The Serial Killer Files (26 page)

Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner, The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook (2000) Miriam Rivett and Mark Whitehead, The Pocket Essential Jack the Ripper (2001) Donald Rumbelow, The Complete Jack the Ripper (1988)

Philip Sugden, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper (1995) The Twentieth Century

No sooner had the new century dawned than America was stunned by the disclosure that a genial, highly respected New England nurse named Jane Toppan was one of the most depraved multiple murderers in the country’s history, a sadistic psychopath (or “moral imbecile,” as such beings were called back then) who had poisoned thirty-one people, many of them close friends, because homicide gave her a sexual thrill.

Each succeeding decade of the century produced new and ever more sensational cases of serial murder both here and abroad.

The World War I Era

Around the time of the First World War, a Hungarian tinsmith named Bela Kiss used lonely hearts ads to lure at least two dozen women to his home in the village of Czinkota, then strangled them and sealed their corpses in alcohol-filled metal drums. By the time his atrocities were discovered in 1916, Kiss had presumably been killed in action after being drafted and sent to the front. In truth, however, he appears to have switched papers with a battlefield casualty, assumed the latter’s identity, and gotten away. To this day, his fate remains a mystery.

Hungarian police discover the metal drums containing the victims of Bela Kiss (© 2003 Nathan MacDicken)

A perennial mystery surrounds another serial murder case from roughly the same time. On the night of May 23, 1918, a New Orleans couple named Maggio were butchered in bed by an intruder who shattered their skulls with an ax blade, then slashed their throats with a razor, nearly decapitating the woman. For the next two and a half years, New Orleans would be periodically terrorized by the night-prowling “Ax Man,” who followed the same MO in each case, chiseling out a back-door panel of the targeted house, then slipping inside and attacking the occupants while they slept. Altogether, he murdered seven people

—including a two-year-old girl—and savagely wounded another eight. An alleged Mafia hit man named Joseph Mumfre is regarded as a prime suspect by some historians of crime, and it is true that the murders came to an abrupt halt when Mumfre was shot and killed by the widow of the Ax Man’s last victim. Still, there is a good deal of uncertainty about Mumfre’s role in the case, and it seems likely that the Ax Man’s identity will never be conclusively established.

1920s–1930s

The single most sensational crime of Jazz Age America was the slaying of a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy named Bobby Franks by the wealthy young “thrill killers” Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb.

That murder—senseless and shocking though it was—pales by comparison to the countless outrages perpetrated during the 1920s by Earle Leonard Nelson and Carl Panzram—two of the most ferocious serial killers in US history. A Bible-quoting sex maniac whose squat physique and enormous hands earned him the nickname the “Gorilla Murderer,” Nelson made his way across the country, killing as he went. During a sixteen-month period that began in February 1926, he strangled nearly two dozen women, most of them middle-aged landladies. He then raped their bodies after death. Captured in Canada after murdering his final two victims in Winnipeg, he was hanged in 1928.

Panzram—arguably the most incorrigible killer ever produced on these shores—blamed his vicious nature on the brutal treatment he received as an inmate of various penal institutions, which—in striving to reform him—only filled him with an implacable hatred of all mankind. Making good on his lifelong credo—“Rob ’em all! Rape ’em all! Kill ’em all!”—he led a life of spectacular brutality, leaving countless corpses in his wake as he traveled around the world—from the US to South America, Europe, Africa, and back. Arrested in 1928 for a string of burglaries, he was sent to Leavenworth, where he earned a long-overdue death sentence for smashing in the head of a fellow inmate who looked at him the wrong way. His last words as the hangman fit the noose around his neck were typical of the unrepentant Panzram: “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard—I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around!”

Overseas in Germany, the period between the two world wars produced some of the most appalling sex-killers of modern times. Indeed, the German term lustmord (“lust-murder”)—extreme sexual homicide involving mutilation, disembowelment, etc.—was coined to describe the atrocities of a handful of hideously depraved psychopaths who were active during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic: Georg Grossmann, the “Berlin Butcher,” charged with murdering and cannibalizing fourteen young women; Karl Denke, the “Mass-Murderer of Münsterberg,” another cannibal who butchered at least thirty people and stored their pickled flesh in the basement of his inn; Peter Kürten, the “Monster of Düsseldorf,” who murdered, raped, and mutilated a minimum of thirty-five victims, mostly women and children; and Fritz Haarmann, the “Vampire of Hanover,” responsible for the slaughter of as many as fifty young men.

Haarmann’s American admirer, Albert Fish—who saved every newspaper clipping he could find about the German lust-murderer—committed most of his own atrocities during the 1920s. It wasn’t until 1934, however, that the appalling truth about the old man’s enormities came to light. Fish’s confession to the murder, dismemberment, and cannibalizing of a lovely twelve-year-old girl—along with a string of earlier pedophiliac torture-slayings—instantly turned him into the most horrifying American monster of the Great Depression.

Fish’s arrest in late 1934 coincided with the start of a four-year serial murder spree by one of the most mysterious figures in the annals of American crime. This was the so-called Cleveland Torso Killer (aka the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run”). This blood-crazed maniac chopped up more than a dozen people

—most of them prostitutes, hoboes, and other social castoffs—and left their body parts strewn around the city. The killer eluded arrest, despite the all-out efforts of law officials (led by the legendary Eliot Ness, the former “Untouchable” who was then serving as Cleveland’s Director of Public Safety).

Though theories about his identity abound, the “Mad Butcher” case remains one of the great unsolved serial murder stories in the chronicles of American crime.

The 1940s

Wartime London was the scene of a short but unusually savage serial murder spree by a young Royal Air Force cadet named Gordon Cummins. On the night of February 9, 1942—while the city was living through the terrors of the Blitz—the twenty-eight-year-old fighter-pilot-in-training accosted a female pharmacist named Evelyn Hamilton as she walked home from a restaurant. In the darkness of the blacked-out city, he strangled her with her scarf and left her corpse sprawled in the entrance of an air-raid shelter.

The following night in Piccadilly Circus, he picked up a prostitute named Evelyn Oatley. She took him back to her Soho apartment, where he slit her throat, then mutilated her genitals with a can opener. Two more mutilation-murders occurred on the next two successive nights, leading police to conclude that a Jack-the-Ripper-style killer was at large in their embattled city.

Cummins undoubtedly would have gone on killing if he hadn’t been stopped. However, he was caught after two abortive murder attempts on the night of February 13. First, he tried to strangle a woman named Greta Haywood in the doorway of an air-raid shelter. He fled when the noise of the struggle attracted the notice of a passerby. He then immediately picked up another woman, who invited him home. This time, Cummins was scared off by her violent screams when he attacked her. Not only did Cummins leave two living witnesses who could identify him, he had also dropped his gas mask, which was tagged with his name, rank, and serial number. Promptly arrested, he was hanged in June 1942

during an air raid.

Just a few years after Cummins’s execution, another member of the Royal Air Force went to the gallows after committing a pair of gruesome sex-murders. Dashingly handsome and irresistible to women, Neville Heath was a con man, thief, and compulsive Don Juan who did several stints in the RAF even while pursuing his life of petty criminality. In June 1946, he crossed the line from small-time crook and impostor to sadistic killer when he flogged and suffocated a thirty-two-year-old film extra named Margery Gardner in a London hotel room. He then chewed off her nipples and rammed a poker up her vagina.

(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham)

Police immediately began searching for Heath, who had registered at the hotel under his own name. By then, however, he had headed South to Bournemouth, where, on July 3, he slit the throat of another young woman. Mutilating her body, he inflicted a massive gash that ran from the inside of her thigh up to her breast. He left her savaged corpse in the woods, where it would not be discovered for several days.

While the search was on for the missing girl, Heath—displaying either an unconscious death wish or the kind of reckless bravado typical of psychopaths—showed up at the police station to offer his help. He was immediately identified as the fugitive in the London murder and placed under arrest. He was hanged in October 1946.

Of the US serial killers active during the 1940s, two of the most notorious were African-American: Jarvis Catoe and Jake Bird. In 1943, Catoe was electrocuted for the rape-murder of a twenty-five-year-old Washington, DC newlywed—one of three women he had murdered during a serial murder spree two years earlier. His death toll was far exceeded, however, by Louisiana-born Jake Bird. In October 1947, while drifting through Tacoma, Washington, Bird entered the home of fifty-three-year-old Bertha Kludt and her teenage daughter, Beverly. He slaughtered them both with an ax he had found in their backyard.

Taken into custody after a ferocious fight—during which he badly wounded two policemen with his knife—he eventually confessed to numerous slayings in at least eight different states. His victims were all white women, bludgeoned with axes or hatchets. Police were able to confirm Bird’s involvement in eleven unsolved homicides, though he was suspected in as many as forty-four. He was hanged in Walla Walla in July 1949.

The single most infamous American serial killer of the 1940s was William Heirens, whose case continues to generate controversy to this day. Raised by sexually repressive parents who imbued him with the belief that “all sex is dirty,” Heirens grew up to be a fetishist who achieved orgasmic release from breaking into women’s homes and stealing their underwear (which he sometimes wore at home while reading books on Nazi war crimes). Like other serial killers, he was also turned on by fire-starting.

An inveterate housebreaker, he began burglarizing apartments around Chicago while still in grade school. A pair of arrests during his adolescence earned him two extended stints in reform schools. In 1945, at the age of sixteen, the intellectually gifted Heirens won admission to the University of Chicago, where he enrolled as an electrical engineering major. Even while leading a stereotypical collegiate existence—dating, hanging out with buddies, cutting classes—he continued to pursue his clandestine life as a cat burglar and panty fetishist.

On June 5, 1945, a forty-three-year-old Chicago woman, Josephine Ross, surprised an intruder looting her bedroom. She was found that afternoon, sprawled across her bed, her throat slashed, her dress wrapped around her head.

Six months later, on December 10, the naked corpse of a petite, thirty-three-year-old brunette named Frances Brown was found in the bathroom of her Chicago apartment not far from the scene of the earlier crime. She had been shot in the head, a butcher knife protruded from her neck, and her housecoat was draped over her head. Scrawled in lipstick on the living room wall was a cry for help that would become the single most famous serial killer message of the century: “For heavens sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”

The “Lipstick Killer” (as he was instantly dubbed by the press) committed his last—and most heinous—crime in early January when he abducted six-year-old Suzanne Degnan from her bedroom, strangled her, dismembered her body with a hunting knife, and dumped the pieces into the sewer.

The shocking murder of the little girl set off the largest manhunt in Chicago’s history. It did not end until the following June, when police—responding to a report of a prowler in a North Side apartment building—cornered Heirens. Drawing a gun, Heirens took aim at the officers, but his weapon misfired.

After a fierce struggle, he was subdued when an off-duty cop who had joined in the fight brained him with a flowerpot.

In custody and drugged up with sodium pentothal—“truth serum”—Heirens initially claimed that the killings had been committed by an evil alter ego named “George Murman” (short for “Murder Man”).

To avoid the chair, he agreed to confess to all three slayings in exchange for life in prison. On the day of his formal sentencing, he tried to commit suicide by hanging himself with a bedsheet but was saved by a quick-acting guard. Since the day he entered prison, Heirens—who has recanted his confession and stoutly maintains his innocence—has been a model prisoner, earning a college degree in 1972. He continues to have supporters who believe that he was railroaded, and who point to another suspect—a drifter named Richard Russell Thomas, with a long record of brutal crimes—as the likelier culprit.

The 1950s

Bathed in the rosy glow of nostalgia, the 1950s are generally regarded as a uniquely placid era in the life of America. Despite its aura of “Happy Days” innocence, however, the Eisenhower decade witnessed some of the most shocking serial murders of the modern age.

Harvey Glatman, for example—the nerdy-looking sadist who snapped pictures of bound and terrified

women before raping and garroting them—epitomized the sleazy underbelly of 1950s, finding his prey in the tawdry “camera clubs” that flourished in those sexually repressive times. The photographic souvenirs he kept of his tormented victims were chilling enough to cause even case-hardened LA cops to feel sick at the sight of them.