One of the psychiatric disorders that Shawcross clearly had was Munchausen syndrome, a disorder wherein those affected feign disease, illness or psychological trauma to draw attention, sympathy or reassurance to themselves. It is also known as hospital addiction syndrome, thick chart syndrome or hospital hopper syndrome. Karl Friedrich Hieronymous von Münchhausen was an eighteenth-century German baron and mercenary officer in the Russian cavalry. On his return from the Russo-Turkish wars, the baron entertained friends and neighbors with stories of his many exploits. Over time, his stories grew more and more expansive and finally quite outlandish. Münchhausen became somewhat famous after a collection of his tales was published. Almost a century later, an unusual behavioral pattern among young men gained recognition in the writings of nineteenth-century pioneering neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. In 1877, he described adults who, through self-inflicted injuries or bogus medical documents, attempted to gain hospitalization and treatment. In 1951, psychiatrist Richard Asher coined the disorder Munchausen syndrome.48
Among certain mostly female serial killers, like mothers who murder their own children, or nurses, babysitters and caregivers who murder patients or children or the elderly in their care, the attention and sympathy is drawn through the deaths of others around them and is known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Shawcross was exhibiting ordinary Munchausen syndrome, not only in his tall tales of combat in Vietnam but as well during his childhood when he had unexplained bouts of paralysis and various seizures that could never be diagnosed. How much it had to do with his homicidal psychopathology is entirely another issue.
Incompetence by police, the medical examiner and the prosecutor and a battery of defense psychiatrists and a smart lawyer got Arthur Shawcross a deal. In October 1972, a month after Karen Hill’s murder, Shawcross pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree manslaughter, which included a guilty plea in the death of Jack Blake so that authorities could close the case on his murder. A New York State prosecutor justified the reduction of charges to manslaughter citing Shawcross’s “extreme emotional disturbance.” The sexual elements of little Jack’s death were brushed over. The story that went on the record was Shawcross’s version.
Jack Blake was following me about a couple hundred yards. . . . I walked down the railway track to see if I could lose him. . . . He was still coming down the track and I ducked into the woods. He followed me and he got up there, too, and I told him to go home and he said, “No.” I got mad and belted him one with the back of my hand and hit him in the face and he hit a tree and fell down. I got scared then and I laid him down on the ground . . . stretched him out on the ground and put some bark on top of him, ran away from him.
The court was not made aware of the location of the clothing or that the boy had been disrobed prior to his death or the extent of the violence unleashed on him by Shawcross.
In the murder of Karen Hill, Shawcross claimed he was urinating under the bridge when the girl came down: “This girl pops up and I am on parole. I got scared after that, things went haywire. . . . I got scared and I grabbed her and, really, I didn’t know what I was doing.” Shawcross insisted he could not remember anything further and had no idea how the girl came to be raped and sodomized.
Shawcross was sentenced to an indeterminate sentence of up to twenty-five years but was technically eligible for parole after ten months. Nobody expected Shawcross to get parole anytime soon. He was packed off to the maximum-security Green Haven Correctional Facility just north of New York, where a battery of psychiatrists was waiting to “cure him” and get him out as fast as they could. At this point, the story of Shawcross is only in its beginnings. For the next fourteen years of incarceration, Shawcross would remain in so deep a state of “suspended animation” that when he was released and went on to murder twelve more victims, profilers famously underestimated his age by fifteen years.
Meanwhile Back in Kansas: Dennis Rader Metamorphosizes into the BTK
Dennis Rader, obsessed by the Harvey Glatman victim bondage photos he viewed in true-detective magazines as a fourteen-year-old, grew up often spying on female neighbors while dressed in women’s clothing, including underwear that he had stolen, and masturbating with ropes or other bindings around his arms and neck. He would later take pictures of himself wearing women’s clothes, a female wig and a mask while self-bound or suspended from a rafter. He admitted that he was pretending to be his own victims as part of a sexual fantasy.
After graduating high school, Rader served in the US Air Force from 1966 to 1970. He married in 1971 and fathered two children. Rader studied criminal justice administration at Wichita State University, graduating in 1979 with a BA while working at a Coleman factory as an assembler and later as an alarm installer for ADT Security. He was a member of his Lutheran church council and a Cub Scout leader. Eventually, he found work as a bylaw enforcement officer.
Dennis Rader, the BTK, “Bind-Torture-Kill,” as he dubbed himself, first killed when he was twenty-eight, the typical statistical age at which serial killers first murder. In the morning hours of January 15, 1974, he entered the home of the Otero family as they were preparing their two younger children for school, nine-year-old Joseph and eleven-year-old Josephine. Armed with a handgun, he forced the father, Joe, to put the dog out into the yard, then strangled the mother, Julie, with a cord and suffocated the father and his son with plastic bags. He then turned on Josephine, the intended target of his sadistic fantasies. After asking the girl if her parents had a camera in the house (they did not), he took her down into the basement and hanged her by the neck from a water pipe. As she dangled suspended in the noose slowly strangling to death, he pulled down her clothing and fondled the dying girl and masturbated. The bodies would be found by the three older Otero children when they returned home from school later that afternoon.
The Otero family murders were an extremely savage and perverse case. It wasn’t just Wichita police who had never seen anything forensically like it; this was unusual by any standard.
On April 4, 1974, Rader bungled his way through his second murder when his targeted victim, twenty-one-year-old Kathryn Bright, returned home unexpectedly with her nineteen-year-old brother, Kevin. Armed with a handgun, Rader attempted to subdue both victims, but they resisted. Kevin was shot twice in the head, but he still managed to escape into the street and get help. Rader panicked and quickly stabbed Kathryn multiple times and fled without an opportunity to act out his sadistic rituals. Kathryn subsequently died of her wounds. Police at first characterized the crime as a “burglary interrupted” and made no connection to the Otero murders.
In October 1974, the BTK phoned the Wichita Eagle, directing them to a letter stashed between the pages of an engineering textbook in the Wichita Public Library. In it he described the murder of the Otero family with enough detail to persuade police that the letter was genuine. It would be the first of a series of cryptic and taunting letters and poems sent to the Wichita news media and police for the next five years. Later, some of his letters were put into packages with victims’ property, which he called “BTK Field Grams.” They were placed inside empty cereal boxes [“cereal killer”] and left for police and media to find in various locations in Wichita.
In one of his letters, Rader wrote in broken grammar:
And then hang the girl. God—oh God what a beautiful sexual relief that would been. Josephine, when I hung her really turn me on; her pleading for mercy then the rope took whole, she helpless; staring at me with wide terror full eyes the rope getting tighter—tighter. You don’t understand these things because your not under the influence of factor X. The same thing that made Son of Sam, Jack The Ripper, Harvey Glatman, Boston Strangler, Dr. H.H. Holmes, Panty Hose Strangler OF Florida, Hillside Strangler, Ted of The West Coast and many more infamous character kill. Which seems senseless, but we cannot help it. There is no help, no cure, except death, or being caught and put away. It a terrible nightmare but, you see I
don’t lose any sleep over it.49
By 1974, it was clear that Rader was self-aware of his place in both the myth and history of serial killers, without the term having yet been coined.
On March 17, 1977, while stalking another victim, on an impulse he feigned and forced his way into the home of twenty-four-year-old Shirley Vian and her three children. After securing the children in the bathroom, he sexually assaulted Vian, while asphyxiating her with a plastic garment bag secured around her head, and strangled her to death while her kids hammered on the door, screaming for their mother. Rader fled when the phone rang, without harming the children further.
On December 8, 1977, after weeks of stalking twenty-five-year-old Nancy Fox, he broke into her home while she was out and waited for her in the dark to return. When she did, he pounced on her, bound her hands and feet and strangled her to death with his belt; then he retied her corpse in one of his fantasy bondage positions and masturbated.
For the next two years, Rader sent police and news media messages claiming credit for the series of murders and enclosed poems mocking his victims with titles like “Oh death to Nancy” and “Shirley Locks.”
In April 1979, after targeting and stalking sixty-three-year-old widow Anna Williams, he entered her premises and waited for her to come home. She was late. Frustrated, he stole several items and departed. In June, he sent Williams an obscene drawing of what he intended to do to her along with a sinister poem titled “Oh, Anna Why Didn’t You Appear” and some of the items he had stolen from inside her home. He sent a similar package to a local TV station. Anna Williams fled Wichita.
And then Rader suddenly broke off contact. There were no more messages and no more murders for the time being. The unidentified serial killer was gradually forgotten.
When Rader committed another three murders (that we know of) in 1985, 1986 and 1991, the BTK was not linked to them. After that, Rader apparently retired. It is entirely possible that he could have gone the way of Jack the Ripper or the Zodiac Killer, leaving behind an unsolved series of murders. But in 2004, on the thirtieth anniversary of his first murders, of the Otero family, Rader began again communicating with the police and claiming responsibility for the three murders from 1985 to 1991. He was apprehended in February 2005 after police traced the metadata on a floppy disk Rader had included in one of his BTK messages to police to a computer at the Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita, where Rader was an elder.
First Kill: My Friend Dahmer, 1978
In his graphic nonfiction work My Friend Dahmer, Derf Backderf, who went to high school with him, gives a vivid and touchingly sad account of Dahmer’s high school years. Dahmer was the school freak, the classroom clown, who nobody could quite figure out. He would bleat like a sheep in the classroom. He was that kid who would eat his own snot or take up any challenge to humiliate himself if it gave him some sense of belonging. Dahmer loved staging pranks, including falling into fake spasms in public places like the mall or a store, which became known among his peers at school as “doing a Dahmer.” Dahmer began drinking heavily as an adolescent and might have been an alcoholic by the age of sixteen. He smuggled alcohol into school and reportedly was drunk almost every day. Nobody from the faculty noticed. He walked a fine line between hanging out with a circle of acquaintances and being ignored and ostracized.
But as Backderf writes, “Dahmer’s descent was not just a straight line down.” Sometimes Dahmer “rallied,” according to Backderf, who describes a spectacular prank that Dahmer pulled on a high school trip to Washington, DC, in 1978. Dahmer phoned the White House and managed to talk the receptionist into connecting him with Jimmy Carter’s vice president Walter Mondale’s aide. Dahmer led the group of high schoolers into the White House for an unscheduled visit with Vice President Mondale.50 (This was about the same time that the president’s wife, First Lady Rosalynn Carter, was meeting John Wayne Gacy in Chicago.)
By the end of high school, Dahmer had a juvenile record for minor offenses: public drunkenness and indecent exposure. After graduating in June 1978, Dahmer dropped out of sight. Nobody missed him as graduates went their separate ways that summer.
That June, his parents separated, and his father moved out into a motel. His mother took Jeffrey’s younger brother and moved out of state, leaving him behind all alone in the empty house. Although Jeffrey was no longer a minor, it was nonetheless a quintessential act of abandonment and rejection. It was at this point, on June 18, that Dahmer says he committed his first murder when he picked up eighteen-year-old Steven Mark Hicks, who was hitchhiking bare chested to a rock concert.
I had been having, for couple of years before that, fantasies of meeting a good-looking hitchhiker, and . . . sexually enjoying him. . . . [The fantasies] just came from within. . . . And that just happened to be the week when no one was home. Mom was off with David, and they had put up at a motel about five miles away; and I had the car, about five o’clock at night; and I was driving back home, after drinking; and I wasn’t looking for anyone but, about a mile away from the house, there he was. Hitchhiking along the road. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He was attractive; I was attracted to him. I stopped then passed him and stopped the car and thought, “Well, should I pick him up or not?” And I asked him if he wanted to go back and smoke some pot, and he said, “Oh, Yeah.” And we went into my bedroom, had some beer, and from the time I spent with him I could tell he wasn’t gay. I didn’t know how else to keep him there other than to get the barbell and to hit him, over the head, which I did, then strangled him with the same barbell.51
Dahmer said that he had no plans or fantasies to kill anybody—it just happened. He was at a stressful point in his life, and the homicide slipped out of him—what he really was fantasizing about was “having complete control.” Like Kemper, however, he needed to “evict” the person of his desire from their body. Dahmer says, however, that from that homicide in June 1978, his fantasies became “locked-in” on possessing his subjects through acts of murder.
Dahmer claimed that had he not encountered the hitchhiker that night, he would not have later become a serial murderer. Perhaps. We do not know if there is such a thing as a “window of opportunity” for potential serial killers through which if they do not pass by a certain period in their lives they move on and never become killers. There are some serial killers whose first kill is fundamentally different from their subsequent series of murders. That would suggest that their first murder occurs in circumstances outside the direct context of their fantasies—unexpectedly. Only afterward is their murderous addiction awakened and articulated in a series of homicides that reflect a fatal signature. There are other serial killers, however, whose fantasies are so violent and murderous, before they even commit their first murder, that it becomes just a matter of time before they kill.
Former FBI profiler Robert Ressler, who interviewed Dahmer, dismisses his claim of fate in his crossing paths with the hitchhiker as “magical thinking.” Ressler maintains that it was Dahmer’s fantasies that led him to the hitchhiker and not fate.
Dahmer described to Ressler his actions after committing his first murder:
DAHMER: In the township where I was at, homosexuality was the ultimate taboo. It was never discussed, never. I had desires to be with someone, but never met anyone that was gay, that I know of; so that was sexually frustrating.
RESSLER: Okay. You say that the guy was going to leave, and you didn’t particularly want him to leave, and that hitting him was a way of delaying him. You took the barbell and what, rendered him unconscious? And what transpired after that?
DAHMER: Then I took the barbell and strangled him.
RESSLER: And after that? Had there been sexual activity before then?
DAHMER: No. I was very frightened at what I had done. Paced the house for a while. Ends up I did masturbate.
RESSLER: Were you sexually aroused by the event? By having him there?
DAHMER: By the captivity.
RESSLER: Now he’s unconscious, or he’s dead, and you have him, and you know he’s not going anywhere, and that was a turn-on?
DAHMER: Right. So later that night I take the body to the crawl space. And I’m down there and I can’t get any sleep that night, so I go back up to the house. The next day, I have to figure out a way to dispose of the evidence. Buy a knife, a hunting knife. Go back the next night, slit the belly open, and masturbate again.
RESSLER: So you were aroused at just the physique?
DAHMER: The internal organs.
RESSLER: The internal organs? The act of evisceration? You were aroused by the cutting open of the body?
DAHMER: Yeah. And then I cut the arm off. Cut each piece. Bagged each piece. Triple-bagged it in large plastic trash bags. Put them in the back of the car. Then I’m driving to drop the evidence off a ravine, ten miles from my house. Did that at three o’clock in the morning. Halfway there, I’m at a deserted country road, and I get pulled over by the police. For driving left of center. Guy calls a backup squad. Two of ’em there. They do the drunk test. I pass that. Shine the flashlight on the backseat, see the bags, ask me what it is. I tell them it’s garbage that I hadn’t gotten around to dropping off at the landfill. And they believe it, even though there’s a smell. So they give me a ticket for driving left of center and I go back home.
RESSLER: Were you nervous when they stopped you?
DAHMER: That’s an understatement.
RESSLER: Well, they apparently didn’t perceive your nervousness, though, to the point of pursuing the bags, or anything like that. They just got into a routine.
American Serial Killers Page 29
