The Serial Killer Files (67 page)

Naturally enough, mass murderers and serial killers—though they were called by other names back then

—were immortalized in ballads, like this one about Lydia Sherman, America’s “Queen Poisoner” who dispatched three husbands, six children, and two stepchildren in the late 1800s: Lydia Sherman is plagued with rats.

Lydia has no faith in cats.

So Lydia buys some arsenic,

And then her husband gets sick;

And then her husband, he does die,

And Lydia’s neighbors wonder why.

Lydia moves, but still has rats;

And still she puts no faith in cats;

So again she buys some arsenic,

This time her children, they get sick,

This time her children, they do die,

And Lydia’s neighbors wonder why.

Lydia lies in Wethersfield jail,

And loudly does she moan and wail.

She blames her fate on a plague of rats;

She blames the laziness of cats.

But her neighbors questions she can’t deny—

So Lydia now in prison must lie.

Belle Gunness, the so-called Lady Bluebeard, was likewise commemorated in a ballad whose first few verses went like this:

Belle Gunness was a lady fair,

In Indiana State.

She weighed about three hundred pounds,

And that is quite some weight.

That she was stronger than a man

Her neighbors all did own;

She butchered hogs right easily,

And did it all alone.

But hogs were just a sideline

She indulged in now and then;

Her favorite occupation

Was a-butchering of men.

Ever since the late 1960s—when the dark id of the counterculture came roaring forth in the form of everything from the Manson murders to Altamont—rock, like every other medium of popular art, has dealt with the figure of the serial killer. Among the classics of this genre are: The Rolling Stones’

“Midnight Rambler” (about the Boston Strangler), Warren Zevon’s creepily sardonic “Excitable Boy,”

and Talking Heads’ “Psycho-Killer.” Even the ultrabenign Beatles recorded “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” an infectious tune about a homicidal maniac whose MO bears a resemblance to that of Peter

“Yorkshire Ripper” Sutcliffe. More recent examples include the Bundy-inspired “Ted, Just Admit It” by Jane’s Addiction, “Killer on the Loose” by Thin Lizzy, and The Blues Traveler’s “Psycho Joe.” Special mention must also be made of Nick Cave’s 1996 Murder Ballads, a powerful updating of the traditional genre.

Some of the more aggressively hard-edged “death metal” bands of recent years have made a career out of singing about serial killers. Foremost among these are Slayer (whose “Dead Skin Mask” is a tribute to Ed Gein) and Macabre, whose discography includes such songs as “Nightstalker,” “The Ted Bundy Song,” “Gacy’s Lot,” and “Edmund Kemper Had a Terrible Temper,” as well as an entire concept album about Jeffrey Dahmer (featuring titles like “Drill Bit Lobotomy” and “Temple of Bones”). Paeans to serial murder can also be found in the oeuvre of 9 Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson (each of whose band

members has adopted the surname of a notorious psycho-killer: Twiggy Ramirez, Madonna Wayne Gacy, Ginger Fish, Gidget Gein, Daisy Berkowitz, and of course the front man himself).

A couple of actual serial killers have tried their hand at songwriting. The most notable is Charles Manson, who actually possesses a certain musical flair. Manson’s best known number, “Look at Your Game, Girl,” set off an uproar when it was included as an unlisted cut on Guns N’ Roses’ 1993

album The Spaghetti Incident? The original version, sung by Charlie himself, appears in the best-known of his several albums, LIE, recorded in August 1968. Another serial-killer-penned song is “Strangler in the Night” by Albert DeSalvo, which appears on the rarity Joe Coleman’s Infernal Machine, an entire album of mayhem-related music that also features such obscure treasures as Red River Dave’s country-western yodel, “California Hippie Murders.”

Poster for the 1980s punk-rock band Ed Gein’s Car

(Courtesy of Timothy Carroll. Art by Scott Weiss.)

On the opposite end of the cultural spectrum are those highbrow works that deal with serial killers. One of the most celebrated is Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, the operatic Grand Guignol musical about the Victorian “Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (who may or may not have been a real person).

Violence has been a crowd-pleasing feature of the motion picture since the medium was invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century. The very first special effect created for the movies was the graphic beheading of an actor (done by means of primitive stop-motion photography) in Thomas Edison’s 1895

peep show short The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Exactly when the psychopathic killer first entered cinematic history is a matter of debate, though one scholar points out that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari— the 1920 classic of German Expressionist cinema—was partly inspired by a real-life case of a pedophiliac sex-murder. Another German silent classic, G. W.

Pabst’s 1929 Pandora’s Box, features a heroine who ends up as a victim of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper case is also the focus of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 The Lodger (remade in 1944).

In 1931, German filmmaker Fritz Lang came out with one of the greatest psycho-killer movies of all time: M, a riveting study of evil starring Peter Lorre as a serial child-killer modeled on the real-life lust-murderer Peter Kürten. The following decade saw the release of several classic movies featuring memorable psycho-killers, including Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 Shadow of a Doubt (reportedly inspired by serial strangler Earle Leonard Nelson), Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1944 Bluebeard, starring ever-creepy John Carradine in the title role, and Henry Hathaway’s 1947 Kiss of Death. Though not technically a serial killer, the villain of the latter film—a giggling hit man named Tommy Udo unforgettably played by Richard Widmark—is one of the most terrifying sociopaths in screen history. Another 1947 movie, Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, is a black comedy about a Parisian Bluebeard modeled on Henri Landru (who was also the subject of a 1963 film by French auteur Claude Chabrol).

The single most frightening cinematic psychopath of the 1950s was undoubtedly the Bible-spouting maniac in Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955), played by Robert Mitchum. (The actor would go on to turn in another unforgettably menacing performance as the implacable Max Cady in the original 1962 version of Cape Fear. ) Another important psycho-film from the 1950s is Edward Dmytryk’s 1952 The Sniper, about a serial shooter who substitutes killing for sex. No fewer than three Jack the Ripper films appeared in the fifties: Room to Let (1950), Man in the Attic (1954), and Jack the Ripper (1959). Saucy Jack would remain the single most popular of all cinematic psychos, appearing in numerous films in succeeding decades, including the nifty little 1979 thriller, Murder by Decree (which pits the Ripper against Sherlock Holmes), the time-travel fantasy Time after Time (which also appeared in 1979 and in which H. G. Wells pursues Jack to modern-day America) and, most recently, the 2001

comic-based period piece, From Hell.

The decade of the 1960s opened with the release of two seminal serial killer films, one a triumph for its director, the other an unmitigated disaster. In America, the stunning commercial success of Hitchcock’s Psycho paved the way for the “slasher” film craze of the 1970s. The story was different in England, where Michael Powell’s now-acclaimed Peeping Tom (1960) — about a sadistic voyeur who films his victims while impaling them with a lethal camera-tripod—sparked such outrage that it effectively ended the distinguished director’s career. The first feature-length film devoted entirely to a sensational, true-life serial murder case appeared near the end of the decade: Richard Brooks’s gritty The Boston Strangler (1968), starring onetime matinee idol Tony Curtis as Albert DeSalvo.

Two equally grim, black-and-white films about notorious serial killers were released at the very start of the 1970s: 10 Rillington Place (1971), about the necrophiliac British psychopath John Reginald Christie, and The Honeymoon Killers (1970), about the ineffably creepy killer couple, Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, aka the “Lonely Hearts Killers.” As the decade progressed, the psycho-killer became an increasingly familiar presence on screen. Notable films include Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 Frenzy (loosely based on the still-unidentified sex killer known as “Jack the Stripper”), Terrence Malick’s 1973 Badlands (based on the murder spree of killer couple Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, whose homicidal exploits also inspired Oliver Stone’s 1994 Natural Born Killers ), and Tobe Hooper’s 1976 Eaten Alive (inspired by homicidal tavern keeper Joe Ball, who fed victims to his pet alligators).

Special mention must also be made of Don Siegel’s 1972 Dirty Harry, which—though a Clint Eastwood action film—contains an unforgettable performance by Andy Robinson as a sniveling psycho (based on the San Francisco Zodiac killer) so utterly detestable that it’s hard not to leap up and cheer when Dirty Harry finally gets around to blasting him with his .44 Magnum.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that the term “serial killer” became part of the common vocabulary and the serial killer film a distinct cinematic genre. Examples range from slick, big-budget Hollywood productions like Kalifornia (1993), Copycat (1995), The Bone Collector (1999), and The Cell (2000) to a recent spate of cheaply made mockumentaries about notorious psycho-killers like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy.

Psycho-cinema: A Deadly Dozen

Though critical judgments are highly subjective, here’s a list of twelve recommended psycho-killer movies, each worthwhile in its own way.

1. Citizen X(1995). This riveting, made-for-cable thriller—about the hunt for the Russian “Mad Beast”

Andrei Chikatilo—deals with a forensic scientist struggling to track down the most savage lust-murderer of modern times while dealing with all the obstacles that the Soviet bureaucracy can put in his way, beginning with the government’s refusal to acknowledge the very existence of the killer.

2. Fear City(1984). A woefully neglected thriller about a psycho-killer stalking topless dancers in New York City. The director, Abel Ferrara, does a highly effective job of capturing the sleazy soul of midtown Manhattan before it turned into a sanitized, Disneyfied tourist destination.

3. Felicia’s Journey(1999). This artful, understated film from director Atom Egoyan—about a pregnant Irish runaway who crosses paths with a pudgy, food-obsessed, seemingly nurturing serial killer (played by Bob Hoskins)—manages to generate nail-biting tension without spilling a single drop of blood.

4. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer(1990). Loosely based on the purported depravities of Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, this small-scale, critically acclaimed movie stands as one of the most harrowing cinematic experiences of all time.

5. Manhunter(1986). Michael Mann’s stylish version of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon (remade under its original title in 2002), with Brian Cox turning in a quietly chilling performance as Hannibal the Cannibal.

6. Maniac(1980). Watching it may be a brutalizing (if not degrading) experience, but this sickeningly gory, low-budget shocker—about a psycho-creep who harvests the scalps of his victims—does a more effective job of evoking the repugnant reality of serial homicide than any slick Hollywood thriller.

7. Rampage(1988). Based on the atrocities of Richard the “Sacramento Vampire” Chase and directed by William Friedkin of Exorcist fame, this movie eventually degenerates into a talky polemic against capital punishment. The first half, though—which recreates Chase’s insanely gruesome crimes—is very powerful stuff.

8. Se7en(1995). Grueling, if artfully made, box office smash about the kind of highly creative serial killer only a Hollywood screenwriter could dream up: a deranged religious fanatic who kills his victims in accordance with the Seven Deadly Sins.

9. The Silence of the Lambs(1991). Jonathan Demme’s blockbuster version of Thomas Harris’s best seller not only generates edge-of-the-seat suspense but managed the startling feat of transforming a cannibalistic psychopath (marvelously incarnated by Anthony Hopkins) into a modern-day pop icon, so bizarrely appealing that audiences demanded to see more of him in two cinematic sequels, Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (2001) and Brett Ratner’s Red Dragon (2002).

10. Summer of Sam(1999). Though not entirely able to live up to its own ambitions, Spike Lee’s 1999

movie deals with those sweltering, tension-charged months in 1976 when New York City was terrorized by David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz. The killings themselves are the backdrop to—not the center of—the action, but the glimpses we get of the ranting Berkowitz, holed up in his squalid lair, are deeply disturbing.

11. The Vanishing(1988). From Holland (of all places) comes this profoundly unsettling film about a young man obsessed with locating his girlfriend, who has been abducted by one of the creepiest psychos ever put on film—a seemingly meek, soft-spoken family man with a taste for unspeakable torture. The ending is absolutely devastating. Warning: Do not confuse with the lame 1993

American remake, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges.

12. The Young Poisoner’s Handbook(1995). Real-life British killer-kid Graham Young was the inspiration for this gruesome black comedy about an adolescent psychopath who uses his family as guinea pigs for his lethal experiments.

Serious writers have grappled with the problem of what we now call psychopathic behavior for many centuries. Iago, the cunning villain of Shakespeare’s Othello, is a classic instance; a frighteningly cold and conscienceless being who cares about nothing but himself and whose malevolence is so well concealed behind a mask of normality that he strikes virtually everyone who knows him as the most honest and trustworthy fellow imaginable. Another example is Melville’s John Claggart: the intelligent, seemingly normal petty officer of Billy Budd who delights in evil for its own sake. Homicidal madmen appear throughout the Gothic short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, though none is more unnerving than the nameless narrator of “The TellTale Heart,” who goes about committing an ultimate atrocity—the murder and dismemberment of his elderly housemate—while insisting on his own perfect sanity.