The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (14 page)

“I really screwed up this time.”

J
EFFREY
D
AHMER
,
to his father

D
EATH
W
ISH

It’s obvious that, in one sense,
all
serial killers have a death wish—they wish to inflict death on as many people as possible. But many of them also have a death wish in the strict Freudian sense of the term: a desire to bring about their own destruction. The long list of serial killers who have either committed or attempted suicide includes such notorious figures as Karl Denke, Georg Grossmann, Gary
Heidnik
, Joseph Kallinger, and Henry Lee
Lucas
.

Some of these psychopaths have killed themselves as a way of escaping the law. Joe Ball, the Florida hardcase who disposed of his unwanted lovers by feeding them to his pet alligators, put a bullet through his heart rather than submit to arrest (see
Alligators
). Leonard Lake—who built a torture bunker on his California ranch where he and his partner, Charles Ng, murdered an indeterminate number of victims—swallowed a cyanide capsule immediately after his arrest (see
Partners
).

By contrast, other serial killers fulfill their death wish by engineering their own capture and eventual execution. Six years after murdering and then cannibalizing a twelve-year-old girl, Albert
Fish
sent a note to her mother describing the crime. Though Fish scratched out the return address embossed on the envelope, he did such a halfhearted job that police had no trouble deciphering the address and tracking him down. The criminal
career of serial sex killer Bobby Joe Long came to an abrupt end when he simply let one of his kidnapped victims go. The young woman instantly went to the police and provided them with a detailed description of her abductor, his apartment, and his car. That some serial killers desperately want to be captured was made clear by the famous lipstick-scrawled plea that sex killer William Heirens left on a bedroom wall—“For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”

It’s not very surprising that serial killers are often suicidal. Brought up by dreadfully abusive parents who fill them with the sense that all human beings—beginning with themselves—are just so much worthless garbage, serial killers are consumed with despair and self-loathing. After his conviction for first-degree murder, Harvey Murray Glatman—a sadistic creep who shot photos of his bound-and-gagged victims before strangling them to death—suggested that execution would be the most appropriate punishment. When the judge obliged by sentencing him to the gas chamber, Glatman remarked, “It’s better this way. I knew this is the way it would be.” Other serial killers—like Mormon-missionary-turned-child-killer Arthur Gary Bishop—have expedited their own deaths by refusing to appeal their death sentences. For killers like these, life becomes a growing nightmare. Eventually they yearn for escape.

It is possible that the most famous of all serial killers,
Jack the Ripper
, fell into this category. Though his identity remains a mystery, the fact that his crimes ceased abruptly after his fifth and final atrocity suggests that—overwhelmed by revulsion at the growing horror of his deeds—the “Whitechapel Monster” took his own life.

Indeed, some serial killers seem to look forward to their impending deaths with positive excitement. Michael Ross, who raped and murdered eight teenage girls in the 1980s, put a stop to any further appeals to his death sentence in 1992 and finally had his death wish come true when prison guards strapped him to a lethal-injection gurney in May 2005. According to one observer, when Ross learned that the execution was finally going to happen, he “became upbeat and started joking around.”

Weird as that may seem, it’s nothing compared to the way Peter
Kürten
—the “Monster of Düsseldorf”—anticipated his own, much harsher execution. His mood, according to certain accounts, can only be described as positively giddy. Aroused since childhood by the sight and sound of
spurting blood, Kürten claimed he would die a happy man if he could hear the blood gushing from his own neck stump at the moment of beheading.

D
EFINITION

Like certain other terms—
obscenity,
for example—
serial killing
is surprisingly tricky to define. Part of the problem is that police definitions tend to differ from popular conceptions. According to some experts, a serial killer is any murderer who commits more than one random slaying with a break between the crimes. There is certainly some validity to this viewpoint. If (for example) Ted
Bundy
had been caught after committing only a couple of atrocities, he wouldn’t have gained worldwide notoriety—but he still would have been what he was: a demented personality capable of the most depraved acts of violence. Still, it’s hard to think of someone as a serial killer unless he’s killed a whole string of victims.

How many victims constitute a “string”? Again, it’s hard to be precise. The most infamous serial killers—Bundy,
Gacy
,
Dahmer
, etc.—are the ones responsible for double-digit murders. Most experts seem to agree, however, that to qualify as a serial killer, an individual has to slay a minimum of three unrelated victims.

The notion of a string implies something else besides sheer number. A serial killer must perpetrate a number of random killings with an emotional “cooling-off” period between each crime. This hiatus—which can last anywhere from hours to years—is what distinguishes the serial killer from the
Mass Murderer
, the homicidal nut who erupts in an explosion of insane violence, killing a whole group of people all at once. Thus, the official
FBI
definition of serial homicide is “three or more separate events with an emotional cooling-off period between homicides, each murder taking place at a different location.”

There are several problems with this definition, however. For one thing, not all serial killers commit their murders in different locations. The nearly three dozen victims of John Wayne Gacy, for example, all met their horrible deaths in the basement of his suburban ranch house. And there are murderers who commit three or more separate homicides over extended periods of time who aren’t serial killers: mob hitmen, for example.

What distinguishes a professional hitman from a serial murderer, however, is that one kills for money—it’s his job—while the other kills purely for depraved pleasure. A hitman may enjoy his work, but murder isn’t his primary source of sexual gratification. The situation is different with psychos like Gacy, who reach the heights of ecstasy while perpetrating their atrocities. According to many experts, in other words, true serial homicide always involves an element of unspeakable sexual
Sadism
.

Taking these issues into account, the National Institute of Justice offers a definition we find more useful than the FBI’s: “A series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually but not always committed by one offender acting alone. The crimes may occur over a period of time ranging from hours to years. Quite often the motive is psychological, and the offender’s behavior and the physical evidence observed at the crime scenes will reflect sadistic, sexual overtones.”

(For more on the element of sexual sadism in serial murder, see
Women
.
)

Coining a Phrase

In earlier times, psychopathic killers who butchered a succession of random victims were generally described in supernatural terms—demons, fiends, monsters. In the late 1800s, one ingenious journalist, searching for a way to describe the infamous Dr. H. H.
Holmes
, invented the term “multi-murderer”—a snappily alliterative coinage that never caught on. Other common terms used to describe these creatures include “lust-murderers,” “recreational killers,” “homicidal maniacs,” and “stranger-killers.” During most of the mid-twentieth century, all criminals who slaughtered a number of victims were lumped together as “mass murderers.”

By the late 1960s, however, it became clear that a distinction had to be drawn between the kind of killer who blows away a whole bunch of people at once and the compulsive killer who commits a string of atrocities over an extended period of time. Ultimately, the term “mass murderer” was reserved for the former—the rampage killer who “goes postal”—while the term “serial killer” was applied to the kind of predatory sex slayer exemplified by
Bundy
,
Gacy
, et al.

Credit for the phrase “serial killer” has generally been given to (and claimed by) former Special Agent Robert K. Ressler, one of the pioneers of
the
FBI
’s Behavioral Science Unit. According to Ressler’s account (published in his 1992 book,
Whoever Fights Monsters
), he was lecturing at the British Police Academy when one of the participants referred to “crimes in series.” Impressed with the phrase, Ressler began using a variation—“serial killers”—in his classes at Quantico.

In point of fact, however, the phrase “serial murderer” can be traced at least as far back as 1961, when it was used by the German film critic Siegfried Kracauer to describe the psychopathic child killer played by Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s classic thriller,
M.
Five years later, British crime writer John Brophy used the same phrase repeatedly in his 1966 book,
The Meaning of Murder.

It’s possible that, while in England, Ressler picked up the phrase (perhaps subliminally) from Brophy or someone familiar with Brophy’s book. Still, Ressler deserves credit for altering the term from “serial murderer” to the slightly more snappy “serial killer.” And it was certainly Ressler and his colleagues at Quantico who popularized the term, which quickly became a part of everyday American speech.