Part 11 (1/2)

”How do you know that?” the doctor asked skeptically.

”From the way he committed his crime,” Roy said. ”We try to think the way he thinks.”

”And how do you do that?” the psychiatrist pressed.

”A lot of experience.”

Then came the challenge.

”If I were to give you a series of tests, do you think you could test out with a particular mental disorder?” he asked.

Hazelwood and Douglas said yes, they thought they could.

”So we went to his office at night,” Roy recalls. ”He took John into one room and me to another. And he said, 'Okay, I want you to test out as paranoid schizophrenics.'

”And both of us did. He just thought that was amazing. He couldn't believe it.”

11.

The Mindzappers For a time early in the 1980s almost all the profiling responsibility in the BSU fell to either Hazelwood or John Douglas or the two of them together.

”We worked closely on so many cases,” Hazelwood says. ”I remember one year I did sixty profiles and he did eighty. And we traveled together on several homicides.”

A Canadian double-murder case from the mid-1960s that Hazelwood and Douglas profiled together, two decades later, also was one of the oldest ever brought to their attention.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who requested the BSU's a.s.sistance, reported that the victims were teenage sweethearts, Maurice* and Chloe,* who lived in a small town in eastern Canada. After failing to solve their double murder using traditional investigative methods, the Mounties hoped a fresh, behavioral approach to the twenty-year-old crime might yield results. Upon hearing of the new profiling service at Quantico, they decided to give it a try.

As RCMP agents recounted the story to Hazelwood and Douglas, one snowy Sat.u.r.day night, Maurice and Chloe went bowling together with friends. Afterward, they climbed into Maurice's car and headed for his house. Chloe was to sleep over with Maurice's family and then drive to church with them the next morning.

They never made it home.

Maurice's car was found with its lights on along a little-used access road leading up a hill to his family's house. The wheels were pulled sharply to the right. Skid marks in the snow indicated the vehicle had stopped suddenly. The driver's door was open, as was the left rear door.

Two sets of footprints led from the car doors to the rear of the sedan. From there, the footprints and a trail of blood led to a ditch about fifteen feet away, where Maurice lay dead. He had been shot once in the back, and again in one ear at extremely close range, with a 30.06 rifle.

Chloe's footprints led from the car's closed front pa.s.senger door up the hill toward Maurice's house. The killer's prints led in the same direction from where he'd shot Maurice in the ditch, and intercepted Chloe's trail about 150 feet from the car.

There investigators found the girl, also murdered, curled in the fetal position. Chloe was surrounded by a series of wildly distorted snow angels, artifacts of her desperate fight with the killer, who had savagely clubbed her to death. He had not s.e.xually a.s.saulted her.

The keys to the car were in her right front pocket. The bolt from his 30.06 lay beneath her.

The killer's footprints then led away from the murder scene, back to the car, past the ditch, and past the dead Maurice and on toward the highway below, where his trail was lost.

Approximately thirty-six hours after the killings, the rifle was found, wrapped in an oilcloth. The killer had carefully placed the murder weapon in a garbage can within a block of Chloe's residence. The rifle's stock was split and broken. He had attempted to tape it back together.

Since the motive for the murders clearly was neither theft nor rape, Hazelwood and Douglas inferred that a deep personal rage lay behind the crimes. Although Maurice might have been the killer's primary target, the impersonal way he was dispatched suggested Maurice's death was incidental to his primary objective, killing Chloe.

Nor were these spontaneous murders. Chloe's killer did not hitchhike through the snow that night with his 30.06, hoping the two would pick him up. Nor was he waiting on the hillside in ambush: All footprints led away from the car.

The likeliest scenario was that the killer was hidden in the back of the vehicle when Maurice and Chloe emerged together from the bowling alley that night.

It was the agents' opinion that he waited until they turned up the hill, and then sat up and announced his presence. The reason Hazelwood and Douglas believed he waited until that moment was the sharp angle at which the car's wheels were turned.

”If I am holding a gun on Maurice the entire ride, and say, 'Now pull over,' he'd pull over,” Hazelwood explains. ”But if I rise up and say suddenly, 'Stop the car!' it will startle him, which explains the wheels being jerked.”

The physical evidence told Hazelwood and Douglas that Maurice was marched to the rear of the car, where the a.s.sailant shot him in the back.

Hazelwood and Douglas surmised that as Maurice was killed Chloe grabbed the car keys and jumped out of her side, slamming her door behind her as the teen scrambled up the hill toward Maurice's distant house.

The mortally wounded Maurice, meantime, staggered a few feet to the ditch, trailing blood as he went. The killer followed him, and discharged a second round into the teen's ear. This murder was unemotional, detached.

Chloe's was not. It was clear from his tracks and the second crime scene that he ran after the girl and attacked her furiously. The later discovery of the rifle bolt under her body also suggested the power of his frenzy.

The weapon was extremely important to him, Hazelwood and Douglas believed. Although he'd smashed the stock in his a.s.sault on Chloe, he obviously carried the damaged weapon all the way back into town, and there discovered that he'd left the bolt behind.

”My bolt! Where's my bolt?!” the profilers imagined him wondering in distress, knowing he'd never find it in the snow.

The importance of the weapon to him was demonstrated by the fact that although he knew he had to get rid of it, he still carefully wrapped it in oilcloth.

He had been patient enough to hide himself in the back of Maurice's car and to bring his own weapon, but the crime scene was on balance disorganized. There was no attempt to hide or disguise what he had done-Maurice and Chloe would be found very soon-and he plainly was out of control when he killed the girl. Moreover, he had neglected to provide for his own escape, or even to improvise one. He simply walked away.

The combination of a disorganized scene and the victims' ages argued for a relatively young killer, nineteen to twenty-one years of age, the agents agreed. He didn't own his own car, or have access to one, or else he would have used a vehicle that night.

But he had developed a giant personal anger against Chloe. Combining all these factors, Hazelwood and Douglas concluded that he lived quite near her, probably with his parents.

What had generated such enormous hatred?

The only person Chloe had ever dated was Maurice. Both agents felt the killer was a socially inadequate loner who had created in his imagination a fantasy relations.h.i.+p with Chloe. She was his dream lover. Hazelwood and Douglas felt that over a period of time the fantasy grew increasingly important to him even as it became ever more untenable. He began to feel betrayed.

”She was his girlfriend,” explains Hazelwood. ”She didn't know that. But he knew it.”

The agents told the Canadian investigators that the killer would have been very agitated in the days following the double murder. He'd be obsessed by the press coverage. He quite likely attended Chloe's funeral.

Six months after crafting this re-creation of the crime and portrait of the killer, Hazelwood and Douglas were contacted once again by the Mounties, who had exceptional news to share.

In a development unconnected with the BSU's consultation on the case, a woman had walked into an RCMP substation halfway across Canada from where Maurice and Chloe had been killed twenty years before, and asked if the murders ever had been solved.

A records check indicated it had not.

”Thank you,” she said, and turned to leave.

”Oh, ah, wait a minute,” the Mountie on duty asked. ”Why do you want to know?”

She decided to be frank.