The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (44 page)

The Lure of the Piper

Given her fascination with the Gothic and grotesque, it’s no surprise that author Joyce Carol Oates was attracted to the Schmid case, using it as the basis for her classic 1966 short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” In Oates’s version, an ineffably creepy character named Arnold Friend—obviously modeled on Schmid—shows up at the home of a teenaged girl named Connie one Sunday afternoon while her family is away and spirits her off to a nameless, but clearly awful, fate.

In 1985, Oates’s tale was made into a handsome film called
Smooth Talk,
starring Treat Williams as Arnold and Laura Dern as Connie. Though the film is an intelligent adaptation of its source, horror buffs are likely to find it disappointingly artsy.

The opposite problem afflicts two other films based on the Schmid story, both of which are hopelessly schlocky affairs:
The Todd Killings,
a low-budget 1971 shocker that changes Schmid into a character named Skipper
Todd but otherwise hews fairly close to the facts; and
Dead Beat
(1994), which focuses on a lonely high-schooler named Rudy who moves to Albuquerque, where he gets involved with a Schmid-like figure named Kit.

P
LUMBING

Clogged pipes have proven to be the undoing of more than one serial killer. In February 1983, residents of a small North London apartment house complained that their toilets wouldn’t flush. When a plumber showed up to check out the problem, he opened a nearby manhole and descended into the sewer. As expected, he found a blocked drainpipe leading from the building. What he couldn’t possibly have anticipated was the nature of the obstruction—a reeking mass of putrefying flesh, mixed with human finger bones. It didn’t take long for police to discover the source of this nightmarish glop. It had come from the upstairs flat of a thirty-seven-year-old
Civil Servant
named Dennis
Nilsen
, who—just several days earlier—had murdered and butchered his fifteenth homosexual victim, then flushed the remains down his toilet.

A similar grisly discovery had been made in West Germany seven years earlier. In July 1976, police in the city of Duisburg were conducting a door-to-door search for a missing four-year-old girl. In the course of interviewing one old man, they heard a bizarre story. According to the old man, a fellow tenant of his apartment building—a lavatory attendant named Joachim Kroll—had warned him not to use the communal bathroom on their floor because the toilet was backed up. What made the story so weird was Kroll’s explanation of the plumbing problem. He had casually mentioned that the toilet was blocked “with guts.”

The police summoned a plumber, who applied a plunger to the clogged toilet. Up came a mass of human entrails and other viscera. Inside Kroll’s apartment, police found several freezer bags full of human flesh and a child’s hand simmering in a saucepan. Like his British counterpart, Dennis Nilsen, Kroll had been murdering for a long time—since 1955. In all, the German cannibal and sex killer was responsible for fourteen homicides.

P
OETRY

Among the ranks of infamous serial killers there have been some rather creative individuals. John Wayne
Gacy
was a prolific painter whose works have become trendy collectibles (see
Art
). Charles
Manson
has composed dozens of
Songs
, some of which have been recorded by bands like Guns N’ Roses and the Lemonheads. Ed
Gein
crafted everything from belts to wastebaskets to soup bowls out of the exhumed and dismembered corpses of middle-aged women. So it’s not entirely surprising that some serial killers have tried their hands at poetry. It’s also not surprising that their poetry is really bad.

Dennis
Nilsen
wrote a whole slew of verse in homage to the young men he strangled, dismembered, and flushed down the toilet. Here’s a typical example, addressed to one of his dead victims: “I try to smile / Despite the vengeance looking at me, / Covered in your tomato paste, / A man of many parts / I try to forget. / Even the perfume of your passing / Lingers on. / More problems now / With all your bits and pieces. . . .”

As a teenager, Long Islander Joel Rifkin—who murdered and dismembered at least seventeen prostitutes—obviously saw himself as some sort of knight in shining armor, as this scrap of adolescent doggerel suggests: “A siren temptress calls me near / a stranger beyond darkness haze / pleading from within the shadows / and though I be helpless to help her / help her I must.” And the ever-romantic Ted
Bundy
beguiled his lovers with greeting-card verse like: “I send you this kiss / deliver this body to hold. / I sleep with you tonight / with words of love untold.”

What woman could resist such lyrical power?

If the verse written by serial killers has been invariably awful, the case is very different when it comes to poetry
about
serial killers. Some outstanding writers have produced powerful works that delve into the twisted minds of psychopathic killers. This tradition extends at least as far back as Robert Browning’s 1842 “Porphyria’s Lover,” whose demented speaker conveys his love for his girlfriend by winding her long blond hair around her “little throat” and strangling her to death. More recent poets have also explored the psychology of sociopathic murderers in their work. These include Ai’s “The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981” (about the Atlanta Child Murders) from her 1986 book,
Sin;
Frank Bidart’s profoundly unsettling “Herbert
White,” which can be found in his 1991 collection,
In the Western Night;
and Thom Gunn’s “Troubadour: Songs for Jeffrey
Dahmer
”
from his 2001 volume,
Boss Cupid.

A Preverse Verse

Dr. J. Paul de River’s classic forensic text,
The Sexual Criminal
(1949), includes a chapter called “The Poetic Nature of the Sado-Masochist,” which reprints a number of works by convicted sex offenders. Reprinted below is one example, entitled “Uncensored Exotics.” As poetry it’s no “Gunga Din,” but it does offer insight into the workings of one psychopathic mind:

Vainly I crouch at the fireside,

For the flames on the hearth cannot warm me.

Vainly I put on coats

Against the cold of the star winds . . .

And my bones are chilled within me

And my blood is become as water.

And now from the void behind me

Comes the piping of the piper,

That senseless, complaining piping,

That tuneless, high, thin piping. . . .

Then, with a shout, I surrender

And leap to do the bidding.

From the wall I snatch my weapons

And rush from the house to the forest.

Where the road winds down the mountain,

Panting I lie in ambush,

Waiting for some poor traveller

Who shall bring me my release.

When he comes with laggard footsteps,

Sudden and fierce is my onslaught.

Like a beast I overcome him

And utterly destroy him.

And I cut out his heart and eat it,

And I guzzle his blood like nectar,

And I cut off his head and scalp him,

And hang his scalp at my belt.

Homeward I walk through the snowdrifts,

And my heart is warm within me,

And my blood and bones are new again

And the star winds cease to chill me. . . .

P
OISONERS

Compared to the average lust murderer who goes in for torture, mutilation, and evisceration, serial killers who quietly dispatch their victims with poison seem like models of refinement. When it comes to racking up bodies, however, serial poisoners can be every bit as deadly as any blood-crazed psycho.

Particularly back in the 1800s—when forensic pathology was still in its infancy—poisoners could get away with murder for years, since their victims appeared to drop dead of natural causes. Homicidal
Housekeepers
like Anna Zwanziger and Helene Jegado knocked off dozens of people by serving them arsenic-spiked food. As late as the 1930s, a sociopathic
Nurse
named Anna Marie Hahn was dishing out lethal doses of arsenic to her patients in Cincinnati’s German community, murdering as many as eleven elderly men over a five-year period. (In 1938, Hahn became the first woman to die in Ohio’s electric chair.)

Though women have a particular preference for poison, they certainly don’t have a monopoly on this insidious murder method. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, England was home to a trio of men who left a trail of poisoned corpses in their wake: Dr. William Palmer (who used antimony tartrate and strychnine to get ride of bothersome relatives and insistent creditors); George Chapman (who poisoned a succession of lovers, also with antimony); and Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (who prescribed strychnine pills to four London prostitutes and claimed he was
Jack the Ripper
).

The deadly tradition of these Victorian villains was carried on by a twentieth-century British youth named Graham Young. Curious about the effects of antimony tartrate on the human body, the fourteen-year-old chemistry buff (and psychopath) began lacing his family’s food with the deadly substance, eventually killing his stepmother. Found guilty but insane
in 1962, he spent the following nine years in a mental asylum. No sooner was he released in 1971 than he took a job at a photographic supply firm and began poisoning fellow employees with thalium. By the time investigators figured out what was going on, five of Young’s co-workers had fallen violently ill and two of them had died after days of agony. “I could have killed them all if I wished,” Young told the arresting officers.