David Gail Meirhofer was born in 1949 and grew up in Manhattan, Montana, a small town in the Gallatin valley. He was a Vietnam veteran, a carpenter, quiet and polite, and regarded locally as an entirely ordinary young man.
He killed Bernard Poelman, thirteen, in 1967, Sandra Smallegan, nineteen, in 1974, and two children, Michael Raney and, on July 24, 1973, seven-year-old Susan Jaeger, taken from a tent at a campsite in the Missouri Headwaters State Park while her family slept.
The Jaeger case brought in the FBI's Howard Teten and Pat Mullany, who were then developing what became behavioural profiling. They told the Gallatin County investigators to expect a young local white man, a Vietnam veteran, who lived alone, who would take trophies, and who would very probably contact the family. Meirhofer had already been interviewed and cleared on a polygraph.
A year to the day after the abduction, a man telephoned the Jaeger house. Susan's mother Marietta kept him talking for over an hour, and rather than accusing him she expressed sympathy for him, at which he broke down and wept. The call was recorded and traced, and voice comparison and Marietta Jaeger's own identification of the voice at a later meeting made the case. He was arrested on September 27, 1974, confessed to all four murders, and hanged himself in his cell within hours.
Marietta Jaeger became a prominent campaigner against the death penalty. The case is cited as the first in which FBI profiling contributed materially to an arrest.