A new type of killer is wreaking havoc across America and around the world. He has made countless headlines in recent years, but until now his core identity has been hidden. He is not driven by rage or lust. His conscience is not set loose by drugs or alcohol-the deadly fuels that can turn some men into momentary killers. Unlike most other murderers, he very often has no criminal record and sometimes no history of violence whatsoever. He is an intelligent, careful, methodical killer.
He is also someone who has always been a fabricator of reality. He is not your harmless garden-variety fibber but a compulsive, pathological liar whose lies are meant to get a reaction out of others: to inspire their admiration, to evoke their sympathy, to get him exactly what he wants. He makes up stories big and small, often lying about things for no readily apparent reason. But he is especially practiced at deceiving others about who he really is.
He fabricates evidence to exaggerate his accomplishments, wealth, success, social standing. Sometimes he proudly displays phony business cards or diplomas, awards from military service he never earned, and other "proof" he needs to create the impression that he craves. He knows how to use words, lies, and actions to manipulate others. Manipulation-either subtle or overt-is a core feature of how he interacts with others.
He leads what appears to be a normal and productive life and is often considered to be an exemplary citizen. But quietly, beneath the surface, unbeknownst to almost anyone, he has used all his well-honed abilities to lie, manipulate, and fabricate reality in order to commit the crown jewel of crimes, the perfect murder.
His goal is to erase his victim-be it his wife, ex-wife, girlfriend, or lover-to expunge her from the record of his life. If she is pregnant with a child he does not want-and an unwanted pregnancy is an alarmingly common motive for eraser killings-he is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating what he views as dead weight dragging him down. In his mind, he is not really murdering a human being; he is simply rearranging the world to better suit his needs, to remove a major annoyance or let him make a fresh start of things.
He harbors a cluster of psychological traits very unusual in the general public. He does not experience the almost universal psychological reaction called fear. It is not that he is uncommonly brave or that he has "conquered" fear. He does experience an abstract, emotionally colorless sensation when put under great stress-especially if he feels caught in a situation he is not confident he can talk his way out of, when he is no longer in control of everyone around him. Most of the time, any sense of truly being afraid is more like a thought than a feeling. His heart does not beat faster, and he shows few if any signs of the emotion of fear. He knows about fear a bit like a colorblind person is aware of color: it is visible, but only as another shade of gray.
Eraser killers employ cunning, stealth, and often meticulous planning to overcome their trusting prey, frequently employing the agonizingly slow and terror-inducing method of suffocation or strangulation in order to minimize the type of messy crime scene evidence that could get them caught.
These killers represent a previously unrecognized subset of intimate partner murderers, different in distinct ways from other domestic killers:
Their killings are not committed in the violent rage or sudden loss of control that characterizes more classic domestic homicides. On the contrary, they kill with total calm, total control. If they leave behind any crime scene at all, it will be what criminal profilers refer to as "organized"-just the kind of crime scene investigators do not expect to see when a domestic homicide is involved, for that is supposed to be the most "hot-blooded," disorganized, and messy of crimes.
The eraser killer is a master of deceit and an expert manipulator. His killing is carried out in total secrecy (unlike many domestic homicides, which often are committed even though there are witnesses present) and then very highly "staged," to use the investigators' term for a crime scene that is arranged like a stage set to create an illusion intended to confuse the police and send them down a wrong trail.
Most domestic homicides involve jealousy, money, another woman, or explosive and vengeful rage felt by the killer because the woman is planning to leave him. Although there are sometimes subsidiary motives involving monetary gain or other women, the eraser killer is not "driven" by these things. His real motivations stem from the unique psychology of men with a particular set of dangerous traits that psychologists have recently named "the Dark Triad" of personality.
He is killing because the woman in question has become inconvenient. In his eyes, she no longer meets his needs, or she stands in the way of something he wants. She is not allowed to leave him or take away anything he holds dear, be it a home or children or the lifestyle he has come to enjoy. He will only let her go on his deadly, unilateral terms.
He plans his killing well in advance, once again distinguishing him from the standard wife-killer. Far fewer than half of all wife-killings are actually planned in advance of the final encounter, according to available research.
The eraser killer will exhibit neither mourning nor real signs of emotional loss, and will almost always exhibit strangely inappropriate behavior and speech after the mysterious death of his wife or girlfriend. (Sometimes he even starts speaking about her in the past tense before he has killed her.) Although he may actively participate in the search for a missing loved one, he will be using his full array of skills to direct any inquiries or police investigation toward fictitious threats and other suspects and away from himself.
He may have hidden his contempt for the object of his enmity, especially if doing so gives him tactical advantage when the moment of attack arrives. But once he makes up his mind to erase his victim, his determination is all-consuming. When the act begins-once he puts his hands around her throat or strikes her with a heavy object as she sleeps-there is no twinge of conscience or compassion.
He is generally intelligent, though he also greatly overestimates his talents. He believes he is smarter and better than the rest of us, certainly smarter than the police and more deserving in all ways than his victim. He often has considerable familiarity with the law and with how the police work. He may have read up on these matters diligently to help him with his plan. Or he may have used his unusual ability for absorbing things around him, observing with the cold eye of a lizard in the desert how other predators kill and get away with it, because getting away with murder is his goal.
To achieve that goal, he may follow one of two distinct strategies. Either he can erase the victim's body by destroying it entirely or secreting it where it won't be found, or he can rearrange the crime or stage a wholly false scenario to erase all connection between himself and any criminal act. Either way, he appears to remain free and clear of any involvement in a dastardly act.
Although men have been carrying out this kind of crime for centuries, it is only now that the extraordinary glare of television lights and an almost "shock-and-awe" level of news coverage are beginning to drive him out of the safety of the darkness. But without an actual name for this crime and for this killer, it is still hard for us to make sense of these crimes, to find the hidden clues, and solve what too often and quite tragically remain unsolved mysteries. As criminal profilers have discovered, truth and resolution can be found only by ferreting out the unseen links and connections between these seemingly disparate cases.
I believe these killers are best described as eraser killers, because that term describes simply and succinctly both their motive and their methods. Their victims are not "missing women" or "vanished wives." They are women who have been erased, just as repressive political regimes have used the method of "forced disappearances" to dispose of their enemies and strike terror into all those who oppose them. The impact of so many women being "erased" or "disappeared" from our very midst, from communities or homes we have assumed in some fundamental sense to be "safe," is overwhelming and undermines so many fundamentals on which our sense of trust and security is based. These eraser killers exploit the fundamental safeguards of our legal system-principles enshrined in our constitution to protect honest citizens from unreasonable searches of their property and from being forced or coerced into making a false confession-as if those honored protections were simply escape hatches built to provide safe haven for someone capable of pulling off an expert murder.
By following a series of threads, beginning with Laci Peterson and then going back and forth in time to hundreds of other instances of mysteriously disappeared women, I discovered that most of the cases fit a distinct pattern or profile of a startlingly prevalent type of murder, yet one that had never been identified because we have tended to look at each case in a vacuum.
Most were not missing persons cases in any strict sense of the word, but elaborately planned and premeditated domestic homicides disguised to appear to be mysterious vanishings. Invariably, the person responsible for the woman's disappearance was her current or former husband or boyfriend. Although some recent killers even cited Scott Peterson as their inspiration, he was hardly the first to come up with such an idea. Looking back in time, I traced the same pattern back a century to the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's literary classic, An American Tragedy.
Although the essential facts of these cases bear a striking similarity, the outcomes vary widely. Many "disappeared" women are never found, and no one is ever held to account for what happened to them. A few victims-the "lucky" ones, in a manner of speaking-are eventually discovered, often by pure chance or an act of nature. Their families get a chance to bury their loved ones, or what is left of them, and sometimes their killers are brought to justice. A small number of presumed killers are tried and convicted in the absence of a body; others are acquitted with or without a body because there is not enough evidence to convince a judge or jury beyond a reasonable doubt that a murder occurred, much less that the woman's intimate partner was the one responsible.
The victims of these killers are women of all races and social classes, from all parts of the country (and around the world as well). Whereas some have been the subject of intensive media coverage, others are all but unknown beyond their closest loved ones.
All the women listed here are dead or presumed to be dead. All were murdered or are believed by authorities to have been murdered by a husband or boyfriend, falling victim precisely because of their physical and emotional vulnerability to their killer. All "went missing" under mysterious circumstances, but none of these women was ever truly lost. They didn't wander off, run away from home, suffer amnesia and forget where they belonged. They were deliberately "disappeared" by someone who had good reason to try to make sure they would never be found, someone who wanted to erase them from the face of the earth.
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Hattie "Fern" Bergeler, fifty-seven, was found floating in the bay near her Florida home in August 2002 with a bedsheet wrapped around her head and cinderblocks tied to her neck and ankles. Her multimillionaire husband, Robert Moringiello, a retired aerospace engineer, claimed the two had lost sight of each other while driving in separate cars to visit his children. But he had still not reported her missing by the time her remains were identified-a month after he claimed to have lost her in traffic. Despite a wealth of physical evidence-the sheet, rope, and cinderblocks and the gun used to kill Fern, also fished from the water behind their Fort Myers Beach home, were all tied to her husband, and cleaned-up blood was found in the house-it took two trials to convict him of second-degree murder. A man of Moringiello's intelligence and character would never have made so many stupid mistakes, his attorney had argued.
Isabel Rodriguez, thirty-nine, vanished in November 2001 two weeks after seeking a protective order against her estranged husband, Jesus, who she said threatened to kill her if she was awarded any money from him in their divorce. In the days before her disappearance, her husband ordered ten truckloads of dirt and gravel delivered to his five-acre farm on the outskirts of the Florida Everglades. On the day she went missing, a witness saw a fire burning for hours on the property. Jesus had told all his farmhands not to come to work that day, explaining to one that he was planning a Santeria "cleansing" ritual on the property. Police believe he killed his wife that day, burned her corpse on the farm, and scattered the ashes under the dirt and gravel. He claims she returned to her native Honduras, abandoning their two children, but there is no record of her leaving the United States or entering Honduras. Not long after his wife disappeared, he began seeing another woman, who looks uncannily like his missing wife and whose name even happens to be Isabel. At the time this book was written, prosecutors were preparing for a third trial after two previous efforts ended in mistrial.
Kristine Kupka, twenty-eight, was just two months away from graduating with a degree in philosophy from Baruch College in New York City when she vanished without a trace in 1998. She was also five months pregnant by one of her professors, Darshanand "Rudy" Persaud, who did not confess to her that he was married until after she became pregnant. He was so adamant that she get rid of the baby that she began to fear he might hurt her. Kupka left her apartment with Persaud on the day she disappeared. Although he admits seeing her that day, he denies harming her or having any knowledge of her whereabouts, and no charges have ever been brought against him or anyone else.
Lisa Tu of Potomac, Maryland, a forty-two-year-old Chinese immigrant caring for two teenagers and her elderly mother, disappeared in 1988. Tu's common-law husband, Gregory, a Washington, D.C., restaurant manager heavily in debt from business failures and gambling losses, said she never returned from a trip to San Francisco to visit a sick friend. But police believe he killed her as she slept on their couch, then attempted to assume a new identity, traveling to Las Vegas, forging checks under her name, stealing from her son's college fund, and enjoying the services of prostitutes. A first-degree murder conviction was overturned when an appeals court ruled that evidence seized from his Las Vegas hotel room was improperly admitted. In the retrial, he was found guilty of second-degree murder.
Pegye Bechler, a physical therapist and mother of three, disappeared in 1997 while boating off the Southern California coast with her husband to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary and her thirty-eighth birthday. Eric Bechler claimed she was piloting a rented speedboat and towing him on a boogie board when she was washed overboard by a rogue wave. Although Pegye was an expert swimmer who completed in triathlons, Bechler claimed she never surfaced, and no sign of her has ever been found. After sobbing for the cameras about his devastating loss, Bechler took up with another woman just three months after his wife's disappearance, an actress and lingerie model; she agreed to wear a wire for police. Having been recorded describing how he bashed his wife over the head with a barbell, then attached the weights to her body and dumped her at sea, he was convicted of first-degree murder.
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Excerpted from Erased by Marilee Strong Mark Powelson Copyright © 2008 by Marilee Strong. Excerpted by permission.
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