Criminal Minds
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Criminal Minds - Masters of Deception: how Friendly Predators hunt and trap wearing masks of civility to hide criminal minds.

Wearing a business suit and claiming to be a police detective, serial killer Ted Bundy approached 17-year-old Carol Daronch in a shopping mall, told her that her car had been burgled, and insisted she come see if anything had been stolen. She asked him how he knew where to find her. “I’m a cop,” he replied. ... He asked her to lead him to her car and they found it still locked and undamaged. “Now we have to go to the police station to file a report,” he said as he led her to his car, an old Volkswagen bug. Suspicious about his odd police car, she asked him for ID. He quickly flashed a gold badge. Hesitantly, she got in with him but when he drove away from the police station and headed out of town, she erupted furiously. Barely controlling and stopping the car, he tried to put handcuffs on her but she fought back ferociously and managed to escape.

As you’re calmly reading this, the holes in Bundy’s scam are glaringly obvious: he couldn’t explain how he found her, he didn’t know where her car was parked, her car wasn’t damaged, and he had no police car.

Caught by surprise and not as skeptical as you’ll soon become, she believed and obeyed him until it was almost too late. Bundy’s Death Row confessions revealed other cunning lures of a criminal mind from which his victims did not escape:
• With his arm in a plaster cast for sympathy, Bundy lured two women at a lakeside park, one at a time, to come help him with his boat. They went.
• He used crutches for sympathy to lure a woman at a motel to help him into his room. She went.
• In another motel, he faked a heart attack to lure a woman into a secluded hallway to aid him. She went.
• He asked a 12-year-old schoolgirl her name. “Kimberly,” she replied. “You’re Dad’s been hurt. Come with me,” said Bundy. She went.

Bundy deliberately kept conversations brief – it destroyed his savage sexual fantasy if he got to know the victim and saw her as a real person. He often used a sly dual strategy: reducing suspicions with an innocuous location, time of day, and appearance while gaining empathy with a clever scam delivered with artful acting and a silver tongue.

While on Death Row, Bundy was asked what makes the criminal mind of a serial killer. He replied, "We are your sons, and we are your husbands, and we grew up in regular families." They seem oh so harmless.

A Force Predator simply attacks you. A Friendly Predator first lures you into a trap – then attacks you. Your tip-off of a friendly predator is that he’s trying to get near you to isolate and trap you. Many victims, afraid to appear rude, ignored their gut feelings and were trusting, easy, naïve prey for the criminal mind of a friendly predator.

Killers blend with their surroundings well enough to move about undetected, without arousing the slightest glint of suspicion. These killers have neighbors, jobs, hobbies, habits, relatives – perhaps even spouses and children. ... These murderers look perfectly normal. They may be attractive and above average in intelligence. Someone could very well have met a killer and found him polite, helpful, charming or, if nothing else, forgettable. Someone may know a killer and refuse to make the connection for the simple reason that we believe only in monsters. ... We call them cold-blooded monsters. We fear monsters, not ordinary people. We read about monsters in novels and watch them in movies. We are confident that we will be able to peer out the window and recognize a monster immediately. ... As a perennial student of crime, I can tell you that there is no such thing as an obvious monster. These killers are human beings, as warm-blooded as the rest of us. ... Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer were good looking and gifted at manipulating others, including the police. Equally nonthreatening was David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer. He looked like a nobody – the guy you might stand next to on the subway, the one working around the corner in the deli or sitting on a bench eating a sandwich. ... Yet these men had invisible and aberrant thoughts and fantasies, and were constantly processing their weird symbols and hatred in ways normal people will never fully comprehend. Author Patricia Cornwell excerpted from The New York Times – 18 October 2002

People are leery of eccentric loners, but cunning predators with masks of sanity make certain to hide their criminal minds and never appear eccentric. The benign Dr. Jekyll lures you to the trap before removing his mask to reveal the monstrous Mr. Hyde.

The Bike Path Killer, after 12 years of silence, was identified as Altemio Sanchez, a church-going, suburban husband and father. “People are shocked to find that someone like this has been living among us,” says UB professor David Schmid, “and they had no idea. You feel very vulnerable.” ... “People would have been less shocked if Sanchez had fit the public perception of what a murderer should look like,” Schmid says, “if he had been a raving loony. The fact that he was socially functional, had a family, the family didn’t know, and lived like this for decades – that’s really scary.”
Excerpted from The Buffalo News – 21 August 2007

A serial killer in 1970’s Alabama, Jerry Marcus, confessed to using charm to make his victims feel safe. He said they didn’t suspect his shy personality was hiding a dangerous soul.

The bodies were found in shallow graves in the back yard of a house occupied until last year by Richard White. Neighbors of White were stunned. A neighbor said the suspect seemed like ''a normal guy'' who would ask him to drink a few beers and ''always had a neighborly handshake when I saw him. Neighbors are freaking out. How would you like to know the man you said ‘good morning’ to everyday is a killer?''
Excerpted from The Casper Star-Tribune (WY) – 12 September 2003

A common gambit used by pick-up artists trolling nightclubs for one-night-stands with needy and carefree women is also used by some rapists: “You look familiar. Where have I seen you before?” Naïve targets (raised to be “nice”) respond with helpful clues as to why this stranger supposedly remembers her. Now the criminal minds of crafty predators can manipulate gullible targets into an impromptu date, or lure her into a trap, or stalk her later with the info she’s given. Even if someone does seem familiar, so what? Being "nice" makes her vulnerable to the criminal minds of friendly predators.

We give permission because we don't recognize these people as predators, because we think sex offenders are monsters and surely we would recognize a monster, wouldn't we? That nice young minister who runs all the youth programs, the one with the crooked smile and the thatch of brown hair over his brow, the one who visits the elderly and gives the poor money from his own funds – surely not him. He could not be a child molester with ninety victims while he's still in his twenties. That good-looking, polite young man who just wants to see the motorcycle for sale in the back yard. Surely he couldn't be a rapist with a knife in his hip pocket waiting for you to turn your back to pull the cover off.
Excerpted from “Predators” by Dr. Anna Salter.

Defense attorney Sarah McKinnon said her time with Dennis Rader [BTK – the self-proclaimed Bind, Torture, Kill serial killer of Wichita KS] would've been easier if he had been the sort of hideously disfigured monster that matched the piles of evidence she read at the office. ... Instead, she sat just inches away and talked daily with a Boy Scout leader [an expert in tying knots], a church president, a family man and a community-minded citizen who repeatedly told investigators that when he wasn't murdering people, he was really a likable person. ... "He wasn't what I expected," McKinnon recalled. "The person I met was human, not the image that was on the media. He was courteous, polite, considerate and easy to deal with." ... At one point, McKinnon, who confesses to having a "child-like" tendency to take people at face value, began to see pieces of Rader everywhere she looked. "It's been difficult to trust the people around me. It's been difficult to trust my instincts about people. I thought, ... 'If I can't see this in him, then what else am I missing?' ... The result is that most people involved on a personal level with a psychopath won't realize what has happened to them until it's too late.
Excerpted from The Hutchinson News (KS) – 25 September 2005

Blow away your naiveté with:
• Criminal Minds - Overview of treacherous criminal minds and what tricks might be up their sleeves.
• Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (YOU’RE NOW ON THIS PAGE): friendly predators you'd never suspect.
• Quick Tricks: insights into sleight of hand and physical bluffs that criminal minds use to bamboozle you.
• Mind Games: how master manipulators control you like a puppet on a string.
• Intuition: trusting your early-warning survival system.
• Predator Profiles: robber's, rapist's, and killer's criminal minds.
• Predatory Mind: an extraordinarily enlightening view into the heart of darkness - and how to beat him at his own game.
• Recap of Criminal Minds.
• Security Products - Overview

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