Читать книгу The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI’s Original Mindhunter - Mark Olshaker - Страница 16
ОглавлениеThe next morning I went before the full New Jersey Parole Board. Most parole decisions were made by only two or three members, but since this was a high-profile case that would be controversial whichever way the decision went, Andrew Consovoy wanted the entire panel on the record.
We met in a conference room at the prison. I think there were about ten or twelve people in the room; the collective experience included legal, psychological, and police work. Consovoy introduced me and asked me to give a brief overview of my background in profiling and investigation. I recounted the origins of the FBI’s behavioral science and profiling programs and explained that my doctoral project concerned teaching police officers and detectives how to classify crimes of violence.
I told them that I try to remain objective going into each case and did not read all of the reports until the day before the interview.
“The basic thesis, the basic premise of my approach,” I stated, “is that to understand the artist, you must look at the artwork.” Likewise, I clarified, to understand the violent criminal, you must look at the crime.
No sense mincing words at the beginning, I decided. They might as well know where I’m coming from. “And I never could understand,” I went on, “people in a position of making decisions relative to probation, parole, sentencing, and treatment—if you didn’t have that information, if you don’t understand what it’s telling you and you don’t understand the person sitting across the table from you, if you believe that person is telling the truth but you’re relying only on self-reporting, you’re going to have the wool pulled over your eyes.”
For example, if you’re trying to evaluate a convicted rapist, you need to review the police interview of the victim about what he did and said during the assault to understand which of the five distinct rapist typologies he fits. If he has murdered the victim, that obviously tells you much of what you need to know right there.
Before the meeting began, Consovoy had told me that a number of members of the board were interested in the pedophile angle. If McGowan was paroled, should he be classified as a sex offender?
I said to the board, “I was curious to see whether we were looking at a traditional type of child molester, a pedophile—looking for whether or not this is a ‘preferential’ type of offender, looking for a specific type of victim, or is it a ‘situational’ offender? What I mean by that term is, whoever crosses the path of this type of offender could potentially be a victim. So what we have to do is evaluate the risk level for the offender and the risk level for the victim.
“As far as victimology, the child goes from a low risk inside her home and yard, to a moderate risk in the neighborhood, to a high risk once she steps inside a house she’s never been in before.”
For the offender, the risk for the act itself is low. There was little doubt he could do whatever he wanted to a seven-year-old. But the risk of identification was high. The crime was committed in the offender’s and victim’s neighborhood, the victim could identify him if left alive, and there was a reasonable certainty that one of the victim’s parents or someone else would know where she had gone. Therefore, it should have gone through the offender’s mind that it would be just a matter of time before the investigation would be directed at him.
When we did the research behind Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives and the Crime Classification Manual, we began dividing predators by organized, disorganized, and mixed presentations. I explained that there would be several possible reasons for a disorganized offender to undertake such a high-risk crime. These would include youthfulness and inexperience, judgment or impulse control mediated by drugs or alcohol, loss of control of the situation, or mental defect. McGowan was none of those.
It wasn’t as if he woke up that morning and said to himself, I’m going to wait for someone to knock on my door and then I’m going to kill him or her. But this crime, while clearly opportunistic, was organized. It showed a logical thinking process. This is something many people, even law enforcement personnel, have a difficult time understanding: If the crime itself is so illogical, how can the process of carrying it out be organized and methodical? In other words, how does someone like Joseph McGowan—who is intelligent, educated, and respectable, heavily invested in society’s regard through his status as a public school teacher—take such an action that jeopardizes everything he has worked for and considers important? How can this happen?
The answer is that it does happen, and usually because the impulse for the act is triggered by something more powerful than the rational thinking process. In this case, that something appeared to be this ongoing and overriding feeling of inadequacy and low self-esteem, coupled with the specific cause of overwhelming anger, looking to vent itself in explosive rage.
I explained that between the ages of approximately twenty-five and thirty-five, certain individuals—and this applies to men overwhelmingly more than to women—realize that they’re not going to amount to what they think they should. Even though Joseph McGowan had a good job, he would be forced to face the fact that he was still living with his mother and had not become the man he wanted to be. The anger begins to build, and these types of feelings don’t just burn out; quite the contrary, they get worse as these individuals accept the fact that they are not going to meet their own goals and expectations.
This was a crime of anger. Sexual assault was merely one of the weapons. It was justified in his own mind, at least in the moment, by what he perceived had been done to him by others. And though McGowan would not have thought of it in this analytical fashion, Joan became the representative and surrogate for all those others. For a person with criminal tendencies who perceives he has little power or control over his own life, murder embodies the ultimate power. For that one brief moment or however long he can extend the experience, he has ultimate control of the immediate world around him. My sense of it, I reported to the parole board, was that McGowan had never experienced this kind of feeling before, and when it occurred, it was all-encompassing, hypnotic, transcendent.
“He gets her down to the basement bedroom. He makes her strip down. He prematurely ejaculates. He’s excited, but not because he’s going to fulfill his fantasy and have sex with a young girl. He’s excited because of his power, because he wants to kill and he’s going to—that’s what causes the erection. And then his anger is intensified even more when he loses control—not of his victim, but of his own erectile function.”
Another concept difficult for many people to understand is that an offender can be sexually aroused by something that does not appear to have any direct connection with sex. When we interviewed Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz, he told us that when he used to set fires and then watch the fire department arrive on the scene, he would masturbate. For this nobody, the power to control great forces—fire itself and the human force of the fire department, plus all of the curious spectators—was a sexual act. Likewise, he told us, during his killing spree, he would return to the locations where he had shot young couples, absorb the atmosphere, then go back home and masturbate, reliving the fantasy of the power of his kills.
Dennis Rader, the BTK Strangler, admitted to me that he loved to drive around past the houses of his victims. He considered those houses trophies as well and gloried in the fact that no one knew his secrets. He said he stayed away from his victims’ memorial services and graves, much as he might like to be there, for fear of surveillance. Instead, he cut their obituaries out of the newspaper and read them over and over again. Indeed, this sense of power that murder creates is incredibly seductive to these killers.
One of the board members noted that McGowan had said in previous statements that Joan had followed his order to remove her own clothing and that she was not crying or protesting in any way during that time.
“I find that hard to believe,” I said. “I think she actually did not obey every command, which meant he lost control.” It was inconceivable to me that this young girl would not be terrified and crying. And my reading of the medical examiner’s report certainly indicated some sort of struggle. Rosemarie had said on several occasions that her daughter would not have taken any assault passively. It was my strong opinion that in his recounting, McGowan was simply trying to minimize the cruelty of his crime.
