A member of the Investigative Support Unit, McCaleb helped focus the investigations of the local police. Media-savvy and always quotable, he often took the spotlight-a move that sometimes rubbed the locals and his supervisors in Quantico, Va., the wrong way.
But it has been more than two years since he has made even a blip on the public radar screen. These days, McCaleb no longer carries a badge or a gun. He says he doesn’t even own a standard-issue navy blue FBI suit anymore.
More often than not he wears old blue jeans and torn T-shirts and can be found restoring his 42-foot fishing boat,
Recovering from heart transplant surgery, McCaleb says hunting serial killers and rapists is the furthest thing from his mind these days.
McCaleb, 46, says he gave his heart to the bureau-his doctors say severe stress triggered a virus that led to the near-fatal weakening of his original heart-but doesn’t miss it.
“When you go through something like this, it changes you more than just physically,” he said in an interview last week. “It puts things in perspective. Those FBI days seem like a long time ago. I’ve got a new start now. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with it but I’m not too worried. I’ll find something.”
McCaleb almost didn’t get the new start. Because he has a blood type found in less than one percent of the population, his wait for a suitable heart lasted almost two years.
“He really strung it out,” said Dr. Bonnie Fox, the surgeon who performed the transplant. “We probably would have lost him or he would have become too weak to undergo the surgery if we’d had to wait much longer.”
McCaleb is out of the hospital and already physically active after only eight weeks. He says that only on occasion does he think about the adrenaline-pumping investigations that once occupied him.
The former agent’s case list reads like a Who’s Who of a macabre walk of fame. Among the cases he worked locally were the Nightstalker and Poet investigations and he took key roles in the hunts for the Code Killer, Sunset Strip Strangler and Luther Hatch, who became known after his arrest as the Cemetery Man because of his visits to the graves of his victims.
McCaleb had been a profiler in the unit’s Quantico base for several years. He specialized in West Coast cases and was flown to Los Angeles often to assist local police in investigations. Finally, the unit’s supervisors decided to create a satellite post here and McCaleb was returned to his native Los Angeles to work out of the FBI field office in Westwood. The move put him closer to many of the investigations in which the FBI was called upon for assistance.
Not all of the investigations were successful and eventually the stress took its toll. McCaleb suffered a heart attack while working late one evening in the local field office. He was found by a night janitor, who was credited with saving the agent’s life. Doctors determined McCaleb suffered from advanced cardiomyopathy-a weakening of the heart’s muscles-and placed him on a transplant list. As he waited, he was given a disability retirement by the bureau.
He traded his bureau pager for a hospital pager and on Feb. 9 it sounded; a heart from a donor with matching blood was available. After six hours of surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the donor’s heart was beating in McCaleb’s chest.
McCaleb is unsure what he’ll do with his new life-other than go fishing. He has had offers from former agents and police detectives to join them as a private investigator or security consultant. But his focus so far has been on restoring
“At the moment I’m content to take things a little at a time,” he said. “I’m not worried too much about what’s ahead.”
His regrets are few but like all retired investigators and fishermen, McCaleb laments the ones that got away.
“I wish I had solved all the cases,” he said. “I hated it when somebody got away. I still do.”
For a moment McCaleb studied the photo they had used with the story. It was an old head shot they had used many times before during his days with the bureau. His eyes stared boldly into the camera.
When Keisha Russell had come around to do the story on him, she had come with a photographer. But McCaleb wouldn’t let them take a fresh shot. He told them to use one of the old photos. He didn’t want anybody to see the way he looked now.
