The face of evil - psychotic murderers; includes related article - Cover Story

National Review, Jan 23, 1995 by Eugene H. Methvin

The FBI developed the interrogation technique that elicited Devier's confession through many interviews with lust killers. They had discovered that the lust murderer can often pass a polygraph examination because he so deeply represses his memory of the crime that he does not have any conscious recollection of it. Hence, he may not display the normal physiological "stress" reactions that the polygraph records. But he may be haunted by seeping recall that appears in the form of dreams or a belief that he was a witness who saw someone else murder the victim. Thus, like Ted Bundy, he may be able to describe details only the actual killer could know. Careful questioning can break open this shell of self-deceit. That happened in Devier's case. Sometimes it is as simple as giving the suspect paper and pen and asking him to write down in careful detail what he "saw" the murderer do. He may then direct police to the murder weapon, items of the victim's clothing, or body parts he has stashed away.

An important advance, as many of these cases show, would be countering the killer's mobility through greater sharing of information among jurisdictions. As part of the 1994 omnibus crime bill, Senator Orrin Hatch got Congress to approve $20 million for the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP), a nationwide computer network designed to identify and track serial criminals. VICAP had officially become operational back in May 1985, but it has languished because it was underfunded and because local police balked at filling out complex questionnaires on their unsolved cases. With about five thousand unsolved murders a year, by 1989 the VICAP data bank should have contained information on twenty thousand cases. In fact, only five thousand had been entered.

The new money will help develop computer systems and satellite links between Quantico and ten cities so that local police can confer directly with the NCAVC analysts. VICAP manager Greg Cooper urges Congress to require local police to report their unsolved violent crimes to VICAP, as they now must do for the FBI for its Uniform Crime Reports. If this happens, and VICAP becomes fully operational, the one-third of homicides in America that go unsolved could be cut to 5 or 10 per cent, Cooper believes.

From Fantasy to Murder

PROBE as they might, the FBI interviewers cannot truly "explain" serial killers. Here we come up against the age-old theological issue of free will versus predestination, and the eternal mystery of evil. After all, thousands of young men in America match the family constellations and emotional patterns mapped by the researchers. Very few of them move from fantasy to murder.

Edmund Kemper, the Co-Ed Killer, personified the pattern as well as anyone. Supposedly traumatized by a domineering mother (one biographer notes that a number of American Presidents have had mothers as "domineering" as Kemper's), at the age of 14 he shot his grandmother "to see what it would feel like to kill," then killed his grandfather as he came home so that he would not be upset. For those murders Kemper spent five years in California's Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane. During his stay there Kemper worked in the hospital's psychology laboratory as a crew leader, supervised by a clinical psychologist. With an IQ of 136, he imbibed a lot of knowledge. When he was 19 his mother, whose parents he had murdered, got him paroled in her custody.