RedHanded

by Suruthi Bala

  Trust has not only been eroded with these groups, but also with sex workers. The profession is as old as time and has been discriminated against for just as long. We’d be hard pressed to find a group less trusting of the police, not to mention the media. Even when the press decides to cover or acknowledge the murders of sex workers, the reporting often undermines these victims and emphasizes and compounds society’s apathy toward them.

  For example, after the 2013 murder of Tracy Connelly in Melbourne, Australia, many local newspapers featured the phrase “prostitute murdered” in their headlines. This term prostitute is synonymous in our society with something “dirty” or “sinful,” and by labeling Connelly that way, the papers—intentionally or not—distanced her from being an empathic victim. The media even noted that Connelly must have been aware of the dangers of her profession; this sort of reporting shifts the blame to the victim by implying that they got themselves into that mess and that it was their choice—that somehow, they deserved what happened to them. It also gives the reader an out for any lack of empathy or secret judgment they may be feeling.

  As we’ve seen, there are some huge disparities in how different groups and demographics are policed, and in the way in which some are discussed in the media when they become victims of violent crimes. But how has this shaped the way we think? After a bit of head-scratching, we’ve identified two big myths when it comes to our collective thinking around serial killers and their victims. These myths, in our humble opinion, have mainly been perpetrated by the media and Hollywood in a joint marketing venture to make more cash money off serial killer movies and true crime stories. So it’s time we did some serious myth-busting.

  MYTH 1: The majority of serial killer victims are beautiful, young white women who only wear negligees to bed.

  This is of course false—no points for having guessed that; we literally labeled it “Myth 1.” But firstly, no one wears a negligee to bed; many have tried, all have morphed into Sweatzilla and given up. These days women wear their favorite true crime podcast’s merch covered in dog/cat hair to bed. That’s not very sellable, though. But despite what the movies want us to believe, the truth is that the majority of serial killer victims are among the less-dead.

  Why is this the case? Well, of course there is a low-hanging fruit element to this; some of these victims, such as sex workers, do lead higher-risk lifestyles. But like we discovered through the stats we shared earlier, far too often deeply entrenched institutional bigotry tragically stands in the way of justice for many. And this kind of bigotry—be it racist, homophobic, transphobic, or misogynistic—within law enforcement and the media has serious ramifications. It can lead to certain cases being overlooked. Consider for a moment the case of Stephen Port (a.k.a. the Grindr Killer, a.k.a. the Cemetery Poisoner) and London’s most recent serial killer.

  In 2014, Stephen Port was a 41-year-old chef living alone in Barking, East London. (He even made a surprise background appearance in that year’s UK MasterChef, spotted behind that guy from boy band JLS making meatballs…) As Port’s first moniker suggests, he used hookup app Grindr to find and lure young gay men to his flat. Port would then give these unsuspecting men fatal doses of the drug GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyric acid), better known as the date rape drug. He would then rape his victims and make their deaths look like accidental overdoses or suicides.

  Port had a fetish for having sex with unconscious boyish-looking young men he called twinks. All four of Port’s victims (Anthony Walgate, 23; Gabriel Kovari, 22; Daniel Whitworth, 21; and Jack Taylor, 25) were young, boyish, similar-looking gay men in their twenties and they all died of GHB overdoses within 15 months of each other. Their bodies were found just meters apart; in fact, Whitworth and Kovari were found in the exact same spot by the exact same terrified dog walker.

  Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and uproar from the men’s friends and family, for over a year the police maintained their stance that these four men had simply died from partying too hard at one of London’s gay nightclubs. It’s unbelievable that the London Metropolitan Police (not some tiny police force in the middle of nowhere with no clue how to run a homicide investigation) totally missed the fact that they had a serial killer on their hands.

  Port is now serving a whole-of-life sentence, convicted of 22 offenses against 11 men, including four murders, four rapes, four assaults by penetration, and 10 offenses of administering a substance with intent. It was thanks to the work of Kovari’s good friend John Pape and Taylor’s sisters that this case was eventually cracked. (They had to shout extremely loudly to be heard over the institutional homophobia.) It’s hard to imagine that if four white middle-class women had turned up dead, just roads apart, two in the same cemetery, that the police wouldn’t have taken it all a bit more seriously.

  Port was not a calculated killer; actually, he was a very careless one. Just look at his lazy body disposals—and that’s our point. Despite his stupidity, Port was able to kill four men and slip under the radar of the London Metropolitan Police because he went after gay men. The police discriminated against these victims by dismissing them as drug addicts. This sort of thinking by law enforcement gives serial killers more calculated and cunning than Port the green light to go after the less-dead. Because they know that if they do, they might be able to go on killing for a much longer period of time. Sadly, this dark hypothesis bears out. You will often see that the serial killers who racked up the highest body counts tended to target marginalized victims; consider Jeffrey Dahmer and Gary Heidnik.

  Gary Heidnik was actually one of the men who, along with lampshade lad Ed Gein, inspired the character of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. Old Ed gave Bill his skin-wearing aesthetic, but Heidnik was very much the menacing real-life architect for the pit in which Bill’s victims had to “put the lotion on the skin.”

  Heidnik was an egomaniac who needed to be admired, so he started a church in his own house at 3520 North Marshall Street, Philadelphia. He used this organization to line his pockets, lure vulnerable young women, and provide himself with a cover of respectability. During this time, Heidnik claimed that God spoke to him and demanded that he father as many children as possible, but Heidnik had failed to hold down marriages due to his wives not enjoying being his punching bag on the daily. Heidnik knew if he abducted women from the church, he’d get caught, so he did the next most obvious thing—he built a pit in his basement and started to abduct Black women, some of them sex workers.

  Eventually, Heidnik had six women chained up and sealed into his basement pit: Josefina Rivera, 25; Sandra Lindsay, 24; Lisa Thomas, 19; Deborah Dudley, 23; Jacqueline Askins, 18; and Agnes Adams, 24. Heidnik believed that these women were inferior to him and everyone else. He also knew that the police probably wouldn’t be looking very hard into what had happened to missing members of the less-dead.

  As described by Ken Englade in his book, Cellar of Horror, the tortures Heidnik doled out are some of the worst in the world of true crime: he raped, beat, and electrocuted the women. Some days he would go down to the basement, wrap duct tape around the heads of his victims, and then drive screwdrivers into their ears. When the women would rebel against him he would fill the pit with water and deliver jolts of agonizing electricity. When Heidnik killed Sandra Lindsay, just to add to the psychological torment for the other women, Heidnik dragged Deborah Dudley upstairs to show them Lindsay’s remains. Lindsay’s head was in a pot, her ribs were in a roasting pan on the stove, and her legs and arms were in the freezer. After this, he starved the women for weeks and then fed them a nightmarish gruel of dog food mixed with Sandra Lindsay’s remains.

  Over the four months he kept these women captive, Heidnik started to become overconfident. No one suspected him, his plan was working, and he was having a great time. In his mind, these stupid women were like animals and he was the master; he had total control. But it was this arrogance that blinded him and Josefina Rivera was about to take the upper hand.

  In March 198
7, Heidnik announced that he was going on the hunt for another victim, to which Josefina Rivera (who had slowly been manipulating Heidnik into thinking she was his brainwashed slave) offered to help. Rivera helped Heidnik abduct Agnes Adams that day, but she had no intention of Adams suffering for long. Rivera managed to convince Heidnik to let her go for just a few minutes so that she could see her family. Rivera told him to wait at a petrol station and that she wouldn’t be long; she just wanted to tell her family that she was OK.

  Heidnik agreed. Josefina Rivera calmly walked around the corner to where she knew Heidnik wouldn’t be able to see her, and then ran to the nearest pay phone and called 911. Within minutes, the police had arrived and Heidnik was arrested right there and then. Rivera then led the police to 3520 North Marshall Street and finally, the women were freed. Two women lost their lives at the hands of Gary Heidnik and if Josefina Rivera hadn’t done what she did, it’s hard to say how many more women he would have abducted, tortured, and killed—because as we know, he was most certainly the type of killer who wouldn’t have stopped until he was caught.

  Much more famous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (a.k.a. the Milwaukee Cannibal, a.k.a. the Milwaukee Monster), like Heidnik, knew exactly how to keep his crimes under wraps. Dahmer chose to live in an incredibly impoverished part of Milwaukee; he suspected that there police officers would be unlikely to take much notice of what he was up to, and he was right. Dahmer also knew to go after marginalized men. He predominately sought out Black, Asian, and Latin men; in fact 11 of Dahmer’s 17 known victims were Black.

  We’ll never really know how many men Dahmer killed (given that he was beaten to death by another prisoner in 1994), but he killed at least 17 men and boys between 1987 and 1991: Steven Hicks, 18; Steven Tuomi, 26; Jamie Doxtator, 14; Richard Guerrero, 25; Anthony Sears, 24; Eddie Smith, 36; Ricky Beeks, 27; Ernest Miller, 22; David Thomas, 23; Curtis Straughter, 16; Errol Lindsey, 19; Tony Hughes, 31; Konerak Sinthasomphone, 14; Matt Turner, 20; Jeremiah Weinberger, 23; Oliver Lacy, 23; and Joseph Bradeholt, 25. (There is contradictory information out there on the men’s ages and some of these are approximations.)

  While Dahmer was killing all these men, he wasn’t living in a remote Wisconsin farmhouse in the middle of nowhere—he lived in an apartment in the city surrounded by neighbors. How this went uninvestigated should be totally baffling, especially considering Dahmer would keep the remains of his victims on the property and even use a chainsaw to dismember the bodies. But really, we know why—the people raising the alarm were all poor and Black.

  Race relations in the city had been in a state of total disarray for nearly a decade by the time Dahmer was boiling bodies, so it’s safe to say the police were less involved because victims were Black and people of color. On top of this, the Milwaukee police at the time couldn’t have been less keen to investigate what they deemed “gay” issues. At trial Dahmer maintained that his victim selection was not racist but based on his sexual preference, but we, like his victims’ families, don’t believe it. He knew that the race of these victims would make it easier for him to carry on doing what he was doing.

  So what was he doing? Well, Jeffrey Dahmer would lure men and boys back to his apartment where he would drug them, and once they were incapacitated Dahmer would experiment. As Jack Rosewood outlines in his 2017 book, Jeffrey Dahmer: A Terrifying Story of Rape, Murder, and Cannibalism, at first Dahmer killed his victims straight away by cutting their throats, then he’d pose them for photos and try to preserve their bodies or body parts. Dahmer wanted to possess his victims. He didn’t want them to leave him, but he also didn’t want a real-life human to be around because they were altogether too much trouble.

  When he was eventually asked about the various preservation techniques he used, Dahmer said, “I wanted to keep them, but if I couldn’t keep them there with me whole, I at least could keep their skeletons.” But soon he realized that these grisly human trinkets (including the decapitated frozen heads of his victims and pickled penises) weren’t enough to satisfy his sick sexual urges. He realized that he wanted, above all else, a sex zombie.

  On April 7, 1991, Dahmer lured 19-year-old Errol Lindsey to his apartment. He drugged him, drilled a hole in Lindsey’s skull, and then poured hydrochloric acid into it. Dahmer was hoping that this would enable Lindsey to stay alive but keep him in a subdued and permanently submissive sex zombie state. According to Dahmer’s later police interviews, Lindsey woke up after the acid was in and said, “I have a headache. What time is it?” Sad that his experiment had failed, Dahmer strangled Errol Lindsey to death.

  Undeterred, he tried again. On the afternoon of May 26, 1991, Dahmer met a 14-year-old Laotian boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone. He offered him some money to go back to his place for a photo shoot, and the kid agreed. Once home, Dahmer drugged the teenager, drilled a hole into his skull, and then just like with Errol Lindsey, he poured acid into his head. He then led the boy into his bedroom where the decaying corpse of another man, Tony Hughes, lay. He put Konerak to bed and lay with him for a while and knocked back a few beers. And then—perhaps having run out of booze—Dahmer decided to pop out to a bar.

  While Dahmer was out, at around 2 a.m., unbelievably the 14-year-old regained consciousness and managed to get out of Dahmer’s apartment. He was clearly heavily drugged, he was naked, and he was bleeding from the hole in his head. Konerak was found by two young Black women, Nichole Childress and Sandra Smith, who called the police, but then Dahmer, who was coming home from his trip to the bar, saw what was going on. He tried to grab Konerak and drag him back inside, but the women stopped him; they knew something was terribly wrong.

  When four officers arrived, Dahmer just told them that Konerak was his boyfriend and that he was just a bit drunk and he needed to get him back inside. The women were outraged; they demanded that the police help the clearly injured boy, but the police believed white adult Dahmer and even threatened to arrest the women if they didn’t stop. The police actually helped Dahmer get Konerak back into his apartment—an apartment with another human body in the bedroom and various dismembered extremities filling up the fridge!

  Dahmer was arrested two months later when another man escaped from his apartment and called the police. After this, the families of Dahmer’s victims filed a lawsuit against the officers who had handed 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone back to Dahmer on May 27, 1991. It turned out that the police hadn’t even done a basic background check on Dahmer. If they had, they would have discovered that he was actually on probation at the time for having sexually assaulted another minor in 1988, and that minor was none other than Konerak’s own brother!

  Despite police denials that race and sexuality had anything to do with their lack of curiosity over what Dahmer had been up to, we have receipts. The recordings of calls made by the responding officers immediately after they left the scene in which they can be heard laughing at Konerak and saying that they needed “delousing” tell a somewhat different story.

  The families’ lawsuit alleged the Milwaukee police department had “a longstanding practice of intentional discrimination against and reckless disregard of the rights of racial minorities and homosexuals.” We find it impossible to believe that had the situation been reversed and the police had found an older Black man trying to wrestle a 14-year-old white boy—who was drugged out of his mind and bleeding from his head while two white women screamed in the street that the boy needed help—that the police would have led the little boy into the apartment of his killer.

  It would appear that the city wasn’t all that confident with their case either, seeing as how they settled the lawsuit out of court and paid $850,000 to Konerak Sinthasomphone’s family. Two of the officers involved in the incident on May 27 were eventually fired following the lawsuit. They were still given a full pension.

  Even the notorious Albert Fish—the horrific “Grey Man”—preyed predominantly on Black children for years, but his downfall only came about when he killed Grace Budd, a 10-year-ol
d white girl.

  Now, both Heidnik and Dahmer were white men targeting victims of color. But usually, serial killers tend to kill within their own race, so the irony of us ignoring victims of color has led to the bizarre, but highly popular misconception, that there’s no such thing as a non-white serial killer. Well, it’s time for equal opportunity horror, guys, and this leads us nicely into our next myth. Queens of the seggie strike again.

  MYTH 2: Only white men are serial killers.

  We’ve all seen the memes saying that dressing up like a serial killer on Halloween if you aren’t white is white cultural appropriation, and sure, we’ve laughed at them too because they’re funny. But—and sorry to be that “well, actually” wanker—pop culture’s obsession with the idea that only white men are serial killers is dangerous.

  In this chapter alone we have already named three white male serial killers that nine out of ten of you probably already knew about. Bundy, Dahmer, and Heidnik are all household names, but the truth is that serial killers are usually as diverse as the country in which they kill. White men do not monopolize serial killing in the West; it’s just historically been white male killers like Bundy who have transcended into uncomfortable, unlikely, glamorous pop culture icons—and the media are all too happy to help them out.

  How deeply rooted is this idea? Well, let’s do a quick test. If we asked you to reel off the names of serial killers you know, how long would it be before you got to a Black or non-white serial killer? Our money says quite a while.

  Caroline Picart and John Browning explore this idea in their book Speaking of Monsters. They posit that the popular misconception that all serial killing is done by white males is due to the continuous cinematic depiction of just that. After all, how many Hollywood movies can you think of that focus on a non-white serial killer? Switchback is all we’ve got.