Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (33 page)

Theodore Frank abandoned his studies three years later when he married at age 22. A year after marrying, he was arrested for indecent exposure. In the same year he became a voyeur, masturbating whilst staring through a girl’s bedroom window.

Later he was arrested again for molesting a ten-year-old girl in front of a church.

This time he spent two years at a mental health hospital in Missouri, but on his release he molested other children and spent further time in a mental facility before serving further jail time. Surprisingly, his wife had three children with him, though she was deeply perturbed by his crimes.

Throughout the 1960s, Theodore Frank was sent to prison for numerous sex offences, including raping a four-year-old Bakersfield girl and molesting an eight-year-old and a ten-275

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year-old girl. Suspected of the murder of a seven-year-old boy in Missouri, he swiftly relocated to California.

In January 1978, he was released early from the Mentally Disordered Sex Offender Programme in Atascadero State Prison as he convinced those running the course that he was cured, this despite the fact that he admitted molesting 150

children over 17 years.

Theodore Frank found work as an engineer with a large aerospace firm, but his main reason for living remained the desire to hurt children. Yet with his silvery hair and beard, impeccable taste in clothes and cultured voice, he looked an avuncular man.

On 14 March 1978, he approached a small boy in Camarillo, Ventura County and began to lead him away from his garden, but luckily his mother saw the attempted abduction and grabbed her child back.

Within minutes he espied two-year-old Amy Sue Seitz playing in her aunt’s garden. The aunt, who looked after the child every day, went upstairs for a couple of moments. Seizing his chance, the sadist persuaded the tiny child to approach the fence. When she did so, he lifted her over and abducted her.

An appalling death

Taking her to his nearby home, he used pliers on her nipples, pinching and tearing them from her body. He spent the next six hours torturing her, removing the skin from her hips and buttocks. He also repeatedly plunged and held her down in the bath, only briefly letting her up to breathe. At one stage, anxious neighbours knocked on his door asking him if he’d seen the child, but he told them no. In reality, she was alive in his living room and he was in the midst of pulling her fingers off.

The sadist returned to the child, raped her and punched her in the face. He also beat her so viciously about the head that she 276

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suffered a skull fracture and a brain haemorrhage. Eventually he strangled her to death with his bare hands. He drove 28 miles to Topanga Canyon to dispose of her corpse then put his car through the car wash to remove any forensic traces. When his wife returned from work, he behaved completely normally.

Two days later, pet dogs found the tiny corpse and dragged it home. Noticing both his dogs playing with a bloody object in their driveway, the owner investigated and found the decomposing body of the unfortunate child.

The authorities wondered what would make a man want to inflict such agonies on a tiny child. But they’d later find Theodore Frank’s notebook with its bizarre rationale ‘Why do I want to degrade and humiliate children? Sadism… I enjoy the humiliation. Defile the innocent. Make them scared of sex.

It’s dirty. I didn’t have a happy childhood, neither will they…

Revenge.’

But such torture murders don’t make the sadist feel peaceful for very long, and four months later he kidnapped a nine-year-old girl, drove her to a remote location and tore her clothes off.

He pinched her breasts and attempted to ram her panties down her throat.

Meanwhile the largest manhunt in Ventura County was well underway with police conducting door-to-door enquiries. They eventually found a mother who had stopped a man abducting her little daughter a few days before Amy was taken away. The woman was able to give them a good description of the would-be abductor and when they brought her photographs of known sex offenders she identified Theodore Frank.

Arrested for Amy Sue Seitz’s torture-murder, he was sentenced to death in 1980. Four years later the State Supreme Court overturned the death penalty saying that Theodore Frank’s sadistic notebooks shouldn’t have been entered into testimony as this violated his privacy. A naïve attorney subsequently told the court that the sadist was a kind and loving man.

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Death Row

After a public outcry, a second penalty hearing was held in 1985 and he was again sentenced to death and in 1990 the State Supreme Court unanimously voted to uphold the death sentence so the sadist remained on Death Row. He began to suffer from heart disease and had open heart surgery paid for by the taxpayer.

Like many people from abusive backgrounds, Theodore Frank was a gifted artist, but, given his sex crime, it’s surprising that he was allowed to sell drawings of semi-naked children.

(Paedophiles in the community feel encouraged to carry out their fantasies if they see that other paedophiles feel no guilt about their criminal actions.) He exhibited at one man shows in Las Vegas and San Francisco to considerable acclaim.

For 23 years following the murder he remained in St Quentin state prison then died there in September 2001 of natural causes

– a heart attack – two months before his latest appeal was to be heard. He was 68 years old.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

SADISTS WHO KILL

INDISCRIMINATELY

As the previous chapters have shown, many sadists
target either men, women or children, invariably
choosing the gender and age group they are most
attracted to. But for others, the need to cause pain
and fear is paramount and they are indifferent to
the victim’s sex or age.

MICHAEL LEE LOCKHART

This sadist is unusual in that he dominated people from differing age and sex groups, torturing and killing two teenage girls, subjecting his ex-wife to a prolonged bondage and domination session and attacking a policeman, making him beg for his life before he shot him dead. He is also suspected of at least 20 other mutilation murders.

Born in Ohio in 1960, Lockhart would later describe his childhood as terrible and allege that he was sexually assaulted repeatedly between the ages of six and eight by two people. He grew up to become a handsome if slightly effeminate man.

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By 1984, his marriage was in trouble and he was relying heavily on drugs and alcohol. He booked himself into a suicide prevention centre and they were sufficiently alarmed by his depression to refer him to the psychiatric unit of the local hospital. The admission form included the question ‘What worries you most?’ to which the early-stage sadist replied

‘Hurting someone else.’

Lockhart’s family urged him to quit the hospital and he did so but remained distraught, eventually leaving his wife and going on the road. From then on the 24-year-old caused mayhem, stealing cars, burglarising houses, committing armed robberies and even holding a woman at gunpoint. He spent various short periods in prison and in a variety of drug and alcohol abuse programmes but remained impulsive and full of hate.

The rst murder

On the afternoon of 13 October 1987 he woke up in an Indiana motel feeling extremely depressed and rootless, so he determined to kill someone. He was driving through Indiana when he spotted cheerleader Windy Gallagher (her name is often misrepresented in crime reports as Wendy) leaving her school. The drifter followed her home and rang the bell, telling her that he needed to make a phone call. He was impeccably dressed and well spoken and she let him in.

When he was sure that she was home alone, the sadist pounced, overpowering the 16-year-old and dragging her into the bedroom. He tied her hands behind her back and stripped her to the waist. He then knifed her a total of four times in the neck and 17 times in the stomach, pulling her intestines out. He also savagely raped the teenager before stealing a photograph of her that he found at the scene, a trophy to remind him of the carnage. Her sister found her corpse lying in a large pool of blood.

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Spousal abuse

The following month Lockhart arrived at his ex-wife’s house in Ohio and bound and gagged her. For the next two days – 7

and 8 November 1987 – he terrorised and sexually assaulted her then fled, continuing to evade the police.

The second murder

The sadist continued to live by theft, then on 20 January 1988 he followed 14-year-old Jennifer Colhouer to her Florida home, gaining entry to the house by telling her that he was an estate agent who wanted to look at houses in the area. When he was sure that the teenager was alone, he stripped her down to her shoes and socks, tied her hands behind her back with strips of cloth and sodomised her. Then he cut her with a carving knife again and again. He also pulled her intestines out, an act which had formed part of his previous signature. She was found by her brother who described it as the most horrendous sight he had ever seen.

The third murder

Lockhart’s next victim was a man. On 22 March 1988, Beaumont police officer Paul Hulsey tracked the sadist to a local motel and tried to arrest him in the hallway for driving a stolen vehicle. He held Lockhart at gunpoint, telling him to put his hands on the wall. But Michael Lockhart positioned himself next to a mirror and was able to see when the officer put his gun in his holster to take his handcuffs out.

He turned and hit the officer several times, also sticking a pen into his face, then shot him in the forearm when he was down.

Officer Hulsey radioed for assistance then begged for mercy but the serial killer shot him again, this bullet puncturing his lungs and his heart. The killer only left the room when he was sure that the policeman was dying, but he was apprehended 281

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within hours, having hailed a taxi and fallen asleep. Lockhart was indifferent to the fact that he’d just murdered a respected police officer and family man, telling the officers, ‘I killed him because he fucked up.’

Break out

But Lockhart wasn’t ready to go out without a fight, and at the jury selection phase of his trial he smashed through a glass window on the third floor of the court room, cutting himself and breaking his pelvis. He was rearrested and taken to hospital.

At the triple-murderer’s Texas trial, a psychologist said that he’d been molested by a neighbour at age six, and that these homosexual acts had left him conflicted about his own sexuality. He said that Lockhart had also been a victim of incest from age nine to 12.

Found guilty of capital murder, he was originally sentenced to die by lethal injection on 23 November 1993 but he kept petitioning for a stay of execution and after endless paperwork his death sentence was rescheduled for 10 September 1996.

Finally it was changed to 9 December 1997 – this time it would be carried out.

Execution

During his decade on Death Row, Lockhart turned to religion and was supported by those who believed that all life was precious. We’ll never know what these supporters would have said to the young siblings of Lockhart’s victims, who had returned home to find their sisters dead and disembowelled.

On 9 December 1997, he enjoyed a final meal from a burger bar before being taken to the execution chamber in Huntsville, Texas. He thanked those in the prison service who had been kind to him, said that he loved his family and friends and told 282

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his murder victims’ families, ‘It is my hope my death will give you some kind of comfort.’ Then he added, ‘Warden, I’m ready.’

At 6 p.m., as the drugs were administered, he closed his eyes then gasped several times and lost consciousness. He was pronounced dead at 6.24 p.m. Anti-death-penalty supporters condemned the move but over 100 of Paul Hulsey’s police officer colleagues stood outside the prison and expressed their relief at the killer’s death.

CÉDRIC BELLEC

Born in the South of France in 1981, Cédric Bellec endured a life of hell with his biological family. His mother gave birth to six other children fathered by four different men. Cédric was mercilessly beaten by his father and was only six when he ran away from home. When he eventually returned his father cut open his hand with a knife by way of retribution and the authorities at last stepped in and put the deeply disturbed child into an orphanage where he remained until he was 13 years old.

At this age, he was sent to live with relatives at Montpellier, namely Philippe and Aimée Narre. Philippe was a pilot and Aimée was a schoolteacher and they were apparently kind to the boy – but it was too little too late. He began to drink and to experiment with drugs, and soon pulled a knife on Aimée Narre. He was also violent outside the home environment and tried to strangle a classmate when he was 14.

Unable to concentrate on his schoolwork, he attempted to learn mechanics and cookery but was equally inept at them. At 16 he left school and moved into a hostel where he befriended other abused youngsters who had been in care. Later still he moved into a flat with a friend in Aix-les-Bains.

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But he remained full of rage and thought often of the various humiliations in his young life, including a time when Philippe Narre had slapped him in front of his schoolfriends and had criticised his lacklustre approach to life.