Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (53 page)

The Bible has many unfortunate passages calling for the punishment of female sexual misbehavior:

Now then, O harlot, hear the word of the Lord! Thus says the Lord God: “Because your filthiness was poured out and your nakedness uncovered in your harlotry with your lovers. . . . I will gather them from all around against you and will uncover your nakedness to them, that they may see all your nakedness and I will judge you as women who break wedlock or shed blood are judged; I will bring blood upon you in fury and jealousy . . . and they shall stone you with stones and thrust you through with their swords.” (
Ezekiel 16:35–40
)

The Bible can be a potent motivator particularly to missionary type killers, desperate to find approval to kill somebody—
anybody.
In their twisted and immoral perception, it can license them to murder prostitutes, homosexuals, or “baby killing” abortion clinic doctors.

Pornography, detective magazines, alcohol or drugs, or any other kind of substance or literature, including the Bible, can become facilitators. While it is not believed that they
cause
serial killers to murder, they do facilitate their acts by lowering inhibitions, fueling or reinforcing existing fantasies, or imparting upon their acts a false rationale. Combined with stress, poor coping capabilities, and a history of isolation and low-esteem, and tempered by fantasies of revenge, sex, and violence, facilitators often are simply lubricants in a well-built killing machine.

The Second Murder

In a serial killer’s history, every first murder has to be followed by another. It differentiates him from a common murderer. Probably the most chilling description of the process of a first-time serial murder and what comes next was provided recently by Ian Brady, one of the Moors Murderers. While confined in a psychiatric facility, Brady recently wrote a controversial book titled
The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis.
*
In it he describes a serial killer’s first and second homicides:

The first killing experience will not only hold the strongest element of existential novelty and curiosity, but also the greatest element of danger and trepidation conjured by the unknown. Usually the incipient serial killer is too immersed in the psychological and legal challenges of the initial homicide, not to mention immediate logistics—the physical labour that the killing and disposal involve. He is therefore not in a condition to form a detached appreciation of the traumatic complexities bombarding his senses.

You could, in many instances, describe the experience as an effective state of shock. He is, after all, storming pell-mell the defensive social conditioning of a lifetime, as well as declaring war upon all the organized, regulatory forces of society. In extinguishing someone’s life he is also committing his own, and has no time to stop and stare in the hazardous, psychological battlefield.

In another very significant sense, he is killing his long-accepted self as well as the victim, and simultaneously giving birth to a new persona, decisively cutting the umbilical connection between himself and ordinary mankind.

Having fought his former self and won, the fledgling serial killer flexes his newfound powers with more confidence. The second killing will hold all the same disadvantages, distracting elements of the first, but to a lesser degree. This allows a more objective assimilation of the experience. It also fosters an expanding sense of omnipotence, a wide-angle view of the metaphysical chessboard.

In many cases, the element of elevated aestheticism in the second murder will exert a more formative impression than the first and probably of any in the future. It not only represents the rite of confirmation, a revelational leap of lack of faith in humanity, but also the onset of addiction to hedonistic nihilism.

The psychic abolition of redemption.
¹⁸⁴

While one should not overvalue the outdated sophomoric existentialism that Brady claims imbues the squalid act of serial murder, his observations are nonetheless insightful. They are hauntingly similar to David Gore’s description quoted earlier: “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.” The serial killer’s first murder can transform him into somebody other than who he was—a type of rebirth. But it is an illusion; in order to sustain his new identity, the serial killer needs to kill again and again.

Brady reveals a curious phenomenon underlying the subsequent second murder. If indeed the serial killer transforms his old self into a new one by committing his first murder, then his second murder is really only the first murder by the newly reinvented self. That perhaps might account for Brady’s assertion that the second murder is the most exciting. After that, unless the killer can totally transform himself again, with each murder the satisfaction and excitement decline and dissipate. The murders gradually drift out of the killer’s fantasy realm into that of his depressing reality from which he first sought escape. In response, some serial killers escalate their crimes to sustain the frontiers of fantasy, until the range of their fantasies become unworkable in the reality of the world in which they commit their acts and they self-destruct by behavior that leads to their arrest or by surrendering to police or confessing. Some perhaps commit suicide, while others simply cease killing and return to their normal lives, leaving behind a mystery forever unsolved.

EIGHT
THE KILLING TIMES:
The Method to the Madness

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.
—
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
,
Hamlet 2.2

Once the serial killer has killed his first victim he enters a complex circular process, akin to addiction, that leads him to kill over and over again. Very distinctive patterns emerge, depending on whether the serial killer is an organized or disorganized personality, and the killer leaves a unique personal imprint called a “signature” on each of his murders.

Each serial homicide goes through a number of dynamic phases, which at some points differ slightly between organized and disorganized killers.

Phase 1: Dissociative-Fantasy-Aura State

The dissociative state is a state of mind “beyond fantasy” in which the killer has crossed the boundaries that separate imagination from reality. This “hyper fantasy stage” is arrived at through a gradual process of withdrawal from reality through years of repeating and elaborating fantasies with specifically violent themes such as murder, rape, revenge, control, mutilation, cannibalism, and possession. During his childhood and adolescence, the future killer takes tentative exploratory journeys into this territory, which manifest themselves in acts of cruelty to animals, bullying of fellow children, setting fires, and petty crimes.

For most children, such forays into violence beyond mere fantasy result in very discouraging and unpleasant results. These consequences often serve to dissuade the child from ever acting out these fantasies again—and often clear the fantasy away completely for the remainder of the child’s life. But for a small minority of children, these forays result in a certain level of stress and fear alleviation, satisfaction, and pleasure, which leave the child wanting more—especially if the child is under continual environmental stress. These fantasies are often accompanied by compulsive masturbation, which conditions a link between the fantasies and sexual urges.

These children cling to their violent fantasies into their adolescence and adulthood, and at some indeterminate point they cross the threshold where they no longer know or are aware of the difference between fantasy and reality. They are no longer cognizant that the thoughts they are having originated in fantasy: Reality and fantasy become merged and the person is said to be in the dissociative state.

The dissociative process can last anywhere from a few hours to a few months before some stressor such as those described in the previous chapter, along with facilitators, causes the person to “snap” and triggers an acting out of a violent fantasy. The stressor can be a culmination of accumulated long-term problems, such as a bad marriage, or a sudden and often minor episode, such as rudeness from a store clerk or rejection by a woman approached in a disco or bar.

Dr. Joel Norris described the dissociative process as the “aura phase,” in which for the killer sounds and colors become more vivid, odors are more intense, and sometimes even his skin can become sensitive to the slightest pressure. The killer is oblivious to any outside stimuli and reacts only to invisible stimuli that he alone can experience and understand. The fantasy is now prolonged, entirely compulsive, and completely dominating the killer’s every thought and action.

Nothing can inhibit the killer at this late stage, not the threat of punishment, laws, fear of death, morality, religion, mores, or taboos—all of these things become meaningless to the serial killer, as does the life of the person he is about to murder. The serial killer is almost a creature that defies the definition of a human, Dr. Norris says:

The killer is simply a biological engine driven by a primal instinct to satisfy a compelling lust. The ritual of killing has become bound up with an autonomic survival mechanism, almost as if the murderer had become a single-celled creature reacting to an overpowering chemical stimulus.
¹⁸⁵

Probably the most focused area of research today in forensic psychiatry is the point at which fantasy transforms into the dissociative process in the serial killer. At the early stages, some serial killers are aware of and can verbalize their transformation from fantasy to dissociative process. William Heirens, who murdered two women and a girl in Chicago, locked his clothes in a bathroom and threw away the key to resist going out to commit his crimes. But the urge became so strong that he crawled out naked on the ledge to recover his clothing. Henry Lee Lucas, on the eve of his release from prison for killing his mother, begged authorities not to let him go free because he was overwhelmed with the urge to kill. On the day he was released he immediately killed a woman and dumped her body near the prison gates.

Once the serial killer enters into the dissociative process, he moves on to the next phase.

Phase 2: Trolling-Hunting-Stalking Stage

“Trolling” is a fishing term describing the process in which a moving boat spreads out a net in an area likely to contain an abundance of fish. Joel Norris applied the term to serial killers when they begin to frequent and cruise areas where they are likely to find a victim. There is nothing random or accidental about trolling. Each serial killer has a precise “shopping list” for the type of victim he needs to satisfy his fantasy. Ted Bundy, for example, is said to have preferred young women with shoulder-length hair parted down the middle who looked like they were from upper-middle-class origins.

In his study of male serial killers, psychologist Eric Hickey determined that 40 percent of serial killers targeted females exclusively. At least 37 percent targeted both sexes, while 22 percent only chose males as their victims.
¹⁸⁶
Michael Newton, looking at victims of serial murder, determined that 65 percent were female and 35 percent male. Of serial killers specifically targeting men, 42 percent were homosexual, while the other 58 percent represented female killers, revenge killings, hospital murders, and “thrill” murders.
¹⁸⁷

In profiling victims, Hickey maintains that between 11 and 13 percent of victims were at “high risk”: they were hitchhiking, were prostitutes, worked alone as store clerks, were driving a taxicab, or were in a car breakdown when approached by their killer.
¹⁸⁸
This suggests that more than two-thirds of victims were unsuspecting of any imminent threat, did not facilitate their deaths, and were essentially at the right place at the wrong time.

Sixteen percent of identified serial killer victims knew their killer as a friend, casual acquaintance, neighbor, or co-worker. Three percent were related to the killer by blood or marriage, of which 49 percent were children murdered by their father or mother; 13 percent were spouses; 10 percent were parents murdered by their child; and 28 percent were an assortment of grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, nieces, and nephews. The remaining 68 percent in Hickey’s study were killed by strangers.
¹⁸⁹

Aside from gender, serial killers use various other criteria for their selection of victims. Age is often important with some serial killers, who focus exclusively on children, teens, or elderly victims. While most serial killers murder victims of the same race, some specifically target victims of other races. Occupation can play a role beyond just that of a victim’s vulnerability. Prostitutes, strippers, and other sex-industry workers might be specifically targeted for the sexual associations of their work. In the twisted mind of a serial killer, however, nurses, store clerks, waitresses, and flight attendants can also be targeted through some obscure sexualizing thought process.

Residence or lack of residence could result in a person being targeted. Street people, derelicts, alcoholics, and homeless people have been targeted as victims in several cases. Victims living in the same building have also been targeted, and killers working in the confines of neighborhoods are frequent as well. In Los Angeles, for example, one needs a street map to sort out the neighborhood serial killers: Skid Row Slasher, Skid Row Stabber, Koreatown Slasher, West Side Rapist, Orange Coast Killer, Southside Slayer . . .