Serial Killer Investigations (21 page)

On the morning of 1 February 1974, he found an unlocked front door in a students’ house and went in. He entered a bedroom at random; 21-year-old Lynda Ann Healy was asleep in bed. He battered her unconscious, and then carried her out to his car. He drove to Taylor Mountain, 20 miles east of Seattle, removed her pyjamas, and raped her. When Bundy was later ‘speculating’ about this crime for Stephen Michaud’s benefit, the interviewer asked: ‘Was there any conversation?’ Bundy replied: ‘There’d be some. Since this woman in front of him represented not a person, but, again, the image of something desirable, the last thing we would expect him to want to do would be to personalise her.’

He then bludgeoned Lynda to death; Bundy always insisted that he took no pleasure in violence, but that his chief desire was ‘possession’ of another person.

Now the ‘hunchback’ was in full control, and there were five more victims over the next five months. Three of the young women were taken to the same spot on Taylor Mountain and there raped and murdered—Bundy acknowledged that his sexual gratification would sometimes take hours. The four bodies were found together in the following year.

On the day he abducted the two young women from Lake Sammamish, Bundy ‘speculated’ that he had taken the first, Janice Ott, to a nearby house and raped her. He then returned to the lake to abduct Denise Naslund, taking her back to the same house and raping her in view of Janice. He then killed them both, drove their bodies to a remote spot four miles north-east of the park, and dumped them.

By the time he had reached this point in his ‘confession’, Bundy had no further secrets to reveal; everything was obvious. Rape had become a compulsion that dominated his life. When he moved to Salt Lake City to enter the law school—he was a failure from the beginning as a law student—he must have known that if he began to rape and kill young women there, he would be establishing himself as suspect number one. This made no difference; he had to continue. Even the unsuccessful kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, and the knowledge that someone could now identify him, made no difference to him. He merely switched his activities to Colorado.

Following his arrest, conviction, and escape, he moved to Florida, and the compulsive attacks continued, although by now he must have known that another series of murders in a town to which he had recently moved must reduce his habitual plea of ‘coincidence’ to an absurdity. It seems obvious that by this time he had lost the power of choice. In his last weeks of freedom, Bundy showed all the signs of weariness and self-disgust.

Time finally ran out for Bundy in January 1989. Long before this, he had recognised that his fatal mistake was to decline to enter into plea-bargaining at his trial; the result was a death sentence instead of life imprisonment. In January 1989, his final appeal was turned down and the date of execution fixed. He then made a last-minute attempt to save his life by offering to bargain murder confessions for a reprieve—against the advice of his attorney James Coleman, who warned him that this attempt to ‘trade over the victims’ bodies’ would only create hostility that would mitigate against further stays of execution.

That same year, Ressler attempted to arrange an interview with Bundy for his research project—Bundy was articulate and intelligent, and Ressler hoped to add something to what he knew about the motivation of serial killers. His plan did not work out at that time, but two years later he was surprised to receive a letter from Bundy saying that he would like to become a consultant to the BSU. This was fairly obviously a long-shot attempt to delay his execution; if he could become a valuable consultant, his chances of being executed would be correspondingly smaller.

At their meeting, Bundy stuck out his hand even before Ressler extended his, (establishing himself as being in charge of the situation) and told Ressler how much he admired his writing. (Ressler had at this time only co-written one book on sexual homicide.) Bundy said he wondered why Ressler had not come to see him earlier, and Ressler replied he had tried but been unable to because Bundy’s appeals were still pending. Bundy apologised, explaining that he would very much like to talk to someone on his own level of understanding—a clear attempt at manipulation reminiscent of John Gacy.

Bundy agreed to answer questions on a ‘speculative’ basis—as with his earlier interviews with Michaud and Aynesworth—and described how he had abducted Caryn Campbell from a hotel at a ski resort in Colorado in January 1979. But he would not admit that he had actually done this, and ‘after three or four hours of this sort of dancing around the issues,’ said Ressler, ‘I realised that Bundy would never talk, that he would attempt to con people... until executed, and I went home.’

In a final attempt to bargain for his life, Bundy finally went on to confess to eight Washington murders, and then to a dozen others. Detective Bob Keppel, who had led the investigation in Seattle, commented: ‘The game-playing stuff cost him his life.’ Instead of making a full confession, Bundy doled out information bit by bit. ‘The whole thing was orchestrated,’ said Keppel, ‘We were held hostage for three days.’ And finally, when it was clear that there was no chance of further delay, Bundy confessed to the Chi Omega Sorority killings, admitting that he had been peeping through the window at girls undressing until he was carried away by desire and entered the building.

He also mentioned pornography as being one of the factors that led him to murder. Newspaper columnists showed an inclination to doubt this, but Bundy’s earlier confessions to Michaud leave no doubt that he was telling the truth.

Ann Rule’s book on Bundy contains another vital clue to his motivations. She comments that Bundy became violently upset if he telephoned Meg Anders from Salt Lake City—where his legal studies were foundering—and got no reply. ‘Strangely, while he was being continuously unfaithful himself, he expected—demanded—that she be totally loyal to him.’ This, of course, is the Right Man of A. E. Van Vogt, the man who will never, under any circumstances, admit he is in the wrong, and spends his life building a sand castle of self-esteem based on illusions. Such a man is often constantly unfaithful to his wife, yet demands total fidelity from her.

Clearly, the Right Man syndrome is a form of mild insanity. Yet it is alarmingly common; most of us know a Right Man, and some have the misfortune to have a Right Man for a husband or father. The syndrome obviously arises from the sheer competitiveness of the world we are born into. Every normal male has an urge to be a ‘winner’, yet he finds himself surrounded by people who seem better qualified for success. One common response is boasting to those who look as if they can be taken in—particularly women. Another is what the late Stephen Potter called ‘one-upmanship’, the attempt to make the other person feel inferior by a kind of cheating—for example, by pretending to know far more than you actually know. Another is to bully people over whom one happens to have authority. Many Right Men are so successful in all of these departments that they achieve a remarkably high level of self-esteem on remarkably slender talents. Once achieved, this self-esteem is like an addictive drug and any threat of withdrawal seems terrifying. Hence the violence with which he reacts to anything that challenges it.

It would probably be true to say that all serial killers are Right Men.

Chapter Nine

The most widely publicised case of the late 1980s was at the time another of those mysteries that seem to demonstrate that the police are helpless when a killer chooses to strike at random. But then, the Behavioral Science Unit was still new, and had not yet had time to find its feet.

The problem with the ‘Hillside Strangler’—as he was then known—was that he seemed to be a completely disorganised killer, and if luck is on their side, these are the most difficult to catch. Ressler explains:

The disorganized killer may pick up a steak knife in the victim’s home, plunge it into her chest, and leave it sticking there. Such a disorganized mind does not care about fingerprints or other evidence. If police find a body rather readily, that is a clue that the crime has been done by a disorganized offender. Organized ones transport the bodies from the place that the victims were killed, and then hide the bodies, sometimes quite well. Many of Ted Bundy’s victims were never found. Bob Berdella, a Kansas City, Missouri, killer who, like John Gacy, abducted, tortured, and killed young boys, cut up their bodies into small pieces and fed them to the dogs in his yard; many that were so treated could never be identified.

Ressler then turns to the Hillside Stranglers:

A different dynamic seems to have been at work in the instance of the Hillside Strangler, who was later identified as two men. The victims were found, and the killers later turned out to have been quite organized offenders. Their desire seems to have been an egotistical one—to flaunt the bodies in front of the police rather than to conceal them in an effort to prevent tracing the killers through identification of the victim.

These two killers, whose trial was one of the most costly in American legal history, differ in another significant way from killers like Schaefer or Heirens, both of whom were tormented as they felt themselves being taken over by the urge to kill—so much so that Schaefer sobbed as he told Sondra London about his compulsions, while Heirens wrote ‘For God’s sake catch me...’

Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono felt as little compunction as two Alsatians who team up to kill sheep. They committed rape-murder as a glutton eats: because it gave them pleasure.

The case is also of interest for another reason. The crimes of the Hillside Stranglers came about because two criminal personalities interacted, and produced an explosive combination. Psychologists sometimes refer to it as
folie a deux,
or ‘madness for two’. When this happens, it is usually because a dominant character interacts with a weak one, and enjoys the sense of exerting power so much that he looks for ways to savour it more fully. It can be seen, for example, in the case of Leopold and Loeb, the two Chicago college students who in 1924 decided to commit a murder simply to prove to themselves that they were not like other people. Two decades later, it appears in the case of the ‘Lonely Hearts Killers’, Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, who killed 20 women to gain possession of their property, and who were executed in 1951. In the 1960s, in England, the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley (see chapter 16), were a textbook case of
folie a deux.
Ten years later, came the Hillside Stranglers.

Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi were cousins, Buono (born 1934) being the elder by 17 years, and they came together when Bianchi moved to Los Angeles from Rochester, New York, in 1976. Buono had spent most of his teens in a reformatory for car theft, but nonetheless had become the successful owner of an auto body shop in Glendale, and gained a reputation as a first class upholsterer; his clients including Frank Sinatra. Intensely macho, his infidelity and brutality had resulted in four divorces by the time he was in his late thirties.

Kenneth Bianchi, born 1951, was the son of a prostitute, and had been adopted at three months. A bright child, he had a tendency to lie compulsively. Good-looking and a plausible talker, he had no trouble finding girlfriends, but a certain weakness of character undermined his relationships. In personality type he bore many resemblances to Gerard Schaefer, including a hankering for authority that led him to try to become a policeman. When rejected, he took a job as a night security guard. But his propensity to steal led to many job changes. Eventually, with one divorce behind him, he moved to Los Angeles at the age of 25.

There he was again turned down on two occasions by the LAPD, and decided instead to become a psychiatrist. He began by reading psychology textbooks, but decided to take a short cut to a career in the field: he placed a fake job advertisement in a newspaper, and then took the identity and qualifications of a graduate who answered it.

The impact of his cousin’s personality on him was profound, and his open admiration led Buono to offer him a home. There Bianchi was impressed by the ease in which his cousin bedded nubile teenagers and persuaded them to perform oral sex. Buono was brutal and coarse, but as a stud, he was awe-inspiring.

Although Buono soon got tired of his fantasy-prone and weak-willed cousin and made him find a place of his own, he nevertheless suggested that they should go into the pimping business together. Bianchi soon made a start. At a party he met an attractive blonde, 16-year-old Sabra Hannan, who wanted to be a model, and convinced her that he could find her jobs. She moved into Buono’s house, and when the jobs failed to materialise, he asked her if she had ever considered prostitution. Her first reaction was indignation, but after being stripped and beaten with a wet towel and made to perform oral sex on both men, she reluctantly submitted. They warned her that if she ever ran away, their Mafia friends would find her and kill her. On one occasion, she and Buono’s teenaged girlfriend, Antoinette, served seven men at the same time, including the local police chief. Soon the cousins had a small stable of girls working for them, with all of whom Buono practised anal intercourse. They called their agency the Foxy Ladies.

It was a slight 15-year-old called Becky who triggered a series of events that led to multiple murder. One evening in August 1977, Buono sent her to the Bel Air apartment of a wealthy lawyer. When he asked the sad waif how she became a prostitute, she told him the story of how two men kept her a prisoner, beat and sodomised her, and threatened her with death. He was so shocked that he put her on a plane back home to Phoenix, Arizona.

Enraged when he learned what had happened, Buono repeatedly telephoned him, threatening him with harm. The lawyer retaliated by calling upon the services of some biker friends, and asked a 300-pound bouncer named Tiny to ‘visit’ Buono’s garage. Tiny took with him four equally huge companions. Buono was working in a car when they walked in, and when Tiny asked him if he was Mr Buono, he just ignored him. Tiny reached through the window, picked Buono up by his shirtfront, dragged him through the window, and calmly asked: ‘Do I have your attention, Mr Buono?’ He then ordered Buono not to bother his lawyer friend again, and left him sprawling on the floor.