The Killer Across the Table

by John E. Douglas

The finding was confirmed for him by the absence of rigor mortis, a postmortem stiffening of the muscles that begins several hours after death and subsides within twenty-four to thirty-six hours.

Essentially, Joan was beaten, choked, sexually assaulted, and ultimately battered to death. But according to Dr. Zugibe, it was even worse than that. Had she died right after the beating and strangulation, her face and body would not have appeared swollen. Upon death, the homeostatic functions that cause swelling at an injured site shut down. And since swelling takes about half an hour to be completed, he concluded that Joan must have been alive for at least that long following the attack. Mercifully, she was almost certainly unconscious.

But I always start from the same premise, one that I taught throughout my years with the FBI: Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.

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.

“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.

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.

He corrected me on the detail of when he had raped Rima. It was as straightforward and procedural a recounting as if he were describing the effort to change a flat tire. Yes, he had hit her hard enough to neutralize her, then had had sex with her when she was unconscious. He strangled her, and as she regained consciousness and gasped for air, he continued sexually assaulting her. Then he dragged her over to the nearby creek and forced her head underwater. But when he raised up her head again, she was still alive and gasping for air. So he grabbed a rock about the size of his hand and bashed it against her head until she died. As I listened, I was conscious of not changing my expression, but my blood was boiling and I was thinking to myself, If anyone deserves the death penalty, it’s this guy.

In the nature-versus-nurture equation, Kondro stands as evidence that some individuals are born that way and will grow up with these dangerous tendencies unless there is dramatic and timely intervention. And frankly, the data is far from conclusive as to whether that works in the majority of cases.

“Any regrets?” “No. I have a regret that I should have been a better father to my children. But I have no regrets, no.” “No regrets, back to 1985 with your first victim? Any regrets there?” “No.” “How about 1996? Any regrets there?” “No.” “Anything you would have done differently?” “Yeah, I would have took her [Kara Rudd] out to a different spot.” “So she wouldn’t have been found?” “Well, that was the idea. That was the intention.”

A lot of people are surprised to discover that the most successful and numerically devastating serial killers are not the Jack the Rippers, who stalk their victims by night, or even the Ted Bundys, who charm, entice, then abduct, assault, and kill beautiful young women. Actually, and ironically, they are workers in one of the most sacred helping professions, people who don’t even bother to hide their identities or their faces from unsuspecting victims or their families.

Another neighbor, Helen Metzger, was perceived by Harvey as a threat to Carl. He sprinkled arsenic on some leftovers he gave her and in a jar of mayonnaise in her refrigerator. Several weeks later he gave her a pie laced with more arsenic. She developed paralysis and needed a tracheotomy to facilitate breathing. But following the tracheotomy, she began hemorrhaging and lost consciousness. She never came out of it. The hospital attributed her death to Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing condition that can affect the lungs.

Applying the nature-versus-nurture question here, one has to ask whether Harvey fits into the “made” or “born” category. As we’ve noted, there seems to be some organic predisposition, and we don’t know enough about neuroscience yet to understand it. Is it genetic? Possibly. But when we study the background of a violent predator, we generally find a sibling who has no such tendencies. Or we find one who has some of the same tendencies but manifests them in a diametrically opposite manner.

Our research suggests that the combination of hardwired neurological factors and a bad childhood and adolescence contributes most often to an antisocial personality. It is possible that without one or the other influence, the violence-prone predator never emerges, as suggested by our informal control group of law-abiding siblings like David and Mikal. But this is not a laboratory experiment where we can play it out two ways. At this point in the development of both neuropsychology and criminology, the best we can offer is theories.

Of course, I don’t know whether these two child molesters contributed to young Donald’s sexual orientation, but I tend to doubt it. The science is pretty convincing that male homosexuality is hardwired in an individual, probably before birth.

This is probably the most common theme that has emerged in all of my confrontations with killers across the table. There is almost always an external reason the killing started. As a result, nearly all serial killers believe their crimes are justified, or at least explainable. They perceive themselves as the true victims—yet another manifestation of their extreme narcissism.

On top of that, Harvey knew that unless there was a specific indication, most hospital deaths would not be subjected to autopsy examination.

Two things struck me in what we learned from Hagmaier’s interview. First, the vicious sexual assault and murder of the beautiful young women who were Bundy’s victims of choice were not the most important or satisfying elements of the crimes for him. What he described as really getting him off was the thrill of the hunt and capture, and then, like Dennis Rader, the sublime power of life and death over another human being. He related that when he abducted two women, Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, from Lake Sammamish in Washington State, he kept them alive as long as he felt he safely could and made one watch as he killed the other. This is what gave him the most sadistic pleasure. He told Hagmaier that the reason he killed so many beautiful young women was that he wanted to. He told Bill he enjoyed it as an almost mystical experience that allowed him to fully possess his victims. In that he was also like Rader, who was operating around the same time.

Then he took an opposite tack, describing how Watson’s comatose body was unnaturally contracted, that he had chronic bedsores, and that it required two people to move him. Harvey compared him to Karen Ann Quinlan, the young Pennsylvania woman who lost consciousness in 1975 after consuming several drugs mixed with alcohol and lay in an irreversible coma while her religious family tried to have her removed from a respirator and returned to her “natural state.” Even after an appeals judge sided with the family and Ms. Quinlan was removed from the respirator, she lived for almost a decade with just feeding tube support. This was the case that brought right-to-die issues to national attention. Harvey claimed he didn’t want Watson to suffer such a fate.

His words turned out to be prophetic. On the afternoon of March 28, 2017, Harvey was found beaten unconscious in his cell at the Toledo Correctional Institution. The wounds were the result of blunt force trauma without a weapon, and the assailant was believed to be another inmate. Both killer and victim were said by prison spokesmen to have been in a protective custody unit. Harvey died two days later without regaining consciousness at Mercy Health–St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo. He was sixty-four years of age—about thirty years short of his first possible parole date.