The Serial Killer Files (24 page)

His name was Vlad III, and he was prince of the Romanian principality of Wallachia, just south of the fictional Dracula’s Transylvania home. His father was known as Dracul, Romanian for dragon. Vlad’s own moniker of Dracula meant son of Dracul. Not a true serial killer, Vlad was reputed to be a deranged autocrat who vanquished his enemies, both real and imagined, with unspeakable sadism. His Dracula moniker might be better known today, but in the fifteenth century he had another nickname—Vlad Tepes, meaning Vlad the Impaler, in honor of his favorite torturous pastime. It is this bloodthirsty reputation that impressed Bram Stoker enough to use Vlad as the basis for his now legendary creature of the night.

Vlad the Impaler

Some historians, though, claim that all this might be a bum rap.

They assert that the accounts of Vlad’s atrocities were exaggerated and that he was, in fact, a great Romanian hero, a defender of his homeland against foreign aggression. They insist that Vlad’s actions must be placed in the proper historical context, a period when his country needed a strong, if somewhat stern, leader.

Vlad took the Wallachian throne in 1456 when his country was hard-pressed by the Ottoman Turks surging up from the south. At the same time, Romanian principalities had to maintain a volatile alliance with the Hungarians to the north. According to author Kurt W. Treplow, Vlad Dracula “lived in a moment of great importance for the future of the Romanian people,” and his defiance in the face of Ottoman conquerors kept “alive the spirit of independence” among his countrymen.

While Vlad’s defenders focused on his political and military accomplishments, his enemies preferred to dwell on exactly how he went about defying the Turks and other adversaries. How much these detractors have embellished Vlad’s dark side is difficult to say. What we do know is that the accounts of Dracula’s savagery are hair-raising.

When it came to his torture method of choice, Vlad the Impaler was supposed to have been unnervingly creative. Using his victims’ weight as they slid down a greased, pointed pole, he would sometimes impale them through the mouth, other times through the anus or the heart or navel. Depending on his whim of the moment, blinding, burning, or scalping might also be a part of the hideous process. Often this type of execution was reserved for enemies in war. In 1461, while retreating from relentless Ottoman troops, he was known to have left a veritable forest of impaled Turks in his wake. His attitude toward Saxons apparently wasn’t much better. On April 2, 1459, in the Transylvanian town of Brasov he

ordered the impalement of thousands of Saxons, the stakes arranged around a table where he calmly ate his dinner amidst the carnage.

Other targets of Vlad’s were the boyars, the Romanian aristocrats, who may have been involved in the assassination of Vlad’s father. Once, the story goes, he invited many of them to his castle for a lavish banquet, then burned them all alive in the dining hall.

His sadism could also be directed at specific individuals for violating his deeply felt, if insanely strict, sense of morality. For the crime of adultery (when committed by women) he would skin the culprit alive and carve out her genitalia. Once he was supposed to have been shocked to see that a peasant woman had fashioned her husband’s shirt far too short. He had a red-hot poker thrust up her vagina and out through her mouth. In what he must have considered a magnanimous gesture, he then presented the widowered peasant with a new wife. Vlad also “roasted children of mothers and they had to eat their children themselves,” according to a 1462 pamphlet on Dracula’s life.

Vlad enjoys his favorite form of torture

The pamphlet was published by Germans, who were enemies of Vlad and probably had valid reasons for hating him. This hatred could very well have inspired the pamphlet’s author to magnify or even invent atrocities. True or not, this version of Vlad’s life, one of the first best sellers produced by the Gutenberg press, spawned his monstrous reputation that has endured through the centuries.

More recent historians have discredited the original Dracula pamphlet as a hatchet job, but even if you accept the idea that Vlad was a notable leader according to the standards of his time, the chances are that he indulged in a certain amount of barbarism. After all, the rules of warfare and capital punishment were a lot less fussy in the fifteenth century. Perhaps he was truly vicious but no worse than other warrior-aristocrats of his day.

The Seventeenth Century

By the 1600s, cheaply printed pamphlets and single-sheet “broadsides” made news stories available to the English masses, who—like ordinary people everywhere—were primarily interested in freakish accidents, bizarre occurrences, and sensational crimes—the gorier the better. Many of these early publications have survived; their contents make it clear that there’s nothing new about serial murder.

In a fascinating study published in the magazine History Today, Professor Bernard Capp of the University of Warwick summarizes some of the notorious seventeenth-century murder cases that he managed to dig up during his researches. There was, for example, the 1675 case of “the bloody innkeeper” who ran a cheap lodging house in Gloucester, catering largely to commercial travelers. After a few years, the owner and his wife had made enough from their business to move into a larger house.

The inn was purchased by a blacksmith, who set about converting the place into a smithy. As he was digging up the backyard to lay foundations for his shop, the new owner was horrified to discover the decomposing corpses of seven fully clothed men, one with a rusty knife still embedded in his chest.

History does not record what happened to the homicidal innkeeper and his wife, though—from what we know about English justice in the 1600s—it seems safe to assume that they came to very unpleasant ends.

So did another killer couple of the era, Thomas Sherwood (aka “Country Tom”) and his distaff accomplice Elizabeth Evans (aka “Canterbury Bess”). For several years, the two plied their murderous trade in London. Bess would pick up a tipsy fellow at a playhouse or tavern and lure him to a remote spot, where Tom would be waiting in ambush. The victim would be murdered and stripped of his belongings, including every scrap of his clothing. At least five men met their deaths at the hands of this infamous pair, who ended their lives on the Newgate gallows.

Ordinary people who had lived apparently respectable lives for years were suddenly revealed to be homicidal maniacs. In 1671, a man named Thomas Lancaster secretly administered arsenic to his wife, her father, her three sisters, her aunt, a cousin, and a young female servant, killing them in succession.

“For good measure,” Capp writes, “he poisoned some neighbors, too.”

Then, as now, “angels of death”—male and female caregivers with a psychopathic urge to murder their charges—were not uncommon. At an almshouse in Coventry, eight inmates were poisoned with ratsbane in 1619 by a man named John Johnson, who committed suicide when he fell under suspicion for the crimes. There were also “Black Widow” killers like Elizabeth Ridgway, who poisoned both her husband and former suitor, as well as her mother and a former servant.

An “East-Indian Devil” slaughters the crew of an English ship, as portrayed in a 1642 engraving (British Library)

All of these and other cases uncovered by Professor Capp illustrate his point: human nature has remained more or less unchanged throughout the ages, and “multiple murders and serial killings were probably no rarer in seventeenth-century England than today.”

Recommended Reading

Bernard Capp, “Serial Killers in 17th-century England,” History Today (March 1996) The Eighteenth Century

One of the most notorious serial killers of the 1700s may never have existed. This was Sweeney Todd, the so-called “Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” According to crime writer Martin Fido, Todd was a completely fictitious character invented by Victorian writers of cheap “blood-and-thunder” fiction. Peter Haining, on the other hand—another British author who frequently writes about horror and crime—not only claims that Sweeney was real but describes him as “the greatest mass murderer in English history.”

According to Haining’s “definitive biography” of this legendary monster, Sweeney Todd was born in the London slums in October 1756, the child of poor silk weavers who abandoned him when he was twelve.

Apprenticing himself to a cutler, young Sweeney became adept at handling and sharpening razors. Two years later, he was accused of petty theft and thrown into Newgate Prison, where he ended up becoming the assistant of a barber named Plummer.

Upon his release in 1775, the nineteen-year-old Sweeney—a sullen, coarse-featured young man with a bitter grudge against the world—became an itinerant barber before leasing a shop on Fleet Street. There, over the next twenty-five years, he would perpetrate more than 160 grisly murders.

The diabolical device he employed to dispatch his unwary customers was a cunningly designed

“revolving chair.” When activated by a hidden bolt, the chair flipped backward, pitching the victim through a trapdoor into the cellar. Those who weren’t killed outright by the fall had their throats slit by the fiendish barber. Afterward, their bodies were butchered and made into meat pies by Margery Lovett, owner of a neighborhood bakeshop.

Eventually, according to Haining, both Todd and his female accomplice were arrested. Mrs. Lovett reportedly committed suicide in prison. Todd was tried, convicted, and hanged on January 25, 1802.

Sweeney Todd dismembers a female victim

There is no question about the authenticity of another eighteenth-century serial killer, though her real name has long been forgotten, along with the biographical details of her early life. In the annals of crime, she is known by her nickname, “La Tofania,” and—if the accounts of her crimes are even halfway accurate—she stands as one of the most prolific murderers in history.

Tofania’s homicidal career actually began in the late 1600s, when—using a specially brewed, arsenic-based potion that came to be called “aqua tofania” after its creator—she murdered a close male relation (possibly her first husband, though the records are a bit fuzzy on this score) in Naples, Italy. Soon, this enterprising female psychopath—who was reportedly motivated as much by a sadistic hatred of men as by greed—had made poison her business, peddling her concoction to aristocratic women eager to rid themselves of odious mates or tiresome lovers.

By 1719, the death rate among seemingly robust Neapolitan noblemen had reached such a point that the viceroy himself launched an investigation. The sixty-six-year-old Tofania—rumored to be the leader of a militant, man-hating sisterhood—was quickly identified as the prime suspect. Alerted by friends, she took refuge in a convent, until the viceroy—enraged by rumors that her followers had poisoned the city wells—sent a troop of soldiers into the sanctuary and had her arrested. Under torture, she confessed to six hundred murders. She was tried, convicted, and killed by strangulation in 1723.

Recommended Reading

Michael Newton, Bad Girls Do It! (1993)

Peter Haining, Sweeney Todd: The Real Story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1993) The Nineteenth Century

Though Jack the Ripper is far and away the most famous psycho-killer of the Victorian Era, there were plenty of other nineteenth-century serial murderers. Some were a lot more deadly than “Saucy Jack.”

Even before Victoria ascended to the throne, Britain was rocked by one of the most sensational crime cases of the century—that of William Burke and William Hare. British laws at the time placed severe restrictions on human dissections, making it exceptionally difficult for doctors and medical students to obtain specimens for anatomical study. As a result, aspiring surgeons and their teachers were often forced to turn to grave robbers—or “Resurrection Men,” as they were called—to supply them with raw material.

The names of Burke and Hare became associated with this ghoulish breed of entrepreneurship: the loathsome body snatcher who would sneak into a graveyard at night, dig up a freshly buried corpse and sell it for a few pounds to an anatomy school. However, these two came to their macabre profession by another route. In 1827, Hare and his common-law wife were running a squalid boardinghouse in the Edinburgh slums when an elderly lodger died, owing them four pounds. To cover the debt, Hare hit upon the idea of selling the old man’s corpse to an anatomist. With the help of his friend Burke, he conveyed the cadaver to a medical school run by a celebrated surgeon, Dr. Robert Knox, who paid them

£7.10s—an enormous sum to two poor Irish immigrants who normally made a pittance as laborers.

Impressed with the monetary potential of dead bodies, but disinclined to engage in the difficult, dirty, and dangerous business of grave-robbing, Burke and Hare opted for an easier method of obtaining marketable corpses: they would produce their own. Not long afterward, when another of Hare’s lodgers fell ill, the men eased him into a coma by feeding him whiskey, then suffocated him by pinching his nose and sealing his mouth. This time, they got £10 from Dr. Knox. Another ailing inmate of Hare’s hostelry soon met the same end.

Having exhausted the supply of sick lodgers at Hare’s boardinghouse, the two began preying on neighborhood beggars, local prostitutes, and other street people. Luring them to Hare’s place with the promise of liquor and food, they would suddenly pounce upon the unwary victims and suffocate them.

Fifteen people—twelve women, two handicapped boys, and an old man—were murdered this way before the two killers were caught.

To save his own skin, Hare turned King’s evidence. In January 1829, Burke was hanged before a cheering crowd of twenty-five thousand spectators and his body publicly dissected. His name would enter the English language, the verb “to burke” meaning to murder someone for the purpose of dissection.

Hare’s lodging house wasn’t the only hostelry-from-hell in the nineteenth century. In our own country, a family nicknamed the “Bloody Benders” ran a roadside inn in Kansas where, as one writer has put it,

“horror rather than hospitality was the rule.”