American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  3. Christoph P. E. Zollikofer, Marcia S. Ponce De León, Bernard Vandermeersch, and François Lévêque, “Evidence for Interpersonal Violence in the St. Césaire Neanderthal,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 99, no. 9 (2002): 6444–48.

  4. Richard Stephen Charnock, “Cannibalism in Europe,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 4 (1866): xxii–xxxi; Elizabeth Pennisi, “Cannibalism and Prion Disease May Have Been Rampant in Ancient Humans,” Science, n.s., 300, no. 5617 (April 11, 2003): 227–28; Elizabeth Culotta, “Neanderthals Were Cannibals, Bones Show,” Science, n.s., 286, no. 5437 (October 1, 1999): 18–19.

  5. Robert Eisler, Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 36–42.

  6. Eisler, Man into Wolf, 78n10.

  7. Vronsky, Sons of Cain, 46–47.

  8. Ann W. Burgess, John E. Douglas, and Robert K. Ressler, Sexual Homicide (New York: Free Press, 1992), loc. 1281–82, Kindle.

  9. Robert J. Morton, Jennifer M. Tillman, and Stephanie J. Gaines, US Department of Justice, FBI, Behavioral Analysis Unit, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, Serial Murder: Pathways for Investigation (Washington, DC, 2014), 43–47.

  10. Lee Mellor, Anil Aggrawal, and Eric Hickey, eds., Understanding Necrophilia: A Global Multidisciplinary Approach (Cognella Academic Publishing, 2017).

  11. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monstrum.

  12. Willem de Blécourt, “The Werewolf, the Witch, and the Warlock: Aspects of Gender in the Early Modern Period,” in Witchcraft and Masculinities in Modern Europe, ed. Alison Rowlands (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 207.

  13. John Philip Jenkins, “H.H. Holmes: American Serial Killer,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/H-H-Holmes.

  14. See Peter Vronsky, Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters (New York: Berkley Books, 2007).

  15. Adam Selzer, H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil (New York: Skyhorse, 2017).

  16. Aamodt, “Serial Killer Statistics.”

  17. Times and Democrat, June 28, 1906; St. John Daily Sun, May 1, 1906; Home Daily Sentinel, June 16, 1906; Queanbeyan Age, September 6, 1907.

  18. Aamodt, Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database.

  19. Philip Jenkins, Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994); “Serial Murder in the United States 1900–1940: A Historical Perspective,” Journal of Criminal Justice 17, no. 5 (1989): 377–92.

  20. Eric Godtland and Dian Hanson, True Crime Detective Magazines 1924–1969 (Cologne: Taschen, 2013), 65.

  21. Kent A. Kiehl, The Psychopath Whisperer: Inside the Minds of Those Without a Conscience (New York: Crown/Archetype, 2015), 170–1, Kindle.

  22. Kent A. Kiehl, “A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective on Psychopathy: Evidence for Paralimbic System Dysfunction,” Psychiatry Research 142, nos. 2–3 (June 15, 2006): 107–28.

  23. Harold Schechter, Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster (New York: Gallery Books, 1999); Michael Newton, The Dark Strangler: Serial Killer Earle Leonard Nelson (St. John’s, NL, 2016).

  24. Henry Lesser, “Panzram Papers,” Special Collections & University Archives, Carl Panzram Papers, 1928–1980, box 1, folder 3: typescript of Panzram Manuscript: part I, section 1, c. 1928–1930, San Diego State University.

  25. Harold Schechter, Deranged: The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990); Mel Heimer, The Cannibal: The Case of Albert Fish (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1971).

  26. http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2014/05/24/notorious-crime-scene-property-is-for-sale/.

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

  1. Michael Hall, “Two Barmaids, Five Alligators, and the Butcher of Elmendorf,” Texas Monthly, July 2002, https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/two-barmaids-five-alligators-and-the-butcher-of-elmendorf/.

  2. See Colin Wilson, “The Rise of Sex Crime,” in A Criminal History of Mankind (London: Grafton Books, 1985).

  3. Eric W. Hickey, Serial Murderers and Their Victims, 6th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadworth, 2013), 226.

  4. J. Paul de River, The Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytical Study, ed. Brian King (Burbank, CA: Bloat Books, 2000), xxvi.

  5. De River, The Sexual Criminal, 96.

  6. De River, The Sexual Criminal, 164–65.

  7. Dayton Daily News (Dayton, OH), January 26, 1936, 62.

  8. Herald-Press (Saint Joseph, MI), January 3, 1936, 8.

  9. Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), December 9, 1934, 66.

  10. Cindy Gueli, “World War II Edition—Part 1: A Serial Killer on the Loose,” Scandalous Washington, https://scandalouswashington.com/2015/08/20/scandalous-washington-world-war-ii-edition-part-1/.

  11. Daily News (New York, NY), June 17, 1941, 4.

  12. Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy, Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 203–4.

  13. Murphy, Jim Crow Capital, 203.

  14. Daily News (New York, NY), June 18, 1941, 4.

  15. Times (Shreveport, LA), July 13, 1941, 2.

  16. See the Afro-American newspaper archive online at https://www.afro.com/archives/.

  17. Knoxville Journal (Knoxville, TN), September 19, 1943, 2.

  18. Time, September 8, 1941.

  19. Washington Post, August 30, 1941, 14.

  20. Washington Post, September 3, 1941, 17.

  21. Washington Post, January 9, 1943, B1.

  22. Washington Post, August 30, 1941, 3.

  23. Lucy Freeman, Catch Me Before I Kill More (New York: Crown Publishers, 1955), 200.

  24. Life, December 6, 1968.

  25. Paul Friswold, “William Heirens, Chicago’s Lipstick Killer, Dies in Prison,” Riverfront Times, March 6, 2012, https://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2012/03/06/william-heirens-chicagos-lipstick-killer-dies-in-prison.

  26. Amended Petition for Executive Clemency, To the Honorable George H. Ryan, Governor of the State of Illinois, April 2002 Docket, 5.

  27. Amended Petition for Executive Clemency, 5–6.

  28. http://home.earthlink.net/~chicago1946/p21.html [inactive].

  29. Foster Kennedy, Harry B. Hoffman, and William H Haines, Court Directed Psychiatric Report, in Freeman, Catch Me Before I Kill More, 337.

  30. Kennedy, Hoffman, and Haines, Court Directed Psychiatric Report, 339.

  31. Louis-Alexandre Marcoux, Pierre-Emmanuel Michon, Sophie Lemelin, Julien I. A. Voisin, Etienne Vachon-Presseau, Philip L. Jackson, “Feeling but Not Caring: Empathic Alteration in Narcissistic Men with High Psychopathic Traits,” Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, October 2014.

  32. Katie Heaney, “My Life As a Psychopath,” The Cut, August 10, 2018, https://www.thecut.com/2018/08/my-life-as-a-psychopath.html.

  33. Colin Wilson, Manhunters: Criminal Profilers and Their Search for the World’s Most Wanted Serial Killers (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007), 52.

  34. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_prison_sentences_served.

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

  1. See, for example, Vernon J. Geberth, Sex-Related Homicide and Death Investigation: Practical and Clinical Perspectives (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2003); Michael H. Stone and Gary Brucato, The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime (New York: Prometheus Books, 2019).

  2. Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), loc. 4297–98, Kindle.

  3. Steven A. Egger, The Killers Among Us: An Examination of Serial Murder and Its Investigation (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pr
entice Hall, 1998), 74–75.

  4. Angus McLaren, A Prescription for Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), xiii.

  5. Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 1.

  6. Robert Kennedy, in statement by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee, Washington, DC, September 25, 1963.

  7. H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 134.

  8. Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 140–43.

  9. Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (New York: Verso, 2007).

  10. Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011), 31–32.

  11. Arkansas State Assembly, Senate Concurrent Resolution to Commemorate the Ninety-Fourth Anniversary of the United States Supreme Court Ruling in Moore v. Dempsey, State of Arkansas, 91st General Assembly, Regular Session (2017).

  12. Brendan Livingston, “Murder and the Black Market: Prohibition’s Impact on Homicide Rates in American Cities” (Rowan University, American Economic Association Conference, 2014), https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2014/retrieve.php?pdfid=801.

  13. Joseph Swanson and Samuel Williamson, “Estimates of National Product and Income for the United States Economy, 1919–1941,” Explorations in Economic History, no. 10 (1972): 53–73.

  14. Victor Davis Hanson, An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2007), 44.

  15. Vronsky, Sons of Cain, pp. 319–324, citing J. Robert Lilly. Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe During World War II. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. and Miriam Gebhardt. Als die Soldaten kamen (When the Soldiers Came). Munich: DVA/Random House, 2015; [English version] Crimes Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017.

  16. Dave Grossman. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York: Open Road Media. Kindle ed., pp. 135–36.

  17. Vronsky, Sons of Cain, 319–30.

  18. The Perilous Fight, “The Mental Toll,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/perilousfight/psychology/the_mental_toll/.

  19. Bernard Rostker, Providing for the Casualties of War: The American Experience Through World War II (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation National Defense Research Institute, 2013), 214.

  20. Time, May 24, 1943.

  21. Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation, (New York: Random House, 2004), Xxxviii.

  22. Edgar L. Jones, “One War Is Enough,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1946, https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/bookauth/battle/jones.htm.

  23. Ernie Pyle, “On Victory in Europe,” unpublished, © by Scripps Howard Foundation, https://sites.mediaschool.indiana.edu/erniepyle/wartime-columns/4/.

  24. “Vote to Support Overtime Pay Bill,” Independent Record (Helena, MT), July 9, 1942, 5.

  25. “Local Brush Artist Turns to Writing,” North Hollywood Valley Times, September 20, 1946, 14.

  26. Ted Kemp, A Commemorative History: First Special Service Force (Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1995), 21.

  27. “Quentin Tarantino: One Helluva BASTERD,” Fangoria, August 22, 2009.

  28. “Mrs. E.E. Kemper, Jr., and Children Spending Vacation at Jung Home,” Independent Record (Helena, MT), August 26, 1951, 10.

  29. Margaret Cheney, Why: The Serial Killer in America (Lincoln, NE: Back Imprint Books, 2000), 7–8.

  30. Jack Olsen, The Misbegotten Son: The True Story of Arthur J. Shawcross (New York: Island Books, 1993), 179.

  31. Katherine Ramsland, Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2016), loc. 710–11, Kindle.

  32. Ann W. Burgess, John E. Douglas, and Robert K. Ressler, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988), loc. 547, Kindle.

  33. Richard Lingeman, The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War (New York: Bold Type Books, 2012), 132–33.

  34. Rostker, Providing for the Casualties of War, 202.

  35. Lingeman, The Noir Forties, 53.

  36. Lloyd Shearer, “Crime Certainly Pays on the Screen: The Growing Crop of Homicidal Films,” New York Times, August 5, 1945, 77.

  37. Victor Dallaire, “The American Woman? Not for This GI,” New York Times, March 10, 1946, SM8.

  38. Max Allan Collins, George Hagenauer, and Steven Heller, Men’s Adventure Magazines in Postwar America (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), 285–364.

  39. Collins, Hagenauer, and Heller, Men’s Adventure Magazines in Postwar America, 470.

  40. See, for example, Collins, Hagenauer, and Heller, Men’s Adventure Magazines in Postwar America; Adam Parfrey, ed., It’s A Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003); Tom Brinkmann, Bad Mags 2 (London: Headpress, 2009); David Saunders, Norman Saunders (St. Louis, MO: Illustrated Press, 2008); Godtland and Hanson, True Crime Detective Magazines 1924–1969; Google Images: “pulp adventure magazines” https://www.google.ca/​search?q=​pulp+​adventure+​magazines&​biw=​1164&bih=​569&source=lnms&tbm=​isch&sa=​X&ved=​0ahUKEwi38-PCg8vLAhVFnoMKHYlgC88Q_AUIBigB or Google Images: “true detective magazines” https://www.google.ca/​search?q=​true+​detective+​magazines&biw=​1164&bih=​569&source=l​nms&tbm=​isch&sa=​X&ved=​0ahUKEwiXh9v​Xg8vLAhXrkYMKHV9JBx8Q​_AUIBigB.

  41. Collins, Hagenauer, and Heller, Men’s Adventure Magazines in Postwar America, 470.

  42. Collins, Hagenauer, and Heller, Men’s Adventure Magazines in Postwar America, 9; Godtland and Hanson, True Crime Detective Magazines 1924–1969, 234.

  43. Mark Pettit, A Need to Kill (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990); Robert K. Ressler and Tom Shachtman, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

  44. Ramsland, Confession of a Serial Killer, loc. 1292–93, 1458–59, 3289–91, Kindle.

  45. P. E. Dietz, B. Harry, and R. R. Hazelwood, “Detective Magazines: Pornography for the Sexual Sadist?” Journal of Forensic Sciences 31, no. 1 (January 1986): 197–211.

  46. De River, The Sexual Criminal, 65.

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

  1. Oshkosh Northwestern (Oshkosh, WI), November 21, 1957, 13.

  2. George W. Arndt, “Gein Humor,” in Robert H. Gollmar, Edward Gein (New York: Pinnacle Books, 1981), 203–5.

  3. Life, May 22, 1944, 35, accessed March 30, 2016, http://time.com/3880997/young-woman-with-jap-skull-portrait-of-a-grisly-wwii-memento/.

  4. http://www.gettyimages.ca/​detail/​news-photo/​filthy-cluttered-kitchen-of-alleged-mass-murderer-ed-gein-newsphoto/​50425931.

  5. The definitive book, although sometimes flawed, on Harvey Glatman is Michael Newton, Rope: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Harvey Glatman (New York: Pocket Books, 1998). Also helpful is the e-book by Edward S. Sullivan, Hellbound: The Sadistic Sex Murders of Harvey Glatman (Elektron Ebooks, 2013).

  6. Stephen G. Michaud with Roy Hazelwood, The Evil That Men Do (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 24.

  7. Newton, Rope, 45.

  8. Silvia Pettem, Someone’s Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe (Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2009), loc. 2898, Kindle.

  9. Ressler and Shachtman, Whoever Fights Monsters, loc. 3526–38, Kindle.

  10. Newton, Rope, 192–96.

  11. Sheila O’Hare and Andrew Smith, “Gifts Nobody Wants: The State of the Art in Dealing wit
h Unwanted Donations,” Kansas Library Association College and University Libraries Section Proceedings 1, no. 1 (2011): 10; Pettem, Someone’s Daughter, loc. 3131, Kindle.

  12. Pettem, Someone’s Daughter, loc. 4476, Kindle.

  13. Ginger Strand, Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), Kindle.

  14. Strand, Killer on the Road, loc. 892–94, Kindle.

  15. Strand, Killer on the Road, loc. 939, Kindle.

  16. Strand, Killer on the Road, loc. 927–28, Kindle.

  17. Janet McClellan, Erotophonophilia: Investigating Lust Murder (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010), loc. 2442, Kindle.

  18. Ramsland, Confession of a Serial Killer, loc. 1084–1115, Kindle.

  19. https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/567735096754029516/?lp=true.

  20. Morton, Tillman, and Gaines, Serial Murder, 47.

  21. Katherine Ramsland, The Sex Beast (Crimescape, Rosetta Books, 2013), Kindle.

  22. Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, NC), June 17, 1956, 2.

  23. News (Frederick, MD), June 11, 1956, 1.

  24. Ramsland, The Sex Beast, loc. 225–30, Kindle.

  25. Salisbury Times (Salisbury, MD), June 27, 1957, 1 and 8.

  26. Evening Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 28, 1957, 2.

  27. Greenville News (Greenville, SC), February 2, 1959, 11.

  28. News Leader (Staunton, VA), March 5, 1959, 1.

  29. Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA), March 7, 1959, 4.

  30. Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA), March 5, 1959, 1.

  31. United States of America v. Melvin Davis Rees, Jr., 193 F. Supp. 849 (D. Md. 1961), Cr. No. 5300, March 22, 1961.