they do.

He closed by appealing, “How about some name for me?” and suggested, formally this time, “SEARCH AND DESTROYER.”

Technically speaking, I suppose, it should have been
Searcher and Destroyer, but even with the shoddy syntax, he’d managed to get his point across. He hadn’t spent much time on his style, but he’d sure as hell spent a lot of time working on his image. If we were going to catch him, we’d have to play his game.

The police had already made a good first step before they even came to us. Not only had they formed a task force to assimilate all the evidence and leads and hunt for the killer, the same day the letter came in to the television station, the chief held a press conference and publicly announced the communication and the department’s belief in its authenticity.

“I want to restate that there is no question in our minds but that the person who wrote the letter killed these people. This person has consistently identified himself with the phrase Search and Destroy and wants to be known as the Search and Destroyer. Because we are sure this man is responsible for six murders, we wish to enlist the assistance of each citizen of this community.”

As new as I was at profiling and criminal investigative analysis, I already knew how good the chief’s instincts were, a feeling that has only strengthened in me throughout my law enforcement career.

There is a tendency in this kind of work to want to withhold and control information, and sometimes, of course, that is necessary. In each open case, you have to keep certain details secret so you can evaluate and authenticate your various suspects and witnesses. Any sensational crime or crime series, and Search and Destroyer certainly qualified as that, is bound to have a bunch of crazies coming out of the woodwork claiming credit. In other words, you’re going to have confessions from people who’d like to have done what the killer did, but couldn’t, so this is an attempt to get the recognition and have the fantasy come to life as it had for the real offender. And there’s got to be a way
to screen them out before they waste too much of your time.

But on the whole, I have found over and over and over again that the public is almost always your best and most effective partner in bringing UNSUBs to justice. Someone out there knows him. Someone out there has seen or heard something. Someone out there has the missing piece to the puzzle. “Douglas’s First Rule of Crime-Solving” states that the more you share with the public, the more they’re going to be able to help you.

Partially because of this, I wasn’t the first to offer a “profile” of Search and Destroyer. The media went crazy with “Motivation X,” with psychiatrists and psychologists weighing in on what it meant and how the UNSUB had come to be the way he was. There was actually merit in some of what was stated, but our approach to profiling is, by its very nature, going to be much different from that of most of the mental health community. It’s their job to use raw psychological data to tell them how he became the way he is. It’s my job to use the material to figure out what he’s like right now, how we can recognize him, and what we can do to catch him before he does any more.

For example, one psychologist wrote a column theorizing that the killer had studied extensively in medical or psychological journals trying to better understand himself and the motivations for his deadly acts, and that he had sought counseling as far back as adolescence to deal with his impulsive feelings and violent fantasies.

Maybe, maybe not. What I was seeing, from a practical criminal-profiling perspective, was a guy fascinated with police life, procedure, and culture. He was either in some form of law enforcement or very much wanted to be and fantasized about the power that status would give him. Not only was I convinced he was
taking crime-scene photos as the real police would, his written descriptions of the bodies and scenes were methodical, procedural, and full of police-type jargon, such as giving north-south, east-west orientations to how the bodies were placed or found. With the kind of pictures he was taking, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was also making sketches, fantasizing and planning the future crimes he promised in his letter.

The offices of the Behavioral Science Unit were in a subbasement at Quantico, sixty feet underground. The suite had originally been designed as a relocation center for the national law enforcement brain trust in case of national emergency. The bunker mentality might be a good one in case of enemy attack, but on a daily basis I found it somewhat stifling. So when I had a case that I really wanted to think about and focus on, I used to go over to an adjacent building, up to the top floor of the library, where the Legal Unit did its research, and isolate myself with the case materials. I would sit there by myself and try to visualize the scene as it was happening—what must have taken place between the victim and the subject. I would try to do an extensive analysis of the victim, what we came to call victimology, equally important as understanding the perpetrator in getting a handle on the crime.

And unlike my tiny basement office, the library had windows and plenty of light. You didn’t feel as if you were working in a crypt.

As my first step, I tried to imagine how each particular victim would have reacted when confronted by the subject. I would analyze the wounds, try to interpret them to understand why the victim was treated as she was.

For example, if you found out from your research that this would have been a compliant victim, but you found evidence of torture on the body, that would tell
you something about the UNSUB and his signature. It would tell you that he inflicted pain for its own sake, that that’s what he needed to make the crime satisfying.

I tried to visualize, to internalize, the terror young Melissa Peterson, this eleven-year-old child, must have gone through as her attacker forced her at gunpoint to undress, as he bound her wrists together, as he tied her around the waist and legs. Had he already killed her parents? My guess was that he had—you have to neutralize the greatest threat first. Did she know they were dead and couldn’t come to her aid? She must have heard the commotion, heard them scream or beg for their and their children’s lives. Did she know that this would only turn on her tormentor even more? My stomach churned and I became almost physically ill as I imagined him cinching the cord ligature tighter and tighter. He knew that the image of him, her torturer, would be the last thing this young girl ever saw, and he must have reveled in the thought. How could anyone do such a thing to another person, much less someone this young and blameless? Once you’ve seen pictures like this, how can you not be obsessed about hunting down the one who did it?

Melissa, I cannot now, nor will I ever be able to, put you out of my mind, or stop thinking about your mother and father and brother, and all the others like you, who are dead now because someone else decided you should be. And just because other people have not seen what I have seen does not mean it could not have happened to them just as easily as it happened to you and your wonderful family. You could be any of us, and any of us could be you.

And yet, merely being angry, merely craving the blood of the guilty to avenge the blood of the innocent, accomplishes nothing. What does the evidence
tell you? What could I intuit from the crime-scene photos and the other material I had to work with?

Later, we would come to use terms such as
organized
and
disorganized
to characterize offenders. What I could say as I looked at the evidence was that this one certainly seemed to have his act together in terms of implementing what he set out to do. I saw no evidence that he knew the victims personally, which meant he had been surveilling them (another thing he’d consider policelike) and constructing his fantasy of control, degradation, and murder before he went in. Because that was one thing we knew from our prison interviews and research: with sexual predators, the fantasy always precedes the act.

The police report described semen found on Melissa’s leg. No surprise; we see a lot of predators masturbate at the scene. But how does it tie in with the rest of the behavioral evidence?

He’s very visual, I noted. Not only does he take photos and take pains to describe the scene, he stages his victims the way he wants to. This was particularly true of Melissa, to whom he seemed to have devoted the most time and attention. What this meant to me was that even though he’s sexually obsessed, he feels deeply inadequate and therefore more comfortable with children than with his chronological peers. His inadequacy is evident by the fact that even though he strips the women, he doesn’t penetrate them. Instead, he just uses them as props for his masturbatory fantasies. In fact, he probably jerked off on her after she was already dead.

Though he certainly puts his victims through a horrible ordeal, it is not physical torture in the sense that we see it in sexual sadists, who have to inflict intense physical pain to get off. The torture is mostly mental, his way of asserting power and superiority. Though he may fantasize about physical torture, this is no more
a part of his signature than actual intercourse with his victims.

His arrested development would probably have shown up first in Peeping Tom or voyeuristic situations, which would tie in with his propensity for surveillance. He spent so much time with the victims that he had to feel confident he was in control of the environment. He had to know that there were only four member of the family and no one else was likely to break in on him.

Just as significant as what he did to Melissa was what he did to her little brother. In one of his letters he stated that he placed the bag over the boy’s head to suffocate him, just as he claimed he intended to do to Frances Farrells sons before he was interrupted by the telephone. But he also used ligature strangulation on young Daniel, just as he did to his parents and sister. So the bag was, in our terminology, overkill, which meant there had to be another reason for it. And the reason, I felt confident, was that, unlike the others, he didn’t feel good about this kill. He wanted to cover it up and also prevent Danny’s dead eyes from accusing him.

Why? Because this was the one he identified with, just as he identified with Frances Farrell’s young boys and shut them up in the bathroom so they wouldn’t see what he was going to do to their mother. Whether he would have treated the girl in the same way remains open to speculation.

Sitting alone at the library table, I began constructing my profile, longhand on a yellow legal pad, heading the first page “MULTIPLE HOMICIDES,” with the name of the city.

I began with what had already become our usual disclaimer, “It should be noted that the attached analysis is not a substitute for a thorough and well-planned investigation,” and went on to point out that the infor
mation contained in the profile was based on our knowledge of behavior in similar cases, but that no two criminal acts or criminal personalities are exactly alike.