Free I Would Find a Girl Walking by Diana Montané, Kathy Kelly Page B

invited to study at Harvard.
    He had the opportunity to gain different and new skills, such as handling the interview process, which he had previously gathered by sheer instinct. “I have always tried to befriend the person,” he said, referring to his relationship with the suspects. “I try to find some common ground with them, and try not to show any emotion about what they did. That way, they relax and feel comfortable.” This made it much easier to extract a confession.
    At the bureau’s profiling school, the sergeant studied with John Douglas, the pioneer investigator who would eventually cowrite Mind Hunter . Crow remembered that Douglas “liked to play mind games” and that he was a “very dapper dresser.”
    Another instructor, Robert K. Ressler, who coined the term serial killer and later founded and headed ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), was different. “He looked like he had just gotten off the midnight shift, which was odd because his mind was sharp and he did not miss a beat.” The older investigator reminded the sergeant of TV’s Columbo, played by Peter Falk, who was always dressed in an old trench coat and going back to ask more and more questions until he completely wore out his suspect. “He always appeared to be confused,” Crow said about Ressler, “but he had his radar on all the time.” Whereas Douglas had more of a pit bull style, the Florida investigator recalled, Ressler was more laid-back, and the two worked best as a team. In retrospect, Paul Crow looked upon the “nightmare,” as he put it, that was Gerald Stano, and how casually he talked to him about crimes that brought such pain to so many.
    The seasoned detective knew that he had to tread into that territory very carefully.
    “Meeting one of Satan’s children is a feeling I can’t put into words,” Crow would later say, referring to Stano. “One side of me gets mad as hell remembering how casual he was about the murders, like they were no big deal at all.”
    No one ever wins was his conclusion. The parents don’t win, the relatives don’t win, and obviously, the victims never did.
    Paul Crow did enjoy a Pyrrhic victory of sorts with Gerald Stano’s admission of guilt. And although he would wait patiently for his answers, engaging in small talk with his subject until he was willing to be forthcoming with the information at hand, at times the investigator would also reach the end of his rope, as in the case of two unidentified victims. He and Stano had already established a rapport, and at some point during the course of that particular interview, the detective said, point-blank:
    “I’m getting tired of talking to you, Jerry. Just where are we with this thing?”
    Stano replied, flatly: “About 90 percent.”
    And then, after Crow prodded him with, “Where else should I look?” Stano answered, succinctly, “Gainesville. It was in Gainesville. There was two of them, two girls. One had a pair of boots on, so I could run her down. The other one had a gypsy outfit on and she didn’t have a chance.” And then the two men just silently stared at each other.
    From Stano’s savage attack on Donna Marie Hensley, the prostitute who escaped from his grasp and led Detective Jim Gadberry to the short-order cook, Sergeant Crow was able to determine that the killer had become, as he put it in the profiling lingo, “disorganized” once he “went inside.” By his own admission, he forced some of his victims out of his car so they wouldn’t leave any traces of evidence; others met death right in the front seat, by a severe pummeling or stabbing. Completing the murder inside the car or apartment or whatever the case might be was what tripped up Ted Bundy, finally, when he went from “organized” to “disorganized” serial killer. Bundy had gone “inside,” to the Sigma Chi Sorority house in Tallahassee. Stano had taken Donna Marie Hensley back to the seedy motel room she called home in Daytona