Willy, an upper-level executive at a New York advertising agency, beat a total of fourteen people to death in suburban New York and New Jersey during the years 1976–1982. He used to prowl the park areas along the Hudson River, find solitary nature lovers (old, young, male, female, black, white — Willy was an Equal Opportunity killer), beat them to death with a rock, steal some kind of keepsake from them, then toss them in the river. I got him on a fluke. I found out all the side streets leading to the parks he used to prowl had one-side-of-the-street-only parking, so I ran computer checks on parking tickets issued near the days the coroner tagged the victims’ D.O.D. Bingo! Old Willy was careless three times out of fourteen.
He had a nice three-story colonial in Chappaqua, and his gross income for the previous year was $275,000 and stock options. When I knocked on his door I wasn’t 100 % sure of his guilt, so I asked him flat out, ‘“Mr. Whalen, are you the Chappaqua Chopper?”
His reply: “Yes, I am. I’ll come along peacefully, Officer, but will you have a martini with me first? My wife and children are soon to leave for the theatre, and I wouldn’t want to spoil their fun. I’ll tell them you’re with the agency.”
Willy’s in Lewisburg now, wearing federal denims instead of Paul Stuart suits. I got a lot of awed laughs when I told people about belting a few Beefeaters with him, and I actually sort of liked the crazy cocksucker. Then, pissed at myself for it, I dug up the coroner’s photos of his victims. I don’t like Willy anymore.
Nor do I understand him.
The other two take-outs belong to my colleague Jim Schwartzwalder, formerly a S.A.C. in Houston. He’s a forensics whiz, and he asked to work the stats on missing children (no one else wanted the job). Jim got ahold of some figures on missing kids in Northern Louisiana, and two dead kids (raped and covered with bite marks) down near Baton Rouge. Hypothesizing a transient killer, possibly a car thief, Jim ran auto-theft reports from the Shreveport area, got one that felt “panicky,” then ran the forensic dental report made from the teeth marks on the dead kids, along with queries on repeating felons popped for Grand Theft Auto. Double bingo from the Texas State Prison in Brownsville, The teeth marks exactly matched dentures fashioned for former inmate Leonard Carl Strohner there at the pen, back when he was serving 3–5 for G.T.A. in the late ’70’s. An A.P.B. bagged Strohner in New Mexico a few months later. He confessed biting, raping and killing twenty-two children throughout the South and Southwest, aided by his sometime sidekick Charles Sidney Hoyt. A routine roundup of vagrants got Hoyt in Tucson, Arizona, the following week. He laughed when he confessed his crimes, and when one of the arresting officers asked him why he liked to bite children, Hoyt said, “The closer the bone, the sweeter the meat.”
I’m rambling again, so I’ll give myself a little more slack, then get back to the point. Digression one — for a cop, I’m sort of a liberal. Poverty is your number-one cause of crime, period. All that stuff about moral breakdowns and the breakdown of the family unit is bullshit. Aside from poverty and its direct correlative of hard narcotics use, we have individual psychological motivation, which is pretty much unfathomable, although the forensic psychologists attached to the Force are pretty good at extrapolating from workups and physical evidence. As a cop, psychological motivation has always been my chief professional interest. Willie Roosevelt Washington, black heroin addict from Philly’s South Side, became a bank robber. Willie’s dad and mom were good people who never hit him. Willie’s next-door neighbor growing up, Robert Dewey Brown, got the shit kicked out of him regularly by his sadistic boozehound parents, and he is now a brilliant young forensic chemist with the Bureau. What happened?
City cops often have a stock answer. Working liaison with them over the years, I’ve heard it often: Evil. Cause and effect and traumatic episodes mean zilch, what is is; look for the cause and effect, and what you’ll get is what is is and good and evil mitigated by shades of gray. I’m a logical, methodical man with only a nominal belief in God, and that answer has always offended me.
Digression two — aside from marrying Carol against my parents’ wishes, the chief act of rebellion in my life has been disavowing the faith I was reared in. I was seventeen when I ceased to believe in the tenets of the Dutch Reformed Church. The sanctity of Jesus Christ, shadeless good and evil, and God the puppet master in the sky doing his predestination number at the birth of members of his flock, was too ugly, mean-spirited and stupid for a logical, methodical kid who wanted to be either a lawyer or a cop. So I enrolled at a Jesuit college and went to Notre Dame Law and became both a cop and a lawyer, and I’m still logical and methodical and obsessed with knowing why at close to fifty. And, punch line — maybe what is is, and good and evil are the real stuff, with the serial killer stats I’ve been working on as unimpeachable proof of it.
Here are some choice tidbits of information to support that thesis:
In serial killings where robbery was (in forensic psych parlance) the “motive of the moment,” the 1981 average take was less than twenty dollars per victim.
A man convicted of nine murders, perpetrated in three states over a five-year period, was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War and went to jail for holding draft-resistance seminars in violation of federal law. In light of that, he was asked how he could murder nine people in cold blood “I adapted my philosophy to accommodate my desire to kill,” he said.
A man caught in the act of raping an elderly woman he had murdered a few moments before was revealed to have been a released suspect in several other killings. The man passed polygraph testing before he was let go. When asked how he accomplished it, he said, “Listen, I groove on killing. I feel no guilt over it, so how can a machine programmed to detect guilt snitch me off?”
None of the six serial murderers of children successfully prosecuted in the United States during the year 1981 had been molested when they were children.
Serial killers are more often than not capable of sustaining normal, monogamous sexual relationships.
A final shocker supplied by Doc Seidman, the head shrink with the Task Force: Hardcore sociopathic career criminals with records of violence that stop short of murder outscore convicted serial killers on psychological tests aimed at detecting lack of moral restraint and criminal lack of conscience. Doc Seidman says that where your typical sociopath will steal you blind and exploit you in all matters from the most picayune on up — pathologically compelled to act with absolute selfishness — serial killers will not. They are, he says, sometimes capable of genuine love and passion. That “fact” heartened me, and it felt like it might be both a good hunting tool and a buffer against depression. Reading reports of sodomy, dismembering and murder, murder, murder can creep up on you. Passion is logical sometimes; I can almost logically harpoon why I love Carol so much, despite the fact a lot of people consider her a bitch. Then I blew it seeking more logical reinforcement. “How are they capable, Doc?”
“They have an exalted sense of style,” he answered.