The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (30 page)

The “Honeymoon Killers”

Martha Beck; from
Bloody Visions
trading cards

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

The loathsome love story of Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez made it to the screen in the 1970 sleeper
The Honeymoon Killers,
starring Shirley Stoler and Tony LoBianco. Writer-director Leonard Kastle does an outstanding job of capturing the creepy essence of this repugnant romance. In spite (or perhaps because) of its cheapness, this black-and-white low-budget chiller is extremely effective—just watching it makes you feel vaguely unclean.

A Couple of Crazy Kids

Portrait of Charles Starkweather by Chris Pelletiere

Charlie “Little Red” Starkweather—a nineteen-year-old garbage collector from Lincoln, Nebraska—saw himself as a romantic young rebel like his teen idol, James Dean. In reality, he was a sociopathic punk with a grudge against everyone in the world except his fourteen-year-old sweetheart, Caril Ann Fugate. On December 1, 1957, Starkweather knocked over a gas station in Lincoln, abducted the twenty-one-year-old attendant, drove him out to the countryside, and gunned him down in cold blood.

That was just a warm-up for the most notorious murder spree of the 1950s.

Seven weeks later, Charlie went to visit Caril, who hadn’t come home yet from school. Her mother—who had a justifiably low opinion of Starkweather—let him know what she thought of him. Charlie shot her and her husband to death with his trusty .22-caliber rifle. Caril arrived home just as her psycho boyfriend was choking her baby sister to death by ramming the rifle barrel down her throat. After Caril tacked a note to the front door—“Stay a Way. Every Body is Sick With the Flu”—the loathsome lovebirds settled in to watch TV, pig out on junk food, and screw.

When the food ran low and suspicious relatives began coming round, the pair made off in Charlie’s jalopy. Stopping at a local farmhouse, they shot both the seventy-year-old owner and his dog, then hitched a ride with two high school sweethearts, Robert Jensen and Carol King. After abducting them at gunpoint, Charlie killed the boy, then raped the girl and shot her. In an apparent fit of jealousy, Caril reportedly mutilated the dead girl’s genitals with a hunting knife.

Heading back to Lincoln, they invaded the home of a wealthy businessman, C. Lauer Ward, where Charlie tortured, raped, and killed Mrs. Ward and the fifty-one-year-old housemaid. After breaking the neck of the family dog, Charlie settled down to wait for Mr. Ward to return from work, blasting him as he stepped over the threshold.

Escaping in Ward’s limousine, the pair headed for Washington state. By then, a 1,200-man posse was hunting for the killer couple. Deciding to switch vehicles, they stopped outside Douglas, Wyoming, where Charlie shot a salesman named Merle Collison as he dozed in his car. Charlie was wrestling the corpse from behind the steering wheel when a passing motorist stopped and began to grapple with the little killer. Starkweather managed to leap into the limo and roar away just as the sheriffs arrived. Leading them on a high-speed chase, he surrendered after being grazed by a police bullet. The twenty-six-day murder spree, which left ten people dead, was over. Charlie was electrocuted on June 24, 1959. Caril was sentenced to life but was paroled in 1977.

Sordid as it was in reality, their story contained enough seductive ingredients—doomed young outlaw lovers on the lam—to give it romantic appeal. It has been told and retold in various forms, from Bruce Springsteen’s song “Nebraska” to Terrence Malick’s 1973 cult film,
Badlands,
to the 2004 novel
Outside Valentine
by Liza Ward (whose own grandparents were among the victims of the sociopathic young pair).

K
RAFFT
-E
BING

Anyone who thinks that serial murder is strictly a modern-day phenomenon will be quickly disabused of that notion by a glance at
Psychopathia Sexualis,
the classic nineteenth-century text on sexual deviation. Its author was
Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), a distinguished German physician who was regarded as the most important neuropsychiatrist of his day.

Krafft-Ebing’s massive compendium covers every known perversion, from foot fetishism to
Necrophilia
.
For the student of serial murder, the most interesting portions are the case histories of notorious lust murderers. Krafft-Ebing covers all the big-name sex killers of the nineteenth century, including
Jack the Ripper
and Joseph
Vacher
.
He also discusses a number of lesser-known, but seriously alarming, psychopaths, such as the English clerk “Alton” who—after dismembering a child—made the following entry in his personal diary: “Killed to-day a young girl; it was fine and hot.”

Another obscure but horrifying case recorded by Krafft-Ebing is that of “a certain Gruyo, aged forty-one, with a blameless past life, [who] strangled six women in the course of ten years. They were almost all public prostitutes and quite old. After the strangling, he tore out their intestines and kidneys through the vagina. Some of the victims he violated before killing, others, on account of the occurrence of impotence, he did not. He set about his horrible deeds with such care that he remained undetected for ten years.”

Krafft-Ebing’s pioneering work makes it shockingly clear that though serial slaughter is unquestionably on the rise, the crime itself has always been with us.

“I opened her breast and with a knife cut through the fleshy parts of the body. Then I arranged the body as a butcher does beef, and hacked it with an axe into pieces. . . I may say that while opening the body, I was so greedy that I trembled and could have cut out a piece and eaten it.”

Lust murderer Andreas Bichel, as quoted by Professor Richard von Krafft-Ebing