The Killer Across the Table. Mark Olshaker
of the type he’d missed out on by being imprisoned throughout his formative years, and how this habit eventually evolved into abduction and murder. He told us how he would bring the bodies back to his mother’s house, have sex with them, then dismember them and dispose of the pieces. Though his victims certainly suffered horribly, he was not motivated by sadism as many serial killers are. What he told us he was doing—and this isn’t a phrase I’ve heard before or since—was “evicting them from their bodies” so he could possess them, at least temporarily, after death.
And then he related how, after two years of this, on Easter weekend he’d finally summoned the will and courage to go into his mother’s bedroom while she slept and bludgeon her to death with a claw hammer. He then decapitated her, raped her headless corpse, cut out her larynx, and fed it down the garbage disposal. But when he turned on the switch, the device jammed and threw the bloody voice box back out at him. He took this as a sign that his mother was never going to stop yelling at him.
He called a friend of his mother and invited her over to the house for dinner. When she arrived, he clubbed and strangled her and cut off her head. He left her body in his bed while he slept in his mother’s. On Easter Sunday morning, he took off and drove aimlessly until he reached the outskirts of Pueblo, Colorado. He stopped at a phone booth, called the Santa Cruz police department, took some pains to convince them that he was the Coed Killer, and waited to be picked up.
Kemper was lonely and narcissistic and wanted to talk to the point that at times I had to tell him to stop because we had specific questions to ask him. We used a handheld tape recorder and took notes. This was a mistake. We learned that because we had taped the interview the subject lost a measure of trust in us. These guys are mostly paranoid by nature, but in prison, there are good reasons for that. There was worry that we would share the recording with prison authorities or it would get out to the general population that a prisoner was talking to the feds. The notes were not a good idea, either, for much of the same reason. And the subject expected us to give him our full attention.
Still, despite these necessary adjustments, much of that first conversation gave us significant insights, Perhaps most important, it demonstrated from the start just how pertinent this question of nature versus nurture would be when it came to understanding what drove these men in their antisocial behavior. This issue would come to infuse just about every interview that I’ve ever done with a killer, and the same would likely be true with Joseph McGowan.
While McGowan did not suffer the same emotional trauma growing up as Ed Kemper had, his domineering and controlling mother clearly had a profound effect on his development. He was a highly intelligent twenty-seven-year-old teacher with a master’s degree in science, yet he was living in his mother’s basement and was still emotionally dependent on her. His inability to go against her and then being forced to live with her as a mature adult surely had an impact on his self-image and, as I would discover, the life of an innocent little girl.
In a bergen County courtroom, with a jury already impaneled, McGowan and his attorneys decided to forgo a trial and instead entered a guilty plea to first degree felony murder on June 19, 1974. From his perspective, I think that was probably a wise decision. Given the facts of the case and the certainty of his guilt, I can’t imagine a jury regarding him with any compassion or leniency when it came time for sentencing.
On November 4, New Jersey superior court judge Morris Malech sentenced him to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after fourteen years. McGowan had his lawyer try to appeal this sentence multiple times, but all of his attempts failed.
The following month, McGowan was examined by another psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene Revitch, at the New Jersey Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenel. Dr. Revitch, trained in both psychiatry and neurology, was a clinical professor at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of Rutgers University and published some of the first papers on sexual assault and murder.
Once again, McGowan admitted to rape fantasies in college, caused by sexual frustration and anxiety. After listening to the account and examining his subject with and without sodium amytal (so-called truth serum) and finding little difference other than degree of affect, the psychiatrist stated that Joan’s homicide was “not a cold-blooded murder, but something committed in a state of extreme emotional disorganization and pressure. The killing was the consequence of an additional upset and failure due to premature ejaculation.” Dr. Revitch also recognized “a degree of dissociation with use of mechanism of denial.”
While I have seen some cases of rape turn into murder as a result of premature ejaculation or failure to achieve or maintain erection on the part of the attacker, it tends to be with two specific rapist typologies—the anger-retaliatory rapist and the exploitative rapist. These guys tend to focus on adult women as their victims, and if the premature ejaculation or similar embarrassment results in either a mocking response from the victim or a loss of face for the attacker, then the situation can turn dire. Given that the victim here was a child, I was pretty convinced that was not what we were seeing here. But it was Dr. Revitch’s conclusion that really had me wondering:
We believe these events only occur once in a lifetime of such individuals. A series of circumstances are necessary to provoke the incident. If the girl had not come to his home that day or, perhaps, if he had two dollars instead of only one dollar and a twenty-dollar bill, the event would not have taken place, at least at the present.
Clearly, the crime would not have taken place had Joan not showed up at the McGowan house and rung the doorbell. She was a tragic victim of opportunity. Beyond that, from what I knew from my own study of the criminal mind, I wasn’t sure how much I agreed with the various psychological reports.
Which evaluation was closer to the mark: Dr. Effron’s opinion that “he may act out again,” or Dr. Revitch’s conclusion that “these events only occur once in a lifetime of such individuals”?
I reserved judgment until I actually talked to McGowan myself.
If there is one word I’ve found that survivors of murder victims detest, it is closure. The media, the public, well-meaning friends, and even the judicial system itself often feel that this is what all grieving loved ones are seeking so they can “put this behind them and get on with their lives.”
But anyone who has “experienced” a murder knows there is no such thing as closure, nor in fact should there be. The mourning process will go through stages and eventually the pain will become less unbearably acute, but it will never go away, any more than the hole in one’s personal universe left by the loss of the victim and the erasure of a lifetime of promise will ever be filled in.
The Girl Scouts sent a sympathy card. Other than that, no one in any official capacity made the effort to contact the family.
The emptiness really started, Rosemarie says, “after the burial, when everyone left and went back to their own lives.” The most important thing for her at that point was to keep life as normal as possible for Frankie and Marie. “I made sure Marie stayed in Girl Scouts because she wanted to, even though it was painful for me even to think about Girl Scout cookies. We stayed in the same house, so the familiar things would still be there, like school and friends, and not having more changes to deal with. I tried not to be overprotective. I let them continue to go out and play, though I was always attentive to their whereabouts. They had to be children and I didn’t want to be paranoid.”
Nor would she shield them from the ongoing news about their little sister’s case. “I would tell them both what was going on so they would hear it from me. I knew they would be hearing things and I didn’t want them to hear in a scary way. We would sit on the bedroom floor and talk about anything they had on their minds. They looked forward to that and knew they weren’t being left out.” Rosemarie and Frank took them to the cemetery on various occasions to visit their “sister in heaven.”
Rosemarie came to accept the reality that her love and pain could not be separated. “I have felt