Whoever Fights Monsters by Robert K. Ressler

Whoever Fights Monsters by Robert K. Ressler

Author:Robert K. Ressler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250084996
Publisher: St. Martin's Press


7

WHAT PLUS WHY EQUALS WHO

When I arrived at the Behavioral Sciences Unit in 1974, I became an apprentice in profiling to the Mutt and Jeff team of Howard Teten and Pat Mullany. Mullany, a former Christian brother, had been at the task since 1972, and Teten, a former San Leandro, California, evidence-unit specialist, had been working on profiling since 1969. Teten, in turn, had received guidance from a psychiatrist in New York, Dr. James A. Brussel, who had astounded the country in 1956 with a prediction about the personality of a “mad bomber” who had left thirty-two explosive packages in New York City over a period of eight years. Brussel studied crime scenes, messages from the bomber, and other information, and had told the police they would find an Eastern European immigrant in his forties who lived with his mother in a Connecticut city. The psychiatrist said the man was very neat; he deduced from the way the bomber rounded off the points of his W’s that he adored his mother—the rounded W’s looked like bosoms—and hated his father. Brussel even predicted that the bomber, when arrested, would be wearing a double-breasted suit, neatly buttoned. When taken into custody, George Metesky was indeed wearing a buttoned double-breasted suit, and fit the profile in many other regards, except for the fact that he resided with two unmarried sisters rather than with his mother.

Profiling had somewhat fallen into disrepute during the 1960s, when a committee of psychiatrists and psychologists guessed very incorrectly about the identity of the Boston Strangler, but the need for profiling kept growing because violent crimes against strangers—the most difficult of all crimes to solve—kept increasing in number. In the 1960s, in the majority of murder cases, the killer had some relationship with his or her victim. By the 1980s, some 25 percent of murders were “stranger murders,” in which the killer did not really know the victim. The reasons for the steady rise in the statistics, sociologists believed, could be found in the sort of society we had become: mobile, in many ways impersonal, flooded with images of violence and of heightened sexuality.

Profiling was even less of a science then; it was an art that had to be painstakingly learned over a period of years by means of an apprenticeship. Even in the FBI, it was not a regular bureaucratically designated activity but, rather, one that was pursued by a handful of people when local police would see fit to refer a case to us that seemed beyond their own capabilities, or when an officer was smart enough to know when he or she needed help. I was fortunate to begin in profiling as Teten and Mullany tackled a difficult case.

Pete Dunbar, an agent in the Bozeman, Montana, office, brought to our attention an unsolved kidnapping in that state. The previous June, while the Jaeger family of Farmington, Michigan, had been on a camping trip, someone had put a knife through the fabric of a tent and snatched away their seven-year-old daughter, Susan.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.