The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (22 page)

For a while, he attempted to lead a respectable life, taking a job in a cigar factory, getting engaged to a young woman. But this period of relative normalcy didn’t last. Deserting his fiancée, he ran off and joined the army. When he returned to Hanover in 1903, he launched into a life of petty crime. Throughout his twenties, he was in and out of jail for offenses ranging from being a pickpocket to burglary. He spent World War I behind bars.

Released in 1918, he returned to his native city and joined a postwar smuggling ring that trafficked, among other things, in black-market beef. He also served as a police stool pigeon, a sideline that afforded him protection for his illicit activities. In 1919, however, after being caught in bed with a young boy, Haarmann was shipped back to prison.

It was after his release nine months later that Haarmann began his career of unparalleled depravity. Living in Hanover’s seamy Old Quarter, he fell under the thrall of a homosexual prostitute named Hans Grans. Together, the two set about preying on the young male refugees who were flooding into the war-ravaged city. Though Haarmann was ultimately charged with twenty-seven murders, it seems likely he was responsible for as many as fifty. The method he employed to kill his victims was always the same.

After luring the hungry boy to his room, Haarmann would feed him a meal, then overpower him (often with Grans’s assistance) and fall upon the boy’s throat, chewing through the flesh until he had nearly separated the head from the body. Generally, he would experience a sexual climax while battening on the boy.

Afterward, Haarmann and Grans would butcher the body and dispose of the flesh by peddling it as black-market beef. The victim’s clothes would also be sold, and the inedible portions of the body dumped in a canal.

Fritz Haarmann; from
Bloody Visions
trading cards

(© & ™ 1995 M. H. Price and Shel-Tone Publications. All rights reserved.)

As the number of missing boys mounted, police suspicion began to fall on Haarmann. A woman who had purchased one of his black-market “steaks” became convinced it was human flesh and turned it over to the police. In the summer of 1924, several skulls and a sackful of bones were found on the banks of the canal. Searching Haarmann’s rooms,
detectives discovered bundles of boys’ clothing. The landlady’s son was wearing a coat—given to him by Haarmann—that belonged to one of the missing boys.

In the end, Haarmann confessed. He was tried in 1924, found guilty, and sentenced to death. While awaiting execution, the “Vampire of Hanover” (as he’d been dubbed by the press) produced a written confession in which he described, with undisguised relish, the pleasure he had derived from his atrocities. At his own request, he was beheaded with a sword in the city marketplace. Afterward, his brain was removed from his skull and shipped to Goettingen University for study. Unfortunately, nothing came of this effort. Seventy years later, science is still no closer to comprehending the evil of monsters like Fritz Haarmann.

Actor Götz George turns in a chillingly persuasive performance as Haarmann in the 1995 German art film
Der Totmacher (The Deathmaker).
With a screenplay based on the actual transcripts of Haarmann’s psychiatric interviews, the movie (available on DVD) is confined entirely to a stark interrogation room where, shortly before his execution, the wild-eyed lust killer is being examined by an impassive shrink. As Haarmann leers, rants, blubbers, and boasts, a terrifying portrait of homicidal madness emerges. Don’t look for fast-paced action or hardcore gore. The movie is all talk—though of a thoroughly compelling kind. Think
My Dinner with Andre
meets
The Silence of the Lambs.

H
EAD
I
NJURIES

When faced with a phenomenon as incomprehensibly evil as serial murder, it’s natural for people to search for some kind of rational explanation. After all, if researchers could only identify the sources of serial murder, then it might be possible to come up with a cure—or at least identify potential psychos before they have a chance to hurt anybody. In their urgent efforts to solve this problem, criminologists have come up with all sorts of theories, from “negative parenting” to screwed-up hormones (see
Causes
). Some specialists put the blame on “juvenile cerebral trauma”—or, in plain English, getting whacked on the head as a kid. The brain damage done by such an injury can, according to these experts, turn people into serial killers.

It’s certainly true that a high percentage of serial killers have suffered
head injuries during their childhoods. Earle Leonard
Nelson
, for example—the notorious “Gorilla Man” who murdered almost two dozen women in the mid-1920s—was thrown off his bike by a trolley when he was ten and lay comatose for nearly a week. He finally recuperated, but his behavior (which wasn’t entirely normal to begin with) became even more bizarre from then on. The serial rapist and killer Bobby Joe Long—convicted in 1984 on nine counts of first-degree murder—must have set some kind of record for head injuries. At five he was knocked unconscious in a fall from a swing. At six he had a bike accident that sent him flying headfirst into a parked car. At seven he fell off a pony and onto his skull. From that point on, he managed to avoid any more head traumas—until he reached his early twenties, when he got into a motorcycle accident, slamming headfirst into the asphalt with such force that his helmet was crushed. These are only two of many examples. The list of head-battered psychos includes some of the most infamous names in the annals of serial murder—John Wayne
Gacy
, Richard
Speck
, Charles
Manson
, and Henry
Lucas
.

Unfortunately, the cerebral trauma theory of serial murder has the same limitations as other reductive explanations. Head injuries are an everyday fact of childhood life. Millions of kids fall off bikes and swings and seesaws and land on their heads. But only a tiny fraction turn out to be psychopathic killers. On the other hand, combined with other predisposing factors, a serious head trauma may well contribute to incipient psychopathology.

So—can serial murder be caused by something as simple as a knock on the head? Probably not.

But it sure doesn’t help.

Gary Heidnik

The average tabloid headline is the printed equivalent of a sideshow barker’s pitch—a shrill, attention-grabbing come-on that tends to promise much more than it can possibly deliver by way of lurid thrills. On rare occasions, however, even the most sensational headlines fall short of the terrible truth. Such was the case on March 26, 1987, when papers from coast to coast trumpeted front-page phrases like “Madman’s Sex Orgy” and “Torture Dungeon.” Titillating as these headlines were,
they couldn’t begin to convey the shocking reality of Gary Heidnik’s house of horrors.

Alerted by a frantic 911 call from a woman named Josefina Rivera—who claimed that she had been held captive for months in Heidnik’s cellar—the cops entered the suspect’s rundown home in North Philadelphia and found a scene that might have been dreamed up by the Marquis de Sade. In the dank and squalid basement, two naked women were shackled to pipes. Another sat quaking in a fetid pit that had been dug in the earthen floor. All three had been beaten, starved, tortured, raped.

Eventually, authorities would learn that Heidnik had abducted and imprisoned a total of six young women. Josefina Rivera had been lucky enough to escape. Two others had died. Heidnik had killed one by forcing her into the pit, filling it with water, then electrocuting her with a live wire. The other victim had perished after Heidnik left her dangling by the wrists for a week. He had dismembered her body, ground up some of her flesh in a food processor, and mixed it with dog food. Then he had forced the other captives to devour this unspeakable mush. Searching Heidnik’s house, police discovered a charred human rib in the oven and a forearm in the freezer. Not surprisingly, Heidnik turned out to be a former mental patient and convicted sex offender with a history of preying on mentally retarded black women. In spite of his flagrant psychopathology, he was something of a financial whiz, who had parlayed a modest investment into a half-million-dollar fortune. As one pundit put it, Heidnik was an expert in “stocks and bondage.” He owned several expensive cars, including a Rolls-Royce. He had managed to avoid paying taxes on his income by founding his own church and appointing himself bishop.

Aspiring to the role of Old Testament patriarch, he had begun kidnapping women in late 1986, intending to assemble a personal harem of ten women who would provide him with a whole tribe of offspring. “We’ll be just one big happy family,” Heidnik told his captives, even as he was busily shoving screwdrivers into their ears, raping each one in turn while the others were forced to watch, and making them into unwitting cannibals.

At his arraignment, Heidnik offered a novel defense, claiming that the women were already there when he moved into the house. For some reason, the judges failed to believe him. He was convicted of two counts of murder and sentenced to death. While in prison, he seemed to share the opinion of many people that his life was not worth saving. During the eleven
years he languished on death row, he made several attempts to kill himself. On July 6, 1999, prison personnel finished the job via lethal injection.