The Serial Killer Files (40 page)

Remarkably, given how wildly deranged he clearly was, Chase was declared sane. He was quickly convicted of six murders and condemned to die in California’s gas chamber. FBI profilers interviewed him in prison and learned about several of his obsessions: his blood was turning to powder because he found a gooey substance underneath his soap dish; Nazis with ties to UFOs were following him; and somebody was trying to poison him in jail. In the end, he escaped execution. In 1980, he died of of an overdose of antidepressants that he had been hoarding in his death row cell.

Recommended Reading

Sondra London, True Vampires (2003)

Cannibalistic urges are deeply rooted in our instinctual makeup. Indeed, they appear to be part of our evolutionary heritage.

Recent scientific research makes it very clear that our closest primate relatives routinely engage in cannibalism. While studying rain forest apes in the wild, for example, Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham observed two adult males—whom he nicknamed “Figan” and “Humphrey”—capture a pair of juvenile monkeys: “With small screams of excitement, Figan raced to where Humphrey sat and, clutching his own prey, seized hold of Humphrey’s also. He did not try to wrest it away from the older male, but bit open the head and consumed it, together with the brain, while Humphrey disemboweled the infant and ate the viscera. After this, Figan ate the brain of his own monkey, and Humphrey moved off with the headless body of his!”

That our earliest ancestors dined on the bodies of their own kind has been firmly established by archaeologists, who have found ample evidence of cannibalistic activity in the cave dwellings of Stone Age people: human bones split to provide access to the savory marrow, skulls cracked open at their bases for easy removal of the brains. Cannibalism has been practiced by aboriginal peoples all over the globe, from Africa to New Zealand. Recent studies have shown that even the Chaco Anasazi of what is now the American Southwest—a tribe long thought to be peace-loving tenders of the land—engaged in systematic cannibalism.

callout 57

Cannibal killer by José Guadalupe Posada

(from “Very Interesting News,” 1911 broadsheet with white-line illustration by Posada, Amon Carter Museum, 1978.123.)

According to current theories, the Anasazi used cannibalism as an instrument of terror, but people have consumed human flesh for all kinds of reasons, from the dietary to the ceremonial. Some aborigines ate the bodies of their dead relatives out of love and respect (“When you die, wouldn’t you rather be eaten by your kinsmen than by maggots?” one Mayoruna cannibal asked a European visitor). Others ate the flesh of their defeated enemies as a sign of contempt. The devouring of sacrificial victims was a central feature of Aztec religion. Fijians, on the other hand, practiced cannibalism simply because they liked the taste, preferring the flavor of “long pig” (as they called human flesh) to that of actual pork.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, however, cannibalism is looked upon as an ultimate taboo, which may be broken only under the most dire imaginable circumstances—by the dying sailors on a drifting lifeboat, say, who are forced to draw straws to see which of them will be sacrificed to supply sustenance for the rest. Even then, it is regarded with such abhorrence that some people would rather starve than eat human flesh. This was the case, for example, with several survivors of the 1972 plane crash that stranded a party of Uruguyans in the high Andes. Though they were all devout Catholics who routinely partook of the body and blood of Christ during Communion, some of them were so repelled by the thought of cannibalism that they chose to die instead.

Because most civilized people regard cannibalism with such horrified fascination, it is often regarded as the worst possible atrocity a serial killer can commit. It’s for this very reason that—when Thomas Harris set out to create the ultimate psychopathic monster in Red Dragon and its sequels—he came up with

“Hannibal the Cannibal,” a man-eating gourmet who wouldn’t dream of taking a transatlantic flight without bringing along a snack of human brains.

In point of fact, however, cannibalism is a relative rarity among serial killers. Those who practice it are motivated as much by deviant sexual impulses as anything else. Unlike Hannibal Lecter—whose fondness for human flesh seems to be a warped feature of his epicurean lifestyle—the most notorious cannibal killers have derived intense erotic pleasure from eating their victims.

A prime example is the pedophiliac lust-killer Albert Fish. Having tried every perversion in the book (plus a few that no one had ever heard of before), the wildly deranged old man developed a growing obsession with tasting the flesh of a child. Luring a twelve-year-old girl away from her parents and bringing her to an abandoned house in Westchester County, he strangled and beheaded her, then sliced about four pounds of flesh from her breast, buttocks, and abdomen. Wrapping the “meat” (as he referred to it) in a piece of old newspaper, he carried it back to his Manhattan boardinghouse, where he cut it into small pieces and made it into a stew with carrots, onions, and strips of bacon. Over the course of nine days, he consumed the stew a little at a time, so aroused by the taste of the child’s flesh—which he likened to veal—that he masturbated constantly.

First I stripped her naked. How she did kick—bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms, Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body.

—Albert Fish

The “Milwaukee Cannibal” Jeffrey Dahmer was also turned on by the act of feasting on the flesh of his victims. During his final interview, Dahmer told pioneering profiler Robert Ressler that eating his victims “made it feel like they were more part of me,” a sensation he found “sexually stimulating.”

Though reluctant to divulge all the grisly details of his atrocities, Dahmer admitted to having eaten the flesh of at least three of his victims, turning some of it into human hamburger patties and experimenting with various seasonings to enhance the flavor. He froze a heart for future consumption, devoured part of another victim’s thigh, and fried and ate the pumped-up biceps of twenty-four-year-old Ernest Miller because it looked so big and juicy.

Every bit as monstrous as Dahmer and Fish—and arguably even more so—was the Russian psycho Andrei Chikatilo. Aptly dubbed the “Mad Beast,” Chikatilo was the kind of killer that the FBI now labels “disorganized.” People in the Middle Ages would have called him a werewolf: a blood-crazed monster who, in a frenzy of sadistic lust, committed the most unimaginable atrocities on his victims, ripping them open with his bare hands, wallowing in their blood, devouring their tongues, breasts, and sex organs.

Germany has produced an unusually large number of twentieth-century man-eaters. During the social chaos of the post–World War I era, the homosexual lust-murderer Fritz Haarmann slaughtered as many as fifty young men, battened on their flesh, then sold the leftovers as black market beef. His abhorrent countryman Georg Grossmann also trafficked in human meat, turning his fellow Berliners into unwitting cannibals by selling them the flesh of butchered prostitutes, which he passed off as pork. Yet another postwar German cannibal was Karl Denke, an innkeeper who killed and consumed at least thirty of his lodgers.

More recently, Germany was transfixed by the first recorded case of Internet-era cannibalism. In the spring of 2001, a forty-one-year-old software technician identified in news reports as “Armin M.” placed the following notice on the Web: “Wanted: Well-built man for slaughter.”

Though arguably the least enticing come-on in the history of advertising, this classified ad actually worked. A forty-three-year-old microchip designer, identified only as “Bernd Jürgen B.,” showed up at M.’s front door.

What happened next staggers belief. As the New York Times reported on December 18, 2002: “M.

removed the victim’s genitals. The two men then ate them. Later, M. stabbed B. to death as a video camera recorded the event. He carved up the victim and stored parts in a freezer for occasional consumption, burying other parts in his garden.”

The experience worked out so nicely for M. that he posted another advertisement, seeking more volunteers. Police quickly arrested him, aborting his incipient career as a serial killer. His case became a nationwide sensation. One German pundit immediately put the blame on Hollywood for glamorizing cannibalism in movies like The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. “One thinks such a case would only happen in the movies, in America, but not in Germany” this commentator declared—a remarkable statement in light of his country’s rich heritage of horror, psychopathology, and lust-murder.

Recommended Reading

Moira Martingale, Cannibal Killers (1993)

Reay Tannahil, Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex (1975) Christy Turner II and Jacqueline Turner, Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest (1999)

In its efforts to explain the behavior of serial killers, modern psychiatry has applied various clinical labels to these murderers: sociopaths, psychopaths, antisocial personalities. But only one label seems appropriate for Andrei Chikatilo: monster. Indeed, had Chikatilo lived a few centuries earlier, he would have been regarded as a very specific type of monster: a lycanthrope, a seemingly ordinary man who, when overcome by bloodlust, would transform into a ravening creature, clawing and biting his victims to pieces, tearing open their bodies, devouring their flesh, and exulting in the gore.

Chikatilo lived two lives. One was that of a middle-aged grandfather and committed Communist Party member. He held a university degree in Russian literature and engineering and—following a ten-year teaching career—worked as a trusted supply clerk for an industrial conglomerate. Shy and soft-spoken, he was considered by his wife of twenty-five years to be an attentive, if somewhat mousy, man who always provided for his family.

He was also one of the most terrifying serial killers in history.

After indulging himself in torture, rape, cannibalism, and mutilation-murder for more than a decade, Chikatilo was finally caught. At his 1992 trial he offered a self-diagnosis that few would dispute: “I am a freak of nature, a mad beast.” The Mad Beast confessed to the unimaginably brutal murder of fifty-three victims—most of them children—though he acknowledged that the real body count could be higher.

Chikatilo was born in 1936 in the Ukraine. Stalin’s harsh collectivization of rural land during the thirties made his childhood one of dire poverty and constant hunger. One incident from this period haunted Chikatilo throughout his life and is sometimes cited as a source of his own monstrous obsessions: an older brother was allegedly killed and eaten by starving peasants.

An introverted and painfully shy boy whose somewhat effeminate mannerisms made him the target of incessant teasing by his schoolmates, Chikatilo matured into a confused and obsessive adolescent. Early attempts at sex with women proved difficult, and he became convinced that he was impotent. He married in 1963 but was unable to consummate the marriage for some time. The Russian Ripper never thought of himself as sexually normal: “I never had sexual relations with a woman, and I had no concept of a sex life. I always preferred listening to the radio.”

It would take many years before his sexual self came fully to life. When it did, it would take the shape of something more animal than human.

After working for a time as a telephone engineer while earning his college degree through a correspondence course, Chikatilo embarked on his life as a vocational school teacher, a job for which he was painfully unsuited. His pathological shyness made it impossible for him to exert discipline upon his students, who treated him with unconcealed derision. Colleagues, too, found him odd and withdrawn.

But the future “Butcher of Rostov” had his own reasons for pursuing his pedagogical career. By then, he had discovered his perverted attraction to children. It wasn’t long before he began molesting them.

Eventually, he was driven from his job as a school dormitory supervisor after attempting to perform fellatio on a sleeping boy.

He progressed—or degenerated—from pedophilia to murder in 1978.

By then, he was already forty-two—a late bloomer in the ranks of lust-killers, who generally begin their ghastly work in their teens or twenties. Luring a nine-year-old girl named Lena Zakotnova from a streetcar stop with the promise of imported chewing gum, he led her to a run-down shack, where, after attempting unsuccessfully to rape her, he stabbed her repeatedly with a knife. He then dumped her body in the river. Despite strong evidence linking him to the crime, the police remained stubbornly convinced that the killer was a young man with a prior conviction for rape and murder, who was ultimately convicted and executed for the Zakotnova slaying. It was the first of many official blunders that would allow Chikatilo to remain at large for another dozen years and lead to untold horror and suffering.

Following the loss of his teaching job, Chikatilo moved his family to the industrial town of Rostov-on-Don, where he found work as a factory supply clerk. It was at this point that his inner beast was truly unleashed. For the next twelve years, he prowled bus stops and train stations in Rostov and farther afield. His method was simple: he would approach his victim—girls or boys or young women—and offer food or money or a car ride. Then—like some dark creature from a fairy tale—he would lead his unwary prey into the woods, where a terrifying metamorphosis would take place. Overpowering his victims, he would bind them with rope, then—in an ecstatic frenzy—savage them with knife, teeth, and bare hands, ripping open their bellies, chewing off their noses, gouging out their eyes, slicing off and eating their tongues, nipples, genitals—sometimes while they were still alive. He wallowed in their internal organs and would later confess to having a particular fondness for the taste and texture of the uterus.