The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read online

  Furthermore, though Stevenson tells us that Hyde has a history of vile and violent deeds, he doesn’t appear to be a homicidal maniac. Rather, he is the personification of the nasty, lawless impulses that lurk beneath our civilized veneers: what Sigmund Freud called the Id. Indeed, in Stevenson’s story, Edward Hyde commits only a single murder—the clubbing of a distinguished old gentleman named Sir Danvers Carew.

  In short, though serial killers like Bundy and Gacy are often described as Jekyll-and-Hydes, they are really far worse. Compared to them, Stevenson’s bestial creation was a pussycat.

  JOKES

  Serial murder is no laughing matter. But that hasn’t stopped people from making fun of it—any more than it’s kept them from swapping sick jokes about other lurid and sensational subjects, from O. J. Simpson to Lorena Bobbitt, the Virginia housewife who, in 1993, sliced off her husband’s penis while he slept because she was unhappy with their sex life. The latter, in fact, costarred in this widely circulated rib tickler with one of America’s premier serial killers, the late Jeff “The Chef” Dahmer:

  What did Jeffrey Dahmer say to Lorena Bobbitt?

  “You going to eat that?”

  Dahmer’s cannibalistic crimes inspired a host of sick jokes. One day, for example, his mother came over for dinner. “Jeffrey,” she complained, halfway through the meal, “I really don’t like your friends.” “Then just eat the vegetables, Ma,” Dahmer replied.

  The phenomenon of serial-killer humor appears to have originated in relation to another celebrity psycho who (like Dahmer) resided in Wisconsin: Edward Gein. Not long after Gein’s atrocities came to light, jokes about the “Plainfield Ghoul” began circulating throughout the Midwest. These crude riddles—known as “Geiners”—drew the attention of a psychologist named George Arndt, who published an article about them in a psychiatric journal. Among Arndt’s examples were the following:

  Why did Ed Gein’s girlfriend stop going out with him?

  Because he was such a cut-up.

  What did Ed Gein say to the sheriff who arrested him?

  “Have a heart.”

  Why won’t anyone play poker with Ed Gein?

  He might come up with a good hand.

  Why do serial-killer jokes exist? Are they an expression of pure callousness and cruelty? Probably not. Like other gross and nasty jokes, serial-killer humor offers an outlet for our fears—in the same way that a child walking past a graveyard will whistle a lively tune to calm his nerves. It’s a way of warding off terror with levity. As the saying goes, we laugh to keep from crying.

  “A Visit from Old Ed”

  Woodcut portrait of Ed Gein by Chris Pelletiere

  Sick jokes about Ed Gein weren’t the only kind of black humor circulating in the months following the discovery of his crimes. Researching local reaction to Gein’s atrocities, psychologist George Arndt recorded this ghoulish parody of Clement Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas”:

  ’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the shed,

  All creatures were stirring, even old Ed.

  The bodies were hung from the rafters above,

  While Eddie was searching for another new love.

  He went to Wautoma for a Plainfield deal,

  Looking for love and also a meal.

  When what to his hungry eyes should appear,

  But old Mary Hogan in her new red brassiere.

  Her cheeks were like roses when kissed by the sun.

  And she let out a scream at the sight of Ed’s gun.

  Old Ed pulled the trigger and Mary fell dead,

  He took his old axe and cut off her head.

  He then took his hacksaw and cut her in two,

  One half for hamburger, the other for stew.

  And laying a hand aside of her heel,

  Up to the rafters went his next meal.

  He sprang to his truck, to the graveyard he flew,

  The hours were short and much work must he do.

  He looked for the grave where the fattest one laid,

  And started in digging with shovel and spade.

  He shoveled and shoveled and shoveled some more,

  Till finally he reached the old coffin door.

  He took out a crowbar and pried open the box,

  He was not only clever but sly as a fox.

  As he picked up the body and cut off her head,

  He could tell by the smell that the old girl was dead.

  He filled in the grave by the moonlight above,

  And once more old Ed had found a new love.

  “He had a bizarre sense of humor.”

  One of Jeffrey Dahmer’s former schoolmates

  JUVENILES

  Little boys who grow up to be serial killers tend to be extremely sadistic, but the targets of their cruelty are almost always small animals, not other children (see Animal Torture). An exception to this rule was the juvenile psychopath Jesse Pomeroy, one of the most unsettling criminals of nineteenth-century America.

  Pomeroy suffered a difficult boyhood. He was raised in hardship by a widowed mother, who scraped together a meager living as a seamstress in South Boston. And he was cursed with a grotesque appearance—his mouth was disfigured by a harelip, and one eye was covered with a ghastly white film. Still, his contemporaries weren’t inclined to attribute his atrocities to childhood trauma. To them, he was simply a natural-born fiend.

  Little is known about Pomeroy’s early life until he reached the age of eleven—at which point, he began preying on other children. Between the winter of 1871 and the following fall, he attacked seven little boys, luring them to a secluded spot, then stripping, binding, and torturing them. His first victims were subjected to savage beatings. Later, Pomeroy took to slashing his victims with a pocketknife or stabbing them with needles.

  Arrested at the end of 1872, Pomeroy was sentenced to ten years in a reformatory but managed to win probation after only eighteen months by putting on a convincing show of rehabilitation. No sooner had he been released, however, than he reverted to his former ways. But by this time, the teenage psychopath wasn’t content merely to inflict injury. At this point, he was homicidal.

  In March 1874 he kidnapped ten-year-old Mary Curran, then mutilated and killed her. A month later, he abducted four-year-old Horace Mullen, took him to a remote stretch of marshland, and slashed him so savagely with a pocketknife that the boy was nearly decapitated.

  When Mullen’s body was found, suspicion immediately lighted on Pomeroy, who was picked up with the bloody weapon in his pocket and mud on his boots that matched the soggy ground of the murder site. When police showed Pomeroy the victim’s horribly mutilated body and asked if he had killed the little boy, Pomeroy simply said, “I suppose I did.” It wasn’t until July that Mary Curran’s corpse was found, when laborers uncovered her decomposed remains while excavating the earthen cellar of the Pomeroys’ house.

  Pomeroy’s 1874 trial was a nationwide sensation. Moral reformers blamed his crimes on the lurid “dime novels” of the day (very much like those modern-day bluenoses who attribute the current crime rate to gangsta rap and violent videogames). Unfortunately, their position was undermined by Pomeroy’s insistence that he had never read a book in his life.

  In spite of his age, Pomeroy was condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment with a harsh proviso: the so-called boy-fiend would serve out his sentence in solitary. And indeed, it wasn’t until forty-one years later that he was finally allowed limited contact with other inmates. He died in confinement in 1932, at the age of seventy-two.

  Pomeroy makes a brief but memorable appearance in Caleb Carr’s bestselling 1994 novel, The Alienist, when the titular hero—seeking insight into the mind of an unknown serial killer—travels to Sing Sing to interview the former boy-fiend and finds him locked in a punishment cell, his head encased in a cagelike “collar cap.”

  During the late 1990s—a century after Pomeroy’s crimes—America was shocked by a rash of horr
endous killings committed by juvenile sociopaths. In Pearl, Mississippi, sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham killed three schoolmates and wounded seven others after knifing his own mother to death. In West Paducah, Kentucky, fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal gunned down three fellow students and wounded five others at an early-morning prayer meeting. In Springfield, Oregon, fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his parents, then shot twenty-seven students, killing two. In Jonesboro, Arkansas, Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson—ages eleven and thirteen—set off a fire alarm to draw their classmates outside, then opened fire, killing four students and a teacher.

  The most notorious of these incidents occurred in April 1999, when seventeen-year-old Dylan Klebold and eighteen-year-old Eric Harris massacred their schoolmates and teachers at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, leaving thirteen dead and twenty-five wounded. Like others of their ilk, however, Klebold and Harris were not serial killers but Mass Murderers: suicidal rampage killers so full of rage and despair that they chose to end their own lives after inflicting a terrible vengeance on the world they had come to find unbearable.

  “Despite both the shackles on the collar cap, Jesse had a book in his hand and was quietly reading. . . . ‘Pretty hard to get an education in this place,’ Jesse said, after the door had closed. ‘But I’m trying. I figure maybe that’s where I went wrong—no education. . . ’ ” “Laszlo nodded. ‘Admirable. I see you’re wearing a collar cap.’

  “Jesse laughed. ‘Ahh—-they claim I burned a guy’s face with a cigarette while he was sleeping. . . . But I ask you—’ He turned my way, the milky eye floating aimlessly in his head. ‘Does that sound like me?’ “

  From Caleb Carr’s The Alienist

  Edmund Kemper

  In August 1963, when Edmund Kemper was fifteen years old, he stepped up behind his grandmother and casually shot her in the back of the head. After stabbing her a few times for good measure, he calmly waited for his grandfather to return from work, then gunned him down, too. His motive? “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma,” he explained to the police.

  In retrospect, this homicidal outburst wasn’t really very surprising. From his earliest years, Kemper had been what his mother euphemistically described as a “real weirdo.” One of his favorite childhood games was to pretend that he was being asphyxiated in the gas chamber. He also enjoyed decapitating his sisters’ dolls.

  By the time he was ten, he had graduated to Animal Torture, chopping up a cat with a machete and stashing the dismembered parts in his closet. He buried another cat alive, then—after exhuming the corpse—cut off its head, which he proudly displayed in his bedroom.

  Deemed mentally unsound after the double murder of his grandparents, Kemper was committed to a maximum-security mental hospital in 1963.

  Just six years later, he was released. Physically, he had undergone a striking change, having grown into a hulking, six-foot-nine, three-hundred-pounder. Psychologically, however, he was the same as ever—a sadistic psychopath obsessed with necrophiliac fantasies.

  Two years after his discharge from the mental hospital, Kemper picked up a pair of hitchhiking coeds, drove them to an isolated spot, and stabbed them to death. After smuggling their bodies back home, he amused himself for several hours with his “trophies”—photographing them, dissecting them, having sex with their viscera. Eventually, he bagged and buried the body parts and tossed the heads into a ravine.

  Four months later, he abducted another teenage hitchhiker, strangled her, raped her corpse, then took it home for more fun and games. The same pattern would repeat itself with three more female victims, all of them hitchhiking students. Though Kemper clearly enjoyed the killing, it was the postmortem perversions that gave him the most satisfaction. He decapitated all of the women and enjoyed having sex with their headless bodies. He also liked to dissect the corpses and save various “keepsakes.” On at least two occasions, he cannibalized his victims, slicing the flesh from their legs and cooking it in a macaroni casserole.

  By January 1973, Santa Cruz authorities were aware that a serial murderer—dubbed the “Coed Killer”—was on the loose, though they never suspected Kemper, who, in fact, had befriended a number of local police officers. Several months later, on Easter weekend, Kemper committed matricide, hammering in the skull of his sleeping mother, then cutting off her head. After raping the decapitated body, he ripped out her larynx and jammed it down the garbage disposal. (“That seemed appropriate,” he would later tell the police, “as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.”) Afterward, he telephoned his mother’s best friend and invited her over for dinner. When she arrived, he crushed her skull with a brick and subjected her corpse to the usual postmortem outrages.

  On Easter Sunday, Kemper got in a car and headed east. When he reached Colorado, he telephoned his pals on the Santa Cruz police force and confessed. Convicted of eight counts of murder, he was asked what he thought a fitting punishment would be. “Death by torture,” was his reasonable reply. Instead, he was sentenced to life in prison.

  Q. “What do you think when you see a pretty girl walking down the street?”

  A. “One side of me says, ‘I’d like to talk to her, date her.’ The other side of me says, ‘I wonder how her head would look on a stick?’ “

  EDMUND KEMPER,

  during a magazine interview

  KIDNEY

  This vital organ has a special significance for crime buffs, since it figures prominently in the case of the most famous serial killer of all time.

  On the evening of September 30, 1888, the anonymous madman who would become known as Jack the Ripper committed two atrocities in quick succession. First, he slit the throat of a Swedish prostitute named Elizabeth Stride. Then—after being interrupted by an approaching wagon—he accosted a forty-three-year-old prostitute named Catherine Eddowes and lured her into a deserted square, where he slashed her windpipe and savaged her body, removing her left kidney.

  Two weeks later—on October 16—a parcel arrived at the home of George Lusk, head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, a group of local tradesmen who had organized to assist in the search for the killer. The parcel contained a ghastly surprise—a chunk of kidney (with an inch of renal artery still attached), accompanied by an equally appalling letter addressed to Lusk: “Sir 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 I took it out if you only wate a whil longer.” It was signed “Catch me when you can Mister Lusk.”

  The sender’s address on the upper-right-hand corner of the letter said simply: “From Hell.”

  In the weeks since the Ripper first struck, the police had been inundated with letters from cranks claiming to be the killer, and at first, there were many who declared that this latest communication was nothing but a depraved hoax. The kidney, they proclaimed, had either been taken from a dog or removed from a dissecting room. Examination by a specialist from the London Hospital Museum, however, revealed not only that the kidney was human but that it had come from a middle-aged alcoholic woman who suffered (as did Catherine Eddowes) from Bright’s disease. Moreover, the inch of renal artery still attached to the preserved piece of kidney precisely matched the severed arterial remains in Eddowes’s eviscerated body.

  There seemed little doubt that the ghastly human artifact sent to George Lusk was the real thing—or that the note that accompanied it was an authentic communication from the Whitechapel Butcher. To this day, the “From Hell” letter is regarded as the only apparently genuine message ever sent by the legendary killer.

  KILLER COUPLES

  Can a woman live with a man for many years without knowing he is a homicidal sex maniac? Apparently so. Some of the most infamous serial killers in history—among them Albert “Boston Strangler” DeSalvo, Peter Kürten, and Andrei Chikatilo—were married to women who had no inkling of their husbands’ sinister secret lives. It’s possible to feel sorry for
such women, who eventually discover, to their uttermost dismay, that they’ve been mated to monsters.

  There is, however, another type of woman who—far from inspiring sympathy—elicits only loathing and disbelief. This is the wife or lover of a serial killer who is not only aware of the horrors her man commits but also actively participates in them.

  Perhaps the most infamous of this breed is Myra Hindley. A shy, twenty-three-year-old typist from Manchester, England, Hindley led an unremarkable life until she hooked up with Ian Brady, a psychopathic creep with a taste for sadomasochistic porn and Nazi paraphernalia. Before long, Hindley was dressing up in S.S. regalia and posing for Brady’s obscene photos—a kinky but relatively harmless pastime compared to the horrors that followed. Beginning in July 1963, the perverted pair murdered a series of children, then buried the corpses in the desolate moors outside Manchester. In the case of one of their victims—a pretty ten-year-old girl named Leslie Ann Downey—the couple forced the child to pose for pornographic pictures, then tape-recorded her tormented pleas before killing her. When the tape was played at the 1966 trial of the Moors Murderers, spectators and jurors alike wept uncontrollably.

  Ian Brady and Myra Hindley; from Bloody Visions trading cards

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

  Like Brady and Hindley, some deadly duos are unmarried lovers who enjoy serial murder the way other couples savor candle-lit dinners and romantic weekends at a country inn. The “Lonely Hearts Killers,” Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, committed an indeterminate number of homicides in the late 1940s (they confessed to three but were suspected of twenty), including the murder of a two-year-old girl. Right to the bitter end, Beck persisted in seeing their vile affair as a storybook romance, vowing undying love for her sleazeball companion even as she was being led to the chair.