Mindhunter by Mark Olshaker John Douglas Read Free Book Online Page A

the whole bit, while my incredible luck holds out and I just get slapped with another $40 fine for posses sion of alcohol, and proba tion.
    But they notify the school, they notify our parents, who are all royally pissed off, and things aren’t going any better academically. I have a straight-D average, I’ve failed a speech class because I never went to class—which is my all-time low since I’d always felt that being able to talk was about my best asset—and I’m not figuring out any way to pull myself out of this morass. By the end of the second year, it’s clear that my adventure in the western wilder ness is at an end.
    If it appears that all of my memories from this period are of mishaps and personal screwups, that’s the way it seemed to me at the time. I came home from college, living under the eyes of my disappointed parents. My mother was especially upset, knowing now I’d never become a veterinarian. As usual when I didn’t know what to do with myself, I fell back on my athletics and took a job lifeguarding for the summer of 1965. When the summer ended and I wasn’t going back to school, I found a job running the health club at the Holiday Inn in Patchogue.
    Not long after I started working there, I met Sandy, who worked at the hotel as a cocktail waitress. She was a beautiful young woman with a young son and I was instantly crazy about her. She looked spectacular in her little cocktail outfit. I was still in great shape physically from all of my exercise and working out, and she seemed to like me, too. I was living at home and she would call me all the time. My father would say to me, "Who the hell is calling you all hours of the day and night? There’s always this child crying and screaming in the background."
    Living at home didn’t provide the opportunity for much action, but Sandy told me that if you worked at the hotel, you could get an unbooked room really cheap. So one day we got a room together.
    The next morning, early, the phone rings. She answers it and I hear, "No! No! I don’t want to talk to him!"
    As I wake up, I say, "Who is that?"
    She says, "The front desk. They said my husband’s here and he’s on his way up."
    Now I’m wide awake. I say, "Your husband? What do you mean, your husband! You never told me you were still married!"
    She pointed out that she’d never told me she wasn’t, either, then went on to explain that they were separated.
    Big deal, I’m thinking as I begin to hear this maniac running down the hall.
    He starts pounding on the door. "Sandy! I know you’re in there, Sandy!"
    The room had a window onto the hallway made of glass louvers, and he’s tearing at them, trying to rip them off the frame. Meanwhile, I’m looking for a place to jump from—we were on the second floor—but there’s no window for me to jump out of.
    I ask, "Does this guy carry guns or anything?"
    "Sometimes he carries a knife," she says.
    "Oh, shit! That’s great! I’ve got to get out of here. Open the door."
    I get into this pugilistic stance. She opens the door. The husband comes running in. He comes straight at me. But then he sees me in silhouette in the shadows, and I must look big and tough, so he changes his mind and stops.
    But he’s still yelling: "You son of a bitch! You get the hell out of here!"
    Figuring I’ve been macho enough for one day—and it’s still early—I say, very politely, "Yes, sir. I was just going as it was." I’d lucked out again, getting out of another scrape with my hide intact. But I couldn’t avoid the truth that everything in my life was going to hell. Incidentally, I’d also cracked the front axle of my father’s Saab racing my friend Bill Turner’s red MGA.
    It was early one Saturday morning that my mother came into my room with a letter from Selective Service saying they wanted to see me. I went down to Whitehall Place in Manhattan for a military physi cal with three hundred other guys. They had me do deep knee bends and you could hear the