The Serial Killer Files (30 page)

Four years later, while managing a gas station in Seattle, he murdered a teenage job applicant who had answered his “Help Wanted” classified—a crime that would earn him his homicidal nickname, the

“Want-Ad Killer.” Shortly afterward—with detectives making things hot for him in Seattle—he decamped for Minneapolis, where, over the next two years, he perpetrated a series of shockingly brutal crimes, sexually assaulting his victims before bludgeoning their skulls with a hammer.

Despite the savagery of these attacks, several women survived to identify Carignan, who was taken into custody by the Minneapolis police. Inside his car, investigators discovered road maps marked with dozens of incriminating, red-penciled circles that corresponded to the sites of various crimes linked to the “Want-Ad Killer.” Under questioning, Carignan tried paving the way for an insanity defense by claiming that he had killed under direct orders from God (whom he described somewhat vaguely as a mysterious figure “who has a large hood on and you can’t see His face”). The jury at his 1975 trial was unconvinced, and Carignan received the maximum sentence of forty years in prison.

Patrick Kearney

The psychopathic counterparts of the immaculately tidy gay men in the TV hit Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Patrick Kearney and his live-in lover were fastidious in their habits. Inside their meticulously clean Redondo Beach apartment, more than a dozen murder victims were neatly dismembered with a hacksaw, then carefully arranged in identical trash bags for disposal along the Southern California freeways.

The “Trash Bag Murders,” as the killings came to be known, began in April 1975, when the mutilated remains of a naked twenty-one-year-old male were discovered off a highway near San Juan Capistrano.

Over the next two years, eight more male corpses turned up in various Southern California counties. All of them were shot in the head, sawed into pieces, and methodically packaged for dumping. Police finally got their break in March 1977, when friends of the final victim, seventeen-year-old John LaMay, supplied them with the name and address of the acquaintance LaMay had gone to visit on the day of his disappearance: David Hill. Warrants were immediately issued for Hill and Kearney, who remained at large until the first day of July, when they suddenly appeared at the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, pointed to their wanted posters hanging on the wall, and cheerfully announced, “That’s us.”

Shouldering full responsibility for the slayings, Kearney claimed that he killed because “it excited him and gave him a feeling of dominance.” He eventually confessed to twenty-eight homicides. He received a life sentence; Hill was released for lack of evidence.

Paul John Knowles

A frequently reprinted news photo of Paul John Knowles shows him with a mane of tousled dark hair, cigarette dangling insouciantly from his lips—a brooding, darkly handsome man with a striking resemblance to the young Kris Kristoferson. His craggy good looks, combined with his easy charm and an indefinable air of danger, made him catnip to women and eventually earned him his homicidal nickname, the “Casanova Killer.” That psychonym, however, is somewhat misleading, since it suggests that Knowles was a Ted Bundy-like lady killer, a predatory sadist who preyed on the opposite sex. In truth, Knowles—for all the romantic-outlaw fantasy that women projected onto him—was nothing but a nihilistic lowlife who degenerated from a petty criminal into a homicidal drifter, randomly killing anyone unlucky enough to get in his way—male or female, young or old. At least eighteen people—and possibly as many as thirty-five—would die at his hands.

His murderous spree began in July 1974. Escaping from a jail in Jacksonville, Florida—where he’d been locked up after a bar fight—he broke into the home of sixty-five-year-old Alice Curtis, who suffocated on her gag while Knowles ransacked the place. Though that killing was inadvertent, his next homicides were perpetrated with a frightening premeditation. While driving Mrs. Curtis’s stolen car, he spotted two little girls who knew his family—seven-year-old Mylette Anderson and her eleven-year-old sister, Lillian. Afraid that the girls had seen him and might serve as potential witnesses to his whereabouts, Knowles strangled both and dumped their corpses in a swamp.

From The Final Days of John Knowles by Joe Coleman

From that point on, Knowles became a one-man crime wave, drifting northward to Georgia, then across the country and back, leaving corpses wherever he went. He killed indiscriminately—hitchhikers and campers, stranded female motorists and businessmen befriended in bars. He broke into houses and murdered their owners. He picked up women in bars and killed them when they brought him home for sex. In Macon, Georgia, he stabbed to death a woman named Carswell Carr, then strangled her fifteen-year-old daughter and molested the teenager’s corpse.

In November 1974—four months into his cross-country killing spree—Knowles met a British journalist named Sandy Fawkes at a Holiday Inn bar in Atlanta. They embarked on a six-day fling, marred only by Knowles’s pathological inability to achieve an erection with a willing sex partner. Though sufficiently fond of Fawkes not to kill her, Knowles took out his frustration by attempting to rape one of Fawkes’s friends, Susan Mackenzie, at gunpoint. She managed to escape and notified the police.

Like other spree killers, Knowles now acted with a suicidal abandon. Brandishing a sawed-off shotgun, he hijacked two vehicles in succession—first a police car, then a car belonging to a passing motorist—taking both drivers as prisoners. Heading to a remote spot in Pulaski County, Georgia, he handcuffed both men to a tree and executed each with a shot to the head. Not long afterward, he tried to crash through a police roadblock and was finally captured after a chaotic foot chase, bringing his four-month rampage to an end. The following day, while being escorted to a maximum security prison by a sheriff and an FBI agent, he lunged for the former’s revolver and was shot dead by the latter.

Robert Hansen

In Richard Connell’s famous 1924 short story, “The Most Dangerous Game,” a crazed Russian general named Zaroff—bored with shooting lions, tigers, and other conventional species of big game—stocks his private island with shipwrecked sailors and begins hunting humans. During a ten-year period beginning in 1973, a Jekyll/Hyde sex-killer named Robert Hansen acted out a true-life version of this fantasy, turning lurid make-believe into nightmarish reality for more than a dozen unfortunate women.

In many respects, Hansen’s life conformed to the familiar, if not stereotypical, pattern seen in the backgrounds of so many serial killers. Afflicted in his boyhood with a severe stutter, a disabling shyness, and a disfiguring case of acne, he grew up feeling shunned by the world, and especially by members of the opposite sex, for whom he developed a profound lifelong hatred.

In his late twenties, he relocated from Idaho to Alaska—a haven for misfits seeking to remake their lives. Settling in Anchorage, he established himself as a successful entrepreneur, the owner of a thriving bakery business. Securing a pilot’s license, he purchased his own plane and became an expert wilderness hunter, stalking mountain goats, grizzlies, and wolves with bow and arrow and rifle. To his neighbors, he appeared to be a paragon: a prosperous self-made family man and community booster.

By his early thirties, however, cracks were beginning to show in his exemplary facade. He was caught shoplifting a chain saw and arrested twice for attempted rape. These crimes were just a prologue for the enormities to come.

Starting in 1973, when he was thirty-three years old, Hansen brought dozens of prostitutes and topless

dancers to his wilderness retreat, flying them into the mountains in his private plane. Those who provided sex for free—“who came across with what I wanted,” as Hansen later put it—were taken back to Anchorage unharmed. The ones who demanded money for their favors met a terrible fate. After keeping them tied up in his cabin for several days of rape and torture, he would release them naked into the wilderness. Then, after giving them a head start, he would stalk them with a .223-caliber hunting rifle. Altogether, seventeen women were slain in this hideously depraved “sport.”

The end came for Hansen in 1983, when one of his intended victims managed to break free as he was attempting to force her into his plane. Picking up Hansen for questioning, police quickly punctured his alibi. Before long, they had found incriminating evidence in his possession, including the hunting rifle and a map marked with the burial sites of his prey. The hunter was caged for life in 1984.

Christopher Wilder

Born and raised in Australia, Wilder began his life of sex crime at an early age. Before he was out of his teens he had been arrested for gang rape and given mandatory electroshock therapy, which proved to be totally useless. A few years later, he was back in trouble with the law after extorting sex from a student nurse. Emigrating to America, he prospered in the construction business and was soon leading the glamorous life of a swinging, 1970s-era playboy, complete with swanky seaside home in Boynton Beach, a speedboat, and a high-powered sports car that he raced in professional competitions.

Beneath the glitzy exterior, however, Wilder was the same compulsive sex criminal he had been since his early adolescence. Time and again, his depraved behavior nearly landed him in prison. In 1971, not long after moving to Florida, he was arrested on a charge of soliciting women to pose for nude photos. A few years later, he was jailed after using physical force to coerce oral sex from an underage girl. Another arrest followed in 1980, when he lured a teenage girl into his car with the promise of a modeling job, drove her to a remote area, and raped her. For various reasons—through plea bargaining or the complainant’s refusal to testify or the inadmissibility of vital evidence—Wilder managed to evade long-term imprisonment in each of these cases.

(Novelty trading card courtesy of Roger Worsham)

His luck appeared to run out in 1983. During a trip back home to Australia, he abducted two fifteen-year-old girls and forced them to pose for pornographic pictures. Charged with kidnapping and indecent assault, he was slated for a trial that seemed certain to end with a long-deferred and richly deserved prison term. Once again, however, he managed to wriggle free, returning to the United States when his family posted the $350,000 bail.

Not long afterward, Wilder’s demons finally took full possession of him. In February 1984, a twenty-year-old aspiring model named Rosario Gonzalez—hired to hand out aspirin samples at the Miami Grand Prix, where Wilder was competing in his 310-horsepower Porsche—vanished without a trace.

One month later, a former girlfriend of Wilder’s—a twenty-three-year-old part-time model named Elizabeth Kenyon—also disappeared. When the local newspaper reported that a Boynton Beach race driver was wanted for questioning in connection with the two cases, Wilder packed his car, kenneled his three pedigreed setters, and embarked on his final insane spree: an eight-thousand-mile cross-country odyssey of torture, rape, and murder that left a half dozen victims dead.

Shopping malls were his preferred hunting ground. Approaching attractive young women, he would introduce himself as a professional photographer and offer them modeling opportunities. Some went with him willingly, others were forced into his car. Once alone with Wilder, the young women were subjected to prolonged torment. Several were hooked up to live electrical wires and tortured for hours.

At least one had her eyelids sealed with superglue. When Wilder was done with them, he generally savaged their bodies with a knife and dumped the remains in some out-of-the-way spot, often in a canal or reservoir.

On April 4—one day after being added to the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list—Wilder abducted a sixteen-year-old girl named Tina Risico in Torrance, California. After repeatedly raping her, he forced her to become his accomplice in luring other young women into his clutches. Whatever shreds of humanity he retained seemed to manifest themselves a week later when—after having perpetrated several final atrocities—he drove Risico to Boston’s Logan Airport, bought her a ticket home to California, and saw her off at the gate.

The following day, April 13, 1984, Wilder’s car was spotted at a New Hampshire gas station by two state troopers. As the lawmen approached, Wilder lunged for the .357 Magnum in his glove compartment. One of the troopers threw himself on Wilder, and in the ensuing struggle, the gun went off twice. Wilder was killed—perhaps in an intentional act of suicide—with a bullet to the heart.

Danny Rolling, the Gainesville Ripper

The crimes committed by Danny Rolling sound like the stuff of a low-budget slasher film: five college students—four female, one male—brutally murdered by a madman over a weekend of terror. These ghastly killings occurred in Gainesville, Florida—an idyllic college town that had only recently been rated as one of America’s most livable places. Within a week of the murders, however, the media had bestowed a new and chilling nickname on the community: “Grisly Gainesville.”

The first victims died August 24, 1990. Christina Powell and Sonja Larson, eighteen-year-old roommates at the University of Florida, were found butchered in their student apartment. The killer had broken in while they slept, bound and gagged them with duct tape, then raped and savaged them with a KA-BAR knife. Afterward, he had mutilated the corpses and arranged them in obscene poses as a final insult to the victims and an affront to the people who would discover them.

The next night he struck again. This time the victim was eighteen-year-old Christa Hoyt, a sophomore at Santa Fe Community College. The killer broke into her home, then waited for her to return. When she did, he duct-taped her mouth and raped her. In a frenzy of violence reminiscent of the atrocities of the original Jack the Ripper, he then stabbed her to death, sliced off her nipples, cut her open from breastbone to groin, and decapitated the corpse, placing the head on a shelf before fleeing the scene. The savagery of this crime would earn him his tabloid nickname, the “Gainesville Ripper.”