The Serial Killer Files (4 page)

Born in Salinas, California, in April 1947, he seemed to a have a normal childhood. He belonged to the Boy Scouts, played Little League baseball, built a tree house with friends.

Years later, he remembered his childhood differently, insisting that his parents had deliberately tried to ruin his life by sending telepathic messages to his schoolmates, threatening to kill them in the afterlife if they played with him. By the time he made this wild accusation, Mullin was already far gone in madness.

From first grade until his sophomore year of high school he attended Catholic parochial school, then—after his family moved to Santa Cruz—transferred to San Lorenzo Valley High, where he found a girlfriend and formed a close attachment to a buddy named Dean.

After Dean’s death in a car crash, Mullin first manifested bizarre symptoms, creating a kind of shrine to his friend in his bedroom and staring at it for hours on end. Around this time, Mullin was also introduced to marijuana. It is difficult to know how much significance to attach to either event, however. After all, many people have had similar experiences—losing loved ones in tragic accidents, experimenting with drugs—without turning into deranged psycho-killers.

The first indication that something was seriously wrong with Mullin occurred at a family gathering for his parents’ twenty-ninth anniversary in March 1969. Over dinner, Mullin robotically imitated every word and gesture of his brother-in-law, Al. His behavior was so bizarre that he was finally convinced to check himself into a state mental hospital, where he was diagnosed as suffering from a “schizophrenic reaction.”

Though the psychiatrists judged that his mental condition was deteriorating and the “prognosis was poor,” they had no power to keep him in custody. After six weeks, Mullin left.

For the next few years, he drifted, working at a succession of menial jobs—dishwasher, gas station attendant, truck driver for Goodwill Industries. For a while he lived in Hawaii. He was in and out of mental hospitals. He began to hear voices commanding him to shave his head and burn his penis with a lighted cigarette. He obeyed both orders. Doctors, recognizing that he was in the grip of extreme paranoid schizophrenia, warned that his condition was “grave.” They had no idea of just how dangerous Herbert Mullin was becoming.

By October 1972, the voices were telling him to kill. He became convinced that he had been chosen by Albert Einstein to go out and murder people as a way of preventing a cataclysmic earthquake. He described his mission as “singing the die song.” He explained it to a psychiatrist: You see, the thing is, people get together, say, in the White House. People like to sing the die song, you know, people like to sing the die song. If I am president of my class when I graduate from high school, I can tell two, possibly three young male Homo sapiens to die. I can sing that song to them and they’ll have to kill themselves or be killed—an automobile accident, a knifing, a gunshot wound. You ask me why this is? And I say, well they have to do that in order to protect the ground from an earthquake, because all of the other people in the community had been dying all year long, and my class, we have to chip in so to speak to the darkness, we have to die also. And people would rather sing the die song than murder.

On October 13, 1972—not long after a voice in his head barked, “Why won’t you give me anything? Go kill someone! Move!”—Mullin clubbed a fifty-five-year-old drifter to death with a baseball bat on a highway shoulder in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Less than two weeks later, he picked up a twenty-four-year-old hitchhiker, stabbed her to death with a hunting knife, then dragged her corpse into some bushes and disemboweled her. Eight days later, he entered the confessional of St. Mary’s Church in Los Gatos and stabbed the priest to death.

In the midst of this hideous campaign, Mullin tried to enlist in the Marines. He impressed the recruiting officer as a “highly intelligent and motivated young man [who] most likely will be … a credit to the corps.” Ultimately, however, he was turned down. Ten days after applying, Mullin massacred five people

—including two brothers, ages four and nine—in a remote area of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Not long afterward, while hiking in a state park, he came upon four teenage boys in a makeshift cabin and shot them all in the head while they begged for their lives. His final victim was a seventy-two-year-old man, shot while working in his yard. Mullin’s car was spotted speeding away from the murder scene, and he was quickly picked up.

In spite of overwhelming evidence of his extravagant mental derangement, the jury deemed Mullin

“sane by legal standards” and found him guilty of eight counts of second-degree murder and two counts of first. On September 18, 1973, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He will be eligible for parole in 2020, at the age of seventy-three.

Because serial killers commit such appalling acts, some experts feel that these criminals can’t be placed in any of the usual clinical categories of mental disorder. To them, serial killers exist in a class by themselves, somewhere beyond the outer limits of comprehensible human behavior.

In his book The Meaning of Murder, for example, John Brophy writes: “Such men are monsters, who live not merely beyond the unmapped frontiers of sanity but beyond the frontiers of madness as madness is conceivable to most people.”

Like Brophy—who reverts to the ancient term “monsters” to describe serial killers—some experts have recently abandoned psychological jargon altogether and have gone back to the age-old notion of evil to describe such beings. At a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in May 2001, forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner of the New York University School of Medicine defined evil as “an intent to cause emotional trauma, to terrorize or target the helpless, to prolong suffering and to derive satisfaction from it all.”

That pretty much sums up the behavior of serial killers.

Recommended Reading

Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity (1976)

Edward Glover, The Roots of Crime (1960)

Donald Lunde, Murder and Madness (1975)

Apart from the obvious characteristics—sick minds, twisted desires, a compulsion to kill again and again

—it’s hard to generalize about serial killers. According to writer Stephen Michaud, the only safe thing you can say about them “is that an inexplicably large percentage are named Wayne or Ricky Lee.”

Michaud, one assumes, is at least half-joking. (Actually, there don’t seem to be that many Ricky Lees among the world’s serial killers.) But his larger point is well-taken. There are so many exceptions to every rule that talking about the typical traits of serial killers is surprisingly tricky.

For example, it’s usually said that most serial killers are white. That’s certainly true in the United States, where the majority of the population is Caucasian. But it’s clearly not the case in, say, South Africa, which has a startlingly high number of serial killers, almost all of them black. Even in our own country, there have been plenty of African-American serial killers.

It’s also part of the received wisdom of criminology that serial killers are almost always male. Again, that’s true—but only if you define “serial murder” as a very specific type of crime, namely, savagely violent sexual homicide of the kind epitomized by Jack the Ripper. That particular brand of mutilation sex-murder is, in fact, only perpetrated by men. (As culture critic Camille Paglia puts it, “There are no female Jack the Rippers.”) But under the broader definitions formulated by the FBI and National Institutes of Justice, a considerable number of females qualify as serial killers.

Still, if we limit ourselves to the United States and to those psychopathic sex-killers first associated with the term “serial murder” back in the 1970s and 1980s—Gacy, Bundy, Kemper, Ramirez, and the rest of that unholy crew—there are certain general statements that hold true.

The sort of serial killer most people think of when they hear that term is a white male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. He is not psychotic but rather psychopathic, suffering from what is often referred to nowadays as “Antisocial Personality Disorder.” He is most probably an extreme loner—a socially maladjusted misfit with few, if any, meaningful relationships. Cut off from the world of normal human connections, he indulges in particularly vivid, highly perverse fantasies of torture, domination, and murder. At some point, he crosses a line and acts out these fantasies on actual victims. Depending on his sexual orientation—that is to say, whether he is a gay or a heterosexual serial killer—his victims will either be male or female.

Though profoundly disturbed in his emotional and psychological makeup, he is not intellectually deficient. On the contrary, he has an above-average intelligence, combined with a criminal cunning that allows him to escape detection long enough to perpetrate a series of atrocities.

At the tenth triennial meeting of the International Association of Forensic Sciences held at Oxford, England, in September 1984, Robert Ressler and John Douglas of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, along with Professors Ann W. Burgess and Ralph D’Agostino, delivered a seminal paper on serial murder, based on a study of thirty-six jailed offenders, including Edmund Kemper and Herbert Mullin.

In their presentation, they listed the following traits as the “general characteristics” of these killers: 1. Most are single white males.

2. They tend to be smart, with a mean IQ of “bright normal.”

3. Despite their intelligence, they do poorly in school, have spotty employment records, and generally end up as unskilled workers.

4. They come from deeply troubled families. Typically, they have been abandoned at an early age by their fathers and grow up in broken homes dominated by their mothers.

5. There is a long history of psychiatric problems, criminal behavior, and alcoholism in their families.

6. As children, they suffer significant abuse—sometimes psychological, sometimes physical, often sexual. Such brutal mistreatment instills them with profound feelings of humiliation and helplessness.

7. Because of their resentment toward their distant, absent, or abusive fathers, they have a great deal of trouble with male authority figures. Because they were dominated by their mothers, they have a powerful hostility toward women.

8. They manifest psychiatric problems at an early age and often spend time in institutions as children.

9. Because of their extreme social isolation and a general hatred of the world and everyone in it (including themselves), they often feel suicidal as teenagers.

10. They display a precocious and abiding interest in deviant sexuality and are obsessed with fetishism, voyeurism, and violent pornography.

It is important to remember, however, that these traits were extrapolated from a small sample of thirty-six sadistic lust-murderers, all men and most of them white. There are many other serial killers who possess different characteristics.

Edmund Kemper, Epitome of Evil

A psychopathic killer who embodies most of the traits in the FBI’s pioneering paper on serial murder—and, indeed, who served as one of the interview subjects for that famous study—is Edmund Kemper III, aka the “Coed Killer.”

Kemper’s upbringing in a broken home was a nightmare of unrelenting emotional abuse. A hulking boy who grew up to be a six-foot-nine-inch, three-hundred-pound behemoth, he was the target of unremitting ridicule from his mother. She constantly belittled both his physical appearance and “weirdo” personality.

Growing up in that toxic atmosphere of rejection and humiliation, he developed an intense sense of self-loathing along with an equally virulent hatred of his hectoring mother, which would eventually be projected onto all of womanhood.

He began to show signs of extreme psychological disturbance in grade school. While other boys played at being Superman or Davy Crockett, little Edmund pretended he was being executed in the gas chamber. Once, when someone found out about his crush on his second grade teacher and teasingly asked why he didn’t kiss her, Edmund replied, “If I kiss her, I’d have to kill her first”—an early expression of his growing belief that the only women he could count on not to reject him were dead ones.

As is common with serial killers, Kemper’s sadism manifested itself at a shockingly early age. At first, he contented himself with dismembering his sister’s dolls. Before long, however, he was torturing house pets. He decapitated one family cat with a machete and buried another alive. By his early teens, he would indulge in masturbatory reveries of slaughtering everyone in town and having sex with their corpses.

In the winter of 1963, the fifteen-year-old Kemper was shipped off to live with his paternal grandparents on their ranch in North Fork, California. The following August, while his grandma Maude sat at the kitchen table, Edmund shot her in the head with a .22 rifle before stabbing her repeatedly and dragging her corpse into her bedroom. When his grandfather returned from running errands a short time later, Edmund shot him to death as he walked through the door. He then notified his mother and sat down to wait for the police. When questioned about his motives, Kemper shrugged, “I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma.” The murder of his grandpa was, he said, an act of mercy: a way to spare the old man the pain of discovering what had happened to his wife.

Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Kemper—not yet sixteen—was committed to Atascadero State Hospital, where he appears to have spent much of his time raptly listening to the fond reminiscences of the various serial rapists he met on his ward. His fantasies became even more dominated by scenarios of sexual violence. Concealing his seething inner life from his therapists, he assumed a mask of docility and newfound religious conviction and was paroled after only five years. In a stunning display of institutional obtuseness, the parole board—against the express advice of Kemper’s doctors and his own wishes—discharged him into the care of his mother.