The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read online

  Among the most notorious are Coral Watts, who killed an indeterminate number of women in Houston in the early 1980s (he confessed to thirteen homicides, though he’s suspected of as many as forty); Henry Louis Wallace, who strangled nine young women in North Carolina in the early 1990s; Cleophus Prince Jr. (aka the “Clairemont Killer”), who butchered a half-dozen women in San Diego during a nine-month spree beginning in January 1990; and Kendall Francois, who murdered eight women in the upstate New York town of Poughkeepsie in the late 1990s and stashed their corpses in his attic crawl space.

  Given the significant number of black psycho-killers in the U.S., why do most people assume that serial murder is an all-white phenomenon? The likeliest explanation is deep-rooted racial prejudice. Serial killers tend to stick to their own race. White psychos generally prey on white victims; blacks on black. And the sad fact is that white America isn’t particularly interested in crimes involving minorities. Even the most horrific murders get far less attention from the mainstream media—and often from the police as well—when the victims are people of color.

  Indeed, some serial killers have counted on this very fact in order to get away with their crimes. In the 1920s, for example, the cannibalistic pedophile Albert Fish prowled the inner-city slums because he knew that the police wouldn’t exert themselves to investigate the disappearance of black children. More recently, Jeffrey Dahmer preyed mostly on African-American and Asian young men for the same reason. The discovery of Dahmer’s atrocities set off major protests among black and Asian Milwaukeeans, outraged at the perceived racism of the city’s police department.

  Fish and Dahmer may have been exploiting the prevailing prejudices of society, but their crimes were motivated by extreme sexual depravity, not racism. The case has been otherwise with a small minority of serial murderers. The late 1970s and early 1980s in particular were a boom time for serial murders based on race, as a handful of self-styled “Aryan warriors” launched homicidal crusades against minorities. In Cleveland, a Nazi transvestite named Frank Spisak killed one black man and two whites he believed were Jews. In western New York State, white supremacist Joseph Christopher hunted down and murdered a dozen African-Americans over a three-month period (cutting out the hearts of two of his victims), while Hitler-worshipping Joseph Franklin roamed from state to state, slaughtering blacks, Jews, and interracial couples—more than thirteen victims in all.

  Of course, racially inspired serial murder (like the sexually motivated variety) is not strictly a white phenomenon. In the early 1970s, a Black Muslim splinter group known as the “Death Angels” required that prospective members prove their zeal by murdering white people and taking Polaroids of their corpses. San Francisco’s “Zebra” killings (so called because the victims were white and the perpetrators black) were the horrific result: fifteen men and women slain in six months. A few years later, the Chicago area was the scene of a similar string of random killings. Calling themselves “De Mau Mau,” the culprits were a group of black Vietnam veterans who vented their rage against white society by slaughtering ten people, including two entire families.

  The Atlanta Child Murders

  Though crimes involving African-American victims often receive scant attention in the press, a notable exception was the appalling series of child murders that took place in Atlanta in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The case, which generated nationwide outrage and horror, was covered extensively by the mainstream media. Indeed, it was in a May 1981 New York Times Magazine article on the then-unsolved case that the recently coined term “serial killer” first appeared in a major publication.

  In a two-year period between 1979 and 1981, the killer claimed twenty-nine victims. Most were children, most were male, and all were African-American. What made the investigation especially difficult was the lack of a clear pattern. Like the infamous Peter Kürten, the killer didn’t seem to have any particular homicidal preference—usually strangling his victims, but sometimes stabbing them or bludgeoning them to death.

  As the months went by and the body count rose, both the public and the media demanded a solution to what seemed to be a case of racial terrorism. Civil rights groups led the way, and President Reagan responded by setting aside federal funds to track down the killer. Meanwhile, celebrities from Muhammad Ali to Burt Reynolds offered private financial assistance. Many perceived the murders as a deranged political act, probably committed by the Ku Klux Klan. When investigators finally made an arrest, however, the suspect turned out to be not a homicidal white racist, but a young black male who fit the classic profile of a psychopathic loner.

  The turning point in the case was a mysterious incident on a bridge that seemed to come straight out of the ominous 1967 ballad “Ode to Billie Joe.” On the night of May 22, 1981, police officers heard something splash beneath the bridge spanning the Chattahoochee River. Moments later, they stopped a car leaving the bridge and questioned the driver, a young African-American named Wayne Williams. He became the prime suspect in the Atlanta Child Murders when police discovered the body of one of the victims in the river. Over the next month, more evidence emerged, including fibers found on the victims that matched furnishings in Williams’s car and house, and animal hairs that matched his pet dog.

  Also implicating him were odd personality traits reminiscent of other psychopaths. He often lied, for instance, to exaggerate his own importance, and he was fond of impersonating police officers, a favorite tactic of serial killers to win the trust of their victims. The police arrested him in June. Eventually, Williams was convicted of two counts of murder and received a life sentence for each.

  Despite the convictions, many people have claimed that authorities railroaded Williams through a combination of questionable circumstantial evidence and inconclusive fiber matches. More than twenty years later, in May 2005, these skeptics got an opportunity to prove their point when police chief Louis Graham of DeKalb County reopened the investigation of the four Atlanta Child Murders in his jurisdiction. Graham, a police officer at the time of Williams’s arrest, has always believed that the true culprit was the KKK.

  These developments, however, may be less significant than they seem. Even if Williams is cleared of the four DeKalb County homicides, he will not be released, since the cases in Graham’s jurisdiction don’t include the two murders that sent Williams to prison in the first place. And the new investigation will also have to answer one crucial question: Why did the child killings suddenly stop after Williams was arrested?

  RAILROADS

  In the 1800s, the railroad was regarded as one of the wonders of the age, a glorious achievement celebrated in story and song. In one of his most famous poems, the great American bard Walt Whitman rhapsodized about the railroad:

  I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad,

  surmounting every barrier;

  I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring,

  and the shrill steam-whistle,

  I hear the echoes reverberate through the

  grandest scenery in the world.

  For Whitman, the transcontinental railroad was a symbol of America’s greatness and glory. Of course, he couldn’t possibly foresee the day when it would serve as the preferred mode of transportation for roving psychopathic killers.

  Carl Panzram—the Jazz Age drifter who eventually confessed to twenty-one murders and more than a thousand acts of sodomy—began riding the rails shortly after finishing a stint in reform school. He was still in his teens when four hoboes gang-raped him in a boxcar. The experience taught him a lesson that would serve as his credo for the remainder of his incorrigible life: “Force and might make right.”

  It was a lesson he put into practice every chance he got. For a while, he worked as a train guard for the Illinois Central Railroad—a job that offered him a prime opportunity for beating the brains out of practically everyone he could lay his hands on, whether union agitators, scabs, or even other guards.

  The rails also figured in an especially spectacul
ar (if undocumented) episode from his misbegotten life. From time to time, Panzram claimed, he would place a bomb in a railroad tunnel, blow up an oncoming train, then shoot anyone who happened to survive the explosion.

  Though Panzram was as vicious as they come, his story about massacring whole trainloads of passengers was probably just a homicidal fantasy. The terrible crimes of “Railway Killer” Angel Maturino Resendez, however, were all too real. A modern railway hobo, Resendez was a migrant worker from Mexico who hitched rides on freight cars from one temporary job to another. He was also a rage-filled psychokiller who preyed upon his victims along the railroad right-of-way.

  After committing his first murder in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1997, Resendez bummed his way by rail from one random destination to the next, killing as he went. Typically, he broke into people’s homes and savaged his victims with whatever weapon was handy—shotgun, kitchen knife, sledgehammer, or gardening tool—then slipped back to the tracks and moved on. The “Railway Killer” struck several times in Texas and ventured as far north as Illinois. Placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List,” he finally surrendered in July 1999. The following year, he received a death sentence for one murder, though he may have killed as many as nine people in all.

  For one serial killer, trains were not a means of moving from one murder to another. Nor were they a breeding ground for abuse and homicidal rage. They were a target. Panzram might have spun yarns about blowing up trains and trying to kill everyone inside, but the mad Hungarian, Sylvestre Matuschka, actually did it.

  A World War I veteran and a successful businessman, Matuschka went for years without acting upon the bizarre obsessions that festered inside him. Then in 1930, at the age of thirty-nine, he attempted to derail two trains by setting up obstructions on the tracks. Neither act of sabotage produced any significant casualties, which only prodded him into devising a more devastating approach.

  After methodically teaching himself the art of setting explosives, he blew up a set of tracks in Germany and sent an oncoming train careening off course. Matuschka was not satisfied. The crash injured seventy-five passengers but killed no one. His next explosion, in his native Hungary, was more to his liking. Twenty-two people were killed. This made him so happy, according to one account, that he experienced an orgasm as he watched the disaster unfold.

  In court, Matuschka offered a series of wild explanations for his crimes, presumably to support an insanity defense. An evil hypnotist made him do it. He believed his train wrecks would stop the spread of atheism. He was controlled by a bunch of demons named Leo.

  But the explanation he gave at the time of his arrest was far simpler. “I wrecked trains because I like to see people die,” he said. “I like to hear people scream.”

  Richard Ramirez

  They called him the “Night Stalker”—a shadowy fiend who would slip into darkened houses and savage the sleeping occupants. During his six-month rampage in the spring and summer of 1985, no one in Los Angeles felt safe.

  Often, he would kill the husband first, then turn his depraved attentions to the woman. His victims—who ranged in age from thirty to eighty-three—were shot, slashed, bludgeoned, and viciously mutilated. In one case, he carved out the eyes of a forty-four-year-old woman and carried them off as Trophies. Sometimes, he daubed satanic pentagrams on the bodies before fleeing into the night.

  Richard Ramirez; from Murderers! trading card set

  (Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

  By early August 1985, he was officially credited with more than a dozen homicides. A few weeks later, after attacking another couple—shooting the man in the head and raping the woman—he fled in their car. After recovering the stolen vehicle, police were able to lift a clear set of fingerprints, which turned out to match those of a small-time hood named Richard Ramirez. An all-points bulletin was issued for the suspect, and his mug shot was broadcast on local TV.

  On August 31, Ramirez tried to yank a woman from her car in a Hispanic neighborhood in East LA. Her screams drew the attention of passersby, who recognized Ramirez and pounced on him. Only the timely arrival of the police saved the “Night Stalker” from the enraged mob.

  At his trial, Ramirez (who had also been involved in numerous sexual assaults, including the abduction-rape of several small children) indulged in various bizarre antics. He enjoyed playing Satan, inscribing a pentagram on his left palm and flashing it to photographers, and making devil’s horns with his fingers while intoning, “Evil, evil, evil . . .” He was ultimately convicted of thirteen murders and sentenced to death. “Big deal,” he said with a sneer when the judge handed down the sentence. “Death comes with the territory. See you in Disneyland.”

  According to his own estimate, the “Night Stalker” (who remains on death row) was responsible for even more murders than the thirteen he was convicted of. “I’ve killed twenty people, man,” he told a fellow inmate. “I love all that blood.”

  “You maggots make me sick. I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells within all of us!”

  RICHARD “NIGHT STALKER” RAMIREZ,

  addressing the court after being convicted of thirteen murders

  RECOMMENDED READING

  Though the popularity of true-crime books has boomed in recent years, the genre itself dates back at least as far as 1621, when one of the bestselling tomes in England was a collection of real-life crime stories called God’s Revenge Against Murder and Adultery. Clearly, a comprehensive history of crime books would require a lot more space than we have at our disposal. Even a history of books dealing only with American serial killers is beyond the scope of this entry. As long ago as 1896, Frank P. Geyer—the Philadelphia detective who followed the trail of the notorious “multi-murderer” Dr. H. H. Holmes—published an account of his investigation, The Holmes-Pitezel Case. Since that time, virtually every serial killer of note has been the subject of at least one book. Covering all of them would take a book of its own.

  Still, there are some volumes that anyone interested in serial killers should be aware of. Some of these deal with the phenomenon as a whole. These include: Thomas S. Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America (1910); L. C. Douthwaite’s Mass Murder (1928); Eric Hickey’s Serial Murders and Their Victims (1991); Jack Levin and James Alan Fox’s Mass Murder: America’s Growing Menace (1988); Elliott Leyton’s Hunting Humans (1988); Michael Newtons Serial Slaughter (1992); Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman’s The Serial Killer (1990); and the volume Serial Killers (1992), part of the “True Crime” series of Time-Life Books.

  Capsule biographies of infamous serial killers are included in a number of encyclopedia-style collections. Jay Robert Nash’s sweeping Bloodletters and Badmen (1973) is the best known of these, but it has to be approached with a certain amount of caution, since it is rife with inaccuracies. Others include: Michael Newton’s Hunting Humans (1990); Brian Lane and Wilfred Gregg’s The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (1992); and David Everitt’s Human Monsters (1993).

  In terms of full-length studies of individual serial killers, the following is an alphabetical list of selected world-class psychos and the books that examine their crimes.

  The Axeman of New Orleans

  Robert Tallant and William Kimber, Murder in New Orleans (1953)

  Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez

  Paul Buck, The Honeymoon Killers (1970)

  David Berkowitz

  David Abrahamsen, Confessions of Son of Sam (1985)

  Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono

  Ted Schwartz, The Hillside Strangler (1981)

  Ian Brady and Myra Hindley (The “Moors Murderers”)

  Emlyn Williams, Beyond Belief (1967)

  Ted Bundy

  Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me (1988)

  Andrei Chikatilo

  Richard Lourie, Hunting the Devil (1993)

  John Reginald Christie

  Ludovic Kennedy, Ten Rillington Place (1961)

  The Cleveland Torso Killer

  Steven Nickel, Torso (1989)
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br />   Juan Corona

  Tracy Kidder, The Road to Yuba City (1974)

  Jeffrey Dahmer

  Anne E. Schwartz, The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough (1992)

  Albert DeSalvo

  Gerold Frank, The Boston Strangler (1967)

  Albert Fish

  Harold Schechter, Deranged (1990)

  John Wayne Gacy

  Tim Cahill, Buried Dreams (1986)

  Edward Gein

  Harold Schechter, Deviant (1989)

  Harvey Glatman

  Michael Newton, Rope (1998)

  Belle Gunness

  Janet L. Langois, Belle Gunness (1985)

  Gary Heidnik

  Ken Englade, Cellar of Horror (1988)

  William Heirens

  Lucy Freeman, Before I Kill More. . . (1955)

  H.H.Holmes

  Harold Schechter, Depraved (1994)

  Jack the Ripper

  Donald Rumbelow, The Complete Jack the Ripper (1975)

  Jack the Stripper

  Brian McConnell, Found Naked and Dead (1974)

  Edmund Kemper

  Margaret Chaney, The Co-Ed Killer (1976)

  Peter Kürten

  Margaret Seaton Wagner, The Monster of Düsseldorf (1932)

  Leonard Lake and Charles Ng

  John Lasseter, Die for Me (2000)

  Henry Lee Lucas

  Joel Norris, Henry Lee Lucas (1991)

  Charles Manson

  Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter (1975)

  Dennis Nilsen

  Brian Masters, Killing for Company (1985)

  Carl Panzram

  Thomas Gaddis, Panzram: A Journal of Murder (2002)

  Marcel Petiot

  John V. Grombach, The Great Liquidator (1982)