Y CHROMOSOME
Serial murder is such an overwhelmingly evil act that it’s natural for people to wonder why. Why would a human being commit such a monstrous crime? There’s a desperate need to find an explanation that would make sense of this incomprehensible horror. For at least a hundred years, scientists have been searching for a single, identifiable cause for criminal violence. In 1968, they finally came up with one. The answer to the question Why? turned out to be . . . Y.
More precisely, it turned out to be a Y chromosome. As everyone who’s taken high school biology knows, there are two sex chromosomes, X (female) and Y (male). Every cell in the average man contains one of each. A few men, however, have an extra Y, or male, chromosome—a condition known as the XYY Syndrome. Once they made this discovery, scientists began theorizing that this extra dash of maleness made its possessor even more masculine—i.e., crude, aggressive, and violent—than normal.
Their theory seemed to be borne out by the case of Richard Speck, the notorious multiple murderer who, in 1966, slaughtered eight student nurses in their Chicago apartment. Speck, who was diagnosed as an XYY type, fit the image of a supercharged male brute to perfection. He was big, dumb, and savage, with a face ravaged by acne scars and a “Born to Raise Hell” tattoo proudly displayed on one arm. At his trial, his attorney argued that Speck wasn’t responsible for his crimes because he was suffering from XYY Syndrome. In effect, Speck’s tattoo was telling the truth—his extra male chromosome had made him bad from birth.
There was only one problem with this defense. Speck, it turned out, had been misdiagnosed. He was normal—at least from a chromosomal point of view.
Undaunted, proponents of the theory pointed out that there is an unusually high proportion of XYY types in the prison population. But these findings were shown to be skewed. The vast majority of men born with XYY Syndrome display no abnormally violent tendencies. By now, the theory has been largely discredited. As of this writing, serial murder remains what it has always been—an unfathomable evil. Or as the Bible puts it, a “mystery of iniquity.”
The “Yorkshire Ripper”
Peter Sutcliffe; from Bloody Visions trading cards
(© & ™ 1995 M. H. Price and Shel-Tone Publications. All rights reserved.)
The five-year search for the homicidal maniac known as the “Yorkshire Ripper” was the biggest manhunt in British history. The police interviewed more than 200,000 people, took more than 30,000 statements, searched more than 20,000 homes. In the course of this mammoth investigation, a young truck driver named Peter Sutcliffe was called in for questioning no fewer than nine times—so often that his co-workers jokingly nicknamed him “Jack the Ripper.” Each time, however, his interrogators swallowed Sutcliffe’s alibi and let him go free.
On January 2, 1981, police discovered—almost accidentally—that Sutcliffe was, in fact, the killer. By then, thirteen women, ranging in age from sixteen to forty-seven, had been savagely murdered—bludgeoned, stabbed, and mutilated.
Sutcliffe led the kind of schizoid life so characteristic of serial killers. On the one hand, he was a reliable worker and devoted husband. On the other, he was a woman-hating sociopath whose crimes were motivated by intense sexual loathing. Sutcliffe himself claimed that his vendetta against Prostitutes began after a hooker cheated him of money. But the roots of his pathology clearly ran much deeper. As a teenager, he took a job as a mortuary attendant and enjoyed manipulating corpses as though they were ventriloquist dummies. He also spent hours at a local wax museum, transfixed by a display that showed the devastating effects of VD on the human body.
Sutcliffe began by assaulting prostitutes with homemade bludgeons—socks weighted with gravel or bricks. His first few victims survived these attacks. A twenty-eight-year-old hooker named Wilma McCann wasn’t as lucky. On October 30, 1975, Sutcliffe smashed the back of her skull with a ballpeen hammer, then stabbed her fourteen times. Three months later, he killed again. Following this second homicide, Sutcliffe’s murderous impulses seemed to subside. A year later, however, they erupted with a vengeance. In the fifteen months between February 1977 and May 1978, he killed seven more women, bludgeoning them first with his hammer, then savaging them with his knife. In some cases, he mutilated the genitalia. Most of these victims were streetwalkers, though one was a sixteen-year-old shop assistant who had been on her way home from a disco.
With all of northern England in a panic, police mounted an all-out hunt for the killer. They were sidetracked, however, by a tape recording they received in June 1979, which purported to be from the Ripper. While police pursued this lead (which turned out to be a hoax), Sutcliffe continued to kill. By then, he was no longer restricting himself to prostitutes. Sutcliffe’s final four victims were female college students and young working women.
His arrest came in January 1981 when a police officer on stakeout—Sergeant Robert Ring—spotted Sutcliffe in a car with a prostitute. A check of Sutcliffe’s plates revealed that the car was stolen. Before being hauled down to the station house, Sutcliffe asked for permission to go behind some shrubbery and “pee.” Sergeant Ring obliged.
The next morning, while Sutcliffe was still being questioned, a lightbulb went off in Ring’s head. Rushing back to the spot where he’d arrested Sutcliffe, he searched behind the shrubbery and discovered a ball-peen hammer and a knife. Confronted with this evidence, Sutcliffe quickly confessed. He attempted to plead insanity, claiming that God’s voice, emanating from a grave, had ordered him to kill. The court was not impressed. The “Yorkshire Ripper” was sentenced to life in prison.
ZEALOTS
There are plenty of people around who blame our country’s social ills—including our epidemic of violent crime—on the loss of old-fashioned religious values, as if the murder rate would miraculously decline if Americans spent fewer hours in front of the TV and more time studying the Bible. Unfortunately, there is a slight problem with this theory. Some of the most monstrous killers in American history were religious fanatics who could recite Scripture from memory and—when they weren’t busy torturing children or mutilating corpses—loved to do nothing better than read the Good Book.
Albert Fish, the cannibalistic monster who spent a lifetime preying on little children, is a terrifying case in point. From his earliest years, Fish was fascinated by the Bible and at one point actually dreamed of becoming a minister. As he grew older, his religious interests blossomed into a full-fledged mania. Obsessed with the story of Abraham and Isaac, he became convinced that he, too, should sacrifice a young child—an atrocity he actually carried out on more than one occasion. From time to time, he heard strange, archaic-sounding words—correcteth, delighteth, chastiseth—that he interpreted as divine commandments to torment and kill. He would organize these words into quasi-biblical messages: “Blessed is the man who correcteth his son in whom he delighteth with stripes”; “Happy is he that taketh Thy little ones and dasheth their heads against the stones.” Fish not only tortured and killed children in response to these delusions but subjected himself to a variety of masochistic torments in atonement for his sins. One of his favorite forms of self-mortification was to shove sewing needles so deeply into his own groin that they remained embedded around his bladder. For the hopelessly demented Fish, his ultimate crime—the murder, dismemberment, and cannibalization of a twelve-year-old girl—also had religious overtones. As he told the psychiatrist who examined him in prison, he associated the eating of the child’s flesh and the drinking of her blood with the “idea of Holy Communion.”
Fish’s near contemporary Earle Leonard Nelson was another religious fanatic, who spent countless hours poring over passages from the Book of Revelations: “And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color . . . having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” Nelson’s familiarity with the Bible was one of his most disarming featu
res, allowing him to win the confidence of his landlady-victims, who never guessed that such a well-read and obviously devout young man was actually the infamous “Gorilla Murderer,” the shadowy serial strangler responsible for nearly two dozen savage killings from coast to coast.
There have been plenty of other psychos who have committed their crimes in the name of religion, from self-ordained street preacher Benjamin Miller, who murdered a string of black prostitutes in the late 1960s as punishment for their sinful ways, to the homicidal hippie couple James and Susan Carson, who believed they were complying with the biblical injunction “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18) when they murdered their victims.
Homicidal religious fanatics have been the subject of two memorable movies: the splendid 1955 thriller Night of the Hunter (in which Robert Mitchum does a terrifying turn as a sin-obsessed preacher) and the gruesomely baroque 1995 hit, Se7en, about a serial killer who arranges his victims in grotesque tableaux inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins: gluttony, lust, sloth, pride, anger, envy, and greed.
“And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.”
Jeremiah 19:9 (Albert Fish’s favorite passage of Scripture)
ZEITGEIST
Anyone who makes a serious study of criminal history quickly discovers an intriguing, if depressing, fact: every period has produced many more cases of appalling murder than most people realize. To cite just one of countless examples, in 1895, a clean-cut medical student named Theo Durrant murdered and raped two young women in San Francisco and stashed their mutilated corpses in his neighborhood church. The Durrant case was a nationwide sensation—but who besides the most ardent crime buff has heard of it today?
This raises an interesting question: why do some heinous killers fade into instant obscurity, while others achieve an almost mythic status? Part of the answer certainly lies in the singularly horrific deeds of the latter. The legendary serial killers (Ed Gein, Albert Fish, Jeffrey Dahmer, etc.) have a larger-than-life quality. Their crimes seem less pathological than supernatural—the doings of demons and ghouls. But there is another factor, too. Certain criminals exert a powerful fascination because they seem to embody the darkest impulses and obsessions of their day—all that is most reprehensible about any given age. As much as any hero or celebrity, they personify the spirit of the time—what the Germans call the zeitgeist.
“To parallel such a career one must go back to past ages and to the time of the Borgias or the Brinvilliers, and even these were not such human monsters as Holmes seems to have been. He is a prodigy of wickedness, a human demon, a being so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character. The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century.”
From an 1896 newspaper article on H. H. Holmes
The nineteenth-century “multi-murderer” Dr. H. H. Holmes is a classic example. A debonair ladies’ man with a deadly allure, Holmes seemed like the living incarnation of the fairy-tale monster Bluebeard, killing and dismembering a string of nubile young women in the murky depths of his “Horror Castle.” At the same time, he was the terrifying epitome of all the excesses of the Gilded Age, a money-mad psychopath whose murders were motivated as much by greed as by blood lust.
In the 1930s—the era when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped—Albert Fish represented every parent’s worst nightmare, a fiendishly cunning child snatcher in the guise of a kindly old man. While the case of Edward Gein had the timeless horror of a “Hänsel and Gretel”-type fairy tale (the seemingly innocuous, out-of-the-way dwelling that turns out to be the abode of an ogre), his crimes also reflected the prevailing cultural pathology of postwar America, a time and place marked by extreme sexual hypocrisy, when the realities of erotic behavior were masked by an official culture of prudery.
Charles Starkweather—the sociopathic James Dean-wannabe who slaughtered eleven people during a three-week killing spree—embodied another quintessentially 1950s phenomenon: the wildly antisocial “juvenile delinquent” with a grudge against grown-up society. During the 1960s, Charles Manson—the sex-and-drug-crazed demon-hippie—was the nightmare realization of “straight” society’s darkest fears, while Ted Bundy seemed to embody all that was most perilous about the 1970s me generation’s swinging-singles scene: the danger of finding yourself with the wrong pickup and ending up in a very nasty one-night stand.
Bret Easton Ellis’s much-reviled book American Psycho actually plays very cleverly with the notion of the serial killer as symbol of the zeitgeist. Its sociopathic Yuppie protagonist, Patrick Bateson, is meant to be a metaphor for the greediness of the 1980s Reagan era. His only concern is the fulfillment of his own appetites, and he regards other people as nothing more than highly disposable commodities to be used for his own pleasure.
Zodiac
Zodiac; from Murderers! trading card set
(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)
California in the late 1960s was a hotbed of hippiedom—the site of the Summer of Love, the birthplace of the “be-in,” the land where visitors were advised to wear flowers in their hair. At the same time, it was home to some of the most notorious psychos of the late twentieth century. Charles Manson and his blood-crazed “family” slaughtered seven people in Los Angeles in 1969. A year later, a hippie named John Linley Frazier wiped out a household of five in the Northern California town of Santa Cruz. Perhaps even more unnerving was the night-prowling gunman known only as “Zodiac,” who terrorized San Francisco during a nine-month spree that began in December 1968. Before he was finished, five people were dead and two more desperately wounded.
His motive? “I like killing people because it’s so much fun,” he explained in an anonymous letter.
The first to die was a teenage couple, shot dead in a Lovers’ Lane. Six months later, he gunned down another young couple, killing the young woman with nine blasts from a 9mm pistol (the young man, shot four times, survived). Forty minutes later—in what would be the first in a series of chilling communications from the killer—the police received an anonymous phone call from a gruff-voiced man: “If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to a public park, you will find the kids in a brown car. They have been shot with a 9mm Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Good-bye.”
While panic spread through the area, the killer began sending Letters to local newspapers, signed with the astrological symbol of the zodiac. Each letter contained a line of cipher. Decoded by a local high school teacher, the cryptic lines formed a single message that explained the killer’s motivations: “I will be reborn in Paradise, and then all that I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife.”
Two months later, Zodiac (as he was now called) set out to collect some more slaves. Wearing a black hood with eye slits and the zodiac symbol painted on it in white, the killer accosted a young couple at gunpoint, bound them with rope, then attacked them with a hunting knife. The young man survived with five wounds in the back, but the girl—stabbed fourteen times—died.
His last known victim was a San Francisco cab driver who was shot once in the back of the head. Before fleeing the crime scene, the killer tore off parts of the victim’s shirt. Shortly afterward, the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle received an envelope. Inside was a swatch of the cab driver’s shirt and a letter from Zodiac in which he promised to “wipe out a school bus some morning.” Fortunately he never made good on this threat. Nor—as far as anyone knows—did Zodiac ever kill again.
The classic Clint Eastwood movie Dirty Harry (1971) is a gripping fictionalized account of the hunt for the Zodiac killer, with Andy Robinson turning in an unforgettable performance as the unspeakable psychocreep. Needless to say, the movie has a much more satisfying ending—with Clint blasting the psycho into well
-deserved oblivion—than real life supplied. In actuality, Zodiac simply vanished.
There have been many theories about his identity, but one has gotten more traction than others. In his 2002 book, Zodiac Unmasked, author Robert Graysmith claims that the killer was a convicted child molester and all-around misfit named Arthur Leigh Allen, who died in 1992.
Others, however, point out that neither Allen’s fingerprints nor his handwriting match the evidence left behind by the murderer. In the end, Zodiac’s identity remains one of the great Unsolved mysteries of modern crime.
ZOMBIES
Joyce Carol Oates’s harrowing 1995 novel Zombie deals with a psychopath named Quentin P———, who is obsessed with the idea of creating a zombie who will become his personal slave. To that end, he performs a series of makeshift lobotomies on various half-drugged victims by sticking an ice pick under their eyelids and up into their brains. All he succeeds in doing, however, is killing them—though a few of them manage to survive for a brief period (see Recommended Reading).
Reviewing Oates’s novel in the New York Times Book Review, one prominent critic interpreted this story as an “allegory” about “what American society itself is capable of.” The character’s “efforts to create zombies,” this critic wrote, are “derived from the irreversible psychosurgical procedures performed during the 1940s and 1950s on thousands of unfortunate Americans judged to be psychotic, dangerous or incompetent.”
“A true ZOMBIE would be mine forever. He would obey every command & whim. Saying ‘Yes, Master’ & ‘No, Master.’ He would kneel before me lifting his eyes to me saying, ‘I love you, Master. There is no one but you, Master.’ ”
From Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Page 32
