Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit

This chapter begins with the case of Robert Hansen, the Alaska serial killer known as the “Butcher Baker.” By the time FBI became involved, Hansen was already identified as a suspect by the Alaska state troopers. He had kidnapped and brutally attacked a teenage sex worker in June 1983; the woman managed to escape. She reported her attack to the police and identified Hansen as her attacker, but two business associates gave him an alibi for the time of the attack. Though he was not arrested, he quickly became a suspect. In the years immediately before the attack, Alaskan law enforcement had found bodies of sex workers who had been shot in the Alaskan wilderness.

Douglas gave Alaskan police the the profile of an individual who sounded like Robert Hansen. According to Douglas, the offender would be a small-statured, pockmarked male with low self-esteem and a stutter; he would have a history of rejection by his peers and by women in particular. He would be a capable hunter who preyed upon female sex workers because they were transient and would not be easily missed. Using behavioral evidence, the FBI was able to assist in breaking his alibi and draft a search warrant that turned up overwhelming physical evidence for a case against Hansen. He pled guilty and was sentenced to 499 years in prison.

Douglas also worked on the case of the “.22-Caliber Killer,” a perpetrator who shot six black men and eviscerated two of them in Buffalo, New York. Shortly after these incidents, a black man at a Buffalo Hospital was attacked and almost strangled to death. In December, seven men were stabbed in Manhattan by the “Midtown Slasher,” and five men were stabbed in Buffalo; of those victims, five survived the attacks. Douglas could not definitively link all three sets of crimes to the same individual, but he believed that the murderer was the same racist offender with a blitz-attack style of crime. He predicted that the individual who committed these crimes would be someone who joined hate groups, the military, or other social organizations, and he would believe that he was contributing to the group’s cause. The offender would be organized and rational, and his belief system could be logical within itself. Joseph Christopher, an Army private who had slashed a black fellow soldier, was arrested for the crimes, and later sentenced to 60 years to life.

Douglas uses this case to discuss modus operandi (or MO) and signature. Christopher did not fit the pattern for the murders of the two taxi drivers who had their hearts cut out, and he never admitted or denied those murders. Douglas believed that the eviscerations did not fit with Christopher’s MO or signature of blitz attacks; the eviscerations appeared to be disorganized and ritualistic. The stabbings differed in MO to the .22-caliber shootings; the signature of random attacks on black men would link the deaths. Another individual who was successfully prosecuted using signature analysis was Steven Pennell, a thirty-one-year-old white married electrician who was the father of two. He raped, tortured, and murdered sex workers in his van, and he disposed of their bodies along Interstates 40 and 13. His modus operandi varied greatly, as he used different methods of torture, but his signature never changed—he physically and sexually tortured his victims before killing them.

Another case involving signature analysis was the case of George Russell Jr., who bludgeoned and strangled three women in 1990. The victims were posed naked in a demeaning and humiliating manner after death. Douglas testified that the blitz attacks were the offender’s MO; his posing of the women was his signature, when he “treat[ed] the victim like a prop to leave a specific message” (256). This element of the crime tied all three homicides to the same perpetrator, and Russell was found guilty and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. 

Douglas discusses two cases of rape-turned-murder. The first case is that of Karla Brown, a petite, pretty, twenty-three-year-old woman who was engaged; she had just moved into her new home with her fiancé, Mark Fair, in Wood River, Illinois. The couple had a thrown a party for their friends on June 20, 1978 to thank them for helping the couple move into their new home. The next day, Fair arrived at their home with a friend to find Brown dead in the laundry room. She was restrained with an electrical cord, naked from the waist down, and she wore a winter sweater. Her upper body was submerged in a barrel filled with water. When Fair and his friend removed her from the barrel, they saw deep lacerations on her face. 

From the start, the case was difficult because many people had been inside the home, assisting with the couple’s move. Additionally, the crime scene technician had difficulty documenting the scene because the flash attachment on his camera did not work. A number of suspects were considered, including Brown’s fiancé Fair, Tom Feigenbaum, the friend who had been with him when he found the body, and Brown’s stepfather Joe Sheppard, Sr., who had been physically abusive to Brown in the past and sexually inappropriate with her friends. All three were eliminated as suspects. Paul Main, the couple’s new neighbor, was suspected as he was at home that afternoon. His polygraph test results were questionable; as well, a friend of Main’s who said they were together said that Main left in the morning to look for work. No physical evidence linked neither Main nor his friend John Prante to the crime.

After several years passed with no leads, the assigned investigators contacted the FBI for assistance on the case. Douglas provided a profile that would likely match an individual that they had already interviewed, one who had been cooperative with the police. This individual would be in his mid-to-late twenties, of average intelligence, and was likely someone who was familiar with the victim or someone who had observed the couple’s habits enough to know that she would be alone the day of the murder. He likely did not plan to murder Brown; he had probably propositioned her and been turned down. His anger was evidenced by the blunt force trauma and manual strangulation. He likely moved, changed homes, and/or jobs during the course of the investigation. Douglas advised intense media attention and continual updates, which would stress the offender. He also provided an arrest-through-interrogation strategy to use when law enforcement had caught the offender. John Prante fit Douglas’s profile almost perfectly, and with corroborating witness testimony and matching dental impressions, he was charged with murder and burglary with intent to commit rape. He was found guilty and sentenced to 75 years in prison.

The second case, of FBI stenographer Donna Lynn Vetter, was unlike Karla Brown’s case; the case was complex, but it was solved within a year of the precipitating incident. Vetter was a religiously devout, young, white twenty-two-year-old who lived alone. Vetter’s resident manager had installed a white lightbulb over the doors of apartments belonging to single female tenants so that staff and security would pay special attention to these tenants; these lights served to highlight who was vulnerable. Vetter’s body was found nude, beaten, stabbed, and raped. Her window screen had been ripped out, and the assailant had forced his way into her ground floor apartment through her front window. The murder weapon was located under a seat cushion in the living room, and nothing of value was taken. The scene indicated that Vetter ferociously fought back, which likely enraged her assailant. The assigned agents, Roy Hazelwood and Jim Wright, profiled the offender as a rapist and not a murderer, as rape appeared to be his original intention. He would be in his twenties, and he likely had an explosive temper and low intelligence, but he would be streetwise and athletic. The assailant lived close to the victim and would have a history of sex crimes, and this murder would be his first homicide. He probably told someone of the crime he committed, and that individual, warned the FBI, would be in danger. Within two and a half weeks of the profile’s release, the assailant’s armed-robbery partner reported him. He was apprehended and charged. The jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death. 

Douglas discusses cases involving family and domestic homicides. The first case involves a young single mother who faked her child’s kidnapping. Her initial report to the police included these details: she had taken her two-year-old son shopping. Just after reaching her car, the mother was suddenly beset with stomach cramps. She used a restroom in her apartment complex after instructing her son to stay inside the building. The mother left her son unattended for forty-five minutes, and when she emerged, he was nowhere to be found. Instead, she found one of his mittens on the pavement of the parking lot. The mother contacted 911 and reported that her child had been kidnapped. During the investigation, she passed a polygraph test, and she received the matching mitten in the mail. From that detail, the FBI’s Gregg McCrary determined that the kidnapping was staged, and that the child was dead by his mother’s hand. When a new polygraph test was administered by an FBI expert, the mother admitted to murdering her child because her new boyfriend did not want her child. She led police to her son’s body, which she had carefully buried in a snowsuit and blanket, covered by a plastic bag. Douglas notes that body dump sites do not typically show such care and guilt.

According to Douglas, this type of staging is “[t]he key to many murders of and by loved ones or family members” (288). An example of this staging can be observed in the 1980 murder of Linda Haney Dover in Georgia. Dover was on cordial terms with her husband Larry, although she was separated from him. Even after their separation, Mrs. Dover still went over to his home to clean, and on the day of her murder, she was allegedly cleaning the home while he took their child to the park. Upon his return from the park, Mr. Dover found blood on the carpet. He called the police, who discovered Mrs. Dover’s body wrapped in a comforter in the crawl space under the house. She had multiple stab wounds and blunt force trauma to the head and face, and her body was positioned in a way that suggested she may have been sexually assaulted. Police were unable to find the weapon but believe that it was from the home. From the crime scene itself, she appeared to have been initially assaulted in a bedroom and then moved to the crawl space. Douglas profiled two possible types of offender. The first suggested a crime of opportunity by an inexperienced loner who lived nearby, and the second, more plausible situation involved someone who knew the victim well. The murderer was intelligent but not well-educated, he was physically strong, and he likely had a history of assault. The perpetrator was probably suffering from financial woes at the time of the homicide. The offender’s appearance, employment, and personality would completely transform. The person who fit this profile was Mrs. Dover’s husband. He was convicted and sentenced to life.

Another case involving domestic staging was the strangulation death of Elizabeth Jayne “Betty” Wolsieffer in 1986. The police in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania were contacted on August 30, regarding a disturbance in the home of a local dentist. When they arrived, they found Dr. Wolsieffer on the floor. He had apparently been the victim of blunt force trauma to the head and attempted strangulation. After the attack, he had contacted his brother Neil; Neil contacted the police after his arrival to the home. Dr. Wolsieffer indicated that his wife and daughter were upstairs, but Neil had not gone up to check on either of them. His wife, Betty, was found on the floor of her bedroom with indications that she was manually asphyxiated. Dr. Wolsieffer’s daughter, Danielle, who was asleep and unharmed, did not hear any upheaval during the attack. Dr. Wolsieffer’s account pointed to a large, unknown assailant who had attacked him and then attacked his wife. His injuries were relatively mild, and the police were suspicious of his version of events. The evidence and the crime scene did not substantiate his allegations of a daytime break-in; nothing of value was taken, he had no injuries that suggested strangulation, and strangest of all, no one had checked on the women upstairs. As time went on, Dr. Wolsieffer’s account of the events evolved and began to contradict previous versions of events. Dr. Wolsieffer also neglected to mention that he was having marital difficulties; he had been having several affairs, and his wife had plans to confront him days before her murder. His brother Neil’s version of events was similarly strange, and after pressure from the victim’s family and the media, and repeated requests from the police, he scheduled a meeting with the police. Neil was killed in a head-on collision the morning of his meeting.

The police already had a suspect when they contacted the FBI for assistance, so the purpose of Douglas’s review was to provide local law enforcement with information that would support an arrest. Douglas agreed that the murder had been committed by someone who was close to the victim because manual strangulation is a personal crime. The crime scene appeared to be staged, given that the break-in took place over a weekend in daylight. The police continued to build their case with Douglas’s profile, and in November 1989, Dr. Wolsieffer was arrested in his dental practice in Falls Church, Virginia.