The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read online

  Charles Manson; from 52 Famous Murderers trading cards

  (Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

  According to some reports, Manson and his tribe dabbled in satanism. Ever since the 1960s, America has been terrified (and titillated) by reports of rampant devil worship, involving everything from ritual animal mutilation to the use of human “breeders”—fertile young women who are impregnated for the express purpose of producing sacrificial infants. If TV tabloid shows like Geraldo are to be believed, our country is full of satanic cults, generally made up of diabolical suburbanites or wild-eyed teens who receive their instructions from Lucifer by playing Black Sabbath records in reverse. Fortunately, most of these reports are nothing more than the quasi-pornographic fantasies of religious nuts or people who have watched one too many viewings of Rosemary’s Baby. Devil cults that perform human sacrifice are blessedly rare. But they do exist—as a young man named Mark Kilroy was unlucky enough to discover in March 1987.

  Kilroy, a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Texas, was on spring vacation with some friends in Matamoros, Mexico, when he disappeared during an evening of bar hopping. His whereabouts remained a mystery until investigators were led to a remote ranch that served as the headquarters for a local drug-smuggling gang. The leader of this bloodthirsty crew was a self-styled sorcerer named Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo—aka El Padrino (“The Godfather”)—who preached a hodgepodge of Cuban Santeria, Haitian Voodoo, Aztec Santismo, and an obscure African-derived religion called Palo Mayombe. Whenever a big drug deal was about to go down, Constanzo’s cult would seek supernatural protection by sacrificing a human victim, whose heart and brain would be cooked in a cauldron and devoured in a cannibal feast. When the federales finally rounded up the gang, they found the mutilated remains of fifteen victims (including Kilroy) who had been sacrificed to the cult’s crazy-quilt religion.

  Cult of Doom

  Your average modern-day thug tends to be a relatively scary character, particularly when he’s armed with a 9mm handgun. Still, compared to the original Thugs—a notorious cult of killers that existed in India for at least six centuries—even a Mafia hitman seems like a wimp.

  A secret society of robbers and murderers, the Thugs were devotees of the cannibal goddess Kali, in whose name they committed their innumerable crimes. The word thug itself is a bastardization of the Hindu word thag, meaning a rogue or deceiver. Deception was crucial to their murderous technique. Posing as innocent travelers, a group of Thugs would join up with a party of pilgrims or traders (their favorite targets). Then—after luring the party to a suitable spot—the Thugs would sneak up on their victims and strangle all of them at once while chanting prayers to the goddess. After mutilating and gutting the corpses, the killers would bury the bodies and hold a ritual feast on the graves.

  Generation after generation of Thugs strangled countless victims throughout India. (Children of cult members were inducted into the society and taught the prescribed method of murder on clay dummies.) Finally, beginning in 1830, the British launched a virtual war on the Thugs, wiping out the death cult by 1860.

  For sheer exotic evil, the Thugs are hard to beat; it’s no surprise that two of the most colorful adventure films of all time have used these Kali-worshipping cultists as villains—George Stevens’s Gunga Din and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

  Other films that deal with the Thugs include the gleefully gruesome 1959 Hammer horror film, The Stranglers of Bombay, and—at the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum—the artsy 1988 thriller The Deceivers, in which a young British officer (played by a pre-007 Pierce Brosnan) infiltrates the Kali-worshipping cult.

  Jeffrey Dahmer

  Jeffrey Dahmer; from True Crime Trading Cards Series Two: Serial Killers and Mass Murderers; art by Jon Bright

  (Courtesy of Jon Bright and Valarie Jones)

  Folklorists sometimes refer to “Forbidden Chamber” stories—tales about young men or women who, while exploring an ogre’s castle, open a secret door and discover a roomful of butchered bodies. In 1991, this nightmare really happened—not in a decaying castle somewhere deep in the Black Forest but in a rundown apartment house in a seedy neighborhood of Milwaukee.

  On the night of July 22, a dazed and terrified young man, with a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist, flagged down an MPD squad car. A “weird dude” had just tried to kill him, he told the police. His story led the officers to apartment no. 213 of a nearby building. Inside, they discovered a virtual warehouse of human remains. The sickening inventory included a human head sitting on a refrigerator shelf, skulls stashed in a closet, body parts packed in a blue plastic barrel, decomposed hands lying in a lobster pot, an assortment of bones stored in cardboard boxes, and a freezer full of viscera—lungs, livers, intestines, kidneys. There was also a collection of sickening Polaroids, including one of a male torso eaten away by acid from the nipples down. The occupant of this charnel house, a meek, soft-spoken young man named Jeffrey Dahmer, made no effort to conceal the stomach-churning evidence of his unspeakable crimes.

  Dahmer had killed seventeen men in all, most of them young African Americans he had picked up in gay bars. He drugged them, strangled them, and dismembered their bodies with an electric saw. He ultimately confessed to the most unimaginable depravities, including cannibalism and necrophiliac rape (disembowelling a corpse and having sex with the viscera was one of his particular pleasures). On several occasions, he also performed makeshift lobotomies on his still-living victims, drilling holes in their skulls and injecting their brains with muriatic acid in an effort to turn them into Zombies.

  Dahmer’s deranged appetites went all the way back to his childhood. As a boy, he loved to collect and dissect roadkill and to butcher small creatures. Former acquaintances would recall finding cats and frogs nailed to trees in the woods behind the Dahmer home. On one occasion, some neighborhood boys came upon a dog’s head impaled on a stick.

  Dahmer progressed from Animal Torture to homicide at the age of eighteen, when—after picking up a young male hitchhiker and bringing him home for sex—he bludgeoned the young man to death, then dismembered the body and buried the parts in the woods. Two years later, Dahmer exhumed the decomposed remains, pulverized the bones with a sledgehammer, and scattered the pieces around the woods.

  The “Milwaukee Monster” was ultimately sentenced to fifteen consecutive life sentences, amounting to a total of 936 years. But his prison term—and his life—came to an abrupt end in 1994, when he was beaten to death by a fellow inmate.

  “I really screwed up this time.”

  JEFFREY DAHMER,

  to his father

  DEATH WISH

  It’s obvious that, in one sense, all serial killers have a death wish—they wish to inflict death on as many people as possible. But many of them also have a death wish in the strict Freudian sense of the term: a desire to bring about their own destruction. The long list of serial killers who have either committed or attempted suicide includes such notorious figures as Karl Denke, Georg Grossmann, Gary Heidnik, Joseph Kallinger, and Henry Lee Lucas.

  Some of these psychopaths have killed themselves as a way of escaping the law. Joe Ball, the Florida hardcase who disposed of his unwanted lovers by feeding them to his pet alligators, put a bullet through his heart rather than submit to arrest (see Alligators). Leonard Lake—who built a torture bunker on his California ranch where he and his partner, Charles Ng, murdered an indeterminate number of victims—swallowed a cyanide capsule immediately after his arrest (see Partners).

  By contrast, other serial killers fulfill their death wish by engineering their own capture and eventual execution. Six years after murdering and then cannibalizing a twelve-year-old girl, Albert Fish sent a note to her mother describing the crime. Though Fish scratched out the return address embossed on the envelope, he did such a halfhearted job that police had no trouble deciphering the address and tracking him down. The criminal career of serial sex killer Bobby Joe Long cam
e to an abrupt end when he simply let one of his kidnapped victims go. The young woman instantly went to the police and provided them with a detailed description of her abductor, his apartment, and his car. That some serial killers desperately want to be captured was made clear by the famous lipstick-scrawled plea that sex killer William Heirens left on a bedroom wall—“For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”

  It’s not very surprising that serial killers are often suicidal. Brought up by dreadfully abusive parents who fill them with the sense that all human beings—beginning with themselves—are just so much worthless garbage, serial killers are consumed with despair and self-loathing. After his conviction for first-degree murder, Harvey Murray Glatman—a sadistic creep who shot photos of his bound-and-gagged victims before strangling them to death—suggested that execution would be the most appropriate punishment. When the judge obliged by sentencing him to the gas chamber, Glatman remarked, “It’s better this way. I knew this is the way it would be.” Other serial killers—like Mormon-missionary-turned-child-killer Arthur Gary Bishop—have expedited their own deaths by refusing to appeal their death sentences. For killers like these, life becomes a growing nightmare. Eventually they yearn for escape.

  It is possible that the most famous of all serial killers, Jack the Ripper, fell into this category. Though his identity remains a mystery, the fact that his crimes ceased abruptly after his fifth and final atrocity suggests that—overwhelmed by revulsion at the growing horror of his deeds—the “Whitechapel Monster” took his own life.

  Indeed, some serial killers seem to look forward to their impending deaths with positive excitement. Michael Ross, who raped and murdered eight teenage girls in the 1980s, put a stop to any further appeals to his death sentence in 1992 and finally had his death wish come true when prison guards strapped him to a lethal-injection gurney in May 2005. According to one observer, when Ross learned that the execution was finally going to happen, he “became upbeat and started joking around.”

  Weird as that may seem, it’s nothing compared to the way Peter Kürten—the “Monster of Düsseldorf”—anticipated his own, much harsher execution. His mood, according to certain accounts, can only be described as positively giddy. Aroused since childhood by the sight and sound of spurting blood, Kürten claimed he would die a happy man if he could hear the blood gushing from his own neck stump at the moment of beheading.

  DEFINITION

  Like certain other terms—obscenity, for example—serial killing is surprisingly tricky to define. Part of the problem is that police definitions tend to differ from popular conceptions. According to some experts, a serial killer is any murderer who commits more than one random slaying with a break between the crimes. There is certainly some validity to this viewpoint. If (for example) Ted Bundy had been caught after committing only a couple of atrocities, he wouldn’t have gained worldwide notoriety—but he still would have been what he was: a demented personality capable of the most depraved acts of violence. Still, it’s hard to think of someone as a serial killer unless he’s killed a whole string of victims.

  How many victims constitute a “string”? Again, it’s hard to be precise. The most infamous serial killers—Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, etc.—are the ones responsible for double-digit murders. Most experts seem to agree, however, that to qualify as a serial killer, an individual has to slay a minimum of three unrelated victims.

  The notion of a string implies something else besides sheer number. A serial killer must perpetrate a number of random killings with an emotional “cooling-off” period between each crime. This hiatus—which can last anywhere from hours to years—is what distinguishes the serial killer from the Mass Murderer, the homicidal nut who erupts in an explosion of insane violence, killing a whole group of people all at once. Thus, the official FBI definition of serial homicide is “three or more separate events with an emotional cooling-off period between homicides, each murder taking place at a different location.”

  There are several problems with this definition, however. For one thing, not all serial killers commit their murders in different locations. The nearly three dozen victims of John Wayne Gacy, for example, all met their horrible deaths in the basement of his suburban ranch house. And there are murderers who commit three or more separate homicides over extended periods of time who aren’t serial killers: mob hitmen, for example.

  What distinguishes a professional hitman from a serial murderer, however, is that one kills for money—it’s his job—while the other kills purely for depraved pleasure. A hitman may enjoy his work, but murder isn’t his primary source of sexual gratification. The situation is different with psychos like Gacy, who reach the heights of ecstasy while perpetrating their atrocities. According to many experts, in other words, true serial homicide always involves an element of unspeakable sexual Sadism.

  Taking these issues into account, the National Institute of Justice offers a definition we find more useful than the FBI’s: “A series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually but not always committed by one offender acting alone. The crimes may occur over a period of time ranging from hours to years. Quite often the motive is psychological, and the offender’s behavior and the physical evidence observed at the crime scenes will reflect sadistic, sexual overtones.”

  (For more on the element of sexual sadism in serial murder, see Women.)

  Coining a Phrase

  In earlier times, psychopathic killers who butchered a succession of random victims were generally described in supernatural terms—demons, fiends, monsters. In the late 1800s, one ingenious journalist, searching for a way to describe the infamous Dr. H. H. Holmes, invented the term “multi-murderer”—a snappily alliterative coinage that never caught on. Other common terms used to describe these creatures include “lust-murderers,” “recreational killers,” “homicidal maniacs,” and “stranger-killers.” During most of the mid-twentieth century, all criminals who slaughtered a number of victims were lumped together as “mass murderers.”

  By the late 1960s, however, it became clear that a distinction had to be drawn between the kind of killer who blows away a whole bunch of people at once and the compulsive killer who commits a string of atrocities over an extended period of time. Ultimately, the term “mass murderer” was reserved for the former—the rampage killer who “goes postal”—while the term “serial killer” was applied to the kind of predatory sex slayer exemplified by Bundy, Gacy, et al.

  Credit for the phrase “serial killer” has generally been given to (and claimed by) former Special Agent Robert K. Ressler, one of the pioneers of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. According to Ressler’s account (published in his 1992 book, Whoever Fights Monsters), he was lecturing at the British Police Academy when one of the participants referred to “crimes in series.” Impressed with the phrase, Ressler began using a variation—“serial killers”—in his classes at Quantico.

  In point of fact, however, the phrase “serial murderer” can be traced at least as far back as 1961, when it was used by the German film critic Siegfried Kracauer to describe the psychopathic child killer played by Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s classic thriller, M. Five years later, British crime writer John Brophy used the same phrase repeatedly in his 1966 book, The Meaning of Murder.

  It’s possible that, while in England, Ressler picked up the phrase (perhaps subliminally) from Brophy or someone familiar with Brophy’s book. Still, Ressler deserves credit for altering the term from “serial murderer” to the slightly more snappy “serial killer.” And it was certainly Ressler and his colleagues at Quantico who popularized the term, which quickly became a part of everyday American speech.

  Albert DeSalvo

  In his short, deranged life, Albert DeSalvo acquired several nicknames. In his late twenties, he became known as the “Measuring Man,” a serial sex molester who went from door to door, posing as a scout for a modeling agency. If a woman fell for this line and invited him in, he would pro
duce a tape measure and proceed to check out her assets—a ploy that allowed him to indulge his taste for crude sexual fondling.

  A few years later, after serving a brief prison sentence, he progressed from molestation to rape, assaulting hundreds of women throughout New England during a two-year span in the early 1960s. During this period, he was known as the “Green Man,” so called because of the green work clothes he favored while committing his crimes.

  It was his third nickname, however, that ensured him enduring infamy. In 1962, DeSalvo became known as the “Boston Strangler,” a smooth-talking sadist who savagely murdered thirteen women during an eighteen-month reign of terror.

  Or, at least, that has been the official version for the last forty years. Recent developments have raised some questions about DeSalvo’s guilt.

  The generally accepted story begins with DeSalvo’s insanely brutal Upbringing, when he acquired an early taste for Sadism. One of his favorite childhood pastimes was placing a starving cat in an orange crate with a puppy and watching the cat scratch the dog’s eyes out. He got married while in the army and maintained a more or less normal facade as a husband and father, even while committing some of the most shocking crimes in American history. (Of course there were strains in the marriage. Among other things, DeSalvo was possessed of a demonic libido and demanded sex as often as six times a day.)

  The earliest victims of the Boston Strangler were elderly women. Each had willingly let the killer into her apartment. Posing as a building repairman, the glib, smooth-talking sex slayer had no trouble gaining entrance. Besides raping and strangling the women, he enjoyed desecrating their corpses, sometimes by shoving bottles or broomsticks into their vaginas. After finishing with his victim, he would leave a grotesque signature, knotting his makeshift garrote (often a nylon stocking) into a big, ornamental bow beneath the dead woman’s chin.