The end result was that some Vietnam combat veterans began to display a matrix of emotional disturbances, ranging from nightmares, depression and social withdrawal, to outright violent outbursts and vivid hallucinations. The disturbance became known as the “flashback syndrome” or PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—which was recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as an “official” disorder in the mid-1980s. In some instances, the hallucinations came complete with the sights, sounds and smells of combat and were so acute that Vietnam veterans injured or killed those around them in the full belief that they were still engaged in battle. Increasingly, a small minority of Vietnam vets found themselves in court after having inexplicably committed violent crimes.
On the positive side, unlike World War II veterans, the Vietnam War vet’s traumas were eventually acknowledged, understood, and became part of the political-cultural discourse. Therapeutic programs were implemented, bringing veterans together to support one another in a healing process.
“Boy, Did She Quiver When I Shot Her!”
Several weeks after Arthur Shawcross left for Vietnam, his mother and wife began to receive letters from him, in which he wrote that he was “made to kill” women and children. There were also horrifically vivid descriptions of battles, which upset his mother. At the same time, Shawcross never failed to send his wife and mother cards on their birthdays or on holidays.
Much later, after he was arrested for murder, this is how Shawcross would describe his experiences in Vietnam:
I shot one woman who was hiding some ammo in a tree. She didn’t die right off. I tied her up, gagged her, then searched the area. Found the hut with another girl inside; age about 16. Knocked her out with the butt of the gun and carried her to where the other girl was. There was a lot of rice, ammo and other stuff in the hut. I tied the young girl to a tree, still gagged, tied her legs too. They didn’t say anything to me at all. I had a machete that was very sharp. I cut that first girl’s throat. Then I took off her head and placed it on a pole in front of that hut. . . .
That girl at the tree peed then fainted, I stripped her then. . . . First I gave her oral sex. She couldn’t understand what I was doing but her body did! I untied her, then retied her to two other small trees. . . . She fainted several times. I cut her slightly from neck to crotch. She screamed and shit herself. I took my M-16, pulled on a nipple then put the gun to her forehead and pulled the trigger. Cut off her head and placed it on a pole where they got water. . . .
That was war! . . . All and all I know for a fact, I killed 39 people in Vietnam.
When I left Vietnam, I wasn’t ready for the states. I was too keyed up, too hyper! I should have stayed another six months!
I left Vietnam and flew to Japan, Alaska, Washington State, Chicago, Detroit, Syracuse. Stayed overnight. The next morning people started calling me names, babykiller, etc. If I had a gun! I was home three days before I was asked if I was going to see Linda. I said, Linda who? I had forgotten that I was married.
Shawcross returned from Vietnam in September 1968. While some veterans lapsed into brooding silence upon their homecoming, Shawcross had no problem recounting stories of his war service. Several acquaintances recalled that he literally babbled about how a baby wired up with a grenade crawled into a crowd of soldiers, blowing them up; how he would smash the gold teeth out of corpses with his rifle butt afterward stringing them together into jewelry. He relished telling a story of how one Vietnamese prostitute hid a razor in her vagina and slit open a soldier’s penis “like a banana.”
One cousin remembers Shawcross telling him that he shot a Vietnamese prostitute as he was climaxing. He told the story in a goofy cartoon duck voice, saying, “Boy, did she quiver when I shot her!”
Shawcross was back from Vietnam, but he remained in the Army. After a few weeks’ vacation, he and Linda Neary packed their things and moved into a small apartment in Lawton, Oklahoma, where Shawcross was assigned as a weapons repair specialist at nearby Fort Sill. Neary recalls that she had to drive Arthur from Lawton to the base every day because he seemed to “be afraid to drive.” She testified that Shawcross read a lot: “war stories, history, sports, but mostly science fiction.”
Neary stated, “We’d had okay sex before, but now he began having problems. He would be too fast or have trouble getting an erection. It bothered him because he felt he wasn’t pleasing me. I just told him to relax: ‘Slow down. You’re not only supposed to please me, you’re supposed to please yourself.’
“After that, things improved a little. If I talked to him, calmed him, he could perform, but he still had trouble getting an orgasm. I didn’t know what to do.”
Neary recalled that Shawcross became sullen and brooding and spent much of his free time off by himself somewhere. He would go on three-hour walks after supper. Neary said that Arthur was tormented by his combat experiences but couldn’t express his grief. He told her that as a child he was forbidden by his mother to cry; she would tell him, “You’re not much of a man if you cry.”
Neary said, “He wanted me to hold him all the time. He was cuddly and easy to love, but he had no idea how to give it back.”
Shawcross’s torment appeared to intensify. Neary testified that one night he came home from one of his walks all shaking and sweaty. He told her he had been thinking about Vietnam.
“It took a long time to get it out of him. ‘I had to kill her,’ he said, and he started to cry.
“I said, ‘Kill who?’
“He said, ‘A kid. She was carrying bombs for the Vietcong. It was kill or be killed.’ He told me that the My Lai incident was nothing compared to what he’d seen. It tore him up. I figured he identified with kids because he’d been a hurt kid himself.”
Linda Neary also recalled that Shawcross began to reveal to her a fascination with fire during this period. He would sit in their apartment, focused trancelike on lighting books of matches. One night he confessed that he had started a big bushfire near the barracks. He became increasingly erratic, with violent mood swings. One day, their dog nipped Shawcross on the hand. He flew into a rage and snapped the dog’s neck. Afterward, Neary said that he wept over the dead dog.
Arthur Shawcross’s behavior did not go unnoticed by the military. He was ordered to report to a psychiatrist but seemed to be able to avoid most of his appointments. His military career came to an end when Shawcross attempted suicide. His wife found him overdosed in the middle of the day on their bathroom floor, wearing his full dress uniform with ribbons. Army medics took him away, and shortly afterward, in March 1969, Shawcross was honorably discharged from the Army. He and Linda settled in Clayton, New York, northwest of Watertown on the St. Lawrence River, where they rented a cottage behind Linda’s family’s house. By now, Linda Neary was three months pregnant.
Neary would drive Shawcross to various job interviews, but he wasn’t too eager to go to work. He spent most of his time drinking and fishing off a dock near the cottage. Neary said, “He chattered constantly about death and dying and body bags. I got the idea he was afraid of death, but at the same time he was attracted to death himself. It was always on his mind.”
Shawcross submitted a disability claim with the Veterans Administration, reporting that he had suffered shrapnel wounds and a cut thumb in May 1968 while in Vietnam. But there were no field commendations for a Purple Heart routinely awarded for injuries in Vietnam, nor was there any mention of combat service in his record. Shawcross was eventually awarded a disability pension amounting to seventy-three dollars per month for a minor injury he sustained while on duty in the United States.
At the same time, Shawcross began to rage more and throw violent temper tantrums while his drinking became heavier. In April, he found employment in a paper mill in Watertown. Three weeks later, he received a commendation for discovering and extinguishing a fire in the plant (which he had probably set himself). Neary recalls that Shawcro
ss “lied about everything. No subject was too small for him to lie about.”
In June, after Linda Neary returned late from her parents’ house to serve Shawcross his dinner, he beat her unconscious in a rage. After regaining consciousness, Neary had to drag herself to the hospital, where she miscarried. Shawcross meanwhile cut his wrists in another suicide attempt, and Neary’s father and brother had to take him to the hospital for stitches. Neary was hospitalized for two weeks and afterward demanded a divorce. When Shawcross refused to vacate the cottage, Neary’s father waited until he went to work and then moved all his belongings out.
Shawcross moved in with a friend in nearby La Fargeville and went on a crazed crime spree. He burglarized a gas station, burned down a barn and then set fire to a milk plant. He was arrested, charged and eventually sentenced to five years in the notorious penitentiary Attica before being transferred to Auburn Correctional Facility. In October 1969, while he was in jail awaiting trial, Neary was granted her separation and eventual divorce from Arthur.
The Child Jeffrey Dahmer: The Last of the “Golden Agers”
May 22, 1960, was when the last of the “golden age” celebrity serial killers, Jeffrey Dahmer, was born into a middle-class Milwaukee, Wisconsin, family. His father, Lionel, a professor and research chemist, was born in 1936, himself of that generation of children I describe raised in the traumatic postwar and Cold War era. Jeffrey’s mother, Joyce, worked as a teletype machine instructor. Joyce’s pregnancy with Jeffrey was a particularly troubled one. She experienced excessive nausea, extreme nervousness, severe depression, hypersensitivity to noises and odors, lack of sleep and uncontrollable spasms that doctors could never diagnose. Lionel would later recall:
At the time, her legs would lock tightly in place, and her whole body would begin to tremble. Her jaw would jerk and take on a similarly frightening rigidity. During these strange seizures, her eyes would bulge like a frightened animal, and she would begin to salivate, literally frothing at the mouth.49
During the last months of her pregnancy, Jeffrey’s mother was taking twenty-six pills a day including drugs such as morphine, barbiturates, and phenobarbital.50
Jeffrey’s father admits to having problematic childhood fantasies of his own. He had an obsession with fires and remembers his own fantasies of murder from the age of eight to twenty. The father wrote:
There were areas of my son’s mind, tendencies and perversities which I had held within myself all my life. Certainly, Jeff had multiplied these tendencies exponentially, his sexual perversion generating acts that were beyond my understanding and far beyond my capability. Nonetheless, I could see their distant origins within myself, and slowly, over time, I began to see him truly as my son in far deeper ways than I had previously imagined.51
The marriage between Jeffrey’s parents was a stormy and troubled one, filled with violent arguments. His mother on one occasion threatened his father with a knife. In school, Jeffrey was a lonely child and had difficulties forming friendships with others. His mother was frequently ill, and one of his teachers at school commented that Jeffrey appeared to be suffering from neglect at home. Once, little Jeffrey formed a rare attachment to a female teacher and presented her a gift of a bowl of tadpoles. The teacher eventually gave the tadpoles to another child, and Jeffrey was so enraged that he killed them by pouring motor oil into the bowl.
Dahmer is reported to have developed a fascination with dissecting animals at around the age of ten. He would dissect animals he found and attempt to reassemble their bones. He would often use acid to strip the meat off the carcasses. He appropriated a shed at the back of their house, where he kept his dissected animal specimens preserved in jars. There are no conclusive reports, however, of Dahmer killing animals for that purpose, and some of his playmates remember Dahmer hiking or riding his bike for miles in search of roadkill to bring back to his shed.
When 1970 arrived with its surge of serial killers, Jeffrey was ten, the youngest of the breed to come.
The Nest of Baby Snakes: “Killing Became the Same Thing as Having Sex”
Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, the future epidemic serial killers were being made, shaped and tutored as children and adolescents—like a nest of squirming baby snakes. Little Ted Bundy was wondering who his wartime soldier father was and mistaking his mother for his sister while sneaking under his young aunt’s bedcovers with a knife in his hand as she slept. Henry Lee Lucas was growing up in Blacksburg, Virginia, watching his alcoholic mother, Viola, having sex with other men while beating his father. When Viola discovered that little Henry loved his pet mule, she forced him to watch as she shot it dead. Little Jerry Brudos watched his mom burn a pair of patent leather high heel pumps that Jerry brought back from the dump and loved as much as Henry Lee loved his mule. Lucas would later recall, “I’ve killed animals to have sex with them. Dogs, I’ve killed them to have sex with them—always killed before I had sex. I’ve had sex with them while they’re still alive only sometimes. Then killing became the same thing as having sex.”52 In his little corner of the world, Jerry would eventually kill women in order to collect their severed foot along with the forbidden high heel shoe he desired. On his first day of school, Viola sent Henry Lee to class dressed as a girl, with his long hair set in curls and wearing a dress. Ironically, Ottis Toole, who would partner with Lucas in their crime spree, was also dressed as a girl by his mother. Carroll Edward Cole, who murdered thirteen victims, was dressed as “Mamma’s little girl” by his mother and forced to serve drinks to her guests. At least seven male serial killers, including Charles Manson, are known to have been dressed as girls in their childhood.53
Other killers were adopted, including Kenneth Bianchi, one of the Hillside Stranglers, who killed twelve women from 1977 to 1979; Gerald Stano, who killed twenty-two women between 1969 and 1980; Joel Rifkin, who killed from nine to seventeen sex workers between 1989 and 1993; David Berkowitz, “the Son of Sam,” who shot six victims in 1976 and 1977; Lawrence Sigmund Bittaker, one of the two “Tool Box Killers” who tortured to death five teenage girls in 1979; and Joseph Kallinger, who killed three victims in 1975. They were all adopted from who knows what kind of hell; one theory holds that, as infants in institutional settings, they were not cuddled enough to form normal bonds and developed early-onset psychopathy as a defensive response to their infantile separation from their natural mother.
That poetic geometry of twisted trauma—the victim as victimizer; the child fathering the man—would become the universal theme for serial murder. Whenever we fail to understand something about a serial killer’s motives, we can quickly mop it up from his dysfunctional childhood. The theory is sometimes painfully true and sometimes not true at all. Some serial killers had relatively banal and undramatic childhoods with well-meaning, stable families, like William Heirens, described above. Richard Cottingham, “the Times Square Torso Ripper,” was brought up in an apparently ideal suburban middle-class family with three younger sisters who adored him and a dog named Gypsy. Cottingham’s dad, William, was a successful vice president at Metropolitan Life in Manhattan. Yet scratch deep enough, the father had a dark side too. William was a scrappy Depression-era fifteen-year-old growing up in the Bronx with five brothers when his father was killed in a car accident, leaving his wife pregnant with their seventh son and the family to fend for itself. William enlisted in the Navy with a desire to serve in the warmth of the Pacific but ended up assigned to Alaska, where, according to his son Richard, “he bit the ear off a guy to take the fight out of him” and “shot a bear and made it into a fur coat for my mother.” One day, William beat up an African American man in a bar because he had the same name as he had. Serial killer Richard Cottingham was the archetypical baby boomer, born on November 25, 1946, as was Ted Bundy, born the day before. Both on the surface appeared to have “normal,” abuse-free childhoods, until one gazed deeper into their pasts.
The baby-boom generation of future se
rial killers was a nest of two thousand sick baby snakes, drinking their fathers’ traumas, their mothers’ neuroses, and sucking up the culture of rape and murder sold to them at the supermarket magazine rack, on TV and movies, and getting stepped on by bullies and rapists and life itself. That’s how a surge of serial killers will be formed, simple and easy. You don’t need a psych degree or a complex theory to figure it out; just peruse a men’s adventure or true-detective magazine from the 1960s and ask your granddad, if he’s still around, what he witnessed in the “last good war.”
Climate Kill
The last of our 1950s innocence, which had lingered on into the 1960s even after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 scared everyone shitless, finally died on Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963, when JFK was assassinated in Dallas. Those of us who were kids back then remember faithfully tuning in the next day to see our favorite cartoon friends on Saturday morning TV and being shocked to find them all preempted by coverage of the assassination. Nothing was for sure after that. We kids withdrew to our rooms to play with our sad toys while the adults gathered around the TV in collective shock. On the third day, TV broadcast live the accused assassin being shot dead. Then they replayed it over and over in slow motion. If the Cold War cartoon character Bert the Turtle warning us kids to “duck and cover” when the bomb fell hadn’t gotten to us, then after the Kennedy assassination, the world definitely became spooky and twisted forever. The death of JFK defined for my generation the halfway point between Pearl Harbor and 9/11—when bad things stopped happening “over there” and began to occur “over here.”
American Serial Killers Page 21
