The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases

by Marlowe, John

  On 1 June 1972, Gacy remarried. His second bride, Carol Hoff, was a divorcee with two daughters; they had known each other since high school. Carol was well aware of her husband’s past incarceration, but shared in the opinion that he was a reformed man and joined him in his active social life. Together they helped host and organize street parties, including one event that was attended by over 300 guests. She watched as her husband toured children’s wards in hospitals, dressed in a clown costume of his own design.

  In 1974, Gacy established a painting and decorating business. His employees were invariably teenage boys. He was particularly drawn to those who were fair-haired and well-built. As in Iowa, rumours again began to circulate concerning Gacy and his employees. When Carol Gacy began finding gay pornography in their house, her husband nonchalantly explained that he simply preferred adolescent boys to adult women. The couple were divorced in March 1976.

  Incredibly, neither criminal record nor rumour prevented Gacy from having political aspirations.

  He began volunteering for a number of community projects and offered to clean the local offices of the Democratic Party. Though he rose slowly through the ranks, rumours continued to grow concerning his private life.

  All began to be revealed following the disappearance of a 15-year-old boy named Robert Piest. On 12 December 1978, Piest had emerged from the pharmacy where he had a part-time job. He told his mother, who had come to pick him up, that he would be right back after speaking with a contractor who was looking to hire him. He never returned.

  Piest’s mother remembered the name of the contractor and several hours later a police officer was at Gacy’s front door. Gacy told the man that he was unable to leave the house as there had been a recent death in the family and he had phone calls to make. He later appeared at the police station and provided a statement to the effect that he knew nothing of the disappearance.

  After a background check revealed that Gacy had once been convicted of sodomy with a minor, a search warrant was issued for his property. Hundreds of objects were removed from Gacy’s house and three vehicles were seized. Items were shown to belong to Piest and several other missing boys. An excavation of the crawl space under Gacy’s house revealed the remains of 27 boys and young men. Gacy later said that the crawl space had become so crowded that he was forced to dispose of some of his victims’ bodies in the Des Plaines River.

  Fully aware of what had been discovered at his home, on 22 December Gacy confessed to killing at least 30 people – it was clear that he had lost count. He said that many of the victims had been invited to his home. The first murder had taken place in January 1972, 18 months after he’d been released from prison. He’d killed for the second time in January 1974, while still living with his second wife. After their separation, the murders had taken place with increasing frequency. In most cases, Gacy admitted, he would invite boys and young men into his home, where he would offer to show them a magic trick using fake handcuffs which were part of his clown act. The handcuffs would prove to be all too real. Gacy would then chloroform and rape his victim. After many hours of torture, death would come through either strangulation or asphyxiation.

  Most of the victims were young male prostitutes or teenage runaways, but Gacy had also been so reckless as to prey upon boys he’d hired through his own contracting company. At least four boys went missing while in his employ, yet the local police failed to recognize the significance of this commonality.

  Although some corpses were so badly decomposed that they could not be identified, it is thought that his youngest victim was just less than ten years old. Nine unidentified corpses were buried under separate headstones bearing the words ‘We Are Remembered’.

  Gradually, it became apparent that there had been other victims; young men who had not been killed, but had been set free by the murderer. Among these was Jeffrey Ringall, whom Gacy had enticed into his car with the promise of marijuana. Not long after they began sharing their first joint, Ringall had a chloroform-doused cloth shoved in his face and lost consciousness. Ringall spent the rest of the car journey drifting in and out of consciousness, but didn’t truly regain his senses until he was in Gacy’s home.

  By this point Gacy had removed all his clothes and was standing naked in front of him demonstrating a number of sexual toys. During the next several hours, Ringall was sodomized, tortured and drugged. He awoke the next morning, fully clothed, in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. The next six days were spent in hospital. When reporting the assault, Ringall was told by the police that it was doubtful they would ever be able to identify his assailant.

  Ringall was fortunate in that his story had been believed by the police. Another of Gacy’s victims had been raped, urinated on, dunked repeatedly in a bathtub and forced to play Russian roulette. His captor, who was later identified as Gacy, correctly predicted that the police would not believe the story of the assault.

  During his trial, beginning on 6 February 1980, Gacy attempted to withdraw his confession, and plead not guilty by reason of insanity. As if to support the claim, Gacy tried to joke with the jury, saying that he was guilty of nothing more than ‘running a cemetery without a licence’. He also claimed to suffer from multiple-personality disorder, and said that an alter-ego named Jack was responsible for the murders.

  On 13 March 1980, Gacy was convicted of 33 murders and sentenced to death. He was transferred to Menard Correctional Center, where he was placed on Death Row. As he waited through 14 years of appeals, Gacy took up oil painting. His favourite subject was portraits of clowns, which he painted and sold at great profit. At a 1994 exhibition at the Tatou Gallery in Beverly Hills, California, Gacy’s portraits sold for as much as $20,000.

  Gacy was executed on 10 May 1994 at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois. When asked whether he had any last words, Gacy is reported to have snarled, ‘Kiss my ass.’ His death, by lethal injection, was botched. As the execution began, the chemicals solidified and the IV tube that led into the condemned man’s arm had to be replaced. As he died, Gacy struggled against his bonds. The entire procedure took 18 minutes, nearly four times as long as had been intended.

  TED BUNDY

  An intelligent, charming, good-looking law student, who already had a degree in psychology, Ted Bundy seemed destined for a brilliant future. Some in the Republican party saw him as a potential future governor of the state of Washington, and yet he ended up being sentenced to death in the electric chair.

  Bundy was born on 24 November 1946 at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. The identity of his father has always been a matter of speculation. Bundy’s birth certificate is at odds with the name provided by his mother, Louise Cowell. There is some evidence pointing to incest – that Bundy was fathered by his grandfather. As an infant he was adopted by his grandparents, and grew up believing his mother to be his older sister. It wasn’t until his university years that Bundy would learn the truth of the relationship.

  His earliest years were spent in Philadelphia, after which he and his ‘sister’ moved to live with relatives in Tacoma, Washington. The year after their relocation, when he was four, Louise met a navy veteran named Johnny Culpepper Bundy at a church singles’ night. Within months they married and Johnny adopted his bride’s ‘brother’.

  The Bundy family quickly grew to five children; as the eldest, Ted spent much of his free time babysitting. Despite this contact, he remained emotionally detached from the rest of the family, feeling that they were beneath him.

  Bundy was an excellent student. Though an active Methodist, serving as vice-president of the Methodist Youth Fellowship, he remained shy and introverted throughout his teenage years. Bundy’s participation in the Church is also at odds with his criminal activity. He had started shoplifting while in high school, and progressed to stealing skis and forging lift tickets. He was twice arrested as a juvenile.

  Handsome and articulate, he appeared to be a generous young man. While attending the University of Washington, he gav
e his time to the Seattle Crisis Clinic on a suicide prevention helpline. One of his co-volunteers, a young Ann Rule, would go on to write The Stranger Beside Me, the finest and most famous biography of the serial killer.

  In the summer of 1969, Bundy visited Vermont, where he finally learned the truth about his parentage. The news served to create a greater distance between himself and the Bundy clan.

  He returned to the University of Washington, and became a psychology major. It was during this year that he met a young divorcee. The two entered into a relationship that would last some seven years.

  In 1972, Bundy graduated with honours and soon began working for the Republican party. During a trip to California in the summer of 1973, he also resumed dating another woman, a former girlfriend from university. Though he continued to date the first woman, he proposed marriage to the second. He ended the engagement after two weeks, and later revealed that the engagement had been made so as to hurt his fiancée when rejecting her. Within weeks he would begin the first of two strings of murderous attacks.

  Shortly after midnight on 4 January 1974, Bundy gained access to the basement bedroom of an 18-year-old student at the University of Washington. He took a metal rod from her bed frame, bludgeoned her as she slept and sexually assaulted her. Discovered by her roommates the next morning, she survived the attack, but suffered permanent brain damage.

  On the evening of 31 January, he broke into the room of another University of Washington student, 19-year-old Lynda Ann Healy. She was knocked unconscious, dressed, wrapped in a bed sheet, and carried away, her body eventually discovered a year later. On 12 March, Bundy kidnapped and murdered Donna Gail Manson, a 19-year-old student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. On April 17, 18-year-old Susan Rancourt disappeared from the campus of Central Washington State College in Ellensburg. Having procured victims from three different Washington state institutions of higher learning, Bundy moved his operation south to Oregon State University in Covalis, from which he abducted a 22-year-old student named Kathy Parks on May 6. In June, two more women were abducted by Bundy, never to be seen again.

  Many of his abductions were performed with the aid of a false plaster-cast on his arm. His method was to approach young women and ask them whether they could help him to carry some books or a briefcase.

  His most audacious and daring abductions occurred in broad daylight on 14 July in Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah, Washington. Five women told police that a man with his left arm in a sling, calling himself ‘Ted’, had asked whether they could help unload a sailboat from his Volkswagen Beetle.

  That day two women went missing: 19-year-old Denise Naslund and 23-year-old Janice Ott; the latter was last seen in his company. Police circulated descriptions of ‘Ted’ and his Beetle throughout the Seattle area, receiving thousands of responses. Among those who reported Bundy as a possible suspect were one of his former psychology professors, his girlfriend and Ann Rule. Their warnings were ignored.

  By early September, the remains of Bundy’s victims began to turn up around the area of Issaquah. By this point he had already killed two more women and had moved to Utah, where he enrolled at the University of Utah’s College of Law.

  During that first term, he killed a total of four Utah girls, aged 16 and 17, including the daughter of a police chief. He also saw the escape of one of his intended victims, Carol DaRonch. Bundy lured her into his car on the pretence that he was a police officer. When he attempted to handcuff and beat her with a crowbar she fought back and managed to escape, later providing the authorities with an accurate description of Bundy.

  In his second term, beginning in January 1975, he claimed four more victims. The first three, females in their 20s, were each killed in Colorado. The fourth, a 13-year-old named Lynette Culver, Bundy abducted from a school playground in Pocatello, Idaho. He then took her to his room at a nearby Holiday Inn, where she was raped and drowned in the bath. Another young girl, 15-year-old Susan Curtis, was killed during his summer break from law school.

  On 16 August 1975, Bundy was arrested when he failed to stop for a police officer. In searching his Beetle police discovered an ice pick, a crowbar, handcuffs and other items that they believed might be burglary tools. Further investigation revealed a more sinister purpose. On 1 March 1976, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his kidnapping of Carol DaRonch.

  Authorities in Colorado, meanwhile, were pursuing murder charges and by 1977 had enough evidence to charge him with the murder of a woman who had disappeared while on a ski trip with her fiancé. Brought to the Pitkin County courthouse in Aspen on 7 June 1977, Bundy was given permission to visit the courthouse library. From there, he managed to escape by jumping from a second-storey window. He ran, then strolled through the streets of Aspen, making his way to the top of Aspen Mountain. He became lost and disoriented. Six days later, Bundy came upon a car, which he stole. As he drove back to Aspen, two patrol men pulled him over for having dimmed headlights. He was recognized immediately and arrested.

  He was imprisoned in a jail in nearby Glenwood Springs, where he was to remain until his murder trial. At some point during the months that followed, he somehow acquired $500 and a hacksaw blade. On the evening of 30 December 1977, ten days before the trial was scheduled to begin, he managed to escape through a crawl space. Seventeen hours passed before Bundy’s jailers discovered he’d escaped – though they didn’t know it, by that point their famous prisoner had made it all the way to Chicago.

  Bundy spent much of the New Year’s first week on the road. There is some evidence to suggest that he was considering educational institutions at which he might commit his next assaults. He spent some time at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and travelled to Atlanta, before settling in Tallahassee, Florida on 8 January. There, Bundy managed to support himself through shoplifting and purse snatching. On 15 January 1978, two and a half years after his last murder, Bundy killed again. His victims were 20-year-old Lisa Levy and 21-year-old Margaret Bowman, two Florida State University students. At approximately three in the morning, Bundy broke into their sorority house and bludgeoned, strangled, and sexually assaulted the two women. Two other members of the sorority were also beaten. Though severely injured, both survived. Eight blocks away, he invaded another house and beat a fifth student – she, too, survived.

  On 9 February, Bundy travelled to Lake City, Florida, where he abducted a 12-year-old named Kimberly Leach from her junior high school. After raping and murdering the girl, he hid her body in an abandoned hog shed. Although he returned to Tallahassee, three days later he stole a car and began a journey across the Florida panhandle. Early on the morning of 15 February, he was stopped by a Pensacola police officer and arrested for driving a stolen vehicle. It wasn’t long before he was identified and linked to the sorority girl murders.

  He received two death sentences – the first for the murders of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman, the second for that of Kimberly Leach. During the second trial, Bundy married Carole Ann Boone, a former co-worker, as he was questioning her under oath. A daughter, Tina, was born in October 1982.

  Bundy spent much of the 1980s fighting his death sentence. However, as the decade was drawing to a close, it appeared all his legal options had been exhausted. Bundy then began to confess to a number of murders, some unknown to authorities. He promised that more would be revealed if he were given extra time. It was a transparent ploy, and did not work.

  On the morning of 24 January 1989, Bundy was executed. He was strapped to an electric chair and for nearly two minutes electricity was sent through his body. His last words were, ‘I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.’

  CLIFFORD OLSON

  As the media in America focused increasingly on the gruesome acts of psychopaths like Jerry Brudos and Ted Bundy, the situation north of the border seemed markedly different. True, Canada had had its own serial killer – Peter Woodcock, a teenager who had been declared legally insane after murdering three children in
the mid-1950s – but his crimes were largely forgotten.

  Then, on 17 November 1980, Christine Wheeler, a 12-year-old who lived with her mother and father in a suburban Vancouver motel, went missing. At first, there was no suspicion of foul play; indeed her parents waited several days before filing a missing person’s report. Even then, the police treated the case as that of a runaway. It was only after the discovery of her abandoned bicycle behind a nearby animal hospital that the serious nature of the disappearance became apparent. On Christmas Day, her body was discovered in a dump by a man walking his dog. She’d been raped, strangled with a belt, and stabbed multiple times in the chest and abdomen.

  Christine Wheeler’s murder was the first in a series of savage, sex-related murders that would lay to rest the idea among some Canadians that the serial killer was an American phenomenon.

  It was some time, though, before the authorities realized that they were dealing with a serial killer. Indeed, after the Wheeler murder, the murderer lay low for five months. On 16 April 1981, he abducted and murdered a 13-year-old girl, Colleen Daignault. Five days later, he used hammer blows to the head in murdering his first male victim, 16-year-old Daryn Johnsrude, a Saskatchewan native who was visiting the Vancouver area during his school’s Easter break.

  As experts then believed that serial killers limited their victims to only one gender, authorities did not initially link the murder of Daryn Johnsrude with those of Christine Wheeler and Colleen Daignault. They did, however, have a suspect in the killings of the two girls: Clifford Olson. In what is certainly the most tragic aspect of the case, the authorities then came upon an even stronger suspect and made him the focus of their investigation. As it turned out, Olson was their man.