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Manson realized he had to assume control, make it seem that he had actually intended these murders as the beginning of Helter Skelter, and direct his family into another killing, or else he would lose credibility and surrender his leadership to Watson. Then his free ride would be over. In Manson’s case, the violence began not when he began his manipulation, domination, and control, but when he began
losing
control.
    All that we learned from Manson doesn’t mean he’s any less a monster than what we thought, it only means he turns out to be a somewhat different type of monster. Understanding the differences gives us insight into his type of crimeand, equally important, his type of charisma. What we learned from Manson we were later able to apply to an understanding of other cults, such as the one led by the Reverend Jim Jones, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians at Waco, the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, the Freemen in Montana, and the entire militia movement.
    Through our interview and research efforts we came up with a number of observations which have had significant bearing on our ability to analyze crimes and predict behavior of criminals. Traditionally, investigators have given great weight to a perpetrator’s modus operandi, or MO. This is the way the perpetrator goes about committing a crime—whether he uses a knife or gun, or the method he uses to abduct a victim.
    Theodore “Ted” Bundy, who was executed in 1989 in the electric chair of the Florida State Penitentiary at Starke with my colleague Bill Hagmaier not far away, was handsome, resourceful, and charming, well-liked by those around him and the model of a “good catch.” He was a perfect example of the reality that serial killers don’t often look like monsters. They blend in with the rest of us. He was one of the most notorious serial killers in American history, a man who abducted, raped, and murdered young women all along the way from Seattle to Tallahassee, having developed a ruse in which he would have his arm in a sling and removable cast, making him appear disabled. He would then ask the assistance of his intended victim in moving some heavy object. When her guard was down, he would whack her. Novelist Thomas Harris used this particular MO in creating the character of Buffalo Bill in
The Silence of the Lambs
.
    Additional aspects of the character were taken from other serial killers with whom we acquainted Harris during a visit he made to Quantico before writing his previous novel,
Red Dragon
. Buffalo Bill kept his victims in a pit dug in his basement. In real life, this is what Gary Heidnick did with the women he captured in Philadelphia. Buffalo Bill’s penchant for using the skins of women to create a female “costume” for himself came from Ed Gein, the 1950s killer in the small Wisconsin farming community of Plainfield. Harris wasn’t the first to borrow the idea, though. Robert Blochhad already used parts of it in his own memorable novel,
Psycho
, made into the film classic by Alfred Hitchcock.
    What’s important to note here is that while using an arm cast and sling to abduct women is a modus operandi, killing and flaying women to use their skins is not. The term I coined to describe that was “signature,” because like a signature, it is a personal detail that is unique to the individual. The MO is what the offender does to effect the crime; the signature, in a sense, is
why
he does it: the thing that fulfills him emotionally. Sometimes there can be a fine line between MO and signature, depending on the reason why it was done. Of the three aspects of the Buffalo Bill composite, the cast is definitely MO, the skinning is signature, and the pit could be either, depending on the situation. If he keeps his captives in the pit as a means of holding and controlling them, then I would classify that as MO. If he gets some emotional satisfaction out of holding them down there, of seeing them degraded and pleading in fear, then that would