Ann Wolbert Burgess - A Killer by Design

One by one, I examined the photos sprawled out on the table in front of me. They were divided into three sets, each a standard forensic collection of overviews, midranges, and close-ups. In the first set, labeled Danny 9.21, the setting of the overviews painted an almost idyllic scene in the quiet Nebraska countryside. But the landscape was only for context. The real focus of the pictures was the small body hidden within them, partially covered by tall grass growing along an unpaved road. The midrange photos were even more unsettling. These depicted the lifeless male victima child or young teenagerbent backward in an unnatural slump. His wrists and ankles were bound with rope, and he was naked except for a pair of navy-blue underwear. Close-ups focused on the boys mutilated body: his sternum torn apart in a chaos of stab wounds, a deep laceration across the back of his neck, his hair matted in tangles of dirt and dried blood. There were flies everywhere.

As I placed these photos back on the table and picked up the next pile, Christopher 12.5, I was overcome by a sense of dj vu. These pictures, taken just yesterday, showed the continuation of a pattern. They depicted a second male victim, indistinguishable in age and appearance from the first, whose body had been found in the same remote stretch of Nebraskan countryside as that of Danny 9.21. The similarities were striking. In this set, however, fall had changed to winter, and by closely inspecting the midrange images I could see a thin layer of snow coating the boys pale skinjust enough to cover his wounds and the features of his face so he looked something like a mannequin. Close-ups revealed puddles of frozen blood outlining the victims head and abdomen. The two photos from the autopsybrightly lit and sharply focused on the small body draped across the examination tablewere even more chilling. The first showed a deep incision where a knife had been pressed into the back of the victims neck and then wrenched, counterclockwise, for several inches, from the right ear to just beneath the chin. The second focused on seven lacerations along the victims belly and chest. It was hard to tell whether these cuts were random or were intended to convey some sort of meaning.

I took a sharp breath to collect my thoughts on that December morning. It was the early 1980s, and I was standing alongside five agents in a large underground conference room known as the bomb shelter in the heart of the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. There were no pictures on the walls, no phones, no distractions. The only window was a small square of wire-reinforced glass that looked out on empty offices and an empty hall. This was an area of Quantico that few people knew about. It belonged to the FBIs Behavioral Science Unit (BSU), and our isolation was a daily reminder of the controversial nature of our work. We hunted serial killers. Our job was to study them, learn how they thought, and find ways to catch them as quickly as possible. We did this through a novel technique called criminal profilinga technique that, at the time, our colleagues throughout the Bureau regarded with varying degrees of skepticism or disdain. But criticism didnt matter, only results. And we were determined to prove just how effective our approach could truly be.

Criminal profiling was the reason we had all gathered that winter morning. Special Agent Robert Ressler was working an urgent case out of Nebraska, and the previous night, hed faxed each of us on the small team within the BSU a briefing and arranged for the room to be set up and ready to go by the time we arrived before the sun came up. We were waiting for Ressler himself to appear. And as we waited, we kept busy with the various documents that stretched across the massive table in front of us. There were case files, autopsy reports, witness testimonies, sketch artist depictions, suspect lists, and the collection of forensic photos I held in my hands. The whole array was equal parts horrifying and impressive.