The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (37 page)

Insofar as serial killing is synonymous with lust murder, the primary motive, according to some experts in the field, is rage against women and the desire to inflict pain and suffering on them—in short, sexual sadism. Other specialists, however, insist that the dominant motive behind serial murder is not sex but power—even when the murder involves extreme sexual cruelty. As one sadistic serial killer explained to Special Agent Roy Hazelwood of the
FBI
’s Behavioral Science Unit: “The wish to inflict pain on others is not the essence of sadism. One essential impulse: to have complete mastery over another person, to make him/her a helpless object of our will, to become the absolute ruler over her, to become her God. The most important radical aim is to make her suffer, since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her.”

For this reason, some criminologists have begun to regard Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, not as the antitechnological terrorist he claims to be but as a genuine serial killer. According to John Douglas, former head of the BSU, the Unabomber’s demands—as expressed in the lengthy manifesto he sent to the media—suggest a “desire for manipulation, domination, and control typical of serial killers.”

“The most important radical aim is to make her suffer, since there is no greater power over another person than that of inflicting pain on her.”

A serial killer, explaining his motives

M
OVIES

People have always been intrigued by the kind of homicidal maniacs we now call serial killers, and every time a new mass medium has been invented, it’s been used to gratify this primal fascination. In pre-electronic days, the “penny press” dished up wildly lurid accounts of grisly crimes, complete with graphic engravings of the murder victims. One of the earliest recordings produced for the Edison phonograph featured an actor reading the shocking confessions of H. H.
Holmes
, the notorious nineteenth-century “Torture Doctor.” When radio became popular, listeners thrilled to such programs as Arch Obler’s
Lights Out
(which also paid tribute to Holmes in a famous episode called “Murder Castle”). And ghoulish killers began stalking the screen virtually from the moment that motion pictures were invented.

Ever since the enormous commercial and critical success of Jonathan Demme’s cinematic version of
The Silence of the Lambs,
Hollywood has churned out a slew of slick and, for the most part, instantly forgettable serial-killer movies—so many that a whole book could be written on the subject. As a matter of fact, a whole book
has
been written on the subject: Robert Cettl’s
Serial Killer Cinema
(McFarland Publishers, 2003), an indispensable reference volume for any hardcore slasher fan.

With almost a century’s worth of maniac movies to choose from, narrowing the list down to a mere handful is a thankless task. But if we were organizing our annual Serial Killer Film Festival, here—in alphabetical order—is the baker’s dozen we’d select:

Deep Red
(1976). A truly unsettling gore film from Italian horror maestro Dario Argento. David Hemmings (looking highly dissolute) stars as a
British pianist on the trail of a deranged killer in Rome. The soundtrack alone is scary enough to give you nightmares for a week.

Fear City
(1984). A shamefully underrated thriller by director Abel Ferrara, about a serial killer stalking topless dancers in the sleazy heart of Manhattan. The first-rate cast includes Tom Berenger, Billy Dee Williams, Melanie Griffith, Rae Dawn Chong, Michael Grasso, and Maria Conchita Alonso.

Frenzy
(1972). After a severe falling off with such turkeys as
Torn Curtain
and
Topaz,
Alfred Hitchcock returned to form in his penultimate film, a witty, stylish, and genuinely shocking thriller about a British serial killer loosely modeled after the real-life psycho known as “Jack the Stripper.”

Halloween
(1978). John Carpenter draws on every teen horror legend ever told in this brilliant low-budget chiller that was followed by various lesser sequels and countless rip-offs.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
(1990). Very possibly the most deeply disturbing—not to say harrowing—serial-killer movie ever made. A cinematic tour de force, but definitely not for everyone. Based on the ostensible exploits of Henry Lee
Lucas
.

M
(1931). Fritz Lang’s riveting masterpiece about a serial child killer terrorizing Weimar Berlin. Loosely based on the career of Peter
Kürten
, the movie made an international star of Peter Lorre as the pudgy personification of psychopathic evil who is hunted down and tried by the criminal underworld.

Maniac
(1980). A truly repulsive movie but—for that very reason—worth seeing, since it does such an effective job of capturing the sickening, sordid reality of serial murder. Starring the late lamented Joe Spinnell as a Norman Bates-like character who decks out his private collection of mannequins with the bloody scalps of his murder victims. Tom Savini served up the stomach-churning effects.

Peeping Tom
(1960). The movie that effectively ended the career of British director Michael Powell (best known for his ballet fantasy,
The Red Shoes
). A young, psychopathic voyeur films his victims while impaling them with a blade concealed in his camera tripod. Vilified upon release, the movie is now considered a classic of psychocinema.

Psycho
(1960). Not only a certified cinematic masterpiece but the seminal work from which the entire genre of so-called slasher movies springs. The crème de la crème of psychofilms.

Se7en
(1995). From the opening credits to the climactic scene, director David Fincher creates an atmosphere of unsurpassed creepiness in this grim, grueling thriller about the kind of high-concept psycho-killer only a Hollywood screenwriter could dream up: a madman whose murders are based on the Seven Deadly Sins.

The Silence of the Lambs
(1991). Jonathan Demme’s deluxe, Oscar-winning version of Thomas Harris’s brilliant bestseller. Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter became such a crowd pleaser that the actor reprised the role in a 2001 sequel,
Hannibal,
and a 2002 prequel,
Red Dragon
(a remake of Michael Mann’s 1986
Manhunter,
in which Lecter was played by Brian Cox). Like
Psycho
and
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Silence
owes a large debt to the true-life atrocities of Wisconsin ghoul Ed
Gein
.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(1974). The
Citizen Kane
of dismemberment movies. Tobe Hooper—who, sadly, has never been able to duplicate (or even approximate) his greatest achievement—creates the scariest interpretation of the Ed Gein story ever put on film. The movie achieves its shocks through a potent combination of relentless brutality, sickening atmosphere, rampaging sadism, and even a dash of black humor (which first-time viewers tend to miss, since they are generally covering up their eyes with their hands). The 2003 remake has much slicker production values but only a fraction of the scares.

The Vanishing
(1988). A gripping, low-key chiller from (of all places) Holland. Don’t look for splashy Hollywood-style effects, hyperkinetic
action, or graphic gore—just one of the most creepily effective serial-killer stories ever filmed, with an absolutely shattering climax.
Viewer Warning:
Do not confuse with the lame 1993 American remake, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges.

“Watching him act like a psychopathic killer with a mommy complex is like watching someone else throw up.”

New York Times
film critic Vincent Canby on Joe Spinnell’s performance in
Maniac

M
ULTIPLE
P
ERSONALITY

Ever since a mild-mannered motel keeper named Norman Bates became possessed by the evil spirit of his dear, departed mother, people have associated serial killers with split personalities. In reality, however, multiple personality disorder (or MPD, as it’s known in the psychology biz) is an extremely rare condition. Still, that hasn’t kept a whole string of serial killers from trying to blame their crimes on their ostensible alter egos.

William Heirens—the “Lipstick Killer,” who is best known for the desperate message he scrawled on the bedroom wall of one murder scene (“For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more”)—claimed that an alternate personality named George Murman was responsible for the three vicious sex murders he committed in 1945 and 1946. Likewise, John Wayne
Gacy
insisted that his thirty-three torture killings were actually the work of an evil personality he called “Jack.”

Kenneth Bianchi—one of the
“
Hillside Stranglers
”—
was so convincing in inventing a second homicidal personality (named “Steve”) that he managed to bamboozle several psychiatrists before being exposed as a fraud.

Indeed, despite all claims to the contrary, there hasn’t been a single authenticated case of a split-personality serial killer (see
Insanity
). Crime maven Colin Wilson, however, does describe the apparently genuine case
of a serial
rapist
named Billy Milligan who suffered from MPD. Sexually brutalized in childhood by his stepfather, Milligan’s traumatized psyche responded by splitting itself into no fewer than twenty-two separate personalities—including a sixteen-year-old painter named Tommy; a fourteen-year-old boy named David (who claimed that he had once been buried alive); a twenty-two-year-old Englishman named Arthur who spoke fluent Arabic; a Serbo-Croatian thief called Regan; and a nineteen-year-old lesbian named Adalana, who took responsibility for the rapes.

“M
URDERABILIA
”

See
Cards, Comics, and Collectibles
.

M
URDER
R
INGS

For the most part, serial killing is a solitary business, though simpatico psychos will occasionally bond in lethal pairs (see
Killer Couples
and
Partners
). Much rarer, though not entirely unheard of, are cases where three or more killers join together to commit murder for fun and profit.

For Dr. Morris Bolber and his confederates, Paul and Herman Petrillo, murder was strictly business. Operating in Philadelphia’s Italian ghetto during the Great Depression, these enterprising reprobates found a way of turning bodies into bucks by persuading disgruntled housewives to take out hefty life-insurance policies on their hubbies. Then—after orchestrating the “accidental” deaths of the insured—Bolber & Co. split the proceeds with the widows. Between 1932 and 1937, Dr. Bolber and his associates were responsible for the deaths of at least a dozen victims.

While the Bolber-Petrillo organization was driven by good old-fashioned greed, other, far more unsettling motives lurked behind one of the most bizarre murder rings in the annals of crime. Though historically factual, the case has all the earmarks of a classic horror story—a kind of
Stepford Wives
in reverse, involving a quiet little town where the housewives were really homicidal maniacs.

Between 1919 and 1929, at least twenty-six women in the small Hungarian town of Nagyrev found a novel way to rid themselves of tiresome relatives.
Led by a murderous midwife named Julia Fazekas—who taught them how to obtain arsenic by boiling flypaper and skimming off the poisonous residue—these fatal females disposed of boorish husbands, sickly children, ailing parents, obnoxious siblings—at least forty-five victims in all before the “Angel-Makers of Nagyrev” (as the newspapers dubbed them) were finally brought to trial.

N
AZI
B
UFFS

Critics of media violence complain that hardcore “splatter” films like
I Spit on Your Grave
and
Maniac
put bad ideas into the minds of budding psychopaths. But aspiring serial killers don’t need movies to inspire them. All they have to do is open a history book.

Published accounts of Nazi atrocities were a common source of inspiration for killers who came of age in the post-World War II era. Graham Young, a British sociopath born in 1947, was a boyhood admirer of Hitler and his genocidal policies. Young also loved to read about the notorious English
Poisoners
of the nineteenth century. When Young was just fourteen, he set about poisoning his own family with all the dispassion of a concentration camp commandant. After a nine-year stint in a mental asylum, Young took a job at a photographic supply firm and immediately reverted to his old exterminative ways, poisoning a bunch of his co-workers before being caught.