Chapter 16 Chapter Thirteen The Most Dangerous Game

In 1924, author Richard Cornell wrote a short story entitled "The Most Dangerous Game".The story is about a hunter named Genalel Zarov, who specializes in big game, gets tired of hunting animals and turns to a more challenging and intelligent kind of prey: people.The story is still widely read today.My daughter Lauren just recently read it at school. As far as we know, until about 1980, Cornell's story existed only in the fictional world of the novel.But a mild-mannered baker named Robert Hanson in Anchorage, Alaska, changed its fictional nature. We did not profile Hansen as we normally would, or devise a strategy to identify and capture him.By the time we were called in in September 1983, the Alaska police had identified Hanson as a murder suspect.But they couldn't be sure of the extent of his involvement, or whether someone as improbable as he was, a respected family man, a pillar of the community, would actually commit the crime of being accused. the horrific crimes alleged.

That's what happened: On June 13 of the previous year, a panicked young woman ran up to a police officer in Anchorage.With a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist, she tells a bizarre story.She was a 17-year-old prostitute who met a small, red-haired, pockmarked man on the street.The man offered $200 for her to perform oral sex on him in his car.He quietly cuffed her wrists during the oral sex, pointed a gun at her, and drove her to his home in the city's bustling Marltown neighborhood, she said.No one else was home at the time.He told her he wouldn't hurt her if she would cooperate and do as he said.He forced her to strip naked and raped her.Later, he handcuffed her to a post in the basement, immobilizing her while he slept for hours.When he woke up, he said he liked her so much that he was going to fly her to his cabin in the woods on his private jet, where they would make love again, and then fly her back to Anchorage and set her free .

But she knew very well in her heart that that possibility was extremely slim.He had raped and violated her and had done nothing to hide his identity.If he did get her to that cabin, she would be in big trouble.At the airport, she managed to escape while her kidnappers were loading supplies onto the plane.She ran as fast as she could, calling for help, and that's how she found the policeman. Based on her description, the kidnapper appeared to be Robert Hansen.He was in his forties, grew up in Iowa, had moved to Anchorage for 17 years, owned a thriving bakery and was considered a valued member of the community.He is married and has a son and a daughter.Police drove her to Hansen's Marltown home, which she said was where she was ravaged.They took her to the airport again, and she recognized the Superhound belonging to Robert Hansen.

Police then found Hanson and confronted him about the young woman's allegations.He reacted with indignation, claiming to have never met her, and insisting that she was obviously interested in his eminence and wanted to blackmail him.He thought the allegation itself was ridiculous. "You can't rape a whore, can you?" he asked the policeman. He also has an alibi for the night of the crime.His wife and two children spent the summer in Europe.He was having dinner with two business associates at his home when the incident occurred.He named them, and they confirmed his account.The police had no evidence other than the young woman's verbal allegations, so he was neither arrested nor charged.

Despite their lack of evidence, Anchorage police and Alaska police officers smelled smoke and felt a fire.As early as 1980, construction workers found the remains of a woman's body while excavating on Iklutna Road.The body was shallowly buried and partly eaten by bears, with marks indicating stabbing.Police have dubbed her "Anne of Iklutna," whose real identity has never been known, and the killer has never been caught. In late 1980, the body of Joanne Messina was found in a gravel pit near Seward.Then, in September 1982, hunters along the Knick River discovered the shallowly buried body of 23-year-old Sheri Morrow.She was a topless dancer who had disappeared in November of the previous year.She was hit three times.Shell casings found at the scene proved that the bullets came from a .223 caliber Ruger Mini 14, a high-powered hunting rifle.Unfortunately, this gun is so common in Alaska that it is impossible to find and make an appointment with every hunter who has one.But there was one peculiarity about the case: there were no bullet holes in the deceased's clothes, which meant she must have been naked when she was shot.

Almost a full year later, another body was discovered shallowly buried by the Knick River.This time the deceased was Paula Goldin, an unemployed secretary who had been desperate enough to take a job in a bar that employed topless waitresses to eke out a living.She was also killed by a Ruger Mini 14.She has been missing since April.Then came the escape of the 17-year-old prostitute from her kidnappers.In view of the many unsolved previous cases, and now there is another Golding case, the Criminal Investigation Division of the Alaska Police Department decided to follow up and investigate Hansen.

Although the police had considered Hansen a suspect before my profile, I wanted to keep my judgment independent of the investigative work that had already been done.So the first time I called, I didn't ask them to give me the details of the suspect first, but I said, "You guys tell me about the case first, and let me tell you about that guy." They described the unsolved murders and what happened to the young woman.After listening, I talked about my basic opinion and described the general situation of the perpetrators. They said that they sounded like their suspects, and even the details of stuttering were consistent.They then told me about Hansen, his job and family, his standing in the community, his reputation as a top-notch hunter, and more.Does this person sound like he might have committed these crimes?

Of course he could, I told them.The problem is: Although they have a lot of second-hand information, unfortunately they lack physical evidence enough to prosecute him.The only way to bring him to justice -- which they were eager to do -- was to try to get him to confess.They asked me to come to the scene and help them solve the case. In a sense, that goes against our normal procedure, which is to use the suspect's profile, his background, his personality and his behavior to determine whether he is involved in a series of crimes. I was joined by Jim Horn, who had recently transferred to our section from our resident office in Boulder, Colorado.We've done new agent training together in the past.When I was finally authorized to pick four agents to work with me, I invited Jim back to Quantico.Jim Horn is now one of the bureau's two top stress-management specialists, the other being Jim Reese.Stress management has become an extremely important part of our job.However, he used behavioral methods to handle cases from the Hansen case in 1983.

The trip to Anchorage was one of the more exciting, yet least comfortable, trips I've ever taken.The final leg of the trip was a nerve-wracking flight close to the water, and my eyes were bloodshot.After arriving, the police sent a car to pick us up and take us to the hotel where we stayed.On the way we drove past some bars where the victims had worked.The local weather is mostly freezing throughout the year, and prostitutes cannot solicit customers outside, so they basically do business in bars.Those bars are open almost 24 hours a day and night, and only close for about an hour to clean up and drive away drunks.In those days, Alaska had the highest rates of suicide, alcoholism, and venereal disease among the nation's highest rates of suicide, alcoholism, and venereal disease, almost a modern-day equivalent of our wild frontier west, thanks to the mass migration of migrants who flocked to build oil pipelines.

I found the atmosphere there to be very eerie.There seems to be a constant backlash between local residents and people from the "lower 48 states."Everywhere you see muscular, tattooed tough guys dangling around, looking as if they could have been straight out of a Marlboro cigarette ad.Since people travel long distances at every turn, everyone seems to have a plane, so Hansen is nothing out of the ordinary in this regard. The significance of this case to us is that this is the first time profiling has been used to assist police in obtaining a search warrant.We began to analyze all the facts we had about the crime and Robert Hansen.

On the victim's side, known victims were either prostitutes or topless dancers.They were part of a large, ubiquitous vulnerable class that traveled up and down the West Coast.Because their whereabouts were erratic, and because they had no habit of reporting their comings and goings to the police, if something happened to one of them, it would be difficult for anyone to know unless the body was found.The same conundrum confronted the police and the FBI in the investigation of the Green River killer in Washington state.This selection of victims deserves attention.The perpetrators only targeted the women who disappeared and no one thought about them. We don't know everything about Hansen's background, but from what we do know, he fits a certain pattern.He was small and thin, with a pockmarked face and a severe stutter.I suspect that he suffered from severe skin diseases when he was a teenager, coupled with his stuttering speech, he may be ridiculed and avoided by his peers, especially girls.So he may have low self-esteem.This may also be the reason why he moved to Alaska-to open up a new life in a new field.And from a psychological point of view, the torture of prostitutes is a fairly common form of revenge against women in general. I also put a lot of weight on the fact that Hansen was a notoriously good hunter.He was famous locally for bringing down a Dole sheep with a crossbow while hunting in the Cascoquim Mountains.I don't mean to imply that most hunters are flawed, but in my experience, if a man is flawed, one way he might try to make up for it is by hunting or juggling with a knife or gun.A severe stutter reminds me of David Carpenter, San Francisco's "Trail Killer."As in the Carpenter case, I'd wager that when Hansen feels absolutely dominant or dominant, his speech impediment disappears. Putting it all together, I began to see what was going on, even though it was a case we had never seen before.The bodies of prostitutes and sex dancers have been found in remote woodland with bullet marks suggesting they were killed by shotguns.In at least one case, bullets were fired at naked bodies.The 17-year-old who claimed to have escaped said Robert Henson had tried to fly her to his cabin in the woods.Hansen sent his wife and children to Europe for the summer, and stayed at home alone. My take is that, like Genalel Zarov in "The Most Dangerous Game," Robert Hansen grew tired of hunting red deer, bears, and dole sheep, and turned his attention to a more interesting prey.Zarov captured sailors as prey, whose ships were wrecked on the way to Zarov's islet when they struck deliberately unmarked reefs.He explained it this way: "I hunt the scum of the earth, the wandering sailors. A thoroughbred horse or a thoroughbred hound is worth more than twenty of them put together." I imagine that Hansen viewed prostitutes in much the same way.He considered them inferior and inferior to himself.He doesn't need rhetoric to get a guy to go with him.He'd drive her, hold her captive, fly her into the middle of nowhere, strip her naked, set her free, and hunt her with guns. His usual approach would not have been like this at first.He may have just killed them at first, and then flew the bodies to distant places by plane.He committed the crime just out of anger.Next, he may experience the pleasure of having the victim beg for his life.As a hunter, he probably had a whim at some point, thinking that he could combine these different activities, first use the plane to take them alive into the wilderness, satisfy his sexual desire, and then hunt them for fun.This may be the ultimate form of control.So he became addicted to hunting, killing again and again. This led me to figure out the exact steps to take to obtain a search warrant.All they wanted Jim and me to do was produce a written statement that they could present in court about what the profiling was about, what evidence we expected to find in the search, and the basis for our inference. Hansen was different from an ordinary criminal or a man who could use any kind of gun, and his shotgun meant a lot to him.I figured, therefore, that his shotgun was somewhere in the house, but not in the open.It might be hidden in crawl spaces in attics, behind paneling or false walls, and the like. I also estimate that our opponent will be a "collector", although this is not a collector in the general sense.Many rapists take mementos from their victims and give them to the women in their lives as a symbol of dominance and a way to relive the experience.But Hansen couldn't have hung the woman's head on the wall as he had done with the big game, so I thought he might have taken some other kind of trophy.Since the bodies hadn't been mutilated, I'd assume he was taking jewelry or something, and possibly giving it to his wife or daughter, lying about its provenance.He doesn't seem to have kept the victim's underwear or anything else we might think of, but maybe a small photograph or something else in the wallet.From my experience with people of this character, I thought it might be possible to find a diary or an inventory of their exploits. The next task is to break the evidence of his alibi.It wasn't a big deal for his two business partners to give testimony that they were with him the night of the murder, as long as they didn't endanger themselves.However, if we can get them to see what is at stake, things will change.Anchorage police persuaded the district attorney to authorize a grand jury to investigate the young prostitute's accusations that Hanson had kidnapped and assaulted her.The police then found the two businessmen and asked them to explain the situation again.Only this time they were told that if they were found to have lied to the grand jury, life would not be good for either of them. As we expected, this forced them to tell the truth.The pair admitted that they weren't with Hansen that night, and it was Hansen who asked them to help him out of what he said was a slightly awkward situation. In this way, Hansen was charged with kidnapping and rape and was arrested.A search warrant was issued to inspect his home.Police recovered the Luger Mini 14 shotgun at the house.Ballistic analysis showed it matched a shell casing found near the body.As we figured, Hansen had a well-appointed trophy room in which he often watched television.Animal heads, walrus ivory, horns and antlers, stuffed birds, etc. are hung everywhere in the room, and the floor is covered with animal fur.Under the floor of the attic, additional weapons were found, as well as various inexpensive jewelry and items belonging to the victims, including a Timex watch.Other items he has given to his wife and daughter.They also found a driver's license belonging to the victims and other identification documents for some of the victims.They didn't find the diary, but they did find physical evidence that served the same purpose: an aerial map showing the locations of various dumps. All this evidence is of course enough to send him to court.But if we didn't get a search warrant in the first place, we couldn't collect evidence.In this case, the only way we could obtain a search warrant was to convince the judge that we had sufficient evidence of conduct to justify the search.Since then, we have issued written statements many times, successfully assisted the police in obtaining search warrants and finally brought the murderer to justice.One of the most prominent cases is the case of Steven Pennell in Delaware, the "I-40 Killer Case", who used a specially modified van to pull women, then tortured and killed them.He was executed in 1992. When Robert Hansen was formally interrogated by Anchorage and Alaska police officers in February 1984, I was recuperating at home, recovering from my illness in Seattle.During this period, in addition to handling his own work, Roy Hazlewood bravely challenged me to teach the police in interview techniques. As when the police first confronted him about the kidnapping allegation, Hanson denied everything.He noted that his family life is happy and his business is thriving.He initially claimed that the casings from his shotgun were found in various locations because he had been there to practice shooting.The discovery of bodies at those locations was apparently purely coincidental.In the end, he confessed to the murders in the face of overwhelming evidence and after an exasperated prosecutor claimed he would seek the death penalty if he did not confess. To extenuate his guilt, he claimed that the purpose of taking the prostitute was to perform oral sex, which he felt should not be asked of his respectable wife.He argued that if the prostitutes satisfied his sexual desires, that was the end of the matter.Those who refused to obey, those who tried to control the situation, were the ones he punished. In this way, Hansen's behavior confirmed what we learned from our interview with Monte Rissel in prison.Both Hansen and Rissel have their own flaws and bad backgrounds.The women who irritated Rissel most were those who pretended to be friendly or jovial in order to appease him.How do they realize that power and dominance means everything to this type of people. Hanson also claimed that 30 to 40 prostitutes had voluntarily flown on his plane and returned alive.I find this statement unbelievable.The kind of prostitute Hansen was looking for wanted to finish the business as soon as possible before picking up the next customer.If they've been in the business for a while, they're generally pretty accurate.They wouldn't want to fly into the wild with a new client who they just met.If they made any mistake in contacting him, it was being persuaded to go to his house.Once they left his home, it was too late. Like his fictional counterpart, Genalel Zarov, Hansen claims that he only hunts a certain kind of man.He would never have thought of hurting a "decent" woman, but felt that prostitutes and topless or nude dancing girls were suitable targets for persecution. "I don't think I hate all women, it's not like that...but I thought prostitutes were inferior to me in my eyes... It was like a game where they had to pitch first before I could hit." During the hunt, the final shot is the climax. "The thrill is following the prey," he told his interrogators. He confirmed our speculations about his background.He grew up in Pocahontes, Iowa, the son of a baker father.Robert often pickedpocketed in shops when he was a child. For a long time after he grew up, even if he could afford the things he wanted to buy, he still persisted in his bad habit just to experience the thrill of pickpocketing.He said his troubles with girls started in middle school.He resented his stutter and pimples for keeping people from socializing with him. “Because of my strange looks and the way I talk, whenever I looked at a girl, she would always turn her head away.” He spent a quiet stint in the Army before marrying at 22.He was then sentenced for arson and theft, separated and divorced his wife, and later remarried.They moved to Alaska as soon as his second wife graduated from college.There, he can start a new life.But for several years, he continued to run afoul of the law, including repeatedly harassing women who flatly rejected his advances.Interestingly, like many other outlaws, he was driving a Volkswagen Beetle at the time. On February 27, 1984, Hansen pleaded guilty to four counts of murder, one count of rape, one count of kidnapping, and multiple counts of theft and misuse of a firearm.He was sentenced to 499 years in prison. In the Hansen case, for the police to have a clear idea of ​​how to solve the case, we must first answer a question: Are all known killings of prostitutes and topless dancers in Anchorage, or are they possible? All by the same person.This is often a key issue in the analysis of criminal investigations.Around the time the body of Robert Henson's first victim was discovered in Alaska, I was also invited by the Buffalo, New York, Police Department to comment on a series of brutal murders apparently motivated by racial hatred. An assessment was made. On September 22, 1980, a 14-year-old boy named Glenn Dunn was shot dead in the parking lot of a supermarket.Witnesses described the shooter as a white male youth.The next day, 32-year-old Harold Green was shot and killed at a fast food restaurant on the outskirts of Cheektowaga.That same night, 30-year-old Emmanuel Thomas was killed in front of his house, on the same lot as the previous day's murder.The next day, another man, Joseph McCoy, was assassinated in Niagara Falls. As far as is known, there are only two correlating factors between these senseless murders.All victims were black.Furthermore, they were all killed by 0.22 caliber rifles, so the media conveniently referred to the perpetrators as "0.22 caliber killers". Race relations in Buffalo became tense.Many in the black community felt their lives were not guaranteed, blaming police for not doing anything to protect them.In some ways, the horrors in Atlanta seemed to be playing out in Buffalo.And, as often happens in such situations, instead of improving immediately, things got worse. On October 8, a 71-year-old black taxi driver named Paller Edwards was found dead in the trunk of the back of the car in the suburbs of Amherst, with his heart cut out.The next day, another black taxi driver, 40-year-old Ernest Jones, was found on the banks of the Niagara River with his heart ripped out of his chest.His blood-stained taxi was found a few miles away on Buffalo's property boundaries.The next day, a Friday, a white man who basically fit the characteristics of a "0.22 caliber killer" walked into the ward of 37-year-old Colin Cole, yelled "I hate niggers", and rushed to strangle the patient's neck.Fortunately, a nurse arrived in time, the intruder fled in a hurry, and Cole survived. There was an uproar in the community.Administration officials feared an immediate backlash from black activist groups.At the request of Special Agent in Charge Richard Bretzing of the Buffalo Field Station, I visited the city that weekend.Bretzing was a very decent, respectable fellow, a man of real family responsibilities, and a prominent member of what the Bureau called "the Mormon Mafia."I will never forget a picture he hung in his office, to the effect: "If a man's family life fails, his life is also a failure." According to the usual practice, I start from the research of the victim.As the police said, the six victims did not have any important common characteristics other than their race. I think they were all unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time.Obviously, the "0.22 caliber" shooting cases were all committed by one person.The perpetrator was driven by a sense of mission and had a murderous style.The only obvious mental illness in it was a pathological hatred of black people.He doesn't care about anything else, as long as he is black, he will kill. I presume that this person has joined a hate group, or even a church with a clear purpose or values, and is hell-bent on convincing himself that he is doing something for it.I can see that he joined the army for this, but was discharged early due to psychological reasons or not being able to adjust to army life.The person may be sane and logical, and his prejudiced and delusional system of ideas may itself be logical and "logical." The other two crimes, vicious assaults on taxi drivers, were also committed by perpetrators based on racial hatred, but in both cases I think it was a different perpetrator to deal with.Both crimes were committed by an incoherent, psychopathic individual who may have suffered from hallucinations, most likely a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic.In my opinion, the crime scene reflects the killer's rage and his excessive desire to control and kill.Assuming that the four shootings and the two heart diggings were committed by the same person, it means that the murderer's personality changed in the less than two weeks between the murder of Joseph McCoy and the murder of Paller Edwards. Seriously divided.The act of breaking into the ward does not seem to be the work of a "0.22 caliber killer".Besides, my intuition and experience tell me that the morbid hallucinations of mind diggers have developed gradually over a long period of time, at least over a period of several years.In neither group of homicides, robbery was the motive.While the perpetrators of the first four cases fled after quick strikes, the crime scenes in the last two cases leave no doubt that the perpetrators were at the scene for a long time.If these six cases are connected, I think it is more likely that the psychopath who digs the heart may have been inspired by the racist who pioneered the killing of black people. Then, on December 22, four blacks and one Hispanic in the heart of Manhattan were killed by "downtown slashers" within 13 hours.Two other black victims narrowly escaped death. On Dec. 29 and 30, the hackers apparently struck again in the northern part of the state, stabbing to death Roger Adams, 31, in Buffalo and Wendell Barn, 26, in Rochester. s.In the following three days, three black men were nearly killed in a similar attack in Buffalo. I can't assure the police that the "0.22 caliber killer" is also the "downtown slasher," the killer in this last group of cases.But I can safely say that they are the same type of people.They all have racist ideas, and their crime styles are all lightning assassinations. Over the next few months, the "0.22 caliber" case made progress and came to light twice. In January, 22-year-old Army Private Joseph Christopher was arrested and charged in Benningside, Ga. (where the "power of evil" murder occurred three years ago, and William Hans was racist in the name of racism). Killed a black soldier in the same unit.During a search of his old home near Buffalo, police found a large amount of .22 caliber ammunition and a short-barreled rifle.Christopher had just enlisted the previous November, and he happened to be away from Benningside on leave when the murders happened in Buffalo and Manhattan. While held in the confinement center at Benningsay, he told the officer in charge, Capt. Aldrich Johnson, that he was responsible for "the Buffalo thing."He was charged with the Buffalo shooting and part of the assassination.He was found guilty.The court sentenced him to 60 years in prison after hearing a vigorous argument over his mental state.Psychiatrist Captain Matthew Levin examined Christopher at the Martin Army Hospital and was surprised to find that Christopher matched the profile of the "0.22 caliber killer" so closely.As predicted by the profile, the perpetrator was not well adapted to military life. Christopher neither admitted nor denied the killings of the two taxi drivers.He was not charged in either case, which did not follow the pattern of the other cases, either in terms of common practice or signature.Both terms are extremely important concepts in the analysis of criminal investigations, and I have spent a great deal of time explaining them on the witness stand in courtrooms across the country trying to make the difference between the two clear to judges and juries. Idioms are learned behaviors.It refers to what a murderer does when he commits a crime.It is dynamic, which means it can change.Signature is a term I coined to distinguish it from commonplace, which refers to what a murderer has to do to get his way.It's static; it doesn't change. For example, you wouldn't expect a minor to grow up committing crimes in the same manner unless he's done it seamlessly the first time around.However, every time he succeeds, he will learn from it and constantly improve his crime skills.That's why we say idioms are dynamic.On the other hand, if the guy commits the crime to—say—dominate the victim, cause him pain, or make him beg for mercy, that's a distinguishing mark.It is something that embodies the personality of the perpetrator, something he needs to do. In many states, the only way prosecutors can connect multiple crimes is by looking for conventions, and I believe we've shown that this approach is outdated.In Christopher's case, defense attorneys for the defendants could have argued that the Buffalo ".He may be right to say so.Yet the signature was similar: a propensity for the arbitrary assassination of black men, fueled by racial hatred. On the other hand, the shootings and heart-diggings revealed to me very different signatures.The heart-digger has the hallmarks of a ritualized, obsessive-compulsive neurosis, although he also has the underlying motives involved.Both types of people need something to gain from crime, but each needs something different. The difference between convention and signature can be subtle.Take, for example, the case of a bank robber in Texas who forced all detainees to strip naked and pose in various sexual positions before he photographed them.This is his identification mark.It wouldn't be necessary or helpful if his goal was just to rob a bank.In fact, doing so kept him there longer and put him at greater risk of arrest.However, it was clearly something he felt he had to do. There was also a bank robber in Rapids, Michigan.I've flown there to give crime-solving advice.This guy also made everyone in the bank strip naked, but didn't take pictures.His purpose in doing this is to make the witnesses too shy to look at him, so that they will not be able to tell his characteristics afterwards.This is a means to achieve the purpose of successfully robbing the bank.This is the usual way. Signature analysis was instrumental in the 1989 trial of Delaware Steven Pennell.In his case, we prepared a written statement which resulted in the police obtaining a search warrant.Our division's Steve Madikin worked closely with a joint task force from Newcastle County and Delaware police to come up with a profile that allowed police to narrow their investigation and develop a proactive strategy to catch the killer. The strangled prostitute was found along Interstates 40 and 13 with a fractured skull and obvious signs of sexual abuse and mutilation.Steve's profile is very accurate.He suggested that the perpetrator may have been a white man in his thirties who worked in construction.He might be driving a van with a lot of miles on it, looking around for targets.He always puts on a tough guy, maintains a normal relationship with his wife or girlfriend, but likes to dominate women.He may have carried a well-chosen weapon with him, destroying evidence after the fact.He may be familiar with the area and choose the place to dump the body according to the situation.He may commit crimes calmly and kill repeatedly until he is caught. Steven Pennell is a 31-year-old white man who works as an electrician, drives a van with a lot of miles, hunts for targets, poses as a tough guy, is married but likes to dominate women, and Che was carrying a well-prepared set of "rape kits". Knowing that the police noticed him, he began to try to destroy the evidence. He knew the area well and chose the place to abandon the body according to the situation.He was very calm when he committed the crime, and he killed again and again until he was arrested. Madikin suggested a female police officer dressed as a prostitute as bait, and the police tracked him down.For two months, Rene Lano wandered the roads, waiting for a man driving a van who fit the profile to pull over beside her.警方尤其对车内的地毯感兴趣，因为在其中一名受害者身上找到了属于车用地毯的蓝色纤维。拉诺被告诫如果确有面包车停下来，不要上车——尽管她身上装了窃听器，她完全有可能断送性命——但要发现尽可能多的线索。当一名符合侧写特征的家伙终于停下车时，她隔着打开的乘客座一侧的车门跟他攀谈起来，为她的服务费叽里呱啦地讨价还价。她注意到蓝色地毯之后，就开始夸奖他的面包车，一边交谈，一边漫不经心地用指甲刮起一些地毯纤维。联邦调查局化验室证实，它们与以前的采样是一致的。 在审判彭内尔的过程中，我被传唤去就本案的识别标志作证。被告方试图说明，这些案子不可能都是同一人所为，因为在惯用手法的诸多细节上存在差异。我则清楚地表明，不管惯用手法如何不同，这些谋杀案都有一个共同点，那就是在肉体和精神上折磨受害者。在一起案子中，作案者用钳子夹受害者的乳房，并割掉乳头。他把其他人的手脚捆绑起来，割伤她们的腿部，抽打她们的屁股，或者用锤子敲击她们。因此，尽管折磨的方法不尽相同——你愿意的话，不妨称之为惯用手法——但识别标志却都是从折磨受害者并从其痛苦的喊叫中获得快感。这并不是完成谋杀所必须的，却是他获得快感所必须的。 即使史蒂文·彭内尔仍然活着并且读了这些文字，他在将来犯罪时还是无法改变自己的行为。他也许能设计出不同的或者更巧妙的方法去摧残女人，但是他无法克制自己不去进行摧残。 如前所述，让我们大家感到幸运的是，特拉华州具有良好的审判制度和行为准则，在1992年3月14日彭内尔被用注射毒药的方式处死。 我们成功地运用识别标志分析方法的一个里程碑事件是1991年将它用在对小乔治·拉塞尔的审判中。他因一年前在西雅图棒打并勒杀三名白人女子的罪名受到指控，她们是玛丽·安·波尔赖克、安德烈亚·莱文和卡罗尔·玛丽·比瑟。我们科的史蒂夫·埃特做了侧写分析，然后我前去出庭作证。在这几起案子中，起诉方知道，他们无法根据一起谋杀案的证据就做出他在三起案子中有罪的判决。警方在波尔赖克被杀一案中掌握了极具说服力的证据，认为它可以证明他也是另外两起案子的元凶。于是成功的关键就在于把三起案子捆绑在一起。 拉塞尔不是你认为会犯下这些令人发指的罪行的那种人。尽管长期有小偷小摸的劣迹，他是个三十多岁的英俊黑人男子，既善辞令又迷人，交际圈子很广。即使默瑟艾兰当地警方过去曾以多项指控拘捕过他，也无法相信他会犯谋杀罪。 时至1990年，跨种族的强奸谋杀案仍不多见，但随着社会变得愈发开放和宽容，人们开始不把种族因素太当一回事。对拉塞尔这类比较沉着冷静、成熟老练的人来说尤其如此。他经常与黑人女子和白人女子约会，在两个种族中都有朋友。 基于三起谋杀案并非同一凶手所为这一假设，公设辩护律师米里亚姆·施瓦茨在公审前向金县高级法院法官帕特里夏·艾特肯提出了请求，要求将三起案件分开审理。法院批不批准他的请求直接关系到拉塞尔是否会被判为三个案子的凶手。检察官丽贝卡·罗和杰夫·贝尔德要求我解释这些案件之间有什么联系。 我提到了每起案子都采取了闪电式攻击这一惯用手法。由于三起凶杀案是在前后七个星期内发生的，我不认为作案者有必要改变惯用手法，除非他在某起案子中出了差错，觉得有必要加以改进。不过更具说服力的倒是识别标志。 三名女子都一丝不挂地摆放成挑逗淫荡的姿势，案发现场所表现的性成分一次比一次升级。 要杀害这些女子，采取闪电式攻击是必要的。把她们摆成淫荡的姿势却不然。 我解释了摆姿势与布置之间的区别。犯罪过程中出现布置时，那是作案者试图通过引导警方相信与实际案情不符的情况，将案件调查引入歧途。比如，当一个强奸犯试图使自己的侵入看起来像是一次普通盗窃时，那就是布置。它是惯用手法的一个表现。而摆姿势则属于识别标志。 “我们不会一连遇到那么多由不同作案者作案的摆姿势的案例，”我在听证会上作证说，“把受害者像道具一样摆弄从而留下特定的信息……这些是发泄愤怒的犯罪，是显示权力的犯罪。他要追求的是捕猎的刺激，是杀戮的刺激，是事后处置受害者以及从根本上击溃现存体制所带来的刺激。” 我很有把握地说：“十有八九这是单一凶手在作案。”鲍勃·凯佩尔是该州检察长办公室首席刑事调查官，曾是格林河专案小组的老资格成员，他出庭作证支持了我的看法。他指出，在他调查过的一千多起谋杀案中，只有大约十起出现了摆姿势，没有一起具有这三起案子的全部成分。 我们此时并没有说拉塞尔就是凶手。我们所要说的就是，其中一案的凶手即是全部三案的凶手。 被告方打算聘请一位专家对我的说法进行反驳，并作证说我对识别标志的看法是错误的，这三件案子不是同一人干的。具有讽刺意味的是，聘请的那个人竟然是我在局里的老同事以及研究系列杀人犯的搭档罗伯特·雷斯勒，他已从局里退休，但仍然在该领域从事咨询工作。 我认为对于任何像我和鲍勃这样在侧写和犯罪现场分析方面富有经验的人来说，这些案子都相当棘手，但为一人所为的迹象是很明显的，因此我感到极其惊讶，他居然会愿意站出来替对方作证，要求把案子分开审理。直言不讳地说，我觉得他大错特错。但正如我们多次承认过的，我们所从事的工作远非一门精确的科学，因此他当然有权发表自己的观点。我和鲍勃在这以后在不少问题上意见相左，其中最显著的或许莫过于杰弗里·达默是否精神失常这一问题。鲍勃站在被告一方，认为他精神失常。我则赞同为起诉方作证的帕克·迪茨的看法，他没有精神失常。 而后我更为吃惊的是，鲍勃声称他有其他事务缠身，根本就未出席拉塞尔一案的审判前听证会，而是派了另一位已退休的特工拉斯·沃佩格尔替代他。拉斯是个聪明的家伙，曾是国际象棋冠军，可以与10名对手进行车轮大战。但侧写不是他的主要专长，而且我认为事实对他也不利。所以，在他反驳我的观点之后，丽贝卡·罗对他进行了盘诘，让他好一阵子下不了台。听证会结束时，艾特肯做出了裁决：基于我和凯佩尔就三案凶手为同一个人的可能性提出了识别标志证据，准予一并审理三起案子。 我在庭审时再度利用识别标志的证据，对被告方提出的多重凶手作案这一观点予以反驳。在卡罗尔·比瑟被杀一案中，辩护律师施瓦茨认为，她的男友既有作案机会，也有作案动机。我们在查办强奸凶杀案时，总是把配偶或情人作为调查对象，但我坚信这是一起“陌生人”出于性动机作下的凶杀案。 由六男六女组成的陪审团经过四天审议最终做出了裁决，小乔治·沃特菲尔德·拉塞尔犯有一项一级谋杀罪和两项恶性一级谋杀罪。他被判处终身监禁，不得假释，被送往该州防备措施最严格的沃拉沃拉监狱服刑。 自从在西雅图虚脱昏迷以后，这是我第一次回到那里。在经历了格林河杀手案的重挫之后，能重返那里并协助侦破一起案子，我感到非常愉快。我回到了瑞典医院，很高兴地看到他们仍然挂着我送去的感谢匾。我也回到了希尔顿饭店，想看看我能否回想起什么，结果什么也不记得了。我想大概是因为大脑受到的创伤太重，对所发生的事难以留下清晰的记忆。不管怎么说，由于多年来经常在外颠簸，住过的旅馆房间在我的记忆中已混做一团。 我们对识别标志的研究现在已经有了长足的进展，我们在系列谋杀案审判过程中出庭作证已成为常规。不仅是我，还有其他对此感兴趣的侧写人员都可出庭作证，其中以拉里·安克罗姆和格雷格·库珀最为出名。 1993年，法庭裁定格雷戈里·莫斯利犯有两项一级谋杀罪，格雷格·库珀起到了主要作用。莫斯利在北卡罗来纳州两个不同司法管辖区内强奸、殴打并刺死了两名女子。如同审判拉塞尔时三起案件是相互关联的那样，两个管辖区各自都很难顺利地给他定罪。两方都需要利用对方的证据。经分析犯罪现场照片和案情档案之后，格雷格觉得他能将两案联系起来。 格雷格认定，对莫斯利所作案件进行识别标志分析的关键找出过度杀戮行为这个共性。两名受害者皆是轻度残疾的独身女子，年约二十出头，同去一家乡村音乐与西部音乐夜总会，在前后相隔几个月的时间内在那里被人绑架。两人都曾遭到毒打，你甚至可以说都是被殴打致死，只不过她们也被人用手掐过和用带子勒过。其中一人还被捅了12刀，阴道和肛门也有被刺戳的痕迹。其中一案中提取到的法医证据，包括从精液中提取的DNA，可以将案件与莫斯利联系起来。两起强奸摧残谋杀案都发生在隐蔽的地方，尸体都抛弃在人迹罕至的偏远地点。 格雷格在审理第一件案子时作证说，作为识别标志的行为证据表明，凶手有人格缺陷，是个性虐待狂。他的缺陷可以从作案对象的选择上明显地看出。他的虐待欲则更明显地表现在他对她们的所作所为上。与许多有缺陷且缺乏条理性的罪犯不同的是，凶手并不是在杀人之后才分尸的。他要完全控制她们的肉体和情绪。他要让她们痛苦，要欣赏由他的残忍行为引起的反应。 通过在第一起案子中的证词，格雷格协助起诉方引出第二起谋杀案。莫斯利被定了罪，判处了死刑。在九个月后审理第二起案子时，格雷格再度使莫斯利被定了罪并判处死刑。 第一次作证时，在格雷格向座无虚席的法庭描述莫斯利的个性之际，他与莫斯利锁定了彼此的目光。格雷格从莫斯利没有表情的脸上看出，他正在纳闷：“见鬼，你怎么会知道这些事的？”格雷格承受的压力是巨大的。如果他的作证不成功，案子审理就会搁浅，第二起案子可能因此蒙受不可挽回的重创。 莫斯利因第二起案子出庭受审时，一看到格雷格时，就对押解他的警察咕哝道：“那个狗娘养的又要来找我麻烦了！” 根据传统，要想成功地对一起谋杀案的凶手起诉并定罪，你必须拿出确凿的法医证据、目击者证词、作案者的供词，或者有力而过硬的间接证据。如今，通过我们根据犯罪现场得出的行为侧写以及识别标志分析，警方和起诉方又增添了一件武器。就其本身而言，它通常尚不足以定罪。但是，只要同一个或多个其他因素结合起来使用，它常常可以将不同案件联系在一起，甚至成为最终了结案子所必需的关键因素。 系列杀手玩的是极其危险的游戏。我们越是了解他们的玩法，就越能使他们陷入不利的境地。