American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Kiehl claims he can recognize psychopaths by merely looking at images of their brain scans. He does not go all the way in claiming that psychopathy is a completely physiological condition but concludes that psychopathic behavioral traits or “pseudo-psychopathy” or “acquired sociopathic personality” can mimic psychopathy as a result of damage in the paralimbic system, and may explain why so many serial killers report childhood head injuries, or don’t have a “classic” background history of family dysfunction or abusive trauma in their childhood.22

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  Back to the young Earle Nelson, who became increasingly obsessed with sex and the Bible to the point that he began scaring his own family. Nelson was institutionalized numerous times in psychiatric facilities because of his erratic behavior, including an attempt to molest a twelve-year-old girl when he was twenty-four.23

  In another statistic typical of serial killers, Nelson committed his first murder at the age of twenty-eight; on February 20, 1926, he murdered sixty-two-year-old Clara Newman, a San Francisco boardinghouse landlady. Nelson apparently saw a “Rooms to Let” sign in her window and knocked on the door, asking to be shown the room. The house was filled with people, but that did not stop Nelson. Newman was found dead seated on a toilet with her dress pulled up around her waist. She had been strangled and then raped. Two weeks later, Nelson killed his second victim, and from there went on a killing spree of landladies from San Francisco to Portland. Nelson would come to the door inquiring about an advertised room with a Bible in hand, quoting biblical verse to assure the elderly landladies of his good character. He would then strangle them, have sex with the corpse and stuff their bodies under a bed. Eventually, he made his way up into Canada, where police finally arrested him for the murder of a landlady in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in June 1927. By then Nelson had murdered an extraordinary twenty-two women, a victim count unparalleled in the United States until the serial killers of the 1970s.

  Nelson was a migratory predator trolling through the pages of newspaper classified ads for rooms to let. Today he would have been on Craigslist or Kijiji trolling for victims on the Internet. Nelson was executed, despite his insanity plea.

  Carl Panzram, United States, 1920–1930

  Carl Panzram was a tightly wired, vicious killing machine, confessing to one thousand male rapes and twenty-one murders, the last of which he perpetrated in prison, where on his arrival he warned, “I’ll kill the first man that bothers me.” Shortly afterward, he beat to death his foreman in the prison laundry with an iron bar. For that murder he was sentenced to death and executed in 1930 at the age of thirty-nine.

  Panzram was born in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, in 1892. In his autobiographical papers he writes, “All of my family are as the average human beings are. They are honest and hard working people. All except myself. I have been a human animal ever since I was born.”24

  When Panzram was eleven, he was arrested for burglary and sent to a reformatory where he was beaten by the administrators and raped by fellow inmates. He wrote, “I had learned that a boy’s penus [sic] could be used for something besides to urinate with and that a rectum would be used for other purposes than crepitating. Oh yes, I had learned a hell of a lot from my expert instructors furnished to me free of charge by society in general and the State of Minnesota in particular.”

  Panzram was a highly migratory serial killer, traveling throughout the United States and eventually sailing to Europe, South America and Africa. He raped and murdered numerous victims, mostly male, along with committing burglaries and arsons and other criminal acts. At one point, he even acquired a yacht on which he killed victims. He admitted to twenty-one murders, including seven boys of age ten or eleven, some in the country of Angola, some in the US. Near the end of his life, Panzram wrote, “In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings. . . . I am sorry for only two things. . . . I am sorry that I have mistreated some few animals in my lifetime and I am sorry that I am unable to murder the whole damned human race.”

  At his execution in Leavenworth, Kansas, he reportedly spat at the executioner, and when asked if he had any final words, he allegedly said, “Yes, hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could kill a dozen men while you’re screwing around!”

  Gordon Northcott, “Wineville Chicken Coop Murders,” California, 1928

  Nineteen-year-old chicken farmer Gordon Northcott, originally from Canada, abducted, raped, axe-murdered and dismembered at least three little boys: two brothers aged ten and twelve and a Mexican migrant who was never identified. Northcott had brought his fifteen-year-old nephew, Sanford Clark, to work on the farm and ended up using him as a sex slave and forced him to help with the disposal of the bodies. Sanford’s older sister, Jessie, visited from Canada, and when they were out of Northcott’s sight, Sanford revealed what was happening. Jessie fled back to Canada and reported the matter to the US consulate, which then contacted the Los Angeles Police Department.

  When police descended on his chicken farm, Northcott escaped to Canada with his mother, Sarah Louise Northcott, but both were extradited back to California. His mother confessed to the killings and was sentenced to life imprisonment, even though she retracted her confession. Gordon confessed to five murders, stood trial and was executed in 1930. Sarah was paroled in 1940 and died in 1944.

  Albert Fish, “The Werewolf of Wisteria” or “The Grey Man,” New York, 1928–1935

  The most shocking case of this era is that of serial killer Albert Fish. Even by today’s standards, his was a tale of true horror.25

  Albert Fish came from a family with a history of mental illness and was brought up in foster homes where he apparently was horrifically abused. He was a self-flagellant, consumed his own urine and excrement, and tortured himself by inserting needles, pins and nails into his groin, dozens of which showed up on X-rays taken after his arrest. He enjoyed putting cotton swabs soaked in kerosene up his anus and setting them on fire. He had a collection of self-torture devices, including nail-studded paddles with which he would beat himself bloody while masturbating. He was a Tasmanian devil of paraphilias, a whirlwind of perversions, a “polymorphous pervert” according to one psychiatrist who believed that Fish might have raped as many as one hundred children.

  Fish was a serial killer inspired not by pornography or erotica but by the Bible. He was probably clinically insane, suffering from visionary psychosis, with hallucinations of God instructing him to mutilate and murder children, as in Genesis 22 when God instructs Abraham to kill and sacrifice his son.

  In June 1928, Fish was fifty-eight but prematurely aged when he spotted a classified ad placed by the family of Edward Budd, a teenager in New York City seeking summer employment. Fish contacted the family, introducing himself as Frank Howard, a farmer with a large farm in New Jersey. His plan, he later confessed, was to lure the boy away and kill him by cutting off his penis and letting him slowly bleed to death and then eat him.

  On a visit to the family home, he impressed the Budds with his well-dressed, kind and grandfatherly demeanor and the opportunity for their son to spend a summer gainfully employed in the fresh air away from their crowded New York City tenement. He agreed to return on Sunday for lunch and afterward bring Edward back to the “farm” with him.

  On Sunday afternoon, June 3, Fish arrived at the Budds’ apartment bearing a gift of pot cheese and fresh strawberries. He was introduced to their ten-year-old daughter, Grace, and, Fish later confessed, instantly made up his mind to kill and eat her instead. Fish now told the parents that he needed to postpone the trip to his farm until later that evening because his sister was throwing a birthday party for his niece. There would be lots of children, games and cake at the party, and would little Grace like to go with him that afternoon? The combination of the era’s naivete, Fish’s grandfatherly persona and the Budds’ reluctance to offend the kindly farmer offering their son a summer job led the parents to allow their child to leave with a
complete stranger. (Of course they asked where the sister lived, and Fish told them Columbus Avenue and 137th Street. Who knows how many New Yorkers even today know that Columbus Avenue ends at 110th Street?)

  Grace never returned, and her abduction remained a highly publicized mystery for four years, until Fish mailed a letter to the girl’s mother describing in excruciating detail how he murdered and ate the girl. In it Fish infamously fantasized about cases of cannibalism in famine times in China, and then wrote:

  On Sunday June the 3–1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her, on the pretense of taking her to a party. You said Yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wild flowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mama. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick—bite and scratch. I choked her to death then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.

  Police managed to trace the letter to Fish from the stationery logo on the envelope. After his arrest, Fish confessed that he’d planned to take Edward Budd to Irvington, a town in Westchester County just north of New York where he had briefly lived. Fish knew there was an abandoned house there known as “Wisteria House” on Mountain Road. Before he went up to the Budds’ apartment, he had left a package of knives wrapped in paper at a local newsstand for safekeeping. Now with Grace in tow, he picked up the knives from the newsstand, took the subway to a commuter railway station and rode out to Irvington with Grace. He bought a round-trip ticket for himself and a one-way ticket for the little girl. He told police that when they got off the train, little Grace pointed out to him that he had forgotten the package, and she ran back to the train car to retrieve the parcel of knives.

  He then walked her to the abandoned house and strangled her as he described in the letter, dismembered her, bringing her body parts back to New York to stew and roast and eat as “leftovers” over a span of nine days. Fish insisted he did not rape the little girl but admitted to ejaculating twice as he strangled her. Police recovered some of Grace’s skeletal remains from a hillside behind Wisteria House. (The house still stands today, looking pretty much as it did in the 1920s but upscale and restored. It was recently listed for sale.)26

  Psychiatrists were divided on Fish’s sanity. While he might have been delusional, he nonetheless carefully planned and executed the murder. The issue for the jury was not so much whether Fish was insane, but whether he should be put to death even if he was. Surely in the jury members’ minds was a recent “thrill” killing of a fourteen-year-old boy in Chicago perpetrated by two wealthy youths, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Their attorney, Clarence Darrow, entered a guilty plea and argued successfully before a judge without a jury that although the boys were “legally sane” they were immature and disturbed and their lives should be spared. The judge sentenced Leopold and Loeb to life imprisonment. Loeb was murdered in prison, but Leopold was released in 1958 and retired to a comfortable life in Puerto Rico until his death in 1971.

  The Albert Fish case, on the other hand, went to trial with an insanity defense, but the jury did not care whether he was insane or not; he was sentenced to death and executed at Sing Sing in 1936.

  Before his execution, Fish confessed to dozens of murders, but only two were persuasively connected to him: the mutilation murder of eight-year-old Francis McDonnell in 1924 as he played by a pond in a wooded area in Staten Island, and four-year-old Billy Gaffney kidnapped from his apartment hallway in Brooklyn in 1927. A further six victims are plausibly attributed to Fish but without conclusive evidence, including the “East Side Ripper” murders of two children in 1915.

  Approximately two hundred serial killers would make their appearance in the United States in the first four decades of the twentieth century; except for a handful like Earle Nelson, Albert Fish and Carl Panzram, they are forgotten, relegated to obscure local newspaper accounts, their stories never fully told or explored. American newspapers had reported more extensively on serial killings overseas than at home, sometimes preferring to depict serial murder as something foreign to the American experience.

  CHAPTER 2

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

  For heavens sake catch me before I kill more.

  William Heirens, serial killer

  By the mid-1930s, despite the relative scarcity of serial murder, the American public was familiar with the phenomenon without the term “serial killer” itself having been used. The “multiple murderer” or “mass murderer,” as he was called in those days, was emerging as a stereotypical character in popular culture.

  Arsenic and Old Lace, a 1939 play by Joseph Kesselring, is a black comedy about a kooky family of serial killers. One of the earliest crime novels with the theme of serial murder also appeared in 1939, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

  Real-life serial killers, or suspected serial killers, continued to appear in the US at a steady rate of approximately five new serial killers every two years. When confronted with multiple unsolved murders, newspapers began noting similarities between cases, describing them sometimes as “pattern murders” or “signature killings,” suggesting that some perpetrators of multiple murders either deliberately or subconsciously left their imprint or “signature” at a crime scene. These terms would be used right into the early 1980s, when the term “serial murder” was universally adopted.

  The 1930s and 1940s saw notorious serial killers like:

  The Kingsbury Run Butcher or Cleveland Torso Murderer, who perpetrated twelve mutilation killings between 1934 and 1938, victims’ torsos, heads and limbs dumped in Kingsbury Run, a city creek bed that runs from East 90th Street and Kinsman Road to the Cuyahoga River. The victims were Depression-era drifters, migratory workers, homeless and prostitutes, the typical victim that serial killers frequently target. The former “Untouchable,” Special Agent Elliot Ness, was Cleveland’s recently appointed safety director, but even he was unable to solve this series of murders.

  Jake Bird, “Axeman of Tacoma,” a migratory African American serial killer who claimed he killed as many as forty-six white female victims between 1930 and 1947 in Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wisconsin. He was arrested, quickly tried and sentenced to death in 1947 for a double axe murder of a mother and her teenage daughter in their home in Tacoma, Washington. His execution was delayed when he confessed to an additional forty-four murders, although the police were able to substantiate only eleven of them.

  Joe Ball, “Alligator Man” or “Butcher of Elmendorf,” was suspected in the murder of six to twenty women whose bodies he allegedly fed to captive alligators behind his Texas roadhouse from 1936 to 1938, although the number of victims has been significantly mythologized.1

  The San Diego Girl Murderer, a serial killer suspected in the press to be behind a string of six unsolved murders of women between 1929 and 1936 (see below).

  The Dupont Circle Murderer, a serial killer suspected in eleven murders in Washington, DC, from 1929 to 1941 (see below).

  The Serial Murder Script

  Rapes, strangulations and mutilations of both children and women were ubiquitous throughout history, but by the 1930s, many sexual murders (both single and serial) were exhibiting more complex and extreme fetishistic elements. The necrophilic anatomical
mutilations perpetrated by Jack the Ripper or Joseph Vacher were “organic” in their nature, primarily committed outdoors, and were primordial, feral and werewolf-like, rarely incorporating manufactured or social fetishes and fantasies. But in the twentieth century, we began to increasingly see episodes of highly “scripted” extreme pathological and paraphilic serial murder that would characterize the upcoming surge of serial killing. The scripting—“what to do and in what way”—for these murders seemed to originate less from the deep instinctual recesses of the primitive corners of the perpetrators’ brains and more from the social, cultural and historical cues from the society they lived in, from what both popular and transgressive culture celebrated in literature, newspapers and the newly emerged medium of cinema. These social-cultural phenomena of the era did not “create” serial killers, any more than they do today, but they inspired and facilitated the scripting of their primitive impulses to extend beyond the instinctual into the realm of fantasy and imagination. The path they took was often illuminated by transgressive cultural artifacts like, for example, pornography or works on the scale of the Marquis de Sade’s One Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom, and buttressed by contemporary social mores and values.