Silent Terror

How, then, does the F.B.I.’s Serial Killer Task Force intend to address this problem?

Inspector Dusenberry: “Once a killer crosses a state line after committing a murder, he’s a federal offender. So what we’ll be doing is cross-checking computer statistics on unsolved homicides and disappearances from all fifty states, going back ten years. If state-to-state links are made, we will be requesting the complete case files from the applicable agencies, and we will be communicating by telephone with the investigating officers. We will have M.O. cross-checking logs, and logs for physical evidence, circumstantial probability and a half-dozen logs compiled from reports made by the forensic psychologists attached to the Task Force. Patterns are likely to emerge from all this information, and we will hypothesize from that information, then initiate follow-up investigations staffed with experienced Criminal Division agents.”

An entire wing of a building on the grounds of the F.B.I. Academy at Quantico has been taken over by the Task Force. The offices are packed with reams of blank paper, desks and computer terminals, along with a giant computer with fifty-state police feed-in. Known to Task Force agents as “Serial Sally,” this brain device will be the starting point of all possible investigations. Already programmed with data on twenty-seven resolved serial killer cases, “Serial Sally” will be assisted by a half-dozen crack forensic psychologists with extensive field experience, three forensic pathologists specializing in homicide evidence, and four criminal division agents, men with fifteen years and up with the Bureau — the “Paperwork Jockeys” who will be trawling for links, connections and clues.

“I’m anxious to get started,” Inspector Dusenberry, 47, the Task Force’s Agent in Charge, told L.E.J. “I’ve already read up a storm on the subject. It’s depressing stuff, and the numbers are staggering. A man in Alabama killed twenty-nine women in two years; Gacy in Chicago killed thirty-three. There’s our friend Ted Bundy, of course, and then we’ve got the stats on missing and presumed-murdered children. They’re more than staggering. The police in Anchorage, Alaska, have a suspect that they make for sixty-one killings, perpetrated within eighteen months. The pain behind all of it is staggering, and I think the serial killer problem is America’s number-one law-enforcement priority.”

Inspector Dusenberry, who joined the Bureau in 1961, is a graduate of Notre Dame Law School and has sixteen years of Criminal Division experience, mostly in supervising bank robbery investigations. Married and with a college-age son and daughter, he is grateful that the Task Force assignment came at a time when his children are grown and his wife is back in college getting an advanced degree in Art History. “It’s going to be a long load of long hours,” he told L.EJ. “My kids and wile in school, and the desk nature of the job will make it a whole lot easier to apply myself. If I was spending this kind of time on the street doing robbery investigations, I’d be worried about them worrying about me.”