Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (4 page)

After Bundy, the crimes of Corona, Corll, and the Son of Sam began to take on a different perspective, and when people backtracked, they learned that there had been more serial killings recently than we realized. Near where Bundy started murdering, shoe fetishist Jerry Brudos had killed four women in 1968–1969, cutting off their feet; in Michigan, John Norman Collins murdered seven young women between 1967 and 1969. And apparently there were others who entered guilty pleas, while some never went to trial by reason of insanity, so we never heard much about them. In Santa Cruz, California, John Frazier killed five people in 1970, while Edmund Kemper, also in Santa Cruz, killed eight women between 1972 and 1973; at about the same time, in Santa Cruz once again, Herbert Mullin killed thirteen people. That one California town contributed a huge body count all on its own.

Toward the end of the 1970s Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono dumped their ten victims on Hollywood hillsides and Wayne Williams threw the last five of his twenty-two victims into the river in Atlanta, while Richard Cottingham cut the heads and hands off his and set their torsos on fire in fleabag hotels in New York City. By now everyone knew what this was. By then the FBI was on it, trying to figure it out by asking the killers themselves what
they
thought they were doing and why. From those interviews a new system of criminal profiling would emerge. In the meantime, more and more new reports kept coming in, faster and faster:

In Chicago, a middle-aged man was a successful construction contractor and a respected figure in his community. He led the annual Polish Constitution Day parade and in his spare time he volunteered to entertain sick children at local hospitals, dressed as “Pogo the Clown.” He was a Democratic Party precinct captain and when the president’s wife, Rosalynn Carter, was in Chicago on a community visit, he was one of her escorts. In his house, buried in a basement crawl space, police found the trussed-up corpses of twenty-eight boys and young men. John Wayne Gacy was convicted of killing thirty-three victims, despite his assertion that “clowns can get away with murder.”

In rural Missouri, a man working for a friendly seventy-five-year-old farmer and his sweet sixty-nine-year-old white-haired wife discovered a skull while plowing a section of their fields. The worker reported his find to the police, and a subsequent search of the property revealed five male bodies, all shot in the head with a .22-caliber rifle. In the house, a notebook was found with lists of temporary employees hired at the farm, some of the names marked with a sinister X. Upstairs in the bedroom, the police discovered a patchwork quilt spread on the bed, made by the wife from pieces of cloth torn from the clothing of the victims buried in the fields out back. The couple, Ray and Fay Copeland, became the oldest convicts on death row in America.
*

A Cincinnati hospital orderly, Donald Harvey, pleaded guilty to murdering thirty-four elderly patients by suffocating some with a pillow or plastic bags or by cutting off their oxygen supply. Others he killed with arsenic, rat poison, cyanide, colostomy cleaner, and adhesive remover. He explained, “I felt that what I was doing was right. I was putting people out of their misery . . . I’m doing them a favor.” After his sentencing in Ohio, Harvey was extradited to Kentucky, where he pleaded guilty to another nine homicides. Then he was returned to Ohio to stand trial for the murder of a neighbor. Eventually he confessed to a total of fifty-eight murders. Until Gary Ridgway’s guilty plea in November 2003 for the forty-eight Green River murders of prostitutes, Harvey had the highest convicted victim count of any American serial killer.

WHO ARE THE SERIAL KILLERS?

Statistically speaking, identified serial killers usually turn out to be white males of above-average intelligence who begin killing in their twenties or thirties, although some have been as young as ten years old when they first killed. Carroll Edward Cole in the United States was ten when he deliberately drowned a boy, and would go on to commit nine more homicides in his adult life—of women. In England, Mary Bell murdered and mutilated two boys on separate occasions when she was only eleven, probably the youngest serial killer on record, if you accept the definition of serial murder as more than one murder on separate occasions. Jürgen Bartsch, who killed five boys in Germany between 1962 and 1966, was fifteen when he started to kill, as was Edmund Kemper in California, when he shot dead both his grandparents in 1963. In his adulthood, Kemper went on to kill six young women, his mother, and her best friend. Some serial killers can be as old as seventy-five, like farmer Ray Copeland, described earlier, who was sentenced to death with his wife in 1991 in Missouri for the five murders.

Sometimes serial killers work in teams of two and sometimes they consist of husband-and-wife or boyfriend-girlfriend couples. There are also several cases of cult group serial killers consisting of more than two people.

In the United States, serial killers are most often individual white males, although African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and even an Eskimo have been convicted. The incidence of African American serial killers is currently increasing dramatically—from 10 percent of the total reported prior to 1975, to 21 percent currently.
⁶
Frequently, but not always, serial murder is intraracial—white killers murdering white victims, blacks killing blacks.

A recent study identified 399 serial killers in the United States between 1800 and 1995 who were responsible for a number of victims between 2,526 and 3,860.
⁷
Sixty-two females represented 16 percent of those serial killers, murdering between four hundred and six hundred victims. Seventy-five percent of known female serial killers have made their appearance since 1950. Of all the female killers, a third committed their crimes with an accomplice, frequently a male.
⁸

Although victims of serial killers are often robbed, the most common driving force of serial murder is sexual control and dominance. Many victims are raped before or after being killed, while bondage, torture, dismemberment, and cannibalism are not uncommon features of a serial homicide. Other motives for serial murder have been financial profit; ritual, political, social, or moral imperatives (missionary murders); attention (mothers killing their children); and compassion (frequent in medical-type serial murders.)

A PRIMER ON THE NATURE OF SERIAL KILLERS AND THEIR VICTIMS

In many of these cases, the killer and the victim did not know each other or were strangers who had just recently met. Most of the victims were not murdered while being robbed, nor did they get into an argument or dispute with their killers—they had no personal or business dealings with their murderer. The victims were strangers who were all murdered to be murdered. A perverse pleasure derived from killing them was the primary motive for their deaths. A study of 326 U.S. male serial killers between 1800 and 1995 concluded that 87 percent had killed at least one stranger among their victims, and 70 percent killed
only
strangers.
⁹
In each of these cases, the killers carefully covered their tracks after the crime and maintained a normal-looking facade: farmer, doctor, businessman, harmless drifter, schoolteacher, law school student, deputy sheriff, office manager. After killing once, the killer rested for days, weeks, or months, then sought out a new victim and killed again and again.

Serial killers, although often described as “monsters,” rarely appear to be creatures with blood dripping from their fangs or crazed psychopaths babbling satanic rituals. While a few are exactly like that, many appear at first glance to be healthy, normal, and even attractive people. And that is precisely the problem—with a serial killer a victim rarely gets beyond the first glance. Others are simply invisibly unmemorable and unnoticeable, until somebody notices them killing.

Policemen would tell you that most murderers, when they killed, did not know that they were going to kill. They killed in the heat of an argument, in a jealous rage, or sometimes accidentally while committing another crime. And cops would tell you that if you were going to be murdered, it was statistically likely that your killer was somebody you already knew—and knew well. Your husband or wife, a parent or your own child, a friend, lover, relative, or acquaintance was more likely to kill you than a stranger. Murder was an intimate occasion that usually unfolded between friends and lovers. Often, remorse and horror quickly overcame those who found themselves having just committed a murder. Many sat passively waiting at the crime scene for the police to arrive. Some tenderly covered or washed the body of the victim they had just murdered. They quietly surrendered to police and quickly confessed; most would never kill again whether they ended up in prison or not. While even today the majority of murders still take place between people who know each other, the proportion is becoming significantly smaller. One’s chance of being murdered by a stranger has increased dramatically during the last three decades.

Serial killers deliberately and relentlessly hunt down their victims with the sole intention of coldly murdering them. The motive for a serial killer does not arise from factors in his
*
relationship with the victim—there usually is no relationship. The serial killer generally preys on strangers for a complex set of motives known only to him. The serial killer also prefers strangers because it makes him harder to catch and the anonymous fill-in-the-blank victim easier to torment and kill. At one time, serial murders were called “stranger-on-stranger” killings, but because there were sufficiently numerous exceptions to this (serial killers will also turn on those near them if necessary) other terms were applied: “motiveless homicides,” “recreational killings,” “thrill kills,” and finally “serial murders.”

Serial killers do everything in their power not to be caught by the police, so that they can remain free to kill again. While it can be argued that professional assassins, like Mafia hit men, also avoid being arrested by the police and kill many victims, they ostensibly kill for money and their victims are individually targeted by the assassin’s clients, not by the killer himself. Serial killers, however, murder for their own personal pleasure and carefully select their victims for their own reasons. Their killings are often highly sexual in nature and rarely offer any financial gain.

At one time serial killers were also called “mass murderers,” but today the term is reserved only for individuals who suddenly go berserk and indiscriminately kill numerous victims during a single frenzied suicidal episode. Mass murderers are out of control and totally deranged and are quickly captured or shot dead by the police, or they commit suicide once their ammunition begins to run out. Serial killers, on the other hand, slip back to their normal state of life between their murders. They are controlled, are aware of what they are doing, and scrupulously avoid arrest. Some studiously read police investigative-technique manuals and familiarize themselves with all levels of police procedure. This, and the fact that serial killers so often prey on strangers, makes them very difficult to identify and capture. Moreover, about a third of serial killers are highly mobile and travel undetected thousands of miles a year, crossing different police jurisdictions during their killing, which further makes investigation difficult.

Experts argue over
how many
victims define a serial killer. Some, like the FBI, insist on a minimum of three victims. Most agree that serial homicide is when victims are killed on separate occasions with a “cooling-off” period between the murders. Others, and I am in that school, argue that two or more murders on separate occasions with a cooling-off period in between are sufficient to define a serial killer. (As far as I am concerned, one murder is freaky enough; anything more is horribly incomprehensible.)

How and why do serial murderers kill again and again? Serial killing is an
addiction,
some experts say. Simply explained, once they begin killing (and sometimes they kill the first time by accident), serial killers find themselves addicted to murder in an intense cycle that begins with homicidal sexual fantasies that in turn spark a desperate search for victims, leading to their brutal killing, followed by a period of cooling off and a return to normal daily routine—with all its unbearable stresses, disappointments, and hurts, which lead back to the reemerging need to start fantasizing about killing again. Once a killing cycle is triggered, it is rarely broken. The worst aspect of this is that murder fantasies are often the
only
thing the budding serial killer has that gives him comfort and solace. Once he crosses the line and actually realizes his fantasy and discovers that actual murder is not as satisfying as the fantasy, he is driven into the depths of depression and despair, from which rise even more intense homicidal fantasies driving him forward to kill again in an attempt to realize in the reality of murder the same satisfaction he derives in fantasy. With time, trapped in this addictive cycle, serial killers become more frenzied, and the frequency and violence of their murders escalate exponentially until they are either caught or “burn out”—reach a point where killing no longer satisfies them and they stop on their own accord if nothing else interrupts their killing career. (Which is why some unsolved serial murders seem to mysteriously cease without the offender ever being identified.) Others commit suicide, move on to commit other crimes, or turn themselves in to police.

 A “Typical” Serial Killer: Gary Leon Ridgway, “The Green River Killer”