The Serial Killer Files (17 page)

In 1942, he assaulted the wife of a school employee. This time, Manuel was hit with a term at Borstal, the prison for juvenile offenders. Released in 1944, he went to live with his parents, who had since moved to Scotland.

A compulsive criminal, Manuel soon reverted to burglary. Arrested again in February 1946, after breaking into a house, he was released on bail. Within the next two weeks, he sexually attacked three women. The first two managed to fend him off; the third—a married woman recuperating from a hospital stay—was too weak to resist. After beating her into submission, he dragged her to a railway embankment and raped her. Within days, Manuel was identified as the culprit. Brought to trial, he received an eight-year prison sentence and was shipped off to prison.

(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham)

Upon his release in 1953, he returned to Glasgow and landed a civil service job with the city Gas Board through the influence of his father—a member of the District Council. It wasn’t long before Manuel was back to his old sociopathic ways. Arrested for attempted rape in 1955, he managed to convince the jury that his victim had voluntarily submitted. He walked free of that charge.

One year later, he graduated to murder.

The first to die at his hands was nineteen-year-old Ann Knielands. Manuel killed her with an iron bar, wielding the implement with such savage force that her skull was shattered into fifteen pieces. As a known sex offender who had been working at a building site not far from where the corpse was found, Manuel was questioned by police. He claimed to have been at home at the time of the killing, an alibi confirmed by his father, who knew it was untrue.

Two months later, in March 1956, Manuel was arrested for attempted burglary and released on bail. On the night of September 17, he broke into the house of a family named Watt and found three women inside: Marion Watt, her sixteen-year old daughter, Vivienne, and Mrs. Watt’s sister, Margaret Brown.

He shot them all in the head at close range. Arrested on suspicion of murder, Manuel was released for lack of proof.

His next victim was a taxi driver name Sidney Dunn, killed with gratuitous cruelty and for no apparent reason other than sheer bloodlust. Manuel shot him in the head and slashed his throat for good measure in early December 1957. Less than three weeks later, on December 28, he raped and killed Isabelle Cooke.

Manuel’s final outrage was the massacre of another family: forty-five-year-old Peter Smart, his wife, and ten-year-old son. As in the Watt incident, all three victims were shot at close range in the head during a housebreaking.

When currency stolen from the Smart home was traced to Manuel, police searched his house and turned up other incriminating evidence. Taken into custody, he soon began confessing so effusively that the press quickly dubbed him “The Man Who Talked Too Much.” It became clear to observers that, though six of Manuel’s nine victims had been killed in the course of burglaries, theft wasn’t his main motivation. Sadism was. As his biographer John Bingham put it, “Manuel did kill for pleasure. He liked killing. The act of killing thrilled him.”

At his trial, he tried to recant his confession, but the tactic failed. He was convicted on seven counts of murder and hanged on July 11, 1958.

Before becoming a member of the English Civil Service, Dennis Nilsen served as a rookie police officer in London. He resigned after one year, apparently because of the contradictions in his life: lawman by day, abject prowler of homosexual pubs after dark.

That one of the most notorious psychopaths of modern times would seek employment as a constable might seem a grim irony. In fact, it is surprisingly common for serial killers to be drawn to police work.

In his best-selling memoir Mindhunter, famed FBI profiler John Douglas explains the psychology behind this phenomenon:

The desire to work with the police was another interesting revelation, which was to come up over and over again in our serial killer studies. The three most common motives of serial rapists and murderers turn out to be domination, manipulation, and control. When you consider that most of these guys are angry, ineffectual losers who feel they’ve been given the shaft by life, and that most of them have experienced some sort of physical or emotional abuse … it isn’t surprising that one of their main fantasy occupations is police officer.

A policeman represents power and public respect. When called upon to do so, he is authorized to hurt bad people for the common good. In our research, we discovered that, while few police officers go bad and commit violent crimes, frequently serial offenders had failed in their efforts to join police departments and had taken jobs in related fields, such as security guard or night watchman.

Even when they aren’t interested in joining the force themselves, serial killers often go out of their way to develop friendly relationships with local lawmen. Douglas writes that infamous “Coed Killer,”

Edmund Kemper, used to “frequent bars and restaurants known to be police hangouts and strike up conversations. This made him feel like an insider, gave him the vicarious thrill of a policeman’s power.

But also, once the Coed Killer was on the rampage, he had a direct line into the progress of the investigation, allowing him to anticipate their next move.” The same thing was true of appalling cannibal killer Arthur Shawcross, who, as Douglas writes, “hung around [police hangouts] and enthusiastically pumped them for information.”

Sometimes, serial killers play at being policemen for the most sinister reasons. Kenneth Bianchi, half of the “Hillside Strangler” team, was a security guard who had tried and failed to join the sheriff’s department. Later, he and his degenerate cousin, Angelo Buono, lured unwary young women into their car by flashing badges and pretending to be cops.

Gerard Schaefer, Maniac Cop

Gerard Schaefer may not have been the world’s sickest serial killer, but he was inarguably the author of the sickest piece of literature ever to emerge from the cesspit of a psychopathic mind. In 1990, while serving a life sentence for mur-der, he published a collection of violently pornographic stories called Killer Fiction, insisting that it was sheer fantasy, though at other times he strongly intimated that the contents were, in fact, chronicles of his actual crimes. In either case, the stories offer unparalleled insight into the unspeakable workings of a mind filled with most virulent hatred of women. The title of one section speaks volumes: “Whores: What to Do About Them.” To Schaefer, all women were whores; his idea of “what to do about them” involved subjecting them to the most hideous tortures imaginable. In a typical passage, he gleefully describes the murder of a “Junior League society bitch” his protagonist picks up on spring break:

I watched her eyes drop to the shaft of steel buried in her belly, just above the crest of her pubic triangle.

She watched my hand as I pulled the blade up and across, neatly gutting her. She stared with wide-eyed fascination as the ropy coils of her own intestines slid out of her belly and hung to her knees. Her eyes were filled with disbelief. Her terror must have blocked off the pain. I angled the cutting edge up under her rib cage [sic] and lanced it into her heart. The green eyes rolled back in her head, becoming white marbles… . I was heartened. It was a satisfying and skillful kill.

The author of this obscenity—and the perpetrator of an unknown number of unspeakably sadistic crimes

—was born in Wisconsin in 1946. By the time he was twelve, he was a confirmed fetishist who enjoyed masturbating while wearing women’s panties. He had also discovered the joys of masochistic bondage, inventing games in which he tied himself to a tree and struggled to get free. “I’d get sexually excited and do something to hurt myself,” he later explained.

When Schaefer was fourteen, his family moved to Florida. In high school, he had a reputation as a weirdo loner, spending his spare time shooting harmless creatures in the Everglades or peeping through the bedroom windows of neighborhood girls. His earliest goal was to become a priest, but—after being rejected by a local seminary—he renounced his faith. Enrolling in a community college, he found himself possessed by increasingly intense homicidal fantasies involving appealing young women, who were instantly classified in his warped mind as “whores.” At this point, however, his murderous impulses were still vented strictly on animals, though he had worked his way up from songbirds and land crabs to cattle. He particularly enjoyed beheading cows with a machete, then raping the carcasses.

Schaefer now aimed his sights on a teaching career. During his brief stint as a student teacher in 1969, a number of females vanished from the vicinity of Schaefer’s residence. Their bodies would never be recovered, though police would eventually find some of their teeth, along with other evidence connecting them to Schaefer, among his stash of souvenirs.

After being dismissed from his teaching job, Schaefer landed a job with a small-town police department in Wilton Manors, Florida. He was fired after six months, apparently for using the department’s computer to dig up personal information about local women. In spite of this blot on his record, he managed to get himself hired a few months later by the Martin County Sheriff’s Department. This time he lasted only a month.

On July 21, 1972—twenty-two days after joining the department—Schaefer picked up two teenage female hitchhikers, drove them to a swamp, then gagged and handcuffed them at gunpoint. Arranging nooses around their necks, he tied the ropes to a tree branch and made the terrified girls stand on the slippery roots, so that if they lost their balance and fell, they would hang. Then, he left them alone.

When Schaefer returned a few hours later, he expected to find two dangling corpses. Instead, the girls were gone, having managed to escape.

Telephoning his boss, Schaefer sheepishly admitted that he had made a boo-boo. “You’re going to be mad at me,” he said. He described what he had done to the two girls, though he swore that he was only trying to scare them out of the hitchhiking habit for their own good. Still, he admitted that he had possibly “overdone” it.

He was fired on the spot, charged with false imprisonment and assault, then released on a fifteen-thousand-dollar bond.

That September, while Schaefer was awaiting trial, two Fort Lauderdale teens, Georgia Jessup and Susan Place, were picked up at the latter’s home by an older man. “Jerry Shepherd” had promised to drive them to a beach. The two girls were never seen alive again.

Two months later, in November 1972, Schaefer came up for trial on his assault charges. Berating him as a “thoughtless fool,” the judge sentenced him to a year behind bars with three year’s probation.

While Schaefer was doing his time in jail, the skeletal remains of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup were found in the same swampy area where Schaefer had taken the two hitchhikers. Forensic analysis indicated that the victims had been “tied to a tree and butchered.” Thanks to Susan’s mother—who had jotted down the license plate number of the man who had picked up the girls a few months earlier—

Schaefer was soon identified as the prime suspect. A search of his house turned up a trove of evidence connecting him not only to the two butchered girls but to a staggering number of other local women, some as young as thirteen, who had gone missing over the years.

Eventually Schaefer received two concurrent life sentences for the murders of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup. His true body count, however, was clearly far higher. He himself admitted to more than a hundred murders. With a sadistic smirk characteristic of his ilk, he claimed that he couldn’t be sure of the exact number. “One whore drowned in her own vomit while watching me disembowel her girlfriend,” he wrote in a letter. “Does that count as a valid kill? Did the pregnant ones count as two kills? It gets confusing.”

Schaeffer’s life came to a deservedly nasty end in December 1995, when another inmate slashed his throat and stabbed him in both eyes, ostensibly for taking the last cup of hot water from a dispenser on their cellblock.

In a famous scene from the 1993 thriller Malice, Alec Baldwin, playing a prominent surgeon undergoing legal questioning, says, “You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something: I am God.”

The crimes of serial killers are motivated by a monstrous lust for both pleasure and power. To compensate for profound, deep-seated feelings of humiliation and worthlessness rooted in their childhoods, these psychopaths develop a pernicious need to prove their omnipotence. Gaining total control over a helpless human being and dispensing death at their whim makes them feel like God. As

“Coed Killer” Edmund Kemper put in explaining the perverse gratification he derived from his atrocities, “I was making life-and-death decisions … playing God in their lives.”

This urge to “play God” has led a number of serial killers to seek careers in medicine. Another motive, of course, is that doctors have access to a steady supply of prospective victims: vulnerable, trusting people who, because they are ill to begin with, can be killed off without arousing too much suspicion.

Among the most infamous medical monsters on record are:

Thomas Neill Cream

Born in Glasgow in 1850, this Victorian serial murderer emigrated to Canada when he was thirteen, at which point he was already displaying criminal propensities. He earned a medical degree from McGill University in 1874 and was soon misusing his newly acquired surgical skills by performing illegal abortions, killing an unknown number of women in the process. In 1881, having moved to Chicago, he poisoned his mistress’s elderly husband by lacing the old man’s epilepsy medication with strychnine.

Convicted of murder, he was sentenced to life in Joliet prison. He ended up doing only ten years.

Upon his release, he sailed for England and embarked on a career as a serial killer of prostitutes, slipping strychnine to five London streetwalkers before his arrest in 1892 at his home on Lambeth Palace Road.