The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (18 page)

Cover of VICAP crime analysis report form

Perceiving the need for a more efficient way of tracking America’s growing population of elusive, highly mobile killers, Brooks came up with the concept of a nationwide, computerized network designed to collate and provide leads on thousands of unsolved crimes. As a result of Brooks’s efforts, VICAP finally became operational in 1985.

VICAP has had some problems: serious underfunding and the reluctance of local police to fill out the hellishly complex forms on their unsolved crimes. But the forms have been simplified, and the program received a major infusion of money from Congress in 1994. If VICAP lives up to its potential, creatures like Ted Bundy might soon go the way of other obsolete scourges, like leprosy and the black plague.

Tales of the “Psyche Squad”

Two founding members of NCAVC—Robert K. Ressler and John Douglas—have published gripping accounts of their experiences. Readers interested in learning more about the Bureau’s crack team of criminal personality profilers (aka the “Psyche Squad”) shouldn’t fail to check out
Whoever Fights Monsters
by Robert K. Ressler and Tom Schachtman (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1992) and
Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit
by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker (New York: A Lisa Drew Book/ Scribner, 1995). Also recommended: H. Paul Jeffers’s
Who Killed Precious?
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), a lively, behind-the-scenes look at the history and operations of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, and Stephen G. Michaud’s
The Evil That Men Do
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), which details the career of Roy Hazelwood, another pioneering profiler and cofounder of VICAP

F
ETISH
O
BJECTS

See
Trophies
.

Albert Fish

Albert Fish has been called “America’s boogeyman”—and for good reason. A cannibal ogre in the guise of a kindly old man, he was every parent’s worst nightmare: a fiend who lured children to destruction with the promise of a treat.

The crime that brought Fish to public attention was the 1928 kidnapping-murder of a pretty twelve-year-old girl named Grace Budd. After befriending her parents, Fish made up a diabolical lie. He said that his niece was having a birthday party and asked if Grace would like to go. Mr. and Mrs. Budd—who had no way of knowing that the grandfatherly old man was a monster—agreed.

Dressed in her Sunday finest, the trusting little girl went off with Fish, who led her to an isolated house in a northern suburb of New York City. There, he strangled her, butchered her body, and carried off several pounds of her flesh. Back in his lodgings, he turned her “meat” (as he called it) into a cannibal stew, complete with carrots, onions, and bacon strips. He spent the next nine days locked in his room, savoring this unholy meal and compulsively masturbating.

For the next six years, Fish remained at large, but throughout this time he was doggedly pursued by a New York City detective named William King, who had made the Grace Budd case his personal crusade. Even so, Fish
probably would have gotten away with the crime if it hadn’t been for his own inner demons. In 1934, he felt compelled to send Mrs. Budd one of the sickest
Letters
ever written. In the end, King was able to track down his quarry through the letterhead stationery Fish had used.

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

(Courtesy of Jon Bright and Valarie Jones)

Once Fish was in custody, authorities quickly realized that they had their hands on a killer of unimaginable depravity, one who had spent his whole lifetime inflicting pain—on himself as well as on others. Like a number of serial killers, Fish was a religious maniac, and he subjected himself to grotesque forms of torture as penance for his sins—flagellating himself with leather straps and nail-studded paddles, eating his own excrement, shoving sewing needles up into his groin. The children he mutilated and murdered were, in his demented eyes, sacrificial offerings to the Lord. Noted New York City psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham—who was called in by the defense to examine Fish—declared that the old man had practiced “every sexual perversion known,” as well as a few that no one had ever heard of (among his grotesque pleasures, Fish liked to insert rose stems into his urethra). X rays of his pelvic region taken in prison revealed that there were twenty-nine needles lodged around his bladder.

Though the jury at his 1935 trial acknowledged that he was insane, they believed he should be electrocuted anyway. After receiving the death sentence, the bizarre old man reportedly exclaimed, “What a thrill it will
be to die in the electric chair! It will be the supreme thrill—the only one I haven’t tried!”

On January 16, 1936, the sixty-five-year-old Fish went to the chair—the oldest man ever put to death in Sing Sing.

F
OLIE À
D
EUX

Would the Columbine massacre have taken place if Eric Harris had never met Dylan Klebold? Would Nathan Leopold have tried his hand at “thrill killing” without the encouragement of Richard Loeb? In both these instances, the answer is: it’s possible but highly unlikely. Cases like these—in which two individuals egg each other on to insane acts of violence that neither one, individually, would have dared to commit on his own—are examples of a phenomenon that psychiatrists call
folie à deux:
a madness shared by two people (otherwise known as “double insanity,” “reciprocal insanity,” or “insanity in pairs”).

Not all criminals caught up in a
folie à deux
are serial killers. Some, like Klebold and Harris, are mass murderers. Others, like Leopold and Loeb, perpetrate a single spectacular act of gratuitous violence.

Conversely, not all serial killers who operate in pairs are in the grip of a
folie à deux.
Henry Lee
Lucas
and the unspeakable Ottis Toole, for example, teamed up for a while, but each was already a confirmed serial killer. A true
folie à deux
involves two people who, separately, might daydream about murder but would never have the nerve to commit it. Only when they form a bond with another, equally toxic personality do they take the plunge into full-blown homicidal behavior.

Among the most notorious of these pernicious partnerships are Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, two wildly vicious sadists who raped, tortured, and murdered a string of victims in a specially designed concrete bunker in northern California during the early 1980s; Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, another deadly California duo who abducted and killed a half-dozen teenage girls in a customized van they dubbed “Murder Mack”; and the “
Hillside Stranglers
.”

A significant number of
folies à deux
involve male-female couples. In
cases like these it is usually the man who instigates the crimes and the woman who serves as his willing, even eager, accomplice. For more on this phenomenon see
Killer Couples
.