The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 2

  Carl Panzram; from 52 Famous Murderers trading cards

  (Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

  Crocodilians haven’t been the only creatures whose indiscriminate eating habits have come in handy to homicidal maniacs. In turn-of-the-century California, a farmer named Joseph Briggen fed his prize hogs the body parts of butchered farm hands. Briggen’s porkers invariably fetched top dollar at local auctions. When people asked for the secret of his success, he would just smile and reply, “Its all in the feeding.”

  Another Canadian pig farmer, Robert Pickton—alleged to be that country’s worst serial killer—apparently relied on the same porcine method of corpse disposal. Arrested in 2002, Pickton, as of January 24, 2004, has been implicated in the murders of up to thirty-one women.

  “I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform people who try to reform me, and I believe the only way to reform people is to kill ’em. My motto is: Rob’em all, rape ‘em all, and kill ‘em all.”

  CARL PANZRAM

  ANIMAL TORTURE

  Childhood cruelty toward small, living creatures isn’t necessarily a sign of psychopathology. Lots of little boys who enjoy pulling the wings off of flies grow up to be lawyers or dentists. The sadistic behavior of budding serial killers is something else entirely. After all, it’s one thing to chop an earthworm in two because you want to watch the separate halves squirm; it’s quite another to eviscerate your neighbor’s pet kitten because you enjoy listening to its agonized howls.

  The case histories of serial killers are rife with instances of juvenile animal torture. As a boy, for example, Henry Lee Lucas enjoyed trapping small animals, torturing them to death, then having sex with the remains. The earliest sexual activity of the appalling Peter Kürten—the “Monster of Düsseldorf”—also combined sadism with bestiality. At thirteen, Kürten discovered the pleasures of stabbing sheep to death while having intercourse with them.

  Instead of more conventional items, like baseball cards and comic books, little Jeffrey Dahmer collected roadkill. According to neighbors, he also liked to nail bullfrogs to trees and cut open live fish to see how their innards worked. One of the favorite childhood pastimes of Moors Murderer Ian Brady (see Killer Couples) was tossing alley cats out of tenement windows and watching them splat on the pavement. Cats, in fact, are a favorite target of youthful sociopaths. Edmund Kemper was only ten when he buried the family cat alive, then dug up the corpse and decapitated it. And former FBI Special Agent Robert K. Ressler—the man credited with coining the term “serial killer”—mentions one sadistic murderer who was nicknamed “Doc” as a child because he liked to slit open the stomachs of cats and see how far they could run before they died.

  Animal torture is, in fact, such a common denominator in the childhoods of serial killers that it is considered one of the three major warning signals of future psychopathic behavior, along with unnaturally prolonged bed-wetting and juvenile pyromania (see Triad).

  The vast majority of little boys who get their kicks from dismembering daddy longlegs or dropping firecrackers into anthills lose their stomach for sadism at an early age. The case is very different with incipient serial killers. Fixated at a shockingly primitive stage of emotional development, they never lose their craving for cruelty and domination. Quite the contrary: it continues to grow in them like a cancer. Eventually—when dogs, cats, and other small, four-legged creatures can no longer satisfy it—they turn their terrifying attentions to a larger, two-legged breed: human beings.

  ARISTOCRATS

  For the most part, the only truly remarkable thing about modern-day serial killers is their grotesque psychopathology. Otherwise, they tend to be absolute nobodies. It is precisely for this reason that they are able to get away with murder for so long. No one looking at, say, Joel Rifkin—the Long Island landscape gardener who slaughtered a string of prostitutes and stored their bodies in the suburban home he shared with his adoptive parents—would ever suspect that this utterly nondescript individual was capable of such atrocities.

  For many serial killers, in fact, the notoriety they achieve through their crimes is, if not their main motivation, then certainly an important fringe benefit. Murder becomes their single claim to fame—the only way they have of getting their names in the paper, of proving to the world (and to themselves) that they are “important” people.

  In centuries past, the situation was frequently different. Far from being nonentities, the most notorious serial killers of medieval times were people of great prominence and power. The most infamous of these was the fifteenth-century nobleman Gilles de Rais. Heir to one of the great fortunes of France, Gilles fought alongside Joan of Arc during the Hundred Years War. For his courage in battle, he was named marshal of France, his country’s highest military honor.

  Following Joan’s execution in 1431, however, Gilles returned to his ancestral estate in Brittany and plunged into a life of unspeakable depravity. During a nine-year reign of terror, he preyed on the children of local peasants. Unlike today’s low-born serial killers, the aristocratic Gilles didn’t have to exert himself to snare his victims; his servants did it for him. Whisked back to his horror castle, the children (most of them boys) were tortured and dismembered for the delectation of the “Bestial Baron,” who liked to cap off his pleasure by violating their corpses. Executed in 1440, he is widely regarded as the model for the fairy-tale monster Bluebeard.

  A female counterpart of Gilles was the Transylvanian noblewoman Elizabeth Bathory, a vampiric beauty who believed she could preserve her youth by bathing in the blood of virgins. According to conservative estimates, Bathory butchered and drained the blood of at least forty young women before her arrest in 1610.

  Her tally was topped by her near contemporary, the French noblewoman Marie Madeleine d’Aubray, marquise de Brinvilliers. Having run through a fortune, this profligate beauty decided to knock off her father in order to get her hands on his estate. In her efforts to concoct an indetectable poison, she volunteered her services at the Hôtel Dieu—Paris’s public hospital—and began trying out different formulas on her patients, ultimately dispatching at least fifty of them. In 1676, she was beheaded for her crimes.

  Closer to our own time, some Jack the Ripper buffs (or “Ripperologists,” as they prefer to be called) speculate that the legendary “Butcher of Whitechapel” was actually Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, Queen Victoria’s grandson and heir to the throne of England. As tantalizing as this theory sounds, it is almost certainly a complete fantasy, akin to the wilder Kennedy assassination scenarios. The unglamorous truth is that Jack was probably nothing more than a knife-wielding nobody—just like the scores of hideously sick nonentities who have followed in his bloody footsteps.

  ART

  Serial killer art can be divided into two major categories: (1) works of art about serial killers, and (2) works of art by serial killers.

  To start with the latter: the best known of all serial killer artists was John Wayne Gacy, who began dabbling in oil painting while in prison. Though Gacy painted everything from Disney characters to Michelangelo’s Pietà, his trademark subject was Pogo the Clown—the persona he adopted during his prearrest years, when he would occasionally don circus makeup and entertain the kids at the local hospital. Gacy’s amateurish oils could be had for a pittance a decade ago, but their value increased as they became trendy collectibles among certain celebrities, like film director John Waters and actor Johnny Depp. Since Gacy’s execution, the price for his paintings has shot even higher. While some of his oils are explicitly creepy (like his so-called Skull Clown paintings), even his most “innocent”—like his depictions of Disney’s Seven Dwarves—have an ineffable malevolence to them.

  Pogo the Clown; painting by John Wayne Gacy

  (Courtesy of Mike Ferris)

  For a while, Gacy’s exclusive art dealer was the Louisiana funeral director and serial killer enthusiast Rick Staton (see The Collector). Under Staton’s encouragement, a number of other no
torious murderers have taken up prison arts and crafts. Staton—who started a company called Grindhouse Graphics to market this work and has staged a number of Death Row Art Shows in New Orleans—has represented a wide range of quasicreative killers, including Richard “Night Stalker” Ramirez (who does crude but intensely spooky ballpoint doodles); Charles Manson (who specializes in animals sculpted from his old socks); and Elmer Wayne Henley. Henley—who, along with his buddy Dean Corll, was responsible for the torture-murder of as many as thirty-two young men—likes to paint koala bears.

  As devoted as he is to promoting the work of these people, even Staton concedes that they possess no artistic talent. There are a couple of exceptions, however. Lawrence Bittaker—who mutilated and murdered five teenage girls—produces some truly original pop-up greeting cards. The most gifted of the bunch, however, is William Heirens, the notorious “Lipstick Killer,” who has been in prison since 1946 and who paints exquisitely detailed watercolors.

  As far as serious art goes (i.e., art about, not by, serial killers), painters have been dealing with horrific sex crimes since at least the nineteenth century. The Victorian artist Walter Sickert, for example, did such disturbing pictures of murdered prostitutes that crime writer Patricia Cornwell has accused him of being Jack the Ripper. Scholars have also discovered that, in addition to the post-Impressionist landscapes and still lifes he’s best known for, Paul Cézanne did a whole series of paintings and drawings depicting grisly sex crimes.

  Throughout the twentieth century, hideous murder often appears as a subject of serious art. In The Threatened Assassin, a 1926 painting by Surrealist René Magritte, a bowler-hatted man wields a clublike human limb while a nude woman lies bleeding in the background. Even more unsettling is Frida Kahlo’s 1935 A Few Small Nips, in which a gore-drenched killer, clutching a knife, stands at the bedside of his savaged girlfriend. In 1966, the German postmodern painter Gerhard Richter caused an uproar when he displayed his Eight Student Nurses, realistic portraits of Richard Speck’s victims, based on their yearbook photos. That controversy was minor, however, compared to the outcry provoked in 1997, when a highly publicized British art show included Marcus Harvey’s Myra—an enormous portrait of the notorious Moors Murderer created from the handprints of children.

  Of all serial murder paintings produced in the twentieth century, probably the greatest are those by Otto Dix, the famous German Expressionist who was obsessed with images of sadistic sexual mutilation and produced a series of extraordinary canvases on the subject. His contemporary George Grosz (who posed as Jack the Ripper in a famous photographic self-portrait) also created a number of works about sex-related killings, including the harrowing Murder on Acker Street, which depicts a cretinous killer scrubbing his hands after decapitating a woman, whose horribly mangled corpse occupies the center of the picture. (If you’re interested in a brilliant study of sexual murder in Weimar Germany—which reproduces several dozen works by Dix and Grosz—check out the 1995 book Lustmord by Harvard professor Maria Tartar.)

  The spiritual heir of Dix and Grosz is Joe Coleman, America’s preeminent painters of serial killers (see The Apocalyptic Art of Joe Coleman). Coleman’s work has inspired a number of younger artists, including the young Brooklyn painter Michael Rose, whose subjects range from religious martyrdoms to grisly accidents to the atrocities of Albert Fish. Another Brooklyn artist, Chris Pelletiere, has done a series of stunning portraits of some of America’s most notorious killers, including Charles Starkweather, Henry Lee Lucas, and Ed Gein.

  Finally, there is the well-known Pop surrealist Peter Saul. Now in his sixties, Saul has been offending sensibilities for the past three decades with canvases like Donald Duck Descending a Staircase, Puppy in an Electric Chair, and Bathroom Sex Murder. Rendered in a garish, cartoony style, Saul’s recent paintings of serial killers—which include grotesque depictions of John Wayne Gacy’s execution and Jeffrey Dahmer’s eating habits—are among his most electrifying works.

  The Apocalyptic Art of Joe Coleman

  America’s premier painter of serial killers, Joe Coleman is also the only significant artist ever to perform as a geek. Indeed, one of his most powerful self-portraits—Portrait of Professor Momboozoo—shows the crucified Coleman with a bitten-off rat’s head jutting from his mouth. Like so much of Coleman’s work, it’s an astounding image, one that sums up three of the major themes of his art: horror, sideshow sensationalism, and (insofar as devouring the body and blood of a rodent represents a grotesque parody of the Last Supper) religious obsession.

  Joe Coleman in his “odditorium” (Photo by Steve Bonge)

  Coleman was born on 11/22/55—a date (as he likes to point out) full of doubles, prefiguring his own fascination with linked dualities: sinner and saint, heaven and hell, corruption and purity, killer and victim. Growing up across from a cemetery and steeped in Catholicism, he developed an early fascination with death and disease, suffering and sacrifice. His childhood imagination was also shaped by two books: the Bible (particularly its juicier stories of sex and violence) and a volume on Hieronymus Bosch, whose teeming, demonic dreamscapes made a profound impression on Coleman’s budding artistic sensibility.

  Indeed, though Coleman is often classified under the ever-so-slightly disparaging category of “naive” or “outsider” artist, his work falls into a mainstream tradition that extends from such medieval painters as Bosch and Breughel to modern German Expressionists like Dix and Grosz. It’s also true, however, that—as accomplished and sophisticated as Coleman’s paintings are—there is, in his densely textured, meticulously detailed style, a distinctly folk-art quality. He is, in short, a complete original, an all-American delineator of the darkest recesses of the soul. If Bosch had coupled with Grandma Moses, their unholy offspring would have been Joe Coleman.

  In the festering landscape of Coleman’s art, legendary serial killers like Carl Panzram and Charles Manson become mad visionaries, driven by a savage need to rip away the comforting illusions of conventional society and expose the terrible realities of existence: random horror, inexorable death. Coleman is quick to point out that his paintings are self-portraits, and the same ferocious drive is evident everywhere in his work. He uses his paint-brush like a vivisectionist’s scalpel, to penetrate to the bloody innards, the guts of existence. Beneath our skins, his art seems to say, we are nothing but blood, shit, and phlegm, with a latent tumor undoubtedly lurking somewhere in our cells. But there is another element, too, one that redeems his work from sheer morbidity: the belief, or at least the hope, that if he penetrates far enough, he will discover something much deeper—the soul.

  As one critic has commented, Joe Coleman has put the pain back in painting. But his work blazes with power and meaning. For those unfamiliar with it, we strongly recommend his book Cosmic Retribution (Fantagraphic Books, 1992)—the only art volume (so far as we know) with an enthusiastic jacket blurb by Charles Manson. More recent examples of his paintings can be found in Original Sin (Heck Editions, 1997) and The Book of Joe (La Luz de Jesus Press, 2003).

  My earliest drawings were of the crucifixion of Christ. That’s one thing that’s going to turn little boys on—that your religion has to do with a guy getting nailed to a fucking cross and all this blood spurting out and all these saints being set on fire.

  That’s the kind of religion I like.”

  JOE COLEMAN

  AXE MURDERERS

  Though the figure of the axe-wielding maniac is a staple of horror movies and campfire tales, he is largely a figment of the popular imagination. In reality, serial killers rarely rely on axes.

  The most famous axe in American criminal history, of course, was the one that belonged to Miss Lizzie Borden, who, according to folklore, used it to give her sleeping stepmother “forty whacks” in the face (and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one). Lizzie, however, was no serial killer but a chubby, thirty-two-year-old spinster with long-simmering resentments who apparently went berserk one sweltering day in
August 1892. In short, her crimes (assuming she committed them, which seems fairly certain, in spite of her acquittal) were a one-shot deal—a lifetime’s worth of stifled emotions exploding in a single savage deed.

  Another fatal female who was handy with an axe was the notorious Belle Gunness (see Black Widows), who murdered at least fourteen of her husbands and suitors. Some apparently were poisoned, others were dispatched in their sleep with a hatchet. Though the fat, ferocious Gunness cut a more frightful figure than the ladylike Miss Lizzie, she was no wild-eyed thrill killer. Rather, she was a cold-blooded mercenary, killing to collect on her spouses’ life-insurance policies or inherit their savings.

  Closer than either of these lethal ladies to the popular stereotype of the axe-wielding psycho was a hard-bitten drifter named Jake Bird. Roaming around Tacoma in 1947, Bird hacked a mother and daughter to pieces with an axe he found in their woodshed. Alerted by the victims’ dying shrieks, neighbors summoned the police, who managed to subdue Bird after a violent struggle. Bird pled innocent until forensic analysis established that the stains on his trousers were human blood and brain tissue. Before his execution in 1949, he confessed to no fewer than forty-four murders throughout the United States, a number of them committed with his weapon of choice—the axe.

  The most fear-provoking axe killer in the annals of American crime, however—one who kept a whole city in a state of panic for over two years—was a maniac whose identity remains unknown. This is the shadowy figure known as the “Axeman of New Orleans.”

  On the night of May 23, 1918, a New Orleans couple named Maggio was butchered in bed by an intruder who smashed their skulls with an axe blade, then slit their throats with a razor, nearly severing the woman’s head. Thus began the reign of terror of the so-called Axeman, a real-life boogeyman who haunted the city for two and half years. His MO was always the same. Prowling through the darkness, he would target a house, chisel out a back-door panel, slip inside, and find his way to the bedroom. There, he would creep toward his slumbering victims, raise his weapon, and attack with demoniacal fury. Altogether, he murdered seven people and savagely wounded another eight.