The Serial Killer Files (53 page)

Another problem is that it’s not always easy to distinguish between a killer’s MO and his signature.

Supposedly, a signature act is something the killer needs to do to satisfy his sickest urges—“whatever he gets his rocks off on,” as Ted Bundy so bluntly put it—whereas the MO relates to the purely practical aspects of pulling off and getting away with the crime. But it’s often hard to make such hard-and-fast distinctions.

Again, Brown provides a useful example, citing the case of a serial rapist who breaks into the bedroom of a sleeping couple, subdues the husband, then makes him lie in the next room with a cup and saucer on his back. “If I hear that cup move or hit the floor,” he tells the husband, “your wife dies.” Supposedly, this cup-and-saucer gambit is part of the killer’s MO, since it is designed for purely pragmatic reasons—to keep the husband under control while the rapist assaults the wife.

But as Brown observes, it could also be a “signature” element. After all, “who’s to say [the rapist] didn’t get a sick kick out of thinking of the husband lying helpless and looking like an idiot with a cup and saucer on his back listening to his wife’s screaming in the next room?”

Recommended Reading

Pat Brown, Killing for Sport (2003)

Robert D. Keppel, Signature Killers (1997)

In attempting to get a handle on the complex phenomenon of serial homicide, experts have come up with various ways of classifying these killers. Crime historian Philip Jenkins, for example, proposes two major categories: the predictable type (criminals with a long history of brutal fantasy and behavior whose progression to serial murder seems unsurprising) versus the respectable type (petty felons with no prior history of violent crime whose sudden turn to serial murder is unexpected). Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz identifies three major kinds of serial murderers: psychopaths who kill for sadistic sexual pleasure, psychotics who act under the influence of hallucinations, and custodial killers like doctors, nurses, and other caretakers who usually poison or smother their victims. R. M. Holmes and J. DeBurger divide serial killers into four varieties, based on their underlying motivations: visionary types (psychotics who hear voices or see visions commanding them to kill); mission-oriented types (generally prostitute killers who believe they are on a crusade to rid the world of scum); hedonistic types (lust-killers who murder for perverted pleasure); and control-oriented types (who derive their sick gratification less from sex than from the assertion of power and dominance over the victim).

There is, however, another, and in certain respects more useful, way of categorizing serial killers—namely, according to their preferred methods of murder, their favorite ways of dispensing death. How a homicidal maniac kills— the weapons he uses, the kinds of injuries he enjoys inflicting—reveals as much about his underlying psychology, his twisted needs and fantasies, as any other feature of his behavior.

To be sure, there are some psychos who don’t limit themselves to any one specific type of weapon or killing method. According to the FBI’s classification system, “disorganized” killers—whose crimes are often committed in a frenzied, spontaneous outburst—will dispatch their victims with whatever weapons are at hand. Other serial murderers have been known to enjoy some variety in the way they kill. Profiler Pat Brown, for example, discusses the case of Gary Taylor, who shot some victims with a rifle, strangled others, and hacked up a few with a machete.

For the most part, however, serial killers display definite homicidal preferences, so much so that their characteristic techniques often become part of their tabloid monikers: the “Boston Strangler,” the

“Yorkshire Ripper,” the “Ax Man of New Orleans,” the “Sunday Morning Slasher,” the “Poison Fiend,”

etc.

If Hollywood movies and literary thrillers are to be believed, serial killers spend much of their time contriving ingenious and colorful ways to commit their atrocities—binding a victim to a kitchen table and forcing him to gorge himself to death, surgically removing the top of someone’s skull and feeding him parts of his own brain before putting him out of his misery. And it is true that the occasional psychopath may resort to elaborate means of dispatching his prey. H. H. Holmes, for example, constructed specially rigged chambers in his Gothic “Horror Castle,” evidently for the express purpose of asphyxiating unwanted girlfriends and unwary lodgers.

For the most part, real-life psychos are more conventional in their homicidal approaches. What distinguishes them from run-of-the-mill murderers is their distinct preference for manual means of killing. Most homicides in the United States—68%, according to the FBI—are committed with firearms, and only 26% by “hands-on” methods like strangulation, bludgeoning, and stabbing. For serial killers, the percentages are almost the exact reverse: 55% rely exclusively on manual means, 22% on guns, and 14% alternate between the two.

The reason for this disparity is frighteningly simple. Driven by depraved sadistic needs, most serial killers derive their deepest pleasure from getting up close and personal with their victims—from feeling their flesh tear, their blood spurt, their bodies convulse, from looking deep into their eyes as the life drains out of them.

Rippers

The most spectacularly gruesome of all homicides are the ones perpetrated by this type of maniac. As Richard von Krafft-Ebing writes in his classic text, Psychopathia Sexualis, police are always justified in classifying a murder as the work of a ripper when the victim’s corpse has been subjected to horrific mutilation, particularly “when the body has been opened and parts (intestines, genitals) torn out.” So savage are these crimes that, in earlier times, they were attributed to the actions of lycanthropes—men

who literally transformed into wolves. The modern designation for such lust-killers—“rippers”—derives, obviously, from the legendary monster of Whitechapel. The unspeakable butcheries that Saucy Jack perpetrated on a twenty-five-year-old prostitute named Mary Kelly typify the kinds of mutilations these madmen are driven to inflict on the bodies of their victims. As an 1888 newspaper reported: Sex Murder on Acker Street by George Grosz (1916)

The throat had been cut right across with a knife, nearly severing the head from the body. The abdomen had been partially ripped open, and both of the breasts had been cut from the body… . The nose had been cut off, the forehead skinned, and the thighs, down to the feet, stripped of the flesh… . The entrails and other portions of the frame were missing, but the liver, etc., were found placed between the feet of this poor victim. The flesh from the thighs and legs, together with the breasts and nose, had been placed by the murderer on the table, and one of the hands of the dead woman had been pushed into her stomach.

Krafft-Ebing’s book includes case histories of other such monsters, among them the “French Ripper,”

Joseph Vacher, who roamed the countryside in the 1890s armed with scissors, cleaver, and knife, strangling, stabbing, disemboweling, and sexually mutilating victims of both sexes; a German psycho-killer named Leger, who “caught a girl twelve years old, violated her, mutilated her genitals, tore out her heart, ate it, drank the blood, and buried the remains”; and “a certain Gruyo” who strangled six women, then “tore out their intestines and kidneys through their vaginas.” Krafft-Ebing also discusses the Boston

“Boy Fiend,” Jesse Pomeroy, a juvenile ripper who—after luring a four-year-old boy to a remote stretch of beach—gashed his throat with a pocketknife, stabbed him a dozen times in the chest and abdomen, punctured one of his eyeballs, and ripped open his scrotum, leaving his testicles hanging out.

I opened her breast and with a knife cut through the fleshy part of the body. Then I arranged the body as a butcher does beef and hacked it with an axe into pieces of a size to fit the hole which I had dug in the mountain for burying it. I may say that while opening the body I was so greedy that I trembled, and could have cut out a piece and eaten it.

—Andreas Bichel

More recent examples include the “Yorkshire Ripper,” Peter Sutcliffe, who preferred to bludgeon his victims to death with a hammer before savaging their bodies, and the Russian “Mad Beast” Andrei Chikatilo, who performed such hideous atrocities on his victims—slicing off their faces, gouging out their eyes, ripping out their tongues, tearing out their entrails, devouring their genitals—that investigating officers who worked on the case had to be treated for psychological trauma.

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper

Three-quarters of a century after Jack the Ripper stalked the shadowed streets of London, a new killer appeared who seemed to be a reincarnation of the infamous Victorian harlot-killer. Preying largely on streetwalkers, he murdered with a ferocity that equaled that of his notorious namesake. Indeed, he outdid the original Ripper in terms of sheer deadliness, claiming more than twice as many victims during his reign of terror.

His name was Peter Sutcliffe, though it would take five years and the largest manhunt in British history before police discovered his identity. He appeared to be a perfectly ordinary man, a hardworking truck driver and devoted husband. Behind his unremarkable mask, however, he harbored a monstrous pathology: a sexual hatred so extreme that he felt utterly justified in committing the most fearful barbarities on women. When asked to account for the motives behind his atrocities, he calmly replied: “I were just cleaning the streets.”

The sources of his sickness are hard to trace, though he appears to have been raised in a household charged with psychosexual tension. A classic “momma’s boy,” he grew up worshiping his mother, even while his overbearing father constantly accused her of sexual infidelity. This situation was bound to exacerbate the normal Oedipal conflicts of adolescence and produce a being who (even more so than is common) divided all womankind into virgins and whores—one deserving of slavish devotion, the other of nothing but death.

A misfit and loner throughout his boyhood, Sutcliffe developed into a young man with morbid preoccupations. After dropping out of school at fifteen, he found employment in a mortuary, where he enjoyed toying with the corpses—arranging them in grotesque poses and using them as ventriloquist dummies. When he wasn’t engaged in these quasi-necrophiliac activities, he liked to visit a local wax museum and ogle the displays that showed the devastating symptoms of advanced venereal disease.

Married at twenty-eight to the first woman he ever dated, he eventually became a truck driver and seemed to settle into the comforting routines of a solid working-class life. If there was any outward indication that all was not right with Sutcliffe, it was the bizarre handwritten sign he kept in his vehicle:

“In this truck is a man whose latent genius, if unleashed, would rock the nation, whose dynamic energy would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep?” Though no one recognized it as such, the message reflected the extreme narcissism of the typical psychopath, whose underlying feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness are often offset by delusions of grandeur.

Sutcliffe’s first assault occurred in July 1975 when he sneaked up on a woman from behind, bludgeoned her with a hammer, then lifted up her skirt and went to work on her with a knife. This victim survived, as did seven more of the twenty-one women he would attack over the next five years. His MO was always the same: he would beat them unconscious with a ball peen hammer, then savage their torsos and genitalia with a knife or sharpened screwdriver. In all, thirteen people died at his hands. Though most were streetwalkers, others were housewives or students or civil servants. All, however, had one thing in common: they were women and, therefore, targets of Sutcliffe’s virulently misogynistic rage.

During their search for the “Yorkshire Ripper,” detectives interviewed more than two hundred thousand people. Sutcliffe himself was questioned on no fewer than nine separate occasions. Each time, however, police accepted his alibi and let him go. The very size of the manhunt hampered the investigation. The police were overwhelmed with thousands of useless leads and thrown off track by tape-recorded messages ostensibly from the Ripper that turned out to be hoaxes perpetrated by a very sick mind.

In the end, routine police work led to Sutcliffe’s capture. In January 1981, Sergeant Robert Ring, an officer on a stakeout, spotted the killer in a car with a prostitute. Before being hauled into the station for questioning, Sutcliffe asked for permission to go behind some shrubbery to urinate. As soon as he was out of sight of the officer, he emptied his pockets of their incriminating contents: his ball peen hammer and knife.

The next morning, while Sutcliffe was still being interrogated, Ring had a realization. Recalling Sutcliffe’s request to relieve himself, the policeman hurried back to the spot, where he discovered the discarded implements. Confronted with the evidence, Sutcliffe broke down. His full confession extended over sixteen hours.

At his trial, he pleaded insanity, claiming that he had committed his murders in obedience to a divine commandment. The jury was unconvinced, and he was sentenced to life. Shortly thereafter, however, he was found insane by prison psychiatrists and transferred to Broadmoor Hospital, where—in March 1997

—he received a taste of his own medicine when a fellow inmate stabbed him in both eyes. Emergency surgery saved the right one. Half-blind, he remains incarcerated as of this writing.

Stranglers

Though a ripper-style killer might choke the life out a victim, his real pleasure comes from the frenzied mutilations he performs afterward— hacking up the body, tearing out the genitals, wallowing in the entrails,
etc.
By contrast, serial killers classified as stranglers do not engage in these postmortem atrocities. Their sadistic satisfaction comes from the act of strangulation itself. Indeed, some of these psychos become so aroused while throttling a victim that they reach a sexual climax during the murder.

(A chilling cinematic portrayal of such a moment appears in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 movie, Frenzy, when the so-called Necktie Killer has an orgasm while garroting a woman.) The first American serial killer of the twentieth century was a strangler—Earle Leonard Nelson, aka the