Fatal Read online

  Praise for Harold Schechter’s true-crime accounts, “well-documented nightmares for anyone who dares to look.”*

  FIEND

  The Shocking True Story of America’s Youngest Serial Killer

  “A memorably gothic tale. . . . True-crime lovers will not want to miss it.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Schechter] blends his research into a seamless story, fascinating in its horror, as well as its ability to turn the century-old characters into real people. . . . In Fiend, Schechter succeeds at reminding us that modern times don’t have a monopoly on juvenile terror.”

  —Amazon.com

  BESTIAL

  The Savage Trail of a True American Monster

  “[An] essential addition. . . . Deserves to be read and pored over by the hard crime enthusiast as well as devotees of social history.”

  —The Boston Book Review

  “Bestial spare[s] no graphic detail. . . . Reads like fast-paced fiction, complete with action, plot twists, suspense, and eerie foreshadowing. . . . Provides chilling insights into the motivations of a man who killed for killing’s sake.”

  —Amazon.com

  “[A] deftly written, unflinching account.”

  —Journal Star (Peoria, IL)*

  DEPRAVED

  The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer

  “Meticulously researched, brilliantly detailed, and above all riveting. . . . Schechter has done his usual sterling job in resurrecting this amazing tale.”

  —Caleb Carr, bestselling author of The Alienist

  “Must reading for crime buffs. Gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting.”

  —Ann Rule

  DERANGED

  The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer

  “Reads like fiction but it’s chillingly real. . . .”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  DEVIANT

  The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho”

  “[A] grisly, wonderful book. . . . Scrupulously researched.”

  —Film Quarterly

  THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS

  By Harold Schechter and David Everitt

  “The scholarship is both genuine and fascinating.”

  —The Boston Book Review

  “A grisly tome. . . . Schechter knows his subject matter.”

  —Denver Rocky Mountain News

  And praise for Harold Schechter’s historical crime fiction featuring Edgar Allan Poe

  THE HUM BUG

  A riveting excursion. . . . Poe and his times come across with wonderful credibility and vitality.”

  —Booklist

  “Evocative. . . .”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Schechter effectively conveys the climate of New York at a time when people were easily suckered by Barnum’s tricks.”

  —Library Journal

  NEVERMORE

  “In this gripping, suspenseful thriller, Harold Schechter does a splendid job of capturing the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. I’m sure my late, great cousin would have loved Nevermore!”

  —Anne Poe Lehr

  “Schechter’s entertaining premise is supported by rich period atmospherics. . . . Keeps the finger of suspicion wandering until the very end.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A literary confection. . . . A first-rate mystery.”

  —Booklist

  “Authentic. . . . Engaging. . . . Schechter manages at once to be faithful to Poe’s voice, and to poke gentle fun at it—to swing breezily between parody and homage.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  Thank you for purchasing this Pocket Star Books eBook.

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  Contents

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part One: American Borgia

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Two: Jolly Jane

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Three: Buzzards Bay

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Four: Murderess

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part Five: A Poisoned Mind

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  For Kimiko

  femme fatale

  The cursed crimes of the secret poisoner

  We must confess are the worst of all,

  You bless the hand that smooths your pillow,

  But by that hand you surely fall.

  You put your trust in those about you,

  When you lie sick upon your bed,

  While you are blessing they are wishing

  The very next moment would find you dead.

  —Nineteenth-century broadside ballad

  INTRODUCTION

  FOR A PERIOD OF EXACTLY ONE YEAR, BEGINNING IN late 1989, a string of male motorists in central Florida ended up dead in the woods after picking up a roadside hooker named Aileen Wuornos. At the time of her arrest, Wuornos—who had led an extraordinarily brutalized life from childhood on—claimed that she had only been acting in self-defense. All seven of the victims, she insisted, had viciously attacked her. For the sake of her own self-preservation, she’d been forced to shoot each of them repeatedly with a .22-caliber semiautomatic, empty their pockets, steal their cars, and dump their corpses in various junkyards, vacant lots, and remote wooded areas.

  Needless to say, prosecutors saw things very differently, portraying Wuornos as a cold-blooded predator who murdered partly for money but mostly for the sheer joy of it. The jury agreed, and Wuornos earned immediate infamy, not just as a homicidal maniac, but as something far more monstrous and alarming—the first woman serial killer in our nation’s history.

  Besides a death sentence (carried out, after much delay, in October 2002), this dubious distinction brought her the kind of celebrity we bestow on our most notorious criminals. Not long after her conviction, the first of several made-for-TV movies about her case hit the airwaves, and she has since been the subject of everything from a critically acclaimed documentary (Nick Broomfield’s Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer) to assorted Court TV specials. All of these works have treated her as a figure of considerable significance in the annals of crime: “America’s First Female Serial Killer.” There is, however, a serious problem with this label.

  It’s completely untrue.

  In spite of the popular belief that sociopathic violence is a strictly male phenomenon, the fact is that women have always accounted for a sizable proportion of humanity’s most prolific and reprehensible multiple-murderers. It is only in recent years, however, that serious attention has begun to be paid to the subject of female serial killers, in studies like Patricia Pearson’s When She was Bad (1997) and Michael and C. L. Kell
eher’s Murder Most Rare (1998). The subject of my own book is a woman born in 1854—exactly a century before Aileen Wuornos was conceived—who conforms in every respect to the classic pattern of the psychopathic sex-killer. A true Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, she possessed a professional competence and affable charm that made her a valued companion to a large circle of people, who trusted her with their very lives. Beneath her jovial exterior, however, there lurked a being of genuinely monstrous drives and appetites—an implacable sadist who derived intense, sexual pleasure from watching a succession of innocent victims perish slowly at her hands. Jane Toppan was her name, and though degrees of evil are difficult to gauge, the sheer malignancy she embodied was, at the very least, equal to that of her better-known male counterparts.

  The question, then, inevitably arises: How is it that when people hear the term “serial killer,” they immediately think of men—John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, et al.? And why are they surprised, if not incredulous, to learn that women have been among the most deadly of all serial killers?

  As is often the case, the problem is largely one of semantics. The term “serial murder” itself is a relatively recent coinage, dating back only a few decades. Definitions vary, but the most useful comes from the National Institute of Justice, which describes it as a “series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually . . . 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.”

  In other words, serial killers are, by and large, sexual psychopaths of a particularly depraved variety—deviants who can only achieve orgasmic release by making other people die. Once their morbid lust is satisfied, they experience an interval of calm—the equivalent of the sated lull that normally follows sex (the FBI calls this the “emotional cooling-off period”). Eventually, they grow ravenous again—horny for death—and go looking for someone new. This behavioral pattern explains the “serial” nature of the phenomenon. Every time one of these monsters is overwhelmed by an exigent sexual need, another person has to die.

  Exactly who coined the term “serial killer” is a matter of some dispute (it is most often credited to former FBI agent Robert Ressler, though some criminologists trace its earliest use to a 1966 book, The Meaning of Murder, by the British writer John Brophy). In any case, it did not gain widespread currency until the 1970s—the decade that witnessed the depredations of Bundy, Gacy, Kenneth Bianchi, and Angelo Buono (the infamous “Hillside Strangler”) and other savagely violent sociopaths. Since the term itself was brand-new at the time, it was easy to get the impression that a frighteningly new species of criminal—previously unheard-of in the long history of human iniquity—had suddenly appeared on the scene: the serial killer.

  In point of fact, creatures like Gacy and his ilk have existed from time immemorial. Anyone who believes that viciously depraved sex-killers are unique to our age—a symptom of the “societal rot” that political demagogues are always blaming on things like Hollywood shoot-’em-ups, rap music, and the ban on classroom prayer—should take a look at Psychopathia Sexualis by Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Published in 1886, this pioneering work surveys a wide range of aberrant behavior, from foot fetishism to necrophilia, and includes capsule case studies of some of the most appalling sadists imaginable.

  Among the monsters cited by Krafft-Ebing are “a certain Gruyo, aged forty-one,” who strangled six women, then “tore out their intestines and kidneys through the vagina”; a fifty-five-year-old Hungarian named Tirsch, who “waylaid a wretched old woman” in the woods, choked her to death, 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”; and a twenty-four-year-old French vineyard worker named Leger, who—after wandering about the woods for eight days in search of a victim—“caught a girl twelve years old, violated her, mutilated her genitals, tore out her heart and ate of it, drank the blood, and buried the remains.” There is also the case of “Alton, a clerk in England,” who lured a little girl to a thicket, “cut her to pieces,” then calmly returned to his office, were he made the following entry in his notebook: “Killed today a young girl; it was fine and hot.”

  These and other instances of hideously sadistic sex-killing are classified by Krafft-Ebing under an old-fashioned but highly expressive label: “lust-murder.” The term nicely captures the particular combination of savage cruelty and frenzied sexual excitement that characterizes the crime and drives its perpetrators to such extremes of unspeakable behavior—to “strangling, cutting of the throat and ripping open of the abdomen, mutilation of the corpse, especially the genitals, [and] gratification of the sexual lust on the corpse” (in Krafft-Ebing’s words).

  Even today, Psychopathia Sexualis is a highly instructive (as well as morbidly titillating) work, whose enormous catalog of nineteenth-century perversion makes it abundantly clear that psychopathic sex-murder did not begin with Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. Indeed, it did not even begin with Jack the Ripper, who is often regarded as the prototype of the modern-day psycho-killer. Krafft-Ebing himself makes reference to the infamous fifteenth-century monster Gilles de Rais, “who was executed in 1440, on account of mutilation and murder, which he had practiced for eight years on more than 800 children.” And though their cases are not mentioned in Psychopathia Sexualis, there are other medieval butchers whose atrocities might easily have earned them a place in Krafft-Ebing’s encyclopedia of perversity: Gilles Garnier, for example, a sixteenth-century French maniac who savaged his victims with such bestial ferocity that he was thought to be a werewolf; and his German contemporary, Peter Stubbe, another ostensible lycanthrope who preyed primarily on young children and who was guilty—among other abominations—of cannibalizing his own son.

  The history of sadistic mutilation-murder, of course, begins long before medieval times. Gilles de Rais himself claimed that he had derived inspiration from his reading of Suetonius, the Roman historian who chronicled the degenerate doings of Imperial madmen like Nero (who, we are told, enjoyed dressing up in the skins of a wild animal and dismembering young men and women with his bare hands).

  Indeed, recent scientific evidence suggests that a taste for such savagery is encoded in our DNA, an evolutionary inheritance from our earliest primate ancestors. In his book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, 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 by KrafftEbing. 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 peacetime and atrocities during war.”

  From African chimps to John Wayne Gacy, however, one fact is clear. As the title of Wrangham’s book indicates, bestial, gratuitously cruel acts of lethal violence—the kind involving torture, rape, mutilation, dismemberment, cannibalism, etc.—are endemic to males. Indeed, 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 Krafft-Ebing’s words) of normal male sexuality. Lust-murder, in short, is a specifically male phenomenon.

  Lust-murder, however, is not synonymous with serial killing. Rather—and this is a point I want to stress—lust-murder is the quintessential male form of serial killing. When police discover a corpse with its throat slit, its torso cut open, its viscera removed, and
its genitals excised, they are always justified in making one basic assumption: the perpetrator was a man. As culture-critic Camille Paglia puts it: “There is no female Jack the Ripper.”

  But if lust-murder is a form of serial killing 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 woman typically differ from those of men.

  A useful analogy here (and one that seems particularly apt to so lurid a subject) 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 a question I’ll leave to others. The indisputable fact is that the differences are real.

  An analogous distinction holds true for serial killers. Female sociopaths 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.

  To be sure, there may be other motives mixed up with the sadism—monetary gain, for example. Indeed, certain female serial killers may never admit, even to themselves, the true nature or extent of the gratification they deprive from their crimes. Their actions, however, speak for themselves. Whatever other benefits may accrue from their atrocities—a windfall of insurance money, for example, or a release from the burdens of motherhood—there is, at bottom, only one reason why a woman would, over the span of years, kill off the people closest to her, one by one, in ways that are to guaranteed make them undergo terrible suffering: because she gets pleasure from doing it.