The Killer Across the Table

I am not revealing any privileged information from McGowan’s case file or medical records. All of the evaluations and analyses I am citing were contained and published in the appellate decision Joseph McGowan, Defendant-Appellant, v. New Jersey State Parole Board, Respondent, decided by the Superior Court of New Jersey on February 15, 2002.

As he told Dr. Galen, once in the bedroom and “safely” away from the street, McGowan ordered Joan to take off her clothes. Though he said he “never completed the act,” he became sexually excited and ejaculated on his fingers only inches from Joan and then penetrated her digitally. He probably couldn’t wait and did this before she was completely undressed, as her panties were stained with blood. Since he acknowledged he had semen on his fingers, we can’t say for sure whether he “completed the act” or not, but the blood and injuries to her vaginal area indicated a brutal assault.

It was at this point, according to McGowan’s account, that the consequences of his impulsive action dawned on him. “All of a sudden,” he told Dr. Galen, “I realized what I had done. If I let her go, my whole life was gone. All I could think of was just to get rid of her.”

As an investigator, I have to say that from a criminological perspective, this part makes sense to me. In a high-stress situation like this, a “smart” offender will tend to have only one thing on his mind: getting away with his crime. This is apparently what happened with McGowan. Whether Joan lived as long after the first strangulation as Dr. Zugibe speculated is an open question, as is which of McGowan’s attempts to kill her was the successful one. But the general narrative of what happened is not in doubt. According to the transcript of the confession:

I grabbed her and started to strangle her and I dragged her off the bed, tossed her into the corner of my room on the tile floor, off the rugs. She was trying to, you know, scream, and was fighting back. But of course she really couldn’t, since I had my hands around her throat. Uh … she stopped struggling … just sort of lay there. I got dressed. I had been sweating so violently. I went out to the garage. I got some plastic bags to put her in. [Returning from the garage,] I saw that she was still moving, so I began strangling her again and I hit her head on the floor repeatedly. She began to bleed from the nose, mouth, face … I don’t know where. There was blood all over the floor. I then grabbed one of the plastic bags and put it over her head and twisted it tightly and held it there until she stopped.

As I read this in preparation for meeting him, I was thinking to myself: An hour or two earlier, this guy was standing in front of a classroom teaching chemistry to high school students. What led from that Point A to this Point B?

As the confession went on, McGowan described how he lifted Joan’s body and placed it in a plastic trash bag, then wrapped it in an old sofa cover, tied it with cord, carried it to the garage, and stowed it in the trunk of his car—the “new car” Joan had spotted from her front yard around the corner and down the block. He cleaned up her blood as best he could with some old T-shirts. Then he drove the twenty miles or so and dumped the body down the slope in Harriman State Park. He unwrapped it and left it under the rock ledge. He put the plastic bag and the couch cover in a roadside trash can.

When he returned to Hillsdale he joined the neighborhood search for Joan.

“I felt better when I went back to the house,” he told Dr. Galen. “I slept well.”

3

MIND OF THE KILLER

Frank Mikulski, who retired as Hillsdale chief of police in 2006 after forty-two years on the force, was a patrol sergeant when Joan was killed.

“It was the most horrible crime that ever occurred in the borough and it’s the one that still stands out in my mind,” he reflected to the Bergen Record. “This man was a monster, and when something like that happens to a child it’s embedded in the memory of the community and it never goes away. For people here, it’s like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 … You remember where you were and what you were doing.”

Just about everyone who knew either the D’Alessandros or Joseph McGowan remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.

Robert Carrillo, a math teacher who rode to work with McGowan and one other teacher, had thought of McGowan when Joan went missing. “When the news came over, the first thing I thought of was Joe. I thought, Gee, he lives there. I wonder if he knows her, not that he would have been involved.”

On Easter Sunday, Carrillo had gone to visit his mother in Queens with his wife and daughter. That evening they were returning home when they heard. “We were on the Cross Bronx Expressway and they made an announcement on the radio that they had caught the suspected killer of Joan D’Alessandro, and he was a high school science teacher from Rockland County and they gave his name. And I had to pull off the side of the road. I got physically ill.”

Jack Meschino taught chemistry with McGowan. He and his longtime partner Paul Coletti had socialized with him and other teachers on several occasions. “I remember when we heard,” Coletti recalled, “when we received the phone call, hanging up, and we just sat and looked at each other and said, ‘What!’ ”

“Yeah, it was just unreal,” Meschino agreed. “It was really a shock that he did something like this.” But then he added, “On the other hand, Joe was a strange fellow; he really was. And in retrospect, you think of things. Another thing that struck me was Joe’s humor. There was a big gap in it. Things that he laughed at and thought were funny, the general population wouldn’t laugh or go along with. Very bizarre.

“Joe always walked around with a set of keys—more keys than anyone would have need of. God only knows what they were for. One of the things Joe took it upon himself to do was to check classroom doors after the school day ended. And it was known that he actually turned in some of his colleagues for leaving their classroom doors unlocked. This was not in his line of duties. He had no administrative responsibilities. The only people he tried to ingratiate himself with were the administrators.”

“He was kind of seen as an administration toady,” said Carrillo. “Also, I remember when the in thing to do was to join the Playboy Club in New Jersey, and Joe was a gold card member. He made it a point to show everyone in the teachers’ room his gold card. These kinds of things were important to him, seeking out approval or recognition from others.”

We asked Carrillo if McGowan was popular with the students. “I think he was,” he responded. “He was the type of teacher who tried to be friendly with them. He strove to be liked by the kids.”

It didn’t always work out that way, though. Mark and I later learned from a number of his female students that they had felt uncomfortable around him. One woman, now in her early sixties, recalled in a chemistry lab asking Mr. McGowan what to do with a glass flask she no longer needed. McGowan grabbed it from her and threw it to the floor, where it shattered across the room. He offered no explanation for his action.

Other students had similar thoughts about McGowan. One shared her story on social media: “Back in the day, I believe senior year 1971, I had McGowan for chemistry. I was so creeped out by him that I went to the office and demanded to get out of his class.”

Tappan Zee High School was closed for spring break the week after Joan’s murder, but when classes resumed the following Monday, an atmosphere of stunned silence prevailed.

“Going back to school was very bizarre,” Carrillo said. “Everybody knew about it, but nobody really talked about it much. The students may have talked about it among themselves, but the staff was more in shock than anything else. The board of education dismissed [McGowan] at a very private meeting; there was no publicity about it.”

Carrillo and Eugene Baglieri, the other teacher in the car pool, talked about it, “and you think of things, looking back,” Carrillo said. “But it was such a terrible experience, even to be touching on it in a peripheral way, that people just avoided it.”

For Jack Meschino, it was even worse. “It was terrible coming back,” he remembered. “We team-taught, and all of a sudden, our students were my students. I’ll never forget the first few classes. It took me five or ten minutes even to get up the courage to address the students. We all sat there and looked at each other; didn’t know how to handle it. We were dumbstruck.”

There would be more psychological exams for Joseph McGowan in the next several weeks as he sat in the Bergen county jail in Hackensack. On May 10, 1973, a little more than two weeks after Dr. Galen’s interview, Dr. Emanuel Fisher, a psychologist, tested the suspect. He found McGowan to be “an exceedingly labile, tense and hysterical personality whose tendency is to act out mood and impulse in a very explosive manner. Rational controls are weak, despite the fact that he is an exceedingly brilliant individual.”

Dr. Fisher noted “a tremendous amount of underlying, unconscious hostility,” that he “repressed, avoided, sublimated and intellectualized.” And although he presented himself as “a very proper, conventional, conforming individual, [t]his exaggerated propriety, conventionality and conformity, constitute his defensive facade, for himself and for others, against the underlying depression and hostility of which he is unconscious.”

Less than a month later, on June 6, Dr. Galen submitted a psychiatric report based on his interviews with McGowan. He said McGowan had “given a well-documented history of sexual attraction to young girls. This, coupled with a clearly evident picture of a dominating and overprotective mother, would strongly hint at some profound problems in [relation] to his making a normal adjustment to an adult woman.”

Galen cited McGowan’s admission to him that for the previous year or so, he had found himself sexually aroused by young girls and specifically mentioned his twelve-year-old female cousin. He said he had masturbated to rape fantasies. From this, the psychiatrist concluded, “younger girls would pose no threat to his rather shaky concept of his manhood.”

A further neuropsychiatric report was submitted by Dr. Abraham Effron in October, confirming what McGowan had told Dr. Galen about “fantasies of sexual relations with little girls,” adding that he was sexually aroused as a nineteen-year-old camp counselor when a young girl sat on his lap.

Dr. Effron also interviewed McGowan’s mother, Genevieve, who had not been home at the time of the murder. She said that her husband, who had died of a heart attack while Joseph was in college, “was much closer to the boy [than she was] and would take him out often.” After Joe completed college, he moved back home with her and his grandmother.

Effron’s report stated:

He does not show what he necessarily feels. He conceals many facets of his complex true self and his true identification and related emotional difficulties. He tries to hide his inability to truly establish his masculinity. He experiences tension whenever he gets close to the opposite sex. This passivity generates anxiety, which in turn feeds on itself and results in a higher state of tension, which must expiate itself in a complete loss of self-control or sexual release.

He manages to control an underlying psychosis by intellectually holding in abeyance his primitive drives to an inordinate extent, but as in the past and tragically in the recent past, he may act out again.

There is an ongoing debate regarding whether violent predators are born or made—the so-called nature versus nurture question. I would argue that, while no one who does not have certain inborn tendencies toward impulsivity, anger, and/or sadistic perversions is going to evolve into a predator because of a bad upbringing, there is no doubt in my mind that those possessing such inborn tendencies can be pushed along the path to predation by negative influences as they grow up and mature.

In fact, Ed Kemper was one such individual.

Edmund Emil Kemper III was the first prison interview that Bob and I did after my idea to speak with the killers. The only problem was we didn’t really know what we were doing.

As FBI agents, we were pretty much trained on the job to interview witnesses and interrogate suspects. But neither of those skill sets really prepared us for the prison interviews. An investigative interview is a meeting with one or more persons who may have information relative to a crime or the perpetrator of that crime. We try to find out as much of the who, what, when, where, why, and how as possible. That person is not treated as a suspect.

An interrogation, on the other hand, involves questioning a potential suspect in a crime. That individual is entitled to be informed of his or her legal rights and in no case may the information violate rules of due process. This tends to be more of a show-and-tell on the part of the interrogator in which the suspect is advised of or shown definitive forensic evidence linking him to the crime. The questions fall into the form of not if, but why and how, to get the suspect to cooperate and confess.

Neither of these approaches was appropriate for our prison interviews. The interplay between the agent and the violent offender needed to be informal and not overtly structured. What we were looking for was not so much the facts of the case, which were already established, but the motivation, the pre- and post-offense behavior, the victim selection process, and then the big question of why, without being too assertive, directed, or leading—the opposite of what we’d try to do in a suspect interrogation.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, the prison encounter had to feel “natural”—just a couple of people talking freely and exchanging information.

Since we were in California, we decided to go after the local “clientele” first. A special agent out there who was one of Bob’s former students agreed to act as liaison for us with the state prison system. Ed Kemper was a six-foot-nine, 300-pound giant of a man who was serving multiple life sentences at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, midway between Sacramento and San Francisco. Kemper had become known as the Coed Killer for his string of murders in and around the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1972–1973.

Before the interview, we familiarized ourselves with all the details of his grisly record. This would become a standard part of our process, so we wouldn’t be misled or conned by men who made a specialty of the practice. What we wanted was not the facts so much as what guys like Kemper were thinking and feeling as they planned and executed their crimes. We wanted to know what motivated them, what techniques they used, and how they regarded each assault or murder afterward. We wanted to know how and where the fantasy began, what the most emotionally satisfying parts of the crime were, and whether torture and the suffering of the victim were important components for them. In other words: What were the distinctions between the “practical” aspects of successfully committing the crime and the “emotional” reasons for doing it.

Born in 1948, Kemper grew up in a dysfunctional family in Burbank, California, with two younger sisters and parents Ed and Clarnell, who fought constantly and eventually separated. Early on, Ed showed a predilection for dismembering the family cats and playing death ritual games with his sister Susan. Clarnell sent him off to live with his father, and when he ran away, she sent him to live with his paternal grandparents on a remote farm in the foothills of the California Sierras.

Told by his grandmother Maude one day to stay and help her with the household chores rather than accompany his grandfather Ed into the field, the hulking fourteen-year-old shot Maude with a .22-caliber rifle and then stabbed her repeatedly with a kitchen knife. When Grandpa Ed returned home, the boy shot him, too. This got him committed to Atascadero State Hospital for the criminally insane, until at age twenty-one and over the objection of state psychiatrists, he was placed in Clarnell’s custody.

Sitting calmly in the prison interview room, Kemper took us through his childhood and his mother’s fear he would molest his sisters, so she made him sleep in a windowless basement room, which terrified him and made him resentful of his mom and sisters. That was when he mutilated the cats. He described his succession of odd jobs once he got out of Atascadero, how Clarnell, a secretary at the newly opened University of California, Santa Cruz, was popular and caring with students, but gave him the message that he would never be in the league with the beautiful coeds who attended there. He described his habit of picking up beautiful female hitchhikers of the type he’d missed out on by being imprisoned throughout his formative years, and how this habit eventually evolved into abduction and murder. He told us how he would bring the bodies back to his mother’s house, have sex with them, then dismember them and dispose of the pieces. Though his victims certainly suffered horribly, he was not motivated by sadism as many serial killers are. What he told us he was doing—and this isn’t a phrase I’ve heard before or since—was “evicting them from their bodies” so he could possess them, at least temporarily, after death.

And then he related how, after two years of this, on Easter weekend he’d finally summoned the will and courage to go into his mother’s bedroom while she slept and bludgeon her to death with a claw hammer. He then decapitated her, raped her headless corpse, cut out her larynx, and fed it down the garbage disposal. But when he turned on the switch, the device jammed and threw the bloody voice box back out at him. He took this as a sign that his mother was never going to stop yelling at him.

He called a friend of his mother and invited her over to the house for dinner. When she arrived, he clubbed and strangled her and cut off her head. He left her body in his bed while he slept in his mother’s. On Easter Sunday morning, he took off and drove aimlessly until he reached the outskirts of Pueblo, Colorado. He stopped at a phone booth, called the Santa Cruz police department, took some pains to convince them that he was the Coed Killer, and waited to be picked up.

Kemper was lonely and narcissistic and wanted to talk to the point that at times I had to tell him to stop because we had specific questions to ask him. We used a handheld tape recorder and took notes. This was a mistake. We learned that because we had taped the interview the subject lost a measure of trust in us. These guys are mostly paranoid by nature, but in prison, there are good reasons for that. There was worry that we would share the recording with prison authorities or it would get out to the general population that a prisoner was talking to the feds. The notes were not a good idea, either, for much of the same reason. And the subject expected us to give him our full attention.

Still, despite these necessary adjustments, much of that first conversation gave us significant insights, Perhaps most important, it demonstrated from the start just how pertinent this question of nature versus nurture would be when it came to understanding what drove these men in their antisocial behavior. This issue would come to infuse just about every interview that I’ve ever done with a killer, and the same would likely be true with Joseph McGowan.

While McGowan did not suffer the same emotional trauma growing up as Ed Kemper had, his domineering and controlling mother clearly had a profound effect on his development. He was a highly intelligent twenty-seven-year-old teacher with a master’s degree in science, yet he was living in his mother’s basement and was still emotionally dependent on her. His inability to go against her and then being forced to live with her as a mature adult surely had an impact on his self-image and, as I would discover, the life of an innocent little girl.

In a bergen County courtroom, with a jury already impaneled, McGowan and his attorneys decided to forgo a trial and instead entered a guilty plea to first degree felony murder on June 19, 1974. From his perspective, I think that was probably a wise decision. Given the facts of the case and the certainty of his guilt, I can’t imagine a jury regarding him with any compassion or leniency when it came time for sentencing.

On November 4, New Jersey superior court judge Morris Malech sentenced him to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after fourteen years. McGowan had his lawyer try to appeal this sentence multiple times, but all of his attempts failed.

The following month, McGowan was examined by another psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Revitch, at the New Jersey Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenel. Dr. Revitch, trained in both psychiatry and neurology, was a clinical professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of Rutgers University and published some of the first papers on sexual assault and murder.

Once again, McGowan admitted to rape fantasies in college, caused by sexual frustration and anxiety. After listening to the account and examining his subject with and without sodium amytal (so-called truth serum) and finding little difference other than degree of affect, the psychiatrist stated that Joan’s homicide was “not a cold-blooded murder, but something committed in a state of extreme emotional disorganization and pressure. The killing was the consequence of an additional upset and failure due to premature ejaculation.” Dr. Revitch also recognized “a degree of dissociation with use of mechanism of denial.”

While I have seen some cases of rape turn into murder as a result of premature ejaculation or failure to achieve or maintain erection on the part of the attacker, it tends to be with two specific rapist typologies—the anger-retaliatory rapist and the exploitative rapist. These guys tend to focus on adult women as their victims, and if the premature ejaculation or similar embarrassment results in either a mocking response from the victim or a loss of face for the attacker, then the situation can turn dire. Given that the victim here was a child, I was pretty convinced that was not what we were seeing here. But it was Dr. Revitch’s conclusion that really had me wondering:

We believe these events only occur once in a lifetime of such individuals. A series of circumstances are necessary to provoke the incident. If the girl had not come to his home that day or, perhaps, if he had two dollars instead of only one dollar and a twenty-dollar bill, the event would not have taken place, at least at the present.

Clearly, the crime would not have taken place had Joan not showed up at the McGowan house and rung the doorbell. She was a tragic victim of opportunity. Beyond that, from what I knew from my own study of the criminal mind, I wasn’t sure how much I agreed with the various psychological reports.

Which evaluation was closer to the mark: Dr. Effron’s opinion that “he may act out again,” or Dr. Revitch’s conclusion that “these events only occur once in a lifetime of such individuals”?

I reserved judgment until I actually talked to McGowan myself.

4

HUMAN FALLOUT

If there is one word I’ve found that survivors of murder victims detest, it is closure. The media, the public, well-meaning friends, and even the judicial system itself often feel that this is what all grieving loved ones are seeking so they can “put this behind them and get on with their lives.”

But anyone who has “experienced” a murder knows there is no such thing as closure, nor in fact should there be. The mourning process will go through stages and eventually the pain will become less unbearably acute, but it will never go away, any more than the hole in one’s personal universe left by the loss of the victim and the erasure of a lifetime of promise will ever be filled in.

The Girl Scouts sent a sympathy card. Other than that, no one in any official capacity made the effort to contact the family.

The emptiness really started, Rosemarie says, “after the burial, when everyone left and went back to their own lives.” The most important thing for her at that point was to keep life as normal as possible for Frankie and Marie. “I made sure Marie stayed in Girl Scouts because she wanted to, even though it was painful for me even to think about Girl Scout cookies. We stayed in the same house, so the familiar things would still be there, like school and friends, and not having more changes to deal with. I tried not to be overprotective. I let them continue to go out and play, though I was always attentive to their whereabouts. They had to be children and I didn’t want to be paranoid.”