Whoever Fights Monsters Page 7

  I was really primed for my interview with this man whose life I had been following since childhood, but the interview didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. He did respond to my knowing a lot about him, but he no longer wished to admit to the crimes to which he had once pleaded guilty. He had decided he’d been framed, and so would no longer acknowledge—as he had done in the 1940s, after his arrest—that he had killed two adult women who surprised him while he was in their homes, or that he had strangled and dismembered a six-year-old girl. I remembered particularly that he had overpowered Suzanne Degnan in her bed. Only after that did he kill the little girl, roll her in a blanket, take her to a basement for dismembering, and then cooly dispose of the body and return to his dormitory room. Here was a monster, now denying his culpability.

  Heirens did acknowledge having had some sexual problems and having committed the break-ins that he now deprecated as adolescent pranks; he said he’d never been a danger to society and that his years as a model prisoner qualified him to spend the remainder of his life out of prison.

  A disappointment. The larger issue, however, the attempt to learn from carefully conducted interviews with convicted serial killers some information that would be helpful to law enforcement, was now on track, part of an established program within the Bureau and the Department of Justice. In time, I would personally interview more than a hundred of the most dangerous violent criminals in the prisons of the United States, and train others to continue this task, and with the information so gained add significantly to our understanding of many murderous patterns and how to apprehend the people in whose minds those patterns were born. In his youth, Bill Heirens had written on a wall, in lipstick, “For heavens sake catch me Before I kill more I cannot control myself.” I would interview serial murderers in an attempt to learn how to do just that.

  3

  INTERVIEWS WITH MURDERERS

  I was nearing the end of my third interview with Edmund Kemper, an enormous man, six feet nine inches in height and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, a man of extremely high intelligence who in his youth had killed his grandparents, spent four years in youth facilities, then had emerged, only to kill eight more people, including his mother. Kemper was serving seven consecutive life terms. Twice before, I had ventured into the Vacaville prison in California to see and talk with him, the first time accompanied by John Conway, the second time by Conway and by my Quantico associate John Douglas, whom I was breaking in. During those sessions, we had gone quite deeply into his past, his motivations for murder, and the fantasies that were intertwined with those crimes. This was a man of great intellectual complexity, whose murders had included the beheading and dismembering of his victims. No one had ever succeeded in talking to him in the ways and at the depths we had achieved. I was so pleased at the rapport I had reached with Kemper that I was emboldened to attempt a third session with him alone. It took place in a cell just off death row, the sort of place used for giving a last benediction to a man about to die in the gas chamber. Although Kemper was in the general population, rather than isolated from it, this was the place that the prison authorities had chosen for our interview. After conversing with Kemper in this claustrophobic locked cell for four hours, dealing with matters that entail behavior at the extreme edge of depravity, I felt that we had reached the end of what there was to discuss, and I pushed the buzzer to summon the guard to come and let me out of the cell.

  No guard immediately appeared, so I continued on with the conversation. Most serial murderers are pretty much loners; even so, they look forward to anything that eases the boredom of their confinement, and that includes visits such as mine. They have a lot on their minds and, properly approached, they are inclined to talk. Conversations with them are rather readily prolonged. Kemper and I had now talked ourselves out, though. After another few minutes had passed, I pressed the buzzer a second time, but still got no response. Fifteen minutes after my first call, I made a third buzz, yet no guard came.

  A look of apprehension must have come over my face despite my attempts to keep calm and cool, and Kemper, keenly sensitive to other people’s psyches (as most killers are), picked up on this.

  “Relax. They’re changing the shift, feeding the guys in the secure areas.” He smiled and got up from his chair, making more apparent his huge size. “Might be fifteen, twenty minutes before they come and get you,” he said to me.

  Though I felt I was maintaining a cool and collected posture, I’m sure I reacted to this information with somewhat more overt indications of panic, and Kemper responded to these.

  “If I went apeshit in here, you’d be in a lot of trouble, wouldn’t you? I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard.”

  My mind raced. I envisioned him reaching for me with his large arms, pinning me to a wall in a stranglehold, and then jerking my head around until my neck was broken. It wouldn’t take long, and the size difference between us would almost certainly ensure that I wouldn’t be able to fight him off very long before succumbing. He was correct: He could kill me before I or anyone else could stop him. So I told Kemper that if he messed with me, he’d be in deep trouble himself.

  “What would they do—cut off my TV privileges?” he scoffed.

  I retorted that he would certainly end up “in the hole”—solitary confinement—for an extremely long period of time. Both he and I knew that many inmates put in the hole are forced by such isolation into at least temporary insanity.

  Kemper shrugged this off by telling me that he was an old hand at being in prisons, that he could withstand the pain of solitary and that it wouldn’t last forever. Eventually, he would be returned to a more normal confinement status, and his “trouble” would pale before the prestige he would have gained among the prisoners by “offing” an FBI agent.

  My pulse did the hundred-yard dash as I tried to think of something to say or do to prevent Kemper from killing me. I was fairly sure that he wouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t be completely certain, for this was an extremely violent and dangerous man with, as he implied, very little left to lose. How had I been dumb enough to come in here alone?

  Suddenly, I knew how I had embroiled myself in such a situation. Of all people who should have known better, I had succumbed to what students of hostage-taking events know as “Stockholm syndrome”—I had identified with my captor and transferred my trust to him. Although I had been the chief instructor in hostage negotiation techniques for the FBI, I had forgotten this essential fact! Next time, I wouldn’t be so arrogant about the rapport I believed I had achieved with a murderer. Next time.

  “Ed,” I said, “surely you don’t think I’d come in here without some method of defending myself, do you?”

  “Don’t shit me, Ressler. They wouldn’t let you up here with any weapons on you.”

  Kemper’s observation, of course, was quite true, because inside a prison, visitors are not allowed to carry weapons, lest these be seized by inmates and used to threaten the guards or otherwise aid an escape. I nevertheless indicated that FBI agents were accorded special privileges that ordinary guards, police, or other people who entered a prison did not share.

  “What’ve you got, then?”

  “I’m not going to give away what I might have or where I might have it on me.”

  “Come on, come on; what is it—a poison pen?”

  “Maybe. But those aren’t the only weapons one could have.”

  “Martial arts, then,” Kemper mused. “Karate? Got your black belt? Think you can take me?”

  With this, I felt that the tide had shifted a bit, if not turned. There was a hint of kidding in his voice—I hoped. But I wasn’t sure, and he understood that I wasn’t sure, and he decided he’d continue to try and rattle me. By this time, however, I had regained some composure, and thought back to my hostage negotiation techniques, the most fundamental of which is to keep talking and talking and talking, because stalling always seems to defuse the situation. We discussed martial arts, whic
h many inmates studied as a way to defend themselves in the very tough place that is prison, until, at last, a guard appeared and unlocked the cell door.

  The procedure is for the interviewer to remain in the room while the guard takes the inmate back to his own cell. As Kemper get ready to walk off down the hall with the guard, he put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You know I was just kidding, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said, and let out a deep breath.

  I resolved never to put myself or any other FBI interviewer in a similar position again. From then on, it became our policy never to interview a convicted killer or rapist or child molester alone; we’d do that in pairs.

  * * *

  The Criminal Personality Research Project was my baby, and as it got going in the late 1970s, I threw myself into it, taking opportunities when I was out of town at road schools to interview men (and a few women) in various prisons around the country. Before I stopped doing all the interviewing myself, and turned the task over to associates, I had interviewed more than a hundred convicted violent criminals, more than any other man alive. (My efforts were eventually recognized within the FBI, and by associated institutions, when I twice won the Jefferson Award, announced annually by the University of Virginia, for which the FBI’s Quantico campus functions as an extension school.) The information collected from these interviews was systematized and analyzed for the CPRP, and eventually my research associates and I were able to discern and document certain patterns in the backgrounds and behaviors of these murderers. The patterns of their childhoods and adolescences, their precrime stresses, and the ways in which they acted during their crimes forms the basis of several later chapters in this book. Before going into those conclusions, however, I want to concentrate on the art of interviewing convicted murderers, and on a few of the highlights of the time I spent in small rooms inside various prisons, speaking with these intense people who had committed the crime held by society to be the most serious of all offenses.

  Interviewing violent criminals is only valuable insofar as it can provide insight into their actions and personalities that can be of importance to law enforcement. To extract such information, the interviewer needs to be taken seriously by the inmate, and to achieve a level of trust so that the inmate will talk freely. And to do that, you have to earn the inmate’s respect.

  Establishing respect requires a good deal of masking your personal feelings about the heinous crimes these people have committed. If, while a murderer was describing the way he had mutilated a body, I had conveyed my disgust by body language or facial grimace, that would have ended the discussion. On the other end of the spectrum, if I said something in response such as, “Oh, you cut her head off. No big deal, I know a lot of guys who did that,” the murderer wouldn’t be inclined to give me much further detail, either. Humoring violent criminals is not the way to deal with them. These people may be crazy, but they’re not stupid—nor entirely insensitive to the nuances of interpersonal behavior.

  Most interrogators move in too quickly to ask the difficult questions. Then the mental barriers go up and the interview is effectively terminated. These inmates have all the time in the world, and if they don’t feel comfortable, you’ll come out of the interview with nothing; therefore, it’s imperative to spend time allowing them to feel good about revealing intimate details of their lives to you. I proceed slowly, stroking, probing gently, and moving closer and closer until I feel the moment is right to ask the hard questions; sometimes it takes many hours, or multiple visits.

  A number of men and women who worked in the Behavioral Sciences Unit were not up to the formidable task of interviewing convicted violent criminals for one reason or another. One colleague of mine had to interview a man who had molested and murdered several children. The interviewer had children of his own, disliked the killer because of it, and the interview session became hopelessly compromised. When the inmate objected to cigarette smoke in the room and wanted to open a window, the agent responded that he should sit down and answer the questions without objection. When the interview subject was asked one of our standard questions—what he might rather have done if he had not entered into criminal pursuits—the convicted man said he would have liked to have been an astronaut.

  “Yeah, and you’d have liked to have a little boy there in the cabin with you,” the agent said in an aside to an FBI colleague in the room.

  That was unnecessarily hostile behavior on the agent’s part, antagonistic questioning that defeated the purpose of the interview. The agent had fallen victim to the stress of the situation. Shortly thereafter, this agent came to me—for I was the one who had sent him to interview the child molester—and admitted that he wasn’t cut out for interviewing. “I can’t work with these animals,” he told me. I admired his courage in facing up to his shortcomings. He took up another specialty; in short order, he became one of our stars in the area of police stress and psychological counseling of law-enforcement personnel. There had been no flies on his talent and potential to do good work; but he wasn’t suited to the difficult task of interviewing convicted child molesters and trying to extract from the interviews something of help to law enforcement.

  Lots of people wanted in on the Criminal Personality Research Project, but most of them didn’t want to do the hard work. They’d be all too glad to traipse along on interviews of high-profile murderers such as Manson or Berkowitz, but they didn’t want to put in the time and effort necessary to properly interview a criminal who was less well known but whose crimes were equally heinous. Many hours of preparation were necessary before going into a prison. Then, prior to conducting the interview, there were prison records to be combed over and part of our lengthy “protocol” to complete. Interviews with inmates regularly lasted three and four hours, and immediately afterward you had to debrief yourself in order to complete the rest of the protocol, as well as other administrative tasks.

  Nearly everyone in our unit fell victim to its situational stress. One woman profiler bailed out after a few years because the work was giving her nightmares. She found herself unable to deal rationally with cases in which someone broke into a house and raped a woman; she, too, went on to other work for the FBI. Several of our people developed bleeding ulcers and three had anxiety attacks that were so severe that they were initially misperceived as heart attacks. Four of us, myself included, had periods of rapid and unexplained weight loss, some twenty to forty pounds in six-month periods. We went for batteries of tests, including the standard gastrointestinal series, and no purely physical reasons for the weight loss were discovered; it was all stress-related. Another male agent fell under the spell of one mass murderer so completely that he would misrepresent the man’s antagonism toward me in order that only he would have access to this murderer; the agent even passed to the murderer a good deal of Bureau-developed information, from which the murderer hoped to fashion a successful appeal of his death sentence. The bizarre behavior on the part of the agent occurred because the murderer was a masterful manipulator—and because the novice was unprepared for the amount of control the murderer was able to exert on those who crossed his path. The agent even managed to entangle in his exploits a Bureau paper shuffler. Soon, the supervisor wanted to go along with the agent to interview the murderer; the supervisor, too, had dreams of later boasting how close he had been to a glamorous and evil figure. When the murderer was finally executed, the agent was ashen and disoriented, as stricken as if he had just lost a close friend or relative—a startling example of the dangers of his having peered far too deeply into “the abyss.”

  Stability in one’s life enables one to keep some helpful distance from the work of interviewing violent criminals, but even when the agents involved are basically stable, as I am, the stress is considerable. Of course, I didn’t know the extent of the stress I would encounter when I began doing these prison interviews in 1978.

  A word about the circumstances of the interviews. Most outsiders visiting a prison are allowe
d only limited access to prisoners, even if the visitor is family or legal counsel. You speak through a hole in a glass, or on a telephone, or in some other way are at a distance from the prisoner. I was usually permitted to conduct the interviews in an attorney’s room or a guard captain’s quarters, so I could sit in relative comfort with the convict. Occasionally, prisoners would be brought to the room handcuffed; invariably, I’d ask that these cuffs be removed—it was part of trying to reach rapport with the person being interviewed. When I began an interview, the inmate would naturally be curious about what the FBI wanted with him, and so I’d begin by talking about him, demonstrating the depth of my knowledge, and saying that I wasn’t here to seek information on a particular crime but, rather, just to research certain categories of offenders. I didn’t say that it was sexual murderers; to do so would have been a mistake. I told the inmate I wanted to know about his childhood, his entire life, and that anything they told me would not be passed on to the prison authorities. This last “rule” was quite important, because that was the inmates’ largest fear, that some of the intimate details they might divulge to me would become known to the prison apparatus and that the authorities would somehow use it against them. For some reason (perhaps it was my earnest assurances), they believed me, and I’ve kept my promises. I also warned the inmates not to speak of any crimes that had not been adjudicated—for instance, an admission that they’d really killed two dozen people, not a dozen—because if they did so, I would have to read them their rights, and the information might lead to an investigation, and so on.