The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (46 page)

“I am sick,” he told his interrogators.

“The women I killed were filth—bastard prostitutes who were littering the streets. I was just cleaning up the place a bit.”

P
ETER
“Y
ORKSHIRE
R
IPPER
” S
UTCLIFFE

P
SYCHOTICS

Thanks in large part to the Alfred Hitchcock 1960 horror masterpiece, the word
psycho
is routinely used in reference to serial killers. There are two very different mental conditions, however, that use
psycho
as a prefix:
psychotic
and
psychopath.

The first of these terms refers to an extreme form of personality disintegration: basically what clinicians call paranoid schizophrenia. People afflicted with this severe mental illness have lost touch with reality. They suffer
from bizarre visions, grotesque delusions, and a variety of terrifying hallucinations—visual, auditory, even olfactory. They see, hear, even smell things that exist only inside their own deeply disordered minds. Ed
Gein
, for example, saw flocks of buzzards squatting in tree limbs, heard laughter emanating from dead leaves, and smelled the stench of rotting flesh wafting up from the ground. Another psychotic, Herbert Mullin, committed a string of random murders in obedience to a voice that commanded him to kill in order to stave off a cataclysmic earthquake.

The vast majority of psychotics are not prone to violence, however, and only a small minority of serial killers fall into this category.

Most are not psychotics but
psychopaths.
(See
Mask of Sanity
.
)

P
YROMANIA

Along with
Animal Torture
and protracted
Bed-Wetting
, starting fires is one of the three early warning signals of future homicidal mania (see
Triad
). So it’s not surprising that some serial killers continue their pyromaniac activities as grown-ups. After all, destruction is the serial killer’s raison d’être. Human beings are his ultimate target, but when a living victim isn’t readily available, an inanimate object will do. Torching a building or two is a common way for a serial killer to satisfy his urge to annihilate.

Back in the late 1800s, Thomas Piper—the “Boston Belfry Murderer,” who fatally bludgeoned and raped four victims (including a five-year-old girl)—confessed that in between his frenzied outbursts of lust murder, he was fond of setting fire to some of the city’s most prominent buildings, including Concord Hall. Since then, arson has been a favorite form of amusement for a long line of serial killers, from turn-of-the-century killer-nurse Jane
Toppan
, to the “Monster of Düsseldorf,” Peter
Kürten
, to such recent psychos as David “Son of Sam”
Berkowitz
and Ottis Toole (Henry Lee
Lucas’s
partner in crime).

The ferociously nihilistic Toole might have been speaking for all killers of this kind when he explained why he felt compelled to burn down houses. “I just hated to see them standing there,” he said.

Q
UAKER

Partly because the term
serial killer
came into common usage only within the last twenty or so years—and partly because human beings have a natural tendency to romanticize the past—people tend to assume that serial homicide is a strictly contemporary phenomenon. In point of fact, America had plenty of multiple murderers in the good old days. They just weren’t called serial killers—or even necessarily regarded as criminals.

A case in point can be found in the 1837 bestselling novel
Nick of the Woods
by Robert Montgomery Bird. The title character—whose real name, aptly enough, is Nathan Slaughter—is, of all things, a Pennsylvania Quaker. Despite belonging to a religion that promotes pacifism, Nathan is a confirmed Indian hater, who has come to the Kentucky wilderness for the express purpose of conducting a bloody campaign against Native Americans. Throughout the novel, he engages in gruesome acts of violence, all described in loving detail. At one point, for example, he attacks a chief named Wenonga. After burying a tomahawk in his enemy’s brain, he grabs a knife and scalps the chief. Then—still not satisfied—Nathan proceeds to draw
“the knife over the dead man’s breast, dividing skin, cartilage, and even bone, so sharp was the blade and so powerful the hand that urged it.”

To be sure, Nathan is a fictional character. But he reflects a historical reality. Many Americans believe that we are living in a time of unprecedented violence. But bloodshed and mayhem were no less endemic to our society a hundred years ago than they are today. On the contrary. The history of the American frontier—with its appalling record of lynchings, massacres, shootings, and other everyday barbarities—makes our own time seem like a Golden Age. Back in the 1800s, a man with a taste for human blood could go out into the wilderness and satisfy his sadistic cravings to his heart’s content—as long as his victims weren’t white. He might even be regarded as a hero. Certainly that was how nineteenth-century readers viewed Nathan Slaughter. To modern eyes, however, he looks somewhat different. As one critic puts it, he resembles a “Quaker serial killer.”

Q
UARRY

An obsessed big-game hunter—who has bagged everything from Bengal tigers to Alaskan grizzlies—grows bored of ordinary prey. He seeks an exciting new challenge, the ultimate thrill. He buys a small South American island and stocks it with castaways and shipwreck survivors. He begins to hunt the only animal that possesses courage, cunning, and the ability to reason: man.

This is the premise of Richard Connell’s prizewinning short story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” At the time of its publication in 1924, the tale was perceived as an exercise in sardonic imagination, its kill-crazed villain—a Russian count named Zaroff—as a chilling embodiment of the hunting instinct gone mad.

Unfortunately, the hunting of humans has become an all-too-common reality, as serial killers stalk, trap, and butcher their human quarry with all the methodical madness of Connell’s fictitious monster.

Serial killers of the so-called organized type (see
Profiling
) pursue their quarry in a frighteningly systematic way. Arming themselves with their chosen weapons, they stalk their favorite hunting grounds in search of the easiest prey—unescorted women, female hitchhikers, prostitutes of either sex,
unsupervised children. Then they pounce, snaring their victims by force or deception.

Perhaps the most unnerving parallel between serial killers and big-game hunters is their shared fondness for taking
Trophies
.
Though some serial killers are satisfied with saving mementoes like the wallets or photographs of their victims, others collect and preserve body parts. Edward
Gein
—
the most notorious of all human-trophy hunters—kept the flayed, stuffed, and mounted faces of women hanging on his bedroom walls (very much in the manner of Connell’s crazy Count Zaroff, who decorates his trophy room with the heads of his human victims).

Between 1973 and 1983, an Alaskan outdoorsman named Robert Hansen indulged in his own depraved version of “The Most Dangerous Game.” Abducting prostitutes to the wilderness outside Anchorage, he would strip and rape them, then force them to flee through the woods while he stalked them with a knife, bow and arrow, or hunting rifle. Hansen was ultimately convicted of four savage murders, though his actual tally may have been as high as seventeen.

“ ‘Oh,’ said the general, ‘it supplies me with the most exciting hunting in the world. No other hunting compares with it for an instant. Every day I hunt and never grow bored now, for I have a quarry with which I can match my wits.’ “

R
ICHARD
C
ONNELL
,

“The Most Dangerous Game”

Q
UICKLIME

When Indiana police dug up the farmyard of Belle Gunness in April 1908, they uncovered more than a dozen bodies—the grisly record of years of profit-motivated murder, mostly of prospective husbands (see
Black Widows
).
Most of the corpses were drastically decomposed. A chillingly practical woman, Gunness had devised a way to expedite the putrefaction process. She had chopped each of the bodies into six sections, then treated the pieces with quicklime, a highly caustic substance that eats away at organic matter. If the search of her farmyard had occurred any later, the bodies would have been decomposed beyond the possibility of identification.

Other murderers have employed quicklime for the same purpose—eliminating the corpus delicti. Dr. H. H.
Holmes
kept a vat of the stuff in the dungeon of his Chicago “Horror Castle,” where untold victims disappeared at the tail end of the nineteenth century. Fifty years later, Dr. Marcel
Petiot
—
who murdered dozens of would-be refugees during the Nazi occupation of Paris—used quicklime to dissolve the corpses buried in his backyard. (Only later did he turn to another method—cremation—as a more efficient means of disposal.) John Wayne
Gacy
periodically sprinkled lime into the crawl space beneath his house to dampen the stench of the rotting male bodies accumulating in the muck.

Of course, if you’re going to use quicklime for this ghoulish purpose, it helps to know something about its chemical properties. In the mid-1980s, a sixty-year-old woman named Dorothea Puente began renting rooms in her San Francisco boardinghouse to elderly welfare recipients, who subsequently vanished without a trace. Alerted by suspicious social workers, police launched an investigation and eventually discovered seven headless corpses planted in Puente’s backyard garden. Though Puente had taken care to sprinkle the bodies with quicklime, she was undone by her faulty knowledge of chemical reactions. Unless lime is mixed with water, it actually acts as a kind of preservative, slowing down instead of accelerating the decomposition process. As a result, medical examiners had no trouble discovering that the victims had died from massive doses of Valium and Dalmane—evidence that helped convict the lethal landlady and send her to prison for life.

R
ACE AND
R
ACISM

Say the phrase “serial killer” to most people and they will immediately conjure up mental images of Jeffrey
Dahmer
, John Wayne
Gacy
, Ted
Bundy
, Charles
Manson
—
or perhaps Hannibal Lecter. In other words, white guys.

It’s true that a significant majority of American serial killers are white. But there’s a simple explanation for this—namely, that whites make up the majority of the U.S. population. But there have been plenty of African-American serial killers, too. According to the
New York Times,
“black serial killers occur in roughly equal—or even slightly greater—proportion to the number of blacks in the population.” Recent studies show that between 13 and 22 percent of U.S. serial killers are African-American.

Among the most notorious are Coral Watts, who killed an indeterminate number of women in Houston in the early 1980s (he confessed to thirteen homicides, though he’s suspected of as many as forty); Henry Louis Wallace, who strangled nine young women in North Carolina in the early 1990s; Cleophus Prince Jr. (aka the “Clairemont Killer”), who butchered a half-dozen women in San Diego during a nine-month spree beginning in January 1990; and Kendall Francois, who murdered eight women in the upstate
New York town of Poughkeepsie in the late 1990s and stashed their corpses in his attic crawl space.