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Authors: John Philpin
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shooting gallery.”
“Fine. You stay. I’ll go.”
He stalked into his bedroom. I could hear him yank open drawers and pull back the zippers on his duffel bag. I walked to the doorway.
“You know I’m not gonna let you go off alone,” I said.
“Then go pack.”
THE 737 LIFTED OFF THE RUNWAY .
I looked down, watching the earth recede and race away. Lake Albert was far behind me. I was roaring toward something that I wanted nothing to do with, but I knew that I had no choice.
I was chasing a killer who consumed victims as if they were handfuls of cheese-flavored popcorn. He was a man who had operated according to his own agenda, who had lived as a god deciding who died and when, until I had tracked him down. For most of his adult life, John Wolf had sought his own justice for the physical and emotional pain inflicted on him by a sadistic stepfather. Now, a different vengeance drove him: I’d had the gall to interrupt his mayhem.
I had more questions than answers. Number one on my list was how anyone could walk away from an explosion that blew flames and debris a hundred feet into the air. I had locked him in the coal bin of his family’s Vermont home and flipped a switch that triggered the load of the plastic explosives buried in the bin. Explosives
he
had planted to kill me and my daughter. Numbertwo nudged for the top spot: Why hadn’t he killed me when he had the chance?
When I first opened my practice in Boston, most of my referrals originated with the courts. Spousal homicide, familicide, patricide. I needed to know how the events of violence had evolved. The killer’s dynamics could be understood only in the context of his or her relationships. Lengthy interviews with survivors— relatives, neighbors, the accused—provided a complete biography that moved inexorably toward a single convulsive moment.
Albert DeSalvo—“The Boston Strangler”—had changed everything. There were many other serial killers before him. Who knew what the werewolf legends of Europe really were? DeSalvo had brought his carnage into my neighborhood, and forced himself into my consciousness.
I was living on Beacon Hill when DeSalvo, in his cell at Bridgewater State Hospital, identified himself— first to fellow inmate George Nassar, then to the fiery young attorney, R Lee Bailey—as Boston’s most feared killer. It was close. One of the strangler’s victims lived on Charles Street, within walking distance of my apartment. For me, in my practice, DeSalvo had changed the face of murder. He had known none of his thirteen homicide victims, nor had he known any of his countless “Measuring Man” or “Green Man” rape victims.
The sixties—a benchmark decade in music, political assassination, social revolution—also saw a sharp increase in the number of strangers killing strangers. How was it possible to trace the evolution of an act of violence that had no apparent context, where there was no discernible relationship? I was determined to find out, and developed my own approach to the art of identifyingthe characteristics of a killer from the evidence left at the crime scene, and from what I could learn about the victim’s personality. It was a process of working backward.
I decided that examining the grab site and its circumstances were as important as microscopy of everything found at the kill site, the location that my colleagues in law enforcement insisted on calling the “crime scene.” The crime, I decided, moved through several locations— whether within the same room, apartment, or house, or spread all over the city and throughout Suffolk County. The homicides that I studied had
scenes,
multiple locations that were equally important.
I remember one homicide detective telling me, “The perp grabbed her at a supermarket on the Cambridge side of the river, but he did her here.”
“Here” was an alley in Boston’s North End.
“Did he grab her inside the market, in the parking lot, what?” I
“Fine. You stay. I’ll go.”
He stalked into his bedroom. I could hear him yank open drawers and pull back the zippers on his duffel bag. I walked to the doorway.
“You know I’m not gonna let you go off alone,” I said.
“Then go pack.”
THE 737 LIFTED OFF THE RUNWAY .
I looked down, watching the earth recede and race away. Lake Albert was far behind me. I was roaring toward something that I wanted nothing to do with, but I knew that I had no choice.
I was chasing a killer who consumed victims as if they were handfuls of cheese-flavored popcorn. He was a man who had operated according to his own agenda, who had lived as a god deciding who died and when, until I had tracked him down. For most of his adult life, John Wolf had sought his own justice for the physical and emotional pain inflicted on him by a sadistic stepfather. Now, a different vengeance drove him: I’d had the gall to interrupt his mayhem.
I had more questions than answers. Number one on my list was how anyone could walk away from an explosion that blew flames and debris a hundred feet into the air. I had locked him in the coal bin of his family’s Vermont home and flipped a switch that triggered the load of the plastic explosives buried in the bin. Explosives
he
had planted to kill me and my daughter. Numbertwo nudged for the top spot: Why hadn’t he killed me when he had the chance?
When I first opened my practice in Boston, most of my referrals originated with the courts. Spousal homicide, familicide, patricide. I needed to know how the events of violence had evolved. The killer’s dynamics could be understood only in the context of his or her relationships. Lengthy interviews with survivors— relatives, neighbors, the accused—provided a complete biography that moved inexorably toward a single convulsive moment.
Albert DeSalvo—“The Boston Strangler”—had changed everything. There were many other serial killers before him. Who knew what the werewolf legends of Europe really were? DeSalvo had brought his carnage into my neighborhood, and forced himself into my consciousness.
I was living on Beacon Hill when DeSalvo, in his cell at Bridgewater State Hospital, identified himself— first to fellow inmate George Nassar, then to the fiery young attorney, R Lee Bailey—as Boston’s most feared killer. It was close. One of the strangler’s victims lived on Charles Street, within walking distance of my apartment. For me, in my practice, DeSalvo had changed the face of murder. He had known none of his thirteen homicide victims, nor had he known any of his countless “Measuring Man” or “Green Man” rape victims.
The sixties—a benchmark decade in music, political assassination, social revolution—also saw a sharp increase in the number of strangers killing strangers. How was it possible to trace the evolution of an act of violence that had no apparent context, where there was no discernible relationship? I was determined to find out, and developed my own approach to the art of identifyingthe characteristics of a killer from the evidence left at the crime scene, and from what I could learn about the victim’s personality. It was a process of working backward.
I decided that examining the grab site and its circumstances were as important as microscopy of everything found at the kill site, the location that my colleagues in law enforcement insisted on calling the “crime scene.” The crime, I decided, moved through several locations— whether within the same room, apartment, or house, or spread all over the city and throughout Suffolk County. The homicides that I studied had
scenes,
multiple locations that were equally important.
I remember one homicide detective telling me, “The perp grabbed her at a supermarket on the Cambridge side of the river, but he did her here.”
“Here” was an alley in Boston’s North End.
“Did he grab her inside the market, in the parking lot, what?” I
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