Whoever Fights Monsters Read online

  After picking up the gun from the store on December 18 and buying several boxes of ammunition for it, he began to shoot. First, he fired one shot at a windowless wall of the residence of a family named Phares. A day or so later, he fired through the kitchen window of the house of the Polenske family, parting the hair of Mrs. Polenske, who stood bent over the kitchen sink; one shot was fired. Shortly thereafter, Chase fired the two shots at Ambrose Griffin, one of which killed him. The Griffin home was located across the street from the Phares house. The shots at Mrs. Polenske and Griffin were hardly random; later analyses showed that from a traveling car one would have had to fire carefully to avoid hitting the many trees on the Griffin block and to hit the man in the chest. Mrs. Polenske was extremely lucky to be alive.

  On January 5, 1978, Chase bought a copy of the Sacramento Bee, which had an editorial about the Griffin killing; he kept this page, with its societal condemnation of the senseless shooting. On January 10, he bought three more boxes of ammunition. On January 16, he set a fire in a garage in order to drive out of the neighborhood some people whose playing of loud music had annoyed him.

  On January 23—the day he killed Terry Wallin—the police were able to trace Chase’s actions moment by moment. Early in the day, he attempted to enter a home in the neighborhood, but he left after coming face-to-face with the woman occupant at the kitchen window. He then sat on her patio, motionless, for some time. She called the police, but he left before the authorities could arrive. Not too many minutes later, a home-owner caught him in the act of having illegally entered another residence. He fled, and the man ran after him down the street, lost him, and then went back to assess the damage. Chase had taken some valuable objects, defecated on a child’s bed, and urinated on clothing in a drawer—the latter behaviors were signs of classic fetish burglaries. An hour later, Chase was in the parking lot of the shopping center, where he met the woman he recognized from high school—and who became suspicious of him.

  He was wearing a bloodstained shirt, had a yellow crust around his mouth, and was shockingly different from the boy she had known years ago. She didn’t recognize him until he asked her whether she had been on the motorcycle when her former boyfriend, a friend of Chase’s, had been killed. She said no, and asked him who he was. He told her his name. She tried to edge away, and said she had to go to the bank. He waited for her, then followed her to her car and attempted to get in on the passenger side; she locked it and sped away. Minutes later, he walked across the porch of a home near the shopping center, and when the owner called out to him not to do that, he said he was just taking a shortcut. Then he left those premises and entered the almost-adjoining home of Terry Wallin.

  * * *

  By mid-1978, the body of the missing child had been found, also not far from Chase’s last residence. In prison, he had refused to do much talking. The trial site was moved from Sacramento to Palo Alto, and there were other delays. During the next year, one psychiatrist did manage to gain Chase’s confidence enough to have conversations with him, and, in one of these, elicited the following rather remarkable confessional statement in response to a question about whether Chase would have continued with his killings.

  The first person I killed was sort of an accident. My car was broken down. I wanted to leave but I had no transmission. I had to get an apartment. Mother wouldn’t let me in at Christmas. Always before she let me come in at Christmas, have dinner, and talk to her, my grandmother, and my sister. That year she wouldn’t let me in and I shot from the car and killed somebody. The second time, the people had made a lot of money and I was jealous. I was being watched, and I shot this lady—got some blood out of it. I went to another house, walked in, a whole family was there. I shot the whole family. Somebody saw me there. I saw this girl. She had called the police and they had been unable to locate me. Curt Silva’s girlfriend—he was killed in a motorcycle accident, as a couple of my friends were, and I had this idea that he was killed through the syndicate, that he was in the Mafia, selling drugs. His girlfriend remembered about Curt—I was trying to get information. She said she was married to somebody else and wouldn’t talk to me. The whole syndicate was making money by having my mom poison me. I know who they are and I think it can be brought out in a court of law if I can pull the pieces together like I’ve been hoping.

  The trial began in early 1979, and on May 6, 1979, Sacramento Bee reporter Iris Yang described Chase in the courtroom: “The defendant has a totally lusterless quality. Dull, limp brown hair, sunken opaque eyes, a sallow complexion and scarcely a spare ounce of flesh clinging to his bony frame. For the past four and a half months, Richard Trenton Chase, just a couple of weeks short of his 29th birthday, has sat hunched in his chair, toying with papers in front of him or staring vacantly at the fluorescent lights of the courtroom.”

  There was a trial only because the prosecution vigorously sought the death penalty under a recently enacted California state law. The defense had wanted to say that Chase was mentally ill and incompetent to stand trial, but the prosecution had argued that Chase had had enough “knowing shrewdness” at the time of his crimes to be deemed responsible for his actions and that he must be held accountable for them. He was charged with six counts of first-degree murder—Terry Wallin, the three people at the Miroth home, the dead baby, and Ambrose Griffin. The jury deliberated only a few hours before pronouncing him guilty on all counts. The judge sent him to death row at San Quentin to await the electric chair.

  I did not agree with this verdict or with the disposition of the case. It occurred in the same time frame as the murders of Mayor Mosconi and Supervisor Harvey Milk by former San Francisco City Hall Supervisor Dan White. White claimed he had been made insane by such things as eating the junk food Twinkies, and his diminished-capacity defense was accepted and he was sent to a state prison and not given the death penalty. Richard Chase, who was clearly mentally ill, and who should have spent the rest of his life in a mental institution, was sentenced to death.

  While Chase was on death row at San Quentin, in 1979, John Conway and I visited him. Conway was the FBI’s prison liaison man in California, an exceptionally smooth, good-looking, and polished guy who had a knack for getting inmates quickly into a conversational mood. Going to see Chase was one of the strangest experiences I have ever had. From the moment I entered the prison to the moment I sat down in the room where we would conduct the interview, it was a series of doors slamming behind us, an oppressive and frightening experience. I’d been in many prisons before, but this was the most grisly; I felt I was going beyond a point of no return. Conway was much more nonchalant about it than I.

  We went up through several elevators, and the final one disgorged us on death row. I heard weird noises, groans, and other almost-inhuman sounds coming from the cells. We sat in a room awaiting Chase, and heard him coming down the hall. He was in leg irons and clanked as he walked, and I thought immediately of Marley’s Ghost in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. In addition to the leg irons, he was handcuffed and had one of those security belts with a loop through which the handcuffs were attached. He could do nothing but barely shuffle along.

  His appearance was another shock. Here was this skinny, odd-looking young man with long black hair; but it was his eyes that really got me. I’ll never forget them. They were like those of the shark in the movie Jaws. No pupils, just black spots. These were evil eyes that stayed with me long after the interview. I almost got the impression that he couldn’t really see me, that he was seeing through me, just staring. He showed no signs of being aggressive, and simply sat, passive. He carried in his hands a plastic cup, which he didn’t talk about at first.

  Since he had already been convicted and was on death row, I didn’t have to go through the sort of romancing that usually characterizes my first interview with a murderer. Ordinarily, I have to work hard to show the interviewee that I am worthy of his trust and that he can talk easily with me. Chase and I talked with relative ease, considering his mental state. He a
dmitted his murders, but said he had done them in order to preserve his own life. He told me that he was fashioning an appeal, and that it would be based on the notion that he had been dying and had taken lives in order to obtain the blood he needed to live. The threat to his life was soap-dish poisoning.

  When I told him that I wasn’t aware of the nature of soap-dish poisoning, he enlightened me. Everyone has a soap dish, he said. If you lift up the soap and the part underneath the soap is dry, you’re all right, but if it’s gooey, that means you have soap-dish poisoning. I asked him what the poison did to him, and he responded that it turns one’s blood to powder, essentially pulverizes the blood; the powder then eats at one’s body and energies and reduces one’s capacities.

  Readers may find Chase’s explanation laughable or impossibly weird. In this situation, when I was confronted with it, however, I had to react properly. I could not appear appalled or shocked, and had to take the explanation for what it was worth—an illustration of the reasoning of a murderer. The rule is, you stay out of commenting on the fantasy, and, by your comments, urge him to continue. So I couldn’t say about soap-dish poisoning, “There isn’t any such thing,” because that wouldn’t have helped. Neither could I say, “Oh, yes, I know people who’ve had soap-dish poisoning.” I merely accepted his explanation and didn’t debate him about it.

  The same principle applied when he began to tell me that he had been born Jewish—I knew that to be untrue—and that he had been persecuted all his life by the Nazis because he had a Star of David on his forehead, which he proceeded to show me. To this announcement, I could have said, “That’s baloney!” or gone in the other direction and answered, “Gee, what a beauty, I wish I had one like it.” Neither answer would have helped much in the conversation. I saw no Star of David, but I thought his mention of it might be a trap that Chase was setting for me, or a test of how far I was willing to go along with his explanation. He might be tricking me, telling me it was on his forehead when it was really on his arm or his chest, and he wanted to see how much I knew about him. In this instance, I merely told Chase that I hadn’t brought my glasses along, and that the lighting was dim and I couldn’t see the birthmark, but that I accepted his word that it was there. He said that the Nazis had been connected to the UFOs that constantly hover over the earth and that had commanded him by telepathy to kill in order to replenish his blood. He summed up his explanation by saying to me, “So you see, Mr. Ressler, you see very clearly that the killings were in self-defense.”

  Perhaps the most important information that I obtained from this interview came from a question as to how Chase had chosen his particular victims. It was a point that had eluded many other of Chase’s interviewers, but I had gained his confidence enough that he was comfortable telling me. He had been hearing voices that told him to take a life, and he just went down the street, rattling doors. If a door was locked, he wouldn’t go in. If it was open, however, he went in. I asked him why he hadn’t simply broken down a door if he wanted to go inside. “Oh,” he said, “if the door is locked, that means you’re not welcome.” How slim the line between those who escaped being the victims of a heinous crime and those who died awful deaths at the hands of Chase!

  At last, I asked him about the little cup that he carried. He said it was evidence that the prison was attempting to poison him. He shoved it forward, and it contained some gooey yellow mess that I later identified as the remains of a packaged macaroni and cheese dinner. He wanted me to take it and have the FBI lab at Quantico analyze it for him. It was a gift I felt I could not refuse.

  The information I gleaned from this interview was helpful in verifying the portrait we at the BSU were already putting together of the “disorganized” killer, a portrait that is in sharp contrast to that of the “organized” killer. Chase not only fit the disorganized pattern, he embodied it more than any other individual that I or others in law enforcement had encountered. In that regard, his was a classic case.

  While at San Quentin, the other inmates taunted Chase. They threatened that if he came near enough, they’d kill him, and told him he ought to commit suicide. Prison psychologists and psychiatrists who examined Chase in those days waited for the brouhaha over the death penalty to calm down, and then suggested that since Chase was “psychotic, insane, and incompetent, and chronically so,” he ought to be transferred to the prison at Vacaville, California, known as the California Medical Facility of the prison system, the place that houses the criminally insane. I certainly concurred in that judgment. By this time, and following up on the notion that the FBI was going to analyze what the prison was feeding him, Chase was writing letters to Conway and to me, conveying to us that he needed to come to Washington, D.C., to perfect his appeal. He was certain that the FBI would want to know that the UFOs were now connected to airplane crashes, and to antiaircraft weapons of the sort that were being used against the United States by the Iranians. “The FBI could easily detect the UFO’s by radar,” he wrote to me, “and find they follow me and are stars in the sky at night that light up through some type of controlled fusion reaction machines.”

  It was the last I heard from Chase. Just after Christmas in 1980, Chase was found dead in his cell at Vacaville. He had saved up many antidepressant pills that had been given to him to damp down his hallucinations and make him a tractable prisoner, and had taken them all at once. Some called his death suicide; others continued to believe that it was accidental, and that Richard Trenton Chase had taken all those pills in an effort to quiet the voices that had driven him to murder and that continued to torment him until he died.

  2

  “WHOEVER FIGHTS MONSTERS…”

  There was a monster on the loose in Chicago, and I was intrigued. It was 1946, and I was all of nine years old. My dad worked in security and maintenance for the Chicago Tribune, so we always had the newspaper around the house. In the Tribune the summer before, I had read about the killing of a middle-aged married woman in an apartment building. It was just an isolated case until the following December, when an ex-Wave was killed in an apartment hotel. The killer had written on a wall, in the woman’s lipstick, “For heavens sake catch me Before I kill more I cannot control myself.” From evidence that was too awful to print in the newspaper (and at which I could not even guess), the police thought the killings of the two women might be connected.

  The Tribune was in the thick of the chase for the killer, sending reporters here and there in search of clues. Shortly after the turn of the year, there was another crime that at first was not thought to be connected to the other two. A six-year-old girl, Suzanne Degnan, was taken from her room in her house and killed; her body was found scattered in parts in the sewers in the Chicago-Evanston area. All of Chicago was aghast at this grisly murder; many parents were worried for the safety of their children. I wondered, What kind of person would kill and cut up a little girl? A monster? A human being? As a nine-year-old boy, I couldn’t imagine what sort of person would commit such a heinous crime, but I could fantasize about catching Suzanne’s killer. I suppose I was somewhat afraid, and the fantasy was my way of coping with that fear—but I think I was actually more fascinated than afraid.

  At the movie houses on Saturdays, I had seen a model I wanted to reproduce. Either in “Our Gang” or “The Little Rascals”—by now I’ve forgotten which—there was a detective agency; in the summer of 1946, I formed one with three of my friends. The RKPK Agency had an office in a garage and a “war wagon,” a wooden structure on wheels that we called the RKPK Express. When we weren’t conducting an investigation, we’d use the Express to haul groceries, a quarter a delivery. That delivery business was only a subsidiary that we kept going in order to meet our overhead costs. Like most fictional movie detectives, we weren’t getting enough cases to pay the rent. Our main activity that summer of ’46 was to put on “detective” clothes—hats and long coats—and to lurk around the bus stop waiting for a suspect to trail. We were trying to look like FBI men, who were heroes t
o the country, back then, or maybe like Sam Spade. When one of the fathers or elder brothers in the neighborhood would get off the bus with his lunch pail or briefcase, we’d assume that this was a suspect in the killing of Suzanne Degnan and follow him home, then stake out positions around his house until it was time to change shifts and compare notes. The men would wonder what these goofy kids dressed up in long coats were doing; they never did figure it out.

  William Heirens was caught that summer, and I found it amazing that he had killed the little girl as well as the two women in the apartments; the reason he gave was that they had surprised him in the course of committing burglaries that were described as sexual in nature. According to the mores of the time, no further details were given, and since I didn’t know very much about sex at age nine, I shrugged off that part of the description. Years later, I would learn far more than the average person gets to know about what were, in effect, fetish burglaries. At the time, the most intriguing fact about Heirens, to me, was that he wasn’t that much older than I—just seventeen, a student at the University of Chicago. It later turned out that he had been sane enough after each murderous event to go back to his dormitory room and act calmly enough to avoid detection. His arrest came almost as an accident, when an off-duty policemen was called to stop Heirens as he was trying to make a getaway after an unsuccessful burglary. There was quite a scuffle, and the policeman had been extremely fortunate that Heirens’s gun misfired twice before another officer arrived and was able to smash Heirens’s skull with a handy flowerpot. In his dormitory room, the authorities found souvenirs from his fetish burglaries. Time magazine called the Heirens case “the crime story of the century,” and marveled at how many reporters flocked to Chicago from all over the country to learn about it and to observe the trial. Once Heirens had been caught, we nine-year-olds watched the bus stop, waiting for Heirens the dangerous killer, and we played that we were following him to his lair.