The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (2 page)

In the late 1950s, a sexual psychopath and bondage nut named Harvey Murray Glatman (see
Photographs
) was able to procure victims by posing as a professional photographer and placing ads for female models. After luring an unwary woman into his “studio,” Glatman would rape her, truss her up, take pictures of her while she screamed in terror, then strangle her. (Glatman’s case served as the real-life basis for Mary Higgins Clark’s bestselling novel
Loves Music, Loves to Dance,
which—as the title suggests—deals with the sometimes perilous world of the personals.)

In more recent times, a vicious sociopath named Harvey Louis Carignan lured young women to their deaths by advertising for employees at the Seattle gas station he managed. Carignan’s MO earned him the nickname the “Want-Ad Killer” (the title of Ann Rule’s 1983 bestselling true-crime book on the subject). At roughly the same time, an Alaskan baker named Robert Hansen—who was ultimately convicted of four savage sex killings, though he was allegedly responsible for seventeen—used the personals page of his local newspaper to attract several of his victims. Hansen, who was married with children, would send his family off on a vacation, then take out a classified, seeking women to “join me in finding what’s around the next bend.” After snaring a victim, he would fly her out to the wilderness in his private plane. Then, after raping her at knifepoint, he would strip off her clothing, give her a head start, and (in a sick, real-life duplication of Richard Connell’s famous short story “The Most Dangerous Game”) stalk her like an animal.

Even scarier was the wizened cannibal and child killer Albert
Fish
, who regularly scoured the classifieds in his endless search for victims. In 1928,
Fish came across a Situation Wanted ad placed by a young man named Edward Budd, who was looking for a summer job in the country. Masquerading as the owner of a big Long Island farm, the monstrous old man visited the Budd household, intending to lure the youth to an abandoned house and torture him to death. Fish altered his plans when he laid eyes on Edward’s little sister, a beautiful twelve-year-old girl named Grace. It was the little girl who ended up dead, dismembered, and cannibalized—and all because her brother’s innocent ad brought a monster to their door.

Albert Fish; from
52 Famous Murderers
trading cards

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

Arguably the most bizarre advertising gambit in the annals of psychopathic sex crime occurred in 2002, when a forty-one-year-old German computer technician, Armin Meiwes, posted an Internet ad that read: “Wanted: Well-Built Man for Slaughter and Consumption.” Though it is impossible to conceive of a less enticing come-on, it caught the fancy of a forty-two-year-old microchip designer named Bernd-Jürgen Brandes, who showed up at Meiwes’s door, eager to be butchered. With the victim’s enthusiastic cooperation, Meiwes cut off Brandes’s penis, cooked it, then served it up for the two of them to eat together. He then stabbed Brandes through the neck, chopped up the corpse, froze certain parts for future consumption, and buried the rest (see
Cannibalism
).

To describe Herr Meiwes as “disturbed” is clearly an understatement.
It must be acknowledged, however, that—in contrast to such wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing as Robert Hansen and Albert Fish—at least he wasn’t guilty of false advertising.

Advertising for Victims

In the 1989 film Sea
of Love,
a serial killer with a seductive line goes trolling for male victims in the classifieds. When a sucker bites, the killer reels him in, then leaves him facedown on the mattress, a bullet in the back of his skull.

As he did nine years earlier in
Cruising,
Al Pacino plays a homicide detective who goes undercover to catch the killer. By placing his own ad in the papers, he turns himself into live bait. In the process he plunges into a turbulent affair with Ellen Barkin—who may or may not be the killer.

A riveting thriller, Sea
of Love
is especially good at conveying the dangerous undercurrents that run beneath the surface of big-city singles life, where lonely people looking for a good catch sometimes end up with a barracuda.

A
LLIGATORS

When it comes to getting rid of human remains, most serial killers prefer to keep things simple, relying on such standbys as shallow graves, basement crawl spaces, river bottoms, and remote, densely wooded areas (see
Disposal
). Occasionally, however, a serial killer may resort to more exotic expedients.

Back in the 1930s, for example, a hard-drinking reprobate named Joe Ball ran a seedy roadhouse called (ironically enough) the Sociable Inn on Highway 181 outside Elmsdorf, Texas. Ball installed a cement pond and stocked it with a brood of five full-grown alligators. To keep his pets fat and happy, Ball fed them a diet of horse meat, live dogs, and human body parts—the remains of various female employees he murdered and dismembered. The exact number of his victims is unknown, since Ball went to his
death without confessing. When two sheriffs who were investigating the disappearance of a pretty young waitress named Hazel Brown showed up to question the brutish barkeep, he whipped out a pistol from the drawer beneath his cash register and fired a bullet into his heart.

(Tobe Hooper, the auteur who directed the original
Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
used Ball’s crimes as the basis for his uninspired follow-up,
Eaten Alive,
a 1977 dud about a psychopathic, scythe-wielding hotel keeper whose guests have an unfortunate tendency to end up in the reptile-infested swamp behind his establishment.)

The alligator’s first cousin—the West African crocodile—has also been exploited for this nefarious purpose. In the 1920s, Carl
Panzram
—arguably the most unregenerate murderer in the annals of American crime—journeyed to Portuguese West Africa as a merchant seaman. Making his way down the coast, he hired a canoe and the services of a half-dozen locals to help him hunt crocodiles. Panzram ended up shooting all six of the Africans in the back and feeding their corpses to the ravenous reptiles.

Carl Panzram; from
52 Famous Murderers
trading cards

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

Crocodilians haven’t been the only creatures whose indiscriminate eating habits have come in handy to homicidal maniacs. In turn-of-the-century California, a farmer named Joseph Briggen fed his prize hogs the body parts of butchered farm hands. Briggen’s porkers invariably fetched
top dollar at local auctions. When people asked for the secret of his success, he would just smile and reply, “Its all in the feeding.”

Another Canadian pig farmer, Robert Pickton—alleged to be that country’s worst serial killer—apparently relied on the same porcine method of corpse disposal. Arrested in 2002, Pickton, as of January 24, 2004, has been implicated in the murders of up to thirty-one women.

“I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform people who try to reform me, and I believe the only way to reform people is to kill ’em. My motto is: Rob’em all, rape ‘em all, and kill ‘em all.”

C
ARL
P
ANZRAM

A
NIMAL
T
ORTURE

Childhood cruelty toward small, living creatures isn’t necessarily a sign of psychopathology. Lots of little boys who enjoy pulling the wings off of flies grow up to be lawyers or dentists. The sadistic behavior of budding serial killers is something else entirely. After all, it’s one thing to chop an earthworm in two because you want to watch the separate halves squirm; it’s quite another to eviscerate your neighbor’s pet kitten because you enjoy listening to its agonized howls.

The case histories of serial killers are rife with instances of juvenile animal torture. As a boy, for example, Henry Lee
Lucas
enjoyed trapping small animals, torturing them to death, then having sex with the remains. The earliest sexual activity of the appalling Peter
Kürten
—the “Monster of Düsseldorf”—also combined sadism with bestiality. At thirteen, Kürten discovered the pleasures of stabbing sheep to death while having intercourse with them.

Instead of more conventional items, like baseball cards and comic books, little Jeffrey
Dahmer
collected roadkill. According to neighbors, he also liked to nail bullfrogs to trees and cut open live fish to see how their innards
worked. One of the favorite childhood pastimes of
Moors Murderer
Ian Brady (see
Killer Couples
) was tossing alley cats out of tenement windows and watching them splat on the pavement. Cats, in fact, are a favorite target of youthful sociopaths. Edmund
Kemper
was only ten when he buried the family cat alive, then dug up the corpse and decapitated it. And former FBI Special Agent Robert K. Ressler—the man credited with coining the term “serial killer”—mentions one sadistic murderer who was nicknamed “Doc” as a child because he liked to slit open the stomachs of cats and see how far they could run before they died.