The Serial Killer Files (18 page)

Sentenced to hang, the so-called “Lambeth Poisoner” ensured his immortality with his astonishing last words. As he stood on the gallows, hood over his head, he cried out, “I am Jack the—”. Just then, the trapdoor crashed open, drowning out the final word. Though Cream certainly shared some traits with his legendary contemporary—most prominently a murderous rage against prostitutes—there is good reason to doubt his final claim, since he was languishing in jail in Joliet at the time of the Ripper killings.

The Case of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream

(from the Illustrated Police News of London )

Marcel Petiot

In twentieth-century Europe, the social chaos created by the two world wars afforded prime opportunities for homicidal maniacs to ply their monstrous trade. This was particularly true in Weimar Germany, which produced some of the most monstrous lust-murderers of modern times, most notably Fritz Haarmann and Peter Kürten. It was also the case in France during World War II, when one of that country’s worst serial killers took ghastly advantage of the horrors around him.

Born in 1897, Marcel Petiot, like most psychopaths, had a history of criminal behavior extending from his youth, when he got into trouble for stealing money from schoolmates. In succeeding years, he was involved in drug-trafficking, arrested for shoplifting, and convicted of theft while serving as the mayor of his native town, Villaneuve.

Despite his criminal record and a stint in a mental asylum, Petiot earned a medical degree. In 1933, he moved to Paris, where he continued to be involved in shady activities even while building a successful practice. It was after the Nazi occupation of France that he hit on the insidious scheme that would earn him everlasting infamy.

Posing as a Resistance member, Petiot let it be known that he could smuggle wealthy Jews out of France for a hefty fee. When his desperate “clients” showed up at his house bearing their most precious possessions, they received an injection, supposedly an immunization shot against unnamed “foreign diseases.” In reality, it was strychnine. Petiot then placed them in a specially constructed death chamber equipped with a peephole, through which he could view their final agonies. He would then dispose of the corpses in his personal crematorium.

His atrocities came to light in 1944 when firemen showed up at his house to investigate reports of a black, fetid cloud of smoke emanating from his chimney. They discovered human limbs in his furnace and the mutilated corpses of twenty-seven people stacked like firewood in the basement. Petiot stuck to his story that he was a member of the Resistance. The corpses, he claimed, were those of Nazi soldiers, killed by the Resistance and turned over to him for disposal. In the end, however, he failed to convince the jury that tried him. In March 1946, he was sent to the guillotine for the murder of twenty-six victims, though the actual total may have been far higher—perhaps as many as 150.

Michael Swango

Swango’s father was a Marine colonel who enforced strict military discipline on the rare occasions he was at home. Michael grew up without much feeling for his martinet dad, though he did come to appreciate the old man a little more after the latter’s death, when he discovered a scrapbook kept by Colonel Swango containing newspaper clippings of car crashes, violent crimes, and other disasters. “I guess he wasn’t such a bad guy after all,” said Michael, himself a lifelong aficionado of gruesome news.

His extreme interest in everything from savage sex crimes to Nazi atrocities was only one of young Michael’s peculiarities. During the 1960s, while his peers wore love beads and marched against the Vietnam War, Swango worked hard to turn himself into Rambo, painting his car military green, sporting fatigues, and dropping to the floor to do a hundred push-ups at the slightest provocation. Eventually, he joined the Marine Corps, remaining for just one tour of duty. In 1979, after receiving an honorable discharge, he enrolled in Southern Illinois University Medical School. There, he quickly gained a reputation for weird behavior. Though exceptionally bright, he demonstrated bizarre lapses in knowledge. On one occasion, he was unable to locate the patient’s heart in a chest X-ray, and his dissection of a cadaver in anatomy class was so bungled that the mangled specimen became a schoolwide joke. Excited by the sight of car wrecks and other accidents—the gorier the better—he spent more time working as a volunteer ambulance attendant than going to classes. As a result, he was almost denied his diploma.

Despite his poor performance, he was offered an internship at the Ohio State University Medical Center, where patients on the road to recovery suddenly began dying of heart failure whenever young Dr.

Swango was making his nightly rounds. Eventually, he fell under suspicion of the nursing staff, who reported their concerns to hospital administrators. Eager to avoid a scandal—and potentially ruinous lawsuits—the officials conducted a shockingly cursory investigation that exonerated Swango of any crime. This was the first of many instances in which the medical establishment turned a “blind eye” (to use the title of James Stewart’s powerful 1999 book on the case) to the nefarious doings of the psychopathic Swango, allowing him to go on satisfying his sadistic needs for an unconscionably long period of time.

Leaving Ohio under a cloud of suspicion, Swango returned to Illinois, where he joined an ambulance corps. He raised eyebrows among coworkers with his gleeful appreciation of hideous accidents. Before long, he was amusing himself by doctoring the snacks of his fellow paramedics with an arsenic-based ant poison. Caught red-handed, he was arrested, convicted on seven counts of aggravated battery, and given a five-year sentence.

Released on good behavior after only two years, he moved to Virginia and—while supporting himself as a lab technician—began sending out résumés, trying to get back into medical practice. Astonishingly, he was offered a residency at the University of South Dakota, whose director accepted at face value Swango’s explanation for his jail time (according to Swango, he had gotten into a barroom brawl and ended up becoming the fall guy, though others were really to blame).

Swango didn’t last long at his new position. In an act of hubris characteristic of psychopaths, he applied for membership in the American Medical Association, which turned up the truth about his battery charge during a background check and conveyed the information to his new employers, who quickly let Swango go.

Undaunted, the ever-resourceful Swango next managed to land a job at Veterans Administration hospital on Long Island, New York, where—true to psychopathic form—he began killing off recuperating patients. This time, when the facts about Swango’s background came to light, the Justice Department finally stepped in.

Realizing that the Feds were on his tail, Swango fled the country and headed for South Africa, where he landed a job in a remote Lutheran hospital. The shocking rash of sudden, unexplained deaths that occurred whenever “Dr. Mike” was on his rounds, however, aroused the suspicions of the hospital staff, and Swango was soon on the lam again. After hiding out in Zimbabwe and Europe for a year, he returned to the United States but was arrested as soon as he stepped off the plane. The deadly doctor—who may have been responsible for as many as sixty murders and who confessed in his diary that nothing turned him on more than “the sweet, husky, close smell of indoor homicide”—was convicted of killing three patients and sentenced to life without parole.

I controlled other people’s lives, whether they lived or died. I had that power to control. After I didn’t get caught for the first fifteen, I thought it was my right. I appointed myself judge, prosecutor and jury.

So I played God.

—Homicidal health-care worker Donald Harvey, accounting for his fifty-two murders CASE STUDY

Harold Shipman, England’s Doctor Death

Those who have looked into the background of Dr. Harold Shipman for the sources of his psychopathology have come up short. Yes, he was known to have been unusually attached to his mother and deeply traumatized by witnessing her slow death from cancer when he was in his teens. According to some psychiatrists, the sight of the family physician administering morphine injections to ease her final agonies left an indelible mark on his psyche, one that drove him, in later life, to re-create that traumatic scene again and again. Still, this explanation—like every theory offered by the experts—is a clear case of grasping at straws. It is likely that we will never know how or why this much-beloved family physician became England’s—and possibly the world’s—most prolific serial killer.

Aside from being a loner who struck certain teachers as “a bit strange,” there was nothing apparently abnormal about the adolescent Shipman. It was not until he got his medical degree and joined a practice in the north England town of Todmorden that he showed signs of psychological trouble. After suffering a series of blackouts, Shipman told his colleagues that he was an epileptic—an explanation that they accepted until it was discovered that he had been forging prescriptions for a morphinelike painkiller called pethidine and injecting himself with the drug on a regular basis. Arrested for forgery and stealing drugs, Shipman was hit with a sizable fine and forced out of the practice. After kicking his habit in rehab, however, he was soon back on the job, finding work with another medical practice.

In 1992, he broke from the group and set himself up in private practice in the town of Hyde. His warm bedside manner and the time and care he lavished on his patients made the bespectacled, gray-bearded physician a local favorite, especially among the elderly female population. No one noticed—at least at first—just how rapidly those old women began to die off.

Shipman’s MO was always the same. He would pay an unexpected afternoon house call on a fairly healthy patient, kill her with an injection of the painkiller diamorphine, then hurry away. Later—often summoned by a frantic call from a relative who had discovered the corpse—he would return and sign the death certificate, attributing the unexpected death to natural causes.

It was not until 1997 that someone—a woman named Debbie Bramboffe, the daughter of the local undertaker—realized that something sinister was going on. Struck by the unusually high death rate among Dr. Shipman’s elderly female patients—and by the bizarre fact that their bodies were invariably found fully dressed and seated in their favorite easy chairs or resting on a settee—Mrs. Bramboffe shared her suspicions with another local physician, Dr. Susan Booth. Before long, an investigation was under way.

Aware that authorities had begun to examine the death certificates of his patients, Shipman still could not stop killing. Indeed, by then, his homicidal mania had grown so extreme that he was sometimes murdering patients at the rate of one a day.

The underlying psychological causes that finally led to his arrest are a matter of debate. Some attribute his undoing to arrogance and a growing sense of invincibility, others to an unconscious wish to get caught. What is beyond dispute is that, in June 1998, Shipman killed Mrs. Kathleen Grundy—an unusually fit octogenarian and the former mayor of Hyde—then crudely forged a will in her name that left him her entire fortune of nearly £400,000. As soon as Mrs. Grundy’s daughter set eyes on the document, she saw it was a fake and contacted the police, who already had Shipman in their sights.

Before long, Mrs. Grundy’s body was exhumed and autopsied. When lethal amounts of morphine were discovered, Shipman was arrested.

At first, the townspeople of Hyde refused to accept that their neighbor and trusted physician could be guilty of murder. Shopkeepers hung posters in their store windows that read, “We don’t believe it.” They were forced to face the truth, however, when Shipman was convicted of fifteen murders in January 2000.

Nothing, however, could have prepared them for the ultimate shock—the revelation, after a prolonged investigation by the British government, that the number of suspicious deaths connected to Shipman totaled at least 297 and possibly as many as 345.

What drove him to do it? At his trial, the prosecuting attorney, Richard Henriques, gave the only possible answer: “He was exercising the ultimate power of controlling life and death, and repeated the act so often he must have found the drama of taking life to his taste.”

In short, Dr. Harold Shipman killed several hundred human beings for the simple reason that he liked it.

Our tendency to mythicize serial killers—to see them not as predatory criminals, but as creatures of superhuman evil—is reinforced by the media’s habit of tagging them with lurid nicknames. This sensationalistic ploy (designed to sell papers by exploiting our primitive, childlike fascination with monsters) began with the first celebrity psycho of the modern era—“Jack the Ripper”—and continues to this day. (When a card featuring the Grim Reaper was found at one crime scene during the 2002

shooting rampage in the Washington, DC, area, the unknown perpetrator was immediately dubbed the

“Tarot Card Killer.”)

Here is a list of notorious serial killers and their tabloid-style monikers: Richard Angelo, “Angel of Death”

Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, “Lonely Hearts Killers”

David Berkowitz, “Son of Sam”

Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, “Hillside Stranglers”

William Bonin, “Freeway Killer”

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, “Moors Murderers”

Harvey Louis Carignan, “Want-Ad Killer”

David Carpenter, “Trailside Killer”

Richard Chase, “Vampire of Sacramento”

Andrei Chikatilo, “Mad Beast”

Reg Christie, “Monster of Rillington Place”

Douglas Clark, “Sunset Slayer”

Carroll Cole, “Barfly Strangler”

Dean Corll, “Candyman”

Jeffrey Dahmer, “Milwaukee Cannibal”

Theo Durrant, “Demon of the Belfry”

Albert Fish, “Moon Maniac”

John Wayne Gacy, “Killer Clown”

Carlton Gary, “Stocking Strangler”

Ed Gein, “Plainfield Ghoul”

John Wayne Glover, “Granny Killer”

Vaughn Greenwood, “Skid Row Slasher”