How, then, does the F.B.I.’s Serial Killer Task Force intend to address this problem?
Inspector Dusenberry: “Once a killer crosses a state line after committing a murder, he’s a federal offender. So what we’ll be doing is cross-checking computer statistics on unsolved homicides and disappearances from all fifty states, going back ten years. If state-to-state links are made, we will be requesting the complete case files from the applicable agencies, and we will be communicating by telephone with the investigating officers. We will have M.O. cross-checking logs, and logs for physical evidence, circumstantial probability and a half-dozen logs compiled from reports made by the forensic psychologists attached to the Task Force. Patterns are likely to emerge from all this information, and we will hypothesize from that information, then initiate follow-up investigations staffed with experienced Criminal Division agents.”
An entire wing of a building on the grounds of the F.B.I. Academy at Quantico has been taken over by the Task Force. The offices are packed with reams of blank paper, desks and computer terminals, along with a giant computer with fifty-state police feed-in. Known to Task Force agents as “Serial Sally,” this brain device will be the starting point of all possible investigations. Already programmed with data on twenty-seven resolved serial killer cases, “Serial Sally” will be assisted by a half-dozen crack forensic psychologists with extensive field experience, three forensic pathologists specializing in homicide evidence, and four criminal division agents, men with fifteen years and up with the Bureau — the “Paperwork Jockeys” who will be trawling for links, connections and clues.
“I’m anxious to get started,” Inspector Dusenberry, 47, the Task Force’s Agent in Charge, told L.E.J. “I’ve already read up a storm on the subject. It’s depressing stuff, and the numbers are staggering. A man in Alabama killed twenty-nine women in two years; Gacy in Chicago killed thirty-three. There’s our friend Ted Bundy, of course, and then we’ve got the stats on missing and presumed-murdered children. They’re more than staggering. The police in Anchorage, Alaska, have a suspect that they make for sixty-one killings, perpetrated within eighteen months. The pain behind all of it is staggering, and I think the serial killer problem is America’s number-one law-enforcement priority.”
Inspector Dusenberry, who joined the Bureau in 1961, is a graduate of Notre Dame Law School and has sixteen years of Criminal Division experience, mostly in supervising bank robbery investigations. Married and with a college-age son and daughter, he is grateful that the Task Force assignment came at a time when his children are grown and his wife is back in college getting an advanced degree in Art History. “It’s going to be a long load of long hours,” he told L.EJ. “My kids and wile in school, and the desk nature of the job will make it a whole lot easier to apply myself. If I was spending this kind of time on the street doing robbery investigations, I’d be worried about them worrying about me.”
VII
Implosion
21
Tick
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Stop-time.
12:16 A.M., June 5, 1982.
I stuck my breaker pick in the keyhole of the Kurzinskis’ apartment door. There was a slight give, and I pushed the door inward, to a point just short of where I knew the inside chain would stop it. There was a snap/clink noise as the chain rattled, and I pulled the door toward me for slack, then popped the chain off with the handle of my pick gouger. The loose end hit the doorjamb, and I heard an unmistakable sound register in George Kurzinski’s bedroom: the hammer of his .32 being pulled back.
I eased the door shut and padded through the dark living room, then flattened myself into the far wall, by the hallway, and the light switch. Unclipping the ax that hung from my web belt, I waited for footsteps to creak in my direction. When the first one hit my ears, I tingled. It was exactly nine paces from George Kurzinski’s bedroom to here; his life would consist of that many more seconds.
The creaking drew nearer, and at the ninth footfall I flicked on the light switch and swung my ax blind into the hallway. Impact and blood spray told me I had hit on-target before I even saw the dead man. Stepping forward, I heard liquid gurgles and felt a strong hand yank the blade free. When I looked into the hall, George Kurzinski was up against the wall, trying to form a one-hand tourniquet to stop the gushing from his side-to-side neck wound. He was trying to shout at the same time, but his severed larynx made the task impossible.
Blood spattered off my black plastic jump suit; a little jet hit my face, and I licked at the trickle that reached my lips. George slid to the floor, raised his gun and shot me six times. At the click of the last misfire, I heard a faint, “Georgie? Georgie?” from Paula’s bedroom, then the sound of her groping through the dresser for her Beretta. Leaving George in the hallway to die, I walked toward the lovely metallic echo of a blank round being slid into a chamber, never to connect with a firing pin.
Paula greeted me from the bed, pride and fire in her eyes as she spat out a T.V.-movie warning: “Freeze, sucker.” Disobeying, I walked slowly toward her, baring my fangs like Shroud Shifter and Lucretia out for fuel. She pulled the trigger; nothing happened; she worked the slide and fired again, getting another click. Watching her throat muscles for the scream that had to be coming, I said, “I’m invulnerable,” and jumped on her.
She fought hard, all elbows and knees, but I got my hands around her throat just as she finally expelled the first syllable of “Mother.” Squeezing full force, I saw colors; biting full force at her neck, I came. When she went limp, I picked her up by one ankle and twirled her around and around and around the room in perfect circles, never letting her limbs touch the four walls. Arranging her limp form on the bed, I felt my indignities move to her body, one-two-three, as businesslike as a handshake.
Setting my brain watch at 3:00, I cook the airline and rock posters from the inner compartment of my jump suit and looked at myself in the wall mirror. Shroud Shifter’s stern, hawklike features stared back. My makeup artistry was superb, and accomplished without “Cougarman Comix” as a visual aid. Self-transformed, blood-validated, at last the only alter ego that counted, I found tacks in the kitchen and fixed the posters to the living room walls, then dipped my surgical-rubber hands in George Kurzinski’s blood and wrote “Shroud Shifter Prevails” on the wall above his body. Entering the apartment ten minutes before, I had been a thirty-four-year-old boy-man hoping to resolve an identity crisis; leaving it, I was a terrorist.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer, June 7, 1982:
From the Sharon News-Register, June 7, 1982:
From the Philadelphia Post, June 10, 1982:
From the Sharon News-Register, June 13, 1982: