The Serial Killer Files (58 page)

When Dahmer was later interviewed by Robert Ressler, the famed FBI profiler asked him why he had begun indulging in such extreme practices. “It was just another step,” said Dahmer. “An escalation.

Trying something new to satisfy.” The answer was revealing. As uniquely depraved as Dahmer was, his crimes were typical in one regard. It is often true of serial murderers that their bloodlust becomes more urgent and irresistible the longer they continue to kill—as if (to quote Hamlet) “increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on.” Each new atrocity only makes them hungrier for more. The intervals between their killings—the so-called cooling-off periods—grow shorter and shorter. Eventually, they may lose control altogether and give way to a frenzy of sadism.

The cross-country serial murder spree of Earle Leonard Nelson, for example—the so-called Gorilla Murderer of the 1920s—began with three stranglings committed over a four-month period. By contrast, his last three homicides were not only perpetrated over a span of just five days but were characterized by exceptional brutality. (The ravaged corpse of one victim, a Winnipeg housewife named Emily Patterson, was left shoved under the bed of her three-year-old son.) Homicidal nurse Jane Toppan was so out of control by the end of her murderous career that she wiped out an entire family of four adults within a few weeks of each other, the last two killings occurring only four days apart. (During the final murder, she also committed an unspeakable perversion, taking her victim’s ten-year-old son to bed with her while the mother lay dying in the next room.) The first two murders committed by Michigan sex-killer John Norman Collins were separated by almost a year; the third and fourth by only three days. When Ted Bundy began his one-man crime wave in 1974, his homicides occurred roughly a month apart. Four years later, in January 1978, he savaged four sorority girls in Tallahassee, Florida, all within the space of an hour.

There are different explanations for this phenomenon. Sometimes this sort of unbridled escalation is a symptom of the killer’s spiraling mental disintegration, the utter breakdown of his impulse control. At other times, it springs from his megalomaniacal belief that he is invulnerable, that he can get away with murder as often as he likes. In rare instances, such growing recklessness may even reflect the killer’s unconscious desire to get caught.

The main reason for this behavior, however, was the one suggested by Dahmer, when he remarked that he began cannibalizing his victims as a way of “trying something new to satisfy.” For homicidal psychopaths, lust-killing often becomes an addiction. Like heroin users, they not only become dependent on the thrilling sensation—the rush— of torture, rape, and murder; they come to require ever greater and more frequent fixes. After a while, merely stabbing a coed to death every few months isn’t enough. They have to kill every few weeks, then every few days. And to achieve the highest pitch of arousal, they have to torture the victim before putting her to death.

This kind of escalation can easily lead to the killer’s own destruction. Like a junkie who ODs in his urgent quest to satisfy his cravings, serial killers are often undone by their increasingly unbridled sadism, which drives them to such reckless extremes that they are finally caught.

Monsters tend to be sadists, deriving sexual gratification from imposing pain on others. Their secret perversions, at first sporadic, often trap them in a pattern as the intervals between indulgences become briefer: it is a pattern whose repetitions develop into an hysterical crescendo, as if from one outrage to another the monster were seeking as a climax his own annihilation.

—John Brophy, The Meaning of Murder

Who was the worst serial killer of all time? That’s a question frequently asked of experts on the subject.

If somebody you know has fallen victim to one of these psychos, the answer is easy: the worst serial killer is the monster who murdered your friend or family member. Otherwise—given the range of atrocities these deviants have committed—it’s impossible to say.

Still—even among a group of criminals as universally vile as psychopathic killers—there are degrees of monstrosity. Though Jeffrey Dahmer would rank high on anyone’s list of the most appalling psycho-killers of modern times, he insisted that he never wanted his victims to suffer. He may have drugged them, drilled holes in their skulls, injected their brains with acid, then strangled, eviscerated, and eaten them. But as he told one interviewer, “I wanted to make it as painless as possible.”

Though Dahmer, like all psychopaths, was incapable of comprehending the full horror of his behavior, his statement reflects a sense that, however dreadful his deeds, at least he wasn’t the kind of killer who subjected his victims to extreme torment. And indeed, it can be argued that, of all psycho-killers, the most unspeakably evil are those who do not merely engage in serial slaughter or even in such postmortem atrocities as necrophiliac rape and cannibalism but who derive sadistic sexual pleasure from inflicting unbearable agony on their helpless victims—who indulge in deliberate, protracted torture.

In the long, gruesome history of sadistic lust-murder, there have been a number of infamous torture-killers, such as Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century French aristocrat who luxuriated in the hideous cruelties he perpetrated on countless children. Another, more recent—though no less monstrous—child-torturer was Albert Fish, who spent a lifetime committing the most hideous atrocities imaginable. On more than one occasion, he abducted little boys, took them to remote locations, bound them, castrated them, then left them there to bleed to death.

I always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have them inflict pain on me. I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt.

—Albert Fish

The Hillside Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, became increasingly sadistic as their murder spree progressed, burning one victim with an electrical cord, injecting another with cleaning solution and asphyxiating her with a gas hose, an agonizing ordeal that lasted at least thirty minutes. The Australian-born playboy-psycho, Christopher Wilder, also favored electrical torture, attaching a fifteen-foot cord to the toes of one victim and jolting her for several hours after sealing her eyelids shut with superglue. Electrocution also figured in the crimes of Gary Heidnik, the sex-slave psycho who kept a half dozen women chained to a pipe in his “Philadelphia Torture Dungeon.” To punish one captive who seemed insufficiently subservient, he tossed her in a water-filled pit, then dropped in a live electric wire, killing her when the wire came in contact with her chains.

Gerard Schaefer—who, like the Hillside Stranglers, regarded all sexually attractive young women as

“whores”—not only committed an untold number of horrifically sadistic murders (often involving his preferred mode of torture, slow hanging), but left written accounts of his enormities that rank among the most appalling documents ever written. Other serial killers have also left documented evidence of their tortures. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the infamous Moors Murderers, tape-recorded the piteous pleas and heart-wrenching screams of one little victim. Harvey Glatman shot photographs of the bound and terrorized women he was about to kill. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng videotaped the sex-and-torture sessions they conducted in their California horror bunker. Not every homicidal sadist, however, has left a detailed record of his atrocities. Ted Bundy, for example, was relatively forthcoming in his confessions. Some of the things he did to his victims were so unspeakable, however, that he refused to discuss them with authorities.

In her book Killing for Sport: Inside the Minds of Serial Killers, profiler Pat Brown offers this description of the typical serial torture-killer:

While a “normal” serial killer might brutally beat, rape, strangle, and shove a tree limb into his victim, this is not the same type of behavior exhibited by the sexually sadistic serial killer. The latter keeps his victim alive for hours or days while he tortures her with all variety of sexually sadistic acts. He likes to see her pain, hear her screams, and make her beg and plead. He may have all manner of implements in his rape kit to accomplish the level of torture he wishes to achieve: whips, nipple clamps, X-Acto blades, dildos, hot wax, enemas, garrotes, gags, and various bondage material.

The only flaw in this passage is Brown’s exclusive use of the feminine pronoun to refer to the victim. In point of fact, the victim of one of these psychos is just as likely to be a “he,” since sadistic torture-slaying is a common feature of gay serial murder. John Wayne Gacy anally raped his adolescent male victims with various objects, shoved their heads into water-filled bathtubs until they lost consciousness, and subjected them to other torments before slowly garroting them. Dean Corll inserted glass pipettes into the urethras of his teenage victims before castrating them with a knife or his teeth. Bob Berdella kept his male victims captive for days, injecting Drano into their throats, jabbing alcohol-soaked Q-Tips into their eyes, beating them with iron clubs, clamping electrodes to their testicles.

Though women rarely engage in brutal sex-torture, except as part of a killer couple, female poisoners can be extremely sadistic, taking voluptuous pleasure in the torments that their victims undergo.

Sometimes they even dole out their lethal doses over a period of days or weeks in order to prolong their own sick enjoyment. Considering the agonizing symptoms of, say, arsenic poisoning—the terrible thirst, the uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea, the excruciating muscle cramps and violent convulsions—there is no doubt that this typical form of female serial murder qualifies as genuine torture.

Recommended Reading

Rose G. Mandelsberg, Torture Killers (1993)

Even as a middle-aged man, the psychologically stunted Eddie Gein related better to youngsters than to grown-ups. In the early 1950s, a few juvenile visitors to his decrepit farmhouse were startled to see several preserved human heads hanging on his bedroom walls. When the boys asked where these ghastly items had come from, Eddie explained that they were shrunken South Seas heads, sent by a cousin who had fought in the Philippines in the Second World War. Only later did the appalling truth come to light—that the supposed war artifacts were actually stuffed and mounted “face masks” that the Plainfield ghoul had flayed from female corpses, crudely preserved, and mounted on his wall like hunting trophies.

Gein’s practice of saving human body parts and displaying them at home is an extreme example of a common tendency among serial killers, who often keep mementos of their crimes. But the fact that his neighbors believed his original story—that the heads were war souvenirs—is also significant. Gein’s explanation was, in fact, fairly plausible. The grisly trophies of South Seas headhunters have always been popular collectibles. American soldiers who fought in the Pacific did sometimes bring home, not just old shrunken heads, but other kinds of human keepsakes—some of them quite recently stripped from the enemy.

Indeed, throughout human history, victors in battle have routinely taken trophies from the corpses of their fallen foes—not only valuables like rings or amulets or articles of clothing but parts of their anatomy: scalps, ears, teeth, fingers, and even genitalia. Warriors engage in this savage practice for various reasons: it serves as proof of their prowess, it is a way of inflicting an ultimate humiliation on their enemy, and it permits them to recall their moment of triumph at a later time.

All of these factors operate in the cases of serial killers, whose behavior reflects the very worst, most bestial aspects of human nature—barbarities that civilization has largely outgrown (though they occasionally surface in the chaos of war).

Ed Gein with his Trophies by Michael Rose

According to the FBI, there are two categories of serial killer keepsakes: the “souvenir” and the

“trophy.” The first presumably serves the same function that a statuette of the Eiffel Tower does for a tourist who has just vacationed in Paris—it reminds the killer of how much fun he had and allows him to relive the experience in fantasy until he can do it again. Trophies, on the other hand, are analogous to the mounted moose head or stag antlers that a hunter might proudly display over the fireplace—prideful evidence of the killer’s lethal skill.

In practice, it’s difficult to make such hard-and-fast distinctions, and most criminologists use the two terms interchangeably to describe the items that serial killers take from their victims.

Occasionally, this stuff is actual booty that the killer can convert into cash—an expensive watch, a wedding ring, a gold necklace. Generally, however, the things most cherished by serial killers have no inherent value. Searching the bedroom of the Florida sex-killer Gerard Schaefer, for example, police found a stash of sinister keepsakes that had belonged to his victims, including a cheap shamrock pin, an address book, a passport, a diary, a driver’s license, a poetry book, and two gold-filled teeth. Hadden Clark, the cross-dressing cannibal killer who murdered an indeterminate number of women, not only accumulated a bucketful of costume jewelry but kept the bloody pillowcase of a coed he had slain in bed.

However intrinsically worthless, these macabre souvenirs possess an almost magical power for the killer, who clearly runs a great risk by holding on to such incriminating evidence. (Clark, for example, was arrested after police retrieved his victim’s pillowcase and found his bloody fingerprint on it). But—like the pederast who cannot stop himself from downloading illegal child porn—serial killers derive such profound, perverted pleasure from their creepy treasures that they cannot give them up. Indeed, in many cases, trophies aren’t just a way for them to commemorate their deeds; they are a masturbatory turn-on.

That some serial killers use their sick mementos for specifically sexual purposes is evinced by the kinds of things they hoard: fetish objects like underwear, shoes, or nylon stockings; tufts of their victims’

pubic hair; or erogenous body parts. Among the unspeakable artifacts uncovered in Eddie Gein’s horror house was a shoe box full of preserved vulvas. Robin Gecht and his team of “Chicago Rippers” sliced off and saved their victims’ breasts. And the fetishistic maniac Jerry Brudos kept the sliced-off left foot of one female victim in his freezer, so that he could deck it out in shoes from his collection of stolen high heels.