THE VAMPIRE KILLER

Russ Vorpagel was a legend in the Bureau, six four and 260 pounds, a former police homicide detective in Milwaukee who also had a law degree and was an expert in sex crimes and bomb demolition. His job as Sacramento coordinator for the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit took him up and down the West Coast, teaching local police about sex crimes, and he had a lot of credibility to do so, because cops and sheriffs appreciated the depth of his knowledge.

On a Monday night, January 23, 1978, that local police confidence had translated into a call to Russ from a small department north of Sacramento. A terrible homicide had been committed, one that was far beyond the ordinary murder in terms of the violence done to the victim. David Wallin, twenty-four, a laundry-truck driver, had returned to his modest suburban rented home after work, about six on the evening of January 23, and found his twenty-two-year-old, three-months-pregnant wife, Terry, in the bedroom, dead, with her abdomen slashed. He ran screaming to a neighbor's house, and that neighbor called the police. Wallin was so upset that he could not talk to the authorities when they arrived. The first policeman who entered the home, a sheriff's deputy, was similarly shocked. Later, the deputy said that he had nightmares for months from viewing the carnage.

As soon as the police had seen it, they called Russ for help, and he called me at the FBI Training Academy at Quantico. Disturbed though I was about the murder, I was also intensely interested, because the case seemed as if it would provide me with an opportunity to use the technique of psychological profiling to catch a killer almost as soon as he had struck. Most of the time, when a case was sent to the BSU, the trail was long cold. In Sacramento, it was very hot indeed.

Articles in the newspapers the next day reported that Terry Wallin had apparently been attacked by an assailant in the living room of the house as she was preparing to take out the garbage. There were signs of a struggle from the front door to the bedroom; two bullet casings had been found. The dead woman was clad in a sweater-type blouse and a pair of pants; her sweater, bra, and pants had been pulled away from her torso, and her abdomen had been slashed. The officers at the scene told reporters that they could not determine a motive for the death, and that robbery had been dismissed as a motive because nothing had been taken.

In fact, the details were far worse than that, but, Russ told me, they were being withheld from the public so as not to cause a panic. Many people often think of the police as rather tough and heartless men who like to shove the public's nose into the dirt so taxpayers will know what the cops themselves have to deal with every day. Not in this instance; some details were kept in-house to spare the public unneeded agony and fright.

There was another reason for withholding information, as well: to keep private certain facts that only the killer would know, facts that might later prove valuable in an interrogation of a suspect.

What the public was not told then were these details: The major knife wound was a gaping one from chest to umbilicus; portions of the intestines had been left protruding from it, and several internal organs had been taken out of the body cavity and cut. Some body parts were missing.

There were stab wounds to the victim's left breast, and inside those wounds the knife appeared to have been moved about somewhat. Animal feces had been found stuffed into the victim's mouth.

There was also evidence that some of the woman's blood had been collected in a yogurt container and drunk.

The local police were both horrified and mystified, and Russ Vorpagel was alarmed, too, because from what he knew of sexual homicide, it was clear to him—as it was immediately obvious to me—that we had to act quickly; there was a distinct danger that the killer of Terry Wallin would strike again. The high level of violence, reflected in the ghastly crime scene, made that almost a certainty. Such a killer would not be satisfied with one homicide. An entire string of killings might follow. I was due to go out to the West Coast to teach at one of our road schools on the following Monday, and we made arrangements that would allow me to arrive on the Friday before that (though on the same taxpayer nickel) and help Russ look into this crime. It was going to be the first time that I was able to go on-site with a profile, and I looked forward to it. Russ and I were both so convinced of the likelihood of the slayer striking again, however, that we shot back and forth a bunch of teletypes and I did a preliminary profile of the probable offender. Criminal profiling was a relatively young science (or art) then, a way of deducing a description of an unknown criminal based on evaluating minute details of the crime scene, the victim, and other evidentiary factors.

Here, in the original (and not entirely grammatical) notes written at the time, is how I profiled the probable perpetrator of this terrible crime:

White male, aged 25–27 years; thin, undernourished appearance. Residence will be extremely slovenly and unkempt and evidence of the crime will be found at the residence. History of mental illness, and will have been involved in use of drugs. Will be a loner who does not associate with either males or females, and will probably spend a great deal of time in his own home, where he lives alone. Unemployed. Possibly receives some form of disability money. If residing with anyone, it would be with his parents; however, this is unlikely. No prior military record; high school or college dropout. Probably suffering from one or more forms of paranoid psychosis.

I had plenty of reasons for making such a precise description of the probable offender. Though profiling was still in its infancy, we had reviewed enough cases of murder to know that sexual homicide—for that's the category into which this crime fit, even if there was no evidence of a sex act committed at the scene—is usually perpetrated by males, and is usually an intraracial crime, white against white, or black against black. The greatest number of sexual killers are white males in their twenties and thirties; this simple fact allows us to eliminate whole segments of the population when first trying to determine what sort of person has perpetrated one of these heinous crimes. Since this was a white residential area, I felt even more certain that the slayer was a white male.

Now I made a guess along a great division line that we in the Behavioral Sciences Unit were beginning to formulate, the distinction between killers who displayed a certain logic in what they had done and those whose mental processes were, by ordinary standards, not...