Obsession Read Free Page A

Peterson, she was nude, bound with black electrical tape and white Venetian-blind cord. Her arms were tied behind her back with the tape and cord and a pair of her own stockings. As with Danny Peterson, Frances had been found with a plastic bag tied over her head. When it was removed at the crime scene, her face was almost completely blackish red from cyanosis and hemorrhaging, and bloody vomit was dried around her nose and mouth. Yet the autopsy report noted no defense wounds on the hands nor evidence of sexual assault.
    Then on November 6 of the same year, twenty-three-year-old Lori Gallagher returned home and was surprised by an intruder who had come in through the bedroom window. This time, he had cut the phone line. She was facedown on her bed, clad in a pink, long-sleeved sweater with her panties pulled down, her own panty hose binding her wrists behind her. There were additional pairs of panty hose of various colors that had been fashioned into a gag around her neck and across her mouth, which, along with her nose, had been bleeding. Her entire body had a reddish cast from petechial hemorrhage. Again, no defense woundsand no apparent vaginal or anal assault. And again, the cause of death was ligature strangulation.
    Most noteworthy about this particular murder was the way police found out about it. The next morning, the killer called them and directed officers to the scene. The police traced the call to a public phone booth on a busy downtown corner. A couple of witnesses vaguely recalled seeing a tall blond man using the phone at about the right time.
    Near the beginning of February 1978, the killer mailed a poem to the local newspaper, but it somehow found its way to the circulation department, where no one noticed it for several days. Evidently ticked off over this slight, not to mention the lack of publicity he so desperately craved, the UNSUB took a different tack, sending a letter to a television station that served a large part of the region. Not only did he reassert credit for the Peterson murders, he also claimed responsibility for Farrell and Gallagher.
    The station immediately brought the letter to the police, who took it seriously.
    The letter’s description of the Farrell and Gallagher murders was just as detailed as the original depictions of the Petersons had been. He said how lucky the Farrell children had been that the phone had rung, saving their lives. He had intended to kill them as he had Danny Peterson. Only this time, his letter gave an even greater insight into his methods and motivations. At the end of the paragraphs on both Farrell and Gallagher, he had written identical commentaries: “Chosen at random with little planning, Motivation X.”
    And he promised another one, in a scenario similar to the one in which he had killed Melissa Peterson, a scenario he described in hideous and vulgar detail. She would be chosen at random with a little more planningthis time. And the driving force, again, would be “Motivation X.”
    “How many do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?” he practically pleaded. “Do the cops think that all those deaths are not related? Yes, the M.O. is different in each, but look at the pattern that is developing.”
    As if he hadn’t made himself clear enough already, he explained, “You don’t understand these things because you’re not under the influence of Motivation X. The same thing that made Son of Sam, Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler, the Hillside Strangler, Ted [Bundy] of the West Coast and many more infamous characters.”
    He called his affliction “a terrible nightmare,” but admitted he didn’t “lose any sleep over it. After a thing like Gallagher I come home and go about life like anyone else. And I will be like that until the urge hits me again.”
    Even as early in my profiling career as this was, I knew he wasn’t going home and going about life like anyone else. But I’d already learned how to