stabbing her repeatedly in the breasts and stomach.
What he had failed to realise, as he daydreamed of revenge on ‘whores’, is that he was handing himself over to a demon who would give him no peace. He would have to carry on murdering and disembowelling woman after woman, even when he knew perfectly well that they were not prostitutes, because only this could make him feel fully alive. Roy Hazelwood was right: ‘sex crime isn’t about sex, it’s about power.’ A murderer like Peter Sutcliffe is the living illustration of what he meant.
The hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was the biggest police operation ever mounted in the United Kingdom. It cost £7 million, and involved 200,000 interviews—including four with Sutcliffe—and 30,000 searches of homes. But it taught the British police the same lesson that the FBI had learned through Manson, Kemper, and the rest: there had to be some more logical way of trapping serial killers. The Yorkshire police reached the conclusion Pierce Brooks had reached in 1948: the answer lay in computerisation. In the United Kingdom, this happened in the early 1980s, and would later help to trap serial killers such as Duffy and Mulcahy, the ‘Railway Rapists’.
In the US, it also began to happen in the early 1980s, when Pierce Brooks persuaded the Department of Justice to host a conference at Sam Houston State University, and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was approved. It was decided to run it from Quantico, and in May 1985 Brooks was appointed its first director, and joined the team there.
By that time, Ressler had already inaugurated a new project that he called the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), which sprang from that plan to interview killers—Ressler’s original ‘Criminal Personality Research Project’ of 1978. The idea, as Ressler put it, was to ‘bring together the fragmented efforts from around the country so they could be consolidated into one national resource centre available to the entire law enforcement community’.
But at the time Ressler and Douglas were advising the British police about the Yorkshire Ripper, all this lay some years in the future. And on the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, another series of random and apparently motiveless killings was underlining the need for some method of psychological profiling.
It had started in the stiflingly hot early hours of 29 July 1976, as two young women sat talking in the front seats of an Oldsmobile on Buhre Avenue in the Bronx; they were 18-year-old Donna Lauria, a medical technician, and 19-year-old Jody Valenti, a student nurse. Donna’s parents, on their way back from a night out, passed them at about 1 a.m., and said good night. A few moments after they reached their apartment, they heard the sound of shots and screams. A man had walked up to the car, pulled a gun out of a brown paper bag, and fired five shots. Donna was killed immediately; Jody wounded in the thigh.
Total lack of motive for the shooting convinced police that they were dealing with a man who killed for pleasure, without knowing his victims.
Three months after the Bronx murder, on 23 October 1976, 20-year-old Carl Denaro shared a few beers with friends at a Queens bar. At 2.30 a.m., he left with Rosemary Keenan and parked his car near her house. Suddenly a man appeared and fired five shots into the car; one of them struck Carl in the head. Rosemary raced the car back to the bar and his friends, who rushed him to the hospital. Surgeons replaced a part of his skull with a metal plate.
Just a month later, on 26 November, two young women were talking on the stoop in front of a house in the Floral Park section of Queens; it was half an hour past midnight when a man walked toward them, started to ask if they could direct him, then, before he finished the sentence, pulled out a gun and began shooting. Donna DeMasi, 16, and Joanne Lomino, 18, were both wounded. A bullet lodged in Joanne’s spine,
What he had failed to realise, as he daydreamed of revenge on ‘whores’, is that he was handing himself over to a demon who would give him no peace. He would have to carry on murdering and disembowelling woman after woman, even when he knew perfectly well that they were not prostitutes, because only this could make him feel fully alive. Roy Hazelwood was right: ‘sex crime isn’t about sex, it’s about power.’ A murderer like Peter Sutcliffe is the living illustration of what he meant.
The hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper was the biggest police operation ever mounted in the United Kingdom. It cost £7 million, and involved 200,000 interviews—including four with Sutcliffe—and 30,000 searches of homes. But it taught the British police the same lesson that the FBI had learned through Manson, Kemper, and the rest: there had to be some more logical way of trapping serial killers. The Yorkshire police reached the conclusion Pierce Brooks had reached in 1948: the answer lay in computerisation. In the United Kingdom, this happened in the early 1980s, and would later help to trap serial killers such as Duffy and Mulcahy, the ‘Railway Rapists’.
In the US, it also began to happen in the early 1980s, when Pierce Brooks persuaded the Department of Justice to host a conference at Sam Houston State University, and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was approved. It was decided to run it from Quantico, and in May 1985 Brooks was appointed its first director, and joined the team there.
By that time, Ressler had already inaugurated a new project that he called the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC), which sprang from that plan to interview killers—Ressler’s original ‘Criminal Personality Research Project’ of 1978. The idea, as Ressler put it, was to ‘bring together the fragmented efforts from around the country so they could be consolidated into one national resource centre available to the entire law enforcement community’.
But at the time Ressler and Douglas were advising the British police about the Yorkshire Ripper, all this lay some years in the future. And on the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, another series of random and apparently motiveless killings was underlining the need for some method of psychological profiling.
It had started in the stiflingly hot early hours of 29 July 1976, as two young women sat talking in the front seats of an Oldsmobile on Buhre Avenue in the Bronx; they were 18-year-old Donna Lauria, a medical technician, and 19-year-old Jody Valenti, a student nurse. Donna’s parents, on their way back from a night out, passed them at about 1 a.m., and said good night. A few moments after they reached their apartment, they heard the sound of shots and screams. A man had walked up to the car, pulled a gun out of a brown paper bag, and fired five shots. Donna was killed immediately; Jody wounded in the thigh.
Total lack of motive for the shooting convinced police that they were dealing with a man who killed for pleasure, without knowing his victims.
Three months after the Bronx murder, on 23 October 1976, 20-year-old Carl Denaro shared a few beers with friends at a Queens bar. At 2.30 a.m., he left with Rosemary Keenan and parked his car near her house. Suddenly a man appeared and fired five shots into the car; one of them struck Carl in the head. Rosemary raced the car back to the bar and his friends, who rushed him to the hospital. Surgeons replaced a part of his skull with a metal plate.
Just a month later, on 26 November, two young women were talking on the stoop in front of a house in the Floral Park section of Queens; it was half an hour past midnight when a man walked toward them, started to ask if they could direct him, then, before he finished the sentence, pulled out a gun and began shooting. Donna DeMasi, 16, and Joanne Lomino, 18, were both wounded. A bullet lodged in Joanne’s spine,
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