The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (42 page)

Some serial-killer teams have more in common than their psychopathology—they are actually related by blood. This was true of the “Hillside Stranglers,” Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, who were cousins; the Haley brothers of Los Angeles, who committed no fewer than five hundred burglaries, sixty rapes, and eight murders in the early 1980s; and the wildly psychotic Joseph Kallinger, who enlisted the aid of his own twelve-year-old son in his six-month campaign of murder and mutilation.

Of course, even the closest of companions can sometimes disagree. Rudolph Pleil—arguably the most monstrous German lust murderer of the post-World War II era—had a voracious appetite for rape, mutilation, and murder but objected when an accomplice insisted on beheading a victim. Though Pleil slaughtered at least two dozen victims with hammers, hatchets, and knives, he evidently drew the line at decapitation. And Lucas disapproved of his partner’s cannibalistic proclivities, refusing to participate when Toole indulged his taste for human flesh.

Marcel Petiot

The smoke spewing from the chimney of 21 Rue Le Sueur on March 11, 1944, was so thick, black, and foul smelling that it might have been coming from a Nazi crematorium. A neighbor telephoned the Parisian authorities. When firemen broke into the building, they made an appalling discovery—a stack of dissected and dismembered human bodies, more than two dozen in all. These would later prove to be the remains of Jewish men and women. Inside the furnace, the firemen found a pile of burning limbs—the source of the billowing stench.

There was a good reason why the chimney smoke carried the stench of a Nazi crematorium. In effect, that’s what the building’s owner—a physician named Marcel Petiot—had turned his basement furnace into.

When Petiot was confronted with the evidence of his crimes, however, he had a ready explanation. A psychopath of unusual—even flamboyant—audacity, he insisted that far from being a criminal, he was actually a patriot. The remains, he claimed, were those of Nazi collaborators, killed by the Resistance and entrusted to himself for disposal. The gullible gendarmes swallowed this whopper whole and released Petiot, who immediately fled Paris with his wife.

He remained at large for seven months, during which time he sent regular, pseudonymous letters to the newspaper
Resistance,
repeating his claim that the bodies were those of Nazis and traitors. In Paris, however, police were entertaining a different theory: that Petiot himself was a collaborator who had been murdering patriots on behalf of the Gestapo.

The truth finally came to light when Petiot was arrested after seven months on the lam. Though perceived by his Parisian neighbors as a prosperous, benevolent physician, the forty-seven-year-old Petiot had a history of criminal behavior going back to World War I, when he was convicted of black marketeering. Later, as mayor of the town of Villeneuve, he had been arrested for drug peddling. He was also a suspect in the mysterious disappearance of a pregnant servant girl. But nothing in his past compared to the outrages he had been perpetrating in his Rue Le Sueur residence.

The murders, it turned out, had nothing to do with politics at all. The victims were neither Nazis nor French patriots. Greed was the sole motive behind Petiot’s atrocities. The victims were wealthy Jews desperate to flee occupied France. Posing as a Resistance leader, Petiot offered to smuggle them out of the country—for a fee. When the unsuspecting victims showed up at his house—laden with all their valuables—Petiot administered a “typhoid inoculation” that was spiked with strychnine. Then he placed them in a sealed chamber. After observing their death agonies through a peephole, he disposed of their remains in his furnace. The valuables he netted through this unspeakable swindle amounted to nearly a million English pounds.

Petiot’s 1946 trial was one of the most sensational in modern French history. The defendant himself—by turns witty and withering, charming and arrogant—put on quite a show, though his histrionics failed to beguile the judge and jury. The “greatest criminal affair of the century” (as the
French papers dubbed it) ended on May 26, 1946, when Marcel Petiot, still maintaining his innocence, went to the guillotine.

For an interesting (if overly arty) dramatization of the case, curious viewers might check out the 1992 French movie
Docteur Petiot,
starring Michel Serrault.

“There is a legend that you all know well: the story of the shipwreckers. Cruel men placed lanterns on the cliffs to lure ashore ships in distress. The sailors, confident, never suspecting that such evil deceit could exist, sailed onto the reefs and died, and those who had pretended to lead them to safety filled their coffers with the spoils of their foul deeds. Petiot is just that: the false savior, the false refuge. He lured the desperate, the frightened, the hunted, and he killed them by turning their instincts for self-preservation against them.”

P
IERRE
V
ERON
,

lawyer at the trial of Dr. Marcel Petiot

P
HASES

The step-by-step pattern that the typical serial killer follows—from the time he first starts brooding on his crime through the inevitable letdown of its aftermath—has been charted by Dr. Joel Norris, one of the country’s leading experts on the subject. According to Norris, the seven “key phases” of serial murder are as follows:

1.
The Aura Phase.
The process begins when the potential killer starts to withdraw into a private world of perverted fantasy. From the outside,
he may appear to be perfectly normal. Inside his head, however, he exists in a kind of twisted twilight zone. His grasp on reality loosens as his mind becomes increasingly dominated by daydreams of death and destruction. Gradually, the need to act out his demented fantasies becomes an overwhelming compulsion.

2.
The Trolling Phase.
Like a fisherman casting out his line and trolling for a catch, the killer now begins to seek out a victim, focusing on those places where he is most likely to encounter the precise kind of person that his sick needs require. He may stake out a schoolyard, cruise a red-light district, patronize a popular pickup spot, or stalk a local lovers’ lane. Eventually, he will zero in on a target.

3.
The Wooing Phase.
In some cases, the killer will simply strike without warning—snatching a victim off the street or breaking into a house and slaying everyone inside. Often, however, the killer will derive a depraved satisfaction from luring his victims into his clutches—lulling them into a false sense of security, tricking them into lowering their defenses. Ted
Bundy
seemed so disarmingly clean-cut and normal that he had no trouble talking young women into his death car. Other killers, like John Wayne
Gacy
, seduce their victims with the promise of money or a job or a place to spend the night. In November 1995, a drifter named Glen Rogers allegedly committed five murders during an interstate killing spree. According to those who knew him, Rogers was a master at wooing his victims. “He could talk a person into anything,” one acquaintance told the police. “A ride home from the bar. A place to crash for a few days. A woman’s affections.” (Rogers has not yet been tried and denies the charges.)

4.
The Capture Phase.
The next step is to spring the trap that the killer has set for his victims. Seeing their terrified reactions as the true horror of their situation suddenly hits home is part of his sadistic game. This is the moment when—having accepted a lift from an affable stranger who has offered you a ride home—you suddenly notice that the car is headed in the wrong direction and that the door handle on the passenger side has been removed, so that there is no possibility of escape. Or when the handsome one-night stand who has handcuffed
you to the bedposts for some kinky fun and games smilingly tells you that he has no intention of releasing you—ever.

5.
The Murder.
If killing is a substitute for sex, as it is for so many serial murderers, then the moment at which they put a victim to death is the climax, the acme of pleasure toward which the whole process has been building ever since they began fantasizing about the crime. (Indeed, it’s not uncommon for sexual psychopaths to experience an orgasm while murdering their victims.) And just as normal people have their particular sexual pleasures—their favorite positions or ways of being touched—serial killers have their own homicidal preferences, some enjoying strangulation, others bludgeoning or slashing or death by slow torture.

6.
The Totem Phase.
Like a sexual climax, the murder is an intense but transient pleasure for the serial killer. To prolong the experience and help him relive it in fantasy during the fallow period before his next crime, he will often remove a souvenir or “totemic” object associated with the victim. This may be anything from a wallet to a body part (see
Trophies
).

7. The Depression Phase.
In the aftermath of the murder, the serial killer often experiences an emotional letdown that is the equivalent of what the French call postcoital
tristesse.
This state can be so severe that the killer may actually attempt suicide. Unfortunately, a more common response is a renewed desire to commit murder again—a growing need for a fix of fresh blood (see
Post-Homicidal Depression
).

P
HOTOGRAPHS

In his chilling 1971 book,
The Family,
Ed Sanders reveals that Charles
Manson
and his creepy-crawly followers allegedly made snuff movies with stolen super-8mm cameras—real-life splatter films depicting human sacrifice, decapitations, and other atrocities. Though Sanders was never able to confirm this story (he was offered a reel of reputed Manson porn by one unnamed source but couldn’t come up with the $250,000 asking price), the rumor itself
embodies an unnerving truth about serial killers. In the same way that ordinary people like to record life’s special moments on film (weddings, birthday parties, family vacations) many serial killers enjoy taking pictures of their victims, dead and alive, to keep as twisted souvenirs—morbid mementoes to help them relive the thrill of their murders.

When police entered the squalid apartment of Jeffrey
Dahmer
, they were staggered to find a cache of Polaroid pictures showing male corpses in various stages of dismemberment. One photo was of a body slit from breastbone to groin like a gutted deer. Another showed a corpse eaten away by acid from the nipples down. Perhaps the most shocking of all was described by Milwaukee journalist Anne E. Schwartz: a photograph of “a bleached skeleton [with] the flesh on the head, hands, and feet . . . left perfectly intact.”

In the mid-1960s, the British
Killer Couple
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley—aka the
Moors Murderers
—kidnapped a ten-year-old girl and forced her to pose for pornographic snapshots before strangling her to death. They also made an audiotape of the child’s piteous pleas for mercy—a recording so heart wrenching that when it was played in court during the murder trial, even hardened policemen wept openly.