The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (13 page)

Charles Manson; from
52 Famous Murderers
trading cards

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

According to some reports, Manson and his tribe dabbled in satanism. Ever since the 1960s, America has been terrified (and titillated) by reports of rampant devil worship, involving everything from ritual animal mutilation to the use of human “breeders”—fertile young women who are impregnated for the express purpose of producing sacrificial infants. If TV tabloid shows like
Geraldo
are to be believed, our country is full of satanic cults, generally made up of diabolical suburbanites or wild-eyed teens who receive
their instructions from Lucifer by playing Black Sabbath records in reverse. Fortunately, most of these reports are nothing more than the quasi-pornographic fantasies of religious nuts or people who have watched one too many viewings of
Rosemary’s Baby.
Devil cults that perform human sacrifice are blessedly rare. But they do exist—as a young man named Mark Kilroy was unlucky enough to discover in March 1987.

Kilroy, a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Texas, was on spring vacation with some friends in Matamoros, Mexico, when he disappeared during an evening of bar hopping. His whereabouts remained a mystery until investigators were led to a remote ranch that served as the headquarters for a local drug-smuggling gang. The leader of this bloodthirsty crew was a self-styled sorcerer named Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo—aka
El Padrino
(“The Godfather”)—who preached a hodgepodge of Cuban Santeria, Haitian Voodoo, Aztec Santismo, and an obscure African-derived religion called Palo Mayombe. Whenever a big drug deal was about to go down, Constanzo’s cult would seek supernatural protection by sacrificing a human victim, whose heart and brain would be cooked in a cauldron and devoured in a cannibal feast. When the
federales
finally rounded up the gang, they found the mutilated remains of fifteen victims (including Kilroy) who had been sacrificed to the cult’s crazy-quilt religion.

Cult of Doom

Your average modern-day thug tends to be a relatively scary character, particularly when he’s armed with a 9mm handgun. Still, compared to the original Thugs—a notorious cult of killers that existed in India for at least six centuries—even a Mafia hitman seems like a wimp.

A secret society of robbers and murderers, the Thugs were devotees of the cannibal goddess Kali, in whose name they committed their innumerable crimes. The word
thug
itself is a bastardization of the Hindu word
thag,
meaning a rogue or deceiver. Deception was crucial to their murderous technique. Posing as innocent travelers, a group of Thugs would join up with a party of pilgrims or traders (their favorite targets). Then—after luring the party to a suitable spot—the Thugs would sneak up on their victims and strangle all of them at once while chanting prayers to the goddess. After
mutilating and gutting the corpses, the killers would bury the bodies and hold a ritual feast on the graves.

Generation after generation of Thugs strangled countless victims throughout India. (Children of cult members were inducted into the society and taught the prescribed method of murder on clay dummies.) Finally, beginning in 1830, the British launched a virtual war on the Thugs, wiping out the death cult by 1860.

For sheer exotic evil, the Thugs are hard to beat; it’s no surprise that two of the most colorful adventure films of all time have used these Kali-worshipping cultists as villains—George Stevens’s
Gunga Din
and Steven Spielberg’s
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Other films that deal with the Thugs include the gleefully gruesome 1959 Hammer horror film,
The Stranglers of Bombay,
and—at the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum—the artsy 1988 thriller
The Deceivers,
in which a young British officer (played by a pre-007 Pierce Brosnan) infiltrates the Kali-worshipping cult.

Jeffrey Dahmer

Jeffrey Dahmer; from
True Crime Trading Cards Series Two: Serial Killers and Mass Murderers;
art by Jon Bright

(Courtesy of Jon Bright and Valarie Jones)

Folklorists sometimes refer to “Forbidden Chamber” stories—tales about young men or women who, while exploring an ogre’s castle, open a secret door and discover a roomful of butchered bodies. In 1991, this nightmare really happened—not in a decaying castle somewhere deep in the Black Forest but in a rundown apartment house in a seedy neighborhood of Milwaukee.

On the night of July 22, a dazed and terrified young man, with a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist, flagged down an MPD squad car. A “weird dude” had just tried to kill him, he told the police. His story led the officers to apartment no. 213 of a nearby building. Inside, they discovered a virtual warehouse of human remains. The sickening inventory included a human head sitting on a refrigerator shelf, skulls stashed in a closet, body parts packed in a blue plastic barrel, decomposed hands lying in a lobster pot, an assortment of bones stored in cardboard boxes, and a freezer full of viscera—lungs, livers, intestines, kidneys. There was also a collection of sickening Polaroids, including one of a male torso eaten away by acid from the nipples down. The occupant of this charnel house, a meek, soft-spoken young man named Jeffrey Dahmer, made no effort to conceal the stomach-churning evidence of his unspeakable crimes.

Dahmer had killed seventeen men in all, most of them young African Americans he had picked up in gay bars. He drugged them, strangled them, and dismembered their bodies with an electric saw. He ultimately confessed to the most unimaginable depravities, including cannibalism and necrophiliac rape (disembowelling a corpse and having sex with the viscera was one of his particular pleasures). On several occasions, he also performed makeshift lobotomies on his still-living victims, drilling holes in their skulls and injecting their brains with muriatic acid in an effort to turn them into
Zombies
.

Dahmer’s deranged appetites went all the way back to his childhood. As a boy, he loved to collect and dissect roadkill and to butcher small creatures. Former acquaintances would recall finding cats and frogs nailed to trees in the woods behind the Dahmer home. On one occasion, some neighborhood boys came upon a dog’s head impaled on a stick.

Dahmer progressed from
Animal Torture
to homicide at the age of eighteen, when—after picking up a young male hitchhiker and bringing him home for sex—he bludgeoned the young man to death, then dismembered the body and buried the parts in the woods. Two years later, Dahmer exhumed the decomposed remains, pulverized the bones with a sledgehammer, and scattered the pieces around the woods.

The “Milwaukee Monster” was ultimately sentenced to fifteen consecutive life sentences, amounting to a total of 936 years. But his prison term—and his life—came to an abrupt end in 1994, when he was beaten to death by a fellow inmate.