Free Criminal Minds by Jeff Mariotte Page A

suspicion would fall on him; he had, after all, murdered his own grandparents. But he thought that if there were two victims, his guilt wouldn’t be as obvious. Later in the day, he called his mother’s friend Sandy Hallett and invited her to dinner. When she arrived, he clubbed, strangled, and decapitated her and left her body in his bed. He slept in his mother’s bed, with her corpse lying beside him.
    Still unsettled, Kemper drove to Reno, Nevada, rented a different car, and kept going. In Colorado he was pulled over, but he was chagrined to learn it was for speeding, not as part of a nationwide manhunt. Finally he called the Santa Cruz police, directing them to look in his mother’s house. At first, knowing “Big Ed,” they thought he was joking. It took a second call before they believed him.
    Back home, he confessed to all of his murders. His public defender tried an insanity defense, which Kemper abetted by claiming that he had sliced off flesh from some of his victims, cooked it with macaroni, and eaten it—a claim he later recanted, saying it had been intended only to bolster the insanity plea. It was hard to convince a jury that someone as smart and personable as Ed Kemper was insane, and he was found guilty on eight counts of first-degree murder. The judge asked what he thought was appropriate punishment, and Kemper suggested that he be tortured to death. Instead, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and he remains locked up today.
    Ed Kemper’s motivations for his crimes were many. He couldn’t conceive of a healthy sexual relationship with a woman. He wanted to possess the pretty girls he saw all around him, who his mother said were so much better than he was that he didn’t stand a chance. Early in life, he had twisted up his brain’s sex-and-death wiring. But he also wanted revenge against his mother, and some believe that if he had simply killed her first, he might have spared others a great deal of suffering.
     
     
    JAMES MITCHELL “Mike” DeBardeleben has been mentioned only once on Criminal Minds , in the episode “Zoe’s Reprise” (415), as one of the subjects of a book by profiler David Rossi, Deviance: The Secret Desires of Sadistic Serial Killers . DeBardeleben is definitely an appropriate subject for that book.
    Initially, his case was investigated by the Secret Service, because in addition to being a sexual sadist and a serial killer, he was a counterfeiter known as the Mall Passer. He traveled the country using fake bills to make small purchases at malls and get substantial change in real currency. In two years, he had hit thirty-eight states and passed about thirty thousand dollars in funny money. The Treasury Department wanted him badly. It finally got ahead of him, figuring out where he might go next and alerting merchants in the malls he might hit.
    In Knoxville, Tennessee, on March 25, 1983, an alert store clerk reported DeBardeleben. The authorities moved in, and the Mall Passer found himself busted.
    The suspect clammed up. His ID said one thing, and his car registration said something else altogether. It took the FBI’s fingerprint analysis to hang his real name on him: Mike DeBardeleben. Once the Secret Service had that information, they realized they’d arrested him once before, for passing fake hundred-dollar bills in 1976, a rap that earned him two years of federal time.
    The car he’d been driving in Knoxville contained drugs, pornography, phony IDs, fake money, and the goods he’d bought with the latter. What they didn’t have was his printing equipment, what the Secret Service calls a counterfeiter’s “plant.” They needed to search his home in Alexandria, Virginia.
    All they found, however, were dirty dishes and more small purchases made with bogus bills—no printing press, no plates. Three agents stayed behind when the others left, determined to find something. Greg Mertz picked up DeBardeleben’s phone book and flipped through the yellow pages.
    There