The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read online

  “I may be a bit peculiar.”

  GEORGE JOSEPH SMITH,

  the “Brides in the Bath” murderer

  BOARD GAMES

  Though it seemed unlikely to become the next Trivial Pursuit, a board game called Serial Killer set off a firestorm of outrage when it was put on the market a few years ago. The brainchild of a Seattle child-care worker named Tobias Allen, Serial Killer consisted of a game board printed with a map of the United States, four serial-killer playing pieces, “crime cards,” “outcome cards,” and two dozen plastic “victims” (in the possibly ill-advised form of dead babies).

  With the roll of a die, each player would move along the map and draw a crime card. Each card would involve either a “high-risk” or a “low-risk” crime, and the player would collect victims accordingly. As Allen explained, “A high-risk crime might be breaking into the house of a prominent citizen and killing him. A low-risk crime would be murdering a prostitute or a street person. Whoever has the highest body count at the end of the game wins.”

  Game cards from Serial Killer board game (Courtesy of Tobias Allen)

  Though Allen intended the game as “a bit of a spoof on the way we glorify mass destruction,” many people failed to see the humor. A number of Canadian politicians mobilized to ban the game’s sale in their country. The fact that it came packaged in a plastic body bag apparently didn’t help.

  “A quiet dorm could turn into a house of horrors when you visit! This campus is crawling with cops, though—so beware!”

  Crime card from Serial Killer board game

  BODY PARTS

  See Trophies.

  BTK

  The insatiable urge to kill is not a passing fancy. On the contrary, it is more like an addiction. And for serial murderers, like heroin junkies, it is very hard, if not impossible, to kick the habit.

  True, there have been rare occasions when a string of savage murders comes to a sudden, mysterious halt: the Jack the Ripper case, for example, or the original Zodiac killings. Few experts believe, however, that those two psychopaths simply decided to quit committing random murder and return to their day jobs. It is far more likely that they were either locked away on some unrelated charge or died, either of natural causes or by suicide.

  There’s an exception to every rule, however, as the case of the so-called BTK murders proves. Twenty-eight years after that madman’s last reported homicide, police finally arrested a suspect. His name was Dennis Rader, a colorless bureaucrat who—after allegedly terrorizing the city of Wichita, Kansas, in the 1970s with a series of horrific murders—somehow managed to set his homicidal impulses aside and retreat into a life of bland Midwestern normality.

  The nightmarish case began in January 1974, when the killer murdered a husband and wife and two of their children. He went on to kill three more people, all young women, over the next three years. All the victims were bound and strangled and forced to endure prolonged suffering. As the murderer explained in one of the anonymous letters he sent to the media, his method was “Bind them, Torture them, Kill them.” He also supplied his own catchy moniker, as if to make it easier for the media to promote him. Using the acronym for his murder method, he called himself the “BTK Strangler.”

  Always a hog for attention, the killer could get a bit peevish if he didn’t receive the response he thought he deserved. Once, he stewed for a week waiting for a newspaper to acknowledge his note, then wrote a TV station to complain: “How many do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?”

  While all this was going on, Dennis Rader was working in his quiet, fussy way, first at a residential security system company, then as a municipal codes enforcer who harried citizens for failing to leash their dogs or for letting their grass grow too high (see Civil Servants). In his spare time, he volunteered at his local Lutheran church and led a Boy Scout troop. As a troop leader, the alleged binder and torturer was especially keen on teaching boys how to tie a proper knot.

  After the BTK murders seemed to stop at the end of 1977, experts like legendary FBI profiler Robert Ressler concluded that the culprit was out of commission in some way. Events of 2004 proved that, in the BTK case at least, this bit of conventional wisdom did not apply.

  In March 2004 the killer sent another package to the media that included photocopies of a woman’s driver’s license and of some photos of the woman’s dead body (see Xerox). Her name was Vicki Wegerle, and she was murdered in 1986. Until this latest message, the police had no idea that Wegerle was another BTK victim.

  Mug shot of Dennis Rader, aka “BTK”

  Other messages followed, and eventually one of them provided the police with the lead they needed to crack the case. It contained a computer disk that was electronically traced back to a computer in Wichita’s Christ Lutheran Church. Before long, the police narrowed their search to Rader, the church’s balding, fifty-nine-year-old deacon. In all, prosecutors charged Rader with ten murders, the latest committed in 1991, five years after the Wegerle killing.

  On June 27, 2005—exactly four months after his arrest—Rader, dressed in a beige sports coat and blue tie, stood in a Wichita courtroom and pled guilty to all ten murders. Speaking in a flat, dispassionate voice—as if he were “reading out of a phonebook,” according to one observer—he offered graphic details of his enormities, explaining how he had trolled for victims, then stalked them, killed them, and—in several cases—masturbated over their bodies.

  When the judge asked him about his motivation, the onetime Boy Scout leader and church president calmly replied that he was simply acting out his sexual fantasies.

  Ted Bundy

  He was a genuine Jekyll and Hyde—a clean-cut Joe College type, so attractive and charming that young women, meeting him for the first time, would climb into his car without hesitation. Once there, however, they found themselves face-to-face with a monster: an implacable lust murderer who tortured and killed with maniacal glee.

  Ted Bundy’s bestial alter ego first came roaring to the surface during his student days at the University of Washington. In 1974, he killed seven women in as many months and inflicted permanent brain damage on another, using a metal rod to fracture her skull, then ramming it into her vagina. From Seattle, he moved to Salt Lake City, enrolling in the University of Utah school of law. Before long, he had established himself as an up-and-coming young Republican with bright political prospects. At the same time, however, the creature that lurked beneath this brilliant facade continued to lust after blood. Young women began disappearing from the Salt Lake area—including a police chief’s teenage daughter, whose nude and mutilated remains were eventually found in a canyon.

  Bundy also made occasional forays into Colorado, where at least five other young women vanished and died. In 1976, he was finally arrested but managed to escape twice, once by climbing through a courthouse window, the second time by sawing a hole in the ceiling of his cell.

  Ted Bundy; from Bloody Visions trading cards

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

  In January 1978 he turned up in Tallahassee, Florida. By now, the monster inside him—his evil Mr. Hyde—was taking control. No longer did Bundy bother to coax young women into his car. Instead, he simply slipped into their rooms at night and pounced with demoniacal fury. In one case, he nearly chewed off the nipple of a victim, then bit her buttocks so savagely that he left teeth marks in her flesh. Those marks were his undoing. After Florida police arrested him in February—for driving a stolen vehicle—they were able to match photographs of the bite marks with impressions of Bundy’s teeth.

  At his trial, the erstwhile law student acted as his own attorney. He failed to impress either the judge or the jury—though he was able to delay his execution for ten years following his conviction. In a desperate effort to fend off death, he also began cooperating with authorities. Interviewed by agents of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, he offered invaluable insights into the ps
ychology of serial killers. He also confessed to twenty-eight murders (though he is suspected of more, perhaps as many as one hundred).

  Ultimately, the legal process caught up with him. He was electrocuted in February 1989. Outside the prison walls, hundreds of people toasted his death with champagne.

  “We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow.”

  TED BUNDY

  CALENDARS

  Murder Can Be Fun Datebook

  (Courtesy of John Marr)

  As everyone knows, there’s a “theme” calendar available for enthusiasts of every stripe, from cat fanciers to Tolkien fanatics to connoisseurs of fine art. To satisfy the demand of hardcore horror fans (or “gorehounds” as they fondly refer to themselves), crime enthusiast John Marr—publisher of the popular “zine” Murder Can Be Fun—offered a handsome yearly datebook, the perfect gift for those discriminating people who like to keep track of such important anniversaries as the date of David Berkowitz’s second “Son of Sam” killing (October 23) and Gary Gilmore’s execution (December 4). A tour de force of research, Marr’s macabre desk calendar managed to come up with a different depressing event for every single day of the year.

  Film Threat magazine’s 1990 “Mass Murderer” calendar; art by Glenn L. Barr (Courtesy of Chris Gore, © 1989 Film Threat, Inc.)

  Calendar of an Organized Psychotic

  Several years ago, a sick but amusing item concocted by some cleverly macabre wit made the rounds—one of those anonymous laugh getters that get passed from hand to hand (or faxed from machine to machine). It pretended to be the monthly calendar of the world’s most anally retentive psychokiller. As an example of hilariously black humor, it remains, in our opinion, unsurpassed. We don’t know the name of the demented genius who produced it, but here it is:

  Several years ago, the cult magazine Film Threat put out a slick Mass Murderer calendar, featuring witty caricatures of Americas most infamous psychos (Ed Gein, Albert Fish, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and eight more) by artist Glenn L. Barr. Unfortunately, the magazine no longer produces this item, and original copies of the rare, out-of-print 1990 edition have become coveted Collectibles among serial-killer buffs.

  CANNIBALISM

  Ever since the Stone Age, human beings have indulged in cannibalism, either for dietary or ritual reasons. The prehistoric hominids known as Homo erectus enjoyed supping on the brains of their fellow cavemen. Aborigines throughout the world, from New Zealand to North America, routinely devoured the hearts of enemy warriors as a way of absorbing their courage. Ceremonial cannibalism was a central feature of the Aztec religion. And Fijians consumed human flesh (which they called puaka balava or “long pig”) just because they liked its taste.

  In the Judeo-Christian tradition, however, cannibalism is regarded with such intense abhorrence that when faced with a choice between eating other humans or starving to death, some people have opted for the latter. (This was the case, for example, with several survivors of the famous 1972 plane crash that stranded a party of young Uruguayans in the high Andes.) As a result, of all the horrors associated with serial killers, cannibalism strikes many people as the worst. When Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs, set out to create the most monstrous serial killer imaginable, the result was Dr. Lecter, aka “Hannibal the Cannibal,” whose idea of a gourmet meal is human liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti on the side.

  In point of fact, however, real-life cannibal killers are relatively few and far between. For reasons that can only be surmised, Germany has produced a disproportionately high percentage of twentieth-century people eaters. During the social chaos of the 1920s, the hideously depraved Fritz Haarmann slaughtered as many as fifty young boys, dined on their flesh, then sold the leftovers as black-market beef. His equally degenerate countryman Georg Grossmann also supplemented his income by peddling human flesh, though his preferred victims were plump young females, whose meat he made into sausages. Yet another postwar German cannibal was Karl Denke, an innkeeper who killed and consumed at least thirty of his lodgers.

  Albert Fish murdering Grace Budd; painting by Michael Rose

  At about the same time in America, the sadomasochistic madman Albert Fish was roaming the country, preying on small boys and girls. He was finally executed for the abduction-murder of a pretty twelve-year-old named Grace Budd, parts of whose body he made into a stew. In recent years, the “Milwaukee Monster,” Jeffrey Dahmer, has served as a grotesque reminder that the forbidden urge to consume human flesh may still lurk beneath the surface of supposedly civilized life.

  Appalling as they were, Dahmer’s crimes were outstripped by the Russian “Mad Beast,” Andrei Chikatilo, who—with a confirmed body count of fifty-two victims—holds the record as the worst serial killer of modern times. Among his countless atrocities, Chikatilo devoured the genitals of some of his victims—a practice that left him (according to his captors) with a telltale case of bizarre halitosis.

  A cannibalistic contemporary of Chikatilo and Dahmer was Arthur Shawcross, whose wildly sadistic tendencies first found free play in the jungles of Vietnam, where (according to his own account) he raped, slaughtered, and cannibalized two peasant women during an army combat mission. Shawcross’s subsequent career of psychopathic violence included the murder of a ten-year-old boy whose genitals he devoured, and the strangulation of a string of prostitutes whose bodies he dumped in the woods in upstate New York. Occasionally, he would sneak back to the body weeks after the murder, then cut out and eat pieces of the decomposing corpse (a particularly abhorrent form of cannibalism technically known as necrophagy).

  During the past twenty-five years or so, there have been a number of appalling cannibal killers who might well have become full-fledged serial murderers if they hadn’t been arrested after committing a single atrocity. These include Albert Fentress, a former schoolteacher in Poughkeepsie, New York, who, in the summer of 1979, lured an eighteen-year-old boy into his basement, cut off and ate the victim’s penis, then shot him to death; Issei Sagawa, a Japanese national living in Paris who, in 1981, killed his girlfriend, had sex with her corpse, then dismembered and ate parts of her body; Daniel Rakowitz, who likewise murdered and dismembered his girlfriend, then boiled her into a soup which he allegedly served to homeless people on New York’s Lower East Side in 1989; and Peter Bryan, a British schizophrenic arrested in 2004 after killing a friend and frying his brain for consumption.

  Most bizarre of all is undoubtedly Armin Meiwes, a middle-aged German computer technician who, in 2001, advertised for a victim willing to be slaughtered and consumed (see Ads). When a forty-three-year-old man named Bernd-Jürgen Brandes showed up in response to this Internet posting, Meiwes—with Brandes’s full approval—sliced off the latter’s penis. The two men then shared a meal of the severed organ. Brandes was then stabbed to death, dismembered, and frozen for future consumption.

  Meiwes was arrested shortly thereafter. Since Germany has no laws against cannibalism, he was charged with murder “for sexual satisfaction” and “disturbing the peace of the dead.” His attorney at his 2004 trial attempted to argue that since Brandes consented (indeed, eagerly cooperated) in his own death, the case should be classified as a mercy killing. The court was not convinced. Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison, though in April 2005, prosecutors—objecting to the leniency of the sentence—won an appeal for a retrial.

  Despite Meiwes’s claim that he had gotten his cannibalistic urges out of his system—“I had my big kick and I don’t need to do it again,” he declared—there is reason to doubt his word. Certainly, if he had chosen to indulge his unnatural appetites a second time, he would have had a varied menu to choose from. At his trial, a state police inspector testified that Meiwes’s computer files showed that his ad had drawn responses from 204 applicants looking to be his next meal.

  In the realm of serial-killer cinema, cannibali
sm features prominently in Tobe Hooper’s splatter classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, about a family of deranged good ol’ boys who turn unwary teens into barbeque. Like Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs, Hooper’s movie was inspired by the crimes of Edward Gein. Ostensibly, investigators found unmistakable signs of cannibalism in Gein’s horror house—a human heart in a frying pan, a refrigerator stocked with paper-wrapped body parts. This allegation, however, was just one of many hysterical rumors that floated around in the wake of his crimes. Though Ghoulish Gein committed all sorts of unspeakable acts, cannibalism was apparently not one of them. He did, however, enjoy eating baked beans from a bowl made out of a human cranium.

  “With every piece of flesh I ate I remembered him. It was like taking communion.”

  ARMIN MEIWES,

  testifying at his trial

  CARDS, COMICS, AND COLLECTIBLES

  Some years ago, a company called Eclipse Enterprises started marketing a set of true-crime trading cards, featuring full-color portraits of America’s most infamous serial killers (among other notable lawbreakers). Predictably enough, a coast-to-coast chorus of outraged voices immediately denounced these collectibles as dangerously immoral, and at least one locality—Nassau County in Long Island, New York—passed a law forbidding their sale to minors.

  Cover of Jeffrey Dahmer comic book from Boneyard Press

  (Courtesy of Hart D. Fisher)

  Of course, what these right-minded folk failed to realize is that American children have always gotten a charge out of all that is violent, gross, and offensive to adult sensibilities. At least as far back as the 1940s, there were trading cards depicting famous gangsters. Members of the boomer generation can fondly recollect the famous Civil War series of bubble-gum cards that depicted such educational scenes as soldiers getting impaled on one another’s bayonets and having their limbs blown off by cannon fire. Another kiddie classic, the legendary Mars Attacks trading cards, featured explicit images of humans having their bodies destroyed by the flesh-dissolving rays of alien invaders.