The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read online

  Occasionally, of course, a long-unsolved serial-murder case really will come to a sudden, unexpected resolution—not, however, as the result of the ingenious theorizings of a bestselling writer but through the apprehension of the perpetrator after years of persistent police investigation. In December 2001, for example—twenty years after he committed his first atrocity—the infamous “Green River Killer” was finally brought to justice. A few years later, another notorious case that had frustrated investigators for decades—the “BTK” killings in Wichita, Kansas, came to a gratifying conclusion with the arrest of a suspect, Dennis Rader.

  Unsolved No More

  Time is not, as a rule, on the side of homicide investigators. With every passing year, the trail gets colder and the chances of finding the killer diminish. When whole decades go by, those chances fade to just about zero.

  In at least one case, however, the reverse turned out to be true. The passage of time—and, more specifically, the technology that developed during that period—made it possible to identify one of the most notorious and elusive serial sex slayers in modern American history.

  In the early 1980s, a mysterious psychokiller murdered dozens of young women, mostly prostitutes and runaways, dumping many of them along the Green River of Kings County, Washington—a signature pattern that earned him his homicidal nickname, the “Green River Killer.” Most of his victims were strangled. In some cases, they had been raped after death.

  Not only were the local police unable to identify the culprit, they had a hard time keeping track of how many people he killed, largely because he was so adept at squirreling the bodies away in the Kings County countryside. By 1984, when the murders seemed to stop, the authorities put the number of victims at twenty-four. Five years later, after finding more decaying remains, their best bet was forty-nine.

  The police might not have had many conclusive leads, but there was one thing they didn’t lack: possible suspects. Altogether, they compiled a list of some 1,300 names. One of them was a truck painter, Gary Ridgeway, who had been seen with a few of the victims. He also had a problem keeping his hands off women’s throats. He had once tried to throttle a prostitute and another time tried the same with his wife. The police suspected him enough to request that he take a lie detector test. Ridgeway agreed and passed the test not once but twice. He was off the hook, at least for the next fifteen years or so.

  From some of the corpses, investigators were able to collect semen samples, but they were minuscule—too small for 1980s forensic science to produce any useful results. By 2001, however, the situation had changed. Enhanced technology now made it possible to analyze such small samples, and the semen found on three of the victims matched the DNA in the saliva taken from Ridgeway.

  In November 2001, police arrested the fifty-two-year-old painter, nearly twenty years after the last known victim had been murdered. In order to escape the death penalty, he agreed to cooperate, supplying the police with information about other murders that they were not aware of, one of them committed as late as 1996. At his trial, he confessed to forty-eight killings, but there might have been more—perhaps as many as sixty. The problem was, after so many years, Ridgeway had trouble remembering.

  As he told investigators, “I killed so many women, I have a hard time keeping them straight.”

  UPBRINGING

  It is common to describe an especially harsh, deprived childhood as “Dickensian”—but in the case of serial killers, that adjective is wildly inadequate. Compared to the boyhoods of most serial killers, Oliver Twist’s early years in a Victorian poorhouse seem like an extended vacation at Disneyland.

  Albert “Boston Strangler” DeSalvo was raised by a monstrous father who liked to bring whores home with him, screw them in front of the kids, then beat his wife savagely when she complained. One of DeSalvo’s most vivid childhood memories was of watching his father knock out all of his mother’s teeth, then break her fingers one by one as she lay sprawled beneath the kitchen sink. DeSalvo himself not only received regular, vicious thrashings with a lead pipe but, along with his two sisters, was sold into slavery. An acquaintance of the senior DeSalvo paid nine dollars for the three children, who were shipped off to Maine and forced to work as farm laborers.

  Henry Lee Lucas was raised in unimaginable squalor by a brutal, alcoholic prostitute who compelled her paraplegic husband to watch her have sex with her tricks. Henry was forced to watch, too—generally while dressed up in the little girl’s clothing his mother made him wear. She also beat him mercilessly with objects ranging from broomsticks to two-by-fours and took pleasure in killing his pets.

  Little Charlie Manson’s mother was a bisexual alcoholic prostitute, who reportedly once traded her son for a pitcher of beer. After she was thrown into prison for armed robbery, Manson was taken in by a brutal uncle, who derided him as a sissy and sent him to school in a dress. In later years, he was placed in an institution where he was routinely beaten with a wooden paddle for bed-wetting.

  Raised in a gothically grim orphanage, Albert Fish was schooled in sadism by a female teacher who disciplined disobedient boys and girls by stripping them naked and beating them in front of the other children. Sex murderer Joseph Kallinger—whose victims included his own son—was raised by adoptive parents who kept him in line with a hammer, a cat-o’-nine-tails, and constant threats of castration. Serial killer Hugh Morse was brought up by an insanely tyrannical grandmother, who once punished him for sneaking out to the movies by butchering his pet mice.

  According to FBI findings, 42 percent of serial killers have suffered severe physical abuse as children, 43 percent were sexually molested, and a full 74 percent were subjected to ongoing psychological torture.

  Of course, there are those who sneer at the notion that an unhappy childhood is the main cause of serial killing, pointing out that countless people who grow up in seriously dysfunctional households do not turn out to be homicidal maniacs. These critics also refer to monsters like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, who appear to have come from more or less normal, middle-class backgrounds. And indeed, childhood snapshots of little Ted, dressed up in a cowboy suit or posing beside a snowman, would not look out of place in Ozzie and Harriet’s family album.

  It’s undoubtedly true that other factors are involved in the making of serial killers (see Causes). Still, “negative parenting” (as the sociologists quaintly call it) is invariably present in their backgrounds. (There are indications that Dahmer and Bundy were both victims of sexual abuse by relatives.) Brutalized in childhood, the serial killer grows up full of a murderous rage that is turned against all of humanity. He can know pleasure only by administering pain. He can feel alive only when he is inflicting death.

  “I hated all my life. I hated everybody. When I first grew up and can remember, I was dressed as a girl by mother. And I stayed that way for two or three years. And after that I was treated like what I call the dog of the family. I was beaten. I was made to do things that no human bein’ would want to do.”

  HENRY LEE LUCAS

  Joseph Vacher

  One of the scariest things about serial killers is how normal they can seem. Ted Bundy looked like a frat boy, Jeffrey Dahmer like a computer nerd, and John Wayne Gacy like the president of the local Rotary Club. Frenchman Joseph Vacher (1869-1897) was different. In his case, appearances weren’t deceiving at all. He had the kind of face that could give children nightmares. And his actions were consistent with his looks.

  A repulsively seedy tramp with a palsied face and an eye that leaked a steady stream of pus, Vacher was born into a poor peasant family, the last of fifteen children. He committed his first known crime—the attempted rape of a young boy—when he was nineteen. Two years later, he was conscripted into the army, and he cut his own throat with a razor when he failed to win promotion to corporal. Several years later, he tried suicide again when a young woman he coveted spurned his advances. Vacher shot her three times with a pistol, then turned the gun on himself and fired point-bl
ank into his own face.

  The woman survived. So did Vacher, though half his face was now permanently paralyzed and his right eye was reduced to a raw, suppurating hole. After a year in an insane asylum, he was discharged as “cured.” Equipping himself with a few basic necessities (maps, an umbrella, a cudgel, several butcher knives, and a cleaver), he tramped around the countryside for three and a half years. Stopping at a farmhouse whenever he grew hungry, he would pound on the door and demand food from the owner, who was usually happy to oblige just to get rid of the hideous tramp.

  But Vacher was possessed by other, infinitely more loathsome appetites. During the course of his wanderings, he set upon and slaughtered eleven people of both sexes, assaulting them in a demonic frenzy—stabbing, strangling, mutilating, biting, disembowelling. Most of his victims, male as well as female, were raped after death.

  The “French Ripper,” as the shadowy killer began to be called, was finally apprehended in August 1897. At his trial, he argued that he was not mentally competent. His mind, he claimed, had been twisted as an eight-year-old boy when he was bitten by a mad dog. The court was not convinced. On New Year’s Eve, 1898, the twenty-nine-year-old Vacher was sent to the guillotine.

  VAMPIRES

  There’s both good and bad news about vampires. The good news is that they don’t exist, at least not the kind found in old Bela Lugosi movies. There are plenty of things to worry about in life, but being attacked in your bedroom by a four-hundred-year-old Transylvanian demon isn’t one of them.

  The bad news about vampires is that some sexual psychopaths derive intense satisfaction from drinking human blood and will resort to serial murder to satisfy this monstrous craving. Deviants like these don’t sleep in coffins or turn themselves into bats, but in one crucial respect, they are infinitely scarier than Bram Stoker’s Dracula or the sexy bloodsuckers of Anne Rice’s novels. These ravenous fiends are for real.

  One of the most infamous real-life vampires was the Italian lust murderer Vincenz Verzeni. From an early age, Verzeni took exquisite delight in strangulation. At twelve, he discovered that he got tremendous pleasure from wringing the necks of chickens. By the time he reached late adolescence, he had progressed from poultry to women. At first, he simply throttled his victims until he achieved orgasm. Once he climaxed, he would let his victims live. In his early twenties, however, Verzeni’s perversion took a horrific turn. In 1871, he pounced on a fourteen-year-old girl, dragged her to a field, and choked her to death. Then—in a sadistic frenzy—he chewed at her thigh and sucked her blood, ripped out her intestines, tore out her genitals, and removed a chunk of her calf, which he carried away with him, intending to roast and eat it. Eight months later, he savaged another young woman, garroting her with a leather thong, then biting open her neck and gorging on her blood. Verzeni was arrested after attacking his own nineteen-year-old cousin, who managed to fight him off, then immediately reported him to the police.

  In the late 1940s, British serial slayer John George Haigh murdered half a dozen people to get his hands on their money, then dissolved their remains in his basement acid vat. At his 1949 trial, the notorious “Acid-Bath Murderer” insisted that before disposing of each body, he had tapped the victim’s jugular, drawn off a glassful of blood, and quaffed it. Though Haigh’s vampiric claims were viewed by many as a clumsy attempt to cop an insanity plea, it seems fairly certain that at the very least he was afflicted with a severe case of hematomania—a lifelong obsession with blood.

  One of the weirdest cases of vampirism was that of Florencio Fernandez, a twenty-five-year-old Argentine stonemason who, in 1960, slipped through the windows of fifteen sleeping women and attacked them in their beds—pinioning their arms, biting into their throats, and drinking their blood. Like the Nicolas Cage character in the 1989 cult movie Vampire’s Kiss, Fernandez apparently suffered from a serious vampiric delusion. He lived in a cave, prowled the night in a black Dracula-like cloak, and spent the daylight hours sunk in a comalike sleep.

  Like Dracula’s zoophagous servant, Renfield, young Richard Chase loved to drink the blood of animals—rabbits, cats, dogs. In 1978, however, he progressed to infinitely more monstrous crimes. During a four-day spree, he broke into several homes, killed and butchered the inhabitants (including a pregnant woman and a twenty-two-month-old infant), and wallowed in their gore. After his arrest, he confessed to drinking the blood of his victims. Chase—who was dubbed the “Vampire of Sacramento”—served as the real-life model for the unspeakable killer in the 1992 movie Rampage, a thought-provoking (and occasionally harrowing) film directed by William Friedkin of Exorcist fame.

  For more on the world of real-life blood sucking killers, readers should check out the book True Vampires (Feral Press, 2003) by Sondra London (a writer who has earned some notoriety herself for her romantic attachment to not one but two infamous lust murderers, Gerard the “Butcher of Blind Creek” Schaefer and Danny the “Gainesville Ripper” Rollings). London’s book is not just a comprehensive survey of its macabre subject; it also features handsome illustrations by one of the crazies she covers: Nico Claux, aka the “Vampire of Paris,” who satisfied his unholy urges by desecrating graves, plundering morgues, and robbing blood banks.

  Richard Chase; from Murderers! trading card set

  (Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

  “I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women, experiencing during the act erections and real sexual pleasure. The feeling of pleasure while strangling them was much greater than that which I experienced while masturbating. . . . It never occurred to me to touch or look at the genitals. It satisfied me to seize the women by the neck and suck their blood.”

  VINCENZ VERZENI

  The Vanishing

  Holland isn’t exactly known for its epidemic of serial murder, so it’s surprising that one of the most disturbing cinematic depictions of a psychopathic killer appears in the 1988 Dutch film The Vanishing, directed by George Sluizer.

  The movie focuses on an obsessed young man named Rex Hofman, whose girlfriend disappears without a trace when they make a pit stop at a roadside rest station. Though Hofman eventually concedes that his girlfriend must have been abducted and killed, he can’t live with the tormenting uncertainty and refuses to rest until he discovers what befell her.

  The villain of the piece is one of the most unsettling psychos in movie history, a meek, soft-spoken family man with a taste for a particularly unspeakable form of torture. Portrayed with chilling perfection by an actor named Barnard Pierre Donnadieu, the killer ultimately offers to show the haunted young man what the vanished girl experienced. In a shattering (if somewhat implausible) conclusion, Hofman accepts the killer’s proposition—leading to one of the most nightmarish endings ever put on film. This is one of those small, understated European fright films that has infinitely more impact than the typical Hollywood splatter fest.

  Hollywood, in fact, produced a remake of The Vanishing in 1993, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges. Though directed again by Sluizer, this second version falls completely flat. Stick to the original!

  VIGAP

  See FBI.

  WANNABES

  Serial killers are driven to perpetrate their outrages by profound psychological compulsions, generally of a perverted sexual nature. As a result, they tend to commit their crimes in highly personal, ritualistic ways. They may bind a victim just so, torture him or her in a specific way, use a particular kind of weapon to inflict death, then leave the corpse arranged in a specific position. All these elements—which make up the killer’s unique “signature”—are dictated by his sick individual needs. This is why there are so few serial-killer Copycats. Homicidal psychos, for the most part, aren’t interested in emulating other killers; they are only out to gratify their own depraved personal needs.

  There is one need, however, that is common to most serial killers. Largely because they are so hideously abused and humiliated as children, most of these psychos grow up feeling utterly worthless and imp
otent. To compensate for this sense of nothingness, they often develop a raging megalomania—an uncontrollable need to prove to the world (and to themselves) that they are superior, all-powerful beings. For some, this need manifests itself as an insane ambition to earn everlasting infamy, to have their names go down in the history books alongside those of the legendary criminals of the past. Killers like these are the psychopathic equivalent of celebrity wannabes.

  The German lust murderer Peter Kürten, for example, sought to surpass the evil of his idol Jack the Ripper and become “the greatest criminal who ever lived.” The highly questionable confessions of Henry Lee Lucas—who admitted to over three hundred murders—were apparently motivated by the same self-aggrandizing impulses. Dr. H. H. Holmes, the nineteenth-century “multi-murderer” sometimes described as America’s first serial killer, possessed the same bizarre ambition. Taking perverse pride in his status as the country’s preeminent criminal (or “arch-fiend,” as the newspapers liked to call him), Holmes eagerly confessed to the murder of several dozen victims—many of whom subsequently turned out to be alive and well.