The Serial Killer Files (9 page)

By contrast, serial murder perpetrated by minors is an exceptionally rare phenomenon. The most infamous case in American history is that of Jesse Harding Pomeroy, the Boston “Boy Fiend,” whose criminal career began when he was twelve. During a nine-month reign of terror that began in December 1871, Pomeroy lured a string of smaller boys to remote locations in Chelsea and South Boston, then bound, beat, and tortured them. Arrested and shipped to reform school, he was released after less than seventeen months; whereupon he promptly committed a pair of appalling mutilation-murders on a ten-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy. Pomeroy was only fourteen when he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. A controversy immediately erupted over the morality of executing a minor, and his sentence was ultimately commuted to life. He lived until 1932, having spent just over forty years of his nearly sixty-year incarceration in solitary confinement—the second-longest such stretch in US penal history.

Jesse Pomeroy

Though Pomeroy began torturing children when he was twelve, he didn’t graduate to homicide until he was fourteen—which makes Craig Price of Warwick, Rhode Island, the youngest serial killer in US

history. During the late 1980s, at the age of thirteen, the black youth—who had been “peeping” on a neighborhood woman named Rebecca Spencer—broke into her house and killed her with a kitchen knife. Two years later, he stabbed to death another local woman, Joan Heaton, and her two daughters, ages eight and ten. Dubbed the “Slasher of Warwick,” he was arrested when a detective noticed a large cut on his hand. Freely confessing to the murders, he was sent to the state prison in Cranston and is scheduled for parole in 2019.

Mary Bell, the British Bad Seed

The savage murder of a pair of preschoolers by a psychopathic killer who exults in the atrocities is appalling enough. But when that killer turns out to be a child, too—and, even more shockingly, an eleven-year-old girl with a heart-shaped face and big blue eyes—the crime is guaranteed to set off an explosion of horror, outrage, and stunned disbelief. This is precisely what happened in the summer of 1968, when Britain was rocked by the case of Mary Bell, arguably the most notorious juvenile psycho-killer of the twentieth century.

Because of her youth and angelic appearance, Mary has sometimes been described as the British Bad Seed—a reference to the 1956 movie about a pretty, pigtailed schoolgirl whose picture-perfect exterior conceals the heart of a psychopathic monster. The comparison is only partially valid. The fictional “Bad Seed” was raised in a loving, stable household by a devoted Mommy and Daddy. Her evil was innate.

Mary Bell, by contrast, was made into a monster. Raised by a viciously depraved young prostitute, the little girl was allegedly subjected to unimaginable abuse, held down by her mother while strange men sexually brutalized her. In light of the soul-deforming horrors she suffered from her earliest years, it is little wonder that Mary Bell herself became a cold-blooded predator.

During her nightmarish childhood, she manifested the classic symptoms that experts see as a predictor of serial murder: cruelty to animals, abnormally prolonged bed-wetting, and vandalism (though not, as is often the case, pyromania). That she cannot technically be classified as a serial killer—at least according to the FBI’s definition—is only because her victim count fell one short of the minimum. However, there is little doubt that Bell would have continued taking lives had she been able to.

Her violent attacks on other children began during the second week of May 1968, when, within twenty-four hours, she and her best friend Norma assaulted four little acquaintances in Scottswood, a dreary, economically depressed industrial community in northern England. Ten days later, on May 25, the body of three-year-old Martin Brown was found in a derelict house, blood and saliva bubbling from his mouth. It was Mary who excitedly ran to tell the boy’s aunt, Rita Finley. In the succeeding days, Mary and Norma showed up repeatedly at Mrs. Finley’s house to plague her with tormenting questions: “Do you miss Martin?” “Do you cry for him?” Finally—unable to stand it any longer—the grieving woman

threw the grinning children out of her house and told them never to return.

Portrait of Mary Bell by Joe Coleman

Two days after the discovery of Martin’s body, the local nursery was vandalized by intruders, who left the place a wreck. Amid the debris, police found four taunting notes written in a childish hand, including one that read:

we did

murder

Martain

brown

Fuckof

you Bastard

Two months passed. On Wednesday, July 31, another three-year-old Scottswood boy, Brian Howe, went missing. When his worried older sister Pat went looking for him, she ran into Mary Bell and Norma, who eagerly offered to help search for the toddler. Mary led the girl to a stretch of industrial waste ground where local children liked to play and where Brian’s corpse was later discovered between two concrete blocks. The little boy had been strangled and sexually mutilated with a broken pair of scissors that lay nearby. The letter “M” had been carved into his naked belly with razor.

Before long, investigators focused their suspicions on Mary and Norma. At Brian’s funeral on August 7, Chief Inspector James Dobson kept his eye on Mary Bell. “I watched her as she stood in front of the Howes’ house while the coffin was brought out,” he would later explain. “That was when I knew I couldn’t risk another day. She stood there laughing, laughing and rubbing her hands. I thought, My God, I’ve got to bring her in or she’ll do another one.”

Brought to the police station for questioning, Mary and Norma accused each other of the murder of Brian Howe. The two girls were brought to trial in December. After nine days, Norma was acquitted, while Mary—labeled a cunning, remorseless psychopath by experts—was sentenced to “detention for life.”

Her later life has been marked by periodic controversy and public uproar. At first, she was placed in a reform school, where—within two years—she accused a housemaster of sexual assault. Later, she was transferred to a prison, where she declared herself a lesbian and paraded around with a rolled-up stocking stuffed in the crotch of her pants. In 1977, she was transferred to a less secure facility, from which she promptly escaped. Though she was quickly captured again, she was at large long enough to lose her virginity to a young man who later sold his story to the tabloids. Shortly before her parole in 1980, she was moved to a halfway house, where she promptly managed to get pregnant by a married man. She aborted that pregnancy, but became a mother in 1984 after her release from jail. She eventually settled in a small town but was driven out by angry residents when they discovered her true identity. The quiet, anonymous life she finally managed to construct for herself and her child was shattered in 1998 with the publication of Gitta Sereny’s Cries Unheard, which ignited a firestorm when the author disclosed that she had paid the onetime child-murderer for her participation.

Overaged serial killers are just as rare as juvenile ones. Albert Fish—arguably the most perverted figure in the annals of American crime—was a genuine geriatric monster. In 1928, the gaunt, grandfatherly-looking Fish lured a twelve-year-old girl to an abandoned house in Westchester, New York, then strangled her, butchered her body, and carried away several pounds of her flesh, which he proceeded to make into a stew and consume in a state of extreme sexual excitation over the course of a week. He was finally captured after sending an unspeakable letter to the little girl’s mother, in which he gloatingly described every atrocity he had perpetrated on the child. He was electrocuted in 1936 at the age of sixty-five, becoming the oldest man ever put to death in Sing Sing.

Recommended Reading:

Jonathan Kellerman, Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children (1999) D. Lassiter, Killer Kids (1998)

Cliff Linedecker, Killer Kids (1993)

The vast majority of sadistic lust-murderers are heterosexual men, venting their virulent hatred of women on prostitutes, coed hitchhikers, and other female victims of opportunity. Gays, however, aren’t exempt from this psychopathology. Some of the most infamous serial killers of recent times have been homosexual men: John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Dean Corll, Dennis Nilsen.

Though gays constitute only a small minority of serial killers—about 5 percent, according to the most informed estimates—they are even more prone to “overkill” than their straight counterparts, indulging in the most horrific extremes of torture, mutilation, and dismemberment. They are also among the most prolific of serial killers. The sheer promiscuity of their crimes is a kind of grotesque mirror of the untrammeled sexual lifestyle embraced by so many gay men in the pre-AIDS era of the 1970s.

Why homosexual serial killers as a group should be especially sadistic is an interesting question, though one element is surely the prevailing homophobia of American society, which causes many gay men to grow up with a deep-seated sense of self-hatred, a violent homophobia of their own. When these feelings are combined with the psychopathology of a serial killer, the results can be particularly appalling.

Randy Kraft

Though less notorious than some of his psychopathic peers, Randy Kraft—aka the “Scorecard Killer”—committed atrocities every bit as horrendous as those of John Wayne Gacy or Dean Corll. And his victim count allegedly surpassed those of both.

An exceptionally bright man who grew up in ultraconservative Orange County, California, Kraft embraced right-wing politics in his teens, joining the ROTC and demonstrating in favor of the Vietnam War. As the sixties progressed, however, he did an about-face, growing his hair long and switching political allegiances to the left. He also “came out” as a gay man. It was during the freewheeling 1970s that he embarked on his sinister secret life. While working by day as a highly paid computer consultant, he spent his nights cruising for male pickups, who would, with terrifying regularity, end up as hideously violated corpses.

Between October 1971 and his arrest twelve years later, Kraft murdered an estimated sixty-seven young men, ranging in age from thirteen to thirty. The victims—whose corpses were generally dumped beside California freeways—had typically been subjected to unspeakable tortures. Some were castrated; others had swizzle sticks or other pencil-sized objects shoved up their penises; still others had been sodomized with everything from toothbrushes to tree branches. At least one had his eyes burned with a cigarette lighter. Many had their nipples gnawed off.

Early on the morning of May 14, 1983, Kraft was pulled over for drunk driving by two California Highway Patrol officers, who were startled to discover a strangled young man in the passenger seat.

Searching Kraft’s vehicle, they found, stashed under a floormat, forty-seven Polaroids of naked young men who appeared to be either dead or unconscious. Inside the trunk was an attaché case containing a coded list that turned out to be Kraft’s meticulously recorded “scorecard” of murder victims. After a long-delayed and protracted trial, he was convicted of sixteen counts of murder and now awaits execution in San Quentin prison.

Kraft made the news again in 1993, when he filed a 60-million-dollar lawsuit against the author of a book about his case, claiming that the writer had unfairly portrayed him as a “sick, twisted man” and ruined his “prospects for future employment.” Apparently the judge did not feel that the condemned serial killer’s job prospects were as bright as Kraft did. His suit was dismissed.

There’s nothing wrong with him, other than he likes killing for sexual satisfaction.

—Prosecutor Bryan Brown on Randy Kraft

William Bonin

During the very same period that Randy Kraft was racking up his appalling body count, another gay serial killer, William Bonin, was at large in Southern California.

Bonin endured the kind of nightmarish childhood so often found in the case histories of serial killers.

His father was a brutal drunk who once gambled away the family home, routinely beat his wife and children, then died from cirrhosis of the liver when Bonin was a little boy. His mother—who spent most of her time playing Bingo—totally neglected her sons, frequently leaving them in the care of her father, a known pedophile who had sexually abused his own children while they were growing up.

At eight years old, Bonin was arrested for stealing license plates and sent to a reformatory. There, he was sexually molested by other juvenile inmates, as well as by at least one adult counselor. From that point on, according to one authority, he developed “an unstinting, often schizophrenic, interest in pedophilia.” Released from detention, he returned to his Connecticut home, where he promptly began molesting his younger brothers and other neighborhood children.

Joining the Air Force, Bonin served as an aerial gunner in Vietnam, won a good conduct medal, and was given an honorable discharge. Unbeknownst to his superiors, his tour of duty included two incidents in which he had sexually assaulted other men at gunpoint.

Returning to the States, he moved to Southern California and almost immediately plunged into his life of depravity. In 1969, he was arrested after sodomizing five underage boys. Deemed a “mentally disordered sex offender,” he was sent to Atascadero State Hospital, where he spent the next five years.

Sixteen months after his release in 1974, he was arrested again for raping a fourteen-year-old boy at gunpoint. For that offense, he spent three more years behind bars. He got out in 1978, but in less than a year was arrested again, this time for assaulting a seventeen-year-old hitchhiker. Through a bureaucratic screwup, however, Bonin was almost immediately set free.

“No one’s ever going to testify again,” he vowed to the friend who drove him home from jail. “This is never going to happen to me again.”

Making good on that threat, Bonin made sure that none of his next nearly two dozen victims lived to identify their attacker. Cruising the highways in his drab green Chevy van—sometimes alone, often with an accomplice—he would pick up a teenage hitchhiker, drive to a remote spot, sodomize and kill the boy, then dump the body along the freeway. Generally, the victims were strangled with their own T-shirts, which were wrapped around their necks and twisted, tourniquet-like, with a tire iron. Sometimes, they were subjected to other tortures as well: ice picks jammed into their ears, acid poured down their throats, coat hangers thrust up their rectums. Between August 1979 and June 1980, twenty-one young men died at the hands of the sadistic fiend whom the press dubbed the “Freeway Killer.”