The Boy Who Learned To Kill - The Montie Rissell Murders
The Making of a Killer
The rain hammered Alexandria, Virginia, that night in August 1976, turning the parking lot outside the apartment complex into a mirror of sodium vapor lights. Twenty-two-year-old Aura Marina Gabor walked toward her car, keys in hand, unaware that a seventeen-year-old boy was watching from the shadows. Montie Ralph Rissell had already decided she was going to die.
He approached with the practiced ease of someone who understood vulnerability. A polite request. A sudden movement. She never reached her car. Within hours, Gabor's body would be found in a wooded area, raped and strangled, her death the opening act in a killing spree that would claim five lives in less than a year. But to understand the monster that Montie Rissell became, you have to go back further—to the quiet rot that began long before any blood was spilled.
Rissell was born in 1959 in Wellington, Kansas, into a family already fracturing at the seams. His parents divorced when he was seven, and his mother moved the children to Sacramento, California. The West Coast offered no salvation. By age twelve, Rissell had committed his first rape—an act of violence that should have triggered every alarm in a broken juvenile justice system that instead treated it as a behavioral hiccup. Counseling. Probation. The machinery of consequence ground forward without teeth.
At fourteen, he was in custody again for another sexual assault. The pattern was forming—predatory, calculated, escalating. But Rissell was smart, articulate, capable of mimicking contrition. He knew how to work the angles. By fifteen, he'd been convicted of car theft and sent to a treatment facility, a halfway house between accountability and the abyss. When he turned sixteen, his mother remarried and moved the family to Virginia, hoping geography might cure what psychology could not.
It didn't. Rissell later claimed the move shattered him, ripping him away from a girlfriend he'd fixated on with the obsessive intensity that would later define his murders. Whether that relationship was real or a convenient fiction, the narrative he constructed was clear: women betrayed him, and betrayal demanded retribution.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Montie Rissell remains incarcerated at Pocahontas State Correctional Center in Virginia, serving five consecutive life sentences. Now in his sixties, he became one of the first serial killers interviewed for the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, providing insights that helped shape modern criminal profiling. He has been denied parole multiple times.
The Hunting Season
After Gabor's murder, Rissell didn't stop. He couldn't. The kill had scratched an itch he'd been nursing since puberty, and now the compulsion had teeth. In March 1977, he abducted twenty-six-year-old Gladys Ross Bradley from a shopping center parking lot in broad daylight. She was a mother, a woman with a life that extended beyond the fifteen square feet where Rissell dragged her into his car. None of that mattered to him. He drove her to a secluded area, raped her, then strangled her with his hands. Her body was found days later, discarded like refuse.
April brought Jeanette McClelland, a thirty-four-year-old prostitute working the neon-lit corridors of Alexandria's sex trade. Rissell picked her up under the pretense of business, then drove her into the woods. Unlike his previous victims, McClelland knew the world Rissell inhabited—the transactional violence, the razor's edge between survival and obliteration. It didn't save her. He raped her, strangled her, and left her body to decompose among the trees.
By May, Rissell was hunting with the efficiency of a predator who'd found his rhythm. Ursula Miltenberger, a twenty-one-year-old German woman living in the United States, became his fourth victim. He followed the same script: abduction, sexual assault, strangulation. Her body joined the others in the anonymous grave of wooded clearings and overgrown ditches.
His final victim was Patricia Magers, a thirty-one-year-old woman he encountered in a chance meeting that turned lethal. By this point, Rissell had refined his methodology. He knew how to identify vulnerability, how to exploit trust, how to kill without hesitation. Magers' murder in September 1977 marked the end of his spree—not because he chose to stop, but because the walls were closing in.
MACABRE LEGACY Rissell's case became foundational material for the FBI's Criminal Profiling Program. His interviews with agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas were featured in the Netflix series 'Mindhunter,' where actor Sam Strike portrayed him. The chilling accuracy of his self-analysis—describing his victims as objects, his crimes as experiments—helped establish the psychological framework still used to track serial offenders today.
The Unraveling
The cracks in Rissell's facade appeared long before his arrest. He was living a double life: the clean-cut teenager who showed up for his job at a local hospital, and the nocturnal predator prowling parking lots and commercial strips. But arrogance and impulse are poor bedfellows. In late 1977, Rissell attempted to abduct another woman at gunpoint. This time, she fought back. She screamed. She ran. And she survived.
Her description—young, white, dark hair, driving a specific make and model—gave investigators the thread they needed. Police began connecting dots: unsolved murders, similar MOs, a geographic cluster around Alexandria. When they pulled Rissell in for questioning, he didn't crumble immediately. He was too smart for that, too practiced in the art of deflection. But the evidence was piling up, and Rissell knew it. Faced with forensic links and witness testimony, he made a calculation: confess, control the narrative, avoid the death penalty.
In a series of chilling interviews, Rissell laid bare the mechanics of his crimes with a detachment that bordered on clinical. He described selecting victims, the process of abduction, the sexual assaults, the strangulations. He spoke about his victims not as people but as variables in an equation he was solving. During one interrogation, he admitted that he sometimes talked to his victims before killing them, gauging their fear, savoring the control. One woman, he said, made him angry by not showing enough terror. So he killed her anyway.
The confessions were a prosecutor's dream and a psychologist's nightmare. Rissell's calm recitation of atrocities revealed a mind that had compartmentalized violence into something almost routine. He expressed no remorse, only a vague acknowledgment that he'd been caught. In 1978, at just nineteen years old, Montie Rissell was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences. The courtroom was packed with family members of the victims, their grief a palpable weight that Rissell seemed incapable of registering.
SIMILAR CASES Rissell's youth and rapid escalation echo cases like Edmund Kemper, who began killing at fifteen, and Jesse Pomeroy, who terrorized Boston in the 1870s as a teenage sadist. All three shared early warning signs—childhood violence, sexual deviance, parental instability—that went unaddressed until bodies started appearing. The pattern underscores the grim truth: serial killers are often made, not born, and the warning signs are written in blood long before anyone bothers to read them.
The Aftermath
Prisons are supposed to be the end of the story, the place where monsters go to rot in obscurity. But for Montie Rissell, incarceration became a second act. In the early 1980s, FBI agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas—pioneers of criminal profiling—descended on Virginia's correctional system looking for subjects. They wanted to understand the criminal mind from the inside, to decode the architecture of psychopathy. Rissell was a goldmine.
John Douglas and Robert Ressler, the founders of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit
Over multiple interviews, Rissell dissected his crimes with the precision of a surgeon. He explained his victim selection: women who reminded him of past rejections, women who were vulnerable, women who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. He described the thrill of control, the way power over life and death became intoxicating. He admitted that he sometimes let victims believe they might survive, prolonging their terror for his own gratification. The agents listened, recorded, analyzed. Rissell's words became data points in a revolutionary approach to understanding serial murder.
But beneath the clinical exchange was a darker truth: Rissell was still performing. He enjoyed the attention, the intellectual sparring, the sense that he was contributing to something larger than himself. In one interview, he mused that if he'd had better guidance as a teenager, he might have channeled his impulses differently. It was a hollow gesture at introspection, a performance of regret without the substance. The victims' families didn't need his theories. They needed their daughters, mothers, and sisters back.
Decades later, Rissell remains behind bars, a relic of an era when serial killers were still novel enough to fascinate rather than horrify. His parole hearings have been perfunctory rejections, the state's acknowledgment that some debts can never be repaid. The families of Aura Gabor, Gladys Bradley, Jeanette McClelland, Ursula Miltenberger, and Patricia Magers live with an absence that no amount of profiling or pop culture retrospectives can fill.
In the end, Montie Rissell is a cautionary tale about the failures that create killers: a juvenile justice system that treated rape like shoplifting, a mental health apparatus that couldn't distinguish between troubled and dangerous, a society that only paid attention when the body count became undeniable. He was seventeen when he started killing. Seventeen. And by the time anyone stopped him, five women were dead, their lives reduced to case files and cautionary tales in FBI training manuals.
The rain still falls in Alexandria. The parking lots still glow under sodium vapor lights. And somewhere in a Virginia prison, an old man who once believed he was invincible sits in a cell, his legacy nothing more than the ghosts of the women he destroyed and the warning his crimes should have been.
THE PROFILING REVOLUTION The FBI's interviews with Rissell and other incarcerated killers in the late 1970s and early 1980s formed the backbone of modern criminal profiling. The technique—analyzing crime scene behavior to predict offender characteristics—became standard in law enforcement worldwide. Rissell's case specifically contributed to understanding how juvenile offenders escalate, the role of rejection in triggering violence, and the psychological detachment that allows serial killers to function in society while committing atrocities.
Timeline of Events
1959: Montie Ralph Rissell born in Wellington, Kansas
1966: Parents divorce; Rissell moves to Sacramento, California with his mother
1971: At age 12, commits first rape; placed on probation
1973: Second sexual assault at age 14
1974: Convicted of car theft; sent to treatment facility
1975: Family moves to Alexandria, Virginia
August 1976: Murders Aura Marina Gabor (victim #1)
March 1977: Murders Gladys Ross Bradley (victim #2)
April 1977: Murders Jeanette McClelland (victim #3)
May 1977: Murders Ursula Miltenberger (victim #4)
September 1977: Murders Patricia Magers (victim #5)
Late 1977: Arrested after failed abduction attempt
1978: Confesses to all five murders; sentenced to five consecutive life sentences
1980s: Interviewed by FBI agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas for criminal profiling research
2017-2019: Featured in Netflix series 'Mindhunter'
Present: Remains incarcerated at Pocahontas State Correctional Center, Virginia; repeatedly denied parole
Sources
Primary source: FBI Behavioral Science Unit interviews with Montie Rissell, conducted by Special Agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas, 1980-1981. Referenced in Ressler, R. K., & Shachtman, T. (1992). Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI. St. Martin's Press.
News article: Shenk, J. W. (1995, May). "The Young and the Deadly: A Look Inside the Mind of a Teen Killer." The Washington Post Magazine. Coverage of juvenile serial offenders including extensive profile of Rissell's crimes and psychological evaluation.
Secondary/Contextual source: Hickey, E. W. (2015). Serial Murderers and Their Victims (7th ed.). Cengage Learning. Chapter analysis of Rissell's case within broader study of juvenile serial offenders and escalation patterns in sexual homicide.
American Killers - Volume 2: Nine Horrific True Crime Stories From The USA...And How They Were Solved. Available on Amazon Kindle $3.99
Blog written by Guy Hadleigh, author of Crimes That Time Forgot, the Macabre True Crimes & Mysteries Series, the Murder and Mayhem Series, the British Killers Series, the Infamous True Crimes and Trials Series - and many more!