The Serial Killer Files (42 page)

Despite this and other outrages perpetrated against juveniles, Panzram did not specifically target children. Totally undiscriminating when it came to mayhem, he would happily kill anyone, regardless of age or gender. There are some serial predators, however, whose taste runs exclusively to children: pedophiliac monsters who derive intense sadistic pleasure from raping and slaughtering the young.

Albert Fish was arguably the most terrifying of this abhorrent breed. From adolescence through old age, his entire life was consecrated to the sexual torture of children, primarily boys. Constantly on the move, he raped at least a hundred little victims and murdered a minimum of fifteen in twenty-three states from New York to Montana.

What made Fish particularly appalling was that, in the words of one court-appointed psychiatrist, “his interest was not so much to have sexual relations with these children as to inflict pain on them.” Many of his victims were African-American slum children, targeted “because the authorities didn’t pay much attention when they were hurt or missing.” Fish would lure them into basements with offers of candy or pocket change, then pounce on them, tie them up, rape and torture them. Sometimes he would gag them, though, as he explained, “he preferred not to gag them, circumstances permitting, for he liked to hear their cries.” In contrast to some psychopaths, whose violent tendencies subside somewhat as their sex drives diminish with age, Fish’s atrocities only grew more extreme as the years passed. His ultimate outrage—the abduction, dismemberment, and cannibalizing of twelve-year-old Grace Budd in 1928—was not committed until he was in his sixties.

Other infamous American child-killers of the twentieth century include: Westley Allan Dodd

Like Albert Fish, Westley Dodd spent much of his time daydreaming about the most unspeakable acts.

“The more I thought about it, the more exciting the idea of murder sounded,” he confessed in a letter. “I planned many ways to kill a boy. Then I started thinking of torture, castration, and even cannibalism… .

I was mainly interested in eating the genitals while kids watched. I was going to do this as a form of torture more than anything else.” Though his odious career was brought to an end before he had a chance to act on the most deranged of his fantasies, he still managed to commit an appalling number of crimes, including three horrendous child murders and an estimated 175 molestations.

Dodd’s pedophiliac compulsions first took hold of him at the age of thirteen, when he began exposing himself to passing children from his bedroom window. He soon progressed to more active forms of abuse, playing sexual “games” with younger cousins, neighborhood kids, and the children at the Midwestern summer camps where he sought work as a counselor specifically to gain sexual access to little victims. By his late teens, he had become an accomplished predator. Though repeatedly apprehended for accosting children, Dodd never received more than a slap on the wrist—generally a brief stint behind bars plus counseling. In 1987, after being arrested for attempting to lure an eight-year-old boy into a vacant building, he was convicted of a “gross misdemeanor” and spent less than four months in jail. The psychologist who treated him at that time accurately predicted that the lifelong pederast was “an extremely high risk for future offense.” But he tragically underestimated Dodd’s potential for violence, concluding that, though driven by deviant sexual desires for children, Dodd

“didn’t want to hurt them.”

In September 1989, having selected a park in Vancouver, Washington, as a “good hunting ground,”

Dodd snared, molested, and savagely murdered eleven-year-old Cole Neer and his ten-year-old brother, William. Slightly more than a month later, he abducted four-year-old Lee Iseli from a playground in Portland, Oregon, took the child home with him, then molested and tortured him for nearly twenty-four hours before strangling him and hanging the corpse in his bedroom closet. Dodd documented these outrages with a series of Polaroid photographs later discovered by police—along with other appalling evidence—in a suitcase under his bed.

Not long afterward, Dodd was captured in the act of abducting a six-year-old boy from a movie theater in Camas, Washington. Pleading guilty to the three murders and attempted kidnapping, he was sentenced to death and was hanged on January 5, 1991, at the age of thirty-one.

The thoughts of killing children are exciting to me.

—Westley Allan Dodd

Arthur Gary Bishop

Born in 1951, Arthur Bishop was raised by devout Mormon parents, excelled at school, and earned promotion to the exalted rank of Eagle Scout. Following his graduation from high school, he served as a teenage missionary in the Philippines. Exactly what forces in this seemingly exemplary early life turned him into a psychopathic monster are unknown.

What is certain is that, by the time he reached his midtwenties, he was addicted to kiddie porn.

Excommunicated in 1978 after embezzling nearly $10,000 from an employer, he took on a new identity

—“Roger Downs”—and moved to an apartment complex in Salt Lake City. Before long, he had joined the Big Brother Program so that he could get access to the little boys he craved.

He progressed from molestation to murder in October 1979, when he lured a four-year-old neighbor named Alonzo Daniels to his apartment and began to fondle the boy. When the child burst into sobs and threatened to tell, Bishop clubbed him with a hammer, drowned him in his tub, stuffed the body into a large cardboard box, and carried it out to his car, right past the boy’s mother, who was frantically searching for her missing son. Driving the corpse twenty miles outside the city, he buried it in the desert.

Like Jeffrey Dahmer—who made a futile effort to satisfy his necrophiliac cravings with manikins—

Bishop tried to find a safer outlet for increasingly homicidal urges. In the year following the murder of Alonzo Daniels, he killed nearly two dozen puppies, adopting them from animal shelters, then taking them home and strangling, drowning, or bludgeoning them to death. In the end, these canine surrogates worked no better than Dahmer’s dummies.

In November 1980, Bishop killed eleven-year-old Kim Peterson after luring the boy to his apartment with the promise to buy his old roller skates. Peterson’s body ended up in the desert beside Alonzo Daniels. Other victims followed: four-year-old Danny Davis, snatched from a supermarket in October 1981, and six-year-old Troy Ward, abducted from a local playground in June 1983.

Bishop was finally caught in July 1983, after killing a thirteen-year-old acquaintance he was scheduled to chaperone on a camping trip. After a six-week trial in 1984, he was convicted of five counts of capital murder and put to death by lethal injection.

Robert Black

Pedophiliac sex-killers aren’t just an American phenomenon. These monsters exist throughout the world. Nor do they only prey on little boys, as the case of British serial murderer Robert Black illustrates.

Born out of wedlock in 1947, Black was placed in foster care at six months of age and raised in the Scottish Highlands. During his early school years, he gained a reputation as a vile-tempered bully who preyed on weaker children (one of his victims was a younger boy with an artificial leg). He also displayed a precocious fascination with perverse sexuality. From childhood on, he enjoyed inserting objects into his anus, a practice he continued throughout his life. (After his arrest, police were stunned to find photographs he had taken of himself with all sorts of bizarre items protruding from his rectum, including a wine bottle, a telephone handset, and a table leg.) Black’s foster mother died when he was eleven. A year later—along with a schoolmate—he attempted to rape a little girl. Shipped off to a home for troubled boys, he was the target of regular sexual abuse by a male staffer.

In 1962, at the age of fifteen, Black was released from the home and took a job as a delivery boy in a town outside Glasgow. During the next two years, by his own later admission, he molested as many as forty little girls while making his rounds, including a seven-year-old he lured into a derelict building, strangled to unconsciousness, then stripped and molested. After masturbating over the inert body, he fled the scene but was later arrested. Inexplicably, his punishment consisted of nothing more than a stern admonishment. Black was soon back to his deviant ways.

Continuing to prey on little girls—including the nine-year-old granddaughter of his landlord—he was incarcerated for a year in 1967 after being found guilty of three charges of indecent assault. Upon his release, he sought fresh hunting grounds in London, where he found work as a swimming pool attendant

—a job that permitted him to spy on little girls as they frolicked in the water. His own preferred form of exercise at this time was to break into the pool after closing time and swim laps with a broomstick lodged in his anus.

Exactly when Black began to kill is a matter of dispute, though some experts believe he claimed his first underage victim as early as 1969. There is no question, however, that between July 1982, and March 1986, he abducted and murdered three little girls along the England-Scotland border. He was caught red-handed while abducting a fourth intended victim in July 1990, and ultimately imprisoned for life. In addition to the trio of children he is known to have snatched, raped, and smothered, he is suspected in as many as ten other child murders, though he has staunchly refused to confess.

However repugnant, pedophilia is an all-too-familiar perversion. Hardly a week goes by without some news account of a respected authority figure—schoolteacher, scoutmaster, man of the cloth—being arrested for abusing children or downloading kiddie porn.

Far less common is another aberration involving abnormal love between the generations. Gerontophilia

—the polar opposite of pedophila in regard to age—is the technical term for a morbid sexual fixation on the elderly.

Some serial killers prey on old people for the same reason that they murder children: because defenseless seniors make easy targets. Others, however, are sadistic gerontophiles—deviants who derive perverted pleasure from attacking and killing the old.

John Wayne Glover

Even more than most of his duplicitous breed, John Glover was the last person you’d suspect of being a psycho-killer. A big, jovial family man in his late fifties, he lived a life of impeccable middle-class respectability in a fashionable suburb of Sydney, Australia. He had a solid marriage, two beloved daughters, a comfortable house, good friends, admiring neighbors, and a solid job as a salesman for the Four ’n’ Twenty Pie Company. He was drinking pals with the former mayor of his community and devoted his spare time to doing charity work for the local Senior Citizens Society.

But Glover had another and far more sinister connection to senior citizens. Unbeknownst to the world, the affable middle-age suburbanite was a vicious serial murderer whose homicidal impulses were triggered by little old ladies.

A native of England, Glover emigrated to Australia in 1956 at the age of twenty-four and within a few years was convicted of two counts of indecent assaults on female victims. Punished with nothing more than three years’ probation, he promptly ran afoul of the law again, getting arrested on a Peeping Tom charge in 1965. After a brief stint in jail, he married, settled down, and appeared to reform. But, as with all psychopaths, it was only a matter of time before his darkest nature showed itself again.

In March 1989, he began the series of atrocities that would earn him lasting infamy as the so-called Granny Killer—one of the most savage and twisted serial murderers in Australia’s history. Glover’s signature method—his homicidal “calling card”—was to bash in his victim’s skull with a hammer, strangle her with her own panty hose, and make off with her money. His victims were frail, often sickly women in advanced old age—most in their eighties, one in her nineties, none younger than seventy-seven. Several could only walk with the help of canes, one was partially deaf and blind, another suffered from cancer.

Though Glover did not rape them, there was a clear sexual motive to his crimes, since he took pleasure from stripping off their hosiery and undergarments. During the period of his killing spree, he also began molesting infirm old women in their beds while making the rounds of nursing homes in his capacity as a pie salesman.

By the time he committed his fifth murder, the biggest task force in Australia’s history had been assembled to catch him. Their big break came in January 1990, when—while visiting a hospital on business—he attempted to sexually molest an elderly cancer patient in her bed. Realizing he had been identified, Glover went home and attempted suicide, leaving a note that read, in part, “No more grannies, no more grannies.” Recovering from this attempt, he managed to commit one final murder, even while under police surveillance. Tried in November 1991, he was found guilty on six counts of murder and received a life sentence for each.

I just see these ladies and it triggers something. I just have to be violent towards them.

—John Wayne Glover

Daniel Ray Troyer

Suspected of as many as thirteen homicides, Troyer committed his first known attack on an elderly woman in 1978, when he beat, choked, and attempted to rape a seventy-one-year-old quadriplegic in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Sent to prison for the crime, he was paroled after seven years. One month later, on July 17, 1985, he murdered eighty-three-year-old Drucilla Ovard, who was found beaten and strangled in her bathroom.

Though she had not been raped, her killer had stripped her naked, arranged her in an obscene position, and masturbated over her body, leaving behind a semen-stained towel.

Two weeks after this outrage, Troyer invaded the home of seventy-year-old Carol Nelson, just a few blocks away from the Ovard apartment. Luckily for Mrs. Nelson, she was not at home. Alerted by a neighbor who had witnessed the breakin, police promptly arrived and arrested Troyer, who received a sentence of one to fifteen years for burglary.

He was paroled three years later. On August 17, 1988—just two weeks after his release—he left his halfway house to apply for a job at a nearby barber’s college. That same day, he beat and strangled eighty-eight-year-old Ethel Luckau in her home, three blocks away from the barber’s school. Once again, a semen-stained towel was found beside the nude body of the victim.