Читать книгу The Killer Across the Table - Mark Olshaker - Страница 15
ОглавлениеFrom the outside, the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton looks just what you would imagine a maximum security institution to look like: thick brownish-gray walls topped with coiled razor wire. Glassed-in guard towers stand at the corners and in the middle of the wall expanses, with the slanted tops of functional and unadorned buildings visible behind them. Even the newer part of the prison is grim-looking and fortresslike, a solid red brick structure whose narrow window slits clearly delineate the boundary between freedom and incarceration.
That morning, I had been sworn in as a deputy by a prison official and given a photo name tag that indicated I was representing the New Jersey State Parole Board. I wore my traditional dark suit to suggest my authority.
Even for someone like me, going through the outer gate of a facility like this and passing through the series of barriers that ultimately took me to the warden’s office produces a sense of what Dante Alighieri must have been thinking when he posited the legend “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” over the gate of Hell.
Before I went in to speak to McGowan, I specified several parameters that I believed, based on previous experience, would be conducive to a successful interview.
I wanted the setting to be reasonably comfortable and nonthreatening. This is no easy task in a maximum security prison, where the entire environment is intimidating and designed to be so. But within that context, I wanted somewhere that the subject would be most likely to open up. I suggested a room with no more than a desk or table and two comfortable chairs. For illumination I preferred only a table lamp—no overhead lighting. This would help make the setting subdued and relaxed.
This is very important, because in a maximum security environment, the prisoner has little freedom and I want him to feel as free in his mental association as possible—in a sense, to give him some of his power back. Then you have to keep proving yourself, not only in your knowledge of the case file and the crimes, but in your nonverbal cues. When David Berkowitz was brought into the windowless interview room in New York’s Attica Correctional Facility—a room about eight by ten feet and painted a somber battleship gray—what struck me were his very blue eyes that kept darting between Bob Ressler and me as I was giving the introduction. He was trying to read our faces and gauge whether we were being sincere. I told him about the research we were conducting and that its purpose was to help law enforcement solve future cases, and possibly to help intervene with children who displayed violent tendencies.
In my research I had surmised his feelings of inadequacy. I took out a newspaper headlining his crimes and said, “David, in Wichita, Kansas, there is a killer who calls himself the BTK Strangler and he mentions you in his letters to the media and police. He wants to be powerful like you.”
Berkowitz leaned back in his chair, adjusted himself into a more comfortable position, and said, “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” I said, and the interview proceeded from there.
In the prison in Trenton, I told the warden I wanted no time restrictions for the interview, nor any interruptions for food or a prison head count. We arranged ahead of time that McGowan would be fed when we concluded, even if he had missed an official mealtime.
The interview room was approximately fourteen feet square. The door was made of steel, with a twelve-by-eighteen-inch wire-reinforced window, through which the guards could check on us. The walls were cinder block, painted bluish gray. There was a small table and two comfortable chairs. The only light came from the table lamp I had requested.
McGowan had no idea ahead of time where he was being taken or why. He was brought into the room by two guards. Board chairman Andrew Consovoy, who had accompanied me to the prison, introduced me as Dr. John Douglas. He said I was there representing the parole board. I use the honorific Dr. only when I want to create a clinical-seeming situation. I asked the guards to remove his handcuffs, which they did before leaving the two of us alone.
McGowan and I were both in our fifties, and each about six-foot-two. I had read descriptions of him having been big but soft during his teaching days. Now his body seemed firm and muscular, after years of working out in prison. And with his gray beard, he certainly didn’t look like a young high school science teacher any longer.
Everything about these interviews was orchestrated. I wanted to face the door and have him face the wall. There were two reasons for this. I didn’t want him distracted, and since I didn’t yet know him well, I wasn’t sure how he’d react, so I wanted a clear view of the window and the guard behind it. The type of offender I interview often determines my seating decisions. When I interview assassins, for instance, I usually have to have them facing the window or door because they tend to be paranoid and will be distracted if they can’t psychologically escape when stressed by the interview.
In this situation, I took a seat and positioned myself in such a way that I would be looking up at him slightly throughout the interview. I wanted to give him that one psychological edge of feeling superior to me. This was a trick I’d learned from talking to Charles Manson when Bob Ressler and I interviewed him in San Quentin. I was surprised, at five-feet-two, how short and slight he was.
As soon as Manson entered the small conference room in the main cellblock at San Quentin where Ressler and I interviewed him, he climbed up onto the back of a chair at the head of the table so he could lord over us from a superior position, just as he used to sit on top of a boulder to preach to his “family” of followers, lending him an air of natural and biblical authority. As the interview progressed, it became clear that this short, slight man who had been the illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old prostitute, who had been partly raised by a fanatically religious aunt and a sadistic, belittling uncle who sometimes dressed him as a girl and called him a sissy, who had been in and out of group homes and reform schools and who essentially raised himself on the street before going in and out of prison for robberies, forgeries, and pimping, had developed an uncanny charisma and ability to “sell” himself to social misfits just as lost and unwanted as he was. As someone who has stared into those penetrating eyes, I can assure you that Manson’s gift, his enticing aura, was real, as real as the delusional grandeur that accompanied it.
What we learned from our interview was that Manson was not a master criminal. He was a master manipulator, and he had developed that skill as a survival mechanism. He didn’t fantasize about torture or murder like so many of the offenders I’ve confronted. He fantasized about being rich and famous as a rock star and even managed to hang out with the Beach Boys for a while.
Like other repeat criminals we had interviewed, Manson had spent a lot of his formative years in institutional settings. He told us he had been assaulted not only by other inmates, but also by counselors and guards. This had the effect of teaching him that weaker or more impressionable people were there to be used.
By the time he was released from prison in 1967, he had spent more than half of his thirty-two years in some sort of institution or custody. He made his way north to San Francisco and discovered things had changed in society. He could use his wits to participate in the culture of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and get it all for free. His musical talent and melodic voice served him well in attracting followers. It was only a matter of time before he drifted down to the Los Angeles area and developed an “audience.”
In listening to him, we realized that the horrific murders carried out in Los Angeles by his followers occurred not because Manson exerted such hypnotic control—which he did—but when he started losing control and others, particularly his lieutenant Charles “Tex” Watson, started challenging him and leading the group on adventures on his own. Manson had been predicting societal “Helter Skelter,” which he picked up from the Beatles’ White Album, and when he realized his acolytes had taken him seriously and murdered beautiful, nine-months-pregnant movie star Sharon Tate and four of her guests, he had to reassert himself, leading to another break-in and murder two nights later that Manson instigated but did not take part in himself.
What we learned from the Manson interview was later applied to the bureau’s dealing with other cults with charismatic and manipulative leaders, such as Reverend Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple in Guyana, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and the Freemen militia movement in Montana. The outcome is not always as we would like it, but it is important to understand the personality of those we are dealing with so we can try to predict behavior.
I had also learned from experience with assassin types like Arthur Bremer and James Earl Ray not to stare for long since it made them too uncomfortable to open up. From Bremer we learned that the target was not nearly so important as the act. Bremer had pursued President Richard Nixon before concluding that he would be too difficult to get close to and then switched his sights to Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace, whom he shot and rendered paraplegic during a campaign stop at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland, on May 15, 1972. From Ray, we got very little. He was so bound up in his paranoid fantasies that he had recanted his guilty plea in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., insisting that he was an unwitting dupe of a complex conspiracy to kill the civil rights icon.
Let’s be honest: Any prison interview of this type begins as a mutual seduction. I am there to seduce the convict into believing that my sole purpose in being there is to help him get out. And he is there to seduce me into believing that he is worthy of getting out. It usually takes a fair amount of time to get beyond those opening positions as the pretense is gradually stripped away to reveal who we each are. My part in this case was to come across as if I was helping him think about and prepare for the big day when he would be paroled. This was not insincere on my part. I had to go into this session with a completely open mind, and with the goal to turn on the switch in his brain that would reveal his inner thoughts and fantasies.
The first two hours were devoted primarily to small talk. This amount of time is necessary to establish a natural conversational rhythm and to ensure that the subject forgets the setting and lowers his inhibitions. I told him some vague things about myself and my own background in law enforcement to build up a level of trust. I asked him about the prison environment, inquiring about what he did with his time. It was interesting to me that he pretty much kept to his own wing in the prison and seldom ventured out into the main yard, where he said he didn’t feel comfortable. This was analogous to his pre-prison life, in which he felt a greater comfort level in school, where he was in control, as opposed to in the greater community, where he was socially awkward and more vulnerable.
Years later, I got to see a copy of a letter he’d written to a woman with whom he corresponded regularly. He mentioned the fact that I did not take notes, that I had the details of his file memorized, and that I was good at putting him at ease. My purpose was to steer the conversation where I wanted it to go. He “complimented” me in his letter on listening to what he had to say, rather than merely going through a list of predetermined questions, as parole board representatives tended to do. He was right about that. I was here to learn from him by listening and getting him to reveal himself. That was my only agenda.
Gradually, I began bringing him around to the crime itself. I stayed away from sounding the least bit judgmental. It was not as if I was trying to give him the impression I was condoning his actions. I just wanted to be as factual and objective as I could, so we could re-create his thought processes at the time. He had given so many different responses to psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors over the years that I wanted to see if I could just get him to give me the story unadorned.
I did this by creating a This Is Your Life–style narrative. For those too young to remember this, it was a television program during my youth in the 1950s in which host Ralph Edwards would “lure” a prominent guest into the studio with the aid of the guest’s family or friends and go through his or her life for the audience, punctuated by reminiscences of people from his past. I got McGowan to tell me about himself as I guided him up to that Thursday afternoon in 1973.
I knew that he had a reputation in school for being kind of humorless and aloof, at least among the faculty. I also knew that he had been engaged to be married around this time, but that the engagement had fallen through. If the woman had rejected him, that could certainly be a precipitating stressor.
Though he said McGowan wasn’t very emotionally forthcoming, Bob Carrillo had the impression that “he had a lot of emotion built up inside.” He never mentioned the breakup of the engagement and Carrillo said he had never met the young lady.
“I met his girlfriend on one occasion,” said Jack Meschino. “My god, she was the sweetest, most beautiful thing. She was very tiny compared to him.” And perhaps a threat to his mother? Though Meschino knew at the time there had been a breakup, he never knew why, and McGowan never brought it up.
Some of his fellow teachers had planned a trip to the Caribbean over the Easter break, but McGowan had not been invited.
I asked Meschino what would have happened if Joe had asked to go along. He indicated that he probably would have been included.
Then why didn’t he? Meschino said that he couldn’t get himself organized and figure out how to make all of the arrangements. That was pretty consistent with a guy of his age who still lived with his mother and grandmother, and it certainly could have contributed to the ongoing frustration of the life he found himself living.
It was about two hours into the interview when I said, “I want to know in your own words what it was like twenty-five years ago. How did this all happen to get you here?” I purposely avoid loaded or descriptive words like kill, assault, or murder, nor did I refer to Joan as his “victim” or a child. “That girl—Joan—did you know her?”
“Well, I’d seen her in the neighborhood,” McGowan replied. His affect was flat, his tone matter-of-fact.
“Had she come to the door to sell you the Girl Scout cookies?”
He said he thought his mother had ordered them from her. A newspaper article quoting a former FBI agent said they found more than a hundred empty boxes of Girl Scout cookies in the house.
“Let’s go back to the moment she came to the door,” I said. “Tell me what happened, step by step, from that point on.”
It was almost like a metamorphosis. McGowan’s whole demeanor transformed. Even his physical appearance seemed to change before my eyes. His eyes were unfocused as he looked beyond me and stared toward the vacant cinder-block wall. I could tell he was looking completely inward—back a quarter of a century. I could sense he was clicking back to the one story that had never left his mind.
The front door was open to the mild spring weather, and from the lower level of the bi-level home, McGowan said he saw her through the screen door standing on the landing. She said she was there to deliver two boxes of Girl Scout cookies and to collect two dollars. He wanted to get her downstairs to the level where he lived, away from his grandmother, who was either sleeping or watching television upstairs.
That was why he said he had only a twenty-dollar bill and a one-dollar bill and would have to go get the proper change—to get her downstairs with him. The story about being embarrassed over not having the exact amount was all crap to give something innocuous to the psychiatrists.
This is what I was hoping would happen during the interview. I’ve had similar experiences with other sex offenders: Once you’re able to flip their on switch, they don’t shut up. When Ressler and I interviewed Monte Rissell, he recounted driving back to the parking lot of his apartment complex in Alexandria, Virginia, seeing a woman about to get out of her car, and forcing her at gunpoint into a secluded area. After that, she tried to run away. He pursued her into a ravine, grabbed her, and vividly described banging her head against the side of a rock and holding her head under the flowing water of a stream, as if he were watching a movie.
My goal was to turn on the “DVD” in McGowan’s brain that had recorded the homicide. After a quarter of a century behind bars, McGowan recalled every specific detail of that Thursday afternoon. It was like having a friend talk about a terrific movie he’s seen. But in this case, McGowan was the scriptwriter, the producer, the director, and the lead actor. He got to exercise the three aspirations of nearly every predator: manipulation, domination, and control.
Without looking directly at me, he described luring Joan into the lower level and his bedroom, ordering her to remove her clothes, and sexually assaulting her.
I asked him if he had penetrated her. Just with his finger, he insisted.
Then how did semen get into her vagina? It was on his fingers after he ejaculated, he said.
In a focused and excited state with no indication of any remorse, he described how he picked her up by her ankles, swung her around, and slammed her head to the floor, fracturing her skull. The account he gave was not much different from what he had told detectives and psychiatrists previously. He never even attempted to fake empathy, as other offenders had when I’d interviewed them. What struck me was not the facts, but the obvious intentionality.
It was hot as hell outside, but the interview room was very cold. In fact, I was trying to keep myself from shivering as I sat there, even though I was wearing a wool suit. McGowan, on the other hand, had begun perspiring profusely, just as he had described feeling after the attack. He was looking away from me in a trancelike state, breathing heavily, and his prison shirt was drenched with sweat. I could see his chest muscles trembling.
I thought immediately of the quotation I had just read from Dr. Galen’s initial report, after McGowan had beaten and strangled Joan: “she stopped struggling … just sort of lay there. I got dressed. I had been sweating so violently.” In his head and in his physical being, he was right back in the act.
“It’s pretty hard to strangle someone, isn’t it?” I asked. “Even a very young person.”
“Yeah,” he readily agreed. “I didn’t realize it would take so much strength.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, I turned around and positioned myself behind her.” I took that to mean he came around to where her head lay on the floor.
“And how long did you choke her?”
“Until I thought she was dead.”
“Then what?”
“I went out to get some bags to stuff her in and put her clothes in, and when I got back, she was twitching.”
Now, this was not a blitz-style attack resulting from a momentary surge of uncontrollable rage. He did not suddenly come to his senses and say to himself, Oh, my god! What have I done? When he saw that she was still twitching, his only thought was to choke her again to make sure she was finally dead. It was almost as if he had murdered her again.
The one time I remember McGowan looking right at me during this entire description was when he said, “John, when I heard the knock and looked up through the screen door and saw who was there, I knew I was going to kill her.
“I can feel two different kinds of rage,” he went on. “Red rage bothers me, but I can turn my head, focus, and control it, like when someone cuts me off in traffic or I have a conflict at school. But white rage I can’t control.”
“And is that what you were feeling when Joan came to your house?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s right.” Our eyes were still locked.
So he killed Joan while seized with white rage. The fact that he even had a name for it told me he had experienced it before and most likely would again. But he didn’t kill her right there at the front door no matter what was raging within him. At that moment, a methodical plan had formed instantly in his mind as to how he was going to get her where he wanted in order to be able to do what he wanted to do.
I pointed this out and said to him, “You’re not a psychotic, even though you tried to show dissociation from the crime. What I see is pretty logical, rational behavior.” He didn’t argue with me.
As for the psychiatric assertion that “The killing was the consequence of an additional upset and failure due to premature ejaculation”: wrong again. The killing was the result of a combination of displaced rage, sexual excitement at his momentary power over another human being, and the very practical consideration of leaving no witness to what already was an unspeakable crime.
He had admitted as much in his interview with Dr. Galen when he said, “If I let her go, my whole life was gone. All I could think of was just to get rid of her.” I wondered if anyone before me had ever taken the time to correlate all of McGowan’s statements together.
But I didn’t minimize the killing as merely a practical consideration to avoid being identified and caught. This was not a question of simply going too far. The way McGowan described it, I could tell that the gratification and emotional fulfillment of the act went through to the brutal murder itself and his ability to destroy something or someone.
At one point I asked him, “If I could have captured one ‘video image’ of your face while you were doing this, what would it show me?”
Obligingly, his face contorted into what I would characterize as an intense, malevolently satisfied grimace.
Even the way he described the body disposal was logical and methodical, as opposed to panicked or hurried. He got some towels and cleaning materials to wipe up the blood, trying to get this potential forensic evidence out of there so that his mother wouldn’t see it and in case the police searched the premises. He wrapped the body in a carpet and drove some distance to a setting he was familiar with to dump it. Then he went back home and acted as if nothing had happened. Joining the neighborhood search for Joan was a conscious means of covering his tracks.
Most cons, knowing they potentially have something to gain from the interviewer’s good report, will try to BS to one extent or another. There was none of that with McGowan. I think that was because I was well prepared, and he was intelligent enough to understand that it wouldn’t work. His goal in agreeing to talk to me was to improve his chances of parole, and he knew that my catching him up in a lie was not going to cut it. And the whole point of my approach was to make the subject “comfortable” enough to let me know what he was actually thinking and feeling.
What did surprise me was that he didn’t even try to express any sorrow for what he had done or feeling for Joan’s family. He was certainly sorry that the whole thing had happened—I was not the first one to hear that sentiment—but there was no sense of emotional comprehension of what he had taken away from this little girl, all those who loved her and all those who had come into her brief life. The impression I received was that he was telling me that since he couldn’t bring this young girl back to life, he just had to move on, and everyone should understand that. The murder was simply a fact of life to him, as if he had had cancer or a heart attack, and now the doctors were determining if he was well enough to leave the hospital and resume normal life.
Every violent crime is a scene acted out between two or more participants. And when the offender and the victim are up close and personal—as opposed to, say, a bombing, a poisoning, arson, or a sniper attack—a trained crime analyst can gain a tremendous amount of information on what is actually going on in the mind of the criminal by observing his behavior, even if he says little or nothing. As I listened to each detail of the deadly encounter between Joseph McGowan and Joan D’Alessandro, I focused not only on the fact of the violence and sexual assault but on the way it was done.
The fixation was with the act itself, not the personality or specificity of the victim. I didn’t doubt McGowan had some pedophilic tendencies, as he’d suggested in some of his previous interviews. That would certainly go along with his lack of social sophistication and his deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. But he had no prior sexual offenses on his record, even minor ones, and there was nothing in the file about search warrants turning up any child pornography or fantasy writing about children. If he fantasized, I thought it would be about an adult woman. And the only real fantasy here was a fantasy of power.
What became clear to me as he talked was that this crime, primarily an act of rage that escalated quickly from “red” to “white,” was triggered by something, some precipitating event, though I wasn’t sure at this point what it was. My guess—based on his living situation, his inability to see his engagement through to marriage, and my extensive knowledge of other sexual predators—was that it had something to do with his mother. Still, it gnawed at me that I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what had set him off.
As I listened to McGowan, I realized that what had gotten him off was the act rather than the victim. All the people who had interviewed him before were barking up the wrong tree if they were trying to get him to talk about his pedophilia. There was nothing either obsessive or particularly pleasurable in his description of the rape of a seven-year-old girl. Not only that, this was a child he had seen frequently in the neighborhood. He had never previously attempted to single her out for special attention, to befriend her, seduce her, or groom her. The violence, the sexual degradation, the murder—these were all manifestations of raw rage. No fantasy scenario was being acted out, not even a sexually sadistic one. What was significant about this particular victim of opportunity was that she was small and vulnerable. If it had been someone who McGowan saw could put up a good fight, no crime would take place.
McGowan slowly returned from his reverie excursion into the past. While describing the particulars of the crime, he had been focused and trembling. Now he was calm, no longer sweating. He had relived a battle he had fought and won, unlike so many others in his life.
We talked about his fondness for guns, another obvious psychological compensation. I asked, “If you were angry and you went out with an AK-47 to a shopping mall, who would you kill?” I was curious not only about his response, but also to see if he would even accept the premise of the question. “Whom would you be gunning for? Schoolchildren, teachers, police officers?”
“Anyone,” he replied.
This was significant. Not only did he not deny the possibility that something like this could happen, but he essentially told me that his rage was generalized and indiscriminate.
We began to talk about his possible release from prison. At one point I asked, “Joe, where are you planning to go when you get out?” I was careful to say when, not if. I wanted to keep the conversation as positive as I could so he would be candid with me.
He told me he was going to New York to meet up with another ex-con who was an electrician. He had promised McGowan a job as his assistant. I told him that I was raised in New York and returned frequently, and that he would be shocked to see how expensive it had become to live there.
He glanced furtively over his shoulder at the door to make sure the guards couldn’t hear our conversation. “John,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper, “I have money.”
“What kind of money could you have, being in a place like this for the past twenty-five years?” I responded. “It can’t be from making license plates.”
In a low voice he said that when his grandmother and mother passed away, he received a fairly substantial chunk from their life insurance policies and the sale of the house. He said it was in a bank out of state. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
He whispered, “I don’t want the victim’s family to be able to get at the money.”
What I was thinking to myself was: This guy just won’t let up. He has absolutely no regard for the people he’s hurt and whose lives he has changed forever.
What I said was “You know, you’re a pretty smart guy, Joe, the way you’ve figured it all out. I think you’d do really well in New York!” This was both necessary to maintain my rapport with the subject and not a lie. I did think this was pretty smart and resourceful and that he would be able to figure out his way through a place as intense as New York. I just didn’t say how appalled I was at his scheme. Just as in negotiating a high-level business deal, you have to know when to speak up and when to shut up, as difficult as it may be.
We later found out that an investigator had looked into Genevieve McGowan’s will and the money trail on Rosemarie’s behalf. She had sold her Hillsdale home shortly after the murder and moved to Villas, New Jersey. When she sold that house, she moved in with her niece in Wisconsin for a while, and then went to live at a Franciscan care center. She died in April 1992. Her will set up various trusts, one of them benefiting a niece.
The will was probated in Wisconsin since Genevieve was living there. Jim discovered that all funds had been disbursed and there was nothing left for the D’Alessandros to touch. Apparently, Genevieve had anticipated claims on anything coming directly to Joe, so she had protected her assets from any claims arising out of a wrongful death suit by making disbursements throughout the years. She had instructed the niece to take care of Joe and give him whatever he needed, without actually having him legally control the money. This is what he must have meant when he told me the money was held and protected out of state.
The sentiments behind these arrangements reminded me of Genevieve’s comments to her church acquaintance that she hated Rosemarie and blamed her for all of her and Joe’s troubles. One of the hallmarks of narcissistic, borderline, and sociopathic personalities is the unwillingness to assume personal responsibility for anything. It is always someone else’s fault.
By the time the conversation wound down, five or six hours had passed. Neither one of us had eaten or left to go to the bathroom. But I did have a pretty good idea now of what made Joseph McGowan tick. He sensed this as well, although his perspective turned out to be somewhat different from mine. In the letter to his female pen pal, McGowan expressed optimism about parole because he thought that he had had a good interview with me and that I had understood him. I did understand him, and I went in with an open mind, not about what he had done—that was beyond debate—but whether he still might be dangerous. Where he was in error was interpreting my nonjudgmental attitude and demeanor as empathy or acceptance.
That is where almost all of these guys go wrong—they can process other people only through their own self-centered emotional filters. It’s always all about them, and they cannot comprehend that my true empathy for them is about equal to what they showed for their victims.
As we concluded the interview, I shook McGowan’s hand and thanked him for talking with me. I wished him good luck and tried to give no indication of my personal feelings about him or my recommendations to the parole board.
