The Serial Killer Files (52 page)
To Dr. Marcel Petiot, the intricate scheme he devised to murder dozens of desperate Jews seeking to flee France during the Nazi occupation was proof of his superior intelligence.
Others, like the Boston Strangler, have gained access to their unwary victims by posing as repairmen. Or pretending to be police officers, like the Hillside Stranglers. Or presenting themselves as professional photographers, like Harvey Murray Glatman. Or passing themselves off as hospital workers, like Australian “Granny Killer” John Wayne Glover.
In several notorious cases, sadistic killers have employed willing accomplices to supply them with victims. The homosexual sadist Dean Corll, for example, relied on Elmer Wayne Henley, who lured his own teenage acquaintances into Corll’s clutches with promises of liquor and drugs. Similarly, Charlene Gallego—the distaff half of one of the most notorious killer couples of the twentieth century—used the bait of free marijuana to snag nubile victims for her depraved husband, Gerald.
Arguably the most complex—and certainly grandiose—approach to acquiring victims was the one devised by the infamous Gilded Age “Torture Doctor,” H. H. Holmes, who constructed a sprawling building in the Englewood suburb of Chicago during the time of the Chicago World’s Fair—a structure erected, among other reasons, to keep himself supplied with corpses.
Given the growing pervasiveness of computers in our lives, it’s no surprise that some serial killers have recently turned to the Internet to locate victims.
John E. Robinson already had a long criminal record before his story burst into the headlines in the summer of 2000. A con artist since his twenties, he had committed a variety of white-collar crimes—from embezzlement to securities fraud—and spent seven years behind bars both in Kansas and Missouri.
Paroled in 1993 at the age of forty-nine, he seemed to put his checkered past behind him, marrying a woman who managed a mobile home park, fathering four children who regarded him as a loving dad, getting named Man of the Year for his charitable work on behalf of the homeless, and hosting neighborhood cookouts at his home in Olathe, Kansas.
Like others of his ilk, however, Robinson led a frighteningly dual, Jekyll-Hyde existence. Posing as a philanthropist interested in helping unwed mothers, he befriended several young women who disappeared soon after making his acquaintance. He was also a frequent visitor to Internet S&M chat rooms, where—using the Web name “Slavemaster”—he arranged to meet willing partners for bouts of kinky sex.
In early June 2000, two of these women complained to police that, after hooking up with Robinson at a Kansas City hotel, he had assaulted and robbed them. By then, Robinson was already under suspicion by the Kansas City police. They had become aware of his connection to the missing unwed mothers.
During the first weekend of June 2000, police searched a farm Robinson owned in La Cygne, Kansas, fifty-seven miles south of Kansas City. There, at the edge of the woods, they discovered two eighty-five-gallon drums, each containing the corpse of a woman. Three more bodies were found in identical drums in three separate storage units Robinson rented at a facility in Raymore, Missouri, fifty-four miles northeast. All the victims had gaping wounds in their skulls.
In the fall of 2002, the fifty-eight-year-old Robinson—by then dubbed the “Cyber Sex Slayer”—was tried in Kansas, convicted of three counts of capital murder, and sentenced to death by lethal injection.
“WANTED: WELL-BUILT MAN FOR SLAUGHTER”
As anyone knows who has ever answered an ad in the Personals (only to discover that the Ruggedly Handsome DWM is thirty pounds overweight and sports a really bad toupee) people who place these notices don’t always tell the truth about themselves. Normally, this situation results in nothing worse than a disappointing date. But some unwary people who have responded to such come-ons have met with far worse fates.
Luring victims through the classifieds has been the favored technique of certain psycho-killers since the dawn of the twentieth century—especially the types known as Bluebeards and Black Widows, who combine the sadistic lust of the serial predator with the ravenous greed of the con artist.
Beginning in 1902, for example, a middle-aged Norwegian widow named Belle Gunness lured a succession of men to her Indiana “murder farm” with a matrimonial ad placed in the Midwestern newspaper Skandinaven:
WANTED—A WOMAN WHO owns a beautifully located and valuable farm in first class condition, wants a good and reliable man as partner in same. Some little cash is required for which will be furnished first class security.
The eager bachelors who responded to this ad vanished without a trace. Their fate remained a mystery until April 1908, when a fire razed the Gunness farmhouse, and more than a dozen dismembered corpses were uncovered on the property.
Around the time of the Great War, Europe produced a pair of notorious Bluebeard killers who relied on lonely hearts ads to supply themselves with victims. Seven women ended up strangled and stuffed into alcohol-filled oil drums after answering the matrimonial advertisements placed in a Budapest newspaper by a young tinsmith named Bela Kiss. A typical ad, which Kiss ran at least ten times, read as follows: Bachelor: aged 40: lonely; good income from commercial enterprises averaging £3000 per annum, is desirous of corresponding with educated lady with a view to matrimony. Address: De Koller, Post Restante, Granatos, Budapest.
Kiss’s contemporary, Henri Landru—the so-called Bluebeard of Paris—resorted to the same ploy to lure ten lonely women to their destruction. Exactly how he killed them is unknown, though the charred human bones discovered in his oversized stove left no doubt as to their ultimate fate.
Widower with two children, aged forty-three, with comfortable income, affectionate, serious and moving in good society, desires to meet widow with a view to matrimony.
—ad placed by Henri Landru
Some serial killers have found their victims, not by placing classified ads but by answering them. In May 1928, for example, the hideously deranged Albert Fish came upon a “Situation Wanted” ad placed in the classified section of the New York World by eighteen-year-old Edward Budd, who was looking for a summer job away from the sweltering heat of the city: “Young man, 18, wishes position in the country.”
Assuming the identity of a Long Island farmer named “Frank Howard,” the monstrous Fish—who had been dreaming about castrating a young man, then letting him to bleed to death—soon showed up at the Budd home in Manhattan, shifting his sights to Edward’s twelve-year-old sister Grace the moment his eyes fell on the lovely little girl.
A more recent example was Bobby Joe Long. Before turning to serial murder, Long became known as the “Classified Rapist” for his signature MO. Scanning newspapers in the Miami area for classifieds offering furniture and other household items, he would call the numbers and—if a woman answered—arrange to see the articles during the weekday, when her husband was at work and the kids were in school. Once inside the house, he would pull a knife on the woman, tie her up, and rape her, then make off with whatever loot he could carry. Long committed more than fifty of these crimes, terrorizing the communities around Fort Lauderdale, Ocala, Miami, and Dade County for more than two years.
Perhaps the most bizarre use of advertising in the annals of sexual psychopathology occurred in late 2002, when a forty-one-year-old German software technician identified in newspapers only as “Armin M.” posted an ad on the Internet that read: “Wanted: Well-built man for slaughter.” Remarkably, someone actually found this offer appealing. After selling his car, a forty-three-year-old microchip designer identified as “Bernd Jürgen B.” presented himself at the dilapidated home of Armin M. in the river town of Rotenburg an der Fulda.
What happened next so defies belief that it is best to simply quote from the account that appeared in the December 18, 2002, edition of the New York Times:
M. surgically removed the victim’s genitals, according to a prosecutor’s statement, which said the two men then ate them. Later, M. stabbed B. to death as a video camera recorded the event. He carved up the victim and stored parts of the body in a freezer for occasional consumption, burying other parts in his garden.
Only quick action by the German police—who arrested the cannibal killer after he posted another advertisement seeking more volunteers—prevented Armin M. from committing additional atrocities and becoming a bona fide serial killer.
If there is any mitigating circumstance to Armin M.’s outrage it is that his victim volunteered to be slaughtered and eagerly participated in his own butchery. Compared to other psychos who have lured victims to horrible deaths under false pretenses, the German man-eater at least deserves credit for truth in advertising.
SIGNATURE, RITUAL, MO
At the height of the hysteria provoked by the shooting spree in the Washington, DC area in the fall of 2002, police found a tantalizing item at one crime scene: a tarot card featuring the figure of death on one side and, on the other, an ominous inscription: “Dear Policeman, I am God.” The media jumped all over this discovery, labeling the unknown perpetrator the “Tarot Card Killer.”
Even at the time, there seemed to be something a little pat, even hokey, about this clue—as though the killer had decided that, to fit the role he was playing, he’d better come up with a sinister trademark. And in fact, as it turned out, there really wasn’t any significance to the tarot death card. Evidently, it was just something that the sniper suspects figured would be kind of cool—the sort of thing real serial killers are supposed to leave behind.
It’s easy to understand why the sniper team thought this way. In the popular imagination, serial killers invariably have their own sinister, often highly creative “signatures.” They may leave a symbolic object like a moth cocoon stuffed down a corpse’s throat. Or carve bizarre messages into the flesh of their victims. Or scrawl bloodlettered biblical passages on the bedroom walls.
In truth, however, this sort of behavior is more likely to be found in a Hollywood thriller than in real life.
To be sure, there have been some notorious serial killers who were closely associated with particular symbols. The original Zodiac, for example, signed his letters with a distinctive crossed-circle mark. The Boston Strangler identified his grisly handiwork by tying his lethal ligatures into grotesquely cheerful, birthday-ribbon bows. Richard the “Night Stalker” Ramirez used lipstick to draw Satanic pentagrams in the homes—and occasionally on the bodies—of his victims. And several of the victims of the “Green River Killer” were found with weird, pyramid-shaped stones inserted in their vaginas.
Generally speaking, however, this type of ostentatious “signature” is used only by those psycho-killers who derive particularly intense gratification from taunting the police and generating as much media publicity as possible (both of these motives figured prominently in the case of the Beltway Snipers). But not every serial killer fits this pattern; indeed, most of the really notorious lust-murderers of the latter part of the twentieth century don’t conform to it—Gacy, Dahmer, Dean Corll, Fred and Rosemary West, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, and many others. These world-class psychos had no interest in drawing attention to their crimes. On the contrary, they wanted to be left alone to pursue their atrocities in secret.
Far from trumpeting their existence to the world by leaving colorful clues like lipstick-inscribed pentagrams or smiley face symbols (the “logo” of the so-called Happy Face Killer, Keith Hunter Jesperson), they did everything possible to keep the world from knowing that horrible crimes were even taking place.
There is, however, another, more subtle and specialized sense in which criminologists use the term
“signature”—and in this case it applies to most serial killers, even those who take great pains to keep a low profile. In this more technical meaning, the term doesn’t refer to a literal message or symbol left behind by the killer—the psychopathic equivalent of the mark of Zorro—but to a feature of the murder that reflects some deep-seated psychological quirk. Driven by his lifelong rope fetish, for example, Harvey Murray Glatman left his victims trussed up like Thanksgiving turkeys. Savage bite marks on his victims’ breasts were the grisly “calling card” of Canadian “Vampire Rapist” Wayne Boden. The corpses of the six London prostitutes killed in 1964 by the still-unidentified lust-murderer dubbed “Jack the Stripper” were all found nude, asphyxiated, and—in four cases—with their front teeth either missing or forced down their throats.
In these and countless other cases, the killer is driven to commit specific acts of violence or desecration on the victim’s body. These distinctive, often highly grotesque, actions—mutilating the corpses in particular ways or arranging them in obscene poses—constitute the serial killer’s unique “signature.”
Because there is a ritualistic quality to such behavior—a compulsion to perform it over and over again in fulfillment of some twisted psychosexual need—criminologists sometimes use the term “signature” and
“ritual” interchangeably.
A good (if fictitious) example of this kind of behavior appears in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, whose main villain—the facially disfigured psycho, Francis Dolarhyde, aka the “Tooth Fairy”—inserts mirror shards into the eyes and orifices of his dead female victims. This outrage—performed out of bizarre unconscious drives related to his own appearance—is what experts mean by a ritualistic “signature.”
In attempting to create a psychological profile of an unknown serial killer, investigators try to distinguish between the perpetrator’s “signature”—the seemingly gratuitous acts of excessive violence or sadistic cruelty he commits for his own depraved pleasure—and his MO or modus operandi.
Technically speaking, the latter term refers to the killer’s preferred method of committing his crimes without getting caught: how he selects, snares, subdues, and dispatches his victims, then makes his getaway.
Several problems, however, often confront investigators. For one thing, a serial killer’s MO often evolves over time as he grows more comfortable with his killings, tries to throw the police off his scent, or just gets bored with one kind of homicide and looks for a little variety. Former criminal profiler Pat Brown talks about one serial killer, Gary Taylor, who “began his career by whacking women over the head at bus stops. Then he started shooting them with a rifle through their bedroom windows. He got caught and put away in a mental institution at this point. But when he was out on pass … he bought some machetes and attacked women on the street.” Later, after his release, he “invited a couple of prostitutes to his house, where they ended up buried in his backyard.” Clearly, it would be hard, if not impossible, to identify a single MO for a psycho as eclectic in his murder methods as Taylor.