In the Name of the Children: An FBI Agent's Relentless Pursuit of the Nation's Worst Predators
300
In the Name of the Children: An FBI Agent's Relentless Pursuit of the Nation's Worst Predators
300Paperback
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Overview
—New York Times Book Review
FBI Special Agent Jeff Rinek had a gift for getting child predators to confess. All he had to do was share a piece of his soul . . .
In the Name of the Children gives an unflinching look at what it's like to fight a never-ending battle against an enemy far more insidious than terrorists: the predators, lurking amongst us, who seek to harm our children.
During his 30-year career with the FBI, Jeff Rinek worked hundreds of investigations involving crimes against children: from stranger abduction to serial homicide to ritualized sexual abuse. Those who do this kind of work are required to plumb the depths of human depravity, to see things no one should ever have to see—and once seen can never forget. There is no more important—or more brutal—job in law enforcement, and few have been more successful than Rinek at solving these sort of cases.
Most famously, Rinek got Cary Stayner to confess to all four of the killings known as the Yosemite Park Murders, an accomplishment made more extraordinary by the fact that the FBI nearly pinned the crimes on the wrong suspects. Rinek's recounting of the confession and what he learned about Stayner provides perhaps the most revelatory look ever inside the psyche of a serial killer and a privileged glimpse into the art of interrogation.
In the Name of the Children takes readers into the trenches of real-time investigations where every second counts and any wrong decision or overlooked fact can have tragic repercussions. Rinek offers an insider's perspective of the actual case agents and street detectives who are the boots on the ground in this war at home. By placing us inside the heart and mind of a rigorously honest and remarkably self-reflective investigator, we will see with our own eyes what it takes—and what it costs—to try to keep our children safe and to bring to justice those who prey on society's most vulnerable victims.
With each chapter dedicated to a real case he worked, In the Name of the Children also explores the evolution of Rinek as a Special Agent—whose unorthodox, empathy-based approach to interviewing suspects made him extraordinarily successful in obtaining confessions—and the toll it took to have such intimate contact with child molesters and murderers. Beyond exploring the devastating impact of these unthinkable crimes on the victims and their families, this book offers an unprecedented look at how investigators and their loved ones cope while living in the specter of so much suffering.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781944648985 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BenBella Books, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 07/17/2018 |
| Pages: | 300 |
| Sales rank: | 179,385 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Marilee Strong is an award-winning journalist who specializes in reporting on crime and psychological and social issues. She is the author of two previous books: A Bright Red Scream, on the aftereffects of childhood abuse and trauma, and Erased, which presented an original criminal and psychological profile of a particular kind of intimate-partner homicide. She has also written widely on topics such as child abduction, women in prison, gang violence, hate groups, and psychological treatment for sex offenders. She is a graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where she awarded a Pulitzer Fellowship, the school's highest honor. She is the recipient of more than a dozen writing and reporting honors, including a National Headliner Award and the Society of Professional Journalists Excellence Award. She has been a guest on NBC's Dateline, Fox News' On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, the BBC, and numerous other TV and radio shows around the US, and has been appeared in several film and television documentaries on the subjects of her work.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Jeffrey
I'VE ALWAYS HAD an unusually intimate relationship with death. My father worked as an undertaker, and when I was born in 1952 we actually lived in the funeral home in downtown Philadelphia where he was employed. I was always interested in those my father attended to and wondered what had brought their lives to an end. Some had died the way we all hope to die: peacefully, at the end of a long and fruitful life. Others died suddenly, violently, miserably at the hands of another. I came to realize that every death told a story, and I became obsessed with trying to figure out what each person's story was.
As a child, I would occasionally sneak into the embalming room, more curious than repulsed by the ministrations that went on in there. Eventually, my father invited me to spend time with him inside this sanctum sanctorum. Once it was because he wanted to teach me a valuable lesson by showing me what the lungs of someone who died from lung cancer looked like. Dad was a heavy smoker himself, but he didn't want me taking up the habit. His scared-straight tactics worked; I never had any desire to smoke. Maybe there was a little bit of cop in him, too.
My father, Sidney Rinek, was highly respected in our community. He loved his job and was supremely dedicated to it. He understood that families called upon him in the darkest hours of their lives and he felt that it was his responsibility to help them get through a perilous passage as best they could. At the time, as fascinated as I was by my dad's work, I also resented the demands it placed on him and the time it stole from our family. He was never able to come to any of my school activities; that was left to my mom. Dad worked all day and late into the night, and when he was with us he was usually on the phone making plans with another family about yet another funeral. As a kid, I was unable to appreciate the acute sense of duty and moral obligation my father felt to perfect strangers, and it created a distance between us. Yet as an adult, be it ironic or simply inevitable, I would choose a calling with the same overriding sense of duty and obligation, and my own wife and kids would pay the price of its voracious demands.
When I turned sixteen my parents expected me to start working, and my dad got me on at the funeral home. My job was to attend to the needs of grieving family members during funeral services, get them water and tissues, and stand by their side stoically and respectfully. I also had to transport the hearse between the funeral home's two Philadelphia locations. Attending services allowed me to hear stories about the deceased that before I had only imagined. But I didn't last long in the profession, not yet mature enough for the seriousness of the task. I laughed out loud once in the middle of a service when an elderly mourner coughed and his dentures came flying out of his mouth. I'm also embarrassed to confess that when the hearse was empty I sometimes took the funeral home nameplates out of the windows and drag raced it up Broad Street, its 472-cubic-inch engine the closest I had yet come to the muscle cars I dreamed of owning. One day, with the engine visibly steaming when I got back to our funeral home, my father asked if I had done anything unusual with the hearse.
"Nothing I don't normally do," I answered honestly, if cryptically. My dad's face bore a mixture of skepticism and a look of what was probably acute disappointment, but he questioned me no further.
Finally, in my gravest breach of decorum, I football-tackled a mourner to the ground. The latter transgression was at the funeral of a woman who had married twice. My father had told me that the woman's second husband, to whom she was still married at the time of her death, would be attending but that a former husband was not welcome and posted me at the door to keep an eye out for him. When a man roughly matching the description of the ex-husband came running up to the door just as the service began, I knocked him down and pinned him to the ground until my red-faced dad pulled me away, screaming that I had the wrong guy. It never occurred to my father, nor should it have, that instead of using polite yet firm persuasion I would resort to physical force on a mourner. With much awkwardness, my dad had no choice but to fire me.
By that point I had learned enough to know that I did not want to follow his footsteps into a career as an undertaker. But the respect and dignity my father afforded both the dead and the grieving left a big impression on me. I would later come to see my work investigating homicides as a way of honoring my father and carrying forward the values he instilled in me by his example.
The job I longed for, the profession I dreamed of since I was a little kid, was to be an FBI agent. Typical boyhood icons like Batman and Superman meant nothing to me. FBI agents had been my superheroes ever since I happened to stumble across the book The FBI Story by Don Whitehead and saw the film version with Jimmy Stewart playing a fictionalized agent named "Chip" Hardesty, a zealous and Zelig-like special agent who was depicted as having a hand in taking down nearly every major bad guy in FBI history: from murderous Ku Klux Klansmen to treacherous spies to the colorfully monikered gangsters "Pretty Boy" Floyd, "Machine Gun" Kelly, and "Baby Face" Nelson.
One time when I was about ten, a mobster's service was held at my dad's funeral home. I remember the deceased was missing one of his lower legs, although I believe that the loss of that body part long preceded his death. So many of the man's friends and associates turned out for the funeral that the police were dispatched to help with traffic. While the service was going on, I noticed that FBI agents were actually outside writing down the license plate numbers of cars parked on the streets nearby, just like I'd seen them do in the movies. It was amazing to see real agents on the job and I tried to take in everything I could about them, from the way they talked to each other to how they carried themselves.
When I was a teenager, the popular TV series The FBI came along with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. playing the iconic Inspector Lewis Erskine, and after watching his weekly exploits I became even more obsessed with the idea of a career with "the Bureau." Some episodes of the show ended with Zimbalist appealing for the public's help in finding real-life criminals featured on the FBI's "Most Wanted List," including, in the most famous instance, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., James Earl Ray, who when that episode aired was still at large. At a time of great political and social chaos in the country, the incorruptible Inspector Erskine seemed so reassuringly foursquare and heroic that many Americans sent fan letters addressed to the fictional character to the real FBI headquarters, believing Erskine actually ran the Bureau. Bringing kidnappers and murderers to justice — while tooling around in a sharp Mustang like Erskine did — was the kind of guy I wanted to be. Jeffrey Rinek didn't have the ring to it that "Chip" Hardesty did, but to be able to have the words Special Agent in front of my name and the ability to do anything remotely as important with my life as he was depicted as doing was the greatest thing I could possibly imagine.
Yet the chance of me ever becoming an FBI agent seemed highly unlikely due to two immutable facts of my life. The first seemingly insurmountable impediment to me having any career in law enforcement was the fact that I was born with a mild case of cerebral palsy and as a result suffered from birth defects that caused physical deformities. I initially appeared to be a normal baby but soon it became apparent that my left leg and foot were not developing in the usual way. As I grew, my foot pointed further and further inward toward the other leg. To call me pigeon-toed would have been a gross understatement: I had a clubfoot. I had great trouble learning to walk to the point that I was a danger to myself. My very first memory, in fact, is of me getting stuck between the door and the doorframe of my parents' chain-locked bedroom door. Seeking a little nighttime comfort, I was unable to negotiate the simple task of passing my left foot across the sill to reach the warmth of my parents' arms.
At age nine my spine started to curve as well. It seemed as if my entire body was being brutally tugged and twisted by some unremitting force. Even today I continue to suffer from shoulder and knee problems that are probably the result of my skeleton being innately off-kilter. My childhood is a blur of the innumerable doctors my parents took me to in search of a solution, which seemed impossibly elusive, and the hell that was school for a deformed kid. I couldn't run and play like the other kids and was never allowed to participate in P.E. but always excused, which enhanced my "different" status. Any day we had to go out into the yard or field for some school activity was not a good day for me. I had no friends at school. I was made fun of, beat up for appearing weak, ostracized for being "defective." As long as I live I'll never forget the trapped, humiliating feeling of being pinned to the ground by some kid sitting on my chest, my legs kicking uselessly, unable to get enough footing to escape my tormentor's grip.
In the summer my parents sent me to a day camp called Happy Acres. That was a little better because there were some activities that did not require a lot of movement, like tetherball and fishing. I could never just buy shoes in a store like regular people but had to get corrective shoes specially made for my left foot. For years I wore all sorts of torturous devices on and between my legs to try to make my left leg and foot turn in a normal direction, but nothing worked. I grew up lonely, embarrassed, ashamed, and, increasingly, angry. I vented my feelings onto my brother, David, and consequently do not consider myself to have been a good brother. My sister, Rebecca, was born eight years after me, which prevented her from being exposed to my anger and anguish.
One of the myriad doctors my parents took me to see was a man named Anthony DePalma, whose son Brian De Palma would become a famous film director. Dr. DePalma was a lauded orthopedic surgeon, the author of textbooks that became standards in the field. I first saw him when I was five and he suggested a radical surgical procedure to completely reconstruct my left leg, which included straightening my clubfoot. But because the surgery was experimental and unproven my parents were scared off and the visits from doctor to doctor continued for several more years.
After my spine began to contort as well and my future looked increasingly compromised, my folks took me back to Dr. DePalma. He believed that due to the cerebral palsy my muscles were weak and constantly in spasm and thus were contorting my leg. This had led in progressive fashion to the curvature of my spine, known medically as scoliosis. The experimental procedure that he hoped would give me a shot at walking normally involved breaking and resetting my leg bone while cutting away muscle and releasing tendons that would, in turn, release pressure on my spine and stop the progression of the scoliosis. At last, my parents agreed and I underwent the procedure.
I woke up in a hospital room with my mom and my aunt Ethel. My left leg was encased in plaster from my knee to the top of my toes. A heavy metal bar was implanted in the cast at my heel, forcing my foot to remain face-forward at a ninety-degree angle to my leg. It was too early to tell what the outcome would be, but just seeing my foot pointing for the first time in the correct direction filled me with excitement at the thought that I would finally be "normal." The torture was not over yet, however. For two weeks I had to lie in my hospital bed in the same position, unable to move. The hospital staff did try to get me up once to see if I could stand, but I could not lift the weight of the cast and metal bar. I began to despair, but Aunt Ethel, who worked near the hospital, snuck hamburgers in to me to raise my spirits. For months, even after I got out of the hospital, I was on crutches.
Eventually, the cast came off and I began to walk — albeit with specially made shoes because my left leg would always be shorter and smaller than my right. While my physical challenges were eased thanks to Dr. DePalma, emotional scars as deep and gnarled as the ones that marked my leg remained. For a long while I seethed with anger and resentment toward those who had bullied me. Where once I had been afraid, I now wanted to get even. Walking on crutches so long had built up my arm strength and given me the power to fight back. I fought a lot and got into various kinds of trouble. At one point in elementary school the vice principal became so fed up with me that he pulled me out of class and threw me up against the wall; the thud of my body into the hallway lockers was loud enough for everyone in class to hear.
I still struggle today with anger to some degree, but over time feelings that had once been so self-directed and self-destructive became the gifts and signposts that would help me along the particular career path I chose. Free-floating, useless anger transformed into a passion for seeking justice. I no longer wanted to "get back" at my own victimizers but to bring to account those who would victimize others — especially predators who chose children, those least able to protect themselves, as their targets. The vulnerability I felt as a kid produced a deep sense of empathy for child victims and the desire to protect them from exploitation and abuse. At the same time, the loneliness and ostracism I had experienced as a kid gave me a measure of insight, and at times great empathy, into those torn and twisted souls who take out their pain on the flesh of others.
College was the first place where I fully began to escape the stigma of my childhood deformity. I didn't travel far to Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, a small liberal arts college less than an hour and a half from Philadelphia, yet to me it was worlds away. But when I graduated I realized that I did not want to follow the culturally acceptable path and go to law school. I went to work in the credit department of Sears, where I had worked as a salesman part time during school. I even went through the application process to become a store manager but realized that wasn't for me either. I became very depressed. It felt like I was playing that game you see during intermission at sporting events where people run around a set of chairs and when the buzzer rings everybody scrambles for a seat — and I kept ending up without a chair to sit on. About a year after school ended I moved back home with my parents and began working at a local department store in security. That began to turn my mind back to law enforcement.
I still dreamed of becoming an FBI agent, but there was a second reason I doubted that my dream would ever become a reality: I'm Jewish, and the FBI was notorious for being the WASPiest, or at least the most Christian, of all law enforcement organizations. While religion might seem like a minor or even irrelevant fact in considering fitness to serve as an FBI agent, the notion of who best fit the mold was set by the man who played the largest role in shaping the organization: J. Edgar Hoover.
The Bureau of Investigation, or BOI, the forerunner of the FBI, was first established not long after the turn of the previous century under President Teddy Roosevelt. In his previous stint as superintendent of the New York City police commission, Roosevelt had implemented a series of bold reforms to professionalize and root out rampant corruption in that city's notoriously corrupt and patronage-riddled police force. As president, he and his attorney general, fellow Progressive Charles Bonaparte, shared the belief that government intervention was necessary to ensure a fair and just society, and they brought together a small cadre of federal investigators under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Justice specifically tasked with fighting crime and corruption. The notion of any kind of national police body was initially controversial, as the prevailing constitutional view at the time was that law enforcement, like most government functions, should be left to the purview of states and municipalities. But with Prohibition and the Great Depression, a massive uptick in crime and criminal syndicates led to an expansion of laws for which the federal government was given jurisdiction.
Hoover took over as director in 1924 and in 1935 changed the name to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He further sought to enhance the image of "special agents" as the most professional and highly skilled in all law enforcement. He wanted agents who were highly educated, preferring those with degrees in law and accounting while also recruiting experts in the developing field of forensics and other scientific specialties. Over the years of his long reign, he established a national laboratory and an academy through which new agents would receive formal, centralized training in the latest crime detection techniques, which evolved from fingerprint analysis thanks to the first national fingerprint database to later advances in forensic testing and DNA analysis and the bold new field of criminal psychological profiling. And with zeal equal to that of Roosevelt and the Progressives, Hoover wanted his agents to be incorruptible, scandal free, above reproach — in stark contrast to local beat cops and federal Prohibition agents who were all too often on the take of those they were supposed to police.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "In the Name of the Children"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Jeffrey L. Rinek and Marilee Strong.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prologue,
Introduction,
Chapter One: Jeffrey,
Chapter Two: Frankie,
Chapter Three: Danny,
Chapter Four: Michael,
Chapter Five: Alexia,
Chapter Six: Alexander ("Salaam"),
Chapter Seven: Carole, Juli, and Silvina,
Chapter Eight: Joie,
Chapter Nine: The Twenty-Two,
Chapter Ten: Lori, Joseph, and Jordan,
Acknowledgments,
About the Authors,
What People are Saying About This
“At a time when people are questioning the motives and dedication of the FBI, here is a book that shows what ‘Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity’ really stands for. In the Name of the Children is an exceptionally well-written and deeply moving look at one FBI agent’s lifelong quest to find missing children and bring sexual predators to justice. No one in law enforcement has ever written with such unvarnished honesty about what it takes to bring down those who prey on kids. Jeff Rinek’s insights into the motives and modus operandi of sex offenders and his approach to getting killers like serial sex slayer Cary Stayner to confess should be mandatory reading not just for those in law enforcement but also for everyone who cares about the safety of our children. Chilling, fascinating, and groundbreaking.”
—John Douglas, FBI profiler, author of Mindhunter, The Anatomy of Motive, and Journey Into Darkness
“Retired FBI Special Agent Jeff Rinek brings us deep inside his investigations of serial killers, child murderers, and sexual predators. These riveting stories document not only the hunt for these elusive criminals but also reveal the emotional upheaval Rinek himself experienced seeing the carnage perpetrated on society’s youngest and most vulnerable victims . . . This is a must-read for anyone who follows true crime. It gave me a greater appreciation of, and respect for, law enforcement’s men and women who serve and protect us.”
—Beth Karas, former prosecutor, legal analyst, longtime truTV correspondent
“The extraordinary calling of Jeff Rinek’s life is wrestling with evil so that evil does not have the last word . . . This book is haunting in its depiction of the worst of psychopathology and conscienceless-ness, but it also brims with the hope that springs from the quest of a hero full of empathy and compassion to find answers, bring justice, and honor life. Rinek is humanity at its best.”
—Sandra L. Brown, MA, trauma therapist, author of Counseling Victims of Violence and How to Spot a Dangerous Man Before You Get Involved
“Part memoir, part true crime, In The Name of the Children, is a riveting read. This rare and candid insider’s look at crimes against children pulls back the curtain on the painstaking, often heartbreaking, process of investigating these unthinkable crimes and the damaging effects of organizational betrayal on those who are seeking justice for the victims.”
—Ellen Kirschman, PhD, author of I Love a Cop: What Police Families Need to Know, Counseling Cops: What Clinicians Need to Know, and the Dot Meyerhoff mystery series
“A must-read for true crime fans! Jeffrey Rinek is not your typical FBI Agent. His memoir is a page-turner full of fascinating cases that he approaches from a unique empathy-based perspective. Rinek’s success in using humanity and compassion to elicit confessions from ruthless predators makes you wonder if we should rethink everything we know about interrogations.”
—Krystal Houghton Ziv, co-executive producer of CSI: Miami, The Purge, Body of Proof
“This book is not only a rare glimpse into the remarkable and dedicated work of the FBI; it is also a ringside seat into the heart and soul of a federal agent doing the most demanding work. Jeffrey Rinek’s personal story punctuates the pages and takes the reader on the journey for justice for America’s most vulnerable victims. Rinek the federal agent? I’d say federal angel.”
—Diane Dimond, journalist, former Court TV reporter, and author of Be Careful Who You Love: Inside the Michael Jackson Case
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