story was crap. Like the UNSUB described inthe previous chapter and so many other sexual predators, he killed because it made him feel good. It let him possess women in death in a way he felt totally incapable of doing in life. His manipulation, domination, and control of his victims didn’t require any verbal interchange or conversation, it didn’t require bodily contact, it didn’t require the taking of souvenirs such as jewelry or underwear. But it was manipulation, domination, and control just as clearly as if the crimes had had those more common elements.
When we got around to the subject of motive, Berkowitz explained to me how he had been receiving telepathic orders to kill from a three-thousand-year-old demon residing in this black Labrador retriever named Harvey, which belonged to his neighbor Sam Carr. Together with the letters full of obscure symbolism, this immediately suggested paranoid schizophrenia to much of the psychiatric community.
“Hey, David, knock off the bullshit,” I said to him. “The dog had nothing to do with it.”
He laughed and owned up to the hoax. It was just one more example of manipulation, domination, and control. Like Ed Kemper, the guy wasn’t normal, but he knew and understood what he was doing and kept doing it.
And this is one of several reasons why, much as I’d like to believe differently, I find the hope of rehabilitation for most of these people dim to nonexistent. As we will see throughout this book, unlike burglars or bank robbers or even drug dealers, who do not necessarily
enjoy
what they do for a living—who merely want the money it brings them—sexual predators and child molesters do enjoy their crimes; in fact, many of them do not even consider them crimes. They don’t want to change.
Dr. Stanton E. Samenow, the Washington, D.C.—area clinical psychologist who has probably done asmuch as anyone to explore, understand, and try to alter the thinking of habitual lawbreakers, challenges the very notion of rehabilitation. “Rehabilitation as it has been practiced cannot possibly be effective,” he writes in his penetrating book,
Inside the Criminal Mind
, “because it is based on a total misconception. To rehabilitate is to restore to a former constructive capacity or condition.
There is nothing to which to rehabilitate a criminal.
There is no earlier condition of being responsible to which to restore him.”
I’m afraid my own research and experience, as well as that of my colleagues, leads me to concur wholeheartedly with Dr. Samenow’s courageous observation.
In the Investigative Support Unit at Quantico, in our work with local police, we were always trying to understand the nature of the obsession of the unknown predator.
Sometimes he communicated to us directly, as in the Search and Destroyer case, telling us just why he was doing it and how he wanted to be perceived.
Sometimes he enlightened us indirectly, giving us the clues to figure it out, as happened in Atlanta.
And sometimes, we were never sure. Those were the toughest and most agonizing cases of all. One of them nearly killed me. More about that in a moment.
But first, by the winter of 1981, Atlanta, Georgia, was gripped by a terror that had been building for a year and a half, ever since a thirteen-year-old boy named Alfred Evans had gone missing and then turned up dead three days later, in a wooded area on the west side of the city. While searching the site, police discovered another body, partially decomposed, this one belonging to fourteen-year-old Edward Smith, who had disappeared four days before Alfred. Both boys were black. Alfred had been strangled, Edward shot. By the time I got involved, there were sixteencases, all black children, and as far as anyone could tell, the killer or killers were still active.
At that time, the FBI’s profiling program was still new. It had its home at the FBI Academy in Quantico because that’s where it had begun, informally at first under
When we got around to the subject of motive, Berkowitz explained to me how he had been receiving telepathic orders to kill from a three-thousand-year-old demon residing in this black Labrador retriever named Harvey, which belonged to his neighbor Sam Carr. Together with the letters full of obscure symbolism, this immediately suggested paranoid schizophrenia to much of the psychiatric community.
“Hey, David, knock off the bullshit,” I said to him. “The dog had nothing to do with it.”
He laughed and owned up to the hoax. It was just one more example of manipulation, domination, and control. Like Ed Kemper, the guy wasn’t normal, but he knew and understood what he was doing and kept doing it.
And this is one of several reasons why, much as I’d like to believe differently, I find the hope of rehabilitation for most of these people dim to nonexistent. As we will see throughout this book, unlike burglars or bank robbers or even drug dealers, who do not necessarily
enjoy
what they do for a living—who merely want the money it brings them—sexual predators and child molesters do enjoy their crimes; in fact, many of them do not even consider them crimes. They don’t want to change.
Dr. Stanton E. Samenow, the Washington, D.C.—area clinical psychologist who has probably done asmuch as anyone to explore, understand, and try to alter the thinking of habitual lawbreakers, challenges the very notion of rehabilitation. “Rehabilitation as it has been practiced cannot possibly be effective,” he writes in his penetrating book,
Inside the Criminal Mind
, “because it is based on a total misconception. To rehabilitate is to restore to a former constructive capacity or condition.
There is nothing to which to rehabilitate a criminal.
There is no earlier condition of being responsible to which to restore him.”
I’m afraid my own research and experience, as well as that of my colleagues, leads me to concur wholeheartedly with Dr. Samenow’s courageous observation.
In the Investigative Support Unit at Quantico, in our work with local police, we were always trying to understand the nature of the obsession of the unknown predator.
Sometimes he communicated to us directly, as in the Search and Destroyer case, telling us just why he was doing it and how he wanted to be perceived.
Sometimes he enlightened us indirectly, giving us the clues to figure it out, as happened in Atlanta.
And sometimes, we were never sure. Those were the toughest and most agonizing cases of all. One of them nearly killed me. More about that in a moment.
But first, by the winter of 1981, Atlanta, Georgia, was gripped by a terror that had been building for a year and a half, ever since a thirteen-year-old boy named Alfred Evans had gone missing and then turned up dead three days later, in a wooded area on the west side of the city. While searching the site, police discovered another body, partially decomposed, this one belonging to fourteen-year-old Edward Smith, who had disappeared four days before Alfred. Both boys were black. Alfred had been strangled, Edward shot. By the time I got involved, there were sixteencases, all black children, and as far as anyone could tell, the killer or killers were still active.
At that time, the FBI’s profiling program was still new. It had its home at the FBI Academy in Quantico because that’s where it had begun, informally at first under
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