March (crime) madness

The month of March is better-known for the beginning of spring, the celebrations of Easter and St. Patrick's Day— and even the flurry of activity surrounding the battle between college basketball's best teams.  But this March 2005 was especially eventful in the world of law and order.

Let's revisit last month's "A Profiler's Perspective" for an update on the cases studied, and for additional lessons learned.

BTK serial killer captured
Confessed BTK killer (his own code name for "Bind them, Torture them, Kill them”) 60-year-old Dennis Rader received the Good Conduct Medal when he was in the U.S. Air Force from 1966  to 1972. Rader is now believed to have murdered 10 people in the Wichita, Kansas area between 1974 and 1991, but there are at least 25 unsolved murders in that area during this time frame that need be compared to BTK's m.o. and DNA.  Rader may be guilty of other unsolved, unlinked, and unmentionable homicides.

AP This is an undated photo from the Website of the city of Park City, Kan., showing Dennis Rader, supervisor of the compliance department.

What made Rader somewhat unique in the ranks of serial killers was his ability to hide in plain sight. [Note that “experts” estimate that there are “as few” as 16 (according to the FBI) and as many as 300 (according to a true crime author) serial killers operating in the United States at any one time.

Some now suggest that they saw the negative aspects of Rader's personality— what profilers call “leakage”—  but he just never appeared as a strong blip on law enforcement's sonar until he resurfaced in March 2004 with his “catch me if you can” letter writing campaign. It's not that law enforcement didn't try to find him; they just missed him, even though they went so far as to even seek out secret government satellite overfly photos of the local area in an attempt to “spot” or otherwise identify the BTK killer after a 1977 murder.

As a former FBI profiler, I don't think that Rader, a local code enforcement official who had once applied to be a police officer, necessarily wanted to be caught. I think that he believed that he had eluded identification and apprehension for so long that he felt he couldn't be caught. Had it not been for his own activities this past year, he might never have been caught.

Rader likely craved the attention that BTK received during his known murderous activities over those three decades, perhaps to substitute for the feelings of power and control that he had when he was committing his suspected murders. A sure way to regain this level of attention was to re-engage media and the police, and by reawakening the icy cold feeling of threat and vulnerability that his community first experienced some 31-years ago.

We're now told that Rader might plead guilty to many of these murders, thereby avoiding a trial, one that would expose his wife and grown children to even more humiliation and shame. But will he give up the chance for yet more attention and will yet more murders be linked to him? The investigation continues.

The Lefkow murder case
We now know the killer of Chicago Federal Judge Joan Lefkow's husband and mother was not the neo-Nazi “head case” that originally plotted to kill Judge Lefkow, but a physically disfigured, mentally challenged 57-year unemployed refugee who had allegedly fled Poland in the early 80s because of his refusal to join the Communist Party. Upon entering the United States, the then-immigrant changed his name to Bart Ross.

EPA via Sipa Press file Undated file photograph of Bart Ross who committed suicide near Milwaukee on Wednesday 09 March 2005 after being stopped by police. According to authorities, a suicide note was found inside his van that claimed Ross is the killer of the husband and mother of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow.

Ross shot himself to death 10 days after the Lefkow murders. He left a suicide note calling all judges terrorists and medical doctors "Nazis." He had also written out a list of those he wanted to kill, a hit list of sorts, that contained the names of ten lawyers, five doctors, and a total of 11 state and federal judges. I think about the other people on Ross' hit list that might also have fallen victim to Ross had that local police officer not gone the extra mile and made a routine traffic stop of Ross' van displaying out of state tags.

The .22 caliber weapon that Ross used to kill Michael Lefkow and Donna Humphrey has not been found (he used yet another firearm to kill himself). As no relative from Poland has claimed his body, and he only had 10 cents on him at the time of his death, he will probably be buried in the equivalent of a pauper's grave.

Judge Lefkow courageously continues her duties on the bench and her responsibilities as a mother, but her morning cup of coffee with her husband Michael, and the opportunity for her mother Donna to witness her grandchildren grow to adulthood has been taken away forever. Why? Because Judge Lefkow had done her duty and decided against Ross in his rambling and misguided civil suit against a local hospital.

Last week in Kansas City, another defendant appeared before another judge for sending a letter stating that “He hated the government and all who worked for it,” threatening to kill all such employees “execution-style.” In most cases heard by a judge, at least 50 percent of the people appearing before her (or him) go away unhappy. Fortunately, only a small percentage of them pick up a gun to even the score.