Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (19 page)

Today we stand on the brink of even worse times. The American dream of each generation advancing to the next socioeconomic class is stalled. In fact, a huge proportion of Americans have actually fallen back from the status of their parents and are faring worse. Real income continues to shrink. The middle class is no longer the safe-haven destination of the impoverished nor the guaranteed springboard to better things. Oceans are no longer a guarantee of physical safety, education of advancement, and corporate employment of financial security. For some, the only dream remaining is a dream of continual murder.

PART TWO
THE METHOD AND MADNESS

THREE
CLASSIFYING SERIAL KILLERS:
The Typologies of Monstrosity

I’m the only Ph.D. in serial murder.
—
TED BUNDY
You could smell the blood.
—
RICHARD RAMIREZ

They say that the twentieth century is an age of specialization; if that is true, then it certainly applies to serial killers. Each serial killer falls into a specific category and rarely do his murders cross the parameters defining the categories. This kind of categorization has become important in police investigations because it helps identify the probable characteristics of a suspect in a process the police use called
criminal profiling.
(See Chapter 9 for a more detailed treatment on profiling and some of the controversies surrounding it.)

There is no single universally accepted system for categorizing serial killers. It varies depending upon the individual investigator, criminologist, or forensic psychologist who is proposing the categories. In the next two chapters we will explore some of the more frequently cited categories used in classifying serial killers.

Probably the most common and familiar is the FBI’s
organized/disorganized
classifications. The FBI’s behavioral specialists have compiled the
Crime Classification Manual,
which categorizes murder into four main groups:
criminal enterprise homicide
(category 100);
personal cause homicide
(category 120);
sexual homicide
(category 130); and
group cause homicide
(category 140). These groups are then further divided up into some forty subcategories. Thus, for example, under personal cause homicide, category 122.01 is
spontaneous domestic homicide
while category 123.01 is
argument murder.
Category 101 under criminal enterprise homicide is
contract killing
while category 107 is
insurance inheritance-related
death.
⁸⁵

There is no separate category for serial killing; serial homicides fall into the various categories depending upon their type. The most common group where serial homicides frequently occur is category 130: sexual homicide. That group is divided into subcategories that include the following:

131: organized sexual homicide

132: disorganized sexual homicide

133: mixed sexual homicide

Thus a singular or serial sex killer will be first categorized as
organized, disorganized
or
mixed.
These three categories are the fundamental building blocks of serial killer identification and profiling used by the FBI and by police agencies that adopt the FBI system.

Organized Killers

The organized offender plans his murders and his escape carefully. He thinks through his crimes, often for weeks, months, and even years, before acting. He evolves his fantasy gradually and is aware of his growing compulsion to act out his murderous desire. He scrupulously targets his victims and stalks them for as long as necessary. He gains control over them at the crime scene. Often he takes his victims to another location and disposes of the body in such a manner that it may never be found. The killer is methodical and orderly in his crime. There are usually three separate crime scenes: where the victim was confronted, where the victim was killed, and where the victim’s body was disposed of.

The organized serial killer is dangerous and difficult to track for the police. Usually he is socially competent and gainfully employed as a skilled worker. He approaches his victims by socializing with them, charming them, or tricking them into a situation where he can overpower them. He owns a car and is mobile, often is married or lives with a partner, and is sometimes the father of children. He follows the reports of his crimes in the media and may change jobs or move to a different city to avoid being detected. He is intelligent, often educated, cunning, and controlled. He brings his own weapons and restraints such as rope, handcuffs, or tape to the scene of the crime, and afterward he destroys evidence left behind. He is sometimes schooled in police investigative methods. The organized serial killer is a perfectionist, constantly improving his technique with each additional murder. The longer he kills, the more difficult he becomes to capture.

Disorganized Killers

The disorganized serial killer is diametrically opposite the organized one. He too is difficult to catch because while the organized killer is predictable in a certain way, the disorganized one is not. The police cannot second-guess the disorganized offender because he himself does not make any careful plans and does not know when he will kill next. He has vague and intense murderous fantasies, but he does not develop a thought-out plan of action. The disorganized serial killer usually attacks his victims spontaneously—his act is often a crime of opportunity. The victim is frequently overcome by a violent “blitz” attack and the weapon is often an object found near by—a pipe, a rock, a branch. The killer is usually socially inept, is unemployed or unskilled, does not own a car, and kills near his home. He is often of below-average intelligence or psychotic. The victim’s body is usually left where the confrontation and attack took place, and the killer makes no attempt to hide it. The corpse is often subjected to extraordinary and frenzied mutilation. The offender often keeps souvenirs from the victim’s belongings, clothes, and even parts of the victim’s body. He makes little or no effort to cover his tracks, destroy evidence, disguise himself, or develop an escape plan. Often the offender is isolated from other people and living alone, and therefore, there is nobody from whom to hide incriminating objects or behavior. Evidence might be found in his premises out in the open or even on display.

Mixed-Category Killers

The FBI system also classifies homicides as a mixture of both organized and disorganized. The reason for this could be two or more killers working as a team. An attack may begin organized but be interrupted and deteriorate into chaos. The youthfulness of the offender or the use of drugs or alcohol can alter a personality of the offender from one crime to another. Critics of the organized/disorganized model argue that the “mixed” classification demonstrates the weakness of the system—too many serial killers do not fit into the neat categories and are thus classified “mixed”—a meaningless classification.

How these three categories manifest themselves in actual behavior is best illustrated with some actual case studies of offenders that reflect these organized/disorganized/mixed characteristics.

 Ted Bundy: The Ultimate Organized Serial Killer

All roads in the empire of serial killers lead to Ted Bundy. Bundy was so organized that the police never located the crime scenes where his first seventeen victims were actually killed. Six of his victims remain missing to this day. Bundy referred to himself as “the only Ph.D. in serial murder.”

What serial killers from Jack the Ripper to the Boston Strangler are to “then,” Ted Bundy is to “now.” He is
the
American psycho: the very essence of both fact and myth in a simultaneous representation of everything we know and think we know the new breed of serial killers are. Bundy is special because he was attractive, educated, and like us—that is, those of us who represent some kind of middle-class aspirations linked to the promise held out by our belief in a college education and hard work.

Albert DeSalvo, whom you met previously, sold by his father to some farmer at age nine, and the killers you will meet later in this book—Ed Gein, all alone on his remote Wisconsin farm; crazy young Herb Mullin and the voices in his head; Henry Lee Lucas in a shack with his glass eye; Jerry Brudos hunched down in his basement workshop with body parts in the freezer—all dwell in a world that we think serial killers
should
come from: a dark insane place that does not belong to us.
Our
world is going to work on Monday morning, showing up in class on time, mowing the grass, going to the weekend barbecue, paying the rent and credit card bills at the end of the month, going out on Friday night, and knowing more or less where we will be six months from now. In our world, serial killers came from the outside as predators, not as neighbors from next door or among our dinner guests. That is, until we met law school student and crisis prevention counselor Ted Bundy.

Bundy’s story has been told in minute detail in numerous contradictory books and summarized in countless encyclopedias of murder. He was an archetypical organized killer and could also be classified as a “power/ control” or “anger-excitation” killer type. (See the next chapter for more details on these categories.) I’ll try to summarize here the essential history of his case and try to knead out some of the contradictory kinks between the various histories.

Ted Bundy was born as Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, in Burlington, Vermont, to Louise Cowell, age twenty-two. From birth Bundy was already in a category in which the FBI survey found 43 percent of sexual and serial killers: he had only one parent. His mother was single and had become pregnant in Philadelphia. The story of who the father was remained obscure. The Cowell family were very strict Methodists and deeply shamed by Louise’s pregnancy. In September she went away to the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Vermont, accompanied by a local church minister’s wife. After giving birth to Ted in November, Louise returned to Philadelphia, leaving Ted behind in Vermont for three months.

Back in Philadelphia, her father, Sam Cowell, pretended to adopt Ted as his son from some unknown orphanage. Louise, it is said, pretended to be his sister. Nobody knows for sure when Ted unraveled the mystery of his birth history because he gave conflicting stories about it afterward.

Most biographies of Bundy simply state that Ted and his mother lived in Philadelphia for four years and then Louise moved to Tacoma, Washington—clear across the continent. In Tacoma she was employed as a church secretary and met and married John Culpepper Bundy, a hospital cook, from whom Ted took his surname.

Reports and memories of Bundy’s childhood in his biographies are relatively mundane and undramatic: Bundy was ashamed of his family’s lower-class status; he was embarrassed to be seen in the family’s working-class Rambler automobile and had fantasies of being adopted by TV cowboy actor Roy Rogers. Bundy missed his grandfather; Bundy wanted to live with his great-uncle Jack, a university music professor in Tacoma who had a grand piano in his house. When Bundy was eight he was no longer allowed to jump into bed with his mother and stepfather; Bundy was threatened by the birth of four other children after his mother married John; Bundy’s playmates remember that he had a short temper. Nothing in the biographies indicates that Bundy grew up in anything but a loving and nurturing family, or that his mother or stepfather treated him any differently from his four siblings. His stepfather was reported to have a short temper, but there are no reports that he abused Ted or his mother, nor did Ted Bundy make any such claims. Ted Bundy’s brothers and sisters apparently had an excellent relationship with their elder half-brother. Bundy’s mother maintains that because he was her first-born, she was especially attentive to Ted.