The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI’s Original Mindhunter
Mark Olshaker
John E. Douglas
‘John Douglas is the FBI's pioneer and master of investigative profiling, and one of the most exciting figures in law enforcement I've had the privilege of knowing’ Patricia Cornwell‘John Douglas knows more about serial killers than anybody in the world’ Jonathan Demme, Director of The Silence of the LambsThe legendary FBI criminal profiler, number-one New York Times bestselling author, and inspiration for the hit Netflix show Mindhunter delves deep into the lives and crimes of four of the most disturbing and complex predatory killers, offering never-before-revealed details about his profiling process, and divulging the strategies used to crack some of his most challenging cases.The FBI’s pioneer of criminal profiling, former special agent John Douglas, has studied and interviewed many of America’s most notorious killers – including Charles Manson, ‘Son of Sam Killer’ David Berkowitz and ‘BTK Strangler’ Dennis Rader. Twenty years after his famous memoir, the man who literally wrote the book on FBI criminal profiling opens his case files once again. In this riveting work of true crime, he spotlights four of the most diabolical criminals he’s confronted, interviewed and learned from.A glimpse into the mind of a man who has pierced the heart of human darkness, The Killer Across the Table unlocks the ultimate mystery of depravity and the techniques and approaches that have countered evil in the name of justice.
COPYRIGHT (#u659b8707-9c8b-5e23-a540-4b41235f5e5f)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Mindhunters, Inc.
Cover design by Jack Smythe
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John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker assert their moral right to be
Identified as the authors of this work in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008338107
Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008338138
Version: 2019-04-12
To the memory of Joan Angela D’Alessandro and in honor of Rosemarie D’Alessandro and all of the others who, through their inspiration, courage, and determination, strive for justice and safety for all children, this book is dedicated with love and admiration
CONTENTS
COVER (#u335b4e04-51b1-5b30-a3ab-a36ba27fc9f5)
TITLE PAGE (#u368dd6fd-b5dd-5a19-b942-caa60c65dcd5)
COPYRIGHT (#u40e3a49c-4f83-5662-baca-ce05a9072f3c)
DEDICATION (#u93e2696f-d9ff-573c-87db-39697c527d57)
AUTHORS’ NOTE
IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE BIG HOUSE
INTRODUCTION: LEARNING FROM THE EXPERTS
I THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB (#uee613b58-2d78-528b-b3b5-9d45b311c5ec)
1 LITTLE GIRL LOST
2 “I SLEPT WELL”
3 MIND OF THE KILLER
4 HUMAN FALLOUT
5 WHAT THE PSYCH PEOPLE SAID
6 RED RAGE AND WHITE RAGE
7 THE BOTTOM LINE
8 “SUBSTANTIAL LIKELIHOOD”
9 JOAN’S LEGACY
II “KILLING FOR ME WAS JUST LIKE SECOND NATURE” (#u9ec16e46-02f0-51ed-ba94-9749ee30ff0b)
10 ALL IN THE FAMILY
11 THE ABANDONED VOLKSWAGEN
12 INSIDE THE WALLS
13 “THE CONVENIENCE OF THE SITUATION”
14 “THERE WERE VICTIMS IN BETWEEN”
15 POWER, CONTROL, EXCITEMENT
III ANGEL OF DEATH (#ub70a4325-6cf1-544d-a22d-b0bb2dfada33)
16 PLAYING GOD
17 WORKING NIGHTS
18 THE MAKING OF A KILLER
19 “I HAVEN’T CHANGED A BIT”
20 FALLEN ANGEL
IV “NO ONE MADE ME DO ANYTHING” (#u6e634d6a-d3cc-52f1-8035-7673dec4a7fb)
21 THE SUPERBIKE MURDERS
22 WHAT HAPPENED TO KALA AND CHARLIE?
23 WHAT MADE TODD TICK?
24 “GOOD OR BAD, I STILL WANT TO KNOW”
25 ORGANIZED VERSUS DISORGANIZED
26 NATURE AND NURTURE
EPILOGUE: A KILLER’S CHOICE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY JOHN E. DOUGLAS AND MARK OLSHAKER
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
AUTHORS’ NOTE (#u659b8707-9c8b-5e23-a540-4b41235f5e5f)
The opinions expressed in this book belong to the authors alone and do not reflect those of the FBI or any other organization.
IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE BIG HOUSE (#u659b8707-9c8b-5e23-a540-4b41235f5e5f)
Here, it is not so much Who done it?, but Why?
And in the end, if we have discovered the Why? and add in How?, we will also come to understand the Who? Because Why? + How? = Who.
The aim is not to be a friend. The aim is not to be a foe. The aim is to get to the truth.
It is a verbal and mental chess match without any game pieces; a sparring session without body contact; an endurance contest in which each side will seek out and exploit the other’s weaknesses and insecurities.
We sit across a small table from each other in a dimly lit room whose cinder-block walls are painted a pale bluish gray. The only window is in the locked steel door, and it is small and reinforced with wire mesh. A uniformed guard peers through from the other side, making sure everything remains in order.
In a maximum security prison, nothing is considered more important.
We have been at this for two hours already and finally the moment is ripe. “I want to know in your own words what it was like twenty-five years ago,” I say. “How did this all happen to get you here? That girl—Joan—did you know her?”
“Well, I’d seen her in the neighborhood,” he replies. His affect is calm and his tone is even.
“Let’s go back to the moment she came to the door. Tell me what happened, step by step, from that point on.”
It is almost like hypnosis. The room is silent, and I watch him transform in front of me. Even his physical appearance seems to change before my eyes. His eyes are unfocused and he looks beyond me to stare at the vacant wall. He is moving back to another time and another place; to the one story of himself that has never left his mind.
The room is very cold, and even though I wear a suit, I struggle to keep myself from shivering. But as he recounts the story I have asked for, he has begun to perspire. His breathing grows heavier and more audible. Soon his shirt is drenched with sweat, and underneath, the muscles of his chest tremble.
He relates the entire story in this manner, not looking at me; almost talking to himself. He is in the zone, in that time and that place, thinking now what he was thinking then.
For a moment, he turns back to face me. He looks me square in the eyes as he says, “John, when I heard the knock and looked up through the screen door and saw who was there, I knew I was going to kill her.”
INTRODUCTION (#u659b8707-9c8b-5e23-a540-4b41235f5e5f)
LEARNING FROM THE EXPERTS (#u659b8707-9c8b-5e23-a540-4b41235f5e5f)
This is a book about the way violent predators think—the bedrock of my twenty-five years as an FBI special agent, behavioral profiler, and criminal investigative analyst, as well as the work I have done since my retirement from the bureau.
But it’s really a book about conversations I had. After all, conversations are where it all began for me, conversations in which I learned how to use what a predatory criminal was thinking to help local law enforcement officials to catch him and bring him to justice. For me, that was the beginning of behavioral profiling.
I started interviewing incarcerated violent offenders out of what I considered personal and institutional necessity, but in many ways, it began with a desire to understand the underlying motivations behind criminals. Like most new FBI special agents, I was assigned as a street agent. My first posting was in Detroit. Right from the beginning, I was interested in why people committed their crimes—not only that they committed crimes at all, but why they committed the particular crimes they did.
Detroit was a tough city, and while I was there they were racking up as many as five bank robberies a day. Robbing a bank backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is a federal crime, so the bureau had jurisdiction, and many new agents were assigned to investigate these cases in addition to their other duties. As soon as we would apprehend a suspect and read him his Miranda rights, often in the back of a bureau car or police cruiser, I would pepper him with questions. Why rob a bank where the security is tight, and everything is recorded on tape, rather than a store that does a large cash business? Why this particular bank branch? Why this particular day and time? Was the robbery planned or spontaneous? Did you surveil the bank first and/or make a practice run inside? I began mentally cataloging the responses and developing informal “profiles” (though we didn’t use that term yet) of bank robber types. I started seeing the differences between planned and unplanned crimes and organized and disorganized ones.
We got to the point where we could begin predicting which bank locations were most likely to be hit and when. In areas with a lot of building going on, for instance, we learned that Friday late morning was a likely time to hit the bank, because it would have a lot of cash on hand to handle the construction workers’ paychecks. We used this kind of intelligence to harden certain targets and be waiting at others if we thought we had a reasonable chance of catching robbers in the act.
During my second bureau posting in Milwaukee, I was sent to the new, modern FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, for a two-week in-service course in hostage negotiation. It was taught by Special Agents Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany, the original champions of behavioral science in the bureau. Their main course was called Applied Criminology. It was an attempt to bring the academic discipline of abnormal psychology into crime analysis and the training of new agents. Mullany saw hostage negotiation as the first practical use of the applied psychology program. This was a new wave in the battle against a new era of crime that involved airplane skyjackings and bank robberies with hostages, such as the 1972 Brooklyn bank heist that inspired the Al Pacino film Dog Day Afternoon. It was easy to see how having some idea of what was going on in the hostage-taker’s head would be of great benefit to the negotiator and ultimately save lives. I was one of about fifty special agents in this class, taught for the first time and a daring experiment in FBI training. Legendary director J. Edgar Hoover had died just three years before, and his lengthened shadow still hung over the bureau.
Even in his declining years, Hoover maintained an iron grip on the agency he had essentially created. His hard-nosed, hard-ass approach to investigation echoed the old Dragnet TV show line: Just the facts, ma’am. Everything had to be measurable and quantifiable—how many arrests, how many convictions, how many cases closed. He never would have embraced anything as impressionistic, inductive, and “touchy-feely” as behavioral science. In fact, he would have considered it a contradiction in terms.
While attending the hostage negotiation course at the FBI Academy, my name got around the Behavioral Science Unit, and before I left to go back to Milwaukee, I was offered positions in both the Education and Behavioral Science Units as my next posting. Even though our unit was called Behavioral Science, the primary responsibility of its nine agents was teaching. Courses included Applied Criminal Psychology, Hostage Negotiation, Practical Police Problems, Police Stress Management, and Sex Crimes, which was later changed by my great colleague Roy Hazelwood to Interpersonal Violence.
Though the academy’s “three-legged stool” model of teaching, research, and consultation was beginning to take shape, any case consultation that star agents like Teten provided was strictly informal and not part of any organized program. The focus of these forty hours of classroom instruction was supposed to be on the issue of most concern to criminal investigators: Motive. Why do offenders do the things they do, in what ways do they do them, and how can understanding this help catch them? The problem with this approach was that most of the content still came from the academic sphere, which became evident whenever senior law enforcement personnel going through the National Academy program had more firsthand case experience than the instructors.
No one was more vulnerable in this area than the youngest instructor on the team: me. Here I was standing in front of a classroom full of seasoned detectives and officers, most of them a lot older than me. And I was supposed to teach them what was going on in the criminal mind, something they’d actually be able to use to help clear cases. Most of my firsthand experience had come from working with experienced cops and homicide detectives in Detroit and Milwaukee, so it seemed presumptuous of me to be telling men like that their own business.
There was a dawning realization among many of us that what was applicable to the psychiatric and mental health community had only limited relevance to law enforcement.
Still, I started getting the same types of requests Teten got. In class or during breaks, or even in the evenings, officers and detectives would come up and ask for pointers or advice on their active cases. If I was teaching a case similar in some way to one they were working on, they would figure I could help them solve it. They saw me as the authoritative voice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But was I? There had to be a more practical way to amass useful data and case studies that would give me the confidence to feel I really knew what I was talking about.
As the guy closest to me in age, Robert Ressler was tapped to help me break into the academy culture and feel comfortable with teaching. About eight years older than I was, Bob was a new instructor who built on what Teten and Mullany had done, aiming to bring the discipline of behavioral analysis closer to something that could be of value to police departments and criminal investigators. The most efficient way to give a new instructor some concentrated experience was through what we called road schools. Instructors from Quantico would spend a week teaching a selective piece, sort of a highlights version, of the National Academy curriculum to a police department or law enforcement agency that had requested it, then move on to another for a second week before returning home with the memories of interchangeable hotel rooms and a suitcase full of dirty laundry. So Bob and I hit the road together.
One morning early in 1978, Bob and I were driving out of Sacramento, California, the site of our latest road school. I commented that most of the criminals we were teaching about were still around, we could easily find out where they were, and they weren’t going anywhere. Why not see if we could meet and talk with some of them, find out what a crime was like through their eyes, get them to recall and tell us why they did what they did and what was going on in their minds when they did it. I figured it didn’t hurt to try, and some of them might be bored enough with their prison routines that they’d welcome a chance to talk about themselves.
Very little research was available relative to interviewing prison inmates, and what there was pertained specifically to convictions, probation and parole, and rehabilitation. However, the record seemed to indicate that violent and narcissistic inmates, on the whole, were incorrigible—meaning they were not able to be controlled, improved, or reformed. By talking to them, we hoped to learn if this was indeed the case.
Bob was initially skeptical, but willing to go along with this crazy idea. He’d served in the army, and between the army and the bureau, he’d had enough experience with bureaucracies that his mantra was “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” We would show up unannounced. In those days FBI credentials could get us into prisons without prior permission. If we had said in advance that we were coming, there was a danger word would leak out into the yard. And if an inmate was known to be planning to speak with a couple of feds, the rest of the prison population might think he was a snitch.
As we embarked on this project, we had some preconceived ideas of what we would encounter during these interviews. Among them:
All would claim they were innocent.
They would blame their convictions on poor legal representation.
They would not willingly talk to law enforcement personnel.
Sex offenders would come across as sex-obsessed.
If there had been capital punishment in the state in which the murder was committed, they would not have killed their victims.
They would project the blame onto the victims.
They all came from dysfunctional family backgrounds.
They knew the difference between right and wrong and the nature of the consequences of their actions.
They were not mentally ill or insane.
Serial murderers and rapists would tend to be highly intelligent.
All pedophiles are child molesters.
All child molesters are pedophiles.
Serial killers are made, rather than born that way.
As we’ll see in the following pages, some of these assumptions proved correct, while others were way off the mark.
Surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of the men we sought out did agree to talk to us. They had various reasons. Some felt cooperating with the FBI would look good on their records, and we did nothing to dissuade that assumption. Others might simply have been intimidated. Many inmates, particularly the more violent types, don’t get many visitors, so it was a way to relieve the boredom, talk to someone from the outside, and spend a couple of hours outside their cells. There were some who were just so cocksure of their ability to con everyone that they looked at the interview as a potential game.
In the end, what started with a simple idea while driving out of Sacramento—conversations with killers—became a project that would change the careers and lives of both Bob and me and the special agents who eventually joined the team, and add a new dimension to the FBI’s crime-fighting arsenal. Before we were done with our initial phase of interviews, we had studied and talked to, among others: shoe fetishist and strangler Jerome Brudos in Oregon, who liked to dress his dead victims in high heels from his extensive wardrobe of women’s clothing; Monte Rissell, who raped and murdered five women as a teenager in Alexandria, Virginia; and David Berkowitz, the .44 Caliber Killer and Son of Sam, who terrorized New York City in 1976 and 1977.
Over the years, my profilers at Quantico and I would interview many other violent and serial predators, including Ted Bundy, the prolific killer of young women, and Gary Heidnik, who imprisoned, tortured, and killed women in the basement pit of his house in Philadelphia. Both of these guys provided character traits for novelist Thomas Harris in The Silence of the Lambs, as did Ed Gein, the Wisconsin recluse who killed women so he could use their skins, whom I interviewed at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison. He was also famously the model for Norman Bates in Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho, the basis for the classic Alfred Hitchcock film. Unfortunately, Gein’s age and mental illness resulted in such rambling, disordered thought patterns that the interview wasn’t productive. He did, however, still enjoy working in leather crafts, making wallets and belts.
What eventually emerged was a set of rigorous interview methods that allowed us to start correlating the crime to what was actually in the criminal’s mind at the time. For the first time, we had a way of linking and understanding what was going on in an offender’s mind with evidence he left at the crime scene and what he said to the victim if she or he was alive, or what was done to the body, both ante- and postmortem. As we have often stated, it helped us begin to answer the age-old question “What type of person could do such a thing?”
By the time we had completed our initial round of interviews, we knew what type of person could do such a thing, and three words seemed to characterize the motivations of every one of our offenders: Manipulation. Domination. Control.
The conversations were the starting point for everything that came after. All the knowledge we gathered, the conclusions we drew, the Sexual Homicide book that came out of our research and the Crime Classification Manual that we created, the killers we helped catch and prosecute—all of it began by sitting across from killers and asking them about their lives with an aim to understanding what drove them to take another life, or in some cases, many lives. It was all possible because of the attention we paid to this previously untapped group of instructors: the criminals themselves.
We are going to take an in-depth look at four killers I confronted across the table after I had left the bureau, using the same techniques we had developed during our extensive study. The killers themselves are all different, each with his own techniques, motivations, and psychic makeup. They range from a single victim to close to a hundred, and I have learned from all of them. The contrasts between them are intriguing and compelling. But so are the similarities. They are all predators, and all grew up without forming trusting bonds with other human beings during their formative years. And they are all prime exhibits in one of the central debates of behavioral science: nature versus nurture, whether killers are born or made.
In my FBI unit, we operated under the equation Why? + How? = Who. When we interview convicted offenders, we can reverse-engineer that process. We know the Who and we know the What. By combining those, we discover the all-important How? and Why?
1 (#ulink_b9dd85c3-7d21-5419-b7d3-8db6a589b13e)
LITTLE GIRL LOST (#ulink_b9dd85c3-7d21-5419-b7d3-8db6a589b13e)
It was just after the July Fourth holiday in 1998 when I took the Amtrak train up north to call on a new potential “instructor.” His name was Joseph McGowan, and he had been a high school chemistry teacher with a master’s degree. But rather than any formal academic title, he was now officially known as Inmate No. 55722 at his longtime place of residence, the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton.
The reason for his incarceration: the sexual assault, strangulation, and blunt force murder of a seven-year-old girl who had come to his house to deliver two boxes of Girl Scout cookies twenty-five years earlier.
As the train wound its way north, I prepared. Preparation when talking to a killer is always important, but no more so than now—after all, this conversation would have consequences far beyond the informational or academic. I’d been called in by the New Jersey parole board to help determine whether McGowan, who’d already been denied parole twice, should be released back into society.
At the time, the chairman of the New Jersey State Parole Board was an attorney named Andrew Consovoy. He had joined the parole board in 1989, and as McGowan’s case was coming up for a third time, he had just been appointed chairman. Consovoy had read our book Mindhunter after hearing me one night on the radio and recommended it to the parole board’s executive director Robert Egles.
“One of the things I realized from reading it and your other books was that you had to have all of the information going in,” Consovoy related years later. “You had to find out who these people were. They didn’t start to exist the day they came to jail.”
Based on this perspective, he formulated a special investigations unit operating under the parole board. It consisted of two former police officers and a researcher, and its function was to look deeply into the questionable parole cases and give board members as much information as possible about the applicant on which to formulate a decision. They asked me to consult on the McGowan case.
Consovoy and Egles picked me up at the train station and took me to my hotel in Lambertville, a picturesque town on the Delaware River. There Egles handed over copies of everything in the case file.
The three of us went out to dinner that evening and talked generally about the work I did, but we stayed away from the specifics of the case. All they had told me was that the subject had killed a seven-year-old female child and they wanted to know whether he remained dangerous.
After dinner, they dropped me off back at the hotel, where I opened the case files and began several hours of review. My role was to see what I could determine about McGowan’s state of mind—then and now. Did he know the nature and consequences of his crime? Did he know basic right from wrong? Did he care about what he had done? Did he have any remorse?
What would be his demeanor during the interview? Would he recall specific details about the crime? If released from prison, where did he intend to live and what did he intend to do? How would he earn a living?
My one cardinal rule of prison interviews is never to go into the encounter unprepared. I also made a practice of not going in with notes, because that could create an artificial distance or filter between the subject and me when the time came to really bore in and search for the deepest layer of his psyche.
I didn’t know what I was going to get out of this interview, but I figured it would be illuminating. Because as I said at the beginning, every time I talked to “the experts,” I learned something valuable. And one of the things to be determined was just what kind of expert Joseph McGowan would turn out to be.
I sifted through the case files, reexamining the evidence and organizing my thoughts for the next day’s interview.
As I did, a grim story unfolded.
About 2:45 on the afternoon of April 19, 1973, which her mother Rosemarie would always remember was Holy Thursday, Joan Angela D’Alessandro noticed a car pulling into the first driveway on the right, on St. Nicholas Avenue, which intersected with Florence Street, where she lived. Joan and her older sister, Marie, had managed to sell Girl Scout cookies to just about everyone in a four-block area in their quiet Hillsdale, New Jersey, neighborhood. At that time, kids of that age going out by themselves to sell the cookies was a normal activity. Since they went to a Catholic school, the D’Alessandro girls had the day off for the religious holiday and spent part of it delivering orders. The people who lived in the house on the corner were the last customers they had to deliver to and then the cookie orders would be complete. Typically, Joan wanted to get the job done.
She was seven years old, a four-foot-three-inch bundle of playful energy and charm—a pretty, proud, and enthusiastic Brownie. In fact, she was enthusiastic about everything: school, ballet, drawing, dogs, dolls, friends, and flowers. Her second-grade teacher called her a “social butterfly,” who naturally attracted people around her. Her favorite music was the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She was the youngest of three children, born close together. Frank, known as Frankie, was nine and Marie was eight. They were more serious, Rosemarie recalls. Joan was more happy-go-lucky.
“Joan was empathetic right from the beginning. She was always concerned with other people’s feelings and hurts. And she had a natural spunkiness about her.”
There is hardly a photograph of her at this age in which she isn’t smiling: Joan in her Brownie uniform with its orange tie and beanie, hands clasped in front of her and long auburn hair symmetrically draping her shoulders; Joan in her black leotard and white tights, hair in a ponytail, arms outstretched to one side, demonstrating a ballet move; Joan in her navy blue plaid jumper, white blouse and red bow tie, as if she’d just turned to camera, bangs brushing her forehead and hair cascading around her adorable face; Joan sitting on her heels in a light blue party dress, hair pinned up, meticulously adjusting the bouquet in the hand of her Miss America Barbie doll. All of them represent different Joan personas. The two commonalities among them are the angelic smile and the innocent magic in her blue eyes.
A friend of Frankie’s said, “She was so down-to-earth. I would have married her!”
Her Italian-speaking grandfather adored her and used to say, “E così libera!” She is so free! She had a hearty laugh and Rosemarie envisioned her acting in plays as she got older. She was going to be taking piano lessons after her eighth birthday.
This afternoon, she was outside playing by herself. Frankie had gone to play at his friend’s house in the neighborhood and Marie was at a softball game.
Suddenly she raced back inside and said to Rosemarie, “I saw the new car. I’m going to take the cookies over there.” She grabbed her Girl Scout carrying case lying in the foyer with the two boxes of cookies inside.
“Bye, Mommy. I’ll be right back,” she called out as she bounded out the front door. It hadn’t even closed since she’d come running inside. Rosemarie remembers her ponytail bobbing up and down, held in place by an elastic band with two little light blue plastic balls on the ends, as Joan skipped down the front steps to the driveway and out onto the street. It all went by in a blur.
About ten minutes later the next-door neighbor, as she told Rosemarie afterward, heard the insistent barking of her dog, Boozer. Joan loved walking and playing with Boozer, and Boozer loved her.
When Joan didn’t come back right away, Rosemarie didn’t think much about it. She had probably gone to her friend Tamara’s house on the corner of St. Nicholas Avenue and Vincent Street. It was that kind of neighborhood, where you could go in and out of the houses of people you knew. The social butterfly could always find someone to hang out with or something to do. About 4:45, when the music teacher came for Marie’s piano lesson, Rosemarie started to get worried. She didn’t want to convey it to the children, so she tried to hold herself together. After all, it was a safe neighborhood, with an FBI agent and a minister living nearby.
She started making phone calls. Joan wasn’t at any of the houses she called, and no one had seen her.
Her husband, Frank D’Alessandro, got home about ten minutes to six and Rosemarie told him Joan was missing. Frank was a computer systems analyst, methodical and taciturn by nature. Rosemarie could see instantly how worried and tense he was, but as usual, he held it all in. Rosemarie said, “We have to call the police.” Frank agreed and made the call. Then he went out with Frankie and Marie to drive around the neighborhood looking for Joan. They covered the entire area.
When they returned without having spotted her or found anyone who had seen her, Rosemarie decided to go out herself. Frank didn’t want to come. She remembered that as Joan ran out, she’d said something about collecting on the last of her cookie orders because she’d seen “the new car” on St. Nicholas Avenue. The car belonged to the McGowan house. Joseph McGowan taught chemistry at Tappan Zee High, just over the state line in Orangeburg, New York. The house was owned by his mother, Genevieve McGowan, and he lived there with her and Genevieve’s mother—his grandmother. The public schools had class that day, so this would have been about the right time for him to be coming home.
Reluctantly, so she wouldn’t be alone, Rosemarie took Frankie with her and together they walked up Florence Street and turned onto St. Nicholas Avenue. It was ten minutes to seven. The McGowan house, a redbrick-and-beige-siding bi-level with a driveway and two-car garage in the left front, was the first one on the right, occupying the corner lot.
They both climbed the five front steps and she rang the bell. She told Frankie to stay on the landing.
Mr. McGowan answered the door. He seemed as if he’d just come out of the shower. He was holding a thin cigar that Rosemarie didn’t notice at first. He was a twenty-seven-year-old bachelor. Rosemarie didn’t know him, but “my children said he was very nice.”
Rosemarie stepped into the foyer; she wanted to stand exactly where she knew Joan had recently stood. She was already starting to get an eerie feeling. She introduced herself. “Have you seen my daughter Joan?” she asked. “She came here to deliver cookies.”
“No, I never saw her,” he replied.
He spoke in a casual, matter-of-fact manner. And it was at that moment that Rosemarie D’Alessandro felt everything go cold.
“After standing in the foyer for a couple of minutes, I noticed a long fire truck parked in front of his house,” she said. “We had called the police, and when I saw that they were responding this way, it just all came to me at that moment and I knew my life would never be the same.”
She was almost immediately struck by McGowan’s reaction—or rather, his lack of reaction. “As I was standing there in the foyer with him, tears were welling in my eyes. And he looked at me like he absolutely didn’t have one ounce of feeling. And what he did at that moment when he saw my tears, he walked up the steps to the upper floor, and he stayed right there facing me, holding his slim cigar, and waited for me to leave.
“Walking back to my house I knew that he knew what had happened to Joan.”
After the police arrived and spoke to Rosemarie and Frank, a neighborhood search for Joan was organized. Boy Scouts volunteered. As did Joseph McGowan. Hundreds of people turned out and organized themselves into small teams, checking every house, backyard, trash and garbage cans, woods, and park in Hillsdale and the surrounding towns. The police brought in bloodhounds to aid in the search. Several people climbed on the fire truck Rosemarie had seen parked. One of them was Joan’s seven-year-old “boyfriend,” Rich. They rode out to the reservoir near Woodcliff Lake.
At about 9:20, a priest from St. John the Baptist Church arrived at the house with a state trooper and a German shepherd. Rosemarie led the K-9 team to the clothes hamper so the dog could sniff Joan’s panties, then they went out into the neighborhood. Rosemarie had the overwhelming sense that the dog understood what had happened and “felt” deeply for her and Joan. With an obvious sense of mission, he cased the area up to and around the McGowan’s house, and went to the front door and the garage door.
But nothing turned up anywhere.
Word of the missing girl and the impromptu search spread quickly. Newspaper and television reporters swarmed the neighborhood. As Rosemarie herself had observed, this kind of thing just didn’t happen in Hillsdale. She spoke frequently to the media, hoping that someone who might have seen something would come forward. Her main memory of the media session was the dirty footprints that had turned the light-brown carpet on the steps a charcoal gray.
The anxiety in the D’Alessandro house that night was almost unbearable. Frank often displayed anger when he was frustrated. The night before, he had an outburst over not having a box in which to wrap an Easter gift. “He could be calm and patient for long periods and then change in a moment,” Rosemarie recalled. “He had a good job, but he wasn’t communicative, and he was never really my soul mate.”
Hillsdale police chief Philip Varisco was on vacation in Florida when he was informed of Joan’s disappearance. Hillsdale was the kind of community, and Varisco was the kind of leader, that made it unthinkable that the chief not be present for a trauma like this. He rushed back home. Varisco, who passed away in 2012 at the age of eighty-nine, was a complete professional. He attended the FBI National Academy program in Quantico to make himself and his force as effective as possible.
The chief went to the D’Alessandros’ house the next day. Rosemarie was sitting on her front steps when he came up the walk. He told her he was taking personal charge of the investigation. While not promising the happy outcome he knew was unlikely, he calmly assured her that everything would be done the right way. He asked for a photograph he could release to the newspapers. Rosemarie went to a picture of Joan in her school uniform, hanging in the hallway, took it off the wall and out of its frame, and handed it to Varisco.
Frank told newspaper reporters that if whoever had taken Joan would bring her back safely, he would ask the authorities to waive prosecution. During a television interview, Rosemarie described Joan to reporter Vic Miles, how special she was and how much she was loved, pleading for her to be returned. Years later, one of Joan’s classmates told Rosemarie she remembered the broadcast as if it were yesterday because Joan’s mommy was asking on TV for her to come back. Only two months before, Rosemarie had suddenly had the terrible thought of what would happen if one of her children died, and how utterly, unimaginably heart-wrenching it would be.
The police questioned several possible suspects, including a man seen driving around the neighborhood about an hour before Joan disappeared and another wandering the area on foot. The first turned out to be looking at neighborhoods in which to move and the second was simply lost. There are almost always loose ends and red herrings in major cases. But the investigators focused quickly on Joseph McGowan. Though he had no criminal record, it had been his house to which Joan said she was going and Rosemarie had related her creepy encounter with him. Her father had seen him taking out the trash the day after Joan’s disappearance and, pointing to the house on the corner, said to Rosemarie, “Something’s not right over there.”
Police officers and detectives spoke to McGowan both Friday and Saturday, asking him to account for himself in the minutes and hours after Joan went to his house. He was calm and amiable but denied that he saw Joan on Thursday. Instead, he claimed he was at the nearby supermarket buying groceries at the time Rosemarie said her daughter went to his house. What about the car Joan saw pull into the driveway? Did anyone see it leave the garage? No, he walked. At which cash register did he check out? He didn’t remember. Could he show them the grocery receipt? He thought he threw it away. Might it still be in the trash? He thought the trash had already been picked up. What days did the trash collectors come? He wasn’t sure. What did he buy? Steaks and apples, among other things. Were the steaks still in the refrigerator? No, he and his mother had eaten them. What about the apples? He wasn’t sure.
Seasoned detectives develop a natural sense for knowing whether a suspect’s story and profession of innocence is true. Over lunch one day, Mark Olshaker asked retired LAPD detective Tom Lange when he came to his own conclusion that O. J. Simpson was the prime suspect in the murders of his ex-wife Nicole and her waiter friend Ronald Goldman in 1994. Lange replied that though O.J. was cordial and cooperative during the interview, he asked no questions regarding the details of Nicole’s death, whether or how much she had suffered, whether the police had any idea who had done it—all of the normal things any close survivor would instinctively want to know.
Joan’s friend Rich recalled a large crowd in front of the police station on Central Avenue as McGowan was inside being questioned. To his young eyes, it seemed as if the entire town had gathered there.
As the seeming holes and contradictions in McGowan’s statements grew increasingly glaring, the detectives asked him to submit to a polygraph examination at the station. He agreed.
McGowan failed the polygraph, and when detectives informed him, they confronted him with all his statements that didn’t add up. Finally, exhausted and without any more answers, he asked for a priest. He and the priest met privately, and McGowan confessed to him. He then confessed to the detectives, and told them that after he killed Joan, he drove her body across the New York state line and deposited it in Harriman State Park in Rockland County, about twenty miles away.
Chief Varisco took it upon himself to be the one to tell Rosemarie and Frank. It was a little after four P.M. A deeply sensitive man, he brought a Catholic priest with him, and together they sat with Rosemarie at the kitchen table. Rosemarie remembers removing the tablecloth from the white table to delay, if only for a few moments, what she knew was to come.
When the chief told her what McGowan had said, she cried, “I want to kill him!” She says she was feeling rational and in control as she said it, knowing at the time she didn’t mean it, but needing a way to release the anguish consuming her.
The priest admonished her not to speak that way.
“What do you expect, Father?” Varisco said.
2 (#ulink_cca3d842-0719-569b-a309-26302743403f)
“I SLEPT WELL” (#ulink_cca3d842-0719-569b-a309-26302743403f)
Dr. Frederick T. Zugibe, the chief medical examiner for Rockland County, New York, said Joan’s case was one of the most emotionally difficult in his long and distinguished career.
Word had spread quickly from the Hillsdale Police Department to the Bergen County district attorney’s office, and from there to the Police Division of the Rockland County sheriff’s office. So early in the afternoon on Easter Sunday, Officer John Forbes drove to the location described to him in Harriman State Park, just off Gate Hill Road, near the southern end of the park.
There he found the naked and battered body of a young white female. She was faceup in a wedge-shaped crevice between two boulders, on a leafy slope under a rock ledge. Her head was twisted sharply to the left and she was facing down the slope. Forbes had four young children of his own and struggled not to break down.
He called in the crime scene team.
By the time Dr. Zugibe arrived, less than an hour later, the cordoned-off crime scene was already populated by a horde of police officers and crime scene technicians, detectives, FBI agents, reporters, press photographers, and the generally curious. He immediately ordered the officers to move all nonessential personnel away.
Richard Collier, the D’Alessandro neighbor who was an FBI special agent working out of the New York City field office, came in to identify the body.
Yes, it was Joan.
Though the crime scene was no longer pristine, her body had not been moved or touched. Dr. Zugibe immediately noted the lividity—the purpling of the flesh around her abdominal area. This told him she had not been killed at this spot. If she had been, the lividity would have been concentrated in her back due to gravity. Since that type of blood settling takes at least six hours, he also knew that she hadn’t just been dumped here. He took her body temperature and found that it matched the temperature of the air. That indicated she had been dead at least thirty-six hours, the time it takes for a body to cool completely. 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.
Taking all the observable physical evidence together, Dr. Zugibe estimated that Joan had been dead for about fifty hours. When he was able to do more sophisticated tests during the autopsy, he upped his estimate to a minimum of seventy hours, which meant that she had died within a couple of hours or less of when Rosemarie last saw her.
Sheriff’s officers conducted a thorough search of the surrounding area and found a gray plastic shopping bag printed with the Mobil logo. According to Zugibe, the bag was neatly packed rather than haphazardly stuffed and contained the clothing Joan had been wearing when she disappeared: a pair of red and white sneakers, a turquoise shirt, maroon pants, white socks, and white panties, stained red with her blood.
Before the body was removed, an officer called the Marian Shrine in Stony Point, New York, and asked that a priest come to the scene. When he arrived, illuminated by the police lights and in the presence of officers, detectives, FBI agents, and reporters, he administered last rites to Joan Angela D’Alessandro. Once the priest was finished, Zugibe officially pronounced death, a seemingly obvious observation but a necessary formality in any murder investigation.
Back at the medical examiner’s office in Pomona, New York, less than ten miles away, he began the autopsy. From my experience in dealing with many medical examiners over the years, I would say there is little that is more painful than having to examine a dead child, and absolutely nothing more agonizing than if the child has been murdered.
By the time he had completed the postmortem, Zugibe listed injuries that spoke to the utter depravity of the crime: fracture of the neck, manual strangulation, dislocated right shoulder, generalized deep bruising, lacerations under the chin and inside the upper lip, frontal fracture of the skull, fracture of both sinuses, swelling of the face, both eyes blackened and swollen shut, three teeth loosened, contusion and hemorrhaging of the brain, bruising of the lungs and liver, and rupture of the hymen.
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.
The medical examiner’s close examination of the neck revealed two areas of injury: the thyroid cartilage and the hyoid bone. His conclusion was that a half hour or so after the deadly attack, the offender, unsure that he had killed her, returned to finish the job with a second manual strangulation. This sounds completely believable to me. With someone like Joseph McGowan, an “inexperienced killer,” it would not be unusual for him to be unsure how effective he had been in dispatching his victim and wish to take no chances.
I had seen a similar sort of behavior in the Christmas 1996 murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in her home in Boulder, Colorado. The medical examiner’s report listed two potentially lethal injuries: blunt force trauma to the head and ligature strangulation. Since there was no bleeding at the crime scene, I concluded that the cause of death was the strangulation and that the severe blow to the head was an attempt to make sure she was dead.
This scientific evidence suggested something highly significant from a behavioral perspective. No parent without a history of extreme child abuse could possibly, and systematically, strangle that child to death over a period of several minutes. It just doesn’t happen. Taken together with all of the other forensic and behavioral evidence, this did not tell us who killed JonBenet. But it told us who did not kill her: either of her parents. Mark and I came up against a lot of pushback and public condemnation for this conclusion, including from my old FBI unit, but the pursuit of criminal justice is not a popularity contest, and you have to let the evidence speak for itself.
Which was precisely what I would do with Joseph McGowan.
Joseph McGowan was arraigned before Bergen County judge James F. Madden. He was held in lieu of the $50,000 bail set by the judge. On Tuesday, April 24, 1973, he was indicted for the murder of Joan D’Alessandro.
Two days later, in the late morning, Joan’s funeral was held at St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, whose school Joan attended. The children from her class were there, and after the service, they all lined up outside as her casket was carried out to say goodbye.
As an investigator of violent crime, you try to be as emotionally detached as possible, not only to maintain your objectivity and critical judgment, but also to preserve your sanity. In fact, having to put myself, as a behavioral profiler, into the head of every victim whose case I work has definitely taken its psychic toll on me throughout my career. Dr. Zugibe’s and Officer Forbes’s reactions to seeing Joan’s small body in the park were understandable. No matter how “professional” you try to be, you can’t not react to something like this.
What kind of a man or monster spontaneously does something like this to a seven-year-old girl? I asked myself as I read through the case file a quarter of a century later. That’s what I would seek to find out.
McGowan repeated his confession to Dr. Noel C. Galen, a forensic psychiatrist who had received his neurology and psychiatry training at Bellevue Hospital in New York and consulted for the New Jersey court system. The day after his indictment, McGowan detailed for Dr. Galen how he answered the door, and when Joan told him what she was there for, said she should come with him downstairs so he could get the money for her. She must have hesitated or resisted, because he admitted grabbing her and forcing her into his downstairs bedroom. Meanwhile, McGowan’s eighty-seven-year-old grandmother, hard of hearing, was watching television upstairs. His mother was at work.
I am not revealing any privileged information from McGowan’s case file or medical records. All of the evaluations and analyses I am citing were contained and published in the appellate decision Joseph McGowan, Defendant-Appellant, v. New Jersey State Parole Board, Respondent, decided by the Superior Court of New Jersey on February 15, 2002.
As he told Dr. Galen, once in the bedroom and “safely” away from the street, McGowan ordered Joan to take off her clothes. Though he said he “never completed the act,” he became sexually excited and ejaculated on his fingers only inches from Joan and then penetrated her digitally. He probably couldn’t wait and did this before she was completely undressed, as her panties were stained with blood. Since he acknowledged he had semen on his fingers, we can’t say for sure whether he “completed the act” or not, but the blood and injuries to her vaginal area indicated a brutal assault.
It was at this point, according to McGowan’s account, that the consequences of his impulsive action dawned on him. “All of a sudden,” he told Dr. Galen, “I realized what I had done. If I let her go, my whole life was gone. All I could think of was just to get rid of her.”
As an investigator, I have to say that from a criminological perspective, this part makes sense to me. In a high-stress situation like this, a “smart” offender will tend to have only one thing on his mind: getting away with his crime. This is apparently what happened with McGowan. Whether Joan lived as long after the first strangulation as Dr. Zugibe speculated is an open question, as is which of McGowan’s attempts to kill her was the successful one. But the general narrative of what happened is not in doubt. According to the transcript of the confession:
I grabbed her and started to strangle her and I dragged her off the bed, tossed her into the corner of my room on the tile floor, off the rugs. She was trying to, you know, scream, and was fighting back. But of course she really couldn’t, since I had my hands around her throat. Uh … she stopped struggling … just sort of lay there. I got dressed. I had been sweating so violently. I went out to the garage. I got some plastic bags to put her in. [Returning from the garage,] I saw that she was still moving, so I began strangling her again and I hit her head on the floor repeatedly. She began to bleed from the nose, mouth, face … I don’t know where. There was blood all over the floor. I then grabbed one of the plastic bags and put it over her head and twisted it tightly and held it there until she stopped.
As I read this in preparation for meeting him, I was thinking to myself: An hour or two earlier, this guy was standing in front of a classroom teaching chemistry to high school students. What led from that Point A to this Point B?
As the confession went on, McGowan described how he lifted Joan’s body and placed it in a plastic trash bag, then wrapped it in an old sofa cover, tied it with cord, carried it to the garage, and stowed it in the trunk of his car—the “new car” Joan had spotted from her front yard around the corner and down the block. He cleaned up her blood as best he could with some old T-shirts. Then he drove the twenty miles or so and dumped the body down the slope in Harriman State Park. He unwrapped it and left it under the rock ledge. He put the plastic bag and the couch cover in a roadside trash can.
When he returned to Hillsdale he joined the neighborhood search for Joan.
“I felt better when I went back to the house,” he told Dr. Galen. “I slept well.”
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