The Serial Killer Files (64 page)

To be sure, some infamous serial killers have been found mentally incompetent and committed to asylums. Though convicted of first-degree murder, the Wisconsin ghoul Ed Gein was simultaneously judged insane and spent the rest of his days in mental institutions. So did Jane Toppan, the female serial poisoner who confessed to thirty-one murders following her trial in 1901. (In Toppan’s case, there is reason to believe that she was spared the death penalty, not because she was truly insane, but because a jury of Victorian gentlemen couldn’t bring themselves to sentence a “respectable” woman to the gallows.)

For the most part, winning an acquittal with an insanity plea is so difficult that few defense lawyers attempt it. In the last hundred years, barely one percent of all felons brought to trial in this country have resorted to this tactic. And of that tiny minority, only one in three has been found NGRI (“not guilty by reason of insanity”).

As for serial killers, “Only 3.6 percent have been declared incompetent for trial or cleared by reason of insanity,” according to one expert. Even a severely delusional psychotic like Herbert Mullin—who believed he could ward off an apocalyptic earthquake by slaughtering strangers—was deemed “sane by legal standards” and convicted of murder.

Of course, the long odds against prevailing with an insanity plea haven’t stopped some serial killers from trying. In England, John George Haigh, the infamous “Acid-Bath Killer” of the 1940s, made a futile attempt to convince the jury that his murders were motivated, not by pathological greed, but by a vampiric lust for body fluids. To prove that he was possessed of unnatural thirsts, he even drank a cup of his own urine in prison—all to no avail. Thirty years later, Haigh’s psychopathic countryman Peter Sutcliffe, aka the “Yorkshire Ripper,” made an equally fruitless attempt to depict himself as insane, claiming that he had been commanded to kill prostitutes by the voice of God, issuing from a grave in a local cemetery.

Perhaps the most popular ploy has been the “multiple personality” gambit, which has been attempted—with a stunning lack of success—by a number of infamous serial killers. These include William the

“Lipstick Killer” Heirens, Kenneth “Hillside Strangler” Bianchi, and John Wayne Gacy—each of whom tried to pin his crimes on a murderous alter ego named, respectively, “George Murman,” “Steve,” and

“Jack.” Ted Bundy, though he did not attempt an insanity defense, also claimed that he was occasionally possessed by a malevolent being he referred to as “the entity.”

Indeed—partly no doubt because of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (which popularized the concept of the

“split personality”), it has become almost commonplace for serial killers to shift responsibility for their acts onto the evil second selves that supposedly dwell inside them. When Australian serial killer William MacDonald was asked why he butchered a half dozen men, he breezily declared, “I didn’t murder those men. It is the other person who lives inside me that actually killed them.” As is typically the case, the jury declined to believe this glib explanation, sentencing the “Mutilator” to life for his atrocities.

In the realm of serial homicide, as in all other areas of human activity, some individuals achieve far greater renown than others. Because their crimes were so sensationally horrific, psychopaths like Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and a handful of others have achieved something close to legendary status. In the popular imagination, they have assumed the role of real-life, flesh-and-blood bogeyman—all-American personifications of absolute evil.

Most serial killers, however, never rate such dark celebrity. How many people have ever heard of Michael Ross, a forty-year-old serial killer sentenced to death for slaying four teenage girls in Connecticut in the 1980s? Or Tommy Lynn Sells, a thirty-five-year-old drifter who—following his arrest in Del Rio, Texas, for slitting the throats of two girls with a boning knife—confessed to ten other slayings in six states? Or Corey Morris, a twenty-four-year-old Phoenix man charged with the murder of six prostitutes in 2003? There is nothing about such degenerates that seizes the imagination of the public. They don’t exert the grim fascination of Jekyll-Hyde types like Bundy and Gacy: the handsome law student whose charming personality conceals the soul of a monster; the roly-poly clown who entertains hospitalized children by day and spends his nights torturing and murdering teenagers. Ross, Sells, Morris, and others of their ilk don’t seem mythically evil—just sick, vicious, and repellent.

The same principle applies to unsolved serial homicides. A surprising number of these never make the national headlines. Many are barely noted in the communities where they are taking place. This is largely because they so often involve male or female street prostitutes—socially despised victims whose death and disappearance arouse little interest or concern among the public. Even the police sometimes pay little attention to such crimes, making only the most perfunctory efforts to solve them.

By contrast, there are a number of unsolved serial killer cases that have become legendary in the annals of crime. Foremost among these, of course, is that of Jack the Ripper. By now, there is an entire cottage industry devoted to the solution of this century-old mystery. Every few years, a new “expert” comes forward with a book purporting to provide definitive proof of the Whitechapel monster’s identity. The most recent (as of this writing, at least) is PortraitofaKiller, the 2002 best seller by mystery writer Patricia Cornwell, who—with much ballyhoo—announced that she had finally identified the legendary harlot-slayer. The culprit, she claimed, was Walter Sickert, a renowned post-Impressionist painter with an intense fascination with the macabre and a supposed sexual pathology allegedly brought about by a bungled penile operation.

Not everyone, however, has been convinced by Cornwell’s “proof.” Savaging the book in the New York Times, for example, Caleb Carr—author of the 1995 blockbuster, The Alienist —not only denounced it as an “exercise in calumny” but demanded that Cornwell apologize for having written it. It might be added that Sickert was long ago identified—and dismissed—as a possible suspect by other Ripperologists.

In short, it seems likely that—despite her claims (and the sizable amount of her personal fortune that she invested in the project)—Cornwell’s book will not be the last word on this subject.

Though less well-known than the Ripper murders, there are several celebrated cases that continue to tantalize armchair detectives. They include:

The Ax Man of New Orleans

One of the great unsolved mysteries in the annals of American serial murder began in the waning days of the World War I era. In the predawn hours of May 23, 1918, an unknown madman broke into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Maggio, battered in their skulls with an ax, then put a razor to their throats and delivered the coup de grace.

He struck again in the dead of night on June 28, invading the home of a grocer named Louis Besumer, who escaped the attack with a nasty gash to the head. His wife, however, was mortally wounded. She lingered until August 5 before succumbing to her injuries.

On the same night that she died, the pregnant wife of a man named Schneider was attacked in her bed by the ax-wielding maniac. Though Mrs. Schneider (and her unborn infant) survived, she was unable to provide police with anything more than a vague description of the shadowy intruder.

Five days later, two young sisters, Pauline and Mary Bruno, were awakened by the sounds of a commotion from the adjoining bedroom. Hurrying to investigate, they caught a glimpse of a sinister figure—“dark, tall, heavyset, wearing a dark suit and black slouch hat,” as they would describe him—making his escape. In the bed lay their uncle, Joseph Romano, bleeding copiously from a savage head wound that would prove fatal.

By this point, New Orleans was experiencing the kind of panic that, a half century later, would grip New York City when the phantom shooter known as “Son of Sam” was on the loose. People began sleeping with loaded pistols at their sides and inundating the police with reports of attempted nighttime breakins, discarded murder weapons found on their front lawns, and countless hysteria-induced sightings of the killer.

After a seven-month hiatus, he committed another attack, this time in the town of Gretna, just across the river from New Orleans. His victims were the three members of the Cortimiglia family. The parents, Charles and Rose, survived with fractured skulls but their two-year-old daughter was murdered.

Four days later, on March 14, 1919, a letter arrived at the offices of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. It was undoubtedly a hoax, much like the fraudulent letter that gave the Whitechapel monster his immortal nickname. Describing himself as a “demon from the hottest hell,” the writer declared his intention to terrorize the city on the night of March 19, sparing only those houses where jazz was playing. He signed the note, “The Ax Man.”

The Ax Man of New Orleans awakens the Bruno sisters

(© 2003 Nathan MacDicken)

In an early instance of a now commonplace phenomenon—the kind of coping mechanism that causes people to indulge in sick jokes whenever a ca-tastrophe occurs—the citizens of New Orleans resorted to macabre humor to relieve their tensions, throwing “Ax Man parties” on the designated night and playing a popular new piano tune, “The Mysterious Ax Man’s Jazz.”

Despite the arrest and conviction of several suspects (who were later released when their accuser confessed to perjury), the killings continued. Between August 10 and October 27, three more attacks occurred, bringing the Ax Man’s toll to six dead and six wounded.

Then, as abruptly as they had started, the murders came to a halt. Some scholars of American crime have identified a likely suspect, a Mafia hit man named Joseph Mumfre who was shot dead by the widow of the Ax Man’s last victim, and whose murder would account for the sudden cessation of the ax killer’s spree. Others, however, have called this theory into question. In any event, the Ax Man killings remain officially unsolved.

The Toledo Clubber

In a two-week spasm of violence that terrorized the city of Toledo, Ohio, and drew nationwide attention in the press, a “murderous maniac” (as the papers described him) savagely attacked a dozen women in the fall of 1925, leaving five dead and the rest severely wounded. Wielding a heavy bludgeoning object, he clubbed his victims from behind, then continued to smash their faces and skulls as they lay unconscious from the initial blow.

The first to encounter the “Clubber” was Mrs. Frank Hall, who was set upon outside her home on the night of November 10, 1925. One of the luckier victims, she survived the attack, though her injuries were severe enough for her never to regain her full health.

Mrs. Emma Hatfield and Lydia Baumgartner were the next to fall victim to the madman. Both were attacked as they made their way down deserted streets after dark. Both would ultimately die of their injuries, though not before giving deathbed statements to the police. Unfortunately, neither woman could provide a precise description of the assailant.

The following week brought additional attacks—seven more in as many days. By then, the city was in an uproar. The American Legion put a thousand men on the streets to help in the search for the killer while the city’s Medical Service Bureau offered escorts for the scores of women suddenly afraid to walk alone after nightfall. The police conducted a sweeping roundup of the usual suspects—mostly “mental defectives” and any swarthy-skinned stranger unlucky enough to find himself in Toledo at the time.

They also had to deal with the usual deluge of hysterical “tips,” including sightings of bizarre creatures with green-rimmed eyes and hulking figures who haunted the rooftops, issuing weird cries.

In the meantime, the authorities circulated a profile of the Clubber as “a beastlike man, more than six feet tall, of dark hue, with long woolly hair, protruding front teeth, fiery eyes, and almost superhuman strength.” Given the hackneyed nature of this description—which sounds like a composite of every monster cliché in the book—it seems likely that it says less about the killer than about the feverish fantasies of the panic-stricken public. Indeed, by issuing this description, the police probably made it easier for the killer to avoid capture. With the entire city on the lookout for a supernatural ogre, the Clubber (who, like many other serial killers, probably looked perfectly ordinary, if not totally unprepossessing) could move about without attracting suspicion.

Following the savage double murder on a single day of a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher and a forty-seven-year-old housewife (both of whom were also sexually assaulted), the Toledo Clubber’s reign of terror came to an abrupt halt. Exactly who he was and what became of him remains a mystery to this day.

The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run

A decade after the end of the Toledo Clubber affair, Ohio was the site of another unsolved serial murder case, perhaps the most famous in the annals of twentieth-century American crime. What made this case so notable was not only the unusual savagery of the killings but the involvement of Eliot Ness, the legendary lawman of Untouchables fame.

It happened in Cleveland during the height of the Great Depression. In September 1934, the lower half of a woman’s torso, the legs severed at the knees, washed up on the shore of Lake Erie near the Euclid Beach amusement park. The victim—dubbed “the Lady of the Lake” by the local press—was never identified, and the story quickly vanished from the news. Only later did people come to see this incident, not as an isolated atrocity, but as a harbinger of the horrors to come.

One year later, while roaming through Kingsbury Run—a weed-choked, garbage-strewn ravine on the east side of Cleveland that served as a hobo jungle—two young boys stumbled upon a pair of headless, decomposing male corpses, both with their genitals severed. Postmortem examinations suggested that they had been decapitated—and probably castrated—while still alive. Though the older victim was never identified, fingerprints showed the younger man to be Edward Andrassy, a “snotty punk” (as one cop described him) with a long rap sheet of petty arrests. Given his reputation for unsavory behavior—which included an affair with a married woman whose husband had threatened Andrassy’s life—police concluded that the two killings were crimes of passion.