The Serial Killer Files (43 page)

Thanks to DNA technology, which matched him to the semen left at both crime scenes, Troyer eventually received consecutive life sentences for the Ovard and Luckau murders. Authorities in Utah, however, believe that he may be responsible for killing up to thirteen elderly women, including sixty-nine-year-old Thelma Blodgett, murdered less than a week before Drucilla Ovard, and seventy-three-year-old Lucille Westermann, slain just six days after Ethel Luckau.

Thierry Paulin

Alternately dubbed the “Monster of Montmartre” and the “Little Old Lady Killer,” Thierry Paulin stood out as an anomaly not only within “normal” society but among serial killers. The victims of most sadistic psychopaths generally mirror the murderer’s own sexual orientation and race: whites tend to prey on whites, blacks on blacks, straight males on women, gay males on other men,
etc.
Paulin violated all these expectations. A bleached blond black drag queen, he savagely murdered nearly two dozen old white women in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris in the mid-1980s, creating a panic among the city’s elderly female population.

Paulin’s crime wave began in 1984, when he was twenty-one. Accompanied on occasion by his nineteen-year-old lover, Jean-Thierry Maturin, Paulin would trail old ladies home as they returned from the market, then pounce when they unlocked the front door. He and his accomplice killed with unusual ferocity. One victim, eighty-year-old Marie Choy, was bound with steel wire and forced to drink bleach before she was beaten to death. Another, seventy-five-year-old Maria Mico-Diaz, was so savagely hacked with a knife that she was nearly cut in two.

The “Monster of Montmartre” celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday in November 1997, by attacking three victims during a single weekend. One survived to describe him to police, who had little trouble in tracking down a black transvestite with platinum blond hair. In custody, Paulin confessed to the murder of twenty-one female victims between the ages of sixty and ninety-five. He died of AIDS in April 1989, while awaiting trial.

THE WORLD’S WORST PERVERT

On the face of it, it might seem like a quixotic effort to identify the most sexually aberrant serial killer of all time. Who, after all, was sicker: Jeffrey Dahmer, who admitted that cutting open his victims and seeing their internal organs got him aroused? Fritz Haarmann, who had orgasms while tearing open the throats of his victims with his teeth? Arthur Shawcross, who derived sexual pleasure from digging up the decaying corpse of a murdered prostitute, cutting out her vulva, and eating it? Douglas Clark, who liked to perform fellatio on the decapitated heads of his victims? The Hillside Stranglers, who got off on raping their victims while forcing Drano down their throats?

Even in this field of unspeakable psychos, however, one figure stands out above the rest: Albert Fish.

Several things made this Depression-era lust-killer uniquely monstrous.

To begin with, he was a lifelong pedophile who preyed exclusively on children. Moreover, he was an unbridled sadist, who not only raped and murdered his little victims but subjected them to the most hideous tortures. (On at least one occasion, he tied up a young boy, cut off his penis with scissors, and left him alone to bleed to death.)

Fish’s need to inflict pain extended to himself. Not only a sadist, he was an ardent masochist. He hired women to bind and whip him. When no one was available for the job, he flagellated himself with a specially designed, nail-studded paddle.

But sadism and masochism were only two of Fish’s paraphilias. He routinely engaged in both urophilia (a perverted fascination with urine, which in Fish’s case involved forcing little boys to piss on him and drinking their urine) and coprophagy (eating feces). He was also a cannibalistic monster straight out of

“Hansel and Gretel.” On two separate occasions, he dismembered his young victims and turned parts of their bodies into a stew, which he devoured over the course of several days.

A compulsive writer of obscene notes, Fish loved to regale his correspondents with graphic descriptions of his atrocities. In one letter, he recounted the horrors he had perpetrated on a four-year-old boy named Billy Gaffney after snatching him from home and leading him to a city dump: I took the G boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took the trolley to 59 St. at 2 A.M. and walked from there home.

Next day about 2 P.M. I took tools, a good heavy cat-o-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these half in six strips about 8 in. long.

I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears—nose—slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood.

I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in grip. Then I cut him thru the middle of his body. Just below his belly button. Then thru his legs about 2 in. below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head—feet—arms—hands and the legs below the knee.

This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along road going to North Beach. Water is 3 to 4 ft. deep. They sank at once.

I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked the best. His monkey and pee wees [i.e., penis and testicles] and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears—nose—pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good.

While in prison, Fish underwent an intensive examination by a prominent New York City psychiatrist, Dr. Fredric Wertham, who concluded that Fish’s life had been one of “unparalleled perversity”—that the old man had routinely practiced “every known sexual perversion and some perversions never heard of before.” He arrived at this assessment after Fish described some of his favorite activities: shoving alcohol-soaked cotton up his rectum and setting it on fire, for example, or inserting a long-stemmed rose into his penis, looking at himself in the mirror, then pulling out the rose and eating the petals. When his jailers noticed that he had trouble sitting down, Fish explained that he liked to stick sewing needles up into his groin and leave them there. No one believed him until an X-ray revealed the presence of more than two dozen needles inside his pelvic region.

Altogether, Wertham concluded that Fish was afflicted with no fewer than seventeen paraphilias. In a futile attempt to save his client from the electric chair, Fish’s attorney cited all seventeen of these perversions to prove that the old man was insane.

“It is noteworthy,” he wrote to the Court of Appeals, “that no single case-history report, either in legal or medical annals, contains a record of one individual who possessed all of these sexual abnormalities.”

X-ray showing needles in Albert Fish’s pelvic region

( New York Daily News)

It’s natural to crave a simple explanation for the sources of serial murder. To the normal mind, the crimes of creatures like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy seem so inconceivable that we desperately seek rational explanations for them. If we could only pinpoint a specific cause for such enormities—child abuse, media violence, biochemical imbalance, anything—the horror would at least seem comprehensible. Just being able to make sense of it would offer a degree of comfort. Perhaps we might even be able to prevent it in the future.

Unfortunately, some mysteries can never be fully resolved. Even a genius like Sigmund Freud admitted defeat when it came to answering certain questions about human psychology. Exactly why a person

“should have turned out the way he did and in no other way” was, he insisted, impossible to say. There are too many random, unknowable factors that go into the development of an individual life to allow for any sort of definitive explanation.

Freud was talking about creative geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci when he made this observation. But his point holds true for serial killers as well. A prodigy of evil like Jeffrey Dahmer is, on some level, every bit as unfathomable as a prodigy of artistic or mathematical creativity, like Picasso or Einstein.

Philosophers, poets, great thinkers, and writers have wrestled with the question of evil throughout the millennia. In our own country, one of the most profound minds ever to grapple with this issue was the nineteenth-century novelist Herman Melville. In his final masterwork, Billy Budd, Melville ponders the depravity of the psychopathic villain John Claggart, who sets out to destroy the innocent title character for no apparent reason. What, Melville wonders, could possibly have created a being like Claggart?

Melville considers several possibilities. Perhaps Claggart was the product of “vicious training.” Or maybe he had read too many “corrupting books.” Or possibly he had overindulged in “licentious living.”

In the end, none of these explanations seems adequate, and Melville is forced to throw up his hands and conclude that evil on the scale of Claggart’s can never be fully accounted for, that it is—in the words of Scripture—a “mystery of iniquity.”

Still, to admit that we may never know the ultimate sources of serial murder shouldn’t stop us from considering some of the contributing causes. Various theories have been advanced over the years. Some of these have been discredited, others are questionable, while still others have a good deal of validity, even if they don’t offer a full and final explanation.

The word “atavism” refers to an ancient, ancestral trait that reappears in modern life. And there’s no question that there is something atavistic about certain serial killers, who—in their unbridled savagery—seem like creatures from a primitive age when cannibalism, human sacrifice, and similar barbaric

practices were rife in the world.

Indeed, it is precisely this atavistic quality that accounts for the terrible fascination some of these psychos exert. It is both appalling and weirdly compelling to think of someone like Eddie Gein—a meek, Midwestern farmer who dressed in the flayed skin of corpses—as though he were an ancient Aztec priest performing a ritual to propitiate the gods of death. Or Jeffrey Dahmer, constructing a pagan altar of skulls, bones, and body parts in his Milwaukee apartment as a way of magically absorbing the

“essence” of his victims. Or Ted Bundy, the clean-cut young law student, reverting to a state of werewolflike ferocity when his bloodlust overcame him.

These and other examples have led some psychologists to argue that sadistic lust-killers are individuals who have suffered a complete breakdown of the normal socialization process. The kind of childhood training that instills morals, empathy, and conscience in the rest of us has totally failed. As a result, they become susceptible to dark, barbaric urges that well up from the most primitive levels of the mind. It is as if, under the right circumstances, a savage, subhuman creature breaks through the surface of their modern-day selves and takes temporary possession of them, much as the apelike Mr. Hyde does in Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic fable, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

There is something to be said for this atavistic view of serial murder. At the very least, it’s a useful metaphor for the kind of monstrous transformations that killers like Bundy undergo. One scientist, however, took the theory to ludicrous extremes. His name was Cesare Lombroso. Nowadays, he is regarded as something of a crackpot whose theories have been completely discredited. In his own time, however, he was admired as the foremost criminologist of his age and the father of something called

“criminal anthropology.”

Illustration of an atavistic “born criminal” from Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man In his 1876 book L’Uomo Delinquente ( Criminal Man), Lombroso (who was heavily influenced by Darwin’s theories) argued that violent criminals were not merely barbaric in their behavior. They were literal atavisms—savage, Neanderthal-like beings born, by some unexplained evolutionary glitch, into the modern world. Because they were throwbacks to the prehistoric past, they could be identified by certain physical characteristics which made them resemble a lower, more apelike species. According to Lombroso, natural-born criminals were distinguished by small skulls, sloping foreheads, jutting brows, protruding ears, bad teeth, barrel chests, disproportionately long arms, and various other traits. They also often had tattoos, which he associated with members of aboriginal tribes, or as he put it, “primitive humanity.”

I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped ears found in criminals, savages, apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresponsible craving of evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.”

—Cesare Lombroso

Needless to say, Lombroso’s theory holds as much water as the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of phrenology (the belief that you can analyze someone’s personality by feeling the bumps on his head).

Nowadays, we know all too well that ultraviolent criminals come in all shapes and sizes. If—as Lombroso suggested—you could tell that someone was a savage killer just by looking at him, then the women who fell victim to dapper H. H. Holmes, or dashing Ted Bundy, or dorky Harvey Glatman might still be alive today. And if tattoos were a sign of someone’s innate criminality, a significant part of the US population—including, at this point, a fair number of suburban soccer moms—would be behind bars.