The Serial Killer Files (49 page)

Recommended Reading

David Abrahamsen, Confessions of Son of Sam (1985)

Joseph C. Fisher, Killer Among Us: Public Reactions to Serial Murder (1997) COPYCATS

Whenever a sensational crime occurs—one that receives lots of media coverage and rivets the attention of the public—chances are good that it will inspire some desperately disturbed individual to commit a similar—or “copycat”—crime as a way of making himself feel important. The Columbine massacre, for example, was followed by a spate of high school shootings perpetrated by juvenile copycats looking to make their own bloody mark on society. And in the midst of the post–9/11 anthrax scare, various anonymous crackpots crawled out of the woodwork, adding to the general panic by sending powder-filled envelopes through the mails.

Despite the premise of the 1995 movie Copycat, however—in which the villain duplicates the precise MO of such notorious psycho-killers as the Hillside Stranglers, Son of Sam, and Jeffrey Dahmer—serial murder cases do not usually incite copycat crimes. In real life, the discovery of Dahmer’s atrocities did not encourage anyone else to run out and cannibalize young gay males. To commit such horrors, a person has to be in the grip of the most grotesque and aberrant compulsions. No one is going to start dismembering prostitutes or burying dead bodies in his crawl space just because he read about it in the newspaper.

Nevertheless—while serial murder may not be caused by copycat motives—there have certainly been psychopaths who have looked up to earlier homicidal maniacs as role models and even wished to emulate their depravities. This phenomenon extends all the way back to the Middle Ages. Gilles de Rais

—the monstrously depraved, fifteenth-century French aristocrat who supposedly served as the model for the fairy-tale figure, Bluebeard—claimed that his favorite author was Suetonius, the Roman historian who chronicled the degenerate doings of Imperial madmen like Nero and Caligula.

In our own century, there have been several notable examples of frighteningly sadistic lust-killers who openly admired others of their breed. Peter Kürten—the so-called Monster of Düsseldorf—was a big fan of Jack the Ripper’s, reading every book on the Whitechapel Horrors that he could get his hands on. And Albert Fish, the cannibalistic pedophile who perpetrated some of the most appalling murders in the annals of American crime, idolized the German madman Fritz Haarmann, saving news clippings about the “Vampire of Hanover” the way teenage girls keep scrapbooks of their favorite pop stars.

There have also been some severely disturbed individuals who can only be described as serial killer

“wannabes.” Such psychos don’t identify with, or seek to emulate, specific murderers from the past.

They aren’t trying to be the new Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Dahmer. Their great ambition is simply to be known as a “serial killer,” as if that in itself were a badge of distinction.

In the spring of 1993, for example, a British psychopath named Colin Ireland perpetrated a string of savage murders for the express purpose of being labeled a serial killer. On March 9 of that year, the thirty-eight-year-old Ireland showed up at a gay pub in London, secretly equipped with a “murder kit,”

consisting of cord, knife, and gloves. After flirting with a forty-five-year-old choreographer named Peter Walker, Ireland and his pickup went back to Walker’s flat. There, Ireland proceeded to bind, beat, torture, and finally suffocate Walker with a plastic bag. Afterward, he burned his victim’s pubic hair—to see, he later told police, “how it would smell”—stuffed condoms in the dead man’s mouth and up his nostrils, and placed two teddy bears on his chest in the “69” position.

Two months later, on May 29, Ireland returned to the same pub, met another gay man who was into S&M sex—a thirty-seven-year-old librarian named Christopher Dunn. After returning to Dunn’s flat, Ireland handcuffed him to the bed, beat him with a belt, and held a cigarette lighter to his testicles before suffocating him by shoving pieces of cloth down his throat.

Ireland claimed his third victim just six days later, when he strangled a thirty-five-year-old American expatriate named Perry Bradley III. Having committed three, virtually identical murders within such a short span of time, Ireland eagerly scanned the news each day, expecting to find stories about the killing spree. The police, however, had not yet linked the three deaths. Frustrated at this lack of recognition, Ireland struck again just three days later, torturing and murdering a thirty-three-year-old gay man named Andrew Collier after picking him up at the same pub. For spite, he also strangled Collier’s cat and left it lying atop the corpse with its gaping mouth around the dead man’s penis.

On June 12, exactly a week after killing Collier, Ireland put in an anonymous phone call to the police and

—after announcing that he had already committed four murders and intended to do one more—scolded them for failing to recognize that a serial killer was on the loose. “Doesn’t the death of a homosexual man mean anything?” he demanded.

The day after the phone call, Ireland killed his final victim, a forty-one-year-old chef named Emanuel Spiteri. He was arrested after police found a security video showing him walking with Spiteri at a subway station. In custody, he quickly confessed.

Unlike most serial killers who target gay men, Ireland wasn’t gay himself. Nor did he have any particular animosity toward homosexuals. (“It might just as well have been women,” he insisted.) He had chosen S&M types, he said, because they were easy targets who would go home with a total stranger and let themselves be tied up.

Ireland steadfastly insisted that he had savagely murdered five men for one simple reason: he aspired to be a serial killer and had read in a book that, to be so classified, a person had to slay a minimum of four.

The last homicide was committed just for good measure.

In December 1993, an Old Bailey judge told Ireland: “You expressed the desire to be regarded as a serial killer. That must be matched by your detention for life.” He was given five consecutive life sentences and told that he would never be released from prison.

I have read a lot of books on serial killers. I think it is from four people that the FBI class as serial, so I may stop now I have done five.

—Colin Ireland in an anonymous call to police

Heriberto Seda, Zodiac Copycat

People—especially New Yorkers—often react with surprise when told that the infamous Zodiac killer was never caught. After all, they can clearly remember the newspaper headlines from 1998 trumpeting the arrest and conviction of the Zodiac shooter. The man referred to in those stories, however, was not the famously elusive gunman who terrorized San Francisco in the late 1960s, but rather a young psychopathic New Yorker named Heriberto Seda—a classic copycat killer whose warped admiration for the original Zodiac inspired him to conduct an astrologically themed murder spree of his own.

Twenty-two at the time he embarked on his homicidal campaign, Seda was a high school dropout who lived with his mother and sister, had neither friends nor romantic relationships, and picked up pocket money by stealing coins from pay phones and vending machines. With no job or social life, he appears to have spent much of his time shut up in his room reading Soldier of Fortune magazine and books about serial killers. A gun nut whose schooling came to an end when he was suspended for carrying a concealed weapon, Seda was particularly obsessed with the Bay Area Zodiac, partly because the latter was one of the rare serial killers who relied on firearms. Seda was also something of a religious fanatic and was fascinated by the Zodiac’s bizarre quasi-mystical letters in which he spoke of collecting slaves to serve him in the afterlife.

Taking a leaf from his role model’s book, Seda sent a letter to the “Anti-Crime” unit of his local police precinct in November 1989:

This is the Zodiac.

The First Sign is dead.

The Zodiac will Kill the twelve signs in the

Belt when the Zodiacal light is seen.

The Zodiac will spread fear

I have seen a lot of police in Jamaica Ave and

Elden Lane but you are no good and will not get

the Zodiac.

Orion is the one that can stop Zodiac and the

Seven Sister.

Given the number of bizarre communications they receive on a regular basis, the cops saw no reason to pay particular attention to this apparent crank letter and filed it away.

Despite the second line of this letter—which suggests that Seda had already committed a murder at the time he sent it—his first two shootings appear to have occurred the following March, when, wielding a homemade 9mm zip gun, he ambushed two people several weeks apart in Brooklyn. Both men survived.

At the time, the police didn’t connect the attacks, assuming that they were simply two more of the many gun-related incidents afflicting New York City in that era of rampant crime.

When Seda struck again on May 31, however—mortally wounding an elderly Brooklynite out for a late-night stroll—he left one of his bizarre notes beside the body. Soon, more communications from the self-styled Zodiac began arriving at the offices of the New York Post, which broke the story on June 19. Riddle of the Zodiac Shooter, read the headline. Suddenly, the police and the public were faced with the unnerving realization that—twenty years after the city was terrorized by the “Son of Sam”—New York had another phantom shooter in its midst.

After consulting astrologers who predicted that the killer would strike again in the early-morning hours of June 21, officials put scores of policemen on the streets of Brooklyn to watch for the shooter. Seda outwitted them, however, by shifting his hunting grounds to Manhattan, shooting a homeless man in Central Park. The following day, he sent another letter to the Post, insisting that he and the San Francisco Zodiac were one and the same. Few believed, however, that the legendary West Coast psycho-killer had suddenly surfaced in New York City, particularly since several witnesses to the Brooklyn shootings described a figure far too young to be the Woodstock-era madman. It was clear that the new spree was the work of a deranged copycat.

With the whole city focused on his capture, Seda—who had lovingly compiled a scrapbook of clippings about his crimes—decided to take a break. When the next astrologically significant date came and went without another shooting, the public began to relax. Before long, Zodiac had been largely forgotten.

He returned with a vengeance the following year, attacking four people—two fatally—in a Brooklyn park between June 4 and October 2, 1992. In June 1994, after another prolonged hiatus, he shot a fifth victim in the same park. A month after the latter incident, he mailed the final—and in many ways most bizarre—of his Zodiac letters to the New York Post. “Sleep my little dead,” he wrote after listing his latest victims. “How we lothe them.”

Two more years would pass before Seda attacked another person. This time, it would be his own sister.

Seda shot her in the back with one of his zip guns during a violent argument. Wounded, she made it to the apartment of a neighbor, who dialed 911.

Taken to the station house, Seda was asked to describe the incident in writing. He complied, signing the statement with the same arcane symbols—a cross and three sevens—he had used on his Zodiac letters.

Suddenly, the detectives realized that the young man in their custody was the long-sought shooter.

Before long, they obtained a full confession from him.

In June 1998, Heriberto Seda was convicted and sentenced to a minimum term of eighty-plus years behind bars. He reportedly spends much of his time in prison poring over the Bible and quoting Scripture to his fellow inmates.

THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

While supernatural explanations for homicidal mania have not been in vogue since the Middle Ages, some serial killers continue to insist that they were the victims of demonic possession. David Berkowitz, for example, stoutly maintained that “a demon has been living in me since birth.” And Herbert Mullin—the California psycho who believed that he could stave off a cataclysmic earthquake by slaughtering eight people—once accounted for his actions by explaining that “Satan gets into people and makes them do things they don’t want to.”

Still, it’s been a long time since anyone tried the “devil made me do it” defense in a courtroom—at least in the United States. As recently as the 1950s, however, one South African serial murderer gave it a shot.

His name was Elifasi Msomi. During a span of twenty-one months in the early fifties, this part-time witch doctor, a native of Natal, butchered fifteen people. Most of his victims were young children.

Posing as a “labor agent,” Msomi lured the little ones away from home by promising to get them well-paying jobs as servants. Once he had them safely in his clutches, he hacked them to death with an ax.

He was arrested in 1955 and confessed to his crimes, though he claimed that he was under the sway of an invisible demon known as a “tokoloshe” that supposedly perched on his shoulder and commanded him to kill. Court-appointed psychiatrists dismissed this story as so much mumbo jumbo and offered a more plausible explanation.

Msomi, they said, derived sadistic sexual pleasure from his atrocities. He was hanged in Pretoria prison in February 1956.

For months, even years, his fantasies have become more obsessive, dominating his waking life. His imagined scenarios of torture and death have grown so intense that he thinks of little else. Finally, he can no longer stand the pressure from within. Lying in bed and masturbating as he thinks about strangling a coed or disemboweling a male hustler isn’t enough anymore. It is time to make his dreams come true—to appease his monstrous hunger with living flesh and blood.

But how?

At the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a psychiatrist named Dr. Richmond describes the circumstances that caused mild-mannered Norman Bates to transform into a crazed, cross-dressing killer. Whenever the profoundly schizoid Norman “felt a strong attraction to any other woman,” Dr.