John E. Douglas - The Killer Across the Table: Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI’s Original Mindhunter

JOHN DOUGLAS is a former FBI special agent, the bureaus criminal profiling pioneer, founding chief of the Investigative Support Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and one of the creators of the Crime Classification Manual . He has hunted some of the most notorious and sadistic criminals of our time, including the Trailside Killer in San Francisco, the Atlanta Child Murderer, the Tylenol Poisoner, the Unabomber, the man who hunted prostitutes for sport in the woods of Alaska, and Seattles Green River killer, the case that nearly ended his own life. He holds a doctor of education degree, based on comparing methods of classifying violent crimes for law enforcement personnel. Today, he is a widely sought-after speaker and expert on criminal investigative analysis, having consulted on the JonBenet Ramsey murder, the civil case against O.J. Simpson, and the exoneration efforts for the West Memphis Three and Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. Douglas is the author, with Mark Olshaker, of seven previous books, including Mindhunter , the number one New York Times bestseller that is the basis for the hit Netflix series.

MARK OLSHAKER is a novelist, nonfiction author, and Emmy Awardwinning filmmaker who has worked with John Douglas for many years, beginning with the PBS Nova Emmy-nominated documentary Mind of a Serial Killer . He has written and produced documentaries across a wide range of subjects, including for the Peabody Awardwinning PBS series Building Big and Avoiding Armageddon. Olshaker is the author of highly praised suspense novels such as Einsteins Brain , Unnatural Causes, and The Edge . In the other realm of life-threatening mysteries, he is coauthor with Dr. C. J. Peters of Virus Hunter: Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses Around the World , and with Dr. Michael Osterholm of Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs . His writing has appeared in the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal , USA Today , the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Newsday .

Both authors and their wives live in the Washington, D.C., area.

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Mindhunter

Journey into Darkness

Unabomber

Obsession

The Anatomy of Motive

The Cases That Haunt Us

Broken Wings

Law & Disorder

THE KILLER ACROSS THE TABLE . Copyright 2019 by Mindhunters, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Abstract paint background image on title page by Eky Studio/shutterstock
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover photographs David Waldorf/Getty Images; IgorZh/Shutterstock

Digital Edition MAY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-291065-3

Version 04032019

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-291063-9 (hardcover)

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-294581-5 (international edition)

To the memory of Joan Angela DAlessandro and in honor of Rosemarie DAlessandro 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

T he opinions expressed in this book belong to the authors alone and do not reflect those of the FBI or any other organization.

For photos related to the cases in this book and other information about John Douglass career, the authors and their work, please visit www.mindhuntersinc.com.

H ere, 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 others 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 girlJoandid you know her?

Well, Id seen her in the neighborhood, he replies. His affect is calm and his tone is even.

Lets 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.

T his is a book about the way violent predators thinkthe 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 its 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 crimesnot 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 didnt use that term yet) of bank robber types. I started seeing the differences between planned and unplanned crimes and organized and disorganized ones.