The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (57 page)

Joseph Vacher

One of the scariest things about serial killers is how normal they can seem. Ted
Bundy
looked like a frat boy, Jeffrey
Dahmer
like a computer nerd, and John Wayne
Gacy
like the president of the local Rotary Club. Frenchman Joseph Vacher (1869-1897) was different. In his case, appearances weren’t deceiving at all. He had the kind of face that could give children nightmares. And his actions were consistent with his looks.

A repulsively seedy tramp with a palsied face and an eye that leaked a steady stream of pus, Vacher was born into a poor peasant family, the last of fifteen children. He committed his first known crime—the attempted rape of a young boy—when he was nineteen. Two years later, he was conscripted into the army, and he cut his own throat with a razor when he failed to win promotion to corporal. Several years later, he tried suicide again when a young woman he coveted spurned his advances. Vacher shot her three times with a pistol, then turned the gun on himself and fired point-blank into his own face.

The woman survived. So did Vacher, though half his face was now permanently paralyzed and his right eye was reduced to a raw, suppurating
hole. After a year in an insane asylum, he was discharged as “cured.” Equipping himself with a few basic necessities (maps, an umbrella, a cudgel, several butcher knives, and a cleaver), he tramped around the countryside for three and a half years. Stopping at a farmhouse whenever he grew hungry, he would pound on the door and demand food from the owner, who was usually happy to oblige just to get rid of the hideous tramp.

But Vacher was possessed by other, infinitely more loathsome appetites. During the course of his wanderings, he set upon and slaughtered eleven people of both sexes, assaulting them in a demonic frenzy—stabbing, strangling, mutilating, biting, disembowelling. Most of his victims, male as well as female, were raped after death.

The “French Ripper,” as the shadowy killer began to be called, was finally apprehended in August 1897. At his trial, he argued that he was not mentally competent. His mind, he claimed, had been twisted as an eight-year-old boy when he was bitten by a mad dog. The court was not convinced. On New Year’s Eve, 1898, the twenty-nine-year-old Vacher was sent to the guillotine.

V
AMPIRES

There’s both good and bad news about vampires. The good news is that they don’t exist, at least not the kind found in old Bela Lugosi movies. There are plenty of things to worry about in life, but being attacked in your bedroom by a four-hundred-year-old Transylvanian demon isn’t one of them.

The bad news about vampires is that some sexual psychopaths derive intense satisfaction from drinking human blood and will resort to serial murder to satisfy this monstrous craving. Deviants like these don’t sleep in coffins or turn themselves into bats, but in one crucial respect, they are infinitely scarier than Bram Stoker’s Dracula or the sexy bloodsuckers of Anne Rice’s novels. These ravenous fiends are for real.

One of the most infamous real-life vampires was the Italian lust murderer Vincenz Verzeni. From an early age, Verzeni took exquisite delight in strangulation. At twelve, he discovered that he got tremendous pleasure from wringing the necks of chickens. By the time he reached late adolescence, he had progressed from poultry to women. At first, he simply throttled his victims until he achieved orgasm. Once he climaxed, he would let his
victims live. In his early twenties, however, Verzeni’s perversion took a horrific turn. In 1871, he pounced on a fourteen-year-old girl, dragged her to a field, and choked her to death. Then—in a sadistic frenzy—he chewed at her thigh and sucked her blood, ripped out her intestines, tore out her genitals, and removed a chunk of her calf, which he carried away with him, intending to roast and eat it. Eight months later, he savaged another young woman, garroting her with a leather thong, then biting open her neck and gorging on her blood. Verzeni was arrested after attacking his own nineteen-year-old cousin, who managed to fight him off, then immediately reported him to the police.

In the late 1940s, British serial slayer John George Haigh murdered half a dozen people to get his hands on their money, then dissolved their remains in his basement acid vat. At his 1949 trial, the notorious “Acid-Bath Murderer” insisted that before disposing of each body, he had tapped the victim’s jugular, drawn off a glassful of blood, and quaffed it. Though Haigh’s vampiric claims were viewed by many as a clumsy attempt to cop an insanity plea, it seems fairly certain that at the very least he was afflicted with a severe case of
hematomania
—a lifelong obsession with blood.

One of the weirdest cases of vampirism was that of Florencio Fernandez, a twenty-five-year-old Argentine stonemason who, in 1960, slipped through the windows of fifteen sleeping women and attacked them in their beds—pinioning their arms, biting into their throats, and drinking their blood. Like the Nicolas Cage character in the 1989 cult movie
Vampire’s Kiss,
Fernandez apparently suffered from a serious vampiric delusion. He lived in a cave, prowled the night in a black Dracula-like cloak, and spent the daylight hours sunk in a comalike sleep.

Like Dracula’s zoophagous servant, Renfield, young Richard Chase loved to drink the blood of animals—rabbits, cats, dogs. In 1978, however, he progressed to infinitely more monstrous crimes. During a four-day spree, he broke into several homes, killed and butchered the inhabitants (including a pregnant woman and a twenty-two-month-old infant), and wallowed in their gore. After his arrest, he confessed to drinking the blood of his victims. Chase—who was dubbed the “Vampire of Sacramento”—served as the real-life model for the unspeakable killer in the 1992 movie
Rampage,
a thought-provoking (and occasionally harrowing) film directed by William Friedkin of
Exorcist
fame.

For more on the world of real-life blood sucking killers, readers should
check out the book
True Vampires
(Feral Press, 2003) by Sondra London (a writer who has earned some notoriety herself for her romantic attachment to not one but two infamous lust murderers, Gerard the “Butcher of Blind Creek” Schaefer and Danny the “Gainesville Ripper” Rollings). London’s book is not just a comprehensive survey of its macabre subject; it also features handsome illustrations by one of the crazies she covers: Nico Claux, aka the “Vampire of Paris,” who satisfied his unholy urges by desecrating graves, plundering morgues, and robbing blood banks.

Richard Chase; from
Murderers!
trading card set

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

“I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women, experiencing during the act erections and real sexual pleasure. The feeling of pleasure while strangling them was much greater than that which I experienced while masturbating. . . . It never occurred to me to touch or look at the genitals. It satisfied me to seize the women by the neck and suck their blood.”

V
INCENZ
V
ERZENI

The Vanishing

Holland isn’t exactly known for its epidemic of serial murder, so it’s surprising that one of the most disturbing cinematic depictions of a psychopathic killer appears in the 1988 Dutch film
The Vanishing,
directed by George Sluizer.

The movie focuses on an obsessed young man named Rex Hofman, whose girlfriend disappears without a trace when they make a pit stop at a roadside rest station. Though Hofman eventually concedes that his girlfriend must have been abducted and killed, he can’t live with the tormenting uncertainty and refuses to rest until he discovers what befell her.

The villain of the piece is one of the most unsettling psychos in movie history, a meek, soft-spoken family man with a taste for a particularly unspeakable form of torture. Portrayed with chilling perfection by an actor named Barnard Pierre Donnadieu, the killer ultimately offers to show the haunted young man what the vanished girl experienced. In a shattering (if somewhat implausible) conclusion, Hofman accepts the killer’s proposition—leading to one of the most nightmarish endings ever put on film. This is one of those small, understated European fright films that has infinitely more impact than the typical Hollywood splatter fest.

Hollywood, in fact, produced a remake of
The Vanishing
in 1993, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges. Though directed again by Sluizer, this second version falls completely flat. Stick to the original!