The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read online

  Carol Bundy took romantic devotion to even more hideous lengths. In the early 1980s, Bundy was the live-in lover of Douglas Clark, a psychopathic killer of prostitutes and necrophiliac dubbed the “Sunset Strip Slayer.” Among his various pleasures, Clark liked to lure young women into his car, shoot them in the temple while they were fellating him, then carry their decapitated heads home for further fun and games. On at least one occasion, Bundy helped out by playing beautician—applying lipstick and makeup to one of the heads and giving it a pretty hairdo. As soon as she was done, her boyfriend took the head into the bathroom and used it for oral sex. “We had a lot of fun with her,” Bundy later confessed. “I made her up like a Barbie.”

  In the early 1990s, Barbie was invoked again in the case of a killer couple. Only this time, the doll’s name was connected not to a victim but to one of the perpetrators.

  Known as the “Ken and Barbie” killers because of their golden good looks, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were a Canadian husband-wife team, perfectly matched in their mutual depravity. Their first victim was Homolka’s own fifteen-year-old sister, Tammy. In December 1990, after a Christmas Eve dinner in the Homolka home, Paul plied the teenager with tranquilizer-laced drinks. Once she was out cold, he videotaped Karla as she performed oral sex on her little sister. Bernardo then raped the young girl while Karla held a drug-soaked cloth over Tammy’s mouth to keep her unconscious. Unfortunately, the drug—an animal sedative called halothane stolen from the veterinary clinic where Karla worked—caused the girl to throw up and choke to death on her own vomit.

  In the following two years, the monstrously depraved pair kidnapped and videotaped the rape, sexual torture, and murder of two more Ontario teenagers: fifteen-year-old Kirsten French and fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahaffy, who was strangled by Bernardo with an electrical cord while she clutched a teddy bear Homolka had given her for comfort.

  Eventually, the pair was arrested. Bernardo was sent to prison for life. In exchange for her full cooperation, Homolka received a lenient sentence. To the outrage of many of her countrymen, she was released in July 2005, after serving twelve years for her role in the atrocities.

  There are other cases of husbands and wives who share a taste for serial murder—couples who add spice to their marriage by indulging in unspeakable crime. Between 1978 and 1980, Charlene Gallego helped procure teenage victims for her sadistic husband, Gerald, by luring them into his car with the promise of marijuana. She would then sit in the front seat and watch while he raped, sodomized, and beat them to death with a hammer. In 1992, the British couple Fred and Rosemary West were charged with the grisly torture-murder of ten young women—including their own seventeen-year-old daughter.

  The monstrous Mrs. West, however, is no longer part of a killer couple. She became a widow on New Year’s Day when her abominable mate hanged himself in his jail cell.

  The “Honeymoon Killers”

  Martha Beck; from Bloody Visions trading cards

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

  The loathsome love story of Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez made it to the screen in the 1970 sleeper The Honeymoon Killers, starring Shirley Stoler and Tony LoBianco. Writer-director Leonard Kastle does an outstanding job of capturing the creepy essence of this repugnant romance. In spite (or perhaps because) of its cheapness, this black-and-white low-budget chiller is extremely effective—just watching it makes you feel vaguely unclean.

  A Couple of Crazy Kids

  Portrait of Charles Starkweather by Chris Pelletiere

  Charlie “Little Red” Starkweather—a nineteen-year-old garbage collector from Lincoln, Nebraska—saw himself as a romantic young rebel like his teen idol, James Dean. In reality, he was a sociopathic punk with a grudge against everyone in the world except his fourteen-year-old sweetheart, Caril Ann Fugate. On December 1, 1957, Starkweather knocked over a gas station in Lincoln, abducted the twenty-one-year-old attendant, drove him out to the countryside, and gunned him down in cold blood.

  That was just a warm-up for the most notorious murder spree of the 1950s.

  Seven weeks later, Charlie went to visit Caril, who hadn’t come home yet from school. Her mother—who had a justifiably low opinion of Starkweather—let him know what she thought of him. Charlie shot her and her husband to death with his trusty .22-caliber rifle. Caril arrived home just as her psycho boyfriend was choking her baby sister to death by ramming the rifle barrel down her throat. After Caril tacked a note to the front door—“Stay a Way. Every Body is Sick With the Flu”—the loathsome lovebirds settled in to watch TV, pig out on junk food, and screw.

  When the food ran low and suspicious relatives began coming round, the pair made off in Charlie’s jalopy. Stopping at a local farmhouse, they shot both the seventy-year-old owner and his dog, then hitched a ride with two high school sweethearts, Robert Jensen and Carol King. After abducting them at gunpoint, Charlie killed the boy, then raped the girl and shot her. In an apparent fit of jealousy, Caril reportedly mutilated the dead girl’s genitals with a hunting knife.

  Heading back to Lincoln, they invaded the home of a wealthy businessman, C. Lauer Ward, where Charlie tortured, raped, and killed Mrs. Ward and the fifty-one-year-old housemaid. After breaking the neck of the family dog, Charlie settled down to wait for Mr. Ward to return from work, blasting him as he stepped over the threshold.

  Escaping in Ward’s limousine, the pair headed for Washington state. By then, a 1,200-man posse was hunting for the killer couple. Deciding to switch vehicles, they stopped outside Douglas, Wyoming, where Charlie shot a salesman named Merle Collison as he dozed in his car. Charlie was wrestling the corpse from behind the steering wheel when a passing motorist stopped and began to grapple with the little killer. Starkweather managed to leap into the limo and roar away just as the sheriffs arrived. Leading them on a high-speed chase, he surrendered after being grazed by a police bullet. The twenty-six-day murder spree, which left ten people dead, was over. Charlie was electrocuted on June 24, 1959. Caril was sentenced to life but was paroled in 1977.

  Sordid as it was in reality, their story contained enough seductive ingredients—doomed young outlaw lovers on the lam—to give it romantic appeal. It has been told and retold in various forms, from Bruce Springsteen’s song “Nebraska” to Terrence Malick’s 1973 cult film, Badlands, to the 2004 novel Outside Valentine by Liza Ward (whose own grandparents were among the victims of the sociopathic young pair).

  KRAFFT-EBING

  Anyone who thinks that serial murder is strictly a modern-day phenomenon will be quickly disabused of that notion by a glance at Psychopathia Sexualis, the classic nineteenth-century text on sexual deviation. Its author was Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), a distinguished German physician who was regarded as the most important neuropsychiatrist of his day.

  Krafft-Ebing’s massive compendium covers every known perversion, from foot fetishism to Necrophilia. For the student of serial murder, the most interesting portions are the case histories of notorious lust murderers. Krafft-Ebing covers all the big-name sex killers of the nineteenth century, including Jack the Ripper and Joseph Vacher. He also discusses a number of lesser-known, but seriously alarming, psychopaths, such as the English clerk “Alton” who—after dismembering a child—made the following entry in his personal diary: “Killed to-day a young girl; it was fine and hot.”

  Another obscure but horrifying case recorded by Krafft-Ebing is that of “a certain Gruyo, aged forty-one, with a blameless past life, [who] strangled six women in the course of ten years. They were almost all public prostitutes and quite old. After the strangling, he tore out their intestines and kidneys through the vagina. Some of the victims he violated before killing, others, on account of the occurrence of impotence, he did not. He set about his horrible deeds with such care that he remained undetected for ten years.”

  Krafft-Ebing’s pioneering work makes it shockingly clear that though serial slaughter is unquestionabl
y on the rise, the crime itself has always been with us.

  “I opened her breast and with a knife cut through the fleshy parts of the body. Then I arranged the body as a butcher does beef, and hacked it with an axe into pieces. . . 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.”

  Lust murderer Andreas Bichel, as quoted by Professor Richard von Krafft-Ebing

  Peter Kürten

  In his own words, Peter Kürten aspired to become “the most celebrated criminal of all time.” He didn’t quite make it—other criminals are more famous, including his role model, Jack the Ripper. Still, though Kürten fell short of that goal, he can lay claim to another distinction. In a century that has produced a slew of sadistic lust killers, Kürten, in the view of many experts, may have been the most appalling of all.

  The household Kürten grew up in—a single room occupied by ten family members—was a hotbed of depraved sex. His father was a vicious drunk who habitually forced himself on his wife in front of the children and was jailed for the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter. Kürten, too, engaged in sex with his sisters.

  Young Kürten’s favorite form of sexual activity, however, wasn’t incest but bestiality. A neighbor who worked as a dog catcher taught the boy how to torture and masturbate animals, forging an early link in Kürten’s already twisted psyche between sadistic cruelty and sexual release. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, he committed countless acts of bestiality with pigs, sheep, and goats, deriving particularly intense pleasure from stabbing the animal to death while having intercourse with it.

  At fifteen, Kürten—already a habitual thief—was arrested and jailed, the first of a long string of prison sentences. Altogether, he would spend more than half of his forty-seven years behind bars. Between 1899 and 1928, during those periods when he managed to remain at large, he may have committed as many as three murders, though none was ever pinned on him. A raging pyromaniac, he also derived sexual satisfaction from torching barns, another of his favorite pastimes.

  Kürten took a wife in 1921, winning the consent of his bride-to-be in an unconventional (if characteristic) way: he threatened to kill her if she refused to marry him. Until Kürten himself confessed to the unspeakable truth, his loyal, long-suffering wife remained completely unaware that she was wed to the infamous “Monster of Düsseldorf.”

  Kürten earned that nickname in 1929. During that year, he unleashed an unprecedented torrent of violence, attacking twenty-nine people between February and November. This blood spree came to an end with the strangling and frenzied stabbing of a five-year-old girl, Gertrude Alberman. A few days later—in emulation of his idol, Jack the Ripper—Kürten sent the police a letter. In it, he directed them to the savaged remains of the Alberman girl, as well as to the body of another of his victims, a housemaid he had stabbed twenty times and sodomized after death.

  For more than a year, the citizens of Düsseldorf lived in terror. The police did everything possible to track down the killer, questioning nearly a thousand suspects and following hundreds of leads. But Kürten was hellishly difficult to track. Most lust killers prefer a single kind of weapon and a certain type of victim. But Kürten used axes, scissors, hammers, knives, and his bare hands to kill the young and old, male and female alike.

  In May 1930, Kürten mysteriously let a young woman go after attempting to rape her. Seventy-two hours later, he was under arrest. In custody, he spilled out his unspeakable story in amazing detail. Among other facts, authorities learned that—besides his other perversions—Kürten was a Vampire, who drank the blood of various victims, and he had once experienced an ejaculation after cutting the head off a sleeping swan and guzzling the blood from the neck stump. Convicted of nine murders, he was guillotined in July 1931.

  “In the case of Ohliger, I also sucked blood from the wound on her temple, and from Scheer from the stab in the neck. From the girl Schulte I only licked the blood from her hands. It was the same with the swan in the Hofgarten. I used to stroll at night through the Hofgarten very often, and in the spring of 1930 I noticed a swan sleeping at the edge of the lake. I cut its throat. The blood spurted up and I drank from the stump and ejaculated.”

  From the confessions of Peter Kürten

  LADY-KILLERS

  The conventional image of a serial killer is someone like Norman Bates—a guy so nice and harmless-looking that you’d never suspect he was a homicidal maniac. Clearly, this is a popular misconception. There have been plenty of scary-looking serial killers: hard-bitten losers like Henry Lee Lucas, wild-eyed madmen like Charles Manson, Mephistophelian creeps like Richard “Night Stalker” Ramirez. Still, stereotypes often possess a kernel of truth—and there have, in fact, been a number of serial killers who look not just normal but downright presentable. Unlike such psychotic dweebs as David Berkowitz and Edward Gein—who couldn’t get the time of day from a woman—these debonair sociopaths are highly attracted to the opposite sex. They are genuine lady-killers—in more ways than one.

  Though Ted Bundy is undoubtedly the best known of this breed, he certainly wasn’t the first. A hundred years ago, another attractive young fellow who shared Bundy’s first name—Theodore Durrant—earned nationwide notoriety as one of the most heinous killers of the century. A bright and personable twenty-three-year-old who still lived at home with his parents, Durrant appeared to be a paragon of young American manhood: a medical student, Sunday school teacher, and a member of the California militia signal corps. He was good-looking, too: tall, trim, and athletic, with fine, almost feminine features. Women found him hard to resist. On April 3, 1895, Durrant lured one of his lady friends into an empty church, then strangled her, raped her corpse, and hid it in the belfry. Nine days later, he dispatched another young woman in a similar way. It wasn’t long before Durrant—who quickly became known as the “Demon of the Belfry”—was arrested, tried, and condemned to death. Public detestation of Durrant was so intense that, after he was hanged, no cemetery in San Francisco would agree to bury him. His parents had to take his body to Los Angeles for cremation.

  Durrant’s contemporary Dr. H. H. Holmes was also catnip to the ladies. A dapper, smooth-talking sociopath, Holmes had no trouble working his seductive charm on scores of young women, an indeterminate number of whom met their ends in the depths of his infamous “Murder Castle.” A model of Gilded Age enterprise, Holmes found a way to make a profit from his crimes by peddling the mounted bones of his victims to local medical schools.

  Ted Bundy; from True Crime Trading Cards, Series Two: Serial Killers and Mass Murderers; art by Jon Bright

  (Courtesy of Jon Bright and Valarie Jones)

  Theo Durrant hauls a victim to the belfry in this nineteenth-century engraving

  The twentieth century produced more than its share of lethal ladies’ men. One of the most notorious was the English psychokiller Neville Heath. Tall, handsome, and charming, Heath looked like a Hollywood version of a British war hero. He was, in fact, a military officer who saw action as an RAF bomber pilot in World War II. Unfortunately, he was also a sadistic sociopath whose taste for bondage and flogging blossomed into full-blown blood lust. In June 1946, a part-time actress named Margery Gardner accompanied Heath to his hotel room for a night of kinky sex. When Gardner’s body was found the next day, the condition of her corpse shocked even hardened policemen. Tied up and suffocated with a gag, she had been savagely whipped with a riding crop. Her nipples had nearly been bitten off, and a poker had been thrust between her legs. Not long afterward, Heath murdered and mutilated another young woman he had met at a Bournemouth hotel. Arrested shortly afterward, he pled not guilty by reason of insanity at his trial, but the jury took less than an hour to convict him. He remained suave to the end. On the day of his hanging, he requested a double whiskey from the warden like a gentleman ordering a drink at a hotel bar.

  “You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that si
tuation is God!”

  TED BUNDY,

  on the joy of murder

  LETTERS

  There is some dispute as to whether Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski—the antitechnological terrorist responsible for a string of letter bomb attacks between 1978 and his arrest in 1996—can be considered a serial murderer. Some people say he most certainly was: after all, he killed three people and seriously injured almost two dozen more. Others, however, regard him as a revolutionary zealot who resorted to violence as a way of promoting his beliefs. This question remains a matter of debate, but one thing’s for sure—the guy could write. In August 1995, he sent a letter to the New York Times, offering to refrain from violence if the paper agreed to publish his tract, “Industrial Society and Its Fate”—a 35,000-word manifesto that (however crackpot in some of its views) is a model of literacy, clarity, and coherence.

  Unfortunately, Kaczynski also put his writing skills to less impressive uses. At the same time that he sent his letter to the Times, he also wrote to one of his victims, Dr. David Gelernter of Yale University, taunting the professor as a “techno-nerd.” In this regard, the Unabomber was, in fact, typical of serial killers, a number of whom have taken delight in communicating through taunting missives.