serial killer: the firewall defense

George Bush, as governor of Texas, pardoned Henry Lee Lucas, a sadistic and prolific serial killer, in 1998.

Henry's crimes were of a particularly brutal nature, involving rape, torture, mutilation, dismemberment, necrophilia, cannibalism, and pedophilia, with the number of victims running as high as 300-600 by some accounts - including Henry's own, at times - though this figure is likely inflated. By all accounts though, Lucas, frequently working with partner Ottis Toole - a self described arsonist and cannibal - savagely murdered literally scores of victims of all ages, races, and genders.

...Henry, as it turns out, has some interesting stories to tell. In 1985, just a couple years into his incarceration, he attempted to tell his story in a book, written for him by a sympathetic author. The book, titled The Hand of Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story, tells of Henry's indoctrination into a nationwide Satanic cult. Lucas claimed that he was trained by the cult in a mobile paramilitary camp in the Florida Everglades in the fine art of killing, up close and personal. Other training involved abduction and arson techniques.

He further claimed that leaders of the camp were so impressed with Henry's handling of a knife that he was allowed to serve as an instructor. Following his training, Henry claimed to have served the cult in various ways, including as a contract killer and as an abductor of children, who were then taken just over the border to a ranch in Mexico near Juarez. Henry has said that this cult operated out of Texas and from a ranch in northern Mexico, trafficking in children and drugs, among other nefarious pursuits. In essence, Henry claimed that what appeared to be the random work of a serial killer was in fact a planned series of crimes often committed for specific purposes.

Some of the murders were political hits, according to Henry, including the occasional assassination of foreign dignitaries. This was not true for all of Henry's crimes. Some he did just because that's what he liked to do. And it was the one thing that he was really good at.

...What are we to make of such stories? Could Henry have been telling the truth about being a contract killer? And if so, did the contracts he was receiving have some kind of government connection? Though Henry never broaches the subject in his book, the training camp as he describes it clearly had military connections. And Henry has explicitly stated that the cult included among its members various prominent persons, including high level politicians. Could this be the reason for the actions taken by Governor Bush in June of 1998?

Now that Colonel Williams has been arrested, will he be linked to other crimes? His arrest opens cold cases in three other provinces.

According to Larry Jones, the man who was initially suspected in Williams' alleged home invasions and sexual assaults, police were looking for very specific items in the early days of their investigation. Jones, who lives next door to Williams on Cosy Cove Lane in Tweed, said that back when police were investigating him, they searched his home and produced a search warrant for La Senza bras, Jessica brand panties, computers, laptops and digital photography. Other reports say police were also looking for baby blankets and zip ties.

...Williams had been posted to the Shearwater base near Halifax, N.S., from 1992 to 1994, according to his biography posted on the Department of National Defence website until Tuesday afternoon. During that time frame, Andrea King, 18, Shelley Connors, 17, and Kimber Leanne Lucas, 24, were murdered. ...Investigators will also look into the unsolved 2001 murder of 19-year-old Kathleen MacVicar in Trenton.

An FBI profiler suggests that whoever committed these murders has been active for a long time.

Torstar News Service asked Mark Safarik, one of the FBI’s serial-killer hunters with the famed Behavioral Analysis Unit, about the likelihood that crimes like that were the work of a first-time offender. After 22 years in the bureau, Safarik now operates a Virginia-based consultancy with Robert K. Ressler, the FBI investigator credited with popularizing the term “serial killer.”

After considering some of the published details, Safarik observes, “People don’t just wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to abduct someone and murder them.’ I’m sure there’s a history.

“For me, the surprise is the number of assaults in a relatively short period of time,” Safarik says. “He’s obviously intelligent. He’s careful. So what’s happening with him? Is there some sort of mental decompensation? Did something trigger this?”

According to the profile of this sort of violent sex offender, “Usually there’s a progression,” Safarik says. “First, prowling, peeping, non-violent paraphilic (sexually deviant) stuff, voyeuristic activities. At some point, offenders decide that’s not enough. They’ll cross that line into fantasy fulfillment. He may have acted out with willing partners initially, prostitutes or others. And then that isn’t enough of a thrill, and he crosses over into non-compliant victims.”

The offender in the latest crimes sounds like someone at the mature end of that progression, Safarik believes. “He’s comfortable in the environment. He’s breaking in. He’s staying for long periods of time. He’s engaged in other activities – binding, photographing. That isn’t typically behaviour that just starts.”

Safarik suggested that, aside from other violent sex crimes, police will be looking for reports of unsolved “precursor” crimes in places where Williams has lived.

“I would be looking for cases where we tend to see sexual components that aren’t necessarily seen as sex crimes,” he says. “For instance, night-time burglaries where someone’s house is broken into but nothing is stolen. Or fetish-type burglaries, where they’re taking clothing.”

The search will be complicated by several factors, Safarik says. First, there’s Williams’ job.

“He’s in the military. That’s a problem. Not only has he moved around, the people around him have moved around.”

There’s also a massive time gap to fill in.

“I’d be checking back into his late teens. I’d probably start at age 18,” Safarik says. That would leave police poring over cold case files, many of them seemingly minor crimes, going back to the early ’70s.

“I’d be running the whole gamut, going deep into this guy’s history,” says Safarik. “I know that’s what they are doing.” 

Indeed. OR, maybe people in our government already know all about William's history. Maybe the idea that he is a "serial killer" is a limited hangout. If this "bright shining star" of a man, having been groomed for the highest levels of the military, and if he has been caught doing crimes that might link back to many other people in the power structure, that is going to require damage control. So if he's a "serial killer," that means he acted alone.

Firewall.


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Safarik's partner, Robert K. Ressler, knows just about everything there is to know regarding "serial killers." You could say he wrote the book.

Actually, he did write the book, I Have Lived in the Monster: Inside the Minds of the World's Most Notorious Serial Killers.

An account of Ressler's Career in the FBI's behavioral science unit, and his work pursuing the nation's worst serial killers. Ressler was a cohort of John Douglas. Reading this book, and some of Douglas' work, I am struck by how egotistical these guys are. I guess they have to be, to deal with the kinds of crimes they deal with.

Sometimes experts get that way.

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According to Dave McGowan, the US military seeded embassies throughout the world with assassins, some of whom were culled from military prisons.

"A U.S. Navy psychologist, who claims that the Office of Naval Intelligence had taken convicted murderers from military prisons, used behavior modification techniques on them, and then relocated them in American embassies throughout the world ... The Navy psychologist was Lt. Commander Thomas Narut of the U.S. Regional Medical Center in Naples, Italy. The information was divulged at an Oslo NATO conference of 120 psychologists from the eleven nation alliance ... The Navy provided all the funding necessary, according To Narut.

"Dr. Narut, in a question and answer session with reporters from many nations, revealed how the Navy was secretly programming large numbers of assassins. He said that the men he had worked with for the Navy were being prepared for commando-type operations, as well as covert operations in U.S. embassies worldwide. He described the men who went through his program as 'hit men and assassins' who could kill on command. "Careful screening of the subjects was accomplished by Navy psychologists through the military records ... and many were convicted murderers serving military prison sentences."

...The intelligence community, it seemed, was recruiting from prisons to make use of the natural talents of convicted killers to produce the fabled 'Manchurian Candidates' - mind controlled assassins. This operation involved killers drawn from military prisons, though there is no reason not to suspect that parallel programs were being conducted in civilian prisons as well.

And that's how, theoretically, someone like Henry Lee Lucas might get away with 600 murders. He's just doing his job. Of course, there's a lot more to it, because people in positions of authority need to look away at the appropriate times.

Lucas' story then, as bizarre as it may appear to be, is certainly not without precedent. Other events that have transpired since Henry first began telling his tales of The Hand of Death lend further credence to various aspects of his story. For example, there is the issue of the cult-run ranch just south of the border. While this may have sounded rather far-fetched back in the early 1980's, it certainly doesn't today. In 1990, just such a ranch was excavated in Matamoros, Mexico, yielding the remains of over a dozen ritual sacrifice victims. While Ottis Toole - still alive at the time - noted that this was not the specific ranch with which he and Henry were associated, he also mentioned that there were numerous such operations in the area.

So closely did the Matamoros case parallel the stories told years before by Lucas that some law enforcement personnel in Texas chose to take a closer look at Henry's professed cult connections. In fact, Jim Boutwell, sheriff of Williamson County, Texas later told a reporter that investigators had verified that Lucas was indeed involved in cult activities. And a decade later, yet another excavation was begun, this time at a ranch near Juarez, Mexico, which is precisely where Henry claimed it to be. This story made a brief appearance in the American press in December of 1999, until U.S. officials moved in to take over the investigation, after which coverage promptly ceased.

Juarez, Mexico, you may recall, is the very same city across the Texas border where "drug traffickers" stormed a party about a week ago and gunned down a couple dozen teenagers. Very little has been accomplished in this case, aside from a few arrests of people around the edges, lookouts and such.

You can read more about this phenomenon of sloppy police work and "untouchable" criminals in the UK, for instance, here and here.

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If Williams is a "serial killer," what would make him any different than Henry Lee Lucas? Intelligence.

Most good people are only aware of the least intelligent part of the evil distribution; those are the people who are obviously evil: criminals. (like Henry - ed.)

...What does an evil person of normal intelligence look like? Most people are very familiar with them. An evil person of normal intelligence is a person who makes life difficult, painful, and unpleasant for the good people around them. The supervisor who creates a crises at work by trying to pour a cup and a half of coffee into a cup and then requires everyone to work holiday's and weekends to clean up the mess - is an example of an evil person of normal intelligence. What distinguishes such people from criminals is that they are quicker learners; they figure out what will happen to them if they pursue the sort of obvious evil things that the least intelligent of the evil spectrum do. Evil people of normal intelligence are careful to do their best to blend into good society.

...Next up the ladder is the evil person of above average intelligence. These people have a similar goal to evil people of average intelligence; the production of human misery. However these people see the opportunity to do something that evil people of normal intelligence don't see how to do; murder someone and get away with it. They understand that the way to murder someone and get away with it is to not care who they kill, how they kill them, or when they kill them. Such people set up conditions where someone will be 'accidentally' killed and wait for the circumstances to occur.

...That leaves us those who are evil and of high intelligence. Most good people are also familiar with these kind of people; we call them leaders - both of industry and of government. It is the goal of such people to get away with mass murder.  

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Why would the idea of "serial killers" be useful to intelligence agencies?

• to cover-up organized rings of Satanic crimes
• to disguise the true motive of some contract killings
• to create a climate of fear and terror
• to eliminate undesirable members of society
• to identify and use 'violence-prone' individuals as assets

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These remarks:

Retired colonel Alain Pellerin is the executive director of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute and served in the army for 36 years. He said he had never heard of such a "strange" case. He compared notes with fellow long-serving military friends Monday...."I think it's a local affair that will affect the population in Trenton because they knew him personally and people served under him. He was the base commander, after all. "But the rest of the people in the forces, it's not related to the work, really, so it's not something that will taint the armed forces negatively. There is a love affair between the population and the armed forces and I don't think that will change. It's really just one individual who's accused of a serious crime."

...combined with the "serial killer" idea, coming straight from Ressler's firm, speak volumes.

UPDATE: An article here notes the curious dead-end of Williams' history before 1987. It might be tough to complete a "serial killer" profile without the background information.

Jones said as he looks back, he really knew very little about his neighbour.He's not the only one. In Williams' biography, the military does not have any information prior to his joining the service in 1987. Other than the fact he attended the University of Toronto, there is little else. In fact, I have not been able to determine where he was born, where he grew up, if he has parents still living or siblings. 

It will be very interesting to study where Williams has been because police sources tell me when it comes to criminal charges "there will be more."