The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (41 page)

Perhaps the most appalling of Holmes’s many crimes was the murder of two young girls, Alice and Nellie Pitezel, who were gassed to death inside a steamer trunk—an atrocity portrayed in this nineteenth-century book illustration

Of course, disposing of victims isn’t the only use to which ovens have been put by deranged psychokillers. When German police arrested the cannibalistic sex killer Joachim Kroll in 1976, they found something cooking on his stove: the chopped-off hand of a four-year-old girl, simmering in a saucepan with sliced potatoes and carrots.

Carl Panzram

During his final prison stretch in the late 1920s, Carl Panzram confessed to twenty-one murders, countless felonies, and more than one thousand acts of sodomy. “For all these things,” he declared, “I am not the least bit sorry.” It was a typical statement by one of the most incorrigible criminals in American history. Some sociologists have blamed Panzram’s vicious nature on the penal system, which subjected him to countless brutalities in an effort to break his spirit, but only filled him with a hatred for all humankind. Others have a different explanation: that he was simply born bad.

Whether Panzram’s badness was acquired or innate is a matter of debate. One thing is certain: his criminal career started early. His first conviction was for drunk and disorderly conduct—when he was eight years old. Three years later, a string of burglaries landed him in reform school. During his time there, he torched one of the buildings, causing an estimated $100,000 worth of damage. The thirteen-year-old Panzram was released from the institution in 1904 with knowledge that would last him a lifetime—“how to steal, lie, hate, burn, and kill” (as he would write in his autobiography).

Portrait of Carl Panzram by Joe Coleman

Paroled to his mother’s custody, he promptly ran away to lead the life of a hobo. While hitching a ride in a boxcar, he was gang-raped by four “burly bums,” who taught him another lesson he would continue to live by: “Force and might make right.”

He joined the army at sixteen, but military discipline was not Panzram’s long suit. He was court-martialed and sentenced to three years in Leavenworth. Following his release, he embarked on a career of spectacular brutality. Traveling around the world—to South America, Europe, Africa, and finally back to the United States—he left a trail of corpses in his wake.

In the 1920s, Panzram committed two of his most infamous crimes. With the proceeds from an especially profitable heist, he purchased a yacht and lured ten sailors aboard with the promise of free bootleg liquor. After the sailors drank themselves into a stupor, Panzram raped them, shot each one in the head, then dumped their bodies in the ocean.

Later, after shipping out as a merchant seaman to West Africa, he
hired eight native bearers, presumably to help him hunt crocodiles. Panzram ended up killing and raping the Africans, then feeding their corpses to the crocs.

By 1928, Panzram was back in America, where he was arrested for a series of burglaries in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. Sentenced to twenty years in Leavenworth, he announced that he would “kill the first man that bothers me.” He made good on his threat the following year, smashing in the skull of a laundry foreman. It was this crime that finally got Panzram a long-overdue death sentence. He was hanged on September 5, 1930. Consistent to the end, he went to his death with a curse on his lips. “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard,” he snarled as the executioner prepared the noose. “I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around!”

For a flawed but intriguing film about Panzram, check out
Killer
(1996), with the always watchable (if somewhat miscast) James Woods in the title role.

“I sat down to think things over a bit. While I was sitting there, a little kid about eleven or twelve years old came bumming around. He was looking for something. He found it, too. I took him out to a gravel pit about one-quarter mile away. I left him there, but first committed sodomy on him and then killed him. His brains were coming out of his ears when I left him, and he will never be any deader.”

C
ARL
P
ANZRAM

P
ARAPHILIA

Paraphilia—which literally means “abnormal love”—is the technical term for sexual deviation or perversion. It need hardly be said that when it comes to paraphiliac behavior, serial killers are as sick as they come.

The average foot fetishist, for example, might assemble a sizable collection of stolen spike-heeled shoes. By contrast, at least one serial killer gratified his fetish by cutting off the feet of his victims and storing them in his refrigerator. Clipping and saving tufts of female pubic hair is another common fetish. Serial killers, on the other hand, are just as likely to remove the entire vulvas of their victims.

Painting of Albert Fish flagellating himself with a nail-studded board; art by Michael Rose

Voyeurism is another paraphilia that serial killers practice with a singular malevolence. The typical Peeping Tom enjoys spying on people who are having sex. Voyeuristic serial killers, on the other hand, like to watch while their partners or accomplices rape, sodomize, and torture helpless victims. Among the other paraphilias favored by serial killers are bestiality, S-M, and exhibitionism.

Undoubtedly the single most perverted serial killer in the annals of American crime was Albert
Fish
. According to the psychiatric experts who examined him, Fish had spent his lifetime indulging in every known paraphilia, plus a few no one had ever heard of before. (For example, he liked to insert long-stemmed roses into his penis and look at himself in the
mirror. Then he would remove the roses and eat them.) His more commonplace paraphilias included: sadism, masochism, flagellation, exhibitionism, voyeurism, piquerism (deriving sexual pleasure from jabbing himself with sharp objects), pedophilia, analingus (oral stimulation of the anus), co-prophagia (eating feces), undinism (sexual preoccupation with urine), fetishism, and cannibalism.

P
ARTNERS

Serial killers have their own special form of male bonding. Instead of bowling with a buddy, they will occasionally link up with a partner and go prowling in pairs. It is estimated that approximately 28 percent of all serial homicides in this country are committed by such deadly duos.

Though the bisexual Henry Lee
Lucas
and his homosexual partner, Ottis Elwood Toole, were occasional lovers, the true basis of their friendship was not sex but a shared passion for serial slaughter. Shortly after meeting in a Florida soup kitchen, they launched into a life of random, nomadic violence, traveling the highways and preying on an untold number of victims—hitchhikers, vagrants, women with car trouble. They killed with appalling cruelty. (In one typical instance, they attacked a forty-six-year-old woman in her mobile home, Lucas raping her while Toole strangled her with a telephone cord; after she was dead, Toole ripped off her nipples with his teeth.) When the pair ran low on cash, they would knock over a convenience store and kill the clerk (whose corpse was generally raped by the necrophiliac Toole).

Both Lucas and Toole had committed homicide before hooking up with each other. Other cases, however, are examples of what the French call a
Folie à Deux
—
a shared psychopathology that only operates when the two individuals come together. Separately, each man—however potentially violent—might never commit murder; together, they bring out each other’s most monstrous impulses. This was the case, for example, not only with the
“
Hillside Stranglers
,”
but also with Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, a pair of ex-marines with a common interest in automatic weapons and sadomasochistic pornography. In the early 1980s, this depraved duo abducted at least three women and kept them as “sex slaves” in an underground bunker on Lake’s remote, wooded compound in Calaveras County, California. The
victims were videotaped while being subjected to extreme sexual torture, then murdered when their captors grew tired of them. (Ng awaits trial on these charges and maintains his innocence to this day.) Other depraved twosomes include Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris (a pair of degenerates who cruised the California roads in a van they called Murder Mack, abducting, torturing, and killing a string of young girls), Dean Corll and Wayne Henley (who conspired to lure dozens of young males to Corll’s home in Pasadena, Texas, where the boys were drugged, shackled, tortured—sometimes for days—then killed), and Theodore Simmons and Milton Jones of Buffalo, New York (who teamed up to torture and kill Catholic priests).