The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 28

  One hundred years ago, our nation was riveted by the case of the Chicago “multi-murderer” H. H. Holmes, who knocked off an indeterminate number of victims in the labyrinthine depths of his so-called Murder Castle. Much like today’s O.J.-crazed public, Americans couldn’t get enough of the Holmes story. Perceiving the commercial potential of this mania, an aspiring showman named A. M. Clark leased the “multi-murderer’s” notorious residence and announced his plans to turn it into a “murder museum,” complete with guided tours by a Chicago homicide detective. The Castle, however, was gutted by a mysterious blaze before Clark could cash in on its gruesome reputation.

  Sixty years later, another suspicious fire razed the ramshackle farmhouse of the Wisconsin ghoul, Ed Gein, shortly before the property was scheduled to be auctioned. For months, the place had drawn hordes of curiosity seekers. The torching of the house (apparently by outraged townspeople) scotched any plans to turn it into a permanent tourist site. A sideshow exhibitor named Bunny Gibbons, however, came up with another way to capitalize on “Crazy Ed’s” notoriety. Successfully bidding on Gein’s beat-up Ford sedan, Gibbons equipped the car with a pair of wax dummies—one in the driver’s seat, simulating Ed, the other representing a mutilated female corpse. Then he displayed “Ed Gein’s Death Car” in county fairs all around the Midwest, charging gawkers two bits apiece for a peek at THE CAR THAT HAULED THE DEAD FROM THEIR GRAVES!

  This ghoulish sideshow, however, paled before the carnival atmosphere that prevailed at the property of the infamous Black Widow killer Belle Gunness, in the weeks following the discovery of her crimes. Traveling by wagon, automobile, and special excursion train, thousands of Midwesterners flocked to the farmstead where a dozen murder victims had been unearthed. Once there, they could gape at the open graves and peer at the decaying remains on display in the carriage house. After viewing the decomposed body parts, they could settle down for a family picnic, then treat themselves to candy and ice cream peddled by local hawkers. And for those desiring a souvenir of the occasion, there were handsome picture postcards of one of Gunness’s dismembered victims.

  As the local sheriff cheerfully proclaimed, “I never saw folks have a better time!”

  TRANSVESTISM

  Homicidal transvestites have been a feature of horror films ever since Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates put on his mother’s clothes and carved up Janet Leigh in the shower. In real life, of course, there is no correlation at all between cross-dressing and violence. On the contrary, guys who enjoy wearing angora sweaters and high heels tend to be perfect gentlemen. There are several cases, however, where transvestism has been a factor in the backgrounds of serial killers.

  Early in their childhoods, both Charles Manson and Henry Lee Lucas were compelled to dress as girls. Manson, who endured the kind of brutalized Upbringing that seems guaranteed to produce extreme psychopathology, was constantly being shuttled between relatives while his wayward mother was off whoring or doing jail time. At six, he was shipped off to Virginia to live with an aunt and uncle. The latter proved to be a sadistic bully who was constantly deriding his little charge as a “sissy.” To drive home the point, he imposed a vicious punishment, forcing young Charlie to attend the first day of school in a dress.

  Lucas was subjected to the identical cruelty, only this time the perpetrator was his own hard-bitten mother, an insanely vicious woman who—among her countless other forms of abuse—curled her little boy’s stringy blond hair into ringlets and sent him off to school in girl’s clothes.

  Clearly, neither Manson nor Lucas enjoyed being a girl. One legendary serial killer who did was Edward Gein, but he was less a transvestite than a thwarted transsexual. In his deranged efforts to turn himself into a woman, Gein attempted to fashion a suit made of skin flayed from the torsos of disinterred female corpses. Arrayed in this ghastly costume—a “mammary vest” and human-skin leggings, with a vulva affixed to his crotch—he would caper around his decaying farmhouse, pretending to be his own mother. Gein, of course, served as the real-life model for the cross-dressing Norman Bates, as well as for Buffalo Bill, the malevolent female-wannabe of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs.

  Dressed to Kill

  Michael Caine plays a New York City psychiatrist who turns out to be (surprise!) nuttier than a twelve-ounce jar of Jif in this 1980 Hitchcockian homage, directed with typical flair by Brian De Palma. Its most memorable scene—in which Angie Dickinson gets sliced to shreds in an elevator car by a cross-dressing killer—carries a real wallop (though it doesn’t match the brilliance of its source, the renowned shower scene in Psycho). All in all, Dressed to Kill is an outstanding cinematic example of the transvestite serial-killer genre.

  TRIAD

  Although it’s impossible to predict if a young person will grow up to be a serial killer, there are three childhood symptoms that criminologists regard as major danger signals. They are:

  1. Enuresis (more commonly known as bed-wetting). Lots of children wet their beds. But this behavior may be a sign of deeper pathology when it persists beyond the age of twelve. (More than 60 percent of serial killers were still wetting their beds as adolescents.)

  2. Fire-starting. Children like to play with matches because they are intrigued by the bright, colorful, flickering flames. But budding serial killers carry this interest to a frightening extreme. Their fascination with fire is an early manifestation of their fondness for spectacular destruction. Ottis Toole—the cretinous sidekick of Henry Lee Lucas—burned down a neighborhood house when he was six. Teenage thrill killer George Adorno was even younger when he first displayed his pyromaniac tendencies, setting fire to his own sister when he was only four. The incorrigible Carl Panzram was thrown into a reformatory when he was eleven. A few months later, he torched the place, causing damage to the tune of $100,000.

  3. Sadistic activity. Before they are big enough to inflict harm on other human beings, future serial killers get their kicks from tormenting small creatures. See Animal Torture.

  The word triad simply means any group of three. When criminologists use it in relation to serial killers, they are referring to this particular set of symptoms. Of course, even when a child exhibits all three—prolonged bed-wetting, fire-starting, and sadistic cruelty to animals—there is no guarantee that he will turn out to be a serial killer.

  Still, it’s a really bad sign.

  TRIGGERS

  A distinguishing characteristic of serial murder is the so-called Cooling-off Period. Weeks, months, even years can lapse between a killer’s crimes. All the while, however, his hunger for blood is building inside him, his fantasies of torture and death are growing more urgent by the day. Suddenly, something pushes him over the edge from morbid daydream to murderous action, driving him to fulfill his lethal fantasies on living victims. Criminologists call that “something” a triggering factor.

  Preventing serial murder might be easier if there were some way to identify the specific triggers that cause psychos to kill. Unfortunately, no such means exist. Almost anything can ignite a serial killer. Sometimes, it’s the way a victim looks. Ed Gein’s homicidal mania was inspired by matronly women, while David Berkowitz vented his psychotic fury on pretty young women with long brown hair.

  Cases like these make a certain amount of psychoanalytic sense, since the triggers can be seen as symbolic stand-ins for hated figures from the killer’s past. (In Gein’s case, it was his monstrous mama; in Berkowitz’s, the various girls who had rejected him since childhood.) But—as is true of so many aspects of serial murder—the triggers that set these creatures off are sometimes beyond rational comprehension. One maniac butchered his victims after receiving instructions from UFO aliens, while German lust murderer Heinrich Pommerencke was inspired to commit serial slaughter by a scene in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.

  The wholly unpredictable nature of these triggering factors is one of the scariest things about serial killers. One young woman may be murdered because she tries to run away. Anoth
er may be slain for the very opposite reason. By agreeing to perform whatever sex acts her abductor wants, she threatens his sense of control. Perceiving her desperate offer as an attempt to take charge of the situation, he grows enraged and kills her.

  In short, there’s just no way of telling what will send a serial killer into a sudden homicidal rage. One evening in late December 1981, a sociopath named David Bullock went to the apartment of an acquaintance named Herbert Morales. Morales was very proud of his Christmas tree, which he had taken great pains to decorate. While Bullock was there, Morales began adjusting some of the ornaments.

  As Bullock later explained to police, Morales “started messing with the Christmas tree, telling me how nice the Christmas tree was. So I shot him.”

  “He started messing with the Christmas tree, telling me how nice the Christmas tree was. So I shot him.”

  DAVID BULLOCK,

  explaining why he murdered an acquaintance following a 1981 Christmas party

  TROPHIES

  For serious students of serial murder, a standard reference book is Michael Newton’s encyclopedic Hunting Humans. The title of this work is meant to convey the predatory nature of serial killers—the way they stalk and slay their victims, as though other people were nothing more than game animals to be butchered for pleasure.

  But Newton’s title is apt for another reason, too. Like big-game hunters who commemorate their feats by bringing home a trophy of the kill—a set of antlers, a stuffed head, or a prize pelt—the serial killer often does the same thing, removing an item from his victim and preserving it as a precious keepsake.

  Sometimes, these objects are completely mundane—a piece of costume jewelry, a cheap wristwatch, a family snapshot, or some other personal effect with little or no apparent value. But the object clearly has great value to the serial killer, or else he wouldn’t run the risk of being caught with such an incriminating piece of evidence in his possession. Depending on what this value is, these items are classified by the FBI as either “souvenirs” or “trophies.” “Souvenirs” are defined as items that are used to fuel the fantasies of a serial killer, whereas “trophies” are objects that are saved as proof of his skill.

  For all intents and purposes, however, there really isn’t much difference between the two. Ultimately, they both serve the same purpose for a serial killer, filling him with a sense of his own power and allowing him to relive his crimes in fantasy as he contemplates his morbid treasures. In short, these items are essentially fetish objects that provide intense, perverted pleasure to their collectors.

  The proof of this perversity lies in the nature of many of these trophies. While some are commonplace, others are clearly sexual. A female victim’s underwear is a particular favorite among lust murderers, with high heels and nylon stockings running a close second.

  The most hideous trophies of all, of course, are human body parts. Serial killers have been known to collect everything from fingernail clippings to entire bodies. British sex killer John Reginald Christie kept three complete corpses in his kitchen cupboard, while Jeffrey Dahmer’s extensive collection included painted skulls, refrigerated heads, and male genital organs stored in a lobster pot.

  The most infamous of all collectors of human trophies was the Wisconsin ghoul, Ed Gein, who turned his ramshackle farmhouse into a kind of museum of unnatural history, full of carefully preserved human artifacts. Among his ghastly treasures were chair seats made of human flesh, soup bowls fashioned from skulls, a nipple belt, and a box full of preserved vulvas. Perhaps most shocking of all were the items found in his bedroom: a collection of female faces, skinned from their skulls, tanned, stuffed, and mounted on the wall—exactly like prize hunting trophies.

  TYPES

  The exact definition of serial murder remains a matter of debate in criminological circles. In the view of some experts, serial killing, in the strict sense of the term, is essentially synonymous with sadistic lust murder. Other authorities, however, take a broader view of the matter and believe that there are different types of serial killers. According to these specialists, serial killers can be divided into the following four categories:

  1. Visionary killers. Most serial killers are psychopaths—i.e., intelligent but utterly amoral human beings characterized by a complete lack of conscience or empathy. Visionary killers, by contrast, are psychotics—people whose minds are gripped by bizarre delusions and hallucinations. David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, for example, claimed that he was obeying a demon who transmitted his orders through a neighbor’s pet dog. Herbert Mullin, who killed thirteen people in the early 1970s, was a paranoid schizophrenic who heard “telepathic voices” commanding him to kill in order to avert a natural disaster, a catastrophic earthquake that would destroy California.

  2. Mission-oriented serial killers see themselves as avenging crusaders, ridding society of “undesirables”—harlots, homosexuals, “foreigners,” etc. In the late 1970s, for example, a Hitler-worshipping thug named Joe Franklin embarked on a one-man war against interracial couples, killing thirteen people before he was stopped.

  3. Hedonistic serial killers have no motive beyond their own pleasure. They kill because it feels good. Inflicting death is the ultimate high for them, a source of intense, even sexual, pleasure.

  4. Power seekers. The primary motive of these killers is the urgent need to assert their supremacy over a helpless victim, to compensate for their own deep-seated feelings of worthlessness by completely dominating another human being.

  The problem with these categories is that there is often so much overlap between the different types that the whole system breaks down. For example, a missionary killer who targets prostitutes may well be responding to “divine” voices commanding him to clean the streets of whores. And the pleasure that a hedonistic killer gets from binding and torturing a teenage girl might derive from the complete power he is exerting over his victim.

  Satan gets into people and makes them do things they don’t want to.”

  HERBERT MULLIN,

  “visionary” serial killer

  UNSOLVED

  Serial killers are the scariest of all criminals not simply because they do such appalling things. What also makes them really frightening is that—though capable of the most insanely violent acts—they are not raving lunatics. On the contrary, the typical serial killer is a man with an above-average IQ, exceptional cunning, and an uncanny ability to appear as boringly normal as the next guy. As a result, serial killers often go undetected for years. Indeed, some of them have been known to elude capture forever—leaving a trail of corpses in their wake but no real clues to their own identities.

  The classic example of this phenomenon, of course, is Jack the Ripper, though there have been other, less renowned serial killers whose identities remain unknown. No arrest was ever made, for instance, in the case of the night-prowling butcher known as the “Axeman of New Orleans” (see Axe Murderers). Nor in the grisly string of “Lovers’ Lane” homicides committed by the “Monster of Florence” (see Foreigners). And there have been plenty of even more obscure serial sex slayers who have gotten away with repeated murder, such as the psycho dubbed the “Colonial Parkway Killer,” responsible for the deaths of four couples in Virginia in the late 1980s.

  Why are some serial killers never caught? One possibility is that they simply decide to stop before they are arrested—in effect, to quit while they’re ahead. But this seems unlikely, at least in the vast majority of cases. After all, homicidal maniacs are as addicted to death as alcoholics are to drink, and since there are no twelve-step recovery programs for lust murderers, it seems improbable that a compulsive killer would simply kick the habit on his own. A more plausible explanation is that some serial killers are forced to stop. They might find themselves locked up behind bars—either imprisoned for an unrelated crime or confined to a mental asylum. Or (like other mortals) they might die very suddenly, possibly at their own hands.

  Suicide has been offered as a theory in
the case of “Jack the Stripper,” a serial killer of prostitutes who terrorized London in the mid-1960s. Though the case remains officially unsolved, many believe that the culprit was a security guard who took his own life (see Rippers). In the case of the mysterious “Toledo Slugger,” another plausible explanation has been offered. In 1925 and 1926, a string of women were raped and bludgeoned to death by a shadowy assailant in Toledo, Ohio. In their zeal to find the culprit, the police rounded up every known “mental defective” they could get their hands on and shipped them off to state asylums. Since the Slugger’s crimes came to an abrupt halt around this time, some people believe that the police managed to nab the killer in their citywide sweep.

  Other cases, however, continue to pose enduring—and tantalizing—puzzles. Another Ohio maniac—the “Cleveland Torso Killer” (aka the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run”)—is a case in point. During a four-year span in the 1930s, this bloodthirsty maniac chopped up a dozen people, leaving body parts strewn around the city. Nevertheless, in spite of an all-out effort by law officials, led by no less an eminence than Eliot Ness, the former Untouchable who was serving as Cleveland’s director of public safety), the “Mad Butcher” eluded arrest. In the spring of 1938, his atrocities came to a sudden, mysterious halt. To this day no one knows who he was. Suspects range from a mentally unbalanced premed student to a Bohemian immigrant to a psychopathic hobo. Perhaps the most unsettling theory of all was put forth by a Cleveland detective who believed that the torso slayings stopped because the culprit pulled up stakes and headed west to California—where he committed the infamous “Black Dahlia” homicide.

  Cracking a legendary unsolved murder case is a challenge that some crime enthusiasts find impossible to resist. Every publishing season seems to bring another book, claiming to be the ultimate solution to one of these real-life whodunits. In the past few years alone, the American public has been treated to a former Los Angeles police officer fingering his own father as the “Black Dahlia” killer (Steve Hodel’s Black Dahlia Avenger); a veteran true-crime writer naming the original “Zodiac” (Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac Unmasked); and a bestselling mystery author announcing, with great fanfare, that she had finally figured out who Jack the Ripper was (Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer). Whether these books will truly prove to be the last word on their respective subjects only time will tell, though there is reason to believe that these cases (especially Saucy Jack’s) will continue to generate new “ultimate solutions” far into the future.