The Serial Killer Files (51 page)

A report on the six o’clock news that an unknown serial killer has just claimed his fifth victim is enough to send a city of two million people into a panic. Why—given the astronomically high odds that any one resident will end up as number six—should this be so?

According to one thinker, the answer has to do with evolutionary biology. In her thought-provoking 1997 book Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that, for millions of years in the early development of our species, human beings were not just predators but prey, hunted down, slain, and devoured by other, stronger carnivores. As a result, our brains are hardwired with a built-in fear of bloodthirsty creatures.

This age-old instinct expresses itself, among other ways, in our lifelong fascination with stories about vulnerable people being chased by predatory monsters, from rampaging T. rexes to chain-saw-wielding psychos. Such scary tales not only tap in to our primitive anxieties; they also offer a reassuring sense of control. As Ehrenreich puts it:

In our own time, the spectacle of anti-human violence is replayed endlessly by a commercial entertainment industry which thrives on people’s willingness to pay for the frisson inspired by images of their fellow humans being stalked by killers, sucked dry by vampires, or devoured by multi-mouthed beasts from outer space. There is even a vogue of what could be called “predation porn”: depictions (on the Discovery Channel, for example) of actual predators in the act of actual predation … All such spectacles offer a “safe” version of the trauma of predation, one in which we approach the nightmare—and survive.

Whatever validity there may or may not be to this theory, there’s no question that the mere thought of serial killers stirs up powerful, irrational terrors in us, far out of proportion to the actual threat posed by these criminals. The best estimate of experts like James Alan Fox of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University is that, at any given time, there are two to three dozen serial killers at large in the country, responsible for the deaths of between one and two hundred victims. Compare that to the nearly forty-three thousand fatalities that resulted from traffic accidents in 2002, and it’s clear that the average American runs a substantially greater risk of getting killed by a drunk driver than by a criminal psychopath.

Recommended Reading

Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites (1997)

The vast majority of serial killers have a signature style of murder, selecting specific types of victims and destroying them in a preferred manner: strangling, shooting, stabbing,
etc.
Eric Cooke was different.

He killed young and old, male and female; and he murdered his victims in a variety of ways. As a result, it took the police a while just to realize that the string of random homicides that terrorized the Australian city of Perth in 1963 was the work of a single psychopath.

Born with a harelip and cleft palate, Cooke had the classic background of a serial killer: an agonizing childhood of abuse and humiliation, most of it inflicted by his alcoholic father, who not only thrashed his son regularly but relentlessly mocked his looks. It’s no surprise that Eric grew up with a seething rage against the world. (“I just wanted to hurt somebody,” was the only explanation he ever gave for his crimes.) By his late adolescence, he was already leading a Jekyll-Hyde existence: an apparent life of bland normality and a secret one of compulsive criminality.

He was only eighteen when he was arrested for the first time on burglary and arson charges. Supposedly rehabilitated after a brief stint in jail, he joined a church, got married, found a job as a truck driver, and settled down in a suburb of Perth. But even while passing as a hardworking husband and father, he was continuing his nocturnal life as a cat burglar, car thief, Peeping Tom, and sexual fetishist.

His first known murder occurred in January 1959, when he crept into the apartment of a sleeping, thirty-three-year-old divorcee, startled her awake, then stabbed her to death with a diver’s knife. Four years later, almost to the day, he embarked on a spree of serial murder that would throw the entire city into a panic. At 2:00A.M. on Sunday, January 27, 1963, he approached a parked car, then opened fire at its occupants with a .22 rifle, wounding the couple inside. When the car sped away, he went prowling for other victims. That same night, he shot two young men while they slept in their beds, killing one outright and mortally wounding the other. He also murdered a middle-aged businessman, rousing him from his sleep, then firing a bullet between his eyes when he came to the front door.

While the police searched for a deranged shooter, Cooke switched his MO. In the early-morning hours of February 16, while looting another apartment, he inadvertently awoke its occupant, a twenty-four-year-old woman. Knocking her unconscious, he strangled her to death with a light cord, then raped her corpse, dragged it outside to a nearby backyard, and arranged it in an obscene pose for the neighbors to find. Six months later, he killed another young woman, an eighteen-year-old female babysitter who was shot through the head as she sat in an easy chair doing her homework.

Cooke was captured when an elderly couple chanced upon his rifle, which he had stashed beneath some bushes. The police mounted a stakeout, and when Cooke came to retrieve the weapon, they nabbed him.

He was tried in November 1963 and hanged slightly less than one year later.

Though the odds are infinitesimal, dying at the hands of a serial killer is, theoretically at least, something that could happen to anyone—like winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. Still, some people run a much greater risk than others. A crack-addicted streetwalker in an inner-city slum, for example, is far more likely to end up strangled, dismembered, and left in a Dumpster than a white suburban soccer mom (though the public is far more likely to hear about the savage sex-murder of a white middle-class woman than of a black hooker).

Prostitutes (especially when they come from the underclass)—along with street hustlers, teenage runaways, vagrants, junkies, and other social outcasts—are what criminologists call “targets of opportunity”: people who are especially vulnerable to serial homicide because they are easy to snare and overpower and are so marginalized that no one, including members of the police and the press, pays much attention when they go missing. When Gary Heidnik, for example, set out to fulfill his insane plan to trap sex slaves for his personal “baby farm,” he chose the perfect targets of opportunity: mentally retarded black women from Philadelphia’s worst slum, the kind of person he knew he could trap with ease and keep in prolonged captivity without attracting anyone’s notice.

The term “target of opportunity” is also used to describe victims who are randomly slain by a serial murderer simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. The people murdered by the Beltway Snipers, died for no other reason than that they were within convenient shooting range when those sociopaths took aim. Similarly, Bertha and Beverly Kludt—a mother-daughter pair butchered in Tacoma, Washington, in 1947—met their awful end merely because they had the misfortune of being at home when a psychopathic drifter named Jake Bird passed by the house and spotted an ax in their backyard.

If some serial killers will murder any easy target that crosses their path, others have distinct preferences when it comes to their victims. When “Son of Sam” was on the loose in the summer of 1976, for example, newspapers reported that his victims tended to be young women with long brown hair—a fact that led countless brunettes throughout the city to cut, dye, or conceal their tresses under hats.

Following his arrest, psychologists theorized that there was a symbolic dimension to his choice of victim. One expert posited that the young women shot by Berkowitz represented his hated birth mother, who had given him up for adoption. Others claimed that they were surrogates for the girls who had snubbed him in high school. Whatever validity there may be to such speculations, there’s no doubt that Berkowitz himself took perverse pride in the appearance of his victims. Like some sick travesty of a Don Juan boasting of his conquests, Berkowitz bragged: “I only shoot pretty girls.”

Ted Bundy, too, prided himself not only on the “quality” of his victims—bright, attractive, generally middle-class young women—but on the skill with which he snared them. On Sunday, July 14, 1974, within the space of a few hours, he managed to abduct two young women in broad daylight amid thousands of people sunbathing and picnicking at a state park in Seattle.

Even killers like Berkowitz and Bundy, however—who derive a warped sense of superiority not from dating desirable women but from slaughtering them—tend to kill targets of opportunity. Berkowitz may have set his sights on “pretty girls” in general. But the ones who actually died were the unlucky few he accidentally happened upon when he went out prowling for blood.

Indeed, except for the rare psycho who targets specific individuals (H. H. Holmes, for example, who eliminated his wives, mistresses, business associates, and potential witnesses), all of these killers are opportunistic. A serial murderer may set out to slaughter a particular type of person. But the specific individuals who end up dead at his hands are the ones who present him with the best opportunity to work evil.

Robert Lee Yates, Jr., Prostitute Slayer

Once a thriving working-class neighborhood, the East Sprague area of Spokane had, by the early 1990s, degenerated into a wasteland—a blighted stretch of porn shops, strip joints, and hot-sheet motels where drug-addicted hookers plied their desperate trade, and where the long-elusive psycho known as the

“Spokane Serial Killer” harvested most of his victims.

The first to die was a twenty-six-year-old African-American prostitute named Yolanda Sapp, whose naked corpse was found sprawled on a highway embankment near the Spokane River on February 22, 1990. The killings would continue for the better part of a decade, interrupted by intervals of wildly varying lengths. On two occasions, several years would elapse between murders. Later—in the pattern of escalation typical of sex-killers—victims would be slain within months, weeks, or even days of each other.

Almost all the victims were women in their thirties or forties, though the youngest was only sixteen, the oldest sixty. All were shot repeatedly with a small-caliber handgun and their nude corpses dumped in various locations around the city.

It was not until 1997 that a task force was established to hunt for the killer. An FBI profile solicited by the police department proved so general as to be useless. The culprit was most likely a “white man between twenty and forty years old who might be a loner”—a description that, as one local sheriff wryly noted, applied to “most of the male residents of the state, including all the investigating officers.”

Assiduous police work, as it often does, finally provided the break in the case. In November 1998, an officer on stakeout in an area frequented by prostitutes spotted a car pull up to the curb and admit a young woman. The driver turned out to be forty-seven-year-old Robert Lee Yates, Jr., who had previously been ticketed for a minor traffic violation while cruising around the East Sprague red-light neighborhood. When the officer questioned him about the streetwalker in his passenger seat, Yates managed to talk his way out of trouble. A short time later, however, another prostitute—who had barely escaped with her life after being attacked by her “date”—reported the incident to police, providing them with a description of her assailant that matched certain known facts about Yates’s background. Police moved in on the suspect.

To all outward appearances, Yates had led not merely a respectable but an exemplary life. A middle-aged family man with five children, he was a highly decorated ex-army helicopter pilot who had participated in Desert Storm, served with distinction in Somalia, and flown rescue missions in Florida following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Andrew.

He was also a remorseless and frighteningly prolific sex-killer. Faced with overwhelming physical evidence—including DNA tests linking him to several victims—Yates eventually struck a deal that spared him the death penalty. In exchange for pleading guilty to thirteen counts of first-degree murder—and leading investigators to the corpse of one of his victims—he was sentenced to 408 years behind bars.

The methods by which a serial killer snares his victims vary according to his particular pathological needs. Some prefer the simplest, most direct approach. Often referred to as a “blitz” attack, this may involve ambushing an unwary pedestrian, for example, as she hurries home at night down a darkened street. Or striding up to a parked car in a lovers’ lane and blasting away at the embracing couple through the windshield. Or following an old lady to her apartment and shattering her skull with a clawhammer as she fiddles with her door keys. Or slashing a prostitute’s throat from behind.

Another sort of “blitz” attack is the kind committed by household invaders like Richard the “Night Stalker” Ramirez or the still-unknown “Ax man of New Orleans”: blood-crazed prowlers who break into unguarded homes and savage the sleeping inhabitants in their beds.

Some killers “troll” for victims, cruising hunting grounds where they can be sure of finding an abundant supply of game. To snag a prostitute, a psychopathic “harlot-killer” has to do nothing more than drive to a red-light area, conduct a brief transaction from behind the wheel, open the passenger door, and speed away.

Children, of course, can be enticed with the simplest of promises—candy or coins or ice cream—or easily coerced with violent threats to themselves or their families.

Other serial killers rely on more elaborate ruses. Indeed, for some of these psychos, the cunning they exert to snare their victims is half the fun. Ted Bundy prided himself on having lured several young women to horrible deaths by wearing one arm in a sling and pretending that he needed help with a task.