Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (7 page)

The FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) at Quantico, Virginia (of
Silence of the Lambs
fame), which was first formed for psychological studies of hostage takers, began to investigate the psychology and techniques of serial killers in an attempt to model their behavior into identifiable patterns. Between 1979 and 1983, agents from the BSU conducted intimate and detailed interviews in prisons with thirty-six convicted sex murderers, of whom twenty-nine were serial killers.
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Everything was asked of them, from their earliest childhood recollections to the most horrifying details of their crimes and motives. The families, friends, and acquaintances of the killers were also extensively interviewed, as were their surviving victims. The BSU also made a detailed study of the 118 dead victims attributed to the killers in the study: their occupations, their lifestyles, vital statistics, where they encountered their killers, their autopsies, and the conditions in which their bodies were found. All that data served as the basis for the FBI’s profiling system.

In order for the profiling system to be applied usefully to serial crimes in different parts of the United States, there needed to be some kind of formal, centralized organization and system of collecting very detailed crime data, storing it, and making it available for analysis. Big money would need to be allocated for that.

At the exact same time (1981–1983), three major committees on Capitol Hill were looking into the issue of increasing violence, linkage blindness, the kidnapping of children, child pornography, and serial killers: the Attorney General’s Task Force on Violent Crime; the House Committee on Civil and Constitutional Rights; and Senator Specter’s Juvenile Justice Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate.

The start of these hearings in 1981 was punctuated by several dramatic cases of child murders. In Atlanta, Wayne Williams was arrested for a series of murders of black male children and youths; in New York, Etan Patz vanished on his way to school; and in Florida, six-year-old Adam Walsh vanished in a mall when his mother left him alone for a moment. The boy’s decapitated remains were found floating in a canal. An out-of-state car was linked to the crime but the perpetrator was never identified. There would later be some controversy that it might have been Ottis Elwood Toole, Henry Lee Lucas’s partner (the two dubiously claimed killing a total of 360 victims as they roamed the highways). Adam was the son of John Walsh, who would become a vocal victims’ and missing children’s advocate and host of
America’s Most Wanted.

A year after his son’s murder, the tragic figure of John Walsh testified before the Senate committee describing recent cases of serial murder and suggesting that missing children are in a large measure murdered by serial killers. The problem, Walsh said, was linkage blindness and the failure of law enforcement agencies to coordinate information and intelligence across multiple jurisdictions. Because of this weakness, young people were disappearing without a trace, until they might be found in a mass grave somewhere. Using the controversial Department of Health figure that 1.8 million children go missing every year, Walsh testified that every hour 205 children go missing, many of whom he said, would be found murdered. He failed to explain that that 95 percent of those missing were confirmed runaways, of whom 95 percent would return home within fourteen days.
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Instead, headlines screamed: “205 MISSING CHILDREN EVERY HOUR!”

“The unbelievable and unaccounted for figure of fifty thousand children disappear annually and are abducted for reasons of foul play,” Walsh claimed in his testimony.
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“This country is littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped, and strangled children,” Walsh warned.
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On February 3, 1984, in her nationally syndicated column, Ann Landers published a letter written by the executive director of the Adam Walsh Center. It opened, “Dear Ann: Consider these chilling statistics: Every hour 205 American children are reported missing. This means 4,920 per day and 1.8 million per year.”
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It was spooky stuff and mothers across the nation huddled up their children behind locked doors. But where did that 50,000 figure that Walsh cited come from? According to recent research by John Gill, it was Senator Claiborne Pell, Democrat from Rhode Island, who in 1981 was the first public official to formally claim that the Department of Health and Human Services stated that 50,000 children vanish each year. Officials at HHS denied making that estimate and Pell’s staff doesn’t remember which official they spoke to.
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As the hearing progressed, all kinds of speculative statements were entered into the record and presented at press conferences. The most prevalent trend was to combine the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports homicide categories of
unknown
and
stranger
into one figure, pumping up the percentage of killings that appeared to be motiveless murders by unknown perpetrators, presumably roaming serial killers. Using this kind of “fuzzy math,” it was claimed that nearly 25 percent of all murders—a total of 4,000 to 5,000 each year—could be attributed to serial killers. The only thing that could save us now was funding from Congress.

This claim was gleefully picked up by the press and true-crime authors. Even serious academic studies on serial murder bought into this big number. For example, an often-cited work by Holmes and De Burger states that in 1988

[b]etween 3,500 and 5,000 persons are slain by serial murderers each year in this country.
We emphasize that this is an estimate, but we believe that it represents a reliable approximation, given the data available and the input of various experts now engaged in efforts to deal with this problem. (italics in original)
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This figure is still being thrust on us today. The back cover art of a recently published edition of Michael Newton’s
Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
features a specially highlighted box with a blurb promoting the book: “The starting point for any serious study of the serial or addicted killers who claim an estimated 3,500 victims each year—and evade detection . . .”
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But these numbers were never realistic and by now everyone should know it. The total maximum number of all known serial killer victims in the United States over a span of 195 years between 1800 and 1995 is estimated at only 3,860 tops.
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Of this total, a maximum of 1,398 victims were murdered between 1975 and 1995, at an average rate of 70 victims a year. Even if we account for unknown victims, that figure is nowhere near the 3,500 annual number so often bandied about. But 3,500 victims a year sells better than 70. As Joel Best put it in his analysis of child abduction statistics in the 1980s, “Three principles seem clear: Big numbers are better than small numbers; official numbers are better than unofficial numbers; and big, official numbers are best of all.”
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For the record, a study of 1,498 child murders in California between 1981 and 1990 determined that not stranger serial killers, as John Walsh claimed, but relatives,
predominately parents,
are the most frequent killers of children up to age nine. Strangers were involved in only 14.6 percent of homicides of children between ages five and nine; and 28.7 percent of those between ages ten and fourteen. The offender relationship was unknown in 10.4 and 20.1 percent of homicides in the two age groups, respectively. Acquaintances murdered 30.2 percent and 39.2 percent of victims in each age group, and females comprised 36.4 percent and 18.7 percent of the killers, while relatives including parents killed 44.8 percent and 11.9 percent, respectively.
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Of children between ages ten and fourteen the motive behind their murder was a dispute in 60.9 percent of the cases, a firearm was used in 64.2 percent, and a public place was the location in 51.5 percent. In summary, young children are killed at home by relatives, while more mobile and independent older adolescent children are increasingly killed by acquaintances first, and then by strangers in public places.

The incredible stranger child abduction figures of 30,000 to 45,000 so often cited became more frequently challenged in the late 1980s. People began to wonder: Where were these abductions occurring? Why were they not being reported in the papers? Where were the anecdotal accounts? Who were the serial killers committing these abductions? Finally Congress sponsored a program to determine exact statistical data on missing and abducted children called the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART).

The study determined that there were two definitions of “abduction”: a legal one and a stereotypical one held by the public. In public perception a child abduction occurs when a victim is taken away by a stranger a great distance, held for ransom, kept overnight or longer, or killed. Crimes such as the 1993 abduction-murder of Polly Klaas or the recently resolved kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart fit the public perception of the threat posed by strangers to children. But the law is broader than the public’s perception. For example, California courts define abduction as when a victim is lured or forcibly moved farther than twenty feet or held longer than half an hour if no movement occurs.
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So when the FBI reported an annual average of 90,000 forcible rapes in the 1980s, in which teenage girls comprised commonly a third to a half of the victims, still defined as children, the circumstances of many of these crimes easily fit the legal definition of child abduction. Thus the figure of 30,000 to 45,000 “abducted children” emerged under those kinds of definitions. But this was not what the public was thinking in their definition of the type of child abduction they feared.

The NISMART study reevaluated child abduction statistics in the context of the public perception of abduction. The study determined that in a twelve-year period between 1976 and 1988, an average of 43 to 147 children were victimized yearly in the United States in the stereotypical public perception of abduction. That brings the statistic more in line with the highly rare anecdotal and press reports of stranger abductions of children that we hear about. The reality is that the abduction and murder of children by strangers is a very rare crime. The degree of fear and concern generated by exaggerated and misrepresented statistics during the early 1980s far exceeded the reality of the danger. This fear persists to this day, despite the extremely low probability of such threats to children. Of course, this fact is of little consolation to the parents of the 43 to 147 children who on average every year are abducted by strangers.

Back in 1981–1983, as the committee hearings unfolded in Washington, the press darted like schools of fish to the Senate hearings and the various press conferences. Articles in large-circulation magazines such as
Time, Newsweek, Life, Omni, Psychology Today, Playboy,
and
Penthouse,
painted a picture of the United States plagued by an “epidemic” of senseless random homicides committed by roaming anonymous monsters who often victimized our children.

All those fearful and perhaps exaggerated cries came to some fruition. In 1982 Congress passed the Missing Children’s Act and in 1984 the Missing Children’s Assistance Act. President Ronald Reagan personally announced the establishment of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), to be housed at the FBI Quantico Behavioral Sciences Unit. The data collected by the BSU sexual killer study is applied today in a program known as VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program). When police suspect that a serial offender is loose in their jurisdiction, they can fill out a standard VICAP questionnaire consisting of 188 questions about their homicide case and submit it to the Investigative Support Unit requesting a profile of the unknown offender. (See Chapter 9 for a more detailed account of profiling and its problems.) The fill-in-the-blanks questions on the form range from the description of the location of where the victim’s body was found down to the details of the nature of the assault and mutilation of the victim, the condition of the suspect’s car, and his method of approaching the victim if it is known.

The result of a VICAP crime report is twofold. First, a computer analysis of the responses can identify patterns that may link the offender to other crimes he may have previously committed anywhere in North America. Each serial killer is known to have his own personal “signature” of which he is often not aware, and a properly completed VICAP questionnaire can identify this signature, while the computer can match it to other incidents.

Second, the data supplied by the VICAP report allows analysts to profile the killer, something that the FBI has developed into a reasonably effective but not entirely perfect technique. An analysis of the data in the report can often identify a high probability of the killer’s race, age, social status, employment, intelligence, and sexual preference; how he dresses, and even the type of car he drives. Successful profiling can greatly narrow the field of suspects.

This means that there is an identifiable method to the madness committed by serial killers. Since the BSU study was completed, much has become known as to how and why serial murderers come to develop and act on their killing addiction.