The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (25 page)

H
OUSEKEEPERS

Contrary to what some people claim, not all serial killers are men.
Women
commit serial murder, too—they just do it in a more, well,
womanly
way. Male serial killing is essentially old-fashioned phallic aggression carried to a monstrous extreme—the violent penetration of a victim’s body with a sharp, pointed implement. Female serial killers, on the other hand, are like grotesque parodies of female stereotypes:
Black Widow
brides instead of
adoring wives. Lethal
Nurses
instead of loving nurturers. And instead of happy homemakers, Housekeepers from Hell.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, an embittered German widow named Anna Zwanziger, who bore a striking resemblance to an oversized toad, hired herself out as a housekeeper and cook to a succession of middle-aged judges. Apparently, Zwanziger hoped that one of these worthies would become so dependent on her domestic skills that he would end up proposing. Of course, there was one small problem with Anna’s plan—namely, the inconvenient fact that each of the men was already married or engaged to another woman. Anna hit on an ingenious solution: she poisoned two of the women with arsenic. For good measure, she also poisoned one of the judges, several servants, and a baby (who died after eating a biscuit soaked in arsenic-spiked milk). Just before her execution in July 1811, Anna told her jailers, “It is perhaps better for the community that I should die, as it would be impossible for me to stop poisoning people.”

While Zwanziger appears to have been motivated by some lethal combination of desperation and crushed hope, other homicidal housekeepers have killed for more obscure reasons. Roughly ten years after Zwanziger’s beheading, another German cook named Gessina Gottfried poisoned an entire family named Rumf—papa, mama, and five children—by sprinkling arsenic over every meal she prepared for them. Her admitted motive was sheer malevolent pleasure—at her trial in 1828, she confessed that the sight of her victims’ death agonies threw her into a transport of ecstasy. Equally appalling was the French domestic Helene Jegado. Between 1833 and 1851, she fatally poisoned at least twenty-three and perhaps as many as thirty men, women, and children. Her victims included several nuns and her own sister.

“Wherever I go,” she was once heard to remark, “people die.”

I
MPOTENCE

Sigmund Freud argued that when normal sexual drives are warped, they tend to vent themselves as violence. The impulse to love turns into an urge to destroy. His theory is confirmed with brutal clarity in the behavior of serial killers, who commonly substitute murder for sex. This is especially evident in the cases of those psychopathic killers who suffer from sexual impotence.

John Reginald Christie, the “Monster of Rillington Place,” was so plagued by impotence that he couldn’t consummate his marriage for more than two years. Murder was his sick way of compensating for this deficiency. Gassing and strangling women served as a sexual turn-on for Christie. Once his victims were dead he had no trouble raping them (see
The Wrong Man
).

Christie’s potency problem probably wouldn’t have surprised his acquaintances. Bald, bespectacled, and a known hypochondriac, he wasn’t exactly a picture of self-confident virility. Paul John Knowles, on the other hand, cut an impressively masculine figure. Charming and ruggedly handsome, he became known in the mid-1970s as the “Casanova Killer.” At least eighteen people who crossed his path—and perhaps as many as thirty-five—ended up shot, stabbed, or strangled. In the course of his deadly
wanderings, Knowles met a British journalist named Sandy Fawkes who, like so many other young women, took an immediate fancy to him. The two ended up in bed, but Knowles was unable to perform sexually with a willing partner. When Fawkes abruptly broke off their short-lived relationship, Knowles reverted to the only kind of sex he was capable of, seeking out one of Fawkes’s close friends and attempting to rape her at gunpoint.

Some serial killers, on the other hand, suffer from the opposite problem—not impotence but a sex drive of almost demonic intensity. When Bobby Joe Long, for example, was in his twenties, even the combination of twice-daily intercourse with his wife and compulsive masturbation couldn’t slake his sexual hunger. Soon he began pursuing an additional outlet, raping at least fifty Florida women and murdering as many as ten.

I
NSANITY

When it comes to a killer who flays the skin from corpses, tans it like animal hide, and tailors it into a suit, the question of sanity would seem to be cut and dried (so to speak). And, in fact, Ed “Psycho”
Gein
—who actually did fashion garments out of human skin—was deemed officially insane and committed for life to a state mental institution.

Gein, however, represents the exception rather than the rule. Though at least one psychiatric expert has flatly declared that serial killers are “almost always insane,” persuading a jury is another matter. Statistics tell the story. Of all the multiple murderers brought to trial in the past century, fewer than 4 percent have resorted to an insanity plea. And of those, only one in three has been found NGRI (not guilty by reason of insanity).

Still, the poor odds haven’t stopped some notorious serial killers from trying. David “Son of Sam”
Berkowitz
, for example, did his best to persuade psychiatrists that his mind was controlled by his neighbor’s dog, a black Labrador retriever that was ostensibly possessed by the spirit of a six-thousand-year-old demon named Sam. The “Voices from Beyond” gambit was also employed (unsuccessfully) by the “Yorkshire
Ripper
,” who slaughtered thirteen women in the late 1970s. The “Yorkshire Ripper” turned out to be a happily married truck driver named Peter Sutcliffe, who insisted that he was simply acting on orders from God, whose voice he heard issuing from a grave in a local cemetery. Sutcliffe’s countryman John George Haigh—the
notorious “Acid Bath Murderer” of the 1940s—tried a different tack to impress jurors with his lunacy: he drank his own urine.

“As a result of our psychiatric examination, we are of the opinion that this man at the present time is not insane.”

From a 1930 Bellevue Hospital report on Albert Fish, who two years earlier had abducted, dismembered, and cannibalized a twelve-year-old girl

Other serial killers have tried their hands at the popular multiple-personality ploy. William Heirens (famous for the
Lipstick
-scrawled plea he left in a victim’s apartment, “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more”) blamed his crimes on an alternate personality named “George Murman.” Similarly, both John Wayne
Gacy
and Kenneth “
Hillside Strangler
” Bianchi claimed that their crimes were the handiwork of evil alter egos, named “Jack” and “Steve,” respectively. None of these ruses worked.

The problem for defense lawyers with serial-killer clients is that even the most horrific acts—crimes no normal person could even imagine, let alone commit—are not necessarily proof of legal insanity. A killer like Jeffrey
Dahmer
can dismember his still-living victims, eat their flesh, store their heads in his refrigerator, etc., and still be deemed sane according to the law. Though legal definitions vary, most states rely on the McNaughton rule, which says, in essence, that the criterion for sanity is the ability to distinguish right from wrong. Since most serial killers go to great pains to cover up their crimes, it’s hard to prove that they don’t know they’re engaged in wrongdoing.

The difficulty of winning an NGRI verdict is vividly illustrated by the case of Albert
Fish
, certainly one of the most bizarre minds in the annals of American crime. A frighteningly sadistic child killer and cannibal, Fish was a true psychiatric phenomenon, who indulged (according to expert testimony) “in every known sexual perversion and some perversions never heard of before.” Though the jury agreed that Fish was suffering from severe
mental derangement, they found him guilty and sentenced him to the chair. As one juror explained after the trial (expressing a sentiment that many people would endorse), “we believed he was insane, but we thought he deserved to die anyway.”

I
NTERNET

In just a few years the Internet has evolved from an online grab bag of highly dubious information to a legitimate, even indispensable, research tool (though there’s still a lot of highly dubious information floating around).

The single best Web site for serial killer biographies—as well as for highly informative articles on subjects like “Team Killers” and “Necrophilia”—is Court TV’s Crime Library (
www.crimelibrary.com
). Serial Killer Central (
www.skcentral.com
) offers up-to-the-minute news, along with a host of psycho-related material, including serial-killer art, poetry, and short stores. The Internet Crime Archives (
www.mayhem.net
) is another rich, if slightly headache-inducing, source of information, some of it relating to obscure murderers ignored by other media outlets.

Google the name of any notorious serial killer and you are sure to come up with a sizable number of hits. Psychos who tend to generate the most obsessive interest in the public often have entire Web sites built around them. One of the best of these is Tom Voigt’s
Zodiac
page (
www.zodiackiller.com
). There is also—as one would expect—a very impressive site devoted exclusively to the most legendary serial killer of all,
Jack the Ripper
(
www.casebook.org
).

If the Internet has become a very useful tool for people interested in serial killers, there’s some indication that it may also prove to be a resource for serial killers themselves. There have already been two known cases of psychos who trolled for victims in cyberspace: the German cannibal Armin Meiwes, who found a sacrificial volunteer by posting an ad on the Web, and online predator John E. Robinson, responsible for at least seven homicides.

An Eagle Scout at thirteen and an aspiring priest, Robinson dropped out of seminary prep school and embarked on a career as a con artist, forger, and embezzler. His scams took a murderous turn in 1985, when he killed a young unwed mother and sold her four-month-old baby to his own brother and sister-in-law, who believed they were receiving a legally adopted child.

In the meantime, Robinson was also running a prostitution ring specializing in sadomasochistic sex, an activity that brought him to the attention of the
FBI
and eventually landed him in jail. Released in 1993, he quickly discovered the Internet and—under the name “Slavemaster”—began participating in sexually explicit chatrooms. With his con-man wiles, it didn’t take him long to snare a series of submissive women who traveled to meet him and ended up rotting in sealed barrels.

Robinson’s increasingly reckless behavior brought him under police surveillance, and he was finally arrested in 2000 at the age of fifty-six. A search of some desolate property he owned in Kansas, as well as of a rented storage facility across the state line in Missouri, turned up five large chemical drums, each containing the decomposed corpse of a woman.

In January 2003, “the first Internet serial killer,” as he was dubbed in the press, was sentenced to death.

IQ

Though no real-life psychopath comes close to matching the evil genius of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, serial killers tend to be smart. When special agents of the
FBI
’s Behavioral Science Unit began their criminal
Profiling
program, they discovered that the mean IQ for serial killers was bright normal.

The above-average intelligence of these psychopaths is one of the scariest things about them, making it possible for them not only to snare victims with relative ease but also to elude the police, sometimes forever (see
Whereabouts Unknown
). It also accounts for the striking number of serial killers who have done well in terms of worldly success. Ted
Bundy
was a law student, John Wayne
Gacy
ran a thriving business, Gary
Heidnik
made a fortune playing the stock market, and a considerable number of serial killers have been
Doctors
.