In real life, Daniel Conahan’s parents might not have tried physical abuse, but when their teenage son admitted to being gay, they weren’t happy about it. They sent Daniel to several psychiatrists to try to “cure” him. Daniel didn’t appreciate being told that his sexuality was a disease that could be cured.
His homicidal nature probably couldn’t be cured, either. Conahan, called the Hog Trail Killer, took gay men out into the woods near Punta Gorda, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, promising them money for posing for nude photographs. The path he took them down was a wild hog trail, rarely traveled by human beings. Once they were there, he posed the men in bondage situations, tied to a tree, then he strangled them, and in several cases he cut off their genitals. Some of the men were also raped.
Conahan was arrested after other men reported that he had approached them with similar offers, and one man said that Conahan had actually tied him to a tree and tried to strangle him with a rope but had run out of time and had to leave the job unfinished.
Prosecutors charged Conahan with only one homicide. In his 1999 trial, Conahan pleaded not guilty but was convicted and sentenced to death. He has appealed that sentence while continuing to maintain his innocence; however, his story has changed, to the point of claiming that the victim’s death was the result of sex play gone awry. The remains of other men have continued to turn up in the woods of the Gulf Coast, including eight near Fort Myers in 2007. The authorities are investigating Conahan in connection with those new bodies, but we may never know how many people he really killed.
Although the psychoses of sexually motivated serial killers are unique to each individual, the basic thrust behind all of these perpetrators is the same. Somewhere in life they develop a fantasy that conflates sex and death. As time goes on, instead of the fantasy being outgrown, it takes on more force and power, to the point that these damaged individuals are unwilling or unable to deny it. They act out the fantasy as closely as they can.
However, fantasy is perfect in a way that real life never is, so the act they commit is not quite right. Living out the fantasy quells the desire for a while, but even through the cooling-off period, it doesn’t leave their minds. The killers ponder it, wondering what they might have done differently to make the act more like the imagination. And so they try it again, but once again it isn’t quite true to how they’ve constructed it mentally.
At the same time, usually with the use of trophies they’ve kept from each murder—photographs, diaries, personal possessions, body parts—they relive the best parts of it in their heads, once again achieving sexual release. But reliving it only feeds the fantasy, so they keep at it, over and over, until they are captured or killed—or, in a very few cases, like Ed Kemper’s, until they murder the person at whom the rage aspect of their fantasy is truly directed, and they give themselves up.
Also key to these fantasies is that the killers are without empathy. They not only can’t understand how other people feel, they don’t care to find out. To them, other people are useful only as props for their fantasies, and their deaths aren’t tragedies but are necessary elements of those fantasies. The only serial killers who factor the feelings of others into their mental equations at all are the sexual sadists, whose pleasure comes from the suffering they inflict.
It’s crucial to profilers to be able to figure out as much about each killer’s fantasy life as they can, because that’s the key to determining what sort of person committed the murders. Profiling can never lead to a specific individual; it can only narrow the scope of a search. The solution to the fantasy riddle is in the killer’s individual signature.
For instance, Daniel Conahan’s signature was tying nude men to trees and strangling them. He achieved sexual gratification through these acts, and sometimes through the rape of the men and the removal of their genitals. These things aren’t necessary aspects of murder—he could just as easily have clubbed them over the head or shot them—but they were necessary to his fantasy.
Conahan was born in 1954; when his fellow Floridian Gerard Schaefer was tying women to trees in remote areas and murdering them, he was a young man, and it would not be at all surprising to learn that Conahan, still struggling with his sexual identity, paid close attention to the news reports of Schaefer’s crimes.
Schaefer’s victimology was different from Conahan’s, because his sexual preference was for women. But the way he treated the girls who made the news was almost too similar to Conahan’s method to be coincidental. Conahan’s fantasies took shape at an early age, and as is the case with most sexual predators, his fantasies determined the ultimate shape of his murders.
4
Killers on the Road
THERE ARE SERIAL KILLERS who stay home and become closely associated with a specific location or region: Son of Sam, the Green River Killer, the Atlanta Child Murderer, and the Boston Strangler come to mind.
Then there are those who take their act on the road, like Henry Lee Lucas and Mike DeBardeleben. This chapter takes a closer look at the traveling road shows of serial-killer history, beginning with the poster boy for the breed—in fact, the person most Americans probably think of when they think of serial killers at all.
TED BUNDY’S name is mentioned in ten episodes of Criminal Minds. It first arises in the fourth episode of Criminal Minds, “Plain Sight” (104). It’s brought up again in “Unfinished Business” (115), “Charm and Harm” (120), “The Boogeyman (206), “The Last Word” (209), “The Big Game” (214), “Penelope” (309), “Limelight” (313), “Omnivore” (418), and “The Slave of Duty” (510). With more mentions on the series than any other criminal, Bundy is the guy you’re talking about when you’ re talking serial killers.
In many ways, Bundy’s case offers us an archetypal serial killer to study, with a clearly observable signature and pattern of behavior. After his final arrest and conviction, people who knew him would say that they had never seen any signs of the monster-to-be within the Ted Bundy they had known. If they’d been familiar with the makings of a serial killer, they might have had a different interpretation.
Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, to a mother who was a temporary resident at a home for unwed mothers in Burlington, Vermont. His father—although Bundy wouldn’t know it for decades—was probably a war veteran who seduced his mother. Louise Cowell went far from home to have her baby, and upon their return (she kept the baby), her family engaged in a charade, claiming that she and Ted were brother and sister and that Ted’s grandparents were his parents. His grandfather was a cruel, intolerant man with a taste for mild pornography, which Ted sampled early. His mother’s sister woke up one night to find herself in bed surrounded by kitchen knives. Her three-year-old nephew stood beside her, grinning.
When Ted was four, he and his “sister” (mother) moved to Tacoma, Washington, to live with his mother’s uncle Jack, a college professor who lived a cultured lifestyle to which Ted spent the rest of his life aspiring. After a year, Louise married Johnnie Culpepper Bundy, a cook at the veteran’s hospital, who gave Ted his last name. Johnnie’s marginal lifestyle, however, was one that Ted—even at that early age—wanted no part of.
By the time Ted was in his teens, he had begun shoplifting, which later evolved into petty theft and burglary. He also developed a taste for peeping into women’s windows. In high school, he was nearly friendless, incapable of mixing socially with the other kids. He could speak up in the controlled situation of the classroom but felt lost in the halls. And although he was a good-looking, athletic kid, he wasn’t skilled at team sports. Using stolen equipment, he became an avid skier.
These factors would all play into Ted Bundy’s psychosis: identity confusion from being lied to about his birth and parentage, the shame he felt at being born out of wedlock, his lack of respect for law and authority, the melding of sex with lawbreaking and pornography, the loner-outsider persona, and his desperate yearning for a social status he could never quite achieve. These things, combined with the
sociopathic lack of empathy and remorse so common among his serial-killing peers, led Bundy down a terrible path.
He graduated from high school and went to college, first at the University of Puget Sound and then at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, settling in the city’s University District. There he fell in love with a wealthy coed from California, a pretty girl with long brown hair parted in the middle (this detail would become significant later on). He was starting to come into his own, becoming active in Republican politics; when most people his age were involved in the antiwar movement and growing their hair long, Bundy was a staunchly proestablishment, law-and-order guy. He grew into a handsome, charming young man who dressed and spoke well.
On one occasion, he saved a drowning child; on another, he ran down a purse snatcher, returned the purse to the victim, and held the culprit for the police. He worked at the Seattle Crisis Center, answering phones, helping people who were suicidal or suffering from extreme situations like rape. One of his coworkers, who became a friend, was Ann Rule, who would later become a best-selling true-crime writer.
The summer after Bundy’s sophomore year at UW, he went to Palo Alto, California, to be close to his upper-middle-class sweet-heart. But the relationship foundered over the summer. Like a fish out of water, Bundy was awkward and ill at ease. His girlfriend lost interest in him and broke off their relationship. Back in Washington, crushed and dispirited, he gave up on school, set off on a trip around the country, then returned to Washington and took a couple of low-paying jobs. He redoubled his burglary efforts and began moving up in Republican politics.
In “Catching Out,” the BAU team, including Hotchner, Prentiss, and Reid, presents a profile to local law enforcement officials to help find a serial killer who jumps trains and targets people living near the railway.
Bundy met another woman who became his girlfriend. Under the pseudonym Elizabeth Kendall, she would later write a book about her life with the most notorious U.S. serial killer. While Bundy was involved with her, he made another trip to the Bay Area and rekindled his relationship with his former flame. Once the former girlfriend had become firmly committed and they were talking about marriage, he returned to Seattle and didn’t get in touch with her for a month. When she finally called him, he blew her off—revenge for dumping him earlier. He played a similar game with Elizabeth, going so far as to get a marriage license, then dramatically tearing it up.
During this period, it’s believed, he began killing. He never confessed to his murders, and they might have started earlier than anybody knows.
His first confirmed attack came in 1972, when he followed a woman to her front door. While she was trying to unlock it, Bundy hit her with a club. She screamed, and he ran off, terrified. In January 1974, he pulled off a more successful assault, breaking into a woman’s apartment while she slept, striking her skull with a metal rod, and shoving a medical instrument into her vagina. The attack left her in a coma.
Then his terror escalated. On January 31, 1974, Lynda Ann Healy was abducted from the house she shared near the university. Healy was a pretty twenty-one-year-old with long brown hair parted in the middle.
Bundy’s pattern established itself early. His victims were attractive young women. Most had long hair parted in the middle. He developed a very effective ruse: he made himself a cast, put it usually on his arm but sometimes on a leg, and pretended to need help with a task that involved putting something in his car, such as groceries or books that he had dropped. Samantha Malcolm, in the Criminal Minds episode “The Uncanny Valley” (512), uses a similar technique to good effect, convincing a woman to help her load a wheelchair into her van; the helpful woman is subdued with a Taser and kidnapped for her trouble.
Once Bundy got the young woman to lean into his car, he would push her inside, sometimes hitting her with the cast to knock her out. He then handcuffed his victim, took her someplace private—a wooded area or his own home—and raped and murdered her. Sometimes he kept the body around the house for several days. In some cases he shampooed his victim’s hair and put makeup on her before dumping her in the woods. He often had sex with the corpses, even visiting them after dumping them to repeat the act. He kept some of the heads for a time as trophies. Although he took most of his victims from Seattle’s university community, he also traveled as far as Corvallis, Oregon, hoping to make it hard for the authorities to link his crimes.
In the summer of 1974, Bundy met Carole Ann Boone, whom he would eventually marry and who, while he was on death row, would bear a daughter she claimed was his. That was still a long way off, however, and many corpses later.
The Washington murders stopped abruptly that summer, after ten victims. Bundy had been accepted into the University of Utah’s law school.
By October, he was busy in Utah, brutalizing, raping, and killing women who resembled his lost love. Deciding that he needed to spread out his activities more, he took to traveling to Colorado for victims. In August 1975, he was arrested and charged with kidnapping in Utah and murder in Colorado.
Two escapes later, he was on the run and wound up in Tallahassee, Florida. As before, he got a room in a college community, near Florida State University.
Bundy was rapidly devolving. Up to this point his murders had been signature crimes, each recognizable as his work, from the victimology to the MO to the body dumps. In Florida, he didn’t bother trying to fit in to society. He lived on credit cards, drank a lot, and stopped keeping up with his formerly immaculate grooming. On January 15, 1978, he dressed in dark clothing and a knit watch cap, wrapped a log in a piece of cloth, and broke into the Chi Omega sorority house. There he went on a horrific rampage, killing two sorority sisters outright: he beat one with the log, raped her, bit a nipple and her buttocks, sodomized her with a hairspray can, and strangled her; he beat the other so hard that her skull was crushed and her brain exposed. Two other women he attacked lived but were badly injured.
The same night, Bundy broke into the nearby apartment of another student and attacked her while she was sound asleep in bed. She survived, but with permanent injuries that ended her hope of a career as a dancer.
For the next several weeks Bundy roamed around Florida, degenerating further. He drank, he drove, he drank some more. On February 9, he talked a twelve-year-old girl into leaving her school playground. She was found the first week of April, dumped in an abandoned hog shed, with her throat slit and severe damage to her pelvic area.
On February 12, Bundy was arrested for the last time. He loudly proclaimed his innocence, but hair and fiber evidence, his semen found at various crime scenes, and bite-mark evidence from the sorority massacre were more convincing to a jury.
During the trial for the twelve-year-old’s death, Carole Ann Boone (Bundy’s friend from Washington who married him), was a witness for the defense. Bundy and Boone startled observers by exchanging their vows during her questioning; since he was serving as his own counsel and she was under oath, it was considered legal. He had already been sentenced, in the Chi Omega case, to two death penalties. Shortly after his very public nuptials, he received a third death sentence.
On January 24, 1989, Bundy’s life came to an end in a Florida electric chair. He had killed at least thirty-six women, but many estimates put the number much higher, perhaps as many as a hundred. He killed them in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and Florida—at least, these are the states that we know of. His good looks and occasionally charming personality, his ruse of injured helplessness, and his winning ways with women—until he blitzed, bound, abused, and murdered them—all combined to make him a kind of folk hero to serial-killer fans. He received many proposals and propositions during his time on death row, and Boone believed in his innocence to the end.
IN THE CRIMINAL MINDS episode “Catching Out” (405), Armando Salinas rides the rails up and down central California, murdering people in homes that are within easy walking distance of the tracks. In that episode, it’s explained that there are two
categories of traveling killers: the itinerant homeless and those with an occupation that allows them to travel.
One of the former type was Angel Maturino Resendiz, who plied his trade in Texas, not California, and became known as the Railroad Killer. Because he was a Mexican national who was in the United States illegally and had no fixed address, he was hard to track down. When he jumped onto a freight train, even he didn’t know where he was going, so how could the authorities get ahead of him?
Angel Leoncio Reyes Recendiz was born on August 1, 1960, in Mexico. Even before his confirmed homicides began, he had an arrest record that began at the age of sixteen. The first time, he was picked up trying to cross the border at Brownsville, Texas. In later years, he was arrested several times; once he was sentenced to twenty years in prison for auto theft and assault, but he was paroled and deported back to Mexico after just six years. By the time his fingerprints were found on a vehicle stolen from Dr. Claudia Benton, whom he had raped and bludgeoned with a statue, those prints were on file in the system and the authorities knew who their man was. But knowing and being able to find were two different things.
The Benton murder took place on December 16, 1998. Nine earlier murders have been attributed to Resendiz; many took place in railroad yards and close to the train tracks. His signature really established itself with his eighth murder, that of eighty-seven-year-old Leafie Mason. All of his later murders took place in his victims’ homes, close to the tracks. He used objects he found in the homes, and he sometimes stayed in those houses for a while. When he left, he took jewelry and other easily disposable items. He sent much of that jewelry to his wife in Mexico.
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