The Serial Killer Files (65 page)

They were obliged to reassess that opinion when other bodies began to turn up. In January 1936, the hacked-up remains of a forty-one-year-old prostitute—stuffed inside in a half bushel basket and a few burlap sacks—were found behind a Central Avenue butcher shop. Four months later—in a virtual replay of the September 1935, incident—two boys cutting through Kingsbury Run on their way to go fishing—stumbled upon a man’s decapitated head. The next day, searchers found the naked corpse, which was adorned with a half dozen distinctive tattoos. Despite all efforts, however—which included displaying the victim’s death mask at the Great Lakes Exposition in the hope that one of the seven million visitors would recognize him—the identity of the “Tattooed Man” was never established.

A newspaper artist’s conception of “The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 2, 1939

(© 1939 The Plain Dealer. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission).

On July 22, another headless corpse was discovered—this one across town from Kingsbury Run. The killer returned to his favorite dumping ground a few months later, in September 1936. Waiting to hop one of the eastbound freight trains that passed through Kingsbury Run, a hobo spotted the bisected halves of a human torso floating in a stagnant pond. The missing parts—which included the head, arms, and genitals—were never found.

By this point, the newspapers were having a field day with the case, running daily, sensationalistic front-page stories written in the purplest prose. “Of all horrible nightmares come to life,” ran one typical lead,

“the most shuddering is the fiend who decapitates his victims in the dark, dank recesses of Kingsbury Run. That a man of this nature should be permitted to work his crazed vengeance upon six people in a city the size of Cleveland should be the city’s shame. No Edgar Allan Poe in his deepest, opium-induced dream could conceive horror so painstakingly worked out.”

Having been recently hired as Cleveland’s safety director, Eliot Ness—whose energies had been largely devoted to rooting out corruption in the police department while overseeing security measures for the Republican National Convention—found himself under enormous pressure to track down the maniac, alternately dubbed the “Cleveland Torso Killer” and the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.” Nothing, however—neither the sizable reward offered by the Cleveland News nor the full-time efforts of two dozen detectives, including a tireless pair named Merylo and Zalewski, who interrogated hundreds of suspects and pursued numberless leads—made a difference. For two more years, the dismembered corpses continued to pile up—twelve in all, a “Butcher’s dozen,” in crime writer Max Allan Collins’s phrase.

The remains of Butcher’s last two victims turned up in August 1938. What became of him after that has remained a matter of speculation ever since. A Cleveland physician named Frank Sweeney—reputedly a bisexual alcoholic with a hair-trigger temper—fell briefly under suspicion. So did a Slavic immigrant named Frank Dolezal, who initially confessed to several of the “Torso” murders, though he later recanted, claiming that the police had beaten the confession out of him. A month after his arrest, he was found hanged in his cell, an apparent suicide.

While some crime mavens believe that Mad Butcher migrated to Los Angeles, others agree with Eliot Ness’s biographer Oscar Fraley, who claimed that the real culprit was a mentally unstable premed student. The scion of a prominent Cleveland family, it is said, the killer eluded arrest by having himself committed to a mental institution, where he died of natural causes in the early 1940s.

The Green River Killer: Case Closed

It is a truism in law enforcement that, with every passing day, the chances of cracking an unsolved case grow progressively slimmer. So it seems highly improbable that we could ever learn the true identities of long-vanished phantoms like the New Orleans “Ax Man” or Cleveland’s “Mad Butcher.” Thanks to recent advances in forensic science, however—specifically the development of DNA analysis—a number of infamous serial murder cases, which have frustrated investigators for decades, appear to have been solved at last.

Police in Glasgow, Scotland, for example, believe that they have finally solved the quarter-century-old case of the Scripture-quoting sex-killer nicknamed “Bible John.” A DNA sample taken from semen stains on the tights of one of his victims was found to match a sample from one of the suspects, a married former Scots Guard with three children who committed suicide in 1980. Though the man’s identity has not been made public, authorities appear confident that the mystery has been solved.

In our own country, one of the most notorious and baffling serial murder cases of the past quarter century took an unexpectedly auspicious turn in the fall of 2001, more than ten years after most people had given up on it. Between 1982 and 1984, no fewer than forty-nine young women were stabbed to death or strangled and their bodies dumped at various woodland sites. Some were runaways and transients, though most of them were prostitutes working a sleazy strip along the Seattle-Tacoma highway. Despite a massive investigation that lasted nearly a decade, cost $15 million, accumulated four thousand pieces of physical evidence, and enlisted the help of everyone from FBI profiler John Douglas to Ted Bundy (who offered his own unique insights into the operations of the psychopathic mind), the

“Green River Killer” managed to elude capture. When the task force that had been assembled to track him finally disbanded in 1990, there was little hope that he would ever be captured.

All that changed suddenly and dramatically in November 2001, when Gary Leon Ridgway was arrested for the relatively minor offense of “loitering for the purposes of soliciting prostitution.” A married fifty-two-year-old father who lived in the Seattle suburb of Austin and worked as a painter for a local trucking company, Ridgway had had a number of previous run-ins with the law, all involving prostitutes. In 1980, a hooker he had picked up on the “Sea-Tac” strip accused him of driving her out to the woods and trying to strangle her. Charges were dropped when Ridgway told authorities that the woman had started to bite him while performing oral sex, and he only choked her to make her stop.

Two years later, he was arrested after propositioning a police decoy during a prostitution sting.

Admitting that his compulsion to pick up prostitutes was akin to an alcoholic’s craving for drink, he pleaded guilty and was given a slap on the wrist. In 1984, he was a prime suspect in the disappearance of one of the Green River Killer’s victims, but was released from custody after passing a polygraph test.

Jokingly, his coworkers at the Kenworth Truck Company began calling him “Green River Gary”—or

“G. R.” for short.

To police officers, however, there was nothing funny about the situation. By 1988, Ridgway was still regarded as a “person of interest” by investigators, who obtained a warrant to search his house (which yielded no evidence), as well as a court order that directed him to provide a saliva sample by chewing on a piece of gauze.

This latter piece of evidence ultimately led to the big break in the case. When Ridgway was arrested again in the fall of 2001 for soliciting prostitution, improved technology allowed forensic scientists to match the DNA in his saliva sample with semen found in three of the victims. His employment records were immediately subpoenaed, and a thorough check revealed that his absences from work coincided with the disappearances of many of the Green River victims.

On Wednesday, December 5, 2001, Gary Ridgway was formally charged with the deaths of four women.

“What cracked this case, in a word, was science,” one official declared. Due credit was also given to tenacious police work, particularly on the part King County sheriff Dave Reichert, who could barely contain his jubilation when he saw the results of the DNA tests. After pursuing his quarry for nearly twenty years, the hunt finally appeared to be at an end.

Ridgway’s responsibility for the Green River Killings was confirmed in November 2003, when—as part of a plea agreement that spared him the death penalty—he stood in a Seattle courtroom and admitted to the murder of forty-eight women.

Ever since the phrase “serial killer” gained currency in the early 1980s, the predatory psycho has become a standard (if not stereotypical) feature of our popular arts. To many finger-wagging critics, America’s fixation on these blood-crazed beings is yet another deplorable sign of our supposed cultural decadence, proof that we have lost our moral bearings as a society.

In truth, however, there is nothing new or uniquely American about the “glorification” of criminals.

Throughout history, people have been fascinated by what crime writer Jay Robert Nash calls

“bloodletters and badmen.” Back in eighteenth-century England, the public couldn’t hear enough about the exploits of famous rogues like Jack Sheppard, Jonathan Wild, and Colonel Blood. A century later, British readers eagerly devoured every grisly tidbit printed about Jack the Ripper. In our own country, frontier psychopaths like Billy the Kid and John Wesley Hardin were transformed into folk heroes. The same thing happened during the Depression, when cold-blooded killers like Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, and John Dillinger were viewed by many people as modern-day Robin Hoods.

Why decent, upstanding citizens should be so intrigued by violent criminals is a complex psychological question, though surely it has something to do with the guilty pleasure we take from vicariously identifying with people who act out the dark, lawless impulses the rest of us repress. In any event, just as serial murder itself is an age-old phenomenon under a new and modern name, the kind of activities that seem so reprehensible to certain moralists—collecting serial-killer-related memorabilia, for example, or turning the sites of notorious murders into tourist attractions—have also existed for centuries.

In the twenty years since its publication, Thomas Harris’s groundbreaking pop novel Red Dragon has already been filmed twice, first by Michael Mann in the 1986 thriller Manhunter, then, under its original title, in Brett Ratner’s 2002 version. Between those two versions, something interesting happened to Hannibal Lecter. He went from being a minor character who appeared for only a few minutes in the original movie to the star of the show. Why? Simply because audiences couldn’t get enough of the suave, man-eating psychopath as portrayed so chillingly by Anthony Hopkins. They wanted to see him fix his prey with his creepy gaze, lick his chops, and devour the vitals of a few more deserving victims.

The audiences who flocked to their local multiplexes to watch “Hannibal the Cannibal” disembowel a pesky policeman and dine on the brains of an obnoxious bureaucrat weren’t blood-crazed weirdos. To pretend that it’s just perverts and potential Ted Bundys who are fascinated by serial murder and other sensational crime is the height of hypocrisy. There aren’t enough sociopaths in the country to account for the 300-million-dollar domestic box office take of The Silence of the Lambs. Upstanding, law-abiding citizens are drawn to this gruesome stuff.

Purveyors of popular entertainment have always recognized this fact. “I’m going to give the people what they want,” Vincent Price exclaims in the 1953 horror movie House of Wax. “Sensation, horror, shocks!”

The great pioneer of the wax museum, the nineteenth-century entrepreneur Madame Tussaud, certainly would have approved of this sentiment. With its gruesome torture dioramas and lifelike effigies of infamous murderers, the “Chamber of Horrors” featured at her celebrated London establishment has always been its most popular attraction, far outdrawing the high-minded exhibits of statesmen, ecclesiastical figures, and world-famous writers.

For centuries, pop impresarios have found ways to exploit a truism noted as far back as 1757 by philosopher Edmund Burke that—given a choice between sitting through an opera or watching the public execution of a notorious criminal—the average crowd of people would flock to the latter. When mass murderer Albert Hicks was hanged in 1860, P. T. Barnum paid $25 and two boxes of cigars for the clothing Hicks wore to the gallows and promptly put it on display. One of Barnum’s competitors went the “master showman” one better. Acquiring the amputated right arm of another infamous mass murderer

—Philadelphia handyman Anton Probst who massacred all seven members of his employer’s family in 1865—he exhibited the severed limb at his Bowery dime museum, where it drew enormous crowds.

Neither Barnum nor his rivals, moreover, had the slightest compunction about wringing every last nickel from such macabre “curiosities,” selling souvenirs in the form of photographic “cartes de visite ” and fully illustrated crime booklets. Indeed, in terms of sheer ghoulishness, many of the killer collectibles from the past far exceeded those of the present. During the Reign of Terror, for example, there was an enormous demand for guillotine-related mementos. Spectators who came to enjoy the daily beheadings could go home with a souvenir program adorned with an image of a severed head, while fashionable women wore guillotine earrings and children played with working toy replicas that could decapitate live mice and birds.

There’s little doubt that some of the serial-killer-related stuff that has incurred the outrage of today’s moral crusaders seriously violates the standards of conventional good taste—board games in which players compete to amass the highest body count, activity books featuring macabre connect-the-dot puzzles and “Help John Wayne Gacy Find an Empty Grave in His Crawl Space” mazes. Indeed, some of this material is deliberately created out of a distinctly juvenile impulse to offend middle-class sensibilities —épater le bourgeois, as they say in France. (The cover of Rich Hillen’s Serial Killer Coloring Book #4 bears the message: “For Immature Colorers Over 18.”) Very little of it, however, actually depicts graphic scenes of hard-core violence.

The once-controversial (now out-of-print) serial killer trading cards published by Eclipse Enterprises, for example, featured handsomely rendered full-face portraits without a suggestion of gore. The card sets still available from Mother Productions of Atwood, California, likewise consist entirely of portraits (done in a playfully expressionistic style that often suggests, quite appropriately, the art of the insane).