Serial Killer Investigations (7 page)

If it was Heirens who knocked Evelyn Peterson unconscious—and who else could it have been?—then he was not the fairly harmless teenager he wanted Dolores Kennedy to believe. He could have cracked her skull or caused brain damage. And as soon as we have this image of Heirens striking a sleeping woman with an iron bar—if he was so harmless, why not just take her purse and vanish?—we also glimpse the person who beat and stabbed Frances Brown, killed and dismembered Suzanne Degnan, and stabbed Josephine Ross through the throat.

Why did he not, in order to obtain parole, simply tell the truth? Because, I suspect, his shame about the sexual aspect of the murders made him incapable of admitting that his victims had seen him masturbating at the side of their beds, and driven him to kill to expunge the humiliation.

Ressler goes on to say that, although the interview with Heirens was a disappointment, even the failure left him doubly certain that this direct contact with criminals could bring new insights.

Chapter Four

In early 1978, Ressler was due to travel to northern California on a teaching assignment, and decided that this would be a good time to make a start with his project of interviewing killers. In theory, he should have obtained permission from his superiors. But he had been present at a lecture by a naval computer expert who had described her own scheme for cutting through bureaucratic red tape. It was better, said Grace Hopper, to ask forgiveness than to ask permission, since permission might be refused, whereas one could always apologise later for transgressions. Ressler took her point, and contacted a friend in California who was the liaison officer for the prison system, and asked him the whereabouts of the murderers he wanted to interview: these included Charles Manson, Edmund Kemper, Herbert Mullin, John Linley Frazier, Juan Corona (a killer of migrant workers), and Sirhan Sirhan, (the assassin of Robert Kennedy). Since FBI agents could enter any prison in the country by showing their badges, and did not have to give a reason for wanting to talk to inmates, all of this presented no problems.

Sirhan happened to be the first interviewee on the list. He had shot Robert Kennedy ten years earlier, on 5 June 1968, as Kennedy was on his way to a press conference at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, after winning the California presidential primary. Kennedy was making his way through the food service area when Sirhan began shooting with a .22 revolver. Convicted of first-degree murder, Sirhan, a Palestinian, was sentenced to death, but a decision of the US Supreme Court brought an end to the death penalty in 1971, before he could be executed.

Sirhan had been diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, and his demeanour bore this out. Ressler says: ‘He entered the room with his eyes wild, frightened and apprehensive. He stood against the wall, his fists clenched, and refused to shake hands.’ Sirhan seemed to believe that Ressler had some connection with the Secret Service, and declined to be tape-recorded. But when Ressler asked his view of the prison system, he became more forthcoming, and talked angrily about a cellmate who had betrayed him by giving an interview to
Playboy.
But finally he relaxed and sat down at the table.

He told Resssler that he had been instructed to assassinate Kennedy by voices in his head, and that when he had been looking in a mirror, he had seen his face cracking and falling in pieces. Ressler noted that he referred to himself in the third person—Sirhan did this and Sirhan did that—and believed that he was in protective custody because the authorities were treating him with more respect than common criminals (whereas the truth was that other prisoners might attack him).

He shot Kennedy, he explained, because Kennedy had once supported the selling of jet fighters to Israel, and if he became president, he might be pro-Israeli and anti-Arab. He believed that in killing Kennedy he had changed the course of world history, and that when he returned to Jordan he would be carried shoulder high as a hero. The parole board was afraid to release him, he said, because they feared his personal magnetism.

Ressler describes how, at the end of the interview, Sirhan stood by the door, pulling in his stomach and flexing his muscles, which he had kept in trim with weight lifting, and as he left asked: ‘Well, Mr Resssler, what do you think of Sirhan now?’ It was clear that he believed he had made a strong impression. ‘Obviously,’ said Ressler, ‘he felt that to know Sirhan was to love him.’

The next three interviews—with Juan Corona, Herb Mullin, and John Linley Frazier—were unrewarding, offering no real insights. Corona, a Mexican labour contractor who had killed and then buried 25 tramps and migrant workers in 1971, was originally believed to have killed them to avoid paying their wages. But the fact that many of the men—mostly alcoholics—had their trousers around their ankles suggested a sexual motive. Corona, argued his defence, was a ‘hopeless heterosexual’ who was married with children, and was therefore unlikely to be guilty. But he had formerly been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and the violence of some of the murders certainly hinted at a disturbed personality. Unfortunately, since Corona was ‘entirely uncommunicative’, Ressler was unable to form any assessment.

The Frazier case had caused some panic at the time, since the Manson murders were fresh in everyone’s minds. After shooting Victor Ohta, his wife and two children, and his secretary, Frazier had dumped them in the swimming pool, and then set the house on fire. Under the windshield wiper of Ohta’s Rolls Royce was a grandiloquent note signed with the four suits of the tarot pack, suggesting some kind of occult group, or perhaps another Zodiac. The doctor’s station wagon had been left in a railway tunnel in the obvious hope of causing a serious accident, but the goods train that struck it was travelling so slowly that it only pushed it out of the tunnel.

Hippies in the nearby woods were able to give information that pointed the investigation in the direction of a 24-year-old car mechanic who had left his wife to live with hippies, and fingerprints on the door of the Rolls Royce confirmed this. John Linley Frazier had been studying the tarot and books on ecology, and concluded that American society lacked spirituality. He had burgled the Ohtas’ expensive home before the crime, and subsequently told someone that the Ohta family was too materialistic and should be killed. (In fact, Dr Ohta had founded a hospital in Santa Cruz to which he gave financial support, and gave free treatment to patients who could not afford his fees.) After his arrest, Frazier had remained silent throughout his trial but had nonetheless been sentenced to death because his guilt was established beyond reasonable doubt. Like Sirhan, he had been saved by the abolition of the death penalty in 1971.

Ressler also found this interview disappointing, commenting only that Frazier was ‘the prisoner of his delusions’.

Herb Mullin had first shown symptoms of schizophrenia after the death of his closest friend in a car accident, and by the time he was 21 (in 1969) was hearing voices that told him to shave his head and burn his penis with a lighted cigarette. In 1972, driving along a highway in the mountains he saw an old tramp; he asked him to take a look at his engine, and then, as the man leaned over the car, killed him with a baseball bat. Ten days later, as he was giving a lift to a college student, he stabbed her in the heart, and then disembowelled her. A month later he killed a friend and his wife, and then a woman and her sleeping children. In a Santa Cruz state park he shot to death four teenagers who were camping, and finally, at random, an old man in his front garden. A neighbour who witnessed the shooting called the police and Mullins was arrested.

These murders, he explained at his trial, had saved thousands of lives by averting natural disasters such as earthquakes. Oddly enough, he was deemed to be sane and sentenced to life. One psychiatrist blamed his murder spree on Governor Ronald Reagan’s closing of mental hospitals in California to save money.

Ressler found Mullin docile and polite, but with nothing to say.

Ressler’s conclusions about his interviewees so far was that, apart from Sirhan they belonged to a category his fellow profiler Roy Hazelwood called ‘disorganised’ killers; these are fundamentally weak personalities whose crimes tend to be spontaneous, and are poorly and inadequately planned. He writes: ‘The disorganised offender’s actions are usually devoid of normal logic; until he is caught and tells us his version of the crimes, chances are that no one can follow the twisted reasoning he uses to pick his victims.’

Organised killers such as Ed Kemper and Charles Manson proved to be a more complex proposition.

‘I’m sorry to sound so cold about this,’ Kemper explained to Ressler, ‘but what I needed to have was a particular experience with a person, and to possess them in the way I wanted to, I had to evict them from their human bodies.’

Edmund Emil Kemper III, born on 18 December 1948, had started to show signs of severe psychological disturbance as a child. His mother and father separated when he was seven; he was one of those children who badly needed a man to admire and imitate, and became an ardent fan of John Wayne. He had been a boy scout, and was taught to shoot and handle a knife at summer camp. He claimed that his mother ridiculed him, and he grew up with a highly ambivalent attitude towards her. As a child, he played games with his sister in which she led him to die in the gas chamber, and he once cut the hands and feet off her doll.

At 13 he cut the family cat into pieces. He had sadistic fantasies which included killing his mother, and often went into her bedroom at night with a gun, toying with the idea. He grew up to be six feet nine inches tall and weighing 280 pounds. He also had fantasies of sexual relation with corpses. In spite of his powerful sexual interest in women from an early age, he was pathologically shy; when his sister once joked with him about wanting to kiss his teacher he replied, ‘If I kissed her I’d have to kill her first.’ Which is precisely what he did to his victims in manhood. Like English sex murderer John Christie, he seems to have killed women because he would have been impotent with a living woman.

At 13 Ed ran away to his father. But his sullen demeanour and his sheer size made his stepmother nervous, and she prevailed on her husband to return him to his mother. He was then sent to live with his father’s parents on a ranch in California. His mother rang her ex-husband to warn him that he was taking a risk in sending Ed to live with them; she said, ‘You might wake up one day and find they’ve been killed.’ Which is exactly what happened. When he lost his temper with his domineering grandmother one day in August 1963, he pointed a rifle at the back of her head, and shot her. He then stabbed her repeatedly. When his grandfather came home, he shot him before he could enter the house. He then telephoned his mother, and waited for the police to arrive. Donald Lunde, a psychiatrist who examined him later, remarked: ‘In his way, he had avenged the rejection of both his mother and father.’

After five years in mental hospitals, he was sent back to his mother. She moved to Santa Cruz, where she became administrative assistant in a college of the University of California. She and Ed had violent, screaming quarrels, usually about trivial subjects. Kemper loathed her. He bought a motorcycle and wrecked it, suing the motorist involved, and then did the same with a second motorcycle. Using the insurance money he bought himself a car, and began driving around, picking up hitchhikers, preferably female. And on 7 May 1972 he committed his first sex murder, picking up Anita Luchessa and Mary Anne Pesce, both students at Fresno State College, in Berkeley. He produced his gun, drove to a quiet spot, and made Anita climb into the trunk while he handcuffed Mary Ann and put a plastic bag over her head. She seemed unafraid of him, and tried to talk to him reasonably. He stabbed her several times in the back, then in the abdomen; finally he cut her throat. After this he went to the trunk, and stabbed the other young woman repeatedly. He then drove home—his mother was out—carried the bodies up to his apartment, and decapitated and dissected them. Later, he buried the pieces in the mountains.

On 14 September 1972, he picked up 15-year-old Aiko Koo hitchhiking to a dance class in San Francisco. He produced his gun, drove her to the mountains, and then taped her mouth. He suffocated her by placing his fingers up her nostrils; she fought fiercely but vainly. When she was dead, he laid her on the ground and raped her, achieving orgasm within seconds. He took her body back to his apartment, cut off the head, becoming sexually excited as he did so, then her hands, and dissected the body. He took the remains out to the mountains above Boulder Creek and buried them. By then, newspapers were reporting that the ‘Chopper’ or the ‘Co-ed Butcher’ was preying on young women.

On 8 January 1973, he picked up Cynthia Schall, who usually hitched a lift to Cabrillo College. He produced the gun, drove her to the little town of Freedom, and stopped on a quiet road. For a while he played a game of cat and mouse with her, assuring her that he had no intention of harming her, enjoying the sensation of power. Then he shot her, dumped the body in the trunk, and drove home. She was a heavy girl, and he staggered with her into his bedroom and stuffed her into his closet. His mother came home, and Kemper talked to her and behaved normally.

As soon as she was gone the next morning, he took out the body and engaged in various sex acts. He then dissected it with an axe in the shower, and drove out to Carmel, with the pieces in plastic sacks, and threw them off cliffs. This time, parts of the body were discovered only a day later, and identified as Cynthia Schall.

After a violent quarrel with his mother on 5 February 1973, he drove to the local campus, and picked up Rosalind Thorpe, who was just coming out of a lecture. Shortly after, he picked up 21-year-old Alice Liu. As they drove along in the dark, he shot Rosalind in the head. Alice covered her face with her hands, and he shot her several times in the head.

He then put both bodies in the trunk, and drove home. His mother was at home, so he could not carry them in. Unable to wait, he took his big hunting knife (which he called ‘the General’) and hacked off both their heads in the trunk. The next morning, when his mother had gone to work, he carried Alice into the bathroom, cleaned off the blood, and had sexual intercourse with the headless corpse. He also cleaned up Rosalind, although it is not clear whether he again performed necrophiliac sex. He placed both bodies back in the trunk, cut off Alice’s hands, then drove to the coast highway south of Pacifica and disposed of the heads; the bodies were dumped in Eden Canyon, Alameda. They were found nine days later.