hybristophilia (a desire in a female to partner with a male serial killer, one of the few female paraphilias);
necrophilia (sex with a corpse);
sadism (sexual arousal from dominating, humiliating or causing pain to an unwilling subject).
American Nineteenth-Century Serial Killers
In the United States it has been recently claimed that Herman Webster Mudgett (aka H. H. Holmes), the killer who prowled the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, was “America’s first serial killer.”13 He was nothing of the sort.
First, there were many female serial poisoners, like Lydia Sherman, “the American Borgia” (10 victims: 1864–71); Sarah Jane Robinson, “the Poison Fiend” (8 victims: 1881–86); and Jane Toppan, “Jolly Jane” (31 victims: 1885–1901). And there were outlaw profit serial killers preying on frontier settlers and travelers, like the notorious Harpe Brothers in Tennessee in the 1790s or the Bloody Benders and their “murder inn” in Kansas, from 1869 to 1872.
There were also numerous “classic” sexual serial killers pre–H. H. Holmes:
Jesse Pomeroy was arguably America’s first known sexual serial killer (1874), and very likely the youngest, at fourteen years old.14 Pomeroy had already been confined in a juvenile facility for a series of nonfatal assaults on young boys, but after his early release he went on to torture and kill two children in separate incidents. Pomeroy was sentenced to life in prison and died in 1932 at the age of seventy-two in the fifty-sixth year of his sentence.
Joseph LaPage, a serial killer who ambushed and mutilated two women in Vermont and New Hampshire in 1874.
Thomas W. Piper murdered two women and a little girl in 1873, battering them to death and engaging in necrophiliac sex acts. A sexton in a Boston church, Piper lured a five-year-old girl into the belfry where he bludgeoned her into unconsciousness with a cricket bat as her family desperately searched for her in the church below. He had planned on keeping her body there to abuse later, but the girl was found and brought home, where she died of her head wounds. Piper was convicted in two of the murders and executed.
The Servant-Girl Annihilator in Austin, Texas, was an unidentified serial killer who murdered, mutilated and posed his victims’ corpses with sharp objects inserted into their ears. He killed at least seven women (five African American and two white) between 1884 and 1885.
All these cases occurred prior to both Jack the Ripper in England and H. H. Holmes in Chicago. Moreover, while Holmes was a serial killer, he was only convicted in the murder of an insurance fraud accomplice and his three children. Holmes was paid by a newspaper to make a “confession” in its pages to many other murders, none of which were confirmed. While it is true that he owned and operated a hotel and boardinghouse in Chicago, there was no evidence that it was especially designed as a kill house with gas chambers and corpse chutes or that he even murdered anybody in it.15
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Meanwhile, the seminal Jack the Ripper murders suddenly ended in November 1888. But serial killers continued to appear with the same regularity after Jack the Ripper as they had before him in what remained of the nineteenth century. For example:
Dr. Thomas Neill Cream compulsively poisoned at least five women in London between 1881 and 1892 before he was apprehended, tried and hanged.
Joseph Vacher in France was apprehended in 1897 for eleven necrophiliac murders of young boys, girls and women, some working as shepherds in the remote countryside. A migratory serial killer, Vacher opportunistically ambushed his victims as he tramped through multiple police jurisdictions.
Theodore “Theo” Durrant in San Francisco was arrested in 1885 in the necrophiliac murder of two women whose corpses he stashed in a church where he was a sexton.
Serial Murder Around the World: 1900–1950
The Radford University/FGCU (Florida Gulf Coast University) Serial Killer Database is one of the most comprehensive statistical surveys of serial murder cases reported around the world.
According to the database, between 1900 and 1950, 5 to 6 new serial killers were reported in the United States each year, an average of 55 per decade for a total of 273.16
The number of serial killers outside the US during the same period, primarily in Europe, was roughly half the number, approximately 25 new serial killers per decade. The Radford/FGCU database is incomplete, as it often relies on news reports of past serial murders, and thus non-European regions where archived news reports might be more obscure and inaccessible to researchers are inevitably underrepresented. But the Radford/FGCU database is the best we currently have and at least represents the history of serial killing as it appeared primarily in the pages of contemporary newspapers.
European serial killers continued to make sporadic appearances in the first half of the twentieth century, with a “hot spot” in the chaos and degradation of post–World War I Germany.
Fritz Haarmann, one of the earliest twentieth-century gay serial killers on record, raped and murdered twenty-seven young men in Hanover between 1918 and 1924. Haarmann, who was a police agent and private investigator, lured schoolboys or drifters from the Hanover railway station back to his apartment. There he attacked his victims and killed them by chewing through their throats. It was rumored he sold their flesh to local butcher shops and restaurants claiming it was pork. (The selling of the victim’s flesh was a frequent and unproven rumor in European serial killer cases.)
Peter Kürten, “the Vampire of Düsseldorf,” stabbed, strangled and battered at least nine and maybe as many as thirty victims between 1913 and 1930. Sometimes Kürten’s victims went willingly with him to have sex, during which he would suddenly attack them with a knife. At other times, Kürten ambushed his victims, frequently children, on the streets and in parks. Kürten was executed in 1931.
Georg Karl Grossman is believed to have killed as many as fifty people between 1913 and 1920 and sold their flesh at a hot dog stand he kept at the railway station in Berlin. He apparently found his victims in the same station where he sold their remains to hungry passengers. He committed suicide, however, when he was arrested, and thus his crimes remain obscured in myth and gossip.
Karl Denke, an innkeeper in Silesia, was arrested in 1924 after attempting to murder a vagrant, and committed suicide in his cell. When police searched his inn, they found the dismembered remains of at least thirty men and women.
Serial murders in Germany, Italy and France are as well-documented as in Britain and America; but one can only imagine how many still-undigitized eastern European and Scandinavian newspapers contain yet-to-be-discovered reports. Then there is serial homicide in Africa, Asia or South and Central America, where there is no reason to believe rates of serial killing were less than Europe’s. Take, for example, this striking case in Morocco.
In April 1906, Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi was charged with murdering thirty-six young women and girls. Mesfewi was an elderly cobbler and letter writer for illiterate customers.17 After parents of a missing girl lodged a complaint with authorities, search parties found twenty-six girls buried beneath the floor of his workshop, beheaded and mutilated with a knife, while another ten were buried in an adjoining yard. The girls came to dictate letters, were offered drugged tea and then were beheaded and dismembered, all apparently for their meager property. Mesfewi’s seventy-year-old wife, Annah, confessed under torture (from which she died) to being his accomplice.
Mesfewi was sentenced to daily flogging in the Marrakesh market square.
After about three weeks, when it appeared that Mesfewi was on the brink of death, he was treated and restored for his final sentence, execution on Monday, June 11, the market day.
Masons had earlier excavated a six-by-two-foot-deep space in the massive Marrakesh city wall that flanks the market. After the crowds had gathered to watch, Mesfewi was led to
the space in the wall. Chains were installed in wall recesses in order that Mesfewi remained erect and would not slump out of view of the crowd. Mesfewi shrieked and screamed as he was chained into position. For several hours, the crowd was allowed to view him, shout insults and curses, and pelt him with excrement and animal offal. Then the masons, with great ceremony, laid down rows of stones until only Mesfewi’s head was visible, and after the jailer fed him a final ration of bread and water, the last stones were thrust into place, entombing Mesfewi completely except for a small slit for air; nobody wanted Mesfewi to die too quickly.
The crowd could hear Mesfewi screaming from inside his tomb and shouted back. On Tuesday, the crowds gathered again to listen to Mesfewi scream and beg to be put to a quick death. On Wednesday morning, only moans could be heard, and by the end of the day, he was dead, cursed by the crowds for dying too soon.
The story of Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi made world news from May to July 1906, and then was forgotten almost forever. There are probably hundreds of such stories of serial killing in the Baltics, Russia, central Asia, China, the Pacific islands, the African continent, Amazonian South America, Central America, and into the backwashes of the American frontier, its melting-pot cities, and the Great White North of Canada. Hundreds probably, all forgotten today, never microfilmed, perhaps only reported in the pages of some small local newspaper, now a yellowed scrap crumbling to dust behind an old attic ceiling or in some obscure archive waiting to be purged and pulped.
Serial Murder in the United States: 1900–1950
In the first fifty years of the twentieth century, the incidence of serial murder in the United States was low. If we include female serial killers and profit killers, a total of 273 serial killers made their appearance over the span of those fifty years, an average of 5.4 new serial killers every year.18
According to historian Philip Jenkins, the serial killer “epidemic” of the 1970s was preceded by two smaller serial killer “epidemics” during which there were unusually high rates of serial homicides in the United States: 1911 to 1915 and 1935 to 1941.19
The First Serial Killer Epidemic
Looking through the New York Times, Jenkins was able to find reports of at least seventeen serial killers in the five years between 1911 and 1915.
Henry Lee Moore, for example, was eventually linked to the murders of more than twenty-five people in 1911 and 1912—sometimes entire families. But little is known about him; he is a mere footnote in history.
In September 1911, thirty-seven-year-old Moore is said to have killed six victims in Colorado Springs—a man, two women and four children; in October, three people in Monmouth, Illinois; and then a family of five in Ellsworth, Kansas, in the same month. In June 1912, he is suspected in the murder of a couple in Paola, Kansas, and several days later, an entire family of eight, including four children, in Villisca, Iowa.
Moore then returned home to Columbia, Missouri, where in December 1912 he murdered his mother and grandmother in order to take possession of their house and marry a fifteen-year-old teenager he had been corresponding with. At this point, he was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. Moore was not immediately linked to the previous crimes until a federal agent investigating the Villisca homicides was informed by the agent’s father, a warden of the Leavenworth Penitentiary with contacts throughout the prison system, of Henry Lee Moore’s crimes in Missouri. The suspicions about Moore’s twenty-five additional murders were avidly covered in the newspapers at the time, but there was insufficient evidence to charge him.
Moore was released on July 30, 1956, at the age of eighty-two, and was last reported living at a Salvation Army center in St. Louis before vanishing from the historical record.
An unidentified Atlanta serial killer between May 1911 and May 1912 is suspected in the murder and Jack-the-Ripper-style mutilations of twenty biracial or light-skinned African American women. Between May 20 and July 1, 1911, the unknown killer murdered the first seven victims, one every Saturday night like clockwork.
A Denver and Colorado Springs serial killer in 1911 and 1912 bludgeoned seven women to death with the perpetrator caught.
A Texas and Louisiana serial killer between January 1911 and April 1912 killed forty-nine victims in a series of unsolved axe murders. Very similar to the Moore murders, entire families were wiped out: a mother and her three children hacked to death in their beds in Rayne, Louisiana, in January 1911; ten miles away in Crowley, Louisiana, three members of the Byers family in February 1911; two weeks later, a family of four in Lafayette. In April, the killer struck in San Antonio, Texas, killing a family of five. In November 1911, the killer returned to Lafayette and killed a family of six; in January 1912, a woman and her three children were killed in Crowley. Two days later, at Lake Charles, a family of five was killed, and a note was left behind: “When He maketh the Inquisition for Blood, He forgetteth not the cry of the humble—human five.” In February 1912, the killer murdered a woman and her three children in Beaumont, Texas. In March, a man and a woman and her four children were hacked to death in Glidden, Texas. In April, a family of five was killed in San Antonio again, and two nights later, three were killed in Hempstead, Texas. The murders were never solved, and the case has only recently been explored at length by Todd C. Elliott, in Axes of Evil: The True Story of the Ax-Man Murders.
In New York City, on March 19, 1915, the East Side Ripper killed and mutilated Lenora Cohn, a five-year-old girl sent by her mother on an errand inside her apartment building on the Lower East Side. On May 3, he killed and mutilated four-year-old Charles Murray, who was playing in a hallway of his First Avenue tenement, and stuffed his body under a staircase. He sent taunting letters to the victim’s mother and the police, signing himself “H. B. Richmond, Jack-the-Ripper” and threatening to kill again. The offender was never identified but might have been the notorious Albert Fish (see below).
Again in New York City in 1915, the corpses of fifteen newborn infants were recovered, suspected to be linked to some sort of “baby farm” operation. That same year, six bodies with their skulls crushed were found hidden in a farmhouse being demolished in Niagara, North Dakota. The victims, who were dropped into the basement through a clever trapdoor, were all farmhands who had been employed by the homeowner. There were numerous hospital and nursing home serial murders and female poisoners rounding out the number of serial killers in this period.
These murders were all spectacular crimes, some widely reported in their time, others not, but all mostly forgotten today. Jack the Ripper with his five or six victims is immortalized, but the Louisiana-Texas axe murderer with forty-nine victims is entirely forgotten. The primary difference is that London in 1888 was the center of a huge global English-language newspaper industry, while North Dakota, Louisiana and Texas were not. The story of Jack the Ripper was retold endlessly and entered popular myth and literature—while the Louisiana-Texas axe murderer faded from public consciousness. Like real estate, serial murder “epidemics” are all about location, location, location, more so than they are about the number of victims.
The 1916–1934 Serial Killer Interlude
Once the United States went to war in Europe in 1917, there appeared to be a lull in reports of sexual serial killing at home. After World War I, the affluent “Roaring Twenties” was a Jazz Age of celebrity gangsters, spates of kidnappings, lynch mob race rioting and wanton thrill killing like the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder in Chicago in 1924.
Overall murder in the United States increased by 77 percent between 1920 and 1933.20 Oddly, sexual serial killing still went on at the same rate as before, but it was now relegated to page six in the newspapers, even while it was becoming pathologically weirder, with increasing reports of necrophilia and bizarre fetishes creeping into the murders. Paradoxically, it was during this “interlude” period between the two surges that some of the more infamous historical cases of serial homicide occurred.
Earle Leonard
Nelson, “Dark Strangler” or “Gorilla Killer,” United States and Canada, 1926–1927
Born to parents who both died of syphilis by the time he was two, Earle Nelson was raised by a severe Pentecostal grandmother. Typical of some serial killers, Nelson suffered a major head injury when at the age of ten he was hit by a streetcar. After that his behavior was said to have changed. What that might mean in serial killer psychopathology we are only now beginning to understand.
Reports of serial killers having childhood head injuries followed by dramatic behavioral change are frequent. But it was only in the 2000s that we began to better understand the relationship between injury to the frontal lobe paralimbic nodes in the brain and behavioral disorders like psychopathy. Forensic psychologist Kent A. Kiehl, after developing deep MRI scanning software and scanning the brains of more than ten thousand incarcerated psychopaths over a fifteen-year period, concluded,
If you damage a part of the paralimbic system, you can acquire a psychopathic personality. As a group, paralimbic brain damaged patients are characterized by problems with aggression, motivation, empathy, planning and organization, impulsivity, irresponsibility, poor insight, and lack of behavioral controls. In some cases, paralimbic brain damaged patients may become prone to grandiosity and confabulation.
These are all symptoms that we see in psychopaths. Damage to some areas of the paralimbic system are not that uncommon. For example, when the brain is slammed forward against the front part of the skull, it can rub against the bony ridge that exists right above the eyes. This rubbing can damage the orbital frontal cortex of the brain. This is the type of injury that can occur in football players who suffer repeated concussions. Whether due to a single event or to the cumulative impact of multiple head traumas, individuals who damage their orbital frontal cortex can end up developing problems. . . . It is this reality that is just beginning to be recognized by former National Football League players as a potential occupational risk to their sport.21
American Serial Killers Page 3