The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read online

  In the century since the Durrant case, high-profile serial killers have continued to attract almost as many groupies as rock stars. While some of these murderers have possessed a certain superficial charm (like Bundy) others have been seriously repellent (John Wayne Gacy, for example) or just plain over-the-top bizarre (like Richard the “Night Stalker” Ramirez). But no matter how loathsome or grotesque the killer, there have always been women who considered him a dreamboat. Even Ed Gein—a dimwitted, middle-aged necrophiliac with the approximate sexual magnetism of Gomer Pyle—received frequent letters from women begging for locks of his hair.

  One of the most startling examples of this strange erotic phenomenon came to light only recently with the publication of the book Love Letters to Adolf Hitler, culled from the collection of a man named William Emker. Shortly after the end of World War II, Emker—then a U.S. Army officer—was searching through Hitler’s bombed-out headquarters when he came upon a trove of letters written to the Führer by female admirers. “Sweetest love,” one typical letter begins, “favorite of my heart, my dearest, my truest and hottest beloved. I could kiss you a thousand times and still not be satisfied. My love for you is endless, so tender, so hot and so complete.” Emker found thousands of missives like this one, addressed to “My darling, sugar-sweet Adolf,” “My beloved Führer,” or sometimes simply “Dear Adi.” The fact that the greatest Mass Murderer of the twentieth century could stimulate such overheated fantasies only confirms the disquieting point: there is something about monsters that just turns certain women on.

  Fritz Haarmann

  One of the most infamous lust slayers of the twentieth century, Haarmann was born to a working-class couple in Hanover, Germany, in 1879. He was a sullen and slow-witted child whose favorite pastime was dressing up like a girl. At seventeen, he was committed to an asylum after being arrested for child molesting. Six months later, he escaped to Switzerland and made his way back to Hanover.

  For a while, he attempted to lead a respectable life, taking a job in a cigar factory, getting engaged to a young woman. But this period of relative normalcy didn’t last. Deserting his fiancée, he ran off and joined the army. When he returned to Hanover in 1903, he launched into a life of petty crime. Throughout his twenties, he was in and out of jail for offenses ranging from being a pickpocket to burglary. 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 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, Haarmann was shipped back to prison.

  It was after his release nine months later that Haarmann began his career of unparalleled depravity. Living in Hanover’s seamy Old Quarter, he fell under the thrall of a homosexual prostitute named Hans Grans. Together, the two set about preying on the young male refugees who were flooding into the war-ravaged city. Though Haarmann was ultimately charged with twenty-seven murders, it seems likely he was responsible for as many as fifty. The method he employed to kill his victims was always the same.

  After luring the hungry boy to his room, Haarmann would feed him a meal, then overpower him (often with Grans’s assistance) and fall upon the boy’s throat, chewing through the flesh until he had nearly separated the head from the body. Generally, he would experience a sexual climax while battening on the boy.

  Afterward, Haarmann and Grans would butcher the body and dispose of the flesh by peddling it as black-market beef. The victim’s clothes would also be sold, and the inedible portions of the body dumped in a canal.

  Fritz Haarmann; from Bloody Visions trading cards

  (© & ™ 1995 M. H. Price and Shel-Tone Publications. All rights reserved.)

  As the number of missing boys mounted, police suspicion began to fall on Haarmann. A woman who had purchased one of his black-market “steaks” became convinced it was human flesh and turned it over to the police. In the summer of 1924, several skulls and a sackful of bones were found on the banks of the canal. Searching Haarmann’s rooms, detectives discovered bundles of boys’ clothing. The landlady’s son was wearing a coat—given to him by Haarmann—that belonged to one of the missing boys.

  In the end, Haarmann confessed. He was tried in 1924, found guilty, and sentenced to death. While awaiting execution, the “Vampire of Hanover” (as he’d been dubbed by the press) produced a written confession in which he described, with undisguised relish, the pleasure he had derived from his atrocities. At his own request, he was beheaded with a sword in the city marketplace. Afterward, his brain was removed from his skull and shipped to Goettingen University for study. Unfortunately, nothing came of this effort. Seventy years later, science is still no closer to comprehending the evil of monsters like Fritz Haarmann.

  Actor Götz George turns in a chillingly persuasive performance as Haarmann in the 1995 German art film Der Totmacher (The Deathmaker). With a screenplay based on the actual transcripts of Haarmann’s psychiatric interviews, the movie (available on DVD) is confined entirely to a stark interrogation room where, shortly before his execution, the wild-eyed lust killer is being examined by an impassive shrink. As Haarmann leers, rants, blubbers, and boasts, a terrifying portrait of homicidal madness emerges. Don’t look for fast-paced action or hardcore gore. The movie is all talk—though of a thoroughly compelling kind. Think My Dinner with Andre meets The Silence of the Lambs.

  HEAD INJURIES

  When faced with a phenomenon as incomprehensibly evil as serial murder, it’s natural for people to search for some kind of rational explanation. After all, if researchers could only identify the sources of serial murder, then it might be possible to come up with a cure—or at least identify potential psychos before they have a chance to hurt anybody. In their urgent efforts to solve this problem, criminologists have come up with all sorts of theories, from “negative parenting” to screwed-up hormones (see Causes). Some specialists put the blame on “juvenile cerebral trauma”—or, in plain English, getting whacked on the head as a kid. The brain damage done by such an injury can, according to these experts, turn people into serial killers.

  It’s certainly true that a high percentage of serial killers have suffered head injuries during their childhoods. Earle Leonard Nelson, for example—the notorious “Gorilla Man” who murdered almost two dozen women in the mid-1920s—was thrown off his bike by a trolley when he was ten and lay comatose for nearly a week. He finally recuperated, but his behavior (which wasn’t entirely normal to begin with) became even more bizarre from then on. The serial rapist and killer Bobby Joe Long—convicted in 1984 on nine counts of first-degree murder—must have set some kind of record for head injuries. At five he was knocked unconscious in a fall from a swing. At six he had a bike accident that sent him flying headfirst into a parked car. At seven he fell off a pony and onto his skull. From that point on, he managed to avoid any more head traumas—until he reached his early twenties, when he got into a motorcycle accident, slamming headfirst into the asphalt with such force that his helmet was crushed. These are only two of many examples. The list of head-battered psychos includes some of the most infamous names in the annals of serial murder—John Wayne Gacy, Richard Speck, Charles Manson, and Henry Lucas.

  Unfortunately, the cerebral trauma theory of serial murder has the same limitations as other reductive explanations. Head injuries are an everyday fact of childhood life. Millions of kids fall off bikes and swings and seesaws and land on their heads. But only a tiny fraction turn out to be psychopathic killers. On the other hand, combined with other predisposing factors, a serious head trauma may well contribute to incipient psychopathology.

  So—can serial murder be caused by something as simple as a knock on the head? Probably not.

  But it sure doesn’t help.

  Gary Heidnik

  The average tabloid headline is the printed equivalent of a sideshow barker’s pitch—a shri
ll, attention-grabbing come-on that tends to promise much more than it can possibly deliver by way of lurid thrills. On rare occasions, however, even the most sensational headlines fall short of the terrible truth. Such was the case on March 26, 1987, when papers from coast to coast trumpeted front-page phrases like “Madman’s Sex Orgy” and “Torture Dungeon.” Titillating as these headlines were, they couldn’t begin to convey the shocking reality of Gary Heidnik’s house of horrors.

  Alerted by a frantic 911 call from a woman named Josefina Rivera—who claimed that she had been held captive for months in Heidnik’s cellar—the cops entered the suspect’s rundown home in North Philadelphia and found a scene that might have been dreamed up by the Marquis de Sade. In the dank and squalid basement, two naked women were shackled to pipes. Another sat quaking in a fetid pit that had been dug in the earthen floor. All three had been beaten, starved, tortured, raped.

  Eventually, authorities would learn that Heidnik had abducted and imprisoned a total of six young women. Josefina Rivera had been lucky enough to escape. Two others had died. Heidnik had killed one by forcing her into the pit, filling it with water, then electrocuting her with a live wire. The other victim had perished after Heidnik left her dangling by the wrists for a week. He had dismembered her body, ground up some of her flesh in a food processor, and mixed it with dog food. Then he had forced the other captives to devour this unspeakable mush. Searching Heidnik’s house, police discovered a charred human rib in the oven and a forearm in the freezer. Not surprisingly, Heidnik turned out to be a former mental patient and convicted sex offender with a history of preying on mentally retarded black women. In spite of his flagrant psychopathology, he was something of a financial whiz, who had parlayed a modest investment into a half-million-dollar fortune. As one pundit put it, Heidnik was an expert in “stocks and bondage.” He owned several expensive cars, including a Rolls-Royce. He had managed to avoid paying taxes on his income by founding his own church and appointing himself bishop.

  Aspiring to the role of Old Testament patriarch, he had begun kidnapping women in late 1986, intending to assemble a personal harem of ten women who would provide him with a whole tribe of offspring. “We’ll be just one big happy family,” Heidnik told his captives, even as he was busily shoving screwdrivers into their ears, raping each one in turn while the others were forced to watch, and making them into unwitting cannibals.

  At his arraignment, Heidnik offered a novel defense, claiming that the women were already there when he moved into the house. For some reason, the judges failed to believe him. He was convicted of two counts of murder and sentenced to death. While in prison, he seemed to share the opinion of many people that his life was not worth saving. During the eleven years he languished on death row, he made several attempts to kill himself. On July 6, 1999, prison personnel finished the job via lethal injection.

  “Any person who puts dog food and human remains in a food processor and calls it a gourmet meal and feeds it to others is out to lunch.”

  ATTORNEY CHUCK PERUTO JR.,

  referring to his client Gary Heidnik

  The Hillside Stranglers

  When the corpses started piling up—young women who had been tortured, raped, and strangled—the papers blared the news: a serial killer was on the loose. They dubbed him the “Hillside Strangler” because the bulk of the bodies were deposited on hillsides around the Los Angeles area. But the newspapers were wrong. The grisly crimes weren’t the work of a serial killer.

  They were the demented teamwork of two serial killers.

  The first to die was a black prostitute, whose naked corpse was dumped near Forest Lawn Cemetery in mid-October 1977. Two weeks later, the body of a fifteen-year-old female runaway turned up in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale. Over the next few months, 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 a variety of ways. One had been burned with an electric cord. Another had been injected with cleaning solution. Yet another had been killed with voluptuous cruelty—strangled to the point of unconsciousness, then revived, then strangled again, and so on until her tormentor finally put her to death.

  From early on in their investigation, police suspected that two killers were involved, since semen found inside the victims indicated that the women had been raped (often both vaginally and anally) by different men. That suspicion was confirmed when an eyewitness caught sight of two men forcing a young woman into their car.

  As a rule, serial killers keep murdering until they are caught. In February 1978, however—four months after they started—the Hillside Stranglings abruptly ceased. The killers might well have gotten away with their atrocities—if it hadn’t been for the twisted compulsions of one member of the unspeakable duo.

  One year after the last of the Los Angeles murders, two young women were raped and strangled in Bellingham, Washington. Suspicion immediately lighted on a twenty-six-year-old security guard named Kenneth Bianchi, who had recently moved to Bellingham from Los Angeles. Before long, police had ferreted out the truth—Bianchi and his forty-four-year-old cousin, a brutish sociopath named Angelo Buono, were the Hillside Stranglers.

  Though Buono led an outwardly respectable life as the owner of a successful auto upholstery business, he was also a sadistic pimp with a long history of violence against women. (He allegedly once sodomized his wife in front of their children after she refused to have sex with him.) Bianchi was a small-time con artist who had moved in with his cousin after relocating from Rochester, New York, in 1976. Separately, neither one had ever been known to commit murder—but together, they brought out the most monstrous impulses in each other. (See Folie à Deux.)

  For a while, Bianchi had authorities believing that he suffered from a split personality. Ostensibly, it was his evil alter ego, “Steve,” who had participated in the murders. But a psychiatric expert finally established that “Steve”—a sadistic sex killer who emerged under hypnosis—was a ruse.

  In the end—in order to avoid a death sentence—Bianchi agreed to plead guilty to the murders and to testify against his cousin, who was convicted after a highly protracted trial. Both Hillside Stranglers are currently serving life sentences.

  HISTORY

  Reviewing the history of serial murder is a tricky proposition, since it’s hard to know exactly where to begin. On the one hand, serial killing seems like a uniquely modern phenomenon, a symptom of the various ills afflicting late-twentieth-century America—alienation, social decay, sexual violence, rampant crime, etc. On the other hand, the savage, sadistic impulses that underlie serial murder are undoubtedly as old as humankind.

  Any historical survey of serial murder would have to begin at least as far back as ancient Rome, when the emperor Caligula was busily indulging his taste for torture and perversion. During the Middle Ages, depraved Aristocrats like Gilles de Rais (the original “Bluebeard”) and Elizabeth Bathory (the “Blood Countess”) fed their unholy lusts on the blood of hundreds of victims, while psychopathic peasants like Gilles Gamier and Peter Stubbe butchered their victims with such bestial ferocity that they were believed to be literal werewolves (see Lycanthropy). Other homicidal monsters of the premodern era include the Scottish cannibal Sawney Beane (see Clans) and Vlad the Impaler, the real-life Dracula (see Vampires).

  Most crime buffs agree that the first serial sex killer of the modern era was Jack the Ripper, whose crimes—the ghastly slaughter of five London streetwalkers—sent shock waves throughout Victorian England. One hundred years later, the serial slaying of prostitutes has become such a commonplace activity that (to cite just one of many examples) when, in July 1995, a former warehouse clerk named William Lester Suff was convicted of killing thirteen hookers in Southern California, the media barely noted the event. That shift sums up the history of serial murder in the twentieth century: its appalling transformation from a monstrous anomaly into an everyday horror.

>   Jack the Ripper’s American contemporary, H. H. Holmes, who confessed to twenty-seven murders in the late 1890s, is regarded as Americas first documented serial killer. Two full decades would pass before another one appeared on the scene: the unknown maniac dubbed the “Axeman of New Orleans,” who terrorized that city between 1918 and 1919 (see Axe Murderers).

  Though it was a violent and lawless decade, the Roaring Twenties produced only two authentic serial killers: Earle Leonard Nelson—the serial strangler nicknamed the “Gorilla Murderer”—and the viciously depraved Carl Panzram. Serial killers were equally few and far between in the 1930s and 1940s. The cannibalistic pedophile Albert Fish and the anonymous psycho known as the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” (aka the “Cleveland Torso Killer”) are the only known serial killers of Depression-era America. The roster of 1940s serial killers is also limited to a pair of names: Jake Bird, a homicidal burglar who confessed to a dozen axe murders, and William Heirens, famous for his desperate, Lipstick-scrawled plea: “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”

  It wasn’t until the post-World War II period that serial murder became rampant in this country. Its shadow was already beginning to spread during the sunny days of the Eisenhower era. The 1950s witnessed the depredations of Wisconsin ghoul Ed Gein; the voyeuristic horrors of Californian Harvey Murray Glatman (who photographed his bound, terrorized victims before murdering them); the crimes of homicidal scam artists Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez (the “Lonely Hearts Killers”); and the bloody rampage of Charles Starkweather, who slaughtered a string of victims as he hot-rodded across the Nebraska badlands.