Fatal mistakes of this kind can happen anywhere, of course. But they are particularly common in totalitarian nations, where “justice” is meted out with alarming speed. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Nazi authorities periodically picked up and executed suspected deviants for a series of lust murders taking place in the town of Kupenick, just east of Berlin. The real culprit, however—a sociopath named Bruno Ludke—wasn’t identified until 1943, by which time he had, according to his own admission, committed an astonishing eighty-five murders.
A similar story took place in the former USSR. In 1978, the savaged corpse of a teenage girl was found in a forest outside the industrial city Rostov-on-Don. The Soviet police quickly arrested and executed a known sex offender. Unfortunately, they shot the wrong man. By the time they identified the right one—Andrei Chikatilo, the “Mad Beast of Rostov”—he had butchered more than fifty women and children.
The Milquetoast Murderer
The story of John Reginald Christie and his fall-guy neighbor, Timothy Evans—one of the most sensational cases in the annals of modern British crime—is told with understated power in Richard Fleischer’s absorbing 1970 film, 10 Rillington Place. Shot on location at the actual murder house (which was torn down the following year to make way for a parking garage), the movie achieves its genuinely creepy power by presenting the sensational facts of the case in a subdued, low-key manner, consistent with the apparent drabness of the killer himself.
Richard Attenborough—who went on to achieve fame as the Oscar-winning director of Gandhi and other high-prestige pictures—turns in a striking performance as the homicidal Milquetoast who raped and murdered eight women over a thirteen-year span, storing their corpses in and around his flat at the infamous address. Equally good are John Hurt as the pathetically dim-witted Evans and Judy Geeson as his wife, Beryl. Highly recommended for those who enjoy subdued, tasteful psycho films. If you’re looking for hardcore gore—forget about it.
X CHROMOSOME
During the 1960s, some scientists tried to establish a link between violence and excessive masculinity. According to their research, the presence of an extra Y (or male) chromosome made a man more prone to violent crime (see Y Chromosome).
Nowadays, this theory isn’t given much credence. Interestingly, however, there has been a documented case of a serial killer suffering from the opposite defect. Bobby Joe Long, who murdered ten women in the 1970s, had an extra X (or female) chromosome in each cell of his body. As a result, his glands produced an inordinate amount of the female hormone estrogen, causing him to grow breasts during puberty.
His humiliation over this condition may well have contributed to his mental imbalance—though it was certainly not his only problem. Wildly accident prone, Long suffered a string of grievous Head Injuries throughout his life. And like so many serial killers, he was also subjected to what sociologists like to call “negative parenting.” Among other things, his mother slept in bed with him until he was thirteen.
XEROX
Contrary to popular belief, most serial killers are happy to commit their crimes in utter obscurity. They enjoy living in the shadows, where they can pursue their unspeakable pleasures without drawing attention to their identities.
Other serial killers, however, are the opposite. They are publicity hounds. Their perverted pleasure is reinforced by playing mind games with the police and the media. This often takes the form of written taunts—a phenomenon that dates at least as far back as the Jack the Ripper case. Sending such letters is the psycho-killer’s way of thumbing his nose at his pursuers, of displaying his supposed superiority. “Catch me if you can,” these messages seem to jeer.
Of course, with advances in modern forensic science, sending an original letter runs its risks—the stationery, for example, might be traced back to the store where it was sold, and from there to the purchaser. One way to get around this problem is to send a copy. That’s exactly what happened in the case of the self-styled BTK Strangler—though this precaution actually ended up giving police an intriguing lead in the case.
As he terrorized the city of Wichita by binding, torturing, and killing at least seven victims, BTK kept up a steady one-way correspondence with the media. On February 10, 1978, he sent a letter to a local TV station in which he claimed to have murdered seven victims and petulantly asked, “How many do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?” The letter, however, was not an original but a Xerox.
In the fall of 1984, a member of the task force set up to identify the elusive serial killer took this piece of evidence to the Xerox company headquarters in Syracuse, New York. Technicians there determined that it was a fifth-generation copy, making it impossible to trace. They were, however, able to establish exactly where the killer made his copy. The Xerox machine was located at the Wichita State University library. Unfortunately, without any other leads, the police couldn’t use this information to narrow down the number of suspects any further.
The investigation continued to spin its wheels until 2003 when the BTK Strangler decided to contact the media once again. Included in his new set of correspondence were other Xeroxed items: photocopies of a woman’s driver’s license along with copies of photos of her dead body. The killer had been fond of taking mementoes from the scenes of his crimes, so it wasn’t surprising that he had held on to this woman’s license. What was surprising was the identity of the woman. Vicki Wegerle had been found murdered in 1986, nine years after the last known BTK killing. Until they received this package, the police had no idea that Wegerle was another one of the Strangler’s victims.
When they finally made an arrest in the case the following year, they had another murder to add to killer’s résumé of terror.
The Xerox company also figured in the case of the worst episode of Mass Murder in Hawaiian history. On November 2, 1999, a disgruntled forty-one-year-old copy machine repairman named Bryan Uyesugi went on a rampage at his workplace, slaughtering seven of his fellow Xerox employees with a semi-automatic handgun. Despite defense efforts to portray him as mentally incompetent—the old “tormented by demons” ploy—Uyesugi was found guilty and sentenced to life without parole. His appalling act has earned him everlasting infamy in the annals of Hawaiian crime as the “Xerox Killer.”
X-RATED
According to the experts from the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, perhaps as many as 80 percent of serial killers display a fondness for hardcore pornography, particularly movies and books featuring violent, sadomasochistic sex. Of course, this isn’t exactly the world’s most startling finding. Indeed, it would be far more surprising to learn that Horton Hears a Who was Henry Lee Lucas’s favorite book or that Jeffrey Dahmer was a big fan of the Nancy Drew series.
Still, various moral crusaders have used this statistic to help bolster their argument that pornography—along with other types of transgressive entertainment (like “slasher” movies and “death metal” rock)—is a leading cause of sexual homicide. Social scientists remain divided on this issue. For every psychologist who insists that there is a direct, causal link between X-rated entertainment and violent crime, there are others who argue the opposite—that material that depicts graphic sex and violence may actually help defuse aggressive impulses.
In short, the relationship between media violence and real-life crime remains extremely murky. It is worth noting, however, that, for as long as there has been such a thing as popular culture, it has been blamed for everything from juvenile delinquency to multiple murder.
A hundred years before porn videos and splatter movies, the favorite target of social reformers was the genre known as “dime novels”—cheap little paperbacks relating the lurid adventures of bloodthirsty bad men, cutthroat pirates, and two-fisted detectives. Writing in the late 1800s, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell—America’s first female physician—warned that “the dangers arising from such vicious literature cannot be overestimated by parents.” The appalling case of the Boston child-fiend, Jesse Po
meroy, seemed to bear out Blackwell’s claim. The grotesque-looking Pomeroy began torturing younger children when he was eleven. He graduated to murder at fourteen, savaging a ten-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy. After his arrest, outraged moralists blamed his crimes on the corrupting influence of dime novels like Desperate Dan, the Dastard and The Pirates of the Pecos. Unfortunately, their argument was somewhat undermined by the fact that Pomeroy had apparently never read a book in his life.
In our own times, other forms of pop entertainment have been attacked for their presumably pernicious influence. In the 1950s, horror comics were condemned as a major cause of juvenile delinquency. More recently, America’s rising crime rate has been blamed on everything from Friday the 13th movies to gangsta rap.
In truth, it is very hard to establish a straightforward link between media images and human behavior, particularly when it comes to serial killers, whose minds work in such bizarre ways. The notorious 1930s cannibal-killer, Albert Fish, found certain passages in the Bible wildly arousing. Charles Manson’s murderous fantasies were inspired by one of the most benign works of popular art ever created—the Beatles’ White Album.
German sex murderer Heinrich Pommerencke—known as the “Beast of the Black Forest”—is another case in point. One night in February 1959, Pommerencke went to the movies, and after seeing a bunch of women cavorting on screen, he became convinced that all females deserved to die. Shortly afterward, he committed the first of four savage rape-murders.
The film that inspired this rampage? Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.
Pornography Made Me Do It
The night before his execution, Ted Bundy gave his final interview to evangelist James Dobson. With death just hours away, Bundy—the slayer of anywhere from thirty to fifty young women—had a message for America: Beware of pornography. Bundy confessed that at an early age, he had become addicted to images of sexual violence and claimed that his exposure to brutal pornography had turned him into a sex killer.
Antiporn crusaders embraced Bundy’s statement. Here, they argued, was conclusive proof of everything they’d been claiming—pornography leads to ultimate evil.
There were a couple of problems with Bundy’s statement, however. For one thing, he was born in 1946, which means that he grew up during the 1950s—an era when it was considerably harder to come by sadomasochistic porn than it is today. Back in the Eisenhower era, you couldn’t just stroll into your neighborhood video shop and rent Teenage Bondage Sluts from the “Adults Only” section. If Bundy was really getting off on violent pornography back then, there must already have been something dark and twisted inside him that was driving him to go out and hunt for these images.
There is another serious problem with Bundy’s admission, conveniently ignored by antiporn activists: Bundy was a psychopathic liar. For ten years, he had done everything possible to deny his guilt. Even when the jig was finally up, he found a way to shrug off responsibility for his atrocities by putting the blame on outside influences.
He wasn’t responsible for his crimes. Pornography made him do it.
X RAYS
In the view of many crime buffs, the single most perverted killer in American history was the cannibalistic pedophile Albert Fish. Perhaps the most compelling evidence in support of this opinion were a series of X rays taken shortly after Fish’s arrest for the kidnapping and murder of twelve-year-old Grace Budd.
Interviewed in his jail cell by two state-appointed psychiatrists who were trying to evaluate his sanity, Fish revealed that—as an act of contrition for killing the girl—he had purchased a pack of sewing needles and, using a thimble, had shoved five of them up behind his testicles so deeply that they had remained permanently embedded inside his body.
Though this story seemed too outrageous to believe, Fish was a degenerate of such extravagant proportions that the authorities decided to check it out. The old man was taken from prison to a nearby hospital, where his pelvic region was X-rayed by the hospital’s chief radiologist.
One of the X rays of Albert Fish’s pelvic region, showing more than two dozen needles shoved into his lower body
(New York Daily News)
As it turned out, Fish’s incredible claim was actually an understatement. The X rays clearly revealed a number of sharp, thin objects scattered throughout the area of the old man’s groin and lower abdomen. These objects—which resembled long, black splinters floating in the bright tissue around and between the hip bones—were unmistakably needles. Their location—around the rectum and bladder, just below the tip of the spine, and in the muscles of the groin—made it clear that they had been inserted into Fish’s body from below, evidently through his perineum, the flesh between his anus and scrotum.
Unbelievable as it seemed, the old man had been telling the truth—or at least part of it. He had told the psychiatrists that he had punished himself by pushing five needles into his body. But when the physician counted the objects in the X rays, he came up with a significantly different figure. Lodged inside Fish’s body were no fewer than twenty-seven needles! Among his dizzying array of masochistic pleasures, the wildly perverted old man had been sticking sewing needles into his own groin for years (see Paraphilia).
“These X rays are unique in the history of medical science.”
DR. FREDERICK WERTHAM,
commenting on the X rays of Albert Fish’s pelvic region
YARDS
A few years back, the satirical paper The Onion ran a pseudo-news story headlined “Neighbors Remember Serial Killer as Serial Killer.” The article quoted (the entirely fictitious) Will Rowell of Dunedin, Florida, who recalled his neighbor, Eddie Lee Curtis, as “kind of a murderous, insane, serial killer-type of fellow. . . . He sort of kept to himself, killing nurses, having sex with their corpses, and then burying their bodies in his backyard.”
As Homer Simpson might say, it’s funny because it’s true. While some suburban serial killers go to great lengths to dispose of their victims (Long Island psycho Joel Rifkin, for example, routinely drove all the way to New Jersey to get rid of the dismembered remains of the prostitutes he had lured to his home and then strangled), others are content simply to bury them in their own backyards.
Of the nine young women who met hideous deaths at the hands of the British Killer Couple Fred and Rose West, for example, a number—including their own seventeen-year-old daughter—ended up interred in the Wests’ backyard garden.
Billy Mansfield, a refugee from a trailer park in Weeki Wachee, Florida, murdered twenty-nine-year-old Renee Salings shortly after relocating to Santa Cruz, California. A few months later, authorities in Florida dug up Mansfield’s property back in Weeki Wachee and discovered the remains of four other women buried in his backyard.
Another Santa Cruz psychopath, Edmund Kemper, the “Coed Butcher,” began using his yard for diabolical purposes at the tender age of nine, when he dug a hole in back of his house and buried the family cat alive. Years later, after graduating to sadistic sex murder, he fatally shot a nineteen-year-old student named Cynthia Schall, transported her body home in the trunk of his car, and kept it overnight in his closet. The following day, while his mother was at work, he dissected the corpse in the bathtub, then buried Schall’s head in his backyard with her face turned toward his bedroom window. “Sometimes at night,” he later confessed, “I talked to her, saying love things, the way you do to a girlfriend or wife.”
Of course, planting corpses in your own backyard can be a risky business. In the early 1990s, for example, Herb Baumeister—a seemingly respectable Midwestern family man with a depraved double life—began trolling the gay hangouts of Indianapolis. Whenever his wife took the kids off for an overnight visit to Grandma, Herb would bring a male pickup back to his handsome suburban house, strangle the young man during sex, then dispose of the corpse in his wooded backyard.
All went smoothly until 1994, when one of Herb’s sons, playing in the yard, stumbled upon the half-buried skeleton of a human be
ing. Fortunately for Herb, his wife, Julie, had a highly developed capacity for denial. When she confronted Herb about this alarming find, he fed her a cock-and-bull story: the skeleton, he claimed, was just an old anatomical specimen he had inherited from his physician father and decided to discard. Julie chose to believe him.
Eventually—thanks to the efforts of a private investigator, hired by the mother of one of the missing young men—Baumeister was identified as a suspect. When the police searched his property, they turned up thousands of human bone fragments—jawbones, thighbones, fingers, ribs, vertebrae, all stripped clean by animals and the elements, some partly burned. Experts estimated that, altogether, the skeletal fragments constituted the remains of eleven victims.
By the time the digging was over, Baumeister himself was dead. Fleeing to Canada, he committed suicide in an Ontario park on the evening of July 3, 1996, shooting himself in the head with a .357 Magnum after eating a peanut butter sandwich.
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 31
