Authors: Mark Olshaker John Douglas
Mindhunter
MINDHUNTER
Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit
John Douglas
and Mark Olshaker
A Lisa Drew Book
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Copyright ©1995 by Mindhunters, Inc.
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Includes index.
ISBN 0-684-86447-9
eISBN 978-0-6848-6447-1
John Douglas
Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives
, with Robert K. Ressler and Ann W. Burgess
Crime Classification Manual
, with Ann W. Burgess, Allen G. Burgess, and Robert K. Ressler
Mark Olshaker
Nonfiction
The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experience
Fiction
Einstein’s Brain
Unnatural Causes
Blood Race
The Edge
To the men and women of the FBI Behavioral Science and Investigative Support Units, Quantico, Virginia, past and present—fellow explorers, partners on the journey.
Foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o’erwhelm them,
to men’s eyes.
—William Shakespeare,
Hamlet
This book has been very much a team effort, and it could not have been accomplished without the tremendous talents and dedication of each member of that team. Chief among them are our editor, Lisa Drew, and our project coordinator and "executive producer" (and Mark’s wife), Carolyn Olshaker. Right from the beginning, they both shared our vision and provided the strength, confidence, love, and good counsel that nurtured us through the effort to realize it. Our profound gratitude and admiration go equally to Ann Hennigan, our talented researcher; Marysue Rucci, Lisa’s able, indefatigable, and endlessly cheerful assistant; and our agent, Jay Acton, who was the first to recognize the potential of what we wanted to do and then made it happen.
Our special thanks go to John’s father, Jack Douglas, for all of his recollections and for so carefully documenting his son’s career, making organization a breeze; and to Mark’s father, Bennett Olshaker, M.D., for all of his advice and guidance on issues of forensic medicine and psychiatry and the law. We are both extremely fortunate to have the families we do, and their love and generosity are always with us.
Finally, we want to express our appreciation, admiration, and heartfelt thanks to all of John’s colleagues at the FBI Academy in Quantico. Their character and contribution is what made the career chronicled in this work possible, which is why the book is dedicated to them.
—John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, July 1995
Chapter 1: Inside the Mind of a Killer
Chapter 2: My Mother’s Name Was Holmes
Chapter 3: Betting on Raindrops
Chapter 5: Behavioral Science or BS?
Chapter 6: Taking the Show on the Road
Chapter 7: The Heart of Darkness
Chapter 8: The Killer Will Have a Speech Impediment
Chapter 9: Walking in the Shoes
Chapter 10: Everybody Has a Rock
Chapter 13: The Most Dangerous Game
Chapter 14: Who Killed the All-American Girl?
Chapter 15: Hurting the Ones We Love
Chapter 16: "God Wants You to Join Shari Faye"
Chapter 17: Anyone Can Be a Victim
Chapter 18: Battle of the Shrinks
Chapter 19: Sometimes the Dragon Wins
Prologue
I Must Be in Hell
I must be in hell.
It was the only logical explanation. I was tied down and naked. The pain was unbearable. My arms and legs were being lacerated by some kind of blade. Every orifice of my body had been penetrated. I was choking and gagging from something shoved down my throat. Sharp objects had been stuck in my penis and rectum and felt like they were tearing me apart. I was bathed in sweat. Then I realized what was happening: I was being tortured to death by all the killers and rapists and child molesters I’d put away in my career. Now I was the victim and I couldn’t fight back.
I knew the way these guys operated; I’d seen it over and over again. They had a need to manipulate and dominate their prey. They wanted to be able to decide whether or not their victim should live or die, or how the victim should die. They’d keep me alive as long as my body would hold out, reviving me when I passed out or was close to death, always inflicting as much pain and suffering as possible. Some of them could go on for days like that.
They wanted to show me they were in total control, that I was completely at their mercy. The more I cried out, the more I begged for relief, the more I would fuel and energize their dark fantasies. If I would plead for my life or regress or call out for my mommy or daddy, that would really get them off.
This was my payback for six years of hunting the worst men on earth.
My heart was racing, I was burning up. I felt a horrible jab as they inched the sharp stick even farther up my penis. My entire body convulsed in agony.
Please, God, if I’m still alive, let me die quickly. And if I’m dead, deliver me quickly from the tortures of hell.
Then I saw an intense, bright white light, just like I’d heard about people seeing at the moment of death. I expected to see Christ or angels or the devil—I’d heard about that, too. But all I saw was that bright white light.
But I did hear a voice—a comforting, reassuring voice, the most calming sound I’d ever heard.
"John, don’t worry. We’re trying to make it all better."
That was the last thing I remembered.
"John, do you hear me? Don’t worry. Take it easy. You’re in the hospital. You’re very sick, but we’re trying to make you better," was what the nurse actually said to me. She had no idea whether or not I could hear her, but she kept repeating it, soothingly, over and over again.
Though I had no idea at the time, I was in the intensive care unit of Swedish Hospital in Seattle, in a coma, on life support. My arms and legs were strapped down. Tubes, hoses, and intravenous lines penetrated my body. I was not expected to live. It was early December of 1983, and I was thirty-eight years of age.
The story begins three weeks earlier, on the other side of the country. I was up in New York, speaking on criminal-personality profiling before an audience of about 350 members of the NYPD, the Transit Police, and the Nassau and Suffolk County, Long Island, Police Departments. I’d given this speech hundreds of times and could just about do the whole thing on autopilot.
All of a sudden, my mind started to wander. I was aware I was still talking, but I’d broken out in a cold sweat and I was saying to myself,
How in hell am I going to handle all these cases?
I was just finishing up with the Wayne Williams child-killing case in Atlanta and Buffalo’s race murders. I had been called in to the "Trailside Killer" case in San Francisco. I was consulting with Scotland Yard on the "Yorkshire Ripper" investigation in England. I was going back and forth to Alaska, working on the Robert Hansen case, in which an Anchorage baker was picking up prostitutes, flying them out into the wilderness, and hunting them down. I had a serial arsonist targeting synagogues in Hartford, Connecticut. And I had to fly out to Seattle the week after next to advise the Green River Task Force in what was shaping up as one of the largest serial murders in American history, the killer preying mainly on prostitutes and transients in the Seattle-Tacoma corridor.
For the past six years, I had been developing a new approach to crime analysis, and I was the only one in the Behavioral Science Unit working cases full-time. Everyone else in the unit was primarily an instructor. I was handling about 150 active cases at a time with no backup, and I was on the road from my office at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, about 125 days a year. The pressure was tremendous from local cops, who themselves were under tremendous pressure to solve cases, from the community, and from the families of victims, for whom I always had enormous empathy. I kept trying to prioritize my workload, but new requests kept pouring in daily. My associates at Quantico often said I was like a male whore: I couldn’t say no to my clients.
During the New York speech, I continued talking about criminal-personality types, but my mind kept wandering back to Seattle. I knew that not everyone on the task force wanted me there, that was par for the course. As in every major case for which I was called in to provide a new service that most cops and many Bureau officials still considered one step removed from witchcraft, I knew I’d have to "sell" them. I had to be persuasive without being overconfident or cocky. I had to let them know I thought they’d done a thorough, professional job while still trying to convince the skeptics the FBI might be able to help. And perhaps most daunting, unlike the traditional FBI agent who dealt with "Just the facts, ma’am," my job required me to deal in
opinions.
I lived with the constant knowledge that if I was wrong, I could throw a serial investigation far off the mark and get additional people killed. Just as bad, it would hammer the lid on the new program of criminal-personality profiling and crime analysis I was struggling to get off the ground.
Then there was the traveling itself. I had already been to Alaska on several occasions, crossing four time zones, connecting to a white-knuckle flight close to the water and landing in darkness, and practically as soon as I got there and met with the local police, I would get back on the plane and fly down to Seattle.
The free-floating anxiety attack lasted maybe a minute. I kept saying to myself,
Hey, Douglas, regroup. Get a grip on yourself.
And I was able to do it. I don’t think anyone in that room knew anything was wrong. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something tragic was going to happen to me.
I couldn’t shake this premonition, and when I got back to Quantico, I went to the personnel office and took out additional life insurance and income-protection insurance in case I became disabled. I can’t say exactly why I did this, except for that vague but powerful feeling of dread. I was physically run-down; I was exercising too much and probably drinking more than I should have been to cope with the stress. I was having difficulty sleeping, and when I did fall asleep, often I’d be awakened by a call from someone needing my instant help. When I would go back to sleep, I’d try to force myself to dream about the case in hopes that that would lead me to some insight about it. It’s easy enough in retrospect to see where I was headed, but at the time there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.
Just before I left for the airport, something made me stop off at the elementary school where my wife, Pam, taught reading to learning disabled students, to tell her about the extra insurance.
"Why are you telling me this?" she asked, very concerned. I had a wicked headache on the right side and she said my eyes were bloodshot and strange-looking.
"I just wanted you to know about everything before I left," I replied. At that time, we had two young daughters. Erika was eight and Lauren was three.
For the trip to Seattle, I brought along two new special agents, Blaine McIlwain and Ron Walker, to break them in on the case. We arrived in Seattle that night and checked into the Hilton Hotel downtown. As I was unpacking, I noticed I had only one black shoe. Either I hadn’t packed the other one or somehow I’d lost it along the way. I would be making a presentation to the King County Police Department the next morning, and I decided I couldn’t go on without my black shoes. I have always been something of a flashy dresser, and in my fatigue and stress, I became obsessed with having black shoes to wear with my suit. So I tore out into the downtown streets, rushed around until I found an open shoe store, and came back to the hotel, even more exhausted, with a suitable pair of black shoes.