Only the River Knows

The Profiler's Suspect

The man first came to Brown's attention in the late 1990s, she said, when authorities in St. Charles, Missouri, contacted her. "They had this guy coming into their police station and he was extremely annoying," Brown said. "He had come in... telling them that he was going to be the next Jeffrey Dahmer."

Needless to say, the cops didn't believe him. Authorities in St. Charles have acknowledged as much. In fact, he was shunted from one police officer to the next, was once instructed to tell his story to the FBI, and one police officer later even went so far as to get a restraining order against the man, all because they wanted him to stop harassing them.

The cops could be forgiven for dismissing the man. They way they figured it, "if somebody's saying he's going to be a serial killer, he's not," Brown said. The problem of course, is that "it's not true."

"We have history of exactly that sort of thing, where they do claim it and they are it," Brown said. "They're trying to practice the concept...people say, 'I want to be something, so let me go out and say (I am) something, and then after a while I get comfortable with the concept then I can be it.'

"People do that for other professions. Why not for serial killers?" Brown asked.

But at least one St. Charles-area detective did take the man's claims seriously enough that he sought a second opinion from Brown. The detective, who spoke to the magazine on condition that he not be identified, was particularly troubled by the man's apparent obsession with a sexual fantasy of watching young men and boys struggle while drowning.

In fact, the man, who spent his days working in a funeral parlor, a perfect job for a man fascinated with death, was a regular on a Web site devoted to a subculture of fetishists who get their sexual thrills from drowning fantasies.

The cop asked Brown to see if she could hook up with the man on the Web site and determine whether he was serious or not, Brown said. "I was very impressed," Brown said with the cop's proactive stance. "Instead of saying, 'Well, he hasn't committed a crime yet'...(he) said check it out and that's exactly what we did."