The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read online

  Indeed, so hungry are some serial killers for celebrity status that they grow actively incensed when their crimes are ignored or underestimated. When German sex killer Rudolph Pleil was charged with nine savage murders, he indignantly insisted that the actual number was twenty-eight. Only one thing mattered to Pleil—that he be universally acknowledged as “der beste Totmacher,” the world’s “best death-maker.”

  Similarly, when the Wichita serial killer who called himself “BTK” didn’t receive the kind of press coverage he thought he deserved, he fired off a peevish complaint to a local newspaper: “How many do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?”

  Colin Ireland, a British psycho-killer who preyed on gay men, thought he knew the answer to that question. In the spring of 1993, he savagely murdered five random victims. The reason? Ireland was a wannabe whose demented dream was to be known as a serial killer. He had read in a book that to be so classified, a person had to slay a minimum of four. He threw in the last one for good measure.

  WARTIME

  There’s an old Chinese saying: “In crisis there is opportunity.” This pearl of proverbial wisdom is epitomized by certain serial killers, who have turned the greatest crisis of them all—global warfare—into an opportunity for wholesale murder.

  If World War I had never occurred, a small-time French sociopath named Henri Landru might have lived out his days as nothing more than a petty crook. When the conflict broke out, however, Landru suddenly perceived a unique opportunity to exploit his nation’s woes for his own personal profit. With France’s male population decimated, the country was suddenly full of young, well-off widows. Landru set about preying on these vulnerable women, luring them through seductive matrimonial Ads, then wooing them, wedding them, and murdering them for their money (see Bluebeards).

  Some twenty years later—during World War II—France’s worst fears were realized when Hitler’s troops occupied Paris, succeeding where the Kaiser’s had failed. Parisian Jews desperately sought a way to escape the Nazi terror. Waiting to prey on them was another French psychopath, Dr. Marcel Petiot. Posing as a sympathetic Resistance agent who would help smuggle them out of the country, Petiot slowly killed the would-be refugees with lethal “vaccines,” then looted their possessions.

  At roughly the same time in London—as the German Luftwaffe bombarded the city night after night—an English airman named Gordon Cummins found a chance to unleash his long-simmering sadism. Taking advantage of the city’s mandatory blackouts, he prowled the darkened streets and, in less than a week, savagely murdered four women (see Rippers).

  The chaotic conditions of war allowed another notorious lust murderer—Bela Kiss of Hungary—not to commit his crimes but to escape punishment for them. Before the outbreak of World War I, Kiss had succeeded in slaying no fewer than twenty-three women without arousing suspicion. By the time his crimes were uncovered, he had already enlisted in the army and been killed in action. Or so it appeared. Only later did authorities surmise that Kiss had actually switched dog tags with a dying soldier, assumed the latter’s identity, and vanished without a trace (see Whereabouts Unknown).

  WEAPONS

  Cinematic serial killers are artists of death, constantly searching for imaginative new ways to create carnage. In their homicidal hands, everything from a scythe to a staple gun becomes an instrument of mayhem, wielded with the virtuosity of a maestro.

  Investigators display the saw Fish used to dismember Grace Budd’s body

  Fish’s “Implements of Hell”; painting by Michael Rose

  By contrast, real-life serial killers are much more conventional in their choice of weapons. What distinguishes them from ordinary killers is their preference for “manual” means of murder—stabbing, strangling, clubbing—over firearms. While the majority of American murders are committed with guns, serial killers favor the “hands-on” approach, which offers a more intense physical experience. When it comes to sick, sadistic pleasure, shooting people from a distance of twenty feet just can’t compete with plunging a serrated hunting knife into their flesh.

  Of course, there are notable exceptions. Ed Gein dispatched his victims with a bullet to the back of the skull. And before he began signing his letters “Son of Sam,” David Berkowitz—the serial assassin who terrorized New York City in the late 1970s—was nicknamed after his favorite weapon: the “.44-Caliber Killer.”

  WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN

  The crimes perpetrated by serial killers are so appalling that when one of these creatures is on the loose, it sometimes seems as if a supernatural monster has risen from the underworld. Newspaper reporters trip all over themselves to come up with lurid, horror-movie monikers—the “Mad Beast,” the “Vampire-Killer,” the “Werewolf Slayer.” So it’s easy to feel a jolt of surprise when the monster is finally caught. The supernatural demon turns out to be a nondescript loser who looks about as threatening as a computer geek. The demon is reduced to pathetically human dimensions.

  Unfortunately, some serial killers are never captured. In cases like these, the killer often continues to live on in popular fantasy as a kind of phantom or specter. Myths and folktales grow up around them. This is certainly true of the most famous of all serial killers, Jack the Ripper. But there are other well-known serial killers who vanished without a trace and whose fate continues to tease the imagination of crime buffs. The anonymous Axe murderer who butchered a string of derelicts in Cleveland during the mid-1930s is one of these cases. In spite of the concerted efforts of the Cleveland police—including the legendary Eliot Ness of Untouchables fame, who was running the department at the time—the “Cleveland Torso Killer” was never apprehended.

  Like the Ripper, the “Cleveland Torso Killer” is a fascinating figure because he remains a total enigma. No one knows who he was or what became of him. There are other cases, however, where a killer’s identity is not in question. The mystery has to do with the maniac’s ultimate whereabouts.

  Sifting through the ruins of the incinerated farmhouse belonging to notorious Black Widow killer Belle Gunness, searchers came upon a charred female body and assumed it was Gunness’s remains. There was only one problem. The corpse had no head—so making a positive ID was a little tricky. Eventually, investigators concluded that the corpse was a substitute—a woman Gunness had murdered expressly for that purpose. In subsequent years, Gunness was allegedly sighted in different parts of the country, from New England to Los Angeles. But to this day, no one knows what really became of her.

  A few years later, during World War I, officials in the Hungarian town of Czinkota discovered the bodies of twenty-three murdered women in and around the abandoned house of a retired tinsmith named Bela Kiss. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no way to punish the killer, since Kiss (who had enlisted in the army) had reportedly died in combat. Reports of his death, however, were greatly exaggerated. As it turned out, Kiss—while recuperating from his wounds in a military hospital—switched dog tags with a dying soldier and disappeared under the other man’s name. From that point on, his trail vanished. Alleged sightings on both sides of the Atlantic—from Budapest to New York City—kept his legend alive.

  Kiss’s countryman Sylvestre Matuschka was one of the most bizarre serial killers of all time, a maniac who derived intense sexual pleasure from bombing railroad trains and listening to the dying shrieks of the passengers. Matuschka was actually convicted and imprisoned in the 1930s, but somehow he managed to get free during the turmoil of World War II. What happened to him next is anybody’s guess. According to some crime historians, however, Matuschka was forced to join the Soviet army, which recognized his special talents and gave him a job for which he was uniquely qualified: explosives expert.

  WOMEN

  One of the most hotly debated questions among people who study violent crime is: Is there such a thing as a female serial killer? The simple answer is: Yes . . . and no. It all depends on how you define serial murder.

  If you follow t
he FBI’s definition—three or more separate killings with an emotional cooling-off period between each homicide—then the answer is clearly affirmative. The annals of crime are full of fatal females who have knocked off large numbers of victims—Black Widow brides who dispatch a succession of hubbies; homicidal Nurses who administer death to dozens of patients; evil Housekeepers who dispose of entire families. Serial-killer encyclopedist Michael Newton has compiled a volume called Bad Girls Do It! that profiles nearly two hundred female multiple murderers—an assemblage almost imposing enough to confirm Rudyard Kipling’s famous line, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”

  Of course, many specialists—Newton included—believe that true serial murder always involves another element, specified in the definition put forth by the National Institute of Justice in 1988: the presence of “sadistic, sexual overtones.” Even when you add this ingredient, there’s a sizable number of women who fit the bill, from “Lonely Hearts Killer” Martha Beck, to the British sex killer Rosemary West (accused of the grisly torture and murder of ten victims, including her own daughter), to Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious “Blood Countess” of sixteenth-century Romania, reputed to have slain as many as six hundred victims for her own erotic delectation.

  The problem arises when you try to find a female criminal who matches the model of the modern-day serial killer epitomized by Jack the Ripper—the lone psychopathic lust murderer, coolly stalking and snaring his victims, then butchering and mutilating them in a sex-crazed frenzy. Here, the issue becomes much more tricky. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to find a single woman in the whole history of crime who fits this mold. (As culture critic Camille Paglia puts it with characteristic bluntness, “There is no female Jack the Ripper.”) Beck and West, for example, were part of Killer Couples. And Bathory falls into the venerable—if thoroughly depraved—tradition of the evil Aristocrat, exemplified by monsters like Caligula and Gilles de Rais.

  There is a solution to this puzzle. If you think of serial homicide as fundamentally a sex crime (as the NIJ definition suggests), it follows that female serial killers will differ from their male counterparts in roughly the same way that the erotic nature of women differs from that of men. Just as male sexuality is phallic-penetrative, promiscuous, and fairly undiscriminating, a typical male serial killer will butcher whatever random stranger he can get his hands on. The average female serial killer, by contrast, generally needs to have a relationship with someone before she’ll kill that person. She derives her excitement not from violating a stranger’s body with a penetrating implement but from a grotesque travesty of tenderness and intimacy: serving poisoned food to a husband, for example, or smothering a child to death. Jane Toppan, a Victorian poisoner who climbed into bed with her many victims and achieved orgasm while embracing them during their death throes, exemplifies this pattern.

  Keep in mind, too, that—though their crimes are less grisly—female psycho-killers are no less sadistic than their male counterparts. On the contrary, it can be argued that—for all the postmortem butchery they were subjected to—the streetwalkers slain by Jack the Ripper died a swifter and more merciful death than the victims of madwomen like Nurse Toppan, who were made to suffer the prolonged agonies of slow poisoning.

  The single, if arguable, exception to this rule is Aileen Wuornos, the onetime Florida hooker who slew a string of male pickups between December 1989 and the following November. Some observers viewed Wuornos as a classic serial murderer—a cold-blooded predator who killed for the sheer joy of it, like David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz. Certain experts even worried that Wuornos represented the start of a frightening trend: the first of a new breed of female serial killers that would soon be terrorizing America.

  Those fears proved to be unjustified. Wuornos appears to have been an isolated case. Indeed, not everyone regards her as a serial killer in the classic sense but as a pathetic, lost soul: a brutalized woman whose rage at the world—and the male sex in particular—exploded in an outburst of horrific violence.

  Aileen Wuornos

  Some people regard her as “the first female serial killer in history”—a coldblooded predator who stalked and murdered a string of victims over an extended period of time. Others (herself included) claim that she only killed in self-defense, when threatened with violence and rape. Whichever of these views is correct, one thing is certain. Between December 1989 and the following November, seven middle-aged male motorists, driving the highways of central Florida, stopped to pick up Aileen “Lee” Wuornos and ended up dead.

  Aileen Wuornos; from Bloody Visions trading cards

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

  Virtually from the day of her birth in 1956, Wuornos’s life was a nonstop nightmare of deprivation and violence, abandonment and abuse. She was the child of a teenage couple whose marriage had ended before she was born. Her father would eventually hang himself in jail after being arrested on child-molestation charges. One day when Aileen was only six months old, her mother left the infant girl and her brother with a babysitter, then telephoned to say she wouldn’t be coming home. Aileen was taken in by her grandparents but kicked out of their house when she was thirteen after giving birth to an illegitimate child (the consequence, she claimed, of rape). By the time she was fourteen, she was living a desperately brutalized life—sleeping in an abandoned car, hustling for drinks, drugs, and an occasional meal. At twenty, she married a seventy-year-old man, but their union lasted only a month (according to her account, she abandoned him because he beat her with a cane; according to his, he sued for divorce after she beat him up to get his car keys). Two years later, she attempted suicide by shooting herself in the stomach. After recuperating, she robbed a convenience store at gunpoint, was promptly arrested, and spent thirteen months in prison. Other arrests—for check forgery and auto theft—followed.

  In 1986, Wuornos met the love of her life—a lesbian named Tyria Moore—at a Daytona gay bar. Even after their sexual passion cooled, the two remained inseparable for the next four years. During that time, Wuornos’s rage and resentment toward men grew increasingly violent. She continued to hustle. Now, however, she carried a .22-caliber gun in her handbag when she worked the truck stops and roadhouses.

  On November 30, 1989, Wuornos took a ride with a fifty-one-year-old electronics repair shop owner named Richard Mallory. The next day, his abandoned car was found in a stretch of secluded woods, along with his wallet, a half-empty vodka bottle, and a torn package of condoms. Twelve days later, Mallory’s bullet-riddled corpse was uncovered in a junkyard. Six more nearly identical killings followed.

  After Wuornos and Moore were spotted driving one of the victims’ cars, Florida police were able to pick up their trail. Wuornos was arrested in a seedy biker bar called The Last Resort. Once in custody, she confessed to all seven killings, though she claimed she was acting in self-defense. Tried for the murder of Richard Mallory, she insisted that she had shot him after he choked and tortured her, raped her anally, and threatened to kill her. The jury was unpersuaded. Wuornos was convicted and sentenced to death. “I’m innocent,” she shouted when the verdict was read. “I hope you get raped! Scumbags of America!” During a subsequent proceeding—at which Wuornos was given three more death sentences—she hurled similar obscenities at the prosecuting attorney: “I hope your wife and children get raped in the ass!”

  As Wuornos sat on death row, she appeared to grow increasingly unbalanced. Even while proclaiming her innocence, she sent a letter to the Florida Supreme Court, declaring, “I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again.” She fired her attorneys, stopped her appeals, and eagerly awaited her execution. She was put to death by lethal injection in October 2002. Her last words seemed to confirm the opinion of some observers that, by the end of her lamentable life, Wuornos had gone completely mad: “I’ll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, like the movie, big mothership and all. I’ll be back.”


  From Beauty into Beast

  2003 was a big year for Aileen Wuornos. True, she had been dead since the previous October, when her long-delayed execution finally took place. But fourteen months after she was killed by lethal injection, her sad, sordid, shockingly violent life story was immortalized in not one but two highly acclaimed movies: Nick Broomfield’s documentary, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, and Patty Jenkins’s drama, Monster, starring actress Charlize Theron.

  On the face of it (as it were), casting Theron—one of the most glamorously beautiful women on the planet—as the coarse-featured, case-hardened Wuornos made about as much sense as deciding that Brad Pitt would be perfect in the role of Quasimodo. Aided, however, by a brilliant makeup job, Theron completely transformed herself into the swaggering, foul-mouthed man-hater, winning a well-deserved Oscar for her performance.

  To get an idea of just how uncannily convincing she is in the role, viewers can compare her to the actual Wuornos in Broomfield’s powerful documentary, a follow-up to his equally fine 1993 film, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer.

  THE WRONG MAN

  There’s only one thing worse than being arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit: being executed for it. And when the crime in question is serial murder, the outrage is compounded. Not only is an innocent man put to death, but the real culprit remains at large and continues to get away with murder.

  Unfortunately, cases like this have occurred from time to time. One of the most egregious was that of Timothy Evans, a dim-witted English truck driver convicted of the brutal murder of his wife and baby daughter in 1950. The chief prosecution witness against Evans was his downstairs neighbor—a quiet, eminently respectable gentleman named John Reginald Christie. Three years after Evans was hanged at London’s Pentonville Prison, Christie vacated his flat at 10 Rillington Place. The tenants who replaced him immediately noticed a foul odor emanating from somewhere in the kitchen. Tracing its source to a hollow section of wall, they tore off the wallpaper, peered inside, and discovered the decomposed remains of three women shoved into a concealed cupboard. Another body—that of Christie’s wife—was found under the floorboards, and two more female corpses were unearthed in the backyard. Altogether, the quiet little man had committed eight murders—four of them following Evans’s execution. Christie himself was hanged in July 1953. Another thirteen years would pass before the British government finally admitted it had made an error in Evans’s case and granted him a posthumous pardon.