The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  Most of ‘Walter’s’ early encounters with teenage whores took place in the 1840s, when the streets were full of starving women and children for whom five shillings meant the difference between life and death. By the 1880s all this had begun to change. The Public Health Act and the Artisans’ Dwellings Act of 1875 had made an attempt to grapple with disease and poverty. When H.G. Wells came to London as a student in 1884, his cousin Isobel – whom he later married – worked as a retoucher of photographs in Regent Street, and many of his fellow students were women. The typewriter had been invented in the 1860s, and businessmen soon discovered that women made better typists than men. Drapers’ shops were now full of women counter assistants. All of which meant that – although there were still plenty of prostitutes on the streets – there was now a whole new class of ‘unavailable’ women to excite the concupiscence of men like ‘Walter’. The result was that, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, rape of adult women became far more common, and sex crime – in our modern sense of the word – made its appearance. In 1867, a clerk named Frederick Baker lured a little girl named Fanny Adams away from her companions in Alton, Hampshire, and literally tore her to pieces. In 1871, a French butcher named Eusebius Pieydagnelle killed six young women with a knife, experiencing orgasm as he stabbed them. (He has a claim to be the first serial killer.) In Italy in the same year, Vincent Verzeni was charged with a number of sex crimes including two murders – he experienced orgasm in the act of strangulation. In Boston, USA, in 1873, a bell-ringer named Thomas Piper murdered and raped three women, then lured a five-year-old girl into the belfry and battered her to death with a cricket bat; he was interrupted before the assault could be completed, and hanged in 1876. In 1874, a fourteen-year-old sadist named Jesse Pomeroy was charged with the sex murders of a boy and a girl in Boston and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1880, twenty-year-old Louis Menesclou lured a five-year-old girl into his room in Paris and killed her, keeping the body under his mattress overnight; when he tried to burn her entrails he was betrayed by the black smoke. He wrote in his notebook: ‘I saw her, I took her.’

  Crimes like these were regarded as the solitary aberrations of madmen, and scarcely came to the attention of the general public. The crimes of an American mass murderer named Herman Webster Mudgett, alias Henry Howard Holmes, should be noted as an exception. Holmes began as a confidence trickster, and in the late 1880s he built himself a large house in a Chicago suburb that would become known as ‘Murder Castle’. When Holmes was arrested in 1894 for involvement in a swindle, police soon came to suspect that he was responsible for the murder of an associate named Pitezel, and three of Pitezel’s children. Further investigation revealed that Holmes had murdered a number of ex-mistresses, as well as women who had declined to become his mistress. Moreover, as Holmes himself confessed, killing had finally become an addiction which, he believed, had turned him into a monster. The total number of his murders is believed to be twenty-seven, and they qualify him as America’s first serial killer. He was hanged in 1896.

  It was the crimes of Jack the Ripper though – which will be further discussed in the next chapter – that achieved worldwide notoriety and made the police aware that they were confronted by a new type of problem: a killer who struck at random. The murders took place in the Whitechapel area of London between 31 August 1888 and 9 November 1888. The first victim, a prostitute named Mary Ann Nicholls, was found in the early hours of the morning with her throat cut; in the mortuary, it was discovered that she had also been disembowelled. The next victim, another prostitute named Annie Chapman, was found spreadeagled in the backyard of a slum dwelling, also disembowelled; the contents of her pockets had been laid around her in a curiously ritualistic manner – a characteristic that has been found to be typical of many ‘serial killers’. The two murders produced nationwide shock and outrage – nothing of the sort had been known before – and this was increased when, on the morning of 30 September 1888, the killer committed two murders in one night. A letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, boasting of the ‘double event’, was sent to the Central News Agency within hours of the murders. When the biggest police operation in London’s history failed to catch the murderer, there was unprecedented public hysteria. As if in response to the sensation he was causing, the Ripper’s next murder was the most gruesome so far. A twenty-four-year-old prostitute named Mary Jeanette Kelly was killed and disembowelled in her room; the mutilations that followed must have taken several hours. Then the murders ceased – the most widely held theories being that the killer had committed suicide or was confined in a mental home. From the point of view of the general public, the most alarming thing about the murders was that the killer seemed to be able to strike with impunity, and that the police seemed to be completely helpless.

  The French police found themselves confronting the same frustrations in the mid-1890s when a travelling killer who became known as ‘the Disemboweller of the south-east’ raped and mutilated eleven victims, including three boys. (It is interesting to observe that many sex criminals have been tramps or wandering journeymen; it is as if the lack of domestic security produced an exaggerated and unnatural form of the sex needs.) He was finally caught – after three years – when he attacked a powerfully-built peasant woman, whose husband and children heard her screams. He proved to be twenty-eight-year-old Joseph Vacher, an ex-soldier who had spent some time in an asylum after attempting suicide. The lesson of the case was that Vacher had been able to kill with impunity for three years, although his description – a tramp with a suppurating right eye and paralysed cheek – had been circulated to every policeman in south-east France.

  The failure was doubly humiliating because France was now celebrated throughout the civilised world as the home of scientific crime detection. As early as 1814, the great doctor Mathieu Orfila had written the first treatise on poisons, revealing how they could be detected in the body; but for many years, other branches of crime detection had remained crude and inefficient. Throughout the nineteenth century, police had been pursuing more or less hit-or-miss methods of detecting criminals, relying on informers and policemen who knew the underworld. The chief virtue of a detective was simply immense patience – the ability, for example, to look through half the hotel registers in Paris in search of the name of a wanted man. All that changed in 1883 when a young clerk named Alphonse Bertillon invented a new method of identifying criminals by taking a whole series of measurements – of their heads, arms, legs, etc. These were then classified under the head measurements, and it became possible for the police to check within minutes whether a man arrested for some minor offence was a wanted murderer or footpad. ‘Bertillonage’ was soon in use in every major city in the world. The science of identification also achieved a new precision. In 1889, a doctor named Alexandre Lacassagne solved a particularly baffling murder when he identified an unknown corpse by removing all the flesh from the bones and revealing that the man had suffered from a tubercular infection of the right leg which had deformed his knee. Once the corpse had been identified, it was relatively simple to trace the murderers, a couple named Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard.

  The next great advance occurred in England, where Sir Francis Galton realised that no two persons have the same fingerprints. The first case to be solved by a fingerprint occurred in a small town in Argentina in 1892; a young mother named Francisca Rojas had murdered her two children and tried to put the blame on a peasant called Velasquez; an intelligent police chief named Alvarez observed a bloody fingerprint on the door, and established that it belonged to Francisca; she then confessed that she had been hoping to persuade a young lover to marry her, but that her ‘illegitimate brats’ stood in the way . . . When fingerprinting was introduced at Scotland Yard in 1902, it was so successful that Bertillon’s more complicated system was quickly abandoned. All over the world, ‘bertillonage’ was quickly replaced by the new fingerprint system.1

  It was at this point, when science seemed to be transforming the cr
aft of the manhunter, that killers like Jack the Ripper and Joseph Vacher made a mockery of all attempts to catch them. A well-known cartoon published at the time of the Ripper murders showed policemen blundering around with blindfolds over their eyes. Scientific crime detection depended on finding some link between the crime and the criminal. If a rich old dowager was poisoned, compiling a list of suspects was easy; the police merely had to find out who would benefit in her will, and which of these had access to poison. But the sex killer struck at random and, unless he left some clue behind, there was nothing to link him to the victim.

  One important advance offered hope of a partial solution. In 1901, a young Viennese doctor, Paul Uhlenhuth, discovered a method for testing whether a bloodstain was animal or human. Blood is made up of red cells and a colourless liquid called serum. Uhlenhuth discovered that if a rabbit is injected with chicken blood, its serum develops a ‘resistance’ to chicken blood. And if a drop of chicken blood is then dropped into a test tube containing serum from the rabbit, the serum turns cloudy. It was obvious that the same method could be used to detect human blood, for when an animal is injected with human blood, its serum will then turn cloudy if a drop of human blood – or even a few drops of dried blood in a salt solution – is introduced into it. In 1901, Uhlenhuth used his method to help convict a sadistic killer of children. Ludwig Tessnow was a carpenter, and in 1898 he had been a suspect when two little girls were killed and dismembered in a village near Osnabrück. Tessnow had insisted that brown stains on his clothes were wood dye, and the police believed him. When, three years later, two young brothers were killed in the same manner – literally torn to pieces – on the island of Rügen, Tessnow was again a suspect; again he insisted that stains on his clothing were of wood dye. The police sent his clothes to Uhlenhuth, who was able to show that some stains were of human blood, and that others were of sheep’s blood (Tessnow was also suspected of disembowelling sheep). He was executed in 1904.

  Tessnow had been living in the areas where the murders took place; but if he had been a tramp, like Vacher, he might never have been caught. This may not have been apparent in 1902, but as the rate of sex crime began steadily to rise in the second decade of the twentieth century, it became increasingly obvious. If a sex criminal observed a reasonable degree of caution, there was nothing to stop him from going on for years. In Cinkota, near Budapest, a plumber named Bela Kiss killed at least a dozen women between 1912 and 1914, storing most of the bodies in oil drums; he had been conscripted into the army by the time someone found the corpses in his cottage, and he was never caught. In Hanover soon after the First World War, a homosexual butcher named Fritz Haarmann killed about fifty youths, and disposed of their bodies by selling them for meat. Georg Grossmann, a Berlin pedlar, killed an unknown number of girls during the same period, and also sold them for meat. (When police burst into his flat in 1921, they found the trussed-up carcase of a girl lying on the bed, ready for butchering.) Karl Denke, a Munsterberg landlord, made a habit of butchering strangers, and eating their flesh; when he was arrested in 1924, police found the pickled remains of thirty bodies, and Denke admitted that he had been eating nothing but human flesh for three years. These four killers escaped notice because they killed their victims on their own premises. All were undoubtedly motivated by sex.

  Sex killers who moved around were equally elusive. Between 1910 and 1934, an itinerant carpenter named Albert Fish tortured and killed an unknown number of children – he confessed to four hundred – and was finally caught only because he was careless enough to put a letter describing one of the murders in an envelope that could be traced. During 1926 and 1927, a travelling rapist and murderer killed twenty-two women in America and Canada, starting in San Francisco and ending in Winnipeg, and in the meantime travelling as far east as Philadelphia. Most of the victims were landladies who advertised rooms to rent, and their naked bodies were usually found in the room they were offering. For a long time the police were not even aware of what the killer looked like, but eventually a woman to whom he had sold some jewellery – taken from a victim – was able to describe him as a polite young man with a simian mouth and jaw. The police eventually caught up with Earle Nelson, the ‘Gorilla Murderer’, simply because he was unable to stop killing, and left a well-defined trail of corpses behind him. In Düsseldorf during 1929, an unknown sadist attacked men, women and children, stabbing them or knocking them unconscious with a hammer. Eight victims were killed; many others were stabbed or beaten unconscious. The killer, Peter Kürten, was eventually caught when one of his rape victims led police to his flat. In Cleveland, Ohio, in the mid-1930s, a killer who became known as the ‘Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run’ killed and dismembered a dozen men and women, mostly derelicts and prostitutes; in two cases, two victims were killed at the same time and the dismembered parts of the bodies mixed together. The murders ceased in 1938, and the ‘Cleveland Torso Killer’ was never caught.

  Yet in spite of the notoriety achieved by these mass murderers, sex crime remained at a fairly low level during the 1930s. It accelerated during the Second World War – partly because the anarchic social atmosphere produced a loss of inhibition, partly because soldiers were deprived of their usual sexual outlet. By 1946, sex crime had doubled in England from its pre-war level. In large American cities, it had quadrupled by 1956. Even in Japan, where sex crime was still rare, a laundry worker – and employee of the American army – named Yoshio Kodaira raped and murdered ten girls in Tokyo between May 1945 and August 1946. He had made the mistake of giving his last victim his name and address when he offered her a job in his laundry, and she had left it with her parents; Kodaira was hanged in October 1949.

  By the time I began compiling An Encyclopedia of Murder in 1959, a strange new type of crime was beginning to emerge – ‘the motiveless crime’. In April 1959, a bachelor named Norman Smith, who lived alone in his caravan in Florida, watched a television programme called ‘The Sniper’, then took a pistol, and went out with the intention of shooting someone – anyone. The victim happened to be a Mrs Hazel Woodard, who was killed as she sat watching television. Colin commented: ‘Apparently he killed out of boredom,’ and compared it with the case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the two wealthy Chicago students who decided to commit a murder simply as a ‘challenge’. In May 1924 they chose at random a fourteen-year-old boy named Bobbie Franks and battered him to death with a chisel. They were caught because Leopold lost his glasses at the site where the body was dumped. The strange motivation – or lack of it – led journalists to label the murder ‘the crime of the century’. In June 1949, a pretty nineteen-year-old brunette named Ruth Steinhagen checked into the Edgewater Beach hotel in Chicago, and sent a note to a man whom she had adored from afar for two years: baseball player Eddie Waitkus, the unmarried first baseman of the Phillies; she asked if she could see him briefly to tell him something of great importance. In her room, she pointed a rifle at him and shot him dead. Asked why she did it, she explained that she ‘wanted the thrill of murdering him’. By the late 1950s, such crimes were ceasing to be unusual. In July 1958, a man named Norman Foose stopped his jeep in the town of Cuba, New Mexico, and with a rifle shot dead two children as they stood beside their mother; when caught, he explained that he wanted to do something about the population explosion. In February 1959, a pretty blonde named Penny Bjorkland accepted a lift from a man she knew slightly, and shot him dead with a revolver; traced through the bullet, she explained that she was curious to see if she could commit a murder and not have it on her conscience.

  During the 1960s, there was a perceptible rise in such crimes. In 1960, a young German named Klaus Gosmann knocked on the door of a flat he had chosen at random, and shot dead the man who opened the door, as well as his fiancée, who was standing behind him. Then he turned and walked away. He committed four more ‘random’ murders before he was caught. In November 1966, an eighteen-year-old student named Robert Smith walked into a beauty parlour in Mesa, Arizona, ordered five wome
n and two children to lie down on the floor, and shot them all in the back of the head. Both Gosmann and Smith were highly intelligent, regarded by their professors as good students. Yet apparently both suffered from a sense of boredom, of unreality. Smith’s explanation of his motive provides the vital clue to this new type of murder. ‘I wanted to become known, to get myself a name.’ He felt that killing seven people would ensure that his name appeared in newspapers around the world. The ‘motiveless murderer’ who began to emerge in the late 1950s was usually suffering from a kind of ego-starvation, a desire to be ‘recognised’. In short, such murders are not committed out of sexual frustration, but out of a frustrated craving for ‘self-esteem’.

  This seemed to provide an interesting clue to what was going on. In the 1940s, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow had suggested an interesting theory of human motivation, which he called the ‘hierarchy of needs’. Maslow pointed out that if a man is starving to death, his basic need is for food; he imagines that if he could have two square meals a day he would be completely happy. If he achieves this aim, then a new level of need emerges – for security, a roof over his head; every tramp dreams of retiring to a country cottage. If he achieves this too, then the next level emerges: for love, for sex, for emotional satisfaction. If this level is achieved, then yet another level emerges: for self-esteem, the satisfaction of the need to be liked and respected.