The Serial Killer Files (28 page)

His first victims were a teenage couple shot to death in a remote lover’s lane about twenty miles northeast of San Francisco on the night of December 20, 1968. Six months later, at midnight on July 5, 1969, he struck again, shooting another young couple in the parking lot of a public golf course. Forty minutes after that attack—which left the girl dead and her boyfriend severely wounded—police received an anonymous phone call from a gruff-voiced man, who directed them to the scene of the shooting and claimed credit for the earlier double murder.

The matter-of-fact tone in which this message was delivered made it clear that a homicidal maniac was on the loose. The full extent of his madness, however, didn’t become apparent until six weeks later, when he sent three separate letters to local newspapers. Each contained a cryptogram. Deciphered by a high school teacher and his wife, the three coded passages formed a single, wildly deranged message: I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING

WILD GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE ANIMAL OF

ALL TO KILL SOMETIMES GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING EXPERENCE IT IS EVEN

BETTER THAN GETTING YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL THE BEST PART IS THAE WHEN

I DIE I WILL BE REBORN IN PARADICE AND ALL THE I HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY

SLAVES I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOI DOWN OR

STOP MY COLLECTING OF SLAVES FOR MY AFTERLIFE

The letter was signed with a peculiar symbol that resembled the sight of a rifle scope—a circle intersected by a cross.

Just a few days later, the killer sent another letter to the San Francisco Examiner. True to his previous message, he did not provide his name. Instead, he used a pseudonym that immediately entered the mythology of modern-day serial murder.

“This is the Zodiac speaking,” the letter began. From that point on, he would start each of his communications with the same ominous greeting.

Two months passed. On September 27, 1969, two twenty-year-old college students, Bryan Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard, were picnicking at a lake near Vallejo when a frightening figure emerged from behind some trees. His face was hidden beneath an oversized black hood embroidered with the Zodiac’s crossed circle device, a large, wood-sheathed knife—possibly a bayonet—hung from his belt, and he had a semiautomatic pistol in his hand. Tying up the couple at gunpoint, he savaged them with his knife, then walked to their car and, with a black Magic Marker, inscribed his crossed circle logo on the door, along with the dates of all three of his Bay Area attacks. An hour later, he put in a call to the police, announcing that he had just committed a “double murder.” As it happened, he was wrong. Stabbed ten times, Cecelia Shepard would die a few days later. Her boyfriend would survive his half dozen wounds.

The Zodiac in full regalia

(Courtesy of Tom Voight)

His last known victim was a San Francisco cab driver named Paul Stine who was killed with a point-blank shot to the head. Before fleeing the crime scene, Zodiac cut off a large piece of the victim’s shirt, soaked it in the dead man’s blood, and carried it away with him. Shortly afterward, the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle received an envelope. Inside was a swatch of the cab driver’s shirt and a letter from Zodiac in which he promised to “wipe out a school bus some morning.” Fortunately, he never made good on his threat. Nor—as far as anyone knows—did Zodiac ever kill again.

He did, however, keep up his bizarre correspondence, sending sporadic greeting cards and letters to the papers for the next several years. As for his identity, it remains a mystery, though one expert on the case has named Arthur Leigh Allen—a gun buff and convicted child molester who died in 1993—as the likeliest suspect.

School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire + then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.

—from one of the Zodiac letters

The Dark Prince of the decade was Charles Manson, the evil incarnation of all that was most insidious about the 1960s counterculture, a social movement that began with dreams of free love and flower power and ended with the violent chaos of Altamont. Manson is unique among serial killers: a legendary monster whose most infamous crime was committed by proxy. Profoundly manipulative, he was able to transform his “family” of fanatical worshipers into a troop of hippie-assassins only too eager to do his homicidal bidding.

He was born in 1934, the illegitimate son of a bisexual teenage prostitute, Kathleen Maddox, who routinely brought her tricks home for sex, left him alone for weeks at a time, and reportedly once traded him to a waitress for a pitcher of beer. Sent to jail in 1939 after knocking over a gas station with her brother, Kathleen shipped little Charlie off to live with her aunt and uncle—the former a religious fanatic, the latter a sadist who constantly derided the boy as a “sissy” and forced him to wear girl’s clothes to school. By twelve, Manson was living on the streets and surviving by theft. His adolescence was a continuous cycle of petty crime, arrest, incarceration, and escape. At eighteen—while doing time in Utah for stealing cars—he sodomized another boy at knifepoint, earning a stint in a federal reformatory, where he racked up eight major disciplinary infractions, including three for homosexual rape. Paroled in 1954, he spent the next dozen years in and out of various prisons for crimes ranging from check forgery to pimping. In 1967, at the age of thirty-two, Manson—who had taught himself guitar and dabbled in Scientology and Buddhism while in jail—came up for parole. He himself expressed doubts about the wisdom of being set free. “Oh, no, I can’t go outside there. I couldn’t adjust to that world, not after all my life had been spent locked up.” In spite of his protests, he was unleashed on the world.

Making his way to San Francisco during the so-called Summer of Love, this charismatic con man quickly mastered the psychedelic gobbledygook of the counterculture, attracting a band of drug-addled dropouts—many of them naive and emotionally unstable young women—who revered him as a guru.

Eventually, Charlie and his ragtag commune settled in a dusty, disused ranch outside LA, where they enjoyed a squalid, orgiastic existence overseen by their increasingly crazed messiah. Manson developed a bizarre obsession with the song “Helter Skelter” from the Beatles’ “White Album.” In his flourishing madness, Manson interpreted the song (which refers to an amusement park thrill ride) as a prophecy about an impending race war in which blacks would rise up and destroy all white people, except for Manson and his followers, who would find refuge in a cave beneath Death Valley. Eventually, Charlie and his family would emerge from hiding and—thanks to their innate superiority over “blackie” (as the racist Manson called African-Americans)—take over the world.

To expedite things, Manson dispatched a band of followers on an insane mission, commanding them to slay some prominent white people in a way that would implicate black revolutionaries and spark an apocalyptic race war. On the night of August 9, 1969—in one of the most shocking atrocities of modern times—five of Manson’s demented disciples invaded the home of film director Roman Polanski (who was away on a shoot) and savagely butchered his eight-months-pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, along with four other people. Before leaving, they used the victims’ blood to scrawl incendiary graffiti on the walls.

The following night, Manson himself led a party of his “creepy crawlers” to the home of a couple named LaBianca. They murdered both husband and wife, leaving Mr. LaBianca with a carving fork jutting from his chest and the word “WAR” carved into his flesh. Once again, the victims’ blood was used to inscribe pseudorevolutionary messages on the walls: “DEATH TO PIGS,” “RISE,” and “HEALTER SKELTER.”

Later, one of the participants in the Tate horrors explained that the Manson gang “wanted to do a crime that would shock the world, that the world would have to stand up and take notice.” If that was their plan, they succeeded. The massacre at the Polanski residence set off a panic in Los Angeles and sent shock waves throughout the nation. Ultimately, Manson was arrested when one of his brain-fried groupies—Susan Atkins, who was behind bars on an unrelated charge—blithely confessed to a jail mate.

Charles Manson at his trial

(Bill Lignante—ABC News)

After a lengthy trial, which Manson did his best to turn into a circus, he and four followers were condemned to the gas chamber. In 1972, however, their sentences were commuted to life when the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty. Still immured behind prison walls, as he has been for the bulk of his lamentably misspent life, Manson is now an old man. Still, it is hard to picture him as anything but the wild-eyed, scraggly-haired demon-hippie of the Woodstock era, an icon every bit as symbolic of that turbulent time as Timothy Leary and the Four Moptops.

I am what you have made me and the mad-dog devil killer fiend leper is a reflection of your society.

—Charles Manson

The 1970s to Now

The 1970s witnessed such a sharp increase in the number of psychopathic sex murders that it seemed—in the words of a pioneering paper presented by members of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit—as if “a new phenomenom in homicide” had suddenly appeared on the scene. To describe the perpetrators of these supposedly unprecedented crimes, Robert Ressler and his colleagues at the Bureau adopted a term that had been coined a decade earlier and that quickly entered the popular lexicon: “serial killers.”

As the foregoing historical survey shows, however, there is nothing new about sadistic lust-murder beyond the name we now apply to it. Still, it is clearly the case that—particularly in the United States—there was a definite spike in such crimes during the 1970s.

Why did this happen? Various reasons suggest themselves, most having to do with the upheaval in sexual mores precipitated by the social revolution of the 1960s. In reaction to the inhibited 1950s, the hippie counterculture preached the joys of “letting it all hang out”—of shedding all repressions and indulging in the Dionysian pleasures of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. But the unconscious mind is a Pandora’s box, and when you open the lid on the id, all kinds of forces—some exhilarating and creative, others scary and destructive—come gushing out. The counterculture started out with the utopian, all-you-need-is-love daydreams epitomized by the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” But it ended up steeped in the nightmarish darkness of the Stones’ “Let It Bleed.”

The permissive ethos that sprang up in the sixties and spread throughout the culture in the 1970s did more than liberate the libidos of middle-class Americans; it gave permission to some extraordinarily aberrant people to act out their sickest fantasies. The countercultural slogan—“If it feels good, do it!”—was intended to encourage a healthy sense of sexual freedom in people. But it’s a dangerous philosophy when adopted by madmen who feel best when they are raping, torturing, and butchering helpless victims. The breaking down of long-standing sexual prohibitions also made it easier for serial killers to find potential victims in the singles bars, gay bathhouses, and other pickup places of the era.

It is important, however, to put the recent rise in sex-murders in perspective. The surge in such crimes has led to a lot of alarmist talk about an “epidemic” of serial killing. This makes for good news copy but

—like more recent scares about shark attacks and child abductions—is mostly hyperbole. To be sure, the last few decades have produced a striking number of world-class lust-murderers in America: John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, the Hillside Stranglers, Edmund Kemper,
etc.
But even during the heyday of these sickos, the number of serial killers at large in our country was infinitesimal. Ordinary Americans who fear that there is a psycho-killer lurking around every corner are far less likely to die at the hands of a knife-wielding slasher than in a car accident on their way to the local video store to rent The Silence of the Lambs.

The serial killer who best exemplifies the shadow side of the sexually freewheeling 1970s was undoubtedly Bundy, the living incarnation of one of that decade’s darkest anxieties: the fear of meeting a seductive stranger whose charm conceals the vicious soul of a psychopath.

Surviving family photographs from Bundy’s early years suggest a Leave It to Beaver childhood of wiener roasts, fishing trips, and warm Christmas holidays. Still, there were striking abnormalities in his background. An illegitimate child, he was forced to pretend that his mother was his sister and his grandparents—Sam and Eleanor Cowell—were his father and mother. There are also indications that—despite Bundy’s avowed adoration of his grandfather—Sam Cowell was a virulent racist and petty tyrant who freely dispensed abuse to every member of the household, from the family pets to his long-suffering wife (who was eventually driven into electroshock therapy).

Even so, there is little in Bundy’s background to account fully for the sheer malevolence of his adult behavior. Perhaps, as he himself suggested, there were unknown genetic factors that contributed to his monstrous makeup.

Whatever the case, his disturbing tendencies manifested themselves at a young age. He was only three when he slipped some butcher knives under the bedclothes of his sleeping aunt. In elementary school—despite his obvious intelligence and superior grades—his recurrent temper tantrums were violent enough to worry his teachers. By high school, he had become a chronic Peeping Tom and petty thief.

By that point, even Bundy was becoming aware that he lacked certain basic human qualities: a conscience, a capacity to see people as anything more than objects to be manipulated for his own gratification. By studying others, he learned to mimic normal behavior so skillfully that, for the rest of his life, even those closest to him failed to perceive his monstrous nature.

While attending the University of Washington, Bundy became involved with a lovely, cultivated young woman named Stephanie Brooks who—insofar as he was capable of such an emotion—would become the love of his life. He was presumably devastated when she broke up with him. Much has been made of the fact that his subsequent victims bore a vague resemblance to Stephanie. The implication is that Bundy’s homicidal career was provoked by this traumatizing incident, that he was taking revenge on the woman who rejected him. The more probable explanation is that Bundy, like many psycho-killers, was simply turned on by a certain kind of woman. Indeed, he took pride in choosing only “quality” victims—pretty, intelligent, college-age women—to abduct, torture, mutilate, and kill.