The Serial Killer Files (5 page)

Kemper received no counseling or psychiatric treatment of any kind after his discharge. In September 1972, he was examined by a panel of state psychiatrists appointed to determine his mental state. Satisfied with his responses, they deemed him fully rehabilitated and sealed his juvenile record. Following the interview, Kemper headed for the Santa Cruz Mountains in his car. Inside its trunk was the head of a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker he had killed, raped, and dismembered the day before.

Her name was Aiko Koo, and she was the third victim of the “rehabilitated” Kemper. His first two were eighteen-year-old roommates from Fresno State College, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. Kemper had picked them up the preceding May, driven them to a secluded stretch of road, stabbed them to death, then stuffed their bodies in his trunk and drove them home. Smuggling the corpses into his bedroom, he amused himself with his “trophies,” snapping Polaroid photos, dissecting the bodies, having sex with the viscera. Eventually, he bagged the remains and disposed of them, burying their bodies in the mountains and tossing their heads into a ravine.

Six young women would meet the same fate. Living out the necrophiliac fantasies he had entertained since childhood, Kemper took particular pleasure in raping the corpses and especially in sodomizing the decapitated heads. On at least two occasions, he indulged in cannibalism, slicing flesh from the legs of his victims and consuming it in a macaroni casserole. He also kept teeth, hair, and patches of skin as grisly trophies.

Psychiatrists would later speculate that all of these poor women were surrogates for the real object of Kemper’s hatred: his mother. That his frenzy climaxed with a horrendous act of matricide tends to confirm this theory. On the day before Easter 1973, Kemper crept into his mother’s bedroom at sunrise with a knife and hammer, smashed in her skull, slit her throat, cut off her head, and raped her decapitated corpse. In one of the more symbolically resonant acts in the annals of criminal depravity, he jammed her larynx down the garbage disposal—which promptly spat it back out into his face. “That seemed appropriate,” Kemper would later tell the police, “as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.” He also propped her head on the mantel and used it as a dartboard.

Later that day, he invited her best friend over for dinner. When she arrived, he strangled her with a scarf, took her corpse to bed, and spent the night molesting the body.

The following morning, Easter Sunday, he fled eastward, driving nonstop to Pueblo, Colorado, where—realizing he had nowhere to run—he put in a call to the police back home. At first, no one at the precinct believed his confession. As is common with serial killers, Kemper was a police buff who had befriended many members of the Santa Cruz department. Eventually, however, he persuaded them, then patiently waited at the phone booth for the authorities to arrive and place him under arrest.

He offered a full and sickeningly detailed confession. At his trial, he was judged to be legally sane and convicted of eight counts of murder. When the judge asked him what punishment he felt was suitable for his crimes, Kemper replied—not unreasonably—“Death by torture.” He was sentenced to life in prison, where he remains as of this writing.

Psychoanalysis is based on the belief that you can explain an adult’s troubled behavior by tracing the causes back to his childhood experiences. But as Freud himself admitted, it’s impossible to do the opposite: i.e., look at a young child’s experiences and predict exactly how he’ll behave as a grown-up.

This certainly holds true in the case of serial killers. If you look at the life of, say, Peter Kürten—who grew up in a household where incest was rife and who was tutored from an early age in the joys of animal torture and bestiality—it seems inevitable that he ended up becoming a sadistic lust-murderer.

On the other hand, if you take a different child who has been subjected to a disturbed, even degenerate, upbringing, you can’t say for sure that he will turn out to be a homicidal psychopath.

Still, in attempting to locate the root causes of serial murder, researchers have identified three major warning signs that are often found in the backgrounds of these criminals. These three behavioral red flags

—often referred to as the psychopathological triad— are enuresis (bed-wetting), pyromania (fire-starting), and precocious sadism (generally in the form of animal torture).

1. Bed-Wetting. There’s nothing unusual or alarming about bed-wetting in itself; it’s a common phenomenon among little children. When the problem persists into puberty, however, it may well be a sign of significant and even dangerous emotional disturbance. According to the findings of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, fully 60 percent of sex-murderers were still suffering from this condition as adolescents—like the African-American serial killer Alton Coleman, who wet his pants so often that he was saddled with the taunting nickname “Pissy.”

2. Fire-Starting. Given their lust for destruction, it’s no surprise that, among their other twisted pleasures, many serial killers love to set fires, a practice they often begin at an early age. Some of the most notorious serial killers of modern times were juvenile arsonists. Ottis Toole, for example—Henry Lee Lucas’s loathsome accomplice—began torching vacant houses when he was six years old. Carl Panzram

—arguably the most unrepentant killer in the annals of American crime—took positive pride in the havoc he could wreak with a matchstick, boasting in his jailhouse memoirs that, at the tender age of twelve, he caused $100,000 worth of damage by burning down a building at reform school. Carlton Gary firebombed a grocery store while still in his teens. And David Berkowitz—who ultimately confessed to more than fourteen hundred acts of arson—was so obsessed with fires as a little boy that his schoolmates nicknamed him “Pyro.”

Firebombing stores and incinerating buildings is, of course, an intensely pathological expression of anger and aggression. But it’s more than sheer malice that underlies the incendiary crimes of serial killers. According to specialists in the psychology of perversion, there is always an erotic motive at the root of pyromania. “There is but one instinct which generates the impulse to incendiarism,” writes Wilhelm Stekel in his classic work on aberrant behavior. “That is the sexual instinct, and arson clearly shows its connecting points with sex.”

True, there are often “secondary motives” behind a pyromaniac’s acts—revenge, for example, like Panzram’s desire to get back at his tormentors. But above all (as Stekel writes), “the incendiary is sexually excited by the flames; he likes to watch them burn.” Anyone who doubts this has only to read Flora Schreiber’s writings about the New Jersey serial killer Joseph Kallinger, who was thrown into orgasmic raptures by the mere thought of the fires he had caused.

In short, serial murderers who enjoy starting fires do so for the same reason that they love to torture and kill. It turns them on.

Oh, what ecstasy setting fires brings to my body! What power I feel at the thought of fire … Oh, what a pleasure, what a heavenly pleasure! I see the flames and no longer is a fire just a daydream. It is the reality of heaven on earth! I love the excitement of the power fire gives me … The mental image is greater than sex!

—Joseph Kallinger

3. Animal Torture. Juvenile sadism directed at lower life-forms is nothing new. There have always been children and adolescents (usually male) who enjoy hurting small creatures. Certainly Shakespeare knew about such things. In King Lear, he writes about “wanton boys” who pull the wings off of flies for

“sport.” And in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the hero finds himself in a one-horse town where a bunch of young loafers are amusing themselves by tying a tin pan to the tail of a stray dog and watching him “run himself to death.”

As disturbing as such behavior is, however, it pales beside the kinds of cruelties perpetrated by budding serial killers. As an adolescent, Peter Kürten took pleasure from performing intercourse with various animals while simultaneously stabbing them or slitting their throats. At ten, Edmund Kemper buried his family cat alive in the backyard. Afterward, he dug up the carcass, brought it back to his bedroom, cut off the head, and stuck it on a spindle. Three years later, after his mother brought a new cat into the house, Kemper sliced off the top of its skull with a machete, then held its foreleg while it showered him with blood.

Besides collecting roadkill, little Jeffrey Dahmer liked to nail live frogs to trees, cut open goldfish to see how their innards worked, and perform impromptu surgery on stray dogs and cats. Dennis Nilsen—the so-called British Jeffrey Dahmer—once hanged a cat just to see how long it would take to die. Albert DeSalvo enjoyed trapping house pets in wooden crates and shooting them with a bow and arrow, while Carroll Cole (aka the “Barfly Strangler”) got a kick out of choking the family dog unconscious.

Other violent psychopaths have disemboweled their pets, burned them alive, fed them ground glass, and cut off their paws.

According to ASPCA therapist Dr. Stephanie LaFarge, “anyone who hurts animals has the potential to move on to people.” Of course, most boys who commit minor acts of childhood sadism outgrow such behavior and look back with shame at the time they blew up an anthill with a cherry bomb or dismembered a daddy longlegs. By contrast, the cruelties perpetrated by incipient serial killers grow more extreme over time, until they are targeting not stray animals and house pets but other human beings.

For them animal torture isn’t a stage. It’s a rehearsal.

I found a dog and cut it open just to see what the insides looked like, and for some reason I thought it would be a fun prank to stick the head on a stake and set it out in the woods.

—Jeffrey Dahmer

These two scenes from William Hogarth’s The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) depict the transition from animal cruelty to sex murder. In the first, a London street urchin named Tom Nero tortures a dog. In the second, the grown-up Tom has just been apprehended after slitting the throat of his pregnant lover.

HOW SMART ARE SERIAL KILLERS?

There’s a simple explanation for the fact that so many serial killers have above-average IQs. Generally speaking, it requires a certain degree of intelligence to get away with repeated acts of homicide. There are plenty of sex criminals who have committed atrocious acts of mutilation-murder. Fortunately, most of them are so sloppy or stupid that they are caught right away and so never have a chance to become serial offenders. “I’ve seen many murderers who might well have gone on to become serial killers,”

criminal psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis testified, “if they’d had the wits not to get arrested.”

Still, there’s a tendency to exaggerate the mental capacities of serial killers, particularly since they are so often portrayed in the media as intellectual prodigies à la Hannibal Lecter—a psychopath so staggeringly erudite that he commits murder to the strains of Mozart and knows Dante by heart in the original Italian.

Lecter, however, is a purely mythic creation. He is a reflection not of the way serial killers really are but of how they like to think of themselves. In their pathological narcissism—their profoundly misguided sense of their own superiority—serial killers like to imagine that they are criminal masterminds who can outwit the world. Serial killers with genius-level IQs, however, are almost nonexistent. Some, in fact, are profoundly stupid, relying on low criminal cunning rather than brains to elude the law. Ottis Toole, for example—Henry Lee Lucas’s accomplice and the psycho believed responsible for the abduction and murder of little Adam Walsh—had an IQ of 75. Others are profoundly psychotic, lost in their own bizarre worlds of paranoid delusion.

Even the brightest serial killers are a lot less intelligent than they think. John George Haigh, the infamous British “Acid Bath Murderer” of the 1940s, was a highly intelligent and cultivated man. For all his sophistication, however, he mistakenly believed that the Latin phrase corpus delecti— the legal term for the body of evidence indicating that a crime has occurred—referred to the actual cadaver of a homicide victim. This erroneous belief that a person could not be indicted for murder if no corpse was found eventually led to his undoing.

Ted Bundy was a law student and rising young figure in the Washington State Republican party.

Insisting on serving as his own defense lawyer during his murder trial, he turned the proceedings into a travesty and proved the adage that a man who defends himself has a fool for a client.

Gay serial killer Randy Kraft had an IQ of 129 and made big bucks as a computer consultant. Still, he got himself arrested while driving drunk with a strangled corpse on the passenger seat.

And when Gary Heidnik—a financial whiz who made a fortune on the stock market—was arrested for keeping chained and tortured “sex slaves” in the basement of his Philadelphia home, the best defense he could come up with at the time of his arraignment was that the women were already there when he moved into the house.

In October 2002, Aileen Wuornos—the Florida hooker who shot seven male motorists in the span of a year—was executed for her crimes. From the time of her arrest, she was widely touted in the media as

“America’s first female serial killer.” Catchy as that label was, it was completely inaccurate. There have been dozens of female serial killers in our country’s history.

The phrase “female serial killer” conjures up images of a distaff Jack the Ripper: a lone woman psychopath, coolly stalking and snaring her victims, then butchering and mutilating them in a sex-crazed frenzy. In fact, there are no women who fit that particular model (at least not outside of overheated Hollywood fantasies like Basic Instinct ). When police discover a corpse with its throat slit, its torso cut open, its viscera removed, and its genitals excised, they are justified in making one basic assumption: the perpetrator was a man.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as a female serial killer. It just means men and women commit serial murder in different ways.