The Serial Killer Files (29 page)

His first attack occurred in January 1974, when he broke into the basement bedroom of an eighteen-year-old coed, bludgeoned her skull with a metal rod yanked from her bedframe, then rammed it into her vagina. If the word can be applied to a young woman who has suffered such appalling injuries, she was lucky: she survived. At least three dozen other young women whose lives intersected with Ted Bundy’s would not.

He was a genuine Jekyll-and-Hyde. He led an outwardly exemplary life: making a name for himself as a rising young star of the local Republican party, helping to man a suicide hotline, even winning a police commendation for saving the life of a drowning toddler. Simultaneously, however, the bright, personable Bundy was pursuing his secret career of unspeakable crime. In 1974, while still living in Washington state, he slaughtered at least seven young women in as many months. Two were lured from a crowded beach in broad daylight on the same afternoon.

Ted Bundy

(Pin button courtesy of Roger Worsham)

That September, he moved to Salt Lake City and enrolled at the University of Utah. Two months later, the bestial second self he described as “the entity” came roaring to the surface. Young women began to vanish, including the teenage daughter of a local police chief. Her nude, hideously mutilated remains were later found in a canyon. During this period, Bundy also made occasional forays into Colorado, where at least five other young women died at his hands.

For authorities, the turning point in the case came after midnight on August 16, 1975. A Utah Highway Patrolman pulled over Bundy for erratic driving. Inside the Volkswagen the officer found a cache of suspicious items, including an ice pick, a mask made of panty hose, and handcuffs. Before long, Bundy was picked out of a lineup by a young woman he had attempted to abduct the year before. Found guilty of aggravated kidnapping, he was sentenced to one to fifteen years at the Utah State Penitentiary. He was then transferred to Colorado to stand trial for murder.

It appeared to be the end of the line for Bundy, but authorities had underestimated his psychopathic cunning. Taking control of his own defense, he was a given access to the courthouse law library. On June 7, 1977, while his guard stepped into the hallway for a smoke, Bundy jumped from the library’s second-story window and escaped.

He was recaptured eight days later but escaped again in December, squeezing through a trapdoor in the ceiling of his cell that he had painstakingly made with a smuggled hacksaw. This time, he headed to Tallahassee, Florida, where he committed a series of attacks so inhumanly savage that even he would later refuse to discuss them. On February 15, 1978—one week after he slaughtered a twelve-year-old girl and dumped her ravaged remains in a pig shed—his luck finally ran out. He was arrested for driving a stolen car and quickly identified as the homicidal fugitive.

Eventually, he was sentenced to death, though he managed to delay his execution for a decade. When the day finally arrived, a huge, festive crowd gathered outside the prison walls to celebrate the event,

while a local radio station diverted its listeners with the sound of frying bacon and a parody of “On Top of Old Smokey”:

On top of Old Sparkey

All loaded with juice,

Goodbye to old Bundy

No more on the loose.

In surveying the serial killers of the past quarter century, there is a kind of hierarchy of evil, with such big-name psychos as Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, Ramirez, Berkowitz, and Lucas topping the list. Just below them in the ranks of infamy are some well-known lust-killers who, for whatever reason, have never achieved the same near-mythic status.

Joel Rifkin, for example, stands as the most prolific serial killer in the history of New York State. That he has never achieved the notoriety of Gacy et al is undoubtedly due to his choice of victims: drug-addicted streetwalkers, the type of social outcasts whose deaths don’t generate the kind of media hoopla that attends the serial slaughter of middle-class marrieds and clean-scrubbed coeds.

Portrait of a serial killer, Joel Rifkin

(Corbis)

Adopted at three weeks, Rifkin grew up to be a quintessential nerd—physically gawky, hopeless at sports, socially inept, and afflicted with a stutter and assorted learning disabilities. His school years were an endless ordeal of humiliation and harassment by bullying peers. Plenty of geeky young men, of course, suffer such torment and end up taking refuge in X-Men comics or Star Trek fandom or The Lord of the Rings. For whatever reason, Rifkin developed a different form of imaginative escape. From an early age, according to his own testimony, he indulged in vivid fantasies involving sex slaves, torture, and female gladiators battling each other to bloody deaths. His favorite movie was Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 Frenzy, about an English sex-killer who can only perform sexually while strangling women.

An utter failure in his academic pursuits as in every other area of his life, the virginal Rifkin began to cruise for hookers shortly before his twentieth birthday. Before long, he was deeply immersed in his sordid secret life, spending whatever small earnings he made from various odd jobs on trysts with junkie prostitutes. By the time he committed his first murder, he had, by his own estimate, engaged in three hundred such squalid encounters.

In March 1989, the thirty-year-old Rifkin was still living at home with his widowed mother, who was away on vacation. Cruising Manhattan’s East Village, he picked up a crack-addicted prostitute whose name he never bothered to learn. He drove her back to his house on suburban Long Island and, after some perfunctory sex, bludgeoned her to death with an old howitzer shell he had bought at a military flea market. Then he cleaned up the blood, straightened up the living room, and took a nap.

Waking up refreshed a few hours later, he dragged the corpse down to the basement, draped it over his mother’s washer and dryer, and—using an X-Acto knife—dismembered it as though he were carving up a roast chicken. To foil identification, he sliced off the fingertips and yanked the teeth out with pliers.

Then he shoved the severed head into an empty paint can, stuffed her body parts into plastic trash bags, loaded the remains into his pickup, and headed for New Jersey, depositing the parts in various locations.

Throughout this atrocity, Rifkin proceeded with the cool deliberation of a Mafia hit man, as though he’d been murdering and disposing of victims his whole life. Finally, he had found something he had an aptitude for: sexual homicide.

Eighteen months would pass before he claimed his second victim. He brought home another young prostitute while his mother was out of town, then bludgeoned, strangled, and dismembered her. Before long, however, he plunged into what he would later describe as his “acceleration period,” strangling hookers at a frenzied rate, sometimes at home, sometimes while they performed fellatio on him in his car. Seventeen women would die at his hands during his four-year spree.

He was caught in June 1993, when a pair of New York State Troopers spotted him driving his pickup without a rear license plate. When they tried to pull him over, Rifkin sped away, leading the cops on a high-speed chase that only ended when he smacked his vehicle into a telephone pole. Under a tarp in the pickup’s bed, the troopers found the decomposing corpse of Rifkin’s final victim.

He was given a 203-year sentence in prison. He now spends his time working on his pet project, a proposed rehabilitation center for prostitutes, where they would get free medical and psychological care, receive job training, and learn home, parenting, and financial skills. Rifkin calls his brainchild the Oholah House Foundation—supposedly named after two biblical prostitutes in the Book of Ezekiel murdered by their clientele.

Another notorious New York serial killer of this period, Arthur Shawcross, committed atrocities even more unspeakable than those of Rifkin. Like the latter, however, he preyed primarily on hard-luck prostitutes—a fact that has undoubtedly contributed to the public’s relative lack of interest in his crimes.

If Shawcross’s account of his childhood is to be fully believed, he suffered the sort of torture almost guaranteed to produce a violent psychopath. According to his story, he was molested by an aunt, sodomized by his mother, and raped by a pedophile while still in grade school. He also insists that he regularly engaged in incest with his sister and cousin, was forced to perform fellatio on his girlfriend’s brother, and practiced bestiality with a variety of creatures, including chickens, sheep, and a horse.

Whatever the truth of these claims, there is no doubt that he was a deeply disturbed child, so bizarre in his behavior that his schoolmates nicknamed him “Oddie.” He also manifested classic early warning signs of future psychopathology, including unnaturally protracted bed-wetting (which continued well into his teens) and a fondness for fire-starting.

In 1968, this profoundly unstable young man—then twenty-three years old—was drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam. During one jungle mission, he supposedly raped, slaughtered, and cannibalized two peasant women who were collaborating with the Vietcong. Like the tales of his childhood torture, it is hard to know how much of this story is true, how much the rabid imaginings of a sick mind. He also bragged of having murdered a string of preadolescent prostitutes in Saigon, a claim that—in light of his later behavior—seems more plausible. In any event, there is little doubt that, as a forensic psychiatrist would later testify, Shawcross left the army suffering from a serious case of posttraumatic stress disorder.

Discharged in 1969, he returned to his hometown in upstate New York, where he soon began to suffer from such violent flashbacks that an army psychiatrist recommended a stay at a mental hospital.

Shawcross’s Christian Scientist wife, however, refused to sign the commitment papers. Not long afterward, his pyromaniac compulsions began to reassert themselves. After setting a string of fires—including a blaze that did $280,000 worth of damage to the paper factory where he worked—he was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison.

Two years later, however, he was given an early release after saving the life of a prison guard during a riot. Returning to Watertown, he found a job as a handyman and spent his spare time fishing the local creeks and rivers. On June 4, 1972—less than a year after his parole—he was walking across some open lots near his home when he heard someone call his name. Turning, he saw a ten-year-old neighbor boy, Jack Blake, stuck waist deep in a mudhole. Pulling the boy free, Shawcross, according to his story, told him to go home and clean up. When the boy refused and insisted on following the older man across a swamp and into the woods, something in Shawcross snapped. Hitting the boy across the throat with a savage chopping blow, he raped and strangled him. Then, as he subsequently confessed to police, he

“cut parts of him out and ate them. I took his penis, his balls, his heart and ate them. Why I did this, I don’t know.” Later, Shawcross would tell psychiatrists that, sometime after sticking the body in a shallow grave, he had dug it up and had sex with it.

Three months later, while fishing in a river, Shawcross spotted eight-year-old Karen Ann Hill playing nearby. After raping the little girl, he buried her, still alive, in a shallow grave beneath a bridge, packing leaves and wet mud into her mouth and nostrils until she suffocated. Later that same day, Shawcross returned to the crime scene to enjoy an ice-cream cone. He was spotted by a witness and quickly identified as a prime suspect. Cutting a deal with prosecutors, he confessed to the murder of Karen Hill and led investigators to Jack Blake’s body. In exchange he was given a maximum sentence of twenty-five years with a possibility of parole in fifteen.

Astonishingly—and over the vehement objections of various prison psychiatrists—he won parole in March 1987, after doing his minimum sentence. At the time of his release, his parole officer penned a prescient memo: “At the risk of being melodramatic, the writer considers this man to be possibly the most dangerous individual to have been released to the community in many years.” This warning went unheeded. As a result, eleven more people would die at Arthur Shawcross’s hands.

In January 1988, after moving to Rochester, he picked up a twenty-seven-year-old prostitute, strangled her to death in his car, then tossed her body into the Genesee River. For the next year and a half, his MO

would remain much the same. Sometimes, after killing a victim and dumping her body along the riverbanks or in the nearby woods, he would sneak back to have sex with the decomposing corpse.

Occasionally, he carved out the sex organs and ate them.

Most of his victims were local hookers, but a few were acquaintances like thirty-year-old June Stotts, a mildly retarded family friend. Offering to drive her to the beach one unseasonably warm November day, Shawcross suffocated her, raped her corpse, then—as he later described it—“cut her wide open in a straight line from neck to asshole. Cut out her pussy and ate it. I was one sick person.”

Shawcross’s habit of visiting the bodies of his victims to practice necrophilia and cannibalism proved to be his undoing. In June 1990, a police surveillance helicopter—on the lookout for the “Genesee River Killer” (as the media had dubbed him)—spotted him masturbating on a bridge over the area where one of the bodies had been recently recovered. Brought in for questioning, he quickly confessed to his crimes, though he showed no signs of repentance. On the contrary, he insisted that his victims were responsible for their own deaths since they had provoked him by ridiculing his sexual inadequacies.

In the end, despite expert witnesses who testified that Shawcross was profoundly psychotic, he was found guilty and sentenced to ten consecutive twenty-five-year terms in prison.

Besides Rifkin and Shawcross, there have been other, no less despicable killers who have achieved notoriety in recent annals of serial murder. Among them are:

Harvey Carignan

While stationed in Alaska during an army stint in 1949, the sociopathic Carignan was sentenced to hang for rape-murder, but escaped the gallows because of a legal technicality. Paroled after just nine more years, he embarked on a string of burglaries and assaults and soon landed back behind bars, where he remained until 1969.