The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (47 page)

Given the significant number of black psycho-killers in the U.S., why do most people assume that serial murder is an all-white phenomenon? The likeliest explanation is deep-rooted racial prejudice. Serial killers tend to stick to their own race. White psychos generally prey on white victims; blacks on black. And the sad fact is that white America isn’t particularly interested in crimes involving minorities. Even the most horrific murders get far less attention from the mainstream media—and often from the police as well—when the victims are people of color.

Indeed, some serial killers have counted on this very fact in order to get away with their crimes. In the 1920s, for example, the cannibalistic pedophile Albert
Fish
prowled the inner-city slums because he knew that the police wouldn’t exert themselves to investigate the disappearance of black children. More recently, Jeffrey
Dahmer
preyed mostly on African-American and Asian young men for the same reason. The discovery of Dahmer’s atrocities set off major protests among black and Asian Milwaukeeans, outraged at the perceived racism of the city’s police department.

Fish and Dahmer may have been exploiting the prevailing prejudices of society, but their crimes were motivated by extreme sexual depravity, not racism. The case has been otherwise with a small minority of serial murderers. The late 1970s and early 1980s in particular were a boom time for serial murders based on race, as a handful of self-styled “Aryan warriors” launched homicidal crusades against minorities. In Cleveland, a Nazi transvestite named Frank Spisak killed one black man and two whites he believed were Jews. In western New York State, white supremacist Joseph Christopher hunted down and murdered a dozen African-Americans over a three-month period (cutting out the hearts of two of his victims), while Hitler-worshipping Joseph Franklin roamed from state to state, slaughtering blacks, Jews, and interracial couples—more than thirteen victims in all.

Of course, racially inspired serial murder (like the sexually motivated variety) is not strictly a white phenomenon. In the early 1970s, a Black Muslim splinter group known as the “Death Angels” required that prospective members prove their zeal by murdering white people and taking Polaroids of their corpses. San Francisco’s “Zebra” killings (so called because the victims were white and the perpetrators black) were the horrific result: fifteen men and women slain in six months. A few years later, the Chicago area was the
scene of a similar string of random killings. Calling themselves “De Mau Mau,” the culprits were a group of black Vietnam veterans who vented their rage against white society by slaughtering ten people, including two entire families.

The Atlanta Child Murders

Though crimes involving African-American victims often receive scant attention in the press, a notable exception was the appalling series of child murders that took place in Atlanta in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The case, which generated nationwide outrage and horror, was covered extensively by the mainstream media. Indeed, it was in a May 1981
New York Times Magazine
article on the then-unsolved case that the recently coined term “serial killer” first appeared in a major publication.

In a two-year period between 1979 and 1981, the killer claimed twenty-nine victims. Most were children, most were male, and all were African-American. What made the investigation especially difficult was the lack of a clear pattern. Like the infamous Peter
Kürten
, the killer didn’t seem to have any particular homicidal preference—usually strangling his victims, but sometimes stabbing them or bludgeoning them to death.

As the months went by and the body count rose, both the public and the media demanded a solution to what seemed to be a case of racial terrorism. Civil rights groups led the way, and President Reagan responded by setting aside federal funds to track down the killer. Meanwhile, celebrities from Muhammad Ali to Burt Reynolds offered private financial assistance. Many perceived the murders as a deranged political act, probably committed by the Ku Klux Klan. When investigators finally made an arrest, however, the suspect turned out to be not a homicidal white racist, but a young black male who fit the classic profile of a psychopathic loner.

The turning point in the case was a mysterious incident on a bridge that seemed to come straight out of the ominous 1967 ballad “Ode to Billie Joe.” On the night of May 22, 1981, police officers heard something splash beneath the bridge spanning the Chattahoochee River. Moments later, they stopped a car leaving the bridge and questioned the driver, a young African-American named Wayne Williams. He became the prime suspect in the Atlanta Child Murders when police discovered the body of one of the victims in the river. Over the next month, more evidence emerged, including fibers
found on the victims that matched furnishings in Williams’s car and house, and animal hairs that matched his pet dog.

Also implicating him were odd personality traits reminiscent of other psychopaths. He often lied, for instance, to exaggerate his own importance, and he was fond of impersonating police officers, a favorite tactic of serial killers to win the trust of their victims. The police arrested him in June. Eventually, Williams was convicted of two counts of murder and received a life sentence for each.

Despite the convictions, many people have claimed that authorities railroaded Williams through a combination of questionable circumstantial evidence and inconclusive fiber matches. More than twenty years later, in May 2005, these skeptics got an opportunity to prove their point when police chief Louis Graham of DeKalb County reopened the investigation of the four Atlanta Child Murders in his jurisdiction. Graham, a police officer at the time of Williams’s arrest, has always believed that the true culprit was the KKK.

These developments, however, may be less significant than they seem. Even if Williams is cleared of the four DeKalb County homicides, he will not be released, since the cases in Graham’s jurisdiction don’t include the two murders that sent Williams to prison in the first place. And the new investigation will also have to answer one crucial question: Why did the child killings suddenly stop after Williams was arrested?

R
AILROADS

In the 1800s, the railroad was regarded as one of the wonders of the age, a glorious achievement celebrated in story and song. In one of his most famous poems, the great American bard Walt Whitman rhapsodized about the railroad:

I see over my own continent the Pacific Railroad,

surmounting every barrier;

I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring,

and the shrill steam-whistle,

I hear the echoes reverberate through the

grandest scenery in the world.

For Whitman, the transcontinental railroad was a symbol of America’s greatness and glory. Of course, he couldn’t possibly foresee the day when it would serve as the preferred mode of transportation for roving psychopathic killers.

Carl
Panzram
—
the Jazz Age drifter who eventually confessed to twenty-one murders and more than a thousand acts of sodomy—began riding the rails shortly after finishing a stint in reform school. He was still in his teens when four hoboes gang-raped him in a boxcar. The experience taught him a lesson that would serve as his credo for the remainder of his incorrigible life: “Force and might make right.”

It was a lesson he put into practice every chance he got. For a while, he worked as a train guard for the Illinois Central Railroad—a job that offered him a prime opportunity for beating the brains out of practically everyone he could lay his hands on, whether union agitators, scabs, or even other guards.

The rails also figured in an especially spectacular (if undocumented) episode from his misbegotten life. From time to time, Panzram claimed, he would place a bomb in a railroad tunnel, blow up an oncoming train, then shoot anyone who happened to survive the explosion.

Though Panzram was as vicious as they come, his story about massacring whole trainloads of passengers was probably just a homicidal fantasy. The terrible crimes of “Railway Killer” Angel Maturino Resendez, however, were all too real. A modern railway hobo, Resendez was a migrant worker from Mexico who hitched rides on freight cars from one temporary job to another. He was also a rage-filled psychokiller who preyed upon his victims along the railroad right-of-way.

After committing his first murder in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1997, Resendez bummed his way by rail from one random destination to the next, killing as he went. Typically, he broke into people’s homes and savaged his victims with whatever weapon was handy—shotgun, kitchen knife, sledgehammer, or gardening tool—then slipped back to the tracks and moved on. The “Railway Killer” struck several times in Texas and ventured as far north as Illinois. Placed on the
FBI
’s “Ten Most Wanted List,” he finally surrendered in July 1999. The following year, he received a death sentence for one murder, though he may have killed as many as nine people in all.

For one serial killer, trains were not a means of moving from one murder
to another. Nor were they a breeding ground for abuse and homicidal rage. They were a target. Panzram might have spun yarns about blowing up trains and trying to kill everyone inside, but the mad Hungarian, Sylvestre Matuschka, actually did it.

A World War I veteran and a successful businessman, Matuschka went for years without acting upon the bizarre obsessions that festered inside him. Then in 1930, at the age of thirty-nine, he attempted to derail two trains by setting up obstructions on the tracks. Neither act of sabotage produced any significant casualties, which only prodded him into devising a more devastating approach.

After methodically teaching himself the art of setting explosives, he blew up a set of tracks in Germany and sent an oncoming train careening off course. Matuschka was not satisfied. The crash injured seventy-five passengers but killed no one. His next explosion, in his native Hungary, was more to his liking. Twenty-two people were killed. This made him so happy, according to one account, that he experienced an orgasm as he watched the disaster unfold.

In court, Matuschka offered a series of wild explanations for his crimes, presumably to support an insanity defense. An evil hypnotist made him do it. He believed his train wrecks would stop the spread of atheism. He was controlled by a bunch of demons named Leo.

But the explanation he gave at the time of his arrest was far simpler. “I wrecked trains because I like to see people die,” he said. “I like to hear people scream.”