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

by Marlowe, John

  The son of a milkman and a cannery worker, Clifford Olson was born in a downtown Vancouver hospital on New Year’s Day, 1940. He spent most his youth in the suburb of Richmond. A poor student, it wasn’t long before he began skipping classes and committing petty crimes. He was jailed for the first time at the age of 14. Three years later he left school for good, getting a job at a racetrack. It didn’t last long. At 17 he was convicted of breaking, entering and theft, and was sentenced to a nearby correctional facility. It would be the first of 83 convictions, ranging from parole violation to armed robbery, before his killing spree began.

  Olson’s first murder, that of Christine Wheeler, coincided with the news of his live-in girlfriend’s pregnancy. The second and third murders occurred during the month in which his only child, Clifford Olson III, was born. The couple married the following month, on May 15 1981, the day after he allegedly assaulted a five-year-old girl, and four days before his fourth murder.

  That day, as her boyfriend’s mother looked on, Sandra Wolfsteiner was picked up by Olson while hitch-hiking. She was never to be seen again. A month later, a 13-year-old girl vanished after taking the bus to meet a friend. Both mysteries were added to a file that had become known as ‘The Case of the Missing Lower Mainland Children’.

  It was the disappearance of a sixth child, on 2 July, that propelled the case on to the national stage. At 9 years of age, Simon Partington was unlikely to be a child runaway; this, combined with photographs of his innocent-looking face and descriptions of the Snoopy book he’d had with him when last seen, provoked an emotional public response. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) began what would become the largest manhunt in their history.

  The heightened profile of the case had little effect on the killer. In fact, it may well have stimulated his desire to kill. On 9 July, he was driving with a male companion through the city of New Westminster when he spotted 15-year-old Judy Kozma, whom he recognized as a McDonald’s cashier. Accepting Olson’s offer to drive her to nearby Richmond, where she had a job interview, Kozma joined the pair. Along the way, Olson encouraged the girl to drink, then gave her pills claiming they would help kill the effects of the alcohol. Olson then dropped off his male companion at a suburban shopping mall, and drove out into the country, where he raped and killed Kozma.

  Though they hadn’t made contact, by this point Olson was once again in the sights of the authorities – and yet the killing continued. Beginning on 23 July Olson murdered a 15-year-old boy, followed by an 18-year-old female German tourist, a 15-year-old girl and a 17-year-old waitress – all within the space of a week.

  The end of Olson’s killing came when a police surveillance team followed their suspect to Vancouver Island. There they watched as he burgled two Victoria homes, then picked up two young female hitch-hikers. The trio headed into the bush, Olson’s driving becoming increasingly erratic. The authorities finally moved in and arrested him for impaired and dangerous driving. In Olson’s rented car they discovered an address book belonging to Judy Kozma, which, it was later claimed, he’d used to make threatening phone calls to the dead girl’s friends.

  Olson was released but remained under surveillance. On 12 August, he was again arrested. Under questioning, he confessed to the murder of Judy Kozma. Though the RCMP officers were convinced that he was involved in other child murders, they had no idea as to the number; few bodies had been found, and several of Olson’s victims were still thought of as runaways.

  It was while Olson was under questioning that the case took a controversial turn. He offered to lead police to his victims’ bodies, and to provide a detailed account of each murder. In exchange he wanted his wife to be given $10,000–$100,000 per body. ‘The first one will be a freebie’, he is reported as having said.

  The proposal was accepted by the police, Olson did as he’d promised, and the money was delivered. When exposed the following year, the deal was met with public outrage.

  Why exactly the RCMP paid Olson can perhaps best be judged by what they had known at the time. The force had a confession for one murder, and suspected Olson of many more. But how many? The high number came as a surprise. Furthermore, only four bodies had been discovered. The money was justified as a small price to pay in order to develop air-tight cases and bring closure to the families of the missing children.

  The subsequent trial was swift. After three days Olson was handed down 11 consecutive life sentences.

  For his brutal crimes, Olson earned the moniker ‘The Beast of BC’. Several books were written, most focusing not on the brutal murders, but on the controversial deal made by the RCMP. Olson served as the inspiration for John Grinell, the serial killer in the 1983 Ian Adams novel Bad Faith. Even Olson wrote a book, Profile of a Serial Killer: The Clifford Olson Story, in which he refers to himself in the third person. It remains unpublished.

  Though Olson took his place in the nation’s psyche, he remained out of the news – gone, but not forgotten. However, he was never one to turn down the opportunity to call attention to himself. In 1991, he applied for release under Canada’s ‘faint hope clause’, a section of legislation intended to release those judged truly reformed. The application was turned down. In 2006, having served 25 years of his sentences, he applied for parole, and was again turned down. During the hearing Olson claimed that the three-member panel had no jurisdiction as he’d been granted clemency by the United States government for information he had provided concerning the attacks of 11 September 2001. Olson was refused parole in 2008 and 2010 and died of cancer in Quebec at the age of 71.

  As for Peter Woodcock, Canada’s first recorded serial killer, on 31 July 1991, after spending 34 years in an Ontario psychiatric facility, he was granted his very first day pass. Within an hour he murdered a fellow psychiatric inmate with a hatchet. Woodcock was quickly apprehended and returned to the facility, where he died in 2010.

  GARY RIDGWAY

  About 200 kilometres south of the Canadian border, less than a three-hour drive from the area where Clifford Olson had committed his murders, is the mouth of the Green River. A beautiful, if not exactly important river, at one time its main claim to fame would have been as the provider of drinking water for the city of Tacoma, Washington. However, in the summer of 1982, it was used for an entirely different purpose: the disposal of bodies. From that point on, the river mouth, appreciated for its fishing and white water rafting, would be forever linked to Gary Ridgway, a man dubbed ‘The Green River Killer’.

  Gary Leon Ridgway was born on 18 February 1949 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The middle child in a family of three boys, he was raised in a working-class neighbourhood of Seattle, Washington. His mother ruled the household and is known to have been abusive both mentally and physically to her husband. Ridgway’s father drove a city bus near the airport and often complained about the prostitutes who worked along his route.

  Ridgway was a poor student and did not finish high school until he was 20 years old. After graduation, he served in the United States Navy. In 1970, while stationed in San Diego, he met and married his first wife. The marriage was a brief one. Shortly after the wedding Ridgway was assigned to a six-month tour of duty, during which his bride took up with another man. Although she accompanied him back to Seattle after he was discharged from the navy, they divorced in 1971.

  After a failed attempt to become a policeman, Ridgway found a painting job customizing new trucks in Bellingham, Washington. Both conscientious and meticulous, he found it was work for which he was well-suited. In December 1973, he married for a second time. A son was born within two years. For a time, it seems, Ridgway’s second marriage was more stable than had been his first. He developed an intense interest in evangelical Christianity, attempting to save co-workers and neighbours. Though his dedication never ceased, it did dissipate somewhat as his second marriage began to fail. In July 1980, the couple were divorced.

  After his second wife left him, Ridgway began frequenting prostitutes, a habit he may have also had in his
later teenage years. Within months, he was accused of having tried to choke a prostitute on Seattle’s airport strip, where his father had once driven the bus. In early 1982, he was stopped by police and questioned after having picked up an 18-year-old named Keli McGinness. In April of that same year, he was arrested after having attempted to solicit an undercover policewoman in a prostitution sting.

  That July and August, the bodies of five females, aged between 16 and 31, were found in the Green River. Most of the victims had been prostitutes. The police quickly realized that the deaths were caused by a serial killer. By April 1983, 20 girls and women had vanished. One of the disappeared was a prostitute named Marie Malvar. Her boyfriend had watched as she had got into a dark-coloured truck. He never saw her again. Quite by chance, a few days later, he spotted the truck, followed it to a house on South 348th Street, and called the police. The truck and house belonged to Ridgway. He was questioned briefly by police.

  During the late spring and summer of 1983, a dozen more women disappeared, including Keli McGinness, the prostitute who had been with Ridgway when he’d been questioned by police the previous year.

  As both the number of disappeared and the body count continued to increase, the Green River Task Force dedicated to catching the killer was inundated with tips and other offers of assistance. Among the interested was Ted Bundy, who from his prison cell contributed in helping to form a profile of the unknown killer. As he’d been raised in Tacoma, Bundy was very familiar with the areas in which the murders were taking place.

  One of numerous persons of interest, Ridgway was twice given a polygraph test, in 1984 and 1986, passing both times. After police searched his locker at work and studied his time sheets, co-workers ribbed Ridgway, dubbing him ‘Green River Gary’. No one gave any serious thought to the notion that he might be the serial killer.

  It was during this period that Ridgway married yet again. By all accounts the marriage appeared to be a happy one. Ridgway was seen as a devoted husband who was said to treat his wife like a queen.

  By 1986, it appeared that the Green River Killer had stopped his activities. While bodies were still being found, it was obvious that the victims had been murdered several years earlier. The task force continued, albeit with a lessened staff. In April 1987, they searched Ridgway’s home, took a DNA sample, and let him be.

  In 1991, nine years after it had begun its work, the Green River Task Force was reduced to a single person. Fifteen million dollars had been spent in its efforts to catch the Green River Killer.

  The case remained all but dormant for a decade until, in April 2001, a new sheriff chose to step up the investigation. Among the new initiatives was a DNA analysis of the semen found on the bodies of several of the Green River Killer’s victims. Using a new testing method, in September a link was made between the semen’s DNA with the DNA obtained from Ridgway in 1987.

  Now being watched by the police, on 16 November Ridgway was arrested in another undercover prostitu-tion sting. Three days after appearing in court on the charge, Ridgway was arrested and charged with the murders of Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds, Opal Mills and Carol Ann Christensen, four of the women whose bodies had been found with his DNA.

  On 5 November 2003, Ridgway pleaded guilty to the aggravated first-degree murder of 48 women. In doing so, he fulfilled his part of a deal that would spare him the death penalty. Another condition of the agreement was that he would assist in efforts to locate the remains of his victims.

  Ridgway claimed that all his victims had been killed in and around the Seattle area. The bodies of two victims had been disposed of 250 kilometres to the south, in Portland, Oregon, in an attempt to confuse the police. Of the women he confessed to murdering 44 were killed between 1982 and 1984, after which he claimed to have committed only four more murders – in 1986, 1987, 1990 and 1998.

  Sceptics point out that this bloody history is atypical of serial killers, and speculate that he may have committed murders in other locations. Some point to a series of 40 prostitutes murdered in and around San Diego from 1985 to 1991. During those years, it is thought that Ridgway travelled to the city as his son was then living there. Other theories put forth the idea that he was involved in the disappearance of some of the approximately 60 women who vanished from the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside from the early 1980s through to 2002.

  On 18 December 2003, Ridgway received 48 life sentences with no possibility of parole and an additional life sentence to be served consecutively. He is currently incarcerated at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, probably still claiming that the murders were committed for the betterment of society.

  AILEEN WUORNOS

  Dubbed ‘the first female serial killer’ by a lazy media, during the closing years of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, Aileen Wuornos was a media star.

  Wuornos had an unenviable beginning. She was born Aileen Carol Pittman in Rochester, Michigan, on that rarest of days, 29 February, in 1956. Wuornos’ parents had married when her mother was just 15 years old. Less than two years into the marriage, her father, Leo Dale Pittman, left his wife Diane, who was pregnant with Aileen. This abandonment was a blessing in disguise, as he would later be convicted as a child molester. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, he spent much of his remaining years in mental hospitals. In 1969, Pittman hanged himself in his prison cell, never having met his daughter.

  When she was four years old, Wuornos and an older brother, her only sibling, were abandoned by their mother. The children were legally adopted and raised by their Finnish grandparents in Troy, Michigan. Wuornos claimed that until the age of 12 she had thought them to be her true parents. She also maintained that as a child she had been sexually abused by her grandfather and had suffered beatings at the hands of both grandparents.

  Though she was sexually promiscuous from an early age, Wuornos’ claim that her brother counted among her many partners is suspect. In 1970, at the age of 14, she became pregnant. The child, a baby boy born on 23 March 1971, was adopted and never knew his birth mother. Four months later, her grandmother died of liver failure, a condition exacerbated perhaps by the unwanted pregnancy. Diane Wuornos accused her father of having killed her mother. The children were made wards of court.

  While still in high school, Aileen turned to prostitution, at first offering sexual favours in return for food, drink and cigarettes. She soon began to have trouble with the law stemming from incidents related to drinking. At the age of 18, Wuornos was first jailed in Jefferson County, Colorado, charged with drunk driving, disorderly conduct and firing a gun from a moving vehicle. A further charge of failing to appear in court was added after she returned to Michigan.

  The year in which Wuornos entered her 20s, 1976, would prove to be highly eventful. That spring, her grandfather committed suicide through gas inhalation. On 13 July, she was charged with assault after throwing a cue ball at a bartender’s head. Four days later, Wuornos’ brother died of throat cancer, leaving her as the beneficiary of his life insurance. She received $10,000 and spent the money within two months. One of her purchases was a luxury car, which she subsequently wrecked.

  That September, Wuornos hitch-hiked to Florida, where she was picked up by a wealthy retired man named Lewis Fell. Though he was 49 years her senior, the two were married before the end of the year. The event was covered on the society page of the local newspaper. Fell bought his new bride a car and jewellery.

  The marriage was neither peaceful nor enduring. Wuornos continued her drinking and fighting in local bars and was soon jailed for assault. As it entered its second month, Fell had the marriage annulled.

  She turned increasingly to crime as a means of support. In 1981, Wuornos held up a supermarket in Edgewater, Florida, while dressed in a bikini. She was quickly apprehended and charged with armed robbery. As a result, she spent most of 1982 and 1983 in prison. In 1984, she was again incarcerated after having attempted to pass forged cheques at a bank in Key West. In 1986 alone, Wuorno
s was accused of speeding, grand theft auto, resisting arrest, obstruction and having attempted to rob a male companion at gunpoint.

  That summer, while drinking in a Daytona gay bar, she met a 24-year-old motel maid named Ty Moore. The two became lovers later that same evening, and were soon living together. Wuornos encouraged Moore to quit her job and allow her to support them both through her earnings as a prostitute. Although the romantic and sexual elements of their relationship soon ended, they remained together in a transient lifestyle that took them through Florida. Wuornos took to travelling with a concealed pistol, which she made a point of keeping loaded.

  By 1989, she was finding it increasingly difficult to support herself and Moore through prostitution. Now 33, she was finding that her market value was diminishing; years of drinking and drug abuse were taking their toll.

  That December, Wuornos committed her first known murder. The victim was Richard Mallory, the 51-year-old owner of a Clearwater electronics repair shop. Though a secretive man, he was known to have gone off on bouts involving drinking and sex. He picked up Wuornos and drove into the woods outside Daytona Beach. Once there, they shared a bottle of vodka, after which Wuornos shot him four times, and stole the contents of his wallet. Wuornos then went home and told Moore what she had done.

  While hitch-hiking in May 1990, she was picked up by a 43-year-old heavy equipment operator named David Spears. Wuornos shot Spears six times, then stole his truck, which she later abandoned.

  On 6 June, she flagged down her next victim, 40-year-old Charles Carskaddon. Wuornos shot him six times, stole his gun, his money and his jewellery, and drove off in his car. The next day she dumped the vehicle and began hitch-hiking. Wuornos was soon picked up by Peter Siems, a 65-year-old retired merchant seaman who was on his way to visit relatives in Arkansas. A man devoted to his work in Christian outreach, he was travelling with a stack of Bibles. Wuornos murdered Siems and stole his car. This time she chose to keep her victim’s vehicle, a reckless decision that would lead eventually to her capture.