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The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI’s Original Mindhunter
Mark Olshaker
John E. Douglas
‘John Douglas is the FBI's pioneer and master of investigative profiling, and one of the most exciting figures in law enforcement I've had the privilege of knowing’ Patricia Cornwell‘John Douglas knows more about serial killers than anybody in the world’ Jonathan Demme, Director of The Silence of the LambsThe legendary FBI criminal profiler, number-one New York Times bestselling author, and inspiration for the hit Netflix show Mindhunter delves deep into the lives and crimes of four of the most disturbing and complex predatory killers, offering never-before-revealed details about his profiling process, and divulging the strategies used to crack some of his most challenging cases.The FBI’s pioneer of criminal profiling, former special agent John Douglas, has studied and interviewed many of America’s most notorious killers – including Charles Manson, ‘Son of Sam Killer’ David Berkowitz and ‘BTK Strangler’ Dennis Rader. Twenty years after his famous memoir, the man who literally wrote the book on FBI criminal profiling opens his case files once again. In this riveting work of true crime, he spotlights four of the most diabolical criminals he’s confronted, interviewed and learned from.A glimpse into the mind of a man who has pierced the heart of human darkness, The Killer Across the Table unlocks the ultimate mystery of depravity and the techniques and approaches that have countered evil in the name of justice.
COPYRIGHT (#u659b8707-9c8b-5e23-a540-4b41235f5e5f)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Mindhunters, Inc.
Cover design by Jack Smythe
Cover images by shutterstock
John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker assert their moral right to be
Identified as the authors of this work in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Abstract paint background image on part titles by Eky Studio/shutterstock
Splattered bloodstain background image on table of contents by oriontrail/shutterstock
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008338107
Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008338138
Version: 2019-04-12
To the memory of Joan Angela D’Alessandro and in honor of Rosemarie D’Alessandro and all of the others who, through their inspiration, courage, and determination, strive for justice and safety for all children, this book is dedicated with love and admiration
CONTENTS
COVER (#u335b4e04-51b1-5b30-a3ab-a36ba27fc9f5)
TITLE PAGE (#u368dd6fd-b5dd-5a19-b942-caa60c65dcd5)
COPYRIGHT (#u40e3a49c-4f83-5662-baca-ce05a9072f3c)
DEDICATION (#u93e2696f-d9ff-573c-87db-39697c527d57)
AUTHORS’ NOTE
IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE BIG HOUSE
INTRODUCTION: LEARNING FROM THE EXPERTS
I THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB (#uee613b58-2d78-528b-b3b5-9d45b311c5ec)
1 LITTLE GIRL LOST
2 “I SLEPT WELL”
3 MIND OF THE KILLER
4 HUMAN FALLOUT
5 WHAT THE PSYCH PEOPLE SAID
6 RED RAGE AND WHITE RAGE
7 THE BOTTOM LINE
8 “SUBSTANTIAL LIKELIHOOD”
9 JOAN’S LEGACY
II “KILLING FOR ME WAS JUST LIKE SECOND NATURE” (#u9ec16e46-02f0-51ed-ba94-9749ee30ff0b)
10 ALL IN THE FAMILY
11 THE ABANDONED VOLKSWAGEN
12 INSIDE THE WALLS
13 “THE CONVENIENCE OF THE SITUATION”
14 “THERE WERE VICTIMS IN BETWEEN”
15 POWER, CONTROL, EXCITEMENT
III ANGEL OF DEATH (#ub70a4325-6cf1-544d-a22d-b0bb2dfada33)
16 PLAYING GOD
17 WORKING NIGHTS
18 THE MAKING OF A KILLER
19 “I HAVEN’T CHANGED A BIT”
20 FALLEN ANGEL
IV “NO ONE MADE ME DO ANYTHING” (#u6e634d6a-d3cc-52f1-8035-7673dec4a7fb)
21 THE SUPERBIKE MURDERS
22 WHAT HAPPENED TO KALA AND CHARLIE?
23 WHAT MADE TODD TICK?
24 “GOOD OR BAD, I STILL WANT TO KNOW”
25 ORGANIZED VERSUS DISORGANIZED
26 NATURE AND NURTURE
EPILOGUE: A KILLER’S CHOICE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY JOHN E. DOUGLAS AND MARK OLSHAKER
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
AUTHORS’ NOTE (#u659b8707-9c8b-5e23-a540-4b41235f5e5f)
The opinions expressed in this book belong to the authors alone and do not reflect those of the FBI or any other organization.
IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE BIG HOUSE (#u659b8707-9c8b-5e23-a540-4b41235f5e5f)
Here, it is not so much Who done it?, but Why?
And in the end, if we have discovered the Why? and add in How?, we will also come to understand the Who? Because Why? + How? = Who.
The aim is not to be a friend. The aim is not to be a foe. The aim is to get to the truth.
It is a verbal and mental chess match without any game pieces; a sparring session without body contact; an endurance contest in which each side will seek out and exploit the other’s weaknesses and insecurities.
We sit across a small table from each other in a dimly lit room whose cinder-block walls are painted a pale bluish gray. The only window is in the locked steel door, and it is small and reinforced with wire mesh. A uniformed guard peers through from the other side, making sure everything remains in order.
In a maximum security prison, nothing is considered more important.
We have been at this for two hours already and finally the moment is ripe. “I want to know in your own words what it was like twenty-five years ago,” I say. “How did this all happen to get you here? That girl—Joan—did you know her?”
“Well, I’d seen her in the neighborhood,” he replies. His affect is calm and his tone is even.
“Let’s go back to the moment she came to the door. Tell me what happened, step by step, from that point on.”
It is almost like hypnosis. The room is silent, and I watch him transform in front of me. Even his physical appearance seems to change before my eyes. His eyes are unfocused and he looks beyond me to stare at the vacant wall. He is moving back to another time and another place; to the one story of himself that has never left his mind.
The room is very cold, and even though I wear a suit, I struggle to keep myself from shivering. But as he recounts the story I have asked for, he has begun to perspire. His breathing grows heavier and more audible. Soon his shirt is drenched with sweat, and underneath, the muscles of his chest tremble.
He relates the entire story in this manner, not looking at me; almost talking to himself. He is in the zone, in that time and that place, thinking now what he was thinking then.
For a moment, he turns back to face me. He looks me square in the eyes as he says, “John, when I heard the knock and looked up through the screen door and saw who was there, I knew I was going to kill her.”
INTRODUCTION (#u659b8707-9c8b-5e23-a540-4b41235f5e5f)
LEARNING FROM THE EXPERTS (#u659b8707-9c8b-5e23-a540-4b41235f5e5f)
This is a book about the way violent predators think—the bedrock of my twenty-five years as an FBI special agent, behavioral profiler, and criminal investigative analyst, as well as the work I have done since my retirement from the bureau.
But it’s really a book about conversations I had. After all, conversations are where it all began for me, conversations in which I learned how to use what a predatory criminal was thinking to help local law enforcement officials to catch him and bring him to justice. For me, that was the beginning of behavioral profiling.
I started interviewing incarcerated violent offenders out of what I considered personal and institutional necessity, but in many ways, it began with a desire to understand the underlying motivations behind criminals. Like most new FBI special agents, I was assigned as a street agent. My first posting was in Detroit. Right from the beginning, I was interested in why people committed their crimes—not only that they committed crimes at all, but why they committed the particular crimes they did.
Detroit was a tough city, and while I was there they were racking up as many as five bank robberies a day. Robbing a bank backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is a federal crime, so the bureau had jurisdiction, and many new agents were assigned to investigate these cases in addition to their other duties. As soon as we would apprehend a suspect and read him his Miranda rights, often in the back of a bureau car or police cruiser, I would pepper him with questions. Why rob a bank where the security is tight, and everything is recorded on tape, rather than a store that does a large cash business? Why this particular bank branch? Why this particular day and time? Was the robbery planned or spontaneous? Did you surveil the bank first and/or make a practice run inside? I began mentally cataloging the responses and developing informal “profiles” (though we didn’t use that term yet) of bank robber types. I started seeing the differences between planned and unplanned crimes and organized and disorganized ones.
We got to the point where we could begin predicting which bank locations were most likely to be hit and when. In areas with a lot of building going on, for instance, we learned that Friday late morning was a likely time to hit the bank, because it would have a lot of cash on hand to handle the construction workers’ paychecks. We used this kind of intelligence to harden certain targets and be waiting at others if we thought we had a reasonable chance of catching robbers in the act.
During my second bureau posting in Milwaukee, I was sent to the new, modern FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, for a two-week in-service course in hostage negotiation. It was taught by Special Agents Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany, the original champions of behavioral science in the bureau. Their main course was called Applied Criminology. It was an attempt to bring the academic discipline of abnormal psychology into crime analysis and the training of new agents. Mullany saw hostage negotiation as the first practical use of the applied psychology program. This was a new wave in the battle against a new era of crime that involved airplane skyjackings and bank robberies with hostages, such as the 1972 Brooklyn bank heist that inspired the Al Pacino film Dog Day Afternoon. It was easy to see how having some idea of what was going on in the hostage-taker’s head would be of great benefit to the negotiator and ultimately save lives. I was one of about fifty special agents in this class, taught for the first time and a daring experiment in FBI training. Legendary director J. Edgar Hoover had died just three years before, and his lengthened shadow still hung over the bureau.
Even in his declining years, Hoover maintained an iron grip on the agency he had essentially created. His hard-nosed, hard-ass approach to investigation echoed the old Dragnet TV show line: Just the facts, ma’am. Everything had to be measurable and quantifiable—how many arrests, how many convictions, how many cases closed. He never would have embraced anything as impressionistic, inductive, and “touchy-feely” as behavioral science. In fact, he would have considered it a contradiction in terms.
While attending the hostage negotiation course at the FBI Academy, my name got around the Behavioral Science Unit, and before I left to go back to Milwaukee, I was offered positions in both the Education and Behavioral Science Units as my next posting. Even though our unit was called Behavioral Science, the primary responsibility of its nine agents was teaching. Courses included Applied Criminal Psychology, Hostage Negotiation, Practical Police Problems, Police Stress Management, and Sex Crimes, which was later changed by my great colleague Roy Hazelwood to Interpersonal Violence.
Though the academy’s “three-legged stool” model of teaching, research, and consultation was beginning to take shape, any case consultation that star agents like Teten provided was strictly informal and not part of any organized program. The focus of these forty hours of classroom instruction was supposed to be on the issue of most concern to criminal investigators: Motive. Why do offenders do the things they do, in what ways do they do them, and how can understanding this help catch them? The problem with this approach was that most of the content still came from the academic sphere, which became evident whenever senior law enforcement personnel going through the National Academy program had more firsthand case experience than the instructors.
No one was more vulnerable in this area than the youngest instructor on the team: me. Here I was standing in front of a classroom full of seasoned detectives and officers, most of them a lot older than me. And I was supposed to teach them what was going on in the criminal mind, something they’d actually be able to use to help clear cases. Most of my firsthand experience had come from working with experienced cops and homicide detectives in Detroit and Milwaukee, so it seemed presumptuous of me to be telling men like that their own business.
There was a dawning realization among many of us that what was applicable to the psychiatric and mental health community had only limited relevance to law enforcement.
Still, I started getting the same types of requests Teten got. In class or during breaks, or even in the evenings, officers and detectives would come up and ask for pointers or advice on their active cases. If I was teaching a case similar in some way to one they were working on, they would figure I could help them solve it. They saw me as the authoritative voice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But was I? There had to be a more practical way to amass useful data and case studies that would give me the confidence to feel I really knew what I was talking about.
As the guy closest to me in age, Robert Ressler was tapped to help me break into the academy culture and feel comfortable with teaching. About eight years older than I was, Bob was a new instructor who built on what Teten and Mullany had done, aiming to bring the discipline of behavioral analysis closer to something that could be of value to police departments and criminal investigators. The most efficient way to give a new instructor some concentrated experience was through what we called road schools. Instructors from Quantico would spend a week teaching a selective piece, sort of a highlights version, of the National Academy curriculum to a police department or law enforcement agency that had requested it, then move on to another for a second week before returning home with the memories of interchangeable hotel rooms and a suitcase full of dirty laundry. So Bob and I hit the road together.
One morning early in 1978, Bob and I were driving out of Sacramento, California, the site of our latest road school. I commented that most of the criminals we were teaching about were still around, we could easily find out where they were, and they weren’t going anywhere. Why not see if we could meet and talk with some of them, find out what a crime was like through their eyes, get them to recall and tell us why they did what they did and what was going on in their minds when they did it. I figured it didn’t hurt to try, and some of them might be bored enough with their prison routines that they’d welcome a chance to talk about themselves.
Very little research was available relative to interviewing prison inmates, and what there was pertained specifically to convictions, probation and parole, and rehabilitation. However, the record seemed to indicate that violent and narcissistic inmates, on the whole, were incorrigible—meaning they were not able to be controlled, improved, or reformed. By talking to them, we hoped to learn if this was indeed the case.
Bob was initially skeptical, but willing to go along with this crazy idea. He’d served in the army, and between the army and the bureau, he’d had enough experience with bureaucracies that his mantra was “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” We would show up unannounced. In those days FBI credentials could get us into prisons without prior permission. If we had said in advance that we were coming, there was a danger word would leak out into the yard. And if an inmate was known to be planning to speak with a couple of feds, the rest of the prison population might think he was a snitch.
As we embarked on this project, we had some preconceived ideas of what we would encounter during these interviews. Among them:
All would claim they were innocent.
