When a Killer Calls: A Haunting Story of Murder, Criminal Profiling, and Justice in a Small Town (Cases of the FBI's Original Mindhunter, #2)

by John E. Douglas

Under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau had developed a reputation for wanting to be involved in every crime that came to its attention. In our case, however, there was no sense in wasting our limited resources or the local law enforcement agency’s critical time if we had nothing to contribute. To put it in its simplest terms, the more common and ordinary a crime, the harder it is to solve using our methods.

While motive or motivation is an important and interesting aspect of a violent crime, and something the jury almost always wants

We looked at a number of critical components, some of which we’ve mentioned previously: victimology, along with any known verbal exchanges between the victim and perpetrator; crime scene indicators, such as any evidence of antecedent behavior or how the crime itself was carried out, how the body was disposed of and left, and evidence of postcrime behavior; how many crime scenes were involved; environment, place, and time; apparent number of offenders; degree of organization or disorganization; type of weapon(s); forensic evidence; personal items missing from the victim or purposely left at the crime scene or body disposal site; and medical examination of the living victim or postmortem examination of a deceased one. All of these factors help us profile an UNSUB and anticipate his—and it was almost always a “he” when it came to UNSUBs we would profile—next move.

We define signature as something the offender has to do to satisfy himself emotionally, not necessarily to pull off the crime successfully. For example, if he is a sadist, physical torture might be part of the signature. If he is a certain type of rapist, making the victim follow a verbal script as he assaults her might be a signature element.

We had learned over our years of research that most predators displayed three primary traits that fulfilled their emotional aspirations in committing their crimes: manipulation, domination, and control.

His frequent invocations of God also suggested an omnipotent and invincible sense of himself, and his repeated instructions as to what Sheriff Metts should and should not do indicated a feeling of superiority over law enforcement authorities. When we see this kind of behavior from an UNSUB, directing the cops or ridiculing them for not being able to catch him, it often indicates an internal war within him over his own inadequacy, and the need to prove himself to himself.

It has been my experience that when someone says they’re not jerking you around, they’re jerking you around. When they claim they’re not playing games, it means they’re playing games. And highly intelligent people don’t often feel the need to go around telling anyone how intelligent they are.

Here was another example of how he was starting to mentally decompensate, to lose the ability to react in a reasonable or methodical way, due to the increasing stress he was under. Logical thinking involves a progression of ideas. Saying he’d be sent to the electric chair and then put in prison for the rest of his life was illogical, regressive thinking. He was starting to come unglued from the pressure he was under.

We then expanded the scope of our discussion to give McCarty examples of how profile elements could be useful with other aspects of the investigation. For example, given our expectation that the UNSUB would have a collection of pornography focused on bondage and sadomasochism, we advised that if they identified a suspect, this was something they could include in a search warrant application.

Though the timing is different for each offender, we explained that our research into the mindset of the serial killer showed that the crime begins as a fantasy in his mind, and generally can be interpreted as some form of personal and sexual empowerment. The fantasy will build and build until he is ready to act on it. But the reality is never as good as he imagined it, and he will become let down and have something of a cooling-off period before the cycle begins again.

There was never any question in my mind that Larry Gene Bell had a mental illness, as I would say just about every violent predator does. But in all of my years of behavioral analysis and criminal investigation, I have almost never seen someone whose urges to harm others were actually uncontrollable. A rare exception and example of someone who really was compelled would be Richard Trenton Chase, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic with severe hypochondria, who murdered six victims in the space of a month in the Sacramento, California, area in 1977. In addition to having sex with some of the corpses, Chase drank their blood, which was his motivation for the murders. He thought he needed it to stay alive and keep his heart beating.

So, I would argue that rather than Bell being under an uncontrollable compulsion, he abducted, assaulted, and murdered his victims because it was the one element in his otherwise ordinary, uneventful, and largely unsuccessful life that gave him satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment, and sexual fulfillment. He made the choice.

Some might wonder at how someone so vicious could also appear to be so nurturing, or vice versa. This doesn’t surprise me at all. It is part of the thrill for this type of predator that he feels the power of life and death; that he can save or kill at will. In both cases, he feels in possession of the other person, that through his intervention she belongs to him.