The Serial Killer Files (59 page)

Sometimes, instead of souvenirs, the killer might shoot pictures of his atrocities or document them in some other way, like a traveler eager to preserve his memories of a thrilling experience. Indeed, every new advance in recording technology has been applied in this way. In the 1950s, Harvey Murray Glatman photographed his bound and terrified victims with a Rolleicord camera. In the 1960s, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley tape-recorded the desperate pleas of one little girl before killing her. In the 1980s, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng videotaped their captives.

Next to Ed Gein—whose farmhouse full of body part artifacts stands as the sickest such assemblage in the annals of crime—Jeffrey Dahmer was probably the most obsessive collector of unspeakable trophies.

Police who searched his nightmarish Milwaukee apartment were aghast to discover Polaroid snapshots of mutilated victims, refrigerated heads, and frozen packages of human viscera, male genitalia in a lobster pot, painted skulls on a shelf, and more. Dahmer was a supremely sick version of one of those out-of-control collectors whose hobby begins to take over his living space. Every victim who fell into his hands ended up as another grisly relic, so precious to the “Milwaukee Cannibal” that he couldn’t bear to part with it.

Because it wouldn’t be a remembrance—it would have been a stranger.

—Jeffrey Dahmer, when asked why—instead of attempting to construct a skeleton from the bones of his victims—he didn’t just buy one from a medical supply store.

A sex-killer dismembers his victim in this engraving from an 1834 crime pamphlet DISPOSAL

What a serial murderer does with the remains of his victims is as much a part of his MO as his preferred method of killing them. Indeed, for some psychos, getting rid of the corpse is the high point of the crime.

In their groundbreaking study, Sexual Homicide, for example, John Douglas and his collaborators talk about one serial killer who got his biggest thrill, not from the murder itself, but from “the successful dismemberment and disposal of the body without detection”—an act that provided him with an exhilarating sense of power, of having committed an ultimate transgression and gotten away with it.

For most serial killers, however, body disposal is less a source of pleasure than a purely practical concern

—a problem to be solved. Because of their aberrant psychological makeup—their inability to feel guilt or empathy or moral revulsion—they are able to go about this nerve-wracking, often horrendously gruesome, task with a bizarre emotional detachment.

After strangling his first victim to death, for example, Joel Rifkin—the Long Island serial prostitute killer responsible for seventeen grisly homicides during the early 1990s—dragged the corpse to the basement, draped it across the washer and dryer, and coolly dismembered it with an X-Acto knife. After the young woman was in pieces, he sliced off her fingertips to foil identification, yanked out her teeth with a pliers, shoved her decapitated head into an empty paint can, stuffed the limbs and torso into separate thirty-three-gallon trash bags, loaded the parts into his mother’s car, and drove the ghastly cargo out to New Jersey, disposing of it in different locations, some in the woods, the rest in the river.

Years later, after his arrest, Rifkin was asked how he felt while performing this horrific operation—the first time he had ever committed such an enormity. “I reduced it to biology class,” he said with a shrug.

“It was just a straight dissection, done as fast as you can. I made very small, controlled cuts over the joints and popped the bones out of the sockets. As a kid you learn how to carve a turkey. You just go to the bone on the wing and the bone on the leg. You can’t cut the bone with a knife, you find it and pop it.” It would be hard to find a more chilling example of the way serial killers dehumanize their victims, treating them as objects to be used for their own pleasure, then tossed away without a second thought.

Rifkin did experience a moment of panic when—less than a week after the murder—a golfer at a New Jersey course sliced his ball into the woods and stumbled upon the paint can containing the prostitute’s head. Thereafter, Rifkin tried different means of disposing of his victims. He placed the dismembered parts of one woman in separate buckets, filled them with concrete, and threw them in the river. Others were stuffed into fifty-five-gallon oil drums and left in recycling plants or tossed into creeks. Still others were discarded in garbage dumps, pine barrens, or along freeways.

Rifkin drove considerable distances to get rid of the bodies. He was, in fact, arrested while transporting the remains of his last tarp-wrapped victim in the bed of his pickup truck. Rifkin is an example of a serial killer who perpetrates his atrocities at home, then smuggles the gory evidence off the premises—a sensible precaution when you live with your mother, as he did. Remarkably, not all psycho-killers go to such trouble. When, in September 1998, police in Poughkeepsie, New York—who had been investigating a string of mysterious disappearances—finally searched the home of the leading suspect, a twenty-seven-year-old African-American named Kendall Francois, they were stunned to discover the decomposing bodies of eight young women stashed in the attic of the two-story colonial he shared with his mother, father, and younger sister. Given the stench given off by the putrefying remains, many people assumed that Kendall’s parents must have known about his crimes. Evidently, however, they had accepted their son’s explanation that a family of raccoons had died in the attic crawl space, suffusing it with a rank, stubborn smell.

The overpowering stink of death led to the arrest of another serial strangler, a hulking twenty-eight-year-old named Harrison Graham who kept seven female cadavers in his squalid North Philadelphia apartment. His crimes were discovered when his neighbors finally complained about the smell. In custody, the mentally retarded, drug-addicted Graham explained that he kept the corpses at home because he “didn’t know where else to put them.”

Other serial killers have also stored the rotting remains of their victims right on their premises, turning their nondescript living quarters into secret charnel houses. Besides burying one victim in his garden, two others in a shed, and his wife under the floorboards, John Reginald Christie—the British psycho known as the “Monster of Rillington Place”—stuck three female corpses into his kitchen cupboard, then plastered it over with wallpaper before vacating the house. Needless to say, the new tenants came in for a nasty surprise when they began making renovations.

John Wayne Gacy did a more effective job of stashing his victims at home, interring the bodies of twenty-eight young men in the crawl space beneath his house in suburban Chicago. Like Gacy, who ran a successful contracting business, the British sex-slayer Frederick West was a builder by trade, a vocation that made it easier for him to conceal his atrocities by carrying out his own at-home renovations. The corpses of some of his victims ended up in the cellar, which—grotesquely—he later converted to a nursery bedroom for his children. Another body was buried underneath a bathroom that West had constructed where an attached garage had previously stood. Other young women—including his own teenage daughter, Heather—were planted in the rear garden. It was, in fact, West’s repeated threat—that if his other children misbehaved they would “end up under the patio like Heather”—which led to his arrest when it was reported to the police.

In contrast to Gacy and West, Dean Corll—another horrifically sadistic sex-killer who turned his home into a torture chamber—took care to remove the corpses from the premises, renting a boat storage shed several miles south of Houston, which became the burying place for seventeen of his mutilated male victims.

Serial killers who commit their atrocities at home (or at a secret location specifically designed for that purpose, like the remote murder bunker constructed by the homicidal team of Charles Ng and Leonard Lake) can generally take their time to dispose of their victims in a carefully planned and organized way.

Like Gacy or the nineteenth-century “Lady Bluebeard,” Belle Gunness—whose Indiana “murder farm”

eventually yielded the remains of at least a dozen dismembered people—such killers can often accumulate a sizable collection of corpses on their property.

Obviously, the case is different for serial killers who do their killing outside the house. How such psychos dispose of their victims depends on various factors, some calculated, others having to do with the warped psychology of the killer. Some serial killers might snatch a victim, drive her to a secluded spot—a remote woodland area, say—then rape her, kill her, and make a quick getaway, leaving the corpse exposed to the elements or possibly concealed in a shallow, hastily dug grave with a pile of dead leaves scooped over it. This was the MO, for example, of the Florida sex-slayer Gerard Schaefer, some of whose victims were taken to a swampy island, where—after being tortured and killed—they were simply left to rot.

In other cases a psycho-killer who has, say, murdered a hitchhiker or snatched a victim from a shopping mall parking lot might dump the body along the roadside, or at an abandoned industrial area, or into a ravine. Depending on how “organized” he is, the killer may devote a fair amount of time to checking out potential dumping sites in advance before selecting the one that seems to offer the best opportunities for disposal.

By contrast, other killers deliberately leave their victims’ corpses in conspicuous places—a decision that generally has as much to do with their perverted need to taunt the police and terrorize the public as with anything else. Several of the hideously butchered women slain by Jack the Ripper, for example, were simply left sprawled in the street. Besides the obvious reason for this—his desire to flee the crime scene as quickly as possible—the consternation he created by flaunting his atrocities undoubtedly added to his sick, sadistic fun. Similarly, the Hillside Stranglers expressed their contempt for authority, for society, and for the entire female sex in general by leaving the naked bodies of their victims exposed to public view in obscenely flagrant poses.

If the Hillside Stranglers seemed intent on advertising their atrocities, other serial killers have done the opposite, going to great lengths to obliterate every trace of their victims’ existence. Henri Landru, the Parisian “Bluebeard” who murdered ten wives in the decade following World War I, got rid of their corpses so efficiently that, even today, no one knows for certain how they died. Apparently, he disposed of the remains by incinerating them in a large stove he had specifically purchased for that purpose.

Incineration was also the preferred disposal method of another French psychopath, Dr. Marcel Petiot, who turned his basement furnace into a private crematorium where the bodies of his Jewish victims were reduced to ash during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Another medical monster, Dr. H. H. Holmes, installed a kiln in the cellar of his “Horror Castle,” where an indeterminate number of people vanished forever during the time of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.

In other cases, Holmes—never one to miss an opportunity to make an extra buck—sold the skeletal remains of his victims to local medical schools. Burke and Hare—the notorious British body snatchers—also disposed of their victims by selling them as anatomical specimens. (Indeed, supplying dead bodies to a London doctor was the explicit motive for their crimes.)

Other serial killers have found diabolical ways to profit from the disposal of their victims. Most ghastly of all was undoubtedly the German lust-killer, Georg Grossmann, who capitalized on the severe meat shortage that afflicted Germany during World War I by selling the butchered flesh of his female victims as beef and pork.

Another serial killer who went to extraordinary trouble to make his victims disappear was John George Haigh, the British “Acid-Bath Killer,” who dissolved a half dozen acquaintances in a forty-gallon oil drum filled with sulfuric acid. Unfortunately for Haigh, even this extreme method was not sufficient to eliminate every vestige of his victims. Police searching his workshop were ultimately able to recover twenty-eight pounds of human body fat, three gallstones, part of a left foot, eighteen bone fragments, and a set of dentures.

The Hungarian serial killer Bela Kiss took the opposite tack in dealing with the remains of his victims.

Instead of attempting to dissolve them with acid, he preserved them in wood alcohol. It wasn’t until Kiss had vanished from his village that authorities discovered the bodies of seven strangled women sealed inside large metal drums in his house.

Arguably the most frightening variety of serial killer—the type that touches our deepest sense of vulnerability—is the household invader, the psycho who slaughters total strangers in the sanctity of their own home. Occasionally, this kind of killer will make a perfunctory effort to conceal his victims. Earle Leonard Nelson, for example—the “Gorilla Murderer” of the 1920s—hid one body in a trunk, another behind a furnace, a third underneath a bed. More frequently, such monsters will leave the bodies where they are, sometimes after committing some appalling desecration on them. The night after the infamous massacre at the Sharon Tate–Roman Polanski mansion, for example, Charles Manson and his “creepy crawlers” broke into the home of a couple named Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. After hacking the pair to death, the hippie killers carved the word war into the husband’s chest and left a serving fork sticking from his stomach. By contrast, other murderers actually display a perverse concern for the condition of the corpses they have created. The “Lipstick Killer” William Heirens took time to wash the blood from several of his victims and drape bathrobes over their naked bodies.

Sometimes, a killer’s attempt to get rid of remains will backfire. In the 1980s, homicidal caretaker Dorothea Puente murdered seven of her elderly tenants, buried their corpses in her backyard, and sprinkled quicklime over the bodies to expedite their decomposition. Puente, however, did not realize that, unless quicklime is treated with water, it actually acts as a preservative, preventing decay by desiccating the tissue. As a result, when the bodies were ultimately uncovered, they were in surprisingly good shape, allowing medical examiners easily to ascertain that the cause of death was poisoning.