Dark Side: Who’s side are You? The Victim’s

 

As the self-esteem of each investigator on a task force flags, the unit itself seems to suffer from a collective loss of confidence breeding mistakes, infighting, defensive behavior, and, ultimately, bureaucratic paralysis. In a multiagency task force, such as the Atlanta child murders, the paralysis ran so deep that different agencies actually distorted facts in order to protect themselves from the recriminations everyone believed would come. This, obviously, benefits the killer who is often only a few steps away, reading about the dissension in the newspaper or hearing it in the news, and realizing that each change of his MO throws the entire police machine off the track. We will also explore the investigative process of following leads. What we call “red herrings, information overload, and the needle in the haystack,” will cover the gamut of the problems involved in pursuing the real killer.  As the serial killer strikes more victims and adds more clues to the already overwhelming stockpile, individual members of the police task force become overloaded. They look at the four walls, see their own failure day after day, and actually long for a reassignment. [1]Collectively, this tends to drag down the task force as an institution as each member’s frustration  feeds the others. Even management reinforcement or cheerleading doesn’t always help, because the managers themselves have to explain both to the higher echelons in the police command and to the media why they haven’t caught the killer. Ultimately, supervisors and investigators surround themselves by walls of frustration everywhere they turn, clouding any possibilities of success, and wearing down the resiliency of the task force even as  the killer continues to prey on his victims.

What was found, and what, in particular, discovered was a case rife with political issues among the different law enforcement agencies that reflected the politics of Atlanta and its suburbs. What was also discovered, and which has stayed with all throughout ones career, was the level of distaste the investigators in Atlanta had for pursuing leads in a case which, despite some obvious clues, in their minds held out little hope of ever being solved.

 

The impact of conducting tangential investigations, methods of prioritizing incoming leads, and strategies for finding that needle in the haystack is discussed in the context of keeping personnel focused on the central mission of the case—finding the serial killer. Personnel must stay focused even when that mission takes them down blind alleys and forces them to look at leads that are exciting at 7:00 in the morning when the coffee’s fresh and they’re full of enthusiasm, but turn out to be as stale as yesterday’s lunch by 6:00 in the evening when they’re worn out after a frustrating day. The section about how the serial killer hides and what he knows is the focus of our characterization of a serial killer’s natural camouflage and his instinct for survival. A confident, long-term, control-type serial killer can become so much apart of the landscape you’d expect to find that he can even interact with the police investigating the case and still not be looked at as a suspect. Even if you’ve deployed your entire force of uniformed officers on overtime shifts in an effort to stake out every possible location the serial killer might visit, you’re probably not going to find him overnight.

And the murderer, because he’s part of the landscape blending in completely with the community he’s preying on, moves right through the police surveillance without being spotted and kills with impunity. At a certain point in most major serial killer cases the victims are visible and the killer is invisible. When a major serial killer case is finally solved and all the paperwork completed, police are sometimes amazed at how obvious the killer was and how they were unable to see what was right before their noses. Even during a case, there is sometimes a feeling that the killer is right there only you can’t see him.

The cops might have been looking for a driver in a particular car or a van while the killer was pulling up to his victim in a pickup truck. The conclusion of our evaluation of a serial killer’s survival mechanism covers how the inability of the police to see their case with a clear vision that only comes with hindsight adds significantly to  their frustrations. Because most serial killers are sex offenders who live or work in the very neighborhoods where they are killing, they blend in and are hard to detect. However, because they live where they kill, they also establish subtle relationships with their victims.

 

www.politie.nl  and a Chief Inspector – Mr. Henk van Essen©

www.aivd.nl       AIVD – Mr. Erik Akerboom ©

 

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[1]  As body after body turned up in the  Chattahoochee River outside of Atlanta, members of the Atlanta Police  Department, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and local sheriff’s offices  kept butting heads over the best ways to pursue the killer. Between the jurisdictional disputes and the political forces at work in what many  believed at first to be racially motivated crimes, little progress was made in  the case. Even the FBI couldn’t come up with a workable predictive investigative model that would allow the homicide.