Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (6 page)

Remarkably, nobody even knows precisely how many homicides in total take place annually in the United States, as there are all sorts of reporting discrepancies. It is believed that until the recent decline in murders, approximately 20,000 to 22,000 murders occurred every year in the United States, but some sources estimate that the number is as high as 40,000 due to variations in reporting procedures.
²⁰
(By 2000 the number of murders declined to 15,586 but began to rise in 2001 to 15,980, not including the victims of 9/11—an increase of 2.5 percent. Preliminary statistics for 2002 indicate a further increase of 0.8 percent in the number of murders. This recent rate is distributed strangely across the United States: a decline of 4.8 percent in the Northeast but a rise of 5.2 percent in the West. Cities of more than a million inhabitants show a decline in murders of 4 percent, while towns of 50,000 to 100,000 show a dramatic 6.7 percent rise in homicides in 2002. Suburban counties reported an extraordinary 12.4 percent rise in homicides.
²¹
)

These statistics do not include the number of people who appear to mysteriously disappear. An often-cited 1984 U.S. Department of Health report estimated that 1.8 million children vanished from home every year. Of those, 95 percent were listed as “runaways” and 90 percent of those returned home within fourteen days. That left 171,000 runaways simply unaccounted for! The other 5 percent of the missing were victims of abduction, of which 72,000 were abducted by parents in custody disputes. The remaining 18,000 children and adolescents simply vanished with no further explanation, according to the statistics.
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The fate of missing adults is even harder to determine—if anybody notices them missing in the first place. In 1971, when Juan Corona initiated the era of big-number serial murder, none of his twenty-six transient victims were reported missing until their graves were discovered. Five remain nameless to this day. Some of the victims for whose deaths Henry Lee Lucas was convicted remain unidentified. During his trial they would be named for articles of clothing they were wearing when their bodies were found. A young woman Lucas picked up hitchhiking in Oklahoma City was found dead in a culvert wearing only socks. She remained known to the police and the courts only by the name “Orange Socks.” Richard Cottingham’s teenage victim found in the Times Square hotel with her head severed remains unidentified. Some of the bodies dug up from under Gacy’s house remain anonymous.

While serial murder is not a new phenomenon, its dramatic rise in incidence in the last three decades is. Eighty percent of all known male serial killers in the United States appeared between 1950 and 1995. Serial killers between 1975 and 1995 accounted for 45 percent of the total of both male and female killers in the United States between 1800 and 1995.
²³
Between 1960 and 1990, confirmed serial homicides increased by 940 percent.
²⁴
By early 1980, the rapid rise in serial murder was causing a panic that seized the nation. Most frightening were statistics that began to emerge from reliable sources that a huge number of children were being abducted by serial killers. Congress began to look into the issue, declaring that the nation was facing a “serial killer epidemic.” Even Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control got into the controversy with its assessment of serial murders as an increasing cause of death in America.

In the 1990s there were all sorts of secondary stories related to serial killing. First was the movie
Silence of the Lambs,
which introduced into mass consciousness the idea of FBI profilers and the character of serial killer Hannibal Lecter. The controversies of Bret Easton Ellis’s book
American Psycho,
the marketing of serial killer trading cards, AOL’s closing of Sondra London’s serial killer Web site, the market for artworks created by serial killers, and online auctions of their artifacts all contributed to a prevailing serial killer culture.

The 1990s marked a continuing wave of serial homicides heavily covered by the media. Television satellite trucks rushed to Gainesville, Florida, to cover practically live the five gruesome mutilations of college students in August 1990. In July 1991, an estimated 450 journalists covered the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer, who was charged with cannibalizing seventeen victims in Wisconsin and Ohio. The capture of serial bomber Ted Kaczynski—the Unabomber—after twenty years of bombings dominated headlines in the mid-1990s, and media organizations paid $6,500 for the privilege of access to his subsequent trial. The murder of Italian fashion mogul Gianni Versace in Miami propelled the issue of serial spree homicide into the headlines in 1997. In 2001 there was the arrest of Gary Ridgway, the suspect in the Green River murders, which had remained unsolved for twenty years.

It just keeps coming and coming. In the autumn of 2002, the Beltway Sniper murders were covered on live television as they unfolded—another case of serial spree killing. In May 2003, police arrested a man suspected in a series of seven rape murders in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and later that year police in Washington State announced the closing of the Green River Killer case with Gary Ridgway’s guilty plea in an astonishing forty-eight murders. In February 2004, law enforcement in Arkansas and Mississippi joined agencies from Texas and Oklahoma to search for a killer who police say is a long-haul truck driver and preys on women around truck stops. The bodies of ten victims, many of them prostitutes, were dumped near a river, creek, or around bridges in four states between 1999 and 2004.
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As this book went to press in the spring of 2004, Kansas suddenly became the nation’s serial murder hotspot. In Witchita, after a silence of twenty-five years an unidentified serial killer known as the “BTK Strangler” suddenly contacted authorities by mailing them identification of one of his previous victims and photographs of her corpse. The killer had murdered at least eight people between 1974 and 1986, including a family of four, while taunting police with letters and phone calls. He frequently entered the victims’ homes, sometimes during the day, cutting their phone line before proceeding to torture and strangle them. He wrote in one letter [spelling as in original]:

I can’t stop it so the monster goes on, and hurt me as well as society. Society can be thankful that there are ways for people like me to relieve myself at time by day dreams of some victims being torture and being mine. It a big compicated game my friend of the monster play putting victims number down, follow them, checking up on them waiting in the dark, waiting, waiting . . . the pressure is great and sometimes he run the game to his liking. Maybe you can stop him. I can’t. He has aready chosen his next victim or victims. I don’t who they are yet. The next day after I read the paper, I will know, but it to late. Good luck hunting. P.S. Since sex criminals do not change their M.O. or by nature cannot do so, I will not change mine. The code words for me will be . . . Bind them, toture them, kill them, B. T.K., you see he at it again. They will be on the next victim.

Then suddenly, in 1979, the BTK strangler broke off contact and except for the 1986 murder of Vickie Wegerle, which was not at first linked to him, he appeared to have stopped killing. By 1987, the special BTK task force was disbanded.

In January 2004, Kansas newspapers marked the thirtieth anniversary of the BTK killer’s first murders—the strangulation of the Otero family. Six weeks later, police announced that photos of Vickie Wegerle’s body taken by the killer had been mailed in to a Wichita paper. Police are now combing prison records in the hope that perhaps the BTK strangler has been incarcerated on other charges during the last two decades and can be identified.

Meanwhile, in Kansas City, police announced in April that they had charged a suspect in a series of twelve rape strangulation murders of women between 1977 and 1993. The accused is a forty-three-year-old married supervisor in a Kansas trash-collecting company who was linked by DNA traces to the victims: nine white and three black women ranging in age from fifteen to thirty-six. Eleven of the victims, according to police, were prostitutes, while the twelfth was a mentally ill woman known to wander the streets and accept rides from strangers.
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In Canada, police have spent $25 million so far investigating farmer Robert Pickton, who is suspected in the disappearances of some sixty Vancouver women, many of them down-on-their-luck street hookers and drug addicts. Investigators have been sifting the grounds of his pig farm for eighteen months, recovering the remains of twenty-two bodies and DNA traces linked to some of the missing women. Pickton is currently charged with fifteen counts of first-degree murder, but in January 2004, police announced that they discovered the remains of an additional nine women on the pig farm. Six of the nine were identified through DNA testing. Prosecutors informed the courts that they would be charging Pickton with additional counts of murder. His trial is scheduled to begin in 2005.
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In China, in April 2004, police dug up more bodies on the property of Huang Yong, the twenty-nine-year-old son of a pig farmer. He had already confessed to killing seventeen high school boys he lured from Internet cafes and video game centers. He tied his victims to a table, tortured them, strangled and dismembered them, because as Yong explained, he liked to “experience the sensation of killing.” Yong had been executed in December, but relatives continued to search his property discovering additional bodies.

China has been recently plagued with cases of serial murder. Xu Ming, a twenty-six-year-old man in China’s Hebei province, raped at least thirty-seven women between the ages of seventy-one and ninety-three. Older women were “easier to control,” he told police. Yang Xinhai, China’s worst serial killer to date, murdered sixty-five people and raped twenty-three women. In the southern city of Shenzhen, a couple murdered seventeen young job seekers. In Beijing, a taxi driver and his wife killed seven people, including four prostitutes whose bodies they chopped into pieces and partially ate. In Nanjing, a snack-shop owner who grew worried about competition put rat poison in a rival’s products, killing thirty-eight people.

Back on the Pacific coast of the U.S., not far from where Gary Ridgway murdered forty-eight victims, David and Michelle Knotek—husband and wife—stand accused of the torture murders of at least four people at their idyllic white-picket-fence farmhouse decorated with smiley faces. At this writing they are awaiting trial. Meanwhile, farther south along the coast, in California, as Scott Peterson stands charged with the murder of his pregnant wife, Laci, his defense is hinting that he has been “framed” by a serial killer, the real perpetrator of her murder.

As I write here, you cannot turn on the TV without major network news magazine shows like
Dateline
or
20/20
running previously broadcast episodes or updated shows on some serial killer. Tune in to the Discovery Channel for the “science of catching serial killers.” Go to the History Channel and you will find the “history of serial killers.” PBS offers us “The Mind of a Serial Killer,” while the Biography Channel . . . well, you guessed it. Only the Food Network seems to have resisted presenting serial killer cannibal recipes.

No wonder they call this the age of serial slaughter; we seem to live in a world truly plagued by an epidemic of crazy homicides that do not appear to be waning.

Behind the Making of the “Serial Killer Epidemic”

If I have been doing my job right as a popular writer so far, you should be breathlessly alarmed by this described sudden and steady three-decade onslaught of crazed serial killers threatening us in every corner of the world. The alarm you feel feeds sales of books, magazines, and commercial time on television. The historian in me, however, wants to know what
really
happened, even if the truth is more prosaic than the myth. This wave of serial murder is not as simple a story as a lot of true-crime literature, the government, and the media have been presenting it.

Yes, it
felt
as if an epidemic of serial murder were starting in the 1970s, just the way I described it, but first we need to acknowledge that the population had risen rapidly over the last half of the century. More people; more victims; more serial killers.

Second, in the earlier part of the century, television did not exist and newspapers were not linked by wire services and syndication deals to the extent they are today. Stories of serial murder often did not get reported beyond a local region, and therefore historians have a hard time identifying cases in the past with which comparisons can be made. By the 1960s, news reporting had become highly centralized by wire services, modern communication, and corporate amalgamation, and thus stories of serial murders, even in remote regions, were more likely to be broadly reported during the 1970s and 1980s, giving us this sense of a sudden epidemic of unprecedented serial killings. Reports of almost any multiple homicides anywhere would be big news and received national distribution on the wire services.

Finally, our “serial killer epidemic” can be attributed to the fact that many of the startling crime statistics in the early 1980s were issuing forth from the U.S. Department of Justice and anticrime lobbies and victim advocate groups. The FBI at precisely that time was lobbying the government for funding for new programs. The FBI had realized that some murders were not being recognized as having been committed by the same person because of jurisdictional disparities (a failure called “linkage blindness”) and was calling for a massive database system to address this issue.