The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read online

  Rader’s job as code enforcer coincided with a period when the BTK murders had stopped. One criminologist thinks there may be a connection. Professor James Fox of Northeastern University theorizes that the sense of power Rader felt while harassing people might have been a substitute for the absolute power he felt while murdering his victims. In other words, as long as he was busting people’s chops, he didn’t feel the need to bind, torture, and kill them.

  Just remember that, the next time you go to the DMV. If you happen to run up against an insufferable, bureaucratic jerk, his obnoxious behavior might just be a safety valve for even more hateful impulses—his way of not going postal.

  CLANS

  In our age of splintered homes, broken marriages, and latchkey children, it’s heartwarming to read about the large, close-knit families of yesteryear, bound together by common interests and shared activities. Unless, of course, those interests and activities included serial murder, gang rape, and even cannibalism—as was the case with two notorious killer clans of the past, the Beanes and the Benders.

  According to legend, Sawney Beane was a fifteenth-century Scottish peasant who grew fed up with farming and turned to highway robbery. With his hard-bitten common-law wife, he holed up in a seaside cavern on the Galloway coast and sired a large brood of children. Eventually, through incestuous mating, the family swelled to forty-eight members, who subsisted by preying on unwary travelers, devouring their flesh, and pickling the leftover meat in seawater.

  No one knows how many people fell victim to this feral clan—estimates run as high as one thousand. To the local inhabitants, the cause of these disappearances was a mystery. Was it a pack of man-eating wolves? Or some supernatural creature? The truth finally came to light when a husband and wife, returning from a village fair, were attacked by the barbarous Beanes, who fell upon the woman, slit her throat, and began feasting on her flesh. A second party, coming upon this appalling scene, informed the authorities. Before long, King James led a party of four hundred troops to the Galloway coast, where the Beanes’ unspeakable hideout—its walls hung with human body parts—was uncovered. The entire family was captured and executed, the men put to slow torture, the women burned alive at the stake.

  In our own country, a fiendish family known as the “Bloody Benders” perpetrated a string of atrocities during the 1870s. Headed by a brutish patriarch, John, and his equally savage wife (known only as “Ma”), the Benders were German immigrants who settled on the rugged Kansas frontier, where they ran a crude ramshackle “hotel.” More than a dozen weary travelers who stopped there for a meal or a good night’s rest never made it any farther. While daughter Kate served the stranger his dinner, Papa Bender and his son, John Jr., would sneak up from behind and smash the unwary victim on the skull with a sledgehammer. Then the body would be stripped, robbed, and buried. When a posse finally searched the place, they found the remains of a dozen victims, including a little girl who had been brutally raped before being buried alive beneath her father’s corpse. By the time these atrocities were uncovered, however, the Benders had already fled. To this day no one knows what became of them.

  The old-fashioned tradition represented by the Benders and the Beanes (“the family that slays together stays together”) has been perpetuated in our own era by a family named the McCrarys. A nomadic band of small-time robbers, the McCrarys committed a string of holdups from coast to coast during a yearlong spree in the early 1970s. Along the way, the three McCrary males (father Sherman, son Danny, and son-in-law Raymond Carl Taylor) abducted twenty-two young women—waitresses, salesclerks, customers—from the crime scenes, then raped them, shot them in the head, and ditched the bodies. Through it all, the two McCrary women—mama Carolyn and daughter Ginger McCrary-Taylor—stood by their men. “I love my husband very much,” declared Ginger after the vicious killer clan was apprehended. “And it never occurred to me to do anything other than to stay with him.”

  Sawney Beane on Film

  Actually, there are no films about Sawney Beane. Two commendable horror movies, however, have been loosely inspired by the man-eating exploits of the legendary Scottish clan of cannibals.

  The scarier of the pair is Wes Craven’s low-budget shocker, The Hills Have Eyes (1977), about a family of vacationing midwesterners whose station wagon breaks down in the California desert, where they are set upon by a clan of mutant cannibals whose members include a truly alarming character named Pluto (played by a truly alarming-looking actor, Michael Berryman). Craven’s classic was given a stylish makeover in 2006 by French goremeister Alexandre Aja.

  Less intense—though still well worth seeing—is the 1972 British horror movie Raw Meat (also known as Death Line). During the 1800s (according to the film) a gang of laborers, digging a tunnel for the London subway, were trapped underground by a cave-in. Since saving them was too expensive, they were simply abandoned down there. The movie concerns their modern-day descendants, a clan of inbred cannibals who still dwell in the subterranean reaches of the London subway system, preying on unlucky commuters. In spite of its lurid title and premise, the movie—starring Donald Pleasence, with a cameo by Christopher Lee—is surprisingly restrained and even (pardon the expression) tasteful.

  COEDS

  Though cinematic psychos like the brilliant and cultured Hannibal Lecter are often portrayed as criminal masterminds, few, if any, real-life serial killers possess genius-level IQs. Still, most are smart enough to know how to select vulnerable victims—what criminologists call “targets of opportunity.” Often this means preying upon Prostitutes. It can also mean setting their sights on more respectable victims.

  The winsome young females who abound on college campuses are a good example. Not only are these coeds alluring; they are often easy to manipulate. They’re generally naïve about the darker dimensions of human nature; they are usually unsupervised for the first time in their lives; and they are sometimes tempted by new experiences that carry a whiff of the forbidden. In short, they make easy pickings for a certain breed of predatory killer.

  By far the most infamous American coed killer was the silver-tongued Ted Bundy. While attending the University of Washington in 1974, he used his wholesome good looks and superficial charm to lure female students away from secure public places and lead them to isolated spots where he would unleash his inner Mr. Hyde. Toward the end of his appalling career, Bundy dispensed with seduction. Breaking into a couple of sororities in Tallahassee, Florida, he set upon several of the sleeping residents and savaged their bodies in a frenzy of blood lust.

  Predating Bundy by a few years was another notorious coed killer, John Norman Collins. Like Bundy, Collins cut a clean-cut all-American figure. His college English teacher, however, glimpsed another side of the seemingly normal young man when Collins handed in a paper on the right to commit murder. “If a person holds a gun on somebody—it’s up to him to decide whether to take the other’s life or not,” Collins had written. “The point is: It’s not society’s judgment that’s important, but the individual’s own choice of will and intellect.” Between 1967 and 1969, Collins—the star athlete and education major—put this theory into practice by raping, shooting, stabbing, strangling, and bludgeoning as many as nine young women.

  Collins became known in the press as the “Coed Killer.” But he wasn’t the only murderer to earn that moniker. The same nickname was applied to one of the most appalling psychopaths of the era, Edmund Kemper III. At six-foot-nine and close to 300 pounds, Kemper didn’t fit the Golden Boy mold of Bundy and Collins. Nor did he possess the slightest social skills when it came to the opposite sex. Rather than smooth-talking nubile young women into dropping their guard, he preferred simply to find them along the side of the road at a time when coeds were trusting enough to regard hitchhiking as a reasonable way to travel. Once he had them in the car, he would either shoot or stab his victims. Afterward, he would bring the corpses home and perform unspeakable atrocities on their bodies.

  In effect, as Kemper c
almly confessed to police, these abominations were his equivalent of taking an attractive young coed out on a date.

  “Alive, they were distant, not sharing with me. I was trying to establish a relationship [with them].”

  EDMUND KEMPER,

  on his motive for butchering, dismembering, performing necrophiliac sex on, and cannibalizing his coed victims

  COOLING-OFF PERIOD

  See Definition.

  COPYCATS

  There’s nothing new about “copycat” killers—desperately disturbed individuals who feel impelled to imitate sensational, highly publicized crimes. Back in the late 1890s, for example, a San Francisco woman named Cordelia Botkin, after being dumped by her married lover, mailed a box of poisoned chocolates to the man’s unwitting wife. The Botkin case, which received frenzied nationwide news coverage, inspired so many similar crimes that the country soon found itself in the midst of what the press (somewhat hysterically) called a “poison epidemic.”

  The situation tends to be different, however, when it comes to serial murder. True, the 1995 movie Copycat depicted a homicidal maniac who mimics the MO of such notorious psychos as David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, the “Hillside Stranglers,” Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer. But that is pure Hollywood fantasy. In real life, even the most infamous homicidal maniacs—the ones who receive the kind of saturation news coverage that turns them into media celebrities—rarely inspire imitators. Dahmer, for example, was page-one news from coast to coast and a People magazine cover boy. But no one has ever attempted to duplicate his atrocities. The reason is simple. The horrors perpetrated by such beings are the product of the deepest psychosexual compulsions. No one is going to disembowel, cannibalize, and perform necrophiliac sex on a bunch of teenage boys just because he read about it in the papers and it sounded like a cool thing to do.

  There have been some acknowledged serial-killer copycats. Peter Kürten, the “Monster of Düsseldorf,” was fascinated by Jack the Ripper and spent hours poring over accounts of Saucy Jack’s atrocities. Kürten’s monstrous compatriot, Fritz Haarmann, was an inspiration for the equally deranged Albert Fish, who collected all the newspaper clippings he could find about the “Vampire of Hanover.”

  A more recent example is Heriberto Seda. A deeply maladjusted young gun nut, Seda became obsessed with the infamous West Coast shooter known as Zodiac. Adopting the same nickname, he committed a string of murders in Brooklyn and Manhattan in the early 1990s, while sending bizarre communications to the press, complete with cryptic astrological messages. Unlike his psychopathic role model, however, Seda was finally captured in 1998 and sentenced to eighty-plus years behind bars.

  While there have been relatively few serial-killer copycats in the strict sense of the term—people who try to replicate specific horrors they’ve read about in the news—there are a larger number who fall into a related category: psychopaths possessed of the sick ambition to win notoriety as serial murderers. For more on this phenomenon, see Wannabes.

  COURTROOM THEATRICS

  Given their bizarre psychological makeup, it’s no wonder that when serial killers are brought to trial, they sometimes create outrageous scenes. After spending their lives in the shadows, like bugs under a rock, they suddenly find themselves thrust onto center stage, with an audience that (in the media age) can number in the millions. With the whole world watching, some of these psychos proceed to put on quite a show.

  During his 1924 trial, Fritz Haarmann—the infamous “Vampire of Hanover,” who murdered at least twenty-eight young boys by chewing through their throats—carried on like a talk-show host. Puffing on a fat cigar, he heckled the witnesses and made frequent quips about his appalling crimes.

  Haarmann’s countryman, the German sex murderer Rudolph Pleil, used his trial as a platform for establishing his lethal preeminence. Pleil was charged with the rape-murder of nine women. Possessed of a perverse vanity, Pleil was indignant at these accusations, insisting that he was actually responsible for twenty-eight homicides. At his trial, he demanded that the official transcript refer to him as “der beste Totmacher”—“the best death-maker.”

  At roughly the same time in America, the “Lonely Hearts Killers,” Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, were on trial for a trio of killings, including the murder of a two-year-old child (see Killer Couples). At one point, the mountainous Beck—determined to demonstrate her undying love—detoured on her way to the witness stand to hurl herself into the arms of her skinny Latin lover (a scene not unlike the one in Walt Disney’s Fantasia when the hippo ballerina dives into the arms of her reptilian dance partner).

  Few trials, however, have been as outrageous as that of Charles Manson and his “family” of drug-crazed hippie assassins. Manson began the proceedings by marching into the courtroom with a big X carved into his forehead. “I have X-ed myself out of your world,” was his lucid explanation for this bizarre self-mutilation. At the height of the trial’s madness, Manson lunged at the judge and tried to assault him.

  Since the psychology of serial killers is such an unholy blend of derangement and cunning, it’s hard to know when their weird courtroom behavior is genuine and when they are just putting on an act. The latter may well have been the case in the trial of Andrei Chikatilo, the Russian “Mad Beast” who murdered, raped, and cannibalized more than fifty young women and children. Chained inside an iron-barred cage—which was installed in the courtroom to protect him from the vengeful relatives of his victims—Chikatilo spent his time swaying autistically, spewing obscenities, baying at the judge, and shouting out insane remarks (at one point, he began yelling about his one-man battle against the Assyrian Mafia; at another, he claimed he was pregnant and lactating). If Chikatilo’s behavior was a calculated act, designed to persuade observers of his legal insanity, it did not meet with success. He received the ultimate pan for his performance—a bullet to the back of the skull from a Russian executioner.

  CSI

  Since its premiere in the fall of 2000, the CBS TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has become a bona fide cultural phenomenon. It has not only spawned two hit spin-offs—CSI: Miami and CSI: New York—but has also produced powerful reverberations in the real world of academics and law. Enrollment in Baylor University’s forensic science program, for example, has increased tenfold since the show went on the air. Dozens of other colleges have created forensic science majors to meet the growing demands of young CSI-wannabes.

  The impact of the show has also become evident in the courtroom—so much so that prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges now speak of the “CSI effect.” Jurors who used to fall asleep when lawyers began talking about scientific evidence now look forward to the testimony of DNA technicians and other forensic specialists. While some legal experts applaud the program for creating a more scientifically informed jury pool, others criticize it for raising unrealistic expectations. After all, not every crime can be proved with hard scientific evidence. And in the real world, even DNA findings can be unreliable, particularly since—unlike Gil Grissom and his glamorous crew—actual human technicians have been known to make errors.

  Grissom, the lead character in the original entry in the CSI franchise, is played by William Petersen. This seems particularly apt, since Petersen started his film career matching wits with Hannibal Lecter in Michael Mann’s 1986 Manhunter, the first cinematic version of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. In CSI, too, Petersen comes up against an assortment of highly creative serial killers: a sex murderer known as the “Blue Paint Killer,” whose coed victims are all found with paint stains on their hands; a sadist called the “Strip Strangler,” who deliberately plants misleading evidence; a madman who compulsively re-creates his father’s murder (which he witnessed as a boy) by shooting victims in the bathtub; a maniac who snares married couples looking for sexual kicks, then kills the husband after forcing him to slit the wife’s throat; and others.

  Of course, for all its veneer of scientific hypersophistication, CSI is, at heart, a very traditio
nal show. Strip away Gil Grissom’s state-of-the-art gadgetry—the gas spectrometers and fiber-optic fluorometers, the electromagnetic dusting kits and ultraviolet flashlights—and you’re left with a Las Vegas version of Sherlock Holmes: a solitary eccentric, his head stuffed with esoteric information, who solves crimes through close observation and a remarkable ability to draw clever deductions from the smallest scraps of physical evidence. In the end, the real message of the show seems to be that while technology is providing police with ever more useful tools, what ultimately counts when it comes to tracking down serial killers and other criminals is good old-fashioned detective work.

  CULTS

  In essence, a cult is a surrogate family, headed by a strong, charismatic leader who functions as a father substitute. Cult members are required to behave like obedient children and do whatever Daddy says—whether that involves committing mass suicide by swallowing poison-spiked Kool-Aid or committing serial murder.

  Undoubtedly the most notorious crimes of the Aquarian Age were the Tate-LaBianca murders, carried out by Charles Manson’s renegade “family” of psycho-hippies. The crimes became a worldwide sensation, partly because of their appalling savagery—seven people butchered over two nights, including the pregnant actress Sharon Tate. But equally unsettling were the killers themselves. Beginning as more or less typical “flower children”—part of the mass migration of drugged-out adolescents who drifted to California during the Summer of Love—they had been transformed into the pawns of a malevolent spellbinder willing to commit random slaughter at his whim.