The Killer Across the Table. Mark Olshaker
McGowan chalked up the murder to a bad confluence of events. In McNiel’s words: “The victim happened to come to his home during a moment of abject despair in which he had been actively planning to kill himself for weeks but had been unable to follow through with his suicide plans.” When Joan showed up at his front door, “he became overwhelmed with unexplainable rage.”
As I read over these reports in preparation for my own encounter with Joseph McGowan, one thing struck me particularly about this latest report: a moment of abject despair in which he had been actively planning to kill himself for weeks.
I wasn’t sure whether or not he had been planning to kill himself, but from the moment I had been brought into this case and then started learning the details, my first questions had been, Why this victim, and why then?
Even if he was sexually drawn to little girls, and even if he was unsure of his own manhood, even if he was under the thumb of a domineering mother, what was going on in his mind at this particular time that led him to the high-risk crime of assaulting and killing a child from his own neighborhood, in his own house?
Dr. McNiel told the parole board that he considered his latest evaluation generally consistent with his earlier one, though in this later report he pointed to McGowan’s “potential for dissociation at times of anger, and also the likelihood of severe sexual pathology involving pedophilia and sexual violence, which he continues to deny.” He also said that McGowan had “paranoid tendencies and significant violence potential,” and that, given “Mr. McGowan’s continued inability to deal with the sexual aspects of his crime, it would appear that he has made very little progress in confronting the pedophilic impulses and sexual sadism that erupted in his crime. As such, he should be considered a poor risk for parole.”
Okay, I said to myself. So even though Dr. McNiel considers his two reports generally consistent, and though the subject had had no serious problems in prison, while once he said he saw “no evidence to indicate Mr. McGowan is at imminent risk of violent behavior,” he now sees “significant violence potential.”
So what was this guy McGowan actually all about? And if I could probe deeply enough, would he show it to me?
From the outside, the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton looks just what you would imagine a maximum security institution to look like: thick brownish-gray walls topped with coiled razor wire. Glassed-in guard towers stand at the corners and in the middle of the wall expanses, with the slanted tops of functional and unadorned buildings visible behind them. Even the newer part of the prison is grim-looking and fortresslike, a solid red brick structure whose narrow window slits clearly delineate the boundary between freedom and incarceration.
That morning, I had been sworn in as a deputy by a prison official and given a photo name tag that indicated I was representing the New Jersey State Parole Board. I wore my traditional dark suit to suggest my authority.
Even for someone like me, going through the outer gate of a facility like this and passing through the series of barriers that ultimately took me to the warden’s office produces a sense of what Dante Alighieri must have been thinking when he posited the legend “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” over the gate of Hell.
Before I went in to speak to McGowan, I specified several parameters that I believed, based on previous experience, would be conducive to a successful interview.
I wanted the setting to be reasonably comfortable and nonthreatening. This is no easy task in a maximum security prison, where the entire environment is intimidating and designed to be so. But within that context, I wanted somewhere that the subject would be most likely to open up. I suggested a room with no more than a desk or table and two comfortable chairs. For illumination I preferred only a table lamp—no overhead lighting. This would help make the setting subdued and relaxed.
This is very important, because in a maximum security environment, the prisoner has little freedom and I want him to feel as free in his mental association as possible—in a sense, to give him some of his power back. Then you have to keep proving yourself, not only in your knowledge of the case file and the crimes, but in your nonverbal cues. When David Berkowitz was brought into the windowless interview room in New York’s Attica Correctional Facility—a room about eight by ten feet and painted a somber battleship gray—what struck me were his very blue eyes that kept darting between Bob Ressler and me as I was giving the introduction. He was trying to read our faces and gauge whether we were being sincere. I told him about the research we were conducting and that its purpose was to help law enforcement solve future cases, and possibly to help intervene with children who displayed violent tendencies.
In my research I had surmised his feelings of inadequacy. I took out a newspaper headlining his crimes and said, “David, in Wichita, Kansas, there is a killer who calls himself the BTK Strangler and he mentions you in his letters to the media and police. He wants to be powerful like you.”
Berkowitz leaned back in his chair, adjusted himself into a more comfortable position, and said, “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” I said, and the interview proceeded from there.
In the prison in Trenton, I told the warden I wanted no time restrictions for the interview, nor any interruptions for food or a prison head count. We arranged ahead of time that McGowan would be fed when we concluded, even if he had missed an official mealtime.
The interview room was approximately fourteen feet square. The door was made of steel, with a twelve-by-eighteen-inch wire-reinforced window, through which the guards could check on us. The walls were cinder block, painted bluish gray. There was a small table and two comfortable chairs. The only light came from the table lamp I had requested.
McGowan had no idea ahead of time where he was being taken or why. He was brought into the room by two guards. Board chairman Andrew Consovoy, who had accompanied me to the prison, introduced me as Dr. John Douglas. He said I was there representing the parole board. I use the honorific Dr. only when I want to create a clinical-seeming situation. I asked the guards to remove his handcuffs, which they did before leaving the two of us alone.
McGowan and I were both in our fifties, and each about six-foot-two. I had read descriptions of him having been big but soft during his teaching days. Now his body seemed firm and muscular, after years of working out in prison. And with his gray beard, he certainly didn’t look like a young high school science teacher any longer.
Everything about these interviews was orchestrated. I wanted to face the door and have him face the wall. There were two reasons for this. I didn’t want him distracted, and since I didn’t yet know him well, I wasn’t sure how he’d react, so I wanted a clear view of the window and the guard behind it. The type of offender I interview often determines my seating decisions. When I interview assassins, for instance, I usually have to have them facing the window or door because they tend to be paranoid and will be distracted if they can’t psychologically escape when stressed by the interview.
In this situation, I took a seat and positioned myself in such a way that I would be looking up at him slightly throughout the interview. I wanted to give him that one psychological edge of feeling superior to me. This was a trick I’d learned from talking to Charles Manson when Bob Ressler and I interviewed him in San Quentin. I was surprised, at five-feet-two, how short and slight he was.
As soon as Manson entered the small conference room in the main cellblock at San Quentin where Ressler and I interviewed him, he climbed up onto the back of a chair at the head of the table so he could lord over us from a superior position, just as he used to sit on top of a boulder to preach to his “family” of followers, lending him an air of natural and biblical authority. As the interview progressed, it became clear that this short, slight man who had been the illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old prostitute, who had been partly raised by a fanatically religious aunt and a sadistic, belittling uncle who sometimes dressed him as a girl and called him a sissy, who had been in