American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Kemper then took Luchessa out of the car and locked her in the trunk. Within thirty seconds of apologizing to Pesce for accidentally brushing against her breast, he threw a plastic bag over her head and wrapped a bathrobe belt around her neck. But as he pulled on the belt, it snapped; meanwhile, Pesce had bitten through the plastic bag. Kemper then drew his knife and began to stab Pesce in the back, but the blows did not seem to have any effect, and she began to twist around, facing Kemper. He then stabbed her in the side and in the stomach, and Pesce twisted back the other way. He grabbed her by the chin, pulled back her head and slit her throat.

  Kemper then went to the back of the car, opened the trunk, pulled Luchessa out and began to stab her repeatedly in the throat, eyes, heart and forearms. He recalled being surprised by how many heavy blows she took before losing consciousness.

  Once the women were dead, he drove their corpses back to his apartment and carried them inside. In his apartment, he dissected their bodies, handled their various internal organs, snapped Polaroid photographs of them and cut their heads off. Kemper confessed, “I remember there was actually a sexual thrill. You hear that little ‘pop’ and pull their heads off and hold their heads up by the hair. Whipping their heads off, their body sitting there. That’d get me off!”

  But Kemper insisted, “There was absolutely no contact with improper areas.”

  Kemper said, “I would sit there looking at the heads on an overstuffed chair, tripping on them on my bed, looking at them [when] one of them somehow becomes unsettled, comes rolling down the chair, very grisly. Tumbling down the chair, rolls across the cushion and hits the rug—‘bonk.’ The neighbor downstairs hates my guts. I’m always making noise late at night. He gets a broom and whacks on the ceiling. ‘Buddy,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry for that, dropped my head, sorry.’ That helped bring me out of the depression. I would trip on that.”

  One FBI behaviorist would later say that a serial killer like Kemper “has basically little or no contact with females, but is intrigued by them. [They] often times can act in a world like a five-year-old. They can be physically strong and everything like that and we used to liken them as much to the five-year-old taking a doll apart.”36

  Afterward, Kemper put what remained of the two women into plastic bags and buried them in the Santa Cruz hills, their torsos and limbs in one location, their hands in another, disguising the burial ground using techniques he had learned in the Boy Scouts. He kept the heads a few days longer before throwing them into a ravine. He returned to the grave where Pesce’s headless body lay because, as he explained, he loved her and wanted to be near her.

  Kemper acknowledged the duality of his psyche. Asked what he thought when he saw a pretty girl, he replied, “One side of me says, I’d like to talk to her, date her. The other side of me says, I wonder what her head would look like on a stick?”

  Kemper said that just before he began killing, his fantasies of making love to women became dissatisfying because he came to believe he could never realize them. If he killed them, then they would not reject him as a man, he explained. He characterized his crimes as “making dolls” out of the women or as “evicting” them from their bodies in order to do what he wanted to do with them.

  “No Psychiatric Reason to Consider Him to Be of Any Danger”

  On September 14, 1972, Kemper picked up fifteen-year-old Aiko Koo hitchhiking to a dance class in San Francisco. He took her to another remote area, choked her into unconsciousness, raped her and then killed her. He placed her body in the trunk and on his way home stopped off for a beer. Emerging from the bar, Kemper said he opened the trunk of the car, “admiring my catch like a fisherman.” He took the corpse back to his apartment, dissected it, had sex with it and cut off the head.

  The next day, Ed Kemper had a scheduled appointment with his probation psychiatrists. In the morning before heading out to the appointment, Kemper buried Koo’s body at one location and her hands at another but kept her head. He then drove to the psychiatrists’ office with the head in the trunk of his car. Leaving his car in the parking lot, he went in for his interview. The psychiatric report resulting from that day’s visit reads:

  If I were seeing this patient without having any history available or without getting the history from him, I would think that we’re dealing with a very well adjusted young man who had initiative, intelligence and who was free of any psychiatric illness. . . . In effect, we are dealing with two different people when we talk of the 15 year old boy who committed the murder and of the 23 year old man we see before us now. . . . It is my opinion that he has made a very excellent response to the years of treatment and rehabilitation and I would see no psychiatric reason to consider him to be of any danger to himself or to any member of society.

  A second psychiatrist cheerfully chirped in:

  He appears to have made a good recovery from such a tragic and violent split within himself. He appears to be functioning in one piece now directing his feelings towards verbalization, work, sports and not allowing neurotic buildup with himself. Since it may allow him more freedom as an adult to develop his potential, I would consider it reasonable to have a permanent expunction of his juvenile records. I am glad he had recently “expunged” his motorcycle and I would hope that he would do that (“seal it”) permanently since this seemed more a threat to his life and health than any threat he is presently to anyone else.

  Instead of looking into Kemper’s head and personality, the psychiatrists should have looked into the trunk of his car parked in their parking lot.

  On November 29, 1972, Kemper’s juvenile record was permanently sealed so that he could go on with his life as Clarnell had lobbied. In the meantime, not being able to work after an injury, he had moved back home with Clarnell.

  On January 8, 1973, he picked up college student Cindy Schall.37 He shot her in the head and then drove back with her body to his mother’s house. While his mother wasn’t looking, he put Schall’s body in his bedroom closet and went to sleep. In the morning when his mother went to work, he took the corpse to bed with him and had sex with it. Afterward, he placed the cadaver in his mother’s bathtub, drained it of blood, carved it up into pieces, bagged them in plastic and threw them off a cliff. He kept Schall’s head for several days, often having sex with it. Afterward, Kemper buried her head in his mother’s yard, facing up toward his mother’s bedroom window because his mother always wanted people to “look up to her.”

  Warnings were issued to students in Santa Cruz not to accept rides from strangers. Kemper’s mother had given him a university sticker for his car so that he could easily enter the campus to pick her up from work. This sticker gave women a sense of security when he offered them a ride.

  On February 5, 1973, he shot two more women, twenty-three-year-old Rosalind Thorpe and twenty-year-old Allison Liu, and brought them back to his mother’s house. He cut off one woman’s head in the trunk of his car, and when his mother went to bed, he carried the headless corpse to his room and slept with it in his bed. Kemper explained, “The head trip fantasies were a bit like a trophy. You know, the head is where everything is at, the brain, eyes, mouth. That’s the person. I remember being told as a kid, you cut off the head and the body dies. The body is nothing after the head is cut off. . . . Well, that’s not quite true. With a girl, there is a lot left in the girl’s body without the head. Of course, the personality is gone.”38

  Killing Mother

  On Easter weekend, April 20, 1973, Kemper finally decided to face his lifelong nemesis.

  At 5:15 a.m., he walked into his mother’s bedroom while she slept and struck her head with a claw hammer. He then rolled her over and slit her throat. Upon killing his mother, Kemper said, he was shocked at how vulnerable and human she had been—that she had died just like his other victims. He said that before then he had always perceived his mother as foreboding, fierce and formidable, and whether he hated or loved her, she had alw
ays been a big influence in his life. Upon killing her, he felt relief. Kemper then decided, “What’s good for my victims was good for my mother.” He cut her head off and raped her headless corpse. He removed her larynx and fed it into the garbage disposal. “It seemed appropriate as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years,” he later told the police. When he turned on the disposal, it jammed, throwing back up his mother’s voice box. “Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me. I couldn’t get her to shut up,” Kemper recalled bitterly.

  Kemper then telephoned his mother’s best friend, Sally Hallett, and invited her over for a “surprise” dinner party for his mother. He punched her, strangled her and cut her head off, placing it in his bed. He then spent the night sleeping in his mother’s bed.

  Kemper then drove to Colorado and from there called the Santa Cruz police to report the murders of his mother and Hallett. He waited in the phone booth for local police to pick him up. Kemper had cured himself, realizing that it was his mother that he had always wanted to kill in the first place. Now having done it, he was finished.

  Years later, Kemper would be among the first serial killers to be visited by the “mindhunters” from the FBI, he was the subject of numerous television interviews and he has regained a new notoriety with the recent Netflix series Mindhunter.

  Arthur Shawcross, “The Genesee River Killer,” Part 2, Watertown, New York, 1972–1989

  Mary Agnes Blake of Watertown, New York, came from a long line of poor, hardworking and hard-luck “North Country” folk. Mary had an alcoholic husband and nine children. They lived in a house set back from the road on 525 Water Street across from the Black River in Watertown near the huge Black-Clawson paper mill machinery plant around the corner on Pearl Street.

  Jack Olsen in his magistral book on the Shawcross case The Misbegotten Son wrote that Mary “ran a salon of the poor” and “had been called ‘Ma’ since her early twenties.”39

  Her seventh child, Jack, was special. With blond hair, freckles, a pug nose and big ears, Jack seemed extra attached to his mom and his pet white cat. He would never go out to play without first hugging Mary and telling her he loved her. A good-natured child, Jack was ten years old, a good boy, looking out for his little brother, Pete, and kid sister, Pam. Like many boys growing up in the region, he wandered the woods and river marshes, fishing on his own or with his little brother.

  “The Fisherman”

  One spring day in 1972 on their wanders, Jack and “Little Pete” came across a fisherman fishing near the Pearl Street Bridge over the Black River around the corner from their house. They were befriended by the amiable man in his mid-twenties whose name was Art and became familiar with seeing him fishing along the Black River. In late April, Jack came home and told his mother that a stranger named Art had taken him and Pete fishing. Mary immediately forbade Jack to go with “the fisherman” again. A few days later, the stranger appeared at their door, asking Mary and her husband for permission to take Jack fishing with him. There was something creepy about him, and when he asked Jack’s father if he “minded” him taking Jack fishing, the father replied, “Yes, I do mind. Don’t take my boys anywhere, I don’t know you.” The boys were warned by both their parents to stay away from “the fisherman.”

  Later that week, Jack and Pete saw Art walking across the Pearl Street Bridge near their home with his fishing rods. He immediately invited them to go fishing with him. When Jack told him that his parents had prohibited their going anywhere with him, he told them he’d “fix it” with them when they’d get back. The boys left with Art. They learned he lived a few blocks north of Water Street in the Cloverdale Apartments. He invited them to visit him there anytime they liked. Pete noticed that Art paid particular attention to his older brother Jack, speaking mostly to him and frequently reaching to stroke his blond hair. They wandered to various fishing spots with Art and stopped at a gravel pit where he built a small fire and cooked bacon in tinfoil. Art told them he had learned how to cook while a soldier in Vietnam. He told them that he had killed several infiltrators in Vietnam and discovered they were little girls. He then took out a picture of a naked woman and, showing it to them, commented, “Nice tits, eh.” He told them how he “got” his wife and liked to make her moan, to which Jack, according to Little Pete, laughed.

  They had spent several hours together when Art suggested they go out to a creek by the quarry and try their luck there. During the hike along the quarry edge, Jack ended up getting ahead of Shawcross and Pete, and at one point Art shouted out to Jack to wait up for them. When Jack did not, Art suddenly became enraged and grabbed Pete by the arm and hung him over the edge of a twenty-foot drop into the quarry. When Jack returned to them, Art set Pete back on his feet and laughed as if the whole thing was a joke. The two boys scurried off home. They did not tell their mother about the encounter with “Art the fisherman.”

  About a week later, on Sunday, May 7, 1972, the boys were scheduled to go fishing with their dad, but true to type, he got drunk by noon and the outing was canceled. Feeling sorry for the boys, Mary gave Jack a dollar to go buy cat food for his pet cat and told them they could go and play but to be back home for dinner. It was bingo night, and Mary planned to take Jack with her to play. Little Pete returned at dinnertime, but Jack had not come home, and Mary went to play bingo without him.

  When Mary got home at 10:00 p.m., she was surprised to see that Jack was still out. This was alarming because Jack was afraid of the dark and never stayed out this late. She awoke Pete and began asking where his brother might be. Pete told her they played together for a while, but that Jack left to visit a friend who lived at the Cloverdale Apartments. Mary searched the neighborhood and called Jack’s friends, but there was no trace of him.

  At around midnight, Mary called the police and reported Jack missing. By then she recalled the strange “fisherman” named Art and his interest in her boys and that he lived at the Cloverdale Apartments, which she reported to the police officer. Mary felt that the officer did not seem to be overly interested or concerned. Again, this would have been typical for the 1960s and 1970s, especially when a young boy was missing without any obvious signs of an abduction. There was no legal stipulation that police could not investigate a missing person until twenty-four or forty-eight hours later; it was simply policy that various departments arbitrarily adopted. And indeed, very often missing kids would show up the next day, which seemed to justify this callous policy.

  Mary decided to go to the Cloverdale Apartments and hunt down Art herself.

  She located his apartment in the name of Arthur Shawcross.

  Just then a police officer arrived anyway to call on Shawcross about Jack. Mary followed him and confronted Shawcross at the door. Shawcross immediately without hesitation told them that he had indeed seen Jack that afternoon playing in the park behind the apartment complex with another boy but that he did not see him after that. That was good enough for the cop. When Mary protested that Shawcross had been hanging around her missing son, the cop replied, “Lady, we can’t arrest a guy for hanging around.”

  Again typically, the police assumed that ten-year-old Jack ran away, and no serious search or interview of Shawcross was done. It was left to Mary to return to the Cloverdale Apartments over the next few days and ascertain from other kids that indeed Jack had been playing there that Sunday but eventually left with Shawcross through the nearby woods to go fishing. When Mary informed the police of that, they just shrugged. No alarm was raised, and after a cursory search of the woods in the area, nothing further was done. One detective commented, “The boy don’t want to be found.”

  On the fifth day of Jack’s disappearance the Watertown Daily Times reported:

  Commenting on a report that the boy’s mother said a man was seen leading the child into the woods, Chief Loftus called it “unfounded.” “We have questioned the man, and there is nothing to the story. We’ve b
een doing everything we can, and have checked every possibility. We talked to friends of the boy, and have been told he left the area.”40

  And that was that. Nothing more was done.

  That summer of 1972, as Jack Blake remained missing, Shawcross was complaining to his probation officer of marital woes and mental stress. He was sent for a psychiatric evaluation. The report stated that Shawcross showed “defective moral and social development” and that “when he becomes upset he acts impulsively. . . . He describes himself as always having felt that rules are to be broken and did everything in his power to break rules at home as a child and in school. . . . His mother had a very bad temper.” Shawcross described her as “domineering” and derisive of him and his father.

  Shawcross got himself a new ten-speed bike on which to pedal around on his fishing excursions: a beautiful white bicycle with distinctive brown-colored fenders.

  In the meantime, Shawcross’s former second wife, Linda Neary, as she read the story of the missing child in the newspapers, was wondering if the Watertown Police were aware that her ex-husband had killed a child in Vietnam according to his confession to her. Thinking about his irrational behavior, his violent outbursts culminating with the beating he gave her, resulting in a miscarriage, and his Vietnam atrocity stories, she thought of calling the police but in the end did not.