The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (19 page)

F
OREIGNERS

America may no longer be the world’s leading manufacturer of cars, cameras, and color TVs, but we’re still way ahead of the pack when it comes to serial killers. Not only do we turn them out in far greater quantity than any other civilized nation, we’ve also produced most of the really big-name psychos of the late twentieth century:
Manson
,
Bundy
,
Gacy
, et al. Still, it would be the height of chauvinism to believe that the United States of America is the only country capable of creating homicidal sex maniacs.

From the days of
Jack the Ripper
, Great Britain has been home to lots of serial killers (see
Rippers
). In the past few decades alone, Shakespeare’s “blessed isle” has produced a number of world-class psychos, including the unspeakably heinous Fred and Rosemary West (see
Killer Couples
) and Dr. Harold Shipman, one of the most prolific serial killers in history (see
Records
). France, too, has produced its fair share—from Joseph
Vacher
to Dr. Marcel
Petiot
to Thierry Paulin (the “Monster of Montmartre,” who murdered at least twenty old ladies in the mid-1980s). Some of the most monstrous lust murderers in history, including Peter
Kürten
and Fritz
Haarmann
, were born and bred in Germany. Among Italian homicidal maniacs, special mention must be made of the “Monster of Florence,” a sexually sadistic
Lovers’ Lane
killer who preyed mostly on young couples in the 1970s and 1980s. Even Belgium, the last place on earth you’d expect to find serial killers, has turned out some scary specimens. In the 1930s, for example, a serial poisoner named Marie Becker knocked off a dozen people (Becker had a knack for picturesque descriptions. During her trial, she told the judge that one of her female victims resembled “an angel choked on sauerkraut.”) More recently, a Belgian pedophile, Marc Dutroux, was at the center of a scandal involving child abduction and serial murder.

With all of these killers in Western Europe (to say nothing of the U.S.), can serial murder be seen as a symptom of capitalist decadence? That’s certainly what Soviet officials used to claim. Their position was somewhat undermined, however, when the victims of Andrei
Chikatilo
, the “Beast of
Rostov,” began piling up. Nor did a Communist social system prevent China from producing at least one notorious sex slayer, Lu Wenxian, aka the “Guangzhou Ripper,” responsible for thirteen mutilation murders in the early 1990s. There is reason to suspect that there have been other serial killers in China, though it’s unlikely that the world will ever hear about their crimes, since that’s not the sort of news a state-controlled media tends to play up.

For such a sparsely populated country, Australia has turned out a surprising number of serial murderers, including “Granny Killer” John Wayne Glover, Edward Leonski (aka the “Singing Strangler”), and William McDonald, the “Sydney Mutilator.” South America can lay claim to having produced the terrifyingly prolific Pedro Lopez, the “Monster of the Andes,” responsible for the deaths of as many as three hundred young girls in Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru.

In South Africa, a soft-spoken ex-convict named Morris Sithole slaughtered thirty-eight young women between January and October 1995, a case that received international attention, particularly after
FBI
“mindhunter” Robert Ressler was brought in as a consultant. The Japanese take justifiable pride in the safety of their society, but during the 1940s, a former naval officer named Yoshio Kodaira confessed to the rape-murder of seven women. More recently, the country was rocked by the case of the “Kobe School Killer,” an underage psycho who placed the severed head of an eleven-year-old boy by the entrance of a junior high school, along with a taunting note stuffed in the victim’s mouth.

From Norway to New Zealand, Portugal to Pakistan, serial murder is clearly an international phenomenon. To paraphrase the song, it’s an appalling world after all.

The Iranian Spider

Here’s a philosophical conundrum: Is serial murder a crime if the perpetrator lives in a society where people condone—even applaud—his behavior? That was the issue surrounding the case of Iranian sex killer Saeed Hanaei.

For more than a year, the thirty-five-year-old construction worker trolled the streets of the holy city of Mashhad, luring sixteen prostitutes to his
home, where they were strangled with their scarves, then wrapped in their black chadors and dumped by the roadside or in open sewers. Arrested in July 2001, Hanaei—known as the “Spider” for his skill at snaring victims—displayed not a trace of remorse. On the contrary, he took positive pride in his crimes, describing himself as a holy crusader against sin and corruption. “I realized God looked favorably upon me, that he had taken notice of my work,” proclaimed Hanaei, who described himself as an “anti-streetwalker activist.”

To be sure, other “harlot killers” have felt they were doing God’s work. The “Yorkshire
Ripper
,” Peter Sutcliffe, for example, believed that he was “just cleaning the streets” by slaughtering prostitutes. And the German lust murderer, Heinrich Pommerencke was inspired to go out and butcher “sinful” women after watching the Golden Calf sequence in Cecil B. DeMille’s
The Ten Commandments.

In Western nations, however, such psychopaths tend not to receive widespread, enthusiastic support for their malevolent acts of misogyny. The case was different in Iran, where Hanaei became a folk hero to religious hardliners, who rallied to his defense, arguing that his victims were a “waste of blood” and that, in disposing of them, Hanaei was only obeying Islamic law.

Their support waned only after Hanaei revealed that he had had sex with the women before killing them. He went to the gallows in April 2002, convinced to the bitter end that his ideological allies would step in at the last minute and save him.

Hanaei’s case is the subject of Maziar Bahari’s fascinating 2002 documentary,
And Along Came a Spider,
which explores his crimes in the context of a society bitterly torn between fundamentalism and reform.

Was Jack the Ripper Really a Yank?

Forget Shakespeare, Churchill, and the Beatles. As far as crime buffs are concerned, the most significant Englishman of all time was
Jack the Ripper
.
There’s only one problem with this belief. According to a pair of writers named Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey, Saucy Jack was really an American!

In their 1995 book,
The Lodger: The Arrest and Escape of Jack the Ripper,
Evans and Gainey argue that the legendary “Whitechapel Monster” was
actually an Irish-American quack, Dr. Francis Tumberty. A bizarre personality who had once been arrested for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Tumberty was a self-confessed woman hater. He had developed a grudge against the opposite sex after discovering that his wife was moonlighting as a prostitute. Among his other eccentricities, he kept a personal collection of preserved female organs, which he liked to display to his guests during dinner parties.

While residing in London in the late 1880s, Tumberty became a prime suspect in the Ripper crimes. Arrested in mid-November 1888—just days after what turned out to be the last of the Whitechapel murders—he was held for a week before being bailed out by loyal employees. Hopping a steamer back to the States, he holed up in his Manhattan apartment, then disappeared again with Scotland Yard inspectors still hot on his trail. Not long afterward, a series of grisly prostitute murders—identical in method to the Whitechapel slayings—occurred in Jamaica and later in Managua, Nicaragua. Evans and Gainey believe that Tumberty was responsible, making him “the world’s first traveling serial killer.”