American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  ALSO BY PETER VRONSKY

  Serial Killers

  Female Serial Killers

  Sons of Cain

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  Copyright © 2021 by Peter Vronsky

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Vronsky, Peter, author.

  Title: American serial killers: the epidemic years 1950–2000 / Peter Vronsky.

  Description: New York: Berkley, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020022004 (print) | LCCN 2020022005 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593198810 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593198827 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Serial murder—United States—History—20th century. |

  Serial murderers—United States—History—20th century.

  Classification: LCC HV6515 .V75 2004 (print) | LCC HV6515 (ebook) | DDC 364.152/32092273—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022004

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022005

  Cover images: Top: Three sketches of the Golden State Killer, Wikipedia. Middle left: Robin Gecht article from Chicago Tribune, © 1982 Chicago Tribune. All rights reserved. Used under license. Middle right: Kendall Francois article, from Poughkeepsie Journal, © Gannett-Community Publishing. All rights reserved. Used under license. Bottom left: Zodiac Killer article, New York Daily News, © 1990, Getty Images; Wanted sign of Ted Bundy, Getty Images. Back jacket images: The Cannibal news article courtesy Mirrorpix / Reach Licensing

  Cover design by Emily Osborne

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  For my beautiful wife, Anna Zinato, for all the years of her love and coffee

  Contents

  Preface: An Arrest in Milwaukee

  Introduction: The “Golden Age” of Serial Murderers

  1. Sons of Cain: A Brief History of Serial Murder from the Stone Age to 1930

  2. American Monstrum: The Rise of Sexual Signature Killers 1930–1945

  3. American Noir: Raising Cain Through the Trauma Years 1930–1950

  4. Pulp True Horror: The Rise of the New Serial Killers 1950–1969

  5. The Big Surge: The Baby Boomer Serial Killers Come of Age 1970–1979

  6. Mindhunters: The Serial Killer Epidemic 1980–1990

  7. The Last Serial Killers: Twilight of the Epidemic Era 1990–2000

  Epilogue: The Post-Epidemic Era 2000–2020

  Notes

  Index

  PREFACE

  An Arrest in Milwaukee

  Cops can go for days, weeks and sometimes even years working routine shifts in which nothing extraordinary happens. They work a grind of calls to domestic disputes, medical distress, unruly customers, parking complaints and petty burglaries. A few go their entire career never once chasing a fleeing suspect, kicking in a door or unholstering their weapon. But all that can change in an instant.

  On the evening of July 22, 1991, Milwaukee police officers Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller were coming to the end of one of those routine shifts. They were assigned to District 3 in the Avenues West, a neighborhood that had seen better days. The Pabst beer family mansion stood there as did the campus of Marquette University and the Milwaukee High School of the Arts. But some parts of the neighborhood were rough and troubled, especially around the blocks at North 25th Street where the elegant old Victorian houses had been converted to rooming houses or torn down to make way for anonymous two- and three-story apartment buildings. The area was predominately populated by poor minorities, especially African Americans and recently arrived Southeast Asians.

  It was 11:30 p.m., and it had been a quiet evening. Rauth and Mueller were hoping that nothing would come up in the next thirty minutes to delay them from ending their shift at midnight and going home. But just as they turned onto 25th Street from Kilbourn Avenue, the headlights of their patrol car came upon a shirtless black man running toward them. He had a pair of handcuffs dangling from his left wrist, and his face was contorted in panic and fear.

  Rauth and Mueller had no idea what they had just driven into as they exited their vehicle to calm the hysterical man down. Thirty-two-year-old Tracy Edwards told the officers some “freak” had handcuffed him and begged them to get the handcuffs off his wrist. Rauth tried using his handcuff key, but it did not fit the brand of cuffs around Edwards’s wrist. Had they been able to remove the handcuffs in the street, perhaps that would have been the end of it, and we would not have heard anything more of this story, at least not that July.

  Edwards told them that he had been forcibly restrained for several hours in the Oxford Apartments just up the street. The officers accompanied Edwards to a shabby three-story apartment building at 924 North 25th Street. Their plan was to get the key, remove the handcuffs and hopefully “clear the matter up” quickly without having to arrest anyone, transport them and do a whole bunch of paperwork till God knows when.

  Edwards led Rauth and Mueller to the door of apartment 213. The first thing they noted was that it had its own electronic alarm system and high-grade armored locks, unusual for a low-income apartment building in that neighborhood. Knocking on the door, they noticed a second thing: a distinct odor of death and decay wafting from the other side, a smell most cops are familiar with and never forget once they have experienced it.

  The door was opened by a tall, slightly disheveled white male in his early thirties. He identified himself as Jeffrey Dahmer and showed them his employee identification card from the Ambrosia Chocolate factory, where he said he worked as a mixer. He was calm and polite and invited the officers and Edwards to step into his apartment.

  Upon entering the small one-bedroom apartment, Rauth and Mueller almost gagged on the thick smell of human decay mixed with the perfumed scent of room deodorant and disinfectant.

  At first glance, the apartment appeared to be completely normal. It was relatively well furnished with a couch and armchair, carpeting, floor and table lamps, cared-for plants and a large lit aquarium on a black table, its electric filter quietly humming and gurgling as fish lazily circled behind its glass. Thick blue curtains hung on the windows. The white walls were decorated with framed abstract posters and gay erotica, which by the 1990s wouldn’t even raise a cop’s eyebrow.

  Immediately to the left of the front door was the kitchen area with a sink, counter, stove and fridge. A small upright floor freezer stood next to a kitchen table cluttered with tools and beer cans. The apartment was moderately littered—like after a small party—with empty beer cans, tissue boxes and spray cans of air freshener. There were several small plastic chemical containers and a stack of bright red boxes of Soilax, a floor and wall cleaner sold i
n hardware stores. The only really unusual thing about the apartment—other than the smell—was a big surveillance camera mounted high in a corner of the room.

  Dahmer readily admitted that he had handcuffed Edwards but offered no explanation or showed any anxiety. His attitude was “I do this all the time. So what?”

  Edwards got a sense that the two police officers did not appear particularly alert or interested in his complaint. Now Edwards added that Dahmer had threatened him with a knife and had told him he was going to “eat his heart.” Rauth and Mueller rolled their eyes. They thought they knew where this was going. This was a “gay drama thing”—a domestic quarrel that got out of hand—and now wild accusations were flying. They radioed in a check on Dahmer, and the response came back that he was on probation for a felony sexual assault on a minor. Now Rauth and Mueller became alert.

  Mueller demanded the handcuff key, and Dahmer told him that it was on the bedside table. When Mueller headed toward the bedroom, Dahmer suddenly became agitated and attempted to push ahead of him. Rauth held Dahmer back.

  Mueller entered Dahmer’s bedroom alone and stood there in the dim light. The first thing that caught his eye was a huge blue plastic chemical drum in the corner of the bedroom. There were a TV and a VCR on a dresser facing the bed. A two-drawer black metal filing cabinet. His attention was drawn to what looked like crusty bloodstains on the bedsheets and faded smears of blood on the wall around the bed, as if someone had been sponging the walls but couldn’t quite get the stains out. The bedroom, like the living room, was decorated with erotic posters, and the window was draped in the same dark blue curtains.

  As Mueller approached the bedside table to look for the handcuff key, his eye was drawn to a stack of Polaroid photos in a partly open drawer. It took Mueller a few seconds to process what he was seeing: severed heads and penises, dismembered bodies. In one photo he saw a severed head spray-painted gold, cupped in two severed hands, perched on a pile of ice in a kitchen sink, next to it a bottle of Dawn dish detergent and a sponge. There was a series of photos of unconscious or dead black men with their wrists handcuffed behind them. A photo of a corpse in a bathtub, gutted and skinned to the rib cage. Another series of photos featured a corpse bent over backward like an arching bridge on the mattress. Mueller immediately recognized in many of the Polaroids the decor of the apartment he was standing in—but he couldn’t quite believe it.

  When Dahmer saw Mueller come out of the bedroom, his face ashen and the Polaroids in his hands, he began struggling and had to be wrestled to the floor by the two officers and handcuffed. By now Mueller knew he would not be ending his shift on time that evening.

  As Rauth held Dahmer to the floor, Mueller, almost in a daze, began trying to find the source of the awful smell. He walked into the kitchen past a pile of pans with a dark brown sticky material pooled in them. Mueller instinctively reached for the fridge door and opened it. As the light blinked on, Mueller gazed past a plastic squeeze bottle of honey and containers of mustard and relish, down into the face of a black man looking back at him from inside a cardboard box on the bottom shelf. Next to it stood an open container of Arm & Hammer baking soda to absorb the stench.

  Inside the freezer compartment, Mueller came upon plastic bags with some kind of meat and a decaying head without a face, its empty skull sockets staring out through the frosty opaque plastic bag. As Mueller backed away from the fridge in horror, he heard Dahmer moan, “For what I did I should be dead.” Over the next few days, as the homicide investigators and forensic technicians took over, Milwaukee police recovered an array of butchered human remains, including a heart from the freezer and three torsos floating in a brine of chemicals in the fifty-seven-gallon drum. In the floor-standing freezer they found three severed heads, a torso and other assorted cuts of human flesh. There were plastic-wrapped “patties” of human flesh stuck in a frozen pool of bodily fluids accumulated at the bottom of the freezer, which had to be defrosted to remove. In a cardboard box that once contained Dahmer’s computer, they found two skulls and an album with more Polaroid photos of victims. The top drawer of the black filing cabinet near Dahmer’s bed revealed three more skulls, while the bottom drawer was filled with a jumble of human bones from a complete skeleton. There were a couple of pots on the top shelf of the bedroom closet; one contained two heads, while the other had severed male genitals and a pair of hands. In the end, Milwaukee PD cataloged the remains of eleven victims in Dahmer’s small one-bedroom apartment.

  * * *

  —

  By July 1991 when Dahmer was arrested, the United States had experienced a surge of some 1,500 serial killer cases in the previous thirty years. Americans had almost become used to it. Some even followed serial killers’ victim numbers like sports scores. Serial killer trading cards were just on the horizon. This was the era of Ted Bundy; John Wayne Gacy; David Berkowitz, “the Son of Sam”; and Richard Ramirez, “the Night Stalker,” all celebrity serial killers and household names. There had been so many serial killers by the beginning of the 1990s that a high number of victims often no longer impressed the media; there had to be a twist. And the Dahmer case obviously had the twist.

  Dahmer eventually confessed to seventeen murders committed between 1978 and 1991 and pleaded guilty in 1992. His insanity hearing was televised, and Dahmer took his place in the pantheon of recent celebrity serial killers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.

  His era, which we have come to characterize as the “serial killer epidemic” years, coincidentally began just a two-hour drive away from Milwaukee, in the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. That’s where in 1957, Ed Gein, the inspiration for the killer in Psycho, ushered in a new age of serial murder. Just like the Dahmer case, the Gein murders also featured grotesque mutilations of corpses and the harvesting of body parts, which brought the case to national prominence. It is one of those strange twists of fate that both the beginning and the end of the epidemic years of American serial murder unfolded in Wisconsin.

  What nobody knew, as all eyes turned to Jeffrey Dahmer, was that he was going to be the last of this wave of “celebrity” serial killers. There would be many more serial killers to come, but none garnered the kind of focus and attention that Dahmer’s generation of serial killers received and still receives to this day. The question why is one of the subjects of this book exploring this epidemic era of serial murder.

  INTRODUCTION

  The “Golden Age” of Serial Murderers

  “The golden age of serial murderers” is an ironic term coined by Harold Schechter, the American author and historian of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century serial killers. In Greek mythology, the Golden Age described a primordial era of peace, stability, harmony and prosperity, akin to a biblical paradise; the best of times. Today the term is applied to all sorts of things: golden age of jazz, golden age of sailing, golden age of radio, golden age of comics, golden age of television, golden age of Hollywood, and even golden age of piracy, golden age of organized crime and golden age of porn. The term is bestowed retroactively after the age passed and is often used nostalgically to describe an era that represented the best of something, the most innovative, exciting or groundbreaking.

  In a 2011 article in Slate magazine entitled “Blood Loss: The Decline of the Serial Killer,” Christopher Beam quotes Schechter as saying, “It does seem the golden age of serial murderers is probably past.”1 What Schechter meant tongue in cheek is that today there is no longer a wide-eyed, “breaking news” fascination with “celebrity” serial killers, in the way there once was in the decades of the 1950s through the 1990s. In its own time, however, when it was happening, this surge of serial murderers in the United States was referred to as a “serial killer epidemic.”

  The passing of this era—the age of Ted Bundy, Edmund Kemper, John Wayne Gacy, the Son of Sam and Jeffrey Dahmer—was followed by a dramatic statistical decline in the number of serial killers apprehended in the 2000s a
nd 2010s compared to the previous three decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. There wasn’t just a decline in the number of serial killers; there was also a huge decline in the number of victims each serial killer accrued. From 1970 to 1980, the average hovered at 10 to 13 victims per serial killer. By the 2000s, the number had declined significantly to between 3 and 4 victims, and there have not been any recent cases in the United States of “big-number” serial killers of the scale of “golden agers” like Juan Corona (25), Dean Corll (28), Ted Bundy (35), John Wayne Gacy (33), Gary Ridgway (49) or Samuel Little, who recently has been linked to as many as 50 to 93 serial murders from 1970 to 2005.2

  As serial homicide expert Eric Hickey concluded in 2016, “Between 2000 and 2014 serial killers have emerged more slowly and quietly. In fact, over the past 15 years there has been a dearth of headline-grabbing killers like the Dahmers, Gacys, Kempers, Raders. . . . Many serial killers have emerged in recent years who receive little media attention. Part of the reason is that most of the new cases do not carry the social drama, social class, or high body counts to be of serious public interest.”3

  While there had been numerous small surges of serial killing in the past, their scope and number were not comparable to the surge from the 1950s to the 1990s. Of 2,604 identified serial killers in the United States during the twentieth century, an astonishing 89.5 percent (2,331) made their appearance between 1950 and 1999, with 88 percent of those appearing in just the three decades from 1970 to 1999—the “epidemic” peak years. The numbers speak for themselves.

  Serial Killers in the US by Decade (1900–2016)4

  1900 49

  1910 52

  1920 62

  1930 55

  1940 55