The Serial Killer Files (12 page)

Not all criminal pairs who fall under the spell of a folie à deux are serial murderers. Leopold and Loeb, for example—the college-age “thrill killers” of the 1920s who murdered a fourteen-year-old acquaintance to prove that they could commit the perfect crime—were clearly in the grip of a folie à deux. So were Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, the adolescent New Zealand girls who bludgeoned Pauline’s mother to death in 1954 (and whose sensational case was the basis for Peter Jackson’s 1994

film, Heavenly Creatures ).

The folie à deux phenomenon has also been a factor in the cases of other notorious murderers, such as the two sociopathic spree killers who gained notoriety as the “Beltway Snipers” in the fall of 2002, and the teenage mass murderers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, of Columbine infamy.

It should be said that not all psychopaths who team up to commit serial murder are examples of a folie à deux. Individually, for example, Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were already serial killers before they joined forces. Strictly speaking, the term only applies to two or more people who, however criminally inclined, would never have taken the plunge into full-blown serial homicide had they not been emboldened by an enthusiastic partner. Lake-Ng and Bittaker-Norris are classic examples.

Bianchi and Buono

Another pair who conform to the same depraved pattern were Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi: the so-called Hillside Stranglers. Born in 1951 to an alcoholic prostitute who gave him up at birth, Bianchi—like a surprising number of serial killers—was adopted as an infant. By his early childhood, he was already manifesting psychopathic symptoms. He was a compulsive liar and chronic underachiever who

erupted into violent tantrums at the slightest frustration. He dreamed (again, like many serial killers) of becoming a policeman, but when his application to the local sheriff’s department was rejected, he drifted into security work. This position allowed him to indulge his taste for petty thievery, which also got him fired from a succession of jobs.

In 1976, he moved from Rochester, New York, to Los Angeles and quickly teamed up with his cousin, Angelo Buono—a sadistic pimp with a long history of violence toward women. Though Buono had been guilty of outrageous brutality (allegedly, he once sodomized his wife in front of their children after she refused to have sex with him), he—like Bianchi—had never been known to commit murder. Together, however, they made a monstrous combination. In the fall of 1977, they embarked on one of the most appalling serial murder sprees of modern times.

(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham)

Posing as police officers, the two lured unsuspecting females into their car, then abducted them and drove them to Buono’s suburban home. Afterward, the victims’ naked, savaged bodies would be disposed of, often on wooded hillsides around the city.

The first to die was a Hollywood hooker named Yolanda Washington. Two weeks later, on Halloween, the corpse of a fifteen-year-old runaway was dumped on a Glendale lawn. Over the next few months—while the city went into a panic—eight more bodies would be found. The victims ranged in age from twelve to twenty-eight. All had been sexually violated (sometimes with objects like soda bottles), strangled, and tortured in various ways: injected with cleaning solution or burned with an electric cord or asphyxiated with slow, almost voluptuous, cruelty.

The killings stopped abruptly in February 1978. One year after the last of the Los Angeles murders, a pair of young women were raped and murdered in Bellingham, Washington. Suspicion quickly alighted on a young man who had moved to Bellingham within the past year and worked as a security guard: Kenneth Bianchi.

Linked by solid evidence to both the Bellingham rape-murders and several of the “Hillside” killings, Bianchi almost succeeded in convincing authorities that he was a victim of multiple personality disorder, and that the crimes had been carried out by an evil alter ego named “Steve.” When this ruse was exposed by a psychiatric expert, Bianchi agreed to plead guilty and testify against his cousin in order to avoid execution. Both men received life sentences. Bianchi is spending his in Walla Walla prison in Washington. On September 21, 2002, the sixty-seven-year-old Buono was found dead in his cell in Calipatria State Prison, apparently the victim of a heart attack.

The Chicago Rippers

Ever since the late 1960s, America has been awash with rumors about devil-worshiping cultists who engage in unspeakable orgies of torture, rape, and human sacrifice. In almost every instance, these stories turn out to be false—the overheated imaginings of people who have watched Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen one too many times. On rare occasions, however, several psychopaths will band together and garb their perverted practices in the trappings of Satanic ritual. This is precisely what happened in Chicago during the early 1980s with a crew of young deviants who became known as the “Chicago Rippers” and exemplify a case of folie à deux involving more than two participants.

The accused ringleader of this degenerate gang was Robin Gecht, a lanky twenty-eight-year-old electrician whose deeply troubled background included accusations of molesting his sister. He also once did work for the city’s most infamous contractor, John Wayne Gacy. Along with his accomplices—brothers Thomas and Andrew Kokoraleis and Edward Spreitzer, all in their early twenties—Gecht is believed to have abducted and killed as many as eighteen women in as many months, beginning in May 1981. Some were hookers, others middle-class singles or housewives (including the wife of a former Chicago Cubs pitching ace). All the women were raped, tortured, and subjected to hideous mutilations.

Specifically, the killers would use a wire garrote to slice off the breasts of their victims. These grisly trophies were then taken back to Gecht’s attic bedroom, which had been converted into a Satanic chapel.

There, the depraved foursome would perform an unholy communion, eating portions of amputated breast before consigning it to a “relic box.”

The case was finally broken when one of his savaged victims survived and provided police with information that led them to Gecht and his cohorts. Under questioning, Tom Kokoraleis spilled his guts.

The Chicago Rippers quickly turned on each other.

Gecht has consistently maintained that, like Charles Manson, he never killed anyone: his followers did.

He was put on trial for attempted murder and rape and is currently serving 120 years in Illinois. Andrew Kokoraleis was executed by lethal injection in 1999. His brother, Tom, was luckier. He won a reversal of a murder conviction on a legal technicality and received a reduced sentence of seventy years. Edward Spreitzer was condemned to death in 1986, but his sentence was subsequently commuted to life by Governor George Ryan.

It’s appalling enough to think of male buddies hitting the highways to commit serial homicide, like some kind of depraved parody of Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. But there’s another type of psychopathic team that seems, if anything, even more unbelievably sick: the killer couple, the husband-wife or boyfriend-girlfriend who engage in sadistic lust-murder as a way to spice up their sex life. While the male partner is almost always the dominant figure in such depraved duos, the woman is generally an active participant, not merely abetting her monstrous mate but getting her own twisted pleasure from their joint atrocities.

The Gallegos

That was certainly the case with Gerald and Charlene Gallego, who enjoyed serial murder the way other couples savor a weekend getaway at a romantic country inn. The son of a skid row prostitute and a violent career criminal whose life ended in Mississippi’s gas chamber, Gallego, born in 1946, carried on the family sociopathic tradition. He racked up more than two dozen arrests by the time he was thirty for various felonies, including incest and rape. Possessed of a sleazy charm, he was catnip to a certain kind of woman and was married and divorced seven times by the age of thirty-two. In September 1977, he finally met the woman of his depraved dreams.

The spoiled only child of a prosperous California couple, Charlene Williams was a violin prodigy, a certified genius with an IQ of 160. She was also a profoundly troubled young woman who flunked out of junior college after one semester, had two brief, disastrous marriages in her early twenties, and was heavily into drugs and kinky sex. She and Gallego moved in together one week after meeting at a Sacramento poker club. “I thought he was a very nice, clean-cut fellow,” she would say of her wildly degenerate lover.

Their sex life was predictably sordid, Gerald bringing home a teenage runaway for threesomes, Charlene indulging herself with an occasional lesbian lover. Impotent when it came to anything approaching normal sex, Gerald required increasingly perverse pleasures to achieve arousal. Exactly who first thought up the idea of supplying him with “disposable sex slaves” is unclear. What is indisputable is that, beginning in September 1978, the homicidal couple embarked on a monstrous scheme.

Their MO was the same from the start. Driving Gallego’s van, they would troll for victims in likely places: county fairgrounds, parking lots of malls, shopping centers, and taverns. While Gerald lurked inside the parked vehicle with pistol at the ready, Charlene would approach the prospective victims—generally, though not always, pairs of teenage girls—and lure them back to the van, usually with an offer of free drugs. Once in the clutches of the depraved duo, the victims would be driven to a remote location, sexually assaulted by both husband and wife, then slaughtered and dumped. Altogether, the Gallegos murdered ten victims, ranging in age from thirteen to thirty-four, all but one of them female.

They were arrested in November 1980, when a witness noted their license plate during their abduction of a young couple who had just left a fraternity dance. Eventually, Charlene struck a deal with prosecutors, agreeing to testify against her husband for a sentence of just under seventeen years. Sentenced to death in 1983, Gerald managed to delay execution through various legal maneuvers but came to a deservedly nasty end anyway, when—in July 2002 at the age of fifty-four—he died of rectal cancer.

Bernardo-Homolka

The sheer level of sexual degeneracy displayed by killer couples staggers belief. Golden-boy Paul Bernardo and his pretty blond wife Karla Homolka were another prime example of the breed. The Ken and Barbie of serial killers, the young Canadian couple presented a picture-perfect image to the world.

Beneath their wholesome exterior, however, lurked two of the most depraved personalities imaginable.

Raised, like so many serial killers, in a severely dysfunctional household (his father was a pedophiliac Peeping Tom who molested his own daughter, his mother a grotesquely obese depressive who immured herself in the basement), Bernardo grew up to be a classic psychopath: a man of superficial charm and apparent normality who harbored profoundly malevolent impulses and lacked anything resembling a conscience. While the world assumed he was a successful accountant, he was actually making his money as a small-time smuggler, running cigarettes across the border in cars with stolen license plates. The women he dated soon found themselves not with the sensitive young man they imagined, but in the hands of a vicious sadist who liked to beat and degrade them and whose favorite sexual activity was anal rape.

Karla Homolka, as devoid of moral faculties as her lover boy, turned out to be the perfect mate for Paul, eagerly satisfying—and encouraging—his most depraved desires. He liked to videotape her while she fondled herself and talked of how much fun it would be to procure thirteen-year-old virgins for him to rape. When Paul expressed a wish to deflower her little sister, Tammy, Karla was only too happy to assist, stealing some animal sedative called halothane from the veterinary clinic where she worked. On December 23, 1990—after a happy pre-Christmas dinner in the Homolka home—Paul plied the fifteen-year-old with Halcion-laced drinks. Once she was out cold, he raped her while Karla held a halothane-soaked rag over her little sister’s face to make sure she stayed unconscious. Unfortunately, she threw up, choking to death on her vomit.

Tammy Homolka was the first to die at the hands of the hideously perverted pair. Between June 1991

and April 1992, Bernardo and Homolka snatched three more teenage girls. The victims would be subjected to a range of degradations and torments, Karla and Paul taking turns having sex with their captives while the other videotaped the outrages. In the end, the girls would be murdered, and their bodies—sometimes dismembered, sometimes left intact—dumped in a lake or ditch.

While these horrendous killings were going on, Paul—with Karla’s encouragement—was conducting a separate career as a serial rapist in Scarborough, Canada. Eventually—when he began beating Karla—she turned on him. Already under suspicion as the “Scarborough Rapist,” Bernardo was arrested and ultimately charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of aggravated assault, two counts of forcible rape, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of performing an indignity on a human body.

In exchange for her full cooperation, Karla received a lenient sentence. Bernardo, convicted on all counts, was sent to prison for life.

We had this sexual fantasy, see, so we just carried it out. I mean, like it was easy and fun and we really enjoyed it, so why shouldn’t we do it?

—Charlene Gallego, explaining why she and her husband abducted, raped, and murdered ten people The Wests

Outside the pages of the Marquis de Sade, it would be hard to find human beings as obscenely evil as the British psycho-couple, Fred and Rose West. Like Karla Homolka—who sacrificed her own sister to her partner’s sadistic lusts—the Wests had no qualms about preying on their nearest kin. Incest was just one of the countless perversions they delighted in. Arguably, the Wests were even more monstrous than their Canadian counterparts since their victims included several of their own children.

Born in 1941, the simian-looking Fred West was reportedly the product of a household in which incest was rife. By the time he was twenty, he was a habitual thief and convicted child molester who had impregnated a thirteen-year-old girl (“Doesn’t everyone do it?” he said in his defense when confronted with this crime).