COLUMN ONE : Killers to the Police: Catch Me if You Can : From Jack the Ripper to the Unabomber, some criminals like to taunt their pursuers. But can such brinkmanship lead to their downfall?

Only so often does a killer like the Unabomber come along who has the desire--and the chutzpah--to play hob with the law.

When Edmund Kemper III was being sought for a series of slayings in the early 1970s in Santa Cruz, the 6-foot-9 construction worker would boldly visit cafes that police officers frequented and eavesdrop on their conversations. At one point, he even phoned one of the detectives working the case.

In a recent spate of serial killings along South Florida’s Tamiami Trail, the killer scrawled a message to police on the back of victim No. 3. It said, in effect: Catch me if you can.

The mysterious and sadistic Zodiac killer from the San Francisco Bay Area, who killed at least six and as many as 37 people between 1966 and 1974, sent spine-tingling letters with coded clues to newspapers and detectives. In one of his last known missives, he told a San Francisco newspaper: “If I do not see this note in your paper, I will do something nasty, which you know I’m capable of doing.”

“It was him saying, ‘I’ll match wits with you any day,’ ” recalled former Napa County sheriff’s Capt. Kenneth A. Narlow, who retired having never enjoyed the satisfaction of jailing his most infamous quarry.

With the Unabomber’s recent threat to blow up an airliner out of Los Angeles International Airport, the elusive letter bomber underscored his membership in this small, if ignominious, fraternity: Those who commit crimes and publicly bait law enforcement. Since 1978, when he started a string of 16 mail bombings, three of them fatal, the Unabomber has shown, among other things, that he is an accomplished tease.

“He’s proven over the last 17 years that he’s very careful, very thorough, and very cunning,” said James A. Fox, professor of criminology at Northeastern University.

Although experts do not know why the Unabomber has gone so public lately, they speculated that the motivation may be linked to the unique relationship a criminal may feel he has with those he has eluded. While taking great pride in avoiding capture, experts say, criminals who taunt also begin to feel as if they and law enforcement are part of a “special” group.

Forensic psychologist J. Reid Meloy described it as “both a desire to link with law enforcement and a desire to devalue it.”

On the other hand, the taunting could also simply be an expression of hubris--the criminal believes his system of communication is foolproof. Or it could be a need to ratchet up the risk because the contest with police has become as intriguing as the crime itself.

Or even more simplistic, experts say, it could be a way of getting more attention. When they are caught, most serial killers usually have a stash of newspaper clippings about their crimes. The Unabomber followed his threat against LAX with the claim that it was just a prank to remind people that he was still around.

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But such temerity can sometimes come with a high price: The unofficial record suggests that most of those who mock law enforcement publicly do not enjoy the last laugh.

“These kind of individuals have illusions of grandeur; they believe they have a unique mental capacity beyond mere mortals,” said Charles Bahn, a forensic psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “The problem is, they don’t give the police credit for being smart too.”

Making contact with the hunter either directly or indirectly adds an unnecessary layer of risk to an enterprise--crime--that is rife with risks to begin with. Success requiresshrewdness, which requires above-average intelligence, which most serial killers do not possess, experts say.

Studies have shown that the average IQ of convicted criminals is 90, roughly 10 points below that of an average member of the public. Contrary to the way they are depicted in television movies, most serial killers are “pretty ordinary,” said Northeastern’s Fox.

In addition, studies suggest that only about one-quarter of prison inmates are psychopathic, a condition that experts say is a necessary precursor to being narcissistic enough to engage in a public cat-and-mouse game with police.

Rare, but still more common than public taunts, is when a killer sends private, subtle, crime-scene messages to police. The Boston Strangler and the Hillside Stranglers, who killed nine women in Glendale in 1978 and 1979, posed their victims for maximum shock value. The suspect in the 30-year-old Boston Strangler case, Albert DeSalvo, confessed to the 13 slayings. He was sentenced to prison on other charges and was stabbed to death by fellow inmates in 1973. In the Hillside case, Angelo Buono was sentenced to life in prison and Kenneth Bianchi is in prison but eligible for parole in 2005.

Other killers have tied greeting cards or notes onto the limbs of their victims. The Tamiami Strangler wrote a taunting message on the third of his six victims, the first of whom was found Sept. 17. Two weeks ago, a suspect, Rory E. Conde, 30, was taken into custody in connection with the killings.

“Yeah, he wrote a catch-me-if-you-can message, and we did. That one’s closed,” Metro-Dade police Sgt. Felix Jimenez said last week with palpable satisfaction.

A desire for notoriety, and a compulsion for brinkmanship, may also have led to the downfall of Kemper, the Santa Cruz killer. Although psychoanalyzing criminals is a subtle, speculative science--it’s difficult enough to climb into the mind of the average citizen--Kemper seemed to have developed the odd kinship with the police that typifies hunter/hunted relationships.

Even as they were pursuing him for a series of murder-mutilations, Kemper was fascinated by how the police work, to the point of frequenting their haunts. Why?

On some level, experts say, the quarry desires to be captured by his or her antagonists, to confide in them. Kemper’s case appears to illustrate that: After killing his mother on Good Friday, 1973, he simply telephoned the police and turned himself in, saying it was time to stop killing.

Kemper is in a state facility for the criminally insane in Vacaville.

“One part of this is, ‘Stop me before I do it again,’ ” said psychologist Bahn.

By comparison, investigators in the nation’s longest-running and biggest serial murder case, the Green River slayer in Washington state, can only wish they had had some contact with their killer. During the mid-1980s, he is believed to have slain at least 49 women. He operated with impunity as investigators identified “persons of interest,” but had a paucity of physical evidence and not a single eyewitness. He has never been caught.

While some law enforcement officials say taunting has little or no effect on the way they view a case--”we don’t take it personally,” one homicide detective said--the Unabomber does seem to have provided additional incentive for federal agents.

“They’ve been scratching hard for this guy for a long time,” said Bob Holland, a former agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who worked on the Unabomber case until he retired. “The incentive is there anyway. But when they taunt you, it increases several times-fold.

“None of them feel like they are ever going to get caught, and this guy is as sharp as any of them,” Holland added. “It’s as if he knows each step of the investigative process, what we’re looking for.”

There are, of course, those storied cases in which killers have taunted without consequence, dating back more than a century to Jack the Ripper. The British serial killer, who was never identified, tormented his pursuers at Scotland Yard by mailing blood-steeped clothing from his victims to a London newspaper.

Once, the Ripper mailed a letter--as well as half a kidney from one of his victims--to the head of the White Chapel Vigilante Committee, the equivalent of Neighborhood Watch. Filled with spelling errors and dated “From hell,” the Ripper’s haunting note said: “I send you half the kidney I took from one woman. Preserved it for you. The other piece I fried and ate. It was very nice. I may send you the bloody knife that took it out if you only wait a while.” It was signed, “Catch me when you can.”

The Ripper’s ability--and willingness--to dare the authorities served as a sinister reminder to the police and the public that they were powerless to stop him.

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Given the advances in sleuthing and clue retrieval in the last 100 years, the Ripper’s antics might have ended in his capture if he tried them today. That, in part, is what makes the Unabomber’s tactics all the more intriguing.

“With the Unabomber, you’re dealing with a very bright criminal, which is unusual in and of itself,” forensic psychologist Meloy said. “He’s been able to front off what is probably the most sophisticated criminal investigating agency in the world for 18 years. It’s prima facie evidence that this man is pretty bright.”

The Unabomber also epitomizes the way “pathologically narcissistic individuals take contemptuous delight . . . in devaluing authority,” Meloy said. “With a psychopathic individual, his Achilles’ heel is his sense of impunity. I’m special. I’m brighter than anybody else. I’m more shrewd. I’m more cunning. All those grandiose notions, which are, of course, reinforced when you have a [such a long record].”

The Unabomber’s recent flurry of letters was reminiscent of the Zodiac, who was never caught. He was another killer believed to have been of above-average intelligence who publicly toyed with his would-be captors. In what would become his calling card, Zodiac reported his crimes himself, telephoning investigators and ridiculing them. He dispatched letters to police and newspapers, boasting of the details of his killings and threatening future ones.

By Oct. 11, 1969, when the Zodiac killed a San Francisco cabdriver, he had been linked to the slayings of a teen-aged couple, a waitress and two female students, and the assaults of two young men, all from the Bay Area.

Before fleeing the scene of the cabby’s murder, the Zodiac took his wallet and tore off a scrap of his bloodied shirttail, pieces of which he included with subsequent letters. Three days after the cabdriver’s death, a San Francisco newspaper received a piece of the crimson-stained shirt, along with this:

“This is the Zodiac speaking. I am the murderer of the taxi driver. . . . I am the same man who did in the people in the North Bay Area. The S.F. police would have caught me last night if they had searched the park properly instead of holding road races with their motorcycles seeing who could make the most noise. The car drivers should have just parked their cars & sat there quietly waiting for me to come out of cover.

“School children make nice targets,” he said in a cryptic postscript that never materialized. “I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire and then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.”

After an unsettling three-year silence, the Zodiac’s last communication came in January, 1974, when a San Francisco newspaper received this message along with a threat of doing something “nasty” if the letter wasn’t published: “I saw & think The Exorcist was the best saterical comidy [sic] that I have ever seen. Signed, yours truely [sic]: He plunged himself into the billowy wave and an echo from the sucide’s [sic] grave, titwillo titwillo titwillo.”

At the bottom of the letter, he included the “score”: Me-37, SFPD-0.

Although there are profound differences, so struck was Narlow by the similarities between the Unabomber’s tactics and those of the Zodiac that he called the FBI and suggested they investigate whether the cases could be related.

“I thought there was enough similarity in the taunting,” said Narlow, who worked the Zodiac case for years before retiring in 1987. At times, Narlow said, he would sit and stare at the pile of letters Zodiac had sent him and the other investigators. He said he did not take the insults personally, but other investigators did.

“It’s a game of chess,” Narlow said. “It’s not a grudge match; it’s not like I’m going to go out and duke this guy. It’s just that you know there are clues in his messages and you just hope you’re smart enough to pick them out.”