The Serial Killer Files (16 page)

Herman Drenth, aka Harry Powers

A classic case of a Bluebeard killer who murdered both for pleasure and profit was Herman Drenth.

Born in the Netherlands in 1892, he emigrated to America, where he changed his name to Harry Powers.

In 1927, he settled in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he sold Electrolux vacuum cleaners door-to-door and helped operate a small grocery store. In addition to these activities, the pudgy, middle-aged Powers also led a sinister secret life.

Through various matrimonial bureaus, Powers—using the pseudonym “Cornelius Pierson”—would correspond with lonely women, describing himself as a wealthy widower whose busy work life as a civil engineer did not leave him time to pursue marriage by more conventional means. In his letter, he promised to give his wife “everything within reason that money can buy,” but above all his “true love and absolute devotion.” Those women who fell for his beguiling words, however, ended up losing all their worldly possessions—and, in many cases, their lives.

Exactly how many widows and spinsters were lured into Powers’s clutches is unknown. He himself ultimately suggested that he had slain as many as fifty. There is no doubt, however, about the last five people he killed.

In 1931, he won the heart of a forty-three-year-old widow named Asta Eichler and brought her, along with her three young children, from their home in Park Ridge, Illinois, to a remote cabin he had built in Quiet Dell, a rural hamlet about five miles outside Clarksburg. No one ever heard from the Eichlers again. Shortly afterward, a fifty-one-year-old divorcee, Dorothy Lemke of North Uxbridge, Massachusetts, also disappeared after going off with her new mail-order husband, Cornelius Pierson.

When Mrs. Eichler’s friends and relatives became alarmed, an investigation was launched that eventually led back to Powers. He was arrested and jailed in August 1931. In the meantime—thanks partly to some neighbors who had complained of the stench emanating from the property—police had turned their attention to his Quiet Dell hideaway. There in a drainage ditch running from the cellar, they turned up the rotting remains of the two women and five children.

Drenth was subjected to a particularly brutal third degree. He was severely beaten, his left arm was broken, and boiled eggs were pressed under his armpits. Eventually, he confessed to everything.

He had turned the cabin cellar into a torture chamber, subjecting his captives to a horrifying ordeal. The three Eichler children—nine-year-old Annabel, twelve-year-old Harry, and fourteen-year-old Greta—had been locked in a cage, starved, and forced to watch their mother being hanged from a ceiling beam.

When Harry tried to struggle free to save his mother, Powers crushed his skull with a hammer. The other children were strangled to death, as was Dorothy Lemke.

When word of Powers’s confession spread through Clarksburg, a mob of approximately five thousand men tried to break into the jail to lynch him. It took a troop of state police armed with tear gas canisters to disperse them. Powers was tried and convicted in December 1931, and hanged three months later at Moundsville State Penitentiary.

Beat any cathouse I was ever in.

—Harry Powers describing the pleasure he got from watching victims die CASE STUDY

Gilles de Rais, alias Bluebeard

One of the most enigmatic figures in the history of true crime, Gilles de Rais, is remembered both as a great hero and as the most infamous of villains. An aristocrat from the province of Brittany in northwestern France, he was an honored military leader in the epic struggle to drive out the English during the second half of the Hundred Years’ War. He served as the chief lieutenant for none other than Joan of Arc. Some say his mind was unhinged by Joan’s execution in 1431. Or perhaps there had been a streak of madness and cruelty in him since childhood. Whatever the explanation, he eventually went to his death convicted of raping, torturing, and murdering over a hundred children.

Not everyone is convinced of his guilt. Some chroniclers have argued that de Rais was innocent, that he was framed by a fellow aristocrat. In the end, though, popular culture cast its own verdict: de Rais was considered the inspiration for the legend of Bluebeard, the most famous of fairy-tale serial killers.

Born in 1404, Gilles was descended from a family of knights and began his career as a soldier at the age of sixteen. He met Joan of Arc at the court of French king Charles VII nine years later when the teenage girl originally convinced the monarch that God had sent her on a divine mission to save France from the English. Gilles fought alongside Joan when she broke the English siege of Orleans and continued to serve under her in subsequent battles, including her defeat at Paris, where she was captured.

By this time, de Rais had been given the title of Marshal of France in recognition of his wartime service.

But his military career was coming to an end. After Joan’s capture, he returned to his family’s castle in Brittany, where he held the position of baron. At this point, his life began to take a bizarre and gruesome turn.

According to the official version of the case, he immersed himself in alchemy as a way to replace the fortune that he was squandering. Soon, he intensified these efforts by indulging in conjuring and Satanism. These pastimes were all part of a larger descent into madness, which, beginning in 1432, included child murder.

Gilles’s servants would provide him with victims, either through abduction or enticement. The children were of both sexes, though most were boys. Gilles sodomized his victims, killed them either through strangulation or decapitation, disemboweled them and masturbated on their entrails. This reign of horror went on for eight years. When de Rais was finally arrested in 1440, the authorities found the dismembered remains of fifty bodies in one of the castle’s towers. All told, his victims numbered 140.

Or so the records of de Rais’ trial tell us.

The person who pressed charges against de Rais was the Duke of Brittany. One theory has it that the duke framed Gilles because he coveted the war hero’s lands. Another possibility is that de Rais was

indeed guilty, and that the duke might have let him get away with his crimes—the victims were only commoners, after all—if not for the land issue. Whatever the motivation behind de Rais’ arrest, his trial left little doubt about his guilt at the time.

There were, in fact, two trials: one for heresy, focusing on de Rais’ alleged involvement in black magic, and the other for the murders. On October 25, 1440, Gilles was excommunicated. The next day he was hanged above a roaring fire.

The Execution of Gilles de Rais by Michael Rose

In disguised form, de Rais’ horrible legacy lived on in folktales about Bluebeard, best known in the Charles Perrault version of the story written over 250 years after the bloody baron’s death. In Perrault’s story, Bluebeard’s newlywed enters a forbidden chamber in her new husband’s castle to discover the dismembered corpses of his previous wives, an abattoir reminiscent of de Rais’ tower filled with the remains of his mangled victims. One question, though: How did de Rais, the serial child torturer and murderer, become transformed into a wife killer? According to Leonard Wolf’s biography of de Rais, the originators of the Bluebeard tales turned the villain into a killer of adults in order to make the memory of de Rais’ hideous crimes easier to absorb. But this, like other aspects of de Rais’ life, is open to debate. Some scholars even dispute that de Rais was an inspiration for the Bluebeard legend. They claim that the true source was another folktale revolving around a character named Conomor, who was a sixth-century aristocrat, a wife-killer and, like de Rais, a resident of Brittany.

According to the FBI, a serial killer is anyone who murders three or more victims with a significant interval of time between each homicide. Under that definition, a mob “enforcer” would qualify. One reason that such professional assassins aren’t regarded as serial killers, however, is precisely because they are professionals. Murder is their business (as indicated by the name of the most famous gang of hit men in the history of organized crime: “Murder, Inc”).

Serial killers, by contrast, don’t perpetrate atrocities for a living. They do it for pleasure. Murder isn’t their job: it’s their passion.

When they aren’t indulging in sadistic daydreams or clandestinely carrying out their sickest fantasies, serial killers, by and large, lead drearily ordinary lives. To be sure, the long-ago past affords several instances of illustrious individuals who engaged in monstrous behavior: Gilles de Rais; Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian “Blood Countess” who bathed in the gore of her victims; Vlad the Impaler, the Transylvanian prince who served as the model for Dracula. In modern times, however, it is impossible to find a single example of a famous, highly accomplished person who turned out to be a serial killer. (This is one reason why all the theories that claim to prove that Jack the Ripper was a member of the royal family or a celebrated artist seem so dubious.)

By and large, serial killers are, in their everyday lives, total nonentities, toiling at unskilled, if not menial, jobs: truck driver, janitor, garbageman. Some are full-time criminals: petty crooks and con artists who are in and out of jail throughout their adult lives. Despite their often superior intelligence, their profoundly antisocial personalities make it difficult for them to achieve anything professionally.

True, some serial killers have been relatively successful. John Wayne Gacy, for example, built a thriving business as a home contractor. More typical, however, was Jeffrey Dahmer—a bright young man with a good education who couldn’t hold down a job more challenging than that of assembly-line worker at a Milwaukee chocolate factory.

Of course, some serial killers deliberately seek out work that serves their twisted interests. A classic case is the monstrous Albert Fish, who preyed on countless young children in the early decades of the twentieth century. From the time he was seventeen, Fish worked as a painter. The psychiatrist who examined him, Dr. Fredric Wertham, explained the diabolical rationale for Fish’s choice of profession: He worked in many different institutions. He worked in Y.M.C.A.s, he worked in homes for the tubercular, he worked in any kind of home where there were children, where he thought he could get children. In all these places, he made his headquarters the basement or cellar. And he had the habit of wearing a painter’s overalls over his nude body, which gave him two advantages. First of all, he was nude in a moment. And secondly, he would be seen only in his painter’s clothes, and if they [a witness or a surviving victim] later met him on the streets or in his other clothes, they wouldn’t recognize him.

Other serial killers make use of their jobs to snare potential victims. Harvey Carignan—the so-called Want-Ad Killer—lured young woman to their deaths by advertising for employees at the Seattle gas station he managed.

While not specifically conducive to their criminal pursuits, some jobs held by serial killers are consistent with their morbid psychologies. Peter Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper,” for example, found employment in a mortuary, while his unspeakable countryman Frederick West worked for a while in a slaughterhouse. And there is something creepily apt about the business run by the Kansas City, Missouri, lust-killer, Bob Berdella: a suburban curio shop called “Bob’s Bizarre Bazaar” that specialized in human-tooth earrings, plaster-of-Paris skulls, and other macabre tchotchkes.

On the other hand, some serial killers have worked at jobs so wildly at variance with their own malevolent natures as to border on the grotesque. A particularly striking case was that of the Houston sex-killer Dean Corll. A cross between Willy Wonka and the Marquis de Sade, Corll worked at his mother’s candy factory. Beloved by neighborhood children for freely handing out samples of pecan sweets, they called him the “Candyman.”

There have also been been clergymen serial killers (such as the Belgian lust-killer, Andras Pandy); dentist serial killers (like Glennon Engleman of St. Louis, who bumped off seven people over twenty-two years); and serial killers who have picked up extra money by babysitting for their neighbors (like Wisconsin ghoul Ed Gein).

It has become part of popular lore that certain kinds of government workers are particularly prone to mass murder; a perception reflected in the phrase “going postal.” Whether mailmen account for a disproportionately high percentage of “rampage killers” is open to question. It is certainly true, however, that a number of highly infamous serial killers have worked as civil servants.

David Berkowitz, for example, worked at a post office by day, sorting letters at a branch in the Bronx.

At night, he would transform into “Son of Sam,” the phantom shooter who preyed on young women in the bicentennial summer of 1976. Another American psycho who relied on firearms to dispatch his victims was the serial sniper Thomas Dillon, who worked for more than twenty years as an employee of the Canton, Ohio, Water Department.

At roughly the same time that David Berkowitz was terrorizing Gotham, Dennis Nilsen—aka the

“British Jeffrey Dahmer”—was earning his own place in the annals of horrific crime. As an employee of the British Manpower Service Commission, Nilsen spent his days helping out-of-work youths find jobs.

After hours, however, he showed how much he cared for young men by luring them to his flat, murdering them, and keeping their corpses around for companionship until they became unbearably rank. At that point, he dismembered the bodies and flushed them down the toilet.

Peter Manuel, the Man Who Talked Too Much

Twenty years before the crimes of Dennis Nilsen were revealed to a stunned and sickened world, another civil servant was moonlighting as a serial murderer. His name was Peter Manuel.

Born to British parents in Manhattan in 1927, Manuel and his family returned to their homeland when he was five. From an early age, he was in trouble with the law. At twelve, he was arrested for burglarizing a bicycle shop and received a year’s probation. Just five weeks later, he was back before the judge for housebreaking. This time, he was sent to reform school. Over the next few years, he escaped and was returned eleven times.