Read Online Obsession by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker - Free Book Online

Ron Walker, hadn’t gotten worried when they didn’t see me and broken down the door to find me. I lingered in a coma for five days, not expected to recover.
    But before that, when the bodies of six young women had ended up in or near the Green River, I had done a profile of the killer. Most, if not all, of the early victims had been transients or prostitutes who gravitated to the Seattle-Tacoma corridor. A multi-agency and jurisdictional task force had been formed, and the special agent in charge (or SAC as we say in the Bureau) of the Seattle Field Office came to Quantico with a package of materials on the case. As I had done with many other cases, I went up to the top floor of the library to analyze and think about the cases.
    From the evidence presented to me, the UNSUB I visualized in this case was a white male in his twenties. He’d be unemployed or underemployed in some sort of blue-collar job. It was clear that he was an out-doorsman, a hunter, fisherman, or hiker who was familiar with the Green River area and knew where he was unlikely to be found. He could have thrown them off a bridge, but he took the time to carry them downto the water, to locations where it would be more difficult to find them.
    Among the many details in the profile and the many factors I used in compiling it, one of the most important was the way he’d disposed of the bodies. That is, they were merely dumped, with no particular staging, no ritualistic binding or bags over the head, and no effort at respect, such as covering the body in a dignified way, as we do see with some serial offenders. What this told me was that the UNSUB had no remorse for what he was doing. In fact, I thought he was trying to humiliate the victims as he must have felt humiliated by other women in the past. He saw himself, I felt, as an avenging angel of sorts, whose duty and privilege it was to punish women for their misdeeds.
    Both the Green River Killer and the Atlanta Child Murderer disposed of bodies by putting them in the river, where the water would wash away the evidence. Why, then, do I say that the Green River Killer was out to punish his victims (not specifically by inflicting pain for its own sake as a sexual sadist would, but because he felt they deserved punishment for their sins), while the killer in Atlanta had a homosexual attraction to his? There are a number of reasons, which get to the subtlety of profiling and why the process has never been effectively reproduced by computer. First, while the UNSUB may very well have been following the media coverage, there was no evidence he was playing to it or playing off of it. He sought no recognition, but at the same time, the number of cases and the level of violence of the crimes continued to escalate.
    Then there is the actual selection of victims—the victimology. In Atlanta, where the victims were young black boys, we concluded that the UNSUB was a black male, which implied a certain type of relationship that we could build on. In Green River, the victims were mainly prostitutes.
    Prostitutes are favorite victims of many serial killers for several reasons. First and most basic, the very nature of their work and clientele makes them extremely approachable and vulnerable. They make their living by being picked up. Second, many men, with severe self-image problems of their own, consider them “bad” or defiled or even evil, which they take as an excuse to abuse them. In several instances at Green River, the nude bodies of the victims were found with small rocks stuffed into their vaginas. I have never seen this type of thing done for sexual thrills or for any reason other than to degrade the victim.
    So in his own way, I felt, the Green River Killer had told us about his obsession. But in this case, merely understanding it wasn’t enough.
    For one thing, this profile was general enough that it could reasonably fit a lot of men who might come into contact with the investigators. Except for the