The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (16 page)

Some of the most notorious serial killers of recent years have been physicians. Though convicted of only three murders, Dr. Michael Swango—a classic psychopath who confessed to feeling turned on by the “sweet, husky, close smell of indoor homicide”—is believed to have dispatched as many as sixty victims, all of them recuperating hospital patients who suffered sudden mysterious heart seizures while under his “care.” (The story of Swango—and the American medical establishment that willfully ignored his nefarious doings—is brilliantly told in James Stewart’s 2000 bestseller,
Blind Eye.)
Even more appalling was Dr. Harold Shipman, who took more innocent lives than any other killer in the annals of British crime.

Dr. Death

No one will ever know exactly how many lives were taken by Dr. Harold Frederick Shipman during the years he treated patients in northern England. A total of 459 people died under his care, but some of those surely perished of natural causes. The most reliable estimate is that, between 1971 and 1998, the genial general practitioner committed no fewer than 250 murders, making him the most prolific serial killer in British—and possibly world—history. (See
Records
.
)

The vast majority of his victims were elderly women, who warmed to his charming bedside manner. Shipman’s MO was always the same. He would pay an unexpected afternoon house call on a fairly healthy patient, kill her with an injection of the painkiller diamorphine (medical-grade heroin, legal in the U.K.), then hurry away. Later—often summoned by a frantic call from a relative who had discovered the corpse—he would return and sign the death certificate, attributing the unexpected death to natural causes.

It was not until 1997 that someone—a woman named Debbie Brambroffe, the daughter of the local undertaker—realized that something sinister was going on. Struck by the unusually high death rate among Dr. Shipman’s elderly female patients—and by the bizarre fact that their bodies were invariably found fully dressed and seated in their favorite easy chairs or resting on the settee—Ms. Brambroffe shared her suspicions with another local physician, Dr. Susan Booth. Before long, an investigation was under way.

Though Shipman became aware that authorities had begun to examine the death certificates of his patients, he could not stop killing. He was finally caught after murdering an unusually fit octogenarian, Mrs. Kathleen Grundy, then crudely forging a will in her name that left him her entire fortune of nearly $400,000. As soon as Mrs. Grundy’s daughter set eyes on the document, she saw it was a fake and contacted the police, who already had Shipman in their sights. Before long, Mrs. Grundy’s body was exhumed and autopsied. When lethal amounts of diamorphine were discovered, Shipman was arrested.

What drove him to kill? Some psychiatrists claim that Shipman was unusually attached to his mother and deeply traumatized by witnessing her slow death from cancer when he was in his teens. According to this theory, the sight of the family physician administering morphine injections to ease her final agonies left an indelible mark on his psyche, one that drove him, in later life, to re-create that traumatic scene again and again. At Shipman’s trial in January 2000, the prosecuting attorney, Richard Henriques, offered a simpler explanation: Shipman killed for pleasure. “He was exercising the ultimate power of controlling life and death,” argued Henriques, “and repeated the act so often he must have found the drama of taking life to his taste.”

Shipman, who consistently denied his guilt, was convicted of killing fifteen patients and sentenced to life in prison. On January 13, 2004—one day before his fifty-eighth birthday—he took one final life: his own. He hanged himself with his bedsheets from the bars of his cell—an act applauded by the British tabloids, which urged other incarcerated serial killers to follow Shipman’s example.

E
SCAPE

With their diabolical cunning, serial killers are often able to elude the law for long periods of time—months, years, sometimes forever (see
Whereabouts Unknown
). There have also been a number of notorious serial killers who have been captured after massive manhunts, only to pull off successful escapes.

Back in the 1920s, when Harry Houdini was wowing audiences by miraculously extricating himself from submerged steamer trunks, buried coffins, and other apparently escape-proof receptacles, Earle Leonard
Nelson
contrived some impressive feats of his own. Sentenced to a state mental asylum, he managed to break out so often that the authorities finally gave up trying to recapture him. In 1926, Nelson embarked on his lethal career as a serial rapist and strangler, a terrifying figure who came to be known as the “Gorilla Murderer.” After committing a score of murders across the United States, he made his way up into Canada, where the police finally apprehended him. Nelson was taken to Killarney jail, stripped of his boots, and tossed into a double-locked cell. Left unguarded for fifteen minutes, he somehow managed to escape, setting off a citywide panic and the largest manhunt in Manitoba
history, which ended when he was recaptured less than twelve hours later.

Perhaps the most fear-provoking escape ever engineered by a serial killer occurred in 1967 when Albert
DeSalvo
, the “Boston Strangler,” slipped out of custody. Countless women barricaded themselves in their homes as terror gripped New England. As it turned out, however, DeSalvo’s escape was a symbolic act, not a serious attempt to break free and resume his career of crime. DeSalvo was unhappy with his lack of psychiatric treatment, and the escape was his way of protesting. When police finally caught up with him, he made no effort to resist.

Just one year earlier, a psychopathic runt named Charles Schmid, who came to be known as the “
Pied Piper
of Tucson,” was sentenced to fifty-five years in prison for the rape-murder of a fifteen-year-old girl, one of his three teenaged victims. Five years after his conviction, Schmid managed to break out of prison. Before he was recaptured a few days later, there were some very nervous people in Arizona. At his trial, Schmid had vowed to “get the people” who had testified against him.

One of the most cunning of all modern serial killers was Ted
Bundy
. In January 1977, Bundy was extradited to Colorado to stand trial for murder. Since Bundy (who had been a law student in Utah) insisted on overseeing his own defense, he was allowed access to the law library at the Pitkin County courthouse in Aspen. On the morning of June 7, 1977, after being left alone in the library for a few minutes, Bundy leapt to freedom through an open second-story window. He was back in custody a few days later, but in late December of that year, he managed to saw a hole in the ceiling of his jail cell and escape. This time, he eluded the authorities for more than a month. Before he was captured again, in mid-February 1978, he had made his way to Florida and brutally murdered three more young women.

E
VIL

The atrocities committed by some serial killers are so extreme—torturing children while tape-recording their agonized pleas for help, drilling holes in the skulls of living victims and injecting their brains with acid to turn them into “sex
Zombies
,” castrating boys and forcing them to eat their own genitals—that, in attempting to account for such behavior, some forensic
psychiatrists have thrown up their hands and resorted to an age-old explanation: pure, elemental evil.

One of these experts is Dr. Michael Stone of Columbia University, who, after studying the biographies of several hundred British and American serial killers, concluded that while some were clearly suffering from severe mental illness, many others were technically sane; their ghastly crimes were committed for sheer pleasure. According to Stone, these beings—Ted
Bundy
, John Wayne
Gacy
, and
Moors Murderer
Ian Brady, among others—cannot be diagnosed according to the usual psychiatric categories: malignant narcissism, criminal psychopathology, antisocial personality disorder, etc. “Such people make a rational choice to commit terrible crimes over and over again,” says Stone. “They are evil, and we should be able to say that formally.”

Not everyone agrees. Some of Stone’s peers believe that talking of evil smacks of medieval superstition. The well-known forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, for example, says of serial killers that “As far as we can tell, the causes of their behavior are biological, psychological, and social, and so far do not demonstrably include the work of Lucifer.”

Others, however, side with Stone in what has been called the “mad or bad” debate. These forensic specialists believe that only one concept can adequately describe creatures like Fred and Rose West, the British
Killer Couple
who raped, tortured, and murdered a string of young victims, including several of their own children.

Evil, plain and simple.

E
XCREMENT

It’s hard to say which of the many
Paraphilias
practiced by serial killers is the most disgusting, though coprophagy—i.e., deriving sexual pleasure from eating feces—clearly ranks high on the list. Needless to say, this was a favorite pastime of the monstrously perverted Albert
Fish
.
During Fish’s 1935 trial for the cannibal murder of little Gracie Budd, his attorney cited the old man’s fondness for eating human excrement as evidence of his extreme abnormality. The prosecution countered by calling a psychiatrist who insisted many “very successful people, successful artists, successful teachers, successful financiers” regularly engaged in the same activity. Such people, he
declared, were “socially perfectly all right”—a bit of testimony that left many spectators wondering who was crazier, Fish or the supposed expert witness.

E
XECUTIONS

Back in the old days—when public executions were a major form of popular entertainment—putting a serial killer to death was quite a production. When the fifteenth-century cutthroat Sawney Beane was finally brought to justice, he and all the other male members of his cannibal clan had their hands and legs chopped off. Then the women were tossed into three blazing bonfires after being forced to watch their men bleed to death. All this, of course, took place before a large crowd of eager spectators. (For more details on the bestial Beanes, see
Clans
.)