‘Doesn’t Meet Any Profile’ : Valley Intruder Defies Serial Killers’ Pattern

In his apparently random attacks, the Valley Intruder has departed from the way serial killers usually operate, according to experts who have studied the behavior of such murderers.

The fact that the intruder’s victims cannot be stereotyped--as well as the fact that the killer has used a variety of weapons and committed a variety of other crimes--make the complex murder investigation even more bedeviling.

“It doesn’t meet any profile we’ve ever seen on a serial murderer,” said one officer involved in the investigation of the 14 murders and 21 rapes, assaults and kidnapings in Los Angeles and Orange counties and San Francisco that have been linked to the killer.

“This guy’s a rapist and a murderer who at one point was abducting small children and setting them free,” the investigator said.

Serial killers--like Hillside Stranglers Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz and Chicago murderer John Wayne Gacy--tend to methodically choose victims with symbolic features.

Avenging ‘Crimes’

They do this, psychiatrists say, out of a desire to avenge the “crimes” they believe were committed against them during unhappy childhoods--in effect reversing roles to purge themselves.

For that reason, a number of researchers said in interviews, the diversity of this killer’s victims is perplexing. They have included men and women of varied ethnic origins and have ranged from children and teen-agers to young, middle-aged and elderly adults.

Although investigators are not yet sure whether the killer first determines who lives in the houses he enters, researchers are convinced that a serial killer always looks for one special quality in his victims--no matter how random his crimes may appear.

Identifying that tendency “is a lot like going to a museum. If you know art, you can spot anything done by Picasso. It’s a creation of that individual,” said Dr. Harvey Schlossberg, a forensic psychologist and former New York Police Department director of psychological services. His cases included that of Berkowitz, who murdered six women and wounded seven other people in New York in 1976 and 1977.

For example, said Richard Rappaport, a Northwestern University psychiatrist, Theodore Bundy, who has been implicated in the murders of 40 young women in the United States, preferred “college-age girls with black hair parted down the middle;” convicted Atlanta murderer Wayne Williams was accused of targeting black children, and Gacy, convicted of 33 mutilation murders, preferred boys and young men.

However, “to know what makes it unrandom in hindsight is very easy,” cautioned Dr. Martin Orne, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist who helped police debunk Bianchi’s “multiple personality” defense before the Hillside Strangler trial. “While it’s going on, it’s often very difficult to tie together,” Orne said.

“One of the big problems is that it can be hidden,” said Robbie Robertson, a former Michigan state police captain who investigated the still-unsolved killings of four children in the Detroit area several years ago. The killer in California may be drawn by something “as insignificant as the bedroom window that was left open,” he said.

This case is one of three-dozen active serial killer investigations in the United States, Justice Department officials said.

Justice Department officials believe that the phenomenon is reflected by the fact that although the number of murders in the country dropped by 3.2% last year, the share of murders for which no motive could be determined increased. The percentage of murders with unknown motives rose to 22.1% in 1984 from 20.9% in 1983, Justice Department official Robert Heck said.

Mass Murderers

As serial killings have received increased attention during the last several years, more social scientists have begun to study how the killers differ from mass murderers, who typically kill a number of people in one attack.

The answers they have found are chilling.

Unlike mass killers, who vent their anger psychotically, serial killers suffer from a dangerous form of personality disorder; they do not go through the sort of dramatic emotional breakdown that characterizes a mass murderer.

The serial killer has perfected what Dr. John Liebert, a Bellevue, Wash., psychiatrist, calls “the mask of sanity,” the ability to fit into a community, escaping detection while planning his next move.

Rappaport, who has put together a psychological description of serial murderers based in part on the 65 hours he spent talking to Gacy, said the killer’s violence is often the result of abuse or rejection during childhood. Fearful of expressing his anger, the child hides his unresolved negative emotions--for a while.

“These are personalities with a particular mix,” said Liebert. “You have antisocial feelings--the inability to perceive another human being--plus feelings of grandiosity and sexual sadism. In a different mix, those components can lead to very narcissistic individuals who can be very creative, although they do not get along well in certain areas of life.”

Satisfying Sexual Drives

The wrong mix produces, typically, a white male in his 20s or 30s who on the surface can be intelligent and charming but who is capable of satisfying his sexual drives only by murdering, researchers say.

Mired in narcissism--a stage of psychological development in which pleasure is taken exclusively in the self--he sees his victims not as people but as “props for his pleasure,” according to Park Elliott Dietz, an associate professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Virginia.

Although the killer’s main impulse is to wipe out the image of the parent or other person who wounded him in childhood, most psychiatrists believe that he is at the same time murdering for sexual satisfaction.

“A serial killing is like a sex crime. There’s a build-up of tension, and killing is like a release for him,” Schlossberg said.

“There are people whose sexual needs are to kill--though it may not necessarily focus on women,” said Orne.

Knives, strangulation and other forms of torture are frequently used because of the killer’s desire to achieve intimacy with his victims--to hear their screams or watch their eyes, Rappaport said.

A Crude Pattern

The Valley Intruder, however, has shot his victims to death as often as he has stabbed or bludgeoned them. There has been a crude pattern to his work: The first three crimes police have linked to the killer were abductions and sexual assaults of children in February and March in which the victims were set free. A high number of his subsequent crimes involved beatings and throat-slashings. The more recent crimes have involved shooting a man and raping his wife.

“The theory is that the crimes committed by this guy escalated at some point,” said Montebello Detective Randy Thomas.

Some researchers say the serial killer’s deep-seated vulnerability and need to prove that he is not weak may make him interested in publicity about his case and may lead him to provoke police. Others believe that he receives progressively lesser amounts of satisfaction from each killing, possibly encouraging him to strike more frequently.

Detectives in this case have refused to describe the threads they believe tie the murders and assaults together. Interviews with sources familiar with the case indicate, however, that investigators have found at least one of three clues in each of the related incidents: similarity in firearms, messages scrawled on walls and a “distinctive” piece of evidence the killer leaves behind in the homes of his victims.

‘An Advantage’

If that is true, Liebert said in an interview, police should consider themselves “very lucky. . . . If they’ve got something left behind, some presentation or staging (by the suspect), they’ve got an advantage.”

Yet even that advantage may not offer much immediate help, Michigan’s Robertson said.

“The evidence they’ve found is probably being gathered more to convict the person than to find him,” Robertson said.

Times staff writer Mark Arax contributed to this story.