The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers

  “For all the genuine horror and revulsion they inspire in us, there’s no point in denying that serial killers exert a dark attraction. They appeal not just to our morbid interest but also to our need to comprehend an ultimate human mystery: how people who seem so ordinary, so much like the rest of us, can possess the hearts and minds of monsters.”

  —From THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS

  by Harold Schechter and David Everitt

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

  —Rocky Mountain News (Denver)

  “The ultimate reference on this fascinating phenomenon.”

  —PI Magazine

  “Harold Schechter combines the graphic style of a horror novelist with a keen eye for bizarre material. . . . One of the few names that guarantee quality.”

  —John Marr, The Bay Guardian (San Francisco)

  More praise for Harold Schechter’s true-crime works

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

  —Ann Rule, New York Times bestselling author of Worth More Dead

  “Meticulously researched, brilliantly detailed, and above all, riveting.”

  —Caleb Carr, bestselling author of The Alienist

  Thank you for purchasing this Pocket Books eBook.

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  Contents

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Preface to the First Edition

  A

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  G

  H

  I

  J

  K

  L

  M

  N

  O

  P

  Q

  R

  S

  T

  U

  V

  W

  X

  Y

  Z

  About Harold Schechter and David Everitt

  Index

  Preface to the Second Edition

  In the decade since our book first appeared, the phenomenon it explores—the brand of compulsive, sexually sadistic homicide we now call serial murder—continues to maintain a tight grip on the public imagination. Indeed, the serial killer has become such a pervasive part of our popular culture that a comprehensive list of all the movies, TV shows, and bestselling thrillers that feature such villains would now require a volume of its own.

  Even the horrific events of September 11,2001, haven’t managed to stem the tide of serial killer entertainments. Though we now face far graver threats to our national well-being than psychopathic sex-killers, we continue to crave stories about the latter. At the time we wrote the introduction to the first edition, for example, David Fincher’s Se7en was Americas number-one film. At the present moment (we are writing this in the spring of 2005), the same director is in the midst of shooting Zodiac, about the search for the notorious serial murderer who terrorized the San Francisco area in the late 1960s. Plus ça change.

  In the news, real-life serial killers also continue to command widespread media attention. The savage exploits of Angel Maturino Resendez—aka the “Railroad Killer”—held the country in thrall in the summer of 1999. Two years later, Gary Ridgway’s arrest for the infamous “Green River” killings was front-page news across the country. So was the apprehension, in early 2005, of Dennis Rader, the seemingly ordinary city worker and churchgoer who confessed to being the notorious murderer known as “BTK.”

  That such long-unresolved cases as Green River and BTK have finally been closed in recent years represents one main reason for the existence of this new edition of The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. A great deal has happened since the book first came out in 1995. Major new cases have occurred (like that of Dr. Harold Shipman, now regarded as the most prolific serial killer in modern history). There have been important new developments in old cases (including a supposed “final” solution of the most legendary serial murders of all, those committed by Jack the Ripper).

  Significant shifts have taken place in our understanding of the subject (it is clear, for example, that both female and African-American serial killers are far more common than previously thought). We have even managed to trace a different—and significantly older—origin for the phrase “serial killer” itself.

  In revising our book, then, we have tried to make it as up-to-date as possible. But The A to Z Encyclopedia was never meant to be simply a reference tool. It always aimed to be something else: a book which acknowledged that the subject of serial murder exerts a dark but undeniable attraction—the kind of “dreadful pleasure” that, as children, we derive from immersing ourselves in the fairy-tale world of demons and witches and flesh-eating ogres.

  There’s little point in denying the fact that, for whatever reasons—anxiety management, morbid curiosity, latent sadism—people enjoy reading about monsters. Like the first edition of our book, this revision is meant to both enlighten and entertain. It is offered, in short, not only in the spirit of serious scholarship but in frank recognition of what Joseph Conrad calls “the fascination of the abomination.”

  Preface to the First Edition

  We are writing this preface in the fall of 1995, when the number-one film at the box office is Se7en, a dark, intensely creepy thriller about a serial murderer who contrives to kill his victims in accordance with the seven deadly sins (lust, greed, gluttony, sloth, pride, anger, and envy). The American public’s long-standing interest in psychopathic butchers—the same morbid fascination that, back in 1991, made Jeffrey Dahmer a People magazine cover boy and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs an Oscar-winning blockbuster—is still going strong.

  Indeed, what was initially a fringe phenomenon—an obsession with blood-crazed psychokillers that was more or less limited to diehard splatter-movie fans—has become so mainstream that publications as traditionally staid (if not stuffy) as The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker have jumped on the bandwagon of late. The former ran a major essay on serial killers by novelist Joyce Carol Oates, while the latter did an extended, pre-execution profile of John Wayne Gacy that included exclusive excerpts from the unpublished writings of “America’s most notorious killer.”

  Moralizing critics have been quick to condemn this phenomenon (labeled “serial chic”) as still another nasty symptom of societal rot, along with gangsta rap and ads for Calvin Klein underwear. We would point out that in considering the significance of pop phenomena it is always useful to put things in a broader cultural context. For better or worse, human beings have always been intrigued by anything that is monstrous, aberrant, or criminal. And grisly murder has been the subject of story and song, of art high and low, for centuries. True-crime books have been around since at least the 1600s, when John Reynolds’s God’s Revenge Against Murder and Adultery was one of the most popular works in England. During the late eighteenth century, the British public devoured the true-crime accounts in The Newgate Calendar, while Victorian readers thrilled to the gory details of murders, mutilations, and torture dished out by The Illustrated Police News, the most popular periodical of its day.

  In our own country, the media frenzy set off by the atrocities of Dr. H. H. Holmes, “America’s first serial killer,” was akin to the hysteria generated by the O.J. trial a century
later. In 1895, Chicagoans lined up around the block when an enterprising showman opened an H. H. Holmes “Murder Museum,” complete with gruesome mock-ups of the “arch-fiend’s” crimes. And the exploitation of mayhem and murder has not been restricted to schlockmeisters. Serious artists from Cézanne to Francis Bacon—as well as novelists from Dostoevsky to Dreiser—have made violent crime the subject of their work.

  In short, we don’t see America’s fascination with serial killers as an aberration but rather as a contemporary manifestation of an age-old human reality. Moreover—insofar as telling stories or swapping jokes or watching movies about fearful things represents a method of coping—this fascination is not at all unhealthy. In late-twentieth-century America, the serial killer has come to embody a host of gnawing anxieties: anxieties about runaway crime and sexual violence and the breakdown of civil conduct. If we are haunted to the point of obsession by the figure of the psychopathic killer, it is not because we revel in the sadistic and ghastly (though there is some of that, too, built into the archaic depths of the psyche) but rather because, like children who love to hear spooky stories at bedtime, reading or hearing about serial killers is a way of gaining a sense of control over our fears.

  Though there have been plenty of books about serial murder in the past few years, The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers is the first to deal with the phenomenon in all its aspects: historical, biographical, criminological, psychological, and cultural. The entries cover every topic we could conceive of, from Ads and Animal Torture to Zombies and Zoophilia. Readers will notice that some words within each entry are boldfaced; these are key names and concepts that are treated in separate entries of their own.

  For all the genuine horror and revulsion they inspire in us, there’s no point in denying that serial killers exert a dark attraction. They appeal not just to our morbid interest but also to our need to comprehend an ultimate human mystery: how people who seem so ordinary, so much like the rest of us, can possess the hearts and minds of monsters.

  In recognition of the need to confront and explore that “mystery of iniquity” (as Herman Melville describes it), we offer the following pages.

  ADS

  Back in the old days, desperate singles in search of a mate might turn to a professional matchmaker. Nowadays, they are more likely to look in the personals section of the classified ads or subscribe to an Internet dating service. Of course, when it comes to getting anything that people are peddling in newspapers or online—whether it’s a used car or themselves—it pays to take heed of the old warning: Buyer Beware! Those Handsome SWMs and Sensual DWFs who make themselves look and sound so attractive in their digital photos and printed descriptions might turn out to be very different when you meet them in person.

  Occasionally, in fact, they might turn out to be serial killers.

  Using classifieds as a way of snaring potential victims is a ploy that dates back at least as far as the early 1900s. That’s when the infamous American Black Widow, Belle Gunness, lured a string of unwary bachelors into her clutches by placing matrimonial ads in newspapers across the country: “Rich, good-looking widow, young, owner of a large farm, wishes to get in touch with a gentleman of wealth with cultured tastes.” There was a certain amount of misrepresentation in this classified, since Gunness was actually fat, fiftyish, and bulldog-ugly. She wasn’t lying about being a rich widow, though, since she had murdered at least fourteen husbands after separating them from their life savings.

  In France, Gunness’s near contemporary, Henri Landru, known as the “Bluebeard of Paris,” also found his lover-victims through the newspapers. Some of the classifieds were matrimonial ads in which Landru presented himself as a wealthy widower searching for a mate. In others, he pretended to be a used-furniture dealer looking for merchandise. In either case, if the person who responded was a lonely woman of means, Landru would turn up the charm. The results were always the same. The woman’s money would end up in his bank account. The woman herself would end up as a pile of ashes in the stove of his country villa.

  In the late 1950s, a sexual psychopath and bondage nut named Harvey Murray Glatman (see Photographs) was able to procure victims by posing as a professional photographer and placing ads for female models. After luring an unwary woman into his “studio,” Glatman would rape her, truss her up, take pictures of her while she screamed in terror, then strangle her. (Glatman’s case served as the real-life basis for Mary Higgins Clark’s bestselling novel Loves Music, Loves to Dance, which—as the title suggests—deals with the sometimes perilous world of the personals.)

  In more recent times, a vicious sociopath named Harvey Louis Carignan lured young women to their deaths by advertising for employees at the Seattle gas station he managed. Carignan’s MO earned him the nickname the “Want-Ad Killer” (the title of Ann Rule’s 1983 bestselling true-crime book on the subject). At roughly the same time, an Alaskan baker named Robert Hansen—who was ultimately convicted of four savage sex killings, though he was allegedly responsible for seventeen—used the personals page of his local newspaper to attract several of his victims. Hansen, who was married with children, would send his family off on a vacation, then take out a classified, seeking women to “join me in finding what’s around the next bend.” After snaring a victim, he would fly her out to the wilderness in his private plane. Then, after raping her at knifepoint, he would strip off her clothing, give her a head start, and (in a sick, real-life duplication of Richard Connell’s famous short story “The Most Dangerous Game”) stalk her like an animal.

  Even scarier was the wizened cannibal and child killer Albert Fish, who regularly scoured the classifieds in his endless search for victims. In 1928, Fish came across a Situation Wanted ad placed by a young man named Edward Budd, who was looking for a summer job in the country. Masquerading as the owner of a big Long Island farm, the monstrous old man visited the Budd household, intending to lure the youth to an abandoned house and torture him to death. Fish altered his plans when he laid eyes on Edward’s little sister, a beautiful twelve-year-old girl named Grace. It was the little girl who ended up dead, dismembered, and cannibalized—and all because her brother’s innocent ad brought a monster to their door.

  Albert Fish; from 52 Famous Murderers trading cards

  (Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

  Arguably the most bizarre advertising gambit in the annals of psychopathic sex crime occurred in 2002, when a forty-one-year-old German computer technician, Armin Meiwes, posted an Internet ad that read: “Wanted: Well-Built Man for Slaughter and Consumption.” Though it is impossible to conceive of a less enticing come-on, it caught the fancy of a forty-two-year-old microchip designer named Bernd-Jürgen Brandes, who showed up at Meiwes’s door, eager to be butchered. With the victim’s enthusiastic cooperation, Meiwes cut off Brandes’s penis, cooked it, then served it up for the two of them to eat together. He then stabbed Brandes through the neck, chopped up the corpse, froze certain parts for future consumption, and buried the rest (see Cannibalism).

  To describe Herr Meiwes as “disturbed” is clearly an understatement. It must be acknowledged, however, that—in contrast to such wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing as Robert Hansen and Albert Fish—at least he wasn’t guilty of false advertising.

  Advertising for Victims

  In the 1989 film Sea of Love, a serial killer with a seductive line goes trolling for male victims in the classifieds. When a sucker bites, the killer reels him in, then leaves him facedown on the mattress, a bullet in the back of his skull.

  As he did nine years earlier in Cruising, Al Pacino plays a homicide detective who goes undercover to catch the killer. By placing his own ad in the papers, he turns himself into live bait. In the process he plunges into a turbulent affair with Ellen Barkin—who may or may not be the killer.

  A riveting thriller, Sea of Love is especially good at conveying the dangerous undercurrents that run beneath the surface of big-city singles life, where lonely people looking for a good catch sometimes end up
with a barracuda.

  ALLIGATORS

  When it comes to getting rid of human remains, most serial killers prefer to keep things simple, relying on such standbys as shallow graves, basement crawl spaces, river bottoms, and remote, densely wooded areas (see Disposal). Occasionally, however, a serial killer may resort to more exotic expedients.

  Back in the 1930s, for example, a hard-drinking reprobate named Joe Ball ran a seedy roadhouse called (ironically enough) the Sociable Inn on Highway 181 outside Elmsdorf, Texas. Ball installed a cement pond and stocked it with a brood of five full-grown alligators. To keep his pets fat and happy, Ball fed them a diet of horse meat, live dogs, and human body parts—the remains of various female employees he murdered and dismembered. The exact number of his victims is unknown, since Ball went to his death without confessing. When two sheriffs who were investigating the disappearance of a pretty young waitress named Hazel Brown showed up to question the brutish barkeep, he whipped out a pistol from the drawer beneath his cash register and fired a bullet into his heart.

  (Tobe Hooper, the auteur who directed the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, used Ball’s crimes as the basis for his uninspired follow-up, Eaten Alive, a 1977 dud about a psychopathic, scythe-wielding hotel keeper whose guests have an unfortunate tendency to end up in the reptile-infested swamp behind his establishment.)

  The alligator’s first cousin—the West African crocodile—has also been exploited for this nefarious purpose. In the 1920s, Carl Panzram—arguably the most unregenerate murderer in the annals of American crime—journeyed to Portuguese West Africa as a merchant seaman. Making his way down the coast, he hired a canoe and the services of a half-dozen locals to help him hunt crocodiles. Panzram ended up shooting all six of the Africans in the back and feeding their corpses to the ravenous reptiles.