Full text of "The Serial Killer Files"

See other formats

e Who, What, 
ere, How, and Why 
of the World's 
ost Terrifying 



CONTENTS 



Title Page 
Dedication 
Half Title Page 
Introduction 

ONE: WHAT IT MEANS 
Origin of the Term 
Definitions 

Categories of Carnage: Serial/Mass/Spree 
Psychopath vs. Psychotic 
Psychopaths: The Mask of Sanity 
“Moral Insanity” 

Psychotics: The Living Nightmare 
Beyond Madness 
TWO: WHO THEY ARE 
Ten Traits of Serial Killers 
Warning Signs 

How Smart Are Serial Killers? 

Male and Female 



Angels of Death 



Black Widows 



Deadlier Than the Male 
Black and White 
Young and Old 
Straight and Gay 
Bloodthirsty “Bi”s 
Partners in Crimes 
Folie a Deux 
Killer Couples 

The Family That Slays Together 

Married with Children 

Bluebeards 

Work and Play 

Uncivil Servants 

Killer Cops 

Medical Monsters 

Nicknames 

Serial Killers International 

THREE: A HISTORY OF SERIAL MURDER 



Serial Murder: Old as Sin 



Grim Fairy Tales 



Serial Slaughter Through the Ages 

FOUR: GALLERY OF EVIL— TEN AMERICAN MONSTERS 

Lydia Sherman 

Belle Gunness 

H. H. Holmes 

Albert Fish 

Earle Leonard Nelson 

Edward Gein 

Harvey Murray Glatman 

John Wayne Gacy 

Gary Heidnik 

Jeffrey Dahmer 

FIVE: SEX AND THE SERIAL KILLER 

Perversions 

Sadism 

The Man Who Invented Sadism 
Science Looks at Sadism 
Wilhelm Stekel 



de River and Reinhardt 



Disciples of De Sade 



Dominance 

Fetishism 

Transvestism 

Vampirism 

Cannibalism 

Necrophilia 

Pedophilia 

Gerontophilia 

The World’s Worst Pervert 

SIX: WHY THEY KILL 

Atavism 

Brain Damage 

Child Abuse 

Mother Hate 

Bad Seed 

Mean Genes 

Adoption 

Fantasy 



Bad Books, Malignant Movies, Vile Videos 



Pornography 



Profit 

Celebrity 

Copycats 

The Devil Made Me Do It 
SEVEN: EVIL IN ACTION 
Triggers 

Hunting Grounds 
Prey 

Targets of Opportunity 
Snares 

“Wanted: Well-Built Man for Slaughter” 

Signature, Ritual, MO 

Methods 

Rippers 

Stranglers 

Ax Murderers 

Poisoners 

Shooters 



Taunts 



Escalation 



Torture 

Trophies 

Disposal 

EIGHT: HOW IT ENDS 

Profiling 

Origins 

The Mind Hunters 

How It Works 

Capture 

Psychics 

Suicide 

Punishment 

NGRI (Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity) 
Unsolved 

NINE: SERIAL KILLER CULTURE 

Fun with Serial Killers 

Art 

Music 



Film 



Literature 



Humor 
Murderbilia 
Tourist Spots 
Groupies 

Internet Resources 

Lethal Lives: A True-Crime Bibliography 

About the Author 

Also by Harold Schechter 

Copyright 



THE 

SERIAL KILLER 
LILES 

The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World’s Most Terrifying Murderers 



Harold Schechter 




for 

Joe and Whitney 




THE 

SERIAL KILLER 
LILES 




INTRODUCTION 



There are people who genuinely believe that serial killers are a strictly contemporary phenomenon, a 
symptom of something horribly amiss in the moral fabric of modern American society. The public’s 
intense fascination with sensational crime (demonstrated so dramatically in the fall of 2002, when the 
airwaves were filled with twenty-four/seven coverage of the so-called Beltway Sniper rampage in the 
Washington, DC area) has likewise been viewed as depressing proof of our supposed cultural decline. 

Since the purpose of this book is to provide the most accurate information about the subject of serial 
killers, let’s begin by considering a pair of images that should help correct these common 
misconceptions. 

The first, at the top of the following page, shows a child- snatcher who has just decapitated a little victim 
after assaulting her in the woods. The picture comes from a nineteenth-century publication called 
th ^Illustrated Police News of London. Like today’s supermarket tabloids, this weekly periodical ran 
stories about all sorts of bizarre phenomena, from ghostly visitations to encounters with sea serpents. Its 
real speciality, however, was grisly true crime — real-life accounts of atrocious murders, accompanied by 
graphic illustrations. Largely because of its emphasis on gore, th ^Illustrated Police News had the highest 
circulation of any publication in Victorian England. 




The second image, below, is by the famous Mexican artist, Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913). It 



shows a homicidal maniac named Francisco Guerrero, the “slitter of women’s throats,” committing an 
atrocity upon an unnamed victim in 1887. This illustration was one of thousands Posada produced for 
mass reproduction in the form of “broadsides” — one-page accounts of sensational news events, the vast 
bulk of which dealt with shockingly violent crimes. 




Though Posada has long been recognized as a significant artist, neither his illustration nor the 
anonymous one from th ^Illustrated Police News was meant to be great art. They were created strictly for 
commercial purposes: to sell papers by appealing to the public’s taste for gruesome horror. Certainly, 
they weren’t supposed to be educational in any way. Nevertheless, there are several lessons we can draw 
from them: 



Serial killers have always existed. They just weren’t called serial killers in the old days. Back when these 
two pictures were first published, for example, newspapers often described such criminals in 
supernatural terms: “murder fiends” or “bloodthirsty monsters” or “devils in human shape.” 



In addition to the legendary ones that everyone has heard about, like Jack the Ripper (an exact 
contemporary of the two long-forgotten murderers in these illustrations), there are many serial killers 
who, for whatever reason, never achieve lasting notoriety . Lots of them, however, commit crimes every 
bit as hideous as those perpetrated by more infamous killers. 



Serial murderers aren ’ t limited to the United States . They can be found in England, in Mexico — in fact, 
all around the world. 



There’s nothing new about the interest in serial murder. People have always been fascinated by it. They 
want every last grisly detail, preferably with accompanying pictures. Nowadays we have twenty-four- 




hour news channels to satisfy that need. A hundred years ago, when cheap, mass-produced printing was 
state-of-the-art, there were illustrated tabloids. Only the technology has changed. The public’s appetite 
for sensational true-crime stories has remained exactly the same. 



This final point offers further food for thought. Given how deeply unsettling the subject of serial murder 
is, it’s legitimate to wonderw/iy it has always possessed such popular appeal. Why do so many people 
want to see pictures, hear stories, and read books (like this one) about such morbid matters? 

One clue to this mystery is suggested by the great nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson. 
Though the popular image of the “Belle of Amherst” is of a prim Victorian spinster, Dickinson was, in 
fact, a tough-minded person with a taste for newspaper sensationalism (in one of her letters, she 
confesses her fondness for stories about fatal train wrecks and factory accidents where “gentlemen get 
their heads cut off quite informally”). One of Dickinson’s most memorable poems, “One need not be a 
Chamber — to be Haunted,” deals with the fact that everyone, even the most law-abiding person, 
possesses a hidden side that is fascinated with the forbidden. One stanza from the poem goes: 



Ourself behind ourself concealed — 
Should startle most — 

Assassin hid in our Apartment 
Be Horror’s least. 



Dickinson is referring to the part of the human personality that psychologists call “the shadow”: the 
brutish Mr. Hyde that lurks beneath the proper veneer of our civilized selves and that loves to dream 
about all kinds of taboo experiences. 

Of course, to say that all of us have a shadow side that revels in lawless fantasies does not mean that 
everyone is a potential serial killer. There is a world of difference between thought and action, between 
dreaming and doing. Indeed, one of the distinguishing characteristics of serial killers is precisely their 
willingness to step over that line and turn their twisted fantasies into nightmarish reality. Plato made this 
point several thousand years ago when he wrote: “The virtuous man is content to dream what the wicked 
man really does.” 



The doings of those supremely wicked people we call serial killers — and the dark dreams they inspire in 
the rest of us — are the subject of this book. 




WHAT IT MEANS 



ORIGIN OF THE TERM 

One reason people tend to think that serial murder is a frighteningly new phenomenon is that, until about 
twenty years ago, no one ever heard of such a thing. For most of the twentieth century, the news media 
never referred to serial killers. But that isn’t because homicidal psychos didn’t exist in the past. 

Indeed, one of the most infamous American serial killers of all time, Albert Fish, committed his 
atrocities around the time of the Great Depression. After his arrest, his unspeakable crimes were covered 
extensively by the newspapers. Nowhere, however, is Fish described as a serial killer. The reason is 
simple. The phrase hadn’t been invented yet. Back then, the type of crime we now define as serial 
murder was simply lumped together under the general rubric of “mass murder.” 

Credit for coining the phrase “serial killer” is commonly given to former FBI Special Agent Robert 
Ressler, one of the founding members of the Bureau’s elite Behavioral Science Unit (aka the “Mind 
Hunters” or the “Psyche Squad”). Along with his colleague John Douglas, Ressler served as a model for 
the character Jack Crawford in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter trilogy. 

In his 1992 memoir , Whoever Fights Monsters, Ressler writes that, in the early 1970s, while attending a 
weeklong conference at the British police academy, he heard a fellow participant refer to “crimes in 
series,” meaning “a series of rapes, burglaries, arsons, or murders.” Ressler was so impressed by the 
phrase that, upon returning to Quantico, he began to use the term “serial killer” in his own lectures to 
describe “the killing of those who do one murder, then another and another in a fairly repetitive way.” 




TO BUDD GIRL’S SLAYER 






itf.-L'iS Ml! RUHR in 



ST At***"*™*, 
Ch-c HiArity boudbini 



« ■df-k-rtrd , 1 j ~T l :lilTtlt 



v iUiW 



rm 



iniiu.rjn — p vi W? in tiurmr to Ihr ■ uitilHmE bulchrry ft J rri H 
pruti -fr* r Qi-nsi.ii T, in bin fiulTy IlinuYtT Pirryt — wu nimbi 

.-.iK 11 to Albert IL. Kish. 66, \'Sr ir/suspy. jtrt4pnk«n inir uim hu innfrMtdi '’,-i 
nil. nl^rm.,: .rut diwTitm t-friii j <!tiw Sudd. 



iirmujn,. - 5 

f i 8 



In thinking up the term, Ressler also says he had in mind the movie-matinee adventure serials of his 
boyhood :Spy Smasher, Flash Gordon, The Masked Marvel, etc. Like a child looking forward to the 
latest installment of his favorite cliffhanger, the serial killer can’t wait to commit his next atrocity. 



That is Ressler’ s version of how he came to invent the phrase that has now become such a vital part of 




our language. There is just one problem with the story. There is documented proof that the expression 
“serial murderer” existed at least a dozen years before Ressler supposedly invented it. 

According to Jesse Sheidlower, editor of the major new revision of th ^Oxford English Dictionary, the 
term can be traced as far back as 1961, where it appears in a citation fromM erriam- Webster ’s Third New 
International Dictionary. The quote, which is attributed to the German critic Siegfried Kracauer, is: 

[He] denies that he is the pursued serial murderer. 

— first documented use of the term “serial murderer,” as it appears mMerriam-Webster’ s 1961 Third 
New International Dictionary 

By the mid-1960s, the term “serial murderer” had become common enough, at least overseas, that it was 
used repeatedly in the 1966 bodkThe Meaning of Murder by the British writer John Brophy. 

Jack the Ripper, still unidentified and still the most famous of all serial murderers, was not altogether 
true to type. The typical serial murderer kills once too often and gets caught. 

— from The Meaning of Murder (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966), p. 189 

It’s possible that, during his visit to England (where Brophy’ s book was originally published), Ressler 
picked up the term, perhaps subliminally. To give credit where it is due, it was evidently Ressler who 
altered the phrase from “ senahnurderer ” to the slightly more punchy “serial killer. ” 

In any event, if he can’t really be credited with coining the expression, Ressler certainly helped 
introduce it into American culture. Surprisingly, it did not enter into common usage until quite recently. 
The earliest published example of the phrase “serial killer” that the editors of th ^Oxford English 
Dictionary have been able to come up with is only twenty years old. It comes from the article “Leading 
the Hunt in Atlanta’s Murders” by M. A. Farber, published in the May 3, 1981, issue of theAfew York 
Times Magazine. 

Here, reprinted for the first time, is the passage containing the first known published use of the term 
“serial killer”: 



Someone, raising a question that trails Brown from forum to forum, asks about race and the murders. 
Some Atlantans fear racial violence if a “serial” killer is discovered to be white. 

DEFINITIONS 

Since the term “serial killer” was invented to describe a specific type of criminal, you’d think the 
definition would be clear-cut. However, confusion surrounds the term. Even the experts can’t agree. 




Let’s start with the official FBI definition: 



Three or more separate events in three or more separate locations with an emotional cooling-off period 
between homicides. 

— FBI Crime Classification Manual (1992) 

This definition stresses three elements: 

1. Quantity. There have to be at least three murders. 

2. Place. The murders have to occur at different locations. 

3. Time.ThQYQ has to be a “cooling-off period” — an interval between the murders that can last anywhere 
from several hours to several years. 



The last two characteristics are meant to differentiate serial killing from mass murder, in which a 
suicidal, rage-filled individual slaughters a bunch of people at once: a disgruntled employee, for 
example, who shows up at his office with an automatic weapon and blows away a half dozen coworkers 
before turning the gun on himself. 

There are several problems with the FBI definition. In one respect, it’s much too broad, since it can be 
applied to homicidal types who aren’t serial killers: professional hit men, for example, or Western 
outlaws like William “Billy the Kid” Bonney, who is said to have gunned down twenty-one men before 
he reached the age of twenty-one. “Mad bombers” like Ted Kaczynski also meet the FBI’s criteria. But 
none of these types match the common conception of a serial killer. 

In another respect, the FBI definition is overly narrow, since it specifies that a serial killer has to commit 
his crimes “in three or more separate locations.” To be sure, some serial killers range far and wide in 
their search for prey. Ted Bundy, for example, murdered women in several different states. Others, 
however, prefer to do their dirty work in one place. John Wayne Gacy, for example, turned the basement 
of his suburban split-level into a private torture chamber and even disposed of his victims’ remains at 
home, stashing them in the crawl space until he ran out of room. 

The main defect in the FBI definition, however, is what’s missing from it — namely, any sense of the 
specific nature of the crimes. When Siegfried Kracauer first used the term “serial murderer,” he was 
discussing the character played by Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s classic mo vie, M: a repulsive, moon-faced 




pervert who preys on little girls. A few years later, John Brophy used it to describe killers like Jack the 
Ripper and Earle Leonard Nelson, the infamous “Gorilla Murderer” of the 1920s who strangled and 
raped several dozen women across the United States and up into Canada. And when Robert Ressler and 
his colleagues in the Behavioral Science Unit adopted the term in the 1970s, they applied it to homicidal 
psychopaths like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Edmund Kemper. In all these cases, there was one 
common thread: a strong component of depraved sexuality. 

Recognizing this fact, some experts stress the sexual motivations behind serial murder, defining it as the 
act of ultraviolent deviants, who get twisted pleasure from inflicting extreme harm on their victims and 
who will keep on committing their atrocities until they are stopped. 

Of course, there are criminals who match this profile but who can’t be considered serial killers for one 
simple reason: they are caught after committing a single homicide. An example is James Lawson, 
described in the book The Evil That Men Do by Stephen Michaud and former FBI Special Agent Roy 
Jiazelwood (another member of the FBI’s original Mind JJunter team). 

A convicted rapist, Lawson was sent to a California state mental institution, where he struck up a 
friendship with a fellow inmate, James Odom. The two men began sharing their fantasies of rape and 
murder, encouraging each other’s sickest impulses and forming a bond based on their mutual depravity. 
No sooner were they released than they decided to put their dreams into action. Abducting a twenty-five- 
year-old female convenience store clerk, they drove her to an isolated location. First Odom raped her in 
the backseat while Lawson watched. 

Then Lawson went to work on her with his knife. 

I wanted to cut her body so she would not look like a person, and destroy her so she would not exist. I 
began to cut on her body. I remember cutting her breasts off. After this, all I remember is that I kept 
cutting on her body. 

— James Lawson 

Fortunately, the two men were traced and arrested in short order. JJowever, Lawson’s case raises an 
interesting question. There’s no doubt that he had the mentality of a serial killer; his confession makes 
that brutally clear, flow many women would he have had to butcher before qualifying for that label? 
“Three or more,” according to the FBI definition. But that number seems arbitrary. Let’s suppose that, 
over the span of several weeks, the police in a small California town had found the remains o ftwo female 
victims, killed and mutilated in the same way. Wouldn’t they be justified in suspecting that a serial killer 
was on the loose? 

These flaws in the FBI definition are rectified in another, more flexible one formulated by the National 
Institutes of Justice, which many authorities regard as a more accurate description: 




A series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by one offender 
acting alone. The crimes may occur over a period of time ranging from hours to years. Quite often the 
motive is psychological, and the offender’s behavior and the physical evidence observed at the crime 
scenes will reflect sadistic, sexual overtones. 

— National Institutes of Justice 

CATEGORIES OF CARNAGE: SERIAL/MASS/SPREE 

Though people sometimes confuse the terms and use them interchangeably, there are important 
differences between serial murder and the other major types of multiple homicide, mass murder and spree 
killing. 

For the most part, serial murder is a sex crime, a fact that accounts for its distinctive features. The classic 
pattern of serial murder is a grotesque travesty of normal sexual functioning. 

Most people who haven’t had sex for a while begin to crave it more and more. They daydream about it. 
In vulgar terms, they grow increasingly horny. If unattached, they eventually seek out a willing partner. 
Once they’ve gratified their sexual urges, the need subsides for a certain period of time. 

In a parallel way, the serial killer spends his time fantasizing about dominance, torture, and murder. In 
effect, he grows horny for blood. When his twisted desires get too strong to resist, he goes prowling for 
unwitting prey. His excitement reaches a climax with the suffering and death of the victim. Afterward, 
he experiences a “cooling-off’ period. (This is somewhat of a misnomer since it is during this lull 
between crimes that the killer’ s bloodlust begins to build again. It would be more accurate to describe it 
as a “cooling-off/heating-up” period.) During this time, he may make use of “trophies” he has taken 
from a murder scene to relive the crime in his mind, savoring the memory of his victim’s suffering. 

In short, their unspeakable acts are a source of supreme pleasure to serial killers, who achieve the 
highest pitch of arousal — even to the point of orgasm — by inflicting savage harm on other human 
beings. Because doing terrible things feels so good to them, serial killers try not to get caught, so they 
can keep on enjoying their atrocities for as long as possible. 

Mass Murder 

Apart from the fact that they both involve multiple homicides, mass murder and serial killing have 
almost nothing in common. 

Whereas the serial killer is often described as a predator, the mass murderer is stereotypically defined as 
a “human time bomb.” Though there have been a number of female mass murderers, the great 
preponderance are male. In general, the mass murderer is someone whose life has come unraveled — who 
has been thrown out by his wife or fired from his job or suffered some other humiliating blow that 




pushes him over the edge. Filled with an annihilating rage at everything he blames for his failure, he 
explodes in a burst of devastating violence that wipes out everyone within range (a phenomenon that has 
entered slang as “going postal,” a sardonic tribute to the number of US Postal Service workers who seem 
to have perpetrated such acts). 

If serial murder is, in essence, a sex crime, mass murder is almost always a suicidal one. In blind, 
apocalyptic fury, the mass murderer has decided to go out with a bang and take as many people with him 
as possible. Typically, once the bloodbath is over, the mass murderer will either end his own life or 
provoke a fatal shoot-out with the police (“suicide by cop,” as it is called). 

Someday before I kill myself, I’ll bring some people down with me. 

— Sylvia Seegrist, mass murderer 

Since his intention is to blow away as many people as possible, the mass murderer almost always uses 
firearms. This is in marked contrast to most serial killers, who (with notable exceptions like David “Son 
of Sam” Berkowitz and Zodiac) prefer the sadistic “hands-on” thrill of stabbing, strangling, mauling, 
and mutilating. 

A key element of mass murder is that, by definition, it occurs in a single location. Indeed, it is this 
factor, as much as anything else, that amounts for the devastating nature of the crime. The mass 
murderer is someone who — like a suicide bomber — detonates without warning in a restaurant, a 
playground, a schoolroom, an office, or even (as in the 1999 case of Larry Gene Ashbrook) a church, 
turning a safe, familiar setting into the scene of a corpse-strewn massacre. 

Though mass murderers don’t exert the same morbid fascination as serial killers — largely because their 
crimes are less sensationally gruesome and sexually perverted — they often run up substantial body 
counts. Charles Whitman, for example — the Texas Tower sniper who, on August 1, 1966, barricaded 
himself on the observation deck overlooking the University of Texas campus and began picking off 
people below — killed fourteen victims in the course of his massacre. And even this grim total was 
surpassed by the case of James Huberty, one of the worst mass-murder episodes of modern times. 

CASE STUDY 

James Huberty and the McDonald’s Massacre 

The site was significant: a suburban McDonald’s restaurant. This all-American symbol of happy family 
life and material satisfaction represented everything that James Oliver Huberty had struggled so hard — 
and failed so miserably — to achieve. 

His life had been difficult from the start. His mother, a religious zealot, became a missionary and 
abandoned her family when James was only seven. Raised by his father, he grew up lonely and 




resentful, a boy whose sole companion was his dog and whose only interest was guns. 

His earliest ambition, to work in a funeral home, didn’t pan out. Though he received a license from the 
Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science, he lacked the personal skills necessary for a successful 
mortician. “He was a good embalmer, but just didn’t relate to people,” was one professional assessment. 

Still, he managed to prosper for a while. In 1965 — at the age of twenty-three — he married his girlfriend, 
Etna. A few years later, they moved into a comfortable house in Massillon, Ohio. By the early seventies, 
Huberty was the father of two, with a good, steady job as a welder at a utility plant in nearby Canton. 

His family was the center of his existence. Outside of Etna and the girls, he had no social contacts. He 
bickered constantly with his neighbors and spent much of his spare time reading gun magazines and 
survivalist literature. On the whole, however, Huberty’ s life during this period was as stable and content 
as it would ever be. 

The bottom fell out in the early 1980s, when hard times hit the area. The plant closed, Huberty lost his 
job, and — as Etna later put it — “his life came crashing in around him.” After nearly six months of 
unemployment, he landed another job, but was soon laid off again. He started to talk of suicide — and 
worse. 

According to an acquaintance, it was around this time that Huberty began voicing scary thoughts. “He 
said he had nothing to live for, no job or anything. He said that if this was the end of his making his 
living for his family, he was going to take everyone with him.” 

In late 1983, in a desperate hunt for a better life, the forty-one-year-old Huberty moved his family to San 
Ysidro, California, a suburb of San Diego just north of the Mexican border. He found work as a security 
guard, but the job didn’t last. His family was forced to move again and again, each time to a slightly 
shabbier apartment. Huberty grew increasingly paranoid, venting his bitterness at the world. On 
Wednesday, July 18, 1984, after a morning trip to Traffic Court to pay a ticket, Huberty reached the end 
of the line. “Society had its chance,” he said to his wife. In their bedroom a few hours later, he dressed in 
camouflage pants and a black T-shirt. His wife asked where he was going. 

“Hunting humans,” he said. 

Not long afterward, he showed up at the local McDonald’s with a semiautomatic rifle, a 9-mm pistol, a 
twelve-gauge shotgun, and a canvas bag full of ammo. Almost immediately, he opened fire. Seventy- 
five minutes later, twenty-one people were dead, many of them children, and another nineteen wounded. 
The massacre didn’t stop until a SWAT team sniper fired a .308-caliber into James Huberty’ s dark heart. 

Spree Killing 

With one key exception, spree and mass murder are more or less identical phenomena. 




Like the mass murderer, the spree killer is someone who has become so profoundly alienated and 
embittered that he no longer feels connected to human society. His life has amounted to nothing, and his 
murderous rampage is his way of bringing his intolerable existence to an explosive end. Most spree 
killers prefer death to surrender; others allow themselves to be captured, knowing that they will be 
executed or locked away forever. One way or another, their lives are over. 

Two major motives fuel the spree killer’s final, hate-filled act: revenge against the world and a desire to 
show that — all evidence to the contrary — he is a person to be reckoned with. Tormented by his failure to 
achieve those things that seem to come so easily to others — satisfying work, loving relationships — he 
will prove that he is special in at least one regard: in his power to wreak havoc. 

Like the mass murderer, the spree killer sometimes targets specific victims: the boss who fired him, the 
professor who flunked him, the bully who made his high school years a living hell. But the randomness 
with which he mows down everyone unlucky enough to cross his path shows that his rage is really 
directed against society itself. 

The defining difference between the spree killer and the mass murderer has to do with motion. Whereas 
the mass murderer slaughters in one place, the spree killer moves from site to site, killing as he goes. In 
that sense, spree killing might best be described as mobile mass murder. 

In 1949, for example, a crazed ex-GI named Howard Unruh stunned the nation when he strode through 
his quiet New Jersey neighborhood and methodically gunned down everyone in his path. 

CASE STUDY 

Howard Unruh, the Retaliator 

The first major spree killer of the post-World War II era, Howard Barton Unruh fit the classic profile of 
his kind. In the fall of 1949, he was a twenty-eight-year-old misfit, living alone with his mother in a 
shabby three-room apartment in East Camden, New Jersey. His empty, aimless existence couldn’t have 
been drearier. He had no job, no friends, no prospects for the future. A closeted gay in an intensely 
homophobic era, he led a sordid secret life, traveling to Philadelphia several times a week for loveless 
sex with anonymous pickups. Otherwise, he spent much of his time playing with his toy trains or 
practicing pistol-shooting in a makeshift target range in his basement. 

Just a few years earlier, he had felt likes ome body. That was in the army, where he had distinguished 
himself during the war as a gunner in the 342d Armored Field Artillery. Now back home, he was a 
nothing: an utter failure. He had tried college, enrolling in Temple University’s School of Pharmacology 
under the GI Bill, but he had dropped out after only three months. 





HQWAUPVNHUH 



(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



He became convinced that his neighbors were talking behind his back, viewing him with contempt for 
living off his frail, aging mother. He began to keep a diary, listing grievances against his neighbors and 
making little cryptic notations beside their names: “Ret.W.T.S.” or “D.N.D.R.” 

The abbreviations stood for “Retaliate When Time Suitable” and “Do Not Delay Retaliation.” 

On Tuesday, September 6, 1949, the day of retaliation arrived. 

Rising promptly at 8:00A.M., Howard washed, shaved, and dressed in his best tropical- worsted suit, 
white shirt, and bow tie. He went into the kitchen for his breakfast, prepared as always by his doting 
mother, who noticed that Howard seemed strangely distracted. After polishing off fried eggs and Post 
Toasties, he went down to the basement, returning with a length of heavy lead pipe. Summoning his 
mother into the living room, he raised the pipe threateningly, as if to brain her. 

“What do you want to do that for, Howard?” Mrs. Unruh stammered. Backing toward the door, she flung 
it open and fled the house in terror. 

Howard stood for a moment. Then, shaking off his daze, he went to his bedroom, got his 9-mm Luger 
pistol with two loaded clips and thirty-three loose cartridges, and hit the streets. 

His first stop was Pilcharik’s shoe shop. The owner, John Pilcharik, was kneeling by his bench, nailing a 
sole onto a shoe when Unruh entered at 9:20A.M. Unruh strode directly up to Pilcharik and, without a 
word, shot the cobbler in the face, then fired again into his head. He then turned and headed next door to 
Clark Hoover’s barbershop. 

Hoover was busily trimming the hair of a six-year-old boy named Orris Smith. “I’ve got something for 
you, Clarkie,” Unruh said as he stepped to the chair and shot both the barber and the little boy. As the 
child’s mother, who was seated nearby, shrieked and ran toward her dying boy, Unruh nonchalantly 




headed out. 



Over the next ten minutes, he calmly made his way through the neighborhood, shooting victims as he 
went: both specific targets of his paranoid hatred and random passersby unfortunate enough to find 
themselves in his way. When he ran out of ammunition — less than fifteen minutes after firing his first 
shot into the face of Joe Pilcharik — thirteen people lay dead or dying, and another three were badly 
wounded. 

Returning to his apartment, Unruh flopped down on his bed. Moments later, about sixty heavily armed 
officers surrounded the house. A ferocious gun battle ensued, ending when Unruh was driven from his 
room by tear gas. 

As Unruh was being handcuffed, the officer asked: “What’s the matter with you? You some kind of 
psycho?” 

“I’m no psycho,” Unruh indignantly said. “I have a good mind.” 

The state disagreed. Unruh was permanently confined to a maximum security psychiatric hospital for the 
criminally insane. 



While Howard Unruh turned his neighborhood into a corpse-littered battleground during thirteen 
horrifying minutes, some spree killers cover far more territory, conducting their rampage by car over the 
span of days or even weeks. That was the case in late 1957, when a pair of teen hoodlums — James Dean 
wannabe Charles Starkweather and his underage sweetheart Caril Ann Fugate — sped across Nebraska, 
killing ten people over twenty-six days. In the spring of 1997, Andrew Cunanan slaughtered four men as 
he made his way in a succession of stolen vehicles from Minneapolis to Miami Beach in search of his 
ultimate target, the celebrated Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace. And in the fall of 2002, John 
Muhammed and his teenage protege, Lee Malvo, allegedly terrorized Virginia, Maryland, and 
Washington, DC, from a blue Chevy Caprice, after first committing a pair of shootings down in 
Montgomery, Alabama. For a variety of reasons — the interval between shootings, the taunting messages 
to the police, the sinister calling card left at one crime scene — many experts assumed that a serial killer 
was on the loose while the sniper shootings were taking place. Once the alleged perpetrators were 
caught, however, it became clear that Muhammed fit the definition of a spree killer: a man with a 
miserably failed personal and professional life, venting his rage in a murderous vendetta against the 
world. 

A Better Term? 

Since mass and spree murder are essentially two manifestations of the same psychological phenomenon, 
a new term has recently been proposed that covers both kinds of crime. In a series of articles published 
shortly before the first anniversary of the Columbine massacre, The New York Times refers to figures like 




Dylan Klebold, Charles Whitman, and others asrampage killers — a highly expressive phrase that 
pinpoints the essential difference between these types of offenders and serial killers. 

Recommended Reading 

Graham Chester .Berserk!: Motiveless Random Massacres (1993) 

Art Crockett .Spree Killers (1994) 

Brian Lane and Wilfred Gregg. The Encyclopedia of Mass Murder (1994) 

New York Times, “Rampage Killers,” April 9-12, 2000 

Pan Pantziarka.Lone Wolf: True Stories of Spree Killers (2000) 

Ronald Tobias. They Shoot to Kill (1981) 

PSYCHOPATH VS. PSYCHOTIC 

When the arresting officer asked Howard Unruh if he was “some kind of psycho,” he was using a 
common slang term nowadays most commonly associated with the title of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 
slasher film. But the policeman’s question is more complicated than it may seem. There are two very 
different types of “psycho s” -.psychopaths andpsychotics. Most serial killers fall into the first category, 
though some belong to the latter. 

Psychopaths: The Mask of Sanity 

Serial killers have a dead conscience. No morals, no scruples, no conscience. 

— Richard “Night Stalker” Ramirez 

Technically, psychopaths aren’t legally insane. They know the difference between right and wrong. 

They are rational, often highly intelligent people. Some are capable of great charm. Indeed, the scariest 
thing about them is that they seem so normal. 

Their pleasant personalities, however, are just a show. Underneath their “masks of sanity” — to use the 
famous phrase coined by psychologist Hervey Cleckley — they are profoundly disturbed individuals. 

The most striking feature of the psychopathic personality is his utter lack of empathy. He is incapable of 
love, incapable of caring, incapable of feeling sorry for anyone but himself. Other people are simply 
objects to be exploited and manipulated for his own profit and pleasure. 




As criminologist Edward Glover puts it his bodkThe Roots of Crime, psychopaths are “outstandingly 
selfish, egotistical, and deceitful.” Nothing matters to them but their own needs. At their worst, they 
have monstrous dreams of torture, rape, and murder that they pursue without the slightest compunction. 
Such extreme criminal psychopaths are devious, cold-blooded predators who hide their evil hearts 
behind bland, plausible facades. 

Because they feel no guilt or remorse, psychopaths are able to maintain an uncanny cool in situations 
that would cause a normal person to break into a cold sweat. For example, when one of Jeffrey 
Dahmer’s handcuffed and bleeding victims managed to escape and run out into the street, Dahmer 
calmly talked the police into returning the young man to his custody. He then led him back to his hellish 
lair and slaughtered him. 

Melville on Psychopaths 

Though the term “psychopath” wasn’t coined until 1891 by a German psychologist named Koch, the 
kind of personality it describes has always existed. The great American novelist Herman Melville not 
only recognized this fact but created a powerful portrait of a criminal psychopath in his final masterpiece, 
Billy Budd. 

One of Melville’s major themes is the lurking evil concealed behind benign appearances. In Billy Budd, 
this theme is embodied in the character John Claggart, a seemingly friendly man who is wicked to the 
core. 

At one point in the novella, the author pauses to contemplate the source of Claggart’ s villainy. Living in 
a pre-Freudian age, Melville does not use the clinical language of modern-day psychology in accounting 
for the character’ s behavior, relying instead on such old-fashioned phrases as “natural depravity” and 
“the mania of an evil nature.” But his description of the master-at-arms’s malevolent personality makes 
it clear that Claggart is a classic instance of what we now call a criminal psychopath: 



Though the man’s even temper and discreet bearing would seem to intimate a mind peculiarly subject to 
the law of reason, not the less in heart he would seem to riot in complete exemption from that law, 
having apparently little to do with reason further than to employ it as an ambidexter implement for 
effecting the irrational. That is to say: Toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of 
atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgment sagacious and sound. These 
men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort, for their lunacy is not continuous, but occasional, 
evoked by some special object. 



In this passage, Melville pinpoints the essence of the psychopath: a person who commits the most 
unspeakable atrocities with cool, rational judgment. 




“MORAL INSANITY” 



During Melville’s lifetime, psychiatrists both here and in Europe were grappling with the same problem 
asBilly Budd: how to explain the psychology of criminals who are rational and even intelligent, but who 
take pleasure in committing murders that are so hideously savage as to seem, by definition, insane. The 
term they came up with was “moral insanity.” 

In the early 1870s, for example, a twelve-year-old boy named Jesse Harding Pomeroy attacked and 
tortured a series of younger boys in Boston. After less than seventeen months at a reformatory he was 
released, only to commit a pair of hideous mutilation murders on a little boy and girl. Under arrest, the 
“Boy Fiend” (as the newspapers dubbed him) was examined by various psychiatrists who found that he 
had “sharp wits” and “a good memory,” had “no delusions whatsoever,” possessed “a knowledge of 
right and wrong in the abstract,” and had an above-normal “intellectual capacity.” 

At the same time, he “was unquestionably defective on the moral side to a degree which was plainly 
much more pronounced than in the criminal. The unusual, atrocious, and cruel nature of his criminal 
acts, his pursuit of crime for crime’s sake only, his utter insensibility to suffering, and his gratification in 
torturing victims for the same reason that a cat does a mouse before killing it” all plainly indicated that 
his “motives and conduct were far different from those of the ordinary malefactor.” 



In short, the experts concluded that though Pomeroy was intellectually unimpaired, he wasmorally insane 
— or, as they variously described him, a “moral degenerate,” a “moral defective,” or a “moral imbecile.” 
Though these terms don’t sound particularly scientific (or politically correct), they are exactly what we 
mean nowadays by a psychopath. 



These patients have good memory and understanding, ability to reason and contrive, much cleverness 
and cunning, and a general appearance of rationality, coexistent with very deficient control, absence of 
moral sense and human sentiments and feelings, perverted and brutal instincts, and propensities for 
criminal acts of various kinds which may be perpetrated deliberately and cleverly planned, yet 
committed with little or no motive and regardless of the consequences to themselves and others. 



— nineteenth-century definition of “moral insanity” 



Psychotics: The Living Nightmare 



Psychosis is defined as a severe mental disorder characterized by some degree of personality 
disintegration. Psychotics live in a nightmarish world of their own. They suffer from hallucinations and 
delusions — hear voices, see visions, are possessed by bizarre beliefs. They have lost touch with reality. 
Unlike psychopaths — who appear to be normal, rational people even while leading grotesque secret lives 
— psychotics match the common conception of insanity. The main forms of psychosis are schizophrenia 
and paranoia. 




For the most part, serial killers aren’t psychotic. There have been some notable exceptions, however — 
like the paranoid schizophrenic Herbert Mullin. 

CASE STUDY 

Herbert Mullin and the Die Song 

For the first twenty-two years of his life, Herbert Mullin showed no signs of the raging psychosis that 
would eventually take possession of his mind and result in the brutal deaths of thirteen random victims. 

Born in Salinas, California, in April 1947, he seemed to a have a normal childhood. He belonged to the 
Boy Scouts, played Little League baseball, built a tree house with friends. 

Years later, he remembered his childhood differently, insisting that his parents had deliberately tried to 
ruin his life by sending telepathic messages to his schoolmates, threatening to kill them in the afterlife if 
they played with him. By the time he made this wild accusation, Mullin was already far gone in madness. 

From first grade until his sophomore year of high school he attended Catholic parochial school, then — 
after his family moved to Santa Cruz — transferred to San Lorenzo Valley High, where he found a 
girlfriend and formed a close attachment to a buddy named Dean. 

After Dean’s death in a car crash, Mullin first manifested bizarre symptoms, creating a kind of shrine to 
his friend in his bedroom and staring at it for hours on end. Around this time, Mullin was also introduced 
to marijuana. It is difficult to know how much significance to attach to either event, however. After all, 
many people have had similar experiences — losing loved ones in tragic accidents, experimenting with 
drugs — without turning into deranged psycho-killers. 

The first indication that something was seriously wrong with Mullin occurred at a family gathering for 
his parents’ twenty-ninth anniversary in March 1969. Over dinner, Mullin robotically imitated every 
word and gesture of his brother-in-law, Al. His behavior was so bizarre that he was finally convinced to 
check himself into a state mental hospital, where he was diagnosed as suffering from a “schizophrenic 
reaction.” 

Though the psychiatrists judged that his mental condition was deteriorating and the “prognosis was 
poor,” they had no power to keep him in custody. After six weeks, Mullin left. 

For the next few years, he drifted, working at a succession of menial jobs — dishwasher, gas station 
attendant, truck driver for Goodwill Industries. For a while he lived in Hawaii. He was in and out of 
mental hospitals. He began to hear voices commanding him to shave his head and burn his penis with a 
lighted cigarette. He obeyed both orders. Doctors, recognizing that he was in the grip of extreme 
paranoid schizophrenia, warned that his condition was “grave.” They had no idea of just how dangerous 
Herbert Mullin was becoming. 




By October 1972, the voices were telling him to kill. He became convinced that he had been chosen by 
Albert Einstein to go out and murder people as a way of preventing a cataclysmic earthquake. He 
described his mission as “singing the die song.” He explained it to a psychiatrist: 

You see, the thing is, people get together, say, in the White House. People like to sing the die song, you 
know, people like to sing the die song. If I am president of my class when I graduate from high school, I 
can tell two, possibly three young mal eHomo sapiens to die. I can sing that song to them and they’ll 
have to kill themselves or be killed — an automobile accident, a knifing, a gunshot wound. You ask me 
why this is? And I say, well they have to do that in order to protect the ground from an earthquake, 
because all of the other people in the community had been dying all year long, and my class, we have to 
chip in so to speak to the darkness, we have to die also. And people would rather sing the die song than 
murder. 

On October 13, 1972 — not long after a voice in his head barked, “Why won’t you give me anything? Go 
kill someone! Move!” — Mullin clubbed a fifty-five-year-old drifter to death with a baseball bat on a 
highway shoulder in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Less than two weeks later, he picked up a twenty-four- 
year-old hitchhiker, stabbed her to death with a hunting knife, then dragged her corpse into some bushes 
and disemboweled her. Eight days later, he entered the confessional of St. Mary’s Church in Los Gatos 
and stabbed the priest to death. 

In the midst of this hideous campaign, Mullin tried to enlist in the Marines. He impressed the recruiting 
officer as a “highly intelligent and motivated young man [who] most likely will be ... a credit to the 
corps.” Ultimately, however, he was turned down. Ten days after applying, Mullin massacred five people 
— including two brothers, ages four and nine — in a remote area of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Not long 
afterward, while hiking in a state park, he came upon four teenage boys in a makeshift cabin and shot 
them all in the head while they begged for their lives. His final victim was a seventy-two-year-old man, 
shot while working in his yard. Mullin’ s car was spotted speeding away from the murder scene, and he 
was quickly picked up. 

In spite of overwhelming evidence of his extravagant mental derangement, the jury deemed Mullin 
“sane by legal standards” and found him guilty of eight counts of second-degree murder and two counts 
of first. On September 18, 1973, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He will be eligible for parole in 
2020, at the age of seventy-three. 

BEYOND MADNESS 

Because serial killers commit such appalling acts, some experts feel that these criminals can’t be placed 
in any of the usual clinical categories of mental disorder. To them, serial killers exist in a class by 
themselves, somewhere beyond the outer limits of comprehensible human behavior. 



In his book The Meaning of Murder, for example, John Brophy writes: “Such men are monsters, who live 




not merely beyond the unmapped frontiers of sanity but beyond the frontiers of madness as madness is 
conceivable to most people.” 



Like Brophy — who reverts to the ancient term “monsters” to describe serial killers — some experts have 
recently abandoned psychological jargon altogether and have gone back to the age-old notion of evil to 
describe such beings. At a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in May 2001, forensic 
psychiatrist Michael Weiner of the New York University School of Medicine defined evil as “an intent 
to cause emotional trauma, to terrorize or target the helpless, to prolong suffering and to derive 
satisfaction from it all.” 

That pretty much sums up the behavior of serial killers. 

Recommended Reading 

Hervey Cleckley ,The Mask of Sanity (1976) 

Edward Glover, The Roots of Crime (1960) 

Donald Lunde , Murder and Madness (1975) 




WHO THEY ARE 



Apart from the obvious characteristics — sick minds, twisted desires, a compulsion to kill again and again 
— it’s hard to generalize about serial killers. According to writer Stephen Michaud, the only safe thing 
you can say about them “is that an inexplicably large percentage are named Wayne or Ricky Lee.” 

Michaud, one assumes, is at least half-joking. (Actually, there don’t seem to be that many Ricky Lees 
among the world’s serial killers.) But his larger point is well-taken. There are so many exceptions to 
every rule that talking about the typical traits of serial killers is surprisingly tricky. 

For example, it’s usually said that most serial killers are white. That’s certainly true in the United States, 
where the majority of the population is Caucasian. But it’s clearly not the case in, say, South Africa, 
which has a startlingly high number of serial killers, almost all of them black. Even in our own country, 
there have been plenty of African-American serial killers. 

It’s also part of the received wisdom of criminology that serial killers are almost always male. Again, 
that’s true — but only if you define “serial murder” as a very specific type of crime, namely, savagely 
violent sexual homicide of the kind epitomized by Jack the Ripper. That particular brand of mutilation 
sex-murder is, in fact, only perpetrated by men. (As culture critic Camille Paglia puts it, “There are no 
female Jack the Rippers.”) But under the broader definitions formulated by the FBI and National 
Institutes of Justice, a considerable number of females qualify as serial killers. 

Still, if we limit ourselves to the United States and to those psychopathic sex-killers first associated with 
the term “serial murder” back in the 1970s and 1980s — Gacy, Bundy, Kemper, Ramirez, and the rest of 
that unholy crew — there are certain general statements that hold true. 

The sort of serial killer most people think of when they hear that term is a white male between the ages 
of twenty-five and thirty-five. He is not psychotic but rather psychopathic, suffering from what is often 
referred to nowadays as “Antisocial Personality Disorder.” He is most probably an extreme loner — a 
socially maladjusted misfit with few, if any, meaningful relationships. Cut off from the world of normal 
human connections, he indulges in particularly vivid, highly perverse fantasies of torture, domination, 
and murder. At some point, he crosses a line and acts out these fantasies on actual victims. Depending 
on his sexual orientation — that is to say, whether he is a gay or a heterosexual serial killer — his victims 
will either be male or female. 

Though profoundly disturbed in his emotional and psychological makeup, he is not intellectually 
deficient. On the contrary, he has an above-average intelligence, combined with a criminal cunning that 
allows him to escape detection long enough to perpetrate a series of atrocities. 



TEN TRAITS OF SERIAL KILLERS 




At the tenth triennial meeting of the International Association of Forensic Sciences held at Oxford, 
England, in September 1984, Robert Ressler and John Douglas of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, 
along with Professors Ann W. Burgess and Ralph D’Agostino, delivered a seminal paper on serial 
murder, based on a study of thirty- six jailed offenders, including Edmund Kemper and Herbert Mullin. 
In their presentation, they listed the following traits as the “general characteristics” of these killers: 



1. Most are single white males. 

2. They tend to be smart, with a mean IQ of “bright normal.” 

3. Despite their intelligence, they do poorly in school, have spotty employment records, and generally 
end up as unskilled workers. 

4. They come from deeply troubled families. Typically, they have been abandoned at an early age by 
their fathers and grow up in broken homes dominated by their mothers. 

5. There is a long history of psychiatric problems, criminal behavior, and alcoholism in their families. 

6. As children, they suffer significant abuse — sometimes psychological, sometimes physical, often 
sexual. Such brutal mistreatment instills them with profound feelings of humiliation and 
helplessness. 

7. Because of their resentment toward their distant, absent, or abusive fathers, they have a great deal 
of trouble with male authority figures. Because they were dominated by their mothers, they have a 
powerful hostility toward women. 

8. They manifest psychiatric problems at an early age and often spend time in institutions as children. 

9. Because of their extreme social isolation and a general hatred of the world and everyone in it 
(including themselves), they often feel suicidal as teenagers. 

10. They display a precocious and abiding interest in deviant sexuality and are obsessed with fetishism, 
voyeurism, and violent pornography. 



It is important to remember, however, that these traits were extrapolated from a small sample of thirty- 
six sadistic lust-murderers, all men and most of them white. There are many other serial killers who 




possess different characteristics. 



CASE STUDY 

Edmund Kemper, Epitome of Evil 

A psychopathic killer who embodies most of the traits in the FBI’s pioneering paper on serial murder — 
and, indeed, who served as one of the interview subjects for that famous study — is Edmund Kemper III, 
aka the “Coed Killer.” 

Kemper’s upbringing in a broken home was a nightmare of unrelenting emotional abuse. A hulking boy 
who grew up to be a six-foot-nine-inch, three-hundred-pound behemoth, he was the target of unremitting 
ridicule from his mother. She constantly belittled both his physical appearance and “weirdo” personality. 

Growing up in that toxic atmosphere of rejection and humiliation, he developed an intense sense of self- 
loathing along with an equally virulent hatred of his hectoring mother, which would eventually be 
projected onto all of womanhood. 

He began to show signs of extreme psychological disturbance in grade school. While other boys played 
at being Superman or Davy Crockett, little Edmund pretended he was being executed in the gas 
chamber. Once, when someone found out about his crush on his second grade teacher and teasingly 
asked why he didn’t kiss her, Edmund replied, “If I kiss her, I’d have to kill her first” — an early 
expression of his growing belief that the only women he could count on not to reject him were dead ones. 

As is common with serial killers, Kemper’s sadism manifested itself at a shockingly early age. At first, 
he contented himself with dismembering his sister’s dolls. Before long, however, he was torturing house 
pets. He decapitated one family cat with a machete and buried another alive. By his early teens, he 
would indulge in masturbatory reveries of slaughtering everyone in town and having sex with their 
corpses. 

In the winter of 1963, the fifteen-year-old Kemper was shipped off to live with his paternal grandparents 
on their ranch in North Fork, California. The following August, while his grandma Maude sat at the 
kitchen table, Edmund shot her in the head with a .22 rifle before stabbing her repeatedly and dragging 
her corpse into her bedroom. When his grandfather returned from running errands a short time later, 
Edmund shot him to death as he walked through the door. He then notified his mother and sat down to 
wait for the police. When questioned about his motives, Kemper shrugged, “I just wondered how it 
would feel to shoot Grandma.” The murder of his grandpa was, he said, an act of mercy: a way to spare 
the old man the pain of discovering what had happened to his wife. 

Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Kemper — not yet sixteen — was committed to Atascadero State 
Hospital, where he appears to have spent much of his time raptly listening to the fond reminiscences of 
the various serial rapists he met on his ward. His fantasies became even more dominated by scenarios of 




sexual violence. Concealing his seething inner life from his therapists, he assumed a mask of docility 
and newfound religious conviction and was paroled after only five years. In a stunning display of 
institutional obtuseness, the parole board — against the express advice of Kemper’s doctors and his own 
wishes — discharged him into the care of his mother. 

Kemper received no counseling or psychiatric treatment of any kind after his discharge. In September 
1972, h Qwas examined by a panel of state psychiatrists appointed to determine his mental state. Satisfied 
with his responses, they deemed him fully rehabilitated and sealed his juvenile record. Following the 
interview, Kemper headed for the Santa Cruz Mountains in his car. Inside its trunk was the head of a 
fifteen-year-old hitchhiker he had killed, raped, and dismembered the day before. 

Her name was Aiko Koo, and she was the third victim of the “rehabilitated” Kemper. His first two were 
eighteen-year-old roommates from Fresno State College, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. Kemper 
had picked them up the preceding May, driven them to a secluded stretch of road, stabbed them to death, 
then stuffed their bodies in his trunk and drove them home. Smuggling the corpses into his bedroom, he 
amused himself with his “trophies,” snapping Polaroid photos, dissecting the bodies, having sex with the 
viscera. Eventually, he bagged the remains and disposed of them, burying their bodies in the mountains 
and tossing their heads into a ravine. 

Six young women would meet the same fate. Living out the necrophiliac fantasies he had entertained 
since childhood, Kemper took particular pleasure in raping the corpses and especially in sodomizing the 
decapitated heads. On at least two occasions, he indulged in cannibalism, slicing flesh from the legs of 
his victims and consuming it in a macaroni casserole. He also kept teeth, hair, and patches of skin as 
grisly trophies. 

Psychiatrists would later speculate that all of these poor women were surrogates for the real object of 
Kemper’s hatred: his mother. That his frenzy climaxed with a horrendous act of matricide tends to 
confirm this theory. On the day before Easter 1973, Kemper crept into his mother’s bedroom at sunrise 
with a knife and hammer, smashed in her skull, slit her throat, cut off her head, and raped her 
decapitated corpse. In one of the more symbolically resonant acts in the annals of criminal depravity, he 
jammed her larynx down the garbage disposal — which promptly spat it back out into his face. “That 
seemed appropriate,” Kemper would later tell the police, “as much as she’d bitched and screamed and 
yelled at me over so many years.” He also propped her head on the mantel and used it as a dartboard. 
Later that day, he invited her best friend over for dinner. When she arrived, he strangled her with a scarf, 
took her corpse to bed, and spent the night molesting the body. 

The following morning, Easter Sunday, he fled eastward, driving nonstop to Pueblo, Colorado, where — 
realizing he had nowhere to run — he put in a call to the police back home. At first, no one at the precinct 
believed his confession. As is common with serial killers, Kemper was a police buff who had befriended 
many members of the Santa Cruz department. Eventually, however, he persuaded them, then patiently 
waited at the phone booth for the authorities to arrive and place him under arrest. 




He offered a full and sickeningly detailed confession. At his trial, he was judged to be legally sane and 
convicted of eight counts of murder. When the judge asked him what punishment he felt was suitable for 
his crimes, Kemper replied — not unreasonably — “Death by torture.” He was sentenced to life in prison, 
where he remains as of this writing. 

WARNING SIGNS 

Psychoanalysis is based on the belief that you can explain an adult’s troubled behavior by tracing the 
causes back to his childhood experiences. But as Freud himself admitted, it’s impossible to do the 
opposite: i.e., look at a young child’s experiences and predict exactly how he’ll behave as a grown-up. 

This certainly holds true in the case of serial killers. If you look at the life of, say, Peter Kiirten — who 
grew up in a household where incest was rife and who was tutored from an early age in the joys of 
animal torture and bestiality — it seems inevitable that he ended up becoming a sadistic lust-murderer. 

On the other hand, if you take a different child who has been subjected to a disturbed, even degenerate, 
upbringing, you can’t say for sure that he will turn out to be a homicidal psychopath. 

Still, in attempting to locate the root causes of serial murder, researchers have identified three major 
warning signs that are often found in the backgrounds of these criminals. These three behavioral red flags 
— often referred to as the psych o p at h o logical triad — ar zenuresis (bed-wetting ), pyromania (fire-starting), 
and precocious sadism (generally in the form of animal torture). 



1. Bed-Wetting. There’s nothing unusual or alarming about bed-wetting in itself; it’s a common 
phenomenon among little children. When the problem persists into puberty, however, it may well be a 
sign of significant and even dangerous emotional disturbance. According to the findings of the FBI’s 
Behavioral Science Unit, fully 60 percent of sex-murderers were still suffering from this condition as 
adolescents — like the African-American serial killer Alton Coleman, who wet his pants so often that he 
was saddled with the taunting nickname “Pissy.” 

2. Fire -Starting. Given their lust for destruction, it’s no surprise that, among their other twisted pleasures, 
many serial killers love to set fires, a practice they often begin at an early age. Some of the most 
notorious serial killers of modern times were juvenile arsonists. Ottis Toole, for example — Henry Lee 
Lucas’s loathsome accomplice — began torching vacant houses when he was six years old. Carl Panzram 
— arguably the most unrepentant killer in the annals of American crime — took positive pride in the 
havoc he could wreak with a matchstick, boasting in his jailhouse memoirs that, at the tender age of 
twelve, he caused $100,000 worth of damage by burning down a building at reform school. Carlton Gary 
firebombed a grocery store while still in his teens. And David Berkowitz — who ultimately confessed to 
more than fourteen hundred acts of arson — was so obsessed with fires as a little boy that his schoolmates 
nicknamed him “Pyro.” 

Firebombing stores and incinerating buildings is, of course, an intensely pathological expression of 




anger and aggression. But it’s more than sheer malice that underlies the incendiary crimes of serial 
killers. According to specialists in the psychology of perversion, there is always an erotic motive at the 
root of pyromania. “There is but one instinct which generates the impulse to incendiarism,” writes 
Wilhelm Stekel in his classic work on aberrant behavior. “That is the sexual instinct, and arson clearly 
shows its connecting points with sex.” 

True, there are often “secondary motives” behind a pyromaniac’s acts — revenge, for example, like 
Panzram’s desire to get back at his tormentors. But above all (as Stekel writes), “the incendiary is 
sexually excited by the flames; he likes to watch them burn.” Anyone who doubts this has only to read 
Flora Schreiber’s writings about the New Jersey serial killer Joseph Kallinger, who was thrown into 
orgasmic raptures by the mere thought of the fires he had caused. 

In short, serial murderers who enjoy starting fires do so for the same reason that they love to torture and 
kill. It turns them on. 

Oh, what ecstasy setting fires brings to my body ! What power I feel at the thought of fire . . . Oh, what a 
pleasure, what a heavenly pleasure! I see the flames and no longer is a fire just a daydream. It is the 
reality of heaven on earth! I love the excitement of the power fire gives me . . . The mental image is 
greater than sex! 

— Joseph Kallinger 

3 .Animal Torture. Juvenile sadism directed at lower life-forms is nothing new. There have always been 
children and adolescents (usually male) who enjoy hurting small creatures. Certainly Shakespeare knew 
about such things. In King Lear, he writes about “wanton boys” who pull the wings off of flies for 
“sport.” And in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the hero finds himself in a one-horse 
town where a bunch of young loafers are amusing themselves by tying a tin pan to the tail of a stray dog 
and watching him “run himself to death.” 

As disturbing as such behavior is, however, it pales beside the kinds of cruelties perpetrated by budding 
serial killers. As an adolescent, Peter Kiirten took pleasure from performing intercourse with various 
animals while simultaneously stabbing them or slitting their throats. At ten, Edmund Kemper buried his 
family cat alive in the backyard. Afterward, he dug up the carcass, brought it back to his bedroom, cut 
off the head, and stuck it on a spindle. Three years later, after his mother brought a new cat into the 
house, Kemper sliced off the top of its skull with a machete, then held its foreleg while it showered him 
with blood. 

Besides collecting roadkill, little Jeffrey Dahmer liked to nail live frogs to trees, cut open goldfish to see 
how their innards worked, and perform impromptu surgery on stray dogs and cats. Dennis Nilsen — the 
so-called British Jeffrey Dahmer — once hanged a cat just to see how long it would take to die. Albert 
DeSalvo enjoyed trapping house pets in wooden crates and shooting them with a bow and arrow, while 
Carroll Cole (aka the “Barfly Strangler”) got a kick out of choking the family dog unconscious. 




Other violent psychopaths have disemboweled their pets, burned them alive, fed them ground glass, and 
cut off their paws. 



According to ASPCA therapist Dr. Stephanie LaFarge, “anyone who hurts animals has the potential to 
move on to people.” Of course, most boys who commit minor acts of childhood sadism outgrow such 
behavior and look back with shame at the time they blew up an anthill with a cherry bomb or 
dismembered a daddy longlegs. By contrast, the cruelties perpetrated by incipient serial killers grow 
more extreme over time, until they are targeting not stray animals and house pets but other human 
beings. 

For them animal torture isn’t a stage. It’s a rehearsal. 

I found a dog and cut it open just to see what the insides looked like, and for some reason I thought it 
would be a fun prank to stick the head on a stake and set it out in the woods. 

— Jeffrey Dahmer 





These two scenes from William Hogarth’sTYi^ Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) depict the transition from 
animal cruelty to sex murder. In the first, a London street urchin named Tom Nero tortures a dog. In the 
second, the grown-up Tom has just been apprehended after slitting the throat of his pregnant lover. 

HOW SMART ARE SERIAL KILLERS? 

There’s a simple explanation for the fact that so many serial killers have above-average IQs. Generally 
speaking, it requires a certain degree of intelligence to get away with repeated acts of homicide. There 
are plenty of sex criminals who have committed atrocious acts of mutilation-murder. Fortunately, most 
of them are so sloppy or stupid that they are caught right away and so never have a chance to become 
serial offenders. “I’ve seen many murderers who might well have gone on to become serial killers,” 
criminal psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis testified, “if they’d had the wits not to get arrested.” 



Still, there’s a tendency to exaggerate the mental capacities of serial killers, particularly since they are so 



often portrayed in the media as intellectual prodigies^ la Hannibal Lecter — a psychopath so staggeringly 
erudite that he commits murder to the strains of Mozart and knows Dante by heart in the original Italian. 
Lecter, however, is a purely mythic creation. He is a reflection not of the way serial killers really are but 
of how they like to think of themselves. In their pathological narcissism — their profoundly misguided 
sense of their own superiority — serial killers like to imagine that they are criminal masterminds who can 
outwit the world. Serial killers with genius-level IQs, however, are almost nonexistent. Some, in fact, are 
profoundly stupid, relying on low criminal cunning rather than brains to elude the law. Ottis Toole, for 
example — Henry Lee Lucas’s accomplice and the psycho believed responsible for the abduction and 
murder of little Adam Walsh — had an IQ of 75. Others are profoundly psychotic, lost in their own 
bizarre worlds of paranoid delusion. 

Even the brightest serial killers are a lot less intelligent than they think. John George Haigh, the 
infamous British “Acid Bath Murderer” of the 1940s, was a highly intelligent and cultivated man. For all 
his sophistication, however, he mistakenly believed that the Latin phras ^corpus delecti — the legal term 
for the body of evidence indicating that a crime has occurred — referred to the actual cadaver of a 
homicide victim. This erroneous belief that a person could not be indicted for murder if no corpse was 
found eventually led to his undoing. 

Ted Bundy was a law student and rising young figure in the Washington State Republican party. 

Insisting on serving as his own defense lawyer during his murder trial, he turned the proceedings into a 
travesty and proved the adage that a man who defends himself has a fool for a client. 

Gay serial killer Randy Kraft had an IQ of 129 and made big bucks as a computer consultant. Still, he 
got himself arrested while driving drunk with a strangled corpse on the passenger seat. 

And when Gary Heidnik — a financial whiz who made a fortune on the stock market — was arrested for 
keeping chained and tortured “sex slaves” in the basement of his Philadelphia home, the best defense he 
could come up with at the time of his arraignment was that the women were already there when he 
moved into the house. 

MALE AND FEMALE 

In October 2002, Aileen Wuornos — the Florida hooker who shot seven male motorists in the span of a 
year — was executed for her crimes. From the time of her arrest, she was widely touted in the media as 
“America’s first female serial killer.” Catchy as that label was, it was completely inaccurate. There have 
been dozens of female serial killers in our country’s history. 

The phrase “female serial killer” conjures up images of a distaff Jack the Ripper: a lone woman 
psychopath, coolly stalking and snaring her victims, then butchering and mutilating them in a sex-crazed 
frenzy. In fact, ther tare no women who fit that particular model (at least not outside of overheated 
Hollywood fantasies lik eBasic Instinct ). When police discover a corpse with its throat slit, its torso cut 
open, its viscera removed, and its genitals excised, they are justified in making one basic assumption: the 




perpetrator was a man. 



That doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as a female serial killer. It just means men and women 
commit serial murder in different ways. 

The sort of atrocities perpetrated by male serial killers — the kind involving rape, mutilation, 
dismemberment — seem to be a function of particular masculine traits. More specifically, there are 
unmistakable parallels between this kind of violence — phallic-aggressive, penetrative, rapacious, and 
(insofar as it commonly gratifies itself upon the bodies of strangers), undiscriminating — and the typical 
pattern of male sexual behavior. For this reason, it is possible to see sadistic mutilation-murder as a 
grotesque distortion (or “pathological intensification,” in the words of Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing) of 
normal male sexuality. 

But if this intensely savage type of serial murder is exclusive to men — a monstrous expression of male 
sexuality — what, then, is the equivalent female form? Clearly, it must reflect female sexuality. Generally 
speaking, female serial killers differ from their male counterparts in roughly the same way that the 
sexual responses and behavior of women typically differ from those of men. 

A useful analogy here is pornography. It is a truth universally acknowledged that — while men are 
aroused by extremely raw depictions of abrupt, anonymous, anatomically explicit sex — women in 
general prefer their pornography to involve at least a suggestion of emotional intimacy and leisurely 
romance. Whether these differences in taste are a function of biology or culture is an open question. The 
indisputable fact is that the differences are real. 

An analogous distinction holds true for serial killers. Female psychopaths are no less depraved than their 
male counterparts. As a rule, however, brutal penetration is not what turns them on. Their excitement 
comes — not from violating the bodies of strangers with phallic objects — but from a grotesque, sadistic 
travesty of intimacy and love: from spooning poisoned medicine into the mouth of a trusting patient, for 
example, or smothering a sleeping child in its bed. In short, from tenderly turning a friend, family 
member, or dependent into a corpse — from nurturing them to death. (What made Aileen Wuornos 
unusual was that she was a rare, though by no means unique, example of a woman who killed her 
victims in the assaultive, phallic style of male serial stalkers like David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz.) 

The majority of female serial killers throughout history have relied on poison to dispatch their victims. 
For most people, there is a quaintArsenic and Old Lace quality associated with such crimes, as though 
disposing of a few people by feeding them arsenic-laced oatmeal were a rather genteel form of murder. 
The truth is that, compared to the lingering agonies suffered by the average poisoning victim, the deaths 
meted out by male serial killers like Jack the Ripper, “Son of Sam,” or the Boston Strangler — the swift 
executions by knife blade, bullet, or garrote — seem positively humane. Female poisoners, in other 
words, differ from the popular stereotype of the dotty old maid getting rid of a burdensome houseguest 
with a little nip of lethal hot cocoa. Many are terrifying sadists who derive intense perverted pleasure 
from the sufferings of their victims. 




There is no doubt that male serial sex-murder tends to be more lurid — more spectacularly violent — than 
the female variety. Whether it is mor e-evil is another matter. After all, which is worse: to dismember a 
streetwalker after slitting her throat, or to cuddle in bed with a close friend you’ve just poisoned, and to 
climax repeatedly as you feel the body beside you subside into death? 

CASE STUDY 

Jane Toppan, the Jolly Psychopath 

Like so many other serial killers, Jane Toppan was the product of a severely unstable upbringing. Her 
real name was Honora Kelley. She was born in Boston in 1857, the child of a poor Irish couple. Her 
mother died when Honora was a baby, leaving her in the dubious care of her father, Peter, a chronic 
drunk prone to violent outbursts and so wildly eccentric that his neighborhood nickname was “Kelley 
the Crack” (as in “crackpot”). 

In 1863, Kelley — eager to be free of his family burdens — deposited Honora and her older sister Delia in 
the Boston Female Asylum, an institution for orphaned and other desperately needy girls. He never saw 
his children again. 

Less than two years later, Honora was “placed out” — signed over as a full-time, live-in servant — to Mrs. 
Abner Toppan, a middle-aged widow from Lowell, Massachusetts. Though never formally adopted, she 
was given the name Jane Toppan. Her position in the household was always equivocal. On the one hand, 
she was treated as a member of the family. On the other, she was never allowed to forget her lowly 
origins or her place as a menial. Within the community, her dark Irish looks branded her a permanent 
outsider. After a childhood of abuse, rejection, and abandonment, she grew up in a constant state of 
humiliation. It was the perfect recipe for the making of a psychopath. 




Jane Toppan 



At no point in her life did Jane appear criminally deranged. On the contrary, she struck most 
acquaintances as a lively, outgoing person — “Jolly Jane,” they called her. Like others of her ilk, 
however, she had a hidden self that was hopelessly diseased. She was a lifelong liar and gossip, 
spreading malicious rumors about people she envied. She was also — like many prospective serial killers 
— a secret pyromaniac, who derived intense erotic pleasure from starting fires. Beneath her amiable 
exterior existed a poisonous well of malevolence, a deep, implacable longing to do harm. 

She found the perfect outlet for her dark desires in nursing. Enrolling in the training school of 
Cambridge JJospital, she impressed many of the doctors with her competence and pleasing personality. 
Secretly, however, she was experimenting on her patients, administering various poisons to them late at 
night when no one else was around. Eventually, she settled on a lethal combination of atropine and 
morphine as the most satisfactory method. Exactly how many victims she killed during those years is 
unclear, though the number was at least a dozen. As she later confessed, she became addicted to murder. 
Making people die gave her a “voluptuous delight.” JJer pleasure was even more intense when she 
climbed into bed with her victims and held their bodies tight while they suffered their final convulsions. 

Eventually, she hired herself out as a private nurse. JJer professional skill and personal charm made her a 
favorite among some of the most respectable families in Cambridge. No one knows for certain how 
many patients died as a result of her care during this ten-year period of her life, though estimates range 
as high as a hundred. Among them were her best friend, Myra Conners, and her foster sister, Elizabeth. 

As with other psychopaths in the grip of a murderous compulsion, her killings escalated in frequency. 
JJer undoing came in the summer of 1901 while vacationing in a Cape Cod cottage owned by an old 
friend, Alden Davis. Within a six-week span, Jane murdered Davis, his wife, and two married daughters. 
The shocking obliteration of the entire family aroused suspicion, and Jane was soon arrested. 

In custody, she stunned some of Boston’s leading psychiatrists by admitting that her murders were 
motivated by “an irresistible sexual impulse.” She got a powerful erotic charge from holding her 
poisoned victims in her arms while they died. This need had grown increasingly powerful over the past 
year, and during the preceding summer she “had let herself go.” 

She was diagnosed as “morally insane” — the Victorian term for a criminal psychopath — and sentenced 
to spend the rest of her life in a mental asylum. No sooner had her brief trial ended than she shocked the 
nation by confessing to thirty-one murders. 

She spent the remaining thirty-six years of her life in a state mental hospital, dying at age eighty-four in 
1938. According to legend, she would occasionally beckon to one of the nurses, and, with a 
conspiratorial smile, say: 

“Get the morphine, dearie, and we’ll go out into the ward. You and I will have a lot of fun seeing them 
die.” 




Angels of Death 



Jane Toppan falls into a common category of female serial killer, the psychopathic nurse who, instead of 
serving as an “Angel of Mercy,” acts as an “Angel of Death.” The annals of crime are filled with such 
homicidal health-care workers. 

Anna Marie Hahn 

Typical of the breed was Anna Marie Hahn, a German emigre who settled in Cincinnati and took up a 
career as a live-in nurse, tending strictly to lonely old men with large bank accounts. After getting her 
hands on their cash, she would dispatch them with various lethal potions, arsenic-spiked beer being a 
favorite. (One prospective victim became suspicious when some houseflies dropped dead after sampling 
the mug of brew Nurse Hahn had just served him.) Between 1932 and 1937, she poisoned an 
indeterminate number of elderly clients, possibly as many as fifteen. Arrested in 1937, she was 
convicted of first-degree murder and — on December 7, 1938 — became the first woman to die in Ohio’s 
electric chair. 

Genene Jones 

A more recent — and even more prolific — “Angel of Death” was Genene Jones. Originally a beautician, 
she switched to vocational nursing in 1977 to pursue her lifelong dream of caring for critically ill 
children. Unfortunately, this dream was motivated not by any healthy desire to help others but by a 
psychopathic need to prove that she was a “miracle worker” who could rescue tiny patients from the 
brink of death. 

In 1981, after four years of work at various hospitals in and around San Antonio, Texas, she accepted a 
position at the Bexar County Medical Center. Not long afterward, administrators began to notice an 
alarming increase in the deaths of little patients. An investigation was quickly launched and suspicion 
quickly focused on Nurse Jones. Like other compulsive killers who continue to commit their horrors 
even while under official scrutiny, Nurse Jones kept right on going. 

Resigning from Bexar in March 1982, she joined the staff of the Kerr County clinic. Almost 
immediately, Kerr found itself plagued with a rash of inexplicable medical emergencies involving young 
children, who were seized with violent respiratory attacks while undergoing routine checkups. Once 
again, the link between these events and Genene Jones was impossible to ignore, particularly when an 
incriminating bottle of muscle relaxant turned up in her possession. 

Eventually, a jury took just three hours to convict her of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to 
ninety-nine years in prison. Her motives sprang from the depraved narcissism characteristic of 
psychopaths. To prove herself a heroine, she would inject her victims with medications that precipitated 
respiratory failure or cardiac arrest, then rush to their rescue. Sometimes, she did, in fact, manage to save 
them, but all too often they succumbed. She is thought to be responsible for the deaths of as many as 




forty-six babies and young children. 



These women take great delight in their secret hidden power. In watching the suffering and slow death 
of her victims, she receives the utmost stimulation. . . . She strives for the will to power which is 
characteristic of her sadistic nature and obtains this through the anguish and suffering of her victims. 

— J. Paul de River, 77ie Sexual Criminal 

Black Widows 

Since serial killers seem almost supernaturally evil, they are often given the kinds of lurid nicknames 
accorded to comic book supervillains. Just as homicidal nurses are known as “Angels of Death,” another 
common type of female psycho-killer is known as the “Black Widow.” 

Named after the poisonous female spider that devours its own mate, this criminological category refers 
to women who murder a whole string of husbands — along with anyone else they perceive as an obstacle 
to their own happiness, such as burdensome children, interfering in-laws, inconvenient acquaintances, 
and the like. In their book , Murder Most Rare, Michael and C. L. Kelleher identify the essential traits 
that make this kind of serial killer particularly deadly: 



The Black Widow is typically intelligent, manipulative, highly organized, and patient; she plans her 
activities with great care. Her crimes are usually carried out over a relatively long period of time, and 
she is rarely suspected of murder until the victim count has become significant or the number of deaths 
among her relatives and acquaintances can no longer be considered coincidental. In many cases, the 
Black Widow begins to murder relatively late in life (often after the age of thirty) and therefore brings a 
good deal of maturity and patience to the planning and commission of her crimes. She relies on her 
ability to win the confidence and trust of her victims as a precursor to any attack. For this reason, she is 
seldom viewed as a suspect, even after she has committed several murders. . . . The average Black 
Widow will claim between six and thirteen victims during her active period, which generally ranges 
from ten to fifteen years. 

Nannie Doss 

One of the more notorious Black Widows of recent times was the pudgy, bespectacled Nannie Doss, 
dubbed the “Giggling Granny” because of her habit of chortling in amusement while discussing her 
crimes. The product of a harsh and abusive upbringing, Doss was a lifelong addict of true romance 
magazines, seeking refuge from the unpleasant realities of her existence in sugar-coated fantasies of 
undying love. Unfortunately, the men she met and married — generally through classified lonely hearts 
ads — were anything but Prince Charmings. Most were philandering alcoholics. When each new mate 
proved less than ideal, Nannie dispatched him with a generous dose of rat poison, mixed into whiskey or 
coffee or stewed prunes. Between 1929 and 1953, she murdered four husbands. She might have added to 




that tally if the doctor who treated her final husband hadn’t grown sufficiently suspicious to order an 
autopsy, which turned up enough arsenic in the victim’s body to have killed eighteen men. 

Under arrest, she indignantly denied that she murdered for profit — and, in fact, the money she realized 
from her husbands’ savings account and life insurance policies was barely enough to cover their funeral 
expenses. Her motive, she claimed, was love. “I was searching for the perfect mate, the real romance of 
life,” she told interrogators. Of course, that didn’t explain why she also poisoned two children, a 
grandchild, two sisters, and her mother. 

In 1955, Doss was sentenced to life in prison, where she died of leukemia ten years later after writing 
her memoirs for Life magazine. 

My late husband sure did like prunes. I fixed a whole box and he ate them all. 

— Nannie Doss 
Marie Besnard 

An exact contemporary of the “Giggling Granny” was the French Black Widow, Marie Besnard, known 
in her country as the “Queen of Poisoners.” Born in 1896 in Loudon, France, she received strict religious 
training at a local convent — an education that didn’t prevent her from acquiring an apparently well- 
deserved reputation for sexual promiscuity as an adolescent. 

In 1920, at the age of twenty-three, she wed an older cousin, Auguste Antigny. The marriage ended 
abruptly seven years later when her husband died of what the doctors called “fluid in the lungs” — the 
first in a long string of medical misdiagnoses that would be made on Marie’s murder victims. 

In 1929, she married her second husband, Leon Besnard. Over the course of the next twenty years, 
Leon’s family would be eliminated, one by one, in a series of shockingly unexpected deaths that came to 
be known locally as the “Besnard curse.” The first to die were two great-aunts. Then Leon’s father, 
mother, sister, two spinster cousins, and finally Leon himself. During this time, Marie also knocked off 
her own father, mother, and an elderly couple she had befriended. Her victims’ deaths were attributed to 
everything from strokes to bizarre accidents. Two of her victims died, she claimed, when they had 
mistakenly eaten from a bowl of lye, thinking it was a special dessert. 

That the police accepted such far-fetched explanations suggests that the investigation into the “Besnard 
curse” was led by Inspector Clouseau. After the thirteenth suspicious death, authorities decided to 
perform an autopsy on Leon Besnard, whose body was found to be full of arsenic. More exhumations 
followed, all with the same result. 

Arrested in 1950, Marie first confessed, then recanted and hired the best lawyers money could buy. Her 
legal dream team did its job. She was brought to trial three times: in 1952, 1954, and 1961. The first two 




proceedings ended in mistrials, the third with her acquittal. In France, her case is considered to be the 
“perfect crime.” 

Deadlier Than the Male 

“The female of the species is more deadly than the male,” wrote Rudyard Kipling. Anyone who doubts 
that female psychopaths can be as lethal as any man should consider the following cases: 

Marie de Brinvilliers (1630-1676) 

The spoiled, sexually promiscuous daughter of a prominent Parisian family, Marie murdered her father, 
two brothers, and as many as fifty other victims with a poison that she secretly tested on unwary patients 
at a Parisian pauper hospital. In July 1676, she was publicly beheaded for her crimes in front of Notre 
Dame Cathedral. 




The execution of Marie de Brinvilliers 
Anna Zanz wiger (1760-1811) 



Born in Nuremburg, Germany, Anna grew to be a profoundly unattractive woman, and was said to 
resemble a toad. In her forties — after a life of hardship and disappointment, including a miserable 





marriage to an abusive alcoholic that ended when he drank himself to death — she hired herself out as a 
housemaid to a succession of well-to-do men, hoping that one would become so dependent on her 
domestic skills that he would marry her. Unfortunately, each of her prospective mates was either already 
married or engaged. Zanzwiger attempted to solve this problem by murdering the women with arsenic. 
She also killed one of her employers for spite and poisoned the food of at least a dozen other people — 
including an infant to whom she gave a teething biscuit dipped in arsenic-laced milk. By the time of her 
arrest in 181 1, the act of poisoning had grown to be an uncontrollable passion. She was beheaded in July 
of the same year. Her body was then lashed to a wagon wheel and displayed in public. 

It is perhaps better for the community that I should die, as it would be impossible for me to stop 
poisoning people. 

— Anna Zanzwiger, at her sentencing 
Gesina Gottfried (1798-1828) 

A native of Bremen, Germany, the beautiful, blond Gesina was a classic psychopath, who experienced 
supreme ecstasy from watching people die and was, by her own admission, “born without a conscience.” 
During a ten-year span, she poisoned sixteen people, including her three husbands, her two young sons, 
her parents, a brother, an old friend, and the wife and five children of an employer named Rumf. 
Arrested in March 1828, after Rumf grew suspicious, she displayed not the slightest trace of remorse. 

On the contrary, she boasted of her crimes. “I was born without conscience,” she declared, “which 
allowed me to live without fear.” Convicted of six counts of murder, she was beheaded in 1828. 

Helene Jegado (c. 1803-1851) 

During her thirty-year career as a a domestic servant in villages throughout Brittany, France, Jegado 
murdered as many as twenty-seven people with no motive other than the sheer pleasure of killing. 
Wielding arsenic as her weapon, she poisoned men, women, and children. Arrested after killing off 
another servant in the household of a university professor, she staunchly maintained her innocence, 
denying all responsibility for the long string of corpses she had left in her wake. Wherever she went, she 
tearfully insisted, people just happened to die. The evidence against her, however, was overwhelming. 
She was guillotined in 1851. 

Mary Ann Cotton (1832-1873) 

One of the most prolific serial killers in English history, Mary murdered an estimated twenty-three 
people in a twelve-year period. Among her victims were her three husbands, ten children, five 
stepchildren, a sister-in-law, and an unwanted suitor. Most of the deaths were attributed to “gastric 
fever” until an autopsy on her seven-year-old stepson revealed enough arsenic in his stomach to have 
killed three men. She was hanged on March 24, 1873, and quickly immortalized in a popular children’s 
rhyme. 




Mary Ann Cotton 



Mary Ann Cotton 

She’d dead and she’s rotten 

She lies in her bed 

With her eyes wide oppen 

Sing, sing, oh, what can I sing 

Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with a string. 

Where, where? Up in the air. 

Sellin’ black puddens a penny a pair. 

— Nineteenth-century British nursery rhyme 

Sarah Jane Robinson (1839-1905) 

A frighteningly remorseless psychopath who felt no qualms about subjecting her nearest relations to 
agonizing deaths, the Irish-born Sarah Jane Tennent emigrated to America after being orphaned at the 
age of fourteen. JJer lethal career began around 1880, when she poisoned her husband, three of her eight 
children (including her infant twin sons) and the elderly landlord to whom she owed fifty dollars in back 
rent. JJer homicidal mania reached a pitch during an eighteen-month period that began in February 1885, 
when — partly for mercenary reasons, partly out of sheer depravity — she murdered her sister, her brother- 
in-law, her one-year-old niece, her six-year-old nephew, her own twenty-five-year-old daughter and 
twenty-three-year-old son. Arrested in August 1886, she became known in the press as America’s worst 
“poison fiend.” After one mistrial, she was condemned to hang, though her sentence was later commuted 
to life in prison. She spent the remainder of her life in a narrow cell decorated with engraved newspaper 
portraits of her victims. 



Marti Enriqueta (7-1912) 



This self-styled witch kidnapped, sexually abused, and ritualistically butchered small children in 
Barcelona, Spain, in the early years of the twentieth century. She apparently cannibalized her victims, 
then boiled the leftovers for use as an ingredient in the “love potions” that she sold to local peasants. She 
was arrested and executed in 1912 after a young victim named Angelita — who had been forced to eat 
human flesh while in captivity — escaped from Enriqueta’ s lair and alerted the police. 

Julia Fazekas (c. 1865-1929) 

A midwife in the remote Hungarian village of Nagyrev, Fazekas not only delivered babies but also 
performed illegal abortions and supplied poison to any woman wishing to rid herself of an unwanted 
husband, troublesome child, aging parent, or wealthy uncle. Ordering flypaper in bulk, she would boil 
off the arsenic coating and render it into powder, which she sold to her clients for $8 to $40 a dose, 
depending on what they could afford. For two decades following the end of World War I, countless local 
women — who would come to be known as “the angel-makers of Nagyrev” — availed themselves of her 
lethal services. When the police finally caught on and came to arrest her, Fazekas committed suicide 
with one of her own potions. Eventually — in a case that gained worldwide notoriety — thirty-four peasant 
women, ranging in age from forty-four to seventy-one, were put on trial for murdering relatives with 
Fazekas ’s poison. Eighteen were convicted, eight executed, the rest acquitted. 

Dorothea Puente (1929-) 

Born in Mexico, Puente was abandoned as an infant and raised in an orphanage. Over the next forty 
years, she married four times and gave birth to a daughter whom she immediately put up for adoption. In 
1983, at the age of fifty-three, she was sent to prison for drugging old men and stealing their money. 
Released in 1985, she rented a run-down house in Sacramento, California, and opened a rooming house 
for elderly persons on fixed incomes. Over the next two years, more than a dozen of her boarders 
disappeared. In November 1988 — investigating neighborhood complaints about the stench emanating 
from Puente’s property — police found the first of seven corpses on her premises. Puente took flight, 
though she was eventually arrested in Eos Angeles. She was charged with nine counts of murder, 
although authorities believed her victims totaled twenty-five. After a marathon six-month trial, she was 
convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. 

Aileen Wuornos (1956-2002) 

Commonly, if mistakenly, called “America’s first woman serial killer,” Wuornos had the kind of 
upbringing that is almost guaranteed to produce a psychopathic criminal. Her father was a habitual 
pedophile who eventually hanged himself after being arrested for molesting a seven-year-old girl. At six 
months of age, Aileen was abandoned by her mother and left in the care of her grandparents. Her 
violent, alcoholic grandfather constantly threatened to kill her. He threw her out of the house when 
Aileen gave birth to an illegitimate child after being raped. She was fourteen years old. From then on, 




she became a drifter, selling her body for drinks, drugs, and food. At twenty, she married a seventy-year- 
old man, a union that lasted all of a month. Two years later, she attempted suicide by shooting herself in 
the stomach. Upon recuperating, she robbed a convenience store and spent slightly more than a year in 
prison. Her rage against the world — and particularly against men — reached a lethal pitch in late 1989, 
when she shot to death a male motorist who had picked her up at a Florida truck stop and driven her to a 
remote wooded area for sex. Six more nearly identical murders followed over the next year. Eventually, 
Wuornos was arrested in a biker bar. She claimed self-defense for all seven murders. At her 1992 trial, 
her lesbian lover turned state’s evidence and testified against her. Wuornos was convicted and sentenced 
to death. Ten years later, in October 2002, the sentence was finally carried out. 

Recommended Reading: 

Ann Jones , Women Who Kill (1996) 

Michael and C. L. Kelleher, Murder Most Rare: The Female Serial Killer (1998) 

Terry Manners, Deadlier Than the Male: Stories of Female Serial Killers (1995) 

Michael Newton, Bad Girls Do It! An Encyclopedia of Female Murderers (1993) 

Patricia Pearson, When She Was Bad (1997) 

Kerry Segrave, Women Serial and Mass Murderers: A Worldwide Reference (1990) 

BLACK AND WHITE 

Though the great majority of American serial killers are white, there is no racial or ethnic basis for this 
fact. That is to say, there’s nothing “white” or “black” or, for that matter, Asian or Hispanic or anything 
else about serial murder. Serial murder is a human phenomenon found throughout history and in virtually 
every culture, with the possible exception of the Inuits. 

(Actually, one serial killer, William Tahl ,was an Eskimo by birth, but he committed his homicides in 
Texas and California, earning a spot on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list in 1965.) 

The preponderance of white serial killers in our own country is simply a matter of demographics. In 
point of fact, as theNew York Times reported in an article on October 28, 2002, “black serial killers occur 
in roughly equal — or even slightly greater — proportion to the number of blacks in the population.” 
According to recent studies, between 13 and 22 percent of United States serial killers are African- 
American. 

Why, then, are people so surprised to learn that a fair number of serial killers are black men? 
Unfortunately, the most likely explanation has to do with lingering racial prejudice. 




Serial murderers generally kill within their race. White serial killers tend to prey on white victims; 
blacks on black. And the sad fact is that the white majority is not especially interested in crimes 
involving minority victims. As a result, these cases get relatively little media coverage. This is true, not 
just of serial murder but of other horrific crimes as well. When the pretty blond Mormon girl, Elizabeth 
Smart, was abducted from her home in Salt Lake City in June 2002, for example, her picture ended up 
on the cover of Newsweek. By contrast, when a four-year-old African-American girl, Dannariah Finley of 
Orange, Texas, was abducted from home and slain just one month later, the newspapers barely reported 
the story. 

Indeed, some white serial killers have deliberately exploited this sorry circumstance in order to avoid 
detection. Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, preyed mostly on African-American and Asian young men, 
apparently in the belief that the police would pay less attention to the disappearance of minority victims. 
And in the 1920s, the hideously deranged child-killer/cannibal Albert Fish snatched an untold number of 
black children from the streets of inner-city ghettos for the same reason. 

In short, one reason that most Americans haven’t heard much about black serial killers is that, 
throughout the decades, the police have been lax in pursuing them and the media uninterested in 
reporting on them — so long, that is, as the victims were also black. 

Jarvis Catoe 

It is significant that one of the most notorious African-American serial killers of the mid-twentieth 
century, Jarvis Catoe, only got caught after he began to target white women. In March 1941, a twenty- 
five-year-old newlywed named Rose Abramowitz approached Catoe, who was loitering outside her 
Washington, DC apartment building. Abramowitz hired him to wax the linoleum floor of her kitchen. 
Once inside her home, Catoe strangled and raped her, then made off with twenty dollars. A few months 
later, twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth Strieff got into his car during a rainstorm, mistaking it for a taxi. 
Driving her to a nearby garage, Catoe raped and strangled her, then dumped her nude body in another 
garage a short distance away. His final victim, also Caucasian, was a twenty- six-year-old Bronx waitress 
named Evelyn Anderson. A watch belonging to Anderson was recovered from a New York City 
pawnshop and traced back to Catoe. In custody, he confessed to having strangled ten women with his 
bare hands and raped at least four others during the preceding three years. The majority of his victims 
had been — as the newspapers put it — “Negro women,” a fact that undoubtedly accounted for the initially 
lethargic response of the police in pursuing the culprit. Convicted of the Abramowitz murder, Catoe was 
sentenced to death and electrocuted on January 13, 1943. 

Henry Louis Wallace 

In restricting himself to victims of his own race, another African-American psychopath — Henry Louis 
Wallace — was more typical of serial killers in general, though he deviated from the usual pattern in 
another regard. Whereas most male serial killers prey on strangers, Wallace murdered a string of 




acquaintances. Between September 1992 and March 1994, the crack-addicted Wallace raped and 
strangled nine young black women in and around Charlotte, North Carolina, all people who knew and 
trusted him. Some were employees at the Taco Bell he managed. Several worked with his girlfriend. 

One was his girlfriend’s roommate. Others knew his sister. As with many serial killers, the pace of 
Wallace’s crimes escalated over time. His first six murders occurred over a twenty-month span; his final 
three within seventy-two hours. Finally arrested in January 1994, he promptly confessed to all nine 
killings and was sentenced to death. Because they were slow to acknowledge a link among Wallace’s 
earliest murders, the Charlotte police were accused of racism: of failing to take the case seriously 
because the victims were black. 

Carlton Gary 

Carlton Gary, another notorious black serial killer, had particular tastes when it came to victims. He only 
killed outside his race, limiting himself to female Caucasians. He also liked his women old. 

Abandoned by his father and shuttled from pillar to post throughout his hardscrabble childhood, Gary 
accumulated a long rap sheet for robbery, arson, and drug dealing while still in his teens. His 
combination of exceptional intelligence, glib charm, and psychopathic cunning made him especially 
dangerous. At one point in his life, he was even dating a female deputy sheriff while pushing drugs and 
committing serial murder on the side. Arrested in May 1970, as a suspect in the rape-murder of an 
eighty-five-year-old Albany, New York, woman, Gary managed to pin the blame on an acquaintance. 
Eventually after several stints behind bars on lesser charges, he escaped from prison and made his way 
back to his native city, Columbus, Georgia. Between September 1977 and April 1978, that city was 
rocked by a string of murders committed by a shadowy intruder dubbed the “Stocking Strangler.” His 
victims were seven white women, the youngest fifty-nine, the oldest just shy of ninety. After embarking 
on a string of restaurant holdups, Gary was arrested for armed robbery in 1978 and sentenced to twenty 
years in jail. Four years later, however, he escaped. He wasn’t nabbed for good until May 1984. Charged 
with three of the “Stocking Strangler” murders, he was convicted on all counts and sentenced to die in 
Georgia’s electric chair. 

Other African-American serial killers include: 



Coral Watts . Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Watts began dreaming of killing women in his 
childhood. When a psychiatrist asked if these dreams disturbed him, Watts replied: “No, I feel better 
after I have one.” He first assaulted a woman when he was fifteen years old. When asked about his 
motives, he shrugged, “I felt like beating her up.” He began to make his homicidal dreams a reality in 
1980 when he terrorized Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the “Sunday Morning Slasher.” Falling under 
suspicion, he relocated to Houston, where he killed an indeterminate number of women, perhaps as 
many as forty. Finally arrested in 1982, he struck a controversial deal with the prosecutor’s office, 
confessing to thirteen murders in exchange for a burglary conviction and sixty-year sentence. Despite a 
public outcry, he is slated to be paroled in 2006 at the age of fifty-eight. 




She was evil. I could see it in her eyes. 



— Coral Watts, explaining his reasons for killing one of his thirteen admitted victims 

Alton Coleman . During a fifty-three-day period in the summer of 1984, Coleman, along with his female 
accomplice Debra Brown, murdered eight people in five Midwestern states, beginning with seven-year- 
old Tamika Turks of Gary, Indiana. After raping the little girl, Coleman jumped up and down on her 
chest until her rib cage fractured and punctured her vital organs. His other victims, all black, ranged in 
age from fifteen to seventy-seven. Some were strangled, some stabbed, others bludgeoned or shot. 
Besides serial murder, Coleman committed at least seven rapes during this period, as well as three 
kidnappings and fourteen armed robberies. Arrested in July 1984, he was tried and convicted in three 
different states: Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. He managed to delay his execution until April 26, 2002, 
when — after devouring a last meal of filet mignon, fried chicken, corn bread, biscuits with brown gravy, 
french fries, broccoli with cheese, salad, onion rings, collard greens, sweet potato pie with whipped 
cream, and butter pecan ice cream — he was put to death by lethal injection. Relatives of his many 
victims watched on closed-circuit TV. 

Celeophus Prince, Jr. Unlike most serial killers, Prince preyed exclusively on victims outside his own 
race. Between January and September 1990, he brutally murdered six women in the San Diego 
community of Clairemont, stabbing one of them more than fifty times and leaving bloody circles 
smeared on his victims’ breasts as a “signature.” His MO involved following unsuspecting women to 
their homes, then breaking in and butchering them with a kitchen knife. Like Alton Coleman — whose 
victims included an Ohio woman and her ten-year-old daughter — Prince murdered a mother and 
daughter, then bragged about the double killing to a friend and took to wearing the dead woman’s 
wedding ring on a chain around his neck. Dubbed the “Clairemont Killer” during his nine-month reign 
of terror, he was the object of the largest police manhunt in the history of San Diego. Arrested in 
September 1991, he was eventually convicted of six counts of first-degree murder, twenty counts of 
burglary, and one count of rape. He remains on San Quentin’s death row, awaiting execution. 

CASE STUDY 

Wayne Williams and the Atlanta Child Murders 

More than twenty years after the accused perpetrator was found guilty and sentenced to life 
imprisonment, questions continue to surround the case of the so-called Atlanta Child Murders. The story 
began in July 1979, when a woman scavenging the roadside for empties stumbled on the corpses of two 
African-American boys, one shot dead with a .22-caliber pistol, the other asphyxiated. Over the next two 
years, twenty-seven more victims would be added to the official list of homicides connected to the killer. 
During that fearful time, the case would spark panic and outrage in Atlanta’s black community, generate 
nationwide media attention (including an article in theNew York Times Magazine that would feature the 
earliest documented use of the term “serial killer”), and bring help from the highest reaches of the 
government, up to and including the president himself. And not even the arrest and conviction of the 




prime suspect put an end to the controversy. 



Right from the start, the killings posed an enormous problem for law enforcement agents. There was no 
consistency — no identifiabl ^signature — in terms of the killer’s MO. Most of the victims were strangled, 
but some were shot, others stabbed or bludgeoned to death. And though most of the victims were males, 
a few were young girls. On March 4, 1980, for example, twelve-year-old Angel Lenair left her house to 
play after completing her homework and never returned. Six days later, her body was found lashed to a 
tree, an electrical cord tied around her neck and someone else’s panties stuffed down her throat. 

As his reign of terror continued, moreover, the killer began to prey on older victims: twenty-year-old 
Larry Rogers, twenty-one-year-old Eddie Duncan, twenty-three-year-old Michael McIntosh, twenty- 
seven-year-old Nathaniel Cater. 




Wayne Williams 

(Bill Lignante — ABC News) 



By the spring of 1980, the city’s African-American community was in an uproar over the failure of the 
police to stop the killings. Rumors swirled that the Ku Klux Klan was on a campaign to annihilate the 
black youth of Atlanta, while Roy Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality went public with a theory 
that the murders were the work of a Satanic cult. Dozens of bounty hunters — drawn by the prospect of a 
hundred-thousand-dollar reward — descended on the city. Celebrities from Burt Reynolds to Muhammad 
Ali offered financial assistance while President Reagan pledged federal funds to help track down the 
killer. A special task force — including thirty-five FBI agents — interviewed 20,000 people in person and 
another 150,000 over the phone. 

The case began to break in the early-morning hours of May 22, 1981, when officers on stakeout at a 
bridge over the Chattahoochee River heard a loud splash and halted the car that was crossing the span. 
Its driver was a twenty-three-year-old African-American named Wayne Williams. 



There was certainly nothing in Williams’s background that matched the typical profile of a serial killer. 




The son of schoolteacher parents, he grew up in a stable and loving household where he was encouraged 
to cultivate his talents. A radio enthusiast who dreamed of making it big in the music business, he 
showed a great deal of early promise. By the time he was sixteen, he was broadcasting music from a 
radio station he had set up in the basement of his home. Besides electronics, he had a keen interest in 
photography and became highly skilled with a camera. 

Still, there were definite signs that all was not right with the enterprising young Williams. Despite his 
intelligence and ambition, he couldn’t make it through college, dropping out of Georgia State after just 
one year. His dream of discovering the next Stevie Wonder came to nothing, and he gained a reputation 
as a blowhard and liar — the kind of person who claims to have important contacts and is always making 
big promises that never pan out. An extreme loner, he had no real social relationships and continued to 
live with his parents into his twenties. He also began displaying some troubling behavioral traits, 
including a fondness for impersonating police officers (a common tendency among serial killers), as 
well as a morbid interest in accident scenes — the grislier the better. Monitoring police transmissions on 
his shortwave, he rushed to the sites of car wrecks or fires or even plane crashes, shooting photographs 
and videos, then peddling them to the local media. 

After being stopped on the bridge, Williams was questioned and let go. Two days later, however, a 
corpse was fished out of the river, and he was brought into the station for another grilling. Afterward — 
playing to the media — he staged an at-home news conference, loudly proclaiming his innocence and 
offering various alibis that subsequently proved to be full of holes. While the police put him under round- 
the-clock surveillance, forensic specialists worked frantically to link him to the crimes. 

When FBI scientists were finally able to match fibers and dog hairs found on several of the victims to 
Williams’s car mats, home carpeting, and bedspread, police moved in and arrested him on June 21, 1981. 

At his nine-week trial, the prosecution portrayed Williams as a violent homosexual filled with racial self- 
loathing who harbored a virulent contempt for black youths. Witnesses were produced who testified to 
having seen Williams in the company of several victims. Toward the end of the trial, the defense put 
Williams on the stand, but the tactic backfired when he was goaded into a display of uncontrolled anger, 
denouncing the prosecutor as a “fool” and lashing out at various government agents. In the end — despite 
his impassioned protestations of innocence — he was convicted of two counts of murder and given a life 
sentence for each. 

Even today, many people believe that Williams was railroaded: that the circumstantial evidence on 
which he was convicted was flimsy at best and possibly manufactured by the government; that key 
information that might have aided his case was suppressed; that Williams received inadequate 
representation. 

One fact, however, suggests that the cops got the right man after all: once Wayne Williams was arrested, 
the Atlanta Child Murders stopped. 




YOUNG AND OLD 



“Killer kids” who commit mass murder have become an all-too-common feature of contemporary 
American society. During the late 1990s there seemed to be a veritable epidemic of them: sixteen-year- 
old Luke Woodham of Pearl, Mississippi, who killed three schoolmates and wounded seven after knifing 
to death his own mother; fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal of West Paducah, Kentucky, who gunned 
down three fellow students and wounded five others at an early-morning prayer meeting; fifteen-year- 
old Kip Kinkel of Springfield, Oregon, who murdered his parents, then shot twenty-four students, killing 
two; Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson — ages eleven and thirteen — who set off a fire alarm at 
school to draw their classmates outside, then opened fire, killing four students and a teacher. And, of 
course, the Columbine killers: seventeen-year-old Dylan Klebold and eighteen-year-old Eric Harris, 
whose April 1999 massacre in Littleton, Colorado left a dozen students and a teacher dead and twenty- 
three other people wounded. 

By contrast, serial murder perpetrated by minors is an exceptionally rare phenomenon. The most 
infamous case in American history is that of Jesse Harding Pomeroy, the Boston “Boy Fiend,” whose 
criminal career began when he was twelve. During a nine-month reign of terror that began in December 
1871, Pomeroy lured a string of smaller boys to remote locations in Chelsea and South Boston, then 
bound, beat, and tortured them. Arrested and shipped to reform school, he was released after less than 
seventeen months; whereupon he promptly committed a pair of appalling mutilation-murders on a ten- 
year-old girl and a four-year-old boy. Pomeroy was only fourteen when he was tried, convicted, and 
sentenced to death. A controversy immediately erupted over the morality of executing a minor, and his 
sentence was ultimately commuted to life. He lived until 1932, having spent just over forty years of his 
nearly sixty-year incarceration in solitary confinement — the second-longest such stretch in US penal 
history. 




Jesse Pomeroy 




Though Pomeroy began torturing children when he was twelve, he didn’t graduate to homicide until he 
was fourteen — which makes Craig Price of Warwick, Rhode Island, the youngest serial killer in US 
history. During the late 1980s, at the age of thirteen, the black youth — who had been “peeping” on a 
neighborhood woman named Rebecca Spencer — broke into her house and killed her with a kitchen 
knife. Two years later, he stabbed to death another local woman, Joan Heaton, and her two daughters, 
ages eight and ten. Dubbed the “Slasher of Warwick,” he was arrested when a detective noticed a large 
cut on his hand. Freely confessing to the murders, he was sent to the state prison in Cranston and is 
scheduled for parole in 2019. 

CASE STUDY 

Mary Bell, the British Bad Seed 

The savage murder of a pair of preschoolers by a psychopathic killer who exults in the atrocities is 
appalling enough. But when that killer turns out to be a child, too — and, even more shockingly, an 
eleven-year-old girl with a heart-shaped face and big blue eyes — the crime is guaranteed to set off an 
explosion of horror, outrage, and stunned disbelief. This is precisely what happened in the summer of 
1968, when Britain was rocked by the case of Mary Bell, arguably the most notorious juvenile psycho- 
killer of the twentieth century. 

Because of her youth and angelic appearance, Mary has sometimes been described as the British Bad 
Seed — a reference to the 1956 movie about a pretty, pigtailed schoolgirl whose picture-perfect exterior 
conceals the heart of a psychopathic monster. The comparison is only partially valid. The fictional “Bad 
Seed” was raised in a loving, stable household by a devoted Mommy and Daddy. Her evil was innate. 
Mary Bell, by contrast, was made into a monster. Raised by a viciously depraved young prostitute, the 
little girl was allegedly subjected to unimaginable abuse, held down by her mother while strange men 
sexually brutalized her. In light of the soul-deforming horrors she suffered from her earliest years, it is 
little wonder that Mary Bell herself became a cold-blooded predator. 

During her nightmarish childhood, she manifested the classic symptoms that experts see as a predictor of 
serial murder: cruelty to animals, abnormally prolonged bed-wetting, and vandalism (though not, as is 
often the case, pyromania). That she cannot technically be classified as a serial killer — at least according 
to the FBI’s definition — is only because her victim count fell one short of the minimum. However, there 
is little doubt that Bell would have continued taking lives had she been able to. 

Her violent attacks on other children began during the second week of May 1968, when, within twenty- 
four hours, she and her best friend Norma assaulted four little acquaintances in Scottswood, a dreary, 
economically depressed industrial community in northern England. Ten days later, on May 25, the body 
of three-year-old Martin Brown was found in a derelict house, blood and saliva bubbling from his 
mouth. It was Mary who excitedly ran to tell the boy’s aunt, Rita Finley. In the succeeding days, Mary 
and Norma showed up repeatedly at Mrs. Finley’s house to plague her with tormenting questions: “Do 
you miss Martin?” “Do you cry for him?” Finally — unable to stand it any longer — the grieving woman 




threw the grinning children out of her house and told them never to return. 




Portrait of Mary Bell by Joe Coleman 



Two days after the discovery of Martin’s body, the local nursery was vandalized by intruders, who left 
the place a wreck. Amid the debris, police found four taunting notes written in a childish hand, including 
one that read: 



we did 

murder 

Martain 

brown 

Fuckof 



you Bastard 



Two months passed. On Wednesday, July 31, another three-year-old Scottswood boy, Brian Howe, went 
missing. When his worried older sister Pat went looking for him, she ran into Mary Bell and Norma, 
who eagerly offered to help search for the toddler. Mary led the girl to a stretch of industrial waste 
ground where local children liked to play and where Brian’s corpse was later discovered between two 
concrete blocks. The little boy had been strangled and sexually mutilated with a broken pair of scissors 
that lay nearby. The letter “M” had been carved into his naked belly with razor. 

Before long, investigators focused their suspicions on Mary and Norma. At Brian’s funeral on August 7, 
Chief Inspector James Dobson kept his eye on Mary Bell. “I watched her as she stood in front of the 
Howes’ house while the coffin was brought out,” he would later explain. “That was when I knew I 
couldn’t risk another day. She stood there laughing, laughing and rubbing her hands. I thought, My God, 
I’ve got to bring her in or she’ll do another one.” 

Brought to the police station for questioning, Mary and Norma accused each other of the murder of 
Brian Howe. The two girls were brought to trial in December. After nine days, Norma was acquitted, 
while Mary — labeled a cunning, remorseless psychopath by experts — was sentenced to “detention for 
life.” 

Her later life has been marked by periodic controversy and public uproar. At first, she was placed in a 
reform school, where — within two years — she accused a housemaster of sexual assault. Later, she was 
transferred to a prison, where she declared herself a lesbian and paraded around with a rolled-up 
stocking stuffed in the crotch of her pants. In 1977, she was transferred to a less secure facility, from 
which she promptly escaped. Though she was quickly captured again, she was at large long enough to 
lose her virginity to a young man who later sold his story to the tabloids. Shortly before her parole in 
1980, she was moved to a halfway house, where she promptly managed to get pregnant by a married 
man. She aborted that pregnancy, but became a mother in 1984 after her release from jail. She 
eventually settled in a small town but was driven out by angry residents when they discovered her true 
identity. The quiet, anonymous life she finally managed to construct for herself and her child was 
shattered in 1998 with the publication of Gitta Sereny’sCmw Unheard, which ignited a firestorm when 
the author disclosed that she had paid the onetime child-murderer for her participation. 



Overaged serial killers are just as rare as juvenile ones. Albert Fish — arguably the most perverted figure 
in the annals of American crime — was a genuine geriatric monster. In 1928, the gaunt, grandfatherly- 
looking Fish lured a twelve-year-old girl to an abandoned house in Westchester, New York, then 
strangled her, butchered her body, and carried away several pounds of her flesh, which he proceeded to 
make into a stew and consume in a state of extreme sexual excitation over the course of a week. He was 
finally captured after sending an unspeakable letter to the little girl’s mother, in which he gloatingly 
described every atrocity he had perpetrated on the child. He was electrocuted in 1936 at the age of sixty- 
five, becoming the oldest man ever put to death in Sing Sing. 



Recommended Reading: 




Jonathan Kel 1 errn an , Sa vag e Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children (1999) 



D. Lassiter , Killer Kids (1998) 

Cliff Linedecker , Killer Kids (1993) 

STRAIGHT AND GAY 

The vast majority of sadistic lust-murderers are heterosexual men, venting their virulent hatred of 
women on prostitutes, coed hitchhikers, and other female victims of opportunity. Gays, however, aren’t 
exempt from this psychopathology. Some of the most infamous serial killers of recent times have been 
homosexual men: John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Dean Corll, Dennis Nilsen. 

Though gays constitute only a small minority of serial killers — about 5 percent, according to the most 
informed estimates — they are even more prone to “overkill” than their straight counterparts, indulging in 
the most horrific extremes of torture, mutilation, and dismemberment. They are also among the most 
prolific of serial killers. The sheer promiscuity of their crimes is a kind of grotesque mirror of the 
untrammeled sexual lifestyle embraced by so many gay men in the pre-AIDS era of the 1970s. 

Wiyhomosexual serial killers as a group should be especially sadistic is an interesting question, though 
one element is surely the prevailing homophobia of American society, which causes many gay men to 
grow up with a deep-seated sense of self-hatred, a violent homophobia of their own. When these feelings 
are combined with the psychopathology of a serial killer, the results can be particularly appalling. 

Randy Kraft 

Though less notorious than some of his psychopathic peers, Randy Kraft — aka the “Scorecard Killer” — 
committed atrocities every bit as horrendous as those of John Wayne Gacy or Dean Corll. And his 
victim count allegedly surpassed those of both. 

An exceptionally bright man who grew up in ultraconservative Orange County, California, Kraft 
embraced right-wing politics in his teens, joining the ROTC and demonstrating in favor of the Vietnam 
War. As the sixties progressed, however, he did an about-face, growing his hair long and switching 
political allegiances to the left. He also “came out” as a gay man. It was during the freewheeling 1970s 
that he embarked on his sinister secret life. While working by day as a highly paid computer consultant, 
he spent his nights cruising for male pickups, who would, with terrifying regularity, end up as hideously 
violated corpses. 

Between October 1971 and his arrest twelve years later, Kraft murdered an estimated sixty-seven young 
men, ranging in age from thirteen to thirty. The victims — whose corpses were generally dumped beside 
California freeways — had typically been subjected to unspeakable tortures. Some were castrated; others 
had swizzle sticks or other pencil- sized objects shoved up their penises; still others had been sodomized 




with everything from toothbrushes to tree branches. At least one had his eyes burned with a cigarette 
lighter. Many had their nipples gnawed off. 

Early on the morning of May 14, 1983, Kraft was pulled over for drunk driving by two California 
Highway Patrol officers, who were startled to discover a strangled young man in the passenger seat. 
Searching Kraft’s vehicle, they found, stashed under a floormat, forty-seven Polaroids of naked young 
men who appeared to be either dead or unconscious. Inside the trunk was an attache case containing a 
coded list that turned out to be Kraft’s meticulously recorded “scorecard” of murder victims. After a 
long-delayed and protracted trial, he was convicted of sixteen counts of murder and now awaits 
execution in San Quentin prison. 

Kraft made the news again in 1993, when he filed a 60-million-dollar lawsuit against the author of a 
book about his case, claiming that the writer had unfairly portrayed him as a “sick, twisted man” and 
ruined his “prospects for future employment.” Apparently the judge did not feel that the condemned 
serial killer’s job prospects were as bright as Kraft did. His suit was dismissed. 

There’s nothing wrong with him, other than he likes killing for sexual satisfaction. 

— Prosecutor Bryan Brown on Randy Kraft 

William Bonin 

During the very same period that Randy Kraft was racking up his appalling body count, another gay 
serial killer, William Bonin, was at large in Southern California. 

Bonin endured the kind of nightmarish childhood so often found in the case histories of serial killers. 

His father was a brutal drunk who once gambled away the family home, routinely beat his wife and 
children, then died from cirrhosis of the liver when Bonin was a little boy. His mother — who spent most 
of her time playing Bingo — totally neglected her sons, frequently leaving them in the care of her father, 
a known pedophile who had sexually abused his own children while they were growing up. 

At eight years old, Bonin was arrested for stealing license plates and sent to a reformatory. There, he 
was sexually molested by other juvenile inmates, as well as by at least one adult counselor. From that 
point on, according to one authority, he developed “an unstinting, often schizophrenic, interest in 
pedophilia.” Released from detention, he returned to his Connecticut home, where he promptly began 
molesting his younger brothers and other neighborhood children. 

Joining the Air Force, Bonin served as an aerial gunner in Vietnam, won a good conduct medal, and was 
given an honorable discharge. Unbeknownst to his superiors, his tour of duty included two incidents in 
which he had sexually assaulted other men at gunpoint. 



Returning to the States, he moved to Southern California and almost immediately plunged into his life of 




depravity. In 1969, he was arrested after sodomizing five underage boys. Deemed a “mentally 
disordered sex offender,” he was sent to Atascadero State Hospital, where he spent the next five years. 
Sixteen months after his release in 1974, he was arrested again for raping a fourteen-year-old boy at 
gunpoint. For that offense, he spent three more years behind bars. He got out in 1978, but in less than a 
year was arrested again, this time for assaulting a seventeen-year-old hitchhiker. Through a bureaucratic 
screwup, however, Bonin was almost immediately set free. 

“No one’s ever going to testify again,” he vowed to the friend who drove him home from jail. “This is 
never going to happen to me again.” 

Making good on that threat, Bonin made sure that none of his next nearly two dozen victims lived to 
identify their attacker. Cruising the highways in his drab green Chevy van — sometimes alone, often with 
an accomplice — he would pick up a teenage hitchhiker, drive to a remote spot, sodomize and kill the 
boy, then dump the body along the freeway. Generally, the victims were strangled with their own T- 
shirts, which were wrapped around their necks and twisted, tourniquet-like, with a tire iron. Sometimes, 
they were subjected to other tortures as well: ice picks jammed into their ears, acid poured down their 
throats, coat hangers thrust up their rectums. Between August 1979 and June 1980, twenty-one young 
men died at the hands of the sadistic fiend whom the press dubbed the “Freeway Killer.” 

The end of his horrific career came when one of his accomplices was busted for another crime and, as 
part of a plea deal, pointed the finger at Bonin, who was immediately placed under round-the-clock 
surveillance. Within twenty-four hours, police arrested him for sodomizing a fifteen-year-old boy. Bonin 
eventually confessed to twenty-one murders and was given the death sentence. During the next 
seventeen years, while he tried every legal maneuver to have his sentence overturned, he painted, read, 
wrote letters to the families of his victims, and played bridge with other serial killers, including Randy 
Kraft. He was finally put to death by lethal injection on February 23, 1996. 

I’d still be killing. I couldn’t stop killing. It got easier each time. 

— William Bonin after his arrest, when asked by a reporter what he would do if he were still at large 
Larry Eyler 

Two years after the capture of Southern California’s “Freeway Killer,” a homicidal sadist with a 
strikingly similar MO sent shock waves through gay communities across the Midwest. Dubbed the 
“Highway Murderer,” his real name was Larry Eyler. For nearly two years, he cruised the interstates of 
Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Kentucky, stopping at small-town pubs, red-light districts, gay bars, 
and even the occasional upscale, residential neighborhood. Night after night, he hunted for prey — male, 
generally white and young, and desperate for something: cash, company, or just a ride. Between late 
1982 and mid- 1984 — while local police, state troopers, and FBI agents crossed signals, missed evidence, 
and botched investigations — Eyler had his unspeakable way with nearly two dozen victims, dumped 
their mutilated corpses just off the open highways, then kept driving. 




He first struck in the fall of 1982, savaging two young men and discarding their remains in Indiana and 
Illinois. Two more bodies were found in December. In his murderous frenzy, the killer slashed his 
victims’ throats and bellies, leaving their entrails hanging out. He had also left a bizarre, ritualistic 
“signature”: in several cases, white tube socks, not belonging to the victims, were found on their feet. 

Throughout the spring of 1983, more trussed and butchered bodies turned up in the neighboring states. 
Despite calls for action from the gay communities of Chicago and Indianapolis, police were slow to 
acknowledge that a homosexual lust-killer was on the loose. It was not until May 1983 — when the 
“Highway Murderer” had already claimed ten victims — that a task force was organized to investigate the 
crimes. The nameless executioner was profiled as a violently self-loathing gay whose atrocities were a 
way of striking out at the homosexuality he hated and feared in himself. 

It wasn’t long before thirty-one-year-old Eyler was identified as a prime suspect by a young man named 
Mark Henry, who, several years earlier, had been handcuffed at knifepoint by Eyler after accepting a 
ride in his pickup truck, then stabbed when he tried to escape. Several months after police received this 
tip, Eyler was arrested when an Indiana State Trooper spotted him emerging from the woods with a 
partially bound young man. A search of Eyler’ s pickup truck turned up a batch of incriminating 
evidence: surgical tape, nylon rope, and a hunting knife stained with what proved to be human blood. 
However — in one of those legal decisions that drive strict law-and-order types crazy — the search was 
ruled illegal and Eyler set free. 

Like other serial killers who believe, in their overweening arrogance, that they can outwit the law 
forever, Eyler — knowing full well that he was under surveillance — continued to kill. He wasn’t stopped 
for good until August 21, 1984, when the janitor of a Chicago apartment building discovered the body 
parts of a dismembered male in several gray plastic trash bags and Eyler was fingered as the person who 
had dumped them there. 

Convicted and sentenced to death, Eyler tried to bargain with authorities. In exchange for a lesser 
punishment, he confessed to several unsolved murders and also named another man — Robert Little, a 
fifty-three-year-old library science professor at Indiana University — as an accomplice in one of the 
mutilation-killings. Little was ultimately tried and acquitted. Eyler died of AIDS in March 1996, having 
confessed to twenty-one murders. 

CASE STUDY 

William MacDonald, the Sydney Mutilator 

In 1926, Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey. He would grow up to be a major cultural 
force in 1960s America, a pioneer of gay liberation who celebrated his homosexuality and wrote some of 
the most influential poetry of the late twentieth century. 




Two years earlier, another boy with the same name was born in Liverpool, England. He, too, would end 
up in the history books — though not as a poet and certainly not as an icon of sexual tolerance. A 
tormented gay who hated and feared his own sexual orientation, this other Allen Ginsberg would turn 
out to be one of the most ghastly murderers in recent history, a lust-killer so savagely violent that he 
came to be known as “the Mutilator.” 

In later life, he would blame his troubles, rather conveniently, on an incident that occurred in 1943, when 
— during a stint in the army — he was raped in an air-raid shelter by a fellow soldier. The problem with 
this story — besides the fact that there is no proof of its truth — is that Ginsberg had already been 
diagnosed as a schizophrenic long before it supposedly happened. 

Discharged from the army in 1947, he soon found himself committed to a mental asylum in Scotland, 
where he spent six nightmarish months crammed inside a freezing cell with gibbering madmen and 
subjected to a daily regimen of shock treatments. Shortly after he emerged from this bedlam, he left 
Great Britain, emigrating first to Canada, then to Australia, where he dropped his birth name and took on 
the identity that would gain lasting infamy in the annals of crime: William MacDonald. 

In 1960, the thirty-six-year-old MacDonald, living in Brisbane, committed his first murder when he 
picked up a fifty-five-year-old alcoholic named Amos Hurst. Accompanying Hurst to a sleazy hotel, 
MacDonald strangled him as they sat together on a bed drinking beer. 

The experience was powerfully stimulating for MacDonald and left with him a craving for more. At the 
start of 1961, he moved to Sydney. By day, he worked in the post office as a letter sorter, while at night 
he prowled parks and public toilets, looking for homosexual pickups. 

Six months after arriving in Sydney, he was overcome with the urge to kill. Carrying a bag containing a 
long-bladed knife and a lightweight plastic raincoat, he lured a forty-one-year-old homeless man named 
Alfred Reginald Greenfield to a deserted swimming pool and plied him with beer until Greenfield 
passed out. Then — after donning the raincoat — MacDonald killed the unconscious derelict with dozens 
of stab wounds to the face and neck, severing his jugular. He then stripped Greenfield naked from the 
waist down and sliced off his genitals, which he took away with him and threw into the harbor. 

After another six-month hiatus — or “cooling-off period,” in the jargon of criminology — MacDonald’s 
blood hunger again reached an overwhelming pitch. In November 1941, he butchered another forty-one- 
year-old male pickup named Ernest Cobbin, slashing the latter’s throat as he sat on a public toilet, then 
castrating him and carrying away the grisly trophy in a plastic bag, which he later tossed into Sydney 
Harbor. 

A nearly identical atrocity followed in March 1962. By then, a massive manhunt was under way for the 
maniac known as the “Mutilator.” Shortly afterward, having been evicted by his landlord and sacked 
from his job, MacDonald moved to a suburb of Sydney. He took on a new name — Alan Brennan — and 
opened a sandwich shop. He perpetrated his final horror that November, when he brought a forty-two- 




year-old derelict, James Hackett, back to his shop. Rendering him stuporous with drink, he butchered 
and mutilated him. Afterward, he hid the corpse in the basement and — in a panic — fled the city for 
Brisbane. 

When the badly decomposed corpse was discovered more than a month later, it was mistakenly 
identified as that of the shop owner, Alan Brennan. The cause of death was given as accidental 
electrocution. Had MacDonald stayed away, he would have remained free to kill again. Instead, for 
unexplained reasons, he returned to Sydney, where he soon bumped into an acquaintance named John 
McCarthy, who was understandably startled to see the supposedly deceased Brennan walking around on 
the streets. When MacDonald turned and fled, McCarthy notified the press. It wasn’t long before a 
leading newspaper ran the story under the headline, “THE CASE OF THE WALKING CORPSE.” 
Exhuming the remains of “Brennan,” authorities now determined that the dead man was really James 
Hackett and that he had been stabbed to death and sexually mutilated. They became convinced that the 
real Brennan was the notorious “Mutilator.” Before long, MacDonald was arrested in Melbourne and 
brought back to Sydney. At his 1963 trial, he was found guilty of four counts of murder and given life in 
prison, where he passes his days reading literary classics and listening to Chopin, Liszt, and Gilbert and 
Sullivan. 

BLOODTHIRSTY “BI”S 

While most sadistic lust-murderers prefer victims of either their own or the opposite sex, a few can be 
classified as bisexual. The extravagantly perverted Albert Fish, for example, derived as much twisted 
pleasure from raping and castrating young boys as he did from torturing and cannibalizing little girls. 
Thirty years earlier, in the late 1890s, an equally depraved monster roamed the French countryside, 
preying on victims of both sexes. He has long been forgotten, though his crimes were even more 
appalling than those of his contemporary, Jack the Ripper. His name was Joseph Vacher. 

In contrast to certain psychopaths whose pleasant looks belie their depraved minds — Ted Bundy, for 
example, or Jeffrey Dahmer — Vacher’ s physical appearance was as repulsive as his soul. One side of his 
face was paralyzed, his right eye exuded a steady flow of pus, his lips were contorted and scarred. These 
deformities were the result of a self-inflicted wound sustained at twenty-four when — after shooting a 
woman who had spurned him — he turned the pistol on himself and fired into his own head. His 
appearance was sufficiently disquieting to cause people to flinch when they saw him. Vacher, in the self- 
pitying way of most psychopaths, would later claim that he had been driven to commit his hideous 
crimes because the world was so very mean to him — a dubious assertion since his sadistic tendencies 
had manifested themselves long before the failed suicide attempt that made his features so revolting. 

Born in 1869, he took great pleasure in torturing animals as a child and showed the kind of precocious 
interest in sex typical of future serial killers. At school, he enjoyed introducing his little playmates to 
mutual masturbation. In his late adolescence, he joined a monastery but was promptly expelled for 
encouraging the same practice, along with sodomy, among the novice monks. 




After a stint in the army — during which he terrorized his fellow soldiers with unprovoked outbursts of 
near-homicidal rage — the incident occurred that left him disfigured for life. Rebuffed by a young woman 
he proposed to, he shot her three times, then turned the gun on himself. The young woman survived, as 
did Vacher, who was committed to an insane asylum and treated for “persecution mania.” Incredibly, he 
was declared cured after less than a year and discharged in April 1894. 

One month later, he embarked on one of the most hideous sprees in the annals of serial murder. Armed 
with knives, scissors, and a cleaver, he took up the life of a tramp and roamed the countryside, searching 
for victims to butcher. 

The list of his atrocities is as follows: 



March 20, 1 894. Vacher strangles a twenty-one-year-old woman, cuts her throat, stomps on her 
abdomen, rips flesh from her breasts, and rapes her corpse. 

November 10, 1894. He murders and mutilates a thirteen-year-old girl. 

May 18, 1895.He murders and mutilates a seventeen-year-old girl. 

August 24, 1895.He strangles a fifty-eight-year-old widow and rapes the corpse. 

August 28, 1895.He murders a sixteen-year-old girl, rips open her abdomen, and tears out the entrails. 

August 31, 1895.He strangles, castrates, and anally sodomizes the corpse of a seventeen-year-old 
shepherd boy. 

September 29, 1895. He murders and castrates a fifteen-year-old boy. 

September 10, 1896.He murders a nineteen-year-old newlywed woman, then rapes the corpse. 

October 1, 1896.He murders a fourteen-year-old shepherdess, tears out her vulva, and carries it away 
with him. 

May 27, 1897. He murders a fourteen-year-old boy, anally sodomizes the body, then throws it down a 
well. 



June 18, 1897. He murders a thirteen-year-old shepherd boy and sodomizes the corpse. 





Joseph Vacher attacks a victim 



In August, 1897, Vacher was finally arrested after attacking a young woman named Marie-Eugenie 
Plantier, who was collecting pinecones in the woods. Her screams brought her husband and sons 
running. Overpowered, Vacher was taken into custody and charged with offending public decency. 
Before long, police realized that they had the notorious “Ripper” on their hands. After offering a written, 
sickeningly detailed confession to all eleven murders, he was brought to trial in 1898. He offered every 
conceivable excuse for his outrages, from temporary insanity to an uncontrollable impulse induced by a 
childhood case of rabies. The judge was unpersuaded. Convicted, Vacher was guillotined on December 
31, 1898. 

PARTNERS IN CRIMES 

In the popular imagination, the stereotypical serial killer is a lone wolf: a solitary psycho who holes up 
in his lair, brooding on his sick, sadistic fantasies until, driven by an overwhelming compulsion, he 
emerges to go prowling for a victim. And in fact there are quite a few serial killers who fit this pattern. 
But many do not. A surprising number of them — anywhere from 10 to 28 percent, according to the best 
estimates — go hunting in pairs. 



Lake and Ng 



Team killers, as they are now generally called, have perpetrated some of the most heinous crimes of 
modern times. In the early 1980s, a self-styled survivalist named Leonard Lake — whose keenest desire 
was to abduct women and keep them as sex slaves — joined forces with a sadistically simpatico Asian 
named Charles Ng. Together — in a specially designed and equipped concrete bunker constructed on a 
piece of wooded property in the remote Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California — they lived out 
their depraved fantasies, raping, torturing, and killing a string of captives while videotaping the 
atrocities. Their unspeakable activities came to an end in June 1985, when a hardware store clerk spotted 
Ng stashing a stolen bench vise in the trunk of Lake’s car. By the time the cops arrived, Ng had fled. A 
check of Lake’s car revealed that it belonged to someone else. The police also found a silenced pistol in 
the trunk. Brought to the station house for questioning, Lake — realizing that the jig was up — plucked 
two hidden cyanide tablets from the lapel of his shirt and swallowed them. He went into a coma and died 
four days later. 

A subsequent search of Lake’s isolated premises turned up a blood-soaked bed fitted with restraints, 
blood-caked power tools, homemade pornographic videos showing the two men debasing their captives, 
handwritten diaries detailing these outrages, and — buried around the property — an appalling cache of 
human remains, including the bodies of seven men, three women, two babies. There were also forty-five 
pounds of human bone fragments, suggesting that up to twenty-five people had met death at the hands of 
the psychopathic pair. 

An arrest warrant for twelve murders was issued for Ng. He was ultimately arrested in Canada for 
shooting a security guard during a store theft. After years of legal wrangling, he was finally extradited 
and brought back to the US, though he managed to delay his trial until October 1998 — thirteen long 
years after his capture. After an eight-month trial, he was found guilty of the murder of six men, three 
women, and two baby boys. He was sentenced to death. 

God meant women for cooking, cleaning house, and sex. When they are not in use, they should be 
locked up. 

— Leonard Lake 

Bittaker and Norris 

California was also the hunting ground for Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, a pair of quintessential 
psychopaths who bonded in prison, where they dreamed up a monstrous plan to kidnap, torture, and kill 
teenage girls while recording the crimes on tape. No sooner were they released than Bittaker purchased a 
used GMC cargo van that they christened “Murder Mack.” After a few dry runs in which they scouted 
locations, they put their hideous scheme into action on June 24, 1979, snatching a sixteen-year-old girl 
who was on her way home from church. They drove her to an abandoned mountain road, then raped her 
before garroting her with a wire coat hanger. Over the next few months, they abducted and murdered 
five more girls, ranging in age from thirteen to eighteen. The victims were raped, mutilated, bludgeoned, 
tortured with ice picks driven into their ears, slashed, and strangled. Meanwhile, their agonized cries and 




terrified pleas were recorded on tape, while Norris chanted: “Keep it up, girl! Keep it up! Scream till I 
say stop!” 

They were finally captured after Norris boasted of his crimes to a friend, who notified the police. Cutting 
a deal with the authorities, Norris testified against Bittaker, who was ultimately found guilty of five 
counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Norris received a sentence of forty-five years to 
life and will be eligible for parole in 2010. Bittaker has passed his time on death row filing nuisance 
suits against the state prison system (including one that claimed that he had been made to suffer cruel 
and unusual punishment from being served a broken cookie on his lunch tray) and enjoying daily bridge 
games with other condemned serial killers. 

Corll and Henley 

A particularly horrific case of team killing came to light on August 8, 1973. Early that morning, police 
in the Houston suburb of Pasadena received an urgent phone call from seventeen-year-old Elmer Wayne 
Henley, summoning them to the apartment of an older man named Dean Corll. When the cops arrived, 
they found Corll’ s naked body on a bedroom floor with six bullets in him. It was clear at a glance that 
bizarre things had been going on in the room. Plastic sheeting covered the carpet, as though to protect it 
from blood. Sinister-seeming items — a bayonet, an enormous dildo, a roll of duct tape, ajar of Vaseline, 
and a bunch of thin glass pipettes — lay scattered on the floor. Most alarming of all was the large wooden 
torture board equipped with restraints. 




(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



Henley — who was there with two other teenagers, a boy named Tim Kerley and a girl named Rhonda — 
poured out his lurid story. Corll — whose job at his family’s confectionery business had earned him the 
nickname the “Candyman” — was a thirty-four-year-old gay who liked to party with much younger 
males. Henley was a friend of his. The previous night, Wayne had invited Tim and Rhonda to Corll’ s 
house for a glue-sniffing party. Eventually, all three teenagers passed out. When Wayne awoke, he 
found himself bound to the torture board. Corll — infuriated that Wayne had brought along a girl — was 




brandishing a gun and threatening to kill him. Frantically, the boy pleaded for his life, promising that he 
would rape Rhonda while Corll “took care” of Tim. When Corll finally relented and loosened Henley’s 
bonds, the latter managed to get his hands on the gun and kill the older man. 



But there was more and worse to come. Henley confessed that, for several years, Corll had paid him and 
another young man, David Brooks, to procure young male victims. The boys — most in their teens, 
though one as young as nine — had been invited to Corll’ s home for drug and booze parties. There, they 
had been overpowered by the much older, powerfully built “Candyman,” bound to his board, and 
subjected to hideous tortures. Some had been castrated, some had the catheter-sized pipettes shoved into 
their urethras and crushed, at least one had his penis chewed off. Eventually, they had been murdered 
and their bodies disposed of in various locations, including a boat shed several miles south of Houston. 

At first Henley maintained that he had merely supplied Corll with victims — some of them, appallingly 
enough, his own friends and neighbors. Eventually, he admitted that he had been an active participant in 
the orgiastic torture-slayings. 

Twenty-seven moldering bodies were eventually recovered, seventeen interred in the boat shed. 
Convicted of one count of murder, David Brooks was sentenced to life. Henley, convicted of murder in 
the deaths of six boys, received six consecutive ninety-nine-year sentences. 

The Lives and Lies of Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole 

Separately and together, the lives of Henry Lee Lucas and his sometime partner-in-atrocity are so 
unspeakably depraved that they seem like the most lurid, over-the-top horror fiction. And, in fact, it has 
become difficult to tell exactly how much of the story is true and how much is pure, malevolent make- 
believe. Long regarded as America’s most prolific serial killer with a victim count numbering in the 
hundreds, Lucas eventually recanted his confessions, claiming that he was innocent of virtually every 
murder he had admitted to. He became the sole condemned prisoner in Texas whose death sentence was 
commuted by then-governor George W. Bush. Still, there’s no doubt that Lucas and Toole were an 
unusually loathsome pair of reprobates, responsible for any number of heinous crimes. 





(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



By all accounts, Lucas’s childhood was sheer Southern Gothic nightmare. Born in August 1936, he grew 
up dirt-poor in a two-room log cabin in the backwoods of Virginia with eight siblings, a moonshiner 
father who lost both legs after falling down drunk in front of an oncoming freight train, and a viciously 
depraved prostitute mother named Viola who entertained her tricks at home. According to Henry, Viola 
forced him to watch when she had sex with her customers, made him dress in girl’s clothes when he 
went off to school, killed his favorite pets as a form of punishment, and once beat him so severely on the 
head with a chunk of wood that he went into a twenty-four-hour coma. 

By the time he was thirteen, Henry had been inducted into the joys of animal torture and bestiality by 
one of his mother’s johns. He took particular pleasure in trapping various creatures, slitting their throats, 
then having sex with the dead bodies. His first alleged human victim, killed in 1951, was a seventeen- 
year-old girl. When she fought off his attempted rape, he strangled her and buried her corpse in the 
woods. 

In 1954, the eighteen-year-old Lucas received a six-year prison term for burglary. He was released in 
September 1959. Six months later, during a drunken argument with his mother, he stabbed her in the 
neck. She died forty-eight hours later. Receiving a term of twenty to forty years for second-degree 
murder, he was soon transferred to a state hospital for the criminally insane and paroled after only ten 
years. Eighteen months later, he was back in prison for molesting two teenage girls. He was released in 
August 1975, and began to drift around the country, reputedly killing victims as the spirit moved him. In 
late 1976, he crossed paths with Ottis Toole. 

A snaggle-toothed degenerate with Neanderthal features and a subnormal IQ, Toole had a childhood 
reportedly as nightmarish as Lucas’s. According to the standard accounts, he was abandoned by his 
drunkard father, subjected to the religious ravings of his fanatical mother, and sexually abused by a 
sister. His grandmother, an alleged Satanist who concocted charms from human body parts, supposedly 
forced him to accompany her on her periodic forays to local graveyards, where she dug up her 
ingredients. By the time he was six, Toole was a confirmed arsonist, torching neighborhood houses 
because, as he later explained, “I just hated to see them standing there.” 

The cretinous, bisexual Toole allegedly committed his first murder in 1961, when he was fourteen. 

While hitchhiking, he was picked up by a traveling salesman who drove him to a remote spot for sex. 
Afterward, according to his account, Toole jumped behind the steering wheel and deliberately ran over 
the older man with his own car. By 1974, he had hit the open road in an old pickup truck, drifting from 
place to place. 

By the time he met Lucas in a Jacksonville, Florida, soup kitchen in 1976, there is some evidence that 
Toole was already a serial killer who had murdered four victims in a six-month span. Recognizing each 
other as depraved soul mates, Lucas and Toole hooked up for the next six and a half years. The exact 




nature and number of the enormities they may or may not have perpetrated during his period remains 
murky. Presumably, they spent a considerable amount of their spare time, raping, killing, and mutilating 
countless victims, as well as indulging in acts of necrophilia and cannibalism. Also during this period 
Lucas became smitten with Toole’s underage niece, Becky Powell — who would ultimately become yet 
another slain and dismembered victim. 

Lucas was picked up on a weapons charge in June 1983. A few days later, apparently stricken with an 
uncharacteristic attack of remorse, he summoned his jailer and began to spew out a staggering 
confession. He had stabbed an eighty-two-year-old woman named Kate Rich, had sex with her corpse, 
then lugged it home, cut it to pieces, and burned it in a woodstove. And she was just one of dozens — no, 
scores — of his victims. Over the next eighteen months — as investigators from various states tried to 
clear up unsolved murder cases — the tally kept growing. Lucas claimed that he had killed women in 
twenty-seven states with nylon rope, a phone cord, guns of every caliber, knives, vases, a hammer, a 
roofer’s ax, a two-by-four. Traveling under heavy guard — dining on decent food and staying in pleasant 
motels — he led detectives to supposed crime scenes all over the country. By the time he finished, he had 
admitted to six hundred murders. 

In the meantime, Ottis Toole had been convicted on an arson charge and sentenced to twenty years in 
prison. Implicated by Lucas, Toole added his own litany of confessions, claiming, among other things, 
that he and Henry had been involved with a Satanic cult called “The Hand of Death” that sacrificed 
children and practiced ritual cannibalism. He also claimed to be the unknown deviant who had snatched, 
murdered, and decapitated Adam Walsh, son of the future host o fAmerica’s Most Wanted — an 
admission he later retracted. There are many, however, including John Walsh, who remain convinced 
that Toole was in fact the perpetrator of that unspeakable deed. 

Henry, too, ultimately recanted, proclaiming that his countless confessions were a hoax. He had never 
killed anyone, he insisted, apart from his mother. He had simply been toying with the police, making 
them look like fools while they shepherded him around the country, treating him to steak dinners and 
milk shakes. 

Eventually, Lucas was convicted of eleven counts of murder. He received the death sentence, however, 
for only one of them — the killing of an unidentified female hitchhiker nicknamed “Orange Socks” (after 
the sole item of clothing she was wearing when her corpse was discovered in a culvert off a Texas 
freeway in 1979). Ironically, compelling evidence surfaced after Henry’s trial indicating that he couldn’t 
possibly have committed the “Orange Socks” murder. (Among other things, work records showed that 
he was in Florida on the day she was killed.) Lucas, it seemed, was going to be executed for a crime he 
didn’t commit. Given the number of homicides h Qwas responsible for (anywhere from three to fifteen, 
according to the best estimates), most people couldn’t work up much sympathy for his plight. Four days 
before he was to die by lethal injection, however, Governor Bush commuted his sentence. Lucas — who 
had grown obese on prison fare — died of a heart attack in March 2001. Toole had predeceased him by 
five years, dying in prison in September 1996 of liver failure, evidently accelerated by AIDS. 




FOLIE A DEUX 



Coined in 1877 by two French psychologists named Laseque and Fabret, the term folie a deux has been 
translated in various ways: “insanity in pairs,” “double insanity,” “reciprocal insanity,” “collective 
insanity.” In its original meaning, it refers to a rare psychological phenomenon in which two or more 
closely associated people — often, though not always, family members — share the same psychotic 
delusion. In a well-known case reported in the 1930s, for example, two middle-aged sisters became 
convinced that they were being blackmailed by a popular radio personality who was sending coded 
threats to them in the songs he performed on the air. 



Nowadays, the term is most often used to describe something slightly different — not a shared paranoid 
fantasy but a pernicious bond between two people who bring out the worst in each other, egging each 
other on to engage in criminal acts that neither person, individually, would have the courage to commit 
on his own. In most such cases of folie a deux, there is one dominant personality who takes the lead in 
instigating and planning the crimes and one subordinate member who serves as an eager accomplice. In 
this sense, the term might best be translated — as psychologist Horace B. English half-humorously 
suggests — as “gruesome twosome.” There have also been rare cases involving mutually toxic trios or 
even foursomes (what might be called folie a trois ovfolie a quatre ). 



Not all criminal pairs who fall under the spell of a folie a deux are serial murderers. Leopold and Loeb, 
for example — the college-age “thrill killers” of the 1920s who murdered a fourteen-year-old 
acquaintance to prove that they could commit the perfect crime — were clearly in the grip of a folie a 
deux. So were Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, the adolescent New Zealand girls who bludgeoned 
Pauline’s mother to death in 1954 (and whose sensational case was the basis for Peter Jackson’s 1994 
film, Heavenly Creatures ). 



Th Qfolie a deux phenomenon has also been a factor in the cases of other notorious murderers, such as the 
two sociopathic spree killers who gained notoriety as the “Beltway Snipers” in the fall of 2002, and the 
teenage mass murderers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, of Columbine infamy. 

It should be said that not all psychopaths who team up to commit serial murder are examples of a folie a 
deux. Individually, for example, Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were already serial killers before they 
joined forces. Strictly speaking, the term only applies to two or more people who, however criminally 
inclined, would never have taken the plunge into full-blown serial homicide had they not been 
emboldened by an enthusiastic partner. Lake-Ng and Bittaker-Norris are classic examples. 

Bianchi and Buono 



Another pair who conform to the same depraved pattern were Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi: the 
so-called Hillside Stranglers. Born in 1951 to an alcoholic prostitute who gave him up at birth, Bianchi — 
like a surprising number of serial killers — was adopted as an infant. By his early childhood, he was 
already manifesting psychopathic symptoms. He was a compulsive liar and chronic underachiever who 




erupted into violent tantrums at the slightest frustration. He dreamed (again, like many serial killers) of 
becoming a policeman, but when his application to the local sheriffs department was rejected, he drifted 
into security work. This position allowed him to indulge his taste for petty thievery, which also got him 
fired from a succession of jobs. 

In 1976, he moved from Rochester, New York, to Los Angeles and quickly teamed up with his cousin, 
Angelo Buono — a sadistic pimp with a long history of violence toward women. Though Buono had been 
guilty of outrageous brutality (allegedly, he once sodomized his wife in front of their children after she 
refused to have sex with him), he — like Bianchi — had never been known to commit murder. Together, 
however, they made a monstrous combination. In the fall of 1977, they embarked on one of the most 
appalling serial murder sprees of modern times. 




(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



Posing as police officers, the two lured unsuspecting females into their car, then abducted them and 
drove them to Buono’ s suburban home. Afterward, the victims’ naked, savaged bodies would be 
disposed of, often on wooded hillsides around the city. 

The first to die was a Hollywood hooker named Yolanda Washington. Two weeks later, on Halloween, 
the corpse of a fifteen-year-old runaway was dumped on a Glendale lawn. Over the next few months — 
while the city went into a panic — eight more bodies would be found. The victims ranged in age from 
twelve to twenty-eight. All had been sexually violated (sometimes with objects like soda bottles), 
strangled, and tortured in various ways: injected with cleaning solution or burned with an electric cord or 
asphyxiated with slow, almost voluptuous, cruelty. 

The killings stopped abruptly in February 1978. One year after the last of the Los Angeles murders, a 
pair of young women were raped and murdered in Bellingham, Washington. Suspicion quickly alighted 
on a young man who had moved to Bellingham within the past year and worked as a security guard: 
Kenneth Bianchi. 




Linked by solid evidence to both the Bellingham rape-murders and several of the “Hillside” killings, 
Bianchi almost succeeded in convincing authorities that he was a victim of multiple personality disorder, 
and that the crimes had been carried out by an evil alter ego named “Steve.” When this ruse was exposed 
by a psychiatric expert, Bianchi agreed to plead guilty and testify against his cousin in order to avoid 
execution. Both men received life sentences. Bianchi is spending his in Walla Walla prison in 
Washington. On September 21, 2002, the sixty-seven-year-old Buono was found dead in his cell in 
Calipatria State Prison, apparently the victim of a heart attack. 

The Chicago Rippers 

Ever since the late 1960s, America has been awash with rumors about devil- worshiping cultists who 
engage in unspeakable orgies of torture, rape, and human sacrifice. In almost every instance, these 
stories turn out to be false — the overheated imaginings of people who have watched Rosemary ’s Baby 
and The Omen one too many times. On rare occasions, however, several psychopaths will band together 
and garb their perverted practices in the trappings of Satanic ritual. This is precisely what happened in 
Chicago during the early 1980s with a crew of young deviants who became known as the “Chicago 
Rippers” and exemplify a case of folie a deux involving more than two participants. 

The accused ringleader of this degenerate gang was Robin Gecht, a lanky twenty-eight-year-old 
electrician whose deeply troubled background included accusations of molesting his sister. He also once 
did work for the city’s most infamous contractor, John Wayne Gacy. Along with his accomplices — 
brothers Thomas and Andrew Kokoraleis and Edward Spreitzer, all in their early twenties — Gecht is 
believed to have abducted and killed as many as eighteen women in as many months, beginning in May 
1981. Some were hookers, others middle-class singles or housewives (including the wife of a former 
Chicago Cubs pitching ace). All the women were raped, tortured, and subjected to hideous mutilations. 
Specifically, the killers would use a wire garrote to slice off the breasts of their victims. These grisly 
trophies were then taken back to Gecht’s attic bedroom, which had been converted into a Satanic chapel. 
There, the depraved foursome would perform an unholy communion, eating portions of amputated 
breast before consigning it to a “relic box.” 

The case was finally broken when one of his savaged victims survived and provided police with 
information that led them to Gecht and his cohorts. Under questioning, Tom Kokoraleis spilled his guts. 
The Chicago Rippers quickly turned on each other. 

Gecht has consistently maintained that, like Charles Manson, he never killed anyone: his followers did. 
He was put on trial for attempted murder and rape and is currently serving 120 years in Illinois. Andrew 
Kokoraleis was executed by lethal injection in 1999. His brother, Tom, was luckier. He won a reversal 
of a murder conviction on a legal technicality and received a reduced sentence of seventy years. Edward 
Spreitzer was condemned to death in 1986, but his sentence was subsequently commuted to life by 
Governor George Ryan. 




KILLER COUPLES 



It’s appalling enough to think of male buddies hitting the highways to commit serial homicide, like some 
kind of depraved parody of Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac’sOn the Road. But there’s 
another type of psychopathic team that seems, if anything, even more unbelievably sick: the killer 
couple, the husband- wife or boyfriend-girlfriend who engage in sadistic lust-murder as a way to spice up 
their sex life. While the male partner is almost always the dominant figure in such depraved duos, the 
woman is generally an active participant, not merely abetting her monstrous mate but getting her own 
twisted pleasure from their joint atrocities. 

The Gallegos 

That was certainly the case with Gerald and Charlene Gallego, who enjoyed serial murder the way other 
couples savor a weekend getaway at a romantic country inn. The son of a skid row prostitute and a 
violent career criminal whose life ended in Mississippi’s gas chamber, Gallego, born in 1946, carried on 
the family sociopathic tradition. He racked up more than two dozen arrests by the time he was thirty for 
various felonies, including incest and rape. Possessed of a sleazy charm, he was catnip to a certain kind 
of woman and was married and divorced seven times by the age of thirty-two. In September 1977, he 
finally met the woman of his depraved dreams. 

The spoiled only child of a prosperous California couple, Charlene Williams was a violin prodigy, a 
certified genius with an IQ of 160. She was also a profoundly troubled young woman who flunked out of 
junior college after one semester, had two brief, disastrous marriages in her early twenties, and was 
heavily into drugs and kinky sex. She and Gallego moved in together one week after meeting at a 
Sacramento poker club. “I thought he was a very nice, clean-cut fellow,” she would say of her wildly 
degenerate lover. 

Their sex life was predictably sordid, Gerald bringing home a teenage runaway for threesomes, Charlene 
indulging herself with an occasional lesbian lover. Impotent when it came to anything approaching 
normal sex, Gerald required increasingly perverse pleasures to achieve arousal. Exactly who first 
thought up the idea of supplying him with “disposable sex slaves” is unclear. What is indisputable is 
that, beginning in September 1978, the homicidal couple embarked on a monstrous scheme. 

Their MO was the same from the start. Driving Gallego’ s van, they would troll for victims in likely 
places: county fairgrounds, parking lots of malls, shopping centers, and taverns. While Gerald lurked 
inside the parked vehicle with pistol at the ready, Charlene would approach the prospective victims — 
generally, though not always, pairs of teenage girls — and lure them back to the van, usually with an 
offer of free drugs. Once in the clutches of the depraved duo, the victims would be driven to a remote 
location, sexually assaulted by both husband and wife, then slaughtered and dumped. Altogether, the 
Gallegos murdered ten victims, ranging in age from thirteen to thirty-four, all but one of them female. 



They were arrested in November 1980, when a witness noted their license plate during their abduction of 




a young couple who had just left a fraternity dance. Eventually, Charlene struck a deal with prosecutors, 
agreeing to testify against her husband for a sentence of just under seventeen years. Sentenced to death 
in 1983, Gerald managed to delay execution through various legal maneuvers but came to a deservedly 
nasty end anyway, when — in July 2002 at the age of fifty-four — he died of rectal cancer. 

B ernardo-Homolka 

The sheer level of sexual degeneracy displayed by killer couples staggers belief. Golden-boy Paul 
Bernardo and his pretty blond wife Karla Homolka were another prime example of the breed. The Ken 
and Barbie of serial killers, the young Canadian couple presented a picture-perfect image to the world. 
Beneath their wholesome exterior, however, lurked two of the most depraved personalities imaginable. 

Raised, like so many serial killers, in a severely dysfunctional household (his father was a pedophiliac 
Peeping Tom who molested his own daughter, his mother a grotesquely obese depressive who immured 
herself in the basement), Bernardo grew up to be a classic psychopath: a man of superficial charm and 
apparent normality who harbored profoundly malevolent impulses and lacked anything resembling a 
conscience. While the world assumed he was a successful accountant, he was actually making his money 
as a small-time smuggler, running cigarettes across the border in cars with stolen license plates. The 
women he dated soon found themselves not with the sensitive young man they imagined, but in the 
hands of a vicious sadist who liked to beat and degrade them and whose favorite sexual activity was anal 
rape. 

Karla Homolka, as devoid of moral faculties as her lover boy, turned out to be the perfect mate for Paul, 
eagerly satisfying — and encouraging — his most depraved desires. He liked to videotape her while she 
fondled herself and talked of how much fun it would be to procure thirteen-year-old virgins for him to 
rape. When Paul expressed a wish to deflower her little sister, Tammy, Karla was only too happy to 
assist, stealing some animal sedative called halothane from the veterinary clinic where she worked. On 
December 23, 1990 — after a happy pre-Christmas dinner in the Homolka home — Paul plied the fifteen- 
year-old with Halcion-laced drinks. Once she was out cold, he raped her while Karla held a halothane- 
soaked rag over her little sister’s face to make sure she stayed unconscious. Unfortunately, she threw up, 
choking to death on her vomit. 

Tammy Homolka was the first to die at the hands of the hideously perverted pair. Between June 1991 
and April 1992, Bernardo and Homolka snatched three more teenage girls. The victims would be 
subjected to a range of degradations and torments, Karla and Paul taking turns having sex with their 
captives while the other videotaped the outrages. In the end, the girls would be murdered, and their 
bodies — sometimes dismembered, sometimes left intact — dumped in a lake or ditch. 

While these horrendous killings were going on, Paul — with Karla’ s encouragement — was conducting a 
separate career as a serial rapist in Scarborough, Canada. Eventually — when he began beating Karla — 
she turned on him. Already under suspicion as the “Scarborough Rapist,” Bernardo was arrested and 
ultimately charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of aggravated assault, two counts 




of forcible rape, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of performing an indignity on a human body. 
In exchange for her full cooperation, Karla received a lenient sentence. Bernardo, convicted on all 
counts, was sent to prison for life. 

We had this sexual fantasy, see, so we just carried it out. I mean, like it was easy and fun and we really 
enjoyed it, so why shouldn’t we do it? 

— Charlene Gallego, explaining why she and her husband abducted, raped, and murdered ten people 
The Wests 

Outside the pages of the Marquis de Sade, it would be hard to find human beings as obscenely evil as the 
British psycho-couple, Fred and Rose West. Like Karla Homolka — who sacrificed her own sister to her 
partner’s sadistic lusts — the Wests had no qualms about preying on their nearest kin. Incest was just one 
of the countless perversions they delighted in. Arguably, the Wests were even more monstrous than their 
Canadian counterparts since their victims included several of their own children. 

Born in 1941, the simian-looking Fred West was reportedly the product of a household in which incest 
was rife. By the time he was twenty, he was a habitual thief and convicted child molester who had 
impregnated a thirteen-year-old girl (“Doesn’t everyone do it?” he said in his defense when confronted 
with this crime). 

In 1962, he married a troubled teen and part-time prostitute, Catherine “Rena” Costello, who was 
carrying another man’s baby. Shortly afterward, she gave birth to a girl, Charmaine. With Fred — who 
enjoyed impregnating his women almost as much as he liked watching them have sex with other men — 
she quickly conceived again. Their daughter, Anna Marie, was born in 1962. 

For a while, Fred drove an ice-cream truck — a job that offered ample opportunity to prey on little girls. 
Later, he found work in a slaughterhouse, an experience he would later put to appalling uses. 

In 1967, fed up with her husband’s perverse sexual demands, Rena moved out. No sooner was she gone 
than Fred took up with a teenage mistress named Anna McFall and quickly got her pregnant. When she 
began to pressure him into marriage, Fred killed and dismembered her, keeping her fingers and toes as 
souvenirs — a grotesque ritualistic “signature” he would repeat on future occasions. 

After briefly moving back in with Fred, Rena abandoned him for good, leaving him to raise their 
children, Anna Marie and Charmaine, whom Fred was routinely molesting. Finally, in 1969 — when Fred 
was twenty-eight — he met the woman who would become his partner in the unspeakable for the 
remainder of his abhorrent life. 

Rosemary Letts was sixteen at the time, the daughter of a schizophrenic father and depressive mother 
who had undergone shock treatments while pregnant with her. Rose grew up a sexually debauched, foul- 




mouthed loner who liked to climb into bed with her younger brother and fondle him. 

Within a year of moving in with Fred, she gave birth to a daughter, Heather. Shortly afterward — 
apparently in a fit of pique — she killed Fred’s stepchild, Charmaine. Fred disposed of the girl’s body in 
his preferred manner, saving fingers and toes for his ghastly collection. Fred’s daughter by Rena, Anna 
Marie, was subjected to repeated sexual torture by her father and his new wife — Rose holding the eight- 
year-old down while Fred raped her. When Rena showed up looking for her children, she was murdered 
and disposed of the usual way: her body dismembered, fingers and toes removed. 

For the next two decades, the Wests led an outwardly respectable life while pursuing a secret existence 
of unimaginable depravity. Rose worked out of their home as a prostitute, advertising herself in swinger 
magazines. Frequently pregnant, she gave birth to seven more children, some by Fred, others by clients. 
Not content with their criminally kinky sex life (among countless other horrors, Fred liked to bring 
friends home and watch them have sex with his underage daughter, Anna Marie), the Wests turned to 
sadistic serial murder for the ultimate thrill. At least nine young women — ranging in age from fifteen to 
twenty-one — were lured to their home or snatched from the streets. Once in captivity, they were 
subjected to protracted sexual torture (sometimes lasting as long as a week) before being killed, 
dismembered, and buried in the cellar. When the cellar got too crowded, the Wests turned it into a 
nursery bedroom for their brood and began to plant new corpses in their rear garden. 

The final victim to be interred in their backyard was their own seventeen-year-old daughter. 

In August 1992, alerted by accusations of child abuse, the police showed up at the Wests’ home and 
arrested Fred and Rose for the rape of a minor. Taken into government care, the children revealed that 
their parents had kept them in line with a chilling threat. If they didn’t behave, they were told, they 
would end up “under the patio, like Heather.” Excavating the backyard, investigators quickly turned up 
human remains. They then turned their attention to the cellar, which yielded its ghastly trove. On New 
Year’s Day, 1995, having confessed to twelve murders, Fred West hanged himself in his jail cell with a 
bedsheet. Eight months later, Rose went on trial. She was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment on 
ten counts of murder. 

Brady-Hindley 

Thirty years before the Wests’ atrocities came to light, another British killer couple, Ian Brady and Myra 
Hindley — aka the “Moors Murderers” — earned everlasting infamy as the most heinous criminals of their 
day. 

The illegitimate child of a Glasgow waitress who turned him over to another couple to be raised, Brady 
displayed classic psychopathic symptoms from early childhood. Though exceptionally bright, he did 
poorly in school, was subject to frequent violent tantrums, and indulged in extreme cruelty to animals — 
stoning dogs, decapitating rabbits, and, on one occasion, burying a cat alive. He got into trouble with the 
law from an early age and did prison time in his late teens. 




In 1961, while working as a stock clerk, the twenty-one-year-old Brady met Myra Hindley, an eighteen- 
year-old peroxide blond typist desperate for relief from the crushing boredom of her life. Falling under 
Brady’s toxic spell, she submitted avidly to his pornographic fantasies, posing in Nazi/dominatrix 
regalia and lapping up Brady’s half-baked Sadean “philosophy.” 





(Novelty trading cards courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



Encouraged by his lover’s slavish devotion, Brady felt increasingly impelled to explore the outer limits 
of human depravity. Between November 1963 and December 1964, the monstrous couple abducted, 
raped, and murdered four children, then buried their remains on the moors. Generally, it was Hindley 
who lured the victims to their doom. Exactly how much she participated in the actual killings remains a 
matter of dispute, though Brady clearly took the more active role. Their final murder was, in many ways, 
the most appalling. After snatching ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey from a local fair, they brought her 
back to Hindley’ s house, bound and stripped her, forced her to pose for pornographic pictures, then — 
before killing her — tape-recorded her heartrending pleas for mercy. 





In October 1965, Brady picked up a gay seventeen-year-old named Edward Evans, brought him back to 
Hindley’s house, and split his skull open with an ax in full view of a witness, Myra’s brother-in-law, 
Dave Smith. Sickened by the crime, Smith reported it to the police. After arresting Brady and Hindley, 
police searched Myra’ s home and came upon a claim check tucked into a prayer book. This led them to 
a locker in the local train station. Inside the locker, they found two suitcases containing a cache of 
incriminating evidence, including the tape recording of little Lesley Downey’s torture. When the tape 
was subsequently played at the trial of the monstrous couple, people throughout the courtroom — not 
only jury members and spectators but hardened police officers as well — openly wept. Only Brady and 
Hindley appeared unmoved. 

In May 1966, both of the “Moors Murderers” were sentenced to life in prison. In the succeeding 
decades, the public’s loathing for the two remained undiminished. When a portrait of Hindley — painted 
in a kind of pointillist style from child-sized handprints — was exhibited at a 1998 art show in London, it 
sparked nationwide outrage. On November 15, 2002, Myra died of respiratory failure at the age of sixty. 
Brady remains behind bars. 

He is cruel and selfish, and I love him. 

— Myra Hindley, writing about Ian Brady in her diary 

Clark-Bundy 

It is hard to know what early influences turned Douglas Clark into a monster. Though frequently 
uprooted in his younger years — his father, a navy lieutenant commander, was constantly moving the 
family from one international post to another — Clark enjoyed a privileged upbringing, living in the kind 
of colonial luxury that a handsome American salary can bring in places like the Marshall Islands and 
India. He was waited on by servants and attended elite private schools. It was the sort of life that has 
produced other intensely self-centered individuals who grow up with a keen sense of entitlement and a 
concern for nothing but their own pleasures. In Clark’s case, it produced something infinitely worse — a 
sexually predatory psychopath. His nasty adolescent pranks (secretly recording his girlfriends during 
sex, for example, then playing the tapes for his buddies’ amusement) were just a warm-up for some of 
the most unspeakable atrocities in the annals of American serial murder. 

The forces that warped Carol Bundy are easier to discern. Though — in her typically deluded way — she 
would later recall her childhood in idealized terms as a warm and happy time, she was actually subjected 
to horrific abuse by both her parents. Her mother’s idea of discipline was to inflict savage beatings with 
a belt and tell the little girl that no one loved her or wanted her around the house. On the night his wife 
died, Carol’s alcoholic father announced to his two underage daughters — thirteen-year-old Carol and her 
eleven-year-old sister, Vicky — that it was now their responsibility to take their mother’s place in his bed. 
For the next year, until he remarried, he took turns molesting both girls. 



At seventeen, Carol married a fifty- six-year-old man to get away from her father (who hanged himself a 




few years later). When her new husband tried to force her into prostitution, she left him for another man, 
who promptly began to beat her. In 1979, she fled with her children to a home for battered women, then 
settled in an apartment in Van Nuys, California, where she quickly entered into an obsessive affair with 
the married building manager, John Murray. When he eventually brushed her off, Carol was shattered. 
Three months later, she met Douglas Clark. 

By then, Clark had a long history of sexually exploiting desperate women. In Carol Bundy — an 
overweight, severely myopic thirty-seven-year-old whose lifetime of abuse had robbed her of every 
shred of self-esteem and who was pathologically needy for anything resembling affection — he found a 
perfect match: a woman who might almost be described as his soul mate, though there is little in 
Douglas Clark’s subsequent actions to suggest that he possessed a human soul. 

In thrall to her new lover, Carol quickly became his eager slave. When she wasn’t busy with her nursing 
job at the Valley Medical Center, she was helping him enact increasingly depraved sexual fantasies. She 
began by snapping pictures of him while he had sex with various pickups — one of them a child no older 
than eleven. Having his girlfriend photograph his pedophiliac encounters, however, wasn’t kinky enough 
for Clark, who had begun to indulge in elaborate daydreams of murder, mutilation, and necrophilia. In 
June 1980, he picked up a pair of teenage runaways, forced them to perform oral sex on him at gunpoint, 
then killed them both with bullets to the head. Afterward, he sodomized the corpses before dumping 
them down a highway embankment. Then he went home to share the story of his outrage with Carol. 

It wasn’t long before the ever-submissive Carol was actively participating in Clark’s enormities. 
Sometimes, she accompanied him when he went cruising the seedy Sunset Strip for young hookers. He 
would lure them into his car, then shoot them in the head while they went down on him. Other times — in 
an obscene travesty of the loving housewife fixing a nice brown-bag lunch for her hubby to take to work 
— she would prepare a “kill bag” for Clark (containing knives, paper towels, liquid cleanser, plastic 
bags, and rubber gloves), then see him off on his nighttime prowl. 

Her complicity in Clark’s atrocities reached a pitch of perversity when Clark brought home the 
decapitated head of twenty-year-old streetwalker Exxie Wilson. Throwing herself into the unspeakable 
spirit of her lover’s “games,” Bundy applied cosmetics to the head and gave it a pretty hairdo, after 
which Clark took it into the bathroom for some necrophiliac fellatio. “We had a lot of fun with her,” 
Bundy later told police. “I made her up like Barbie.” 

However devoted to her depraved lover, Bundy still carried a torch for John Murray. She occasionally 
met him for furtive sexual encounters, during one of which she revealed to him that her new lover, Doug 
Clark, was the “Sunset Slayer” whose crimes were all over the newspapers. A few days later — regretting 
her indiscretion — she arranged to meet Murray again, then stabbed him to death, cut off his head, and 
brought it home in a plastic bag for future disposal. 

Shortly afterward, the unrelenting horror of her life became too much for Bundy. Breaking down at her 
workplace, she began to sob, “I can’t take it anymore. I’m supposed to save lives, not take them.” Before 




long, she and Clark were under arrest. Eventually, Bundy was sentenced to two consecutive terms of 
twenty-seven and twenty-five years to life. Clark received the death penalty and is still on death row, 
twenty years after his conviction. 

The Bimies 

Like other monstrous couples, Australians David and Catherine Birnie were two unspeakably 
codependent perverts who used rape, torture, and murder to spice up their sex life. As is typical in such 
cases, the man was the prime instigator, while his female partner was a slavish — if enthusiastic — 
accomplice, who threw herself into their joint atrocities as a way of pleasing her man. 

A scrawny ne’er-do-well who grew up in various government institutions and was in trouble with the 
law throughout his adolescence, David Birnie met his future partner-in-crime when they were both 
children. In their late teens, they teamed up to commit a series of robberies that eventually landed both 
of them in jail. Catherine, released after a six-month stint, went to work as a live-in domestic servant. 
She fell in love with her employer’s son and ended up marrying him. As their relationship deteriorated 
in succeeding years, however, she pined for David Birnie. In 1985, she abandoned her husband and five 
children, moved back in with Birnie, and took his last name without bothering with the formality of a 
marriage. Before long, their mutually toxic relationship led them to explore new extremes of depravity. 

Like other killer couples, the Birnies were heavily into deviant sex. As their craving for ever-kinkier 
experiences accelerated, Birnie began to talk openly about his fantasies of abduction and rape. They first 
acted on these degenerate desires in October 1986, when they lured a twenty-two-year-old coed to their 
ramshackle house on the outskirts of Perth, bound and gagged her at knifepoint, and chained her to a 
bed. Birnie raped her repeatedly in front of Catherine. Then the depraved duo drove the victim to a 
wilderness area, where she was garroted with a nylon cord and buried in a shallow grave. 

Three more nearly identical atrocities followed. The last of these crimes was so appalling that even 
Catherine was shaken by it. The victim — a twenty-one-year-old girl abducted from a bus stop — was 
taken into a forest, raped, stabbed repeatedly, then placed in a shallow grave. As Birnie began covering 
her up with dirt, she sat bolt upright. Grabbing an ax, Birnie smashed her on the skull. When this 
tremendous blow didn’t kill her, Birnie was forced to split her head in two. 

They brought another victim home for sexual abuse and murder just five days later. Catherine — 
unnerved by the sheer horror of the previous incident — left the sixteen-year-old girl unbound and alone 
in the bedroom while Birnie was away at work. The captive managed to escape and gave the police 
complete details about the identity of her tormentors. 

Under arrest, Birnie and his common-law wife soon confessed to all four torture-killings and led police 
to the buried remains. At their 1987 trial, they each pleaded guilty to four counts of murder and were 
given the maximum sentence of life in prison. 




THE FAMILY THAT SLAYS TOGETHER 



Some team killers are connected, not just by a sick psychological bond — a shared, mutually inciting 
interest in torture and murder — but by actual ties of kinship. The Hillside Stranglers, for example, were 
cousins. So, too, were a pair of bloodthirsty psychopaths who terrorized the American frontier more than 
two centuries ago. 

The Harps 

Their names were William and Joshua Harpe. Though often referred to as siblings, they were actually 
first cousins — the children of two Scottish brothers who emigrated from their homeland to North 
Carolina sometime around 1760. 

As young men during the Revolutionary War, the younger Harpes picked the wrong side, fighting 
alongside the British. Their motives had less to do with politics than with the opportunities for rape, 
pillage, and murder that the conflict afforded them. After taking part in a losing battle in South Carolina, 
the brutish pair deserted the Redcoats and fled to the wilderness. Before long, they had abducted a 
couple of women and carried them off to Tennessee, settling down around Chattanooga. Over the next 
few years, they raided farms and robbed unwary travelers. They are also reputed to have killed at least 
four of their own offspring: unwanted babies born to their captive women. 

Sometime around 1794, the two killer cousins dropped the final “e” from their family name and changed 
their Christian names to Micajah and Wiley. Along the frontier, however, they would come to be known 
simply as Big Harp and Little Harp — names that would strike fear into the backwoods residents. In 
1798, the Harps embarked on what many criminal historians regard as the first serial murder spree in 
American history. Over a nine-month period, they roamed from Tennessee to Virginia to Kentucky to 
Illinois, slaughtering an estimated forty victims at a time when the entire population of the country was 
less than six million. 

Some of their murders were especially atrocious. On one occasion, they stripped a man naked, tied him 
to a horse, then blindfolded the animal and ran it off a cliff. On another, Big Harp picked up his own 
four-month-old daughter by the ankle and bashed her brains out against a tree because he was worried 
that the crying infant might alert a posse to his whereabouts. The Harps were also fond of slitting open 
their victims and filling their bellies with stones before sinking the corpses in a river. 

Eventually, Big Harp was shot and seriously wounded by a pursuing posse near present-day Dixon, 
Kentucky. One of the posse members, Moses Stegall — whose wife and child had been murdered by the 
Harps — decapitated the still-living outlaw with a hunting knife, impaled the head on a tree, and left it 
there to rot. To this day, the spot is known as Harp’s Head. 

Little Harp escaped, changed his name to Sutton, and took up with a band of Mississippi river pirates. In 
1804, however, after being recognized in Greenville, Mississippi, he was arrested, convicted, and 




hanged. As with his brother, his head was cut off and displayed on a stake as a warning to other outlaws. 



The Kallingers 

Other team killers have been even more closely related to each other than the Harp cousins. In the early 
1970s, for example, a Philadelphia shoemaker named Joseph Kallinger enlisted his own son as an 
accomplice in a series of horrendous crimes. 

Born in 1936, Kallinger was abandoned in his infancy and adopted at eighteen months by a sadistic 
Austrian couple who subjected him to savage floggings, beat him with a hammer, and convinced him 
that his penis had been permanently stunted by a hernia operation he was forced to undergo at age six. 
Two years later, he was gang-raped at knifepoint by a bunch of older boys. 

Unsurprisingly, he grew up violently disturbed. As an adolescent, he liked to masturbate while clutching 
a knife and stabbing at pornographic pictures. He was a lifelong pyromaniac who set fires for both 
pleasure and profit, torching homes for insurance money as well as for the ecstatic sense of power 
derived from seeing buildings go up in flames. 

Briefly committed on two occasions to mental hospitals, he was diagnosed as a schizophrenic sadist with 
intense hostility toward women. For the most part, however, he managed to pass himself off as normal. 
Marrying twice, fathering seven children, he opened a shoe repair shop in the Kensington district of 
Philadelphia. To the outside world, he appeared to be a respectable, self-employed member of the 
community. 

At home, his sadistic violence was never far below the surface. His children were its primary targets. In 
early 1972, three of them filed abuse charges against him, including his thirteen-year-old daughter, Mary 
Jo — who claimed that, as punishment for some minor infraction, her father had once branded her thigh 
with the blade of a red-hot spatula. Kallinger was convicted, but released on probation after just a few 
months behind bars. 

By 1974, his psychosis was in full bloom. Among other symptoms, he began to hear voices — issued by 
an invisible floating head named “Charlie” — commanding him to murder and castrate young boys. 

When he asked his thirteen-year-old son Michael for help in this deranged mission, the boy readily 
agreed. On July 7, 1974, they lured a young Puerto Rican boy into an abandoned factory, stripped him, 
gagged him with his socks, and sliced off his penis. 

The next victim was Kallinger’ s twelve-year-old son, Joey. Kallinger drowned him in a stagnant pool in 
the cellar of an abandoned rug factory while Michael watched. 

Beginning in November 1974, Kallinger and his son went on a wide-ranging rape and robbery spree, 
invading homes in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, assaulting the female residents and making 
off with money and jewelry. Their nine-month crime wave culminated in a horrific episode, when — after 




gaining entrance to a house in Leonia, New Jersey, and trussing up eight people at gunpoint — Kallinger 
slit the throat of a twenty-one-year-old woman when she refused to bite off the penis of a male victim. 
Two weeks later, he and his son were arrested. 

Michael — deemed by the courts to have been under his father’ s nefarious influence — was released into 
foster care after a stint in reform school. Kallinger was sentenced to life. In prison, he underwent a 
progressive mental breakdown, proclaiming himself God, declaring his desire to slaughter every person 
on earth. He also developed an obsessive fascination with his own feces, which he liked to eat from the 
toilet, smear on his skin, and mail to pen pals. He died of a seizure on March 26, 1996, at the age of fifty- 
nine. 

The Pandys 

Another serial sex-killer who enlisted his own child — in this case his daughter — to participate in his 
atrocities was Belgian pastor Andras Pandy. A stout, bespectacled man with a perpetual half smile and a 
goofy Prince Valiant hairdo, the middle-aged clergyman looked like the last person on earth capable of 
homicidal depravity. Underneath his innocuous facade, he was a psychopath of monstrous proportions. 

A refugee from Hungary, Pandy settled in Brussels in 1956 and became a respected pastor and founder 
of a humanitarian organization, presumably set up to provide foster care for children orphaned during 
the Romanian revolution that toppled the Ceaucescu dictatorship. At home, however, he was a vicious 
sexual predator. He began raping his daughter Agnes when she was thirteen. Psychologically enslaved to 
her degenerate dad, Agnes was forced to assist him in a series of horrendous crimes. Between 1986 and 
1992, they murdered an indeterminate number of victims, bludgeoning some with a sledgehammer, 
shooting others, then hacking up the bodies and dissolving the dismembered pieces in a vat of Cleanest — 
a store-bought drain opener with a high acid content. Six of the victims were Pandy’ s own family 
members — his first and second wives, several children and stepchildren. Others were apparently orphans 
recruited through his “charitable” organization, along with women he lured into his clutches through 
“lonely hearts” ads in a Hungarian newspaper. 

In 1997, Agnes — by then pushing forty — confessed to police. Searching Pandy ’s home, investigators 
turned up ghastly evidence of his atrocities — human bones and teeth in the basement, chunks of human 
flesh in his freezer. Arrested in 1997, the “Pastor Diabolique” — as he was dubbed by the local press — 
finally went on trial in February 2002, and received a life sentence for six counts of murder. For 
assisting her monstrous father, Agnes was given a sentence of twenty-one years. 

It was my task to take out the organs while Pandy was cutting up the remains. I just used a kitchen knife. 
You have to exercise strength. It’s not that easy. 

— Agnes Pandy, explaining how she had eviscerated one of her own stepsisters 



The Beanes 




Among the more sensational crimes of the blood-soaked 1960s were the appalling murders perpetrated 
by the so-called Manson family. Of course, the wild-eyed bunch who carried out this slaughter weren’t 
really relatives; just a band of psychopathic pseudohippies under the sway of their deranged messiah. 

But ther diave been a few cases in which entire families have collaborated in serial murder. 

One legendary killer clan was the barbarous tribe headed by a fifteenth-century outlaw, Sawney Beane. 
Born during the reign of James IV of Scotland, the bloodthirsty Beane and his common-law wife fled 
from civilized society and found refuge in a cave on the Galloway coast, where they proceeded to spawn 
a family that — through years of incestuous breeding — eventually grew to four dozen members. The 
main component of their diet was human flesh. Preying on unwary travelers, the feral clan not only 
robbed but cannibalized their victims, “butchering them in their den, then salting and pickling the meat 
for future consumption,” as historian Michael Anglo writes. 

According to legend, hundreds of people ended up as provender for the man-eating Beanes. Their 
hideout was finally discovered when some travelers spotted several members of the monstrous family 
feasting on the flesh of a freshly killed husband and wife who had been ambushed on the way home 
from a fair. Led by the Scots king himself, a small army rounded up the entire clan, who were 
condemned to a punishment commensurate with their crimes. 

“The sex organs of the men were cut off and cast into a fire, and their hands and legs severed from their 
bodies,” historian Anglo explains. “They were left to bleed to death while the females were forced to 
watch. Finally, cursing and swearing, the women were thrown into fires and slowly burned to death.” 

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN 

Though female psychos like Karla Homolka, Charlene Gallego, and Rosemary West were active 
accomplices in their husbands’ depravities, not every woman married to a sadistic sex-murderer 
participates in his atrocities. Indeed some of these wives aren’t even aware that their mates are serial 
killers. 

Undoubtedly a certain amount of denial is at work in such cases. When Herb Baumeister’s wife, Julie, 
asked him about the half-buried human skeleton that their son had stumbled across in their wooded 
backyard, Herb hastily explained that it was just an old, discarded lab specimen inherited from his 
physician father. Unlikely as this story was, Julie chose to believe it. Mostly, however, the fact that 
certain serial killers are able to fool their own families is testimony to one of the most chilling traits of 
these psychopaths: their ability to pass themselves off as normal, to conceal their monstrous secret 
identities from the rest of the world, even from those who share their homes. 

Peter Kiirten, for example, was married to a perfectly respectable woman who never had an inkling that 
her spouse was the infamous “Monster of Diisseldorf,” responsible for butchering twenty-nine victims in 
1929. Nor did the wife of the Russian maniac Andrei Chikatilo ever guess that she was wed to a creature 




who not only slaughtered more than fifty victims but perpetrated unspeakable acts of torture, mutilation, 
and cannibalism on their bodies. Peter Sutcliffe — aka the “Yorkshire Ripper” — maintained his facade as 
a happily married family man while conducting a savage five-year murder spree that claimed the lives of 
thirteen women. 

To be sure, some wives of serial killers come to realize that their husbands are seriously disturbed. John 
Wayne Gacy’s first wife, for example, divorced him after it became clear that he was an inveterate 
molester of boys. His second marriage ended for similar reasons. And in 1944, the wife of serial 
prostitute killer Steve Wilson left her husband because of his penchant for sneaking up on her while she 
was naked and and slicing her buttocks with a razor blade — his idea of an affectionate gesture. 

Even in such cases, however, the women never guess the full scope of their husbands’ depravity. Of 
course, the crimes committed by a creature like Gacy are so inconceivable that it’s easy to see why his 
wife wouldn’t suspect. After all, it’s one thing to leave your husband because he prefers to have sex with 
teenage boys. The thought that he might also be torturing them to death before stashing their corpses in 
the crawl space would simply not occur to most people. 

Some women married to serial killers do eventually discover what kind of monsters they’re living with. 
Unfortunately for most, this realization comes too late. Like the wife of British sex-slayer John Reginald 
Christie — who ended up buried beneath the floorboards of her own dining room — these poor women are 
doomed to learn the dreadful truth the hard way. 

CASE STUDY 

Herb Baumeister, Family Man 

Situated twenty miles from the state capital, Westfield, Indiana, is an exclusive bedroom community of 
million-dollar estates, so safe and sheltered that locals refer to it as “the golden ghetto.” But in the 
summer of 1996, residents of that exclusive enclave were stunned to discover that a monster had been 
living in their midst. 

His name was Herb Baumeister. Like John Wayne Gacy — another gay Midwestern sex-killer who 
maintained a facade of suburban propriety — Baumeister was regarded as a pillar of the community, a 
successful, self-made businessman who generously gave to charities and was well liked by his 
neighbors. What the world didn’t know was that — again, like Gacy — Baumeister led a depraved double 
life. He made secret forays into the gay hangouts of Indianapolis, where he would pick up young men 
who would never again be seen alive. 

His victims — at least eleven, though possibly many more — would be lured back to his sprawling Tudor- 
style home. There, they would be strangled during sex, their corpses disposed of in the woods behind the 
house. 




What made these crimes seem even more shocking was that, for at least three years, Baumeister had 
committed them not merely within the tranquil confines of Westfield but right under the noses of his 
own family. How, people wondered, could someone with a wife and three children get away with such 
atrocities? 

Psychopathic cunning had something to do with it. So did denial, especially on the part of Herb’s wife, 
Julie. In 1994, when she confronted her husband about a half-buried human skeleton that their son had 
stumbled upon in the wooded backyard, Herb gave her a cock-and-bull story: the skeleton, he claimed, 
was just an old anatomical specimen he had inherited from his physician father and had decided to 
discard. Julie chose to believe him. Eventually, however, even she was forced to face up to the dreadful 
truth. 

Born in 1947, Baumeister showed no signs of mental disturbance until high school. Then his 
increasingly erratic behavior caused his father to take him for mental evaluations. Though diagnosed as 
a schizophrenic, there is no record that he received any treatment. After flunking out of college, he 
drifted from job to job, though his bizarre outbursts — which included urinating on his boss’s desk — 
made it impossible for him to remain gainfully employed. 

After marrying in 1971, he and his wife opened a string of flourishing thrift shops in Indianapolis. 
Eventually, they were able to afford an estate in Westfield: a four-bedroom house with an indoor pool 
and riding stable on eighteen acres of wooded property. To all outward appearances, they were living the 
American Dream. The reality, of course, was a nightmare that no one knew a thing about — apart, that is, 
from Herb and the young men who fell into his clutches. 

During the frequent overnight trips taken by Julie and the kids — often to visit Herb’s widowed mother at 
her lakeside condominium — Baumeister traveled to the gay bars of the city, trolling for victims. When 
young men began disappearing in early 1993, the gay community was quick to take note. Articles 
appeared in a local gay newspaper. The police were notified. But — as is often the case when gay victims 
are involved — authorities were slow to take action. 

It was not until November 1995 that — thanks to the efforts of a private investigator, hired by the mother 
of one of the missing men — Baumeister was identified as a suspect. Another eight months would pass 
before members of the sheriff’s department searched his property. By then, Baumeister’ s life had 
unraveled: his business had foundered, his long-suffering wife had filed for divorce, and he himself had 
absconded in his 1989 Buick. Searching the wooded property behind the house, investigators eventually 
turned up thousands of human bone fragments: jawbones, thighbones, fingers, ribs, vertebrae, all 
stripped clean by animals and the elements, some partly burned. Experts estimated that, altogether, the 
skeletal fragments constituted the remains of eleven young men. 

By the time the digging was over, Baumeister himself was dead. Fleeing to Canada, he committed 
suicide in an Ontario park on the evening of July 3, 1996, shooting himself in the head with a .357 
Magnum after eating a peanut butter sandwich. The note he left made no mention of his atrocities, 




attributing his act to personal and family matters: his failed business and broken marriage. 
Recommended Reading: 

James Alan Fox and James Levin. Overkill: Mass Murder and Serial Killing Exposed (1996) 

Eric W. Hickey, Serial Murderers and Their Victims (1991) 

David Lester, Serial Killers: The Insatiable Passion (1995) 

Michael Newton, Serial Slaughter (1992) 

Joel Norris, Serial Killers (1988) 

BLUEBEARDS 

One of the most famous of all fairy tales, “Bluebeard” was originally recorded by the French writer 
Charles Perrault in his classic collection, Contes du temps passe ( Tales of Past Times), more commonly 
known in English as Mother Goose ’s Tales. The story concerns a fabulously rich gentleman. Despite the 
creepy coloration of his facial hair — which causes young women to flee at the sight of him — he woos 
and wins a beautiful maiden and brings her home to one of his country estates. Called away on an 
extended business trip, he gives his new bride the keys to the castle, telling her that she is free to open 
any door except the small one at the end of the ground-floor gallery. 

No sooner is he out the door, of course, than — overcome with curiosity — his young bride heads for the 
forbidden room. Opening the door with trembling hands, she steps inside. At first, she can see nothing 
clearly because the window curtains are drawn. As her eyes become adjusted to the dimness, she is 
greeted by a fearful sight: 

“The floor was all covered over with clotted blood, on which lay the bodies of several dead women 
ranged against the walls,” Perrault writes. “These were all the wives whom Bluebeard had married and 
murdered, one after another.” 

When her husband returns home and discovers his new bride’s disobedience, he pulls out his cutlass and 
gets ready to add her to the collection of butchered ex-wives in his storage room. At the last minute, 
however, she is rescued by the timely arrival of her brothers. 

In criminology, the name of this legendary lady killer is applied to a specific type of psychopath: the 
man who marries and knocks off a succession of women. (In this sense, the Bluebeard killer is the male 
counterpart of the female “Black Widow.”) 




Two things distinguish the Bluebeard type from other kinds of serial killers who prey on female victims. 
First, while psychos of the Ted Bundy /Edmund Kemper/Hillside Strangler variety target random 
strangers, the Bluebeard’s victims are his own wives or girlfriends. Second, while most serial killers are 
driven primarily by sexual sadism, the Bluebeard — though clearly deriving satisfaction from his 
atrocities — is also motivated by profit. 

Here are some examples of infamous twentieth-century “Bluebeards”: 

Henri Landru 

His spiky beard wasn’t blue, but in many other respects Henri Landru bore a striking similarity to his 
fairy-tale prototype. Though distinctly unattractive, the bald, bushy-browed, middle-aged Frenchman 
had no trouble attracting the opposite sex. Of course, his victims were especially vulnerable: women 
who had been widowed in the devastation of World War I and were desperate for male companionship. 
Landru was a practiced con artist who had already served seven prison sentences for fraud before he 
turned his hand to serial murder. 

He made the lethal transition when he was in his forties. His usual MO was to place a matrimonial ad in 
the newspaper, describing himself as a well-off widower with two children and a warm, affectionate 
nature. When a sufficiently wealthy prospect nibbled at this bait, the charming Landru would sweep her 
off her feet and whisk her away to a rented villa outside Paris. After she had signed over all her worldly 
possessions to him, the woman would never be seen or heard from again. 

Exactly how Landru killed his victims has never been determined, though their remains were evidently 
disposed of in a large stove purchased for that specific purpose. Ten women died at his hands. All were 
middle-aged widows, except one. This was a poor nineteen-year-old servant girl Landru picked up at a 
train station. That she met the same fate as his other victims reinforces the belief that — like all 
Bluebeard killers — Landru was not motivated solely by greed but also by sadism. 

He was finally caught after one of his victims — a rich widow named Madame Buisson — vanished. Her 
relatives immediately grew suspicious, though they were unable to track Landru down since he was 
using a pseudonym. On April 11, 1919, Buisson’ s sister happened to spot Landru escorting an attractive 
young woman into a Paris china shop. She alerted the police, who confronted him the next day. In his 
pocket, they found a little black book, containing notes on all his victims. In November 1921, two and a 
half years after his arrest, he was convicted, despite steadfast proclamations of innocence. On February 
23, 1922, the “French Bluebeard” was guillotined. 

George Joseph Smith 

Born in 1872, this British Bluebeard became infamous as the “Brides in the Bath Murderer” for his 
sinister MO. A small-time crook and charming con artist, Smith initially limited himself to scamming 
gullible spinsters out of their life savings by luring them into bigamous marriages. (He was legally wed 




throughout his adult life to his first wife, who left him without ever obtaining a divorce.) The moment 
Smith had his hands on his new bride’s money, he would disappear. Usually telling her that he was 
going out on an errand — to pick up a newspaper or buy a pack of cigarettes — he would never return. On 
one occasion, he brought his newlywed wife to the National Gallery of Art and, after viewing some 
paintings, excused himself to go to the bathroom. She never saw him — or her life savings — again. 

Smith progressed from swindle to murder in 1912. After getting his fourth “wife,” Bessie Mundy, to 
make out a will leaving him property worth £2,500, he rented a house and had a new zinc-and-enamel 
bath installed. Shortly afterward, Bessie was found drowned in the tub. 

Smith made it appear that, at the time of this tragic “accident,” he had gone out to buy fish for their 
dinner. In reality, of course, he had not sneaked outside until the dreadful deed was done. Crime writer 
John Brophy vividly describes the method Smith employed: 



With honeymoon playfulness he would enter the room where his bride was already in the bath, admire 
her naked beauty, bend over her fondly, and, still murmuring endearments, hold her feet. Suddenly, he 
would tug her feet upwards, thus jerking her head at the end of the bath, below the water, so that in a few 
moments she would be drowned with no bruises on the body or other signs of assault and resistance. 



The next woman to die in this fashion was a nurse named Alice Burnham. After marrying her in 
November 1913, Smith insured her life for £500. She drowned in the bathtub shortly thereafter, while 
Smith was ostensibly out of the house buying eggs. 

Smith’s final murder victim was Margaret Lofty. After marrying her in December 1914, he got her to 
make out a new will, naming him as beneficiary. Shortly thereafter, the honeymoon pair moved into 
rented rooms in Highgate. The very next day, while Smith was supposedly out purchasing tomatoes, his 
new bride drowned in the tub. 

The end came for Smith when the father of his second victim, Alice Burnham, read a newspaper account 
of Margaret Lofty’s death. That two of Smith’s brides had died in identical “accidents” within days of 
their weddings struck Mr. Burnham as highly suspicious. He quickly shared his suspicions with the 
police, who launched an investigation. Eventually, Smith was arrested and put on trial. Despite 
protestations of his innocence, the jury needed only twenty-three minutes to convict him. He was 
executed on August 13, 1915. 

Johann Hoch 

A native of Germany, Johann Schmidt came to America in 1887 at the age of twenty-five, abandoning a 
wife and three children. In 1895, under the name Huff, he bigamously married a well-off widow named 
Martha Steinbucher. Four months later, she fell ill with a devastating intestinal ailment. As she writhed 




in agony, she told her physician that she had been poisoned, but — attributing the remark to delirium — he 
paid her no heed. She died the next day. Immediately afterward, her husband sold her property for 
$4,000 and disappeared. 

Huffs second murder victim was Caroline Hoch of Wheeling, West Virginia, who was hit with a violent 
illness shortly after their wedding. On a visit to the stricken woman, her minister surprised Huff in the 
act of giving his wife some white powder — presumably medicine. The next day, Caroline was dead. 

Huff immediately sold the house, claimed his wife’s insurance policy, then faked his own suicide and 
disappeared. 

Now calling himself Hoch, the killer made his way to Chicago. Along the way he preyed on an 
indeterminate number of women, murdering some, merely fleecing and abandoning others. For a while 
he worked in the Chicago stockyards, an occupation that would ultimately earn him his homicidal 
nickname: the “Stockyard Bluebeard.” 

In December 1904, Hoch placed a matrimonial ad in a German newspaper and, soon afterward, received 
a reply from forty-six-year-old widow Marie Walcker, who owned a small candy store. They were 
married a short time later. A week after the wedding, Marie was stricken with excruciating abdominal 
pains, a violent thirst, and a tingling in her extremities that felt, she said, like ants crawling over her flesh 
— all classic symptoms of arsenic poisoning. Her physician, however, diagnosed the problem as 
nephritis. She died two weeks later. No sooner had Marie exhaled her last, agonized breath than Hoch 
proposed to her sister, Julia, who had come to tend her dying sibling. Three days later, Hoch and Julia 
were married. Hoch soon disappeared with all of Julia’s money. 

Notifying the police, Julia learned that Hoch was already under suspicion for swindle and murder. 
Caroline Hoch’s body had previously been exhumed, but examiners were unable to determine if there 
was poison in her stomach because Hoch had taken the precaution of eviscerating the corpse and 
dumping the organs in the river. Authorities had better luck with the body of Marie Walcker. A 
postmortem examination turned up lethal traces of arsenic in her viscera. 

Police immediately distributed the fugitive’s photograph. Hoch — who had fled to New York City — was 
arrested when his landlady recognized his picture in the papers. When police searched him, they found a 
fountain pen on his possession. Instead of ink, the reservoir contained 58 grains of a powdered substance 
that turned out to be arsenic. He was convicted of the murder of Marie Walcker and hanged on February 
23, 1906. The number of his victims is unknown; estimates range from six to twenty-four. 

Herman Drenth, aka Harry Powers 

A classic case of a Bluebeard killer who murdered both for pleasure and profit was Herman Drenth. 

Born in the Netherlands in 1892, he emigrated to America, where he changed his name to Harry Powers. 
In 1927, he settled in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he sold Electrolux vacuum cleaners door-to-door 
and helped operate a small grocery store. In addition to these activities, the pudgy, middle-aged Powers 




also led a sinister secret life. 



Through various matrimonial bureaus, Powers — using the pseudonym “Cornelius Pierson” — would 
correspond with lonely women, describing himself as a wealthy widower whose busy work life as a civil 
engineer did not leave him time to pursue marriage by more conventional means. In his letter, he 
promised to give his wife “everything within reason that money can buy,” but above all his “true love 
and absolute devotion.” Those women who fell for his beguiling words, however, ended up losing all 
their worldly possessions — and, in many cases, their lives. 

Exactly how many widows and spinsters were lured into Powers’s clutches is unknown. He himself 
ultimately suggested that he had slain as many as fifty. There is no doubt, however, about the last five 
people he killed. 

In 1931, he won the heart of a forty-three-year-old widow named Asta Eichler and brought her, along 
with her three young children, from their home in Park Ridge, Illinois, to a remote cabin he had built in 
Quiet Dell, a rural hamlet about five miles outside Clarksburg. No one ever heard from the Eichlers 
again. Shortly afterward, a fifty-one-year-old divorcee, Dorothy Lemke of North Uxbridge, 
Massachusetts, also disappeared after going off with her new mail-order husband, Cornelius Pierson. 

When Mrs. Eichler’ s friends and relatives became alarmed, an investigation was launched that 
eventually led back to Powers. He was arrested and jailed in August 1931. In the meantime — thanks 
partly to some neighbors who had complained of the stench emanating from the property — police had 
turned their attention to his Quiet Dell hideaway. There in a drainage ditch running from the cellar, they 
turned up the rotting remains of the two women and five children. 

Drenth was subjected to a particularly brutal third degree. He was severely beaten, his left arm was 
broken, and boiled eggs were pressed under his armpits. Eventually, he confessed to everything. 

He had turned the cabin cellar into a torture chamber, subjecting his captives to a horrifying ordeal. The 
three Eichler children — nine-year-old Annabel, twelve-year-old Harry, and fourteen-year-old Greta — 
had been locked in a cage, starved, and forced to watch their mother being hanged from a ceiling beam. 
When Harry tried to struggle free to save his mother, Powers crushed his skull with a hammer. The other 
children were strangled to death, as was Dorothy Lemke. 

When word of Powers’s confession spread through Clarksburg, a mob of approximately five thousand 
men tried to break into the jail to lynch him. It took a troop of state police armed with tear gas canisters 
to disperse them. Powers was tried and convicted in December 1931, and hanged three months later at 
Mounds ville State Penitentiary. 

Beat any cathouse I was ever in. 



Harry Powers describing the pleasure he got from watching victims die 




CASE STUDY 



Gilles de Rais, alias Bluebeard 

One of the most enigmatic figures in the history of true crime, Gilles de Rais, is remembered both as a 
great hero and as the most infamous of villains. An aristocrat from the province of Brittany in 
northwestern France, he was an honored military leader in the epic struggle to drive out the English 
during the second half of the Hundred Years’ War. He served as the chief lieutenant for none other than 
Joan of Arc. Some say his mind was unhinged by Joan’s execution in 1431. Or perhaps there had been a 
streak of madness and cruelty in him since childhood. Whatever the explanation, he eventually went to 
his death convicted of raping, torturing, and murdering over a hundred children. 

Not everyone is convinced of his guilt. Some chroniclers have argued that de Rais was innocent, that he 
was framed by a fellow aristocrat. In the end, though, popular culture cast its own verdict: de Rais was 
considered the inspiration for the legend of Bluebeard, the most famous of fairy-tale serial killers. 

Born in 1404, Gilles was descended from a family of knights and began his career as a soldier at the age 
of sixteen. He met Joan of Arc at the court of French king Charles VII nine years later when the teenage 
girl originally convinced the monarch that God had sent her on a divine mission to save France from the 
English. Gilles fought alongside Joan when she broke the English siege of Orleans and continued to 
serve under her in subsequent battles, including her defeat at Paris, where she was captured. 

By this time, de Rais had been given the title of Marshal of France in recognition of his wartime service. 
But his military career was coming to an end. After Joan’s capture, he returned to his family’s castle in 
Brittany, where he held the position of baron. At this point, his life began to take a bizarre and gruesome 
turn. 

According to the official version of the case, he immersed himself in alchemy as a way to replace the 
fortune that he was squandering. Soon, he intensified these efforts by indulging in conjuring and 
Satanism. These pastimes were all part of a larger descent into madness, which, beginning in 1432, 
included child murder. 

Gilles ’s servants would provide him with victims, either through abduction or enticement. The children 
were of both sexes, though most were boys. Gilles sodomized his victims, killed them either through 
strangulation or decapitation, disemboweled them and masturbated on their entrails. This reign of horror 
went on for eight years. When de Rais was finally arrested in 1440, the authorities found the 
dismembered remains of fifty bodies in one of the castle’s towers. All told, his victims numbered 140. 
Or so the records of de Rais’ trial tell us. 

The person who pressed charges against de Rais was the Duke of Brittany. One theory has it that the 
duke framed Gilles because he coveted the war hero’s lands. Another possibility is that de Rais was 




indeed guilty, and that the duke might have let him get away with his crimes — the victims were only 
commoners, after all — if not for the land issue. Whatever the motivation behind de Rais’ arrest, his trial 
left little doubt about his guilt at the time. 



There were, in fact, two trials: one for heresy, focusing on de Rais’ alleged involvement in black magic, 
and the other for the murders. On October 25, 1440, Gilles was excommunicated. The next day he was 
hanged above a roaring fire. 




The Execution of Gilles de Raisby Michael Rose 



In disguised form, de Rais’ horrible legacy lived on in folktales about Bluebeard, best known in the 
Charles Perrault version of the story written over 250 years after the bloody baron’s death. In Perrault’s 
story, Bluebeard’s newlywed enters a forbidden chamber in her new husband’s castle to discover the 
dismembered corpses of his previous wives, an abattoir reminiscent of de Rais’ tower filled with the 
remains of his mangled victims. One question, though: How did de Rais, the serial child torturer and 
murderer, become transformed into a wife killer? According to Leonard Wolf’s biography of de Rais, 
the originators of the Bluebeard tales turned the villain into a killer of adults in order to make the 
memory of de Rais’ hideous crimes easier to absorb. But this, like other aspects of de Rais’ life, is open 
to debate. Some scholars even dispute that de Rais was an inspiration for the Bluebeard legend. They 




claim that the true source was another folktale revolving around a character named Conomor, who was a 
sixth-century aristocrat, a wife-killer and, like de Rais, a resident of Brittany. 

WORK AND PLAY 

According to the FBI, a serial killer is anyone who murders three or more victims with a significant 
interval of time between each homicide. Under that definition, a mob “enforcer” would qualify. One 
reason that such professional assassins aren’t regarded as serial killers, however, is precisely because 
they are professionals. Murder is their business (as indicated by the name of the most famous gang of hit 
men in the history of organized crime: “Murder, Inc”). 

Serial killers, by contrast, don’t perpetrate atrocities for a living. They do it for pleasure. Murder isn’t 
their job: it’s their passion. 

When they aren’t indulging in sadistic daydreams or clandestinely carrying out their sickest fantasies, 
serial killers, by and large, lead drearily ordinary lives. To be sure, the long-ago past affords several 
instances of illustrious individuals who engaged in monstrous behavior: Gilles de Rais; Elizabeth 
Bathory, the Hungarian “Blood Countess” who bathed in the gore of her victims; Vlad the Impaler, the 
Transylvanian prince who served as the model for Dracula. In modern times, however, it is impossible to 
find a single example of a famous, highly accomplished person who turned out to be a serial killer. (This 
is one reason why all the theories that claim to prove that Jack the Ripper was a member of the royal 
family or a celebrated artist seem so dubious.) 

By and large, serial killers are, in their everyday lives, total nonentities, toiling at unskilled, if not 
menial, jobs: truck driver, janitor, garbageman. Some are full-time criminals: petty crooks and con 
artists who are in and out of jail throughout their adult lives. Despite their often superior intelligence, 
their profoundly antisocial personalities make it difficult for them to achieve anything professionally. 
True, some serial killers have been relatively successful. John Wayne Gacy, for example, built a thriving 
business as a home contractor. More typical, however, was Jeffrey Dahmer — a bright young man with a 
good education who couldn’t hold down a job more challenging than that of assembly-line worker at a 
Milwaukee chocolate factory. 

Of course, some serial killers deliberately seek out work that serves their twisted interests. A classic case 
is the monstrous Albert Fish, who preyed on countless young children in the early decades of the 
twentieth century. From the time he was seventeen, Fish worked as a painter. The psychiatrist who 
examined him, Dr. Fredric Wertham, explained the diabolical rationale for Fish’s choice of profession: 



He worked in many different institutions. He worked in Y.M.C.A.s, he worked in homes for the 
tubercular, he worked in any kind of home where there were children, where he thought he could get 
children. In all these places, he made his headquarters the basement or cellar. And he had the habit of 
wearing a painter’s overalls over his nude body, which gave him two advantages. First of all, he was 




nude in a moment. And secondly, he would be seen only in his painter’s clothes, and if they [a witness 
or a surviving victim] later met him on the streets or in his other clothes, they wouldn’t recognize him. 



Other serial killers make use of their jobs to snare potential victims. Harvey Carignan — the so-called 
Want-Ad Killer — lured young woman to their deaths by advertising for employees at the Seattle gas 
station he managed. 

While not specifically conducive to their criminal pursuits, some jobs held by serial killers are consistent 
with their morbid psychologies. Peter Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper,” for example, found employment 
in a mortuary, while his unspeakable countryman Frederick West worked for a while in a 
slaughterhouse. And there is something creepily apt about the business run by the Kansas City, 

Missouri, lust-killer, Bob Berdella: a suburban curio shop called “Bob’s Bizarre Bazaar” that specialized 
in human-tooth earrings, plaster-of-Paris skulls, and other m ac ab re tch o tchkes . 

On the other hand, some serial killers have worked at jobs so wildly at variance with their own 
malevolent natures as to border on the grotesque. A particularly striking case was that of the Houston 
sex-killer Dean Corll. A cross between Willy Wonka and the Marquis de Sade, Corll worked at his 
mother’s candy factory. Beloved by neighborhood children for freely handing out samples of pecan 
sweets, they called him the “Candyman.” 

There have also been been clergymen serial killers (such as the Belgian lust-killer, Andras Pandy); 
dentist serial killers (like Glennon Engleman of St. Louis, who bumped off seven people over twenty- 
two years); and serial killers who have picked up extra money by babysitting for their neighbors (like 
Wisconsin ghoul Ed Gein). 

UNCIVIL SERVANTS 

It has become part of popular lore that certain kinds of government workers are particularly prone to 
mass murder; a perception reflected in the phrase “going postal.” Whether mailmen account for a 
disproportionately high percentage of “rampage killers” is open to question. It is certainly true, however, 
that a number of highly infamous serial killers have worked as civil servants. 

David Berko witz, for example, worked at a post office by day, sorting letters at a branch in the Bronx. 

At night, he would transform into “Son of Sam,” the phantom shooter who preyed on young women in 
the bicentennial summer of 1976. Another American psycho who relied on firearms to dispatch his 
victims was the serial sniper Thomas Dillon, who worked for more than twenty years as an employee of 
the Canton, Ohio, Water Department. 

At roughly the same time that David Berko witz was terrorizing Gotham, Dennis Nilsen — aka the 
“British Jeffrey Dahmer” — was earning his own place in the annals of horrific crime. As an employee of 
the British Manpower Service Commission, Nilsen spent his days helping out-of-work youths find jobs. 




After hours, however, he showed how much he cared for young men by luring them to his flat, 
murdering them, and keeping their corpses around for companionship until they became unbearably 
rank. At that point, he dismembered the bodies and flushed them down the toilet. 



CASE STUDY 

Peter Manuel, the Man Who Talked Too Much 

Twenty years before the crimes of Dennis Nilsen were revealed to a stunned and sickened world, 
another civil servant was moonlighting as a serial murderer. His name was Peter Manuel. 

Born to British parents in Manhattan in 1927, Manuel and his family returned to their homeland when he 
was five. From an early age, he was in trouble with the law. At twelve, he was arrested for burglarizing a 
bicycle shop and received a year’s probation. Just five weeks later, he was back before the judge for 
housebreaking. This time, he was sent to reform school. Over the next few years, he escaped and was 
returned eleven times. 

In 1942, he assaulted the wife of a school employee. This time, Manuel was hit with a term at Borstal, 
the prison for juvenile offenders. Released in 1944, he went to live with his parents, who had since 
moved to Scotland. 

A compulsive criminal, Manuel soon reverted to burglary. Arrested again in February 1946, after 
breaking into a house, he was released on bail. Within the next two weeks, he sexually attacked three 
women. The first two managed to fend him off; the third — a married woman recuperating from a 
hospital stay — was too weak to resist. After beating her into submission, he dragged her to a railway 
embankment and raped her. Within days, Manuel was identified as the culprit. Brought to trial, he 
received an eight-year prison sentence and was shipped off to prison. 




(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham) 




Upon his release in 1953, he returned to Glasgow and landed a civil service job with the city Gas Board 
through the influence of his father — a member of the District Council. It wasn’t long before Manuel was 
back to his old sociopathic ways. Arrested for attempted rape in 1955, he managed to convince the jury 
that his victim had voluntarily submitted. He walked free of that charge. 

One year later, he graduated to murder. 

The first to die at his hands was nineteen-year-old Ann Knielands. Manuel killed her with an iron bar, 
wielding the implement with such savage force that her skull was shattered into fifteen pieces. As a 
known sex offender who had been working at a building site not far from where the corpse was found, 
Manuel was questioned by police. He claimed to have been at home at the time of the killing, an alibi 
confirmed by his father, who knew it was untrue. 

Two months later, in March 1956, Manuel was arrested for attempted burglary and released on bail. On 
the night of September 17, he broke into the house of a family named Watt and found three women 
inside: Marion Watt, her sixteen-year old daughter, Vivienne, and Mrs. Watt’s sister, Margaret Brown. 
He shot them all in the head at close range. Arrested on suspicion of murder, Manuel was released for 
lack of proof. 

His next victim was a taxi driver name Sidney Dunn, killed with gratuitous cruelty and for no apparent 
reason other than sheer bloodlust. Manuel shot him in the head and slashed his throat for good measure 
in early December 1957. Less than three weeks later, on December 28, he raped and killed Isabelle 
Cooke. 

Manuel’s final outrage was the massacre of another family: forty-five-year-old Peter Smart, his wife, 
and ten-year-old son. As in the Watt incident, all three victims were shot at close range in the head 
during a housebreaking. 

When currency stolen from the Smart home was traced to Manuel, police searched his house and turned 
up other incriminating evidence. Taken into custody, he soon began confessing so effusively that the 
press quickly dubbed him “The Man Who Talked Too Much.” It became clear to observers that, though 
six of Manuel’s nine victims had been killed in the course of burglaries, theft wasn’t his main 
motivation. Sadism was. As his biographer John Bingham put it, “Manuel did kill for pleasure. He liked 
killing. The act of killing thrilled him.” 

At his trial, he tried to recant his confession, but the tactic failed. He was convicted on seven counts of 
murder and hanged on July 11, 1958. 



KILLER COPS 




Before becoming a member of the English Civil Service, Dennis Nilsen served as a rookie police officer 
in London. He resigned after one year, apparently because of the contradictions in his life: lawman by 
day, abject prowler of homosexual pubs after dark. 

That one of the most notorious psychopaths of modern times would seek employment as a constable 
might seem a grim irony. In fact, it is surprisingly common for serial killers to be drawn to police work. 
In his best-selling memoir Mindhunter, famed FBI profiler John Douglas explains the psychology behind 
this phenomenon: 

The desire to work with the police was another interesting revelation, which was to come up over and 
over again in our serial killer studies. The three most common motives of serial rapists and murderers 
turn out to be domination, manipulation, and control. When you consider that most of these guys are 
angry, ineffectual losers who feel they’ve been given the shaft by life, and that most of them have 
experienced some sort of physical or emotional abuse ... it isn’t surprising that one of their main 
fantasy occupations is police officer. 



A policeman represents power and public respect. When called upon to do so, he is authorized to hurt 
bad people for the common good. In our research, we discovered that, while few police officers go bad 
and commit violent crimes, frequently serial offenders had failed in their efforts to join police 
departments and had taken jobs in related fields, such as security guard or night watchman. 



Even when they aren’t interested in joining the force themselves, serial killers often go out of their way 
to develop friendly relationships with local lawmen. Douglas writes that infamous “Coed Killer,” 
Edmund Kemper, used to “frequent bars and restaurants known to be police hangouts and strike up 
conversations. This made him feel like an insider, gave him the vicarious thrill of a policeman’s power. 
But also, once the Coed Killer was on the rampage, he had a direct line into the progress of the 
investigation, allowing him to anticipate their next move.” The same thing was true of appalling 
cannibal killer Arthur Shawcross, who, as Douglas writes, “hung around [police hangouts] and 
enthusiastically pumped them for information.” 

Sometimes, serial killers play at being policemen for the most sinister reasons. Kenneth Bianchi, half of 
the “Hillside Strangler” team, was a security guard who had tried and failed to join the sheriff’s 
department. Later, he and his degenerate cousin, Angelo Buono, lured unwary young women into their 
car by flashing badges and pretending to be cops. 

CASE STUDY 

Gerard Schaefer, Maniac Cop 



Gerard Schaefer may not have been the world’s sickest serial killer, but he was inarguably the author of 




the sickest piece of literature ever to emerge from the cesspit of a psychopathic mind. In 1990, while 
serving a life sentence for mur-der, he published a collection of violently pornographic stories 
caWedKiller Fiction, insisting that it was sheer fantasy, though at other times he strongly intimated that 
the contents were, in fact, chronicles of his actual crimes. In either case, the stories offer unparalleled 
insight into the unspeakable workings of a mind filled with most virulent hatred of women. The title of 
one section speaks volumes: “Whores: What to Do About Them.” To Schaefer, all women were whores; 
his idea of “what to do about them” involved subjecting them to the most hideous tortures imaginable. In 
a typical passage, he gleefully describes the murder of a “Junior League society bitch” his protagonist 
picks up on spring break: 

I watched her eyes drop to the shaft of steel buried in her belly, just above the crest of her pubic triangle. 
She watched my hand as I pulled the blade up and across, neatly gutting her. She stared with wide-eyed 
fascination as the ropy coils of her own intestines slid out of her belly and hung to her knees. Her eyes 
were filled with disbelief. Her terror must have blocked off the pain. I angled the cutting edge up under 
her rib cage [sic] and lanced it into her heart. The green eyes rolled back in her head, becoming white 
marbles. ... I was heartened. It was a satisfying and skillful kill. 

The author of this obscenity — and the perpetrator of an unknown number of unspeakably sadistic crimes 
— was born in Wisconsin in 1946. By the time he was twelve, he was a confirmed fetishist who enjoyed 
masturbating while wearing women’s panties. He had also discovered the joys of masochistic bondage, 
inventing games in which he tied himself to a tree and struggled to get free. “I’d get sexually excited and 
do something to hurt myself,” he later explained. 

When Schaefer was fourteen, his family moved to Florida. In high school, he had a reputation as a 
weirdo loner, spending his spare time shooting harmless creatures in the Everglades or peeping through 
the bedroom windows of neighborhood girls. His earliest goal was to become a priest, but — after being 
rejected by a local seminary — he renounced his faith. Enrolling in a community college, he found 
himself possessed by increasingly intense homicidal fantasies involving appealing young women, who 
were instantly classified in his warped mind as “whores.” At this point, however, his murderous 
impulses were still vented strictly on animals, though he had worked his way up from songbirds and 
land crabs to cattle. He particularly enjoyed beheading cows with a machete, then raping the carcasses. 

Schaefer now aimed his sights on a teaching career. During his brief stint as a student teacher in 1969, a 
number of females vanished from the vicinity of Schaefer’s residence. Their bodies would never be 
recovered, though police would eventually find some of their teeth, along with other evidence 
connecting them to Schaefer, among his stash of souvenirs. 

After being dismissed from his teaching job, Schaefer landed a job with a small-town police department 
in Wilton Manors, Florida. He was fired after six months, apparently for using the department’s 
computer to dig up personal information about local women. In spite of this blot on his record, he 
managed to get himself hired a few months later by the Martin County Sheriff’s Department. This time 
he lasted only a month. 




On July 21, 1972 — twenty-two days after joining the department — Schaefer picked up two teenage 
female hitchhikers, drove them to a swamp, then gagged and handcuffed them at gunpoint. Arranging 
nooses around their necks, he tied the ropes to a tree branch and made the terrified girls stand on the 
slippery roots, so that if they lost their balance and fell, they would hang. Then, he left them alone. 

When Schaefer returned a few hours later, he expected to find two dangling corpses. Instead, the girls 
were gone, having managed to escape. 

Telephoning his boss, Schaefer sheepishly admitted that he had made a boo-boo. “You’re going to be 
mad at me,” he said. He described what he had done to the two girls, though he swore that he was only 
trying to scare them out of the hitchhiking habit for their own good. Still, he admitted that he had 
possibly “overdone” it. 

He was fired on the spot, charged with false imprisonment and assault, then released on a fifteen- 
thousand-dollar bond. 

That September, while Schaefer was awaiting trial, two Fort Lauderdale teens, Georgia Jessup and 
Susan Place, were picked up at the latter’s home by an older man. “Jerry Shepherd” had promised to 
drive them to a beach. The two girls were never seen alive again. 

Two months later, in November 1972, Schaefer came up for trial on his assault charges. Berating him as 
a “thoughtless fool,” the judge sentenced him to a year behind bars with three year’s probation. 

While Schaefer was doing his time in jail, the skeletal remains of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup were 
found in the same swampy area where Schaefer had taken the two hitchhikers. Forensic analysis 
indicated that the victims had been “tied to a tree and butchered.” Thanks to Susan’s mother — who had 
jotted down the license plate number of the man who had picked up the girls a few months earlier — 
Schaefer was soon identified as the prime suspect. A search of his house turned up a trove of evidence 
connecting him not only to the two butchered girls but to a staggering number of other local women, 
some as young as thirteen, who had gone missing over the years. 

Eventually Schaefer received two concurrent life sentences for the murders of Susan Place and Georgia 
Jessup. His true body count, however, was clearly far higher. He himself admitted to more than a 
hundred murders. With a sadistic smirk characteristic of his ilk, he claimed that he couldn’t be sure of 
the exact number. “One whore drowned in her own vomit while watching me disembowel her 
girlfriend,” he wrote in a letter. “Does that count as a valid kill? Did the pregnant ones count as two 
kills? It gets confusing.” 

Schaeffer’s life came to a deservedly nasty end in December 1995, when another inmate slashed his 
throat and stabbed him in both eyes, ostensibly for taking the last cup of hot water from a dispenser on 
their cellblock. 




MEDICAL MONSTERS 



In a famous scene from the 1993 thrillerMa/zc^, Alec Baldwin, playing a prominent surgeon undergoing 
legal questioning, says, “You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something: I am God.” 

The crimes of serial killers are motivated by a monstrous lust for both pleasure and power. To 
compensate for profound, deep-seated feelings of humiliation and worthlessness rooted in their 
childhoods, these psychopaths develop a pernicious need to prove their omnipotence. Gaining total 
control over a helpless human being and dispensing death at their whim makes them feel like God. As 
“Coed Killer” Edmund Kemper put in explaining the perverse gratification he derived from his 
atrocities, “I was making life-and- death decisions . . . playing God in their lives.” 

This urge to “play God” has led a number of serial killers to seek careers in medicine. Another motive, 
of course, is that doctors have access to a steady supply of prospective victims: vulnerable, trusting 
people who, because they are ill to begin with, can be killed off without arousing too much suspicion. 

Among the most infamous medical monsters on record are: 

Thomas Neill Cream 

Born in Glasgow in 1850, this Victorian serial murderer emigrated to Canada when he was thirteen, at 
which point he was already displaying criminal propensities. He earned a medical degree from McGill 
University in 1874 and was soon misusing his newly acquired surgical skills by performing illegal 
abortions, killing an unknown number of women in the process. In 1881, having moved to Chicago, he 
poisoned his mistress’s elderly husband by lacing the old man’s epilepsy medication with strychnine. 
Convicted of murder, he was sentenced to life in Joliet prison. He ended up doing only ten years. 

Upon his release, he sailed for England and embarked on a career as a serial killer of prostitutes, slipping 
strychnine to five London streetwalkers before his arrest in 1892 at his home on Lambeth Palace Road. 
Sentenced to hang, the so-called “Lambeth Poisoner” ensured his immortality with his astonishing last 
words. As he stood on the gallows, hood over his head, he cried out, “I am Jack the — ”. Just then, the 
trapdoor crashed open, drowning out the final word. Though Cream certainly shared some traits with his 
legendary contemporary — most prominently a murderous rage against prostitutes — there is good reason 
to doubt his final claim, since he was languishing in jail in Joliet at the time of the Ripper killings. 











■-..hlyS-:i.j 



K !-nE^JWti«lS 



The Case of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream 
(from th ^Illustrated Police News of London ) 

Marcel Petiot 

In twentieth-century Europe, the social chaos created by the two world wars afforded prime 
opportunities for homicidal maniacs to ply their monstrous trade. This was particularly true in Weimar 
Germany, which produced some of the most monstrous lust-murderers of modern times, most notably 
Fritz Haarmann and Peter Kiirten. It was also the case in France during World War II, when one of that 
country’s worst serial killers took ghastly advantage of the horrors around him. 

Born in 1897, Marcel Petiot, like most psychopaths, had a history of criminal behavior extending from 
his youth, when he got into trouble for stealing money from schoolmates. In succeeding years, he was 
involved in drug-trafficking, arrested for shoplifting, and convicted of theft while serving as the mayor 
of his native town, Villaneuve. 



Despite his criminal record and a stint in a mental asylum, Petiot earned a medical degree. In 1933, he 
moved to Paris, where he continued to be involved in shady activities even while building a successful 




practice. It was after the Nazi occupation of France that he hit on the insidious scheme that would earn 
him everlasting infamy. 

Posing as a Resistance member, Petiot let it be known that he could smuggle wealthy Jews out of France 
for a hefty fee. When his desperate “clients” showed up at his house bearing their most precious 
possessions, they received an injection, supposedly an immunization shot against unnamed “foreign 
diseases.” In reality, it was strychnine. Petiot then placed them in a specially constructed death chamber 
equipped with a peephole, through which he could view their final agonies. He would then dispose of 
the corpses in his personal crematorium. 

His atrocities came to light in 1944 when firemen showed up at his house to investigate reports of a 
black, fetid cloud of smoke emanating from his chimney. They discovered human limbs in his furnace 
and the mutilated corpses of twenty-seven people stacked like firewood in the basement. Petiot stuck to 
his story that he was a member of the Resistance. The corpses, he claimed, were those of Nazi soldiers, 
killed by the Resistance and turned over to him for disposal. In the end, however, he failed to convince 
the jury that tried him. In March 1946, he was sent to the guillotine for the murder of twenty-six victims, 
though the actual total may have been far higher — perhaps as many as 150. 

Michael Swango 

Swango’s father was a Marine colonel who enforced strict military discipline on the rare occasions he 
was at home. Michael grew up without much feeling for his martinet dad, though he did come to 
appreciate the old man a little more after the latter’ s death, when he discovered a scrapbook kept by 
Colonel Swango containing newspaper clippings of car crashes, violent crimes, and other disasters. “I 
guess he wasn’t such a bad guy after all,” said Michael, himself a lifelong aficionado of gruesome news. 

His extreme interest in everything from savage sex crimes to Nazi atrocities was only one of young 
Michael’s peculiarities. During the 1960s, while his peers wore love beads and marched against the 
Vietnam War, Swango worked hard to turn himself into Rambo, painting his car military green, sporting 
fatigues, and dropping to the floor to do a hundred push-ups at the slightest provocation. Eventually, he 
joined the Marine Corps, remaining for just one tour of duty. In 1979, after receiving an honorable 
discharge, he enrolled in Southern Illinois University Medical School. There, he quickly gained a 
reputation for weird behavior. Though exceptionally bright, he demonstrated bizarre lapses in 
knowledge. On one occasion, he was unable to locate the patient’s heart in a chest X-ray, and his 
dissection of a cadaver in anatomy class was so bungled that the mangled specimen became a 
schoolwide joke. Excited by the sight of car wrecks and other accidents — the gorier the better — he spent 
more time working as a volunteer ambulance attendant than going to classes. As a result, he was almost 
denied his diploma. 

Despite his poor performance, he was offered an internship at the Ohio State University Medical Center, 
where patients on the road to recovery suddenly began dying of heart failure whenever young Dr. 
Swango was making his nightly rounds. Eventually, he fell under suspicion of the nursing staff, who 




reported their concerns to hospital administrators. Eager to avoid a scandal — and potentially ruinous 
lawsuits — the officials conducted a shockingly cursory investigation that exonerated Swango of any 
crime. This was the first of many instances in which the medical establishment turned a “blind eye” (to 
use the title of James Stewart’s powerful 1999 book on the case) to the nefarious doings of the 
psychopathic Swango, allowing him to go on satisfying his sadistic needs for an unconscionably long 
period of time. 

Leaving Ohio under a cloud of suspicion, Swango returned to Illinois, where he joined an ambulance 
corps. He raised eyebrows among coworkers with his gleeful appreciation of hideous accidents. Before 
long, he was amusing himself by doctoring the snacks of his fellow paramedics with an arsenic-based 
ant poison. Caught red-handed, he was arrested, convicted on seven counts of aggravated battery, and 
given a five-year sentence. 

Released on good behavior after only two years, he moved to Virginia and — while supporting himself as 
a lab technician — began sending out resumes, trying to get back into medical practice. Astonishingly, he 
was offered a residency at the University of South Dakota, whose director accepted at face value 
Swango’ s explanation for his jail time (according to Swango, he had gotten into a barroom brawl and 
ended up becoming the fall guy, though others were really to blame). 

Swango didn’t last long at his new position. In an act of hubris characteristic of psychopaths, he applied 
for membership in the American Medical Association, which turned up the truth about his battery charge 
during a background check and conveyed the information to his new employers, who quickly let 
Swango go. 

Undaunted, the ever-resourceful Swango next managed to land a job at Veterans Administration hospital 
on Long Island, New York, where — true to psychopathic form — he began killing off recuperating 
patients. This time, when the facts about Swango’s background came to light, the Justice Department 
finally stepped in. 

Realizing that the Leds were on his tail, Swango fled the country and headed for South Africa, where he 
landed a job in a remote Lutheran hospital. The shocking rash of sudden, unexplained deaths that 
occurred whenever “Dr. Mike” was on his rounds, however, aroused the suspicions of the hospital staff, 
and Swango was soon on the lam again. After hiding out in Zimbabwe and Europe for a year, he 
returned to the United States but was arrested as soon as he stepped off the plane. The deadly doctor — 
who may have been responsible for as many as sixty murders and who confessed in his diary that 
nothing turned him on more than “the sweet, husky, close smell of indoor homicide” — was convicted of 
killing three patients and sentenced to life without parole. 

I controlled other people’s lives, whether they lived or died. I had that power to control. After I didn’t 
get caught for the first fifteen, I thought it was my right. I appointed myself judge, prosecutor and jury. 
So I played God. 




Homicidal health-care worker Donald Harvey, accounting for his fifty-two murders 



CASE STUDY 

Harold Shipman, England’s Doctor Death 

Those who have looked into the background of Dr. Harold Shipman for the sources of his 
psychopathology have come up short. Yes, he was known to have been unusually attached to his mother 
and deeply traumatized by witnessing her slow death from cancer when he was in his teens. According 
to some psychiatrists, the sight of the family physician administering morphine injections to ease her 
final agonies left an indelible mark on his psyche, one that drove him, in later life, to re-create that 
traumatic scene again and again. Still, this explanation — like every theory offered by the experts — is a 
clear case of grasping at straws. It is likely that we will never know how or why this much-beloved 
family physician became England’s — and possibly the world’s — most prolific serial killer. 

Aside from being a loner who struck certain teachers as “a bit strange,” there was nothing apparently 
abnormal about the adolescent Shipman. It was not until he got his medical degree and joined a practice 
in the north England town of Todmorden that he showed signs of psychological trouble. After suffering 
a series of blackouts, Shipman told his colleagues that he was an epileptic — an explanation that they 
accepted until it was discovered that he had been forging prescriptions for a morphinelike painkiller 
called pethidine and injecting himself with the drug on a regular basis. Arrested for forgery and stealing 
drugs, Shipman was hit with a sizable fine and forced out of the practice. After kicking his habit in 
rehab, however, he was soon back on the job, finding work with another medical practice. 

In 1992, he broke from the group and set himself up in private practice in the town of Hyde. His warm 
bedside manner and the time and care he lavished on his patients made the bespectacled, gray-bearded 
physician a local favorite, especially among the elderly female population. No one noticed — at least at 
first — just how rapidly those old women began to die off. 

Shipman’s MO was always the same. He would pay an unexpected afternoon house call on a fairly 
healthy patient, kill her with an injection of the painkiller diamorphine, then hurry away. Later — often 
summoned by a frantic call from a relative who had discovered the corpse — he would return and sign the 
death certificate, attributing the unexpected death to natural causes. 

It was not until 1997 that someone — a woman named Debbie Bramboffe, the daughter of the local 
undertaker — realized that something sinister was going on. Struck by the unusually high death rate 
among Dr. Shipman’s elderly female patients — and by the bizarre fact that their bodies were invariably 
found fully dressed and seated in their favorite easy chairs or resting on a settee — Mrs. Bramboffe 
shared her suspicions with another local physician, Dr. Susan Booth. Before long, an investigation was 
under way. 

Aware that authorities had begun to examine the death certificates of his patients, Shipman still could 




not stop killing. Indeed, by then, his homicidal mania had grown so extreme that he was sometimes 
murdering patients at the rate of one a day. 

The underlying psychological causes that finally led to his arrest are a matter of debate. Some attribute 
his undoing to arrogance and a growing sense of invincibility, others to an unconscious wish to get 
caught. What is beyond dispute is that, in June 1998, Shipman killed Mrs. Kathleen Grundy — an 
unusually fit octogenarian and the former mayor of Hyde — then crudely forged a will in her name that 
left him her entire fortune of nearly £400,000. As soon as Mrs. Grundy’s daughter set eyes on the 
document, she saw it was a fake and contacted the police, who already had Shipman in their sights. 
Before long, Mrs. Grundy’s body was exhumed and autopsied. When lethal amounts of morphine were 
discovered, Shipman was arrested. 

At first, the townspeople of Hyde refused to accept that their neighbor and trusted physician could be 
guilty of murder. Shopkeepers hung posters in their store windows that read, “We don’t believe it.” They 
were forced to face the truth, however, when Shipman was convicted of fifteen murders in January 2000. 
Nothing, however, could have prepared them for the ultimate shock — the revelation, after a prolonged 
investigation by the British government, that the number of suspicious deaths connected to Shipman 
totaled at least 297 and possibly as many as 345. 

What drove him to do it? At his trial, the prosecuting attorney, Richard Henriques, gave the only 
possible answer: “He was exercising the ultimate power of controlling life and death, and repeated the 
act so often he must have found the drama of taking life to his taste.” 

In short, Dr. Harold Shipman killed several hundred human beings for the simple reason that he liked it. 

NICKNAMES 

Our tendency to mythicize serial killers — to see them not as predatory criminals, but as creatures of 
superhuman evil — is reinforced by the media’s habit of tagging them with lurid nicknames. This 
sensationalistic ploy (designed to sell papers by exploiting our primitive, childlike fascination with 
monsters) began with the first celebrity psycho of the modern era — “Jack the Ripper” — and continues to 
this day. (When a card featuring the Grim Reaper was found at one crime scene during the 2002 
shooting rampage in the Washington, DC, area, the unknown perpetrator was immediately dubbed the 
“Tarot Card Killer.”) 

Here is a list of notorious serial killers and their tabloid-style monikers: 



Richard Angelo, “Angel of Death” 



Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, “Lonely Hearts Killers” 




David Berkowitz, “Son of Sam” 



Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, “Hillside Stranglers” 
William Bonin, “Freeway Killer” 

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, “Moors Murderers” 

Harvey Louis Carignan, “Want-Ad Killer” 

David Carpenter, “Trailside Killer” 

Richard Chase, “Vampire of Sacramento” 

Andrei Chikatilo, “Mad Beast” 

Reg Christie, “Monster of Rillington Place” 

Douglas Clark, “Sunset Slayer” 

Carroll Cole, “Barfly Strangler” 

Dean Corll, “Candyman” 

Jeffrey Dahmer, “Milwaukee Cannibal” 

Theo Durrant, “Demon of the Belfry” 

Albert Fish, “Moon Maniac” 

John Wayne Gacy, “Killer Clown” 

Carlton Gary, “Stocking Strangler” 

Ed Gein, “Plainfield Ghoul” 

John Wayne Glover, “Granny Killer” 

Vaughn Greenwood, “Skid Row Slasher” 



Belle Gunness, “Lady Bluebeard” 




Fritz Haarmann, “Vampire of Hanover” 

John George Haigh, “Acid Bath Killer” 

William Heirens, “Lipstick Killer” 

Gary Heidnik, “Sex-Slave Killer” 

Dr. H. H. Holmes, “Chicago Bluebeard” 

Keith Jesperson, “Happy Face Killer” 

Edmund Kemper, “Coed Killer” 

Paul John Knowles, “Casanova Killer” 

Peter Kiirten, “Monster of Dusseldorf ’ 

Pedro Lopez, “Monster of the Andes” 

Richard Macek, “Mad Biter” 

William MacDonald, “Sydney Mutilator” 

Earle Leonard Nelson, “Gorilla Murderer” 

Thierry Paulin, “Monster of Montmartre” 

Jesse Pomeroy, “Boy Fiend” 

Heinrich Pommerencke, “Beast of the Black Forest” 
Richard Ramirez, “Night Stalker” 

Melvin Rees, “Sex Beast” 

Angel Maturino Resendez, “Railway Killer” 

Danny Rolling, “Gainesville Ripper” 




Charles Schmid, “Pied Piper of Tucson” 



Lucian Staniak, “Red Spider” 

Peter Sutcliffe, “Yorkshire Ripper” 

Coral Eugene Watts, “Sunday Morning Slasher” 
Randall Woodfield, “1-5 Killer” 



Some serial killers have never been caught and are known only by their tabloid monikers (or what might 
be called iheivpsychonyms ). The best known of these — besides Jack the Ripper — are: the Ax Man of 
New Orleans, the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, the Monster of Florence, and Zodiac. 

CASE STUDY 

Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker 

Richard Ramirez — the twenty-five-year-old man who held Los Angeles in the grip of fear during the hot 
summer of 1985 — had some heartfelt words for the court that sentenced him to death: “You maggots 
make me sick. You don’t understand me. I am beyond good and evil. I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells 
in us all.” Like all psychopaths, he felt not the slightest twinge of remorse for the horrors he had visited 
upon the city. As he left the courtroom he shrugged off the well-deserved punishment that awaited him: 
“Big deal. Death always went with the territory. I’ll see you in Disneyland.” 

Born into a poor Mexican-descended family in El Paso, Texas, Ramirez was an average student until he 
reached high school, when things went from bad to worse. As a motel worker he was caught breaking 
into a woman’s room and grabbing her as she exited the shower. The woman’s husband caught and beat 
him up, but the couple did not press charges. Ramirez moved to LA and acquired a rap sheet for drug 
and driving violations. 

In the spring of 1985, he began to roam the neighborhoods of suburban LA in stolen cars, looking for 
homes to vandalize — and people to destroy. Later, when the LA police intensified their manhunt, he 
drove up to San Francisco for prey. Usually high on coke or speed, he slipped into darkened houses 
where sleeping couples lay, killing the husband first, then raping and savaging the woman. Once he 
carved out the eyes of a female victim and took them away as trophies. 





Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez 
(Button pin courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



From June 1984 until his capture over a year later, it seemed to the terrified residents of Los Angeles 
that a demon was on the loose. The press dubbed him the “Night Stalker.” No one felt safe. The 
shadowy fiend did not focus on any particular age group or sex or race. He raped women in their 
eighties; he tortured young mothers in front of their children. He would help himself to a snack while his 
victims bled to death before his eyes and leave Satanic pentagrams on their bodies or the walls of their 
homes. 

As his crimes escalated, Ramirez — like many serial killers — developed a sense of omnipotence. He 
believed that he was being protected by Satan. 

He was wrong. 

In August 1985, he attacked a couple — shooting the man in the head and raping the woman — then fled 
in their car. After recovering the stolen vehicle, police lifted a fingerprint and were able to match it to 
Ramirez’s rap sheet. His mug shot was immediately broadcast on local TV. A few days later, during an 
attempted carjacking in East LA, he was recognized by passersby, pounced on, and nearly beaten to 
death. Only the timely arrival of the police saved him from the enraged mob. 

His fourteen-month trial was a media sensation. The unrepentant Ramirez mugged for reporters, flashing 
a pentagram he had drawn on his palm, making devil’s horns with his fingers, and chanting, “Evil . . . 
Evil . . . Evil. . . .” Hordes of groupies flocked to the proceedings, showering him with fan letters and 
love notes. When one young woman was asked about her fascination with the notorious psycho-killer, 
she replied: “When I look at him, I see a real handsome guy who just messed up his life because he 
never had anyone to guide him.” Ramirez later married one of his female admirers. 



He was ultimately convicted of thirteen murders, though he later confessed to more. “I’ve killed twenty 
people, man,” he told a fellow inmate. “I love all that blood.” He currently resides on death row in San 




Quentin. 



SERIAL KILLERS INTERNATIONAL 

There’s little doubt that America is the world’s leading producer of serial killers, though any true 
measurement has to take into account the sheer size of our population. The FBI estimates that there are 
between thirty and fifty serial killers at large in our country at any given time. That might seem like a 
shockingly high number, but in a nation of more than 280,000,000 people, it’s a minuscule percentage. 

England, for example, may be afflicted with only a few serial killers a year, but its population is less 
than a fifth of ours. Indeed, in a study of serial murder between the years 1962 and 1982, the crime 
expert Colin Wilson lists eighteen cases in the US and eleven in Great Britain. According to that finding, 
the incidence of serial murderers for that twenty-year period turns out to be significantly higher in Britain 
— 18 per 100,000, compared to 8.3 for the United States. Recent British serial killers, moreover, include 
not only some of the most depraved murderers of modern times — like Fred and Rosemary West — but 
also the single most prolific: Dr. Harold Shipman, responsible for as many as four hundred murders. 

Still, there are definite cultural factors in America that are conducive to serial murder. The fragmented, 
highly dysfunctional families that are a fertile breeding ground for criminal psychopaths. The 
rootlessness and anonymity of American life, which make it possible for serial killers to keep on the 
move or live in a community without attracting notice. The large number of “targets of opportunity” — 
teenage runaways, inner-city prostitutes, etc. And, of course, the unusually high level of violence in 
general, which has always been a feature of our society. 

It’s important to recognize, however, that serial murder is not limited to any one nation. It’s a universal 
phenomenon, one that has existed throughout history and in every part of the globe. Indeed, a 
comprehensive survey of international serial killers would require a book of its own. For a sense of just 
how widespread the phenomenon is, here is a sampling of serial killers from other lands. 

Ramiro Artieda 

Though this Bolivian psychopath gained infamy in the late 1930s for the serial strangling of seven 
young women, he began his homicidal career by killing his own brother, Luis, to gain control of the 
family estate. Unfortunately for future victims, the police were unable to gather sufficient evidence to 
convict him, and Artieda was allowed to go free. 

Jilted by his eighteen-year-old fiancee — who evidently had qualms about marrying an accused fratricide 
— Artieda left for the United States, where he studied acting. No sooner had he returned to Bolivia than 
a string of eighteen-year-old women — who all bore a striking physical resemblance to Artieda’ s former 
girlfriend — began to die, each strangled by a dark-haired stranger posing in a different role. One was 
lured to her death by a “film-company executive,” another by a “visiting professor,” another by a 
“traveling salesman,” yet another by a “monk.” After a final, failed murder attempt in May 1939, 




Artieda was identified by an intended victim and arrested. 



Under interrogation, he admitted to strangling seven women, presumably as a way of taking revenge on 
the female sex after being spurned by his fiancee. He also confessed to the murder of Luis. He was 
executed by a firing squad on July 3, 1939. 

Wayne Clifford Boden 

Viewers of Michael Moore’s Academy Award-winning documentary , Bowling for Columbine, may be 
forgiven for thinking of Canada as an idyllic land where violent crime is so rare that its citizens go to 
sleep with their front doors unlocked. Thirty years ago, however, Montreal was the scene of a series of 
murders as gruesome as any in the bad old USA. 

The horrors began in July 1968, when the naked corpse of a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher named 
Norma Vaillancourt was found in her Montreal apartment. The victim had been raped and strangled, and 
her breasts savaged by bite wounds. Just over one year later, the killer struck again, raping and 
strangling another petite young brunette, then shredding her breasts with his teeth. 

It wasn’t until his third atrocity that police finally got a lead. In November 1969, twenty-year-old 
Marielle Archambault met the same grisly fate as the previous victims. Searching her apartment, 
investigators found a crumpled snapshot of a nice-looking young man. Marie’s coworkers at a 
downtown jewelry shop were able to identify him as a guy named “Bill” who had stopped by the store to 
chat with her on the day of her murder. 

Two months later, the “Vampire Rapist” — as the newspapers were by then calling him — struck again, 
raping and strangling twenty-four-year-old Jean Way, then subjecting her corpse to his trademark 
mutilation. 

With the police hot on his trail, the phantom killer decamped for Calgary twenty-three hundred miles 
away, where he murdered his final victim, a young schoolteacher named Elizabeth Porteous, in May 
1971. Interviewing Porteous ’s friends, police learned that she had been dating a man named “Bill,” who 
drove a blue Mercedes. Spotting a car matching that description parked just a block away from the 
victim’s apartment, police set up a stakeout and apprehended the owner as he approached the vehicle. 

He turned out to be twenty-three-year-old Wayne Clifford Boden. His cuff link had been found in the 
shredded remnants of Elizabeth Porteous’s dress as her body was being transported to the medical 
examiner’s lab. Boden admitted that he had gone out with her on the night of her murder, but he insisted 
that she had been alive when he left her. At his trial, however, a forensic odontologist established 
beyond doubt that the bite marks on the victim’s breasts could only have been made by Boden. 
Convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the Calgary murder, he was subsequently tried again 
in Montreal and given an additional three life sentences. 




Luis Alfredo Garavito 



Americans like to think they have the biggest and best of everything. We take perverse pride in having 
produced the worst serial killers of modern times: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, et al. 
The truth is, however, that the enormities of even our most monstrous psycho-killers pale before those of 
the Colombian lust-murderer Luis Alfredo Garavito. The fact that his name is virtually unknown on 
these shores is clearly a function of cultural chauvinism: Americans just aren’t especially interested in 
psychopathic foreigners. Certainly the sheer magnitude of his crimes makes him a serious candidate for 
the title of “Worst Serial Sex-Killer of the Twentieth Century.” 

Born in 1957 in the coffee-growing area of Pereira, Garavito — the youngest of seven children — was 
subjected to regular, brutal beatings by his alcoholic father and raped by two adult male neighbors. He 
grew up to be an alcoholic, as well as a depressive with suicidal tendencies. After just five years of 
schooling, he dropped out of school and, at sixteen, became a drifter, finding occasional work as a store 
clerk and street vendor of religious articles. 

During a seven-year span that began in 1992, Garavito murdered no fewer than 140 boys between the 
ages of eight and sixteen. He killed them in more than fifty cities across Colombia, as well as in 
Ecuador. Posing in various benign guises — a teacher, a priest, a social worker, a representative of a 
charitable organization — glib, smooth-talking Garavito would win the confidence of his victims, often 
by buying them soft drinks or giving them small sums of money. Then he would invite them on a long 
walk into the countryside. When the boys began to grow tired, Garavito pounced. He would tie them up 
with nylon line, rape them, mutilate them, then slit their throats or behead them. 

That these enormities went undetected for years was a function of Colombia’s dire conditions. His 
victims were poor, often homeless, street children: the displaced products of a country in the throes of 
social disintegration. For the most part, no one even noticed that they were missing. It wasn’t until 
twenty-seven skeletons were found in a ravine in the western province of Pereira that authorities 
launched an investigation. Eventually — after nearly ninety more skeletons were uncovered — the police 
were led to Garavito, already in jail awaiting trial for the slaying of an eleven-year-old boy in the city of 
Tunja. During a marathon grilling, Garavito confessed to 140 murders, each of which he had 
painstakingly recorded in a notebook. Colombia having no death penalty, he was sentenced to fifty-two 
years for the Tunja murder — a shockingly mild punishment in light of his unparalleled enormities. 

Saeed Hanaei 

For more than two years, an Iranian serial killer — nicknamed the “Spider” because of his sinister skill at 
luring victims into his web — killed at least sixteen prostitutes in the holy city of Mashad. The women 
were all strangled with their head scarves, then swaddled head to toe in their black chadors and dumped 
on the streets. Far from causing outrage, however, these horrific crimes were actually applauded by 
many hard-line supporters of the fundamentalist regime, who viewed the unknown serial killer as a 
righteous crusader against corruption. 




Eventually, a thirty-nine-year-old construction worker, Saeed Hanaei, was arrested for the crimes. 
According to his confession, he had embarked on his murderous mission after his own wife was 
mistaken for a prostitute by a cabdriver. Blaming the large number of prostitutes in the city for this 
humiliating episode, Hanaei had decided to kill as many of them as he could as a “religious obligation.” 
Hanaei was utterly remorseless, declaring that killing the women was no harder than “breaking open a 
melon.” 

At first, some hard-liners rallied to his defense, arguing that he was simply trying to clean up the 
country. They fell silent, though, when he revealed that he had had sex with most of his victims before 
strangling them. He was hanged in the prison compound in Teheran on the morning of April 18, 2002. 

They were worthless as cockroaches to me. Toward the end, I could not sleep at night if I had not killed 
one of them that day. 

— Saeed Hanaei 

Javed Iqbal 

In 1999, a thirty-seven-year-old, independently wealthy Pakistani named Javed Iqbal was brutally beaten 
by a pair of young servant boys. When he reported the crime to the police, they not only brushed off his 
charges but accused him of sodomy. At that moment, Iqbal decided to take a dreadful revenge against 
“the world I hated.” He vowed to murder exactly one hundred children. 

During the next six months, he made good on this hideous pledge. Enticing young teens — most of them 
beggars and runaways — to his small apartment in Lahore, he fed them, took their snapshots, and offered 
them a bed. Once they were asleep, he asphyxiated them with cyanide. Later, he dissolved their bodies 
in a vat of acid and dumped the residue down an alleyway sewer. Iqbal not only saved their clothing and 
shoes but kept a meticulous record of his victims, recording their names, ages, the dates of their deaths, 
and even the cost of disposing of them (roughly $2.40 per victim, including the cost of the acid). As 
soon as he reached his goal, he turned himself in. 

Convicted in March 2000, he was given a sentence commensurate with the monstrosity of his crimes. He 
was to be strangled in front of the parents of his victims, then cut into a hundred pieces and dissolved in 
acid. He appealed the sentence but was then found dead in his cell, an apparent suicide, in October 2001. 

I could have killed five hundred, this was not a problem. But the pledge I had taken was one hundred 
children, and I did not want to violate this. My mother had cried for me. I wanted one hundred mothers 
to cry for their children. 



Javed Iqbal 




Muhammad Adam Omar Ishaak 



In the early 1980s, the University of Sana opened Yemen’s first medical school, producing physicians 
who, in succeeding years, would serve throughout the country and across the Arab world. Among its 
graduates were Yemen’s first women doctors. The reputation of this proud institution was badly 
tarnished in the summer of 2000, however, when one of its employees — a forty-eight-year-old morgue 
attendant named Muhammad Adam Omar Ishaak — turned out to be a deranged sex-killer whose victims 
included two of the school’s own female students. An emigrant from the Sudan who had arrived in 
Yemen on a wave of impoverished African job-seekers, Ishaak — or the “Sana Ripper,” as he was dubbed 
— confessed to raping, killing, and dismembering his victims, before soaking their remains in acid and 
dumping them in the morgue drains. 

From the start, however, a great deal of controversy surrounded Ishaak, who kept altering his story. At 
first, he claimed to have butchered more than fifty women as a transient worker in a half dozen Arab 
countries. Later, he lowered the number to sixteen victims, all of them from Yemen, insisting that he had 
never worked anywhere else except his native Sudan, where he had been a gravedigger. His story 
changed again, however, when one of his supposed victims — a twenty-one-year-old woman whose 
mutilation-murder he had described in grisly detail — turned up alive. In the end, he admitted to only two 
murders, those of a twenty-four-year-old Iraqi medical student and a twenty-three-year-old Yemeni, 
both female, whose body parts were found in the morgue drains. 

Though some observers clung to the belief that Ishaak was a scapegoat, set up by powerful figures 
seeking to cover up a sex-and-murder scandal at an exclusive Sana brothel, Ishaak was sentenced to 
death. He was publicly executed outside the gates of the medical school in August 2001 — shot through 
the heart and head after receiving eighty lashes with a whip of knotted leather. 

The “Kobe School Killer” 

In the spring and summer of 1997, Japan was riveted by a hideous crime. On Tuesday morning, May 27, 
several passersby spotted what looked like a manikin’s head resting in front of the gate to a junior high 
school in the port city of Kobe. Upon closer examination, it proved not to be a fake but — much to the 
horror of witnesses — the decapitated head of a mentally retarded eleven-year-old boy named Jun Hase 
who had been missing for several days. Stuffed inside the mouth was a note that read: “Well, let’s begin 
a game. Can you stop me, police? I desperately want to see people die. I think it’s fun to kill people. A 
bloody judgment is needed for my years of great bitterness.” A rash of other crimes had lately occurred 
in the vicinity. Just a half mile from the school gate, a ten-year-old girl had been bludgeoned to death 
with a steel pipe in March, and a nine-year-old girl seriously stabbed the same day. Before that, two 
other elementary school girls had been attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant, though both escaped 
serious injury. And then there were the animals: two dead kittens — one with its paws cut off — left in 
front of the school, along with a decapitated pigeon. 



Realizing that a serial killer was on the loose, the police began looking for a man in his thirties who had 




been seen in the company of little Jun shortly before the boy’s disappearance. In early June, the killer 
sent several sinister letters to a local newspaper, declaring that murder brought him a sense of inner 
peace and threatening to kill “three vegetables a week” — by which he apparently meant children. 

Given the degree of the killer’ s psychopathology, it should have come as a tremendous relief when he 
was finally caught at the end of June. But in fact, his arrest precipitated a nationwide spasm of anguished 
soul-searching. The killer turned out to be a fourteen-year-old boy, reportedly from a nice, middle-class 
home. Though Japanese law forbade the release of his name, certain facts about him emerged. Like most 
serial killers, he began manifesting sociopathic symptoms at an early age. He loved to play with hunting 
knives in elementary school and enjoyed torturing animals, on one occasion lining up frogs on the street 
and running over them with his bicycle. He maintained a detailed diary of his crimes and engaged in 
bizarre rituals. After luring Jun Hase to a wooded hill, he had strangled the boy, removed his head with a 
saw, taken it home in a plastic bag, and washed it in a purification ceremony before leaving it at the 
school gate. 

Under Japanese law, the “Kobe School Killer” cannot be jailed because of his youth. One way or 
another, he is expected to be back on the streets by the time he is eighteen. 

I can relieve myself of hatred and feel at peace only when I’m killing someone. I can ease my own pain 
only when I see others in pain. 

— from a note sent by the “Kobe School Killer” 

Pedro Lopez 

The man who would grow up to become the notorious “Monster of the Andes” had the sort of childhood 
almost guaranteed to produce a criminal psychopath. Born in rural Colombia in 1949, Lopez — one of 
thirteen children of a penniless prostitute — was raised in utter squalor. At eight, he was kicked out of his 
home after his mother caught him fondling one of his own little sisters. Out on the streets, he quickly fell 
victim to a middle-aged pedophile who — promising him food and shelter — lured him to an abandoned 
building and raped him. 

Making his way to Bogota, he subsisted on whatever he could beg, pilfer, or scavenge. He was briefly 
taken under the wing of a sympathetic American couple who enrolled him in a school for orphans. This 
relatively normal interlude in his life ended abruptly when he stole some money from the school 
(allegedly after being molested by one of the male teachers) and ran away. 

By his midadolescence, Lopez had turned to car theft, a vocation that landed him in jail when he was 
eighteen. Two days after he started his seven-year sentence, he was gang-raped by a quartet of older 
inmates. Not long afterward, Lopez killed all four of his attackers with a homemade shiv. Deemed an act 
of self-defense, the killings earned him only an additional two years. 




Released in 1978, Lopez embarked on a nomadic career of sadistic lust-murder that would earn him 
international infamy as possibly the most prolific serial killer of all time. Traveling widely through Peru, 
he raped and strangled scores of young girls, many snatched from Indian tribes. Once, after being caught 
during the abduction of a nine-year-old Ayachucos child, he was beaten, tortured, and nearly buried 
alive. Only the timely intervention of an American missionary saved him. 

Deported from the country, Lopez resumed his homicidal ways in Colombia and Ecuador. He was 
finally caught in April 1980, while attempting to lure a twelve-year-old girl from an Ecuadorian 
marketplace. In custody, Lopez was initially silent, though he finally opened up to his “cellmate” — 
actually a priest in prison garb, planted there by the authorities. Confronted with the horrifying 
admissions he had made to the disguised priest, Lopez broke down and offered a full confession that 
would have seemed flatly incredible if subsequent developments hadn’t supported its truth. 

In the two years between his release from prison and his capture, Lopez claimed to have murdered at 
least a hundred girls in Ecuador, the same number in Colombia, and “many more” in Peru. He would 
scout village markets for the most innocent-looking children he could find, then — having decided on a 
victim — lure her away with small trinkets. Once he had her in his power, he would strangle the girl 
while raping her, prolonging his pleasure as long as he could while he watched the life drain from her 
eyes. “It took the girls five to fifteen minutes to die,” he told interrogators. “I would spend a long time 
with them, making sure they were dead. I would use a mirror to check whether they were still breathing. 
Sometimes, I had to kill them all over again.” 

Initially skeptical over his staggering claims, police became convinced when Lopez led them to a 
secluded area where they dug up the remains of fifty-three female victims, ages eight to twelve. Charged 
with 110 counts of murder, Lopez was convicted in 1980 and sentenced to the maximum under 
Ecuadorian law: life imprisonment. 

I am the man of the century. No one will ever forget me. 

— Pedro Lopez 

Archibald McCafferty 

As a slayer of three, Archie “Mad Dog” McCafferty may not have been one of Australia’s worst serial 
murderers in purely quantitative terms. But he was certainly one of the most viciously deranged. 

McCafferty was actually a citizen of Scotland who emigrated to Australia with his parents at the age of 
ten. Like the madman he would most often be compared to — Charles Manson — he spent his adolescence 
in and out of various institutions. By the age of twenty-four, he had racked up nearly three dozen 
convictions for everything from housebreaking and burglary to car theft and assault. One of the few 
crimes he hadn’t been arrested for was murder. Not that he wasn’t prone to violence. Until his 
midtwenties, however, his sadism was vented largely on small animals — puppies, cats, chickens — which 




he liked to strangle for fun. 



In 1972, he married a young woman named Janice, who soon became pregnant. To give the devil his 
due, McCafferty seemed to recognize how frighteningly unstable he was and checked himself into 
psychiatric hospitals on several occasions, usually after he got drunk or stoned on angel dust and 
subjected his young wife to a savage beating. What finally pushed him over the edge into raging 
homicidal mania was the accidental death of his infant son, Craig. In March 1973, the baby smothered 
when Janice brought him into her bed and rolled over on him in her sleep. 

A short time later, McCafferty — whose body was covered with hundreds of tattoos — added a new one, 
the number 7, inscribed on the web between thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Its significance 
would soon be made terrifyingly clear. In his spiraling madness, McCafferty had decided to murder 
seven people to “avenge” his son’s death. 

Six months later, McCafferty put his insane scheme into motion. Janice had fled back to her family, and 
Archie was now living with a suicidal young woman named Carol JJowes. Residing with them was an 
emotionally unbalanced teenager, Julie Todd, whom they had befriended at a psychiatric clinic. This 
unholy threesome became the core of a gang that also included three other teenagers, a trio of seventeen- 
year-old boys McCafferty had met at his favorite tattoo parlor. 

The first to die was an inebriated fifty-year-old news seller named George Anson. JJe was jumped by the 
gang, dragged to a side street, then stabbed seven times by McCafferty. By that point, McCafferty was 
deeply delusional. JJe had become convinced that the seven homicides he was planning to commit 
would bring his dead son back to life. 

Victim number two was a forty-two-year-old miner named Ronald Cox, abducted at gunpoint after 
stopping to give a lift to two of McCafferty’ s teen accomplices. Driven to the cemetery where 
McCafferty’ s son was buried, Cox was made to lie facedown in the mud and shot in the back of the 
head. The following morning, the gang killed another well-meaning stranger, Evangelos Kollias, who 
had stopped to give two of the teenagers a lift. 

After shooting Kollias in the head and dumping his body, McCafferty drove toward Blacktown, where 
his wife, Janice, had taken refuge at the home of her mother. JJe planned to kill both women, along with 
the mother’s live-in boyfriend. Fortunately for the intended victims, McCafferty’ s car ran out of gas 
along the way. He decided to defer their executions. Shortly afterward, one of his gang members, a boy 
named Rick Webster, having become convinced that he had been targeted for death by McCafferty, 
turned him in to the police. 

At the 1974 trial of the “Australian Charles Manson” (as the press dubbed him), psychiatrists offered 
conflicting testimony as to McCafferty’ s mental state. All agreed, however, that the twenty-five-year-old 
was a remorseless killer who posed a permanent threat to the community. McCafferty concurred with 
this opinion, stating that “if given the chance, I will kill again, for the simple reason that I have to kill 




seven people, and I have only killed three, which means I have four to go.” 



Hit with three life sentences, McCafferty spent the next twenty-three years in some of Australia’s 
toughest prisons, where he gained a reputation as a particularly dangerous and incorrigible inmate. 
Despite his life sentences — supplemented with additional time for various offenses he committed while 
in jail (including manslaughter and drug-peddling) — he was paroled in 1993. Much to the delight of 
Australians — and the dismay of the Scots — he was deported to his homeland, where he declared that he 
was a “changed person.” He remarried and fathered a child. 

Sixteen months later, he was put on two years’ probation after threatening to kill some cops. 

You and the rest of your family can go and get fucked because anyone who has anything to do with me 
is going to die of a bad death. 

— Archie McCafferty in a note to his wife 

The “Monster of Florence” 

One of the most gruesome — and perplexing — of modern murder mysteries, the series of crimes 
perpetrated by the so-called Monster of Florence has earned renewed notoriety in recent years as the 
case that inspired Thomas Harris to set his novel Hannibal in Dante’s native city. 

The case began in August 1968, when an adulterous couple was shot to death while parked in a 
cemetery, where they’d gone for some quick, furtive sex. The double murder appeared to be solved 
when the woman’s cuckolded husband was arrested and convicted. But he was ultimately proved to be 
innocent, since he was still languishing in prison six years later when the killer struck again. 

In September 1974, another couple — this time a pair of teenage lovers — was shot repeatedly while 
making out in their car. The girl was then dragged outside and stabbed nearly a hundred times in a 
frenzy of bloodlust. Afterward, the killer arranged her nude body in a spread-eagle position and thrust a 
vine branch up her mutilated vagina. 

The pattern was established: double murders committed on moonless nights by a sexually sadistic 
“lovers’ lane” maniac. 

Seven years later, in June 1981, an off-duty policeman on a walk in the Florentine countryside happened 
upon the phantom-killer’s next pair of victims. A thirty-year-old man was slumped behind the wheel of 
his car. He had been shot repeatedly and his throat had also been slashed. Sprawled at the bottom of a 
steep bank a few yards away was the savaged body of the man’s twenty-one-year-old lover, whose 
vagina had been removed with a razor- sharp implement. 



More horrors followed. In October 1981, another young couple who had parked for a romantic interlude 




at a scenic overlook just north of Florence was slaughtered by the maniac, who — once again — 
absconded with the woman’s excised vulva. The following June, a couple was slain while making love 
in their car, though this time — apparently spooked by passing traffic — the killer fled without committing 
his usual mutilations. 

In September 1983, two teenage boys were executed while sleeping in their parked camper nineteen 
miles south of Florence. This was a departure for the killer, who had so far focused on heterosexual 
couples, and police theorized that he might have mistaken one of the youths — who sported shoulder- 
length blond hair — for a girl. 

In any case, he returned to his usual MO ten months later, when he slaughtered two young lovers who 
had parked just north of Florence. This time, he not only cut out the girl’s genitals but removed her left 
breast. He repeated this atrocity the following September when he slaughtered a French couple in a 
campsite just outside Florence. Several days after their bodies were found, an assistant in the public 
prosecutor’s office received a chunk of the woman’s amputated breast in the mail. 

During the next eight years, a hundred thousand people were questioned. More than two decades after 
the first killings, the case finally appeared to be solved when a suspect was arrested in January 1993. He 
was seventy-one-year-old Pietro Pacciani, a semiliterate farmhand and amateur taxidermist who had 
served time in the 1950s for a particularly grisly murder. After catching his fiancee in the embrace of a 
traveling salesman, he had stabbed and stomped the man to death, then raped the corpse. Pacciani had 
also done a stint in prison in the late 1980s for beating his wife and sexually molesting his two 
daughters. His 1994 arrest was a nationwide media sensation. Despite a paucity of hard evidence — and 
his own protestations of innocence — he was convicted of seven double murders. Two years later, 
however, his conviction was overturned on appeal. By then, police had come to believe that Pacciani 
was the ringleader of a small gang of killers, who had committed the murders for ritualistic purposes. In 
the end, three of his alleged confederates were put on trial. One was acquitted, two convicted of 
participating in five of the double slayings. Pacciani himself died, presumably of natural causes, before 
he could be retried, making it unlikely that the “Monster of Florence” mystery would ever be 
definitively resolved. 

Arnfinn Nesset 

A balding, bespectacled nursing home administrator, Nesset looked about as dangerous as Mr. Rogers. 
And yet he has entered the criminal-history books as Norway’s most prolific serial killer, convicted of 
twenty-two murders and suspected of as many as 138. 

When elderly, infirm patients at the Orkdal Valley Nursing Home began dying at rapid pace in the late 
1970s, no one paid much attention until journalists received a tip that the director, Arnfinn Nesset, had 
been stocking up on curacit, a derivative of the notoriously lethal muscle relaxant, curare. Brought in for 
questioning, Nesset first insisted that he had purchased the drug to kill a pack of wild dogs that had been 
prowling around the premises. Abruptly, however, he changed his story and began confessing to a 




homicidal compulsion that had been going on for almost twenty years. 



At first he admitted to twenty-seven killings. Before long, the number had grown to forty-six. Then sixty- 
two. But even that staggering sum was probably conservative. “I’ve killed so many, I’m unable to 
remember them all,” he said. He had been doing away with elderly patients since he became a nursing 
home worker in 1962. Some of his homicides, he claimed, were mercy killings. Mostly, however, he 
murdered for the sheer sadistic joy of it. 

Shortly before his trial was set to open, Nesset suddenly recanted and pleaded innocent. His lawyers 
tried to convince the jury that he was mentally unbalanced, a pathologically deluded individual who 
believed he was a “demigod” with the power of life and death over the elderly. The ploy didn’t work. In 
March 1983, Nesset was convicted of twenty-two counts of murder and given the maximum sentence 
under Norwegian law: twenty-one years behind bars. 

Anatoly Onoprienko 

A Ukrainian psychopath who wreaked such devastation that newspapers dubbed him the “Terminator,” 
Onoprienko was dumped in an orphanage as a child by his widowered father — an act that instilled the 
abandoned boy with a lifelong rage against normal, stable families. A late-blooming serial killer, he did 
not commit his first homicide until 1989. At the age of thirty, he and a confederate shot and killed an 
entire family — two adults and eight children — in the course of a robbery. Over the next seven years, he 
made up for lost time, conducting an ever-escalating rampage of slaughter that left more than fifty men, 
women, and children dead. 

Just a few months after his first killings, Onoprienko — approaching a parked car with the intention of 
stealing it — discovered a family sleeping inside and shot all five occupants, including a five-year-old 
boy. He then burned their bodies. 

Several years elapsed before he struck again. In December 1995, he broke into the home of a family 
named Zaichenko and murdered all four members — father, mother, and two young sons — with a sawed- 
off double-barrel shotgun. Nine days later, he slaughtered another family of four, torched their home, 
then killed a witness while fleeing the scene. 

His reign of terror had begun in earnest. 

Increasingly possessed by the need to murder random victims, Onoprienko killed seven more people in 
three separate incidents over a two-day span in early January 1996. Some victims were shot as they sat 
in parked or stalled cars, others were pedestrians, and one was a policeman on patrol. 

Between mid- January and his arrest in April, Onoprienko broke into six more homes, slaughtering 
families wholesale with axes, guns, and hammers. By then, the largest manhunt in Ukraine was under 
way for the phantom killer. The village of Bratkovichi — where several of his worst massacres had taken 




place — was under the protection of a National Guard Unit equipped with rocket launchers and armored 
vehicles. 

The end came in April 1996. Onoprienko was staying at the home of a cousin, who — after stumbling 
upon a hidden cache of weapons — kicked Anatoly out of his house and notified the police. Tracking 
Onoprienko to his girlfriend’s apartment, the police found a mountain of evidence tying him to the spate 
of unsolved murders. 

In custody, Onoprienko confessed to fifty-two homicides, offering various explanations for his 
atrocities. At different times, he insisted that he was under the control of God, Satan, and space aliens; 
he also claimed that he had killed out of sheer boredom. Despite evidence that he was a paranoid 
schizophrenic, he was judged competent to stand trial and was convicted and sentenced to death in April 
1999. 

I would be sitting, bored, with nothing to do ... So I would get in the car or catch a train and go out to 
kill. 

— Anatoly Onoprienko 
Jose Antonio Rodriguez Vega 

A pervert whose sexual pathology combined elements of necrophilia and gerontophila (erotic attraction 
to the elderly), Rodriguez Vega conducted a two-year reign of terror in the Spanish coastal town of 
Santander. Following his 1986 release from prison on a rape charge, he began talking his way into the 
homes of solitary old women under the pretext of performing minor household repairs. Once alone with 
his victims, he would strangle and rape them (in that order), then set about expunging every sign of his 
presence. 

He did such a thorough job of cleaning up after himself — neatly tucking the bodies into bed and 
removing all traces of incriminating evidence — that most of the deaths were chalked up to natural 
causes. Only after his arrest — when police found the cache of “trophies” he had removed from his 
victims’ homes — did the full extent of his crimes become known: sixteen murders in all, earning him a 
place in the criminal record books as the most prolific serial killer in recent Spanish history. 

During his 1991 trial, the sadistic Rodriguez Vega seemed to revel in the grief he had caused his 
victims’ families. He was sentenced to 440 years in prison, though — given the leniency of the Spanish 
penal system — there is every likelihood he will end up serving no more than twenty. 

Morris Sithole 

Between January and October 1995, more than three dozen young black women fell victim to a serial 
killer in the vicinities of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Because the crimes occurred in three suburbs — 




Atteridgeville, Boksburg, and Cleveland — they were dubbed the “ABC Murders.” All the victims had 
been raped, then strangled with their purse straps or articles of clothing. At least a dozen of the corpses 
were found in a field strewn with a bizarre assortment of objects: knives, mirrors, crosses, burned 
Bibles, even dead birds impaled with pins like voodoo dolls. Stymied in their efforts to find the killer, 
South African authorities brought in ex-FBI agent Robert Ressler — a founding member of the bureau’s 
pioneering team of “Mind Hunters” — who predicted that the case would eventually be solved and came 
up with the following profile: “a black male, twenty-five to thirty-five, an eye-catching dresser with a 
fancy car who charms his victims into entering his car willingly.” 

In early October, a Capetown newspaper received an anonymous telephone call from the killer, in which 
he described the murders as an act of revenge. He claimed to have been imprisoned in the past on a false 
accusation of rape. Having been subjected to unrelieved “torture” for the fourteen years behind bars, he 
had decided to inflict suffering on all womanhood. “I force a woman to go where I want,” he said, “and 
when I go there I tell them, ‘Do you know what? I was hurt, so I’m doing it now.’ Then I kill them.” 

As a result of the call, police soon identified a suspect: a surprisingly soft-spoken ex-convict named 
Morris Sithole. In October 1995, after a nationwide manhunt, the thirty-one-year-old Sithole was tracked 
to a Johannesburg slum. Wielding a hatchet, he wounded one of the arresting officers before he himself 
was shot and taken into custody. In a series of taped jailhouse confessions, he smoked and munched on 
an apple while casually describing the terrified last moments of his victims. He freely admitted that he 
hated women and felt that he was teaching them “a very good lesson” by murdering them. Tried in 1997, 
he was convicted of thirty-eight murders, making him South Africa’s most prolific serial killer. 
Prohibited from imposing the death penalty, the judge gave him the maximum sentence: 2,410 years. 

Lucian Staniak 

Communist Poland’s answer to Jack the Ripper, Lucian Staniak committed a string of sadistic sex- 
murders over the span of three years, most timed to coincide with public celebrations. 

The first hint of the horrors to come was a letter sent to a Warsaw newspaper on the eve of a national 
holiday. “There is no happiness without tears, no life without death,” read the note, which was written 
with red ink in a spidery scrawl. “Beware! I am going to make you cry.” The next day, the naked, 
disemboweled corpse of a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl was found in a park in the city of Olsztyn. The 
morning after this appalling discovery, another blood-colored note was sent to a newspaper editor: “I 
picked a juicy flower in Olsztyn and I shall do it again somewhere else, for there is no holiday without a 
funeral.” 

Six months would pass before the killer made good on his threat. In January 1965, he waylaid a sixteen- 
year-old girl on her way home from a student parade, raped her, garroted her with a wire, then hid her 
corpse in a factory basement. 



His next atrocity took place on November 1 — All Saints’ Day — when he attacked a young woman at a 




freight terminal, immobilizing her with chloroform before raping her and savaging her lower body with 
a screwdriver. Her mutilated corpse was found the next day inside a wooden packing crate, a six-inch 
metal spike protruding from her vagina. The following day, he sent the newspapers another letter written 
in red: “Only tears of sorrow can wash out the stain of shame; only pangs of suffering can blot out the 
fires of lust.” 

Exactly six months later, on May 1 — Labor Day in Poland — a seventeen-year-old girl was raped and 
disemboweled in a suburb of Warsaw. In a hideous gesture reminiscent of Jack the Ripper’s atrocities, 
the killer left the victim’s entrails draped across her thighs. 

By that point, a major manhunt was under way for the madman whose sinister, crimson-hued notes had 
earned him the nickname the “Red Spider.” Various clues led the police to deduce that the killer resided 
in the city of Katowice. 

Their big break came on Christmas Eve, 1966, when the hideously mangled body of seventeen-year-old 
Janina Kozielska was found aboard a train. Before fleeing, the killer had slipped one of his trademark 
notes through the slot of the mail car: “I have done it again.” 

Police quickly established that, two years earlier, Janina’ s fourteen-year-old sister had met the same 
awful fate — a fact that suggested that the girls were acquainted with the killer. Before long, detectives 
had also discovered that both sisters were models at the Art Lover’s Club in Cracow — an intriguing lead, 
since police analysts had already determined that the red ink used by the killer was actually thinned- 
down artist’s paint. 

Checking the roster of the club, investigators zeroed in on twenty-six-year-old Lucian Staniak, the only 
member who lived in Katowice. Their suspicions were strengthened when they broke into his locker and 
discovered a red-painted picture of a disemboweled woman with flowers sprouting from her gaping 
belly. 

On January 31, 1967, detectives tracked down and arrested Staniak, though not before he killed his final 
victim, an eighteen-year-old art student raped and butchered at a train station. Though he confessed to 
twenty murders, he was ultimately convicted of six and committed to a lunatic asylum for life. 

Li Wenxian 

Information about serial murder in hard-line Communist societies is difficult to come by, since — 
according to official party propaganda — such heinous crime is strictly a product of decadent Western 
capitalism and could not possibly exist in a people’s republic. And indeed, the world might never have 
heard about the monster known as the “Guangzhou Ripper” if the hideously violated corpse of a young 
woman had not floated ashore in the then-British colony of Hong Kong in March 1992. The victim’s 
body had been slit from throat to groin and her fingers sliced off. When authorities determined that the 
body had drifted in from the mainland, the outside world learned the truth that the Red Chinese 




government had been at pains to conceal: a vicious lust-murderer was at large in their worker’s paradise. 



The savaged corpse that washed up in Hong Kong that March was actually the Ripper’s seventh known 
victim. The first — a young woman missing her genitals — had turned up in the province of Guangzhou in 
February 1991. Over the next six months, five more young women met identically gruesome deaths — 
raped, murdered, mutilated, then dismembered, stuffed into burlap rice bags, and dumped on rubbish 
heaps. 

Partly because of their reluctance to admit that a serial killer could possibly be at large in their country 
(the same willful blindness that hampered the hunt for the Russian “Mad Beast,” Andrei Chikatilo), the 
Chinese police were slow to resolve the case. Six more women came to grisly ends over the next four 
years. The break finally came in November 1996, when a woman survived the Ripper’s savage assault 
and identified her attacker as a construction worker named Li Wenxian, a onetime farmer who had 
migrated to Guangzhou in 1991, just prior to the start of the Ripper slayings. In custody, Wenxian 
confessed to all thirteen murders, exposing another discomfiting fact that clashed with the utopian 
mythology of the Communist state — that prostitution, as well as serial homicide, existed in China. A 
classic “harlot slayer,” Wenxian had vowed revenge against all prostitutes after one of them — so he 
claimed — had cheated him of money shortly after his arrival in Guangzhou. Convicted of murder and 
rape, he was sentenced to death in December 1996. 

Who Is Killing the Women of Juarez? 

Since August 1993, a killing spree of unprecedented proportions has drawn worldwide media attention 
to the Mexican city of Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Though exact figures are hard 
to determine, sources most familiar with the case estimate that well over three hundred young women 
have been savagely murdered in the past decade. 

The victims tend to be slender, dark-haired young women between the ages of fourteen and sixteen who 
have disappeared on their way to or from work at the foreign-owned sweatshop factories known 
as maquiladoras. Their bodies, often horribly mutilated, have turned up in the desert or alongside the 
roads leading to the squatter camps ringing the city. Though many have apparently died at the hands of 
pimps, drug dealers, jealous husbands, and brutal boyfriends, at least one-third of the victims — as many 
as ninety in the past decade — are believed to have been raped, maimed, and slaughtered by one or more 
serial killers. 

The first “official” victim in the case was a young woman named Alva Chavira Farel, found beaten, 
raped, and strangled in January 1993. By mid-September 1995, more than forty brutalized corpses had 
turned up, some with their right breasts severed and their left nipples bitten off — the grisly “signature” 
of the homicidal madman the press had dubbed the “Juarez Ripper” or el Depredator Psicopata. 

A supposed solution to the case occurred in October 1995, with the arrest of an Egyptian-born chemist, 
Abdel Latif Sharif, a man with a long history of brutal assaults on women in the United States. After 




serving time on a rape charge in Florida, he relocated to Mexico, where he was taken into custody on 
suspicion of murder in October 1995 and allegedly confessed to five of the Juarez killings. At his trial in 
March 1999, he received a thirty-year sentence. 

Following Sharif s arrest, Mexican police triumphantly proclaimed that the case was closed. 
Unfortunately, the corpses soon began piling up again — this time, at an even faster rate. 

More suspects were arrested, including ten members of a gang calledLos Rebeldes (“The Rebels”), 
accused of receiving a large sum of cash from Sharif to commit atrocities that would make it appear as if 
the “Juarez Ripper” were still at large, thereby exonerating Sharif. Despite the imprisonment of these 
latest perpetrators, however, there was no letup in the atrocities. 

In the ensuing years, the grim pattern has continued: suspects are arrested, the police trumpet the 
solution of the case, then more butchered corpses turn up. Theories about the identity of the killer or 
killers abound. Candidates have ranged from a gang of homicidal bus drivers known as Los Choferes 
(“The Chauffeurs”) to the so-called Railway Killer, Angel Maturino Resendez, to Satanists, drug cartels, 
and members of the Juarez police force. 

One persistent rumor, reported in the May 2, 2003, edition of theNew York Daily News, is that “roving 
gangs kidnapped the women to harvest their organs and sell them on the black market to wealthy people 
needing transplants — possibly in the United States.” Most experts, however, scoff at this notion. A much 
likelier solution, as FBI Special Agent Art Werge has said, is that the culprits are not international organ 
traffickers or devil-worshiping cultists but garden-variety psychopaths, “acting out sexual fantasies that 
are violent that they simply get a kick out of.” 




A HISTORY OF SERIAL MURDER 



SERIAL MURDER: OLD AS SIN 

There’s a common belief that serial murder is a modern phenomenon which started, according to certain 
self-proclaimed experts, with the crimes of Jack the Ripper. Not to put too fine a point upon it, this is 
utter nonsense. The harsh fact is that we belong to a violent species; the kinds of outrages committed by 
serial killers have been an aspect of human society at all times in all places. As the Bible says, “There is 
no new thing under the sun” — and that applies to sadistic murder as much as to anything else. 

Indeed, recent scientific evidence suggests that a taste for savage cruelty is encoded in our DNA, an 
evolutionary inheritance from our earliest primate ancestors. In his book Demonic Males, Harvard 
anthropologist Richard Wrangham demonstrates that chimpanzees (who are “genetically closer to us 
than they are even to gorillas”) routinely commit acts of torture and mayhem as appalling as anything 
recorded in Psychopathia Sexualis. Not only do they prey upon vulnerable members of their own species, 
but their assaults “are marked by a gratuitous cruelty — tearing off pieces of skin, for example, twisting 
limbs until they break, or drinking a victim’s blood — reminiscent of acts that among humans are 
regarded as unspeakable crimes during peace time and atrocities during war.” 

That human beings have always indulged in extraordinarily barbaric behavior is made clear in 
everything from ancient Greek myths (like the story of Atreus, who butchered his brother’s sons and 
baked them in a cannibal pie) to the recorded deeds of medieval knights, who — far from being the 
chivalrous paragons of popular stereotype — were brutish warriors who felt free to pillage, rape, and 
(when they got drunk enough on mead) indulge in mass slaughter, sometimes of helpless women. 
Anyone who claims that there was no such thing as mutilation sex crime in centuries past clearly hasn’t 
read Shakespeare ’ sTitus Andronicus, in which a young woman is gang-raped, then has her tongue cut 
out and hands chopped off to prevent her from identifying her assailants. 

Given all the shocking evidence that lust-murder has always been a component of human behavior, how 
is it that people have come to believe that serial killers are unique to modern times? 

There are several answers. First, a man who committed repeated acts of appalling mutilation-murder on 
innocent victims wasn’t necessarily regarded as a criminal in past ages. Throughout the millennia when 
bloody warfare was a routine feature of people’s lives, a psychopathic killer who enjoyed inflicting 
savage harm on others could join the army, butcher men, women, and children to his heart’s content — 
and earn a promotion for it. Francisco Goya’s famous series of engravings , Disasters of War — with its 
horrific images of rape, castration, and dismemberment — makes it appallingly clear that combat has 
always afforded an opportunity for uniformed sadists to gratify their bloodlust. This has been true even 
in recent times. One American soldier, for example, described a sight he witnessed in Vietnam. After 
shooting a peasant woman to death, one member of his squad “went over there, ripped her clothes off, 
and took a knife and cut from her vagina all the way up, just about to her breast and pulled her organs 




out, completely out of her cavity, and threw them out. Then he stooped and knelt over and commenced 
to peel every bit of skin off her body and left her there as a sign for something or other.” 

Indeed, depending on who his victims were, a homicidal maniac wouldn’t necessarily have to bother 
becoming a soldier. Anyone could get away with serial murder, as long as he was preying on people 
who “didn’t matter.” If a peasant girl in twelfth-century Europe was attacked, raped, and murdered while 
walking through the forest, no one in authority would notice or care. Even today, certain serial killers 
deliberately target despised or disenfranchised members of the population — prostitutes, say, or poor 
ghetto children — knowing that authorities are far less likely to take such crimes seriously. 

In our own country, just a little over a century ago, a psycho-killer could travel west and butcher all the 
Native Americans he wanted to with impunity. Anyone who doubts this sorry truth is referred to Cormac 
McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a fact-based novel about a troop of white scalp-hunters who commit 
atrocities that would make Jack the Ripper blanch but who are rewarded for their actions because their 
victims are Indians. Larry McMurtry’ sLonesome Dove trilogy also contains vivid portraits of frontier 
psychopaths, like Mox Mox the “Manburner” and pretty-boy sniper, Joey Garza — fictional creations 
who reflect the violent realities of the lawless West. Back in those days, such remorseless killers were 
called “bad men” or “desperadoes,” but if they existed today they would be defined as serial killers. 




One of the many atrocities portrayed in Goya’s Disasters of War (1863) 



Another reason why people assume that serial killers have only come into existence in modern times is 
that, back in the preindustrial days, there was no such thing as the press. There are no newspaper records 
of, say, fourteenth-century serial killers, not because human beings didn’t commit hideous sex crimes 




back then, but because there were no newspapers. It’s significant that Jack the Ripper’s crimes coincided 
with the rise of mass literacy and the appearance of the first cheap tabloid-type papers, like th ^Illustrated 
Police News of London. Jack the Ripper was not the first serial sex-killer, not by a long shot. But he was 
the first celebrity psycho made internationally famous by the media. 

Besides the clergy, the aristocracy were the only literate members of the population back in the Middle 
Ages, and they were only interested in reading about their own kind. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the 
homicidal monsters whose names have come down to us from the distant past tend to be aristocrats 
themselves: Gilles de Rais, for example, or Vlad the Impaler. But again, that doesn’t mean that there 
weren’t plenty of degenerate killers among the “lower orders” as well. It just means that bloodthirsty 
peasants who preyed on their own class rarely made it into the official chronicles, which tended to stick 
to the doings of the high and mighty. 

As David Lester points out in his book Serial Killers: The Insatiable Passion, “Record keeping was 
highly unreliable in times past and crime detection was very rudimentary (the authorities would have 
had great difficulty in identifying a serial killer’s work), and so the true incidence of serial murder in 
premodern times is unknown.” 

Recommended Reading 

David Lester, Serial Killers: The Insatiable Passion (1995) 

Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (1996) 

GRIM FAIRY TALES 

Because the literacy rate among the peasants of premodern Europe was basically zero, there are few 
written records of early serial killers. Evidence exists, however, that such monsters walked among them. 

That evidence is in the form of fairy tales. Nowadays we think of fairy tales as a charming variety of 
kiddie lit, but originally they were oral stories intended for adults. And though they are full of magic and 
enchantment, they are also, as many scholars have pointed out, historical documents, reflecting social 
realities of the time. The extremely gruesome content of many of these tales makes it clear that their 
audience was quite familiar with the kind of homicidal maniacs we now call serial killers. 

In “The Robber Bridegroom,” for example — one of the tales recorded by the Brothers Grimm — the 
heroine sneaks into her boyfriend’s home and watches in horror as he and some buddies bring home a 
young woman, get her drunk on wine, then kill her, chop her up in pieces, and devour her body. And in 
another Grimm story, “Fitcher’s Feathered Bird,” an overly curious young woman discovers that her 
new husband is a serial ax-murderer when she enters a forbidden room and finds “a great bloody basin” 
filled with “human beings, dead and hewn to pieces.” When her husband returns home and realizes that 
his wife has discovered the terrible truth about him, he wastes no time in getting rid of her: “He threw 




her down, dragged her along by her hair, cut her head off on the block, and hewed her in pieces so that 
the blood ran on the ground. Then he threw her into the basin with the rest.” 




An ogre cuts the throats of seven sleeping children in this Gustav Dore illustration of the fairy tale “Hop 
o’ My Thumb” 



Perhaps the most famous fairy tale reflecting early fears of serial killers is “Little Red Riding Hood.” 
Many scholars believe that ancient superstitions about werewolves stem, at least partly, from real-life 
cases of medieval mutilation-murderers who killed with such bestial ferocity that they were thought to 
be actual wolf-men, ovlycanthropes. The two most famous of these were Peter Stubbe and Gilles Gamier. 

Serial murder may, in fact, be a much older phenomenon than we realize. The stories and legends that 
have filtered down about werewolves and vampires may have been a way of explaining outrages so 
hideous that no-one [sic] in the small and close-knit towns of Europe and early America could 
comprehend the perversities we now take for granted. Monsters had to be supernatural creatures. 

— John Douglas , Mindhunter 

For us, the werewolf is a character in old horror movies, some tormented guy played by Lon Chaney, Jr., 
who gets hairy and vicious in the light of the full moon. But Europeans in the sixteenth century had 
different ideas. Werewolves constituted a vexing issue of criminal justice and public policy. When 
officials at the time discovered that some crazed criminal was on a murderous rampage, not only killing 
but tearing apart his victims, they didn’t regard him as someone driven by twisted psychological 
impulses. They characterized him as someone who had welcomed the power of Satan and had literally 



turned into a monster. 



In December 1573, the regional parliament in Franche-Comte in eastern France issued a proclamation 
outlining the most effective and proper ways to catch, convict, and punish werewolves. The authorities 
were responding to the recent shocking case in nearby Dole of Gilles Gamier, the most notorious of 
French lycanthropes. Sixteen years later, German concerns about werewolves in their midst came to a 
head in the trial of a man named Peter Stubbe. Together, these two cases give us some idea of the 
ferocity of these so-called demons, the serial killers of their day, as well as the brutality of the 
authorities’ response. 

The alleged werewolves came to their savage criminal careers from different directions. Gamier was 
known as a hermit — today he would be called a loner — who gave up his solitary life to take a wife and 
start a family. He soon found, though, that he was unable to live up to his role as a provider. Supposedly, 
he made his deal with the devil out of desperation. Not so with Stubbe. The way contemporary 
chroniclers tell it, he was born bad and practiced black magic and indulged in cruelty from an early age. 
Once the two men made their pacts with Satan, the distinctions between them blurred. Both became 
addicted to murder and cannibalism, both preferred to prey upon children. 




A lycanthrope makes off with a baby 



Supposedly turning into a wolf when he applied an enchanted ointment, Gamier murdered four children. 




Stubbe was said to accomplish his transformation thanks to a magical belt. He killed thirteen kids, along 
with one man and two women. In his monster incarnation, Stubbe reportedly had “eyes great and large, 
which in the night sparkled like brands of fire; a mouth great and wide, with most sharp and cruel teeth; 
a huge body and mighty paws.” It’s easy to understand why people in those days thought that Stubbe or 
other similar killers took such a nightmarish form. Their crimes seemed to be the work of infernal 
creatures. 

Gamier would strangle his young victims, then rip them apart and feast upon the flesh of their legs, 
arms, and belly. In one case, he tore off the leg of a boy. In another case, he tore off a chunk of a girl’s 
flesh and took it home to his wife so that she could cook it for dinner. 

The attacks by Stubbe along the Rhine River in Westphalia might have been even more ferocious. Like 
Gamier, he consumed parts of his victims and was particularly fond of eating “hearts panting hot and 
raw.” Once he was reputed to have eaten an entire victim without leaving a trace. Although he often 
roamed the countryside looking to waylay strangers, he would also target his own family. He raped both 
his sister and his daughter before turning them into his accomplices, and he murdered his son and 
devoured his brain. 




The crimes, trial, and torture of the “werewolf,” Peter Stubbe, from a 1590 pamphlet 



When the authorities finally tracked down these psychos, they made it clear that they planned to make 
graphic examples of them. After his trial, Gamier was turned over to Dole’s Master Executioner of High 
Justice, who burned the alleged werewolf alive. Officers of the law in the German town of Bedburg went 
several steps further when dealing with Stubbe. First they put him on the rack and tortured a confession 





out of him. Then, after the formality of a trial, they strapped him to a wheel, tore away chunks of his 
flesh with red-hot pincers, crushed his limbs with the head of an ax, decapitated him, and burned what 
was left of his body. The gruesome procedure was not only an act of revenge but also intended as a 
deterrent. To underscore the message for any other aspiring werewolves in the vicinity, the authorities 
tied the torture wheel to a pole and left Stubbe’s head impaled on the pole’s tip. 

While these cases show that horrendous serial murder is nothing new, they also demonstrate that media 
fascination with this sort of crime is also old news. Immediately following the executions of both 
werewolves, the professional printers, empowered by the new media innovation of movable type, 
cranked out pamphlets recounting all the grisly details of each case. Included in the Stubbe booklet was 
the sixteenth-century equivalent of a comic strip depicting his crimes and capture and, in the final four 
panels, showing the excruciating details of his punishment. 

Recommended Reading 

David Everitt , Human Monsters (1993) 

Catherine Orenstein, Zi#/e Red Riding Hood Uncloaked (2002) 

SERIAL SLAUGHTER THROUGH THE AGES 

According to Thomas Carlyle, “history is but the biography of great men.” Of course, he wasn’t thinking 
aboutcriminal history when he made that remark. Far from being the biography of great men, the history 
of serial murder is largely the chronicle of psychopathic creeps — misfits, losers, and utter nonentities — 
whose only claim to fame is a capacity for spectacularly sick acts of violence. 

Of course, there have been some exceptions — individuals who would have made it into the history 
books even if they hadn’t been among the most depraved killers who ever lived. This was particularly 
true in the distant past, when a number of notorious psycho-killers were members of the high 
aristocracy, and sometimes of the royalty itself. 

Ancient Rome 

In an age when watching an arena full of helpless human beings get torn to pieces by wild animals was 
regarded as an enjoyable pastime, it required something very special to stand out as a particularly 
degenerate individual. The behavior of certain ancient emperors, however, was so grotesquely depraved 
that it was shocking even by the sadistic standards of pagan Rome. Though Tiberius, Justinian, and 
Caligula all engaged in unspeakable perversions, the worst of them all was arguably Nero. 

Like most psychopaths, Nero began to act on his sadistic propensities at an early age. As an adolescent 
(according to the Roman historian, Suetonius) he liked to disguise himself in a cap and prowl the streets 
at night “in search of mischief. One of his favorite games was to attack men on their way home from 




dinner, stab them if they offered resistance, and then drop their bodies down the sewer.” 

His “games” became increasingly baroque. Later in life, he liked to pretend he was one of the ravenous 
beasts of the Coliseum. Dressing himself in the skin of a wild animal, he would leap from a den and 
“attack the private parts of men and women who stood bound to stakes,” biting and ripping off their 
genitals in a state of savage ecstasy. 

Among his countless other atrocities, he once castrated a boy named Sporus, dressed him up as a bride, 
and married him in a mock ceremony; turned a bunch of captive Christians into human torches and used 
them to light up a garden party; and tore out the womb of his own mother Agrippina, so that he could 
see where he had come from. 

Agrippina herself once employed the services of a female poisoner named Locusta who — according to 
crime maven Michael Newton — “takes the honors as the first publicly identified practitioner of serial 
murder.” Eager to rid herself of her husband, the emperor Claudius, Agrippina hired Locusta for the job, 
which the latter carried out successfully with a tempting dish of poisoned mushrooms. Later, she was 
also called upon to eliminate Claudius’s son, Britannicus. Eventually, she paid for her crimes (which 
reportedly included the murder of at least five other victims) in a manner that was typical of the 
extravagant depravities of Nero’s Rome. As Newton describes it, “she was publicly raped by a specially 
trained giraffe, after which she was torn apart by wild animals.” 

The Premodern Age 

Even in our own age of twenty-four/seven news coverage, most serial murder cases are barely reported 
by the media (it’s a safe bet that, unless you’re a hard-core crime junkie, you’ve never heard of Todd 
Reed, a devoted father and part-time poet arrested for the murder of three Portland prostitutes in May 
2000; or Tommy Lynn Sells, a drifter who, following his arrest by Texas authorities in January of that 
same year, confessed to ten killings in six states). So it’s impossible to say how many serial sex-murders 
were committed five hundred years ago, when newspapers didn’t exist and crimes among the peasantry 
went largely unrecorded (unless they were spectacularly gruesome, like those of Peter Stubbe and Gilles 
Gamier). 

The most infamous figures of premodern Europe were highborn sadists like Gilles de Rais, the original 
Bluebeard, who was executed in 1440 for the torture-murder of 140 children (though estimates of his 
victims range as high as 300). Perhaps even more appalling — at least if all the legends are to be believed 
— was the Hungarian “Blood Countess,” Erzebet (or Elizabeth) Bathory. Born in 1560 into one of 
Hungary’s most ancient families, the beautiful Erzebet grew up in the same spooky area inhabited by the 
fictional Count Dracula, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. While still in her teens, she was 
reputedly initiated into the pleasures of torture, devil-worship, and sexual perversion by assorted family 
members. Her monstrous nature came into full blossom after she married an aristocratic warrior, Count 
Nazady, and moved into his castle, which was equipped with a well-stocked torture dungeon. 




Between her marriage in 1575 and her arrest more than thirty years later, Bathory was responsible for a 
staggering number of murders — perhaps as many as 650. Most of her victims were peasant girls. Lured 
to the grim castle by the promise of employment — or sometimes abducted outright — the young women 
were subjected to unspeakable torments for the delectation of the degenerate countess, who was driven 
into a sexual frenzy by their agonies. She was especially fond of ripping out chunks of their flesh with a 
custom-made pincers, though she also made frequent use of whips, scissors, needles, red-hot branding 
irons, spike-lined cages, and her own teeth. According to legend, she was also in the habit of butchering 
her virginal captives, filling a tub with their blood, and bathing in the gore as a way of preserving her 
youth. 

Eventually, having exhausted the supply of nubile peasant girls from the surrounding countryside, 
Bathory began to prey on the daughters of minor nobility, a practice that finally aroused the authorities 
and led to her arrest in 1610. During her trial, she was accused, among countless other atrocities, of 
cutting off parts of her victims’ bodies and making them eat their own flesh. Condemned to a living 
entombment in a bricked-up chamber in her castle, she died of apparent starvation in 1614. 

For several centuries, the name of another notorious woman of the distant past, Lucretia Borgia, was 
synonymous with female serial murder. A member of the most powerful family of the Italian 
Renaissance, Lucretia was infamous for her sexual excesses (which supposedly included incest with her 
father, the pope) as well as her habit of getting rid of enemies with a poisoned powder she dispensed 
from a sinister ring. Indeed, throughout the Victorian era, every time a new female poisoner like Lydia 
Sherman appeared, she was immediately branded a latter-day “Borgia.” There seems to be a growing 
consensus among historians, however, that tales about Lucretia’ s crimes were merely rumors spread by 
her political enemies and that she was, in fact, a model of virtue who never engaged in sexual 
misconduct or killed anyone at all. 

CASE STUDY 

Vlad the Impaler 

Yes, there once was a real-life Dracula. But no, he did not bite the necks of young, voluptuous women 
and drain them of their blood. Still, he was more than horrendous enough to qualify as a monster — if, 
that is, fifteenth-century accounts can be believed. 

His name was Vlad III, and he was prince of the Romanian principality of Wallachia, just south of the 
fictional Dracula’ s Transylvania home. His father was known as Dracul, Romanian for dragon. Vlad’s 
own moniker of Dracula meant son of Dracul. Not a true serial killer, Vlad was reputed to be a deranged 
autocrat who vanquished his enemies, both real and imagined, with unspeakable sadism. His Dracula 
moniker might be better known today, but in the fifteenth century he had another nickname — Vlad 
Tepes, meaning Vlad the Impaler, in honor of his favorite torturous pastime. It is this bloodthirsty 
reputation that impressed Bram Stoker enough to use Vlad as the basis for his now legendary creature of 
the night. 




Vlad the Impaler 



Some historians, though, claim that all this might be a bum rap. 

They assert that the accounts of Vlad’s atrocities were exaggerated and that he was, in fact, a great 
Romanian hero, a defender of his homeland against foreign aggression. They insist that Vlad’s actions 
must be placed in the proper historical context, a period when his country needed a strong, if somewhat 
stern, leader. 

Vlad took the Wallachian throne in 1456 when his country was hard-pressed by the Ottoman Turks 
surging up from the south. At the same time, Romanian principalities had to maintain a volatile alliance 
with the Hungarians to the north. According to author Kurt W. Treplow, Vlad Dracula “lived in a 
moment of great importance for the future of the Romanian people,” and his defiance in the face of 
Ottoman conquerors kept “alive the spirit of independence” among his countrymen. 

While Vlad’s defenders focused on his political and military accomplishments, his enemies preferred to 
dwell on exactly how he went about defying the Turks and other adversaries. How much these detractors 
have embellished Vlad’s dark side is difficult to say. What we do know is that the accounts of Dracula’ s 
savagery are hair-raising. 

When it came to his torture method of choice, Vlad the Impaler was supposed to have been unnervingly 
creative. Using his victims’ weight as they slid down a greased, pointed pole, he would sometimes 
impale them through the mouth, other times through the anus or the heart or navel. Depending on his 
whim of the moment, blinding, burning, or scalping might also be a part of the hideous process. Often 
this type of execution was reserved for enemies in war. In 1461, while retreating from relentless 
Ottoman troops, he was known to have left a veritable forest of impaled Turks in his wake. His attitude 
toward Saxons apparently wasn’t much better. On April 2, 1459, in the Transylvanian town of Brasov he 




ordered the impalement of thousands of Saxons, the stakes arranged around a table where he calmly ate 
his dinner amidst the carnage. 



Other targets of Vlad’s were the boyars, the Romanian aristocrats, who may have been involved in the 
assassination of Vlad’s father. Once, the story goes, he invited many of them to his castle for a lavish 
banquet, then burned them all alive in the dining hall. 

His sadism could also be directed at specific individuals for violating his deeply felt, if insanely strict, 
sense of morality. For the crime of adultery (when committed by women) he would skin the culprit alive 
and carve out her genitalia. Once he was supposed to have been shocked to see that a peasant woman 
had fashioned her husband’s shirt far too short. He had a red-hot poker thrust up her vagina and out 
through her mouth. In what he must have considered a magnanimous gesture, he then presented the 
widowered peasant with a new wife. Vlad also “roasted children of mothers and they had to eat their 
children themselves,” according to a 1462 pamphlet on Dracula’s life. 




Vlad enjoys his favorite form of torture 



The pamphlet was published by Germans, who were enemies of Vlad and probably had valid reasons for 
hating him. This hatred could very well have inspired the pamphlet’s author to magnify or even invent 
atrocities. True or not, this version of Vlad’s life, one of the first best sellers produced by the Gutenberg 
press, spawned his monstrous reputation that has endured through the centuries. 



More recent historians have discredited the original Dracula pamphlet as a hatchet job, but even if you 
accept the idea that Vlad was a notable leader according to the standards of his time, the chances are that 
he indulged in a certain amount of barbarism. After all, the rules of warfare and capital punishment were 
a lot less fussy in the fifteenth century. Perhaps he was truly vicious but no worse than other warrior- 
aristocrats of his day. 

The Seventeenth Century 

By the 1600s, cheaply printed pamphlets and single-sheet “broadsides” made news stories available to 
the English masses, who — like ordinary people everywhere — were primarily interested in freakish 
accidents, bizarre occurrences, and sensational crimes — the gorier the better. Many of these early 
publications have survived; their contents make it clear that there’s nothing new about serial murder. 

In a fascinating study published in the magazine/ZAtory Today, Professor Bernard Capp of the 
University of Warwick summarizes some of the notorious seventeenth-century murder cases that he 
managed to dig up during his researches. There was, for example, the 1675 case of “the bloody 
innkeeper” who ran a cheap lodging house in Gloucester, catering largely to commercial travelers. After 
a few years, the owner and his wife had made enough from their business to move into a larger house. 
The inn was purchased by a blacksmith, who set about converting the place into a smithy. As he was 
digging up the backyard to lay foundations for his shop, the new owner was horrified to discover the 
decomposing corpses of seven fully clothed men, one with a rusty knife still embedded in his chest. 
History does not record what happened to the homicidal innkeeper and his wife, though — from what we 
know about English justice in the 1600s — it seems safe to assume that they came to very unpleasant 
ends. 

So did another killer couple of the era, Thomas Sherwood (aka “Country Tom”) and his distaff 
accomplice Elizabeth Evans (aka “Canterbury Bess”). For several years, the two plied their murderous 
trade in London. Bess would pick up a tipsy fellow at a playhouse or tavern and lure him to a remote 
spot, where Tom would be waiting in ambush. The victim would be murdered and stripped of his 
belongings, including every scrap of his clothing. At least five men met their deaths at the hands of this 
infamous pair, who ended their lives on the Newgate gallows. 

Ordinary people who had lived apparently respectable lives for years were suddenly revealed to be 
homicidal maniacs. In 1671, a man named Thomas Lancaster secretly administered arsenic to his wife, 
her father, her three sisters, her aunt, a cousin, and a young female servant, killing them in succession. 
“For good measure,” Capp writes, “he poisoned some neighbors, too.” 

Then, as now, “angels of death” — male and female caregivers with a psychopathic urge to murder their 
charges — were not uncommon. At an almshouse in Coventry, eight inmates were poisoned with ratsbane 
in 1619 by a man named John Johnson, who committed suicide when he fell under suspicion for the 
crimes. There were also “Black Widow” killers like Elizabeth Ridgway, who poisoned both her husband 
and former suitor, as well as her mother and a former servant. 





A MO$T JL 

EXECRABLE 

iND EAR.BAit.OVS MVRDER 

htal*s t»7 an EjyKIi^dA! Ocfrij , til Rtlin of Jj&h- 

^.*1 B rlrt Soxtor I AhcurJ wglr^r S&LD 
ajy-rf Lift, fe J43. 

IVhcrtm is ftirrwcd Low phc si|iik.r J Villa in unj-c co tt 
liiJ S^ij 1 Ml bin i felf lair i[ wu <nrdLri< h ml ihtn he 
niieAnidiii d* w>ihr me j.BuM.joiepi *(■ 

’■ mi 4 m ■ J 7 ?* 

*n| lJlU T . hSw Ik nnlfi lirntdiv,* K-faM. 

M—r VtTt JfHyt-Trcrrict i ijui-tfmif H^£h^. 



An “East-Indian Devil” slaughters the crew of an English ship, as portrayed in a 1642 engraving 
(British Library) 

All of these and other cases uncovered by Professor Capp illustrate his point: human nature has 
remained more or less unchanged throughout the ages, and “multiple murders and serial killings were 
probably no rarer in seventeenth-century England than today.” 

Recommended Reading 

Bernard Capp, “Serial Killers in 17th-century England '"History Today (March 1996) 

The Eighteenth Century 

One of the most notorious serial killers of the 1700s may never have existed. This was Sweeney Todd, 
the so-called “Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” According to crime writer Martin Fido, Todd was a 
completely fictitious character invented by Victorian writers of cheap “blood-and-thunder” fiction. Peter 
Haining, on the other hand — another British author who frequently writes about horror and crime — not 
only claims that Sweeney was real but describes him as “the greatest mass murderer in English history.” 





According to Haining’s “definitive biography” of this legendary monster, Sweeney Todd was born in the 
London slums in October 1756, the child of poor silk weavers who abandoned him when he was twelve. 
Apprenticing himself to a cutler, young Sweeney became adept at handling and sharpening razors. Two 
years later, he was accused of petty theft and thrown into Newgate Prison, where he ended up becoming 
the assistant of a barber named Plummer. 

Upon his release in 1775, the nineteen-year-old Sweeney — a sullen, coarse-featured young man with a 
bitter grudge against the world — became an itinerant barber before leasing a shop on Fleet Street. There, 
over the next twenty-five years, he would perpetrate more than 160 grisly murders. 

The diabolical device he employed to dispatch his unwary customers was a cunningly designed 
“revolving chair.” When activated by a hidden bolt, the chair flipped backward, pitching the victim 
through a trapdoor into the cellar. Those who weren’t killed outright by the fall had their throats slit by 
the fiendish barber. Afterward, their bodies were butchered and made into meat pies by Margery Lovett, 
owner of a neighborhood bakeshop. 

Eventually, according to Plaining, both Todd and his female accomplice were arrested. Mrs. Lovett 
reportedly committed suicide in prison. Todd was tried, convicted, and hanged on January 25, 1802. 




Sweeney Todd dismembers a female victim 



There is no question about the authenticity of another eighteenth-century serial killer, though her real 
name has long been forgotten, along with the biographical details of her early life. In the annals of 
crime, she is known by her nickname, “La Tofania,” and — if the accounts of her crimes are even 
halfway accurate — she stands as one of the most prolific murderers in history. 




Tofania’s homicidal career actually began in the late 1600s, when — using a specially brewed, arsenic- 
based potion that came to be called “ aqua tofania ” after its creator — she murdered a close male relation 
(possibly her first husband, though the records are a bit fuzzy on this score) in Naples, Italy. Soon, this 
enterprising female psychopath — who was reportedly motivated as much by a sadistic hatred of men as 
by greed — had made poison her business, peddling her concoction to aristocratic women eager to rid 
themselves of odious mates or tiresome lovers. 

By 1719, the death rate among seemingly robust Neapolitan noblemen had reached such a point that the 
viceroy himself launched an investigation. The sixty-six-year-old Tofania — rumored to be the leader of 
a militant, man-hating sisterhood — was quickly identified as the prime suspect. Alerted by friends, she 
took refuge in a convent, until the viceroy — enraged by rumors that her followers had poisoned the city 
wells — sent a troop of soldiers into the sanctuary and had her arrested. Under torture, she confessed to 
six hundred murders. She was tried, convicted, and killed by strangulation in 1723. 

Recommended Reading 

Michael Newton, Bad Girls Do It! (1993) 

Peter Rommg,Sweeney Todd: The Real Story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1993) 

The Nineteenth Century 

Though Jack the Ripper is far and away the most famous psycho-killer of the Victorian Era, there were 
plenty of other nineteenth-century serial murderers. Some were a lot more deadly than “Saucy Jack.” 

Even before Victoria ascended to the throne, Britain was rocked by one of the most sensational crime 
cases of the century — that of William Burke and William Hare. British laws at the time placed severe 
restrictions on human dissections, making it exceptionally difficult for doctors and medical students to 
obtain specimens for anatomical study. As a result, aspiring surgeons and their teachers were often 
forced to turn to grave robbers — or “Resurrection Men,” as they were called — to supply them with raw 
material. 

The names of Burke and Hare became associated with this ghoulish breed of entrepreneurship: the 
loathsome body snatcher who would sneak into a graveyard at night, dig up a freshly buried corpse and 
sell it for a few pounds to an anatomy school. However, these two came to their macabre profession by 
another route. In 1827, Hare and his common-law wife were running a squalid boardinghouse in the 
Edinburgh slums when an elderly lodger died, owing them four pounds. To cover the debt, Hare hit 
upon the idea of selling the old man’s corpse to an anatomist. With the help of his friend Burke, he 
conveyed the cadaver to a medical school run by a celebrated surgeon, Dr. Robert Knox, who paid them 
£7. 10s — an enormous sum to two poor Irish immigrants who normally made a pittance as laborers. 



Impressed with the monetary potential of dead bodies, but disinclined to engage in the difficult, dirty, 




and dangerous business of grave-robbing, Burke and Hare opted for an easier method of obtaining 
marketable corpses: they would produce their own. Not long afterward, when another of Hare’s lodgers 
fell ill, the men eased him into a coma by feeding him whiskey, then suffocated him by pinching his 
nose and sealing his mouth. This time, they got £10 from Dr. Knox. Another ailing inmate of Hare’s 
hostelry soon met the same end. 

Having exhausted the supply of sick lodgers at Hare’s boardinghouse, the two began preying on 
neighborhood beggars, local prostitutes, and other street people. Luring them to Hare’s place with the 
promise of liquor and food, they would suddenly pounce upon the unwary victims and suffocate them. 
Fifteen people — twelve women, two handicapped boys, and an old man — were murdered this way 
before the two killers were caught. 

To save his own skin, Hare turned King’s evidence. In January 1829, Burke was hanged before a 
cheering crowd of twenty-five thousand spectators and his body publicly dissected. His name would 
enter the English language, the verb “to burke” meaning to murder someone for the purpose of 
dissection. 

Hare’s lodging house wasn’t the only hostelry-from-hell in the nineteenth century. In our own country, a 
family nicknamed the “Bloody Benders” ran a roadside inn in Kansas where, as one writer has put it, 
“horror rather than hospitality was the rule.” 

The Bender family consisted of the sixty-year-old patriarch, John (generally referred to simply as “Old 
Man Bender” in historical accounts), his wife, known only as “Ma” — just forty-two years old but with 
the cold-eyed, wizened looks of a hag — a hulking dim-witted twenty-seven-year-old son, John, Jr., and a 
daughter named Kate, a young woman in her early twenties who, by default, was considered the brains 
of the operation. Though Kate has gone down in legend as a red-haired temptress, she appears to have 
been a ruddy-faced, mannish-looking female who held seances under the name “Professor Miss Katie 
Bender” and claimed to be a faith healer. 

Sometime around 1870, the Bender family arrived in Labette County, Kansas, and built a home along a 
lonely stretch of road a few miles south of the railway town of Cherryvale. The dwelling was little more 
than a one-room log box, sixteen by twenty feet in size. The interior was divided in half by a canvas 
curtain. One side served as the family’s living quarters. The other was turned into a rudimentary inn, 
where a traveler could get a hot meal or drink or a bed for the night. Some visitors, however, got much 
more than they bargained for. 





The Bender shanty 

(Kansas State Historical Society) 



The Benders, it turned out, were really running a frontier murder-and-robbery operation. When a 
prosperous-looking traveler showed up, he would be ushered into the dining area and seated at the table 
with his back to the canvas divider. While Kate beguiled him with some dinnertime conversation, her 
father or brother would be lurking on the other side of the curtain with a sledgehammer at the ready. 
When the unsuspecting guest leaned his head back against the curtain, the hammer would come crashing 
down, shattering the back of his skull. The body would then be dragged into the bedroom, where it 
would be robbed, stripped, and dumped through a trapdoor into the cellar. There, his throat would be slit 
for good measure. Later, the body would be taken out and buried in the pasture. 

The dreadful truth about the Benders came to light in the spring of 1873 when a physician named 
William York left Fort Scott on horseback for his home in Independence and never showed up. 

Retracing his route, a posse led by York’s brother eventually happened on the Bender place. The 
Benders denied all knowledge of the missing Dr. York. A few days later, however — fearing that they 
were under suspicion — they pulled up stakes and fled. When word got around that the Benders had 
absconded, the posse returned to the farm and made a horrific discovery. In the pasture were seven 
shallow graves containing the corpses of eight human beings. Seven were grown men (including Dr. 
York). One was an eighteen-month-old girl, who had been traveling with her father. The Benders hadn’t 
bothered to brain her. They had simply tossed her into the pit with her father’s mangled corpse and 
buried her alive. 

Angry posses scoured the prairies for the fugitives. To this day, no one can say for certain what became 
of the Benders. In her memoirs, however, Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame writes 
that her father was one of the men who went out in search of the Benders. Though he never spoke about 
the experience, she deduced, from the grim expression on his face when he returned from the manhunt, 
that the posse had in fact caught up with the four Benders and dispensed well-deserved frontier justice. 




At the same time that the Bloody Benders were running their lethal roadhouse in Kansas, Boston was 
being terrorized by the depredations of a juvenile psychopath named Jesse Harding Pomeroy. The 
crimes of the Boston “Boy Fiend” (as the newspapers dubbed him) began in late 1871, when the sadistic 
twelve-year-old lured a string of children to various remote locations, where they were stripped, flogged, 
and tortured with knives and sewing needles. Arrested in late 1872, he was sent to a reformatory but 
managed to win a discharge after only eighteen months. Just six weeks after his release — while working 
in a shop run by his mother — he killed a ten-year-old girl and hid her body in the cellar. Five weeks 
later, he lured a four-year-old boy to a lonely stretch of marshland and savaged his body with a penknife, 
slashing his throat, stabbing his eyes, and nearly severing his genitals. Arrested in April 1873, the 
fourteen-year-old Pomeroy was convicted and sentenced to death — a judgment that ignited a bitter two- 
year controversy over the morality of hanging a minor. The sentence was ultimately commuted to life in 
solitary confinement, a punishment that many people felt was even harsher than death. 

Even while the argument over Pomeroy’s death sentence was raging, Boston was stunned by another 
serial murder case. On May 23, 1875, a pretty five-year-old girl named Mabel Young, who had just 
attended Sunday school at the Warren Avenue Baptist Church, was lured into the belfry by the twenty- 
four-year-old sexton, Thomas Piper. He promised to show her his pet pigeons. Once he had her alone in 
the tower, Piper broke her head open with a cricket bat brought to church that morning for precisely that 
purpose. When the little girl’s body was discovered, suspicion immediately alighted on Piper. He was 
already a suspect in another brutal murder, that of a young female servant named Bridget Landregan, 
whose skull had been crushed with a makeshift club during an attempted rape two years earlier. First 
proclaiming his innocence, Piper finally confessed not only to the killings of Mabel Young and Bridget 
Landregan but to two other unsolved homicides: the December 1873 rape-murder of a young woman 
named Sullivan, who had been savagely bludgeoned with a club, and a nearly identical assault seven 
months later on a young prostitute named Mary Tynam. The “Belfry Murderer” — as Piper came to be 
called — went to the gallows on May 26, 1876. 

callout 32 

Jesse Pomeroy kills 10-year-old Katie Curran in this illustration from an 1875 crime pamphlet 

(Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Loundations) 

Twenty years later and on the opposite side of the continent, another belfry murder would send shock 
waves through America. On the morning of April 13, 1895, several San Lrancisco women arrived at the 
Emmanuel Baptist Church on Bartlett Street to decorate it for Easter. Spotting a strange, reddish brown 
trail leading to a closed-off storage closet, they opened the door and recoiled in horror at the sight of a 
horribly violated corpse. The victim was twenty-one-year-old Minnie Williams. Her clothes had been 
ripped off and her underwear shoved down her throat with a stick. She had been slashed to death with a 
silver table knife — her wrists severed, her breasts cut to ribbons. The broken-off blade of the murder 
weapon still protruded from her chest. A subsequent autopsy revealed that she had been raped after 
death. 




The following day — Easter Sunday — policemen searching the church for more evidence made another 
horrifying discovery: the nude and bloated body of eighteen-year-old Blanche Lamont, who had 
vanished ten days earlier. Her killer had strangled her with his bare hands, then, as in the case of Minnie 
Williams, committed necrophiliac rape. 




Theodore Durrant carries a victim to the belfry 



A suspect was quickly identified and taken into custody: Theodore Durrant, a handsome and charming 
young medical student, who still lived at home with his parents and served as assistant superintendent of 
the church Sunday school. His three-week trial in September 1895 was a nationwide sensation and drew 
dozens of swooning, female groupies, one of whom — dubbed the “Sweet-Pea Girl” by the press — 
brought the handsome young psycho-killer a daily bouquet of the flowers. Despite his protestations of 
innocence, the jury took just five minutes to convict Durrant, who was hanged, after several 
postponements, on January 7, 1898. Such was the public’s antipathy toward the so-called Demon of the 
Belfry, even after his death, that his parents had a hard time finding someplace to dispose of his body, 
and finally had to transport it to Los Angeles for cremation. 




Dr. H. H. Holmes by Rick Geary 



Horrific as Durrant’ s crimes were, they were easily surpassed by the most infamous medical monster of 
his day, Herman Mudgett, aka Dr. H. H. Holmes, one of the most prolific serial killers in American 
history. Though he confessed to twenty-seven murders of men, women, and children, Holmes is 
suspected of many more — possibly several hundred. Most were committed in the notorious “Horror 
Castle” he erected in a suburb of Chicago during the time of the great 1893 World’s Fair. 

At around the same time that Holmes was overseeing the construction of his nightmarish building, 
another homicidal physician, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, was busily poisoning a string of prostitutes in 
London. Besides medical training and a taste for serial murder, Cream shared something else with H. H. 
Holmes. Before moving to London, Cream had committed murder in Chicago — a crime for which he 
had received a life sentence, though (unaccountably) he was released after only ten years. 

As a poisoner of five prostitutes, Cream wasn’t nearly as lethal as female contemporaries like Sarah Jane 
Robinson, who killed eleven known victims, including her husband, sister, and five children. Dr. Cream 
won everlasting notoriety, however, with his dying claim — cut short when he plunged through the 
trapdoor of the gallows — that he was Jack the Ripper. 

Recommended Reading 

Thomas S. Duk e, Celebrated Criminal Cases of America (1910) 

Martin Fido, The Chronicle of Crime (1993) 



Carl Sifrakis,77ze Encyclopedia of American Crime (1982) 




Colin Wilson, The Mammoth Book of True Crime 2 (1980) 



The Whitechapel Horrors 

Jack the Ripper holds a special place in true-crime history for two reasons. First, the infamous butcher of 
London’s East End ushered in the modern age of serial lust-murder. And second, he spawned a spate of 
books and documentaries, a veritable genre unto itself that has supplied a seemingly endless string of 
theories purporting to solve this grisly, unsolved case. 

Even though many so-called Ripperologists have claimed to have identified England’s most notorious 
murderer, the bare facts of the case tell us virtually nothing about who the Ripper actually was. What we 
do know is that he went about his work with unbridled savagery and instigated a citywide panic, 
qualities that would characterize all of the most celebrated serial murder cases that would follow. 

The murders occurred between August and November of 1888. According to most accounts, there were 
five victims in all. All were prostitutes, as would be the case with so many future serial killers. The first 
victim, Mary Anne Nichols, was found with both her throat and abdomen slashed. As ghastly as this 
killing might have seemed at the time, it was mild compared to what would happen to the Ripper’s other 
victims. On September 8, the killer nearly decapitated Ann Chapman, then carved open her stomach and 
yanked out her intestines. At the end of the month, he murdered two women in one night. It seems the 
Ripper was interrupted and had to flee while in the middle of mutilating Elizabeth Stride, but he took his 
time with Catherine Eddowes, cutting off pieces of her face, disemboweling her, and making off with 
her kidney. His final victim was Mary Kelly, killed on November 9. In the process of carving her from 
head to toe, he removed her nose and the skin covering her forehead, pulled out her entrails, nearly 
amputated one of her arms, and skinned her thighs. 

Most of the information we have about the Ripper — negligible as it is — comes from a series of letters he 
wrote to a news agency and a local vigilance committee. The most famous of these, signed “From Hell,” 
revealed that his crazed appetites were not confined to murder and mutilation. The letter writer enclosed 
half of Eddowes’ s kidney and described how he had fried and eaten the other half. 

The murders ended with the Mary Kelly atrocity. After that, the Ripper seemed to disappear without a 
trace. 

Quickly, theories emerged about who the mystery killer really was. Some believed he was a doctor, in 
particular a man named Dr. Stanley. The idea was that only a man with surgical skill could have taken 
apart the victims with such precision, though it’ s a little hard to understand how someone could confuse 
the ravaged remains of Mary Kelly with the work of a gifted surgeon. A butcher could have done as 
well. Which brings us to another theory, that the Ripper was actually a shochet, a Jewish ritual 
slaughterman. Other people disputed the very idea that the Ripper was a man, saying that the killer 
might have been a deranged midwife, a Jill the Ripper. Perhaps the most fanciful theory proposed that 




the murders were the work of an agent of the Russian tsar’s secret police as part of an effort to make the 
English police look ineffectual. 




The Whitechapel Horrors 



A general rule of thumb in murder investigations is that the chances of finding the culprit diminish after 
the first couple of weeks; by that time, the thinking goes, the killer’s trail starts to go cold. Undaunted by 
this piece of conventional police wisdom, authors continued to assert that they have discovered the 
definitive solution to the Ripper case over a hundred years after the final murder. 

A book in the 1970s pointed the finger at Queen Victoria’s grandson, Edward, the Duke of Clarence. In 
1993, Hyperion published77i<? Diary of Jack the Ripper, the alleged journal of the killer, a Liverpool 
cotton merchant named James Maybrick. The authenticity of the diary was discredited by a prominent 
document expert. The most recent expose came in 2002 under the hopefully definitive title of Portrait of 
a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed. In this highly controversial work, crime novelist Patricia 
Cornwell implicates a post-impressionist painter named Walter Sickert. Sickert’s name had come up 
before in other Ripper speculations, but Cornwell went further by turning to the science of DNA 
identification to prove her case. The DNA samples came from letters, both those written by the killer 
and those written by Sickert. However, the results of the DNA tests did not conclusively single out 
Sickert. They only indicated that the DNA residueconW have belonged to Sickert — and thousands of 
other people. For the time being, Cornwell’s assertion will be definitive only until the publication of the 
next book that purports to solve the ultimate true-crime riddle for once and for all. 





Recommended Reading 



Paul Begg, The Jack the Ripper A-Z (1996) 

Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner, The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook (2000) 

Miriam Rivett and Mark Whitehead, The Pocket Essential Jack the Ripper (2001) 

Donald Rumbelow,77ie Complete Jack the Ripper (1988) 

Philip Sugden,77i£ Complete History of Jack the Ripper (1995) 

The Twentieth Century 

No sooner had the new century dawned than America was stunned by the disclosure that a genial, highly 
respected New England nurse named Jane Toppan was one of the most depraved multiple murderers in 
the country’s history, a sadistic psychopath (or “moral imbecile,” as such beings were called back then) 
who had poisoned thirty-one people, many of them close friends, because homicide gave her a sexual 
thrill. 

Each succeeding decade of the century produced new and ever more sensational cases of serial murder 
both here and abroad. 

The World War I Era 

Around the time of the First World War, a Hungarian tinsmith named Bela Kiss used lonely hearts ads to 
lure at least two dozen women to his home in the village of Czinkota, then strangled them and sealed 
their corpses in alcohol-filled metal drums. By the time his atrocities were discovered in 1916, Kiss had 
presumably been killed in action after being drafted and sent to the front. In truth, however, he appears 
to have switched papers with a battlefield casualty, assumed the latter’s identity, and gotten away. To 
this day, his fate remains a mystery. 





Hungarian police discover the metal drums containing the victims of Bela Kiss 
(© 2003 Nathan MacDicken) 



A perennial mystery surrounds another serial murder case from roughly the same time. On the night of 
May 23, 1918, a New Orleans couple named Maggio were butchered in bed by an intruder who shattered 
their skulls with an ax blade, then slashed their throats with a razor, nearly decapitating the woman. For 
the next two and a half years, New Orleans would be periodically terrorized by the night-prowling “Ax 
Man,” who followed the same MO in each case, chiseling out a back-door panel of the targeted house, 
then slipping inside and attacking the occupants while they slept. Altogether, he murdered seven people 
— including a two-year-old girl — and savagely wounded another eight. An alleged Mafia hit man named 
Joseph Mumfre is regarded as a prime suspect by some historians of crime, and it is true that the 
murders came to an abrupt halt when Mumfre was shot and killed by the widow of the Ax Man’s last 
victim. Still, there is a good deal of uncertainty about Mumfre’ s role in the case, and it seems likely that 
the Ax Man’s identity will never be conclusively established. 

1920s-1930s 



The single most sensational crime of Jazz Age America was the slaying of a fourteen-year-old Chicago 
boy named Bobby Franks by the wealthy young “thrill killers” Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb. 



That murder — senseless and shocking though it was — pales by comparison to the countless outrages 
perpetrated during the 1920s by Earle Leonard Nelson and Carl Panzram — two of the most ferocious 
serial killers in US history. A Bible-quoting sex maniac whose squat physique and enormous hands 
earned him the nickname the “Gorilla Murderer,” Nelson made his way across the country, killing as he 
went. During a sixteen-month period that began in February 1926, he strangled nearly two dozen 
women, most of them middle-aged landladies. He then raped their bodies after death. Captured in 
Canada after murdering his final two victims in Winnipeg, he was hanged in 1928. 

Panzram — arguably the most incorrigible killer ever produced on these shores — blamed his vicious 
nature on the brutal treatment he received as an inmate of various penal institutions, which — in striving 
to reform him — only filled him with an implacable hatred of all mankind. Making good on his lifelong 
credo — “Rob ’em all! Rape ’em all! Kill ’em all!” — he led a life of spectacular brutality, leaving 
countless corpses in his wake as he traveled around the world — from the US to South America, Europe, 
Africa, and back. Arrested in 1928 for a string of burglaries, he was sent to Leavenworth, where he 
earned a long-overdue death sentence for smashing in the head of a fellow inmate who looked at him the 
wrong way. His last words as the hangman fit the noose around his neck were typical of the unrepentant 
Panzram: “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard — I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around!” 

Overseas in Germany, the period between the two world wars produced some of the most appalling sex- 
killers of modern times. Indeed, the German term lustmord (“lust-murder”) — extreme sexual homicide 
involving mutilation, disembowelment, etc. — was coined to describe the atrocities of a handful of 
hideously depraved psychopaths who were active during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic: 
Georg Grossmann, the “Berlin Butcher,” charged with murdering and cannibalizing fourteen young 
women; Karl Denke, the “Mass-Murderer of Miinsterberg,” another cannibal who butchered at least 
thirty people and stored their pickled flesh in the basement of his inn; Peter Ktirten, the “Monster of 
Diisseldorf,” who murdered, raped, and mutilated a minimum of thirty-five victims, mostly women and 
children; and Fritz Haarmann, the “Vampire of Hanover,” responsible for the slaughter of as many as 
fifty young men. 

Haarmann’ s American admirer, Albert Fish — who saved every newspaper clipping he could find about 
the German lust-murderer — committed most of his own atrocities during the 1920s. It wasn’t until 1934, 
however, that the appalling truth about the old man’s enormities came to light. Fish’s confession to the 
murder, dismemberment, and cannibalizing of a lovely twelve-year-old girl — along with a string of 
earlier pedophiliac torture-slayings — instantly turned him into the most horrifying American monster of 
the Great Depression. 

Fish’s arrest in late 1934 coincided with the start of a four-year serial murder spree by one of the most 
mysterious figures in the annals of American crime. This was the so-called Cleveland Torso Killer (aka 
the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run”). This blood-crazed maniac chopped up more than a dozen people 
— most of them prostitutes, hoboes, and other social castoffs — and left their body parts strewn around 
the city. The killer eluded arrest, despite the all-out efforts of law officials (led by the legendary Eliot 
Ness, the former “Untouchable” who was then serving as Cleveland’s Director of Public Safety). 

Though theories about his identity abound, the “Mad Butcher” case remains one of the great unsolved 




serial murder stories in the chronicles of American crime. 



The 1940s 

Wartime London was the scene of a short but unusually savage serial murder spree by a young Royal 
Air Force cadet named Gordon Cummins. On the night of February 9, 1942 — while the city was living 
through the terrors of the Blitz — the twenty-eight-year-old fighter-pilot-in-training accosted a female 
pharmacist named Evelyn Hamilton as she walked home from a restaurant. In the darkness of the 
blacked-out city, he strangled her with her scarf and left her corpse sprawled in the entrance of an air- 
raid shelter. 

The following night in Piccadilly Circus, he picked up a prostitute named Evelyn Oatley. She took him 
back to her Soho apartment, where he slit her throat, then mutilated her genitals with a can opener. Two 
more mutilation-murders occurred on the next two successive nights, leading police to conclude that a 
Jack-the-Ripper-style killer was at large in their embattled city. 

Cummins undoubtedly would have gone on killing if he hadn’t been stopped. However, he was caught 
after two abortive murder attempts on the night of February 13. First, he tried to strangle a woman 
named Greta Haywood in the doorway of an air-raid shelter. He fled when the noise of the struggle 
attracted the notice of a passerby. He then immediately picked up another woman, who invited him 
home. This time, Cummins was scared off by her violent screams when he attacked her. Not only did 
Cummins leave two living witnesses who could identify him, he had also dropped his gas mask, which 
was tagged with his name, rank, and serial number. Promptly arrested, he was hanged in June 1942 
during an air raid. 

Just a few years after Cummins’s execution, another member of the Royal Air Force went to the gallows 
after committing a pair of gruesome sex-murders. Dashingly handsome and irresistible to women, 
Neville Heath was a con man, thief, and compulsive Don Juan who did several stints in the RAF even 
while pursuing his life of petty criminality. In June 1946, he crossed the line from small-time crook and 
impostor to sadistic killer when he flogged and suffocated a thirty-two-year-old film extra named 
Margery Gardner in a London hotel room. He then chewed off her nipples and rammed a poker up her 
vagina. 





(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



Police immediately began searching for Heath, who had registered at the hotel under his own name. By 
then, however, he had headed South to Bournemouth, where, on July 3, he slit the throat of another 
young woman. Mutilating her body, he inflicted a massive gash that ran from the inside of her thigh up 
to her breast. He left her savaged corpse in the woods, where it would not be discovered for several days. 

While the search was on for the missing girl, Heath — displaying either an unconscious death wish or the 
kind of reckless bravado typical of psychopaths — showed up at the police station to offer his help. He 
was immediately identified as the fugitive in the London murder and placed under arrest. He was hanged 
in October 1946. 

Of the US serial killers active during the 1940s, two of the most notorious were African-American: 

Jarvis Catoe and Jake Bird. In 1943, Catoe was electrocuted for the rape-murder of a twenty-five-year- 
old Washington, DC newlywed — one of three women he had murdered during a serial murder spree two 
years earlier. His death toll was far exceeded, however, by Louisiana-born Jake Bird. In October 1947, 
while drifting through Tacoma, Washington, Bird entered the home of fifty-three-year-old Bertha Kludt 
and her teenage daughter, Beverly. He slaughtered them both with an ax he had found in their backyard. 
Taken into custody after a ferocious fight — during which he badly wounded two policemen with his 
knife — he eventually confessed to numerous slayings in at least eight different states. His victims were 
all white women, bludgeoned with axes or hatchets. Police were able to confirm Bird’s involvement in 
eleven unsolved homicides, though he was suspected in as many as forty-four. He was hanged in Walla 
Walla in July 1949. 

The single most infamous American serial killer of the 1940s was William Heirens, whose case 
continues to generate controversy to this day. Raised by sexually repressive parents who imbued him 
with the belief that “all sex is dirty,” Heirens grew up to be a fetishist who achieved orgasmic release 
from breaking into women’s homes and stealing their underwear (which he sometimes wore at home 
while reading books on Nazi war crimes). Like other serial killers, he was also turned on by fire- starting. 
An inveterate housebreaker, he began burglarizing apartments around Chicago while still in grade 
school. A pair of arrests during his adolescence earned him two extended stints in reform schools. In 





1945, at the age of sixteen, the intellectually gifted Heirens won admission to the University of Chicago, 
where he enrolled as an electrical engineering major. Even while leading a stereotypical collegiate 
existence — dating, hanging out with buddies, cutting classes — he continued to pursue his clandestine life 
as a cat burglar and panty fetishist. 

On June 5, 1945, a forty-three-year-old Chicago woman, Josephine Ross, surprised an intruder looting 
her bedroom. She was found that afternoon, sprawled across her bed, her throat slashed, her dress 
wrapped around her head. 

Six months later, on December 10, the naked corpse of a petite, thirty-three-year-old brunette named 
Frances Brown was found in the bathroom of her Chicago apartment not far from the scene of the earlier 
crime. She had been shot in the head, a butcher knife protruded from her neck, and her housecoat was 
draped over her head. Scrawled in lipstick on the living room wall was a cry for help that would become 
the single most famous serial killer message of the century: “For heavens sake catch me before I kill 
more. I cannot control myself.” 

The “Fipstick Killer” (as he was instantly dubbed by the press) committed his last — and most heinous — 
crime in early January when he abducted six-year-old Suzanne Degnan from her bedroom, strangled her, 
dismembered her body with a hunting knife, and dumped the pieces into the sewer. 

The shocking murder of the little girl set off the largest manhunt in Chicago’s history. It did not end 
until the following June, when police — responding to a report of a prowler in a North Side apartment 
building — cornered Heirens. Drawing a gun, Heirens took aim at the officers, but his weapon misfired. 
After a fierce struggle, he was subdued when an off-duty cop who had joined in the fight brained him 
with a flowerpot. 

In custody and drugged up with sodium pentothal — “truth serum” — Heirens initially claimed that the 
killings had been committed by an evil alter ego named “George Murman” (short for “Murder Man”). 

To avoid the chair, he agreed to confess to all three slayings in exchange for life in prison. On the day of 
his formal sentencing, he tried to commit suicide by hanging himself with a bedsheet but was saved by a 
quick-acting guard. Since the day he entered prison, Heirens — who has recanted his confession and 
stoutly maintains his innocence — has been a model prisoner, earning a college degree in 1972. He 
continues to have supporters who believe that he was railroaded, and who point to another suspect — a 
drifter named Richard Russell Thomas, with a long record of brutal crimes — as the likelier culprit. 

The 1950s 

Bathed in the rosy glow of nostalgia, the 1950s are generally regarded as a uniquely placid era in the life 
of America. Despite its aura of “Happy Days” innocence, however, the Eisenhower decade witnessed 
some of the most shocking serial murders of the modern age. 



Harvey Glatman, for example — the nerdy-looking sadist who snapped pictures of bound and terrified 




women before raping and garroting them — epitomized the sleazy underbelly of 1950s, finding his prey 
in the tawdry “camera clubs” that flourished in those sexually repressive times. The photographic 
souvenirs he kept of his tormented victims were chilling enough to cause even case-hardened LA cops to 
feel sick at the sight of them. 




Harvey Glatman’s victim Judy Dull, photographed in his apartment moments before she was killed 
(Corbis) 



Even more ghastly were the anatomical trophies investigators turned up in the ramshackle farmhouse of 
the Wisconsin ghoul, Ed Gein, whose crimes — partly inspired by the lurid men’s magazines of the 
period and their obsession with Nazi atrocities — also reflected the dark side of 1950s culture. 

In 1957 — the same year that Glatman embarked on his murder spree and the Gein horrors were 
uncovered — another American serial killer appeared on the scene. That June, a woman named Margaret 
Harold and her army sergeant boyfriend were parked in a lover’s lane near Annapolis, Maryland, when a 
green Chrysler pulled up beside them. A tall, thin-faced man emerged from the Chrysler and, after 
identifying himself as the owner of the property, drew a gun, climbed into the backseat of the couple’s 
car, and demanded their money. When Margaret Harold refused, she was shot in the back of the skull. 
Leaping from the car, her boyfriend ran to the nearest house and called for help. When the police arrived 
at the crime scene, they found Margaret’ s body still in the car. Her clothes had been stripped from her 
body, and she had been raped after death. 



Searching the area, police found a cinder-block shack, its walls plastered with pornographic pictures, 
morgue shots of murdered women, and — incongruously — the yearbook photo of a coed who had 
graduated from the University of Maryland in 1955. 




A year and a half later, in January 1959, a family of four out for a drive near Apple Grove, Virginia, was 
run off the road by a man in a blue Chevrolet, who forced them into the trunk of his car at gunpoint. 

Two months later, the body of the husband, Carroll Jackson, was found in a roadside ditch, lying atop 
the corpse of his infant daughter, Janet. Mr. Jackson had been bound and shot in the back of the head; 
the baby had been tossed alive into the ditch, where she had smothered under the weight of her dead 
father. 

The other two members of the family — mother Mildred and her five-year-old daughter, Susan — were 
discovered in the woods by some young squirrel hunters a few weeks afterward. Both victims had been 
raped and beaten to death with a blunt instrument. Evidence suggested that the killer had tortured Mrs. 
Jackson to force her to perform fellatio upon him. 

The investigation into both cases had run into a dead end when police received an anonymous letter in 
May, pointing a finger at a young jazz musician named Melvin Rees, who — according to the tipster — 
had been making suspicious comments while hopped up on Benzedrine at the time of the Jackson 
killings. Checking into Rees’s background, detectives discovered that he had once dated the University 
of Maryland coed whose yearbook picture had been taped to the wall of the cinder-block structure near 
the first crime scene. It wasn’t until FBI agents searched Rees’s home, however, and found a saxophone 
case full of incriminating evidence — including handwritten notes describing his murder of the Jackson 
family — that officials knew they had their man. 

Eventually, Rees — or the “Sex Beast,” as the newspapers dubbed him — was linked to the unsolved rape- 
murders of four adolescent girls in Maryland. He was condemned to death, but the sentence was later 
commuted, and he died of natural causes in prison. 




(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



One of the most infamous multiple murderers of the 1950s was not, strictly speaking, a serial killer. A 
sociopathic punk who liked to think of himself as romantic young rebel a la his idol, James Dean, 





Charlie “Little Red” Starkweather was responsible for murdering ten people during a twenty- six-day 
period in early 1958. Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, however, fall 
into the category of “spree killers.” Their rampage through Nebraska and Wyoming was not a series of 
distinct events motivated by recurrent need for sadistic gratification but rather a single, if protracted, 
massacre. 

CASE STUDY 

Reg Christie, the Monster of Rillington Place 

America wasn’t the only place to produce serial killers in the 1950s. In England, the decade began with 
one of the most notorious sex-murder cases of modern times. 

The full story began to come to light in March 1953, when the new residents at 10 Rillington Place in 
London’s Notting Hill section began to remodel their kitchen. One section of the wallpapering seemed 
to have nothing but air behind it. Tearing away the wallpaper, they discovered that it had been 
concealing a cupboard. In the cupboard were three dead women wrapped in blankets. The police arrived 
to investigate and found that the three corpses were just the tip of the iceberg. Under the floorboards in 
the dining room they found another dead woman and outside buried in the garden they found two more. 

The previous resident was a man named John Reginald Christie — Reg to his friends. A quiet, balding, 
bespectacled man, he had been in the public eye three years earlier during a notorious murder trial. A 
dim-witted young man named Timothy Evans had confessed to killing his wife and baby, then retracted 
his admission. He eventually claimed that the real killer was his downstairs neighbor, Christie. At the 
trial, the respectable-looking Christie testified to Evans’s guilt and the jury concurred. Evans was 
hanged. Now, after uncovering six more bodies, the police were beginning, a bit belatedly, to rethink the 
case. Christie himself filled in the details for them when they arrested him eleven days later. 

Christie came from a working-class family and supported himself over the years with a series of menial 
and clerical jobs. But there were disturbing undercurrents coursing just beneath the surface of his 
seemingly unexceptional life. One was a chronic hypochondria that began in childhood and culminated 
when he was a young man in a case of hysterical muteness that went on for over three years. Christie 
also had an inability to resist other people’s property. He stole frequently from his various employers. 

He and his wife Ethel moved into the flat on Rillington Place in 1938. Two years later, when he was 
forty-two, he began to murder women. 

He pursued his secret homicidal life when his wife was away visiting relatives. He brought Ruth Fuerst 
to his apartment in 1940 and offered to help ease her respiratory condition by administering an herbal 
steam concoction. Instead, he gassed her, then strangled and raped her. He waited three years before he 
killed his second victim, Muriel Eddy — a friend of his wife. Both Fuerst and Eddy ended up in his 
garden. 




In 1949, he got the wife of Timothy Evans alone under the pretext of offering another service. He 
claimed to be able to perform an abortion for her. He strangled and raped her and murdered her baby as 
well. The police found the bodies in the building’s toolshed. Christie may have somehow tricked the 
feebleminded Evans into confessing. 

Once again he let three years go by without any further murders; then he set his sights closer to home, 
strangling his wife and stashing her beneath the floorboards. No more would he have to wait to have the 
house to himself. In less than three months, he killed three more women. They would be the ones he 
halfheartedly concealed in the kitchen cupboard before moving out at the end of March 1953. 

After the police caught up with Christie, the tabloids dubbed the mild-mannered maniac the “Monster of 
Rillington Place.” The judicial system was no less appalled by his crimes than the public was. Christie 
went to the gallows just three and a half months after his arrest. 

The 1960s 

The serial killers of sixties America were as emblematic of that socially turbulent era as race riots, 
political assassinations, and the British Invasion. If we remember the decade as the time of JFK, Martin 
Luther King, the Beatles, and Woodstock, we also associate it with the sensational crimes of the Boston 
Strangler, the Zodiac killer, and — most notoriously — the demon-hippie, Charles Manson. 

More than forty years after the Boston Strangler committed his first atrocity, the case remains one of the 
most controversial in the annals of modern crime. The first five of the Strangler’s eleven confirmed 
murders occurred during the summer of 1962. The initial victims were all older women, ranging in age 
from fifty-five to seventy-five. Each had willingly let her killer into her apartment, taken in by his story 
that he was a repairman sent by the landlord. Besides raping and strangling the women, he desecrated 
their corpses, sometimes by shoving bottles or other objects up their vaginas. In most cases, he left a 
grotesque “signature,” knotting his makeshift garrote (often a nylon stocking, though sometimes a 
bathrobe sash) into an ornamental bow beneath the dead woman’s chin. 

Toward the end of 1962, his MO changed. He began targeting younger women, most in their twenties. 
And his killings became even more vicious: in one instance, he stabbed a victim twenty-two times, 
savaging her throat and leaving eighteen wounds in a bull’s-eye pattern on her left breast. Another 
young woman was left propped up against the headboard of her bed, a pink bow tied around her neck, a 
broomstick jutting from her vagina, and a “Happy New Year’s” card resting at her feet. 

With the women of Boston in a panic, a special task force was set up to track down the killer. With no 
solid leads, however, investigators were reduced to calling in psychics whose paranormal assistance — 
unsurprisingly — proved worthless. The big break in the case did not come until 1965 when a rape victim 
led the police to Albert DeSalvo. 




DeSalvo had the kind of nightmarish childhood that is a prescription for future psychopathology. His 
father was the type of man who liked to bring whores home with him, have sex with them in front of the 
family, then beat his wife when she complained. One of DeSalvo’ s most vivid childhood memories was 
of watching his father knock out all his mother’s teeth, then break her fingers one by one as she lay 
sprawled beneath the kitchen sink. The children were also subjected to savage abuse. On one typical 
occasion, Albert was clubbed with a lead pipe for not moving fast enough when his father asked for 
something. 

Like other budding psychopaths, Albert displayed a sadistic streak from an early age. One of his favorite 
childhood pastimes was sticking a dog inside an orange crate with a starving cat so he could watch the 
cat scratch out the dog’s eyes. 

By the time he was a teenager, DeSalvo had accumulated a long rap sheet for breaking and entering. 
Joining the army at seventeen, he was shipped to Europe, where he married a German girl and brought 
her back home to the States. In 1955, while stationed in Fort Dix, New Jersey, he was charged with 
molesting a nine-year-old girl. He escaped prosecution when her mother decided not to press charges. 

Afflicted with a volcanic sex drive, DeSalvo routinely demanded sex a half dozen times a day from his 
long-suffering wife, accusing her of being “frigid” whenever she rebuffed him. Back in Boston after his 
discharge from the army, he struggled to support his growing family with blue-collar jobs, 
supplementing his meager income with occasional petty burglaries. 

He also began to assault women. His earliest technique was to go door to door, posing as a scout for a 
modeling agency. If a woman fell for this line and invited him in, he would pull out a tape measure and 
proceed to check out her vital statistics, a ploy that allowed him to indulge in crude sexual fondling. 
Before long, the women of Boston were warned to beware of the smooth-talking pervert known as the 
“Measuring Man.” 

In March 1961, the thirty-year-old DeSalvo was caught while attempting to burglarize a house. Under 
arrest, he confessed to being the “Measuring Man” and was given a two-year sentence. Back on the 
streets after just eleven months, he embarked on a new, more violent spree of sexual assault. Posing as a 
repairman in green work clothes, he managed to talk his way into the homes of countless women 
throughout New England. Over a two-year span, the “Green Man” — as he came to be dubbed — raped as 
many as three hundred victims in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. 

During this same period, eleven Boston women were strangled and defiled by a smooth-talking sex 
maniac posing as a workman. 

In November 1964 — ten months after the Strangler killed his last victim — a victim of the “Green Man” 
rapes gave police a description that led them to DeSalvo. Confessing to those crimes, he was committed 
for psychiatric observation to Bridgewater State Hospital, where he befriended a hardened killer named 
George Nassar, whose attorney was a young hotshot named F. Lee Bailey. Before very long, Bailey 




became DeSalvo’s lawyer, too. That’s when DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler. 

In the end, DeSalvo was never punished for the Boston Strangler crimes. Under an unusual deal 
engineered by Bailey, he was spared the chair and given a life sentence for the “Green Man” rapes 
instead. In November 1973, at the age of forty-two, he was stabbed to death by a fellow inmate. 

DeSalvo’s death, however, was not the end of the story. From the time of his confession, doubts about 
his guilt have been raised both by his own family members and relatives of his victims. Some believe 
that DeSalvo — knowing that he was already facing life imprisonment for the “Green Man” crimes — 
claimed to be the Strangler in order to cash in on the book and movie rights he assumed would be 
coming his way. Others believe that there was more than one Strangler. Support for the doubters came in 
2001, when the remains of both DeSalvo and the Strangler’s final victim, Mary Sullivan, were exhumed 
and examined by forensic experts. DNA evidence taken from Mary Sullivan did not provide a match 
with DeSalvo. It seems unlikely that there will ever be definitive answers to the questions that still swirl 
around the case. 

Another famous serial murder case also remains shrouded in mystery, though at least one writer claims 
to have come up with the long-sought solution. 

During a nine-month span that began in late 1968, the citizens of San Francisco were terrorized by a 
night-prowling gunman who, in the years to follow, would assume near-mythic proportions in the 
popular mind. His notoriety stemmed from several sources: his seemingly preternatural ability to elude 
capture, the viciously taunting messages he sent to the press, and, perhaps most importantly, his chilling 
nickname, which has become almost as infamous as that of Jack of the Ripper — the Zodiac. 

His first victims were a teenage couple shot to death in a remote lover’s lane about twenty miles 
northeast of San Francisco on the night of December 20, 1968. Six months later, at midnight on July 5, 
1969, he struck again, shooting another young couple in the parking lot of a public golf course. Forty 
minutes after that attack — which left the girl dead and her boyfriend severely wounded — police received 
an anonymous phone call from a gruff- voiced man, who directed them to the scene of the shooting and 
claimed credit for the earlier double murder. 

The matter-of-fact tone in which this message was delivered made it clear that a homicidal maniac was 
on the loose. The full extent of his madness, however, didn’t become apparent until six weeks later, 
when he sent three separate letters to local newspapers. Each contained a cryptogram. Deciphered by a 
high school teacher and his wife, the three coded passages formed a single, wildly deranged message: 



I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING 
WILD GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE ANIMAL OF 
ALL TO KILL SOMETIMES GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING EXPERENCE IT IS EVEN 
BETTER THAN GETTING YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL THE BEST PART IS THAE WHEN 




I DIE I WILL BE REBORN IN PARADICE AND ALL THE I HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY 
SLAVES I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOI DOWN OR 
STOP MY COLLECTING OL SLAVES LOR MY ALTERLILE 



The letter was signed with a peculiar symbol that resembled the sight of a rifle scope — a circle 
intersected by a cross. 

Just a few days later, the killer sent another letter to th eSan Francisco Examiner. True to his previous 
message, he did not provide his name. Instead, he used a pseudonym that immediately entered the 
mythology of modern-day serial murder. 

“This is the Zodiac speaking,” the letter began. From that point on, he would start each of his 
communications with the same ominous greeting. 

Two months passed. On September 27, 1969, two twenty-year-old college students, Bryan Hartnell and 
Cecilia Shepard, were picnicking at a lake near Vallejo when a frightening figure emerged from behind 
some trees. His face was hidden beneath an oversized black hood embroidered with the Zodiac’s crossed 
circle device, a large, wood-sheathed knife — possibly a bayonet — hung from his belt, and he had a 
semiautomatic pistol in his hand. Tying up the couple at gunpoint, he savaged them with his knife, then 
walked to their car and, with a black Magic Marker, inscribed his crossed circle logo on the door, along 
with the dates of all three of his Bay Area attacks. An hour later, he put in a call to the police, 
announcing that he had just committed a “double murder.” As it happened, he was wrong. Stabbed ten 
times, Cecelia Shepard would die a few days later. Her boyfriend would survive his half dozen wounds. 




The Zodiac in full regalia 




(Courtesy of Tom Voight) 



His last known victim was a San Francisco cab driver named Paul Stine who was killed with a point- 
blank shot to the head. Before fleeing the crime scene, Zodiac cut off a large piece of the victim’s shirt, 
soaked it in the dead man’s blood, and carried it away with him. Shortly afterward, the editor of th tSan 
Francisco Chronicle received an envelope. Inside was a swatch of the cab driver’s shirt and a letter from 
Zodiac in which he promised to “wipe out a school bus some morning.” Fortunately, he never made 
good on his threat. Nor — as far as anyone knows — did Zodiac ever kill again. 

He did, however, keep up his bizarre correspondence, sending sporadic greeting cards and letters to the 
papers for the next several years. As for his identity, it remains a mystery, though one expert on the case 
has named Arthur Leigh Allen — a gun buff and convicted child molester who died in 1993 — as the 
likeliest suspect. 

School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the 
front tire + then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out. 

— from one of the Zodiac letters 

The Dark Prince of the decade was Charles Manson, the evil incarnation of all that was most insidious 
about the 1960s counterculture, a social movement that began with dreams of free love and flower 
power and ended with the violent chaos of Altamont. Manson is unique among serial killers: a legendary 
monster whose most infamous crime was committed by proxy. Profoundly manipulative, he was able to 
transform his “family” of fanatical worshipers into a troop of hippie-assassins only too eager to do his 
homicidal bidding. 

He was born in 1934, the illegitimate son of a bisexual teenage prostitute, Kathleen Maddox, who 
routinely brought her tricks home for sex, left him alone for weeks at a time, and reportedly once traded 
him to a waitress for a pitcher of beer. Sent to jail in 1939 after knocking over a gas station with her 
brother, Kathleen shipped little Charlie off to live with her aunt and uncle — the former a religious 
fanatic, the latter a sadist who constantly derided the boy as a “sissy” and forced him to wear girl’s 
clothes to school. By twelve, Manson was living on the streets and surviving by theft. His adolescence 
was a continuous cycle of petty crime, arrest, incarceration, and escape. At eighteen — while doing time 
in Utah for stealing cars — he sodomized another boy at knifepoint, earning a stint in a federal 
reformatory, where he racked up eight major disciplinary infractions, including three for homosexual 
rape. Paroled in 1954, he spent the next dozen years in and out of various prisons for crimes ranging 
from check forgery to pimping. In 1967, at the age of thirty-two, Manson — who had taught himself 
guitar and dabbled in Scientology and Buddhism while in jail — came up for parole. He himself 
expressed doubts about the wisdom of being set free. “Oh, no, I can’t go outside there. I couldn’t adjust 
to that world, not after all my life had been spent locked up.” In spite of his protests, he was unleashed 
on the world. 




Making his way to San Francisco during the so-called Summer of Love, this charismatic con man 
quickly mastered the psychedelic gobbledygook of the counterculture, attracting a band of drug-addled 
dropouts — many of them naive and emotionally unstable young women — who revered him as a guru. 

Eventually, Charlie and his ragtag commune settled in a dusty, disused ranch outside LA, where they 
enjoyed a squalid, orgiastic existence overseen by their increasingly crazed messiah. Manson developed 
a bizarre obsession with the song “Helter Skelter” from the Beatles’ “White Album.” In his flourishing 
madness, Manson interpreted the song (which refers to an amusement park thrill ride) as a prophecy 
about an impending race war in which blacks would rise up and destroy all white people, except for 
Manson and his followers, who would find refuge in a cave beneath Death Valley. Eventually, Charlie 
and his family would emerge from hiding and — thanks to their innate superiority over “blackie” (as the 
racist Manson called African-Americans) — take over the world. 

To expedite things, Manson dispatched a band of followers on an insane mission, commanding them to 
slay some prominent white people in a way that would implicate black revolutionaries and spark an 
apocalyptic race war. On the night of August 9, 1969 — in one of the most shocking atrocities of modern 
times — five of Manson’ s demented disciples invaded the home of film director Roman Polanski (who 
was away on a shoot) and savagely butchered his eight-months-pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, along with 
four other people. Before leaving, they used the victims’ blood to scrawl incendiary graffiti on the walls. 
The following night, Manson himself led a party of his “creepy crawlers” to the home of a couple named 
LaBianca. They murdered both husband and wife, leaving Mr. LaBianca with a carving fork jutting from 
his chest and the word “WAR” carved into his flesh. Once again, the victims’ blood was used to inscribe 
pseudorevolutionary messages on the walls: “DEATH TO PIGS,” “RISE,” and “HEALTER SKELTER.” 

Later, one of the participants in the Tate horrors explained that the Manson gang “wanted to do a crime 
that would shock the world, that the world would have to stand up and take notice.” If that was their 
plan, they succeeded. The massacre at the Polanski residence set off a panic in Los Angeles and sent 
shock waves throughout the nation. Ultimately, Manson was arrested when one of his brain-fried 
groupies — Susan Atkins, who was behind bars on an unrelated charge — blithely confessed to a jail mate. 





Charles Manson at his trial 
(Bill Lignante — ABC News) 



After a lengthy trial, which Manson did his best to turn into a circus, he and four followers were 
condemned to the gas chamber. In 1972, however, their sentences were commuted to life when the 
California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty. Still immured behind prison walls, as he has been 
for the bulk of his lamentably misspent life, Manson is now an old man. Still, it is hard to picture him as 
anything but the wild-eyed, scraggly-haired demon-hippie of the Woodstock era, an icon every bit as 
symbolic of that turbulent time as Timothy Leary and the Four Moptops. 

I am what you have made me and the mad-dog devil killer fiend leper is a reflection of your society. 

— Charles Manson 
The 1970s to Now 

The 1970s witnessed such a sharp increase in the number of psychopathic sex murders that it seemed — 
in the words of a pioneering paper presented by members of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit — as if “a 
new phenomenom in homicide” had suddenly appeared on the scene. To describe the perpetrators of 
these supposedly unprecedented crimes, Robert Ressler and his colleagues at the Bureau adopted a term 




that had been coined a decade earlier and that quickly entered the popular lexicon: “serial killers.” 

As the foregoing historical survey shows, however, there is nothing new about sadistic lust-murder 
beyond the name we now apply to it. Still, it is clearly the case that — particularly in the United States — 
there was a definite spike in such crimes during the 1970s. 

Why did this happen? Various reasons suggest themselves, most having to do with the upheaval in 
sexual mores precipitated by the social revolution of the 1960s. In reaction to the inhibited 1950s, the 
hippie counterculture preached the joys of “letting it all hang out” — of shedding all repressions and 
indulging in the Dionysian pleasures of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. But the unconscious mind is a 
Pandora’ s box, and when you open the lid on the id, all kinds of forces — some exhilarating and creative, 
others scary and destructive — come gushing out. The counterculture started out with the utopian, all-you- 
need-is-love daydreams epitomized by the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” But it ended up steeped in the 
nightmarish darkness of the Stones’ “Let It Bleed.” 

The permissive ethos that sprang up in the sixties and spread throughout the culture in the 1970s did 
more than liberate the libidos of middle-class Americans; it gave permission to some extraordinarily 
aberrant people to act out their sickest fantasies. The countercultural slogan — “If it feels good, do it!” — 
was intended to encourage a healthy sense of sexual freedom in people. But it’s a dangerous philosophy 
when adopted by madmen who feel best when they are raping, torturing, and butchering helpless 
victims. The breaking down of long-standing sexual prohibitions also made it easier for serial killers to 
find potential victims in the singles bars, gay bathhouses, and other pickup places of the era. 

It is important, however, to put the recent rise in sex-murders in perspective. The surge in such crimes 
has led to a lot of alarmist talk about an “epidemic” of serial killing. This makes for good news copy but 
— like more recent scares about shark attacks and child abductions — is mostly hyperbole. To be sure, the 
last few decades have produced a striking number of world-class lust-murderers in America: John 
Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, the Hillside Stranglers, Edmund Kemper, etc. But even during the heyday of 
these sickos, the number of serial killers at large in our country was infinitesimal. Ordinary Americans 
who fear that there is a psycho-killer lurking around every corner are far less likely to die at the hands of 
a knife-wielding slasher than in a car accident on their way to the local video store to rent The Silence of 
the Lambs. 

The serial killer who best exemplifies the shadow side of the sexually freewheeling 1970s was 
undoubtedly Bundy, the living incarnation of one of that decade’s darkest anxieties: the fear of meeting 
a seductive stranger whose charm conceals the vicious soul of a psychopath. 

Surviving family photographs from Bundy’s early years suggest a Leave It to Beaver childhood of 
wiener roasts, fishing trips, and warm Christmas holidays. Still, there were striking abnormalities in his 
background. An illegitimate child, he was forced to pretend that his mother was his sister and his 
grandparents — Sam and Eleanor Cowell — were his father and mother. There are also indications that — 
despite Bundy’s avowed adoration of his grandfather — Sam Cowell was a virulent racist and petty tyrant 




who freely dispensed abuse to every member of the household, from the family pets to his long-suffering 
wife (who was eventually driven into electroshock therapy). 

Even so, there is little in Bundy’s background to account fully for the sheer malevolence of his adult 
behavior. Perhaps, as he himself suggested, there were unknown genetic factors that contributed to his 
monstrous makeup. 

Whatever the case, his disturbing tendencies manifested themselves at a young age. He was only three 
when he slipped some butcher knives under the bedclothes of his sleeping aunt. In elementary school — 
despite his obvious intelligence and superior grades — his recurrent temper tantrums were violent enough 
to worry his teachers. By high school, he had become a chronic Peeping Tom and petty thief. 

By that point, even Bundy was becoming aware that he lacked certain basic human qualities: a 
conscience, a capacity to see people as anything more than objects to be manipulated for his own 
gratification. By studying others, he learned to mimic normal behavior so skillfully that, for the rest of 
his life, even those closest to him failed to perceive his monstrous nature. 

While attending the University of Washington, Bundy became involved with a lovely, cultivated young 
woman named Stephanie Brooks who — insofar as he was capable of such an emotion — would become 
the love of his life. He was presumably devastated when she broke up with him. Much has been made of 
the fact that his subsequent victims bore a vague resemblance to Stephanie. The implication is that 
Bundy’s homicidal career was provoked by this traumatizing incident, that he was taking revenge on the 
woman who rejected him. The more probable explanation is that Bundy, like many psycho-killers, was 
simply turned on by a certain kind of woman. Indeed, he took pride in choosing only “quality” victims — 
pretty, intelligent, college-age women — to abduct, torture, mutilate, and kill. 

His first attack occurred in January 1974, when he broke into the basement bedroom of an eighteen-year- 
old coed, bludgeoned her skull with a metal rod yanked from her bedframe, then rammed it into her 
vagina. If the word can be applied to a young woman who has suffered such appalling injuries, she was 
lucky: she survived. At least three dozen other young women whose lives intersected with Ted Bundy’s 
would not. 

He was a genuine Jekyll-and-Hyde. He led an outwardly exemplary life: making a name for himself as a 
rising young star of the local Republican party, helping to man a suicide hotline, even winning a police 
commendation for saving the life of a drowning toddler. Simultaneously, however, the bright, 
personable Bundy was pursuing his secret career of unspeakable crime. In 1974, while still living in 
Washington state, he slaughtered at least seven young women in as many months. Two were lured from 
a crowded beach in broad daylight on the same afternoon. 




Ted Bundy 



(Pin button courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



That September, he moved to Salt Lake City and enrolled at the University of Utah. Two months later, 
the bestial second self he described as “the entity” came roaring to the surface. Young women began to 
vanish, including the teenage daughter of a local police chief. Her nude, hideously mutilated remains 
were later found in a canyon. During this period, Bundy also made occasional forays into Colorado, 
where at least five other young women died at his hands. 

For authorities, the turning point in the case came after midnight on August 16, 1975. A Utah Highway 
Patrolman pulled over Bundy for erratic driving. Inside the Volkswagen the officer found a cache of 
suspicious items, including an ice pick, a mask made of panty hose, and handcuffs. Before long, Bundy 
was picked out of a lineup by a young woman he had attempted to abduct the year before. Found guilty 
of aggravated kidnapping, he was sentenced to one to fifteen years at the Utah State Penitentiary. He 
was then transferred to Colorado to stand trial for murder. 

It appeared to be the end of the line for Bundy, but authorities had underestimated his psychopathic 
cunning. Taking control of his own defense, he was a given access to the courthouse law library. On 
June 7, 1977, while his guard stepped into the hallway for a smoke, Bundy jumped from the library’s 
second- story window and escaped. 

He was recaptured eight days later but escaped again in December, squeezing through a trapdoor in the 
ceiling of his cell that he had painstakingly made with a smuggled hacksaw. This time, he headed to 
Tallahassee, Florida, where he committed a series of attacks so inhumanly savage that even he would 
later refuse to discuss them. On February 15, 1978 — one week after he slaughtered a twelve-year-old 
girl and dumped her ravaged remains in a pig shed — his luck finally ran out. He was arrested for driving 
a stolen car and quickly identified as the homicidal fugitive. 

Eventually, he was sentenced to death, though he managed to delay his execution for a decade. When 
the day finally arrived, a huge, festive crowd gathered outside the prison walls to celebrate the event, 




while a local radio station diverted its listeners with the sound of frying bacon and a parody of “On Top 
of Old Smokey”: 



On top of Old Sparkey 
All loaded with juice, 
Good-bye to old Bundy 
No more on the loose. 



In surveying the serial killers of the past quarter century, there is a kind of hierarchy of evil, with such 
big-name psychos as Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, Ramirez, Berkowitz, and Lucas topping the list. Just below 
them in the ranks of infamy are some well-known lust-killers who, for whatever reason, have never 
achieved the same near-mythic status. 

Joel Rifkin, for example, stands as the most prolific serial killer in the history of New York State. That 
he has never achieved the notoriety of Gacy et al is undoubtedly due to his choice of victims: drug- 
addicted streetwalkers, the type of social outcasts whose deaths don’t generate the kind of media hoopla 
that attends the serial slaughter of middle-class marrieds and clean-scrubbed coeds. 




Portrait of a serial killer, Joel Rifkin 
(Corbis) 



Adopted at three weeks, Rifkin grew up to be a quintessential nerd — physically gawky, hopeless at 
sports, socially inept, and afflicted with a stutter and assorted learning disabilities. His school years were 
an endless ordeal of humiliation and harassment by bullying peers. Plenty of geeky young men, of 




course, suffer such torment and end up taking refuge in X-Men comics or Star Trek fandom or The Lord of 
the Rings. For whatever reason, Rifkin developed a different form of imaginative escape. From an early 
age, according to his own testimony, he indulged in vivid fantasies involving sex slaves, torture, and 
female gladiators battling each other to bloody deaths. His favorite movie was Alfred Hitchcock’s 
\912Frenzy, about an English sex-killer who can only perform sexually while strangling women. 

An utter failure in his academic pursuits as in every other area of his life, the virginal Rifkin began to 
cruise for hookers shortly before his twentieth birthday. Before long, he was deeply immersed in his 
sordid secret life, spending whatever small earnings he made from various odd jobs on trysts with junkie 
prostitutes. By the time he committed his first murder, he had, by his own estimate, engaged in three 
hundred such squalid encounters. 

In March 1989, the thirty-year-old Rifkin was still living at home with his widowed mother, who was 
away on vacation. Cruising Manhattan’s East Village, he picked up a crack-addicted prostitute whose 
name he never bothered to learn. He drove her back to his house on suburban Long Island and, after 
some perfunctory sex, bludgeoned her to death with an old howitzer shell he had bought at a military 
flea market. Then he cleaned up the blood, straightened up the living room, and took a nap. 

Waking up refreshed a few hours later, he dragged the corpse down to the basement, draped it over his 
mother’ s washer and dryer, and — using an X- Acto knife — dismembered it as though he were carving up 
a roast chicken. To foil identification, he sliced off the fingertips and yanked the teeth out with pliers. 
Then he shoved the severed head into an empty paint can, stuffed her body parts into plastic trash bags, 
loaded the remains into his pickup, and headed for New Jersey, depositing the parts in various locations. 

Throughout this atrocity, Rifkin proceeded with the cool deliberation of a Mafia hit man, as though he’d 
been murdering and disposing of victims his whole life. Finally, he had found something he had an 
aptitude for: sexual homicide. 

Eighteen months would pass before he claimed his second victim. He brought home another young 
prostitute while his mother was out of town, then bludgeoned, strangled, and dismembered her. Before 
long, however, he plunged into what he would later describe as his “acceleration period,” strangling 
hookers at a frenzied rate, sometimes at home, sometimes while they performed fellatio on him in his 
car. Seventeen women would die at his hands during his four-year spree. 

He was caught in June 1993, when a pair of New York State Troopers spotted him driving his pickup 
without a rear license plate. When they tried to pull him over, Rifkin sped away, leading the cops on a 
high-speed chase that only ended when he smacked his vehicle into a telephone pole. Under a tarp in the 
pickup’s bed, the troopers found the decomposing corpse of Rifkin’s final victim. 

He was given a 203-year sentence in prison. He now spends his time working on his pet project, a 
proposed rehabilitation center for prostitutes, where they would get free medical and psychological care, 
receive job training, and learn home, parenting, and financial skills. Rifkin calls his brainchild the 




Oholah House Foundation — supposedly named after two biblical prostitutes in the Book of Ezekiel 
murdered by their clientele. 

Another notorious New York serial killer of this period, Arthur Shawcross, committed atrocities even 
more unspeakable than those of Rifkin. Like the latter, however, he preyed primarily on hard-luck 
prostitutes — a fact that has undoubtedly contributed to the public’s relative lack of interest in his crimes. 

If Shawcross ’s account of his childhood is to be fully believed, he suffered the sort of torture almost 
guaranteed to produce a violent psychopath. According to his story, he was molested by an aunt, 
sodomized by his mother, and raped by a pedophile while still in grade school. He also insists that he 
regularly engaged in incest with his sister and cousin, was forced to perform fellatio on his girlfriend’s 
brother, and practiced bestiality with a variety of creatures, including chickens, sheep, and a horse. 

Whatever the truth of these claims, there is no doubt that he was a deeply disturbed child, so bizarre in 
his behavior that his schoolmates nicknamed him “Oddie.” He also manifested classic early warning 
signs of future psychopathology, including unnaturally protracted bed-wetting (which continued well 
into his teens) and a fondness for fire-starting. 

In 1968, this profoundly unstable young man — then twenty-three years old — was drafted into the army 
and sent to Vietnam. During one jungle mission, he supposedly raped, slaughtered, and cannibalized two 
peasant women who were collaborating with the Vietcong. Like the tales of his childhood torture, it is 
hard to know how much of this story is true, how much the rabid imaginings of a sick mind. He also 
bragged of having murdered a string of preadolescent prostitutes in Saigon, a claim that — in light of his 
later behavior — seems more plausible. In any event, there is little doubt that, as a forensic psychiatrist 
would later testify, Shawcross left the army suffering from a serious case of posttraumatic stress disorder. 

Discharged in 1969, he returned to his hometown in upstate New York, where he soon began to suffer 
from such violent flashbacks that an army psychiatrist recommended a stay at a mental hospital. 
Shawcross’s Christian Scientist wife, however, refused to sign the commitment papers. Not long 
afterward, his pyromaniac compulsions began to reassert themselves. After setting a string of fires — 
including a blaze that did $280,000 worth of damage to the paper factory where he worked — he was 
arrested and sentenced to five years in prison. 

Two years later, however, he was given an early release after saving the life of a prison guard during a 
riot. Returning to Watertown, he found a job as a handyman and spent his spare time fishing the local 
creeks and rivers. On June 4, 1972 — less than a year after his parole — he was walking across some open 
lots near his home when he heard someone call his name. Turning, he saw a ten-year-old neighbor boy, 
Jack Blake, stuck waist deep in a mudhole. Pulling the boy free, Shawcross, according to his story, told 
him to go home and clean up. When the boy refused and insisted on following the older man across a 
swamp and into the woods, something in Shawcross snapped. Hitting the boy across the throat with a 
savage chopping blow, he raped and strangled him. Then, as he subsequently confessed to police, he 
“cut parts of him out and ate them. I took his penis, his balls, his heart and ate them. Why I did this, I 




don’t know.” Later, Shawcross would tell psychiatrists that, sometime after sticking the body in a 
shallow grave, he had dug it up and had sex with it. 

Three months later, while fishing in a river, Shawcross spotted eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill playing 
nearby. After raping the little girl, he buried her, still alive, in a shallow grave beneath a bridge, packing 
leaves and wet mud into her mouth and nostrils until she suffocated. Later that same day, Shawcross 
returned to the crime scene to enjoy an ice-cream cone. He was spotted by a witness and quickly 
identified as a prime suspect. Cutting a deal with prosecutors, he confessed to the murder of Karen Hill 
and led investigators to Jack Blake’s body. In exchange he was given a maximum sentence of twenty- 
five years with a possibility of parole in fifteen. 

Astonishingly — and over the vehement objections of various prison psychiatrists — he won parole in 
March 1987, after doing his minimum sentence. At the time of his release, his parole officer penned a 
prescient memo: “At the risk of being melodramatic, the writer considers this man to be possibly the 
most dangerous individual to have been released to the community in many years.” This warning went 
unheeded. As a result, eleven more people would die at Arthur Shawcross’ s hands. 

In January 1988, after moving to Rochester, he picked up a twenty-seven-year-old prostitute, strangled 
her to death in his car, then tossed her body into the Genesee River. For the next year and a half, his MO 
would remain much the same. Sometimes, after killing a victim and dumping her body along the 
riverbanks or in the nearby woods, he would sneak back to have sex with the decomposing corpse. 
Occasionally, he carved out the sex organs and ate them. 

Most of his victims were local hookers, but a few were acquaintances like thirty-year-old June Stotts, a 
mildly retarded family friend. Offering to drive her to the beach one unseasonably warm November day, 
Shawcross suffocated her, raped her corpse, then — as he later described it — “cut her wide open in a 
straight line from neck to asshole. Cut out her pussy and ate it. I was one sick person.” 

Shawcross ’s habit of visiting the bodies of his victims to practice necrophilia and cannibalism proved to 
be his undoing. In June 1990, a police surveillance helicopter — on the lookout for the “Genesee River 
Killer” (as the media had dubbed him) — spotted him masturbating on a bridge over the area where one 
of the bodies had been recently recovered. Brought in for questioning, he quickly confessed to his 
crimes, though he showed no signs of repentance. On the contrary, he insisted that his victims were 
responsible for their own deaths since they had provoked him by ridiculing his sexual inadequacies. 

In the end, despite expert witnesses who testified that Shawcross was profoundly psychotic, he was 
found guilty and sentenced to ten consecutive twenty-five-year terms in prison. 

Besides Rifkin and Shawcross, there have been other, no less despicable killers who have achieved 
notoriety in recent annals of serial murder. Among them are: 



Harvey Carignan 




While stationed in Alaska during an army stint in 1949, the sociopathic Carignan was sentenced to hang 
for rape-murder, but escaped the gallows because of a legal technicality. Paroled after just nine more 
years, he embarked on a string of burglaries and assaults and soon landed back behind bars, where he 
remained until 1969. 

Four years later, while managing a gas station in Seattle, he murdered a teenage job applicant who had 
answered his “Help Wanted” classified — a crime that would earn him his homicidal nickname, the 
“Want-Ad Killer.” Shortly afterward — with detectives making things hot for him in Seattle — he 
decamped for Minneapolis, where, over the next two years, he perpetrated a series of shockingly brutal 
crimes, sexually assaulting his victims before bludgeoning their skulls with a hammer. 

Despite the savagery of these attacks, several women survived to identify Carignan, who was taken into 
custody by the Minneapolis police. Inside his car, investigators discovered road maps marked with 
dozens of incriminating, red-penciled circles that corresponded to the sites of various crimes linked to 
the “Want-Ad Killer.” Under questioning, Carignan tried paving the way for an insanity defense by 
claiming that he had killed under direct orders from God (whom he described somewhat vaguely as a 
mysterious figure “who has a large hood on and you can’t see His face”). The jury at his 1975 trial was 
unconvinced, and Carignan received the maximum sentence of forty years in prison. 

Patrick Kearney 

The psychopathic counterparts of the immaculately tidy gay men in the TV hit Queer Eye for the Straight 
Guy, Patrick Kearney and his live-in lover were fastidious in their habits. Inside their meticulously clean 
Redondo Beach apartment, more than a dozen murder victims were neatly dismembered with a hacksaw, 
then carefully arranged in identical trash bags for disposal along the Southern California freeways. 

The “Trash Bag Murders,” as the killings came to be known, began in April 1975, when the mutilated 
remains of a naked twenty-one-year-old male were discovered off a highway near San Juan Capistrano. 
Over the next two years, eight more male corpses turned up in various Southern California counties. All 
of them were shot in the head, sawed into pieces, and methodically packaged for dumping. Police finally 
got their break in March 1977, when friends of the final victim, seventeen-year-old John LaMay, 
supplied them with the name and address of the acquaintance LaMay had gone to visit on the day of his 
disappearance: David Hill. Warrants were immediately issued for Hill and Kearney, who remained at 
large until the first day of July, when they suddenly appeared at the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, 
pointed to their wanted posters hanging on the wall, and cheerfully announced, “That’s us.” 

Shouldering full responsibility for the slayings, Kearney claimed that he killed because “it excited him 
and gave him a feeling of dominance.” He eventually confessed to twenty-eight homicides. He received 
a life sentence; Hill was released for lack of evidence. 



Paul John Knowles 




A frequently reprinted news photo of Paul John Knowles shows him with a mane of tousled dark hair, 
cigarette dangling insouciantly from his lips — a brooding, darkly handsome man with a striking 
resemblance to the young Kris Kristoferson. His craggy good looks, combined with his easy charm and 
an indefinable air of danger, made him catnip to women and eventually earned him his homicidal 
nickname, the “Casanova Killer.” That psychonym, however, is somewhat misleading, since it suggests 
that Knowles was a Ted Bundy-like lady killer, a predatory sadist who preyed on the opposite sex. In 
truth, Knowles — for all the romantic-outlaw fantasy that women projected onto him — was nothing but a 
nihilistic lowlife who degenerated from a petty criminal into a homicidal drifter, randomly killing 
anyone unlucky enough to get in his way — male or female, young or old. At least eighteen people — and 
possibly as many as thirty-five — would die at his hands. 

His murderous spree began in July 1974. Escaping from a jail in Jacksonville, Florida — where he’d been 
locked up after a bar fight — he broke into the home of sixty-five-year-old Alice Curtis, who suffocated 
on her gag while Knowles ransacked the place. Though that killing was inadvertent, his next homicides 
were perpetrated with a frightening premeditation. While driving Mrs. Curtis’s stolen car, he spotted two 
little girls who knew his family — seven-year-old Mylette Anderson and her eleven-year-old sister, 
Lillian. Afraid that the girls had seen him and might serve as potential witnesses to his whereabouts, 
Knowles strangled both and dumped their corpses in a swamp. 




From 77?^ Final Days of John Knowles by Joe Coleman 



From that point on, Knowles became a one-man crime wave, drifting northward to Georgia, then across 
the country and back, leaving corpses wherever he went. He killed indiscriminately — hitchhikers and 
campers, stranded female motorists and businessmen befriended in bars. He broke into houses and 




murdered their owners. He picked up women in bars and killed them when they brought him home for 
sex. In Macon, Georgia, he stabbed to death a woman named Carswell Carr, then strangled her fifteen- 
year-old daughter and molested the teenager’s corpse. 

In November 1974 — four months into his cross-country killing spree — Knowles met a British journalist 
named Sandy Fawkes at a Holiday Inn bar in Atlanta. They embarked on a six-day fling, marred only by 
Knowles’s pathological inability to achieve an erection with a willing sex partner. Though sufficiently 
fond of Fawkes not to kill her, Knowles took out his frustration by attempting to rape one of Fawkes’s 
friends, Susan Mackenzie, at gunpoint. She managed to escape and notified the police. 

Like other spree killers, Knowles now acted with a suicidal abandon. Brandishing a sawed-off shotgun, 
he hijacked two vehicles in succession — first a police car, then a car belonging to a passing motorist — 
taking both drivers as prisoners. Heading to a remote spot in Pulaski County, Georgia, he handcuffed 
both men to a tree and executed each with a shot to the head. Not long afterward, he tried to crash 
through a police roadblock and was finally captured after a chaotic foot chase, bringing his four-month 
rampage to an end. The following day, while being escorted to a maximum security prison by a sheriff 
and an FBI agent, he lunged for the former’s revolver and was shot dead by the latter. 

Robert Hansen 

In Richard Connell’s famous 1924 short story, “The Most Dangerous Game,” a crazed Russian general 
named Zaroff — bored with shooting lions, tigers, and other conventional species of big game — stocks 
his private island with shipwrecked sailors and begins hunting humans. During a ten-year period 
beginning in 1973, a Jeky 11/Hyde sex-killer named Robert Hansen acted out a true-life version of this 
fantasy, turning lurid make-believe into nightmarish reality for more than a dozen unfortunate women. 

In many respects, Hansen’s life conformed to the familiar, if not stereotypical, pattern seen in the 
backgrounds of so many serial killers. Afflicted in his boyhood with a severe stutter, a disabling shyness, 
and a disfiguring case of acne, he grew up feeling shunned by the world, and especially by members of 
the opposite sex, for whom he developed a profound lifelong hatred. 

In his late twenties, he relocated from Idaho to Alaska — a haven for misfits seeking to remake their 
lives. Settling in Anchorage, he established himself as a successful entrepreneur, the owner of a thriving 
bakery business. Securing a pilot’s license, he purchased his own plane and became an expert wilderness 
hunter, stalking mountain goats, grizzlies, and wolves with bow and arrow and rifle. To his neighbors, 
he appeared to be a paragon: a prosperous self-made family man and community booster. 

By his early thirties, however, cracks were beginning to show in his exemplary facade. He was caught 
shoplifting a chain saw and arrested twice for attempted rape. These crimes were just a prologue for the 
enormities to come. 



Starting in 1973, when he was thirty-three years old, Hansen brought dozens of prostitutes and topless 




dancers to his wilderness retreat, flying them into the mountains in his private plane. Those who 
provided sex for free — “who came across with what I wanted,” as Hansen later put it — were taken back 
to Anchorage unharmed. The ones who demanded money for their favors met a terrible fate. After 
keeping them tied up in his cabin for several days of rape and torture, he would release them naked into 
the wilderness. Then, after giving them a head start, he would stalk them with a .223-caliber hunting 
rifle. Altogether, seventeen women were slain in this hideously depraved “sport.” 

The end came for Hansen in 1983, when one of his intended victims managed to break free as he was 
attempting to force her into his plane. Picking up Hansen for questioning, police quickly punctured his 
alibi. Before long, they had found incriminating evidence in his possession, including the hunting rifle 
and a map marked with the burial sites of his prey. The hunter was caged for life in 1984. 

Christopher Wilder 

Born and raised in Australia, Wilder began his life of sex crime at an early age. Before he was out of his 
teens he had been arrested for gang rape and given mandatory electroshock therapy, which proved to be 
totally useless. A few years later, he was back in trouble with the law after extorting sex from a student 
nurse. Emigrating to America, he prospered in the construction business and was soon leading the 
glamorous life of a swinging, 1970s-era playboy, complete with swanky seaside home in Boynton 
Beach, a speedboat, and a high-powered sports car that he raced in professional competitions. 

Beneath the glitzy exterior, however, Wilder was the same compulsive sex criminal he had been since 
his early adolescence. Time and again, his depraved behavior nearly landed him in prison. In 1971, not 
long after moving to Florida, he was arrested on a charge of soliciting women to pose for nude photos. A 
few years later, he was jailed after using physical force to coerce oral sex from an underage girl. Another 
arrest followed in 1980, when he lured a teenage girl into his car with the promise of a modeling job, 
drove her to a remote area, and raped her. For various reasons — through plea bargaining or the 
complainant’s refusal to testify or the inadmissibility of vital evidence — Wilder managed to evade long- 
term imprisonment in each of these cases. 




Chriatopter Wfck* 




(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



His luck appeared to run out in 1983. During a trip back home to Australia, he abducted two fifteen-year- 
old girls and forced them to pose for pornographic pictures. Charged with kidnapping and indecent 
assault, he was slated for a trial that seemed certain to end with a long-deferred and richly deserved 
prison term. Once again, however, he managed to wriggle free, returning to the United States when his 
family posted the $350,000 bail. 

Not long afterward, Wilder’s demons finally took full possession of him. In February 1984, a twenty- 
year-old aspiring model named Rosario Gonzalez — hired to hand out aspirin samples at the Miami 
Grand Prix, where Wilder was competing in his 310-horsepower Porsche — vanished without a trace. 

One month later, a former girlfriend of Wilder’s — a twenty-three-year-old part-time model named 
Elizabeth Kenyon — also disappeared. When the local newspaper reported that a Boynton Beach race 
driver was wanted for questioning in connection with the two cases, Wilder packed his car, kenneled his 
three pedigreed setters, and embarked on his final insane spree: an eight-thousand-mile cross-country 
odyssey of torture, rape, and murder that left a half dozen victims dead. 

Shopping malls were his preferred hunting ground. Approaching attractive young women, he would 
introduce himself as a professional photographer and offer them modeling opportunities. Some went 
with him willingly, others were forced into his car. Once alone with Wilder, the young women were 
subjected to prolonged torment. Several were hooked up to live electrical wires and tortured for hours. 

At least one had her eyelids sealed with superglue. When Wilder was done with them, he generally 
savaged their bodies with a knife and dumped the remains in some out-of-the-way spot, often in a canal 
or reservoir. 

On April 4 — one day after being added to the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list — Wilder abducted a sixteen- 
year-old girl named Tina Risico in Torrance, California. After repeatedly raping her, he forced her to 
become his accomplice in luring other young women into his clutches. Whatever shreds of humanity he 
retained seemed to manifest themselves a week later when — after having perpetrated several final 
atrocities — he drove Risico to Boston’s Logan Airport, bought her a ticket home to California, and saw 
her off at the gate. 

The following day, April 13, 1984, Wilder’s car was spotted at a New Hampshire gas station by two 
state troopers. As the lawmen approached, Wilder lunged for the .357 Magnum in his glove 
compartment. One of the troopers threw himself on Wilder, and in the ensuing struggle, the gun went off 
twice. Wilder was killed — perhaps in an intentional act of suicide — with a bullet to the heart. 

CASE STUDY 



Danny Rolling, the Gainesville Ripper 




The crimes committed by Danny Rolling sound like the stuff of a low-budget slasher film: five college 
students — four female, one male — brutally murdered by a madman over a weekend of terror. These 
ghastly killings occurred in Gainesville, Florida — an idyllic college town that had only recently been 
rated as one of America’s most livable places. Within a week of the murders, however, the media had 
bestowed a new and chilling nickname on the community: “Grisly Gainesville.” 

The first victims died August 24, 1990. Christina Powell and Sonja Larson, eighteen-year-old 
roommates at the University of Florida, were found butchered in their student apartment. The killer had 
broken in while they slept, bound and gagged them with duct tape, then raped and savaged them with a 
KA-BAR knife. Afterward, he had mutilated the corpses and arranged them in obscene poses as a final 
insult to the victims and an affront to the people who would discover them. 

The next night he struck again. This time the victim was eighteen-year-old Christa Hoyt, a sophomore at 
Santa Fe Community College. The killer broke into her home, then waited for her to return. When she 
did, he duct-taped her mouth and raped her. In a frenzy of violence reminiscent of the atrocities of the 
original Jack the Ripper, he then stabbed her to death, sliced off her nipples, cut her open from 
breastbone to groin, and decapitated the corpse, placing the head on a shelf before fleeing the scene. The 
savagery of this crime would earn him his tabloid nickname, the “Gainesville Ripper.” 

Hysteria gripped the community. Hundreds of students fled the state. Many who remained traveled in 
groups and avoided being alone. 

Though twenty-three-year-old Tracey Paules shared in the general unease, she was not overly 
concerned. Her roommate, also twenty-three, was an old high school pal; Manuel Taboada, a strapping 
six-foot-three-inch senior who weighed over two hundred pounds. With Manny around, no harm would 
befall her, she believed. 

She was wrong. 

In the early-morning hours of August 27, the Ripper crept into their apartment while they slept. Manny 
awoke to find himself under attack by the knife-wielding maniac. Though the young man put up a 
ferocious struggle, he was no match for the Ripper’s blade. Hearing the commotion, Tracey hurried to 
Manny’s bedroom door, where she was set upon by the killer. He subdued her with duct tape, raped, 
then killed her. 

With the city in a panic, police intensified their search for the sex-killer. Suspicion fell heavily on a local 
man named Edward Humphrey — a chronic troublemaker with a history of violently erratic behavior. But 
as the authorities focused their attentions on Humphrey, the real killer was miles away. 

His name was Daniel Harold Rolling. Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1954, he seems never to have 
had a chance at a normal life. His policeman father was a brutal martinet who terrorized the family, 
subjecting his children — and especially young Danny — to unrelenting physical and verbal abuse. By his 




early adolescence, the boy was heavily into alcohol and drugs and had made several failed suicide 
attempts. He had also become a Peeping Tom, a compulsion that would later evolve into housebreaking, 
rape, and, ultimately, sex-murder. 

At seventeen, he joined the Air Force, but was discharged two years later after being caught with 
marijuana. By 1979, he had turned to armed robbery — an offense that earned him several stints in the 
penitentiary. Paroled in 1989, Rolling returned to Shreveport and tried living with his parents. This ill- 
advised move culminated in an explosion of gun violence between father and son. After putting two 
bullets into the old man, Danny fled to Kansas City, then made his way down to Florida. August 1990 
found him in Gainesville, camping in the woods not far from the homes of the women who would 
become his first victims. 

After the slaughter in Gainesville, Rolling headed for Ocala, where, on September 8, he was captured 
after robbing a supermarket at gunpoint. At first, the police didn’t realize that they had bagged the 
Ripper. Rolling seemed like nothing more than a petty thief, short on talent and luck. Further 
investigation into his background, however, uncovered some disturbing facts. Officials learned that 
Rolling was wanted in Shreveport for the attempted murder of his father. Moreover, there had been a 
horrific triple homicide in Shreveport during the time that Rolling resided there with his parents — a 
crime that bore marked similarities to the Gainesville horrors. 

An examination of evidence gathered from the campsite where Rolling had stayed after arriving in 
Gainesville produced overwhelming physical evidence linking him to the murders, including a pubic 
hair that — thanks to DNA analysis — was matched with one of the victims. Before long, Rolling had 
confessed to the crimes, though he tried to pin the blame on an evil alter ego named “Gemini” — a ploy 
that fell apart when investigators discovered that he had gotten the idea from watching the 
movi eExorcist III. 

At his 1994 trial, his lawyer tried to persuade the jury that Rolling deserved sympathy because of his 
brutalized upbringing. Whatever sympathy they might have felt for the mistreatment he had suffered as a 
child, however, failed to mitigate their outrage over the atrocities he had committed as an adult. For five 
counts of murder, Danny Rolling was sentenced to die in the electric chair. 

Recommended Reading 

Colin Wilson and Damon Wilson , The Killers Among Us, Book II (1995) 



Time-Life Books , Serial Killers (1992) 




GALLERY OF EVIL: TEN AMERICAN MONSTERS 



LYDIA SHERMAN 
1825-1879 

Every era is haunted by its own particular monsters — dark, unsettling figures who incarnate the 
dominant fears of the time. In the late 1800s, when American women first organized to demand social 
and political equality, triggering powerful anxieties in men, that figure was the female serial poisoner. 
This nightmarish being became a stock feature of late-nineteenth-century popular culture, which 
spawned a whole genre of fictional crime stories about the unspeakable doings of assorted “domestic 
fiends” — homicidal maniacs in the guise of loving housewives, mothers, and caretakers. Far more 
unnerving, of course, were the real-life cases of women who gleefully wiped out large numbers of their 
nearest and dearest. Among the most infamous of these was the woman who has gone down in the 
annals of crime under the name of Lydia Sherman. 

Her original name was Lydia Danbury. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1825, she was just 
seventeen when she married her first husband, Edward Struck, a forty-year-old widower with six 
children. Within a year of their wedding, Lydia had given birth to a healthy girl. Six more babies 
followed in rapid succession. 




Lydia Sherman encourages her elderly husband to drink a glass of doctored wine 



With a wife and thirteen children to support, Struck — by then living with his family in Manhattan — took 
a job as a police officer. In 1863, however, he was fired in disgrace after failing to respond quickly 
enough when a knife-wielding drunkard attacked a hotel bartender. 

By then, Struck’ s children from his first marriage had grown up and left home, and one of Lydia’s 




babies had died of an intestinal ailment. That left six children in the household. With not a penny 
coming in to feed them, Struck plunged into a state of extreme despondency. Eventually, he refused to 
leave his bed. Deciding that he had become more trouble than he was worth, Lydia killed him with 
arsenic-laced porridge. The attending physician diagnosed the cause of death as “consumption.” 

Lydia was a forty-two-year-old widow with no income. Just a month after disposing of her husband, she 
began to feel disheartened by the difficulty of supporting six children on her own. In the first week of 
July, she poisoned the three youngest with arsenic. 

Lreed of these burdens, Lydia’s situation improved, particularly since her fourteen-year-old son George 
had gotten a job as a painter’s assistant. Unfortunately, George soon developed a condition known as 
“painter’s colic” and was forced to quit work. His mother gave him a week to recuperate. When he 
showed no signs of improvement, she killed him with arsenic- spiked tea. 

Only two of Lydia’s children still remained above ground: her eighteen-year-old daughter, also named 
Lydia, and little Ann Eliza, aged twelve. Ann Eliza was a frail child, frequently sick with fever and 
chills. Lydia began to feel oppressed by the burden of caring for her. In March 1864, she killed the little 
girl by mixing a few grains of arsenic into a spoonful of patent medicine. The cause of death was given 
as “typhoid fever.” 

Lor the next six or seven weeks, the two Lydias — mother and daughter — lived together in a small 
apartment on upper Broadway. In early May, after paying an overnight visit to her half sister in lower 
Manhattan, young Lydia returned home with a fever and took to bed. Her mother did not feel like caring 
for her. On May 16, 1866, after dutifully taking the foul-tasting medicine her mother had fed her, the 
eighteen-year-old girl died in convulsive agony and was laid to rest beside the bodies of her father and 
five siblings. 

Shortly afterward, Lydia moved to Stratford, Connecticut, where she met and married an old man named 
Dennis Hurlburt, a local farmer of considerable means. Slightly more than one year later, Hurlburt fell 
violently ill and died after eating a bowl of his wife’s special clam chowder. His death was attributed to 
“cholera.” 

The forty-six-year-old widow came into a considerable inheritance. If her motives had been entirely 
mercenary, she could then have tossed away her arsenic and never killed again. But — though Lydia was 
happy to profit from her crimes — money was not, in the end, what drove her. Like others of her breed, 
she was a confirmed predator, addicted to cruelty and death. 

Within months of Hurlburt’ s death, Lydia married Horatio N. Sherman, a hard-drinking widower with 
four children. In mid-November 1870 — just two months after the wedding — Lydia murdered Sherman’s 
youngest child, a four-month- old baby named Lrankie. The following month, she poisoned his fourteen- 
year-old daughter, Ada. 




The sudden death of his two children devastated Sherman. He began to hit the bottle harder than ever. 
After returning from one weeklong bender, he took to bed for several days before returning to work on 
Monday, May 8, 1871. When he came home from the factory that evening, Lydia was waiting with a 
nice cup of poisoned hot chocolate. Two days later, he was dead. 

The sudden, shocking death of the seemingly healthy Sherman aroused the suspicions of his physician, 
Dr. Beardsley. Securing permission to conduct a postmortem, Beardsley removed the stomach and liver 
and shipped them to a toxicology professor at Yale for analysis. Three weeks later, he received the 
results. Sherman’s liver was saturated with arsenic. A warrant was promptly issued for the arrest of 
Lydia Sherman. 

On June 7, 1871, she was picked up in New York City and transported back to New Haven, where she 
was charged with the murder of Horatio Sherman. Her trial was a nationwide sensation. In the end, 

Lydia was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the state prison 
at Wethersfield, where she died of cancer in 1879. 

BELLE GUNNESS 
1859 -? 

She was that rarest of all psychopaths: a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed 
but mostly for the sheer joy of it. Even more unusual was the extreme savagery of her crimes. There had 
been other female “murder fiends” in the late nineteenth century — Lydia Sherman, Sarah Jane Robinson, 
Jane Toppan. But they had all shared the traditional MO of female serial killers: poisoning their victims, 
then pretending that the deaths were due to natural causes. 

Belle Gunness was frighteningly different. True, she was not averse to eliminating an expendable spouse 
or superfluous child with a dose of strychnine when it suited her purposes. But the corpses that were dug 
up on her Indiana “murder farm” hadn’t been poisoned. They had been butchered. 

A forty-two-year-old Norwegian emigrant, Belle had purchased the farm in 1902 with the $8,500 
insurance money she came into when her first husband, Mads Sorenson, died suddenly in convulsive 
agony. Her first two babies — also heavily insured — had perished the same way. Though the symptoms 
were characteristic of strychnine poisoning, the doctors who examined the corpses saw nothing 
suspicious. 

Moving to the small town of La Porte, she set herself up on what she liked to call “the prettiest and 
happiest country home in northern Indiana.” Shortly thereafter, she married a young widower, Peter 
Gunness. Just nine months after the nuptials, he was killed when a cast-iron sausage grinder fell from the 
stove top and struck him directly between the eyes while he was reaching for a shoe. At least that was 
Belle’s explanation. So bizarre was this story that neighbors talked openly of murder. The insurance 
company, however, declared her husband’s death an accident, and Belle collected another hefty payment. 




That was when her homicidal career began in earnest. Over the course of the next six years, a succession 
of men found their way to Belle Gunness’s happy country home. Some were hired hands brought in to 
help with the farm work. Others were well-to-do bachelors lured to the farm by the classified 
matrimonial ads that Belle regularly took out in Norwegian newspapers throughout the Midwest. All of 
them vanished without a trace. 

Then, in the early-morning hours of April 27, 1908, the Gunness farmhouse burned to the ground. When 
the blaze was finally extinguished, firemen were aghast to discover the remains of four people — three 
children and an adult woman — stacked like cordwood in the cellar of the incinerated house. Though 
badly charred, the murdered children were recognizable as the youngest of Belle’s six offspring. The 
fourth corpse was assumed to be that of Belle herself. Positive identification was impossible, however. 
The woman had been decapitated, and her head was nowhere to be found. 







Belle Gunness 



(Corbis) 



Suspicion immediately fell on a disgruntled farmhand named Ray Lamphere, who was charged with 
murder. In the meantime, searchers sifted through the ashes in a search for the missing head. They never 
found it. What they did unearth sent shock waves throughout the nation — and earned Belle Gunness 
everlasting infamy as one of the most terrifying sociopaths in the annals of American crime. 

A dozen butchered corpses lay buried around the property: in a rubbish pit, a privy vault, a chicken yard. 
Each of the bodies had been carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey — head hacked off, arms removed 
from the shoulder sockets, legs sawed off at midthigh. The various pieces of each body — limbs, head, 
trunk — had been stuffed into separate grain sacks, sprinkled with lime, then buried. 

The discovery of these atrocities turned the Gunness farmstead into an instant, macabre tourist 
attraction. On the following Sunday, ten thousand curiosity seekers descended on the property, some 
from as far away as Chicago. Whole families strolled about the place like vacationing sightseers, while 
hawkers did a booming business in hot dogs, lemonade, and souvenir postcards of the “murder farm.” 
Inset was a photograph of Belle: “America’s Female Bluebeard,” as the newspapers quickly dubbed her. 

Under arrest, Lamphere — who had served not only as Belle’s hired hand but her lover as well — told a 
gruesome tale. Each of the victims had been murdered for money. But greed wasn’t Belle’s only motive. 
Judging from Lamphere’ s testimony (and from the grisly evidence unearthed in the Gunness farmyard), 
it was clear that she was a sexual psychopath. Despite her 250-pound bulk and mannish features, she 
wielded a seductive charm. Her victims had been lured into a secret bedchamber, where they were 
chloroformed, then slaughtered with an ax by the monstrous Belle. 

As to her fate, questions linger to this day. Did Lamphere — her suspected accomplice — kill her and her 
children for unknown reasons, then set fire to the farmhouse in an attempt to cover up his crimes? Many 
people believed so. 

Others, however, had doubts that the charred, decapitated woman in the cellar was Belle. For one thing, 
the body weighed just seventy-three pounds — inordinately small, even allowing for the shrinkage that 
results when meat is roasted at high temperatures. Lamphere himself claimed that Belle had staged her 
own death, then absconded with $100,000 in ill-gotten gains. In the end, she was officially declared 
dead. For many years, however, sightings of the infamous “Lady Bluebeard” were reported in places 
across America. In the popular mind, she continued to live on, a legendary monster immortalized in 
story and song: 



Belle Gunness was a lady fair, 




In Indiana State. 



She weighed about three hundred pounds, 
And that is quite some weight. 

That she was stronger than a man 
Her neighbors all did own; 

She butchered hogs right easily, 

And did it all alone. 

But hogs were just a sideline 
She indulged in now and then; 

Her favorite occupation 
Was a-butchering of men. 

To keep her cleaver busy 
Belle would run an ad, 

And men would come a-scurrying 
With all the cash they had. 

Now some say Belle killed only ten, 

And some say forty-two; 



It was hard to tell exactly, 




But there were quite a few. 



And where Belle is now no one knows, 

But my advice is fair: 

If a widow advertises 

For a man with cash — beware ! 

H. H. HOLMES 
1860-1896 

Herman Mudgett was a native of Gilmanton Academy, a tiny hamlet nestled among the Suncook hills at 
the southern end of New Hampshire’s Lake District. Born in 1860, Herman was a delicately built boy, 
blue-eyed and brown-haired, with a reputation as “the brightest lad in town.” Among his schoolmates he 
was also known to be slightly odd. His father devoutly believed in the Bible, especially Proverbs 13:24: 
“he that spareth his rod, hateth his son.” Herman’s father loved his son and displayed his devotion by 
beating the boy with savage regularity. 

Throughout his childhood, Herman kept mostly to himself, shunning other children. He did have one 
friend, a slightly older boy named Tom. But Tom died under tragic circumstances, plunging to his death 
from the upstairs landing of a deserted house he was exploring with Herman. Herman saw the accident 
clearly. He was standing right behind Tom at the time, so close that he could put out his hand and touch 
his friend’s back without even reaching at all. 

Partly because of his delicate stature and partly because of his peculiar personality, Herman was often 
persecuted by the village bullies. One episode in particular left a lasting impression. One morning, two 
of Herman’s older schoolmates waited until the village doctor was away from his office on a house call, 
then waylaid Herman. Dragging him kicking and screaming inside, they wrestled him over to the human 
skeleton that the doctor had mounted on a metal stand in a shadowy corner of the office. They forced the 
bony fingers of the skeleton against the hysterical boy’s face, then let Herman go and left him shrieking 
on the floor. 





H. H. Holmes asphyxiates two child victims inside a steamer trunk 



Ironically, it was to this traumatic experience that Herman later attributed his lifelong interest in 
anatomy. By the time he was eleven, he was already conducting secret medical experiments — first on 
frogs and salamanders, then on rabbits, kittens, and stray dogs. 

New England was not large enough to contain Herman Mudgett’s ambitions. After a year of college in 
Vermont, he transferred to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, graduating with a medical degree 
in 1884. By then, Mudgett was an accomplished con artist who had learned how to bilk insurance 
companies of thousands of dollars. His method was simple: he would take out a life insurance policy for 
a fictitious person, acquire a corpse, claim that the corpse was the insured individual, and cash in the 
policy. Of course, the success of the scheme depended on Mudgett’s ability to acquire dead bodies. But 
at that activity, too, he had already become quite proficient. 



In 1886, Herman Mudgett showed up in Chicago. By this time, he had assumed the pseudonym by 
which the whole world would eventually know him: Dr. Henry Howard Holmes. 





Within a few months, the debonair Dr. Holmes had taken a job as a druggist’s assistant in the 
fashionable suburb of Englewood. The drugstore was owned by an elderly widow named Holton. Before 
the year was out, Mrs. Holton had abruptly disappeared. “Gone to California to visit relatives,” the 
handsome young assistant told inquiring customers. Only by then, he was no longer an assistant. The 
1887 city directory listed a new proprietor of the pharmacy at Sixty-third and Wallace Streets in 
Englewood: Dr. H. H. Holmes. 

Before long, the profits from his store — combined with proceeds from assorted scams — allowed Holmes 
to construct a magnificent new residence for himself on a vacant lot across the street from his drugstore. 
In one respect, the building bore a striking similarity to its owner. Its exterior spoke of nothing but 
affluence and good taste. But behind the handsome facade it presented to the world, there existed a 
labyrinthine realm of madness and horror. 

Holmes called his new building the Castle. It contained over one hundred rooms linked by secret 
passageways, fake walls, concealed shafts, and trapdoors. Some rooms were soundproofed and padded 
with asbestos; peepholes in the doors allowed Holmes to see into them. Many were equipped with gas 
pipes connected to a large tank in the cellar. From a control panel in his office, Holmes could fill any of 
the chambers with poison gas. Chutes ran from the second and third floors of the building to the 
basement, where Holmes kept a laboratory, complete with dissection table, surgical instruments, and an 
oven large enough to accommodate a human body. 

Shortly after moving into the Castle, Holmes invited a watchmaker named Conner — who was blessed 
with a statuesque wife, Julia, and a lovely infant daughter named Pearl — to set up shop in a section of 
the pharmacy. Before long, the seductive Dr. Holmes had made Julia his mistress. When she became 
pregnant by Holmes, the outraged Mr. Conner packed up his belongings and left for good. Holmes, 
however, was not prepared for the responsibilities of fatherhood. He performed a crude abortion on 
Julia, killing her in the process, then dispatched little Pearl with chloroform. 

When the Chicago World’s Fair opened in 1893, decent lodgings were hard to find in the city. Holmes 
began renting rooms to tourists. Few were ever seen alive again. Throughout this period, local medical 
schools received a regular supply of human skeletons from Dr. Holmes. Since the schools were in 
desperate need of high-grade anatomical specimens, no questions were asked. 

Holmes was finally arrested after killing his confederate, Ben Pitezel. Holmes used Pitezel’s corpse to 
pull off his favorite life insurance fraud, but was caught by clever investigators. The discovery of the 
horrors inside his Chicago “Murder Castle” — along with the revelation that he had killed three of 
Pitezel’ s children to cover up his scam — sent shock waves throughout the country. The trial of the 
“Arch-Fiend” (as Holmes was quickly dubbed) became the century’s greatest criminal sensation. 
Following his conviction, he confessed to twenty-seven murders, though authorities believed that the 
death count was closer to fifty — ten times the number racked up by Jack the Ripper. 





Police discover human remains in the basement of Holmes’ “Murder Castle” 
(Courtesy of Rick Geary) 



Because the careers of these two serial killers coincided, some crime buffs regard them as transatlantic 
counterparts. But others — in recognition of the handsome young doctor’s appalling double life — have 
seen Holmes as the American version of a different Victorian monster. If ever there was a real-life Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, these people say, then surely Henry H. Holmes was the man. 

ALBERT FISH 
1870-1936 



Edward Budd was an able-bodied, energetic young man, the eldest child of a poor, working-class family 
scraping by in a New York City tenement. In late May 1928, hoping to find summer work as a 
farmhand, he placed a classified ad in a newspaper: “Youth, 18, wishes position in country.” 




Albert Fish by Joe Coleman 

Several days later, a frail-looking old man with gentle eyes and a drooping mustache showed up at the 
Budds’ apartment. Introducing himself as Frank Howard, the little man explained that he was hiring help 
for his truck farm on Long Island. He had spotted Edward’s ad in the paper and had come to interview 
the young man for a job. 

Mr. Howard gave Edward the once-over and seemed satisfied by what he saw. He made a generous offer 
and arranged to return in a few days to pick Edward up and drive him to the farm. 

A few days later, on Sunday, June 3, the old man returned. Edward was out on an errand. Mrs. Budd 
invited her son’s new employer to have lunch with the family while they awaited the young man’s return. 

Shortly afterward, while Mr. Howard sat at the Budds’ kitchen table, the youngest member of the family 
— a glowing little girl named Grace — wandered into the room. She instantly caught the old man’s eye. 

He called her over, sat her on his knee, and exclaimed over her beauty. She reminded him, he said as he 
caressed her silky brown hair, of his own ten-year-old granddaughter. 



Suddenly, he turned to her parents as though an idea had just struck him. His niece, who lived in upper 
Manhattan, was having a birthday party that afternoon. He had decided to attend the party for a few 




hours, then pick Edward up afterward. Perhaps Grace would like to come along with him? It was going 
to be quite a party — with lots of children and games and ice cream. He would take good care of her and 
bring her home before dark. 

Mrs. Budd felt a little uncertain about letting her child go off with a virtual stranger. Still, Mr. Howard 
seemed so utterly harmless that her qualms seemed foolish. And besides, the old gentleman had offered 
her son a desperately needed job. 

She allowed herself to be persuaded. “Let her go,” Grace’s father urged. “She doesn’t see much good 
times.” Grace was gotten up in her prettiest outfit. Then, the creature known as Frank Howard — whose 
name was really Albert Fish and whose kindly demeanor concealed a mind of unimaginable depravity — 
took the child by the hand and led her away from home toward a subway station. 

Before boarding the train, the old man stopped to retrieve a canvas bundle he had stashed behind a 
corner newsstand on his way to the Budds’ apartment. Wrapped inside were a butcher’s knife, a cleaver, 
and a saw. 

To describe Albert Fish as the black sheep of his family is almost a laughable understatement. No 
eminent American family has ever been cursed with any sheep blacker. Though his ancestors fought in 
the Revolutionary War and his namesake had served as secretary of state in the Grant administration, 
Albert Fish — whose given name was actually Hamilton Fish — came from a branch of the family 
characterized by poverty and psychosis. When he was five, his parents, unable to afford his upbringing, 
placed him in a public orphanage. There, Fish had a teacher whose preferred form of discipline was to 
strip her young charges naked and beat their bare bodies while the other boys and girls watched. Fish 
came away from this experience with a singular education. What he learned, as he later put it, was to 
“enjoy everything that hurt.” 

At twenty-eight, Fish was making an irregular living as a housepainter and handyman. He married a 
nineteen-year-old woman who would eventually abandon him for another man, leaving Fish to care for 
their six children. He was an affectionate father and grandfather. At the same time, he admitted to other 
feelings toward children. As he grew older, he became increasingly possessed by what he described as a 
“lust for their blood.” 

Obsessed throughout his life with religion, Fish began to have searing visions of Christ and His angels 
and to hear the voice of God addressing him in dark, quasi-biblical terms. “Blessed is the man who 
correcteth his son in whom he delighteth with stripes.” “Happy is he that taketh Thy little ones and 
dasheth their head against their stones.” He saw himself as Abraham and each of his little victims as a 
young Isaac. “It seemed to me,” he later explained, “that I had to offer a child for sacrifice, to purge 
myself of sins, iniquities, and abominations in the sight of God.” 



His compulsion to kill grew overpowering. 




Even today, no one knows the precise number of Fish’s victims, though it seems certain that he molested 
several hundred and slew at least fifteen. Most were children of the slums. Many of his victims were 
black, and authorities — after a cursory investigation — simply gave up the search. Eventually, authorities 
would learn some of the horrifying details from Albert Fish himself. 

But that wouldn’t happen until six years after Grace Budd’s disappearance. And on June 3, 1928, Grace 
Budd’s parents had no way of knowing any of these facts about the monster who called himself Frank 
Howard — the friendly old man who led their little daughter onto the New York Central Railroad, while, 
tucked under one arm, he carried the canvas bundle containing the tools he liked to think of as his 
“implements of hell.” 

Over the course of the next six years, the New York City police — led by Detective William King of the 
Missing Persons Bureau — conducted a massive manhunt for the Budd girl and her kidnapper. Hopes 
were raised and dashed with dismaying regularity. 

Then, in November 1934, a letter addressed to Grace’s mother arrived at the Budds’ apartment. Its 
contents were unspeakably demented. The anonymous writer began by recounting a story he had heard 
about “a famine in China,” during which boys and girls under the age of twelve were seized and cut up 
and their meat sold. The writer explained that he had been told this story by an acquaintance, a sea 
captain who had lived in Hong Kong. “On Sunday June the 3 1928,” the letter continued, “I called on 
you at 406 W. 15 St. . . . We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat 
her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. ... I took her to an empty house in Westchester. ... I 
choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take her meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. 
How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven.” 

By dint of old-fashioned sleuthing, Detective King managed to trace the letter to its source. A trap was 
laid, and Fish was arrested. His confession stunned even the most hardened officers. 

Fish revealed that Grace was not his intended victim at all. He had originally planned to kill her brother. 
His intent was to lure Edward up to an abandoned house in suburban Westchester, overpower him, bind 
him with stout cords — and slice off his penis. Afterward, he planned to take the train back to the city, 
leaving the trussed and mutilated boy to bleed to death on the floor of the cottage. 

The moment he saw little Grace, however, he changed his plan. It was she he wanted to sacrifice, not her 
brother. And so he made up the birthday party story on the spot. 

After leading her out of the city to a place known locally as Wisteria Cottage, he left her out in the 
empty house’s front yard picking wildflowers. He then had made his way to an upstairs bedroom and 
stripped completely naked. Concealing himself behind a door, he called to Grace to come upstairs. 

When she reached the landing, he leapt out at her and strangled her, kneeling on her chest and climaxing 
twice as she expired. 




Then he cut her body into pieces and disposed of them in various places around the property. All except 
for a few pounds of her flesh, which he had carried back into the city with him, wrapped in newspaper. 
Fish’s trial in 1935 held the nation riveted with its steady stream of shocking revelations — including 
Fish’s incredible disclosure that he had used the butchered chunks of the little girl’s body to make a 
human stew, cooking her flesh in a pot with carrots, onions, and strips of bacon, devouring the infernal 
concoction over a period of about a week. 

Meanwhile, Fish took a liking to Dr. Fredric Wertham, senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital, who had 
been retained by the defense to examine the madman. For the first time, Fish opened himself up to 
another human being, revealing the incredible story of his life and crimes — a history so appalling that, 
years later, after a long career of dealing with the criminally insane, Wertham would continue to regard 
Fish as the most wildly deranged human being he had ever encountered. 

Among other incredible admissions, Fish explained that one of his favorite forms of sexual gratification 
consisted of shoving sewing needles up into his crotch, just behind the scrotum. Wertham had difficulty 
believing this claim until X-rays were taken which revealed twenty-seven sewing needles lodged around 
Fish’s pelvic region. 

In the end, Fish was found guilty and sentenced to death. Even the jurors believed he was insane. But as 
one of them later explained, they felt he should be electrocuted anyway. 

On Thursday, January 16, 1936, Albert Fish went to the chair — the oldest man ever to be electrocuted at 
Sing Sing. 

EARLE LEONARD NELSON 
1897-1928 

Even as a baby, Earle Nelson had the ability to unsettle those who encountered him. According to one 
crime writer, the earliest surviving photograph of little Earle showed “a loose-mouthed degenerate infant 
with a vacant expression.” The picture was taken shortly after Earle was left an orphan, both his parents 
having died of syphilis. Less than a year old, he was taken into the home of his maternal grandmother, a 
Bible-thumping widow who instilled in him a lifelong fascination with Scripture. 

In spite of her efforts to provide him with a stable home life, Earle’s behavior grew increasingly erratic 
as he matured. At the dinner table, he seemed barely socialized, devouring food with the ferocity of a 
caged beast. He routinely managed to lose his clothing whenever he left the house. When he wasn’t sunk 
into profound self-pitying depressions, he was gripped by uncontrollable rages. By the age of seven, he 
had already been expelled from grade school and earned a neighborhood reputation as a petty thief and 
shoplifter. 





Earle Leonard Nelson in custody 

In 1907, shortly after his tenth birthday, Earle suffered a serious head injury when he bicycled in front of 
an oncoming trolley car and was sent flying into the cobblestones. He remained in a coma for nearly a 
week before regaining consciousness. It is possible that the brain damage he sustained in this accident 
contributed to his future psychopathology. Or perhaps — given his family inheritance of instability and 
the bizarre behavioral symptoms he had manifested from infancy — his life would have turned out the 
same even if he hadn’t been hit by the trolley. 

In any event, his formal education ended when he was fourteen. Dropping out of school, he took a 
succession of menial jobs, supplementing his meager earnings (most of which he spent in the brothels of 
the Barbary Coast) with burglary. By then he was residing with his aunt Lillian, his grandmother having 
died a few years earlier. Despite Earle’s increasingly erratic behavior — his Tourette’s-like tendency to 
spew obscenities at the dinner table, his brooding obsession with the Book of Revelation, his freakish 
habit of walking around on his hands whenever a guest dropped by for coffee — Lillian remained 
staunchly supportive of her bizarre nephew. When he was arrested for housebreaking in 1915, she made 
a tearful appeal on his behalf at his trial. Her plea was ignored, however, and Earle was sentenced to two 
years in San Quentin. 

Released from prison during the height of the Great War, Earle enlisted in the military but spent a good 
part of his stint in a naval mental hospital, where he was diagnosed as a constitutional psychopath. 
Discharged in 1919, the twenty-two-year-old Nelson took a job as a hospital janitor and soon fell in love 
with a grizzled fifty-eight-year-old spinster named Mary Martin. Before long, this very odd couple had 
married. The new Mrs. Nelson found herself living with a madman who continuously accused her of 




infidelity when he wasn’t ranting about the Great Beast of the Book of Revelation and proclaiming that 
he himself was Jesus Christ. Not long after Earle raped her in a hospital bed while she was recuperating 
from a serious illness, Mary decided to leave him. A year later, he attacked a twelve-year-old girl in the 
basement of an apartment building and landed back in a mental hospital. 

He was discharged in June 1925. Less than one year later, he embarked on the rampage that would make 
him the most feared and prolific serial killer of his era. 

On February 20, 1926, he showed up at the doorstep of Mrs. Clara Newman, a sixty-year-old spinster 
who ran a boardinghouse in San Francisco. There was a vacancy sign in her front window. Nelson, 
explaining that he was looking for a place to stay, asked to see the available room. Once he had the 
landlady alone, he strangled her with his bare hands, then raped her corpse. 

During the next few months, Nelson ranged along the West Coast — from San Francisco to Seattle and 
back — on a monstrous spree of murder and sexual mayhem. Ten more women died at his hands between 
February and November 1926. All his victims were landladies. All were strangled, then raped after 
death. A number of the corpses were left stuffed in small spaces — inside a trunk, behind the basement 
furnace. By now, the press had dubbed the unknown maniac the “Dark Strangler.” A massive manhunt 
was launched all along the West Coast. 

Nelson moved inland. On December 2, he murdered Mrs. John Brerard, forty-nine, of Council Bluffs, 
Iowa. On December 27, he strangled twenty-three-year-old Bonnie Pace of Kansas City, Missouri. The 
following day, he killed another Kansas City woman, twenty-eight-year-old Germania Harpin. He also 
choked to death Mrs. Harpin’ s eight-month-old son by stuffing a rag down the infant’s throat. 

A nationwide alert was now on for the monster. Witnesses had provided the police with a description of 
the suspect: dark hair, stocky build, sloping forehead, protruding lips, and grotesquely oversized hands. 
There was something apelike about his appearance. The press hung a new tag on the phantom killer: the 
“Gorilla Murderer.” 

Nelson headed eastward. Between April and June he murdered four more women in Philadelphia, 
Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago. Then he turned north into Canada, where he was finally captured after 
murdering two final victims in Winnipeg, a sixteen-year-old flower girl named Lola Cowan and a 
housewife named Emily Patterson, whose violated corpse he stuffed under a bed. 

Tried and convicted in November 1927, Nelson was hanged the following January in Winnipeg. He 
went to his death clutching his Bible and proclaiming his innocence. His blood rampage had lasted for 
slightly more than a year, from February 1926 until June 1927. During that brief span of time, twenty- 
two victims met their death at the beastlike hands of the Gorilla Murderer. 



EDWARD GEIN 
1906-1984 




A beautiful blonde slides out of her bathrobe, steps into the shower, and turns on the water. She pulls the 
plastic curtain closed. The water gushes down. She soaps herself, smiling. Suddenly, over her shoulder, 
a shadow appears on the other side of the curtain. It draws nearer. The curtain rips back. The shadow, 
shaped like an old woman, clutches a butcher knife. The big blade slashes downward, then slashes again. 
And again. Screeching chords on the sound track match the dying shrieks of the victim. Her streaming 
blood whirlpools down the drain. 

The sequence, of course, is the famous shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’ sPsycho — the most 
frightening moment from the most influential horror movie of modern times. AitevPsycho, a new kind of 
monster began stalking the movie screens of America: the psychotic “slasher.” And showering was 
never the same again. 




Ed Gein 



The brilliance of Hitchcock’ s film derives from his genius for drawing us into a world of total insanity — 
a nightmare realm where a bathroom becomes a chamber of horrors, a shy young man turns into a crazed 
transvestite, and a sweet little old lady turns out to be a mummified corpse. By the time the film is over, 
the shaken audience steps away from the screen saying, “Thank God it was only a movie.” 

Perhaps the scariest thing aboutPsycho, then, is this — 

It was based on the truth. There really was a maniac whose unspeakable deeds served as the inspiration 
foxPsycho. His name wasn’t Norman Bates, however. It was Edward Gein. 



Gein grew up on a hardscrabble farmstead a few miles outside of Plainfield, Wisconsin, a small, 
featureless town situated in an area that has been called the “Great Dead Heart” of the state. His father, 





George, was a hard-luck type with a weakness for alcohol. Though George could be brutal when drunk, 
he was no match for his domineering wife, Augusta. 

But then, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have matched Augusta’s ferocious willpower. Or her all- 
consuming madness. 

Raised in a fiercely religious atmosphere, she had gradually developed into a ranting fanatic who harped 
on a single theme: the loathsomeness of sex. Looking around the world, all she perceived was rottenness 
and filth. She had fled the city of LaCrosse — the place of Eddie’s birth — because she regarded it as 
modern-day Sodom, reeking of sin and perversion. But Plainfield, in her warped view, had turned out to 
be no better. The small, God-fearing town was, in her eyes, a hellhole of depravity. She kept her two 
boys — Ed and his older brother Henry — tightly bound to her apron strings and imbued them with her 
own twisted sense of universal wickedness, the whorish ways of women, and the vileness of carnal love. 

When George Gein dropped dead of a heart attack in 1940, no one — not even his family — was sorry to 
see him go. Left alone with their mother, the two boys fell even more powerfully under her poisonous 
spell. Henry, at least, seems to have had some sense of Augusta’ s destructive influence and tried to help 
his brother break away. But Eddie wouldn’t listen. He worshiped Augusta and did not take kindly to his 
brother’s criticisms. 

In 1944, Henry was found dead on the Geins’ property — presumably from a heart attack while putting 
out a brush fire. No one ever came up with a convincing explanation for the strange bruises on the back 
of his head. 

Now Eddie had his mother all to himself. But not for long. In 1945, Augusta suffered a stroke. Eddie 
tended to her day and night, though nothing he did ever seemed to be good enough. Sometimes — her 
voice slurred but still dripping with contempt — she would call him a weakling and a failure, just like his 
father. At other times, she would beckon him to her side and pat the mattress beside her. Eddie would 
crawl into her bed and cling to her, while she cooed in his ear: he was her own little man, her baby. At 
night, he wept himself to sleep, praying to God to spare his mother’s life. Eddie could never manage life 
without her; she had told him so herself. 

But his prayers went unheeded. 

A few months later, Augusta was stricken with another, even more devastating stroke. She died in 
December 1945. Eddie Gein, thirty-nine years old, was left all alone in his dark, empty, shut-off world. 

It was then that he began his descent into the chaos of unutterable madness. For a long time, no one 
seemed to notice. A loner all his life, Ed started keeping more to himself — locked up behind the weather- 
beaten walls of his gloomy, ramshackle farmhouse. And even when he did venture out in public — to run 
an errand in town or perform some handyman chores or drink an occasional beer at Mary Hogan’s 
roadside tavern — he didn’t seem that much stranger than he had before. A little dirtier maybe, more in 




need of a bath. But he had always been a queer one, ever since childhood. Folks just accepted Eddie’s 
peculiarities. 

True, he seemed to talk more and more about the magazine articles he was fascinated by: stories of Nazi 
atrocities, South Sea headhunters, and sex-change operations. And then there were the “jokes” he told. 
When Mary Hogan, the big, foul-mouthed tavern keeper, suddenly disappeared from her place one 
afternoon, leaving nothing but a puddle of blood, Eddie began kidding that she was staying over at his 
house. But that kind of sick humor was just something you’d expect from a weirdo like Eddie Gein. 

Even the stories about the creepy things at his farmhouse didn’t faze most folks. Some neighborhood 
kids who had visited his home claimed that they had seen shrunken heads hanging on the walls of 
Eddie’s bedroom. Eventually the rumors got back to Eddie, who had a plausible explanation. The heads, 
he said, were World War II souvenirs, sent to him by a cousin who had served in the South Seas. His 
neighbors shrugged. Trust Eddie to have weird souvenirs like that. 

They never imagined that Eddie was capable of hurting anyone. Hell, the meek little man with the 
lopsided grin couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He wouldn’t even go deer hunting, like every other man 
in town. 

That’s what folks said. Then Bernice Worden disappeared. 

It happened on November 16, 1957 — the first day of deer-hunting season. Late that afternoon, Frank 
Worden returned home from a fruitless day in the woods and proceeded directly to the corner hardware 
store owned and managed by his mother, Bernice. To his surprise, she wasn’t there. Searching the 
premises, Worden discovered a trail of dried blood leading from the storefront out the back door. He 
also discovered a sales receipt for a half gallon of antifreeze made out to Worden’s last customer: Eddie 
Gein. 

When the police arrived at Eddie’s farmhouse to question him about Mrs. Worden’s whereabouts, they 
came upon the body of the fifty-eight-year-old grandmother in the summer kitchen behind the house. 
Hanging by her heels from a pulley, she had been beheaded and disemboweled — strung up and dressed 
like a butchered deer. 

The stunned and sickened officers called for reinforcements. Before long, a dozen or more lawmen 
showed up at the farm and began exploring the unspeakable contents of Ed Gein’s house of horrors. 
What they found during that long, hellish night was appalling beyond belief. 

Soup bowls made from the sawed-off tops of human heads. Chairs upholstered in human flesh. 
Lampshades fashioned of skin. A boxful of noses. A shade pull decorated with a pair of women’s lips. A 
belt made of female nipples. A shoe box containing a collection of preserved female genitalia. The faces 
of nine women, carefully dried, stuffed with paper and mounted, like hunting trophies, on a wall. A skin 
vest, complete with breasts, which had been fashioned from the tanned upper torso of a middle-aged 




woman. 



Later, Eddie confessed that, at night, he would lace the skin around himself and go mincing around the 
farmhouse, pretending to be his mother. 

At around 4:30A.M„ after much searching through the ghastly clutter of Gein’s home, an investigator 
discovered a bloody burlap sack shoved under a fetid mattress. Inside was a freshly severed head. Two 
tenpenny nails, each with a loop of twine tied to the end of it, had been inserted in the ears. The head 
was Bernice Worden’s. Eddie Gein was going to hang it on the wall as a decoration. 

At first, everyone assumed that Eddie Gein had been running a murder factory. But during his 
confessions he made a claim that seemed, at first, almost too incredible to accept. He wasn’t a mass 
murderer at all, he insisted. Yes, he had killed two women — Bernice Worden and the tavern keeper 
Mary Hogan, whose preserved, peeled-off face had been found among Ed’s gruesome collection. But as 
for the rest of the body parts, Eddie revealed that he had gotten them from local cemeteries. For the past 
twelve years, ever since his mother’s death, he had been a grave robber, turning to the dead for the 
companionship he could not find among the living. 

In the strict definition of the term, Eddie Gein was not a serial killer. He was a ghoul. 

Gein spent the remainder of his days locked away in mental institutions. Long before his death from 
cancer at the age of seventy-eight, he had been immortalized in Alfred Hitchcock’ sPsycho, based on a 
novel whose author — Robert Bloch — had been inspired by the Gein affair. When Eddie died on July 26, 
1984, they took his body back to Plainfield and buried it next to his mother. Eddie Gein was back where 
he belonged. 

HARVEY MURRAY GLATMAN 
1928-1959 

Born in the Bronx in 1927, Harvey Glatman moved to Denver with his parents, Albert and Ophelia, 
while in grade school. With his big nose, Dumbo ears, and horn-rimmed glasses, he grew up to resemble 
a flesh-and-blood version of the nerdy Milhouse from TV’s The Simpsons. His lifelong terror of the 
opposite sex was clear from the beginning. A socially maladroit loner, he couldn’t speak to a girl 
without turning beet red. 





(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



He was also a precocious sex pervert, indulging in bizarre erotic practices at a shockingly early age. 
Glatman was no older than four when his mother walked into his bedroom and found him naked, one 
end of a taut string tied around his penis, the other attached to a dresser drawer. It was the first 
manifestation of the rope fetish that would dominate Glatman’ s life and ultimately lead to the terrible 
deaths of three women. 

By the time Harvey was eleven, he was heavily into the perilous activity known as autoerotic 
asphyxiation: putting his head in a noose, throwing the rope over a rafter, and choking himself while he 
masturbated with his free hand. When his parents discovered him at this “game,” they consulted a 
doctor, who attributed it to “growing pains.” He assured the Glatmans that their boy would outgrow it. 

Far from subsiding, Glatman’ s perverse compulsions only grew worse. In high school, he began 
breaking into homes, coming away from one these forays with a stolen .26-caliber handgun. Soon he had 
progressed from thievery to sexual assault. Sneaking into the houses of attractive young women, he 
would tie them up at gunpoint and caress them while he masturbated. 

In June 1945, while awaiting trial on a burglary charge, the seventeen-year-old Glatman abducted a 
Denver woman and subjected her to the usual molestation before driving her home. She immediately 
informed the police, and, before long, the teenager was behind bars in Colorado State Prison. 

Paroled after less than a year, Glatman — at the urging of his parents, who hoped he could put his 
checkered past behind him — moved to Yonkers, New York, where he found a job as a TV repairman — a 
trade he had learned in prison. In the grip of his growing pathology, however, he managed to stay out of 
trouble for less than a month. In August 1946, brandishing a toy pistol, he accosted a pair of strolling 
young lovers at midnight, bound the man with a length of rope, then began fondling the woman. 
Wriggling free of his bonds, the boyfriend attacked Glatman, who drew a pocketknife, slashed at the 
man’s shoulders, then fled into the shadows. 




Boarding a train that night, he headed for Albany, where, a few days later, he made a botched assault on 
a nurse, then mugged two middle-aged women. The police — by then on the lookout for someone who 
was targeting women — spotted Glatman just two days later as he followed a potential victim along a 
darkened street. Searching him, they found his toy pistol, a pocketknife, and a length of stout rope. Two 
months later, Glatman — just nineteen years old — found himself back in prison, this time with a sentence 
of five to ten years. 

During his incarceration, Glatman was evaluated by a prison psychiatrist who diagnosed him as a 
“psychopathic personality — schizophrenic type” with “sexually perverted impulses as the basis for his 
criminality.” Despite this grim assessment, Glatman won parole after less than three years. 

Released into parental custody, he returned to Denver, moved in with his mother, and spent the next four 
and a half years working at various odd jobs and checking in with his parole officer. Finally, in early 
1957, having earned his full liberty, he moved to Los Angeles, where his dormant psychopathic cravings 
burst into full, deadly bloom. 

Finding work as a TV repairman, Glatman began to frequent the seedy photography clubs where sex- 
starved creeps could shoot “art pictures” of naked young models. Many of these women were aspiring 
starlets, eking out a living any way they could. They also accepted jobs on the side. Glatman, using the 
pseudonym “Johnny Glenn,” approached a baby-faced nineteen-year-old named Judy Dull. He explained 
that he worked as a freelance photographer for a true detective magazine and asked if she would be 
interested in posing for him. The pay was twenty dollars an hour. 

Judy Dull agreed. 

Taking her to his apartment, Glatman explained that she would have to be bound and gagged and look 
convincingly frightened, as though she were about to be raped. Whatever apprehensions Judy Dull might 
have had, they were allayed by the innocuous appearance of the goofy-looking Glatman. Trussed up and 
placed in an armchair, the young woman threw herself into her part — assuming a terrified expression 
and twisting in her seat — while Glatman snapped away. All at once, the game turned terribly real. 

Pulling out a gun, he undid her bonds, forced her to strip, and repeatedly raped her. When darkness fell, 
he drove her out to the desert, strangled her with a length of sash cord, took some photographs of her 
corpse, and left her there for the buzzards and coyotes. 

Two more victims followed: a twenty-four-year-old divorcee he met at a lonely hearts club and a former 
striptease dancer who, like Judy Dull, posed for a seedy “modeling agency.” Both were killed in 
Glatman’ s signature style: trussed, photographed, raped at gunpoint, garroted, then posed after death and 
photographed again before being dumped in the desert. 

In the summer of 1958, a state patrolman cruising the Santa Ana freeway happened upon a man and a 
woman struggling beside a car parked on the shoulder. Stopping to investigate, the officer found 
Glatman grappling with a twenty-eight-year-old model named Lorraine Vigil, who had managed to 




wrestle the killer’ s gun away from him as he was attempting to abduct her. 



In custody, Glatman confessed to everything. Searching his apartment, police discovered a toolbox 
containing his horrifying photo collection. In some of the pictures, the women were fully clothed. In 
others, they were partly or completely nude. Bound and gagged, they wore terrified expressions. The 
most appalling photographs of all, however, were the ones he took of each victim after her death, the 
limbs carefully arranged, the corpses posed just so for his camera. 

After pleading guilty, Glatman was sentenced to death. “It’s better this way,” he said when the judgment 
was handed down. He died in San Quentin’s gas chamber on September 18, 1959. 

To understand Harvey Glatman is to understand the basic psychology of the serial killer. 

— Colin Wilson 

JOHN WAYNE GACY 
1942-1994 

The cops had already paid one visit to John Wayne Gacy in 1978. Awakened in the middle of the night 
by shrill, continuous shrieks coming from the house behind her own, a neighbor had called the police. A 
squad car was dispatched to Gacy’s brick ranch house in the Chicago suburb of Norwood Park. But the 
officers who questioned the owner came away convinced that nothing was wrong. 

Then a fifteen-year-old boy named Robert Piest disappeared. 

Piest was a bright, ambitious student who worked after school as a stockboy in a pharmacy. On the day 
of his disappearance — December 11, 1978 — he told his mother that he was leaving the drugstore early to 
see a man about a summer job. The man was a local building contractor. His name was John Wayne 
Gacy. 

When Piest’ s parents reported that their son was missing, the cops put a tracer on Gacy and discovered 
that he’d done time in jail ten years earlier. The charge was sodomy. The victim had been a fifteen-year- 
old boy. 

Before long, Gacy was under arrest and a team of investigators was headed for his house with a search 
warrant. As they combed the rooms for clues, they turned up suspicious and increasingly ominous bits of 
evidence — pornographic magazines featuring sex between older men and young boys. A vibrating dildo 
encrusted with fecal matter. And — stashed throughout the house and garage — personal items that clearly 
belonged to a number of teenage boys: jewelry, clothes, wallets. 

They also found something else — a trapdoor in a living room closet that opened into a flooded crawl 
space. 





(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham) 

After draining the crawl space, the inspectors lowered themselves into the putrid muck. There they 
uncovered the sickening evidence of horrendous crimes: lardlike globs of decomposed human flesh and 
an assortment of human bones, some of them blackened with rot, others covered with dried, mummified 
flesh. 

Confronted with these discoveries, Gacy immediately confessed to the atrocities that would mark him as 
one of America’s most monstrous serial killers: the torture-murder over a period of half dozen years of 
thirty-three young men. 

The news seemed unbelievable at first, not only because of the enormity of the crimes — which set a 
new, nightmarish record — but also because of Gacy’s public persona. As far as the outside world was 
concerned, John Wayne Gacy was a pillar of the community — a successful, hard-driving businessman 
who still found time to devote himself to community affairs and charitable causes. One of his favorite 
activities was dressing himself up as “Pogo the Clown” and performing for sick children at the local 
hospital. He was also active in local politics and was a valued member of the Junior Chamber of 
Commerce. Hanging on the wall of his home office were photographs of him shaking hands with the 
mayor of Chicago and First Lady Rosalynn Carter. 

But a very different picture emerged in the course of Gacy’s examination by court-appointed 
psychiatrists. 

Raised by an abusive, alcoholic father — who spent much of his time deriding his son as a “sissy” — Gacy 
grew up to be a pudgy hypochondriac whose homosexual drives were a source of profound self-loathing. 
In an attempt to appear “normal,” he married early and settled down in Waterloo, Iowa, where he ran a 
Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Even while cultivating this unimpeachable persona, however, he was 
leading a secret life as a seducer and molester of underage males. Arrested in 1968 for sodomy, he was 




hit with a ten-year jail term. His wife filed for divorce on the day of the sentencing. 

Gacy proved to be such a model prisoner that he was paroled after less than two years. Relocating to 
Chicago, he married again and started his contracting business. Before long, however, his darkest 
impulses reasserted themselves — in even ghastlier form. He became a human predator, a cunning, 
remorseless sadist who tortured and murdered for his own depraved pleasure. 

Though some of his victims were acquaintances or employees, most were street hustlers and runaways. 
Gacy — sometimes posing as a cop — would snare his prey at the bus station or the local gay district, 
“Bughouse Square.” Back in his house, he would lock the young man in handcuffs, then spend hours 
sodomizing and torturing him before committing the final outrage — the “rope trick.” Looping a length of 
nylon rope around the victim’ s neck, Gacy would insert a wooden hammer handle through the cord, then 
twist the handle slowly, reaching his own sexual climax as the victim strangled to death. 

Once the boy was dead, Gacy buried the remains in the crawl space. Twenty-nine decomposed corpses 
were recovered from the muck beneath his house. Eventually, Gacy ran out of room in the crawl space 
and began dumping bodies in a nearby river. 

Gacy tried to convince the court that he suffered from a split personality and should not be punished for 
his crimes since they were committed by an evil alter ego named “Jack.” The jury did not accept his 
insanity plea and, in March 1980, sentenced him to death. 

Fourteen years passed before the sentence was carried out. During that time, he turned out scores of 
grotesquely cheery paintings — many of circus clowns and Disney characters. These became coveted 
collectibles among connoisseurs of such things. He also took pride in his sinister celebrity, bragging that 
he had been the subject of “eleven hardback books, thirty-one paperbacks, two screenplays, one movie, 
one off-Broadway play, five songs, and over 5,000 articles.” 

Just after midnight on May 10, 1994, he was executed by lethal injection. His last words were: “Kiss my 
ass.” 

GARY HEIDNIK 
1943-1999 

Vincent Nelson hadn’t seen his girlfriend, Josefina Rivera, since Thanksgiving Day 1987, when she’d 
stormed out of his apartment after a bitter fight. So he was amazed when she suddenly showed up at his 
front door four months later, close to midnight on March 24. But it wasn’t just her unexpected 
reappearance that stunned him. It was Josephine’s physical condition. She looked like hell; as haggard 
and ghastly as a concentration camp victim. 

Most shocking of all was the incredible story that Josefina had to tell. Barely keeping her hysteria under 
control, she poured out an unbelievable tale of horror to Nelson — how she and several other women had 




been kept chained in a basement by a madman who had subjected them to four months of rape, beatings, 
and torture. And there was even worse. Two of the girls had died. The madman — whose name was Gary 
Heidnik — had chopped up the body of the first murder victim and forced Josefina and the other captives 
to eat the dead woman’s flesh. 

In short, Josefina Rivera looked like hell for a good reason. She had been living there for the past four 
months. 

Nelson’s first impulse was to go after Heidnik himself but, after reconsidering, he called 911 instead. At 
first, the cops were dubious. But their skepticism gave way to horror after they obtained a search warrant 
and broke into Heidnik’ s North Philadelphia slum house early the next morning. Josefina Rivera had 
been telling the truth. Gary Heidnik’ s basement was a torture dungeon. Inside the dank, filthy cellar, the 
cops found two half-naked black women chained to the pipes. A third, completely naked, was 
imprisoned in a shallow, plank-covered pit. 

Upstairs, they found grisly support for Rivera’s most incredible accusation. Carefully stored inside 
Heidnik’ s kitchen freezer was a woman’s chopped-off forearm, while a roasting pan inside the oven 
contained a charred human rib bone. Rivera’s claim was evidently true: Gary Heidnik had force-fed 
human flesh to his captives. He had turned them into cannibals. 

By then, Heidnik was under arrest. Across the country, headlines blared the news about the 
“Philadelphia Torture Dungeon” and “Heidnik’s House of Horrors.” Staggered by the story, Americans 
shook their heads and asked themselves one question: What kind of creature could commit such 
atrocities? 

Gary Heidnik had been born with real potential. He possessed a superior, 130-point IQ and the kind of 
stock market savvy that makes for Wall Street success. But Heidnik was not destined for a career on 
Wall Street. His parents made sure of that. 

His father was a savage disciplinarian — the kind of man who dealt with his son’s bed-wetting problem 
by hanging the stained bedsheets out the front window for the whole world to see. His mother was a 
drunkard who left the family when Gary was two. She ultimately committed suicide. 

By the time Heidnik entered the army in 1962, he was beginning to manifest the severe psychological 
problems that would afflict him for the rest of his life. Between the time the army discharged him for 
mental disability in 1963 and the day of his arrest nearly a quarter century later, Heidnik would be in and 
out of psychiatric institutions twenty-one times. He also made more than a dozen suicide attempts 
through hanging, drug overdose, and reckless driving. One time, he smashed up a lightbulb and forced 
himself to swallow the pulverized glass. 

During more lucid periods, Heidnik applied himself to a variety of pursuits. He trained as a practical 
nurse. With the savings from his army pension, he purchased a run-down three-story house and became 




a landlord. He also found Jesus. In 1971, he incorporated the United Church of the Ministers of God, 
elected himself bishop, and attracted a handful of followers, who contributed $1,500 to the operation. 
Heidnik invested the funds in the stock market and, within ten years, built up a half-million-dollar 
portfolio. 

Heidnik’ s sexual tastes ran to mentally retarded black women. One of his many girlfriends bore him a 
daughter in 1978. In May of that year, Heidnik and his girlfriend drove up to a mental institution in 
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where the woman’s sister, Alberta — a thirty-four-year-old with the IQ of a 
toddler — had resided for the past twenty years. Heidnik and his girlfriend got permission to take Alberta 
for a day’s outing. When they failed to bring her back, the cops were alerted. They found Alberta 
cowering in Heidnik’ s basement. Medical tests revealed that she had been raped and sodomized, her 
throat infected with gonorrhea from forced oral sex. 

Heidnik was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to three to seven years in the penitentiary. He ended up 
serving only four years of the time, most of it in various mental institutions. One day, halfway through 
his sentence, Heidnik scribbled a message and passed it along to his guards. He couldn’t talk anymore, 
the message read, because the devil had shoved a cookie down his throat. For the next two and a half 
years, Gary Heidnik was a mute. 

Following his discharge, he married a Filipino mail-order bride who bore him a son. She abandoned him 
after tiring of being forced to watch him have sex with assorted black prostitutes. Shortly after her 
departure, Heidnik became obsessed with a plan to create a baby factory in the basement of his house. 
His intention was to kidnap, imprison, and impregnate ten women. Josefina Rivera, a twenty-six-year- 
old part-time prostitute, became the first. Heidnik picked her up on Thanksgiving Day and took her to 
his apartment. When they finished having sex, he performed the “Heidnik Maneuver” on her, throttling 
her into submission. Then he forced her down to the basement and chained her to a pipe. 

Two days later, he added another victim to his horror harem — a mildly retarded African-American 
acquaintance named Sandra Lindsay. The women were subjected to torture, beatings, and daily rape. 
Their diet consisted of bread and oatmeal, with an occasional dog biscuit treat. Before long, other 
victims followed — five women in all. 

Heidnik’ s punishments became more insane. He subjected them to electrical shocks and shoved 
screwdrivers into their ears. When Sandra Lindsay died after dangling by her wrists from a pipe for a 
week, Heidnik dragged her body upstairs, dismembered it with a power saw, cooked her head in a 
saucepan, roasted her rib cage in the oven, and ground up her flesh in a food processor. 

Then he mixed the ground meat with dog food and fed it to the surviving captives. 

When twenty-three-year-old Deborah Dudley started giving him trouble, Heidnik decided to treat her to 
some electric shock therapy. He threw her in a water-filled pit and stuck a live electric wire in after her. 
The wire touched her chains and killed her. Heidnik stored her body in his freezer for a few days, then 




drove it out to Wharton State Forest in New Jersey and dumped it in the woods. 



Two days later, Rivera managed to escape and made a beeline for her boyfriend’s apartment. 

On July 1, 1988, Gary Heidnik was found guilty on eighteen counts, including two of first- degree 
murder. When his father was informed that his son had been sentenced to die, the old man replied, “I’m 
not interested.” After the usual delays, Heidnik was executed by lethal injection on July 6, 1999. 

JEFFREY DAHMER 
1960-1994 

Perhaps the horror could have been avoided. Certainly, warning signs appeared along the way — signs 
that there was something wrong with Jeffrey Dahmer. Something very wrong. 

But then, millions of people suffer from emotional disturbances during their early years, and they do not 
grow up to be like Jeffrey Dahmer. They do not grow up to be monsters. 

He was born in Milwaukee but raised in Bath, Ohio — a comfortable middle-class community. His 
parents detested each other and were — as Dahmer later recalled — “constantly at each other’s throats.” 
Their endless squabbling left them little time for their eldest son. Friendless and neglected, Dahmer 
retreated deeper and deeper into his own little world of fantasy. 




TTk TnutStofj 'lha( I lavs Bss.1 

Trying to EJj»i For Two Yurt. 



Jeffrey Dahmer comic book 




(Courtesy of Hart D. Fisher) 



He took up a unique hobby: killing small animals, skinning them, and scraping off their meat with acid. 
In a backyard shed, he displayed his collection of squirrel and chipmunk skeletons. He also created his 
own, private pet cemetery at the side of his house. Sometimes, however, he didn’t bury the bodies. 
Sometimes, he staked them into trees. 

Starved for attention, he resorted to desperate acts. Though he did well in high school, his behavior was 
often bizarre. He would emit sheeplike bleats during class and collapse in the hallways in mock-epileptic 
fits. When the high school honor roll society assembled for its yearbook portrait, Dahmer sneaked into 
the picture. The prank was not discovered until the photograph was developed. The editor was so 
outraged that he took a Magic Marker and blotted out Dahmer’ s face. In the published picture, Dahmer 
stands surrounded by other students, his features veiled in blackness. 

It was an appropriate image. By that time, a deadly darkness had already begun to envelop Dahmer’ s 
life. He had started to drink heavily. His fantasies of torture, mutilation, and death had become even 
more intense — more obsessive. 

One day in 1975, several neighborhood boys, strolling through the woods behind the Dahmer house, 
came upon a shocking sight — a decapitated dog’s head impaled on a stick. Nearby, they found its 
skinned and gutted body nailed to a tree. 

In 1978, during Dahmer’s senior year, his parents’ poisonous marriage finally came to an end. The 
couple split up, going their separate ways. Dahmer was left alone in the house with nothing but his 
increasingly deranged fantasies. 

A few weeks after his mother abandoned him, he picked up a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker named Steven 
Hicks and invited him home. The two shared some beers, chatted, had sex. When Hicks announced that 
he had to be moving on, Dahmer smashed him in the back of the skull with a barbell and strangled him. 
Then he dragged the body into the crawl space under the house, dismembered it, and stored the pieces in 
plastic bags. Later, he buried the bones — only to dig them up, pulverize them with a sledgehammer, and 
scatter the fragments in a wooded ravine behind the house. 

Jeffrey Dahmer’s career of carnage had begun. He was eighteen years old. 

He tried college for a while, but dropped out of the Ohio State University after only a few months and 
enlisted in the army. To his buddies, he seemed like a “regular guy” until he began to drink. Then a very 
different Jeffrey Dahmer emerged: moody, aggressive, defiant. Though he had enlisted for six years, the 
army discharged him after two. 



He went to live with his grandmother in West Allis, near Milwaukee, getting a job in a blood bank. In 




1985, he went to work at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company as a general laborer. That same year, 
something else happened to Jeffrey Dahmer. Something far more significant — and far more appalling. 
His terrifying pathology, dormant for nearly six years, came raging back to life. 

He began hanging out at a local gay bar. One night, he and a pickup took a room at the Ambassador 
Hotel. The two men got drunk, had sex, passed out. When Dahmer awoke the next morning, the other 
man was dead, blood dripping from his mouth. Dahmer went to a nearby shopping mall and purchased a 
suitcase, which he took back to the hotel room. After stuffing the corpse inside, he called a cab and 
transported the body back to his grandmother’s house, where he dismembered and disposed of it. 

A year later, Dahmer killed his next victim: another gay man he had picked up at the club and taken to 
his grandmother’s house. Dahmer kept the victim’s skull as a ghoulish souvenir after scraping it clean of 
flesh. Another victim followed soon afterward. 

Dahmer had several brushes with the law during the next few years. In 1986, he was arrested for lewd 
and lascivious behavior after urinating in front of some children. Two years later, he lured a thirteen- 
year-old Laotian boy to his apartment in Milwaukee, drugged him with a sedated drink, and fondled 
him. Arrested on a charge of second-degree sexual assault and enticement of a child for immoral 
purposes, he spent ten months in jail before being released in March 1990. 

During the next year, Dahmer butchered three more men. At some point, neighbors noticed a putrid odor 
leaking from his apartment. But when they knocked on Dahmer’ s door to complain, he explained that 
his freezer had broken and the meat gone rotten. His apologetic manner was so convincing that the 
neighbors bought the story. 

In May 1991, he came even closer to being caught. Shortly after midnight on the twenty-seventh, two 
women spotted Dahmer chasing a naked and bleeding teenage boy down an alley. The cops were called. 
But when they arrived to question Dahmer, his powers of persuasion saved his skin once again. He 
managed to convince the cops that he and the boy were gay lovers engaged in a harmless spat. The 
police left the dazed fourteen-year-old boy in Dahmer’ s clutches. 

Later, the teenager’s butchered remains were found amid the other human debris in Jeffrey Dahmer’ s 
charnel house. 

During the next two months, Dahmer claimed five more victims. Then, on a muggy night in late July 
1991, two Milwaukee patrolmen saw a dazed man stumbling toward them, a pair of handcuffs dangling 
from one wrist. Flagging down their squad car, he gestured wildly toward Dahmer’ s apartment building 
and stammered out a tale of attempted murder. The police went to investigate. What they found left them 
reeling with disbelief. They found Jeffrey Dahmer’ s chamber of horrors. 

The drawers of the bedroom highboy were crammed with Polaroids of body parts and mutilated corpses 
— including one shot of a torso eaten away from the nipples down by acid. That was just the beginning 




of the nightmare. Inside a freezer, police found three human heads plus an assortment of organs: 
intestines, lungs, livers, kidneys, and a heart. Dahmer told the police that he was saving the heart to “eat 
later.” 

Another head was stored in the refrigerator next to an open box of baking soda. Seven skulls and five 
complete skeletons were stashed in various places around the apartment, along with miscellaneous 
remains: bone fragments, decomposed hands, sexual organs in a lobster pot. The police also found 
bottles of acid, chloroform, and formaldehyde, and three electric saws. 

Altogether, these ghastly trophies represented the remains of eleven victims. Dahmer would later 
confess to seventeen murders in all. 

The revelation of Dahmer’ s unspeakable deeds sent shock waves across America. At his 1992 trial, his 
attorney argued that the very nature of Dahmer’ s atrocities — “skulls in a locker, cannibalism, making 
zombies, necrophilia, lobotomies, defleshing” — was proof of his madness. The jury, however, rejected 
the insanity defense and found Dahmer guilty. During his own final statement, Dahmer expressed a 
desire to die — a wish that was fulfilled in November 1994, when he was bludgeoned to death by another 
prisoner. 

Dahmer was cremated, though not before his brain was removed, setting off one last bitter dispute 
between his parents. Arguing that her son “always said that if he could be of any help, he wanted to do 
whatever he could,” Dahmer’ s mother petitioned to have the brain donated to science for research into 
the neurological roots of antisocial behavior. His father, on the other hand — claiming that he wanted “to 
put the whole thing behind him” — was eager to have the organ destroyed. The matter was settled in 
December 1995, when a judge, citing Dahmer’s own wishes as conveyed in his last will and testament, 
ordered the brain cremated. 




SEX AND THE SERIAL KILLER 



It goes without saying that serial killers tend to have extraordinarily aberrant sex lives. Their brutalized 
upbringings render them incapable of experiencing anything resembling real love. Many of them are 
impotent under normal conditions. They can only get aroused when they have another human being in 
their absolute power — a helpless, terrified object to be tortured, debased, slaughtered, and perhaps 
violated after death. 

Lacking any capacity for empathy or guilt, serial killers are unconstrained by the inhibitions that keep 
other people from acting out their darkest fantasies. To these psychopaths, there is nothing forbidden, 
nothing taboo. They exist in a realm beyond the bounds not only of civilized behavior but even of 
ordinary criminal behavior. As a result, they indulge in activities that most people would find not just 
incomprehensible but inconceivable. 

PERVERSIONS 

The technical term for a sexual perversion is “paraphilia,” which literally means “abnormal love.” In our 
own anything-goes age, of course, it’ s seriously unhip to suggest that there is something “abnormal” 
about any form of sex play between consensual adults, whether it’s smearing baked beans all over each 
other or watching videos in which scantily clad females squish earthworms beneath their feet. Still, even 
the most diehard erotic libertarian would be hard put to defend the kinds of practices routinely engaged 
in by serial killers. 

The average panty fetishist, for example, might purchase some linge-rie from Victoria’s Secret under the 
pretense of buying a sexy gift for his girlfriend — or, in more extreme cases, acquire a used pair of 
female underpants from a sleazy adult-oriented Web site. A serial killer like William Heirens, however, 
is more likely to break into the bedroom of a sleeping woman, rifle through her bureau, have an orgasm 
while slipping into her undies, then murder and mutilate her when she wakes up and discovers him in the 
act. 

Clipping and saving pubic hair from their sexual conquests is another common fetish among men. The 
serial killer’ s version of this practice is to remove the entire vulva of a victim, as exemplified by the 
Wisconsin ghoul, Ed Gein, who collected a whole shoe box full of preserved female genitalia. 

Sexual voyeurism — which the average Peeping Tom satisfies by peering into his neighbors’ bedroom 
windows — is another aberration that serial killers practice in a particularly malevolent way. They may 
masturbate while watching an accomplice rape and kill a captive. In the case of Charles Ng and Leonard 
Lake, they produced their own pornographic videos by abducting victims and subjecting them to 
horrendous sexual torture before the camera. 

In short, anyone delving into the sex lives of serial killers will find that these psychopaths often take 




common paraphilias to the most hideous extremes. Others indulge in the kind of unspeakable acts 
described by Krafft-Ebing inPsychopathia Sexualis: cannibalism, vampirism, necrophilia. And a few 
serial killers have engaged in practices so outrageously sick, so grotesquely depraved, that it is 
impossible to find parallels to them, even in the pages of Krafft-Ebing ’s massive survey of sexual 
deviancy. 

SADISM 

The standard psychiatric reference book known as theDSM — th ^Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of 
Mental Disorders — distinguishes between two forms of sadism. The first is “Sadistic Personality 
Disorder,” a condition in which someone “is amused by or takes pleasure in the psychological or 
physical suffering of others.” 

It’s safe to say that all serial killers fit this diagnosis. Whatever other rewards they may derive from their 
crimes — a warped sense of omnipotence, media celebrity, even, at times, money — the fundamental fact 
is that they enjoy what they do. Making other people suffer and die is their idea of fun. Their credo is 
summed up by one of the scariest characters in American fiction, the psychopathic killer in Flannery 
O’Connor’s famous story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” who declares: “No pleasure but meanness.” 

The second type of sadism identified by theDSM is “Sexual Sadism.” This is one of the major paraphilias 
— a perversion of the erotic instinct in which the suffering of a victim is not just generally enjoyable but 
intensely arousing, often to the point of orgasm. 

While not every serial murderer suffers from this perversion, a great many do. Indeed, the figures most 
closely associated in the popular mind with the term “serial killer” — from Jack the Ripper to John 
Wayne Gacy — were all, to one extent or another, sexual sadists. 

The Man Who Invented Sadism 

No single person “invented” sadism, of course. The love of cruelty is a component of human psychology 
as old as the species itself. From the enormities of Caligula to the unspeakable crimes of Vlad the 
Impaler and Gilles de Rais, there have always been people who revel in inflicting torture and death on 
their fellow beings. 





Sadistic sketch by Gerard Schaefer 
(Courtesy of Adam Parfrey) 



Until relatively recently, however, there was no technical term to describe such behavior. In the English 
language, the word “sadism” only goes back a hundred years or so. (It wasn’t until 1897 that it first 
appeared in print, according to th ^Oxford English Dictionary. ) In that sense, “sadism” is like “serial 
killer”: a modern expression for an age-old phenomenon. 

The man we have to thank for this useful addition to our vocabulary was Comte Donatien Alphonse 
Francis de Sade, commonly known as the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). Possessed of a “volcanic” sex 
drive coupled with a taste for extreme depravity, de Sade was tossed into the Bastille in 1778 for various 
perverse activities. (Knifing prostitutes and pouring hot wax into their wounds and masturbating on a 
crucifix were just a few of the “excesses” he was accused of.) During his many years in prison, he 
passed the time dreaming up the most violently pornographic fantasies imaginable and turning them into 
books lik eJustine, Philosophy of the Boudoir, andTTzc 120 Days of Sodom. 

Anyone who has seen the movi tQuills might get the impression that de Sade was a champion of sexual 
and artistic liberation, unjustly persecuted by a repressive, hypocritical regime threatened by his lust for 
life. In fact, he was a fantastically depraved aristocrat with a nihilistic contempt for everything that 
ordinary people value as decent, moral, and virtuous. To say that his notorious work,77ic 120 Days of 




Sodom, is a catalogue of every conceivable perversion is not quite accurate, since the activities it 
describes are so sheerly monstrous as to go well beyond what most of us are capable of conceiving. 

Formerly he loved to fuck very youthful mouths and asses; his later improvement consists in snatching 
out the heart of a living girl, widening the space that organ occupied, fucking the warm hole, replacing 
the heart in that pool of blood and come, sewing up the wound, and leaving the girl to her fate, without 
help of any kind. 

— fromThe 120 Days of Sodom 

Science Looks at Sadism 

The first psychiatrist to look closely at the more extreme forms of sadistic behavior was the eminent 
German physician Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Besides coining the term “masochism” (named after the 
Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose famous novel, Venus in Furs, deals with a man who 
craves humiliation), Krafft-Ebing made a major contribution to the literature of morbid psychology with 
his classic book, Psychopathia Sexualis — a massive compendium of every known perversion, illustrated 
with hundreds of detailed case histories. At the time of its initial publication in 1886, the book was 
considered so shocking that its author was nearly expelled from the prestigious British Medico- 
Psychological Association. Even today, it makes for deeply disturbing reading. Still, it is a significant 
work, one that clearly demonstrates there’s nothing new about serial murder. 

Of course, Krafft-Ebing doesn’t use the term “serial murder,” which wouldn’t enter the language for 
another hundred years. The term he uses is the German word lustmord or “lust-murder.” The essence of 
this crime is extreme sadistic violence against the victim. The lust-murderer doesn’t just kill his victims. 
His ultimate pleasure comes from savaging their bodies: disemboweling them, cutting out their genitals, 
etc. For such blood-crazed sadists, violence is a substitute for sex. In a later edition of his book Krafft- 
Ebing cites Jack the Ripper as a classic example, noting that the killer did “not seem to have had sexual 
intercourse with his victims, but very likely the murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse 
were equivalents for the sexual act.” 

Besides Jack the Ripper, Krafft-Ebing included case studies of other equally deranged, but far less 
famous, lust-murderers of the day. There was a man named Gruyo, who strangled six prostitutes in the 
course of ten years. After each murder he “tore out their intestines and kidneys through the vagina.” 
There was an English clerk named Frederick Baker, who abducted and butchered a little girl, then went 
home and wrote in his diary: “Killed to-day a young girl; it was fine and hot.” There was a young 
Frenchman named Leger who, while wandering through a forest, “caught a girl twelve years old, 
violated her, mutilated her genitals, tore out her heart, ate of it, drank the blood, and buried the remains.” 
There was a Hungarian hospital worker named Tirsch, who waylaid an old woman in the woods, 
strangled her, then “cut off the dead woman’s breasts and genitalia with a knife, cooked them at home, 
and in the course of the next few days, ate them.” 




CASE STUDY 



Verzeni the Lust-Killer 

One of the cases to which Krafft-Ebing devotes particular attention was that of an Italian man, Vincenz 
Verzeni. Though infinitely more obscure than his contemporary Jack the Ripper, Verzeni committed a 
series of crimes so appalling that Krafft-Ebing regarded him as the “prototypical” lust-murderer for 
whom “sadistic crime was a substitute for coitus.” 

Verzeni was born in a small Italian village in 1849. As is often the case with serial killers, his perverted 
predilections began to manifest themselves in childhood, when he discovered that strangling chickens 
gave him “a peculiar feeling of pleasure.” From the age of twelve, he killed large numbers of hens, then 
covered up the act by claiming that a weasel had gotten into the coop. 

By the time he reached adulthood, he had begun to crave human victims. He assaulted several women, 
including a twenty-seven-year-old named Gala, attempting to strangle her while kneeling on her 
abdomen. For unexplained reasons, he was not arrested for these attacks. In the meantime, his blood 
mania was growing more intense by the day. 

In December 1871, a fourteen-year-old servant girl named Johanna Motta set out for a neighboring 
village at around seven in the morning. When she failed to return by evening, her master set out to look 
for her. He found her naked corpse lying by a path near some fields not far from the village. The girl had 
been horribly mutilated. Her intestines had been torn from her body and were lying nearby. Her mouth 
had been stuffed with dirt. A chunk of her right calf had been ripped from her leg and was hidden under 
a pile of straw, along with scraps of her clothing. There were strange abrasions on her thighs. 

Nine months later, early on the morning of August 28, 1871, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named 
Frigeni set out into the same fields. Several hours later, her naked body was found by her husband. She 
had been strangled with a leather thong. As with the previous victim, her abdomen had been ripped open 
and her intestines yanked out. 

The following day, as nineteen-year-old Maria Previtali was walking through a field, she became aware 
that someone was following her. It was her cousin, Vincenz Verzeni. All at once, the twenty-two-year- 
old Verzeni sprang at the girl and began to strangle her. As he loosened his grip for an instant to see if 
anyone was near, the girl scrambled to her knees and begged for mercy. Verzeni relented and let her go. 
He was quickly arrested. 

In custody, Verzeni readily confessed to his crimes. Strangling women gave “indescribable feelings” of 
pleasure. As soon as he wrapped his fingers around their throats, he got an erection. It didn’t matter if 
the victims were “old, young, ugly, or beautiful.” Choking them, he said, was better than masturbation. 

He was also a vampire. The abrasions on young Johanna Motta’ s thighs were from his teeth. After 




strangling her, he had sucked her blood in a frenzy of “lustful pleasure.” He had then torn out a piece of 
her calf, intending to roast it at home, though he had abandoned this plan, fearing that his mother would 
be suspicious if she saw him cooking a strange piece of meat. 

The texture and odor of his victims’ intestines were another source of pleasure. After disemboweling the 
women, he carried pieces of their entrails away with him, so he could smell and touch them. He 
possessed no normal sexual interest of any kind; it had never occurred to him to touch or even look at 
his victims’ genitals. “To this very day, I am ignorant of how a woman is formed,” he declared. He 
never felt the slightest pang of guilt or remorse for his crimes. 

Verzeni advised the authorities that “it would be a good thing if he were kept in prison, because with 
freedom he could not resist his impulses.” The judges agreed, and he spent the remainder of his life 
behind bars. 

Wilhelm Stekel 

Next to Krafft-Ebing, the psychiatrist who made the most detailed study of sadistic behavior was one of 
Freud’s former colleagues, Dr. Wilhelm Stekel. Stekel’ s two-volume, 1929 work, Sadism and 
Masochism, contains dozens of extraordinary case histories: men and women in thrall to the most 
extreme, and often appalling, sexual aberrations. 

I should like most of all to kiss her breasts . . . and then tear them or bite them off . . . and then eat them. 
I would tear out the vagina, the uterus . . . and the rectum. I would eat all of them and with them the 
inner portions of the thigh which border on the sexual parts. I would then tear her open and fondle the 
viscera — take them out and put them back. I should like to feel their warmth. Finally, I should want to 
suck the blood from the side of her neck. 

— One of Wilhelm Stekel’ s patients, describing a favorite fantasy 

Some of the individuals described by Stekel might well have become serial killers if they hadn’t found 
ways to sublimate their violence — to vent their violent impulses on substitute objects. There was, for 
example, a man Stekel identifies only as “Mr. K. H.,” who “always has a fowl with him when he goes to 
a brothel. This fowl he has to strangle before the eyes of the prostitute; then he throws himself upon her 
and performs coitus with a great orgasm. Without the bird, he is completely impotent. In this case, the 
fowl plays the role of the prostitute. He must strangle a living being, wring its neck.” 

Another patient examined by Stekel was “a fifty-three-year-old very elegant man known as the ‘sofa- 
stabber.’ He goes only to those prostitutes who know his mania and are not afraid of him. He undresses 
himself, murmurs all sorts of wild but completely unintelligible words, throws himself upon the sofa, 
and stabs it through ever so many times with a knife. Then brief coitus, after which he lies for some time 
as if unconscious.” 




However bizarre, these activities — which allowed these two men to act out their murderous impulses 
without actually killing a woman — seem relatively benign. Other sadists mentioned by Stekel were 
genuine monsters, including the notorious Fritz Haarmann — one of the most ghastly of all twentieth- 
century serial killers. 

CASE STUDY 

Fritz Haarmann, the Vampire of Hanover 

Born in 1879, Haarmann was a mama’s boy who liked to play with dolls and dress in girl’s clothes — 
activities that didn’t sit well with his surly, alcoholic father. Like many incipient serial killers, he began 
displaying bizarre behavior at an early age. One of his favorite pastimes was trussing up his sisters and 
terrorizing them by banging at their window and pretending to be a demon. 

As he grew into adolescence he became a habitual child molester. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, 
he was sent to an asylum after being diagnosed as “mentally deficient.” Six months later, he managed to 
escape and, after a stint in Switzerland, made his way back home. In what his biographers generally 
refer to as the only sexually “normal” period of his life, he seduced and impregnated a young woman 
and even got engaged. Before long, however, he deserted her and their unborn child and joined the 
military. 

For a while, he did well as a soldier but eventually suffered a mental collapse and was discharged as 
unfit. 

Back in Hanover, he launched a life of petty crimes that ran the gamut from small-time swindling to 
house burglary to grave-robbing. Throughout his twenties, he was in and out of jail for various offenses. 
He spent World War I behind bars. 

Released in 1918, he returned to his native city and joined a postwar smuggling ring that trafficked, 
among other things, in old clothes and black-market beef. He also served as a police stool pigeon — a 
sideline that afforded him protection for his illicit activities. In 1919, however, after being caught in bed 
with a young boy, he was shipped back to prison. 

It was after his release nine months later that Haarmann embarked on his career of unparalleled 
depravity. Living in Hanover’s seedy Old Quarter with a young lover named Hans Grans, he set about 
preying on the young male refugees pouring into the city. Picking up one of these penniless boys at the 
railway station, he would invite him back home, feed him a meal, then demand sexual favors in return. 
As Haarmann approached his climax, he would suddenly clamp his teeth around the boy’s throat and 
tear at the flesh, reaching his orgasm as he chewed through the Adam’s apple. He would later describe 
his method of disposal to the police: 



I’d make two cuts in the abdomen and put the intestines in a bucket, then soak up the blood and crush 




the bones until the shoulders broke. Now I could get the heart, lungs, and kidneys and chop them up and 
put them in my bucket. I’d take the flesh off the bones and put it in my waxcloth bag. It would take me 
five or six trips to take everything and throw it down the toilet or into the river. 

When human remains began washing up on the riverbank in the spring of 1924, it became clear that a 
monster was on the loose in the city. Haarmann, like every other known sex offender, fell under 
suspicion. He was arrested when the mother of one missing boy noticed another young man wearing her 
son’s jacket. The young man turned out to be the son of Haarmann’ s landlady. He had been given the 
garment by Haarmann. 

Haarmann was charged with twenty-seven counts of murder, though he intimated that the total was 
closer to forty. Hans Grans — whose role in the atrocities is still a matter of dispute — was charged with 
“instigating” two murders. After a two-week trial in December 1924, Haarmann was found guilty of 
twenty-four murders and sentenced to death. When the verdict was announced, he proclaimed: “I want 
to be executed in the marketplace. On the tombstone must be put this inscription: ‘Here Lies Mass- 
Murderer Haarmann. ’ ” 

While awaiting execution, he produced a written confession in which he described, with undisguised 
relish, the sensual pleasure he had derived from his atrocities. His request for a public execution was 
ignored. He was decapitated behind the walls of the Hanover Prison in April 1925, at the age of forty-six. 

de River and Reinhardt 

Two psychiatrists with close ties to law enforcement published important studies of sadistic crime in the 
post-World War II era. In 1949, Dr. J. Paul de River, head of the Sex Offense Bureau for the LAPD, 
came out with the first edition of his book,77i<? Sexual Criminal (a work recommended only for those 
with a high tolerance for stomach-churning gore, since de River chose to illustrate it with photographs of 
hideously mangled victims). And in 1957, James Melvin Reinhardt, a criminology professor at the 
University of Nebraska, publishedSAr Perversions and Sex Crimes, which contained an important 
chapter on lust-murder — or, as Reinhardt called it, “mutilation madness.” 

Among the cases cited by Reinhardt was that of a seventeen-year-old boy who, in 1947, lured an eight- 
year-old boy into a barn, then “seized the boy around the throat from behind, dragged him across the 
barn floor, took a beer can opener from his coat pocket, stripped off the unconscious child’s pants, threw 
the shirt over the child’s face, and with the beer can opener tore open the rectum and slashed the testicles 
of the victim. He then sat down beside this small mutilated body and engaged in an act of onanism.” 

I likes to see blood. Then I feel great — I feel like I could tear up anything. I once was in a place where 
there was a shooting and there was blood all over the place. I wanted to go and wet my shoes and walk 
in the blood. I likes blood. 



Sadistic lust-murderer quoted by Dr. J. Paul de River 




One sobering lesson taught by these works is that — though a relative rarity in regard to other kinds of 
crime — sadistic lust-murder is more common than most people suppose. Fortunately, the vast majority 
of deviants who commit such outrages are caught after their first murder and so never have a chance to 
turn into serial killers. 

Those who<ie> manage to get away with their crime are almost certain to repeat it, since the very essence 
of this perversion is — as Reinhardt puts it — “uncontrollable lust urges to mutilate and kill.” 

Disciples of De Sade 

Some notorious serial killers are known to have been fans of the Marquis de Sade. Ian Brady, for 
example — the male half of the infamous British couple known as the “Moors Murderers” — praised de 
Sade as a “good writer” and endorsed the Sadean belief that murder is “necessary, never criminal.” 

Ted Bundy was also familiar with de Sade’s fiction. During a jailhouse interview conducted shortly 
before his execution, Bundy — speaking of himself in the third person — referred to de Sade when 
describing his own malevolent desire to dominate and possess his victims: 



“Uh, with respect to the idea of possession. I think that with this kind of person, control and mastery is 
what we see here. ... In other words, I think we could read about the Marquis de Sade and other people 
who take their victims in one form or another out of a desire to possess and would torture, humiliate, and 
terrorize them elaborately — something that would give them a more powerful impression that they were 
in control.” 



Of course, to say that people like Brady and Bundy enjoyed de Sade’s writings does not mean that they 
were directly inspired by him, or that they wouldn’t have committed their atrocities if they hadn’t read 
him. It is probably more accurate to say that, in the case of these particular psychopaths, de Sade 
provided them with a philosophical justification for their crimes. Serial killers, after all, don’t need 
books to give them hideous ideas. Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, is said to have perpetrated an atrocity 
very much like the one described in the above quotation from720 Days of Sodom. Turned on by the sight 
of human viscera, Dahmer reportedly slit open the bellies of his victims and — there’s no other way to 
put this — fucked the entrails. And there’s no indication that Dahmer ever read de Sade. He dreamed it up 
all by himself. 

CASE STUDY 

Robert Berdella, Torture- Slayer 

His business card alone should have been a giveaway. Underneath the name of his shop — “Bob’s 
Bizarre Bazaar” — was a quotation that could only make sense to a madman: 




“I rise from death. I kill death, and death kills me — although I carry poison in my head. The antidote can 
be found in my tail, which I bite with rage.” 

Still — in a way that so often seems true with serial killers — none of his neighbors or acquaintances in 
Kansas City, Missouri, thought there was anything particularly wrong with Robert Berdella. He seemed 
friendly enough, a quiet man who belonged to the neighborhood “Crime Watch” and had turned his 
modest home — so he claimed — into a kind of halfway house for troubled young men. 

His store, located in the section of town known as “Olde Westport,” was one of those supposedly hip 
“head shops” that — along with pot paraphernalia like bongs and roach clips — specialize in macabre 
curios beloved by adolescent “Goths”: plaster-of-Paris skulls, statuettes of capering skeletons, and the 
like. 

These pseudo-Satanic gewgaws paled beside the actual horrors in Berdella’ s home. But until the spring 
of 1988, only a few people had discovered that terrifying fact. And they didn’t live to reveal it. 

The beginning of the end for Berdella occurred on the morning of Saturday, April 2, 1988, when one of 
his neighbors heard a frantic pounding on the front door. Opening it, he was startled to discover a 
terrified young man, naked except for a dog collar around his neck. There was something wrong with his 
eyes. The young man, whose name was Chris Bryson, explained that he had just escaped from the house 
next door, where he’d been held captive for several days. 

The neighbor summoned the police. Bryson told them that he’d been picked up a few days earlier by 
Berdella, who took him home, led him upstairs, then knocked him unconscious with a blow to the back 
of the head. When Bryson awoke, he was naked and tied spread-eagle to a bed. 

Over the next four days, he was subjected to a horrendous range of torture — sodomized with various 
objects, beaten with an iron club, shocked with electrodes attached to his testicles. His throat had been 
injected with animal tranquilizer, his eyes jabbed with chemical-soaked Q-Tips. Eventually, he had 
managed to escape when Berdella went off on an errand. Getting hold of a matchbook left on a bed 
table, he had burned the rope binding one wrist, freed himself from his other restraints, and jumped from 
the second-floor window. 

Berdella was immediately arrested on charges of forced sodomy, felonious restraint, and first-degree 
assault. A search warrant was obtained. Amid the squalid clutter of his house, investigators turned up a 
weird assortment of artifacts: skulls, devil masks, a hooded red robe. There were also books on voodoo 
and novels by the Marquis de Sade. However disturbing, none of these items proved anything more than 
Berdella’ s interest in the bizarre and occult. 



The photographs were a different story. 




Police found them in a box: about two hundred Polaroids of naked young men being raped and tortured. 
There was also a diary, written in crude shorthand, meticulously detailing the type of abuse each victim 
had been subjected to. 

The police still hadn’t found any hard evidence of murder, however. There were two human skulls in 
Berdella’s bedroom, but it wasn’t immediately clear if they were the real thing or the kind of replicas 
Berdella sold in his store. In fairly short order, however, a forensic anthropologist determined that one of 
the skulls was authentic. It belonged to a young man who had evidently died sometime within the 
previous two years. Another skull — this one with hair and some tissue still intact — was unearthed in 
Berdella’s backyard. Through dental charts, both skulls were eventually identified. Berdella was charged 
with first- degree murder. 

At his arraignment, he shocked the court by pleading guilty — a tactic that spared him the death sentence. 
Eventually, he offered a full confession. Between 1984 and 1987, he had tortured and killed six young 
captives. Like other sadists, he derived his highest pleasure from asserting complete control over his 
bound and terrified victims. He injected them with animal tranquilizer to turn them into “playtoys.” 
When they died, he dismembered their bodies in his bathtub, stuffed them into trash bags, and left them 
at the curb for the garbagemen. 

In spite of his atrocities, Berdella — displaying the utter lack of moral awareness that is typical of 
psychopaths — saw himself as a basically decent human being. To prove the point, he set up a trust fund 
for the families of his victims. On October 8, 1992 — just four years after the start of his life sentence — 
he died of a heart attack at the age of 43. 

DOMINANCE 

Sadistic pleasure isn’t just about the infliction of pain. It also has to do with the assertion of power — the 
lust to dominate, to reduce a victim to a state of total submission. 

The psychological reasons for this behavior aren’t hard to understand. According to experts, the vast 
majority of serial killers were subjected to extreme forms of psychological abuse as children. They were 
made to feel utterly helpless and humiliated. As a result, they grew up with a malevolent need to inflict 
the same condition on others. The only way to overcome their deep-rooted feelings of impotence is by 
asserting total control over another human being. 

It was the power and domination and seeing the fear. That was more exciting than actually causing the 
harm. 

— Serial killer John Joubert, explaining why he slaughtered three boys 

In its most extreme form, the serial killer’s need for control involves turning another human being into a 
completely passive object, a kind of doll that belongs entirely to him. Incapable of normal human 




relationships with willing partners, he seeks gratification with inanimate bodies that offer no resistance. 



Edmund Kemper — the “Coed Killer,” who committed a range of atrocities on the corpses of his female 
victims — was quite explicit about this aspect of his crimes. “I couldn’t follow through with the male end 
of the responsibility,” he told police, “so my fantasies became ... if I killed them, you know, they 
couldn’t reject me as a man. It was more or less making a doll out of a human being and carrying out my 
fantasies with a doll, a living human doll.” 

Edward Gein — the notorious Wisconsin ghoul of the 1950s, whose crimes served as the inspiration 
\ or Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, wn&The Silence of the Lambs — sought to slake his terrible 
loneliness by digging up the corpses of middle-aged women and taking them home to his desolate 
farmhouse. Interviewed by psychiatrists after his arrest, he spoke of the bodies “as being like dolls” and 
described the “comfort he received from their presence.” 

Jeffrey Dahmer — whose greatest urge was to have a person who was “totally compliant, willing to do 
whatever I wanted” — made an abortive attempt at Gein’s necrophiliac method. After reading the 
obituary of an eighteen-year-old, he went to the funeral home to view the young man’s body (which he 
found so attractive that he immediately hurried to the bathroom and masturbated). After the funeral, 
Dahmer sneaked into the cemetery late one night with a shovel and wheelbarrow, intending to take the 
corpse back home, but gave up because the ground was frozen. 

Later, Dahmer tried to satisfy his need for a completely inert sex object with a mannequin, but that 
proved unsatisfactory. Ultimately, he devised the staggeringly sick plan of trying to turn a living victim 
into a “sex zombie.” After bringing a young man back to his apartment, Dahmer would slip him a 
mickey, then make a hole in the victim’s skull with a power drill and inject muriatic acid into his brain 
with a turkey baster. Needless to say, these hideous experiments only ended up killing the victims. 
Robert Berdella tried something similar, injecting his victims with animal tranquilizers in an effort to 
turn them into “sex toys.” 

Dennis Nilsen — the so-called British Jeffrey Dahmer — was similarly driven by a monstrous need to 
dominate. Nilsen once told an interviewer that the most exciting part of his fifteen murders “was the 
moment when he lifted the dead victim and saw the dangling limbs, which represented his power and 
control over the victim, and the victim’s passivity.” 

Recommended Reading 

J. Paul de River, The Sexual Criminal (1949) 

Richard von Krafft-Eb i n g , Psychopath ia Sexualis (1886) 



James Melvin Reinhardt, Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes (1967) 




Robert K. Ressler, Ann W. Burgess, and John E. Douglas, Sexual Homicide (1988) 



Wilhelm Stekel, Sadism and Masochism (1929) 

FETISHISM 

In the strict, psychoanalytic sense of the term, fetishism is a disorder in which a person, usually a man, 
can only be turned on by an object associated with the opposite sex, generally either an intimate article 
of clothing — shoes, bras, panties, nylon stockings, etc. — or a specific body part, most commonly the 
feet. The fetishist is so fixated on the object itself that the actual sex partner becomes secondary. That is 
to say, a male shoe fetishist will be more aroused by his girlfriend’s spike-heeled footwear than by the 
woman herself. According to the American Psychiatric Association, “The person with fetishism 
frequently masturbates while holding, rubbing, or smelling the fetish object, or may ask his sexual 
partner to wear the object during their sexual encounters.” 

There’s nothing inherently harmful about fetishism. It is, after all, just an exaggerated form of an interest 
shared by most red-blooded males. (As John Douglas points out in his bookThe Anatomy of Motive, “It’s 
safe to say that a significantly large percentage of the normal American male population is turned on by 
black lace panties.”) 

The fetishes of psychopaths, however, are often unspeakably extreme. The average fingernail fetishist, 
for example, might be aroused by the sight of a woman with unusually long, sharp, clawlike nails. By 
contrast, one of the deviants described by R. E. L. Masters in his studySex Crimes in History could only 
get sexually aroused by eating the fingernail clippings of female corpses. 

According to John Douglas, fully 72 percent of serial killers are “preoccupied with fetishism during their 
formative years.” The fetishistic impulses of serial killers account for their tendency to take “trophies” 
from their murder victims — anything from wallets to underpants to body parts. These items — which the 
killers use to relive their crimes in fantasy, often while masturbating — are essentially fetish objects, 
providing them with intense, perverted pleasure. 

CASE STUDY 

Jerry Brudos, Fetishist from Hell 

Exactly how or why Jerome Brudos became a foot fetishist is a mystery. One thing is certain, however: 
he began to manifest his obsession at a startlingly early age. Born in 1939, Jerry was only five when he 
found a pair of woman’s shoes in the local dump and brought them home. When his mother found him 
clumping around his bedroom in the patent leather high heels, she confiscated them, tossed them into the 
furnace, and gave little Jerry a lively beating. 



The punishment did nothing to curb his footwear fixation. In first grade, he was severely reprimanded 




after swiping his teacher’s spare pair of high heels. By his early teens, he was breaking into homes to 
steal women’s shoes, along with various items of female underwear, which he had developed a taste for 
wearing beneath his street clothes. 

At sixteen, Brudos — his mind full of fantasies about abducting a sex slave — went so far as to dig a 
tunnel in a hillside near his home, where he planned to keep his captive. The following year, he 
assaulted a young girl at knifepoint and tried to make her strip. Arrested, he was sent to Oregon State 
Hospital for psychiatric observation. Despite the hair-raising thoughts he revealed to his doctors — one 
recurrent fantasy, for example, involved putting women into freezers so that he could arrange their 
stiffened bodies into pornographic poses — he was judged sane enough to be released after only nine 
months. 

Brudos tried the army but was discharged before long because of his bizarre and increasingly frequent 
delusions. 

In 1961, twenty-three-year-old Brudos, making good money by then as an electrician, impregnated and 
married a seventeen-year-old girl. Brudos demanded that she do her housework in the nude while he 
photographed her. He also liked to parade around in high heels, bra, and panties. His young wife 
displayed a high degree of tolerance for her husband’s peculiarities. Of course, she had no idea that he 
was also much engaged in much darker pursuits. On the night she was in the hospital giving birth to 
their child, Brudos broke into the home of a young woman, choked her unconscious, then raped her 
before fleeing with her shoes. 

His escalating violence evolved into murder in 1968. In January of that year, a nineteen-year-old girl 
named Linda Slawson — who was going door-to-door selling encyclopedias — had the misfortune of 
approaching Brudos as he stood in his backyard. Inviting her into his garage-workshop, he bludgeoned 
her with a two-by-four, then strangled her to death. After playing with her corpse for a while — removing 
her clothes and dressing her up in items from his own underwear collection, as though she were an 
oversized Barbie doll — he carried his foot fetishism to a new and unparalleled level of monstrosity. He 
severed the dead woman’s left foot, slipped a stolen spike-heeled shoe on it, and stored it away in his 
freezer. Then he tied an engine block to the corpse and sank her in the nearby Willamette River. 

Eleven months later, he killed his second victim, twenty-three-year-old Jan Whitney. Offering her a lift 
when her car broke down, he drove her to his garage, where he strangled her to death, anally raped her 
corpse, then spent some time dressing up the dead body in different articles of lingerie and 
photographing the results. Brudos had so much fun with her that he suspended her corpse from a ceiling 
hook and kept it in the garage for two days before disposing of it in the river. Even then, he couldn’t 
entirely let her go. Before getting rid of the remains, he sliced off one of her breasts, which he later made 
into a paperweight by treating it with epoxy. 

He performed a similar mutilation on the corpse of his next victim, a nineteen-year-old girl named Karen 
Sprinker, whom he abducted at gunpoint the following March. After choking her to death and subjecting 




her to the usual postmortem violation, he amputated both her breasts. Then he stuffed the cups of one of 
his own bras with brown paper and put it on the mutilated body before dumping the remains in the 
Willamette. 

His last known victim, killed just four weeks later, was twenty-two-year-old Linda Salee. After 
strangling and raping her in his garage, he suspended her body from the ceiling, rigged up wires to a pair 
of hypodermic needles, stuck them in her chest, and jolted her with electricity to see if he could make 
her “dance.” This time, he did not slice off her breasts because he was turned off by her pink nipples. 
(“They should be brown,” he later explained to police.) 

Not long after the corpses of two of his victims were recovered from the river, Brudos was nabbed when 
police got a tip from some coeds he had been pestering. Searching his garage, they found overwhelming 
evidence of his guilt, including photographs of his victims. Charged with three counts of first-degree 
murder at his trial in July 1969, he pleaded guilty and drew three consecutive life sentences. 

TRANSVESTISM 

In horror films, guys who like to wear female clothing tend to be psychotic, woman-hating slashers, a 
tradition that began withPsycho ’s Norman Bates, was carried on by Michael Caine’s razor- wielding 
psycho in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, and continued with the mincing “Buffalo Bill” in The 
Silence of the Lambs. Even Leatherface added a touch of transvestism by putting on a female wig in The 
Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 

Real life, of course, is a different matter. For the most part, guys who enjoy strutting their stuff in high 
heels and Angora sweaters are about as dangerous as Nathan Lane’s character in The Birdcage. Still, 
there have been several instances of serial killers who have engaged in cross-dressing. 

During their boyhoods, both Charles Manson and Henry Lee Lucas were forced to wear girl’s clothing — 
Manson by a sadistic uncle who sent him off to school in a dress, Lucas by the insanely vicious mother 
he would ultimately murder. The same was true of the so-called Barfly Strangler, Carroll Cole, who — 
according to crimewriter Michael Newton — “was forced to dress in frilly skirts and petticoats for the 
amusement of his mother’s friends, dispensing tea and coffee at sadistic ‘parties’ where the women 
gathered to make sport of ‘mama’s little girl.’ ” 

These cases, however, have less to do with transvestism than with child abuse. They are examples of the 
kind of extreme humiliation to which future psychopaths are often subjected and which fills them with a 
lifelong hatred of themselves and the world. 

The legendary Wisconsin psycho, Ed Gein (the real-life model for Norman Bates, Leatherface, and 
Buffalo Bill) was less a transvestite than a frustrated transsexual, whose desire to turn himself into a 
woman led him to create a grotesque female skin suit in which he would sashay around the house. Gein, 
however, was not a sadistic lust-killer. Though he executed two women, he acquired his raw material 




largely from the graveyard, exhuming and flaying the corpses of elderly women who resembled his 
mother. 

CASE STUDY 

Hadden Clark, Cross-Dressing Cannibal Killer 

Though regarded as the prototype of the modern-day slasher, the necrophiliac Ed Gein doesn’t quite 
match the image of the deranged, cross-dressing psycho-killer so familiar from “splatter” movies. There 
is, however, one serial killer who really does seem to have stepped from the gender-bending nightmare 
of Psycho or Dressed to Kill. His name was Hadden Clark. 

Unlike many serial killers who come from sordid, hardscrabble backgrounds, Clark was a child of 
money and privilege. His mother traced her ancestry back to th ^Mayflower Pilgrims, while his father 
was a chemical engineer with several advanced degrees who, among his other accomplishments, helped 
invent Saran Wrap. Despite their pedigree and wealth, the elder Clarks were bitterly mismated 
alcoholics. Constantly at each other’s throats, they created a pernicious and profoundly unstable 
atmosphere at home, as evidenced by the fate of three of their four children. Their youngest daughter, 
Alison, would run away in her teens and permanently renounce her parents. Their oldest son, Bradfield, 
would end up in prison after murdering a girlfriend, roasting chunks of her breasts on a barbecue grill, 
and eating them. 

And then there was Hadden. 

Derided by his father as a “retard” and treated as a female plaything by his mother — who liked to put 
him in girl’s clothing and address him as “Kristen” — Hadden, perhaps unsurprisingly, grew up to be a 
severely disturbed youth. He enjoyed running down other children with his bike and leaving the 
decapitated heads of house pets on the doorsteps of schoolmates who annoyed him. 

Unable to succeed academically, he eventually decided to become a chef. Despite his malicious 
temperament (he retaliated for real or imagined slights, for example, by pissing into the mashed potatoes 
of people he disliked), he managed to graduate from the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. With 
degree in hand, he landed a job in the tony Cape Cod town of Provincetown — a community with a high 
tolerance for alternative lifestyles. Even there, however, Clark’s behavior — guzzling beef’s blood in the 
kitchen, for example — was regarded as extreme. He was constantly moving from job to job. 

In the meantime — so he claimed — he was using the cutlery skills he had acquired as a chef for far more 
sinister purposes than cooking. According to his later admissions, he murdered a number of victims 
while residing on Cape Cod, burying one naked woman in the sand dunes of Wellfleet after cutting off 
her hands. 



Having worn out his welcome among the restaurateurs of Cape Cod, Clark drifted from job to job during 




the next few years, working in the kitchen of a cruise ship, at banquet halls on Long Island, and in Lake 
Placid, New York, at the 1980 Olympics. He enlisted as a cook in the navy. His shipmates, however, did 
not take well either to his increasingly erratic behavior or his fondness for frilly panties, and Clark was 
subjected to frequent savage beatings at their hands. 

Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and given a medical discharge, Clark went to live with his older 
brother, Geoffrey, in Silver Spring, Maryland. Less than a year later, he committed his first confirmed 
atrocity. It happened on the sweltering afternoon of May 31, 1986. Clark — who had been kicked out of 
the house after masturbating in front of his young niece, Eliza — was packing up his belongings when six- 
year-old Michelle Dorr, dressed in a pink, ruffled swimsuit, drifted over from her backyard wading pool, 
looking for Eliza. Luring her into the house, Clark butchered the girl with one of his chef s knives, made 
an abortive attempt to have sex with her corpse, then stuffed the body into a duffel bag, drove it to a 
nearby park, and buried it in a shallow grave after devouring some of her flesh. 

While police focused their attention on the wrong suspect — Michelle’s distraught father — Clark 
embarked on a rootless existence, living in his pickup truck and working at odd jobs. His mental 
condition continued to deteriorate at an alarming pace. By 1989, he had been arrested on various 
charges: assaulting his mother, shoplifting women’s apparel, destroying a rented home with black dye, 
rotting fish heads, and dead cats. He had also begun conversing with squirrels and birds. 

In 1992, while working as a gardener in Bethesda, Maryland, for a woman named Penny Houghteling, 
he committed his final atrocity. Around midnight on October 17, he sneaked into the bedroom of Mrs. 
Houghteling ’s daughter, Laura, a recent college graduate. He was got up in full female regalia — wig, 
purse, blouse, and slacks — and carried a .22-caliber rifle. Nudging the girl from her sleep, he demanded 
to know what she was doing in his bed. He then forced the terrified young woman to admit that he was 
Laura. 

It was a scene straight out of a horror movie: a beautiful young woman being awakened by a deranged 
transvestite who claims her identity and accuses her of being an impostor. 

After forcing her at gunpoint to undress and bathe, Clark asphyxiated her by covering her face with duct 
tape. He then removed her earlobes with a scissor, smuggled her body, along with the bloody bed linens, 
into his pickup, drove her to a deserted spot, and buried her in a shallow grave. 

Quickly identified as a suspect, Clark was arrested when his fingerprint was found on one of the bloody 
pillowcases he had saved as a souvenir. In 1993, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was 
given a thirty-year sentence. While in prison, he began bragging about the Michelle Dorr murder and 
eventually led police to her remains. Tried again, he received another thirty years. 

The world hadn’t heard the last of Clark. Following his second conviction, he became convinced that a 
long-haired fellow inmate was actually Jesus Christ and confessed to this supposed Messiah that he had 
killed as many as a dozen women throughout the Northeast during the 1970s and 1980s. In early 2000, 




Clark agreed to show investigators the murder sites on the condition that they purchase a female 
wardrobe for him at Kmart. Decked out in his new wig, panties, bra, and skirt, he then led detectives to 
various spots in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. On a piece of Cape Cod 
property that had once belonged to Clark’s grandfather, police dug up a bucket containing two hundred 
pieces of jewelry, including items belonging to Laura Houghteling. Clark claimed that these were 
articles he had taken as trophies from his many victims. Beyond the remains of the Houghteling girl and 
little Michelle Dorr, no additional bodies have been found to date. 

VAMPIRISM 

In folklore, myth, and Gothic literature, the word “vampire” conjures up images of the evil “undead” — 
supernatural, seductively creepy beings who spend their days snoozing in coffins, emerge after dark to 
batten on the blood of the living, and are highly susceptible to garlic, crucifixes, and sharp wooden 
stakes. Happily, such creatures do not exist outside of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the novels of Anne Rice, 
and about a zillion grade-Z horror movies, many of them starring Christopher Lee. 

In the realm of abnormal psychology, however, “vampirism” refers to a different and all-too-real 
phenomenon: a perversion (or paraphilia) in which people derive intense sexual pleasure from the 
drinking of human blood. It should be stressed that — as repellent as such a practice might seem to most 
people — not all, or even most, real-life “vampires” are criminal psychopaths. Indeed, nowadays — when 
even the most outre sexual activities have their advocates — there are socially responsible Web sites 
lik eSanguinarius.org which advise vampirically inclined individuals on medical precautions (“Make 
sure your victims get blood tests done!”), legal matters (“Have them sign some form of consent!”), and 
etiquette (“When feeding, it is impolite to lap blood like an animal!”). 

Needless to say, serial killers with a yen for drinking blood do not observe such niceties. They are not 
politically correct paraphiliacs who ask permission from their victims and take care not to slurp while 
they feed. Rather, they are blood-crazed maniacs who resort to the most hideous acts to satisfy their 
monstrous cravings. 

A classic example of a vampiric lust-killer is Vincenz Verzeni, one of the many cases included in Krafft- 
Ebing’s classic study of extreme aberration , Psychopathia Sexualis. In 1871, in a frenzy of blood mania, 
this Italian madman savaged two young women, ripping open their bodies, chewing on their flesh, and 
gorging on their blood. 

Verzeni wasn’t the only vampiric lust-killer at large in late-nineteenth-century Europe. His countryman, 
Eusebius Pieydagnelle, got so turned on whenever he passed a butcher’s shop and caught a whiff of 
fresh blood that he was impelled to go out and commit some butchery of his own, slaughtering six 
women in 1878. Nineteen years later, the “French Ripper,” Joseph Vacher, admitted that blood-drinking 
was one of the many atrocities he committed on the bodies of nearly a dozen male and female victims. 

Some of the most notorious serial killers of the twentieth century engaged in vampirism, along with 




other abominations. During his uniquely depraved childhood, for example, Peter Ktirten managed to 
perform several deviant acts at once — sadism, vampirism, bestiality, and necrophilia — by cutting off the 
heads of swans and drinking their spurting blood while sexually violating their dying bodies. In 
adulthood, the so-called “Monster of Diisseldorf ’ gratified his unspeakable lusts on human victims, 
mutilating — and often drinking the blood of — more than two dozen men, women, and children. Equally 
horrific was Kiirten’s Weimar-era contemporary, Fritz Haarmann, known as the “Vampire of Hanover” 
for his habit of of chewing through the throats of his young male victims. 

The extravagantly perverted Albert Fish — a big fan of Haarmann’ s, who saved newspaper stories about 
the German lust-killer the way teenage girls collect clippings of their favorite pop stars — sampled the 
blood of at least one of his juvenile victims. Fish, however, did not find the reeking fluid especially 
palatable. The same was true of another all-American cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer, who told FBI profiler 
Robert Ressler that he had drunk some human blood out of “curiosity” but “hadn’t liked the experience 
nor found it stimulating.” 

By contrast, the Russian “Mad Beast,” Andrei Chikatilo — a twentieth-century monster every bit as 
appalling as Kiirten or Fish or Dahmer — eagerly consumed the blood of his many victims, along with 
other parts of their anatomy, including their genitals. 

A recent case of alleged vampiric serial murder involved a young African-American named Marc 
Sappington. Raised in a slum district of Kansas City, Kansas, by a hardworking, churchgoing mother, 
Sappington was, by all accounts, a model child: bright, fun-loving, and well behaved. During his 
adolescence, however, his personality underwent a radical change when, succumbing to the temptations 
of the streets, he got hooked on angel dust and “danks” — cigarettes soaked in embalming fluid. In March 
2001, the onetime choirboy gunned down a young man during a robbery for no other reason than sheer 
malice. 

His vampiric spree began a month later. By then — possibly because of the effects of the drugs — he had 
begun hearing voices commanding him to taste human flesh and blood. On April 7, he lured a longtime 
friend, twenty-five-year-old Terry Green, into the basement of his home, savaged Green with a hunting 
knife, then knelt by the mangled carcass and lapped up some blood from the cement floor. 

Just three days later, he committed a nearly identical atrocity, luring another old friend — twenty-two- 
year-old Michael Weaver — into an alley, stabbing him to death, then drinking his blood. The sound of 
approaching footsteps, however, caused Sappington to cut short his vampiric feast and flee. 

On his way home from the murder, Sappington — his bloodlust unsated — spotted a neighborhood 
teenager named Alton “Freddie” Brown. Inviting the boy into his basement, Sappington quickly 
dispatched him with a shotgun, then leisurely drank some blood and cannibalized the body. He then 
stuffed the remains in a trash bag and went out for a postprandial stroll. 

When his mother returned a few hours later, she quickly discovered the scene of carnage in her 




basement and notified the police. Sappington was arrested a short time later. In custody, he maintained a 
stubborn silence before spilling out his grisly tale — a confession that earned him his media nickname, 
the “Kansas City Vampire.” 

CASE STUDY 

Richard Chase, the Vampire of Sacramento 

Dr. John Seward runs an “immense lunatic asylum” in Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic masterpiec eDraculci. 
Under his care is a patient named Renfield who has caught Seward’s attention as a new kind of lunatic: 

My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call 
him a zoophagous (life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he has 
laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way. He gave many flies to one spider and many spiders to 
one bird, and then wanted a cat to eat the many birds. What would have been his later steps? 

Bloodlust powers Renfield’ s madness — a bloodlust spawned and controlled by his Transylvanian 
master, Count Dracula. It is a famous fiction. It is the novel that gave us the most popular image of the 
vampire. 

In late-twentieth- century America that fiction turned into nightmarish fact. 

His name was Richard Chase. Early in his life, he tortured and killed small animals — birds, rabbits, cats, 
dogs — and drank their blood. He also gorged upon the intestines of his animal victims. He believed their 
blood would prevent his own from turning to dust. Sometimes, he injected the blood of rabbits into his 
veins. At other times, he used kitchen blenders to mix together the blood and entrails of animals for 
hideous gore shakes. 

He spent two prolonged stays in mental institutions, where he puzzled fellow patients and health-care 
professionals with his obsession with blood. They called him “Dracula” but thought he was as harmless 
as Renfield, that his obsession was limited to animal blood. 

They were horribly wrong. 

By 1977, he progressed from rabbits to larger mammals. That year, police spotted him stumbling naked 
across the Nevada desert covered in blood. In his car, they found a bucket of coagulated blood and two 
rifles that had been used to stir the horrid concoction. Tests revealed the blood to be that of cows, and 
Chase was released. But this blood collecting soon turned even more monstrous. 

Chase’s first human victim was a middle-aged man whom he shot dead on the street for no apparent 
reason. Then he began breaking into houses. In late January 1978, he barged into a Sacramento home 
and shot a twenty-two-year-old woman to death. He disemboweled her body and covered himself in her 




blood. He used an empty yogurt cup to collect and drink her blood. His victim had been three months 
pregnant. 

Four days later, he broke into the home of thirty-eight-year-old Evelyn Miroth and shot her to death 
along with her six-year-old son and a visiting male friend. He eviscerated Miroth, mutilated her face, 
and sodomized her. He also collected her blood and drank it. Chase committed a final outrage upon the 
dead woman by stuffing her mouth with animal feces. But the worst atrocity was still to come. 

Miroth had been babysitting her twenty-two-month-old nephew. When the crime scene was discovered 
the baby was missing. The vampire had taken the little boy back to his lair. The decapitated child was 
eventually found in a box dumped in a vacant lot. 

A classic “disorganized killer,” Chase had left footprints and fingerprints all over the crime scenes and 
had used a car of one of the victims. He was soon apprehended. Inside his apartment, police discovered a 
vampire’s inner sanctum. Blood covered everything, including the blenders Chase used to mix his horrid 
zoophagous shakes. 

Remarkably, given how wildly deranged he clearly was, Chase was declared sane. He was quickly 
convicted of six murders and condemned to die in California’s gas chamber. FBI profilers interviewed 
him in prison and learned about several of his obsessions: his blood was turning to powder because he 
found a gooey substance underneath his soap dish; Nazis with ties to UFOs were following him; and 
somebody was trying to poison him in jail. In the end, he escaped execution. In 1980, he died of of an 
overdose of antidepressants that he had been hoarding in his death row cell. 

Recommended Reading 

Sondra London , True Vampires (2003) 

CANNIBALISM 

Cannibalistic urges are deeply rooted in our instinctual makeup. Indeed, they appear to be part of our 
evolutionary heritage. 

Recent scientific research makes it very clear that our closest primate relatives routinely engage in 
cannibalism. While studying rain forest apes in the wild, for example, Harvard anthropologist Richard 
Wrangham observed two adult males — whom he nicknamed “Figan” and “Humphrey” — capture a pair 
of juvenile monkeys: “With small screams of excitement, Figan raced to where Humphrey sat and, 
clutching his own prey, seized hold of Humphrey’s also. He did not try to wrest it away from the older 
male, but bit open the head and consumed it, together with the brain, while Humphrey disemboweled the 
infant and ate the viscera. After this, Figan ate the brain of his own monkey, and Humphrey moved off 
with the headless body of his!” 




That our earliest ancestors dined on the bodies of their own kind has been firmly established by 
archaeologists, who have found ample evidence of cannibalistic activity in the cave dwellings of Stone 
Age people: human bones split to provide access to the savory marrow, skulls cracked open at their 
bases for easy removal of the brains. Cannibalism has been practiced by aboriginal peoples all over the 
globe, from Africa to New Zealand. Recent studies have shown that even the Chaco Anasazi of what is 
now the American Southwest — a tribe long thought to be peace-loving tenders of the land — engaged in 
systematic cannibalism. 

callout 57 

Cannibal killer by Jose Guadalupe Posada 

(from “Very Interesting News,” 1911 broadsheet with white-line illustration by Posada, Amon Carter 
Museum, 1978.123.) 

According to current theories, the Anasazi used cannibalism as an instrument of terror, but people have 
consumed human flesh for all kinds of reasons, from the dietary to the ceremonial. Some aborigines ate 
the bodies of their dead relatives out of love and respect (“When you die, wouldn’t you rather be eaten 
by your kinsmen than by maggots?” one Mayoruna cannibal asked a European visitor). Others ate the 
flesh of their defeated enemies as a sign of contempt. The devouring of sacrificial victims was a central 
feature of Aztec religion. Fijians, on the other hand, practiced cannibalism simply because they liked the 
taste, preferring the flavor of “long pig” (as they called human flesh) to that of actual pork. 

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, however, cannibalism is looked upon as an ultimate taboo, which may 
be broken only under the most dire imaginable circumstances — by the dying sailors on a drifting 
lifeboat, say, who are forced to draw straws to see which of them will be sacrificed to supply sustenance 
for the rest. Even then, it is regarded with such abhorrence that some people would rather starve than eat 
human flesh. This was the case, for example, with several survivors of the 1972 plane crash that 
stranded a party of Uruguyans in the high Andes. Though they were all devout Catholics who routinely 
partook of the body and blood of Christ during Communion, some of them were so repelled by the 
thought of cannibalism that they chose to die instead. 

Because most civilized people regard cannibalism with such horrified fascination, it is often regarded as 
the worst possible atrocity a serial killer can commit. It’s for this very reason that — when Thomas Harris 
set out to create the ultimate psychopathic monster in Red Dragon and its sequels — he came up with 
“Hannibal the Cannibal,” a man-eating gourmet who wouldn’t dream of taking a transatlantic flight 
without bringing along a snack of human brains. 

In point of fact, however, cannibalism is a relative rarity among serial killers. Those who practice it are 
motivated as much by deviant sexual impulses as anything else. Unlike Hannibal Lecter — whose 
fondness for human flesh seems to be a warped feature of his epicurean lifestyle — the most notorious 
cannibal killers have derived intense erotic pleasure from eating their victims. 




A prime example is the pedophiliac lust-killer Albert Fish. Having tried every perversion in the book 
(plus a few that no one had ever heard of before), the wildly deranged old man developed a growing 
obsession with tasting the flesh of a child. Luring a twelve-year-old girl away from her parents and 
bringing her to an abandoned house in Westchester County, he strangled and beheaded her, then sliced 
about four pounds of flesh from her breast, buttocks, and abdomen. Wrapping the “meat” (as he referred 
to it) in a piece of old newspaper, he carried it back to his Manhattan boardinghouse, where he cut it into 
small pieces and made it into a stew with carrots, onions, and strips of bacon. Over the course of nine 
days, he consumed the stew a little at a time, so aroused by the taste of the child’s flesh — which he 
likened to veal — that he masturbated constantly. 

First I stripped her naked. How she did kick — bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in 
small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass 
was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. 

— Albert Fish 

The “Milwaukee Cannibal” Jeffrey Dahmer was also turned on by the act of feasting on the flesh of his 
victims. During his final interview, Dahmer told pioneering profiler Robert Ressler that eating his 
victims “made it feel like they were more part of me,” a sensation he found “sexually stimulating.” 

Though reluctant to divulge all the grisly details of his atrocities, Dahmer admitted to having eaten the 
flesh of at least three of his victims, turning some of it into human hamburger patties and experimenting 
with various seasonings to enhance the flavor. He froze a heart for future consumption, devoured part of 
another victim’s thigh, and fried and ate the pumped-up biceps of twenty-four-year-old Ernest Miller 
because it looked so big and juicy. 

Every bit as monstrous as Dahmer and Fish — and arguably even more so — was the Russian psycho 
Andrei Chikatilo. Aptly dubbed the “Mad Beast,” Chikatilo was the kind of killer that the FBI now 
labels “disorganized.” People in the Middle Ages would have called him a werewolf: a blood-crazed 
monster who, in a frenzy of sadistic lust, committed the most unimaginable atrocities on his victims, 
ripping them open with his bare hands, wallowing in their blood, devouring their tongues, breasts, and 
sex organs. 

Germany has produced an unusually large number of twentieth- century man-eaters. During the social 
chaos of the post-World War I era, the homosexual lust-murderer Fritz Haarmann slaughtered as many 
as fifty young men, battened on their flesh, then sold the leftovers as black market beef. His abhorrent 
countryman Georg Grossmann also trafficked in human meat, turning his fellow Berliners into unwitting 
cannibals by selling them the flesh of butchered prostitutes, which he passed off as pork. Yet another 
postwar German cannibal was Karl Denke, an innkeeper who killed and consumed at least thirty of his 
lodgers. 



More recently, Germany was transfixed by the first recorded case of Internet-era cannibalism. In the 




spring of 2001, a forty-one-year-old software technician identified in news reports as “Armin M.” placed 
the following notice on the Web: “Wanted: Well-built man for slaughter.” 

Though arguably the least enticing come-on in the history of advertising, this classified ad actually 
worked. A forty-three-year-old microchip designer, identified only as “Bernd Jurgen B.,” showed up at 
M.’s front door. 

What happened next staggers belief. As theAfew York Times reported on December 18, 2002: “M. 
removed the victim’s genitals. The two men then ate them. Later, M. stabbed B. to death as a video 
camera recorded the event. He carved up the victim and stored parts in a freezer for occasional 
consumption, burying other parts in his garden.” 

The experience worked out so nicely for M. that he posted another advertisement, seeking more 
volunteers. Police quickly arrested him, aborting his incipient career as a serial killer. His case became a 
nationwide sensation. One German pundit immediately put the blame on Hollywood for glamorizing 
cannibalism in movies lik &The Silence of the Lambs andHannibal. “One thinks such a case would only 
happen in the movies, in America, but not in Germany” this commentator declared — a remarkable 
statement in light of his country’s rich heritage of horror, psychopathology, and lust-murder. 

Recommended Reading 

Moira Martingale, Cannibal Killers (1993) 

Reay Tannahil, Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex (1975) 

Christy Turner II and Jacqueline Turner, Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric 
American Southwest (1999) 

CASE STUDY 

Andrei Chikatilo: The Mad Beast 

In its efforts to explain the behavior of serial killers, modern psychiatry has applied various clinical 
labels to these murderers: sociopaths, psychopaths, antisocial personalities. But only one label seems 
appropriate for Andrei Chikatilo -.monster. Indeed, had Chikatilo lived a few centuries earlier, he would 
have been regarded as a very specific type of monster: a lycanthrope, a seemingly ordinary man who, 
when overcome by bloodlust, would transform into a ravening creature, clawing and biting his victims to 
pieces, tearing open their bodies, devouring their flesh, and exulting in the gore. 

Chikatilo lived two lives. One was that of a middle-aged grandfather and committed Communist Party 
member. He held a university degree in Russian literature and engineering and — following a ten-year 
teaching career — worked as a trusted supply clerk for an industrial conglomerate. Shy and soft-spoken, 




he was considered by his wife of twenty-five years to be an attentive, if somewhat mousy, man who 
always provided for his family. 

He was also one of the most terrifying serial killers in history. 

After indulging himself in torture, rape, cannibalism, and mutilation-murder for more than a decade, 
Chikatilo was finally caught. At his 1992 trial he offered a self-diagnosis that few would dispute: “I am a 
freak of nature, a mad beast.” The Mad Beast confessed to the unimaginably brutal murder of fifty-three 
victims — most of them children — though he acknowledged that the real body count could be higher. 

Chikatilo was born in 1936 in the Ukraine. Stalin’s harsh collectivization of rural land during the thirties 
made his childhood one of dire poverty and constant hunger. One incident from this period haunted 
Chikatilo throughout his life and is sometimes cited as a source of his own monstrous obsessions: an 
older brother was allegedly killed and eaten by starving peasants. 

An introverted and painfully shy boy whose somewhat effeminate mannerisms made him the target of 
incessant teasing by his schoolmates, Chikatilo matured into a confused and obsessive adolescent. Early 
attempts at sex with women proved difficult, and he became convinced that he was impotent. He 
married in 1963 but was unable to consummate the marriage for some time. The Russian Ripper never 
thought of himself as sexually normal: “I never had sexual relations with a woman, and I had no concept 
of a sex life. I always preferred listening to the radio.” 

It would take many years before his sexual self came fully to life. When it did, it would take the shape of 
something more animal than human. 

After working for a time as a telephone engineer while earning his college degree through a 
correspondence course, Chikatilo embarked on his life as a vocational school teacher, a job for which he 
was painfully unsuited. His pathological shyness made it impossible for him to exert discipline upon his 
students, who treated him with unconcealed derision. Colleagues, too, found him odd and withdrawn. 

But the future “Butcher of Rostov” had his own reasons for pursuing his pedagogical career. By then, he 
had discovered his perverted attraction to children. It wasn’t long before he began molesting them. 
Eventually, he was driven from his job as a school dormitory supervisor after attempting to perform 
fellatio on a sleeping boy. 

He progressed — or degenerated — from pedophilia to murder in 1978. 

By then, he was already forty-two — a late bloomer in the ranks of lust-killers, who generally begin their 
ghastly work in their teens or twenties. Luring a nine-year-old girl named Lena Zakotnova from a 
streetcar stop with the promise of imported chewing gum, he led her to a run-down shack, where, after 
attempting unsuccessfully to rape her, he stabbed her repeatedly with a knife. He then dumped her body 
in the river. Despite strong evidence linking him to the crime, the police remained stubbornly convinced 
that the killer was a young man with a prior conviction for rape and murder, who was ultimately 




convicted and executed for the Zakotnova slaying. It was the first of many official blunders that would 
allow Chikatilo to remain at large for another dozen years and lead to untold horror and suffering. 

Following the loss of his teaching job, Chikatilo moved his family to the industrial town of Rostov-on- 
Don, where he found work as a factory supply clerk. It was at this point that his inner beast was truly 
unleashed. For the next twelve years, he prowled bus stops and train stations in Rostov and farther 
afield. His method was simple: he would approach his victim — girls or boys or young women — and 
offer food or money or a car ride. Then — like some dark creature from a fairy tale — he would lead his 
unwary prey into the woods, where a terrifying metamorphosis would take place. Overpowering his 
victims, he would bind them with rope, then — in an ecstatic frenzy — savage them with knife, teeth, and 
bare hands, ripping open their bellies, chewing off their noses, gouging out their eyes, slicing off and 
eating their tongues, nipples, genitals — sometimes while they were still alive. He wallowed in their 
internal organs and would later confess to having a particular fondness for the taste and texture of the 
uterus. 

Because Soviet dogma insisted that serial murder was a product of capitalist decadence — something that 
could never exist in a communist state — the gruesome murders were never reported in the press, leaving 
the unalerted public even more vulnerable to the depredations of the monster. On several occasions, 
Chikatilo fell under suspicion, but was let go each time for lack of solid evidence. In 1984, he was 
arrested on a theft charge but released after just three months in jail. Within weeks, he butchered eight 
more victims. 

Despite a massive (if unpublicized) manhunt, it was not until 1990 that Chikatilo was finally nabbed. At 
his 1992 trial, he was kept inside a cage for his own protection. Jamming the courtroom, relatives of his 
victims howled for his blood, while — behind the steel bars — the Mad Beast ranted, raved, tore off his 
clothes, waved his penis at the crowd, and spewed obscenities at the judge. As the trial progressed, his 
behavior grew increasingly outrageous. At one point, he claimed that he was pregnant and lactating, and 
accused his guards of hitting him in the stomach to deliberately damage his baby. 

If his wildly bizarre behavior was — as some people thought — a calculated attempt to prove he was 
insane, the tactic failed. On February 14, 1994 — after his appeal for clemency was rejected by President 
Boris Yeltsin — he was led into a prison courtyard and executed with a bullet to the base of his skull. 

NECROPHILIA 

The suffix “phile” is used to denote a person who is especially enamored of something. There are 
bibliophiles (book lovers), oenophiles (wine lovers), Anglophiles (lovers of English culture). And then 
there are necrophiles — lovers of the dead, people who get sexually aroused by the thought, sight, smell, 
and feel of corpses. 

So revolting is this aberration that even Richard von Krafft-Ebing — who adopts a tone of scientific 
detachment in his classic text ,Psychopathia Sexualis — can’t discuss it without using words like 




“horrible,” “repugnant,” and “monstrous.” Still, there are degrees of evil even in regard to necrophiliac s. 
Some are far more monstrous than others — with serial killers, unsurprisingly, representing the most 
appalling end of the spectrum. 

Bizarre as it may sound, some necrophiliac acts have been motivated by overpowering love. According 
to his own journal entry, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most revered figures in American literary 
history, was so devastated by the death of his young wife, Ellen, that, shortly after her burial, he went 
out to the cemetery one night and dug up her corpse. (What he did with it once he raised it from the 
grave is anybody’s guess.) This grief-stricken variety of necrophilia has even been commemorated in 
literature. In the famous ballad, “The Unquiet Grave,” for example, an anguished young man visits the 
burial place of his beloved in the hope of getting one last kiss from her “clay-cold lips.” 

As awful as it may be to contemplate, this sort of necrophilia — in which a profoundly bereft individual, 
driven wild by sorrow, digs up his lover for a final embrace — is at least comprehensible. Significantly 
creepier was the case of Carl von Cosel, a middle-aged radiologist working at a sanitarium in Key West, 
Florida. In 1931, Cosel became so obsessed with a beautiful, twenty-two-year-old patient named Maria 
Elena de Hoyos that, when she died of tuberculosis, he smuggled her body back to his home. Despite 
being treated with formaldehyde, the dead woman’s corpse gradually decomposed. As it did, Cosel tried 
various desperate measures to preserve it, using piano wire to string the bones together, sticking glass 
eyes in the sockets, replacing the rotting skin with wax and silk. Most ghastly of all, he inserted a tube 
between her legs to serve as a makeshift “vagina,” so that he could continue having sex with the 
remains. This nightmarish travesty of true love went on for a full seven years before it came to light. But 
nothing could dim Cosel’ s obsession. He died in 1952, clutching a doll wearing a death mask of his 
beloved. 

However horrific, Cosel’ s ghoulish activities were at least confined to a single corpse. Other notorious 
necrophiles have been far more promiscuous. Perhaps the most infamous case on record is that of a 
young French soldier, Sergeant Francis Bertrand, whose hideous career began in the late 1840s. 
Possessed of an overwhelming compulsion to violate the dead, Bertrand would dig up freshly buried 
female bodies in Parisian cemeteries — sometimes with his bare hands. Then — “with a madman’s 
frenzy” (as he himself described it) — he would rape, dismember, disembowel, and occasionally chew on 
the corpses. Compared to the pleasure he derived from his “mad embrace” of the dead, he confessed, 

“all the joy procured by possession of a living woman was as nothing.” 

Another nineteenth-century French necrophile, twenty-six-year-old Henri Blot, was in the habit of 
dozing off contentedly after digging up and performing coitus on female cadavers in the cemetery of 
Saint-Ouen. On one of these occasions, Blot passed out so completely that, the next morning, cemetery 
workers found him sound asleep beside the ravished corpse of a young ballerina. Brought to trial, Blot 
earned a certain immortality in the annals of psychopathology when — after being rebuked by the judge 
for the “depravity of his offense” — he indignantly replied: “How would you have it? Every man to his 
own tastes. Mine is for corpses.” 




And then there was Viktor Ardisson, a feebleminded gravedigger who reportedly had sex with over one 
hundred dead bodies. Ardisson was finally captured when police — who had received reports of a terrible 
stench emanating from his rooms — found the decaying corpse of a three-year-old girl that he had 
brought back from the cemetery and performed cunnilingus on every night for a week. 

America’s best-known necrophile was the Midwestern ghoul Ed Gein. In the years following his 
mother’s death in 1947, this lonely, demented little bachelor made dozens of nocturnal forays into local 
cemeteries, where he dug up the bodies of middle-aged women and brought them back to the squalor of 
his decrepit farmhouse on the outskirts of Plainfield, Wisconsin. 

Gein, however, differed from his European counterparts like Bertrand and Blot in several significant 
ways. For one thing, though there was clearly a sexual component to his acts (he performed 
gynecological examinations on the corpses and carefully removed and preserved the vulvas), he appears 
not have engaged in coitus. Instead, he used the bodies as raw material to make various macabre 
artifacts, from human-skin lampshades, to cranium soup bowls, to a “mammary vest” that he wore in his 
deranged efforts to turn himself into a woman. 

Moreover, Gein was not just a grave robber and violator of the dead. He was a multiple murderer. When 
the supply of middle-aged female cadavers ran dry in the Plainfield cemetery, he resorted to murder, 
coolly dispatching two middle-aged women and carrying his booty home, where he butchered their 
carcasses like deer and put their body parts to various unimaginable uses. 

This, of course, is what makes necrophiliac serial killers especially evil. Abhorrent as it may be to 
violate graves and sexually defile corpses, deviants like Sergeant Bertrand and Henri Blot limited their 
abominations to victims that were already dead. Serial killers who perform necrophilia, on the other 
hand, don’t dig up corpses: they create their own. 

The best that can be said about Gein is that he was not a sadist. Uninterested in living women, he 
dispatched his victims swiftly, with a bullet to the back of the head, so that he could take their corpses 
home and play with them at leisure in the privacy of his hellish homestead. The same cannot be said 
about other serial killers who have practiced necrophilia, like Ted Bundy and Andrei Chikatilo. For lust- 
murderers like these, raping a corpse is part of their unspeakably vicious sadism, an expression of their 
need to dominate, humiliate, and annihilate other human beings. 

I should like to wallow in corpses. I want to be stronger and stronger. I know that the dead bodies cannot 
defend themselves. I should like to torture people, even after they are dead. 

— from the fantasies of a necrophile, as recorded by Dr. Wilhelm Stekel 

The abominations which serial killers have perpetrated on the dead are beyond the lurid. Edmund 
Kemper not only raped the corpses of his coed victims before dismembering them, but — on at least one 
occasion — had sex with a victim’s body after cutting off her head. Conversely, the “Sunset Slayer,” 




Douglas Clark, used the decapitated head of a murdered prostitute for necrophiliac fellatio. 

According to one of his apparently autobiographical short stories, Gerard Schaefer — aka the “Butcher of 
Blind Creek” — dug up the body of one female victim several days after burying it in a swamp and 
masturbated on the rotting remains. And Jeffrey Dahmer performed oral sex on corpses of his male 
victims (who would often die with an erection, a common physiological reaction to strangulation). He 
also took pleasure from cutting open their bellies and having sex with their viscera. 

CASE STUDY 

Dennis Nilsen, Lover of the Dead 

Along with Jeffrey Dahmer — the killer he most closely resembles in terms of aberrant behavior and 
ghastly MO — Dennis Nilsen is the most infamous necrophile of the late twentieth century. 

Exactly where his grotesque psychopathology sprang from is difficult to say. Certainly he showed none 
of the classic warning signs associated with budding serial killers — childhood sadism, for example. On 
the contrary, as a young boy he recoiled from cruelty to animals. Some experts who have studied his 
case attribute his lifelong fascination with cadavers to the sudden, shocking death of his beloved 
grandfather — the sight of whose laid-out corpse left a profound mark on young Nilsen’ s psyche. Equally 
important in terms of his emotional development was the terrible isolation, the crushing sense of 
loneliness, that he experienced as a child and suffered throughout his life. And then there were his own 
powerfully conflicted feelings about his homosexuality. 

Whatever the sources of his unspeakable perversions, they manifested themselves at an early age. In his 
teens, he liked to stretch out before a mirror and masturbate while pretending that the body reflected in 
the glass was a corpse. 

In 1961, the sixteen-year-old Nilsen enlisted in the army. He became a cook and learned how to butcher 
meat — a skill later put to horrific use. It was during this period that he fell in love with an eighteen-year- 
old private, who indulged his friend’s peculiarities by stripping naked and pretending he was dead while 
Nilsen shot home movies of him. Leaving the army after eleven years, he tried his hand at police work. 
Though he enjoyed his occasional trips to the morgue, the work wasn’t for him, and he soon took a civil 
service job for the Manpower Commission Services. 

After the breakup of a two-year live-in relationship with another young man, Nilsen — cut off from all 
meaningful human contact — began to revert to his bizarre autoerotic rituals, applying cadaverous paint 
to his naked body, then masturbating in front of a mirror. By 1978, his simmering sickness — his utter 
inability to connect with another human being, his sadistic need for control, the grotesque attraction he 
felt for lifeless male flesh — reached a boiling point. 



His first atrocity set the pattern for all the others to follow. In late December 1978, the thirty-three-year- 




old Nilsen picked up a teenage boy at a local pub and brought him home for a one-night stand. The next 
morning — unable to bear the thought of being alone for New Year’s Eve — Nilsen garroted the sleeping 
boy with a necktie, then finished him off by submerging his head in a bucket of water. After enjoying a 
cup of coffee and a cigarette, he stripped the body, bathed it, then laid it out in his bed. Over the next 
few days, he treated the stiffening corpse like a new lover, dressing it in fresh underwear, caressing it, 
masturbating over it. Eventually, he stashed it under the floorboards, though he would remove it from 
time to time for a bath and a bit of necrophiliac sex. He kept it around for seven months until he 
disposed of it in a backyard bonfire. 

For Nilsen, it was the end of one kind of life and the beginning of another. “I had started down the 
avenue of death,” he would later say, “and possession of a new kind of flatmate.” 

Over the next five years, he would find and acquire fourteen more such “flatmates” — young pickups he 
turned into corpses, then kept around for companionship, sleeping with them, bathing them, having sex 
with them. Sometimes, he would prop a corpse beside him on the sofa and watch TV in an unspeakable 
travesty of domestic coziness. At times, there were as many as a half dozen cadavers stashed in his 
apartment at once — some in the cupboard, some under the floorboards, a few in the garden shed. When 
it finally came time to dispose of them, he would call on his old butchering skills, dismembering the 
bodies with a kitchen knife, putting the viscera in a plastic bag, boiling the flesh off the skulls in a soup 
pot, stuffing the torsos in suitcases, then cremating the remains in his backyard. 

The problem of disposal became trickier when he moved to an attic apartment in 1983. Without access 
to a secluded garden, Nilsen resorted to the ill-advised method of chopping up his victims and flushing 
the pieces down the toilet. His horrors were uncovered when the building pipes became clogged and the 
horrified plumber discovered that the problem was caused by a nauseating sludge composed of human 
bones and decomposing flesh. 

Under arrest, Nilsen freely confessed to his atrocities. Indeed, he seemed eager to fathom his own 
motives, cooperating with writer Brian Masters on the 1985 book , Killing for Company. In the end, 
however, such evil remains beyond comprehension. Nilsen himself put his finger on the frighteningly 
fundamental motive that drives all psychopathic sex criminals when — asked what made him commit 
such horrors — he replied: “Well, enjoying it is as good a reason as any.” 

PEDOPHILIA 

To a certain kind of psycho, children are just targets of opportunity, no different from any other 
vulnerable people unlucky enough to cross his path. In 1920, for example, while residing in Luanda, 
Angola, Carl Panzram found himself relaxing in a park not far from the US consulate. As he sat there, an 
African boy, eleven or twelve years old, came wandering by. 

“He was looking for something,” Panzram writes in his chilling jailhouse memoir. “He found it, too. I 
took him out to a gravel pit about 1/4 mile from the main camp of the Sinclair Oil Company at Luanda. I 




left him there, but first I committed sodomy on him and then killed him. His brains were coming out of 
his ears when I left him and he will never be any deader. He is still there.” 

Despite this and other outrages perpetrated against juveniles, Panzram did not specifically target 
children. Totally undiscriminating when it came to mayhem, he would happily kill anyone, regardless of 
age or gender. There<w some serial predators, however, whose taste runs exclusively to children: 
pedophiliac monsters who derive intense sadistic pleasure from raping and slaughtering the young. 

Albert Fish was arguably the most terrifying of this abhorrent breed. From adolescence through old age, 
his entire life was consecrated to the sexual torture of children, primarily boys. Constantly on the move, 
he raped at least a hundred little victims and murdered a minimum of fifteen in twenty-three states from 
New York to Montana. 

What made Fish particularly appalling was that, in the words of one court-appointed psychiatrist, “his 
interest was not so much to have sexual relations with these children as to inflict pain on them.” Many of 
his victims were African-American slum children, targeted “because the authorities didn’t pay much 
attention when they were hurt or missing.” Fish would lure them into basements with offers of candy or 
pocket change, then pounce on them, tie them up, rape and torture them. Sometimes he would gag them, 
though, as he explained, “he preferred not to gag them, circumstances permitting, for he liked to hear 
their cries.” In contrast to some psychopaths, whose violent tendencies subside somewhat as their sex 
drives diminish with age, Fish’s atrocities only grew more extreme as the years passed. His ultimate 
outrage — the abduction, dismemberment, and cannibalizing of twelve-year-old Grace Budd in 1928 — 
was not committed until he was in his sixties. 

Other infamous American child-killers of the twentieth century include: 

Westley Allan Dodd 

Like Albert Fish, Westley Dodd spent much of his time daydreaming about the most unspeakable acts. 
“The more I thought about it, the more exciting the idea of murder sounded,” he confessed in a letter. “I 
planned many ways to kill a boy. Then I started thinking of torture, castration, and even cannibalism. . . . 
I was mainly interested in eating the genitals while kids watched. I was going to do this as a form of 
torture more than anything else.” Though his odious career was brought to an end before he had a 
chance to act on the most deranged of his fantasies, he still managed to commit an appalling number of 
crimes, including three horrendous child murders and an estimated 175 molestations. 

Dodd’s pedophiliac compulsions first took hold of him at the age of thirteen, when he began exposing 
himself to passing children from his bedroom window. He soon progressed to more active forms of 
abuse, playing sexual “games” with younger cousins, neighborhood kids, and the children at the 
Midwestern summer camps where he sought work as a counselor specifically to gain sexual access to 
little victims. By his late teens, he had become an accomplished predator. Though repeatedly 
apprehended for accosting children, Dodd never received more than a slap on the wrist — generally a 




brief stint behind bars plus counseling. In 1987, after being arrested for attempting to lure an eight-year- 
old boy into a vacant building, he was convicted of a “gross misdemeanor” and spent less than four 
months in jail. The psychologist who treated him at that time accurately predicted that the lifelong 
pederast was “an extremely high risk for future offense.” But he tragically underestimated Dodd’s 
potential for violence, concluding that, though driven by deviant sexual desires for children, Dodd 
“didn’t want to hurt them.” 

In September 1989, having selected a park in Vancouver, Washington, as a “good hunting ground,” 

Dodd snared, molested, and savagely murdered eleven-year-old Cole Neer and his ten-year-old brother, 
William. Slightly more than a month later, he abducted four-year-old Lee Iseli from a playground in 
Portland, Oregon, took the child home with him, then molested and tortured him for nearly twenty-four 
hours before strangling him and hanging the corpse in his bedroom closet. Dodd documented these 
outrages with a series of Polaroid photographs later discovered by police — along with other appalling 
evidence — in a suitcase under his bed. 

Not long afterward, Dodd was captured in the act of abducting a six-year-old boy from a movie theater 
in Camas, Washington. Pleading guilty to the three murders and attempted kidnapping, he was sentenced 
to death and was hanged on January 5, 1991, at the age of thirty-one. 

The thoughts of killing children are exciting to me. 

— Westley Allan Dodd 

Arthur Gary Bishop 

Born in 1951, Arthur Bishop was raised by devout Mormon parents, excelled at school, and earned 
promotion to the exalted rank of Eagle Scout. Following his graduation from high school, he served as a 
teenage missionary in the Philippines. Exactly what forces in this seemingly exemplary early life turned 
him into a psychopathic monster are unknown. 

WhatA certain is that, by the time he reached his midtwenties, he was addicted to kiddie porn. 
Excommunicated in 1978 after embezzling nearly $10,000 from an employer, he took on a new identity 
— “Roger Downs” — and moved to an apartment complex in Salt Lake City. Before long, he had joined 
the Big Brother Program so that he could get access to the little boys he craved. 

He progressed from molestation to murder in October 1979, when he lured a four-year-old neighbor 
named Alonzo Daniels to his apartment and began to fondle the boy. When the child burst into sobs and 
threatened to tell, Bishop clubbed him with a hammer, drowned him in his tub, stuffed the body into a 
large cardboard box, and carried it out to his car, right past the boy’s mother, who was frantically 
searching for her missing son. Driving the corpse twenty miles outside the city, he buried it in the desert. 

Like Jeffrey Dahmer — who made a futile effort to satisfy his necrophiliac cravings with manikins — 




Bishop tried to find a safer outlet for increasingly homicidal urges. In the year following the murder of 
Alonzo Daniels, he killed nearly two dozen puppies, adopting them from animal shelters, then taking 
them home and strangling, drowning, or bludgeoning them to death. In the end, these canine surrogates 
worked no better than Dahmer’s dummies. 

In November 1980, Bishop killed eleven-year-old Kim Peterson after luring the boy to his apartment 
with the promise to buy his old roller skates. Peterson’s body ended up in the desert beside Alonzo 
Daniels. Other victims followed: four-year-old Danny Davis, snatched from a supermarket in October 
1981, and six-year-old Troy Ward, abducted from a local playground in June 1983. 

Bishop was finally caught in July 1983, after killing a thirteen-year-old acquaintance he was scheduled 
to chaperone on a camping trip. After a six-week trial in 1984, he was convicted of five counts of capital 
murder and put to death by lethal injection. 

Robert Black 

Pedophiliac sex-killers aren’t just an American phenomenon. These monsters exist throughout the 
world. Nor do they only prey on little boys, as the case of British serial murderer Robert Black illustrates. 

Born out of wedlock in 1947, Black was placed in foster care at six months of age and raised in the 
Scottish Highlands. During his early school years, he gained a reputation as a vile-tempered bully who 
preyed on weaker children (one of his victims was a younger boy with an artificial leg). He also 
displayed a precocious fascination with perverse sexuality. From childhood on, he enjoyed inserting 
objects into his anus, a practice he continued throughout his life. (After his arrest, police were stunned to 
find photographs he had taken of himself with all sorts of bizarre items protruding from his rectum, 
including a wine bottle, a telephone handset, and a table leg.) 

Black’s foster mother died when he was eleven. A year later — along with a schoolmate — he attempted 
to rape a little girl. Shipped off to a home for troubled boys, he was the target of regular sexual abuse by 
a male staffer. 

In 1962, at the age of fifteen, Black was released from the home and took a job as a delivery boy in a 
town outside Glasgow. During the next two years, by his own later admission, he molested as many as 
forty little girls while making his rounds, including a seven-year-old he lured into a derelict building, 
strangled to unconsciousness, then stripped and molested. After masturbating over the inert body, he fled 
the scene but was later arrested. Inexplicably, his punishment consisted of nothing more than a stern 
admonishment. Black was soon back to his deviant ways. 

Continuing to prey on little girls — including the nine-year-old granddaughter of his landlord — he was 
incarcerated for a year in 1967 after being found guilty of three charges of indecent assault. Upon his 
release, he sought fresh hunting grounds in London, where he found work as a swimming pool attendant 
— a job that permitted him to spy on little girls as they frolicked in the water. His own preferred form of 




exercise at this time was to break into the pool after closing time and swim laps with a broomstick 
lodged in his anus. 

Exactly when Black began to kill is a matter of dispute, though some experts believe he claimed his first 
underage victim as early as 1969. There is no question, however, that between July 1982, and March 
1986, he abducted and murdered three little girls along the England- Scotland border. He was caught red- 
handed while abducting a fourth intended victim in July 1990, and ultimately imprisoned for life. In 
addition to the trio of children he is known to have snatched, raped, and smothered, he is suspected in as 
many as ten other child murders, though he has staunchly refused to confess. 

GERONTOPHILIA 

However repugnant, pedophilia is an all-too-familiar perversion. Hardly a week goes by without some 
news account of a respected authority figure — schoolteacher, scoutmaster, man of the cloth — being 
arrested for abusing children or downloading kiddie porn. 

Far less common is another aberration involving abnormal love between the generations. Gerontophilia 
— the polar opposite of pedophila in regard to age — is the technical term for a morbid sexual fixation on 
the elderly. 

Some serial killers prey on old people for the same reason that they murder children: because 
defenseless seniors make easy targets. Others, however, are sadistic gerontophiles — deviants who derive 
perverted pleasure from attacking and killing the old. 

John Wayne Glover 

Even more than most of his duplicitous breed, John Glover was the last person you’d suspect of being a 
psycho-killer. A big, jovial family man in his late fifties, he lived a life of impeccable middle-class 
respectability in a fashionable suburb of Sydney, Australia. He had a solid marriage, two beloved 
daughters, a comfortable house, good friends, admiring neighbors, and a solid job as a salesman for the 
Four ’n’ Twenty Pie Company. He was drinking pals with the former mayor of his community and 
devoted his spare time to doing charity work for the local Senior Citizens Society. 

But Glover had another and far more sinister connection to senior citizens. Unbeknownst to the world, 
the affable middle-age suburbanite was a vicious serial murderer whose homicidal impulses were 
triggered by little old ladies. 

A native of England, Glover emigrated to Australia in 1956 at the age of twenty-four and within a few 
years was convicted of two counts of indecent assaults on female victims. Punished with nothing more 
than three years’ probation, he promptly ran afoul of the law again, getting arrested on a Peeping Tom 
charge in 1965. After a brief stint in jail, he married, settled down, and appeared to reform. But, as with 
all psychopaths, it was only a matter of time before his darkest nature showed itself again. 




In March 1989, he began the series of atrocities that would earn him lasting infamy as the so-called 
Granny Killer — one of the most savage and twisted serial murderers in Australia’s history. Glover’s 
signature method — his homicidal “calling card” — was to bash in his victim’s skull with a hammer, 
strangle her with her own panty hose, and make off with her money. His victims were frail, often sickly 
women in advanced old age — most in their eighties, one in her nineties, none younger than seventy- 
seven. Several could only walk with the help of canes, one was partially deaf and blind, another suffered 
from cancer. 

Though Glover did not rape them, there was a clear sexual motive to his crimes, since he took pleasure 
from stripping off their hosiery and undergarments. During the period of his killing spree, he also began 
molesting infirm old women in their beds while making the rounds of nursing homes in his capacity as a 
pie salesman. 

By the time he committed his fifth murder, the biggest task force in Australia’s history had been 
assembled to catch him. Their big break came in January 1990, when — while visiting a hospital on 
business — he attempted to sexually molest an elderly cancer patient in her bed. Realizing he had been 
identified, Glover went home and attempted suicide, leaving a note that read, in part, “No more grannies, 
no more grannies.” Recovering from this attempt, he managed to commit one final murder, even while 
under police surveillance. Tried in November 1991, he was found guilty on six counts of murder and 
received a life sentence for each. 

I just see these ladies and it triggers something. I just have to be violent towards them. 

— John Wayne Glover 
Daniel Ray Troyer 

Suspected of as many as thirteen homicides, Troyer committed his first known attack on an elderly 
woman in 1978, when he beat, choked, and attempted to rape a seventy-one-year-old quadriplegic in 
Salt Lake City, Utah. 

Sent to prison for the crime, he was paroled after seven years. One month later, on July 17, 1985, he 
murdered eighty-three-year-old Drucilla Ovard, who was found beaten and strangled in her bathroom. 
Though she had not been raped, her killer had stripped her naked, arranged her in an obscene position, 
and masturbated over her body, leaving behind a semen-stained towel. 

Two weeks after this outrage, Troyer invaded the home of seventy-year-old Carol Nelson, just a few 
blocks away from the Ovard apartment. Luckily for Mrs. Nelson, she was not at home. Alerted by a 
neighbor who had witnessed the break-in, police promptly arrived and arrested Troyer, who received a 
sentence of one to fifteen years for burglary. 




He was paroled three years later. On August 17, 1988 — just two weeks after his release — he left his 
halfway house to apply for a job at a nearby barber’s college. That same day, he beat and strangled 
eighty-eight-year-old Ethel Luckau in her home, three blocks away from the barber’ s school. Once 
again, a semen-stained towel was found beside the nude body of the victim. 

Thanks to DNA technology, which matched him to the semen left at both crime scenes, Troyer 
eventually received consecutive life sentences for the Ovard and Luckau murders. Authorities in Utah, 
however, believe that he may be responsible for killing up to thirteen elderly women, including sixty- 
nine-year-old Thelma Blodgett, murdered less than a week before Drucilla Ovard, and seventy-three- 
year-old Lucille Westermann, slain just six days after Ethel Luckau. 

Thierry Paulin 

Alternately dubbed the “Monster of Montmartre” and the “Little Old Lady Killer,” Thierry Paulin stood 
out as an anomaly not only within “normal” society but among serial killers. The victims of most 
sadistic psychopaths generally mirror the murderer’s own sexual orientation and race: whites tend to 
prey on whites, blacks on blacks, straight males on women, gay males on other men, etc. Paulin violated 
all these expectations. A bleached blond black drag queen, he savagely murdered nearly two dozen old 
white women in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris in the mid-1980s, creating a panic among the 
city’s elderly female population. 

Paulin’s crime wave began in 1984, when he was twenty-one. Accompanied on occasion by his nineteen- 
year-old lover, Jean-Thierry Maturin, Paulin would trail old ladies home as they returned from the 
market, then pounce when they unlocked the front door. He and his accomplice killed with unusual 
ferocity. One victim, eighty-year-old Marie Choy, was bound with steel wire and forced to drink bleach 
before she was beaten to death. Another, seventy-five-year-old Maria Mico-Diaz, was so savagely 
hacked with a knife that she was nearly cut in two. 

The “Monster of Montmartre” celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday in November 1997, by attacking 
three victims during a single weekend. One survived to describe him to police, who had little trouble in 
tracking down a black transvestite with platinum blond hair. In custody, Paulin confessed to the murder 
of twenty-one female victims between the ages of sixty and ninety-five. He died of AIDS in April 1989, 
while awaiting trial. 

THE WORLD’S WORST PERVERT 

On the face of it, it might seem like a quixotic effort to identify the most sexually aberrant serial killer of 
all time. Who, after all, was sicker: Jeffrey Dahmer, who admitted that cutting open his victims and 
seeing their internal organs got him aroused? Lritz Haarmann, who had orgasms while tearing open the 
throats of his victims with his teeth? Arthur Shawcross, who derived sexual pleasure from digging up the 
decaying corpse of a murdered prostitute, cutting out her vulva, and eating it? Douglas Clark, who liked 
to perform fellatio on the decapitated heads of his victims? The Hillside Stranglers, who got off on 




raping their victims while forcing Drano down their throats? 



Even in this field of unspeakable psychos, however, one figure stands out above the rest: Albert Fish. 
Several things made this Depression-era lust-killer uniquely monstrous. 

To begin with, he was a lifelong pedophile who preyed exclusively on children. Moreover, he was an 
unbridled sadist, who not only raped and murdered his little victims but subjected them to the most 
hideous tortures. (On at least one occasion, he tied up a young boy, cut off his penis with scissors, and 
left him alone to bleed to death.) 

Fish’s need to inflict pain extended to himself. Not only a sadist, he was an ardent masochist. He hired 
women to bind and whip him. When no one was available for the job, he flagellated himself with a 
specially designed, nail-studded paddle. 

But sadism and masochism were only two of Fish’s paraphilias. He routinely engaged in boXhurophilia 
(a perverted fascination with urine, which in Fish’s case involved forcing little boys to piss on him and 
drinking their urine) and coprophagy (eating feces). He was also a cannibalistic monster straight out of 
“Hansel and Gretel.” On two separate occasions, he dismembered his young victims and turned parts of 
their bodies into a stew, which he devoured over the course of several days. 

A compulsive writer of obscene notes, Fish loved to regale his correspondents with graphic descriptions 
of his atrocities. In one letter, he recounted the horrors he had perpetrated on a four-year-old boy named 
Billy Gaffney after snatching him from home and leading him to a city dump: 



I took the G boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of 
dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes in the dump. Then I 
walked back and took the trolley to 59 St. at 2 A.M. and walked from there home. 

Next day about 2 P.M. I took tools, a good heavy cat-o-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of 
my belts in half, slit these half in six strips about 8 in. long. 

I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears — nose — slit his mouth from 
ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to 
his body and drank his blood. 

I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I 
put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in grip. Then I cut him thru the middle of his body. Just 
below his belly button. Then thru his legs about 2 in. below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of 
paper. I cut off the head — feet — arms — hands and the legs below the knee. 



This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you 




will see all along road going to North Beach. Water is 3 to 4 ft. deep. They sank at once. 

I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked the best. His monkey and pee wees [i.e., 
penis and testicles] and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears — 
nose — pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. 



While in prison, Fish underwent an intensive examination by a prominent New York City psychiatrist, 
Dr. Fredric Wertham, who concluded that Fish’s life had been one of “unparalleled perversity” — that the 
old man had routinely practiced “every known sexual perversion and some perversions never heard of 
before.” He arrived at this assessment after Fish described some of his favorite activities: shoving 
alcohol-soaked cotton up his rectum and setting it on fire, for example, or inserting a long-stemmed rose 
into his penis, looking at himself in the mirror, then pulling out the rose and eating the petals. When his 
jailers noticed that he had trouble sitting down, Fish explained that he liked to stick sewing needles up 
into his groin and leave them there. No one believed him until an X-ray revealed the presence of more 
than two dozen needles inside his pelvic region. 

Altogether, Wertham concluded that Fish was afflicted with no fewer than seventeen paraphilias. In a 
futile attempt to save his client from the electric chair, Fish’s attorney cited all seventeen of these 
perversions to prove that the old man was insane. 

“It is noteworthy,” he wrote to the Court of Appeals, “that no single case-history report, either in legal or 
medical annals, contains a record of one individual who possessed all of these sexual abnormalities.” 





X-ray showing needles in Albert Fish’s pelvic region 



{New York Daily News ) 



WHY THEY KILL 



It’s natural to crave a simple explanation for the sources of serial murder. To the normal mind, the 
crimes of creatures like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy seem so inconceivable that we desperately seek 
rational explanations for them. If we could only pinpoint a specific cause for such enormities — child 
abuse, media violence, biochemical imbalance, anything — the horror would at least seem 
comprehensible. Just being able to make sense of it would offer a degree of comfort. Perhaps we might 
even be able to prevent it in the future. 

Unfortunately, some mysteries can never be fully resolved. Even a genius like Sigmund Freud admitted 
defeat when it came to answering certain questions about human psychology. Exactly why a person 
“should have turned out the way he did and in no other way” was, he insisted, impossible to say. There 
are too many random, unknowable factors that go into the development of an individual life to allow for 
any sort of definitive explanation. 

Freud was talking about creative geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci when he made this observation. But 
his point holds true for serial killers as well. A prodigy of evil like Jeffrey Dahmer is, on some level, 
every bit as unfathomable as a prodigy of artistic or mathematical creativity, like Picasso or Einstein. 

Philosophers, poets, great thinkers, and writers have wrestled with the question of evil throughout the 
millennia. In our own country, one of the most profound minds ever to grapple with this issue was the 
nineteenth-century novelist Herman Melville. In his final mas ter work, 5z7/y Budd, Melville ponders the 
depravity of the psychopathic villain John Claggart, who sets out to destroy the innocent title character 
for no apparent reason. What, Melville wonders, could possibly have created a being like Claggart? 
Melville considers several possibilities. Perhaps Claggart was the product of “vicious training.” Or 
maybe he had read too many “corrupting books.” Or possibly he had overindulged in “licentious living.” 

In the end, none of these explanations seems adequate, and Melville is forced to throw up his hands and 
conclude that evil on the scale of Claggart’ s can never be fully accounted for, that it is — in the words of 
Scripture — a “mystery of iniquity.” 

Still, to admit that we may never know the ultimate sources of serial murder shouldn’t stop us from 
considering some of the contributing causes. Various theories have been advanced over the years. Some 
of these have been discredited, others are questionable, while still others have a good deal of validity, 
even if they don’t offer a full and final explanation. 

ATAVISM 

The word “atavism” refers to an ancient, ancestral trait that reappears in modern life. And there’s no 
question that there is something atavistic about certain serial killers, who — in their unbridled savagery — 
seem like creatures from a primitive age when cannibalism, human sacrifice, and similar barbaric 




practices were rife in the world. 



Indeed, it is precisely this atavistic quality that accounts for the terrible fascination some of these 
psychos exert. It is both appalling and weirdly compelling to think of someone like Eddie Gein — a 
meek, Midwestern farmer who dressed in the flayed skin of corpses — as though he were an ancient 
Aztec priest performing a ritual to propitiate the gods of death. Or Jeffrey Dahmer, constructing a pagan 
altar of skulls, bones, and body parts in his Milwaukee apartment as a way of magically absorbing the 
“essence” of his victims. Or Ted Bundy, the clean-cut young law student, reverting to a state of 
werewolflike ferocity when his bloodlust overcame him. 

These and other examples have led some psychologists to argue that sadistic lust-killers are individuals 
who have suffered a complete breakdown of the normal socialization process. The kind of childhood 
training that instills morals, empathy, and conscience in the rest of us has totally failed. As a result, they 
become susceptible to dark, barbaric urges that well up from the most primitive levels of the mind. It is 
as if, under the right circumstances, a savage, subhuman creature breaks through the surface of their 
modern-day selves and takes temporary possession of them, much as the apelike Mr. Hyde does in 
Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic fable, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

There is something to be said for this atavistic view of serial murder. At the very least, it’s a useful 
metaphor for the kind of monstrous transformations that killers like Bundy undergo. One scientist, 
however, took the theory to ludicrous extremes. His name was Cesare Lombroso. Nowadays, he is 
regarded as something of a crackpot whose theories have been completely discredited. In his own time, 
however, he was admired as the foremost criminologist of his age and the father of something called 
“criminal anthropology.” 




Illustration of an atavistic “born criminal” from Cesare Lombroso’ s Criminal Man 



In his 1876 book L’Uomo Delinquente (Criminal Man), Lombroso (who was heavily influenced by 
Darwin’s theories) argued that violent criminals were not merely barbaric in their behavior. They were 
literal atavisms — savage, Neanderthal-like beings born, by some unexplained evolutionary glitch, into 
the modern world. Because they were throwbacks to the prehistoric past, they could be identified by 
certain physical characteristics which made them resemble a lower, more apelike species. According to 




Lombroso, natural-born criminals were distinguished by small skulls, sloping foreheads, jutting brows, 
protruding ears, bad teeth, barrel chests, disproportionately long arms, and various other traits. They also 
often had tattoos, which he associated with members of aboriginal tribes, or as he put it, “primitive 
humanity.” 

I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature 
of the criminal — an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive 
humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek- 
bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle- 
shaped ears found in criminals, savages, apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, 
excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresponsible craving of evil for its own sake, the desire not 
only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.” 

— Cesare Lombroso 

Needless to say, Lombroso’ s theory holds as much water as the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of 
phrenology (the belief that you can analyze someone’s personality by feeling the bumps on his head). 
Nowadays, we know all too well that ultraviolent criminals come in all shapes and sizes. If — as 
Lombroso suggested — you could tell that someone was a savage killer just by looking at him, then the 
women who fell victim to dapper H. H. Holmes, or dashing Ted Bundy, or dorky Harvey Glatman might 
still be alive today. And if tattoos were a sign of someone’s innate criminality, a significant part of the 
US population — including, at this point, a fair number of suburban soccer moms — would be behind bars. 

Recommended Reading 

Robert Eisler ,Man into Wolf (1951) 

Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981) 

BRAIN DAMAGE 

Serial killers are such spectacular cases of mental aberration that it is natural to wonder if they suffer, 
not merely from severe psychological problems, but from physiological ones as well — specifically, if 
their brains are actually different from those of normal people. In order to test this theory, scientists 
have, on occasion, performed postmortem dissections on notorious psychopaths. After his execution in 
1924, the brain of the infamous German lust-killer Fritz Haarmann was removed from his skull and 
shipped off to Gottingen University for study. 

Nothing came of this effort. And in the decades since, no one has been able to identify a specific 
neurological defect that would account for monstrous criminal behavior. 



One intriguing fact has emerged in recent years, however: severe head injuries are surprisingly common 




in the early lives of serial killers. 



At the age of ten, for example, Earle Leonard Nelson — the notorious “Gorilla Murderer” who strangled 
nearly two dozen victims in the 1920s — collided with a trolley car while riding his bike in San 
Francisco, crashed headfirst into the cobblestones, and lay comatose for nearly a week. At his 1927 
murder trial, his attorney argued (unsuccessfully) that Nelson’s homicidal behavior was a direct result of 
this dire childhood accident. 

Arthur Shawcross — who slaughtered a string of prostitutes in upstate New York and occasionally 
consumed parts of their bodies — suffered at least four major head injuries in his youth that left him with 
scars on his brain and a cyst on the temporal lobe. Even more accident-prone was Bobby Joe Long, 
convicted killer of nine women, who was hospitalized four times in his childhood for various head 
injuries, plus once in his early twenties after he crashed his motorcycle into a car and slammed his skull 
into the vehicle with such force that his helmet was crushed. 

At seventeen, the British psychopath Fred West — half of the notorious killer couple whose victims 
included their own teenage daughter — also had a nasty motorcycle accident, which left him with a metal 
plate in his head. John Wayne Gacy developed a blood clot on the brain after being hit by a swing as a 
child. And young Gary JJeidnik sustained such a severe injury when he plunged from a tree that his skull 
was permanently deformed, earning him the cruel playground nickname, “Football JJead.” 

These and many other cases of ultraviolent criminals who have sustained severe head traumas in their 
youth have convinced some researchers that brain damage is a key element in the development of serial 
killers. Even proponents of this theory, however, admit that brain damage alone isn’t the ultimate 
explanation for serial murder. After all, countless children take headlong spills from the bikes or swing 
sets or Jungle Gyms each year without growing up to be cannibalistic lust-killers. Moreover, a close 
look at the backgrounds of serial killers reveals other factors that clearly contribute to their 
psychopathology. 

Earle Leonard Nelson, for example, had a severely dysfunctional family background. Orphaned as an 
infant when both his parents died of syphilis, he was taken into the home of a fanatical grandmother and 
displayed signs of extreme emotional disturbance long before his bicycle accident. Arthur Shawcross 
was repeatedly molested by a pedophiliac neighbor and sodomized with a broom handle at the age of 
ten. Fred West was the product of a household in which incest was rife, while Bobby Joe Long’s mother 
allegedly forced him (by his account, which she denies) to share her bed throughout his childhood and 
witness her lovemaking with her boyfriends. 

John Wayne Gacy was raised by a viciously demeaning father, whose unrelenting ridicule of his son’s 
effeminate mannerisms created a bottomless well of self-loathing in the boy. Gary Heidnik’s father also 
subjected his son to systematic humiliation, publicly displaying the urine-stained sheets whenever the 
boy wet his bed. 




Indeed, the head injuries suffered by serial killers are often the direct result of childhood maltreatment. 
Henry Lee Lucas’s mother once beat him so severely with a piece of lumber that he lay in a coma for 
three days. Of a group of death row inmates described in a study by Dr. Jonathan Pincus, one had been 
“beaten almost to death” by his father at age three, another had repeatedly been “beaten in the head with 
two-by-fours by his parents,” and the third had received a severe wound to his cranium when a family 
member “deliberately dropped a glass bottle on his head.” 

In short, while brain damage is often present in the case histories of serial killers, other kinds of damage 
play a central role, too — especially the emotional and psychological damage inflicted by a shockingly 
abusive upbringing. 

Recommended Reading 

Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Guilty By Reason of Insanity (1998) 

Jonathan H. Pincus , Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill? (2003) 

CHILD ABUSE 

Though often gussied up in technical jargon, a great deal of psychiatric theory is just plain common 
sense. It makes perfect sense, for example, that if human beings are raised in warm, loving households — 
if they are brought up to believe that the world is a secure and decent place — then they will grow up 
with a healthy relationship to themselves and other people, able to give love freely and receive it in 
return. 

Conversely, if a person is severely maltreated from his earliest years — subjected to constant 
psychological and physical abuse — he or she will grow up with a malignant view of life. To such a 
person, the world is a hateful place, where all human relationships are based, not on love and respect, 
but on power, suffering, and humiliation. Having been tortured by his earliest caretakers, he will, in later 
life, seek to inflict torture on others, partly as a way of taking revenge, partly because he has been so 
psychologically warped by his experiences that he can only feel pleasure by inflicting pain — and, in the 
most extreme cases, only feel alive when he is causing death. 

In short, while neurological problems — either from brain damage or hereditary defects — often play a 
role in the making of serial killers, severely abusive upbringings are more or less universal in their 
family backgrounds. 

To be sure, not every abused child grows up to be a psychopathic killer. But virtually every 
psychopathic killer has suffered extreme, often grotesque, mistreatment at the hands of his or her parents 
or guardians. In the language of logic, severe child abuse may not be a sufficient cause in the creation of 
serial murderers, but it appears to be a necessary one. 




Based on their pioneering prison interviews with the likes of David Berkowitz and Edmund Kemper, 
John Douglas and his fellow “mindhunters” in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit concluded that all 
serial killers come from dysfunctional backgrounds: “unstable, abusive, or deprived family situations.” 
Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis — who has also conducted jailhouse interviews with notorious psychopaths, 
including Ted Bundy — flatly declares that, in addition to whatever neurological problems they may 
suffer, serial killers have invariably experienced a “violent abusive upbringing.” Other theorists on the 
origins of homicidal behavior have confirmed this view. In his highly publicized 1999 book, Why They 
Kill, for example, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes describes the discoveries of a 
sociologist named Lonnie Athens, who, after many years of research, concluded that children who grow 
up to be cold-blooded killers undergo a four-stage process, beginning with what Athens calls 
“brutalization” — i.e., “coarse and cruel treatment at the hands of an aggressive authority figure,” 
generally one or another (or both) of the parents. 

Recent scientific research has reinforced the findings of people like Otnow and Athens by demonstrating 
that a traumatic upbringing can actually alter the anatomy of a person’s brain. Brain scans performed on 
severely abused children have found that specific areas of the cortex — related not just to the intelligence 
but to the emotions — never develop properly, leaving them incapable of feeling empathy for other 
human beings. 

Given the kind of abuse suffered by some serial killers, it’s no surprise that they turn out to be homicidal 
sadists; indeed, it would be more surprising if they didn’t. Mary Bell — the juvenile serial killer who 
murdered two little boys in Newcastle, England, in 1968 — was raised by a mother who, on at least four 
occasions, tried to get rid of her unwanted child by feeding her drugs. After turning to prostitution, 
Mary’s mother participated in the sexual torture of the little girl, holding her daughter down while her 
tricks orally raped the child and ejaculated in her mouth. Henry Lee Lucas was also raised by an 
alcoholic prostitute, who forced him to watch her have sex with her clients, beat him so severely that she 
once put him into a coma, and — when his brother accidentally gashed him in the eye — waited so long to 
get him medical attention that the eye had to be removed. 

“Negative parenting” — the phrase used by sociologists to describe the kind of dysfunctional upbringings 
that serial killers are subjected to — doesn’t begin to suggest the monstrous behavior of beings like 
Charlie Manson’s teenage mother, who once traded him to a barmaid in exchange for a bottle of beer. Or 
Jesse Pomeroy’s brutish father, who liked to strip his son naked and flog him half to death for the 
slightest infraction. Or Joseph Kallinger’s pathological stepparents, who disciplined the boy with 
hammers, cat-o’-nine tails, and the threat of castration, and, on at least one occasion, forced him to hold 
his palm over an open flame until the skin began to smolder. Or Hugh Morse’s grandmother, who 
butchered his pet mice before his eyes as punishment for his sneaking off to the movies. 

Sometimes, the childhood horrors experienced by future serial killers occur, not at home, but in various 
institutions. Shipped off to a Dickensian orphanage at the age of five, Albert Fish acquired his lifelong 
taste for sadomasochistic torture from one of the matrons, who liked to strip the little boys naked and 
savagely flog one of them while the others stood in a circle and watched. After stealing some license 
plates when he was eight, William Bonin was sent to reform school, where he was regularly raped by the 




older boys. Carl Panzram’s implacable character was forged in a series of brutal “training schools,” 
where juvenile inmates were subjected to unimaginable punishment, often for such minor offenses as 
failing to fold their dinner napkins properly. 

They used to have a large wooden block which we were bent over and tied face downward after first 
being stripped naked. Then a large towel was soaked in salt water and spread on our backs from the 
shoulders to the knees. Then the man who was to do the whipping took a large strap about 1/4 of an inch 
thick by 4 inches and about two feet long. This strap had a lot of little round holes punched through it. 
Every time that whip came down on the body the skin would come up through these little holes in the 
strap and after 25 or 30 times of this, little blisters would form and then burst, and right there and then 
hell began. The salt water would do the rest. About a week or two later a boy might be able to sit down. 

— Carl Panzram, describing the punishment he regularly received as a twelve-year-old inmate of the 
Minnesota Training School 

Some people question the findings of researchers like Dorothy Otnow Lewis and Jonathan Pincus, who 
insist that all serial killers have severe abuse in their backgrounds. After all, they argue, there have been 
homicidal monsters like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy who don’t appear to have experienced such 
childhood torture. 

There are problems with this argument, however. For one thing, even in the cases of such notorious 
figures, whose lives have been studied by all manner of experts, there is a great deal that we simply 
don’t know. Dahmer, for example, may well have been sexually molested by a neighbor. And — despite 
family snapshots showing little Ted Bundy enjoying an all-American boyhood of fishing, camping, and 
roasting hot dogs in a fireplace — there were very weird things going on in his childhood home. He was 
born to a young, unwed mother who pretended to be his older sister as he grew up, and was co-raised by 
a viciously racist, wife-beating grandfather who got a kick out of tormenting house pets. 

It is clear, moreover, that psychological abuse can be every bit as devastating to the emotional 
development of a child as physical maltreatment. According to psychoanalyst Carl Goldberg, a child 
who is systematically shamed and humiliated — who is made to feel that he is utterly worthless and 
undeserving of love — is almost bound to develop into a malevolent personality. His feeling of self- 
contempt becomes so profound “that the only way to survive is to become indifferent to other people, 
too.” In effect, such a person grows up to believe that “I may not be worthy, but neither is anyone else.” 
Convinced of his own badness, he bitterly lashes out at the world. 

Certainly — in addition to regular beatings — John Wayne Gacy received nothing but humiliation from his 
father, who constantly belittled his son’s masculinity. Ed Kemper’s mother ridiculed him relentlessly 
during his youth, mocking his physical appearance and telling him that no woman would ever love him. 
Henry Louis Wallace’s mother not only thrashed him regularly with a switch but liked to shame him by 
dressing him up as a girl and parading him around in public — a form of mortification also endured by 
Charles Manson, Henry Lee Lucas, and Carroll Cole. According to Goldberg, Jeffrey Dahmer, too, 




experienced intense feelings of “shame and betrayal” in relation to his parents, feelings that afflicted him 
with a profound, lifelong sense of “loneliness and self-hatred.” 

In short, whatever other factors enter into the making of a serial killer, one element stands out above the 
rest — what best-selling novelist and child psychologist Jonathan Kellerman calls “overall rotten 
families.” Indeed, in looking at the nightmarish childhoods of these psychopaths, it is hard not to feel 
sorry for them — at least until you recall the kinds of horrors they commit as adults. In the end, they elicit 
a twofold response — pity for the hideously abused children they were, outrage at the monsters they 
ended up becoming. 

Recommended Reading 

John Douglas and Mark 01shaker,77i<? Anatomy of Motive (1999) 

Carl Goldberg, Speaking with the Devil (1996) 

Jonathan Kellerman, Savage Spawn (1999) 

Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill (1999) 

MOTHER HATE 

In world mythology, there is a figure known as the Terrible Mother: a nightmarish female who, instead 
of offering nurture and comfort, dominates and destroys her own offspring. Unfortunately, this type of 
female isn’t limited to myths, fairy tales, and horror fantasies lik tCarrie andPsycho. She sometimes 
appears in real life. Her effect on the vulnerable young males unlucky enough to be her sons can be 
devastating, causing them to grow up with a virulent hatred, not just of the maternal monsters who raised 
them, but of womankind in general. 

Blaming your problems on mommy, of course, is the oldest excuse in the psychoanalytic book. Still, if 
you have the kind of mother who sodomized you with a broomstick — or forced you to hold your open 
palm over a flame — or punished you by slaughtering your favorite pets — or made you watch her have 
sex with strangers — or subjected you to incessant mockery because of the way you looked — chances are 
pretty good that you will end up with a profound animosity toward members of the opposite sex. 

Indeed, some criminologists have claimed that serial killers who target women are driven largely by 
mother hate. Dr. David Abrahamsen, who has written extensively about the “murdering mind” (to use 
the title of one of his books), maintains that the crimes of psychopathic killers are invariably rooted in 
their unconscious need to “take revenge” upon their rejecting mothers. 

Whatever the truth of this assertion, there is no doubt that some serial killers grow up with a murderous 
rage against their monstrously abusive mothers. Though it is impossible to tell how many victims 




actually died at the hands of the spectacularly unreliable Henry Lee Lucas, we know for certain that one 
of them was his appallingly vicious mother, Viola, whom he stabbed to death during an argument in 
1960. Edmund Kemper, too, spent his teenage years indulging in homicidal fantasies about his 
relentlessly demeaning mother — fantasies that he finally put into action in 1974, when he killed her in 
her sleep, cut off her head, and (in one of the more symbolically resonant acts in the annals of serial 
murder) shoved her larynx down the garbage disposal. “It seemed appropriate,” he later told the police, 
“as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.” 

Even serial killers who haven’t acted out their matricidal fury have openly acknowledged it. Joe Fischer, 
for example — responsible for an indeterminate number of killings during the 1970s — bore a murderous 
hate for his prostitute mother long after she died of natural causes. “I would have killed her ten times 
over,” he told investigators, “but I really believe it would have broken my father’s heart.” 

According to psychiatrists, the loathing such killers feel for their mothers becomes projected onto all 
females, resulting in what crime writer Stephen Michaud calls “malignant misogyny.” Women come to 
be seen as noxious, disgusting creatures that deserve whatever horrors are inflicted on them — a 
sentiment chillingly expressed by “Hillside Strangler” Kenneth Bianchi, who steadfastly defended his 
atrocities. 

“It wasn’t fuckin’ wrong,” he blithely told his interrogators. “Why is it wrong to get rid of some fuckin’ 
cunts?” 

If I could dig up my mother’s grave, I’d take out her bones and kill her again. 

— Joe Fischer 

BAD SEED 

The term “bad seed” was popularized by the 1956 movie of that title, which was based on a successful 
Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson (which in turn was adapted from a 1954 novel by William 
March). In the film, an adorable, pigtailed moppet (played by the child actor Patty McCormack) turns 
out to be a frighteningly cold-blooded serial killer who dispatches her victims with all the childlike 
exuberance of Lisa Simpson tootling away on her saxophone. 

The phrase “bad seed,” however, does not relate to killer-kids in general, but specifically to the notion 
that a profoundly psychopathic child can grow up in a normal, stable, loving household — in other words, 
that some people are just born evil. Here’s how one of the characters, a writer named Reginald Trasker, 
puts it in the play when the little girl’s mother asks him if “criminal children are always the product of 
environment”: 



Some doctor friends of mine assure me that we’ve all been putting too much emphasis on environment 




and too little on heredity lately. They say there’s a type of criminal born with no capacity for remorse or 
guilt . . . They can’t prove it, but they think there are such people. They say there are children born into 
the best families with every advantage of education and discipline — that never acquire any moral 
scruples. It’s as if they were born blind — you couldn’t expect to teach them to see. 



While this theory makes for effective drama — and is certainly reassuring to parents who don’t want to 
accept responsibility for raising severely screwed-up kids — it does not conform to real life. There are 
simply no serial killers who have been “born into the best families” — if by the phrase “best families” 
one means households where children are given real love, a deep sense of security, and solid moral 
values. 

True, the precise degree to which bad families contribute to the creation of criminal psychopaths is still a 
matter of debate. The range of mistreatment that serial killers have suffered as children varies widely, 
from outright physical and sexual torture to extreme humiliation and other forms of emotional abuse. 

But one thing is certain: there is no such thing as a serial killer who has come from a healthy, happy 
home. All of them are the products of distinctly dysfunctional backgrounds. 

Listening to Reginald Trasker speak, another character in the play, a writer name Richard Bravo, replies: 
“If you encounter a human without compassion or pity or morals, he grew up where these things weren’t 
encouraged. That’s final and absolute.” Bravo calls Trasker’ s “bad seed” theory “tommyrot.” 

And he’s right. 

MEAN GENES 

To say that there are no such things as “bad seeds” — children who are born evil — is not to claim that 
inherited factors play no role at all in the creation of serial killers. 

In his indispensable book The Blank Slate, MIT professor Steven Pinker sets out to counter the currently 
fashionable notion that there is nothing innate in human nature and that people are purely the products of 
their environment. Pinker begins his book with an intriguing example. “Many policies on parenting,” he 
writes, “are inspired by research that finds a correlation between the behavior of parents and the 
behavior of children. Loving parents have confident children, authoritative parents (neither too 
permissive nor too punitive) have well-behaved children, parents who talk to their children have children 
with better language skills, and so on. Everyone concludes that to grow the best children parents must be 
loving, authoritative, and talkative, and if children don’t turn out well, it must be the parents’ fault.” This 
conclusion, as Pinker points out, “depends on the belief that children are blank slates” — that their minds, 
characters, and behavioral patterns are entirely shaped by their upbringing. 

But there is another possibility, too: “The correlations between parents and children may be telling us 
only that the same genes that make parents loving, authoritative, and talkative make their children self- 




confident, well-behaved, and articulate.” In other words, heredity also plays a role in producing good 
children. 

The same principle applies to serial killers. Most experts believe that certain children grow up to be 
violent psychopaths because they are treated so monstrously by their parents. And there is no doubt that, 
almost without exception, serial killers grow up in wretchedly dysfunctional households. But it is 
possible that — to paraphrase Pinker — the same genes that make some adults miserable excuses for 
parents make their children warped and pernicious human beings. 

Recent scientific discoveries seem to confirm that severely antisocial personalities are at least partly the 
product of genetic factors. Experiments have shown that when people born with a certain “low-active” 
gene (specifically, something called the “monoamine oxidase A gene”) are subjected to severe 
childhood maltreatment, they grow up to be criminally violent at a far higher rate than people born with 
a “high-active” gene. 

In short, it seems likely that both nurtur eand nature play a part in producing serial killers. 

Recommended Reading 

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modem Denial of Human Nature (2002) 

Matt Ridley, “What Makes You Who You Ar&T’Time Magazine (June 2, 2003) 

ADOPTION 

Obviously there are millions of adopted children who grow up to be perfectly happy and well-adjusted 
adults (or at least as happy and well-adjusted as any nonadopted person). Still, a surprisingly high 
percentage of serial killers have been raised in adoptive or foster homes. 

There shouldn’t be anything surprising about this fact, since it reflects, among other things, the kinds of 
extremely unstable backgrounds — the “overall rotten families” — as Jonathan Kellerman calls them — 
that psychopaths invariably spring from. Jane Toppan’s father, for example, was an illiterate, abusive 
drunk who stuck both his daughters in an orphanage after the death of his wife and never saw them 
again. Earle Leonard Nelson was born to a dissolute couple who died of syphilis within a few months of 
each other when their son was an infant. A fair number of notorious serial killers have been children of 
prostitutes who couldn’t wait to get rid of their kids. From the moment of her birth, Mary Bell was 
spurned by her mother, Betty, who — when the midwife tried to put the newborn in her arms — shouted: 
“Get that thing away from me!” Throughout Mary’s early years, her mother made every effort to dispose 
of her unwanted child, once even taking her to an adoption agency and leaving her there with a stranger. 

The belief (usually fully justified) that they have been rejected by their birth parents contributes to the 
sense of worthlessness and shame that typically afflicts budding psychopaths. Throughout his life, for 




example, David Berko witz was told by his adoptive parents that his mother had died while giving birth 
to him — a story that burdened him with a heavy load of guilt. When Berko witz later discovered that his 
mother was actually alive, he tracked her down, only to discover that she wasn’t especially interested in 
having a relationship with him. 

The adoptive or foster homes that some children find themselves in can also have a deeply pernicious 
effect on their developing personalities. Joseph Kallinger’s adoptive parents scourged him with a cat-o’- 
nine tails and assured him that his penis would remain permanently stunted from a childhood hernia 
operation. Though Jane Toppan (born Honora Kelley) was given the name of her foster family, she was 
never formally adopted and was made to feel like a perennial outsider in the only home she ever knew. 
Described by a social worker as “deeply disturbed,” Kenneth Bianchi’s adoptive mother treated him 
with pathological overprotectiveness, smothering the little boy with bizarre medical attention (once, 
when he accidentally wet his pants, she rushed him to the doctor to have his genitals examined). And 
after the death of his parents, Earle Nelson was raised by a Bible-crazed grandmother who was the 
source of his own lifelong obsession with the Whore of Babylon from Revelation — an obsession that 
helped fuel his homicidal rage against women. 

To be sure, the correlation between serial murder and adoption can be easily overstated. Some experts 
dismiss it entirely and scoff at defense attorneys who argue that their clients should not be held 
responsible for their crimes because they were abandoned at birth (a tactic tried — unsuccessfully — in the 
case of the Long Island serial killer Joel Rifkin, who murdered seventeen prostitutes in the home of his 
adoptive parents supposedly, so he claimed, to alleviate the pain of having been rejected by his birth 
mother). Certainly the vast majority of adopted Americans grow up to be productive, law-abiding 
citizens. It is also the case that being raised by a birth parent is no guarantee that a child will turn out to 
be normal. 

Mary Bell’s mother, after all, never managed to rid herself of her unwanted daughter. Instead, the little 
girl was kept at home and subjected to such unimaginable torture that it would have been better if 
sh shad been given up for adoption. 

FANTASY 

In his landmark 1899 book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud quotes Plato on the difference 
between ordinary citizens and criminals: “The virtuous man is content to dream what the wicked man 
really does.” Freud’s point is that, in the depths of the unconscious mind, even the most morally upright 
person harbors fantasies of forbidden behavior — of savage lust and primal violence. But the quote 
implies something else, too: that what differentiates “wicked men” (and women) from the rest of us is 
their willingness to act on their darkest desires. 

After a long day at the office, for example — where he was passed over yet again for promotion, then 
embarrassed by the attraction he felt for a cute summer intern no older than his own daughter — a law- 
abiding, happily married husband and father might fall asleep and dream of butchering his boss and 




forcing himself sexually on the girl. Chances are, he’ll wake up feeling so shaken and guilty that he will 
erase all memory of this disturbing dream from his mind. 

For a serial killer, on the other hand, mental images of mayhem and rape aren’t the stuff of nightmare; 
on the contrary, they form the basis of his favorite daydreams. Far from trying to put such unwholesome 
thoughts out of his mind, he will cultivate them — wallow in them. The recollection of a real or perceived 
slight inspires him to envision the most sadistic forms of revenge. The sight of a pretty girl arouses 
thoughts of abduction, sexual torture, and dismemberment-murder. For days, weeks, months, he will 
dwell on — and masturbate to — such imagined atrocities. 

Then — when his perverted fantasies have reached an unbearable pitch of intensity — he will go out and 
attempt to commit them. 

I knew long before I started killing that I was going to be killing, that it was going to end up like that. 
The fantasies were too strong. They were going on for too long and were too elaborate. 

— Edmund Kemper 

The twisted fantasies of serial killers begin at a young age. While other little boys are daydreaming 
about scoring the winning run in a Little League game or becoming a member of the X-Men, these 
budding psychopaths are already lost in all-consuming reveries of sadism and mass murder. In their 
groundbreaking 1988 study Sexual Homicide, Robert Ressler, John Douglas, and their collaborator Ann 
Burgess discuss one serial murderer who, as a schoolboy, drove his teachers crazy by spending so much 
time woolgathering in class. When psychiatrists later asked him what he had been thinking about, he 
replied: “Wiping out the whole school.” At the tender age of twelve, another future sex-killer was so 
obsessed with masochistic fantasies of slow, agonizing death that he regularly forced his little sister to 
tie him up in a chair and pretend that she was executing him in a gas chamber. 

As psychopaths reach puberty, their fantasies become increasingly sexual and more alarmingly aberrant. 
Normal adolescent daydreams of wild sex with an enthusiastic partner are replaced, in the psychopathic 
mind, with sadistic thoughts of dominance and degradation, perversion and pain. While jailed for double 
murder in 1874, Jesse Pomeroy, the so-called Boy Fiend, begged his friend Willie Baxter, who was 
occupying an adjacent cell, to provide him with detailed written descriptions of every flogging Willie 
had ever received, urging him to “tell me of the hardest licking you ever got. Tell me all the particulars 
of it!” The sadistic Pomeroy then used these lurid accounts of punishment and humiliation to enhance 
his own autoerotic pleasures. Jeffrey Dahmer told his examiners that he began masturbating at the age of 
fourteen to conventional homosexual fantasies of sex with well-built young males. A few years later, 
however, he was getting off while imagining that he was rendering his partners unconscious and 
exposing their viscera. 

It’s not just extreme deviance that distinguishes the fantasy life of psychopaths but their overpowering 
urge to translate their sickest fantasies into fact. The most extravagant erotic daydreams of normal 




people always run up against what Freud called “the reality principle.” However much fun it might be to 
lie in bed and masturbate while imagining that you are making love to your favorite movie star or pop 
singer, the average person understands that such erotic pipe dreams are never going to come true. 

Serial killers, on the other hand, have only a tenuous hold on reality. They live inside their heads, locked 
within their own bizarre, pathological dreamworlds. Isolated from most social contacts — unconstrained 
by the scruples of conscience — possessed of an infantile narcissism that places their own sordid needs 
above all other concerns — they eventually cross the threshold that separates imagination from actuality 
and carry out the horrors they have been brooding over for so long. According to the testimony of many 
serial killers, the experience of stepping over that line fills them with an intoxicating sense of power, 
even invincibility. Once they have taken that fateful step, they cannot — and have no wish to — go back. 
Far from satisfying their degenerate desires, each new act of violence only supplies more fuel for their 
fantasies. In the “cooling-off’ periods between their crimes, they masturbate to the memories of the 
horrors they have already perpetrated and fantasize of the outrages still to come. 

Because of the prominent role that such vicious daydreams play as a preliminary to the act of serial 
murder, Robert Ressler and his colleagues reached the conclusion that fantasy is the mainspring of 
sexual homicide. “My research convinced me that the key was not the early trauma but the development 
of perverse thought patterns,” Ressler has written. “These men were motivated to murder by their 
fantasies.” 

Recommended Reading 

Robert K. Ressler, Ann W. Burgess, John E. Douglas , Sexual Homicide (1988) 

Robert I. Simon , Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream, (1996) 

Killer Fantasy 

Since fantasies are, by definition, private, imaginary scenarios that are played out in the secrecy of the 
mind, it’s hard to get a direct firsthand sense of the unspeakably fetid inner worlds inhabited by serial 
killers. Thanks to one notorious psychopath, however, that distinctly unpleasant experience is not entirely 
impossible. 

A reasonably skilled writer who studied with Southern Gothic novelist Harry Crews, Gerard J. Schaefer 
— the onetime Florida deputy sheriff who committed an indeterminate number of horrendous torture- 
slayings in the early 1970s — churned out a series of hair-raising short stories collected by former 
girlfriend Sondra London and published under the titleKiller Fiction. Exactly how much of this 
appalling stuff is make-believe and how much memoir is unclear, though that very ambiguity is in itself 
an accurate reflection of the twisted mentality of serial killers, whose depraved fantasies eventually spill 
out into the real world, wiping out the barrier between fantasy and fact. Schaefer himself was 
deliberately coy about this question. In the typical way of psychopaths, he was also utterly hypocritical 




and self-serving about his intent in composing his stories. Though they undoubtedly served as a form of 
masturbatory pornography for him, he claimed that they were written with a serious sociological purpose 
— to give readers an unvarnished view of the “horrible malignancies” perpetrated by serial killers. 

To give the devil his due, his stories do, in fact, offer unparalleled insight into the obscene workings of a 
psycho-killer’s mind. Since the experience of reading them is a bit like opening the cover of a septic 
tank and sticking your head inside for a better look, his book can only be recommended with an asterisk. 
The selection reprinted here, from a story with the straightforward and typically Schaeferian title 
“Whores,” is one of the milder passages to be found in his work. The narrator — having read a magazine 
article about an Old West prostitute named Cattle Kate who was hanged for her sins — picks up a young 
woman and offers her thirty dollars if she will “model like Cattle Kate for me.” When she agrees, he 
drives her to an abandoned garage: 



We got out of the car and I fetched a rope from the carry-all section of the station wagon. I leaned 
against the bumper and fashioned the line into a hangman’s noose while she watched. She’d picked a 
wild daisy and was twirling it in her fingers, picking it apart petal by petal and chanting as she dropped 
each piece, “He loves me loves me not.” She finished up on “he loves me not” and shot me a crooked 
smile. “Bad luck in love.” 

“Ah, you don’t believe in bad luck, do you? Come on over here, Kate!” 

I tossed the noose over the heavy beam at the front of the garage where at one time engines were raised 
from the bodies of cars. I widened the loop and placed it over her head. She fiddled with her long 
ponytail while I adjusted the coil around her neck. I set the knot behind her ear just like the picture in the 
magazine. I asked her if it was too tight. She said it wasn’t tight at all. Then I tied her wrists behind her 
with green nylon twine, and arranged her ankles the same way: took a few turns around them and made 
a nice tight knot. I moved a few steps back, put my hands on my hips, and told her that she made a 
perfect Cattle Kate. 

She smiled, stuck out her tongue, and crossed her eyes. I told her to hold the pose, and I’d take a picture 
of her and mail it to Otto Preminger in Hollywood with a movie suggestion. She thought that was a great 
idea. I told her I’d get the camera from the glove compartment, turned and picked up the loose end of the 
rope and tied it to the car bumper. I slid behind the wheel, cranked up the ignition, put the car in reverse 
and backed up. 

The whore rose right up in the air and once again stuck out her tongue. It was comical the way it popped 
right out of her mouth, all wet and pink. Her eyes were wide open and staring straight at me. Her 
expression was fascinating. Her face turned pink, then red, then blue — a pleasant lavender-blue. Her 
body quivered and shimmied; as she turned blue she wet her pants. A dark stain materialized at the 
juncture of her thighs, then quickly slid down the legs of her pedal pushers. The pee streamed down over 
her calves and dribbled from her toes making a puddle on the concrete floor under her. The pretty face 
turned purple, her body shivered violently; then she went limp. It was interesting to watch. 




BAD BOOKS, MALIGNANT MOVIES, VILE VIDEOS 



Ever since cheap, mass-produced popular art first appeared in the eighteenth century, critics have 
blamed it for debasing public taste, corrupting the morals of minors, and providing potential 
psychopaths with helpful hints on how to commit crimes. When thirteen-year-old Jesse Harding 
Pomeroy was arrested for the mutilation-murder of two younger children in 1872, for example, critics 
immediately pointed an accusing finger at the action-packed “dime novels” beloved by juvenile readers 
in post-Civil War America. The fact that there was not a single shred of evidence to show that Pomeroy 
had ever read such literature made no difference to these moralists, who insisted that the frontier 
bloodshed depicted in books lik eRaiders of the Rawhide Range andRattle snake Ned’s Revenge had 
inspired the “Boy Fiend” to perpetrate his atrocities. 

As soon as movies were invented, attention shifted to the new medium. Shortly after the release of the 
first cinematic Western, Edwin S. Porter’s 190377k? Great Train Robbery, a train was held up near 
Scranton, Pennsylvania, and one passenger murdered. Critics immediately blamed the film, despite the 
fact that (as it later turned out) none of the culprits had seen it. 

The story has been the same ever since. Whenever a new mass medium comes along, it is immediately 
accused of undermining moral values and instigating crime. During the “Golden Age” of radio, one 
critic claimed that children were being “rendered psychopathic” by popular on-air melodramas 
lik eLights Out nndThe Shadow, which glorified “every form of crime known to man.” In the 1950s, self- 
proclaimed child-rearing experts declared that comic books caused everything from juvenile 
delinquency to homosexuality (a type of behavior that, at the time, was regarded as only slightly less 
heinous than mass murder). 

By the early 1960s, the culprit of choice had become television — particularly violent cop and cowboy 
shows. Nowadays, it is gangsta rap and Grand Theft Auto. In another fifty years, it will undoubtedly be 
virtual reality shooter games in which players actually feel the blood-spray from the blown-off head of a 
cannibal zombie (at which point, of course, today’s media scapegoats will be looked at in the same way 
we now regard radio shows and television Westerns — as the quaint relics of a more innocent past). 

Though media violence makes a convenient whipping boy (particularly for people who would rather 
blame their child’s behavioral problems on The Matrix and PlayStation 2 than on their own parental 
shortcomings), there is — despite the countless scientific studies devoted to the question — no definitive 
proof of a direct relationship between watching make-believe violence and committing real-life murder. 
In his exceptionally well informed and levelheaded book , Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent 
Children, Jonathan Kellerman is so insistent on this point that he puts it in italics: “Not a single causal 
link between media violence and criminality has ever been produced .” 

To be sure, the occasional serial killer might be incited by a movie, book, or piece of music. The 
problem with psychopaths, however, is that there’s no telling what will set them off. In 1959, German 




lust-killer Heinrich Pommerencke — aka the “Beast of the Black Forest” — felt compelled to commit four 
savage murders after watching Cecil B. DeMille’sTVi^ Ten Commandments. And the atrocities 
perpetrated by the Manson family were at least partly inspired by their leader’s obsession with the 
Beatles’ “White Album,” one of the most benign works of pop art ever produced. 

Moreover, when a person commits an appalling crime after watching a movie or reading a book or 
hearing a rock song, it’s invariably because he was severely disturbed to begin with. In his 1999 study, 
Serial Killers: The Insatiable Passion, for example, David Lester describes a case in which psychiatrists 
initially tried to pin the crimes of one serial killer on his addiction to lurid detective magazines. As they 
probed into his background, however, they discovered that, throughout his childhood and early 
adolescence, his mother had relentlessly subjected him to public ridicule for bed-wetting, while his 
stepfather had routinely tortured him with lighted cigarettes and forced him to drink his own urine. 
Moreover, on two separate occasions during his boyhood, he had suffered head injuries severe enough to 
put him into a coma. 

In short, it became clear that this man’s sadistic compulsions were rooted in his severely abused 
upbringing (as is so often the case), and that his psychopathology was firmly established long before he 
became such an obsessive reader of true-crime magazines. His insatiable appetite for sleazy 
entertainment, in other words, was a symptom of his sickness, not its cause. 

One particularly twisted individual — a serial killer named David Harker, who strangled a thirty-two- 
year-old woman during sex, then cut up her body and ate chunks of her thigh with pasta and cheese — put 
the matter in perspective. Known to be a fan of The Silence of the Lambs, he was questioned after his 
arrest about the possible influence of the film on his own cannibalistic crime. “People like me don’t 
come from films,” he replied. “Films come from people like me.” 

Nowadays, of course, whenever a horrific murder occurs, the reading, listening, and viewing habits of 
the perpetrator are immediately scrutinized for evidence that his crimes were somehow triggered by 
today’s supposedly debased popular entertainment. When mass murderer Michael McDermott 
slaughtered seven employees of a Boston high-tech company in December 2000, reports quickly 
surfaced that his home video library was heavily weighted with action films lik eLethal Weapon and Die 
Hard — as though his enjoyment of these Hollywood blockbusters explained his appallingly violent act. 
Only later did the press reveal that his video collection also included the Steve Martin comedy, The Jerk; 
the Academy Award-winning drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo ’s Nest; the Grade-Z sci-fi flick, Plan 9 
from Outer Space; and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. As one criminologist wisely advised, “I would caution 
against looking at this list as any indicator of violent tendencies.” 

Indeed, anyone inclined to blame psychopathic violence on a killer’s favorite books or movies must deal 
with the discomfiting fact that a significant number of serial murderers have been devoted students of 
the Bible, capable of committing the most horrendous crimes even while reciting Scripture. 



Several years before metamorphosing into the crazed, woman-hating gunman known as “Son of Sam,” 




David Berkowitz underwent a religious awakening, becoming a convert to evangelical Christianity 
during an army stint in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Embracing his new faith with a near-obsessive zeal, he 
became a fixture at the Beth Flaven Church, listening raptly to the hellfire sermons, undergoing the ritual 
of full-immersion baptism, and taking to the sidewalks to preach about sin and salvation. Even in his 
ardent religiosity, however, Berkowitz’ s pathology shone through. The only souls he was interested in 
saving were those of men. As he later explained to a prison psychiatrist, “I just wanted to see the men 
get into heaven. Who the hell needed those sluts, those go-go dancers? Too many women in heaven 
would spoil it.” 

John George Haigh was raised in a hyperreligious household, his parents being devout members of a 
puritanic sect, the Plymouth Brethren. Throughout his life — even during the years when he was busily 
dispatching victims and dissolving their bodies in drums of hydrochloric acid — he loved to take part in 
theological discussions, impressing his listeners with his intimate knowledge of the Bible. 

Earle Leonard Nelson, too, was highly conversant with Scripture, having been brought up by a 
fanatically religious grandmother. Obsessed with the Book of Revelation, he could quote his favorite 
passage by heart: 



So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored 
beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in 
purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a gold cup in her 
hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, 
MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF 
THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the 
martyrs of Jesus. 



Nelson used his religious training to win the confidence of his potential victims, who never suspected — 
until it was too late — that the well-spoken, seemingly devout young man was really the notorious 
“Gorilla Murderer” wanted from coast to coast for the savage slaying of nearly two dozen women. 

Another Scripture-spouting serial strangler was the still-anonymous psychopath known only as “Bible 
John,” who murdered three women in Glasgow, Scotland, in the late 1960s. The killer’s nickname 
derived from his habit of reciting scraps of the Old Testament, particularly bits relating to Moses. The 
identity of the Bible-quoting psycho-killer remains one of the great unsolved mysteries in the annals of 
Scottish crime. 

Of all Bible-crazed serial killers, however, the most terrifying was undoubtedly Albert Fish, whose 
obsession with the story of Abraham and Isaac drove him to act out hideous sacrificial rituals on a string 
of child victims. The cannibalistic Fish — who described the eating of one twelve-year-old girl as an act 
of “Holy Communion” — spent years poring over Scripture, searching for the most disturbing passages, 
which he would then commit to memory. His favorite was Jeremiah 19:9: “And I will cause them to eat 




the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend 
in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.” 

Recommended Reading 

Jib Fowles,77ze Case For Television Violence (1999) 

Gerard Jones, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence 

( 2002 ) 

PORNOGRAPHY 

It’s a common occurrence. A serial killer is captured, and the police — while searching his living quarters 
— turn up a stash of violent sadomasochistic porn. Immediately, the proponents of censorship trumpet 
this discovery as proof of the evils of pornography in general, its insidious power to corrupt morality and 
inspire crimes against women. 

Clearly, there are problems with this argument. For one thing, the vast majority of porn consumers are 
law-abiding citizens who use XXX-rated material to excite their libidos, not their aggressions. There’s 
no solid evidence that pornography has anything other than an aphrodisiacal effect on such viewers. 

For another thing, it makes perfect sense that serial killers seek out sadomasochistic porn. Criminal 
psychopaths, after all, are predisposed to violent fantasy. It would be far more surprising if the cops 
broke into the home of a sadistic lust-killer and discovered that his entire video library consisted of the 
collected episodes of SpongeBob Squarepants. 

Still, the arguments of the antipornography crusaders received a powerful boost from a source who 
certainly seemed to know as much about the subject as any man alive (however temporarily). On the 
night of January 23, 1989, just hours before his execution, Ted Bundy gave an interview to Christian 
psychologist Dr. James Dobson, an antiporn crusader and former member of President Reagan’s 
Commission on Pornography. 

Hailed by some as compelling testimony of the dangers of pornography — and dismissed by others as the 
self-serving rationalizations of a pathological liar — Bundy’s responses are fairly thoughtful, if not 
consistent or especially convincing. At one point he states that his atrocities cannot be blamed on 
pornography; at another, he describes himself as someone who was perfectly normal until he fell under 
the evil sway of dirty magazines. He denies that he is trying to evade responsibility for his behavior, 
even while insisting that he would never have committed his outrages if it hadn’t been for his exposure 
to images of “sexualized violence.” 

In the end, it is hard to know what to make of the interview. Was Bundy — a quintessential psychopath 
who had gone through life masquerading as normal — simply playing one final role, that of the repentant 




sinner? Or was he really struggling to comprehend his own evil nature and grasping at an easy 
explanation for that ultimately unknowable mystery? 

Here are the relevant parts of the interview: 



Bundy: As a young boy of twelve or thirteen, I encountered, outside the home, in the local grocery and 
drug stores, soft-core pornography. Young boys explore the sideways and byways of their 
neighborhoods, and in our neighborhood, people would dump the garbage. From time to time, we would 
come across books of a harder nature — more graphic. This also included detective magazines, etc., and I 
want to emphasize this. The most damaging kind of pornography — and I’m talking from hard, real, 
personal experience — is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces 
— as I know only too well — brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe. 



Dobson : Walk me through that. What was going on in your mind at that time? 



Bundy:BQfoYQ we go any further, it is important to me that people believe what I’m saying. I’m not 
blaming pornography. I’m not saying it caused me to go out and do certain things. I take full 
responsibility for all the things that I’ve done. That’s not the question here. The issue is how this kind of 
literature contributed and helped mold and shape the kinds of violent behavior. 



Dobson . Tt fueled your fantasies. 



Bundy . Tn the beginning, it fuels this kind of thought process. Then, at a certain time, it is instrumental in 
crystallizing it, making it into something that is almost a separate entity inside. 



Dobson : You had gone about as far as you could go in your own fantasy life, with printed material, 
photos, videos, etc., and then there was the urge to take that step over to a physical event. 



Bundy : Once you become addicted to it, and I look at this as a kind of addiction, you look for more 
potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something 
which is harder and gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the 
pornography only goes so far — that jumping-off point where you begin to think maybe actually doing it 
will give you that which is just beyond reading about it and looking at it. 



Dobson : How long did you stay at that point before you actually assaulted someone? 




Bundy: A couple of years. I was dealing with very strong inhibitions against criminal and violent 
behavior. That had been conditioned and bred into me from my neighborhood, environment, church, and 
schools. I knew it was wrong to think about it, and certainly, to do it was wrong. I was on the edge, and 
the last vestiges of restraint were being tested constantly, and assailed through the kind of fantasy life 
that was fueled, largely, by pornography. 



Dobson. Do you remember what pushed you over that edge? Do you remember the decision to “go for 
it”? Do you remember where you decided to throw caution to the wind? 



Bundy. Tt’s a very difficult thing to describe — the sensation of reaching that point where I knew I 
couldn’t control it anymore. The barriers I had learned as a child were not enough to hold me back from 
seeking out and harming somebody. 



Dobson : You hadn’t known you were capable of that before? 



Bundy : There is no way to describe the brutal urge to do that, and once it has been satisfied, or spent, and 
that energy level recedes, I became myself again. Basically, I was a normal person. I wasn’t some guy 
hanging out in bars, or a bum. I wasn’t a pervert in the sense that people look at somebody and say, “I 
know there’s something wrong with him.” I was a normal person. I had good friends. I led a normal life, 
except for this one, small but very potent and destructive segment that I kept very secret and close to 
myself. Those of us who have been so influenced by violence in the media, particularly pornographic 
violence, are not some kind of inherent monsters. We are your sons and husbands. We grew up in 
regular families. Pornography can reach in and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out 
of my home twenty or thirty years ago. As diligent as my parents were, and they were diligent in 
protecting their children, and as good a Christian home as we had, there is no protection against the 
kinds of influences that are loose in a society that tolerates. 

PROFIT 

When the term “serial killer” exploded into public consciousness in the early 1980s, it was applied to 
madmen like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez et al. These were classic sexual predators 
— lust-killers, as they used to be called — who could only get aroused and reach climax when they were 
perpetrating unspeakable acts on the bodies of helpless victims. 

Though most serial killers fall into this category, not all of them are motivated primarily by sexual 
sadism. Some commit their crimes not only for pleasure but also for monetary gain. 




Such profit-driven killers are no less psychopathic than their sexually perverted brethren. In conceiving 
and carrying out their atrocities, they proceed in a rational, cunning, often highly intelligent manner. 

They are also utterly without conscience, remorse, or the capacity to empathize. To them, other human 
beings are simply objects to be manipulated, destroyed, and disposed of for their own narcissistic ends. 

A classic example of this breed is Dr. H. H. Holmes, the notorious nineteenth-century “Torture Doctor” 
who killed an indeterminate number of victims around the time of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. 
Though this suave lady killer and bigamist was certainly interested in sex, his crimes were fueled largely 
by an insatiable greed, characteristic of the money-crazed ethos of the post-Civil War “Gilded Age.” 

One of Holmes’s many scams required the use of dead bodies to defraud insurance companies. In his 
published autobiography, he repeatedly refers to these corpses as “material” — a term that says a great 
deal about his psychopathic personality. To Holmes, the decomposing remains of a fellow human being 
meant nothing more than a piece of lumber does to a carpenter — and if no dead bodies were available 
when required, he was only too happy to create his own. 

The same was true of the entrepreneurial eighteenth-century ghouls, Burke and Hare, who began by 
supplying dead bodies to British anatomists desperate for human specimens and quickly progressed to 
serial murder as a way of maintaining their inventory. 

In our own century, another medical monster, Dr. Marcel Petiot, disposed of dozens of trusting victims — 
desperate Jews hoping to flee Nazi-occupied France who were killed, incinerated, and relieved of their 
earthly possessions by the homicidal physician. 

The kinds of serial killers known as Bluebeards and Black Widows — respectively, male and female 
psychopaths who murder a succession of spouses — also fall into this motivational category, since greed, 
as much as the gratification of malevolent impulses, underlies their crimes. 

There is a tendency to see mercenary serial killers as less horrific than lust-murderers. And it is true that, 
as a general rule, such psychopaths tend not to indulge in the most appalling atrocities: torture, 
dismemberment, evisceration, cannibalism, etc. Even so, murder isn’t just a matter of business to them. 
It’s a distinct and very twisted pleasure. 

Holmes, for example, may have killed his victims primarily for money, but he also liked to see them 
suffer, reportedly outfitting some of the rooms in his “Murder Castle” with peepholes that permitted him 
to watch the death agonies of his victims. Marcel Petiot also had a peephole installed in the door of his 
basement death chamber for similarly sadistic reasons. The nineteenth-century “Angel of Death,” Jane 
Toppan stole sizable sums from her victims. But she also derived exquisite pleasure from climbing into 
bed with them during their dying moments and holding them tight as they suffered their final 
convulsions. And greed alone can’t account for the actions of John George Haigh, who supported 
himself for years by murdering some of his closest acquaintances, then dissolving their bodies in metal 
drums filled with acid and pouring the resulting unspeakable muck into the sewers. As Haigh himself 
put it, “There are easier ways of making money.” 




CASE STUDY 



John George Haigh, The Acid Bath Killer 

People who believe that posting the Ten Commandments in public schools is the cure for today’s social 
problems would surely be confounded by the case of John George Haigh. Born in 1909, Haigh was 
raised in a strict religious sect known as the Plymouth Brethren, whose members not only abjured the 
usual puritanical bugaboos — alcohol, tobacco, gambling, theatergoing, and the reading of novels — but 
refused to socialize with people of any other persuasion, all whom they derided as “gentiles.” Despite 
(or possibly because of) this godly upbringing, Haigh grew up to be an inveterate hedonist with a taste 
for fast cars, fine food, and expensive clothing. He was also a lifelong criminal, who spent much of his 
young manhood behind bars and ended up becoming one of the most notorious figures in the history of 
modern British crime. 

To be sure, his upstanding background did endow him with some attractive features: a keen intelligence, 
fastidious personal habits, and a polite and charming manner. More than one constable and prison 
official who came to know him near the end of his life attested that he was the “nicest murderer they 
ever met.” 

After leaving school in his late teens, Haigh worked at a succession of jobs: government clerk, insurance 
salesman, apprentice engineer. The knowledge he gained from each of these occupations — coupled with 
a gift for calligraphy that made him an excellent forger — would prove useful in his future life of crime. 

At twenty-four, Haigh married a vivacious young woman named Betty Hamer, who had no idea that her 
suave, well-spoken husband was supporting himself by swindling. She discovered the truth four months 
later when he was arrested for fraud. While Haigh was serving his fifteen-month sentence, his wife gave 
birth and immediately put the child up for adoption. Apart from one brief meeting after his release, 
Haigh would never see her again. 

Nor would he ever remarry. Despite his easy charm and dapper appearance — the Brylcreemed hair, 
pencil mustache, handsome suits, and lemon yellow gloves he wore indoors and out — he was not a 
ladies’ man. Unlike other serial killers, his crimes were not motivated by depraved sexual compulsions. 
His madness took a more mercenary form. Like other serial killer con men — H. H. Holmes, for example 
— Haigh was blessed with many admirable qualities: industriousness, intelligence, ingenuity. Had he put 
those traits to legitimate uses, he would undoubtedly have done very well in the world. But he was 
undermined by his psychopathology. Making money by killing acquaintances wasn’t necessarily easier 
than earning an honest living — indeed, Haigh devoted a great deal of time and energy to his terrible 
crimes — but it was more gratifying. It fulfilled his darkest, most twisted needs. 

Released from prison in 1935, Haigh, the prodigal son, returned to his parents’ home. He worked for a 
while at the dry-cleaning business, then moved to London, where he befriended a young man named 
William McSwan, owner of a pinball arcade business, who offered him a job as secretary/chauffeur. 




Haigh stayed on the job for just a year before striking out on his own. Setting up a phony solicitor’s 
office, he contrived an elaborate stock scam which eventually landed him behind bars again, this time 
for four years. 

He put his time in prison to productive use, studying law books to learn how to commit the perfect 
crime. It was during this period that he acquired the notion that a murder could not be legally proved 
without a dead body, a misconception based on his flawed understanding of the term corpus delecti 
(which does not refer to a corpse but rather to the body of evidence that proves a crime has been 
committed). Within a year of his release, he found himself back in jail for scamming money from a 
female acquaintance. While there, he managed to steal some sulfuric acid from a tinsmith’s shop and 
experimented on field mice to see how long it took for their bodies to dissolve. 

Released in 1943, the thirty-four-year-old Haigh got a legitimate job as a bookkeeper, saved up his 
money, and, after about a year, moved to London, where he set himself up in a basement workshop, 
passing himself off in public as a company director with an engineering degree. 

In September 1944, after he and his old pal, William McSwan, ran into each other at a pub and renewed 
their friendship, Haigh invited the young man down to his basement workshop, bludgeoned him to death 
with a lead pipe, then dissolved his body in a forty-gallon oil drum filled with hydrochloric acid. When 
nothing was left of “Mac,” Haigh poured the stinking, porridgelike fluid down the drain. After 
persuading McSwan’ s parents that their son had gone to Scotland to avoid the draft, Haigh — using his 
skills as a forger — managed to get power of attorney over his old friend’s property. Later, when the 
parents began asking too many questions about their son’s abrupt departure, Haigh dispatched them in 
the same way, luring them to his workshop, smashing in their skulls, turning them into sludge, and 
dumping them into the sewers. 

More victims followed, including a well-to-do couple named Henderson. Haigh killed each with a pistol 
shot to the head before liquefying them in his acid-filled oil drum. Afterward, he managed to get hold of 
the Hendersons’ substantial estate, though he soon squandered the money at the track. 

His final victim was a sixty-nine-year-old widow named Mrs. Olivia Durand-Deacon. When the well-to- 
do widow failed to return from a visit to Haigh’ s workshop, her friends notified the police, who soon 
turned up incriminating evidence in Haigh’ s possession, including some of the missing woman’s 
jewelry. Realizing that the jig was up, the audacious con man made a startling admission, confessing not 
only to the murders of Mrs. Durand-Deacon, the Hendersons, and all three McSwans, but to three other 
killings as well. With the arrogance typical of psychopaths, he then challenged the police to convict him, 
declaring that — since “every trace” of the victims had been dissolved in acid — he couldn’t possibly be 
found guilty. “How can you prove murder without a body?” he asked with a smile. 

His smug belief that he had left no physical evidence of his atrocities was quickly shattered. Searching 
Haigh’ s premises, investigators turned up twenty-eight pounds of human fat, three gallstones, eighteen 
fragments of human bone, part of a foot, and Mrs. Durand-Deacon’ s undissolved dentures. 




As if the case weren’t already gruesome enough, Haigh began to lay the groundwork for an insanity plea 
by claiming that the real motive for his crimes was a lifelong vampiric compulsion. For many years, he 
claimed, he had been tormented by the same recurring nightmare of driving through a forest of 
crucifixes while blood rained from the sky. He would awaken each time with an overwhelming thirst for 
human blood. In each of his murders, he had slit the victim’s carotid artery with a penknife, drained off a 
glass of blood, and drunk it. 

Needless to say, these ghastly revelations turned the trial of Haigh — alternately dubbed the “Acid Bath 
Killer” and the “Vampire Killer” — into a media sensation. Unsurprisingly, psychiatric witnesses 
disagreed about the defendant’s mental condition, even after Haigh — as though to prove just how 
disturbed he really was — drank a cup of his own urine in prison. In the end, the jury found him guilty, 
agreeing with the prosecution’s argument that the inveterate con artist had committed his atrocities out 
of greed, not vampiric need. He was hanged on August 6, 1949. 

CELEBRITY 

When the so-called Beltway Snipers were at large in the fall of 2002, many people were outraged over 
the nonstop saturation coverage of the case. Television and radio talk shows were deluged with callers, 
complaining that such unrelenting media attention only glamorized the gunmen and encouraged other 
potential psycho-killers to seek their own fifteen minutes of notoriety. 

Though understandable, such reactions aren’t especially valid. For one thing, it’s hypocritical for people 
to stay glued to their TV sets, eagerly lapping up every morsel of information about a grisly murder 
case, while simultaneously clucking their tongues over the crass and insensitive behavior of the media. 
After all, when cable news networks devote twenty-four/seven coverage to a particularly ghastly crime, 
they are only giving the public what it wants — and what it has always wanted. 

The fascination with gruesome murders existed long before there was such a thing as “the media.” In 
preliterate times, people learned about sensational crimes through orally transmitted ballads. Every time 
a dissatisfied wife poisoned her abusive husband, or a jealous young man hacked to death his unfaithful 
lover, or a desperate mother smothered her sleeping children, or a band of brigands slaughtered a party 
of travelers — the details were turned into a song and transmitted from person to person, village to 
village, until everyone had heard the news. 

When movable type was invented, these so-called murder ballads were printed on cheap sheets of paper 
and sold for a penny apiece. Many of these “broadsides” still exist, and their titles make it abundantly 
clear that people have always had an insatiable appetite for news about the latest horrific crimes: 
“Horrible and Atrocious Murder of a Woman at Wednesbury,” “Frightful Murder of the Rev. Mr Huelin 
and His Housekeeper at Chelsea,” “Shocking Murder of a Wife at Oving, Near Aylesbury,” “Horrid 
Murder Committed by Mary Wilson Upon the Body of George Benson, Through Disappointment in 
Marriage.” 




Serial murder was big news back in the Victorian era, as the frenzied tabloid coverage of the Jack the 
Ripper case attests. There is no question that, had cable TV existed back then, Geraldo Rivera would 
have been on the scene, interviewing the residents of Whitechapel about their reactions to the latest 
disemboweling. When the atrocities of Dr. H. H. Holmes were uncovered a few years after the Ripper 
horrors, the American public couldn’t get enough of them. Publishers churned out instant true-crime 
books on the case, newspapers printed every trivial detail they could dig up, and one entrepreneur even 
opened an H. H. Holmes museum, complete with replicas of his victims’ remains. 

Indeed, popular nineteenth-century museums often appealed to the public’s interest in macabre crime. 
From the moment Madame Tussaud’s first opened its doors for business in 1835, the exhibition hall 
known as the “Chamber of Horrors” — featuring wax effigies of world-famous murderers, along with 
torture tableaux and other macabre dioramas — has always been the biggest attraction, far outdrawing the 
high-minded displays of politicians, philosophers, and artists. The character played by Vincent Price in 
the 1953 movi tHouse of Wax understood this. Planning to open his own Madame Tussaud-like museum, 
he announces: “I’m going to give the people what they want: sensation, horror, shocks!” 

There is no doubt that the possibility of being immortalized — if not in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum 
then in a made-for-TV movie or best-selling true-crime book — is an appealing prospect to many serial 
killers, who revel in the celebrity that their crimes confer on them. There’s nothing surprising about this. 
Most serial killers are complete nonentities: total losers who have failed in every important area of life. 
Even those who have managed to forge respectable careers — John Wayne Gacy, for example, who ran a 
successful contracting business — feel like nothing inside. Having been subjected, almost without 
exception, to brutalized upbringings, they are instilled with a sense of utter worthlessness. Seeing their 
names in the papers or their faces on TV fills their hollow souls with an intoxicating sense of power and 
importance. Murder is their only means of making a mark on the world, of proving (to themselves as 
much as to anyone else) that they exist. As Pete Hamill said of David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz: “He was 
a nobody who became somebody by killing people.” 

Berkowitz, in fact, is an interesting case, a perfect illustration of the slogan used in the ads for the 
movi ^Chicago: “If you can’t be famous, be infamous.” As noted by Dr. David Abrahamsen, who got to 
know him through extensive interviews, Berkowitz had a desperate lifelong need “to be noticed, attract 
attention, create a sensation.” His transformation from obscurity to notoriety — from being an unknown 
postal clerk to the world-famous “Son of Sam” — openly thrilled him. 

Certainly, in the twenty-five years since his chubby face was first plastered on the front pages, 

Berkowitz has remained addicted to his infamy, periodically finding ways to get his name in the papers. 
In 1997, he made headlines when he announced that he had found God, changed his nickname from 
“Son of Sam” to “Son of Hope,” and begun preaching the Gospel on public access TV. Two years later, 
theNew York Times ran a page-one story, describing how distressed he was over the release of Spike 
Lee’s movi ^Summer of Sam, which was re-awakening painful memories of his 1977 reign of terror. And 
when the Beltway Snipers were at large, Berkowitz insinuated himself back in the papers by releasing a 
letter to the press in which he declared that the current serial shooter rampage was causing him to “relive 
a nightmare.” 




David Berko witz 



(Button pin courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



Clearly, media notoriety is an important fringe benefit for many serial killers, another sick gratification 
they derive from their crimes. Whether it is also th e-cause of their behavior is another question. To be 
sure, at least one homicidal maniac — not a serial killer but a mass murderer named Robert Benjamin 
Smith — is on record as saying that he committed his crime because “I wanted to get known, to get 
myself a name. I knew I had to kill a lot of people to get my name in the newspapers all over the world.” 

Even in this case, however, it is legitimate to wonder if the desire for media attention was really what 
made Smith walk into a Mesa, Arizona, beauty parlor in 1966 and execute four victims, including a 
three-year-old girl. After all, anyone who thinks that cold-blooded mass murder is a good way to 
become well-known has to be deeply psychopathic to begin with. 

In short, while many serial killers certainly enjoy being the center of the media attention, they are 
motivated by far darker compulsions. The sinister celebrity they achieve from their atrocities may afford 
them a twisted satisfaction — what psychoanalysts call a secondary gain. But the root causes of their 
monstrous behavior lie elsewhere. 

Recommended Reading 

David Abrahamsen, Confessions of Son of Sam (1985) 

Joseph C. Fisher, Killer Among Us: Public Reactions to Serial Murder (1997) 

COPYCATS 



Whenever a sensational crime occurs — one that receives lots of media coverage and rivets the attention 




of the public — chances are good that it will inspire some desperately disturbed individual to commit a 
similar — or “copycat” — crime as a way of making himself feel important. The Columbine massacre, for 
example, was followed by a spate of high school shootings perpetrated by juvenile copycats looking to 
make their own bloody mark on society. And in the midst of the post-9/1 1 anthrax scare, various 
anonymous crackpots crawled out of the woodwork, adding to the general panic by sending powder- 
filled envelopes through the mails. 

Despite the premise of the 1995 movie Copycat, however — in which the villain duplicates the precise 
MO of such notorious psycho-killers as the Hillside Stranglers, Son of Sam, and Jeffrey Dahmer — serial 
murder cases do not usually incite copycat crimes. In real life, the discovery of Dahmer’ s atrocities did 
not encourage anyone else to run out and cannibalize young gay males. To commit such horrors, a 
person has to be in the grip of the most grotesque and aberrant compulsions. No one is going to start 
dismembering prostitutes or burying dead bodies in his crawl space just because he read about it in the 
newspaper. 

Nevertheless — while serial murder may not becaused by copycat motives — there have certainly been 
psychopaths who have looked up to earlier homicidal maniacs as role models and even wished to 
emulate their depravities. This phenomenon extends all the way back to the Middle Ages. Gilles de Rais 
— the monstrously depraved, fifteenth-century French aristocrat who supposedly served as the model for 
the fairy-tale figure, Bluebeard — claimed that his favorite author was Suetonius, the Roman historian 
who chronicled the degenerate doings of Imperial madmen like Nero and Caligula. 

In our own century, there have been several notable examples of frighteningly sadistic lust-killers who 
openly admired others of their breed. Peter Kiirten — the so-called Monster of Diisseldorf — was a big fan 
of Jack the Ripper’s, reading every book on the Whitechapel Horrors that he could get his hands on. And 
Albert Fish, the cannibalistic pedophile who perpetrated some of the most appalling murders in the 
annals of American crime, idolized the German madman Fritz Haarmann, saving news clippings about 
the “Vampire of Hanover” the way teenage girls keep scrapbooks of their favorite pop stars. 

There have also been some severely disturbed individuals who can only be described as serial killer 
“wannabes.” Such psychos don’t identify with, or seek to emulate, specific murderers from the past. 
They aren’t trying to be the new Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Dahmer. Their great ambition is simply to be 
known as a “serial killer,” as if that in itself were a badge of distinction. 

In the spring of 1993, for example, a British psychopath named Colin Ireland perpetrated a string of 
savage murders for the express purpose of being labeled a serial killer. On March 9 of that year, the 
thirty-eight-year-old Ireland showed up at a gay pub in London, secretly equipped with a “murder kit,” 
consisting of cord, knife, and gloves. After flirting with a forty-five-year-old choreographer named Peter 
Walker, Ireland and his pickup went back to Walker’s flat. There, Ireland proceeded to bind, beat, 
torture, and finally suffocate Walker with a plastic bag. Afterward, he burned his victim’s pubic hair — to 
see, he later told police, “how it would smell” — stuffed condoms in the dead man’s mouth and up his 
nostrils, and placed two teddy bears on his chest in the “69” position. 




Two months later, on May 29, Ireland returned to the same pub, met another gay man who was into 
S&M sex — a thirty-seven-year-old librarian named Christopher Dunn. After returning to Dunn’s flat, 
Ireland handcuffed him to the bed, beat him with a belt, and held a cigarette lighter to his testicles before 
suffocating him by shoving pieces of cloth down his throat. 

Ireland claimed his third victim just six days later, when he strangled a thirty-five-year-old American 
expatriate named Perry Bradley III. Having committed three, virtually identical murders within such a 
short span of time, Ireland eagerly scanned the news each day, expecting to find stories about the killing 
spree. The police, however, had not yet linked the three deaths. Frustrated at this lack of recognition, 
Ireland struck again just three days later, torturing and murdering a thirty-three-year-old gay man named 
Andrew Collier after picking him up at the same pub. For spite, he also strangled Collier’s cat and left it 
lying atop the corpse with its gaping mouth around the dead man’s penis. 

On June 12, exactly a week after killing Collier, Ireland put in an anonymous phone call to the police and 
— after announcing that he had already committed four murders and intended to do one more — scolded 
them for failing to recognize that a serial killer was on the loose. “Doesn’t the death of a homosexual 
man mean anything?” he demanded. 

The day after the phone call, Ireland killed his final victim, a forty-one-year-old chef named Emanuel 
Spiteri. He was arrested after police found a security video showing him walking with Spiteri at a 
subway station. In custody, he quickly confessed. 

Unlike most serial killers who target gay men, Ireland wasn’t gay himself. Nor did he have any 
particular animosity toward homosexuals. (“It might just as well have been women,” he insisted.) He 
had chosen S&M types, he said, because they were easy targets who would go home with a total 
stranger and let themselves be tied up. 

Ireland steadfastly insisted that he had savagely murdered five men for one simple reason: he aspired to 
be a serial killer and had read in a book that, to be so classified, a person had to slay a minimum of four. 
The last homicide was committed just for good measure. 

In December 1993, an Old Bailey judge told Ireland: “You expressed the desire to be regarded as a serial 
killer. That must be matched by your detention for life.” He was given five consecutive life sentences 
and told that he would never be released from prison. 

I have read a lot of books on serial killers. I think it is from four people that the FBI class as serial, so I 
may stop now I have done five. 

— Colin Ireland in an anonymous call to police 



CASE STUDY 




Heriberto Seda, Zodiac Copycat 



People — especially New Yorkers — often react with surprise when told that the infamous Zodiac killer 
was never caught. After all, they can clearly remember the newspaper headlines from 1998 trumpeting 
the arrest and conviction of the Zodiac shooter. The man referred to in those stories, however, was not 
the famously elusive gunman who terrorized San Francisco in the late 1960s, but rather a young 
psychopathic New Yorker named Heriberto Seda — a classic copycat killer whose warped admiration for 
the original Zodiac inspired him to conduct an astrologically themed murder spree of his own. 

Twenty-two at the time he embarked on his homicidal campaign, Seda was a high school dropout who 
lived with his mother and sister, had neither friends nor romantic relationships, and picked up pocket 
money by stealing coins from pay phones and vending machines. With no job or social life, he appears 
to have spent much of his time shut up in his room reading Soldier of Fortune magazine and books about 
serial killers. A gun nut whose schooling came to an end when he was suspended for carrying a 
concealed weapon, Seda was particularly obsessed with the Bay Area Zodiac, partly because the latter 
was one of the rare serial killers who relied on firearms. Seda was also something of a religious fanatic 
and was fascinated by the Zodiac’s bizarre quasi-mystical letters in which he spoke of collecting slaves 
to serve him in the afterlife. 

Taking a leaf from his role model’s book, Seda sent a letter to the “Anti-Crime” unit of his local police 
precinct in November 1989: 



This is the Zodiac. 

The First Sign is dead. 

The Zodiac will Kill the twelve signs in the 
Belt when the Zodiacal light is seen. 

The Zodiac will spread fear 
I have seen a lot of police in Jamaica Ave and 
Elden Lane but you are no good and will not get 
the Zodiac. 



Orion is the one that can stop Zodiac and the 




Seven Sister. 



Given the number of bizarre communications they receive on a regular basis, the cops saw no reason to 
pay particular attention to this apparent crank letter and filed it away. 

Despite the second line of this letter — which suggests that Seda had already committed a murder at the 
time he sent it — his first two shootings appear to have occurred the following March, when, wielding a 
homemade 9mm zip gun, he ambushed two people several weeks apart in Brooklyn. Both men survived. 
At the time, the police didn’t connect the attacks, assuming that they were simply two more of the many 
gun-related incidents afflicting New York City in that era of rampant crime. 

When Seda struck again on May 31, however — mortally wounding an elderly Brooklynite out for a late- 
night stroll — he left one of his bizarre notes beside the body. Soon, more communications from the self- 
styled Zodiac began arriving at the offices of theNew York Post, which broke the story on June 19 . Riddle 
of the Zodiac Shooter, read the headline. Suddenly, the police and the public were faced with the 
unnerving realization that — twenty years after the city was terrorized by the “Son of Sam” — New York 
had another phantom shooter in its midst. 

After consulting astrologers who predicted that the killer would strike again in the early-morning hours 
of June 21, officials put scores of policemen on the streets of Brooklyn to watch for the shooter. Seda 
outwitted them, however, by shifting his hunting grounds to Manhattan, shooting a homeless man in 
Central Park. The following day, he sent another letter to th zPost, insisting that he and the San Francisco 
Zodiac were one and the same. Few believed, however, that the legendary West Coast psycho-killer had 
suddenly surfaced in New York City, particularly since several witnesses to the Brooklyn shootings 
described a figure far too young to be the Woodstock-era madman. It was clear that the new spree was 
the work of a deranged copycat. 

With the whole city focused on his capture, Seda — who had lovingly compiled a scrapbook of clippings 
about his crimes — decided to take a break. When the next astrologically significant date came and went 
without another shooting, the public began to relax. Before long, Zodiac had been largely forgotten. 

He returned with a vengeance the following year, attacking four people — two fatally — in a Brooklyn 
park between June 4 and October 2, 1992. In June 1994, after another prolonged hiatus, he shot a fifth 
victim in the same park. A month after the latter incident, he mailed the final — and in many ways most 
bizarre — of his Zodiac letters to theNew York Post. “Sleep my little dead,” he wrote after listing his 
latest victims. “How we lothe them.” 

Two more years would pass before Seda attacked another person. This time, it would be his own sister. 
Seda shot her in the back with one of his zip guns during a violent argument. Wounded, she made it to 
the apartment of a neighbor, who dialed 911. 




Taken to the station house, Seda was asked to describe the incident in writing. He complied, signing the 
statement with the same arcane symbols — a cross and three sevens — he had used on his Zodiac letters. 
Suddenly, the detectives realized that the young man in their custody was the long-sought shooter. 

Before long, they obtained a full confession from him. 

In June 1998, Heriberto Seda was convicted and sentenced to a minimum term of eighty-plus years 
behind bars. He reportedly spends much of his time in prison poring over the Bible and quoting 
Scripture to his fellow inmates. 

THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT 

While supernatural explanations for homicidal mania have not been in vogue since the Middle Ages, 
some serial killers continue to insist that they were the victims of demonic possession. David Berkowitz, 
for example, stoutly maintained that “a demon has been living in me since birth.” And Herbert Muhin — 
the California psycho who believed that he could stave off a cataclysmic earthquake by slaughtering 
eight people — once accounted for his actions by explaining that “Satan gets into people and makes them 
do things they don’t want to.” 

Still, it’s been a long time since anyone tried the “devil made me do it” defense in a courtroom — at least 
in the United States. As recently as the 1950s, however, one South African serial murderer gave it a shot. 

His name was Elifasi Msomi. During a span of twenty-one months in the early fifties, this part-time 
witch doctor, a native of Natal, butchered fifteen people. Most of his victims were young children. 

Posing as a “labor agent,” Msomi lured the little ones away from home by promising to get them well- 
paying jobs as servants. Once he had them safely in his clutches, he hacked them to death with an ax. 

He was arrested in 1955 and confessed to his crimes, though he claimed that he was under the sway of 
an invisible demon known as a “tokoloshe” that supposedly perched on his shoulder and commanded 
him to kill. Court-appointed psychiatrists dismissed this story as so much mumbo jumbo and offered a 
more plausible explanation. 

Msomi, they said, derived sadistic sexual pleasure from his atrocities. He was hanged in Pretoria prison 
in February 1956. 




EVIL IN ACTION 



For months, even years, his fantasies have become more obsessive, dominating his waking life. His 
imagined scenarios of torture and death have grown so intense that he thinks of little else. Finally, he can 
no longer stand the pressure from within. Lying in bed and masturbating as he thinks about strangling a 
coed or disemboweling a male hustler isn’t enough anymore. It is time to make his dreams come true — 
to appease his monstrous hunger with living flesh and blood. 

But how? 

TRIGGERS 

At the end of Alfred Hitchcock’ sPsycho, a psychiatrist named Dr. Richmond describes the 
circumstances that caused mild-mannered Norman Bates to transform into a crazed, cross-dressing 
killer. Whenever the profoundly schizoid Norman “felt a strong attraction to any other woman,” Dr. 
Richmond explains, the evil “mother side of him would go wild.” That’s exactly what happened with 
Marion Crane (the character played by Janet Leigh). When Norman met her, says Richmond, “He was 
touched by her — aroused by her. H ^wanted her. That set off the jealous mother.” Next thing you know, 
poor Marion was slashed to death in a scene that caused an entire generation of moviegoers to feel a 
twinge of anxiety every time they stepped into the shower. 

Though some film critics see the psychiatrist as a ludicrous figure — a deliberate caricature of a smug 
Freudian know-it-all — he actually does a pretty good job of describing the phenomenon that 
criminologists call a “triggering factor.” This is the thing that (in Dr. Richmond’s words) “sets off’ a 
serial killer and causes him — after a prolonged period during which his fantasies have been lying 
dormant — to “go wild.” 

In real life, as mPsycho, the triggering factor is often a specific type of victim, one who has the kinds of 
qualities that turn the killer on. For psychopaths, as for normally constituted human beings, these 
features vary widely. In contrast to the movie, the homicidal impulses of Ed Gein — the real-life 
prototype of Norman Bates — were provoked not by young, attractive females but by stout, middle-aged 
women with a physical resemblance to his mother. Ted Bundy, on the other hand, was drawn to pretty 
college-age brunettes with their hair parted down the middle. Other serial killers have been excited to a 
murderous frenzy by muscular adolescent boys, drug-addicted hookers, or defenseless little girls. A 
powerful portrayal of a “triggering” episode can be seen in the classic 1931 movieM, when the 
pedophiliac lust-killer, Franz Becker (brilliantly played by Peter Lorre) spots a pretty prepubescent girl 
as he strolls along a Berlin street. The look that passes over Beckert’s face chillingly conveys the 
hideous lust that is suddenly aroused in him by the sight of the unwary child. 

As inPsycho — where a beautiful, unescorted blonde unexpectedly shows up at the Bates Motel — an 
unforeseen opportunity can also serve as a triggering factor. In 1874, a ten-year-old girl named Katie 




Curran, looking to buy a new notebook for school, wandered into the newspaper shop where Jesse 
Pomeroy was working by himself. Though Pomeroy preferred boy victims, the circumstance of suddenly 
finding himself alone with the trusting child incited his homicidal mania. Luring the little girl into the 
cellar, he set upon her with a pocketknife, then concealed her mutilated corpse in an ash heap. In a 
similar way, during the spring of 1928, the cannibalistic monster Albert Fish presented himself at the 
home of a couple named Budd, having been drawn there by a classified newspaper ad placed by their 
adolescent son — Fish’s intended target. During the visit, however, the Budds’ lovely twelve-year-old 
daughter, Grace, suddenly showed up. Something about the little girl’s appearance triggered Fish’s 
bloodlust. On the spot, he determined to abduct, kill, and eat her instead. 

Clearly, it would be useful for law enforcement officials to know exactly what “triggering factors” lead 
to serial murder. The trouble is that — precisely because psychopathic killers are so profoundly disturbed 
— there is no telling what may set any one of them off. The German lust-killer Heinrich Pommerencke — 
aka the “Beast of the Black Forest” — progressed from serial rape to serial slaughter after seeing Cecil B. 
DeMille’s biblical epic, The Ten Commandments in 1959. The Manson family’s atrocities were triggered 
by, of all things, the Beatles’ “White Album.” Some psycho-killers grow enraged when their captives try 
to run away, others when their victims are overly cooperative. The frighteningly psychotic serial killer 
Joseph Kallinger abandoned his plans to assault several women when he discovered that they were 
menstruating. In the late 1960s, on the other hand, a still-unknown serial killer nicknamed “Bible John” 
picked up three women at a Glasgow dance hall called the Barrowland Ballroom. Their fully or partially 
unclothed corpses were subsequently found with “sanitary napkins they had been using discarded beside 
them.” It appeared, as crime writer Martin Fido has put it, that the Scripture-citing psycho was 
“somehow provoked by menstruation.” 

I saw women dancing around the Golden Calf and I thought they were a fickle lot. I knew I would have 
to kill. 

— Heinrich Pommerencke 

HUNTING GROUNDS 

From coyotes and wolves to bobcats and lions, creatures who prey on other, weaker animals tend to be 
highly territorial, confining their kills to a specific hunting ground. The same holds true for most serial 
killers. Like their four-legged counterparts, these human predators generally commit their atrocities 
within a particular area. 

These places vary widely in size. Some killers restrict themselves to a single neighborhood. Jack the 
Ripper, for example, committed all his butcheries within the Whitechapel slum district of East London. 
Others range around an entire city, like David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz — whose victims were shot in 
different boroughs of New York. Still others might cover one or more counties, like the so-called Green 
River Killer, who prowled the area between Seattle and Tacoma. In each case, however, the killer sticks 
to a distinct territory. Depending on the extent of this area, he might stalk his quarry on foot (like Jack 




the Ripper) or rely on a vehicle. The Southern California psycho-killers Lawrence Bittaker and Roy 
Norris, for example, purchased a 1977 GMC cargo van — which they christened “Murder Mack” — 
specifically for the purpose of cruising for victims along the Pacific Coast Highway. 

Serial killers select particular areas for their crimes partly because of the availability of their preferred 
form of prey. If you are stalking prostitutes, for example, you will obviously focus on red-light districts 
where streetwalkers flaunt their wares. As crime writer Michael Newton says, “Hunters go where there 
is game.” 

I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game — tasty meat. ... I live for the hunt — my life. 

— David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz 

Another factor is what criminologists refer to as the killer’s “comfort zone.” Most serial killers commit 
their crimes relatively close to home because they prefer to hunt in places they are familiar with, where 
they feel confident and in control. They like to know the lay of the land — the best spots to snare victims, 
the quickest escape routes. 

Some serial killers actually feel most comfortable committing their outrages right inside their own 
homes. Even this kind of psycho is territorial, however, in the sense that he will haunt particular locales 
in search of prey. Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, favored a gay bar in Milwaukee, which kept him stocked 
with the young male victims he slaughtered inside his squalid apartment. John Wayne Gacy, who turned 
his suburban split-level into a private torture dungeon and charnel house, cruised the Greyhound bus 
station in central Chicago and other seamy areas where street hustlers congregated. David and Catherine 
Birnie trolled the highways of Perth for their victims, who were then raped and tortured in the couple’s 
white brick bungalow, a ramshackle dwelling that became known as “Australia’s House of Horrors.” 

At the opposite extreme from such home-based sadists are th znomads. The least territorial of all serial 
killers, these itinerant psychos — who depend on modern modes of transportation, from planes to trains 
to automobiles — travel across states, countries, and sometimes entire continents, killing as they go. 
Because this type of serial killer is so mobile, he is often able to stay several steps ahead of the law. 
Indeed, he is generally long gone by the time his latest atrocity is even discovered. As a result, such 
vagabonds are particularly hard to catch. Often, authorities aren’t even aware that one of these killers is 
on the loose, since they fail to recognize that, say, two middle-aged women — one found strangled and 
raped in San Francisco, the other in Seattle — were actually the victims of the same psycho, a 
phenomenon that criminologist Stephen Egger has called “linkage blindness.” 

Earle Leonard Nelson, who actually did strangle landladies in San Francisco and Seattle (as well as in 
San Jose, Santa Barbara, Oakland, Portland, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, and 
Winnipeg) was the first of this breed, at least in twentieth-century America. A compulsive drifter from 
adolescence on, he made his way back and forth across the country, generally by car, leaving nearly two 
dozen corpses in his wake. 




Nelson’s contemporary Carl Panzram was even more peripatetic. In the course of his extraordinarily 
brutal life, he traveled around the world, committing, by his own estimate, twenty-one murders, along 
with countless assault and homosexual rapes. In the mid- 1920s, after shipping out to West Africa as a 
merchant seaman, he hired eight native bearers to help him hunt crocodiles, then ended up killing and 
raping the Africans and feeding their bodies to the crocs. 

More recently, Angel Maturino Resendez — aka the “Railway Killer” — slaughtered a minimum of nine 
known victims as he aimlessly rode the rails from place to place. A Mexican national, Resendez crossed 
the Texas border at will, hitching rides on freight cars that carried him as far north as Kentucky and 
Illinois. With no specific destination in mind, he would hop off at random locales and commit an 
atrocity in close proximity to the tracks. His usual MO was to invade a residence, club the inhabitants to 
death with whatever implement was at hand (a tire iron, a sledgehammer, a gardening tool), burglarize 
the place, then hop on the next passing train and vanish before the crime was even discovered. 

Because he traveled in such a haphazard way, without knowing where he was heading or who his next 
victim would be, authorities were slow to see a pattern in the string of savage murders committed along 
the railroad tracks between August 1997 and June 1999. Eventually, however, Resendez was placed on 
the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List. In July 1999, he surrendered himself peacefully at the behest of 
his beloved older sister. He was later found guilty of capital murder. 

His traveling days over, the infamous “Railway Killer” now sits on death row in Livingston, Texas. 

CASE STUDY 

John Eric Armstrong, Psycho Sailor 

There’s an old saying about the “sailor with a girl in every port.” If the claims of John Eric Armstrong 
are true, he was a frighteningly psychopathic variation of that stereotype: a sailor who murdered girls in 
every port. 

In 1992, at the age of eighteen, Armstrong enlisted in the US Navy and served the next seven years 
aboard the aircraft carrierMmfe At no time during this period did his shipmates or superiors detect 
signs of mental instability. On the contrary, he earned four promotions and two Good Conduct Medals. 
After leaving the navy in 1999, he and his wife settled in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, a working-class 
suburb of Detroit. Neighbors regarded him as a solid citizen: a good family man devoted to his wife and 
infant son, a reliable worker at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and a generally decent guy, the kind 
who sometimes ran errands for the blind woman across the street. 

What no one around him knew, of course, was that — beneath his respectable veneer — the baby-faced, 
three hundred-pound Armstrong was a classic “harlot-killer,” a psycho whose virulent hatred of 
prostitutes was directly proportional to his irresistible compulsion to have sex with them. Cruising the 




seedy Michigan Avenue strip in southwest Detroit after dark, he would pick up a hooker in his black 
Jeep Wrangler, then — as soon as their tryst was over — undergo a frightening metamorphosis, yelling “I 
hate whores” while trying to strangle the woman to death. 

On January 2, 2000, Detroit police received a call from a man who told them of a female body floating 
in the Rouge River. The man explained that — while crossing the bridge on foot — he suddenly felt ill and 
leaned over the railing to vomit. That’s when he spotted the corpse. 

The dead woman turned out to be Wendy Jordan, a drug addict and prostitute whose family had reported 
her missing several days earlier. A postmortem exam determined that she had been strangled to death, 
then tossed from the bridge. 

The man who called the police to report the discovery was John Eric Armstrong. 

Whether Armstrong’s call was prompted by an unconscious desire to confess or the twisted need — 
common among serial killers — to play head games with the cops is unknown. In any event, the police 
found his story deeply suspicious and put him under surveillance. After collecting physical evidence 
from the victim — DNA from her killer’s sperm, plus fibers on her clothes that apparently came from 
vehicle she’d been killed in — they visited Armstrong at home and, with his consent, took fibers from his 
Jeep, along with a blood sample. 

When the preliminary test results came back in March, they showed definite matches between the 
evidence gathered from the victim and the samples taken from Armstrong. But prosecutors elected not to 
issue an arrest warrant until the final, official report arrived from the lab. 

In the meantime — even knowing he was under police scrutiny — Armstrong was unable to resist his 
deadly compulsion. 

On the morning of April 10, the bodies of three prostitutes in varying stages of decomposition were 
found beside the tracks in an isolated rail yard — clearly the work of a serial killer. By that evening, a 
task force had been assembled. Questioned by investigators, streetwalkers along Michigan Avenue 
described their terrifying encounters with a beefy, baby-faced john who would go berserk and try to 
strangle them after sex in his Jeep Wrangler. The police immediately made the connection to Armstrong. 
He was arrested on April 12 — the same day the official report arrived, confirming his links to the Jordan 
murder. 

No sooner was he in custody than Armstrong broke down and spewed out a tearful confession that 
stunned his interrogators. During his years in the navy, he said, he had strangled at least eleven 
prostitutes throughout the world — Seattle, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, and Newport 
News, Virginia. “Basically,” one police official told reporters, “he said he either killed or tried to kill 
every prostitute he’d ever had sex with.” 




In March 2001 — while international investigators tried to confirm Armstrong’s claims — he was put on 
trial for the murder of Wendy Jordan. His lawyers tried an insanity defense, arguing that Armstrong had 
been sexually abused by his father as a child. The tactic failed to persuade the jury, who convicted him 
of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in a state maximum-security prison. 

PREY 

A report on the six o’clock news that an unknown serial killer has just claimed his fifth victim is enough 
to send a city of two million people into a panic. Why — given the astronomically high odds that any one 
resident will end up as number six — should this be so? 

According to one thinker, the answer has to do with evolutionary biology. In her thought-provoking 
1997 book Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that, for millions of years in the early development of 
our species, human beings were not just predators but prey, hunted down, slain, and devoured by other, 
stronger carnivores. As a result, our brains are hardwired with a built-in fear of bloodthirsty creatures. 
This age-old instinct expresses itself, among other ways, in our lifelong fascination with stories about 
vulnerable people being chased by predatory monsters, from rampagingT. rexes to chain-saw-wielding 
psychos. Such scary tales not only tap in to our primitive anxieties; they also offer a reassuring sense of 
control. As Ehrenreich puts it: 



In our own time, the spectacle of anti-human violence is replayed endlessly by a commercial 
entertainment industry which thrives on people’s willingness to pay for th efrisson inspired by images of 
their fellow humans being stalked by killers, sucked dry by vampires, or devoured by multi-mouthed 
beasts from outer space. There is even a vogue of what could be called “predation porn”: depictions (on 
the Discovery Channel, for example) of actual predators in the act of actual predation . . . All such 
spectacles offer a “safe” version of the trauma of predation, one in which we approach the nightmare — 
and survive. 



Whatever validity there may or may not be to this theory, there’s no question that the mere thought of 
serial killers stirs up powerful, irrational terrors in us, far out of proportion to the actual threat posed by 
these criminals. The best estimate of experts like James Alan Fox of the College of Criminal Justice at 
Northeastern University is that, at any given time, there are two to three dozen serial killers at large in 
the country, responsible for the deaths of between one and two hundred victims. Compare that to the 
nearly forty-three thousand fatalities that resulted from traffic accidents in 2002, and it’ s clear that the 
average American runs a substantially greater risk of getting killed by a drunk driver than by a criminal 
psychopath. 

Recommended Reading 



Barbara Ehrenreich , Blood Rites (1997) 




CASE STUDY 



Eric Edgar Cooke 

The vast majority of serial killers have a signature style of murder, selecting specific types of victims 
and destroying them in a preferred manner: strangling, shooting, stabbing, etc. Eric Cooke was different. 
He killed young and old, male and female; and he murdered his victims in a variety of ways. As a result, 
it took the police a while just to realize that the string of random homicides that terrorized the Australian 
city of Perth in 1963 was the work of a single psychopath. 

Born with a harelip and cleft palate, Cooke had the classic background of a serial killer: an agonizing 
childhood of abuse and humiliation, most of it inflicted by his alcoholic father, who not only thrashed 
his son regularly but relentlessly mocked his looks. It’s no surprise that Eric grew up with a seething 
rage against the world. (“I just wanted to hurt somebody,” was the only explanation he ever gave for his 
crimes.) By his late adolescence, he was already leading a Jekyll-Hyde existence: an apparent life of 
bland normality and a secret one of compulsive criminality. 

He was only eighteen when he was arrested for the first time on burglary and arson charges. Supposedly 
rehabilitated after a brief stint in jail, he joined a church, got married, found a job as a truck driver, and 
settled down in a suburb of Perth. But even while passing as a hardworking husband and father, he was 
continuing his nocturnal life as a cat burglar, car thief, Peeping Tom, and sexual fetishist. 

His first known murder occurred in January 1959, when he crept into the apartment of a sleeping, thirty- 
three-year-old divorcee, startled her awake, then stabbed her to death with a diver’s knife. Four years 
later, almost to the day, he embarked on a spree of serial murder that would throw the entire city into a 
panic. At 2:00A.M. on Sunday, January 27, 1963, he approached a parked car, then opened fire at its 
occupants with a .22 rifle, wounding the couple inside. When the car sped away, he went prowling for 
other victims. That same night, he shot two young men while they slept in their beds, killing one outright 
and mortally wounding the other. He also murdered a middle-aged businessman, rousing him from his 
sleep, then firing a bullet between his eyes when he came to the front door. 

While the police searched for a deranged shooter, Cooke switched his MO. In the early-morning hours 
of February 16, while looting another apartment, he inadvertently awoke its occupant, a twenty-four- 
year-old woman. Knocking her unconscious, he strangled her to death with a light cord, then raped her 
corpse, dragged it outside to a nearby backyard, and arranged it in an obscene pose for the neighbors to 
find. Six months later, he killed another young woman, an eighteen-year-old female babysitter who was 
shot through the head as she sat in an easy chair doing her homework. 

Cooke was captured when an elderly couple chanced upon his rifle, which he had stashed beneath some 
bushes. The police mounted a stakeout, and when Cooke came to retrieve the weapon, they nabbed him. 
He was tried in November 1963 and hanged slightly less than one year later. 




TARGETS OF OPPORTUNITY 



Though the odds are infinitesimal, dying at the hands of a serial killer is, theoretically at least, something 
that could happen to anyone — like winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. Still, some people 
run a much greater risk than others. A crack-addicted streetwalker in an inner-city slum, for example, is 
far more likely to end up strangled, dismembered, and left in a Dumpster than a white suburban soccer 
mom (though the public is far more likely to hear about the savage sex-murder of a white middle-class 
woman than of a black hooker). 

Prostitutes (especially when they come from the underclass) — along with street hustlers, teenage 
runaways, vagrants, junkies, and other social outcasts — are what criminologists call “targets of 
opportunity”: people who are especially vulnerable to serial homicide because they are easy to snare and 
overpower and are so marginalized that no one, including members of the police and the press, pays 
much attention when they go missing. When Gary Heidnik, for example, set out to fulfill his insane plan 
to trap sex slaves for his personal “baby farm,” he chose the perfect targets of opportunity: mentally 
retarded black women from Philadelphia’s worst slum, the kind of person he knew he could trap with 
ease and keep in prolonged captivity without attracting anyone’s notice. 

The term “target of opportunity” is also used to describe victims who are randomly slain by a serial 
murderer simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. The people murdered by the 
Beltway Snipers, died for no other reason than that they were within convenient shooting range when 
those sociopaths took aim. Similarly, Bertha and Beverly Kludt — a mother-daughter pair butchered in 
Tacoma, Washington, in 1947 — met their awful end merely because they had the misfortune of being at 
home when a psychopathic drifter named Jake Bird passed by the house and spotted an ax in their 
backyard. 

If some serial killers will murder any easy target that crosses their path, others have distinct preferences 
when it comes to their victims. When “Son of Sam” was on the loose in the summer of 1976, for 
example, newspapers reported that his victims tended to be young women with long brown hair — a fact 
that led countless brunettes throughout the city to cut, dye, or conceal their tresses under hats. 

Following his arrest, psychologists theorized that there was a symbolic dimension to his choice of 
victim. One expert posited that the young women shot by Berko witz represented his hated birth mother, 
who had given him up for adoption. Others claimed that they were surrogates for the girls who had 
snubbed him in high school. Whatever validity there may be to such speculations, there’s no doubt that 
Berko witz himself took perverse pride in the appearance of his victims. Like some sick travesty of a 
Don Juan boasting of his conquests, Berkowitz bragged: “I only shoot pretty girls.” 

Ted Bundy, too, prided himself not only on the “quality” of his victims — bright, attractive, generally 
middle-class young women — but on the skill with which he snared them. On Sunday, July 14, 1974, 
within the space of a few hours, he managed to abduct two young women in broad daylight amid 
thousands of people sunbathing and picnicking at a state park in Seattle. 




Even killers like Berko witz and Bundy, however — who derive a warped sense of superiority not from 
dating desirable women but from slaughtering them — tend to kill targets of opportunity. Berkowitz may 
have set his sights on “pretty girls” in general. But the ones who actually died were the unlucky few he 
accidentally happened upon when he went out prowling for blood. 

Indeed, except for the rare psycho who targets specific individuals (H. H. Holmes, for example, who 
eliminated his wives, mistresses, business associates, and potential witnesses), all of these killers are 
opportunistic. A serial murderer may set out to slaughter a particular/ype of person. But the specific 
individuals who end up dead at his hands are the ones who present him with the best opportunity to work 
evil. 

CASE STUDY 

Robert Lee Yates, Jr., Prostitute Slayer 

Once a thriving working-class neighborhood, the East Sprague area of Spokane had, by the early 1990s, 
degenerated into a wasteland — a blighted stretch of porn shops, strip joints, and hot-sheet motels where 
drug-addicted hookers plied their desperate trade, and where the long-elusive psycho known as the 
“Spokane Serial Killer” harvested most of his victims. 

The first to die was a twenty-six-year-old African-American prostitute named Yolanda Sapp, whose 
naked corpse was found sprawled on a highway embankment near the Spokane River on February 22, 
1990. The killings would continue for the better part of a decade, interrupted by intervals of wildly 
varying lengths. On two occasions, several years would elapse between murders. Later — in the pattern 
of escalation typical of sex-killers — victims would be slain within months, weeks, or even days of each 
other. 

Almost all the victims were women in their thirties or forties, though the youngest was only sixteen, the 
oldest sixty. All were shot repeatedly with a small-caliber handgun and their nude corpses dumped in 
various locations around the city. 

It was not until 1997 that a task force was established to hunt for the killer. An FBI profile solicited by 
the police department proved so general as to be useless. The culprit was most likely a “white man 
between twenty and forty years old who might be a loner” — a description that, as one local sheriff wryly 
noted, applied to “most of the male residents of the state, including all the investigating officers.” 

Assiduous police work, as it often does, finally provided the break in the case. In November 1998, an 
officer on stakeout in an area frequented by prostitutes spotted a car pull up to the curb and admit a 
young woman. The driver turned out to be forty-seven-year-old Robert Lee Yates, Jr., who had 
previously been ticketed for a minor traffic violation while cruising around the East Sprague red-light 
neighborhood. When the officer questioned him about the streetwalker in his passenger seat, Yates 
managed to talk his way out of trouble. A short time later, however, another prostitute — who had barely 




escaped with her life after being attacked by her “date” — reported the incident to police, providing them 
with a description of her assailant that matched certain known facts about Yates’s background. Police 
moved in on the suspect. 

To all outward appearances, Yates had led not merely a respectable but an exemplary life. A middle- 
aged family man with five children, he was a highly decorated ex-army helicopter pilot who had 
participated in Desert Storm, served with distinction in Somalia, and flown rescue missions in Florida 
following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Andrew. 

He was also a remorseless and frighteningly prolific sex-killer. Faced with overwhelming physical 
evidence — including DNA tests linking him to several victims — Yates eventually struck a deal that 
spared him the death penalty. In exchange for pleading guilty to thirteen counts of first-degree murder — 
and leading investigators to the corpse of one of his victims — he was sentenced to 408 years behind bars. 

SNARES 

The methods by which a serial killer snares his victims vary according to his particular pathological 
needs. Some prefer the simplest, most direct approach. Often referred to as a “blitz” attack, this may 
involve ambushing an unwary pedestrian, for example, as she hurries home at night down a darkened 
street. Or striding up to a parked car in a lovers’ lane and blasting away at the embracing couple through 
the windshield. Or following an old lady to her apartment and shattering her skull with a clawhammer as 
she fiddles with her door keys. Or slashing a prostitute’s throat from behind. 

Another sort of “blitz” attack is the kind committed by household invaders like Richard the “Night 
Stalker” Ramirez or the still-unknown “Ax man of New Orleans”: blood-crazed prowlers who break into 
unguarded homes and savage the sleeping inhabitants in their beds. 

Some killers “troll” for victims, cruising hunting grounds where they can be sure of finding an abundant 
supply of game. To snag a prostitute, a psychopathic “harlot-killer” has to do nothing more than drive to 
a red-light area, conduct a brief transaction from behind the wheel, open the passenger door, and speed 
away. 

Children, of course, can be enticed with the simplest of promises — candy or coins or ice cream — or 
easily coerced with violent threats to themselves or their families. 

Other serial killers rely on more elaborate ruses. Indeed, for some of these psychos, the cunning they 
exert to snare their victims is half the fun. Ted Bundy prided himself on having lured several young 
women to horrible deaths by wearing one arm in a sling and pretending that he needed help with a task. 
To Dr. Marcel Petiot, the intricate scheme he devised to murder dozens of desperate Jews seeking to flee 
France during the Nazi occupation was proof of his superior intelligence. 



Others, like the Boston Strangler, have gained access to their unwary victims by posing as repairmen. Or 




pretending to be police officers, like the Hillside Stranglers. Or presenting themselves as professional 
photographers, like Harvey Murray Glatman. Or passing themselves off as hospital workers, like 
Australian “Granny Killer” John Wayne Glover. 

In several notorious cases, sadistic killers have employed willing accomplices to supply them with 
victims. The homosexual sadist Dean Corll, for example, relied on Elmer Wayne Henley, who lured his 
own teenage acquaintances into Corll’ s clutches with promises of liquor and drugs. Similarly, Charlene 
Gallego — the distaff half of one of the most notorious killer couples of the twentieth century — used the 
bait of free marijuana to snag nubile victims for her depraved husband, Gerald. 

Arguably the most complex — and certainly grandiose — approach to acquiring victims was the one 
devised by the infamous Gilded Age “Torture Doctor,” H. H. Holmes, who constructed a sprawling 
building in the Englewood suburb of Chicago during the time of the Chicago World’s Fair — a structure 
erected, among other reasons, to keep himself supplied with corpses. 

Given the growing pervasiveness of computers in our lives, it’s no surprise that some serial killers have 
recently turned to the Internet to locate victims. 

John E. Robinson already had a long criminal record before his story burst into the headlines in the 
summer of 2000. A con artist since his twenties, he had committed a variety of white-collar crimes — 
from embezzlement to securities fraud — and spent seven years behind bars both in Kansas and Missouri. 

Paroled in 1993 at the age of forty-nine, he seemed to put his checkered past behind him, marrying a 
woman who managed a mobile home park, fathering four children who regarded him as a loving dad, 
getting named Man of the Year for his charitable work on behalf of the homeless, and hosting 
neighborhood cookouts at his home in Olathe, Kansas. 

Like others of his ilk, however, Robinson led a frighteningly dual, Jekyll-Hyde existence. Posing as a 
philanthropist interested in helping unwed mothers, he befriended several young women who 
disappeared soon after making his acquaintance. He was also a frequent visitor to Internet S&M chat 
rooms, where — using the Web name “Slavemaster” — he arranged to meet willing partners for bouts of 
kinky sex. 

In early June 2000, two of these women complained to police that, after hooking up with Robinson at a 
Kansas City hotel, he had assaulted and robbed them. By then, Robinson was already under suspicion by 
the Kansas City police. They had become aware of his connection to the missing unwed mothers. 

During the first weekend of June 2000, police searched a farm Robinson owned in La Cygne, Kansas, 
fifty-seven miles south of Kansas City. There, at the edge of the woods, they discovered two eighty-five- 
gallon drums, each containing the corpse of a woman. Three more bodies were found in identical drums 
in three separate storage units Robinson rented at a facility in Raymore, Missouri, fifty-four miles 
northeast. All the victims had gaping wounds in their skulls. 




In the fall of 2002, the fifty-eight-year-old Robinson — by then dubbed the “Cyber Sex Slayer” — was 
tried in Kansas, convicted of three counts of capital murder, and sentenced to death by lethal injection. 

“WANTED: WELL-BUILT MAN FOR SLAUGHTER” 

As anyone knows who has ever answered an ad in the Personals (only to discover that the Ruggedly 
Handsome DWM is thirty pounds overweight and sports a really bad toupee) people who place these 
notices don’t always tell the truth about themselves. Normally, this situation results in nothing worse 
than a disappointing date. But some unwary people who have responded to such come-ons have met 
with far worse fates. 

Luring victims through the classifieds has been the favored technique of certain psycho-killers since the 
dawn of the twentieth century — especially the types known as Bluebeards and Black Widows, who 
combine the sadistic lust of the serial predator with the ravenous greed of the con artist. 

Beginning in 1902, for example, a middle-aged Norwegian widow named Belle Gunness lured a 
succession of men to her Indiana “murder farm” with a matrimonial ad placed in the Midwestern 
newspaper Skandinaven: 



WANTED — A WOMAN WHO owns a beautifully located and valuable farm in first class condition, 
wants a good and reliable man as partner in same. Some little cash is required for which will be 
furnished first class security. 



The eager bachelors who responded to this ad vanished without a trace. Their fate remained a mystery 
until April 1908, when a fire razed the Gunness farmhouse, and more than a dozen dismembered corpses 
were uncovered on the property. 

Around the time of the Great War, Europe produced a pair of notorious Bluebeard killers who relied on 
lonely hearts ads to supply themselves with victims. Seven women ended up strangled and stuffed into 
alcohol-filled oil drums after answering the matrimonial advertisements placed in a Budapest newspaper 
by a young tinsmith named Bela Kiss. A typical ad, which Kiss ran at least ten times, read as follows: 



Bachelor: aged 40: lonely; good income from commercial enterprises averaging £3000 per annum, is 
desirous of corresponding with educated lady with a view to matrimony. Address: De Koller, Post 
Restante, Granatos, Budapest. 



Kiss’s contemporary, Henri Landru — the so-called Bluebeard of Paris — resorted to the same ploy to lure 
ten lonely women to their destruction. Exactly how he killed them is unknown, though the charred 




human bones discovered in his oversized stove left no doubt as to their ultimate fate. 

Widower with two children, aged forty-three, with comfortable income, affectionate, serious and 
moving in good society, desires to meet widow with a view to matrimony. 

— ad placed by Henri Landru 

Some serial killers have found their victims, not by placing classified ads but by answering them. In May 
1928, for example, the hideously deranged Albert Fish came upon a “Situation Wanted” ad placed in the 
classified section of th eNew York World by eighteen-year-old Edward Budd, who was looking for a 
summer job away from the sweltering heat of the city: “Young man, 18, wishes position in the country.” 
Assuming the identity of a Long Island farmer named “Frank Howard,” the monstrous Fish — who had 
been dreaming about castrating a young man, then letting him to bleed to death — soon showed up at the 
Budd home in Manhattan, shifting his sights to Edward’s twelve-year-old sister Grace the moment his 
eyes fell on the lovely little girl. 

A more recent example was Bobby Joe Long. Before turning to serial murder, Long became known as 
the “Classified Rapist” for his signature MO. Scanning newspapers in the Miami area for classifieds 
offering furniture and other household items, he would call the numbers and — if a woman answered — 
arrange to see the articles during the weekday, when her husband was at work and the kids were in 
school. Once inside the house, he would pull a knife on the woman, tie her up, and rape her, then make 
off with whatever loot he could carry. Long committed more than fifty of these crimes, terrorizing the 
communities around Fort Lauderdale, Ocala, Miami, and Dade County for more than two years. 

Perhaps the most bizarre use of advertising in the annals of sexual psychopathology occurred in late 
2002, when a forty-one-year-old German software technician identified in newspapers only as “Armin 
M.” posted an ad on the Internet that read: “Wanted: Well-built man for slaughter.” Remarkably, 
someone actually found this offer appealing. After selling his car, a forty-three-year-old microchip 
designer identified as “Bernd Jurgen B.” presented himself at the dilapidated home of Armin M. in the 
river town of Rotenburg an der Fulda. 

What happened next so defies belief that it is best to simply quote from the account that appeared in the 
December 18, 2002, edition of theAYw York Times: 



M. surgically removed the victim’s genitals, according to a prosecutor’s statement, which said the two 
men then ate them. Later, M. stabbed B. to death as a video camera recorded the event. He carved up the 
victim and stored parts of the body in a freezer for occasional consumption, burying other parts in his 
garden. 



Only quick action by the German police — who arrested the cannibal killer after he posted another 




advertisement seeking more volunteers — prevented Armin M. from committing additional atrocities and 
becoming a bona fide serial killer. 

If there is any mitigating circumstance to Armin M.’s outrage it is that his victim volunteered to be 
slaughtered and eagerly participated in his own butchery. Compared to other psychos who have lured 
victims to horrible deaths under false pretenses, the German man-eater at least deserves credit for truth 
in advertising. 

SIGNATURE, RITUAL, MO 

At the height of the hysteria provoked by the shooting spree in the Washington, DC area in the fall of 
2002, police found a tantalizing item at one crime scene: a tarot card featuring the figure of death on one 
side and, on the other, an ominous inscription: “Dear Policeman, I am God.” The media jumped all over 
this discovery, labeling the unknown perpetrator the “Tarot Card Killer.” 

Even at the time, there seemed to be something a little pat, even hokey, about this clue — as though the 
killer had decided that, to fit the role he was playing, he’d better come up with a sinister trademark. And 
in fact, as it turned out, there really wasn’t any significance to the tarot death card. Evidently, it was just 
something that the sniper suspects figured would be kind of cool — the sort of thing real serial killers are 
supposed to leave behind. 

It’s easy to understand why the sniper team thought this way. In the popular imagination, serial killers 
invariably have their own sinister, often highly creative “signatures.” They may leave a symbolic object 
like a moth cocoon stuffed down a corpse’s throat. Or carve bizarre messages into the flesh of their 
victims. Or scrawl blood-lettered biblical passages on the bedroom walls. 

In truth, however, this sort of behavior is more likely to be found in a Hollywood thriller than in real life. 
To be sure, there have been some notorious serial killers who were closely associated with particular 
symbols. The original Zodiac, for example, signed his letters with a distinctive crossed-circle mark. The 
Boston Strangler identified his grisly handiwork by tying his lethal ligatures into grotesquely cheerful, 
birthday-ribbon bows. Richard the “Night Stalker” Ramirez used lipstick to draw Satanic pentagrams in 
the homes — and occasionally on the bodies — of his victims. And several of the victims of the “Green 
River Killer” were found with weird, pyramid-shaped stones inserted in their vaginas. 

Generally speaking, however, this type of ostentatious “signature” is used only by those psycho-killers 
who derive particularly intense gratification from taunting the police and generating as much media 
publicity as possible (both of these motives figured prominently in the case of the Beltway Snipers). But 
not every serial killer fits this pattern; indeed, most of the really notorious lust-murderers of the latter 
part of the twentieth century don’t conform to it — Gacy, Dahmer, Dean Corll, Fred and Rosemary West, 
Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, and many others. These world-class psychos had no interest in drawing 
attention to their crimes. On the contrary, they wanted to be left alone to pursue their atrocities in secret. 
Far from trumpeting their existence to the world by leaving colorful clues like lipstick-inscribed 




pentagrams or smiley face symbols (the “logo” of the so-called Happy Face Killer, Keith Hunter 
Jesperson), they did everything possible to keep the world from knowing that horrible crimes were even 
taking place. 

There is, however, another, more subtle and specialized sense in which criminologists use the term 
“signature” — and in this case it applies to most serial killers, even those who take great pains to keep a 
low profile. In this more technical meaning, the term doesn’t refer to a literal message or symbol left 
behind by the killer — the psychopathic equivalent of the mark of Zorro — but to a feature of the murder 
that reflects some deep-seated psychological quirk. Driven by his lifelong rope fetish, for example, 
Harvey Murray Glatman left his victims trussed up like Thanksgiving turkeys. Savage bite marks on his 
victims’ breasts were the grisly “calling card” of Canadian “Vampire Rapist” Wayne Boden. The 
corpses of the six London prostitutes killed in 1964 by the still-unidentified lust-murderer dubbed “Jack 
the Stripper” were all found nude, asphyxiated, and — in four cases — with their front teeth either missing 
or forced down their throats. 

In these and countless other cases, the killer is driven to commit specific acts of violence or desecration 
on the victim’s body. These distinctive, often highly grotesque, actions — mutilating the corpses in 
particular ways or arranging them in obscene poses — constitute the serial killer’s unique “signature.” 
Because there is a ritualistic quality to such behavior — a compulsion to perform it over and over again in 
fulfillment of some twisted psychosexual need — criminologists sometimes use the term “signature” and 
“ritual” interchangeably. 

A good (if fictitious) example of this kind of behavior appears in Thomas Harris ’sRed Dragon, whose 
main villain — the facially disfigured psycho, Francis Dolarhyde, aka the “Tooth Fairy” — inserts mirror 
shards into the eyes and orifices of his dead female victims. This outrage — performed out of bizarre 
unconscious drives related to his own appearance — is what experts mean by a ritualistic “signature.” 

In attempting to create a psychological profile of an unknown serial killer, investigators try to 
distinguish between the perpetrator’s “signature” — the seemingly gratuitous acts of excessive violence 
or sadistic cruelty he commits for his own depraved pleasure — and his MO or modus operancli. 
Technically speaking, the latter term refers to the killer’s preferred method of committing his crimes 
without getting caught: how he selects, snares, subdues, and dispatches his victims, then makes his 
getaway. 

Several problems, however, often confront investigators. For one thing, a serial killer’s MO often 
evolves over time as he grows more comfortable with his killings, tries to throw the police off his scent, 
or just gets bored with one kind of homicide and looks for a little variety. Former criminal profiler Pat 
Brown talks about one serial killer, Gary Taylor, who “began his career by whacking women over the 
head at bus stops. Then he started shooting them with a rifle through their bedroom windows. He got 
caught and put away in a mental institution at this point. But when he was out on pass ... he bought 
some machetes and attacked women on the street.” Later, after his release, he “invited a couple of 
prostitutes to his house, where they ended up buried in his backyard.” Clearly, it would be hard, if not 




impossible, to identify a single MO for a psycho as eclectic in his murder methods as Taylor. 

Another problem is that it’s not always easy to distinguish between a killer’s MO and his signature. 
Supposedly, a signature act is something the killer needs to do to satisfy his sickest urges — “whatever he 
gets his rocks off on,” as Ted Bundy so bluntly put it — whereas the MO relates to the purely practical 
aspects of pulling off and getting away with the crime. But it’s often hard to make such hard-and-fast 
distinctions. 

Again, Brown provides a useful example, citing the case of a serial rapist who breaks into the bedroom 
of a sleeping couple, subdues the husband, then makes him lie in the next room with a cup and saucer on 
his back. “If I hear that cup move or hit the floor,” he tells the husband, “your wife dies.” Supposedly, 
this cup-and-saucer gambit is part of the killer’s MO, since it is designed for purely pragmatic reasons — 
to keep the husband under control while the rapist assaults the wife. 

But as Brown observes, it could also be a “signature” element. After all, “who’s to say [the rapist] didn’t 
get a sick kick out of thinking of the husband lying helpless and looking like an idiot with a cup and 
saucer on his back listening to his wife’s screaming in the next room?” 

Recommended Reading 

Pat Brown , Killing for Sport (2003) 

Robert D. Keppel, Signature Killers (1997) 

METHODS 

In attempting to get a handle on the complex phenomenon of serial homicide, experts have come up with 
various ways of classifying these killers. Crime historian Philip Jenkins, for example, proposes two 
major categories: th ^predictable type (criminals with a long history of brutal fantasy and behavior 
whose progression to serial murder seems unsurprising) versus th ^respectable type (petty felons with no 
prior history of violent crime whose sudden turn to serial murder is unexpected). Forensic psychiatrist 
Park Dietz identifies three major kinds of serial murderers: psychopaths who kill for sadistic sexual 
pleasure, psychotics who act under the influence of hallucinations, and custodial killers like doctors, 
nurses, and other caretakers who usually poison or smother their victims. R. M. Holmes and J. DeBurger 
divide serial killers into four varieties, based on their underlying motivations -.visionary types (psychotics 
who hear voices or see visions commanding them to kill Emission- oriented types (generally prostitute 
killers who believe they are on a crusade to rid the world of scum hedonistic types (lust-killers who 
murder for perverted pleasure); and control-oriented types (who derive their sick gratification less from 
sex than from the assertion of power and dominance over the victim). 

There is, however, another, and in certain respects more useful, way of categorizing serial killers — 
namely, according to their preferred methods of murder, their favorite ways of dispensing death. How a 




homicidal maniac kills — the weapons he uses, the kinds of injuries he enjoys inflicting — reveals as much 
about his underlying psychology, his twisted needs and fantasies, as any other feature of his behavior. 

To be sure, there are some psychos who don’t limit themselves to any one specific type of weapon or 
killing method. According to the FBI’s classification system, “disorganized” killers — whose crimes are 
often committed in a frenzied, spontaneous outburst — will dispatch their victims with whatever weapons 
are at hand. Other serial murderers have been known to enjoy some variety in the way they kill. Profiler 
Pat Brown, for example, discusses the case of Gary Taylor, who shot some victims with a rifle, strangled 
others, and hacked up a few with a machete. 



For the most part, however, serial killers display definite homicidal preferences, so much so that their 
characteristic techniques often become part of their tabloid monikers: the “Boston Strangler,” the 
“Yorkshire Ripper,” the “Ax Man of New Orleans,” the “Sunday Morning Slasher,” the “Poison Fiend,” 
etc. 



If Hollywood movies and literary thrillers are to be believed, serial killers spend much of their time 
contriving ingenious and colorful ways to commit their atrocities — binding a victim to a kitchen table 
and forcing him to gorge himself to death, surgically removing the top of someone’s skull and feeding 
him parts of his own brain before putting him out of his misery. And it is true that the occasional 
psychopath may resort to elaborate means of dispatching his prey. H. H. Holmes, for example, 
constructed specially rigged chambers in his Gothic “Horror Castle,” evidently for the express purpose 
of asphyxiating unwanted girlfriends and unwary lodgers. 

For the most part, real-life psychos are more conventional in their homicidal approaches. What 
distinguishes them from run-of-the-mill murderers is their distinct preference for manual means of 
killing. Most homicides in the United States — 68%, according to the FBI — are committed with firearms, 
and only 26% by “hands-on” methods like strangulation, bludgeoning, and stabbing. For serial killers, 
the percentages are almost the exact reverse: 55% rely exclusively on manual means, 22% on guns, and 
14% alternate between the two. 



The reason for this disparity is frighteningly simple. Driven by depraved sadistic needs, most serial 
killers derive their deepest pleasure from getting up close and personal with their victims — from feeling 
their flesh tear, their blood spurt, their bodies convulse, from looking deep into their eyes as the life 
drains out of them. 



Rippers 

The most spectacularly gruesome of all homicides are the ones perpetrated by this type of maniac. As 
Richard von Krafft-Ebing writes in his classic te x t , Psych opath ia Sexualis, police are always justified in 
classifying a murder as the work of a ripper when the victim’s corpse has been subjected to horrific 
mutilation, particularly “when the body has been opened and parts (intestines, genitals) torn out.” So 
savage are these crimes that, in earlier times, they were attributed to the actions of lycanthropes — men 




who literally transformed into wolves. The modern designation for such lust-killers — “rippers” — 
derives, obviously, from the legendary monster of Whitechapel. The unspeakable butcheries that Saucy 
Jack perpetrated on a twenty-five-year-old prostitute named Mary Kelly typify the kinds of mutilations 
these madmen are driven to inflict on the bodies of their victims. As an 1888 newspaper reported: 




Sex Murder on Acker Streetby George Grosz (1916) 



The throat had been cut right across with a knife, nearly severing the head from the body. The abdomen 
had been partially ripped open, and both of the breasts had been cut from the body. . . . The nose had 
been cut off, the forehead skinned, and the thighs, down to the feet, stripped of the flesh. . . . The entrails 
and other portions of the frame were missing, but the liver, etc., were found placed between the feet of 
this poor victim. The flesh from the thighs and legs, together with the breasts and nose, had been placed 
by the murderer on the table, and one of the hands of the dead woman had been pushed into her stomach. 



Krafft-Ebing’s book includes case histories of other such monsters, among them the “French Ripper,” 
Joseph Vacher, who roamed the countryside in the 1890s armed with scissors, cleaver, and knife, 
strangling, stabbing, disemboweling, and sexually mutilating victims of both sexes; a German psycho- 
killer named Leger, who “caught a girl twelve years old, violated her, mutilated her genitals, tore out her 
heart, ate it, drank the blood, and buried the remains”; and “a certain Gruyo” who strangled six women, 




then “tore out their intestines and kidneys through their vaginas.” Krafft-Ebing also discusses the Boston 
“Boy Fiend,” Jesse Pomeroy, a juvenile ripper who — after luring a four-year-old boy to a remote stretch 
of beach — gashed his throat with a pocketknife, stabbed him a dozen times in the chest and abdomen, 
punctured one of his eyeballs, and ripped open his scrotum, leaving his testicles hanging out. 

I opened her breast and with a knife cut through the fleshy part of the body. Then I arranged the body as 
a butcher does beef and hacked it with an axe into pieces of a size to fit the hole which I had dug in the 
mountain for burying it. I may say that while opening the body I was so greedy that I trembled, and 
could have cut out a piece and eaten it. 

— Andreas Bichel 

More recent examples include the “Yorkshire Ripper,” Peter Sutcliffe, who preferred to bludgeon his 
victims to death with a hammer before savaging their bodies, and the Russian “Mad Beast” Andrei 
Chikatilo, who performed such hideous atrocities on his victims — slicing off their faces, gouging out 
their eyes, ripping out their tongues, tearing out their entrails, devouring their genitals — that 
investigating officers who worked on the case had to be treated for psychological trauma. 

CASE STUDY 

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper 

Three-quarters of a century after Jack the Ripper stalked the shadowed streets of London, a new killer 
appeared who seemed to be a reincarnation of the infamous Victorian harlot-killer. Preying largely on 
streetwalkers, he murdered with a ferocity that equaled that of his notorious namesake. Indeed, he outdid 
the original Ripper in terms of sheer deadliness, claiming more than twice as many victims during his 
reign of terror. 

His name was Peter Sutcliffe, though it would take five years and the largest manhunt in British history 
before police discovered his identity. He appeared to be a perfectly ordinary man, a hardworking truck 
driver and devoted husband. Behind his unremarkable mask, however, he harbored a monstrous 
pathology: a sexual hatred so extreme that he felt utterly justified in committing the most fearful 
barbarities on women. When asked to account for the motives behind his atrocities, he calmly replied: “I 
were just cleaning the streets.” 

The sources of his sickness are hard to trace, though he appears to have been raised in a household 
charged with psychosexual tension. A classic “momma’s boy,” he grew up worshiping his mother, even 
while his overbearing father constantly accused her of sexual infidelity. This situation was bound to 
exacerbate the normal Oedipal conflicts of adolescence and produce a being who (even more so than is 
common) divided all womankind into virgins and whores — one deserving of slavish devotion, the other 
of nothing but death. 




A misfit and loner throughout his boyhood, Sutcliffe developed into a young man with morbid 
preoccupations. After dropping out of school at fifteen, he found employment in a mortuary, where he 
enjoyed toying with the corpses — arranging them in grotesque poses and using them as ventriloquist 
dummies. When he wasn’t engaged in these quasi-necrophiliac activities, he liked to visit a local wax 
museum and ogle the displays that showed the devastating symptoms of advanced venereal disease. 

Married at twenty-eight to the first woman he ever dated, he eventually became a truck driver and 
seemed to settle into the comforting routines of a solid working-class life. If there was any outward 
indication that all was not right with Sutcliffe, it was the bizarre handwritten sign he kept in his vehicle: 
“In this truck is a man whose latent genius, if unleashed, would rock the nation, whose dynamic energy 
would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep?” Though no one recognized it as such, the 
message reflected the extreme narcissism of the typical psychopath, whose underlying feelings of 
inadequacy and worthlessness are often offset by delusions of grandeur. 

Sutcliffe’s first assault occurred in July 1975 when he sneaked up on a woman from behind, bludgeoned 
her with a hammer, then lifted up her skirt and went to work on her with a knife. This victim survived, 
as did seven more of the twenty-one women he would attack over the next five years. His MO was 
always the same: he would beat them unconscious with a ball peen hammer, then savage their torsos and 
genitalia with a knife or sharpened screwdriver. In all, thirteen people died at his hands. Though most 
were streetwalkers, others were housewives or students or civil servants. All, however, had one thing in 
common: they were women and, therefore, targets of Sutcliffe’s virulently misogynistic rage. 

During their search for the “Yorkshire Ripper,” detectives interviewed more than two hundred thousand 
people. Sutcliffe himself was questioned on no fewer than nine separate occasions. Each time, however, 
police accepted his alibi and let him go. The very size of the manhunt hampered the investigation. The 
police were overwhelmed with thousands of useless leads and thrown off track by tape-recorded 
messages ostensibly from the Ripper that turned out to be hoaxes perpetrated by a very sick mind. 

In the end, routine police work led to Sutcliffe’s capture. In January 1981, Sergeant Robert Ring, an 
officer on a stakeout, spotted the killer in a car with a prostitute. Before being hauled into the station for 
questioning, Sutcliffe asked for permission to go behind some shrubbery to urinate. As soon as he was 
out of sight of the officer, he emptied his pockets of their incriminating contents: his ball peen hammer 
and knife. 

The next morning, while Sutcliffe was still being interrogated, Ring had a realization. Recalling 
Sutcliffe’s request to relieve himself, the policeman hurried back to the spot, where he discovered the 
discarded implements. Confronted with the evidence, Sutcliffe broke down. His full confession extended 
over sixteen hours. 

At his trial, he pleaded insanity, claiming that he had committed his murders in obedience to a divine 
commandment. The jury was unconvinced, and he was sentenced to life. Shortly thereafter, however, he 
was found insane by prison psychiatrists and transferred to Broadmoor Hospital, where — in March 1997 




— he received a taste of his own medicine when a fellow inmate stabbed him in both eyes. Emergency 
surgery saved the right one. Half-blind, he remains incarcerated as of this writing. 

Stranglers 

Though a ripper-style killer might choke the life out a victim, his real pleasure comes from the frenzied 
mutilations he performs afterward — hacking up the body, tearing out the genitals, wallowing in the 
entrails, etc. By contrast, serial killers classified as stranglers do not engage in these postmortem 
atrocities. Their sadistic satisfaction comes from the act of strangulation itself. Indeed, some of these 
psychos become so aroused while throttling a victim that they reach a sexual climax during the murder. 
(A chilling cinematic portrayal of such a moment appears in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 movi q, F renzy, 
when the so-called Necktie Killer has an orgasm while garroting a woman.) 

The first American serial killer of the twentieth century was a strangler — Earle Leonard Nelson, aka the 
“Gorilla Murderer,” a Bible-quoting psycho who traveled from coast to coast, choking women to death 
before raping their corpses (Alfred Hitchcock also made a movie loosely inspired by this notorious case: 
his 1943 masterpiece, Shadow of a Doubt ). 

Whereas Nelson (who was also known as the “Dark Strangler”) enjoyed throttling his victims with his 
bare hands, Harvey Murray Glatman — the nerdy-looking sex maniac who liked to take pictures of his 
bound and terrorized victims before taking their lives — employed his favorite fetish object: a length of 
stout rope. The Boston Strangler, by contrast, preferred articles belonging to his victim, garroting them 
with scarves or bathrobe sashes or nylon stockings. He was also known for his grotesque “signature,” 
tying the ligatures into extravagant, gift-wrap bows as a taunt to the police. African-American sex-killer 
Carlton Gary — aka the “Stocking Strangler” — also used hosiery as a murder weapon, leaving all seven 
of his elderly victims with their nylons tightly knotted around their necks. 

Arguably the most vile of all modern stranglers were the psychopathic cousins Kenneth Bianchi and 
Angelo Buono. These women-hating sadists took pleasure not only from the murder method that earned 
them their infamous nickname — the “Hillside Stranglers” — but from subjecting their young victims to 
various, and often prolonged, forms of torture — injecting them with cleaning solution, attaching live 
electric wires to their palms, raping them with soda bottles, asphyxiating them with slow, voluptuous 
cruelty. Then they would add to their unspeakable fun by dumping the young women’s violated corpses 
out in the open, as a final indignity to the victim and a taunt to the police. 

I am fond of women, but it is sport for me to strangle them after having enjoyed them. 

— Serial strangler quoted by Krafft-Ebing 

CASE STUDY 



Carroll Edward Cole, the Barfly Strangler 




Everybody failed Carroll Cole: his mother, teachers, psychiatrists, and police detectives. His entire life 
was one downward spiral of mental illness, alcoholism, and murder. It was also one of the most blatant 
examples of how the health-care and legal systems can completely fail to treat and capture an out-of- 
control serial killer. Near the end of the ordeal that was his existence, someone finally came to his aid. 
This person was the Nevada judge who handed down a death sentence. For this help — for this much 
needed relief — Cole had a laconic reply: “Thanks, Judge.” 

Cole’s life, like that of so many criminal psychopaths, began with parental abuse. His sadistic mother 
forced him to accompany her on her adulterous liaisons and enjoyed dressing him up as a girl to 
entertain her friends at parties. As with Ed Gein, Edmund Kemper, and Henry Lee Lucas, the hatred he 
developed for his monstrous mom figured prominently in his crimes. Cole himself made this perfectly 
clear. “I think I kill her through them,” he would later remark of his victims. 

Murderous rage ran through Cole’s head; to drown it out he used copious amounts of alcohol. By late 
adolescence he could not control himself. In 1960, he attacked a couple in a car with a hammer. 
Concerned about the demon inside of him, Cole turned himself in to police. He spent the next three 
years in several mental institutions where he was deemed “antisocial” but harmless. In 1963 he left 
treatment and married an alcoholic topless dancer who occasionally worked for Jack Ruby. The 
marriage was predictably rocky. Cole left her in 1965 after burning down the fleabag hotel where they 
lived because he was convinced she was sleeping with other tenants. 

Cole again surrendered himself to police in 1970, but this time with a specific fear: he was having 
uncontrollable fantasies about raping and strangling women. This happened in Nevada. Taken in for a 
psychiatric evaluation, the report on his mental condition typified the quality of treatment he received 
throughout his life: “Prognosis: Poor. Condition on Release: Same as on admittance. Treatment: Express 
Bus ticket to San Diego.” 

With a human time bomb on their hands, the authorities just shipped him out of town. 

Over the next decade Cole went on a rampage of drinking and murder across the states of Nevada, 
Texas, California, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. His victims were classic “targets of opportunity” — female 
barflies easily lured to their deaths by the good-looking, charismatic psychopath. As crime writer Cliff 
Linedecker puts it, “Cole didn’t prey on healthy, sober women who could wage a fair fight. He was a 
scavenger who looked for lonely alcoholics who were so weakened as a result of their dissolute living 
that they had no chance to defend themselves . . . They were broken, bruised, and defeated. And most 
had either lost contact with their families or had no close friends who would create a fuss over their 
deaths.” 

Once Cole had a woman alone, he strangled her and often raped the corpse. Alcohol clouded his mind, 
and he later had trouble recounting all the details of his atrocities. One of his most horrific crimes 
occurred in Oklahoma City, where Cole emerged from a stupor to find a mutilated body in a bathtub, 




slices of the woman’s buttocks in a pan on the stove and the sweet taste of blood in his mouth. 

As in the case of so many serial killers, Cole’s murders escalated in frequency as his homicidal mania 
spun out of control. In November 1980, he strangled two women to death within twenty-four hours. Less 
than three weeks later, he picked up a forty-three-year-old woman at a Dallas honky-tonk, accompanied 
her back to her apartment, and killed her with his bare hands during a violent struggle. When neighbors 
showed up to investigate the ruckus, they discovered the victim’s corpse stretched out on the floor. 

Under questioning by police, Cole claimed that the woman had simply dropped dead — a story that did 
not seem entirely implausible given the exceptionally high concentration of alcohol discovered in her 
blood by the medical examiner. Cole was allowed to go free. 

By that point, he had tired of his life. When the cops returned to question him again several days later, 
he greeted them with a startling admission. “I need some help,” he declared. “I see a woman with a drink 
in her hand and I have to kill her. I am tired of killing.” 

Cole then proceeded to pour out a confession to all the murders he could remember. He was eventually 
convicted of thirteen homicides, though he maintained that the body count might have reached as high as 
thirty-five. He was executed in the early-morning hours of December 6, 1985, — the first person put to 
death in Nevada by lethal injection. 

Ax Murderers 

Back in the nineteenth century — when many Americans still lived on farms, butchered their own 
chickens, and relied on cordwood to heat their homes — hatchets and axes were standard equipment in 
most households, as common as corkscrews and can openers are today. It’s not surprising, therefore, that 
— when someone flew into a homicidal rage — he or she often grabbed one of these readily available 
chopping implements to do the job. Search through the archives of any small-town newspaper from the 
1800s and you’re likely to come across a case of gruesome ax murder, like the slaughter of two sisters, 
Maren and Anethe Hontvet, in a remote New Hampshire fishing village in 1873 (“Terrible Tragedy on 
the Isle of Shoals! Two Women Killed with an Axe!”). Or the massacre of the Vacelet family of Knox 
County, Indiana, in 1878 (“Brutal Butchery! A Whole Family Brained in Bed with a Blunt-Edged 
Axe!”). Or the 1894 murder of Missouri farmer Gus Meeks and his family, memorialized in a ballad 
supposedly sung by a surviving daughter (“They murdered my mamma and pappa, too/ And knocked 
baby in the head/They murdered my brothers and sisters four/And left me there for dead”). 





While these and most other nineteenth-century ax murders stirred up intense local interest in the places 
they occurred, they quickly faded from the news. A few, however, became bona fide national sensations. 
In 1836, a young man named Richard Robinson — the spoiled scion of a wealthy Connecticut family — 
murdered a beautiful New York City prostitute named Helen Jewett by smashing in her skull with a 
hatchet. Thanks to its irresistibly juicy combination of sex, violence, and scandal, the Jewett ax murder 
case became one of the most highly publicized crimes of its era. Even more notorious, of course, was the 
1892 case of Lizzie Borden who, as the famous nursery rhyme put it, “gave her mother forty whacks/ 
And when she saw what she had done/She gave her father forty-one.” 

Even assuming she committed this double murder (which, despite her acquittal, seems probable), Lizzie 
Borden was not a serial killer but rather an emotionally unstable Victorian spinster who went berserk 
one sweltering summer day and committed a singular act of parricide. Likewise, the ax slayings of the 
Hontvet sisters, the Meeks family, and the Vacelets were cases of multiple murder, not serial homicide. 
Indeed — contrary to countless slasher movies which routinely portray psycho-killers as ax-wielding 
maniacs (such as the 2001 thriller ,Frailty ) — axes are rarely the weapon of choice for serial killers, being 
hard to conceal and awkward to wield, especially indoors. 

There have been notable exceptions. Though a good deal of uncertainty surrounds the 1901 case of Belle 
Gunness — whose farmstead outside La Porte, Indiana, became a mass grave for more than a dozen 
victims — it is generally believed that she dispatched most of them with a hatchet. (A pop ballad written 
about the case describes the notorious Lady Bluebeard as a “Hatchet-hackin’ Mama”). During the World 
War I era, New Orleans was haunted by a night-prowling intruder known as the Ax Man who attacked a 
dozen people in their homes. In the late 1940s, African-American serial killer Jake Bird was captured 
after breaking into the Tacoma, Washington, home of fifty-three-year-old Bertha Kludt and butchering 




Mrs. Kludt and her teenage daughter with an ax he had found in their backyard. Under arrest, the hard- 
bitten drifter confessed to numerous slayings in at least eight different states, all involving white women 
bludgeoned with axes or hatchets. 

There have also been some international cases, such as that of the South African ax-murderer Elifasi 
Msomi, a self-styled witch doctor who, in the mid-1950s hacked to death fifteen people (most of them 
young children), then tried to pin the blame on demonic possession. 

Poisoners 

Partly, no doubt, because it was the favorite murder method of Victorian women, most people tend to 
think of poisoning as a comparatively genteel way to commit serial homicide, not nearly as savage as, 
say, slitting a victim’s throat and tearing out his entrails. And it is certainly true that mutilation-murder is 
far more sensationally grisly. Whether it is also crueler than poisoning is an open question. Though a 
significant number of male serial killers engage in hideous torture, many others — including some of the 
most notorious ones — have dispatched their victims in a fairly quick manner. This is true, for example, 
of most rippers. The atrocities perpetrated by Jack the Ripper seem nearly inhuman in their ferocity. But 
at least they were inflicted on his victims after death, which came with merciful swiftness. 

By contrast, poisoners often subject the people closest to them — friends, family members, and coworkers 
— to excruciatingly slow and painful deaths, and derive considerable pleasure from observing the 
torments of their victims. 

During the Victorian era, for example, arsenic was a popular, over-the-counter item, sold in various 
forms and used as everything from a pesticide to a cosmetic. Generously mixed into someone’s food, 
however, it had devastating results. 

In most cases of arsenic ingestion, the commencement of symptoms occurs within the hour. The first 
sign is an acrid sensation in the throat. Nausea sets in, growing more unbearable by the moment. Then 
the vomiting begins. It continues long after the stomach is empty, until the victim is heaving up a foul 
whitish fluid streaked with blood. The mouth is parched, the tongue thickly coated, the throat 
constricted. The victim is seized with a terrible thirst. Anything he drinks, however — even a few sips of 
icy water — only makes the vomiting worse. 

Uncontrollable diarrhea — often bloody, and invariably accompanied by racking abdominal pain — 
follows the vomiting. Some victims experience a violent burning from mouth to anus. Urine is scanty 
and red in color. As the hours pass, the victim’s face — deathly pale to begin with — takes on a bluish tint. 
The eyes grow hollow. The skin is slick with perspiration that gives off an unusually thick, fetid odor. 
The victim’s breathing becomes harsh and irregular, his extremities cold, his heartbeat feeble. There 
may be convulsions of the limbs and excruciating cramps in the muscles of the legs. Depending on the 
amount of poison consumed, this torment may last anywhere from five or six hours to several days. 
Death, when it finally comes, is a mercy. 




Female poisoners, in short, are capable of being every bit as sadistic as the sickest male torture-killer. 
They have also been among the most prolific serial killers in history. Mary Ann Cotton — a British serial 
murderer so infamous that she was immortalized in a popular nursery rhyme — killed an estimated 
twenty-three people, including three husbands, ten children, five stepchildren, a sister-in-law, and an 
unwanted suitor. Her American counterpart, the Massachusetts “Borgia” Jane Toppan — who liked to 
crawl into bed with her victims and feel their dying convulsions — admitted to thirty-one homicides after 
her trial in 1902. Another lethal New England caretaker, Amy Archer-Gilligan — proprietor of the Archer 
Home for Elderly and Indigent Patients in Windsor, Connecticut — dispatched as many as forty of her 
clients between 1911 and 1916. However impressive, these tallies were surpassed by the collective 
killings of the so-called Angel-makers of Nagyrev,” a group of peasant women from a remote Hungarian 
village who — supplied with arsenic by their leader, a midwife named Julia Fazekas — murdered as many 
as one hundred victims in the decades after World War I. 

This is not to say that only female psychopaths have resorted to poison. Victorian England was home to 
a trio of notorious male poisoners: Dr. William Palmer (who favored strychnine as a way of eliminating 
persistent creditors, professional rivals, and burdensome children); George Chapman (who poisoned a 
series of lovers with antimony tartrate); and Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (who slipped strychnine pills to 
several London prostitutes and went to his death claiming to be Jack the Ripper). And at the same time 
that Jane Toppan was committing her ghastly crimes, America was riveted by another sensational 
poisoning case, that of a dashing New York City playboy named Roland Molineux, accused of 
murdering several acquaintances with cyanide-spiked Bromo-Seltzer. 

One of the deadliest American poisoners of recent years was Dr. Michael Swango, suspected of killing 
as many as sixty victims. Though his usual method was to inject them with fatal medications, Swango — 
who confessed that he loved nothing better than “the sweet, husky, close smell of indoor homicide” — 
resorted to other methods during those periods when he was banished from the hospital wards. In 1984, 
after leaving Ohio State University Medical Center under a cloud of suspicion, he returned to his 
hometown, Quincy, Illinois, where he joined an ambulance corps. Before long, he was secretly doctoring 
the donuts and soft drinks of his fellow paramedics with ant poison. After he was arrested and charged, 
police searched his apartment where they found a minilab, designed for the production of some of the 
most virulent poisons known, including botulism toxin and supersaturated cyanide. 

CASE STUDY 

Graham Young, Poisoner 

Though poisoning has long been the preferred murder method for female serial killers, it is not the 
exclusive domain of women. Particularly in Britain there have been some notorious male serial 
poisoners, including Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, who dispatched a string of prostitutes with strychnine in 
the late 1800s. His Victorian compatriot, Dr. William Palmer, used the same substance to murder his 
mother-in-law, his brother, four children, an uncle, various creditors, and a close friend. 




The most notorious serial poisoner in recent British history was, in many ways, the most remarkable: a 
precociously brilliant, remorseless psychopath who began his homicidal career while still in his boyhood. 

Just three months after his birth in 1947, Graham Young’s mother died. Initially, the infant was cared for 
by his aunt. At two, he was sent to live with his father, who had since remarried. Later, psychiatrists 
would trace Young’s extreme psychopathology — his utter inability to feel human warmth or empathy — 
to the loss of his mother at such a critical moment in his emotional development. 

His lifelong obsession with poison manifested itself from an early age. While his schoolmates idolized 
athletes and pop stars, Young’s boyhood heroes were notorious English poisoners like Palmer and Dr. 
Hawley Crippen (whose case became an international sensation in 1910 after he murdered his wife, 
buried her in the coal cellar, and ran off with his secretary). Young was especially fascinated with 
another Victorian poisoner, Dr. Edward Pritchard, who was hanged in Glasgow in 1855 for murdering 
his wife and mother-in-law with antimony. He also developed an intense admiration for Adolf Hitler, 
whose malignant power he envied. 

Obtaining a vial of antimony tartrate from a local pharmacist under the pretense of needing it for a 
school science project, Young began carrying it around with him. He referred to it as his “little friend.” 

Before long, Young began experimenting on his schoolmates, lacing their sandwiches with just enough 
of the poison to make them sick. He then shifted his attentions to his own family, beginning with his 
sister. Graham would observe with interest the effects that different doses of the toxin had on his loved 
ones — the vomiting, the agonizing stomach pains, the violent diarrhea. In 1962, after a prolonged siege 
of poison-induced suffering, his stepmother died. 

After Young’s chemistry teacher discovered alarming evidence in Young’s desk — drawings of people 
dying in agony with poison bottles at their side, charts detailing the effects and lethal dosages of various 
toxins — the boy was questioned by police, who found his beloved vial of antimony in his pocket. He 
quickly confessed to having used it on his own family members. Put in jail to await trial, he tried to 
commit suicide — not because he felt shame or remorse but because he couldn’t bear the thought of 
living without his poisons. At his 1962 trial, he was found guilty but insane, and committed to 
Broadmoor mental institution. 

After nine years in the asylum, Young was released, presumably having made a “full recovery,” 
according to a psychiatrist’s report. He moved to the village of Bovingdon and found work in the 
storeroom of a company that manufactured optical equipment, telling his employers that he had spent 
time in an institution after suffering a nervous breakdown brought on by the death of his beloved 
stepmother. 

The day after he started his new job, he went out and purchased enough poison to kill several hundred 
people. 




It wasn’t long before his coworkers began to suffer from a serious ailment whose symptoms included 
diarrhea, cramps, backaches, nausea, and numbness. As many as seventy workers were stricken with the 
illness, which was nicknamed the “Bovingdon bug.” Several were hospitalized, and two of them — fifty- 
nine-year-old Bob Egle and sixty-year-old Fred Biggs — died after protracted suffering. 

At first, no one seemed to notice that the victims were hit with the sickness after drinking the coffee and 
tea served to them by the ever-helpful Young. Eventually, however, suspicion grew that someone in the 
factory was poisoning his coworkers. An investigation was launched. When it was Young’s turn to be 
questioned, he could not resist flaunting his superior knowledge of chemistry, setting off alarm bells 
when he remarked that the mysterious illness seemed consistent with the signs of thallium poisoning. 

A check of Young’s background revealed the chilling truth about his past. The police quickly arrested 
him on suspicion of murder. Searching his apartment, they found shelves of bottled poisons — thallium, 
antimony, aconitine — beneath framed photographs of Hitler and his henchmen. They also found a diary 
in which he detailed, with a monstrous detachment, the effects of the different toxins on his victims. “I 
have administered a fatal dose of the special compound to F,” he had written after poisoning Fred Biggs, 
“and anticipate a report on his progress on Monday. I gave him three separate doses.” 

At first, Young claimed that the diary entries were simply notes for a novel. Eater, he confessed. His 
sole motive was the power he exerted over others’ lives. Human beings were nothing more to him than 
lab animals. “I could have killed them all if I wished,” he boasted to detectives, “but I let them live.” 

His June 1972 trial lasted ten days. The jury needed less than an hour to convict him. He was sentenced 
to jail for the rest of his life, which turned out to be extremely abbreviated. In August 1990, he was 
found dead on the floor of his cell — killed by a heart attack at the age of forty-two. 

Shooters 

When people hear the term “serial killer,” they tend to picture a creature like Jack the Ripper or Ted 
Bundy or Richard Ramirez: a blood-crazed madman, butchering or bludgeoning his victims with his 
favorite implement — hunting knife, hammer, meat cleaver, machete — or possibly dispatching them with 
his bare hands. And statistics confirm that most serial killers do, in fact, enjoy the sensations that come 
from direct physical contact with their victims. 

Still, there have been a number of notorious serial murderers who preferred to do their killing with 
firearms. Shooting, after all — even at a long distance — can supply the kinds of sick thrills that 
psychopaths crave, including sexual gratification. As we know from Freud, guns can feel like erotic 
objects in the hands of their users. There is direct testimony to this effect from one of the most notorious 
serial shooters of modern times, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz. As John Douglas reports in his 
book The Anatomy of Motive, Berkowitz admitted during an interview that “on nights when he could not 
find the appropriate victims of opportunity, he would return to the locations of his previous crimes and 
masturbate, recalling the sexual charge and feeling of supreme power he’d had as he pulled the trigger of 




his large Charter Arms Bulldog.” Berkowitz’s choice of victims — attractive young women, some of 
them parked in cars with their boyfriends — also reflects the sexual dimension of his crimes. 

Even for those serial shooters who do not derive a specifically sexual kick from their crimes, guns can 
satisfy their psychopathic urges by giving them (as Berkowitz’s statement also indicates) a godlike sense 
of power. Surely, this was true of the original San Francisco Zodiac, whose twisted megalomania was 
evident in the written taunts he sent to the press, as well as in his apparent belief that his victims would 
become his slaves in the afterlife. 

Sheer viciousness seemed to underlie the crimes of Gary and Thaddeus Lewingdon, a pair of sociopathic 
siblings who randomly murdered ten residents of Columbus, Ohio, in the late 1970s. The “.22-Caliber 
Killings,” as the newspapers dubbed them, began in December 1977 when two women were gunned 
down as they left a cafe late at night. Two months later, fifty-two-year-old Robert McCann, along with 
his mother and live-in girlfriend were savagely murdered at home, each shot multiple times in the face 
and head. The same savage “overkill” characterized the murder of the next victim, a seventy-seven-year- 
old named Jenkin Jones, whose four dogs were also shot dead. Three more victims followed in the next 
few months — a reverend named Gerald Fields and a middle-aged couple named Martin. After a six- 
month hiatus, the phantom shooter killed his tenth and final victim, fifty-six-year-old Joseph Annick, 
shot five times while working in his garage. The case finally broke when one of the brothers, Gary, tried 
to use Annick’ s stolen credit card at a local department store. Arrested on the spot, Fewingdon was 
placed in an interrogation room, where he immediately confessed to all ten murders and implicated his 
brother, Thaddeus, who proved equally forthcoming. Both brothers were convicted and received 
multiple terms of life imprisonment. Following the trial, however, Gary had a psychotic breakdown and 
was committed to a state hospital for the criminally insane. After an unsuccessful breakout attempt, he 
petitioned the court for permission to commit suicide, a request that was denied. Eventually, he was 
transferred back to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, where he remains incarcerated. In April 
1989, his fifty-two-year-old brother, Thaddeus, died of lung cancer. 

Ohio was the home of another serial shooter, Thomas Dillon. Though less well known than “Son of 
Sam” or Zodiac, Dillon was in many ways an equally chilling figure: a classic psychopath who killed for 
pure sadistic pleasure. 

Born in 1950 and raised by a widowed mother who, according to reliable accounts, never displayed the 
slightest warmth or affection for her child, Dillon loved to shoot animals from an early age, keeping a 
running record of his kills on a wall calendar in his bedroom. Besides deer and other small game, he 
enjoyed shooting dogs, cats, and cows — generally with his large collection of firearms, though 
occasionally with a crossbow. He was also, like so many budding psycho-killers, an inveterate 
pyromaniac. 

Dillon progressed to murder in April 1989, when he shot a thirty-five-year-old jogger through the heart 
from a distance of about ten feet on a remote stretch of highway in rural Ohio. In November 1990, he 
committed two cold-blooded murders within the space of a few weeks. First to die was a twenty-one- 




year-old bow hunter named Jamie Paxton, shot to death on a hillside. Eighteen days later, thirty-year-old 
Kevin Loring was killed with a bullet to the face, also while out hunting deer. 

When police made no headway in the Paxton investigation, the young man’s mother, Jean, took matters 
into her own hands, publishing a direct plea to her son’s killer in a local newspaper, theFerry Times 
Leader: 



To the murderer(s) of my son, Jamie, 

Would it be easier for you if I wrote words of hate? I can’t because I don’t feel hate. I feel deep sorrow 
at losing my son. You took a light from my life November 10 and left me with many days of darkness. 
JJave you thought of your own death? Unless you confess your sin and ask for God’s forgiveness, you 
will face the fire and fury of hell. When you are caught, I will be sorry for your family. They will have 
the burden of your guilt all their lives. 



Though this letter produced no results, a second plea, published eleven months later, brought a 
remarkable reply — an anonymous typewritten note that revealed the utterly callous, sadistic sensibility 
of a classic psychopathic killer: 



I am the murderer of Jamie Paxton. Jamie Paxton was a complete stranger to me. I never saw him before 
in my life, and he never said a word to me that Saturday. 

Paxton was killed because of an irresistible compulsion that has taken over my life. I knew when I left 
my house that day that someone would die by my hand. I just didn’t know who or where. Technically, I 
meet the definition of a serial killer, but I’m an average-looking person with a family, job, and home just 
like yourself. 

Something in my head causes me to turn into a merciless killer with no conscience. To the Paxtons, you 
deserve to know the details. 

I was very drunk and a voice inside my head said “do it.” I stopped my car behind Jamie’s and got out. 
Jamie started walking very slowly down the hill toward the road. JJe appeared to be looking past me at 
something in the distance. 

I raised my rifle to my shoulder and lined him up in the sights. It took at least five seconds to take 
careful aim. My first shot was off a little bit and hit him in the right chest. He groaned and went down. I 
wanted to make sure he was finished so I fired a second shot aimed half way between his hip and 
shoulder. He was crawling around on the ground. I jerked the shot and hit him in the knee. He raised his 
head and groaned again. My third shot also missed and hit him in the butt. He never moved again. 




Five minutes after I shot Paxton, I was drinking a beer and had blocked out all thoughts of what I had 
just done out of my mind. I thought no more of shooting Paxton than I thought of shooting a bottle at the 
dump. 

I know you hate my guts, and rightfully so. I think about Jamie every hour of the day, as I am sure you 
do. 

Don’t feel bad about not solving this case. You could interview till doomsday everyone that Jamie 
Paxton ever met in his life and you wouldn’t have a clue to my identity. With no motive, no weapon, and 
no witnesses, you could not possibly solve this crime. 



When a forty-nine-year-old fisherman was shot in March 1992 on federal land, the FBI got involved. 
Less than a month later, another man was shot in the back while fishing. At that point, investigators 
issued a press release, revealing that a serial sniper was stalking outdoorsmen in rural eastern Ohio. 

Shortly after the publication of the press release — which included an FBI profile of the suspect — 
investigators were contacted by a man named Roger Fry. He told him the published description of the 
killer sounded a good deal like his old buddy, Thomas Dillon — a lifelong gun fanatic who enjoyed 
shooting animals and openly admired Ted Bundy. Dillon was put under surveillance. Eventually, he was 
tied to one of the murder weapons, a Mauser rifle he had sold off at a gun show. Shortly after his arrest, 
he confessed to three murders. “I have a major problem,” he declared. “I’m crazy. I want to kill.” Under 
a plea agreement, he was spared the death penalty and received a life sentence in prison with no chance 
of parole for 165 years. 

CASE STUDY 

The Beltway Snipers 

For three weeks in the fall of 2002, the citizens of Washington, DC and surrounding communities — still 
recovering from the trauma of the 9/11 attacks a year earlier — found themselves once again in the grip 
of terror. This time, the enemy was an unseen sniper who killed at whim, then vanished without a trace. 
The sheer randomness of the murders — which struck down men, women, and children as they went 
about their daily business — stirred up the public’s most primal anxieties, creating a sense that anyone 
was vulnerable to sudden violent death anywhere, at any time. 

As the killings proceeded, the sniper began to leave taunting messages, as if daring the police to capture 
him. In the meantime, the nation watched in grim fascination, as the twenty-four/seven news coverage 
turned the tragedy into a macabre reality show: a true-life police melodrama that pitted the full resources 
of federal and local law enforcement agencies against a cunning and implacable psycho-killer. 

The first shot missed its target — barely. At 5:20P.M. on Wednesday, October 2, a bullet from a high- 




powered rifle blew a hole through the window of a hobby shop in a run-down strip mall in Aspen Hill, 
Maryland, passing so close to the head of the cashier, Ann Chapman, that it grazed her hair. Just thirty- 
two minutes later, the sniper struck again. This time, he took closer aim. The victim was James Martin, a 
fifty-five-year-old family man, Civil War buff, and program analyst for the National Oceanic and 
Atmospheric Administration. At 6 :04P.M. , as he walked across the parking lot toward a Wheaton Hills 
supermarket where he’d come to buy snacks for his son’s church group, Martin was killed with a .223- 
caliber slug to the back, becoming the sniper’s first fatality. 

It wasn’t until the following morning — Thursday, October 3 — that the police realized they had a full- 
blown crisis on their hands. In the span of slightly more than two hours, four people were shot dead by 
the sniper in different areas of suburban Maryland. James Buchanan, a thirty-nine-year-old landscaper, 
was killed at 7:4lA.M. as he mowed a strip of grass outside a car dealership in Rockville. Premkumar 
Walekar, a fifty-four-year-old Indian emigre, was gunned down at 8:12A.M. as he filled up his taxicab at 
a Mobil station in Aspen Hill. Sarah Ramos, a thirty-four-year-old housecleaner, got shot at 8:37A.M. as 
she sat on a bench near a retirement community in Silver Spring. And Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, a twenty- 
five-year-old professional nanny, was murdered at 9:58A.M. as she vacuumed her minivan at a Shell 
station in Kensington. All the victims had been murdered close to major roadways. In each case, the 
faceless marksman had killed with a single shot before vanishing into the rush of the morning traffic. 

That night, he claimed another life. At 9:15P.M., seventy-two-year-old Pascal Chariot, a father of five 
who spent much of his time caring for his Alzheimer’ s-afflicted wife, was shot dead as he crossed the 
street near his home in northwest Washington, DC. 

The shooter waited until the following afternoon before striking again. This time, he fired at a forty- 
three-year-old mother of two as she loaded packages into her minivan outside a crafts store in 
Fredericksburg, Virginia. The bullet hit her in the back and came out under her left breast. The woman — 
whose identity has never been made public — was one of the lucky few who survived. 

Panic spread through the region. The simplest of tasks — shopping for groceries, gassing up a car, 
mowing a lawn — suddenly seemed fraught with peril. The job of reassuring the public — as well as 
coordinating the massive manhunt, while simultaneously dealing with the media, which had begun to set 
up a tent city outside headquarters — fell to Montgomery County police chief, Charles Moose. Moose 
reassured the parents of Maryland that there was no reason to keep their children home from school. 

“We have no information that this has anything to do with schools,” he announced at a press conference. 
“None of the victims has been anything close to school age. None of the locations are close to the 
schools. ... I think the schoolkids are safe.” 

At 8:09A.M. on Monday, October 7 — as if in spiteful response to Chief Moose’s calming words — the 
sniper shot thirteen-year-old honors student Iran Brown in front of his middle school in Bowie, 

Maryland. If this heinous deed left any doubts that the sniper was a desperately sick individual, the item 
found by the police as they searched the schoolgrounds for clues dispelled them. The item was a tarot 
card depicting the figure of Death and inscribed with the handwritten message: “I am God.” 




For another two weeks — despite the unprecedented efforts to identify the diabolical killer now dubbed 
the “Tarot Card Killer” — the sniper continued to strike with an impunity that endowed him with an aura 
of almost supernatural evil, and that undoubtedly reinforced his own megalomaniacal sense of power 
and superiority. Between October 9 and October 22, five more victims were shot. Dean Harold Myers, 
fifty-three-year-old design engineer and Vietnam vet, killed at the Battlefield Sunoco gas station in 
Manassas, Virginia. Kenneth Bridges, fifty-three-year-old father of six, killed at an Exxon station in 
Fredericksburg, Virginia. Linda Franklin, forty-seven-year-old mother of two and FBI analyst, killed in 
a Home Depot parking garage in Falls Church, Virginia. Jeffrey Hopper, thirty-seven-year-old Florida 
man, wounded outside a Ponderosa Steak House in Ashland, Virginia. Conrad Johnson, thirty-five-year- 
old bus driver, killed while standing on the top step of his idling bus near Silver Spring, Maryland. 

During this period, the sniper left more taunting catch-me-if-you-can messages, as well as a blackmail 
demand for $10 million to be deposited in the account of a Visa bank card. The writer warned of more 
“body bags” if the demand wasn’t met and added a chilling P.S.: “Your children aren’t safe anywhere at 
any time.” 

In the meantime, the airwaves were full of pundits, profilers, and self-professed experts offering highly 
conjectural characterizations of the killer, nearly all of which proved wildly inaccurate. Some believed 
that the sniper was a deranged teenage gamer who, after honing his skills on Doom, had progressed from 
virtual victims to flesh-and-blood targets. Others proposed that he was a Special Forces sniper gone bad. 
Some even speculated that he might be an al-Qaeda terrorist. 

How exactly to classify the shooter was also a subject of debate. Was he a serial killer like Zodiac, 
driven by a sadistic need for power and the sheer pleasure of inflicting death? Or a spree killer like 
Versace-slayer Andrew Cunanan, a man at the end of his tether who had finally snapped and embarked 
on a rampage that was almost certain to end in his own death? 

When the answer finally came, it caught everyone by surprise. 

For one thing the sniper turned out to be — not the “well-organized white male” predicted by FBI 
profilers — but a team of two African-Americans: forty-one-year-old John Allen Muhammad and his 
juvenile sidekick, seventeen-year-old John Lee Malvo. For another, they were not driving the white box 
truck or van that investigators had been searching for since the start of the rampage, but rather a 
battered, blue Chevy Caprice. 

The penniless pair were living in the car, whose trunk had been equipped with a small hole and 
converted into a mobile sniper’s nest. It later emerged that, during the shooters’ three-week reign of 
terror, the Caprice had been repeatedly stopped by police, generally for minor traffic infractions. On no 
fewer than ten separate occasions, authorities had run its license plate through the national police 
database, only to let the car and its drivers go on their way when the computerized check turned up 
nothing. Harsh criticism would eventually be leveled at the police for having allowed the killers to slip 
from their grasp so often during the manhunt. 




Still, it was solid police work — along with the alleged killers’ own overweening egos — that led to the 
break in the case. Constantly needing to prove what big bad men they were, the shooters couldn’t resist 
bragging about their past criminal exploits, placing a phone call to Chief Moose’s office in which they 
revealed their involvement in an earlier robbery-murder at a Montgomery, Alabama, liquor store. After a 
second such call to a priest in Ashland, Virginia, the FBI contacted Alabama authorities, who 
immediately turned over a package of evidence from that crime. Among the items was a gun magazine 
dropped near the liquor store by one of the perpetrators. When fingerprints lifted from the magazine 
were run through a national database, they matched those of young Lee Malvo, who was linked to 
Muhammad. 

Probing into the backgrounds of the oddly matched duo, investigators quickly placed them at the top of 
their suspect list, launching a hunt for the car they were now known to be driving. The end came just 
after 3:00A.M. on October 24, after the Caprice was spotted in a McDonald’s parking lot near a highway 
rest stop in Frederick, Maryland. Swooping down on the car, a small army of lawmen — local police 
SWAT teams, the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, and other state and federal paramilitary units — 
found the suspects dozing inside. Muhammad and Malvo surrendered so peacefully that, according to 
one official, “They practically slept through the takedown.” 

In the aftermath of the ordeal, a picture emerged of the senior sniper suspect as a classic sociopath. 
Effectively orphaned at three when his mother died of cancer and his father disappeared, Muhammad — 
born John Williams — was raised by an abusive grandfather who dealt out regular thrashings to the little 
boy. He grew up to be a lone wolf with a volatile temper and a powerful streak of arrogance. During a 
stint in the Louisiana National Guard after high school he was court-martialed twice, once for 
disobeying an order, the second time for striking a noncommissioned officer. 

An inveterate ladies’ man, he moved from woman to woman, impregnating one girlfriend, who gave 
birth to a son, marrying another, who bore him a second son in 1982. When the marriage fell apart three 
years later, he joined the army and converted to Islam, taking the surname Muhammad. During his nine- 
year stint, he served in the first Gulf War, qualifying as a hand grenade expert and an M-16 
marksmanship expert. 

After leaving the service, nothing in his life went right. Every business scheme he tried fell apart, as did 
his second marriage. In late 1999 — with failure piled upon failure and Muhammad becoming 
increasingly unstable and abusive — his wife filed for divorce and got a restraining order against him. 
Shortly thereafter, he absconded with their three children to Antigua. 

He remained there for slightly more than a year, supporting himself in various shady ways, including the 
sale of forged US travel documents. During this time, he struck up an intense mentoring relationship 
with Lee Malvo, a young man who had been raised by his divorced mother and was desperate for 
attention from a strong father figure. When Muhammad — unable to support his kids — returned them to 
the United States in May 2001, he brought Malvo with him. 




Just three months after their return, Muhammad’s three children were taken away from him and put into 
protective custody. In September, his wife was granted full custody. She lost no time in moving them 
across the country to suburban Washington, DC. 

Not long afterward, Muhammad seems to have snapped. An inordinately arrogant man whose life had 
come to nothing, he blamed everyone but himself for his failures. Seething with resentment at the 
society he could not manage to succeed in — and at the contented middle-class world that seemed to 
make a mockery of his own botched life — he was ready to use his army-honed skills to take his revenge. 
Abetting him was the worshipful acolyte who, in a classic instance of a folieadeux, came to share in his 
pathology. 



The Beltway Snipers weren’t the first homicidal maniacs to leave a tarot-related “calling card” at a 
crime scene. In 1970, after slaughtering five people, a psychotic hippie named John Linley Frazier left a 
bizarre typewritten note at the victims’ home that ended by invoking four of the figures from the deck: 



halloween. ... 1970 

today world war 3 will begin as brought to you by the people of the free universe. 

From this day forward any one and?/or company of persons who missuses the environment or destroys 
same will suffer the penalty of death by the people of the free universe. 

I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom, against anything or anyone who 
dose not support natural life on this planet, materialisum must die or man-kind will. 

KNIGHT OF WANDS 

KNIGHT OF CUPS 

KNIGHT OF PENTICLES 

KNIGHT OF SWORD 

TAUNTS 

There is a widespread notion — reinforced by countless movies in which the hero receives a steady 
stream of sneering messages from the psychopathic creep he’s chasing — that serial killers typically 
engage in taunting communications with authorities. Like many stereotypes, this one is mostly false. 
However much satisfaction they may derive from outwitting the police, most serial killers have no desire 
to draw undue attention to themselves. Every time they get away with murder, they may exult in their 




sense of supposed superiority — their distorted idea of how much smarter and more cunning they are than 
other mere mortals. For the most part, however, they prefer to keep those feelings to themselves, without 
sending gloating letters or making boastful phone calls that sometimes offer an inadvertent clue to their 
whereabouts and might lead to their arrest. 

Stereotypes, however, often contain an element of truth. In fact, there have been a number of notorious 
serial killers who took delight in thumbing their noses at authorities. For these psychopaths, taunting 
their pursuers and manipulating the media are an integral part of the criminal experience, adding to their 
sadistic fun and reinforcing their delusions of omnipotence. 

Though serial murder is at least as old as the human species, psychos who get a kick out of playing such 
games did not appear until the nineteenth century. There is a good reason for this. Before there could be 
criminals who enjoyed jeering at the police and generating frenzied news coverage, two things were 
required: police departments and a popular press. These institutions didn’t come into being until the 
Victorian era. The modern London police force was not established until 1839, and sensationalistic 
tabloids didn’t appear until the late 1800s. So it’s not surprising that the first serial killer who fits this 
pattern was Jack the Ripper. 

Ironically, the most famous of the written taunts received by the police during the height of the 
Whitechapel horrors — indeed the one that gave this shadowy madman his legendary pseudonym — was 
probably not written by the killer at all. Inscribed in red ink, it read: 



25 Sept: 1888 
Dear Boss 

I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet. I have laughed when they 
look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I 
am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I 
gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. 
You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger 
beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit 
enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just 
for jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s 
so nice and sharp I want to go to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck. 

Yours truly 
Jack the Ripper 



In the view of most students of the case — Ripperologists, as they call themselves — this message was 




most likely a hoax. A few weeks later, however, a letter was received that is generally regarded as the 
only authentic communication sent by the Whitechapel monster. On October 16, 1888 — two weeks after 
the Ripper savaged a streetwalker named Catherine Eddowes and removed her left kidney — a parcel 
arrived at the home of George Lusk, head of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, a group of local 
tradesman who had organized to assist in the hunt for the killer. Inside the package was a rotting chunk 
of human kidney, accompanied by a jeering letter addressed to Lusk. Printed on the upper left-hand 
corner of the letter was the sender’s return address (which, a century later, would supply the title for an 
acclaimed graphic novel and movie on the Ripper case): “From hell.” 

The letter itself read as follows: 



Sor 

I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was 
very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer 

signed 

Catch me when 
you can 
Mishter Lusk 



The practice of mailing taunting letters to their pursuers, first established by the monster of Whitechapel, 
has been carried on by other serial killers, whose infamy partly derives from the correspondence they 
have entered into with authorities and/or members of the press. In April 1977, for example, police 
investigating the latest double murder committed by the phantom shooter who had begun terrorizing 
New York City the previous summer found a letter that — like the first message from the self-styled 
“Jack the Ripper” — would provide this notorious figure with his homicidal nickname. The letter was 
addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli, a key member of the police task force that had been established to 
track down the shadowy gunman known, until then, as the “.44-Caliber Killer”: 



Dear Captain Joseph Borrelli, 

I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the “Son of 
Sam.” I am a little brat. 



When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up to the back of 
the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to drink blood. 




“Go out and kill,” commands father Sam. 



Behind our house some rest. Mostly young — raped and slaughtered — their blood drained — just bones 
now. 

Papa Sam keeps me locked in the attic too. I can’t get out but I look out the attic window and watch the 
world go by. 

I feel like an outsider. I am on a different wavelength then everybody else — programmed to kill. 

However, to stop me you must kill me. Attention all police: Shoot me first — shoot to kill or else keep 
out of my way or you will die ! 

Papa Sam is old now. He needs some blood to preserve his youth. He has had too many heart attacks. 
“Ugh, me hoot, it hurts, sonny boy.” 

I miss my pretty princess most of all. She’s resting in our ladies house. But I’ll see her soon. 

I am the “Monster” — “Beelzebub” — the chubby behemouth. 

I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game — tasty meat. The wemon of Queens are 
prettyist of all. It must be the water they drink. I live for the hunt — my life. Blood for papa. 

Mr. Borrelli, sir, I don’t want to kill anymore. No sur, no more but I must, “honour thy father.” 

I want to make love to the world. I love people. I don’t belong on earth. Return me to yahoos. 

To the people of Queens, I love you. And I want to wish all of you a happy Easter. May God bless you 
in this life and in the next. And for now I say goodbye and goodnight. 

POLICE: Let me haunt you with these words: 

I’ll be back! I’ll be back! 

To be interrpreted as — bang, bang, bang, bang — ugh!! 

Yours in murder 
Mr. Monster 



Son of Sam’s West Coast counterpart, the elusive psycho-killer known as Zodiac, was an even more 




inveterate writer of sadistically gloating letters. Typical of his epistolary style, which combined sneering 
references to police incompetence with promises of future atrocities, was a letter he mailed to the editor 
of th zSan Francisco Chronicle in October 1969, shortly after he shot San Francisco cab driver Paul 
Stine to death. Enclosed with the letter was a bloody swatch of fabric he had removed from the victim’ s 
shirt: 



Thti if -fir*. ^ — C_ 

By 

f&tt *-//>■£ 3- r *. 

— — 



"‘W'' ^ -A*'* f H 

I j/ *- J H ^y+H- £t/c t*+f- 

a j £<* f y~ f s^-jc ^ £ 

pi.* / i/f -m 

*>■-»*<■ -f i tr/f*' * i ^ «■,£ r 



*'r„ . f, f „ f-i TW y 4 


-Z~ V%r 


+ fa tiff-ip JrzfjtfiS F“^ 


m.-t j}** 


P h » ■ F ^ ^ 


tV 


^ f m, P« S!*imMr#m£- f- ft 


■” i* ~^r 1 


B y^ji * -■ f Ji 




f* Ca/ r 4 


■ i i&jr* 



rAm^ AtKLfc . ,2“ ? AtWitef 

As— * ** 



fA,/ A+r—f 4 

^ J" «-- c . f‘ r ^ Jtff ^ 

"■^V" /, 



«■ 

ri^/r- J 



Zodiac letter 

(Courtesy of Tom Voight) 



This is the Zodiac speaking. I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington St + Maple St last 
night, to prove this here is a blood stained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did in the people in 
the north bay area. The S.F. Police could have caught me last night if they had searched the park 
properly instead of holding road races with their motorcicles seeing who could make the most noise. The 
car drivers should have just parked their cars and sat there quietly waiting for me to come out of cover. 
School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the 
frunt tire + then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out. 



Heriberto “Eddie” Seda — the New York City Zodiac copycat who shot four people in 1990 — also sent 
several written taunts to local papers, vowing to kill one person born under each of the twelve 
astrological signs. 




If the Jack the Ripper case represented the first time that a psycho-killer played mind games with his 
pursuers by mailing them taunting letters, it also established another pattern that would be repeated in 
future instances of serial murder: the tendency of some sick individuals to get in on the fun by sending 
hoax messages to the police. A century after the Whitechapel horrors, for example, Great Britain was 
shocked by the murder spree of another savage harlot-killer dubbed the “Yorkshire Ripper.” During the 
manhunt for this vicious psycho (who would ultimately turn out to be a seemingly stable and 
contentedly married truck driver named Peter Sutcliffe), George Oldfield, the chief investigator, 
received a taunting tape-recorded message, presumably from the killer, outlining his plans to slay 
another victim and challenging the authorities to find him: 

“I’m Jack. I see you are still having no luck catching me. I reckon your boys are letting you down, 
George. Can’t be much good, can you? I’m not sure when I will strike again, but it will definitely be 
sometime this year, maybe September or October — even sooner if I get the chance.” 

As it turned out, this and other communications from the same source were not from the actual 
perpetrator but were rather the twisted handiwork of a hoaxer — a “criminal joke,” in the words of writer 
Jane Caputi, “that disastrously diverted the police from the track of the actual killer as they assiduously 
searched for someone who matched the voice and accent of the wrong man.” 

The arrogance that underlies the act of sending taunting messages — the killer’s deluded belief that his 
superior intellect and cunning make him invincible — can sometimes lead to his undoing. Theodore 
Kaczynski, for example — the so-called Unabomber whose mad crusade against modern technology left 
three people dead and twenty-nine injured — was finally captured after theAfew York Times agreed to 
publish his thirty-five-thousand-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Fate.” Recognizing its 
writing style — to say nothing of its fanatical views — Kaczynski’ s brother notified authorities, and the 
Unabomber was soon in custody. 

Overweening arrogance also led to the arrest of the men believed to be the Beltway Snipers in the fall of 
2002. In mid-October, an anonymous caller contacted a police hotline, claiming to be the sniper and 
bragging about a murder-robbery he had committed in Montgomery, Alabama. Pursuing the lead, 
investigators ran a fingerprint found at the Alabama crime scene through the FBI database and found a 
match with the prints of seventeen-year-old Jamaican-born John Lee Malvo which were on file with the 
Immigration and Naturalization Service. Before long, both Malvo and his sociopathic mentor, John 
Allen Muhammad — who allegedly had placed the boastful call — were under arrest, bringing to an end 
one of the most sensational and highly publicized homicide cases of recent times. 

A Maniac’s Twisted Taunt 

Undoubtedly, the most viciously taunting letter ever written by a serial killer was not sent to the police 
(though it quickly found its way into their hands). It was mailed to the mother of one of the killer’s 
young victims. In 1934, six years after committing one of the most heinous acts in the history of 
American crime — the murder, dismemberment, and cannibalization of twelve-year-old Grace Budd — the 




insanely perverted Albert Fish, who had gotten away scot-free with the atrocity, felt impelled to 
compose a letter to little Grace’s mother, detailing the outrages he had perpetrated on the child. 
Fortunately, Fish’s sadistic intention in composing this message — i.e., to rub the poor woman’s nose in 
the horror — was thwarted by the fact that she was functionally illiterate. When her adult son read the 
letter, he immediately passed it along to the lead detective on the case, who used it (or more precisely, 
the envelope it came in) to track down the monster. 

Here is the content of this appalling communication: 



My dear Mrs. Budd, 

In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed 
from San Francisco for Hong Kong China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got 
drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was a famine in China. Meat of any 
kind was from $1-3 Dollars a pound. So great was the suffering among the poor that all children under 
12 were sold to the Butchers to be cut up and sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy 
or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go to any shop and ask for steak — chops — or stew 
meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or a girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from 
it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest 
price. John staid [sic] there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole 
two boys one 7 and one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then 
burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them — tortured them — to 
make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 1 1 yr old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of 
course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was Cooked and eaten except head — bones and guts. 
He was Roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried, stewed. The little boy was next, went 
the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E. 100 St. near — right side. He told me so often how 
good Human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3 — 1928 I called on you at 
406 W. 15 St. Brought you pot cheese — strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. 

I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said Yes she could go. I took 
her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain 
outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I 
would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and Called her. Then I hid in a 
closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run 
downstairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she 
did kick — bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to 
my rooms, Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 
days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could have had I wished. She died a virgin. 

ESCALATION 

Nine years elapsed between Jeffrey Dahmer’s first and second murders. In June 1978, while his parents 
were away on vacation, the eighteen-year-old Dahmer picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Hicks and 




brought him home for beers. A few hours later, when the handsome young man got ready to leave, 
Dahmer smashed his skull with a barbell, choked him to death, dismembered the body, and buried it in 
the backyard. He did not kill again until September 1987, when he met twenty-eight-year-old Steven 
Tuomi at a gay bar in Milwaukee, took him to a nearby hotel, and murdered him during the night. 

By contrast, in the two months between May 24 and July 22, 1991, when he was finally arrested, 

Dahmer committed no less than six homicides, killing at the approximate rate of one young man per 
week. Not only had the pace of his murders accelerated dramatically; the horrors he perpetrated on his 
victims had also grown increasingly grotesque. By the end, he was having anal sex with the corpses, 
saving the heads, torsos, and genitalia in his refrigerator, and cutting out the hearts for consumption. 

When Dahmer was later interviewed by Robert Ressler, the famed FBI profiler asked him why he had 
begun indulging in such extreme practices. “It was just another step,” said Dahmer. “An escalation. 
Trying something new to satisfy.” The answer was revealing. As uniquely depraved as Dahmer was, his 
crimes were typical in one regard. It is often true of serial murderers that their bloodlust becomes more 
urgent and irresistible the longer they continue to kill — as if (to quote Hamlet) “increase of appetite had 
grown by what it fed on.” Each new atrocity only makes them hungrier for more. The intervals between 
their killings — the so-called cooling-off periods — grow shorter and shorter. Eventually, they may lose 
control altogether and give way to a frenzy of sadism. 

The cross-country serial murder spree of Earle Leonard Nelson, for example — the so-called Gorilla 
Murderer of the 1920s — began with three stranglings committed over a four-month period. By contrast, 
his last three homicides were not only perpetrated over a span of just five days but were characterized by 
exceptional brutality. (The ravaged corpse of one victim, a Winnipeg housewife named Emily Patterson, 
was left shoved under the bed of her three-year-old son.) Homicidal nurse Jane Toppan was so out of 
control by the end of her murderous career that she wiped out an entire family of four adults within a 
few weeks of each other, the last two killings occurring only four days apart. (During the final murder, 
she also committed an unspeakable perversion, taking her victim’s ten-year-old son to bed with her 
while the mother lay dying in the next room.) The first two murders committed by Michigan sex-killer 
John Norman Collins were separated by almost a year; the third and fourth by only three days. When 
Ted Bundy began his one-man crime wave in 1974, his homicides occurred roughly a month apart. Four 
years later, in January 1978, he savaged four sorority girls in Tallahassee, Florida, all within the space of 
an hour. 

There are different explanations for this phenomenon. Sometimes this sort of unbridled escalation is a 
symptom of the killer’ s spiraling mental disintegration, the utter breakdown of his impulse control. At 
other times, it springs from his megalomaniacal belief that he is invulnerable, that he can get away with 
murder as often as he likes. In rare instances, such growing recklessness may even reflect the killer’s 
unconscious desire to get caught. 

The main reason for this behavior, however, was the one suggested by Dahmer, when he remarked that 
he began cannibalizing his victims as a way of “trying something new to satisfy.” For homicidal 




psychopaths, lust-killing often becomes an addiction. Like heroin users, they not only become dependent 
on the thrilling sensation — th erush — of torture, rape, and murder; they come to require ever greater and 
more frequent fixes. After a while, merely stabbing a coed to death every few months isn’t enough. They 
have to kill every few weeks, then every few days. And to achieve the highest pitch of arousal, they have 
to torture the victim before putting her to death. 

This kind of escalation can easily lead to the killer’s own destruction. Like a junkie who ODs in his 
urgent quest to satisfy his cravings, serial killers are often undone by their increasingly unbridled 
sadism, which drives them to such reckless extremes that they are finally caught. 

Monsters tend to be sadists, deriving sexual gratification from imposing pain on others. Their secret 
perversions, at first sporadic, often trap them in a pattern as the intervals between indulgences become 
briefer: it is a pattern whose repetitions develop into an hysterical crescendo, as if from one outrage to 
another the monster were seeking as a climax his own annihilation. 

— John Brophy,77ze Meaning of Murder 

TORTURE 

Who was the worst serial killer of all time? That’s a question frequently asked of experts on the subject. 
If somebody you know has fallen victim to one of these psychos, the answer is easy: the worst serial 
killer is the monster who murdered your friend or family member. Otherwise — given the range of 
atrocities these deviants have committed — it’ s impossible to say. 

Still — even among a group of criminals as universally vile as psychopathic killers — there are degrees of 
monstrosity. Though Jeffrey Dahmer would rank high on anyone’s list of the most appalling psycho- 
killers of modern times, he insisted that he never wanted his victims to suffer. Tie may have drugged 
them, drilled holes in their skulls, injected their brains with acid, then strangled, eviscerated, and eaten 
them. But as he told one interviewer, “I wanted to make it as painless as possible.” 

Though Dahmer, like all psychopaths, was incapable of comprehending the full horror of his behavior, 
his statement reflects a sense that, however dreadful his deeds, at least he wasn’t the kind of killer who 
subjected his victims to extreme torment. And indeed, it can be argued that, of all psycho-killers, the 
most unspeakably evil are those who do not merely engage in serial slaughter or even in such 
postmortem atrocities as necrophiliac rape and cannibalism but who derive sadistic sexual pleasure from 
inflicting unbearable agony on their helpless victims — who indulge in deliberate, protracted torture. 

In the long, gruesome history of sadistic lust-murder, there have been a number of infamous torture- 
killers, such as Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century French aristocrat who luxuriated in the hideous 
cruelties he perpetrated on countless children. Another, more recent — though no less monstrous — child- 
torturer was Albert Fish, who spent a lifetime committing the most hideous atrocities imaginable. On 
more than one occasion, he abducted little boys, took them to remote locations, bound them, castrated 




them, then left them there to bleed to death. 



I always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have them inflict pain on me. I always seemed to 
enjoy everything that hurt. 

— Albert Fish 

The Hillside Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, became increasingly sadistic as their 
murder spree progressed, burning one victim with an electrical cord, injecting another with cleaning 
solution and asphyxiating her with a gas hose, an agonizing ordeal that lasted at least thirty minutes. The 
Australian-born playboy-psycho, Christopher Wilder, also favored electrical torture, attaching a fifteen- 
foot cord to the toes of one victim and jolting her for several hours after sealing her eyelids shut with 
superglue. Electrocution also figured in the crimes of Gary Heidnik, the sex-slave psycho who kept a 
half dozen women chained to a pipe in his “Philadelphia Torture Dungeon.” To punish one captive who 
seemed insufficiently subservient, he tossed her in a water-filled pit, then dropped in a live electric wire, 
killing her when the wire came in contact with her chains. 

Gerard Schaefer — who, like the Hillside Stranglers, regarded all sexually attractive young women as 
“whores” — not only committed an untold number of horrifically sadistic murders (often involving his 
preferred mode of torture, slow hanging), but left written accounts of his enormities that rank among the 
most appalling documents ever written. Other serial killers have also left documented evidence of their 
tortures. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the infamous Moors Murderers, tape-recorded the piteous pleas 
and heart-wrenching screams of one little victim. Harvey Glatman shot photographs of the bound and 
terrorized women he was about to kill. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng videotaped the sex-and-torture 
sessions they conducted in their California horror bunker. Not every homicidal sadist, however, has left 
a detailed record of his atrocities. Ted Bundy, for example, was relatively forthcoming in his 
confessions. Some of the things he did to his victims were so unspeakable, however, that he refused to 
discuss them with authorities. 

In her bookKilling for Sport: Inside the Minds of Serial Killers, profiler Pat Brown offers this 
description of the typical serial torture-killer: 



While a “normal” serial killer might brutally beat, rape, strangle, and shove a tree limb into his victim, 
this is not the same type of behavior exhibited by the sexually sadistic serial killer. The latter keeps his 
victim alive for hours or days while he tortures her with all variety of sexually sadistic acts. He likes to 
see her pain, hear her screams, and make her beg and plead. He may have all manner of implements in 
his rape kit to accomplish the level of torture he wishes to achieve: whips, nipple clamps, X-Acto blades, 
dildos, hot wax, enemas, garrotes, gags, and various bondage material. 



The only flaw in this passage is Brown’s exclusive use of the feminine pronoun to refer to the victim. In 
point of fact, the victim of one of these psychos is just as likely to be a “he,” since sadistic torture- 




slaying is a common feature of gay serial murder. John Wayne Gacy anally raped his adolescent male 
victims with various objects, shoved their heads into water-filled bathtubs until they lost consciousness, 
and subjected them to other torments before slowly garroting them. Dean Corll inserted glass pipettes 
into the urethras of his teenage victims before castrating them with a knife or his teeth. Bob Berdella 
kept his male victims captive for days, injecting Drano into their throats, jabbing alcohol-soaked Q-Tips 
into their eyes, beating them with iron clubs, clamping electrodes to their testicles. 

Though women rarely engage in brutal sex-torture, except as part of a killer couple, female poisoners 
can be extremely sadistic, taking voluptuous pleasure in the torments that their victims undergo. 
Sometimes they even dole out their lethal doses over a period of days or weeks in order to prolong their 
own sick enjoyment. Considering the agonizing symptoms of, say, arsenic poisoning — the terrible thirst, 
the uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea, the excruciating muscle cramps and violent convulsions — 
there is no doubt that this typical form of female serial murder qualifies as genuine torture. 

Recommended Reading 

Rose G. Mandelsberg , Torture Killers (1993) 

TROPHIES 

Even as a middle-aged man, the psychologically stunted Eddie Gein related better to youngsters than to 
grown-ups. In the early 1950s, a few juvenile visitors to his decrepit farmhouse were startled to see 
several preserved human heads hanging on his bedroom walls. When the boys asked where these ghastly 
items had come from, Eddie explained that they were shrunken South Seas heads, sent by a cousin who 
had fought in the Philippines in the Second World War. Only later did the appalling truth come to light — 
that the supposed war artifacts were actually stuffed and mounted “face masks” that the Plainfield ghoul 
had flayed from female corpses, crudely preserved, and mounted on his wall like hunting trophies. 

Gein’s practice of saving human body parts and displaying them at home is an extreme example of a 
common tendency among serial killers, who often keep mementos of their crimes. But the fact that his 
neighbors believed his original story — that the heads were war souvenirs — is also significant. Gein’s 
explanation was, in fact, fairly plausible. The grisly trophies of South Seas headhunters have always 
been popular collectibles. American soldiers who fought in the Pacific did sometimes bring home, not 
just old shrunken heads, but other kinds of human keepsakes — some of them quite recently stripped 
from the enemy. 

Indeed, throughout human history, victors in battle have routinely taken trophies from the corpses of 
their fallen foes — not only valuables like rings or amulets or articles of clothing but parts of their 
anatomy: scalps, ears, teeth, fingers, and even genitalia. Warriors engage in this savage practice for 
various reasons: it serves as proof of their prowess, it is a way of inflicting an ultimate humiliation on 
their enemy, and it permits them to recall their moment of triumph at a later time. 




All of these factors operate in the cases of serial killers, whose behavior reflects the very worst, most 
bestial aspects of human nature — barbarities that civilization has largely outgrown (though they 
occasionally surface in the chaos of war). 




Ed Gein with his Trophiesby Michael Rose 

According to the FBI, there are two categories of serial killer keepsakes: the “souvenir” and the 
“trophy.” The first presumably serves the same function that a statuette of the Eiffel Tower does for a 
tourist who has just vacationed in Paris — it reminds the killer of how much fun he had and allows him to 
relive the experience in fantasy until he can do it again. Trophies, on the other hand, are analogous to the 
mounted moose head or stag antlers that a hunter might proudly display over the fireplace — prideful 
evidence of the killer’s lethal skill. 

In practice, it’s difficult to make such hard-and-fast distinctions, and most criminologists use the two 
terms interchangeably to describe the items that serial killers take from their victims. 

Occasionally, this stuff is actual booty that the killer can convert into cash — an expensive watch, a 
wedding ring, a gold necklace. Generally, however, the things most cherished by serial killers have no 
inherent value. Searching the bedroom of the Florida sex-killer Gerard Schaefer, for example, police 
found a stash of sinister keepsakes that had belonged to his victims, including a cheap shamrock pin, an 
address book, a passport, a diary, a driver’s license, a poetry book, and two gold-filled teeth. Hadden 
Clark, the cross-dressing cannibal killer who murdered an indeterminate number of women, not only 
accumulated a bucketful of costume jewelry but kept the bloody pillowcase of a coed he had slain in bed. 




However intrinsically worthless, these macabre souvenirs possess an almost magical power for the 
killer, who clearly runs a great risk by holding on to such incriminating evidence. (Clark, for example, 
was arrested after police retrieved his victim’s pillowcase and found his bloody fingerprint on it). But — 
like the pederast who cannot stop himself from downloading illegal child pom — serial killers derive 
such profound, perverted pleasure from their creepy treasures that they cannot give them up. Indeed, in 
many cases, trophies aren’t just a way for them to commemorate their deeds; they are a masturbatory 
turn-on. 

That some serial killers use their sick mementos for specifically sexual purposes is evinced by the kinds 
of things they hoard: fetish objects like underwear, shoes, or nylon stockings; tufts of their victims’ 
pubic hair; or erogenous body parts. Among the unspeakable artifacts uncovered in Eddie Gein’s horror 
house was a shoe box full of preserved vulvas. Robin Gecht and his team of “Chicago Rippers” sliced 
off and saved their victims’ breasts. And the fetishistic maniac Jerry Brudos kept the sliced-off left foot 
of one female victim in his freezer, so that he could deck it out in shoes from his collection of stolen 
high heels. 

Sometimes, instead of souvenirs, the killer might shoot pictures of his atrocities or document them in 
some other way, like a traveler eager to preserve his memories of a thrilling experience. Indeed, every 
new advance in recording technology has been applied in this way. In the 1950s, Harvey Murray 
Glatman photographed his bound and terrified victims with a Rolleicord camera. In the 1960s, Ian Brady 
and Myra Hindley tape-recorded the desperate pleas of one little girl before killing her. In the 1980s, 
Leonard Lake and Charles Ng videotaped their captives. 

Next to Ed Gein — whose farmhouse full of body part artifacts stands as the sickest such assemblage in 
the annals of crime — Jeffrey Dahmer was probably the most obsessive collector of unspeakable trophies. 
Police who searched his nightmarish Milwaukee apartment were aghast to discover Polaroid snapshots 
of mutilated victims, refrigerated heads, and frozen packages of human viscera, male genitalia in a 
lobster pot, painted skulls on a shelf, and more. Dahmer was a supremely sick version of one of those 
out-of-control collectors whose hobby begins to take over his living space. Every victim who fell into 
his hands ended up as another grisly relic, so precious to the “Milwaukee Cannibal” that he couldn’t 
bear to part with it. 

Because it wouldn’t be a remembrance — it would have been a stranger. 

— Jeffrey Dahmer, when asked why — instead of attempting to construct a skeleton from the bones of his 
victims — he didn’t just buy one from a medical supply store. 




A sex-killer dismembers his victim in this engraving from an 1834 crime pamphlet 



DISPOSAL 

What a serial murderer does with the remains of his victims is as much a part of his MO as his preferred 
method of killing them. Indeed, for some psychos, getting rid of the corpse is the high point of the crime. 
In their groundbreaking study , Sexual Homicide, for example, John Douglas and his collaborators talk 
about one serial killer who got his biggest thrill, not from the murder itself, but from “the successful 
dismemberment and disposal of the body without detection” — an act that provided him with an 
exhilarating sense of power, of having committed an ultimate transgression and gotten away with it. 

For most serial killers, however, body disposal is less a source of pleasure than a purely practical concern 
— a problem to be solved. Because of their aberrant psychological makeup — their inability to feel guilt 
or empathy or moral revulsion — they are able to go about this nerve-wracking, often horrendously 
gruesome, task with a bizarre emotional detachment. 

After strangling his first victim to death, for example, Joel Rifkin — the Long Island serial prostitute 
killer responsible for seventeen grisly homicides during the early 1990s — dragged the corpse to the 
basement, draped it across the washer and dryer, and coolly dismembered it with an X-Acto knife. After 
the young woman was in pieces, he sliced off her fingertips to foil identification, yanked out her teeth 
with a pliers, shoved her decapitated head into an empty paint can, stuffed the limbs and torso into 
separate thirty-three-gallon trash bags, loaded the parts into his mother’s car, and drove the ghastly cargo 
out to New Jersey, disposing of it in different locations, some in the woods, the rest in the river. 

Years later, after his arrest, Rifkin was asked how he felt while performing this horrific operation — the 
first time he had ever committed such an enormity. “I reduced it to biology class,” he said with a shrug. 
“It was just a straight dissection, done as fast as you can. I made very small, controlled cuts over the 
joints and popped the bones out of the sockets. As a kid you learn how to carve a turkey. You just go to 
the bone on the wing and the bone on the leg. You can’t cut the bone with a knife, you find it and pop 
it.” It would be hard to find a more chilling example of the way serial killers dehumanize their victims, 




treating them as objects to be used for their own pleasure, then tossed away without a second thought. 



Rifkmdid experience a moment of panic when — less than a week after the murder — a golfer at a New 
Jersey course sliced his ball into the woods and stumbled upon the paint can containing the prostitute’s 
head. Thereafter, Rifkin tried different means of disposing of his victims. He placed the dismembered 
parts of one woman in separate buckets, filled them with concrete, and threw them in the river. Others 
were stuffed into fifty-five-gallon oil drums and left in recycling plants or tossed into creeks. Still others 
were discarded in garbage dumps, pine barrens, or along freeways. 

Rifkin drove considerable distances to get rid of the bodies. He was, in fact, arrested while transporting 
the remains of his last tarp-wrapped victim in the bed of his pickup truck. Rifkin is an example of a 
serial killer who perpetrates his atrocities at home, then smuggles the gory evidence off the premises — a 
sensible precaution when you live with your mother, as he did. Remarkably, not all psycho-killers go to 
such trouble. When, in September 1998, police in Poughkeepsie, New York — who had been 
investigating a string of mysterious disappearances — finally searched the home of the leading suspect, a 
twenty-seven-year-old African-American named Kendall Francois, they were stunned to discover the 
decomposing bodies of eight young women stashed in the attic of the two-story colonial he shared with 
his mother, father, and younger sister. Given the stench given off by the putrefying remains, many 
people assumed that Kendall’s parents must have known about his crimes. Evidently, however, they had 
accepted their son’s explanation that a family of raccoons had died in the attic crawl space, suffusing it 
with a rank, stubborn smell. 

The overpowering stink of death led to the arrest of another serial strangler, a hulking twenty-eight-year- 
old named Harrison Graham who kept seven female cadavers in his squalid North Philadelphia 
apartment. His crimes were discovered when his neighbors finally complained about the smell. In 
custody, the mentally retarded, drug-addicted Graham explained that he kept the corpses at home 
because he “didn’t know where else to put them.” 

Other serial killers have also stored the rotting remains of their victims right on their premises, turning 
their nondescript living quarters into secret charnel houses. Besides burying one victim in his garden, 
two others in a shed, and his wife under the floorboards, John Reginald Christie — the British psycho 
known as the “Monster of Rillington Place” — stuck three female corpses into his kitchen cupboard, then 
plastered it over with wallpaper before vacating the house. Needless to say, the new tenants came in for 
a nasty surprise when they began making renovations. 

John Wayne Gacy did a more effective job of stashing his victims at home, interring the bodies of 
twenty-eight young men in the crawl space beneath his house in suburban Chicago. Like Gacy, who ran 
a successful contracting business, the British sex-slayer Frederick West was a builder by trade, a 
vocation that made it easier for him to conceal his atrocities by carrying out his own at-home 
renovations. The corpses of some of his victims ended up in the cellar, which — grotesquely — he later 
converted to a nursery bedroom for his children. Another body was buried underneath a bathroom that 
West had constructed where an attached garage had previously stood. Other young women — including 




his own teenage daughter, Heather — were planted in the rear garden. It was, in fact, West’s repeated 
threat — that if his other children misbehaved they would “end up under the patio like Heather” — which 
led to his arrest when it was reported to the police. 

In contrast to Gacy and West, Dean Corll — another horrifically sadistic sex-killer who turned his home 
into a torture chamber — took care to remove the corpses from the premises, renting a boat storage shed 
several miles south of Houston, which became the burying place for seventeen of his mutilated male 
victims. 

Serial killers who commit their atrocities at home (or at a secret location specifically designed for that 
purpose, like the remote murder bunker constructed by the homicidal team of Charles Ng and Leonard 
Lake) can generally take their time to dispose of their victims in a carefully planned and organized way. 
Like Gacy or the nineteenth-century “Lady Bluebeard,” Belle Gunness — whose Indiana “murder farm” 
eventually yielded the remains of at least a dozen dismembered people — such killers can often 
accumulate a sizable collection of corpses on their property. 

Obviously, the case is different for serial killers who do their killing outside the house. How such 
psychos dispose of their victims depends on various factors, some calculated, others having to do with 
the warped psychology of the killer. Some serial killers might snatch a victim, drive her to a secluded 
spot — a remote woodland area, say — then rape her, kill her, and make a quick getaway, leaving the 
corpse exposed to the elements or possibly concealed in a shallow, hastily dug grave with a pile of dead 
leaves scooped over it. This was the MO, for example, of the Florida sex-slayer Gerard Schaefer, some 
of whose victims were taken to a swampy island, where — after being tortured and killed — they were 
simply left to rot. 

In other cases a psycho-killer who has, say, murdered a hitchhiker or snatched a victim from a shopping 
mall parking lot might dump the body along the roadside, or at an abandoned industrial area, or into a 
ravine. Depending on how “organized” he is, the killer may devote a fair amount of time to checking out 
potential dumping sites in advance before selecting the one that seems to offer the best opportunities for 
disposal. 

By contrast, other killers deliberately leave their victims’ corpses in conspicuous places — a decision that 
generally has as much to do with their perverted need to taunt the police and terrorize the public as with 
anything else. Several of the hideously butchered women slain by Jack the Ripper, for example, were 
simply left sprawled in the street. Besides the obvious reason for this — his desire to flee the crime scene 
as quickly as possible — the consternation he created by flaunting his atrocities undoubtedly added to his 
sick, sadistic fun. Similarly, the Hillside Stranglers expressed their contempt for authority, for society, 
and for the entire female sex in general by leaving the naked bodies of their victims exposed to public 
view in obscenely flagrant poses. 

If the Hillside Stranglers seemed intent on advertising their atrocities, other serial killers have done the 
opposite, going to great lengths to obliterate every trace of their victims’ existence. Henri Landru, the 




Parisian “Bluebeard” who murdered ten wives in the decade following World War I, got rid of their 
corpses so efficiently that, even today, no one knows for certain how they died. Apparently, he disposed 
of the remains by incinerating them in a large stove he had specifically purchased for that purpose. 
Incineration was also the preferred disposal method of another French psychopath, Dr. Marcel Petiot, 
who turned his basement furnace into a private crematorium where the bodies of his Jewish victims were 
reduced to ash during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Another medical monster, Dr. H. H. Holmes, 
installed a kiln in the cellar of his “Horror Castle,” where an indeterminate number of people vanished 
forever during the time of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. 

In other cases, Holmes — never one to miss an opportunity to make an extra buck — sold the skeletal 
remains of his victims to local medical schools. Burke and Hare — the notorious British body snatchers — 
also disposed of their victims by selling them as anatomical specimens. (Indeed, supplying dead bodies 
to a London doctor was the explicit motive for their crimes.) 

Other serial killers have found diabolical ways to profit from the disposal of their victims. Most ghastly 
of all was undoubtedly the German lust-killer, Georg Grossmann, who capitalized on the severe meat 
shortage that afflicted Germany during World War I by selling the butchered flesh of his female victims 
as beef and pork. 

Another serial killer who went to extraordinary trouble to make his victims disappear was John George 
Haigh, the British “Acid-Bath Killer,” who dissolved a half dozen acquaintances in a forty-gallon oil 
drum filled with sulfuric acid. Unfortunately for Haigh, even this extreme method was not sufficient to 
eliminate every vestige of his victims. Police searching his workshop were ultimately able to recover 
twenty-eight pounds of human body fat, three gallstones, part of a left foot, eighteen bone fragments, 
and a set of dentures. 

The Hungarian serial killer Bela Kiss took the opposite tack in dealing with the remains of his victims. 
Instead of attempting to dissolve them with acid, he preserved them in wood alcohol. It wasn’t until Kiss 
had vanished from his village that authorities discovered the bodies of seven strangled women sealed 
inside large metal drums in his house. 

Arguably the most frightening variety of serial killer — the type that touches our deepest sense of 
vulnerability — is the household invader, the psycho who slaughters total strangers in the sanctity of their 
own home. Occasionally, this kind of killer will make a perfunctory effort to conceal his victims. Earle 
Leonard Nelson, for example — the “Gorilla Murderer” of the 1920s — hid one body in a trunk, another 
behind a furnace, a third underneath a bed. More frequently, such monsters will leave the bodies where 
they are, sometimes after committing some appalling desecration on them. The night after the infamous 
massacre at the Sharon Tate-Roman Polanski mansion, for example, Charles Manson and his “creepy 
crawlers” broke into the home of a couple named Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. After hacking the pair 
to death, the hippie killers carved the word war into the husband’s chest and left a serving fork sticking 
from his stomach. By contrast, other murderers actually display a perverse concern for the condition of 
the corpses they have created. The “Lipstick Killer” William Heirens took time to wash the blood from 




several of his victims and drape bathrobes over their naked bodies. 



Sometimes, a killer’s attempt to get rid of remains will backfire. In the 1980s, homicidal caretaker 
Dorothea Puente murdered seven of her elderly tenants, buried their corpses in her backyard, and 
sprinkled quicklime over the bodies to expedite their decomposition. Puente, however, did not realize 
that, unless quicklime is treated with water, it actually acts as a preservative, preventing decay by 
desiccating the tissue. As a result, when the bodies were ultimately uncovered, they were in surprisingly 
good shape, allowing medical examiners easily to ascertain that the cause of death was poisoning. 

Both Dennis Nilsen — the so-called British Jeffrey Dahmer — and the cannibalistic German lust-murderer 
Joachim Kroll (responsible for fourteen between 1959 and 1976) made the mistake of flushing human 
body parts down the toilet, a method of disposal that led to their arrest when the plumbing in their 
respective apartment buildings became clogged with flesh and viscera, bringing their atrocities to light. 

Were it not for the unfortunate tendency of corpses to rot, the necrophiliac Nilsen would undoubtedly 
have saved the dead bodies of his victims forever, since he enjoyed keeping them around the house for 
companionship. The same was true of Jeffrey Dahmer, who did, in fact, preserve various parts of the 
young men he killed. Another notorious Wisconsin necrophile, the ghoul Ed Gein, was the ultimate 
example of a madman who — instead of getting rid of his cadavers as quickly as possible — took them 
home to play with. 

A few serial killers have resorted to such bizarre methods of disposal that they have become infamous 
less for the murders they committed than for the way they got rid of the bodies. One of the most 
outlandish of these psychopaths was Joe Ball. 

A sullen, beer-bellied reprobate rumored to have sprung from a family of respectable ranchers, Ball took 
to bootlegging in the 1920s, earning enough money to open his own drinking establishment once 
Prohibition was repealed. His tavern — a rowdy, roadside joint called the Sociable Inn, situated on US 
Highway 181 south of San Antonio — became locally famous for an offbeat feature Ball installed out 
back: a large cement pond stocked with five, fully grown alligators whose frenzied feedings became a 
nightly attraction for Joe’s hard-bitten regulars, particularly when he tossed in a live cat or dog. 

Besides the reptile shows, Ball’s place was known for its high turnover of waitresses, who seemed to 
come and go with surprising regularity. In 1937, rumors began to circulate that Joe was keeping his 
gators fat and happy with more than horsemeat and stray animals. One local laborer claimed that, while 
passing the property on horseback one moonlit night, he had seen Ball dumping what appeared to be 
human limbs into the pond. Relatives of several young women who had worked for Ball — and 
subsequently disappeared without a trace — began pressuring authorities to launch an investigation. 
Checking into the case, Texas Rangers discovered that at least a dozen of his former waitresses, along 
with two of his ex-wives, had gone missing. When a pair of Rangers showed up at the Sociable Inn on 
the night of September 24, 1938, the proprietor — realizing that the jig was up — casually stepped to the 
cash register, rang up “No Sale,” then, when the register drawer sprang open, pulled out an automatic 




pistol and shot himself in the head. 




Disposal by fire: an 1842 engraving showing the incineration of a victim’s dismembered remains 

The horrific truth was confirmed when his janitor, Clifford Wheeler, confessed that he had been coerced 
into helping Ball dispose of dismembered women — some in the desert, others in the alligator pond. 
Wheeler was sent to jail as an accomplice; the gators ended up in the San Antonio zoo. 

A more recent case of a serial sex-murderer who reportedly relied on voracious creatures to dispose of 
his victims is that of Robert Pickton, alleged to be the most savage psycho-killer in Canadian history. In 
November 2002, authorities announced that the remains of eighteen missing women — drug-addicted 
prostitutes from the skid row section of Vancouver — had been uncovered on a pig farm owned by 
Pickton. He is suspected of as many as sixty-three murders. 

“The sufferings of the women can only be imagined,” theNew York Times reported shortly after 
Pickton’ s arrest. “Not one body has been found intact, and a wood chipper and Mr. Pickton’ s pigs are 
believed to have devoured much of the evidence, leaving behind mostly microscopic traces of DNA.” 



Recommended Reading 



Brian Lane,77ze Butchers: A Casebook of Macabre Crimes and Forensic Detection (1998) 




HOW IT ENDS 



In popular culture, even the most fiendishly cunning serial killer can’t elude the forces of law and order 
forever. Heroic profilers create uncannily accurate psychological portraits of their quarry that lead 
straight to the killer’s lair. Crime scene investigators employ a dazzling array of high-tech tools to 
identify a perpetrator from the merest, microscopic traces of evidence. FBI field agents defeat their 
diabolical foes by solving elaborate puzzles that would tax the deductive genius of Sherlock Holmes. 

Of course, the reason people turn to movies, TV shows, and best-selling thrillers is precisely because 
these works depict a world far tidier and more reassuring than the one we actually inhabit. In reality, 
stopping serial killers is a grueling and distinctly unglamorous business, owing more to sheer accident, 
dumb luck, criminal incompetence, and old-fashioned dogged detective work than to the kind of forensic 
razzle-dazzle that makes for an exciting movie or suspense novel. And then, of course, there is another 
sobering difference between make-believe and fact. 

In real life, the bad guy sometimes gets away with murder. 

PROFILING 

In the world of pop entertainment, criminal profilers are generally portrayed as the modern-day 
descendants of Sherlock Holmes: investigative prodigies whose uncanny powers of observation, 
deduction, and intuition inevitably lead to the killer’ s arrest. This glamorized view of profiling has been 
encouraged by some of its more celebrated practitioners. In a pioneering 1986 article on the subject, 
“Criminal Profiling from Crime Scene Analysis,” John Douglas and Robert Ressler — two of the 
founding members of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit — liken the profiler to Agatha Christie’s famed 
fictional detective, Hercule Poirot. “The ability of Hercule Poirot to solve a crime by describing the 
perpetrator is a skill shared by the expert investigative profiler,” they proclaim. “Evidence speaks its 
own language of patterns and sequences that can reveal the offender’s behavioral characteristics. Like 
Poirot, the profiler can say, ‘I know who he must be.’ ” 

Such boasts have created an inevitable backlash among other law enforcement types, who scoff at the 
notion that the profiler is some kind of forensic genius — part scientist, part psychic — who can deduce 
the identity of an “unsub” (police slang for “unknown subject”) by analyzing the evidence gathered from 
a crime scene. Some skeptics dismiss the usefulness of profiling altogether, claiming that, by itself, it 
has never led to the solution of a crime and that it has actively hampered some investigations. 

Certainly, the record of profilers has been spotty. Between September 2001 and May 2003 — to cite just 
one example — five women, all of them white, were raped and killed in and around Baton Rouge by a 
sex-slayer dubbed the “Louisiana Slasher.” Because statistics show that the majority of serial killers 
choose victims of their own race, profilers initially described the “unsub” as a white male, a description 
that in retrospect seemed totally wrong when the prime suspect — linked to the murders by DNA evidence 




— turned out to be Derrick Todd Lee, a thirty-four-year-old African-American. 

Even Douglas and Ressler have backtracked from some of their more extravagant claims. In the very 
same article in which they compare themselves to real-life Poirots, they subsequently modify the claim, 
offering a more modest assessment of what profiling can accomplish: “Profiling does not provide the 
specific identity of the offender. Rather, it indicates th ekind of individual most likely to have committed 
a crime.” 

In this more limited sense — as a tool for narrowing the field of suspects, for helping police focus on 
certain avenues of investigation — profiling has often proved useful. And occasionally it has produced 
startlingly accurate results. 

Origins 

Experts agree that the earliest documented instance of the practice we now know as profiling occurred 
during the Jack the Ripper case. Following the Ripper’s final and most appalling murder — the butchery 
of twenty-five-year-old Mary Jane Kelly on November 9, 1888 — a postmortem was carried out by 
several physicians, including police surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond. Afterward, Bond assembled his findings 
into a report that (as crime writer Martin Fido puts it) took “the form of primitive deductive offender 
profile” — one that can be favorably compared to any “drawn up by the best and most experienced 
criminal profilers in the world today”: 



The murderer must have been a man of physical strength and of great coolness and daring. There is no 
evidence that he had an accomplice. He must in my opinion be a man subject to periodic attacks of 
Homicidal and erotic mania. The character of the mutilations indicate that the man may be in a 
condition, sexually, that may be called satyriasis. It is of course possible that the Homicidal impulse may 
have developed from a revengeful or brooding condition of the mind, or that Religious Mania may have 
been the original disease, but I do not think either hypothesis is likely. The murderer in external 
appearance is quite likely to be a quiet inoffensive looking man probably middle-aged and neatly and 
respectably dressed. I think he must be in the habit of wearing a cloak or overcoat or he could hardly 
have escaped notice in the streets if the blood on his hands or clothes were visible. 

Assuming the murderer to be such a person as I have just described he would probably be solitary or 
eccentric in his habits, also he is most likely to be a man without regular occupation, but with some 
small income or pension. He is possibly living among respectable people who have some knowledge of 
his character and habits and who may have grounds for suspicion that he is not quite right in his mind at 
times. Such persons would probably be unwilling to communicate suspicions to the Police for fear or 
trouble or notoriety; whereas if there were a prospect of reward it might overcome their scruples. 



Fifty years later, Dr. J. Paul de River of Los Angeles created another early criminal profile. On Saturday 
June 26, 1937, three little girls from Inglewood — six-year-old Madeline Everett, her nine-year-old sister 




Melba Marie, and their neighbor, eight-year-old Jeanette Stephens — went off to play in a local park and 
never came home. Two days later, their bodies — raped, strangled, and horribly mutilated — were found 
in a nearby ravine. 

The crimes — dubbed the “Babes of Inglewood Murders” by the press — sent shock waves through the 
city and set off a massive police manhunt. When the investigation hit a dead end, Captain James Doyle 
of the LAPD decided to consult Dr. de River, a psychiatrist he had previously worked with. After 
viewing the corpses of the children and the physical evidence at the crime scene, de River wrote up this 
report for the district attorney’s office: 



Look for one man, probably in his twenties, a pedophile who might have been arrested before for 
annoying children. JJe is a sadist with a superabundance of curiosity. JJe is very meticulous and 
probably now remorseful, as most sadists are very apt to be masochistic after expressing sadism. The 
slayer may have a religious streak and even become prayerful. Moreover, he is a spectacular type and 
has done this thing, not on a sudden impulse, but as a deliberately planned affair. I am of the opinion that 
he had obtained the confidence of these little girls. I believe they knew the man and trusted him. 



There is some question as to how much this protoprofile actually contributed to the arrest of the 
perpetrator, a school crossing guard named Albert Dyer who was eventually hanged for the atrocities. 

De River got a few things wrong: Dyer was in his thirties, not his twenties, and had been previously 
arrested only for vagrancy, not child molestation. Still, de River’s speculations were remarkably astute. 
In his confession, Dyer revealed that the crime was carefully planned, that he had used his position as a 
crossing guard to win the trust of the girls, and that he was overcome with remorse after killing them and 
had prayed over their dead bodies. 

Another pioneering profiler was Harvard psychiatrist Walter Langer. In 1943, Dr. Langer was asked by 
the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA) to construct a psychological portrait of Adolf Hitler. Langer’ s report 
not only offered a number of intriguing speculations about the Fiihrer’ s sexuality and overall 
psychopathology but correctly predicted that he would become increasingly unstable as Germany 
suffered more and more defeats and would commit suicide rather than face capture. 

It was a New York psychiatrist named James A. Brussel, however, who is universally regarded as the 
direct forerunner of the modern profiler. 

Between 1940 and 1956 (with a temporary “truce” during the war years, declared as an act of personal 
“patriotism”), an unknown madman planted several dozen pipe bombs around Manhattan: in public 
buildings, movie theaters, railway stations, and the facilities of the Con Edison utilities company. Most 
of these devices failed to detonate, though a few went off, severely injuring several people. The bombs 
were accompanied by anonymous notes, composed of cut-and-pasted letters from various publications, 
in which the writer — who identified himself only by the initials “F. P.” — ranted at and swore vengeance 
on Con Ed. 




After years of fruitless search for the “Mad Bomber” — as the tabloids dubbed him — investigators 
decided to consult Dr. Brussel, Assistant Commissioner of Mental Hygiene for the State of New York. 
After reviewing all the evidence, Brussel suggested that police focus their search on a paranoid, middle- 
aged, Roman Catholic bachelor of medium build and Eastern European descent who lived with a brother 
or sister in a Connecticut city, hated his father, and bore a grudge against Con Ed. He was also likely to 
be meticulous in his personal habits. 

“When you find him,” the report famously concluded, “chances are he’ll be wearing a double-breasted 
suit. Buttoned.” 




George “The Mad Bomber” Metesky — complete with buttoned double-breasted suit — under arrest 
(Corbis) 



Not long afterward, thanks partly to Brussel’s profile, police tracked down the bomber, a disgruntled 
former Con Ed employee named George Metesky, who had suffered a minor on-the-job injury in 1931 
and whose claim for permanent disability payment had been rejected. Just as Brussel had predicted, 
Metesky (whose cryptic signature, “F. P.” stood for “Fair Play”), was a fifty-four-year-old bachelor of 
Polish descent who lived with two older sisters in Waterbury, Connecticut. He was a regular churchgoer, 
had not gotten along with his father, and suffered from acute paranoia. Before being led away by police, 
he changed into a carefully pressed pin-striped, double-breasted suit, which he made sure to button 
before leaving the house. 



The Mind Hunters 



Though their contributions are regarded as landmarks in the history of profiling, Langer, de River, and 
Brussel were not criminologists but psychiatrists whose opinions were occasionally sought by frustrated 
law officials. It was not until the 1960s that efforts were made to place the profiling process on a more 
professional and scientific footing — to add it to the repertoire of forensic techniques used to track down 
serial killers. 

The acknowledged father of this effort was Howard Teten, who began his career as an investigator with 
the San Leandro Police Department in California. During the 1960s, Teten started working with 
instructors at the School of Criminology at the University of California to develop a more systematic 
approach to profiling. After joining the FBI, he teamed up with fellow agent Pat Mullany — a specialist 
in abnormal psychology — to create the Bureau’s first profiling program. 

Teten — who was often consulted by police officers from across the country — had a reputation for being 
able to come up with amazingly detailed suspect descriptions based on the scantiest data. In an article in 
the April 1983 issue ofPsychology Today, writer Bruce Porter describes one memorable incident: 



On one occasion, a California policeman telephoned about a baffling case involving the multiple 
stabbing of a young woman. After hearing just a quick description of the murder, Teten told him he 
should be looking for a teenager who lived nearby. He would be a skinny kid with acne, a social isolate, 
who had killed the girl as an impulsive act, had never killed before, and felt tremendous guilt. “If you 
walk around the neighborhood knocking on doors, you’ll probably run into him,” Teten said. “And when 
you do, just stand there looking at him and say, ‘You know why I’m here.’ Two days later, the 
policeman called back to say that he had found the teenager as Teten had said he would. But before the 
officer could open his mouth, the boy blurted out: “You got me.” 



Teten was succeeded at the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit by a younger generation of agents who 
refined and improved upon his groundbreaking techniques. The most prominent of these individuals 
were John Douglas, Robert Ressler, and Roy Hazelwood. Along with a half dozen others — Richard 
Ault, Roger Depue, Jim Reese, Swanson Carter, Robert Schaeffer, Ken Lanning — these agents 
constituted the now-celebrated team of “Mind Hunters” whose pioneering interviews with notorious 
serial murderers like David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, and Edmund Kemper would shed vital new 
light on the mental and behavioral patterns of psychopathic sex-killers. 

Besides making key innovations in the still-evolving science of profiling (for example, by introducing 
the basic distinction between “organized” and “disorganized” offenders), Douglas and Ressler were also 
instrumental in bringing the once-obscure figure of the psychological profiler to the forefront of public 
awareness. Their work (especially as popularized by Thomas Harris in The Silence of the Lambs ) 
transformed the profiler into a modern-day media icon, the glamorous hero of countless fictional and 




cinematic thrillers. 



In more recent years — while Douglas and Ressler, now retired from the Bureau, have become best- 
selling authors and media celebrities in their own right — sophisticated new techniques have been 
developed by other criminologists. These include the “Behavioral Evidence Analysis” method of Brent 
E. Turvey, a California-based private criminal profiler who has made extensive studies of sex offenders, 
and the “Investigative Psychology” approach of British criminologist David Canter, whose profile of 
England’s notorious “railway rapist” in the 1980s led directly to the perpetrator’s arrest. 

How It Works 

By now, the FBI’s criminal profiling program has been going on for more than thirty years. In its efforts 
to help local law enforcement agencies identify and track down psychopathic killers, the Bureau’s 
behavioral specialists are far better equipped than their predecessors. One of the most powerful tools at 
their disposal is the high-tech system known as the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, established 
in 1985. The brainchild of a former Los Angeles homicide detective named Pierce Brooks, VICAP is a 
computerized database that collects, collates, and analyzes information on solved and unsolved serial 
homicide cases across the nation. 

For all the advances made in the field, however, criminal profiling still remains essentially what it has 
always been: a painstaking procedure of deducing certain facts about an elusive, unknown killer, based 
on statistical probabilities, years of investigative experience, psychological training, plus a healthy dose 
of intuition and educated guesswork. 

However astonishing it may sometimes seem to a layman, there is nothing magical about the profiler’s 
art. For example, when James Brussel correctly predicted that the “Mad Bomber” would turn out to be a 
severely paranoid middle-aged Catholic of Eastern European background and medium build who lived 
with a sibling in Connecticut and would be dressed in a neatly buttoned, double-breasted suit when 
arrested, the psychologist was basing his conjecture on both fairly obvious assumptions and solid 
probabilities. 

The ranting letters that accompanied the bombs were clearly the work of a paranoiac, and since the 
writer had been sending them out for so many years, it was a pretty safe bet that he had reached middle 
age by 1956. From the work of a German psychiatrist named Ernst Kretschmer — who correlated body 
types with different kinds of psychoses — Brussel concluded that the suspect would be neither fat nor 
skinny but of medium build. He deduced that the bomber was not native-born from the stiffly formal 
style of his writing and guessed that he was part of the large wave of Eastern Europeans who had 
emigrated to America in the 1930s. Slavs, Brussel believed, were particularly prone to using bombs as 
weapons, and — if the bomber were in fact Slavic — he would obviously be Catholic and very likely 
living in Connecticut, which had a large population of such immigrants. Anyone as crazy as the Mad 
Bomber, Brussel assumed, would not be married and would probably be living with relatives, as was 
often the case in immigrant families. 




As for the bit about the buttoned, double-breasted suit — which struck so many people as nothing short of 
supernatural — that prediction was, in a sense, the most obvious of all. From the care he had taken in 
constructing his devices and cutting and pasting his communications, it was clear that the bomber was a 
finicky fellow, the kind who would likely be meticulous in other areas of his life, including the way he 
dressed. Double-breasted suits were a popular style in the 1950s, and — unlike the single-breasted variety 
— the jackets couldn’t be worn unbuttoned without appearing extremely slovenly. 

The same kind of reasoning employed by Brussel is still used by current-day profilers. When local 
police officers, stymied in their search for a serial killer, seek help from the FBI, they will send all 
available information of the case — from crime scene photos to autopsy reports to the victims’ 
background — to the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, part of the National Center for the Analysis of 
Violent Crime (NCVAC). There, agents will study the material and draw up a profile intended to help 
the police focus their search on a particular type of victim. 

When twenty-two-year-old, three-month pregnant Terry Wallin was found hideously butchered in her 
Sacramento home in January 1978, for example, Robert Ressler drew up the following preliminary 
profile, based on information about the crime sent to him via teletype: 



White male, aged 25-27 years thin, undernourished appearance. Residence will be extremely slovenly 
and unkempt and evidence of the crime will be found at the residence. History of mental illness, and will 
have been involved in use of drugs. Will be a loner who does not associate with either males or females, 
and will probably spend a great deal of time in his own home, where he lives alone. Unemployed. 
Probably receives some form of disability money. If residing with anyone, it would be with his parents; 
however this is unlikely. No prior military record; high school or college dropout. Probably suffering 
from one or more forms of paranoid psychosis. 



In his 1992 book, Whoever Fights Monsters, Ressler explains the reasoning that lay behind this 
description. He assumed that the killer, like the victim, was white because serial homicide is usuallymrra 
racial — that is, a crime involving members of the same race. He also knew that savage lust-murders — of 
which the Wallin killing was a particularly appalling example — are virtually always committed by males 
in their twenties or thirties. 

Ressler narrowed the suspect’s presumed age to between 25 and 27 because the murder was so 
unusually violent as to suggest that the perpetrator was in the grip of a full-blown psychosis. (Mrs. 
Wallin had been partly eviscerated, animal feces had been stuffed in her mouth, and a yogurt cup found 
near the corpse clearly indicated that her attacker had used it to drink some of her blood.) “To become as 
crazy as the man who ripped up the body of Terry Wallin is not something that happens overnight,” 
Ressler explains in his book. “It takes eight to ten years to develop the depth of psychosis that surfaces 
in such an area of apparently senseless killing. Paranoid schizophrenia is usually first manifested in the 
teenage years. Adding ten years to an inception-of-illness age of about fifteen would put the slayer in the 




mid-twenties age group.” 



The rest of Ressler’s profile had followed logically from the inference that the killer was suffering from 
a raging psychosis: 



That was why I thought this killer was bound to be a thin and scrawny guy. Introverted schizophrenics 
don’t eat well, don’t think in terms of nourishment and skip meals. They similarly disregard their 
appearance, not caring at all about cleanliness or neatness. No one would want to live with such a 
person, so the killer would have to be single. This line of reasoning led me to postulate that his domicile 
would be a mess, and also to guess that he would not have been in the military, because he would have 
been too disordered for the military to have accepted him as a recruit in the first place. Similarly, he 
would not have been able to stay in college, though he might well have completed high school before he 
disintegrated. If he had a job at all, it would be a menial one, a janitor perhaps, or someone who picked 
up papers in a park; he’d be too introverted even to handle the task of a delivery man. Most likely he’d 
be a recluse living on a disability check. 



Ressler’s profile was instrumental in helping the police track down the madman, Richard Trenton Chase, 
aka the “Vampire of Sacramento” (though not before the blood-crazed young man butchered several 
other victims). In his book, Ressler takes justifiable pride in his contributions, though he is careful not to 
overstate the role of profiling in the solution of such crimes: “Some people later said that the profile 
caught the killer. That, of course, is not true. It’s never true. Profiles don’t catch killers, cops on the beat 
do, often through dogged persistence and with the help of ordinary citizens, and certainly with the aid of 
a little bit of luck. My profile was an investigative tool, one that in this instance markedly narrowed the 
search for a dangerous killer.” 

There have been times, of course, when profiles have been, not just wrong, but wildly off base. Roy 
Hazelwood was known among his colleagues for having produced one of the most inaccurate profiles on 
record. As Bruce Porter describes it: 



He did it in a Georgia case in which a stranger showed up at a woman’s door one day and for no 
apparent reason punched her in the face and shot her little girl in the stomach. Hazelwood told local 
police to look for a man who came from a broken home, had dropped out of high school, held a low- 
skilled job, hung out in honky-tonk bars, and lived far from the crime scene. 

When the culprit was finally caught, he turned out to have been raised by both his parents who had 
stayed married for 40 years. He had a college degree and had earned above-average grades. He held an 
executive job at a large bank, taught Sunday school and regularly attended church, never touched a drop 
of alcohol, and lived in a neighborhood close to the crime scene. 




Even when profiles aren’t this wide of the mark, some law enforcement professionals remain deeply 
skeptical about their effectiveness. At the height of the Hillside Strangler murders, for example, a 
forensic psychiatrist offered this suspect profile: 



The Strangler is white, in his late twenties or early thirties, separated or divorced — in any case not living 
with a woman. He is of average intelligence, unemployed or existing on odd jobs, not one to stay with a 
job too long. He has probably been in trouble with the law before. He is passive, cold, and manipulative 
— all at once. He is the product of a broken family whose childhood was marked by cruelty and 
brutality, particularly at the hands of women. 



The disdain of profiling felt by many cops was summed up by one investigator on the case — Bob 
Grogan of the LAPD — who, after hearing this description, dryly remarked: “Gee, all we got to do now is 
find a white male who hates his mother.” 

Recommended Reading 

D. Canter , Criminal Shadows: Inside the Mind of the Serial Killer (1994) 

John Douglas and Mark 01shaker,77i<? Anatomy of Motive (1999) 

Ronald M. Holmes and Stephen T. Holmes, Profiling Violent Crimes (1996) 

H. Paul Jeffers, Who Killed Precious? (1992) 

Robert Ressler and Tom Shachtman , Whoever Fights Monsters (1992) 

B. E. Turvey, Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioural Evidence Analysis (1999) 

CAPTURE 

Mass murderers — “human time bombs,” as they’re often described — cause enormous damage when they 
go off without warning. But once the explosion is over, there’s not much for the police to do in terms of 
solving the crime. These killers don’t conceal their identities or commit their atrocities in secret. Their 
massacres are carried out in full public view, as though they were seeking to inflict the greatest possible 
trauma not just on their immediate targets but on society at large. They will stride brazenly into a 
populated place — a bustling office, a packed high school cafeteria, a busy fast-food restaurant — and 
open fire. Once they have finished slaughtering everyone within range, their own fate is a foregone 
conclusion. If they don’t commit suicide or contrive to be killed in a shoot-out, they will often surrender 
without a fight, allowing the state to dispense the inevitable punishment that, one way or another, puts 
an end to their intolerable existence. 




The situation is different with serial killers, who are driven — not by a slow-burning rage that erupts one 
day in a single, cataclysmic act of gun-crazed vengeance — but by a profound sadistic lust, a terrible joy 
in inflicting suffering and death on helpless victims. Because they derive such intense satisfaction from 
their enormities, serial killers generally try everything in their power to escape detection and capture. As 
a result, they present significant challenges to the police — so much so that, according to one expert on 
the subject, “nearly one in five escape completely and are never brought to justice for their crimes.” 

Though it’s easy to overestimate the intelligence level of serial killers — particularly since they are 
typically portrayed in pop entertainment as criminal masterminds — most of th zmdo possess a sinister 
cunning that allows them to get away with their outrages, often for considerable stretches of time. Some 
limit themselves to “low-priority” victims, knowing that such socially despised individuals can be 
preyed upon without attracting undue official notice. The small-town sex-killer who specializes in 
teenage male hustlers understands that if a few of these “undesirables” vanish from the streets, the police 
will shrug off the matter, assuming that the young men have simply taken off for the more congenial 
environment of San Francisco or New York City. 

Other serial killers keep on the move, committing their atrocities in different jurisdictions so that the 
police do not even realize that the various murders are the work of one madman (a phenomenon known 
as “linkage blindness”). Still others strike in such sudden, random ways that investigators are unable to 
discover any clues that might point to a suspect. 

There’s no question that investigative techniques have become infinitely more advanced than they were 
in the days of Jack the Ripper, when several crime scenes were immediately scrubbed clean of evidence 
(like a chalked anti-Semitic message possibly left by the killer) because authorities were afraid of 
offending the sensibilities of the public. Even so, there’s only so much that modern forensic procedures 
can accomplish. 

While there have been exceptions — instances where masterful police work or brilliant psychological 
deduction or sophisticated scientific analysis has led to the capture of a serial killer — many cases are 
resolved as a result of other factors. The thirty-six serial killers interviewed by John Douglas and his 
collaborators for their landmark 1988 book , Sexual Homicide, had been apprehended for various reasons. 
Police investigation had played a key role in half the cases, but other killers had been betrayed by 
accomplices or identified by spouses or had turned themselves in. And some serial killers end up being 
caught because — after getting away with a string of audacious murders — they start to feel invulnerable 
and grow increasingly careless. 

A case that demonstrates the variety of factors involved in catching an elusive serial killer is that of 
Albert Fish. After a lifetime of preying on children, Fish committed his ultimate atrocity in 1928, when 
he abducted, strangled, butchered, and cannibalized twelve-year-old Grace Budd of Manhattan. Despite 
a massive manhunt — led by a fiercely determined New York City police detective named William King 
— the diabolical old man managed to escape scot-free. 




Six years later, however, his sadistic compulsions led him to send Grace’s mother an appalling letter in 
which he detailed the horrors he had perpetrated on the little girl. He wrote this obscenity on the 
stationery of an organization called the New York Private Chaffeur’s Benevolent Association. Fish had 
found several sheets of this letterhead, along with some envelopes, on a shelf in his boardinghouse room 
when he noticed a cockroach crawling on the wall and rose to kill it. 

As soon as the Budd family received this deranged communication, they turned it over to Detective 
King. Because Fish did such a sloppy job of crossing out the embossed return address on the envelope, 
King was ultimately able to track Fish down to the boardinghouse and bring the sick old man to long- 
deferred justice. 

Albert Fish might well have gotten away with one of the most shocking murders in New York City 
history had it not been for a combination of three things: the unwavering resolve of a New York City 
police detective who never gave up his search to find the monster; Fish’s own twisted need to send the 
awful letter and his inexplicable failure to obscure the return address; and the pure happenstance that led 
him to find the telltale stationery in the first place, something that would never have occurred if a 
passing cockroach hadn’t caught his eye. 

The following ten representative examples illustrate how often the apprehension of a serial killer 
depends on a combination of factors, from police persistence to the killer’ s own blundering behavior to 
sheer chance. 

Bob Berdella 

After spending several days in his Kansas City horror house raping and torturing a young male prostitute 
named Chris Bryson, sadistic sex-killer Bob Berdella left home to run some errands, leaving the still- 
living Bryson tied to the headboard. Seizing the opportunity, Bryson worked one hand free of his bonds, 
grabbed a matchbook that Berdella had carelessly left near the bed, burned the rope binding his other 
hand, then escaped through the window and ran to the nearest neighbor, who alerted the cops. 

Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris 

This pair of vicious psychopaths was stopped when Norris couldn’t keep from bragging about his role in 
the 1978 murder spree to an old prison pal, who promptly transmitted the information to his lawyer who, 
in turn, reported the news to the Los Angeles police. 

David Berko witz 

Son of Sam’s reign of terror came to an end when a woman out walking her dog on the night of his final 
murder recalled that, just before the shooting, she had noticed a policeman ticketing an illegally parked 
car. A check of tickets handed out in the neighborhood revealed that a summons had been left on the 
windshield of a Ford Galaxie sedan registered to Berkowitz. 




Ian Brady and Myra Hindley 



The infamous Moors Murderers were arrested after the megalomaniacal Brady decided that it would be a 
good idea to involve a new recruit in his sadistic undertakings and invited seventeen-year-old David 
Smith (Hindley ’s brother-in-law) to participate in a horrendous ax murder. The next morning, the 
sickened Smith contacted the police who soon uncovered the appalling evidence of Brady and Hindley ’s 
atrocities. 

John Reginald Christie 

After committing a series of grisly rape-murders, the so-called Monster of Rillington Place grew so 
incautious that he disposed of his final three victims in the most perfunctory way imaginable, sticking 
the corpses in a kitchen cupboard, then covering it over with a sheet of wallpaper before vacating the 
house. When the new tenants moved in and began to renovate the kitchen, they came in for a nasty 
surprise and the meek-looking psycho was soon under arrest. 

John Wayne Gacy 

The “Killer Clown” was caught after luring teenager Rob Piest to a grisly death with the offer of a job. 
Before leaving for his “interview” with Gacy, Piest told his mother where he was going. When her son 
didn’t return, the frantic mother notified the police. 

Randy Kraft 

Guilty of at least sixteen murders, the so-called Scorecard Killer was arrested after driving around drunk 
with a strangled corpse on his passenger seat, forty-seven Polaroids of his victims beneath the floor mat, 
and a briefcase in the trunk containing a legal pad filled with notes about his various murders. 

Dennis Nilsen 

The end came for the “British Jeffrey Dahmer” when he began disposing of his victims by the ill- 
advised method of flushing their dismembered bodies down the toilet of his North London flat. When 
the building pipes became clogged, neighbors called a plumber who was understandably staggered to 
discover that the blockage was caused by a thick porridge of putrefying human flesh. 

Joel Rifkin 

After committing seventeen murders, the Long Island prostitute-slayer was caught when police officers 
spotted him driving a pickup truck with no rear license plate. When they pulled him over after a high- 
speed chase, they discovered the nude decomposing corpse of a woman in the back of his vehicle. 




Jane Toppan 



After a decade of serial poisoning, Nurse Toppan grew so reckless that she blithely wiped out an entire 
family of four adults in a matter of weeks: a father, mother, and two grown daughters, none of whom 
seemed in especially poor health before Jane showed up to care for them. Needless to say, their 
shockingly abrupt extinction set off alarms in relatives and friends, and Jane was soon in custody. 

PSYCHICS 

The fear of monsters is deeply rooted in the human psyche. Huddled in our beds as little children, we 
imagine terrifying creatures lurking in the closet, ready to spring out and devour us as soon as our 
parents turn out the lights. This primitive anxiety remains alive in the recesses of the adult mind and is 
stirred up whenever a serial killer is on the loose. We are all too prone to view these desperately sick 
individuals as larger-than-life demons — a perception reinforced by the tendency of the media to christen 
them with horror-movie nicknames: the “Night Stalker,” the “Vampire of Sacramento,” the “Sunday 
Morning Slasher.” The longer a serial killer remains at large — committing his atrocities, even with an 
entire police force on the hunt for him — the more supernatural he seems, a malevolent phantom haunting 
the shadows just outside our living room windows. 

Because serial killers arouse such primal, irrational feelings in us, people have sometimes turned to the 
occult in the form of self-professed psychics in a desperate attempt to identify these psychos. 

Ostensibly possessed of extrasensory perception that allows them to visualize the location of missing 
victims and sense the identity of the killer, so-called psychic detectives have an extremely spotty record 
when it comes to solving crimes, though occasionally (whether through sheer luck or the kind of gut 
instinct that all good detectives rely on) they have produced startling results. A representative instance of 
psychic detective work applied to the pursuit of a serial murderer occurred during the frustrating hunt for 
the Michigan sex-killer John Norman Collins. 

Over a two-year period, beginning in August 1967, seven young women — a number of them students at 
either Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti or the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor — were 
murdered in especially brutal ways. Like many serial sex-killers, the perpetrator had particular tastes in 
victims. Ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-three, they were all petite, long-haired brunettes with 
pierced ears. That his crimes were fueled by extreme sadistic rage was clear from the inordinately 
savage injuries he inflicted. All the victims were subjected to frenzied “overkill”: raped, tortured, 
slashed, mutilated, garroted, and bludgeoned. In several cases, their faces had been pulped with a 
hammer. One thirteen-year-old girl had a three-inch nail driven into her skull. 

Despite intensive efforts by local police agencies, the investigation went nowhere. The late 1960s, of 
course, were the era of The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby — a time when belief in the occult flourished in 
the United States. All manner of soothsayers, mind readers, and astrologers began coming out of the 
woodwork to offer solutions to the crime. In mid- 1969, a group of local hippies calling themselves the 




“Psychedelic Rangers” decided to take action by calling in the most famous, self-professed clairvoyant 
of the time, Peter Hurkos. 

Hurkos had presumably acquired his powers in 1941 after falling off a ladder while painting a house and 
surviving a four-story plunge. He had come to the United States in 1956 under the sponsorship of a 
research society and gained national celebrity for his work on the Boston Strangler case, despite the fact 
that he ended up identifying the wrong suspect. 

Arriving in Michigan, Hurkos — a master showman if nothing else — began a highly publicized quest for 
the killer that he presented as a titanic struggle between his own mysterious God-given powers and the 
Satanic genius of his adversary. He performed feats worthy of the most skilled “mentalist,” holding 
sealed envelopes containing crime scene photos to his brow, then reciting amazingly detailed 
reconstructions of the murders. To those inclined to believe in his powers, he achieved what seemed like 
miracles — though other, less starry-eyed observers were far more skeptical of his results. (At one point, 
he predicted that a body would be found “beside a short ladder.” When the remains of one victim turned 
up near a derelict barn with broken cellar steps, Hurkos ’s supporters hailed this as a vindication of his 
extraordinary psychic abilities.) 

In the end, despite a steady stream of announcements that he was on the brink of identifying the killer, 
Hurkos never managed to come up with a name, let alone a consistent description. At various times, he 
characterized the perpetrator as a self-taught genius, a depraved homosexual, a homicidal transvestite, a 
member of a Satanic hippie cult, a traveling salesman, and a scavenger who hung around garbage 
dumps. He was certain that the killer was a baby-faced blond of medium height who went to night 
school and possibly lived in a trailer. 

Insisting that he would return the following week to wrap up the case, Hurkos flew back to his home in 
Los Angeles in late July. Within days of his departure, the killer was finally caught. 

A handsome, dark-haired student preparing for a career as an elementary school teacher, John Norman 
Collins bore no resemblance to the suspect visualized by Hurkos. Typically described as the 
quintessential “all-American boy,” he had been an honors student and star athlete in high school. His 
affable, well-groomed exterior, however, was just a mask that sometimes slipped, revealing the true face 
beneath. With his good looks and easy charm he had no trouble attracting women. But a number of his 
girlfriends quickly realized that their handsome catch was a deeply troubled young man — moody, sullen, 
prone to violent tirades against women. And a few of his professors at EMU were surprised by some of 
the ideas expressed in John’s papers: that a man is bound by no laws but those of his own making. That 
he who is smart enough can get away with anything. That the Ten Commandments do not hold — 
particularly the fifth, “Thou shalt not kill.” Collins was apprehended when the manager of a wig shop 
was able to identify him as the person she had seen with the killer’s final victim on the day of the latter’s 
disappearance. Despite his protestations of innocence, he was eventually convicted of murder. 



In the end — as is virtually always the case — it was not ESP but dogged police fieldwork that solved the 




mystery. 



SUICIDE 

Though lacking a political motivation, mass murderers are akin to suicide bombers: men and women 
determined to go out with a literal bang and take as many people as possible with them. By contrast, 
suicide is relatively rare among serial killers. They derive such intense, twisted pleasure from their 
atrocities that they keep committing them until forced to stop. 

There have been exceptions to this rule. Some serial killers seem to reach a point where they can no 
longer stand the unremitting horror their lives have become. They may begin to behave in such self- 
destructive ways that they are certain to get caught. Toward the end of his rampage, for example, 
playboy killer Christopher Wilder not only let one of his captives go free but drove her to the airport, 
bought her a plane ticket, and saw her off at the gate. And Jeffrey Dahmer seemed genuinely eager to 
put his nightmarish existence to an end. In contrast to other monsters like John Wayne Gacy and Ted 
Bundy — who did everything in their power to delay their executions — Dahmer made no efforts to avoid 
death. On the contrary, he refused protective custody in prison, though he surely knew that — given his 
notoriety — he made a particularly tempting target for other inmates. When he was murdered by another 
prisoner in November 1994, the act seemed almost self-ordained. 

It is now over. This has never been a case of trying to get free. I didn’t ever want freedom. Frankly, I 
wanted death for myself. 

— Jeffrey Dahmer in his final statement to the court 

For the most part, however, serial killers only commit suicide when — realizing that the jig is up — they 
choose a quick death at their own hands (or those of the police) over public disgrace and imprisonment. 
When two Texas Rangers showed up to arrest him at his roadhouse, for example, Joe Ball — the 
homicidal tavern keeper who disposed of some of his victims by feeding them to his pet alligators — 
stepped behind the bar, rang up “No Sale” on his cash register, then pulled a gun from the drawer and 
shot himself in the head. When police began to dig up human remains on his Indiana estate, Herb 
Baumeister — the seemingly stable family man who led a secret existence as a gay sex-slayer — took off 
for Canada, where he ended his life with large-caliber bullet to the brain. Taken into custody on a 
shoplifting charge, Leonard Lake — who, along with his equally psychopathic partner Charles Ng, 
committed assorted horrors in his northern California torture bunker — downed a concealed cyanide pill. 
The British sex maniac Fred West hanged himself in his jail cell before his trial. “Casanova Killer” Paul 
John Knowles committed “suicide by cop”: the day after his arrest, while flanked by a sheriff and an FBI 
agent who were escorting him to prison, Knowles made a mad grab for the sheriff s gun and was swiftly 
shot dead by the FBI agent. 

Of course, it’ s likely that some serial killers have committed suicide before they were identified or 
caught. Experts theorize that certain notorious murder sprees have come to abrupt, inexplicable ends 




precisely for this reason. Over the span of a year beginning in February 1964, for example, a still- 
unknown maniac killed a half dozen hookers and dumped their naked bodies around London, a feature 
of his crimes that earned him the tabloid moniker, “Jack the Stripper.” One of the prime suspects in the 
case — a security guard who worked near the site of the final murder — committed suicide in February 
1965, leaving a note that said he could no longer “stand the strain.” Since his death coincided with the 
sudden cessation of the crimes, some people are convinced that the guard (whose identity has never been 
made public) was, indeed, the perpetrator. 

It is even possible that Jack the Stripper’s legendary Victorian forebear — Jack the Ripper himself — took 
his own life. In the view of some experts, the inhuman ferocity with which the Ripper carried out his 
final act of butchery shows that he was in the throes of a complete mental disintegration, a spiraling 
madness that may well have culminated in suicide. This would account for the fact that the Whitechapel 
JJorrors — the single most notorious killing spree in the annals of serial murder — stopped as suddenly as 
they began, and why the identity of their perpetrator may never be definitively established. 

PUNISHMENT 

Some atrocities committed by serial killers are so unspeakable — torturing children while tape-recording 
their agonized pleas, slitting the mouths and slicing off the noses of still-living victims, castrating boys 
and forcing them to eat their own genitals — that just hearing about them is enough to convert the most 
committed pacificist into an ardent supporter of capital punishment. And a fair number of serial killers 
have, in fact, been executed. This was especially true in the past. 

For all the denunciations of capital punishment as a barbaric relic of the past, modern methods of 
execution are positively humane compared to those of the premodern era. From an old woodcut 
pamphlet, for example, we know the fate of the sixteenth-century “lycanthrope,” Peter Stubbe. Bound to 
the spokes of a wheel, chunks of his body were ripped off with red-hot pincers, his limbs were 
pulverized with an iron rod, his head was cut off, and his torso was tied to a stake and incinerated. 





The execution of H. H. Holmes 



(Courtesy of Rick Geary) 



In the nineteenth century, hanging was the preferred way of dealing with convicted sex-killers, at least in 
America. Thomas Piper — the so-called Boston Belfry Murderer — dangled for his atrocities, as did his 
West Coast counterpart, Theo the “Demon of the Belfry” Durrant (who was regarded as so loathsome by 
the citizens of San Francisco that no cemetery would accept him, and his parents were forced to 
transport his corpse to Los Angeles for cremation). The Chicago “Arch-Fiend,” Dr. H. H. Holmes, was 
also sent to the gallows, after which, by his own request, his body was interred under several tons of 
concrete to ensure that it would not be exhumed by grave robbers. Jesse Pomeroy, the “Boston Boy 
Fiend,” was initially condemned to be hanged, but — because of his extreme youth — the sentence was 
commuted to life in solitary confinement, a form of living entombment that he endured for over forty 
years before being released into the general prison population. 

In Europe, a number of the most notorious serial killers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries were beheaded. Both Joseph Vacher, the “French Ripper,” and Henri Landru, the “Bluebeard 
of Paris,” were guillotined. So was the German lust-killer Peter Kiirten, the so-called Monster of 
Diisseldorf, who announced that he would die a happy man if he could only have the pleasure of hearing 
the blood spurt from his neck stump. Kurten’s equally depraved contemporary, Fritz Haarmann, was 
beheaded by sword in the Hanover public square, after which his brain was removed and sent to 
Gottingen University for study. 

All sorts of legends sprang up around the execution of Haarmann’ s American admirer, Albert Fish, who, 
upon receiving the death sentence, reportedly declared: “What a thrill it will be to die in the electric 
chair! It will be the supreme thrill — the only one I haven’t tried!” Following his execution in January 
1936, rumors circulated that the twenty-nine needles lodged in the bizarre old man’s groin had produced 
a burst of blue sparks when the switch was thrown and short-circuited the chair. 

Nowadays, the death penalty is meted out much more sparingly. Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy were 
put to long-deferred (and, in the view of many people, richly deserved) deaths. Both of them did 
everything possible to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. Bundy in particular — like virtually all 
psychopaths, capable of feeling pity for no one but himself — was so weak-kneed at the end that he 
virtually had to be carried to the death chamber. 

He lived too long, if you ask me. If they’d have asked me, I probably would have pulled the switch 
myself. 

— Carol DaRonch, one of the lucky few who escaped Ted Bundy’s clutches 

By contrast, other serial killers have gone willingly to their deaths. When Harvey Murray Glatman 




received the death sentence, his only comment was, “It’s better this way.” He refused to appeal and did 
everything possible to expedite his execution. Aileen Wuornos — whose disgust at the world was such 
that she could not wait to depart from it — similarly put an end to her appeals process after firing her 
lawyers. And Jeffrey Dahmer — who declared his eagerness to die at his trial — refused to accept 
protective custody in prison, fully aware that (as happened) he would most likely be killed by another 
inmate. 

G. J. Schaefer was another monstrous sex-slayer who escaped the death penalty only to be murdered in 
prison. Others have been killed off by various ailments while serving out their terms. A combination of 
cirrhosis of the liver and AIDS took care of the odious Ottis Toole; his equally repellent partner, Henry 
Lee Lucas (one of the very few condemned prisoners whose death sentence was actually commuted by 
then-Texas governor George W. Bush) ended up expiring of heart disease. 




Aileen Wuornos on death row 
(Courtesy of Dan Spiegle) 



Given the primordial human urge for vengeance, the fact that some psychopathic killers escape 
execution because of legislative bans on capital punishment can seem like a gross injustice, particularly 





to friends and family members of their victims. Such survivors often grow especially outraged when 
they see the butcher of their loved ones exploiting his notoriety (by selling his “artwork” to collectors, 
for example) or otherwise enjoying himself in prison. 

A particularly egregious case was that of Richard Speck, perpetrator of one of the most heinous 
American crimes of the twentieth century — the rape and murder of eight student nurses in Chicago in 
1966. Speck was originally condemned to death, but when the US Supreme Court abolished the death 
penalty, he was resentenced to consecutive life terms amounting to four hundred years. He ended up 
serving fewer than twenty, however, dying of a massive heart attack in 1991. 

Five years later, a bizarre videotape — sent to a CBS News anchor in Chicago — set off of a tidal wave of 
revulsion when it was aired on national TV. Shot in Statesville Correctional Institute, it showed an 
unspeakably grotesque Speck sporting hormone-induced breasts, wearing blue panties, performing 
fellatio on a cellmate, and bragging about all the fun he was having in prison. Questioned by the off- 
screen cameraman about why he had slaughtered the eight young women, Speck merely shrugged, and 
said: “It just wasn’t their night.” 

It was enough to make a person long for the age of Peter Stubbe, when criminals who indulged in acts of 
barbaric violence were punished with commensurate cruelty. 

A Bluebeard Beheaded 

In his 1936 book,/ Found No Peace, foreign correspondent Webb Pierce — who was present at the 
execution of the French Bluebeard, Henri Landru in the early hours of February 25, 1922 — vividly 
describes the scene: 



Nearly 100 officials and newspaper men gathered in a circle around the guillotine; I stood 15 feet away. 
News arrived from the prison that Landru, whose long black beard had been cut off previously, asked 
that he be shaved. “It will please the ladies,” he said. He wore a shirt from which the neck had been cut 
away, and cheap dark trousers — no shoes or socks. 

Just as the first streaks of chilly dawn appeared, a large horse-drawn van arrived and backed up within a 
few feet of the guillotine. The executioner’s assistants pulled two wicker baskets from it; placed the 
small round one in front of the machine where the head would fall, and the large coffin-shaped one close 
behind the guillotine. 

Suddenly the great wooden gates of the prison swing open. Three figures appeared walking rapidly. On 
each side a jailer held Landru by his arms, which were strapped behind him, supporting him and pulling 
him forward as fast as they could walk. His bare feet pattered on the cold cobblestones and his knees 
seemed not to be functioning. His face was waxen and as he caught sight of the ghastly machine, he 
went livid. 




The jailers hastily pushed Landru face downward under the lunette, a half-moon-shaped wooden block 
which clamped his neck beneath the suspended knife. In a split second the knife flicked down, and the 
head fell with a thud in the basket. As an assistant lifted the hinged board and rolled the headless body 
into the big wicker basket, a hideous spurt of blood gushed out. . . . 

Since Landru had first appeared in the prison courtyard, only 26 seconds had elapsed. 

NGRI (NOT GUILTY BY REASON OF INSANITY) 

Common sense suggests that a person who rapes dead bodies or cannibalizes children or drills holes in 
his lovers’ skulls to turn them into sex-zombies qualifies as insane. Common sense and the law, 
however, don’t always coincide. 

In the strict legal sense of the term — based on a 160-year-old precedent known as the M’Naghten Rule — 
insanity is defined as the inability to distinguish right from wrong. Since the majority of serial killers are 
psychopaths — beings who, however devoid of moral faculties, behave in rational, often highly 
calculating, ways — it is hard to argue that they meet the legal criterion for insanity. The mere fact that 
most serial killers go to such lengths to elude capture suggests that they know they’re engaged in 
wrongdoing. 

As psychiatrist Donald Lunde puts it in his classic book Murder and Madness, the purpose of an insanity 
trial is to “separate the mad from the bad.” American juries, however, as Lunde also points out, are often 
reluctant “to believe that someone who kills is mad rather than bad. In fact, many people suspect that the 
insanity defense is a ruse employed by clever lawyers in collaboration with naive psychiatrists to win an 
acquittal of an obviously guilty client.” The case of Albert Fish is instructive. Possessor of one of the 
most extravagantly bizarre psychologies in the annals of crime, Fish was convicted and sentenced to 
death by a jury that — though acknowledging his extreme mental derangement — found his crimes so 
appalling that they could not bring themselves to acquit him. 

Even judges can be hard to convince. Despite testimony from a team of psychiatrists that David “Son of 
Sam” Berkowitz was mentally “incapacitated” and therefore legally insane (a reasonable diagnosis of 
someone who believed he was taking orders from a demon-possessed dog), the presiding judge sided 
with the lone prosecution expert, who declared that “while the defendant shows paranoid traits, they do 
not interfere with his fitness to stand trial.” 

To be sure, some infamous serial killers have been found mentally incompetent and committed to 
asylums. Though convicted of first-degree murder, the Wisconsin ghoul Ed Gein was simultaneously 
judged insane and spent the rest of his days in mental institutions. So did Jane Toppan, the female serial 
poisoner who confessed to thirty-one murders following her trial in 1901. (In Toppan’ s case, there is 
reason to believe that she was spared the death penalty, not because she was truly insane, but because a 
jury of Victorian gentlemen couldn’t bring themselves to sentence a “respectable” woman to the 
gallows.) 




For the most part, winning an acquittal with an insanity plea is so difficult that few defense lawyers 
attempt it. In the last hundred years, barely one percent of all felons brought to trial in this country have 
resorted to this tactic. And of that tiny minority, only one in three has been found NGRI (“not guilty by 
reason of insanity”). 

As for serial killers, “Only 3.6 percent have been declared incompetent for trial or cleared by reason of 
insanity,” according to one expert. Even a severely delusional psychotic like Herbert Mullin — who 
believed he could ward off an apocalyptic earthquake by slaughtering strangers — was deemed “sane by 
legal standards” and convicted of murder. 

Of course, the long odds against prevailing with an insanity plea haven’t stopped some serial killers 
from trying. In England, John George Haigh, the infamous “Acid-Bath Killer” of the 1940s, made a 
futile attempt to convince the jury that his murders were motivated, not by pathological greed, but by a 
vampiric lust for body fluids. To prove that he was possessed of unnatural thirsts, he even drank a cup of 
his own urine in prison — all to no avail. Thirty years later, Haigh’ s psychopathic countryman Peter 
Sutcliffe, aka the “Yorkshire Ripper,” made an equally fruitless attempt to depict himself as insane, 
claiming that he had been commanded to kill prostitutes by the voice of God, issuing from a grave in a 
local cemetery. 

Perhaps the most popular ploy has been the “multiple personality” gambit, which has been attempted — 
with a stunning lack of success — by a number of infamous serial killers. These include William the 
“Lipstick Killer” Heirens, Kenneth “Hillside Strangler” Bianchi, and John Wayne Gacy — each of whom 
tried to pin his crimes on a murderous alter ego named, respectively, “George Murman,” “Steve,” and 
“Jack.” Ted Bundy, though he did not attempt an insanity defense, also claimed that he was occasionally 
possessed by a malevolent being he referred to as “the entity.” 

Indeed — partly no doubt because of Alfred Hitchcock’ sPsycho (which popularized the concept of the 
“split personality”), it has become almost commonplace for serial killers to shift responsibility for their 
acts onto the evil second selves that supposedly dwell inside them. When Australian serial killer William 
MacDonald was asked why he butchered a half dozen men, he breezily declared, “I didn’t murder those 
men. It is the other person who lives inside me that actually killed them.” As is typically the case, the 
jury declined to believe this glib explanation, sentencing the “Mutilator” to life for his atrocities. 

UNSOLVED 

In the realm of serial homicide, as in all other areas of human activity, some individuals achieve far 
greater renown than others. Because their crimes were so sensationally horrific, psychopaths like 
Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and a handful of others have achieved 
something close to legendary status. In the popular imagination, they have assumed the role of real-life, 
flesh-and-blood bogeyman — all-American personifications of absolute evil. 




Most serial killers, however, never rate such dark celebrity. How many people have ever heard of 
Michael Ross, a forty-year-old serial killer sentenced to death for slaying four teenage girls in 
Connecticut in the 1980s? Or Tommy Lynn Sells, a thirty-five-year-old drifter who — following his 
arrest in Del Rio, Texas, for slitting the throats of two girls with a boning knife — confessed to ten other 
slayings in six states? Or Corey Morris, a twenty-four-year-old Phoenix man charged with the murder of 
six prostitutes in 2003? There is nothing about such degenerates that seizes the imagination of the 
public. They don’t exert the grim fascination of Jekyll-Hyde types like Bundy and Gacy: the handsome 
law student whose charming personality conceals the soul of a monster; the roly-poly clown who 
entertains hospitalized children by day and spends his nights torturing and murdering teenagers. Ross, 
Sells, Morris, and others of their ilk don’t seem mythically evil — just sick, vicious, and repellent. 

The same principle applies to unsolved serial homicides. A surprising number of these never make the 
national headlines. Many are barely noted in the communities where they are taking place. This is 
largely because they so often involve male or female street prostitutes — socially despised victims whose 
death and disappearance arouse little interest or concern among the public. Even the police sometimes 
pay little attention to such crimes, making only the most perfunctory efforts to solve them. 

By contrast, there are a number of unsolved serial killer cases that have become legendary in the annals 
of crime. Foremost among these, of course, is that of Jack the Ripper. By now, there is an entire cottage 
industry devoted to the solution of this century-old mystery. Every few years, a new “expert” comes 
forward with a book purporting to provide definitive proof of the Whitechapel monster’s identity. The 
most recent (as of this writing, at least) isPortraitofaKiller, the 2002 best seller by mystery writer 
Patricia Cornwell, who — with much ballyhoo — announced that she had finally identified the legendary 
harlot-slayer. The culprit, she claimed, was Walter Sickert, a renowned post-impressionist painter with 
an intense fascination with the macabre and a supposed sexual pathology allegedly brought about by a 
bungled penile operation. 

Not everyone, however, has been convinced by Cornwell’s “proof.” Savaging the book in th eNew York 
Times, for example, Caleb Carr — author of the 1995 blockbuster , The Alienist — not only denounced it as 
an “exercise in calumny” but demanded that Cornwell apologize for having written it. It might be added 
that Sickert was long ago identified — and dismissed — as a possible suspect by other Ripperologists. 

In short, it seems likely that — despite her claims (and the sizable amount of her personal fortune that she 
invested in the project) — Cornwell’s book will not be the last word on this subject. 

Though less well-known than the Ripper murders, there are several celebrated cases that continue to 
tantalize armchair detectives. They include: 

The Ax Man of New Orleans 

One of the great unsolved mysteries in the annals of American serial murder began in the waning days 
of the World War I era. In the predawn hours of May 23, 1918, an unknown madman broke into the 




home of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Maggio, battered in their skulls with an ax, then put a razor to their throats 
and delivered the coup de grace. 

He struck again in the dead of night on June 28, invading the home of a grocer named Louis Besumer, 
who escaped the attack with a nasty gash to the head. His wife, however, was mortally wounded. She 
lingered until August 5 before succumbing to her injuries. 

On the same night that she died, the pregnant wife of a man named Schneider was attacked in her bed by 
the ax- wielding maniac. Though Mrs. Schneider (and her unborn infant) survived, she was unable to 
provide police with anything more than a vague description of the shadowy intruder. 

Five days later, two young sisters, Pauline and Mary Bruno, were awakened by the sounds of a 
commotion from the adjoining bedroom. Hurrying to investigate, they caught a glimpse of a sinister 
figure — “dark, tall, heavyset, wearing a dark suit and black slouch hat,” as they would describe him — 
making his escape. In the bed lay their uncle, Joseph Romano, bleeding copiously from a savage head 
wound that would prove fatal. 

By this point, New Orleans was experiencing the kind of panic that, a half century later, would grip New 
York City when the phantom shooter known as “Son of Sam” was on the loose. People began sleeping 
with loaded pistols at their sides and inundating the police with reports of attempted nighttime break-ins, 
discarded murder weapons found on their front lawns, and countless hysteria-induced sightings of the 
killer. 

After a seven-month hiatus, he committed another attack, this time in the town of Gretna, just across the 
river from New Orleans. His victims were the three members of the Cortimiglia family. The parents, 
Charles and Rose, survived with fractured skulls but their two-year-old daughter was murdered. 

Four days later, on March 14, 1919, a letter arrived at the offices of theAYw Orleans Times-Picayune. It 
was undoubtedly a hoax, much like the fraudulent letter that gave the Whitechapel monster his immortal 
nickname. Describing himself as a “demon from the hottest hell,” the writer declared his intention to 
terrorize the city on the night of March 19, sparing only those houses where jazz was playing. He signed 
the note, “The Ax Man.” 




The Ax Man of New Orleans awakens the Bruno sisters 



(© 2003 Nathan MacDicken) 



In an early instance of a now commonplace phenomenon — the kind of coping mechanism that causes 
people to indulge in sick jokes whenever a ca-tastrophe occurs — the citizens of New Orleans resorted to 
macabre humor to relieve their tensions, throwing “Ax Man parties” on the designated night and playing 
a popular new piano tune, “The Mysterious Ax Man’s Jazz.” 

Despite the arrest and conviction of several suspects (who were later released when their accuser 
confessed to perjury), the killings continued. Between August 10 and October 27, three more attacks 
occurred, bringing the Ax Man’s toll to six dead and six wounded. 

Then, as abruptly as they had started, the murders came to a halt. Some scholars of American crime have 
identified a likely suspect, a Mafia hit man named Joseph Mumfre who was shot dead by the widow of 
the Ax Man’s last victim, and whose murder would account for the sudden cessation of the ax killer’s 
spree. Others, however, have called this theory into question. In any event, the Ax Man killings remain 
officially unsolved. 

The Toledo Clubber 

In a two- week spasm of violence that terrorized the city of Toledo, Ohio, and drew nationwide attention 
in the press, a “murderous maniac” (as the papers described him) savagely attacked a dozen women in 
the fall of 1925, leaving five dead and the rest severely wounded. Wielding a heavy bludgeoning object, 
he clubbed his victims from behind, then continued to smash their faces and skulls as they lay 
unconscious from the initial blow. 




The first to encounter the “Clubber” was Mrs. Frank Hall, who was set upon outside her home on the 
night of November 10, 1925. One of the luckier victims, she survived the attack, though her injuries 
were severe enough for her never to regain her full health. 

Mrs. Emma Hatfield and Lydia Baumgartner were the next to fall victim to the madman. Both were 
attacked as they made their way down deserted streets after dark. Both would ultimately die of their 
injuries, though not before giving deathbed statements to the police. Unfortunately, neither woman could 
provide a precise description of the assailant. 

The following week brought additional attacks — seven more in as many days. By then, the city was in 
an uproar. The American Legion put a thousand men on the streets to help in the search for the killer 
while the city’s Medical Service Bureau offered escorts for the scores of women suddenly afraid to walk 
alone after nightfall. The police conducted a sweeping roundup of the usual suspects — mostly “mental 
defectives” and any swarthy-skinned stranger unlucky enough to find himself in Toledo at the time. 

They also had to deal with the usual deluge of hysterical “tips,” including sightings of bizarre creatures 
with green-rimmed eyes and hulking figures who haunted the rooftops, issuing weird cries. 

In the meantime, the authorities circulated a profile of the Clubber as “a beastlike man, more than six 
feet tall, of dark hue, with long woolly hair, protruding front teeth, fiery eyes, and almost superhuman 
strength.” Given the hackneyed nature of this description — which sounds like a composite of every 
monster cliche in the book — it seems likely that it says less about the killer than about the feverish 
fantasies of the panic-stricken public. Indeed, by issuing this description, the police probably made it 
easier for the killer to avoid capture. With the entire city on the lookout for a supernatural ogre, the 
Clubber (who, like many other serial killers, probably looked perfectly ordinary, if not totally 
unprepossessing) could move about without attracting suspicion. 

Lollowing the savage double murder on a single day of a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher and a forty- 
seven-year-old housewife (both of whom were also sexually assaulted), the Toledo Clubber’s reign of 
terror came to an abrupt halt. Exactly who he was and what became of him remains a mystery to this day. 

The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run 

A decade after the end of the Toledo Clubber affair, Ohio was the site of another unsolved serial murder 
case, perhaps the most famous in the annals of twentieth-century American crime. What made this case 
so notable was not only the unusual savagery of the killings but the involvement of Eliot Ness, the 
legendary lawman of Untouchables fame. 

It happened in Cleveland during the height of the Great Depression. In September 1934, the lower half 
of a woman’s torso, the legs severed at the knees, washed up on the shore of Lake Erie near the Euclid 
Beach amusement park. The victim — dubbed “the Lady of the Lake” by the local press — was never 
identified, and the story quickly vanished from the news. Only later did people come to see this incident, 
not as an isolated atrocity, but as a harbinger of the horrors to come. 




One year later, while roaming through Kingsbury Run — a weed-choked, garbage-strewn ravine on the 
east side of Cleveland that served as a hobo jungle — two young boys stumbled upon a pair of headless, 
decomposing male corpses, both with their genitals severed. Postmortem examinations suggested that 
they had been decapitated — and probably castrated — while still alive. Though the older victim was 
never identified, fingerprints showed the younger man to be Edward Andrassy, a “snotty punk” (as one 
cop described him) with a long rap sheet of petty arrests. Given his reputation for unsavory behavior — 
which included an affair with a married woman whose husband had threatened Andrassy’ s life — police 
concluded that the two killings were crimes of passion. 

They were obliged to reassess that opinion when other bodies began to turn up. In January 1936, the 
hacked-up remains of a forty-one-year-old prostitute — stuffed inside in a half bushel basket and a few 
burlap sacks — were found behind a Central Avenue butcher shop. Four months later — in a virtual replay 
of the September 1935, incident — two boys cutting through Kingsbury Run on their way to go fishing — 
stumbled upon a man’s decapitated head. The next day, searchers found the naked corpse, which was 
adorned with a half dozen distinctive tattoos. Despite all efforts, however — which included displaying 
the victim’ s death mask at the Great Lakes Exposition in the hope that one of the seven million visitors 
would recognize him — the identity of the “Tattooed Man” was never established. 




A newspaper artist’s conception of “The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” from the ClevelandP/mn 
Dealer, April 2, 1939 



(© 1939 The Plain Dealer. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission). 



On July 22, another headless corpse was discovered — this one across town from Kingsbury Run. The 
killer returned to his favorite dumping ground a few months later, in September 1936. Waiting to hop 
one of the eastbound freight trains that passed through Kingsbury Run, a hobo spotted the bisected 
halves of a human torso floating in a stagnant pond. The missing parts — which included the head, arms, 
and genitals — were never found. 

By this point, the newspapers were having a field day with the case, running daily, sensationalistic front- 
page stories written in the purplest prose. “Of all horrible nightmares come to life,” ran one typical lead, 
“the most shuddering is the fiend who decapitates his victims in the dark, dank recesses of Kingsbury 
Run. That a man of this nature should be permitted to work his crazed vengeance upon six people in a 
city the size of Cleveland should be the city’s shame. No Edgar Allan Poe in his deepest, opium-induced 
dream could conceive horror so painstakingly worked out.” 

Having been recently hired as Cleveland’s safety director, Eliot Ness — whose energies had been largely 
devoted to rooting out corruption in the police department while overseeing security measures for the 
Republican National Convention — found himself under enormous pressure to track down the maniac, 
alternately dubbed the “Cleveland Torso Killer” and the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.” Nothing, 
however — neither the sizable reward offered by th ^Cleveland News nor the full-time efforts of two 
dozen detectives, including a tireless pair named Merylo and Zalewski, who interrogated hundreds of 
suspects and pursued numberless leads — made a difference. For two more years, the dismembered 
corpses continued to pile up — twelve in all, a “Butcher’s dozen,” in crime writer Max Allan Collins’s 
phrase. 

The remains of Butcher’s last two victims turned up in August 1938. What became of him after that has 
remained a matter of speculation ever since. A Cleveland physician named Frank Sweeney — reputedly a 
bisexual alcoholic with a hair-trigger temper — fell briefly under suspicion. So did a Slavic immigrant 
named Frank Dolezal, who initially confessed to several of the “Torso” murders, though he later 
recanted, claiming that the police had beaten the confession out of him. A month after his arrest, he was 
found hanged in his cell, an apparent suicide. 

While some crime mavens believe that Mad Butcher migrated to Eos Angeles, others agree with Eliot 
Ness’s biographer Oscar Fraley, who claimed that the real culprit was a mentally unstable premed 
student. The scion of a prominent Cleveland family, it is said, the killer eluded arrest by having himself 
committed to a mental institution, where he died of natural causes in the early 1940s. 

The Green River Killer: Case Closed 

It is a truism in law enforcement that, with every passing day, the chances of cracking an unsolved case 
grow progressively slimmer. So it seems highly improbable that we could ever learn the true identities of 
long-vanished phantoms like the New Orleans “Ax Man” or Cleveland’s “Mad Butcher.” Thanks to 
recent advances in forensic science, however — specifically the development of DNA analysis — a 




number of infamous serial murder cases, which have frustrated investigators for decades, appear to have 
been solved at last. 

Police in Glasgow, Scotland, for example, believe that they have finally solved the quarter-century-old 
case of the Scripture-quoting sex-killer nicknamed “Bible John.” A DNA sample taken from semen 
stains on the tights of one of his victims was found to match a sample from one of the suspects, a 
married former Scots Guard with three children who committed suicide in 1980. Though the man’s 
identity has not been made public, authorities appear confident that the mystery has been solved. 

In our own country, one of the most notorious and baffling serial murder cases of the past quarter 
century took an unexpectedly auspicious turn in the fall of 2001, more than ten years after most people 
had given up on it. Between 1982 and 1984, no fewer than forty-nine young women were stabbed to 
death or strangled and their bodies dumped at various woodland sites. Some were runaways and 
transients, though most of them were prostitutes working a sleazy strip along the Seattle-Tacoma 
highway. Despite a massive investigation that lasted nearly a decade, cost $15 million, accumulated four 
thousand pieces of physical evidence, and enlisted the help of everyone from FBI profiler John Douglas 
to Ted Bundy (who offered his own unique insights into the operations of the psychopathic mind), the 
“Green River Killer” managed to elude capture. When the task force that had been assembled to track 
him finally disbanded in 1990, there was little hope that he would ever be captured. 

All that changed suddenly and dramatically in November 2001, when Gary Leon Ridgway was arrested 
for the relatively minor offense of “loitering for the purposes of soliciting prostitution.” A married fifty- 
two-year-old father who lived in the Seattle suburb of Austin and worked as a painter for a local 
trucking company, Ridgway had had a number of previous run-ins with the law, all involving 
prostitutes. In 1980, a hooker he had picked up on the “Sea-Tac” strip accused him of driving her out to 
the woods and trying to strangle her. Charges were dropped when Ridgway told authorities that the 
woman had started to bite him while performing oral sex, and he only choked her to make her stop. 

Two years later, he was arrested after propositioning a police decoy during a prostitution sting. 

Admitting that his compulsion to pick up prostitutes was akin to an alcoholic’s craving for drink, he 
pleaded guilty and was given a slap on the wrist. In 1984, he was a prime suspect in the disappearance of 
one of the Green River Killer’s victims, but was released from custody after passing a polygraph test. 
Jokingly, his coworkers at the Kenworth Truck Company began calling him “Green River Gary” — or 
“G. R.” for short. 

To police officers, however, there was nothing funny about the situation. By 1988, Ridgway was still 
regarded as a “person of interest” by investigators, who obtained a warrant to search his house (which 
yielded no evidence), as well as a court order that directed him to provide a saliva sample by chewing on 
a piece of gauze. 

This latter piece of evidence ultimately led to the big break in the case. When Ridgway was arrested 
again in the fall of 2001 for soliciting prostitution, improved technology allowed forensic scientists to 




match the DNA in his saliva sample with semen found in three of the victims. His employment records 
were immediately subpoenaed, and a thorough check revealed that his absences from work coincided 
with the disappearances of many of the Green River victims. 

On Wednesday, December 5, 2001, Gary Ridgway was formally charged with the deaths of four women. 
“What cracked this case, in a word, was science,” one official declared. Due credit was also given to 
tenacious police work, particularly on the part King County sheriff Dave Reichert, who could barely 
contain his jubilation when he saw the results of the DNA tests. After pursuing his quarry for nearly 
twenty years, the hunt finally appeared to be at an end. 

Ridgway ’s responsibility for the Green River Killings was confirmed in November 2003, when — as part 
of a plea agreement that spared him the death penalty — he stood in a Seattle courtroom and admitted to 
the murder of forty-eight women. 




SERIAL KILLER CULTURE 



Ever since the phrase “serial killer” gained currency in the early 1980s, the predatory psycho has 
become a standard (if not stereotypical) feature of our popular arts. To many finger-wagging critics, 
America’s fixation on these blood-crazed beings is yet another deplorable sign of our supposed cultural 
decadence, proof that we have lost our moral bearings as a society. 

In truth, however, there is nothing new or uniquely American about the “glorification” of criminals. 
Throughout history, people have been fascinated by what crime writer Jay Robert Nash calls 
“bloodletters and badmen.” Back in eighteenth- century England, the public couldn’t hear enough about 
the exploits of famous rogues like Jack Sheppard, Jonathan Wild, and Colonel Blood. A century later, 
British readers eagerly devoured every grisly tidbit printed about Jack the Ripper. In our own country, 
frontier psychopaths like Billy the Kid and John Wesley Hardin were transformed into folk heroes. The 
same thing happened during the Depression, when cold-blooded killers like Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty 
Boy Floyd, and John Dillinger were viewed by many people as modern-day Robin Hoods. 

Why decent, upstanding citizens should be so intrigued by violent criminals is a complex psychological 
question, though surely it has something to do with the guilty pleasure we take from vicariously 
identifying with people who act out the dark, lawless impulses the rest of us repress. In any event, just as 
serial murder itself is an age-old phenomenon under a new and modern name, the kind of activities that 
seem so reprehensible to certain moralists — collecting serial-killer-related memorabilia, for example, or 
turning the sites of notorious murders into tourist attractions — have also existed for centuries. 

FUN WITH SERIAL KILLERS 

In the twenty years since its publication, Thomas Harris’s groundbreaking pop nos/zYRecl Dragon has 
already been filmed twice, first by Michael Mann in the 1986 thriller Manhunter, then, under its original 
title, in Brett Ratner’s 2002 version. Between those two versions, something interesting happened to 
Hannibal Lecter. He went from being a minor character who appeared for only a few minutes in the 
original movie to the star of the show. Why? Simply because audiences couldn’t get enough of the 
suave, man-eating psychopath as portrayed so chillingly by Anthony Hopkins. They wanted to see him 
fix his prey with his creepy gaze, lick his chops, and devour the vitals of a few more deserving victims. 

The audiences who flocked to their local multiplexes to watch “Hannibal the Cannibal” disembowel a 
pesky policeman and dine on the brains of an obnoxious bureaucrat weren’t blood-crazed weirdos. To 
pretend that it’s just perverts and potential Ted Bundys who are fascinated by serial murder and other 
sensational crime is the height of hypocrisy. There aren’t enough sociopaths in the country to account 
for the 3 00-million- dollar domestic box office take of The Silence of the Lambs. Upstanding, law-abiding 
citizens are drawn to this gruesome stuff. 



Purveyors of popular entertainment have always recognized this fact. “I’m going to give the people what 




they want,” Vincent Price exclaims in the 1953 horror movi eHouse of Wax. “Sensation, horror, shocks!” 
The great pioneer of the wax museum, the nineteenth-century entrepreneur Madame Tussaud, certainly 
would have approved of this sentiment. With its gruesome torture dioramas and lifelike effigies of 
infamous murderers, the “Chamber of Horrors” featured at her celebrated London establishment has 
always been its most popular attraction, far outdrawing the high-minded exhibits of statesmen, 
ecclesiastical figures, and world-famous writers. 

For centuries, pop impresarios have found ways to exploit a truism noted as far back as 1757 by 
philosopher Edmund Burke that — given a choice between sitting through an opera or watching the 
public execution of a notorious criminal — the average crowd of people would flock to the latter. When 
mass murderer Albert Hicks was hanged in 1860, P. T. Barnum paid $25 and two boxes of cigars for the 
clothing Hicks wore to the gallows and promptly put it on display. One of Barnum’ s competitors went 
the “master showman” one better. Acquiring the amputated right arm of another infamous mass murderer 
— Philadelphia handyman Anton Probst who massacred all seven members of his employer’s family in 
1865 — he exhibited the severed limb at his Bowery dime museum, where it drew enormous crowds. 



Neither Barnum nor his rivals, moreover, had the slightest compunction about wringing every last nickel 
from such macabre “curiosities,” selling souvenirs in the form of photographic “ cartes de visite ” and 
fully illustrated crime booklets. Indeed, in terms of sheer ghoulishness, many of the killer collectibles 
from the past far exceeded those of the present. During the Reign of Terror, for example, there was an 
enormous demand for guillotine-related mementos. Spectators who came to enjoy the daily beheadings 
could go home with a souvenir program adorned with an image of a severed head, while fashionable 
women wore guillotine earrings and children played with working toy replicas that could decapitate live 
mice and birds. 



There’s little doubt that some of the serial-killer-related stuff that has incurred the outrage of today’s 
moral crusaders seriously violates the standards of conventional good taste — board games in which 
players compete to amass the highest body count, activity books featuring macabre connect-the-dot 
puzzles and “Help John Wayne Gacy Find an Empty Grave in His Crawl Space” mazes. Indeed, some of 
this material is deliberately created out of a distinctly juvenile impulse to offend middle-class 
sensibilities — epater le bourgeois, as they say in France. (The cover of Rich Hillen’s Serial Killer 
Coloring Book #4 bears the message: “For Immature Colorers Over 18.”) Very little of it, however, 
actually depicts graphic scenes of hard-core violence. 

The once-controversial (now out-of-print) serial killer trading cards published by Eclipse Enterprises, for 
example, featured handsomely rendered full-face portraits without a suggestion of gore. The card sets 
still available from Mother Productions of Atwood, California, likewise consist entirely of portraits 
(done in a playfully expressionistic style that often suggests, quite appropriately, the art of the insane). 

And the oft-maligned genre of serial killer comic books has produced some highly literate and visually 
sophisticated works. Especially noteworthy are Rick Geary’s elegant re-creations of sensational 
Victorian cases, including the Lizzie Borden murders, the Jack the Ripper crimes, and, most recently, 




the story of Dr. H. H. Holmes; Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s celebrated graphic novel, From Hell; 
and the moody, noirish Torso by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko, about the still-unsolved case 
of the 1930s Cleveland maniac known as the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.” 

Recommended Reading 

Martha Grace Duncan, Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons (1996) 

Robert I. Simon, Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream (1996) 

ART 

Serial killer art is generally divided into two categories: works of ar tabout serial killers and works 
created/?)’ serial killers. Both types have been known to spark firestorms of outrage, though for different 
reasons. 

In 1997, for example, an exhibit called “Sensation” — featuring works by edgy young British artists — 
provoked heated controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. In New York City, the show (mounted at the 
Brooklyn Museum) became the target of a widely publicized attack by then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani, 
who was deeply offended by a painting by artist Chris Ofili: a portrait of the Virgin Mary that used, 
along with other materials, lumps of dried elephant dung. In England, however, the work that incited 
howls of protest was not Ofili’ s African-inspired icon but Marcus Harvey’ sMyra: an enormous black- 
and-white mug shot of Myra Hindley — the female half of the infamous “Moors Murderers” — created in 
a kind of pointillist style out of hundreds of children’s handprints. 

The accusations leveled against Harvey’s work — that it trafficked in cheap sensationalism, that it was an 
obscene exploitation of an unspeakable atrocity, that it profaned the memories of the child victims while 
glorifying a monster — are typical of the kinds of charges aimed at artists who treat such disturbing 
subject matter. Since most of us have been educated to think of art as something spiritually elevated, 
even sacred, the mere notion of hanging a picture of a sadistic lust-murderer on the walls of a museum 
strikes many people as blasphemous — a symptom of the debased, anything-for-a-shock, sex-and- 
violence-obsessed culture we live in. 

It is helpful to remember, however, that — since they deal with every aspect of human behavior, 
including the most painful and grotesque — serious artists have never shied away from portraying our 
proclivity for cruelty and violence. Medieval art is full of pictures showing religious martyrs being 
subjected to every variety of unspeakable torture, from flaying to slow evisceration. Goya’s astonishing 
suite of etchings, The Disasters of War — with its appalling images of castration, impalement, beheading, 
and dismemberment — makes the most graphically gory “splatter” movie seem almost laughably tame. 
Art scholar Robert Simon has shown that, between 1859 and 1872, the great post-impressionist painter 
Paul Cezanne — associated in the public mind with ravishing landscapes and still lifes — turned out a 
string of paintings and drawings depicting exceptionally grisly sex crimes: “bizarre, violent, aggressive 




images in which women are raped, strangled, and stabbed.” Another late-nineteenth-century artist, the 
Victorian painter Walter Sickert, produced a series of dark, disturbing works inspired by the savage 
slaying of a prostitute. (Indeed, crime writer Patricia Cornwell found Sickert’s paintings so brutal and 
morbid that she became convinced he was the real Jack the Ripper — an accusation that has been greeted 
with hoots of derision by both serious art critics and responsible Ripperologists.) 

In the twentieth century, serial killers have been a frequent subject of serious art, from the 
Expressionistic works of Weimar-era painters like Otto Dix and George Grosz (who were both obsessed 
with the subject of sex-murder) to the cartoon-inspired creations of Pop surrealist Peter Saul, 
whos eoeuvre includes the 1984 paintingSo: Deviate Being Executed, which depicts John Wayne Gacy 
molesting one final victim while seated in the electric chair. Though it doesn’t deal with serial killers per 
se, In the Realms of the Unreal — the epic masterwork of “Outsider” genius Henry Darger — contains 
scenes that would have warmed the heart of Albert Fish: graphic depictions of little girls being 
mutilated, disemboweled, and slaughtered. Another important American artist affiliated with the 
“Outsider” movement, Joe Coleman — whose paintings seem like some fantastical hybrid of Byzantine 
icons and carnival freak show banners — has produced astonishing portraits of some of our country’s 
most notable serial killers, including Fish, Ed Gein, Carl Panzram, and Charles Manson. 

When discussing the second category — works created/?)’ serial killers — it’s necessary to place quotation 
marks around the word “art,” since the paintings and sketches produced by these homicidal maniacs are 
generally devoid of anything approaching aesthetic value. There are a few exceptions: the ingenious, if 
predictably bizarre, pop-up greeting cards of Eawrence Bittaker, the surprisingly delicate watercolors of 
“Eipstick Killer” William Heirens, and some of the charcoal studies of Elmer Wayne Henley. The erotic 
fantasy-drawings of Bobby Beausoleil — an associate of the Manson “family” convicted of one count of 
murder — display the draftsmanship of a professional illustrator, while Nicolas Claux, a Parisian 
mortician and self-confessed cannibal, has provided powerfully unsettling portraits for Sondra London’s 
2003 book, True Vampires (in which he is also featured as a subject). For the most part, however, the 
average piece of serial killer artwork has all the technical skill and aesthetic interest of a badly applied 
prison tattoo or a paint- by-numbers picture done by an especially clumsy grade-schooler. 





Torture illustration by John Wayne Gacy 
(Courtesy of Adam Parfrey) 



The seminal figure in the brief history of this unsavory genre was John Wayne Gacy, who took up 
painting in prison and began turning out crude, if creepy, oils of a range of subjects. These included 
Disney characters to Renaissanc tPietas to portraits of himself in the guise of Pogo the Clown — the role 
he assumed in his prearrest days, when he would entertain children at local hospitals. The growing 
popularity and monetary value of Gacy’s work among collectors of the macabre led a Louisiana funeral 
director and horror enthusiast named Rick Staton to contact other imprisoned psycho-killers and 
encourage them to create works of their own. Before long, Staton was staging “Death Row Art Shows” 
featuring everything from Charlie Manson sock puppets to Elmer Wayne Henley sunflowers to New 
Testament scenes painted by Henry Lee Lucas. These public exhibitions never failed to attract intense 
media attention and arouse outrage. 






“Art” by Richard Ramirez 
(Courtesy of Adam Parfrey) 

What people have found so reprehensible about art produced by serial killers is not the subject matter 
itself. With some exceptions (like the demon-obsessed doodles of Richard the “Night Stalker” Ramirez 
or some of the degenerate scratchings of Ottis Toole), most of the imagery is utterly banal, often highly 
sentimental: sunsets and seascapes, angels and koala bears. What inspires such widespread disgust is the 
mere notion that convicted lust-killers are allowed to be treated like minor celebrities and enjoy the ego 
gratification of having their work put on public display. 

Those boys died in agony. This guy up here gets an art show. That’s not right. 

— Brother of a teenage boy tortured and killed by Dean Corll and Elmer Wayne Henley, protesting 
ashow of Henley’s work at a Houston art gallery. 

There is also the issue of money. Though “Son of Sam” laws bar criminals from profiting from their 
crimes by writing books, doing interviews, or selling film rights, current legislation doesn’t ban the sale 
of art. This situation led to a highly publicized uproar in April 2001, when \heNew York Daily News 




reported in a page-one story that a state-sponsored art show for inmates included a pencil portrait of 
Princess Diana done by cannibal killer Arthur Shawcross, who stood to make 50 percent of the five- 
hundred- dollar asking price from its sale. This disclosure caused such a flap that, within a month, the 
state Senate passed legislation prohibiting inmates from pocketing any of the proceeds of the sales. 




Poster for Julian Hobbs’ documentary “Collectors” 

(Courtesy of Julian Hobbs. Art by Andrew Brooks and Chris Trent) 

For a fascinating look at the world of serial killer art, its creators, devotees, and detractors, see Julian 
Hobbs’s compelling 1999 documentary Collectors. 

Recommended Reading 

Lionello Puppi, Torment in Art: Pain, Violence, and Martyrdom (1991) 

Robert Simon, “Cezanne and the Subject of Violence, ”Ar? in America (May, 1991) 



Maria Tatar ,Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimer Germany (1995) 




Joe Coleman, Delineator of America’s Dark Soul 



A cult figure since the 1970s when he burst (quite literally) onto the underground scene as the self- 
exploding, rodent-chomping Professor Mombooze-o, Joe Coleman possesses a genius for generating 
controversy that has shown no signs of abating in more than a quarter century. It’s a testimony to the 
profoundly unsettling power of his work that it still manages to shock and offend everyone from 
mainstream critics to the self-appointed arbiters of “Outsider” art. With his shattering portrayals of 
American pathology, he is the anti-Norman Rockwell — a painter who renders with visceral force the 
nightmare realities behind the sugar-coated delusions that are generally referred to as the American 
Dream. 




Joe Coleman 



Though Coleman’s subjects are international in scope, ranging from the depravities of ancient Rome to 
infamous British criminals like the juvenile psychopath Mary Bell, the majority of his paintings explore 
our country’s anarchic shadow side as embodied by our indigenous outlaws and madmen, fanatics, and 
freaks. His portraits of legendary psycho-killers like Ed Gein, Albert Fish, Carl Panzram, and Charles 
Manson (a self-proclaimed admirer of Coleman’s art) present these figures as all-American icons, no 




less representative of our violence-drenched culture than the mythicized heroes we are taught to worship 
in grade school. To study his riveting depictions of Devil Anse Hatfield (of the notorious Hatfield- 
McCoy feud) or Boston Corbett (killer of John Wilkes Booth) or Outsider artist Henry Darger (creator 
of the epically bizarre/n the Realms of the Unreal ) is to gain unparalleled insight into poet William 
Carlos Williams’s famous dictum, “The pure products of America go crazy.” 

In his life no less than his art, Coleman immerses himself in the lurid underside of our history. Crammed 
with countless bizarre artifacts, his home — the “odditorium,” as he calls it — resembles a nineteenth- 
century dime museum, where a visitor can view everything from P. T. Barnum’s original Feejee 
mermaid to the actual letter that Albert Fish sent to his child- victim’ s mother (a document that Coleman 
proudly describes as the Magna Carta of serial killer collectibles). 

Though he has been compared to everyone from Hieronymus Bosch to Otto Dix, his dense, obsessively 
detailed paintings are inimitably his own — a wholly unique and original body of work that has been 
reproduced in three volumes to dat e:Cosmic Retribution (1992), Original Sin (1997), and The Book of Joe 
(2003). 

Coleman’s Life of Panzram 

Though the sheer body count he tallied in his ferocious life of wide-ranging destruction puts Carl 
Panzram high on the list of America’s worst serial murderers, he was not a sexual psychopath like most 
of the deviants in this book. True, by his own proud estimate, he committed more than one thousand acts 
of forced sodomy, along with nearly two dozen murders and more felonies than he could keep track of. 
But his homosexual rapes — like his countless other outrages — were motivated less by sexual sadism 
than by his savage will to power. 

Having been brutalized in various institutions from his childhood on, Panzram grew up to believe that — 
beneath its sanctimonious veneer of God-fearing righteousness — American society, like every other 
human culture throughout history, operated according to only one primal rule: the exploitation of the 
weak by the strong, “might makes right.” Embracing this law of the jungle, he turned himself into an 
implacable predator, heaping murderous contempt on everyone from lawmen to well-meaning reformers 
whose kindness he dreamed of repaying by wrapping his hands around their throats and squeezing until 
their eyeballs popped from their skulls. 

However appalling their crimes, America’ s other infamous serial killers were no match for Panzram in 
terms of sheer hard-bitten fury. Locked in a jail cell with Panzram, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, or 
Jeffrey Dahmer would have ended up becoming his bitch. 



Here is his story, as told in pictures by today’s premiere artist of American pathology, Joe Coleman. 






*Hi! HrvTe-a K-c-ji fffi yut-k t*wi. I hu p^fvuKtd by *rw Mi IJ-Iwh j habo i--d h-> - -+i'-*d in rtc* h**alu i~wii Dm 

paniv&uvd ic-b« ma ftcc-d wnhi m if ■ nptriHci I KjM dkiring tiji inu 1 iwtr but I Ht rkfcng 

Mr if J indinduu in udurhy riwi I tad tatr. wkiwa ■ fc«3E car Ktch Pc-ji Uf tart, SuTiH mm bWHUd tn 

I ■«— n bwiM ■* BWj n fr ni E f m Tr^u^< uuimmm ju^i^i dUM4 

rim** I ft** ih+ i U i i » mr i 1 ^i-i | |i ■ ht+m *m m m ir- *h;4 -*ft| *yi -OT4-I ** I* 

P* *■* I Ihl lll l |fcy|ft+^ ■fH*UH* T c-r-jH" ! p.| tr,- 

I l i i r rtifl m bm m f rfp*4* l m hw h hImP. P'^i» I tl l**p pnfcn4*d to prf by *«=■« I c«rt. bvqppd. 

ta. k«<*. t-»» and iui. in -***r ywi 1 hrm •^ri ■Pownda cf p ! »fli J ferrmtai p*f- ■ywp^Tf. bui noTPria I miM ft*f 

[Pf4urii ■ a! Pm Hndi ■:■! irwijfeitiwm md Ptf uara rihn iiii) Pws hm V ht inipi — 1 41 rvx nrt v bn Lhn Iwn-- . 










*1 Hr ■ T-l F-l 6 *d I —FI .jMj V. [P* kF, ,. K 4 AIH«F 

Im Hfunlgrtthniywi " N n tj dr) hnFM Km 
L i wfi wr^ Kiriui WWte "ft-™ I hm iftftEfclftd I® ■ M ft 

«ot, u i HMich I km ajg mI f#I, I -jd u k*d mv inn tufl, 
H * ♦ p(L F'M Fd P i.l1m Hr. c™ bar 

WPP IIP I LH bl .Tl K-] kFliW HlKFW HM-PpP* (^*PnY 
II-.T-T n+n >FF-. Itn ^ Bifl P i ' » 3irPUpp — Fk*d M-. 

■ lrc--fliM I gol. I «■■ ft icttan t^g barton Puftrfl l**"», t»jfl 

■n*fi 1 ton . bA ttM gocd ituK irmf ~.Tnm ba*n In ■» tud bft-i n 
p>C^ «-1 c I ” 1 ' (M» (i pi* t:v,j h+iot» 



in tuify pwii I hh htr n, than li ilftayi both fc- — i c- J k-rtun 
■UI — *r (p U*e I bn Pi. «i » »• «■ «o*»r. Di» 
- - j -i him *tMtc — P* *1 Jtp^nuiuj *m lit *u» ip nil 
■ hard and IT I lfn ftp* m * CM F|W l >"3 4 ■ M PM 1 F++ 
Limla i pi |T* irirpj tf ppvrilw' -ij D> b* d ■ Mrr M 
■k nuu hvn ~ ■ t». j .-j ■“ ori Vh ha r*n In igwi 

u ft de«' 4 * mu n-.la UkE ih* nunuii pueJataftn! *ri" 
TH- —-PT-J'U hpTH *0 in* *411 « r <l-it r . 

wi HVi tHHP. W p v-h ' i Ip Td PH ("r ■ ■■ mw 

mrwlH i/Dv'rv rm w S y Iw Un pm* w Vir M3 h&vri *. 




nrwi I mi ffaThftfpftd I>uh pitai, I mi ih* BpftTi c* rTMwnt 
jM.iuV-i* *i 1 I UM I "YM# U 0 Wtf ■*«! ttft* I K>w 4 d 

Mb. Mp#. hi" «i M|WfW» I 

wvnM ■■^cH irttiKCP.Tk-»VM G I' M ■ *! ■■ : PP *4 

ft ilrfta E wifti i.lHM ■*■ **| *W M« M *M kt | k li "M # 

1*-ftr¥. Vtot-btortiofl rw* f*" -HI » P* 

I iLnriwd m In Ncfc mty u«f®fi B*rt»r I w 
kI l-: a J-a ihft Kftbi ml gumfetoc. Aeapp*! fr*#d l-c* Kto® rr *f 
«* I Kud hn lea I** u&ppri Ftgtttrq vng rwugii ta t+iw 
■ak ■fiiUH kKWftlf. 5k. I l- 3 -«a n *jr Im tor Hta bfcm ttw 
*+p 4 



1 pM £'i i*U fM »#ft« i*f W |p^ MW« <h*#*** ^ 

>n^mM ntw" iH rMW Pa M ^>1 JfMMIA ««■ **# 
T i r ji J i ftWj ruT^id rl. 

ft Iftrdft lid riuu II &r 12 vm uiwfeininng B'MkI. hk m 
looUftfllai bomMi^ M»ti-_r-d H lab I k-c-i: Mm cuf k i }fMl 
pnitiMiiwkPMrpbHM IL»hhu»TT«*,iHKrrKciiTi- 
“mtt«*T(«*l*P^"Pi M) M" jM.hnur»n»n t*m- 
“tjpi ^ T*t -n+rt I n* mm, up hi ink nr* bp ir n 
^M^PTo tti 11 WIK 







TPM ftm^ n< IU 9—141 K ill |F| i h unu ndi I mu Mni'd I mi 3 H-*ip*rf hsti i- m r [rtHn*( HhMMli Mid &miT: *-mi 

■44** l piti j 4MJnni|*4CIII T i'l-KTiip i '■■■♦O' *t«n« imiiu mi ud i; im mum u: dmi rji 

Mrtatm^ifr-cfT iU M d inJtaJitpnlKiM^br' M ■ IkUPMEn M l i ■ l»* dU p f ■! nl « M *y MM* U il«niy 

IIk*i In Ml >kn «• -tvmI— mu Iwd wile ■ p: v In In Lmvir. M IfcH iftugM In ■ m n— M B » i «i™ 

-dapa, UfUMd and hiw^ wtfeia t* ox checHd vp ixfca* In I laia# ra^md i via Hrtc*rv. I win n No- Km *w> 



»*+ «u»# i um ir- -ofta *«d mu u iha kai I dona rr* i trnm 1 v-anud Mr *--d k+= ->Wi TmfBnfia mm 

lm« l*4*> l«. rH K*4*i W +W**‘ 4*M4n-k*". IMI rW #« fM IHpiY Ofl ny HI* I My Iww* lm* uynju to* 

Kid 1*11™ Iron rh» I i i ■ j 1 1 f nv~: Hrn l**4*n K*~* 1*1 '■iK». "*? ktvM 4* W* >*lv+4 I -M* >4 Him ■ 




HiVm I UM ■'hi*Mi EHiM I plIllJ ■* fc I I 111 HViH. Tt Ar^f KapfellM. Ifeii W UWl Tiy EVWll. I 3-1 "C 

HW . I l " l. T ’l ’ II* | ■ i| | I fUMlH -W * lUftMMt*! El WdUUM Aid kK-OiHH Jl th-l 

In likri ( 4 t* 4 k** n y . 4 - 4 -* * 4 . 4 "d Mli UTM i i *r II' ( I • r.uii. ■ a**u.i la iji'Mii Icr j .v* mu Cwi Iiuiht. 

li'w Htl E*h up Hflh-n Kid rdo* -"y 14™ M>|bi ITn kn "I IM* ir- -J.,.1 & I'riUH * U-. *4*4 VW UYlm 

vfl *1 ™ cm V.T-- in rw*jin Per * *n nn| * ekhI m. i 4 h nih |*4 *n hr*. I m »*r^i ■*■ 4 ' Wn. I ~ V - 44 ffc, 

I -;-:l lonud >J j ml hi .|n ik=l"-: e*mif w ■ :ii» on <hr 'v In* 41 n I it nrliM Pi ft*. 1 1 mv* ***** H* 

*-->= ■= i j iee* pin Ii* ht* *Ma*El la 'ii j ra La-dw* Kidding |” J J i-ilr Itn im-Im m **>j Lhn* in L 'F r |. dni i rn T 

■vijpi wd ji: ■ iiw t£* un we etiktii iNki ■‘■j lot m u tun I'm rai ! riptitan mong MvoofTK^nra ite*K l bc^ar 

■uu^i ^ irt|i^«ijtyiiittl'^if. iai iftf Rgull and oyw^ rra*. 1 1 — no enraoanoa I hrt M Eha ’»*c 4 a tm wr i raca i^ouM? 

*4 |>K 1*4 p i i p i H 4*4 III III -Hr 441 *1 W J|K* 1 1 I** ii*in*Mil. II* ny Mtodjll mydunci I H* 

— *■>• I"* dd *4 «y *»v. y™ *■ !*«*».'■ 









luld you afcwra* wi c*ta mqmin L« sn# apm-mpi. ir.i aa&n 
*h#* I Mf* I EM +T+'r-*+ ■ **«* » ■ ■>«Ui i rhw 
i «£uki +v« •*« hd* 9-7 ™..rvi «+ i #-*« 

lWP#1l P##^Kjr W ftoto! I 

MY1 Hw^ Pe-w I Mtodpna tM-lpWatanffftTfc 
TTh bijt I rt^um Wnfp awl ia INa wif : H i'a a I rttfii toi Ltaa 
1 m h: da r+ tfwv iamhia ttwi ia ad n-jh: tw nw Id 
aa sit* ihh ■#ihag lb I ha Iw Thao nuk** J i (has I nwa ta rrf 
tntM. ■to*. mi pi* shai -xtmf « r ^ 1 Bra* aurytaufe, and J I 
"-;h tonpu. I a«T M 1 ** 



5 uky i ha JfeBlifc-jwn -si Ca^-ul fu-dfewam i'71T4> 

MiwuJ DriudqMdfWi. WUha^m, DC 

Ta* wt ir.i-h» pcu bi pcu U#J Mi &*i m* n* y^r 

! «M "T *+'■’**■ M V- I'd wi f*a* ■*•*!*'*. |v 4>1 

Bto H«f at Pfttoto Pft "T Tfff ft "j> 4 ct #f Wtti p H pi a . 

I fwa hp dnra a's^Hir to lafom rr^apf! . H| wff 4Mrf 
ia Lc ralcm - - p#^p4* arta Iryto ra*K*i ih and ! ba> cyi Pw-wtfy 
■T.rf n wtorra p*apto la u fefl hi kl y mart: ■ Hcfa 'am afl 
b#* 'mm aft, and KM 'mm Mr 

IVf VRM4-WPVI 1 





afrc-ul caning- Into Pto wrid. rand rmttf all rr^ 3+ jian- H f! 
I haw had wry Ml to Ip iff m nd-fai afrq w l &cw I afnvi# taa my 
Ha Fvofto Iwv* drhwi ma Mg Prog -a wiT^p > tow wrar 
x-'-a Mn Ito lima ha ■ cvpm nh*n 4 rrhrw to Da ar<f 

larhar. 

today 1 tow. 1 —n an I pa to Pw pw. • ad^w (haw IM 
raa run can dftw n. H an win gtod to iaa i a Mb tovay ntidd 
and Uwhsuwp- pooc+a toMawafto. Onto! aitoa kv*rpap|Dtoi 
In Vat nwtoL I bHIaw I an Pw tow l fM opI an aft . Heritor I am 
Pda. M WtoW B rifc* 5Pff * 



MUSIC 



Contrary to popular belief, songs about criminal violence existed long before rap artists started 
celebrating the thug life. Back in the premodern era, when literacy was largely confined to the clergy 
and aristocracy, accounts of sensational crimes were circulated among the peasantry by means of grim 
little ditties known as “murder ballads.” Whenever a particularly ghastly homicide occurred, it was 
immediately translated into a song that could be transmitted orally from person to person, village to 







village. 



In later centuries, as reading became more widespread among the common folk, these graphic true-crime 
lyrics were printed up on cheap sheets of paper and peddled to the hardworking masses eager to brighten 
their overburdened lives with a little morbid titillation. Throat slittings, stranglings, bludgeoning, and ax 
murder were among the most popular topics of these crudely composed verses. One surviving ballad 
describes a ghastly case of child murder, perpetrated by a woman named Emma Pitt. Typically, the 
anonymous author omits no detail of the grisly killing: 



This Emma Pitt was a schoolmistress, 
Her child she killed we see, 

Oh mothers, did you ever hear, 

Of such barbarity. 



With a large flint stone she beat its head 
When such cruelty she’d done, 

From the tender roof of the infant’ s mouth 
She cut away its tongue. 



The tradition of the murder ballad continued well into the twentieth century. Indeed, one of the most 
popular songs of the 1950s, the Kingston Trio’s early hit “Tom Dooley,” was a somewhat sanitized 
version of a traditional murder ballad about a man about to hang for slaughtering his girlfriend (“Met her 
on the mountain/ There I took her life/ Met her on the mountain/ Stabbed her with my knife”). 

Naturally enough, mass murderers and serial killers — though they were called by other names back then 
— were immortalized in ballads, like this one about Lydia Sherman, America’s “Queen Poisoner” who 
dispatched three husbands, six children, and two stepchildren in the late 1800s: 



Lydia Sherman is plagued with rats. 



Lydia has no faith in cats. 




So Lydia buys some arsenic, 



And then her husband gets sick; 

And then her husband, he does die, 

And Lydia’s neighbors wonder why. 

Lydia moves, but still has rats; 

And still she puts no faith in cats; 

So again she buys some arsenic, 

This time her children, they get sick, 

This time her children, they do die, 

And Lydia’s neighbors wonder why. 

Lydia lies in Wethersfield jail, 

And loudly does she moan and wail. 

She blames her fate on a plague of rats; 

She blames the laziness of cats. 

But her neighbors questions she can’t deny — 

So Lydia now in prison must lie. 

Belle Gunness, the so-called Lady Bluebeard, was likewise commemorated in a ballad whose first few 
verses went like this: 



Belle Gunness was a lady fair, 




In Indiana State. 



She weighed about three hundred pounds, 
And that is quite some weight. 

That she was stronger than a man 
Her neighbors all did own; 

She butchered hogs right easily, 

And did it all alone. 



But hogs were just a sideline 
She indulged in now and then; 
Her favorite occupation 
Was a-butchering of men. 



Ever since the late 1960s — when the dark id of the counterculture came roaring forth in the form of 
everything from the Manson murders to Altamont — rock, like every other medium of popular art, has 
dealt with the figure of the serial killer. Among the classics of this genre are: The Rolling Stones’ 
“Midnight Rambler” (about the Boston Strangler), Warren Zevon’s creepily sardonic “Excitable Boy,” 
and Talking Heads’ “Psycho-Killer.” Even the ultrabenign Beatles recorded “Maxwell’s Silver 
Hammer,” an infectious tune about a homicidal maniac whose MO bears a resemblance to that of Peter 
“Yorkshire Ripper” Sutcliffe. More recent examples include the Bundy-inspired “Ted, Just Admit It” by 
Jane’s Addiction, “Killer on the Loose” by Thin Lizzy, and The Blues Traveler’s “Psycho Joe.” Special 
mention must also be made of Nick Cave’s 1996 Murder Ballads, a powerful updating of the traditional 
genre. 

Some of the more aggressively hard-edged “death metal” bands of recent years have made a career out 
of singing about serial killers. Foremost among these are Slayer (whose “Dead Skin Mask” is a tribute to 
Ed Gein) and Macabre, whose discography includes such songs as “Nightstalker,” “The Ted Bundy 
Song,” “Gacy’s Lot,” and “Edmund Kemper Had a Terrible Temper,” as well as an entire concept album 
about Jeffrey Dahmer (featuring titles like “Drill Bit Lobotomy” and “Temple of Bones”). Paeans to 
serial murder can also be found in th zoeuvre of 9 Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson (each of whose band 




members has adopted the surname of a notorious psycho-killer: Twiggy Ramirez, Madonna Wayne 
Gacy, Ginger Fish, Gidget Gein, Daisy Berkowitz, and of course the front man himself). 

A couple of actual serial killers have tried their hand at songwriting. The most notable is Charles 
Manson, who actually possesses a certain musical flair. Manson’s best known number, “Look at Your 
Game, Girl,” set off an uproar when it was included as an unlisted cut on Guns N’ Roses’ 1993 
album The Spaghetti Incident? The original version, sung by Charlie himself, appears in the best-known 
of his several albums, LIE, recorded in August 1968. Another serial-killer-penned song is “Strangler in 
the Night” by Albert DeSalvo, which appears on the rarity Joe Coleman ’s Infernal Machine, an entire 
album of mayhem-related music that also features such obscure treasures as Red River Dave’s country- 
western yodel, “California Hippie Murders.” 




FRIDAY APRIL1ST 



ANTHRAX 

li ptfB mam. <e™r:ne*r ■ !ii< un - lih 



Poster for the 1980s punk-rock band Ed Gein’s Car 
(Courtesy of Timothy Carroll. Art by Scott Weiss.) 



On the opposite end of the cultural spectrum are those highbrow works that deal with serial killers. One 
of the most celebrated is Stephen Sondheim’ s Sweeney Todd, the operatic Grand Guignol musical about 
the Victorian “Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (who may or may not have been a real person). 



FILM 



Violence has been a crowd-pleasing feature of the motion picture since the medium was invented at the 
tail end of the nineteenth century. The very first special effect created for the movies was the graphic 
beheading of an actor (done by means of primitive stop-motion photography) in Thomas Edison’s 1895 
peep show short The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. 

Exactly when the psychopathic killer first entered cinematic history is a matter of debate, though one 
scholar points out that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — the 1920 classic of German Expressionist cinema — 
was partly inspired by a real-life case of a pedophiliac sex-murder. Another German silent classic, G. W. 
Pabst’s 1929 Pandora’s Box, features a heroine who ends up as a victim of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper 
case is also the focus of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1921 The Lodger (remade in 1944). 

In 1931, German filmmaker Fritz Lang came out with one of the greatest psycho-killer movies of all 
tim e:M, a riveting study of evil starring Peter Lorre as a serial child-killer modeled on the real-life lust- 
murderer Peter Kiirten. The following decade saw the release of several classic movies featuring 
memorable psycho-killers, including Alfred Hitchcock’s \942Shadow of a Doubt (reportedly inspired by 
serial strangler Earle Leonard Nelson), Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1944 Bluebeard, starring ever-creepy John 
Carradine in the title role, and Henry Hathaway’s 1941 Kiss of Death. Though not technically a serial 
killer, the villain of the latter film — a giggling hit man named Tommy Udo unforgettably played by 
Richard Widmark — is one of the most terrifying sociopaths in screen history. Another 1947 movie, 
Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, is a black comedy about a Parisian Bluebeard modeled on Henri 
Landru (who was also the subject of a 1963 film by French auteur Claude Chabrol). 

The single most frightening cinematic psychopath of the 1950s was undoubtedly the Bible-spouting 
maniac in Charles Laughton ’sMg/it of the Hunter (1955), played by Robert Mitchum. (The actor would 
go on to turn in another unforgettably menacing performance as the implacable Max Cady in the original 
1962 version of Cape Fear. ) Another important psycho-film from the 1950s is Edward Dmytryk’s 
\952The Sniper, about a serial shooter who substitutes killing for sex. No fewer than three Jack the 
Ripper films appeared in the fifties -.Room to Let (1950), Man in the Attic (1954), and Jack the Ripper 
(1959). Saucy Jack would remain the single most popular of all cinematic psychos, appearing in 
numerous films in succeeding decades, including the nifty little 1979 thriller, Murder by Decree (which 
pits the Ripper against Sherlock Holmes), the time-travel fantasy 77ra<? after Time (which also appeared 
in 1979 and in which H. G. Wells pursues Jack to modern-day America) and, most recently, the 2001 
comic-based period piece, From Hell. 

The decade of the 1960s opened with the release of two seminal serial killer films, one a triumph for its 
director, the other an unmitigated disaster. In America, the stunning commercial success of 
Hitchcock’ sPsycho paved the way for the “slasher” film craze of the 1970s. The story was different in 
England, where Michael Powell’s now-acclaimed Peeping Tom (1960) — about a sadistic voyeur who 
films his victims while impaling them with a lethal camera-tripod — sparked such outrage that it 
effectively ended the distinguished director’ s career. The first feature-length film devoted entirely to a 
sensational, true-life serial murder case appeared near the end of the decade: Richard Brooks’s gritty The 
Boston Strangler (1968), starring one-time matinee idol Tony Curtis as Albert DeSalvo. 




Two equally grim, black-and-white films about notorious serial killers were released at the very start of 
the 1970s:70 Rillington Place (1971), about the necrophiliac British psychopath John Reginald Christie, 
and The Honeymoon Killers (1970), about the ineffably creepy killer couple, Martha Beck and Raymond 
Fernandez, aka the “Lonely Hearts Killers.” As the decade progressed, the psycho-killer became an 
increasingly familiar presence on screen. Notable films include Alfred Hitchcock’s \912Frenzy (loosely 
based on the still-unidentified sex killer known as “Jack the Stripper”), Terrence Malick’s \912Badlands 
(based on the murder spree of killer couple Charles Starkweather and Card Ann Fugate, whose 
homicidal exploits also inspired Oliver Stone’s 1994 Natural Born Killers ), and Tobe Hooper’s 
\916Eaten Alive (inspired by homicidal tavern keeper Joe Ball, who fed victims to his pet alligators). 
Special mention must also be made of Don Siegel’s \912Dirty Harry, which — though a Clint Eastwood 
action film — contains an unforgettable performance by Andy Robinson as a sniveling psycho (based on 
the San Francisco Zodiac killer) so utterly detestable that it’s hard not to leap up and cheer when Dirty 
Harry finally gets around to blasting him with his .44 Magnum. 

It wasn’t until the 1980s that the term “serial killer” became part of the common vocabulary and the 
serial killer film a distinct cinematic genre. Examples range from slick, big-budget Hollywood 
productions lik eKalifornia (1993), Copy cat (1995), The Bone Collector (1999), and The Cell (2000) to a 
recent spate of cheaply made mockumentaries about notorious psycho-killers like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey 
Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy. 

Psycho-cinema: A Deadly Dozen 

Though critical judgments are highly subjective, here’s a list of twelve recommended psycho-killer 
movies, each worthwhile in its own way. 



1. Citizen X(1995). This riveting, made-for-cable thriller — about the hunt for the Russian “Mad Beast” 
Andrei Chikatilo — deals with a forensic scientist struggling to track down the most savage lust- 
murderer of modern times while dealing with all the obstacles that the Soviet bureaucracy can put 
in his way, beginning with the government’s refusal to acknowledge the very existence of the killer. 

2. Fear City( 1984). A woefully neglected thriller about a psycho-killer stalking topless dancers in 
New York City. The director, Abel Ferrara, does a highly effective job of capturing the sleazy soul 
of midtown Manhattan before it turned into a sanitized, Disneyfied tourist destination. 

3. Felicia’s Journey{\999). This artful, understated film from director Atom Egoyan — about a 
pregnant Irish runaway who crosses paths with a pudgy, food-obsessed, seemingly nurturing serial 
killer (played by Bob Hoskins) — manages to generate nail-biting tension without spilling a single 
drop of blood. 




4. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer{ 1990). Loosely based on the purported depravities of Henry Lee 
Lucas and Ottis Toole, this small-scale, critically acclaimed movie stands as one of the most 
harrowing cinematic experiences of all time. 

5. Manhunter{\9%6). Michael Mann’s stylish version of Thomas Harris’s^J Dragon (remade under 
its original title in 2002), with Brian Cox turning in a quietly chilling performance as Hannibal the 
Cannibal. 

6. Maniac{ 1980). Watching it may be a brutalizing (if not degrading) experience, but this sickeningly 
gory, low-budget shocker — about a psycho-creep who harvests the scalps of his victims — does a 
more effective job of evoking the repugnant reality of serial homicide than any slick Hollywood 
thriller. 

7. Rampage{ 1988). Based on the atrocities of Richard the “Sacramento Vampire” Chase and directed 
by William Friedkin of Exorcist fame, this movie eventually degenerates into a talky polemic 
against capital punishment. The first half, though — which re-creates Chase’s insanely gruesome 
crimes — is very powerful stuff. 

8. Se7en( 1995). Grueling, if artfully made, box office smash about the kind of highly creative serial 
killer only a Hollywood screenwriter could dream up: a deranged religious fanatic who kills his 
victims in accordance with the Seven Deadly Sins. 

9. The Silence of the Lambs{ 1991). Jonathan Demme’s blockbuster version of Thomas Harris’s best 
seller not only generates edge-of-the-seat suspense but managed the startling feat of transforming a 
cannibalistic psychopath (marvelously incarnated by Anthony Hopkins) into a modern-day pop 
icon, so bizarrely appealing that audiences demanded to see more of him in two cinematic sequels, 
Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (2001) and Brett Ratner’ sR<?d Dragon (2002). 

10. Summer ofSam( 1999). Though not entirely able to live up to its own ambitions, Spike Lee’s 1999 
movie deals with those sweltering, tension-charged months in 1976 when New York City was 
terrorized by David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz. The killings themselves are the backdrop to — not the 
center of — the action, but the glimpses we get of the ranting Berkowitz, holed up in his squalid lair, 
are deeply disturbing. 

11. The Vanishingi 1 988). From Holland (of all places) comes this profoundly unsettling film about a 
young man obsessed with locating his girlfriend, who has been abducted by one of the creepiest 
psychos ever put on film — a seemingly meek, soft-spoken family man with a taste for unspeakable 
torture. The ending is absolutely devastating. Warning: Do not confuse with the lame 1993 
American remake, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges. 




12. The Young Poisoner’s Handbook^ 1995). Real-life British killer-kid Graham Young was the 

inspiration for this gruesome black comedy about an adolescent psychopath who uses his family as 
guinea pigs for his lethal experiments. 



LITERATURE 

Serious writers have grappled with the problem of what we now call psychopathic behavior for many 
centuries. Iago, the cunning villain of Shakespeare’ sOthello, is a classic instance; a frighteningly cold 
and conscienceless being who cares about nothing but himself and whose malevolence is so well 
concealed behind a mask of normality that he strikes virtually everyone who knows him as the most 
honest and trustworthy fellow imaginable. Another example is Melville’s John Claggart: the intelligent, 
seemingly normal petty officer ofBilly Budd who delights in evil for its own sake. Homicidal madmen 
appear throughout the Gothic short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, though none is more unnerving than the 
nameless narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” who goes about committing an ultimate atrocity — the 
murder and dismemberment of his elderly housemate — while insisting on his own perfect sanity. 

In more recent times, Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” offers one 
of the most chilling fictional portraits of a psycho-killer ever created, in the character called “The 
Misfit,” a Bible-obsessed madman who travels around the Southern countryside conducting unspeakable 
massacres. Joyce Carol Oates’s deeply unsettling 1966 short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have 
You Been?” — loosely based on the case of serial killer Charles Schmid, the so-called Pied Piper of 
Tucson — is another classic of contemporary Gothic fiction. 

Psycho-killers have also appeared in the work of serious poets. The speaker of Robert Browning’s 1842 
“Porphyria’s Fover,” for example, seems rational enough — until he decides that the best way to express 
his love for his girlfriend is by strangling her with her own hair: 



That moment she was mine, mine, fair, 
Perfectly pure and good: I found 
A thing to do, and all her hair 
In one long yellow string I wound 
Three times her little throat around, 



And strangled her. 




More recent poets have also explored the psychology of serial murderers in their work. Notable 
examples include Ai’s “The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981” (about the Atlanta Child Murders) from her 
1986 bookSm, and the sequence of poems called “Troubadour: Songs for Jeffrey Dahmer” from Thom 
Gunn’s 2000 bookSoss Cupid. 

Even before the term “serial killer” was invented, some outstandingly scary examples of the species had 
appeared in works of popular fiction. Now considered a classic, Jim Thompson’s 195277 k? Killer Inside 
Me — about a deputy sheriff in a small Texas town whose aw-shucks manner conceals the sick mind of a 
sadistic murderer — is one of the most unsettling portraits of a psychopath in print. The decade of the 
1950s ended with the publication of Robert Bloch’s pulp classic, Psycho, the granddaddy of serial killer 
novels and inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie. 

The enormous critical and commercial success of Thomas Harris’s first two Hannibal Lecter books , Re d 
Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988) unleashed a flood of popular procedural thrillers 
focusing on investigative heroes and their struggles with assorted, highly colorful serial killers. Among 
the most popular works in this genre are James Patterson’s Alex Cross books ( Along Came a Spider, 

Kiss the Girls, Jack and Jill, etc.); Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels (including Postmortem, 
Cruel & Unusual, andThe Body Farm ), John Sandford’s “Prey” series ( Rules of Prey, Shadow Prey, 
Night Prey, and so on), and Jeffery Deaver’s novels featuring quadriplegic criminologist Lincoln 
Rhymes (The Coffin Dancer, The Bone Collector, The Vanished Man ). 

A comprehensive list of contemporary serial killer fiction has been compiled by Martin Kich, professor 
of English at Wright State University — Lake Campus in Ohio, and can be found on his Web site,www. 
wright. edu/~martin.kich. 

Recommended Reading 

Philip L. Simpson, Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary Film and Fiction 

( 2000 ) 

Killer Fiction 

By dint of their superior literary qualities, a handful of novels dealing with psychopathic criminals stand 
out above the rest. These include: 



1. Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer (1996). Set in Seattle, this thematically complex, racially charged 
thriller centers on a Native American serial killer who targets whites in retribution for the historical 
injustices suffered by his people. 




2. Toni Cade Bambara , Those Bones Are Not My Child (2000). A hugely ambitious, posthumously 
published novel about the Atlanta Child Murders of the early 1980s, told from the point of view of 
an African-American mother whose eldest son disappears one afternoon on the way home from an 
outing. 

3. Caleb Carr , The Alienist (1994). This mega-selling historical mystery is not only a highly 
suspenseful psychological thriller but a brilliant evocation of late-nineteenth-century New York 
City. 

4. Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho (1991). A savage satire of Yuppie consumerism that largely 
consists of detailed itemizations of upscale consumer goods alternating with scenes of dizzyingly 
baroque, stomach-churning violence, most of it directed against women. 

5. John Fowles,77i<? Collector (1963). Though the protagonist of this book is more serial kidnapper 
than serial killer, the fantasy he enacts — abducting a beautiful young woman and holding her 
captive in a dungeon — has made this story a perennial favorite among actual psychopathic sex- 
killers. 

6. Patricia Highsmith,77ie Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). The first of Elighsmith’s books to feature her 
sociopathic hero, Tom Ripley, this gripping novel sends him to Europe where he becomes 
entranced with the life of golden-boy acquaintance Dickie Greenleaf, with fatal consequences for 
the latter. 

7. Gordon Lish, Dear Mr. Capote (1983). A deeply unsettling, unconventional novel that takes the 
form of a letter to Truman Capote (author of the true-crime classic In Cold Blood ) written by a 
homicidal maniac who intends to murder forty-seven women, one for each year of his life. 

8. Cormac McCarthy, Child of God (1974). A haunting, lyrical novel about an Eddie Gein-like outcast 
named Lester Ballard who holes up in a Tennessee cave with his necrophiliac trophies, emerging 
periodically to seek new victims. 

9. Susanna Moore, In the Cut (1995). A brutally suspenseful erotic thriller about a New York City 
college professor who finds herself caught up in an intense sexual affair with a cop who may also 
be a serial killer. 

10. Joyce Carol Oates, Zombie (1995). A profoundly disquieting book, inspired by the doings of Jeffrey 
Dahmer, about a young psycho obsessed with the idea of turning victims into mindless sex slaves 
by subjecting them to ice pick lobotomies. 




HUMOR 



There’s nothing amusing about serial murder. By the same token, there’s nothing intrinsically funny 
about dead babies, quadriplegics, and Princes Di’s death in a car crash — all of which have been the 
subjects of widely circulated jokes. Psychologists and other academic experts tell us that sick humor 
functions as a coping mechanism — a way to ventilate the fears stirred up in us by the overwhelming 
horrors and tragedies of existence. “Where there is anxiety, there will be jokes to express that anxiety,” 
says folklorist Alan Dundes, adding: “The expression ‘laughing to keep from crying’ has a good deal of 
merit in it.” 

According to Professor Dundes in his 1987 book Cracking Jokes, the tradition of American sick humor 
dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when macabre rhymes about a character called 
“Little Willie” became popular throughout the United States. Though sometimes the victim of horrible 
accidents (“Little Willie, in bows and sashes/ Fell in the fire and got burned to ashes”), the incorrigible 
Willie was more often portrayed as a pint-sized psychopath — Dennis the Menace with a seriously 
homicidal streak: 



Willie poisoned his father’s tea 
Father died in agony. 

Mother came, and looked quite vexed. 
“Really, Will,” she said, “What next?” 

Little Willie hung his sister; 

She was dead before we missed her. 
Willie’s always up to tricks. 

Ain’t he cute? He’s only six. 



Willie, of course, was a fictional creation. The now-familiar custom of swapping sick jokes about real- 
life serial killers seems to have begun in the late 1950s, when crude little riddles about the Wisconsin 
ghoul Ed Gein became the rage throughout the Midwest. These so-called Geiners caught the attention of 
psychologist George D. Arndt, who wrote an article about the phenomenon, “Community Reaction to a 
Horrifying Event,” in which he reprinted a number of examples: 




Why did they let Ed Gein out of jail on New Year’s Eve? 



So he could dig up a date. 



Why wouldn’t anyone play poker with Ed Gein? 
They were afraid he’d come up with a good hand. 



Forty years later, the discovery of Jeffrey Dahmer’s atrocities set off another wave of morbid rib ticklers: 

What did Jeffrey Dahmer say when his mother told him she didn’t like his friends? 

“That’s OK, Mom, just eat the noodles.” 

What did Jeffrey Dahmer do when he finished his vegetables? 

He threw away their wheelchairs. 



More recently, serial killer humor has been a staple of the parody newspaperT/ie Onion, which has run 
such classic stories as WHY MUST THE MEDIA CALL MY RITUAL KILLINGS “SENSELESS”? 
(“Is it that the media simply don’t see the pride and craftsmanship I put into my work? What about the 
way I wrap the victims’ own intestines around their necks not once, not twice, but three times, then tie 
them off in a sheepshank?) and NEIGHBORS REMEMBER SERIAL KILLER AS SERIAL KILLER (“ 
‘He was kind of a murderous, insane, serial-killer type of fellow,’ said Will Rowell, 57, who lived next 
door to the man arrested for the murder of 14 nurses in Florida and Georgia. ‘He sort of kept to himself, 
killing nurses, having sex with their corpses and burying the bodies in his backyard.’ ”). 





Jeffrey Dahmer novelty pin 
(Courtesy of Roger Worsham) 

MURDERBILIA 

Some people collect autographs of movie stars. Others invest in sporting equipment signed by their 
favorite athletes — a Wayne Gretzky hockey puck or Derek Jeter jersey. Still others have been known to 
bid thousands at auction for John Kennedy’s golf clubs or a cocktail dress worn by Princess Di. 

And a small but highly controversial subculture of hobbyists devote themselves to the acquisition of 
artifacts connected to serial killers. 

Why anyone would seek out, let alone spend good money on, a lock of Charles Manson’s hair or Ted 
Bundy’s high school yearbook seems deeply perplexing, if not downright immoral, to many right- 
thinking people. Apart from changes in technology, however — the fact that such collecting is now 
typically conducted over the Internet — there is nothing new about this phenomenon. 

From crucified criminals lining the Appian Way in ancient Rome, to medieval traitors left to rot in 
dangling gibbets, to the gunned-down outlaws exhibited in store windows and undertaking parlors in the 
Old West, the dead and decomposing bodies of murderers, thieves, and rapists (and sometimes of 
perfectly innocent victims of lynch mobs) have always been put on public display. And the law-abiding, 
God-fearing types who flock to see these gruesome spectacles have often felt a need to procure a little 
keepsake. 



Exactly how long this practice has been going on is impossible to pin down, though — extrapolating from 




the known anthropological evidence (such as the habit of various aboriginal peoples to collect skulls, 
scalps, and other anatomical relics) — the most likely answer is forever. When King Charles I was 
executed in 1649, for example, his blood was mopped up with rags, which were torn to pieces and sold 
to eager bystanders. Even the sawdust that had been sprinkled on the scaffold to soak up the gore was 
swept up and offered for sale. 

Describing the “grisly appetite of souvenir hunt-ers” as a “timeless” phenomenon, historian Michael 
Hollingsworth cites the case of Maria Marten, a young Englishwoman who vanished after supposedly 
eloping with a man named William Corder in 1827. The following April — acting on pleas from her 
mother, who had dreamed that the girl was buried beneath the floor of a local bam — police discovered 
the young woman’s body, just where her mother had said it would be. The crime became a nationwide 
sensation. When Corder was executed three months later, the crowd was so eager for souvenirs that the 
hangman’s noose was cut into pieces and sold for a guinea per inch. Corder’ s skin was subsequently 
flayed from his body, tanned like cowhide, and sold piecemeal at auction. One of the larger sections 
ended up being made into a tobacco pouch. The barn itself was reduced to splinters by the owner, who 
made a small fortune by peddling them as individual souvenirs. 






Serial killer novelty pins 
(Courtesy of Roger Worsham) 



When actual relics of a murder weren’t available, the public has happily settled for other sorts of 
mementos. In 1889, a Paris court bailiff named Gouffe was murdered, stuffed into a trunk, and 
transported to Lyons, where the horribly decomposed corpse was eventually discovered. When the killer 
was guillotined on February 2, 1891, a horde of spectators turned out for the beheading. To satisfy the 
demand for souvenirs, peddlers strolled among the crowd, selling miniature replicas of the trunk with a 
little lead corpse inside. 

The situation hasn’t changed in the past hundred years. When the junkyard possessions of Wisconsin 
ghoul Ed Gein were auctioned in the spring of 1958, twenty thousand people showed up. One 
enterprising bidder drove away with Gein’s battered Ford sedan, which he promptly put on display at 
county fairs and carnivals. Over the next few months, more than two thousand Midwesterners — men, 
women, and children — eagerly forked out a quarter each for a peek at “the car that hauled the dead from 
their graves.” 

Forty years later, another proposed sale of serial killer belongings set off an uproar in Wisconsin, when a 
lawyer representing the families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims announced plans to auction off a bunch of 
items owned by the Milwaukee Cannibal, including the drill he used to perform his makeshift 
lobotomies and the freezer in which he stored human body parts for future consumption. So frenzied was 
the interest in these macabre artifacts among serious collectors of psycho-memorabilia that the 
organizers of the event expected to reap a profit of one million dollars. In the end, however, the auction 
was canceled when a civic group — fearful that such a ghoulish event would tarnish Milwaukee’s image 
— purchased the goods and destroyed them (much to the dismay of Dahmerphiles everywhere). 

Owning a Gein, for some, is to own a Rembrandt for other collectors. 



Andy Kahan, commenting on the theft of EdGein’s gravestone in June 2000 




Beyond good old morbid fascination, the lure of such grisly items appears to have something to do with 
the kind of primitive thinking that humans never seem to outgrow. There is a demonic quality to these 
objects. They are the antithesis of saints’ relics — artifacts that are infused, not with the sacred, but with 
the profane. To possess something owned by a serial killer offers some people titillating contact with the 
taboo — th efrisson of the forbidden. It is also a way to ward off anxiety, as though having control of 
something belonging to a monster will magically keep evil at bay. 




Ed Gein’s “death car” on display at a county fair 



(© 2003 Journal Sentinel Inc, reproduced with permission) 



Of course, there are many people who have no use for psychological rationales for such behavior, which 
they simply view as inexcusably wrong. One of these is Andy Kahan, Director of the Mayor’s Crime 
Victims Assistance Office in Houston, Texas. Acting on behalf of the families of those who have been 
preyed on by serial murders, Kahan has led a crusade against such material, which he has memorably 
labeled “murderbilia.” To date, his efforts have been instrumental in the adoption of a Texas “Son of 
Sam” law — which prevents criminals from profiting from the sale of their goods — and in the banning of 
serial killer memorabilia from the online auction site eBay. 

TOURIST SPOTS 

On Sunday, July 28, 1895 — following reports of the horrors that had presumably taken place in the 




Chicago “Murder Castle” of Dr. H. H. Holmes — five thousand people descended on the building, hoping 
for a glimpse of what the newspapers had described as its “torture dungeon,” “suffocation vault,” and 
“corpse chambers.” Recognizing the money that could be made from such morbid fascination, an 
enterprising ex-policeman named A. M. Clark lost no time in securing the lease to the building. Two 
weeks later, newspapers announced that, under Clark’s management, the Castle would be turned into a 
tourist attraction — a “murder museum” with an admission charge of fifteen cents per person and guided 
tours conducted by a Chicago detective named Norton. Unfortunately for Clark, nothing came of his get- 
rich-quick scheme. Just days before the renovated “Castle of Horrors” was set to open for business, a 
mysterious fire broke out, completely gutting the building. 

Something similar happened sixty years later when the ramshackle farmhouse in which Ed Gein had 
practiced his necrophiliac abominations was reduced to ashes by a blaze apparently set by outraged 
townspeople, determined to prevent the unhallowed place from being turned into a “museum for the 
morbid.” The obliteration of Gein’s dwelling, however, could not stop countless curiosity seekers from 
making the pilgrimage to his hometown over succeeding decades, much to the chagrin of the residents of 
Plainfield, sick of having their community forever associated in the public mind with America’s most 
notorious psycho. 

The sites of notorious, highly publicized crimes have always exerted a mysterious, magnetic pull on the 
public. In 1908, the discovery of a dozen dismembered bodies on the Indiana farm of the “Lady 
Bluebeard” Belle Gunness, brought thousands of Midwesterners flocking to her property, where they 
could gape at the open graves and peer at the decaying corpses on display in the carriage house. Ninety 
years later, John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina — where, on the evening of October 25, 1994, 
Susan Smith rolled a car containing her two young sons down a boat ramp into the waters — became a 
tourist destination for sightseers from as far away as Alaska. In 1996, while visiting the site, one family 
became the victims of their morbid curiosity when — in a bizarre echo of the Smith crime — their truck 
accidentally rolled down the same ramp, drowning the mother, father, and three little children. 

Not everyone, of course, thinks it’s fun to take a day-trip to a place where children were murdered or 
teenagers tortured or female corpses exhumed and dismembered. Some people find the whole idea 
abhorrent. Ed Gein’s house of horrors wasn’t the only such place to be razed by an outraged citizenry. 
The suburban house in which John Wayne Gacy committed his abominations was leveled. So was 
Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment building, which a community group bought for the sole purpose of 
demolishing. In December 2002, Ted Bundy’s onetime residence went the way of Gein’s farmhouse and 
H. H. Holmes’s Castle, when unknown arsonists torched the Tallahassee, Llorida, house in which he was 
living at the time he committed his final string of atrocities. 

Lor those interested in macabre sightseeing, writer Neal S. Yonover has put togetherCWm<? Scene U.S.A. 
(2000), a state-by-state traveler’s guide that provides descriptions of, directions to, and other pertinent 
information about infamous murder locations throughout the country. 



Lor those who feel sheer disgust at the whole notion of “psycho-tourism” (as he calls it), the following 




excerpt is reprinted from writer Peter Schuller’s scathing satire on the phenomenon. (The entire essay 
can be found on Jeff Vogel’s Web sitQlronycentral.com. ) 

“Psycho-tourism” 

You’ve heard of Eco-tourism, where handfuls of broke-ass hippies go out to the boonies and “tread 
lightly on Mother Earth” as if this was some namby-pamby socialist state. Shit! More people would 
drive ten hours to see the face of the Virgin Mary weeping in an oil leak on some guy’s driveway than 
would paddle a kayak for ten minutes to see the last breeding pair of Woodcrested Chirrups in the wild. 

Eco-Tourism, pshaw! Psycho-Tourism is where it’s at. People don’t want to see rare ferns or endangered 
predators. They want to see human predators! They want to see John Wayne Gacy’s crawlspace, where 
Pogo the Clown buried thirty victims. They want to see the soup kitchen where Henry Lee Lucas and 
Ottis Toole struck up their highly successful necrophiliac-cannibal partnership. They want to sit in the V. 
W. van that Ted Bundy drove. They want to open Jeffrey Dahmer’s fridge. These are the kind of things 
that matter to people. 

. . . Given America’s obsession with crime, Psycho-tourism is an All-American, capitalist venture that 
can’t miss. Property of killers is inexplicably cheap. The killer generates free publicity and a fan base to 
draw from. Tours can be arranged for next to nothing. All it would take are a few guides and some buses. 

Let’s use Dean Corll as an example. We could buy his home, the factory and the boathouse for a few 
100 grand. Tour buses would deliver pilgrims from surrounding Motel Sixes and Holiday Inns. They’d 
tour the candy factory and get to purchase authentic Corll Candy. Maybe they’ll offer some to kids in the 
playground next door. 

Then it’s back on the bus and over to Dean’s. Here a Disney-esque diorama awaits. First, we walk 
through the living room where a Dean-robot gets the boy-robots high on glue and paint fumes. Then we 
move to the bedroom where the boys are handcuffed to the torture-bed. Be careful not to trip on the 
plastic floor-liner. In the next room, we see Dean’s bloody, bullet ridden body lying on the floor. 
Turncoat Henley stands over him with a smoking gun. Dean’s penis collection lies on a nearby table. 

After that, it’s off to the boathouse, where we’re met with another scene. A couple of backhoes are there. 
The boathouse floor has been dug up, exposing replicas of the bodies. Henley is there too, leaning on the 
driver’s side of the police car, talking to his mother on the police radio. 

“Mama, I’m with the police . . . Mama, I killed Dean.” The police recorded the actual conversation and 
it will be played on a tape loop for tourists as they pass by. 

From there, they’re funneled into the gift shop where various Corll-themed knickknacks are available. 
Items include: life preservers, handcuffs, glue, plastic tarpaulins and “I survived the Dean Corll Tour” T- 
shirts. Also for sale: toy boats with Skipper Dean and 1st Mate Henley, Dean’s Bag O’Penises and a 




variation of the kiddie board game, Candymanland. 



Pockets emptied and shopping bags filled, the tourists exit the giftshop, board a barge and serenely float 
down river. This symbolizes Candyman’s victims drifting peacefully into the hereafter while taking our 
victims to the parking lot and their buses. 

This is an example of what can be done with lesser known serial killers. Imagine what you could do with 
Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment or Leonard Lake and Charles Ng’s mountain hideaway. At the very least, 
Psycho-tourism should surpass military air shows, Civil War battle recreations and tours of Graceland or 
the White House. 

— Peter Schuller 

GROUPIES 

It’s a striking fact of life that — in fantasy at least — women seem to go for bad boys. The standard 
formula of female-oriented romance, whether in fiction or film, involves a respectable, well-brought-up 
woman who is married or engaged to or just going steady with a perfectly nice, if somewhat bland, 
fellow of her own social station and breeding. Suddenly, a seductively dangerous, often “lower-class,” 
stranger (or former lover) appears in her life and sweeps her away on a forbidden passionate adventure. 

The vast majority of women are content to confine this thrillingly erotic scenario to the realm of 
daydream. Some, however, feel the need to go further, pursuing a relationship with the baddest men of 
all — serial killers. 

It is this female proclivity for flirting with danger that undoubtedly accounts for the otherwise 
inexplicable appeal that even the most repugnant psychopaths have been known to exert over women. 
Men who, prior to their arrest, could never get a date — who sometimes turned to serial murder as a way 
of taking vengeance on all the women who rejected them — have suddenly found themselves the object 
of swooning attention from members of the opposite sex. 

There’s nothing new about this phenomenon. For more than a century, observers have been struck by 
both the number of female spectators who flock to the trials of notorious murderers and the unabashedly 
heart-smitten behavior of some of these women. During the 1895 trial of the San Francisco sex-killer 
Theo Durrant, for example, a young woman named Rosalind Bowers showed up in the courtroom each 
morning with a bouquet of sweet pea flowers, which she presented to the “Demon of the Belfry” as a 
token of her admiration. Before long, the papers had made the “Sweet Pea Girl” herself into a minor 
celebrity, foreshadowing the kind of media attention bestowed on today’s serial killer groupies, whose 
strange infatuations are a favorite topic for supermarket tabloids and the sleazier TV talk shows. 

Vile as he was, Durrant was at least a handsome (if profoundly psychopathic) young man. The same is 
true of other, more recent serial killers who have become homicidal heartthrobs — Ted Bundy, for 




example, and Paul Bernardo, the male half of Canada’s infamous “Ken and Barbie” psycho-couple. But 
good looks are by no means a prerequisite for romantic success in the bizarre realm of serial killer 
groupiedom. Creatures as repulsive-looking as John Wayne Gacy and Henry Lee Lucas became the 
objects of female adoration once they were behind bars. Even Eddie Gein — a man who, prior to his 
arrest, had to dig up women from their graves in order to find companionship — was besieged by requests 
from gushing female admirers, begging for a lock of his hair. 

Nor does the sheer atrocity of a killer’s behavior discourage certain women from pursuing them. 

Edmund Kemper — whose sex life consisted of violating the corpses of butchered young women — had 
no trouble attracting girlfriends once he became infamous. Another psycho-killer with similarly 
abhorrent tastes, Douglas Clark — the “Sunset Strip Slayer” whose perversions included performing oral 
sex on the decapitated heads of his victims — became the love object of a woman who clearly viewed 
him as a soul mate, writing him a letter in which she wistfully asked: “I wonder why others don’t see the 
necrophiliac aspects of existence as we do?” 

While some groupies are content to remain pen pals with their idols, others pursue the relationship much 
further, even to the point of matrimony. Richard the “Night Stalker” Ramirez was wed in prison, as were 
both Hillside Stranglers. One of the most bizarre instances occurred during the penalty phase of Ted 
Bundy’s 1980 trial for the murder of twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach. When his girlfriend, Carol Ann 
Boone, took the witness stand to plead for his life, Bundy — who had been serving as his own defense 
attorney — rose to his feet as though to question her. Instead — much to the astonishment of everyone 
present — he proposed marriage, taking advantage of an obscure Florida law that allowed a public 
declaration in open court to constitute a legal wedding. When Boone accepted with a delighted giggle, 
she immediately became Mrs. Ted Bundy. She later gave birth to a daughter she claimed was Bundy’s, 
having become inseminated with sperm presumably smuggled from prison. 

What lies behind the behavior of serial killer groupies? Perhaps these women are in the grip of a 
“Beauty and the Beast” fantasy, believing that their love is so powerful that it can transform a ferocious 
monster into a decent human being. Or perhaps the opposite is the case — that they are so devoid of any 
sense of self-worth that, on some level, they believe that only a monster could lo vethem. Perhaps they 
just enjoy playing with fire — getting close to a source of tremendous physical peril while knowing that 
they are protected by the steel bars and unbreachable walls. Who knows? As novelist D. H. Lawrence 
said, the human soul is a dark forest. 

In a looser sense, the phrase “serial killer groupie” is sometimes applied to anyone, male or female, who 
develops an obsessive fixation on serial murderers. Two interesting books written by people who found 
themselves caught up in intense correspondences with infamous, jailed psycho-killers are Jennifer 
Furio’s The Serial Killer Letters (1998) and Jason Moss’s77z<? Last Victim (1999). 

INTERNET RESOURCES 



As with every other imaginable subject, there’s plenty of information about serial murder on the Web, 




though it varies considerably in quality. 



The single best site for biographies of individual figures — as well as for thoroughly researched articles 
on specific topics (like “Team Killers” and “Necrophilia”) — is Court TV’s Crime Library (www. 
crimelibrary.com ). Also very useful is the Serial Killer Hit List (www.mayhem.net ). Though its 
gleefully ghoulish tone flirts with the tasteless, this constantly updated site contains solid, concise 
biographies of hundreds of serial killers (organized according to body count), including many obscure 
murderers largely ignored by the mainstream media. 

Serial Killer Central ( www.angelfire.com/oh/yodaspage ) features brief, nicely illustrated biographies, 
along with a selection of serial killer artwork and poetry, and even an online store where dedicated 
gorehounds can purchase everything from coffee mugs to baseball caps decorated with the Serial Killer 
Central logo. The Crime Web (www.crimeweb.com ) supplements its biographical entries with features 
like “This Day in Serial Killer History” and up-to-the minute “Serial Killer News.” Perhaps because it is 
a joint Australian-English venture, the Crime Web also pays particular attention to international serial 
killers, a nice change from the American-centric orientation of most of these Web sites. Good material 
can also be found on the Web site maintained by author Sondra London (www.sondralondon.com ), 
whose relationships with sex-killers Gerard Schaefer and Danny the “Gainesville Ripper” Rolling have 
brought her a degree of personal notoriety. 

Of the various Web sites devoted to individual serial killers like Charles Manson and Ted Bundy (easily 
found by typing their names onto any search engine), the best is undoubtedly Tom Voigt’s Zodiac page 
(www.zodiackiller.com ), a beautifully designed, exhaustive site devoted to this legendary, long-sought 
psycho. 

Those with a particular interest in the most celebrated serial killer of all, Jack the Ripper, should check 
out the Web site called Casebook: Jack the Ripper (www.casebook.org ). Advertising itself — justifiably 
— as “the world’s largest public repository of Ripper-related information,” this site is conveniently 
divided into extensive, well-researched chapters on victims, suspects, witnesses, Ripper letters, police 
officials, press reports, and other key topics. An indispensable site both for advanced and beginning 
Ripperologists. 




LETHAL LIVES: A TRUE-CRIME BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Ever since the 1970s, when the serial killer phenomenon exploded onto the cultural scene, there has 
been an avalanche of true-crime books on the subject. The following bibliography, which lists all 
available works on over one hundred individual cases, is meant for readers who’d like to learn more 
about the many infamous figures discussed throughoutT/ie Serial Killer Files. 

Joe Ball 

Radin, Edward D .Crimes of Passion. New York: Putnam Books (1953). 

Elizabeth Bathory 

McNally, Raymond.Z)racw/a Was a Woman. New York: McGraw-Hill (1983). 

Penrose, Valentine. The Bloody Countess. London: Calder & Boyars (1970). 

Herb Baumeister 

Weinstein, Fannie and Wilson, Melinda. Where the Bodies Are Buried (1998). New York: St. Martin’s 
Press. 

Mary Bell 

Sereny, Gitta .The Case of Mary Bell. London: Methuen (1972). 

Sereny, Gitta. Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill — The Case of Mary Bell. New York: Henry Holt/Owl 
Books (1998). 

Bender Family 

Adleman, Robert H .The Bloody Benders. New York: Stein & Day (1970). 

James, John T.The Benders in Kansas. Wichita: Kan-Okla Publishing (1913). 

Robert Berdella 

Jackman, Tom and Cole, Troy .Rites of Burial. New York: Pinnacle (1998). 



David Berkowitz 




Abrahamsen, David. Confessions of Son of Sam. New York: Columbia University Press (1985). 

Calohan, George H.My Search for the Son of Sam. New York: Universe.com (2001). 

Carpozi, Georg e.Son of Sam: The .44-Caliber Killer NY: Manor Books (1977). 

Klausner, Lawrence D. and Klausner, Larry .Son of Sam: Based on the Authorized Transcription of the 
Tapes, Official Documents, and Diaries of David Berkowitz . New York: McGraw-Hill (1981). 

Terry, Maury. The Ultimate Evil. New York: Doubleday (1987). 

Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka 

Burnside, Scott and Cairns, Alm.Deadly Innocence: The True Story of Paul Bernardo, Karla Homolka, 
and the Schoolgirl Murders. New York: Warner Books (1995). 

Davey, Frank .Karla’s Web. Toronto: Penguin (1995). 

Pron, Nick .Lethal Marriage: The Unspeakable Crimes of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. New 
York: Bantam Books (1996). 

Williams, Stephen .Invisible Darkness: The Strange Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. New 
York: Bantam Books (1996). 

“Bible John” 

Crow, Alan and Damson, Peter .Bible John: Hunt for a Killer. New York: First Press Publishing (1997). 
Stoddart, Charles .Bible John: Search for a Sadist. Edinburgh: Paul Harris (1980). 

Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris 

Markman, Ronald and Bosco, Dominic .Alone with the Devil. New York: Doubleday (1989). 

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley 

Goodman, Jonathan. Trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley: The Moors Case. London: David & Charles 
(1973). 

Harrison, Fred .Brady & Hindley: Genesis of the Moors Murders. London: Ashgrove Press (1986). 




Johnson, Pamela. On Iniquity: Some Personal Reflections Arising Out of the Moors Murder Trial. New 
York: Scribner (1967). 

Potter, J. D .The Monsters of the Moors. New York: Ballantine (1966). 

Sparrow, Gerald .Satan’s Children. London: Odhams (1966). 

Williams, Cmelyn.Beyond Belief. New York: Random House (1968). 

Wilson, Robert .Devil’s Disciples. Poole, U.K.: Javelin Books (1986). 

Jerome Brudos 

Rule, Ann .Lust Killer. New York: Signet (1983). 

Ted Bundy 

Humphries, William. Pro/i/e of a Psychopath. Batavia, IL: Flinn (1999). 

Kendall, Elizabeth. The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy. Seattle: Madrona Publishers (1981). 

Keppel, Robert. The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer. New York: Pocket 
Books (1995). 

Larsen, Richard W .The Deliberate Stranger. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall (1980). 

Michaud, Stephen, Aynesworth, Hugh, and Hazelwood, Roy .The Only Living Witness: The Story of 
Serial Killer Ted Bundy. New York: Penguin Books (1989). 

Michaud, Stephen and Aynesworth, Hugh. Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer. New York: New 
American Library (1989). 

Nelson, Polly .Defending the Devil: My Story as Ted Bundy’s Last Lawyer. New York: William Morrow 
(1994). 

Rule, Ann .The Stranger Beside Me. New York: Norton (1996). 

Winn, Steven and Merrill, David. Ted Bundy: The Killer Next Door. New York: Bantam (1980). 



Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi 




O’Brien, Darcy .Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers. New York: New American Library (1985). 



Schwarz, Ted .The Hillside Strangler. Garden City, New York: Doubleday (1981). 

Harvey Carignan 

Rule, Ann .The Want-Ad Killer. New York: New American Library (1999). 

David Carpenter 

Graysmith, Robert. 77?^ Sleeping Lady: The Trailside Murders Above the Golden Gate. New York: 
Dutton (1990). 

Richard Trenton Chase 

Biondi, Lt. Ray and Hecox, Walt .The Dracula Killer. New York: Pocket Books (1992). 

Markman, Ronald and Bosco, Dominic .Alone with the Devil: Famous Cases of a Court Psychiatrist. 
New York: Doubleday (1989). 

Andrei Chikatilo 

Conradi, Peter. The Red Ripper. New York: Dell (1992). 

Cullen, Robert. The Killer Department: Detective Viktor Burakov’s Search for the Most Savage Serial 
Killer in Russian History. New York: Pantheon Books (1993). 

Krivich, M. and Ol’gin, Ol’gert. Comrade Chikatilo: The Psychopathology of Russia’s Notorious Serial 
Killer. New York: Barricade Books (1993). 

Lourie, Richard. Hunting the Devil: The Pursuit, Capture and Confession of the Most Savage Se-rial 
Killer in History. New York: HarperCollins (1994). 

John Christie 

Eddowes, John .The Two Killers of Rillington Place. London: Little, Brown (1994). 

Furneaux, Rupert. The Two Stranglers of Rillington Place. London: Panther (1961). 



Kennedy, Ludovic .10 Rillington Place. London: Gollancz (1961). 




Douglas Clark and Carol Bundy 



Farr, Louise. The Sunset Murders. New York: Pocket (1992). 

Hadden Clark 

Havill, Adrian.5ora Evil: A True Story of Cannibalism and Sexual Murder. New York: St. Martin’s 

( 2001 ). 

Carrol Edward Cole 

Newton, Michael .Silent Rage: The 30-Year Odyssey of a Serial Killer. New York: Dell (1994). 

John Norman Collins 

Keyes, Edward. The Michigan Murders. New York: Pocket Books (1978). 

Dean Corll and Elmer Wayne Henley 

Gurwell, John K .Mass Murder in Houston. Houston: Cordovan Press (1974). 

Hanna, David .Harvest of Horror: Mass Murder in Houston. New York: Belmont Tower (1975). 

Olsen, Jack.77z<? Man with the Candy: The Story of the Houston Mass Murders. New York: Simon & 
Schuster (2001). 

Mary Ann Cotton 

Appleton, Arthur .Mary Ann Cotton: Her Story and Trial. London: Michael Joseph (1973). 

Whitehead, Tony .Mary Ann Cotton, Dead, but Not Forgotten. London: Whitehead (2000). 

Dr. Thomas Neill Cream 

McLaren, Angus.A Prescription for Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream. 
Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1993). 

Jeffrey Dahmer 



Baumann, Edward. SYep into My Parlor: The Chilling Story of Serial Killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Chicago: 




Bonus Books (1991). 



Dahmer, LionelA Father’s Story. New York: William Morrow (1994). 

Davis, Don .The Milwaukee Murders: Nightmare in Apartment 213. New York: St. Martin’s (1993). 

Dvorchak, Robert and Howlewa, Lisa .Milwaukee Massacre: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Milwaukee 
Murders. New York: Dell (1991). 

Jaeger, Richard W. and Balousek, M. WiWiam.Massacre in Milwaukee: The Macabre Case of Jeffrey 
Dahmer. Oregon, WI: Waubesa Press (1991). 

Masters, Brian. The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer. London: Hodder and Stoughton (1993). 

Murphy, Dennis and Kennedy, Patrick .Incident, Homicide: The Story of the Milwaukee Flesh-Eater. 
Boston, MA: Quimby World Headquarters Publications (1992). 

Norris, Joel .Jeffrey Dahmer: A Bizarre Journey into the Mind of America’ s Most Tormented Serial 
Killer. New York: Windsor (1992). 

Schwartz, Anne E .The Man Who Could not Kill Enough: The Secret Murders of Milwaukee’ s Jeffrey 
Dahmer. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing. (1992). 

Tithecott, Richard. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. 
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press (1997). 

Gilles de Rais 

Bataille, Georges. The Trial of Gilles de Rais. Translated by Richard Robinson. Paris: Jean-Jacques 
Pauvert (1965). 

Benedetti, Jean .The Real Bluebeard: The Life of Gilles de Rais. New York: Stein & Day (1972). 

Winwar, Frances. The Saint and the Devil: The Story of Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais. New York: 
Harper (1948). 

Wolf, Leonard .Bluebeard: The Life and Crimes of Gilles de Rais. New York: Clarkson N. Potter (1980). 

Albert DeSalvo 



Banks, Harold .The Strangler!: The Story of Terror in Boston. New York: Avon (1967). 




Frank, Gerold .Boston Strangler. New York: New American Library (1966). 



Kelly, Susan. The Boston Stranglers: The Wrongful Conviction of Albert DeSalvo and the True Story of 
Eleven Shocking Murders. New York: Birch Lane (1995). 

Westley Alan Dodd 

Dodd, Westley Alan, Steinhorst, Lori, and Rose, John .When the Monster Comes out of the Closet: 
Westley Alan Dodd in His Own Words. Salem, Oregon: Rose Publications (1994). 

King, Gary. Driven to Kill. New York: Windsor (1993). 

Larry Eyler 

Kolarik, Gera-Lind .Freed to Kill: The True Story of Serial Murderer Larry Eyler. New York: Avon 
Books (1992). 

Albert Fish 

Angelella, Michael. Trail of Blood: A True Story. New York: Bobbs-Merrill (1979). 

Heimer, Mel .The Cannibal. New York: Lyle Stuart (1971). 

Schechter, Harold .Deranged. New York: Pocket Books (1990). 

Wertham, Frederic. The Show of Violence. Garden City, New York: Doubleday (1949). 

Kendall Francois 

Rosen, Fred.Body Dump. New York: Pinnacle (2002). 

John Wayne Gacy 

Cahill, Tim .Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer. New York: Bantam Books (1986). 

Gacy, J. W .Question of Doubt: The John Wayne Gacy Story. New York: Craig Bowley Consultants 
(1991). 



Kozenczak, Joseph and Henrikson, Karen.A Passing Acquaintance. New York: Carlton Press (1992). 




Linedecker, Clifford L.The Man Who Killed Boys: A True Story of Mass Murder in a Chicago Suburb. 
New York: St. Martin’s Press (1980). 

Nelson, Mark and Oswald, Gerald .The 34th Victim. Westmont, Illinois: Fortune Productions (1986). 
Rignall, Jeff.29 Below. Chicago: Wellington Press (1979). 

Sullivan, Terry and Maiken, Peter T. Killer Clown: The John Wayne Gacy Murders. New York: Pinnacle 
Books (1983). 

Gerald Gallego 

Biondi, Ray and Hecox, Walt.A// His Father’s Sins. New York: Pocket Books (1990). 

Flowers, R. Barri .The Sex Slave Murders. New York: St. Martin’s (1996). 

Van Hoffman, Eric.A Venom in the Blood. New York: Pinnacle (1999). 

Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins 

Gaskins, Donald and Earle, Wilton .Final Truth: The Autobiography of Mass Murderer/Serial Killer 
Donald “ Pee Wee” Gaskins. New York: Pinnacle Books (1993). 

Hall, Frances S. Slaughter in Carolina. Florence, South Carolina: Hummingbird Publishers (1990). 

Robin Gecht 

Fletcher, Jaye Slade. Deadly Thrills. New York: Onyx (1995). 

Ed Gein 

Gollmar, Robert H .Edward Gein. New York: Pinnacle (1984). 

Schechter, Harold .Deviant: The Shocking True Story of the Original “Psycho. ” New York: Pocket 
Books (1989). 

Harvey Glatman 

Newton, Michael .Rope: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Harvey Glatman. New York: Pocket Books 
(1998). 




Wolf, Marvin J. and Mader, Katherine.Ea/fen Angels. New York: Ballantine Books (1988). 

Belle Gunness 

de la Torre, Lillian .The Truth about Belle Gunness. New York: Gold Medal (1955). 

Langlois, Janet .Belle Gunness: The Lady Bluebeard. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1985). 

John George Haigh 

Bryne, Gerald .John George Haigh, Acid Killer. London: J. Hill (1954). 

Briffett, David. The Acid Bath Murders. Sussex: Field Place Press (1988). 

Dunboyne, Lord .The Trial of John George Haigh: The Acid Bath Murderer. London: William Hodge 
(1953). 

La Bern, Arthur .Haigh: The Mind of a Murderer. London: W.H. Allen & Co., Ltd. (1973). 

Robert Hansen 

DuClos, Bernard .Fair Game. New York: St. Martin’s (1993). 

Gilmour, Walter and Hale, Leland E .Butcher, Baker: A True Account of a Serial Murderer. New York: 
Onyx (1991). 

Neville Heath 

Selwyn, Francis. Rotten to the Core: The Life and Death of Neville Heath. London: Routledge (1988). 

Gary Heidnik 

Englade, Ken .Cellar of Horror. New York: St. Martin’s (1989). 

Apsche, JsLck.Probing the Mind of a Serial Killer. Morrisville, Pennsylvania: International Information 
Associates (1993). 

William Heirens 



Downs, Thomas .Murder Man. New York: Dell (1984). 




Freeman, Lucy .Before I Kill More. New York: Crown (1955). 



Kallio, Lauri E.Confess or Die: The Case of William Heirens. New York: Minerva Press (1999). 
Kennedy, Dolores. William Heirens: His Day in Court. Chicago: Bonus Books. (1991). 

Lindberg, Richard .Return to the Scene of the Crime. Nashville: Cumberland House Publishers (1999). 

Hillside Stranglers 

O’Brien, Darcy .Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers. New York: New American Library (1985). 
Schwarz, Ted .The Hillside Strangler. Garden City, New York: Doubleday (1981). 

H. H. Holmes 

See HERMAN MUDGETT. 

Joseph Kallinger 

Downs, Thomas. The Door-to-Door Killer. New York: Dell (1984). 

Schreiber, Flora R .The Shoemaker: The Anatomy of a Psychotic. New York: Signet (1983). 

Ed Kemper 

Cheney, Margaret. The Co-Ed Killer. New York: Walker and Co. (1976). 

Damio, Ward .Urge to Kill. New York: Pinnacle (1974). 

Paul John Knowles 

Fawkes, Sandy. Killing Time: Journey into Nightmare. London: Peter Owen (1977). 

Randy Kraft 

McDougal, Dennis .Angel of Darkness. New York: Warner Books (1991). 



Peter Kiirten 




Berg, Karl .The Sadist. London: Heinemann (1945). 



Wagner, Margaret Seaton .The Monster of Diisseldorf. London: Faber and Faber (1932). 

Leonard Lake and Charles Ng 

Harrington, Joseph and Burger, Robert.L'y^ of Evil. New York: St. Martin’s (1993). 

Harrington, Joseph and Burger, Robert .Justice Denied: The Ng Case, the Most Infamous and Expensive 
Murder Case in History. New York: Plenum Press (1999). 

Lasseter, Don .Die for Me: The Terrifying True Story of the Charles Ng and Leonard Lake Torture 
Murders. New York: Pinnacle Books (2000). 

Owens, Greg and Henton, Darcy Wo Kill, No Thrill: The Shocking True Story of Charles Ng. Calgary, 
Canada: Red Deer Press (2001). 

Henri Landru 

Bardens, Dennis. The Lady Killer: The Life of Landru, the French Bluebeard. London: P. Davies. (1972). 
Papa, Juliet .Lady Killer. New York: St. Martin’s (1995). 

Wakefield, Russell .Landru: The French Bluebeard. London: Duckworth (1936). 

Bobby Joe Long 

Flowers, Anna .Bound to Die: The Shocking True Story of Bobby Joe Long, America’s Most Savage 
Serial Killer. New York: Pinnacle Books (1995). 

Ward, Bernie.fio^y Joe: In the Mind of a Monster. Boca Raton, Florida: Cool Hand Communications 
(1995). 

Wellman, Joy, McVey, Lisa and Replogle, Susan .Smoldering Embers: The True Story of a Serial 
Murderer and Three Courageous Women. Far Hills, New Jersey: New Horizon Press (1997). 

Henry Lee Lucas 

Call, Msix.Hand of Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story. Lafayette, Louisiana: Prescott Press (1985). 

Cox, Mik Q.The Confessions of Henry Lee Lucas. New York: Pocket Books (1991). 




Norris, Soe\. Henry Lee Lucas: The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Notorious Serial Killer. New 
York: Zebra (1991). 



Charles Manson 

Baer, Rosemary .Reflection on the Manson Trial: Journal of a Pseudo-Juror. Waco, Texas: Word (1972). 
Bishop, George. Witness to Evil. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing (1971). 

Bugliosi, Vincent and Gentry, Curt .Helter Skelter. New York: Norton (1974). 

George, Edward and Matera, Davy .Taming the Beast: Charles Manson’ s Life Behind Bars. New York: 

St. Martin’s (1998). 

Gilmore, John and Kenner, Ron .Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family. Los Angeles: 
Amok Books (2000). 

Gilmore, John and Kenner, Ron. The Garbage People: The Trip to Helter-Skelter and Beyond with 
Charlie Manson and the Family. Los Angeles: Amok Books (1996). 

Livsey, Clara. The Manson Women. New York: Marek (1980). 

Manson, Charles and Emmons, Nuel. Manson in His Own Words. New York: Grove Press (1986). 
Sanders, Ed .The Family. New York: Dutton (1971). 

Schiller, Lawrence and Atkins, Susan. The Killing of Sharon Tate. New York: New American Library 
(1970). 

Schreck, Nikolas. The Manson File. New York: Amok Press (1988). 

Watkins, Paul and Soledad, Guillermo. A/y Life with Charles Manson. New York: Bantam (1979). 

Herman Mudgett (Dr. H. H. Holmes) 

Boswell, Charles and Thompson, Lewis. The Girls in Nightmare House. New York: Gold Medal (1955). 
Eckert, Allan W .The Scarlet Mansion. New York: Little, Brown (1985). 

Franke, David .The Torture Doctor. New York: Hawthorn Books (1975). 




Schechter, Harold .Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer. New York: 
Pocket Books (1998). 

Herbert Mullin 

Lunde, Donald T. and Morgan, Jefferson. The Die Song: A Journey Into the Mind of a Mass Murderer. 
New York: W.W. Norton (1980). 

Damio, Ward .Urge to Kill. New York: Pinnacle (1974). 

West, Don .Sacrifice Unto Me: The 21 Santa Cruz Murders. New York: Pyramid (1974). 

Earle Leonard Nelson 

Anderson, Frank .The Dark Strangler. Calgary: Frontier (1974). 

Schechter, Harold .Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster. New York: Pocket Books 
(1998). 

Dennis Nilsen 

Masters, Brian .Killing for Company: The Story of a Man Addicted to Murder. New York: Stein and Day 
(1986). 

McConnell, Brian and Bence, Douglas. The Nilsen File. London: Futura (1983). 

Carl Panzram 

Gaddis, Thomas .Panzram: A Journal of Murder. Los Angeles: Amok Books (2002). 

Marcel Petiot 

Grombach, John .The Great Liquidator. New York: Doubleday (1980). 

Maeder, Thomas. The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot. Boston: Little, Brown (1980). 

Jesse Pomeroy 

Schechter, Harold.Fz'end: The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer. New York: 
Simon & Schuster (2000). 




Dorothea Puente 



Blackburn, Daniel. Human Harvest. Los Angeles: Knightsbridge (1990). 

Richard Ramirez 

Carlo, Phillip. The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez. New York: Kensington 
Books (1996). 

Linedecker, Chfford.Mg/it Stalker. New York: St. Martin’s (1991). 

Angel Maturino Resendez 

Clarkson, Wensley.77ze Railroad Killer: The Shocking True Story of Angel Maturino Resendez. New 
York: St. Martin’s (1999). 

Joel Rifkin 

Eftimiades, Maria. Garden of Graves: The Shocking True Story of Long Island Serial Killer Joel Rifkin. 
New York: St. Martin’s (1993). 

Mladinich, Robert .The Joel Rifkin Story: From the Mouth of the Monster. New York: Pocket Books 

( 2001 ). 

Pulitizer, Lisa Beth and Swirsky, Joan .Crossing the Line. New York: Berkley (1994). 

Danny Rolling 

Fox, James and Levin, Jack. Killer on Campus: The Terrifying True Story of the Gainesville Ripper. New 
York: Avon Books (1996). 

Philpin, John and Donnelly, JoJm.Beyond Murder: The Inside Account of the Gainesville Murders. New 
York: Onyx (1994). 

Rolling, Danny and London, Sondra .The Making of a Serial Killer: The Real Story of the Gainesville 
Student Murders in the Killer’s Own Words. Portland, Oregon: Feral House (1996). 

Ryzuk, Mary S.The Gainesville Ripper: A Summer’s Madness, Five Young Victims, the Investigation, 
the Arrest, and the Trial. New York: St. Martin’s (1995). 




Charles Schmid 



Gilmore, John .Cold-Blooded: The Saga of Charles Schmid, the Notorious Pied Piper of Tucson. 
Portland, Oregon: Feral House (1996). 

Moser, Don and Cohen, Jerry. The Pied Piper of Tucson. New York: New American Library (1967). 

Arthur Shawcross 

Norris, Joel. Arthur Shawcross: The Genesee River Killer. New York: Pinnacle Books (1992). 

Olsen, Jack.TTzc Misbegotten Son: A Serial Killer and His Victims: The True Story of Arthur Shawcross. 
New York: Delacorte (1993). 

Dr. Harold Shipman 

Clarkson, Wensley.Good Doctor. London: Blake Publishing (2001). 

Sitford, M ikael a A ddicted to Murder: The True Story of Dr. Harold Shipman. London: Virgin 
Publishing (2000). 

Whittle, Brian and Ritchie, Jean .Prescription for Murder. New York: Warner Books (2000). 

Charles Starkweather 

Allen, William .Starkweather: The Story of a Mass Murderer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin (1967). 

Newton, Michael. Waste Land: The Savage Odyssey of Charles Starkweather and Card Ann Fugate. 
New York: Pocket Books (1998). 

O’Donnell, Jeff. Starkweather: A Story of Mass Murder on the Great Plains. Lincoln, Nebraska: J&L 
Lee Publishers (1993). 

Reinhardt, Jim .Murderous Trail of Charles Starkweather. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas 
(1960). 

Peter Sutcliffe 

Beattie, John .The Yorkshire Ripper. London: Quartet (1981). 

Burn, Goxdon.Somebody’ s Husband, Somebody’s Son. New York: Penguin (1990). 




Cross, RogQY.The Yorkshire Ripper. New York: Dell (1981). 



Jones, Barbara .Evil Beyond Belief. London: Blake Publishing (1992). 

Jouve, Nicole. The Street Cleaner: The Yorkshire Ripper Case on Trial. London: Marion Boyars (1986). 
Yallop, David .Deliver us from Evil. New York: Coward, McCann (1982). 

Michael Swango 

Stewart, James .Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away with Murder. New 
York: Simon & Schuster (2000). 

Fred and Rosemary West 

Burn, Goxdon.Happy like Murderers. London: Faber & Faber (1999). 

Masters, Brian .She Must Have Known: The Trial of Rosemary West. London: Transworld Publishers 
(1996). 

Sounes, Floward .Fred and Rose: The Full Story of Fred and Rose West and the Gloucester House of 
Horrors. London: Warner (1995). 

Wansell, Geoffrey .An Evil Love: The Life of Frederick West. London: JJeadline (1996). 

West, Anne. On? of the Shadows. London: Pocket Books (1996). 

Wilson, Cohn .The Corpse Garden: The Crimes of Fred and Rose West. London: True Crime Library 
(1998). 

Christopher Wilder 

Gibney, Bruce. The Beauty Queen Killer. New York: Pinnacle (1990). 

Wayne Williams 

Baldwin, James. The Evidence of Things Not Seen. New York: JJolt (1995). 



Dettlinger, Chet .The List. Atlanta: Philmay Enterprises (1983). 




Headley, Bernard. The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Politics of Race. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern 
Illinois University Press (1998). 



Aileen Wuornos 

Reynolds, Michael.Dead Ends. New York: Warner Books (1992). 
Russell, Su q. L ethal Intent. New York: Pinnacle (2002). 





© Whitney Ward 



HAROLDSCHECHTERis a professor of American literature and culture at Queens College, the City 
University of New York. Among his nonfiction works are the true-crime classics Fiend, Deviant, 
Deranged, andDepraved. He also authors a critically acclaimed mystery series featuring Edgar Allan 
Poe, which includesTTze Hum Bug andN evermore. He lives in New York City. 



Also by Harold Schechter 



Nonfiction 

The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (with David Everitt) 

Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster 

Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer 

Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer 

Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho” 

Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer 

Fiend: The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer 

Fiction 

Nevermore 

Outcry 



The Hum Bug 




A Ballantine Book 



Published by The Random House Publishing Group 



Copyright © 2003 by Harold Schechter 



All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the 
United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, 
and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. 



Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. 



www.ballantinebooks.com 



Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 



Schechter, Harold 

The serial killer files : the who, what, where, how, and why of the world’s most terrifying murderers / 
Harold Schechter. — 1st ed. 

p. cm. 

Includes bibliographical references and index. 
e-ISBN 0-345-47200-4 

1. Serial murders — History. 2. Serial murderers. I. Title. 



HV6505.S34 2004 



364.1 52'3—dc22 




2003062982 



vl.O