The Serial Killer Files (38 page)
At his arraignment, he shocked the court by pleading guilty—a tactic that spared him the death sentence.
Eventually, he offered a full confession. Between 1984 and 1987, he had tortured and killed six young captives. Like other sadists, he derived his highest pleasure from asserting complete control over his bound and terrified victims. He injected them with animal tranquilizer to turn them into “playtoys.”
When they died, he dismembered their bodies in his bathtub, stuffed them into trash bags, and left them at the curb for the garbagemen.
In spite of his atrocities, Berdella—displaying the utter lack of moral awareness that is typical of psychopaths—saw himself as a basically decent human being. To prove the point, he set up a trust fund for the families of his victims. On October 8, 1992—just four years after the start of his life sentence—he died of a heart attack at the age of 43.
Sadistic pleasure isn’t just about the infliction of pain. It also has to do with the assertion of power—the lust to dominate, to reduce a victim to a state of total submission.
The psychological reasons for this behavior aren’t hard to understand. According to experts, the vast majority of serial killers were subjected to extreme forms of psychological abuse as children. They were made to feel utterly helpless and humiliated. As a result, they grew up with a malevolent need to inflict the same condition on others. The only way to overcome their deep-rooted feelings of impotence is by asserting total control over another human being.
It was the power and domination and seeing the fear. That was more exciting than actually causing the harm.
—Serial killer John Joubert, explaining why he slaughtered three boys In its most extreme form, the serial killer’s need for control involves turning another human being into a completely passive object, a kind of doll that belongs entirely to him. Incapable of normal human relationships with willing partners, he seeks gratification with inanimate bodies that offer no resistance.
Edmund Kemper—the “Coed Killer,” who committed a range of atrocities on the corpses of his female victims—was quite explicit about this aspect of his crimes. “I couldn’t follow through with the male end of the responsibility,” he told police, “so my fantasies became … if I killed them, you know, they couldn’t reject me as a man. It was more or less making a doll out of a human being and carrying out my fantasies with a doll, a living human doll.”
Edward Gein—the notorious Wisconsin ghoul of the 1950s, whose crimes served as the inspiration for Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs— sought to slake his terrible loneliness by digging up the corpses of middle-aged women and taking them home to his desolate farmhouse. Interviewed by psychiatrists after his arrest, he spoke of the bodies “as being like dolls” and described the “comfort he received from their presence.”
Jeffrey Dahmer—whose greatest urge was to have a person who was “totally compliant, willing to do whatever I wanted”—made an abortive attempt at Gein’s necrophiliac method. After reading the obituary of an eighteen-year-old, he went to the funeral home to view the young man’s body (which he found so attractive that he immediately hurried to the bathroom and masturbated). After the funeral, Dahmer sneaked into the cemetery late one night with a shovel and wheelbarrow, intending to take the corpse back home, but gave up because the ground was frozen.
Later, Dahmer tried to satisfy his need for a completely inert sex object with a mannequin, but that proved unsatisfactory. Ultimately, he devised the staggeringly sick plan of trying to turn a living victim into a “sex zombie.” After bringing a young man back to his apartment, Dahmer would slip him a mickey, then make a hole in the victim’s skull with a power drill and inject muriatic acid into his brain with a turkey baster. Needless to say, these hideous experiments only ended up killing the victims.
Robert Berdella tried something similar, injecting his victims with animal tranquilizers in an effort to turn them into “sex toys.”
Dennis Nilsen—the so-called British Jeffrey Dahmer—was similarly driven by a monstrous need to dominate. Nilsen once told an interviewer that the most exciting part of his fifteen murders “was the moment when he lifted the dead victim and saw the dangling limbs, which represented his power and control over the victim, and the victim’s passivity.”
Recommended Reading
J. Paul de River, The Sexual Criminal (1949)
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) James Melvin Reinhardt, Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes (1967) Robert K. Ressler, Ann W. Burgess, and John E. Douglas, Sexual Homicide (1988) Wilhelm Stekel, Sadism and Masochism (1929)
In the strict, psychoanalytic sense of the term, fetishism is a disorder in which a person, usually a man, can only be turned on by an object associated with the opposite sex, generally either an intimate article of clothing—shoes, bras, panties, nylon stockings, etc.—or a specific body part, most commonly the feet. The fetishist is so fixated on the object itself that the actual sex partner becomes secondary. That is to say, a male shoe fetishist will be more aroused by his girlfriend’s spike-heeled footwear than by the woman herself. According to the American Psychiatric Association, “The person with fetishism frequently masturbates while holding, rubbing, or smelling the fetish object, or may ask his sexual partner to wear the object during their sexual encounters.”
There’s nothing inherently harmful about fetishism. It is, after all, just an exaggerated form of an interest shared by most red-blooded males. (As John Douglas points out in his book The Anatomy of Motive, “It’s safe to say that a significantly large percentage of the normal American male population is turned on by black lace panties.”)
The fetishes of psychopaths, however, are often unspeakably extreme. The average fingernail fetishist, for example, might be aroused by the sight of a woman with unusually long, sharp, clawlike nails. By contrast, one of the deviants described by R. E. L. Masters in his study Sex Crimes in History could only get sexually aroused by eating the fingernail clippings of female corpses.
According to John Douglas, fully 72 percent of serial killers are “preoccupied with fetishism during their formative years.” The fetishistic impulses of serial killers account for their tendency to take “trophies”
from their murder victims—anything from wallets to underpants to body parts. These items—which the killers use to relive their crimes in fantasy, often while masturbating—are essentially fetish objects, providing them with intense, perverted pleasure.
Jerry Brudos, Fetishist from Hell
Exactly how or why Jerome Brudos became a foot fetishist is a mystery. One thing is certain, however: he began to manifest his obsession at a startlingly early age. Born in 1939, Jerry was only five when he found a pair of woman’s shoes in the local dump and brought them home. When his mother found him clumping around his bedroom in the patent leather high heels, she confiscated them, tossed them into the furnace, and gave little Jerry a lively beating.
The punishment did nothing to curb his footwear fixation. In first grade, he was severely reprimanded after swiping his teacher’s spare pair of high heels. By his early teens, he was breaking into homes to steal women’s shoes, along with various items of female underwear, which he had developed a taste for wearing beneath his street clothes.
At sixteen, Brudos—his mind full of fantasies about abducting a sex slave—went so far as to dig a tunnel in a hillside near his home, where he planned to keep his captive. The following year, he assaulted a young girl at knifepoint and tried to make her strip. Arrested, he was sent to Oregon State Hospital for psychiatric observation. Despite the hair-raising thoughts he revealed to his doctors—one recurrent fantasy, for example, involved putting women into freezers so that he could arrange their stiffened bodies into pornographic poses—he was judged sane enough to be released after only nine months.
Brudos tried the army but was discharged before long because of his bizarre and increasingly frequent delusions.
In 1961, twenty-three-year-old Brudos, making good money by then as an electrician, impregnated and married a seventeen-year-old girl. Brudos demanded that she do her housework in the nude while he photographed her. He also liked to parade around in high heels, bra, and panties. His young wife displayed a high degree of tolerance for her husband’s peculiarities. Of course, she had no idea that he was also much engaged in much darker pursuits. On the night she was in the hospital giving birth to their child, Brudos broke into the home of a young woman, choked her unconscious, then raped her before fleeing with her shoes.
His escalating violence evolved into murder in 1968. In January of that year, a nineteen-year-old girl named Linda Slawson—who was going door-to-door selling encyclopedias—had the misfortune of approaching Brudos as he stood in his backyard. Inviting her into his garage-workshop, he bludgeoned her with a two-by-four, then strangled her to death. After playing with her corpse for a while—removing her clothes and dressing her up in items from his own underwear collection, as though she were an oversized Barbie doll—he carried his foot fetishism to a new and unparalleled level of monstrosity. He severed the dead woman’s left foot, slipped a stolen spike-heeled shoe on it, and stored it away in his freezer. Then he tied an engine block to the corpse and sank her in the nearby Willamette River.
Eleven months later, he killed his second victim, twenty-three-year-old Jan Whitney. Offering her a lift when her car broke down, he drove her to his garage, where he strangled her to death, anally raped her corpse, then spent some time dressing up the dead body in different articles of lingerie and photographing the results. Brudos had so much fun with her that he suspended her corpse from a ceiling hook and kept it in the garage for two days before disposing of it in the river. Even then, he couldn’t entirely let her go. Before getting rid of the remains, he sliced off one of her breasts, which he later made into a paperweight by treating it with epoxy.
He performed a similar mutilation on the corpse of his next victim, a nineteen-year-old girl named Karen Sprinker, whom he abducted at gunpoint the following March. After choking her to death and subjecting her to the usual postmortem violation, he amputated both her breasts. Then he stuffed the cups of one of his own bras with brown paper and put it on the mutilated body before dumping the remains in the Willamette.
His last known victim, killed just four weeks later, was twenty-two-year-old Linda Salee. After strangling and raping her in his garage, he suspended her body from the ceiling, rigged up wires to a pair of hypodermic needles, stuck them in her chest, and jolted her with electricity to see if he could make her “dance.” This time, he did not slice off her breasts because he was turned off by her pink nipples.
(“They should be brown,” he later explained to police.)
Not long after the corpses of two of his victims were recovered from the river, Brudos was nabbed when police got a tip from some coeds he had been pestering. Searching his garage, they found overwhelming evidence of his guilt, including photographs of his victims. Charged with three counts of first-degree murder at his trial in July 1969, he pleaded guilty and drew three consecutive life sentences.
In horror films, guys who like to wear female clothing tend to be psychotic, woman-hating slashers, a tradition that began with Psycho ’s Norman Bates, was carried on by Michael Caine’s razor-wielding psycho in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, and continued with the mincing “Buffalo Bill” in The Silence of the Lambs. Even Leatherface added a touch of transvestism by putting on a female wig in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Real life, of course, is a different matter. For the most part, guys who enjoy strutting their stuff in high heels and Angora sweaters are about as dangerous as Nathan Lane’s character in The Birdcage. Still, there have been several instances of serial killers who have engaged in cross-dressing.
During their boyhoods, both Charles Manson and Henry Lee Lucas were forced to wear girl’s clothing—
Manson by a sadistic uncle who sent him off to school in a dress, Lucas by the insanely vicious mother he would ultimately murder. The same was true of the so-called Barfly Strangler, Carroll Cole, who—according to crimewriter Michael Newton—“was forced to dress in frilly skirts and petticoats for the amusement of his mother’s friends, dispensing tea and coffee at sadistic ‘parties’ where the women gathered to make sport of ‘mama’s little girl.’ ”
These cases, however, have less to do with transvestism than with child abuse. They are examples of the kind of extreme humiliation to which future psychopaths are often subjected and which fills them with a lifelong hatred of themselves and the world.
The legendary Wisconsin psycho, Ed Gein (the real-life model for Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill) was less a transvestite than a frustrated transsexual, whose desire to turn himself into a woman led him to create a grotesque female skin suit in which he would sashay around the house. Gein, however, was not a sadistic lust-killer. Though he executed two women, he acquired his raw material largely from the graveyard, exhuming and flaying the corpses of elderly women who resembled his mother.
Hadden Clark, Cross-Dressing Cannibal Killer
Though regarded as the prototype of the modern-day slasher, the necrophiliac Ed Gein doesn’t quite match the image of the deranged, cross-dressing psycho-killer so familiar from “splatter” movies. There is, however, one serial killer who really does seem to have stepped from the gender-bending nightmare of Psycho or Dressed to Kill. His name was Hadden Clark.
Unlike many serial killers who come from sordid, hardscrabble backgrounds, Clark was a child of money and privilege. His mother traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower Pilgrims, while his father was a chemical engineer with several advanced degrees who, among his other accomplishments, helped invent Saran Wrap. Despite their pedigree and wealth, the elder Clarks were bitterly mismated alcoholics. Constantly at each other’s throats, they created a pernicious and profoundly unstable atmosphere at home, as evidenced by the fate of three of their four children. Their youngest daughter, Alison, would run away in her teens and permanently renounce her parents. Their oldest son, Bradfield, would end up in prison after murdering a girlfriend, roasting chunks of her breasts on a barbecue grill, and eating them.