Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Can you profile me and say, "He's safe"?
That you're never going to be a killer? No, no, no. That's the problem: People expect that killers look a certain way -- they have a third eyeball in the middle of their head or they're drooling. There are some disorganized killers -- weird kind of guys. But you catch them very quickly. It's the ones that are generally above average in intelligence -- like chameleons they can blend into the crowd. As an example, Ted Bundy -- killed college co-eds. Very attractive, good looking guy. His modus operandi was that he used a phony cast on his arm. He'd wait outside libraries. When the right victim came by, he'd drop the books. The girl would come over to help pick them up. The next thing you know -- boom! Like in the movie "The Silence of the Lambs," Buffalo Bill with the cast on his arm -- hit the girl and take her away.
What's novelist Thomas Harris like?
He's not exactly Mr. Personality or the life of the party. You wouldn't want to be a drinking buddy with this guy. He's just very quiet, more of a loner. Kind of an asocial guy. He's very thorough, though. He would sit in on classes in my criminal psychology class at the FBI Academy. I was just beginning to develop profiling at that time, going into the penitentiaries -- not to ask Hannibal Lecter, "Help us catch someone." Nothing like that. Just going in and conducting interviews about individual crimes. No one had ever done that before. A lot of people who deal with criminals and who are making decisions for probation and parole don't want to know about the crime. What I've always said is, "To understand the artist, you must look at the art work."
Harris saw this kind of stuff. And then what he did was he took a composite. Hannibal Lecter does not really exist. There is no one, thank goodness, like him. I think it's more scary that there are people like Buffalo Bill. He is a composite of three killers who Harris learned about in a lecture: Ted Bundy. A guy from Plainview, Wis., who killed a couple people. Dug up the graves of a couple more. And he'd skin them. And preserve the flesh in motor oil. Then he would slip them on himself. Face masks. He had half a dozen of them.
Ed Gein. Isn't "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" as well as "Psycho" based on him?
Yes. And the third one was a guy from Philadelphia. He kept women in a pit about five and a half feet deep. His lawyers argued that he was insane, but he had over half a million dollars in his bank account. He selected stocks with his little disability check through Merrill Lynch. So Merrill Lynch testified, "We would like to say it was through our strategy that he got so much money, but he did this on his own." The guy was found guilty. [Gary Heidnik, 55, was executed Tuesday at Rockview state prison in Pennsylvania.]
In your book you say pornography doesn't make sex criminals. In the same way, books like "The Silence of the Lambs" don't stimulate unhinged people to go out and kill women, do they?
People who are unhinged will gravitate to violent themes. That's a given. They tried to say Bundy was driven to kill because of pornography. That's nonsense. The studies that I've done show that 83 percent of offenders were into pornography. But so what? Maybe if I did a search of FBI agents it could be 90 percent are reading pornography. If you get into sadomasochistic types of pornography -- that stuff doesn't take a normal person and then make them abnormal.
So "Hannibal" will not make a guy who loves steak consider chowing down on a plate of ribs that once belonged to his neighbor?
Ha! No, no.
Have you read Harris' new one?
I just started it. Friends tell me about it -- that it is so bizarre. The ending is so bizarre.
Yup
I get knocked off too, I understand.
I think you just die naturally.
I nearly died in '83. That's how Harris got his character. I was on a murder case. I was 38 years of age. I was so burned out from working so many cases that my body was giving out. I had a tremendous headache on Wednesday. I went before the task force, the people I was with, and told them, "Don't check on me until Friday when we head back to Washington, D.C." I collapsed that night in my motel and was on that floor for two days. When they kicked in the door they found that my body temperature had gone up to 107, causing my brain to split. They packed me in ice. I was in a coma for a week. I came out of it paralyzed. I had to go through five months of rehabilitation.
At the time, my personal life was turning into a disaster. Harris cashed in on all these kinds of things. I was drinking too much. I was exercising too much. I wasn't socializing at all. No religion. My work wasn't the kind of stuff I could come home and tell my children. "Tonight it's not the Three Little Bears it's Jack the Ripper."
It was tough on my family. I was the only one doing this work. I'd get calls 24 hours a day, like you're on duty all the time. Most of my human guinea pigs were in local law enforcement because the FBI would not embrace my work.
Hoover died in '72. I joined in 1970. Now it's '77, '78, '80, and I'm doing this stuff, but the Hooverites are still around. They want to deal in blacks and whites, and I want to deal in grays.
Did you know Hoover?
I just saw him when he came before the class as a new agent. It was a little like a cardboard placard. It was just so unusual to see him. The thing that amazed me is that he seemed like a loosey-goosey sort of guy, and there was such fear in the organization. When I got to Detroit [my first office], and later Milwaukee, old-timers would be fearful of an inspection. There would be inspectors who would come in every two years and someone would get whacked.
You mean fired?
Disciplined. You could be demoted or reprimanded -- where you don't get promotions on time.
Where were you when you heard J. Edgar Hoover like to wear dresses?
You'll laugh about it. In my office in '83 I had dresses. I told you the blue chiffon dress joke. I'd say, "If I don't get any help here, you're gonna find me one of these days behind my desk wearing a blue chiffon dress smoking a cigar." So for my 20th anniversary in the FBI, two different people gave me blue chiffon dresses. So I hung them in my office on a coat rack. "60 Minutes" was down with Lesley Stahl. When she saw my dresses, I told her the story. She said, "That's great." They wanted to film them, but the public relations people said, "No! Don't go there." I said, "What are you talking about? I'm just going to stand next to the dress. I'm not going to wear it." But they said, "No. No. This could come out wrong." I said, "Look, they're my dresses. If they want to take a picture of me with the dresses they can take a picture of me with the dresses."
Did Hoover make you feel personally embarrassed for the FBI?
I thought it was funny. Some of the old-timers were angry as hell. But the younger guys thought it was funny. What embarrassed me was Hoover keeping book on people like Martin Luther King.
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