American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Way Out in Kansas: Little Dennis Rader

  Dennis Rader, the future BTK serial killer of ten victims starting from the 1970s, was born in 1945 and grew up on a farm in Kansas. We do not know much about his Marine father, William Elvin Rader, who was twenty-five when he returned home from the war in the Pacific. He went to work with the Kansas Gas and Electric Company in 1948 and then somewhat mysteriously retired at the early age of forty-five in 1963. There is no record of his being employed after that.17

  Dennis Rader recalled first being aroused at the age of four by the sight of his mother accidentally restrained when her wedding ring caught on a spring underneath the couch cushions. As she twisted about, trying to disengage her ring, her dress slid upward, revealing the lace trim of her slip. Rader eventually developed a fetish for his mother’s white satin slip and would secretly fondle it and masturbate, making sure not to stain it. When his mother caught him masturbating, she beat him with a belt, telling him that God would kill him. Rader told forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland that he would become aroused at the beating and later developed fantasies of restraining women dressed in slips or other types of underwear, particularly teachers he did not like. He developed a lifelong addiction to self-bondage combined with transvestism, often photographing himself bound and hanging while wearing female lingerie.

  Eighteen years apart, Rader and Glatman had acquired similar obsessions and similar combinations of paraphilias, but nobody knows from where.

  Rader was fourteen years old when he apparently came across a 1959 issue of True Detective magazine in his father’s car. The issue featured a story about Harvey Glatman and ran the photos of his victims. Rader would recall:

  This was exactly the pictures and theme that I dreamed about. The old chicken house was near. I had ropes and hooks stashed away there, and some of Mom’s feminine clothing. I secured a blanket. I read the article and masturbated into the clothes I had hid.

  The women in the photos knew they were going to die. Glatman liked to bind their bare legs over the knees and their hands behind them. He even placed a gag twisted into a rope over their mouths. One woman, wearing just a slinky white slip, lay on a blanket, bound at the ankles, knees, and hands, with a rope going around her across her midriff.

  The lady in the white slip in the desert, that triggered me off. Slips turn me on sexually. They are soft satin, and like the early ribbons I used to stroke in my Grandma’s, Aunt’s, or Mom’s hair, it was the type of material I found in a special place in my Mom’s bedroom, I assume for her and Dad. Glatman as a child also play [sic] or carry around string and rope and did self-gratification. . . .

  I put the magazine back where I found it, but it had a profound effect. The image of the woman staring, terrified, knowing death was coming, was frozen for me. It was part of my SF [sexual fantasy] the rest of my life. The best gratification. . . . The Action Men magazine in the barber shop became popular for me to read. I recall that Stag was popular, and I never really bought any, but at the drugstore at the corner of 53rd Street North and Seneca, I would buy Popular Science or Popular Mechanic, and while thumbing through them, I would sneak a look at the recent Stags or detective magazines. Most had women in distress on the cover, a big Cookie Jar for me. I couldn’t get enough of them.18

  Rader recalled as a boy being aroused by scenes in the Dudley Do-Right animated cartoons on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show when the villain Snidely Whiplash ties the cute young damsel in distress Nell Fenwick to railway tracks. Nell wears a knee-length blue dress with frills around the hem—or is that her slip showing? In one sequence, Snidely with rope in hand forces Nell spread-eagle across the tracks, her arms outstretched along the rail behind her shoulders, her legs spread open across the opposite rail, her dress sliding upward, exposing her calves. As Nell wiggles and struggles, he unties her spread legs, loops a rope around her ankles and pulls them tight together high in the air, exposing the back of her bare legs, her skirt sliding farther down as he restrains and gags her.19

  Hundreds of thousands of horny boys would tune in to The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show to see Nell get bound and gagged before Dudley Do-Right rescues her and gets her kiss. Most boys wanted to be Dudley at the end of Nell’s kiss, but there were some damaged ones who were feeling things from Snidely’s point of view. I never went for freckled redheads with braids like Nell, but I’d tune in to Rocky and Bullwinkle for Natasha Fatale, the dark vamp Russian spy in a tight, slutty purple dress with lipstick and eyeliner color to match, for whom I’d get a little boy-boner every time.

  Scripting Bondage: The Parsed Paraphilic Imagination

  Would Glatman and Rader have killed if there were no true-detective magazines? Or The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show? Yes, of course they would have. But how they would have; how they would express their sexual rage and through which rituals—the scripting—would have been something entirely else.

  To most of us, the true-detective and men’s adventure magazines all look alike: the covers show a woman in bondage. To the paraphilic serial killer, however, the literature was a stimulant for highly selective fantasies, very specific, parsed subplots that radiated out from his own imagination. It wasn’t just the question of abduction and rape—there was a very narrow self-defined specificity to it. Some serial killers would paw through hundreds of these rape scenarios until they came upon just the right one that either reflected their own fantasy script or inspired a new additional twist to it that they had not imagined on their own. It is a constant and obsessive give-and-take process that consumes enormous blocks of time and energy in the serial killer’s fantasy world. These are the brushstrokes in the “work” of the “artist” that profiler John Douglas referred to when he famously said of serial killers, “If you want to understand the artist, look at his work.”

  Glatman as a youth was inspired by his generation of true-detective covers from the 1940s, turned on by bound and frightened women in distress. The bindings, the ropes and cords, he already at an early age sexually ritualized as he engaged in autoerotic asphyxiation, which enhanced his pleasure as the lack of oxygen put him into a euphoric state of arousal. After he came out of prison in his mid-twenties, Glatman stumbled on the new postwar bondage fetish publications like those distributed by Irving Klaw. Unlike the improvised bindings on the disheveled true-detective models with their lingerie accidentally exposed, the Klaw women were carefully posed in their lingerie, while the ropes and cords restraining them were carefully and intricately, almost ritually, knotted and laced about their bodies in a way for their captor to move and pose them in different positions of submission, like gagged sex puppets on strings.

  What Glatman wanted was a rape culture hybrid of his very own, an abducted, intricately bound Klaw lingerie model but inserted into a menacingly rougher, dirtier and darker true-detective scenario, and he was ready to murder for it. And that’s what Glatman did with his victims: froze the realized fantasy on film, killed the models and left them in the desert to the animals and the baking heat. Afterward, he would return to the safety of his home with the pictures to compulsively masturbate in the afterkill. Many serial killers do not climax during the commission of their rape and murder. DNA of any kind, including from ejaculate when present, was found in only 29.2 percent of sexual serial homicides according to the recent FBI study.20 After they have killed their victim, many serial killers remain in the same state of tension and arousal that they started off with until they return to a safe and secure location and finally achieve relief through masturbation, sometimes hours or days after the murder (the afterkill), before they “come down” into their cooling-off period and start working back up the cycle anew to the next murder. Totems and souvenirs from the victim are often taken to enhance the masturbatory experience once a serial killer has abandoned the body of his victim but is still in an aroused state.

  Glatman’s photos became the featured visual for every article recounting his crimes in the late 1
950s. From daily newspapers and Time magazine to tabloids and true-detective magazines, all splashed across their pages the horrific photos of the intricately bound victims. The victims are still there fixed in their last minutes of life in a state of fear and dread on the Internet today, staring into their killer’s lens, and beyond it, all the Internet creeps on the other end jerking off to real snuff sex and death.

  The adolescent Rader was living on a farm in Kansas, masturbating into detective magazines in the barn with his mother’s underwear and the chickens. He didn’t have Glatman’s sophistication or the means to order Irving Klaw publications by mail. He probably didn’t even know that kind of bondage material existed. But he didn’t need to. Glatman had done the mash-up for Rader, and the results were in every magazine in the drugstores of every little town and big booming city, all of Klaw’s special knots and bindings on Glatman’s victims. (Glatman bragged to police how he selected low-grain panchromatic film for his photos so that details could be enlarged.) Glatman added the final touch of his own: a cloth gag interwoven with a rope on several of his victims.

  Rader got the second-generation Glatman-processed homicidal fetish fantasy, ready to go, and that would be where Rader would pick up in his script and take it in the 1970s to the third generation of homicidal crazy of his own as the Bind-Torture-Kill—BTK—Killer.

  Melvin Davis Rees, “The Sex Beast” or “The Bebop Nietzsche Necrophile,” Maryland and Virginia, 1956–1959

  The “Sex Beast Killings” unfolded on the opposite side of the country from the desert freeways of California, on the wooded back roads of Virginia and Maryland. In many ways, the case mirrored the Harvey Glatman murders, yet it has been largely forgotten and not well-documented or reported. There is only one very recent book on the case, Katherine Ramsland’s The Sex Beast.21 Like the “Glamor Girl Murders,” this case involved a car, a handgun, abductions, detective magazines, a more-intelligent-than-average perpetrator and deeply twisted sexual impulses. But while Harvey Glatman had been the organized vampire monster of his generation, wooing and luring his victims into his monstrous fantasies, Melvin Rees, the Sex Beast, was the disorganized werewolf, brutalizing and dragging his victims into his monstrous impulses.

  Double Abduction of Mary Fellers and Shelby Venable

  The case began with the disappearance of two teenage girls in Beltsville, Maryland, on June 1, 1956: Mary Elizabeth Fellers, eighteen, and her longtime friend Shelby Jean Venable, sixteen. The girls grew up in Tennessee originally, but their parents moved to Beltsville and North Laurel in Maryland, towns ten miles apart. The teens often traveled to visit each other by bus, perhaps even hitchhiked despite their parents’ admonishments not to. They were “good girls,” according to their parents, but they had a typical hidden teen girl flirtatious side to them that their parents might not have been fully aware of. Diaries left behind by the girls revealed that they sometimes dated soldiers from nearby Fort Meade and racetrack workers.22 Ramsland reports that the girls were attracted to “bad boy rebel” James Dean types, beatniks, poets and bebop jazz musicians.

  On June 1, the girls were waiting for a bus on US 1 to travel up to North Laurel, where they planned to spend the night at Venable’s house. Fellers’s little brother, twelve-year-old Irwin Jr., caught a glimpse of his sister and Venable at the bus stop just as a light blue Ford sedan with a dented fender and a Virginia tag pulled up beside the girls. Irwin had the impression that they recognized the driver and readily climbed into the car. Then they got out to reverse positions before getting back in. Irwin described a white male with bushy eyebrows and thought he had a scar across his face. That was the last time the two girls were seen alive.

  Nothing appeared in the media about the missing girls until June 10, when a newspaper in Tennessee reported that the police were on the lookout for the girls there in case they returned to the state where they grew up. When an adolescent or teenager disappeared, the assumption was that they had run away, unless there was some hard evidence that something more sinister had occurred. And it was only going to get worse once kids really started taking to the road on their own in the turbulent 1960s. It wouldn’t be until the 1980s with the “serial killer epidemic” that missing children and youths would become an issue of national concern.

  By the time the Tennessee papers reported the missing girls, police near Brunswick, Maryland, had pulled one of them from the Potomac River. She had been found nude, jammed by the river current against some rocks.

  Nobody knew who she was at first, and her body was laid out at a funeral home for people with missing relatives to view. One newspaper reported, “B. Lee Feete, the Brunswick funeral director, said hundreds of persons had come to his establishment over the weekend to look at the body. He said he had no idea there were so many missing girls in this area.”23

  Mary Elizabeth Fellers’s father arrived at the scene but was unable to positively identify his daughter. Based on the shade of her bright red painted toenails and her ear piercings, her older sister made the identification, later confirmed through dental records. Due to the waterlogged condition of her body, no cause of death could be immediately determined.

  On June 14, the nude body of Shelby Jean Venable was found facedown in six inches of water in the Catoctin Creek, a tributary of the Potomac near Wheatfield, Virginia, about nine miles from Brunswick. Because of the direction in which the waterways flow it was immediately evident that the two girls were put into the water at different points. Through stomach content analysis it was established that both girls died at approximately the same time and that Venable had been strangled. No final cause of death could be determined for Fellers, nor whether either girl had been raped.

  Police in the meantime attempted to identify and interview some of the males named in the girls’ diaries. According to Katherine Ramsland, the girls had told their parents about one musician in particular who played at dances they attended on Saturday nights, a versatile and talented young man they called Rees.24 He was handsome and friendly, and quoted poetry and philosophy. Hundreds of interviews were conducted in the weeks following the girls’ murders, but in the end police developed no leads.

  Double murders like this one are relatively rare even today, but in Maryland, the abduction and killing of Fellers and Venable made headlines across the nation. And worse. This was the second double murder of teenage girls in that many years. In 1955, Nancy Marie Shomette, sixteen, and her friend Michael Ann Ryan, fourteen, took a short cut through Northwest Branch Park near the University of Maryland in College Park, in the middle of the day to pick up Nancy’s report card from her high school. Their bodies were found several hours later by a girl walking her dog. Judging by the shell casings, the girls had been shot with a .22 rifle from a distance of about 150 yards in an ambush. Nancy was shot eleven times, while Michael was shot three times. The killer had walked up to the bodies and shot Nancy one more time in the forehead between the eyes. They did not appear to be sexually molested. Nobody knew what to make of the killings. The two pairs of murders were substantially different, but two pairs of teenage girls killed in the same Maryland region were troubling. Again, no useful leads were developed.

  Margaret Harold Murder

  On June 26, 1957, Margaret Virginia Harold, a thirty-six-year-old wife and mother of two teenagers working as a clerk at Fort Meade, wrapped up work early. She changed into a pair of tight black toreador pants and a sexy pink blouse. Waiting for her in his car was thirty-one-year-old Master Sergeant Roy Hudson, who had also changed into civilian clothing. Margaret threw her work clothes onto the back seat of Roy’s car, and the two of them drove off the base. They headed south from Fort Meade through Gambrills, stopping along the way to have lunch and a few beers. Eventually, they took Route 424 south and turned east along Route 450 (Defense Highway), which took them into Mount Tabor, a remote stretch of forest and farming country that lay between the highway and Mount Tabor Road to the north. Today, some housing d
evelopments have crept into the area, but there are still spooky isolated farmhouses accessible only by hidden private roads. After about a mile along Defense Highway, Roy turned at random into a narrow country lane to find a secluded place for the couple. They passed what looked like an abandoned shack, and Roy noted there was a foam green car parked near it. He described to Anne Arundel County chief of police Wilbur Wade what happened after he parked with Margaret at the end of the road:

  Some twenty minutes later the man came up. Margaret saw him coming down the road first and said, “There comes a man.” He was hollering at us. I got out of the car to see what he wanted and the man said, “What do you think this is, a national park?”

  I told him, “No, we’re just sitting here.” He asked if we were interested in buying a lot and I told him we weren’t. He said he was the watchman of the area and we couldn’t park here so I told him we would leave.

  The man said, “Let me bum a cigarette off you.” I reached in the car and got a cigarette for both of us and the man said, “I guess there’s no harm in just sitting here talking.”

  Then the man said, “Well, since I walked this far down how about giving me a ride back to the shack.”

  Margaret said, “We have some clothes on the back seat and don’t have room for you.”

  Roy climbed back into his car intending to drive off, but the man opened the rear door and jumped into the back seat. Roy told police: