Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (35 page)

When Kenneth was twelve years old, another report stated:

. . . Kenneth is a deeply hostile boy who has extremely dependent needs which his mother fulfills. He depends upon his mother for his very survival and expends a great deal of energy keeping his hostility under control and under cover. He is very eager for other relationships and uses a great deal of denial in handling his own feelings. For example, he says that his mother and father are the best parents in the world.

He is a very lonely boy who wants to move away from his mother. He is very constricted however, and feels being hurt if he should move away from her. Mother seems to allow him only one friend in the house. There seems some basic confusion around his own identity. He tries very hard to placate his mother, but she always seems to be dissatisfied. To sum up, Dr. Dowling said that he is a severely repressed boy who is very anxious and very lonely. He felt that the only outlet whereby he could somehow get back at his mother was through his psychosomatic complaints. Dr. Dowling felt that without this defense of the use of his somatic complaints he might very well be a severely disturbed boy.

It is interesting how sparse and few are the mentions of Kenneth Bianchi’s father—it is as if he did not exist. In the FBI sexual homicide study, 66 percent of sexual and serial killers interviewed reported their mothers as the dominant parent. Kenneth Bianchi’s father was almost never home, holding down several jobs. When Kenneth was thirteen, his father dropped dead from overwork with a heart attack. Kenneth was apparently devastated by his death. The psychiatric reports speak for themselves. Kenneth Bianchi was one very angry child who was suppressing his anger under a mask of friendliness and compliance.

Some argue that the formation of a serial killer is rooted to gender identification involving a boy’s ability to successfully negotiate his masculine autonomy from his mother. When a boy cannot achieve this autonomy or when there is no solid foundation for him from which to negotiate this autonomy, a sense of rage develops in the child, and he subsequently carries the anger into adolescence and adulthood, focusing it on females.

Kenneth Bianchi’s high school history seems fairly untroubled. He was athletic and popular with girls. In 1971, Bianchi married, but his young wife left him for another man after eight months. Friends recall that Bianchi seemed to have trouble perceiving the reality of his marriage. During this time, Bianchi studied police sciences at college and worked as an ambulance attendant. He hoped to become a police officer. After his breakup with his wife, however, Bianchi led a depressed and lonely life.

Between 1971 and 1973, three girls were strangled in Rochester while on their way to do grocery shopping for their mothers. After Bianchi was identified as the Hillside Strangler, police in Rochester suspected that Bianchi might have been behind these killings—but they remain unsolved.

By 1975, Bianchi’s mother was remarried and Kenneth had moved to Los Angeles to seek a new life. He moved in with his mother’s nephew, his cousin, Angelo Buono.

Buono was forty at the time, the father of seven children, three times divorced on grounds of cruelty—he had a predilection for violent anal sex. He had an upholstery shop behind a small house in which he lived. Buono also seemed to attract a stream of young runaway girls.

At some point, Buono and Bianchi decided to get into the prostitution business. They began to lure young runaways into drugs and prostitution. As Hollywood was, for obvious reasons, a mecca for runaway teenagers from all over the United States, Buono and Bianchi had no problems finding suitable girls to pimp. However, they ran into several problems. One girl told a client of such horrific abuse at the hands of Buono and Bianchi, that he refused to let the girl return to them. Buono and Bianchi threatened the man, who responded by sending Hell’s Angels bikers to threaten Buono. Buono was thoroughly terrorized.

Then Buono and Bianchi paid another prostitute for an alleged list of clients who regularly used prostitutes. The list turned out to be worthless. Shortly after this episode, Yolanda Washington, the first victim, a professional prostitute, was found strangled.

In the meantime, Bianchi had moved out into his own apartment and met Kelli Boyd, who worked as a secretary at the time. They became lovers, moved in together, and eventually had a child. Kelli recalls that Bianchi often went to his cousin’s upholstery shop to “play cards,” but she never accompanied him—she did not like Buono, who appeared to her as if he hated women. Otherwise, she remembers Kenneth as a childish and irresponsible man, but gentle and loving. She had not the slightest suspicion of his double life and was not convinced of it for the longest time, even after Bianchi’s arrest.

After what was at that time Los Angeles’s longest and most expensive criminal trial, Angelo Buono was convicted as the other Hillside Strangler. Because Bianchi had confessed to his crimes and testified against Buono, he was spared the death penalty. In the case of Buono, the jury felt reluctant to give him the death penalty while his partner got life. Buono denied having any involvement with the crimes to the end, but evidence linking him and Bianchi was fairly conclusive.

Kenneth Bianchi’s story did not quite end, however, after his arrest. Bianchi seemed to have a strange hold over women, which only increased after he was accused of killing a string of women. Veronica Compton, a twenty-four-year-old fledgling playwright whose work was obsessed with sadomasochism and serial murder, began to write to Bianchi while he was in jail. Eventually she went to see him and they began a relationship. In the summer of 1980, Bianchi showed Compton how he strangled his victims and slipped her a sample of his sperm secreted in the finger of a rubber glove. Compton then flew to Bellingham and lured a woman to her motel room where she attempted to strangle her. This was in an era before DNA testing, and the plan was to kill the woman in the same way Bianchi killed the others and make it look as if the killer were still at large by leaving a sperm trace similar to Bianchi’s. The victim, however, was more powerful than Compton and managed to escape. Compton was arrested shortly afterward. While in jail, Compton fell into a relationship through letters with another Los Angeles serial killer—Doug Clark, one of the Sunset Boulevard Killers. Compton was eventually convicted of premeditated attempted murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole until 1994. She is currently an inmate in the Washington Correctional Center for Women and, in 2002, published a book,
Eating the Ashes: Seeking Rehabilitation Within the U.S. Penal System,
in which, according to the publisher, “she relates heart-rending images of lives in disarray and describes programs that have been successful in producing rehabilitation.”
¹¹⁸

It is interesting to note that Angelo Buono was the dominant partner of the two, and Kenneth Bianchi spent much of his energy attempting to please and impress his older cousin. Yet Buono is not known to have committed any murders before Kenneth arrived in Los Angeles or after Kenneth’s departure for Bellingham. Buono, however, is said to have kept Kenneth’s enthusiasm in check and made sure that the crimes were so carefully committed that there was no chance of their being arrested. Eventually, Buono grew tired of Bianchi and suggested that Bianchi go to Bellingham to join Kelli. There Bianchi attempted to commit two murders on his own and was quickly arrested. Without Bianchi, Buono would not kill, while without Buono, Bianchi could not kill efficiently. That often is the interdependent nature of serial killer partners.

POWER/CONTROL KILLERS

Power/control serial killers are highly organized and closely related to sadistic thrill killers, with the difference that causing pain and suffering is not the primary motive for their offense; controlling and dominating the victim is (but they may use pain as a method of control and torture as a token of it). The actual pleasure of controlling the victim may begin before the victim even realizes it as the serial killer manipulates and seduces the victim.

These serial killers are often charming, charismatic, and intelligent, gradually taking control over their victims before springing a physical capture. Again, they often pick a certain “type” of victim, but fetishistic elements are less important. The murder is often the ultimate expression of the serial killer’s control over his victim—but unlike the thrill killer, the power/control killer does not necessarily lose his interest once the victim is dead. The control often continues into death with the offender keeping the corpses near him, sometimes in his home or in some safe place where they can be revisited. Sometimes various postmortem sexual acts, mutilation, and necrophilia also occur with the power/control killer.

 John Wayne Gacy—“The Killer Clown”

On December 11, 1978, in Chicago, Elizabeth Piest went to pick up her fifteen-year-old son, Robert, from a drugstore where he worked. It was her birthday and a big party had been planned. Robert asked her to wait inside the store while he went out to the parking lot to speak with a construction contractor about a summer job that would pay twice as much as he was currently earning. Robert had met the contractor when he came by to inspect the premises for some possible renovations. That was the last Elizabeth Piest ever saw of her son. He never returned to the store.

After the mother reported the disappearance, police went out to interview the contractor: John Wayne Gacy, age thirty-six, a short, chubby man with a double chin and a dark mustache. He was a successful building contractor, well known and respected in the community. He had been voted Jaycee (Junior Chamber of Commerce) “Man of the Year” in three different cities, led the Polish Constitution Day Parade one year in Chicago, and escorted President Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, on one of her visits to the city. In his spare time, Gacy entertained sick children at a hospital, dressed as a clown named “Patches” or “Pogo.” His act for the kids included the “handcuff trick,” in which he cuffed a child to a bed and pretended to lose the key, and the “rope trick,” in which he lassoed kids while they squealed with delight. He had lived in the same house since 1972, and neighbors described him as a helpful and friendly man who always decorated the house with elaborately strung Christmas lights. He shoveled snow for some of his elderly neighbors. He had been twice married and divorced and had two children.

Gacy would have been a very unlikely suspect had he not denied knowing Piest or being anywhere near the parking lot where the boy disappeared. When the police challenged him by saying that they had witnesses who saw him with Piest that day, Gacy admitted that perhaps he had been in the parking lot, but had nothing to do with the boy.

The police checked Gacy’s records and discovered that he had been convicted of forcible sodomy of a minor in Iowa back in 1968, a crime for which he served eighteen months of a ten-year prison sentence. In 1970, similar charges were brought against him in Chicago, but were dropped when the youth failed to appear in court. In March 1978, a twenty-seven-year-old man complained to police that Gacy had invited him to smoke some marijuana in his car and then clapped a chloroform-soaked rag over his face. He said that he had been driven to Gacy’s house and then whipped and repeatedly raped by him. Afterward Gacy released the man. The authorities could not secure enough evidence to bring Gacy to trial and the investigation lapsed.

Investigators surrounded Gacy with a tight ring of surveillance. At first Gacy challenged the police, telling the officers following him that their superiors were idiots and inviting them out for lunch. He would playfully tell the surveillance team his destination, and hung out his Christmas lights as usual at his house. But as the days progressed, Gacy began to show signs of stress—he stopped shaving and started drinking heavily and shouting at people. He hired two lawyers and filed a lawsuit charging the Chicago police with harassment and preventing him from conducting his business.

At one point, Gacy invited two detectives into his house for coffee, and one of them asked to use his bathroom as a ruse to poke around and see what he could find. The detective found nothing in the bathroom, but detected a distinct odor coming from the drain familiar to any experienced homicide investigator—the smell of decomposing human remains.

On December 21, the police searched his house and accused Gacy of holding Piest in it. Gacy denied the charge, but inexplicably admitted that in 1972 he had had a homosexual lover whom he killed in self-defense. He had buried the body in concrete in his garage, he told the police, and led them to the site, spray-painting a mark on the floor where the body lay. As the police searched the house, they found a trap door leading to a crawl space beneath Gacy’s house. There they discovered three decomposing corpses and parts of others. Gacy was arrested while the police began tearing his house apart. They uncovered the bodies of twenty-eight males between ages fifteen and twenty. Gacy admitted to killing another five and dumping their bodies into the river. Later, Gacy retracted his confession, claiming that some unidentified other person, who had a key to his house, had put the bodies there to frame him. Gacy said his worst crime was perhaps running a cemetery without a license.