The most infamous of these characters is Charles Manson. At the height of the flower-child era, this psychopathic ex-con managed to mesmerize a group of young hippie followers with a seductive mix of drugs, sex, and occult mumbo-jumbo. Like the mythical Pied Piper, he was a musician (of sorts). And—also like the Piper—he believed he had been cheated of his just reward for his musical talents.
Determined to become a rock star, he toadied his way into contact with such industry insiders as the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson and even saw one of his songs performed on a Beach Boys album. But he failed to land the lucrative recording contract that he craved. After this snub, Manson began to formulate his murder plans—partly to realize his deranged apocalyptic visions, and partly, some say, to get revenge against music producer Terry Melcher, whom he blamed for his failures.
Manson prepared his “family” to go on a homicidal rampage. Once again, music played a part. To Manson’s unhinged mind, the songs from the Beatles’ White Album—especially “Helter Skelter”—were actually coded messages relating personally to him. Manson used his wacko interpretations of the songs to help program his disciples to carry out his plans. When he was done, seven people were dead, all of them hacked to death.
Another modern-day Pied Piper was Dean Corll, nicknamed the “Candy Man” for his habit of handing out free treats to neighborhood children while working at his family’s confectionery company. Behind that innocent veneer, Corll was an insanely sadistic gay sex killer who employed a teenage accomplice named Elmer Wayne Henley to procure male victims. Enticed to Corll’s apartment in suburban Houston with the promise of glue-sniffing parties, the unwitting young men would be overpowered by Corll, then subjected to hours of unspeakable sexual torture and mutilation before being killed. Corll himself was eventually murdered by Henley, who then led police to the moldering remains of twenty-seven young men, victims of the abominable “Candy Man.”
Another modern murderer was explicitly compared to the old German legend by the press. This was Charles Schmid, a mid-1960s thrill killer dubbed the “Pied Piper of Tucson.”
In the eyes of most of those who knew him, Schmid was just plain bizarre. He dyed his hair jet black and shaped it into a towering pompadour (like his idol, Elvis), wore heavy pancake makeup over his unwashed face, painted his mouth with white lipstick, and sported a fake “beauty mark” fashioned from a quarter-inch circle of dark putty. And then there was his walk—an odd, staggering gait that resulted from his habit of stuffing his boots with rags, cardboard, and crumpled beer cans to boost his undersized stature.
For the bored and restless teens who cruised the Tucson strip known as the Speedway, however, the twenty-two-year-old “Smitty” was a charismatic rebel. He enticed them into his crackpot little orbit with booze and sex and tantalizing (if totally fictitious) tales of his secret life involving the Hell’s Angels, drug-running, and the Mafia.
He led his teenage followers into a deadly nightmare in mid-1964, when he convinced two of his acolytes to help him lure a fifteen-year-old girl out into the desert. There he raped the girl and crushed her skull with a rock. A year later he murdered his girlfriend and her thirteen-year-old sister. Some of his followers knew about these murders but for months refused to tell the police, so devoted were they to their psychopathic leader. Eventually, however, Smitty was turned in by a guilt-ridden accomplice. While awaiting execution in the Arizona penitentiary, he was fatally stabbed in the face and chest by another inmate.
Shortly after his arrest at the end of 1965, a pop tune hit the charts that seemed to be an eerie reflection of the Schmid phenomenon. Titled, appropriately enough, “The Pied Piper,” and sung by Crispian St. Peters, its chorus went: “Hey, c’mon, babe, follow me/I’m the Pied Piper, follow me/I’m the Pied Piper/And I’ll show you where it’s at.”
The Lure of the Piper
Given her fascination with the Gothic and grotesque, it’s no surprise that author Joyce Carol Oates was attracted to the Schmid case, using it as the basis for her classic 1966 short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” In Oates’s version, an ineffably creepy character named Arnold Friend—obviously modeled on Schmid—shows up at the home of a teenaged girl named Connie one Sunday afternoon while her family is away and spirits her off to a nameless, but clearly awful, fate.
In 1985, Oates’s tale was made into a handsome film called Smooth Talk, starring Treat Williams as Arnold and Laura Dern as Connie. Though the film is an intelligent adaptation of its source, horror buffs are likely to find it disappointingly artsy.
The opposite problem afflicts two other films based on the Schmid story, both of which are hopelessly schlocky affairs: The Todd Killings, a low-budget 1971 shocker that changes Schmid into a character named Skipper Todd but otherwise hews fairly close to the facts; and Dead Beat (1994), which focuses on a lonely high-schooler named Rudy who moves to Albuquerque, where he gets involved with a Schmid-like figure named Kit.
PLUMBING
Clogged pipes have proven to be the undoing of more than one serial killer. In February 1983, residents of a small North London apartment house complained that their toilets wouldn’t flush. When a plumber showed up to check out the problem, he opened a nearby manhole and descended into the sewer. As expected, he found a blocked drainpipe leading from the building. What he couldn’t possibly have anticipated was the nature of the obstruction—a reeking mass of putrefying flesh, mixed with human finger bones. It didn’t take long for police to discover the source of this nightmarish glop. It had come from the upstairs flat of a thirty-seven-year-old Civil Servant named Dennis Nilsen, who—just several days earlier—had murdered and butchered his fifteenth homosexual victim, then flushed the remains down his toilet.
A similar grisly discovery had been made in West Germany seven years earlier. In July 1976, police in the city of Duisburg were conducting a door-to-door search for a missing four-year-old girl. In the course of interviewing one old man, they heard a bizarre story. According to the old man, a fellow tenant of his apartment building—a lavatory attendant named Joachim Kroll—had warned him not to use the communal bathroom on their floor because the toilet was backed up. What made the story so weird was Kroll’s explanation of the plumbing problem. He had casually mentioned that the toilet was blocked “with guts.”
The police summoned a plumber, who applied a plunger to the clogged toilet. Up came a mass of human entrails and other viscera. Inside Kroll’s apartment, police found several freezer bags full of human flesh and a child’s hand simmering in a saucepan. Like his British counterpart, Dennis Nilsen, Kroll had been murdering for a long time—since 1955. In all, the German cannibal and sex killer was responsible for fourteen homicides.
POETRY
Among the ranks of infamous serial killers there have been some rather creative individuals. John Wayne Gacy was a prolific painter whose works have become trendy collectibles (see Art). Charles Manson has composed dozens of Songs, some of which have been recorded by bands like Guns N’ Roses and the Lemonheads. Ed Gein crafted everything from belts to wastebaskets to soup bowls out of the exhumed and dismembered corpses of middle-aged women. So it’s not entirely surprising that some serial killers have tried their hands at poetry. It’s also not surprising that their poetry is really bad.
Dennis Nilsen wrote a whole slew of verse in homage to the young men he strangled, dismembered, and flushed down the toilet. Here’s a typical example, addressed to one of his dead victims: “I try to smile / Despite the vengeance looking at me, / Covered in your tomato paste, / A man of many parts / I try to forget. / Even the perfume of your passing / Lingers on. / More problems now / With all your bits and pieces. . . .”
As a teenager, Long Islander Joel Rifkin—who murdered and dismembered at least seventeen prostitutes—obviously saw himself as some sort of knight in shining armor, as this scrap of adolescent doggerel suggests: “A siren temptress calls me near / a stranger beyond darkness haze / pleading from within the shadows / and tho
ugh I be helpless to help her / help her I must.” And the ever-romantic Ted Bundy beguiled his lovers with greeting-card verse like: “I send you this kiss / deliver this body to hold. / I sleep with you tonight / with words of love untold.”
What woman could resist such lyrical power?
If the verse written by serial killers has been invariably awful, the case is very different when it comes to poetry about serial killers. Some outstanding writers have produced powerful works that delve into the twisted minds of psychopathic killers. This tradition extends at least as far back as Robert Browning’s 1842 “Porphyria’s Lover,” whose demented speaker conveys his love for his girlfriend by winding her long blond hair around her “little throat” and strangling her to death. More recent poets have also explored the psychology of sociopathic murderers in their work. These include Ai’s “The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981” (about the Atlanta Child Murders) from her 1986 book, Sin; Frank Bidart’s profoundly unsettling “Herbert White,” which can be found in his 1991 collection, In the Western Night; and Thom Gunn’s “Troubadour: Songs for Jeffrey Dahmer” from his 2001 volume, Boss Cupid.
A Preverse Verse
Dr. J. Paul de River’s classic forensic text, The Sexual Criminal (1949), includes a chapter called “The Poetic Nature of the Sado-Masochist,” which reprints a number of works by convicted sex offenders. Reprinted below is one example, entitled “Uncensored Exotics.” As poetry it’s no “Gunga Din,” but it does offer insight into the workings of one psychopathic mind:
Vainly I crouch at the fireside,
For the flames on the hearth cannot warm me.
Vainly I put on coats
Against the cold of the star winds . . .
And my bones are chilled within me
And my blood is become as water.
And now from the void behind me
Comes the piping of the piper,
That senseless, complaining piping,
That tuneless, high, thin piping. . . .
Then, with a shout, I surrender
And leap to do the bidding.
From the wall I snatch my weapons
And rush from the house to the forest.
Where the road winds down the mountain,
Panting I lie in ambush,
Waiting for some poor traveller
Who shall bring me my release.
When he comes with laggard footsteps,
Sudden and fierce is my onslaught.
Like a beast I overcome him
And utterly destroy him.
And I cut out his heart and eat it,
And I guzzle his blood like nectar,
And I cut off his head and scalp him,
And hang his scalp at my belt.
Homeward I walk through the snowdrifts,
And my heart is warm within me,
And my blood and bones are new again
And the star winds cease to chill me. . . .
POISONERS
Compared to the average lust murderer who goes in for torture, mutilation, and evisceration, serial killers who quietly dispatch their victims with poison seem like models of refinement. When it comes to racking up bodies, however, serial poisoners can be every bit as deadly as any blood-crazed psycho.
Particularly back in the 1800s—when forensic pathology was still in its infancy—poisoners could get away with murder for years, since their victims appeared to drop dead of natural causes. Homicidal Housekeepers like Anna Zwanziger and Helene Jegado knocked off dozens of people by serving them arsenic-spiked food. As late as the 1930s, a sociopathic Nurse named Anna Marie Hahn was dishing out lethal doses of arsenic to her patients in Cincinnati’s German community, murdering as many as eleven elderly men over a five-year period. (In 1938, Hahn became the first woman to die in Ohio’s electric chair.)
Though women have a particular preference for poison, they certainly don’t have a monopoly on this insidious murder method. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, England was home to a trio of men who left a trail of poisoned corpses in their wake: Dr. William Palmer (who used antimony tartrate and strychnine to get ride of bothersome relatives and insistent creditors); George Chapman (who poisoned a succession of lovers, also with antimony); and Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (who prescribed strychnine pills to four London prostitutes and claimed he was Jack the Ripper).
The deadly tradition of these Victorian villains was carried on by a twentieth-century British youth named Graham Young. Curious about the effects of antimony tartrate on the human body, the fourteen-year-old chemistry buff (and psychopath) began lacing his family’s food with the deadly substance, eventually killing his stepmother. Found guilty but insane in 1962, he spent the following nine years in a mental asylum. No sooner was he released in 1971 than he took a job at a photographic supply firm and began poisoning fellow employees with thalium. By the time investigators figured out what was going on, five of Young’s co-workers had fallen violently ill and two of them had died after days of agony. “I could have killed them all if I wished,” Young told the arresting officers.
Young’s crimes were the basis of The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, a 1996 film praised by New York Times movie critic Janet Maslin for its “assured style, malevolent wit, and uncompromising intelligence.”
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
Since PC etiquette requires language and behavior that are completely inoffensive, serial killers are about as incorrect as it’s possible for people to be. Bizarrely enough, however, at least one multiple murderer—a young Californian named John Linley Frazier—acted out of his own demented sense of political correctness. From his warped point of view, he was killing to protect the environment.
A high school dropout who worked as an auto mechanic, Frazier evolved into an ecological zealot, apparently under the influence of the psychedelic drugs he began ingesting in the late 1960s. Quitting his job (because he believed that cars contributed to “the death cycle of the planet”), he began drifting from commune to commune. His fierce, obsessive rants against environmental destruction, however, clashed with the mellowed-out sensibilities of his newfound hippie friends, and Frazier soon found himself living like a hermit in a six-foot-square shack in the Northern California woods.
About half a mile away from the shack stood the home of an eye surgeon named Victor Ohta. In the fall of 1970, Frazier broke into the Ohtas’ house and—in his paranoia—decided that the family was the evil personification of American materialism in its most pernicious form. Returning shortly afterward with a .38 revolver, Frazier managed to tie up the entire family (father, mother, and two sons), plus Dr. Ohta’s secretary. After lecturing them on the damage done to the environment by capitalistic society, Frazier shot and killed all five people and dumped their bodies in the swimming pool. Next, he typed out a note promising death to all those who would “ruin the environment,” set the house on fire, and fled.
With the help of local hippies—who recognized the crackpot ideas in the note as Frazier’s—police quickly nabbed the suspect. During his 1971 trial, Frazier showed up in court with one side of his head shaved completely bald, the other side sporting shoulder-length hair and half a beard. In spite of his flagrantly bizarre behavior, he was ruled sane and sentenced to the gas chamber. Frazier appeared to welcome the decision, since, as he said, he preferred death to spending his life under the control of “fascist pigs.” When the Supreme Court abolished capital punishment, however, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
PORNOGRAPHY
See X-Rated.
POST-HOMICIDAL DEPRESSION
Sick as it sounds, the fact is that for many serial killers murder is a substitute for sex. The act of plunging a sharp, pointed object into the writhing body of another person is the equivalent of intercourse. Many lust murderers actually achieve orgasm while stabbing (or beating or strangling) their victims to death. So it’s not surprising that following a murder, many serial killers experience the equivalent of postcoital depression—the emotional
letdown that sometimes descends after sex.
Indeed, so common is this experience among lust murderers that one expert on the subject, Dr. Joel Norris, actually describes depression as one of the standard Phases of serial murder. According to Dr. Norris, many serial killers suffer severe bouts of dejection following a murder because the killing fails to live up to their fantasies. Moreover, even the most cold-blooded killers can sometimes be hit with a belated sense of horror and guilt after perpetrating a particularly vicious crime. Occasionally, they suffer such intense despair that they actually attempt suicide (see Death Wish).
Whatever the cause of their depression, the response is often a binge of drinking or drug taking, which dulls their sense of emptiness and despair. Soon their inner compulsions rise up again. Like addicts who can’t stop getting high—even though they know that they will suffer an inevitable crash—they go prowling for their next “fix” of blood.
POWER TOOLS
The chain saw is the favorite weapon of serial killers. At least that’s what you’d think if your concept of serial killers came entirely from the movies. During the 1970s, Hollywood churned out a spate of low-budget splatter films with titles like Driller Killer, The Toolbox Murders, The Bloody Mutilators, and The Ghastly Ones. The psychos in these movies wielded more power tools than Tim Allen on Home Improvement: drills, bucksaws, chain saws, you name it. The power-tool motif made it to the big time in a pair of Brian De Palma movies from the early 1980s—Body Double (featuring an electric drill bit large enough to qualify for The Guinness Book of World Records) and Scarface (which contains what is arguably the most harrowing chain-saw mutilation sequence in cinematic history).
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 22
