The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (50 page)

Seven years later, in March 1987, Philadelphia police raided the home of a maniac named Gary
Heidnik
and discovered a trio of half-starved women chained up to the plumbing in his cellar. Heidnik, as it turned out, had abducted and enslaved a total of six victims altogether, subjecting them to months of rape and torture. Searching the rest of the house, the officers quickly discovered that the horrors were not confined to the so-called Torture Dungeon. In the freezer compartment of the kitchen refrigerator, they found a human arm, intended for a cannibal meal. Among his other atrocities, Heidnik liked to mix chopped-up human flesh with dog food and force his starving captives to devour the unholy meal.

Other serial killers, like the German lust murderer Joachim Kroll, had stocked their refrigerators with human flesh to satisfy their own cannibalistic cravings. The same was true of Jeffrey
Dahmer
, whose refrigerator contained a wide assortment of body parts, including heads, intestines, kidneys, lungs, livers, and a heart.

R
ELIGION

See
Zealots
.

R
IPPERS

According to most crime historians,
Jack the Ripper
is the seminal psychokiller of the modern era—the granddaddy of all serial murderers. So it’s only fitting that some of his descendants have been named after him.

His earliest namesake stalked the countryside of southern France: Joseph
Vacher
, the “French Ripper,” who savaged almost a dozen victims in the late 1890s. Since that time, most of the killers christened with the Ripper name have been compatriots of the original.

During the London blitz of World War II, while Hitler’s Luftwaffe rained terror from the sky, the city was confronted with a very different kind of menace—a homicidal fiend who stalked and slaughtered defenseless women. On February 9, 1942, this bloodthirsty butcher struck for the first time, strangling a female pharmacist in an air-raid shelter. The following day, he picked up a prostitute in Picadilly Circus, then—after accompanying her back to her Soho flat—slit her throat and mutilated her genitals with a can opener. Two more victims followed on succeeding nights, both subjected to hideous mutilations. The perpetrator of these atrocities—who turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old RAF cadet named Gordon Cummins—was caught after two more attempted killings, both of which he botched. His ghastly deeds, so reminiscent of those of the original “Whitechapel Horrors,” earned him the moniker the “Blackout Ripper.”

Another of Jack’s homicidal heirs was Peter Sutcliffe, aka the “Yorkshire Ripper.” A thirtyish truck driver and former gravedigger, Sutcliffe—who believed he was acting on orders from God—conducted a five-year campaign of carnage that commenced in the mid-1970s. Using his favorite weapons—ball peen hammer, chisel, carving knife, and screwdriver—he attacked more than two dozen women, killing thirteen. Though some of his victims were coeds, his primary targets were prostitutes. When Sutcliffe was finally arrested in 1981 after the largest manhunt in British history, his younger brother, Carl, asked him why he had done it. “I were just cleaning the streets,” Sutcliffe replied.

The crimes of Cummins and Sutcliffe were clearly in the tradition of the original “Whitechapel Horrors.” But these two killers differed from Jack the Ripper in one important respect: both of them were eventually caught. One serial killer of
Prostitutes
who eluded the police was the shadowy killer
who strangled half a dozen women in the early to mid-1960s. After dispatching his victims, he dumped their naked bodies in various places around London—an MO that inspired his punning tabloid moniker. The killer (who has never been officially identified) was dubbed “Jack the Stripper.”

R
ITUAL

Ritual killings committed by devil-worshipping cultists happen all the time in horror fiction and fantasy but rarely, if ever, in real life. The
FBI
has yet to document a single instance of such ceremonial sacrifice in America (see
Satanism
). On the other hand, bizarre ritualistic patterns are commonplace among serial killers. Though this behavior often appears random to an outside observer, it clearly possesses some deep, terrible significance to the killer himself, who is compelled to repeat it again and again.

Often the pattern involves a particular
way
of killing. Each of
Jack the Ripper’s
crimes culminated in a kind of ritual evisceration—as if he were enacting some primitive sacrifice in which the victim’s entrails were removed and offered up to the gods. Another unidentified serial murderer, the 1930s madman known as the “Cleveland Torso Killer,” methodically dismembered his victims and made off with their heads, which he apparently kept as ritual
Trophies
—in much the same way that aboriginal warriors collect the scalps and shrunken heads of their foes.

At other times, the killer will perform some compulsive ritual as an integral
part
of the crime. John Wayne
Gacy
turned his hideous murders into a grotesque ceremony by reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd”) while slowly garroting his victims. The “Green River Killer”—who murdered a string of young women in the Seattle area during the early 1980s—left weird, pyramid-shaped stones in the vaginas of his victims. Ed
Gein
—in unwitting emulation of those Aztec priests who arrayed themselves in the flayed skin of sacrificial victims—liked to parade around in apparel fashioned from the human flesh of dissected female corpses. And Albert “Boston Strangler”
DeSalvo
ritualistically left his victims looking like grotesque, gift-wrapped holiday presents. After strangling a woman, he would tie the ligature—usually a scarf, stocking, or bathrobe sash—into a big, ornamental bow. In one case, he also left a greeting card propped up against the victim’s foot.

R
USSIA

For decades, leaders of the Soviet Union maintained that crime was not a problem in their country. Thievery and murder, they insisted, were symptoms of Western-style capitalistic decadence. The collapse of communism in the early 1980s, of course, revealed all sorts of problems that had been hidden by the Iron Curtain. In particular, the 1992 trial of Andrei
Chikatilo
—the “Rostov Ripper”—demonstrated that while the USSR might not have been able to supply its citizens with basic consumer items, it could certainly produce serial killers every bit as terrifying as any American psycho. Moreover, though Chikatilo was undoubtedly the most savage of Russian sex killers, he was not unique: multiple murderers had been prowling through the Soviet Union from the earliest days of the Communist regime.

In the early 1920s, thirty-three men fell victim to a sociopathic horse trader named Vasili Komaroff, aka the “Wolf of Moscow.” After luring a prospective customer to his stable, Komaroff—assisted by his wife—would bludgeon or strangle the victim to death, strip him of his possessions, then truss up the body, stuff it into a sack, and deposit it in an empty lot somewhere in the city. When authorities finally caught up with him, Komaroff claimed that he killed solely for money—an unlikely explanation, since his nearly three dozen murders netted him a grand total of $26.40. Clearly, there were other, darker motives at work—but the Soviet authorities were much less interested in fathoming his psychology than in putting him to death as promptly as possible. Komaroff and his wife were executed by a firing squad in June 1923.

In more recent years, as the serial-murder rate started burgeoning in the West, the Soviet Union also had its share of grisly killers. In 1964, an unemployed Moscow actor named Vladimir Ionosyan butchered five people with an
Axe
. Ten years later, a shadowy killer nicknamed “Ivan the Ripper” slaughtered eleven Moscow women. Authorities eventually arrested a man for the killings, but—in typically secretive Soviet style—they never divulged who the culprit was or how the case was resolved.

In the 1980s—while America was confronted with the gruesome likes of Henry Lee
Lucas
and Gary
Heidnik
—Soviet authorities caught up with Gennadily Mikhasevich, who used his position as an auxiliary policeman to trap and strangle thirty-three women. Another homicidal monster of that
decade was Nikolai Dzumagalies—one of the most frightening and ferocious serial killers ever spawned in the USSR (or anywhere else, for that matter). Like Francis Dolarhyde, the terrifying psychocreep in Thomas Harris’s novel
Red Dragon
—who savages his victims with a lethal set of dentures—Dzumagalies (or “Metal Fang,” as he came to be nicknamed) sported scary, white metal false teeth. Luring women to a lonely riverbank at night, he proceeded to rape them, stab them, and carve up their bodies. Then he roasted the flesh and shared it with friends, who—believing they were partaking of beef—were turned into unwitting cannibals.

S
ADISM

Some criminologists define serial murder in strictly quantitative terms: three or more homicides committed over an extended length of time, with an emotional “cooling-off” period between each incident (see
Definition
). Other specialists in the field, however, believe that serial murder in the strict sense of the term always contains another element: a powerful streak of sexual sadism.

Certainly, this is the aspect of serial killing that makes it such a uniquely hideous crime—even worse than mass murder. After all, it is one thing to be cut down by a crazed gunman in a convenience store; it is quite another to fall victim to a psycho who calmly explains (as one serial killer actually did): “First, I’m going to torture you in the most horrible and painful manner I can think of. Then I’m going to abuse you sexually in the most degrading way I can possibly think of. Then I’ll kill you in the slowest and most painful way I can. Any questions?”

Albert
Fish
liked to castrate teenage boys and watch them bleed to death in agony. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng took videotapes of the slow, sadistic murder of their bound and captive sex slaves. Another serial killer tortured a
prostitute for forty-three days before killing her. These are just a few of countless unspeakable examples.

In this regard, serial murder can be seen as a kind of depraved travesty of normal sexual functioning. Instead of looking for a date at a singles bar or dance club, the serial killer goes trolling for victims in some favorite hunting ground—a red-light district, say, or a homosexual hangout. Once he has a victim in his power, he achieves sexual release not through intercourse but through torture, degradation, and finally murder (it is not uncommon for a lust murderer to reach orgasm during his victim’s death throes). The so-called cooling-off period corresponds to the contented lull that normally follows sex, while the psychopath’s growing need to kill again is the equivalent of building sexual hunger—in effect, the serial killer gets increasingly horny for blood.

Sexual psychopaths of this type tend to be victims of extreme physical and/or emotional childhood abuse (often sexual abuse). Subjected to vicious
Upbringings
that twist their erotic natures completely out of shape, they grow up equating sex not with love and tenderness but with aggression, dominance, and murderous rage. To cite just one of many examples: Joseph Kallinger—who tortured and mutilated a string of young boys (including his own son)—was raised by parents who routinely flogged him with a cat-o’-nine-tails and threatened him with castration. Other serial killers who conform to this pattern are Henry Lee
Lucas
, John Wayne
Gacy
, Edmund
Kemper
, and Jeffrey
Dahmer
—in short, some of the most monstrous criminals of our (or any other) time.

“I always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me. I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt. The desire to inflict pain, that is all that is uppermost.”

A
LBERT
F
ISH

“It is probable that he first cut the throats of his victims, then ripped open the abdomen and groped among the intestines. In some instances he cut off the genitals and carried them away; in others he only tore them to pieces and left them behind. He does not seem to have had sexual intercourse with his victims, but very likely the murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse were the equivalents for the sex act.”

R
ICHARD VON
K
RAFFT
-E
BING
,
discussing Jack the Rippet