The Serial Killer Files (3 page)

Like the mass murderer, the spree killer sometimes targets specific victims: the boss who fired him, the professor who flunked him, the bully who made his high school years a living hell. But the randomness with which he mows down everyone unlucky enough to cross his path shows that his rage is really directed against society itself.

The defining difference between the spree killer and the mass murderer has to do with motion. Whereas the mass murderer slaughters in one place, the spree killer moves from site to site, killing as he goes. In that sense, spree killing might best be described as mobile mass murder.

In 1949, for example, a crazed ex-GI named Howard Unruh stunned the nation when he strode through his quiet New Jersey neighborhood and methodically gunned down everyone in his path.

Howard Unruh, the Retaliator

The first major spree killer of the post–World War II era, Howard Barton Unruh fit the classic profile of his kind. In the fall of 1949, he was a twenty-eight-year-old misfit, living alone with his mother in a shabby three-room apartment in East Camden, New Jersey. His empty, aimless existence couldn’t have been drearier. He had no job, no friends, no prospects for the future. A closeted gay in an intensely homophobic era, he led a sordid secret life, traveling to Philadelphia several times a week for loveless sex with anonymous pickups. Otherwise, he spent much of his time playing with his toy trains or practicing pistol-shooting in a makeshift target range in his basement.

Just a few years earlier, he had felt like somebody. That was in the army, where he had distinguished himself during the war as a gunner in the 342d Armored Field Artillery. Now back home, he was a nothing: an utter failure. He had tried college, enrolling in Temple University’s School of Pharmacology under the GI Bill, but he had dropped out after only three months.

(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham)

He became convinced that his neighbors were talking behind his back, viewing him with contempt for living off his frail, aging mother. He began to keep a diary, listing grievances against his neighbors and making little cryptic notations beside their names: “Ret.W.T.S.” or “D.N.D.R.”

The abbreviations stood for “Retaliate When Time Suitable” and “Do Not Delay Retaliation.”

On Tuesday, September 6, 1949, the day of retaliation arrived.

Rising promptly at 8:00A.M., Howard washed, shaved, and dressed in his best tropical-worsted suit, white shirt, and bow tie. He went into the kitchen for his breakfast, prepared as always by his doting mother, who noticed that Howard seemed strangely distracted. After polishing off fried eggs and Post Toasties, he went down to the basement, returning with a length of heavy lead pipe. Summoning his mother into the living room, he raised the pipe threateningly, as if to brain her.

“What do you want to do that for, Howard?” Mrs. Unruh stammered. Backing toward the door, she flung it open and fled the house in terror.

Howard stood for a moment. Then, shaking off his daze, he went to his bedroom, got his 9-mm Luger pistol with two loaded clips and thirty-three loose cartridges, and hit the streets.

His first stop was Pilcharik’s shoe shop. The owner, John Pilcharik, was kneeling by his bench, nailing a sole onto a shoe when Unruh entered at 9:20A.M. Unruh strode directly up to Pilcharik and, without a word, shot the cobbler in the face, then fired again into his head. He then turned and headed next door to Clark Hoover’s barbershop.

Hoover was busily trimming the hair of a six-year-old boy named Orris Smith. “I’ve got something for you, Clarkie,” Unruh said as he stepped to the chair and shot both the barber and the little boy. As the child’s mother, who was seated nearby, shrieked and ran toward her dying boy, Unruh nonchalantly headed out.

Over the next ten minutes, he calmly made his way through the neighborhood, shooting victims as he went: both specific targets of his paranoid hatred and random passersby unfortunate enough to find themselves in his way. When he ran out of ammunition—less than fifteen minutes after firing his first shot into the face of Joe Pilcharik—thirteen people lay dead or dying, and another three were badly wounded.

Returning to his apartment, Unruh flopped down on his bed. Moments later, about sixty heavily armed officers surrounded the house. A ferocious gun battle ensued, ending when Unruh was driven from his room by tear gas.

As Unruh was being handcuffed, the officer asked: “What’s the matter with you? You some kind of psycho?”

“I’m no psycho,” Unruh indignantly said. “I have a good mind.”

The state disagreed. Unruh was permanently confined to a maximum security psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.

While Howard Unruh turned his neighborhood into a corpse-littered battleground during thirteen horrifying minutes, some spree killers cover far more territory, conducting their rampage by car over the span of days or even weeks. That was the case in late 1957, when a pair of teen hoodlums—James Dean wannabe Charles Starkweather and his underage sweetheart Caril Ann Fugate—sped across Nebraska, killing ten people over twenty-six days. In the spring of 1997, Andrew Cunanan slaughtered four men as he made his way in a succession of stolen vehicles from Minneapolis to Miami Beach in search of his ultimate target, the celebrated Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace. And in the fall of 2002, John Muhammed and his teenage protégé, Lee Malvo, allegedly terrorized Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC, from a blue Chevy Caprice, after first committing a pair of shootings down in Montgomery, Alabama. For a variety of reasons—the interval between shootings, the taunting messages to the police, the sinister calling card left at one crime scene—many experts assumed that a serial killer was on the loose while the sniper shootings were taking place. Once the alleged perpetrators were caught, however, it became clear that Muhammed fit the definition of a spree killer: a man with a miserably failed personal and professional life, venting his rage in a murderous vendetta against the world.

A Better Term?

Since mass and spree murder are essentially two manifestations of the same psychological phenomenon, a new term has recently been proposed that covers both kinds of crime. In a series of articles published shortly before the first anniversary of the Columbine massacre, The New York Times refers to figures like Dylan Klebold, Charles Whitman, and others as rampage killers— a highly expressive phrase that pinpoints the essential difference between these types of offenders and serial killers.

Recommended Reading

Graham Chester. Berserk!: Motiveless Random Massacres (1993) Art Crockett. Spree Killers (1994)

Brian Lane and Wilfred Gregg. The Encyclopedia of Mass Murder (1994) New York Times, “Rampage Killers,” April 9–12, 2000

Pan Pantziarka. Lone Wolf: True Stories of Spree Killers (2000) Ronald Tobias. They Shoot to Kill (1981)

PSYCHOPATH VS. PSYCHOTIC

When the arresting officer asked Howard Unruh if he was “some kind of psycho,” he was using a common slang term nowadays most commonly associated with the title of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic slasher film. But the policeman’s question is more complicated than it may seem. There are two very different types of “psychos”: psychopaths and psychotics. Most serial killers fall into the first category, though some belong to the latter.

Psychopaths: The Mask of Sanity

Serial killers have a dead conscience. No morals, no scruples, no conscience.

—Richard “Night Stalker” Ramirez

Technically, psychopaths aren’t legally insane. They know the difference between right and wrong.

They are rational, often highly intelligent people. Some are capable of great charm. Indeed, the scariest thing about them is that they seem so normal.

Their pleasant personalities, however, are just a show. Underneath their “masks of sanity”—to use the famous phrase coined by psychologist Hervey Cleckley—they are profoundly disturbed individuals.

The most striking feature of the psychopathic personality is his utter lack of empathy. He is incapable of love, incapable of caring, incapable of feeling sorry for anyone but himself. Other people are simply objects to be exploited and manipulated for his own profit and pleasure.

As criminologist Edward Glover puts it his book The Roots of Crime, psychopaths are “outstandingly selfish, egotistical, and deceitful.” Nothing matters to them but their own needs. At their worst, they have monstrous dreams of torture, rape, and murder that they pursue without the slightest compunction.

Such extreme criminal psychopaths are devious, cold-blooded predators who hide their evil hearts behind bland, plausible facades.

Because they feel no guilt or remorse, psychopaths are able to maintain an uncanny cool in situations that would cause a normal person to break into a cold sweat. For example, when one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s handcuffed and bleeding victims managed to escape and run out into the street, Dahmer calmly talked the police into returning the young man to his custody. He then led him back to his hellish lair and slaughtered him.

Melville on Psychopaths

Though the term “psychopath” wasn’t coined until 1891 by a German psychologist named Koch, the kind of personality it describes has always existed. The great American novelist Herman Melville not only recognized this fact but created a powerful portrait of a criminal psychopath in his final masterpiece, Billy Budd.

One of Melville’s major themes is the lurking evil concealed behind benign appearances. In Billy Budd, this theme is embodied in the character John Claggart, a seemingly friendly man who is wicked to the core.

At one point in the novella, the author pauses to contemplate the source of Claggart’s villainy. Living in a pre-Freudian age, Melville does not use the clinical language of modern-day psychology in accounting for the character’s behavior, relying instead on such old-fashioned phrases as “natural depravity” and

“the mania of an evil nature.” But his description of the master-at-arms’s malevolent personality makes it clear that Claggart is a classic instance of what we now call a criminal psychopath: Though the man’s even temper and discreet bearing would seem to intimate a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason, not the less in heart he would seem to riot in complete exemption from that law, having apparently little to do with reason further than to employ it as an ambidexter implement for effecting the irrational. That is to say: Toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgment sagacious and sound. These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort, for their lunacy is not continuous, but occasional, evoked by some special object.

In this passage, Melville pinpoints the essence of the psychopath: a person who commits the most unspeakable atrocities with cool, rational judgment.

“MORAL INSANITY”

During Melville’s lifetime, psychiatrists both here and in Europe were grappling with the same problem as Billy Budd: how to explain the psychology of criminals who are rational and even intelligent, but who take pleasure in committing murders that are so hideously savage as to seem, by definition, insane. The term they came up with was “moral insanity.”

In the early 1870s, for example, a twelve-year-old boy named Jesse Harding Pomeroy attacked and tortured a series of younger boys in Boston. After less than seventeen months at a reformatory he was released, only to commit a pair of hideous mutilation murders on a little boy and girl. Under arrest, the

“Boy Fiend” (as the newspapers dubbed him) was examined by various psychiatrists who found that he had “sharp wits” and “a good memory,” had “no delusions whatsoever,” possessed “a knowledge of right and wrong in the abstract,” and had an above-normal “intellectual capacity.”

At the same time, he “was unquestionably defective on the moral side to a degree which was plainly much more pronounced than in the criminal. The unusual, atrocious, and cruel nature of his criminal acts, his pursuit of crime for crime’s sake only, his utter insensibility to suffering, and his gratification in torturing victims for the same reason that a cat does a mouse before killing it” all plainly indicated that his “motives and conduct were far different from those of the ordinary malefactor.”

In short, the experts concluded that though Pomeroy was intellectually unimpaired, he was morally insane

—or, as they variously described him, a “moral degenerate,” a “moral defective,” or a “moral imbecile.”

Though these terms don’t sound particularly scientific (or politically correct), they are exactly what we mean nowadays by a psychopath.

These patients have good memory and understanding, ability to reason and contrive, much cleverness and cunning, and a general appearance of rationality, coexistent with very deficient control, absence of moral sense and human sentiments and feelings, perverted and brutal instincts, and propensities for criminal acts of various kinds which may be perpetrated deliberately and cleverly planned, yet committed with little or no motive and regardless of the consequences to themselves and others.

—nineteenth-century definition of “moral insanity”

Psychotics: The Living Nightmare

Psychosis is defined as a severe mental disorder characterized by some degree of personality disintegration. Psychotics live in a nightmarish world of their own. They suffer from hallucinations and delusions—hear voices, see visions, are possessed by bizarre beliefs. They have lost touch with reality.

Unlike psychopaths—who appear to be normal, rational people even while leading grotesque secret lives

—psychotics match the common conception of insanity. The main forms of psychosis are schizophrenia and paranoia.

For the most part, serial killers aren’t psychotic. There have been some notable exceptions, however—like the paranoid schizophrenic Herbert Mullin.

Herbert Mullin and the Die Song

For the first twenty-two years of his life, Herbert Mullin showed no signs of the raging psychosis that would eventually take possession of his mind and result in the brutal deaths of thirteen random victims.