The Serial Killer Files (21 page)

Hit with three life sentences, McCafferty spent the next twenty-three years in some of Australia’s toughest prisons, where he gained a reputation as a particularly dangerous and incorrigible inmate.

Despite his life sentences—supplemented with additional time for various offenses he committed while in jail (including manslaughter and drug-peddling)—he was paroled in 1993. Much to the delight of Australians—and the dismay of the Scots—he was deported to his homeland, where he declared that he was a “changed person.” He remarried and fathered a child.

Sixteen months later, he was put on two years’ probation after threatening to kill some cops.

You and the rest of your family can go and get fucked because anyone who has anything to do with me is going to die of a bad death.

—Archie McCafferty in a note to his wife

The “Monster of Florence”

One of the most gruesome—and perplexing—of modern murder mysteries, the series of crimes perpetrated by the so-called Monster of Florence has earned renewed notoriety in recent years as the case that inspired Thomas Harris to set his novel Hannibal in Dante’s native city.

The case began in August 1968, when an adulterous couple was shot to death while parked in a cemetery, where they’d gone for some quick, furtive sex. The double murder appeared to be solved when the woman’s cuckolded husband was arrested and convicted. But he was ultimately proved to be innocent, since he was still languishing in prison six years later when the killer struck again.

In September 1974, another couple—this time a pair of teenage lovers—was shot repeatedly while making out in their car. The girl was then dragged outside and stabbed nearly a hundred times in a frenzy of bloodlust. Afterward, the killer arranged her nude body in a spread-eagle position and thrust a vine branch up her mutilated vagina.

The pattern was established: double murders committed on moonless nights by a sexually sadistic

“lovers’ lane” maniac.

Seven years later, in June 1981, an off-duty policeman on a walk in the Florentine countryside happened upon the phantom-killer’s next pair of victims. A thirty-year-old man was slumped behind the wheel of his car. He had been shot repeatedly and his throat had also been slashed. Sprawled at the bottom of a steep bank a few yards away was the savaged body of the man’s twenty-one-year-old lover, whose vagina had been removed with a razor-sharp implement.

More horrors followed. In October 1981, another young couple who had parked for a romantic interlude at a scenic overlook just north of Florence was slaughtered by the maniac, who—once again—absconded with the woman’s excised vulva. The following June, a couple was slain while making love in their car, though this time—apparently spooked by passing traffic—the killer fled without committing his usual mutilations.

In September 1983, two teenage boys were executed while sleeping in their parked camper nineteen miles south of Florence. This was a departure for the killer, who had so far focused on heterosexual couples, and police theorized that he might have mistaken one of the youths—who sported shoulder-length blond hair—for a girl.

In any case, he returned to his usual MO ten months later, when he slaughtered two young lovers who had parked just north of Florence. This time, he not only cut out the girl’s genitals but removed her left breast. He repeated this atrocity the following September when he slaughtered a French couple in a campsite just outside Florence. Several days after their bodies were found, an assistant in the public prosecutor’s office received a chunk of the woman’s amputated breast in the mail.

During the next eight years, a hundred thousand people were questioned. More than two decades after the first killings, the case finally appeared to be solved when a suspect was arrested in January 1993. He was seventy-one-year-old Pietro Pacciani, a semiliterate farmhand and amateur taxidermist who had served time in the 1950s for a particularly grisly murder. After catching his fiancée in the embrace of a traveling salesman, he had stabbed and stomped the man to death, then raped the corpse. Pacciani had also done a stint in prison in the late 1980s for beating his wife and sexually molesting his two daughters. His 1994 arrest was a nationwide media sensation. Despite a paucity of hard evidence—and his own protestations of innocence—he was convicted of seven double murders. Two years later, however, his conviction was overturned on appeal. By then, police had come to believe that Pacciani was the ringleader of a small gang of killers, who had committed the murders for ritualistic purposes. In the end, three of his alleged confederates were put on trial. One was acquitted, two convicted of participating in five of the double slayings. Pacciani himself died, presumably of natural causes, before he could be retried, making it unlikely that the “Monster of Florence” mystery would ever be definitively resolved.

Arnfinn Nesset

A balding, bespectacled nursing home administrator, Nesset looked about as dangerous as Mr. Rogers.

And yet he has entered the criminal-history books as Norway’s most prolific serial killer, convicted of twenty-two murders and suspected of as many as 138.

When elderly, infirm patients at the Orkdal Valley Nursing Home began dying at rapid pace in the late 1970s, no one paid much attention until journalists received a tip that the director, Arnfinn Nesset, had been stocking up on curacit, a derivative of the notoriously lethal muscle relaxant, curare. Brought in for questioning, Nesset first insisted that he had purchased the drug to kill a pack of wild dogs that had been prowling around the premises. Abruptly, however, he changed his story and began confessing to a homicidal compulsion that had been going on for almost twenty years.

At first he admitted to twenty-seven killings. Before long, the number had grown to forty-six. Then sixty-two. But even that staggering sum was probably conservative. “I’ve killed so many, I’m unable to remember them all,” he said. He had been doing away with elderly patients since he became a nursing home worker in 1962. Some of his homicides, he claimed, were mercy killings. Mostly, however, he murdered for the sheer sadistic joy of it.

Shortly before his trial was set to open, Nesset suddenly recanted and pleaded innocent. His lawyers tried to convince the jury that he was mentally unbalanced, a pathologically deluded individual who believed he was a “demigod” with the power of life and death over the elderly. The ploy didn’t work. In March 1983, Nesset was convicted of twenty-two counts of murder and given the maximum sentence under Norwegian law: twenty-one years behind bars.

Anatoly Onoprienko

A Ukrainian psychopath who wreaked such devastation that newspapers dubbed him the “Terminator,”

Onoprienko was dumped in an orphanage as a child by his widowered father—an act that instilled the abandoned boy with a lifelong rage against normal, stable families. A late-blooming serial killer, he did not commit his first homicide until 1989. At the age of thirty, he and a confederate shot and killed an entire family—two adults and eight children—in the course of a robbery. Over the next seven years, he made up for lost time, conducting an ever-escalating rampage of slaughter that left more than fifty men, women, and children dead.

Just a few months after his first killings, Onoprienko—approaching a parked car with the intention of stealing it—discovered a family sleeping inside and shot all five occupants, including a five-year-old boy. He then burned their bodies.

Several years elapsed before he struck again. In December 1995, he broke into the home of a family named Zaichenko and murdered all four members—father, mother, and two young sons—with a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun. Nine days later, he slaughtered another family of four, torched their home, then killed a witness while fleeing the scene.

His reign of terror had begun in earnest.

Increasingly possessed by the need to murder random victims, Onoprienko killed seven more people in three separate incidents over a two-day span in early January 1996. Some victims were shot as they sat in parked or stalled cars, others were pedestrians, and one was a policeman on patrol.

Between mid-January and his arrest in April, Onoprienko broke into six more homes, slaughtering families wholesale with axes, guns, and hammers. By then, the largest manhunt in Ukraine was under way for the phantom killer. The village of Bratkovichi—where several of his worst massacres had taken place—was under the protection of a National Guard Unit equipped with rocket launchers and armored vehicles.

The end came in April 1996. Onoprienko was staying at the home of a cousin, who—after stumbling upon a hidden cache of weapons—kicked Anatoly out of his house and notified the police. Tracking Onoprienko to his girlfriend’s apartment, the police found a mountain of evidence tying him to the spate of unsolved murders.

In custody, Onoprienko confessed to fifty-two homicides, offering various explanations for his atrocities. At different times, he insisted that he was under the control of God, Satan, and space aliens; he also claimed that he had killed out of sheer boredom. Despite evidence that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, he was judged competent to stand trial and was convicted and sentenced to death in April 1999.

I would be sitting, bored, with nothing to do … So I would get in the car or catch a train and go out to kill.

—Anatoly Onoprienko

Jose Antonio Rodriguez Vega

A pervert whose sexual pathology combined elements of necrophilia and gerontophila (erotic attraction to the elderly), Rodriguez Vega conducted a two-year reign of terror in the Spanish coastal town of Santander. Following his 1986 release from prison on a rape charge, he began talking his way into the homes of solitary old women under the pretext of performing minor household repairs. Once alone with his victims, he would strangle and rape them (in that order), then set about expunging every sign of his presence.

He did such a thorough job of cleaning up after himself—neatly tucking the bodies into bed and removing all traces of incriminating evidence—that most of the deaths were chalked up to natural causes. Only after his arrest—when police found the cache of “trophies” he had removed from his victims’ homes—did the full extent of his crimes become known: sixteen murders in all, earning him a place in the criminal record books as the most prolific serial killer in recent Spanish history.

During his 1991 trial, the sadistic Rodriguez Vega seemed to revel in the grief he had caused his victims’ families. He was sentenced to 440 years in prison, though—given the leniency of the Spanish penal system—there is every likelihood he will end up serving no more than twenty.

Morris Sithole

Between January and October 1995, more than three dozen young black women fell victim to a serial killer in the vicinities of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Because the crimes occurred in three suburbs—

Atteridgeville, Boksburg, and Cleveland—they were dubbed the “ABC Murders.” All the victims had been raped, then strangled with their purse straps or articles of clothing. At least a dozen of the corpses were found in a field strewn with a bizarre assortment of objects: knives, mirrors, crosses, burned Bibles, even dead birds impaled with pins like voodoo dolls. Stymied in their efforts to find the killer, South African authorities brought in ex–FBI agent Robert Ressler—a founding member of the bureau’s pioneering team of “Mind Hunters”—who predicted that the case would eventually be solved and came up with the following profile: “a black male, twenty-five to thirty-five, an eye-catching dresser with a fancy car who charms his victims into entering his car willingly.”

In early October, a Capetown newspaper received an anonymous telephone call from the killer, in which he described the murders as an act of revenge. He claimed to have been imprisoned in the past on a false accusation of rape. Having been subjected to unrelieved “torture” for the fourteen years behind bars, he had decided to inflict suffering on all womanhood. “I force a woman to go where I want,” he said, “and when I go there I tell them, ‘Do you know what? I was hurt, so I’m doing it now.’ Then I kill them.”

As a result of the call, police soon identified a suspect: a surprisingly soft-spoken ex-convict named Morris Sithole. In October 1995, after a nationwide manhunt, the thirty-one-year-old Sithole was tracked to a Johannesburg slum. Wielding a hatchet, he wounded one of the arresting officers before he himself was shot and taken into custody. In a series of taped jailhouse confessions, he smoked and munched on an apple while casually describing the terrified last moments of his victims. He freely admitted that he hated women and felt that he was teaching them “a very good lesson” by murdering them. Tried in 1997, he was convicted of thirty-eight murders, making him South Africa’s most prolific serial killer.

Prohibited from imposing the death penalty, the judge gave him the maximum sentence: 2,410 years.

Lucian Staniak

Communist Poland’s answer to Jack the Ripper, Lucian Staniak committed a string of sadistic sex-murders over the span of three years, most timed to coincide with public celebrations.

The first hint of the horrors to come was a letter sent to a Warsaw newspaper on the eve of a national holiday. “There is no happiness without tears, no life without death,” read the note, which was written with red ink in a spidery scrawl. “Beware! I am going to make you cry.” The next day, the naked, disemboweled corpse of a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl was found in a park in the city of Olsztyn. The morning after this appalling discovery, another blood-colored note was sent to a newspaper editor: “I picked a juicy flower in Olsztyn and I shall do it again somewhere else, for there is no holiday without a funeral.”

Six months would pass before the killer made good on his threat. In January 1965, he waylaid a sixteen-year-old girl on her way home from a student parade, raped her, garroted her with a wire, then hid her corpse in a factory basement.

His next atrocity took place on November 1—All Saints’ Day—when he attacked a young woman at a freight terminal, immobilizing her with chloroform before raping her and savaging her lower body with a screwdriver. Her mutilated corpse was found the next day inside a wooden packing crate, a six-inch metal spike protruding from her vagina. The following day, he sent the newspapers another letter written in red: “Only tears of sorrow can wash out the stain of shame; only pangs of suffering can blot out the fires of lust.”