The Serial Killer Files (19 page)

Belle Gunness, “Lady Bluebeard”

Fritz Haarmann, “Vampire of Hanover”

John George Haigh, “Acid Bath Killer”

William Heirens, “Lipstick Killer”

Gary Heidnik, “Sex-Slave Killer”

Dr. H. H. Holmes, “Chicago Bluebeard”

Keith Jesperson, “Happy Face Killer”

Edmund Kemper, “Coed Killer”

Paul John Knowles, “Casanova Killer”

Peter Kürten, “Monster of Düsseldorf”

Pedro Lopez, “Monster of the Andes”

Richard Macek, “Mad Biter”

William MacDonald, “Sydney Mutilator”

Earle Leonard Nelson, “Gorilla Murderer”

Thierry Paulin, “Monster of Montmartre”

Jesse Pomeroy, “Boy Fiend”

Heinrich Pommerencke, “Beast of the Black Forest”

Richard Ramirez, “Night Stalker”

Melvin Rees, “Sex Beast”

Angel Maturino Resendez, “Railway Killer”

Danny Rolling, “Gainesville Ripper”

Charles Schmid, “Pied Piper of Tucson”

Lucian Staniak, “Red Spider”

Peter Sutcliffe, “Yorkshire Ripper”

Coral Eugene Watts, “Sunday Morning Slasher”

Randall Woodfield, “I-5 Killer”

Some serial killers have never been caught and are known only by their tabloid monikers (or what might be called their psychonyms ). The best known of these—besides Jack the Ripper—are: the Ax Man of New Orleans, the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, the Monster of Florence, and Zodiac.

Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker

Richard Ramirez—the twenty-five-year-old man who held Los Angeles in the grip of fear during the hot summer of 1985—had some heartfelt words for the court that sentenced him to death: “You maggots make me sick. You don’t understand me. I am beyond good and evil. I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells in us all.” Like all psychopaths, he felt not the slightest twinge of remorse for the horrors he had visited upon the city. As he left the courtroom he shrugged off the well-deserved punishment that awaited him:

“Big deal. Death always went with the territory. I’ll see you in Disneyland.”

Born into a poor Mexican-descended family in El Paso, Texas, Ramirez was an average student until he reached high school, when things went from bad to worse. As a motel worker he was caught breaking into a woman’s room and grabbing her as she exited the shower. The woman’s husband caught and beat him up, but the couple did not press charges. Ramirez moved to LA and acquired a rap sheet for drug and driving violations.

In the spring of 1985, he began to roam the neighborhoods of suburban LA in stolen cars, looking for homes to vandalize—and people to destroy. Later, when the LA police intensified their manhunt, he drove up to San Francisco for prey. Usually high on coke or speed, he slipped into darkened houses where sleeping couples lay, killing the husband first, then raping and savaging the woman. Once he carved out the eyes of a female victim and took them away as trophies.

Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez

(Button pin courtesy of Roger Worsham)

From June 1984 until his capture over a year later, it seemed to the terrified residents of Los Angeles that a demon was on the loose. The press dubbed him the “Night Stalker.” No one felt safe. The shadowy fiend did not focus on any particular age group or sex or race. He raped women in their eighties; he tortured young mothers in front of their children. He would help himself to a snack while his victims bled to death before his eyes and leave Satanic pentagrams on their bodies or the walls of their homes.

As his crimes escalated, Ramirez—like many serial killers—developed a sense of omnipotence. He believed that he was being protected by Satan.

He was wrong.

In August 1985, he attacked a couple—shooting the man in the head and raping the woman—then fled in their car. After recovering the stolen vehicle, police lifted a fingerprint and were able to match it to Ramirez’s rap sheet. His mug shot was immediately broadcast on local TV. A few days later, during an attempted carjacking in East LA, he was recognized by passersby, pounced on, and nearly beaten to death. Only the timely arrival of the police saved him from the enraged mob.

His fourteen-month trial was a media sensation. The unrepentant Ramirez mugged for reporters, flashing a pentagram he had drawn on his palm, making devil’s horns with his fingers, and chanting, “Evil …

Evil … Evil… .” Hordes of groupies flocked to the proceedings, showering him with fan letters and love notes. When one young woman was asked about her fascination with the notorious psycho-killer, she replied: “When I look at him, I see a real handsome guy who just messed up his life because he never had anyone to guide him.” Ramirez later married one of his female admirers.

He was ultimately convicted of thirteen murders, though he later confessed to more. “I’ve killed twenty people, man,” he told a fellow inmate. “I love all that blood.” He currently resides on death row in San Quentin.

There’s little doubt that America is the world’s leading producer of serial killers, though any true measurement has to take into account the sheer size of our population. The FBI estimates that there are between thirty and fifty serial killers at large in our country at any given time. That might seem like a shockingly high number, but in a nation of more than 280,000,000 people, it’s a minuscule percentage.

England, for example, may be afflicted with only a few serial killers a year, but its population is less than a fifth of ours. Indeed, in a study of serial murder between the years 1962 and 1982, the crime expert Colin Wilson lists eighteen cases in the US and eleven in Great Britain. According to that finding, the incidence of serial murderers for that twenty-year period turns out to be significantly higher in Britain

—18 per 100,000, compared to 8.3 for the United States. Recent British serial killers, moreover, include not only some of the most depraved murderers of modern times—like Fred and Rosemary West—but also the single most prolific: Dr. Harold Shipman, responsible for as many as four hundred murders.

Still, there are definite cultural factors in America that are conducive to serial murder. The fragmented, highly dysfunctional families that are a fertile breeding ground for criminal psychopaths. The rootlessness and anonymity of American life, which make it possible for serial killers to keep on the move or live in a community without attracting notice. The large number of “targets of opportunity”—teenage runaways, inner-city prostitutes,
etc.
And, of course, the unusually high level of violence in general, which has always been a feature of our society.

It’s important to recognize, however, that serial murder is not limited to any one nation. It’s a universal phenomenon, one that has existed throughout history and in every part of the globe. Indeed, a comprehensive survey of international serial killers would require a book of its own. For a sense of just how widespread the phenomenon is, here is a sampling of serial killers from other lands.

Ramiro Artieda

Though this Bolivian psychopath gained infamy in the late 1930s for the serial strangling of seven young women, he began his homicidal career by killing his own brother, Luis, to gain control of the family estate. Unfortunately for future victims, the police were unable to gather sufficient evidence to convict him, and Artieda was allowed to go free.

Jilted by his eighteen-year-old fiancée—who evidently had qualms about marrying an accused fratricide

—Artieda left for the United States, where he studied acting. No sooner had he returned to Bolivia than a string of eighteen-year-old women—who all bore a striking physical resemblance to Artieda’s former girlfriend—began to die, each strangled by a dark-haired stranger posing in a different role. One was lured to her death by a “film-company executive,” another by a “visiting professor,” another by a

“traveling salesman,” yet another by a “monk.” After a final, failed murder attempt in May 1939, Artieda was identified by an intended victim and arrested.

Under interrogation, he admitted to strangling seven women, presumably as a way of taking revenge on the female sex after being spurned by his fiancée. He also confessed to the murder of Luis. He was executed by a firing squad on July 3, 1939.

Wayne Clifford Boden

Viewers of Michael Moore’s Academy Award-winning documentary, Bowling for Columbine, may be forgiven for thinking of Canada as an idyllic land where violent crime is so rare that its citizens go to sleep with their front doors unlocked. Thirty years ago, however, Montreal was the scene of a series of murders as gruesome as any in the bad old USA.

The horrors began in July 1968, when the naked corpse of a twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher named Norma Vaillancourt was found in her Montreal apartment. The victim had been raped and strangled, and her breasts savaged by bite wounds. Just over one year later, the killer struck again, raping and strangling another petite young brunette, then shredding her breasts with his teeth.

It wasn’t until his third atrocity that police finally got a lead. In November 1969, twenty-year-old Marielle Archambault met the same grisly fate as the previous victims. Searching her apartment, investigators found a crumpled snapshot of a nice-looking young man. Marie’s coworkers at a downtown jewelry shop were able to identify him as a guy named “Bill” who had stopped by the store to chat with her on the day of her murder.

Two months later, the “Vampire Rapist”—as the newspapers were by then calling him—struck again, raping and strangling twenty-four-year-old Jean Way, then subjecting her corpse to his trademark mutilation.

With the police hot on his trail, the phantom killer decamped for Calgary twenty-three hundred miles away, where he murdered his final victim, a young schoolteacher named Elizabeth Porteous, in May 1971. Interviewing Porteous’s friends, police learned that she had been dating a man named “Bill,” who drove a blue Mercedes. Spotting a car matching that description parked just a block away from the victim’s apartment, police set up a stakeout and apprehended the owner as he approached the vehicle.

He turned out to be twenty-three-year-old Wayne Clifford Boden. His cuff link had been found in the shredded remnants of Elizabeth Porteous’s dress as her body was being transported to the medical examiner’s lab. Boden admitted that he had gone out with her on the night of her murder, but he insisted that she had been alive when he left her. At his trial, however, a forensic odontologist established beyond doubt that the bite marks on the victim’s breasts could only have been made by Boden.

Convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the Calgary murder, he was subsequently tried again in Montreal and given an additional three life sentences.

Luis Alfredo Garavito

Americans like to think they have the biggest and best of everything. We take perverse pride in having produced the worst serial killers of modern times: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer,
et al.

The truth is, however, that the enormities of even our most monstrous psycho-killers pale before those of the Colombian lust-murderer Luis Alfredo Garavito. The fact that his name is virtually unknown on these shores is clearly a function of cultural chauvinism: Americans just aren’t especially interested in psychopathic foreigners. Certainly the sheer magnitude of his crimes makes him a serious candidate for the title of “Worst Serial Sex-Killer of the Twentieth Century.”

Born in 1957 in the coffee-growing area of Pereira, Garavito—the youngest of seven children—was subjected to regular, brutal beatings by his alcoholic father and raped by two adult male neighbors. He grew up to be an alcoholic, as well as a depressive with suicidal tendencies. After just five years of schooling, he dropped out of school and, at sixteen, became a drifter, finding occasional work as a store clerk and street vendor of religious articles.

During a seven-year span that began in 1992, Garavito murdered no fewer than 140 boys between the ages of eight and sixteen. He killed them in more than fifty cities across Colombia, as well as in Ecuador. Posing in various benign guises—a teacher, a priest, a social worker, a representative of a charitable organization—glib, smooth-talking Garavito would win the confidence of his victims, often by buying them soft drinks or giving them small sums of money. Then he would invite them on a long walk into the countryside. When the boys began to grow tired, Garavito pounced. He would tie them up with nylon line, rape them, mutilate them, then slit their throats or behead them.

That these enormities went undetected for years was a function of Colombia’s dire conditions. His victims were poor, often homeless, street children: the displaced products of a country in the throes of social disintegration. For the most part, no one even noticed that they were missing. It wasn’t until twenty-seven skeletons were found in a ravine in the western province of Pereira that authorities launched an investigation. Eventually—after nearly ninety more skeletons were uncovered—the police were led to Garavito, already in jail awaiting trial for the slaying of an eleven-year-old boy in the city of Tunja. During a marathon grilling, Garavito confessed to 140 murders, each of which he had painstakingly recorded in a notebook. Colombia having no death penalty, he was sentenced to fifty-two years for the Tunja murder—a shockingly mild punishment in light of his unparalleled enormities.

Saeed Hanaei

For more than two years, an Iranian serial killer—nicknamed the “Spider” because of his sinister skill at luring victims into his web—killed at least sixteen prostitutes in the holy city of Mashad. The women were all strangled with their head scarves, then swaddled head to toe in their black chadors and dumped on the streets. Far from causing outrage, however, these horrific crimes were actually applauded by many hard-line supporters of the fundamentalist regime, who viewed the unknown serial killer as a righteous crusader against corruption.

Eventually, a thirty-nine-year-old construction worker, Saeed Hanaei, was arrested for the crimes.

According to his confession, he had embarked on his murderous mission after his own wife was mistaken for a prostitute by a cabdriver. Blaming the large number of prostitutes in the city for this humiliating episode, Hanaei had decided to kill as many of them as he could as a “religious obligation.”