American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  The psychiatrists concluded all this was “clear proof of the patient’s hysterical personality.” Today the psychiatric wind blows the other way. What psychiatrists in 1946 described as “hysterical personality” today is described as psychopathy.

  In 2014, a study at Université Laval in Quebec resulted in a report entitled “Feeling but Not Caring: Empathic Alteration in Narcissistic Men with High Psychopathic Traits.” It measured and compared both the muscular and brain wave responses to viewing others in pain and experiencing pain itself, comparing a group of non-incarcerated (“outpatient”) diagnosed psychopath narcissists with a group of normatives—that is, “normal” people. An electric probe to the forearm was used to measure cold/heat pain, while pressure pain was measured with a gradual crushing force on the thumbnail of the subject. Reaction to the pain of others was elicited through projected images of people in pain, as measured by electroencephalograph (EEG)—to record brain activity—and electromyograph (EMG)—muscular activity.

  According to the report, when feeling their own pain, both groups had the same response to heat-induced pain, but the psychopath narcissists scored “a significantly higher pressure-pain threshold.”31

  As for viewing others in pain, it was an infinite universe of pleasure for the psychopaths: their muscles and brain waves sparkled and purred like happy kittens.

  Psychopaths, including the serial killing kind, not only have a low level of remorse and empathy but also anxiety, fear and their own pain; they suffer less because they feel less! That’s why they constantly feed on stimulation, excitement, risk and other people’s fear and pain. As one diagnosed psychopath explained:

  People think we have no emotion, which is absolutely not true. We just feel them way turned down. If most people feel an emotion between seven and eight on a dial of ten, I feel it between zero and two. Negative emotions are background noise. We can’t tune into that frequency because our brains just don’t process enough information for them to ever be loud enough to feel or direct behavior. We enjoy things, get excited about things, like adrenaline—that’s great. I laugh with people, I enjoy intellectual discussions.32

  Since the age of nine, and probably earlier, Heirens was a spinning wheel of escalating paraphilic transgressive addictions. He began with a tactile sexual fetish for female undergarments and progressed to the sexual thrill of stealing them, then to breaking into homes, where he stayed for hours in a state of sexual arousal. His first murder might have been as accidental as perhaps his first pantie theft. He was prowling around Josephine Ross’s apartment, not realizing she was there; when she awoke she either interrupted his sexual ecstasy and he stabbed her in a rage, or she startled him and he killed her in a panic to silence her. He tried to “fix her” by washing her blood away and taping her wounds.

  Now he was addicted to a new thrill that stimulated his emotional state numbed by psychopathy. Just as the act of burglary replaced his pantie fetish, murder would now replace the stimulus of burglary. He would continue burglarizing, but it was no longer as exciting as that moment when he killed his first victim. He resisted the temptation for several months before he shot nineteen-year-old Veronica Hudzinski through a window from the exterior of her apartment. It wasn’t as satisfying as hands-on murder.

  A few days later, he entered Evelyn Peterson’s apartment through the skylight, perhaps again being surprised by her when she was awakened. He bludgeoned her into unconsciousness, bound her and slipped out of her apartment, locking the door behind him. We know Heirens was very forensically aware, systematically wiping his fingerprints away. In his study of Heirens’s case, Colin Wilson speculates that the reason Heirens returned to Peterson’s apartment was a compulsion to double-check if he’d left any evidence behind.33

  Between the ballistic match to a handgun found in his dorm room and witness IDs, there is no doubt that Heirens was at least capable of shooting and wounding women and perpetrating violence. Today Heirens is, clearly, if not a murderer, then at least a psychopath, although that in itself does not absolve nor condemn him, but in the overall circumstantial matrix, leans toward a circumstantially inculpatory conclusion and understanding of his possible motive.

  William Heirens may have been convicted in a procedurally unfair process, but it’s doubtful he was wrongly convicted. He was a raging bundle of pathological compulsions and confessed to the murders with sufficient accuracy in the details for the confessions to be believable.

  William Heirens died unrepentant on March 5, 2012, at the age of eighty-three, after serving sixty-five years in prison, currently the seventh-longest sentence to be served by an inmate in US history.34

  CHAPTER 3

  American Noir: Raising Cain Through the Trauma Years 1930–1950

  These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand.

  Ernie Pyle, war correspondent

  Between the abduction and cannibal-mutilation murder of Grace Budd by Albert Fish in 1928 and the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, “the Black Dahlia,” in 1947, a generation of future “epidemic era” serial killers was born, including Juan Corona (1934), Angelo Buono (1934), Charles Manson* (1934), Joseph Kallinger (1935), Henry Lee Lucas (1936), Carroll Edward Cole (1938), Jerry Brudos (1939), Dean Corll (1939), Patrick Kearney (1939), Robert Hansen (1939), Lawrence Bittaker (1940), John Wayne Gacy (1942), Rodney Alcala (1943), Gary Heidnik (1943), Arthur Shawcross (1945), Dennis Rader (1945), Robert Rhoades (1945), Chris Wilder (1945), Randy Kraft (1945), Manuel Moore (1945), Paul Knowles (1946), Ted Bundy (1946), Richard Cottingham (1946), Gerald Gallego (1946), Gerard Schaefer (1946), William Bonin (1947), Ottis Toole (1947), John N. Collins (1947), Herbert Baumeister (1947) and Herbert Mullin (1947).

  They were followed by the births of Edmund Kemper (1948), Douglas Clark (1948), Gary Ridgway (1949), Robert Berdella (1949), Richard Chase (1950), William Suff (1950), Randy Woodfield (1950), Joseph Franklin (1950), Gerald Stano (1951), Kenneth Bianchi (1951), Gary Schaefer (1951), Robert Yates (1952), David Berkowitz (1953), Carl Eugene Watts (1953), Robin Gecht (1953), David Gore (1953), Bobby Joe Long (1953), Danny Rolling (1954), Keith Jesperson (1955), Alton Coleman (1955), Wayne Williams (1958), Joel Rifkin (1959), Anthony Sowell (1959), Richard Ramirez (1960), Charles Ng (1960) and Jeffrey Dahmer (1960).

  The vast majority of these children would not begin their serial killing until they were in their late twenties or early thirties in the 1970s and 1980s, with the exception of Edmund Kemper, who first killed in 1964, Patrick Kearney who began killing in 1965, John N. Collins in 1967, Richard Cottingham in 1967 (perhaps even as early as 1963) and Jerry Brudos in 1968.

  In trying to explain the surge of serial murders from the 1970s to the 1990s, we often invoke the epoch in which the serial killings happened.1 From the cultural and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and the wanton hedonism of the 1970s to the cruel Reaganomics callousness of the 1980s and the rapacious greed of the 1990s, we argued that somehow serial killing was a product of the violent times in which the killing happened. But that was only half the story.

  Psychopathology is first shaped in childhood, so to understand surge-era serial killers of the 1970s and 1980s, we actually need to look back some twenty or thirty years earlier, to the eras in which they were steeped as children in the 1940s and 1950s. I’ve already described the process of basic “scripting” of transgressive fantasies. The direction these “scripts” take and how people are chosen for the role of victim in them has a complex structure pinning it all together.

  Diabolus in Cultura and the “Less-Dead”

  In Sons of Cain, I threw myself at the term diabolus in cultura in an attempt to describe the range of phenomena that could lead to a surge of children who grew up to be serial killers. The term was coined by anthropologist Simon Harrison, in his study of soldiers who brought home necrophilic collections of body parts as war trophies. Invoking the discordant tritone musical chords forbidden in the medi
eval era, known as diabolus in musica (“Satan in music”), he wrote there are also discordant tones in culture, a type of “diabolus in cultura—a forbidden conjunction of cultural themes, each unexceptionable in itself, but highly disturbing when brought together.”2 This notion best describes “scripting” in a serial killer culture, or serial killing “ecology,” as I sometimes call it, when charting the ebbs and surges of serial killing at various points in history.

  These “discordant tones” consist of not only cultural but also historical, social and economic phenomena that align in a “perfect storm” of a cocktail that triggers serial killer surges and has to do primarily with a serial killer’s preference for certain types of victims and their availability.

  In explaining surges of serial murder, criminologist Steven Egger argues, it was not that there were more serial killers but that there were more available victims whose worth was discounted and devalued by society. Egger maintains that society perceives certain categories of murder victims as “less-dead” than others, such as sex workers, homeless transients, drug addicts, the mentally ill, runaway youths, senior citizens, minorities, Indigenous women and the inner-city poor; these victims are all perceived as less-dead than, say, a white college girl from a middle-class suburb or an innocent fair-haired child. Sometimes the disappearance of these victims is not even reported. Criminologists label them the “missing missing.”

  Egger writes:

  The victims of serial killers, viewed when alive as a devalued strata of humanity, become “less-dead” (since for many they were less-alive before their death and now they become the “never-were”) and their demise becomes the elimination of sores or blemishes cleansed by those who dare to wash away these undesirable elements.3

  We popularly regard serial killers as disconnected outcasts, as those who reject societal norms, but more often the opposite is true. In killing prostitutes, Jack the Ripper, for example, was targeting the women that Victorian society chose for its most vehement disdain and scorn. Gary Ridgway, “the Green River Killer,” who was convicted for the murder of forty-nine women, mostly sex workers, said he thought he was doing the police a favor, because they themselves could not deal with the problem of prostitution. As Angus McLaren observed in his study of Victorian-era serial killer Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, who murdered at least five victims (prostitutes and unmarried women coming to him seeking abortions), Cream’s murders “were determined largely by the society that produced them.”4

  The serial killer, according to McLaren, rather than being an outcast, is “likely best understood not so much as an ‘outlaw’ as an ‘oversocialized’ individual who saw himself simply carrying out sentences that society at large leveled.” Social critic Mark Seltzer suggests that serial killers today are fed and nurtured by a “wound culture,” “the public fascination with torn and open bodies and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound,” to which serial killers respond with their own homicidal contributions in a process that Seltzer calls “mimetic compulsion.”5

  Or, as the late Robert Kennedy once put it more simply, “Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.”6

  Serial killers, in other words, partly take their cue from society as it is filtered through a combination of history, popular discourse, mainstream media, culture and subcultures.

  To try to understand why there was this surge of serial killers in the 1970s through the 1990s, we need to look at the American diabolus in cultura of the 1920s through the 1950s and the generation of the parents who were raising the children who would become the future “epidemic era” serial killers.

  Breakdown of the American Dream, 1919–1940

  Prior to the First World War (1914–1918), American society was relatively disciplined and cohesively structured between the upper, middle and working classes, between rural and urban, and between white and people of color. The privileges and burdens, the rights and responsibilities of each class of Americans, aside from that of industrial labor, were rarely challenged, questioned or crossed before the Great War. In the way that medieval Europeans with passive Christian forbearance lived their place in society from birth to death as divine destiny, Americans settled into their place in the social hierarchy on the basis of Horatio Alger’s “rags-to-riches” promise that with hard work and prayer, anyone can rise in the American class hierarchy to something spectacularly better than what they were born into. Most Americans quietly settled for moderately better, and did so, and that was what made America great.

  World War I and its aftermath changed all that. It challenged the notion that duty and sacrifice would be rewarded with real change. A “Lost Generation” of disillusioned and shell-shocked American men returned from the horrors of a “war to end all wars” that did nothing of the sort. In the spring of 1919, as the Allies sat down at Paris and Versailles to draft a peace settlement to create a better world, the United States instead was subsumed in a rising surge of terror, murder and race war.

  In late April 1919, thirty-six dynamite bombs were mailed to prominent politicians and appointees by a shadowy anarchist group. One bomb just missed killing the future president Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, who lived across the street from the targeted house of US attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer and had passed on their way home just minutes prior to detonation.7 On June 2, nine large bombs exploded nearly simultaneously in eight cities: Philadelphia; Cleveland; Boston; Pittsburgh; New York; Washington, DC; Paterson, New Jersey; and Newton, Massachusetts. A night watchman in New York was killed by one of the blasts. The bombs were accompanied with the following message:

  War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.8

  The bombings culminated with the Wall Street Bombing on September 16, 1920, that killed 38 people and seriously injured 143. The time bomb set for noon had been left behind in a horse-drawn carriage near the New York Stock Exchange and has been described as history’s “first car bomb.”9 The culprits were never conclusively identified but are believed to have been Italian American anarchists. Blaming the bombings on Italian, eastern European and Jewish immigration, the United States closed its doors to immigrants from anywhere except the UK and Nordic countries. Immigration to the US for all others would now be stymied to a trickle until after World War II.

  At the same time, the 350,000 African Americans who had served in the war “defending democracy” came home to a segregated America to be told, even when in uniform, to give their seats up for whites on streetcars and where they might walk, sit, eat or sleep or whom they might date or marry. W. E. B. Du Bois, the editor of the NAACP’s monthly magazine, wrote:

  We return.

  We return from fighting.

  We return fighting.10

  Already in 1917, a “Buffalo Soldier” regiment of black infantrymen (many from the North, where segregation was not enforced by law) stationed in Houston went to battle with Houston police over the issue of segregation and harassment in town. Eleven civilians and five policemen were killed by rioting soldiers. After a quick drumhead court-martial, thirteen black soldiers were summarily hanged without appeal, executed simultaneously on thirteen gallows in the largest single mass execution in American history on December 11, 1917. Altogether, nineteen would eventually be put to death.

  The “Red Summer” of 1919 saw over a thousand African Americans hanged, stoned, shot, burned and battered to death in race riots across the nation. Some sixty cities that year from north to south saw violent race riots. Over two days in rural Elaine, Arkansas, roaming white mobs killed at random an estimated 100 to 237 African Americans, many of them migrant sharecroppers.11
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  Then on January 17, 1920, when the National Prohibition Act (Volstead Act) went into effect, millions of law-abiding Americans were turned into outlaws overnight for doing something they had been doing forever: drinking alcohol. It was perhaps the most profound break of faith between Americans and their government since the Civil War. As serial killing gangsters with tommy guns began to seize control of the lucrative illicit alcohol trade, murder rates soared.12 In the growing affluence and ennui of the “Roaring Twenties,” anybody who could make a buck made it. Wealth, time and leisure spawned the beginning of a “youth culture” and a narcissistic “speakeasy” anything-goes attitude.