The Serial Killer Files (54 page)

“Gorilla Murderer,” a Bible-quoting psycho who traveled from coast to coast, choking women to death before raping their corpses (Alfred Hitchcock also made a movie loosely inspired by this notorious case: his 1943 masterpiece, Shadow of a Doubt ).

Whereas Nelson (who was also known as the “Dark Strangler”) enjoyed throttling his victims with his bare hands, Harvey Murray Glatman—the nerdy-looking sex maniac who liked to take pictures of his bound and terrorized victims before taking their lives—employed his favorite fetish object: a length of stout rope. The Boston Strangler, by contrast, preferred articles belonging to his victim, garroting them with scarves or bathrobe sashes or nylon stockings. He was also known for his grotesque “signature,”

tying the ligatures into extravagant, gift-wrap bows as a taunt to the police. African-American sex-killer Carlton Gary—aka the “Stocking Strangler”—also used hosiery as a murder weapon, leaving all seven of his elderly victims with their nylons tightly knotted around their necks.

Arguably the most vile of all modern stranglers were the psychopathic cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono. These women-hating sadists took pleasure not only from the murder method that earned them their infamous nickname—the “Hillside Stranglers”—but from subjecting their young victims to various, and often prolonged, forms of torture—injecting them with cleaning solution, attaching live electric wires to their palms, raping them with soda bottles, asphyxiating them with slow, voluptuous cruelty. Then they would add to their unspeakable fun by dumping the young women’s violated corpses out in the open, as a final indignity to the victim and a taunt to the police.

I am fond of women, but it is sport for me to strangle them after having enjoyed them.

—Serial strangler quoted by Krafft-Ebing

Carroll Edward Cole, the Barfly Strangler

Everybody failed Carroll Cole: his mother, teachers, psychiatrists, and police detectives. His entire life was one downward spiral of mental illness, alcoholism, and murder. It was also one of the most blatant examples of how the health-care and legal systems can completely fail to treat and capture an out-of-control serial killer. Near the end of the ordeal that was his existence, someone finally came to his aid.

This person was the Nevada judge who handed down a death sentence. For this help—for this much needed relief—Cole had a laconic reply: “Thanks, Judge.”

Cole’s life, like that of so many criminal psychopaths, began with parental abuse. His sadistic mother forced him to accompany her on her adulterous liaisons and enjoyed dressing him up as a girl to entertain her friends at parties. As with Ed Gein, Edmund Kemper, and Henry Lee Lucas, the hatred he developed for his monstrous mom figured prominently in his crimes. Cole himself made this perfectly clear. “I think I kill her through them,” he would later remark of his victims.

Murderous rage ran through Cole’s head; to drown it out he used copious amounts of alcohol. By late adolescence he could not control himself. In 1960, he attacked a couple in a car with a hammer.

Concerned about the demon inside of him, Cole turned himself in to police. He spent the next three years in several mental institutions where he was deemed “antisocial” but harmless. In 1963 he left treatment and married an alcoholic topless dancer who occasionally worked for Jack Ruby. The marriage was predictably rocky. Cole left her in 1965 after burning down the fleabag hotel where they lived because he was convinced she was sleeping with other tenants.

Cole again surrendered himself to police in 1970, but this time with a specific fear: he was having uncontrollable fantasies about raping and strangling women. This happened in Nevada. Taken in for a psychiatric evaluation, the report on his mental condition typified the quality of treatment he received throughout his life: “Prognosis: Poor. Condition on Release: Same as on admittance. Treatment: Express Bus ticket to San Diego.”

With a human time bomb on their hands, the authorities just shipped him out of town.

Over the next decade Cole went on a rampage of drinking and murder across the states of Nevada, Texas, California, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. His victims were classic “targets of opportunity”—female barflies easily lured to their deaths by the good-looking, charismatic psychopath. As crime writer Cliff Linedecker puts it, “Cole didn’t prey on healthy, sober women who could wage a fair fight. He was a scavenger who looked for lonely alcoholics who were so weakened as a result of their dissolute living that they had no chance to defend themselves … They were broken, bruised, and defeated. And most had either lost contact with their families or had no close friends who would create a fuss over their deaths.”

Once Cole had a woman alone, he strangled her and often raped the corpse. Alcohol clouded his mind, and he later had trouble recounting all the details of his atrocities. One of his most horrific crimes occurred in Oklahoma City, where Cole emerged from a stupor to find a mutilated body in a bathtub, slices of the woman’s buttocks in a pan on the stove and the sweet taste of blood in his mouth.

As in the case of so many serial killers, Cole’s murders escalated in frequency as his homicidal mania spun out of control. In November 1980, he strangled two women to death within twenty-four hours. Less than three weeks later, he picked up a forty-three-year-old woman at a Dallas honky-tonk, accompanied her back to her apartment, and killed her with his bare hands during a violent struggle. When neighbors showed up to investigate the ruckus, they discovered the victim’s corpse stretched out on the floor.

Under questioning by police, Cole claimed that the woman had simply dropped dead—a story that did not seem entirely implausible given the exceptionally high concentration of alcohol discovered in her blood by the medical examiner. Cole was allowed to go free.

By that point, he had tired of his life. When the cops returned to question him again several days later, he greeted them with a startling admission. “I need some help,” he declared. “I see a woman with a drink in her hand and I have to kill her. I am tired of killing.”

Cole then proceeded to pour out a confession to all the murders he could remember. He was eventually convicted of thirteen homicides, though he maintained that the body count might have reached as high as thirty-five. He was executed in the early-morning hours of December 6, 1985,—the first person put to death in Nevada by lethal injection.

Ax Murderers

Back in the nineteenth century—when many Americans still lived on farms, butchered their own chickens, and relied on cordwood to heat their homes—hatchets and axes were standard equipment in most households, as common as corkscrews and can openers are today. It’s not surprising, therefore, that

—when someone flew into a homicidal rage—he or she often grabbed one of these readily available chopping implements to do the job. Search through the archives of any small-town newspaper from the 1800s and you’re likely to come across a case of gruesome ax murder, like the slaughter of two sisters, Maren and Anethe Hontvet, in a remote New Hampshire fishing village in 1873 (“Terrible Tragedy on the Isle of Shoals! Two Women Killed with an Axe!”). Or the massacre of the Vacelet family of Knox County, Indiana, in 1878 (“Brutal Butchery! A Whole Family Brained in Bed with a Blunt-Edged Axe!”). Or the 1894 murder of Missouri farmer Gus Meeks and his family, memorialized in a ballad supposedly sung by a surviving daughter (“They murdered my mamma and pappa, too/And knocked baby in the head/They murdered my brothers and sisters four/And left me there for dead”).

While these and most other nineteenth-century ax murders stirred up intense local interest in the places they occurred, they quickly faded from the news. A few, however, became bona fide national sensations.

In 1836, a young man named Richard Robinson—the spoiled scion of a wealthy Connecticut family—murdered a beautiful New York City prostitute named Helen Jewett by smashing in her skull with a hatchet. Thanks to its irresistibly juicy combination of sex, violence, and scandal, the Jewett ax murder case became one of the most highly publicized crimes of its era. Even more notorious, of course, was the 1892 case of Lizzie Borden who, as the famous nursery rhyme put it, “gave her mother forty whacks/

And when she saw what she had done/She gave her father forty-one.”

Even assuming she committed this double murder (which, despite her acquittal, seems probable), Lizzie Borden was not a serial killer but rather an emotionally unstable Victorian spinster who went berserk one sweltering summer day and committed a singular act of parricide. Likewise, the ax slayings of the Hontvet sisters, the Meeks family, and the Vacelets were cases of multiple murder, not serial homicide.

Indeed—contrary to countless slasher movies which routinely portray psycho-killers as ax-wielding maniacs (such as the 2001 thriller, Frailty )—axes are rarely the weapon of choice for serial killers, being hard to conceal and awkward to wield, especially indoors.

There have been notable exceptions. Though a good deal of uncertainty surrounds the 1901 case of Belle Gunness—whose farmstead outside La Porte, Indiana, became a mass grave for more than a dozen victims—it is generally believed that she dispatched most of them with a hatchet. (A pop ballad written about the case describes the notorious Lady Bluebeard as a “Hatchet-hackin’ Mama”). During the World War I era, New Orleans was haunted by a night-prowling intruder known as the Ax Man who attacked a dozen people in their homes. In the late 1940s, African-American serial killer Jake Bird was captured after breaking into the Tacoma, Washington, home of fifty-three-year-old Bertha Kludt and butchering Mrs. Kludt and her teenage daughter with an ax he had found in their backyard. Under arrest, the hard-bitten drifter confessed to numerous slayings in at least eight different states, all involving white women bludgeoned with axes or hatchets.

There have also been some international cases, such as that of the South African ax-murderer Elifasi Msomi, a self-styled witch doctor who, in the mid-1950s hacked to death fifteen people (most of them young children), then tried to pin the blame on demonic possession.

Poisoners

Partly, no doubt, because it was the favorite murder method of Victorian women, most people tend to think of poisoning as a comparatively genteel way to commit serial homicide, not nearly as savage as, say, slitting a victim’s throat and tearing out his entrails. And it is certainly true that mutilation-murder is far more sensationally grisly. Whether it is also crueler than poisoning is an open question. Though a significant number of male serial killers engage in hideous torture, many others—including some of the most notorious ones—have dispatched their victims in a fairly quick manner. This is true, for example, of most rippers. The atrocities perpetrated by Jack the Ripper seem nearly inhuman in their ferocity. But at least they were inflicted on his victims after death, which came with merciful swiftness.

By contrast, poisoners often subject the people closest to them—friends, family members, and coworkers

—to excruciatingly slow and painful deaths, and derive considerable pleasure from observing the torments of their victims.

During the Victorian era, for example, arsenic was a popular, over-the-counter item, sold in various forms and used as everything from a pesticide to a cosmetic. Generously mixed into someone’s food, however, it had devastating results.

In most cases of arsenic ingestion, the commencement of symptoms occurs within the hour. The first sign is an acrid sensation in the throat. Nausea sets in, growing more unbearable by the moment. Then the vomiting begins. It continues long after the stomach is empty, until the victim is heaving up a foul whitish fluid streaked with blood. The mouth is parched, the tongue thickly coated, the throat constricted. The victim is seized with a terrible thirst. Anything he drinks, however—even a few sips of icy water—only makes the vomiting worse.

Uncontrollable diarrhea—often bloody, and invariably accompanied by racking abdominal pain—follows the vomiting. Some victims experience a violent burning from mouth to anus. Urine is scanty and red in color. As the hours pass, the victim’s face—deathly pale to begin with—takes on a bluish tint.

The eyes grow hollow. The skin is slick with perspiration that gives off an unusually thick, fetid odor.

The victim’s breathing becomes harsh and irregular, his extremities cold, his heartbeat feeble. There may be convulsions of the limbs and excruciating cramps in the muscles of the legs. Depending on the amount of poison consumed, this torment may last anywhere from five or six hours to several days.

Death, when it finally comes, is a mercy.

Female poisoners, in short, are capable of being every bit as sadistic as the sickest male torture-killer.

They have also been among the most prolific serial killers in history. Mary Ann Cotton—a British serial murderer so infamous that she was immortalized in a popular nursery rhyme—killed an estimated twenty-three people, including three husbands, ten children, five stepchildren, a sister-in-law, and an unwanted suitor. Her American counterpart, the Massachusetts “Borgia” Jane Toppan—who liked to crawl into bed with her victims and feel their dying convulsions—admitted to thirty-one homicides after her trial in 1902. Another lethal New England caretaker, Amy Archer-Gilligan—proprietor of the Archer Home for Elderly and Indigent Patients in Windsor, Connecticut—dispatched as many as forty of her clients between 1911 and 1916. However impressive, these tallies were surpassed by the collective killings of the so-called Angel-makers of Nagyrev,” a group of peasant women from a remote Hungarian village who—supplied with arsenic by their leader, a midwife named Julia Fazekas—murdered as many as one hundred victims in the decades after World War I.

This is not to say that only female psychopaths have resorted to poison. Victorian England was home to a trio of notorious male poisoners: Dr. William Palmer (who favored strychnine as a way of eliminating persistent creditors, professional rivals, and burdensome children); George Chapman (who poisoned a series of lovers with antimony tartrate); and Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (who slipped strychnine pills to several London prostitutes and went to his death claiming to be Jack the Ripper). And at the same time that Jane Toppan was committing her ghastly crimes, America was riveted by another sensational poisoning case, that of a dashing New York City playboy named Roland Molineux, accused of murdering several acquaintances with cyanide-spiked Bromo-Seltzer.