The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (38 page)

Another postwar Briton who embraced Nazi philosophy was Ian Brady, the male half of the notorious
Killer Couple
known as the
“
Moors Murderers
.”
Captivated by the concept of the Aryan Übermensch—the “superman”
who is entitled to exert his will on lesser mortals—Brady recruited a willing sex slave, Myra Hindley, who played obedient storm trooper to his two-bit führer. Together this vile pair abducted and murdered four children and left their mangled bodies buried on the moors.

In America, a tormented Chicago teenager named William Heirens was similarly infatuated with Nazism. Both an honor student and a compulsive burglar, Heirens nursed a simmering obsession with violence, sex, and totalitarian power. Besides a stockpile of firearms and a stash of stolen female panties (which he liked to wear around the house), he collected photographs of Hitler, Himmler, and other Nazi bigwigs. In 1945 and 1946, Heirens’s obsessions finally boiled over. He murdered two women and a six-year-old girl, leaving an infamous lipstick-scrawled message on the bedroom wall of one crime scene: “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”

At roughly the same time in Wisconsin, Edward
Gein
was feeding his own demented fantasies with magazine stories about Nazi atrocities. A deranged do-it-yourselfer, Gein was inspired by accounts of concentration camp officials who turned human skin into lampshades. When investigators broke into Gein’s horror house in 1957, they found a staggering collection of similarly constructed ghastly artifacts—chair seats, lampshades, wastebaskets, and more—all crafted from the flesh of corpses Gein had been stealing from local graveyards.

N
ECROPHILIA

In
Psychopathia Sexualis,
his classic study of aberrant behavior, Richard von Krafft-Ebing calls necrophilia the most monstrous of all perversions. Since necrophilia (from the Greek, meaning “love of the dead”) is the practice of having sex with corpses, this is not a surprising assessment. Nor is it surprising that this most monstrous of acts should be common among the most monstrous of criminals—serial killers.

Many infamous psychopaths, from Earle Leonard
Nelson
to Ted
Bundy
, occasionally raped the bodies of their freshly slain victims. Still, some experts in the field of criminal psychology distinguish between this type of outrage—which is motivated by the malevolent desire to completely
dominate and violate a victim—and the behavior of the “true necrophiliac,” the man who is deeply infatuated with death, who derives his greatest sexual satisfaction from making love to a cadaver. This sort of necrophiliac is much rarer among serial killers. But there have been some notable cases.

Jeffrey
Dahmer’s
love affair with dead things began as a child, when his favorite hobby was collecting and dissecting roadkill. By the time he was a grown-up, this morbid obsession had metastasized into an unspeakable perversion. Dahmer told psychiatrists that he routinely cut open the abdomens of his murder victims and masturbated into their viscera. He also confessed to anally raping the corpses. His British counterpart, Dennis
Nilsen
, was also driven by necrophiliac urges, though he tended to treat his victims more tenderly, masturbating as he snuggled beside them in bed.

The most infamous of all American necrophiliacs is Ed
Gein
. Like all classic necrophiliacs, Gein was completely uninterested in living women. He found his sex partners in local cemeteries, which he plundered periodically for more than a dozen years. In general, necrophiliacs are regarded as less of a menace than serial killers because the victims they prey on are already dead. Gein was no exception. He was more ghoul than serial killer. Still, he was not, by any means, harmless. When the local graveyards ran low on available females, he simply went out hunting for a likely looking prospect and turned her into the kind of woman he loved best—a dead one.

“I took her bra and panties off and had sex with her. That’s one of those things I guess that got to be a part of my life—having sexual intercourse with the dead.”

H
ENRY
L
EE
L
UCAS
,

describing his reaction to the death of his beloved common-law wife, twelve-year-old Becky Powell, whom he had just stabbed in the chest during an argument

Earle Leonard Nelson

Earle Leonard Nelson; from
Bloody Visions
trading cards

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

In the annals of U.S. crime, Earle Leonard Nelson—aka the “Gorilla Man”—holds a historic position. He was the first American serial sex killer of the twentieth century. In February 1926, he began a frenzied, eighteen-month odyssey that took him from one end of the country to the other and up into Canada. Along the way, he slaughtered no fewer than twenty-two women—a grisly record that would remain unbroken for another fifty years.

Orphaned in infancy when his young parents both died of syphilis, Nelson was taken in and raised by his mother’s family. He was a withdrawn, moody child with bizarre personal habits. (Among his other peculiarities, he would regularly set off for school in neat, freshly laundered garments and return in foul rags, as though he’d swapped clothes with a derelict.) As a result of a severe head injury—sustained when his bicycle collided with a cable car—his behavior became even more erratic.

By his early teens, he was already a habitué of the brothels and bars of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. He had also taken to petty thievery. In 1915—just a few months after his eighteenth birthday—he was arrested for burglary and sentenced to two years in San Quentin. America had just
entered World War I when Nelson emerged. He enlisted in the navy, but—after refusing to do anything but lie on his cot and babble about the Great Beast of Revelations—he was confined to a mental institution. He remained there for the duration of the war.

Discharged in 1919, the twenty-two-year-old Nelson met and married a sixty-year-old spinster and proceeded to make her life a daily hell. Shortly after she left him, he attacked a twelve-year-old girl and was returned to the mental asylum. Discharged in 1925, he soon embarked on his deadly career.

He started in San Francisco, working his way up the Pacific Coast to Seattle, then headed eastward. At first, the tabloids dubbed him the “Dark Strangler”; later, he became known as the “Gorilla Man”—a nickname that had less to do with his appearance (he was actually quite ordinary-looking) than with the savagery of his crimes. For the most part, his targets were middle-aged or elderly landladies who had placed “Rooms to Let” ads in their local papers. Nelson—who could be ingratiating when he wanted to—would show up at their homes and ask to see a room. Once alone with his victims, he would undergo a
Jekyll/Hyde
-like transformation.

Typically, he would choke the women to death, commit postmortem rape, then conceal the corpses in bizarre hiding places. One of his victims was stuffed into an attic trunk. Others were crammed behind the basement furnaces. His final victim was discovered when her husband knelt to say his evening prayers and found her body shoved under the bed.

With the police departments of a dozen different cities on the alert, Nelson headed into Canada, where he finally reached the end of his corpse-strewn trail. After killing two more victims, he was captured in Manitoba. He managed to escape from jail, setting off a widescale panic and massive manhunt. Twelve hours later, he was back in custody—this time for good.

Several months later, Earle Leonard Nelson went to the gallows. His final words were: “I forgive those who have wronged me.”

N
ICKNAMES

With the advent of tabloid newspapers in the 1800s, crime reporters began wracking their brains to come up with catchy nicknames for sensational killers—a tradition that continues to this day. (When a co-ed was murdered in New York City in early 2006 and her brutalized corpse found
heavily wrapped in packing tape, the papers immediately dubbed her killer “The Mummy Maniac.”) Following is a list of notorious serial murderers along with their sinister pseudonyms:

Richard Angelo, “The Angel of Death”

Elizabeth Bathory, “The Blood Countess”

Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, “The Hillside Stranglers”

William Bonin, “The Freeway Killer”

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, “The Moors Murderers”

Gary Carlton, “The Stocking Strangler”

Harvey Louis Carnigan, “The Want-Ad Killer”

David Carpenter, “The Trailside Killer”

Andrei Chikatilo, “The Mad Beast”

Douglas Clark, “The Sunset Strip Slayer”

Albert DeSalvo, “The Boston Strangler”

Theo Durrant, “The Demon of the Belfry”

Albert Fish, “The Moon Maniac”

John Wayne Gacy, “Killer Clown”

Ed Gein, “The Plainfield Ghoul”

John Wayne Glover, “The Granny Killer”

Cleo Green, “The Red Demon”

Vaughn Greenwood, “The Skid Row Slasher”

Fritz Haarmann, “The Butcher of Hanover”

William Heirens, “The Lipstick Murderer”

H. H. Holmes, “The Torture Doctor”

Edmund Kemper, “The Coed Killer”

Richard Macek, “The Mad Biter”

Earle Leonard Nelson, “The Gorilla Man”