The Serial Killer Files (50 page)

Richmond explains, the evil “mother side of him would go wild.” That’s exactly what happened with Marion Crane (the character played by Janet Leigh). When Norman met her, says Richmond, “He was touched by her—aroused by her. He wanted her. That set off the jealous mother.” Next thing you know, poor Marion was slashed to death in a scene that caused an entire generation of moviegoers to feel a twinge of anxiety every time they stepped into the shower.

Though some film critics see the psychiatrist as a ludicrous figure—a deliberate caricature of a smug Freudian know-it-all—he actually does a pretty good job of describing the phenomenon that criminologists call a “triggering factor.” This is the thing that (in Dr. Richmond’s words) “sets off” a serial killer and causes him—after a prolonged period during which his fantasies have been lying dormant—to “go wild.”

In real life, as in Psycho, the triggering factor is often a specific type of victim, one who has the kinds of qualities that turn the killer on. For psychopaths, as for normally constituted human beings, these features vary widely. In contrast to the movie, the homicidal impulses of Ed Gein—the real-life prototype of Norman Bates—were provoked not by young, attractive females but by stout, middle-aged women with a physical resemblance to his mother. Ted Bundy, on the other hand, was drawn to pretty college-age brunettes with their hair parted down the middle. Other serial killers have been excited to a murderous frenzy by muscular adolescent boys, drug-addicted hookers, or defenseless little girls. A powerful portrayal of a “triggering” episode can be seen in the classic 1931 movie M, when the pedophiliac lust-killer, Franz Becker (brilliantly played by Peter Lorre) spots a pretty prepubescent girl as he strolls along a Berlin street. The look that passes over Beckert’s face chillingly conveys the hideous lust that is suddenly aroused in him by the sight of the unwary child.

As in Psycho— where a beautiful, unescorted blonde unexpectedly shows up at the Bates Motel—an unforeseen opportunity can also serve as a triggering factor. In 1874, a ten-year-old girl named Katie Curran, looking to buy a new notebook for school, wandered into the newspaper shop where Jesse Pomeroy was working by himself. Though Pomeroy preferred boy victims, the circumstance of suddenly finding himself alone with the trusting child incited his homicidal mania. Luring the little girl into the cellar, he set upon her with a pocketknife, then concealed her mutilated corpse in an ash heap. In a similar way, during the spring of 1928, the cannibalistic monster Albert Fish presented himself at the home of a couple named Budd, having been drawn there by a classified newspaper ad placed by their adolescent son—Fish’s intended target. During the visit, however, the Budds’ lovely twelve-year-old daughter, Grace, suddenly showed up. Something about the little girl’s appearance triggered Fish’s bloodlust. On the spot, he determined to abduct, kill, and eat her instead.

Clearly, it would be useful for law enforcement officials to know exactly what “triggering factors” lead to serial murder. The trouble is that—precisely because psychopathic killers are so profoundly disturbed

—there is no telling what may set any one of them off. The German lust-killer Heinrich Pommerencke—aka the “Beast of the Black Forest”—progressed from serial rape to serial slaughter after seeing Cecil B.

DeMille’s biblical epic, The Ten Commandments in 1959. The Manson family’s atrocities were triggered by, of all things, the Beatles’ “White Album.” Some psycho-killers grow enraged when their captives try to run away, others when their victims are overly cooperative. The frighteningly psychotic serial killer Joseph Kallinger abandoned his plans to assault several women when he discovered that they were menstruating. In the late 1960s, on the other hand, a still-unknown serial killer nicknamed “Bible John”

picked up three women at a Glasgow dance hall called the Barrowland Ballroom. Their fully or partially unclothed corpses were subsequently found with “sanitary napkins they had been using discarded beside them.” It appeared, as crime writer Martin Fido has put it, that the Scripture-citing psycho was

“somehow provoked by menstruation.”

I saw women dancing around the Golden Calf and I thought they were a fickle lot. I knew I would have to kill.

—Heinrich Pommerencke

From coyotes and wolves to bobcats and lions, creatures who prey on other, weaker animals tend to be highly territorial, confining their kills to a specific hunting ground. The same holds true for most serial killers. Like their four-legged counterparts, these human predators generally commit their atrocities within a particular area.

These places vary widely in size. Some killers restrict themselves to a single neighborhood. Jack the Ripper, for example, committed all his butcheries within the Whitechapel slum district of East London.

Others range around an entire city, like David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz—whose victims were shot in different boroughs of New York. Still others might cover one or more counties, like the so-called Green River Killer, who prowled the area between Seattle and Tacoma. In each case, however, the killer sticks to a distinct territory. Depending on the extent of this area, he might stalk his quarry on foot (like Jack the Ripper) or rely on a vehicle. The Southern California psycho-killers Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, for example, purchased a 1977 GMC cargo van—which they christened “Murder Mack”—specifically for the purpose of cruising for victims along the Pacific Coast Highway.

Serial killers select particular areas for their crimes partly because of the availability of their preferred form of prey. If you are stalking prostitutes, for example, you will obviously focus on red-light districts where streetwalkers flaunt their wares. As crime writer Michael Newton says, “Hunters go where there is game.”

I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game—tasty meat… . I live for the hunt—my life.

—David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz

Another factor is what criminologists refer to as the killer’s “comfort zone.” Most serial killers commit their crimes relatively close to home because they prefer to hunt in places they are familiar with, where they feel confident and in control. They like to know the lay of the land—the best spots to snare victims, the quickest escape routes.

Some serial killers actually feel most comfortable committing their outrages right inside their own homes. Even this kind of psycho is territorial, however, in the sense that he will haunt particular locales in search of prey. Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, favored a gay bar in Milwaukee, which kept him stocked with the young male victims he slaughtered inside his squalid apartment. John Wayne Gacy, who turned his suburban split-level into a private torture dungeon and charnel house, cruised the Greyhound bus station in central Chicago and other seamy areas where street hustlers congregated. David and Catherine Birnie trolled the highways of Perth for their victims, who were then raped and tortured in the couple’s white brick bungalow, a ramshackle dwelling that became known as “Australia’s House of Horrors.”

At the opposite extreme from such home-based sadists are the nomads. The least territorial of all serial killers, these itinerant psychos—who depend on modern modes of transportation, from planes to trains to automobiles—travel across states, countries, and sometimes entire continents, killing as they go.

Because this type of serial killer is so mobile, he is often able to stay several steps ahead of the law.

Indeed, he is generally long gone by the time his latest atrocity is even discovered. As a result, such vagabonds are particularly hard to catch. Often, authorities aren’t even aware that one of these killers is on the loose, since they fail to recognize that, say, two middle-aged women—one found strangled and raped in San Francisco, the other in Seattle—were actually the victims of the same psycho, a phenomenon that criminologist Stephen Egger has called “linkage blindness.”

Earle Leonard Nelson, who actually did strangle landladies in San Francisco and Seattle (as well as in San Jose, Santa Barbara, Oakland, Portland, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, and Winnipeg) was the first of this breed, at least in twentieth-century America. A compulsive drifter from adolescence on, he made his way back and forth across the country, generally by car, leaving nearly two dozen corpses in his wake.

Nelson’s contemporary Carl Panzram was even more peripatetic. In the course of his extraordinarily brutal life, he traveled around the world, committing, by his own estimate, twenty-one murders, along with countless assault and homosexual rapes. In the mid-1920s, after shipping out to West Africa as a merchant seaman, he hired eight native bearers to help him hunt crocodiles, then ended up killing and raping the Africans and feeding their bodies to the crocs.

More recently, Angel Maturino Resendez—aka the “Railway Killer”—slaughtered a minimum of nine known victims as he aimlessly rode the rails from place to place. A Mexican national, Resendez crossed the Texas border at will, hitching rides on freight cars that carried him as far north as Kentucky and Illinois. With no specific destination in mind, he would hop off at random locales and commit an atrocity in close proximity to the tracks. His usual MO was to invade a residence, club the inhabitants to death with whatever implement was at hand (a tire iron, a sledgehammer, a gardening tool), burglarize the place, then hop on the next passing train and vanish before the crime was even discovered.

Because he traveled in such a haphazard way, without knowing where he was heading or who his next victim would be, authorities were slow to see a pattern in the string of savage murders committed along the railroad tracks between August 1997 and June 1999. Eventually, however, Resendez was placed on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List. In July 1999, he surrendered himself peacefully at the behest of his beloved older sister. He was later found guilty of capital murder.

His traveling days over, the infamous “Railway Killer” now sits on death row in Livingston, Texas.

John Eric Armstrong, Psycho Sailor

There’s an old saying about the “sailor with a girl in every port.” If the claims of John Eric Armstrong are true, he was a frighteningly psychopathic variation of that stereotype: a sailor who murdered girls in every port.

In 1992, at the age of eighteen, Armstrong enlisted in the US Navy and served the next seven years aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz. At no time during this period did his shipmates or superiors detect signs of mental instability. On the contrary, he earned four promotions and two Good Conduct Medals.

After leaving the navy in 1999, he and his wife settled in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, a working-class suburb of Detroit. Neighbors regarded him as a solid citizen: a good family man devoted to his wife and infant son, a reliable worker at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and a generally decent guy, the kind who sometimes ran errands for the blind woman across the street.

What no one around him knew, of course, was that—beneath his respectable veneer—the baby-faced, three hundred-pound Armstrong was a classic “harlot-killer,” a psycho whose virulent hatred of prostitutes was directly proportional to his irresistible compulsion to have sex with them. Cruising the seedy Michigan Avenue strip in southwest Detroit after dark, he would pick up a hooker in his black Jeep Wrangler, then—as soon as their tryst was over—undergo a frightening metamorphosis, yelling “I hate whores” while trying to strangle the woman to death.

On January 2, 2000, Detroit police received a call from a man who told them of a female body floating in the Rouge River. The man explained that—while crossing the bridge on foot—he suddenly felt ill and leaned over the railing to vomit. That’s when he spotted the corpse.

The dead woman turned out to be Wendy Jordan, a drug addict and prostitute whose family had reported her missing several days earlier. A postmortem exam determined that she had been strangled to death, then tossed from the bridge.

The man who called the police to report the discovery was John Eric Armstrong.

Whether Armstrong’s call was prompted by an unconscious desire to confess or the twisted need—common among serial killers—to play head games with the cops is unknown. In any event, the police found his story deeply suspicious and put him under surveillance. After collecting physical evidence from the victim—DNA from her killer’s sperm, plus fibers on her clothes that apparently came from vehicle she’d been killed in—they visited Armstrong at home and, with his consent, took fibers from his Jeep, along with a blood sample.

When the preliminary test results came back in March, they showed definite matches between the evidence gathered from the victim and the samples taken from Armstrong. But prosecutors elected not to issue an arrest warrant until the final, official report arrived from the lab.

In the meantime—even knowing he was under police scrutiny—Armstrong was unable to resist his deadly compulsion.

On the morning of April 10, the bodies of three prostitutes in varying stages of decomposition were found beside the tracks in an isolated rail yard—clearly the work of a serial killer. By that evening, a task force had been assembled. Questioned by investigators, streetwalkers along Michigan Avenue described their terrifying encounters with a beefy, baby-faced john who would go berserk and try to strangle them after sex in his Jeep Wrangler. The police immediately made the connection to Armstrong.

He was arrested on April 12—the same day the official report arrived, confirming his links to the Jordan murder.

No sooner was he in custody than Armstrong broke down and spewed out a tearful confession that stunned his interrogators. During his years in the navy, he said, he had strangled at least eleven prostitutes throughout the world—Seattle, Honolulu, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, and Newport News, Virginia. “Basically,” one police official told reporters, “he said he either killed or tried to kill every prostitute he’d ever had sex with.”

In March 2001—while international investigators tried to confirm Armstrong’s claims—he was put on trial for the murder of Wendy Jordan. His lawyers tried an insanity defense, arguing that Armstrong had been sexually abused by his father as a child. The tactic failed to persuade the jury, who convicted him of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in a state maximum-security prison.