Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,113
criminology.
The big man was Robert Keppel, renowned chief criminal investigator for the Washington state attorney general’s office, nationally known for his decades-long pursuit of Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer. A criminology Ph.D. and ex-Seattle cop, the formidable Keppel was known for a brilliant analytical mind, relentless bulldog attitude, and pioneering use of computers in criminal investigations.
Keppel quickly realized his remarkable bond with Walter. The Washington state detective and the Michigan psychologist had spent their careers like a right hand and a left hand that each didn’t know what the other was doing, until now. While Keppel had spent two decades as a homicide detective arresting killers and investigating fifty serial murder cases, more than any living cop, Walter had interviewed thousands of incarcerated killers, descending deeper into the criminal mind than any scholar. Both men were mavericks and outspoken critics of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, the acknowledged leader of the science of criminal profiling. On their own, they had developed almost precisely the same theories—revolutionary ideas that would transform modern murder investigation.
“There’s only one problem with what the FBI is doing,” said Keppel, who like Walter had been a friend or rival of the leading FBI agents for years. “It’s a lot of bunk.” Star special agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler had traveled the country in the 1980s interviewing an incarcerated murderers’ row of thirty-six famous serial killers and assassins to try to determine what made them tick. The list included Bundy, Charles Manson, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck, Edward Kemper, and last, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, and Lynette Frome, respectively assassins of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, and attempted assassin of President Gerald Ford. Douglas and Ressler’s resulting book, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, coauthored with a psychologist, became the bible of the new criminal profiling, dividing sexual murderers into two broad personality categories based on the crime scene, organized or disorganized.
Unfortunately, Keppel said, “they made it up. There’s no data at all. It wasn’t created out of a data set or known empirical study, it’s just there. As a result, FBI agents swoop into town, sit with the local cops, and begin their Kentucky windage estimate of what the offender was like. ‘We know he’s young and thin and a clothes-horse so I think he’s attractive to women’—and so on. The agents are in a room talking, never at the murder scene, not a one of ’em. As my detective friend Frank Salerno says, you know they never smelled the blood.”
Walter agreed, but was slightly more diplomatic. He saw the FBI as flawed and hidebound by bureaucracy, but deserving of credit for originating the systematic psychological study of killers. “I may disagree with the FBI or whatever, but we’re all on the same Roman road, trying to understand murder, evil, for the betterment of mankind.”
Walter had studied the history of murder back to the Greeks, but the modern road of criminal profiling began in November 1888, when Scotland Yard surgeon Thomas Bond attempted the first psychological profile of a killer after performing the autopsy of Mary Kelly, the fifth victim of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper, he wrote, would be physically strong, quiet, and harmless in appearance, possibly middle-aged, and neatly attired, probably wearing a cloak to hide the bloody effects of his attacks.
Both Walter and Keppel were aware of how little progress had been made in a century of trying to peer into the minds of killers. There were few highlights. In a 1943 profile of Adolf Hitler commissioned by American intelligence, New York psychiatrist Walter Langer correctly predicted that if the Third Reich collapsed the Führer would likely commit suicide. In 1957, the psychiatrist James Brussel, “The Sherlock Holmes of the Couch,” successfully profiled the Mad Bomber who had terrorized New York City in the 1940s and ’50s, injuring fifteen people with thirty-three bombs planted everywhere from phone booths to libraries, including Penn Station, the New York Public Library, and Radio City Music Hall. The Mad Bomber eluded cops for sixteen years until Brussel, after studying the bomber’s many crimes and letters, successfully predicted down to the last detail that the killer would be a middle-aged, Catholic, Slavic ex–Commonwealth Edison employee living in Connecticut, who furthermore would be, as George P. Metesky was when arrested at his sisters’ house, wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned. In the 1970s, Brussel helped the FBI create its Behavioral Sciences Unit, which developed the first “profiles” of suspects.