The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (62 page)

Of course, planting corpses in your own backyard can be a risky business. In the early 1990s, for example, Herb Baumeister—a seemingly respectable Midwestern family man with a depraved double life—began trolling the gay hangouts of Indianapolis. Whenever his wife took the kids off for an overnight visit to Grandma, Herb would bring a male pickup back to his handsome suburban house, strangle the young man during sex, then dispose of the corpse in his wooded backyard.

All went smoothly until 1994, when one of Herb’s sons, playing in the yard, stumbled upon the half-buried skeleton of a human being. Fortunately for Herb, his wife, Julie, had a highly developed capacity for denial. When she confronted Herb about this alarming find, he fed her a cock-and-bull story: the skeleton, he claimed, was just an old anatomical specimen he had inherited from his physician father and decided to discard. Julie chose to believe him.

Eventually—thanks to the efforts of a private investigator, hired by the mother of one of the missing young men—Baumeister was identified as a suspect. When the police searched his property, they turned up thousands of human bone fragments—jawbones, thighbones, fingers, ribs, vertebrae, all stripped clean by animals and the elements, some partly burned. Experts estimated that, altogether, the skeletal fragments constituted the remains of eleven victims.

By the time the digging was over, Baumeister himself was dead. Fleeing to Canada, he committed suicide in an Ontario park on the evening of July
3, 1996, shooting himself in the head with a .357 Magnum after eating a peanut butter sandwich.

Y C
HROMOSOME

Serial murder is such an overwhelmingly evil act that it’s natural for people to wonder why. Why would a human being commit such a monstrous crime? There’s a desperate need to find an explanation that would make sense of this incomprehensible horror. For at least a hundred years, scientists have been searching for a single, identifiable cause for criminal violence. In 1968, they finally came up with one. The answer to the question
Why?
turned out to be . . .
Y.

More precisely, it turned out to be a
Y chromosome.
As everyone who’s taken high school biology knows, there are two sex chromosomes,
X
(female) and Y (male). Every cell in the average man contains one of each. A few men, however, have an extra Y, or male, chromosome—a condition known as the XYY Syndrome. Once they made this discovery, scientists began theorizing that this extra dash of maleness made its possessor even more masculine—i.e., crude, aggressive, and violent—than normal.

Their theory seemed to be borne out by the case of Richard
Speck
, the notorious multiple murderer who, in 1966, slaughtered eight student nurses in their Chicago apartment. Speck, who was diagnosed as an XYY type, fit the image of a supercharged male brute to perfection. He was big, dumb, and savage, with a face ravaged by acne scars and a “Born to Raise Hell” tattoo proudly displayed on one arm. At his trial, his attorney argued that Speck wasn’t responsible for his crimes because he was suffering from XYY Syndrome. In effect, Speck’s tattoo was telling the truth—his extra male chromosome had made him bad from birth.

There was only one problem with this defense. Speck, it turned out, had been misdiagnosed. He was normal—at least from a chromosomal point of view.

Undaunted, proponents of the theory pointed out that there is an unusually high proportion of XYY types in the prison population. But these findings were shown to be skewed. The vast majority of men born with XYY Syndrome display no abnormally violent tendencies. By now, the theory has been largely discredited. As of this writing, serial murder remains
what it has always been—an unfathomable evil. Or as the Bible puts it, a “mystery of iniquity.”

The “Yorkshire Ripper”

Peter Sutcliffe; from
Bloody Visions
trading cards

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

The five-year search for the homicidal maniac known as the “Yorkshire Ripper” was the biggest manhunt in British history. The police interviewed more than 200,000 people, took more than 30,000 statements, searched more than 20,000 homes. In the course of this mammoth investigation, a young truck driver named Peter Sutcliffe was called in for questioning no fewer than nine times—so often that his co-workers jokingly nicknamed him
“
Jack the Ripper
.”
Each time, however, his interrogators swallowed Sutcliffe’s alibi and let him go free.

On January 2, 1981, police discovered—almost accidentally—that Sutcliffe was, in fact, the killer. By then, thirteen women, ranging in age from sixteen to forty-seven, had been savagely murdered—bludgeoned, stabbed, and mutilated.

Sutcliffe led the kind of schizoid life so characteristic of serial killers. On the one hand, he was a reliable worker and devoted husband. On the other,
he was a woman-hating sociopath whose crimes were motivated by intense sexual loathing. Sutcliffe himself claimed that his vendetta against
Prostitutes
began after a hooker cheated him of money. But the roots of his pathology clearly ran much deeper. As a teenager, he took a job as a mortuary attendant and enjoyed manipulating corpses as though they were ventriloquist dummies. He also spent hours at a local wax museum, transfixed by a display that showed the devastating effects of VD on the human body.

Sutcliffe began by assaulting prostitutes with homemade bludgeons—socks weighted with gravel or bricks. His first few victims survived these attacks. A twenty-eight-year-old hooker named Wilma McCann wasn’t as lucky. On October 30, 1975, Sutcliffe smashed the back of her skull with a ballpeen hammer, then stabbed her fourteen times. Three months later, he killed again. Following this second homicide, Sutcliffe’s murderous impulses seemed to subside. A year later, however, they erupted with a vengeance. In the fifteen months between February 1977 and May 1978, he killed seven more women, bludgeoning them first with his hammer, then savaging them with his knife. In some cases, he mutilated the genitalia. Most of these victims were streetwalkers, though one was a sixteen-year-old shop assistant who had been on her way home from a disco.

With all of northern England in a panic, police mounted an all-out hunt for the killer. They were sidetracked, however, by a tape recording they received in June 1979, which purported to be from the Ripper. While police pursued this lead (which turned out to be a hoax), Sutcliffe continued to kill. By then, he was no longer restricting himself to prostitutes. Sutcliffe’s final four victims were female college students and young working women.

His arrest came in January 1981 when a police officer on stakeout—Sergeant Robert Ring—spotted Sutcliffe in a car with a prostitute. A check of Sutcliffe’s plates revealed that the car was stolen. Before being hauled down to the station house, Sutcliffe asked for permission to go behind some shrubbery and “pee.” Sergeant Ring obliged.

The next morning, while Sutcliffe was still being questioned, a lightbulb went off in Ring’s head. Rushing back to the spot where he’d arrested Sutcliffe, he searched behind the shrubbery and discovered a ball-peen hammer and a knife. Confronted with this evidence, Sutcliffe quickly confessed. He attempted to plead insanity, claiming that God’s voice, emanating from a grave, had ordered him to kill. The court was not impressed. The “Yorkshire Ripper” was sentenced to life in prison.

Z
EALOTS

There are plenty of people around who blame our country’s social ills—including our epidemic of violent crime—on the loss of old-fashioned religious values, as if the murder rate would miraculously decline if Americans spent fewer hours in front of the TV and more time studying the Bible. Unfortunately, there is a slight problem with this theory. Some of the most monstrous killers in American history were religious fanatics who could recite Scripture from memory and—when they weren’t busy torturing children or mutilating corpses—loved to do nothing better than read the Good Book.

Albert
Fish
, the cannibalistic monster who spent a lifetime preying on little children, is a terrifying case in point. From his earliest years, Fish was fascinated by the Bible and at one point actually dreamed of becoming a minister. As he grew older, his religious interests blossomed into a full-fledged mania. Obsessed with the story of Abraham and Isaac, he became convinced that he, too, should sacrifice a young child—an atrocity he actually carried out on more than one occasion. From time to time, he heard strange, archaic-sounding words—
correcteth, delighteth, chastiseth
—that he
interpreted as divine commandments to torment and kill. He would organize these words into quasi-biblical messages: “Blessed is the man who correcteth his son in whom he delighteth with stripes”; “Happy is he that taketh Thy little ones and dasheth their heads against the stones.” Fish not only tortured and killed children in response to these delusions but subjected himself to a variety of masochistic torments in atonement for his sins. One of his favorite forms of self-mortification was to shove sewing needles so deeply into his own groin that they remained embedded around his bladder. For the hopelessly demented Fish, his ultimate crime—the murder, dismemberment, and cannibalization of a twelve-year-old girl—also had religious overtones. As he told the psychiatrist who examined him in prison, he associated the eating of the child’s flesh and the drinking of her blood with the “idea of Holy Communion.”