The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (49 page)

For a seemingly asexual man, however, Lecter has produced a prodigious number of offspring: namely the hundreds (if not thousands) of make-believe serial killers who have pervaded popular fiction since the runaway success of Thomas Harris’s
Red Dragon
and
The Silence of the Lambs.
Thanks to Harris—the first pop novelist to hit the jackpot by tapping into America’s obsessive fascination with psycho-killers—the serial murderer has become the favorite monster of modern-day thriller writers, who wrack their brains dreaming up ever more diabolical homicidal maniacs with fantastically elaborate MOs. By now, there are far too many books in this genre to list here, though Professor Martin Kich of Wright State University has compiled an excellent bibliography, available online at
www.wright.edu/~martin.kich
.

Here are a dozen of our personal favorites (a few of them golden oldies):

1.
Psycho.
The granddaddy of psycho-killer novels. This pulp classic by the late great Robert
Bloch
transformed the real-life atrocities of Ed
Gein
into genuine myth and inspired one of the masterworks of American cinema.

2.
American Gothic.
A lesser-known (but in certain ways even more sus-penseful) novel by Bloch, based on the crimes of Chicago’s nineteenth-century
Bluebeard
, Dr. H. H.
Holmes
.

3.
American Psycho.
Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious bestseller—which set off a feminist firestorm when it was originally published—is actually a savagely dark comedy about Yuppie consumerism, though its scenes of stomach-churning sadism often obscure its basically satirical intent.

4.
Red Dragon.
Hannibal Lecter made his debut appearance in this nail-biter by Thomas Harris. One of the most sheerly suspenseful thrillers of modern times with a knockout ending that, bizarrely, Hollywood has failed to get right in both cinematic versions, Michael Mann’s 1986
Manhunter
and Bret Ratner’s 2002
Red Dragon.

5.
The Silence of the Lambs.
The
Gone with the Wind
of psychokiller
novels. A tour de force of horror-suspense, this novel by Harris—the second to feature Hannibal Lecter—stands as the yardstick against which all other fiction in the serial-killer genre must be measured.

6.
The Killer Inside Me.
The narrator of Jim Thompson’s pulp classic—a small-town sheriff who torments people by speaking in mind-numbing clichés when he isn’t committing horrendous acts of homicide—is not, strictly speaking, a serial killer. Still, this powerfully unsettling, darkly hilarious novel is one of the best psychological portraits of a psychopath in print.

7.
Zombie.
Joyce Carol Oates crawls into the mind of a Jeffrey
Dahmer
-like psycho who dreams of creating his own personal
Zombie
by using ice picks to perform lobotomies on living victims. Not for the squeamish!

8.
The Alienist.
An intensely evocative historical thriller by Caleb Carr about a psychiatrist tracking down a serial killer in turn-of-the-century New York City. The novel features a cameo appearance by the real-life “Boy Fiend,” Jesse Pomeroy (see
Juveniles
).

9.
Child of God.
Written in the trademark lyrical style of author Cormac McCarthy, this haunting novel tells the story of an Eddie
Gein
-like necrophile named Lester Ballard who holes up in a Tennessee cave with his unholy trophies, emerging periodically to seek new victims.

10.
In the Cut.
Susanna Moore’s brutally suspenseful erotic thriller deals with a New York City college professor who finds herself involved in a highly charged sexual affair with a cop who may also be a serial killer. The novel builds to a shattering climax, completely lost in the disappointing 2003 film version starring Meg Ryan.

11.
Darkly Dreaming Dexter.
In this engaging novel, Jeff Lindsay manages the unlikely feat of creating an utterly endearing serial killer. Dexter Morgan, the protagonist of this delightfully offbeat thriller, is a police forensic specialist by day and a sadistic murderer in his spare time. What makes him such an appealing character—besides his wit and self-deprecating humor—is his strict code of serial killer ethics: he preys only on psychos sicker than himself.

12.
13 Steps Down.
Readers looking for hardcore horror and edge-of-the-seat suspense may find this book disappointing. But for those who cherish stylish prose, complex characterization, and psychological subtlety, this novel by acclaimed British mystery writer Ruth Rendell—about an eccentric spinster landlady and her sociopathic tenant, a fitness-equipment repairman obsessed with the legendary serial killer Reg Christie—is a rare literate treat.

For Bibliophiles Only

Patterson Smith, an antiquarian bookseller and social historian, specializes in rare and out-of-print crime volumes. Smith offers everything from hard-to-find reference works (like a reprint of Thomas S. Duke’s 1910 classic,
Celebrated Criminal Cases of America)
to oddities like
Killer Fiction,
a collection of absolutely hair-raising stories by convicted sex killer G. J. Schaefer.

For information, contact: Patterson Smith, 23 Prospect Terrace, Mont-clair, NJ 07402.

R
ECORDS

No, we’re not referring to Guns N’ Roses’ version of Charlie
Manson
’s “Look at Your Game, Girl” or
“
Heidnik
’s House of Horrors” by the Serial Killers (you’ll find those catchy numbers covered under
Songs
). We’re talking about something much grimmer: killers who can claim the deadly distinction of having slain the most victims.

The serial-murder rate has increased so alarmingly in recent years that some criminologists talk in terms of an “epidemic.” One indication of how scary the situation has become is the escalating number of victims attributed to individual killers. In 1888, the Western world was horrified by the deeds of
Jack the Ripper
—but Saucy Jack’s total of five victims wouldn’t even rate a mention on the national news nowadays.

By 1896, Jack’s record had already been eclipsed by Dr. H. H.
Holmes
, who killed a minimum of nine victims (he himself claimed twenty-seven, and some crime historians put the total in the hundreds). Thirty years later, Earle Leonard
Nelson
set the homicidal record in our country, strangling twenty-two women during a savage, cross-country killing spree. His contemporary Carl
Panzram
fell just short of that number, confessing to twenty-one murders (in addition to a slew of other crimes).

During the past twenty-five years, each new record has been broken almost as soon as it was set. In 1973, Juan Corona officially became the
most prolific serial killer in American history when he was convicted of slaying twenty-five California transients. But by the end of the decade, Ted Bundy had slain at least twenty-eight and John Wayne Gacy thirty-three.

And still the numbers kept rising. In Russia, Andrei Chikatilo was accused of fifty-two sadistic slayings and suspected of even more. Gary Ridgway—the long-elusive “Green River Killer”—eventually confessed to forty-eight murders, though there may have been as many as sixty. As appalling as these figures are, they pale before the estimated two hundred and fifty murders committed by Dr. Harold Shipman, England’s most prolific serial killer (see Doctors).

When it comes to killers who have
claimed
the highest total, the all-time champions are America’s own Henry Lee Lucas and the South American lust slayer Pedro Lopez (aka the “Monster of the Andes”), each of whom confessed to more than three hundred murders. Lucas, however, ultimately retracted his story. As for Lopez—who was convicted in 1980 of fifty-seven homicides—the true number of his victims has never been definitively established.

Henry Lee Lucas; from
Murderers!
trading card set

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

R
EFRIGERATORS

Serial killers have been known to use their household appliances for purposes that the friendly folks at Maytag and KitchenAid have never dreamed of—not even in their worst nightmares. Living in a decaying old farmhouse without electricity, Edward
Gein
was forced to rely on time-consuming tanning methods to preserve his collection of anatomical
Trophies
. Other serial killers, however—whose homes were equipped with all the modern conveniences—had a much easier time of it. To preserve a favorite body part, all they had to do was pop it into the fridge.

Douglas Clark—the “Sunset Strip Slayer,” who killed a string of Hollywood hookers in 1980—had a particular fetish for decapitated female heads. His girlfriend, Carol Bundy, indulged this perversion by applying makeup to the head of one of Clark’s victims, a twenty-year-old streetwalker. Clark stored this grotesque keepsake in his apartment refrigerator, occasionally removing it for the purpose of oral sex.