The Serial Killer Files (23 page)

That evidence is in the form of fairy tales. Nowadays we think of fairy tales as a charming variety of kiddie lit, but originally they were oral stories intended for adults. And though they are full of magic and enchantment, they are also, as many scholars have pointed out, historical documents, reflecting social realities of the time. The extremely gruesome content of many of these tales makes it clear that their audience was quite familiar with the kind of homicidal maniacs we now call serial killers.

In “The Robber Bridegroom,” for example—one of the tales recorded by the Brothers Grimm—the heroine sneaks into her boyfriend’s home and watches in horror as he and some buddies bring home a young woman, get her drunk on wine, then kill her, chop her up in pieces, and devour her body. And in another Grimm story, “Fitcher’s Feathered Bird,” an overly curious young woman discovers that her new husband is a serial ax-murderer when she enters a forbidden room and finds “a great bloody basin”

filled with “human beings, dead and hewn to pieces.” When her husband returns home and realizes that his wife has discovered the terrible truth about him, he wastes no time in getting rid of her: “He threw

her down, dragged her along by her hair, cut her head off on the block, and hewed her in pieces so that the blood ran on the ground. Then he threw her into the basin with the rest.”

An ogre cuts the throats of seven sleeping children in this Gustav Doré illustration of the fairy tale “Hop o’ My Thumb”

Perhaps the most famous fairy tale reflecting early fears of serial killers is “Little Red Riding Hood.”

Many scholars believe that ancient superstitions about werewolves stem, at least partly, from real-life cases of medieval mutilation-murderers who killed with such bestial ferocity that they were thought to be actual wolf-men, or lycanthropes. The two most famous of these were Peter Stubbe and Gilles Garnier.

Serial murder may, in fact, be a much older phenomenon than we realize. The stories and legends that have filtered down about werewolves and vampires may have been a way of explaining outrages so hideous that no-one [sic] in the small and close-knit towns of Europe and early America could comprehend the perversities we now take for granted. Monsters had to be supernatural creatures.

—John Douglas, Mindhunter

For us, the werewolf is a character in old horror movies, some tormented guy played by Lon Chaney, Jr., who gets hairy and vicious in the light of the full moon. But Europeans in the sixteenth century had different ideas. Werewolves constituted a vexing issue of criminal justice and public policy. When officials at the time discovered that some crazed criminal was on a murderous rampage, not only killing but tearing apart his victims, they didn’t regard him as someone driven by twisted psychological impulses. They characterized him as someone who had welcomed the power of Satan and had literally

turned into a monster.

In December 1573, the regional parliament in Franche-Comte in eastern France issued a proclamation outlining the most effective and proper ways to catch, convict, and punish werewolves. The authorities were responding to the recent shocking case in nearby Dole of Gilles Garnier, the most notorious of French lycanthropes. Sixteen years later, German concerns about werewolves in their midst came to a head in the trial of a man named Peter Stubbe. Together, these two cases give us some idea of the ferocity of these so-called demons, the serial killers of their day, as well as the brutality of the authorities’ response.

The alleged werewolves came to their savage criminal careers from different directions. Garnier was known as a hermit—today he would be called a loner—who gave up his solitary life to take a wife and start a family. He soon found, though, that he was unable to live up to his role as a provider. Supposedly, he made his deal with the devil out of desperation. Not so with Stubbe. The way contemporary chroniclers tell it, he was born bad and practiced black magic and indulged in cruelty from an early age.

Once the two men made their pacts with Satan, the distinctions between them blurred. Both became addicted to murder and cannibalism, both preferred to prey upon children.

A lycanthrope makes off with a baby

Supposedly turning into a wolf when he applied an enchanted ointment, Garnier murdered four children.

Stubbe was said to accomplish his transformation thanks to a magical belt. He killed thirteen kids, along with one man and two women. In his monster incarnation, Stubbe reportedly had “eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like brands of fire; a mouth great and wide, with most sharp and cruel teeth; a huge body and mighty paws.” It’s easy to understand why people in those days thought that Stubbe or other similar killers took such a nightmarish form. Their crimes seemed to be the work of infernal creatures.

Garnier would strangle his young victims, then rip them apart and feast upon the flesh of their legs, arms, and belly. In one case, he tore off the leg of a boy. In another case, he tore off a chunk of a girl’s flesh and took it home to his wife so that she could cook it for dinner.

The attacks by Stubbe along the Rhine River in Westphalia might have been even more ferocious. Like Garnier, he consumed parts of his victims and was particularly fond of eating “hearts panting hot and raw.” Once he was reputed to have eaten an entire victim without leaving a trace. Although he often roamed the countryside looking to waylay strangers, he would also target his own family. He raped both his sister and his daughter before turning them into his accomplices, and he murdered his son and devoured his brain.

The crimes, trial, and torture of the “werewolf,” Peter Stubbe, from a 1590 pamphlet When the authorities finally tracked down these psychos, they made it clear that they planned to make graphic examples of them. After his trial, Garnier was turned over to Dole’s Master Executioner of High Justice, who burned the alleged werewolf alive. Officers of the law in the German town of Bedburg went several steps further when dealing with Stubbe. First they put him on the rack and tortured a confession out of him. Then, after the formality of a trial, they strapped him to a wheel, tore away chunks of his flesh with red-hot pincers, crushed his limbs with the head of an ax, decapitated him, and burned what was left of his body. The gruesome procedure was not only an act of revenge but also intended as a deterrent. To underscore the message for any other aspiring werewolves in the vicinity, the authorities tied the torture wheel to a pole and left Stubbe’s head impaled on the pole’s tip.

While these cases show that horrendous serial murder is nothing new, they also demonstrate that media fascination with this sort of crime is also old news. Immediately following the executions of both werewolves, the professional printers, empowered by the new media innovation of movable type, cranked out pamphlets recounting all the grisly details of each case. Included in the Stubbe booklet was the sixteenth-century equivalent of a comic strip depicting his crimes and capture and, in the final four panels, showing the excruciating details of his punishment.

Recommended Reading

David Everitt, Human Monsters (1993)

Catherine Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked (2002) SERIAL SLAUGHTER THROUGH THE AGES

According to Thomas Carlyle, “history is but the biography of great men.” Of course, he wasn’t thinking about criminal history when he made that remark. Far from being the biography of great men, the history of serial murder is largely the chronicle of psychopathic creeps—misfits, losers, and utter nonentities—whose only claim to fame is a capacity for spectacularly sick acts of violence.

Of course, there have been some exceptions—individuals who would have made it into the history books even if they hadn’t been among the most depraved killers who ever lived. This was particularly true in the distant past, when a number of notorious psycho-killers were members of the high aristocracy, and sometimes of the royalty itself.

Ancient Rome

In an age when watching an arena full of helpless human beings get torn to pieces by wild animals was regarded as an enjoyable pastime, it required something very special to stand out as a particularly degenerate individual. The behavior of certain ancient emperors, however, was so grotesquely depraved that it was shocking even by the sadistic standards of pagan Rome. Though Tiberius, Justinian, and Caligula all engaged in unspeakable perversions, the worst of them all was arguably Nero.

Like most psychopaths, Nero began to act on his sadistic propensities at an early age. As an adolescent (according to the Roman historian, Suetonius) he liked to disguise himself in a cap and prowl the streets at night “in search of mischief. One of his favorite games was to attack men on their way home from dinner, stab them if they offered resistance, and then drop their bodies down the sewer.”

His “games” became increasingly baroque. Later in life, he liked to pretend he was one of the ravenous beasts of the Coliseum. Dressing himself in the skin of a wild animal, he would leap from a den and

“attack the private parts of men and women who stood bound to stakes,” biting and ripping off their genitals in a state of savage ecstasy.

Among his countless other atrocities, he once castrated a boy named Sporus, dressed him up as a bride, and married him in a mock ceremony; turned a bunch of captive Christians into human torches and used them to light up a garden party; and tore out the womb of his own mother Agrippina, so that he could see where he had come from.

Agrippina herself once employed the services of a female poisoner named Locusta who—according to crime maven Michael Newton—“takes the honors as the first publicly identified practitioner of serial murder.” Eager to rid herself of her husband, the emperor Claudius, Agrippina hired Locusta for the job, which the latter carried out successfully with a tempting dish of poisoned mushrooms. Later, she was also called upon to eliminate Claudius’s son, Britannicus. Eventually, she paid for her crimes (which reportedly included the murder of at least five other victims) in a manner that was typical of the extravagant depravities of Nero’s Rome. As Newton describes it, “she was publicly raped by a specially trained giraffe, after which she was torn apart by wild animals.”

The Premodern Age

Even in our own age of twenty-four/seven news coverage, most serial murder cases are barely reported by the media (it’s a safe bet that, unless you’re a hard-core crime junkie, you’ve never heard of Todd Reed, a devoted father and part-time poet arrested for the murder of three Portland prostitutes in May 2000; or Tommy Lynn Sells, a drifter who, following his arrest by Texas authorities in January of that same year, confessed to ten killings in six states). So it’s impossible to say how many serial sex-murders were committed five hundred years ago, when newspapers didn’t exist and crimes among the peasantry went largely unrecorded (unless they were spectacularly gruesome, like those of Peter Stubbe and Gilles Garnier).

The most infamous figures of premodern Europe were highborn sadists like Gilles de Rais, the original Bluebeard, who was executed in 1440 for the torture-murder of 140 children (though estimates of his victims range as high as 300). Perhaps even more appalling—at least if all the legends are to be believed

—was the Hungarian “Blood Countess,” Erzebet (or Elizabeth) Bathory. Born in 1560 into one of Hungary’s most ancient families, the beautiful Erzebet grew up in the same spooky area inhabited by the fictional Count Dracula, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. While still in her teens, she was reputedly initiated into the pleasures of torture, devil-worship, and sexual perversion by assorted family members. Her monstrous nature came into full blossom after she married an aristocratic warrior, Count Nazady, and moved into his castle, which was equipped with a well-stocked torture dungeon.

Between her marriage in 1575 and her arrest more than thirty years later, Bathory was responsible for a staggering number of murders—perhaps as many as 650. Most of her victims were peasant girls. Lured to the grim castle by the promise of employment—or sometimes abducted outright—the young women were subjected to unspeakable torments for the delectation of the degenerate countess, who was driven into a sexual frenzy by their agonies. She was especially fond of ripping out chunks of their flesh with a custom-made pincers, though she also made frequent use of whips, scissors, needles, red-hot branding irons, spike-lined cages, and her own teeth. According to legend, she was also in the habit of butchering her virginal captives, filling a tub with their blood, and bathing in the gore as a way of preserving her youth.

Eventually, having exhausted the supply of nubile peasant girls from the surrounding countryside, Bathory began to prey on the daughters of minor nobility, a practice that finally aroused the authorities and led to her arrest in 1610. During her trial, she was accused, among countless other atrocities, of cutting off parts of her victims’ bodies and making them eat their own flesh. Condemned to a living entombment in a bricked-up chamber in her castle, she died of apparent starvation in 1614.

For several centuries, the name of another notorious woman of the distant past, Lucretia Borgia, was synonymous with female serial murder. A member of the most powerful family of the Italian Renaissance, Lucretia was infamous for her sexual excesses (which supposedly included incest with her father, the pope) as well as her habit of getting rid of enemies with a poisoned powder she dispensed from a sinister ring. Indeed, throughout the Victorian era, every time a new female poisoner like Lydia Sherman appeared, she was immediately branded a latter-day “Borgia.” There seems to be a growing consensus among historians, however, that tales about Lucretia’s crimes were merely rumors spread by her political enemies and that she was, in fact, a model of virtue who never engaged in sexual misconduct or killed anyone at all.

Yes, there once was a real-life Dracula. But no, he did not bite the necks of young, voluptuous women and drain them of their blood. Still, he was more than horrendous enough to qualify as a monster—if, that is, fifteenth-century accounts can be believed.