The Killer Across the Table

Nor would she shield them from the ongoing news about their little sister’s case. “I would tell them both what was going on so they would hear it from me. I knew they would be hearing things and I didn’t want them to hear in a scary way. We would sit on the bedroom floor and talk about anything they had on their minds. They looked forward to that and knew they weren’t being left out.” Rosemarie and Frank took them to the cemetery on various occasions to visit their “sister in heaven.”

Rosemarie came to accept the reality that her love and pain could not be separated. “I have felt a relationship with Joan in my heart all these years,” she says. “It’s a relationship I wouldn’t have chosen, but it’s still a relationship that inspires me to do what I do. And I found there is a peace that comes with that.”

It was not all Rosemarie had to contend with. Seven months after the murder, her beloved father died of cancer. He had adored his granddaughter and never stopped grieving for her.

Rosemarie went to the court hearing when McGowan pled guilty. She felt she had to be there for Joan. Genevieve McGowan was there, too. “When I walked into the courtroom, she gave me the coldest stare I have ever experienced in my life. It was the first time I had ever seen her.”

Rosemarie would not have minded if McGowan had stood trial so that the truth would have come out and nothing would have been held back, including the details of what had happened to Joan. But as often happens, other types of details began filtering back to her. One of the most appalling was when she heard through a friend that Genevieve had told an acquaintance from church that she hated Rosemarie, because if it hadn’t been for her, Joe wouldn’t have killed Joan and gone to prison.

And then there were the persistent challenges from her own body. The first inkling, when she stopped to think about it, had come years earlier, when she was a nineteen-year-old in New York. One day she was running for a bus. Suddenly her leg felt tense and then gave out on her. She didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t recur, and she didn’t think much about the incident.

A few years later, when she was pregnant with Marie, she was feeling exceptionally tired and knew it wasn’t the normal fatigue of pregnancy.

She tried to work out her own strategies and coping mechanisms for dealing with her unknown affliction. “I had to develop my own strength through focus and determination.”

When Joan was born, the tiredness became more pronounced and she was forced to hire help, which she kept until the baby was six weeks old. The ongoing symptoms were vague and fluctuating, and seemed to affect various regions of her body. “It got worse as the day went on and was worst in the late afternoon. I knew I had something.” The one common denominator was the extreme fatigue and the knowledge that she had a limited amount of energy on any given day, and if she used it up, there would be consequences going forward.

She went to doctors, but they couldn’t find anything. Or they told her it was a physical manifestation of postpartum depression. Or it was a virus and she would get over it. But she didn’t get over it, and “if I didn’t rest, I would pick up infections regularly.”

It wasn’t until a year after Joan’s death that Rosemarie finally got an accurate diagnosis. She checked into Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and submitted to an extensive battery of tests. A neurologist there concluded that she was suffering from myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease caused by the breakdown in normal communication between nerves and muscles. It is an autoimmune disorder that can be related to thymus gland abnormalities, with minimal or no relationship to one’s genetic background. There was and is no cure, and treatment centers on trying to alleviate symptoms that, in addition to the severe fatigue and weakness, can involve drooping eyelids, double vision, slurred speech, difficulty chewing and swallowing, and even trouble breathing.

“They told me every case of MG is different. If I pace myself and stay organized, it’s a little better,” she says, but adds, “I do take risks, and that is when I get the most joy out of life. In fact, I think it makes me appreciate moments of joy so much more because this condition makes the experiences so pointed.”

After a miscarriage, two of those joys occurred in 1980 and 1982, when Michael and John were born. Frankie and Marie were already in their teens, so for Rosemarie and Frank, it was like having a second generation of children.

But the joy would not last. Frank lost his job, and their marriage started to fail. “Even though he found another good job, he was lashing out at us more,” Rosemarie says. “And when John was eight, I witnessed inappropriate touching and other gestures.” Throughout all the trials, Rosemarie was sustained by her religious beliefs and devotion. “In my faith,” she commented, “God was always my psychiatrist. After what happened to Joan, I asked Him to help me choose a life without animosity, and instead, a life advocating for prevention, protection and justice.”

In the early 1990s, around the time Michael was eleven and John was nine, Frank moved downstairs. Rosemarie knew it was just the next step on a road that led in only one direction. “I was going to go for a divorce in 1993—on September 7, Joan’s birthday,” she related.

Then they received a telephone call that changed her life yet again. It came on July 26 of that year, from Deputy Chief of Detectives Ed Denning from the Bergen County prosecutor’s office. He said that Joseph McGowan was coming up for parole. This was a shock, because Rosemarie had not been informed that six years could be cut for good behavior and work credit. He had been turned down in 1987, the first time he’d been eligible, but his chances looked better this time since he’d served more than his minimum sentence.

It had been twenty years since the murder, and Rosemarie wanted to bring Joan back into the public consciousness. “It wasn’t about dwelling on the grief but being a squeaky wheel to fight to keep her killer in prison and trying to make sure he wouldn’t be up for parole every few years. I thought starting a movement of the people would help us all.”

The mother of a former Tappan Zee High cheerleader called Rosemarie to say her daughter felt she had been stalked by McGowan back in school and would be “petrified if he came out.”

Rosemarie knew she’d have to fight to keep him behind bars and began by working with local and county officials, district representatives and the community to organize a vigil on September 30, 1993, at Veterans Park in Hillsdale. More than a thousand supporters attended. “My divorce plans had to change according to the advice that I sought from an attorney,” she explains. “The focus had to be on the fight to keep McGowan in, and that couldn’t be complicated by the divorce.”

And she had two overwhelming reasons to keep him behind bars: to make the punishment at least in some sense commensurate with the enormity of the crime; and to make sure no other young child suffered at McGowan’s hands as Joan had. If there were to be any meaning to Joan’s death, any meaning to her disappearing on Holy Thursday and being found on Easter Sunday, Rosemarie understood, she would have to do something herself. “The message of hope was clear. It would be the movement for child protection and helping society inspired by Joan, Holy Thursday, and Good Friday.” It was as if God, who had ordained free will to mankind and therefore had to suffer the deaths of little children at the hands of those who would forsake His values, was giving her a message.

“I realized then that this is the work I’m supposed to do. And I saw it as getting closer to Joan’s spirit. That’s when the movement started. I didn’t get positive support from my family—instead quite the opposite when family members verbally assaulted me, actually threatened me with physical force, and sent harassing mail. In the late 1990s, Michael and John would become involved, but before that, I was pretty much on my own.”

She began speaking out. She began organizing. She spearheaded a nine-month campaign to make the public aware of the danger of child predators and the reasons that they should be kept in prison. The parole board listened and once again turned down McGowan’s request. Just as important, it reviewed his case and had him transferred to the maximum security facility in Trenton, where the warden felt he should have been to begin with. Additionally, the board imposed a future eligibility term (FET) of twenty years before his next hearing. With good behavior and work credits, this would be reduced to twelve years, making him once again eligible in 2005.

And Rosemarie did not just let matters stand once McGowan’s 1993 parole request was denied. She began a grassroots movement, organizing parents and other interested parties in rallying and petitioning for justice for child victims. She wrote; she called; she appeared on television and radio and sat for interviews. Wherever she went, she handed out little green bows, Joan’s favorite color.

It took three years of essentially full-time advocacy. Then, on April 3, 1997, Governor Christine Todd Whitman signed what became known as Joan’s Law. Wearing a green bow on her lapel in memory of Joan, Governor Whitman sat in bright sunshine outside the Bergen County jail. Rosemarie, Frank, and Michael and John stood around her, surrounded by police officers, detectives, sheriff’s deputies, and legislators, all of whom had supported the campaign to have the law enacted.

Joan’s Law amended the New Jersey criminal code to mandate that anyone convicted of the murder of a child under fourteen years of age during the commission of a sexual assault would be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

Rosemarie came to the podium and thanked the governor and the sponsors and supporters of the bill. “Maybe this can deter crime—we hope,” she stated. Then she held up a photograph of Joan and said, “It’s she who we have to be thankful for. Joan’s spirit is very much alive. She wants you to smile more. She wants you to be more positive.”

The following year, on October 30, 1998, President Bill Clinton would sign a federal version of Joan’s Law. Six years after that, on September 15, 2004, New York governor George Pataki traveled to Harriman State Park, the site where Joan’s body was found, to sign a Joan’s Law for his state. Rosemarie could not make the signing but listened on the phone from her bed. It was where she had made many of her calls to connect with people to get bills passed.

Ironically, one convict Joan’s Law would not affect was Joan’s killer, Joseph McGowan. He had been sentenced before the statute went into the code, and the law could not be made retroactive. So, according to the instructions of the court of appeals, the New Jersey parole board and Rosemarie D’Alessandro prepared for the next hearing.

This was particularly problematic because shortly after the 1993 decision was handed down, McGowan appealed the ruling that didn’t allow him a parole hearing until 2005. The appellate court requested additional information from the parole board, then let its ruling stand. Over the next few years McGowan appealed three times, and the D’Alessandros went to each one. Their victim impact statements were difficult to go through, but Rosemarie felt she had to make Joan’s ordeal, and their own, as real to the board as possible.

In May 1998, the court ruled that the board had set the parole bar too high. It stated that board members should not consider whether he had been rehabilitated or not, only whether there was substantial reason to believe he would commit another violent crime if released. In other words: Was he dangerous?

And that’s where I came in.

5

WHAT THE PSYCH PEOPLE SAID

Over the first fifteen years of McGowan’s incarceration, the case file showed, and the previously cited appeals court decision confirmed, there were at least eight psychological evaluations in addition to the initial ones conducted by Drs. Galen, Effron, and Revitch in 1974. During this fifteen-year period, McGowan appeared to be a near model prisoner, not getting into trouble and not stirring things up with other prisoners.

The first several evaluations were brief and relied mainly on self-reporting. This kind of examination of incarcerated felons is always problematic for me. When most of us see a doctor, either for a physical or mental issue, our aim is to be cured or helped, so it is definitely in our best interests to tell the truth.

This logic does not always hold up on the other side of the bars. For one thing, the felon is not seeing the psychiatrist or psychologist by choice; the visit is officially mandated. For another, as far as the felon is concerned, the encounter is not designed to help him “get better.” It is to evaluate his behavior, rehabilitation, and potential dangerousness. He therefore has a vested interest not in telling the truth, but in portraying himself in the most favorable light.

On one of his court-mandated visits to a state psychiatrist following his release from Atascadero, Ed Kemper had the head of his latest victim, a fifteen-year-old girl, in the trunk of his car. During that particular interview, the psychiatrist concluded he was no longer a threat to himself or others and recommended that his juvenile record be sealed. That’s why I don’t trust self-reporting.

But that is what the McGowan mental health files from his incarceration amounted to. Three individual reports, generated in January 1987, October 1988, and September 1991, stated that McGowan had admitted his guilt and appeared remorseful about the crime. All three had recommended parole. On the other hand, McGowan had never reached out or attempted to express remorse to Rosemarie or anyone else in Joan’s family.

On October 7, 1993, Dr. Kenneth McNiel, the principal clinical psychologist at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center, met with McGowan. He was there at the request of the New Jersey state parole board. Specifically, the board wanted to assess the prisoner’s “(1) likelihood of violent acting-out; (2) general personality profile; (3) presence/absence of several psychological problems; and (4) treatment program recommendations.”

Dr. McNiel’s findings painted a substantially different picture, not only from the three previous reports, but also from the original ones conducted by Drs. Galen, Effron, and Revitch. According to Dr. McNiel, McGowan denied “any history of sexual fantasies or behaviors toward children prior to or subsequent to his crime.”

McNiel’s report stated that while

Mr. McGowan also denied any dissociative symptoms, his discussion of the present offense was notable for brief moments in which he would blank and look away while discussing the crime, which suggested a dissociative process. [I]t was clearly difficult for him to concentrate on specific memories of his crime.

HE CONCLUDED:

Mr. McGowan has made little or no progress in fully appreciating the extent of sexual deviance and violence that is apparent in his crime. Unfortunately it appears that he continues to primarily manage such negative aspects of himself through denial and repression, similar to the time of his crime.

Like the three previous reports, McNiel found “no evidence to indicate Mr. McGowan is at imminent risk of violent behavior,” but hedged himself by adding, “in a non-structured community setting, his ability to manage anger, rejection and feelings of sexual inadequacy remains open to question.”

Taken together, these reports underscored for me the vagaries of our understanding of the human mind and motivation, or even their relationship to the physical brain. Sometimes we can look at a mental symptom and link it directly to a physical problem in the brain or nervous system, but most of the time we can’t. Or, to take it one step further, sometimes we will say that a particular cruel, antisocial, or criminal action was the result of a mental or emotional disease. In other instances, we’ll say that the perpetrator wasn’t suffering from a mental disease per se, but had a “character disorder,” and therefore is more responsible for what he did. But what is the difference between a mental disease and a character disorder? A psychiatrist reading the DSM can give us a definitional answer, but will it really tell us anything about the distinction?

My colleagues and I on the criminal analysis side of behavior science operate from the premise that anyone who commits a violent or predatory crime is mentally ill. This is almost ipso facto, in that “normal” people do not commit such crimes. But a mental disorder, in and of itself, does not mean the perpetrator is insane, which is a legal, rather than a medical, term that has to do with culpability.

There have been many attempts to define insanity over the years, but in one way or another, they all go back to the M’Naghten Rule, formulated by the British courts in the wake of one Daniel M’Naghten’s attempt to assassinate British prime minister Sir Robert Peel in 1843. Shooting at point-blank range outside Peel’s London house, M’Naghten instead killed the prime minister’s private secretary Edward Drummond. M’Naghten, who suffered from delusions of persecution, was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and ever since, through multiple interpretations and permutations, the basic legal test of insanity in British and American courts has been whether the defendant could distinguish between right and wrong or was acting under a delusion or compulsion so strong that it negated that distinction.

Perhaps the closest we had to a genuinely insane predator was the late Richard Trenton Chase, who was convinced he needed to drink the blood of women to stay alive. When he was placed in a mental institution for the criminally insane and could no longer obtain human blood, he’d catch rabbits, bleed them, and inject their blood into his arm. When he could catch small birds, he would bite off their heads and drink blood. This was not a sadist who enjoyed inflicting pain and death on creatures smaller and weaker than him. This was an out-and-out psychotic, as opposed to a run-of-the-mill criminal sociopath. He committed suicide in his cell at age thirty by overdosing on antidepressant drugs he had saved up.

Still, there haven’t been many killers like Richard Trenton Chase, and this ambiguity around insanity and mental illness highlights one of the early objectives of our project to interview killers. The conversations alone were not enough. We knew that to be truly useful, we would have to find a way to systematize our results: create distinctions that could be applied more broadly, so that there was a vocabulary that extended beyond each individual case. Back in 1980, Roy Hazelwood, our sex crimes and interpersonal violence expert, was collaborating with me on an article about lust murder for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. For the first time, instead of jargon borrowed from psychology, we employed a series of terms we thought would be more practical for crime investigators. We introduced concepts such as organized, disorganized, and mixed to describe behavioral presentations at crime scenes.

Roy put me in touch with Dr. Ann Burgess, with whom he had done previous research. Ann was a highly regarded author, professor of psychiatric mental health nursing at Boston College and the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, and associate director of nursing research for the Boston Department of Health and Hospitals. Along with Roy, she was one of the nation’s leading authorities on rape and its psychological impact. Interestingly, she had recently completed a research project at Boston College involving the accuracy of predicting heart attacks in men and thought there were interesting similarities in the “reverse engineering” required for her study and what we were aiming to do.

Ann was eventually able to secure a large grant from the National Institute of Justice that allowed us to conduct a rigorous study and publish our results. Bob Ressler administered the grant and served as the NIJ liaison, and with our input, we developed a fifty-seven-page document to be filled out for each offender interview, which we called the Assessment Protocol. There were categories for modus operandi, description of the crime scene, victimology, pre- and post-offense behavior, and how they were identified and apprehended, among many other elements. Since we had already established that neither recording the interviews nor taking notes was a good idea, as soon as we finished, we would fill out the interview document, using the subject’s own words, to the best of our memories.

When we finished our formalized study in 1983, we had thirty-six in-depth studies of offenders and 118 of their victims, primarily women. By this point we had enough experience and sophistication in the Behavioral Science Unit to offer profiling and case consultation on a formal basis. Bob Ressler and Roy Hazelwood continued with their teaching and research and consulted part time as their other duties allowed. I became the first full-time operational profiler and program manager of the Criminal Profiling Program, and eventually created a new unit. My first order of business was to “take the BS out of behavioral science and profiling.” I renamed our group the Investigative Support Unit, or ISU. It encompassed programs in profiling, arson and bombing, the Police Executive Fellowship Program, VICAP—the national Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which involved logging and comparing cases between jurisdictions—and coordination with other federal law enforcement agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Secret Service.

We understood and tried to make clear to potential law enforcement clients that there were certain types of crimes for which our form of criminal investigation was useful and some for which it was not. For example, a run-of-the-mill back-alley robbery or felony murder—a crime of opportunity in which quick profit was the only motive—did not lend itself to profiling or behavioral analysis. It is all too common a scenario, with a predictable profile that fits too many people to be useful. However, even in a case such as that, we might be able to suggest proactive techniques that could help flush out the offender.

On the other hand, the more psychopathology the offender demonstrates, as evidenced by the analysis of the crime, the more we can do in profiling and helping to identify the culprit. But we had to be able to undertake our analyses and consult with local investigators in a context that would use psychology but be effective in crime solving.

In 1988 Bob Ressler, Ann Burgess, and I published our findings and conclusions in book form, entitled Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives. The reception in both the academic and law enforcement communities was gratifying. But we were still working toward the goal of making our studies and research useful in a practical way to law enforcement professionals in the manner that mental health professionals use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its fifth edition (DSM-5).

We came to realize that truly to understand an unknown subject (UNSUB in our parlance), you had to understand why and how he was committing a particular type of crime. And by the same token, you could classify crimes by motivation rather than simply by result or outcome. This was the challenge I tackled in the doctoral dissertation I was working on: evaluating different ways to train law enforcement officers in how to classify homicides. In other words, I was trying to present this material in such a way that it would actually help solve cases by explaining the behavioral dynamics of the crime.

The ultimate result, growing out of my dissertation research and involving some of the best minds in the FBI and law enforcement, was the Crime Classification Manual, published in 1992, with Ann Burgess, her husband, Allen Burgess, and Bob Ressler. By the time of the Crime Classification Manual’s initial publication, we already had a significant number of profiling victories under our belts, including the Atlanta Child Murders; Arthur Shawcross’s murders of prostitutes in Rochester, New York; the Francine Elveson murder in New York City; the Trailside Killer in San Francisco; and the murders of Karla Brown in Illinois, Linda Dover in Georgia, Shari Faye Smith in South Carolina, and FBI employee Donna Lynn Vetter in Texas. In addition, we were also able to use profiling and behavioral science to help free wrongly convicted David Vasquez, an intellectually challenged individual who was in prison in Virginia. Though he had confessed to several murders under coercive circumstances, we were able to link the crimes to the actual killer, Timothy Spencer, who has since been tried and executed.