The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 21

  Voyeurism is another paraphilia that serial killers practice with a singular malevolence. The typical Peeping Tom enjoys spying on people who are having sex. Voyeuristic serial killers, on the other hand, like to watch while their partners or accomplices rape, sodomize, and torture helpless victims. Among the other paraphilias favored by serial killers are bestiality, S-M, and exhibitionism.

  Undoubtedly the single most perverted serial killer in the annals of American crime was Albert Fish. According to the psychiatric experts who examined him, Fish had spent his lifetime indulging in every known paraphilia, plus a few no one had ever heard of before. (For example, he liked to insert long-stemmed roses into his penis and look at himself in the mirror. Then he would remove the roses and eat them.) His more commonplace paraphilias included: sadism, masochism, flagellation, exhibitionism, voyeurism, piquerism (deriving sexual pleasure from jabbing himself with sharp objects), pedophilia, analingus (oral stimulation of the anus), co-prophagia (eating feces), undinism (sexual preoccupation with urine), fetishism, and cannibalism.

  PARTNERS

  Serial killers have their own special form of male bonding. Instead of bowling with a buddy, they will occasionally link up with a partner and go prowling in pairs. It is estimated that approximately 28 percent of all serial homicides in this country are committed by such deadly duos.

  Though the bisexual Henry Lee Lucas and his homosexual partner, Ottis Elwood Toole, were occasional lovers, the true basis of their friendship was not sex but a shared passion for serial slaughter. Shortly after meeting in a Florida soup kitchen, they launched into a life of random, nomadic violence, traveling the highways and preying on an untold number of victims—hitchhikers, vagrants, women with car trouble. They killed with appalling cruelty. (In one typical instance, they attacked a forty-six-year-old woman in her mobile home, Lucas raping her while Toole strangled her with a telephone cord; after she was dead, Toole ripped off her nipples with his teeth.) When the pair ran low on cash, they would knock over a convenience store and kill the clerk (whose corpse was generally raped by the necrophiliac Toole).

  Both Lucas and Toole had committed homicide before hooking up with each other. Other cases, however, are examples of what the French call a Folie à Deux—a shared psychopathology that only operates when the two individuals come together. Separately, each man—however potentially violent—might never commit murder; together, they bring out each other’s most monstrous impulses. This was the case, for example, not only with the “Hillside Stranglers,” but also with Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, a pair of ex-marines with a common interest in automatic weapons and sadomasochistic pornography. In the early 1980s, this depraved duo abducted at least three women and kept them as “sex slaves” in an underground bunker on Lake’s remote, wooded compound in Calaveras County, California. The victims were videotaped while being subjected to extreme sexual torture, then murdered when their captors grew tired of them. (Ng awaits trial on these charges and maintains his innocence to this day.) Other depraved twosomes include Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris (a pair of degenerates who cruised the California roads in a van they called Murder Mack, abducting, torturing, and killing a string of young girls), Dean Corll and Wayne Henley (who conspired to lure dozens of young males to Corll’s home in Pasadena, Texas, where the boys were drugged, shackled, tortured—sometimes for days—then killed), and Theodore Simmons and Milton Jones of Buffalo, New York (who teamed up to torture and kill Catholic priests).

  Some serial-killer teams have more in common than their psychopathology—they are actually related by blood. This was true of the “Hillside Stranglers,” Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, who were cousins; the Haley brothers of Los Angeles, who committed no fewer than five hundred burglaries, sixty rapes, and eight murders in the early 1980s; and the wildly psychotic Joseph Kallinger, who enlisted the aid of his own twelve-year-old son in his six-month campaign of murder and mutilation.

  Of course, even the closest of companions can sometimes disagree. Rudolph Pleil—arguably the most monstrous German lust murderer of the post-World War II era—had a voracious appetite for rape, mutilation, and murder but objected when an accomplice insisted on beheading a victim. Though Pleil slaughtered at least two dozen victims with hammers, hatchets, and knives, he evidently drew the line at decapitation. And Lucas disapproved of his partner’s cannibalistic proclivities, refusing to participate when Toole indulged his taste for human flesh.

  Marcel Petiot

  The smoke spewing from the chimney of 21 Rue Le Sueur on March 11, 1944, was so thick, black, and foul smelling that it might have been coming from a Nazi crematorium. A neighbor telephoned the Parisian authorities. When firemen broke into the building, they made an appalling discovery—a stack of dissected and dismembered human bodies, more than two dozen in all. These would later prove to be the remains of Jewish men and women. Inside the furnace, the firemen found a pile of burning limbs—the source of the billowing stench.

  There was a good reason why the chimney smoke carried the stench of a Nazi crematorium. In effect, that’s what the building’s owner—a physician named Marcel Petiot—had turned his basement furnace into.

  When Petiot was confronted with the evidence of his crimes, however, he had a ready explanation. A psychopath of unusual—even flamboyant—audacity, he insisted that far from being a criminal, he was actually a patriot. The remains, he claimed, were those of Nazi collaborators, killed by the Resistance and entrusted to himself for disposal. The gullible gendarmes swallowed this whopper whole and released Petiot, who immediately fled Paris with his wife.

  He remained at large for seven months, during which time he sent regular, pseudonymous letters to the newspaper Resistance, repeating his claim that the bodies were those of Nazis and traitors. In Paris, however, police were entertaining a different theory: that Petiot himself was a collaborator who had been murdering patriots on behalf of the Gestapo.

  The truth finally came to light when Petiot was arrested after seven months on the lam. Though perceived by his Parisian neighbors as a prosperous, benevolent physician, the forty-seven-year-old Petiot had a history of criminal behavior going back to World War I, when he was convicted of black marketeering. Later, as mayor of the town of Villeneuve, he had been arrested for drug peddling. He was also a suspect in the mysterious disappearance of a pregnant servant girl. But nothing in his past compared to the outrages he had been perpetrating in his Rue Le Sueur residence.

  The murders, it turned out, had nothing to do with politics at all. The victims were neither Nazis nor French patriots. Greed was the sole motive behind Petiot’s atrocities. The victims were wealthy Jews desperate to flee occupied France. Posing as a Resistance leader, Petiot offered to smuggle them out of the country—for a fee. When the unsuspecting victims showed up at his house—laden with all their valuables—Petiot administered a “typhoid inoculation” that was spiked with strychnine. Then he placed them in a sealed chamber. After observing their death agonies through a peephole, he disposed of their remains in his furnace. The valuables he netted through this unspeakable swindle amounted to nearly a million English pounds.

  Petiot’s 1946 trial was one of the most sensational in modern French history. The defendant himself—by turns witty and withering, charming and arrogant—put on quite a show, though his histrionics failed to beguile the judge and jury. The “greatest criminal affair of the century” (as the French papers dubbed it) ended on May 26, 1946, when Marcel Petiot, still maintaining his innocence, went to the guillotine.

  For an interesting (if overly arty) dramatization of the case, curious viewers might check out the 1992 French movie Docteur Petiot, starring Michel Serrault.

  “There is a legend that you all know well: the story of the shipwreckers. Cruel men placed lanterns on the cliffs to lure ashore ships in distress. The sailors, confident, never suspecting that such evil deceit could exist, sailed onto the reefs and died, and those who had pretended to lead them to safety filled their coffers
with the spoils of their foul deeds. Petiot is just that: the false savior, the false refuge. He lured the desperate, the frightened, the hunted, and he killed them by turning their instincts for self-preservation against them.”

  PIERRE VERON,

  lawyer at the trial of Dr. Marcel Petiot

  PHASES

  The step-by-step pattern that the typical serial killer follows—from the time he first starts brooding on his crime through the inevitable letdown of its aftermath—has been charted by Dr. Joel Norris, one of the country’s leading experts on the subject. According to Norris, the seven “key phases” of serial murder are as follows:

  1. The Aura Phase. The process begins when the potential killer starts to withdraw into a private world of perverted fantasy. From the outside, he may appear to be perfectly normal. Inside his head, however, he exists in a kind of twisted twilight zone. His grasp on reality loosens as his mind becomes increasingly dominated by daydreams of death and destruction. Gradually, the need to act out his demented fantasies becomes an overwhelming compulsion.

  2. The Trolling Phase. Like a fisherman casting out his line and trolling for a catch, the killer now begins to seek out a victim, focusing on those places where he is most likely to encounter the precise kind of person that his sick needs require. He may stake out a schoolyard, cruise a red-light district, patronize a popular pickup spot, or stalk a local lovers’ lane. Eventually, he will zero in on a target.

  3. The Wooing Phase. In some cases, the killer will simply strike without warning—snatching a victim off the street or breaking into a house and slaying everyone inside. Often, however, the killer will derive a depraved satisfaction from luring his victims into his clutches—lulling them into a false sense of security, tricking them into lowering their defenses. Ted Bundy seemed so disarmingly clean-cut and normal that he had no trouble talking young women into his death car. Other killers, like John Wayne Gacy, seduce their victims with the promise of money or a job or a place to spend the night. In November 1995, a drifter named Glen Rogers allegedly committed five murders during an interstate killing spree. According to those who knew him, Rogers was a master at wooing his victims. “He could talk a person into anything,” one acquaintance told the police. “A ride home from the bar. A place to crash for a few days. A woman’s affections.” (Rogers has not yet been tried and denies the charges.)

  4. The Capture Phase. The next step is to spring the trap that the killer has set for his victims. Seeing their terrified reactions as the true horror of their situation suddenly hits home is part of his sadistic game. This is the moment when—having accepted a lift from an affable stranger who has offered you a ride home—you suddenly notice that the car is headed in the wrong direction and that the door handle on the passenger side has been removed, so that there is no possibility of escape. Or when the handsome one-night stand who has handcuffed you to the bedposts for some kinky fun and games smilingly tells you that he has no intention of releasing you—ever.

  5. The Murder. If killing is a substitute for sex, as it is for so many serial murderers, then the moment at which they put a victim to death is the climax, the acme of pleasure toward which the whole process has been building ever since they began fantasizing about the crime. (Indeed, it’s not uncommon for sexual psychopaths to experience an orgasm while murdering their victims.) And just as normal people have their particular sexual pleasures—their favorite positions or ways of being touched—serial killers have their own homicidal preferences, some enjoying strangulation, others bludgeoning or slashing or death by slow torture.

  6. The Totem Phase. Like a sexual climax, the murder is an intense but transient pleasure for the serial killer. To prolong the experience and help him relive it in fantasy during the fallow period before his next crime, he will often remove a souvenir or “totemic” object associated with the victim. This may be anything from a wallet to a body part (see Trophies).

  7. The Depression Phase. In the aftermath of the murder, the serial killer often experiences an emotional letdown that is the equivalent of what the French call postcoital tristesse. This state can be so severe that the killer may actually attempt suicide. Unfortunately, a more common response is a renewed desire to commit murder again—a growing need for a fix of fresh blood (see Post-Homicidal Depression).

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  In his chilling 1971 book, The Family, Ed Sanders reveals that Charles Manson and his creepy-crawly followers allegedly made snuff movies with stolen super-8mm cameras—real-life splatter films depicting human sacrifice, decapitations, and other atrocities. Though Sanders was never able to confirm this story (he was offered a reel of reputed Manson porn by one unnamed source but couldn’t come up with the $250,000 asking price), the rumor itself embodies an unnerving truth about serial killers. In the same way that ordinary people like to record life’s special moments on film (weddings, birthday parties, family vacations) many serial killers enjoy taking pictures of their victims, dead and alive, to keep as twisted souvenirs—morbid mementoes to help them relive the thrill of their murders.

  When police entered the squalid apartment of Jeffrey Dahmer, they were staggered to find a cache of Polaroid pictures showing male corpses in various stages of dismemberment. One photo was of a body slit from breastbone to groin like a gutted deer. Another showed a corpse eaten away by acid from the nipples down. Perhaps the most shocking of all was described by Milwaukee journalist Anne E. Schwartz: a photograph of “a bleached skeleton [with] the flesh on the head, hands, and feet . . . left perfectly intact.”

  In the mid-1960s, the British Killer Couple Ian Brady and Myra Hindley—aka the Moors Murderers—kidnapped a ten-year-old girl and forced her to pose for pornographic snapshots before strangling her to death. They also made an audiotape of the child’s piteous pleas for mercy—a recording so heart wrenching that when it was played in court during the murder trial, even hardened policemen wept openly.

  As technology has progressed over the years, the recording techniques of serial killers have become increasingly sophisticated. Twenty years after the “Moors Murders” case, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng began kidnapping women and imprisoning them in an underground bunker in Northern California (see Partners). The bunker was outfitted with a set of state-of-the-art video equipment, which Lake had stolen from the home of a San Francisco photographer named Harvey Dubs. Lake and Ng used the equipment to record the rape, torture, and murder of three young women—including Dubs’s wife, Deborah.

  Harvey Murray Glatman, Snuff Photographer

  In 1960, the distinguished British director Michael Powell—renowned for his beautiful ballet fantasy, The Red Shoes—released a film that so incensed both the public and critics that it effectively ended his career. It was called Peeping Tom, a movie about a sadistic voyeur who films his victims as he is stabbing them to death with a lethal camera tripod (see Movies). What sort of sick mind—asked the outraged reviewers—could have dreamed up such a story? But, in fact, just a year before Peeping Tom came out, an American psycho named Harvey Murray Glatman had been put to death at San Quentin for crimes shockingly like the ones depicted in the film.

  Harvey Murray Glatman; from 52 Famous Murderers trading cards

  (Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

  Even as an adolescent, Glatman showed twisted sexual tendencies. His favorite form of masturbation was autoerotic asphyxiation—achieving sexual release while dangling by his neck from a rope tied to an attic rafter. A family physician assured Glatman’s mother that her son would outgrow this bizarre practice. As Glatman matured, however, he continued to be obsessed by fantasies of bondage, sadism, and strangulation. At the age of twenty-nine, he set about making his depraved dreams come true.

  Posing as a professional photographer, he managed to persuade a series of struggling young models that he was going to take their photos for the covers of the kind of sleazy detective magazines that were so popular back in the 1950s. Since these covers typically featured bound and helpless young women, t
he models allowed Glatman to truss them up and gag them. They were further disarmed by his appearance—Glatman looked like a creepy but essentially harmless nerd. (If a movie were ever made about his case, Rick Moranis would be the inevitable casting choice.)

  Once he had the women in his power, Glatman proceeded to strip and photograph them, rape them at gunpoint, and take more photos of their terrified looks as the true horror of their situation finally dawned on them. Then he strangled them with a length of rope and disposed of their bodies in the desert.

  Altogether, Glatman murdered three young women in this way. He tried to set up a fourth deadly photo session—but this time, the intended victim proved to be more than he could handle. When Glatman pulled his pistol on her in his car, she lunged at him, wrestled the weapon away, and held him at gunpoint until the police arrived.

  In custody, Glatman confessed in lengthy detail. He was convicted after a three-day trial in November 1958 and received his death sentence with a philosophical shrug. “It’s better this way,” he remarked.

  Few people would have argued with him.

  PIED PIPERS

  According to German legend, the Pied Piper lured the rats out of the medieval town of Hamelin by playing a magical tune on his flute. When the townspeople refused to pay him, he piped his siren song again, this time leading all the children away and (as one especially disturbing version of the story goes) sealing them up in a cave where they were entombed forever.

  Over the years, scholars have tried to discover a historical basis for the tale. In his 1992 book A World Lit Only by Fire, for example, author William Manchester argues that the real-life model for the legendary figure was a fifteenth-century lust murderer who kidnapped and killed 130 children. It’s impossible to judge the validity of this claim. Still, there’s reason to believe that there might have been a true-life Pied Piper. Certainly, our own era has produced a number of flesh-and-blood examples—strangely charismatic misfits who have used some sort of intoxicating enticement to lead young people horribly astray.