The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read online

  For Dr. Morris Bolber and his confederates, Paul and Herman Petrillo, murder was strictly business. Operating in Philadelphia’s Italian ghetto during the Great Depression, these enterprising reprobates found a way of turning bodies into bucks by persuading disgruntled housewives to take out hefty life-insurance policies on their hubbies. Then—after orchestrating the “accidental” deaths of the insured—Bolber & Co. split the proceeds with the widows. Between 1932 and 1937, Dr. Bolber and his associates were responsible for the deaths of at least a dozen victims.

  While the Bolber-Petrillo organization was driven by good old-fashioned greed, other, far more unsettling motives lurked behind one of the most bizarre murder rings in the annals of crime. Though historically factual, the case has all the earmarks of a classic horror story—a kind of Stepford Wives in reverse, involving a quiet little town where the housewives were really homicidal maniacs.

  Between 1919 and 1929, at least twenty-six women in the small Hungarian town of Nagyrev found a novel way to rid themselves of tiresome relatives. Led by a murderous midwife named Julia Fazekas—who taught them how to obtain arsenic by boiling flypaper and skimming off the poisonous residue—these fatal females disposed of boorish husbands, sickly children, ailing parents, obnoxious siblings—at least forty-five victims in all before the “Angel-Makers of Nagyrev” (as the newspapers dubbed them) were finally brought to trial.

  NAZI BUFFS

  Critics of media violence complain that hardcore “splatter” films like I Spit on Your Grave and Maniac put bad ideas into the minds of budding psychopaths. But aspiring serial killers don’t need movies to inspire them. All they have to do is open a history book.

  Published accounts of Nazi atrocities were a common source of inspiration for killers who came of age in the post-World War II era. Graham Young, a British sociopath born in 1947, was a boyhood admirer of Hitler and his genocidal policies. Young also loved to read about the notorious English Poisoners of the nineteenth century. When Young was just fourteen, he set about poisoning his own family with all the dispassion of a concentration camp commandant. After a nine-year stint in a mental asylum, Young took a job at a photographic supply firm and immediately reverted to his old exterminative ways, poisoning a bunch of his co-workers before being caught.

  Another postwar Briton who embraced Nazi philosophy was Ian Brady, the male half of the notorious Killer Couple known as the “Moors Murderers.” Captivated by the concept of the Aryan Übermensch—the “superman” who is entitled to exert his will on lesser mortals—Brady recruited a willing sex slave, Myra Hindley, who played obedient storm trooper to his two-bit führer. Together this vile pair abducted and murdered four children and left their mangled bodies buried on the moors.

  In America, a tormented Chicago teenager named William Heirens was similarly infatuated with Nazism. Both an honor student and a compulsive burglar, Heirens nursed a simmering obsession with violence, sex, and totalitarian power. Besides a stockpile of firearms and a stash of stolen female panties (which he liked to wear around the house), he collected photographs of Hitler, Himmler, and other Nazi bigwigs. In 1945 and 1946, Heirens’s obsessions finally boiled over. He murdered two women and a six-year-old girl, leaving an infamous lipstick-scrawled message on the bedroom wall of one crime scene: “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”

  At roughly the same time in Wisconsin, Edward Gein was feeding his own demented fantasies with magazine stories about Nazi atrocities. A deranged do-it-yourselfer, Gein was inspired by accounts of concentration camp officials who turned human skin into lampshades. When investigators broke into Gein’s horror house in 1957, they found a staggering collection of similarly constructed ghastly artifacts—chair seats, lampshades, wastebaskets, and more—all crafted from the flesh of corpses Gein had been stealing from local graveyards.

  NECROPHILIA

  In Psychopathia Sexualis, his classic study of aberrant behavior, Richard von Krafft-Ebing calls necrophilia the most monstrous of all perversions. Since necrophilia (from the Greek, meaning “love of the dead”) is the practice of having sex with corpses, this is not a surprising assessment. Nor is it surprising that this most monstrous of acts should be common among the most monstrous of criminals—serial killers.

  Many infamous psychopaths, from Earle Leonard Nelson to Ted Bundy, occasionally raped the bodies of their freshly slain victims. Still, some experts in the field of criminal psychology distinguish between this type of outrage—which is motivated by the malevolent desire to completely dominate and violate a victim—and the behavior of the “true necrophiliac,” the man who is deeply infatuated with death, who derives his greatest sexual satisfaction from making love to a cadaver. This sort of necrophiliac is much rarer among serial killers. But there have been some notable cases.

  Jeffrey Dahmer’s love affair with dead things began as a child, when his favorite hobby was collecting and dissecting roadkill. By the time he was a grown-up, this morbid obsession had metastasized into an unspeakable perversion. Dahmer told psychiatrists that he routinely cut open the abdomens of his murder victims and masturbated into their viscera. He also confessed to anally raping the corpses. His British counterpart, Dennis Nilsen, was also driven by necrophiliac urges, though he tended to treat his victims more tenderly, masturbating as he snuggled beside them in bed.

  The most infamous of all American necrophiliacs is Ed Gein. Like all classic necrophiliacs, Gein was completely uninterested in living women. He found his sex partners in local cemeteries, which he plundered periodically for more than a dozen years. In general, necrophiliacs are regarded as less of a menace than serial killers because the victims they prey on are already dead. Gein was no exception. He was more ghoul than serial killer. Still, he was not, by any means, harmless. When the local graveyards ran low on available females, he simply went out hunting for a likely looking prospect and turned her into the kind of woman he loved best—a dead one.

  “I took her bra and panties off and had sex with her. That’s one of those things I guess that got to be a part of my life—having sexual intercourse with the dead.”

  HENRY LEE LUCAS,

  describing his reaction to the death of his beloved common-law wife, twelve-year-old Becky Powell, whom he had just stabbed in the chest during an argument

  Earle Leonard Nelson

  Earle Leonard Nelson; from Bloody Visions trading cards

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

  In the annals of U.S. crime, Earle Leonard Nelson—aka the “Gorilla Man”—holds a historic position. He was the first American serial sex killer of the twentieth century. In February 1926, he began a frenzied, eighteen-month odyssey that took him from one end of the country to the other and up into Canada. Along the way, he slaughtered no fewer than twenty-two women—a grisly record that would remain unbroken for another fifty years.

  Orphaned in infancy when his young parents both died of syphilis, Nelson was taken in and raised by his mother’s family. He was a withdrawn, moody child with bizarre personal habits. (Among his other peculiarities, he would regularly set off for school in neat, freshly laundered garments and return in foul rags, as though he’d swapped clothes with a derelict.) As a result of a severe head injury—sustained when his bicycle collided with a cable car—his behavior became even more erratic.

  By his early teens, he was already a habitué of the brothels and bars of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. He had also taken to petty thievery. In 1915—just a few months after his eighteenth birthday—he was arrested for burglary and sentenced to two years in San Quentin. America had just entered World War I when Nelson emerged. He enlisted in the navy, but—after refusing to do anything but lie on his cot and babble about the Great Beast of Revelations—he was confined to a mental institution. He remained there for the duration of the war.

  Discharged in 1919, the twenty-two-year-old Nelson met and married a sixty-year-old spinster and proceeded
to make her life a daily hell. Shortly after she left him, he attacked a twelve-year-old girl and was returned to the mental asylum. Discharged in 1925, he soon embarked on his deadly career.

  He started in San Francisco, working his way up the Pacific Coast to Seattle, then headed eastward. At first, the tabloids dubbed him the “Dark Strangler”; later, he became known as the “Gorilla Man”—a nickname that had less to do with his appearance (he was actually quite ordinary-looking) than with the savagery of his crimes. For the most part, his targets were middle-aged or elderly landladies who had placed “Rooms to Let” ads in their local papers. Nelson—who could be ingratiating when he wanted to—would show up at their homes and ask to see a room. Once alone with his victims, he would undergo a Jekyll/Hyde-like transformation.

  Typically, he would choke the women to death, commit postmortem rape, then conceal the corpses in bizarre hiding places. One of his victims was stuffed into an attic trunk. Others were crammed behind the basement furnaces. His final victim was discovered when her husband knelt to say his evening prayers and found her body shoved under the bed.

  With the police departments of a dozen different cities on the alert, Nelson headed into Canada, where he finally reached the end of his corpse-strewn trail. After killing two more victims, he was captured in Manitoba. He managed to escape from jail, setting off a widescale panic and massive manhunt. Twelve hours later, he was back in custody—this time for good.

  Several months later, Earle Leonard Nelson went to the gallows. His final words were: “I forgive those who have wronged me.”

  NICKNAMES

  With the advent of tabloid newspapers in the 1800s, crime reporters began wracking their brains to come up with catchy nicknames for sensational killers—a tradition that continues to this day. (When a co-ed was murdered in New York City in early 2006 and her brutalized corpse found heavily wrapped in packing tape, the papers immediately dubbed her killer “The Mummy Maniac.”) Following is a list of notorious serial murderers along with their sinister pseudonyms:

  Richard Angelo, “The Angel of Death”

  Elizabeth Bathory, “The Blood Countess”

  Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, “The Hillside Stranglers”

  William Bonin, “The Freeway Killer”

  Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, “The Moors Murderers”

  Gary Carlton, “The Stocking Strangler”

  Harvey Louis Carnigan, “The Want-Ad Killer”

  David Carpenter, “The Trailside Killer”

  Andrei Chikatilo, “The Mad Beast”

  Douglas Clark, “The Sunset Strip Slayer”

  Albert DeSalvo, “The Boston Strangler”

  Theo Durrant, “The Demon of the Belfry”

  Albert Fish, “The Moon Maniac”

  John Wayne Gacy, “Killer Clown”

  Ed Gein, “The Plainfield Ghoul”

  John Wayne Glover, “The Granny Killer”

  Cleo Green, “The Red Demon”

  Vaughn Greenwood, “The Skid Row Slasher”

  Fritz Haarmann, “The Butcher of Hanover”

  William Heirens, “The Lipstick Murderer”

  H. H. Holmes, “The Torture Doctor”

  Edmund Kemper, “The Coed Killer”

  Richard Macek, “The Mad Biter”

  Earle Leonard Nelson, “The Gorilla Man”

  Thierry Paulin, “The Monster of Montmartre”

  Heinrich Pommerencke, “The Beast of the Black Forest”

  Dennis Rader, “BTK”

  Richard Ramirez, “The Night Stalker”

  Melvin Rees, “The Sex Beast”

  Vicytor Szczepinski, “The Doorbell Killer”

  Peter Sutcliffe, “The Yorkshire Ripper”

  Coral Eugene Watts, “The Sunday Morning Slasher”

  Thomas Harris acknowledges this tradition in his bestselling thrillers, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, whose FBI heroes are on the hunt for two terrifying figures: a serial killer nicknamed the “Tooth Fairy” (because he bites his victims with a special set of dentures) and another dubbed “Buffalo Bill” (because he “always skins his humps”).

  Dennis Nilsen

  Dennis Nilsen; from True Crime Trading Cards Series Two: Serial Killers and Mass Murderers; art by Jon Bright

  (Courtesy of Jon Bright and Valarie Jones)

  Nilsen—the “British Jeffrey Dahmer,” responsible for the grisly murders of fifteen young men—never fit the standard profile of a serial killer. As a child, he recoiled from cruelty to animals. Even bird hunting seemed wrong to him. In his adult life, he devoted himself to helping the downtrodden in his work for the Manpower Services Commission. Even his murders were motivated less by psychopathic rage than by a grotesque form of love. In the phrase of writer Brian Masters, Nilsen “killed for company.”

  From early adolescence onward, Nilsen’s sexuality was marked by a necrophiliac strain. As a teenager, he liked to stretch out in front of a mirror and masturbate while imagining that the body reflected in the glass was a corpse. During a brief homosexual affair in 1972, he took home movies of his lover—an eighteen-year-old army private—while the young man pretended to be dead.

  During his eleven-year stint in the military, Nilsen worked for a time as a butcher (an occupation that provided him with skills he would later put to appalling use). After leaving the army in 1972, he joined the London police, lasting just a year. Before long, he had begun his civil service career at a government-run Job Centre. For a time, he had a contented relationship with another young man, but when it finally broke up, the reclusive Nilsen was plunged into a despairing loneliness. He reverted to bizarre autoerotic rituals. Applying powder and paint to his naked body—to make it look like the corpse of a gunshot victim—he would masturbate while regarding his own ghastly flesh in a mirror.

  A few days after Christmas, 1978, Nilsen began to kill. After picking up a teenage boy in a pub, Nilsen brought him back to his apartment in the Cricklewood section of London. Frantic for companionship, Nilsen did not want the young man to leave. While the teenager slept, Nilsen garroted him with a necktie, then finished the job by submerging the boy’s head in a bucketful of water. Afterward, Nilsen stripped the corpse, gave it a tender, ritual bath, and laid it out on his bed. He kept it around the flat for the next few days, caressing it, cleaning it, masturbating over it. Eventually, he stashed it under the floorboards.

  Over the next three years, the same ghastly pattern repeated itself another eleven times in Nilsen’s Cricklewood apartment. The accumulating bodies posed a problem, which Nilsen dealt with in increasingly sickening ways. At first, he stored the corpses in and around his flat—in his cupboard or under the floorboards or in a garden shed. Eventually, however, he was compelled to dismember the decaying bodies and incinerate them in a backyard bonfire. He tossed an old tire onto the blaze, hoping that the smell of burning rubber would disguise the stench of burning flesh.

  In 1981, Nilsen moved to a different apartment, where he murdered three more young men and got rid of the bodies by chopping them up and flushing the chunks down the toilet. (To remove the flesh from the skulls, he boiled the heads in a big soup pot.) Eventually, this method of Disposal led to his downfall. When the toilets in the entire building became clogged up, neighbors called a plumber, who discovered human bones and gobs of decomposed flesh blocking the pipes.

  Inside his fetid flat, police found a ghastly assortment of human remains—heads and limbs, torsos, bones, and viscera. Nilsen, who confessed freely to fifteen murders, was sentenced to life imprisonment at his 1983 trial.

  “I wished I could stop but I could not. I had no other thrill or happiness.”

  DENNIS NILSEN

  NOMADS

  Here’s a sobering statistic: nearly three-quarters of all known serial killers in the world—74 percent to be exact—come from the United States (as opposed to a measly 19 percent for all of Europe). Clearly, there is something about American culture that is conducive to serial murder. Theor
ies range from our puritanical attitudes about matters of the flesh—which presumably produce all kinds of sexual pathology—to our steady diet of media violence.

  Whatever other factors are involved, one aspect of our cultural life surely exacerbates the problem: the extreme mobility of Americans. Ever since the time of the early pioneers, we’ve been a people on the go. While this cultural characteristic has undoubtedly been a source of strength (our unique freedom of movement has helped our nation develop at an extraordinary pace), it has also contributed to our notoriously high crime rate. From the days of John Wesley Hardin and Billy the Kid, highly mobile outlaws have been able to get away with murder for years by staying a few steps ahead of the law.

  As early as the 1920s, however, a new and even more frightening phenomenon appeared on the criminal scene: the nomadic killer who exploited modern modes of transportation (primarily cars and trains) to keep constantly on the move, leaving behind a trail of corpses (and little else in the way of traceable clues). Earl Leonard Nelson—the “Gorilla Man” who strangled nearly two dozen women during an eighteen-month, coast-to-coast killing spree—was one of the first of this deadly breed. Another was Carl Panzram, the globe-trotting sociopath who bragged of having committed more than one thousand homosexual rapes and twenty-one murders in the course of his extraordinarily hard-bitten life. Twenty years later, a homicidal drifter named Jake Bird racked up an even higher body count during his career of peripatetic Axe Murder.

  It wasn’t until the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, that Americans began to perceive nomadic serial murder as a growing public menace, thanks largely to the crimes of monsters like Ted Bundy (who committed his lust killings in four different states) and—even more unnervingly—Henry Lee Lucas, who may have slaughtered as many as one hundred people during his life of aimless travel. In our mobile, fast-paced society, such itinerant psychopaths can go on killing for years, depositing corpses in quiet stretches of woods, along deserted coastlines, and beside isolated highways—preying on hitchhikers, roadside hookers, casual pickups, and other easy victims as rootless (and often as difficult to trace) as the killers themselves.