The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (58 page)

V
IGAP

See
FBI
.

W
ANNABES

Serial killers are driven to perpetrate their outrages by profound psychological compulsions, generally of a perverted sexual nature. As a result, they tend to commit their crimes in highly personal, ritualistic ways. They may bind a victim just so, torture him or her in a specific way, use a particular kind of weapon to inflict death, then leave the corpse arranged in a specific position. All these elements—which make up the killer’s unique “signature”—are dictated by his sick individual needs. This is why there are so few serial-killer
Copycats
. Homicidal psychos, for the most part, aren’t interested in emulating other killers; they are only out to gratify their own depraved personal needs.

There is one need, however, that is common to most serial killers. Largely because they are so hideously abused and humiliated as children, most of these psychos grow up feeling utterly worthless and impotent. To compensate for this sense of nothingness, they often develop a raging megalomania—an uncontrollable need to prove to the world (and to themselves) that they are superior, all-powerful beings. For some, this need manifests itself as an insane ambition to earn everlasting infamy, to have their names go down
in the history books alongside those of the legendary criminals of the past. Killers like these are the psychopathic equivalent of celebrity wannabes.

The German lust murderer Peter
Kürten
, for example, sought to surpass the evil of his idol
Jack the Ripper
and become “the greatest criminal who ever lived.” The highly questionable confessions of Henry Lee
Lucas
—who admitted to over three hundred murders—were apparently motivated by the same self-aggrandizing impulses. Dr. H. H.
Holmes
, the nineteenth-century “multi-murderer” sometimes described as America’s first serial killer, possessed the same bizarre ambition. Taking perverse pride in his status as the country’s preeminent criminal (or “arch-fiend,” as the newspapers liked to call him), Holmes eagerly confessed to the murder of several dozen victims—many of whom subsequently turned out to be alive and well.

Indeed, so hungry are some serial killers for celebrity status that they grow actively incensed when their crimes are ignored or underestimated. When German sex killer Rudolph Pleil was charged with nine savage murders, he indignantly insisted that the actual number was twenty-eight. Only one thing mattered to Pleil—that he be universally acknowledged as
“der beste Totmacher,”
the world’s “best death-maker.”

Similarly, when the Wichita serial killer who called himself “
BTK
” didn’t receive the kind of press coverage he thought he deserved, he fired off a peevish complaint to a local newspaper: “How many do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?”

Colin Ireland, a British psycho-killer who preyed on gay men, thought he knew the answer to that question. In the spring of 1993, he savagely murdered five random victims. The reason? Ireland was a wannabe whose demented dream was to be known as a serial killer. He had read in a book that to be so classified, a person had to slay a minimum of four. He threw in the last one for good measure.

W
ARTIME

There’s an old Chinese saying: “In crisis there is opportunity.” This pearl of proverbial wisdom is epitomized by certain serial killers, who have turned the greatest crisis of them all—global warfare—into an opportunity for wholesale murder.

If World War I had never occurred, a small-time French sociopath
named Henri Landru might have lived out his days as nothing more than a petty crook. When the conflict broke out, however, Landru suddenly perceived a unique opportunity to exploit his nation’s woes for his own personal profit. With France’s male population decimated, the country was suddenly full of young, well-off widows. Landru set about preying on these vulnerable women, luring them through seductive matrimonial
Ads
, then wooing them, wedding them, and murdering them for their money (see
Bluebeards
).

Some twenty years later—during World War II—France’s worst fears were realized when Hitler’s troops occupied Paris, succeeding where the Kaiser’s had failed. Parisian Jews desperately sought a way to escape the Nazi terror. Waiting to prey on them was another French psychopath, Dr. Marcel
Petiot
.
Posing as a sympathetic Resistance agent who would help smuggle them out of the country, Petiot slowly killed the would-be refugees with lethal “vaccines,” then looted their possessions.

At roughly the same time in London—as the German Luftwaffe bombarded the city night after night—an English airman named Gordon Cummins found a chance to unleash his long-simmering sadism. Taking advantage of the city’s mandatory blackouts, he prowled the darkened streets and, in less than a week, savagely murdered four women (see
Rippers
).

The chaotic conditions of war allowed another notorious lust murderer—Bela Kiss of Hungary—not to commit his crimes but to escape punishment for them. Before the outbreak of World War I, Kiss had succeeded in slaying no fewer than twenty-three women without arousing suspicion. By the time his crimes were uncovered, he had already enlisted in the army and been killed in action. Or so it appeared. Only later did authorities surmise that Kiss had actually switched dog tags with a dying soldier, assumed the latter’s identity, and vanished without a trace (see
Whereabouts Unknown
).

W
EAPONS

Cinematic serial killers are artists of death, constantly searching for imaginative new ways to create carnage. In their homicidal hands, everything from a scythe to a staple gun becomes an instrument of mayhem, wielded with the virtuosity of a maestro.

Investigators display the saw Fish used to dismember Grace Budd’s body

Fish’s “Implements of Hell”; painting by Michael Rose

By contrast, real-life serial killers are much more conventional in their choice of weapons. What distinguishes them from ordinary killers is their preference for “manual” means of murder—stabbing, strangling, clubbing—over firearms. While the majority of American murders are committed with guns, serial killers favor the “hands-on” approach, which offers a more intense physical experience. When it comes to sick, sadistic pleasure, shooting people from a distance of twenty feet just can’t compete with plunging a serrated hunting knife into their flesh.

Of course, there are notable exceptions. Ed
Gein
dispatched his victims with a bullet to the back of the skull. And before he began signing his letters “Son of Sam,” David
Berkowitz
—the serial assassin who terrorized New York City in the late 1970s—was nicknamed after his favorite weapon: the “.44-Caliber Killer.”

W
HEREABOUTS
U
NKNOWN

The crimes perpetrated by serial killers are so appalling that when one of these creatures is on the loose, it sometimes seems as if a supernatural monster has risen from the underworld. Newspaper reporters trip all over themselves to come up with lurid, horror-movie monikers—the “Mad Beast,” the “Vampire-Killer,” the “Werewolf Slayer.” So it’s easy to feel a jolt of surprise when the monster is finally caught. The supernatural demon turns out to be a nondescript loser who looks about as threatening as a computer geek. The demon is reduced to pathetically human dimensions.

Unfortunately, some serial killers are never captured. In cases like these, the killer often continues to live on in popular fantasy as a kind of phantom or specter. Myths and folktales grow up around them. This is certainly true of the most famous of all serial killers,
Jack the Ripper
.
But there are other well-known serial killers who vanished without a trace and whose fate continues to tease the imagination of crime buffs. The anonymous
Axe
murderer who butchered a string of derelicts in Cleveland during the mid-1930s is one of these cases. In spite of the concerted efforts of the Cleveland police—including the legendary Eliot Ness of
Untouchables
fame, who was running the department at the time—the “Cleveland Torso Killer” was never apprehended.

Like the Ripper, the “Cleveland Torso Killer” is a fascinating figure because
he remains a total enigma. No one knows who he was or what became of him. There are other cases, however, where a killer’s identity is not in question. The mystery has to do with the maniac’s ultimate whereabouts.

Sifting through the ruins of the incinerated farmhouse belonging to notorious
Black Widow
killer Belle Gunness, searchers came upon a charred female body and assumed it was Gunness’s remains. There was only one problem. The corpse had no head—so making a positive ID was a little tricky. Eventually, investigators concluded that the corpse was a substitute—a woman Gunness had murdered expressly for that purpose. In subsequent years, Gunness was allegedly sighted in different parts of the country, from New England to Los Angeles. But to this day, no one knows what really became of her.

A few years later, during World War I, officials in the Hungarian town of Czinkota discovered the bodies of twenty-three murdered women in and around the abandoned house of a retired tinsmith named Bela Kiss. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no way to punish the killer, since Kiss (who had enlisted in the army) had reportedly died in combat. Reports of his death, however, were greatly exaggerated. As it turned out, Kiss—while recuperating from his wounds in a military hospital—switched dog tags with a dying soldier and disappeared under the other man’s name. From that point on, his trail vanished. Alleged sightings on both sides of the Atlantic—from Budapest to New York City—kept his legend alive.

Kiss’s countryman Sylvestre Matuschka was one of the most bizarre serial killers of all time, a maniac who derived intense sexual pleasure from bombing railroad trains and listening to the dying shrieks of the passengers. Matuschka was actually convicted and imprisoned in the 1930s, but somehow he managed to get free during the turmoil of World War II. What happened to him next is anybody’s guess. According to some crime historians, however, Matuschka was forced to join the Soviet army, which recognized his special talents and gave him a job for which he was uniquely qualified: explosives expert.

W
OMEN

One of the most hotly debated questions among people who study violent crime is: Is there such a thing as a female serial killer? The simple answer is: Yes . . . and no. It all depends on how you define serial murder.

If you follow the
FBI
’s definition—three or more separate killings with an emotional cooling-off period between each homicide—then the answer is clearly affirmative. The annals of crime are full of fatal females who have knocked off large numbers of victims—
Black Widow
brides who dispatch a succession of hubbies; homicidal
Nurses
who administer death to dozens of patients; evil
Housekeepers
who dispose of entire families. Serial-killer encyclopedist Michael Newton has compiled a volume called
Bad Girls Do It!
that profiles nearly two hundred female multiple murderers—an assemblage almost imposing enough to confirm Rudyard Kipling’s famous line, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”