The Murder Room

“What I do is too eccentric for a healthy, normal person,” he told himself.

He discouraged the young people who approached him at parties or forensic conferences, as CSI became an international TV hit, looking for advice on how to become a “profiler.” “Young man,” he’d say, “while I understand your enthusiasm, you seem quite too normal. You look like a fine fellow who’d like to marry, have children, have a happy life, not devote yourself to something that can destroy your marriage and, ultimately, your soul. This is not for the faint of heart. There are few of us who are cut out for it.”

Few cops wanted to explore the netherworld of the criminal mind, or could do so with the scientific training of a psychologist. On the other hand, few psychologists had or wished to have experience at crime scenes. Since Freud, leading psychologists had focused on everyday behavior and its disorders with a single-minded determination not to make old-fashioned moral judgments. Murder, evil, they left to the burly, often uneducated police officer or constable.

Walter was astonished, while lecturing to prominent European psychologists on the personality subtypes of murderers, that “none of them had any idea what I was talking about. They could look at John Wayne Gacy and see schizophrenia, but they had no training in sadism. There is no psychology of evil.” Walter was a man without a country.

Then, in 1995, he was listening to Ann Rule, the bestselling true-crime author, lecture on psychopaths at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences convention in Seattle. Walter was a distinguished fellow and frequent lecturer at the conference with FBI agent Bob Ressler and others. Now he scowled in disgust. There was absolutely nothing a popular writer like Rule could teach him about psychopaths, even if she had been friends with Ted Bundy, the basis of her book The Killer Beside Me.

“Are you believing this bullshit?” Walter asked the large man sitting next to him.

“I’m good friends with Ann Rule,” the big man barked, eyeing the wan, bespectacled figure beside him. “Who the hell are you?”

Thus began one of the most important friendships in the modern history of criminology.

The big man was Robert Keppel, renowned chief criminal investigator for the Washington state attorney general’s office, nationally known for his decades-long pursuit of Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer. A criminology Ph.D. and ex-Seattle cop, the formidable Keppel was known for a brilliant analytical mind, relentless bulldog attitude, and pioneering use of computers in criminal investigations.

Keppel quickly realized his remarkable bond with Walter. The Washington state detective and the Michigan psychologist had spent their careers like a right hand and a left hand that each didn’t know what the other was doing, until now. While Keppel had spent two decades as a homicide detective arresting killers and investigating fifty serial murder cases, more than any living cop, Walter had interviewed thousands of incarcerated killers, descending deeper into the criminal mind than any scholar. Both men were mavericks and outspoken critics of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, the acknowledged leader of the science of criminal profiling. On their own, they had developed almost precisely the same theories—revolutionary ideas that would transform modern murder investigation.

“There’s only one problem with what the FBI is doing,” said Keppel, who like Walter had been a friend or rival of the leading FBI agents for years. “It’s a lot of bunk.” Star special agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler had traveled the country in the 1980s interviewing an incarcerated murderers’ row of thirty-six famous serial killers and assassins to try to determine what made them tick. The list included Bundy, Charles Manson, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck, Edward Kemper, and last, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, and Lynette Frome, respectively assassins of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, and attempted assassin of President Gerald Ford. Douglas and Ressler’s resulting book, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, coauthored with a psychologist, became the bible of the new criminal profiling, dividing sexual murderers into two broad personality categories based on the crime scene, organized or disorganized.

Unfortunately, Keppel said, “they made it up. There’s no data at all. It wasn’t created out of a data set or known empirical study, it’s just there. As a result, FBI agents swoop into town, sit with the local cops, and begin their Kentucky windage estimate of what the offender was like. ‘We know he’s young and thin and a clothes-horse so I think he’s attractive to women’—and so on. The agents are in a room talking, never at the murder scene, not a one of ’em. As my detective friend Frank Salerno says, you know they never smelled the blood.”

Walter agreed, but was slightly more diplomatic. He saw the FBI as flawed and hidebound by bureaucracy, but deserving of credit for originating the systematic psychological study of killers. “I may disagree with the FBI or whatever, but we’re all on the same Roman road, trying to understand murder, evil, for the betterment of mankind.”

Walter had studied the history of murder back to the Greeks, but the modern road of criminal profiling began in November 1888, when Scotland Yard surgeon Thomas Bond attempted the first psychological profile of a killer after performing the autopsy of Mary Kelly, the fifth victim of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper, he wrote, would be physically strong, quiet, and harmless in appearance, possibly middle-aged, and neatly attired, probably wearing a cloak to hide the bloody effects of his attacks.

Both Walter and Keppel were aware of how little progress had been made in a century of trying to peer into the minds of killers. There were few highlights. In a 1943 profile of Adolf Hitler commissioned by American intelligence, New York psychiatrist Walter Langer correctly predicted that if the Third Reich collapsed the Fuhrer would likely commit suicide. In 1957, the psychiatrist James Brussel, “The Sherlock Holmes of the Couch,” successfully profiled the Mad Bomber who had terrorized New York City in the 1940s and ’50s, injuring fifteen people with thirty-three bombs planted everywhere from phone booths to libraries, including Penn Station, the New York Public Library, and Radio City Music Hall. The Mad Bomber eluded cops for sixteen years until Brussel, after studying the bomber’s many crimes and letters, successfully predicted down to the last detail that the killer would be a middle-aged, Catholic, Slavic ex–Commonwealth Edison employee living in Connecticut, who furthermore would be, as George P. Metesky was when arrested at his sisters’ house, wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned. In the 1970s, Brussel helped the FBI create its Behavioral Sciences Unit, which developed the first “profiles” of suspects.

By the time Pennsylvania State Trooper Stoud attended a Vidocq Society luncheon in Philadelphia in 1995, as a guest of a senior state trooper who was a VSM, he had investigated more than a dozen murders and read everything he could get his hands on about murder and murder investigation, including all of Douglas’s and Ressler’s books, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Yet he was deeply frustrated. In his thirties, he wanted to advance his career.

Walter had given a talk at the Vidocq luncheon about his murder subtypes. He discussed his method of solving the most notorious murder in modern Australian history—the brutal slaying of beauty queen and nurse Anita Cobby. Stoud was dazzled. He was desperate to become a profiler, but after reading all the books, there wasn’t any more to learn.

Mindful that “you had to find a profiler to show you the road so you can walk it yourself,” he approached Walter after the luncheon and asked if he could study with him, and was swiftly rejected. Late that night, he called Walter at home in Michigan, repeating his request to “be a learner.” Walter snapped at him, “I said no, did you hear me? I’m not interested. You’re too normal, a family and all the rest. I’ve tried this before, and it’s never successful. It would be a waste of my time and yours.” Half an hour later, Stoud called back and said, “I was just hung up on, but I won’t take no for an answer.” Walter cursed him out; Stoud said, “I’m going to keep calling.” He called the next night, and the next. Gradually, the younger man and the older developed a dialogue. They discussed murder cases in the news, murder cases they were working, the nature of evil. Walter allowed himself to wonder if Stoud had the brains, the guts, the character, and moral fiber, to be his protege. “You must learn to think horizontally as well as vertically,” he said, “which very few of us in the world can do.” Walter nurtured hopes the younger man could follow him, could stand witness to and stand against the worst evil human beings did to one another.

Walter drove over the icy hills in his aging Ford Crown Victoria to the Green Gables tavern. The car had 120,000 miles on it, and was always breaking down. Walter was always getting lost. Stoud pointed out he needed new shocks and brakes, and he snorted in reply, “You know I don’t care about those things.” The state trooper marveled at how little he knew about ordinary life—cars, computers, the World Series—for a genius. I guess he’s saving it all for sadism, necrophilia, and Munchausen syndrome, Stoud thought.

Walter said that after a lifetime immersed in ghastly murders, he had decided to reinvent himself as a country