OFFENDER PROFILING & THE CALDER OIL FIELD: THE CASE OF ROBERT ABEL

Offender profiling; serial murder; journalism; suicide

Offender profilers: on one hand, you have public perceptions. On the other, you have reality. The two may be quite different. Public perceptions are mediated by autobiographies, movies, limited series on streaming services. But reality – well, reality is as elusive as a killer’s confession.

In both senses of the word, profilers have no interest confessing to failure, not with a public so eager to hear about success. Just about everyone on the planet has seen The Silence of the Lambs; perhaps half that number have seen (or read) Manhunter; many UK viewers will recall Tony Hill from Wire in the Blood, writhing constantly on his living-room carpet in eye-pleasing torment as he struggled to get ‘into the head’ of yet another serial killer from the north of England. (If Tony Hill’s job was that painful, they should have bought him a new carpet every time he wore one out.)

Real offender profilers aren’t like that. For one thing, they seem to disagree even on what ‘offender profiling’ means. And that’s not all. They also disagree on what methods they should use, what data they should collect,  and even how to talk to each other.[i] We’ll discuss all of this in an upcoming newsletter. Today, we’ll concentrate on the human cost of an individual case.

It was the 1980s and the 90s. Young women were being abducted and killed along and around the I-45 in Texas. The area became known as the Texas Killing Fields. Several bodies appeared almost side by side in Calder Oil Field just outside League City: which is just the kind of safe, quiet community that true-crime aficionados find most suspicious - and even more so after a quick glance at the details. The victims were of the same gender and ethnicity and similar age; they were last seen in similar places; they were found in one specific, circumscribed location; their corpses were laid out on their backs in a mannered and formalised way that almost seemed designed to bring to mind that FBI buzzword ‘signature’.

You can catch a Netflix documentary about the Calder Oil Field murders. A commentator tells us: ‘Profiling is a technique where special agents dissect a crime scene. They use the information to identify the killers’ characteristics’

Well, at least, they try to. If you have read a little about offender profiling, you could probably manage a respectable job yourself. The killer is likely to be male, of course. He’s probably white (like his victims), perhaps aged 20-40, intelligent and organised, but with a spotty history when it comes to both relationships and employment. He’s likely to live locally. He’s known as a trouble-maker. He may have a history of cruelty to animals (maybe arson, too). Probably he has been hurt in the past and tried to ‘externalise’ his pain. He has anger problems and a tendency to sexualised violence. He probably presents with a somewhat superior or condescending attitude. He remains involved, one way or another, with the murders: he may have collected souvenirs from his victims, or may try to get involved in the police investigation.

If the profile was a glove, it was tailored for Robert Abel’s hand. Abel was a former NASA scientist who ran a stables nearby. He lived close to the land where the bodies were discovered. He tried to aid the investigation by clearing brush, providing equipment, and so on. Such helpfulness struck the police as suspicious. So, too, did the rumours they heard about Abel’s violence towards his horses, and threats he’d allegedly made to one of his ex-wives. (Perhaps it is fair to point out that, the FBI’s psychological profile wasn’t the only thing that fitted Robert Abel. There was also the pulp-fiction stereotype of the ‘brilliant serial killer’. That must have made him a particularly thrilling suspect.)

One profiler talked to Abel. Another analysed his relationships with women. If the police didn’t exactly drop the other suspect they’d been considering, they certainly placed him gently on a lower shelf. Abel was looking like the one they wanted.

Here’s Netflix again: ‘Supported by an FBI profile, and testimony from two former wives, police said the killer was Robert William Abel […] The League City Police Department writes an affidavit, which goes public, that Robert Abel, the NASA scientist, could actually be the sexual serial killer, who had done the killings to these four young women in the Killing Fields…’

Now, imagine being Robert William Abel at this point. For one thing, guilt is implied every time they refer to you: the press are using all three of your names. That’s never good: think of Gary Michael Heidnik and Jack Henry Abbot; think of John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. Regrettable moments from your past – true or otherwise – have become public property. So, too, has the fact that you fit the profile of a serial killer whose vengeful, grief-stricken relatives are your actual neighbours. Not only that, but your life, incredibly, is about to get worse. You are now being seriously considered as the man behind the still-unsolved murders near the I-45, those notorious Texas Killing Fields. How many women do they think you’ve killed? The police are able to obtain a search warrant based on nothing more than the FBI’s profile. A squad invades your home and a second property, trying to find evidence to prove your guilt.

This is inordinate weight for one bland and predictable profile to carry.

If clues were shoes, the police would have emerged barefoot. A twelve-hour search turned up practically nothing. Robert Abel’s life was capsized for the sake of a gold tooth, some press clippings, and a .22 calibre gun, of the sort that had been used to kill one of the victims. Let’s pause a moment to consider this evidence. The tooth turned out to be Abel’s own. The clippings? They seem quite natural. A serial killer had been dumping victims’ bodies practically at the other side of Abel’s fence. Under the circumstances, it might have been stranger if he hadn’t collected clippings. Finally, the gun. There is nothing to say about this. It was Texas. Again, it might be stranger not to have found a gun.

In October 1999, Texas Monthly carried an article with the headline, ‘Is Robert Abel Getting Away With Murder?’ The first paragraph ends like this: ‘There’s only one problem. [Lawmen] don’t have enough evidence to arrest him. In fact, they don’t have any’. Which inevitably leads us to ask, Why write the article?

There was plenty of evidence, in fact, that Abel wasn’t getting away with murder. No one had actually seen anything, after all. ‘He seemed as haunted as I was,’ said Skip Hollandsworth, a journalist who was cover the case. Referring to the clippings, he added that perhaps Abel was ‘being a scientist looking for evidence to try to prove what happened’.

Even so, one policeman felt compelled to remark, unhelpfully, ‘[Abel is] a suspect. He may not be responsible for killing these women and he may be responsible for killing these women. So he’s still in the pool. He’s still swimming in the pool of suspects’.

Not only that. ‘[M]others backpedal when they see him in the grocery store […] a group of teenage boys, hoping to prove their courage when they spotted him cruising through town in his pickup, rolled down their car windows and shouted, “Hey, Killer!”’ That’s Texas Monthly again.

Tim Miller, father of Laura Miller, one of the victims, had his life shattered by the murder. When he reassembled it, he promised God to help other families reassemble theirs. Tim Miller founded an excellent free service to help relatives hunt for victims. Equusearch does really good work by all accounts.

Miller seems to have been driven by the thought that Abel was guilty and the police not doing their job. He set out to torment the man he saw as his enemy. ‘Tim was convinced he was on the righteous path,’ said Hollandsworth. Whether Miller was right or wrong, who can tell? We can be sure that any empathetic person understands his feelings. But we can be equally sure that little in the psychological world is more dangerous than the conviction that one is on ‘the righteous path’. Such a conviction allows us to feel justified in doing things we would never contemplate otherwise. Miller, for instance, left a message on Abel’s answerphone to tell him he planned to hire an assassin and dump his body in a sand dune outside Las Vegas. Rumour has it he held a gun to Abel’s head, demanding he confess. Abel refused. Miller assembled a gang of locals – construction workers, friends, his ex-wife – to help him dig up the Calder Oil Field. The gang brought more than just their limitless enthusiasm and sympathy. They even brought a backhoe and a pack of cadaver dogs. They discovered buried clothes, but no more victims.

Abel filed for an ‘Order of Protection’, and who can blame him? At length, he was forced to close his business and leave his home. By this point, even Tim Miller had his regrets. He phoned Abel to apologise. The two men met and ‘cried together’.

Throughout it all, detectives continued to hound Robert William Abel. Until his death in 2005, he remained under suspicion of the most hideous crimes. He drove his golf cart up onto some railway tracks and died under the wheels of a train. Whether or not it was suicide no one can say.

Violence, as is well known, breeds. So does its offspring, misery. Imagine, now, being Tim Miller. Imagine being the train driver, or a member of his family. Imagine being the person who had to clean up. When one person makes a mistake, someone, somewhere, always has to clean up.

All pictures courtesy of Wiki Commons.

You can check out Texas Monthly’s article here

And also on Netflix: Crime Scene – The Texas Killing Fields

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[i] Fox, Bryanna & Farrington, David P: What have we learned from offender profiling? A systematic review & meta-analysis of 40 years of research, Psychological Bulletin, 2018, vol 144, No 12, pp 1247-1274