Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (51 page)

He was horrified by the recognition that he’d done this, the realization that he had the capacity to do such a thing or even attempt—that’s a better word—this kind of thing . . . The sobering effect of that was to . . . for some time close up the cracks again. For the first time, he sat back and swore to himself that he wouldn’t do something like that again . . . or even, anything that would lead up to it.
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Bobby Joe Long, who raped and murdered nine women in Florida, recalls killing his first victim, a woman he picked up in a bar:

She picked me up really, I didn’t go after her. She was a whore. She manipulated men, and she wanted to manipulate me. Once I had her in the car, I tied her up and raped her. Then I strangled her and dumped her body alongside the highway. I knew what I was doing but I couldn’t stop myself. I hated her. I hated her from the time she picked me up, but I didn’t plan to murder her. I don’t even think I planned to rape her either . . . I couldn’t believe what I’d done the next morning. I was sick, and I knew I was in real trouble.

But the feelings of shock, fear, regret, and remorse, wear off before long. Bobby Joe Long continued:

Then a few days later I met the Simms girl, and it was the same thing all over again. She was a barfly. She really picked me up, and I just turned on her in the car.
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David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, recalled that after committing his first killing:

You just felt very good after you did it. It just happens to be satisfying, to get the source of blood . . . I no longer had any sympathy whatsoever for anybody. It was very strange. That’s what worried me the most. I said, “Well, I just shot some girl to death and yet I don’t feel.” . . . They were people I had to kill. I can’t stop and weep over them. You have to be strong and . . . you have to survive.
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David Gore, convicted of the torture, rape, and murder of six women, stated:

All of a sudden I realized that I had just done something that separated me from the human race and it was something that could never be undone. I realized that from that point on, I could never be like normal people. I must have stood there in that state for twenty minutes. I have never felt an emptiness of self like I did right then and I will never forget that feeling. It was like I crossed over into a realm I could never come back from.
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Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, recalled his first murder:

The feeling after I got out of that apartment was as if it never happened. I got out and downstairs, and you could of said you saw me upstairs, and as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t me. I can’t explain it to you any other way. It’s just so unreal . . . I was there. It was done. And yet if you talked with me an hour later, or half an hour later, it didn’t mean nothing. It just didn’t mean nothing.
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Triggers

Every serial killer has to begin with his first murder. The fantasies, the predisposition, the isolation are all in place waiting for him to act on them. What remains now to happen is the “trigger” that catapults the embryonic serial murderer out from his fantasy world into that of homicidal reality, and the “facilitator” that lubricates the process. The trigger is usually a series or combination of pressures in daily life that law enforcement officers call “stressors,” which at some point drive the predisposed individual to crack and act on his fantasy. The facilitator is frequently either some stimulant that enhances the stressors, such as pornography or cocaine, or a depressant that lowers the inhibitions, such as alcohol.

Sometimes in the beginning, murder is not even a component of the fantasy. Bobby Joe Long’s fantasy, for example, was rape, but in the end he turned to killing. During the acting out of the fantasy, the individual might accidentally kill, and from that point onward murder can become an active part of the future fantasy. Sometimes the killing is committed to preserve the fantasy when the victim’s behavior threatens to disrupt it.

The FBI study indicated that in 59 percent of the serial and sexual homicides they surveyed, the stressor reported was a conflict with a female. Because of the often sexual component of serial murder, this should not come as a surprise. Monte Rissell, who would eventually murder five women, had already been on probation for rape before he killed anybody. He received a letter from his girlfriend, who was a year ahead of him in college, that she no longer wanted to see him. Armed with a .45-caliber handgun, he drove to her campus and saw her with her new boyfriend but did not do anything. He then drove to a parking lot and sat in his car drinking beer and smoking marijuana. At about 2:00
A
.
M
. a woman drove into the lot and parked her car. Rissell approached her with his gun, abducted her, raped her, and killed her. He went on to kill four more women in a similar way.

Parental conflict is reported as a major stressor in 53 percent of the homicides surveyed. Ed Kemper reported that he began killing young women after a particularly bitter argument with his mother. Richard Chase, who killed, mutilated, and drank the blood of some of his six victims in Sacramento, California, in 1978, was typical of the FBI’s disorganized offender profile. He too describes a parental trigger behind his first homicide:

The first person I killed was sort of an accident. My car was broken down. I wanted to leave but I had no transmission. I had to get an apartment. Mother wouldn’t let me in at Christmas. Always before she let me come in at Christmas, have dinner, and talk to her, my grandmother, and my sister. That year she wouldn’t let me in and I shot from the car and killed somebody.
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Additional stress factors reported during the homicides surveyed were financial, 48 percent; employment problems, 39 percent; marital problems, 21 percent; legal problems, 28 percent; conflict with a male, 11 percent; physical injury, 11 percent; death of a significant person, 8 percent; and birth of a child, 8 percent.
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When serial killings begin and police have a potential suspect, investigators often make a careful survey of the suspect’s life around the time of the first murder in an attempt to identify potential stressors: Was he fired from work, is he in the middle of a divorce, has there been a death or a birth in the family, did he break up with his girlfriend, is he failing in school? Often such events occur just before the first homicide, but stressors can also trigger subsequent killing cycles as well. The FBI study reports the timing of three homicides committed by one unnamed individual. The offender purchased a handgun as soon as he learned that his wife was pregnant, claiming he was worried that his wife might be assaulted while he was away from home. After the birth of his first child, the offender became preoccupied, slept restlessly, and complained of physical pain. He showed little interest in having sexual relations with his wife, and his relationships with other people were disrupted. Three murders were linked to the birth: The first occurred six weeks after the birth of the child; the second when his wife became pregnant with a second child; and the third on the day of the first child’s birthday party.
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At other times it is not as simple as that; the trigger could be an event or stressor that is obscure and is only meaningful to or understood by the killer.

The problem here is that by the very nature of their childhood, serial killers are most likely to lead lives full of stressful events. As children and adolescents they lack self-esteem, are isolated and maladjusted, and are therefore poorly prepared for coping with life as adults. By the very nature of their personalities and coping skills, they contribute to or instigate stressful occurrences and instability in their lives. The FBI survey indicates that only 20 percent of their subjects were steadily employed and 47 percent did not graduate from high school. Of killers in the study who served in the military, 58 percent received undesirable, dishonorable, or medical discharges, while 29 percent registered a criminal record while serving.

Facilitators

The final element in the homicidal formula that unleashes serial killers is what psychologists have labeled “facilitators”—alcohol, drugs, pornography, and so on. Alcohol’s depressant effect can decrease inhibitions and suppress moral conscience and propriety. In his usual third-person discourse, Ted Bundy explained the role of alcohol in his twenty known homicides:

I think you could make a little more sense out of much of this if you take into account the effect of alcohol. It’s important. It’s very important as a trigger. When this person drank a good deal, his inhibitions were significantly diminished. He would find that his urge to engage in voyeuristic behavior on trips to the bookstore would become more prevalent, more urgent. It was as though the dominant personality was sedated. On every occasion when he engaged in such behavior, he was intoxicated.
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The FBI study reported that in 49 percent of the homicides it analyzed, the killer was consuming alcohol prior to committing the murder. Of those killers, 30 percent reported that at the time of the crime, their drinking was significantly heavier than their usual amount.

Drug use just prior to murder was reported by 35 percent of the killers, but only 12.5 percent stated that the amount of drugs consumed was different from their typical habit. Regrettably, the FBI study did not specify precisely which types of drugs were being consumed; however, the most likely drug is marijuana, which is the drug most readily available after alcohol (and after nicotine and caffeine). Cocaine, which also acts as a stimulant and ego booster, was presumably the next most cited substance, perhaps equaled by various amphetamine-like substances, and followed by hallucinogenics such as LSD and PCP. (Crack cocaine was not a popular drug when the study was being conducted.) As far as opiates such as morphine or heroin are concerned, there seem to be no accounts of any heroin-addicted serial killers—probably because the frequently debilitating nature of heroin addiction is not conducive to the necessary long-term high performance demanded of a focused serial killer.

PORNOGRAPHY

Pornography as a facilitator is a more complex issue. Some psychologists maintain that pornography inspires fantasies, provides models for sexual behavior, and encourages individuals to perceive females as objects. They suggest that as a visual stimulant combined with masturbation, pornography mentally conditions its consumer to derive pleasure from the fantasies of various behaviors depicted in it. Others maintain the opposite—that it defuses fantasies and provides a harmless and perhaps even healthy outlet for otherwise dangerous desires.

The FBI study reports that 81 percent of offenders reported encountering pornography in their childhood, but does not specify the nature or extent of the encounter. Nor does the study detail the nature of the pornography or even offer a definition of pornography. Colin Wilson’s theory on pornography and the rise of sex crime in the nineteenth century has been described in Chapter 2. Wilson, however, does not necessarily claim that the shift from “lusty” eighteenth-century pornography to the sadistic–prohibited behavior pornography of the nineteenth-century is the
cause.
That shift could have very easily reflected a change in cultural mores of the emerging urban industrial society, which contributed to the rise of sexual homicide. Nonetheless, many serial killers had extensive pornography collections, and some took sexually explicit photographs and made videos of their victims during the commission of their crime and after.

Until the mid 1990s, there existed a multimillion dollar pornographic publishing industry whose printed products ranged from straight sexual imagery to more fetishistic and sadomasochistic products. (Today it is mostly focused on video and digital products as opposed to printed matter.) Next to child pornography, the most offensive publications were magazines with titles such as
Stalked, Captured,
and
Bound and Fettered,
which took the nonexplicit detective magazine covers to their logical conclusions. They featured series of pornographic images of obviously kidnapped or stalked women, bound and gagged, often posed in settings such as abandoned barns, cellars, empty boxcars, back storerooms, or secret dungeons: a serial killer’s fantasy land. These magazines were more or less sold openly, depending on state and local law, in porn stores that were found clustered in most major U.S. cities.

The Times Square neighborhood in New York City was at one time probably the mecca of porn stores: Dozens of stores on and around West 42nd Street sold thousands of discounted pornographic titles stacked vertically in bins two feet deep, arranged by themes: anal, gay, big breasts, bondage, fat and chubby, legs and nylons, toes and feet, pet and farm, diapering, amputees, senior citizens, sweet sixteen, spanking, golden showers, and so on. But in the mid-1990s, the Internet did to Times Square porn shops what decades of campaigning by neighborhood improvement associations could not—it wiped them out, replacing them with something many find more oppressive than pornography: the Walt Disney gift shops and Starbucks cafés that now monotonously reign over West 42nd Street and the rest of our suffocating planet.