Jesse Pomeroy
Harold Schechter, Fiend (2000)
Richard Ramirez
Clifford Lindecker, Night Stalker (1991)
Joel Rifkin
Robert Mladinich, The Joel Rifkin Story (2001)
Dr. Harold Shipman
Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie, Prescription for Murder (2000)
Charles Starkweather
Michael Newton, Waste Land (1998)
Peter Sutcliffe (“The Yorkshire Ripper”)
David A.Yallop, Deliver Us from Evil (1980)
Jane Toppan
Harold Schechter, Fatal (2003)
Fred and Rosemary West
Colin Wilson, The Corpse Garden (1998)
Aileen Wuornos
Sue Russell, Lethal Intent (2002)
Zodiac
Robert Graysmith, Zodiac Unmasked (2003)
Psycho Fiction
One of the many things that distinguish Hannibal Lecter from real-life serial killers is that—while passionate about classical music, Renaissance literature, and fine Italian wines—he seems to care nothing about sex. Certainly we never see him indulge in anything as mundane as erotic activity. He appears to be a singularly celibate serial killer, who derives his deepest pleasure from dining on a perfectly sautéed human liver while savoring a first-rate Barolo and listening to the latest recording of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
For a seemingly asexual man, however, Lecter has produced a prodigious number of offspring: namely the hundreds (if not thousands) of make-believe serial killers who have pervaded popular fiction since the runaway success of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. Thanks to Harris—the first pop novelist to hit the jackpot by tapping into America’s obsessive fascination with psycho-killers—the serial murderer has become the favorite monster of modern-day thriller writers, who wrack their brains dreaming up ever more diabolical homicidal maniacs with fantastically elaborate MOs. By now, there are far too many books in this genre to list here, though Professor Martin Kich of Wright State University has compiled an excellent bibliography, available online at www.wright.edu/~martin.kich.
Here are a dozen of our personal favorites (a few of them golden oldies):
1. Psycho. The granddaddy of psycho-killer novels. This pulp classic by the late great Robert Bloch transformed the real-life atrocities of Ed Gein into genuine myth and inspired one of the masterworks of American cinema.
2. American Gothic. A lesser-known (but in certain ways even more sus-penseful) novel by Bloch, based on the crimes of Chicago’s nineteenth-century Bluebeard, Dr. H. H. Holmes.
3. American Psycho. Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious bestseller—which set off a feminist firestorm when it was originally published—is actually a savagely dark comedy about Yuppie consumerism, though its scenes of stomach-churning sadism often obscure its basically satirical intent.
4. Red Dragon. Hannibal Lecter made his debut appearance in this nail-biter by Thomas Harris. One of the most sheerly suspenseful thrillers of modern times with a knockout ending that, bizarrely, Hollywood has failed to get right in both cinematic versions, Michael Mann’s 1986 Manhunter and Bret Ratner’s 2002 Red Dragon.
5. The Silence of the Lambs. The Gone with the Wind of psychokiller novels. A tour de force of horror-suspense, this novel by Harris—the second to feature Hannibal Lecter—stands as the yardstick against which all other fiction in the serial-killer genre must be measured.
6. The Killer Inside Me. The narrator of Jim Thompson’s pulp classic—a small-town sheriff who torments people by speaking in mind-numbing clichés when he isn’t committing horrendous acts of homicide—is not, strictly speaking, a serial killer. Still, this powerfully unsettling, darkly hilarious novel is one of the best psychological portraits of a psychopath in print.
7. Zombie. Joyce Carol Oates crawls into the mind of a Jeffrey Dahmer-like psycho who dreams of creating his own personal Zombie by using ice picks to perform lobotomies on living victims. Not for the squeamish!
8. The Alienist. An intensely evocative historical thriller by Caleb Carr about a psychiatrist tracking down a serial killer in turn-of-the-century New York City. The novel features a cameo appearance by the real-life “Boy Fiend,” Jesse Pomeroy (see Juveniles).
9. Child of God. Written in the trademark lyrical style of author Cormac McCarthy, this haunting novel tells the story of an Eddie Gein-like necrophile named Lester Ballard who holes up in a Tennessee cave with his unholy trophies, emerging periodically to seek new victims.
10. In the Cut. Susanna Moore’s brutally suspenseful erotic thriller deals with a New York City college professor who finds herself involved in a highly charged sexual affair with a cop who may also be a serial killer. The novel builds to a shattering climax, completely lost in the disappointing 2003 film version starring Meg Ryan.
11. Darkly Dreaming Dexter. In this engaging novel, Jeff Lindsay manages the unlikely feat of creating an utterly endearing serial killer. Dexter Morgan, the protagonist of this delightfully offbeat thriller, is a police forensic specialist by day and a sadistic murderer in his spare time. What makes him such an appealing character—besides his wit and self-deprecating humor—is his strict code of serial killer ethics: he preys only on psychos sicker than himself.
12. 13 Steps Down. Readers looking for hardcore horror and edge-of-the-seat suspense may find this book disappointing. But for those who cherish stylish prose, complex characterization, and psychological subtlety, this novel by acclaimed British mystery writer Ruth Rendell—about an eccentric spinster landlady and her sociopathic tenant, a fitness-equipment repairman obsessed with the legendary serial killer Reg Christie—is a rare literate treat.
For Bibliophiles Only
Patterson Smith, an antiquarian bookseller and social historian, specializes in rare and out-of-print crime volumes. Smith offers everything from hard-to-find reference works (like a reprint of Thomas S. Duke’s 1910 classic, Celebrated Criminal Cases of America) to oddities like Killer Fiction, a collection of absolutely hair-raising stories by convicted sex killer G. J. Schaefer.
For information, contact: Patterson Smith, 23 Prospect Terrace, Mont-clair, NJ 07402.
RECORDS
No, we’re not referring to Guns N’ Roses’ version of Charlie Manson’s “Look at Your Game, Girl” or “Heidnik’s House of Horrors” by the Serial Killers (you’ll find those catchy numbers covered under Songs). We’re talking about something much grimmer: killers who can claim the deadly distinction of having slain the most victims.
The serial-murder rate has increased so alarmingly in recent years that some criminologists talk in terms of an “epidemic.” One indication of how scary the situation has become is the escalating number of victims attributed to individual killers. In 1888, the Western world was horrified by the deeds of Jack the Ripper—but Saucy Jack’s total of five victims wouldn’t even rate a mention on the national news nowadays.
By 1896, Jack’s record had already been eclipsed by Dr. H. H. Holmes, who killed a minimum of nine victims (he himself claimed twenty-seven, and some crime historians put the total in the hundreds). Thirty years later, Earle Leonard Nelson set the homicidal record in our country, strangling twenty-two women during a savage, cross-country killing spree. His contemporary Carl Panzram fell just short of that number, confessing to twenty-one murders (in addition to a slew of other crimes).
During the past twenty-five years, each new record has been broken almost as soon as it was set. In 1973, Juan Corona officially became the most prolific serial killer in American history when he was convicted of slaying twenty-five California transients. But by the end of the decade, Ted Bundy had slain at least twenty-eight and John Wayne Gacy thirty-three.
And still the numbers kept rising. In Russia, Andrei Chikatilo was accused of fifty-two sadistic slayings and suspected of even more. Gary Ridgway—the long-elusive “Green River Killer”—eventually confessed to forty-eight murders, though there may have been as many as sixty. As ap
palling as these figures are, they pale before the estimated two hundred and fifty murders committed by Dr. Harold Shipman, England’s most prolific serial killer (see Doctors).
When it comes to killers who have claimed the highest total, the all-time champions are America’s own Henry Lee Lucas and the South American lust slayer Pedro Lopez (aka the “Monster of the Andes”), each of whom confessed to more than three hundred murders. Lucas, however, ultimately retracted his story. As for Lopez—who was convicted in 1980 of fifty-seven homicides—the true number of his victims has never been definitively established.
Henry Lee Lucas; from Murderers! trading card set
(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)
REFRIGERATORS
Serial killers have been known to use their household appliances for purposes that the friendly folks at Maytag and KitchenAid have never dreamed of—not even in their worst nightmares. Living in a decaying old farmhouse without electricity, Edward Gein was forced to rely on time-consuming tanning methods to preserve his collection of anatomical Trophies. Other serial killers, however—whose homes were equipped with all the modern conveniences—had a much easier time of it. To preserve a favorite body part, all they had to do was pop it into the fridge.
Douglas Clark—the “Sunset Strip Slayer,” who killed a string of Hollywood hookers in 1980—had a particular fetish for decapitated female heads. His girlfriend, Carol Bundy, indulged this perversion by applying makeup to the head of one of Clark’s victims, a twenty-year-old streetwalker. Clark stored this grotesque keepsake in his apartment refrigerator, occasionally removing it for the purpose of oral sex.
Seven years later, in March 1987, Philadelphia police raided the home of a maniac named Gary Heidnik and discovered a trio of half-starved women chained up to the plumbing in his cellar. Heidnik, as it turned out, had abducted and enslaved a total of six victims altogether, subjecting them to months of rape and torture. Searching the rest of the house, the officers quickly discovered that the horrors were not confined to the so-called Torture Dungeon. In the freezer compartment of the kitchen refrigerator, they found a human arm, intended for a cannibal meal. Among his other atrocities, Heidnik liked to mix chopped-up human flesh with dog food and force his starving captives to devour the unholy meal.
Other serial killers, like the German lust murderer Joachim Kroll, had stocked their refrigerators with human flesh to satisfy their own cannibalistic cravings. The same was true of Jeffrey Dahmer, whose refrigerator contained a wide assortment of body parts, including heads, intestines, kidneys, lungs, livers, and a heart.
RELIGION
See Zealots.
RIPPERS
According to most crime historians, Jack the Ripper is the seminal psychokiller of the modern era—the granddaddy of all serial murderers. So it’s only fitting that some of his descendants have been named after him.
His earliest namesake stalked the countryside of southern France: Joseph Vacher, the “French Ripper,” who savaged almost a dozen victims in the late 1890s. Since that time, most of the killers christened with the Ripper name have been compatriots of the original.
During the London blitz of World War II, while Hitler’s Luftwaffe rained terror from the sky, the city was confronted with a very different kind of menace—a homicidal fiend who stalked and slaughtered defenseless women. On February 9, 1942, this bloodthirsty butcher struck for the first time, strangling a female pharmacist in an air-raid shelter. The following day, he picked up a prostitute in Picadilly Circus, then—after accompanying her back to her Soho flat—slit her throat and mutilated her genitals with a can opener. Two more victims followed on succeeding nights, both subjected to hideous mutilations. The perpetrator of these atrocities—who turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old RAF cadet named Gordon Cummins—was caught after two more attempted killings, both of which he botched. His ghastly deeds, so reminiscent of those of the original “Whitechapel Horrors,” earned him the moniker the “Blackout Ripper.”
Another of Jack’s homicidal heirs was Peter Sutcliffe, aka the “Yorkshire Ripper.” A thirtyish truck driver and former gravedigger, Sutcliffe—who believed he was acting on orders from God—conducted a five-year campaign of carnage that commenced in the mid-1970s. Using his favorite weapons—ball peen hammer, chisel, carving knife, and screwdriver—he attacked more than two dozen women, killing thirteen. Though some of his victims were coeds, his primary targets were prostitutes. When Sutcliffe was finally arrested in 1981 after the largest manhunt in British history, his younger brother, Carl, asked him why he had done it. “I were just cleaning the streets,” Sutcliffe replied.
The crimes of Cummins and Sutcliffe were clearly in the tradition of the original “Whitechapel Horrors.” But these two killers differed from Jack the Ripper in one important respect: both of them were eventually caught. One serial killer of Prostitutes who eluded the police was the shadowy killer who strangled half a dozen women in the early to mid-1960s. After dispatching his victims, he dumped their naked bodies in various places around London—an MO that inspired his punning tabloid moniker. The killer (who has never been officially identified) was dubbed “Jack the Stripper.”
RITUAL
Ritual killings committed by devil-worshipping cultists happen all the time in horror fiction and fantasy but rarely, if ever, in real life. The FBI has yet to document a single instance of such ceremonial sacrifice in America (see Satanism). On the other hand, bizarre ritualistic patterns are commonplace among serial killers. Though this behavior often appears random to an outside observer, it clearly possesses some deep, terrible significance to the killer himself, who is compelled to repeat it again and again.
Often the pattern involves a particular way of killing. Each of Jack the Ripper’s crimes culminated in a kind of ritual evisceration—as if he were enacting some primitive sacrifice in which the victim’s entrails were removed and offered up to the gods. Another unidentified serial murderer, the 1930s madman known as the “Cleveland Torso Killer,” methodically dismembered his victims and made off with their heads, which he apparently kept as ritual Trophies—in much the same way that aboriginal warriors collect the scalps and shrunken heads of their foes.
At other times, the killer will perform some compulsive ritual as an integral part of the crime. John Wayne Gacy turned his hideous murders into a grotesque ceremony by reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd”) while slowly garroting his victims. The “Green River Killer”—who murdered a string of young women in the Seattle area during the early 1980s—left weird, pyramid-shaped stones in the vaginas of his victims. Ed Gein—in unwitting emulation of those Aztec priests who arrayed themselves in the flayed skin of sacrificial victims—liked to parade around in apparel fashioned from the human flesh of dissected female corpses. And Albert “Boston Strangler” DeSalvo ritualistically left his victims looking like grotesque, gift-wrapped holiday presents. After strangling a woman, he would tie the ligature—usually a scarf, stocking, or bathrobe sash—into a big, ornamental bow. In one case, he also left a greeting card propped up against the victim’s foot.
RUSSIA
For decades, leaders of the Soviet Union maintained that crime was not a problem in their country. Thievery and murder, they insisted, were symptoms of Western-style capitalistic decadence. The collapse of communism in the early 1980s, of course, revealed all sorts of problems that had been hidden by the Iron Curtain. In particular, the 1992 trial of Andrei Chikatilo—the “Rostov Ripper”—demonstrated that while the USSR might not have been able to supply its citizens with basic consumer items, it could certainly produce serial killers every bit as terrifying as any American psycho. Moreover, though Chikatilo was undoubtedly the most savage of Russian sex killers, he was not unique: multiple murderers had been prowling through the Soviet Union from the earliest days of the Communist regime.
In the early 1920s, thirty-three men fell victim to a sociopathic horse trader named Vasili Komaroff, aka the “Wolf of Moscow.” After luring a
prospective customer to his stable, Komaroff—assisted by his wife—would bludgeon or strangle the victim to death, strip him of his possessions, then truss up the body, stuff it into a sack, and deposit it in an empty lot somewhere in the city. When authorities finally caught up with him, Komaroff claimed that he killed solely for money—an unlikely explanation, since his nearly three dozen murders netted him a grand total of $26.40. Clearly, there were other, darker motives at work—but the Soviet authorities were much less interested in fathoming his psychology than in putting him to death as promptly as possible. Komaroff and his wife were executed by a firing squad in June 1923.
In more recent years, as the serial-murder rate started burgeoning in the West, the Soviet Union also had its share of grisly killers. In 1964, an unemployed Moscow actor named Vladimir Ionosyan butchered five people with an Axe. Ten years later, a shadowy killer nicknamed “Ivan the Ripper” slaughtered eleven Moscow women. Authorities eventually arrested a man for the killings, but—in typically secretive Soviet style—they never divulged who the culprit was or how the case was resolved.
In the 1980s—while America was confronted with the gruesome likes of Henry Lee Lucas and Gary Heidnik—Soviet authorities caught up with Gennadily Mikhasevich, who used his position as an auxiliary policeman to trap and strangle thirty-three women. Another homicidal monster of that decade was Nikolai Dzumagalies—one of the most frightening and ferocious serial killers ever spawned in the USSR (or anywhere else, for that matter). Like Francis Dolarhyde, the terrifying psychocreep in Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon—who savages his victims with a lethal set of dentures—Dzumagalies (or “Metal Fang,” as he came to be nicknamed) sported scary, white metal false teeth. Luring women to a lonely riverbank at night, he proceeded to rape them, stab them, and carve up their bodies. Then he roasted the flesh and shared it with friends, who—believing they were partaking of beef—were turned into unwitting cannibals.
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 25
