The killer across the table unlocking the secrets of serial killers and predators with the fbi s ori
The Killer
the Table Unlocking the Secrets of Serial Killers and Predators with the FBI s Original Mindhunter 1st Edition John E. Douglas
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The Dexter Syndrome The Serial Killer in Popular Culture 1st Edition Marcel Danesi
To the memory of Joan Angela D’Alessandro and in honor of Rosemarie D’Alessandro and all of the others who, through their inspiration, courage, and determination, strive for justice and safety for all children, this book is dedicated with love and admiration
Contents
Cover
Title Page Dedication
Authors’ Note
In a Small Room in the Big House
Introduction: Learning from the Experts
I: The Blood of the Lamb
1: Little Girl Lost
2: “I Slept Well”
3: Mind of the Killer
4: Human Fallout
5: What the Psych People Said
6: Red Rage and White Rage
7: The Bottom Line
8: “Substantial Likelihood”
9: Joan’s Legacy
II: “Killing for Me Was Just Like Second Nature”
10: All in the Family
11: The Abandoned Volkswagen
12: Inside the Walls
13: “The Convenience of the Situation”
14: “There Were Victims in Between”
15: Power, Control, Excitement
III: Angel of Death
16: Playing God
17: Working Nights
18: The Making of a Killer
19: “I Haven’t Changed a Bit”
20: Fallen Angel
IV: “No One Made Me Do Anything”
21: The Superbike Murders
22: What Happened to Kala and Charlie?
23: What Made Todd Tick?
24: “Good or Bad, I Still Want to Know”
25: Organized Versus Disorganized
26: Nature and Nurture
Epilogue: A Killer’s Choice
Acknowledgments About the Authors
Also by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker
Copyright About the Publisher
Authors’ Note
The opinions expressed in this book belong to the authors alone and do not reflect those of the FBI or any other organization.
For photos related to the cases in this book and other information about John Douglas’s career, the authors and their work, please visit www.mindhuntersinc.com.
In a Small Room in the Big House
Here, it is not so much Who done it?, but Why?
And in the end, if we have discovered the Why? and add in How?, we will also come to understand the Who? Because Why? + How? = Who.
The aim is not to be a friend. The aim is not to be a foe. The aim is to get to the truth.
It is a verbal and mental chess match without any game pieces; a sparring session without body contact; an endurance contest in which each side will seek out and exploit the other’s weaknesses and insecurities.
We sit across a small table from each other in a dimly lit room whose cinder-block walls are painted a pale bluish gray. The only window is in the locked steel door, and it is small and reinforced with wire mesh. A uniformed guard peers through from the other side, making sure everything remains in order.
In a maximum security prison, nothing is considered more important.
We have been at this for two hours already and finally the moment is ripe. “I want to know in your own words what it was like twenty-five years ago,” I say. “How did this all happen to get you here? That girl—Joan—did you know her?”
“Well, I’d seen her in the neighborhood,” he replies. His affect is calm and his tone is even.
“Let’s go back to the moment she came to the door. Tell me what happened, step by step, from that point on.”
It is almost like hypnosis. The room is silent, and I watch him transform in front of me. Even his physical appearance seems to change before my eyes. His eyes are unfocused and he looks beyond me to stare at the vacant
wall. He is moving back to another time and another place; to the one story of himself that has never left his mind.
The room is very cold, and even though I wear a suit, I struggle to keep myself from shivering. But as he recounts the story I have asked for, he has begun to perspire. His breathing grows heavier and more audible. Soon his shirt is drenched with sweat, and underneath, the muscles of his chest tremble.
He relates the entire story in this manner, not looking at me; almost talking to himself. He is in the zone, in that time and that place, thinking now what he was thinking then.
For a moment, he turns back to face me. He looks me square in the eyes as he says, “John, when I heard the knock and looked up through the screen door and saw who was there, I knew I was going to kill her.”
Introduction Learning from the Experts
This is a book about the way violent predators think—the bedrock of my twenty-five years as an FBI special agent, behavioral profiler, and criminal investigative analyst, as well as the work I have done since my retirement from the bureau.
But it’s really a book about conversations I had. After all, conversations are where it all began for me, conversations in which I learned how to use what a predatory criminal was thinking to help local law enforcement officials to catch him and bring him to justice. For me, that was the beginning of behavioral profiling.
I started interviewing incarcerated violent offenders out of what I considered personal and institutional necessity, but in many ways, it began with a desire to understand the underlying motivations behind criminals. Like most new FBI special agents, I was assigned as a street agent. My first posting was in Detroit. Right from the beginning, I was interested in why people committed their crimes—not only that they committed crimes at all, but why they committed the particular crimes they did.
Detroit was a tough city, and while I was there they were racking up as many as five bank robberies a day. Robbing a bank backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is a federal crime, so the bureau had jurisdiction, and many new agents were assigned to investigate these cases in addition to their other duties. As soon as we would apprehend a suspect and read him his Miranda rights, often in the back of a bureau car or police cruiser, I would pepper him with questions. Why rob a bank where the security is tight, and everything is recorded on tape, rather than a store that
does a large cash business? Why this particular bank branch? Why this particular day and time? Was the robbery planned or spontaneous? Did you surveil the bank first and/or make a practice run inside? I began mentally cataloging the responses and developing informal “profiles” (though we didn’t use that term yet) of bank robber types. I started seeing the differences between planned and unplanned crimes and organized and disorganized ones.
We got to the point where we could begin predicting which bank locations were most likely to be hit and when. In areas with a lot of building going on, for instance, we learned that Friday late morning was a likely time to hit the bank, because it would have a lot of cash on hand to handle the construction workers’ paychecks. We used this kind of intelligence to harden certain targets and be waiting at others if we thought we had a reasonable chance of catching robbers in the act.
During my second bureau posting in Milwaukee, I was sent to the new, modern FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, for a two-week in-service course in hostage negotiation. It was taught by Special Agents Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany, the original champions of behavioral science in the bureau. Their main course was called Applied Criminology. It was an attempt to bring the academic discipline of abnormal psychology into crime analysis and the training of new agents. Mullany saw hostage negotiation as the first practical use of the applied psychology program. This was a new wave in the battle against a new era of crime that involved airplane skyjackings and bank robberies with hostages, such as the 1972 Brooklyn bank heist that inspired the Al Pacino film Dog Day Afternoon. It was easy to see how having some idea of what was going on in the hostage-taker’s head would be of great benefit to the negotiator and ultimately save lives. I was one of about fifty special agents in this class, taught for the first time and a daring experiment in FBI training. Legendary director J. Edgar Hoover had died just three years before, and his lengthened shadow still hung over the bureau.
Even in his declining years, Hoover maintained an iron grip on the agency he had essentially created. His hard-nosed, hard-ass approach to investigation echoed the old Dragnet TV show line: Just the facts, ma’am. Everything had to be measurable and quantifiable—how many arrests, how many convictions, how many cases closed. He never would have embraced
anything as impressionistic, inductive, and “touchy-feely” as behavioral science. In fact, he would have considered it a contradiction in terms.
While attending the hostage negotiation course at the FBI Academy, my name got around the Behavioral Science Unit, and before I left to go back to Milwaukee, I was offered positions in both the Education and Behavioral Science Units as my next posting. Even though our unit was called Behavioral Science, the primary responsibility of its nine agents was teaching. Courses included Applied Criminal Psychology, Hostage Negotiation, Practical Police Problems, Police Stress Management, and Sex Crimes, which was later changed by my great colleague Roy Hazelwood to Interpersonal Violence.
Though the academy’s “three-legged stool” model of teaching, research, and consultation was beginning to take shape, any case consultation that star agents like Teten provided was strictly informal and not part of any organized program. The focus of these forty hours of classroom instruction was supposed to be on the issue of most concern to criminal investigators: Motive. Why do offenders do the things they do, in what ways do they do them, and how can understanding this help catch them? The problem with this approach was that most of the content still came from the academic sphere, which became evident whenever senior law enforcement personnel going through the National Academy program had more firsthand case experience than the instructors.
No one was more vulnerable in this area than the youngest instructor on the team: me. Here I was standing in front of a classroom full of seasoned detectives and officers, most of them a lot older than me. And I was supposed to teach them what was going on in the criminal mind, something they’d actually be able to use to help clear cases. Most of my firsthand experience had come from working with experienced cops and homicide detectives in Detroit and Milwaukee, so it seemed presumptuous of me to be telling men like that their own business.
There was a dawning realization among many of us that what was applicable to the psychiatric and mental health community had only limited relevance to law enforcement.
Still, I started getting the same types of requests Teten got. In class or during breaks, or even in the evenings, officers and detectives would come up and ask for pointers or advice on their active cases. If I was teaching a case similar in some way to one they were working on, they would figure I
could help them solve it. They saw me as the authoritative voice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But was I? There had to be a more practical way to amass useful data and case studies that would give me the confidence to feel I really knew what I was talking about.
As the guy closest to me in age, Robert Ressler was tapped to help me break into the academy culture and feel comfortable with teaching. About eight years older than I was, Bob was a new instructor who built on what Teten and Mullany had done, aiming to bring the discipline of behavioral analysis closer to something that could be of value to police departments and criminal investigators. The most efficient way to give a new instructor some concentrated experience was through what we called road schools. Instructors from Quantico would spend a week teaching a selective piece, sort of a highlights version, of the National Academy curriculum to a police department or law enforcement agency that had requested it, then move on to another for a second week before returning home with the memories of interchangeable hotel rooms and a suitcase full of dirty laundry. So Bob and I hit the road together.
One morning early in 1978, Bob and I were driving out of Sacramento, California, the site of our latest road school. I commented that most of the criminals we were teaching about were still around, we could easily find out where they were, and they weren’t going anywhere. Why not see if we could meet and talk with some of them, find out what a crime was like through their eyes, get them to recall and tell us why they did what they did and what was going on in their minds when they did it. I figured it didn’t hurt to try, and some of them might be bored enough with their prison routines that they’d welcome a chance to talk about themselves.
Very little research was available relative to interviewing prison inmates, and what there was pertained specifically to convictions, probation and parole, and rehabilitation. However, the record seemed to indicate that violent and narcissistic inmates, on the whole, were incorrigible—meaning they were not able to be controlled, improved, or reformed. By talking to them, we hoped to learn if this was indeed the case.
Bob was initially skeptical, but willing to go along with this crazy idea. He’d served in the army, and between the army and the bureau, he’d had enough experience with bureaucracies that his mantra was “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” We would show up unannounced. In those days FBI credentials could get us into prisons without prior permission. If
we had said in advance that we were coming, there was a danger word would leak out into the yard. And if an inmate was known to be planning to speak with a couple of feds, the rest of the prison population might think he was a snitch.
As we embarked on this project, we had some preconceived ideas of what we would encounter during these interviews. Among them:
All would claim they were innocent.
They would blame their convictions on poor legal representation. They would not willingly talk to law enforcement personnel.
Sex offenders would come across as sex-obsessed.
If there had been capital punishment in the state in which the murder was committed, they would not have killed their victims.
They would project the blame onto the victims. They all came from dysfunctional family backgrounds. They knew the difference between right and wrong and the nature of the consequences of their actions.
They were not mentally ill or insane.
Serial murderers and rapists would tend to be highly intelligent. All pedophiles are child molesters.
All child molesters are pedophiles.
Serial killers are made, rather than born that way.
As we’ll see in the following pages, some of these assumptions proved correct, while others were way off the mark.
Surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of the men we sought out did agree to talk to us. They had various reasons. Some felt cooperating with the FBI would look good on their records, and we did nothing to dissuade that assumption. Others might simply have been intimidated. Many inmates, particularly the more violent types, don’t get many visitors, so it was a way to relieve the boredom, talk to someone from the outside, and spend a couple of hours outside their cells. There were some who were just so cocksure of their ability to con everyone that they looked at the interview as a potential game.
In the end, what started with a simple idea while driving out of Sacramento—conversations with killers—became a project that would change the careers and lives of both Bob and me and the special agents who
eventually joined the team, and add a new dimension to the FBI’s crimefighting arsenal. Before we were done with our initial phase of interviews, we had studied and talked to, among others: shoe fetishist and strangler Jerome Brudos in Oregon, who liked to dress his dead victims in high heels from his extensive wardrobe of women’s clothing; Monte Rissell, who raped and murdered five women as a teenager in Alexandria, Virginia; and David Berkowitz, the .44 Caliber Killer and Son of Sam, who terrorized New York City in 1976 and 1977.
Over the years, my profilers at Quantico and I would interview many other violent and serial predators, including Ted Bundy, the prolific killer of young women, and Gary Heidnik, who imprisoned, tortured, and killed women in the basement pit of his house in Philadelphia. Both of these guys provided character traits for novelist Thomas Harris in The Silence of the Lambs, as did Ed Gein, the Wisconsin recluse who killed women so he could use their skins, whom I interviewed at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison. He was also famously the model for Norman Bates in Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho, the basis for the classic Alfred Hitchcock film. Unfortunately, Gein’s age and mental illness resulted in such rambling, disordered thought patterns that the interview wasn’t productive. He did, however, still enjoy working in leather crafts, making wallets and belts.
What eventually emerged was a set of rigorous interview methods that allowed us to start correlating the crime to what was actually in the criminal’s mind at the time. For the first time, we had a way of linking and understanding what was going on in an offender’s mind with evidence he left at the crime scene and what he said to the victim if she or he was alive, or what was done to the body, both ante- and postmortem. As we have often stated, it helped us begin to answer the age-old question “What type of person could do such a thing?”
By the time we had completed our initial round of interviews, we knew what type of person could do such a thing, and three words seemed to characterize the motivations of every one of our offenders: Manipulation. Domination. Control.
The conversations were the starting point for everything that came after. All the knowledge we gathered, the conclusions we drew, the Sexual Homicide book that came out of our research and the Crime Classification Manual that we created, the killers we helped catch and prosecute—all of it
began by sitting across from killers and asking them about their lives with an aim to understanding what drove them to take another life, or in some cases, many lives. It was all possible because of the attention we paid to this previously untapped group of instructors: the criminals themselves.
We are going to take an in-depth look at four killers I confronted across the table after I had left the bureau, using the same techniques we had developed during our extensive study. The killers themselves are all different, each with his own techniques, motivations, and psychic makeup. They range from a single victim to close to a hundred, and I have learned from all of them. The contrasts between them are intriguing and compelling. But so are the similarities. They are all predators, and all grew up without forming trusting bonds with other human beings during their formative years. And they are all prime exhibits in one of the central debates of behavioral science: nature versus nurture, whether killers are born or made.
In my FBI unit, we operated under the equation Why? + How? = Who. When we interview convicted offenders, we can reverse-engineer that process. We know the Who and we know the What. By combining those, we discover the all-important How? and Why?
I
The Blood of the Lamb
1 Little Girl Lost
It was just after the July Fourth holiday in 1998 when I took the Amtrak train up north to call on a new potential “instructor.” His name was Joseph McGowan, and he had been a high school chemistry teacher with a master’s degree. But rather than any formal academic title, he was now officially known as Inmate No. 55722 at his longtime place of residence, the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton.
The reason for his incarceration: the sexual assault, strangulation, and blunt force murder of a seven-year-old girl who had come to his house to deliver two boxes of Girl Scout cookies twenty-five years earlier.
As the train wound its way north, I prepared. Preparation when talking to a killer is always important, but no more so than now—after all, this conversation would have consequences far beyond the informational or academic. I’d been called in by the New Jersey parole board to help determine whether McGowan, who’d already been denied parole twice, should be released back into society.
At the time, the chairman of the New Jersey State Parole Board was an attorney named Andrew Consovoy. He had joined the parole board in 1989, and as McGowan’s case was coming up for a third time, he had just been appointed chairman. Consovoy had read our book Mindhunter after hearing me one night on the radio and recommended it to the parole board’s executive director Robert Egles.
“One of the things I realized from reading it and your other books was that you had to have all of the information going in,” Consovoy related
years later. “You had to find out who these people were. They didn’t start to exist the day they came to jail.”
Based on this perspective, he formulated a special investigations unit operating under the parole board. It consisted of two former police officers and a researcher, and its function was to look deeply into the questionable parole cases and give board members as much information as possible about the applicant on which to formulate a decision. They asked me to consult on the McGowan case.
Consovoy and Egles picked me up at the train station and took me to my hotel in Lambertville, a picturesque town on the Delaware River. There Egles handed over copies of everything in the case file.
The three of us went out to dinner that evening and talked generally about the work I did, but we stayed away from the specifics of the case. All they had told me was that the subject had killed a seven-year-old female child and they wanted to know whether he remained dangerous.
After dinner, they dropped me off back at the hotel, where I opened the case files and began several hours of review. My role was to see what I could determine about McGowan’s state of mind—then and now. Did he know the nature and consequences of his crime? Did he know basic right from wrong? Did he care about what he had done? Did he have any remorse?
What would be his demeanor during the interview? Would he recall specific details about the crime? If released from prison, where did he intend to live and what did he intend to do? How would he earn a living?
My one cardinal rule of prison interviews is never to go into the encounter unprepared. I also made a practice of not going in with notes, because that could create an artificial distance or filter between the subject and me when the time came to really bore in and search for the deepest layer of his psyche.
I didn’t know what I was going to get out of this interview, but I figured it would be illuminating. Because as I said at the beginning, every time I talked to “the experts,” I learned something valuable. And one of the things to be determined was just what kind of expert Joseph McGowan would turn out to be.
I sifted through the case files, reexamining the evidence and organizing my thoughts for the next day’s interview.
As I did, a grim story unfolded.
ABOUT 2:45 ON THE AFTERNOON OF APRIL 19, 1973, WHICH HER MOTHER ROSEMARIE would always remember was Holy Thursday, Joan Angela D’Alessandro noticed a car pulling into the first driveway on the right, on St. Nicholas Avenue, which intersected with Florence Street, where she lived. Joan and her older sister, Marie, had managed to sell Girl Scout cookies to just about everyone in a four-block area in their quiet Hillsdale, New Jersey, neighborhood. At that time, kids of that age going out by themselves to sell the cookies was a normal activity. Since they went to a Catholic school, the D’Alessandro girls had the day off for the religious holiday and spent part of it delivering orders. The people who lived in the house on the corner were the last customers they had to deliver to and then the cookie orders would be complete. Typically, Joan wanted to get the job done.
She was seven years old, a four-foot-three-inch bundle of playful energy and charm—a pretty, proud, and enthusiastic Brownie. In fact, she was enthusiastic about everything: school, ballet, drawing, dogs, dolls, friends, and flowers. Her second-grade teacher called her a “social butterfly,” who naturally attracted people around her. Her favorite music was the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She was the youngest of three children, born close together. Frank, known as Frankie, was nine and Marie was eight. They were more serious, Rosemarie recalls. Joan was more happy-go-lucky.
“Joan was empathetic right from the beginning. She was always concerned with other people’s feelings and hurts. And she had a natural spunkiness about her.”
There is hardly a photograph of her at this age in which she isn’t smiling: Joan in her Brownie uniform with its orange tie and beanie, hands clasped in front of her and long auburn hair symmetrically draping her shoulders; Joan in her black leotard and white tights, hair in a ponytail, arms outstretched to one side, demonstrating a ballet move; Joan in her navy blue plaid jumper, white blouse and red bow tie, as if she’d just turned to camera, bangs brushing her forehead and hair cascading around her adorable face; Joan sitting on her heels in a light blue party dress, hair pinned up, meticulously adjusting the bouquet in the hand of her Miss America Barbie doll. All of them represent different Joan personas. The two commonalities among them are the angelic smile and the innocent magic in her blue eyes.
A friend of Frankie’s said, “She was so down-to-earth. I would have married her!”
Her Italian-speaking grandfather adored her and used to say, “E così libera!” She is so free! She had a hearty laugh and Rosemarie envisioned her acting in plays as she got older. She was going to be taking piano lessons after her eighth birthday.
This afternoon, she was outside playing by herself. Frankie had gone to play at his friend’s house in the neighborhood and Marie was at a softball game.
Suddenly she raced back inside and said to Rosemarie, “I saw the new car. I’m going to take the cookies over there.” She grabbed her Girl Scout carrying case lying in the foyer with the two boxes of cookies inside.
“Bye, Mommy. I’ll be right back,” she called out as she bounded out the front door. It hadn’t even closed since she’d come running inside. Rosemarie remembers her ponytail bobbing up and down, held in place by an elastic band with two little light blue plastic balls on the ends, as Joan skipped down the front steps to the driveway and out onto the street. It all went by in a blur.
About ten minutes later the next-door neighbor, as she told Rosemarie afterward, heard the insistent barking of her dog, Boozer. Joan loved walking and playing with Boozer, and Boozer loved her.
When Joan didn’t come back right away, Rosemarie didn’t think much about it. She had probably gone to her friend Tamara’s house on the corner of St. Nicholas Avenue and Vincent Street. It was that kind of neighborhood, where you could go in and out of the houses of people you knew. The social butterfly could always find someone to hang out with or something to do. About 4:45, when the music teacher came for Marie’s piano lesson, Rosemarie started to get worried. She didn’t want to convey it to the children, so she tried to hold herself together. After all, it was a safe neighborhood, with an FBI agent and a minister living nearby.
She started making phone calls. Joan wasn’t at any of the houses she called, and no one had seen her.
Her husband, Frank D’Alessandro, got home about ten minutes to six and Rosemarie told him Joan was missing. Frank was a computer systems analyst, methodical and taciturn by nature. Rosemarie could see instantly how worried and tense he was, but as usual, he held it all in. Rosemarie said, “We have to call the police.” Frank agreed and made the call. Then he
went out with Frankie and Marie to drive around the neighborhood looking for Joan. They covered the entire area.
When they returned without having spotted her or found anyone who had seen her, Rosemarie decided to go out herself. Frank didn’t want to come. She remembered that as Joan ran out, she’d said something about collecting on the last of her cookie orders because she’d seen “the new car” on St. Nicholas Avenue. The car belonged to the McGowan house. Joseph McGowan taught chemistry at Tappan Zee High, just over the state line in Orangeburg, New York. The house was owned by his mother, Genevieve McGowan, and he lived there with her and Genevieve’s mother—his grandmother. The public schools had class that day, so this would have been about the right time for him to be coming home.
Reluctantly, so she wouldn’t be alone, Rosemarie took Frankie with her and together they walked up Florence Street and turned onto St. Nicholas Avenue. It was ten minutes to seven. The McGowan house, a redbrick-andbeige-siding bi-level with a driveway and two-car garage in the left front, was the first one on the right, occupying the corner lot.
They both climbed the five front steps and she rang the bell. She told Frankie to stay on the landing.
Mr. McGowan answered the door. He seemed as if he’d just come out of the shower. He was holding a thin cigar that Rosemarie didn’t notice at first. He was a twenty-seven-year-old bachelor. Rosemarie didn’t know him, but “my children said he was very nice.”
Rosemarie stepped into the foyer; she wanted to stand exactly where she knew Joan had recently stood. She was already starting to get an eerie feeling. She introduced herself. “Have you seen my daughter Joan?” she asked. “She came here to deliver cookies.”
“No, I never saw her,” he replied.
He spoke in a casual, matter-of-fact manner. And it was at that moment that Rosemarie D’Alessandro felt everything go cold.
“After standing in the foyer for a couple of minutes, I noticed a long fire truck parked in front of his house,” she said. “We had called the police, and when I saw that they were responding this way, it just all came to me at that moment and I knew my life would never be the same.”
She was almost immediately struck by McGowan’s reaction—or rather, his lack of reaction. “As I was standing there in the foyer with him, tears were welling in my eyes. And he looked at me like he absolutely didn’t
have one ounce of feeling. And what he did at that moment when he saw my tears, he walked up the steps to the upper floor, and he stayed right there facing me, holding his slim cigar, and waited for me to leave.
“Walking back to my house I knew that he knew what had happened to Joan.”
After the police arrived and spoke to Rosemarie and Frank, a neighborhood search for Joan was organized. Boy Scouts volunteered. As did Joseph McGowan. Hundreds of people turned out and organized themselves into small teams, checking every house, backyard, trash and garbage cans, woods, and park in Hillsdale and the surrounding towns. The police brought in bloodhounds to aid in the search. Several people climbed on the fire truck Rosemarie had seen parked. One of them was Joan’s seven-year-old “boyfriend,” Rich. They rode out to the reservoir near Woodcliff Lake.
At about 9:20, a priest from St. John the Baptist Church arrived at the house with a state trooper and a German shepherd. Rosemarie led the K-9 team to the clothes hamper so the dog could sniff Joan’s panties, then they went out into the neighborhood. Rosemarie had the overwhelming sense that the dog understood what had happened and “felt” deeply for her and Joan. With an obvious sense of mission, he cased the area up to and around the McGowan’s house, and went to the front door and the garage door.
But nothing turned up anywhere.
Word of the missing girl and the impromptu search spread quickly. Newspaper and television reporters swarmed the neighborhood. As Rosemarie herself had observed, this kind of thing just didn’t happen in Hillsdale. She spoke frequently to the media, hoping that someone who might have seen something would come forward. Her main memory of the media session was the dirty footprints that had turned the light-brown carpet on the steps a charcoal gray.
The anxiety in the D’Alessandro house that night was almost unbearable. Frank often displayed anger when he was frustrated. The night before, he had an outburst over not having a box in which to wrap an Easter gift. “He could be calm and patient for long periods and then change in a moment,” Rosemarie recalled. “He had a good job, but he wasn’t communicative, and he was never really my soul mate.”
Hillsdale police chief Philip Varisco was on vacation in Florida when he was informed of Joan’s disappearance. Hillsdale was the kind of
community, and Varisco was the kind of leader, that made it unthinkable that the chief not be present for a trauma like this. He rushed back home. Varisco, who passed away in 2012 at the age of eighty-nine, was a complete professional. He attended the FBI National Academy program in Quantico to make himself and his force as effective as possible.
The chief went to the D’Alessandros’ house the next day. Rosemarie was sitting on her front steps when he came up the walk. He told her he was taking personal charge of the investigation. While not promising the happy outcome he knew was unlikely, he calmly assured her that everything would be done the right way. He asked for a photograph he could release to the newspapers. Rosemarie went to a picture of Joan in her school uniform, hanging in the hallway, took it off the wall and out of its frame, and handed it to Varisco.
Frank told newspaper reporters that if whoever had taken Joan would bring her back safely, he would ask the authorities to waive prosecution. During a television interview, Rosemarie described Joan to reporter Vic Miles, how special she was and how much she was loved, pleading for her to be returned. Years later, one of Joan’s classmates told Rosemarie she remembered the broadcast as if it were yesterday because Joan’s mommy was asking on TV for her to come back. Only two months before, Rosemarie had suddenly had the terrible thought of what would happen if one of her children died, and how utterly, unimaginably heart-wrenching it would be.
The police questioned several possible suspects, including a man seen driving around the neighborhood about an hour before Joan disappeared and another wandering the area on foot. The first turned out to be looking at neighborhoods in which to move and the second was simply lost. There are almost always loose ends and red herrings in major cases. But the investigators focused quickly on Joseph McGowan. Though he had no criminal record, it had been his house to which Joan said she was going and Rosemarie had related her creepy encounter with him. Her father had seen him taking out the trash the day after Joan’s disappearance and, pointing to the house on the corner, said to Rosemarie, “Something’s not right over there.”
Police officers and detectives spoke to McGowan both Friday and Saturday, asking him to account for himself in the minutes and hours after Joan went to his house. He was calm and amiable but denied that he saw
Joan on Thursday. Instead, he claimed he was at the nearby supermarket buying groceries at the time Rosemarie said her daughter went to his house. What about the car Joan saw pull into the driveway? Did anyone see it leave the garage? No, he walked. At which cash register did he check out? He didn’t remember. Could he show them the grocery receipt? He thought he threw it away. Might it still be in the trash? He thought the trash had already been picked up. What days did the trash collectors come? He wasn’t sure. What did he buy? Steaks and apples, among other things. Were the steaks still in the refrigerator? No, he and his mother had eaten them. What about the apples? He wasn’t sure.
Seasoned detectives develop a natural sense for knowing whether a suspect’s story and profession of innocence is true. Over lunch one day, Mark Olshaker asked retired LAPD detective Tom Lange when he came to his own conclusion that O. J. Simpson was the prime suspect in the murders of his ex-wife Nicole and her waiter friend Ronald Goldman in 1994. Lange replied that though O.J. was cordial and cooperative during the interview, he asked no questions regarding the details of Nicole’s death, whether or how much she had suffered, whether the police had any idea who had done it—all of the normal things any close survivor would instinctively want to know.
Joan’s friend Rich recalled a large crowd in front of the police station on Central Avenue as McGowan was inside being questioned. To his young eyes, it seemed as if the entire town had gathered there.
As the seeming holes and contradictions in McGowan’s statements grew increasingly glaring, the detectives asked him to submit to a polygraph examination at the station. He agreed.
McGowan failed the polygraph, and when detectives informed him, they confronted him with all his statements that didn’t add up. Finally, exhausted and without any more answers, he asked for a priest. He and the priest met privately, and McGowan confessed to him. He then confessed to the detectives, and told them that after he killed Joan, he drove her body across the New York state line and deposited it in Harriman State Park in Rockland County, about twenty miles away.
Chief Varisco took it upon himself to be the one to tell Rosemarie and Frank. It was a little after four P.M. A deeply sensitive man, he brought a Catholic priest with him, and together they sat with Rosemarie at the
kitchen table. Rosemarie remembers removing the tablecloth from the white table to delay, if only for a few moments, what she knew was to come.
When the chief told her what McGowan had said, she cried, “I want to kill him!” She says she was feeling rational and in control as she said it, knowing at the time she didn’t mean it, but needing a way to release the anguish consuming her.
The priest admonished her not to speak that way. “What do you expect, Father?” Varisco said.
2
“I Slept Well”
Dr. Frederick T. Zugibe, the chief medical examiner for Rockland County, New York, said Joan’s case was one of the most emotionally difficult in his long and distinguished career.
Word had spread quickly from the Hillsdale Police Department to the Bergen County district attorney’s office, and from there to the Police Division of the Rockland County sheriff’s office. So early in the afternoon on Easter Sunday, Officer John Forbes drove to the location described to him in Harriman State Park, just off Gate Hill Road, near the southern end of the park.
There he found the naked and battered body of a young white female. She was faceup in a wedge-shaped crevice between two boulders, on a leafy slope under a rock ledge. Her head was twisted sharply to the left and she was facing down the slope. Forbes had four young children of his own and struggled not to break down.
He called in the crime scene team.
By the time Dr. Zugibe arrived, less than an hour later, the cordoned-off crime scene was already populated by a horde of police officers and crime scene technicians, detectives, FBI agents, reporters, press photographers, and the generally curious. He immediately ordered the officers to move all nonessential personnel away.
Richard Collier, the D’Alessandro neighbor who was an FBI special agent working out of the New York City field office, came in to identify the body.
Yes, it was Joan.
Though the crime scene was no longer pristine, her body had not been moved or touched. Dr. Zugibe immediately noted the lividity—the purpling of the flesh around her abdominal area. This told him she had not been killed at this spot. If she had been, the lividity would have been concentrated in her back due to gravity. Since that type of blood settling takes at least six hours, he also knew that she hadn’t just been dumped here. He took her body temperature and found that it matched the temperature of the air. That indicated she had been dead at least thirty-six hours, the time it takes for a body to cool completely. The finding was confirmed for him by the absence of rigor mortis, a postmortem stiffening of the muscles that begins several hours after death and subsides within twenty-four to thirtysix hours.
Taking all the observable physical evidence together, Dr. Zugibe estimated that Joan had been dead for about fifty hours. When he was able to do more sophisticated tests during the autopsy, he upped his estimate to a minimum of seventy hours, which meant that she had died within a couple of hours or less of when Rosemarie last saw her.
Sheriff’s officers conducted a thorough search of the surrounding area and found a gray plastic shopping bag printed with the Mobil logo. According to Zugibe, the bag was neatly packed rather than haphazardly stuffed and contained the clothing Joan had been wearing when she disappeared: a pair of red and white sneakers, a turquoise shirt, maroon pants, white socks, and white panties, stained red with her blood.
Before the body was removed, an officer called the Marian Shrine in Stony Point, New York, and asked that a priest come to the scene. When he arrived, illuminated by the police lights and in the presence of officers, detectives, FBI agents, and reporters, he administered last rites to Joan Angela D’Alessandro. Once the priest was finished, Zugibe officially pronounced death, a seemingly obvious observation but a necessary formality in any murder investigation.
Back at the medical examiner’s office in Pomona, New York, less than ten miles away, he began the autopsy. From my experience in dealing with many medical examiners over the years, I would say there is little that is more painful than having to examine a dead child, and absolutely nothing more agonizing than if the child has been murdered. By the time he had completed the postmortem, Zugibe listed injuries that spoke to the utter depravity of the crime: fracture of the neck, manual
strangulation, dislocated right shoulder, generalized deep bruising, lacerations under the chin and inside the upper lip, frontal fracture of the skull, fracture of both sinuses, swelling of the face, both eyes blackened and swollen shut, three teeth loosened, contusion and hemorrhaging of the brain, bruising of the lungs and liver, and rupture of the hymen.
Essentially, Joan was beaten, choked, sexually assaulted, and ultimately battered to death. But according to Dr. Zugibe, it was even worse than that. Had she died right after the beating and strangulation, her face and body would not have appeared swollen. Upon death, the homeostatic functions that cause swelling at an injured site shut down. And since swelling takes about half an hour to be completed, he concluded that Joan must have been alive for at least that long following the attack. Mercifully, she was almost certainly unconscious.
The medical examiner’s close examination of the neck revealed two areas of injury: the thyroid cartilage and the hyoid bone. His conclusion was that a half hour or so after the deadly attack, the offender, unsure that he had killed her, returned to finish the job with a second manual strangulation. This sounds completely believable to me. With someone like Joseph McGowan, an “inexperienced killer,” it would not be unusual for him to be unsure how effective he had been in dispatching his victim and wish to take no chances.
I had seen a similar sort of behavior in the Christmas 1996 murder of sixyear-old JonBenet Ramsey in her home in Boulder, Colorado. The medical examiner’s report listed two potentially lethal injuries: blunt force trauma to the head and ligature strangulation. Since there was no bleeding at the crime scene, I concluded that the cause of death was the strangulation and that the severe blow to the head was an attempt to make sure she was dead.
This scientific evidence suggested something highly significant from a behavioral perspective. No parent without a history of extreme child abuse could possibly, and systematically, strangle that child to death over a period of several minutes. It just doesn’t happen. Taken together with all of the other forensic and behavioral evidence, this did not tell us who killed JonBenet. But it told us who did not kill her: either of her parents. Mark and I came up against a lot of pushback and public condemnation for this conclusion, including from my old FBI unit, but the pursuit of criminal justice is not a popularity contest, and you have to let the evidence speak for itself.
Which was precisely what I would do with Joseph McGowan.
JOSEPH MCGOWAN WAS ARRAIGNED BEFORE BERGEN COUNTY JUDGE JAMES F. MADDEN.
He was held in lieu of the $50,000 bail set by the judge. On Tuesday, April 24, 1973, he was indicted for the murder of Joan D’Alessandro.
Two days later, in the late morning, Joan’s funeral was held at St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church, whose school Joan attended. The children from her class were there, and after the service, they all lined up outside as her casket was carried out to say goodbye.
As an investigator of violent crime, you try to be as emotionally detached as possible, not only to maintain your objectivity and critical judgment, but also to preserve your sanity. In fact, having to put myself, as a behavioral profiler, into the head of every victim whose case I work has definitely taken its psychic toll on me throughout my career. Dr. Zugibe’s and Officer Forbes’s reactions to seeing Joan’s small body in the park were understandable. No matter how “professional” you try to be, you can’t not react to something like this.
What kind of a man or monster spontaneously does something like this to a seven-year-old girl? I asked myself as I read through the case file a quarter of a century later. That’s what I would seek to find out.
McGowan repeated his confession to Dr. Noel C. Galen, a forensic psychiatrist who had received his neurology and psychiatry training at Bellevue Hospital in New York and consulted for the New Jersey court system. The day after his indictment, McGowan detailed for Dr. Galen how he answered the door, and when Joan told him what she was there for, said she should come with him downstairs so he could get the money for her. She must have hesitated or resisted, because he admitted grabbing her and forcing her into his downstairs bedroom. Meanwhile, McGowan’s eightyseven-year-old grandmother, hard of hearing, was watching television upstairs. His mother was at work.
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.
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Glenquhargen. They were all nimble-footed, and the panic with which they were now actually seized gave wings to their speed, and rendered a matter of no regard the rocks and other impediments over which they were flying. Their pursuer was not more speedy, but much longer winded, and the rage which then impelled him was not less potent than their terror. He possessed a fund of physical ability which was almost inexhaustible, and he had sworn not to drop the pursuit till he had “smashed the hale set,” so that from the length of the race the poor wights had but a small chance of safety. At length the top of Glenquhargen, then Cairnkinnow, and next Gowkthorn, were reached, without any loss or advantage to either party. From the latter of these places, the ground declines nearly the whole way to Drumlanrig, and the soldiers, with the start in their favour, flew on with a glimmering of hope that now they could scarcely be overtaken. Their hope was realised, but not without such overstraining as had nearly proved equally fatal with the vengeance from which they fled. Leaning forward almost to the ground, and staggering like drunkards from excess of fatigue, they at last reached the western staircase which leads into the court of the castle. Behind them Glenmannow rushed on also with abated speed, but with indignation as hot as ever. He still bore upon his shoulder the ponderous car limb; his face was literally bathed in perspiration; and the wild expression of his eyes, and the foam which was beginning to appear at each corner of his mouth, rendered him a true personification of Giant Madness broken from his chains.
The two dukes, who had been informed of their approach by some servants who observed them descending the opposite heights, were waiting to receive them within the balustrade which runs along that side of the castle; but on marking the fury of Glenmannow, Duke James deemed it prudent to retire with the exhausted soldiers until the storm should be passed; for while his tenant remained in that mood of mind, he dared not, absolute as was his authority, to come into his presence. His brother of Buccleuch was therefore left to bear the first brunt of the salutation, who, on Glenmannow’s approach, called out, “What is the matter? What is to do?” Glenmannow, without regarding this interrogatory further than by darting upon him a wild and fierce look, sprang up stairs, and rushed past him into the court of the castle. But here his progress was stopped; for among the several doors which lead from thence to every part of the castle,
he knew not by which his enemies had entered. One, however, was known to him, and along that passage he rapidly hastened, until he at length arrived in the kitchen. There he was equally at fault, and there his pursuit was ended; for the smiles of the sonsy cook, and the fondlements of the various servants who thronged around him, succeeded in restoring his mind to a degree of calmness and repose. The cook eased his shoulder of the car limb, with the intention of repaying herself for the trouble by using it as fuel; others divested him of his bonnet; and all, with many words, prevailed upon him at last to assume a chair. After a moment’s silence, in which he seemed to be lost in reflection, “Ay, ay,” said he, “I see through a’ this noo. It has been a trick o’ the juke’s makin’ up.” Then, with a serious air, he added, “But it was dangerous though; for if I had gotten a haud o’ thae chaps, wha kens what I might hae done!”
The duke, on being informed of this change wrought upon his tenant, and having learnt from the soldiers the way in which he had been deprived of his breakfast, ordered him a plentiful refreshment, and afterwards sent for him into the presence of himself and of Buccleuch. The breach between them was speedily healed; and Glenmannow, nothing poorer for his race, returned shortly afterwards with a servant on horseback, who was dispatched to convey to headquarters the poor grenadier who had been so roughly handled in the affray.
Mally, with a humanity and forgiveness which the soldier had little right to expect, had succeeded in removing him from the spot where he was cast down, into the house, and having there laid him upon a bed, tended him with such kindness and care, that, by the time of Glenmannow’s return, he was so far recovered as to be able to sit upon the horse sent to remove him. Glenmannow, after Mally had wrapped round him a pair of blankets, bore him out in his arms, and placed him behind the servant, who in this manner conducted him in safety to Drumlanrig.
This is the last exploit of a remarkable kind which I have been able to glean respecting Glenmannow. He lived to a pretty long age, yet his life was abridged within its natural period by imprudently taxing his great strength beyond its actual capability. A high dyke was in the course of being built, from the heights on the left of the Nith into the channel of the river, about four miles above Drumlanrig, on the way
to Sanquhar, and in order to resist the force of the current, the largest stones that could be moved were built into the dyke at its termination. One in particular, which lay near the place, was deemed excellently fitted for that purpose, but its weight rendered it unmanageable. Glenmannow undertook to lift it into its place, and in reality did so; but in the effort he injured his breast and spine, and brought on a lingering disorder, of which he died in less than a twelvemonth afterwards, in the year 1705. I am not aware of his having left any descendants to perpetuate and spread his name; one thing at least is certain, that in the present day none such are to be found in that district which was the principal scene of his exploits, and where still is cherished to such a degree his singular yet honest renown.—Traits of Scottish Life, and Pictures of Scenes and Character.
MY GRANDMOTHER’S PORTRAIT.
B D G .
In picture galleries, or in private apartments, portraits seldom receive much attention from visitors, unless they happen to have known the originals, or to be aware that the pictures are the productions of distinguished artists. And yet, whether we have known the originals or not, and apart altogether from the general artistic merit of the works, there are many portraits which have a wonderful effect in giving the mind a reflective and inquisitive turn. Portraits of this description may occasionally be seen in retired country houses of modest dimensions, where one need scarcely expect to find specimens of the highest class of art. Faces we may there observe, silently depending from the walls, on which stronglypronounced character is depicted in spite of every artistic defect, and through the deep lines of which the record of a stirring or painful life seems to struggle earnestly for utterance. People are too much in the habit of regarding every person as commonplace and uninteresting who has not managed somehow to make a noise in the world; but in these “counterfeit presentments” of men and women who have died in comparative obscurity, known only to their own circle of friends, we may see much that strangely moves our hearts, and makes us long to learn what their history has been.
Let the reader look in fancy on that old portrait hanging before me there on the wall. To me it is no dead picture, but rather does it seem the living embodiment of a maternal grandmother—a heroic old dame, who never lost heart whatever might betide, and of whom that image is now almost the sole remaining relic. Even a stranger could scarcely fail to note with curious interest that small round face with nose and chin attenuated by years—those peering eyes, where a
twinkle of youth yet breaks through the dim of eld—that wrinkled brow, shaded with a brown frontage-braid of borrowed hair—and that compact little head, encased in a snow-white cap with its broad band of black ribbon. The least skilful artist could hardly have failed in depicting the features; but the old familiar expression is also there, preserved as in amber, and the aged face is pleasantly blended in my mind with memories of early days. Detached incidents in her life, which she was fond of frequently relating to her grandchildren, who eagerly clustered around her, listening to the oft-told tale, recur to me with considerable freshness after the lapse of many years.
At the time when that portrait was taken, Mrs Moffat—as I shall name her—was well-nigh eighty years of age. For about the half of that period she had led a widowed life. Her husband, who witnessed many stirring scenes on sea and shore, had been a surgeon in the Royal Navy, and she was left “passing rich with forty pounds a year” of government pension.
There was one remarkable incident in his history to which she frequently recurred. Samuel Moffat obtained an appointment as surgeon on board the ill-fated Royal George; but before the time set apart for her leaving port, he found that the smell of the fresh paint of the new vessel created a feeling of nausea, which would have rendered him unfit for duty; and by his good fortune in getting transferred, on this account, to another man-of-war, he escaped the sad fate that befell so many hapless victims—
When Kempenfelt went down With twice four hundred men.
A striking incident of this kind naturally made a deep impression on his own mind, and it also formed a prominent reminiscence in the memory of his faithful partner during the long remainder of her life.
The earlier period of Mrs Moffat’s widowhood was passed in Edinburgh; but when death and marriage had scattered her family, she followed one of her married daughters to the country, and took up her abode in a neat poplar-shaded cottage on the outskirts of a quiet village, situated in a fertile and beautiful valley of the county that lies cradled in the twining arms of the Forth and the Tay. That cottage, with its garden behind, and pretty flower-borders in front, and with its row of poplar and rowan-trees, through which the
summer breeze murmured so pleasantly, comes up vividly before my mind’s eye at this moment. Beautiful as of yore the valley smiles around, with its girdling ridges belted with woods, and dotted with pleasant dwellings; and away to westward, shutting in the peaceful scene from the tumult of the great world, rise the twin Lomond hills, glorious at morn and eve, when bathed in the beams of the rising and setting sun. The good old lady, who had spent a large portion of her life in “Auld Reekie,” when narrow Bristo Street and Potterrow and the adjoining courts were inhabited by the better class of citizens, took kindly to the country cottage, and she was fond of the garden and flowers. With a basket on her arm, she trotted about the garden, apparently very busy, but doing little after all. In autumn, after a gusty night, one of her first morning occupations was to gather up the fallen ruddy apples, which she preserved for the special gratification of her grandchildren. Many a time and oft were they debarred from touching the red berries of the rowan-trees, which look as tempting in children’s eyes as did the forbidden fruit in those of Mother Eve. The girls were even enjoined not to make necklaces of these clustering red deceivers.
In that retired village there were, in those days, a good many wellto-do people, who had not found it very difficult to make money out of a generous soil. The different families lived on very sociable terms, and during the winter season there were rounds of tea-parties, winding up with cold suppers and hot toddy. Teetotalism was a thing unknown in that district and in those days, though I shall do the good folks the justice of saying that they knew the virtues of moderation. To all those winter gatherings of the local gentry, Mrs Moffat invariably received an invitation. They could not do without her, relishing as they did her ready wit and hearty good-humour. She was, in sooth, the life of every party. On such occasions she displayed all the artless buoyancy of youth, as if she had never endured the agonies of bereavement, or borne the burdens of life. She was then the very image of “Old Delight,” and her aged face renewed its youth in the sunshine of joy. Some of the knowing lairds tried by bantering and otherwise to draw her out, and her quick cutting repartees were followed by explosions of mirth. It seemed marvellous that such a well of sunny mirth should be encased in that tiny frame. Indeed, it was nothing unusual for the hearty old lady to treat the company to a “canty” song at these village parties, and touches of melody still
lingered about the cracks of her voice. When bothered overmuch to sing another song after she had already done enough, she generally met the request with a solitary stanza to this effect:—
There was a wee mannie an ’ a wee wifie, And they lived in a vinegar bottle; “And O,” says the wee mannie to the wee wifie, “Wow, but oor warld is little, is little! Wow, but oor warld is little!”
Rare encounters of wit and amusing banter occasionally took place between her and a strange eccentric humorist of a lawyer of the old school, who frequently visited the village from a neighbouring country town. Old Bonthron was the name by which he was familiarly known.
It may readily be imagined that, when old Mr Bonthron and Mrs Moffat met in the same company, the fun would grow “fast and furious,” and such certainly was the case. I have seen the hearty old humorist take the equally hearty old lady on his knee, and dandle her there like a child, greatly to their own delight and to the infinite amusement of the company. There will be less genial and boisterous mirth now-a-days, I should imagine, in that sequestered village.
Such was Mrs Moffat in her lightsome hours, when friends met friends; but her grandchildren were as much delighted with her when, in graver mood, she recalled early recollections, told them pleasant little stories, and narrated graphically what to her were eventful incidents in her life.
I can still remember some of the pleasant pictures she gave us of her early days. She was born in the town of Dalkeith, which is beautiful for situation, being planted in the midst of the richest woodland scenery, and she imprinted in our hearts vivid impressions of the delighted feelings with which, in the days of her girlhood, she looked through the gate of the Duke’s great park, and saw the long winding avenue and the greensward traversed by nibbling sheep, and the magnificent trees whose “shadowing shroud” might cover a goodly company at their rural feast in the noontide of a summer’s day. She described the rustic seats and summer-houses on the banks of a brook, that wandered at its own sweet will through the wooded grounds—regions and resorts of joyance, where the children of the
town, through the kindness of the then reigning Duke of Buccleuch, were permitted to spend the livelong summer’s day, thus enabling them to store their memories with pleasing recollections, which might come back upon them in their declining days, like visions of beauty from lands of old romance. There was a pathetic story about a family of larks that had their nest in the Duke’s Park, which she recited to us over and over again, by way of inculcating the virtue of treating kindly all the creatures of God. Her story was, that some of the young rascals of Dalkeith had caught the mother-bird in the nest, and had carried off her and the whole family of young ones at one fell swoop. The male bird, thus deprived at once of mate and family, took up his melancholy station near the nest, and mourned his loss with plaintive pipe for two days, at the end of which time the brokenhearted warbler died. This affecting incident, told with much seriousness and feeling, was not unproductive of good effect upon the young listeners. Cities and towns being still to us mysteries of which we had only a vague conception, it pleased us much to hear her tell how the bells of Dalkeith tolled children to bed, and how little boys walked through the streets at night, calling “Hot pies for supper!” It struck us that at whatever hour the bell tolled, we should have liked to remain out of bed till the pies went round.
On winter evenings, beside the good old lady’s cottage fire, she was often constrained to recount her famous voyage to London, in which she wellnigh suffered shipwreck. The war-vessel on board of which her husband acted as surgeon had arrived in the Thames. He could not then obtain leave of absence, and as they had not met for many long months, she determined—protracted as the passage then was from Leith to London—to make an effort to see her husband, and to visit the great metropolis. Steamers had not, at that period, come into existence, and the clipper-smacks that traded between Leith and London, and took a few venturesome passengers on their trips, dodged along the Scotch and English coasts for days and weeks, thus making a lengthened voyage of what is now a brief and pleasant sail. It was considered a bold and hazardous undertaking, in those days, for any lady to proceed alone on such a voyage. This, however, she did, as she was gifted with a wonderful amount of pluck, leaving her family in the charge of some friends till she returned.
The vessel had scarcely left the Firth of Forth, and got out into the open sea, when the weather underwent a bad turn, and soon they had to encounter all the fury of a severe storm, which caused many shipwrecks along the whole eastern seaboard. With a kind of placid contentment—nay, even with occasional glee—would she describe the protracted miseries and hardships they endured, having run short of supplies, and every hour expecting the vessel to founder. It was three weeks after leaving Leith until the smack was, as she described it, towed up the Thames like a dead dog, without either mast or bowsprit—a hapless and helpless hulk. However, she managed to see her husband, and the happiness of the meeting would be considered a good equivalent for the mishaps of the voyage. She saw, in the great metropolis, the then Prince of Wales—the “First Gentleman in Europe,” and used to relate, with considerable gusto (old ladies being more rough-and-ready then than now), how the Prince, as he was riding in St James’s Park, overheard a hussar in the crowd exclaiming, “He’s a d——d handsome fellow!” and immediately lifting his hat, his Royal Highness replied, “Thank you, my lad; but you put too much spice in your compliments!” That London expedition was a red-letter leaf in Mrs Moffat’s biography, and it was well thumbed by us juveniles. Her return voyage was comparatively comfortable, and much more rapid; but she never saw her husband again, as he died at sea, and was consigned to the deep.
Even more interesting than the London trip were all the stories and incidents connected with her only son—our uncle who ought to have been, but who was dead before any of us were born. Through the kindness and influence of Admiral Greig of the Russian navy, he obtained a commission in the Russian service at an unusually early age—Russia and Britain being at that time in close alliance. Neither the Russian navy nor army was in the best condition, and the Emperor was very desirous to obtain the services of British officers, Scotsmen being preferred. Mrs Moffat loved her son with all the warmth of her kindly nature, and when he had been about a year or two in the Russian service, the news spread through Edinburgh one day, that a Russian man-of-war was coming up the Firth to Leith roads. I have heard the good lady relate the eventful incidents of that day with glistening eyes and tremulous voice.
The tidings were conveyed to her by friends who knew that she had some reason to be interested in the news. She had received no communication from her son for some time, as the mails were then very irregular, and letters often went amissing; and, filled with the hope that he might be on board the Russian vessel that was approaching the roads, she immediately hurried off for Leith, whither crowds of people were already repairing, as a Russian warvessel in the Forth was as great a rarity then as it is now. Before she arrived at the pier, the vessel had anchored in the roads, and the pier, neither so long nor so commodious as it is now, was thronged with people pressing onwards to get a sight of the stranger ship. Nothing daunted by the crowd, Mrs Moffat squeezed herself forward, at the imminent risk of being seriously crushed. A gentleman who occupied a “coigne of vantage,” out of the stream of the crowd, observed this slight-looking lady pressing forward with great eagerness. He immediately hailed her, and asked, as she appeared very much interested, if she expected any one, or had any friends on board. She replied that she half expected her son to be with the vessel. The gentleman, who was to her a total stranger, but who must have been a gentleman every inch, immediately took her under his protection, and having a telescope in his hand, he made observations, and reported progress.
One of the ship’s boats had been let down, and he told her that he observed officers in white uniform rapidly descending. Mrs Moffat’s eagerness and anxiety were now on the increase. The boat put off from the ship, propelled by sturdy and regular strokes, cutting the water into foam, which sparkled in the sunshine. When the boat had approached midway between the ship and the shore, Mrs Moffat asked her protector if he could distinguish one officer apparently younger than the others.
“Yes,” he replied; “there is one who seems scarcely to have passed from boyhood to manhood.”
Her eager impatience, with hope and fear alternating in her heart, seemed now to agitate her whole frame, and the bystanders, seeing her anxiety, appeared also to share in her interest.
At last the boat, well filled with officers, shot alongside the pier, the crowd rushing and cheering, as it sped onward to the upper landing-place. It was with great difficulty that the gentleman could
restrain the anxious mother from dashing into the rushing stream of people. When the crowd had thinned off a little, they made their way up the pier, and found that the officers had all left the boat and gone into the Old Ship Inn—probably because they had no desire of being mobbed. Mrs Moffat immediately went to the inn, and requested an attendant to ask if one of the officers belonged to Scotland, and if so, to be good enough to mention his name.
“Yes—Moffat!” was the cheery response, and in a short time mother and son were locked in each other’s arms in the doorway of the Old Ship.
With a glee, not unmingled with tender regrets, she used to tell how, when she and the spruce young officer were proceeding up Leith Walk together to Edinburgh, an old woman stopped them, and, clapping him kindly on the shoulder, said—“Ay, my mannie, ye’ll be a captain yet!” This prophecy of the old woman certainly met its fulfilment.
After staying a few days in the old home near the Meadows, young Moffat again took his departure, never more to see his affectionate mother, or the bald crown of Arthur Seat rising by the side of the familiar Firth. He joined the army (changes of officers from the navy to the army being then frequent in the Russian service), and reenacted his part honourably in many memorable scenes. Still do I remember the tender and tearful care with which his old mother opened up the yellow letters, with their faded ink-tracings, which contained descriptions of the part he played in harassing the French, during their disastrous retreat after the burning of Moscow. One of these letters, I recollect, commenced thus—“Here we are, driving the French before us like a flock of sheep;” and in others he gave painful descriptions of their coming up to small parties of French soldiers who were literally glued by the extreme frost to the ground—quite stiff and dead, but still in a standing attitude, and leaning on their muskets. Poor wretches! that was their sole reward for helping to whet the appetite of an insatiable ambition. In those warlike times, young Moffat grew into favour, and gained promotion. He received a gold-hilted sword from the Emperor for distinguished service, but he succumbed to fatigue, and died on foreign soil. The gold-headed sword and his epaulets, which he had bequeathed to a favourite
sister, fell into the hands of harpies in London, and to this day have never reached Scotland.
In the quiet village Mrs Moffat spent her declining days in peace and sweet content, and she now sleeps in the village churchyard, till the last spring that visits the world shall waken inanimate dust to immortal life.
THE BAPTISM.
B P W .
It is a pleasant and impressive time, when, at the close of divine service, in some small country church, there takes place the gentle stir and preparation for a baptism. A sudden air of cheerfulness spreads over the whole congregation; the more solemn expression of all countenances fades away; and it is at once felt that a rite is about to be performed which, although of a sacred and awful kind, is yet connected with a thousand delightful associations of purity, beauty, and innocence. Then there is an eager bending of smiling faces over the humble galleries—an unconscious rising up in affectionate curiosity—and a slight murmuring sound, in which is no violation of the Sabbath sanctity of God’s house, when, in the middle passage of the church, the party of women is seen, matrons and maids, who bear in their bosoms, or in their arms, the helpless beings about to be made members of the Christian communion.
There sit, all dressed becomingly in white, the fond and happy baptismal group. The babies have been intrusted, for a precious hour, to the bosoms of young maidens, who tenderly fold them to their yearning hearts, and with endearments taught by nature, are stilling, not always successfully, their plaintive cries. Then the proud and delighted girls rise up, one after the other, in sight of the whole congregation, and hold up the infants, arrayed in neat caps and long flowing linen, into their fathers’ hands. For the poorest of the poor, if he has a heart at all, will have his infant well dressed on such a day, even although it should scant his meal for weeks to come, and force him to spare fuel to his winter fire.
And now the fathers were all standing below the pulpit, with grave and thoughtful faces. Each has tenderly taken his infant into his toilhardened hands, and supports it in gentle and steadfast affection. They are all the children of poverty, and if they live, are destined to a life of toil. But now poverty puts on its most pleasant aspect, for it is beheld standing before the altar of religion with contentment and faith. This is a time when the better and deeper nature of every man must rise up within him, and when he must feel, more especially, that he is a spiritual and immortal being making covenant with God. He is about to take upon himself a holy charge; to promise to look after his child’s immortal soul; and to keep its little feet from the paths of evil, and in those of innocence and peace. Such a thought elevates the lowest mind above itself, diffuses additional tenderness over the domestic relations, and makes them who hold up their infants to the baptismal font, better fathers, husbands, and sons, by the deeper insight which they then possess into their nature and their life.
The minister consecrates the water; and, as it falls on his infant’s face, the father feels the great oath in his soul. As the poor helpless creature is wailing in his arms, he thinks how needful indeed to human infancy is the love of Providence! And when, after delivering each his child into the arms of the smiling maiden from whom he had received it, he again takes his place for admonition and advice before the pulpit, his mind is well disposed to think on the perfect beauty of that religion of which the Divine Founder said, “Suffer little children to be brought unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven!”
The rite of baptism had not thus been performed for several months in the kirk of Lanark. It was now the hottest time of persecution; and the inhabitants of that parish found other places in which to worship God and celebrate the ordinances of religion. It was now the Sabbath-day, and a small congregation of about a hundred souls had met for divine service in a place of worship more magnificent than any temple that human hands had ever built to Deity. Here, too, were three children about to be baptised. The congregation had not assembled to the toll of the bell, but each heart knew the hour and observed it; for there are a hundred sun-dials
among the hills, woods, moors, and fields, and the shepherd and the peasant see the hours passing by them in sunshine and shadow.
The church in which they were assembled was hewn by God’s hand out of the eternal rocks. A river rolled its way through a mighty chasm of cliffs, several hundred feet high, of which the one side presented enormous masses, and the other corresponding recesses, as if the great stone girdle had been rent by a convulsion. The channel was overspread with prodigious fragments of rock or large loose stones, some of them smooth and bare, others containing soil and verdure in their rents and fissures, and here and there crowned with shrubs and trees. The eye could at once command a long stretching vista, seemingly closed and shut up at both extremities by the coalescing cliffs. This majestic reach of river contained pools, streams, rushing shelves, and waterfalls innumerable; and when the water was low, which it now was in the common drought, it was easy to walk up this scene, with the calm blue sky overhead, an utter and sublime solitude. On looking up, the soul was bowed down by the feeling of that prodigious height of unscaleable and often overhanging cliff. Between the channel and the summit of the farextended precipices were perpetually flying rooks and wood-pigeons, and now and then a hawk, filling the profound abyss with their wild cawing, deep murmur, or shrilly shriek. Sometimes a heron would stand erect and still on some little stone island, or rise up like a white cloud along the black wall of the chasm and disappear. Winged creatures alone could inhabit this region. The fox and wild-cat chose more accessible haunts. Yet there came the persecuted Christians and worshipped God, whose hand hung over their heads those magnificent pillars and arches, scooped out those galleries from the solid rock, and laid at their feet the calm water in its transparent beauty, in which they could see themselves sitting in reflected groups, with their Bibles in their hands.
Here, upon a semicircular ledge of rocks, over a narrow chasm, of which the tiny stream played in a murmuring waterfall, and divided the congregation into two equal parts, sat about a hundred persons, all devoutly listening to their minister, who stood before them on what might well be called a small natural pulpit of living stone. Up to it there led a short flight of steps, and over it waved the canopy of a tall graceful birch-tree. This pulpit stood in the middle of the
channel, directly facing that congregation, and separated from them by the clear deep sparkling pool into which the scarce-heard water poured over the blackened rock. The water, as it left the pool, separated into two streams, and flowed on each side of that altar, thus placing it on an island, whose large mossy stones were richly embowered under the golden blossoms and green tresses of the broom. Divine service was closed, and a row of maidens, all clothed in purest white, came gliding off from the congregation, and crossing the stream on some stepping-stones, arranged themselves at the foot of the pulpit, with the infants about to be baptized. The fathers of the infants, just as if they had been in their own kirk, had been sitting there during worship, and now stood up before the minister. The baptismal water, taken from the pellucid pool, was lying consecrated in a small hollow of one of the upright stones that formed one side or pillar of the pulpit, and the holy rite proceeded. Some of the younger ones in that semicircle kept gazing down into the pool, in which the whole scene was reflected, and now and then, in spite of the grave looks or admonishing whispers of their elders, letting a pebble fall into the water, that they might judge of its depth from the length of time that elapsed before the clear air-bells lay sparkling on the agitated surface. The rite was over, and the religious services of the day closed by a psalm. The mighty rocks hemmed in the holy sound, and sent it in a more compacted volume, clear, sweet, and strong, up to heaven. When the psalm ceased, an echo, like a spirit’s voice, was heard dying away up among the magnificent architecture of the cliffs, and once more might be noticed in the silence the reviving voice of the waterfall.
Just then a large stone fell from the top of the cliff into the pool, a loud voice was heard, and a plaid hung over on the point of a shepherd’s staff. Their watchful sentinel had descried danger, and this was his warning. Forthwith the congregation rose. There were paths dangerous to unpractised feet, along the ledges of the rocks, leading up to several caves and places of concealment. The more active and young assisted the elder—more especially the old pastor, and the women with the infants; and many minutes had not elapsed, till not a living creature was visible in the channel of the stream, but all of them hidden, or nearly so, in the clefts and caverns.
The shepherd who had given the alarm had lain down again in his plaid instantly on the greensward upon the summit of these precipices. A party of soldiers were immediately upon him, and demanded what signals he had been making, and to whom; when one of them, looking over the edge of the cliff, exclaimed, “See, see, Humphrey! we have caught the whole tabernacle of the Lord in a net at last. There they are, praising God among the stones of the river Mouss. These are the Cartland Craigs. By my soul’s salvation, a noble cathedral!” “Fling the lying sentinel over the cliffs. Here is a canting Covenanter for you, deceiving honest soldiers on the very Sabbathday. Over with him, over with him—out of the gallery into the pit.” But the shepherd had vanished like a shadow; and, mixing with the tall green broom and brushes, was making his unseen way towards the wood. “Satan has saved his servant. But come, my lads, follow me; I know the way down into the bed of the stream, and the steps up to Wallace’s Cave. They are called the ‘Kittle Nine Stanes.’ The hunt’s up—we’ll be all in at the death. Halloo, my boys, halloo!”
The soldiers dashed down a less precipitous part of the wooded banks, a little below the “Craigs,” and hurried up the channel. But when they reached the altar where the old grayhaired minister had been seen standing, and the rocks that had been covered with people, all was silent and solitary—not a creature to be seen.
“Here is a Bible dropped by some of them,” cried a soldier; and with his foot spun it away into the pool.
“A bonnet! a bonnet!” cried another. “Now for the pretty sanctified face that rolled its demure eyes below it.”
But after a few jests and oaths the soldiers stood still, eyeing with a kind of mysterious dread the black and silent walls of the rock that hemmed them in, and hearing only the small voice of the stream that sent a profounder stillness through the heart of that majestic solitude. “Curse these cowardly Covenanters! What if they tumble down upon our heads pieces of rock from their hiding-places? Advance? Or retreat?”
There was no reply; for a slight fear was upon every man. Musket or bayonet could be of little use to men obliged to clamber up rocks, along slender paths, leading they knew not where; and they were aware that armed men now-a-days worshipped God,—men of iron hearts, who feared not the glitter of the soldier’s arms, neither barrel
nor bayonet; men of long stride, firm step, and broad breast, who, on the open field, would have overthrown the marshalled line, and gone first and foremost if a city had to be taken by storm.
As the soldiers were standing together irresolute, a noise came upon their ears like distant thunder, but even more appalling; and a slight current of air, as if propelled by it, passed whispering along the sweetbriers and the broom, and the tresses of the birch-trees. It came deepening and rolling, and roaring on, and the very Cartland Craigs shook to their foundation as if in an earthquake. “The Lord have mercy upon us!—what is this?” And down fell many of the miserable wretches on their knees, and some on their faces, upon the sharppointed rocks. Now it was like the sound of many myriad chariots rolling on their iron axles down the stony channel of the torrent. The old grayhaired minister issued from the mouth of Wallace’s Cave, and said, with a loud voice, “The Lord God terrible reigneth!” A waterspout had burst up among the moorlands, and the river, in its power, was at hand. There it came—tumbling along into that long reach of cliffs, and in a moment filled it with one mass of waves. Huge agitated clouds of foam rode on the surface of a blood-red torrent. An army must have been swept off by that flood. The soldiers perished in a moment; but high up in the cliffs, above the sweep of destruction, were the Covenanters—men, women, and children, uttering prayers to God, unheard by themselves in that raging thunder.
THE LAIRD’S WOOING.
B J G .
The laird began the record of his eighteenth year in these words:—
There lived at this time, on the farmstead of Broomlands, a person that was a woman, by calling a widow; and she and her husband, when he was in this life, had atween them Annie Daisie, a dochter;— very fair she was to look upon, comely withal, and of a feleecity o’ nature.
This pretty Annie Daisie, I know not hoo, found favour in my eyes, and I made no scruple of going to the kirk every Sabbath day to see her, though Mr Glebeantiends was, to a certainty, a vera maksleepie preacher. When I forgathered with her by accident, I was all in a confusion; and when I would hae spoken to her wi’ kindly words, I could but look in her clear een and nicher like Willie Gouk, the haverel laddie; the which made her jeer me as if I had a want, and been daft likewise; so that seeing I cam no speed in courting for myself, I thocht o’ telling my mother; but that was a kittle job,— howsoever, I took heart, and said—
“Mother!”
“Well, son,” she made answer, “what would ye?”
“I’m going to be marriet,” quo’ I.
“Marriet!” cried she, spreading out her arms wi’ consternation. “And wha’s the bride?”
I didna like just to gie her an even down answer, but said I thought myself old enough for a helpmeet to my table, which caused her to respond with a laugh; whereupon I told her I was thinking of Annie Daisie.
“Ye’ll surely ne’er marry the like o’ her;—she’s only a gair’ner’s dochter.”
But I thocht of Adam and Eve, and said—“We’re a’ come of a gair’ner;”—the which caused her presently to wax vera wroth with me; and she stampit with her foot, and called me a blot on the ‘scutcheon o’ Auldbiggins; then she sat down, and began to reflec’ with herself; and, after a season, she spoke rawtional about the connection, saying she had a wife in her mind for me, far more to the purpose than such a causey-dancer as Annie Daisie.
But I couldna bide to hear Annie Daisie mislikened, and yet I was feart to commit the sin of disobedience, for my mother had no mercy when she thought I rebelled against her authority; so I sat down, and was in a tribulation, and then I speir’t, with a flutter of affliction, who it was that she had willed to be my wife.
“Miss Betty Græme,” said she; “if she can be persuaded to tak sic a headowit.”
Now this Miss Betty Græme was the tocherless sixth daughter o’ a broken Glasgow provost, and made her leevin’ by seamstress-work and flowering lawn; but she was come of gentle blood, and was herself a gentle creature, though no sae blithe as bonnie Annie Daisie; and for that I told my mother I would never take her, though it should be the death o’ me. Accordingly I ran out of the house, and took to the hills, and wistna where I was, till I found myself at the door of the Broomlands, with Annie Daisie before me, singing like a laverock as she watered the yarn of her ain spinning on the green. On seeing me, however, she stoppit, and cried—
“Gude keep us a’, laird!—what’s frightened you to flee hither?”
But I was desperate, and I ran till her, and fell on my knees in a lover-like fashion; but wha would hae thocht it?—she dang me ower on my back, and as I lay on the ground she watered me with her watering-can, and was like to dee wi’ laughing: the which sign and manifestation of hatred on her part quenched the low o’ love on mine; an’ I raise an’ went hame, drookit and dripping as I was, and told my mother I would be an obedient and dutiful son.
Soon after this, Annie Daisie was marriet to John Lounlans; and there was a fulsome phrasing about them when they were kirkit, as the comeliest couple in the parish. It was castor-oil to hear’t; and I
