The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (11 page)

The police finally nabbed Chikatilo in 1990. He was charged with a
staggering fifty-three murders, though the true total may have been even higher. At his trial, he was kept locked inside a steel cage to protect him from his victims’ relatives. He was executed in 1994.

For a compelling dramatization of the case, we highly recommend
Citizen X,
a 1995 made-for-cable movie (available on video) starring Stephen Rea, Donald Sutherland, Max von Sydow, and—in a thoroughly chilling portrayal—Jeffrey DeMunn as Chikatilo.

“What I did was not for sexual pleasure. Rather it brought me some peace of mind.”

A
NDREI
C
HIKATILO

C
HILDHOOD

See
Upbringing
.

C
IVIL
S
ERVANTS

Government workers have never enjoyed the most glowing reputation among the general public. Just ask anyone who’s ever had to deal with a surly clerk at the information desk of the local DMV, or been called in for an IRS audit.

The public’s dim view of civil servants certainly wasn’t helped any in 1986 when postal worker Patrick Sherrill strolled into his workplace in Edmond, Oklahoma, with a pair of Colt .45 semi-automatics and proceeded to relieve some of his work-related tension by killing fourteen people and himself. As it turned out, he was just the first of several USPS workers over the next ten years to teach the world the meaning of the phrase “going postal.”

To be to fair to postal workers, theirs are not the only governmental ranks from which homicidal maniacs have sprung. In the late 1950s, a Scottish sociopath named Peter Manuel was holding down a civil service job with the
City of Glasgow Gas Board. During his off hours, however, Manuel was leading a sinister secret life. A lifetime criminal with a long record of convictions for offenses ranging from burglary to rape, Manuel murdered his first victim—a seventeen-year-old girl whose body he dumped on a golf course—in January 1956. Before long, he had slaughtered a total of eight people, including two entire families who were shot in their skulls as they slept in their beds at night.

Manuel’s countryman, the notorious Dennis
Nilsen
—whose crimes bore a sickening resemblance to those of Jeffrey
Dahmer
—also worked as a civil servant. Employed by the British Manpower Services Commission, Nilsen was a dedicated professional who helped downtrodden young men find gainful work. By night, however, he was not assisting young men but preying on them. After having sex with one of his gay pickups, Nilsen would kill the young victim, then keep the rotting corpse around his flat for “companionship.” When the decay became unbearable, Nilsen would finally dismember and dispose of the body.

Nilsen’s monstrous career—which left fifteen victims dead—began in late 1978. Just one year earlier, the crimes of another notorious serial killer came to an end. In August 1977, the gun-crazy madman known as “Son of Sam” was apprehended after the biggest manhunt in New York City history. The public responded to his arrest with two equally intense emotions—relief at his capture and amazement at his identity. Instead of a slavering monster, the great boogeyman of the disco age turned out to be a pudgy-faced nonentity named David
Berkowitz
, regarded by his fellow employees as a quiet, courteous nebbish.

Berkowitz’s job? He worked as a letter sorter for a post office branch in the Bronx.

Nearly thirty years later, the public had grown more accustomed to this sort of disparity between the mundane and the monstrous and was less taken aback to learn that the man charged with being the notorious
BTK
Strangler was a balding, bespectacled codes enforcer for the Wichita suburb of Park City. Unlike other serial-killer suspects who are often described as quiet and inoffensive, Dennis Rader could be a royal pain. In carrying out his not-so-civil duties, he would badger people over the most trivial infractions, going so far in some cases as to measure the height of the grass on neighbors’ front lawns to make sure it complied with some obscure municipal ordinance.

Rader’s job as code enforcer coincided with a period when the BTK murders had stopped. One criminologist thinks there may be a connection. Professor James Fox of Northeastern University theorizes that the sense of power Rader felt while harassing people might have been a substitute for the absolute power he felt while murdering his victims. In other words, as long as he was busting people’s chops, he didn’t feel the need to bind, torture, and kill them.

Just remember that, the next time you go to the DMV. If you happen to run up against an insufferable, bureaucratic jerk, his obnoxious behavior might just be a safety valve for even more hateful impulses—his way of not going postal.

C
LANS

In our age of splintered homes, broken marriages, and latchkey children, it’s heartwarming to read about the large, close-knit families of yesteryear, bound together by common interests and shared activities. Unless, of course, those interests and activities included serial murder, gang rape, and even cannibalism—as was the case with two notorious killer clans of the past, the Beanes and the Benders.

According to legend, Sawney Beane was a fifteenth-century Scottish peasant who grew fed up with farming and turned to highway robbery. With his hard-bitten common-law wife, he holed up in a seaside cavern on the Galloway coast and sired a large brood of children. Eventually, through incestuous mating, the family swelled to forty-eight members, who subsisted by preying on unwary travelers, devouring their flesh, and pickling the leftover meat in seawater.

No one knows how many people fell victim to this feral clan—estimates run as high as one thousand. To the local inhabitants, the cause of these disappearances was a mystery. Was it a pack of man-eating wolves? Or some supernatural creature? The truth finally came to light when a husband and wife, returning from a village fair, were attacked by the barbarous Beanes, who fell upon the woman, slit her throat, and began feasting on her flesh. A second party, coming upon this appalling scene, informed the authorities. Before long, King James led a party of four hundred troops to the Galloway coast, where the Beanes’ unspeakable hideout—its walls hung with human
body parts—was uncovered. The entire family was captured and executed, the men put to slow torture, the women burned alive at the stake.

In our own country, a fiendish family known as the “Bloody Benders” perpetrated a string of atrocities during the 1870s. Headed by a brutish patriarch, John, and his equally savage wife (known only as “Ma”), the Benders were German immigrants who settled on the rugged Kansas frontier, where they ran a crude ramshackle “hotel.” More than a dozen weary travelers who stopped there for a meal or a good night’s rest never made it any farther. While daughter Kate served the stranger his dinner, Papa Bender and his son, John Jr., would sneak up from behind and smash the unwary victim on the skull with a sledgehammer. Then the body would be stripped, robbed, and buried. When a posse finally searched the place, they found the remains of a dozen victims, including a little girl who had been brutally raped before being buried alive beneath her father’s corpse. By the time these atrocities were uncovered, however, the Benders had already fled. To this day no one knows what became of them.

The old-fashioned tradition represented by the Benders and the Beanes (“the family that slays together stays together”) has been perpetuated in our own era by a family named the McCrarys. A nomadic band of small-time robbers, the McCrarys committed a string of holdups from coast to coast during a yearlong spree in the early 1970s. Along the way, the three McCrary males (father Sherman, son Danny, and son-in-law Raymond Carl Taylor) abducted twenty-two young women—waitresses, salesclerks, customers—from the crime scenes, then raped them, shot them in the head, and ditched the bodies. Through it all, the two McCrary women—mama Carolyn and daughter Ginger McCrary-Taylor—stood by their men. “I love my husband very much,” declared Ginger after the vicious killer clan was apprehended. “And it never occurred to me to do anything other than to stay with him.”

Sawney Beane on Film

Actually, there
are
no films about Sawney Beane. Two commendable horror movies, however, have been loosely inspired by the man-eating exploits of the legendary Scottish clan of cannibals.

The scarier of the pair is Wes Craven’s low-budget shocker,
The Hills
Have Eyes
(1977), about a family of vacationing midwesterners whose station wagon breaks down in the California desert, where they are set upon by a clan of mutant cannibals whose members include a truly alarming character named Pluto (played by a truly alarming-looking actor, Michael Berryman). Craven’s classic was given a stylish makeover in 2006 by French goremeister Alexandre Aja.

Less intense—though still well worth seeing—is the 1972 British horror movie
Raw Meat
(also known as
Death Line).
During the 1800s (according to the film) a gang of laborers, digging a tunnel for the London subway, were trapped underground by a cave-in. Since saving them was too expensive, they were simply abandoned down there. The movie concerns their modern-day descendants, a clan of inbred cannibals who still dwell in the subterranean reaches of the London subway system, preying on unlucky commuters. In spite of its lurid title and premise, the movie—starring Donald Pleasence, with a cameo by Christopher Lee—is surprisingly restrained and even (pardon the expression) tasteful.

C
OEDS

Though cinematic psychos like the brilliant and cultured Hannibal Lecter are often portrayed as criminal masterminds, few, if any, real-life serial killers possess genius-level
IQ
s. Still, most are smart enough to know how to select vulnerable victims—what criminologists call “targets of opportunity.” Often this means preying upon
Prostitutes
.
It can also mean setting their sights on more respectable victims.