The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  * * *

  1 A Criminal History of Mankind, page 605, Colin Wilson, 1984.

  2 Between 1750 and 1800 the population of Europe rose from 147 million to 187 million.

  Nine

  Update

  THE AIM OF this book has not been to simply retell the histories of known serial killers, but to provide the reader with an understanding of what creates and drives such a predator. Serial murder is a social aberration that has arisen within the last two hundred years and – thanks to modern forensic policing and behavioural science – might effectively cease to happen within the next generation or so. Other once universal forms of crime have been driven out of existence by both technology and society’s willingness to combat them creatively; banditry and slavery, to name just two. So it is not too much to hope that the serial killer might soon go the way of the Viking raider and the Roman gladiator: a gruesome evidence of human cruelty, only to be found in the pages of history books.

  Until that happy day, however, there are always new cases to record and old cases to update . . .

  Andrei Chikatilo

  The Russian Andrei Chikatilo operated throughout the 1980s, mostly around the city of Rostov on Don. He was able to go on killing for such a long period largely because of the Soviet policy of refusing to give publicity to criminal cases, in a futile effort to convince the world that, compared to the decadent West, Russia was virtually free of crime. The result was that the citizens of Rostov were unaware that Russia’s worst serial killer was working in their midst, and therefore had no chance to take precautions, or to warn their children about plausible strangers.

  Andrei Chikatilo was born in the farming village of Yablochnoye, in the Ukraine, on 6 October 1936. Ukrainians are an ethnic minority in Russia, and because so many peasants opposed ‘collective farming’, Stalin treated them as his personal enemies; millions died in the starvation of the early 30s. Chikatilo’s family were very poor and lived in a one-room hut; his parents worked hard in the fields for very little pay.

  Medical examination of Chikatilo after his arrest showed abnormal electrical activity of the brain which dated from birth – ‘probably the result of something that happened in the uterus.’ His skull was slightly hydrocephalic, the pupils of his eyes of different sizes, and when he stuck out his tongue, it came out to the right-hand side.

  In spite of these abnormalities, Chikatilo was in no way mentally sub-normal, and was a good student at school, and undoubtedly of a high IQ. He was fond of his father, a kind, easy-going man, but his mother, Anna, was a virago who never showed affection, either for Chikatilo or for his sister Tatyana, seven years his junior. She had been dead almost twenty years at the time of her son’s arrest.

  When Chikatilo was five, his mother told him about a male cousin who had vanished two years before his birth, and who – according to her – was killed and eaten by starving peasants. (According to his sister, it was an older brother who had vanished.) This, Chikatilo claimed, preyed on his mind and promoted a tendency to morbidity.

  During the war – when the Ukraine was occupied by Germans – Chikatilo saw the aftermath of a bombing raid, with dismembered corpses and pools of blood. He later told a psychiatrist that when he saw this, he experienced an excitement that was almost sexual.

  This underlying sadism was reinforced by an immensely popular novel of the post-war period, Molodaya Gvardiya (The Young Guard), which was about patriotic young communists who fought against Nazism. They were shown beating up Germans and throwing them down mine shafts, and Chikatilo enjoyed indulging in revenge fantasies based on the novel. He saw himself as a young partisan who tortured German prisoners for information. And he later told in interrogators that during his first murder, he experienced a ‘high’ that made him feel like a young partisan. In the novel, all the young partisans are finally killed, which introduced an undertone of masochism into his fantasies.

  In his teens, he began to grow large and powerful – his new nickname was ‘Andrei Sila’, meaning ‘Andrew the Strong’. He read voraciously, and displayed a prodigious memory. At sixteen he became editor of the school newspaper, and was appointed school ‘agitator for political information’, which entailed reading aloud (and explaining) articles from Pravda. But he remained virtually friendless, and was paralysingly shy with the opposite sex. When, on one occasion, he found a more-than-willing girl, he was so terrified that he was unable to achieve an erection. He became convinced that he was impotent and would never have a normal sex live. This only increased the morbid intensity of his masturbation fantasies.

  At eighteen he tried to enter Moscow University to study law, but was turned down because – he believed – of his father’s war record. Instead he trained as an engineer at technical college. After a two-year course he was sent by the Young Communist League to work in a factory in the dreary town of Nizhno-Tagil. Again he tried sex with local girls, but always failed at the crucial moment. The only time he succeeded achieving sexual satisfaction was when a girl tried pushing him away; he held her tight as she struggled, and found that her struggle induced an orgasm.

  There were three years of national service – during which he joined the Communist Party – followed by a job as a telephone engineer in a small town near Rostov. Once his fellow engineers saw him masturbating in the woods – his short sightedness made him unaware that they were within sight – and it was yet another humiliation to increase his deep self-pity.

  When he was 27, his sister Tatyana – now married – decided to become a matchmaker, and introduced him to a shy girl called Fayina who was looking for a husband. His timidity gradually vanished and they married. But on their wedding night, he was impotent as usual – it was a long time before he could succeed in intercourse, and even then, it was seldom more than four times a year. Two children – a boy and a girl – were born.

  After obtaining a degree in Russian philology and literature from Rostov University in 1971, Chikatilo found himself a job as a schoolteacher in Novoshakhtinsk, in the coalfields. He was a hopelessly bad teacher; awkward, irritable, and inclined to mumble.

  He soon began to enter the dormitories of teenage girls when they were in their underwear; several described him masturbating with his hand in his trouser pocket. In May 1973, swimming with a fifteen-year-old pupil, he was unable to restrain himself from fondling her breasts and genitals, and her screams excited him even more. In 1974, he was forced to resign from his job, but no mention of the reason was made in his work record.

  He found a job in Shakhti at a technical school, where his youngest pupils were fifteen, and for a while kept out of trouble. But in 1978, he went into the boys’ dormitory in the middle of the night, pulled back the bedclothes of a fifteen year old, and began to suck his penis. The boy woke up. When Chikatilo tried to repeat this two nights later, the boys were all waiting for him and drove him away. As usual, he remained isolated and disliked, both by pupils and colleagues, while his neighbours found him a thoroughly unpleasant man.

  It was at this time that he bought his small hut at the other end of the town, and began picking up female down-and-outs and trying to entice children there. And in December of that year, 1978, he committed his first murder – that of nine-year-old Lena Zakotnova. He started a conversation with her as she was walking home from school; when she revealed that she desperately needed to go to the toilet, he persuaded her to go into his shack. There he hurled her to the ground and began tearing off her clothes. But even when she was subdued, he failed to achieve an erection to have sex with her. He ejaculated anyway, and pushed the semen into her with his fingers, rupturing her hymen. The blood filled him with excitement, and he pulled out a penknife and stabbed her repeatedly. Afterwards he carried her body to a nearby stream and threw it in.

  Although Chikatilo was questioned nine times by the police, another man with a record of sex crime, Aleksandr Kravchenko, was arrested for the murder, and executed.

  Chikatilo committed his next murder almost three yea
rs later, in September 1981. He met seventeen-year-old Larisa Tkachenko at a bus stop, and persuaded her to walk with him to nearby woods. She was almost certainly willing to have sex with him, but he was too excited. He threw her down, bludgeoned her with his heavy fists, and choked her to death. Then he bit off one of her nipples and ejaculated over the corpse.

  This murder established the pattern for all Chikatilo’s later murders – over 50 of them. He would lure someone to the woods, batter them into submission, usually stab them to death, achieve a climax, then leave the body covered with leaves or buried in a shallow grave.

  In the following year, he committed seven murders – five of these girls, ranging in age from ten to nineteen, and two boys, aged fifteen and nineteen. As he continued to kill, Chikatilo became increasingly sadistic. He liked to inflict dozens of stab wounds on his victims, none serious enough to kill, to bite out the tongues, and to emasculate the boys. He is known, on many occasions, to have carried cooking equipment with him, and may have practised cannibalism.

  By the end of the following summer, 1983, the number of his victims had increased to fourteen, and the Rostov police began the hunt for a sex killer. But, shielded by public ignorance, Chikatilo went on to kill three more times that year – two women and a fourteen-year-old boy. By September 1984, his total had risen to 32.

  Chikatilo’s method was to hang around train stations and travel on buses, trying to make pick-ups. On 13 September 1984, a police inspector followed Chikatilo for hours, watching him accost women, and even being fellated by one of his pick-ups on a bench. He arrested him, and felt certain that he had caught the murderer when he discovered a knife, a rope and a jar of vaseline in his briefcase. Yet Chikatilo was saved by a strange chance – he was one of those rare people whose blood group was different from the group of his semen – his blood was type A, his semen type AB. Unaware of this, the police decided to release him.

  For nine months he stopped killing, then was driven by his compulsion to start again. He killed prostitutes, and young boys and girls – one boy was only nine. By late 1990 the number of victims had reached 53, and the hunt for the serial killer was being organised from Moscow. The police set up surveillance patrols on small railway stations near wooded areas. When the body of a 22-year-old woman was found in woods near Donleskhoz station on 13 October 1990, a policeman recalled interviewing a suspicious-looking man a week earlier. He had asked for identification, and been given a passport that bore the name Andrei Chikatilo. The policeman had sent in a report but – typically – it had been lost.

  When police learned that Chikatilo had been questioned about the murder of nine-year-old Lena Zakotnova in 1978, they were fairly certain they had their man. He was arrested on 20 November 1990, and when his semen group was tested, it was proved to be AB, like that of the murderer. Soon Chikatilo confessed, and even led the police to bodies that had never been found.

  His trial opened on 14 April 1992; Chikatilo, kept in a cage to protect him from public fury, raged and shouted at the court, and even waved his penis at the public, shouting: ‘Look at this useless thing! What could I do with that?’

  He was sentenced to death on 14 October for 52 murders, and on 14 February 1994 was executed by a pistol shot in the back of the head.

  Jeffrey Dahmer

  Jeffrey Dahmer, a homosexual killer, was dominated by the same morbid compulsions as Chikatilo: but while Chikatilo enjoyed torturing living victims, Dahmer was fascinated by the dead.

  Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, born 21 May 1960, had killed seventeen young men, twelve of them in his apartment in Milwaukee, between March 1988 and his arrest on 22 July 1991. On that evening, a slim black man ran out of Oxford Apartments shouting for help, and stopped a police car. He was wearing a handcuff on one wrist, and said that a white youth had threatened to kill him. Police went to apartment 213, and were met by a tall, good-looking young man, who apologised for causing a disturbance. Noticing an unpleasant odour of decay, the police forced their way in. When one of them opened the door of the refrigerator, he was shocked to find a human head. Minutes later, they found another severed head in a freezer, three skulls in a filing cabinet, and four more elsewhere. A kettle contained severed hands and severed male genitals. Packets of meat proved to be human flesh.

  The man who had escaped, 32-year-old Tracy Edwards, told how he had met Dahmer in a shopping mall and accepted his invitation to a ‘party’ in his apartment. As Dahmer plied him with drink, Edwards became oddly sleepy. Then Dahmer snapped a handcuff on his wrist, and held a butcher’s knife against his chest as they watched a video of The Exorcist. Finally, Dahmer said he intended to strip Edwards and take photographs, then to kill him and eat his heart. At that point Edward kicked him and ran for the door, then fled for his life.

  At the police station, Dahmer seemed relieved to tell his story. As a child, he had been obsessed by the dissection of animals, stripping birds and rats of their flesh to preserve their skeletons. Although his background was comfortably middle class, his parents fought violently, and they preferred his younger brother. At eighteen, Dahmer committed his first murder. While his parents were away he picked up a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker, Stephen Hicks, and took him back to the house to drink beer. When Hicks finally said he had to go, Dahmer begged him to stay, and, when he refused, picked up a dumbbell and knocked him unconscious, then strangled him. After that, he undressed him and masturbated on the body, then dismembered it in the crawl space under the house. Later, after burying it, he dug it up and smashed the bones into fragments with a hammer.

  During the next nine years Dahmer joined the army, but was discharged for drunkenness – he had been a heavy drinker since his school days. He moved in with his grandmother in West Allis, near Milwaukee, and found himself a job in a chocolate factory. He also discovered gay bars, where he was known as a monosyllabic loner. It was there that he began slipping drugs into drinks, often leaving his drinking companion unconscious. He was banned from one bar for doing this.

  In 1986 he was in trouble with the law for exposing himself to two boys, and put on probation. On 15 September 1987 he committed his second murder. After going to bed with a 24-year-old man, Stephen Tuomi, in a hotel, he strangled him in the night. He managed to remove the body in a large suitcase, and dismembered it in the basement in his grandmother’s house. He left it out in garbage bags for collection.

  Between January 1988 and July 1991 he committed fifteen more murders. The method was basically much the same. He picked up a young male, usually black, and invited him home – either to his grandmother’s, or, after she had asked him to leave, to his own apartment on N. 24th Street. There the victim was knocked out with a drugged drink, then violated and strangled. The body was then dismembered, parts kept for cooking and eating, and the rest left out in garbage bags.

  All Dahmer’s confessions were sensational; but the story of one teenage victim was so appalling that it created outrage around the world. On 26 May 1991, fourteen-year-old Laotian Konerak Sinthasomphone had met Dahmer in front of the same shopping mall where the killer was later to pick up Tracy Edwards; the boy agreed to return to Dahmer’s apartment to allow him to take a couple of photographs.

  Unknown to Konerak, Dahmer was the man who had enticed and sexually assaulted his elder brother Keison three years earlier. Dahmer had asked the thirteen-year-old boy back to his apartment in September 1988, and had slipped a powerful sleeping draught into his drink, then fondled him sexually. Somehow, the boy had succeeded in staggering out into the street and back home. The police were notified, and Dahmer was charged with second degree sexual assault and sentenced to a year in a correction programme, which allowed him to continue to work in the chocolate factory.

  Now the younger brother Konerak found himself in the same apartment. He was also given drugged coffee, and then, when he was unconscious, stripped and raped. After that, Dahmer went out to buy some beer. On his way back to the apartment, Dahmer saw, to his horror, that his naked victim was tal
king to two black teenage girls, obviously begging for help. Dahmer hurried up and tried to grab the boy, but the girls clung on to him. One of them succeeded in ringing the police, and two squad cars arrived within minutes. Three irritable police officers wanted to know what the trouble was about.

  When Dahmer told them that the young man was his lover, that they lived together in the nearby apartments, and that they had merely had a quarrel, the policemen were inclined to believe him because he looked sober and Konerak looked drunk. So they left the youth in Dahmer’s apartment – to be strangled, violated and dismembered.

  When Dahmer was released from the correctional centre in March 1990 – where he was serving his sentence for the assault on the elder Sinthasomphone brother – he had already murdered five times. On 13 March 1990 he moved into the Oxford Apartments. During the next eighteen months he would kill twelve more victims, the last three in just over two weeks, between 5 July 1991 and 22 July 1991, when he was arrested.

  After his seventh murder – that of a black homosexual named Eddie Smith on 14 June 1990 – Dahmer came very close to being caught again. He invited a fifteen-year-old hispanic youth back to his apartment, but instead of drugging him, tried to knock him unconscious with a rubber mallet, then to strangle him. The youth fought back, and somehow managed to calm his attacker. Incredibly, Dahmer let him go, after making him promise not to notify the police. But in hospital, the youth broke his promise. However, when he begged the police not to let his foster parents know he was homosexual, they decided to do nothing about it.