American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  In October 1929, it all crashed on Wall Street, wiping out billions of dollars of wealth in what became known as the Great Depression. By 1933, the unemployment rate in the United States was an astonishing 25 percent.13 Making matters worse in the Midwest, an environmental disaster in the form of the Dust Bowl uprooted millions of families from their homes and farms. All this without a “social safety net” of welfare, food stamps or public housing. Men raised and socialized for generations into their role as family patriarchs and breadwinners suddenly found themselves helpless and broken, shivering in a soup kitchen line just to eat.

  Families came apart under these strains, like the family of Joseph Lee Brenner III, born in Philadelphia in 1935. By 1937, Joseph’s father had abandoned the family, and his mother could not keep going. Little Joseph was put into foster care and eventually adopted by a crazily sadistic religious couple, Stephen and Anna Kallinger, who subjected Joseph to a range of mental and physical tortures. When Joseph grew up, he had six children of his own, whom he abused and tortured in the same way he was as a child. By 1974, this child of the Depression became a serial killer, taking on as a partner his own thirteen-year-old son in a series of rapes and murders in Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey.

  While some families, like William Heirens’s, survived in a neurotic state of stress and anxiety, others just broke apart, but they all left a generation of hardened and traumatized children and teenagers, some of whom would be old enough to be thrown into the next horrible thing to come along and fuck them up even more: World War II.

  The “Last Good War” and the “Greatest Generation”: 1941–1945

  That battered generation of young men who matured over the 1930s was now sent into what was going to be history’s most lethal and brutal war, sometimes referred to as the “last good war” because of the unambiguous evil of the enemy we fought.

  In December 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, dragging it into World War II. Some 16.5 million men (61 percent of American males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six) were mobilized into the military and deployed in Europe, the Pacific or on wartime duty at home. Their average age was twenty-six.

  About 990,000 of them would see combat, and 405,000 were killed. Nothing in their experience at home prepared them for what they were going to see in this war, a primitive war of total kill-or-be-killed annihilation culminating with two thermonuclear detonations that in several nanoseconds incinerated 120,000 men, women and children. Winston Churchill said it best: “The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.”14

  Things That Warriors Have Always Done

  In Sons of Cain, I described in detail not only what American GIs endured on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific, but what some of them perpetrated as well. They did things that warriors have always done. Northern Kentucky University’s criminal sociologist J. Robert Lilly reported, for example, that American GI “liberators” raped fourteen thousand to seventeen thousand women between 1942 and 1945 in Britain, France and Germany, while German historian Miriam Gebhardt argues that American GIs raped 190,000 women in Germany.15

  American GIs were not immune to the primordial primitive state that all warriors descend into to do what they have to do, especially so in a kill-them-all war of the kind World War II was. As Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society:

  The linkage between sex and killing becomes unpleasantly apparent when we enter the realm of warfare. Many societies have long recognized the existence of this twisted region in which battle, like sex, is a milestone in adolescent masculinity. Yet the sexual aspects of killing continue beyond the region in which both are thought to be rites of manhood and into the area in which killing becomes like sex and sex like killing.16

  A baby boom generation of future serial killers were about to be raised by a generation of fathers initiated in that “twisted region” of sex and battle in many different ways. And more.

  In the Pacific, so many American soldiers engaged in wanton acts of trophy taking, collecting teeth and body parts and boiling and curing the skulls of severed Japanese heads, that US Customs inspectors were alerted to search the bags of homeward-bound GIs and confiscated all human-body-part trophies.17

  Yes. The Nazis and the Imperial Japanese troops did all the same things, more wantonly and frequently and perversely than we ever did. But we did our part.

  To be clear, the majority of American GIs did not perpetrate any of these acts; but most witnessed others among their “band of brothers” committing them. War is horror, and warriors are called upon to do horrific things, no matter how noble the cause for which they kill and are killed. When it was over, some could not find their way back.

  Kill Crazy

  The familiar term “PTSD”—post-traumatic stress disorder—would appear only in the 1980s in the wake of the Vietnam War, but during World War II the terms “combat stress reaction” (CSR), “battle fatigue” or “battle neurosis” were rolled up into a general statistical term: “neuropsychiatric casualty.” Of American ground combat troops deployed in World War II, an astonishing 37 percent were discharged and sent home as neuropsychiatric casualties.18 It just wasn’t often reported or talked about. America preferred to see their sons coming home less a leg or arm than “crazy in the head.” Hometown newspapers would euphemistically report on returning “wounded” or “casualty” figures without specifying the nature of the “wound” or “casualty.”

  A 2013 RAND Corporation study of World War II causalities reported that after the war:

  The neuropsychiatrically impaired, 454,699 veterans, accounted for 30 percent of all service-connected active disability awards in 1946. Of this group . . . the largest category, with about 66 percent of the cases, included those diagnosed with a “functional nervous disorder or psychoneurosis,” a category that includes what is called PTSD today.19

  Combat psychoneurosis was something new and very much unlike the physically disabling concussive “shell shock” from World War I. The annual American Psychiatric Association meeting in 1943 heard from Naval physician Edwin Smith about a new disorder labeled at the time as “Guadalcanal Neurosis.” According to a May 24, 1943, Time magazine article, Smith described

  a group neurosis that has not been seen before and may never be seen again that occurred after prolonged warfare on Guadalcanal. He had treated over five hundred Marines from that killing island and he described their physical and mental strain as combining the “best of Edgar Allan Poe and Buck Rogers. . . . Rain, heat, insects, dysentery, malaria all contributed—but the end result was not bloodstream infection nor gastrointestinal disease, but a disturbance of the whole organism, a disorder of thinking and living, of even wanting to live.” Symptoms displayed by these hard-bitten Marines were “headaches, sensitivity to sharp noises, periods of amnesia, tendency to get panicky, tense muscles, tremors, hands that shook when they tried to do anything. They were frequently close to tears or very short-tempered.” Smith felt that it was doubtful these men could go back to the type of combat they had been exposed to on Guadalcanal.20

  Returning World War II veterans did not have the current diagnosis of PTSD to take comfort in. “Combat psychoneurosis” sounded shamefully “psycho,” and most wanted to just go home and forget about everything they had seen and endured. Our returning soldiers were patted on the back and told they did their duty in a just cause, were given medals and a parade and tossed a GI Bill and then sent home to suck it up in sullen silence in the privacy of their own trauma. They couldn’t even talk to their families about it. Nobody wanted to hear it . . . at least not the truth. Our traumatized fathers and grandfathers were forever trapped in silence, like prehistoric life preserved in transparent amber, as “the greatest generation any society has ever produced,” a term journalist Tom Brokaw coined in his
1998 book, The Greatest Generation.21

  When after the war politicians and civilians who had never experienced it began talking about “the next war,” one combat veteran wrote bitterly in the Atlantic Monthly:

  Probably I shall be tagged as a psychoneurotic veteran of too much bloodshed when I say that I get alternately fighting mad and cold sick inside whenever I hear people talk about the next war. . . . What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for our sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers. We topped off our saturation bombing and burning of enemy civilians by dropping atomic bombs on two nearly defenseless cities, thereby setting an all-time record for instantaneous mass slaughter.22

  Mostly, however, the popular media remained focused on the atrocities and war crimes perpetrated by the enemy.

  When the American war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed on a small island just off the coast of Okinawa in April 1945, he was writing an article that read, in part:

  Death and misery is a spouse that tolerates no divorce. Such companionship finally becomes a part of one’s soul, and it cannot be obliterated. . . . There are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.

  Dead men by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

  Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.

  Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.

  These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. . . .23

  Who was coming back the same from that? You had to be crazy not to be crazy.

  The Women, 1930–1945

  It wasn’t just the men and children who were battered out of shape by the Great Depression and World War II. The women had to take it twice as hard, once for themselves and then again for their children. It was easier for the men to just turn their back and make a go of it alone. During the Depression, some men gave up and drifted away from their families, abandoning them, but most of the women hung in there, found work or some way to make a living and raise their children. In the 1940s, as the men went to war, women were thrust into munition factories and other realms traditionally occupied by men.

  Millions of women found opportunity in a booming war industry at home, as men went away into military service. When it ended, women were expected to give up those lifesaving jobs and stand aside for the returning men. With the Great Depression a distant memory, the war secure in victory, the postwar years were supposed to be a rebirth of everything America thought it was before the Dirty Thirties killed it; “as the clever hopes expire of a low dishonest decade” is the way W. H. Auden described it in his poem “September 1, 1939.”

  War Bride Clarnell

  Clarnell Stage from Great Falls, Montana, would be the subject of some seventy society-page newspaper articles before her death in Santa Cruz, California, at age fifty-two in 1973. She wasn’t an obvious candidate. Clarnell’s father was a pipe fitter, but her mother, Nellie, had ambitions to a “better” class. The newspaper articles in its “society” pages began in 1931 on Clarnell’s tenth birthday, when the Great Falls Tribune described the extravagant party her mother threw for her. Over the next ten years, the paper reported on Clarnell’s progress in the Girl Scouts, her appearances at social events and the parties and events she organized and clubs she led. She chaired the Great Falls Junior Women’s Club at the YMCA and organized charity events for underprivileged children on Christmas.

  When Clarnell graduated high school, the newspaper featured a quarter-page studio portrait of the stern and bucktoothed, hatchet-faced girl with a determined and commanding look on her face. The caption extolled her membership in the Quill and Scroll, the Young Authors club, the school orchestra, the Little Symphony and the Rainbow Girls Assembly. Not only was Clarnell smart and ambitious; she was six feet tall, towering over most boys and men in Great Falls. Her height, her determined jawline, her brilliance and drive were surely a one-way ticket to a busy social life devoid of a romantic, personal, private one.

  After graduating, Clarnell went to work as a collector for the Internal Revenue Service in Helena, Montana, where she ruthlessly pursued tax debtors. Very quickly, the hard-nosed and efficient Clarnell rose to the rank of deputy collector, and she was elected president of the local branch of the National Federation of Federal Employees. Clarnell ruled with a stern hand both members and nonmember federal employees in Helena, admonishing nonmembers to toe the Federation line.24 As the war began and the men went away, Clarnell’s power and ambition grew.

  In 1942, twenty-one-year-old Clarnell met the man of her dreams: twenty-three-year-old US Army staff sergeant Edmund Emil Kemper Jr. of North Hollywood, California, stationed at Fort Harrison near Helena. At six feet eight, a man towered over her for once, and not just any man, but a handsome, dashing Special Forces commando with an aristocratic pencil-thin mustache and shiny paratrooper wings on the left breast of his crisp uniform. And Edmund wasn’t just a muscle-head staff sergeant; he was future executive officer material, in her opinion, as smart and ambitious as she was. She immediately saw themselves as a power couple.

  Like Clarnell, her beau came from a blue-collar family striving for better things. Edmund Emil Kemper Sr. worked as a mechanic for the California Department of Highways, while Edmund’s mother, Maude Hughey Kemper, was an ambitious painter and a published author of boys’ adventure stories, appearing in the social pages of Los Angeles papers. Maude founded and chaired a writers’ club in North Hollywood and was a precinct organizer for the Democratic Party there.25 Clarnell could see somebody just like that for a future mother-in-law as clearly as she could see the palm trees and coconuts of sunny California as she shivered in the cold of backwoods Montana.

  After completing high school, Edmund had enlisted in an Army engineering battalion in 1939. When the US entered the war in 1941, he was recruited into a newly formed 1,400-man elite airborne commando unit, the legendary First Special Service Force (FSSF)—which would become known as the Devil’s Brigade. Recruits were drawn from among experienced soldiers in the US and Canadian armies with backgrounds as rangers, lumberjacks, north woodsmen, hunters, prospectors, explorers and game wardens. Edmund must have had something special and was quickly promoted to staff sergeant. The FSSF was sent to Fort Harrison, Montana, to train for future forest and mountain special operations in Europe.

  Clarnell and Edmund were married in a Methodist ceremony at her parents’ home in Great Falls on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1942.

  On April 15, 1943, Edmund and the FSSF left Montana and began a series of deployments: to the East Coast of the US, to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, and to Morocco, from where they would launch toward Italy.

  Back home, on November 8, 1943, the first of their three children was born, Susan Hughey.

  By then, Edmund was deployed in Italy with the FSSF’s Second Regiment, Second Battalion. On the night of December 1, Edmund’s regiment of 418 commandos was ordered to scale a thousand-foot cliff to the top of Monte La Difensa in Campania, between Rome and Naples. Their mission—a suicide mission for all intents and purposes—was to take out the German panzer-grenadiers of the elite Hermann Göring Division dug in on a series of mountaintops.

  From December 2 to January 8, 1944, in fierce mountain fighting, the FSSF suffered 77 percent casualties: 91 dead, 9 missing, 313 wounded and 116 neuropsychiatric casualties.26

  Edmund was one of the 23 percent to survive. After just a three-week regroup, the Devil’s B
rigade was thrown back into combat on February 1, 1944, in the Battle of Anzio, south of Rome.

  Operating clandestinely behind the German lines, the FSSF terrorized the Nazis by silently killing sentries or cutting the throats of sleeping soldiers in foxholes, leaving one alive to spread the news on awakening. The Germans nicknamed the FSSF the “Black Devils” because of their night camouflage. The FSSF left cards on German dead whom they had ambushed in the night. The cards showed the unit’s insignia, a bloodred stone-flint arrowhead, with text in German: “Das dicke Ende kommt noch,” roughly translating to “The worst is yet to come.”

  The FSSF would see ninety-nine continuous days of combat before they were relieved early in May 1944. By August, they were in combat again, this time in Southern France in Operation Dragoon, attacking German island fortifications. By the end of the war, the Devil’s Brigade had killed or wounded some 12,000 Germans, captured 7,000 prisoners and sustained in return a final casualty rate of over 600 percent.

  Film director Quentin Tarantino would later say that the commandos in his 2009 movie Inglourious Basterds were based on the Devil’s Brigade.27

  Edmund finally came home from the Army in 1946 and took Clarnell and Susan home with him to sunny California, to live the postwar dream.

  After the war, Clarnell’s hometown newspaper, reporting on her visit home, casually mentioned that her husband had been “wounded during combat [at] Anzio.”28 The nature of Edmund’s wound, whether physical or otherwise, is obscured. Nobody talked about it. But when Edmund returned home, he no longer was the same. Who would be?

  To Clarnell, used to running things on her own since she was a Girl Scout, her husband now appeared listless, depressed, lacking the former vigor and ambition of the handsome young commando she had met and married.