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and their families, this is always a bitter and extremely difficult persona for me to assume. But it’s necessary, and after I did it with Speck I was able to start penetrating the macho facade and achieve an understanding of how his mind worked and what made him escalate that night in 1966 from a simple burglary to rape and mass murder.
    When I went to Attica to interview David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” who had killed six young men and women in cars in New York City during a year-long reign of terror beginning in July of 1976, he held to his well-publicized story that his neighbor’s three-thousand-year-old dog had made him commit the crimes. I knew enough about the specific details of the case and I’d seen enough of his methodology that I was sure the killings were not the result of such a complex delusional system. I felt this way not because I made it up, but because of what I’d already learned in interviews we’d previously conducted and analyzed.
    So once Berkowitz started giving me the song and dance about the dog, I was able to say, “Hey, David, knock off the bullshit. The dog had nothing to do with it.”
    He laughed and quickly admitted I was right. This cleared the way to the heart of his methodology, which was the aspect I most wanted to hear about and learn from. And we did learn. Berkowitz, who had started out his antisocial career as a fire-starter, told us that he was on the hunt nightly for victims of opportunity who met his criteria. When he couldn’t find them, which was most nights, he would gravitate back to the scenes of his previous crimes to masturbateand relive the joy and satisfaction, the power of life and death over another human being, just as Bittaker and Norris had with their audiotapes and Lake and Ng did with their home movies.
    Ed Kemper is a six-foot-nine giant of a man who probably has the highest IQ of any killer I’ve ever encountered. Fortunately for me and the rest of us, where I encountered him was in the secure visitors’ room of the California State Medical Facility at Vacaville, where Kemper was serving out multiple life terms. As a young teen he had spent some time in a mental hospital for killing both his grandparents on their farm in northern California. He had gone on as an adult to terrorize the area around the University of California at Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, where he decapitated and mutilated at least six coeds before getting himself focused and butchering his own mother, Clarnell, the real object of his resentment.
    I found Kemper to be bright, sensitive, and intuitive. And unlike most killers, he understands enough about himself to know that he shouldn’t be let out. He gave us a number of important insights into how an intelligent killer’s mind works.
    He explained to me, with insight rare for a violent criminal, that he dismembered the bodies after death not because of any sexual kick, but simply to delay identification and keep investigators off his trail as long as possible.
    From other “experts” we got additional nuggets of information and insight which were to prove tremendously valuable in devising strategies to catch UNSUBs. For instance, the old cliché about killers returning to the scenes of their crimes turns out to be true in many instances, though not necessarily for the reasons we thought. True, a certain personality of killer under certain circumstances does feel remorse and returns to the crime scene or the victim’s grave site to beg forgiveness. If we think we’re dealing with that sort of UNSUB, it can help dictate our actions. Some killers return for different reasons—not because they feel bad about a crime but because they feel good about it. Knowing this can help us catch them, too. Some inject themselves directly into an investigation to keep on top of things, chatting up cops or coming forward as witnesses. When I workedon the Atlanta Child Murders in 1981, I was convinced from what I saw that the UNSUB would