The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (63 page)

Fish’s near contemporary Earle Leonard
Nelson
was another religious fanatic, who spent countless hours poring over passages from the Book of Revelations: “And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color . . . having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” Nelson’s familiarity with the Bible was one of his most disarming features, allowing him to win the confidence of his landlady-victims, who never guessed that such a well-read and obviously devout young man was actually the infamous “Gorilla Murderer,” the shadowy serial strangler responsible for nearly two dozen savage killings from coast to coast.

There have been plenty of other psychos who have committed their crimes in the name of religion, from self-ordained street preacher Benjamin Miller, who murdered a string of black prostitutes in the late 1960s as punishment for their sinful ways, to the homicidal hippie couple James and Susan Carson, who believed they were complying with the biblical injunction “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18) when they murdered their victims.

Homicidal religious fanatics have been the subject of two memorable movies: the splendid 1955 thriller
Night of the Hunter
(in which Robert Mitchum does a terrifying turn as a sin-obsessed preacher) and the gruesomely baroque 1995 hit,
Se7en,
about a serial killer who arranges his victims
in grotesque tableaux inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins: gluttony, lust, sloth, pride, anger, envy, and greed.

“And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.”

Jeremiah 19:9 (Albert Fish’s favorite passage of Scripture)

Z
EITGEIST

Anyone who makes a serious study of criminal history quickly discovers an intriguing, if depressing, fact: every period has produced many more cases of appalling murder than most people realize. To cite just one of countless examples, in 1895, a clean-cut medical student named Theo Durrant murdered and raped two young women in San Francisco and stashed their mutilated corpses in his neighborhood church. The Durrant case was a nationwide sensation—but who besides the most ardent crime buff has heard of it today?

This raises an interesting question: why do some heinous killers fade into instant obscurity, while others achieve an almost mythic status? Part of the answer certainly lies in the singularly horrific deeds of the latter. The legendary serial killers (Ed
Gein
, Albert
Fish
, Jeffrey
Dahmer
, etc.) have a larger-than-life quality. Their crimes seem less pathological than supernatural—the doings of demons and ghouls. But there is another factor, too. Certain criminals exert a powerful fascination because they seem to embody the darkest impulses and obsessions of their day—all that is most reprehensible about any given age. As much as any hero or celebrity, they personify the spirit of the time—what the Germans call the zeitgeist.

“To parallel such a career one must go back to past ages and to the time of the Borgias or the Brinvilliers, and even these were not such human monsters as Holmes seems to have been. He is a prodigy of wickedness, a human demon, a being so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character. The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century.”

From an 1896 newspaper article on H. H. Holmes

The nineteenth-century “multi-murderer” Dr. H. H.
Holmes
is a classic example. A debonair ladies’ man with a deadly allure, Holmes seemed like the living incarnation of the fairy-tale monster
Bluebeard
, killing and dismembering a string of nubile young women in the murky depths of his “Horror Castle.” At the same time, he was the terrifying epitome of all the excesses of the Gilded Age, a money-mad psychopath whose murders were motivated as much by greed as by blood lust.

In the 1930s—the era when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped—Albert Fish represented every parent’s worst nightmare, a fiendishly cunning child snatcher in the guise of a kindly old man. While the case of Edward Gein had the timeless horror of a “Hänsel and Gretel”-type fairy tale (the seemingly innocuous, out-of-the-way dwelling that turns out to be the abode of an ogre), his crimes also reflected the prevailing cultural pathology of postwar America, a time and place marked by extreme sexual hypocrisy, when the realities of erotic behavior were masked by an official culture of prudery.

Charles Starkweather—the sociopathic James Dean-wannabe who slaughtered eleven people during a three-week killing spree—embodied another quintessentially 1950s phenomenon: the wildly antisocial “juvenile delinquent” with a grudge against grown-up society. During the 1960s, Charles Manson—the sex-and-drug-crazed demon-hippie—was the nightmare realization of “straight” society’s darkest fears, while Ted
Bundy
seemed to embody all that was most perilous about the 1970s me
generation’s swinging-singles scene: the danger of finding yourself with the wrong pickup and ending up in a very nasty one-night stand.

Bret Easton Ellis’s much-reviled book
American Psycho
actually plays very cleverly with the notion of the serial killer as symbol of the zeitgeist. Its sociopathic Yuppie protagonist, Patrick Bateson, is meant to be a metaphor for the greediness of the 1980s Reagan era. His only concern is the fulfillment of his own appetites, and he regards other people as nothing more than highly disposable commodities to be used for his own pleasure.

Zodiac

Zodiac; from
Murderers!
trading card set

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

California in the late 1960s was a hotbed of hippiedom—the site of the Summer of Love, the birthplace of the “be-in,” the land where visitors were advised to wear flowers in their hair. At the same time, it was home to some of the most notorious psychos of the late twentieth century. Charles
Manson
and his blood-crazed “family” slaughtered seven people in Los Angeles in 1969. A year later, a hippie named John Linley Frazier wiped out a household of five in the Northern California town of Santa Cruz. Perhaps even more unnerving was the night-prowling gunman known only as “Zodiac,”
who terrorized San Francisco during a nine-month spree that began in December 1968. Before he was finished, five people were dead and two more desperately wounded.

His motive? “I like killing people because it’s so much fun,” he explained in an anonymous letter.

The first to die was a teenage couple, shot dead in a
Lovers’ Lane
.
Six months later, he gunned down another young couple, killing the young woman with nine blasts from a 9mm pistol (the young man, shot four times, survived). Forty minutes later—in what would be the first in a series of chilling communications from the killer—the police received an anonymous phone call from a gruff-voiced man: “If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to a public park, you will find the kids in a brown car. They have been shot with a 9mm Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Good-bye.”

While panic spread through the area, the killer began sending
Letters
to local newspapers, signed with the astrological symbol of the zodiac. Each letter contained a line of cipher. Decoded by a local high school teacher, the cryptic lines formed a single message that explained the killer’s motivations: “I will be reborn in Paradise, and then all that I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife.”

Two months later, Zodiac (as he was now called) set out to collect some more slaves. Wearing a black hood with eye slits and the zodiac symbol painted on it in white, the killer accosted a young couple at gunpoint, bound them with rope, then attacked them with a hunting knife. The young man survived with five wounds in the back, but the girl—stabbed fourteen times—died.

His last known victim was a San Francisco cab driver who was shot once in the back of the head. Before fleeing the crime scene, the killer tore off parts of the victim’s shirt. Shortly afterward, the editor of the
San Francisco Chronicle
received an envelope. Inside was a swatch of the cab driver’s shirt and a letter from Zodiac in which he promised to “wipe out a school bus some morning.” Fortunately he never made good on this threat. Nor—as far as anyone knows—did Zodiac ever kill again.

The classic Clint Eastwood movie
Dirty Harry
(1971) is a gripping fictionalized account of the hunt for the Zodiac killer, with Andy Robinson turning in an unforgettable performance as the unspeakable psychocreep. Needless to say, the movie has a much more satisfying ending—with Clint blasting the psycho into well-deserved oblivion—than real life supplied. In actuality, Zodiac simply vanished.

There have been many theories about his identity, but one has gotten more traction than others. In his 2002 book,
Zodiac Unmasked,
author Robert Graysmith claims that the killer was a convicted child molester and all-around misfit named Arthur Leigh Allen, who died in 1992.

Others, however, point out that neither Allen’s fingerprints nor his handwriting match the evidence left behind by the murderer. In the end, Zodiac’s identity remains one of the great
Unsolved
mysteries of modern crime.

Z
OMBIES

Joyce Carol Oates’s harrowing 1995 novel
Zombie
deals with a psychopath named Quentin P———, who is obsessed with the idea of creating a zombie who will become his personal slave. To that end, he performs a series of makeshift lobotomies on various half-drugged victims by sticking an ice pick under their eyelids and up into their brains. All he succeeds in doing, however, is killing them—though a few of them manage to survive for a brief period (see
Recommended Reading
).