Serial Killer Investigations by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

old-school cops disliked what they saw as compromise with criminal scum (an attitude that made the Dirty Harry movies of Clint Eastwood so popular). But this attitude had its practical disadvantages, not least of which were expensive lawsuits against the police for excessive use of force.
    Ressler took note of the new approach and melded it into the idea that was taking shape in his mind, and that would become his own brand of criminal profiling.
    What fascinated him was the psychology of the criminal. What drove Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, ‘Son of Sam’ David Berkowitz, and the Texas Tower Sniper, Charles Whitman (who had killed 16 people from the University of Texas Tower)? But the books about these killers contained insufficient information for a full assessment of their motives. As to his colleagues at the FBI, he comments wryly on the ‘Bureau’s belief that if there was something worth knowing about criminals, the Bureau already knew it’.
    By the late 1960s and mid-1970s, however, a whole series of bizarre mass murders made it clear that there was a great deal to be learned. The five killings at the house of film star Sharon Tate on 9 August 1969, followed by the slaying of supermarket owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, the next day, traumatised the American public. When it emerged that December that an ex-convict named Charles Manson had ordered his drug-dependent ‘Family’ to commit the murders, there was universal bafflement about his motive, which the subsequent trial failed to disperse.
    Between December 1968 and October 1969, five apparently ‘motiveless’ murders were committed in the San Francisco area by a killer who called himself ‘Zodiac’, and who signed letters to newspapers with a cross over a circle, the astrological sign of the zodiac. The killings and the letters ceased abruptly, although whether this was because of the death of the killer, or some other reason, is still unknown.
    On Halloween 1970, eye surgeon Victor Ohta and his family and secretary were murdered near Santa Cruz, California, by a dropout named John Linley Frazier, who left a note saying that World War Three had just begun and would not cease until ‘misusers of the environment’ had all met the same fate; the killer proved to be a local hippie on a bad mescaline trip.
    In October 1972, another dropout, Herb Mullin, committed the first of 14 murders in the Santa Cruz area, ordered by ‘voices in his head’.
    In May 1972, Ed Kemper, a six-foot nine-inch ex-mental patient, began a series of sex murders of co-eds, also in the Santa Cruz area, decapitating and mutilating six of them. He concluded his spree in April 1973 by killing and beheading his mother and her best friend. He had earlier spent five years in an institution after murdering his grandparents.
    In January 1974, failed law student Ted Bundy committed in Seattle the first of a long series of sex murders that continued until his final arrest in Florida in April 1978, and probably exceeded forty victims. He seemed such a good-looking, intelligent, charming person that many people felt there must be some mistake and the wrong man had been arrested.
    If New Yorkers felt like congratulating themselves that the craziest killers seemed to originate on the West Coast, they were forced to think again when a series of apparently motiveless shootings commenced in July 1976, and continued until the arrest of David Berkowitz, known as ‘the Son of Sam’, a year later.
    Clearly, something strange was happening; murder had ceased to be as straightforward as in the days of Harvey Glatman, or even the Boston Strangler. Ever since the first police forces had been created in the nineteenth century, crime detection had taken its starting point from the concept of motive; killers like Zodiac, Frazier, Kemper, and Berkowitz seemed to defy the normal classification. Which is why, it seemed to Ressler, it would be sensible to talk to some of these killers and find out