Interview of Former Special Agent of the FBI Howard D. Teten ( ) Interviewed by Stanley Pimentel On November 19, 2004

Transcription

1 Society of the Former Special Agents of the FBI, Inc. Interview of Former Special Agent of the FBI Howard D. Teten ( ) Interviewed by Stanley Pimentel On Edited for repetitions, spelling, etc. by Sandra Robinette on February 4, Final Edit for Mr. Teten s corrections by Sandra Robinette on April 5, This is Stanley Pimentel and I m here with Howard D. Teten, T-et-e-n, in Manassas, Virginia, and here for the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Oral History Heritage Project. Mr. Teten has already read the copyright release and background form, and he and I have discussed this. And he wishes or doesn t interpose any objection to being interviewed regarding his career in the FBI. At this time, it s now about 10:43 on the morning of November 19th, We will commence with Mr. Teten telling us a little bit about his early background, where he was born and raised, and start from there. I was born in Nebraska City, Nebraska and reared in various towns in Nebraska. My dad was a road construction foreman, so we moved when the jobs moved. I went to just one high school at Crofton, Nebraska, which by the way, for a town of six hundred, managed to produce three FBI Agents. Oh. Four FBI Agents. They must have followed your example. 1

2 Page 2 One of them was before me. The others were after me. Matter of fact, I think one of them is still in the Bureau, out in San Francisco. And another one was the local lawyer s son and he was about six years behind me. Anyway, I grew up in Nebraska. Joined the Marine Corps the day I graduated from high school, which seemed like the way to get out of town. What year was that that you joined? Okay. About two months before Korea started. I was just finishing up boot camp when Korea started. I didn t go overseas right away though. I went up to the Marine Corps headquarters in San Francisco, Department of Pacific because a local photographer had taught me photography and the Corps needed photographers, I guess. Then overseas as a ground photographer. When I got there, I found that they were transferring me to the air wing. Apparently, they needed air wing photographers more than they needed ground photographers. They formed a new squadron called the VMJ-1 and I spent my year over there as an aerial photographer. In Seoul, Korea or Oh, no, no. In a place called K-3 in Pohang Dong, Korea. Seoul wasn t ours at the time. No, that s true, that s true. Yeah. Matter of fact, Jim McGraw was stationed there. Jim McGuire? 2

3 Page 3 McGuire, that s his name. He was at the same base a little later. I don t know what he was, but I finally found somebody else that was there. Anyway, I got out of Boot Camp, finished my tour in Korea, come back and went to El Toro Marine Air Station. I was in the photo unit there and photographed their airplane accidents, construction and stuff. Also I was selected for the Marine Corps rifle and pistol team there at the Air Station. When did I retire? Well, I didn t retire. I was discharged from the Marines in I wanted to be a doctor, but I found out that they wanted too much money, so that didn t work too well. I was also thinking of becoming a gunsmith, because I was deeply into guns. And then I talked to a guy from Weatherby Arms, which was a very topnotch rifle company and he was not making very much money. At the time I was working part-time with the Sheriff s Department and I was making almost as much as he. Where was this? In Orange County, California. I got on the Sheriff s Department in a rather odd way. I was out shooting at the public pistol range and the Sheriff s Department practiced there, their team. Well, I had been shooting about twenty thousand rounds a year, and they had been shooting thirty rounds a month. So I m standing right next to em and at twenty-five yards, hitting a rapid fire target is not much of a shot. It s easy. And they were having trouble and I m looking at it like why are you having trouble. And they said, Do you want to come on the Sheriff s Department and be a member of the pistol team? In those days, unlike today, if a department had a full complement of officers and couldn t hire any more under Civil Services rules, they could hire people to work full-time as reserves. 3

4 Page 4 I went on as a reserve. Interestingly enough, I made eight cents an hour more than the regular. And after the initial training, which amounted to about three weeks, I was just another deputy. As a matter of fact, about a third of the department was reserve deputies and very seldom would you get to ride with, you know, a regular officer. At any rate, while working with the Sheriff s Department there, I got to know the people from the crime lab. They had one of the better crime labs in Southern California. The director of the crime lab there was a guy named Jack Cadman. I didn t know it at the time, but he was an internationally known criminalist. One of the better ones. And I got to know him pretty well. I loved the idea of catching people with evidence and so forth. And we talked and over a period I was going to school at the same time. I was going to junior college, we came up with an idea. I switched my major from, I forgot what it was, biochemistry or medicine or something, to criminology. Jack Cadman said, Look, if you re really interested in this, go to the University of California, get a degree in criminalistics, and I ll hold a job open for you. That sounded like a good deal. Sure. So I did. I went to the University of California and got into the criminalistics program. That was USC? No, Berkeley. Berkeley. Oh, okay. I know, see, there was another problem. I couldn t say in the Bureau that I graduated from Berkeley. (laughs) In those days, Berkeley was considered very liberal. 4

5 Page 5 Oh, no, I understand. Yeah. The professor there was a guy named Kirk, Dr. Douglas Kirk, the primary professor, who was a chemist, biochemist really, and was an expert in blood identification, and a crackerjack criminalist. By the way, a criminalist is the same thing as a forensic scientist, but he s on the West Coast. They re all called forensic scientists on the East Coast. Anyway, about halfway through the program or so, a psychiatrist on the staff named Dr. Douglas Kelly, who had been one of the interviewers at the Nuremberg war trials, decided that my personality was such that I wouldn t be happy working in a lab for the rest of my life. He talked me into going into psychological criminology. Now, while all this was going on, here I am a veteran, my wife is an RN, she is working in a local hospital, and I m only getting the GI Bill. That s not much money. So I joined the San Leandro Police Department. San Leandro? Yeah. This was in 57 or 58. I think 58. And for about, I don t know, a year, a year and a half maybe, I was street patrol. I was then promoted and assigned to what was then called the Identification Division. Now they call it CSI. Right, CSI, right. The job was to process the prisoners and classify fingerprints and to process all crime scenes. So I felt like I was back home, you know. I was working my crime scenes again. And I, the upshot of it was, here I am at school taking courses in abnormal psychology, criminal psychology, and working crime scenes on a daily basis, and I m beginning to see parallels. 5

6 Page 6 So I thought, you know, there s somethin here. Now, San Leandro didn t have that many murders, so I worked with some of the guys from Oakland who had many more murders. I got a little information and enough to continue. My other problem was still money. We had our second child and I needed more money. San Leandro was a small department, relatively small. It had about a hundred and some officers. And there promotion to sergeant was in the distant future, if ever. So I joined the FBI, which by the way dropped my salary by a thousand a year. This was in 62 then? Yeah, 62. But I knew that was the entry salary and it d come up. And that got me into it. But I never dropped this idea that there was an association between the personalities and the psychology of people, their outlook on life, and the kind of crimes they committed, and the way they committed em. The first seven years in the Bureau, I was in various different places. Oklahoma City to begin with. That was your first office? Yeah. I was there exactly three months. And they sent me to an RA in Muskogee, which was a real interesting place. One of the Sheriff s there, the Sheriff of Salisaw County, was Pretty Boy Floyd s brother. And it was interesting, you know. That was quite an area down there. Did he ever talk about Pretty Boy being his brother? Openly? Yeah, yeah on occasion. But he was a really nice guy. He didn t even carry a gun. Yeah.. 6

7 Page 7 You had to watch what you said to him. Oh, sure. I never will forget That s also Indian country. I was doing an applicant or some innocuous, you know, case and I said I needed to talk to this guy. And he said all right, if I see him, I ll let you know. So he calls me about a week later and he says, Uh, you still want to talk to that guy? I said, Yeah. He said, I ve got him here in jail. I said, Well, what you got him in on? He said, Well, just, just waiting for you to talk to him. Oh my goodness. Oh no. Don t tell me that. But, you know, those are the kinds of things that happened. Anyway, I was there for a year and then I went to Cincinnati. I went on the bank robbery squad, bank robbery, bank burglary, kidnapping. I pretty much stayed on that squad, but Ed Mason, the, the SAC there, transferred me to Columbus, to the RA. Then after he transferred me, he found out that I had a photographic background, so he killed the transfer. He wanted me to take pictures of everybody, you know, of the judges. You kind of have to know Ed Mason to know what all he wanted. I ve heard many good stories about Ed Mason through Dick Schwein, who was a clerk in the office there with Ed Mason and then later on became my classmate in Well, let me tell you that I m one of the people who never got Christmas cards or birthday cards from him. As a matter of fact, we didn t agree on a particular matter and I was transferred the next week to Memphis. 7

8 Page 8 I went to Memphis very suddenly. My wife, you know, you can t move that quick, and so the wife was stuck in Cincinnati for a while. But I went down there and I took over as the principal firearms instructor and the police training coordinator for the office, as well as, you know, in those days you worked cases too. Right, you did. I spent four years there. I guess about four years. I left there right about 69, so I guess about four years. About the only thing that happened of any consequence in Memphis was the King killing. As far as I know, I was the first agent on the scene when he was killed. It was a little after the usual office hours at our office, and I was the only agent in the office. So I went out and saw the gun laying on the pavement. Of course, you realize a deputy had found it first. I forget who the SAC was at the time. Gunnar Jensen I believe it was. Anyway, he came out and I said, You need to pick that up, package it, and send it back to the Bureau. I won t go into some of the problems we ran into with that. If you want to, you know, if you want to put it on there, that s fine with me. Well, there s no point to putting it on. Anyway Personality problems or just forensic difficulty? Forensic problems. Forensics, okay. 8

9 Page 9 Anyway, somebody flew it back. Some Agent took it back. As I recall, there were fingerprints on it and our boy s (Ray s) fingerprint was the hundred and tenth print they checked. He was already wanted. He was, you know, for escaping from either a prison or some such thing. James Earl Ray Yeah. The fugitives are the first thing they check and he was right there, so we got a very quick ID on him. Of course, he didn t stand outside and wait for us, he was long gone. Yeah. It took a while to catch him. As a matter of fact, as I recall, they caught him in England. Right, right. George Zeiss and Kenny Bounds went over and picked him up. One thing of interest. Because of my background, myself and the chief of the Ident Bureau for the Memphis PD and another ident officer who was on duty, did the crime scene for Martin Luther King. I recall being very upset because no one was listening to what I thought were very important things. They may or may not have really been important, but I thought they were important at the time. One of the things was that I learned he had first purchased a very good sniper rifle. With a good scope and then had taken it back and exchanged it for what I consider a total piece of trash, but had a heavier caliber. And I felt that it suggested that he really didn t know what the hell he was doing, but someone told him to use a different caliber gun. 9

10 Page 10 The 30-06, which is the caliber used, was the old-time sniper s caliber. And I thought, um boy, somebody else is involved here. They talked him out of using use what would have been an excellent gun. Cause there was only about 97 yards, I believe. From where he fired to where King was. And from my point of view, he missed that shot by about four inches. I think it was because he aimed at the head, which a good sniper would never do to begin with. But he caught him right in the cheek, and it went in and came out under his jaw. Then, because Dr. King was leaning over, it went back in here at the top of the neck and spun down his spine, which is what killed him. Well to me, having been on a rifle and pistol team, this is not a good shot. I mean, in the first place, you don t aim at a head and then in the second place, even if you do it at that distance, with a scope for Pete s sake. You should hit what you re aiming at. I got in a lot of arguments over that. So what caliber, the 0.6? A is the only one that comes in an 0.6. Yeah. Okay. That s right. But he traded the bolt action rifle for a pump. I could see the pump aspect because he was left-handed. 10

11 Page 11 But to me that wasn t a big deal. I d known a lot of left-handed people that use bolt-action rifles. It s not that hard to handle them. Yeah, but it still would be, you d have to take it off your shoulder and be able to cock it. No, you just reach over and They can just reach over? Yeah. Oh, okay. It s not that bad. Now granted, there was a scope on there and Yeah. But there s been books written about Ray not being the killer. I processed that bathroom he shot out of and I looked at those angles and that shot couldn t have come from anyplace else. They tried to say well, it came from down in the bushes. It couldn t have come from down in the bushes. The angle was wrong. Because he was, as I recall, he was on the He was on the second floor. second floor balcony. And he was leaning over talking to somebody. Right, right. 11

12 Page 12 And the bullet had to have come from an angle. I laid out that angle. Simple trigonometry. I just laid it out and there it was. It landed right on that window. And we measured it. We triangulated it. We did get down and cast footprints in all the weeds and brush down in there, but they didn t turn out to be anything. Did his fingerprints show up in the bathroom at all? James Earl Ray? No. However, I don t know how much fingerprint work you have done. A little bit, a little bit. Well, if you have seventy-five coats of paint, of which the last thirty-four have crumpled up Right, yeah. you don t get much in the way of prints. No, no. This was not a brand new apartment. So, it wasn t something I was surprised at. I dusted it and worked it, but I knew the odds of getting a print was really going to be edgy. Yeah. So you did all the forensics on this case? Not all of it. I mean the Memphis PD was there, you know. It was their jurisdiction. Memphis PD, okay. But yeah, I did a lot of it. Oh okay. And I went to his autopsy, which is the reason I know the path of the bullet. 12

13 Page 13 And I guess one of the amazing things is that Earl Ray denied that he ever did this until his dying day, and we still have the I still feel that he was not alone in that. Really? I can t help it. I think there was somethin and I don t know what. Now, his personality is quite capable of doing it alone, but they seldom do anything without a personal motive. And I couldn t figure out why he would go out of his way to do this at that time, unless somebody talked him into it. Or paid him or paid somebody. Who knows. His personality would not have lent to him acting alone, you re saying then? Oh, no. He could do it alone. Okay. Don t misunderstand me. But they don t normally wait ten years to do somethin. They just go do it. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Well King had been around quite a while. Right, right. King, after the first march, went to New York and talked to somebody. And I don t know the ins and outs of that. 13

14 Page 14 Then he came back to do another march. The first time he was there, he stayed in a real hotshot hotel, you know. The second time he stayed in the Lorraine Motel. Ray had just finished a six-week course in how to be a bartender. Huh. In LA. Yeah. Then he drove to Birmingham to get a gun and he drove over here to shoot him. King was over in Birmingham, so theoretically he could ve shot him over there. But, it just Well, nothing ever come of it, you know. But it was investigated, that aspect I can t answer that. Oh you don t know? Don t know. I was an agent in Memphis. I forget the name, Sullivan or somebody came out from the Bureau and that turned the case into a special. Okay. It was probably, yeah, the Sullivan who later on I think it was Sullivan. who had problems with Mr. Hoover? Well. 14

15 Page 15 Or vice versa, whatever. Yeah, somethin like that. Anyway, that s what happened. That was the extent of that. Now all during all of this, while I m firearms instructor and have a number of commitments, so then they assign the case to Joe Hester. We had to take a little break here for two seconds so Mr. Teten could answer the telephone. We re back again to the Martin Luther King killing. Do you recall the date that he was killed? I don t recall offhand. The year? 68, I believe. 68, okay. Just trying to recall, I can t recall myself. It was real interesting, because I had a lot on my plate right then. I was principal firearms instructor, principal police instructor, I was working regular cases, mostly bank robberies. And I was also going to school to get my master s degree. It was a mess. You were trying to get your master s in what criminology? Well, actually it was in social psychology. Oh, okay. They didn t have a criminology course. And I eventually got the degree. 15

16 Page 16 And by the way, the Bureau paid for that degree. They had sent me to I had been to an in-service sometime before and they had picked me as one of the individuals that could potentially come back and teach. I guess they probably talked to all the principal firearms instructors and principal police instructors. I don t know. Anyway, they sent me to school. When I graduated, within not too many months, I was transferred to Headquarters. Got here in 69, I believe, the first part of 69. Now because The case agent on the King case was who, Hester? Joe Hester. Joe Hester. Yeah. Excellent, excellent agent. Is he still with us? I can t answer that. He would be an excellent, excellent interview. He s a topnotch agent. Anyway, I got back here and I went into the training division. I went on what was known as the flying management squad, whatever you want to call em. There were eight of us. I m sure you re saying well why would I go onto a management squad, to teach management. 16

17 Page 17 But see, when you go to the University of California School of Criminology We re back again, at 11:15. Yeah. At the time, O.W. Wilson was one of the world s top authorities in police management. So anyway, they put me on this squad flying around the United States, giving lectures to police departments and management. My partner was a guy named Bob Kelly, who later became the Deputy Assistant Director of Laboratory, I believe. While we were doing that, and all the time I ve been in the Bureau, I had been working on my theories, you know, as you could probably tell from what I said about King. In about 1970, the only way I could bring my theories out was because I was an instructor. I was teaching all the time. The only thing I could do was write my theories out in the form of a lesson plan. So that s what I did. And I talked my supervisor, Tom Brownfield, into letting me give a class in what I called Applied Criminology. He said, Well, if you can find somebody willing to listen. So I called the principal police instructor was up in New York. I forget his name. He said Suffolk County would be glad to bring together a regional group to listen to this. So I gave a four-hour lecture on it, and they really, boy, they really ate it up. So Tom got some letters on it and I said, Well, can I do this again? And he said, Yeah. So I went out a second time and I went to Amarillo, Texas. Again it was a regional school. You know how when you teach schools, they expand on you if you re not careful. Well, this expanded to four days. Oh. 17

18 Page 18 About the third day, they were bringing in their unsolved cases to talk about. One of em had a case which he took off and come back. Based on the data that we were discussing, he went out and made an interview and the guy confessed. And so we solved a cold case. Based on just your theories. Just that course. Right, yeah. We didn t call em cold cases. We called them old dogs. Old dogs, right. No, I had several old dogs. But we solved the case. Of course, they wrote a letter to Brownfield and Brownfield said, you know, We re going to put this in the National Academy. Then I started lecturing in the National Academy with it. They kind of pulled me off police management courses and put me on this applied criminology. Well, I said, look, you know, in police management, there was always two of us. And I need somebody. I can t lecture eight hours a day. So they brought in Pat Mullany from New York, or at least they got him on loan from New York. And we taught a couple of courses together. And Pat really made a difference, because he was a fully qualified psychologist, where I was a criminologist. And there s a lot of difference between those two. We taught as a team. What I would do is talk about a crime, here s the crime. Then he would talk about the characteristics of a particular personality. Then I would show how those characteristics reveal themselves in a crime scene. And that s how we worked. Both in front of the class at the same time. They called it team teaching. 18

19 Page 19 They used to call us Frick and Frack. No one knew exactly what that meant. When the new academy opened, we brought in Conrad Hassel and Tom Strentz, because there was just no way to teach it all. We trained them in the same thing. And we also changed the name to I think psychological criminological investigation or, you know, somethin like that, psych-crim. When we were doing the last few field schools, we were always asking them, bring in your unsolved cases. Well, that worked pretty well. So we did that for the NA. And in about a year, we were doing real well, and there were cases coming in like they were going out of style. Yeah, I bet, yeah. Now I don t know whether you want this on there or not, but we were very worried, because Mr. Hoover wasn t thrilled about particular agents becoming well known. So everything was done casually, so to speak, informally. They wanted me to write a book about it and I said, you know, I just can t write a book about this. And I don t even want em to know up town. But it eventually got out, you know. Sure. Word got out, you know. Yeah. Boy, it got out. I couldn t believe how it got out. It was supposed to be a little, simple investigative aid and people got the idea it was the panacea. They picked it up in a book, this book called Red Dragon and then they made that movie, and it just went crazy. 19

20 Page 20 And I m looking around. Hey, you can t use it for all kinds of crimes. You know, it s good for about two hundred crimes a year. And that s it. And they were out there trying to do robberies. Yeah. A robbery is committed by a robber. Right, right. What do you want? He s a criminal. A lot of the guys trying to do profiles, switched over and started using statistics, you know. The average robber is so and so, so and so, so and so. Well, that isn t profiling the way I meant it. You re talking now more of statistical It was just, you know, on the average, a bank robber will drive a Chevy. He s about thirty-five. He s already committed a number of crimes. Big deal. You know, it s right there in the UCR. Uniform Crime Report. But profiling was looking at the individual, psychological makeup of an individual, in terms of what you see at the crime scene. If you see certain things at the crime scene, it s suggestive, from a gross analysis point of view, this individual is unusual in his personality in a certain area. And may well be mentally ill. May or may not. A lot of people also got the idea that all these people were mentally ill and they weren t, you know. Matter of fact, mentally ill people commit less crimes than normal people. 20

21 Page 21 Anyway, that s how the profiling got started. And the criminology profiling, when did that come to be? Was that in your? Well, what would happen In the beginning, they would call in. So I got a crime, let me tell you what happened and maybe you can give me kind of a profile of what we re looking at. Graduates of the course were spreading the word and police were calling in from all over. Well that s where it came from. So it was a psychological profile. Sure. So, it just got all out of hand, you know. They still have a number of people down there doing that kind of stuff. But getting back to your era, when you were just, you and Pat were doing these police schools or that you were starting this applied psych, criminology. Was anyone else working on your ideas? No. of the profiling. No. Okay. So, you were, you were, you were kind of the first ones You mean in the Bureau? Yes, yes. Well I mean anywhere. There were absolutely none. Matter of fact, they were staying as far away from us as they could get. 21

22 Page 22 You mean in the Bureau? Yeah. Now Was there any other like in England or Oh, sure. Yeah. I didn t start the profiling of criminals. Okay. I started the FBI s approach to profiling, which was different. Now, the first profiling case that I can remember. Matter of fact, the book that influenced me most was a book by August Vollmer on police in modern society. You know who August Vollmer is? No. Vollmer. You really should look him up some time. He was the police chief in Berkeley, California. He also started the use of polygraphs in law enforcement. He recommended the use of a national database for fingerprint records. You ve heard of that probably. They called the Bureau. Now this was before the Bureau ever did it. So his recommendation started it. He started the School of Criminology at Berkeley. He was the guy with the idea to put radios in police cars. 22

23 Page 23 It just poured out of him, tons of it. And I was very impressed. And he said in a book he wrote in about 1935, 34, 33, that the kind of crime a person commits is based on what kind of a person he is. Some kinds of people commit this crime. Other kinds commit their crime, you know. That stuck with me because here I am reading this abnormal psychology and doing more homework than you would believe. Because I had this professor, Dr. Kelly, who worked on the Nuremberg war trials, and he was, I won t go into what he was, but he was a hard taskmaster. This really made sense to me. And I dug and we had a few murders in San Leandro, and one of em really fit. I looked at the murder. It was supposed to be a rape-murder, typical murder, you know. When you re emotionally upset, you can t think very well. And some of the things he did didn t fit. And it took about eight minutes, you know, this is not a sex crime. There s no sex involved. The guy I worked with all the time was a detective named Chuck Kane. He and I were both the same height and so forth and he was the detective on the case. And I said Chuck, This can t be what it looks like. And so he went out and they finally arrested the husband. The husband had followed her to a grocery mart and grabbed her when she was coming out with the groceries and pulled her across the street to where they were building a house and made it look like a rape-robbery type thing. Yeah. But it really worked. And anyway, that s kind of how it started. Now, the guy that started it all really at Quantico was a guy named Jack Kirsch. 23

24 Page 24 Okay. And you know Jack Kirsch. Yeah. I talked to him yesterday. Now he picked everybody to come into the Behavioral Science Unit. And if you want to give credit to somebody, that s who you give credit to. Okay. So, I should talk to Jack Oh, by all means. I will do that. I was on the phone with him yesterday. Now who, in terms of profiling, the first profile that I m aware of, and it wasn t called a profile, was done by a guy named Dr. Thomas Bond. It was in 1888, in the Jack The Ripper case. Oh, okay. I read that on the Internet somehow. In fact, I have it here with me. And there s a number of other cases. There was a guy up in New York. I had been doing profiles since 70. I started doing them in 70. And I think Pat started working with me in 71, something like that, and then the Academy, of course, opened in 72. About 73 or 74, I read a book, Case Book of a Crime Psychiatrist by George, no, wait a minute, Brussel. I can t think of his first name, something Brussel. Anyway, he was up in New York. Seems like I would know his first name. Maybe it was James Brussel. I can look it up. The book is sitting over there someplace. It s right here, I think. You were an advisor to The Profiler, were you not? Oh, yeah. Matter of fact, I just got a set of tapes back, where I answer a bunch of questions for the next TV show on it. 24

25 Page 25 James Brussel. James, okay. James Brussel had been the Assistant Director of Psychiatric Services for the Army in World War II and had worked in a number of mental hospitals and so forth. And he was doing profiles, if you want to call them that. I don t believe they were called that, but he was doing them for the New York City PD. And he did George Mateski, the mad bomber in New York. And the Wiley murders, and he also did that guy in Cleveland, (Shepard), the dentist or whatever it was. I can t think of his name. And he did De Salvo. The rapist. Right, right. I can t think of it. They had a name for him. The Son of Sam? No, no, no, no, not Son of Oh, no, no, the DeSalvo, yes, the rapist-murderer, yeah. But I can t think of what they called him. Anyway, he never went to trial. So, we really don t know. One of the problems you have to understand and, you do understand, the trial isn t about truth. It s about whether you convict somebody or not convict them. So, I don t know whether all the people who were acquitted are innocent and all the people convicted are guilty. But, at any rate, he didn t go to court. DiSalvo. DiSalvo, that s what it was. Di Salvo. But there was a nickname for him. 25

26 Page 26 Yes, there was a nickname. But later on, of course, there was the Son of Sam. That was That was Berkowitz. Yeah. But, anyway, he did a bunch of them and had been doing them since the 50s. I went up to interview him. I wanted to know how he was doing it. You know, you never want to pass up a chance to learn something. Never, ever. If you look around in here, you see books. I m still trying to learn this business. So you did talk to him? Oh, yeah. I went up several times and talked to him. And he was a really nice guy. Anyway, as it turned out, his approach and my approach were quite different. He used a lot of ethnic aspects. For instance, people who were from Mediterranean areas were more likely to use a knife, people were from Eastern Europe more likely to use explosives, et cetera, et cetera. Well, I had problems with that, you know. Anyway, he did some good work. But we disagreed on how to read the crime scene. 26

27 Page 27 He did it one way. I did it a different way. And, you know, like everything else, there s more than one way to do something. He did come down to lecture a couple times at Quantico, when we brought in homicide investigators. But he was getting pretty old then and he really, he just talked about the old cases. Anyway, it was very interesting to talk to him. But that, you know, as you can see, there had been profiling before. Right, right. But I didn t know about these profiles. All I knew was, Vollmer said that, you know, there was this correlation between personality and crime. A guy named Dr. Hans Gross back in about the turn of the century had said that on the stand, you can determine a person s personality by the way he answers questions, which fit pretty much with what Vollmer said. Those were pretty much my motivators and it made a lot of sense to me. Sure, sure. So I just kept digging. I had about five departments sending me all their homicides all the time, you know. I ll tell you. I had, when I first got back to Headquarters, I called over to whatever the department was. I guess it was Congressional Affairs or PR or somebody. And I said do we get a lot of, how shall we say, mentally abnormal letters, letters from mentally abnormal, that s not what we called them, but Right, right. 27

28 Page 28 And, you know, I said does Hoover get em? He said, We get em by the tons. And I said I d like to get em. Well, see, that didn t help my reputation. No, no. Cause they figured well this guy s nuttier than Anybody who would want to read those letters has got to be nutty. Right, right. But those letters covered the entire range of mental illness. There were all kinds of them. I would use them in class to show now here s an example of this kind of a person and here s an example of this kind, you know. And I had PDs sending me letters. They would kill somebody and then they would write a letter and, you know, catch me if you can, you know. Well, that s a particular type of killer and so you see by those letters, you know what you re looking for. Nobody else does it. And so it had value, but it gave me a bad reputation. And I couldn t get em to stop sending me those mass letters. That s incredible. I finally said, you know, look, I don t need any more. I got enough here for eight hundred years. Did you ever get to the point Well, I know that you ve written things or have you written any books on this? No. But you ve written articles on that? 28

29 Page 29 No. No? I wrote a little article on offender profiling as a definition. I have been asked to write books and I ve been promised things. I ve had well-known authors say, you know, I ll write it with you, this kind of stuff. I don t feel you should write a book on how to do it. I really don t. But some other folks have. We know that. Yes, but they didn t say how to do it. Okay. If you read the book, they don t really say how to do it. Yeah. I mean they talk about their case and what they did in that case. But they don t tell you what you really do. And some of em, some of the books written, I won t say they re by agents or anything, some of the books were written by people who have no idea what profiling means. Yeah. There s one guy that wrote a book on profiling, who s never done a profile. He made good money, I guess. Yeah, yeah. 29

30 Page 30 A guy named Adderly, Aderline or Adderly, something along that line, was the chief investigator for Jack the Ripper. And they asked him why he didn t give out what the police were doing and so forth. He said, If I give out that information, all I do is make it harder for me to catch em. Exactly, exactly, yeah. He says, They read the paper. He says, We give out information on fingerprintings and now they all wear gloves. Right, that s true. So this is kind of my approach. Yeah. Now, I am writing a book. It s a novel. Okay, okay. And it will be about profiling? Profiling will be in it. Okay. Actually, it ll be about a guy teaching a policeman profiling. It will be your background. It won t exactly be, but yeah, it could be. But it s going to be a fiction and how much of it will be accurate and how much of it will not will be a question. Right, right. Now, when Jack Kirsch, and I definitely will talk to him. Oh, absolutely, because he is Cause he was there. 30

31 Page 31 He was the motivating factor behind this whole mess, whole mess, and I call it a mess because we were going crazy for a while. Who else was did he bring in or, besides yourself? Well, there were people there before me. Oh, okay. See, I was originally in the management unit, because there wasn t any opening over in the other unit. But there was John Pfaff. Our illustrious chairman, huh? How do you spell it? I just shanghaied him in to being chairman as a matter of fact. There was a guy named Brian Highland and Bill Mooney. And there was an agent who had also been a California police officer. And he was, and I can t think of his name, but Jack will tell you who it is. Okay. He was the guy who designed all those classrooms. At Quantico. Boy, I can t remember that guy s name. He died a few years ago. Kolher, Dick Kolher. Now, they were the The pioneers or Dick Kolher and Jack Kirsch, I think, were probably the prime movers. The other guys were there, but they weren t quite the Yeah. 31

32 Page 32 John taught police community relations at the NA. And Brian Highland, I don t know what he taught. I really never got to know him very well. The guys in my unit, that flying management squad, all taught management and went to Quantico. Crickenberger you know. Who s that? Gene Crickenberger. Oh, yes, yes. He was a member of that unit, as well as I was. I think Jack pretty much was the guy that did it. So Jack I ll definitely have to talk to him. And then you were there for how long? I was there until I retired in 86. Okay. And see about 1980, 79 or 80, they made me unit chief of Research and Development. And from then on, I did cost benefit studies. I also built an undercover protection program. We were losing undercover agents like they were going out of style. They called down and said we want to know why we re losing these agents and we want to stop it. And I went out and I did a study. And the first study showed that we were losing the agents, but it just showed us what we knew, you know, that stress was getting to em. I had to do a second study to find and correct the problem. Stress, right. We re back again. We had to change tapes on both recorders here. It s 11:48. 32

33 Page 33 What really happened about 1978, 79, something like that, I lost my voice. I had been lecturing about eight hours a day and my voice just couldn t handle it. And so they sent me to school. They sent me to the University of Maryland for a doctorate. I spent, I don t know, two and a half, three years over there. Now, I also was working at Quantico obviously and during that time, I became unit chief of the Research and Development unit, which at the time wasn t really doing very much. I got a whole bunch of people from other units, and we built it up until we were doing about twenty research projects at any given time. We were doing a lot of operational projects, like Operation Greylord. You ve probably heard of that in Chicago. The Judges, yeah. Yeah. Well what we did is do a statistical analysis to see what the probability of error was or probability that by chance a case would fall to a certain judge. And we showed that it s not going to do it that way. We had another one down in Central America, where they had ammo down there, and the ammo wasn t working. They had I don t know how many hundred thousand rounds down there. The contractor, they thought maybe the contractor, who was a U.S. contractor, had slipped in foreign ammo. It wasn t as reliable, cause it was misfiring all the time. We had to come up with a way to sample that ammo under fire within an hour and give them a reasonable estimate of whether that ammo was U.S. or foreign. And we worked out a sampling system, a random sampling system. We did it and they prosecuted them and nailed it. 33

34 Page 34 And that s when I started in all these screwball cases, you know, the Santeria and the Aliens sucking blood out of cattle up in Wyoming. You name it. And there were a bunch of them in northern New Mexico that were happening. Yeah, now am Agent in the Southwest handled all of those cases. I didn t go down there. But Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, Wyoming, that group. Then there was all these cult crimes. And so I worked the cult crimes. There was a lieutenant on a department out in Utah that I worked with on that a lot. And you wouldn t believe what a Pandora s box you open when you work one of those cases. Somebody gets your name, cause they, they never quit calling. Yeah. I was doing this, plus we did the research on what an agent should be. What we really needed in terms of ability to have a good agent. That was a major, major project. Matter of fact, it was so big that when we did the computer matrix, we had to send the data to the air base at San Antonio, who was the only one who had a computer that would do it. It was eleven foot by eleven foot, that matrix. Then we did it for support. And then we did one for the supervisor. They had that supervisory I forget the name. The executive management? No. Well, you had them, you had the EDS, ED, Executive Development Course. 34

35 Page 35 Yeah, whatever it was. The one where they had to take the course before they made supervisor Yeah. or ASAC or something like that. It was a two-week course back then. Well, we did the research on what they should teach. And we told em, okay, this is what they need to know. And in some cases, we built their things for them, their in-baskets and stuff. Anyway, we did that kind of stuff. But the big thing I thought we did as a research unit was this thing for undercover agents. We were losing, I can t tell you how many we were losing. Guys were shoplifting. They were exposing themselves. All kinds of stuff. It was terrible. Yeah. It happened to us down in Miami. I knew the kid, you know. He went off bonkers, I mean, really. I went to all the offices and I gave psychological tests to every undercover agent in every office. And then I developed a system, shall we say an informal system of performance evaluation, a very informal system. And it was a peer system rather than a supervisory system. You re an undercover agent. If you had to be undercover with anybody, which one would you pick. That kind of thing. 35

36 Page 36 We got pretty good data on who the good undercover agents were. So then we saw what characteristics they did not have, which told us what characteristics we should not have in undercover agents. I had to do the thing twice to get down to those characteristics. I finally built a procedure that involved doing a test before they go undercover, an interview - a rather involved interview - before they go undercover. Like are you going undercover because you don t get along with your wife, you know, why are you going undercover. Every six months while they re undercover, and then an interview six months after you get out from undercover. And I set a deadline that you can t be undercover over two years. And laid it out and damned if they didn t buy it. The problem was, the SACs and ASACs didn t buy it. Yeah. Particularly if they were getting good data. And so we run into a lot of problems with that. Yeah. I understand now they got a full unit doing that now. And when I was looking through my drawers here a minute ago, I still got some of those old packets. Cause we trained undercover agent coordinators. Huh. For instance, we trained them to look for things like when you make an appointment with the undercover agent, 36

37 Page 37 Are the indicators. Yeah. You know, all, all these things Yeah. Look for these things. And then after they get out, they re going to be mad. They re gonna have problems. So the exit interview was a big interview. What do you think you learned? What can we teach at Quantico based on what you learned. And then after six months, we know they re gonna be mad. That was a rule? Everyone coming out would be mad. Yes, they had to do this. Now they didn t because a lot of people wouldn t follow it, but that was the rule. And it stopped the loss of the undercover agents. As you know. They suddenly stopped, we stopped losing them. Right, right. It worked. And it s still working. Yeah. I talked to the unit chief down at Quantico the other day, one of the ones I still know. And he said that there s a full unit doing it now. They re not at Quantico. A full unit doing it and they haven t changed a thing on it. Isn t that something. That s good. That made me feel good. 37

38 Page 38 You know, I felt like I really accomplished something. You were a pioneer on that. Pioneer, well, you know. What I felt I was a guy that, you know, here s a problem, what ll we do? How do we fine tune this to resolve this problem. How do we fix this thing? It s kind of like a fireman. How do I put this fire out, you know. I don t know whether you call it pioneer or not. So you were the unit chief of that R&D unit down there at Quantico until you retired in 86? Any other? Oh, we also did the national police training needs assessment. Oh, okay. For all police departments, all eleven thousand some odd police departments, ninety percent of which have under ten officers. No kidding. To find out what kind of training they really needed. As opposed to what we were giving them. That made quite a bit of change in how the principal instructors in the different offices looked on the departments and what, what training we gave to agents. So they would teach police training schools in the field, you know. What subjects would be pushed. It was getting to the point where well what they were teaching, you go into LAPD and you start teaching management, everybody in your class has either a bachelor s or a master s in that subject. 38

39 Page 39 Right, right. There is no point in doing this, you know. And this is the kind of stuff they ve come up with. You didn t need that kind of course. So pretty much then a model was developed for all police agencies in the States? For training? For training. Yeah. So the Bureau was responsible for putting that kind of training out there. Actually, you know, the Training Division of the NA Unit, the Training Division, was responsible for it. I m sorry, it wasn t the NA. It was the Field Police Training Unit. Field Police Training Unit. Yeah. And now whether they re still doing it or not. The last time I talked to someone, they were updating the needs assessment about every two or three years to see if there were changes. And I don t know about the changes. But there s not as much police training going on now I think because of as a result of 9/11 and all that. The training changed. Our problem was we didn t have a lot of instructors in this new area. 39

40 Page 40 So until we get instructors. One of the problems you run into is a department with ten people think they ought to be able to do everything. And they can t. They can t have an expert in every field. And it s very hard to set up a regional school and say well, why doesn t this department specialize in this area, this one in this area, this one in this area. They don t want to do that see, you know. They all want it, you know. And so that s one of the areas that is a problem. Another area that we ran into that was a problem was the kind of training received in basic training. And that needed some changes or at least we recommended some changes. Right, right. There was a lot going on. We had a lot of research going on. Research on our own people. For instance, one research project, we were losing people, applicants, because they couldn t shoot. Yeah, right, yeah. Well, I developed a very simple procedure using a red handled gun with an eight and a half pound pull. If you couldn t pull that trigger so many times, they wouldn t hire you. Right, right. We stopped losing people. Now that s when the applicants or people interested or had filed applications with the Bureau, that one of the first things they did was bring them in and see if they could handle that. But also if the female could handle a shotgun. That came right out of that research unit. 40

41 Page 41 That was the kind of stuff we were doing. Yeah. And it was kind of funny because we had really bad days down there, because I knew the Associate Director. He had been at Quantico. And I knew most of the Assistant Directors, and they would call down, they d want something. Teten, what is this? And they wouldn t get off the phone. I d say, well, you know, let, let me call Well no, I ll just wait. Wait? I don t know where the hell it is. I ve got to pull this out of a hat. Anyway, it was a lot of fun down there. I enjoyed it. They actually in 1986, they offered to let me go over my age thing. To stay an extra year. I d never heard of em doing that before. Yeah. They didn t do that to too many folks, no. Yeah. I was very impressed. You were what fifty-five at the time? Fifty-seven? I was fifty-three. Oh, okay. If you ll stay on, we will let you stay on beyond fifty-five. 41

42 Page 42 They wouldn t let you go a year beyond, you know. You d had enough. Well, I loved the work. But about once a year, they tried to transfer my unit to Headquarters. Oh. Okay. I would come up with some reason that you can t do research in Headquarters. Like there was too many people walking in or somethin. I was going to run out of ideas. Oh, boy. And you were living at this house? Yeah. Well, you were closer to Headquarters than you were to Quantico, weren t you? That would have cost about four thousand a year more. I know. And as you will recall, we had a freeze on. Yes, yes. And I was at the top of my GS. I couldn t get any more. Right, right. Well, they were going to give me