Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (8 page)

Previous Serial Killer “Epidemics”

Let us return once more to the question of the rising wave of serial murders over the last thirty years. Is it real, or is it exaggerated media hype intended to address political agendas and sell papers? Philip Jenkins, a professor at Penn State, is probably the most recognized debunker of serial homicide statistics. Jenkins, for example, cites working lists of all known serial killers compiled by the Justice Department for use at the Behavioral Sciences Unit. He noted that in 1992, the FBI list of serial killers in the United States from 1900 to 1970 contained 447 names and an additional 365 names from 1970 to 1992, linked to 2,636 known victims and suspected in an additional 1,839. But after combing through the lists, Jenkins found enormous faults of duplication—for example, each of the convicted killers in the Manson Family was assigned the same list of victims, making the number of victims of spree killing in 1969 three times greater than it really was.
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Jenkins found case after case of similar such multiplication of victims in the use of “suspected victim” categories and discredited confessions such as Henry Lee Lucas’s confession of 360 murders. So the good news is that there are fewer serial killers and victims in recent times than the FBI claims.

The bad news, according to Jenkins, is that the apparent rise in serial murder in the last three decades, while not as big as once thought, is nevertheless real—and worse, it is not our first. It merely follows several previous waves of serial killer epidemics over the last hundred years, each bigger than the last. Jenkins identified two previous periods during which there were surging waves of serial homicides: 1911–1915 and 1935–1941. He found that the FBI list, while duplicating some of the more modern serial homicide cases, entirely overlooked the existence of earlier ones.
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The FBI study, for example, lists a total of thirteen serial homicide cases in a twenty-five-year period between 1900 and 1924. But by merely looking through back issues of the
New York Times
, Jenkins identified a wave of seventeen cases just in the short period of five years between 1911 and 1915! Clearly the FBI was underestimating the prevalence of serial murder in America in earlier years.

Henry Lee Moore, for example, between 1911 and 1912, was a traveling serial killer who murdered more than twenty-three people—entire families. But little is known about him—he is a mere footnote. In September 1911, using an axe, Moore killed six victims in Colorado Springs—a man, two women, and four children. In October he killed three people in Monmouth, Illinois, and then he slaughtered a family of five in Ellsworth, Kansas, the same month. In June 1912, he killed a couple in Paola, Kansas, and several days later he killed seven people, including four children, in Villisca, Iowa. Moore then returned home to Columbia, Missouri, where he murdered his mother and grandmother. At this point he was arrested and prosecuted in December 1912. But Moore was not immediately linked to the previous crimes until a federal agent investigating the Villisca homicides was informed by his father, a warden of the Leavenworth Penitentiary with contacts throughout the prison system, of the nature of Henry Lee Moore’s crimes in Missouri.

In another case, in Atlanta between May 1911 and May 1912 twenty light-skinned black women were murdered on the streets in Jack-the-Ripper-style mutilations. Between May 20 and July 1, 1911, the unknown killer murdered the first seven victims—one every Saturday night like clockwork.

In Denver and Colorado Springs in 1911–1912, seven women were bludgeoned to death with the perpetrator never being caught.

Between January 1911 and April 1912, forty-nine victims were killed in unsolved axe murders in Texas and Louisiana. Very similar to the Moore murders, entire families were wiped out: a mother and her three children hacked to death in their beds in Rayne, Louisiana, in January 1911; ten miles away in Crowley, Louisiana, three members of the Byers family in February 1911; two weeks later, a family of four in Lafayette. In April the killer struck in San Antonio, Texas, killing a family of five. All the victims were killed in their beds at night and nothing was stolen from their homes. In November 1911 the killer returned to Lafayette and killed a family of six; in January 1912 a woman and her three children were killed in Crowley. Two days later, at Lake Charles, a family of five were killed in their beds, and a note was left behind: “When He maketh the Inquisition for Blood, He forgetteth not the cry of the humble—human five.”

In February 1912 the killer murdered a woman and her three children while they slept in their beds in Beaumont, Texas. In March, a man and a woman and her four children were hacked to death in Glidden, Texas, while they slept. In April a family of five were killed in San Antonio again, and two nights later, three were killed in Hempstead, Texas. The murders were never solved.

In New York City a “ripper” killed a five-year-old girl on an errand inside her apartment building on March 19, 1915. He sent taunting letters to the victim’s mother and the police, signing himself as “H. B. Richmond, Jack-the-Ripper” and threatening to kill again. On May 3 he killed a four-year-old boy playing in a hallway and stuffed his body under a tenement staircase. The offender was never identified.

Again in New York City, in 1915 the corpses of fifteen newborn infants were recovered, suspected to be linked to some sort of “baby farm” operation.

These murders were all spectacular crimes, some widely reported in their time, others not, but all forgotten today. Jack the Ripper with his five victims is immortalized, but the Louisiana-Texas axe murderer with forty-nine victims is entirely forgotten. The primary difference is that London was the center of a huge newspaper industry while Louisiana and Texas were not. The story of Jack the Ripper was retold and entered popular myth and literature—while the Louisiana-Texas axe murderer faded from public consciousness. Serial murder “epidemics” are as much about reporting as they are about killing.

The Global Rise of Serial Murder

The rise in cases of serial murder in the last three decades is not a uniquely American problem. Although the United States is the primary location for serial murders, it does not exclusively harbor this trend. While 76 percent of all recently reported serial killings in the world took place in the United States, 21 percent occurred in Europe, where England led with 28 percent of the European total, followed by Germany with 27 percent and France at 13 percent.
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Serial murder was once considered only an American phenomenon, but Europe is also increasingly reporting a resurgent rise in the rate of serial murders. In England, police uncovered twelve murders committed between 1971 and 1987 by Rosemary and Fred West in Gloucester, England, including that of their sixteen-year-old daughter, who vanished in 1987.

In another case, the residents of a London apartment building complained that their toilets were not flushing properly. When a drain company operator inspected the plumbing he found it blocked by greasy fragments of human remains. Dennis Nilsen, a former police constable who lived in the same building, confessed to killing sixteen young men, cutting them up into pieces, and flushing them down the toilet.

In 2000, English doctor Fred Shipman was convicted of murdering fifteen of his elderly patients, while the actual number of his victims is believed to be four hundred—making him the possibly the most prolific serial killer in recent history. (Once a serial killer is successfully convicted for a few murders, authorities often do not pursue further convictions in the same jurisdiction.)

In France, Paris police announced in 1998 the arrest of Guy Georges—the “Beast of Bastille”—who raped and murdered seven women. Described as “unstable,” Georges is said to be a persistent sexual offender who had been living in cheap hotels and squats for some time. In court, Georges was described by the public prosecutor as “the incarnation of evil,” and psychiatrists warned that he could not be cured of his desire to kill. Born and raised in Angers, he is also being questioned about three rapes and murders committed there between 1991 and 1994. All the victims were young women, some found tied to their beds with knife or razor cuts to their throats. In 2001 he was sentenced to life with no chance of parole for twenty-five years.

In Copenhagen, Denmark, two surgeons, one of them a police pathologist, were sentenced to life in prison for the murders of ten women. The police pathologist had performed the forensic autopsies on some of his own victims.

Italy is not immune to the current rise of serial murder in Europe, as illustrated by the well-known case of the Monster of Florence, who killed eight couples between 1968 and 1985 and mailed pieces of their bodies to police and the media. In another case, two young men in their twenties—“yuppies”—one the son of a renowned plastic surgeon in Verona, the other of a managing director of the Verona branch of a German insurance company—were charged with twenty-seven homicides. One victim was a priest who had a nail driven through his forehead followed by a chisel with a cross attached to it.

More recently, in Apulia, in September 1997 police arrested a suspect in the murders of at least eight elderly women, each of whom lived on the ground floor of her building. Meanwhile in Verona, Gianfranco Stavanin was convicted in 1998 of murdering and dismembering six women between 1991 and 1994 and burying their remains in nearby fields.

That same winter in 1998, Italy was electrified by a dramatic series of murders of women on trains along the vacation coast between Genoa and Monte Carlo. The killer would surprise women inside the washroom by opening the door with his own special key. After murdering his victim, he would relock the door and slip back to his compartment in the dark while the train was passing through a tunnel. By the time a conductor would get around to checking the locked toilet, the killer had long ago gotten off the train. Police eventually arrested forty-seven-year-old professional gambler and petty criminal Donato Bilancia and charged him with a total of seventeen homicides over a six-month period. His victims consisted of nine males and eight females and included not only women on the train and roadside prostitutes, but criminal associates and friends and acquaintances. One victim was strangled; the rest were shot.

But Belgium appears to be inexplicably emerging as Europe’s newest serial slaughter hot zone. After awaiting trial for eight years, Marc Dutroux, 47, and his two accomplices, one of whom is his ex-wife Michel Martin, 44, finally went on trial in March 2004 for the horrific kidnapping, rape, and murder of four girls during the mid-1990s. Dutroux, a previously convicted rapist and pedophile is also charged with killing a fifth victim, an accomplice who Dutroux claims allowed the girls to die from starvation during their captivity in a secret dungeon. In court, Dutroux admitted to the raping of the kidnapped girls, some were as young as eight, but he denies killing them. The bodies of the girls and the accomplice were found on Dutroux’s property. Police also rescued two girls, ages 12 and 14, found alive in a cage in Dutroux’s house. Dutroux admitted to raping the twelve-year old victim at least twenty times during her seventy-nine-day captivity. Belgians have been angrily protesting the eight-year delay of the trial amidst allegations of the existence of a highly placed and powerful pedophile ring in that country.

In another case, in October 1997 Belgian authorities charged a man identified as Andras Pandy—a seventy-year-old Protestant pastor from Hungary—with the murder of two of his ex-wives and four of his children. His daughter, Agnes, confessed to helping him kill five relatives—her mother, two brothers, a stepmother, and her daughter—and is now being investigated for possible links to the disappearance of others in the family. Authorities have also linked Agnes to the disappearance in 1993 of a twelve-year-old girl whose Hungarian mother had a relationship with Pastor Pandy. It was reported that Andras Pandy fostered an undetermined number of orphaned or homeless Romanian children in his home in Brussels. The children—who became orphaned or homeless in Romania’s 1989 revolution that toppled communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu—were taken in by a charity club named YDNAP (PANDY backward) founded by the pastor. They stayed under his care for varying periods of time, “and nobody knows what happened to them or if they returned home.”

Also in Belgium, police admitted they were nowhere near finding the serial killer who scattered up to thirty bags of severed and precisely measured body parts of six women around the city of Mons. The city’s public prosecutor’s office said eight inspectors and a police commissioner had conducted seven hundred interviews and received six hundred items of information since the first bags were discovered in March 1997. The killer is believed to be a man, probably with local geographic and historical knowledge. Belgian authorities have called on the FBI for help profiling the elusive killer. The serial killer seems to be taunting authorities by leaving the dismembered remains of his victims in places with emotive names. The remains have been left in the Rue du Depot (Dump), near the River Haine (Hate), on the Chemin de l’Inquietude (the path of Worry), and on the banks of the River Trouille (Jitters). The last of the bags found containing body parts was on Rue St. Symphorien, named after a third-century French saint who was decapitated and whose relics are in church nearby. Apparently the killer did not dismember the bodies by hand. He rolled his victims through a machine—used for chopping logs—with circular blades placed at twelve-inch intervals. Each body fragment so far found measures exactly one foot.

Until recently the Third World accounted for only 3 percent of the world’s reported serial murders, but by now that number must have climbed.
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Because these regions have police systems that are underfinanced—or focused on political repression—and huge populations of impoverished, underprivileged, and unwanted people, Third World serial killers individually murder extraordinary numbers of victims.