The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 23

  Though the very first chain-saw murder movie was Wes Craven’s pioneering splatter film The Last House on the Left (1971), the film that made this particular piece of equipment de rigueur for cinematic psychos was Tobe Hooper’s 1975 cult classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs, Hooper’s masterwork was inspired by the horrific deeds of the Wisconsin ghoul, Edward Gein. Indeed, the original advertisements for the film claimed that it was entirely factual. “What happened is true! Now see the movie that is just as real!” The real truth, however, is that Hooper’s film is only loosely—very loosely—based on reality. Among other things, Ed Gein didn’t even own a chain saw. The only tools he is known to have employed were his trusty spade (for exhuming female corpses) and a big-bladed hunting knife (for dismembering them).

  It’s easy to see why the makers of in-your-face splatter movies are attracted to chain saws—they are big, loud, and exceptionally scary-looking (the chain saws, that is, though the description undoubtedly applies to some of the filmmakers, too). For those same reasons, however, chain saws do not make very suitable weapons for real-life serial killers. After all, it’s hard to sneak into a house in a nice residential neighborhood and quietly dismember an entire family with a chain saw. Chain saws also make notoriously poor concealed weapons.

  There is, however, at least one serial killer who used a power saw on his victims, albeit posthumously. In the 1980s, a Swedish physician named Teet Haerm, who worked as a medical examiner for the Stockholm police, was accused of the serial murder of seven prostitutes. But his outrages didn’t stop there. After killing his victims, he beheaded and dismembered their bodies with a power saw.

  Then—like another serial-killer physician, the fictional Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter—Dr. Haerm devoured portions of their flesh.

  PROFILING

  During the 1950s, New York was terrorized by an anonymous psycho—dubbed the “Mad Bomber” by the press—who planted dozens of homemade explosives around the city. Stymied in their investigation, police turned to a psychiatric whiz named James Brussel. After studying all the available evidence, Dr. Brussel deduced that the unknown madman would turn out to be a middle-aged paranoiac of Eastern European descent who lived in Connecticut with a maiden aunt or sister, was afflicted with a serious physical illness like tuberculosis, attended church regularly, went out of his way to behave in a polite, soft-spoken manner, and would be wearing a double-breasted suit (buttoned) when arrested.

  Thanks in large part to Brussels description, police were able to trace the bomber, who turned out to be a well-mannered, fifty-four-year-old bachelor of Polish immigrant stock named George Metesky, who lived in Connecticut with his unmarried sisters, was a weekly churchgoer, had been treated for TB, and suffered from severe paranoia. When Metesky was led off by police, he was dressed in a blue, double-breasted suit. Buttoned.

  Brussel’s amazing prediction is universally acknowledged as the pioneering example of a technique that now stands as one of the most potent weapons in the war against serial killers: the psychological profiling of “unsubs” (police slang for “unknown subjects”). Building on Brussels groundbreaking work, agents of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit began visiting prisons in the late 1970s. They interviewed several dozen of America’s most infamous killers in an effort to figure out what makes these monsters tick. The agents found that serial murderers can be roughly divided into two categories. The organized type is a methodical killer who carefully plans his crimes, stalks his prey, brings along his weapon of choice, then—once he has his victim in his power—engages in slow, sadistic murder. By contrast, the disorganized killer tends to be subject to sudden, overwhelming impulses, chooses his victims spontaneously, then quickly overpowers and kills them with whatever weapons are at hand.

  Beyond these broad classifications, each case taken on by the FBI’s crack team of “mind hunters” receives highly individualized attention. When local law officers are faced with a particularly savage and baffling crime, they can—as an ultimate resort—submit a request to the FBI’s Criminal Personality Profiling Program. If the Bureau decides to accept the case, a profiler will make a close study of all the facts he receives, then send back a highly detailed, multipage report containing his analysis of the unsub. Since profiles are a form of highly educated guesswork, involving as much intuition as science, they sometimes miss their mark. But when they are accurate—which is surprisingly often—they can seem uncanny.

  Stumped by the brutal murder of a twelve-year-old girl, for example, police in a small Southern town contacted renowned FBI profiler John Douglas, who came up with this sketch of the unsub: a divorced white man who drove a black or blue car, worked at a “macho laborer’s job,” was dishonorably discharged from the military, knew the victim, and had a previous record of sex crimes. Following through on this lead, police soon arrested the culprit—a divorced white male who drove a blue Pinto, cut tree limbs for a living, had been kicked out of the army, had done work at the victim’s house, and was implicated in an earlier rape case.

  Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have done it any better.

  PROSTITUTES

  It comes as no surprise to learn that prostitutes are prime targets of serial killers. For one thing, hookers have no compunctions about going off to isolated places with strange men (indeed, it’s part of the job description). For another, since so many working girls are runaways, drifters, and druggies, nobody becomes very concerned—or even notices—when they disappear or turn up dead. Finally—for those twisted, often impotent lust killers who see all women as “sluts”—prostitutes epitomize everything they most hate and fear about sex. In the demented view of these psychos, these prostitutes “deserve to die.”

  From the very beginning of modern serial murder, killers have seized on the vulnerability of prostitutes. In the 1880s, Jack the Ripper set the pattern for future generations of night-stalking butchers by slaughtering a series of harlots. His deadly descendants include Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (who deviated from the usual pattern by poisoning his victims instead of slashing them to pieces), the still-unidentified “Jack the Stripper,” and Peter Sutcliffe, who believed he was doing the Lord’s work in ridding the world of whores. Dr. Teet Haerm of Sweden also believed that he was engaged in a righteous cause. During the 1980s, he killed, dismembered, and occasionally cannibalized a string of Stockholm hookers in order—so he claimed—to clean the streets of sin.

  One of the more sensational cases of the serial murder of prostitutes in recent years occurred in 1990, when a forty-five-year old man named Arthur Shawcross was accused of the mutilation and murder of ten hookers in Rochester, New York. According to Shawcross, he killed one woman because she bit him, another because she made too much noise during sex, a third for trying to steal his wallet, and a fourth because she called him a “wimp.” Like a number of other serial killers, Shawcross insisted that he had Multiple Personalities, and was possessed by the reincarnated spirit of a thirteenth-century English cannibal named Ariemes, who had taught him to dine on human flesh. (Shawcross claimed to have eaten the body parts of several of his victims.)

  Not all of Shawcross’s victims were prostitutes; he also preyed on children. So did another psycho-killer, the South African serial murderer Stewart Wilken, whose victims were more or less equally divided between pubescent boys and female prostitutes. During a seven-year span between February 1990 and January 1997, Wilken murdered ten victims in the coastal town of Port Elizabeth, usually by strangulation. He also routinely engaged in necrophiliac sex, sometimes returning to a dump site to have sex with the victim’s decomposing corpse. In at least one case, he engaged in cannibalism, slicing off the nipples of a forty-two-year-old prostitute and eating them on the spot. And to top off the list of his enormities, he murdered his own ten-year-old daughter, stripped her naked, and slept beside the corpse until it mummified. When finally arrested, he offered a self-assessment that stands as one of the greatest understatements on record.
<
br />   “I am sick,” he told his interrogators.

  “The women I killed were filth—bastard prostitutes who were littering the streets. I was just cleaning up the place a bit.”

  PETER “YORKSHIRE RIPPER” SUTCLIFFE

  PSYCHOTICS

  Thanks in large part to the Alfred Hitchcock 1960 horror masterpiece, the word psycho is routinely used in reference to serial killers. There are two very different mental conditions, however, that use psycho as a prefix: psychotic and psychopath.

  The first of these terms refers to an extreme form of personality disintegration: basically what clinicians call paranoid schizophrenia. People afflicted with this severe mental illness have lost touch with reality. They suffer from bizarre visions, grotesque delusions, and a variety of terrifying hallucinations—visual, auditory, even olfactory. They see, hear, even smell things that exist only inside their own deeply disordered minds. Ed Gein, for example, saw flocks of buzzards squatting in tree limbs, heard laughter emanating from dead leaves, and smelled the stench of rotting flesh wafting up from the ground. Another psychotic, Herbert Mullin, committed a string of random murders in obedience to a voice that commanded him to kill in order to stave off a cataclysmic earthquake.

  The vast majority of psychotics are not prone to violence, however, and only a small minority of serial killers fall into this category.

  Most are not psychotics but psychopaths. (See Mask of Sanity.)

  PYROMANIA

  Along with Animal Torture and protracted Bed-Wetting, starting fires is one of the three early warning signals of future homicidal mania (see Triad). So it’s not surprising that some serial killers continue their pyromaniac activities as grown-ups. After all, destruction is the serial killer’s raison d’être. Human beings are his ultimate target, but when a living victim isn’t readily available, an inanimate object will do. Torching a building or two is a common way for a serial killer to satisfy his urge to annihilate.

  Back in the late 1800s, Thomas Piper—the “Boston Belfry Murderer,” who fatally bludgeoned and raped four victims (including a five-year-old girl)—confessed that in between his frenzied outbursts of lust murder, he was fond of setting fire to some of the city’s most prominent buildings, including Concord Hall. Since then, arson has been a favorite form of amusement for a long line of serial killers, from turn-of-the-century killer-nurse Jane Toppan, to the “Monster of Düsseldorf,” Peter Kürten, to such recent psychos as David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz and Ottis Toole (Henry Lee Lucas’s partner in crime).

  The ferociously nihilistic Toole might have been speaking for all killers of this kind when he explained why he felt compelled to burn down houses. “I just hated to see them standing there,” he said.

  QUAKER

  Partly because the term serial killer came into common usage only within the last twenty or so years—and partly because human beings have a natural tendency to romanticize the past—people tend to assume that serial homicide is a strictly contemporary phenomenon. In point of fact, America had plenty of multiple murderers in the good old days. They just weren’t called serial killers—or even necessarily regarded as criminals.

  A case in point can be found in the 1837 bestselling novel Nick of the Woods by Robert Montgomery Bird. The title character—whose real name, aptly enough, is Nathan Slaughter—is, of all things, a Pennsylvania Quaker. Despite belonging to a religion that promotes pacifism, Nathan is a confirmed Indian hater, who has come to the Kentucky wilderness for the express purpose of conducting a bloody campaign against Native Americans. Throughout the novel, he engages in gruesome acts of violence, all described in loving detail. At one point, for example, he attacks a chief named Wenonga. After burying a tomahawk in his enemy’s brain, he grabs a knife and scalps the chief. Then—still not satisfied—Nathan proceeds to draw “the knife over the dead man’s breast, dividing skin, cartilage, and even bone, so sharp was the blade and so powerful the hand that urged it.”

  To be sure, Nathan is a fictional character. But he reflects a historical reality. Many Americans believe that we are living in a time of unprecedented violence. But bloodshed and mayhem were no less endemic to our society a hundred years ago than they are today. On the contrary. The history of the American frontier—with its appalling record of lynchings, massacres, shootings, and other everyday barbarities—makes our own time seem like a Golden Age. Back in the 1800s, a man with a taste for human blood could go out into the wilderness and satisfy his sadistic cravings to his heart’s content—as long as his victims weren’t white. He might even be regarded as a hero. Certainly that was how nineteenth-century readers viewed Nathan Slaughter. To modern eyes, however, he looks somewhat different. As one critic puts it, he resembles a “Quaker serial killer.”

  QUARRY

  An obsessed big-game hunter—who has bagged everything from Bengal tigers to Alaskan grizzlies—grows bored of ordinary prey. He seeks an exciting new challenge, the ultimate thrill. He buys a small South American island and stocks it with castaways and shipwreck survivors. He begins to hunt the only animal that possesses courage, cunning, and the ability to reason: man.

  This is the premise of Richard Connell’s prizewinning short story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” At the time of its publication in 1924, the tale was perceived as an exercise in sardonic imagination, its kill-crazed villain—a Russian count named Zaroff—as a chilling embodiment of the hunting instinct gone mad.

  Unfortunately, the hunting of humans has become an all-too-common reality, as serial killers stalk, trap, and butcher their human quarry with all the methodical madness of Connell’s fictitious monster.

  Serial killers of the so-called organized type (see Profiling) pursue their quarry in a frighteningly systematic way. Arming themselves with their chosen weapons, they stalk their favorite hunting grounds in search of the easiest prey—unescorted women, female hitchhikers, prostitutes of either sex, unsupervised children. Then they pounce, snaring their victims by force or deception.

  Perhaps the most unnerving parallel between serial killers and big-game hunters is their shared fondness for taking Trophies. Though some serial killers are satisfied with saving mementoes like the wallets or photographs of their victims, others collect and preserve body parts. Edward Gein— the most notorious of all human-trophy hunters—kept the flayed, stuffed, and mounted faces of women hanging on his bedroom walls (very much in the manner of Connell’s crazy Count Zaroff, who decorates his trophy room with the heads of his human victims).

  Between 1973 and 1983, an Alaskan outdoorsman named Robert Hansen indulged in his own depraved version of “The Most Dangerous Game.” Abducting prostitutes to the wilderness outside Anchorage, he would strip and rape them, then force them to flee through the woods while he stalked them with a knife, bow and arrow, or hunting rifle. Hansen was ultimately convicted of four savage murders, though his actual tally may have been as high as seventeen.

  “ ‘Oh,’ said the general, ‘it supplies me with the most exciting hunting in the world. No other hunting compares with it for an instant. Every day I hunt and never grow bored now, for I have a quarry with which I can match my wits.’ “

  RICHARD CONNELL,

  “The Most Dangerous Game”

  QUICKLIME

  When Indiana police dug up the farmyard of Belle Gunness in April 1908, they uncovered more than a dozen bodies—the grisly record of years of profit-motivated murder, mostly of prospective husbands (see Black Widows). Most of the corpses were drastically decomposed. A chillingly practical woman, Gunness had devised a way to expedite the putrefaction process. She had chopped each of the bodies into six sections, then treated the pieces with quicklime, a highly caustic substance that eats away at organic matter. If the search of her farmyard had occurred any later, the bodies would have been decomposed beyond the possibility of identification.

  Other murderers have employed quicklime for the same purpose—eliminating the corpus delicti. Dr. H. H. Holmes kept a vat of the stuff in the dungeon of
his Chicago “Horror Castle,” where untold victims disappeared at the tail end of the nineteenth century. Fifty years later, Dr. Marcel Petiot— who murdered dozens of would-be refugees during the Nazi occupation of Paris—used quicklime to dissolve the corpses buried in his backyard. (Only later did he turn to another method—cremation—as a more efficient means of disposal.) John Wayne Gacy periodically sprinkled lime into the crawl space beneath his house to dampen the stench of the rotting male bodies accumulating in the muck.

  Of course, if you’re going to use quicklime for this ghoulish purpose, it helps to know something about its chemical properties. In the mid-1980s, a sixty-year-old woman named Dorothea Puente began renting rooms in her San Francisco boardinghouse to elderly welfare recipients, who subsequently vanished without a trace. Alerted by suspicious social workers, police launched an investigation and eventually discovered seven headless corpses planted in Puente’s backyard garden. Though Puente had taken care to sprinkle the bodies with quicklime, she was undone by her faulty knowledge of chemical reactions. Unless lime is mixed with water, it actually acts as a kind of preservative, slowing down instead of accelerating the decomposition process. As a result, medical examiners had no trouble discovering that the victims had died from massive doses of Valium and Dalmane—evidence that helped convict the lethal landlady and send her to prison for life.

  RACE AND RACISM

  Say the phrase “serial killer” to most people and they will immediately conjure up mental images of Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson—or perhaps Hannibal Lecter. In other words, white guys.

  It’s true that a significant majority of American serial killers are white. But there’s a simple explanation for this—namely, that whites make up the majority of the U.S. population. But there have been plenty of African-American serial killers, too. According to the New York Times,“black serial killers occur in roughly equal—or even slightly greater—proportion to the number of blacks in the population.” Recent studies show that between 13 and 22 percent of U.S. serial killers are African-American.