American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Rader said, “I quit buying detective magazines when they dropped the B/D women from the covers. I still read books about serial killers if they related to the style I was into. I always cut photos out of ads from places like Dillard’s and J. C. Penney’s.”44

  By the 1980s, these magazines were labeled by FBI behaviorists as “pornography for sexual sadists” and would eventually be driven off the newsstands both by the failing economics of monthly magazine publishing and by a popular social revulsion to “rape culture” imbued in that sector of mainstream media.45

  * * *

  —

  Why had the Greatest Generation and their sons fed on this sadistically depraved popular literature and imagery after the war? Why did this material even exist? What really happened to our fathers and grandfathers in that war? What dark secrets were encoded in this literature and its imagery? What made the men and their sons so angry with women?

  It was only fifty years later, in the early 2000s, as most of the war generation started to pass away, that we began gathering the courage to ask those unaskable questions about what it meant for them to fight a primitive war to utterly exterminate an enemy. We did not like the answers coming back to us.

  It’s never one thing but a combination of things in the diabolus in cultura. The fathers in the 1930s and 1940s laid the road, but now as America lurched forward into the fear and loathing of the Cold War and the chaos and death of the sixties, their serial killing sons would be marching down it.

  The New Serial Sadist Raffiné (Genteel Sadist): “Everything a Girl Could Wish For”

  In this new complex social chemistry of broken-pride males, war-traumatized husbands and fathers, recently unfettered women reluctantly prodded back into their social cage by postwar readjustment and mainstream celebration of the bondage, torture, rape and murder of women, a new species of sexual serial murderers began to emerge. They were cognizant of the new assertive and independent woman who could no longer be easily led into ambush by an old-school chauvinist male—she needed to be seduced by what appeared to be a “new” man respectful of the new woman. This was the same old wolfish predator but now disguised as a lamb, the refined “nice guy” torturer and necrophile, the sadist raffiné.

  The concept was introduced by Dr. J. Paul de River, who in 1939 became the first forensic psychiatrist to be permanently hired by a law enforcement agency in the United States when the LAPD assigned him to the Sex Offense Bureau. His function was to assist police in profiling unknown suspects and to prepare prosecutorial psychiatric assessments to preempt any potential insanity defense. In 1949, de River published The Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytical Study in which he revised and expanded the psychiatric terminology, including the concept of the psychopath’s “mask of sanity” as described at the time by Hervey M. Cleckley.

  De River did away with the notions of vulgar, crude, quirky werewolf “monster” serial killers and introduced a new typology of offender that we recognize today in many serial killers. De River labeled them as the sadist raffiné (genteel sadist). He described them as

  the genteel “nice boy” type, whose suave manner and smooth tongue ingratiates him in the favor of his victim. He may be studious and pedantic and often strives to give one the impression of being very religious. His genteel manner and fastidious appearance, together with a winning personality, dimpled chin, wavy hair, usually offset by dreamy, neuropathic eyes, are very often everything a girl could wish for.46

  De River could have been describing the sadistic necrophile serial killer Ted Bundy when he wrote those lines in his 1949 book, except Ted Bundy was only three years old at the time. That in itself is of great significance, because Bundy was part of an incoming generation of “golden age” serial killers to come, and the age he was now growing up in would have much, if not everything, to do with the murders he would perpetrate as an adult in the 1970s.

  CHAPTER 4

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

  I like killing people because it is so much fun.

  Zodiac Killer, unidentified serial killer

  In the second half of the 1940s, Americans were awakened from the twelve years of financial degradation and the four years of apocalyptic warfare that followed. The birth rate had declined. America had been an Edward Hopper painting—redbrick tenements, smoky skies, gloomy diners, lonely souls and war-wrecked males. Gasoline, rubber and metal had been rationed for the war effort, so Detroit stopped producing cars for consumers and retooled its factories for war production. After 1942, no new car models were produced.

  In May 1945, as the war ended in Europe, the US War Production Board authorized a restart of manufacturing of 200,000 automobiles for the domestic market, mostly “warmed up” 1942 models.

  In 1946, there were 8,000 television sets in American homes. By 1956, there were 37 million television sets in American households. Americans were watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents, I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, The Mickey Mouse Club, Roy Rogers, Captain Kangaroo, Dragnet, and Adventures of Superman. Some television shows were broadcast in color, and Elvis Presley made his first television appearances in that year.

  There were 54 million cars and 10 million trucks. A national interstate freeway system was beginning to rip through inner-city neighborhoods, connecting outward to a rapidly growing suburban sprawl with its clean new schools and shopping malls, into which a new generation of serial killers would be injected. American families that put off having children during the Great Depression and the war now started families. The war years were followed by a resurgent booming economy, partly fueled by the Marshall Plan, which funneled US dollars into the war-torn European nations on the condition they spend the dollars on American-made products. It prevented a depression that typically follows a war. Between 1941 and 1961, 65 million children were born in the United States in what became known as the baby boom.

  The years of fear and loathing, blacklisting and inquisitorial House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings and Senator Joe McCarthy’s paranoid rantings had come to an end midway through the 1950s. McCarthy had been censured and condemned in 1954 by the Senate, and by 1957 he’d be dead.

  After Joe McCarthy’s decline, the 1950s saw the beginning of an age of sweet innocence that would last until its abrupt end in November 1963 when JFK was assassinated. One doesn’t need to describe the loss of innocence here, as it has been nostalgically celebrated in movies like Grease and American Graffiti, the Happy Days TV series (1974–1984) and scores of “golden oldies” radio stations and revival shows.

  But as always there remained in popular culture a craving for the dark side. Nuclear test mishaps inspired a slew of science fiction monster movies and radiation-created comic book superheroes. The true-detective magazines and the men’s adventure “sweats” were in their heyday, with the “sweats” primarily focused on Nazi sexploitation themes of rape, bondage, torture, mutilation and murder while the true detectives reported on the same thing at home. Both featured photo-realistic imagery—sometimes with posed models, sometimes authentic forensic evidence photos.

  There was a creeping rise in violent crime, but the country was more alarmed by a rise in juvenile delinquency (although it remained unclear whether there was more juvenile delinquency or simply more juveniles!). The generation born in the 1940s, as they were entering their adolescence in the 1950s, was “acting up” now at an unusually higher frequency than before. The future serial killers among them were only starting to test their compulsions and fantasies, not yet mature enough to follow through all the way to murder.

  In response to this rise in juvenile crime, the Comics Code Authority (CCA) was introduced in 1954 to police the depiction of crime, violence and horror in comic books. But the true-detective magazines and “sweats” were as easily available as comic books for readers of all ages. One only had to go to a barbershop for a haircut to paw through dozens of gari
shly illustrated magazines depicting abduction, bondage, rape and murder.

  The serial killers of the 1950s and early 1960s like Ed Gein and Albert DeSalvo were primarily the older brothers or uncles of the “golden agers” to come. They were steeped in the Great Depression, in the psyche of serial killers like Albert Fish, Earle Nelson, Jarvis Roosevelt Catoe and William Heirens, the creepy brain-injured necro-psychos who acted more on deviant impulses than compulsively masturbated paraphilic fantasies.

  Some of those cases resonated on multiple levels and are today part of serial killer lore and popular culture.

  Edward Gein, “The Plainfield Ghoul” or “Original Psycho,” Plainfield, Wisconsin, 1954–1957

  Ed Gein looked like a farm elf with his flannel hat and checkered shirt buttoned to the neck. He was fifty-one, just 140 pounds, a good-natured semi-recluse with neatly groomed gray hair who lived alone on a farm after his mother and brother died. He was well-known in the community as slightly odd but otherwise harmless. He did not farm his land but earned a meager living working occasionally on county highway projects, doing odd jobs for local farmers and babysitting the locals’ kids. Nobody knew he had been robbing graves of freshly buried corpses since the late 1940s after his mother died. Then on December 8, 1954, in the late-afternoon winter dusk, he killed fifty-four-year-old tavern keeper Mary Hogan in her bar and hauled her body on a sled back to his farm. Nobody saw him or at least took notice of the wrapped cargo he was sledding home.

  Her disappearance remained unsolved for three years.

  On November 16, 1957, Bernice Worden, fifty-eight, disappeared from her hardware store in the middle of the day. Somebody remembered seeing Gein on the premises earlier. The local police detained him that evening and proceeded to his farm to search it. Upon entering his shedlike summer kitchen, they came upon the headless and quartered corpse of Worden hanging from the rafters by hooks driven through her heel bones, dressed out and washed like a freshly killed deer carcass.

  Searching Gein’s dingy, cluttered farmhouse, police found a horror show: Worden’s freshly severed head in a burlap sack; a box with another mummified female head, perhaps Mary Hogan; a human heart in a pan on the stove; human entrails in the refrigerator; a shoebox with nine vulvas in it; another box containing four noses; a pair of stockings made from human skin; a soup bowl fashioned out of a skull; a wearable vest with breasts made from the skin of a female torso; skulls mounted on bedposts; nine masks made out of the flesh of female faces, some hanging on the walls as decoration; a human scalp in a cereal box; a drum fashioned out of human skin; four chairs whose upholstery was made of human skin caked in dripping fat; various pieces of jewelry fashioned out of body parts; and ten decomposed female heads. Many of the artifacts had been rubbed down with oil to retain their luster; the human masks were made up with lipstick; a red ribbon was tied through one of the vulvas.

  Four days after his arrest, an unidentified investigator summed up the case in what remains the essential core of the Gein historical narrative:

  Gein had been extremely close to his mother throughout his life, so close, in fact, that he apparently acquired a feminine complex. After the death of his father, George, about 20 years ago he became more attached to his mother, with whom he lived, along with his older brother, Henry, who died in 1944. [Mysteriously, in a brush fire on the farm.]

  Before her death in 1945, his mother had two paralytic strokes during which her devoted son Ed nursed her, further strengthening their relationship. Gein associated little with girls. He was too shy and had little interest in them. He said he never had any sex contact with them.

  Some years ago, at the height of his mother devotion, he wished he had been a woman instead of a man. He bought medical books and studied anatomy. He wondered whether it would be possible to change his sex. He considered inquiring about an operation to change him to a woman, and even thought of trying to operate upon himself, but did nothing about such plans.

  After his mother’s death, he brooded for a long time. From this disconsolate mood emerged the compulsion to visit cemeteries. After a few nocturnal trips to graveyards, he began digging into fresh graves.

  He said he took the bodies to his home and cut them up. He kept only the heads, the skin, and some other parts. He insisted he disposed of the remainder of the bodies by burning them in small pieces in his kitchen cook stove.

  Gein said he kept all of the faces of his victims. He was particularly intrigued by the women’s hair. He removed the skin of some of them and used it for making belts, a drum fashioned by stretching skin over the ends of a large tin can, and other items. He stripped the skin from the entire upper part of one woman’s body and made a vest.

  He gave particular attention to the women’s faces which he stripped off the skulls leaving a human mask. He said he preserved these by curing them with oil and keeping them as cold as possible. He rubbed oil on the faces whenever they became stiff.

  On occasions, he said, he would don one of the masks, slip into the torso skin vest, and attach to himself other parts he had removed from a woman’s body and parade around by himself in his lonely farm house. He said this gave him great satisfaction.1

  Ed Gein had no compulsion to kill—what he wanted was the female skin. When, during the hard winter months, he could no longer dig into the frozen earth to uncover fresh graves, he began killing to refresh his supply of female body parts.

  Other than that, he was considered a nice guy by the folks and neighbors.

  One of his neighbors remarked, “Good old Ed. Kind of a loner and maybe a little bit odd with that sense of humor of his, but just the guy to call in to sit with the kiddies when me and the old lady want to go to the show.” For years, children who visited Gein’s house had been reporting to their parents that Gein had a collection of “shrunken heads” and strange masks hanging on the walls, but the parents dismissed the stories as imagination. None of the children ever reported Gein’s behavior toward them as threatening or unusual in any way.

  The Gein murders inspired a Christmas poem recited by Wisconsin schoolchildren that year:

  T was [sic] the night before Christmas

  And all through the school

  Not a creature was stirring,

  Nor even a mule

  The teachers were hung

  from the ceiling with care

  In hope that Ed Gein

  Soon would be there.

  There were even Gein jokes:

  Someone asked Gein how his folks were. He replied, “Delicious.”

  Gein Beer: lots of body but no head.

  What was Gein’s telephone number? O-I-C-U-8-1-2.

  There were no mice at Gein’s house because there were too many pussies.

  What did Gein have in his sewing box? Belly buttons.

  What did Gein say to the Sheriff when he arrested him? Have a heart.

  They say Gein was popular with the ladies. There were always a lot of women hanging around his place.

  You had to keep the heat on in Gein’s house or else the furniture got goose-bumps.

  Why did his girlfriend stop going out with him? Because he was such a cut-up.

  What did Gein say when a hearse went by? “Dig you later Baby.”2

  Gein’s fetish for human skulls, mummified female nipple belts and vaginal labia necklaces, he confessed, was partly inspired by the pulp men’s adventure magazine stories and illustrations of Japanese atrocities against female captives. The other component of his inspiration came from the true wartime accounts of necrophilic trophy taking by GIs in the Pacific that were ingrained in the American diabolus in cultura of the 1940s.*

  After Gein’s arrest, Life magazine, the same magazine that in 1944 proudly ran the infamous photo of a young woman with a skull captioned “Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull
he sent her,”3 now published photos of the squalid interior of Gein’s house, cluttered with stacks of true-detective and adventure pulp magazines.4 Gein was a carnival sideshow freak of a serial killer—the rare serial killer who was truly too insane to be put on trial. He went straight into the psychiatric wing, and nobody blinked an eye about it.

  Ed Gein grew in stature with time, not so much as himself as for the myths spun around him. Gein became the inspiration for the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho based on Robert Bloch’s novel, and Gein was later incorporated into the composite character of Buffalo Bill, the fictional serial killer who skinned his victims in the The Silence of the Lambs, and Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But Gein himself, with two confirmed murders, until recently was not even considered “officially” a serial killer by those insisting on the traditional “three or more” victims defining serial murder.

  Edward Gein died on July 26, 1984, at the age of seventy-seven, a quiet, model inmate-patient at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin.

  * * *

  —

  Two serial killer contemporaries of Ed Gein were much more indicative of the evolution of serial killers to come, yet somehow they remain mostly footnotes in the history of serial homicide. Their cases are worth delving into, however, because in many ways they are the direct precursors of things to come when the 1970s hit.

  Harvey Murray Glatman, “The Glamor Girl Slayer,” Los Angeles, 1957–1958

  By the 1950s, the village-like structure of Los Angeles had amalgamated into the United States’ third-largest city, a massive megalopolis. Hollywood was the movie mecca, and it drew hundreds of thousands of worshippers, adherents and disciples seeking fame and fortune. The movie industry was centralized in several large factorylike studio lots serviced by thousands of independent subcontractors, service providers and casual laborers. Television had taken a bite out of national movie attendance: it dropped dramatically from its heyday of 96 million a week to 46 million by 1956. The response from the movie studios was not a cutback in production but an escalation of big, spectacular widescreen Technicolor movies, drawing even more pilgrims seeking fame and employment in the Hollywood dream factory.