American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  The late author Colin Wilson described, for example, how emergent Victorian-era puritanism changed the erotic imagination and nature of pornography in Britain. Earlier, pornography, like John Cleland’s notorious 1748 novel Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, had portrayed women as lustfully indulging in sexual pleasure as much as males, seducing the male as frequently as the other way around. But in the Victorian age, female celibacy and virginity became a primary pillar of social order and class values. Britain introduced the Obscene Publications Act in 1857 outlawing the publishing and distribution of erotic literature portraying women willfully indulging in sex, classifying it as obscenity subject to criminal penalties and confiscation. As pornography went underground in the new puritanical age, women were no longer portrayed as willfully pursuing sex with a lustful appetite but instead as victims forced to breach their Victorian chastity. They became, in other words, sex “objects.” Increasingly, pornography, and popular literature, portrayed unmarried women having sex only if they were forced into it, bound, battered and raped. (While married women only did it out of duty, gritting their teeth.) In this new emerging pornography, sex became something women experienced only against their will and often as children. Sex, seduction, bondage, force and pain became interconnected. It introduced narratives of abduction, bondage, enslavement and flagellation, and the more chaste the girl or woman subjected to forcible sex, the more unwilling she was, the more attractive she was as the “sex object” of the pornographic fantasy.2 The cultural abolition of female sexual desire was the first step in transforming women into “pure” objects of male desire, including that of serial killers.

  Those early pathological sex murderers who were making their appearance were often apprehended after their first killing or two, before they got a chance to serially repeat their offenses over a longer period. (Like the infamous murder and dismemberment of eight-year-old Fanny Adams in Britain in 1867 by Frederick Baker, who was apprehended the same day after making a journal entry “Killed a young girl. It was fine and hot”; or the two mutilation murders by Joseph LaPage in 1875.) Only a handful went on to become prolonged serial Rippers. The psychopathology of these offenders and the nature of their acts would be very similar to those of future serial killers, except they were being apprehended relatively quickly. They were like homicidal baby birds learning to fly, able to wing out of their nest of fantasies but unable to stay aloft the distance. They either lacked imagination and sophistication to continually get away with their crimes, or somehow their mental “scripting” did not include the possibility of living a double life as a serial murderer, or maybe they did not have enough role models. Also, society was less anonymous and murderers were quickly exposed by attracting attention to themselves in a pretelevision era, when people were out congregating in public, going to the theater and later movies, sitting on their front porch or stoop, flocking to parks, saloons and diners, visible, easily identified by neighbors in a simpler world with fewer people in it. But individual occurrences of extreme sex murders would essentially set the bedrock for future serial murders; the only thing left was for the pathological murder to be repeated serially. From Jesse Pomeroy’s torture of child victims in Boston, reported to have been inspired by dime novel tales of “Indian torture,” to the mutilation cannibal murders by Albert Fish in New York “facilitated” (as the FBI terms it) by popular tales of South Pacific cannibalism and biblical passages, a new breed of sexual murderers was emerging: some serial, some not, and all feeding on new ideas, themes and fetishes, new ways of thinking and new ways of moving around through new social customs and mores.

  In the US during the 1930s, California would incubate a string of notorious extreme sexual homicide cases that would eventually set the framework and “script” for many of the serial killers to come. There is no exact answer as to why a rash of these murders occurred in California in particular. Serial murders at different points in time sometimes cluster in regions—the Pacific Northwest, Florida, Nevada, Louisiana and Alaska, for example, had periods when there were disproportionate increases in serial killers compared to other regions. Maybe California in the 1930s had its surge because at the time it was almost as puritanical as Victorian Britain, at least compared to a more cosmopolitan New York. But that alone would not explain why California would become a hot spot again in the 1970s and 1980s when it was the mecca of the new age of progressive freethinking. Overall, with more than seventy serial killers cataloged by Eric Hickey between 1800 and 2011, California remains the leading state for the number of serial killers.3

  “San Diego Girl Murders” or “The Modern Girl Murders,” San Diego, 1929–1938

  Some newspapers speculated that these six unsolved sexual murders were perpetrated by the same killer, although in the end this was never conclusively determined. Some of the girls were independent and dated freely and were dubbed “modern girls” by the press, seeking to link their “immorality” to their deaths (even though the youngest was ten years old and the oldest of the “girls” was forty-three). Looking at the cases today, I consider it unlikely that the same perpetrator committed them all. The third murder, however, was notable for the bizarre, fetishistic crime scene.

  Seventeen-year-old Louise Teuber was a store clerk living at home. The press described her as a “butterfly,” a girl who dated a variety of men. On Saturday, April 18, 1931, Louise quit her job, telling her employer she “was going away” without specifying where or with whom. A letter to her father would arrive by special delivery on Monday, in which the girl wrote, “Dear Dad, I have tried for a long time to be satisfied with the way you are running the house and I can stand it no longer. I am leaving home tonight and I am not coming back.” It was postmarked at 7:00 p.m. Saturday. By the time the letter arrived, Louise was already dead.

  Her body was found by picnickers in Black Mountain Park. Louise was naked except for a pair of gray silk stockings and black pumps. She was hanging at the end of a rope thrown over an oak tree branch and secured to a large bush, in a semi-seated position, her buttocks suspended about a foot above the ground and her legs extended forward, her heels resting on the ground. The rope around her neck was secured with a sailor’s double half hitch knot. Her clothes were found neatly folded nearby on an Army blanket, along with a package containing a bra and a pair of hose purchased Saturday evening. When found Sunday, Louise was estimated to have been dead for about eight hours.

  There was no evidence of penetrative rape, but skin was found under her fingernails, indicating she had fought with her murderer. She had also sustained a severe blow to her head.

  In her diary, Louise described dating some fifteen men, including a married commercial photographer who shot suggestive photographs of her. None of them could be conclusively connected to her murder, and it remains unsolved.

  The other “San Diego Girl Murders” were:

  Virginia Brooks, ten, who disappeared on her way to school on February 11, 1931. Her dismembered body was discovered on March 10 in a burlap bag under a clump of sagebrush, clutching several strands of blond hair in her hand. Police could not determine the exact cause of death due to the dismemberment but believed it was a blow to the head.

  Dolly Bibbens, forty-three, was found four days after Louise Teuber, on April 23, 1931, in her apartment, strangled with a towel, beaten and her throat slashed. Although a diamond ring had been viciously torn off her finger, the rest of her jewelry had not been taken, ruling out robbery as the motive.

  Hazel Bradshaw, twenty-two, was found May 3, 1931, by Boy Scouts at Indian Village in Balboa Park, stabbed and slashed seventeen times (seven knife wounds were defensive wounds on her hands). A boyfriend was charged with her murder but acquitted in a jury trial.

  Celia Cota, sixteen, was reported missing by her father after going out for a short walk on the evening of August 17, 1934. Her body was found the following morning in the backyard of her home clutching
strands of gray hair in her hands. She had been strangled and raped.

  Ruth Muir, thirty-five years old, a YMCA worker from Riverside, California, was found near a beachside bench, raped and battered to death, on September 1, 1936.

  Albert Dyer, “Inglewood Babes Murders,” Los Angeles, 1937

  Up to now, most serial murder profiling was undertaken by the newspaper reporters trying to link unsolved murders with similar characteristics. The first apparent attempt by American police to psychologically profile an unknown subject in a sexual homicide case took place in 1937, with the rape-murders of three little girls aged six, eight, and nine found strangled in the Baldwin Hills ravine in Inglewood, Los Angeles. Their shoes were neatly set out by each corpse and became an iconic image for the press of a world beginning to go mad.

  Inglewood by the mid-1930s was considered a “utopian paradise” for the working class, with Centinela Park and its swimming pool and playgrounds a safe haven for local children to play in. This was still an innocent era when parents had no trouble letting their children leave their eyesight, despite the occasional reports of child abductions and murders.

  The three girls had been seen Saturday morning in a nearby park playing there as they often did. Shortly before they vanished, they told a swimming pool attendant they were going to go look for “bunny rabbits” with somebody. Their bodies would be found two days later by search parties in a ravine about two miles from the park.

  New Orleans–born psychiatrist Dr. J. Paul de River was employed by the Los Angeles probation department assessing parolees when the LAPD asked him to view the crime scene and offer any insight into the character and possible identity of the unknown child rapist-murderer. De River ventured the following profile:

  Look for one man, probably in his twenties, a pedophile who might have been arrested before for annoying children. He is a sadist with a super-abundance of curiosity. He is very meticulous and probably now remorseful, as most sadists are very apt to be masochistic after expressing sadism. The slayer might have a religious streak and even become prayerful. Moreover, he is a spectacular type and has done this thing, not on sudden impulse, but as a deliberately planned affair. I am of the opinion that he had obtained the confidence of these little girls. I believe they knew the man and trusted him.4

  A number of the “usual suspects,” that is, bachelor men and Mexican migrants, were brought in for questioning but cleared. Then a week after the murders, thirty-two-year-old Albert Dyer, a uniformed crossing guard, came into the Inglewood Police Station ranting and raving about being harassed by the police for the murders.

  Police had indeed questioned Dyer when a witness reported seeing him lurking around Centinela Park, but he was cleared after he claimed to have been gardening at home on the day the girls disappeared. When the bodies of the girls were discovered, Dyer showed up at the crime scene in the ravine, wearing his crossing guard uniform and badge, trying to give instructions on how to move the girls’ bodies and haranguing bystanders who were smoking near the scene for being disrespectful to the victims. All week long he had been making a nuisance of himself, bringing in tips on possible suspects and inquiring frequently on the progress of the investigation.

  Now police gave Dyer a second look and brought him in for another round of questioning. Before long, he confessed, telling police that he had been fantasizing for years about having sex with a young girl, that he had always wanted “something tight and young” but that he “would rather they be dead so that he would not hurt them.” Dyer staked out the park, where he saw children frequently playing and prepared his rope. The familiar, friendly crossing guard then approached the three girls and invited them to meet him later in the afternoon and go with him to “look for bunnies” in the Baldwin Hills. After strangling the girls one by one, he vaginally raped their three corpses and anally raped two of them. Dyer then arranged the girls’ shoes neatly by their bodies, in order that whoever found them, according to his confession, would “think that the children had been orderly to the last.” Then, just as de River had estimated in his profile, Dyer knelt next to each dead girl and said a prayer: “God please save the soul of this child, and save my soul, and forgive me for what I have done.”5

  Albert Dyer was convicted and executed by hanging in September 1938.

  In 2018, lawyer and former journalist Pamela Everett, the niece of two of the victims, wrote a new account of the case, Little Shoes: The Sensational Depression-Era Murders That Became My Family’s Secret, in which she presents very compelling—but inconclusive—arguments that Dyer might have been innocent. For example, Dyer did not own a car, and Everett is skeptical that the little girls would have walked two miles to a place they had never been before, even in a quest for “bunny rabbits.”

  Otto Wilson, “Walking Dead Murders,” Los Angeles, 1944

  On Tuesday, November 15, 1944, police responded to the report of a mutilated female body found by staff at the seedy Barclay Hotel on the corner of West 4th and South Main Streets in downtown Los Angeles. The hotel stood on the fringe of the burgeoning skid row that had first risen up in the Depression east of Main Street where it still festers today, hard up tight against the once-elegant Victorian-era Romanesque office buildings, storefronts and movie palaces of early downtown Los Angeles. When it opened in 1897 (as the Van Nuys Hotel), it had been a premier hotel, the first in the city to offer electricity and telephones in all its rooms. But the Barclay had fallen through the hard times of the 1930s into a dollar-a-night fleabag by the 1940s.

  The victim, twenty-six-year-old Virginia “Virgie” Lee Griffin, was a five-dollars-a-trick sex worker, so desperate that she was working at eight o’clock in the morning in a Main Street bar, when according to witnesses she was picked up by a handsome, well-dressed young man with a neatly trimmed mustache who resembled the movie star Robert Taylor. The two checked into the Barclay at 9:00 a.m. as “Mr. and Mrs. O. S. Wilson from Steubenville, Indiana.” At around noon, the man left the hotel alone, on the way out tipping the maid a dollar “to not disturb his wife.” But another maid went in to clean the room, and she would never be the same after what she saw; even some of the hardened cops arriving at the scene later would never get over it.

  The victim was lying naked on the floor of the bathroom, limbs askew and broken, like a puppet cut from its strings. Her torso was vertically cleaved and “cracked” open literally in two, all the way from her left shoulder down to her crotch, which was itself, along with the genitals, entirely excised. The mutilation had been performed with a butcher knife left lying next to her. Her intestines and internal organs had been scooped out in a slimy pumpkin “pulp”-like mass and tossed between her legs—or where “between her legs” would have once been, because one of her legs had been completely severed and flung aside while the other had been hacked deeply just above the knee and folded up almost underneath itself. One of her severed breasts was discarded next to her bent leg. Both of her arms were completely separated from her shoulders but remained in place, connected by a loose strip of flesh and fatty tissue strapped around her back. Her throat was deeply cut, her face and head battered and her torso slashed and stabbed numerous times, her breasts mutilated and severed. It was one of the worst mutilation cases that the LAPD had seen, and is still infamously extreme even by today’s standards.

  Griffin’s killer was thirty-four-year-old Otto Stephen Wilson, a discharged Navy pharmacist’s mate. Wilson had been abandoned by his single mother and raised in an orphanage where his childhood was steeped in rape and abuse. He married but was bisexual. He admitted engaging in rough sex with his wife, biting her and hurting her. Fearing his escalating violence and becoming wary of his fetish for razors and knives, his bruised and bitten wife reported his bisexuality to the Navy, and as a result he was medically discharged in 1941. They separated. Wilson ended up working dead-end jobs as a dishwasher while flopping in skid row rooming houses on East 5th Street in downtown L
A. He later confessed that he began developing a rage toward women and cannibalistic sexual fantasies. In 1943, he attacked a woman entering her apartment house and attempted to strangle her in the stairwell, but she managed to escape. His offense was pleaded down to battery, and he served a six-month sentence. Once released, the urge overtook him again.

  That November morning in 1944, after a two-day drinking binge, Wilson armed himself with his favorite shaving razor, went to a local hardware store and purchased a butcher knife, then went trolling through downtown bars for a victim. At 8:00 a.m. he came across the hapless skid row denizen “Virgie” Griffin, so desperate for a drink that she willingly went to a hotel room with him for the price of five dollars and a few shots of whiskey.

  Once in the room, Wilson set the knife on the dresser out of her sight and the two of them downed two glasses of whiskey each. Wilson stripped naked and folded up his clothing neatly on a chair. He later told police that Virginia suddenly raised her price from five to twenty dollars and that he punched her and strangled her in a rage until she was unconscious or dead. He then slashed her throat and stabbed her in the chest and torso. He bit her around the neck and shoulders and performed cunnilingus on her and bit her between her legs. Afterward, he dragged her body off the bed to the washroom and carved her up into pieces, leaving the knife and its bloodstained wrapping paper and towels crumpled up among the chunks of fatty flesh and slippery intestines spewed out on the floor. After an hour of “playing” with the human pulp, Wilson washed up in the washroom sink, put on his jacket and left.

  Wilson then went to a movie theater around the corner, where he watched The Walking Dead, in which Boris Karloff plays a zombie, a man wrongly executed for murder who is scientifically restored to take vengeance on those responsible for his death. Stepping out at the end of the movie into the bright afternoon light, Wilson was now aglow and feeling mentally disconnected between the fantasy death he’d just watched and the one he had just hours ago perpetrated in reality, far more grotesque than that portrayed in the Karloff zombie movie.