The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (29 page)

In retrospect, this homicidal outburst wasn’t really very surprising. From his earliest years, Kemper had been what his mother euphemistically described as a “real weirdo.” One of his favorite childhood games was to pretend that he was being asphyxiated in the gas chamber. He also enjoyed decapitating his sisters’ dolls.

By the time he was ten, he had graduated to
Animal Torture
, chopping up a cat with a machete and stashing the dismembered parts in his closet. He buried another cat alive, then—after exhuming the corpse—cut off its head, which he proudly displayed in his bedroom.

Deemed mentally unsound after the double murder of his grandparents, Kemper was committed to a maximum-security mental hospital in 1963.

Just six years later, he was released. Physically, he had undergone a striking change, having grown into a hulking, six-foot-nine, three-hundred-pounder. Psychologically, however, he was the same as ever—a sadistic psychopath obsessed with necrophiliac fantasies.

Two years after his discharge from the mental hospital, Kemper picked up a pair of hitchhiking coeds, drove them to an isolated spot, and stabbed them to death. After smuggling their bodies back home, he amused himself for several hours with his “trophies”—photographing them, dissecting them, having sex with their viscera. Eventually, he bagged and buried the body parts and tossed the heads into a ravine.

Four months later, he abducted another teenage hitchhiker, strangled her, raped her corpse, then took it home for more fun and games. The same pattern would repeat itself with three more female victims, all of them hitchhiking students. Though Kemper clearly enjoyed the killing, it was the postmortem perversions that gave him the most satisfaction. He decapitated all of the women and enjoyed having sex with their headless bodies. He also liked to dissect the corpses and save various “keepsakes.” On at least two occasions, he cannibalized his victims, slicing the flesh from their legs and cooking it in a macaroni casserole.

By January 1973, Santa Cruz authorities were aware that a serial murderer—dubbed the “Coed Killer”—was on the loose, though they never suspected Kemper, who, in fact, had befriended a number of local police officers. Several months later, on Easter weekend, Kemper committed matricide, hammering in the skull of his sleeping mother, then cutting off her head. After raping the decapitated body, he ripped out her larynx and jammed it down the garbage disposal. (“That seemed appropriate,” he would later tell the police, “as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.”) Afterward, he telephoned his mother’s best friend and invited her over for dinner. When she arrived, he crushed her skull with a brick and subjected her corpse to the usual postmortem outrages.

On Easter Sunday, Kemper got in a car and headed east. When he reached Colorado, he telephoned his pals on the Santa Cruz police force and confessed. Convicted of eight counts of murder, he was asked what he thought a fitting punishment would be. “Death by torture,” was his reasonable reply. Instead, he was sentenced to life in prison.

Q. “What do you think when you see a pretty girl walking down the street?”

A.
“One side of me says, ‘I’d like to talk to her, date her.’ The other side of me says, ‘I wonder how her head would look on a stick?’ “

E
DMUND
K
EMPER
,
during a magazine interview

K
IDNEY

This vital organ has a special significance for crime buffs, since it figures prominently in the case of the most famous serial killer of all time.

On the evening of September 30, 1888, the anonymous madman who would become known as
Jack the Ripper
committed two atrocities in quick succession. First, he slit the throat of a Swedish prostitute named Elizabeth Stride. Then—after being interrupted by an approaching wagon—he accosted a forty-three-year-old prostitute named Catherine Eddowes and lured her into a deserted square, where he slashed her windpipe and savaged her body, removing her left kidney.

Two weeks later—on October 16—a parcel arrived at the home of George Lusk, head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, a group of local tradesmen who had organized to assist in the search for the killer. The parcel contained a ghastly surprise—a chunk of kidney (with an inch of renal artery still attached), accompanied by an equally appalling letter addressed to Lusk: “Sir I send you half the kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif I took it out if you only wate a whil longer.” It was signed “Catch me when you can Mister Lusk.”

The sender’s address on the upper-right-hand corner of the letter said simply: “From Hell.”

In the weeks since the Ripper first struck, the police had been inundated with letters from cranks claiming to be the killer, and at first, there were
many who declared that this latest communication was nothing but a depraved hoax. The kidney, they proclaimed, had either been taken from a dog or removed from a dissecting room. Examination by a specialist from the London Hospital Museum, however, revealed not only that the kidney was human but that it had come from a middle-aged alcoholic woman who suffered (as did Catherine Eddowes) from Bright’s disease. Moreover, the inch of renal artery still attached to the preserved piece of kidney precisely matched the severed arterial remains in Eddowes’s eviscerated body.

There seemed little doubt that the ghastly human artifact sent to George Lusk was the real thing—or that the note that accompanied it was an authentic communication from the Whitechapel Butcher. To this day, the “From Hell” letter is regarded as the only apparently genuine message ever sent by the legendary killer.

K
ILLER
C
OUPLES

Can a woman live with a man for many years without knowing he is a homicidal sex maniac? Apparently so. Some of the most infamous serial killers in history—among them Albert “Boston Strangler”
DeSalvo
, Peter
Kürten
, and Andrei
Chikatilo
—were married to women who had no inkling of their husbands’ sinister secret lives. It’s possible to feel sorry for such women, who eventually discover, to their uttermost dismay, that they’ve been mated to monsters.

There is, however, another type of woman who—far from inspiring sympathy—elicits only loathing and disbelief. This is the wife or lover of a serial killer who is not only aware of the horrors her man commits but also actively participates in them.

Perhaps the most infamous of this breed is Myra Hindley. A shy, twenty-three-year-old typist from Manchester, England, Hindley led an unremarkable life until she hooked up with Ian Brady, a psychopathic creep with a taste for sadomasochistic porn and Nazi paraphernalia. Before long, Hindley was dressing up in S.S. regalia and posing for Brady’s obscene photos—a kinky but relatively harmless pastime compared to the horrors that followed. Beginning in July 1963, the perverted pair murdered a series of children, then buried the corpses in the desolate moors outside Manchester. In the case of one of their victims—a pretty ten-year-old girl named Leslie
Ann Downey—the couple forced the child to pose for pornographic pictures, then tape-recorded her tormented pleas before killing her. When the tape was played at the 1966 trial of the
Moors Murderers
, spectators and jurors alike wept uncontrollably.

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley; from
Bloody Visions
trading cards

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

Like Brady and Hindley, some deadly duos are unmarried lovers who enjoy serial murder the way other couples savor candle-lit dinners and romantic weekends at a country inn. The “Lonely Hearts Killers,” Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, committed an indeterminate number of homicides in the late 1940s (they confessed to three but were suspected of twenty), including the murder of a two-year-old girl. Right to the bitter end, Beck persisted in seeing their vile affair as a storybook romance, vowing undying love for her sleazeball companion even as she was being led to the chair.

Carol Bundy took romantic devotion to even more hideous lengths. In the early 1980s, Bundy was the live-in lover of Douglas Clark, a psychopathic killer of prostitutes and necrophiliac dubbed the “Sunset Strip Slayer.” Among his various pleasures, Clark liked to lure young women into his car, shoot them in the temple while they were fellating him, then carry
their decapitated heads home for further fun and games. On at least one occasion, Bundy helped out by playing beautician—applying lipstick and makeup to one of the heads and giving it a pretty hairdo. As soon as she was done, her boyfriend took the head into the bathroom and used it for oral sex. “We had a lot of fun with her,” Bundy later confessed. “I made her up like a Barbie.”

In the early 1990s, Barbie was invoked again in the case of a killer couple. Only this time, the doll’s name was connected not to a victim but to one of the perpetrators.

Known as the “Ken and Barbie” killers because of their golden good looks, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were a Canadian husband-wife team, perfectly matched in their mutual depravity. Their first victim was Homolka’s own fifteen-year-old sister, Tammy. In December 1990, after a Christmas Eve dinner in the Homolka home, Paul plied the teenager with tranquilizer-laced drinks. Once she was out cold, he videotaped Karla as she performed oral sex on her little sister. Bernardo then raped the young girl while Karla held a drug-soaked cloth over Tammy’s mouth to keep her unconscious. Unfortunately, the drug—an animal sedative called halothane stolen from the veterinary clinic where Karla worked—caused the girl to throw up and choke to death on her own vomit.

In the following two years, the monstrously depraved pair kidnapped and videotaped the rape, sexual torture, and murder of two more Ontario teenagers: fifteen-year-old Kirsten French and fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahaffy, who was strangled by Bernardo with an electrical cord while she clutched a teddy bear Homolka had given her for comfort.

Eventually, the pair was arrested. Bernardo was sent to prison for life. In exchange for her full cooperation, Homolka received a lenient sentence. To the outrage of many of her countrymen, she was released in July 2005, after serving twelve years for her role in the atrocities.

There are other cases of husbands and wives who share a taste for serial murder—couples who add spice to their marriage by indulging in unspeakable crime. Between 1978 and 1980, Charlene Gallego helped procure teenage victims for her sadistic husband, Gerald, by luring them into his car with the promise of marijuana. She would then sit in the front seat and watch while he raped, sodomized, and beat them to death with a hammer. In 1992, the British couple Fred and Rosemary West were charged with the
grisly torture-murder of ten young women—including their own seventeen-year-old daughter.

The monstrous Mrs. West, however, is no longer part of a killer couple. She became a widow on New Year’s Day when her abominable mate hanged himself in his jail cell.