The Serial Killer Files (55 page)

One of the deadliest American poisoners of recent years was Dr. Michael Swango, suspected of killing as many as sixty victims. Though his usual method was to inject them with fatal medications, Swango—who confessed that he loved nothing better than “the sweet, husky, close smell of indoor homicide”—resorted to other methods during those periods when he was banished from the hospital wards. In 1984, after leaving Ohio State University Medical Center under a cloud of suspicion, he returned to his hometown, Quincy, Illinois, where he joined an ambulance corps. Before long, he was secretly doctoring the donuts and soft drinks of his fellow paramedics with ant poison. After he was arrested and charged, police searched his apartment where they found a minilab, designed for the production of some of the most virulent poisons known, including botulism toxin and supersaturated cyanide.

Graham Young, Poisoner

Though poisoning has long been the preferred murder method for female serial killers, it is not the exclusive domain of women. Particularly in Britain there have been some notorious male serial poisoners, including Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, who dispatched a string of prostitutes with strychnine in the late 1800s. His Victorian compatriot, Dr. William Palmer, used the same substance to murder his motherin-law, his brother, four children, an uncle, various creditors, and a close friend.

The most notorious serial poisoner in recent British history was, in many ways, the most remarkable: a precociously brilliant, remorseless psychopath who began his homicidal career while still in his boyhood.

Just three months after his birth in 1947, Graham Young’s mother died. Initially, the infant was cared for by his aunt. At two, he was sent to live with his father, who had since remarried. Later, psychiatrists would trace Young’s extreme psychopathology—his utter inability to feel human warmth or empathy—to the loss of his mother at such a critical moment in his emotional development.

His lifelong obsession with poison manifested itself from an early age. While his schoolmates idolized athletes and pop stars, Young’s boyhood heroes were notorious English poisoners like Palmer and Dr.

Hawley Crippen (whose case became an international sensation in 1910 after he murdered his wife, buried her in the coal cellar, and ran off with his secretary). Young was especially fascinated with another Victorian poisoner, Dr. Edward Pritchard, who was hanged in Glasgow in 1855 for murdering his wife and motherin-law with antimony. He also developed an intense admiration for Adolf Hitler, whose malignant power he envied.

Obtaining a vial of antimony tartrate from a local pharmacist under the pretense of needing it for a school science project, Young began carrying it around with him. He referred to it as his “little friend.”

Before long, Young began experimenting on his schoolmates, lacing their sandwiches with just enough of the poison to make them sick. He then shifted his attentions to his own family, beginning with his sister. Graham would observe with interest the effects that different doses of the toxin had on his loved ones—the vomiting, the agonizing stomach pains, the violent diarrhea. In 1962, after a prolonged siege of poison-induced suffering, his stepmother died.

After Young’s chemistry teacher discovered alarming evidence in Young’s desk—drawings of people dying in agony with poison bottles at their side, charts detailing the effects and lethal dosages of various toxins—the boy was questioned by police, who found his beloved vial of antimony in his pocket. He quickly confessed to having used it on his own family members. Put in jail to await trial, he tried to commit suicide—not because he felt shame or remorse but because he couldn’t bear the thought of living without his poisons. At his 1962 trial, he was found guilty but insane, and committed to Broadmoor mental institution.

After nine years in the asylum, Young was released, presumably having made a “full recovery,”

according to a psychiatrist’s report. He moved to the village of Bovingdon and found work in the storeroom of a company that manufactured optical equipment, telling his employers that he had spent time in an institution after suffering a nervous breakdown brought on by the death of his beloved stepmother.

The day after he started his new job, he went out and purchased enough poison to kill several hundred people.

It wasn’t long before his coworkers began to suffer from a serious ailment whose symptoms included diarrhea, cramps, backaches, nausea, and numbness. As many as seventy workers were stricken with the illness, which was nicknamed the “Bovingdon bug.” Several were hospitalized, and two of them—fifty-nine-year-old Bob Egle and sixty-year-old Fred Biggs—died after protracted suffering.

At first, no one seemed to notice that the victims were hit with the sickness after drinking the coffee and tea served to them by the ever-helpful Young. Eventually, however, suspicion grew that someone in the factory was poisoning his coworkers. An investigation was launched. When it was Young’s turn to be questioned, he could not resist flaunting his superior knowledge of chemistry, setting off alarm bells when he remarked that the mysterious illness seemed consistent with the signs of thallium poisoning.

A check of Young’s background revealed the chilling truth about his past. The police quickly arrested him on suspicion of murder. Searching his apartment, they found shelves of bottled poisons—thallium, antimony, aconitine—beneath framed photographs of Hitler and his henchmen. They also found a diary in which he detailed, with a monstrous detachment, the effects of the different toxins on his victims. “I have administered a fatal dose of the special compound to F,” he had written after poisoning Fred Biggs,

“and anticipate a report on his progress on Monday. I gave him three separate doses.”

At first, Young claimed that the diary entries were simply notes for a novel. Later, he confessed. His sole motive was the power he exerted over others’ lives. Human beings were nothing more to him than lab animals. “I could have killed them all if I wished,” he boasted to detectives, “but I let them live.”

His June 1972 trial lasted ten days. The jury needed less than an hour to convict him. He was sentenced to jail for the rest of his life, which turned out to be extremely abbreviated. In August 1990, he was found dead on the floor of his cell—killed by a heart attack at the age of forty-two.

Shooters

When people hear the term “serial killer,” they tend to picture a creature like Jack the Ripper or Ted Bundy or Richard Ramirez: a blood-crazed madman, butchering or bludgeoning his victims with his favorite implement—hunting knife, hammer, meat cleaver, machete—or possibly dispatching them with his bare hands. And statistics confirm that most serial killers do, in fact, enjoy the sensations that come from direct physical contact with their victims.

Still, there have been a number of notorious serial murderers who preferred to do their killing with firearms. Shooting, after all—even at a long distance—can supply the kinds of sick thrills that psychopaths crave, including sexual gratification. As we know from Freud, guns can feel like erotic objects in the hands of their users. There is direct testimony to this effect from one of the most notorious serial shooters of modern times, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz. As John Douglas reports in his book The Anatomy of Motive, Berkowitz admitted during an interview that “on nights when he could not find the appropriate victims of opportunity, he would return to the locations of his previous crimes and masturbate, recalling the sexual charge and feeling of supreme power he’d had as he pulled the trigger of his large Charter Arms Bulldog.” Berkowitz’s choice of victims—attractive young women, some of them parked in cars with their boyfriends—also reflects the sexual dimension of his crimes.

Even for those serial shooters who do not derive a specifically sexual kick from their crimes, guns can satisfy their psychopathic urges by giving them (as Berkowitz’s statement also indicates) a godlike sense of power. Surely, this was true of the original San Francisco Zodiac, whose twisted megalomania was evident in the written taunts he sent to the press, as well as in his apparent belief that his victims would become his slaves in the afterlife.

Sheer viciousness seemed to underlie the crimes of Gary and Thaddeus Lewingdon, a pair of sociopathic siblings who randomly murdered ten residents of Columbus, Ohio, in the late 1970s. The “.22-Caliber Killings,” as the newspapers dubbed them, began in December 1977 when two women were gunned down as they left a cafe late at night. Two months later, fifty-two-year-old Robert McCann, along with his mother and live-in girlfriend were savagely murdered at home, each shot multiple times in the face and head. The same savage “overkill” characterized the murder of the next victim, a seventy-seven-year-old named Jenkin Jones, whose four dogs were also shot dead. Three more victims followed in the next few months—a reverend named Gerald Fields and a middle-aged couple named Martin. After a six-month hiatus, the phantom shooter killed his tenth and final victim, fifty-six-year-old Joseph Annick, shot five times while working in his garage. The case finally broke when one of the brothers, Gary, tried to use Annick’s stolen credit card at a local department store. Arrested on the spot, Lewingdon was placed in an interrogation room, where he immediately confessed to all ten murders and implicated his brother, Thaddeus, who proved equally forthcoming. Both brothers were convicted and received multiple terms of life imprisonment. Following the trial, however, Gary had a psychotic breakdown and was committed to a state hospital for the criminally insane. After an unsuccessful breakout attempt, he petitioned the court for permission to commit suicide, a request that was denied. Eventually, he was transferred back to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, where he remains incarcerated. In April 1989, his fifty-two-year-old brother, Thaddeus, died of lung cancer.

Ohio was the home of another serial shooter, Thomas Dillon. Though less well known than “Son of Sam” or Zodiac, Dillon was in many ways an equally chilling figure: a classic psychopath who killed for pure sadistic pleasure.

Born in 1950 and raised by a widowed mother who, according to reliable accounts, never displayed the slightest warmth or affection for her child, Dillon loved to shoot animals from an early age, keeping a running record of his kills on a wall calendar in his bedroom. Besides deer and other small game, he enjoyed shooting dogs, cats, and cows—generally with his large collection of firearms, though occasionally with a crossbow. He was also, like so many budding psycho-killers, an inveterate pyromaniac.

Dillon progressed to murder in April 1989, when he shot a thirty-five-year-old jogger through the heart from a distance of about ten feet on a remote stretch of highway in rural Ohio. In November 1990, he committed two cold-blooded murders within the space of a few weeks. First to die was a twenty-one-year-old bow hunter named Jamie Paxton, shot to death on a hillside. Eighteen days later, thirty-year-old Kevin Loring was killed with a bullet to the face, also while out hunting deer.

When police made no headway in the Paxton investigation, the young man’s mother, Jean, took matters into her own hands, publishing a direct plea to her son’s killer in a local newspaper, the Ferry Times Leader:

To the murderer(s) of my son, Jamie,

Would it be easier for you if I wrote words of hate? I can’t because I don’t feel hate. I feel deep sorrow at losing my son. You took a light from my life November 10 and left me with many days of darkness.

Have you thought of your own death? Unless you confess your sin and ask for God’s forgiveness, you will face the fire and fury of hell. When you are caught, I will be sorry for your family. They will have the burden of your guilt all their lives.

Though this letter produced no results, a second plea, published eleven months later, brought a remarkable reply—an anonymous typewritten note that revealed the utterly callous, sadistic sensibility of a classic psychopathic killer:

I am the murderer of Jamie Paxton. Jamie Paxton was a complete stranger to me. I never saw him before in my life, and he never said a word to me that Saturday.

Paxton was killed because of an irresistible compulsion that has taken over my life. I knew when I left my house that day that someone would die by my hand. I just didn’t know who or where. Technically, I meet the definition of a serial killer, but I’m an average-looking person with a family, job, and home just like yourself.

Something in my head causes me to turn into a merciless killer with no conscience. To the Paxtons, you deserve to know the details.

I was very drunk and a voice inside my head said “do it.” I stopped my car behind Jamie’s and got out.

Jamie started walking very slowly down the hill toward the road. He appeared to be looking past me at something in the distance.

I raised my rifle to my shoulder and lined him up in the sights. It took at least five seconds to take careful aim. My first shot was off a little bit and hit him in the right chest. He groaned and went down. I wanted to make sure he was finished so I fired a second shot aimed half way between his hip and shoulder. He was crawling around on the ground. I jerked the shot and hit him in the knee. He raised his head and groaned again. My third shot also missed and hit him in the butt. He never moved again.

Five minutes after I shot Paxton, I was drinking a beer and had blocked out all thoughts of what I had just done out of my mind. I thought no more of shooting Paxton than I thought of shooting a bottle at the dump.

I know you hate my guts, and rightfully so. I think about Jamie every hour of the day, as I am sure you do.

Don’t feel bad about not solving this case. You could interview till doomsday everyone that Jamie Paxton ever met in his life and you wouldn’t have a clue to my identity. With no motive, no weapon, and no witnesses, you could not possibly solve this crime.

When a forty-nine-year-old fisherman was shot in March 1992 on federal land, the FBI got involved.

Less than a month later, another man was shot in the back while fishing. At that point, investigators issued a press release, revealing that a serial sniper was stalking outdoorsmen in rural eastern Ohio.