The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (34 page)

BOOK: The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers

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Lucas was picked up on a weapons charge in 1983. A few days later, after apparently being stricken by an uncharacteristic attack of bad conscience, he summoned his jailer. “I done some pretty bad things,” he muttered. With that, he began spilling his guts, admitting to a staggering number of murders. Some of these have been confirmed, others have proven false, many remain open cases. According to certain investigators, Lucas may have killed as many as sixty-nine victims; others put the number at eighty-one or possibly even higher. At his 1985 trial, he was convicted of ten homicides—more than enough to get him the death sentence.

In the end, Lucas’s life would be spared. The state of Texas’s leniency came from the most unlikely source. Then-governor George W. Bush, who allowed one hundred fifty-two people to be executed during his term, used his power to commute a death sentence only once—and that was for Lucas in 1998. He based his decision on the findings of the State Board of Pardons and Parole, which indicated Lucas might have been in Florida at the time one of his supposed victims—a female hitchhiker whose corpse was clad in nothing but a pair of orange socks—was killed. But Lucas’s unexpected reprieve did not extend his life for very long. In 2001, three years after eluding a lethal injection, he died in prison of a heart attack.

Lucas’s nine other murder convictions were never challenged. His prosecutor did not go along with the more extravagant estimates of Lucas’s body
count, but still maintained that he had killed anywhere between three and a dozen people. Whatever the actual total, the horrific nature of Lucas’s life and crimes was summed up in one of his own statements: “Killing someone is just like walking outdoors. If I wanted a victim, I’d just go and get one.”

Viewers interested in subjecting themselves to a singularly disturbing cinematic experience should rush right out and rent
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,
John McNaughton’s brilliant (if harrowing) fictionalization of the Lucas-Toole story.

“Sex is one of my downfalls. I get sex any way I can get it. If I have to force somebody to do it, I do. . . . I rape them; I’ve done that, I’ve killed animals to have sex with them, and I’ve had sex while they’re alive.”

H
ENRY
L
EE
L
UCAS

L
USTMORD

For unexplained reasons, possibly having to do with their national character, Germans have a knack for coining colorful, descriptive words for nasty human behavior. The same folks who came up with the term
schadenfreude
(meaning “to take pleasure in another person’s misfortune”) also invented the word
lustmord:
to kill for joy, for the sheer, sexy fun of it.

Lustmord,
in short, is really another, catchier name for sexual homicide. The classic lust murderer doesn’t just kill his victims (usually women). He derives intense erotic pleasure from maiming and mutilating their bodies—gutting or beheading them, cutting out their vulvas, slicing off their breasts. “The presumption of a murder out of lust is always given when injuries of the genitals are found,” writes Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his classic study,
Psychopathia Sexualis,
“and still more, when the body has been opened or parts (intestines, genitals) torn out.”

Not only did the Germans invent the term
lustmord,
they pioneered its
actual practice—at least according to one crime expert, Colin Wilson, who maintains that the earliest documented lust murderer in history was a sixteenth-century German named Nicklaus Stüller. Among his other atrocities, Stüller killed and cut open the bellies of three pregnant women, one of whom was carrying twins.

In our own century, Germany has continued its tradition of producing some of the worlds most appalling lust murderers. During the years between the two world wars, no fewer than four of these monsters were at large in Germany: Fritz
Haarmann
, the “Vampire of Hanover,” responsible for the slaughter of as many as fifty young men; Georg Grossmann, the “Berlin Butcher,” charged with murdering and cannibalizing fourteen young women; Karl Denke, the “Mass Murderer of Münsterberg,” another cannibal who butchered at least thirty people and stored their pickled flesh in the basement of his inn; and Peter
Kürten
, the “Monster of Düsseldorf,” who murdered, raped, and mutilated a minimum of thirty-five victims, mostly women and children.

For a scholarly discussion of lust murder as a major theme in German art and literature during the years between the wars, readers are referred to Maria Tartar’s book,
Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

L
YCANTHROPY

Serial murder has always existed, but the terminology used to describe this most heinous of crimes has changed over the centuries. Four hundred years ago, killers roamed the European countryside, slaughtering their victims with a bestial ferocity. But back then, they weren’t known as “sociopaths” or “homicidal maniacs” or “lust murderers.” They were known as “lycanthropes,” a term that derives from two Greek words—
lykos
(meaning “wolf”) and
anthropos
(meaning “man”). In short, these maniacs were thought to be literal wolfmen or werewolves.

Some of these psychos were so deranged that they themselves might have actually believed they were supernatural monsters. The peasants they preyed on certainly did. So did the authorities, who openly believed in lycanthropy and regarded it as one of the most pressing social problems of the day.

In old-time movies like the 1941 classic
The Wolf Man,
lycanthropy is depicted as a terrible curse. Lon Chaney Jr. doesn’t enjoy turning into a werewolf, but whenever the moon is full, he begins to sprout hair, claws, and fangs whether he likes it or not. Sixteenth-century people had a different view of things. Werewolves were regarded as malevolent men who had deliberately entered into a bargain with the devil. They
wanted
to turn into monsters.

In the late 1500s, a French hermit named Gilles Garnier was rumored to have cut just such a demonic deal. In exchange, he received a black-magic ointment that allowed him to turn into a ravenous, man-eating wolf. At roughly the same time, a German named Peter Stübbe supposedly peddled his soul for an enchanted belt that endowed him with lycanthropic powers.

The methods of transformation might have differed, but the killings committed by these two maniacs were remarkably similar and equally stomach churning—far more gruesome than the make-believe horrors in any wolfman movie. Both Garnier and Stübbe were lust murderers and cannibals who preyed primarily on children. In two months, Gamier attacked and tore apart four little victims, using his bare hands and teeth. During a much longer period, Stübbe ravaged at least fifteen victims—including his own son. After ripping out the boy’s throat, Stübbe allegedly cracked open his skull and devoured his brains.

Modern-day psychiatry has given us concepts like “antisocial personality disorder” to replace the medieval notion of lycanthropy. Even in the twentieth century, however, a killer occasionally came along whose crimes were so appalling that they seemed like the work of a supernatural monster. Back in the late 1920s, for example, the cannibal-killer Albert
Fish
lured a twelve-year-old girl to an abandoned house known as Wisteria Cottage, then killed her, cut her to pieces, and removed several pounds of her flesh, which he turned into a stew. When this crime was discovered, tabloid writers wracked their brains to come up with sensational names for its perpetrator.

Among other lurid labels, they called him the “Werewolf of Wisteria.”

“Look down on me, you will see a fool. Look up at me, you will see your lord. Look straight at me, you will see yourself.”

C
HARLES
M
ANSON

Charles Manson

Manson is unique among homicidal maniacs. The killings that brought him lasting notoriety—the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, the most shocking crimes of the 1960s—were actually committed by others; he himself never fired a pistol or wielded a knife. But that’s precisely the source of his dark fascination—the Svengali-like power he exerted over his slavish followers, who were prepared to do his most blood-crazed bidding. Though Manson
was little more than a clever con artist with a knack for occult babble, he made himself into an evil messiah, a malevolent guru, an embodiment of the darkest impulses of an era that began by preaching peace, love, and flower power and ended up awash in the satanic fantasy of
Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist,
and “Sympathy for the Devil.”