She was a profiler for “Mindhunter”: When Bill reported his conversations with Bundy, the atmosphere in the room thickened

Be afraid of wishes fulfilled

Working at the BSU (Behavioral Science Unit) meant that almost every day I dealt with aberrations that were hard to imagine. I felt chills when Bill Hagmaier first told me about the Ted Bundy hearings he conducted. After years of denial, Bundy confessed to thirty murders. He almost certainly killed more people.

As Bill reported his conversations with Bundy, the atmosphere in the room thickened. Bundy’s arrogance, his claims that he chose “people worthy of being killed” (no “ugly”, no prostitutes), his complete lack of emotion when deciding where he would dig his next grave (sometimes he prepared it before he even chose his next victim). ), his contempt for the women he murdered… Probably no other serial killer acted with such premeditation.

I’ve never met him. Only Bill had access to it. He had to follow the rules set by the killer: no recording devices, no women. Bundy fed Bill information. He tried not to reveal too much because he hoped to avoid the electric chair. I would often lie in bed in the evenings and imagine myself in Bill’s shoes. Just me and Bundy, a plexiglass wall between us. Bundy won’t look me in the eye. However, I think about the fact that he managed to escape from closely guarded prisons twice. At times he seemed half human, half ghost, able to pass through walls. I wondered if he would even consider me “worthy” of talking.

This is what I mean when I write about perversions. These types of things can become deeply embedded in the brain. Another example is Jeffrey Dahmer. He was undoubtedly one of the worst serial killers in history: he murdered seventeen men and boys over a thirteen-year period, starting in 1978. Moreover, he was undoubtedly perverted. He dismembered the victims’ bodies and had previously indulged in necrophilia. In preparation for interrogating him in prison, I had to learn more about his crimes. Then I went on a journey to the land of darkness. A journey you won’t forget.

The policemen who visited us in Quantico to consult on Dahmer’s case were very talkative. They provided a lot of details about him. Much of the information I heard then was not found in any later reports. For example, few people know that Dahmer’s first victim was a postman delivering mail on a bicycle. He survived the attack, although he almost died. Jeffrey was fifteen years old then: he lurked in the bushes and hit a passing postman with a heavy piece of wood. And he raped him anally while he was lying unconscious on the roadside.

I also learned that later, Dahmer broke into funeral homes at night and had sex with corpses. Other details were widely known. Dahmer invited men into his home under the pretense of sex, killed them, desecrated their bodies, dismembered them, and so on.

I must add that doing my homework on it turned out to be unnecessary. In November 1994, two days before we were scheduled to meet, Dahmer was beaten to death by another inmate at the Portage Correctional Facility in Wisconsin. It often happens that, whenever inmates have the opportunity, they bring “justice” to serial killers. This is not surprising, especially in the case of a murderer who killed young men and boys.

Speaking of perversions, we cannot omit Edmund Kemper, the third person of the unholy trinity. Kemper combined the worst traits of Bundy and Dahmer. Like Bundy, he killed female students. Like Dahmer, he was a necrophiliac and dismembered his victims’ bodies. Already as a teenager, he proved that he was tainted with evil.

He grew up in Santa Cruz, California. From an early age, he had exceptionally serious educational problems. He was so conflicted with his mother, Clarnell Strandberg, that she decided to send him to his grandmother who lived in the province, about a day’s drive from Santa Cruz. She hoped that the fresh air would be good for the fourteen-year-old boy. A few months later he called her and said:

– Come get me, I just shot Grandma and Grandpa.

Due to his age, he could not stand trial. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. He got out at the age of twenty-one. A condition was set: he was not allowed to live with his mother. But things turned out differently, and Kemper and Strandberg soon resumed their toxic relationship.

Kemper was estimated to be a genius – he scored one hundred and eighty points on an intelligence test. He was powerful, two meters six centimeters tall. He didn’t like working. Every day he drove his mother to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she worked as a secretary to the dean of one of the departments, and then he drove around the neighborhood picking up new victims, young hitchhikers who thought he was a student because he had a university parking pass behind the window. (By the way, a frightening number of serial killers lure victims into their cars under the pretense of giving them a ride. Let this be a warning to all parents – don’t let your children hitchhike.)

At first he killed one at a time, but it’s common for serial killers to become more bold over time, so Kemper soon began killing two girls at once. He cut off their heads and hands and buried them in one grave. He thought no one would ever catch him. He told me: “Policemen are incompetent idiots.” To prove this, he walked around Santa Cruz with the severed head of one of the victims in a transparent plastic bag. The people of California have obviously become accustomed to all sorts of oddities, because no one saw anything unusual about it.

Ultimately, Kemper turned himself in to justice, but not before he decided that the chapter of his life he was closing deserved a dramatic ending. On the night of April 20, 1973, he attacked his sleeping mother with a hammer. He then slit her throat, cut off her head and used her in a sexual act. He then placed her on a shelf and spent an hour yelling at her and throwing darts at her. He threw his mother’s tongue and larynx into the grinder in the kitchen sink – probably to silence her forever – but the grinder spat it all out. He went to a bar, had a few drinks, came home, invited his mother’s best friend to dinner, murdered her, stuffed her body in a closet. He got into the car and drove over fifteen hundred kilometers without any stops. He reached Pueblo, Colorado and called the Santa Cruz police to confess to the crime. “Yeah, sure,” said the officer on duty. So Kemper called a police officer he knew personally. He told him the whole bloody story and told him that he was waiting for someone to come to arrest him.

Years later, my colleagues John Douglas and Bob Ressler interviewed Kemper, who would soon appear before a committee responsible for determining whether to transfer him to another closed psychiatric facility, where he would spend the rest of his life, according to the verdict. The videotaped portion of the interrogation lasts only ninety seconds, but it is terrifying.

Clearly, a psychiatrist had explained to Kemper that matricide was a terrible crime, especially if it was committed in such a cruel way. Someone advised him: “Tell me you regret murdering your mother.” In conversation with my colleagues, Kemper managed to utter the word: “I regret it.” Then he apparently tried to cry, but he couldn’t help it. It was incredibly painful, yet incredibly disturbing, to look into his cold, dead eyes as he tried to feign emotions he didn’t really feel and didn’t understand at all.

A few years later, I analyzed a series of high-profile homicides that had occurred in Philadelphia and tried to determine whether they were the work of a single perpetrator or perhaps unrelated events. One day Kemper called me and offered to help. (He did this through the FBI management; he didn’t know me by name and didn’t have my number). I decided to talk to him, although quite reluctantly.

Serial killers get a lot of media attention, so they think they are God knows how important. Moreover, those who agree to be subjected to psychiatric examinations quickly master the psycho-jargon – no wonder, after all, they constantly deal with therapists and specialists – and then use it in interviews with journalists to tell them complete nonsense. However, I decided that he would meet his own. I got a call from Ed Kemper and described the murders in Philadelphia to him. He repeated several times:

– Yes, it’s about control. For pleasure. People want to feel complete control, they want to feel that someone is terrified of them.

He spoke in a dispassionate tone, just like in the interviews he gave in prison, available on YouTube. At the same time, however, I later realized that he treated me somewhat familiarly, which shocked me deeply. If you have an association with Hannibal Lecter at this point – rightly so.

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