The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (45 page)

Young’s crimes were the basis of
The Young Poisoner’s Handbook,
a 1996 film praised by
New York Times
movie critic Janet Maslin for its “assured style, malevolent wit, and uncompromising intelligence.”

P
OLITICAL
C
ORRECTNESS

Since PC etiquette requires language and behavior that are completely inoffensive, serial killers are about as
in
correct as it’s possible for people to be. Bizarrely enough, however, at least one multiple murderer—a young Californian named John Linley Frazier—acted out of his own demented sense of political correctness. From his warped point of view, he was killing to protect the environment.

A high school dropout who worked as an auto mechanic, Frazier evolved into an ecological zealot, apparently under the influence of the psychedelic drugs he began ingesting in the late 1960s. Quitting his job (because he believed that cars contributed to “the death cycle of the planet”), he began drifting from commune to commune. His fierce, obsessive rants against environmental destruction, however, clashed with the mellowed-out sensibilities of his newfound hippie friends, and Frazier soon found himself living like a hermit in a six-foot-square shack in the Northern California woods.

About half a mile away from the shack stood the home of an eye surgeon named Victor Ohta. In the fall of 1970, Frazier broke into the Ohtas’ house and—in his paranoia—decided that the family was the evil personification of American materialism in its most pernicious form. Returning shortly afterward with a .38 revolver, Frazier managed to tie up the entire family (father, mother, and two sons), plus Dr. Ohta’s secretary. After lecturing them on the damage done to the environment by capitalistic society, Frazier shot and killed all five people and dumped their bodies in the swimming pool. Next, he typed out a note promising death to all those who would “ruin the environment,” set the house on fire, and fled.

With the help of local hippies—who recognized the crackpot ideas in the note as Frazier’s—police quickly nabbed the suspect. During his 1971 trial, Frazier showed up in court with one side of his head shaved completely bald, the other side sporting shoulder-length hair and half a beard. In spite of his flagrantly bizarre behavior, he was ruled sane and sentenced to the gas chamber. Frazier appeared to welcome the decision, since, as he said, he preferred death to spending his life under the control of “fascist pigs.” When the Supreme Court abolished capital punishment, however, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

P
ORNOGRAPHY

See
X-Rated
.

P
OST
-H
OMICIDAL
D
EPRESSION

Sick as it sounds, the fact is that for many serial killers murder is a substitute for sex. The act of plunging a sharp, pointed object into the writhing body of another person is the equivalent of intercourse. Many lust murderers actually achieve orgasm while stabbing (or beating or strangling) their victims to death. So it’s not surprising that following a murder, many serial killers experience the equivalent of postcoital depression—the emotional letdown that sometimes descends after sex.

Indeed, so common is this experience among lust murderers that one expert on the subject, Dr. Joel Norris, actually describes depression as one of the standard
Phases
of serial murder. According to Dr. Norris, many serial killers suffer severe bouts of dejection following a murder because the killing fails to live up to their fantasies. Moreover, even the most cold-blooded killers can sometimes be hit with a belated sense of horror and guilt after perpetrating a particularly vicious crime. Occasionally, they suffer such intense despair that they actually attempt suicide (see
Death Wish
).

Whatever the cause of their depression, the response is often a binge of drinking or drug taking, which dulls their sense of emptiness and despair. Soon their inner compulsions rise up again. Like addicts who can’t
stop getting high—even though they know that they will suffer an inevitable crash—they go prowling for their next “fix” of blood.

P
OWER
T
OOLS

The chain saw is the favorite weapon of serial killers. At least that’s what you’d think if your concept of serial killers came entirely from the movies. During the 1970s, Hollywood churned out a spate of low-budget splatter films with titles like
Driller Killer, The Toolbox Murders, The Bloody Mutilators,
and
The Ghastly Ones.
The psychos in these movies wielded more power tools than Tim Allen on
Home Improvement:
drills, bucksaws, chain saws, you name it. The power-tool motif made it to the big time in a pair of Brian De Palma movies from the early 1980s—
Body Double
(featuring an electric drill bit large enough to qualify for
The Guinness Book of World Records)
and
Scarface
(which contains what is arguably the most harrowing chain-saw mutilation sequence in cinematic history).

Though the very first chain-saw murder movie was Wes Craven’s pioneering splatter film
The Last House on the Left
(1971), the film that made this particular piece of equipment de rigueur for cinematic psychos was Tobe Hooper’s 1975 cult classic,
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Like
Psycho
and
The Silence of the Lambs,
Hooper’s masterwork was inspired by the horrific deeds of the Wisconsin ghoul, Edward
Gein
. Indeed, the original advertisements for the film claimed that it was entirely factual. “What happened is
true! Now see the movie that is just as real!” The real truth, however, is that Hooper’s film is only loosely—
very
loosely—based on reality. Among other things, Ed Gein didn’t even
own
a chain saw. The only tools he is known to have employed were his trusty spade (for exhuming female corpses) and a big-bladed hunting knife (for dismembering them).

It’s easy to see why the makers of in-your-face splatter movies are attracted to chain saws—they are big, loud, and exceptionally scary-looking (the chain saws, that is, though the description undoubtedly applies to some of the filmmakers, too). For those same reasons, however, chain saws do not make very suitable weapons for real-life serial killers. After all, it’s hard to sneak into a house in a nice residential neighborhood and quietly dismember an entire family with a chain saw. Chain saws also make notoriously poor concealed weapons.

There is, however, at least one serial killer who used a power saw on his victims, albeit posthumously. In the 1980s, a Swedish physician named Teet Haerm, who worked as a medical examiner for the Stockholm police, was accused of the serial murder of seven prostitutes. But his outrages didn’t stop there. After killing his victims, he beheaded and dismembered their bodies with a power saw.

Then—like another serial-killer physician, the fictional Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter—Dr. Haerm devoured portions of their flesh.

P
ROFILING

During the 1950s, New York was terrorized by an anonymous psycho—dubbed the “Mad Bomber” by the press—who planted dozens of homemade explosives around the city. Stymied in their investigation, police turned to a psychiatric whiz named James Brussel. After studying all the available evidence, Dr. Brussel deduced that the unknown madman would turn out to be a middle-aged paranoiac of Eastern European descent who lived in Connecticut with a maiden aunt or sister, was afflicted with a serious physical illness like tuberculosis, attended church regularly, went out of his way to behave in a polite, soft-spoken manner, and would be wearing a double-breasted suit (buttoned) when arrested.

Thanks in large part to Brussels description, police were able to trace the
bomber, who turned out to be a well-mannered, fifty-four-year-old bachelor of Polish immigrant stock named George Metesky, who lived in Connecticut with his unmarried sisters, was a weekly churchgoer, had been treated for TB, and suffered from severe paranoia. When Metesky was led off by police, he was dressed in a blue, double-breasted suit. Buttoned.

Brussel’s amazing prediction is universally acknowledged as the pioneering example of a technique that now stands as one of the most potent weapons in the war against serial killers: the psychological profiling of “unsubs” (police slang for “unknown subjects”). Building on Brussels groundbreaking work, agents of the
FBI
Behavioral Science Unit began visiting prisons in the late 1970s. They interviewed several dozen of America’s most infamous killers in an effort to figure out what makes these monsters tick. The agents found that serial murderers can be roughly divided into two categories. The
organized
type is a methodical killer who carefully plans his crimes, stalks his prey, brings along his weapon of choice, then—once he has his victim in his power—engages in slow, sadistic murder. By contrast, the
disorganized
killer tends to be subject to sudden, overwhelming impulses, chooses his victims spontaneously, then quickly overpowers and kills them with whatever weapons are at hand.

Beyond these broad classifications, each case taken on by the FBI’s crack team of “mind hunters” receives highly individualized attention. When local law officers are faced with a particularly savage and baffling crime, they can—as an ultimate resort—submit a request to the FBI’s Criminal Personality Profiling Program. If the Bureau decides to accept the case, a profiler will make a close study of all the facts he receives, then send back a highly detailed, multipage report containing his analysis of the unsub. Since profiles are a form of highly educated guesswork, involving as much intuition as science, they sometimes miss their mark. But when they are accurate—which is surprisingly often—they can seem uncanny.

Stumped by the brutal murder of a twelve-year-old girl, for example, police in a small Southern town contacted renowned FBI profiler John Douglas, who came up with this sketch of the unsub: a divorced white man who drove a black or blue car, worked at a “macho laborer’s job,” was dishonorably discharged from the military, knew the victim, and had a previous record of sex crimes. Following through on this lead, police soon arrested the culprit—a divorced white male who drove a blue Pinto, cut tree limbs for
a living, had been kicked out of the army, had done work at the victim’s house, and was implicated in an earlier rape case.

Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have done it any better.

P
ROSTITUTES

It comes as no surprise to learn that prostitutes are prime targets of serial killers. For one thing, hookers have no compunctions about going off to isolated places with strange men (indeed, it’s part of the job description). For another, since so many working girls are runaways, drifters, and druggies, nobody becomes very concerned—or even notices—when they disappear or turn up dead. Finally—for those twisted, often impotent lust killers who see all women as “sluts”—prostitutes epitomize everything they most hate and fear about sex. In the demented view of these psychos, these prostitutes “deserve to die.”

From the very beginning of modern serial murder, killers have seized on the vulnerability of prostitutes. In the 1880s,
Jack the Ripper
set the pattern for future generations of night-stalking butchers by slaughtering a series of harlots. His deadly descendants include Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (who deviated from the usual pattern by poisoning his victims instead of slashing them to pieces), the still-unidentified “Jack the Stripper,” and Peter Sutcliffe, who believed he was doing the Lord’s work in ridding the world of whores. Dr. Teet Haerm of Sweden also believed that he was engaged in a righteous cause. During the 1980s, he killed, dismembered, and occasionally cannibalized a string of Stockholm hookers in order—so he claimed—to clean the streets of sin.

One of the more sensational cases of the serial murder of prostitutes in recent years occurred in 1990, when a forty-five-year old man named Arthur Shawcross was accused of the mutilation and murder of ten hookers in Rochester, New York. According to Shawcross, he killed one woman because she bit him, another because she made too much noise during sex, a third for trying to steal his wallet, and a fourth because she called him a “wimp.” Like a number of other serial killers, Shawcross insisted that he had
Multiple Personalities
, and was possessed by the reincarnated spirit of a thirteenth-century English cannibal named Ariemes, who had taught him to dine on
human flesh. (Shawcross claimed to have eaten the body parts of several of his victims.)

Not all of Shawcross’s victims were prostitutes; he also preyed on children. So did another psycho-killer, the South African serial murderer Stewart Wilken, whose victims were more or less equally divided between pubescent boys and female prostitutes. During a seven-year span between February 1990 and January 1997, Wilken murdered ten victims in the coastal town of Port Elizabeth, usually by strangulation. He also routinely engaged in necrophiliac sex, sometimes returning to a dump site to have sex with the victim’s decomposing corpse. In at least one case, he engaged in cannibalism, slicing off the nipples of a forty-two-year-old prostitute and eating them on the spot. And to top off the list of his enormities, he murdered his own ten-year-old daughter, stripped her naked, and slept beside the corpse until it mummified. When finally arrested, he offered a self-assessment that stands as one of the greatest understatements on record.