The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read online

  Lizzie Borden; from 52 Famous Murderers trading cards

  (Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

  Panic gripped the city, particularly since the police were helpless to locate the killer. Hysterical citizens pointed fingers at various suspects, including a supposed German spy named Louis Besumer and a father and son named Jordano, who were actually convicted on “eyewitness testimony” that later proved to be fabricated. Since many of the victims were Italian grocers, there was also a theory (wholly unsubstantiated) that the killer was a Mafia enforcer. To cope with their fears, citizens resorted to morbid humor, throwing raucous New Orleans-style “Axeman parties” and singing along to a popular tune called “The Mysterious Axeman’s Jazz.”

  Though the killer was never identified, some people believe that he was an ex-con named Joseph Mumfre, who was shot down by a woman named Pepitone, the widow of the Axeman’s last victim. Mrs. Pepitone claimed that she had seen Mumfre flee the murder scene. Whether Mumfre was really the Axeman remains a matter of dispute, but one fact is certain: the killings stopped with his death.

  Hatchet Man

  Frailty, a creepily effective chiller released in 2002, stars Bill Paxton (who also directed) as a Texas widower whose fatherly devotion to his two young sons is somewhat undercut by his rampaging religious mania. Dad (the only name he’s given in the film) believes that God has chosen him to hunt down and destroy demons-in-human-form, using a very large axe as his weapon of divine retribution.

  Complications arise when Dad comes to believe that his own twelve-year-old son, Fenton, is a demon in disguise. Reluctant to dismember his child, Dad settles for locking the boy in a dungeon until he repents. Thanks to this act of paternal solicitude, Fenton manages to make it to manhood. In the grown-up form of Matthew McConaughey, Fenton shows up years later at FBI headquarters to tell his story to an agent named Doyle (Powers Boothe), who is investigating an unsolved serial murder case known as the “God’s Hand” killings.

  Solid acting, surprising plot twists—and the scariest axe-wielding father to appear in movies since Jack Nicholson went off the deep end in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining—make Frailty a highly satisfying little horror film.

  BATHTUBS

  Exploring the spooky labyrinth of Buffalo Bill’s basement at the climax of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling happens on a ghastly sight: a “big bathtub . . . almost filled with hard red-purple plaster. A hand and wrist stuck up from the plaster, the hand turned dark and shrivelled, the fingernails painted pink.” Clarice has stumbled onto one of the monster’s former victims, who has been turned into some sort of grotesque tableau.

  Like the rest of us, of course, real-life serial killers require an occasional bath and so can’t clog up their tubs with decomposed corpses encased in red-purple plaster of Paris. Some, however, have put their tubs to specialized uses.

  For obvious reasons, bathtubs make a handy place to dismember corpses. After picking up a female hitchhiker in January 1973, for example, Edmund Kemper shot her in the head, then drove the body back home, hid it in his bedroom closet, and went to sleep. The next morning, after his mother left for work, he removed the corpse, had sex with it, then placed it in his bathtub and dismembered it with a Buck knife and an axe.

  Dennis Nilsen’s tub, on the other hand, was used for a more traditional purpose. He liked to bathe his lovers in it. Of course, they were dead at the time. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, this British serial killer murdered his homosexual pickups partly because he was desperate for companionship. Turning them into corpses was his way of ensuring that they wouldn’t leave in the morning. After strangling a victim, Nilsen would engage in a regular ritual, tenderly cleaning the corpse in his tub, then lovingly arranging it in front of the TV or stereo or perhaps at the dining room table, so he could enjoy its company until it became too decomposed to bear.

  And then there is the occasional serial killer who turns his tub into a killing device, like the British Bluebeard George Joseph Smith, the notorious “Brides in the Bath” murderer, who drowned three of his seven wives for their insurance money.

  Of course, the most famous of these bathroom fixtures is the shower-tub combo where Janet Leigh meets her brutal end at the hands of Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Thanks to Hitchcock’s Psycho, countless unclad starlets have been butchered by maniacs while soaping up in the shower or relaxing in a bubble bath. Every now and then, a knife-wielding psycho will even pop out of a tub as in Fatal Attraction. But on the whole, these are perils that hardly ever occur outside the movies. For the most part, bathtubs are perfectly safe—as long as you don’t slip on the soap.

  BED-WETTING

  See Triad.

  David Berkowitz

  It was the era of New York disco fever—of platform shoes, leisure suits, dancing to the Bee Gees while a mirrored globe spun and flashed overhead. But for a little more than a year, between 1976 and 1977, the disco beat turned into a pulse of fear as a gun-wielding madman prowled the city streets at night. His weapon was a .44 revolver—and at first the tabloids tagged him the “.44-Caliber Killer.”

  The terror began on July 29, 1976, when two young women were shot in a parked car in the Bronx. Young people in cars—often dating couples—would continue to be the killer’s targets of choice. On one occasion, however, he gunned down a pair of young women sitting on a stoop. On another, he shot a woman as she walked home from school. Frantically she tried protecting her face with a book—but to no avail. The killer simply raised the muzzle of his weapon to the makeshift shield and blasted her in the head. Before his rampage was over, a total of six young New Yorkers were dead, seven more severely wounded.

  David Berkowitz; from Bloody Visions trading cards

  (© & ™ 1995 M. H. Price and Shel-Tone Publications. All rights reserved.)

  At the scene of one double murder, police found a long, ranting note from the killer. “I am the ‘Son of Sam.’ I am a little brat,” he wrote. From that point on, the killer would be known by his bizarre new nickname.

  For months, while the city was gripped by panic, police made no headway. When a break finally came, it happened as a result of a thirty-five-dollar parking ticket. On July 31, 1977, when a couple was shot along the Brooklyn shore, a witness noticed someone driving away from the scene in a car that had just been ticketed. Tracing the summons through their computer, the police came up with the name and address of David Berkowitz, a pudgy-faced postal worker living in Yonkers.

  When police picked him up, they found an arsenal in the trunk of Berkowitz’s car. Son of Sam had been planning an apocalyptic act of carnage—a kamikaze assault on a Long Island disco.

  Under arrest, Berkowitz explained the meaning of his bizarre moniker. “Sam” turned out to be the name of a neighbor, Sam Carr, who—in Berkowitz’s profoundly warped mind—was actually a “high demon” who transmitted his orders to kill through his pet dog, a black Labrador retriever. Insane as this story was, Berkowitz was found mentally fit to stand trial. He was eventually sentenced to three hundred years in the pen, where he has recently undergone a religious conversion and become a jailhouse televan-gelist, preaching the gospel on public-access TV.

  “I didn’t want to hurt them,

  I only wanted to kill them.”

  DAVID BERKOWITZ

  BLACK WIDOWS

  Classic serial sex murder—in which a sadistic sociopath is driven to stalk, slay, and commit unspeakable acts on a succession of strangers—is an outrage perpetrated almost exclusively by men. As two-fisted culture critic Camille Paglia puts it, “There are no female Jack the Rippers” (see Women). On the other hand, women who murder a whole string of their mates, often for mercenary reasons, are relatively common in the annals of crime. These female counterparts of the male Bluebeard-type killer are known (in homage to the deadly arachnid that devours its mates after sex) as “Black Widows.”

  The most infamous of this breed was the legendary Belle Gunness, née Brynhild Storset, who came to this cou
ntry from a small fishing village in Norway in 1881. Like other nineteenth-century immigrants, the enterprising young woman found America to be a land of plenty, where she could put her God-given talents to the most profitable use. As it happened, Belle’s particular talent was serial murder. After a fire destroyed her Indiana farm in 1908, searchers found the decomposed remains of at least a dozen people on her property, some interred in the basement of the gutted house, others buried in the muck of the hog pen or planted in her garden. Most of her victims were either prospective husbands or hired hands who doubled as lovers. Their deaths allowed Gunness to cash in on their insurance policies and loot their bank accounts. Like the sow that devours its farrow, she also murdered two of her own infant children after insuring their lives. Gunness has gained legendary status not only because of the enormity of her crimes but also because she disappeared without a trace, slipping (like Jack the Ripper) into the realm of folklore and myth.

  Mary Ann Cotton; from Bloody Visions trading cards

  (© & ™ 1995 M. H. Price and Shel-Tone Publications. All rights reserved.)

  Other notorious Black Widows followed Gunness’s avaricious pattern. In the mid-nineteenth century, America’s “Queen Poisoner,” Lydia Sherman, bumped off one husband after another in order to inherit their savings. Reluctant to split her new bounty with anyone else, she also poisoned her children, dispatching more than one of her victims with arsenic-spiked hot chocolate. In a strikingly similar fashion, her British contemporary Mary Ann Cotton liquidated a whole string of spouses and children. Their deaths were attributed to “gastric fever”—until a postmortem on her final victim, her seven-year-old stepson, turned up traces of arsenic in his stomach.

  Not all Black Widows, however, are motivated by greed. The matronly multicide Nannie Doss—dubbed the “Giggling Granny” by the press because she chuckled with amusement while confessing her crimes—became incensed when police accused her of killing four husbands for their insurance policies (which were, in fact, pretty paltry). An avid reader of true-romance fiction, Nanny insisted that she had murdered for love, not money. “I was searching for the perfect mate, the real romance of life.” When a husband didn’t measure up, she simply dispatched him (slipping liquid rat poison into his corn whiskey or stewed prunes), then went in search of another Prince Charming. Of course, her explanation was not entirely convincing, since her victims also included her mother, two sisters, two children, one grandson, and her nephew. Nannie Doss was sentenced to life in prison, where she died of leukemia in 1965 after writing her memoirs for Life magazine. She murdered neither for love nor for money. She killed because she enjoyed it.

  BLASPHEMY

  For the most part, this is an outrage perpetrated by devil-worshipping cultists who delight in blaspheming the orthodox rituals of Christianity (see Satanism). The central ceremony of satanic worship, for example, is the so-called Black Mass, an obscene travesty of the Catholic mass involving baby sacrifice, orgiastic sex, and other abominations.

  There is, however, at least one serial killer who added blasphemy to his staggering list of outrages. After murdering his final victim—an eighty-eight-year-old grandmother named Kate Rich—Henry Lee Lucas carved an upside-down cross between the old woman’s breasts. Then he raped her corpse.

  ROBERT BLOCH

  Say the word psycho to most people and they will immediately visualize scenes from the classic horror film: Janet Leigh getting slashed to pieces in a shower, Martin Balsam being set upon by an old biddy with a butcher knife, Anthony Perkins smiling insanely while a fly buzzes around his padded cell. But while it was Alfred Hitchcock’s genius that made Psycho into a masterpiece, it was another imagination that first dreamed up Norman Bates and his motel from hell. It belonged to Robert Bloch, one of the most prolific and influential horror writers of the century.

  Born in Chicago in 1917, Bloch began publishing stories in the pulps while still a teenager. He received encouragement from his pen pal and muse, horrormeister H. P. Lovecraft (who named a character after Bloch in his story “The Haunter of the Dark”). After working as an advertising copywriter in Milwaukee, Bloch quit to become a full-time writer in the early 1950s. He specialized in tales whose macabre twist endings make them read like extended sick jokes. Psychopathic killers figure prominently in his fiction. One of his best-known stories is titled, “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.”

  In 1957, Bloch—who had relocated to Los Angeles to write screenplays—moved back to Wisconsin so that his ailing wife could be close to her parents. He was living in the town of Weyauwega, less than thirty miles from Plainfield, where police broke into the tumbledown farmhouse of a middle-aged bachelor named Edward Gein and discovered a collection of horrors that sent shock waves around the nation. Fascinated by the incredible circumstances of the Gein affair—particularly by the fact (as he later put it) “that a killer with perverted appetites could flourish almost openly in a small rural community where everybody prides himself on knowing everybody else’s business”—Bloch hit on the idea for a horror novel. The result was his 1959 thriller, Psycho, about the schizophrenic mama’s boy, Norman Bates—a monster who (like Dracula and King Kong) has become a permanent icon of our pop mythology.

  Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and more than twenty novels, in addition to dozens of screenplays and television scripts. However, when he died, on September 23, 1994, the headlines of his obituaries invariably identified him (as he predicted they would) as the “Author of Psycho.” As interpreted by Hitchcock, this pioneering piece of serial-killer literature set the pattern for all cinematic slasher fantasies of the past forty-six years. In spite of his lifelong obsession with psychopathic killers, Bloch himself was the gentlest of men, who had little use for the kind of graphically gory horror movies his own work had inspired. When asked his opinion of films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the man who gave birth to Norman Bates admitted, “I’m quite squeamish about them.”

  BLUEBEARDS

  Reputedly modeled on the fifteenth-century monster Gilles de Rais (see Aristocrats), the folktale character Bluebeard is a sinister nobleman who murders a succession of wives and stores their corpses in a locked room in his castle. In real life, the term is used to describe a specific type of serial killer who, like his fictional couterpart, knocks off one wife after another.

  There are two major differences between a Bluebeard killer and a psycho like Ted Bundy. The latter preys on strangers, whereas the Bluebeard type restricts himself to the women who are unlucky (or foolish) enough to wed him. Their motivations differ, too. Bundy and his ilk are driven by sexual sadism; they are lust murderers. By contrast, the cardinal sin that motivates the Bluebeard isn’t lust but greed. For the most part, this kind of serial killer dispatches his victims for profit.

  The most infamous Bluebeard of the twentieth century was a short, balding, red-bearded Frenchman named Henri Landru (the real-life inspiration for Charlie Chaplin’s black comedy Monsieur Verdoux). In spite of his unsightly appearance, Landru possessed an urbane charm that made him appealing to women. It didn’t hurt, of course, that there were so many vulnerable women around—lonely widows of the millions of young soldiers who had perished on the battlefields of World War I. An accomplished swindler who had already been convicted seven times for fraud, Landru found his victims by running matrimonial Ads in the newspapers. When a suitable (i.e., wealthy, gullible) prospect responded, Landru would woo her, wed her, assume control of her assets, then kill her and incinerate the corpse in a small outdoor oven on his country estate outside Paris. He was guillotined in 1922, convicted of eleven murders—ten women, plus one victim’s teenaged son.

  Even more prolific was a German named Johann Hoch, who emigrated to America in the late 1800s. In sheer numerical terms, Hoch holds some sort of connubial record among Bluebeards, having married no fewer than fifty-five women, at least fifteen of whom he dispatched. Like Landru, he never confessed, insisting on his innocence even as the hangman’s noose tightened around his
neck.

  Victorian engraving, showing Bluebeard’s collection of chopped-off female heads.

  Another notorious Bluebeard from across the sea was the Englishman George Joseph Smith, who became known as the “Brides in the Bath” murderer for his habit of drowning his wives in the tub in order to collect on their life insurance. Like Landru and Hoch, Smith vehemently proclaimed his innocence, leaping up during his trial and shouting, “I am not a murderer, though I may be a bit peculiar!” The jury didn’t buy it, at least the first part. He was hanged on Friday, August 13, 1915.

  Though the killer who snares his female victims with his suave, attentive manners seems quintessentially European, our own country has produced its share of Bluebeards. Born and bred in Kansas, Alfred Cline looked like a Presbyterian minister—one of the reasons, no doubt, that he was able to win the trust of so many well-to-do widows, eight of whom he married and murdered between 1930 and 1945. Even Cline’s favorite killing device—a poisoned glass of buttermilk—was as American as could be.

  Then there was Herman Drenth, who dispatched an indeterminate number of victims in his homemade gas chamber outside Clarksburg, West Virginia. He was hanged for five murders in 1932. Unlike most Bluebeards, Drenth was an admitted sadist, deriving not only financial profit but also sexual pleasure from his crimes. Watching his victims die, he told police, “Beat any cathouse I was ever in.”