Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky Page A

model their behavior into identifiable patterns. Between 1979 and 1983, agents from the BSU conducted intimate and detailed interviews in prisons with thirty-six convicted sex murderers, of whom twenty-nine were serial killers. 27 Everything was asked of them, from their earliest childhood recollections to the most horrifying details of their crimes and motives. The families, friends, and acquaintances of the killers were also extensively interviewed, as were their surviving victims. The BSU also made a detailed study of the 118 dead victims attributed to the killers in the study: their occupations, their lifestyles, vital statistics, where they encountered their killers, their autopsies, and the conditions in which their bodies were found. All that data served as the basis for the FBI’s profiling system.
    In order for the profiling system to be applied usefully to serial crimes in different parts of the United States, there needed to be some kind of formal, centralized organization and system of collecting very detailed crime data, storing it, and making it available for analysis. Big money would need to be allocated for that.
    At the exact same time (1981–1983), three major committees on Capitol Hill were looking into the issue of increasing violence, linkage blindness, the kidnapping of children, child pornography, and serial killers: the Attorney General’s Task Force on Violent Crime; the House Committee on Civil and Constitutional Rights; and Senator Specter’s Juvenile Justice Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate.
    The start of these hearings in 1981 was punctuated by several dramatic cases of child murders. In Atlanta, Wayne Williams was arrested for a series of murders of black male children and youths; in New York, Etan Patz vanished on his way to school; and in Florida, six-year-old Adam Walsh vanished in a mall when his mother left him alone for a moment. The boy’s decapitated remains were found floating in a canal. An out-of-state car was linked to the crime but the perpetrator was never identified. There would later be some controversy that it might have been Ottis Elwood Toole, Henry Lee Lucas’s partner (the two dubiously claimed killing a total of 360 victims as they roamed the highways). Adam was the son of John Walsh, who would become a vocal victims’ and missing children’s advocate and host of America’s Most Wanted.
    A year after his son’s murder, the tragic figure of John Walsh testified before the Senate committee describing recent cases of serial murder and suggesting that missing children are in a large measure murdered by serial killers. The problem, Walsh said, was linkage blindness and the failure of law enforcement agencies to coordinate information and intelligence across multiple jurisdictions. Because of this weakness, young people were disappearing without a trace, until they might be found in a mass grave somewhere. Using the controversial Department of Health figure that 1.8 million children go missing every year, Walsh testified that every hour 205 children go missing, many of whom he said, would be found murdered. He failed to explain that that 95 percent of those missing were confirmed runaways, of whom 95 percent would return home within fourteen days. 28 Instead, headlines screamed: “205 MISSING CHILDREN EVERY HOUR!”
    “The unbelievable and unaccounted for figure of fifty thousand children disappear annually and are abducted for reasons of foul play,” Walsh claimed in his testimony. 29 “This country is littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped, and strangled children,” Walsh warned. 30
    On February 3, 1984, in her nationally syndicated column, Ann Landers published a letter written by the executive director of the Adam Walsh Center. It opened, “Dear Ann: Consider these chilling statistics: Every hour 205 American children are reported missing. This means 4,920 per day and 1.8 million per year.” 31
    It was spooky stuff and mothers