The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (5 page)

B
ATHTUBS

Exploring the spooky labyrinth of Buffalo Bill’s basement at the climax of Thomas Harris’s
The Silence of the Lambs,
Clarice Starling happens on a ghastly sight: a “big bathtub . . . almost filled with hard red-purple plaster. A hand and wrist stuck up from the plaster, the hand turned dark and shrivelled, the fingernails painted pink.” Clarice has stumbled onto one of the monster’s former victims, who has been turned into some sort of grotesque tableau.

Like the rest of us, of course, real-life serial killers require an occasional bath and so can’t clog up their tubs with decomposed corpses encased in red-purple plaster of Paris. Some, however, have put their tubs to specialized uses.

For obvious reasons, bathtubs make a handy place to dismember corpses. After picking up a female hitchhiker in January 1973, for example, Edmund
Kemper
shot her in the head, then drove the body back home, hid it in his bedroom closet, and went to sleep. The next morning, after his mother left for work, he removed the corpse, had sex with it, then placed it in his bathtub and dismembered it with a Buck knife and an axe.

Dennis
Nilsen
’s tub, on the other hand, was used for a more traditional purpose. He liked to bathe his lovers in it. Of course, they were dead at the time. Like Jeffrey
Dahmer
, this British serial killer murdered his homosexual pickups partly because he was desperate for companionship. Turning them into corpses was his way of ensuring that they wouldn’t leave in the morning. After strangling a victim, Nilsen would engage in a regular ritual, tenderly cleaning the corpse in his tub, then lovingly arranging it in front of the TV or stereo or perhaps at the dining room table, so he could enjoy its company until it became too decomposed to bear.

And then there is the occasional serial killer who turns his tub into a killing device, like the British
Bluebeard
George Joseph Smith, the notorious “Brides in the Bath” murderer, who drowned three of his seven wives for their insurance money.

Of course, the most famous of these bathroom fixtures is the shower-tub combo where Janet Leigh meets her brutal end at the hands of Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Thanks to Hitchcock’s
Psycho,
countless unclad starlets have been butchered by maniacs while soaping up in the shower or relaxing in a bubble bath. Every now and then, a knife-wielding psycho will even pop out of a tub as in
Fatal Attraction.
But on the whole, these are perils that hardly ever occur outside the movies. For the most part, bathtubs are perfectly safe—as long as you don’t slip on the soap.

B
ED
-W
ETTING

See
Triad
.

David Berkowitz

It was the era of New York disco fever—of platform shoes, leisure suits, dancing to the Bee Gees while a mirrored globe spun and flashed overhead. But for a little more than a year, between 1976 and 1977, the disco beat turned into a pulse of fear as a gun-wielding madman prowled the city streets at night. His weapon was a .44 revolver—and at first the tabloids tagged him the “.44-Caliber Killer.”

The terror began on July 29, 1976, when two young women were shot in
a parked car in the Bronx. Young people in cars—often dating couples—would continue to be the killer’s targets of choice. On one occasion, however, he gunned down a pair of young women sitting on a stoop. On another, he shot a woman as she walked home from school. Frantically she tried protecting her face with a book—but to no avail. The killer simply raised the muzzle of his weapon to the makeshift shield and blasted her in the head. Before his rampage was over, a total of six young New Yorkers were dead, seven more severely wounded.

David Berkowitz; from
Bloody Visions
trading cards

(© & ™ 1995 M. H. Price and Shel-Tone Publications. All rights reserved.)

At the scene of one double murder, police found a long, ranting note from the killer. “I am the ‘Son of Sam.’ I am a little brat,” he wrote. From that point on, the killer would be known by his bizarre new nickname.

For months, while the city was gripped by panic, police made no headway. When a break finally came, it happened as a result of a thirty-five-dollar parking ticket. On July 31, 1977, when a couple was shot along the Brooklyn shore, a witness noticed someone driving away from the scene in a car that had just been ticketed. Tracing the summons through their computer, the police came up with the name and address of David Berkowitz, a pudgy-faced postal worker living in Yonkers.

When police picked him up, they found an arsenal in the trunk of
Berkowitz’s car. Son of Sam had been planning an apocalyptic act of carnage—a kamikaze assault on a Long Island disco.

Under arrest, Berkowitz explained the meaning of his bizarre moniker. “Sam” turned out to be the name of a neighbor, Sam Carr, who—in Berkowitz’s profoundly warped mind—was actually a “high demon” who transmitted his orders to kill through his pet dog, a black Labrador retriever. Insane as this story was, Berkowitz was found mentally fit to stand trial. He was eventually sentenced to three hundred years in the pen, where he has recently undergone a religious conversion and become a jailhouse televan-gelist, preaching the gospel on public-access TV.

“I didn’t want to hurt them,
I only wanted to kill them.”

D
AVID
B
ERKOWITZ

B
LACK
W
IDOWS

Classic serial sex murder—in which a sadistic sociopath is driven to stalk, slay, and commit unspeakable acts on a succession of strangers—is an outrage perpetrated almost exclusively by men. As two-fisted culture critic Camille Paglia puts it, “There are no female
Jack the Rippers
” (see
Women
). On the other hand, women who murder a whole string of their mates, often for mercenary reasons, are relatively common in the annals of crime. These female counterparts of the male
Bluebeard
-type killer are known (in homage to the deadly arachnid that devours its mates after sex) as “Black Widows.”

The most infamous of this breed was the legendary Belle Gunness, née Brynhild Storset, who came to this country from a small fishing village in Norway in 1881. Like other nineteenth-century immigrants, the enterprising young woman found America to be a land of plenty, where she could put her God-given talents to the most profitable use. As it happened, Belle’s
particular talent was serial murder. After a fire destroyed her Indiana farm in 1908, searchers found the decomposed remains of at least a dozen people on her property, some interred in the basement of the gutted house, others buried in the muck of the hog pen or planted in her garden. Most of her victims were either prospective husbands or hired hands who doubled as lovers. Their deaths allowed Gunness to cash in on their insurance policies and loot their bank accounts. Like the sow that devours its farrow, she also murdered two of her own infant children after insuring their lives. Gunness has gained legendary status not only because of the enormity of her crimes but also because she disappeared without a trace, slipping (like
Jack the Ripper
) into the realm of folklore and myth.

Mary Ann Cotton; from
Bloody Visions
trading cards

(© & ™ 1995 M. H. Price and Shel-Tone Publications. All rights reserved.)

Other notorious Black Widows followed Gunness’s avaricious pattern. In the mid-nineteenth century, America’s “Queen Poisoner,” Lydia Sherman, bumped off one husband after another in order to inherit their savings. Reluctant to split her new bounty with anyone else, she also poisoned her children, dispatching more than one of her victims with arsenic-spiked hot chocolate. In a strikingly similar fashion, her British contemporary
Mary Ann Cotton liquidated a whole string of spouses and children. Their deaths were attributed to “gastric fever”—until a postmortem on her final victim, her seven-year-old stepson, turned up traces of arsenic in his stomach.

Not all Black Widows, however, are motivated by greed. The matronly multicide Nannie Doss—dubbed the “Giggling Granny” by the press because she chuckled with amusement while confessing her crimes—became incensed when police accused her of killing four husbands for their insurance policies (which were, in fact, pretty paltry). An avid reader of true-romance fiction, Nanny insisted that she had murdered for love, not money. “I was searching for the perfect mate, the real romance of life.” When a husband didn’t measure up, she simply dispatched him (slipping liquid rat poison into his corn whiskey or stewed prunes), then went in search of another Prince Charming. Of course, her explanation was not entirely convincing, since her victims also included her mother, two sisters, two children, one grandson, and her nephew. Nannie Doss was sentenced to life in prison, where she died of leukemia in 1965 after writing her memoirs for
Life
magazine. She murdered neither for love nor for money. She killed because she enjoyed it.