The Serial Killer Files (44 page)

Recommended Reading

Robert Eisler, Man into Wolf (1951)

Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (1981)

Serial killers are such spectacular cases of mental aberration that it is natural to wonder if they suffer, not merely from severe psychological problems, but from physiological ones as well—specifically, if their brains are actually different from those of normal people. In order to test this theory, scientists have, on occasion, performed postmortem dissections on notorious psychopaths. After his execution in 1924, the brain of the infamous German lust-killer Fritz Haarmann was removed from his skull and shipped off to Göttingen University for study.

Nothing came of this effort. And in the decades since, no one has been able to identify a specific neurological defect that would account for monstrous criminal behavior.

One intriguing fact has emerged in recent years, however: severe head injuries are surprisingly common in the early lives of serial killers.

At the age of ten, for example, Earle Leonard Nelson—the notorious “Gorilla Murderer” who strangled nearly two dozen victims in the 1920s—collided with a trolley car while riding his bike in San Francisco, crashed headfirst into the cobblestones, and lay comatose for nearly a week. At his 1927

murder trial, his attorney argued (unsuccessfully) that Nelson’s homicidal behavior was a direct result of this dire childhood accident.

Arthur Shawcross—who slaughtered a string of prostitutes in upstate New York and occasionally consumed parts of their bodies—suffered at least four major head injuries in his youth that left him with scars on his brain and a cyst on the temporal lobe. Even more accident-prone was Bobby Joe Long, convicted killer of nine women, who was hospitalized four times in his childhood for various head injuries, plus once in his early twenties after he crashed his motorcycle into a car and slammed his skull into the vehicle with such force that his helmet was crushed.

At seventeen, the British psychopath Fred West—half of the notorious killer couple whose victims included their own teenage daughter—also had a nasty motorcycle accident, which left him with a metal plate in his head. John Wayne Gacy developed a blood clot on the brain after being hit by a swing as a child. And young Gary Heidnik sustained such a severe injury when he plunged from a tree that his skull was permanently deformed, earning him the cruel playground nickname, “Football Head.”

These and many other cases of ultraviolent criminals who have sustained severe head traumas in their youth have convinced some researchers that brain damage is a key element in the development of serial killers. Even proponents of this theory, however, admit that brain damage alone isn’t the ultimate explanation for serial murder. After all, countless children take headlong spills from the bikes or swing sets or Jungle Gyms each year without growing up to be cannibalistic lust-killers. Moreover, a close look at the backgrounds of serial killers reveals other factors that clearly contribute to their psychopathology.

Earle Leonard Nelson, for example, had a severely dysfunctional family background. Orphaned as an infant when both his parents died of syphilis, he was taken into the home of a fanatical grandmother and displayed signs of extreme emotional disturbance long before his bicycle accident. Arthur Shawcross was repeatedly molested by a pedophiliac neighbor and sodomized with a broom handle at the age of ten. Fred West was the product of a household in which incest was rife, while Bobby Joe Long’s mother allegedly forced him (by his account, which she denies) to share her bed throughout his childhood and witness her lovemaking with her boyfriends.

John Wayne Gacy was raised by a viciously demeaning father, whose unrelenting ridicule of his son’s effeminate mannerisms created a bottomless well of self-loathing in the boy. Gary Heidnik’s father also subjected his son to systematic humiliation, publicly displaying the urine-stained sheets whenever the boy wet his bed.

Indeed, the head injuries suffered by serial killers are often the direct result of childhood maltreatment.

Henry Lee Lucas’s mother once beat him so severely with a piece of lumber that he lay in a coma for three days. Of a group of death row inmates described in a study by Dr. Jonathan Pincus, one had been

“beaten almost to death” by his father at age three, another had repeatedly been “beaten in the head with two-by-fours by his parents,” and the third had received a severe wound to his cranium when a family member “deliberately dropped a glass bottle on his head.”

In short, while brain damage is often present in the case histories of serial killers, other kinds of damage play a central role, too—especially the emotional and psychological damage inflicted by a shockingly abusive upbringing.

Recommended Reading

Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Guilty By Reason of Insanity (1998) Jonathan H. Pincus, Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill? (2003) CHILD ABUSE

Though often gussied up in technical jargon, a great deal of psychiatric theory is just plain common sense. It makes perfect sense, for example, that if human beings are raised in warm, loving households—if they are brought up to believe that the world is a secure and decent place—then they will grow up with a healthy relationship to themselves and other people, able to give love freely and receive it in return.

Conversely, if a person is severely maltreated from his earliest years—subjected to constant psychological and physical abuse—he or she will grow up with a malignant view of life. To such a person, the world is a hateful place, where all human relationships are based, not on love and respect, but on power, suffering, and humiliation. Having been tortured by his earliest caretakers, he will, in later life, seek to inflict torture on others, partly as a way of taking revenge, partly because he has been so psychologically warped by his experiences that he can only feel pleasure by inflicting pain—and, in the most extreme cases, only feel alive when he is causing death.

In short, while neurological problems—either from brain damage or hereditary defects—often play a role in the making of serial killers, severely abusive upbringings are more or less universal in their family backgrounds.

To be sure, not every abused child grows up to be a psychopathic killer. But virtually every psychopathic killer has suffered extreme, often grotesque, mistreatment at the hands of his or her parents or guardians. In the language of logic, severe child abuse may not be a sufficient cause in the creation of serial murderers, but it appears to be a necessary one.

Based on their pioneering prison interviews with the likes of David Berkowitz and Edmund Kemper, John Douglas and his fellow “mindhunters” in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit concluded that all serial killers come from dysfunctional backgrounds: “unstable, abusive, or deprived family situations.”

Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis—who has also conducted jailhouse interviews with notorious psychopaths, including Ted Bundy—flatly declares that, in addition to whatever neurological problems they may suffer, serial killers have invariably experienced a “violent abusive upbringing.” Other theorists on the origins of homicidal behavior have confirmed this view. In his highly publicized 1999 book, Why They Kill, for example, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Rhodes describes the discoveries of a sociologist named Lonnie Athens, who, after many years of research, concluded that children who grow up to be cold-blooded killers undergo a four-stage process, beginning with what Athens calls

“brutalization”—i.e., “coarse and cruel treatment at the hands of an aggressive authority figure,”

generally one or another (or both) of the parents.

Recent scientific research has reinforced the findings of people like Otnow and Athens by demonstrating that a traumatic upbringing can actually alter the anatomy of a person’s brain. Brain scans performed on severely abused children have found that specific areas of the cortex—related not just to the intelligence but to the emotions—never develop properly, leaving them incapable of feeling empathy for other human beings.

Given the kind of abuse suffered by some serial killers, it’s no surprise that they turn out to be homicidal sadists; indeed, it would be more surprising if they didn’t. Mary Bell—the juvenile serial killer who murdered two little boys in Newcastle, England, in 1968—was raised by a mother who, on at least four occasions, tried to get rid of her unwanted child by feeding her drugs. After turning to prostitution, Mary’s mother participated in the sexual torture of the little girl, holding her daughter down while her tricks orally raped the child and ejaculated in her mouth. Henry Lee Lucas was also raised by an alcoholic prostitute, who forced him to watch her have sex with her clients, beat him so severely that she once put him into a coma, and—when his brother accidentally gashed him in the eye—waited so long to get him medical attention that the eye had to be removed.

“Negative parenting”—the phrase used by sociologists to describe the kind of dysfunctional upbringings that serial killers are subjected to—doesn’t begin to suggest the monstrous behavior of beings like Charlie Manson’s teenage mother, who once traded him to a barmaid in exchange for a bottle of beer. Or Jesse Pomeroy’s brutish father, who liked to strip his son naked and flog him half to death for the slightest infraction. Or Joseph Kallinger’s pathological stepparents, who disciplined the boy with hammers, cat-o’-nine tails, and the threat of castration, and, on at least one occasion, forced him to hold his palm over an open flame until the skin began to smolder. Or Hugh Morse’s grandmother, who butchered his pet mice before his eyes as punishment for his sneaking off to the movies.

Sometimes, the childhood horrors experienced by future serial killers occur, not at home, but in various institutions. Shipped off to a Dickensian orphanage at the age of five, Albert Fish acquired his lifelong taste for sadomasochistic torture from one of the matrons, who liked to strip the little boys naked and savagely flog one of them while the others stood in a circle and watched. After stealing some license plates when he was eight, William Bonin was sent to reform school, where he was regularly raped by the older boys. Carl Panzram’s implacable character was forged in a series of brutal “training schools,”

where juvenile inmates were subjected to unimaginable punishment, often for such minor offenses as failing to fold their dinner napkins properly.

They used to have a large wooden block which we were bent over and tied face downward after first being stripped naked. Then a large towel was soaked in salt water and spread on our backs from the shoulders to the knees. Then the man who was to do the whipping took a large strap about 1⁄4 of an inch thick by 4 inches and about two feet long. This strap had a lot of little round holes punched through it.

Every time that whip came down on the body the skin would come up through these little holes in the strap and after 25 or 30 times of this, little blisters would form and then burst, and right there and then hell began. The salt water would do the rest. About a week or two later a boy might be able to sit down.

—Carl Panzram, describing the punishment he regularly received as a twelve-year-old inmate of the Minnesota Training School

Some people question the findings of researchers like Dorothy Otnow Lewis and Jonathan Pincus, who insist that all serial killers have severe abuse in their backgrounds. After all, they argue, there have been homicidal monsters like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy who don’t appear to have experienced such childhood torture.

There are problems with this argument, however. For one thing, even in the cases of such notorious figures, whose lives have been studied by all manner of experts, there is a great deal that we simply don’t know. Dahmer, for example, may well have been sexually molested by a neighbor. And—despite family snapshots showing little Ted Bundy enjoying an all-American boyhood of fishing, camping, and roasting hot dogs in a fireplace—there were very weird things going on in his childhood home. He was born to a young, unwed mother who pretended to be his older sister as he grew up, and was co-raised by a viciously racist, wife-beating grandfather who got a kick out of tormenting house pets.

It is clear, moreover, that psychological abuse can be every bit as devastating to the emotional development of a child as physical maltreatment. According to psychoanalyst Carl Goldberg, a child who is systematically shamed and humiliated—who is made to feel that he is utterly worthless and undeserving of love—is almost bound to develop into a malevolent personality. His feeling of self-contempt becomes so profound “that the only way to survive is to become indifferent to other people, too.” In effect, such a person grows up to believe that “I may not be worthy, but neither is anyone else.”

Convinced of his own badness, he bitterly lashes out at the world.

Certainly—in addition to regular beatings—John Wayne Gacy received nothing but humiliation from his father, who constantly belittled his son’s masculinity. Ed Kemper’s mother ridiculed him relentlessly during his youth, mocking his physical appearance and telling him that no woman would ever love him.

Henry Louis Wallace’s mother not only thrashed him regularly with a switch but liked to shame him by dressing him up as a girl and parading him around in public—a form of mortification also endured by Charles Manson, Henry Lee Lucas, and Carroll Cole. According to Goldberg, Jeffrey Dahmer, too, experienced intense feelings of “shame and betrayal” in relation to his parents, feelings that afflicted him with a profound, lifelong sense of “loneliness and self-hatred.”

In short, whatever other factors enter into the making of a serial killer, one element stands out above the rest—what best-selling novelist and child psychologist Jonathan Kellerman calls “overall rotten families.” Indeed, in looking at the nightmarish childhoods of these psychopaths, it is hard not to feel sorry for them—at least until you recall the kinds of horrors they commit as adults. In the end, they elicit a twofold response—pity for the hideously abused children they were, outrage at the monsters they ended up becoming.