The Serial Killer Files (45 page)

Recommended Reading

John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, The Anatomy of Motive (1999) Carl Goldberg, Speaking with the Devil (1996)

Jonathan Kellerman, Savage Spawn (1999)

Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill (1999)

In world mythology, there is a figure known as the Terrible Mother: a nightmarish female who, instead of offering nurture and comfort, dominates and destroys her own offspring. Unfortunately, this type of female isn’t limited to myths, fairy tales, and horror fantasies like Carrie and Psycho. She sometimes appears in real life. Her effect on the vulnerable young males unlucky enough to be her sons can be devastating, causing them to grow up with a virulent hatred, not just of the maternal monsters who raised them, but of womankind in general.

Blaming your problems on mommy, of course, is the oldest excuse in the psychoanalytic book. Still, if you have the kind of mother who sodomized you with a broomstick—or forced you to hold your open palm over a flame—or punished you by slaughtering your favorite pets—or made you watch her have sex with strangers—or subjected you to incessant mockery because of the way you looked—chances are pretty good that you will end up with a profound animosity toward members of the opposite sex.

Indeed, some criminologists have claimed that serial killers who target women are driven largely by mother hate. Dr. David Abrahamsen, who has written extensively about the “murdering mind” (to use the title of one of his books), maintains that the crimes of psychopathic killers are invariably rooted in their unconscious need to “take revenge” upon their rejecting mothers.

Whatever the truth of this assertion, there is no doubt that some serial killers grow up with a murderous rage against their monstrously abusive mothers. Though it is impossible to tell how many victims actually died at the hands of the spectacularly unreliable Henry Lee Lucas, we know for certain that one of them was his appallingly vicious mother, Viola, whom he stabbed to death during an argument in 1960. Edmund Kemper, too, spent his teenage years indulging in homicidal fantasies about his relentlessly demeaning mother—fantasies that he finally put into action in 1974, when he killed her in her sleep, cut off her head, and (in one of the more symbolically resonant acts in the annals of serial murder) shoved her larynx down the garbage disposal. “It seemed appropriate,” he later told the police,

“as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.”

Even serial killers who haven’t acted out their matricidal fury have openly acknowledged it. Joe Fischer, for example—responsible for an indeterminate number of killings during the 1970s—bore a murderous hate for his prostitute mother long after she died of natural causes. “I would have killed her ten times over,” he told investigators, “but I really believe it would have broken my father’s heart.”

According to psychiatrists, the loathing such killers feel for their mothers becomes projected onto all females, resulting in what crime writer Stephen Michaud calls “malignant misogyny.” Women come to be seen as noxious, disgusting creatures that deserve whatever horrors are inflicted on them—a sentiment chillingly expressed by “Hillside Strangler” Kenneth Bianchi, who steadfastly defended his atrocities.

“It wasn’t fuckin’ wrong,” he blithely told his interrogators. “Why is it wrong to get rid of some fuckin’

cunts?”

If I could dig up my mother’s grave, I’d take out her bones and kill her again.

—Joe Fischer

The term “bad seed” was popularized by the 1956 movie of that title, which was based on a successful Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson (which in turn was adapted from a 1954 novel by William March). In the film, an adorable, pigtailed moppet (played by the child actor Patty McCormack) turns out to be a frighteningly cold-blooded serial killer who dispatches her victims with all the childlike exuberance of Lisa Simpson tootling away on her saxophone.

The phrase “bad seed,” however, does not relate to killer-kids in general, but specifically to the notion that a profoundly psychopathic child can grow up in a normal, stable, loving household—in other words, that some people are just born evil. Here’s how one of the characters, a writer named Reginald Trasker, puts it in the play when the little girl’s mother asks him if “criminal children are always the product of environment”:

Some doctor friends of mine assure me that we’ve all been putting too much emphasis on environment and too little on heredity lately. They say there’s a type of criminal born with no capacity for remorse or guilt … They can’t prove it, but they think there are such people. They say there are children born into the best families with every advantage of education and discipline—that never acquire any moral scruples. It’s as if they were born blind—you couldn’t expect to teach them to see.

While this theory makes for effective drama—and is certainly reassuring to parents who don’t want to accept responsibility for raising severely screwed-up kids—it does not conform to real life. There are simply no serial killers who have been “born into the best families”—if by the phrase “best families”

one means households where children are given real love, a deep sense of security, and solid moral values.

True, the precise degree to which bad families contribute to the creation of criminal psychopaths is still a matter of debate. The range of mistreatment that serial killers have suffered as children varies widely, from outright physical and sexual torture to extreme humiliation and other forms of emotional abuse.

But one thing is certain: there is no such thing as a serial killer who has come from a healthy, happy home. All of them are the products of distinctly dysfunctional backgrounds.

Listening to Reginald Trasker speak, another character in the play, a writer name Richard Bravo, replies:

“If you encounter a human without compassion or pity or morals, he grew up where these things weren’t encouraged. That’s final and absolute.” Bravo calls Trasker’s “bad seed” theory “tommyrot.”

And he’s right.

To say that there are no such things as “bad seeds”—children who are born evil—is not to claim that inherited factors play no role at all in the creation of serial killers.

In his indispensable book The Blank Slate, MIT professor Steven Pinker sets out to counter the currently fashionable notion that there is nothing innate in human nature and that people are purely the products of their environment. Pinker begins his book with an intriguing example. “Many policies on parenting,” he writes, “are inspired by research that finds a correlation between the behavior of parents and the behavior of children. Loving parents have confident children, authoritative parents (neither too permissive nor too punitive) have well-behaved children, parents who talk to their children have children with better language skills, and so on. Everyone concludes that to grow the best children parents must be loving, authoritative, and talkative, and if children don’t turn out well, it must be the parents’ fault.” This conclusion, as Pinker points out, “depends on the belief that children are blank slates”—that their minds, characters, and behavioral patterns are entirely shaped by their upbringing.

But there is another possibility, too: “The correlations between parents and children may be telling us only that the same genes that make parents loving, authoritative, and talkative make their children self—

confident, well-behaved, and articulate.” In other words, heredity also plays a role in producing good children.

The same principle applies to serial killers. Most experts believe that certain children grow up to be violent psychopaths because they are treated so monstrously by their parents. And there is no doubt that, almost without exception, serial killers grow up in wretchedly dysfunctional households. But it is possible that—to paraphrase Pinker—the same genes that make some adults miserable excuses for parents make their children warped and pernicious human beings.

Recent scientific discoveries seem to confirm that severely antisocial personalities are at least partly the product of genetic factors. Experiments have shown that when people born with a certain “low-active”

gene (specifically, something called the “monoamine oxidase A gene”) are subjected to severe childhood maltreatment, they grow up to be criminally violent at a far higher rate than people born with a “high-active” gene.

In short, it seems likely that both nurture and nature play a part in producing serial killers.

Recommended Reading

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) Matt Ridley, “What Makes You Who You Are?” Time Magazine (June 2, 2003) ADOPTION

Obviously there are millions of adopted children who grow up to be perfectly happy and well-adjusted adults (or at least as happy and well-adjusted as any nonadopted person). Still, a surprisingly high percentage of serial killers have been raised in adoptive or foster homes.

There shouldn’t be anything surprising about this fact, since it reflects, among other things, the kinds of extremely unstable backgrounds—the “overall rotten families”—as Jonathan Kellerman calls them—that psychopaths invariably spring from. Jane Toppan’s father, for example, was an illiterate, abusive drunk who stuck both his daughters in an orphanage after the death of his wife and never saw them again. Earle Leonard Nelson was born to a dissolute couple who died of syphilis within a few months of each other when their son was an infant. A fair number of notorious serial killers have been children of prostitutes who couldn’t wait to get rid of their kids. From the moment of her birth, Mary Bell was spurned by her mother, Betty, who—when the midwife tried to put the newborn in her arms—shouted:

“Get that thing away from me!” Throughout Mary’s early years, her mother made every effort to dispose of her unwanted child, once even taking her to an adoption agency and leaving her there with a stranger.

The belief (usually fully justified) that they have been rejected by their birth parents contributes to the sense of worthlessness and shame that typically afflicts budding psychopaths. Throughout his life, for example, David Berkowitz was told by his adoptive parents that his mother had died while giving birth to him—a story that burdened him with a heavy load of guilt. When Berkowitz later discovered that his mother was actually alive, he tracked her down, only to discover that she wasn’t especially interested in having a relationship with him.

The adoptive or foster homes that some children find themselves in can also have a deeply pernicious effect on their developing personalities. Joseph Kallinger’s adoptive parents scourged him with a cat-o’-nine tails and assured him that his penis would remain permanently stunted from a childhood hernia operation. Though Jane Toppan (born Honora Kelley) was given the name of her foster family, she was never formally adopted and was made to feel like a perennial outsider in the only home she ever knew.

Described by a social worker as “deeply disturbed,” Kenneth Bianchi’s adoptive mother treated him with pathological overprotectiveness, smothering the little boy with bizarre medical attention (once, when he accidentally wet his pants, she rushed him to the doctor to have his genitals examined). And after the death of his parents, Earle Nelson was raised by a Bible-crazed grandmother who was the source of his own lifelong obsession with the Whore of Babylon from Revelation—an obsession that helped fuel his homicidal rage against women.

To be sure, the correlation between serial murder and adoption can be easily overstated. Some experts dismiss it entirely and scoff at defense attorneys who argue that their clients should not be held responsible for their crimes because they were abandoned at birth (a tactic tried—unsuccessfully—in the case of the Long Island serial killer Joel Rifkin, who murdered seventeen prostitutes in the home of his adoptive parents supposedly, so he claimed, to alleviate the pain of having been rejected by his birth mother). Certainly the vast majority of adopted Americans grow up to be productive, law-abiding citizens. It is also the case that being raised by a birth parent is no guarantee that a child will turn out to be normal.

Mary Bell’s mother, after all, never managed to rid herself of her unwanted daughter. Instead, the little girl was kept at home and subjected to such unimaginable torture that it would have been better if she had been given up for adoption.

In his landmark 1899 book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud quotes Plato on the difference between ordinary citizens and criminals: “The virtuous man is content to dream what the wicked man really does.” Freud’s point is that, in the depths of the unconscious mind, even the most morally upright person harbors fantasies of forbidden behavior—of savage lust and primal violence. But the quote implies something else, too: that what differentiates “wicked men” (and women) from the rest of us is their willingness to act on their darkest desires.

After a long day at the office, for example—where he was passed over yet again for promotion, then embarrassed by the attraction he felt for a cute summer intern no older than his own daughter—a law-abiding, happily married husband and father might fall asleep and dream of butchering his boss and forcing himself sexually on the girl. Chances are, he’ll wake up feeling so shaken and guilty that he will erase all memory of this disturbing dream from his mind.

For a serial killer, on the other hand, mental images of mayhem and rape aren’t the stuff of nightmare; on the contrary, they form the basis of his favorite daydreams. Far from trying to put such unwholesome thoughts out of his mind, he will cultivate them—wallow in them. The recollection of a real or perceived slight inspires him to envision the most sadistic forms of revenge. The sight of a pretty girl arouses thoughts of abduction, sexual torture, and dismemberment-murder. For days, weeks, months, he will dwell on—and masturbate to—such imagined atrocities.

Then—when his perverted fantasies have reached an unbearable pitch of intensity—he will go out and attempt to commit them.

I knew long before I started killing that I was going to be killing, that it was going to end up like that.