Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters
Read Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters Online
Authors: Peter Vronsky
Contents
PART ONE
A HISTORY OF MONSTERS
ONE
THE POSTMODERN AGE OF SERIAL HOMICIDE, 1970–2000: The Silence of the “Less-Dead”
TWO
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SERIAL HOMICIDE: Two Thousand Years of Murder from Rome to Boston
PART TWO
THE METHOD AND MADNESS
THREE
CLASSIFYING SERIAL KILLERS: The Typologies of Monstrosity
FIVE
THE QUESTION OF MADNESS: Inside Their Heads
SIX
SERIAL KILLERS AS CHILDREN: The Making of Monsters
EIGHT
THE KILLING TIMES: The Method to the Madness
PART THREE
FIGHTING MONSTERS
NINE
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF CRIMINAL PROFILING: How They Get It Right and When They Don’t
TEN
SURVIVING A SERIAL KILLER: Escaping the Monster’s Clutch
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr. Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
Copyright © 2004 by Peter Vronsky.
Cover design by Jill Boltin.
Text design by Kristin del Rosario.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Electronic Edition / March 2005
ISBN: 9781101425923
Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For my wife, Anna, and my daughters, Quantel and Alisa
Serial killers
know
they’re invisible.
—
ROBERT D. KEPPEL,
criminal investigator
I have a problem with women.
—
RICHARD COTTINGHAM
, The Times Square Torso Ripper
I am not a highly educated expert on serial killers. I was never an FBI profiler, a police officer, a criminologist, or a forensic psychologist. I did not write a college thesis about them and I never interviewed incarcerated serial killers or exchanged letters with any. I never bought their art or collected their memorabilia. In other words, I am probably a lot like you: a curious amateur. Other than reading about them and seeing them on TV, my only experience with serial killers is my two brief personal encounters with them before they were identified and captured. You might think
that
is what makes me different from you—but don’t be too hasty in your conclusion.
In my travels I randomly bumped into two notorious “rippers”: Richard Cottingham, the Times Square Torso Ripper, who was eventually linked to five torture dismemberment murders in New York and New Jersey, and Andrei Chikatilo, the Red Ripper, whom I briefly met in Russia just days before he committed the last three of his more than fifty cannibalistic murders of women, youths, and children. In both cases I did not know until much later whom it was I had encountered. My run-in with Cottingham was as dramatic as my meeting with Chikatilo was banal and forgettable.
I bumped into Richard Cottingham for about ten seconds one early Sunday morning in New York City in December 1979. I was working as a production assistant on a movie being shot in Toronto. My job was to fly out to New York every few days and personally deliver our exposed film for a special type of processing at a laboratory located near the Times Square area. It was a great gig: I would fly into New York in the morning and quickly drop off the film, and then I was on my own until it was ready for pick up the next day.
Usually I would be handed an airline ticket and an envelope of cash, and I was expected to arrange my own hotel and meals. Film crews routinely stayed at good business-class hotels—Sheraton, Hilton, and so on—and I’d be given enough cash to stay and eat in those kinds of places. Young, punkish, having backpacked to New York previously and slept on the floor of CBGB’s on the Bowery and fed myself on cheese and wine by attending gallery openings, I couldn’t care less about upscale accommodations. I was content to routinely book cheap tourist-class hotel rooms on my film deliveries. I would spend the cash I saved on clubbing, record albums, books, and electronics. But on one such trip I went too far.
An unforeseen technical delay at the lab forced me to stay an entire weekend in New York. In order to stretch out my expense cash for the extra unexpected nights, I decided to check into a really marginal hotel on the last day. Early on a Sunday morning, I walked over to a nondescript medium-sized hotel on West 42nd Street, about two blocks from the Hudson River near the collapsed husks of the West Side Highway. Offering bargain rates, the hotel was located near nothing—no convenient subway station, no tourist sites, no office buildings—in what was at that time a derelict neighborhood around Tenth Avenue deserving of its historical name, Hell’s Kitchen. The hotel was even inconvenient for the junkies and hookers who hung out in
Taxi Driver
country a few blocks west on what was then called the forty-deuce—a sleazy stretch of West 42nd Street lined with porn shops, live sex shows, and knife stores that ran from Broadway and past the bus terminal toward Eighth and Ninth Avenues. The hotel had bargain rates but for the price it appeared to be clean and secure enough, and within quick walking distance of the film lab I would have to go to early the next morning.
I showed up without a reservation and was told that a room would be ready for me shortly if I would wait about half an hour, as people were checking out. I decided that in the meantime I would go up and wander around a few floors just to see how bad the place might really be. As I waited at the elevator, I was mildly annoyed to see that it had stopped for what seemed an eternity on the top floor. Finally the stalled elevator began to come down, and when the doors opened, presumably the jerk who had held the elevator on the upper floor got off. He almost walked over me like some kind of glassy-eyed zombie, looking right through me and brushing me aside as if I were not there. As he passed me by heading into the lobby he lightly bumped my leg with a bag or a suitcase or something. I never noticed what exactly he carried, nor could I today describe the feel of it against my leg. The only other thing I would later remember was that he seemed to glow with a thin sheen of perspiration and he had this really bad moplike haircut. He appeared to be in his midthirties with sandy-colored hair and looked like a junior pasty-faced office worker—which was precisely what he turned out to be later (although he was described by other witnesses as having an “olive” complexion). By the time the elevator doors closed behind me, I had forgotten all about him.
I took the elevator up and got off on one of the floors at random. I immediately noticed a faint but distinct odor of something burning, but I did not see any smoke and thought it was the natural smell of the hotel. As I walked around the halls I did not detect anything particularly nasty about the place, but I did notice the smell getting stronger, and now with an unmistakable underlying back-odor of burnt chicken feathers or hair. I did not know it at the time, but that was the smell of roasting human flesh.
In the corridor my eyes were drawn to several elusively small, dark, greasy slivers of sooty substances floating and circulating in the air like tiny black snowflakes. When I caught one, it stained my fingers black. As I moved along the hall it seemed to get lightly misty and the smell was now unquestionably that of a building fire—that kind of woody-paint burning smell. I heard all sorts of commotion and shouting in the stairwells and fire alarms began ringing. I quickly made my way down to the lobby, emerging just as the fire department was pulling up in the street outside. All this gave me a bad vibe about the place (to say the least) and I left almost immediately to seek out another hotel without a glance backward.
The next morning I read in the newspapers that firemen responding to flames in one of the rooms of the hotel had discovered the corpses of two murdered women laid out on twin beds that had been set on fire. A firefighter had dragged one of the women out of the smoky room into the hallway and attempted to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation only to discover that she had no head or hands. At first he thought it was a mannequin. A fifteen-year veteran of the NYFD, the firefighter said he nearly had to undergo trauma counseling afterwards: “I’ve never come across something like that. I hope I never do again.”
1
The victims’ clothing was found folded in the bathtub in two neat stacks with their platform shoes on top of each pile. Except for blood on the mattresses, the hotel room was remarkably free of any bloodstains, fingerprints, or any other evidence. Whatever the killer used to dismember the bodies, he took it with him. In addition to the mutilation, the bodies showed signs of horrific torture—cigarette burns, beatings, and bite marks around the breasts.
At the time I never made the connection with the man I bumped into at the elevator. I did not even remember him. Somehow my wandering around the hotel in the black floating flakes, the fire alarm going off, and finding the fire engines outside all overwhelmed the minor memory of him. He came to me only later when Richard Cottingham was arrested and tried for the mutilation murders of young women, mostly prostitutes in New York and New Jersey, including the two victims at the hotel. Seeing his picture in the paper, I immediately recognized him: the bad haircut and pasty face.
Since then I always assumed that when he stepped by me in the elevator that Sunday morning, he must have been carrying the severed heads and hands with him. I could not imagine him taking the risk of leaving two headless corpses unattended in the hotel room to go out and dump the heads and hands and then return to set fire to the room. Whatever he had transported the heads in, it must have been what he brushed my leg with as he stepped by me in the elevator doors. (On the other hand, did he kill one woman and leave her body in the room, then go out to seek out another, or were they both alive together before he killed them? Cottingham never said.)