But he didn’t.
The Queering of Serial Murder
Like the Corona murders, the Candy Man murders also vanished from public view. The main perpetrator in this narrative, Dean Corll, having been shot dead, escaped the ritual trial so necessary to a true-crime narrative. To this day, we know very little about his past. He is but a shadowy figure, with only a few photographs of him in the public record. His disciples, Henley and Brooks, were fucked-up juveniles in fucked-up times in a fucked-up place, and that explained everything to everyone’s satisfaction.
The homosexual dimensions of these two spectacular murder cases with a combined total of fifty-two male victims took on a sudden significance for conservatives. This carnage was dramatic evidence of the dangerous post-sixties creeping tolerance of all forms of “deviant” sexuality, especially homosexuality. In a way it foresaw “gay serial killers” in the manner AIDS was first characterized as an exclusively “gay disease” when it surged in the 1980s.
That many of the boys killed by Dean Corll were troubled juvenile delinquents residing in a poor inner-city neighborhood and that they had been lured with promises of marijuana and good-time parties, perhaps were even “male prostitutes” selling themselves, left a sense among staid conservative Americans that somehow the boys had “put themselves” at risk as drug users and/or as sex workers. Getting abducted, raped and murdered was an “occupational hazard” for prostitutes and young, poor weedheads as far as mainstream Americans were concerned, as was hitchhiking or running away from home, or many other things that made you one of the less-dead.
The superconservative mentality of the average police officer at the time further warped this perception. As one police officer explained it to the mother of one of the twenty-seven unearthed victims, “It looks like a homosexual thing.”18
Both the Corona murders and the Corll murders confirmed for police their overkill theory and its connection to gay deviant sex. What Dean Corll did to his teenage victims was overkill; there was no denying that. True-crime literature also echoed this theme of exceptional violence in gay homicide. As Dennis McDougal asserted in his book on the gay serial killer Randy Kraft in California:
Husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends—they beat up on each other, shot each other, stabbed and strangled and slapped each other. But they rarely went in for torture and dismemberment and all of the other imaginative mutilation that seemed to delight a small and perverse—but all too active—segment of the gay community in southern California, particularly around Long Beach. They had their dungeons and their whips and chains, all for fun. Just make believe, they said. Heterosexuals did it too, of course: tying each other up and going through crazy rituals of submission and punishment. . . . But when it came to body dumps of nude young males, raped and maimed at the hands of another, it could generally be traced back to a lover whose anger or ecstasy—or both—got out of hand. The results were almost always ghastly.19
Cops historically also added an extra flourish and flamboyant ego twist to the motives of gay killers. In the case of Andrew Cunanan, for example, Chicago police captain and serial killer specialist Tom Cronin stated, “Down deep inside, the publicity is more sexual to him than anything else. Right after one or two of these homicides, he probably goes to a gay bar in the afternoon when the news comes on and his face is on TV, and he’s sitting there drinking a beer and loving it.”20
David Schmid in Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture quotes Richard Tithecott’s observations on the Jeffrey Dahmer serial murder case: “For a heterosexual culture, the Dahmer case represents an opportunity to explain acts of savagery by referring to his putative homosexuality, to confuse homicidal with homosexual tendencies, confuse ‘sexual homicide’ with homo sex.”21
A whole host of gay serial killers would rack up huge victim counts over the next three decades. In an era when homosexuality was just beginning to come out of the closet, an older generation of gay serial killers was well versed in maintaining double lives since childhood. It was no challenge to a gay serial killer with a lifelong history of deception and concealment of their sexuality to have added to it another secret, an occasional two or three serial murders . . . or even thirty-three or more.
The 1978 case of John Wayne Gacy is horrifically familiar (and described in detail in Serial Killers). Gacy was ostensibly married, working in a “macho male” world of construction contracting, appeared so straight that he was a Chicago Democratic Party precinct assistant captain and hosted First Lady Rosalynn Carter at the Polish Constitution Day Parade in May 1978, six months before he was apprehended in the thirty-three murders of teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978, twenty-six of whom were buried in the crawl space of his suburban house.
There were the three gay and independently nicknamed “Freeway Killers,” Patrick Kearney (21 victims, 1965–1977), Randy Kraft (16 victims, 1971–1983) and William Bonin (14 victims, 1979–1980). These serial killers abducted and killed a confirmed 51 male victims between them and are suspected in a total of 146 victims. The cases were all characterized by overkill and, worse, horrific acts of prolonged torture and necrophilic possessive sex that in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer reached the epitome of taboo possessive deviance in the form of cannibalism.
For the conservative and religious bent, these “sodomite” serial murders fit well into their vision of post-sixties sexual liberation becoming the infernal “anything goes” hedonism that the 1970s became for almost everybody, gay or straight.
Sweet Little Mary
Vernon Geberth, whose current procedural textbook I quoted above, while a detective sergeant with the NYPD in the 1970s, zealously railed at sexual permissiveness. In 1974, twenty-five-year-old model and former airline hostess Brigitte Albrecht was found dead from an apparent “cocaine overdose” in the Travel Inn, the same notorious 42nd Street hotel where later in 1979 Cottingham would kill two sex workers and behead them. It was noted that Albrecht had been partying at the East Side singles bar and after-hours club scene and had checked into the hotel at 3:00 a.m. with an unidentified black male. Geberth told a New York Times reporter that the NYPD believes “there are hundreds of young women, from respectable, middle-class families, who are ‘making it with street people’ in a world defined by sex and drugs.”22
Geberth explained:
Some of these young women come from very austere, religious backgrounds. Once they feel they’ve let their parents down, they feel they might as well do it again. Sweet little Mary who spends her weekends in the suburbs may be the wildest thing on the streets of New York City. It’s absolutely amazing to see the Jekyll and Hyde personality that they develop.
The New York Times warned:
Young women who are exploring the perimeters of what they see as new-found freedoms—living alone in the city, going out with whom they please—are not fully cognizant of the danger involved in making choices, according to a young woman who lives in Queens with her boyfriend and two lesbians. “Young women are destroyed,” she said, “by seeing liberation strictly in terms of sexual freedom.” Even now, she said, “living with my boyfriend is just my way of fumbling around.”
In the Big Apple
Calvin Jackson, “The House of Horrors Killer”
New York at first appeared to have been spared from “big number” serial murders, but then in 1973 and 1974, twenty-six-year-old petty ex-con serial killer necrophile Calvin Jackson strangled and suffocated and raped nine women. The case is probably vague and unfamiliar even to New Yorkers because the victims were not young, single women testing the limits of their sexual liberation, as the New York Times worried; they were all elderly female welfare indigents ranging in age between fifty-two and seventy-nine. Eight of Jackson’s victims lived in a decrepit long-term hotel on the Upper West Side at 50 West 77th Street called the Park Plaza (not to be confused with the posh “Plaza” on Fifth Avenue and Central
Park South). The ninth victim was murdered in a building two doors away.
Jackson lived with his twenty-five-year-old girlfriend in room 822 of the Park Plaza and was sometimes employed as a hotel caretaker and porter. He would gain access to the rooms, strangle or suffocate his elderly victims and rape and mutilate their corpses. He would then make sandwiches from food he found in the victims’ fridges and linger over the corpses as he ate.
With access to the victims’ rooms, Jackson would return to have sex with the corpses for another few days before the fly larvae eggs in their nostrils and dead eyes began to hatch maggots and neighbors would begin complaining about the smell. By then the bodies of the solitary, near-destitute victims were so badly decomposed that police did not recognize some of them as homicides and wrote off the deaths of the decayed, lonely elderly women as a result of alcoholism or natural causes.
On September 12, 1974, Jackson killed his ninth victim, but not in the Park Plaza. Pauline Spanierman, 69, was the widow of a prominent Manhattan art dealer. Like the other victims, she too had been strangled and raped, and her TV was gone. She lived in an upscale building a few steps away, at 40 West 77th Street and this time police put in a more thorough effort investigating.23
Jackson was arrested after he was seen by witnesses on a fire escape carrying the television set belonging to the victim and eventually he confessed to all the murders. Just to show how naive the world was to serial killing even as late as 1975, Calvin Jackson’s primary motive was attributed to theft of property in supporting a drug habit while the murders and necrophiliac rapes were seen as secondary factors. The prosecutors could not understand why Jackson “had to” kill his victims and violate their corpses while committing the thefts!
Jackson’s response was “I guess I kind of broke wild there, you know?”24 Today we understand it was never about the thefts but always about the necrophiliac rape from the beginning. The TVs were the serial killer’s trophies, entirely secondary to the commission of the postmortem rapes.
The district commander of the homicide squad was removed from his post when it was revealed that only five of the deaths were investigated as homicides. He blamed the medical examiner who had determined that the others had been natural deaths. The ME responded that the blame lay with the homicide squad that had failed “to detect a ‘pattern of murder.’”25
Jackson had been arrested in 1973 for robbing a tenant in the building but plea-bargained himself into a short thirty-day sentence on a reduced charge. Nobody thought of evicting him from the building, nor had the building’s management or police reviewed Jackson’s criminal record once the deaths began. New York State attorney general Louis Lefkowitz demanded the closure of the “house of horrors” across the street from the American Museum of Natural History, declaring the Park Plaza “has become a repository of degradation and debauchery.”26
Calvin Jackson was sentenced to hundreds of years in prison and is currently incarcerated in Elmira penitentiary in New York. The elderly $40-a-month welfare residents in the Park Plaza “house of horrors” were eventually evicted, the little hovel rooms gutted open, the corpse maggots swept out, and the building rebranded as “Parc 77 Apartments,” where today a one-bedroom can rent for $4,500 a month.27 The lonely old women subsisting on cat food were replaced by a trendy upscale Italian restaurant on the ground floor charging $19.50 for a shrimp cocktail until it was recently forced out when the landlord jacked up the rent beyond reason. According to the owners of the restaurant, “The landlords coveted a shinier, fancier model in our place.”28
That’s how serial murder comes to town and goes and gets forgotten. By the time Calvin Jackson’s trial wove its way through the system, the Son of Sam killings had already begun. And that was the last people remembered of Calvin Jackson, despite the body count. Again, little old ladies on welfare get listed with the less-dead.
David Berkowitz, “The Son of Sam”
The Son of Sam was another of those seminal cases with a familiar “celebrity” serial killer: six murders in 1976 and 1977 in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn committed by twenty-four-year-old postal worker David Berkowitz, who used to sneak up on dating couples with a .44 Bulldog revolver and open up on them. Berkowitz was arrested in August 1977, in the “Summer of Sam,” after a search of parking violations linked his car to the murder scenes.
What made the Son of Sam so big of course was his correspondence with police and with Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin. Unlike the reputed self-naming by Jack the Ripper, Berkowitz actually did give himself the moniker in a letter he left near two victims addressed to an NYPD captain who in a press conference suggested that the serial killer had a hate for women. Berkowitz wrote in part:
I am deeply hurt by your calling me a wemon [sic] hater. I am not. But I am a monster. I am the “Son of Sam.” I am a little “brat”. When father Sam gets drunk he gets mean. He beats his family. Sometimes he ties me up to the back of the house. Other times he locks me in the garage. Sam loves to drink blood. “Go out and kill” commands father Sam. . . . Police—Let me haunt you with these words; I’ll be back! I’ll be back! To be interrpreted [sic] as—bang, bang, bang, bank, bang—ugh!! Yours in murder Mr. Monster.
Until he was apprehended, his kooky messages and, again, the press’s “scorekeeping victim count” kept the public fascinated and on edge. When Berkowitz was arrested, we were surprised by how mild mannered, soft, and pudgy the killer looked. Again, he seemed totally insane, claiming to receive orders from a black dog, and that was sufficient explanation for us.
Rodney Alcala, “The Dating Game Killer”
In the meantime, Rodney Alcala, “the Dating Game Killer,” who would not be convicted until 2011 for his murders in New York, was posing in 1971 as an amiable East Village artist photographer, while he raped and murdered Cornelia Michel Crilley, a Trans World Airlines flight attendant, in her Upper East Side apartment. In the summer of 1977, he lured Ellen Jane Hover, an aspiring musician, to her death from her Midtown apartment. Alcala was originally from California and ended up in New York as a fugitive from charges in a brutal rape and attempted murder of an eight-year-old girl walking to school. He moved back and forth between the East and West Coasts, appearing infamously on the TV show The Dating Game as a bachelor contestant while he murdered another five females, including a twelve-year-old girl on her way to ballet practice.
Remarkably, in the early 1970s, Alcala worked in the same Blue Cross insurance office on Lexington Avenue that serial killer Richard Cottingham did, although Cottingham claims he has no memory of Alcala.
And then, of course, we have Richard Cottingham, who was wolfing down victims from an available flock of forty thousand sex workers on the streets and in the massage parlors of New York City in the 1970s. Nobody was aware of his existence until he killed two, decapitated them and set their torsos on fire in the Travel Inn in December 1979 and then killed another in May 1980 in the Seville Hotel on Madison Avenue, severing her breasts and leaving them on the headboard of the bed. Cottingham was captured “by accident” when the screams of one of his victims coming from a room in a New Jersey motel brought motel security to the door.
California Dreaming
California has always had a reputation as a dreamy mecca for the weird and occult. Strangely, its beautiful beaches, sunny days and palm trees became a backdrop to darker evil forces, madness and murder. A year before the Manson murders, Joan Didion described the murderous barometric Santa Ana winds blowing through the paradise:
The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather.” My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that
he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake. “On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.” That was the kind of wind it was.29
That was the kind of climate and terrain it was; the kind that Harvey Glatman and Charlie Manson and the unidentified Zodiac Killer would find themselves in. Driving. Driving like the three “Freeway Killers” Patrick Kearney, Randy Kraft and William Bonin. Driving like Edmund Kemper.
Unlike densely populated Eastern pedestrian cities like New York, Chicago or Boston, serial murder in California, and for that matter, most of the United States, was an automotive kind of thing. Serial murders occurred in automotive dimensions, like distant islands strung out in an archipelago of death. Throughout the United States, serial killers drove to find their victims, drove their victims to their deaths and drove their bodies to their dumping grounds. A 1980 study of serial homicides found that in 78 percent of serial murders, the killer used a vehicle directly or indirectly in the murder, and that 50 percent of the serial killers who did use a vehicle used it to offer their victims a ride.30
In California, serial killers were even teaming up to carpool. Serial killer cousins Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, “the Hillside Stranglers,” in 1977 murdered ten girls and women between the ages of twelve and twenty-eight. They would pose as undercover police officers in Buono’s car “arresting” women. They would drive their victims to Buono’s car upholstery workshop, where they would torture, rape and strangle their victims before dumping them in the Hollywood Hills. Not realizing there were two serial killers, the murders were first ascribed to the Hillside Strangler. The case was solved only after Buono and Bianchi broke up and Bianchi went up to Bellingham, Washington, where he was arrested when he bungled a double murder there.
American Serial Killers Page 25