The murder of Susan Jaeger

When Susan Jaeger vanished from a tent near Three Forks on June 25, 1973, there was no witness, no useful physical evidence, and no obvious suspect, only a slit in the canvas and an empty sleeping bag. The kidnapper soon began calling the Jaeger family, demanding ransom and proving he had taken Susan by describing personal details about her, but he never completed an exchange and the case went cold. Because there was so little to work with, the FBI turned to a method it was still inventing. Agents Howard Teten and Patrick Mullany at the FBI training academy in Quantico, who were pioneering the discipline that would become criminal profiling, built a psychological portrait of the offender for the Montana investigators: a young white man, local to the rural area, physically capable, likely with military or telecommunications training, and a social loner. The profile fit a 23-year-old Manhattan-area building contractor and Vietnam veteran named David Meirhofer, who had already drawn the attention of the lead local FBI agent, Pete Dunbar, but there was not enough to charge him, and a polygraph and even a session under truth serum had seemed to clear him. The decisive break was engineered by Susan's mother. Exactly one year after the abduction, in the small hours of June 25, 1974, the kidnapper telephoned the Jaeger home, apparently expecting to torment a grieving mother. Instead, Marietta Jaeger, who had spent the year preparing herself, stayed calm and kept him talking for roughly an hour on a line the FBI was monitoring and recording. She told him she had been praying for him and asked what she could do to help him, and the caller, disarmed, broke down crying and let slip details he had not meant to reveal. He had made the call using telephone skills from his military service, even tapping into a line to place it, but the recording was enough for the FBI to perform an audiophonoscopic voice comparison that matched the caller to Meirhofer. Marietta then traveled to Montana and confronted Meirhofer face to face at her lawyer's office in September 1974, telling him plainly that she knew what he had done, an encounter investigators believed helped rattle him. With the voice evidence and other developments closing in, Meirhofer was taken into custody, and on September 29, 1974, confronted with what investigators had assembled, he confessed not only to the murders of Susan Jaeger and Sandra Dykman Smallegan but also to two killings from years earlier, those of 13-year-old Bernard Poelman in 1967 and 12-year-old Michael Raney in 1968. He led or pointed investigators toward where remains had been left at an abandoned ranch in the Horseshoe Hills. Roughly four hours after confessing, Meirhofer was found dead in his cell in the Gallatin County jail, having hanged himself with a towel; he was never tried in court, but his confession and the corroborating evidence officially identified him as the killer in all four cases. Marietta Jaeger went on to become a prominent advocate against the death penalty and for restorative justice, speaking publicly about forgiving her daughter's killer. The case is repeatedly described as the first in which the FBI's nascent behavioral-profiling method was used to actively pursue a serial murderer.