Whoever Fights Monsters Read online

  The fantasy game and our detective agency faded that summer, but in a way I continued even at that age to follow and be fascinated by Heirens himself and many criminals like him, and, as I grew up, to fall naturally into what became an important part of my life’s work, catching and understanding criminals.

  An average student in high school, I wasn’t particularly interested in any one subject, and that attitude carried over into two years of ho-hum attendance at a community college in Chicago. Then I joined the Army, got married, and was sent to Okinawa. While overseas, I still received the Chicago Tribune, and in one Sunday supplement read about a school of criminology and police administration at Michigan State. It sounded good. I applied, was accepted, and began a bachelor’s program after I finished my two years in the army. Law enforcement interested me greatly, and, as a consequence, my grades steadily improved. After completing the undergraduate program, I was accepted for graduate work. I finished only one semester of that, though, before I went back into the Army—this time as an officer, having been in ROTC while at Michigan State University.

  I had attempted to get a job on the Chicago police force, only to be told that the force wasn’t interested in recruits with too much schooling, because they “might make too much trouble.” The chairman of our school had some influence, but the best Chicago would offer, my Chicago patrolman brother-in-law, Frank Graszer, told me privately, was a patrolman’s job, which I could have obtained with only a high school education. Frank continued to encourage my interest in law enforcement. The Army, however, offered me a position as a lieutenant in the MPs, and a post in Germany. That intrigued me, because both my wife and I were of German extraction, and we leapt at the chance to go to the land of our forefathers.

  I was fortunate enough to receive a choice assignment, that of provost marshal of a platoon of MPs in Aschaffenburg. The town had a population of about 45,000, and our garrison held about 8,000, so I became, in effect, the chief of police for a small town; there were homicides, burglaries, arson cases, the whole gamut of problems that a police chief would see. After four years, when I was ready to get out of the army again, I was offered another plum assignment, as commander of a Criminal Investigation Division (CID) unit based at Fort Sheridan, just outside of Chicago, a plainclothes investigations unit responsible for operations in military jurisdictions in five surrounding states. I supervised men in and around Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and so on. Contrary to what the general public often thinks about the military—that inside such an organization, talent and drive get lost—the Army has developed ways of trying to intrigue and retain good people by watching them closely and offering them good assignments; I had twice already been the beneficiary of their interest.

  As I discovered later, the assignment at Fort Sheridan was similar to running one of the FBI’s field offices: All my agents wore civilian clothes, carried credentials, a badge, and a .38. In fact, we frequently worked with the local police and the FBI. In Aschaffenburg, as a lieutenant, I had replaced a senior captain; at Fort Sheridan, as a first lieutenant (still quite a junior officer), I replaced a major.

  One of our largest cases involved my bringing in some agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (later known as the Drug Enforcement Agency) to Fort Sheridan to penetrate a narcotics ring. The agents posed as troublemaking enlisted men who had been posted to Fort Sheridan while they awaited dishonorable discharges. The ring was infiltrated, but not without some danger—the undercover men were on the verge of being set up to be ripped off and murdered when we learned of the proposed hit. The finale of the affair was right out of the movies. As all units at the fort were mustered in the company streets for a final inspection before everyone was to get a three-day pass, my units and those of the FBN and the FBI surrounded the area with cars, trucks, and machine guns; the undercover men stepped out of ranks, pinned on their badges, and accompanied the commanding officer through the ranks, fingering the dope dealers, who were then led away to the brig.

  The whole affair left me feeling as if I would like to continue this sort of work for the government, but as a civilian with the FBI. As commander of the CID unit, I frequently was the host at liaison parties for the various policing agencies with whom we routinely interacted, including the FBI.

  There were lots of FBI–type cases in those days, the mid-1960s. On college campuses, there were the beginnings of riots and other antiestablishment activities, some of which spread to young people the same age as college students who were on nearby military bases. My CID agents worked their way into groups that were planning disruptive activities, and reported back with what they had seen, not just to me but also to the FBI. Lest the reader think that this was much ado about nothing, I should point out that one of these groups had stolen explosives from Fort Sheridan and was interrupted while planning to bomb some military targets. Several years later, after I had joined the FBI, I had occasion to do research into these old cases, and learned that the Bureau people in the Chicago field office of the FBI had taken credit for the work of my CID investigators. That was a first and a somewhat rude insight into how the FBI sometimes went about its business. There was what FBI insiders called a one-way street in operation: The FBI took from other law-enforcement agencies but gave back nothing—ever.

  I was due to be discharged from the Army and was looking for a way to go further in law enforcement when my status was frozen as a result of the escalation of the war in Vietnam. No one of my rank in my part of the armed services was allowed to leave just then. The Army came to me with an interesting proposition: Someone higher up in the service had looked over my records and had seen that I had completed a semester of graduate work; the Army now offered to pay for me to complete my master’s in police administration and to continue my salary while I studied—in exchange for signing up for an additional two-year hitch after I finished the master’s program.

  This time, at Michigan State, I had a wife and two children along, and, in addition to my studies, a secret assignment from the Army: undercover work within the groups that were actively resisting the Vietnam War. I grew my hair long, and went to SDS and various New Left meetings, including marches and so on. Painting myself as a disgruntled veteran, I attended organizational get-togethers and other meetings. There’s even a picture of me in a campus newspaper somewhere, long-haired, and with my infant daughter perched on my shoulder for additional cover. We were protesting CIA recruiting on campus; I wonder whether that picture of me ended up in the CIA files.

  I thought these “radical” protesters didn’t know what they were talking about; they hadn’t been in the military, didn’t know what the military was doing, but were determined that the military was their enemy. Often, they seemed to want to disrupt things just for the joy of making a mess. One assistant professor of psychology was hanging around these same meetings, trying to motivate students to protest the war, even suggesting to them that they massively enroll in ROTC in an attempt to disrupt the system. He counseled that while in classes they should make things difficult for the instructors by asking dumb questions, and that at the time they were supposed to graduate, they refuse to take commissions in the armed forces. The assistant professor was soon advised to get a job somewhere else.

  The classes went quickly and well. Among my cohorts in the graduate program was Ken Joseph, then the senior resident agent of the Lansing, Michigan, FBI office; Ken stayed on to finish his doctorate while I went back into the army to fulfill my obligation.

  After finishing my degree, I served for a year as a provost marshal in Thailand, and another year as deputy provost marshal at Fort Sheridan. By now, I was a major, and seriously had to consider continuing on in the military as a career, but my friends in the FBI convinced me to reinstate the application I had made earlier, just before my position in the military had been frozen, and to come into the Bureau. The alternative didn’t seem as attractive in 1970, when I was thirty-two, as it had been in 1967, but I certainly liked the s
ort of investigations I knew the FBI to be conducting, so I applied in earnest and was accepted. Several of my commanders in the army tried to talk me out of leaving, and touted my prospects for advancement with the CID, but I was enthralled by the prospect of becoming a special agent of the FBI, and was no longer listening to reason.

  * * *

  I was in trouble in the FBI from the first half hour of my tenure. I had received a letter telling me to report to a room in the Old Post Office building at eight on a Monday morning in February 1970, and arrived there at 7:50 A.M., bright and eager, only to find a note posted announcing that the class had been transferred to a room at the Department of Justice building, some blocks away. Hustling there, I was met in the halls by agent counselors, who, upon learning my name, told me that everything was about to hit the fan, and that I should be worried. In the classroom, an instructor was droning on about Bureau insurance and retirement matters, and he halted the class to tell me that I was late; I stood my ground, saying that I had been ten minutes early and had had no prior notice that the location had been changed. He couldn’t deal with that, and sent me to a high Bureau official.

  J. Edgar Hoover was still alive and firmly in charge at that time, and Joe Casper, Deputy Assistant Director of the Training Division, was an old Hoover hand. Although Casper was nicknamed “the Ghost” (for the cartoon character Casper the Friendly Ghost), he was anything but friendly. I reiterated my argument to him: that I had been on time, but that the location had been changed. The Ghost tried to tell me that everyone had been sent a letter advising them of the room change, and I replied that all I had was the letter telling me to go to the Old Post Office building. He wanted me to admit that I was wrong and had disobeyed orders, and I wasn’t going to do that; I informed the official that I’d been in the army for quite some time and knew all about orders, both giving and receiving them. I thought steam was going to come out of the Ghost’s ears as he threatened me with being kicked out of the FBI that very minute. I responded by saying that perhaps that would be best for everyone, if the FBI was such a nit-picking outfit that it didn’t know how to treat new agents who had been so actively recruited. The army would take me back in a minute, no questions asked.

  “Raise your goddamn right hand,” Casper said to me, and proceeded to swear me in, to advise me to shut my mouth, and to warn me that “we’ll be watching you” from that moment on. It was a typical attempt to intimidate a new agent, but I was a little older, a little wiser, and a little more used to the ways of a military or quasimilitary bureaucracy than the average recruit, and so stood it reasonably well. This experience left me, however, with a bad taste in my mouth for the “do it by the book” stodginess and inflexibility of the Bureau, an attitude I would continue to fight from that day until my retirement twenty years later.

  New Agents Class 70–2 was counseled by two experienced agents in their mid-forties who aspired to higher management in the Bureau, and who, as part of “getting their tickets punched,” had to manage a class of new agents successfully through sixteen weeks of training. As I learned, theirs was a “high risk for high gain” proposition, for if the new agents didn’t pan out, the counselors could be headed for oblivion rather than for desk jobs at headquarters. Joe “O.C. Joe” O’Connell was known for his work against organized crime figures; a multimillion-dollar lawsuit was pending against him for bugging mob members. (The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed.) He didn’t seem worried about that, but he did have a bee in his bonnet about the “white shirts,” his nonaffectionate name for headquarters supervisors. These supervisors would come to lecture about various violations of the laws that FBI agents were to administer, and after one had come and gone, O.C. Joe would tell us to throw away the notes we had just taken, and that he would help us prepare for the test on that particular law. He also told anyone that needed extra help to see him in the hall. Today, I look back and recognize that those agents who did regularly see O.C. Joe in the hall for additional guidance—because they truly needed help—were nevertheless the ones who progressed well up the management ladder, while many smarter agents toiled in the field for years and never made supervisor.

  The other counselor was Bud Abbott, nicknamed “Shakey” because of his nervousness. What he was nervous about was the antiestablishment attitude of O.C. Joe. Because the two men shared this particular class, their fates were tied one to another, and Shakey, a rather standard bureaucrat, was worried that O.C. Joe’s antics would sabotage his own attempts to land a headquarters job. Eventually, both men went on to higher management, so I guess we must have done well enough to satisfy the powers above.

  After training, I put in several years of fieldwork as a Special Agent based at the FBI offices in Chicago, New Orleans, and Cleveland. During those years of the early 1970s, the Bureau had opened the new FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, the last positive legacy of J. Edgar Hoover, who had championed the building of what was to be the world’s finest training facility for law-enforcement personnel. Ken Joseph had been tapped to come to headquarters and help in the setting up of the Quantico programs, and in 1974, he pulled me in from Cleveland. At the FBI National Academy (FBINA), I began as a class counselor for the visiting policemen; each instructor handled about fifty students, shepherding them through the several-month program. By June of 1974, I was convinced that I should make a stay at Quantico part of my FBI resume; the academic environment was attractive, as was the beautiful Virginia countryside, and I also thought that a stint at Quantico was imperative if I was to go up the ladder into higher FBI management. Another factor luring me to Quantico was the fledgling Behavioral Sciences Unit, then consisting mainly of two senior men, Howard Teten and Pat Mullany, a Mutt and Jeff team. They always taught together, and were quite a pair, with Teten the six-seven, thin straight man and Mullany the five-ten, slightly chubby comic. Teten, quiet, low-key, and methodical, and Mullany, quick and energetic, devoted most of their time to teaching, but now and then analyzed a violent crime and “profiled” the appearance and behavior of likely suspects. They were my mentors in profiling, and within a few years, when they retired, I took up the mantle of chief profiler.

  Learning to profile was an ongoing process, part of trying to understand the violent criminal mind, something I was also pursuing personally in another way in my lectures at Quantico about abnormal and criminal psychology. The people who commit crimes against other people, crimes that have nothing to do with money, are a different breed from the ordinary criminals whose motivation is profit. Murderers, rapists, and child molesters aren’t seeking monetary profit from their crimes; in a perverse though sometimes understandable way, they are seeking emotional satisfaction. That makes them different, and, to me, that makes them interesting.

  At Quantico, I taught subjects ranging from abnormal psych to interviewing techniques; and I discovered that I was a pretty good teacher. I also learned that I liked being an instructor. We got to go on the road for our training sessions, both nationally and sometimes internationally, and while travel can be wearing, we did journey to some interesting places overseas and met a great many law-enforcement personnel.

  It was at one of these international sessions that I coined the term serial killer, now much in use. At that time, killings such as those of “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz in New York were invariably labeled “stranger killings.” This term didn’t seem appropriate to me, however, for sometimes killers do know their victims. Various other terms had also been used, but none hit the nail on the head. I’d been invited to participate in a week of lectures at Bramshill, the British police academy, and while there, I took the opportunity to attend the other seminars and lectures. In one of them, a man was discussing what the Brits called crimes in series—a series of rapes, burglaries, arsons, murders. That seemed a highly appropriate way of characterizing the killings of those who do one murder, then another and another in a fairly repetitive way, and so in my classes at Quantico and elsewhere I began referring to “serial killers.�
� The nomenclature didn’t seem to be a big deal at the time; it was part of our overall effort in trying to get a handle on these monstrous crimes, of seeking ways of comprehending them so we could move more quickly toward apprehending the next serial killer.

  Now that I look back on that naming event, I think that what was also in my mind were the serial adventures we used to see on Saturday at the movies (the one I liked best was the Phantom). Each week, you’d be lured back to see another episode, because at the end of each one there was a cliff-hanger. In dramatic terms, this wasn’t a satisfactory ending, because it increased, not lessened the tension. The same dissatisfaction occurs in the minds of serial killers. The very act of killing leaves the murderer hanging, because it isn’t as perfect as his fantasy. When the Phantom is left sinking in the quicksand, the viewer has to come back next week to see how the hero gets out of difficulty. After a murder, the serial murderer thinks of how the crime could have been bettered. “Good heavens, I killed her too quickly. I didn’t take time to have enough fun, to torture her properly. I should have approached her a new way, thought up a different way of sexually assaulting her.” When he follows this sort of train of thought, his mind jumps ahead to how he can kill more nearly perfectly the next time; there’s an improvement continuum.

  That’s not how the public imagines serial killers, however. Most people conceive of the murderer as being a kind of Jekyll and Hyde: One day he’s normal and on the next a physiological drive is taking hold—his hair is growing, his fangs are lengthening—so that when the moon is full, he’ll have to seize another victim. Serial killers are not like that. They are obsessed with a fantasy, and they have what we must call nonfulfilled experiences that become part of the fantasy and push them on toward the next killing. That’s the real meaning behind the term serial killer.