The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (12 page)

The winsome young females who abound on college campuses are a good example. Not only are these coeds alluring; they are often easy to manipulate. They’re generally naïve about the darker dimensions of human nature; they are usually unsupervised for the first time in their lives; and they are sometimes tempted by new experiences that carry a whiff of the forbidden. In short, they make easy pickings for a certain breed of predatory killer.

By far the most infamous American coed killer was the silver-tongued Ted
Bundy
.
While attending the University of Washington in 1974, he used his wholesome good looks and superficial charm to lure female students away from secure public places and lead them to isolated spots where he would unleash his inner Mr. Hyde. Toward the end of his appalling career,
Bundy dispensed with seduction. Breaking into a couple of sororities in Tallahassee, Florida, he set upon several of the sleeping residents and savaged their bodies in a frenzy of blood lust.

Predating Bundy by a few years was another notorious coed killer, John Norman Collins. Like Bundy, Collins cut a clean-cut all-American figure. His college English teacher, however, glimpsed another side of the seemingly normal young man when Collins handed in a paper on the right to commit murder. “If a person holds a gun on somebody—it’s up to him to decide whether to take the other’s life or not,” Collins had written. “The point is: It’s not society’s judgment that’s important, but the individual’s own choice of will and intellect.” Between 1967 and 1969, Collins—the star athlete and education major—put this theory into practice by raping, shooting, stabbing, strangling, and bludgeoning as many as nine young women.

Collins became known in the press as the “Coed Killer.” But he wasn’t the only murderer to earn that moniker. The same nickname was applied to one of the most appalling psychopaths of the era, Edmund
Kemper
III. At six-foot-nine and close to 300 pounds, Kemper didn’t fit the Golden Boy mold of Bundy and Collins. Nor did he possess the slightest social skills when it came to the opposite sex. Rather than smooth-talking nubile young women into dropping their guard, he preferred simply to find them along the side of the road at a time when coeds were trusting enough to regard hitchhiking as a reasonable way to travel. Once he had them in the car, he would either shoot or stab his victims. Afterward, he would bring the corpses home and perform unspeakable atrocities on their bodies.

In effect, as Kemper calmly confessed to police, these abominations were his equivalent of taking an attractive young coed out on a date.

“Alive, they were distant, not sharing with me. I was trying to establish a relationship [with them].”

E
DMUND
K
EMPER
,
on his motive for butchering, dismembering, performing necrophiliac sex on, and cannibalizing his coed victims

C
OOLING-OFF
P
ERIOD

See
Definition
.

C
OPYCATS

There’s nothing new about “copycat” killers—desperately disturbed individuals who feel impelled to imitate sensational, highly publicized crimes. Back in the late 1890s, for example, a San Francisco woman named Cordelia Botkin, after being dumped by her married lover, mailed a box of poisoned chocolates to the man’s unwitting wife. The Botkin case, which received frenzied nationwide news coverage, inspired so many similar crimes that the country soon found itself in the midst of what the press (somewhat hysterically) called a “poison epidemic.”

The situation tends to be different, however, when it comes to serial murder. True, the 1995 movie
Copycat
depicted a homicidal maniac who mimics the MO of such notorious psychos as David “Son of Sam”
Berkowitz
, the “
Hillside Stranglers
,” Ted
Bundy
, and Jeffrey
Dahmer
.
But that is pure Hollywood fantasy. In real life, even the most infamous homicidal maniacs—the ones who receive the kind of saturation news coverage that turns them into media celebrities—rarely inspire imitators. Dahmer, for example, was page-one news from coast to coast and a
People
magazine cover boy. But no one has ever attempted to duplicate his atrocities. The reason is simple. The horrors perpetrated by such beings are the product of the deepest psychosexual compulsions. No one is going to disembowel, cannibalize, and perform necrophiliac sex on a bunch of teenage boys just because he read about it in the papers and it sounded like a cool thing to do.

There
have
been some acknowledged serial-killer copycats. Peter
Kürten
, the “Monster of Düsseldorf,” was fascinated by
Jack the Ripper
and spent hours poring over accounts of Saucy Jack’s atrocities. Kürten’s monstrous compatriot, Fritz
Haarmann
, was an inspiration for the equally deranged Albert
Fish
, who collected all the newspaper clippings he could find about the “Vampire of Hanover.”

A more recent example is Heriberto Seda. A deeply maladjusted young gun nut, Seda became obsessed with the infamous West Coast shooter known as
Zodiac
.
Adopting the same nickname, he committed a string of
murders in Brooklyn and Manhattan in the early 1990s, while sending bizarre communications to the press, complete with cryptic astrological messages. Unlike his psychopathic role model, however, Seda was finally captured in 1998 and sentenced to eighty-plus years behind bars.

While there have been relatively few serial-killer copycats in the strict sense of the term—people who try to replicate specific horrors they’ve read about in the news—there are a larger number who fall into a related category: psychopaths possessed of the sick ambition to win notoriety as serial murderers. For more on this phenomenon, see
Wannabes
.

C
OURTROOM
T
HEATRICS

Given their bizarre psychological makeup, it’s no wonder that when serial killers are brought to trial, they sometimes create outrageous scenes. After spending their lives in the shadows, like bugs under a rock, they suddenly find themselves thrust onto center stage, with an audience that (in the media age) can number in the millions. With the whole world watching, some of these psychos proceed to put on quite a show.

During his 1924 trial, Fritz
Haarmann
—the infamous “Vampire of Hanover,” who murdered at least twenty-eight young boys by chewing through their throats—carried on like a talk-show host. Puffing on a fat cigar, he heckled the witnesses and made frequent quips about his appalling crimes.

Haarmann’s countryman, the German sex murderer Rudolph Pleil, used his trial as a platform for establishing his lethal preeminence. Pleil was charged with the rape-murder of nine women. Possessed of a perverse vanity, Pleil was indignant at these accusations, insisting that he was actually responsible for twenty-eight homicides. At his trial, he demanded that the official transcript refer to him as
“der beste Totmacher”
—“the best death-maker.”

At roughly the same time in America, the “Lonely Hearts Killers,” Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, were on trial for a trio of killings, including the murder of a two-year-old child (see
Killer Couples
). At one point, the mountainous Beck—determined to demonstrate her undying love—detoured on her way to the witness stand to hurl herself into the arms of her
skinny Latin lover (a scene not unlike the one in Walt Disney’s
Fantasia
when the hippo ballerina dives into the arms of her reptilian dance partner).

Few trials, however, have been as outrageous as that of Charles
Manson
and his “family” of drug-crazed hippie assassins. Manson began the proceedings by marching into the courtroom with a big
X
carved into his forehead. “I have X-ed myself out of your world,” was his lucid explanation for this bizarre self-mutilation. At the height of the trial’s madness, Manson lunged at the judge and tried to assault him.

Since the psychology of serial killers is such an unholy blend of derangement and cunning, it’s hard to know when their weird courtroom behavior is genuine and when they are just putting on an act. The latter may well have been the case in the trial of Andrei
Chikatilo
, the Russian “Mad Beast” who murdered, raped, and cannibalized more than fifty young women and children. Chained inside an iron-barred cage—which was installed in the courtroom to protect him from the vengeful relatives of his victims—Chikatilo spent his time swaying autistically, spewing obscenities, baying at the judge, and shouting out insane remarks (at one point, he began yelling about his one-man battle against the Assyrian Mafia; at another, he claimed he was pregnant and lactating). If Chikatilo’s behavior was a calculated act, designed to persuade observers of his legal insanity, it did not meet with success. He received the ultimate pan for his performance—a bullet to the back of the skull from a Russian executioner.

CSI

Since its premiere in the fall of 2000, the CBS TV series
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
has become a bona fide cultural phenomenon. It has not only spawned two hit spin-offs—
CSI: Miami
and
CSI: New York
—but has also produced powerful reverberations in the real world of academics and law. Enrollment in Baylor University’s forensic science program, for example, has increased tenfold since the show went on the air. Dozens of other colleges have created forensic science majors to meet the growing demands of young CSI-wannabes.

The impact of the show has also become evident in the courtroom—so much so that prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges now speak of the
“CSI
effect.” Jurors who used to fall asleep when lawyers began talking about scientific evidence now look forward to the testimony of DNA technicians and other forensic specialists. While some legal experts applaud the program for creating a more scientifically informed jury pool, others criticize it for raising unrealistic expectations. After all, not every crime can be proved with hard scientific evidence. And in the real world, even DNA findings can be unreliable, particularly since—unlike Gil Grissom and his glamorous crew—actual human technicians have been known to make errors.

Grissom, the lead character in the original entry in the
CSI
franchise, is played by William Petersen. This seems particularly apt, since Petersen started his film career matching wits with Hannibal Lecter in Michael Mann’s 1986
Manhunter,
the first cinematic version of Thomas Harris’s
Red Dragon.
In
CSI,
too, Petersen comes up against an assortment of highly creative serial killers: a sex murderer known as the “Blue Paint Killer,” whose coed victims are all found with paint stains on their hands; a sadist called the “Strip Strangler,” who deliberately plants misleading evidence; a madman who compulsively re-creates his father’s murder (which he witnessed as a boy) by shooting victims in the bathtub; a maniac who snares married couples looking for sexual kicks, then kills the husband after forcing him to slit the wife’s throat; and others.

Of course, for all its veneer of scientific hypersophistication,
CSI
is, at heart, a very traditional show. Strip away Gil Grissom’s state-of-the-art gadgetry—the gas spectrometers and fiber-optic fluorometers, the electromagnetic dusting kits and ultraviolet flashlights—and you’re left with a Las Vegas version of Sherlock Holmes: a solitary eccentric, his head stuffed with esoteric information, who solves crimes through close observation and a remarkable ability to draw clever deductions from the smallest scraps of physical evidence. In the end, the real message of the show seems to be that while technology is providing police with ever more useful tools, what ultimately counts when it comes to tracking down serial killers and other criminals is good old-fashioned detective work.

C
ULTS

In essence, a cult is a surrogate family, headed by a strong, charismatic leader who functions as a father substitute. Cult members are required to behave
like obedient children and do whatever Daddy says—whether that involves committing mass suicide by swallowing poison-spiked Kool-Aid or committing serial murder.

Undoubtedly the most notorious crimes of the Aquarian Age were the Tate-LaBianca murders, carried out by Charles
Manson
’s renegade “family” of psycho-hippies. The crimes became a worldwide sensation, partly because of their appalling savagery—seven people butchered over two nights, including the pregnant actress Sharon Tate. But equally unsettling were the killers themselves. Beginning as more or less typical “flower children”—part of the mass migration of drugged-out adolescents who drifted to California during the Summer of Love—they had been transformed into the pawns of a malevolent spellbinder willing to commit random slaughter at his whim.