The Serial Killer Files (20 page)

Hanaei was utterly remorseless, declaring that killing the women was no harder than “breaking open a melon.”

At first, some hard-liners rallied to his defense, arguing that he was simply trying to clean up the country. They fell silent, though, when he revealed that he had had sex with most of his victims before strangling them. He was hanged in the prison compound in Teheran on the morning of April 18, 2002.

They were worthless as cockroaches to me. Toward the end, I could not sleep at night if I had not killed one of them that day.

—Saeed Hanaei

Javed Iqbal

In 1999, a thirty-seven-year-old, independently wealthy Pakistani named Javed Iqbal was brutally beaten by a pair of young servant boys. When he reported the crime to the police, they not only brushed off his charges but accused him of sodomy. At that moment, Iqbal decided to take a dreadful revenge against

“the world I hated.” He vowed to murder exactly one hundred children.

During the next six months, he made good on this hideous pledge. Enticing young teens—most of them beggars and runaways—to his small apartment in Lahore, he fed them, took their snapshots, and offered them a bed. Once they were asleep, he asphyxiated them with cyanide. Later, he dissolved their bodies in a vat of acid and dumped the residue down an alleyway sewer. Iqbal not only saved their clothing and shoes but kept a meticulous record of his victims, recording their names, ages, the dates of their deaths, and even the cost of disposing of them (roughly $2.40 per victim, including the cost of the acid). As soon as he reached his goal, he turned himself in.

Convicted in March 2000, he was given a sentence commensurate with the monstrosity of his crimes. He was to be strangled in front of the parents of his victims, then cut into a hundred pieces and dissolved in acid. He appealed the sentence but was then found dead in his cell, an apparent suicide, in October 2001.

I could have killed five hundred, this was not a problem. But the pledge I had taken was one hundred children, and I did not want to violate this. My mother had cried for me. I wanted one hundred mothers to cry for their children.

—Javed Iqbal

Muhammad Adam Omar Ishaak

In the early 1980s, the University of Sana opened Yemen’s first medical school, producing physicians who, in succeeding years, would serve throughout the country and across the Arab world. Among its graduates were Yemen’s first women doctors. The reputation of this proud institution was badly tarnished in the summer of 2000, however, when one of its employees—a forty-eight-year-old morgue attendant named Muhammad Adam Omar Ishaak—turned out to be a deranged sex-killer whose victims included two of the school’s own female students. An emigrant from the Sudan who had arrived in Yemen on a wave of impoverished African job-seekers, Ishaak—or the “Sana Ripper,” as he was dubbed

—confessed to raping, killing, and dismembering his victims, before soaking their remains in acid and dumping them in the morgue drains.

From the start, however, a great deal of controversy surrounded Ishaak, who kept altering his story. At first, he claimed to have butchered more than fifty women as a transient worker in a half dozen Arab countries. Later, he lowered the number to sixteen victims, all of them from Yemen, insisting that he had never worked anywhere else except his native Sudan, where he had been a gravedigger. His story changed again, however, when one of his supposed victims—a twenty-one-year-old woman whose mutilation-murder he had described in grisly detail—turned up alive. In the end, he admitted to only two murders, those of a twenty-four-year-old Iraqi medical student and a twenty-three-year-old Yemeni, both female, whose body parts were found in the morgue drains.

Though some observers clung to the belief that Ishaak was a scapegoat, set up by powerful figures seeking to cover up a sex-and-murder scandal at an exclusive Sana brothel, Ishaak was sentenced to death. He was publicly executed outside the gates of the medical school in August 2001—shot through the heart and head after receiving eighty lashes with a whip of knotted leather.

The “Kobe School Killer”

In the spring and summer of 1997, Japan was riveted by a hideous crime. On Tuesday morning, May 27, several passersby spotted what looked like a manikin’s head resting in front of the gate to a junior high school in the port city of Kobe. Upon closer examination, it proved not to be a fake but—much to the horror of witnesses—the decapitated head of a mentally retarded eleven-year-old boy named Jun Hase who had been missing for several days. Stuffed inside the mouth was a note that read: “Well, let’s begin a game. Can you stop me, police? I desperately want to see people die. I think it’s fun to kill people. A bloody judgment is needed for my years of great bitterness.” A rash of other crimes had lately occurred in the vicinity. Just a half mile from the school gate, a ten-year-old girl had been bludgeoned to death with a steel pipe in March, and a nine-year-old girl seriously stabbed the same day. Before that, two other elementary school girls had been attacked by a hammer-wielding assailant, though both escaped serious injury. And then there were the animals: two dead kittens—one with its paws cut off—left in front of the school, along with a decapitated pigeon.

Realizing that a serial killer was on the loose, the police began looking for a man in his thirties who had been seen in the company of little Jun shortly before the boy’s disappearance. In early June, the killer sent several sinister letters to a local newspaper, declaring that murder brought him a sense of inner peace and threatening to kill “three vegetables a week”—by which he apparently meant children.

Given the degree of the killer’s psychopathology, it should have come as a tremendous relief when he was finally caught at the end of June. But in fact, his arrest precipitated a nationwide spasm of anguished soul-searching. The killer turned out to be a fourteen-year-old boy, reportedly from a nice, middle-class home. Though Japanese law forbade the release of his name, certain facts about him emerged. Like most serial killers, he began manifesting sociopathic symptoms at an early age. He loved to play with hunting knives in elementary school and enjoyed torturing animals, on one occasion lining up frogs on the street and running over them with his bicycle. He maintained a detailed diary of his crimes and engaged in bizarre rituals. After luring Jun Hase to a wooded hill, he had strangled the boy, removed his head with a saw, taken it home in a plastic bag, and washed it in a purification ceremony before leaving it at the school gate.

Under Japanese law, the “Kobe School Killer” cannot be jailed because of his youth. One way or another, he is expected to be back on the streets by the time he is eighteen.

I can relieve myself of hatred and feel at peace only when I’m killing someone. I can ease my own pain only when I see others in pain.

—from a note sent by the “Kobe School Killer”

Pedro Lopez

The man who would grow up to become the notorious “Monster of the Andes” had the sort of childhood almost guaranteed to produce a criminal psychopath. Born in rural Colombia in 1949, Lopez—one of thirteen children of a penniless prostitute—was raised in utter squalor. At eight, he was kicked out of his home after his mother caught him fondling one of his own little sisters. Out on the streets, he quickly fell victim to a middle-aged pedophile who—promising him food and shelter—lured him to an abandoned building and raped him.

Making his way to Bogotá, he subsisted on whatever he could beg, pilfer, or scavenge. He was briefly taken under the wing of a sympathetic American couple who enrolled him in a school for orphans. This relatively normal interlude in his life ended abruptly when he stole some money from the school (allegedly after being molested by one of the male teachers) and ran away.

By his midadolescence, Lopez had turned to car theft, a vocation that landed him in jail when he was eighteen. Two days after he started his seven-year sentence, he was gang-raped by a quartet of older inmates. Not long afterward, Lopez killed all four of his attackers with a homemade shiv. Deemed an act of self-defense, the killings earned him only an additional two years.

Released in 1978, Lopez embarked on a nomadic career of sadistic lust-murder that would earn him international infamy as possibly the most prolific serial killer of all time. Traveling widely through Peru, he raped and strangled scores of young girls, many snatched from Indian tribes. Once, after being caught during the abduction of a nine-year-old Ayachucos child, he was beaten, tortured, and nearly buried alive. Only the timely intervention of an American missionary saved him.

Deported from the country, Lopez resumed his homicidal ways in Colombia and Ecuador. He was finally caught in April 1980, while attempting to lure a twelve-year-old girl from an Ecuadorian marketplace. In custody, Lopez was initially silent, though he finally opened up to his “cellmate”—actually a priest in prison garb, planted there by the authorities. Confronted with the horrifying admissions he had made to the disguised priest, Lopez broke down and offered a full confession that would have seemed flatly incredible if subsequent developments hadn’t supported its truth.

In the two years between his release from prison and his capture, Lopez claimed to have murdered at least a hundred girls in Ecuador, the same number in Colombia, and “many more” in Peru. He would scout village markets for the most innocent-looking children he could find, then—having decided on a victim—lure her away with small trinkets. Once he had her in his power, he would strangle the girl while raping her, prolonging his pleasure as long as he could while he watched the life drain from her eyes. “It took the girls five to fifteen minutes to die,” he told interrogators. “I would spend a long time with them, making sure they were dead. I would use a mirror to check whether they were still breathing.

Sometimes, I had to kill them all over again.”

Initially skeptical over his staggering claims, police became convinced when Lopez led them to a secluded area where they dug up the remains of fifty-three female victims, ages eight to twelve. Charged with 110 counts of murder, Lopez was convicted in 1980 and sentenced to the maximum under Ecuadorian law: life imprisonment.

I am the man of the century. No one will ever forget me.

—Pedro Lopez

Archibald McCafferty

As a slayer of three, Archie “Mad Dog” McCafferty may not have been one of Australia’s worst serial murderers in purely quantitative terms. But he was certainly one of the most viciously deranged.

McCafferty was actually a citizen of Scotland who emigrated to Australia with his parents at the age of ten. Like the madman he would most often be compared to—Charles Manson—he spent his adolescence in and out of various institutions. By the age of twenty-four, he had racked up nearly three dozen convictions for everything from housebreaking and burglary to car theft and assault. One of the few crimes he hadn’t been arrested for was murder. Not that he wasn’t prone to violence. Until his midtwenties, however, his sadism was vented largely on small animals—puppies, cats, chickens—which he liked to strangle for fun.

In 1972, he married a young woman named Janice, who soon became pregnant. To give the devil his due, McCafferty seemed to recognize how frighteningly unstable he was and checked himself into psychiatric hospitals on several occasions, usually after he got drunk or stoned on angel dust and subjected his young wife to a savage beating. What finally pushed him over the edge into raging homicidal mania was the accidental death of his infant son, Craig. In March 1973, the baby smothered when Janice brought him into her bed and rolled over on him in her sleep.

A short time later, McCafferty—whose body was covered with hundreds of tattoos—added a new one, the number 7, inscribed on the web between thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Its significance would soon be made terrifyingly clear. In his spiraling madness, McCafferty had decided to murder seven people to “avenge” his son’s death.

Six months later, McCafferty put his insane scheme into motion. Janice had fled back to her family, and Archie was now living with a suicidal young woman named Carol Howes. Residing with them was an emotionally unbalanced teenager, Julie Todd, whom they had befriended at a psychiatric clinic. This unholy threesome became the core of a gang that also included three other teenagers, a trio of seventeen-year-old boys McCafferty had met at his favorite tattoo parlor.

The first to die was an inebriated fifty-year-old news seller named George Anson. He was jumped by the gang, dragged to a side street, then stabbed seven times by McCafferty. By that point, McCafferty was deeply delusional. He had become convinced that the seven homicides he was planning to commit would bring his dead son back to life.

Victim number two was a forty-two-year-old miner named Ronald Cox, abducted at gunpoint after stopping to give a lift to two of McCafferty’s teen accomplices. Driven to the cemetery where McCafferty’s son was buried, Cox was made to lie facedown in the mud and shot in the back of the head. The following morning, the gang killed another well-meaning stranger, Evangelos Kollias, who had stopped to give two of the teenagers a lift.

After shooting Kollias in the head and dumping his body, McCafferty drove toward Blacktown, where his wife, Janice, had taken refuge at the home of her mother. He planned to kill both women, along with the mother’s live-in boyfriend. Fortunately for the intended victims, McCafferty’s car ran out of gas along the way. He decided to defer their executions. Shortly afterward, one of his gang members, a boy named Rick Webster, having become convinced that he had been targeted for death by McCafferty, turned him in to the police.

At the 1974 trial of the “Australian Charles Manson” (as the press dubbed him), psychiatrists offered conflicting testimony as to McCafferty’s mental state. All agreed, however, that the twenty-five-year-old was a remorseless killer who posed a permanent threat to the community. McCafferty concurred with this opinion, stating that “if given the chance, I will kill again, for the simple reason that I have to kill seven people, and I have only killed three, which means I have four to go.”