The situation became even grimmer during the 1960s, a period that produced such infamous figures as Melvin “Sex Beast” Rees, Albert “Boston Strangler” DeSalvo, Richard Speck, Charles Manson, and the still-unknown Zodiac. By the time the 1970s rolled around, the problem had become so dire that, for the first time, law enforcement officials felt the need to define this burgeoning phenomenon as a major category of crime (see Definition/ Coining a Phrase). The 1970s was the decade of Berkowitz and Bundy, Kemper and Gacy, Bianchi and Buono (the “Hillside Stranglers”), and more.
By the 1980s, some criminologists were bandying words like plague and epidemic to characterize the problem. Though these terms smack of hysteria, it is nevertheless true that serial homicide has become so common in our country that most of its perpetrators stir up only local interest. Only the most ghastly of these killers, the ones who seem more like mythic monsters than criminals—Jeffrey Dahmer, for example—capture the attention of the entire nation and end up as creepy household names.
In view of this grim chronicle, it’s hard not to agree with Voltaire’s famous definition. “History,” he wrote, “is little else than a picture of human crime and misfortune.”
H.H. Holmes
At the same time that Jack the Ripper was terrorizing London, America was home to its own psychopathic monster. Calling himself Dr. H. H. Holmes, he was at least as notorious in his own day as “Saucy Jack.” But while the latter’s fame has grown through the years, Dr. Holmes—for unexplained reasons—has largely been forgotten. In the chronicle of American crime, however, he occupies a special place: he was our country’s first documented serial killer.
Dr. H. H. Holmes, the nineteenth-century “multi-murderer”
(Courtesy of the Illinois State Historical Society)
Much about his life and crimes remains shrouded in mystery. We know that his real name was Herman Mudgett, that he was born in the tiny New Hampshire village of Gilmanton Academy, and that—like other budding sociopaths—he enjoyed conducting “medical experiments” on small, living creatures during his childhood.
In his early twenties, he wed a young female acquaintance—the first of several wives he would acquire without ever bothering with the formality of a divorce. He abandoned her within a few years of the marriage. After a year of college in Vermont, he transferred to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, graduating with a medical degree in 1884. By then, he was already an accomplished swindler who had learned to bilk insurance companies of thousands of dollars. His method was simple. He would take out a life insurance policy for a fictitious person, obtain a corpse, claim that the corpse was the insured individual, and cash in on the policy. Of course, the scheme depended on Mudgett’s ability to acquire dead bodies. But at this activity, too, he grew proficient.
In 1886, he showed up in Chicago under a new name—Henry Howard Holmes. Within a few months, he had taken a job as a druggist in the fashionable suburb of Englewood. The pharmacy was owned by an elderly widow, who mysteriously disappeared a few months later, leaving Holmes as the new proprietor. A consummate con artist, he had no trouble finagling large sums of cash from gullible investors. Combined with the proceeds from assorted scams, this money allowed him to construct a magnificient residence on a vacant lot across from his store. He called it “The Castle.” It contained dozens of rooms, linked by secret passageways, hidden staircases, fake walls, concealed shafts, and trapdoors. Some of the rooms were soundproofed, lined with asbestos, and equipped with gas pipes connected to a large tank in the cellar. From a control panel in his office, Holmes could fill these chambers with asphyxiating gas. A pair of chutes ran from the second and third floors to the basement, where Holmes kept a fully equipped dissection lab.
Inside the walls of this Gothic horror house, an indeterminate number of people disappeared—including a string of susceptible young women who had fallen under the spell of Holmes’s insidious charm. During the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Holmes also rented rooms to tourists, many of whom were never seen again. Throughout this period, local medical schools—in desperate need of high-grade anatomical specimens—purchased a regular supply of human skeletons from Dr. Holmes, no questions asked.
He was finally arrested for the murder of a confederate, Ben Pitezel. Holmes used Pitezel’s corpse to try to pull off his favorite insurance scam, but he was caught by clever investigators. Following his trial—the most sensational of its day—he confessed to twenty-seven murders. The enormity of his deeds made him the most infamous criminal of his age, known throughout the land as “Holmes, the Arch Fiend.” He was hanged in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896.
“I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing. . . . I was born with the Evil One standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since.”
From the confession of Dr. H. H. Holmes
HOMEBODIES
Some serial killers range far and wide in search of their prey. Others, however, have a more domestic bent. Luring their victims to their houses or apartments, these psychos commit their gruesome murders in the comfort of their own homes—and sometimes even conceal the dead bodies right on the premises.
Shortly after a mousy little man named John Reginald Christie vacated his London flat in 1953, the new tenants began noticing an unpleasant smell that seemed to be emanating from a hollow place in the kitchen wall. Tearing down the wallpaper, they discovered a concealed cupboard containing three female corpses. When police made a search of the premises, they found a fourth decomposed body—that of Christie’s own wife—under the dining room floorboards, and the skeletal remains of two other victims buried in the backyard. (See The Wrong Man.)
In the 1970s, both Dean Corll and John Wayne Gacy turned their homes into suburban torture chambers, committing dozens of atrocities on bound and helpless young men. Each of these sociopaths perpetrated more than thirty at-home murders without ever arousing the suspicions of his next-door neighbors. Corll buried the corpses along the shore of a nearby lake (see Partners). Gacy likewise dumped some of his victims in a river—but not until he had run out of room on his property, where police eventually dug up twenty-nine bodies.
Jeffrey Dahmer was another homebody homosexual killer, who not only turned his cramped Milwaukee apartment into a death chamber but filled it with an appalling assortment of human remains. His British counterpart, Dennis Nilsen, played out twisted little scenes of domesticity with the dead bodies of his male victims—bathing them, snuggling with them in bed, propping them up in front of the TV, or seating them at the dinner table.
One of the most gruesome of all domestic serial killers was a deranged German innkeeper named Karl Denke. Denke was so reluctant to leave home that he didn’t even bother to go out shopping for food. During the post-World War I era, he murdered almost three dozen lodgers, then butchered their carcasses, pickled the meat in brine, and stored it in his basement. When Denke was finally arrested in 1924, he told the police that he had been eating nothing but human flesh for the past three years (see Cannibalism).
HOMOSEXUALITY
In a tome called A Casebook of Murder, British crime maven Colin Wilson makes the rather remarkable statement that Ed Gein, the infamous Wisconsin ghoul, was “a sexually normal man.” Since, among other things, Gein was guilty of digging up the bodies of elderly women, dismembering the corpses, and performing unspeakable atrocities upon them, it takes a moment to figure out that what Wilson really means is that, whatever other kind of creature Gein was, at least he wasn’t a homosexual While the implications of Wilson’s remark are truly staggering (i.e., that grave robbing, necrophilia, dismemberment, etc., are more “normal” than homosexuality), he does manage to put his finger on a salient fact of serial murder. The great bulk of its practitioners are, indeed, heterosexuals.
More specifically, criminologists estimate that at least 86 percent of male serial killers are hetero
sexual—meaning that they derive their deepest gratification from raping, mutilating, and murdering women. Still, though numerically inferior, gay serial killers include some of the foremost monsters of our time.
Throughout his two marriages, for example, John Wayne Gacy was busily having sex with teenage boys—twenty-seven of whom ended up buried in the crawl space beneath his suburban house. Likewise, Jeffrey Dahmer preyed exclusively on young males. So did the infamous British serial killer Dennis Nilsen, whose murders—like Dahmer’s—seemed at least partly motivated by a desperate desire to prevent his male pickups from leaving in the morning. Less well known—though every bit as heinous—was California’s “Freeway Killer,” William George Bonin, a Vietnam vet and truck driver responsible for torturing and then murdering twenty-one young men during the 1970s.
Serial sex murder, as practiced by men, is virtually unknown among Women, homosexual or otherwise. A recent exception is the lesbian hooker Aileen Wuornos, who killed a string of male motorists along a Florida highway in 1989 and 1990.
Certain lust murderers are possessed of such ravening appetites that they are, in effect, bisexual, preying indiscriminately on both male and female victims. During a three-year span in the late 1890s, for example, a hideously disfigured maniac named Joseph Vacher, armed with knives, scissors, and a butcher’s cleaver, roamed the French countryside, savaging nearly a dozen victims before his capture in August 1897. Vacher’s victims—who suffered unspeakable sexual mutilations at his hands—ranged from a fifty-eight-year-old widow to a fourteen-year-old boy. Andrei Chikatilo, the Russian “Beast of Rostov,” likewise tortured, mauled, raped, and cannibalized members of both sexes, many of them adolescents. And while the desperately deranged American pedophile Albert Fish preferred to commit his atrocities on boys, he was happy to settle for a pretty little girl when a male victim wasn’t available.
Homosexual Serial Killers in the Cinema
Gay serial killers—psychopathic homosexuals who prey on members of their own gender—are a rarity in movies. Aileen Wuornos, for example—whose sordid story is told in the Oscar-winning biopic Monster—was a lesbian, but her homicidal rage was directed strictly at men. Conversely, “Buffalo Bill”—the flagrantly effeminate psychokiller of The Silence of the Lambs—targets only female victims.
The only mainstream Hollywood movie (so far as we know) to deal with homosexual serial murder is William Friedkin’s 1980 Cruising. Friedkin’s shocker was widely—and, to a large extent, deservedly—reviled by critics (in his Movie and Video Guide, Leonard Maltin tosses around words like “distasteful,” “sick,” and “degrading”). Still, it’s a deeply unsettling film, starring Al Pacino as a New York City cop on the hunt for a gay homicidal maniac in pre-AIDS Greenwich Village.
HOUSEKEEPERS
Contrary to what some people claim, not all serial killers are men. Women commit serial murder, too—they just do it in a more, well, womanly way. Male serial killing is essentially old-fashioned phallic aggression carried to a monstrous extreme—the violent penetration of a victim’s body with a sharp, pointed implement. Female serial killers, on the other hand, are like grotesque parodies of female stereotypes: Black Widow brides instead of adoring wives. Lethal Nurses instead of loving nurturers. And instead of happy homemakers, Housekeepers from Hell.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, an embittered German widow named Anna Zwanziger, who bore a striking resemblance to an oversized toad, hired herself out as a housekeeper and cook to a succession of middle-aged judges. Apparently, Zwanziger hoped that one of these worthies would become so dependent on her domestic skills that he would end up proposing. Of course, there was one small problem with Anna’s plan—namely, the inconvenient fact that each of the men was already married or engaged to another woman. Anna hit on an ingenious solution: she poisoned two of the women with arsenic. For good measure, she also poisoned one of the judges, several servants, and a baby (who died after eating a biscuit soaked in arsenic-spiked milk). Just before her execution in July 1811, Anna told her jailers, “It is perhaps better for the community that I should die, as it would be impossible for me to stop poisoning people.”
While Zwanziger appears to have been motivated by some lethal combination of desperation and crushed hope, other homicidal housekeepers have killed for more obscure reasons. Roughly ten years after Zwanziger’s beheading, another German cook named Gessina Gottfried poisoned an entire family named Rumf—papa, mama, and five children—by sprinkling arsenic over every meal she prepared for them. Her admitted motive was sheer malevolent pleasure—at her trial in 1828, she confessed that the sight of her victims’ death agonies threw her into a transport of ecstasy. Equally appalling was the French domestic Helene Jegado. Between 1833 and 1851, she fatally poisoned at least twenty-three and perhaps as many as thirty men, women, and children. Her victims included several nuns and her own sister.
“Wherever I go,” she was once heard to remark, “people die.”
IMPOTENCE
Sigmund Freud argued that when normal sexual drives are warped, they tend to vent themselves as violence. The impulse to love turns into an urge to destroy. His theory is confirmed with brutal clarity in the behavior of serial killers, who commonly substitute murder for sex. This is especially evident in the cases of those psychopathic killers who suffer from sexual impotence.
John Reginald Christie, the “Monster of Rillington Place,” was so plagued by impotence that he couldn’t consummate his marriage for more than two years. Murder was his sick way of compensating for this deficiency. Gassing and strangling women served as a sexual turn-on for Christie. Once his victims were dead he had no trouble raping them (see The Wrong Man).
Christie’s potency problem probably wouldn’t have surprised his acquaintances. Bald, bespectacled, and a known hypochondriac, he wasn’t exactly a picture of self-confident virility. Paul John Knowles, on the other hand, cut an impressively masculine figure. Charming and ruggedly handsome, he became known in the mid-1970s as the “Casanova Killer.” At least eighteen people who crossed his path—and perhaps as many as thirty-five—ended up shot, stabbed, or strangled. In the course of his deadly wanderings, Knowles met a British journalist named Sandy Fawkes who, like so many other young women, took an immediate fancy to him. The two ended up in bed, but Knowles was unable to perform sexually with a willing partner. When Fawkes abruptly broke off their short-lived relationship, Knowles reverted to the only kind of sex he was capable of, seeking out one of Fawkes’s close friends and attempting to rape her at gunpoint.
Some serial killers, on the other hand, suffer from the opposite problem—not impotence but a sex drive of almost demonic intensity. When Bobby Joe Long, for example, was in his twenties, even the combination of twice-daily intercourse with his wife and compulsive masturbation couldn’t slake his sexual hunger. Soon he began pursuing an additional outlet, raping at least fifty Florida women and murdering as many as ten.
INSANITY
When it comes to a killer who flays the skin from corpses, tans it like animal hide, and tailors it into a suit, the question of sanity would seem to be cut and dried (so to speak). And, in fact, Ed “Psycho” Gein—who actually did fashion garments out of human skin—was deemed officially insane and committed for life to a state mental institution.
Gein, however, represents the exception rather than the rule. Though at least one psychiatric expert has flatly declared that serial killers are “almost always insane,” persuading a jury is another matter. Statistics tell the story. Of all the multiple murderers brought to trial in the past century, fewer than 4 percent have resorted to an insanity plea. And of those, only one in three has been found NGRI (not guilty by reason of insanity).
Still, the poor odds haven’t stopped some notorious serial killers from trying. David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, for example, did his best to persuade psychiatrists that his mind was controlled by his neighbor’s dog, a black Labrador retriever that was ostensibly possessed by the spirit of a
six-thousand-year-old demon named Sam. The “Voices from Beyond” gambit was also employed (unsuccessfully) by the “Yorkshire Ripper,” who slaughtered thirteen women in the late 1970s. The “Yorkshire Ripper” turned out to be a happily married truck driver named Peter Sutcliffe, who insisted that he was simply acting on orders from God, whose voice he heard issuing from a grave in a local cemetery. Sutcliffe’s countryman John George Haigh—the notorious “Acid Bath Murderer” of the 1940s—tried a different tack to impress jurors with his lunacy: he drank his own urine.
“As a result of our psychiatric examination, we are of the opinion that this man at the present time is not insane.”
From a 1930 Bellevue Hospital report on Albert Fish, who two years earlier had abducted, dismembered, and cannibalized a twelve-year-old girl
Other serial killers have tried their hands at the popular multiple-personality ploy. William Heirens (famous for the Lipstick-scrawled plea he left in a victim’s apartment, “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more”) blamed his crimes on an alternate personality named “George Murman.” Similarly, both John Wayne Gacy and Kenneth “Hillside Strangler” Bianchi claimed that their crimes were the handiwork of evil alter egos, named “Jack” and “Steve,” respectively. None of these ruses worked.
The problem for defense lawyers with serial-killer clients is that even the most horrific acts—crimes no normal person could even imagine, let alone commit—are not necessarily proof of legal insanity. A killer like Jeffrey Dahmer can dismember his still-living victims, eat their flesh, store their heads in his refrigerator, etc., and still be deemed sane according to the law. Though legal definitions vary, most states rely on the McNaughton rule, which says, in essence, that the criterion for sanity is the ability to distinguish right from wrong. Since most serial killers go to great pains to cover up their crimes, it’s hard to prove that they don’t know they’re engaged in wrongdoing.
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 12
