The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read online

  Pausing to wash the blood from his hands, Speck returned to his grisly work. One by one the young women were led off into different bedrooms and brutally killed—some had their throats slashed, others were strangled. The last to die was twenty-two-year-old Gloria Davy. Speck took his time, raping her twice before sodomizing her with a foreign object and strangling her to death.

  Having dispatched every one of the young women—or so he thought—Speck shuffled off into the night. But during his rampage, he had lost count of his victims. One of the student nurses—Corazon Amurao—had managed to hide herself under a bed. Waiting until five in the morning, she wriggled out from under the mattress, made her way to the balcony, and began screaming, “They are all dead! My friends are all dead!”

  From Amurao’s description, along with other clues—primarily the fingerprints he had left all over the apartment and the telltale knots he had tied, which were characteristic of a seaman—police quickly identified Speck, who was arrested in Cook County Hospital after a failed suicide attempt. He was given the death sentence, but when the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty, he was resentenced to consecutive life terms amounting to four hundred years. He had served only nineteen of them when he died in prison of a heart attack.

  The Speck Tape

  In May 1995, the public got its first stunned look at a grainy VHS tape that gave new meaning to the term “pornographic video.” Shot in Stateville prison in 1988—three years before his death—the tape shows Richard Speck snorting cocaine, engaging in oral sex with another inmate, and flaunting his monstrously repulsive body.

  Looking unspeakably grotesque in a blond, bobbed hairdo, Speck—lounging in a cell with his young African-American lover—jokes about his murders, talks about how much he loves to be anally penetrated by other men, and brags about the good life he has been enjoying in prison. “If they only knew how much fun I was having in here,” he says, laughing, “they would turn me loose.”

  In what is perhaps the most revolting moment in this thoroughly odious tape, Speck—at the behest of his lover—strips off his clothes to reveal that he is sporting blue silk panties and a floppy set of hormonally induced female breasts. He then proceeds to perform fellatio on the other man.

  When this video was shown to Illinois lawmakers, it set off a storm of outrage. “This is the kind of thing that really shakes the public’s confidence in the criminal justice system,” remarked one state legislator. Indeed, this comment was a significant understatement. The tape was so abhorrent that—after portions of it were broadcast on news stations around the country—even some die-hard opponents of the death penalty found themselves regretting that Speck had escaped execution.

  SPREE KILLERS

  In its efforts to establish precise criminal classifications, the FBI distinguishes between serial killing and spree killing. According to the Bureau’s definitions, a serial killer always experiences an emotional “cooling-off” period between his crimes—a hiatus lasting anywhere from days to years. By contrast, a spree killer is someone who murders a string of people in several different locations with no cooling-off period between homicides.

  A classic case of spree killing occurred in 1949, when a crazed ex-GI named Howard Unruh strode through his Camden, New Jersey, neighborhood with a 9mm Luger in hand, gunning down everyone who crossed his path. In the space of just twelve minutes, he killed thirteen people and wounded three more. More recently, a twenty-seven-year-old Englishman named Michael Ryan decked himself out like Rambo—complete with an AK-47 Kalashnikov assault rifle—and spent the morning of August 19, 1987, shooting thirty people around the British market town of Hungerford.

  Other spree killers, however, commit their crimes over a much more extended period of time. This can make the FBI’s distinction between spree killing and serial murder seem a little blurry. In 1984, for example, a homicidal maniac named Christopher Wilder went on a murder spree that left six women dead in a month’s time. Perhaps the most famous of all American spree killers, Charles Starkweather, killed ten people during a twenty-six-day rampage through the badlands of Nebraska and Wyoming (see Killer Couples: A Couple of Crazy Kids).

  Perhaps a more useful distinction between spree killing and serial homicide has to do with underlying motives. Serial killing is, bottom-line, a sexual crime. The serial killer spends a great deal of time (perhaps years) indulging in dark, obsessive fantasies about dominance, torture, and murder. Finally, driven by an overpowering hunger, he goes out in search of a very precise type of victim (women with long dark hair parted in the middle, for example, or Asian teenage boys). Once he has fulfilled his depraved desires, his blood lust subsides for a certain length of time, until it builds again to an irresistible need.

  Charles Starkweather; from Murderers! trading card set

  (Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

  Spree killing, on the other hand, is really a form of mobile Mass Murder. While the mass murderer commits his crimes in a single location (for example, the disgruntled employee who suddenly goes berserk and blows away all his co-workers), the spree killer moves from place to place (throughout a neighborhood, around a town, or even across an entire county or state). But his rampage is essentially a single extended massacre (even when it lasts for several weeks).

  In short, the spree killer is generally not a sexual psychopath but a deeply unbalanced individual who suddenly snaps and embarks on a murderous jaunt, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake. Spree killers share another trait with mass murderers: they are driven by profoundly self-destructive impulses. Typically, their rampages end with their own deaths, either by suicide or in a barrage of police gunfire. They are walking time bombs who detonate without warning, destroying everyone in sight—themselves included.

  That suicidal impulse was clear in the case of Andrew Cunanan, whose cross-country rampage became a worldwide media sensation in the summer of 1997. A charismatic young man who led a glitzy, hedonistic life as the kept boy-toy of a succession of older gay males, Cunanan eventually went into a sudden downward spiral, possibly as a result of drug abuse. By the summer of 1996, the high-living party boy was leading a sordid, desperate existence. Shortly afterward, he embarked on a murderous spree that culminated in the killing of celebrated fashion designer Gianni Versace. With a mammoth manhunt under way, Cunanan took refuge in a Miami houseboat, where, on July 25, 1997, he shot himself in the head with his .40-caliber handgun.

  Cunanan perfectly fit the profile of a spree killer: a profoundly embittered individual, full of suppressed rage and resentment, whose world suddenly falls apart. Life having become unendurable, he decides to go out with a bang—but not without taking others down with him. By committing such a high-profile crime, moreover, he seeks to demonstrate that he is someone to be reckoned with after all—not the nonentity he appears to be, but the kind of person who can rivet the attention of the world.

  The same psychological syndrome can be seen in the case of another spree killer whose crimes held the nation in thrall: the “Beltway Sniper,” John Allen Muhammad. A supremely arrogant man, Muhammad had failed in every area of grown-up life—marriage, fatherhood, business. Seething with resentment, he blamed everyone but himself for his botched life. With the aid of a worshipful, teenaged accomplice, Muhammad—who had honed his shooting skills in the army—set off on a terrifying spree, randomly shooting more than a dozen people in the Washington, D.C., area as they went about their daily routines. As in the case of Cunanan, the crimes were Muhammad’s way both of taking revenge on society and of satisfying his own deluded sense of importance.

  Unlike Cunanan, Muhammad was taken alive, though he had contrived to end his life just the same. He awaits execution in Virginia, having been condemned to death in March 2004. His teenaged acolyte, Lee Boyd Malvo, received a life sentence.

  STATISTICS

  If you live in California and you’re the kind of person who worries obsessively about encountering a serial killer, you might consider moving to a different pla
ce—like Maine. Of all the states in the union, California has the single highest number of serial homicide cases in the twentieth century—fully 16 percent of the national total. Maine, on the other hand, has the lowest—none. Other states to avoid: New York, Texas, Illinois, and Florida. The safest places in America, at least in terms of serial murder, are Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, Delaware, and Vermont, each of which had only one case of serial murder in of the twentieth century.

  For the statistically minded student of serial murder, here are a few other interesting facts and figures:

  • The United States is the hands-down leading producer of serial killers, with 76 percent of the world’s total. Europe comes in a distant second with a measly 17 percent.

  • England has produced 28 percent of the European total. Germany is a very close second with 27 percent, and France is third with 13 percent.

  • In terms of demographics, the vast majority of American serial killers—fully 84 percent—are Caucasian and a mere 16 percent black.

  • In terms of gender, men constitute the overwhelming preponderance of serial killers—at least 90 percent. Indeed, depending on how the crime is defined, many experts believe that serial murder is an exclusively male activity. (See Definition and Women.)

  • While women constitute, at most, an infinitesimal fraction of serial murderers, they make up the majority of victims—65 percent.

  • It is very rare for a serial killer to prey on members of another race. Since most serial killers are white, so are the vast majority of victims—89 percent.

  • Serial murder tends to be a young person’s crime. Most serial killers—44 percent—embark on their deadly careers in their twenties, with 26 percent starting out in their teens and 24 percent in their thirties.

  • If you’re seeking a career that will keep you safe from serial killers, you’ll want to avoid prostitution, since hookers are prime targets for sociopathic sex slayers. The bad news is that there really isn’t any profession that will necessarily protect you from a run-in with a serial killer. In almost 15 percent of serial-murder cases, the victims are chosen entirely at random.

  SUICIDE

  See Death Wish.

  THEATER

  The kinds of sickos we now call serial killers—bloodthirsty butchers who revel in torture, mutilation, and every conceivable variety of murder—have been portrayed onstage for centuries. During the Elizabethan era, for example, one of the most popular forms of drama was the so-called revenge tragedy, featuring villains who were never happier than when gouging out a rival’s eyes or ripping out his entrails or feeding him pies made from the reeking flesh of his own children. Even Shakespeare got in on the act. In his play Titus Andronicus, a young girl—after being gang-raped—has her tongue cut out and her hands chopped off to keep her from identifying her attackers.

  A few centuries later, Parisians flocked to the Theater of the Grand Guignol, which specialized in insanely sadistic skits with titles like “The Garden of Torture,” “The Merchant of Corpses,” “The Kiss of Blood,” “The Castle of Slow Death,” and “The Horrible Experiment.” The plots, such as they were, were little more than a flimsy pretext to depict the most outrageous atrocities imaginable, all simulated with shockingly realistic stage effects. Audiences shrieked, swooned, and occasionally lost their suppers as they watched cackling psychos amputate their victims’ limbs or tear out their tongues or saw open their skulls or grill their faces on red-hot stoves.

  Nowadays, the Grand Guignol tradition of gratuitous gore and stomachchurning effects has largely been taken over by low-budget slasher Movies (and the occasional high-end Hollywood production, like Ridley Scott’s Hannibal). Occasionally, however, a play about serial murder still appears on the Broadway stage. Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 “musical thriller” Sweeney Todd, for example, resurrects the tale of the legendary “Demon Barber of Fleet Street”—the Victorian madman who slaughtered his customers in his specially designed chair, then (with the help of his landlady-lover) turned them into meat pies. The score, one of Sondheim’s best, contains the wittiest paean to Cannibalism ever written (“A Little Priest”).

  There are no songs in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, which debuted on Broadway in 2005. Like Sondheim’s play, however, it contains a potent blend of horror and humor, along with some shocking moments that wouldn’t have been out of place on the stage of the Theater of the Grand Guignol. A meditation on the power of storytelling, the play deals with a series of grisly child murders that may or may not have been inspired by the macabre tales written by the main character and committed by his mentally deficient brother.

  Another recent, powerfully disturbing play about serial murder is Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, a harrowing, three-character drama about a British woman, Nancy, whose ten-year-old daughter is abducted and slain by a serial killer; the serial killer himself, a brain-damaged pedophile named Ralph; and an American psychologist, Agnetha, who is studying the causes of serial homicide. Agnetha’s theory—that criminal psychopathology is rooted in neurological changes caused by extreme child abuse—closely echoes that of real-life criminal psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis, co-author of the influential 1999 study Guilty by Reason of Insanity. The similarities were not lost on Lewis, who, in 2004, launched a highly publicized plagiarism suit against the playwright, claiming that Lavery had not only ripped off her book but “stolen her life.”

  Jane Toppan

  They call Nurses “angels of mercy”—and to all appearances, Jane Toppan fit that description. Besides her obvious competence, she seemed to be a sensitive, sympathetic woman who had worked for some of Boston’s best families. Of course, none of her employers knew anything about Jane’s early years. They did not know about her mother’s tragic death when Jane was just an infant—or about her father’s subsequent insanity, which impelled him to stitch his eyelids together one day in his Boston tailor shop. They weren’t aware of Jane’s own suicide attempts after being jilted by her fiancé. Or the morbid obsessions she displayed during her student nursing years at a Cambridge hospital, where her bizarre fascination with autopsies became a source of dismay to her supervisors.

  It wasn’t until members of the Davis family began dropping like flies in the summer of 1901 that the terrible truth about the skilled, seemingly compassionate nurse finally came to light. Far from being an “angel of mercy,” Jane Toppan turned out to be one of America’s most bloodthirsty “angels of death.”

  Mrs. Mattie Davis was the first to go, presumably of heart failure. She died while visiting her old friend Jane Toppan. The elder Davis daughter, Mrs. Annie Gordon, was so grief-stricken that she turned to Nurse Toppan for relief. Toppan obliged by administering some injections. Shortly thereafter, Annie Gordon followed her mother to the grave. A few days later, the patriarch of the family, Captain Alden Davis, was felled, supposedly by a massive stroke. He, too, had been receiving medication from Nurse Toppan. That left just one surviving member of the family, another married daughter, Mrs. Mary Gibbs. Several days after her father’s funeral—after placing herself under the care of kindly Nurse Toppan—Mary Gibbs dropped dead, too.

  With his wife’s entire family wiped out in less than six weeks, Mary Gibbs’s husband demanded an autopsy. Toppan did her best to prevent it, but Gibbs—suspecting foul play—called in the Massachusetts State Police. The autopsy on Mary Gibbs’s body confirmed her husband’s darkest fears. His wife had been killed with a lethal injection of morphine and atropine, obviously administered by Jane Toppan.

  By then, Toppan had fled Boston. She was finally arrested in Amherst, New Hampshire, on October 29, 1901—though not before she had knocked off her own foster sister.

  At first, Toppan insisted on her innocence, though she admitted to the police that she “was frequently troubled with her head.” As investigators dug into her past, they discovered a string of former patients who had suffered sudden, mysterious deaths. Questioned by psychiatrists (or “alienists” in the lingo of the day), Toppan finally
confessed to poisoning not only the four members of the Davis family but also seven other people as well—eleven victims altogether. Later, she would tell her own attorney that the true total was thirty-one.

  At her 1902 trial, doctors testified that Toppan had been “born with a weak and nervous mental condition” and suffered “from a lack of moral sense and defective self-control.” There was reason to believe that her condition was hereditary: not only her father but her sister, too, had ended up in an insane asylum. Toppan’s own testimony helped persuade the jury of her madness. “That is my ambition,” she declared, “to have killed more people—more helpless people—than any man or woman who has ever lived.” Declared insane, she was confined to a state asylum, where she died in 1938 at the age of eighty-four.

  “That is my ambition, to have killed more people—more helpless people—than any man or woman who has ever lived.”

  JANE TOPPAN

  TOURIST ATTRACTIONS

  Ever since the summer of 1994, one of the most popular sightseeing spots in Los Angeles has been the Brentwood condo where the late Mrs. O. J. Simpson and her waiter-friend, Ron Goldman, met their brutal ends. What are we to make of this phenomenon? Are the tourists who come to gape at this celebrated crime scene little more than morbid voyeurs satisfying their prurient fascination? Well . . . yes. And does such fascination reflect something alarming about the decline of moral values in our violence-obsessed society? Absolutely not. The fact is that for better or worse, intense public fascination with sensational crimes has always been a feature of human society—and enterprising hucksters have always found ways to exploit it.