The face of evil.

ON March 14, 1992, at a peaceful country lake between Canton and Zanesville, Ohio, a 49-year-old man was fishing, when he was shot dead by a high-powered Swedish Mauser rifle.

Six detectives spent a week investigating the crime and came up clueless. Then a deputy sheriff remembered a random shooting that had occurred three years before in a neighboring county. A man had been shot as he walked or jogged near his rural home. The police soon found another case: James Paxton, 21, killed 50 miles away on November 10, 1990, by three shots from a .30-caliber rifle as he stalked deer with a crossbow.

Paxton's murder had never been solved. But six days before the first anniversary of his death, a letter had arrived at the Martin's Ferry Times Leader from the murderer, who proved he was no hoaxer by identifying the murder weapon and offering other details known only to the killer and the police. "Paxton was killed because of an irresistible compulsion that has taken over my life," the killer wrote. "I knew when I left my house that day that someone would die.... This compulsion started with just thoughts about murder and progressed from thoughts to action. I've thought about getting professional help but how can I ever approach a mental-health professional? I just can't blurt out in an interview that I've killed people (Paxton was not the only one). Technically I meet the definition of a serial killer (three or more victims with a cooling-off period in between) but I'm an average-looking person with a family, job, and home just like yourself."

On April 5, while the cops scratched their heads, another fisherman was killed with a shot from a Swedish Mauser two counties farther south, near Interstate 77. Federal, state, and local lawmen formed a task force to find the Hunter of Humans, as reporters tagged the killer. All the murders had happened on weekends, at or near rural roads not far from the two major interstates, I-70 and I-77, that quadrisect the area south of Akron and Canton. All the victims were alone, shot from a distance with a high-powered rifle. None was robbed, mutilated, or sexually assaulted. Four other killings in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana bore intriguing similarities. And around the same time there was a rash of animal killings: a thousand cows, horses, dogs, and cats shot dead throughout southeast Ohio.

A Break in the Case

ON August 24, 1992, after the task force had publicized its manhunt and opened a toll-free hotline, investigators got a break. A telephone caller who requested anonymity described a hunting companion, a man he had known since high school, a loner and "gun nut," whom he suspected of the murders. The suspect was Thomas Dillon, 42, a husband and father who had worked as a draftsman for 22 years in the Canton Water Department. The informant described himself as having been Dillon's only close friend. On hunting trips Dillon would shoot dogs and cats from public roads, and he kept a calendar in his bedroom recording his score. Once, the informant recalled, Dillon had taken potshots at a farmer. By the early 1980s, Dillon was boasting that his death count had reached 500, and the informant broke off their friendship.

In 1989 Dillon announced he had quit killing animals and invited the informant to accompany him to gun shows. On their long drives, they would talk about guns, hunting--and serial murders. Both had read many books about serial killers. Once Dillon remarked: "Do you realize you can go out into the country and find somebody and there are no witnesses? You can shoot them. There is no motive. Do you realize how easy murder would be to get away with?" During a trip in the summer of 1992, they discussed Ted Bundy and how he had escaped detection for so long. Dillon asked the informant: "Do you think I've ever killed somebody?"

Caught off guard, the other man said, "No, I don't think so." And Dillon repeated the question. "I'd never seen him like that before," the informant said. "I thought to myself, 'Has anybody been shot?'" When the informant read about the serial killings of five outdoorsmen, he wrestled with his memories for several days and decided to call the police.

Investigators began following Dillon's rural ramblings by airplane, saw enough to alarm them, and managed to arrest him on gun charges. When a prosecutor seeking to deny him bond named him in court as a suspect in the serial killings, another witness stepped forward with a Swedish Mauser he had bought from Dillon at a gun show on April 5, the day the second fisherman was killed; ballistics tests nailed Dillon, and he eventually pleaded guilty to five murders. He is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole.

Serial killers were once rare. Although reports in Europe date back as far as the fifteenth century, London's Jack the Ripper was one of the few to be widely written about before the mid twentieth century, and by modern standards he was a piker, claiming only five victims over three months in 1888 (see p. 38). Yet in the last two decades serial killings have become increasingly frequent, with as many as half a dozen peppering the headlines and newscasts simultaneously, terrorizing entire cities and regions--the Boston Strangler; San Francisco's Zodiac Killer; New York City's Son of Sam; Atlanta's child murderer, Wayne Williams; Los Angeles's Hillside Strangler; Chicago's John Wayne Gacy; Houston's Dean Corll; California's Co-Ed Killer, Ed Kemper; Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal; and a host of others.

Victorian Psycho

THE Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel, London, caused a sensation that has never died out. Between the autumn of 1888, when the grisly murders took place, and World War II, half a dozen books on the case were published. Between the end of the war and 1980 nine books appeared, and since 1980 there have been more than twenty. Jack has turned up in novels, short stories, films, and TV shows (Robert Bloch even brought the Ripper onto the USS Enterprise in one of the most daring episodes of Star Trek). No other murder case has provoked anything like this ballooning bibliography. There is now even a quarterly journal devoted to the topic, Ripperana. Philip Sugden's Complete History of Jack the Ripper (Orbit, 1994) offers the most thorough, sober, and scholarly narrative that has yet appeared, as well as the most painstaking analysis of the evidence. Anyone who wants to look into the case without wasting time on tosh linking the killings with the royal family or the Freemasons should start with Sugden. To be sure, his account will not be the last word.

Why all the interest? In our day we have become unhappily familiar with serial killers and sex maniacs. To the Victorian mind, however, the Whitechapel murders represented something new, strange, and terrifying. They were reported and embellished in the London newspapers and immediately picked up by the foreign press. In this way the Ripper murders sent shock waves throughout Europe, the United States, and what was then the colonial world.

The sobriquet Jack the Ripper clearly played a part in seizing and holding public attention. Yet there is no good reason to believe that the killer gave himself that title. The name first appeared at the foot of a letter sent to the Central News Agency after the second murder. Neither that letter nor any of the other Ripper letters sent to the press, Scotland Yard, or the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee have been firmly linked to the murderer. Leading Scotland Yard officers were sure that the first Jack the Ripper letter was the work of a journalist. Most students of the case agreed. In part, then, he was a media invention.

Five murders, all of prostitutes, are definitely credited to the Ripper, and one or two others might have been his. The body of Polly Nichols was found in Bucks Row around 3:40 A.M. on August 31. Her throat had been cut, and she had been mutilated in the abdomen. She was considered by Scotland Yard to have been the first Ripper victim. But two other prostitutes had been murdered with knives in Whitechapel earlier in the year. These other murders were never cleared up, and there is reason to attribute at least one of them to the Ripper. At any rate, the hue and cry now began in earnest, and Whitechapel was inundated with police. To no avail. On the morning of September 8, Annie Chapman was found dead and mutilated in Hanbury Street. At 1 A.M. on September 30, Elizabeth Stride was found dead in Berner Street. Only 45 minutes later the body of Catharine Eddowes was found in Mitre Square. It seemed the killer had been interrupted while cutting up his first victim that night. Elizabeth Stride was only lightly mutilated, whereas Catharine Eddowes was the worst yet.

Nothing happened in October or in the first week of November. Then, on the morning of November 9, police were called to a dingy apartment off Miller's Court, again in Whitechapel. Mary Jane Kelly was the last known victim of Jack the Ripper, and no one who saw the scene of the crime, soaked with blood and strewn with viscera, was ever able to forget it.

Of all the suspects paraded before us by the various Ripper authors, including Mr. Sugden, none would need Perry Mason to get an acquittal on the evidence as it stands. For some years the front-runner was a barrister and schoolmaster named Montague John Druitt, who committed suicide shortly after the Miller's Court murder. He was favored by a senior Scotland Yard man, Sir Melville Macnagten, mainly, it appears, because Druitt's family suspected him. We don't know why.

RECENT research points to a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski. He was identified by a witness who had seen a man with one of the victims a few minutes before her murder. Yet the witness would not give evidence in court. The trouble with Kosminski is that he did not come to police attention until February 1891, more than two years after the last murder took place. Kosminski was incarcerated in Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. Later he was taken to another asylum, where he died in 1919.

Because of the continuing mystery about the killer's identity, a darkly glamorous legend has flourished. Lurking in a dim corner of the public imagination with his top hat, cloak, and Gladstone bag, walking silently at night through the swirling fog of Victorian London, Jack the Ripper has only a tenuous connection with the Whitechapel murderer. He is more a Gothic monster than a real person; it's no coincidence that the popular fascination with the Ripper coincides with a boom in Gothic horror. It would all come to an end if he could be identified and found to be as boring and mediocre as most killers are.

Often a killer's victims fit a particular pattern: migrant farm workers, elderly women at home alone, street-walking prostitutes, adolescent boys, black children, attractive young women who part their hair in the middle, hitchhiking co-eds. Sometimes they fit no pattern at all. The phenomenon is worldwide, from England's Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, who killed 13 women before his apprehension in 1981, to the Rostov Cannibal, Andrei Chikatilo, who slaughtered at least 53 young men and women in Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan over a dozen years before his arrest in 1990.

By one count, the U.S. has seen more than 150 documented cases of serial killers since 1800. John Douglas, a senior FBI analyst, estimates thirty to fifty serial killers are active in the U.S. at any one time. Any city large enough to have significant prostitution, a drug culture, "street people," and runaway kids is a hospitable locale, but so are quiet, semi-rural and exurban areas.

Ohio's Hunter of Humans illustrates the difficulty of catching serial killers. Modern mobility enables a serial killer to move easily from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and makes it difficult for police to recognize connections among deaths. Police often lack the sophisticated organization and computer systems that would help identify the problem while it is happening. In many places, detectives still use a primitive pin map showing the locations of all the homicides in the city.

In New York, Joel Rifkin killed 18 women, mostly prostitutes, unnoticed. He was caught at 3:15 A.M. on June 28, 1993, when two New York State troopers on a Long Island parkway noticed a pickup truck without a license plate. Rifkin led them on a 20-mile chase before smacking into a utility pole. The troopers noticed an odor coming from a tarp in back and found a bloated, decaying body underneath. Rifkin confessed to killing 17 women and directed police to bodies. In his bedroom detectives found credit cards, driver's licenses, and other personal items connecting him to his victims, who were scattered over nine counties. Identification papers connected him to an 18th victim. Until Rifkin's arrest police did not suspect they had a serial killer on their hands.

The Catch Ratio

ASUBSTANTIAL proportion of the rise in reports of serial killings is probably due to increasing police sophistication in recognizing the patterns. But there has also been a real increase in the rate of serial murders, partly due to a decline in the police's efficiency at catching murderers. In the bad old days before the Warren Court's "due process revolution," homicide detectives were very good at catching killers, and states executed a significant proportion of them. We can safely conjecture that many a serial killer was caught early in his career, before he had mastered his craft. Police nationwide cleared homicides at a stable rate of about 92 per cent. The rate began a long slide in 1966, hitting 64 per cent in 1992. That is, unsolved homicides nearly quintupled--to about 8,400, almost as many as the total number of murders in 1965 (9,850).

The late Jeffrey Dahmer--killer of 17 over 13 years, 5 of them in the 2 months before he was caught--would have been stopped after his first killing if police had operated without the unreasonable definition of "reasonable search" imposed by the federal judiciary and the paralyzing fear of federal suits for "civil rights" violations. Dahmer's first murder was in 1978, when he was 18 and lived near Akron, Ohio. He picked up, strangled, and dismembered a hitchhiker. Driving with body parts in garbage bags on the back seat, he was stopped in the wee hours by two cops who thought he was a burglar or marijuana smuggler and asked what was in the bags. Garbage, Dahmer said, claiming he was on the way to a dump. "Let's see it," is all the officers would have had to say to nip this serial cannibal's career after the first victim. In an earlier day, the officers might have pursued their inquiry. But the Supreme Court's definition of a reasonable search inhibited them. So they let the young cannibal go on his way to stardom.

Or consider Coral Eugene Watts, who outfoxed prosecutors and the criminal-justice system despite an IQ of 75. Enrolled at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, he started acting out violent fantasies against women at the age of 21. On October 25, 1974, he knocked on the doors of 2 apartments and strangled 2 women. He left them for dead, but both survived. Five days later he stabbed a 19-year-old co-ed 33 times, killing her. Identified as a suspect in the non-fatal assaults, Watts listened to the Miranda warning, got a lawyer, and followed his advice, refusing to answer any questions about the murder and committing himself to a state mental hospital. More than a year later, Watts bargained prosecutors into dropping one assault charge in return for a guilty plea to the other, for which he received a one-year sentence.

After his release, Watts killed 6 people in Michigan and probably another in Ontario, earning himself the nickname the Sunday Morning Slasher. In March 1981, after police put Watts under surveillance, he moved to Texas. Michigan cops alerted Texas cops, but in vain. Within days Watts had killed a medical student out jogging. Six months later he knifed 2 women to death in separate attacks the same night. He got 6 in 6 weeks in the spring of 1982. Finally, he was caught fleeing a Sunday-morning attack on 2 women in their apartment; another woman was found strangled in her bathtub.

Psychiatrists declared Watts legally sane but diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic with a pathological hatred of women; his fantasies, they found, "revolve to a large extent around the struggle against the 'evil' he sees everywhere." He escaped trial for homicide by agreeing to a guilty plea on burglary and assault charges with a 60-year sentence and parole eligibility in 20 years. In return he confessed to 14 Houston homicides and led or directed cops to 3 undiscovered bodies. He also admitted to murdering a young woman found floating in an Austin swimming pool, whose death had been judged accidental. Investigators believe his body count totals at least 22. However, a decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals wiped out his assault conviction. As a result, he no longer has to serve 20 years before being eligible for parole. He had a parole hearing in 1993 and will get another in 1996; his current release date is 2007. He is 40 years old--young enough for another round of Sunday-morning murders.

In addition to weaknesses in the criminal-justice system, publicity has contributed to the rise in serial murders by encouraging imitation. One student of this phenomenon is Shervert Frazier, who has served as president of the American Psychiatric Association, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and supervisor of psychiatric services at Massachusetts's Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane. Frazier's patients there included the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo (13 victims in 1962--64). Frazier says many people have murderous fantasies and control them through "bypass techniques." They may get in their cars and drive to an isolated place where they can't hurt anyone, or go to a beach and walk until they're exhausted. One murderer Frazier studied would visit a lake and sit for hours, even days. Another sought strenuous nighttime employment to avoid explosive feelings that emerged at night. Another repeatedly walked a course in a ritualized way.

All these strategies ultimately failed in the cases Frazier studied, but many people do succeed in controlling murderous impulses through such techniques. A highly publicized murder or series of murders may push such individuals over the edge. In 1974 Dean Corll and two accomplices were found to have killed 27 youths in a homosexual murder series around Houston. A nationwide rash of homosexual assaults and single murders ensued. Says Frazier, "That means there are a lot of people abroad in the land with the same ideas who generally keep control; but the person who has inhibitions against acting out his urges finds it easier to break through his controls when he sees somebody has gotten away with 27 murders." After Frazier discussed homicide on a nationwide talk show, he got dozens of letters from people describing their own murderous impulses and struggles to stay in control.

Interviews with the Killers

PSYCHIATRISTS like Frazier and FBI crime analysts are beginning to dispel the mystery surrounding serial killers. In the late 1960s Frazier and collaborators from Massachusetts to Saskatchewan went into prisons and interviewed 31 murderers: 23 who had killed 1 each; 1, Charles Whitman, who had killed 16 in the infamous Texas Tower mass murder; and 7 serial murderers who had killed 3 to 13 victims each. The researchers also interviewed families, friends, teachers, police, and probation authorities. The serial killers themselves, put away for life, generally proved cooperative and candid. Several of the single murderers, it transpired, were beginning serial killers who had got caught before they had polished their techniques.

Frazier concluded that these killers had been subjected to brutalizing treatment that generated overwhelming hostile and ultimately murderous emotions. Many had been beaten repeatedly or sexually abused as children; as adolescents and adults, they were given to gender confusion, chaotic sexual behavior, and periodic cross-dressing. The rage and confused sexual impulses generated delusions. Yet these killers were organized and rational enough to plan and execute several murders. They were like Captain Ahab, who proclaimed, "All of my methods are rational; only my ends are insane."

Chicago psychiatrist Helen L. Morrison has done the most intensive clinical interviews of serial killers. Director of Chicago's Evaluation Center, Dr. Morrison interviewed her first serial killer in 1975 out of intellectual curiosity. He was Richard Macek, known as the Mad Biter because of the bite marks he left on the flesh of young women he tortured and murdered in Illinois and Wisconsin. Expecting a monster, she found a short, stocky man who treated her "as if we were sisters or bored housewives chatting away while our husbands spoke of business."

She interviewed Macek for 400 hours during the next year. He had committed rapes and rape--murders that included stabbing, drowning, strangulation, mutilation, biting, and necrophilia in various combinations. His attacks were ritualistic. He tied his victims with precise knots, cut symmetrical lines on their flesh, bit them, and took souvenirs. The rituals appeared to be a sort of "magical insurance" against further loss of control.

To date Dr. Morrison has studied 45 serial murderers around the world and interviewed the wives and relatives of many. On her first 8 cases alone she conducted more than 8,000 hours of interviews. Her specimens have included John Wayne Gacy, murderer of 33 young men and boys, with whom she spent 800 hours and at whose trial she testified. Typically, the killers had committed 10 to 30 murders each. Their victims were "chosen preconsciously," with an uncanny resemblance to one another. The murders were sadistic, sexual, and strikingly similar.

"These are basically cookie-cutter people, so much alike psychologically I could close my eyes and be talking to any one of them," says Dr. Morrison. "They are phenomenally alike in the way their psychology is set, the way they function, and how they're misdiagnosed."

In her view, the psychological development of serial killers has stopped at about six months of age. Whatever the cause of this impairment, Dr. Morrison says, the evidence suggests it is fixed in the first year of life. They do not make the transition child-development specialists call individuation, in which the infant realizes he is separate from his mother and surroundings. "As an infant," she says, "the future serial murderer cannot develop the ability to differentiate himself into a separate, distinct personality. He cannot distinguish himself from others; he cannot distinguish a human being from, say, a chair, or any other inanimate object."

Like a baby exploring the world, the serial murderer explores killing. Murder to him is no more than child's play, like taking apart a clock to see what makes it tick. Dr. Morrison hopes her research will lead to techniques allowing earlier recognition and apprehension of these beasts in human form. Her views are not popular with her professional colleagues, who do not want to believe there are incurable cases beyond their therapeutic powers. "When he is finally put in prison," she says of the serial killer, "he must never be released."

Enter the Feds

THE FBI got into the business of interviewing imprisoned serial killers after two psychiatrists demonstrated the practical crime-solving advantages of understanding the aberrant behavior patterns of compulsive criminals. New York psychiatrist James A. Brussel astounded the law-enforcement world with his uncannily precise 1956 forecast of the personality of Manhattan's Mad Bomber, George Metesky. Among other things, he correctly predicted that when arrested the mystery bomber would be wearing a double-breasted suit, neatly buttoned.

Dallas psychiatrist David G. Hubbard helped stop the 1968--72 skyjacking wave by interviewing virtually every skyjacker in captivity and designing techniques to take them apart psychologically and thwart their fantasies of power and control. Hubbard guided the airlines in a training program that enabled pilots and flight attendants to abort 42 consecutive skyjackings and stamp out the wild fad. From a rate of seven or eight a month, Hubbard-trained air crews cut skyjackings to zero, a full six months before metal detectors were installed in the nation's airports.

The spectacular successes of Brussel and Hubbard induced the FBI to create a Behavioral Sciences Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, which evolved into the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC). In 1978 agents began interviewing imprisoned assassins and serial killers, most of whom were flattered and happy to talk about themselves. In six years the agents talked to 38, including Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme (who tried to shoot President Ford), David Berkowitz (Son of Sam), Ted Bundy, and Ed Gein, whose exploits in the 1950s helped inspire both Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Today FBI researchers have studied more than a hundred serial murderers, plus scores of serial rapists; and agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms have interviewed dozens of serial arsonists. They find an astonishing common denominator. One study of 36 murderers showed 58 per cent set fires as children, 52 per cent set fires as adolescents, and only 8 per cent set fires as adults. They made a choice, moving to murder as more fulfilling. David Berkowitz set 1,412 fires, then switched to killing because it provided more excitement and power and gave him command of the front pages and TV newscasts.

The killer who taught the FBI the most was Ted Bundy. Articulate, with an IQ of 125, he compared his crimes to those of other serial killers, pointed out differences, and explained why he made certain choices. During a hunt for one such killer, Bundy advised staking out locations of the murderer's former crimes. He correctly predicted that the killer would revisit the scenes to relive the experiences and look for mementos.

Two cases show how FBI agents put their new knowledge to work. In a small Midwestern city, citizens were terrified by the grisly sex murder of a young woman, whose mutilated body was found in a public park near her home. Police pronounced themselves stumped, without a single clue or lead. The chief of detectives put in a call to John Douglas, a pioneer psychological profiler who today heads the NCAVC's investigative support unit. Over the phone the detective described the crime scene. "Put a microphone at the victim's grave and keep it under surveillance," Douglas suggested. Skeptical, the local cops nevertheless complied. They were astounded a couple of days later when a young man showed up soon after dark, dropped to his knees, and started apologizing to the victim for killing her. The cops arrested him and found some of the victim's jewelry in his pocket; at his apartment they found items of her bloody clothing. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.

In Adairsville, Georgia, the body of 12-year-old Mary Stoner was found in the woods near her home in December 1979. She had been sexually assaulted, and her head had been crushed with a large rock. By telephone the sheriff in this little mountain community consulted Douglas and described the scene. It was not much to go on. However, Douglas responded: "The killer will probably be a divorced white man in his mid twenties, will drive a black or blue car and work at a macho laborer's job. You'll probably find he had some prior contact with the victim. He'll probably be a high-school dropout who served in the Army or Marines, but he probably got a medical or dishonorable discharge after fewer than six months in service. I think he'll have a previous record of sex crimes. And if you put him on a lie detector, the test will be inconclusive or show no deception at all."

The sheriff was amazed. "You just described a suspect we just released!" he declared. Douglas suggested interviewing the man again, following a subtle interrogation technique that he detailed to the sheriff. The man was Darrell Gene Devier. As predicted, he showed no deception in a polygraph examination. At all points, his resemblance to Douglas's profile was uncanny. He worked as a tree-limb cutter, drove a dark blue Pinto, was an eighth-grade dropout, and had been kicked out of the Army with a general discharge after less than a year's service. He was divorced at the time of the killing. Other evidence implicated him in an attempt to rape a 13-year-old girl in a nearby town before Mary Stoner's murder. Witnesses testified that Devier's crew had worked at the Stoner home before the murder and that Devier had made sexual remarks about the girl. In an extensive interview, Devier confessed. Testimony about his confession was admitted at his March 1982 trial, and a jury convicted him and sentenced him to death for rape and murder.

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.

When she petitioned to have his juvenile murder record sealed, Kemper had to see a psychiatrist, who concluded, "I see no psychiatric reason to consider him a danger to himself or any other member of society." At the time of the examination, Kemper had a severed head stowed in the trunk of his car. After six co-ed murders, Kemper slaughtered his own mother, invited her best friend to come over and help him plan a surprise birthday dinner, and killed the friend too. He cannibalized his mother, then got in his car and drove aimlessly eastward, eventually calling police and begging them to arrest him before he killed again.

In 1978 FBI interviewers John Douglas and Robert Ressler, aware of Kemper's high IQ and sophistication in psychology, asked him where he thought he would fit in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, then in its second edition. Kemper had read the manual, did not find a description that fit him, and did not expect to until psychiatry had advanced considerably. "When would that be?" Ressler asked. When the DSM is in its sixth or seventh edition, Kemper answered--some time in the next century.

Kemper may be right. But research now under way is advancing the quest for that understanding and for the law-enforcement techniques to exploit it.